Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,36

be used and thrown away, or possessed so completely that I would have disappeared. Marmee Noir wanted to take over my body, and I would have ceased to be me.”

“But you slew her, ma petite.”

I kept nodding. “Yes.”

“And from the stories that everyone told when you got back, if you hadn’t had Domino at the end, the Mother of All Darkness might have won instead,” Micah said.

I blinked and looked at him. I remembered reaching out in the fight, when I was drowning in the darkness that was her, and finding Domino’s hand to hold, his power of white and black tiger completely the power I needed.

“She meant to use you both like pawns, but you turned yourself into a queen, and made Domino your knight, and destroyed her.”

The Mother of All Darkness had been the night given form, and she had done her best to take me over and make me into a meat puppet for her spirit to inhabit. When that hadn’t worked, she’d tried to get me pregnant by one of the cat lycanthropes that she could control. She’d been willing to wait until the baby grew old enough and then she’d have moved in, but none of it had worked out. Hired assassins had blown up her last body with modern bombs and fire, and that cleanses everything, even her, but her spirit escaped and left her shell behind. How do you kill something that is untouchable, just floating from body to body? By making it stay in one place long enough, inside one person long enough, to kill it. I hadn’t done it on purpose, but she had wanted me so badly that I’d been bait enough to make her linger.

She had tried to pour thousands of years of darkness into me, and in the end I had used the vampire powers I’d gained, partly through her meddling, to drink her down. It was like drowning in a night-black sea, but instead of fighting to breathe the air I’d let myself sink and bet that I could drink the ocean faster than it could drown me. I was losing when Domino’s hand had reached into that darkness and grabbed me, given me his energy to help tip the balance. Domino and Ethan, who had been the newest weretiger of all, had carried every genetic line that had belonged to the tiger clans, and it had been enough to save me and help destroy the Mother of All Darkness.

“Domino without Ethan wouldn’t have been enough; it took both of them with their mixed heritage to save me,” I said.

“Oui, if Ethan had not held the bloodlines of red, gold, and blue tiger clans, then the white and black of Domino would not have been enough, but the point stands, ma petite. You had the power of the tiger clans at that moment, that singular moment that the tigers had been prophesying about for over two thousand years.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m supposed to save everybody from the great bad thing, because I’m the Queen of Tigers.”

“But it worked exactly as the prophecy predicted, ma petite; without the weretigers you could not have prevailed, and without you to harness their power they could not have killed their dark nemesis.”

I’d have argued with the term dark nemesis, but it was too damned accurate. If the Mother of All Darkness and Vittorio hadn’t forced us together, I’d be worse than dead now. I’d be trapped inside my own body, watching her use it to do terrible things. She had been a necromancer like me, but a thousand times more powerful. She could have raised an army of the walking dead to do her bidding. I wondered if she could have done what I had seen on the FBI tapes. Could Marmee Noir have put someone’s soul back in their zombie corpse? I didn’t think so; I was almost certain that required voodoo, which she hadn’t known, but I wouldn’t have put anything past her. Thinking about the case steadied me, helped me remember who I was, what I was, and that I was no one’s victim. I had survived, and they were dead; if anyone was anyone’s victim, they were mine.

“Fuck them,” I said, forcefully.

Micah smiled at me. “That’s our girl.”

“Indeed she is,” Jean-Claude said. He leaned in and laid a gentle kiss against my hair.

I nodded, but this time it was just a nod, not that endless, helpless gesture. I wrapped my arms around their waists, which made them wrap