Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [150]
A gasp came from the right. “William!”
Embelys’s massive bulk fastened Kaldar to the wall. Her coil thrust through the paneling and twisted about his waist and shoulders, pinning his right arm to his side. His left arm lay on top of Embelys’s chest, where her body bent before catching a thick iron rod affixed to the ceiling. The pattern on her coils was pallid and dull. Her head hung limply to the side. A long streak of blood stretched to the floor from her neck, where William’s knife protruded from her flesh.
“Thanks for the knife.” Kaldar’s face went red with effort. “Help me get the whore off of me.”
A tremor echoed through the house. It reverberated through William’s skull, shaking his teeth as if they were loose in his jaw.
“I could use some help,” Kaldar’s voice rasped.
Another tremor pulsed, like the toll of a colossal bell, and William staggered from the pressure.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Inside William, the wild raised its ears. Someone was calling him. He turned toward the door. The call resonated through his skull, directly in his mind, bypassing his ears. If this was magic, he’d never met it before.
“Be still and don’t make noise.”
“Don’t go! Help me, damn it!” Kaldar punched Embelys’s corpse with his free fist. “Sonovabitch!”
A cry full of pain and longing echoed through William’s head. He ran through the door and to the hallway, heading toward the source of the screaming. The intensity of the mental wail was enough to make his heart skip a beat.
A door came into his view at the end of the hallway, a dark rectangle shivering with tiny magic aftershocks. The source of the call lay behind it. William broke into a run.
The Hand’s magic danced on the door’s surface, breaking into smoke-thin coils of pale green. He kicked the door. It flew open.
A sweet scent filled his nostrils, heady and liquid-thick, like the odor of old buckwheat honey. Something stirred within the room, outside his field of vision. William bared his teeth, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.
An enormous flower bloomed in the corner of the room. Its roots, thin and studded with chunky tuber-like vesicles, spread across the floor and walls in a reddish net, leaving only the windows bare. The roots swirled together into a thick squat stem, from which protruded three wide leaves. Red liquid pumped through the veins of the leaves, adding a pink tint to the sections of green.
Three massive petals, gray and spotted with flecks of green, rose above the leaves. They were closed, hiding the center of the flower like hands folded in prayer.
A jerky quickening ran through the network of roots. William stepped back.
The roots crawled, unwinding from the far corner, revealing a desk and three long, flexible tentacles stretching from the flower to a four-feet-tall cocoon.
With a rubbery menacing strength, the tentacles peeled the cocoon from the wall and brought it across the room, uncurling as they moved. The last coils slid, straightened, and a body fell at William’s feet with a wet thud. The tentacles froze in the air, as solid and unmoving as a cypress stem.
Fuck me.
Hydraulic movement. He’d learned about this during his time in the Adrianglian Legion. The tentacles couldn’t move until the plant replenished its supply of liquid.
William knelt by the body. The corpse lay on its back. A man. Probably. The exposed flesh of its face and neck was unnaturally smooth and swollen, its color the deep swollen purple of a fresh bruise. The cadaver’s mouth gaped open. The puffy eyelids lay half-closed over the milky orbs of the eyes.
A tiny tendril of the root snaked its way onto the corpse’s cheek. The sharp tip of the root, enclosed in a rough, almost bark-like cone, probed the dead flesh, and thrust through it. The skin tore like wet paper. A thick torrent of viscous bloody fluid spilled forth and streamed across the dead cheek to the floor. The nauseating stench of rotting meat erupted from the body. William leaped back.
Other roots reached for the corpse, the vesicles pulsing like tiny hearts.