by Faith Hunter
A frisson of uncomfortable heat roiled through me. A date? It sounded like a date. His treat and all. It had been years since I’d had a real date. And Saturday was just after the three days of the full moon. Beast would still be feeling . . . amorous. I swallowed and was pretty sure I blushed, hoping it wasn’t easy to tell with my coppery skin. “Um. I should be finished with this contract by then. Sure. Maybe eight?”
He nodded, ducking his head and glancing up at me. “Bikes. Burgers. Okay?”
“Yeah.” Actually, that sounded like a fun date. And I had houseguests, so I didn’t have to worry about any awkward leave-taking or expectations. “Um . . . Eight, then.”
Rick nodded at me, gave a little one-fingered salute-style wave, and disappeared back into the bowels of the NOPD. Crap. I had a date. I flipped open my phone and returned the most important call that had come in while I was trapped in the woo-woo room. It was answered on the first ring. “George Dumas.”
I straddled Bitsa and helmeted up. “Jane. So, you got permission for me to visit the official vamp cemetery?” Not to be confused with the grave site where I’d killed the rogue the other night.
“Yes. When?”
“No time like the present.”
“On my way.”
* * *
When I’d marked my map with the location of all the reported young-rogue vamp attacks on humans, there had been three clusters, and one had been in the two miles around the vamp cemetery. I needed to look around a bit.
The call ended. A man of few words, our Bruiser. But a man of really good kisses, especially the kind delivered on the floor of a limo. Uncomfortable prickly warmth spread through me. I was interested in a blood-servant. Interested as in interested. And Bruiser seemed pretty interested in me. He could have turned off the security system at the cemetery from Leo’s house. Was he just using the alarm system as an excuse to see me? The scratchy warmth spread, barbed and maddening. Yeah. I was interested.
Yet I had a date Saturday with another man entirely. A breathtakingly gorgeous human man, who would be a far better choice for romantic entanglements than the blood-servant of the master of the city. I’d once figured Rick for a player, but that was back when he’d been undercover. I didn’t really know him at all.
Thinking about men was frustrating and tied up my mind in barbed wire. Not something I had time for right now. I switched mental gears to more pressing matters, like the feel of Bitsa between my thighs, the heated wind beating against me, and the ripe smells of the city.
I could have searched the vamp cemetery alone once Bruiser had disabled the alarms, but he was a careful man, less trusting than Rick when it came to keys and security precautions. Once inside the barred gate, he entered the first mausoleum we came to. When he left the crypt, he nodded at me once. I figured that meant I could do whatever I wanted, but he didn’t leave. He leaned against the hood of his car, watching me from behind mirrored sunglasses. He looked patient. Which made me nervous. If he’d been impatient, I could have been annoyed and recalcitrant and deliberately taken my time. It was harder with a calm and peaceful man.
I removed my helmet and tossed my denim jacket to the seat. From the saddlebags, I pulled a pad and pen and began sketching the layout of the cemetery. It didn’t have to be exact or to scale, but I wanted a map to trigger my memories later if I needed. I drew in the eight mausoleums, labeling them with clan names and descriptions, including the naked angel statues on top of each. The last time I’d been here, several of the mausoleums had been damaged. Now there was evidence of repair work: tire tracks crushing the grass, a ladder lying flat, a device that looked like a portable cement mixer but likely was something else, and a few cigarette butts littering the ground. Bruiser picked them up as I worked, looking disgruntled. I watched him from the corner of my eye as I sketched in the chapel from which the priestess had emerged the time I’d been here in owl form. Today the place looked deserted.
When I returned the pad to the saddlebags, Bruiser wandered over. He looked pale, as if he’d been badly fed upon and not restored enough by sips of his master’s blood. Last time I saw him he’d been facing a feeding frenzy. “You look a little pale. Okay, a lot pale,” I offered diffidently. “You okay?”
“I’ve been better. Tell me again why you have to be here?”
I explained about the clusters of young-rogue vamp attacks. “Like the rogues had risen close by, and attacked the first humans who happened to be in their path.”
He looked interested. “Where else have they risen?”
I briefly detailed the map, then told him more about the rogue I’d taken down the other night. “I’d never seen a rising before, and there was something really strange about it, something I don’t think is part of a normal rising. The site had a pentagram and a casting circle shaped in shells on the ground. There were crosses nailed to the trees at the points of the pentagram.”
I glanced at him, catching a look of utter disbelief on his face. “What?”
He shook his head. “Not possible. The crew sent to clean up the grave site in the park would have reported on that.”
Now, that was interesting. There were crosses when I’d been there. Someone had gotten to the city park pretty quickly after the rising to get them down between my visit and the visit by the sanitation crew. Or . . . maybe the lightning strike I’d smelled when I first got there had changed the timing of the rising? Was that even possible? Frankenstein had risen after his maker had channeled a lightning strike into his body—early cinematic defibrillator. I grinned and Bruiser raised his brows. I shook my head to show that my thoughts weren’t important.
He went on. “Any young rogue who woke in the presence of crosses would be driven back into the grave, screaming in pain.”
“Maybe the pentagram and the magics performed in the soil prevented it?” Bruiser stared off in the distance, face closed, thinking thoughts he had no desire to share with me. When he didn’t reply, I insisted, “But why the crosses? Okay, I get that vamps live and breathe religion, which is pretty weird for the undead, who don’t need to breathe.”
That startled Bruiser out of his funk. “Religion? And vampires?” His tone added, “Are you crazy?” though he didn’t say it. But there was something off about his body language.
I looked out over the graveyard, keeping him in my peripheral vision. Calmly, I said, “Vampires and religion should be like oil and water, but they aren’t. Because vampires believe. Organized religion pervades everything they do and everything they are—the myths attached to the holy land, their reaction to crosses”—I thought of the priestess, Sabina—“all the formal Christian trappings. There’s no such thing as distant history with vamps. All their grudges, alliances, even though they shift, seem to have roots in events that took place hundreds or thousands of years ago. Their history, as humans perceive it, impacts their present, and whoever the rogue maker is, he’s been raising young rogues for a long time. He may be driven by something that happened yesterday, a century ago, or two thousand years ago.”
Bruiser shifted on his feet, an unconscious adjustment of balance. “I suggest that you not repeat such nonsense to the Mithrans.” But his scent change suggested that I was dead-on with my religion and vamp analysis.
I flipped my palm up in a hand shrug and turned away. Over my shoulder I said, “I’m going to walk the perimeter of the grounds. It won’t take long.” Bruiser didn’t reply, and I paced away, walking sun wise—clockwise—around the ring of trees surrounding the cemetery. The sun was hot, the air muggy, sour, and unmoving. Sweat trickled down my spine as I walked, trying to get a feel for the place, something I hadn’t allowed myself the previous times I was here. Of course the first time I’d been in the shape of a Eurasian hunting owl, and the other time I was with Rick, so it wasn’t as though I had the right senses, time, or opportunity to let the place seep in under my skin, to get to know a patch of ground the way Beast did.
Now I mentally nudged Beast awake and let my sen
ses loose to absorb the place through its smells, the taste of its air, the springiness of the grass beneath my boots, and the magics wafting across the ground. There was power here. Not holy ground power, not ley line power. Not power that has seeped into the earth at old churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, or other places where faith makes the ground holy. Not quite the power of belief. But power nonetheless, of an old and vital kind. Though I couldn’t place it, I recognized the taste of it.
I was halfway around the large clearing when the ground became damp, giving beneath me with a squelch. The air cooled, thinned, became wetter, though how that was possible with all the humidity I couldn’t have said. I breathed in and scented something peppery and astringent, the faint herbal scent of vamps on the breeze from the woods, the odor itself dry and desiccated. Beneath it was the tang of decaying blood, and a trace of magic. Witch magic. I moved into the trees. The signature of power tingled faintly along my arms. Shade from the trees above me closed out the sun and some of the heat, shadows darkening the ground.
The scent of it pulled me north, along an overgrown trail just wide enough for my feet. A rabbit trail, according to Beast. She sent me an image of a rabbit and flooded my senses with the remembered hot taste of blood. “Thanks for that,” I murmured to her, “but I prefer my protein skinned, gutted, boned, cooked, and seasoned.” Beast hacked in amusement.
Not far into the woods I found a patch of saplings in a circle of older trees. It looked as if it might have been a ten-foot-round space once, maybe five years ago. Kneeling, I ran my hands over the bare ground, between the roots of the young trees. I found a broken white shell. Traversing the outskirts of the circle, I scuffed the ground, finding more shells. This had been a blood rite circle involving both witches and vamps, and I bet that it was used as the first resting place of one or more new rogues. Whatever was going on now had been happening for a lot longer than I’d been told. Maybe a lot longer than the vamp council knew.
I found two other old circles in the forested land around the vamp graveyard, one younger than the first, one older, which I had missed on my first pass and caught on my second. Back at my bike, I marked their locations on my map, with the approximate length of time they had been abandoned, my guesstimate based on the age of the trees. A city girl might not have been able to tell that part, but I had been raised in the country, and the children’s home had used the earth for more than just a playground and parking. We had grown a lot of our own vegetables, and had once reclaimed a patch of land to increase the size of the garden. I remembered the backbreaking work of tree-clearing. I knew how long it took forest to steal back land left fallow too long.
I stood in the edge of the woods, wondering if there were more such sites in the trees. It wasn’t impossible. But Bruiser was waiting. Patiently. Which made me feel guilty.
He was still beside his car when I walked back, his butt against the high gloss, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses against the light. Unlike me, he wasn’t sweating in the heat and humidity. I wondered if his ability to withstand temperature changes was a result of the blood sips he got in return for being a blood meal to Leo, or if it was natural to him. No way to ask and be polite, of course, though if I hadn’t needed something from him, I might have asked anyway. I grinned at the thought and he cocked his head. I waved it away and said, “I don’t guess you’d consider giving me access to the security around this place so I can come back anytime I want.”
His lips twitched in what might have been a smile and he shook his head once, an abbreviated but unequivocal no.
“Okay. I ran across some things in my research into vamp attacks that you can help me with instead.” Bruiser’s brow lifted a bit, as if he was amused that I’d put him into the role of assistant. “How about out-clan and devoveo?” I was pretty sure I knew the answers, but in my business, “pretty sure” was worth roughly zero. I needed to know for dead certain.
The heavy-lidded look slid away. “Where did you come across this information?”
Bruiser was my best source of all things fangy and I knew I had to give to get, but not this time. I hated negotiation. “My source”—if the NOPD woo-woo files could be described that way—“is confidential. I want to know what they mean.”
Thoughts flickered deep in his eyes. After a moment he cocked his head and seemed to come to a decision. “Devoveo is the state of the young rogue. The ten years of insanity when they have to be kept confined. The curse of the Mithrans is the fact that they must enter the ten years of the devoveo and may not come out of it.”
“Have you ever heard of people drinking witch blood to stave it off?”
He looked confused. “No. The reason witches are seldom turned is that they suffer from devoveo far beyond the usual decade, and often must be destroyed by their sires. But I have no idea what the effects of drinking their blood would be.”
“Oh.” Though I’d expected no new revelations, I was still disappointed.
“The out-clan are part of their history. Before the vampires were divided into clans or families, they were all one family. When their society became too large and unwieldy to manage on their own, and when humans began hunting them, there was a diaspora and many of the oldest sired clans in new lands, others later joined existing clans, banding together for safety and defense, and some few chose to be considered out-clan. From the out-clan group came the keepers of the past. They act as historians, ambassadors, deal brokers. Peacemakers when necessary.”
“So Sabina and Bethany really are among the oldest. Like, nearly two thousand years old.” When he inclined his head, I added, “And the ground they inhabit is holy to the vamps.”
“Not holy ground. The eldest Mithrans are respected, venerated, perhaps, not worshipped. The priestess is the oldest Mithran in this hemisphere. And Bethany was her acolyte.”
“Was?”
“There have been disagreements between them several times over the past centuries; the last time was over the issue of slavery during the Civil War. The rift has never been healed.”
Bethany had been a slave. I could see where discord might be possible. I had a feeling there was more to everything he’d said, but Bruiser stood straight and opened his car door, leaning inside to pick up an envelope and a box, handing them to me. “The check is for the heads you delivered to the vampire council. And Leo wants you to have the other as a gift, but he didn’t want it wrapped. And no, I have no idea why it should go to you.”
I tucked the envelope into a saddlebag. Taking the box, I flipped back the lid. Wedged between layers of packing material were bones and teeth. The small bones looked like paw bones, the larger long ones like foreleg bones. The teeth were encased in a lower jawbone, the canines several inches long, one with its tip broken off. I was pretty sure they all came from a sabertooth cat. A cold chill shot through me. Leo had given me his “son’s” fetishes, the things Immanuel had used to become a sabertooth lion and kill. The things that might have driven him insane. My instinct was to refuse them.
I heard shells crunch beneath footsteps and looked up, but Bruiser was sliding his long, lean form under the wheel. Without another word, he closed the door and started the car, backing into a three-point turn. I took it as my cue and strapped the box to the back of my bike and powered up Bitsa. I still needed info about witch blood bringing the young rogue to sanity; I’d have to ask that one later. I followed the blood-servant of the master of the city out of the vamp cemetery, hardly noticing the passage of the road beneath my tires.
Why had Leo given me the bones? What was the purpose of the sites in the woods when vamps could be put to earth almost anywhere except a place with crosses on it? A couple dozen other questions piled on to the original one of who was raising young-rogue vamps. I had lots more questions, but I had proved one thing to myself. Vamps and witches, likely a small, renegade group of them, were definitely working together to raise new rogues. And if the new growth in the woods was an indication, it had been going on for decades.
> CHAPTER 13
Nap time, Aunt Jane
When I got back to the house after depositing the check into Derek Lee’s account, I found a note from Molly saying they were at Katie’s Ladies visiting and doing laundry. She and the little witch Bliss had been visiting back and forth for days in the beginnings of a friendship that I hoped might help Bliss to accept her own power. I didn’t think many mothers would let their daughters near a house of ill repute, but Molly wasn’t most mothers. Open-minded, tolerant, and unprejudiced, that was Molly. She even let Angie hang around a skinwalker.
Alone on the property, I tucked the box of sabertooth bones and teeth into the back garden under a rock. It was stupid, but I didn’t want them in the house. It was just too creepy. I couldn’t use them; the genetic structure was male and I couldn’t shift into a male animal. But what did you do with a gift from the master of the city? I couldn’t toss them in the garbage.
Back inside, I discovered the dress I had damaged at the vamp party hanging, dripping, in my bathroom. I had thought it ruined, but Molly had gotten all the blood out. It maybe needed a needle and thread in a spot or two, but it looked pretty good for a blood-soaked rag.
On the bed, I found a packing box and sighed. More surprises? I slit the packing tape with a knife. No one was home to hear me whoop.
I’d lost my favorite leather jacket to the liver-eater masquerading as Immanuel, and the replacement I’d treated myself to was finally here. I’d been measured and fitted at a leather shop in town, getting to be part of the design process from the leather up. From the box I pulled out a buttery soft, armored, padded leather motorcycle jacket and the loose-fitting armored leather pants I’d thrown in for good measure, perfect for fighting vamps and for riding Bitsa. And something I’d never have thought of until living in the Deep South—they had zippered, mesh pockets that could be left open for air to move through. It wouldn’t help much on foot, but on a bike, I’d be more comfortable.
