“It was one thing she could not take from me.”

   Kaazim studied him, emotions playing over his dark face like cloud shadows on a windy day, too fast for me to understand, but it was more emotion than I’d ever seen him display. “If she left you your faith, then it was only because she could not understand it enough to tear it away from you.”

   “Yes, most likely.”

   “You are lucky that your master did not understand faith.”

   “I am.”

   “I was sent to spy on her once, your mistress. She was a terrible thing.”

   “Did you see me?”

   “Yes.”

   “I did her bidding.”

   “I saw.”

   “I will not ask what you saw me do on her orders, because I do not want Anita to know the worst of me.”

   “You are her servant. She knows all your secrets.”

   “No, she leaves me space and privacy.”

   Kaazim looked surprised. “Why would she do that?”

   “I don’t want Damian to know all my secrets either. I don’t want anyone that far inside my head.”

   “That is very you,” Kaazim said.

   “Yeah, it is. What do you know about what’s happening to Damian?”

   “Nothing,” he said.

   Bobby Lee said, “What do you know about a vampire with symptoms like Damian has?”

   Kaazim smiled and nodded respect at the other guard. “Well worded, my friend.”

   “I’ve been in your part of the world a lot.”

   “It has been centuries since we have seen such symptoms.”

   “Symptoms of what?” I asked.

   “Of having angered the Mother of All Darkness.”

   “I don’t understand.”

   “Did the Mother ever visit your dreams, Anita?” he asked.

   I nodded. “Yeah.”

   “Did you ever wake up in a cold sweat from it?”

   I tried to think back to when Marmee Noir was trying to take me over. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t paying attention to how much I was sweating after she’d just been in my dreams.”

   “I understand,” Kaazim said.

   “Wait. Are you implying that the Mother of All Darkness is behind Damian’s issues?”

   “The last time I saw such symptoms, it was her.”

   I shook my head. “She’s dead.”

   “She’s a vampire, Anita. She started out dead.”

   I shook my head harder. “No, she is dead, completely, utterly, really, truly dead this time.”

   “How do you kill something that is only spirit, Anita?”

   “I know that the Harlequin that witnessed her death were in contact with others. The Harlequin say they were witness to her death.”

   Kaazim nodded. “Indeed some of us were.”

   “Then answer your own question,” I said.

   “You absorbed her through the very skin of your body.”

   “Yeah, creepy as fuck, but yeah.”

   “How did it feel to devour the night, Anita? For she was that, the night made alive and real. How could one small human, even a necromancer, consume the night itself?”

   “I learned how to take someone’s energy from another vampire.”

   “Yes, Obsidian Butterfly, the Master of Albuquerque, New Mexico.”

   “If you know all the answers, why are you asking the questions?”

   “I know what happened, but that is bare facts, and this was so much more than just facts.”

   “I don’t even know what that means, Kaazim.”

   “You ate the living darkness, Anita. It has given your own necromancy a power jump of near-legendary proportions. You raised every cemetery and lone body in and around the city of Boulder, Colorado last year, while you chased down the spirit of the Lover of Death, one of the last members of the now-disbanded vampire council who did not bend knee to Jean-Claude’s rebellion.”

   “You say rebellion. I say killing crazy motherfuckers to save the world from their plans to spread vampirism and contagious zombie plague across the planet.”

   “It would have been an apocalypse for the human race.”

   “But not the apocalypse.”

   “You mean the biblical one?” he asked.

   “Yeah, as in the apocalypse.”

   “You say that as if there is only one.”

   “There is only one.”

   “You have prevented two on your own. We have prevented more events that would have destroyed the planet, or at least the human population. Some of us lived through the last great extinction and the coming of the great winter.”

   “You mean the Ice Age, as in the real Ice Age.”

   He nodded.

   I took in a deep breath, let it out slow, and said, “Okay, some of you guys are old as fuck. Make your point.”

   “My point, Anita, is that apocalypse as in the great devastation or second coming of some religious significance has happened before and will likely happen again.”

   “I’m not sure we’re defining it the same way,” I said.

   “Perhaps not, but there really does need to be a plural for apocalypse.”

   “Fine. You’ve made your point. Now tie all that back to what’s happening with Damian.”

   “You are so impatient for someone who will likely live to see centuries.”

   “It’s not certain that I’m immortal, Kaazim, and besides, I’ve killed more supposedly immortal beings than anyone else I know, so who will live forever is really up for debate.”

   “Fair enough,” he said, “but you absorbed the Mother of All Darkness without having any idea how to control that much power.”

   “It’s like eating steak; my body uses the energy of the food I eat automatically. I don’t need to tell it to make bone, or more red blood vessels; it just does it.”

   “And whoever said that metaphysical food was the same as physical food, Anita?”

   I stared at him, trying to reason my way through what he’d said. “I’m not sure I understand.”

   “He’s saying that eating magic isn’t the same as eating steak,” Damian said.