by Faith Hunter
I started to shake my head and stopped. I had a quick image of leaves, dark and thick, over my face. Beyond them was fire, a man hanging over it, screaming. Three women worked over him, mostly naked, wearing only thin shifts, their clothes draped across nearby bushes. The women were Etsa, my mother, and her sister, and Elisi. “I wasn’t supposed to see it,” I whispered. “But I hid. I watched. Until he started screaming so bad. When they cut him.”
I looked at Aggie. “I led my grandmother to him. To them. I caused their deaths.”
“And is that part of the storm inside you, child?”
I shook my head, stopped, and nodded, uncertain. “I think that there’s more. I need to remember the rest.”
Aggie looked as if she would disagree, but after a long indecisive moment, she passed me another bottle of water. “One bottle should have kept you in the dream place for many hours. No one has ever needed two.”
I stopped with the bottle halfway to my mouth, watching her.
“Did your grandmother have yellow eyes like you?” she asked
Holding her gaze, I drank the drugged water down. Recapped the bottle. Handed it back to her. “Yes. So did my father.”
“I see.” And I was afraid that she did indeed see. Before I could comment, the dreams took me again.
* * *
The yunega was in a cave up the hill beyond Elisi’s house, bound and naked. I squatted before him, bare feet on the smooth clay floor, my hands clasped between my knees. “Did you see what they did to him, to your friend?” I asked. “They will do much worse to you.” The man looked at me. He was yunega. He did not understand the speech of Tsalagiyi. He was staring at my face. It was still crusty with the traces of the blood of my father. I wouldn’t wash it until my vengeance was done. I smiled. He shrank back against the cave wall.
* * *
The night was cold and wind blew through the trees, whispering and sighing, and golden leaves swirled on the night air. But I was warm in the coat that had once belonged to the killer of my father. It had been in the saddlebags of his horse, wrapped up in brown paper and twine. It was too big, but it was warm and red, the color of blood.
The last yunega had been brought to the clearing. He was gagged. Naked. Tied. He was lying on his stomach, screaming into the dirt as Elisi pounded deer antlers through his shoulders with a huge piece of white quartz the size of a human head. I was with the women this time, sitting on a log at the fire, not hiding. The wind skirled through the clearing, setting the leaves dancing. I pulled my new coat closer and the women hauled on ropes, lifting the man into the air and over the fire circle. There was no fire tonight. Tonight the women each held knives. I too had a knife, my first blade. It felt strange in my hand, cold as the winter wind, sharp as the pain in my heart at the death of my father. We gathered close. Etsa, my mother, made the first cut.
* * *
When I woke much later, it was night, and the sweathouse was cool and empty, the fire out, Aggie One Feather gone. I was alone. And I knew why Aggie One Feather thought me angry and full of storms. I knew. Slowly I stood and went outside into the night. Winter had come in the past hours. It was cool, with a north wind blowing. I removed my cloth covering and placed it in the basket for used sweat clothes. Turning the faucet on, I washed the smoke and sweat from me, the cool well water sluicing me clean—the washing part of the ritual—a cleansing after the pain of old memories. On the narrow shelf high above the faucet, there was a scrub brush, new, still in its plastic wrap, a new bar of soap, and shampoo in a small bottle like the kind hotels leave on the counters for the forgetful patron. They were gifts from Aggie. I opened them all and applied them to my body to remove the stink of fear-sweat and the stubborn reek of smoke. Afterward, I dried off, braided my hair, and dressed. The house was dark and silent as I walked to Bitsa. I helmeted up, kick-started her, and drove into the night.
The ride over the river and back into the French Quarter was fast, but less furious than the one this morning. My mind was quiet, my spirit was quiet, and even my emotions were quiet. I was quietness all inside me. I had found a part of me that I had lost. It wasn’t a pretty part, but it tied the lost pieces together. I was born of a war clan. Of a skinwalker clan. We led our people into battle, tribe against tribe, tribe against the white man. When there was no war, we were the executioners.
I remembered the vision of one of the men who had raped my mother, hanging, bucking his body, fighting to get free as the women took their time with him. I blinked the image away, but it was burned into my mind, the memory, once found, now a part of me.
My grandmother had not let evil lie. She had searched the evil ones out, had hunted them down, and killed them in the worst way possible, which was the ancient, long-forgotten way of her skinwalker culture. She had brought justice to the people who depended on her. But there was a narrow, thin line between justice and sadism. Between justice and evil. My grandmother had surely crossed that line, had dumped gallons of blood onto it, obscuring it totally. I wasn’t sure she was any better than the men who had killed my father.
No wonder skinwalkers went crazy when we got old, if we carried that kind of thing with us, inside us. Vengeance and justice were what we did. It was what I was. That spiritual constraint and demand for justice was why I had become a rogue-vamp hunter. Was why I was so good at killing. Living with it had never been easy, but at least I understood more of who I was now, more of why I made the choices I made. And more of the guilt that rested in my heart, a guilt that was trying to reconcile the duties of the skinwalker with the rules of the Christian God. Thou shalt not kill. Turn the other cheek. Pray for those that despitefully use you. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. The rules were supposed to uplift the human spirit and make us better people and help take us to a better place within our own hearts here on earth and after death. I had helped torture a man to death, and then buried the memory.
Now I remembered it. I remembered it all, every cut, every scream, and the joyful rage that rose in me when he died at my hand. I was five years old.
And now I could chose who I would be in the face of evil, in the face of life’s problems, in the face of a vampire who had taken what I stupidly offered him. In the face of who I could become. If I lived long enough, I could decide—rationally and without emotion—how I would deal with Leo’s blood theft. Leo, who was a scorpion with a stinger, and who acted only according to his nature, just as I had, when I was a five-year-old skinwalker, only recently awakened to my shape-changing gifts.
I pulled into the side yard of my freebie house and locked the gate behind me. I lifted Bitsa to the porch and leaned her against the house wall, leaving the helmet on Bitsa’s seat. As I gathered my weapons, I smelled steaks on the grill in the backyard, and my stomach growled like a wild animal. I entered my house, smelling Kid—freshly showered—and Eli, and beer, and potatoes, and . . . Bruiser.
I stopped in the kitchen, placing my guests. They were sitting in the living room, a football game on the TV, and they were talking beer—brands, hops, distilleries. Guy talk. The kitchen table was set for four. I pushed a plate over and placed my weapons with a clatter in the cleared spot, knowing the men had to have heard me—Bitsa alone could wake the undead. I took a beer from the fridge and twisted off the top, drinking it down fast. The alcohol hit my system like a bomb, even with my skinwalker metabolism. I was dry as a bone and the sudden rush felt wonderful. I finished the beer and picked the weapons back up.
I walked silently through the house, avoiding the men, and into my room. I stopped, placed the weapons on the bed, and dropped my blood-stiff clothes to the floor. I dressed in black jeans and a yellow, long-sleeved T-shirt, smoothed and braided my hair, the long plait hanging down my back, still wet. I shoved stakes in, scraping them against my scalp. I strapped one blade to my thigh in plain sight. I didn’t bother with shoes.
Back in the kitchen, the smell of cooking meat blowing in from outside made me salivate. The hunger that had been quiescent all d
ay rose, clawing my stomach like a taloned hand. I hadn’t eaten after the shift. I was starving. But there were things I needed to face before I ate. I opened another beer, the alcohol potent in my blood.
Sipping my beer, I walked into the living room and stood in the opening, my feet apart, one hand loose at my side near the knife. The swinging shelves were in place over the safe room, no hinges showing. If I hadn’t seen the mess earlier, I’d never have known the hidden room was there. The living room looked as if nothing had been done to it; even the construction dust was cleaned up, the room spotless.
The men finally saw me, and the TV went mute, leaving the room in silence. I turned my gaze slowly to the men, the Kid first, then Eli, then Bruiser, and his gaze I held. The tension in the air rose, electric, as if Bruiser were sitting on a live wire. Eli and Alex were watching him, watching me, uncertain, knowing that something was up, but clearly not knowing what.
“Good evening, Jane,” Bruiser said, after an eternity.
I didn’t reply. Just took another sip, waiting.
He stood, and took two steps, as if he thought he might cross to me, and then stopped, a yard from his chair, in the middle of the room. “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .” He stopped and drew in a breath as if air-starved. “I couldn’t stop them. When they forced you.”
Eli came to his feet in a single rolling motion, as if he were all muscle, no bone. He stood between us, but back, so that we formed a tripod with me at the apex. His body was loose in that precombat tension of the best fighting men, and his eyes shifted back and forth between us. The Kid rolled the other way, all elbows and knobby knees, and stood behind the couch, out of the way. I let one side of my mouth rise, just slightly. Eli didn’t know what had happened, but he was ready for anything.
“Jane?” Bruiser held out his hand. It was bruised, purpled, and swollen, as if it had been broken. So was the side of his face. Bruiser had been hit. Hard. It was difficult to injure a blood-servant. It took a vamp.
I indicated his hand with the beer bottle. “Leo do that?”
He looked down and turned his hand over and back, as if seeing the injury for the first time. “Yes. When I disagreed with his tactics.” He looked back at me, his brown eyes catching the lamplight. He raised the hand and shoved it through his hair, sending the brown strands askew. “I thought it was simply a planning session. That was how Leo phrased it when he asked me to bring you. I didn’t know they were planning to force a feeding and binding on you.”
“And when they forced me? And you were holding me on the floor? What then?” As I said those words I could see Eli tense, shifting one pace in for better positioning. I lifted a finger from the beer, stopping him. I wanted to hear this.
Bruiser stood straight, dropping his hands to his sides. He blew out a breath, his face going from supplication to something colder, harder. I liked this Bruiser better. It was more honest. He was Leo’s plaything and blood meal, Leo’s right-hand man, and he always had been. It should have hurt, but the hunger growing inside me and the emptiness that Aggie had exposed when the trapped anger stormed away stopped my pain.
“I was blood-drunk, Jane. I wasn’t able to move, wasn’t able to fight, wasn’t able to stop them. I held you down and they hurt you. They forced me. I want you to know that. It was against my will.”
I didn’t say anything and he added, “When you left, I attacked Leo. He stopped me.” Bruiser held up the hand as explanation. “He backhanded me into a wall. Broke my hand and jaw. It was bad enough that I didn’t heal instantly even with all the Mithran blood in me.” Bruiser dropped the hand. “Leo needed your cooperation once he read your report and saw the name de Allyon. He remembered the problems his uncle Amaury had not so long ago, and he thought you wouldn’t agree with his plans. So he used me to get you. I’m sorry, Jane.”
Not so long ago. Only a man who had already lived more than a hundred years would think two centuries was not so long ago. I understood what had happened. I even understood my own stupidity in being part of it. But I was not ready to forgive. “And you defend him?”
“No. I explain him,” he growled. “And I apologize for myself. It’s what a primo does.”
It’s what a primo does. Yeah. Got that. “Get out, George. Now. Before I decide to let my Eli here hurt you.”
He heard his given name and he put it together, understanding that my calling him George and not Bruiser was important on many levels. And he processed the “my Eli.” George swiveled his head to the man standing one pace away. He considered Eli’s positioning, the placement of his feet, the relaxed posture. The two men, who had just been talking beer and sports, studied each other now like potential combatants, one trained by Uncle Sam to kill, the other still so full of vamp blood he was nearly healed in one day from wounds that would have incapacitated a human for weeks.
George turned his head to me, dismissing the soldier as if he posed no challenge. From the corner of my eye, I saw Eli’s mouth curl up in a smile. Without looking at him, I smiled too. It was one of those perfect agreement things that happens sometimes when two people understand each other on an instinctive level, on a snake-brain level. Eli and I had fought. We knew what moves we’d make and how fast. If it was needed. I saw his fingers curl in slightly.
I tucked the thumb of my free hand into my jeans at my waist, to indicate action wasn’t necessary. Yet. “I’ll do my job for Leo,” I said to George, “but not because of his forced blood-bond. I’ll do my job because I killed a man in Asheville. Because humans were killed there and here on my watch. You tell that blood-sucking fiend I said that.
“If there was a dinner invitation, it’s rescinded. Get out of my house. You know where the door is.” I stepped out of the way and gestured with the bottle at the door.
George’s mouth firmed, an obstinate gesture that said he was going to disagree. But he didn’t. He walked past me out the door and closed it behind him with a firm snap. That sound said something important, but I didn’t want to deal with it, not now. I followed and keyed the dead bolt, then went back to the living room. Eli and Alex hadn’t moved. I leaned against the wall and finished my beer, watching them.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked.
“Just ducky. But if your brother doesn’t feed me I may eat him.”
Eli laughed at the double entendre, but he went outside to the grill and came back in with four steaks. The Kid cleaned off a place and put away the unused dishes. We ate in silence at the kitchen table, companionable silence. I liked it. And I got the extra steak.
* * *
After dinner, while not-so-Stinky Alex cleaned up the dishes and griped about not having a dishwasher, Eli and I stayed at the table, going over the day’s intel. “There might be a correlation we haven’t considered, between the Blood-Call businesses and the cities where de Allyon has taken over,” Eli said, passing a printout to me.
“I’m listening.”
“De Allyon was making vamps sick. What better way than to have them drink from sick humans at Blood-Call?”
I remembered thinking at one time, in the last hectic days, that vamps were being made sick by drinking diseased blood, but that had seemed impossible unless a normal, natural plague had entered the human population. There had been no reports of horrific human illness in the media, and no way could that have been kept quiet.
There were also so many cities where Blood-Call was operating, cities that had no sign of sickness. The lack of plague and the specificity of attack had made me put the idea on the back burner. But then, there were the sick humans in Seattle who had claimed they were getting better. They weren’t Blood-Call employees, they were blood-servants who lived and worked at the Seattle Clan Home. Without explaining, I pulled my cell and dialed the Seattle Clan Home. When a woman answered, I said, “This is Jane Yellowrock. I was there a few days ago, and took some blood from some blood-servants who were left on the premises after the revolt staged by the Mercy Blade failed. Are they still alive? Did they get well?”
The woman said stiffly, “Yes and yes. And then our new master removed them. Don’t call again.” There was a click and the call ended.
I stared at the cell and smiled. “Of course he did.” I looked up at the brothers and said, “Alex, how certain are you about the money trail of the corporations that own Blood-Call?”
He was standing at the sink, drying his hands; he pushed a tiny laptop to the center of the table and opened it. It must have been sleeping because it opened to a company Web page instantly. Blood-Call’s graphics were red and black with two beautiful, scantily clad couples on the front. One partner of each couple was a vamp, and the other was being a meal. It was clear that sex was on the menu as well as blood. Eli scooted his chair closer to me and we both leaned in, studying the screen, arms almost touching.
“I’ve traced it back through several shell corporations to an offshore account,” Alex said. “The mailing address is a PO box on the main island. The shipping address is here.” He pointed to the screen. “I have a World of Warcraft buddy on the island and he’s doing some footwork to see what’s at the address. I’m betting it’s a café or an empty lot. The finances trace back through four shells to a numbered account. There’s no way to find out anything further. No way to see if it ties to Lucas Vazquez de Allyon.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Someone has to come in from time to time and deal with the accounts.”
“Not offshore accounts. Not if they have the numbers and the passwords. Back in the day, someone had to show up in person and open an account. Now it can be done electronically and no one at the bank ever sees the client. I tried tracking the money back, but I couldn’t get through.”
He looked at his brother with a sly grin. “Offshore banks have better security than the Pentagon.” Eli raised his eyes without lifting his head, and Alex laughed at whatever he saw on his brother’s face. He looked back and forth between us, his expression changing to speculation. He grinned at his brother and went back to the dishes.
