The Harlequin (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 15)

Chapter Forty-three

FACES TURNED TO us as we stumbled through the door. There was no vestibule, so the three of us were just suddenly in view of the crowd. Nathaniel and I were breathing as if we'd run a mile. Only Graham was calm at my side. Edward and Olaf fanned out to either side of us. Micah moved wide around us all. Was he still fighting off his beast? I trusted him to handle it. I had to trust him, because there were things happening that I didn't trust anyone else to handle.

The area behind the pulpit had become a stage. There were three people on stage in masks. What could only be Columbine and Giovanni were to the left. She was elegant in a skintight version of the Harlequin's motley, all red, blue, white, black, and gold with a short half skirt to pretend at modesty. A gold tricorn hat had multicolored balls to echo the colors of the rest. Her mask left a white chin and crimson mouth bare. The man beside her was much taller than she was, dressed in a white mask like the one they'd sent us in the first box. His face was an empty blankness trapped in the black hooded cloak that covered him to his ankles. A black tricorn hat completed the outfit. They stood in a contrast of bright and dark, color and not.

The third masked figure was on our side of the stage, standing beside Jean-Claude and his vampires. Damian and Malcolm were close at his side, behind Asher. But the last masked figure wasn't a vampire.

He looked more like he was about to do bondage than go to Carnival. The mask was leather and hid most of the face, covering even the back of the head, a hood instead of a mask. It was the broad shoulders framed by the leather vest, and the slightly paler version of his summer tan, that let me know it was Richard. He'd come to stand at Jean-Claude's side after all. Jake and some of the other bodyguard werewolves stood behind him.

Asher stood on the other side of Jean-Claude, his hair catching the lights like spun gold. Remus and a handful of other werehyenas stood behind him. Most of Jean-Claude's vampires were scattered around the stage. But Elinore and a few others weren't there because Jean-Claude had made them stay away. If we died tonight and managed to take the Harlequin with us, he trusted Elinore to rebuild the city's vampires. Truth and Wicked were there, along with Haven and his werelions. Rafael and his wererats were there, on the stage. There was an ocean of wereanimals around our side of the stage. The two Harlequin looked so outnumbered. Part of me was sad that it wasn't going to be a stand-up fight. It looked like we might win that kind of fight. Of course, the Harlequin standing in the church had scouted us; they knew our resources. Maybe there was more than one reason they'd offered a metaphysical fight instead of a physical one.

My pulse had started to slow. We started up the aisle, Graham a little ahead of us all, Nathaniel and I still hand in hand. Micah was still giving us room. I'd have loved to touch him, but he was right. We didn't need another visit from our leopards. Edward and Olaf brought up the rear. I thought we'd get to the stage. I thought I'd get to touch Jean-Claude, and Damian, but Columbine thought otherwise.

Her power poured over the congregation like invisible smoke. My breath caught in my throat. I felt her power touch some of the vampires. They were choking on her power. I was choking on her power. I dropped Nathaniel's hand and grabbed for the back of a pew. Whatever was happening, I didn't want it spreading to Nathaniel.

"Anita," he said, "what's wrong? I feel power, but..."

I shook my head. I couldn't talk past the feel of her power. It was almost delicate, like choking on feathers; light, airy, and deadly. Vampires were standing in the pews or falling to the floor. I fought to stand and stared at the vampire in her colored clown outfit. If something that elegant could be called a clown. I realized I wasn't choking. It wasn't death the power offered, but it was the end of free will. Her will was so large, so powerful, that it would be slavery. I could feel it. She would control us as surely as I could control a zombie that I had raised. Her power was something close to mine. She could control vampires, so why was it hitting me this hard?

Her power was a dainty fingertip sticking into my mind, pushing against my will. "Be mine," it whispered. "Be mine."

Nathaniel touched me. His power shivered over my skin, chasing back that cold touch. I could think again, feel again, take a deep breath again.

My own power roared to life. My necromancy, and something else, something that was necromancy, and not. I thrust that power into the delicate, coaxing touch. There was nothing delicate about what I did. I smashed into her power with a hammer, straight through that deceptive softness. Hit it, and found the steel nail underneath the lie of gentleness. It was all lies. There was nothing gentle, nothing kind. Submit, the power breathed. Be mine, I'll take care of you, I'll take away all your problems, be mine. I screamed down those lying words. I drowned her voice in my head in sheer power, like dynamiting a hotel because you didn't like your room. Her power collapsed, retreated, and I was suddenly standing in the aisle when I hadn't realized I'd moved.

I was standing with Nathaniel's hand in mine. I could taste pulses, blood flowing sluggish in a dozen veins. Vampires turned and looked at me, because they had no choice. I'd smashed her power and replaced it with my own. The dozen vamps hadn't fed yet tonight, so slow the beat, so sluggish the pulse. We needed food.

Nathaniel's hand convulsed around mine, bringing me back from that thought. Had he shared it? I could suddenly smell their skin, half a dozen different perfumes, someone's sweet shampoo, the sharp scent of cigarettes, aftershave. I could smell their skin as if I'd put my face just above their arms, their necks. Jean-Claude had kept me from drowning in the sensations of them last time I'd come to the church. Why wasn't he helping me now? I turned to the stage and found him looking, not at me, but at Columbine and Giovanni. Something was happening. Were they talking? I couldn't hear them. It was as if all my senses were narrowed down to scent and touch and vision.

I felt her power draw inward, like you'd take a breath before blowing out a candle. Except this candle was a few hundred vampires. That power spilled outward, and it was like water moving around the rocks of the vampires that Nathaniel and I could sense. We could save them, but the rest... the rest were lost.

Damian cried out, in my head, a scream. Nathaniel and I turned and found Malcolm wrapped around Damian, Malcolm's mouth shoved into Damian's throat. Malcolm shoved his power into the less powerful vampire, but taking his blood meant he was blood-oathing to him. It made no sense. Then the power hit us. Hit me.

It was like a door blew open inside my head. Nathaniel cried out, and I echoed him. My power, our power, blew outward over the other vampires. Malcolm had created almost every vampire in here. He had trusted no one else. Now he blood-oathed himself not to Damian, but to me. He was using his power to send mine over the rest of his flock. He was giving them all to me to keep Columbine from taking them. But I think Malcolm didn't understand what blood-oathing to me could mean. Maybe he thought that blooding himself to me and not Jean-Claude would make it a weaker bond, but I'd never blood-oathed someone without Jean-Claude's guidance. I only knew one way to do anything, and that was all the way.

In one of those moments that lasts forever, and is the blink of an eye, I saw inside Malcolm's mind. He had thought me the lesser evil. He had thought he could control me and retain some control of his people. It wasn't words, but more pictures, like some dream shorthand, if dreams could slap you as they ran across your mind. I'd always wondered if Malcolm's motives were as pure as they seemed. I'd assumed it was a bid for power; all vampires wanted power. But I saw him holding his people, cradling them while they wept. I saw him plunging fangs into their throats to give them that third bite. I felt him treat it as a holy thing, a ceremony as pure in his own heart as the marriage of a nun to God. It was his fault that the joining was so complete, his power thrusting into mine, and not understanding that my necromancy was like the biggest gravity well that any vampire would ever touch. It sucked him in, and I could not stop it.

But I was of Belle Morte's line, and all our talents are double-edged blades. I felt his power dive as deep inside me as mine in him, and I couldn't keep it out. And it wasn't just my mind. Nathaniel's and Damian's memories flooded to the surface. Nathaniel as a little boy, a man holding his hand, food for a hungry stomach, then hands where... Malcolm broke the memory before he went further. He understood that I could not steer us through these waters. He couldn't break what was happening, but his centuries of being a master helped us skim along the surface and not drown. Damian on the deck of a ship in the sunlight; the wind was so fresh, the sea smelled so good. The darkness of his creator's dungeon. That dark stairway, the screams, the smells. Malcolm drew us away from it. My mother's funeral, and I drew us away from that. It was like blinking; you see something you don't want to see, and you blink, and look away. You look away, and there's another picture.

Malcolm thought of his congregation, and just like that we had images to go with the scents and tactile explosion in our heads. I knew that the girl who smelled of soap and some sweet shampoo wanted to go to college, but was fighting to get enough nighttime classes to complete her degree. I knew that the family of vampires was trying for a house in a neighborhood that did not want them. I knew that the "child" was the master of the house. Malcolm gave us the problems and hopes. What we gave him back was the scent of their skin, the finger brush along a collar, a dozen different aftershaves, twenty different perfumes, from powdery sweetness to an herbal cleanness that was almost bitter. We gave him back sighs, as our power swept over them. We gave him back upturned faces as they shivered at the touch of power that was more sensuous than anything Malcolm had shown them. It didn't have to be sexual, but it was a dance of the senses. To be touched by Belle's line of vampires was to understand that someone's breath against your arm, just your arm, could cover your body in shivers.

Malcolm drew back from Damian's neck like a drowning man surfacing. We all came to the surface of that binding. Nathaniel and I ended in a heap on the carpeted aisle. Hands had to catch Damian or he would have fallen.

"You have not saved them, Malcolm. When I wrest them from you, you will come with them like a dog on a leash." The voice was clear and bell-like, echoing to the ends of the big church. I didn't think it was vampire powers. It was more like a voice that had been trained centuries before microphones existed.

Jean-Claude touched Malcolm to keep the other vampire from answering. He answered with a voice that sounded almost ordinary compared to Columbine's. It was as bland and empty as his voice got, but somehow it filled the room. "We bargained that you would duel the first to use magic. Ma petite, my servant, did not know these rules."

"We also promised not to use our servants to bolster our powers," she said.

"So I was not allowed to contact her mind-to-mind."

"You might have plotted behind my back."

"But you did not attack ma petite, you struck at the congregation. That seems as if you have broken the bargain first." His voice held a shiver at the end, and the entire congregation reacted to it, shuddering. They began to gaze at him, some reluctantly, but they heard him now, felt him now. In that moment I understood that Malcolm had been right in one thing. Blood-oathing to me was blood-oathing to Jean-Claude. Blood of my blood and all that.

"Your servant was using her leopards and her vampire. I could have reached out to my servant, Giovanni, but I kept to our bargain. But if she was allowed to gain power from others, then it seemed fair that I could do the same."

"You can feed off the combined power of all the vampires." Jean-Claude made it a statement.

"Yes," she said, and sounded pleased with herself.

Edward and Olaf were standing on either side of us like good bodyguards. It was Micah who knelt and asked, "Are you safe to touch?"

I knew what he meant: Will whatever metaphysical crap is happening spread by touch? "I think I'm safe to touch."

He grabbed my elbow and lifted, effortlessly. Graham offered Nathaniel a hand. We both swayed a little, but we were upright. Yea.

Columbine had meant to own the congregation and use them like a battery to make her own powers greater. Great enough to win a fight with Jean-Claude, maybe. But now they were mine, and through me, Jean-Claude's.

"You are too late," Malcolm said. "I have given them to my master."

"Oh, such bonds, when fresh, are not so firm," she said.

"Bold words, Columbine," Jean-Claude said, and his voice slid over my skin. Nathaniel shivered beside me. I felt two hundred vampires, or more, react to that voice. One vampire cried out, "Malcolm, save us from this lecher and his whore."

I turned and found the man who had spoken. He was staring at Malcolm, his hand out, beseeching. I started to be angry, but then sensed a thought, and I could feel his fear. Jean-Claude's voice had made this heterosexual man's body react. Just the voice, ordinary words; Jean-Claude wasn't even trying, not yet. How would I feel if it were a female vamp? The thought made me think of Belle Morte. She'd done a lot more than use voice powers on me. The thought brought heat in a rush up my face. I burned at the thought of her body, her hands on me. Then I could taste her mouth, the sweetness of her lipstick. The silk of her skin clung to my fingertips, so that I rubbed them against the leather of my coat to get some other sensation, but it didn't help. The feel of her skin clung to my fingers like a cobweb that I could not brush away.

Nathaniel started to touch me, but I jerked back. I was shaking my head. I held my hands out to all of them, and was backing down the aisle. I needed Jean-Claude, or Asher. I needed someone who understood her power better than I did. Maybe it was just a reaction to what she had done to me in dream, but I couldn't count on that. If she was going to try to take me over, I needed to be near someone who could help me fight.

I don't know if Columbine understood what was happening, or thought it was the ardeur, but she seemed to think it was an opening; a weakness. She attacked the congregation again, but what she'd done before had been a feint. She'd just been pretending to try. Her power cut through the vampires like a burning sword. Where it touched, they screamed, and the ties that bound them to me, to Jean-Claude, seared away. It was as if she literally could cut the metaphysical bonds like rope that was too fragile to hold.

One of the vampires she cut free stumbled into the aisle and fell on all fours at my feet, shrieking. I couldn't feel what she was feeling, but apparently it hurt. A man reached out, gray eyes wide. He screamed, "Master, help me!" He didn't reach toward Malcolm, or Jean-Claude. He was inches away, and he reached for me.

I took his hand. I didn't even think about it. His hand was bigger than mine, so it was his hand that encircled mine, but the moment he touched me, he stopped screaming. He came out of the pew and wrapped himself around me. He held me as if I were the last safe thing in the world. I hugged him back, tight, and the feel of Belle Morte's skin faded under the muscled realness of the man in my arms. The girl on the floor crawled to me, touched my leg. She stopped screaming.

She wrapped herself around our legs, the nameless vampire and me. I was of Belle Morte's line. I knew how to stop the pain. I knew how to bring them back and make them mine.

I raised my face to the gray-eyed man. He bent toward me, folded his tall frame downward. I held his face in my hands and went up on tiptoe. His mouth found mine, and we kissed. His lips were dry, nervous, afraid, but I did something I'd never been able to do before: I was able to draw a little bit of the ardeur. I understood, as if the light had finally dawned, that the ardeur didn't have to be an ocean. It could be a single drop of rain, to wet the lips. I gave that tiny bit of power to him, breathed it into his mouth. I found the broken piece inside him that Columbine had cut. She had cut it with pain and force, and offered them a warning. She had showed them torture, fire, to burn and destroy them, if they refused her. I offered a kiss. I offered gentleness. I offered love. If I hadn't tasted Malcolm's power only moments before, maybe I couldn't have done it, but his intent was so pure, so unselfish, that it was like the ardeur had learned a new flavor. I offered that flavor to them. I offered them a choice. I gave them cool water and safety. She offered terror and punishment. She was threat. I was promise.

I won them back with a kiss, a touch. They poured from the pews, and I moved among them. Damian and Nathaniel helped me, moving into the crowd, touching, a kiss here and there. There was a gentleness to the ardeur that I had never felt before. Columbine's power died under a wave of kindness. A wave of touch, and chaste kisses. A wave of offering help. We will save you. We will take away your pain. She should have remembered that people have given everything they own, everything they are, to be taken care of, and to have their pain gone. It's the lure of cults: the promise of a good family; it's what people think love is, but love isn't absence of pain, it's a hand to hold while you're going through it.

Columbine screamed her frustration, and she broke the pact. She reached out to Giovanni. I felt her touch him. Not the hand that she took, but her power. The power that we had been pushing back suddenly took a leap. I felt it like a huge tidal wave rising above us. I turned and looked up as if there should be something to see, but there was nothing. Then that nothingness hit. It was like standing in the middle of a whirlwind of fire. Every breath was agony, death, but you had to breathe. Power seared down my throat, and I fought to scream, but there was no air. There was nothing but pain.

A voice came out of that pain and said, "I will make the pain stop. Be mine, and it will stop." I screamed my defiance to that voice in my head, but it was the kind of pain that eventually would break you. Eventually, you'd simply say yes, anything, everything, just to make it stop.

Vaguely, I felt the carpet of the floor underneath me. I knew I was writhing on it, but the pain ate all other sensations. My vision ran in streamers, sliding images, as if my eyes could not see past the pain. Hands tried to hold me down, but my body wouldn't be still. It hurt too much to be still.

The voice in my head said, "Let go, and it will feel so good. Just let go. Let go. They are strangers to you; let me have them, Anita. Let them go."

I didn't even know who "them" was. There was nothing but the pain, and some part of me that would not give in. It was as if everything underneath my skin had turned to fire and was trying to burn its way out.

Hands held me down, and there were enough hands that I had to feel them. They were firm and real, and it was like an anchor in the pain. I could feel the hands, feel that they were real. Which meant... Light, burning light, the sun dazzled my eyes, and I burned.

I screamed, and something covered my mouth. Lips, a kiss, and down that kiss was the sweet musk of leopard. My leopard rose to that scent. The sun was warm, and good, not a burning thing. I rose with Micah's beast, two black furred creatures that writhed and danced, and rose up and up, toward the light. The pain fell away as I remembered fur and claw, and teeth, and meat. I wasn't a vampire, not really. I was nothing that she could make burn. Her power only worked on the dead. I was reminded that I was very much alive.

I blinked up into Micah's face from inches away. He was lying on top of me, his hands trapping my face between them. I couldn't turn my head to see who was leaning weight on my arms and legs, but there were a lot of hands. I smelled wolf and hyena and human. I scented the air before I tried to see who was holding me down.

Micah stared down at me with his leopard eyes. "Anita?" He said my name like a question.

"I'm here," I whispered.

Micah crawled off of me. I could see Edward on my right arm now. Olaf was on my right leg, and Remus was on my left leg. Graham was on my left arm. I turned back to the men who were still pinning me. "You can let me up now."

"Not yet," Edward said. I realized he was up on all fours, putting his full body weight on just the one arm. I wondered how hard he had had to work to hold me down.

"You acted as if you were about to shift," Remus said, from where he had my left leg pinned.

"If there is another animal left, we cannot let go," Olaf said. The big man, almost as big in human form as Graham's animal form, seemed very serious about holding my leg down. I think the strength had impressed even Olaf. What the hell had I done?

I wanted to argue, but the looks on everyone's face said that I had scared them, or at least impressed them all. Impressed in a bad way. Nothing I could say would make them let up, but I so did not want to be spread-eagled on the ground, held down, sort of helpless in the middle of a fight.

"Our servants have fought, Jean-Claude, and mine is still standing."

"But ma petite won, Columbine. She withstood Giovanni's power. All the pain you caused her, and she did not let you use her to own the other vampires. They are still mine. You cannot feed upon their powers, as you had planned."

I could turn my head and see Jean-Claude on the stage, but Columbine was just a voice out of sight. I needed to be at his side. Call it a hunch, but bad things were coming. You could feel it in the air.

"Someone has talked out of turn," she said.

"I felt your power, Columbine, felt it forming them into a great fire to feed your power. No one had to bear tales for me to understand what you meant to do. You can take other vampires and make of their powers one great weapon."

"Yes," she said.

"But ma petite stopped you from taking these little vampires and forming them into your army, your source of power. What will you do now that you cannot win power in this way?" His voice breathed through my head, "You beside me would be well, ma petite."

I whispered, "Trying. Let me up, boys."

Power breathed through the church. It sought to feed your doubts, no, to feed on them. I'd met vampires who could feed on lust, on fear, but never one who fed on doubt. Dear God, she fed on it, and she could cause it, just like the vamps who fed off lust and fear. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the certainty that we would lose. Everyone was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it.

"God." Remus almost moaned it. He had his head in his hands. Edward and Olaf seemed the least affected. Micah reached out to me. I let him draw me into the circle of his arms, let myself sink into the strength of him, but the doubts didn't go away. I was suffocating in my doubts. People cried out, some begged for it to stop. I heard one man say, "Anything, anything, just stop it, stop it." There was more than one way to win this fight.

Nathaniel crawled to us. He reached out, head hanging down. I touched his hand and a surge of power knocked back the doubts. He raised his face and gave me the full look of those beautiful eyes. His face brightened like the sun coming from behind a cloud. He said, "I believe in you."

I drew him into the circle of Micah's body. "You make me believe in myself." As it had earlier, Nathaniel's touch chased back the doubts. His unwavering certainty kept us both safe from her. Even sitting in the room with her, her doubts could not get past the certainty that Nathaniel gave me.

Damian crawled to us. I think partially the doubts assailed him, but also he was a vampire. The burning illusion of being consumed by the sun had hit him, too. I could feel his pain, and the double pain of the memory of watching his best friend die in the sunlight. His tie to me let him be in sunlight and not burn, but the terror of the light made him unable to enjoy it. Sunlight was death, period, end of story. He was remembering watching his friend's skin peel away under the heat of a summer day.

Nathaniel grabbed his wrist, I took his hand, and we pulled him into the circle of our arms. The moment we touched him, he shuddered, but raised a tear-stained face. "Her power is terrible. You would do anything to make it stop."

I nodded. The crowd was still crying for help, for it to stop. If they'd set up similar rules to the last challenger Jean-Claude had had, then it was winning over the crowd that would decide it. An actual member of the vampire council had come to town. He was the Earthmover, he could cause earthquakes with his power. To save the city and keep the destruction to a minimum, Jean-Claude had gotten him to agree that they would fight with less destructive powers, and one of the tests would be which one could sway the audience at the Circus of the Damned. If victory was in getting this crowd on our side, we were about to lose.

I tried to feel Jean-Claude through his own marks, but he kept me out. I got one hard glimpse of him drowning in doubt. But they weren't his doubts, they were Richard's. Poor Richard, he'd come to support Jean-Claude, but he was so full of self-doubt that he was hurting him, hurting them both. Jean-Claude shielded so I wouldn't feel it. That left him and Richard trapped in Richard's version of hell.

I got to my feet, still holding on to Nathaniel and Damian. Micah stood with us, but let his hands fall away. I told him, "I love you."

"I love you, too, now go. Go to Jean-Claude."

We started hurrying toward the stage. Jean-Claude needed to touch someone who had no doubts about him, or themselves. With Nathaniel's hand in mine, I had enough certainty to share.