Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [192]
I lowered my left hand. One, it was twitching so badly, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could hit anything with it. Two, I couldn’t keep pointing guns if we weren’t going to kill people. Three, my hand was hurting.
“Your word that if I give you a suitable gift, we all leave here in safety.”
“You’d take the word of an ex-con, drug dealing, biker gang leader?”
“No, but I’ll take the word of the Ulfric of the Los Lobos clan. That I’ll take.” There were rules, and if he broke his word as Ulfric, he lost brownie points. He had to be on shaky ground anyway for a human, no matter how magically powerful, vargamor to have challenged his authority. He wouldn’t give his word and break it, not in front of his pack.
“I am Ulfric of the Los Lobos clan, and I give my word that you will all go in safety, if your gift is worthy.”
I didn’t like the wording on that last. “I didn’t have time to stop at Tiffany’s and pick up something for the little lady. Didn’t get to hunt on the way here from the hospital. Cops frown on you shooting animals in town. The mystical shit is beyond me today.”
“Then you have nothing worthy,” he said, but he looked puzzled as though he was sure I had a gift of some kind.
“Let me see what’s behind the bar, and I’ll put up my guns and make tribute.” I’d tried to put up the Firestar, but my left hand was shaking so badly that I couldn’t raise the shirt and slide it inside my pants. I needed two hands for it. Which meant I needed to be able to holster the Browning.
“Done,” he said. “Monstruo, rise, greet our guest.”
It rose above the bar in a thin line of pale flesh like the rising of a crescent moon, then a face came into view. It was a woman’s face with one eye gone stiff and dry like some kind of mummy. Face after face, rose brown and withered like a string of monstrous beads, strung together with pieces of body, arms, legs, and thick black thread like gigantic stitches holding it all together, holding the magic inside. It rose up and up until it towered against the ceiling, curving like a giant snake to stare down at me. I estimated forty heads, more, before I lost count, or lost heart to count anymore.
The werewolves had moved back farther into the room like the tide retreating backwards. They feared the thing. I didn’t blame them.
I heard Bernardo say, “Fuck.”
Olaf said something in German, which meant he wasn’t watching his part of the room. Only Edward remained silent and on the job, ever vigilant. I have to admit that if the werewolves had wanted to jump me while that thing rose above me like some demented snake I would have been slow. It was too much horror to leave room for anything else.
I’d only seen something like it once before. That monster had been made by the most powerful vaudun priestess I’d ever met. But hers had been formed of fresh zombies and pulled seamlessly together into one monstrous ball of flesh. Pure magic. This had been stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, and the bodies being dead like that, dried, deliberately mummified, or an aftereffect of the spell.
I dragged my gaze from the thing to Nicky Baco still lying on the bar, gagged and bound and bloody. I heard my voice like a distant thing, “Why, Nicky, you bad, bad boy.” I’d made a joke, when what I wanted to do was put a gun to his head and blow him away. Some things you did not do. Some things you simply did not do.
“You see why he’s still alive,” the Ulfric said.
“Too powerful to get rid of,” I said, voice still oddly detached, as if I wasn’t really concentrating on what I was saying.
“I used him as my threat. He would lay his magic on a wolf that was misbehaving, and they would be turned into what you see. And he would stitch them into the monstruo. But my wolves fear him now more than they fear me.”
I was nodding over and over because I couldn’t think of a good thing to say. Alive, they were alive