Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #28) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,72

ever do the change that smoothly? Did I want to know?

“He is one of the old council members, but we have no way of knowing if our dead queen made him more powerful with her magic, or if she kept him powerless. If the first, then we will slay him, but if the second, we are all in terrible danger.”

“He’s the son of a bitch that skinned Rafael alive as torture because he wouldn’t give the rest of you up,” I said. I’d have tugged on the door handle if I’d had a hand free, but I still had a knife in each hand, which raised the question of how I had planned to open the door in the first place. I realized I’d gone for the wrist knives. I sheathed the one in my left hand in the right wrist sheath, which was on top of the wrist; the left sheath carried the knife on the underside of the wrist so I could draw them simultaneously. I’d carried them almost longer than any other weapon I owned. They’d been the first silver I’d bought after bullets. I tried to feel bad about the fact that I’d gone for a killing weapon first thing, but all I could think was if we killed Hector, it might kill Padma and then we’d all be safer.

“I know who he is and what he did, Anita,” Claudia said. She looked somewhere between sad and in pain, but she still kept her hands on the door so I couldn’t go after him.

“Then let’s finish this,” I said.

“If you kill Hector before he fights Rafael, then the rest of the rodere will turn against him. They will not see it as his victory, as some of the vampires see the defeat of the Earthmover and the Mother of All Darkness as your kills and not Jean-Claude’s, but vampire culture is not based on duels, and ours is, Anita. If they lose faith in Rafael, they will challenge him constantly, they will challenge all of us in his inner circle until we are dead, and then someone else will rule what is left and they will not be friendly to you and Jean-Claude.”

I was suddenly tired, all the adrenaline of the last few minutes draining into my feet and into the floor. There’s a cost to ramping up for a life-and-death struggle, but if you keep going up without fighting, it can exhaust you almost as much as a real battle.

“You smell defeated,” Lillian said from behind us.

“Why can’t any of this be simple?”

“That is a child’s question, Anita,” Lillian chided.

My anger roared up from that pit it lived in and filled up all my tired empty cup. I looked at the doc, and knew I looked angrier than she deserved, but anger would keep me going tonight, good behavior wouldn’t.

“Such rage, luckily I know you now, and I know it is not really aimed at me,” she said.

The anger started to fade, but the tiredness was there waiting to engulf me. I had miles to go before I could sleep, so I fed my rage on the thought that one way or another Hector would die tonight. If he killed Rafael, then the rest of us would finish it immediately, no games, no rules. I told myself that and made myself believe it, and it kept me going out the door. It was only when we were about to enter the stadium that I realized I was still wearing the bloody clothes. I’d forgotten to change shirts, but I didn’t go back. It was too late for going back. I’d go forward covered in the blood of my enemy; let it be a warning to others, so I didn’t have to kill anyone else by accident tonight. No, if I killed again, I wanted it to be on purpose.

24

MY THIGH DIDN’T hurt until I started following Claudia up the stairs toward Rafael. She’d called it a stadium and it was, just smaller than one meant for baseball or football. It wasn’t even that the painkiller was wearing off so much as the stitches let me know they were there both holding the skin together and sort of pulling as I moved up the steps. Stitches on the arms never seemed to bother me as much as stitches on parts of the body that moved me forward.

There were hundreds of wererats packed into a space that fit inside a large warehouse. I had to shield hard