Лорел Гамильтон - Rafael

I recognized Hector; part of it was he was the only other one in the crowd dressed in fight shorts, but his energy stood out to me now. If he hadn’t come to visit in the locker room, maybe he would have blended into the hum and rush of all the other wererats, but now there was a taste to his power that couldn’t hide from me. Vampire , my magic whispered, there’s a vampire near us . It was the same little voice that had helped me stay alive for all these years while I hunted vampires. I’d have been dead a thousand times over if I hadn’t listened to that warning voice.

“You seat a vampire’s human servant above all the women in the rodere. How can you humiliate them like this?” It took me a second to realize that Hector was speaking over a microphone.

Benito handed Rafael one with a snake of cord attached to it. Rafael stood and said, “Anita has earned her way tonight with blood and death. She has honored the power of the rodere that I put inside her.”

“But the leopard that stands beside Anita did not earn her way, yet she stands above the women of the rodere. You put a cat above your rats, Rafael; what kind of king does that?” Hector said.

There were mutterings in the crowd that said they agreed with him. The energy changed, as if the air were a little thicker with their outrage.

“It is rare for other leaders to visit us here, but when it happens, they are allowed one of their people to accompany them so that there are no accidental assassinations that would cause war between us and another animal group.”

“First you let Anita sit in the queen’s throne for our people, and now you say she is a visiting queen, someone else’s queen. Wererats, tell me whose queen is she? Who does she belong to?”

Most of the crowd nearest to Hector yelled, “Jean-Claude!” In fact, there were a lot of voices from all over shouting “Jean-Claude,” but there were enough yelling “Micah!” that it rose above the other voices. Someone nearer to us yelled, “Nicky!”

Hector said, “She is not Nicky’s queen, she is his master, as she and Jean-Claude would be master over all of us!”

Boos from the crowd, cries of “No, never!” Even I had a second of feeling the pull to be angry. “His voice has power in it,” Pierette said.

Rafael stood tall and proud, and for the first time I felt the power inherent in him. The energy that came from being connected to every wererat in the country and a few outside of it. It wasn’t just power for Jean-Claude and me to feed on, but magic, the magic of command because most people don’t know how to follow without giving up some of their own personal power, but in this case it was more than that. Literally to be part of the rodere you had to give Rafael the keys to your energy, to yourself. Until that moment I hadn’t really understood how close the connection was to the one that Jean-Claude had with his vampires. I’d never heard of anyone saying that the ties to the leader of a shapeshifter group were a similar dynamic, but power doesn’t lie.

“I am the only master here,” Rafael said.

“We feel the vampires drain our lives away when you let her feed on you!”

When he said drain , I felt weaker; when he said feed , I felt pain like the memory of something trying to take a bite out of me. I started to shield harder, but Jean-Claude whispered through me, “ Non, ma petite , we need to know what he is capable of.”

I let the power flow over me without blocking it out, but it didn’t cling either, but then I knew how to let things go, or to keep them from holding on to me; most people didn’t, as in most of the crowd.

“I have hidden nothing from you when I am with Anita. I have shared the power we raise with all of you.” But Rafael’s voice was just a voice. It could not carry the crowd the way that Hector’s magic could.

Neva leaned in between the two thrones and said, “Bring the power to your eyes, Anita, and tell me what you see?”

It sounded too much like an order, but I wanted all the information I could get tonight, so I did it. There was a black nimbus around Hector, and it wasn’t his aura, because that was squeezed down tight to his body, a dark, red brick color. I’d been told my aura could spike red in places, which most psychics don’t like being around, but the dirty red of Hector’s meant illness. The aura is supposed to be clean and bright whatever color it happens to be, or a mix of colors for that matter; anytime it’s dim or muddy something is wrong. It didn’t feel like physical illness, more like mental or emotional, but whatever it was, it was serious.

“What is that black shine around his aura?” I asked.

“Good, you see as we do,” Neva said.

“Padma never had the power of voice before,” Pierette said.

“Hector is not a brujo,” Benito said.

“The power is not his,” Neva replied.

“Then where is the power coming from?” Claudia asked.

Pierette said, “Padma,” at the same time I said, “The Master of Beasts.”

“The darkness in him is not vampire,” the younger witch with the short hair said.

“It is unlike any vampire you have ever seen, mija , but it is still one of them,” Neva said.

“You’ve seen this darkness before,” I said, looking at Neva. She seemed to glow just under her skin as if parts of her nerves ran with golden light. It was faint but seemed to remind me that stars are just distant suns.

“Yes, she came to us pretending to be Santa Muerte many years ago, but she was not Her, nor was she any goddess she claimed, but she was powerful. We called her Madre de la Oscuridad.”

“I don’t know what oscuridad means,” I said.

“It means darkness ,” Claudia said.

“Madre de la Oscuridad, you mean Mother of the Darkness, do you mean the Mother of All Darkness, the first vampire?”

“So she claimed,” Neva said.

I almost asked her if she’d been the actual bruja that told Mommie Darkest she wasn’t a saint or a goddess, but it was probably an ancestor, because when vampires decide to play at being gods, they don’t like being told they’re wrong. Best just to go along with the delusion and kill them as quickly as possible. Of course, I’d killed her once already, but like all really good monsters once might not be enough.

I was suddenly so afraid that my skin ran cold with it, and I could no longer see the black energy around Hector or the glowing power under Neva’s skin. I knew my eyes were back to normal. I’d drunk her power down, and I’d thought, we’d thought, it had killed her, but apparently we’d missed some, and the messy leftovers were inside the Master of Beasts, who had his metaphysical hand up Hector’s ass. Fuck.

26

PIERETTE TOUCHED MY face and turned my eyes to hers, they were charcoal gray again, like storm clouds. Pierrot spoke with her lipsticked mouth: “It is not her, Anita; we would know if our evil queen were alive, for we would still be loyal to her.”

What he said made perfect sense in my head, but the back part of my brain that had gone to some ancestral cave where the darkness was all too real and solid wasn’t convinced by logic. Especially not with Hector’s voice working its magic on me and the audience. Jean-Claude had wanted to feel through me how powerful Hector was, or Padma was, and he was feeling it, but I wasn’t the one being touched by the words directly. When Hector said, “Rafael gives us to the vampires to be raped,” it felt awful in ways that I couldn’t or didn’t want to understand completely. When he said, “He will give us away,” it was like every time you’d ever been left out, abandoned, unwanted.

“We must distract the Master using Hector,” Pierette/Pierrot said.