Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [272]
“Shit, that’s one of those damn things they used on us,” the cop said.
“Nicely ironic to use it on their god, don’t you think?” Bernardo asked.
Olaf knelt beside the body.
“Hey, we didn’t say you could do that,” the cop said.
Olaf looked at Ramirez. “What do you say, Ramirez?”
“I say we do whatever Anita says.”
Olaf whirled the club as if getting the feel for it. It also made the cops back up. He looked at me. “I’ll take the head.”
I pulled the knife out of Tlaloci’s hand. He wasn’t going to be needing it anymore. “I’ll take the heart.” I walked toward him, blade in hand. The cops kept backing away from us.
I stood over the vampire. Olaf knelt on the other side, looking up at me. “If I’d let you get killed, Edward would have thought I failed.”
“Edward’s alive then?”
“Yes.”
A tightness left my shoulders that I hadn’t even realized was there. “Thank God.”
“I don’t fail,” Olaf said.
“I believe you,” I said.
We stared at each other, and there was still something in his eyes that I couldn’t read or understand, a step beyond whatever I’d become. I stared into his dark eyes and knew that here was a monster, not as powerful as the one that lay on the ground, but just as deadly in the right circumstances. And I owed him my life.
“You take the head first.”
“Why?”
“I’m afraid if I take the knife out while the body’s still intact that he’ll sit up and start breathing again.”
Olaf raised eyebrows at me. “You are not joking me?”
“I never joke about vampires,” I said.
He gave me another long look. “You would have made a good man.”
I took the compliment because that’s what it was, maybe the best compliment he’d ever given a woman.
“Thank you,” I said.
The SWAT team came back out of the far tunnel. “There’s nothing down there. It’s empty.”
“Then it got away,” I said. I looked at the body still lying there. “Take the head. I want out of this damn cave.”
The SWAT team leader didn’t like us cutting up the body. He and Ramirez went into a yelling match. While everyone was watching the argument, I nodded to Olaf and he beheaded the corpse in one blow. Blood gushed out onto the cave floor.
“What the fuck are you doing?” one of the SWAT cops asked, bringing his gun pointed at us.
“My job,” I said. I put the tip of the blade under the ribs.
The policeman brought the gun up to his shoulder. “Get away from the body until the captain tells you it’s okay to do it.”
I kept the knife against the body. “Olaf.”
“Yes.”
“If he shoots me, kill him.”
“My pleasure.” The big man turned his eyes to the policeman, and there was something in that gaze that made the heavily armed man take a step back.
The captain in question said, “Stand down, Reynolds. She’s a vamp executioner. Let her do her job.”
I plunged the blade into the skin, and it slid home. I cut a hole just below his ribs and reached into the hole. It was tight and wet and slick, and it took two hands to get the heart out, one to cut it free of the connecting tissue, and one to hold onto it. I drew it from the chest, bloodstained to my elbows.
I caught Ramirez and Bernardo both looking at me, with nearly identical looks on their faces. I didn’t think either of them would be wanting a date any time soon. They’d always remember watching me cut a man’s heart out, and that memory would stain anything else. With Bernardo, I didn’t give a shit. With Ramirez, it hurt to see that look in his eyes.
A hand touched the heart. I stared at that hand, then looked up to meet Olaf’s eyes. He wasn’t repulsed. He stroked the heart, hands sliding over mine. I pulled away, and we looked at each other over the body we’d butchered. No, Olaf wasn’t repulsed. The look in his eyes was that pure darkness that only fills a man’s eyes in the most intimate of situations. He raised the severed head up by the hair and held it almost as if he’d let me kiss it. Then I realized he was holding it over the heart, like a matched pair.
I had to turn away from