I pushed at him, so that I could turn in his arms to see what I’d done to Jamil and Shang-Da. They looked like mummies, shriveled and dead, corpses desiccated in some dry desert, but they weren’t dead. Jamil was making a high keening noise.

“God,” Nicky said, “they aren’t dead.” He was pressed against the far wall, as if he weren’t sure he wanted to be near me right that moment. Maybe there were things terrible enough that even my hold on him couldn’t make him see it as all right. I found that oddly comforting.

“No,” I said, “they’re not dead.” I crawled toward Jamil.

“Ma petite, you gained a great deal of power, but we cannot afford to lose more vitality, or you will kill one of us.”

“There’s power in raising the dead, Jean-Claude. You should know that by now.” Obsidian Butterfly, the vampire that I’d learned this nasty, useful piece of information from, had thought she was a goddess, for real, and part of what made her think that was that she gained power from taking life and from giving it back. Jamil’s eyes were dried and blind, but as I leaned over him, he screamed, high and buzzy, but louder. Maybe he smelled that it was me, and he was afraid of me now. I didn’t blame him for being afraid, because I could have killed him with this second touch just as easily as helped him. Both would be energy. Both would feel good.

I prayed. I prayed that I could give this back and gain energy through it. I’d never actually reversed the process. I’d only seen it done. I touched his face, and it felt like dried leather; the strong bones of his face felt fragile like sticks, as if I could have broken his bones if I held his face too tight. I was as gentle as I knew how to be, as I called my necromancy. This was a type of that energy, and it hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but Obsidian Butterfly was the first vampire I’d ever met who could work with this kind of energy.

There was a rush of warm wind as if early summer suddenly filled my skin and the man underneath my hands. It was like watching one of those films where flowers bloom, except this was his skin, his flesh, his very bones filling back out, blooming into the strong, muscled, handsome man I’d known. He came to himself, eyes wide, and screaming. When he could move, he pushed me away and scrambled on hands and feet backward, away, until he hit the wall, and then he screamed again. He held his hands out in front of him as if to ward me off.

I should have felt bad that he was that afraid of me, but the energy felt too good to feel bad. I laid my hands on Shang-Da’s shriveled face, his shiny black hair reduced to straw. That warm wind raced over my skin and into him. The energy filled him, plumbed him, like water returning after a horrible drought. He gasped back to himself, coughing and staring up at me with his brown eyes wide and panic-filled. I’d never seen him panic over anything.

“Your eyes,” he whispered, “they’re black and full of stars.”

They weren’t my eyes. They were Obsidian Butterfly’s eyes. All power comes with a price. I turned to Jean-Claude and found his eyes filled with a night sky that had spilled over South America when the conquistadors had conquered the New World. I felt Richard’s wolf in the woods miles away, and I knew that his eyes weren’t wolf amber, they were night-sky black.

Damian staggered around the corner, wiping the blood of a fresh feeding from his mouth. His eyes were filled with blackness and stars.

30

SOME OF THE other shapeshifters took Jamil and Shang-Da to a back room to lie down. Jamil wouldn’t look at me. Shang-Da did, but it wasn’t a good look. It was more as if he were considering how he would kill me if he had to, and considering for the first time that he might not be able to. One of them dealt with his fear by being afraid, the other by estimating his chances. Either way, I’d damaged what relationship I had with the two werewolves. I could have pointed out that they’d volunteered, and that it did save Richard’s life, but I wasn’t comfortable enough with what I’d just done to be that logical.

I let them be led away like children lost in the mall when security finally finds them and takes them back to Mommy and Daddy.

The black-star vision did what it had last time: It helped me see things more clearly, as if everything were sharp-edged like it can be in an emergency. You see everything, and you notice things you might not have noticed otherwise—like I knew that Nicky had a knife tucked into his boot on the right side, because his jeans didn’t lie quite right. It was a small knife; normally I wouldn’t have noticed the slight rise along the seam of his pants.

I rose up to look at his face, and he wasn’t afraid now. His face wasn’t calm, though; it was considering. “What?” I asked him.

“The energy rush you shared felt amazing. Did it feel even better to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you do. It felt good the way killing something with teeth and claws feels good. It feels good to feed.”

Jean-Claude stepped between us, took me by the shoulders, and made me look at him. “Ma petite, you have saved our Ulfric. You saved Richard’s life. You have done no lasting harm to the other wolves.”

I looked up at him, wondering if I’d see through some illusion with the new vision. He looked the same as he always did; amazing. “You really don’t use any vampire wiles to make yourself this beautiful,” I said.

He smiled. “I told you long ago, ma petite, that I do not try to appear to you as other than I am.”

I nodded.

Damian came to stand beside us. The black eyes looked even more startling in his face, I think because he didn’t have black hair to balance it. It was just pools of darkness in all that white skin and red hair.

“It was almost better than blood,” he said, and his voice was distant. That was the real danger to some of these powers; it wasn’t that it felt bad. It felt so good, good enough that if you weren’t careful you might crave that power rush. If I craved it and gave in to it, I would be the monster. I didn’t want to be the monster. I didn’t want Jamil and Shang-Da to be afraid of me, not like that. But if the choice had been Richard dead or them afraid, I chose them afraid. Was that monstrous? No, not yet, but I was beginning to understand that the only difference between being the monster and being powerful was choosing not to be the monster. Not today. But there would always be tomorrow, and another chance to choose.

My cell phone rang. This time it was the peal of church bells, so I knew it wasn’t a regular caller, or Nathaniel would have figured out a ring tone for them. I reached for it without thinking. Jean-Claude and Damian just watched me reach for it. I think they were being cautious, and I just needed something ordinary. “Blake here.”

“Is this Marshal Anita Blake?” a man’s voice asked.

“Yes, and you are?”

“Marshal Finnegan.”

I stood up a little straighter. Shit, please don’t let the Marshals Service need me now. Black glowy eyes and hit men out to get me, how would I explain it? “What can I do for you, Marshal Finnegan?” My voice sounded even and unemotional, business as usual. Good for me.

“I’d like you to take a look at some crime scene video.”

There was a little spurt of relief. Usually I could do that sort of thing from a distance. Distance was good right now. “Be glad to. You want to email it to me, or give me an address and password for a site?”

“Got pen and paper?” he asked. Which meant it was going to be a password and one use of his site.

“Not on me. Hang on a minute.” I pantomimed writing in the air, and Nicky handed me his iPhone with the screen set to notebook. I kept forgetting it did that. I used my shoulder to hold my phone and had my fingers poised to hit the itty-bitty keyboard. “Ready when you are.”