Лорел Гамильтон - Rafael

Rafael laughed at him, and he wasn’t the only one. People in the audience joined him, not a lot, but enough.

Hector snarled at him, and said, “I will kill you tonight, Rafael, and when I am king, no one will laugh.”

“Even if you kill me tonight, Hector, you will never be king now.”

“Enough talk, old man, time to die.”

“Hector, you speak like someone who does not know our laws.”

“All I have to do to be king is to kill you, old man, that’s all I need to know.”

Rafael said, “Let Claudia explain your mistake,” and handed the microphone to her.

“You have challenged the three of us publicly in the fighting pits, Hector. By your own words, if you manage to kill Rafael tonight, then you will face all three of us together.”

Pierette stood and drew me to my feet with her hand in mine so we could go stand closer to Claudia. She slid her arm around my waist, and I did the same. I trusted her to have a reason for the unusually bold public display, because normally she was much more circumspect outside the bedroom.

“I will have my way with all of you. I will rape the cat until her master fills her eyes and then I will slay them both,” he said.

“You talk like a vampire, not a rat,” Claudia said.

“And you talk like someone who is afraid to face me alone.”

“You didn’t challenge me alone, you challenged me along with Anita and Pierette, so that’s how we’ll fight: three against one.”

“That is not what I meant.”

“Words have weight in the fighting pit,” she said, and it had the ring of an old saying.

Some of the people near him moved toward him and then he shoved one of them away. “Get away from me, you crazy old woman.”

“We do not hurt our elders,” Claudia said, and this time I had a bit of knowledge that must have come from Rafael. If any member of the rodere survived to true old age, they were revered and no longer had to fight to survive in the clan. It was such a rare thing to happen that it was considered sacred to be truly ancient among them.

Rafael took the microphone back from her. “Is she hurt?” he asked.

The crowd around the white-haired woman he’d pushed took the microphone from him after the group around Hector closed in with a silent threat of share the microphone, or else .

An older man with hair almost as white said, “She is not injured, but she says this one smells like a stranger to her.”

“He is possessed by a vampire whose animal to call is rat like Nikolaos, but a hundred times more powerful than she was,” Rafael said. Again, the statement was too abrupt for any of the supernatural groups I’d been involved with from vampires to werewolves. I didn’t like the constant fighting, but I liked cutting to the chase.

There were some gasps, but mostly a heavy silence from the crowd. I expected them to move back from him even at the possibility of it, but I’d underestimated the wererats. They crowded closer to him, even though they had to know that touch made all vampire powers stronger. “What are you doing? Rafael is trying to poison your mind against me. He seeks to escape our battle because he knows he cannot win!” Hector yelled.

I thought the crowd was going to grab him and it would be over, but they never touched him. In fact, they kept their hands down close to their sides, in a clear attempt to appear harmless as they leaned in toward him. I realized suddenly that they were trying to smell his skin. Rats have one of the best senses of smell in the animal kingdom; apparently that still applied in human form for them.

Rafael said, “Did you forget the laws of the fighting pit, Hector, as you forgot to respect your elders?”

“I forget nothing, old man! What are you all doing? Get away from me!” He was shouting at the people around him.

Neva leaned in to speak low to me and Pierette, because she couldn’t talk to me alone while we were standing so intertwined. “Every time you touch each other, or Rafael, the red at the center of his aura pulses and fills more of the darkness around him.”

“And he sounds less like Hector,” Claudia said with the microphone safely away from her mouth, or maybe she’d turned it off. Either way the sound didn’t carry.

“Can we prove he is Padma’s creature?” Pierette asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Rafael said.

“But if we can prove he’s Padma’s rat to call, then you won’t have to fight him,” I said.

“Who told you that?” he asked.

I stared up at him. He looked back at me, face serene as if what he’d said made sense to me. “If we can make him go all vampy, then you won’t have to fight him, right?”

Neva said, “Challenge has been given and accepted—Rafael must fight.”

I looked at her and she was far closer than I’d realized. Her eyes were still black with the gleam of silver starlight in them. Did her eyes ever look normal, or were they permanently stuck like this, the way Micah’s eyes were to leopard?

“But Hector is like a Trojan horse, he’s not here to fight Rafael and be king, he’s here to destroy us all.”

“He must kill me first and that is no easy task.” He was so confident now; the doubts of earlier in the day were like an illusion he’d shaken off.

“If he used vampire powers, is that cheating?” I asked.

“It would depend on the power,” Rafael said.

“That’s crazy,” I said, and let go of Pierette so I could touch him; what I wanted to do was grab him by his shirt and shake him, but since he wasn’t wearing a shirt, I settled for touching his arm and the top of his shorts on one side. “Rafael, you’ve felt his power before and now he has even more power. We can’t let him use that here on you, on the rodere.”

“He called to my beast and I could not refuse him, but now he is in our inner sanctum and we have power here that we do not have in the outside world.”

“What power?” I asked.

Neva came close to us and spoke low. “I believe the reach of our magic will go outside of here now.”

Rafael turned to her, sliding an arm around my waist without thinking, as if it were just the natural thing to do. I wasn’t sure it was natural, but I slid in closer to him as if I agreed. Frankly, I was too tense to cuddle well. We were all in terrible danger—didn’t he understand that?

“We have small magic outside here,” Rafael said.

“No, my king, not small, not tonight, not with her power inside you, and the power of a goddess similar to ours inside her.”

I started to open my mouth to argue that Obsidian Butterfly wasn’t a goddess, or that I was a monotheist, but honestly, I was more interested in her saying they had a goddess similar to Obsidian Butterfly. I knew they didn’t have a vampire as powerful as her hidden away in here, so what did Neva mean?

“What do you mean about a goddess power inside Anita?” he asked.

“All women have the power of the Goddess in them,” Neva said, as if she were telling him something he should already know.

“Of course, but you were not speaking in generalities,” he said.

“Get away from me, all of you!” Hector yelled.

“He is done talking to the rest of us,” Claudia said, and handed the microphone to Rafael.

The young bruja that Neva had called mija came forward and said, “Carlos texts that Hector smells like a stranger, and Abuela Flora says he smells like a tlahuelpuchi .”

“Isn’t that just another word for vampire ?” I said.

“Young people think so,” Neva said.

“They are born, not made, and their desire for blood only arises at puberty,” the young bruja said.

“It is good to know you can listen as well as talk, mija ,” Neva said.