Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [1095]
“They’ll kill me.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of them anymore, Columbine.”
“You’ll protect me?”
“In a way. You don’t have to be afraid of the council killing you later, because we’re going to kill you tonight, remember? All we’re negotiating on is whether you die easy, or hard. Your choice.”
She shook her head.
“Olaf.”
“Yes.”
“We have to cut her heart out anyway. Want to do it first?”
He stared at me as if wondering if I was kidding. I remembered Remus’s body in my arms. I knew now that I’d felt his body jerk as Pantalone had forced his arm through his chest, through his heart, dug his way through, and killed him. I could still hear his last whispered “I’m sorry.” Not “help me,” or “God, it hurts,” but “I’m sorry.”
“Do it,” I said.
They held her down, and they held Giovanni down, and Olaf ripped her costume open, bared her breasts to the room, and began very slowly to carve out her heart. He didn’t get very far before she gave up the names. Master of Beasts and the Lover of Death.
Olaf didn’t stop when she gave up the names. He’d gone to his happy place. It was like trying to argue with an autistic child; he just didn’t hear us.
Columbine screamed, “I answered your questions. In the name of the dark, kill me.”
I told Wicked to behead her. He did, one clean blow that scarred the wood underneath her. I could never get a head to come off in one blow. Olaf looked up as the blood poured out of the neck in a crimson fountain. “I wasn’t finished.”
“She gave the information up a while ago. I promised her a quick death if she told me what I needed to know.”
He gave me a look that wasn’t friendly at all.
“You can still cut out her heart,” I said.
“It’s not the same,” he said, and the look on his face was nothing I understood, or wanted to understand.
I started to apologize for not letting him cut out her heart while she was still alive, then I caught myself. Fuck, the shock was beginning to leave and I was wondering what the hell I’d been thinking. Legally, everything we were doing was A-okay. I had a warrant of execution, it covered a multitude of sins.
He did finish cutting out her heart. I had Wicked behead Giovanni. I was really going to see if he and his brother could teach me the beheading-a-person-with-one-blow technique. I could never manage, not even with a sword. Maybe it was a leverage thing?
I took Giovanni’s heart myself, with one of Fredo’s knives that was better for carving open a person’s sternum than anything I had on me. I was tired, and the shock was wearing off, which made me clumsy. I was nearly elbow deep inside Giovanni’s chest. I just couldn’t seem to get the heart out of the ligaments that held the pericardial sac in place. I’d pierced the sac, but it was as if I’d gotten something tangled. I was so tired, and numb, and not numb enough.
“May I help?” Olaf was kneeling beside the body. His hands were bloody, too, but only one of them looked like he was wearing a red glove.
“Yeah, it’s tangled. I think I’m just tired.”
He slid his hand inside the hole I’d made, so that his arm slid up alongside mine in the chest cavity. It wasn’t until his hand cupped mine, pressing both our hands into the still warm heart, that I looked at him. We were both leaning over the body, our faces inches apart, with our arms up the much longer torso of the male. He looked at me over the body, our hands around the heart, blood everywhere. He looked at me as if it were a candlelit dinner and I were wearing nice lingerie.
I thought very clearly in my head, I will not scream. I would be calm. Fuck, but I would be. Besides, he’d enjoy it if I screamed. My voice was only a little strained as I said, “I think it’s just past my fingertips. Can you reach the ligament there?”
He slid his hand over mine, farther up the heart. He caressed my hand while he reached for the piece