Easy Pickings

by Faith Hunter

  I growled. Hungry.

  “I thinkin’ big cat need to eat,” Laz said.

  “Yeah. And I’ll let the big kitty cat eat you, too,” Jo said, “unless you agree to talk.”

  Witchy woman swallowed, throat moving under teeth, against tongue. Tasted good. “Oui,” she said.

  “Talk? No magic?” Jo asked.

  “Oui.”

  “Don’ believe her,” Laz said. “We wrap her in eart’, no? D’eart’ will stop her magics. Big cat, dis might hurt some.”

  I growled and swiveled my eyes to big witch man. Do not hurt Beast. I will kill.

  Magics twisted under belly. Burning. I pushed off of witchy woman, shoving down with paws. Heard breath grunt out of her. I did spiral in midair, swiveling with long, heavy tail. Landed in front of Laz and leaped at him. Screaming, Hurt! Hurt! Kill witchy man!

  Landed on him, like landed on small woman. But Laz did not fall. Did not move at all. He caught Beast with arm and threw Beast into trees. Beast landed, rolled, and screamed again, screamer cat cry. Angry!

  “Stop!” Jo shouted. She had arm out, with claw in hand. Magics surrounded her, hot and blazing like blue fire.

  Jane clamped down on Beast mind. Stop. Stop now. Jane pushed down on legs and paws. Beast sat. Growled. But sat.

  “Jane? Are you in control?” Jo asked.

  Jane nodded Beast’s head. Beast did not like Jane in control. Beast is alpha! Pushed at mind with claws. Beast is alpha!

  Not right now. Jo can kill us with that sharp pointy thing.

  Beast growled, but lowered body to ground. Lying down. Flicked ears in disgust. Looked away. Bored. Small biting things bit at skin. Mosquitoes. Hate small biting things. Hate stinky magic.

  “Okay, lady.” Jo bent and picked up not-kit-doll. Shook it and laughed. She held it to Laz. “Doesn’t look a thing like me.” She touched lock of hair on not-kit-doll. “Where . . . Son of a bitch. This is mine! When did you get this from me? In the underworld? Had to be. How did you get some of my hair!”

  Witchy-woman-Jo made stubborn frown. Pointed sharp claw at black magic woman. “I think we were drawn here to stop you from doing whatever black magic you’re doing.”

  “I no do black magic,” other witchy woman said. She put hand to throat. Smearing her blood. Laz put hand to his chest. Blood was dried there. Beast wanted to lick it. Hungry!

  He’s healed, Jane thought in mind. Wonder when that happened.

  “Coulda fooled me,” Jo said.

  “Black magic vampire does black magic. No me. Black magic vampire said I had to hurt you, or else he would hurt Lissa.” She rose to her knees, fighting Laz magics on her skin. “Where is Lissa? Give her back to me!”

  “Lady, I don’t know any Lissa.” Jo tilted head. “We aren’t from around here. We were pulled here to fix something that went wrong on this . . . in this place.”

  “Pulled here?” The little witchy woman sat down the ground. “Pulled here? Oh praise all that is holy. I did that. I pulled you here. I did that.” She started to leak again.

  I pulled from Jane’s control and moved silently into bushes. Hunt. I hunger.

  No. Not yet. Shift back, Jane thought. We need to know what’s going on here and I think she can tell us.

  I hunger! Beast screamed. But Jane pressed down on mind. I lay down beneath sharp pointy plant.

  Not here. Oh, crap. Not again. Jane thought about Jane form. Pain hit belly and bones. Pain made much worse by hunger, hunger like from hunger times, when there was no prey to eat.

  ***

  I came to lying naked under a sword plant, so named because the leaves were serrated on the sides and pointed on the end. Dang Beast and her petty games. The leaves drew blood as I climbed out. And now I had to find my clothes, which would be back at the burned out car. Grumbling imprecations under my breath about cats in general and Beast in particular, I made my way painfully across the rough ground, limping each time my bare feet came down on something sharp—every other step, it seemed—and swatting mosquitoes. Dang Beast.

  My clothes were scattered everywhere, and I never found my underwear or my socks. Going commando was not comfortable, but it was better than the naked alternative. I already had damaged feet, and the blisters I’d get from the boots would only make things worse. Still grumbling, I made my way back to the shack.

  From the voices spilling onto the air, Laz and Jo had herded the voodoo-gal inside and started an interrogation. It was pretty much one sided, or maybe two sided, with the third side—the voodoo-gal—remaining silent except for sobbing.

  I stomped up the rickety steps and stopped just inside the door. I’d seen dozens, maybe hundreds, of these bayou shacks while in Louisiana, but this was the first time I’d ever been inside one. It was a sensory overload I could only call awful.

  The unpainted boards on the outside were covered with layers of newspaper on the inside, damp and moldering. The boards between the uprights were piled with things—saltshakers, herbs in glass jars, candles in jars, wicks flaming and fluttering in the night. Bird nests and bird houses sat next to hammers, saws, spatulas and soup dippers hanging from nails pounded into the wood. Pots hung from hooks next to brightly colored dresses or shawls. Mardi Gras masks hung next to bags with cartoon babies crawling on them, next to shoulder bags with university names and mascots on them, next to parasols and umbrellas and hats and plastic containers and books by the hundreds, most mystery or romance. The scents were citronella, kerosene, lighter fluid, chicken, and overcooked grease. The sounds were the snapping of candle flames and the heartbroken crying of the witchy-woman.

  I studied her. She was thin, maybe five feet tall, with coffee-and-milk skin and curly black hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. Her eyes were green and intelligent, and her hands and nails were clean.

  From the look of her skin, she had been crying a lot. Sitting in a rocker, her knees drawn up and her arms around them, her face was crusted with white from the salt of tears. Her belly was flat. And her dress was stained and wet over her breasts. That’s when I recognized the other smells, hidden beneath the others. Breast milk. And baby.

  I looked around fast. “Holy crap. Where’s the baby?” I asked. The woman burst into tears again. Jo and Laz looked at each other and then at me. Their eyes said, Baby? The woman’s anguish didn’t smell like grief. It sounded and smelled like fear.

  Someone took her kit, Beast thought at me.

  The others went quiet as I went to the stove and turned on a burner, found a pot—amazingly it was clean—and I poured water into it from a huge container marked with a commercial water company logo. Added salt. A 42-ounce box of Quaker Old-Fashioned Oats was on a wall-board over the stove and there was milk in the old icebox. A real icebox, with a block of melting ice in it. The voodoo-gal had no electricity and, if the smell was anything to by, no indoor plumbing. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t modern at all.

  While the water heated, I prowled, and the other three watched me. There was an outhouse to the side of the house. No car in the drive, but a small electric scooter, which I had no idea how she charged, was leaned against the house.

  I found the basinet in the back room, empty and cold. It hadn’t been used recently, but the dirty diapers suggested that the baby had only been gone a day or two. I pulled the bassinet into the kitchen and set it in front of the crying woman with a firm snap of wheels on the wood floor. She stared at it with tormented eyes.

  “Lissa is your baby, right?”

  “Oui. My bebe.” And she started wailing again.

  Took kit, Beast snarled in my mind. Will kill thief of kit.

  Jo looked at it, and then at me. And she sighed. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah. That pretty well sums up my feelings,” I said as I stirred a half box of oats into the boiling water. Moments later, I dumped the oats into a big bowl, added a fourth of a pound of sugar and all the milk, and ate. While I stuffed my face, Laz bent over the erstwhile enemy and said, gently, softly, “Wh
o dat took your baby, sweetheart, eh? We get him back for you, yes?” Laz gently wiped her face with a tissue he pulled from a box on the jumbled shelves. “What your name, eh?”

  “S-s-s-Serena.” And the girl laid her head on Laz’s arm and bawled.

  It was a totally unexpected tenderness from the big guy and I saw Jo melt. I was feeling a little mushy myself, though that could have been the oatmeal and sugar. Who knew the muscle bound man could be such a knight in shining armor?

  “Monsieur Pellissier,” Serena sobbed into Laz’s arm. “He ask for something stupid, no? A love spell. He want a woman he cannot have—the wife of the Vampire Crewe.”

  Joanne interrupted with an, “Um?”

  “The Mardi Gras Vampire Crewes,” Serena wailed.

  “The Crewes who make the parades, the floats, all that. The biggest Crewe is led by another vampire, a rival to Monsieur Pellissier, and Monsieur Pellissier, he wanted his rival’s human wife to love him instead.” She shuddered in a breath, fresh tears streaking her cheeks. “And when I could not do it, he took my bebe, my little Lissa, and said I would do it or my bebe would die.”

  Anger began to burn through her sobs. Anger and vengeance. I knew a thing or two about those motivators. She still cried, but more quietly now, and the hand clinging to Laz’s big muscular biceps tightened with fury, not sobs. “I told him I would try again, but instead I open a rift into the magic worlds, so I can pull something through. Something strong that might kill Amaury Pellissier. And something came, but I can’t find it. It got free! And if I don’t do what he wants by tomorrow night, Amaury will kill my bebe.” Her rage faded into a frightened whisper: “My Lissa, my bebe. . . .”

  Jo tilted her head as the story came out, her eyes lost in the distance. I was too busy eating to figure out what had her thinking so hard. I mean, it was easy right? Kill Pellissier and get the baby back.

  Finally, Jo said, “So you opened a rift, and pulled something dangerous through, and we came through too.”

  The girl went still, staring at Laz, who still held her, then at me and Joanne in turn. Jo didn’t seem to notice, focused on Laz as she said thoughtfully to Serena, “And there you are, pulling down a major magic like opening rifts between worlds, but you can’t even do a love spell, and in the meantime Laz puts the kibosh on your attack like he’s not even thinking about it. What the hell does that mean, that we’ve got a higher power threshold in this world than people who live here do?”

  Serena gave Joanne a withering look. Her tears turned on themselves, quenched in sarcasm, an emotion that could let her be brave instead of terrified. “Love don’t come and go with a magic spell, fool. Hate, hate is easy, hate you stir up from all the little black thoughts we all got buried inside us, but love is God bleedin’ through the cracks of weak human souls. I got power,” she spat. “I pray to Papa Legba, the gatekeeper, I pray and I ask for help, and I open a rift so maybe something stronger than me comes through, but it’s too much stronger and I can’t keep it in my hands.” Her fingers clutched together like she was grabbing at water, and then she looked at each of us, me while I wolfed down her food and Jo and Laz as they listened in silence.

  “You,” she said to all of us. “I called you through, and if this big man here couldn’t shut down my magic easy as pie then none of you would be any help to me at all. I donno what you are, but you came here and you gotta help me now.” Her bravado suddenly fled and she shrank in on herself, all big eyes and fear once more. “You’ll help me, yes? You’ll save my bebe, Lissa?”

  “Of course we will,” Joanne said, and Beast forgot her hunger long enough to rumble approval deep inside my head.

  I didn’t look at Jane to see if she agreed. Laz was on my side already, and frankly, we were going to help Serena find her kid if I had to stay in this Somebody Else’s World for a month, because let’s face it. Threatening children is about as low as it gets, and that was without my own personal monogrammed set of baggage on the matter.

  I did look at Lazarus. I didn’t have a name for whatever he was. The earth magic he connected to said witch, but the witches I knew needed a coven to pull down the kind of earth power he’d been throwing around so casually. Maybe he was a warlock. I had the vague idea that, traditionally, warlocks didn’t work with covens, though also traditionally, warlocks were men and I’d met a fair number of male witches. Of course, as far as I knew, warlocks were also traditionally bad guys, but Laz was doing a pretty convincing impression of being one of the good guys. Even Jane had softened up when he went all protective and daddy-like with Serena.

  The thought that I might just not get all the answers I wanted crossed my mind. I dismissed it with a snort, then scrubbed my hands over my face. “I don’t suppose you know where he’s keeping your baby, Serena.”

  I knew the answer before I even asked, though. The kid was back in New Orleans at that blood bordello. All that stood between us and the kid was one vampire channeling every drop of magic in the Big Easy, and all his vampirey minions. No problem. “I don’t suppose,” I said mostly to Lazarus, “that you can use that funky earth magic of yours to fake a love spell. . . .”

  Jane coughed on her oatmeal. My ears turned red. “Okay, okay, no, not really. I’m not getting some other poor sap involved in this, not even long enough to be used as a distraction. I just, y’know. Nevermind. How do you stop a vampire?”

  “You kill him.” Jane sounded like her Beast had found a human voice, all snarls and deadly business.

  As mildly as I could, I said, “I don’t know how to kill a vampire,” but really, I’d known that answer was coming. Amaury wasn’t going to give up his grip on the Big Easy’s magic without giving up his grip on life. Even without Serena’s baby in the picture, it wasn’t like I could really go home again knowing I’d left dozens or hundreds of adepts in magical slavery. Amaury had been a dead man walking since we’d crossed into this world.

  Well of course he’s a dead man walking a snarky little voice said in the depths of my skull. I smacked myself in the temple and muttered, “Oh, shut up,” aloud.

  Jane banged her bowl down—I’d never seen somebody eat that much oatmeal at once, nevermind so quickly—and stood up with the lithe movement of an angry cat. “I do,” she said. “I get paid for killing vamps. She’s coming with us.”

  She pointed her spoon at Serena while my brain stuttered over get paid for killing vamps. I didn’t get paid to do magic. The idea kind of gave me the creeps, actually, and I wondered how Jane lived with it. Then I shook it off, because of the various problems and questions we had right now, how Jane made a living wasn’t one of them. What was an important question, though, was, “How?”

  “How what?” Jane and Laz both looked at me, Jane with the spoon still pointed accusingly at Serena.

  “How is she coming with us? Our car got kind of blown up—” A fact which would give me palpitations if I thought about it, since we’d stolen the damned car in the first place, which meant we’d blown up somebody else’s vehicle. “—and I didn’t see another one anywhere around her house.”

  Lazarus stood, put his hands together in front of his chest, and bowed his head. “Dat,” he said, “dat I can help wit’.”

  ***

  “Eart’,” he said when we were all outside. “It all connected, whether we stand in d’dirt and d’swamps or wet’er we walk d’hard concrete streets of d’city. Take off you shoes.”

  Serena already wasn’t wearing any, and Laz had taken his off when we came outdoors. His were super-shiny black patent leather with buckles and platform heels, not that a man his size needed any more height. I toed my soggy tennies off and wondered how his shoes had come through the swamp fight unscathed. Earth magic, I guessed. Jane pulled her boots off, picked them up, and glowered at them like boot leather was the next thing on her menu. I sympathized: shapeshifting took a lot of energy. It hadn’t been that long ago I’d run through so many shifts that my body had started cannibalizing itself to survive. Just thinking about
it made me hungry.

  Once we were unshod, Laz gave a satisfied nod and extended his hands. Serena took one without hesitation. Jane and I looked between each other, our shoes, and the offered hands. Then we both scrambled to tie laces together and throw them over our shoulders before joining hands, me with Laz, Jane with Serena and me.

  Instinct made me edge about three-quarters of a step to the right. Everybody else shifted accordingly, and Laz gave me a startled flash of approval. I shrugged, pleased, and Jane muttered, “What?”

  “Power circle. We were misaligned to the cardinal directions, now we’re not.”

  She went, “Huh,” which was mostly a motion of her eyebrows, and we both looked back at Laz.

  “Eart’, it all de same,” he said again. “We here, we need to be dere. De eart’, it carry us.”

  I triggered the Sight, and was glad I did.

  Rich brown power roared up from the ground we stood on, rushing over Lazarus like a mud bath. It coated him head to toe, all the variation of the swamp. Mud bugs, earthworms, green growing muck, everything that had a spark of life glittered gold within the rising power until they became stars in a blacked-out, man-shaped sky. Lazarus still held my hand, but at the same time he was gone, a cut-away door rife with mystical energy.

  Serena fearlessly stepped through the portal that Lazarus had become, and because she held our hands, we followed.

  I expected it to be cold. The space between stars was, after all, but no: traversing the world through the Lazarus-gate was warm, like drifting in an equatorial sea. Life pulsed within him, small bumps and waves of passion sparking and fading as we passed them by. In the months since my shamanic powers had awakened, I’d rarely felt such serenity—and when I had, it had been in the moments where the power of many adepts came together to create a larger whole. Lazarus, I thought with a grin, contained the power of multitudes.

  A moment later the journey ended and we stepped onto the sidewalk of St. Louis Street in front of Vamp Mojo. Laz came through himself last. Jane and I sat down to haul our shoes on, and I took half a second to notice we were now all opposite the cardinal points where we’d been.