The Harlequin

chapter twelve

I WOKE IN a tangle of bodies. I was on my back with Micah and Richard half on top of me, as if even in their sleep they had fought over who would touch the most of me. The scent of their skins had mingled into a rich perfume that tightened my body. But I was still pinned and not comfortable at all. I was so tangled that I couldn't even rise enough to see Nathaniel on the far side of Micah. I thought the uncomfortable position had been what woke me; then I caught movement at the foot of the bed. I held my breath. Was it one of the guards? Somehow I knew it wasn't.

The faint light from the half-open bathroom door didn't really show me anything. It was almost as if the light were being sucked at by the dark, as if eventually the darkness would swallow the light completely. My pulse was thudding in my throat, so hard I could barely breathe past it, and swallowing hurt. I knew who was in the dark, and I knew I dreamed. But just because it's a dream doesn't mean it can't hurt you.

«What is that?»

I screamed, a short, sharp scream. I was looking into Richard's face. He was awake. He started easing up to sit, and I moved with him. He tried to shake Micah awake, but I didn't bother. I'd had this dream before.

«Wake them up,» he whispered, eyes searching the darkness.

«Her animals to call are all cats; they won't wake.»

«Who… Marmee…»

I stopped the words with fingers against his lips. «Don't,» I whispered. I don't know why we were whispering. She would hear us. But there's something about being in the dark when you know the predator is out there, that makes you whisper. You try to be small and quiet. You pray that it passes you by. But this wasn't a predator, exactly; this was the entire night, given life and substance, and a mind. I smelled jasmine and summer rain, and other scents of a land that I had never seen except in vision and dream. The land where Marmee Noir had begun. I had no idea how old she was, didn't want to know. I was a necromancer. I could have tasted her age on my psychic tongue, but I didn't know if I could swallow that many centuries. I feared I'd choke.

«Necromancer.» Her voice eased through the night like a sweet-scented wind.

I managed to swallow past the beating of my heart. «Marmee Noir,» I said, and my voice was only a little hoarse. It was better with Richard beside me, awake. His arm wrapped around me as if he felt it, too, that together we were more here. Maybe our accidental sharing of dreams, Richard and me and Jean-Claude, had a purpose. One we just hadn't understood until now.

I leaned into the curve of Richard's body, and his arm tightened. My hand on his bare chest let me feel the beat of his fear against my palm.

The darkness gathered, almost the way light will narrow down to a point of brightness, except this was darkness compacted, squeezed down as if a small black hole were forming in front of our eyes. The black hole took on the vague shape of a woman in a cloak.

I thought, very carefully, in my head at Richard, «Don't look at her face.»

«I know the rules,» he said out loud. He had heard me; good, great. Mind-to-mind talking was still not my best thing in dream or out of it.

«Do you truly believe that not looking upon my face will save you?»

Great, she read minds, too. I'd had much lesser vamps be able to do it. I shouldn't have been surprised.

«Tell me again why Micah and Nathaniel won't wake?» Richard asked, his voice soft, but not a whisper anymore. It was too late for whispering. She'd found us.

«Necromancer,» she said.

«Cats are her creatures to call, all cats, so she can keep them out of the dream. Jean-Claude was with me last time and she was able to keep him out, too. She doesn't do wolves.»

«Your wolf will not save you this time, necromancer.»

«How about mine?» Richard said, and a low growl trickled out from between his lips. It raised the hair on my arms, and that part of me where the beasts waited, stirred. The best I can describe it is that the place is like a cave where my animals wait. They walk up a long corridor to get to me. Since they're inside me, that can't exactly be right. But it's the visualization that works for me.

In dream, though, the wolf inside me could come out and play. My wolf was pale, white and cream with a black saddle and marks on her head. She crouched in front of me and joined her growl with Richard's. I dug my free hand into her fur and found it like last time: soft, coarse. I could feel the vibration of the growl through my hand, feel the muscle and meat of her body. She was real, my she-wolf. She was real.

Richard stopped growling and stared at the wolf. She turned eyes that were brown and glowing to him. My eyes when vampire powers had filled them. They stared at each other, then she turned back to the darkness. When Richard looked down at me, his eyes were the amber of his wolf.

«Your master has left you both with the last piece undone,» she said. Her voice floated around the almost-body she'd formed from the shadows. She came to the foot of the bed.

The wolf crouched, and growled, that sound that was absolutely serious. It was the last warning sound before violence.

She didn't try to touch the bed. She actually stopped moving. I remembered seeing her body in that distant room jerk when my wolf bit her in dream last time. Had it hurt her enough to make her hesitate? Had it hurt her enough to make a true threat? God, I hoped so.

«You can still be enslaved to any master stronger than he, and there is no one stronger than me, necromancer.»

I clung to the wolf's fur and Richard's body. «I believe that last part, Marmee Noir.»

«Then why has your master left this door open?»

The question puzzled me.

«I do not know that expression on your face. I have been too long without humans.»

«I'm puzzled,» I said.

«I will help you not be puzzled, necromancer. I came tonight to make you mine. To shatter your triumvirate and make you my human servant. I do not need to share blood to own your soul.»

I was trying to breathe past my pulse again, and having trouble doing it.

«You won't touch her,» Richard said, and his voice sounded gravelly, the beginnings of the change in the sound of his words.

«I think you are right, wolf. I think it would be a battle with you by her side. I am not ready for battle, not yet. But there are others who know what Jean-Claude has not done.»

«Who?» I managed to ask.

«Do I need to say the word?» she asked.

I opened my mouth to say it, but Richard said, «It's against your laws to say it out loud. A killing offense, Jean-Claude said.»

She laughed, and the darkness tightened around the bed like a giant's fist. You knew, could feel, that it could crush the bed and everyone on it, if it wanted to. «That is not the trick I have come to play, wolf, but fine: Harlequin. They know you are not safe. They know that I am close to waking. They fear the darkness.»

«Everyone's afraid of you,» I said. The wolf had begun to relax under my grip. You could only hold on to emergency mode for so long. Apparently, we were talking, not fighting. Fine by me.

«True, and I would have taken you tonight. I planned on it.»

«You said that already,» Richard said, his voice a little more human, but sullen.

«Then let me not repeat myself, wolf.» Her anger was not hot, but cold, as if an icy wind danced across my bare skin. Richard shivered beside me. I didn't think I'd have to caution him to be nice. That flex of power explained it nicely. «By tomorrow they will be upon you, and I do not want them to have you.»

«Have me, how?» I asked.

«I will allow Jean-Claude to have you, because you are already his. But no one else. I would prefer you were my human servant, but Jean-Claude is acceptable. No one else, necromancer. I will destroy you before I allow the Harlequin to make you their slave.»

«Why do I matter to you?»

«I like the taste of you, necromancer,» she said, «and no one else can have you. I am a jealous Goddess, and I do not share power.»

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. I nodded as if that made sense to me.

«A parting gift, necromancer, wolf.» The shadowed form vanished, but she wasn't gone. The darkness suddenly had weight and grew thicker, as if the night itself could become so thick it would eventually crawl down your throat and choke you. She'd done almost exactly that to me before. The scent of jasmine and rain was thick on my tongue.

The wolf growled and Richard echoed her. «Can you bite that which you cannot find?» Her voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. «My mistake was trying to be too human for you. I do not repeat mistakes.»

The wolf crouched, but Marmee Noir was right, there was no body to bite here now. I had to find a way to visualize a target for my wolf. I struggled to believe that my wolf could bite the night itself.

Richard grabbed my shoulders, turned me to him. His eyes were still amber and inhuman. He kissed me. He drew back enough to say, «I can taste her power in your mouth.»

I nodded.

He kissed me again, and this time he stayed with our mouths pressed together. He poured that warm, rising energy that was shapeshifter into me. He pushed it into me through our mouths, his hands, our bodies. I kept my grip on my wolf, but the rest of me I gave to Richard, and gradually I could taste pine, and leaf mold, rich and thick and foresty. I smelled the musk of wolf fur. I smelled pack. I smelled home, and the last taste of jasmine vanished under the taste of Richard's power, Richard's wolf, and finally, at the end, simply the taste of Richard. The sweet, thick taste of his kiss. The dream ended with a kiss.