Rafael Read online

  “I have told you what is happening tonight,” he said, his voice rumbling up through his chest against my face.

  “I’ve seen you before other fights, Rafael, and this is not right, you’re not right tonight. I don’t know what is wrong, but you have to delay the fight.”

  “Why?” he asked, and he kissed the top of my wet hair.

  “Because if you are convinced you will lose, then you will, that’s true of all fighting.”

  “I will do my best for my people tonight, Anita.”

  “Tell me you will win tonight. Tell me you will kick his ass. Tell me you will kill him, Rafael.”

  “I will try.” But his voice made a lie of it. He would try, but he didn’t believe it would work.

  I started pushing against him then. I couldn’t stay pressed to him like this; I needed to see him, I needed to move. “Don’t make me force you to let me go, Rafael.”

  “Do you think you could?” he asked, and there was just a hint of amused arrogance that a lot of the big athletic guys had. Good, at least that sounded like someone who planned to win, though I didn’t really want it aimed at me.

  I said, “I’d have to hurt you badly, but unless you were willing to hurt me back, yes, I can make you let me go, but I don’t want to hurt you.” Then I had an idea. “Would you being hurt postpone the fight?”

  He laughed then and let go of me, stepping back as much as the shower stall would let him. His face was alight with laughter even as it faded. That was better already in so many ways.

  “Do not hurt me to keep me from the fight tonight, Anita. If they thought that you were able to injure me that badly, it would be another weakness on the long list that my enemies have collected.”

  “Could you say that you were injured in training?” I asked.

  “Why should I lie?”

  “Because this is the most confident I’ve seen you in the last few minutes, and I don’t want to send you into battle unless you know you can win.”

  He looked me in the eyes, probably the best eye contact he’d ever given me when we were both naked and alone, but this moment wasn’t about sex, so the nudity truly didn’t matter.

  “I did not care about the first few challengers, they were no great loss to the rodere, or the organization I have built, but now we are starting to lose the future of our people. I have had my eye on Hector for a few years now. I was thinking of bringing him here and starting to train him, groom him to take over from me someday.”

  “Won’t he have to kill you to do that?” I asked. I hugged my arms, because without the hot water it was starting to get chilly.

  “No, he would have to kill the challenger who just killed me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He handed me one of the towels from the hook outside the shower stall. I took it and started to dry off as he continued to talk. “I wanted to find a young wererat to train up to be my successor. Hector was on the list. In another five to ten years he could be what the rodere need, what the Coalition needs, but now he is too new, too inexperienced to lead us. It would be a disaster if he wins tonight.”

  “Yeah, you’d be dead,” I said, and had to carefully towel-dry my hair without rubbing it or wrapping the towel on it, which breaks the curl. I and Micah had had the towel lecture from Jean-Claude for weeks as the wedding got closer. I’d be the bride, but Micah would be standing with us and God forbid our hair not look fabulous for the day. Even listening to Rafael now, I was careful to remember. So stupid, but it made Jean-Claude happy.

  “My death would be a disaster now with no one to lead us, but someday I will lose, Anita. Someday all warriors grow old and weak, or when two people are of the same size and equally well trained it is sometimes luck that chooses the winner of a fight. In boxing or MMA, the loser lives to train harder, to learn from their mistakes and come back and win another day, but tonight will be a final loss for one of us.”

  “Before you were talking as if you couldn’t win tonight. Is he really that much better than you?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so, but I see his death as a waste of potential. I will mourn his loss to the rodere, but he will celebrate my death. I cannot afford to think like a king tonight and see a great warrior and the potential for so much more. I must be the fighter I once was not just in body, but in mind and attitude. I need the tunnel vision that Hector has, because he believes in his cause. He believes that I am selling us into slavery to the vampires through you and Jean-Claude.”

  “That’s not true, you know it’s not.”

  “And yet I cannot prove it to Hector or to any of my enemies. Even now I want you to feed on me tonight and take power from all of them.”

  “Proximity makes vampire abilities stronger, Rafael. If Hector has never been this geographically close when I fed the ardeur on you, then it’s just going to convince him even more that I’m going to give you all to Jean-Claude as food and slaves.”

  “Sex slaves,” Rafael said.

  “Excuse me?”

  He smiled, but not like it was entirely funny. “The rumor says that Jean-Claude’s seductive powers will turn us all into sex slaves for him and his vampires and those wereanimals closest to him and you.”

  “I’ve heard that rumor that everyone who joins any group in St. Louis has to sleep with one of us, but the whole sex slave thing is new. Do they think we’re pimping people out, or how will it work?”

  “I do not know and neither does Hector, but he is homophobic, so the fact that I’m supposed to be sleeping with Jean-Claude seems to threaten him and other young men in our clans. The last fight I won was someone like Hector, someone I saw as a potential next king. Even if I win tonight, Anita, I am starting to destroy the future of all I have built, for a kingdom is only as good as its leader. If the person who follows after me is a bad king, then he will destroy everything that we have worked so long and hard for, and if I keep killing the best and brightest of our young men, then I will win the battles, but eventually the war will be lost. Do you understand what I mean?”

  I nodded, wrapping the towel around me, and having to fold it at the top so that I’d be able to walk later without tripping. “I think so, you’ve defeated all the would-be kings who would have been bad leaders, but now you’re starting to fight the ones that you think could rule, just not now and not yet.”

  “Exactly, even if I win tonight, it is still a loss for the future of my people.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a loss for future generations, Rafael. I don’t give a flying fuck if Hector would age into being a great king. He doesn’t get to kill you tonight. He doesn’t get to wear your crown a decade too early. He isn’t a fit ruler tonight, and tonight is all that matters, Rafael.”

  “So fierce, would you miss me that much, or is it only as an ally and a part of your power base that you will mourn me?”

  “You know I care for you as more than a friend and ally.”

  “I’m attracted to crazy bitches, Anita; that means that love to me is about drama and screaming and horrible behavior. That makes me feel loved; as fucked up as that is, it is still the truth, and before you ask, I am speaking with the therapist that Micah recommended. I even know that I was raised by someone who was that kind of unstable crazy, and that is why I chase it. Knowing why doesn’t change that it makes me feel loved, or that it tears down my life and breaks my heart again and again. I am a king and I cannot afford any more unstable would-be queens, but you are so sane, Anita, so pragmatic at times that I don’t know what you feel, or what I feel.”

  “Therapy takes time,” I said.

  “I hope someday to be able to love a woman who doesn’t play games or burn my belongings in the driveway.”

  “Or stab you,” I said.

  He smiled. “Yes, that, too, but I still miss the women who go with that kind of insanity.”

  “Do I say I’m sorry, or do you want me to pick some of your stuff that I don’t think you’ll miss much and plan a bonfir
e for you? We could roast hot dogs and make s’mores.”

  This time he smiled at my joke. Brownie points for me. “That will not be necessary, but perhaps a summer cookout in the backyard, around the pool, with s’mores toasted over the fire pit would be nice.”

  I smiled. “That sounds good.”

  “It does.”

  I handed him one of the other towels. “If you don’t dry your hair soon, you’ll have to wet it down and start over, and if I don’t put in all the leave-in conditioners, Jean-Claude will make me start over on mine.”

  He started drying his hair, still smiling. “Let us find a bed and do more things that put a smile on both our faces.”

  I was about to agree with him when Jean-Claude whispered through my head, “Ma petite, how close are you to feeding on Rafael?”

  I very carefully thought back, “Why?”

  I could suddenly see Jean-Claude still dressed for fencing practice, though the way he and the other older vampires practiced it was more traditional combat arts. I did mostly kali, which was Filipino martial arts, though my main instructor, Fredo, was helping me incorporate the knife skills I’d been using for years, so it wasn’t a pure style of Sinawali, but as Fredo taught me, What is kali? I am kali. Which basically meant that you should do it the way that works best for you. Kali isn’t just a martial art, it’s a combat style, and that means you do it the way that keeps you alive. Martial arts have referees and point systems. Combat arts have, did you live? I liked all the blade classes, from the various types of sword and knife work to the axe class that Truth and Wicked had just begun teaching. Some people thought blades weren’t practical for modern day, but they should look up the Tueller Drill. A regular human being with no supernatural speed can still stab you before you can draw, aim, and fire a gun if they’re within twenty-one feet of you. Between twenty and eighteen feet you may shoot them as they stab you and die together, but eighteen to sixteen feet and they will stab, or club, or smash your brains in, faster than you can shoot them. But honestly even without the practical statistics, I just seemed to like anything with an edge. Saturday’s class was vampires and wereanimals that had lived when the sword was the weapon at a gentleman’s side. It was one of the few blade classes I wasn’t trying to take.

  Jean-Claude smiled up at me, because my visual was looking down at him as if I were a hovering camera; it was always the view from the mind-to-mind peeks. His black curls were back in a loose ponytail, but with or without the hair to frame it his face was still almost too lovely to be real. Once I thought it was vampire wiles that made him so beautiful, but it was just him.

  He said, “I am soon to take my turn upon the field, and I need my concentration. The sweetness of your combined release will be most distracting.”

  I didn’t try to talk anymore; I just lowered my shields enough so he could see Rafael and where we were in the process.

  Rafael said, “What does Jean-Claude want?”

  It made me startle and look at the other man, which made me lose the visual of Jean-Claude. I started to ask him how he knew anyone had contacted me, let alone knew it was Jean-Claude, then I realized he was rubbing at the goose bumps on his arms. “You felt the energy,” I said.

  “I know when Jean-Claude is in your head.”

  I didn’t have to file it away to share later, because Jean-Claude just knew what I knew, because he was in my head. “Interesting,” he whispered, and then was gone so that Rafael and I were alone again in the showers. Our thoughts and our feelings private and ours again.

  “He’s at the new sword class the older vamps and shapeshifters are doing. He doesn’t want us to be feeding the ardeur while he’s on the practice mat.”

  “I didn’t think they used live blades,” Rafael said.

  “They don’t, but you can still get hurt even with a dull practice blade.”

  “True enough,” he said.

  “I know that the wererats like to use live blades for most of their practices,” I said.

  “If it is not silver, then it will heal almost instantly if you are a powerful enough shapeshifter.”

  “Yeah, you’re powerful as fuck, so you’ll heal, but I’ve seen some of your people after the wererat-only practices and they don’t all heal like you do.”

  He smiled and it had that arrogance, or maybe confidence, that he hid most of the time behind a diplomatic, almost humble demeanor. But since I’d been his lover, I’d seen him when he wasn’t so controlled, and you didn’t get to be king without being confident or even arrogant.

  “You do not always heal as quickly as I do, and yet you participate in knife practice with us.”

  I shrugged and felt both embarrassed and proud. “I was surprised when Fredo invited me into the private lessons.”

  “You should be honored, Fredo includes only the very best in his private classes.”

  I smiled and then felt myself blush. It usually took something sexual to get me to blush, which meant that being invited into Fredo’s private lessons meant even more to me than I’d thought. It was stupid to risk myself with real blades, and even in the private classes we used practice blades most of the time, but not all the time, and sometimes we used silver-edged blades, which meant that even a shapeshifter or a vampire would heal human-slow. The wererats and the golden tigers both believed that if you didn’t practice with silver blades at least part of the time, you didn’t really know how good you were or how you’d react when you got hit for real. I’d been cut up in real fights before, so I knew what it felt like and how I’d react, but the theory was sound.

  Rafael laughed. “I am sorry that I have not been able to be in the practices since you were invited into them.”

  “What’s so funny?” I asked and felt prickly like an old reaction that I hadn’t quite outgrown.

  “I did not mean to upset you.”

  “Sorry, I know you didn’t mean it that way, but for a second it was like you were laughing at me; that whole smallest-kid-in-class, only-woman-in-a-man’s-profession thing, it’s put a serious chip on my shoulder.”

  He touched my still-bare shoulder, very gently, almost as if he wasn’t sure I’d be okay with it. I didn’t tell him not to touch me, but I didn’t smile either. He had hit a serious issue by accident, but it was still hit.

  “I would never laugh at you, Anita. I have benefited too often from that chip on your shoulder. It is what let you stand up to the Master of Beasts when he had me skinned alive. I will never forget that you risked yourself to save me. I never dreamed that we would ever be more than friends then, but if we had never been lovers, I would still owe you for that moment of bravery.”

  I put my hand over his where he was touching me. I could still see the back of his body red and raw where they’d had him chained. They’d left his skin nailed to a door as a message. I could still see him bound facedown to the table with silver bands at wrist, ankles, and neck. Bands that were bolted to the table itself. He was nude, but more than his clothes were missing. The entire back of his body was one raw bloody mess. I’d found the owner of the skin on the door. Rafael’s darkly handsome face was slack, unconscious. It had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen done to another person.

  “You were strong enough to withstand the torture until we could get to you, Rafael. If you’d done what they wanted and given them control of the wererats, they’d have had enough firepower to take over the city.”

  “I could not give my people over to a such a monster, no matter what they did to me.”

  I didn’t say out loud that most people, even strong ones, would have caved under that kind of torture. As my friend Edward says, everyone breaks eventually. Out loud I said, “I’m only sorry I didn’t get to kill the Master of Beasts before he left town.”

  “You killed his only son; for a vampire as old as the Master of Beasts, that is revenge enough.”

  “Yeah, his chances of ever having another child at his age is pretty slim.”

  “Have any of the Har
lequin found the Master of Beasts yet?”

  I shook my head. “We freed him from the Mother of All Darkness, but after that he vanished. I think he’s afraid of what we and all his enemies might do to him when we find him.”

  “All the old council members have many enemies, made over centuries,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, and stepped away from his hand. “Let’s get dressed and find a bedroom.”

  “I have spoiled the mood talking about old enemies,” he said.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “A little, okay, maybe a lot, but let’s find a bedroom and see if you can get me back in the mood.” Honestly with the memory of him tortured dancing in my head, sex was the furthest thing from my mind. If he’d been an ordinary lover, I’d have just said, Let’s skip it today, but he was going to be fighting for his life later tonight. If I’d been in love with him, I’d have wanted sex just in case it was the last time, but that wasn’t what made me suggest the bedroom. If it was the last time I could feed on him, the last time I could share the energy of a country’s worth of wererats with Jean-Claude and all our people, then I needed to take it, but that wasn’t the only reason. If Rafael died tonight, I’d regret saying no. We’d been friends years longer than we’d been friends with benefits, but friendship is a type of love and I would miss him.

  6

  WE GOT DRESSED, put our weapons in place, and were going hand in hand down the hallway with Claudia and Benito trailing us. I tried to get them to stay and shower, but they insisted on escorting us to the bedroom. Rafael took it as business as normal, so I stopped arguing about it. He was their king, and that trumped anything I could say or do.

  Rafael and I moved well together; there was none of that awkwardness you have with some people that you date where walking hand in hand is a challenge in rhythm, as if your internal music doesn’t match, and yet it didn’t feel romantic. Again, I found it jarring that I could be this physically comfortable with a lover and not be in love with them. It hurt that tiny wistful part of me that had believed most sincerely in that white-dress, one-great-love-of-your-life ideal. I’d accepted that I had more than one love of my life, but apparently part of me was still holding on to the thought that some things only came when you were in all-caps LOVE. Another illusion shattered.