by Faith Hunter
I studied the face of Shimon. He was vamped out and so was his mouthpiece. She had upper and lower fangs, top and bottom. I had no idea what she might be saying until the audio suddenly came through Alex’s speakers.
Then the woman’s voice came over the sound system. “—kill every human for ten miles. Claim every Naturaleza and every Mithran for twenty miles. Tribal woman and her pitiful followers, you will be mine or you will be true-dead. I am king. I am the god of the blood-drinkers. I am all there is for life and death and for any future that defeats the dragons. You will kneel to me. I will drink your blood and eat your flesh. Your witches will enter my circle and give me time. All time. I will rule from the beginning to the end, the alpha and the omega . . .”
I made a slashing motion to Alex and he cut the volume. “He knew we would find him and hear this.”
“He spent a lot of time in Ed’s head,” Alex said. “He may know us better than we want him to.”
“Oh goody.” I sighed. “I get the megalomania,” I said. “I get the belief that, because he’s lived so long, he thinks he deserves something. Even worship. But something feels off.” I walked closer to the screen with the fanghead and the bleeding woman. Her fingers were working, twisting and bending and—“Alex. Get your deaf friend to read the fingers. She’s using the . . . whatchu call it . . . the deaf alphabet.”
Alex cursed under his breath. “American Sign Language hand alphabet. Yeah. Got it. I have a feeling that whatever she’s signing, it isn’t what the fanghead wants her to say.”
We fell silent. In the background I heard Angie and EJ screaming in laughter. I also heard Big Evan’s woodwind pipes and felt distant magic glance across my skin. Cia and Liz were at work in the parking lot. Something about their magic felt odd, felt shadowy and smoky, as if the world had burned from within their workings. It was a trace of dark magic or demon taint, and either one terrified me, but there was nothing I could do about that. Not now.
“Humans in danger,” Alex said. “Cantrell, my deaf friend, says the bloody woman is saying that over and over. ‘Humans in danger. Send DQ. Help.’”
DQ. Dark Queen. Asking me for help. An act of compassion or a trap?
“I don’t believe that one of the Flayer’s vamps would care about humans,” Alex said, echoing my thoughts.
I said nothing, but my entire body tightened. Silently I walked away, up the stairs, and changed into my half-form shape. Lying on the floor, panting, in pain, I thought about the message. It was probably a trap. Fangheads were good ambush hunters. But . . . I was the Dark Queen. This was my job, or would be once I figured out where my enemy was. I weaponed up. Thinking about my clan, my people who would be on the firing line with me and in danger if I failed. I hadn’t heard back from Soul about help. Ayatas was useless. Rick LaFleur was not answering. The LEOs were trapped in an avalanche.
My people and I were alone. I needed to be ready when the opportunity came.
My mind on autopilot, I dressed and braided my hair, repainted my claws with the last of the scarlet polish. I looked in the full-length mirror. My hair was in a fighting queue, with multiple silver stakes in it like a crown. Six throwing knives. I didn’t put on boots, but I did secure a tactical pocketknife in the deep boot sheath and a tactical fixed blade over it. Someone searched me once I put on the boots? They’d find the fixed blade easy peasy, but chances were good that they wouldn’t stick their fingers into the space below and find the folded knife. My dual shoulder holster and matching nine-mils. I slid my lucky vamp-killer into its sheath. This blade had been made for me by Evan to replace the one lost when I killed Molly’s sister for calling a demon. The vamp-killer had taken many enemies since then. It was mostly superstition, but I felt safer with it on me.
I heard Molly’s fast steps up the stairs. My half-form ears were better than my human ears. She was calling out before she reached my doorway. “Someone’s coming up the road. I can feel it through the hedge and Alex says two monitoring devices indicate something passed through.” She swung in the doorway, arms holding the doorjamb to either side, bouncing on her toes.
I gave a slight smile. “You could have texted.”
“I need the exercise. I need to get away from the kids. You coming or you just gonna stand there looking all badass?”
My cell dinged and I tapped on the speaker. Alex said, “You and Molly get back here. The car’s now being chased at five miles an hour through the snow, by two more cars. Eli and Bruiser are on the way there but it’s slow going in the drifts. Witches are in place. Need you here.”
Molly turned and raced back downstairs. She was wearing running shoes, doing cardio. “Move it, Big-Cat!”
I followed and entered the office, where Alex had the main TV screen partitioned off into twelve screens, each with a different view, none of them showing dying bloody vamps. The kids were putting a puzzle together on a big coffee table that hadn’t been there earlier, juice boxes with tiny straws and a bowl of grapes between them. They were under a personal hedge, big enough to cover the kids and the table. Neither child looked up when I entered, seemingly focused on the shaped pieces before them. Uh-huh. Sure. But, Molly’s problem, not mine.
“With one of the outer-perimeter cameras, I spotted Soul inside the lead car. She’s being chased by the other cars, driven by blood-servants of the Flayer,” Alex said. “But an arcenciel doesn’t have to let herself be chased.”
“Right,” I muttered, taking in the different screens. I had seen Soul shift to her rainbow dragon form. And to a tiger. She could be anything she wanted. So why stay human-shaped, trapped in a slow-moving car, one that was having trouble staying on the narrow drive, swerving and sliding across the ice? The car revolved slowly left and began a slow spin as it approached a raised curve, the road higher than the woods around it. The car behind her was wearing chains. It revved up, throwing snow from all tires. Its bumper nudged Soul’s car. Just hard enough.
Soul’s vehicle left the driveway, made a circle half on the verge, and tilted. Almost leisurely, its front end slanted down and slid off the raised drive, down into the trees. It hit two small trees that should have stopped it, but lack of friction and momentum sent it sideways, into more trees, crumpling the passenger door and sending showers of ice and snow from branches to cover the windshield and roof.
The car wasn’t stopped; it twisted and spun farther, down into the denser trees, wedging itself in, finally coming to rest facing back up the driveway, the headlights brightening the gray day. On the screen to the left, I could make out Eli following Bruiser through the snowfall. Bruiser moved like a vamp, fast and graceful. Even with a body full of vamp blood, Eli was less nimble than usual and a lot slower, falling behind in the half-mile sprint. Brute was nowhere to be seen.
Alex put something in my hand and I pulled on a communication unit by muscle memory. This one fitted my cat-situated and shaped ears. Eli had been making me custom-fitted headgear, in his copious spare time. My eyes got teary at the thought, but I never took them from his slow, jerky lope through the snow-crusted trees. I could hear both men breathing deeply, but they communicated by hand signals, not speech. Bruiser moved right and down. Eli moved left and to higher ground. They disappeared from the screen, Alex working to find them again.
The two chasing cars came to a stop on the driveway. Headlights illuminated the falling snow. Two females leaped from the first car. Two men from the second car. They were wearing winter gear, holding weapons. Agile and fast. Well-fed blood-servants.
The women reached the undented car doors and wrenched them open. I expected Soul to leap away as an arcenciel. To attack as a tiger. Or even an African lion. Nothing happened. The bigger blood-servant reached into the car, holding something in her hand. Clear and iridescent.
She had a scale from a rainbow dragon. There was a smear on it. Blood? If so, whose?
Over the headset, I heard weapons fire and saw
the two male blood-servants drop behind their opened car doors. Like that ever helped in real life. Not. Eli, however, was behind the trunk of a decent-sized tree, protected. Firing. Pinning the men down. Alex had found his brother’s vest camera and pinned it to the screen.
On the other side of the screen Bruiser appeared. He practically flew along the low-lying ridge. Firing.
The woman without the scale slid and fell. It didn’t look clumsy. It looked dead. The woman with the scale turned, her weapon tracking for the threat.
Bruiser leaped, weapon out front. Firing high. Cover fire. The woman didn’t fall or duck. She lifted the weapon to Bruiser. Still in the air, Bruiser fired. Collided with the woman. They rammed into the roof and side supports of the car.
Fell into the snow.
On the screen showing the chasing cars, the men ducked into their vehicle and backed down the driveway. Eli didn’t pursue them, but he did place three centered shots where the driver’s head should be and three more where the passenger’s head should be. The car kept moving away.
Eli eased from behind the tree and across snowdrifts to Bruiser. Together they zip-tied the hands of the two women with extrawide ties, which meant the woman I thought had been killed hadn’t been. Soul, wearing jeans and a sweater, and not her usual flowing garb, left the safety of her car but didn’t shift, even now. She looked cold. Miserable. Pale. Her silver hair was tangled. Something was wrong, but that would have to wait. We had prisoners. That meant we had info.
* * *
* * *
I left the TV room, the sotto voce argument between Big Evan and Molly, the louder discussion by the Everhart witch sisters about anchoring the hedge of thorns, and the puzzle the kids were playing. Walking around the last cottage toward the creek where Soul waited, I could make out the soft drone of voices and made a cone of my hands on the window to see inside the unfinished, unheated space.
The inner walls were two-by-fours and the outer walls were uninsulated, but it kept the wind out, which seemed good enough for Eli and Bruiser. They were talking to one prisoner, talking being a euphemism for a combo of military interrogation techniques and mind bending. My business partner/brother was asking the questions; Bruiser was standing behind the human woman with his hands on her head, whispering, pushing with his magic. Onorio energies had a scent and a texture—hot and burning and prickly. There was no mistaking it. The only other time I’d been around when he did this, the stink of burning things had been so strong I hadn’t noticed the sensory components of his magic. His mind bending. That was my word for Bruiser’s reordering of her thoughts, brainwashing her the hard-fast way, to force her to become his. He hated it; I could see that from the tension in his shoulders, the stress on his face and tears in his eyes. But . . .
The same old excuse military commanders had used for eons still held true here. Lives were at stake and she was our enemy. She would have killed us or Soul in an instant. She had value only because of what she might give us. Which sucked.
The woman was talking. Baring her heart and soul. I had known my honeybunch could twist vamps to love him. That was the Onorio superpower. But I hadn’t known he could twist humans. From his body language, I was pretty sure he hadn’t known he could either. The smell was distantly familiar enough to make me wonder if the other Onorios I had known had tried that with me. I remembered a fight in a workout room once, where the scents had been vaguely similar to this. And right after that I had claimed I was Leo’s Enforcer. Dang, dang, dang. Had the other Onorios tried to tie me to Leo? Or worse, to Grégoire? Was this ability why Leo had been so mad at Bruiser, because he refused to use this talent on me? Crap. I hated to be so suspicious.
Eli caught my eye and nodded to Bruiser, hand gestures saying he’d be right back. He left the cottage, silent, officially my second, which meant half bodyguard, half champion. My friend and chosen brother. He was pulling on a cold coat when he closed the door, leaving Bruiser inside with his prey, alone.
“Is Bruiser okay without you?” I asked.
“Yeah. He’s good, in control. He doesn’t like what he is or what he can do, but he understands it’s necessary. Bruiser has access to Alex via comms. If something goes wrong, it will likely be magical in nature and nothing I can help with. But.” Eli looked to the tree line rather than at me. “George’s acting in opposition to his basic nature. He’s doing things by choice that he was forced to do when he was under Leo’s thrall. Things he did to you. Once again he’s doing things he isn’t proud of. He’s not going to be a happy man for a while after this.”
It was odd hearing Bruiser referred to by his real name, and I gave a belated truncated nod. “I didn’t ask him to. Or make him.”
“Course not. And that might be even worse. He’s doing it out of necessity, not under compulsion.”
“Yeah. I get that. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“Be human for him a little more often.” Eli barked with quiet laughter. “Give him some of that sweet, sweet lovin’.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“But a good-looking, hunky, amazeballs idiot, right?”
I laughed, which he had surely intended.
“On the other hand,” he said, “there’s Shaddock.”
“What about him?”
“That guy has power, Janie, way more than was apparent before you promoted him. He claimed the vamps who attacked the sweathouse, and they were all at least fifty years old. It took all of an hour each.”
“That’s fast. But then . . .” I grimaced. “Shaddock has access to Amy Lynn Brown and . . . he actually made Amy Lynn. Maybe there’s something extra about him, something Leo missed? Something we all missed?”
“We’ll keep an eye out.” Eli looked grim and I wondered if there had been a good reason Leo refused to promote Lincoln Shaddock to MOC. Something I hadn’t known about when I gave him the city.
“Yeah. Thanks.” I turned away, stopped, and turned back. “I’m glad you’re in my life.”
Eli gave me a battle-worthy smile, which is to say, not much of anything. “Somebody’s got to keep you alive.”
Together we tramped through the snow, me barefoot, more ice balls working their way up under my toe pads and toenails. The snow-sleet frozen mixture was now crusty and about fourteen inches thick. I held up a paw-foot and shook it. I said, “It’ll be a bugger to get the ice out of the hairs on my feet.”
“Bet that’s not something you ever expected to say.” I showed my fangs to him and he chuckled before he continued. “You going to talk to Soul?”
“Try to. You know why she wanted to jump in icy water instead of coming inside?”
“No idea. I’ll stay out of the way.” He faded into the trees. Softly, from the snow-covered forest, he added, “Hey, babe. Try to not get killed.”
CHAPTER 15
Not Cat and Mouse, Beast thought. Beast and Boar.
I heard Soul before I saw her, and from the way the splashes slowed and stopped, she knew I was near. The faint breeze carried my scent to her even before I approached the high bank and looked down. In the icy pool made by the mountain stream, she was swimming, unexpectedly naked. I wasn’t rude enough to stare, and couldn’t be sure, but I thought she might have fins instead of hands and feet. Her silver hair was swirling on the surface, caught in a current I didn’t see or moving all by itself. Her eyes were silvery too. We watched each other, silent, two predators at the watering hole. Soul cracked first.
“I smell disease leaking from your pores. Do you understand why you are sick?”
It was an odd form of the question. Not “Do you know why you are sick,” but “Do you understand . . .” “Skinwalkers aren’t meant to walk through time,” I said. “Timewalking and absorbing all the magics I came across ruined my DNA. I have a tooth with healthy DNA and can heal myself, but I might have a five-year-old body and have to grow up again.” And I might
lose Beast, I thought. Not willing to do either.
Puma concolor and Jane are Beast. Best hunter.
Dang skippy, I thought at my Beast.
Soul tilted her head to the sky, her eyes still on me, and said, “You have a scale from an arcenciel. Take the scale and go to the interdimensional opening. You can use the scale to see your damage, and to heal yourself. Or you can swim through the rift and you will be healed.”
Yeah. Sounds so easy. I didn’t believe the shape-shifting creature in the water and neither did Beast. Soul wasn’t quite human right now and I had no idea how that might affect her brain, her instincts, her mores, or her personality.
“There will be a price,” she said, “no matter which method you choose. And danger. There always is. But there are ways and methods that make either path less dangerous. Take me with you and I will show you the safest way in.”
People who wanted something had a way of bending the truth to suit them, and Soul had just made this a bargaining session. We had made a number of deals in the past. Sometimes she held up her end. Sometimes an agreement with her meant nothing. I didn’t have long to negotiate. After dark, Soul would be able to see the magic of the rift through the trees anyway. Of course, she didn’t know that yet. I hated politics and the half lies that came with political maneuvering, but I’d clearly learned a lot from Leo—and from Beast—because I knew what steps to take. A game of cat and mouse.
Not cat and mouse, Beast thought. Beast and boar.
None of my swift thoughts showed on my face as I asked a question I already knew the answer to. “Are the local PsyLED agencies going to help me destroy the Flayer of Mithrans?”
She frowned and the winter-cold water swirled as if fish swam with her. “I was not able to obtain their agreement. If those hunting the Flayer of Mithrans locate him, they will target him with missiles. They will claim a gas leak or a terrorist attack. But they will make certain that he is no more.”
