Anita Blake 14 - Danse macabre (36 page)

The breath left me, as if someone had pushed on my stomach. I finally managed a whisper: "Who are you?"

"Good, this guise does not frighten you. I was hoping it would not."

"Who…" Then I smelled it: night. Night out of doors, night some place warm and soft with the scent of jasmine on the air. I knew who it was. "Marmee Noir" was the least rude of the nicknames the vampires called her. She was the Mother of All Darkness; she was the first vampire, and the ruler of their council, though she'd been in hibernation, or a coma, for more than a thousand years. The last time I'd seen her in a dream she'd been as big as the ocean, as black as the space between the stars. She'd scared the shit out of me.

The shadow smiled, or at least that's what it felt like. "Good."

I struggled to sit up, and the men slept on, not even moving in their sleep. Was this a dream, or was it real? If it was real we were in deep, deep shit. If it was a dream, then I'd had powerful vamps invade my dreams before.

I put my back against the wood of the headboard. It felt real and solid. But I didn't like sitting there naked in front of her. I wished I had a gown, and the thought was enough. I was suddenly wearing a white silk gown. Dream, because I'd been able to change it. Dream, it would be okay. It was just a dream. The knot in my gut didn't believe me, but the rest of me tried to believe.

I thought of several questions to ask that shadow, and finally settled for, "Why are you here?"

"You interest me."

It was like having the devil suddenly take a personal notice of you; not good. "I'll try to be less interesting."

"I am almost awake."

I was suddenly cold down to my toes.

"I can taste your fear, necromancer."

I swallowed hard, and couldn't keep my voice from being breathy. "Why are you here, Marmee Noir?"

"I need something to wake me after such a long sleep."

"What?"

"You, perhaps."

I frowned at her. "I don't understand."

The shadow began to grow more solid, until she was a small female figure in a black cloak. I could almost see her face, almost, and I knew I did not want to. To see the face of darkness was to die.

"Jean-Claude has still not made you his, still not crossed that last line with you. Until he does, another more powerful than he can take what is his, and finish it."

"I am bound to a vampire," I said.

"Yes, you have a vampire servant, but that does not close the other door." She was suddenly sitting at my feet. I tucked my feet up, and pushed myself against the headboard. It was a dream, just a dream, she couldn't really hurt me, but I didn't believe it.

She spread a hand wide, and the hand was carved of darkness. "I thought this guise would make me less frightening, but you cringe from me. I am wasting a great deal of energy to speak to you in dream, rather than invade your mind further, yet still you fear me." She sighed, and the sound of it flittered through the room. "Perhaps I have lost the knack of being human, even to pretend. Perhaps if I have lost the knack, I should stop trying—what do you think, necromancer? Should I show you my true form?"

"Is this a trick question?" I asked.

I felt her frown, rather than saw it, because I couldn't see her face yet.

"I mean, is there a good answer here? I don't think seeing your true form would be a good thing, but I don't really want you to keep playing humanish for me, either."

"Then what do you want?"

I wanted Jean-Claude awake to help me answer this question. Out loud I said, "I don't know how to answer that question."

"Of course you do; humans always want something."

"You to go away."

I felt her smile. "This is not working, is it?"

"I don't know what was supposed to work," I said. I was hugging my knees now, because I did not want her touching me, not even in dream.

She stood, in the middle of the bed, then I realized that wasn't exactly it.

She stood, but then she kept growing, stretching up and up, like some black flame. The light reflected off whatever she was becoming, as off water, or sparkling rock. How could something gleam and give no light? How could something both reflect light and absorb it?

"If you are afraid of me anyway, then why pretend?" Her voice echoed through the room like a rush of wind. I could smell rain on the edge of that wind. "Let there be truth between us, necromancer."

She vanished; no, she became the dark. She became the darkness in the room. One minute she was a central point, almost a body, the next she was the darkness. She hung in the dark of the room, and that darkness had weight and knowledge. I was like every other human who had ever huddled around the fire because they could feel the darkness pressing around them. Feel the darkness waiting for them. She didn't try to talk to me now, she simply
was
, not words, not even images, but something I had no words for. She simply was. A summer night does not talk to you, but it exists. The dark of a moonless night does not think, but it is still alive with a thousand eyes, a thousand sounds. She was that night, with one addition: she could think. You don't want the dark to be able to think, because it won't think anything you want to know.

I screamed, but the darkness filled my throat, cut off my air. I was choking on the scent of night, drowning in jasmine and rain. I tried to call my necromancy, but it wouldn't come. The darkness in my throat laughed at me like the cold twinkling of stars, beautiful and deadly. I tried for my link to Jean-Claude, but she had severed it. I tried for my link to Nathaniel and Micah, but her animal to call was all cats, both great and small. My leopards could not help me now. The darkness whispered them to sleep.

I remembered the last time she'd been this close to me metaphysically, and thought of the only thing she hadn't been able to control. I thought of wolf. It had taken Richard's tie to me, and Jason's closeness, to waken my wolf in me and chase the darkness back, but we'd grown closer now, my wolf and I, and it came. A huge pale wolf with markings of darkness leapt out of
the darkness, its eyes filled with brown fire. It put itself between me and the dark. It let me wrap my fingers in its fur, and the moment I touched it, I could breathe again. The scent of night was there, but it wasn't in me.

The darkness swelled around me like some great dark ocean, building up, up, to crash upon the shore. The wolf tensed against me, so real against my body. I could feel its bones, its muscle, under the fur, pressed tight against me. I could smell its fear, but knew it would not leave me alone. It would stay, and defend me, because if I died, so did it. It wasn't Richard's wolf, it was mine. Not his beast, but mine.

That black ocean reared above us, so that the bed was like some tiny raft. Then it fell toward us with a sound like a thousand screams. I knew those screams—victims, eons of victims.

The wolf sprang to meet that blackness, and I felt teeth sink into flesh. I felt us bite her. I had an instant to see the room where her real body lay, all those thousands of miles away. I saw her body jerk, saw her chest rise in a sharp breath. Her breath sighed through the room. "Necromancer."

The dream shattered, and I woke screaming.

JEAN-CLAUDE'S BEDROOM WAS bright with lights. Micah was on his knees looking down at me, petting my shoulder. "Anita, thank God, we couldn't wake you."

I had time to see Nathaniel on the other side of the bed, and Jean-Claude standing beside him. I'd been out of it long enough for Jean-Claude to die and come alive again. Hours lost to the dark. Claudia, Graham, and others were in the room. It must have been hours; the shift should have changed. I had time to see and think all that, then the wolf from my dream tried to climb out my body.

It was as though my skin were a glove, and the wolf were the hand. It filled me, impossibly long. I could feel its legs stretching out and out into my arms and legs. But its limbs and mine weren't the same shape; it didn't fit. The wolf tried to make me fit.

My fingers curved, tried to form paws, and when that didn't work, it tried for claws to come out of the human fingers. I screamed, holding my hands up, trying to get breath to explain. Then I didn't have to, because my body started to try to tear itself apart. It was as if every bone and muscle were trying to tear itself free from every other piece of me. The pain of it was indescribable. Parts of my body that were never meant to move were moving now. It was like the meat-and-bone of my body was trying to move out of the way so something else could take its place.

Micah pinned my arm and shoulder. Nathaniel had my other arm. Jean-Claude pinned one leg, and Claudia had the other. They were yelling, "She's shifting!"

"She'll lose the baby!" Claudia yelled. "Help hold her, damn it."

Graham put his weight across my waist. "I don't want to hurt her."

I heard something in my shoulder pop, a wet sound that you never want to hear from your own body. I shrieked, but my body didn't care. It wanted to tear itself apart. It wanted to remake itself. The wolf was there, just under my skin. I felt it, pushing, pushing, trying to get out. Other bodies threw themselves on the pile, and gradually the sheer weight of them held me, but still the muscles and tendons kept writhing.

Another convulsion shook my body, forced some of them to shift their grips. An arm came close to my face, and I smelled wolf. That sweet musky smell quieted my body. My wolf sniffed at that pale skin and thought, not quite in words or in images, but somewhere in between:
pack, home, safe
.

The arm moved away and took that calming smell with it. The wolf tried to leap after that scent, tried to follow it, but the other smells held me down. Leopard, rat, and something not furred, not warm. Nothing that would help us.

The wolf clawed at my throat like it was an opening to be dug at, enlarged, so it could crawl out. The wolf couldn't get out, couldn't get out, trapped. Trapped! I tried to scream but a scream wasn't what broke out of my throat; a low, mournful howl spilled out instead. The sound cut through the frantic voices around me, froze the pressing hands. It echoed up and up, dying in the sudden silence. Then as the last quavering echo faded another voice rose, high and sweet. A third voice joined, deeper, so that for an instant their voices entwined in glorious harmony. Then one voice fell octaves lower, breaking the harmony, but the discord had a kind of harmony of its own.

I answered them, and for a moment our voices filled the air with quavering music. The bodies pressing against me slid away. The smell of wolf pressed close. A hand touched my face and I turned in against that hand, pressed it to my face, breathed in the scent of wolf. There were other scents on that hand, a scented map of everything he had touched that day, but under it all was wolf. I tried to raise both hands to press his skin against mine, but only one of my hands would rise. Something was broken in my left shoulder, something that wouldn't let me use that hand. Fear flared through me, and I whimpered, and that warm skin pressed closer to me. I'd never realized that you could cuddle a scent around yourself as if it were an arm. But I hugged that scent around me, smelling it so intently that it spread around me like someone taking me into their arms.