Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #28) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,57

that Jean-Claude was getting all this.

She turned her head to look at me out of one eye the way a bird will, and I caught a glint of light in her eyes that wasn’t black. I blinked and took a step toward her, then thought to ask, “May I come closer to see your eyes better?”

“A step, or two, no more; I do not want you tempted to go for a blade. I would hate to explain to our king what happened to his concubine.”

I didn’t really like being called a concubine, but she had several thousand rats waiting to swarm over us, so until that changed, she could call me any damn thing she wanted. I moved slowly and deliberately the two steps she’d given me; I didn’t want a misunderstanding.

She stared at me aggressively, both eyes forward, and there it was, starshine in her black eyes. They were the darkness of space with stars scattered and shining in the permanent night between the worlds.

“I’ve seen eyes like yours before,” I said, keeping my voice low and careful, just in case.

“You have never been to the heart of our people, so you have never seen eyes like mine.”

“I think I know why your power and I are getting along so well.”

“Tell me.”

“How about if I show you?”

“Show me what?”

“I’m going to call a little of the magic in me, so you can feel how similar it is to yours.”

“We are not necromancers here.”

“This isn’t necromancy. I just don’t want you to freak out when I open myself to the power, okay?”

“Show me something worth seeing, Anita Blake.”

I took that for reassurance that she wouldn’t freak out and I called an ability that hadn’t come through Jean-Claude, or any of the shapeshifters I was tied to, but a self-professed goddess. My skin ran with the energy she had shared with me. The magic around us pulsed and then hesitated like a heart skipping a beat.

“Your eyes,” Neva said, “this can’t be.”

The beat of magic around us caught up with that lost beat, and it was as if my body were a gong and it had hit me solidly in the chest. It stole my breath and staggered me backward.

Claudia caught me or I might have fallen. “Neva, you are not allowed to harm her.”

“I did nothing,” she said.

I fought to have enough air to say, “Not her . . . fault.” I looked up at her as I said it and watched her face pale.

“Neva, what have you done!” She turned back to the other woman, and her anger and fear raised her beast enough that I jerked back from the heat of it.

Pierette said, “Anita’s eyes are not the witch’s doing.”

“I can see them for myself. Neva, what did you do?”

“It is you and our king who should have told me that she carries our magic inside her.” Her anger and fear translated to heat like I’d opened a blast furnace. I stumbled back from them both, and it was Pierette who caught my arm so I didn’t hit a wall.

“Control your little beasts, witch,” Pierette said.

I looked and saw that the rats were beginning to creep forward, still unnaturally silent and well behaved. I looked at them with eyes made of black space and starlight, and their energy wasn’t right. They weren’t ordinary animals of any kind. They watched everything with a weight of intelligence and thought that wasn’t very ratlike. Rats are smart, very smart, but they’re animals and no matter how intelligent they can’t look at you with that sense of a personhood in their eyes, their bodies.

“Wererats don’t come this small,” I whispered.

Pierette said, “They are just rats that the witch is controlling.”

“No, they’re not just rats.” I didn’t know what they were, so I had no word to substitute, but I knew what they were not, and that was a normal animal of any kind.

“What do you see, Anita?” Neva asked; it took me a second to realize she’d used just my first name.

“I’m not sure, but something’s wrong with them, or right with them, but right or wrong, they’re different.” I glanced back at her and physically she looked the same, though now I could “see” where the tip of the short sword on her back poked out of the line of her shirt. Her thick, unbound hair hid the hilt that came out above the opposite shoulder. How was she carrying it? Just thinking about it gave me the hint of straps