Лорел Гамильтон - Rafael

“I asked her to,” Claudia said.

That wasn’t strictly true, but it wasn’t strictly untrue either. The older I get, the more I realize that lies and truths aren’t black and white, but so dependent on how you look at them, or how you hear them.

“And why did you ask her to use that spell on someone as harmless as Rosa?” Neva said.

“Because Anita and I are both tired of her having to prove herself every few minutes; she needed something frightening enough to stop the challenges.”

Neva looked at the wererats around us who had seen what I’d done. “Then you have accomplished your goal, just as the wererats who saw Anita tear Antonio’s arm off will not lightly attack her in the future.”

It took me a second to realize that she meant Tony. “I’m really tired of having to prove myself tonight.”

Neva looked at me and I sort of wished I’d kept my mouth shut. “Did Rafael not explain what would happen?”

“I was told no silver in the warehouse outside the fighting pit.”

“It is not typical to pull a silver blade outside of a duel,” she said.

“And he didn’t mention anything about fighting other women to just sit down beside him.”

“Rafael has never been a good judge of women, not even as a child.”

I knew that Rafael was over fifty, so how old did that make Neva to have known him as a little boy? I wanted to ask, but vampires consider it rude if you ask them, so I figured all long-lived supernaturals would feel the same.

“He could simply come to you and escort you safely to your seat,” she said, and she looked past me at Rafael. It was the look your parents give you as a child when you’re out of reach, but they want you to be more polite and better behaved than you are being.

Rafael got up and started walking down the steps toward us. I could finally see all of him in his fightgear. He looked taller, leaner, and even more fiercely in shape than I knew he was wearing just the black compression shorts. They came down almost to his knees and there were no slits for movement in them like Hector had had, but they were more form-fitting. He looked sexy and fierce and I didn’t care. I wanted to go home to the men waiting for me. I’d killed a man for no good damn reason.

Claudia moved aside so that Rafael could stand above me and Pierette, who had moved down a step to be between me and the trio of witches, or brujas, or whatever they wanted to call themselves.

“You killed tonight to defend your life, that is a very good reason,” he said.

“You read my mind,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You were very subtle about it; I didn’t know you were inside my head.”

“I do not want to cause you pain as I did earlier with Nathaniel.”

“Thanks.” I realized he’d probably heard me think I wanted to go home and be with the men I was in love with, because if I was going to kill people, it should be for people that I actually loved. I blinked at him and didn’t try to apologize; it was the truth, and if I couldn’t keep Rafael from “hearing” my thoughts, then truth was all that was left between us tonight.

“May I take your hand?” he asked, no editorializing about how I didn’t love him. Smart man.

“Sure, thanks for asking first.”

“Underneath the shock you are angry with me. I do not want to presume anything with you right now.”

The anger fountained up and then back down behind the numbness of the shock. “You can feel what I’m feeling and most of what I’m thinking.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t feel anything from you, except caution. I didn’t even think that was an emotion, but for you, it is.”

He took my hand carefully in his and raised it up so that he could lay a kiss across my knuckles. “I am so sorry that your introduction to our world has been one of pain and death.”

“Yeah, we will be talking about the whole no they won’t try to kill you tonight thing.”

“I heard that Tony used a silver blade on you.”

“Yeah, but he’ll never do it again.” I still wasn’t sure how I felt about what I’d done to the man, so I pushed it down with all the other things I wasn’t sure about. The place wasn’t as full as it had once been, because I’d accepted more of myself, but killing Tony was going to go in the box with the other things that made me feel like a monster.

Rafael started to hug me but stopped with a look at the knife still naked in my right hand. “I would hold you, comfort you, if you will allow it.”

“It’s not silver, you’ll live,” I said.

He gave me a startled look, because even inside my head I had felt nothing when I said it, nothing, just the emptiness where some of my emotions should have been, used to be, but some things are so awful you can’t feel too much about them, not if you want to keep moving forward.

“I did not set you up, Anita. I swear I thought you would be safer than this here among us.”

I studied his face, those dark brown eyes, and then I let down my shields, opened a brick for him in the wall so I could know that he meant it. He was telling the truth, but that was only a little better. It meant that he hadn’t understood how afraid his people were of me and the vampires. Kings should know shit like that; Jean-Claude would have known, or would have known to admit he wasn’t sure.

Rafael studied my face; felt my emotions, or lack of them; heard my thoughts, at least some of them. He was very carefully trying not to think or feel anything much. “What can I do to make this up to you?”

“Kill Hector, help us kill his master.”

“And that will make up for the fact that you trust me less now?”

“It’ll help.” And still I felt nothing. I realized I thought I’d have to kill more people tonight. I no longer trusted Rafael to be a good judge of what would happen, so I was shoving my emotions deep so I wouldn’t feel bad when the violence happened. I even acknowledged in the front of my head that I would not hesitate to use my new supernatural strength again, not if it would save my life, our lives, Rafael’s life, Claudia’s life. If it would keep the rodere free of the Master of Beasts, I would wade through a sea of blood and tear a dozen enemies apart with my bare hands. I would do what it took, whatever it took, to win, because if we lost . . . The Master of Beasts had had a rape fetish, the kind that wasn’t safe, sane, or consensual. I’d forced him to give up his only son to be executed; he would make me and all those I loved pay for that. It was a price I was not willing to pay, so I decided to pay another price, the cost of victory, because no matter how many people I killed, no matter how bloodily and inhumanly I did it, it would still be better than watching Padma torture, rape, and kill everyone I loved.

Sometimes being the monster scared the shit out of me, and then there were moments like these when I realized I’d rather be the monster a thousand times over than be at the mercy of one.

25

NEVA AND HER backup witches surprised all of us by saying they would stay. Rafael hadn’t been able to hide how unusual that was; the surprise and confusion of it ran through his body almost like fear. That was interesting and I filed it away to ask about later when the three witches couldn’t overhear us. They stood behind us bookended by Claudia and Benito on Rafael’s side and Pierette on mine.

The two of us sat in the carved wooden thrones, though Rafael’s truly looked like a throne with high carved spires on the back of it like something out of a European royal family except the carvings were rats, writhing in masses, crawling over flowers, chewing on human bones. There was even at least one plague doctor carved small, complete with the pointed mask, hat, and robes. The chair was beautiful and macabre. It was a chair for a movie wizard, or an evil king dressed all in black with jewels, not gym clothes. Of course, I didn’t match my chair either. It was much smaller, less impressive, dainty even, but the slender wooden rods were carved entirely of rats, and the headpiece had two carved rats holding a huge round cabochon of bloodred ruby. It was bigger than my thumb and that pigeon bloodred that almost doesn’t exist in modern rubies. It was only when the light hit it that I realized it was a six-pointed star sparkling in the depths of it. I’d seen star sapphires and rubies this big only in museum collections. Even knowing that rubies were a nine on the hardness scale, just down from diamonds, I worried about scratching it. Worrying about damaging the jewel and the carving was so mundane in the scale of things that it broke through the shock and made me more present looking down at the fighting pit. It looked like a small stadium had married a bullfighting ring, with the sand and some of the partial walls around the circle of it, as if sometimes there were things on the sand that people wanted to hide from. I had no idea why you’d needs walls for hiding from bulls in a fighting arena that was supposed to be for humans and wererats. They didn’t shift into anything that big, and they climbed well enough that the small barriers would be useless. I might have asked questions, but movement on the left-hand side of the arena drew my attention.