The Harlequin (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 15)

Chapter Forty-seven

"TAKE OFF HIS mask," I said, but the voice held an echo of a different voice.

"If you see my face I will be forced to kill you all," he said.

I laughed, and the laughter made the wind play around the room, patting with cool, damp hands at people's hair, their skin. "You are going to die tonight, Pantalone. Your mask can come off now, or after your corpse lies stretched at my feet. I prefer now, but I guess it really doesn't matter." The wind eased back. I was drowning in the scent of rain and jasmine.

He struck at me with his own power. It was like some spirit wolf, a great dark beast that rose from him and came at me, huge jaws agape. Micah and Nathaniel pulled me backward, but though it looked like a shadow, it hit me and pulled us all to the floor. People were running from everywhere, but Marmee was already there. The shadow wolf spilled into me; she absorbed it like something melting into the snow. With the touch of his power came a memory.

A snowstorm, so cold, the wind howling, so that he thought he heard voices on the wind. He'd found a cave, buried in the snow. Shelter, he thought. Then he'd heard the growl, low and too close. Something else had taken shelter from the storm. Then a woman had stepped into the light of his fire. A woman with a spill of dark hair and eyes that glittered in the firelight. He had smelled death on her and tried to fight. I felt his body run hot and spill bone and muscle and flesh from human to wolf. But a wolf like none that still walked today. She had turned into a huge striped cat, the color of a lion, but striped like a tiger, bigger than both. She'd nearly killed him, but when pain and injury had turned him back to human, she'd fed on him. She fed on him for three days until the storm stopped, and when the fourth night rose, they went out together, to hunt.

I came back to the here and now and found that Wicked and Truth had pierced his heart and neck with their swords. He cursed them, and writhed, but he wasn't dead. I knew, I just knew that swords would not kill him. He was old blood. Blood when vampire and shapeshifter could be one, back before the blood weakened. We could take his head and heart and burn the pieces separately, but didn't I want answers? Yes, I did.

I sat back up with Micah and Nathaniel's help. "Your actions could get the entire Harlequin disbanded; don't you care?"

"Kill me, if you can, but I will not answer questions from you."

The darkness inside me thought otherwise. "Fredo," I called.

The slender knife-wielding man was just beside me. "Can you get enough help and enough knives to pin him to the floor?"

"We can pin him, but unless we're leaning on the knives, they won't hold him."

"Then pin him with your bodies, I don't care how. I need to touch him."

"Why?"

"Does it matter?"

"Tonight, yes," he said.

I looked up into his dark eyes. I saw pain there. I answered that pain. "The darkness can make him talk, and then I'm going to kill him."

Fredo nodded. "Good plan." He went around getting volunteers to hold the vampire down. There were a lot of volunteers.

Jean-Claude came to me while they were wrestling him into place. "I feel her all around you, ma petite."

"Yeah," I said, but I wasn't looking at him. I was watching them pin the big vampire.

"Look at me." He touched my chin and turned me so that I would look at him. I didn't fight him, but I didn't seem to care whether I looked at him or not. "There is a light in your eyes that I do not know."

I half-saw, out of the corner of my eye, a dark figure form. She formed of the dark, and she looked vaguely like she had in my dream, all-black cloak, a small female figure. But this was no dream.

Screams again from the vampires. The ones with Asher, standing guard over Columbine and Giovanni, held their ground, but no one was happy.

Pantalone himself screamed, like a girl. It made it harder for the guards to wrestle him into submission. Oh, well.

The figure spoke, and the smell of jasmine and rain was in her voice, or on the wind, or the wind was her voice. I wasn't sure which. "Did you think my laws were superstitions, Jean-Claude? You were supposed to kill her when you knew what she was. Now it is too late."

"Too late for what?" he said, and he wrapped his arm around me, drew me in against his body, and we both looked up as my nightmare damn near materialized in front of us.

"She's a necromancer, Jean-Claude, she controls the dead, all the dead. Don't you understand yet? Some of the Harlequin think I woke because I want to steal her body, ride her as the Traveller rides other vampires. I had that gift once, to travel from body to body, but that is not why I woke."

"Why did you wake?" he whispered.

"She attracts the dead, Jean-Claude, all the dead. She called me from my sleep. Her power called to me like the first ray of sunlight after a thousand years of night. Her warmth and life called to my death. Even I cannot resist her. Do you understand now?"

"You are so not under my power," I said.

She gave a low, dry chuckle. "Legend says that necromancers can control the dead, and that is true, but what legend does not say is that the dead give necromancers no peace. We pester the poor things, because they draw us like moths to the flame, except with vampires and necromancers it is a question who is flame and who is moth. Beware, Jean-Claude, that she does not burn you up. Beware, necromancer, that the vampires do not put you in your grave."

"Your law," Pantalone yelled, "your law says she must be put to death."

The dark figure turned toward the struggling pile of people. "Do not dare speak to me of my laws, Pantalone. I made you. I gave you a piece of myself, that is what made you one of the Harlequin. I have been listening to vampires that dwell closer to my physical form. You have been assassinating vampires for council members. You are neutral. You take no sides. That is what makes the Harlequin!" Her voice rose as she spoke until the wind held not just rain but the promise of storm. "I will take back what I gave you. What you used to make these pale imitations of my Columbine and her Giovanni. These are not my Harlequin."

"Columbine died. I had to make a replacement, and you were not here to guide me."

"Then the mask should have been retired, and the name with it. That was my will, and our way, once." She began to walk toward them. I could almost see her foot, dainty in a slipper edged with white pearls.

Jean-Claude called, "Do not look upon her face. For fear of sanity and life do not meet her eyes, any of you."

"I am not the Traveller, to need to steal bodies to walk. I did need flesh once, but I am the darkness made flesh, Pantalone. I am she who made you, made you all! Killing the necromancer will not put me back to sleep again. It is too late for that."

It was Jake who knelt beside me, and Jean-Claude. Jake whispered, "She's using your energy to manifest, Anita. You have to shut her down before she's solid here. You do not want her in America in flesh and bone."

I looked at him, and I knew. "You're one of them."

Jake nodded.

"You saved ma petite, when you could have let her die in the bathroom at the Circus," Jean-Claude said.

"The Mother was always going to wake again, nothing would prevent that. Some of us believe that Anita is our only hope of controlling her. Prove my master right by shutting down the power you're feeding her."

"I don't know..."

"She's feeding on your anger, your rage."

"I don't know how to stop that."

"If she feeds on Pantalone, one of the oldest of us, she may have enough power to be permanent flesh."

The black-cloaked figure was standing at his feet. The guards were looking at me. I said the only thing I could think of: "Get away from him."

Some of the guards hesitated, but most of them glanced toward the dark figure and moved a discreet distance.

"Anita," Jake said, "help us."

I turned to Jean-Claude and said, "Help me think of something besides my anger."

The black figure was spreading into what looked like a piece of the night sky, like some beautiful and frightening cloak of stars and darkness. Pantalone shrieked, as if whatever he saw in that piece of darkness was something terrible to behold.

"Hurry," I said.

Jean-Claude raised the ardeur, in a breath, in the feel of his mouth on mine. He raised the ardeur and stripped away my sorrow in a rush of skin and hands. I hadn't fed the ardeur in over twelve hours. I was suddenly starving.

Marmee Noir screamed, "No!" Her rage cut through me, and a sharp pain laced my back. I felt blood a second later. The ardeur was gone in a rush of fear and pain. I turned, and Jean-Claude caught my face, forced my eyes against his velvet jacket. "She is fading, ma petite."

Her voice came in a rush of rain and wind. "I know who your master is, wolf. You have betrayed me, and I will not forget it."

When I could no longer smell jasmine or feel rain against my skin like some invisible presence, I asked Jake, "How do I keep her from popping in to see me?"

"There's a charm for that."

I gave him a look.

"People used to think she was a demon, but whatever they thought she was, one human witch made a charm a very long time ago, and it works."

"Is it a holy symbol?" I asked.

He smiled. "No, it's magic, not faith."

"Isn't all magic faith?" I asked.

"No, sometimes it's just magic."

The concept was too hard for me. "You got one of those charms on you?"

"Always, but I'll get one for you. We should be safe for the rest of tonight."

"I hope those aren't famous last words," I said.

"What do we do with them, Anita?" Truth asked.

I looked at Jake. "He broke your laws more than mine."

"Kill him under your laws, we won't argue. We suspected one of us was being paid as an assassin, but we didn't know who. Then Pantalone volunteered to come check out Malcolm's church. It was just a visit, and a report back to the council. He usually only takes killing jobs, so we were suspicious. If Columbine had won Jean-Claude's lands, it would have been Pantalone who ruled here. We are allowed to leave the service of the Mother now, because she sleeps. Once she wakes, all that are in her service will be trapped there."

"So you came to spy," I said.

"And to help keep you alive."

"Thanks for that." I glanced back toward Remus's body. "I wish everybody were still alive."

"I'm sorry about that, truly. He was a good man."

I turned back to Wicked and Truth. "Did you guys wade into the dark and cut off his hand without being able to see anything?"

"Yes," Wicked said.

"Of course," Truth said.

"Then take his head."