“Jean-Claude, Master of the City of St. Louis.”
She cocked her head to one side as if listening to something. “Then you are the Executioner. You did not give your true name at the door.”
“Not all vampires will talk to me if they know who I am.”
“What is it you wish to speak with me about?”
“The mutilation murders.”
Again, she turned her head to one side as if listening. “Ah, yes.” She blinked and looked up at me. “The price for an audience is what lies on your hands.”
I must have looked as puzzled as I felt, because she elaborated. “The blood, César’s blood. I wish to take it from you.”
“How?” I asked; just call me suspicious.
She simply turned and started walking away. Her voice came like the sound to a badly dubbed film, sound long after it should have been heard. “Follow me, and do not clean your hands.”
I glanced at Edward. “Do you trust her?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Me either,” I said.
“Are we going or staying?” Olaf asked.
“I vote for going,” Bernardo said. I hadn’t really looked at him since the sacrifice began. He was looking a little pale. Olaf wasn’t. Olaf looked fresh and bright-eyed, as if he were enjoying the evening.
Dallas said, “It would be a grave insult if you refuse her invitation. She rarely gives personal interviews voluntarily. You must have impressed her.”
“I didn’t impress her. I attracted her,” I said.
Dallas frowned. “Attracted her. She likes men.”
I shook my head. “She may have sex with men, but what attracts her is power, Professor.”
She looked at me, searching my face. “You have that kind of power?”
I sighed. “We’ll find out, won’t we?” I started walking in the direction that the cloaked figure had gone. She hadn’t waited for us to decide. She’d just walked away. Like I said, arrogant. Of course, we were about to follow her into her private lair. That was arrogance, too, or stupidity. Arrogance or stupidity, sometimes there’s not much difference between the two.
25
I DIDN’T KNOW where to go, but Dallas did. She led us to a small door set to one side of the temple steps, hidden by curtains. The door was still open, like a black mouth. Steps led down. Where else? Just once I’d like to see a vamp whose major hideout was up instead of down.
Dallas walked down the steps with a spring in her step and a song in her heart. Her ponytail bounced as she skipped down the steps. If she had a single misgiving about going down into that darkness, it didn’t show. Dallas confused me. On one hand she didn’t see that Olaf was dangerous, and she wasn’t afraid of any of the monsters in the club. On the other hand, she’d believed me when I told her I’d cut her heart out. I’d seen it in her eyes. How could she believe that threat from a total stranger and not see the other dangers? Didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t like what I didn’t understand. She seemed utterly harmless, but her reactions were weird, so I put a question mark by her. Which meant, I wouldn’t be turning my back on her or treating her like a civilian until I was convinced that that was what she was.
I was going too slowly for Olaf. He pushed past me and followed Dallas’s bouncing ponytail down the stairs. He had to stoop to keep from bumping his head on the ceiling, but he didn’t seem to mind. Fine with me. Let him take the first bullet. But I followed them down into the dark. No one had offered me violence, not really, not yet. So it seemed rude to have a gun naked in my hand, but. . . I’d apologize later. Unless I knew the vampire personally, I liked having a loaded gun in hand the first time I paid a call. Or maybe it was the narrow stairs, the close press of stone as if it would close around us like a fist and crush us. Have I mentioned that I’m claustrophobic?
The stairs didn’t go down very far, and there was no door at the end of them. Jean-Claude’s retreat in St. Louis was something of an underground fortress. The barely hidden doorway, the short stairs, no second door—arrogance, again.
Olaf blocked my view of Dallas, but I saw him reach the dimly lit doorway at the bottom. He had to stoop even farther to get through the door and hesitated before standing up on the other side. There was a sense of movement around him, or rather to either side of him. Quick, almost not there, like things you see out of the corner of your eyes. It reminded me of the hands that had stripped César as he walked between light and darkness.
He stayed just in the doorway, his body nearly filling it completely, blocking what little light there had been. I caught the faintest edge of Dallas. She led him away from the door farther into the firelit dark.
I called down, “Olaf, are you okay?”
No answer.
Edward tried. “Olaf?”
“I am fine.”
I glanced back at Edward. We had a moment of staring into each other’s eyes, both of us thinking the same thing. This could be a trap. Maybe she was behind the murders. Maybe she just wanted to kill the Executioner. Or maybe she was a centuries-old vampire, and she just wanted to hurt us for the hell of it.
“Could she make Olaf lie?”
“You mean mind tricks?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Not this fast. I may not like him, but he’s stronger than that.” I looked at him, searching his face in the dim light. “Could they force him to lie?”
“You mean a knife at his throat?” Edward said.
“Yeah.”
He gave a faint smile. “No, not this quick, not ever.”
“You’re sure of that?” I asked.
“My life on it.”
“We’re betting all our lives on it.”
He nodded. “Yes, we are.”
But if Edward said that Olaf wouldn’t sell us out on fear of death or pain, then I believed him. Edward didn’t always understand why people did what they did, but he was usually right about the fact that they were going to do it. Motive evaded him, but he was seldom wrong. So . . . I kept walking down the steps.
I strained my peripheral vision, trying to see on either side of the doorway as I walked through it. I didn’t have to bend over to go through. The room was square and small, maybe sixteen by sixteen. It was also packed nearly corner to corner with vampires.
I put my back against the wall to the right of the door, gun clutched two-handed, pointed at the ceiling. I wanted badly to point it at someone, anyone. My shoulders ached with the tension of not doing it. No one was threatening me. No one was doing a damn thing except standing, staring, milling around the way people do. So why did I feel like I should have entered the room shooting?
Tall vampires, short vampires, thin vampires, fat vampires, every size, every shape, and almost every race, moved around that small stone room. After what had happened upstairs with their master, I was careful not to make eye contact with any of them. My gaze swept over the room, taking in the pale faces, and getting a quick head count. When I got over sixty, I realized the room was at least twice the size I’d originally thought. It had to be just to hold this many of them. It only looked small because it was packed so tight. The torchlight added to the illusion, flickering, dancing, uncertain light.
Edward stayed in the doorway, his back to the doorframe, shoulder touching mine lightly. His gun was up like mine, his eyes searching the vamps. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? Look at them.” My voice was breathy, not because I was trying to whisper—that would have been useless—but because my throat was tight, my mouth dry.
He scanned the crowd again. “So?”
My gaze flashed to him, then back to the waiting vampires. “Shit, Ed . . . Ted. Shit.” It wasn’t just the number of them. It was my own ability to sense them that was the problem. I’d been around a hundred vamps before, but they hadn’t affected me like this. I didn’t know if having walled off my link to Jean-Claude made me more vulnerable to them, or if my necromancy had grown since then. Or maybe Itzpapalotl was just that
much more powerful than the other master had been. Maybe it was her power that had made them so much more than most vamps. There were close to a hundred in this room. I was getting impressions from all of them, or most of them. My shields were great now; I could keep out a lot of the preternatural stuff, but this was too much for me. If I had to guess, there wasn’t a vamp in the room under a hundred. I got flashes from individual ones if I looked at them too long, a slap in the face of their age, their power. The four females in the right corner were all over five hundred years old. They watched me with dark eyes, dark-skinned, but not as dark as they would have been with a little sun. The four of them watched me with patient, empty faces.
Her voice came from the center of the room, but she was hidden behind the vampires, shielded by them. “I have offered you no violence, yet you have drawn weapons. You seek my aid, yet you threaten me.”
“It’s not personal, Itz . . .” I stumbled over her name.
“You may call me Obsidian Butterfly.” It was odd talking to her without being able to glimpse her through the waiting figures.
“It’s not personal, Obsidian Butterfly. I just know that once I put up the gun, chances of drawing it again before one of your brood rips my throat out are damn small.”
“You mistrust us,” she said.
“As you mistrust us,” I said.
She laughed then. Her laughter was the sound of a young woman, normal, but the strained echoes from the other vampires were anything but normal. The laughter held a wild note to it, a desperation, as if they were afraid not to laugh. I wondered what the penalty was for not following her lead.
The laughter faded away, except for one high pitched masculine sound. The other vampires went still, that impossible stillness where they seem like well-made statues, things made of stone and paint, not real, not alive. They waited like a host of empty things. Waited for what? The only sound was that high, unhealthy laughter, rising up and up like the sounds the movies have you hear in insane asylums, or mad scientists’ laboratories. The sound raised the hair on my arms, and it wasn’t magic. It was just creepy.
“If you put up your guns, I will send most of my people away. That is fair, is it not?”
It was fair, but I didn’t like it. I liked having the gun naked in my hands. Of course, the gun only worked if shooting a few of them would stop the rest from rushing us, and it wouldn’t. If she said, go to hell, they’d start digging a hole. If she told them to rush us, they most certainly would. So the guns were just a security blanket, a delaying tactic before the end. It took only a few seconds to think it through, but that awful laughter kept going like it was one of those creepy dolls with a laugh track inside of it.
I felt Edward’s shoulder pressing against mine. He was waiting for me to give the answer, trusting my expertise. I hoped I didn’t get us killed. I put the gun back in its holster. I rubbed my hand against my leg. I’d been holding the gun too long, and too damn tight. Me, nervous?
Edward put his gun up. Bernardo was still in the stairway, and I realized that he was making sure nothing came down the stairs and blocked our retreat. It was kind of nice working with more than just two people and knowing everyone on your side was willing to shoot anything that moved. No bleeding hearts, no empathy, just business.
Of course, Olaf was off to one side with Dallas. He had never pulled a gun. He had waded into this many vampires, following her bouncing ponytail to destruction. Or at least to potential destruction.
The vampires drew a breath, each chest rising as one, as if they were many bodies with one mind. Life, for lack of a better term, flowed back into them. Some of them looked almost human, but many of them were pale and starved, and weak. Their faces were too thin, as if the bones of their skull would push out through the sickly skin. They were all pale, but the natural skin color of many was darker than Caucasian, so even pale, they weren’t the ghostly paleness I was used to seeing. I realized with something like shock that most of the vampires I knew were Caucasian. Here, white skin was the minority. A nice reversal.
The vampires began to glide towards the door. Or some of them glided. Some of them shuffled as if they didn’t have energy to pick their feet up, as if they were truly ill. To my knowledge vampires couldn’t catch any disease. But these vampires looked sick.
One of them stumbled and fell at my feet, landing heavily on hands and knees. He stayed where he was, head hanging down. His skin was a dirty white, like snow that had lain too long by a busy road, a greyish white. The other vampires moved around him as if he were a bump in the road. They flowed past him, and he didn’t seem to notice. His hands looked like the hands of a skeleton, barely covered with skin. His hair was a blond so light, it looked white, hanging down around his face. He raised his face up, slowly, and it was like looking at a skull. His eyes had sunk so far into his head that they seemed to burn at the end of long black tunnels. I wasn’t afraid of looking in this one’s eyes. He didn’t have enough juice to roll me with his eyes. I could tell that just standing here. The bones of his cheeks pushed so hard against the thin skin that it looked like they should tear through.
A pale tongue slid from between thin, nearly invisible lips. His eyes were a pale, pale green, like bad emeralds. The thin walls of his nose flared as if he were scenting the air. He probably was. Vamps didn’t rely on scent the way shapeshifters did, but they had a much better sense of smell than humans. He closed his eyes in the middle of drawing a deep breath. He shuddered and seemed to swoon, faint. I’d never seen a vamp act like this. It caught me off guard, and that was my fault.
I saw him tense, and my hand was going for the Browning, but there was no time. He was less than a foot away. I never even touched the gun before he slammed into me. He knocked the breath from my body. His hand was on my face, turning my head to one side, baring my neck, before I had time to breathe. I had a sense of movement even though I couldn’t see him. I felt his body tense and I knew he was coming in for a strike. He made no effort to control my hands. I kept going for the gun, but I would never get it out and pointed in time. He was going to sink fangs into my neck, and I couldn’t stop it. It was like a car accident. I just had time to see it coming and to think, “I can’t stop it.” There wasn’t even time to be afraid.
Something jerked the vampire backwards. His hand curled in my jacket, and didn’t let go. His desperate grip nearly pulled me off my feet, but I got the gun out before I worried about staying on my feet.
A large, very Aztec-looking vamp had the skeletal vamp, holding him pinned against his body, only that one arm with its clutching hand not pressed to the larger man’s body.
Edward had his gun out pointed at the vampires. He’d gotten to his gun first, but then he hadn’t been shoved up against a wall and manhandled. Or would that be vampire-handled?
The big vamp jerked the thin one hard enough that he nearly pulled me off my feet, but that one clutching hand stayed curled in my jacket, catching on the shirt underneath. I had the Browning pointed at the vamp’s chest, though I wasn’t sure if the Hornady ammo was safe to shoot at arm’s distance into one target pressed directly in front of another person. I wasn’t sure if the ammo would go through the first vamp and into the second. The second vamp had saved me. It really wouldn’t be nice to blow a hole in him.
The other vampires were leaving the room in a hurrying line to get past us and up the stairs, out of harm’s way. Cowards. But it was thinning out the ranks, which would be great. Eventually, I’d care that there weren’t so damn many vamps in the room, but right now the world was narrowed down to the vamp that had hold of me. First things first.
The big vamp kept backing up, trying to get the skeletal one to let go of me. We kept moving farther into the room. Edward paced us, gun held two-handed pointed at the vampire’s head. I finally put the barrel of my gun underneath the vamp’s chin. I could blow his brains up without hitting the second vampire.
Obsidian Butterfly’s voice slashed through the room like a whip. The sound m
ade me wince, shoulders tightening as if it had been a blow. “These are my guests. How dare you attack them!”
The skeletal vampire started to cry, and his tears were clear, human. Vampire’s tears are tinged red. They cry bloody tears. “Please, please let me feed, please!”
“You feed as we all feed, as befits a god.”
“Please, please, mistress, please.”
“You disgrace me before our visitors.” Then she spoke low and rapidly in a language that was sort of Spanish sounding, but it wasn’t Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, but I’ve heard it spoken often enough to know it when I hear it, and this wasn’t it. Whatever she was saying, upset both vampires.
The big one pulled so hard that he finally jerked me off my feet because the other vamp was still holding on. I ended up on my knees, my jacket and shirt dangling from the vamp’s hand, one arm pulled up at an awkward angle. My gun was pressed into his stomach now, and again I wondered if at point blank range the new ammo would kill both vamps? It was a miracle that I hadn’t accidentally shot his head off. Edward was still there, gun pointed at the vamp’s head. The first hint I had that something else had gone wrong was a faint glow. The glow grew into something pure and white. My cross had spilled out of my shirt.
The vampire kept his grip on me, but started to scream in a high pitiful voice. The cross flared bright and brighter until I had to turn my head and shield my eyes. It was like having magnesium burning around your neck. So bright, it only got this bright when something very bad was near. I didn’t think the something bad was the thing still hanging onto me. I was betting the cross was glowing for her benefit, maybe others’ but mostly hers. A lot of things in the room could kill me, but nothing else in the room was worth this much of a light show.
“Let him go to his destiny,” she said.
I felt the arm that was still pulling so desperately go limp. I felt him kneeling, felt it through the barrel of the gun still pressed against him.
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 153
