Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [774]
Edward sat unmoved, but Ramirez was rubbing his arms, chasing goosebumps. “What’s happening?”
He was at the very least a sensitive. I guess I couldn’t possibly be attracted to a totally normal human being. I whispered, “Magic.”
He looked at me, eyes showing too much white. “What kind?”
I shook my head. That I didn’t know. I had a few clues, but I really had never seen anything like it, not exactly.
Pinotl walked around the coffin in a counter-clockwise motion, bleeding arm and bloody knife held apart, palm up while he chanted. The power built and built in the air like close thunder until my throat closed with it, and I was having trouble breathing. Pinotl came back to the front of the coffin where he’d begun. He made some kind of sign with his hands, then flung a spray of blood onto the body, and began to back slowly away. The lights dimmed until the only light was the harsh white light on the thing in the coffin.
The power had built to a screaming pitch. My skin was trying to crawl off my body and hide. The air was too thick to breathe, as if it had grown more solid, thick with magic.
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