Лорел Гамильтон - Rafael

Neva said, “Make him look into your eyes, Anita.”

I did what she asked, staring into the brown of Padma’s eyes set in Hector’s face. “I am the vampire here, Anita, not you.” The eyes started to glow with brown fire like a brown glass with the sun behind it.

“Keep the Goddess in your eyes, Anita, it is not as vampires we need to tame him,” Neva said.

I fought to hold on to the blackness that Obsidian Butterfly had taught me. I leaned over Hector and looked into Padma’s glowing eyes with the darkness between stars in my eyes.

“They showed me their dark eyes and it availed them nothing,” Hector said, but it was Padma’s voice the way Pierrot’s voice could come out of Pierette.

“This is not the same darkness,” Neva said. “There is more than one goddess in the heavens, Master of Beasts.”

“I don’t know what you are babbling about, woman.”

And then I saw the rats in the darkness, so that it wasn’t the darkness between the stars at all, but a blackness made up of rats, as if the universe were connected together with them, or the universe was nothing but rats, black and warm, and the darkness collapsed into an avalanche of rats that fell through Neva’s eyes and into my own and into Padma’s eyes in Hector’s face.

“What are you doing?” Hector asked, and his voice held the first hint of fear.

Neva answered, “She has opened the way for us.”

I felt like I was falling with the rats and the darkness into the brown glow of Padma’s eyes. Hector started to scream, and I wanted to join him. I repeated in my head, I trust Neva, I trust the rodere, I trust their magic, I trust Rafael, I trust Claudia, I trust Benito , and then the rats and I spilled through Hector’s eyes and into Padma’s hotel room, except the rats weren’t metaphors or bits of space darkness—they were real squeaking, scrambling, wriggling rats filling the room.

“You cannot hurt me with rats, it was my first animal to call,” Padma said.

The rats milled around the room and did not touch him, he was right, and then like an echo I felt the black rat with the white chest spot touching my hand, its whiskers tickling along my skin. It reminded me that my body was still kneeling on the sand and on Hector, and it reminded me of one more thing.

“Rats are my animal to call now, too,” I said.

“You are a child playing with toys you do not understand,” Padma sneered.

I felt the rat scramble up my bloody shirt and push its way through the mess of my hair with its drying blood, and the rat didn’t care. It liked being near me, and I realized I liked the weight of it on my shoulder, the way it cuddled against my face. This was the first time I’d ever been able to interact with the real-life version of my animal to call—with all the others it was the wereanimal, but never just the animal part without the human in there somewhere.

It was as if I’d been holding my breath and suddenly, I could let it go. I could relax in a way that you can around your dog, or cat, because they aren’t judging you like people do. The rat settled more heavily against my neck and the side of my jaw. If it was relaxing to touch the wereanimal you could call, touching the animal version of it was even more soothing.

And just like that was all right, it was all right to feel like the darkness was made up of a million rats. It was all right that the rats fell through me and were me, and weren’t me, and filled the hotel room and began to swarm over Padma.

“I forbid you to hurt me,” he commanded.

The rats didn’t care what he wanted, and neither did I, because I wanted him dead. I did not want him haunting our steps and I never wanted him near our child. We needed him dead and the rats liked me better because he didn’t like them. He didn’t even like wererats, because they were just animals, after all.

The first one took a bite. “Stop, I command you! You will not hurt me. You cannot hurt me; I am your master.” He sounded so sure of himself, but we could feel his fear, we could smell it on him, feel the trembling of him underneath our feet and against our bellies as we climbed him. Fear meant food.

They started biting him, hundreds of tiny mouths taking a bite, and then they began to feed. And he started to scream. “You cannot do this! I am your master!”

“You are not master here,” Neva, the two other brujas, and I said in unison, “not in our holy of holies. You cannot win here when we have another vampire to call rats for us, another bruja to see the darkness between stars, another wererat to be a conduit for the Goddess. You only seek to steal power, Master of Beasts, but Anita seeks to share it. Someone who shares is always more welcome than someone who takes.” And all the time Neva’s words poured from our mouths the rats fed. If Neva hadn’t held me in her power, our power, their power, the Goddess, or the God, or something, I would have been horrified, shocked, guilt ridden, but he had threatened our child, one we didn’t even have yet. He would have killed us all, enslaved us all, and that we could not allow.

Regular rats shouldn’t have been able to hurt him, it would have been like a lead bullet, but the magic changed the rats into something more like a silver-dipped bullet that could pierce supernatural flesh. The fire died in his eyes while they were still tugging and slicing the flesh from his bones. And then we were back on the sands, and the light died in Hector’s eyes while we were still pulling back from them. He hadn’t survived the death of his master.

I half expected the rats all around us on the sand to fall on Hector’s body like the other rats had on Padma, but the rat on my shoulder made a soft, almost chirp sound in my ear. We aren’t that kind of rat , it seemed to say.

Neva said, “That is not how we dispose of bodies here in the fighting pit.”

I knew because Rafael knew that there was a trap door that opened over the river and there was something not rat, not human, that had been there when the wererats first came to St. Louis. The wererats had built upon the power of this place and what lay beneath. The dead of the fighting pit were sacrifices to what hid in the river here, and in turn it had become part of the magic of the brujas, part of the power of the holy of holies.

I knew that Rafael was healing before I turned and saw him sitting up on the sand. My eyes were back to normal as I crossed the sand toward him. I wanted to run to him, but I still had the rat on my shoulder, and I wasn’t sure how secure he was there. I’d never had a pet rat, and immediately in my head the rat was disgusted with the thought that he was a pet.

“Sorry,” I said, out loud.

Rafael held his hand out to me, and I took it and knelt on the sand, keeping my shoulders straight so I didn’t spill the big rat off. Rafael was smiling at me; his legs were healing all that damage like those fast-forward films of blooming flowers. It was wonderful and a little disturbing.

“You killed another master vampire for us,” he said.

“It was a group effort,” I said.

“A group effort that wouldn’t have worked without you with us,” he said, and raised my hand to his lips to lay a kiss across my fingers.

I wanted to say so much, ask so many things, but I let it all go to trail my fingers down the edge of his face. The rat on my shoulder started to walk down my arm toward him.

“And who is this?” he asked.

“He didn’t like being called a pet, so I’m not sure I get to name him.”

“He says you may choose a human name for him,” Neva said as she walked toward us, “and he will let you know if he likes it.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“I had hoped to take you up on your offer with Pierette tonight, but though I am healing I will not be able to do anyone justice tonight, let alone you and another lovely woman.”