Skin Trade

Chapter 67



BUT HE DIDN'T find me first. She found me. I stood in the room where I knew her body lay. She looked small under the silk sheet; no, shrunken. For the first time, she looked like a corpse under a sheet. I waited for her to move or to hear her breathe, see movement, but there was nothing. She was gone.



Then I was in a night long ago, with the scent of jasmine and rain on the air. The air was hot, but not muggy, as if there wasn't a lot of moisture in it. But there was that edge of rain, and you could almost feel the ground underneath your feet, eager for it, like a lover waiting for an embrace.



She'd stepped into this night as a woman's figure, and as the night itself, but now she was a voice whispering against my skin. "Necromancer, they are coming to kill me. They are coming with modern weapons and things I do not understand. I have abandoned the shell in the room. That they may have it."



The smell of jasmine grew stronger, as the rain blew closer, a thick, clean smell. "What do you want?"



"You, necromancer. I want your body."



"No," I said.



"No, because you have kept me out. You and your ties to your men. But I need power, enough to survive when my shell is consumed. I cannot take your body, Anita, but I think I can feed through you."



"Feed how?" I asked, and felt the first tightness in my gut. The first hint of fear.



"The tigers, little necromancer, did you think they found you by accident?"



"No, I knew you had done something to me."



"Simply feed on all the colors of their rainbow and give the energy to me. It will give me enough strength to survive until I can find a host."



"Are you asking me or telling me to do this?"



"Would asking make you do it?" the voice asked.



"No."



"Then I tell you to do it."



"No," I said.



"I can make you do it, necromancer, but it will be less pleasant."



"I won't help you find another body, just because you can't have mine."



"Remember, necromancer, I gave you a choice. You have chosen the path of pain. Now, if you become pregnant, it is too late to help me."



"What did you say?"



"When I realized I could not get inside you, I tried to have you pregnant by one of the weretigers, but you stayed too far away from them for too long. Now you lie with two of them, and have a blue tiger close at hand. A color even I thought was lost. There are even two kings of two different pure bloodlines within walking distance of you. I would have given you a choice to use your protection when you fed for me, but if you will not do it willingly, then I will do what I did when you first met the white tiger."



"Wait," I said, because now I was afraid. I'd met Crispin in North Carolina, when he'd been traveling for a VIP bachelorette party, and I'd been a guest at the same hotel. I'd woken up two days later, naked, bruised, scratched, sore, with three naked men passed out around me. One had been Jason, but the other had been Crispin, who I'd just met, and Alex, who was just an innocent reporter covering the wedding, who also happened to be a red tiger. I could suddenly taste my pulse in my throat.



"Don't," I said.



"Either feed on the tigers voluntarily and let me take the power, or I will take you again. I will not make it days, though; as I said, pregnant now does me no good. So the sex will be quicker."



"Why me pregnant by a weretiger?"



"Because I was a necromancer in life, Anita, like you, and a wereanimal. The tigers are the most powerful cat left on this earth. I thought if the baby was part weretiger and part necromancer, I would have a greater chance of taking it's body."



I was still scared, but the first anger was there, too. "You had no right."



"You've been inside my mind, little necromancer; do you really believe I care about right and wrong?"



The scent of jasmine was thick on my tongue. "No," I whispered. The rain was almost here, the wind cool with it. The night was so dark.



"This is your last choice to make, Anita. Is it willing you are, or is it force?"



"If I help you, you'll use the energy to escape the assassins and hide in someone else's body. You'll take them over and escape."



"Yes," she said.



The rain blew the thin dress against my body. I was wearing sandals that I'd never owned. My hair blew across my face. All I could taste was jasmine, as if I'd drunk perfume. The first spatters of rain rode the wind.



"Time grows short, necromancer. Your answer?"



I knew what the jasmine on my tongue meant. It was her power growing in me, like the trigger on a gun with a finger on it, already moving to squeeze.



I swallowed, and it was like it hurt to swallow past the sweet taste of it. "I can't help you take over another person's body. I can't sacrifice someone else to save myself."



"They would be a stranger to you," the voice in the dark said.



I shook my head. The wind hit me, and the rain came like a wall, so that one moment I was dry, and the next I was soaked to the skin. The rain was cold, and the world tasted of jasmine.



"I can't," I said.



"Oh, you can, and you will, necromancer. You will feed me. You will save me. I am the Mother of All Darkness; I will not die because one stubborn girl said no."



I stood there in a desert night that had existed longer ago than books or cities. I shivered in a cold rain that hadn't fallen for thousands of years. I tasted jasmine on my tongue and felt her cut off my breath as she slid her power down my throat.



I managed to say, "No means no, bitch!" Then there were no more words.



Chapter 68



THE RAIN STOPPED abruptly, like someone had turned a switch. The jasmine retreated from my throat. I drew a huge gasping breath. The world didn't smell like rain anymore. There was still the scent of flowers, but the rain had gone. The air was dry, and a wind came off the desert that the palm trees hid from view. The desert that I'd always known was there in this vision.



A whirlwind blew in from the sand. The Mother of All Darkness whispered in my ear, "No, it cannot be."



The whirlwind stopped a few feet way; as the wind died, Vittorio was revealed. But it was not the Vittorio that I'd seen in Vegas. This one pointed a handsome, unmarked face to the moonlight. His clothes were embroidered and rich, but matched the thin dress and sandals I wore. His short hair was long again, and he walked out of the wind, like some fairy-tale magician appearing in the nick of time. He had helped me; why? I didn't even care how, but why?



"I know you are still here, Dark Mother. I can feel you, hovering in the night, like some evil dream."



The voice came. "Father of the Day, you look unchanged. I see your little pets are back with you."



He made a motion and something appeared beside him. It was almost as if I couldn't see it, but from the corner of my eye, there was a huge man standing behind him. It wavered, and moved like a bad image on a screen that you needed to adjust, but it was there, in the dream, at least.



"Can you only call the people of the wind in dream?" she asked.



"No, the powers that you stripped from me return more every day. As you grow weak, you lose control of that which you stole from me. It returns to me."



"I should have killed you."



"Yes, you should have. I would have killed you."



"I was too sentimental," the voice said.



"It wasn't sentiment that saved me, Dark Mother. I remember your words, very well. You said, 'If I were certain there was a hell, then I would kill you, so you could be tormented for eternity, but since I am not certain, I will leave you alive, to walk this earth, in your own private, powerless hell.' "



"It is too long ago; I do not remember my words exactly," she sighed.



"You were always careful what you remembered of your own deeds."



I wanted to say something, but was afraid to draw their attention to me. I wondered if I could break the dream and simply wake up?



"Do not go, Anita," Vittorio said, as if he'd read my mind. "Don't you want to see what happens?"



I swallowed and said, trying not to sound nearly as afraid as I was, "It sounds like you two have a lot of things to catch up on. I'll just leave you to it."



They spoke together. "No, necromancer, you will not go." "No, Anita, I can't let you go."



Shit.



"Does daylight not hold you prisoner?"



"You always did envy me that. You could never do it."



"As you could not raise the true dead."



"As you could not call the wind to your hand."



"We both had our armies of slaves, Day Father."



"You had your shambling hordes, and I had my army of jinn. I will have my army again, but you will not." His voice had gone low, and evil, somehow.



I wanted to ask if jinn meant genie, but I didn't want the answer enough to have him turn on me.



Her voice held that first thread of fear. "You would keep me from saving myself."



"Oh, yes, my love, I would."



"We both loved power more than anything else. It was not sentiment that kept you from striking the first blow, my love," and she made the endearment sound like an insult.



He raised his hands and spoke words that I did not understand, but the hairs on my arms rose anyway, as if a part of my brain that I couldn't understand anymore knew exactly what the words meant.



He touched a ring on his finger.



"You speak the words, but the ring is what makes it happen. You are not strong enough yet to command them without it," she said.



"Not yet, but thanks to your plans, I will be soon." He spoke the strange words again, and my body shivered with it.



"They are almost here."



For a minute I thought she meant the jinn, and then I felt her look backward, as if there were a window I could not see behind where her voice was coming from. I had a moment to glimpse a slender, dark girl, and then the wind hit her. The wind held blades like a silver whirlwind; it surrounded her and cut her to pieces.



She shrieked, "Necromancer, do not trust him!" Then she was gone, but it wasn't the blades here. I felt an explosion rock in the pit of me, as if my body were the room where it had gone off. I fell to my knees with the sharp, burning pain of it.



"They've used modern explosives. She is dead," and he was triumphant. The wind of blades died down, as if it had never been, but I had another image of a second large figure behind him. There were two of them. Were they genies? If so, it was nothing like the cartoons except that the ring on his finger helped him control them. That was straight out of the old children's stories.



He turned to me, smiling, but it wasn't a good smile. It was the kind of smile that snakes would give if they could, just before they eat the mouse.



I decided I had nothing to lose by asking questions. "The jinn killed the policemen, didn't they?"



"Yes; my daytime servant shares some of my ability through the vampire marks."



"He just takes the ring," I said.



"No, the ring never leaves me."



"If you didn't have the ring, would they turn on you?"



"They are slaves. Slaves always resent the chains."



"I'm going to break the dream now, and wake up," I said, and tried for my voice to sound as sure as I felt.



He laughed, and it was a good laugh, but compared to Jean-Claude's it wasn't ordinary. Again it was as if he read my mind, because he said, "Belle Morte's line has powers that neither she, nor I, possessed. Belle was something new. All the others descend from us, but her and the Dragon. She was never human to begin with, so she was always different from us."



"So you don't share Belle's line of power," I said.



"I am oversharing, but it has been so long since I've had anyone to tell the truth to."



"It gets lonely," I said.



"It can, but I have my servants returning to me, and my magic."



"Bully for you. Now can I go, please?" I hated to add the please, but if it would get me the hell out of here, I'd say worse.



"The Dark Mother was always a good strategist. It's why she defeated me. It's a good plan."



"What plan?" I asked.



"Your feeding on all the colors of the tigers, and a vampire siphoning off the energy. It would have been enough power to save her, and it will still be enough to return me to my former glory."



"You're short two colors of tigers in Max's clan. You need yellow and red," I said.



"You saw the signs, Anita; there is a red tiger performing in Vegas. He was loaned to Max's clan for this year."



"But Max doesn't own him."



"I'm not calling only the tigers that belong to Max, Anita. I had many names, but one was Father of Tigers. I will call them to your room, and you, and they, will do what I want."



"You're still short a yellow one," I said, past the pulse that was trying to crawl up my throat.



"Don't you understand, Anita? You are the yellow tiger. It was a yellow tiger that struck you."



"But that makes me just a survivor, not pureblood. I'd shapeshift to a normal tiger."



"No, Anita, you wouldn't. How do you think the clans began? Do you actually believe the stories of tigers mating with humans and having offspring? No, fairy tales. They were all survivors of different strains of tiger. They have convinced themselves they are better because they breed true, but they have forgotten their own truth. They were once as you are, nothing more. They smell the gold tiger on you, Anita. The gold clan ruled them all, once, and they still respond to the power. If you were not true golden tiger, then they would not react to you, as they do."



"No," I said.



"I don't need you with child; in fact, that would complicate things, so we will make it quicker. I just need you to feed on them and to bring all the lines into their powers. For that we need a full feeding of Belle Morte's powers."



"Aren't you going to give me a chance to cooperate with you?" I asked.



"Why would I do that? I see my death in your mind, Anita. Lucky for you, I need you alive. Now, feed me the power that was once mine before the Darkness stripped me bare."



I screamed at him, "No!" Then there was nothing but the dark, and this time there was no voice in the blackness; there was nothing.