Danse Macabre   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

It felt as if my body were a cave, a fleshy, soft cave, and the birds that I had heard and felt poured inside me, as if they'd found a home. I swear I could feel the brush of feathers, tiny bodies, fluttering, diving, filling me. Merlin's power poured into me, and tried to find Jean-Claude and Auggie. The power tried to find a way out of me and into them. Merlin poured more and more power into me, and I swallowed it.

Auggie and Jean-Claude clung to me, afraid to let go, afraid not to let go, I think. So much power, so much that it began to leak through into the other two vampires. The moment it touched them, they both understood. Merlin wasn't going to break me, we were going to eat him.

He must have figured it out at the same time, because he tried to stop the power, just cut it off. But I had the taste of him, and I didn't want it to stop.

The torrents of invisible birds slowed, but didn't stop. Obsidian Butterfly's power called to them, helped me know sweet words to use, to coax that power. The power kept coming, and I felt the flash of fear. It was sweet, and good, and I longed to taste the sweat on his skin. And I could, I licked down his skin, where he watched from the shadows.

He stared at me with dark eyes that held crimson like a pinpoint tear inside them. I'd seen eyes like that before. Never were human, were you ? I thought.

He tried to break the contact, and he couldn't do it. Not with Auggie and Jean-Claude hooked up to me. He was big and bad and powerful, but he was not a Master of the City. He was not two Masters of the City, and he didn't know what the hell I was; in that moment neither did I.

I smelled jasmine and rain. I smelled a tropical night that hadn't existed for thousands on thousands of years. A voice rode the smell of rain. The Mother of All Darkness whispered, «I know what you are, necromancer.»

I didn't want to ask, but it was as if I couldn't stop my mouth from forming the word. «What?»

«Mine.»



47

I SCREAMED, AND I shut it down. I shut it all down. No more birds from Merlin. But in my panic, I shut down the tie with Auggie and Jean-Claude. For an instant, it was just me and her inside my head. I felt rain on my face, cool and warm. The moon rode full and bright, and I was too tall, and too male. I thought it was Jean-Claude's memory, but the hand I could see was too rough, too dark. Whose memory was I trapped in?

«Mine,» she said again.

Oh, yeah, her. So why was I inside the head of the man she was about to eat? Why wasn't I inside her body?

Something moved in the moonlight.