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Danse Macabre :: Гамильтон Лорел
Страница: 409 из 427«Vision,» Asher supplied.
«But that makes it seem like some beatific otherworldly shit, and it wasn't like that.»
«What was it like?» Merlin asked.
«She sent a spirit cat once, an illusion. It sort of climbed up my body in the Jeep once. She smells of night, soft and tropical, jasmine, rain. She damn near suffocated me once with the taste of a rainy night. Belle Morte does it with the perfume of roses.»
«Do you equate their power with each other?» he asked.
«Do you mean, are they similar in power?»
«Yes.»
«No,» I said.
«How is it no?»
«I've seen her rise above me in vision, or dream, or whatever the fuck it was, like a huge black ocean. I've seen her rise like living night, made into something real, and separate. As if night wasn't just the absence of light, but was something real, and alive. She is the reason that our ancestors huddled around the fire at night. She's why we fear the dark. She's a fear in the very fiber of our beings, something going back to the lizard part of us. We don't fear her because we fear the dark; we fear the dark because of her.»
I shivered, suddenly cold. Asher took off his tuxedo jacket and laid it around my bare shoulders. It put Damian's hand against the back of my neck, under my hair, so he could keep contact. I didn't argue about it.
«Then it is true,» Merlin said, in a voice that held a sliver of fear, «she is waking.»
«Yes,» I said, «she is.» I took Asher's hand in mine. I needed the comfort.
«Belle Morte believes it is her power that has raised the mother's servants.»
«That isn't it, and you know it,» I said.
«They wake, because she is waking,» he said.
«Yes,» I said.
«Why is she so interested in a human servant?» Adonis asked, not rudely, but like he truly wanted to know.
«I believe it is not the human servant who interests her, but the necromancer.» He looked at me, and again I fought not to meet his eyes. I didn't think it was mind tricks, just habit. You look in someone's eyes. You just do. «Did you know, Ms. Blake, that it is on her orders that the necromancers of old were slaughtered?»
«No,» I said, «I didn't know that.»
«It was her orders that all with your gifts be killed before they could grow to such power.»
«I can sort of understand that.»
«Can you?»
I nodded, and squeezed Asher's hand, and pressed Damian's hand closer to my skin. «I can roll a vampire's mind the way you guys roll us.