I looked up at him, squeezing his hand. “Okay, maybe I’m being really slow, but I still don’t get it.”

   “Did you really think you could consume the Mother of All Darkness, the one who created vampirekind, who gave us our civilization, our rules, our laws, and it would have no effect on you?”

   “She was trying to do worse than kill me, Kaazim. She was trying to take over my body and use it for her house, car, whatever. She’d even tried to get me pregnant so she could transfer her spirit to my unborn baby, in case she couldn’t take me. I had no choice but to kill her the only way I could. You said it: She was just spirit, untouchable, uncontainable, so I destroyed her the only way I could.”

   “By eating her,” he said.

   “Yeah, sort of.”

   “You gained a great deal of power, and Jean-Claude has used it well.”

   “Yeah, he has.”

   “But you were the power that consumed her, Anita, not Jean-Claude. You were the one who put your flesh against the body she was using and drank down the darkness between the stars.”

   I remembered the moment of it and how I’d thought the same thing: a darkness that had existed before the light found it, and would exist after the last star had burned out and the darkness took everything again. But I’d won. I’d defeated her. I’d saved myself and stopped all the evil she had planned for the rest of humanity, the rest of the vampires, and the shapeshifters—she’d been an equal-opportunity villain. She’d planned to take over all of us and make us her slaves, or puppets, or just die at her whim.

   Nathaniel hugged me from behind, drawing me in against his body. He’d been tied to me metaphysically when I’d consumed the Mother of All Darkness. Part of what had helped me defeat her was my love and craving for him, and Jean-Claude, and all the men I loved. The Mother of All Darkness hadn’t understood love.

   “Say what you are thinking, Anita,” Kaazim said.

   “There was a moment when I thought I couldn’t swallow the darkness, because it existed before the light, and would exist after the last star burned out. The darkness is always there. It always wins in the end.”

   “Yes, Anita, that is the truth.”

   “But I won.”

   “Did you?”

   I frowned at him. “No more riddles, Kaazim. Just say it, whatever it is.”

   “The Mother would torment vampires she wanted to bend to her will. She haunted their dreams, and some bled out through their skin as Damian has today.”

   “Marmee Noir didn’t do this, Kaazim, because she’s dead.”

   “She’s gone, but you are here.”

   “Yeah, that’s what I said. I won, she lost. I’m alive, she’s dead.”

   He sighed and shook his head. “You talk about her as if she were a body you could stab and watch die, Anita, but she was pure spirit. She housed herself in the bodies of her followers, but she did not have to use a body.”

   “Yeah, the Lover of Death was able to pull that trick off, too, but he had to keep his original body unharmed, just like the Traveller, one of your other council members.”

   “The Mother of All Darkness is not a council member, Anita.”

   “She was their queen, I know.”

   “No, you don’t know. You absorbed her, drank her down, and perhaps she is dead, but her power is not, because you took it into yourself.”

   “We all know that Anita took the power into herself,” Damian said.

   “We don’t all know any such thing,” Bobby Lee said.

   We looked at him. “Oh come on, Bobby Lee, don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

   “I did, but I don’t want you all discussing this out of this room in front of everybody.”

   “Kaazim already knows.”

   “Still, one of the debates against Jean-Claude being king is that it was you who killed the big bad, not him.”

   “Whatever belongs to the servant belongs to the master,” Kaazim said.

   “Yes, but the vampires that are against Jean-Claude argue that it’s the necromancer that’s the master, not the vampire.”

   Kaazim nodded. “They use Damian as proof that Anita makes vampire servants.”

   “You mean some of the vamps think Jean-Claude is my servant, too?”

   “Yes.”

   “A vampire can only have one servant at a time.”

   “As a vampire, you can only have one animal to call at a time, but you have nearly a dozen animals to call, so it is not a large stretch of logic to think you could have more than one vampire servant.”

   I wanted to argue with him, but I wasn’t sure how. “Jean-Claude is not my servant.”

   “How can you be certain of that?”

   “It’s totally not how my power works with Damian, and he is my servant.”

   “As your connection is different with Nathaniel, your leopard to call, and Jason, your wolf to call, and all your tigers to call.”

   I opened my mouth, wanted to argue again, but wasn’t sure I could work my way to a logical argument. I wrapped Nathaniel’s arms tighter around me and squeezed Damian’s hand. I knew it wasn’t true about Jean-Claude, but I couldn’t prove it by talking, only by how it felt, and feelings make piss-poor testimony.

   “And what does any of that have to do with what’s happening with Damian?” Bobby Lee asked, while I was trying to think my way through the logic maze that Kaazim had put me in.

   “Anita absorbed the power of the Mother of Us All, but she is young and inexperienced. It is as if you gave a baby an AR rifle. It is a perfectly safe tool in the right hands, but in the wrong hands, it can do much harm.”

   “What?” I asked.

   “What if you are causing Damian’s problem, Anita? The power that is flowing through you, that you don’t know how to control. He is your vampire servant and you have avoided him in nearly every way, but a vampire’s power is drawn to its servants. You ignore him, but your power doesn’t.”

   “I am not doing this to him.”

   “This doesn’t feel like Anita’s power,” Damian said.

   “Have you not listened to me? It is not Anita’s power. It merely resides inside her, but it is not her.”

   “What are you talking about?” I asked.

   “Wait,” Damian said. “You’re saying that the power is the Mother of All Darkness’s power.”