Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [90]
Jason said, “It’s like a cat, a many-headed cat.”
“What the hell is that, and why is it glowing?” Chuck asked.
I answered, “It’s a charm against the oldest vampire on the planet.”
“The vampire’s here,” Shadwell said, and guns came out.
I didn’t bother with a gun. I told them the truth. “She’s in Europe somewhere, but her magic isn’t.” I looked up at them. “You don’t get it. A vampire doesn’t have to come through the damn window to fuck you over. If they’re powerful enough they can do you from a thousand miles away.”
“We have to do magic,” Jason said, “and you aren’t allowed to see it.” He told half the truth. We didn’t want them to see it, but I let the half-truth stand, because I couldn’t think of a better way to get rid of them.
“Why, you have to kill us if we see it?” Chuck said, voice derisive.
Jason and I looked at him. I was the one who said it. “We wouldn’t have to kill you, Chuck. We’d consider it a bonus. Now get out. Now!” I screamed the last at them, flinging myself off the bed. I drew the Browning and pointed it at them, screaming for them to leave. Me calm might not have moved them, but me hysterical and armed helped Jason get them out of the room.
I fell to my knees, the gun still naked in my hand. The tigers swirled inside me. I waited for one of them to run up toward me, inside me, and try to tear its way out, but they didn’t. They just paced in the not-trees, the almost-shadows. They seemed to be waiting for something.
The smell of jasmine filled the air. My cross flared to life alongside the glowing lines of the charm. Then the smell of rain and flowers faded. It faded, and the cross quieted. The room was suddenly very quiet, quiet enough that I could hear the blood in my own ears pounding.
Jason knelt beside me. I saw his lips move, but could hear no sound. My gun fell from my hand, and I grabbed his arms, tried to say something, anything. Then I felt it. A sound, a call, a smell, a feeling, and yet that wasn’t it either. It was all of those things, none of those things. The tigers that I could see in my mind’s eye like some sort of waking nightmare stood still. They raised their faces to the air, and roared. The sound of it bowed my spine, sent me to the floor, screaming. It was as if my body were some great bell, and their sound had struck a chord in me. I heard that sound not with my ears, but with my skin, like a silent tuning fork pressed against the spine to vibrate its message along every nerve ending.
Jason’s hands were on me. He tried to hold me. I heard his shouts, broken in pieces, as if the ringing call let me hear only snatches of any other sound.
The charm’s lines glowed again like metal taken fresh from the fire, cherry red, hot enough to sear flesh. I could feel the warmth of it through my shirt. I waited for it to begin to melt through my shirt the way a cross could do, but if it would keep the vampire’s tigers from tearing me apart, I was willing to get one more burn scar.
Jason tried to get up. I held on to his arm. He mouthed something; I heard, “door.” He went to the door and opened it. Someone must have knocked, but I hadn’t heard it.
It was Crispin, the white-haired stripper. He must have done his dance already because he was wearing nothing but an iridescent G-string. He knelt beside me, and the moment I looked into those strange blue eyes there was silence inside me. The tigers all looked up that long metaphysical tunnel.
Jason came to kneel on the other side of me. “Is it better?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper.
“I heard your call,” Crispin said. “I had to answer it.”
I wanted to ask, What call? or what he had heard, but he touched my arm. It was such an innocent gesture. The white tiger leapt forward from the rest. It charged up that impossible path inside me like a white blur of grace and muscle and death.
Jason