by Faith Hunter
I couldn’t fight this thing alone. I needed to call in the cavalry, but I didn’t know who to call, who I could trust to keep Molly alive. With the heater on high, I drove back to Asheville.
I made my room without running into anyone I knew, stripped, and climbed into the shower. I stood beneath the scalding water and let it parboil me, trying to thaw the cold in my soul left by the nearness to the ancient evil. When I was warmer, I dressed and went to the drawer holding my Bible and crosses, the only defense against evil I knew. I put on three silver crosses, held the Bible on my lap, and turned on the gas fire with the remote control as I scrolled through my phone contacts for Aggie One Feather’s number.
Guilt wormed under my skin like bamboo shoots under fingernails. I hadn’t told Aggie—my Cherokee teacher, the elder who was helping me find my past—that I was leaving New Orleans. I hadn’t said good-bye. I was a coward and an idiot. And if the thing in the circle had claimed to be anything other than a Cherokee demon, I’d go on being a coward and an idiot. I checked the time on the cell—nine a.m.—and hit send. Aggie answered on the second ring.
“Hello. How can I help you?”
I thought about that for a moment. Only an elder would answer the phone like that, knowing the odds of it being a solicitation call. “Aggie One Feather.” I paused. “Egini Agayvlge i, in the speech of The People. This is Jane Yellowrock,” I took a breath, “Dalonige’i digadoli. Yellow Eyes Yellowrock. I seek council.”
“How may an Elder of The People assist?” There was no snark in the words, no sarcasm.
I swallowed and said, “First of all you can forgive me for acting like an idiot and taking off without telling you I was leaving.”
Aggie laughed, the sound soothing. “There is nothing to forgive, Dalonige’i digadoli. You have a life outside of my counsel, outside of the sweathouse.”
I do. I did. But it was way more than that. It was the parts of my life staring at each other across a chasm of decades, across a sea of cultures and religion and history. Parts of myself that were bifurcated, broken, torn. Parts that didn’t know how to heal or how to accept the other.
I could almost see Aggie, sitting at her kitchen table, a plate of fresh baked cookies and a bottled Coke frosted with white before her. Her calm reached out across the airwaves and settled around my shoulders like a warm blanket. I relaxed, only now aware that I was tense. I took up my guilt in both hands as if to strangle it, and said, “I haven’t been back to see you since going to water. I ran away from your guidance and took a gig in Asheville to put space between us.”
“No,” she said gently. “You accepted the job to put space between the parts of yourself. The Christian child with the white man’s upbringing and the Tsalagi and our ancient ways.”
Crap. I was so totally transparent. I looked down at my hand in the firelight, at the shadows and light that moved across my skin. I was at war with my selves and I didn’t know how to knit me together into a single whole. Aggie knew this, even if she didn’t know what I was, or where I came from. “Yeah. Change is hard. Acceptance is harder.”
“You will find yourself, Dalonige’i digadoli. You will like what you find at the end of that journey. You will like being whole, though the way of the Christian may have to work hard to accept the way of the Tsalagi. How may I help you?” she asked gently.
“It’s pretty heavy stuff.” When she didn’t reply I said, “A mostly Irish Celt witch has trapped a demon in a binding circle to summon and drain the two-natured to accomplish—I don’t know what. The witch is looking younger, prettier, and a lot less stable. The thing in the circle is black, misty, has wings and claims to be Cherokee. Do you know what it is?”
Aggie One Feather took a slow breath between her teeth, the sound shocked. “No. But I will ask my mother.”
“I need to know how to kill it.”
After a long moment, she said, “If it is a true demon, they cannot be killed. They can only be bound and banished.” Aggie’s voice sounded calm, steady, not like she wanted to run from me and my problems. Kudos to her for that. I didn’t think I’d sound so serene in her place. “And the ceremony to banish a demon to the underworld is lost in time. No one knows of it. I cannot help you Dalonige’i digadoli.” I hadn’t really believed it would be easy, but a heavy misery flowed over me at her words. “But I will ask others. Give me your numbers. I will call when I know more.”
I gave her the number to my fancy cell and to my throwaway cell, the one I used when I didn’t want Leo to have access to me. Of course, if Leo could listen in on my conversations, then giving out that number meant he had it now, but it couldn’t be helped. Modern communication came with a price: total lack of privacy from anyone with the money to buy the access, and with the will to listen.
When I hung up, I opened the Bible at random and started reading. I hadn’t read anything holy in months. I hadn’t wanted to. But now, with the coercion of the demon and my own emptiness, I needed something. Something to fill me. To protect me. Because I was close to being . . . afraid. Yeah. Afraid. The emptiness inside me was a yawning maw with killing teeth and I was poised on the lip of the darkness. The scripture I opened to in Deuteronomy six wasn’t exactly comforting.
Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you;
(For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.
A cold sensation swept through me, like a frozen wind. Had I done that? Gone after other gods? The gods of The People? The gods of my own life, my job, my friends, my own wants? Yeah. I had. I wondered if God would forgive me for that. Before I closed the Bible I flipped to the New Testament at random and read in Luke six:
Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven:
“Okay,” I said aloud, not sure what I was reading, but willing to accept it. I closed the Bible. “Okay, I can forgive. Forgive what?” Instantly I saw the face of yunega, the white man who killed my father. I saw the shadows on the cabin wall as the other yunega raped my mother. I felt the chill of the cooling blood as I painted my face in promise of retribution.
I jerked out of the memories and put the Bible down, staring at it, the worn pages looking ordinary, powerless, in the dull light seeping around the blinds. “Okay. Not so easy, then,” I murmured. I hadn’t forgiven the murderers and rapists, even after more than a hundred years.
I closed the old Bible and went online. Reach had sent me some files, a huge one on Thomas Stevenson, Shaddock’s scion who had gotten free and was probably hunting humans for dinner. I didn’t bother to open it. Instead I opened the one labeled Evangelina Everhart Stone. The file was full of info pulled off the Web and other places, and it mentioned her in a lot of contexts: her graduate and post-grad work at the University of North Carolina; a stint at UNC Asheville as a part-time professor; in Charlotte at Johnson & Wales University’s College of Culinary Arts; a few years teaching at Shaw University; the opening of Seven Sassy Sisters’ Herb Shop and Café; a newspaper spread about her cooking classes at the restaurant, which had been before I knew her. She had returned to UNC Asheville as a full professor, and married a professor named Marvin R. Stone, and they had one daughter, Shiloh Everhart Stone.
I remembered the body rolled in the carpet behind the couch. And the girlish bedroom, dusty and closed off. Neither husband nor daughter had lived there in years. I did a search for Stone but he had disappeared off the map. So. Hubby might be wearing a carpet, but he wasn’t alive.
Reach had provided me with a file on Shiloh. The contents were thin. Shiloh had been a mediocre student, better at art and poetry than math and science, and had disappeared at age fifteen. And reappeared in New Orleans, in a shelter for runaway teens. Crap. Shiloh had run to New Orleans—Leo’s city. The chill I’d been fighting settled in my bones.
Shiloh disapp
eared from the shelter before her mother could get to her. The police report said three of the girl’s friends had watched as she was yanked into a dark car, maybe a Lincoln or a Park Avenue. The car squealed off before the friends could do anything. Shiloh had been kidnapped. In New Orleans. In Leo’s main power base.
Quickly, I minimized the screen and opened a different file, one provided by NOPD, listing all the witch children who disappeared in their city, kidnapped and never found. Shiloh E. Stone was on the list. I compared the date of Shiloh’s kidnapping to the dates other witch young had vanished. Three others had gone missing in the same month. “Oh crap,” I whispered. I knew what this case was about, now. As with most things vampy, this situation went back a lot of years, the originating event buried beneath the weight of time. But now I had the single thread that tied the disconnected parts together. Shiloh Everhart Stone.
I opened more of my own files and discovered that the policeman who had taken the report was R.A. Ferguson; he had filed the report as a runaway, not as a kidnapping. Shiloh was a witch kid. He hadn’t cared about a nonhuman child who disappeared, had, in fact, hated them. I had met Ferguson, just before an ancient vamp had rolled him and sucked the hatred out of him along with his blood. I hadn’t tried to stop the vamp.
Evangelina had lost a witch daughter in Leo’s city, in Leo’s territory, likely to the vamp witches who were sacrificing witch children to the pink blood-diamond. They’d been trying to create a cure for the long-chained—scions who never found sanity. Evangelina had known that. She had claimed that her appearance in New Orleans was for parley—to negotiate peace between vamps and witches, and compensation to the witches for the loss of their children, not that there could ever be sufficient compensation for the loss of a child. But she had really gone there to kill the man she held responsible for her child’s death. Leo Pellissier.
Evan hadn’t known about Shiloh running away and being kidnapped, which meant it was likely that Molly hadn’t known either. Evangelina had kept it all secret until she spelled her sisters to enact vengeance on Leo. Shiloh had run away from home. Had Evangelina killed Marvin by accident, later? Or had Shiloh seen Evil Evie kill her father and then run away? Crap. I’d never had a family, but as an investigator, I knew that family secrets were the very worst. They destroyed so much. Sometimes they destroyed everything, as if, after decades in the grave, the dead reached out to shatter the living.
Molly had never told me the story of Shiloh, so Evangelina had likely not told her sisters. Probably because she had killed her husband. I called Evan and left the info about Shiloh on his voice mail. He needed to know. They all did. But for some reason, I didn’t mention what I feared had happened to Marvin Stone. Coward. I was a coward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Eat Humans When They Go
to the Dark Side
Staring at the computer screen, I put it all together. Evangelina knew that Leo’s now-true-dead scions killed Shiloh. The witch was trying to get back at Leo for the decades of murders, but she wasn’t stupid enough to try to kill him in open confrontation. She had appeared in New Orleans, allied with the wolves, tried to help them kill Leo in his lair by creating a modified hedge of thorns that let the wolves in. Unrelated, but associated, I took a gig in my old hometown and came to Asheville. When the weres got out of jail, they had followed me here from New Orleans to exact their own brand of vengeance. Evangelina—who had been kicked out of New Orleans by Leo—found out that weres had followed me to Asheville and lured them to her home, her place of power. And there she created a spell or upped the power on an existing one, with their two-natured blood. The spell was intended to kill Leo, who was dead and undead—one of the two-natured. It all made sense.
I dialed Bruiser. When he picked up, before he could say more than hello, I said, “Tell me who suggested to Leo that Lincoln Shaddock was ready to be master of his own city.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Was it you?”
“Yes.” He sounded bewildered, and just a tad defensive. “I recommended that he go to the Appalachians and meet with Lincoln. Amy Lynn Brown had come out of the devoveo in record time. It was a good call. Why do you ask?”
Instead of answering, I asked a question. “And Leo was going?”
“At first, yes. Then he changed his mind. Why. Do. You ask?”
I closed my eyes. “I ask because Evangelina had you spelled and open to suggestion. She set this whole thing in place, to get Leo here, in her hometown, where her coven gave her power to draw on. And she thought you could force the issue.” The main reason Leo had agreed to the parley was because of the location of her coven, though he never knew that.
I heard Bruiser’s slow intake of breath. I almost felt his shock through the airwaves. My cell beeped. It was Molly’s number. “I’ll get back to you.” I cut Bruiser off and said, “Hi.”
“I’m sorry,” Molly said. Before I could reply she went on. “For not believing you about my sister. For not trusting that you knew what you were doing. For not standing up to Big Evan when he was an ass about you.”
I heard Evan in the background, say, “Hey. No fair.”
“Jane is my friend. You were an ass. Don’t let it happen again,” Molly said, her words muted, her mouth turned away from the phone. I heard Evan grumble in the background. To me she said, “The ass says he’s sorry.” I didn’t believe that Big Evan had apologized, but I would accept it.
“My sisters and I are meeting at two p.m. at Evangelina’s to take a look at the demon she trapped, and bind it back to darkness if we can. Evangeline is teaching a cooking class at the Biltmore House all day, and won’t be back until after dark. Big Evan analyzed the photos you sent and he thinks that daylight is the best time for us to neutralize the working. Can you be there?”
I thought about taking Derek and the boys to take Evie out, and about all the collateral damage that might result if she fought with demon-backed witch spells. I discarded the idea. “I’ll be there at one forty-five,” I said. “And Molly? I used Evangelina’s hair and one of her scarves to get inside without the spell taking me over.”
A long silence followed before Molly sighed into the phone. “I still can’t accept that she used blood magic,” Molly said. “But if you got in with her genetic material then, well. Oh hell.” Her voice was clotted with tears. “See you soon, Big-Cat.”
Satisfied that I had done all I could, I set my phone to wake me by twelve thirty, pulled the covers from the foot of the neatly made bed and fell asleep. Hard.
I sat on Fang under the blazing sun at Evil Evie’s and sweated, smelling the stench of old blood, sickly sweet and rotting. The early cold spell had melted away into Indian summer, and the jeans and denim jacket were too warm for the high eighties and humidity, but were much preferable to the riding and fighting leathers I would have needed for a vamp hunt. I wasn’t sure what Evangelina’s witch-magic problem would require, but protection from vamp fangs wouldn’t be one of them.
I hadn’t wanted anyone to be able to track me, so I left the cell and the SUV with their GPS locator devices at the hotel. I had no idea how the sisters would banish the demon in the basement and free the weres and Lincoln, but it would involve lots of magic, and I wondered if there would be anything left of the old homeplace when they were done.
I studied the odd lines inside the garden’s witch circle. The blood-splattered rocks looked like broken alphabet letters, something archaic. It hit me. Runes. Evangelina was using runes. I felt really stupid. Lots of witches used runes; their ability to craft raw power into something useful had some special reliance on runes. So if I took a tree branch and batted away the rocks that made up her circle, and knocked the runes out of place, it might—
Molly’s van pulled up beside me before I had a chance to try it, which was probably a good thing for my state of health. Witch magic that got interrupted might go bang. I pulled off my jacket, tossed it on the seat, and set Fang’s kickstand. Boots crunching on the gravel, I stood by M
ol’s open window. Her face was grief stricken, her eyes on the witch circle with its coating of dried blood. She took a breath, and her throat tissue quaked audibly as she swallowed, tears in her eyes. I patted her shoulder through the window, knowing the gesture was not nearly enough.
“Blood magic,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Son of a witch on a stick.” Visibly, she gathered herself and opened the van door. From the passenger seat, she handed me a heavy wicker basket covered with a kitchen towel. I held it while she climbed from the van, her face now set and resolute. When the van door closed, she tilted her head, the motion reticent. “Evan told me about Shiloh. About how she was kidnapped in New Orleans. I think . . . I think I knew it, already. I think Evangelina told us when she spelled us all.”
I almost told her about the body in the rug upstairs, but something stopped me. She’d had enough bad news today. “Where’s Evan?” I asked, instead.
“The kids are napping. He’s watching them. I don’t need him for this.” Which was a lie. Major witch workings required five witches. They had only four. But I didn’t argue. This was her sister they were going up against, the leader of the Everhart coven. They would handle it alone. “Turn off your cell,” she added. “It might interfere with the working.” Which was news to me. I’d have to be more careful.
Two all-wheel Subarus pulled in beside the van, and the other sisters got out, Carmen Miranda carrying a basket from the blue car, the twins Boadacia and Elizabeth from the green one—Cia with a small trunk, Liz with a weighty cloth tote over one shoulder. Molly looked at me. “Do you have the scarf and hairs?” I nodded. “Cover your head and shoulders with the scarf and stick the hairs in a pocket. Stay here.”
