Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #28) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,95
its white spots was looking up at me. The other rats had spilled around the island of all of us, but some had climbed the three brujas and the one on my hand. I stared into those black button eyes, and I swear there was too much weight of intelligence and personality for any rat I’d ever seen. I mean they’re smart, but not that kind of smart.
“They will not hurt another rat,” Hector said.
I laughed, and there was that uncertain look that I knew was Padma’s and not the confident swaggering man that Hector was supposed to be. “Do you know anything about real rats?” I asked.
Neva said, “Make him look into your eyes, Anita.”
I did what she asked, staring into the brown of Padma’s eyes set in Hector’s face. “I am the vampire here, Anita, not you.” The eyes started to glow with brown fire like a brown glass with the sun behind it.
“Keep the Goddess in your eyes, Anita, it is not as vampires we need to tame him,” Neva said.
I fought to hold on to the blackness that Obsidian Butterfly had taught me. I leaned over Hector and looked into Padma’s glowing eyes with the darkness between stars in my eyes.
“They showed me their dark eyes and it availed them nothing,” Hector said, but it was Padma’s voice the way Pierrot’s voice could come out of Pierette.
“This is not the same darkness,” Neva said. “There is more than one goddess in the heavens, Master of Beasts.”
“I don’t know what you are babbling about, woman.”
And then I saw the rats in the darkness, so that it wasn’t the darkness between the stars at all, but a blackness made up of rats, as if the universe were connected together with them, or the universe was nothing but rats, black and warm, and the darkness collapsed into an avalanche of rats that fell through Neva’s eyes and into my own and into Padma’s eyes in Hector’s face.
“What are you doing?” Hector asked, and his voice held the first hint of fear.
Neva answered, “She has opened the way for us.”
I felt like I was falling with the rats and the darkness into the brown glow of Padma’s eyes. Hector started to scream, and I wanted to join him. I repeated in my head, I trust Neva, I trust the rodere, I trust their magic, I trust Rafael, I trust Claudia, I trust Benito, and then the rats and I spilled through Hector’s eyes and into Padma’s hotel room, except the rats weren’t metaphors or bits of space darkness—they were real squeaking, scrambling, wriggling rats filling the room.
“You cannot hurt me with rats, it was my first animal to call,” Padma said.
The rats milled around the room and did not touch him, he was right, and then like an echo I felt the black rat with the white chest spot touching my hand, its whiskers tickling along my skin. It reminded me that my body was still kneeling on the sand and on Hector, and it reminded me of one more thing.
“Rats are my animal to call now, too,” I said.
“You are a child playing with toys you do not understand,” Padma sneered.
I felt the rat scramble up my bloody shirt and push its way through the mess of my hair with its drying blood, and the rat didn’t care. It liked being near me, and I realized I liked the weight of it on my shoulder, the way it cuddled against my face. This was the first time I’d ever been able to interact with the real-life version of my animal to call—with all the others it was the wereanimal, but never just the animal part without the human in there somewhere.
It was as if I’d been holding my breath and suddenly, I could let it go. I could relax in a way that you can around your dog, or cat, because they aren’t judging you like people do. The rat settled more heavily against my neck and the side of my jaw. If it was relaxing to touch the wereanimal you could call, touching the animal version of it was even more soothing.
And just like that was all right, it was all right to feel like the darkness was made up of a million rats. It was all right that the rats fell through me and were me, and weren’t me, and filled the hotel room and began to swarm over Padma.