Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [171]
Ramirez went to the door that I’d tried earlier. I left him banging against it with his shoulder. I pulled myself up to the window. It was tearing the blanket off of another baby, like unwrapping a present. I didn’t know where my guns were. I had nothing left to throw at it. It turned in silhouette, and the baby was grabbing for the air with tiny matchstick arms. The monster’s mouth widened showing a mouth already red with blood.
Ramirez had gotten the door open enough to slip inside. He shot at its legs and lower body, afraid to try a head shot so close to the baby. The monster ignored him, and everything slowed down to a crystalline crawl. The face lowered, mouth wide to take that tiny heart. I screamed, and I put all my rage, all my helplessness into that shout. I pulled that power that let me raise the dead, I pulled it around me like a shining thing and flung it outward. I could actually see it in my mind like a thin white rope of fog. I threw my aura, my essence around the thing. I was a necromancer, and all this fucking thing was, was a corpse.
I screamed, “Stop!”
It froze in mid-motion, the baby almost at its mouth. I felt the power that animated it. I felt it inside that dead shell. Its master’s power was like a dark flame inside it. I had a hand outstretched as if I needed it to point my power. I opened my hand and flared that white rope over the corpse. I covered it in my aura like growing a new body. I closed my aura like a fist around the thing and severed it from the power that made it move. The corpse shuddered, then collapsed instantly like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
I felt its master. I felt him like a cold wind across my skin. I felt him coming for me, following the line of my own aura towards me, like a string through a maze. I tried to pull it back, tried to fold it into myself again, but I’d never tried anything like this before, and I wasn’t fast enough. Your aura is your magical shield, your armor. When I lashed out at the corpse, I’d opened myself to anything and everything. I thought I’d understood the risks, but I was wrong.
The master’s power lashed out at me like fire following a trail of gasoline, and when it hit, there was a moment where I threw back my head, and I couldn’t breathe. I felt my heart flutter and stop. I felt my body fall to the floor, but it didn’t hurt, as if I were already numb. My vision went gray, then black, and there was a voice in the blackness. “I have many servants. That you stopped this one is nothing to me. I will feed through others. You die in vain.”
I tried to form words to answer that voice and found that I could. “Fuck you.”
I felt his anger, his outrage that I could defy him.
I tried to laugh at him, at his impotence, but there wasn’t enough left of me to laugh. The darkness became something thicker. I passed beyond the master’s voice, beyond my own, then there was . . . nothing.
41
THE FIRST HINT I had that I wasn’t dead was pain. The second was light. My chest was burning. I jerked back to consciousness, gasping for air, trying to pull the burning things off of me. I blinked up into a burning white light, then voices.
“Hold her down!”
Weight on my arms and legs, hands holding me down. I tried to struggle, but couldn’t feel my body enough to be sure I was moving at all.
“BP sixty over eighty and dropping fast.”
I saw shapes, blurred with light moving around me. A sharp jab in my arm, a needle. A man’s face swam into view, blond, wire-framed glasses. His face slid back out of sight into a white-rimmed fog.
Gray spots slid like greasy streamers across my vision, and I felt myself sinking backwards, downwards, outwards.
A man’s voice, “We’re losing her!”
Darkness rolled over me taking the pain, and the light. A woman’s voice floated through the dark. “Let me try.” Then silence in the dark. There was no alien voice this time. There was nothing