Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [656]
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.
A pale tongue slid from between thin, nearly invisible lips. His eyes were a pale, pale green, like bad emeralds. The thin walls of his