Obsidian Butterfly (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 9)

25

I DIDN'T KNOW where to go, but Dallas did. She led us to a small door set to one side of the temple steps, hidden by curtains. The door was still open, like a black mouth. Steps led down. Where else? Just once I'd like to see a vamp whose major hideout was up instead of down.

Dallas walked down the steps with a spring in her step and a song in her heart. Her ponytail bounced as she skipped down the steps. If she had a single misgiving about going down into that darkness, it didn't show. Dallas confused me. On one hand she didn't see that Olaf was dangerous, and she wasn't afraid of any of the monsters in the club. On the other hand, she'd believed me when I told her I'd cut her heart out. I'd seen it in her eyes. How could she believe that threat from a total stranger and not see the other dangers? Didn't make sense to me, and I didn't like what I didn't understand. She seemed utterly harmless, but her reactions were weird, so I put a question mark by her. Which meant, I wouldn't be turning my back on her or treating her like a civilian until I was convinced that that was what she was.

I was going too slowly for Olaf. He pushed past me and followed Dallas's bouncing ponytail down the stairs. He had to stoop to keep from bumping his head on the ceiling, but he didn't seem to mind. Fine with me. Let him take the first bullet. But I followed them down into the dark. No one had offered me violence, not really, not yet. So it seemed rude to have a gun naked in my hand, but ... I'd apologize later. Unless I knew the vampire personally I liked having a loaded gun in hand the first time I paid a call. Or maybe it was the narrow stairs, the close press of stone as if it would close around us like a fist and crush us. Have I mentioned that I'm claustrophobic?

The stairs didn't go down very far, and there was no door at the end of them. Jean-Claude's retreat in St. Louis was something of an underground fortress. The barely hidden doorway, the short stairs, no second door ¨C arrogance, again.

Olaf blocked my view of Dallas, but I saw him reach the dimly lit doorway at the bottom. He had to stoop even further to get through the door and hesitated before standing up on the other side. There was a sense of movement around him or rather to either side of him. Quick, almost not there, like things you see out of the comer of your eyes. It reminded me of the hands that had stripped Cesar as he walked between light and darkness.

He stayed just in the doorway, his body nearly filling it completely, blocking what little light there had been. I caught the faintest edge of Dallas. She led him away from the door further into the firelit dark.

I called down, "Olaf, are you okay?"

No answer.

Edward tried. "Olaf?"

"I am fine."

I glanced back at Edward. We had a moment of staring into each other's eyes, both of us thinking the same thing. This could be a trap. Maybe she was behind the murders. Maybe she just wanted to kill the Executioner. Or maybe she was a centuries-old vampire, and she just wanted to hurt us for the hell of it.

"Could she make Olaf lie?"

"You mean mind tricks?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Not this fast. I may not like him, but he's stronger than that." I looked at him, searching his face in the dim light. "Could they force him to lie?"

"You mean a knife at his throat?" Edward said.

"Yeah."

He gave a faint smile. "No, not this quick, not ever."

"You're sure of that?" I asked.

"My life on it."

"We're betting all our lives on it."

He nodded. "Yes, we are." But if Edward said that Olaf wouldn't sell us out on fear of death or pain, then I believed him. Edward didn't always understand why people did what they did, but he was usually right about the fact that they were going to do it, Motive evaded him, but he was seldom wrong. So ... I kept walking down the steps.

I strained my peripheral vision, trying to see on either side of the doorway as I walked through it. I didn't have to bend over to go through. The room was square and small, maybe sixteen by sixteen. It was also packed nearly corner to corner with vampires.

I put my back against the wall to the right of the door, gun clutched two-handed, pointed at the ceiling. I wanted badly to point it at someone, anyone. My shoulders ached with the tension of not doing it. No one was threatening me. No one was doing a damn thing except standing, staring, milling around the way people do. So why did I feel like I should have entered the room shooting?

Tall vampires, short vampires, thin vampires, fat vampires, every size, every shape, and almost every race, moved around that small stone room. After what had happened upstairs with their master, I was careful not to make eye contact with any of them. My gaze swept over the room, taking in the pale faces, and getting a quick head count. When I got over sixty, I realized the room was at least twice the size I'd originally thought. It had to be just to hold this many of them. It only looked small because it was packed so tight. The torchlight added to the illusion, flickering, dancing, uncertain light.

Edward stayed in the doorway, his back to the doorframe, shoulder touching mine lightly. His gun was up like mine, his eyes searching the vamps. "What's wrong?"

"What's wrong? Look at them." My voice was breathy, not because I was trying to whisper ¨C that would have been useless ¨C but because my throat was tight, my mouth dry.

He scanned the crowd again. "So?"

My gaze flashed to him, then back to the waiting vampires. "Shit, Ed ... Ted. Shit." It wasn't just the number of them. It was my own ability to sense them that was the problem. I'd been around a hundred vamps before, but they hadn't affected me like this. I didn't know if having walled off my link to Jean-Claude made me more vulnerable to them, or if my necromancy had grown since then. Or maybe Itzpapalotl was just that much more powerful than the other master had been. Maybe it was her power that had made them so much more than most vamps. There were close to a hundred in this room. I was getting impressions from all of them, or most of them. My shields were great now, I could keep out a lot of the preternatural stuff, but this was too much for me. If I had to guess, there wasn't a vamp in the room under a hundred. I got flashes from individual ones if I looked at them too long, a slap in the face of their age, their power. The four females in the right corner were all over five hundred years old. They watched me with dark eyes, dark-skinned, but not as dark as they would have been with a little sun. The four of them watched me with patient, empty faces.

Her voice came from the center of the room, but she was hidden behind the vampires, shielded by them. "I have offered you no violence, yet you have drawn weapons. You seek my aid, yet you threaten me."

"It's not personal, Itz ... " I stumbled over her name.

"You may call me Obsidian Butterfly." It was odd talking to her without being able to glimpse her through the waiting figures.

"It's not personal, Obsidian Butterfly. I just know that once I put up the gun, chances of drawing it again before one of your brood rips my throat out is damn small."

"You mistrust us," she said.

"As you mistrust us," I said.

She laughed then. Her laughter was the sound of a young woman, normal but the strained echoes from the other vampires were anything but normal. The laughter held a wild note to it, a desperation, as if they were afraid not to laugh. I wondered what the penalty was for not following her lead.

The laughter faded away, except for one high pitched masculine sound. The other vampires went still, that impossible stillness where they seem like well-made statues, things made of stone and paint, not real, not alive. They waited like a host of empty things. Waited for what? The only sound was that high, unhealthy laughter, rising up and up like the sounds the movies have you hear in insane asylums, or mad scientists' laboratories. The sound raised the hair on my arms, and it wasn't magic. It was just creepy.

"If you put up your guns, I will send most of my people away. That is fair, is it not?"

It was fair, but I didn't like it. I liked having the gun naked in my hands. Of course, the gun only worked if shooting a few of them would stop the rest from rushing us, and it wouldn't. If she said, go to hell, they'd start digging a hole. If she told them to rush us, they most certainly would. So the guns were just a security blanket, a delaying tactic before the end. It took only a few seconds to think it through, but that awful laughter kept going like it was one of those creepy dolls with a laugh track inside of it.

I felt Edward's shoulder pressing against mine. He was waiting for me to give the answer, trusting my expertise. I hoped I didn't get us killed. I put the gun back in its holster. I rubbed my hand against my leg. I'd been holding the gun too long, and too damn tight. Me, nervous?

Edward put his gun up. Bernardo was still in the stairway, and I realized that he was making sure nothing came down the stairs and blocked our retreat. It was kind of nice working with more than just two people and knowing everyone on your side was willing to shoot anything that moved. No bleeding hearts, no empathy, just business.

Of course, Olaf was off to one side with Dallas. He had never pulled a gun. He had waded into this many vampires, following her bouncing ponytail to destruction. Or at least to potential destruction.

The vampires drew a breath, each chest rising as one, as if they were many bodies with one mind. Life, for lack of a better term, flowed back into them. Some of them looked almost human, but many of them were pale and starved, and weak. Their faces were too thin, as if the bones of their skull would push out through the sickly skin. They were all pale, but the natural skin color of many was darker than Caucasian, so even pale, they weren't the ghostly paleness I was used to seeing. I realized with something like shock that most of the vampires I knew were Caucasian. Here, white skin was the minority. A nice reversal.

The vampires began to glide towards the door. Or some of them glided. Some of them shuffled as if they didn't have energy to pick their feet up, as if they were truly ill. To my knowledge vampires couldn't catch any disease, but these vampires looked sick.

One of them stumbled and fell at my feet, landing heavily on hands and knees. He stayed where he was, head hanging down. His skin was a dirty white like snow that had lain too long by a busy road, a greyish white. The other vampires moved around him as if he were a bump in the road. They flowed past him, and he didn't seem to notice. His hands looked like the hands of a skeleton, barely covered with skin. His hair was a blond so light, it looked white, hanging down around his face. He raised his face up, slowly, and it was like looking at a skull. His eyes had sunk so far into his head that they seemed to burn at the end of long black tunnels. I wasn't afraid of looking in this one's eyes. He didn't have enough juice to roll me with his eyes, I could tell that just standing here. The bones of his cheeks pushed so hard against the thin skin that it looked like they should tear through.

Apale tongue slid from between thin nearly invisible lips. His eyes were a pale, pale green, like bad emeralds. The thin walls of his nose flared as if he were scenting the air. He probably was. Vamps didn't rely on scent the way shapeshifters did, but they had a much better sense of smell than humans. He closed his eyes in the middle of drawing a deep breath. He shuddered and seemed to swoon, faint. I'd never seen a vamp act like this. It caught me off guard, and that was my fault.

I saw him tense, and my hand was going for the Browning, but there was no time. He was less than a foot away. I never even touched the gun before he slammed into me. He knocked the breath from my body. His hand was on my face, turning my head to one side, baring my neck, before I had time to breathe. I had a sense of movement even though I couldn't see him. I felt his body tense and I knew he was coming in for a strike. He made no effort to control my hands. I kept going for the gun, but I would never get it out and pointed in time. He was going to sink fang into my neck, and I couldn't stop it. It was like a car accident. I just had time to see it coming and to think, "I can't stop it." There wasn't even time to be afraid.

Something jerked the vampire backwards. His hand curled in my jacket, and didn't let go. His desperate grip nearly pulled me off my feet, but I got the gun out before I worried about staying on my feet.

A large, very Aztec-looking vamp had the skeletal vamp, holding him pinned against his body, only that one arm with its clutching hand not pressed to the larger man's body.

Edward had his gun out pointed at the vampires. He'd gotten to his gun first, but then he hadn't been shoved up against a wall and manhandled. Or would that be vampire-handled?

The big vamp jerked the thin one hard enough that he nearly pulled me off my feet, but that one clutching hand stayed curled in my jacket, catching on the shirt underneath. I had the Browning pointed at the vamp's chest, though I wasn't sure if the Hornady ammo was safe to shoot at arm's distance into one target pressed directly in front of another person. I wasn't sure if the ammo would go through the first vamp and into the second. The second vamp had saved me. It really wouldn't be nice to blow a hole in him.

The other vampires were leaving the room in a hurrying line to get past us and up the stairs, out of harm's way. Cowards. But it was thinning out the ranks, which would be great. Eventually, I'd care that there weren't so damn many vamps in the room, but right now the world was narrowed down to the vamp that had hold of me. First things first.

The big vamp kept backing up, trying to get the skeletal one to let go of me. We kept moving further into the room. Edward paced us, gun held two-handed pointed at the vampire's head. I finally put the barrel of my gun underneath the vamp's chin. I could blow his brains up without hitting the second vampire.

Obsidian Butterfly's voice slashed through the room like a whip. The sound made me wince, shoulders tightening as if it had been a blow. "These are my guests. How dare you attack them!"

The skeletal vampire started to cry, and his tears were clear, human. Vampire's tears are tinged red. They cry bloody tears. "Please, please let me feed, please!"

"You feed as we all feed, as befits a god."

"Please, please, mistress, please."

"You disgrace me before our visitors." Then she spoke low and rapidly in a language that was sort of Spanish sounding, but it wasn't Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, but I've heard it spoken often enough to know it when I hear it, and this wasn't it. Whatever she was saying, upset both vampires.

The big one pulled so hard that he finally jerked me off my feet because the other vamp was still holding on. I ended up on my knees, my jacket and shirt dangling from the vamp's hand, one arm pulled up at an awkward angle. My gun was pressed into his stomach now, and again I wondered if at point blank range the new ammo would kill both vamps? It was a miracle that I hadn't accidentally shot his head off. Edward was still there, gun pointed at the vamp's head. The first hint I had that something else had gone wrong was a faint glow. The glow grew into something pure and white. My cross had spilled out of my shirt.

The vampire kept his grip on me, but started to scream in a high pitiful voice. The cross flared bright and brighter until I had to turn my head and shield my eyes. It was like having magnesium burning around your neck. So bright, it only got this bright when something very bad was near. I didn't think the something bad was the thing still hanging onto me. I was betting the cross was glowing for her benefit, maybe others' but mostly hers. A lot of things in the room could kill me, but nothing else in the room was worth this much of a light show.

"Let him go to his destiny," she said.

I felt the arm that was still pulling so desperately, go limp. I felt him kneeling, felt it through the barrel of the gun still pressed against him.

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 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 line, 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.