Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [817]
“I wear the roots of their bodies so that all that see me will know that my enemies are empty shells and I have all that was theirs.”
Ask a silly question. “Why the tongues?”
“So that the lies of my enemies will not be believed.”
“Eyelids?”
“I will open the eyes of my enemies so that they may never again close their eyes to the truth.”
He was answering questions so nicely that I decided to try for more. “How did you skin the people without using a tool of some kind?”
“Tlaloci, my priest, called the skin from their bodies.”
“How?” I asked.
“My power,” he said.
“Don’t you mean Tlaloci’s power?”
He frowned again. “All his power derives from me.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I am his master. He owes all to me.”
“Sounds like you owe him.”
“You do not know what you are saying.” He was getting angry. Probably not what I wanted. I tried another more polite question.
“Why take the breasts and penises?”
“To feed my minion.” He did nothing, but suddenly I felt the air in the cavern move, and it was as if the shadows themselves drew apart like a curtain revealing a tunnel about thirty feet from the foot of where I lay. Something crawled out of that tunnel. The first impression was of a brilliant iridescent green. The scales changed color at every turn of the light. First green, then blue, then blue and green all at once, then a pearl white glitter that I thought I must have imagined, until it turned its head and flashed a white underbelly. The green scales went closer to true blue as the color moved up towards the head, until the square snout was a clear pure blue the color of sky. There was a fringe of delicate feathers in a rainbow of colors around that face. It turned and stared at me, fanning the feathers around its scaled head into a display that would have been the envy of any peacock. Its eyes were round and huge, taking up most of its face like the eyes of a bird of prey. A pair of slender wings was folded along its back, rainbow colors of the fringe, but I knew without seeing that the underside of the wings would be white. It pushed forward on four legs. Counting the wings, it was a six-limbed animal.
It was a Quetzalcoatl Draconus Giganticus, or at least that was the last Latin classification I was aware of. Sometimes they were classed as a subspecies of dragons, sometimes as a subspecies of gargoyles, and sometimes they had their own group all to themselves. Whatever classification, the Giganticus was the biggest and supposedly extinct. The Spaniards had killed a lot of them to dishearten the natives to whom they were sacred, and because it was just the European thing to do. See a dragon, kill it. It was not a complex philosophy.
I’d only seen black and white photos, and the stuffed one in the Chicago Field Museum. The photos hadn’t come close to doing it justice, and the stuffed one, well, maybe it was a bad taxidermy job.
It glided into the room in a shimmering roll of color and muscle. It was literally one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was also probably what had been gutting people. It opened that sky-blue snout and yawned, showing rows of sawlike teeth. The sound of its claws clattered over the stone floor like some nightmarish dog.
Red Woman’s Husband laid his Spanish helmet on the stone by my legs and went to greet the creature. It lowered its head to be petted, very like a dog. He stroked it just above the eye ridges and it made a low, rolling sound, eyes closing to slits. It was purring.
He sent it away with a playful push against one muscular shoulder. I watched it vanish back through the tunnel like it wasn’t real. “I thought they were extinct.”
“My minion helped bring us to this place, then it slept a magic sleep, waiting