by Nell Stark
“Uje!” I gasped. And then my panther was on me.
Chapter Eight
Olivia was shouting something, but her words were lost to me in my bone-wrenching slide into feline form. The disorientation faded as quickly as it had come, and I flattened myself to the ground, haunches coiled to spring. Olivia was pointing her gun at a woman, who was in turn pointing her gun at me. The stranger’s wavy dark hair framed a grim expression. She wore form-fitting dark green cargo pants and a matching vest over a beige blouse, and her hand wavered as she debated the focus of her revolver.
“Drop your weapon.” Olivia’s voice was pitched higher than usual, but her words were steady.
As soon as the stranger’s arm began to pivot, I sprang, knocking her to the floor. But as she fell, the sharp report of her pistol pierced my ears. Olivia’s cry of pain and the tang of blood in the air drove me wild. Hunger twisted in my belly like a writhing snake, compounded by the wholly feline desire to tear my assailant apart. She struggled, and I pressed harder on her shoulders, piercing her fragile flesh with my claws. I wanted her blood in my mouth and her bones between my jaws. Snarling into her ashen face, I bared my teeth and tensed for the lunge that would tear out her throat.
“Alexa, no!” Olivia cried. She was alive, her words breathless but strong. I paused, saliva dripping onto the woman’s neck. Olivia was slumped against the wall, one hand covering her left shoulder. Blood seeped slowly between her fingertips. “It’s not serious. I’m okay. I’m okay. Don’t hurt her.”
My panther’s every instinct warred against retreat. She wanted to finish the job, and in so doing, to satiate herself. It was an effort to pull her back from the stranger and into a wary crouch. Tail lashing, I watched as Olivia rose slowly, then took possession of the stranger’s gun and ordered her to sit with her back to the wall.
“I did not intentionally fire at you,” the woman said. Her accent was an intriguing combination of British and Argentinean, her voice remarkably steady for a woman who had been on the cusp of a gory death. “My gun discharged as I fell. Is your wound serious?”
“I’ll live.” With a practiced movement, Olivia ejected the stranger’s clip and tucked the pistol into her waistband. Blood trickled down her arm, but she paid it no mind. She wasn’t losing it quickly enough to risk fainting right away, but that meant the bullet was probably still inside her body. She would need surgery. “Who are you?”
The woman swept her hair back from her face, looking far more regal than she had any right to under the circumstances. “My name is Solana Carrizo, and this home has been in my family for generations. You are the interlopers here. Who are you?”
Olivia’s jaw dropped and a low whine escaped my throat. Solana Carrizo? The female estanciero, who had been born over a century ago? If so, she had to be a vampire. I edged closer to her and inhaled, but her scent was wholly unfamiliar: not pungent like a human’s, nor musky like a shifter’s, nor the sharp chill of a snowbound winter morning that I’d always associated with vampires.
“Solana Carrizo? But…but how old are you?”
Solana’s stare was coolly defiant. “Why should I answer your questions?”
She was toying with us while Olivia was injured. Baring my teeth, I growled and took a menacing step closer in an attempt to show her exactly why she should be cooperative.
“Alexa. Stop.”
Solana’s thin eyebrows arched. “The cat—she is under your control?”
Olivia shook her head, then winced as the movement agitated her injury. “She’s under her own control.”
Solana regarded me pensively, then turned back to Olivia. “What is your business here? Why have you trespassed on my land?”
Olivia didn’t have an immediate reply, and I could practically feel her trying to sort out how much information to give this woman—or whatever she was. Bending awkwardly, she reached for one of the scraps from my shirt that I’d shredded during my shift and pressed it against her shoulder. The flow of blood had slowed, but as the adrenaline wore off, her pain would only increase. And that bullet had to come out.
“My name is Olivia,” she said finally. “Alexa and I—we’re searching for something. Something that could save the life of…of a friend. We were told that this place has been deserted for years.” She managed a chuckle. “That it was haunted.”
“Haunted.” Solana’s gaze was unfocused, as though the object of her scrutiny was far off in the distance. “In a manner of speaking.” She rose to her feet and Olivia cursed, fumbling for her gun. In an instant, I stood between them, snarling.
She waved me away. “Stop this. That wound needs tending to. I know of a skilled curandero—a healer—in a nearby village. Let me take you there.”
“We have a Jeep just off the highway.” Olivia sounded as doubtful of her proposition as I felt. “I can get medical attention in Fiambala.”
“Your vehicle is hours away on foot, and dusk is almost upon us. We can be in the village of which I speak by sunset.”
“How will we get there?”
“I have a car concealed nearby. The cat—Alexa, you call her? She can follow us.”
Olivia looked conflicted, but the right decision seemed clear to me—though I didn’t like it. If Solana was a vampire, she had excellent control over her bloodlust. She could, of course, be harmful even if she wasn’t, but her words and mannerisms felt genuine to me. It might seem foolish to take such a risk on intuition, but Solana was right; our options were slim. Olivia’s condition would only deteriorate, and the longer she went without medical care, the greater the probability of infection became.
Once I hunted, I would be able to follow their trail closely. Depending on the quality of the road to this village, I might even be able to keep pace with Solana’s car. Olivia still had her weapon and the strength to use it; she wouldn’t be unprotected. Besides, Solana’s offer gave us the excuse to stay close to her. She could be the “parched spirit” of Miralla’s translated anecdotes, and I wasn’t about to let her get away.
“What do you think?” Olivia asked me, fully meeting my gaze for the first time since my shift. It wasn’t an easy thing for a human to do. I could tell that the pain was beginning to register; her eyes were hazy and her cheeks had lost their flush.
I paced close to her and brushed against her thigh, then dipped my head and nosed gently at her legs, propelling her in Solana’s direction.
“She, at least, believes I can be trusted.” Solana sounded bemused, but when she glanced my way, I silently bared my teeth. Her answering nod was proof that she understood the stakes.
If any more harm came to Olivia, Solana’s life was forfeit.
*
As Solana pulled out of the barn, I let my panther’s instincts take over. Within minutes, I had flushed out, caught, and devoured a brown hare from the nearby woods. As the hunger waned, my control and concentration improved. I was soon following the fresh tire tracks north and east over a steep rise and along a sparsely forested ridge. Several miles later, the tracks made a switch-backed descent into a narrow ravine that opened into a small box canyon. I scented the village before I could see it, but my panther balked at walking into what she considered to be a trap. The canyon walls were sheer, and the path in was also the only way out.
I abandoned the tracks and clung to the thin cover available from the sparsely distributed trees and undergrowth. The village was a cluster of whitewashed buildings, but most of the rooftops glinted silver from the presence of solar panels. Somehow, clean energy had found this remote community. I wove in and out of the shadows in as wide a circle as the steep canyon walls would allow, until Solana’s melodic voice reached my ears. The sound of her conversation was emanating not from one of the buildings, but from a stone structure near the back wall of the canyon. A now-crumbling fortress had been built into the rock at some point in the distant past, but the thin tendril of smoke emerging from one of the more intact chambers signaled that someone had co-opted the ruins for curre
nt use. I crouched low, belly pressing against the dusty earth, and slunk up the broken stone stairs.
Solana was speaking rapidly in Spanish. When she paused, a deep male voice interjected a question. As I drew closer, I caught Olivia’s scent under the pungent aroma of a large collection of herbs. After listening for several minutes, however, I still hadn’t heard her speak or even move and had no way of knowing whether she was silent because she couldn’t understand the conversation or if she was somehow in trouble. I crept forward, hoping to catch a glimpse inside the room, but my paws slipped on shale and loose stone crumbled down the steps. The voices inside the room stopped.
In the next moment, Solana was outside the door, regarding me with her hands on her hips. She had moved more quickly than a human could, but the dying rays of sunlight played over her face without inciting a conflagration.
“Your friend Olivia is fine. Miguel removed the bullet, and she is resting. If you return to two legs, you can see her.”
As much as I wanted the power of my own voice, I wasn’t ready to trust her. When I shifted back, I would be naked and vulnerable. I didn’t want to be trapped in a small room where I would be easily overpowered.
At the sound of my rumbling growl, Solana sighed. “You require proof? Very well then. Come inside as you are and see that I’ve kept my word.”
She disappeared, and I cautiously padded after her through an elaborately beaded curtain and into a small square room. The floor was covered with brightly colored woven mats, and herbs hung from the patched roof like alien icicles.
The man whose voice I’d heard was crouched next to a pile of blankets on which Olivia lay supine, the white cloth of a bandage peeking out from under the collar of her sweater. Miguel seemed unfazed by my approach, but I ignored him until I had reassured myself that she was breathing. When I finally looked up, he wordlessly held out a blanket. Apparently, he knew what to expect.
I stretched into the shift, but my panther’s will to remain four-legged was strong; she felt ill at ease and wanted the protection of her own teeth and claws. Her reluctance made the transformation more painful than it had to be, and I leaned hard against the wall to catch my breath as bright shards of agony seared up my legs and along the length of my spine.
Solana had taken the blanket from Miguel, and she wrapped it around my shoulders. I examined her through my own eyes for the first time and found her beautiful. She was petite of stature, her delicate frame at odds with the imposing air that surrounded her. High cheekbones framed her hazel eyes, made darker by the pallor of her features.
“Impressive,” she said. “I’ve never seen it done with such speed.”
I wasn’t about to confess that at my best, I could shift much more quickly. Clutching the blanket close, I turned so that my back was no longer against the wall. “What are you?”
“What do I look like?”
I didn’t want to play these games with her, but I also didn’t really have a choice. “You move like a vampire.” Her patronizing smile confirmed my suspicions. “But your scent isn’t right. If you are really Solana Carrizo the estanciera, you must have been turned near the beginning of the twentieth century. You shouldn’t be able to walk in the sun because you must have made the transition long ago. Unless, that is, you’ve discovered a way to stop it.” I glanced at Miguel, then up at his collection of herbs. If my hunch was correct, the flower might be among them. “Or reverse it.”
The smile faded as first surprise and then fear flashed across her features. In another moment, all emotion was hidden behind a grim mask. “Olivia claimed you were on some sort of quest, but she wouldn’t tell me the object. What are you looking for?”
It was time to lay all of my cards on the table, and I had to suppress a shiver at the adrenaline rush that spiked my blood. “We came here in search of a plant—a flower—with the ability to restore a vampire’s soul.”
Her lips thinned, but she gave no other sign that my words had affected her. “That’s quite a bit of power to ascribe to a simple flower.”
“I can’t be sure of how or if it will work, but I have to try.” I paused, searching her impassive eyes for some sign of connection or compassion. “Do you have any information that might help me?”
She regarded me silently then turned and asked Miguel a question. When he responded in the affirmative, she indicated the thicker rugs before the crude stone hearth. “Miguel has offered us the use of this chamber while Olivia recovers. Shall we sit?”
“When will she wake up?”
Solana exchanged a few words with Miguel. “Soon. He gave her an herbal tincture to render her unconscious while he removed the bullet, and it should wear off within the hour.”
“Gracias,” I told him, wishing I had better words to express my gratitude. He nodded, then left the room. I joined Solana at the hearth.
“I am curious about your motives,” she said. “Most vampires would never wish to give up the power they have gained in exchange for freedom from the darkness.”
“Are you speaking from personal experience?”
She turned her gaze on me and settled back against the blankets. “Tell me your story, and I will tell you mine.”
My story. As I considered where to begin, I felt a sense of vertigo, as though I were teetering on the edge of a great mental chasm. My story. Here, now, I was sitting next to a vampire in a tiny Andes village thousands of miles from the city I called home, which was itself a thousand miles from the provincial hospital where my mother had first taken me from the arms of a nurse and smiled and called me “Alexa.” That moment and this would have been worlds apart if not for Valentine. She connected the woman in me to the werepanther. She was my past, and I would fight to make her my future.
“My lover and I had been together for almost a year when she was turned by the Missionary,” I began. “At first, she tried to convince me that we should no longer be together—that she was too dangerous to me. My blood was powerful enough to stop her transition, but she was afraid that in a moment of weakness, she might take too much.”
Solana’s sigh would have been inaudible to human ears, but it wasn’t to mine. I glanced at her just in time to see a flash of pain twist her lips. “And did she?”
“We had one very close call. After that, I started looking for a way to better sustain her. Ultimately, I decided to become a Were. It took a while before I was able to control my panther while Valentine fed from me, but eventually I was successful.”
I pressed the heel of one hand to the hollow space that ached between my breasts whenever the guilt resurfaced. “But then we spent some time apart. Not because of a disagreement, but because I had been invited to spend the summer in Telassar. Are you familiar with it?”
Solana inclined her head. “As familiar as someone who is not of your kind can be.”
“I knew that us being apart was hard on her, but I didn’t realize just how hard. And then the whole world went mad, when Balthasar Brenner destroyed Sybaris and besieged Telassar and released a shifter virus in New York. My return was delayed.”
An echo of the fear and anxiety that had been my constant companions in those days must have shown on my face, because Solana fleetingly rested her hand on my knee. “And so your lover…grew distant.”
“I got home before it happened, but I was too late to stop it.” Leaning forward, I held her unblinking gaze and willingly let down my guard. “At first, I believed that bringing her back would be impossible. But I think there’s a way, and that you know what it is. I’ll do anything. Whatever it takes. Please help me.”
She turned away, the tiny muscles along her jaw line twitching as she stared into the flames. “To understand what you are asking,” she said finally, “requires me to tell a story that no one else except Miguel has ever heard—Miguel and his father before him, and his father before him. And now you.
“I was born in 1881 into a family of powerful landowners just outside Buenos Aires. My parents had no sons, and my fathe
r passed away before his time. He should have named one of my male cousins his successor, but instead, he named me. One of his last acts was to write me a letter in which he described the bargain that our family and others like us had made with a group of vampires. They protected us and furthered our interests in exchange for blood. We gave them our undesirables—our thieves and our murderers. It was, as my father put it, a devil’s bargain. And I inherited it.
“The vampire to whom I answered was named Romero. One of his younger associates, Helen, saved my life when the head of one of the other families sought to have me killed, simply for being a woman. Despite my better judgment, I fell in love with her.”
The air stuttered in my lungs as surprise stole my breath. “Helen? Helen Lambros?”
“Yes. She has control of the Consortium in New York City now, or so I’ve heard.”
My brain spun wildly. “She does. I know her fairly well. She was the one who turned you?”
The corners of Solana’s mouth tightened. “No. But she believed she had killed me.” At my look of confusion, Solana rose and began to pace before the fire. “We were happy together for almost five years. And then, one night, she simply took too much. I will never know what, if anything, made that night different from any other. She thought I was dead, but I was only unconscious. When I woke, Helen was gone. I tried to find her, but overexerted myself and fainted again. The next thing I can remember is the taste of blood in my throat and a vampire named Hector standing over me. Hector was the patron of the powerful Vargas family. He may have saved my life by turning me, but he should have let me die.”
This was an argument I’d heard from Valentine in the days soon after she had become a vampire, and I reacted viscerally to it. “Why would you say a thing like that?”
Solana remained calm. “Because it is true. In the throes of my early bloodlust, I killed my mother and the elder of my two sisters.”
