Hit List (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 20)

THE VAMPIRES CAME for us, and worse yet, they took back control of Thaddeus. He didn't attack us, but he stopped moving, stopped running. Thaddeus said, "Save yourselves if you can. It is too late for me."

I reached back for him, but Lisandro grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. He got a death grip on my arm and ran toward the stairs. I had a choice of being dragged, or running. I ran.

Bernardo and Ethan were at the mouth of the stairs with guns in their hands. They fired over our heads at the vampires, and missed. "They're too fast!" Bernardo said.

I stumbled, fell, and Lisandro half-carried, half-dragged me. I held on to my gun, but I couldn't run like this and aim. I started to try to pull loose of Lisandro so I could turn and fight, but something hit me so hard it drove all the air from my body, and I carried Lisandro's nail marks in my arm as the vampire slammed me into the wall. It knocked all the air out of me for a moment. Just a moment, before I was able to try to bring my gun up, but a moment was all the Harlequin needed to pin my arm and gun against the wall and snarl into my face. One minute I was looking into pale brown eyes, and the next the eyes were black, like staring into the deepest, darkest night you'd ever known. The Mother of All Darkness was here. The man's voice said, "Necromancer," but though the voice was deeper, the intonation was still her.

I screamed, and tried to move my arm enough to use the gun that was still in my hand. She laughed at me. "Drop your shields, necromancer, or my Harlequin will kill them one by one."

"Don't do it!" Lisandro yelled, and then made a pain noise. Thaddeus and another Harlequin that was probably his master had him pinned to the floor. It's harder to capture than to kill someone as good as Lisandro.

Ethan and one of the werelions were circling each other. One of Ethan's arms dangled, badly broken. The werelion had a gun in each hand. The other werelion had Bernardo shoved up against the wall, one arm behind his back, the other around his throat. Bernardo's face was bloody. It looked like they'd shoved him face first into the wall to stun and disarm him.

The vampire in front of me leaned his face near mine. "Drop your shields, necromancer."

"Don't do it, Anita," Bernardo said. The werelion tightened her grip on his throat and began to slowly squeeze. I watched his face darken as the werelion choked him.

"Shall we kill your human lover first, necromancer?" the vampire asked, and leaned in, the male body pinning me more solidly against the wall.

"Why won't anyone believe he's not my lover?"

"Jokes, even now, Anita," she said in that deep voice. "There is a difference between bravery and stupidity, necromancer."

Bernardo went limp in the choke hold. It takes longer to choke someone to death than you think it does, but I didn't want to chance it. Shit!

"Let him go," I said.

"But if he is not your lover, then you shouldn't care."

"Let him go," I said, through gritted teeth.

"Let him breathe again," she said.

The werelion eased the hold, and Bernardo made that terrible wheezing breath like coming back from the dead. He choked, and finally whispered, "Don't do it, Anita."

"He is very brave, your human lover," she said.

I didn't correct her again. "You've gotten inside my shields before and couldn't possess me; what makes you think this time will be different?"

"I have a body to touch you with that I already possess. You should know that physical contact makes all vampire powers harder to resist."

I stared into that stranger's face with eyes that I seemed to have known for a lifetime. "But you're wearing gloves. None of you is touching my skin."

I saw the frown lines through the eyes of the mask. "Drop your shields, necromancer, and we shall see if I need to remove the gloves."

I hesitated.

"You will do as I ask eventually, necromancer. The only question is how many of your companions will die first."

Ethan was on the ground, and the werelion pistol-whipped him across the face. The werelion aimed one of the guns at the fallen man.

"We will kill the wererat first. He is more dangerous than the human, and I don't like rats."

"It's because you can't control them," I said. "If it's not a cat you can't force it to do anything. You have to ask, just like with me."

"Shoot him."

"No!" I yelled.

The shot echoed through the emptiness of the space, but it was Thaddeus kneeling over Lisandro; he'd moved his body in the way of his master's shot. He half fell over Lisandro, as his master fell to his own knees wounded as he'd wounded Thaddeus. "I can't disobey you," Thaddeus said, "but I can do things that you have not forbidden." He coughed and blood sprayed down his chin. He looked across the room at me. "Thank you, Anita Blake."

"Thaddeus," I said.

"I am a slave no more." He let himself collapse over Lisandro, and then his hand was up, his gun under his own chin. He pulled the trigger before his master could tell him not to, and they both fell in a heap, their cloaks and their bodies entwined. Lisandro lay under them and I couldn't tell how badly he was hurt.

"You are forbidden to harm yourself," she spat out, and the werelion that had Bernardo seemed to shift her weight, as if she'd been thinking about it.

The last Harlequin went toward the last werelion. "I forbade such things centuries ago, or he would have done himself a harm long ago, wouldn't you, my pet?"

The male werelion snarled at him, but he kept the gun steady on Ethan. They might not like what they had to do, but they'd be good at it.

"Good, pet," the vampire said, and then he stalked toward us.

The vampire pinning me to the wall said, "Everywhere you go you disrupt my vampires. Revolution follows in your wake like a plague after a rat."

I wanted to make a smart remark, but my last one had gotten Lisandro hurt, and maybe worse. He hadn't moved since Thaddeus and his master fell. Some ammunition went through flesh like it was butter. It could have traveled through Thaddeus and into Lisandro. He could be dead because I had to remind her that she couldn't control wererats.

"Drop your shields or the human dies next," she said.

"You would never fuck me, don't do this for me," Bernardo said. Lisandro lay very still on the floor. I didn't want to see someone else die for me, and there was one more benefit to dropping my shields. Domino was one of my tigers to call; if I dropped my shields he'd be able to sense me. If I dropped them and burned bright enough, Jean-Claude and everyone I was tied to would sense me, and there were ties between us that physical distance had nothing to do with. She'd wanted me alone, but was I alone? Was I ever really alone?

My heart was trying to climb into my throat. I was so scared my mouth was dry.

Ethan called out, "Anita!"

"Don't do it," Bernardo said.

"If you can't possess me, I don't want you saying it's because I didn't drop my shields enough. You said it yourself: Vampire powers work better if you touch skin to skin. Take off the gloves at least, because when you aren't vampire enough to roll my ass, I don't want you bitching."

"You are impudent, girl."

"You've been trying to roll my mind and take my body for over a year; don't go all high and mighty about the fact that you can't do it." My words were brave, but my mouth was still dry and I was so scared my fingertips tingled with it. One strong emotion reads like another sometimes.

"Do you want me to hurt you? Is that it? Are you trying to anger me so I kill you instead of possessing you?"

"No," I said.

In the end, she let the other Harlequin help hold me and disarm me while she stripped off the gloves, and then she undid snaps at the neck and lifted the mask off. "Mistress, you reveal his face." He sounded shocked. Everything else that she'd done, and this was the thing that shocked him.

The man's face was very ordinary. It was a face that you'd pass in a crowd a dozen times and never notice. It was a real spy's face - attractive, but not too attractive, ordinary, but not too ordinary. He was neutral, from the dark brown hair cut short to the medium skin tone. James Bond is a myth; real spies don't stand out unless they wish to, and the man standing in front of me would have blended in almost anywhere, almost.

"This body is shocked to be so naked." Her voice sounded bemused, and just that one comment let me know that the vampire whose body she was using was still in there, still feeling his own feelings. Would that be what it was like? Would I be in there, but a prisoner in my own body? Would I have to watch her do terrible things to the people I loved and be helpless to stop it? I said a silent prayer: Please, God, don't let her take me over.

"If you use your fighting skills to hurt this body, your friends will suffer for it. Do you understand?" she said.

"If I hit or kick you, fight you physically, you'll hurt Ethan and Bernardo."

"Yes."

I nodded. "Fine."

She put her hands on either side of my face and said, "Let her go."

The vampire at my back didn't argue, but simply let go of me. We stood there for a breath, and she whispered, "Drop your shields."

I did what she asked. I did exactly what she asked. I dropped my shields. She'd never specified which shields. I let the ardeur spill up and over my skin and into hers. Her night-filled eyes widened, and she drew me in against the borrowed body.

"Sex opens us all up, Anita. I have tamed many a necromancer during sex." She leaned down and kissed me, and I dropped another shield. I dropped the one that guarded the worst power I had ever learned, the one that I had learned in New Mexico from a vampire whose eyes were the color of night and stars. She had taught me to take the life, the very essence of a person and drink it down. It wasn't that different from the ardeur; they both fed on energy, except with the ardeur there was an exchange like any act of sex in which pleasure and energy mixed and mingled, but for this feeding there was only the taking. I fed on the body, on the energy that animated it, the life of it.

She drew back from the kiss, but her hands were still on my face, and any skin would do. "Necromancer, you surprise me," but there was no fear in the surprise. "I will gain so much power when we are one." And I saw in my mind's eye a great wave of darkness, as if the deepest, darkest part of night had suddenly formed a body and reared up above me, impossibly tall, impossibly everything.

I drank down the body I was touching. I drank his very "life" that made that sluggish blood pump, that body move. His skin began to run with fine lines as if he were drying out. I drained his energy, but he hadn't fed for the night, and there wasn't nearly the "life" to him that there was when I'd fed on lycanthropes, but I took what was there, and the energy filled my eyes until I knew they glowed with brown light, my eyes made blind with my own vampire power.

The Darkness crashed into me, and for a moment I thought I would drown in it. I couldn't breathe, couldn't see, couldn't . . . I tasted jasmine and rain, and smelled the scent of a long-gone tropical night in a part of the world I'd never seen, in a city that no longer existed except as sand and a few wind-kissed stones.

One moment I was drowning and the next I could taste Jean-Claude's lips on mine. He whispered through my mind, "Ma petite." Down those long miles that separated us, he was there, and he offered me himself, his power to help me stand and remember that I was a vampire, too. The warm scent of wolf and Richard was there over the long miles. I could smell his skin and knew he was tucked in beside a woman's body. I could feel the curve of her hip under his hand. I smelled vanilla and could feel the cloud of Nathaniel's hair across my face, and a thousand mornings of waking up beside him. Damian's green eyes above me as we made love, his hair the color of fresh blood, red hair when it hasn't seen sunlight for nearly a thousand years. Neither of them was as powerful as Jean-Claude and Richard, but they were mine, and they added to who I was, what I was. Jean-Claude whispered, "We cannot drown if we drink the sea."

It took me a breathless, terrifying moment to understand, and then I went back to drinking down the vampire in my arms. It didn't matter that she was putting her energy into his; I would drink it all, and everything she offered. She wanted to put her energy into me, I'd let her.

She poured the deepest darkness into me, down my throat so that I choked on the taste of jasmine and rain, but I swallowed it down. I knew if I didn't panic, if I just swallowed and breathed in between that shivering pour of energy down my throat, I could do this. She tried to drown me; I tried to drink the blackness between stars. It was like the immovable object and the unstoppable force - she wanted to pour into me, and I let the energy fill me, but I was eating her, and she wanted to eat me.

Distant as a dream I heard gunshots, but I had to trust to someone else for that. My battle was here in the dark, fighting not to drown in the jasmine sea. The world became darkness, and I was standing in an ancient night with the scent of jasmine thick on the air, and a distant smell of rain. "You are mine, necromancer," she breathed.

I slid to my knees and it was her body, her first body, a dark-skinned woman who held me as we knelt in the sand, on the edge of palm trees and insects I'd never heard outside her memories. "You cannot drink the night, there is too much of it."

And then there was a hand in the darkness, and Domino was in the vision, pressing himself against the back of my body, not trying to take me away from her, but adding his strength to mine.

She laughed, "White tiger and black is not enough, necromancer."

And then there was another hand in the night, another figure that wrapped around me and Domino. Ethan, with one arm still broken from the fight, was there in the dream, and that was it, that was the key. He was all the other tiger colors that Domino wasn't. I had my rainbow of tigers. What I'd never understood was why the Master of Tigers had been her nemesis, but in that moment I understood. It was the gold tigers, and all the colors were the powers of the day and the earth and all that was alive, and she was all that was dead, no matter that she'd begun life as a shapeshifting cave lion; she was cold now, dead for so long that she didn't really understand what it meant to be alive. Maybe she never had.

I touched the men, and they touched me, warm flesh to warm flesh, and just the feel of their hands on me threw me back to making love to them both. I had images of the sheets wrapped around Ethan, his face looking up at me as he licked; Domino pinning me to the bed, me looking back over my shoulder to see his body bow backward with that one last thrust. She tried to remember sex, and there were memories, but it had been too long and she didn't truly understand it. She was like a sex symbol who had been told what it is to be sexy and to have sex, but not believing in her own sex appeal, and not really liking sex; it was an empty shell, pretend. There was nothing pretend about me. It wasn't about being the prettiest, or the best, it was about enjoying it. It was about loving the men who were with you, while they were with you, and valuing every last one of them. It was, in the end, about love. The love of a lover, of friends, and of partners, of people that I never wanted to lose, and wanted to wake up beside every damn day. It was about home. Home wasn't a place, or a building, or a tropical night full of flowers and rain. Love made home not out of boards and walls and furniture, but of hands to hold, and smiles to share, and the warmth of that body cuddled around you in the dark. I swam in the darkness of the ocean on a raft of hands, and bodies, and giving a damn what happened to them all.

We let her pour her scary, lonely, insane dark into us, and we drank it down with our comforting hands, our bodies that had made us all home, and the craziness of having too many people, too much going on, but what would we give up, who would we give up, and the answer, in the end, was not a single thing. The golden tigers were the power of the sun to bring life to the earth made flesh. They'd been created to chase back the darkness and remind us all that sometimes beauty and life triumph even on the darkest night.

When she realized that she couldn't win, she tried to pull out of the vampire's body. She tried to leave him to die alone, but she couldn't back up, we wouldn't let her. She wanted to fill us up with her power, and we let her.

Her voice in my head held the first note of panic, as she said, "If you take my power into you, you will be as I am."

"I'm not like you," I thought.

"You will be."

The power felt so good, and yet I knew I was draining the life out of two people, evil vampires, but still people. I prayed, not for help to do it, but that the power wouldn't corrupt me. That drinking in her darkness wouldn't make me evil, too.

Using the most evil power I had, I prayed, and I didn't burst into flames, and no one's holy object glowed. I ate the darkness that existed before God thought light was a good idea, and he was okay with that; he created the darkness, too. He actually liked both just fine.