by Faith Hunter
I met Eli at the door to the restroom / changing room, and he looked me over, clearly making sure I was human and covered. He pointed to a small door I hadn’t seen earlier, and I ducked out into the sunlight. But on the way, I saw the baptismal water. It was no longer blue and clean. It now had an odd tinge, with a froth of brownish bubbles along the sides.
I had desecrated the baptismal pool. Something unknown, something like horror and shock and revulsion, quivered along my body. Something evil had been left in that water. Something evil that had been inside me. What if I hadn’t gotten it all out? What if something was left behind, a taint, a smear of dark magic?
I made my way to the SUV, trudging through the heat in my new flip-flops, trying to make sense of what I had seen of the water. It had looked shadowy. Not muddy or dirty or dyed with blood, as I might have expected. It had looked shadowy. As if something loomed over the water, cutting out the light, the corners and bottom brownish and smoked over. I got in the front passenger seat of the SUV, which was running, the AC on high, and examined my arms, ankles, shins, feet, hands, and, in the sun-visor mirror, my face. No red lines. Not anywhere.
But somehow, I didn’t think I was totally cured.
Eli got in and eased into the sparse traffic, assuring me he had pulled the drain on the pool and set it to empty, making certain that the contaminated water was removed from the baptismal basin. He had also made a generous donation to the church. Then he pulled into a Popeyes fried-chicken joint and handed a bucket of extra-crispy to me.
I was generous—I gave each of the brothers a leg. I devoured the rest, ten pieces, four biscuits, and a tub of mashed potatoes that my skinwalker metabolism demanded for energy replenishment. Shifting almost always required food. Shifting and moving through time required something like penance—a sickness that nearly killed me the last time I used it, the recovery taking too long. Too dang long. Today, I wasn’t sick, but the caloric needs were greater than usual. I still felt empty when I finished the bucket of chicken, but exhaustion took me under and I closed my eyes on the way home, my head against the headrest, my thoughts gloomy and uncertain. And wary. As if something watched me through the darkness of my own thoughts, its sights on the center of my back, between my shoulder blades.
CHAPTER 10
I Have the Scratches to Prove It
I woke in my own bed, when a heated body climbed in beside me and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me close. “Spooning,” I mumbled.
“Courting and living in sin,” Bruiser whispered back. “And your partners are gone to make groceries, so we have the place to ourselves.”
“Yeah?” I managed, waking up more slowly than I would have liked. Making groceries was strictly a New Orleans term, and it sounded odd coming from Bruiser’s mouth.
“Yes,” he said, a low thrum of need in his voice. He pressed his lips to the back of my neck, his hands spread wide across my stomach. His scent filled the tent of the covers, his usual citrusy cologne changed to something that smelled like blue cypress and oak moss, with a small amount of frankincense and a hint of . . . catnip. In bloom.
I rolled over in his arms, an action that twisted me in my own hair but brought my nose into contact with his chest. “You smell good,” I said.
“I’m glad you like it,” Bruiser said, tilting my chin up so our mouths met. His fingers slipped beneath my T-shirt and slid it off over my head. Brushed the lower curve of my breast as he did. I sighed into his mouth, a soft moaning sound.
“I had it blended with you in mind,” he whispered. And that was the last thing we said for a long, long time.
* * *
We were dressed and brewing tea and coffee when the guys got back, banging through the side door with bags of groceries. The Kid dropped three bags of veggies and one of canned, pasta-based dinners and sugary cereal on the kitchen table and took off to his tablets, muttering into his earbud cell something about encryption coding. Eli entered more slowly, placing his six bags of tofu, yogurt, green stuff, and steak on the table beside his brother’s. He looked back and forth between Bruiser and me and he might have smiled.
I didn’t look at his face long enough to judge, but my own flared and heated. “Shut up,” I grumbled.
“Babe,” he said, and grabbed a carrot and a stick of string cheese to munch as he put away the groceries. Stacking stuff on the top refrigerator shelf, he asked Bruiser, “What’s the latest on the action at vamp HQ? Janie got hit pretty bad yesterday.”
Bruiser smiled and went to the foyer, bringing back a leather satchel, a cross between a backpack and a briefcase, but looking expensive and well-worn. “Leo, Del, and I went over the data from the attack on Jane, and the Master of the City suggested some reading material from the library.” He set the satchel on the kitchen table and removed three heavy tomes from it, along with sealed files of loose papers, the files made of acid-free materials that had been treated to preserve antique paper, papyrus, sheepskin, and anything else the ancients had used for writing. He laid the books to the side and spread out a cloth on the table before placing the files atop it. He donned white gloves, smoothing the fingers into place.
Bruiser had been given a classical education, meaning that he could read ancient and modern Greek, Latin, and several more modern languages. He had previously been translating a Latin-ish history of witches from the original hand-bound manuscript, and so far, he had discovered a lot of history that we might be able to use when the EuroVamps came calling, but nothing about the bag of bones formerly hanging on the wall of sub-five and currently running around the city killing people. Not a thing. Research into things historical and not yet scanned into the clouds of the Internet was more time-consuming than I’d expected. He had been at it for several weeks.
“The escape of Joseph Santana,” Bruiser said, “and the deaths in the bar have necessitated a change in Leo’s usual modus operandi. He is suddenly much more helpful in directing me to materials that might assist our research. Of course, having access to Reach would have been more helpful than any reading material, but I’m taking what I can get.”
Reach—the world’s foremost researcher on all things vampiric—had disappeared from view following a visit by some particularly nasty vamps and a human torturer. They had hurt him and I hadn’t been able to discover how badly or where he was now. I hoped healing on some sunny beach somewhere, sipping umbrella drinks and working on his tan. Reach was a treacherous, double-dealing, entrepreneurial backstabber, who would have sold his mother to the highest bidder, but we had done business for a long time, and no one deserved to be tortured. No one.
“With the focus now shifted from the European Mithrans’ visit to Joseph Santana,” Bruiser said, “I’ve done some prep work in the material suggested by Leo, scanning for names used by Santana over the years, and trying to find information about his magical abilities.”
Eli made a snorting sound while putting away three dozen eggs, a bunch of celery, and a big bag of sweet potatoes.
Bruiser gave him a lazy grin. “Oddly enough, the search led me to the arcenciels, also called serpentes iridis.”
Eli closed the refrigerator and leaned a hip against the counter. “What do the dragons of light have to do with Santana?”
Bruiser said, “They, or the human magic users of the time, may have left behind some magical implements.” I thought about the hints of gold I’d seen on Santana, at neck and at wrist. And the wyrd that had fried my body. What if the spell he had spoken had been augmented by an ancient artifact? What if the wyrd had been a spell created by the arcenciels or ancient magic users?
“I do have something new for you all,” Bruiser said, and I got up to freshen my tea and Bruiser’s coffee. “First, Leo’s humans are tearing the Council House apart looking for documents pertaining to Joseph Santana—properties, habits, humans who might still be alive to offer him a lair. Second, the address of the lair from which Joseph Santana originally disappeared. The room was supposedly sealed and remains un
touched to this day. It’s a remote possibility that Santana, in his currently unstable mode, might return there to lair, as a place that he remembers as comfortable and safe. Or there may be papers there that will lead us to a current lair.” With two fingers, he extended a folded slip of paper to Eli. “This will take you there. The caretaker has the keys.”
I let myself relax against the kitchen cabinet for just a moment and sipped my tea, my eyes lingering on Bruiser, showing him with my smile my appreciation for his efforts. The look he gave me back was a little more warm and made me think about his efforts in the bedroom earlier. I dropped my head, letting my hair slide forward, over my face, to touch the oversized mug at my mouth, hiding my heated cheeks.
“Jane has told me about her injuries and the way she was healed,” he said, his eyes on me and the words feeling weighted, as if they carried more import than appeared on the surface.
Not quite as gently, Eli said, “Yeah. About that. Jane? Why did you go get the blood diamond and the iron discs out of the bank?”
The house went silent, Alex in the living room, suddenly standing at the opening to the kitchen, all three men unmoving, watching me. I hadn’t told Bruiser about that yet. I put down my mug and pushed my hair behind my ears and over my shoulders to hang down my back, using the opportunity to think through how I wanted to respond.
“Jane?” Bruiser asked.
“Something about Santana’s attack,” I said, long after I should have spoken to fill the silence, “reminded me of the blood diamond, back when the Damours used it.” For the Youngers, who hadn’t been with me then, I said, “Adrianna was there the night of the fight with the Damours. She was part of the blood-magic spell that they were trying to invoke. The night they tried to kill Angelina and Little Evan.” My godchildren. I had nearly gotten them killed.
I held out my right hand, fingers spread, and studied it. It looked normal. But it still felt off. Just a little. Just a very, very little. “On sub-five, Adrianna and Mario had scratch marks at neck and wrist, as if something had been ripped off each of them during Santana’s escape.”
I could almost feel Bruiser’s mind work, thoughts clicking into place. Softly, he said, “I remember that night, not long after you first came to work for Leo. You fought the Damours and killed them.”
“All except for Adrianna, who Leo saved. Nutso, insane, psycho vamp, and he still won’t let me kill her.”
“In that fight,” Bruiser said, “did your blood touch the blood diamond?”
Staring at my right hand, I made a fist, watching as the muscles bunched and tightened, remembering the tracery of black magic through my skin. I nodded, a jerky motion, up and down. Eli cursed. The Kid’s eyes went wide.
“How did your blood come in contact with the blood diamond?” Bruiser asked. “Walk me through it, step by step.”
“One of the Damours—I called him Baldy—was holding the gem in one hand. I had a cut on my cheek from a branch, from running through the woods in the dark. I know. Idiot civilians,” I said before Eli could. “He was trying to kill me and I was trying to kill him. He touched the diamond to me.” I touched my cheek, remembering, fear crawling up my spine like slithering snakes, sinuous and cold, swallowing my strength. “Into the cut, into my blood. And he spoke a wyrd, activating the spell.” The feeling, the pain, had been so very similar to what had happened when the Son of Darkness attacked. I lifted my cooling tea and sipped, but it did nothing for the dryness of my mouth.
“When I was in the baptismal pool”—I opened my hand again and turned it over, seeing my palm with its three deep, smooth lines and myriad tiny ones—“I was able to remember the fight with—let’s call it skinwalker clarity. Santana was wearing a bracelet when he came up from the elevator shaft. It had a setting crafted for two stones.” I stopped and took a breath. “But one was missing.”
Alex swore softly. Eli pursed his lips, staring at my hand.
“I went to the bank and . . . when I held my hand near the blood diamond, I could feel the magic in it. I could feel Santana’s spell on me. In me. Even now.”
Eli said, “If the blood diamond was once part of the bracelet worn by the Son of Darkness, and if the diamond still in the bracelet is magically connected to the blood diamond, then you might now be connected to the bracelet. Possibly even accessible to the Son of Darkness himself. He could find you through the gems’ attraction to each other and to you. Through your blood.”
I nodded again, more slowly, knowing what he was going to say. It wasn’t prescience. It was just knowing my partner and the way his mind worked. The way my mind worked too.
“Bait,” Eli said.
“No! I forbid it,” Bruiser said.
Which was such an old-man thing to say that it made me smile. “You can’t stop it,” I said, setting down the tea mug and rubbing my right hand in remembered pain. I recalled the strange sense of being spied on earlier, that awareness between my shoulder blades. “The holy water and the shift may have mostly healed me, but I think—” I stopped abruptly, knowing how weird this would sound to anyone not in the room. “I think the bracelet knows where I am. Maybe not all the time, but—” I stopped to reconsider. “If it recognizes my blood, it could be used to track me. Meaning that I should put it back in the safe-deposit box, I know that, but if I do that, then . . .” I can’t use it. No. Not what I wanted to say. I changed it to “. . . we can’t use it ourselves to lure him to me or to track him with it, you know, in case the witches have that ability.”
Bruiser set down his empty coffee cup and asked, “Can you track him? Can you feel him with or through the diamond?”
“I don’t know. I think it would be stupid to try all on my own. Which is one reason why I want the intro to Lachish Dutillet. She could put up a protective circle or something witchy.” I waved a hand to indicate there were a lot of things magical that could be done and that I had no idea what might be involved.
The doorbell rang, and I jumped up to answer, feeling, literally, Saved by the bell. It was a delivery of pizza from Mona Lisa’s, ordered by the Kid while we chatted about ways to capture a killer and my magical problems. Bruiser kissed me on the top of the head and left while I paid the delivery guy. Even in the midst of people dying and my body being eaten up by spells, I could appreciate the view from the back side, and Bruiser had a veeery nice backside. He turned as he stepped into the street and smiled at me. It was one of those special smiles that people in relationships offer each other, smiles that say so much more than the movement of lips and face. Bruiser’s said he’d had fun in my bed and would be back in it soon.
* * *
While we were eating, my cell vibrated. I opened the Kevlar-backed cover and started to say hi. I never got the chance.
“Why didn’t you call me?” My best friend sounded mildly annoyed with me, and whether quietly seething or furious, an angry Molly was dangerous, because her earth-witch gift had gone wonky and started killing things. I ran through what I might have done this time, but no member of her family was in danger and I wasn’t bringing problems to her door. And though Molly was powerful, there was no way she could know that we had been talking about the night I nearly got her children murdered in a blood-magic ceremony. So, for once, there was no reason why she should be upset with me.
“Ummm . . . Hey, Molly,” I said carefully. “Why didn’t I call you about what?”
“About an introduction to Lachish Dutillet. Why didn’t you call me instead of Jodi Richoux?”
“Beeecause you are far away and—” I stopped as understanding hit me over the head, and started over. “I’m an idiot. I’m sorry. I know that you’re planning the Witch Conclave, and that has to involve Lachish Dutillet, doesn’t it? And because I didn’t call you and tell you I needed to see the coven leader, you got blindsided. And probably embarrassed. I was trying to be nice and not bother you. I’m an idiot.”
The silence over the line told me nothing, and though I wanted to babble to cover the hush—a t
otally uncharacteristic urge—I decided that not saying anything was the smart thing to do. Keeping my big mouth shut wasn’t easy for me, but I was getting smarter. Slowly.
Alex shoved a megabite of Mona Lisa Special pizza into his mouth to smother a laugh. Eli just looked amused and helped himself to another slice of the spinach pizza. Both guys were listening avidly, probably wondering if Molly would lose it and try to kill me.
“Molly?”
She blew out a breath and let go of her anger, which was a step in the right direction for the control issues my friend was having, control over her magic and emotions. In the background I heard the musical anti-spell playing, the one created by Molly’s husband to dampen her death magic.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “in case ‘I’m an idiot’ didn’t say it clearly enough.”
“Okay. I was just . . . surprised,” she said, her tone suggesting a shrug, still anxious sounding. “There’s a meeting next week between Lachish and the Master of the City’s primo to discuss topics for the parley. I’m going to ask Leo’s Enforcer to be on hand to present the security arrangements for the conclave.” Which meant me, because she didn’t know that temporarily, I wasn’t Leo’s Enforcer. “The meeting has been moved up because of the death of the fifty-two humans and the blood-sucker that’s loose. Jodi talked to Lachish and suggested that the fanghead might have used magic as well as compulsion to hold the humans down.”
Jodi had been studying the video too, probably with the help of a PsyLED agent, and had clearly drawn some interesting conclusions. A little warning from her would have been nice, but I held that in, saying, “We need to chat about that. I have info. And some problems. And—”
