Cerulean Sins - Laurell K. Hamilton [109]
That whisper echoed through the room again, “By waking them.”
She’d answered my question again. Shit. I was beginning to have an awful idea. Could the darkness become lost in sleep? Could the dark become lost in the dark? Could the mother of all nightmares be trapped in the land of dreams?
“Not trapped,” the whisper in the dark said.
“Then what?” I asked it out loud, and the body under the sheet rolled all the way over, feeling the silence with the hissing glide of silk over skin. My throat closed around the words, and I cursed myself for not thinking.
“Waiting,” still the air breathing around me, not a voice, not really.
I thought really hard, waiting for what?
There was no answer from the dark room. But there was a new noise. Someone beside me was breathing, deep, even breathing, as if they slept. Though I would have sworn that the figure on the bed hadn’t been breathing a second ago.
I did not want to be here when she sat up, I so did not want to be here for that. What had she been waiting for all this time?
This time the voice came from the bed, the same voice as the wind, faint, long unused, so hoarse and soft that I couldn’t tell if it were male or female. “Something of interest.”
With that last, I finally felt something from that body. I’d been prepared for malice, evil, anger, but was totally unprepared for curiosity. As if she wondered what I was, and she hadn’t wondered about anything in a millennia, or two, or three.
I smelled wolf, musky, sweet, pungent, so real I could feel it gliding over my skin. I suddenly had a cross around my neck, and the white glow filled the room. I think I could have seen the figure on the bed clearly by the light of the cross, but either I closed my eyes without remembering, or some things you shouldn’t see, even in dreams.
I woke in the Jeep with Nathaniel and Caleb’s worried faces hovering over me. There was a huge wolf sitting in the driver’s seat, its long snout snuffling against my face. I reached up to touch that soft, thick fur, then saw the shine of liquid all over the driver’s seat, where Jason had shape-shifted on the leather.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you couldn’t have shape-shifted in the back in the cargo area. You had to shape-shift on the leather seats. It’ll never come clean.”
Jason growled at me, low and rumbling, and I didn’t have to speak wolf to know what he was saying. I was being an ungrateful wretch. But it was so much easier to concentrate on my ruined upholstery than to think about the fact that I’d been in the presence of the Mother of all Vampires, the Mother of all Darkness, the Primordial Abyss made flesh. I knew through Jean-Claude’s memories that they called her Mother Gentle, Marme, a dozen different euphemisms to make her seem kind, and, well, motherly. But I’d felt her power, her darkness, and finally, at the end an intellect as cold and empty as any evil. She was curious about me the way some scientists are curious about a new species of insect. Find it, capture it, put it in a jar, whether it wants to go with you, or not. It’s just an insect, after all.
They could call her Mother Gentle if they wanted to, but Mommy Dearest was a hell of a lot more accurate.
30
CALEB HAD CLIMBED into the back of the Jeep to get the plastic I’d started carrying, for when I transported something messier than chickens, and spread it on the seat so Nathaniel could drive. I’d tried to insist on driving but Jason had growled at me. He had a point, I wasn’t feeling my steadiest. Nathaniel, his eyes bled back to their normal lilac, had told me, “You passed out. You stopped breathing. Jason shook you, and you did this sort of gasp.” Nathaniel shook his head, face very serious. “We had to keep shaking you, Anita. You kept not breathing.”
If they’d been human I might have argued with them, that they only thought I’d stopped breathing, but they weren’t human. If a bunch of shape-shifters