Guilty Pleasures - Laurell K. Hamilton [72]
They hesitated, then parted for Theresa to stride through them until she faced me. “This is not your business.” She stared at me, and I didn’t avoid her gaze. One less thing to worry about.
“I’m making it my business,” I said.
“Do you wish to join him?”
The vampires began to spread out from Zachary to encircle me as well. I let them. There wasn’t much I could do about it anyway. Either I’d get us both out alive or I’d die, too, maybe, probably. Oh, well.
“I wish to speak with him, one professional to another,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
I stepped close to her, almost touching. Her anger was nearly palpable. I was making her look bad in front of the others, and I knew it, and she knew I knew it. I whispered, though some of the others would hear me, “Nikolaos gave orders for the man to die, but she wants me alive, Theresa. What would she do to you if I accidentally died here tonight?” I breathed the last words into her face. “Do you want to spend eternity locked in a cross-wrapped coffin?”
She snarled and jerked away from me as if I had scalded her. “Damn you, mortal, damn you to hell!” Her black hair crackled around her face, her hands gripped into claws. “Talk to him, for what good it will do you. He must raise this zombie, this zombie, or he is ours. So says Nikolaos.”
“If he raises the zombie, then he goes free, unharmed?” I asked.
“Yes, but he cannot do it; he isn’t strong enough.”
“Which was what Nikolaos was counting on,” I said.
Theresa smiled, a fierce tug of lips exposing fangs. “Yesss.” She turned her back on me and strode through the other vampires. They parted for her like frightened pigeons. And I was standing up to her. Sometimes bravery and stupidity are almost interchangeable.
I knelt by Zachary. “Are you hurt?”
He shook his head. “I appreciate the gesture, but they’re going to try to kill me tonight.” He looked up at me, pale eyes searching my face. “There isn’t anything you can do to stop them.” He gave a thin smile. “Even you have your limits.”
“We can raise this zombie if you’ll trust me.”
He frowned, then stared at me. I couldn’t read his expression—puzzlement and something else. “Why?”
What could I say, that I couldn’t just watch him die? He had watched a man be tortured and hadn’t lifted a hand. I opted for the short reason. “Because I can’t let them have you, if I can stop it.”
“I don’t understand you, Anita, I don’t understand you at all.”
“That makes two of us. Can you stand?”
He nodded. “What are you planning?”
“We’re going to share our talent.”
His eyes widened. “Shit, you can act as a focus?”
“I’ve done it twice before.” Twice before with the same person. Twice before with someone who had trained me as an animator. Never with a stranger.
His voice dropped to a bare whisper. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Save you?” I asked.
“Share your power,” he said.
Theresa strode over to us in a swish of cloth. “Enough of this, animator. He can’t do it, so he pays the price. Either leave now, or join us at our . . . feast.”
“Are you having rare Who-roast-beast?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s from Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. You know the part, ‘And they’d Feast! Feast! Feast! Feast! They would feast on Who-pudding, and rare Who-roast-beast.’ ”
“You are crazy.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Do you want to die?” she asked.
I stood up, very slowly, and felt something build in me. A sureness, an absolute certainty that she was not a danger to me. Stupid, but it was there, solid and real. “Someone may kill me before all this is over, Theresa”—I stepped into her, and she gave ground—“but it won’t be you.”
I could almost taste her pulse in my mouth. Was she afraid of me? Was I going crazy? I had just stood up to a hundred-year-old vampire, and she had backed down. I felt disoriented, almost dizzy, as if reality had moved and no one had warned me.
Theresa turned her back on me, hands balled into fists. “Raise the dead, animators, or by all the blood ever spilled, I’ll kill you both.”
I think she meant it. I