The Firestar went into an Uncle Mike’s inner pants holster, though truthfully the jeans were too tight for an inner pants holster. Maybe I wasn’t spending enough time in the gym. I had been on the road more than I’d been home. The Kenpo was neat stuff, but it wasn’t the same thing as a full workout with weights and running. Another thing to pay more attention to when I got back to St. Louis. I’d been letting a lot of things slide.
I finally transferred the Firestar to the small of my back and hated it, but it dug in something fierce in front. I have a slight sway to my back so there’s always more room for a gun there, but it wasn’t a quick place to draw from. Something about a woman’s hip structure makes a gun at the small of the back not the best idea. That I kept the gun at the small of my back tells you just how tight the jeans were. Definitely going to have to get back into a regular gym schedule. The first five pounds are easy to get rid of, the second five are harder, and it gets even harder from there. I’d been chunky in junior high, close to fat, so I knew what I was talking about. So that no teenager out there will get the wrong idea and go all anorexic on me, I was a size thirteen in jeans, and that was at five foot nothing. See, I really was chunky. I hate women who complain about being fat when they’re like a size five. Anything under size five isn’t a woman. It’s a boy with breasts.
I stared at the black jacket. Two days folded in a gym bag and it desperately needed to go to the dry cleaners. I decided to carry it folded over one arm, on the theory it would unwrinkle a little. I didn’t really need to hide the weapons until we got to the club. The knives were illegal if I’d been a cop or a civvie, but I was a vampire executioner, and we got to carry knives. Gerald Mallory, the grandfather of our business, had testified before a senate subcommittee, or something like that, at how many times knives had saved his life. Mallory was well liked in Washington. It was his home base. So the law got changed to let us carry knives, even really big ones. If someone challenged me, all I had to do was whip out my executioner’s license, and I was legal. Of course, that predicated on them knowing the loophole in the law. Not every cop on the beat is going to know. But my heart is pure because I’m legal.
Edward and Ramirez were waiting for me in the hallway. They both smiled and the smiles were so close to identical it was unnerving. Will the real good guys please stand up? But Edward’s smile never faltered as I walked towards them. Ramirez’s did. His gaze hesitated on the wrist sheath. The jacket hid the other one. I walked up to them smiling, and my eyes were shiny, too. I put a hand around Edward’s waist and brushed my arm along the gun I’d thought was there at the small of his back.
“I’ve called for backup,” Ramirez said.
Edward had given me a quick Ted hug and let me go, though he knew I’d found the gun. “Great. It’s been a long time since I visited a Master of the City with the police.”
“How do you usually do it?” Ramirez asked.
“Carefully,” I said.
Edward turned his head away and coughed. I think he was trying not to laugh, but you can never tell with Edward. Maybe he just had a tickle in his throat. I watched him walk and wondered where in the world he was hiding the third gun.
51
ONE OF THE THINGS I liked about working with the police was that when you went into a business and asked to speak with the manager or owner, no one argued. Ramirez flashed his badge and asked to speak with the owner, Itzpapalotl, also known as Obsidian Butterfly.
The hostess, the same darkly elegant woman that had shown Edward and me to a table last time, took Ramirez’s business card, showed us all to a table, and left us. The only difference was this time we didn’t get any menus. The two uniforms stayed at the door, but kept us in sight. I’d put the wrinkled jacket on to cover the guns and knives, but I was glad the club was dark, because the jacket had seen better days.
Ramirez leaned over and asked, “How long do you think she’ll keep us waiting?”
Funny how he didn’t ask if she would keep us waiting. “Not sure, but a while. She’s a goddess and you’ve just ordered her to appear before you. Her ego won’t let her be quick.”
Edward was leaning in on the other side. “Half hour, at least.”
A waitress came. Ramirez and I ordered Cokes. Edward got water. The lights on the stage dimmed, then came up brighter. We settled back for the show. César had probably healed by now, but not by much. So it would either be a different wereanimal or a different show altogether.
There was what looked like a stone coffin propped up on the stage, sitting on its end with the carved lid staring out at the audience. Our table wasn’t as good as last time. I spotted Professor Dallas at her usual table, alone this time. She didn’t seem to mind.
The stone lid was carved in a crouching jaguar with a necklace of human skulls. The high priest Pinotl came onto the stage. He was dressed only in that skirt thing, a maxtlatl, that left the legs and most of the hips bare. I’d asked Dallas what the skirt was. His face was painted black with a stripe of white across the eyes and nose. His long black hair had been formed into individual strands curling at the ends. He wore a white crown, and it took me a second to realize it was made of bones. The stage lights flickered over the white bones, making them shimmer, and almost bleed white color when he moved his head. Finger bones had been restrung and formed a fan above the main band, reminiscent of the feathers I’d seen him wearing the first time. His ear spools of gold had been replaced by bones. He looked totally different from the first time, and yet the moment he stepped out onstage I knew it was him. No one else had had that aura of command.
I leaned into Ramirez. “You wearing a cross?”
“Yes, why?”
“His voice can be a little overwhelming without a little help.”
“He’s human, isn’t he?”
“He’s her human servant.”
Ramirez turned his face full into mine, and we were too close. I had to move back to keep from bumping noses. “What?”
Did he really not know what a human servant was for a vampire? I didn’t have time to give him a preternatural lesson, and this wasn’t the place anyway. Far too many listening ears. I shook my head. “I’ll explain later.”
Two very Aztec-looking bouncers came onstage and lifted the lid of the coffin off. They moved to one side with it, and the way they shuffled, muscles in their arms and back working, it looked heavy. There was a cloth-draped body in the coffin. I didn’t know for certain that it was a body, but it was shaped like a body. There just aren’t that many things that are body-shaped.
Pinotl began to speak. “Those of you who have been with us before, know what it is to make sacrifice to the gods. You have shared in that glory, taken the offering into yourselves. But only the bravest, the most virtuous, are fit sacrifices. There are those that are not fit to feed the gods with their lives, but they, too, may serve.” He drew the cloth off in one large movement, sending the black and sequined draped cloth spreading wide like a fisherman’s net. As that glittering cloth fell to the stage, the contents of the coffin were revealed. Gasps, screams spread through the audience like ripples in a pool.
There was a body in the coffin. It was dried and wizened, as if the body had been buried in the desert and had mummified naturally. No artificial preservatives. The spotlight on the coffin seemed very bright, harsh. It showed every line in the dried skin. The skeletal shadow of bones underneath was painfully clear.
We were only three rows back, close enough to see more detail than I cared to see. At least this time they wouldn’t be cutting anyone up. I really wasn’t in the mood to see inside anyone’s chest tonight. I was searching the crowd, trying to see if she was coming or if we were about to be surrounded by werejaguars.
I turned and looked. The dead mummy’s eyes were open. I looked at Edward. He answered the question without me having to say it. “Its eyes just opened. Nobody touched it.”
I stared at that skull trapped under dry parchment skin. The eyes were full of something dry and
brown. There was no life to the eyes, but they were open. The mouth began to open slowly, as if the mouth were on a stiff hinge. As the mouth opened a sound came out of it, a sigh that grew into a scream. A scream that echoed through the room, reverberated off the ceiling, the walls, the inside of my head.
“It’s a trick, right?” Ramirez said.
I just shook my head. It wasn’t a trick. Dear God, it wasn’t a trick. I looked at Edward, and he just shook his head. He’d never seen this particular act either.
The scream died, and there was a silence so thick you could have dropped a pin and heard it bounce. I think everyone was holding their breath, straining to hear. To hear what I didn’t know, but I was doing it, too. I think I was trying to hear it breathe. I studied that skeletal chest, but it didn’t rise and fall. It didn’t move. I said a silent prayer of thanks.
“This one’s energy went to feed our dark goddess, but she is merciful. What was taken shall be given back. This is Micapetlacalli, the box of death. I am Nextepeua. In legend I was the husband of Micapetlacalli, and I am still married to death. Death runs through my veins. My blood tastes of death. Only the blood of one consecrated to death will free this one of torment.”
I realized that Pinotl’s voice was just a voice, a good voice, like a good stage actor, but nothing more. Either he wasn’t trying to bespell the audience, or I wasn’t as susceptible tonight. The only change that I knew for certain was the marks. They were wide open now. I’d been told by my teacher and by Leonora Evans that the marks made me more vulnerable to psychic attack, but maybe on some things having a direct link to the boys helped me. Whatever it was, his voice didn’t move me tonight. Great.
Pinotl drew an obsidian blade from behind his back. He’d probably been carrying it the way Edward and I were carrying guns, at the small of his back. He held his arm over the open coffin, over that gaping mouth. He drew the blade across his skin. It wasn’t clear to the audience what he’d done. It would have been much better theater for Pinotl to slash his arm where the audience could see that first crimson slash. For him to hide it, there had to be some ritual significance, some importance, to those first drops of blood going into the corpse’s mouth.
He dripped blood on the top of the thing’s skull, dabbed it in the middle of that skull forehead, touched it to the throat, the chest, the stomach, the abdomen. He went down the line of chakras, energy points, of the body. I’d never believed in chakras until this year, when I’d found they were real, and they seemed to work. I hated all this new age stuff. I hated it worse when it worked. Of course, this wasn’t new age stuff. This was very old stuff. With each touch of blood to that dried thing I felt magic. Each drop of blood made it grow, until the air hummed with it and my skin crept in waves of goosebumps.
Edward sat unmoved, but Ramirez was rubbing his arms, chasing goosebumps. “What’s happening?”
He was at the very least a sensitive. I guess I couldn’t possibly be attracted to a totally normal human being. I whispered, “Magic.”
He looked at me, eyes showing too much white. “What kind?”
I shook my head. That I didn’t know. I had a few clues, but I really had never seen anything like it, not exactly.
Pinotl walked around the coffin in a counter-clockwise motion, bleeding arm and bloody knife held apart, palm up while he chanted. The power built and built in the air like close thunder until my throat closed with it, and I was having trouble breathing. Pinotl came back to the front of the coffin where he’d begun. He made some kind of sign with his hands, then flung a spray of blood onto the body, and began to back slowly away. The lights dimmed until the only light was the harsh white light on the thing in the coffin.
The power had built to a screaming pitch. My skin was trying to crawl off my body and hide. The air was too thick to breathe, as if it had grown more solid, thick with magic.
Something was happening to the body. The power broke like a cloud bursting with rain, and that invisible rain broke over the body, over the room, over us all, but the focus was that dried thing. The skin began to move, to twitch. It filled out as if water flowed beneath it. Something liquid moved under that dry, wasted skin, and where it flowed the skin began to stretch. It was like watching one of those blow-up dolls fill up. Flesh, flesh was flowing under the skin. It plumped like some obscene kind of dough. The body, the man, began to thrash and twist against the sides of the coffin. The chest finally rose, drawing in a great draught of air, as if he were struggling back from the dead. It was like the opposite of that death rattle where the breath flows away for the last time. Of course, that was exactly what it was: life returning, the last breath being drawn back in. When he had air to breathe, he began to scream. One long ragged shriek after another. As fast as his healing chest could bring in the air, he screamed.
The dry hair on his head turned curly, brown, and soft. His skin was tanned and young, smooth and flawless. He’d been under thirty when he went into the coffin. Who knew how long he’d been in there? Even after he looked human again, he kept shrieking, as if he had been waiting a very long time to scream.
A woman near the front screamed and took off running for the door. The vampires had moved up quietly through the tables. I hadn’t sensed them over the suffocating flow of magic, and the sheer horror of the show. Careless of me. A vampire caught the running woman, held her, and she grew instantly still. He led her quietly back to her table, to the man that was standing, wondering what he should do. The vampires moved through the crowd touching someone here, stroking a hand there, soothing, soothing, telling the great lie. It was safe, it was peaceful, it was good.
Ramirez watched the vampires. He turned to me. “What are they doing?”
“Soothing the crowd so they don’t all bolt for the exits.”
“They aren’t allowed to use one on one hypnosis.”
“I don’t think it’s personal, more like crowd hypnosis.” I looked back to the stage and found the man had collapsed onto the stage, pushing his way out of the coffin as soon as he got the strength. He was trying to crawl away.
Pinotl appeared in the growing circle of light. The man screamed and held his hands up in front of his face as if to ward off a blow. Pinotl spoke, and he didn’t yell, so he must have been using a microphone of some kind. “Have you learned humility?” he asked.
The man whimpered and hid his face.
“Have you learned obedience?”
The man nodded his head over and over, still hiding his face. He started to cry, great sobs that made his shoulders shake. Three rows out and I could hear him sobbing.
Pinotl motioned and the two bouncers that had opened the coffin walked onstage. They lifted the weeping man up, carrying him between them. His legs didn’t seem to move yet, so they carried him, with an arm on either of their shoulders, his feet dangling off the floor. He wasn’t a small man, and again you got that sense of how strong the two men were. They were human, too, not wereanything.
Two werejaguars walked onstage in their spotted skin clothes, and between them they held another man. No, not a man, a wereanimal. It was Seth. He’d been stripped down to a G-string that left very little to the imagination. His long yellow hair was unbound, streaked with light and color. He didn’t struggle as they brought him up onstage. The jaguar men had him kneel in front of Pinotl.
“Do you acknowledge our dark goddess as your one and true mistress?”
Seth nodded. “I do.” His voice didn’t have the resonance of the other man’s, and I doubted that the people in the back could hear him.
“She has given you life, Seth, and it is right that she should ask you give that life back to her.”
“Yes,” Seth said.
“Then I will be her hand, and take that which is hers.” He cradled Seth’s face between his hands. It was gentle. The two jaguar men let go of Seth and backed away. But they stayed close, almost as if afraid that he might run. But his face was turned upward with a near beatific expression on it, as if this were wonder
ful. He’d been so afraid of being tortured by Itzpapalotl’s four sisters weird, and yet now he seemed at peace with what they were about to do. I thought I knew, and I hoped I was wrong. Just once when I expect something truly hideous is about to happen, I’d like to be wrong. It would be a nice change.
It wasn’t flashy. There was no fire or light or even a shimmer of heat. Lines appeared on Seth’s twenty-something skin. The muscles under his skin began to shrink as though he had a wasting disease, but what should have taken months was happening in seconds. No matter how willing the sacrifice, it can still hurt. Seth started screaming as fast as he could draw breath. His lungs were working better than the other man’s, and he drew breath so fast, it was like one continuous shriek. The skin darkened as it drew in and in like something were sucking him dry. It was like watching a balloon shrivel. Except there was muscle and when the muscle vanished, there was bone, and finally there was nothing but dried skin over bones, and still he screamed.
I’ve become something of a connoisseur of screams over the years, and I’ve heard some good ones. Some of them have even been mine, but I’d never heard anything like this. The sound stopped being human and became like the high-pitched sound of some wounded animal, but underneath it all you knew, knew at a level that you couldn’t even explain, that it was a person.
Finally, there was no more air for screaming, but that dry, empty mouth kept opening and closing, opening and closing. Long after the screaming stopped, that skeletal thing was still writhing, still flinging its head from side to side.
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 180
