Obsidian Butterfly (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 9)

Something was happening to the body. The power broke like a cloud bursting with rain, and that invisible rain broke over the body, over the room, over us all, but the focus was that dried thing. The skin began to move, to twitch. It filled out as if water flowed beneath it. Something liquid moved under that dry, wasted skin, and where it flowed the skin began to stretch. It was like watching one of those blow up dolls fill up. Flesh, flesh was flowing under the skin. It plumped like some obscene kind of dough. The body, the man, began to thrash and twist against the sides of the coffin. The chest finally rose, drawing in a great draught of air, as if he were struggling back from the dead. It was like the opposite of that death rattle where the breath flows away for the last time. Of course, that was exactly what it was: life returning, the last breath being drawn back in. When he had air to breathe, he began to scream. One long ragged shriek after another. As fast as his healing chest could bring in the air, he screamed.

The dry hair on his head turned curly, brown, and soft. His skin was tanned and young, smooth and flawless. He'd been under thirty when he went into the coffin. Who knew how long he'd been in there? Even after he looked human again, he kept shrieking, as if he had been waiting a very long time to scream.

A woman near the front screamed and took off running for the door. The vampires had moved up quietly through the tables. I hadn't sensed them over the suffocating flow of magic, and the sheer horror of the show. Careless of me. A vampire caught the running woman, held her, and she grew instantly still. He led her quietly back to her table, to the man that was standing, wondering what he should do. The vampires moved through the crowd touching someone here, stroking a hand there, soothing, soothing, telling the great lie. It was safe, it was peaceful, it was good.

Ramirez watched the vampires. He turned to me. "What are they doing?"

"Soothing the crowd so they don't all bolt for the exits."

"They aren't allowed to use one on one hypnosis."

"I don't think it's personal, more like crowd hypnosis." I looked back to the stage and found the man had collapsed onto the stage, pushing his way out of the coffin as soon as he got the strength. He was trying to crawl away.

Pinotl appeared in the growing circle of light. The man screamed and held his hands up in front of his face as if to ward off a blow. Pinotl spoke, and he didn't yell, so he must have been using a microphone of some kind. "Have you learned humility?" he asked.

The man whimpered and hid his face.

"Have you learned obedience?"

The man nodded his head over and over, still hiding his face. He started to cry, great sobs that made his shoulders shake. Three rows out and I could hear him sobbing.

Pinotl motioned and the two bouncers that had opened the coffin walked on stage. They lifted the weeping man up, carrying him between them. His legs didn't seem to move yet, so they carried him, with an arm on either of their shoulders, his feet dangling off the floor. He wasn't a small man, and again you got that sense of how strong the two men were. They were human, too, not wereanything.

Two werejaguars walked on stage in their spotted skin clothes, and between them they held another man. No, not a man, a wereanimal. It was Seth. He'd been stripped down to a G-string that left very little to the imagination. His long yellow hair was unbound, streaked with light and color. He didn't struggle as they brought him up on stage. The jaguar men had him kneel in from of Pinotl.

"Do you acknowledge our dark goddess as your one and true mistress?"

Seth nodded. "I do." His voice didn't have the resonance of the other man's, and I doubted that the people in the back could hear him.

"She has given you life, Seth, and it is right that she should ask you give that life back to her."

"Yes," Seth said.

"Then I will be her hand, and take that which is hers." He cradled Seth's face between his hands. It was gentle. The two jaguar men let go of Seth and backed away. But they stayed close, almost as if afraid that he might run. But his face was turned upward with a near beatific expression on it, as if this were wonderful. He'd been so afraid of being tortured by Itzpapalotl's four sisters weird, and yet now he seemed at peace with what they were about to do. I thought I knew, and I hoped I was wrong. Just once when I expect something truly hideous is about to happen, I'd like to be wrong. It would be a nice change.

It wasn't flashy. There was no fire or light or even a shimmer of heat. Lines appeared on Seth's twenty-something skin. The muscles under his skin began to shrink as though he had a wasting disease, but what should have taken months was happening in seconds. No matter how willing the sacrifice, it can still hurt. Seth started screaming as fast as he could draw breath. His lungs were working better than the other man's, and he drew breath so fast, it was like one continuous shriek. The skin darkened as it drew in and in like something were sucking him dry. It was like watching a balloon shrivel. Except there was muscle and when the muscle vanished, there was bone, and finally there was nothing but dried skin over bones, and still he screamed.

I've become something of a connoisseur of screams over the years, and I've heard some good ones. Some of them have even been mine, but I'd never heard anything like this. The sound stopped being human and became like the high-pitched sound of some wounded animal, but underneath it all you knew, knew at a level that you couldn't even explain, that it was a person.

Finally, there was no more air for screaming, but that dry, empty mouth kept opening and closing, opening and closing. Long after the screaming stopped, that skeletal thing was still writhing, still flinging its head from side to side.

Pinotl kept his hands pressed to Seth's face. He held him, and it looked gentle the whole time, but he had to be gripping with all the strength he had because he never lost his grip. While the flesh of that handsome face shriveled and died between his hands, Pinotl never moved. And through it all, Seth never once raised his hands up to save himself. He struggled because he couldn't not struggle, it hurt that much, but he never raised his hands against the other man. A willing sacrifice, a fit sacrifice.

My throat was tight, and something burned behind my eyes. I just wanted it over now. I just wanted it to stop. But it didn't stop. The skeletal thing that had been Seth kept twitching, opening and closing its mouth, as if trying to scream.

Pinotl looked up, breaking eye contact with Seth for a heartbeat. The two jaguar men that had escorted him onto the stage came into the light. One of them held a silver needle with black thread on it. The other held a pale green ball, tiny, the size of a marble maybe. If I'd been sitting much further out, I'd have never known what it was. Jade, I think, a jade ball. They placed it in that gaping mouth, and the mouth closed. The other jaguar began to sew his mouth shut, driving the silver needle through the dry lipless flesh, tugging it tight.

I looked at the table too, resting my forehead on the cool stone of the table. I would not faint. I never fainted. But I had a sudden flash of the creature that Nicky Baco had created out of the werewolves. Some of them had had their mouths sewn shut. I'd never seen a power like this. It was too big a coincidence that two people in one town could do it and not be connected.

Ramirez touched my shoulder. I raised my head and shook it. "I'm all right." I looked up and they were putting Seth in the coffin. I knew without trying to sense it that he was still in there. Still aware. He could not have understood what he was letting them do to him. He couldn't have. Could he?

Pinotl turned to the audience, and his eyes glowed with black fire the way a vampire's do when their power is high. Black flames licked around his eye sockets, and his skin seemed to glow with the power.

The thing that Seth had become was covered with the same black glittering cloth that had covered the last body. The jaguar assistants closed the coffin, securing the heavy lid. A collective sigh ran through the audience as if they were all relieved that it was covered. I wasn't the only one that didn't want to see it anymore.