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I shook my head and said to Richard, “It’s not her.”

He moved up beside me, as close as the other men would allow. We were getting to be quite a crowd again. “If I hadn’t been in your dream with the real thing, this might be scary.”

I nodded. “But we’ve felt the real deal, and this ain’t it.”

“This isn’t the Mother?” Asher said. He’d gotten to his feet, scrubbing at tears on his face.

“No, it’s a shadow of her, barely that,” I said.

Nathaniel drew in a large breath. “I smelled her once in the car. She smelled like something cat, and jasmine, and so many things. This has no scent, it’s not real.”

The darkness began to press down like a shadowy hand, but it was only a shadow. The little vampires huddled and, beating at the doors, screamed louder. It had cleared the pews out so that there was no one but our guards in the aisles. The guards, and our vampires.

“The Dark Mother will consume you all, unless you lay down your arms and submit to us.”

The shadow of dark tried to crush us. Damian made a small sound. “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “It’s barely a shadow of her power. It can’t hurt us.”

Columbine gestured as if she were crushing something invisible in her hand. The shadowy darkness tried to squeeze down around us, but I thought, Love, warmth, life, and the shadows shredded. The lights began to grow brighter again.

Requiem spoke from a small distance away. “This is not the darkness that hunted my master in England. This is smoke and mirrors compared to what came for him in the end.”

“Smoke and mirrors,” I said, softly, “misdirection like a magician’s illusion. How do we know you’re the real Columbine, a real Harlequin? All vampires know the rules, the masks. Anyone could pretend,” I said.

“You uppity little bitch,” she said. “How dare you?”

“That would explain them breaking the rules,” Nathaniel said. “They tried to kill you guys without giving you a black mask first.”

“Are you truly asking us to prove we are of the Harlequin?’ Columbine asked.

“Yeah, I am.”

“Jean-Claude, does she do all your talking for you?”

“I am happy to have ma petite do my talking for me.” Which wasn’t always true, but tonight, I was doing okay.

“I wanted to own you, not destroy you, but if you insist,” she said. A piece of blackness unwound itself from near the ceiling. It had to have been there all along, but none of us had noticed it. It was like some large black snake, if snakes were formless and could float. Oh, hell, it wasn’t a snake, but I didn’t know what else to call it. It was a ribbon of blackness that moved, and where it touched the lights, the lights went out, as if the light was eaten by the coming dark.

“It smells like night air,” Micah said, in his growling voice.

“It does,” Nathaniel and Richard said at the same time. They didn’t even look at each other. The three wereanimals seemed intent on something I couldn’t hear, or see, or smell. Then I felt it, a cool line of wind, and I did smell it, night air, damp, but not rain. Damp, but not rain. I drew in a deep breath. “Where’s the jasmine?”

Half the lights on one side of the church had been engulfed by the sinuous stream of living darkness. The vampires and humans of the congregation had made a huddle of themselves on the other side of the church, as far from the dark as the closed doors would allow.

Requiem had pulled his cloak up around his face, but he was beside the stage now. “This is the darkness that killed my master.”

“How did it kill him?” Micah asked.

“The darkness covered him, hid him from sight, he gave a terrible cry, and when we could see again, he was dead.”

“How exactly, Requiem?” I asked.

“His throat had been torn out as if by some great beast.”

We had two lights between us and the consuming dark. “I smell wolf,” Micah said.

I shook my head. “The Mother of All Darkness doesn’t do wolf, she does cats, lots of cats, no doggies.”

Nathaniel and Richard sniffed the air, too. “Wolf,” Richard said. Nathaniel nodded.

Edward called to me. “Can bullets hurt