Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [1092]
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.