Obsidian Butterfly ab-9

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "You know the punishment," she said. "Surely, that is incentive enough to hold yourself in check."

  I glanced back then and found that Seth was staring back over his shoulder at the four women in the corner. When he turned back, he looked scared. The vampire was still feeding, sucking, throat swallowing. Surely, the wound had healed by now, unless they'd made a second wound while I was being embarrassed and not looking.

  Seth dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands. His hands paled with the force of squeezing nails into his own flesh. He threw his head back suddenly, breath coming fast, faster, fastest. The vampire pulled off of him, leaving him hard and still intact. "The wound has closed."

  Chualtalocal stood and went back to his mistress. The moment there was room, Seth collapsed to his knees, opening his hands slowly as if they hurt There were bloody half-moons where his nails had bitten into his palms. But it had worked. Any distraction to keep him out of the clutches of the goddess's pet freaks.

  "I offer you hospitality, to you and your friends. You may have Seth if you like and finish him as his body seems to so badly need."

  I suddenly knew what she meant by hospitality. Somehow I didn't think that was Aztec culture, though if I remembered correctly, hadn't some of the Aztecs sent Cortez and his men women along with food and gold? Maybe this wasn't any different. But I didn't want to mess with it.

  "Dawn is coming. I can feel it pressing against the darkness like a weight about to tear the night apart."

  She turned her head to one side and seemed to think, or maybe she was sensing the night, the air, something. "Yes," she said, "I feel it, too."

  "Then if it isn't too large an insult, can we skip the hospitality for tonight and get to the murders?"

  "Only if you give me your word that you will return and taste our hospitality before you go back to Saint Louis."

  I glanced at Edward. He shrugged. I guess it was up to me. What else was new when it came to monster? "I don't agree to having sex with your people, but I'll agree to a return visit."

  "You seemed to like Seth. I would offer you Cesar, who your power seemed to like even more, but he does not make sacrifice, nor does he act as hospitality. It is his price for letting us come so near killing him twice a month."

  "You mean because he lets you nearly tear his heart out twice a month, he doesn't have to make sacrifice or all the other stuff?"

  "That is what I mean."

  It made me think better of ol' Cesar. I'd seen his show, and now I'd seen some of the behind the scenes stuff, and I had to say that it was a close call which was worse. Letting someone cut your chest open and touch your still beating heart, or letting vamps suck blood off of tender body parts and be offered for sex to strangers. No, come to think of it, I'd have rather had my chest cut open, as long as I knew I'd heal completely every time.

  "It's not that Seth isn't lovely to look at. I'm sure it would be a pleasure to be with him, but I don't do casual sex. Thanks for thinking of me though. I know the police spoke with you."

  "They did. I do not think they learned anything of value from me."

  "Maybe they didn't ask the right questions," I said.

  "And what are the right questions?"

  I was about to do something that the police wouldn't like at all. I was about to tell the monsters, someone they had suspected at one point of being the murderer, details of the crime. But she needed specific details or how was she to recognize the marks of some Aztec bogeyman? I knew how the cops had done it. They'd been so general, it was almost useless to show up. I understood why they did it that way. Once I opened my mouth and let out details to Itzpapalotl, then she was contaminated. They'd never be able to slip her up in an interrogation, because she got the secret details from me.

  What I knew and the police couldn't was that they'd never interrogate the truth out of her. She was the kind of vamp that could sit in a dark room and watch the colors on the inside of her own eyeballs and be content. The only thing they could threaten her with was the death penalty, and if she was behind the murders, it was already a death penalty. One of the downfalls to a swift and certain punishment was that it took a lot of the give and play out of an interrogation. Once someone knows they are going to be executed, you can't bargain with them.

  "Can we clear the room out a little?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Can we have fewer of your people in here? I'm going to share confidential police information with you, and I don't want it to get out."

  "Whatever you say in this room remains in this room. No one here will talk of it to anyone else. I can promise you this." She was utterly sure of herself, arrogant. But why not? All of her people were terrified of her. If what happened to Diego was commonplace, then think what the exotic stuff must be. If she dictated that the secrets were safe, they were safe.

  Edward stepped close to me. He lowered his voice though he didn't try and whisper. "Are you sure about this?"

  "I'm sure, Edward. She can't help if she doesn't have enough information." We looked at each other for a few seconds, then he gave a small nod. I turned luck to the waiting vampire. "Okay," I said, and I told her about the survivors, and the dead.

  I don't know what I expected, maybe for her to be titillated, or to go, aha, and recognize the monster responsible. What I got was serious attention, good questions at the right places, and a glimpse at a very intelligent mind behind all the games. If she wasn't a delusional, sadistic, megalomaniac, would-be goddess, she might have been likable.

  "The skins of men are valuable to Xipe Totec and Tlazolteotl. The priests would flay the sacrifice and wear the skin. The heart had many uses for the gods. Even the flesh was used, at least in part. Sometimes, the insides of a sacrifice would have some strange thing inside it, and be an omen. Then the other organs might be kept for a time and studied, but it was rare."

  "Can you think why they would cut out the tongues?"

  "To keep them from speaking the secrets they have seen." She said it, like of course that was the reason. It made sense ritually, I guess.

  "Why cut off the eyelids?"

  "So they can never not see the truth, even though they cannot speak it. I do not know if this is why they have done these awful things."

  "Why would someone remove the outward secondary sex characteristics?"

  "I do not understand," she said, and she was holding the cloak close about her, as if she were cold. We'd been talking long enough, I had to remind myself not to look directly in her eyes.

  "The genitalia on the men, the breasts on the women, were removed." She shuddered, and I knew something I hadn't before. Itzpapalotl, the goddess of the obsidian blade, was frightened. "It sounds like some of the things the Spanish did to our people."

  "But the flaying and taking the organs, that's more Aztec, than European "

  She nodded. "Yes, but our sacrifices were messengers to the gods. We caused pain only for sacred purposes, not for cruelty or a whim. All blood was holy. If you died at the hand of a priest, you died knowing it served a greater purpose. Literally, your death helped the rain to fall, the maize to grow, the sun to rise in the sky. I do not know of any god that would flay people and leave them alive. Death is necessary for the messenger to reach the gods, Death is part of the worship of the deity. The Spaniards taught us to kill for the sake of killing, not as a sacred trust, but just for slaughter." She stared past me at the four women that waited patiently for her to notice them, for her to give them a purpose. "We have learned the lesson well, but I would rather have stayed in a world where it was not true." I saw in her face that she had some clue to what she'd lost, to what her vampires had lost when she decided they would become as cruel as their enemies. "The Spaniards killed so many of our people along the road to Acachinanco that they tied white handkerchiefs over their noses because of the stench of rotting bodies."

  She looked at me then, and the hatred in those eyes burned along my skin. After five hundred years, she still carried a grudge. Yo
u had to admire someone who could hold on to hate like that. I thought I knew how to hold a grudge, but looking into her face, I realized I was wrong. There was room in me for forgiveness. In Itzpapalotl's face there was room for only one thing, hatred, She'd been angry about the same thing for over five hundred years. She'd been punishing people for the same crimes for five hundred years. It was impressive in a psychotic sort of way.

  I hadn't learned much more about the murders than when I'd stepped through the doors. I'd mostly learned negatives. A genuine Aztec didn't recognize the murders as the work of any god or cult associated with the Aztec pantheon. It was good to know, something to cross off the list. Police work is mostly negatives. Finding out what you don't know, so you can decide what you do. I didn't know anything positive about the murders, but I knew one thing for absolute certain as I listened to the outrage in her voice about atrocities older than the entire country we were sitting in. I never wanted this woman mad at me. I'd told people that I'd chase them into hell to have my vengeance, but I probably didn't mean it. Itzpapalotl would mean every word.

  27

  IT WAS STILL DARK as Edward drove us homeward. Still night, true dark, the vampires still roamed, but that soft edge in the air let you know the light is coming. If we hurried, we'd make it into bed before true dawn. If we dawdled, we'd get to see the sun come up. None of us seemed to be dawdling. We sat in the car in a silence that no one seemed willing to break.

  We left the club behind and drove out into the hills beyond towards Santa Fe. Stars spread like a blanket of cold fire across the soft black silk of the sky. The sky had that larger than life, empty quality it gets over large bodies of water or in the desert.

  Olaf's voice came out of the darkness, low and strangely intimate the way voices can be in a car at night. "If we'd accepted their hospitality, do you think I could have had the vampire they whipped?"

  I raised an eyebrow. "Define have?" I said.

  "Have, to do with as I liked."

  "What would you have done with him if they had?" Bernardo said.

  "You don't want to know, and I don't want to hear it," Edward said. He sounded tired.

  "I thought you liked women, Olaf," Bernardo said it. I didn't say it, honest.

  "For sex I like women, but so much blood. It shouldn't have gone to waste." He sounded wistful.

  I turned in my seat and tried to see his face in the dark. "So it's not just women who have to be careful around you, is that it? Does it just have to bleed to be attractive?"

  "Leave him alone, Anita. About this, leave him the fuck alone."

  I turned to look at Edward. He rarely cussed, and he rarely sounded as tired and almost overwhelmed as he did now. "Okay, I mean, sure."

  Edward glanced in the rearview mirror. There wasn't a car in either direction for miles. I think he was looking at Olaf. He stared into the mirror a long time. I think they had some major eye contact going.

  He finally blinked and went back to staring at the road, but he didn't seem happy.

  "What aren't you telling me?"

  "Us," Bernardo said. "What isn't he telling us?"

  "All right, what aren't you telling us?"

  "It's not my secret to tell," Edward said, and that was all he'd say. He and Olaf had a secret, and they weren't willing to share.

  We finished the rest of the drive in silence. The sky was still black, but it was a paler black, the stars dim in it. Dawn was tremblingly close when we went into the house. I was so tired, my eyes burned. But Edward took me by the arm and led me down the small hallway away from the bedrooms. He kept his voice low. "Be very careful of Olaf."

  "He's big and bad. I get it."

  He dropped his hand from my arm, shaking his head. "I don't think you do."

  "Look, I know he's a convicted rapist. I saw the way he looked at Professor Dallas tonight, and I saw his reaction to the blood and torture. I don't know what you're not telling me, but I know that Olaf would hurt me if he could I know that."

  "You're afraid of him?"

  I took a breath. "Yeah, I'm afraid of him."

  "Good," Edward said. He hesitated then said, "You fit his vic profile."

  "Excuse me?"

  "His favorite victims are petite women, usually Caucasian, but always with long dark hair. I told you I would never have brought him in on this case if I'd known you were coming down, too. It isn't just because you're a woman. You're his physical ideal for a victim."

  I stared at him for a few seconds, mouth opened, then closed it, and tried to think what to say. "Thanks for telling me, Edward. Shit. You should have told me this up front."

  "I was hoping he could hold his act together, but I saw him tonight, too. I'm worried that he'll snap. I just don't want you to be the one in the way when it happens."

  "Send him back to wherever he came from, Edward. We don't need him if he adds to the problem."

  He shook his head. "No, he's got a specialty that's perfect for this case."

  "And that specialty would be?"

  He gave that small smile. "Go to bed, Anita. It's already dawn."

  "No," I said, "almost, but not quite."

  He studied my face. "You can really feel the sunrise without looking?"

  I nodded. "Yep."

  He looked at me, and it was as if he were trying to read me now. For the first time I felt that maybe, just maybe, Edward was as puzzled by me as I was by him, sometimes. He escorted me to my room and left me at the door like an overprotective date.

  I was glad I'd prepared the room for safety before I left. If someone came through the window, they'd knock the dolls over or step on the mirror with its antlers. The door would have a chair and the suitcase in front of it. The room was as safe as it was going to get. I undressed, putting the guns and knives on the bed until I could decide exactly what was staying where for overnight. A man's extra large T-shirt that hung past my knees came out of the overnight bag. I'd started keeping one change of clothes, nightclothes, and toiletries in the overnight bag ever since the airline lost my luggage on a business trip. The last thing I pulled out of the overnight bag was my toy penguin Sigmund. I used to only sleep with Sigmund every so often, but lately, he'd been my constant companion under the sheets. A girl needs something to cuddle with at night.

  The Browning Hi-Power was my other constant companion. At home it stayed in a holster I'd rigged to my headboard. Here I put it under my pillow, making very sure the safety was on. It always made me slightly nervous to put a loaded gun under my pillow. Seemed less than safe, but not nearly as unsafe as being unarmed if Olaf came through the door. I had brought four knives with me. One of them went between the mattresses. I put the Firestar back into the suitcase. I wanted something bigger than a handgun. I had a sawed-off shotgun and a mini-Uzi. Normally, I'd have brought more big guns, but I knew Edward would have more and better, and he would share. I finally decided on the mini-Uzi with a modified clip that held thirty rounds with enough humph to cut a vampire in half. It was a gift from Edward so the ammo was probably illegal, but then so was the gun. I'd been almost embarrassed about carrying it at first, but one night last August I used it for real. I'd pointed it at a vampire, pulled the trigger, and cut him in half. It had looked like his body was torn in half by some giant hand. His upper body had fallen slowly to one side. His lower body collapsed to its knees. I still had the vision of it like a slow motion image. There was no horror or regret. It was just amemory. The vampire had come with a hundred of his friends to kill us. I'd tried to kill one of them as messily as possible to get the rest to leave us alone. It hadn't worked, but that was only because the vampires were more afraid of their Master of the City than of me.

  Maybe the Uzi was overkill for a human being, but if by some chance I emptied the Browning into Olaf's chest and he didn't go down, I wanted to make sure he didn't reach me. I'd cut him in half and see if the pieces could crawl.

  28

  IT WAS AFTER FIVE when I finally closed my eyes. Sleep sucked me under
like a roll of black water, dragging me deep, and instantly into a dream. I stood in a dark place. There were small stunted trees everywhere, but they were dead. All the trees were dead. I could feel it.

  Something crashed over to my right, something large moving through the trees, and a sense of dread rode before it like a wind. I ran, hands up to protect my face from the dry branches. I tripped over a root and went sprawling. There was a sharp pain in my arm. It was bleeding. Blood poured down it, but I couldn't find a wound.

  The thing was getting closer. I could hear tree trunks snapping with sharp explosions. It was coming. It was coming for me. I ran, and ran, and ran, and the dead trees stretched out forever and there was no escape.

  A typical chase dream, I thought, and the moment I thought it, I realized it was a dream, and the dream changed, faded into another dream. Richard standing in nothing but a sheet, one tanned muscled arm reaching out to me. His brown hair falling in a froth of waves around his face. I reached for him, and as my fingertips brushed his, a smile curving his lips, the dream shattered, and I woke.

  I woke, blinking into a patch of sunlight that spilled across the bed. But it hadn't been the light that had woken me. There was a light tapping on my door. A man's voice. "Edward says get up."

  It took me a moment to realize it was Bernardo's voice. It didn't take Freud to analyze the dream at the end with Richard in a sheet. I was going to have to be careful around Bernardo. Embarrassing, but true.

  I sat up in bed, yelling through the door, "What time is it?"

  "Ten."

  "Okay, I'm coming."

  I listened but didn't hear him walk away. Either the door was more solid than it looked, or Bernardo was quiet. If it had just been Edward, I'd have thrown on a pair of jeans under the over-sized T-shirt, and had some coffee. But there was company in the house and it was all male. I managed to get into the bathroom and dress without meeting anyone in the hallway. I was wearing dark blue jeans, a navy blue polo shirt, white jogging socks, and in black Nikes. Normally, I'd left the guns off until I went out into the big bad world, but at Edward's house the big bad world was staying in the next room so I put the Firestar 9 mm in an inner pants holster, set for a right-handed cross draw. Brushed, cleaned, and armed, I wandered toward the smell of bacon.