Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Book 14. Danse Macabre(92)
«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.
22
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.