Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [54]
“Stop the car,” I said. We were as far from the first house as we could get without backtracking.
Edward pulled over to the side of the road. The dust rose in a cloud to either side of the car, settling over the clean paint job in a dry powder.
“You guys don’t get much rain up here, do you?”
“No,” he said. Anyone else would have elaborated, but not Edward. Even the weather wasn’t a topic of conversation unless it affected the job.
I got out of the car and walked a little way into the dry grass. I walked until I could no longer sense Edward or the car. When I looked back, I was yards away. Edward was standing on the driver’s side door, arms crossed on the roof, hat tilted back so he could watch the show. I don’t think there was another person I knew who wouldn’t have asked at least one question about what I was about to do. It would be interesting to see if he asked any questions afterwards.
Darkness hung like a soft silken cloth, hanging against the sky, and the dying light. It was a soft comfortable twilight, an embracing dark. A breeze blew across the open land and played with my hair. Everything felt fine, good. Had I imagined? Was I letting Edward’s problems get to me? Was the memory of the survivors in their air-compressed hospital room making me see shadows?
I almost just turned around and walked back to the car, but I didn’t. If it were my imagination, then it wouldn’t hurt to check, and if it wasn’t . . . I turned and faced away from the car, away from the distant houses, and looked out into the emptiness. Of course, it wasn’t really empty. There was grass rustling in the wind, it sounded so dry, like corn in autumn just before it’s harvested. The ground was covered in a thin layer of pale reddish-brown gravel with paler dirt showing through. The ground ran until it met the hills that continued on and on towards the darkening sky. Not empty, just lonely.
I took a deep cleansing breath, let it out and did two things at once: I dropped my shields and spread my arms wide, hands reaching. I was reaching with my hands, but it wasn’t just my hands. I reached outward with that sense I have—magic, if you like the word. I don’t. I reached outward with that power that let me raise the dead and mix with werewolves. I reached outward towards that waiting presence that I’d felt, or thought I’d felt.
There, there like a fish tugging on my line. I turned to face the direction of the road. It was in that direction, going towards Santa Fe. It—I had no better word. I felt its eagerness for the coming night and knew that it could not move in daylight. And I knew that it was large, not physically, but psychically, because we were not close to it, and yet I’d picked it up miles away. How many miles I couldn’t say, but far, very far to have sensed it. It didn’t feel evil. That didn’t mean it wasn’t evil, just that it didn’t think of itself as evil. Unlike people, preternatural entities are rather proud of being evil. They embraced their malignancy because whatever this was, it wasn’t human. It wasn’t physical. Spirit, energy, pick a word, but it was up ahead, and it was not contained in any physical shell. It was free floating. No, not free . . . Something slammed into me, not physically, but as if a psychic truck had run me down. I was on my butt in the dirt, trying to breathe, as if someone had hit me in the chest and knocked the wind out of me.
I heard Edward’s running footsteps, but I couldn’t seem to turn around. I was too busy relearning how to breathe.
He knelt by me, gun in hand. “What happened?” He was looking out into the thick twilight, not at me, searching, searching for the danger. His sunglasses were gone, and his face was very serious as he searched for something to shoot.
I gripped his arm, shaking my head, trying to talk. But when I finally had air enough, all I said was, “Shit,