Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(77)

He was shielding so tight from me that I had no idea what he was thinking or feeling.

“You’re shielding so tight it’s like you’re almost not there. What am I missing that’s got you this spooked? I mean, I’m having my own PTSD mind-fuck, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in yours.”

That earned me a small smile. “I was not in Ireland either and there is guilt to that since it is such a wound to you, ma petite, but there is a vampiric dragon in my territory that wants to take all that I have built for his own. That would be a loss that you cannot imagine, not just of power but of lives. I have seen what the Dragon of the old vampire council could do in battle. I thought she was the last of her kind, so I did not prepare to fight a dragon to maintain my kingdom.”

“Wait, the Dragon is a real dragon? I thought it was just a fearsome name to scare would-be challengers?”

“All the names of the council members are descriptive of their powers, ma petite, and none of the names are subtle. The Master of Beasts was the first vampire to have more than one animal to call.

Amoureux de la Mort was the creator of all rotting vampires in the world. Belle Morte is beautiful death, a bloodline of seduction and lust. The Earthmover could cause literal earthquakes.”

“The Mother of All Darkness was supposed to be the first vampire, and she was a scary motherfucker like the name implies,” I said.

“Oui, ma petite,” he said, smiling, “your descriptive use of language is, as always, music to my ears.”

I smiled back, because I knew he meant it; he’d confessed to me years back that he fell in love with me not on sight, but the first time he heard me talking tough and realized I was armed and dangerous. When he realized the petite woman in front of him was the same person the other vampires nicknamed the Executioner. The last woman who had been the love of his life had died with his name on her lips asking him to save her. He knew I’d save myself and that meant more to him than any poetry I could have uttered.

“I love you, too,” I said.

He smiled wider. “The Dragon is literally that in the shape of a woman. She led us all to believe she was the last of her kind.”

“She is the last of the great dragons from ancient China,” Jake said, “and they are their own people. To say ‘dragon’ is like saying ‘human being,’ they are not all the same.”

“How did a dragon become a vampire in the first place?” Richard asked.

“The original strain of vampirism is contagious to everyone and everything as far as I can tell, though I guess Jake can answer the question for sure,” I said.

“The Mother of All Darkness and the Father of the Day, as well as the Earthmover, could bring shapeshifters over as vampires, and any other humanoid. Modern vampirism needs three bites over a space of time and to drain the most blood on the last bite, but in the olden days one bite was enough either to contaminate you so that when you finally died you would rise as a vampire, or if enough blood was lost the first feeding for them to die, they would rise immediately.”

“That’s why the oldest stories have people so evil the grave couldn’t hold them, and werewolves being accused of being vampires,” I said.

“The dragon tonight looked like a giant serpent,” Richard said.

“He had a more human form. He is called a dragon, and his name is Drakon, but he is not a true dragon like the council member. He is a dragon because that was the word the Greek and Romans used for anything snake-or lizardlike that was of unusually large size or had killed enough people.

They would call your modern snakes a dragon if they were large enough.”

“So, he is not a dragon, as the Dragon?” Jean-Claude said.

“No, nor is he like the old dragons of the Norse, or the more fantastic tales from other parts of what is now Europe. In serpent form he is venomous, and there will be no modern medicine that can counteract it.”

“There can’t be any antivenom to a venom that medicine doesn’t know exists,” I said.

“Precisely,” Jake said.

“In human form is he just a vampire, or does he have other powers?” I asked.

“You saw some of his other powers tonight.”

“When the Dragon went to battle she could cause rage in her warriors and make them stronger, faster, impervious to pain. A wise man from her old country said she was a fallen dragon because she turned her gifts to destruction. He spoke about it as if in ancient China dragons could fall like angels in Christian theology,” Jean-Claude said.

“It wasn’t as simple as good and evil, but the analogy is close enough,” Jake said.

“So, if he can look human could he have been there tonight in the crowd?” I asked.

“No, I would have smelled him. He can look human, but he never smells human.”

“The shadow serpent tonight didn’t smell real,” Richard said.

“It was a sending, a form of attack, but his physical form was never at risk.”

“I’ve chased power back to its source before and been able to do harm to it,” I said.

“Was he real enough to chase back to his body tonight?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know, but I think it was all smoke and mirrors. That’s what I thought at one point, that he was a trick, or like Richard said, he wasn’t real. You mentioned djinn along with the fey earlier. The fey are real like us, solid, but the djinn are not. They’re made of wind and magic, there’s no way to physically hurt them.”