Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [99]
I strained my peripheral vision, trying to see on either side of the doorway as I walked through it. I didn’t have to bend over to go through. The room was square and small, maybe sixteen by sixteen. It was also packed nearly corner to corner with vampires.
I put my back against the wall to the right of the door, gun clutched two-handed, pointed at the ceiling. I wanted badly to point it at someone, anyone. My shoulders ached with the tension of not doing it. No one was threatening me. No one was doing a damn thing except standing, staring, milling around the way people do. So why did I feel like I should have entered the room shooting?
Tall vampires, short vampires, thin vampires, fat vampires, every size, every shape, and almost every race, moved around that small stone room. After what had happened upstairs with their master, I was careful not to make eye contact with any of them. My gaze swept over the room, taking in the pale faces, and getting a quick head count. When I got over sixty, I realized the room was at least twice the size I’d originally thought. It had to be just to hold this many of them. It only looked small because it was packed so tight. The torchlight added to the illusion, flickering, dancing, uncertain light.
Edward stayed in the doorway, his back to the doorframe, shoulder touching mine lightly. His gun was up like mine, his eyes searching the vamps. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? Look at them.” My voice was breathy, not because I was trying to whisper—that would have been useless—but because my throat was tight, my mouth dry.
He scanned the crowd again. “So?”
My gaze flashed to him, then back to the waiting vampires. “Shit, Ed . . . Ted. Shit.” It wasn’t just the number of them. It was my own ability to sense them that was the problem. I’d been around a hundred vamps before, but they hadn’t affected me like this. I didn’t know if having walled off my link to Jean-Claude made me more vulnerable to them, or if my necromancy had grown since then. Or maybe Itzpapalotl was just that much more powerful than the other master had been. Maybe it was her power that had made them so much more than most vamps. There were close to a hundred in this room. I was getting impressions from all of them, or most of them. My shields were great now; I could keep out a lot of the preternatural stuff, but this was too much for me. If I had to guess, there wasn’t a vamp in the room under a hundred. I got flashes from individual ones if I looked at them too long, a slap in the face of their age, their power. The four females in the right corner were all over five hundred years old. They watched me with dark eyes, dark-skinned, but not as dark as they would have been with a little sun. The four of them watched me with patient, empty faces.
Her voice came from the center of the room, but she was hidden behind the vampires, shielded by them. “I have offered you no violence, yet you have drawn weapons. You seek my aid, yet you threaten me.”
“It’s not personal, Itz . . .” I stumbled over her name.
“You may call me Obsidian Butterfly.” It was odd talking to her without being able to glimpse her through the waiting figures.
“It’s not personal, Obsidian Butterfly. I just know that once I put up the gun, chances of drawing it again before one of your brood rips my throat out are damn small.”
“You mistrust us,” she said.
“As you mistrust us,” I said.
She laughed then. Her laughter was the sound of a young woman, normal, but the strained echoes from the other vampires were anything but normal. The laughter held a wild note to it, a desperation, as if they were afraid not to laugh. I wondered what the penalty was for not following her lead.
The laughter faded away, except for one high pitched masculine sound. The other vampires went still, that impossible stillness where they seem like well-made statues, things made of stone and paint, not real, not alive. They waited like a host of empty things. Waited for what? The only sound was that high, unhealthy