Jim Butcher - Changes

It was only then that I noticed the woman on the altar, bound hand and foot, her eyes wide and hopeless, fixed on that black knife as if she could not look away.

My hands clenched into fists. I wasn’t here to fight, I reminded myself. I wasn’t here to fight.

But I wasn’t here to stand around and let something like this happen, either. And I’ve never had a clear head when it comes to protecting women. Murphy says it makes me a Neanderthal.

She may be right, but I didn’t seize a bone and jump the guy. I just cleared my throat really, really obnoxiously, and said, “Hey.”

The knife paused.

Then the Red King lowered it and turned to face me. And I was forcibly reminded that nuclear warheads come in relatively small packages. He made absolutely no threatening gesture. He didn’t even glare.

He didn’t need to.

The pressure of his eyes was like nothing I had ever felt before—empty darkness that struck at me like a physical blow, that made me feel as if I had to physically lean away from him to keep from being drawn forward into that vacuum and lost to the void. I was suddenly reminded that I was alone, that I had none of my tools, that I was involved in matters way over my head, and that my outfit looked ridiculous.

And all of it was simply his physical presence. It was far too huge for the little body it came in, too large to be contained by the stone of this temple, a kind of psychic body heat that loomed so large that only a fool would not be instantly aware of how generally insignificant he was in the greater scheme of the universe. I felt my resolve being eroded, even as I stood there, and I clenched my jaw and looked away.

The Red King chuckled. He said something. Alamaya answered him, then rose and came to kneel down at his feet, facing me.

The slave on the altar remained in place, crying quietly.

I could hear another, smaller voice coming from behind the altar. Holy crap. I couldn’t have cut this one much closer. I focused on my daughter’s voice for a moment, small and sweet—and suddenly I didn’t feel nearly so small. I just felt angry.

The Red King spoke.

Alamaya listened and then said, “You do not speak the true tongue of the ages, wizard, so my lord will use this slave to ensure that understanding exists between us.”

“Radical,” I said. “Wicked cool.”

Alamaya eyed me for a moment. Then she said something to the Red King, apparently conveying the fact that I had obnoxiously used phrasing that was difficult to translate.

He narrowed his eyes.

I mimicked his expression. I didn’t know if he got it, but he sure didn’t like it.

He said something in a short, curt tone.

“My lord demands to know why you are here,” the priestess said.

“Tell him he fucking well knows why I’m here,” I said.

She stared at me in shock. She stammered several times as she translated for me. I don’t know if Ancient Mayan has a word for bleep or if she used it.

The Red King listened, his expression slipping from displeasure into careful neutrality. He stared at me for several moments before he spoke again.

“ ‘I was given a gift by she you know as Duchess Arianna,’ ” the girl translated. “ ‘Are you saying that the gift was wrongfully obtained?’ ”

“Yes,” I said, not looking away from him. “And you know it.” I shook my head. “I’m sick of dancing. Tell him that I’ll kill Arianna for him, take my daughter with me, and leave in peace. Tell him if he does that, it stops being personal. Otherwise, I’m prepared to fight.”

The girl translated, her face once more fearful. When she finished, the Red King burst out laughing. He leaned back against the altar, his mouth wide in a grin, his black eyes utterly unsettling. He spoke a few terse sentences.

“My lord says that he will throw one of your limbs from each door if you lift your hand against him.”

I snorted. “Yes. But I won’t even try to kill him.” I leaned forward, speaking to the Red King, not the girl, and showing him my teeth. “I’ll try to cripple him. Wound him. Weaken him. Ask him if he thinks the death curse of a wizard of the White Council can deal him a wound. Ask him how well he trusts the people on the nearest couple of levels of the pyramid. Ask him if he thinks that they’ll visit and send gifts when they realize he’s been hurt.”

Alamaya spoke in a fearful whisper, earning a sharp word of reproof and a command from the Red King. I guessed at the subject matter: “I don’t want to tell you this, my lord.” “Stupid slave, translate the way I damned well told you to do or I’ll break my foot off in your ass.”

Okay. Maybe not that last part.

Alamaya got on with her unpleasant job, and the words pushed the Red King into a rage. He gritted his teeth, and . . . things moved beneath his skin, shifting and rolling where nothing should have existed that could shift and roll.

I stared at him with one eyebrow lifted and that same wolf smile on my face, waiting for his reaction. He hadn’t been talked to like this in a long time, if ever. He might not have much of a coping mechanism for dealing with it. If he didn’t, I was going to die really horribly.

He did. He mastered himself, but I thought it was close—and it cost the woman on the altar her life.

He spun and slammed the obsidian knife into her right eye with such force that the blade broke off. She arched her body up as much as her restraints allowed and let out a short, choked scream of agony, throwing her head left and right—and then she sort of slowly relaxed into death. One leg kept twitching and moving.

The Red King ran two fingertips through the blood that was seeping from her eye socket. He slipped the fingers into his mouth and shuddered. Then he turned to face me, completely composed again.

I’d seen behavior like that before. It was the mark of an addict scoring a fix and full of contentment that he had a body full of booze or drugs or whatever, and therefore the illusion that he could handle emotional issues more capably.

That . . . explained a lot about how the Red Court had behaved during the war. Hell’s bells, their king was a junkie. No wonder they had performed so inconsistently—brilliant and aggressive one moment, capable of making insane and idiotic mistakes the next. It also explained why there was strife within the Court. If the mark of power was control of one’s blood thirst, indulging it only when and where one chose, and not with every random impulse, then anyone who knew about the Red King’s condition would know that he was weak, inconsistent, and irrational.

Hell’s bells. This guy wasn’t just a monster. He was also paranoid. He had to be, because he knew that his bloodlust would be seen as a sign that he should be overthrown. If it had been happening for very long, it would have driven him insane. Even for one of the Red Court, I mean.

And that must be what had happened. Arianna had somehow tumbled to the Red King’s weakness, and was building a power base aimed at deposing him. She’d be building her own power, personal, political, and social, inasmuch as the vampires had a psychotic, blood-spattered, ax-murdering version of a society. Dealing appropriately with one’s enemies was critical to maintaining standing in any society—and for the Red Court, the only two enemies were those who had been dealt with appropriately and those who were still alive. She literally had no choice but to take me down if she was to succeed. And a Pearl Harbor for the White Council wouldn’t hurt her any either, if she pulled it off.

Oh, I had to make sure this little lunatic stayed king. As long as he was, the Council would never face a competent, united Red Court.