"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Skeleton Key" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

throbbing elsewhere, when at last Steve drew a knife and spilled my heart's blood, the god came to us in
the guise of a dark-haired boy, his chlamys draped carelessly over one shoulder and fastened at the
other. In his hand he held the caduceus, his wand of sleep and balm of healing, with serpents twined
about it.
"I'm sorry I'm late," he said.
Steve had given me a slow but fatal wound. It was a relief, actually, because they stopped torturing
me and just waited for me to die. I was still aware enough to see that all the black-robed people fell to
the ground. One started a chant, "Bless us, Lord Satan," and all the others joined in.
He glanced at them, but walked through their circle and came to kneel on the slab beside me. "I'm
sorry," he said again. Pearly light haloed him. I couldn't figure out if it was my sight going or something
that was actually happening. "I'm sorry," he said, touching the smaller wounds. As he touched them, the
pain faded from them. "There was so little energy for me in this era that it took your great sacrifice for me
to manifest. I would not have had you die for me."
My eyelids were getting heavier, and pain no longer pinned me in place.
"Not against your will," he murmured, putting his hands in the blood on my chest.
I shaped my mouth around the breath coming out of me. "Much rather you than any other," I
whispered. Wonder bat-tled the lassitude seeping into me.
"Bless us, Lord Satan. Bless us, Lord Satan," they cried all around us.
He leaned over and pressed his lips to mine, and in that moment, all pain faded and I came free of
my body, which stopped breathing. He rose and held out his hand, which glowed with my blood as if it
were rosy liquid light. Confused, I reached toward himтАФhow could I do that without a body?тАФand saw
my own arm, a phantom but there, as I held it out.
"Come," he said, taking my hand. I felt a tingling warmth in my palm and fingers where his hand
touched mine. The pearly haze wrapped around him was very strong now. We walked out past all the
kneeling dark figures. I glanced back once. My body, violated, burned, stabbed, its face twisted with
pain, lay in its own blood and fluids. I shuddered and walked through the wall hand in hand with my god.


We traveled to a place removed from the earth I had spent my life on, yet just around the corner. We sat
in a midnight meadow where all the grasses glowed with green pinpoints of light, and night-blooming
flowers offered cores of yellow radiance and golden scent to the stars. From somewhere not too far
away, a stream whispered and murmured.
"I am the god of travelers," he said, "I am the conductor of souls; I can take you to the next world."
"But IтАФ" I began, then stopped, my fingers touching my throat, surprised at having a voice again.
They had gripped my tongue in red-hot pinchers, and my screams had left my throat torn and raw; but
that pain was gone now.
He waited, smiling at me, so beautiful I wanted to hug him, the image of my dreams and wishes.
 "I don't feel ready," I said. Though I didn't know what I meant.
"You can stay for a while," he murmured. "It won't be the same."
After a silence, I touched his knee.
He put his hand on mine, closed his fingers around my hand. "Do you wish to go back into your dirt?
I have done such a thing before."
"My body, you mean?" I asked. I thought of my last sight of my body: hurt, mangled, wretched.
"No!" Heat flowed through me as I remembered candlelit faces framed in black hoods. A smile from a
brown-eyed woman as she leaned down to flay some skin off my arm. The frowning concentra-tion of a
man with deep crows'-feet at the outer edges of his eyes as he sketched a design on my stomach with
many prickings of a hot needle. "No," I said, "but I don't want to leave Earth. And IтАФLord, those people
tortured me..." I stared at my free hand. Each bone in each finger had been broken, yet now my hand
looked whole.
"Yes," he said.