Raven Cursed: A Jane Yellowrock Novel

by Faith Hunter

  I swore succinctly and gathered myself to follow. Derek caught my arm. “You’re not wearing a vest, Legs,” he said.

  “They don’t have guns,” I replied. “Time?”

  “They’re in place. On my order, I’ve instructed the men to target the humans and the witch on first volley. Where is this demon?”

  “Your two o’clock. About ten feet off the ground. I have silver ammo,” I said. “It might work on the demon.”

  His eyes promised me retribution for not telling him about the silver. “Go,” he said.

  Time had done that slow-down thing, where every sight is sharpened, each sound is clear, crisp, and slow. Outside I heard the sound of firing, a boom-boom-boom of overlapping shotgun fire. Humans fell fast, downed by fat, non-lethal, antiriot beanbags fired at point blank range by figures dressed in night-combat black. Then they were shot by tranquilizer darts, to keep them down. But nothing hit Evangelina. She stood tall in the red car, behind a red ward, a hedge of thorns so strong, the concrete blackened and cracked where it intersected the ground outside of the tires. The ward sizzled a smutty black, like charcoal and flames, her arms out to her sides as she gathered power. Her scarlet hair flew to the sides, a wind buffeting her slender form, molding to her body.

  Blue strobes lit the scene as cops pulled up. They’d be in the way, but there was no help for that. Beside me, Derek counted off the time for the shooters to get back to safety. “Three-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, one-one-hundred. Go!”

  I dove into the fray, the M4 in one hand, stabilized against my side, and the semiautomatic in the other. The smell of human blood, witch, and vamp blood hit me. Demon burned my nostrils, acrid as smoke. I had weapons, but I needed more. “Hayyel!” I shouted as I ran, hoping my angel was still hanging around, keeping an eye on the blood-diamond.

  Derek followed me, firing rubber bullets up, not hurting the demon, but drawing his attention. Allowing me to get in under the winged evil. Time slowed further, a thick construct that parted around me, allowing me to move faster than any human.

  “Hayyel,” I breathed, stepping beneath the Raven Mocker, his wings wide above me. His beak open. Screaming. The tail that constrained him was attached to his leg like a shackle, dropping to the earth, snaking across the hotel’s drive along a trail of blood thrown by the protestors. Evangelina’s blood. Shaddock’s blood. Drained into bowls and splashed by humans. Humans who were now inactive. No longer throwing blood. The tail thinned. I had a feeling that if the Raven Mocker got loose, it would be bad. Really bad. “Hayyel. Please come get the Kalona Ayeliski, the Raven Mocker.” The demon screamed and beat his wings, looming above me. “I give him to you on a platter of silver fléchettes.”

  Darkness and emptiness drenched me, swarmed over me, filled me with a pressure that stole my breath. It felt like being smothered in my sleep, drowning in the knowledge of failure, utter and complete. Like dying in the darkness, drenched in the blood of my brothers and sisters and children. The Cherokee on the Trail of Tears had been lied to, cheated, defeated, beaten, and banished, for the greed of the white man. They had walked the long trail, dying in despair by the hundreds, their lives cut short feeding this demon.

  Wings flapped down. I saw them drop, shutting, closing on me. I tried to fire my weapons. Tried to duck. But my fingers wouldn’t squeeze the triggers. I couldn’t even fall. Hayyel didn’t come. The wings swept in, enveloping me.

  It was like being struck by lightning. Stealing my sight, my hearing, my energy. I fell then, a dizzying descent. I heard the sound of weapons hitting the ground, tinks of sound, almost lost in the emptiness of the void. I landed hard on one knee—­the pain the only thing that proved I was still on Earth and not in the emptiness of a demon’s hell.

  Then, even the wrenching of the fall was gone. I was deep in the absence of . . . everything. All sensation vanished. All hope fled. I would have sobbed had I been able to draw a breath.

  Beast? Help!

  But Beast was gone. It felt as if part of me had died in Evangelina’s basement, just as The People had died on the Trail of Tears. Their memories and despair swamped me. Lying in the frozen mud, sick, as white soldiers walked past me. Pain in waves, overwhelming. Dying. I was dying. And maybe it was best. Maybe I should give up the fight. The pain. Maybe the time of The People was past.

  Far, far away, I heard a sound. Slow, slow, slow—­thump . . . thump. Again nothingness, an ageless passage of time in the darkness, the aloneness, of the demon’s world. Until . . . The abyss was punctured by a sound, resonant, resounding. Thump . . . thump.

  A heartbeat. My heart, slowing.

  There was no up or down. No me or it. But if I still possessed a body, I would have weapons. And there would be a blade, heavily silvered, in a sheath. Near my right hand. Near . . . here. I had trained to reach and draw and cut outward and upward all in one sliding motion, a parry built into the draw. Fast. Trained so hard and thoroughly that I never had to think about drawing the weapon.

  I reached up, my mind pushing through the motions, the expectation of action. And though I felt nothing, I slid into the memory of fight, my mind moving even if my hand didn’t believe it, my fractured faith taking over where reality had failed. I drew, cut outward, upward, and finished with a thrust, whispering in my mind, Hayyel. The Raven Mocker is yours. Send him back where he belongs.

  Light blasted against me. Light and air and warmth. A flare of moonlight. A vision of angel wings and demon claws. A concussion of sound buffeted me, the roar of every battle that had ever been. It rolled me across the concrete, banging elbows, knees, jaw, and cheek. The M4 was beneath my hand. I caught it up. Continued the roll. Saw the demon above me, feathered and blacker than the sky above it. No time to finesse a shot. No collateral damage, the soft thought warned. I braced the weapon on the concrete, away from the blinding light. Fired carefully into the dark. Boom. Boom. Boom. I rolled again. Braced. Fired. Boom. Boom. Boom. I was on my feet, pulling blades and stabbing into the demon-dark. The light was blinding against the shadow.

  I jumped back. Saw the demon constrict. Tighten where I had stabbed. The light arrowed in after the silver of my shots. The darkness drew in and down, into a large black bird, four feet tall, wings flailing, fighting for freedom, bleeding black blood, even as it was pulled into the blood splattered on the drive. Over him, a massive golden eagle flapped his wings, screaming a challenge, throwing off light and lightning. The blood on the concrete rippled and bubbled, a clotting, drying mass, like a trap. A tar pit for evil.

  The demon was caught. Sucked down, into the blood. Gone in an instant. Just gone. So was the golden eagle. My angel? Hayyel? I blinked away the image of heaven and hell in battle.

  Blue lights strobed the night. Shots echoed as cops fired into the hedge. I saw a cop fall, Sam Orson, screaming, falling into the dark. I didn’t know how long the spilled blood would hold the Raven. I didn’t know how long I had been trapped. I didn’t know much of anything except that I needed the pink blood-diamond. The Raven had been summoned with the diamond and the blood. If they got together—­

  Gunfire erupted to my left. I pivoted on the balls of my feet. In front of the red car, Grégoire and Evangelina struggled, lit by flashes of light, obscured by a swirling darkness the color of old blood. He was inside the hedge of thorns. He had a blade, and he was stabbing at the witch. She was bleeding on arms and one shoulder, but not badly injured. She was deflecting the sword somehow, using her magic. Grégoire dashed and cut, seeming to parry some unseen enemy, some invisible blade. And Grégoire was burning.

  Red-orange flames rippled across his arms and upper back. In a whoosh, his hair caught fire. Flames shot into the sky. Evangelina laughed. Grégoire screamed, that glass-shattering sound they make when vamps are dying. Leo attacked the hedge with his blade, but where it had parted for Grégoire, it resisted Leo.

  Grégoire thrust and parried. Silver flashed against the hedge. He’s using a silvered sword. A weapon designed to kill his own kind. Outl
awed by the Vampira Carta. It let him penetrate the hedge of thorns. I pulled my last blade, my favorite vamp-killer, held it out in front of me. And raced in, leaping. The blade pressed in to the ward. Pierced through. Hedge of thorns shattered against me. Over me. Flaring bright, white, hot. It was like being flayed with melting obsidian blades. I screamed. I was still screaming when I landed inside. Stumbled with the momentum of my charge. Fell. Into Evangelina.

  The blade slid into her. No resistance at all. Deep. All the way. Hilt deep. Eighteen inches of silver. Heated by the hedge as the ward died.

  My eyes tracked the damage—­midcenter. Between her ribs. Direct hit. Slicing through her aorta—­even as I screamed. “Nooo!” And still I fell forward, the blade shoving her before me. Into the car. Blood gouted out, pumping over my hand. I rode her down. Onto the leather seat. My momentum wasn’t yet spent. I rolled across her, into the passenger floor. Caught myself with one hand. My hair slung forward. I was holding myself up with the hand that was coated, painted, with her blood.

  Jane is killer only. Jane even kills her friends.

  Beast!

  She didn’t reply. I levered off the floor. Evangelina lay on the seat, one hand to her stomach, as if to hold in the blood that pumped. With the other, she grasped at her throat. Clutching, grabbing at air. Seizing the necklace around her neck. The blood-diamond dangled, bright with the pink hue of its magic, with the brilliance of flickering lights. The gem spinning, beautiful, deadly, and dangerous as the hell the demon came from.

  The Raven will possess the witch in death, Beast thought. His goal from the beginning.

  Evangelina ripped down on the delicate chain. Breaking it. I lunged toward her, pushing off with my toes, up through my arches, ankles, calves, knees, a whiplashing thrust into thighs, hips, spine. Too slow. She dropped the blood-diamond into her wound.

  The earth screamed. Darkness rose and covered . . . everything. Everything, everywhere, was nothingness. But I had been here before, in this place of emptiness. It could be defeated. Blind, I finished my leap, reaching down. Into the void of the warm, wet, bloody wound.

  I took the diamond into my hand.

  The world blazed around me, bright. Her blood sizzled. Her blood boiled. My hand scorched and froze in chorus, a duality of agonies that raced up my arm. Into my chest. But I was still leaping. Airborne. Out of the car. To land and stand, poised on the pavement. The gem in my fist. It had no warmth, no cold, yet it contained the energies of the Raven Mocker, the blood sacrifice of countless witch children over centuries. It was powerful beyond anything I had ever touched. And if I destroyed it, I might release an evil beyond my own imagining. A trilling cry sounded behind me. Slowly, I turned.

  The Raven Mocker stood on the back of the car, illuminated by the lights from a van. And this time he threw a shadow. He was real. He was here. He was free. Evangelina’s blood had bought his freedom. His huge, clawed feet dented in the trunk lid with dull thumps. His wings gathered close. Beak to the sky. He was singing, a hooting, warbling, tocking sound, his head back. Throat exposed. Then he reached down with his beak toward Evangelina. And she reached up to him with blood-stained hands.

  My blades were all gone. The last one was buried in the witch. Movement caught my eye. I saw Molly and Big Evan, racing toward me, appearing out of the bright lights. Big Evan wore a grimace. Carried a knife in his fist. It was a twin to mine, the silver brilliant as moonbeams on the blade. He flipped it. At me.

  Time slowed again. Thick as clotted cream. The blade glittered, scattering the light. It tumbled in midair, gliding at me, hilt first. I lifted my right hand. The one with the necklace in it. The chain wrapped around and around my wrist as I raised it, caught in the force of my movement. The hilt smacked into my palm. Perfectly planted. Big Evan opened his mouth, started to speak the round, fluid syllables of the ancient witches. I pushed off hard, leaping. To the back seat of the car.

  Holding the blood-diamond, my hand coated with Evangelina’s blood, I stabbed upward. Into the belly of the demon. I shouted, “Hayyel!”

  The magic was cold. It swarmed over me like a blizzard, burning and icy. The demon’s blood gushed over my hand, mixing with Evangelina’s. Coating the blood-diamond. It flashed red, then black, and red again. My wrist burned where the chain touched me. Binding itself to me. The gold chain around my neck branding into me. The hilt of the knife heating. Evan invoked the name, “Hayyel, take Kalona Ayeliski, the Raven Mocker.” He spoke the Irish Gaelic of the binding, syllables I couldn’t reproduce if I tried. “Bíodh sé daor, le m’ordú agus le mo chumhacht.”

  The explosion sent me back, over the witch dead on the front seat, over the windshield and hood. To the ground where I hit, slamming the breath out of me, a shocking pain. I rolled, bounced, scraped over the driveway, leaving layers of my flesh. Light flashed over the night, so bright I saw my own bones through my skin. Wings, light and golden, black and shadowed, beat at the world.

  It was all over when I finally remembered to take a breath.

  All except the screaming. The grief. Molly wailed, clutching her sister to her. A reporter raced up to thrust a microphone at my face. I growled. Leo smoothly stepped between us before I coldcocked her. I caught a glimpse of Grégoire being helped into the hotel, the stink of burned vamp on the air. Derek handed me my weapons and put an arm around me. Shielding me. Steered me inside. Something crashed, and the light, so bright it had been blinding, went out. In my right hand was an elk-horn hilt and a melted blade. The chain of the blood-diamond was seared into my flesh, still so hot my skin blistered around it.

  “Light?” I croaked.

  “From the news van. They got the whole damn thing and sent it out live.” He pointed to a TV discreetly on the check-in desk. It was a close-up of Leo, looking urbane and elegant, even with the smear of blood on his cheek. And beside him was Lincoln Shaddock, looking shell-shocked and lost, staring at a body on the pavement. Chen. Naked. Dead. With runes cut into his flesh. I remembered the lump in the car next to Shaddock earlier. Evangelina had sacrificed him to the demon.

  My back and Derek’s were in the background, something dangling against my hand. I tucked the pink diamond gem—­the blood-diamond—­into my pocket. I knew what it was now. A portal into hell. Guarded by an angel.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  A Marriage Ceremony with a Death Sentence at the End

  Two days later, I stood beside the hospital bed, awkwardly patting Itty Bitty’s hand. The tiny woman was being released, her werewolf wounds healing with no trace of were-taint found in her blood. Gertruda, the Mercy Blade sworn to the service of Charles Dufresnee, the Master of the Raleigh-Durham area, sat at her other side, looking far more comfortable in the medical surroundings than I felt.

  Gertruda still wanted nothing to do with me. She hadn’t looked at me once since she walked into the room to give the injured witch her final healing. Still silent, she left the room, managing to convey her disdain of me and everything I stood for without saying a word. I didn’t know what I’d done to the woman, but I was good at ticking off supernats.

  And cops. I was real good at ticking them off. And men in general, even better. Itty Bitty’s boyfriend sat in the corner of the room and glowered at me as if the wolf attack had been my fault. Which it had been. Sorta. It’s hard to dodge well-deserved blame, and harder still to ignore the stab of guilt when I think about all the people hurt because I hadn’t thought about two werewolves in jail and how they might react when their pack was slaughtered. And hadn’t thought about the magical amulet locked in my gun cabinet in New Orleans. And hadn’t thought about Evangelina and how weird she had acted while visiting me in New Orleans. And just hadn’t thought at all.

  I patted Itty Bitty’s hand again. “Like I said. The Party of African Weres will pick up any outstanding medical bills. The leader assured me personally.”

  “Thank you for coming,” she said. “You didn’t have to.”

  I managed a smile, but from the reaction on
her face, not a good one. “Yeah. I did.” Okay. Enough social-small-talk. I waggled my fingers at them and left the room, fighting the urge to run. I’d rather face a pack of wolves than try to comfort someone.

  Rick lounged against a wall in the hallway, his legs crossed at the ankles, looking long and lean in black jeans and jacket, and not trying very hard to discourage the two young women who were hanging around. They were dressed in brightly patterned scrub suits and one had a chest that Rick clearly found imposing. Maybe mesmerizing was a better word. “Come on, Ricky Bo,” I said, “before your eyeballs fall out.”

  He grinned at me, his too-long hair falling forward, curling into his collar. “Sandra is Sam Orson’s nurse.” He nodded to the busty one. “She says the deputy’s going to be fine. He just took a ricochet off the magical ward into the meaty part of his thigh.” I hadn’t realized I carried the weight of the cop’s injury until it fell away. “You can quit worrying,” he added more gently.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and shrugged, not knowing how to respond.

  Rick pushed off the wall and draped his arm around my shoulders, not an easy thing to do when there’s no disparity in height. “Come on. We need to talk.”

  Oh crap. We need to talk as in, I bought a house and want you to move in? Or as in, I want to see other people, like the busty Sandra? Or as in—­

  “I had a call from Grizzard. And from PsyLed. I’ve got job offers from both.”

  I thought about that as we entered the elevator and Rick pushed the button for the lobby. As the doors closed, I asked, “They know about you?”

  “Yeah. They do. I told them. I’d be a detective with the sheriff’s department, with full moons off so I can listen to the spell music Evan made for me. The job PsyLed outlined is a kind of roving special agent with a territory covering seven Southeastern states.” When I didn’t reply he said, “I’m thinking about taking the PsyLed offer.”