Лорел Гамильтон - Rafael

“He’s the son of a bitch that skinned Rafael alive as torture because he wouldn’t give the rest of you up,” I said. I’d have tugged on the door handle if I’d had a hand free, but I still had a knife in each hand, which raised the question of how I had planned to open the door in the first place. I realized I’d gone for the wrist knives. I sheathed the one in my left hand in the right wrist sheath, which was on top of the wrist; the left sheath carried the knife on the underside of the wrist so I could draw them simultaneously. I’d carried them almost longer than any other weapon I owned. They’d been the first silver I’d bought after bullets. I tried to feel bad about the fact that I’d gone for a killing weapon first thing, but all I could think was if we killed Hector, it might kill Padma and then we’d all be safer.

“I know who he is and what he did, Anita,” Claudia said. She looked somewhere between sad and in pain, but she still kept her hands on the door so I couldn’t go after him.

“Then let’s finish this,” I said.

“If you kill Hector before he fights Rafael, then the rest of the rodere will turn against him. They will not see it as his victory, as some of the vampires see the defeat of the Earthmover and the Mother of All Darkness as your kills and not Jean-Claude’s, but vampire culture is not based on duels, and ours is, Anita. If they lose faith in Rafael, they will challenge him constantly, they will challenge all of us in his inner circle until we are dead, and then someone else will rule what is left and they will not be friendly to you and Jean-Claude.”

I was suddenly tired, all the adrenaline of the last few minutes draining into my feet and into the floor. There’s a cost to ramping up for a life-and-death struggle, but if you keep going up without fighting, it can exhaust you almost as much as a real battle.

“You smell defeated,” Lillian said from behind us.

“Why can’t any of this be simple?”

“That is a child’s question, Anita,” Lillian chided.

My anger roared up from that pit it lived in and filled up all my tired empty cup. I looked at the doc, and knew I looked angrier than she deserved, but anger would keep me going tonight, good behavior wouldn’t.

“Such rage, luckily I know you now, and I know it is not really aimed at me,” she said.

The anger started to fade, but the tiredness was there waiting to engulf me. I had miles to go before I could sleep, so I fed my rage on the thought that one way or another Hector would die tonight. If he killed Rafael, then the rest of us would finish it immediately, no games, no rules. I told myself that and made myself believe it, and it kept me going out the door. It was only when we were about to enter the stadium that I realized I was still wearing the bloody clothes. I’d forgotten to change shirts, but I didn’t go back. It was too late for going back. I’d go forward covered in the blood of my enemy; let it be a warning to others, so I didn’t have to kill anyone else by accident tonight. No, if I killed again, I wanted it to be on purpose.

24

MY THIGH DIDN’T hurt until I started following Claudia up the stairs toward Rafael. She’d called it a stadium and it was, just smaller than one meant for baseball or football. It wasn’t even that the painkiller was wearing off so much as the stitches let me know they were there both holding the skin together and sort of pulling as I moved up the steps. Stitches on the arms never seemed to bother me as much as stitches on parts of the body that moved me forward.

There were hundreds of wererats packed into a space that fit inside a large warehouse. I had to shield hard and even then, the air around us vibrated and hummed with their energy. How had I not felt it earlier? It was like the magic outside had dimmed as we stepped into the warehouse; this was contained at the entrances to the stadium. I didn’t know how they’d done it, but I knew really good magic containment when I walked through it.

A hand reached out from the bleachers and Pierette moved up closer to me, not like a bodyguard block, but like she was just hurrying to keep up with me. The hand fell away, and we kept following Claudia upward while my new stitches pulled. I glanced at the crowd for threats and just because the energy made me want to look. There were people in rat form scattered in among the human audience. I wondered if the energy had overwhelmed them and forced the turn, or if they’d come here and slipped their skins on purpose.

Pierette and I were small enough that she was able to take my hand on the steps without touching the crowd. She leaned in and whispered against my ear, “Nathaniel says that you are shielding too hard. You’re close to cutting him and Damian off.” Her eyes were back to gray, so a message from Pierrot and my homeboys.

I let out a long breath and let my shields shift. I was good at shielding; I wasn’t so good at selective shielding. I stumbled on the step and only her hand in mine kept me from falling. I pulled her hand hard enough to stop us where we were, and leaned close to whisper, “I can’t do something this delicate to my shields while I’m moving.”

Pierette rubbed her cheek against mine like a cat scent-marking, but that was okay, her touching me helped steady me. It felt good to touch the type of animal you could call, and leopard had been my first. It helped me think of Nathaniel, and that helped me think of Damian. I visualized my shields not as metal walls, but as stone, and they were vines that were allowed through the stone to touch me. Nathaniel’s energy breathed through me, and the vines were thorns and roses because he loved pain and pretty things. It made me smile.

I opened my eyes to find that Claudia had come back down the steps to stand two steps above us. She was watching the crowd on either side of us, which made me look to my side of the aisle; Pierette was already watching her side.

There was a ratman very close to me. His fur was soft gray and white, not like a spotted animal, but like a man’s hair had gone from dark to gray and now white. His black button eyes were almost as big as my palm. You don’t think about animals having bigger eyes for their head size until you see them in larger-than-normal-life form. It looked almost anime, like he was a special effect. The fur looked softer, maybe it was the color, but I wanted to reach out and pet him to see if it was as soft as it looked.

I moved back a fraction to touch my hip to Pierette’s, and even that helped shake me out of the urge. I hadn’t been that attracted to wererats the last time I’d seen people in their furry birthday suits, not even Rafael, but then wererat hadn’t been one of my animals to call until he and I made it happen.

I looked farther into the crowd and found a lot of them watching me. Some were hostile, but most were just too intense. I didn’t remember having this effect on the leopards or wolves the first time I’d seen them in a group after they were my animals, but then maybe it was just volume. The wereleopard pard was tiny compared to this, less than fifty, but the werewolves were around this same size, so why was this different?

There was movement above us; I turned my hand going to a knife before I had time to stop myself. It was a tall, slender woman with her hair back in a loose braid; one strand was white not like age, but like it had always been there. She stared down at me with large black eyes, not rat eyes, but just brown eyes so dark they looked black until I realized I could see the difference between her pupils and her irises. Her hands were loose and empty at her sides, but the energy coming off her prickled along my skin and threatened to close my throat down. The moment I thought it, I cleared the energy around my throat, and I could swallow again. I pushed her magic, or whatever it was, outside my shields. I didn’t even have to visualize my wall with its thorny rose vine, all I had to do was flex my will, but she was using magic against me; was that allowed in a challenge?