Bullet (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #19)

Bullet (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #19) Page 12

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WE WERE STILL in the bedroom under the Circus. We were still in the bed, still wedded to each other's bodies, but I knew we could all see Belle Morte in our heads like a bad dream. She was dressed in gold, a deep rich satin that made her pale brown eyes look even more amber than they were, but I had Richard's wolf amber to compare with and I knew that try as she might her eyes were not truly anything but brown. Her brunette hair was curled in careful ringlets on top of her head, to cascade around her oval face. It looked complicated and not touchable, as if she'd yell at you if you messed it up.

She spread her arms wide, chin coming up. "I am Belle Morte, I am Beautiful Death, gaze upon me, desire me, but come to me, my petite ones, and I will give you all you desire."

I had a flash of memories of Jean-Claude and Asher and a speech like this for both of them separately. I saw her offer herself to others in front of them, countless others. But none of us wanted her, none of us were tempted, that had so not been the case the last time she'd visited us. Then I'd known that Jean-Claude would always love her; he could run away from her, but he could never be free of her. Now the three of us who had been touched by her didn't want to be touched again, and Richard was the difference. He hadn't been there through any of the other times, and now he was our rock in the tide of temptation, because he wasn't tempted.

Jean-Claude took Richard's lack of interest and built on it so we could all stare at her with cold eyes. We could pull ourselves apart from each other so that Richard lay beside me, holding me, and Jean-Claude could hug Asher and reach up to undo one wrist from the chains. In a way, we ignored her, though it was like ignoring a leopard that just happened to be walking through your living room. Maybe if you ignored it the cat would keep moving, but then again, maybe it would stop and want a snack.

Rejection wasn't something that Belle Morte had dealt with much in the last two thousand years. She didn't deal well with it. Her anger filled her eyes with pale, brown fire, like staring at the sun through dark glass, but as the sun can burn skin if magnified through glass, so could Belle's power if you dared reject her.

Belle tried to flood us with the ardeur, but it was too well fed. We were sated. She held her hand out to the darkened room. I caught shadows and realized the only light was torchlight. Where was she? "Lust is no longer my only weapon, Jean-Claude. Feel my new power and learn to fear me again." The scent of roses was thicker, but underneath that was the scent of jasmine, and that had never been Belle's perfume.

A fresh thrill of fear painted my skin in cold goose bumps. Jasmine was the scent of the Mother of All Darkness, but she was dead, her body destroyed by the mercenaries the Vampire Council had hired to do the job. I'd heard her last scream in my mind from thousands of miles away. She was gone, so why did Belle Morte smell of roses and jasmine?

Jean-Claude had used Richard and his connection to the wolves to help us, but Belle's animals were all cats. I smelled leopard. The leopard inside me woke and began to pad up that long path in my head. My beast liked the scent of the leopard touching Belle, and we liked Belle. For the first time she tried to call me as if I were just another wereleopard and she my master. "You are still warm, Anita. Jean-Claude can cut your vampire away from me, but he doesn't hold leopard, and you don't know enough to fight me."

I thought about my leopards, Micah and Nathaniel, and I knew they were coming. I reached out and tasted Damian's power. I called him to me. Belle had opened us too wide and I could feel so many people. It was as if she'd peeled away my shields, like breaking into a house by tearing down an entire wall. I couldn't keep her out, but I was suddenly sensing people that I'd never been able to sense before. I knew that Rafael, the wererat king, was sitting at a table at a restaurant with others of his rodere, his animal group. I knew that the swan king was in St. Louis visiting our local swanmanes. It was as if anyone I had ever fed the ardeur on was suddenly clear in my mind. Face after face, body after body, and I realized that Belle was shifting through them like shuffling a deck of cards.

"You have done my bloodline proud, Anita; look at all of them, taste them, feel them," she said.

Jean-Claude undid Asher's other wrist, and Richard went to him, helped  him hold the other man, who was still too lost in afterglow. The moment that Richard wasn't touching me, the leopard inside me started to run. It would hit the surface of me and burst on my skin in a rush of pain and damage. Belle laughed that musical, slithering, seductive, frightening laugh.

Then Jean-Claude touched Richard's skin, even a small brush and he thrust that coolness, that calmness that Richard had learned from the tigers into my leopard, and my beast did slow, but she was still walking toward the light with a sense of purpose. Jean-Claude and Richard carried Asher back to me, laid him on one side of me, and Richard laid down on the other. Asher slid down on the bed so he could cuddle his head against my shoulder, his arm around my waist. Asher was still boneless and fighting back to full awareness; as he'd said, he didn't have a triumvirate so he didn't have the energy we did to fight her. He needed a werehyena, which was his animal to call. I thought it to Nathaniel and Micah, and more-distant Damian.

Jean-Claude lay on the other side of Asher, but he put an arm across the bed, and Richard and he clasped wrists, and Jean-Claude put a hand across Asher to take my hand in his. The moment we touched we were more solid. The shadowy torch-lit room was foggy around the edges, beginning to recede like a bad dream.

Then the scent of evil flowers was stronger, like we were bathing in jasmine perfume, but underneath was heat, dry grass, and then lion. The scene in my mind came into focus again like crystal, all hard edges and unbelievably brilliant in color the way dreams so seldom are. She stood there pushing lion and leopard at us and we had only wolf touching us. It wasn't enough.

She smiled, and the scent of roses and jasmine grew stronger. Jean-Claude said, "Belle, what have you done?"

"The roses are your scent, but jasmine is Marmee Noir," I said.

Jean-Claude said again, "What have you done, Belle?"

"She was the Mother of us all. If we had let her power die with her, we would all have died," Belle Morte said.

"That is a lie," Jean-Claude said, "a lie to keep us from attacking those that made us."

"We were not willing to take that chance," she said, and I felt her power reaching out to us, almost visible like some evil fog. I didn't know what she meant to do with it, but if she had truly swallowed some of the Mother of All Darkness, then I didn't want any of that power to touch us. But it was  as if the mist were a trick, a sleight of hand to keep me looking in the wrong direction, because her power was just suddenly there, against my body. I could feel a claw digging under my ribs. It tore a gasp of pain from me, and blood began to spill down the front of my body. Belle had never been able to cut from a distance with her animals. But it was more than that; it was as if the invisible claw were a hand being held out to my leopard, saying, Come, take my hand, let me free you, and no matter how much control I thought I had on the beasts inside me, they all wanted out. They were all frustrated with this human body that would not let them come out and play.

"Here, kitty, kitty," Belle said, and then she called it in French, but the language didn't matter, only the power. I writhed and fought not to scream.

Richard put his hand on my stomach and I felt that soothing power again. He stroked my leopard as he'd petted the wolf before. The leopard snarled at him, but it stopped racing for the surface. It circled, snarling in frustration. My leopard was stopped, but Belle wasn't. She clawed at my skin, and faint red lines appeared across my stomach.

"I am not so easily stopped now, necromancer. I have the power of the Mother of us all in me, and you cannot stand against it."

The door opened and Nathaniel, Micah, and Damian were there with one of our new female vampires holding Damian's hand. Her name was Cardinal after her red curls, though they were more gold-red than Damian's; nothing was quite as bloodred as his long straight hair, just as his eyes were the green of a cat's eyes, inhumanly beautiful, though I knew that the eyes were the color he'd had in life. He was almost six feet tall, which made Cardinal very tall for a woman in the century she'd died in, thin and small breasted, boyishly hipped under her silk robe. In her day she'd have been too thin, but now she looked like a model.

Micah and Nathaniel reached the bed first and just climbed onto it. Micah was wearing purple silk boxers, but Nathaniel was nude, which meant they'd been in bed sleeping, or trying to; most of the wereanimals wore nothing to bed if I didn't make them. Lately I'd stopped insisting on it. It was only the group leaders who seemed to throw something on for walking around in the Circus.

I held my hand out and Nathaniel touched me first. The power flared like a warm wind over my skin. The moment his power touched mine the claws hurt a little less, but Nathaniel flinched and I saw red lines appear  on his skin. He was sharing the damage but not stopping it. Micah knelt by my legs, putting his hand on Nathaniel's shoulder and my thigh. His power was like a soothing wash of water, a calm deep pool, and his beast swirled up through his body and crossed that barrier into me. There was a moment of feeling his beast slide into me and then I could feel it rubbing its silken fur against my side. I could feel our beasts greeting each other with that long sinuous cat rub from cheek to hip, and at the same time it felt as if the fur was rubbing along the inside of my human body, so there was a moment of disorientation, of being my leopard, his leopard, and me at the same time. The two leopards turned as one, snarling, at the power that was trying to dig its way into us.

Micah and I had been enough to chase Belle out once before. She hadn't been prepared for us to be a true Nimir-Ra and Nimir-Raj. With Nathaniel as my leopard to call, we were enough. We pushed her back. The scent of jasmine and roses began to fade.

"Not this time, Anita," Belle said, and I smelled sun on dry grass, and a beating, pulsing heat, and there were bigger claws pushing at my stomach. The lioness looked up from deep inside me and began her walk up the road. "You have no lion to call yet, and you have not joined yourself to the local Rex. You cannot win this. I will bring your beast and make you my animal to call, Anita."

I thought lion and I felt two of them, distant but reacting. One was Haven, our local Rex, and the other was Nicky, who was something less than an animal to call, and something more. He was a Bride, my Bride. It didn't mean marriage; it meant I'd rolled his mind so completely that he was worse than a slave. I'd meant to roll him, but the results were frightening even to me. To Nicky I said, Come, but to Haven I said, Don't. The local Rex was off my feeding schedule for starting a fight with Nathaniel and Micah one morning, and for "marrying" a female werelion and lying to her and me that she was his Regina. It had been a ploy to make me jealous; when it hadn't worked he'd annulled the marriage and sent her packing. It was like he was stuck in a sitcom mentality and didn't know how to behave in the real world. He projected the thought that he was coming. I thought back, No, don't. I had a werelion closer; I didn't need two.

Damian stood beside the bed in a new silk robe that was almost the same green as his eyes, with Cardinal pulling on his hand. He turned to her and I heard him say, "You've seen Belle's court. Do you want her in charge here, too?"

She blinked big blue eyes, shook her head over and over, but she let go of his pale hand and let him crawl onto the bed. He had the palest skin of any of the vampires in our kiss, our group, because in life he'd probably been paler, too. Damian lay down, putting his upper body across my bare legs, and the moment that he and Nathaniel touched me, while Jean-Claude and Richard touched me, it was as if we were a wind, a storm edge that forced back whatever Belle was trying to do. Damian was my vampire servant, an impossibility, but through him and Nathaniel I had my own triumvirate. I was the equivalent of the master vampire for them, and Jean-Claude still had his triumvirate with Richard and me. Triumvirates of power were rare among vampires; to have two that we could draw on was unheard of. Belle's image began to grow dim again.

"I told you it would take more of us," said a man's voice from Belle's vision. I smelled the grass and heat of lion, and the thick pine of forest and the musk of wolf, and rain and jungle, thick and exotic and leopard. I knew who it was before the vision cleared and the Master of Beasts stood with Belle Morte. He was one of the darkest-complected vampires I'd ever met, pale with death, but he'd been dark enough in life that he could only be so pale. He was Indian, as in the country, not Native American. He wore what I used to think of as harem pants with a matching sparkly vest over a silk shirt. It would have looked like a cheap costume except that the sparkle on his clothes wasn't sequins but real small jewels sewn in patterns. He was another Vampire Council member. He'd actually come to St. Louis once and tried to take over, or at least torment us. We'd killed his son, who he'd brought with him, for raping and torturing some of our people. It didn't surprise me that he'd be willing to help Belle possess us. It only surprised me that he hadn't tried to do something to us sooner.

He could call almost every kind of wereanimal, and he had three of them clustered around him now. He smiled out at us. It was a very unpleasant smile. "Jean-Claude, Master of the City of St. Louis, greetings from the Council on High. We have come to tame you tonight as I have tamed all my beasts." Except for his wife, who had been a wererat and given him his now deceased son, he ruled by fear and power, as Belle ruled by seduction, power, and fear.

"We are not so easily tamed as all that," Jean-Claude said, and he settled back against the bed with all of us clustered around him, touching and being touched. I felt him think that the sight would bother Padma, Master  of Beasts, because his line of vampire didn't use sex as their tools. Nothing we would be willing to do would scandalize Belle Morte.

"You say that, but you have two triumvirates of power in your bed. We are still using only our beasts to call, and yet the vision remains even," Padma said, and I knew before he called them who would come to his hands. Captain Thomas Carswell was still dressed in a version of the British uniform he'd worn when he was a soldier for Queen Victoria in the 1800s. His dark gold hair was still cut short and neat, but the brownish mustache that curled across his upper lip and up to meet his sideburns always made me unable to really see his face. Still, you had to admire a man who had worn the same look for more than a century. He was Padma's human servant, but the only time I'd seen them in person, well, it hadn't been a love match between him and his master. In fact neither he nor Gideon, Padma's animal to call, liked their master very much. Gideon's hair was still somewhere between brown and blond, but it was longer than last time, shoulder length now, thick and straight with an edge of wave to it as if the longer it got the more it would wave. His eyes were still yellow with orange pinwheels, tiger eyes. I knew he had kitty-cat fangs upper and lower in his mouth. His master had forced him to stay in tiger form too long and now Gideon didn't come completely back.

The more vampires I met, the better a master Jean-Claude seemed in comparison.

Padma made a gesture, and first Gideon touched his shoulder, still standing behind him, and then Thomas raised a slow hand. He said, "If I had a choice, I would not help him do this."

"I believe that," I said, and then there was no air for talking. There was nothing but power. Padma was the storm now, a hot wind blowing out of the edge of a painful hell to make Damian, Nathaniel, and me scream. Micah reached out to the other leopards in the city and fed that power into us. There was a moment where I could draw a breath, but it was as if every beast inside me were trying to come to the surface at once. Padma was muttering in French under his breath. I couldn't understand the words, but my beasts could and they clawed and fought inside me like a crowd with one narrow door and a fire behind them, except that the door they fought at was the inside of my body. I screamed, and then Micah was there, and Richard's wolf, and they chased back two of the beasts, soothed and calmed them with what we'd learned from the weretigers. They should  have been able to calm them all regardless of beastie form, or that was what we'd discovered was possible, but it was as if the tigress and lioness inside me spoke a different language that none of us could speak. Padma spoke it.

I reached out for tiger and found Crispin curled in bed with Gina and her boyfriend. I felt him look up, and felt Domino farther away with Nicky, and knew that Domino was already hurrying this way with the werelion.

The only good thing was that I was the only one writhing in pain. Padma's attack was narrowly focused on me. His voice came through the pain. "I control all the beasts you carry, Anita; I am the perfect weapon against you."

There were no claw marks on the outside of my skin; this was different power, and it was my skin that pushed out as if things were fighting to get out through my body. I watched a claw stretch up against my skin like some horrible baby caught inside me. It felt like the claws were ripping up things that no hand should have ever been able to touch with my skin still intact, and I screamed. The pain had to come out somehow, and my body couldn't free the beasts clawing inside me.

Crispin was suddenly above me, pale blue tiger eyes wide. He'd been born with the eyes of his beast. His short, curly white hair stayed the color of his tiger form as his eyes never changed. I hadn't heard or felt him come into the room; the pain was too much, it was eating the world. He held my face between his big hands and forced me to look at him. He was my white tiger to call, and he'd been trained since puberty to help the women of the white tiger clan not to shapeshift while they were pregnant.

He soothed the beasts, all of them, and I was left breathing too hard, lying on the bed staring into the calm of his pale blue eyes. He smiled down at me. "Better," he said.

I swallowed and realized my throat was raw from screaming. "Better," I whispered.

The image of Belle and Padma blurred, as if I were staring at it through a pane of frosted glass. The big bad vampires were growing dim again. Belle's voice came. "Together, Padma."

And the lioness inside me was suddenly flinging herself against my body as if she were trying to use her shoulder to smash through a door, but the door was me. The impact made my body rise on the bed as if I'd honestly been smashed into. Hands were everywhere holding me down, trying to  soothe, but there was no lion, and with both Padma and Belle's energy I needed a match to their power.

I heard Nicky's voice before I saw him. "Anita, I'm here, I'm here!" He was stripping out of his clothes as he came, handing his guns to Domino, who was right behind him. Crispin rolled off me so Nicky could press his naked upper body against mine. His blond hair was cut longer on top so that a long fall of it hid most of the right side of his face like some anime character's haircut. It was only as he lay above me so the hair fell forward that I could see the scars where his eye had once been. It was just a slick rush of scars. His one brown eye stared down at me.

"Give me your beast, Anita," he said. He kissed me as if he'd crawl inside my mouth, and I kissed him back and stopped trying to control my lioness. I released my control and let all that heat, all that power, go into Nicky. I'd learned how to be gentler when I brought their beasts, but there was no time for gentle, there was just Padma's lion and mine thrusting upward, spilling into Nicky's mouth, clawing out of my body and into his. There was no sense of Belle's lioness. There was a moment when the pain ate the world in black-edged fog, and I could feel huge claws piercing my stomach and into Nicky's like some macabre conjoined twin, and then Nicky's body exploded, one second human, the next a lionman above me. That thick, warm liquid that always happened when they shifted to animal form was everywhere. I blinked it out of my eyelashes, but I was still too hurt to wipe it away.

Nathaniel's hand cleaned the worst of it off my face, as Nicky's strangely dry body collapsed on top of me in a spill of thick golden fur. The animal form rose out of all the mess and liquid, but the fur was never wet. His mane was coarser fur tickling along my face in a pale brown-and-gold ruff.

His voice came breathless with the pain of such a violent change, but he gasped it out. "See . . . you should . . . keep me beside . . . you always." He managed to raise his head enough that I could see his face, a strange mixture of lion and human, but the eyes were a deep rich gold with an edge of orange around the pupil.

"I need my lion," I said, and my own voice was breathy and pain-filled as if I'd run a very long way and it had all hurt.

"You need . . . me," he said, and that was the worst thing about what I'd done to Nicky; he would have stayed glued to my side if I'd allowed it. He seemed to have almost no will of his own. That was why he was called  my Bride, like those pitiful women in the Dracula movies, the Brides of Dracula. The movies showed them as baby vampires, and some vampires could do that to other vampires, but my ability went past species barriers. Theoretically, anyone I could attract could be made into a Bride. Nicky had been a sociopathic assassin, and now he did what I told him.

I said the only thing I could think to say. "Thank you, Nicky."

He smiled, and it was his human smile caught in the half-man face. A shining smile, excited that he'd pleased me.

"I tasted the white tiger when he touched you," Padma said, "so I will not try white, but there are other colors of tiger, Anita."

"Gideon is a standard-issue weretiger," I said, and my voice was steady. Good, I was tired of sounding afraid.

"True enough, but then I didn't have a lion when I helped her call your lion, did I?"

I lay there on the ruined silk sheets with the clear, thick liquid over us like someone had smeared the bed with thin Karo syrup, and tried to think past the fading pain.

"She is my human servant," Jean-Claude said. "It is against all our laws to try to steal her away from me. We are not allowed to break the link between vampire and servants, or animals to call."

"Just as we are supposed to kill all baby necromancers," Belle said, "because if we do not, they become something that can control us. You should have told us the moment she created a vampire servant, Jean-Claude. You should have told us when she gained the ability to call all manner of beasts."

"Did you think you could hide her growing powers forever?" Padma asked.

"She is my human servant. You all agreed not to kill her just because she was a necromancer," Jean-Claude said.

"She killed the Father of the Day, Jean-Claude," Belle said. "Did you think we would not feel both his regaining his power and then his death?"

"If she can kill one of the greatest of us, then we must either tame her and you, or destroy you all," Padma said.

"Where is the rest of the council? Why are you hidden away for this attack?" Jean-Claude said. "They don't know you are doing this, do they?"

The two vampires lied well, but Jean-Claude said, "You would not be deep into the catacombs doing this if you weren't hiding. You are trying  to destroy my human servant and attacking another master, and both are crimes among us. Even the council is not above the law."

"She has the powers of two bloodlines, Jean-Claude; don't you see that we must tame her?" Padma said.

"She carries the power of Belle's line," Jean-Claude said.

"She calls beasts like she is one of mine, Jean-Claude. Don't you understand yet how dangerous she is to us all? She gains power from every vampire that attacks her. She touched me once, used her ties to wolf once against me, felt me call beast once, and now she is able to call beasts as I do."

"I was attacked by a panwere," I said.

"And why was he attracted to your city, Anita? Why did he attack your people? He was drawn to you, necromancer."

Funny, it had never occurred to me that my ability to call animals came from the Master of Beasts. I'd blamed it all on Chimera, a panwere who cut me up and gave me the same kind of lycanthropy he'd had, one that adapted to any beast that bled me.

"You're giving me too much credit," I said.

"The Mother of All Darkness wanted Anita, wanted to possess her body," Jean-Claude said. "You ate some of her power, and now you are obsessed with Anita, too. The Mother would defy the council, but the two of you would never do anything so rash. What you are doing could turn the rest of the council against you and your people. It would be civil war among the vampires. Why would you risk all that when we are in America? We are not trying to take anything from you. Why would you risk so much when we are no threat to Europe?"

"The American vampires petitioned the council for permission to kill you, Jean-Claude," Belle said.

Padma said, "They do not need to know that."

"If the council had agreed to our destruction, you would not be doing this behind the other council members' backs," Jean-Claude said.

"Why do they want us dead?" I asked.

"They fear you," Belle said.

"Belle Morte, do not answer their questions."

Something passed over her face, some thought, some idea.

It was Jean-Claude who put the pieces together. "Who among the council voted in our favor?"

Belle simply answered, "The Dragon, the Traveller, and me." She put her hands over her mouth.

I felt Jean-Claude settling in against the bed, felt some tension in him ease. "Padma wishes us dead, but you want to save us, don't you?"

She just stared at him with her hands across her lovely mouth. I realized she was fighting not to answer his questions. What was going on?

Asher stirred and said, "Do you miss Jean-Claude and me, Belle Morte?"

She couldn't leave that alone. "If I had missed you, Asher, I could have had you again any time in the last century. I do not bed the ugly."

Jean-Claude and I moved toward Asher as a unit, and I realized that it was Jean-Claude's thought first, but it didn't matter; I agreed with it. We wrapped ourselves around Asher, his body slick with the thick lubricant that Nicky had gotten on us all. We held him and stared up at the vision of Belle Morte.

"Do you miss being with both of us together?" Jean-Claude asked.

She struggled not to answer. It showed on her face, but in the end she said, "Yes." Then she was angry, so angry, her rage filled her eyes with brown fire, and she threw power into me again. "If I cannot tame you, I will destroy you."

The claws struck, raising fresh welts on my stomach, but then Jean-Claude was there, his power, no, our power, spilling over all of us. He drew the power of both triumvirates to him and used it to shield us.

"Thank you, Padma, for showing us how to control the triumvirates better."

"I did not show you."

"Anita is my human servant. I have been able to gain vampire powers simply by having them used against us. Until now the power did not stay with me, but I think this time it will. I think you have shown me how to do what I've been wanting to do, to bind multiple triumvirates into one thing, one power. Thank you."

Belle Morte screamed, "No!" She thrust that power and there was no lust to it; it was all about anger, rage, and underneath that was pain. I, we, tasted her regret like something bitter and sweet on our tongues. I reached out to all that anger without thinking about it. It was like seeing something shiny and just reaching for it. I felt Jean-Claude at my back, but it was Damian's hard-won control that steadied us. I reached out and si-phoned off Belle's rage, because I could eat anger. That was my ability, not Jean-Claude's and not one of Belle's, either.

I felt Nathaniel so calm, Damian cold and controlled, and Richard more  fearful but determined not to be the weak link, and beyond that was Jean-Claude more certain, more sure, more master than ever before. He let me reach out to all that angry power and eat it. I drew off that anger and we all fed on it, because Jean-Claude understood how to share the energy between all of us. In that moment I realized that it wasn't my triumvirate and his, but ours, and he knew how to drive the metaphysical car better than I did. I was okay with riding shotgun on this one, as long as I got to shoot Belle Morte.

Her rage wakened my own, that deep pool of anger that I'd carried for so many years. It liked Belle's anger, liked the taste of it, and we drank it, her, down.

She fell to the floor. "No," she said, "this cannot be."

"The piece of the Mother you took into yourself wants Anita," Jean-Claude said, "and that piece is controlling you both. She is not dead, she lives in you. Did the rest of the council take her power into themselves?"

"Yes," Belle said, before she could stop herself.

"Then you are all poisoned with her evil." I felt his fear then, and we all shared it.

"You should have let her die," I said.

"She offered her power to us like a dark wind," Padma said, and he looked lost.

"Oh my God," I said, "she really has possessed you."

Then both the vampires stared at me. "But it's you she wants, necromancer." They spoke in unison. The smell of jasmine was everywhere, and the scent of a rain that had fallen on earth thousands of years ago. It was the scent of the Mother of All Darkness. Marmee Noir wasn't dead; she was in all of them.

They stared at me and said in that echo, "The Lover of Death would feed on your fear, necromancer. But these two bodies cannot, more's the pity. We would enjoy the taste of how much you fear us."

"Do you control Padma and Belle more completely than the rest?"

They both answered, "They are the youngest on the council, the farthest away from me in time."

"They aren't as powerful as the others," Jean-Claude said.

"He hates you for destroying his son; it opened him to me. She wants you; her anger and regret opened her to me. The Lover of Death feels nothing for you, except that your death would be wise. But he hungers for slaughter and deaths to feed upon, and this new, more modern council  controls him. I've promised him death, death as he hasn't seen it in centuries if he will be my horse to ride. The Dragon feels nothing for you, except curiosity. The Traveller knows what is happening, and he hides from me. He has one body and if it is destroyed he is no more, but my soul fills many bodies now. You would have to kill all of them to destroy me."

"A separable soul," Jean-Claude said.

"Yes," she said, "and even the death of all the council will not find all of me." They looked at me, and said, "Thank you for killing the Father of the Day; he was the only one who could have challenged me."

"I didn't do it to help you," I said.

"But it did help me, Anita, so much more than you will ever know."

"You ate his power when he died," I said.

The two vampires nodded.

"Belle Morte," Jean-Claude said, "you must fight her."

"She cannot," the vampires said together.

I felt Jean-Claude open the ardeur and thrust it into Belle Morte. Belle's head went back, her spine bowing, and when she looked up her eyes were their human brown. "She doesn't understand the ardeur, but she understands lust, Jean-Claude."

Then Belle's eyes were drowned in power darker than her own, her eyes like a sea of night sky, and I'd seen those eyes before, and not from the Mother. Belle and Padma spoke in unison. "Lust we know of old, Anita. Remember what we did in your Las Vegas with the weretigers? I can raise the ardeur and drown you all in it for hours until the sun does rise and my power grows by every tick of your clocks."

Richard's fingers dug into my shoulder, and I realized that as each man had come into the room he'd been pushed farther away from me, no, not pushed, had moved farther away from me. He understood it was a choice now, because I felt him understand that as his thoughts touched me. Fear ran through Jean-Claude like cold water, and I was feeling almost nothing yet, shoving my emotions away as I did in a crisis. Only Richard, of the three of us, was calm, no, Micah, I could feel him, calm, too, and Nathaniel beyond him. Micah was calm because he was almost always that way, and we got a glimpse of the years and the work that had gone into that calm. He was like a deep, still pool where all the trouble could go. Nathaniel was calm because he honestly believed that I would not fail him, that I would find a way. His unshakable faith had saved us before, but as always it frightened  me, too, my fear that I would fail him, and his deep, abiding belief that I wouldn't. And then there was Richard, calm at last, and his was like Micah's, a calm built of work, therapy, effort; he'd built his calm the way he built his muscles, one weight at a time.

I felt Richard's version of the ardeur for only the second time ever. It was about possession, but not demonic, just about till death do us part, belonging to you and no other. Once upon a time that had been my heart's desire, but by the time the ardeur had risen in me, I needed more help in my life than any one person could give, so the ardeur had given me Micah, and Nathaniel, and finally made me someone who could be with Jean-Claude.

I reached out to Jason, because I knew he was still in the room somewhere even though my vision was drowning in the sight of Belle and Padma in that dark room so far away. Jason's hand met mine, as if he'd sensed what I needed. The last time I'd faced Richard's rice-and-roses  ardeur, it had been Jason's fear of being consumed by a single person that had helped me fight it off. I had a moment to doubt, to wonder if J.J. had made him change his mind, but she hadn't. One of the reasons he and J.J. were working better for each other than anyone else ever had was that they didn't want monogamy, but they did want to belong to each other, to be special, just not in that burn-your-bridges kind of way.

But Richard didn't throw his wedding-veil ardeur into me; he aimed it at that distant room. He aimed it at Belle Morte. In all the centuries of the  ardeur, some had tried to trap Belle in love. Augustine of Chicago had done that, and Jean-Claude and Asher had been her obsessions, but no one had offered this, only Richard. Only he could have turned something that was meant to feed on lust and make it about fiftieth wedding anniversaries and make it sound like a good idea.

He lay on the bed, curling himself around Jean-Claude, Asher, and me, and sent the thought out that you could have this forever, and with the offer to Belle it meant forever. It was that kind of love, and Belle didn't understand it, and if she had no clue, Marmee Noir was lost.

Belle looked at us with her own brown eyes. "Richard," she said, and she'd never said his name with that kind of heat behind it. He stared up at her through that long line of vision and let her see him lying there nude. It was no small promise, what he offered. "Belle," he whispered back. She smiled at him, but spoke to Jean-Claude. "I keep calling you foolish, but  you find strength where I have only found weakness. Any power the Mother possesses is hers to command. She feeds on negative emotions, follows them into your mind and heart."

Padma was behind her with a sword in his hands. His eyes were black fire, not his color, not his eyes. I cried out, reached toward them. I wasn't sure if I screamed or if it was Jean-Claude. We cried, "Behind you, Belle!"

We felt her ardeur drown Padma. He fell to his knees, overwhelmed by too much desire. I watched Gideon and Thomas hesitate. They hated Padma and they understood now that having him dead might be better. But when he ordered them to help him, they had no choice. Belle picked up her skirts and ran. They let her run, and I knew Padma would make them pay for it later. She said, "Save yourself if you can, Jean-Claude. Contact the Traveller if you can find him. Maybe he can help you. Run if you can. Hide if you can. We are not descended from the Darkness, remember that." Then it was as if someone had turned off the picture. We were all suddenly lying on the bed with just ourselves and no sense of Belle, or Padma, or Mommie Dearest. The world didn't smell like flowers anymore.

We all just lay there in a silence so thick I could hear the blood in my own head. Into the silence, I heard myself say, "Motherfucker."

"Exactement, ma petite, exactement," Jean-Claude said.