Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [150]
My goal was not to kill Primo, but to make him let go of the man. I held my hand out toward him, and he still didn’t look scared.
“Do you think your little cuts will stop me?” he demanded.
“No,” I said, and I threw power at him, almost like throwing a ball, and that ball caught against his aura, his shielding, like a burr on a piece of cloth. But the ball didn’t stay a ball, and it didn’t exactly pierce Primo’s shielding. It was as if the ball melted onto it, and where it melted, it invaded the shielding, became one with it, and turned that protective coating into something long and slender and sharp. I visualized that sharpness cutting across his belly, and his shirt split like a skin to show white flesh and blood.
It was a bigger wound than the other two, and his hand went to it, as if it hurt, or as if he wasn’t sure how hurt he was.
“How do you like that one?” I asked. “Big enough for you?”
He snarled at me, flashing fangs that looked too big for his mouth.
It had done exactly what I wanted it to. Thanks to Jean-Claude’s centuries of frustrated study, I had a new weapon. I’d been afraid before to hit too close to the victim. All it would have taken was the vic to have a little psychic gift, and I could have done more damage to him than to Primo. But now I had it, I knew it, I felt it.
I flicked a hand at the arm that held the man, and that arm split open from elbow to wrist. Blood spilled down his arm in a crimson wash, if his heart had been beating enough, the blood would have jumped out of his open arteries, but he didn’t have the blood pressure for it. Not anymore.
“Do you seek to save this?” he lifted the man by his twisted collar. “It is dead and only meat for the animals now.”
“His heart still beats,” Jean-Claude said.
But we had only moments before mouth-to-mouth wasn’t going to save him from brain damage. I threw both hands up, and I cut him. I tried slicing his arm like you’d bone a fish, but I could not break the deeper tissue. I could cut his skin and meat away but the ligaments held, and that was all Primo needed to hold the vic until he died. Stubborn bastard.
“If you do not drop the man now, Primo, I will see this as a direct challenge to my authority.”
“See it any way you like, but I will not be a whipping boy for this,” and he pointed not at me, but at the men that lay unconscious around him, at Buzz who stood near, but not too near. We were out of his league, and he knew it.
“So be it,” Jean-Claude said. In my head he said, “Ma petite, it is not a knife, it is not a single blade, it is magic. If you can turn one small piece of his power against him, then why not all of it?”
I started to ask, what did he mean, then he showed me. It was like my mind was a wall, and he’d just plugged that bit of answer directly into my brain. I understood, and I didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t in me to hesitate when lives were at stake.
I didn’t point or throw up a hand. It wasn’t a game of ball. I could affect his shielding, and that shielding covered his entire body. I thought at that skin of magic, I threw power into all of it, and when I felt all of his shielding, as if I was caressing that invisible skin with my hands, I turned it all against him. I turned it all into inward-pointing blades. It was as if Primo were suddenly standing in the center of a reverse porcupine, a porcupine with spines the size of daggers.
Every inch of his skin I could see was just suddenly covered in blood. He screamed, screamed with a mouth that poured blood, screamed with a throat that was pierced in a half-dozen places. He screamed, and he let go of the man.