Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(60)

Richard whispered, “Are those eyes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We must destroy it,” Jean-Claude said.

“How?” Richard asked.

“The only way I know,” Jean-Claude said, his eyes filled with blue fire, as if the midnight sky could burn. The pale eyes floating in the mist seemed dimmer just in comparison, but they didn’t go away, and the hazy blackness tightened around his upper body like a snake trying to squeeze his life away.

“Whatever you need to defeat that thing,” Richard said, and his brown eyes filled with blue fire.

“Whatever you need,” I said, and I didn’t need a mirror to know that my own eyes had turned to the same burning-night-sky blue.

Jean-Claude stood there wreathed by that blackness, the eyes of the other vampire floating above him as if it could mark him the way he had marked us. No other vampire was strong enough to do that

to him, but there it was like a venomous serpent clinging to him. The eyes were less clear with him touching both of us, but it wasn’t gone, and it should have been gone, chased out by the power of his own triumvirate, his own human servant and beast half. We were his seat of power, the thing that had allowed him to rise to rule over every other vampire in America. There was a hiss of sound through my head, every vampire save one. That wasn’t our thought.

Fear poured over us like the coldest of showers, all lust lost in the terror of that serpent body and those floating eyes. “It’s a mora, a night hag, it feeds off our fear.” I said it out loud as if we didn’t all know, but somehow saying the words helped loosen what it was doing to us.

“Release the ardeur,” Richard said.

“I will not have control as normal, Richard, and I would not lose you so soon again,” Jean-Claude said.

“No more running,” he said, “no matter what happens I swear to you both I will stay and work it out, and not abandon you.”

Jean-Claude gave me a desperate look because it was too good to believe. Jean-Claude’s blue eyes were as human as they ever got, but the pale eyes floating just above and beside his head gleamed like fog with headlights behind it, coming this way. The vampire was going to drive right over us unless we acted now.

“Jean-Claude, you have to raise the ardeur now, right now,” I said.

“He feeds on nightmares and terror. He won’t care about my feelings, or anyone’s feelings but his own. He will take over your vampires, and then the entire country will be his,” Richard said.

That hissing voice came again. “Such tender morals Jean-Claude has acquired, he will not take by force what is rightfully his, but I will.”

My skin ran cold with the opposite of nameless dread because I knew exactly where the dread was coming from, no name needed. My mouth went dry, and I was so scared I could taste metal on my tongue as if I was already bleeding from wounds he hadn’t made yet. I heard Richard almost moan, “I will not give the Thronnos Rokke clan over to you.”

The smoke turned black and solid; it was feeding off our fears, using us to give it power. It turned a huge spade-shaped head toward me and even without the colored scales I knew that head shape.

“Viper,” Richard said; I thought he’d read my mind, then realized that we both had biology degrees.

“I want to say rattlesnake but I’m not sure that it’s anything natural.”

“Maybe it’s an ancestral viper like some of the older types of shapeshifters are extinct species,”

he said.

The night-dark head turned to look at each of us in turn as we spoke. Its head was as wide across as Jean-Claude’s. Another wave of terror tried to travel down Jean-Claude’s hands to us, but we were studying the snake, trying to classify it, not something recommended in the field with real snakes. If you think it’s venomous just get away from it, figure out species later in safety, but we couldn’t let go of Jean-Claude. We could not leave this snake alone, so . . . “No viper in the world was ever this big,” I said.

“Not that we’ve found a fossil for,” agreed Richard.

The more we used our brains for thinking and studying, the easier it was to slough off the fear, like a snake shedding its skin so it can grow bigger. “The eyes haven’t changed color,” I said.

“Still pale gray,” he said.

“Shining like moonlight or rain if it could glow,” I said.

“Why do you think the eyes aren’t changing color with the rest of the body?” he asked.

“I don’t know, maybe they’re windows into his soul and all that jazz.”

“You mean they’re really the vampire’s eye color?” Richard leaned closer and the snake’s head leaned toward him. He should have been afraid to get closer to it, but he wasn’t. The more we studied it, the less afraid we both were; it worked that way with real animals, too, so we’d discovered back when we were still camping, birdwatching, hiking, caving—he was the last person in my dating life who had loved the outdoors even more than I did. I saw a ghostly fringe around the top of its head, or I thought I did, but it was, like most of the body, smoke—the phrase smoke and mirrors came to mind.

“Is there a fringe on top of its head?” I asked.

“Yes,” Richard said, “and no. It’s insubstantial like smoke, and no living snake has ever had a fringe, that’s only lizards.”