by Faith Hunter
Time slid forward again, a fraction of a second. The droplets skittered. Leo’s mouth opened wider. He was really not happy. When time let up again, the poop was gonna hit the prop and it was gonna get messy.
I/we were not . . . do not understand words. This. This is what he did to us. Beast showed me a memory, one I had seen before. Two streams, roiling with white water, tumbling, plummeting down a mountain, taking different paths. Rushing over and around rocks and deadwood debris. Water dropping and falling. Coiling like living things, angry and lusting and thrusting down the peaks, an image I had seen before, and thought I understood, but . . . perhaps not.
In a tight, narrow spot, full of broken stone and flood-blasted trees, the rivers met. Became one. The eddies and currents exploded into one another. Fought one another for supremacy. Spray, icy with winter, spewed into the air. Wave trains rose and fell, cresting at the tops. Eddy lines lifted a foot above the waterline, like a fence, as the two rivers struggled for power, fought for control. And merged.
This, Beast thought, indicating the eddy line. And this, she thought, showing me the swirling water in a pool below, as the two rivers became one and stopped fighting for supremacy. And found a calm pool of peace. We were broken. Alone. Fighting for dominance. First as two. Then as two merged, but not at peace. Hayyel healed us. Healed our broken soul. Gave us strength and power. But we have not accepted it. Have not taken his gift and made it ours. Have not eaten it and made it part of who we are.
I turned my attention from Beast’s memory of rivers joining to the memory of my soul home, the place/memory where my skinwalker nature was first revealed. The cavern was composed of limestone, the scent sharp and tart. In this memory it was also dark and dank, cold, without the light of the fire that was usually lit. But I knew this place that existed within me, even in the dark. I moved through the large cavern and into a small passageway, to the nook where Beast slept.
She lay on the ledge in the space she claimed as her den, belly to the cool rock. Her chin and jaw were on her paws. Her amber eyes studied me as I studied her. If two broken souls join, are we still a broken soul? But just a bigger broken soul?
Beast chuffed with amusement. If we join, we are stronger. Faster. This place becomes ours, our hunting territory.
And what does that mean?
Stronger, faster. This is always better than weaker, slower. Weaker, slower is prey.
You have a point. Especially with Leo trying to kill us. Again. But . . . you couldn’t tell me this before?
Jane did not need to know before. And price of more power might be much, like Beast trying to eat whole bison. Sickness.
I remembered my last partial shift in the HQ gym. Time had slowed and I had moved even faster than normal then too. And I’d had cramps after. Incapacitating stomach cramps. That would be bad in the middle of a fight.
Beast waited, staring at me through the dark. I had scratched her behind the ears once before. Now I bent into the ledge. And Beast rose to her paws, claws out, digging into the stone beneath her. Oddly, I could feel her claws in the back of my brain, piercing. She stepped toward me. Our faces met, hers prickly and rough with stiff hairs. She tilted her face, lifting her jaw. I rubbed my face over her jaw, accepting her scent, allowing her to mark me. She dropped her head and rubbed the top of it under my jaw, taking my scent.
It was odd and disorienting. To feel both sides of a motion. Beast’s and mine.
Okay. Let’s do it, I thought at her.
Beast opened her mouth and showed her fangs. Her breath was hot and rich with scent patterns. Meat and milk and kits and blood. Gently she placed her fangs against my throat. I knew what needed to happen if we were to live the next second. I reached to my waist, finding the hilt of a knife. The hilt was large and coarse, crosshatched for a better grip in a sweaty hand, but too big for my small fist. It was familiar to my childhood. My father had used this knife to clean fish. He had put it into my hand, teaching me how to behead a fish, how to skin a catfish. How to scale a black bass. Fillet it for cooking or drying. It felt real, that hilt of carved bone, though the knife had been lost long ago. It felt as real as my own heartbeat, as my own lungs pulling in breath. I drew the knife and placed it at Beast’s throat.
So. We both have to die, together, here, in the gray place of the change, in our soul home, to get this stronger, faster thingamajig?
Yesss.
And then we have to pay the price.
Yesss.
Fine. Now!
Beast bit down. I thrust into her throat. Pain shivered through us both. Our blood gushed out, hot, spurting. Death blood, from death strikes. Like the two rivers, our blood mingled. And became one. Fire and ice rushed through me with the pain, molten lava and glaciers calving, all of nature held in a single moment of time that wasn’t. A bubble of not-here, not-now, a time of its own, potent with life and possibility, outside of other reality. That moment had a sound, like a huge bronze bell, a note that reverberated through my bones. It had a color, the dark blue of deep ocean water, full of life rolling with power. The color of a sunset, burning through the sky. And the scent of blood.
A snippet of scripture came to me. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood . . . for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” I lifted my hand, which was coated in hot blood, and licked my fingers, smelling/tasting the life force of Beast. I swallowed, her fangs caught in my throat an electrified torment at the motion. Her own throat moved against the blade buried there, as Beast swallowed my blood.
The gray energies and black motes of power vanished.
The scalding shower spilled down. Leo roared, diving toward me. Shouting, “—not released from me!”
I dropped to the wet tile floor, grabbing up the dropped stakes. My hands were tawny-pelted. My fingers knobby and strong. My claws were extended. My clawed feet scratched into the wet and slippery tile as I rose, fastfastfast, thrusting up with the silver stakes. Hard. Directly into Leo’s heart.
CHAPTER 17
Deadish Leo on My Floor
He fell at my feet, into the shower, his head bouncing on the tile. His blood was a pinkish wash into the drain. I jumped back, slapping my body against the cool shower wall. Stared at Leo’s back, his black tux soaked. Holy crap. What just happened?
Over the roaring of the water I heard the schnick of a round entering the chamber of a semiautomatic handgun. I looked up into Derek’s face over the barrel of the weapon aimed at me. He was breathing hard, face slick with sweat, his nose bleeding. His finger tightened on the trigger. Another schnick sounded, and the barrel of a weapon was placed tight against Derek’s head. It gave his head a little push and Derek’s mouth turned down in a snarl worthy of Beast. All I could see of the second gunman was his hand and wrist, but it was Eli.
“Hey, my brother,” Eli said, sounding friendly and casual. “Let’s chat about this first, before I hafta kill you and then figure out where to bury the body. Though I’m thinking out in a bayou, somewhere close to gators, you dig?”
“I didn’t kill Leo,” I said, over the sound of the shower. “Or not yet. We have options if we act fast. Unless you kill me. Think about it.”
“I smell silver and vamp blood,” Derek said, breath still heaving. He must have run all the way from the St. Philip Apartments. “Silver will kill a vamp. Even a vamp like Leo. If you weren’t trying to kill him, why use silver?”
“It was all I had at hand. And not if he gets fed by his maker. Or a priestess. Like I said. We have options if we act fast.
“I’m reaching behind me to shut off the shower. Then I’m going to grab a towel and we’ll haul Leo out and figure out what happened and how to handle it. I was not trying to kill him. He chased me down, not the other way around.”
I turned off the water. The bathroom was loud with the sound of Derek’s breathing and water dripping. I was acutely uncomfortable with
the two men in my bathroom and the nearly true-dead vamp at my pelted but mostly human-shaped feet in my shower, but I was more worried about getting shot than my embarrassment. Healing took time that this situation might not give me.
From the top of the shower stall door I pulled a towel and wrapped it around me. My hair was sticking to my skin, I had soap on me, which itched, and I smelled like a bordello from the soap, but at least I was covered.
“Eli, Derek, enough with the Mexican standoff. I’ll heal from most anything Derek can do to me, but Derek won’t heal. He’ll be dead. And I’ll have to clean up the brains, which is messy and sticky and pretty ick. Now, help me get Leo out of here.” I bent and slid my hands under Leo’s shoulders. I heard the appropriate—though far too slow—sounds of rounds being removed from chambers and guns being holstered.
My gut began to cramp. Nausea rose up in me. Not now, I told myself. Not yet. I breathed deeply, forcing down the pain and sickness. It didn’t seem inclined to go away, but it stopped increasing, more a low ache than a twisting of my entire abdominal cavity’s contents.
Derek helped me roll Leo and together we lifted him and carried him, dripping, from the bathroom, placed him on the kitchen floor, faceup. Leo usually looked dead. He didn’t breathe except to talk, and his heart beat only from time to time. But lying on my floor, wet and bloody, his eyes open and human-looking now that he was sorta dead and not vamped out, he looked really dead. I bent and closed his eyes. “I’m going to get dressed. Don’t touch the stakes. Derek, call Del and tell her to get a healer over here. Eli, call Bruiser and get him over here.”
“Can’t do that, Jane,” Derek said, his voice cold as stone dust. “I left him in bad shape.”
Fear shocked through me. “Do I need to call an ambulance? The cops?”
“He’ll heal,” Derek said shortly.
I kept the relief off my face. Any anger left in my system at Bruiser was gone. It might make me a wishy-washy woman, but I wanted Bruiser alive. If only so I could torture him for being an ass. I said, “Fine. Get me a healer—Gee, or a priestess, or someone.” I left the deadish Leo on my floor and went to rinse and dry off and dress in something more formal than a damp, bloody towel. I also weaponed up in case anyone else had issues with Leo’s current condition.
I was standing in the foyer, braiding my wet hair with pelted, knobby hands, trying to keep the sickness at bay, when the first visitors arrived. Katie entered through the side door like she had been fired through a cannon, which meant she had leaped over the brick fence in the evening gown and heels she was wearing. I wished I’d seen that. But the clothes and her presence meant that she hadn’t been kept safely in HQ. Nor had Leo.
It also meant I needed a new side door. She stalked over the splinters of the old one in her stilettos. Gee DiMercy walked in behind her. I figured he had flown. Neither looked happy. I dropped the braid and stood my ground with a silver stake in one hand and a steel blade in the other. Before I could explain or defend myself, the most nutso vamp I’d ever met showed up at the front door with Bruiser over her shoulder. She didn’t need an invitation to enter. The door blew off its hinges. Again. This time, crime scene tape blew in with it.
The priestess Bethany Salazar y Medina was in my house. Her gaze was empty and fathomless, but her body oozed the scents of rage and vengeance. Bruiser rested across her shoulder as if he weighed no more than the shawl on her other side. He was breathing. He was also out cold, dangling like that shawl, with artful repose. And he was bleeding, his blood soaked through Bethany’s clothing.
The pain in my gut twisted and went hot. I pressed my middle with one hand, the blade pointed away from me. Not now. Not now!
Beast cannot stop it, she thought at me. Price must be paid.
“Who injured my George?” Bethany hissed. She cocked her head in that snake-way vamps have and settled all her magics on me. They prickled over my skin like lightning, ready to strike. She was nothing like the other priestess, Sabina. The power that surrounded Bethany was sharp and pitted, piercing and ephemeral. Her magics carried a scent similar to witch power, but with the bitter sting of shamanism and the yellowish tint and tang of cardamom. She was old, among the oldest vamps I had ever seen.
I took a breath of icy air to speak but she beat me to it. “I smell you on him,” she said. “I will rip you to small shreds of flesh and cook you over my fire. I will eat you and your power—”
“Not me.” I backed away fast, toward the kitchen door that hung open. Unfortunately, that put me near Katie, who was on the floor beside Leo. A quick glance told me she was the lesser danger at the moment, along with Derek, who stood in the kitchen area, weapons drawn and uncertainty on his face, as if he wasn’t sure what to do in this FUBARed mess. “Is Br—George going to be okay?” I asked as I scuttled like a crab, my toes spreading and aching, growing and changing shape, starting to look like puma paws.
“He is my George. I made certain that he is always well when I remade him.” Bethany looked at Leo on the floor. “You staked my Leo. I smell the stink of silver. You would kill him true-dead?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Not my intent. He attacked and, umm, I happened to be holding silver stakes.” Stupid answer.
Her eyes bored into me as she advanced, her cerulean skirts swirling, her dark-skinned flesh looking smooth and oiled in the lamplight, the toes of her bare feet spread wide on the floor. And Bruiser’s blood dripping steadily behind her. “I made certain that my Leo would forever be well when I gave to him my finest and most deadly gift.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. Whatever. Leo hurt George,” I half lied, to keep Derek alive. His eyes went wide as he understood what I’d done. “How ’bout you put George down and help Leo?”
Bethany dropped George on the floor. His head hit first and bounced hard, his body hitting just after, the double blows making hollow, dull echoes through the flooring. Awrighty, then, I thought, my breath coming faster to deal with the increasing pain. She went to Leo and settled on the floor beside him. Katie and Bethany stared at each other across Leo’s body, and it didn’t take a mad scientist to tell that they were not the best of pals. Keeping their eyes on the floor grouping, Eli and the Kid lifted George and laid him on the couch in a boneless heap.
“What does the priestess mean, her finest and most deadly gift?” Gee DiMercy asked me. He was standing behind Katie, watching the scene with intense but inscrutable interest.
“Heck if I know. I’m just the hired help. Or I was the hired help. I quit.” I shook my head. “But I think Leo refused my resignation and decided to kill me instead.”
For some reason, that made Gee laugh, but my eyes were drawn away from him. Shadows and sparkles flowed across the wall of the foyer, reflected onto the living room walls, and into the kitchen. Prickles of magic burned on my skin. “Oh crap,” I whispered.
The light-dragon flowed through the front door, into the house, and across the ceiling. It moved like the shadow of a serpent, one with wings of dappled sunlight on springwater, and opened its mouth. It had teeth like needles and knives and the distorted fun-house-mirror face of a human female. Its—her—wings were fully extended and their span was wider than the house, seeming to rise and fall through walls and out into the street.
The last time I had seen it, the arcenciel had been fighting the vampires who attacked me. My eyes on it, I took a breath. “Eli,” I said, my voice soft. “I smell vamp.”
My hands ached as claws pierced my fingertips. Pelt rippled down my body. And everything seemed to slow again, just a bit. Even the pain began to ease, which should have been a good thing, but instead made me wonder whether delaying paying the price made it go up.
In the light of the overhead fixture the arcenciel went visible, still glowing, but with a darker line along one side where I had stabbed her. She had already healed, but not without cost. Can light scar? Her wings cast streamers of light, like the afte
rimage glare of a camera flash combined with the arctic lights in a night sky, an effervescent opalescence, green and gold and pale shades of the rainbow, a feathery luminosity sparkling with brighter motes. Her hair was white, striped with red and black and brown. Bethany screamed and raced at the arcenciel, reaching, trying to grab the light. To the side, I saw Eli drawing a vamp-killer and a small subgun, seemingly out of the air. Derek flashed hand signals to him, the two fighters moving as one.
A stranger I knew only from the shadows of a fight stepped through the front door. She was copper-skinned, like me. And like me—or like me when I was prepared—she carried more weapons than a small army. She was dressed in the leathers of an Enforcer, but with an old-fashioned design and enough slices and cuts in the tanned hide to be risqué. The stink of old blood was on the leathers, hers and her opponents’, ripe and dense with the reek of old pain and death. She smelled like the sniper, and the bomb maker. And she was carrying two long swords. With a single, smooth, backhand cut, she struck Bethany in the neck. The priestess dropped, falling with the blade. She hit the floor, her dark blood spattering the wall.
Before I could blink, Gee had drawn two swords and raced at the swordswoman. He was moving nearly vamp fast, but time had slowed. I could see each movement, see his body flex and contract. “My challenge to blood duel was never satisfied,” he shouted, his voice low and his words slurred. “En garde!”
The woman tipped her body forward and raced at Gee, but slow, sluggish. The two met at the juncture of the foyer and the living room. In an honest-to-God sword fight. Steel clashed. A cut appeared in the wall as if by magic. A small table split in two with a crash. I had really liked that table. Not so long ago, it had been blown over when an angry air witch came visiting. Now it was nothing but splinters, like the side door. And the front door.
The Kid, who had been hiding behind the couch, grabbed me by the arm and dove to the floor with me. We landed in a painful heap; I yelped and so did he. The smell of mixed blood rose on the air and I found my feet. I was still holding the stake and the way-too-small blade. The smell of blood was grounding me fast. Adding Beast’s blood to the gray place of the change had reinforced my reactions.
