kippurcritiquesbadbooks | Hey look. Blake.

Chapter twenty seven. Pt1

Anita starts to try and free Requiem, but then stops and digresses. She asks if Requiem would do whatever she wanted, which they don't know. Then this lovely bit ensues:

"I wouldn't do it to any of our people on purpose, but sometimes I'm on a my own in a nest of vamps that I'm supposed to kill. They get testy about stuff like that. I'm just wondering if I could raise the ardeur as a weapon? Is there a way to make it an asset instead of a disaster?"

London frowned at me, but said, "I don't believe you, Anita."

"London," Elinore said, "never use that tone again with her."

"I've seen what the ardeur can do, Elinore. You haven't, not really." His face tightened in likes of anger so raw it almost hurt to see it. "I've seen my face look like Requiems's. I remember what it feels like." His hands gripped the bedpost until the skin changed color, just a bit. The mottling would be more after he fed. The wood creaked in protest, and he dropped his hands. "Part of me still wants to feel like that. It's like being on a drug all the time. Being pleasantly high, pleasantly happy. It may not be real happiness, but it's hard to tell when you're in the middle of it." He hugged himself tight. "The world is a colder, darker place without it. But with it, you're a slave. A slave to someone who makes you do things..." He shook his head, so hard it looked dizzying.

"Maybe London should go before I start this," I said.

London has just told Anita that being enslaved to the ardeur is the worst thing in the world you can do to a person. It's like the ultimate drug that you can't get over even if you are freed from it. You always want it and the only reason why you can't get it is because there's a limited supply. Not only that but enslaving people willingly is a horrible and disgusting thing to do, even if Elinore seems to think that Anita should be able to do what she wants.

Anita's response to London's admonishes? Go away. She doesn't care about the morality of it all. Even if she's upset that she's accidentally enslaved Requiem, she's perfectly willing to enslave others. London says that he will stay to see if he can resist her feeding the ardeur . The fact that he wants to stay and potentially addict himself to it again is not a good thing. Having heard that Anita should have insisted he leave. But she lets him stay, making him promise that he'll leave if it gets to much for him. Her reasoning for it? "Because I'm going to have enough trouble freeing Requiems' mind; I don't want to have to do it twice today." Her motives are completely selfish. It's not that she doesn't want him enslaved because it would be a horrible thing to have happen to him, but because she doesn't want to deal with the work.

Finally, we begin to try and free Requiem after all this blathering. She starts calling to him. In that horribly cliche way of trying to get to him. His real him that's been trapped by something. In this case the ardeur. It's never questioned that maybe his personality has been completely changed. Or that there's no him to bring back. It's not like he put on the helm of alignment change. Those are always neat. You put it on and you automatically become the opposite alignment that you were. You don't want to change and will resist all attempts to do so. But I digress. Those sorts of things never happen in books like this. There's always the "real" person hidden underneath.

On a secondary digression, this reminds me of a lot of parents with autistic children. They're often convinced that if they find the right drug, diet, cure that their real child which is buried underneath the shell of autism will appear. They don't realize that there isn't anything there but the autistic child.

Anita calls Requiem saying "come to me" with her necromancy powers. This apparently wasn't specific enough because all the vampires in the room were trying to come to her.

"I would be more specific with your calls, if I were you. You told only Requiem to stop. The others are still compelled." [Jean-Claude] motioned at the other vampires. London had a death grip on the bedpost. He looked panicked. Wicked and Truth were fighting at the edge of the bed. Truth wanted to get on, and Wicked was holding his brother back. Truth looked scared, and Wicked looked angry.

I found Elinore standing by her chair, holding on to it, as if the only the chair's weight kept her from coming to me."

Wicked is pissed that Truth got so gobsmacked by Anita's call and wants to know why he wasn't affected by it. Apparently because Truth took Anita's blood when he blood oathed to Jean-Claude he's more responsive to Anita's wishes. This is bad because Wicked and Truth needed to be brought over the same way. He doesn't say why though. I imagine it might be explored later.

London who seems to be the sensible one of the bunch, says "I'm beginning to understand why we used to kill necromancers on sight." Jean-Claude wants to know if it's a threat. London's response is a "No, no, master."

Anita decides that she needs to find the flavor of Requiem. Yes. The flavor. To do that she needs Requiem to drink her blood. It's going to hurt because he can't roll her. I'm thinking now of Vampire bats who have a special thingy in their blood to make the animals they drink from not notice. I would think that vampires would have that too. Because they might not always be able to roll their victims. It's just a thought. It'd be better if it was pleasurable and that way get more victims to come willingly. Than having to force them to come. But it's not as sexy, I guess. Or something.

Still it works.

He drew back from my throat, gasping, as if he'd been running. There was blood on his lower lip as he stared up at me. One moment he still looked dazed, the next he spilled into his eyes. They flared with blue fire, with that hint of turquoise in the center. His power danced over my skin like a cold prickling breeze.

I'm not sure how you can spill into your own eyes. It sounds messy. Maybe if you melt the insides of your brain and they leak out your eyes... Of course that would only improve the intelligence of the characters in this story, so perhaps that might not be a bad thing.

Still, it frees Requiem. And he wants to know what she would have of him. But Anita is too busy tasting the other vampires. Yes. Tasting.

I looked around at the other vampires. I looked at Elinore still gripping the back of her chair. I felt her. Felt her as if she were a flavor of ice cream that I could have put in a cone and licked. Mostly vanilla, but with chocolate chips. I looked at London. Not vanilla, but something darker, chunkier, full of hard crunchy bits. Wicked filled my mind like icing, chocolate icing to spread on skin and lick clean. I shook my head at the imagery, and looked for Truth, still huddling by the fireplace. Something fresh and clean, strawberries, maybe, strawberry ice cream to melt down the skin, and be licked away, so you could suck the cold around the nipples...

Coming soon to Baskin Robbins: New vampire flavors! Taste your favorite vampire in a cone or cup!

Now that Requiem is free of the arduer he wants Anita to feed on him again. He wants her to feed the arduer from him. As he says, "I don't want to be enslaved, but I do want her to feed. I want it more than I've wanted anything in a very long time." Well of course he does. He's an addict. Let's give the addict more of the drug so he can continue to be an addict. Yup. Even if he wants to be free. Anita tries to talk him out of it. But he continues to insist. "My heart has died twice. Once when my moral life ceased and the second when Ligeia was taken from me. I have felt nothing for so long, Anita. You make me feel again." ... "There is something about you that has awakened my heart". Because Anita is just that special that she can do that to people.

Requiem continues to babble about the arduer and about how Jean-Claude used his own and not Belle's which means that he's strong enough to start his own bloodline. Whoopie. Do you care? Nope. Neither do I.

After all this build up, they decide not to test the arduer. They know they're too dangerous and that's it. They're still going to bring Anita to the party I bet.

I'm stopping here. It's a long chapter. And it's taking me forever to get through it.