Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [125]
My face was burning sharply, from just below my left eye to mid-cheek. Even before I felt the first trickle, I knew it was going to bleed, it just had that feel to it.
She was screaming, loud, ragged screams.
Steve Brown was closest to us, and he said, “You’re hurting her.”
“I’m hurting her,” I said, “she tried to take out my eye.”
I didn’t have as good a hold on her as I should have, I was still trying to be nice to the poor bereaved crazy woman. She twisted in my grip and dug her nails across my hand. I tucked my elbow tight across her throat and pulled up sharp on her arm behind her back. She cried out, but it stopped abruptly because I was applying pressure to her neck. I knew how to do a choke hold so that all it did was make you pass out. I knew not to crush the Adam’s apple or anything stupid. And I admit I was pissed by this point, but Mr. Brown shouldn’t have done what he did.
He yelled, “Let her go!”
I said, calmly, I thought, “If you can’t control her, I will.”
She struggled, and I tucked my head down tight to her. Then two things happened at once: Nathaniel said, “Anita look out,” and Mary screamed. I looked up, in time to see Steve Brown hit me in the face.
It rocked my head back and made reality shift just a little to the side, like a televison that isn’t quite in focus. It didn’t really hurt immediately, not like the scratches at all. You can usually judge how bad an injury is by how long it takes for you to feel the pain. Quick pain, small to medium injury; long pain, not good.
It was a good hit, nice and solid. I think he’d expected me to go down, because he had this surprised look on his face. Or maybe he hadn’t ever hit a woman that hard before, or maybe at all. We had one of those long seconds that seem to last forever, but are really just the blink of an eye, to look at each other over his wife’s head.
I saw his lips move, but couldn’t hear what he said. The only sound was a high, white, buzzing, static, and the taste of blood in my mouth. It didn’t matter that it was my own blood. It only mattered that it was blood, and I was angry.
I had a moment, a heartbeat, where I smelled Barbara Brown’s skin underneath the sweetness of her perfume. A moment where I could smell her skin, salty, sick, almost, sick with her grief like some poison coming out of her skin. She was wounded, she was hurt, I could end that suffering. I tucked myself tight in against her body, tight enough that her husband couldn’t hit me without risking her. I still couldn’t hear his voice, but I could hear something else. I could hear her heartbeat. So loud, so very loud. It was a thick, meaty sound, not like that fragile tinny sound you get through a stethoscope. This was what a heart would sound like, if you could put your ear inside someone’s chest. This was what someone’s life sounded like, beating inside their body, beating fast and faster. Barbara Brown had smelled like food before, but now that first flush of adrenaline kicked through her system. Some part of her that she couldn’t even name knew something was wrong. Knew that danger was very, very close.
I must have closed my eyes, because I felt him looming over me. I opened my eyes to see Steve Brown about to touch me. I think he was going for my hair to pull me off his wife. But I saw the hand, and I grabbed it, just stopped it with my hand. My hand looked small around his bigger one, but my arm was solid, and when he tried to pull away, he couldn’t do it.
I still had his wife on her knees with my other hand around her wrist and her arm up almost to her shoulders. Distantly, I thought, if I kept pulling