Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (77 page)

“I’ll still be alive when the ambulance gets here,” he said.

I hunkered in a little closer to him, my boots in his blood. The last time I’d seen another animator that could heal like a zombie, or a vampire, he’d had a spell helping him. “What have you done to yourself, Maximiliano? Am I going to find a gris-gris on you somewhere?”

His eyes widened just a touch, his shoulders reacting to it.

“What’s a gris-gris?” Hudson asked.

“It’ll be something he wears, so probably a bracelet, or armband. It’ll never come off, because it needs to touch his skin at all times to work, doesn’t it, Maximiliano?”

He was watching me now, and not nearly as happy with himself.

“It’s a spell, and it’s what let him take three bullets to the chest and keep on ticking. But they’ll cut your clothes and jewelry off at the emergency room, so they can treat your wounds. What happens when they cut the gris-gris off, Max?”

“Maximiliano, and you will stop them from cutting it off of me, because you know it is keeping me alive. It would be the same as shooting me in the head now that I am handcuffed and no longer a danger to anyone.”

He was right, unfortunately, but I still didn’t hear the second ambulance so we had time to play with him. If I played well enough maybe he’d help us stop the zombie that was sobbing behind us.

I drew one of the smaller silver-edged blades from a wrist sheath.

“What are you going to do, Blake?” Hudson asked.

“Search him for magic. If he has a gris-gris to help heal himself, he could have other things on him that could harm us.”

“We patted him down,” Hill said.

“Magic can hide better than a gun,” I said. I moved closer to him, and he started struggling so that Hill and Montague had to kneel down and hold him for me. Sutton finally knelt on his legs, because Max didn’t want me near him with the knife. There had to be more than just the gris-gris for him to be this upset, or there had to be something about the gris-gris that he didn’t want me to see. Either way, I was going to search him for dangerous magical objects, and I was going to make it thorough.

“Hold him still, boys, I wouldn’t want to cut him by accident.” I started at the shoulder of his shirt, along the seam. I wanted his sleeves off first. I kept my blades sharp; it didn’t take much to slice through the seams and start peeling down the cloth to expose the smooth skin of his arms. He kept trying to move, but he had three large men sitting on him who knew how to subdue and hold someone. His right arm was clean, no jewelry at all.

I duck walked to his left side and he tried to struggle harder. They leaned on him more, forcing his face down into the pool of his own blood. He was afraid now. Why? I couldn’t cut it off him now that we all knew it was helping keep him alive; he was right about that. It would take weeks or longer of court hearings to get permission to take the gris-gris off him, and by that time his body would have healed enough that he might not die when it was removed, unfortunately. But he knew that, so why was he afraid? Was there something else on him that he didn’t want us to see?

I peeled his left sleeve down and there it was on his upper arm, snugged in tight so it dimpled his flesh. “That’s a gris-gris. They don’t have to be armbands. A lot of them are small bags on a cord, but for magic that keeps you this alive when you’re this hurt, you’ll want it attached to you.”

I put up my knife and started to fish for the small flashlight I kept in one of the many pockets on the tac pants. Most of them held extra ammo, but not all of them. Hudson figured out what I was doing and hunkered down beside me with his own flashlight.

It was a band made of black hair woven together. I looked at his short black hair. It wasn’t long enough to do this. Then the light picked up a strand of blond hair, and paler brown, and another shade of brown, and another blond. I touched Hudson’s wrist and used it to move the light. There was hair to match every zombie I’d seen on the videos.

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

“What is it, Blake?” Sutton asked.

“The smaller pieces of hair woven around the main band match all the zombies on the sex tapes. DNA will double-check that it belongs to all his victims, but the main hair is going to be Estrella’s, isn’t it, you fucking son of a bitch?”

He was quiet now.

“Not so chatty now, are you, Max?”

“I am Maximiliano,” he said, though his voice was strained, because Hill was forcing his face down into the grass and blood.

“I don’t care if you’re Mother Teresa, you are going to die for this.”

“I took hair from them, that doesn’t prove I killed anyone.”

“The hair doesn’t, but a few voodoo expert witnesses, and all the practitioners of your faith will tell the truth, Max. They won’t want to be anywhere near this kind of soul debt to the loa, or whatever else you invoked to do this piece of evil shit.”

“Tell us what you see, Blake,” Hudson said.

“He didn’t tell us we wouldn’t find the bottle that held Estrella’s soul. He said I’d never find what contains her soul, and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to free her.”

“What’s the significance?” Hill asked.

“Yeah, I don’t understand,” Montague said.

“He’s the bottle.”

“What?” Montague asked.

“He’s tied Estrella’s soul to that gris-gris and him.”

“That’s not possible,” Maximiliano said. “Everyone will tell you it’s not possible.”

“They will, but you figured it out anyway, didn’t you, you evil piece of shit?”

“You’ll never prove it, and you’ll never get anyone to be able to explain the spell to a jury, or a judge.”

“We’ll find someone,” Hudson said.

“It’s an original spell,” I said. “Like his mother before him, he’s real creative when it comes to evil.”

He gave a small smile. Hill pressed a knee harder into his shoulders, leaning more into the neck and head to grind him into the bloody grass. “Don’t smile,” Hudson said.

“He’s used soul magic, which isn’t even supposed to work, to trap Estrella and use her soul, her being a zombie, to give him some of the same ability to take damage, but he’ll heal, unlike her.”

“You mean she’s stuck like that, with a hole in her side?” Sutton asked.

“Zombies can’t heal injuries, so if we can’t free her soul, yeah.”

Max smiled again. Hill ground more weight into holding him down. Max finally made a noise that sounded like pain, so he could still feel it; good.

He spoke between gritted teeth. “I did not expect someone to shoot a hole in her.”

“You shouldn’t have used her as a shield then,” I said.

I could hear sirens now; the ambulance was on its way.

“What can we do for her then?” Hill asked.

“Hope that sunup steals her mind away, and she’s only afraid at night.”

“Her soul doesn’t vanish with the sunrise,” he said, voice still strained.

All the men leaned harder on him, grinding him into the ground and making him bleed faster, but it wouldn’t kill him. Until we either removed the gris-gris, or found a way to destroy Estrella’s zombie, he might not be able to die. Why is it that the really evil bastards are so fucking afraid of death? Cowards, such cowards.

It was two ambulances, and we had to let the paramedics take him, and her, though once they found out she was a zombie they seemed at a loss. One EMT asked me, “Can we sedate a zombie? Can we make her comfortable?”

“I don’t know.”

Then I realized that I’d been stupid, so caught up in the monstrous parts of what talent with the dead could do that I’d forgotten there might be better uses for my gifts. I went over to the zombie where she was strapped to the gurney, still whimpering and saying it hurt. I doubted it really hurt, but it could have been like phantom limb pain in an amputee. Some of them can feel pain in their missing parts for years afterward. Estrella expected the wound to hurt, so it did, and it certainly was scaring the hell out of her. If I’d known I couldn’t free her soul tonight, I’d have still shot through her to save Connie, but I would have regretted it beforehand a bit more.

She looked up at me with wide, dark eyes. I took her hand in mine and aimed my necromancy at her. I thought,
Be calm, don’t be afraid
. I whispered it to her, and watched her face lose some of the terror, felt her body relax.

Max yelled, “What are you doing, Anita?”

I ignored him, but Estrella jumped, flinching and whimpering. She knew his voice all right, and it meant bad things. “He can’t hurt you anymore, Estrella. You’re safe.” That was both true and a lie, but it filled her eyes with calm again. It helped her relax.

“She’s mine! Her soul is mine! Mine!”

I smiled down at the pretty face, the calm zombie that didn’t know it was dead. She smiled back. “You’re safe. Calm.”

“I’m safe, calm,” she repeated.

I patted her hand and put it on top of the blanket they’d strapped over her, as they moved her toward the ambulance. I went to talk to Max before they loaded him. We were going to accompany that ambulance, because when Hudson had asked me if Max might be able to use his magic to escape from the ambulance, or hospital, I honestly couldn’t say yes or no. He’d already done a piece of magic that should have been impossible, so all bets were off.

“What did you do to her?” he asked, straining against the straps that held him down and the handcuffs on both wrists.

“I helped her be less afraid.”

“I want her afraid. I want her to remember that she only has herself to blame for this.”

“Why, because she dumped your ass? Stalker much, Max?”

“Maximiliano, and she’s mine, Anita, mine! You keep your magic off of her!”

“She listens to me, to my necromancy, when you’ve got a piece of her soul trapped in you, and you still can’t keep me from controlling her.”

“I stopped you over the computer.”

“Yeah, because you could touch the zombie and I couldn’t, but now I can touch her and you can’t. I’m betting I can control her, even if you don’t want me to. I’ll keep her calm and unafraid while we get a judge to sign off on removing the gris-gris so we can free her soul, because trafficking in human parts, even souls, is a felony. Did you know that?”

“How do you prove I have her soul?”

“I don’t have to, someone tried to sell their soul on eBay a few years back and a judge ruled that a soul is the same as any human organ. It’s a felony to sell pieces of ourselves.”

“Fine, take it, it still won’t prove that I did anything to earn an execution, and by the time you get through all the hearings to remove the gris-gris I’ll have healed. It will be years in court before you can prove anything. Magic is so hard to explain to a jury, and I’ll get to tell them what a bastard my father is, and how he abandoned me. His wife isn’t going to like knowing that he had a bastard child with Dominga Salvador.”

Max was right about that.

“Juries love videos, Maximiliano. The sex slavery angle will make them hate you. By the time they see it all, they will be thinking there but for the grace of God go I, or my sister, my daughter, my wife, my child. They’ll put the needle in your arm themselves by the time we’re done with you.”

“A good lawyer will make sure those videos never see a jury, Anita. They are too prejudicial, and would bias the jury against me. If convicted it would be magical malfeasance, which means my execution would be swift. They won’t take the chance of getting the verdict overthrown after I’m dead—that doesn’t look good on a judge’s record.”

“What was your major in college again, Maximiliano?”

“Prelaw.”

“Of course it was.” I smiled at him.

He didn’t like the smile.

“But, Max, all I have to do is get a court order to remove all dangerous magical items from you. I can honestly say that I don’t know exactly what the gris-gris does. I mean, after all I don’t do voodoo, not really. If we cut it off tonight, I think three bullets in the chest will be enough that natural causes will do it for us.”

“You’ll never get a judge to sign off while I’m this hurt.”

I leaned in and spoke low. “You’re probably right, but I’m going to try anyway.”

He smiled, smug and safe behind magic too complicated to explain to most judges and nothing quite hard enough to be called evidence. He should have been safe as they bundled him up into the ambulance and we got in the Bear Cat and followed him. I didn’t want him safe. I didn’t want Estrella to be trapped in her ruined body for weeks while we fought this out in court.

I found Manny and his whole family in the waiting room outside surgery. I was still dressed for SWAT, so it took Mercedes a second to recognize me. She looked like a slightly younger version of Connie. She got up and came to me, hugging me. “Thank you for rescuing them!”

Then Rosita was there, all five-ten of her with her wide shoulders and nearly square shape. Her hair was back in a bun at the nape of her neck, so she could still undo her hair and let Manny brush it out at night. It was one of the things they’d done since they married in their teens. She’d probably have been embarrassed that I knew that, but I liked knowing it. It was sweet to know they still loved each other like that, after so many years. Connie hugged me and started to cry, which she hadn’t done at the cemetery. Manny hugged me last.

“How’s Tomas?” I asked.

He took me off to one side of the room away from the women in his life. “He’ll live, but they aren’t sure how hurt he is, and after the . . . man shot him he stomped his leg, broke it badly.”

I thought about Tomas being fast enough to make State, and good enough to be scouted for high schools in the area, and even some colleges. He could run like the wind, Manny had said. I was sad I hadn’t gone to one of the track meets now. “Max needs to die, Manny.”

A look as bleak as any I’d ever seen filled his eyes. “Didn’t he kill those girls and raise them as zombies? That will earn him a warrant of execution.”

“We can’t prove he killed them, not easily.”

“He will be a danger to my family and to you while he is alive.”

“I know, and if he could die we’d have taken care of it tonight.”

“What do you mean, if he could die?”