Obsidian Butterfly (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 9)

42

I WOKE UP SMELLING sage incense. Sage for cleansing and ridding you of negativity, or so my teacher Marianne was fond of telling me when I complained about the smell. Sage incense always gave me a headache. Was I in Tennessee with Marianne? I didn't remember going there. I opened my eyes to see where I was, and it was a hospital room. If you wake up in enough of them, you recognize the signs.

I lay there blinking into the light, happy to be awake. Happy to be alive. A woman came to stand by the bed. She was smiling. She had shoulder-length black hair, cut blunt around a strong face. Her eyes seemed too small for the rest of her face, but those eyes stared down at me like she knew things I didn't, and they were good things or at least important ones. She was wearing something long and flowing, violet with a hint of red in the pattern.

I tried to talk, cleared my throat. The woman got a glass from the small bedside table, her many necklaces clinking as she moved. She bent the straw so I could drink. One of the necklaces was a pentagram.

"Not a nurse," I said. My voice still sounded rough. She offered the water again, and I took it. I tried again, and this time my voice sounded more like me. "You're not a nurse."

She smiled, and the smile turned an ordinary face into something lovely, just as the burning intelligence in her eyes made her striking. "What was your first clue?" She had a soft rolling accent that I couldn't place; Mexican, Spanish, but not.

"You're too well dressed for one thing, and the pentagram." I tried to point at the necklace, but my arm was taped to a board with an IV running into my skin. The hand was bandaged, and I remembered the corpse biting me. I finished the gesture with my right hand, which seemed unharmed. My left arm seemed to have a sign over it that said cut here, bite here, whatever here. I moved the fingers of my left hand to see if I could. I could. It didn't even really hurt, just tight, as if the skin needed to stretch a little.

The woman was watching me with those eyes of hers. "I am Leonora Evans. I believe you've met my husband."

"You're Doctor Evans' wife?"

She nodded.

"He mentioned you were a witch."

She nodded, again. "I arrived at the hospital in the ... how do you say, nick of time, for you." Her accent thickened when she said, how do you say.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

She sat down in the chair beside the bed, and I wondered how long she'd been sitting there, watching me. "They restarted your heart, but they couldn't keep life in your body."

I shook my head, and the beginnings of a headache was starting behind my eyes. "Can you put out the incense? Sage always gives me a headache."

She didn't question it, just got up and moved to one of those little folding tables on wheels that they have in hospitals. There was incense stuck in a small brazier, a long wooden wand, a small knife, and two candles burning. It was an altar, her altar, or a portable version of it.

"Don't take this wrong, but why are you here and a nurse isn't?"

She spoke with her back to me as she quenched the incense. "Because if the creature that attacked you tried to kill you a second time, the nurse would probably not even notice it was happening until it was too late." She came and sat back down by the bed.

I stared at her. "I think the nurse would notice if a flesh-eating corpse came into the room."

She smiled and it was patient, even condescending. "You and I both know that as horrible as its servants are, the true danger is in the master."

My eyes widened. I couldn't help it. Fear thudded in my throat. "How did you ... know that?"

"I touched his power when I helped cast him out of you. I heard his voice, felt his presence. He was willing you to die, Anita, draining you of life."

I swallowed, my pulse still too fast. "I'd like a nurse now, please."

"You're afraid of me?" She smiled when she said it.

I started to say no, but then ... "Yeah, but it's not personal. Let's just say after my brush with death, I'm not sure who to trust, magically speaking."

"Are you saying I saved you because this master allowed me to save you?"

"I don't know."

She frowned for the first time. "Trust me on this, Anita. It was not easy to save you. I had to encircle you with protection, and some of that protection was my own power, my own essence. If I had not been strong enough, if the names I called on for aid had not been strong enough, I would have died with you."

I looked up at her and wanted to believe her, but ... "Thank you."

She sighed, settling the skirt of her dress with fingers aglitter with rings. "Very well, I will fetch you a familiar face, but then we must talk. Your friend Ted told me of the marks that bind you to the werewolf and the vampire."

Something must have shown on my face because she said, "I needed to know in order to help you. I'd saved your life by the time he arrived here, but I was trying to fix your aura, and I couldn't." She passed a hand just above my body and I felt that trail of warmth that was her power caressing over mine. She hesitated over my chest, over my heart. "There is a hole here as if there is a piece of yourself missing." Her hands slid further down my body and hesitated low on my stomach, or high on my abdomen depending on how you looked at it. "Here is another hole. They are both chakra points, important energy points for your body. Bad places to have no ability to shield from magical attack."

My heart was back to beating faster than it should have. "They are closed. I've worked for the last six months to close them up."

Leonora shook her head, taking her hands gently back from me. "If I understand what your friend told me of this triumvirate of power you are a part of, then these spaces are like electrical sockets in the wall of your aura, your body. The two creatures have the plugs that fit their respective sockets."

"They aren't creatures," I said.

"Ted painted a very unflattering picture of them."