"Then answer it," I said.
"All the Harlequin are old vampires. That means they think that human servants are lesser beings, but Damian is a reminder that to you, they are the servants. They don't like that much."
"Okay, I get that, but why do Kaazim and the other shapeshifters have an issue?"
"They all treat any Harlequin human servant as a lesser being, because very few of them were ever good enough to fight at the skill level that the vampires and shapeshifters of the Harlequin did."
"I've noticed that almost none of the Harlequin vamps have human servants."
"Humans are too fragile for our world," Kaazim said.
"The world of the Harlequin, you mean?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Damian is a vampire servant, so the animals to call of the Harlequin have one vampire they can feel superior to," Bobby Lee said.
"That makes sense, I guess."
"Feel superior to me, then," Damian said, "but if you know anything that can explain what is happening to me, please share it."
Kaazim stepped out of the shadows enough so I could see the puzzlement on his face. "Doesn't it bother you that I think of you as less, because Anita has forced you to be her servant?"
"No."
"Because you do not care about my opinion." Kaazim sounded angry now. The first thread of his beast breathed through the room as if someone had opened a hot oven for a second.
"You are Harlequin. That means that you are a better warrior than I will ever be. That alone gives you reason to feel superior to me, but the vampire who made me tortured any pride out of me centuries ago. She made of me an empty vessel to fill as she saw fit. Empty vessels do not have pride, so I have no pride to be injured."
"We know of your creator."
"I always hoped that She-Who-Made-Me would finally do something so awful that the vampire council would send the Harlequin to slay her."
"If we had been sent to kill your master, we would not have left any vampires so old as you alive."
"Either way, I would have been free of her."
"You would have embraced death to be free of your master?"
"Oh, yes."
"Suicide would have freed you, too."
"But it might have denied me entrance to Valhalla. Death at the hands of the Harlequin would have been a glorious death."
"Do you still believe in your Valhalla after all these centuries?" Kaazim asked.
"Yes, I do."
"Most of us lose our faith under the power of the vampires."
"It was one thing she could not take from me."
Kaazim studied him, emotions playing over his dark face like cloud shadows on a windy day, too fast for me to understand, but it was more emotion than I'd ever seen him display. "If she left you your faith, then it was only because she could not understand it enough to tear it away from you."
"Yes, most likely."
"You are lucky that your master did not understand faith."
"I am."
"I was sent to spy on her once, your mistress. She was a terrible thing."
"Did you see me?"
"Yes."
"I did her bidding."
"I saw."
"I will not ask what you saw me do on her orders, because I do not want Anita to know the worst of me."
"You are her servant. She knows all your secrets."
"No, she leaves me space and privacy."
Kaazim looked surprised. "Why would she do that?"
"I don't want Damian to know all my secrets either. I don't want anyone that far inside my head."
"That is very you," Kaazim said.
"Yeah, it is. What do you know about what's happening to Damian?"
"Nothing," he said.
Bobby Lee said, "What do you know about a vampire with symptoms like Damian has?"
Kaazim smiled and nodded respect at the other guard. "Well worded, my friend."
"I've been in your part of the world a lot."
"It has been centuries since we have seen such symptoms."
"Symptoms of what?" I asked.
"Of having angered the Mother of All Darkness."
"I don't understand."
"Did the Mother ever visit your dreams, Anita?" he asked.
I nodded. "Yeah."
"Did you ever wake up in a cold sweat from it?"
I tried to think back to when Marmee Noir was trying to take me over. "I don't think so, but I'm not sure. I wasn't paying attention to how much I was sweating after she'd just been in my dreams."
"I understand," Kaazim said.
"Wait. Are you implying that the Mother of All Darkness is behind Damian's issues?"
"The last time I saw such symptoms, it was her."
I shook my head. "She's dead."
"She's a vampire, Anita. She started out dead."
I shook my head harder. "No, she is dead, completely, utterly, really, truly dead this time."
"How do you kill something that is only spirit, Anita?"
"I know that the Harlequin that witnessed her death were in contact with others. The Harlequin say they were witness to her death."
Kaazim nodded. "Indeed some of us were."
"Then answer your own question," I said.
"You absorbed her through the very skin of your body."
"Yeah, creepy as fuck, but yeah."
"How did it feel to devour the night, Anita? For she was that, the night made alive and real. How could one small human, even a necromancer, consume the night itself?"
"I learned how to take someone's energy from another vampire."
"Yes, Obsidian Butterfly, the Master of Albuquerque, New Mexico."
"If you know all the answers, why are you asking the questions?"
"I know what happened, but that is bare facts, and this was so much more than just facts."
"I don't even know what that means, Kaazim."
"You ate the living darkness, Anita. It has given your own necromancy a power jump of near-legendary proportions. You raised every cemetery and lone body in and around the city of Boulder, Colorado last year, while you chased down the spirit of the Lover of Death, one of the last members of the now-disbanded vampire council who did not bend knee to Jean-Claude's rebellion."
"You say rebellion. I say killing crazy motherfuckers to save the world from their plans to spread vampirism and contagious zombie plague across the planet."
"It would have been an apocalypse for the human race."
"But not the apocalypse."
"You mean the biblical one?" he asked.
"Yeah, as in the apocalypse."
"You say that as if there is only one."
"There is only one."
"You have prevented two on your own. We have prevented more events that would have destroyed the planet, or at least the human population. Some of us lived through the last great extinction and the coming of the great winter."
"You mean the Ice Age, as in the real Ice Age."
He nodded.
I took in a deep breath, let it out slow, and said, "Okay, some of you guys are old as fuck. Make your point."
"My point, Anita, is that apocalypse as in the great devastation or second coming of some religious significance has happened before and will likely happen again."
"I'm not sure we're defining it the same way," I said.
"Perhaps not, but there really does need to be a plural for apocalypse."
"Fine. You've made your point. Now tie all that back to what's happening with Damian."
"You are so impatient for someone who will likely live to see centuries."
"It's not certain that I'm immortal, Kaazim, and besides, I've killed more supposedly immortal beings than anyone else I know, so who will live forever is really up for debate."
"Fair enough," he said, "but you absorbed the Mother of All Darkness without having any idea how to control that much power."
"It's like eating steak; my body uses the energy of the food I eat automatically. I d
on't need to tell it to make bone, or more red blood vessels; it just does it."
"And whoever said that metaphysical food was the same as physical food, Anita?"
I stared at him, trying to reason my way through what he'd said. "I'm not sure I understand."
"He's saying that eating magic isn't the same as eating steak," Damian said.
I looked up at him, squeezing his hand. "Okay, maybe I'm being really slow, but I still don't get it."
"Did you really think you could consume the Mother of All Darkness, the one who created vampirekind, who gave us our civilization, our rules, our laws, and it would have no effect on you?"
"She was trying to do worse than kill me, Kaazim. She was trying to take over my body and use it for her house, car, whatever. She'd even tried to get me pregnant so she could transfer her spirit to my unborn baby, in case she couldn't take me. I had no choice but to kill her the only way I could. You said it: She was just spirit, untouchable, uncontainable, so I destroyed her the only way I could."