Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [949]
The faint light from the half-open bathroom door didn’t really show me anything. It was almost as if the light were being sucked at by the dark, as if eventually the darkness would swallow the light completely. My pulse was thudding in my throat, so hard I could barely breathe past it, and swallowing hurt. I knew who was in the dark, and I knew I dreamed. But just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.
“What is that?”
I screamed, a short, sharp scream. I was looking into Richard’s face. He was awake. He started easing up to sit, and I moved with him. He tried to shake Micah awake, but I didn’t bother. I’d had this dream before.
“Wake them up,” he whispered, eyes searching the darkness.
“Her animals to call are all cats; they won’t wake.”
“Who…Marmee…”
I stopped the words with fingers against his lips. “Don’t,” I whispered. I don’t know why we were whispering. She would hear us. But there’s something about being in the dark when you know the predator is out there, that makes you whisper. You try to be small and quiet. You pray that it passes you by. But this wasn’t a predator, exactly; this was the entire night, given life and substance, and a mind. I smelled jasmine and summer rain, and other scents of a land that I had never seen except in vision and dream. The land where Marmee Noir had begun. I had no idea how old she was, didn’t want to know. I was a necromancer. I could have tasted her age on my psychic tongue, but I didn’t know if I could swallow that many centuries. I feared I’d choke.
“Necromancer.” Her voice eased through the night like a sweet-scented wind.
I managed to swallow past the beating of my heart. “Marmee Noir,” I said, and my voice was only a little hoarse. It was better with Richard beside me, awake. His arm wrapped around me as if he felt it, too, that together we were more here. Maybe our accidental sharing of dreams, Richard and me and Jean-Claude, had a purpose. One we just hadn’t understood until now.
I leaned into the curve of Richard’s body, and his arm tightened. My hand on his bare chest let me feel the beat of his fear against my palm.
The darkness gathered, almost the way light will narrow down to a point of brightness, except this was darkness compacted, squeezed down as if a small black hole were forming in front of our eyes. The black hole took on the vague shape of a woman in a cloak.
I thought, very carefully, in my head at Richard, “Don’t look at her face.”
“I know the rules,” he said out loud. He had heard me; good, great. Mind-to-mind talking was still not my best thing in dream or out of it.
“Do you truly believe that not looking upon my face will save you?”
Great, she read minds, too. I’d had much lesser vamps be able to do it. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Tell me again why Micah and Nathaniel won’t wake?” Richard asked, his voice soft, but not a whisper anymore. It was too late for whispering. She’d found us.
“Necromancer,” she said.
“Cats are her creatures to call, all cats, so she can keep them out of the dream. Jean-Claude was with me last time and she was able to keep him out, too. She doesn’t do wolves.”
“Your wolf will not save you this time, necromancer.”
“How about mine?” Richard said, and a low growl trickled out from between his lips. It raised the hair on my arms, and that part of me where the beasts waited, stirred. The best I can describe it is that the place is like a cave where my animals wait. They walk up a long corridor to get to me. Since they’re inside me, that can’t exactly be right. But it’s the visualization that works for me.
In dream, though, the wolf inside me could come out and play. My wolf was pale, white and cream with a black saddle and marks on her head. She crouched in front of me and