Obsidian Butterfly (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 9)

40

I COULDN'T REGAIN the link with the thing without stopping and concentrating. I made the decision to keep chasing, and hoped I didn't miss it as I ran past the doors. Besides, on the 19th floor there was a huddled group of water-soaked patients with a nurse. They all pointed wordlessly down. At 17 there was a man with a bouquet of flowers with a bloody lip that babbled at me and pointed down. The door opened on 14, and nurse in a pink smock rushed out and ran into me. She screamed, jerking back against the wall, staring at me with huge eyes. She had a baby in each arm, in those little blankets. One even had its little pink knit hat still in place. Both babies were screaming, their high cat-like wails competing with the fire alarm.

The nurse just stared at me, unable to speak or afraid to. Maybe it was the gun, or maybe not all the blood had washed away in the sprinklers. I raised my voice above the noise, "Is it on this floor?"

She just nodded. She was mumbling something over and over. I had to lean into her to understand it. "It's in the nursery. It's in the nursery. It's in the nursery."

I didn't think my adrenaline could get any higher. I was wrong. I could suddenly feel the blood rushing through my body, feel my heart like a painful thing in my chest. I opened the door, scanning the hallway with the Browning. Nothing moved. The corridor stretched long and empty with too many closed doors for comfort. The fire alarm was still screaming, making my skin tight with the noise. But even over the screech of the alarm I could hear the babies

... crying ... screaming.

I slipped the phone out of my pocket, hit the button he'd told me to hit earlier, and started jogging down the hallway towards the sounds. Ramirez answered it in the middle of the first ring. "Anita?"

"I'm on maternity. It's the 14th floor. A nurse says the thing is in the nursery." I was at the first corner. I threw myself against the far wall, but didn't really stop. I'm usually more cautious around corners, but the crying was getting closer, more piteous.

"I'm on my way," Ramirez said.

I hit the button that cut us off, but still had it in my hand when I came around the next corner. There was a body pushed through a pane of wired safety glass. I could tell it was a man, but that was about all. The face looked like hamburger. I stepped on a stethoscope on the floor below him. Doctor or nurse. I didn't check for a pulse. If he was alive, I didn't know how to help him. If he was dead, it didn't matter. One last door, then a long expanse of window. But I didn't need to see the long window to know it was the nursery. I could hear the babies crying. Even over the fire alarm the sound of those panicked cries made my heart flutter, made me want to run and help them. A hard wiring response that I hadn't even known I had made me reach for the door. I still had the phone in my left, and made one attempt to shove it in my pocket. The bite on my left hand made me awkward. The phone slipped, and I let it fall to the floor.

The handle turned, but the door stopped just inches open. I put my shoulder into it, and realized it was a body, an adult body. I backed off and hit it again, moving it by painful inches. There was a woman screaming, not just the babies. I couldn't open the door. Dammit!

Then the window crashed outward in a spray of glass and a body. A woman hit the ground and lay there sprawled and bleeding. I left the wedged door and went for the window. There were shards of glass like small swords on the bottom of the break. But I'd taken falls in Judo higher than this. I'd practiced falling for years. I glanced in to check one thing. The herd of little plastic cribs was pushed to either side. I had room. I took a running leap at it and threw myself over the broken glass, rolling as I fell. I only had one free hand to slap the floor with and take the impact of the fall, but I wanted the gun in my hand ready to fire. I hit the floor, and the force of my blow, the jump, whatever, was still there, still rolling me. I used it to come to my feet before I even knew what was in the room.

I didn't so much see what was happening as take pictures of isolated things. I registered the overturned cribs: a tiny, tiny baby lying on the floor like a broken doll, the center of its body eaten away, like the center sucked out of a piece of candy; cribs still standing upright splattered with blood, some with tiny twisted bodies inside, some empty except for the blood; then in the far corner was the monster.

It held a tiny blanket-wrapped bundle. Tiny fists waving in the air. I couldn't hear it crying. I couldn't hear anything. There was nothing but sight, and that skinless face bending over the baby. My first bullet took it through the forehead, the second through the face as its head was thrown back by the impact of the first shot. It raised the struggling baby up in front of its face, and our eyes locked over the tiny form. It looked at me. The bullet holes in its face filled in like soft clay. I fired into its stomach because that's what I could hit without endangering the baby. It jerked back, but it threw itself to the floor. It didn't fall. I hadn't really hurt it. It took cover behind a row of tiny cribs. They were all on thin-legged wheels. I dropped to a crouch and sighted through that forest of thin metal legs, and saw it crouching, bringing the baby to its mouth.

There was no clear shot. I fired anyway, shooting into the wall beside it. It flinched, scuttling away, but didn't drop the baby. I fired through the legs of the wheeled cribs, keeping it moving. Where was Ramirez?

It stood and ran straight at me. I fired into its body. It shuddered but kept coming. The baby was naked except for a little diaper now, but it was alive. The thing threw the baby at me. It wasn't even a decision. I just caught cradling it to my chest, both hands compromised. The monster smashed into me. The momentum took us all back through the window I'd come through. We landed with the monster on bottom as if we'd flipped in midair. My gun barrel was pressed into its stomach, and I started pulling the trigger with my right hand before I even started cradling the baby tight with my left.

The creature jerked like a broken-backed snake. I got to my knees beside it, firing until the gun clicked empty. I dropped the Browning and went for the Firestar. I had it almost pointed when it hit me with the back of one hand, and the blow sent me crashing into the wall. I'd tried to protect the baby from the impact and had taken more of it than was good for me. I was stunned for a second, and it grabbed me by the hair, turning me towards it.

I fired into its chest and stomach. Each bullet made the body jerk, and somewhere around the sixth or seventh shot, it let go of my hair. A bullet later and the Firestar clicked empty. It stood over me, and that lipless mouth smiled.

The fire alarm stopped. The sudden silence was almost frightening. I could hear my heart pounding in my head. The baby in my arms was suddenly piercingly loud, more frantic sounding. The thing tensed, and I knew a second before it came that it was going to rush me. I used that second to try and put the baby on a clear piece of floor. I was half-turned when it picked me up and flung me into the opposite wall. I didn't have the baby to worry about anymore. I slapped my hands and arms into the wall taking as much of the impact as I could. When it closed the distance, I wasn't stunned. It grabbed one upper arm, and I struggled to keep it from grabbing the other.

I knew how to grapple, but not with something that was slick and skinless. There was nothing to grab onto. It picked me up by my shirt, the other hand under my thigh, and dead lifted me like a barbell. I hit the wall as though it had tried to throw me through it. I tried to protect myself, but I slid to the floor, stunned, unable to breathe or think for a space of heartbeats.

It knelt beside me, tearing my shirt out of my pants, baring my stomach and my bra. It put a hand under my back and lifted me almost gently, bowing my back, raising me up, and lowering its face towards my bare flesh, as if it meant to kiss me. I heard a voice in my head. It whispered, "I hunger." Everything seemed distant, dreamlike, and I knew that I was close to passing out. I raised my hand and almost didn't feel like it was mine. But I moved it. I caressed that slick, fleshless face. And it rolled those strange lidless eyes up at me as it lowered its mouth to feed. My thumb slid along the flesh, feeling, feeling for the eye. It didn't stop me. It bit into my upper stomach, as my thumb slid into its eye. We both screamed.

It reared back, dropping me to the floor. It was a short fall, and I was on my knees, edging away from it when the first bullet whirled it around. Ramirez came down the hallway from the direction of the fire stairs, firing in a two-handed stance as he advanced down the hall.

The body jerked, but the wounds were closing faster and faster, as if the more we shot it, the better the flesh was at healing the damage. I expected the thing to attack Ramirez or me, or escape, but it didn't. It leaped into the broken window of the nursery. And I knew what it meant to do. It wasn't trying to escape. It was trying to take as many lives as it could before we destroyed it. Its master was feeding off the deaths.

Ramirez went to the door that I'd tried earlier. I left him banging against it with his shoulder. I pulled myself up to the window. It was tearing the blanket off of another baby, like unwrapping a present. I didn't know where my guns were. I had nothing left to throw at it. It turned in silhouette, and the baby was grabbing for the air with tiny matchstick arms. The monster's mouth widened showing a mouth already red with blood.

Ramirez had gotten the door open enough to slip inside. He shot at its legs and lower body, afraid to try a head shot so close to the baby. The monster ignored him, and everything slowed down to a crystalline crawl. The face lowered, mouth wide to take that tiny heart. I screamed, and I put all my rage, all my helplessness into that shout. I pulled that power that let me raise the dead, I pulled it around me like a shining thing and flung it outward. I could actually see it in my mind like a thin white rope of fog. I threw my aura, my essence around the thing. I was a necromancer, and all this fucking thing was, was a corpse.

I screamed, "Stop!"

It froze in mid-motion, the baby almost at its mouth. I felt the power that animated it. I felt it inside that dead shell. Its master's power was like a dark flame inside it. I had a hand outstretched as if I needed it to point my power. I opened my hand and flared that white rope over the corpse. I covered it in my aura like growing a new body. I closed my aura like a fist around the thing and severed it from the power that made it move. The corpse shuddered, then collapsed instantly like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

I felt its master. I felt him like a cold wind across my skin. I felt him coming for me, following the line of my own aura towards me, like a string through amaze. I tried to pull it back, tried to fold it into myself again, but I'd never tried anything like this before, and I wasn't fast enough. Your aura is your magical shield, your armor. When I lashed out at the corpse, I'd opened myself to anything and everything. I thought I'd understood the risks, but I was wrong.

The master's power lashed out at me like fire following a trail of gasoline, and when it hit, there was a moment where I threw back my head, and I couldn't breathe. I felt my heart flutter and stop. I felt my body fall to the floor, but it didn't hurt, as if I were already numb. My vision went gray, then black, and there was a voice in the blackness. "I have many servants. That you stopped this one is nothing to me. I will feed through others. You die in vain."

I tried to form words to answer that voice and found that I could. "Fuck you."

I felt his anger, his outrage that I could defy him,

I tried to laugh at him, at his impotence, but there wasn't enough left of me to laugh. The darkness became something thicker. I passed beyond the master's voice, beyond my own, then there was ... nothing.