Guilty Pleasures - Laurell K. Hamilton [32]
He silenced me with a wave of a slender, pale hand. The hand seemed as white as the lace on his shirt. His eye sockets were filled with blue flame. The long, black hair floated around his suddenly death-pale face. His humanity was folding away. His power flared across my skin, raising the hairs on my arms. I hugged myself, staring at the creature that had been Jean-Claude.
“Run!” He screamed it at me, voice slashing into me. I should have been bleeding from it. I hesitated and caught sight of Nikolaos. She was levitating, ever so slowly, upward. Milkweed hair danced around her skeleton head. She raised a clawed hand. Bones and veins were caught in the amber of her skin.
Jean-Claude whirled, claw-hand slashing out at me. Something slammed me into the wall and half out the door. Zachary caught my arm and pulled me through.
I twisted free of him. The door thudded closed in my face. I whispered, “Sweet Jesus.”
Zachary was at the foot of a narrow stairway, leading up. He held his hand out to me. His face was slick with sweat. “Please!” He fluttered his hand at me like a trapped bird.
A smell oozed from under the door. It was the smell of rotting corpses. The smell of bloated bodies, of skin cracked and ripening in the sun, of blood slowed and rotting in quiet veins. I gagged and backed away.
“Oh, God,” Zachary whispered. He put one hand over his mouth and nose, the other still held out to me.
I ignored his hand but stood beside him on the stairs. He opened his mouth to say something, but the door creaked. The wood shook and hammered, like a giant wind was beating against it. Wind whooshed from under the door. My hair streamed in a tornado wind. We backed up a few steps while the heavy wooden door fluttered and kicked against a wind that couldn’t be there. A storm indoors? The sick smell of rotting flesh bled into the wind. We looked at each other. There was that moment of recognition of us against them, or it. We turned and started running like we were attached by wires.
There couldn’t be a storm behind that door. There couldn’t be a wind chasing us up the narrow stone stairs. There were no rotting corpses in that room. Or were there? God, I didn’t want to know. I did not want to know.
13
AN EXPLOSION RIPPED up the stairs. The wind smashed us down like toys. The door had blown. I scrambled on all fours trying to get away, just get away. Zachary got to his feet, dragging me up by one arm. We ran.
There was a howling from behind us, out of sight. The wind roared up behind us. My hair streamed over my face, blinding me. Zachary’s hand grabbed mine and held on. The walls were smooth, the stairs slick stone, there was nothing to hold on to. We flattened ourselves against the stairs and hung onto each other.
“Anita.” Jean-Claude’s velvet voice whispered. “Anita.” I fought to look up into the wind, blinking to see. There was nothing there. “Anita.” The wind was calling my name. “Anita.” Something glimmered, blue fire. Two points of blue flame, hung on the wind. Eyes—were those Jean-Claude’s eyes? Was he dead?
The blue flames began to float downward. The wind didn’t touch them. I screamed, “Zachary!” But the sound was swallowed in the roar of the wind. Did he see it, too, or was I going crazy?
The blue flames came lower and lower, and suddenly I didn’t want it to touch me, just as suddenly I knew that was what it was going to do. Something told me that that would be a very bad thing.
I tore loose from Zachary. He screamed something at me, but the wind roared and screeched between the narrow walls like a roller coaster gone mad. There was no other sound. I started to crawl up the stairs, wind beating against me, trying to crush me down. There was one other sound, Jean-Claude’s voice in my head. “Forgive me.”
The blue lights were suddenly in front of my face. I flattened myself against a wall, hitting at the fire. My hands passed through the burning. It wasn’t there.
I screamed, “Leave me alone!”
The fire melted through