“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.
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
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.
