The Harlequin

"You can feed off the combined power of all the vampires." Jean-Claude made it a statement.

"Yes," she said, and sounded pleased with herself.

Edward and Olaf were standing on either side of us like good bodyguards. It was Micah who knelt and asked, "Are you safe to touch?"

I knew what he meant: Will whatever metaphysical crap is happening spread by touch? "I think I'm safe to touch."

He grabbed my elbow and lifted, effortlessly. Graham offered Nathaniel a hand. We both swayed a little, but we were upright. Yea.

Columbine had meant to own the congregation and use them like a battery to make her own powers greater. Great enough to win a fight with Jean-Claude, maybe. But now they were mine, and through me, Jean-Claude's.

"You are too late," Malcolm said. "I have given them to my master."

"Oh, such bonds, when fresh, are not so firm," she said.

"Bold words, Columbine," Jean-Claude said, and his voice slid over my skin. Nathaniel shivered beside me. I felt two hundred vampires, or more, react to that voice. One vampire cried out, "Malcolm, save us from this lecher and his whore."

I turned and found the man who had spoken. He was staring at Malcolm, his hand out, beseeching. I started to be angry, but then sensed a thought, and I could feel his fear. Jean-Claude's voice had made this heterosexual man's body react. Just the voice, ordinary words; Jean-Claude wasn't even trying, not yet. How would I feel if it were a female vamp? The thought made me think of Belle Morte. She'd done a lot more than use voice powers on me. The thought brought heat in a rush up my face. I burned at the thought of her body, her hands on me. Then I could taste her mouth, the sweetness of her lipstick. The silk of her skin clung to my fingertips, so that I rubbed them against the leather of my coat to get some other sensation, but it didn't help. The feel of her skin clung to my fingers like a cobweb that I could not brush away.

Nathaniel started to touch me, but I jerked back. I was shaking my head. I held my hands out to all of them, and was backing down the aisle. I needed Jean-Claude, or Asher. I needed someone who understood her power better than I did. Maybe it was just a reaction to what she had done to me in dream, but I couldn't count on that. If she was going to try to take me over, I needed to be near someone who could help me fight.

I don't know if Columbine understood what was happening, or thought it was the ardeur, but she seemed to think it was an opening; a weakness. She attacked the congregation again, but what she'd done before had been a feint. She'd just been pretending to try. Her power cut through the vampires like a burning sword. Where it touched, they screamed, and the ties that bound them to me, to Jean-Claude, seared away. It was as if she literally could cut the metaphysical bonds like rope that was too fragile to hold.

One of the vampires she cut free stumbled into the aisle and fell on all fours at my feet, shrieking. I couldn't feel what she was feeling, but apparently it hurt. A man reached out, gray eyes wide. He screamed, "Master, help me!" He didn't reach toward Malcolm, or Jean-Claude. He was inches away, and he reached for me.

I took his hand. I didn't even think about it. His hand was bigger than mine, so it was his hand that encircled mine, but the moment he touched me, he stopped screaming. He came out of the pew and wrapped himself around me. He held me as if I were the last safe thing in the world. I hugged him back, tight, and the feel of Belle Morte's skin faded under the muscled realness of the man in my arms. The girl on the floor crawled to me, touched my leg. She stopped screaming.

She wrapped herself around our legs, the nameless vampire and me. I was of Belle Morte's line. I knew how to stop the pain. I knew how to bring them back and make them mine.

I raised my face to the gray-eyed man. He bent toward me, folded his tall frame downward. I held his face in my hands and went up on tiptoe. His mouth found mine, and we kissed. His lips were dry, nervous, afraid, but I did something I'd never been able to do before: I was able to draw a little bit of the ardeur. I understood, as if the light had finally dawned, that the ardeur didn't have to be an ocean. It could be a single drop of rain, to wet the lips. I gave that tiny bit of power to him, breathed it into his mouth. I found the broken piece inside him that Columbine had cut. She had cut it with pain and force, and offered them a warning. She had showed them torture, fire, to burn and destroy them, if they refused her. I offered a kiss. I offered gentleness. I offered love. If I hadn't tasted Malcolm's power only moments before, maybe I couldn't have done it, but his intent was so pure, so unselfish, that it was like the ardeur had learned a new flavor. I offered that flavor to them. I offered them a choice. I gave them cool water and safety. She offered terror and punishment. She was threat. I was promise.

I won them back with a kiss, a touch. They poured from the pews, and I moved among them. Damian and Nathaniel helped me, moving into the crowd, touching, a kiss here and there. There was a gentleness to the ardeur that I had never felt before. Columbine's power died under a wave of kindness. A wave of touch, and chaste kisses. A wave of offering help. We will save you. We will take away your pain. She should have remembered that people have given everything they own, everything they are, to be taken care of, and to have their pain gone. It's the lure of cults: the promise of a good family; it's what people think love is, but love isn't absence of pain, it's a hand to hold while you're going through it.

Columbine screamed her frustration, and she broke the pact. She reached out to Giova

A voice came out of that pain and said, "I will make the pain stop. Be mine, and it will stop." I screamed my defiance to that voice in my head, but it was the kind of pain that eventually would break you. Eventually, you'd simply say yes, anything, everything, just to make it stop.

Vaguely, I felt the carpet of the floor underneath me. I knew I was writhing on it, but the pain ate all other sensations. My vision ran in streamers, sliding images, as if my eyes could not see past the pain. Hands tried to hold me down, but my body wouldn't be still. It hurt too much to be still.

The voice in my head said, "Let go, and it will feel so good. Just let go. Let go. They are strangers to you; let me have them, Anita. Let them go."

I didn't even know who "them" was. There was nothing but the pain, and some part of me that would not give in. It was as if everything underneath my skin had turned to fire and was trying to burn its way out.

Hands held me down, and there were enough hands that I had to feel them. They were firm and real, and it was like an anchor in the pain. I could feel the hands, feel that they were real. Which meant… Light, burning light, the sun dazzled my eyes, and I burned.

I screamed, and something covered my mouth. Lips, a kiss, and down that kiss was the sweet musk of leopard. My leopard rose to that scent. The sun was warm, and good, not a burning thing. I rose with Micah's beast, two black furred creatures that writhed and danced, and rose up and up, toward the light. The pain fell away as I remembered fur and claw, and teeth, and meat. I wasn't a vampire, not really. I was nothing that she could make burn. Her power only worked on the dead. I was reminded that I was very much alive.