Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [179]
“I’ve felt this thing’s power. Baco is powerful, but he’s not that powerful. Whatever this thing is, it’s not human.”
He sighed. “Fine.” He said it like he’d made a decision. “Baco says you have to meet him before ten this morning or don’t bother coming.”
I searched the room until I found the clock on the wall. It was eight. “Shit,” I said.
“The doc says you need at least another twenty-four hours in here. Leonora says that if the monster tries for you again, you won’t make it.”
“You have a point to make,” I said.
“I almost didn’t tell you.”
I was beginning to get pissed. “I don’t need you to protect me, Edward. I thought you of all people knew better than that.”
“Are you sure you’re up to it?”
I almost just said yes, but I was so tired. It was a bone weariness that had nothing to do with lack of sleep. I was hurt, and it went beyond the bruises and cuts that I could feel. “No,” I said.
He blinked. “You must feel like shit to admit that.”
“I’ve felt better, but something’s scaring Baco. If he says meet before ten this morning, we meet. Maybe the great bad thing is coming to get him at eleven today. Can’t miss that, can we?”
“I’ve got a bag of fresh clothes out in the hall for you. They cut your shoulder holster off of you in the emergency room, and the spine sheath.”
“Shit,” I said, “that spine sheath was a custom job.”
He shrugged. “You can order a new one.” He went to the door, stepped out a moment, then came back in with a small overnight bag. He came around to the side of the bed that Leonora’s chair was on. The other side of the bed was a little too crowded with equipment for visitors to stand.
He opened it and started laying out the clothes. His button-down black shirt didn’t fit perfectly smooth around his ribs. He laid out the clothes in neat piles: black jeans, black polo shirt, black socks, even the underwear and bra matched the theme. “What’s with the funerary color scheme?”
“The dark blue polo shirt and jeans were trashed. All you had left was black, red, and purple for shirts. We need something dark today, authoritative.”
“Why are you in black, then?” I was watching the way the shirt lay when he moved. It wasn’t a gun. I didn’t think it was knives. What was under his shirt?
“White shows blood.”
“What’s under your shirt, Edward?”
He smiled and unbuttoned the middle buttons. He had what looked like a modified belly band holster strapped across his upper body. But it wasn’t a gun. It was metal pieces, too big to be ammo, and too oddly shaped on the end I could see. They looked like teeny-tiny metal darts . . . “Are those some sort of itty-bitty throwing knives?”
He nodded. “Bernardo said that if you took out an eye the flayed ones didn’t like it.”
“I poked out eyes on them twice, and each time it seemed to hurt and disorient them. Truthfully, I didn’t think Bernardo noticed what I was doing.”
He smiled and started buttoning his shirt up. “You shouldn’t underestimate him.”
“Could you really hit an eye throwing one of those things?” He slipped one out of its little holster and threw it into the wall in one flick of his hand. He pierced one of the tiny designs on the wallpaper across the room.
“I can’t hit shit with something like that.”
He retrieved it from the wall and replaced it on his chest, and walked back to me. “You can even have your very own flamethrower, if you want it.”
“Gee, and it isn’t even Christmas.”
He smiled. “Not Christmas, more like Easter.”
I frowned up at him. “I don’t get the Easter reference.”
“You came back from the dead, or didn’t anyone tell you?”
I shook my head. “Tell me what?”
“Your heart stopped three times. Ramirez kept it going with CPR until the doctors got to you. But they lost you twice. You were going down for the third time when Leonora Evans convinced them to let her try and save you with some of that good old time religion.”
My heart was suddenly beating too hard, and I could have sworn that the inside of my ribs hurt with each beat. “Are you trying to scare me?”
“No, just explaining the Easter reference. You know, Christ