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.