Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [815]
The first man I’d seen stepped forward. “How do you feel?” His English was heavily accented but clear.
I just looked at him for a second. He had to be kidding. “How am I supposed to feel? I just woke up in a cave where you just performed a human sacrifice.” I glanced at the men still holding me down. “I’m being held down by men wearing flayed human skin suits. How the hell am I supposed to feel?”
“I am asking after your bodily health. Nothing more,” he said.
I started to say something else sarcastic, but stopped and really thought about his question. How did I feel? Actually, I felt good. I remembered that rush of energy and well-being that had spread over me when the spell finished. It was still there. I felt better than I’d felt in days. If it hadn’t required human sacrifice, it would have been a great medical treatment.
“I feel okay.”
“No pain in the head?”
“No.”
“Good,” he said. He motioned, and the skin guys moved away from me. They moved back to stand against the wall by the fourth man who hadn’t been needed to hold me down. They stood there like good soldiers, waiting for their next orders.
I turned back to look at the other guy. Everyone in the room was scary, but at least he wasn’t wearing someone else’s skin. “What did you do to me?”
“We have saved your life. Our master’s creature was overzealous. There was bleeding in your head. We needed you alive.”
I thought about that. “You used Paulina’s life force to heal me.”
“Yes.
“I’m glad to be alive, honest.” I looked past him at Paulina’s body lying broken and forgotten. “But she didn’t volunteer to trade her life for mine, did she?”
“Nicky Baco began to suspect what price he would have to pay for our master’s blessing. She was a hostage to make sure he came to this our last meeting,” the man said.
“Let me guess. He didn’t show,” I said.
“He no longer answers our master’s call.”
Apparently, Ramirez had taken my advice of having Leonora Evans do some sort of magical barrier around Nicky so he couldn’t contact his master. Good to know it was working, but you try to do the right thing and it ends up getting someone else killed. Why is that always the way it works? But I admit that I was happier for me than sorry for Paulina. Not about her trading her life for mine, but if Nicky was being protected by magic, then he and the police were on their way. All I had to do was stall and keep them from doing whatever it was they had planned for me.
“So when Nicky didn’t show up, you didn’t need to keep her alive.” My voice sounded calm, but better than that, I was calm. Not normal calm, but the cool distant calm that you either learn to do during the really bad stuff, or you run screaming. I’d done all the screaming I planned on doing tonight.
“Her life did not matter. Yours does.”
“I’m glad to be alive, and don’t take this wrong, but why do you give a damn if I live or die?”
“We need you,” a male voice said from behind me. I had to arch my neck and crane my head backward to see the owner of that second voice. I didn’t see the man at first because he was surrounded by the flayed ones. I’d known that Edward was worried that they’d missed some bodies. He had no idea. There must have been twenty-five, thirty-five animated corpses standing behind me. They’d been standing so quietly, I hadn’t heard them or sensed them. They stood there now like robots with the switch turned off, waiting for life to return. Zombies never got that still, never went that empty. At the end, when they started to rot and you had to put them back in the grave before they melted into little puddles, they were more alive than this. I realized in that instant that the bodies were raised, but the person inside that body wasn’t raised. The master ate that which made them individuals. He ate that which made them more than so much muscle and skin. He didn’t eat the souls because I’d seen one of them in a house where two flayed ones