Skin Trade

67

BUT HE DIDN’T find me first. She found me. I stood in the room where I knew her body lay. She looked small under the silk sheet; no, shrunken. For the first time, she looked like a corpse under a sheet. I waited for her to move or to hear her breathe, see movement, but there was nothing. She was gone.

Then I was in a night long ago, with the scent of jasmine and rain on the air. The air was hot, but not muggy, as if there wasn’t a lot of moisture in it. But there was that edge of rain, and you could almost feel the ground underneath your feet, eager for it, like a lover waiting for an embrace.

She’d stepped into this night as a woman’s figure, and as the night itself, but now she was a voice whispering against my skin. “Necromancer, they are coming to kill me. They are coming with modern weapons and things I do not understand. I have abandoned the shell in the room. That they may have it.”

The smell of jasmine grew stronger, as the rain blew closer, a thick, clean smell. “What do you want?”

“You, necromancer. I want your body.”

“No,” I said.

“No, because you have kept me out. You and your ties to your men. But I need power, enough to survive when my shell is consumed. I cannot take your body, Anita, but I think I can feed through you.”

“Feed how?” I asked, and felt the first tightness in my gut. The first hint of fear.

“The tigers, little necromancer, did you think they found you by accident?”

“No, I knew you had done something to me.”

“Simply feed on all the colors of their rainbow and give the energy to me. It will give me enough strength to survive until I can find a host.”

“Are you asking me or telling me to do this?”

“Would asking make you do it?” the voice asked.

“No.”

“Then I tell you to do it.”

“No,” I said.

“I can make you do it, necromancer, but it will be less pleasant.”

“I won’t help you find another body, just because you can’t have mine.”

“Remember, necromancer, I gave you a choice. You have chosen the path of pain. Now, if you become pregnant, it is too late to help me.”

“What did you say?”

“When I realized I could not get inside you, I tried to have you pregnant by one of the weretigers, but you stayed too far away from them for too long. Now you lie with two of them, and have a blue tiger close at hand. A color even I thought was lost. There are even two kings of two different pure bloodlines within walking distance of you. I would have given you a choice to use your protection when you fed for me, but if you will not do it willingly, then I will do what I did when you first met the white tiger.”

“Wait,” I said, because now I was afraid. I’d met Crispin in North Carolina, when he’d been traveling for a VIP bachelorette party, and I’d been a guest at the same hotel. I’d woken up two days later, naked, bruised, scratched, sore, with three naked men passed out around me. One had been Jason, but the other had been Crispin, who I’d just met, and Alex, who was just an innocent reporter covering the wedding, who also happened to be a red tiger. I could suddenly taste my pulse in my throat.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Either feed on the tigers voluntarily and let me take the power, or I will take you again. I will not make it days, though; as I said, pregnant now does me no good. So the sex will be quicker.”

“Why me pregnant by a weretiger?”

“Because I was a necromancer in life, Anita, like you, and a wereanimal. The tigers are the most powerful cat left on this earth. I thought if the baby was part weretiger and part necromancer, I would have a greater chance of taking it’s body.”

I was still scared, but the first anger was there, too. “You had no right.”

“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.