Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [816]
My eyes finally found the man. He wore a steel helmet and breastplate like the history books are always showing the conquistadors wearing, but the rest of the outfit was straight out of a nightmare.
He wore a necklace of tongues, and they were all still fresh and pink as if they’d just been cut out seconds ago. He wore a skirt of intestines that writhed and twisted like snakes, as if each thick glistening strand had an independent life of its own. His arms were bare, strong and muscled, and covered in the missing eyelids of the victims. As he moved close, the eyelids opened and closed. He came to stand beside me, next to the first man. The eyelids blinked at me and there were eye-shaped holes underneath every lid that I saw. The holes held darkness and the cold light of stars.
I turned away because I was remembering Itzpapalotl’s starry eyes. I didn’t want to fall into these eyes. At that second if you had given me a choice, I’d have taken the vampire in town to the thing that was standing in front of me.
After what I’d seen at the murder scene, I expected to feel evil emanating from him, but there was no evil. There was power like being next to a battery the size of the Chrysler building. The energy hummed along my skin, but it was neutral energy. Neither good nor bad in and of itself, the way a gun is neither good nor bad but can be turned to evil purposes.
I stared up the line of his body, and the tongues were moving as if still trying to scream. He took off the helmet and showed a slender, handsome face that reminded me of Bernardo’s, not the pure Aztec ethnicity I’d been expecting. He had turquoise ear spools in his lobes, and they matched the blue green of his eyes. He smiled down at me, looking like a fresh-faced twenty-something. I could feel the weight of the ages in his gaze like some vast weight pressing down on me, as if just being this close made it hard to breathe.
He reached out to touch my face, and I jerked back from him. That one movement seemed to break his hold over me. I could move. I could breathe. I could think. I’d been on the receiving end of enough magical glamour to know it when I felt it. You’re either a god, or you’re not. He was not. And it wasn’t just my monotheism showing. I’d felt the magic of monsters and preternatural beasties of all sorts, and I knew one when I saw one. Power doesn’t make you a deity. I don’t know exactly what does, but power ain’t it. Some spark of the divine was missing from the being that gazed down upon me. If he was just another monster, maybe we could deal.
“Who are you?” And I was happy that my voice was confident, normal.
“I am the Red Woman’s Husband.” He gazed down at me with eyes so patient, so kind. You think angels must have eyes like that.
“The Red Woman is the Aztec phrase for blood. What does it mean that you’re blood’s husband?”
“I am the body, and she is the life.” He said it like it answered my question. It didn’t.
Something wet and slimy touched my hand. I jerked back, but the chain didn’t let me go far. The length of animated intestine followed my hand, nuzzling it like some obscene worm. I swallowed a scream, but I couldn’t keep my pulse from speeding up.
He laughed at me.
It was a very ordinary laugh for a would-be god, but it was nicely condescending and maybe that’s how would-be gods laughed. But it was a peculiarly masculine condescension, long gone out of style. The laugh says, “Silly little girl, don’t you know I’m the big strong man, and you know nothing, and I know everything?” Or maybe I’m just too sensitive.
“Why intestines?” I asked.
The smile faded around the edges. His handsome face looked puzzled. “Are you making fun of me?” The intestine dropped away from my hand like a date that I’d rebuffed. Fine with me.
“No. I just wondered why intestines. You can