The Harlequin

"Don't let her inside you."

"Micah, take my arm."

"Don't let her do this," Richard said to him.

"We are still in danger here, Richard," Micah said. "Don't you get that? We have to finish what we started."

"You mean kill them?"

"Yes," I said, "yes, kill them. Kill them all!" Another cut opened on Richard's arm. He let me go, as if I were something hot that had burned him. Micah slid furred arms around me. He and Nathaniel led me forward, so I could do what needed to be done. No, truth, what I was going to do. Not need, want. I wanted him dead. He'd killed Remus, and Remus had died because the vampire on the ground had meant to kill me. Remus had given his life to save mine. I'd pay my debt, now, tonight, in the blood and pain of his killer. It sounded like such a good idea.

The smell of jasmine was everywhere. I could taste rain on my tongue. The wind was cool and fresh against my face, and the wind was coming from me.

Chapter Forty-seven

"TAKE OFF HIS mask," I said, but the voice held an echo of a different voice.

"If you see my face I will be forced to kill you all," he said.

I laughed, and the laughter made the wind play around the room, patting with cool, damp hands at people's hair, their skin. "You are going to die tonight, Pantalone. Your mask can come off now, or after your corpse lies stretched at my feet. I prefer now, but I guess it really doesn't matter." The wind eased back. I was drowning in the scent of rain and jasmine.

He struck at me with his own power. It was like some spirit wolf, a great dark beast that rose from him and came at me, huge jaws agape. Micah and Nathaniel pulled me backward, but though it looked like a shadow, it hit me and pulled us all to the floor. People were ru

A snowstorm, so cold, the wind howling, so that he thought he heard voices on the wind. He'd found a cave, buried in the snow. Shelter, he thought. Then he'd heard the growl, low and too close. Something else had taken shelter from the storm. Then a woman had stepped into the light of his fire. A woman with a spill of dark hair and eyes that glittered in the firelight. He had smelled death on her and tried to fight. I felt his body run hot and spill bone and muscle and flesh from human to wolf. But a wolf like none that still walked today. She had turned into a huge striped cat, the color of a lion, but striped like a tiger, bigger than both. She'd nearly killed him, but when pain and injury had turned him back to human, she'd fed on him. She fed on him for three days until the storm stopped, and when the fourth night rose, they went out together, to hunt.

I came back to the here and now and found that Wicked and Truth had pierced his heart and neck with their swords. He cursed them, and writhed, but he wasn't dead. I knew, I just knew that swords would not kill him. He was old blood. Blood when vampire and shapeshifter could be one, back before the blood weakened. We could take his head and heart and burn the pieces separately, but didn't I want answers? Yes, I did.

I sat back up with Micah and Nathaniel's help. "Your actions could get the entire Harlequin disbanded; don't you care?"

"Kill me, if you can, but I will not answer questions from you."

The darkness inside me thought otherwise. "Fredo," I called.

The slender knife-wielding man was just beside me. "Can you get enough help and enough knives to pin him to the floor?"

"We can pin him, but unless we're leaning on the knives, they won't hold him."

"Then pin him with your bodies, I don't care how. I need to touch him."

"Why?"

"Does it matter?"

"Tonight, yes," he said.

I looked up into his dark eyes. I saw pain there. I answered that pain. "The darkness can make him talk, and then I'm going to kill him."

Fredo nodded. "Good plan." He went around getting volunteers to hold the vampire down. There were a lot of volunteers.

Jean-Claude came to me while they were wrestling him into place. "I feel her all around you, ma petite."

"Yeah," I said, but I wasn't looking at him. I was watching them pin the big vampire.

"Look at me." He touched my chin and turned me so that I would look at him. I didn't fight him, but I didn't seem to care whether I looked at him or not. "There is a light in your eyes that I do not know."

I half-saw, out of the corner of my eye, a dark figure form. She formed of the dark, and she looked vaguely like she had in my dream, all-black cloak, a small female figure. But this was no dream.

Screams again from the vampires. The ones with Asher, standing guard over Columbine and Giova

Pantalone himself screamed, like a girl. It made it harder for the guards to wrestle him into submission. Oh, well.

The figure spoke, and the smell of jasmine and rain was in her voice, or on the wind, or the wind was her voice. I wasn't sure which. "Did you think my laws were superstitions, Jean-Claude? You were supposed to kill her when you knew what she was. Now it is too late."

"Too late for what?" he said, and he wrapped his arm around me, drew me in against his body, and we both looked up as my nightmare damn near materialized in front of us.

"She's a necromancer, Jean-Claude, she controls the dead, all the dead. Don't you understand yet? Some of the Harlequin think I woke because I want to steal her body, ride her as the Traveller rides other vampires. I had that gift once, to travel from body to body, but that is not why I woke."

"Why did you wake?" he whispered.

"She attracts the dead, Jean-Claude, all the dead. She called me from my sleep. Her power called to me like the first ray of sunlight after a thousand years of night. Her warmth and life called to my death. Even I ca

"You are so not under my power," I said.

She gave a low, dry chuckle. "Legend says that necromancers can control the dead, and that is true, but what legend does not say is that the dead give necromancers no peace. We pester the poor things, because they draw us like moths to the flame, except with vampires and necromancers it is a question who is flame and who is moth. Beware, Jean-Claude, that she does not burn you up. Beware, necromancer, that the vampires do not put you in your grave."

"Your law," Pantalone yelled, "your law says she must be put to death."

The dark figure turned toward the struggling pile of people. "Do not dare speak to me of my laws, Pantalone. I made you. I gave you a piece of myself, that is what made you one of the Harlequin. I have been listening to vampires that dwell closer to my physical form. You have been assassinating vampires for council members. You are neutral. You take no sides. That is what makes the Harlequin!" Her voice rose as she spoke until the wind held not just rain but the promise of storm. "I will take back what I gave you. What you used to make these pale imitations of my Columbine and her Giova

"Columbine died. I had to make a replacement, and you were not here to guide me."

"Then the mask should have been retired, and the name with it. That was my will, and our way, once." She began to walk toward them. I could almost see her foot, dainty in a slipper edged with white pearls.

Jean-Claude called, "Do not look upon her face. For fear of sanity and life do not meet her eyes, any of you."

"I am not the Traveller, to need to steal bodies to walk. I did need flesh once, but I am the darkness made flesh, Pantalone. I am she who made you, made you all! Killing the necromancer will not put me back to sleep again. It is too late for that."