Edward said, “Anita?” It was a question, but I didn’t have an answer yet.
I blinked past the light, trying to see. The vampire put a hand on either side of my shoulders. His eyes were squeezed shut against the light. His face stretched wide with pain. The white white light glistened on fangs as he moved in to feed.
“Stop, or die,” I said.
I’m not sure he even heard me. His hand caressed the edge of my cheek, and it was like being touched by fleshy sticks. His hands didn’t even feel real. I yelled, “I’ll kill him.”
“Do so. It’s his choice.” Her voice was so matter of fact, so uncaring, that it made me not want to do it.
His hand grabbed my hair, tried to twist my face to one side. His head was drawn back for a strike, but he couldn’t push past the glare of the cross. But he might work up to it. As weak as he was, he should have run screaming from this much holy light.
“Anita.” Edward’s voice and it wasn’t a question now, more a preview.
The vampire let out a scream that made me gasp. His head threw back, then down, and his face moved in a white blur towards me. The gun went off before I realized I’d squeezed the trigger, just a reflex. A second gun echoed so close on my shot that it sounded like a single gunshot. The vamp jerked, and his head exploded. Blood and thicker things sprayed half my face.
I knelt in a sudden deafening silence. There was no sound, nothing but a fine, distant ringing in my ears, like tinny bells. I turned in a sort of slow motion to see the vamp’s body sprawled on its side. I got to my feet and still couldn’t hear anything. Sometimes that’s shock. Sometimes it’s just gunshots going off next to your ears.
I scraped at the blood and thicker pieces on the left side of my face. Edward handed me a white handkerchief, probably something Ted would carry, but I took it. I started trying to scrape the stuff off of me.
The cross was still glowing like a captive star. I was already deaf. If I didn’t stop having to squint around the light, I was going to be blind as well. I looked around the room. Most of the vamps had fled up the stairs away from the cross’s glow, but what was left huddled around their goddess, shielding her, I think, from us. I blinked through the glare, and I think I saw fear on one or two faces. You don’t see that often on several hundred years worth of vampire. It might have been the cross, but I didn’t think that was it. I slipped the cross back into my shirt. The cross was still cool silver. It never burned unless vampire flesh touched it. Then it would flare into actual flame and burn the vamp and any human flesh that happened to be touching it at the same time. Usually, the vamp would jerk away before you got past second degree burns so I’d never gotten a scar from one of my own crosses.
The vampires stayed in front of their mistress, and the fear was still there on at least one face. The cross could keep them at bay, but that wasn’t what they feared. I looked down at the body. The entrance hole was just a small red thing, with black scorch marks around it, but the exit hole was nearly a foot in diameter. There was no head on the body, only the lower jaw and a thin rim of back brain left. The rest had been blown in a wide spray across the floor and across me.
Edward’s mouth was moving, and sound came back in a kind of Doppler shift, so that I heard only the end of it. “. . . ammo are you using now?”
I told him.
He knelt by the body and inspected the chest wound. “I thought the Hornady XTP wasn’t supposed to make this much of a mess going out.”
His voice still sounded like it was distant, tinny, but I could hear again. It meant that my hearing would go back to normal eventually. “I don’t think they did any firing tests at point blank range.”
“It makes a nice hole at point blank range.”
“In like a penny, out like a pizza,” I said.
“You had questions about the murders?” Obsidian Butterfly said. “Ask them.”
She was standing in the middle of her people, but no longer shielded. I don’t know if she decided we weren’t going to shoot her, or if she thought it was cowardice to hide behind others, or if we’d passed some kind of test. But if she were willing to answer my questions, then I’d take it any way I could get it.
I saw Dallas and Olaf to one side of the vamps. Dallas had her face hidden against his chest, and he was holding her, comforting her, helping her not see the mess on the floor. Olaf was looking down at her as if she were something precious. It wasn’t love, more the way a man will look at a really nice car that he wants to own. He looked at her like she was a pretty thing that he’d wanted but hadn’t expected to get. He stroked her hair, running his fingers through the long dark ponytail over and over, playing with her hair, watching it fall against her back.
I wasn’t the only one watching them. “Cruz, take the professor upstairs. I think she’s seen enough for one night.”
A short male vamp, very Hispanic, went to them, but Olaf said, “I’ll take her upstairs.”
“No,” Edward said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Itzpapalotl said, “That will not be necessary.”
The three of us exchanged a glance, though I didn’t meet her eyes dead on. But there was an understanding between us, I think. Olaf needed to stay away from the professor. Maybe a state or two away from her.
Cruz pulled Dallas out of Olaf’s reluctant arms and led the crying woman up the stairs, and away from the horror we’d stretched out on the floor. Though we hadn’t made the vampire a horror, we just killed him. Itzpapalotl had starved him until he faced a glowing cross for the chance to feed. Starved him until he’d let two humans point guns at him and not even try to get away. He’d wanted to sink fangs into human flesh more than he’d wanted to live. I don’t usually feel sorry for vampires that try to feed off of me, especially without permission, but this one time I’d make an exception. He’d been pitiful. Now he was dead. Pity has never stopped me from pulling a trigger, and Edward didn’t feel pity. I could stare down at what was left of that skeletal body and think, poor thing, but I felt nothing about the death. It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel regret. I felt nothing, absolutely nothing.
I looked at Edward, and he looked at me, and I’d have given a great deal for a mirror right that second. Staring into Edward’s blank face, those empty eyes that felt nothing, I realized that I didn’t need a mirror. I already had one.
26
MAYBE I’D HAVE BEEN afraid of that revelation, but the vampires began to flow out towards us. Survival first, moral issues later. Richard might say that was one of my biggest problems. Jean-Claude wouldn’t. There’s more than one reason why Richard and I haven’t settled down to a happy ever after life, and there’s more than one reason why I haven’t cut Jean-Claude loose.
Itzpapalotl glided forward still shrouded in the scarlet cloak. It was so long that you couldn’t see her feet and she moved so smoothly that it looked like she was on wheels. There was something artificial about her.
The four silent women moved on her left, and something bothered me about the way they moved. It took me a second or two to realize what it was. They were moving in utter unison, perfect step. One lifted a hand to brush a strand of black hair from her face, and all the others followed the movement like puppets, though there was no stray hair on their faces. From the breaths that raised their chests, to the small jerk of a finger, they imitated each other. No, not imitated, that was too mild a word. They were like one being with four bodies. The effect was eerie because they didn’t look alike. One was short and square. One was tall and thin. The other two were delicate and did look something alike. All of them had paler skin than Itzpapalotl, as if in life they hadn’t been much darker than they were now.
The tall vamp that had tried to pull the starving vamp off me walked to her right. He was the tallest of the ones that looked pure Aztec, six feet at least, with shoulders and muscles to match. His hair fell in a black wash down his back, held from his face by a crown of feathers and gold. His nose was pierced, though that was
too mild a word for the three inches of thick gold that bisected his face. Gold earplugs stretched his earlobes to a thin line of flesh. His skin was the color that old ivory sometimes gets, not a pale gold, but a pale copper, palest bronze. It was a striking color with the coal black hair and the perfectly black eyes. He moved two steps back, at her right, and like the women, he moved as if this had always been his place.
Three male vamps moved a little distance from the man. They were all that shining ivory white that I was used to seeing. They were dressed in the same clothing as the bouncers, those skirt/thong bathing suit thingies. But they had no adornment. Their arms and legs were pale and empty. They were even barefoot. I knew servants when I saw them, or prisoners maybe.
One was medium height with curly brown hair cut short, and a darker brown line of beard and mustache outlining the perfect whiteness of the skin. The eyes were pale blue. The second man was shorter with short hair turned salt and pepper as if he’d died after the hair had gone grey. The face was lined, but strong, and the body still muscular, so that his age at death was hard to tell. Older than the others, fortyish, though I was no judge of age of death in vamps. His eyes were the dark grey of storm clouds, echoing his hair color. He held a leash in one hand, and on the end of that leash the third man crawled, not on all fours, but on his hands, and his feet, legs hunched monkey like, or like a whipped dog. His hair was short and a surprising yellow, curling soft. It was the only thing on him that looked alive. His skin was like old paper, clinging and yellowed to his bones. His eyes were sunk so far back into his head that I couldn’t tell what color they were.
The end of the entourage was five very Hispanic, Aztecy bodyguards. Bodyguards are bodyguards regardless of the culture, the century, or state of life, or would that be death? I knew muscle when I saw it, and the five vamps were muscle, even carrying obsidian blades, and obsidian-edged clubs, and looking somewhat less than serious in feathers and jewelry. They exuded that aura of badass.
Olaf had moved back to stand with us, and the three of us faced them. Bernardo had stayed near the stairway, making sure our retreat wasn’t cut off. So nice to work with other professionals. Olaf had his gun out now, too, and was watching the vamps with a look that wasn’t neutral. It was hostile. I didn’t know why, but he seemed pissed. Go figure.
The vamps stopped about eight feet from us. The dead vampire lay on the floor between us. The body had already stopped bleeding. When you take a head off of a vamp, they bleed just like a human, quarts and quarts of the red stuff. It is a freaking mess when you decapitate someone. But this vampire had bled only a small odd-shaped space on the stone floor, barely a foot across, and a second even smaller pool under the chest. Not nearly enough blood for what we’d done to him.
The silence seemed thicker than it should have, and Olaf filled it. “You can check his pulse if you want.”
“Olaf, don’t,” Edward said.
Olaf shifted, either uncomfortable, or fighting down the urge to do something worse than mouthing off. “You’re the boss,” he said, but not like he meant it.
“I doubt this one had a pulse,” I said, and I was looking at the vampires while I said it. “It takes energy to make a vamp’s heart beat and he didn’t have any.”
“You feel pity for him,” Itzpapalotl said.
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Your friend does not.”
I glanced at Edward. His face showed nothing. It was nice to know there were still some differences between us. I felt pity. He didn’t. “Probably he doesn’t.”
“But there is no regret in either of you, no guilt.”
“Why should we feel guilty? We just killed him. We didn’t turn him into a crawling, starved thing.”
Even under the masking cloak, I could feel her grow still with that awful stillness that only the old ones have. Her voice came warm with the first thread of anger. “You presume to judge me.”
“No, just stating facts. If he hadn’t been starved worse than any vamp I’ve ever seen outside of a coffin prison, he would never have attacked me.” I also thought that they could have tried harder to get him off of me, but didn’t say it out loud. I really didn’t want to piss her off with eighty or so vamps waiting upstairs between us and the door. That wasn’t even taking into account the werejaguars.
“And if I told my starved ones that they could feed off of you, all of them, what would they do?” she asked.
The starved vamp on the leash, looked up at that. His eyes never stayed on anyone too long, flitting from face to face to face, but he’d heard her.
My stomach jerked tight in a knot hard enough to hurt. I had to blow out a breath to be able to talk around the sudden flutter of my pulse. There’d been at least ten, fifteen of the starved ones. “They’d attack us,” I said.
“They would fall upon you like ravening dogs,” she said.
I nodded, hand settling more securely on the butt of my gun. “Yeah.” If she gave the order, my first bullet was going between her eyes. If I died, I wanted to take her with me. Vindictive, but true.
“The thought frightens you,” she said.
I tried to see her face in that hood, but some trick of shadow left only her small bowed mouth visible. “If you can feel all these emotions, then you can tell a lie from a truth.”
She lifted her face, a sudden defiant movement. A look passed over her face, the barest flicker across that calmness. She really couldn’t tell lie from truth. Yet she sensed regret, pity, fear. Truth and lie should have come in there somewhere.
“My starved ones are useful from time to time.”
“So you starve them deliberately.”
“No,” she said. “The great creator god sees they are weak and does not sustain them as he sustains us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They are allowed to feed as gods feed, not as animals.”
I frowned. “Sorry, I still don’t get it.”
“We will show you how a god feeds, Anita.” She said my name like it was meant to be said, making it a rolling three syllable word, making of the ordinary name something exotic.
“Shapeshifter coming down,” Bernardo said. He had his gun up and pointed.
“I have called a priest to feed the gods.”
“Let him come down,” I said. I looked at that delicate face and tried to read what was there, but there was nothing home that I could talk to, nothing I could understand. “I don’t mean to be insulting, my apologies if I am being insulting, but we came here to talk about the murders. I would like to ask you some questions.”
“Your vast knowledge of things arcane and things Aztec has brought us to you,” Edward said.
I fought not to raise eyebrows at him, just nodding. “Yeah, what he said.”
She actually smiled. “You still believe I and my people are merely vampires. You do not truly believe that we are gods.”
She had me there, but she couldn’t smell a lie. “I’m Christian. You saw that when the cross glowed. That means I’m a monotheist, so if you guys are gods, then it’s something of a problem for me.” That was so diplomatic, even I was impressed.
“We will prove it to you, then we will offer you hospitality as our guests, then we will talk business.”
I’ve learned over the years that if someone says they’re a god, you don’t argue with them unless you’re better armed. So I didn’t try and get the business moved up. She was nuts and had enough muscle backing her in this building to make her brand of craziness contagious, or even fatal. So we’d do arcane vampire shit, then when the self-proclaimed goddess was satisfied I’d get to ask my questions. How bad could it be, watching them prove they were gods? Don’t answer that.
The werejaguar that came through the door was the blue-eyed blond with his golden tan that had first passed so near our table that I’d touched his fur. He came through the door with a neutral face, empty-eyed as if he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be here.
His gaze took in the ro
om, and hesitated over the dead vamp in the middle. But he fell to one knee in front of Itzpapalotl, his back to us and our guns, fur-covered head bowed. “What would you have of me, holy mistress?”
I fought to keep my face blank. Holy mistress? Good grief.
“I want to show our visitors how a god is fed.”
He looked up then, looking into her face. “Who am I to worship, holy mistress?”
“Diego,” she said.
The brown-haired vampire startled at the name, and though his face was blank, empty, I knew he wasn’t happy. “Yes, my dark goddess, what would you have of me?”
“Seth will offer sacrifice to you.” She caressed a delicate hand across the fur of the man’s hood.
“As you like, my dark goddess,” Diego said. His voice was as empty as his face tried to be.
The werejaguar, Seth, crawled on all fours, mimicking the animal whose skin he wore. He pressed his forehead to his hands, lying nearly prostrate at Diego’s feet.
“Rise, priest of our dark goddess, and make sacrifice to us.”
The werejaguar stood, and he was nearly half a foot taller than the vampire. He did something on the front of the jaguar skin, and it opened, enough for him to lift the headpiece over his head, so that the animal’s sightless glass eyes stared back at us over the man’s shoulders. The head flopped bonelessly like a broken-necked thing. His hair was a rich honey blond, sun-streaked, held back in a long club, woven back and forth so that it looked like a lot of hair, but held close to his head so the jaguar skin would slip on easily. It was just like the hairdo on the one who had gotten cut up by the priest backstage.
“Turn so our visitors can see all,” Itzpapalotl said.
The men turned so we had a side view. The werejaguar’s earlobes were covered in; thick white scars. He drew a small silver knife from his belt, the hilt was carved jade. He placed the sliver blade against his earlobe, steadying it with his other hand and sliced it open. Blood spilled in scarlet lines on his fingers, down the blade, to drip on the shoulders of the jaguar skin.
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 6-10 Page 154