We sat smack in the middle and I let out a tiny breath of relief. Sitting was a lot easier than standing.
“So who are we waiting for?” I asked.
“Aivisha,” Crest said with gravity.
I had no idea who Aivisha was.
“It’s the last performance of the season,” he continued. “It’s getting too warm. I didn’t think she would perform this late, but the management assured me that she will have no difficulties. She can use the residual magic.”
I leaned back in my seat and waited quietly. Around us people settled into their seats. An old woman, dressed in an impeccably white gown and escorted by a distinguished older gentleman, stopped by us. Crest jumped to his feet. Oh dear God, I would have to get up. I rose and smiled and waited politely until we completed the introductions. The woman and Crest chattered for a few minutes while the escort and I quietly shared each other’s misery. Finally she moved on.
“Madam Emerson,” Crest told me and patted my hand. “Probably the last true Southern socialite. You did very well. I think she likes you.”
I opened my mouth and clamped it shut. I hadn’t done anything but stand still and smile. Like a well-behaved child or a disciplined dog. Had he expected me to hump her leg?
A bell rang, commanding quiet from the crowd. A hush claimed the concert hall and slowly the velvet curtain parted to reveal a short woman. She was dark-skinned and heavy, with glossy coils of raven black hair styled high on top of her head. A long gown of silvery fabric cascaded in folds and plaits off her shoulders, shimmering, as if it was woven of sun-lit water.
Aivisha looked at the audience, her dark eyes bottomless, and took a tiny step forward, the cascade of silver moving all around her. She opened her mouth and let her voice pour forth.
Her voice was incredible. Startling in its clarity and beauty, it rose, gaining strength, building on itself, and power streamed from her, permeating the concert hall and the astonished crowd. I forgot about Crest, about Olathe, about my work, and listened, lost in the harmony of the enchanting voice.
Aivisha raised her hands. Thin slivers of ice grew from her fingers, spiraling, twisting, in perfect accord with her song. Like impossibly complex crystal lace, the ice stretched across the stage to climb up the side columns, blossoming into bundles of needle-thin feathers. It hugged the folds of Aivisha’s gown, a dutiful pet, happy to please, and I couldn’t tell where the silver of the fabric began and the crystal purity of ice ended.
Aivisha sang and sang, and ice danced for her, obeying her every whim. She commanded us, and mesmerized, we held our breath until her voice climbed to an overpowering crescendo. A burst of blue light pulsed from her, saturating the ice in an instant. The crystal lace burst, evaporating into the air. The curtain fell, hiding Aivisha from the audience. For a moment we sat stunned. And then the concert hall erupted in applause.
Crest squeezed my hand and I squeezed back.
Forty-five minutes later we pulled into the parking lot before my apartment building.
“Can I walk you to the door?” Crest asked.
“Not tonight,” I murmured. “I’m sorry. I just wouldn’t be good company.”
“Are you sure?” Crest asked, hope dying in his eyes. I felt bad, but I couldn’t do it. Something told me I should just stop this right here.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you for the dinner and company.”
“I was hoping the evening wouldn’t end this soon,” he said.
I touched his hand with my fingertips. “I’m sorry. Perhaps some other time.”
“Oh, well,” he said. “There is always tomorrow night.”
I opened the door and let myself out of his car. He lingered for a moment and then sped off. Too late I realized that he had expected a good night kiss.
MY HIP HURT MORE AND MORE AND BY THE TIME I crossed the parking lot, the ache had graduated to a full pain, spiced with sharp spasms.
“Just great.” I slipped off my shoes. Barefoot, with heels in hand, I headed toward the door.
My foot found an imperfection in the pavement. I slid, and almost landed on my ass. Pain bit my leg. I bent forward, waiting for it to pass and growling wordless curses under my breath.
“Do you need me to carry you?” a voice whispered into my ear. “Again?”
I spun and hammered an uppercut into the speaker’s midsection. My fist met a wall of solid muscle.
“Good punch,” Curran said. “For a human.”
Yeah yeah. I heard you exhale when I hit you. You felt it. “What do you want?”
“Where is your pretty date?”
“Where is yours?”
I started toward the building again. The only way to get away from him was to climb up the stairs and shut the ward in his face.
“Home,” he said. “Waiting for me.”
“Well, do me a fucking favor and go see her.”
I reached the stairs and sat down. My leg demanded a break.
“Hurts?”
“No, I like sitting on filthy steps in an expensive evening dress.”
“You’re a bit surly tonight,” he observed. “Not getting laid will do that.”
I looked at the night sky, at the tiny dots of stars. “I’m tired, my leg hurts, and there’s shit that needs answers and I can’t find any.”
“Like what?”
I sighed. “One, I don’t know who killed Greg and why. Two, we found no evidence of the necro-tainted animals that killed your people. Three, Greg’s file mentioned women. Why did Olathe take them and what did she do with them?”
He bent low toward me. “It’s over,” he said. “And you’ve got a bad case of spotlight deprivation.”
“A bad case of what?”
“You’re a no-name merc and all of a sudden everyone wants to talk to you. The power brokers of the city know your phone number. Makes you feel important. And now the dance is done. I sympathize.” His voice dripped derision. “But it’s over.”
“You’re wrong.”
Curran walked away.
“She called you a half-breed,” I told his back. “Why?”
He ignored me.
I forced myself to my feet and went upstairs. I got into the apartment, changed clothes, threw together a bag of stuff I didn’t want to be without, took Slayer, and went downstairs again. I started Karmelion, biting off the words of the chant like a snapping dog, and pulled out of the parking lot. I’ve had it with this whole bloody city. I was going home. To my real home.
CHAPTER 8
DAYLIGHT STREAMED THROUGH THE WINDOW tickling my face. I yawned and snuggled under the covers. I didn’t want to wake up. Not yet. In retrospect driving out of the city close to midnight, and with an aching hip, wasn’t the brightest idea, especially considering that the tech hit around four, leaving my truck marooned a mile away from the house, but I had gotten in just before the sunrise and now none of it mattered. I was home.
I stuck my face into the pillow, but daylight persisted and I stretched, sighing. My bare feet hit the sun-warmed floor and I happily padded to the kitchen to make coffee.
Outside the late morning was in full swing. The clear sky was luminescent with blue. No wind troubled the leaves on the myrtles. The kitchen window begged to be opened. I unlocked it and pushed the bottom half up to let the coastal, sea-spiced air into my house. Home. Finally.
In the yard, positioned so it could be noticed from either kitchen or porch, rose a stick. On the stick was a human head.
Long hair hung in blood-caked strands. Pale eyes bulged from their sockets. The mouth gaped open and green flies were breeding among the torn lips.
It was so out of place in my sunlit world that for a moment it didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be real.
An unmistakable stench of rot crept into my kitchen I sprinted to the bedroom, wincing at the pain, grabbed Slayer, and went to the front door. My wards were up. Cautiously I opened the front ward and stepped onto the porch.
Nothing.
No sound.
No power.
Nothing except a rotting head in my front yard.
I approached the head and circled it slowly. It belonged to a young woman. She had died recently—the expression of horror was still frozen on her face.
A large nail pinned a folded piece of paper to the back of her head. I raised the paper with the tip of Slayer’s blade. Uneven letters glared back at me.
Do you like my present? I made it special for you. When you see your half-breed friend, tell him I won’t waste his head like this. I’ll strip every shred of meat off his bones. I’ll gorge myself on his carcass until I can’t walk and let my children finish the rest, while I sleep it off with half-breed women. Half-breed meat tastes like shit but it has good texture. Olathe never did appreciate it. It’s a shame about her dress. I was partial to it.
I walked inside and dialed Jim’s number.
THE DEAD HEAD LOOKED AT JIM. JIM LOOKED AT the head.
“You know some fucked up people,” Jim said.
“Her name’s probably Jennifer Ying,” I said. “The hair has Mongoloid texture. She’s one of the missing women whose names I found in Feldman’s file. The head wasn’t here when I came in, which was around four thirty this morning.”
Jim sniffed at the head. “Fresh kill. A day, maybe a day and a half at most,” he said. “You need to call Curran.”
“He won’t listen to me. He thinks I’m a glory hound.”
Jim shrugged. We’ve worked together long enough to know that neither of us was interested in fame.
“You aggravate the hell out of him.”
“There is more.” I led him to the porch. A gathering of human bones lay arranged on canvas, spanning the entire porch.
“You rob a graveyard?”
“I wondered how he came so close to the house without setting my wards off, so I went looking and found these. He arranged them in a circle around the property in the tree line. It’s a form of a ward. Very old.”
“How old?”
“Neolithic. Primitive hunters would lay out the bones of their prey around their settlements. The idea is to form a chain of Rock, Bone, and Wood. You use Rock and Wood to obtain the Bone, binding all three, so if you return the Bone to the Rock and Wood after you’re done with it, it will afford you protection. He created himself a safe passage so he could wander around my yard whenever he wanted. It’s an easy spell to break. All you have to do is to remove the bones, and that’s why nobody uses it anymore. Unfortunately, you can’t detect it unless you stumble over it.”
I picked up a skull and handed it to him. Jim took it and recoiled, hissing. His eyes flooded with green.
Folklore correctly stated that in death a shapechanger’s body would revert to the form it had at birth, be it human or animal, but Lyc-V did some permanent things to bone structure, which remained in life or in death. Several long glossy strips of Lyc-V-created bone marked the skull in telltale places above the jaw and along the cheekbones.
“A wererat,” Jim said, handing me the skull as if it was hot.
“Guess how many I found?”
“Seven.”
“And at least three vampires. The skeletons are not complete. Some bones are missing, but there are eight pelvises and nine skulls, three of which have bloodsucker fangs.”
Jim glared at the bones. “You have to put the vamps separate.”
“What?”
“Put the bloodsucker bones separate,” he repeated. He was agitated and low snarls crept into his voice.
“Why don’t you get off your ass and help me?”
“I’m not touching them.”
I sighed. “Jim, I’m not a criminalist. Without a bloody loup and an m-scanner, I don’t know which bones are vamp. You, on the other hand, can tell by the scent.”
He glared at me, his eyes a little wild. “You look through it and if you have trouble, you let me know.”
He marched into the yard. I sighed and went about sorting the bones.
I SAT ON THE PORCH BETWEEN TWO PILES OF bones, watching the werejaguar in my yard make small circles around the stick supporting the rotting head of a young woman. I had failed her. I had looked at the evidence. I had drawn the wrong conclusions. But I was still here, sitting on my porch, while she had paid for my stupidity. And my arrogance.
Jim kept walking, placing each foot softly in front of the other, stalking an invisible prey around a circle. Yellow flooded his eyes and his upper lip quivered once in a while, showing his fangs. Unless the cat was yawning in your face, you wouldn’t see his fangs until he was ready to sink them into you. Jim was ready to sink them into someone. He would have to wait in line.
“Stop it. You’re wearing a hole in my yard.”
Jim stopped pacing to glare at me.
A dark van pulled into the driveway. It was magic and water powered like Karmelion and it made enough noise to match my horror of a truck. Four stone-faced shapechangers stepped out and approached me, carrying several canvas bags. I got up and stood aside, giving them access to the bones. They began packing the fractured skeletons of their dead into the bags, sorting as they went along, handling the bones with the same care a china dealer employs when touching his best merchandize.
Doolittle stepped out of the van, wearing denim overalls and carrying a portable m-scanner. He paused to murmur a few words to Jim and proceeded to the head.
Jim approached the porch. “Curran wants you in the city.”
I shook my head. “I can’t go. After you’re done, I’ll have to call the cops. You got your bones back. The Ying family deserves to receive their daughter’s.”
“What the fuck do I tell Curran?”
Doolittle plucked the note from the nail, flipped it over. “Looks like he wrote on the back of some sort of magazine page.”
I took the note from his fingers. The page was from Volshebstva e Kolduni, the “Spells and Warlocks” rag-sheet whose credibility Saiman had so easily dismissed.
“Kate?” Jim asked.
I wanted to cry. How could I have been so stupid? I brought the Almanac out to them and handed the upir article Bono had given me to Doolittle. He read a few words. “It says here this creature feeds on dead human flesh. It will mate with animals and produce half-breed sons, neither animal nor human. Where did you get this?”
“One of Ghastek’s journeymen gave it to me.”
“Ghastek knew,” Jim snarled. “He knew the whole time. I’ll rip his heart out!”
“ ‘Driven by the need to produce an heir, the upir will mate with women of power, for only a woman of power can carry a true upir to term . . .’ ” Doolittle looked at me. “You cannot stay here, Kate. You must come to the keep.”
I opened my mouth but he silenced me with a wave of his hand. “There are seven of us and one of you. We’ll carry you if we have to.”
THE PACK COUNCIL SAT IN PADDED CHAIRS around a table. In the middle of the table sat the head of Jennifer Ying brought in as evidence by Doolittle and placed under a glass hood laced with preserving spells. She bore silent witness to all that was said. Next to her a speaker phone relayed Saiman’s cool voice.
“All upiri are male. The history of their breed is quite old: it’s likely they were an integral part of the fertility cults in early agrarian societies of the Bronze Age. During the rites young women, embodying the Goddess, were brought to the upir so he could play out his role of her son-consort by copulating with them. Of course, often the copulation resulted in the woman’s death, in which case, the upir would complete the rite full circle, devouring her body.
“The arrival of the Iron Age with its patriarchal gods-heroes signaled the end of the Goddess cult and the upiri gradually migrated to the remote regions, finding the vast Russian forests particularly suitable. Although they are driven by the urge to procreate, the upiri are interested only in producing a powerful male, another upir. All female children are born dead. Once a son is produced, the upir feeds the mother to the child and casts him out, driving him out of his territo
ry. It must be noted that only a woman of significant magic power is able to sustain enough magic to produce a baby upir.”
“What about the animal children?” Curran demanded.
“The upir will mate with any animal he can anatomically penetrate. The resulting offspring, although viable, is usually sterile. A single upir may have scores of these servant-creatures. Also, since an agrarian cult of fertility centers on regeneration, the upir is likely to have vast recuperative powers. My source lists him as immune to metal, wood, tooth, and claw. He is virtually impossible to kill.”
Curran nodded at Mahon. The Bear spoke, “The Pack thanks you for your information.”
“I appreciate the gratitude of the Pack. You will receive my bill within three days.”
Mahon turned off the phone.
“It has to be Crest,” Curran said.
Startled, I asked, “How do you know his name?”
“I know more about you than you do. Do you really think I would deal with you without following your every step?”
“You had Derek spy on me. You promised me he would do no such thing.”
“Actually I put a scout in the apartment above you,” Jim said. “Greg’s place isn’t soundproof.”
I shut up, stunned by the betrayal. I should’ve known better—the Pack always came first. They were professionally paranoid.
“How did you and Crest meet?” the alpha-wolf asked.
I didn’t answer.
Jim reached over and touched my hand. “Kate, this is one of those times when silence isn’t golden.”
There was nothing left to do. No way out. If Crest was an upir, I couldn’t take him on my own. “I went to the morgue to examine a deceased vamp found at the knight-diviner murder scene. I was looking for the brand and he walked in on me. He stated that he was a cosmetic surgeon performing what he called ‘charity duty’ at the morgue. He wore scrubs and the stripes of a unit supervisor. He asked me to join him for lunch. I refused.”
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