Obsidian Butterfly ab-9

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  He grabbed my ankle, pinning my leg against his body. We stared at each other, and I saw my death in his face. He tossed the knife one-handed so that the grip changed from slashing, to a downward stab. He had my left leg pinned, but my right leg was still on the floor. I braced my upper body with my arms, leaned my shoulders downward and drew back my right leg. I lined up his kneecap. Tlaloci started the downward stroke. I kicked the downward edge of his kneecap with everything I had. I saw the kneecap slide sideways, dislocated. His leg crumbled, he cried out in pain, but the blade kept coming.

  Tlaloci's head exploded in a shower of brains, and bone. The pieces rained down on me, and the body fell to one side, obsidian blade scrapping along the stone floor as the hand convulsed around the hilt.

  I stared across the cave and saw Olaf standing at the foot of the stone steps.

  He was still standing in his shooting stance, one-handed, gun still pointed at where the priest had been standing. He blinked, and I watched the concentration leave his face, watched something close to human spill across his face. He started walking towards me, gun at his side. The other hand held a knife, bloody to the hilt.

  I was wiping Tlaloci's brains off my face when Olaf came to stand in front of me. "I never thought I'd say this, but damn I'm glad to see you."

  He actually smiled. "I saved your life."

  That made me smile. "I know."

  Ramirez came down the stairs with what looked like a SWAT team in full battle gear behind him. They spilled out to either side, nasty-looking guns pointed at every inch of the cavern. Ramirez just stood there, gun in hand, looking for something to shoot. National Guardsmen in flame-thrower gear came next, nozzle of the flame-thrower pointed up at the ceiling.

  Olaf cleaned his knife on his pants, sheathed it, and offered me a hand. The hand was stained red, but I took it. His skin was sticky with blood, but I squeezed his hand and let him pull me to my feet.

  Bernardo came into the room with more cops behind him. His cast was red with blood, the blade sticking out of it so dark with blood, it looked black. He said, "You're alive."

  I nodded. "Thanks to Olaf."

  He gave a small pressure to my hand, then let me go.

  "I was late again," Ramirez said.

  I shook my head. "Does it matter who saves the day, as long as it gets saved?"

  The other cops were starting to relax as they realized there was no one to shoot.

  "Is this all?" one of the black-decked cops asked.

  I looked back at the far tunnel. "There's a Quetzalcoatl down that tunnel."

  "A what?"

  "A ... dragon."

  Even through the battle gear you could see them all exchange glances.

  "Monster, if you like the word better, but it's still down there."

  They got into ranks and went past me to the tunnel at a crouched run. They hesitated at the tunnel entrance, then slipped through one at a time. For once I let them go. I'd done my part for one night. Besides, they were a hell of a lot better armed than I was. One of them ordered Ramirez and some of the other more civvie looking policemen to escort the civilians to the surface.

  Ramirez came to stand in front of me. "You're bleeding." He touched the cut on my arm.

  I turned so he could see some of the other cuts. "Pick one."

  Bernardo and the other cops that had been ordered to stay behind came to look at the two dead men. "Where's this Red Woman's Husband that the little creep kept talking about?" one of the cops asked.

  I pointed at the body with the blade sticking out of its chest.

  Two of the cops went to stand over the body. "He doesn't look much like a god."

  "He was a vampire," I said.

  That got everyone's attention. "What did you say?" Ramirez asked.

  "Let's concentrate on the important details here, hoys. We need to make sure that body doesn't get back up. Trust me. He is one powerful son of a bitch. We want him to stay dead."

  A cop kicked the body, which rolled limply as only the true dead move, "Looks dead to me."

  Watching the body roll limply made me jump, as if I expected him to sit up and say, just kidding, I'm not really dead. The body stayed still, but it hadn't done my nerves any good.

  "We need to take the head and cut out his heart. Then we burn them separately and scatter the ashes over different bodies of water. Then we burn the body to ash, and scatter it over a third body of water."

  "You've got to be kidding," one of the cops said.

  "The flayed ones just fell down and stopped moving," Ramirez said. "Did you do that?"

  "Probably when I put the knife through his heart."

  "Bullets hadn't worked on any of them until the flayed ones fell down, then the bullets killed everything."

  "She did that?" the cop asked. "She made our bullets work?"

  "Yes," Ramirez said, and probably he was right. Probably it had been me. Regardless, I wasn't going to raise any doubts. I wanted them to listen to me. I wanted to make sure that the 'god' stayed dead.

  "How exactly do we chop off the head?" the same cop asked.

  Olaf went to the chest that the men had gotten their weapons out of and lifted a large flat club with bits of obsidian embedded in it. He holstered his gun and walked to the body.

  "Shit, that's one of those damn things they used on us," the cop said.

  "Nicely ironic to use it on their god, don't you think?" Bernardo asked.

  Olaf knelt beside the body.

  "Hey, we didn't say you could do that," the cop said.

  Olaf looked at Ramirez. "What do you say, Ramirez?"

  "I say we do whatever Anita says."

  Olaf whirled the club as if getting the feel for it. It also made the cops back up. He looked at me. "I'll take the head."

  I pulled the knife out of Tlaloci's hand. He wasn't going to be needing it anymore. "I'll take the heart." I walked toward him, blade in hand. The cops kept backing away from us.

  I stood over the vampire. Olaf knelt on the other side, looking up at me. "If I'd let you get killed, Edward would have thought I failed."

  "Edward's alive then?"

  "Yes."

  A tightness left my shoulders that I hadn't even realized was there. "Thank God."

  "I don't fail," Olaf said.

  "I believe you," I said.

  We stared at each other, and there was still something in his eyes that I couldn't read or understand, a step beyond whatever I'd become. I stared into his dark eyes and knew that here was a monster, not as powerful as the one that lay on the ground, but just as deadly in the right circumstances. And I owed him my life.

  "You take the head first."

  "Why?"

  "I'm afraid if I take the knife out while the body's still intact that he'll sit up and start breathing again."

  Olaf raised eyebrows at me. "You are not joking me?"

  "I never joke about vampires," I said.

  He gave me another long look. "You would have made a good man."

  I took the compliment because that's what it was, maybe the best compliment he'd ever given a woman.

  "Thank you," I said.

  The SWAT team came back out of the far tunnel. "There's nothing down there. It's empty."

  "Then it got away," I said. I looked at the body still lying there. "Take the head. I want out of this damn cave."

  The SWAT team leader didn't like us cutting up the body. He and Ramirez went into a yelling match. While everyone was watching the argument, I nodded to Olaf and he beheaded the corpse in one blow. Blood gushed out onto the cave floor.

  "What the fuck are you doing?" one of the SWAT cops asked, bringing his gun pointed at us.

  "My job," I said. I put the tip of the blade under the ribs.

  The policeman brought the gun up to his shoulder. "Get away from the body until the captain tells you it's okay to do it."

  I kept the knife against the body. "Olaf."

  "Yes."

  "If he shoots me, kill him."<
br />
  "My pleasure." The big man turned his eyes to the policeman, and there was something in that gaze that made the heavily armed man take a step back.

  The captain in question said, "Stand down, Reynolds. She's a vamp executioner. Let her do her job."

  I plunged the blade into the skin, and it slid home. I cut a hole just below his ribs and reached into the hole. It was tight and wet and slick, and it took two hands to get the heart out, one to cut it free of the connecting tissue, and one to hold onto it. I drew it from the chest, blood stained to my elbows.

  I caught Ramirez and Bernardo both looking at me, with nearly identical looks on their faces. I didn't think either of them would be wanting a date any time soon. They'd always remember watching me cut a man's heart out, and that memory would stain anything else. With Bernardo, I didn't give a shit. With Ramirez, it hurt to see that look in his eyes.

  A hand touched the heart. I stared at that hand, then looked up to meet Olaf's eyes. He wasn't repulsed. He stroked the heart, hands sliding over mine. I pulled away, and we looked at each other over the body we'd butchered. No, Olaf wasn't repulsed. The look in his eyes was that pure darkness that only fills a man's eyes in the most intimate of situations. He raised the severed head up by the hair and held it almost as if he'd let me kiss it. Then I realized he was holding it over the heart, like a matched pair.

  I had to turn away from what I saw in his face. "Does anyone have a bag that I can carry this in?"

  Someone finally found an empty equipment bag and let me spill the heart into it. The policeman told me I could keep the bag. He didn't want it back.

  No one offered Olaf a bag, and he never asked.

  63

  THEY FOUND MY GUNS in the chest with the rest of the weapons, though the holsters were missing. I just couldn't keep a holster intact on this job. But I stuffed the guns down my jeans. The knives weren't in the chest. Ramirez drove me personally to a crematorium so that I could see the heart and head burned down to ash. When I had two little containers of ash, it was almost dawn. I fell asleep in the seat beside him, or he'd have had a fight about taking me to the hospital. But he insisted that the doctors check me out. Amazingly enough, none of the cuts were even deep enough for stitches. I wouldn't even have any new scars. Miraculous.

  One of the men had given me a jacket that said FBI on it to cover my nearly naked upper body. Several of the uniforms and most of the hospital staff assumed I was a federal agent. I kept having to correct people, and I finally realized that the emergency room doctor thought my denial meant I had a concussion and didn't know who I was. The more I argued the more concerned he got. He ordered a series of head X-rays, and I couldn't talk him out of it.

  I was actually sitting in a wheelchair waiting to be escorted to X-ray when Bernardo came up. He touched the FBI jacket. "You're moving up in the world."

  "When the nurse comes back, he'll be taking me down to X-ray."

  "You okay?"

  "Just precautionary," I said.

  "I just came back from checking on the invalids."

  "Olaf said Edward would live."

  "He will."

  "How are the kids?"

  "Peter is okay. They put Becca in a room. She's got a cast to her elbow."

  I stared at his cast stained a dirty brown. "That thing is going to start stinking with all that blood dried into it."

  "The doc wants me to get a new cast, but I wanted to check on everyone first."

  "Where's Olaf?"

  Bernardo shrugged. "I don't know. He disappeared once the monsters were all dead and Ramirez had you in his car. He said something about the job being done. I guess he went back under whatever rock Edward found him under."

  I started to nod, then remembered something that Edward had said. "Edward told you that you couldn't have a woman because he'd forbidden Olaf to have women, right?"

  "Yeah, but the job's over, babe. I am headed for the first open bar."

  I looked at him, nodding. "Maybe that's where Olaf is."

  He frowned at me. "Olaf's at a bar?"

  "No, he's out getting his ashes hauled, his way."

  We both looked at each other, and there was a moment when horror dawned on Bernardo's face, and hewhispered, "Oh, my god, he's out killing someone."

  I shook my head. "If he's just out killing at random, there's no way to find him, but what if it's not random?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Remember how he looked at Professor Dallas?"

  Bernardo looked at me. "You don't think ... I mean he wouldn't ... oh, shit."

  I got up out of the wheelchair and said, "I've got to tell Ramirez what we're thinking."

  "You don't know he's there. You don't know he's doing anything wrong."

  "Do you believe he just went home?" I asked.

  Bernardo seemed to think about that for a second, then shook his head.

  "Neither do I."

  "He saved your life," Bernardo said.

  "I know." We went to the elevator.

  The elevator doors opened and Lieutenant Marks was standing there. "Where the fuck do you think you're going?"

  "Marks, I think that Professor Dallas is in danger." I got into the elevator.

  Bernardo followed.

  "You think I'd believe anything you say, witch?" He hit the button that kept the doors open.

  "Hate me if you want, but don't let her die."

  "Your pet FBI agent kept me out of the big raid."

  I didn't know what he meant, but I was pretty sure who he meant. "Whatever Bradley did, he did without me knowing, but that's not the point."

  "I can make it the point."

  "Did you hear that Dallas is in danger? Did you hear that part?" I asked.

  "She's as corrupt as you are."

  "So it's okay that she dies a horrible death," I said.

  He just looked at me. I moved as if to go towards the buttons. Bernardo caught his clue. He hit Marks in the head with his cast. The man went down, and I hit the door closed button. The doors hushed closed as Bernardo lowered Marks to the floor.

  "You want me to kill him?" Bernardo asked.

  "No." But now if I went to Ramirez for help, Marks would think he'd been in on it. Shit. "Do you have Edward's car?"

  "Yeah."

  "How did Olaf drive off, then?"

  Bernardo looked at me. "If he's really doing this, he'll steal a car and ditch it away from the murder scene. He won't chance using Edward's car."

  "He'll go back to Edward's house for his goody bag," I said.

  The doors opened on the floor that he'd parked on. We got out. "What do you mean goody bag?"

  "If he's going to cut her up, then he'll want the tools he normally uses. Serial murderers are very anal when it comes to how the victims are treated. They spend a lot of time planning exactly what they'll do and how."

  "So he's at Edward's?"

  "How long has he been gone?"

  "Three hours, maybe three and a half."

  "No, he'll be at Dallas's, if that's where he is at all."

  Bernardo opened the car, and we got in. I had to take the Browning out of my pants. The barrel's just too long for sitting down like that. I ended up holding it in my lap. I watched Bernardo drive with his cast-wrapped arm, "You need me to drive?"

  "I'm fine. Just tell me where Dallas lives, and I'll drive us."

  "Shit!"

  He put the car in park and looked at me. "The police would know the address."

  "When Marks wakes up, we'll be lucky to stay out of jail," I said.

  "We don't even know that Olaf's at her house," he said.

  "I got a better one. How to explain that we know he was a serial murderer and didn't warn the police sooner."

  "Do you have Edward's cell phone?" I asked.

  He didn't argue, just leaned across and opened the glove compartment. I got the phone out.

  "Who you going to call?"

  "Itzpapalotl. She'll know the address."

  "She'll
eat Olaf's face."

  "Maybe, maybe not. Either way you better get us out of the parking area before Marks wakes up and starts screaming."

  He drove us out of the parking lot and started slowly down the street. I dialed information, and the operator was happy to dial The Obsidian Butterfly for me. It was daylight. I knew better than to ask for Itzpapalotl herself, so I asked for Pinotl and told them it was an emergency and it was Anita Blake. I think it was my name that got me through, as if they'd been expecting the call.

  Pinotl came on the line with his rich voice. "Anita, my mistress said you would call."

  I was betting that she'd been wrong on the why, but ... "Pinotl, I need the address for Professor Dallas's house."

  Silence on the other end of the phone.

  "She's in danger, Pinotl."

  "Then we will take care of it."

  "I'm going to have to call the police in on this, Pinotl. They'd shoot your werejaguars on sight."

  "You are worried about our people?" he said.

  "Give me the address, and I'll take care of it for you, Pinotl."

  Silence except for his breathing.

  "Tell your mistress, thanks for her help, Pinotl. I know I'm alive now because she helped me."

  "You are not angry that she did not tell you all she knew?"

  "She's a centuries old vampire. They can't help themselves sometimes."

  "She is a goddess."

  "We're just arguing semantics, Pinotl. We both know what she is. Please give me the address."

  He gave it to me. I read the directions to Bernardo, and off we went.

  64

  I CALLED THE POLICE on the way. I made it an anonymous call. Saying I'd heard screams. I hung up without giving my name. If Olaf wasn't there, then they'd scare the hell out of Dallas, and I'd apologize. I'd even pay for any busted locks.

  "Why didn't you tell them the truth?" Bernardo asked.

  "What? I think that some serial killer is there murdering her. And how do you know this, ma'am? Well, officer, you see it's like this. I've known he was a serial killer for days now, but our mutual friend Ted Forrester had forbidden him from attacking women while he was here helping us solve the mutilation murders. You've heard of the mutilation murders. Who is this? It's Anita Blake, the vampire executioner. And what does an executioner know about serial murderers? More than you'd think." I looked at Bernardo.