I turned back to look at the other guy. Everyone in the room was scary, but at least he wasn’t wearing someone else’s skin. “What did you do to me?”
“We have saved your life. Our master’s creature was overzealous. There was bleeding in your head. We needed you alive.”
I thought about that. “You used Paulina’s life force to heal me.”
“Yes.
“I’m glad to be alive, honest.” I looked past him at Paulina’s body lying broken and forgotten. “But she didn’t volunteer to trade her life for mine, did she?”
“Nicky Baco began to suspect what price he would have to pay for our master’s blessing. She was a hostage to make sure he came to this our last meeting,” the man said.
“Let me guess. He didn’t show,” I said.
“He no longer answers our master’s call.”
Apparently, Ramirez had taken my advice of having Leonora Evans do some sort of magical barrier around Nicky so he couldn’t contact his master. Good to know it was working, but you try to do the right thing and it ends up getting someone else killed. Why is that always the way it works? But I admit that I was happier for me than sorry for Paulina. Not about her trading her life for mine, but if Nicky was being protected by magic, then he and the police were on their way. All I had to do was stall and keep them from doing whatever it was they had planned for me.
“So when Nicky didn’t show up, you didn’t need to keep her alive.” My voice sounded calm, but better than that, I was calm. Not normal calm, but the cool distant calm that you either learn to do during the really bad stuff, or you run screaming. I’d done all the screaming I planned on doing tonight.
“Her life did not matter. Yours does.”
“I’m glad to be alive, and don’t take this wrong, but why do you give a damn if I live or die?”
“We need you,” a male voice said from behind me. I had to arch my neck and crane my head backward to see the owner of that second voice. I didn’t see the man at first because he was surrounded by the flayed ones. I’d known that Edward was worried that they’d missed some bodies. He had no idea. There must have been twenty-five, thirty-five animated corpses standing behind me. They’d been standing so quietly, I hadn’t heard them or sensed them. They stood there now like robots with the switch turned off, waiting for life to return. Zombies never got that still, never went that empty. At the end, when they started to rot and you had to put them back in the grave before they melted into little puddles, they were more alive than this. I realized in that instant that the bodies were raised, but the person inside that body wasn’t raised. The master ate that which made them individuals. He ate that which made them more than so much muscle and skin. He didn’t eat the souls because I’d seen one of them in a house where two flayed ones had been made. But he took something out of their bodies, some memory or remnant that I left in when I raised the dead. They stood like rocks carved of flesh, utterly empty. At least the ones in the hospital had pretended to still be alive. There was no pretense here.
My eyes finally found the man. He wore a steel helmet and breastplate like the history books are always showing the conquistadors wearing, but the rest of the outfit was straight out of a nightmare.
He wore a necklace of tongues, and they were all still fresh and pink as if they’d just been cut out seconds ago. He wore a skirt of intestines that writhed and twisted like snakes, as if each thick glistening strand had an independent life of its own. His arms were bare, strong and muscled, and covered in the missing eyelids of the victims. As he moved close, the eyelids opened and closed. He came to stand beside me, next to the first man. The eyelids blinked at me and there were eye-shaped holes underneath every lid that I saw. The holes held darkness and the cold light of stars.
I turned away because I was remembering Itzpapalotl’s starry eyes. I didn’t want to fall into these eyes. At that second if you had given me a choice, I’d have taken the vampire in town to the thing that was standing in front of me.
After what I’d seen at the murder scene, I expected to feel evil emanating from him, but there was no evil. There was power like being next to a battery the size of the Chrysler building. The energy hummed along my skin, but it was neutral energy. Neither good nor bad in and of itself, the way a gun is neither good nor bad but can be turned to evil purposes.
I stared up the line of his body, and the tongues were moving as if still trying to scream. He took off the helmet and showed a slender, handsome face that reminded me of Bernardo’s, not the pure Aztec ethnicity I’d been expecting. He had turquoise ear spools in his lobes, and they matched the blue green of his eyes. He smiled down at me, looking like a fresh-faced twenty-something. I could feel the weight of the ages in his gaze like some vast weight pressing down on me, as if just being this close made it hard to breathe.
He reached out to touch my face, and I jerked back from him. That one movement seemed to break his hold over me. I could move. I could breathe. I could think. I’d been on the receiving end of enough magical glamour to know it when I felt it. You’re either a god, or you’re not. He was not. And it wasn’t just my monotheism showing. I’d felt the magic of monsters and preternatural beasties of all sorts, and I knew one when I saw one. Power doesn’t make you a deity. I don’t know exactly what does, but power ain’t it. Some spark of the divine was missing from the being that gazed down upon me. If he was just another monster, maybe we could deal.
“Who are you?” And I was happy that my voice was confident, normal.
“I am the Red Woman’s Husband.” He gazed down at me with eyes so patient, so kind. You think angels must have eyes like that.
“The Red Woman is the Aztec phrase for blood. What does it mean that you’re blood’s husband?”
“I am the body, and she is the life.” He said it like it answered my question. It didn’t.
Something wet and slimy touched my hand. I jerked back, but the chain didn’t let me go far. The length of animated intestine followed my hand, nuzzling it like some obscene worm. I swallowed a scream, but I couldn’t keep my pulse from speeding up.
He laughed at me.
It was a very ordinary laugh for a would-be god, but it was nicely condescending and maybe that’s how would-be gods laughed. But it was a peculiarly masculine condescension, long gone out of style. The laugh says, “Silly little girl, don’t you know I’m the big strong man, and you know nothing, and I know everything?” Or maybe I’m just too sensitive.
“Why intestines?” I asked.
The smile faded around the edges. His handsome face looked puzzled. “Are you making fun of me?” The intestine dropped away from my hand like a date that I’d rebuffed. Fine with me.
“No. I just wondered why intestines. You can obviously animate any body part. You can keep detached parts from decaying like the skins your men are wearing. With all that to choose from, why people’s guts and not something else?” People love to talk about themselves. The bigger the ego, the more they enjoy it. I was hoping that the Red Woman’s Husband was the same as everyone else, at least in this one thing.
“I wear the roots of their bodies so that all that see me will know that my enemies are empty shells and I have all that was theirs.”
Ask a silly question. “Why the tongues?”
“So that the lies of my enemies will not be believed.”
“Eyelids?”
“I will open the eyes of my enemies so that they may never again close their eyes to the truth.”
He was answering questions so nicely that I decided to try for more. “How did you skin the people without using a tool of some kind?”
“Tlaloci, my priest, called the skin from their bodies.”
“How?” I asked.
“My power,” he said.
“Don’t you mean Tlaloci’s power?”
He frowned again. “All his power derives from me.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I am his master. He owes all to me.”
“Sounds like you owe him.”
“You do not know what you are saying.” He was getting angry. Probably not what I wanted. I tried another more polite question.
“Why take the breasts and penises?”
“To feed my minion.” He did nothing, but suddenly I felt the air in the cavern move, and it was as if the shadows themselves drew apart like a curtain revealing a tunnel about thirty feet from the foot of where I lay. Something crawled out of that tunnel. The first impression was of a brilliant iridescent green. The scales changed color at every turn of the light. First green, then blue, then blue and green all at once, then a pearl white glitter that I thought I must have imagined, until it turned its head and flashed a white underbelly. The green scales went closer to true blue as the color moved up towards the head, until the square snout was a clear pure blue the color of sky. There was a fringe of delicate feathers in a rainbow of colors around that face. It turned and stared at me, fanning the feathers around its scaled head into a display that would have been the envy of any peacock. Its eyes were round and huge, taking up most of its face like the eyes of a bird of prey. A pair of slender wings was folded along its back, rainbow colors of the fringe, but I knew without seeing that the underside of the wings would be white. It pushed forward on four legs. Counting the wings, it was a six-limbed animal.
It was a Quetzalcoatl Draconus Giganticus, or at least that was the last Latin classification I was aware of. Sometimes they were classed as a subspecies of dragons, sometimes as a subspecies of gargoyles, and sometimes they had their own group all to themselves. Whatever classification, the Giganticus was the biggest and supposedly extinct. The Spaniards had killed a lot of them to dishearten the natives to whom they were sacred, and because it was just the European thing to do. See a dragon, kill it. It was not a complex philosophy.
I’d only seen black and white photos, and the stuffed one in the Chicago Field Museum. The photos hadn’t come close to doing it justice, and the stuffed one, well, maybe it was a bad taxidermy job.
It glided into the room in a shimmering roll of color and muscle. It was literally one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was also probably what had been gutting people. It opened that sky-blue snout and yawned, showing rows of sawlike teeth. The sound of its claws clattered over the stone floor like some nightmarish dog.
Red Woman’s Husband laid his Spanish helmet on the stone by my legs and went to greet the creature. It lowered its head to be petted, very like a dog. He stroked it just above the eye ridges and it made a low, rolling sound, eyes closing to slits. It was purring.
He sent it away with a playful push against one muscular shoulder. I watched it vanish back through the tunnel like it wasn’t real. “I thought they were extinct.”
“My minion helped bring us to this place, then it slept a magic sleep, waiting for me to awake.”
“I didn’t know Quetzalcoatls could hibernate.”
He frowned at me again and came to stand by my head. “I know what your word hibernate means, but it was a magic sleep, done by the last of my warrior priests. The priest sacrificed himself, putting all of us in an enchanted sleep, knowing that there was no one to aid him, and that he would die alone in this alien place long before I rose.”
Enchanted sleep. Sounded like Sleeping Beauty. “That’s true loyalty, sacrifice yourself for the better good.”
“I’m so glad you agree. It will make what has to happen much easier.”
Didn’t like the sound of that. Maybe flattery wasn’t the way to go. I’d try something more normal for me—sarcasm—and see if that led us away from the topic of my impending doom. “I don’t owe you any loyalty. I am not one of your followers.”
“Only because you do not understand,” he said, and those smiling eyes gazed down at me with a look of almost perfect peace.
“That’s what Jim Jones said just before he gave every one the Kool-Aid.”
“I do not know this name, Jim Jones.” Then he turned his head to one side, and it reminded me of Itzpapalotl when she listened to voices I could not hear. Now I realized that it might just be a way to access other people’s memories. “Ah, I know who he is now.” He looked down at me with those calm, beatific eyes. “But I am no madman. I am a god.”
He was getting distracted, as if it mattered to him for me to believe he was a god. If he had to convince me that he was divine before he killed me, then I was safe. He could kill me, but he’d never convince me he was a god.
He frowned. “You do not believe me.” He sounded surprised again. And I realized that for all his power, he seemed young. The ages raged through the eyes on his arms as though you could see back through to the beginning of creation, but he, himself, seemed young. Or maybe he just wasn’t used to people who didn’t drop down and worship him. If that’s all you’d known in your entire existence, then anyone not worshipping you might be a shock.
“I am a god,” he repeated, and his voice had that condescending tone again.
“Whatever you say.” But I made sure my doubt showed in my voice.
The frown deepened, and again I was reminded forcibly of a pouting child. A spoiled, pouting child. “You must believe that I am a god. I am the Red Woman’s Husband. I am the body that will be revenged on those that destroyed my people.”
“You mean the Spanish Conquistadors?”
“Yes,” he said.
“There aren’t a lot of conquistadors in New Mexico,” I said.
“Their blood still runs in the veins of their children’s children’s children.”
“No offense, but you didn’t get those turquoise blue eyes from anyone local.”
He frowned again, and little lines formed between his eyes. If he kept talking to me, he was going to get frown lines. “I am a god created by my people’s tears. I am the power that is left of the Aztecs, and I am the Spaniard’s magic made flesh. We will use their own power to destroy them.”
“Isn’t it a little late to destroy them? About five hundred years too late.”
“Gods do not reckon time as men do.”
I believed that he believed what he was saying, but I also thought he was rationalizing. He’d have kicked the Spaniards’ butts five hundred years ago if he’d been able to do it.
Maybe it showed on my face because he said, “I was a new god then, and I did not have the strength to defeat our enemies, so the Quetzalcoatl brought me here to wait until I grew strong enough for our purpose. I am ready to lead my army forward now.”
“So you’re saying that it took five hundred years for you to go from being a wee little god to a big bad god, the way soup needs to simmer for a really long time before it’s soup?”
He laughed. “You think very strangely. I am sad that you will be dead soon. I would make you the first of my concubines, and the mother of gods, for children born of you would be great sorcerers, but sadly, I have need of your life.”
We were back to killing me, and I didn’t want to be there. His ego seemed pretty fragile for a deity. I’d see how fragile. “The offer doesn’t sound very appealing, no offense.”
He smiled down at me, fingers trailing along my arm. “That we will take your life is not an offer. It is a fact.”
I gave him my best innocent eyes. “I thought you were offering to make me your concubine, the mother of gods?”
He frowned at me harder. “I did not offer you a chance to be my concubine.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I misunderstood you.”
His fingers were still touching my arm, but they were still now, as if he’d forgotten he was touching me. “You would refuse my bed?” He sounded truly perplexed. Great.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Is it your virtue you are protecting?”
“No, it’s just your particular offer doesn’t appeal to me.”
He was really having trouble with the concept that I didn’t find him attractive. He ran his fingers down my bare arm in a tickling brush. I just lay there and looke
d at him. I was giving him some of the best eye contact I’d given anyone this trip because if I looked anywhere else, I kept seeing severed body parts wiggling on their own. Hard to be tough as nails when you wanted to start screaming. He touched my face, and I let him this time. His fingers traced my face, delicately, gently. His eyes no longer looked peaceful. No, definitely disturbed.
He leaned into me as if he’d kiss me, and the eyelashes on his arms fluttered in butterfly kisses along my body. I gave a little shriek.
He drew back. “What is wrong?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Severed eyelids fluttering against my skin, intestines that writhe like snakes around your waist, the necklace of tongues trying to lick me. Pick one.”
“But that should not matter,” he said. “You should see me as beautiful, desirable.”
I did the best shrug I could with my hands chained higher than my shoulders.
“Sorry, but I just can’t get past what you’re wearing.”
“Tlaloci,” he said.
The man in shorts came forward, and dropped to one knee before him. “Yes, my lord.”
“Why does she not see me as wonderful?”
“Apparently, the aura of your godhood does not work on her.”
“Why not?” And there was anger now in his voice, in that once peaceful face.
“I do not know, my lord.”
“You said she could replace Nicky Baco. You said she was a nauhuli as he was. You said she had been touched by my magic, and it was the scent of my magic that drew the Quetzalcoatl to her. But she lies under the touch of my hands and does not feel for me. That is not possible if my magic clings to her.”
I thought, what if it’s not his magic, but I didn’t say it out loud. What if it was Itzpapalotl’s? The being standing in front of me had nearly killed me from a distance. He’d roared over my mind and taken me, and I hadn’t been able to stop him. Now, he was touching me, and evidently trying things on me, and it wasn’t working. The only thing that had changed was Itzpapalotl’s power filling me for awhile. Had that made the difference?
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