by Faith Hunter
Once Wrassler was gone, Evan leaned against the doorway, one arm up to support and balance him, his head resting back against his palm as he stared up. Almost as if speaking to the painted wood, he said, “You asked if witches were working with the vamps. When we broke the chain on her charm, I heard a voice, whispering, like a spell being worked long-distance.”
“Well, that’s just ducky,” I said.
The big guy nodded as if he agreed with my sarcasm, dropped his arms, squared his shoulders, and walked to the safe room. He opened it with a touch of his hand, and the bookcase swung open to reveal the room beneath the stairs, narrow and tight, the stone-lined walls and wood shelves hung with weapons of all kinds, a bed and emergency supplies along one wall, and a trapdoor in the floor for escape.
He brought his children out of the safe room, the Kid following along. I expected Alex to look upset at having been placed with the children, and then he raised a long-barreled weapon from beside his leg and handed it to his brother. “You need to teach me how to use it,” Alex said simply, his face tight with responsibility and the dawning reality of the world as a dangerous place, a place he wasn’t prepared to survive on the training he had so far. “Something more than ‘Point and shoot.’”
“Noted,” Eli said.
The smaller children were sleeping deeply, a spelled sleep that had kept them silent, out of harm’s way, and safe from playing with the weapons in the room. Evan carried them both up the stairs while Eli and I took care of securing the house, which meant putting weapons and noisemaker alarms at the windows and doors. You don’t always need a fancy electronic security system. Fog can make some systems useless, and if witches are involved, they might have ways to eliminate or decrease even a magical system’s effectiveness. I’d seen it happen—once—to an Everhart-Trueblood ward, a hole blown into it, leaving the edges tangled and frayed.
A pyramid of empty cans was a nifty, low-tech way to be alerted to a B&E.
When Evan came back down, I picked the conversation back up. “You can hear long-distance spells?”
“Sometimes. If the spell is directed at me, if the speaker isn’t in a vault with no outside air flow, and if the working isn’t warded against it, which most practitioners don’t bother to do.” He went to the kitchen and brought back three cans of Coke. We each popped a top and took a swig. “Warding against long-distance listening requires more energy, and not many witches have the ability. Since I’m not officially registered with PsyLED—yet—not everyone knows I’m an air witch.” The weariness in his tone pulled at me. His wife was missing. His children were in danger. Because they were my friends and my extended family, they were my responsibility. And I hadn’t helped much so far.
I looked down at my drink can for a moment. It was my fault that Big Evan was out of the closet in any way. Maybe my fault that Molly was in New Orleans, and therefore her family in harm’s way. Again. “I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling the weight of guilt. I stared at my hand and clenched my fist, remembering the feel of hot blood spurting over my hand as I killed the violently psychotic witch Evangelina, Molly’s sister, the demon-caller. Remembering. Knowing I had no choice. Yet knowing that I’d hurt Molly beyond imagining.
“No help for it,” Evan said, reading my body language. “Once Evie brought her power play public, in front of cameras, it was only a matter of time before someone looked closer at the Everharts and, by extension, me.”
But I knew he was thinking about the children upstairs. The witch gene was X-linked, meaning it passed through the X chromosome. Molly was a witch, Big Evan was a witch. There was a one hundred percent chance that all their daughters would have the X-linked gene and be witches. There was a fifty percent chance that any son, like EJ, would be a witch, making him predisposed to the childhood cancers suffered by almost all witches, cancers that killed almost all males. And there was also a fifty percent chance that any girl child would have the witch gene on both X chromosomes, making her a weapon, dangerous, something to be feared or desired. The Trueblood children had already been in danger, as Everhart children, the descendants of a known witch, a danger made far worse by me when I let others in on Big Evan’s secret. I had done it to save Rick LaFleur, my ex. I had done it with all good intentions. And like most of the things I do when flying by the seat of my pants, my action had unintended consequences.
My anger, my protective instincts, which had seemed to be cooling, flared hot again. “I have to go back to vamp HQ,” I said, “and see what Edmund found out from the humans Wrassler took back. I’ll be home after dawn.”
Eli tossed me a set of keys, which I caught single-handed. “Take the SUV. Weapon up. And don’t surrender them at the door. Be careful.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. But I did as he said, and weaponed up fully, holstering four semiautomatic handguns, my Benelli M4 shotgun loaded for vamp with silver shot—rounds made with sterling fléchettes—two vamp-killers, and twelve stakes in my bun before I left—the new stakes with small buttonlike ends to make them easier to shove through flesh. As I departed the house, I heard Evan singing softly, “B-b-b-b-bad. B-b-b-b-bad to the bone,” George Thorogood’s version, his singer’s voice low and rough and not hiding the anger and fear inside him.
As Evan sang, Eli chuckled, his eyes telling me that I looked good, real good, and that if other people hadn’t been present he would have been ragging me about being a totally kick-ass, hot chick. I just shook my head and closed the door on the lyrics. The sad part? I probably was bad to the bone. As if listening in to my darker thoughts, Beast whispered softly inside my skull, Jane is killer only, a litany she had begun not that long ago, and which, for reasons I didn’t understand, made me feel really awful.
• • •
Vamp HQ was lit up like a ballpark, lights in every bulletproof-glass window, humans and vamps patrolling the grounds. I pulled to the security gate and let my window slide down. “Jane Yellowrock to finish business and see Leo.” The words sounded harsh, half growl, and I felt Beast pad to the front of my brain, shoulders rolling with each step, sleek and predatory, and I wondered what the person on the far side of the security camera saw in my eyes.
Without an acknowledgment, the gate rolled open. I parked out front and strode up the steps two at a time, adjusting my bun stakes after the ride in the SUV. I pushed through the air lock doors and stared at the triplets standing there, waiting to take my weapons. They musta seen something because they looked at one another before speaking to me. I beat them to the punch and gave them a grin that couldn’t have been pretty. I said, “You can try. I’ll leave you all three bleeding on the nice slick marble.”
The three backed away, one of them speaking sotto voce into his mic. “Jane Yellowrock is on the premises. She is armed and dangerous.”
“Good call,” I said to them as I stalked through the building, heading for the prisoners. Wrassler was standing in the hallway when I got there, at parade rest, if parade rest meant looking relaxed, feet spread on the carpet, with two handguns drawn, held down beside his legs. “Did Edmund question the others from the security meeting?” I asked.
He nodded. “All but the one who actually attacked you. He saved that one for you.”
“What did you learn?”
“No one liked the two tattooed security men, especially the women.”
I narrowed my eyes, knowing what that likely meant. “Has Hawk Head given you any trouble?”
“Not a peep. We let the uninvolved ones go after Edmund fed on them, and vetted them. Edmund is looking pink and a little too happy, by the way.”
“Which warms my heart,” I snarked. But not hearing a peep from the prisoner was strange. Disquiet pattered down my back on sticky, padded feet, and I drummed my fingertips on my thighs before saying, “Okay. Open it.”
The smell of blood hit first, and I shoved Wrassler aside, stepping into the room. At some point in the last instant, I’d drawn my weapons, a nine-mil in one hand, a vamp-killer in the other. But I w
ouldn’t need them.
Hawk Head was dead. The hawk and scalp were on one side of the room, attached to his skull, which was sitting on the back of a chair like a stage prop. The rest of the body was on the other side of the room, on the floor, spread-eagle. Or spread-hawk. The body was posed like the raptor on the scalp. He’d been beheaded, like a vamp.
The room reeked with the stench of death. He’d lost control of bladder and bowels. Blood had sprayed over the ceiling and walls. Prey, Beast thought at me. Meat. I opened my mouth and sucked in the air over tongue and roof of mouth, through nose, in little spurts of breath. The blood smell was so strong I couldn’t get a taste of the killer.
Wrassler was behind me, on his mic. The hallway was filling up with people. Filling up with smells. Filling up with voices. I growled and the place went silent. I studied the blood spray on the wall in front of me. “The killer was between five-seven and five-ten.” Without turning around, I said, “Wrassler. Get on the cameras. I want to see every person who came and went down this hallway. And make a copy of the footage.” The cops would want to see it too. Dead humans meant human cops on the premises. “And call Jodi. Give her a heads-up before you call nine-one-one.”
I heard Wrassler move away and knew that Derek had taken his place. Didn’t smell him or hear him. Just knew it. Beast was high in my brain, studying with me, taking over, evaluating death the way only a true predator can. Closer, she demanded.
I wiped my shoes on the carpet just inside the door, wiping them hard, to remove any trace evidence. It wasn’t good enough. I should have on booties, but I/we needed to see/scent/taste-this-on-the-air. I stepped around the blood spatter and squatted over the body to look at the neck. The cut was higher on one side than the other, clean, a single cut, like the kind a sword makes in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. And the killer’s scent, buried beneath the stink of blood and bowel, was both unknown and familiar, hauntingly so. I swallowed hard, trying to figure out how everything that had happened fit together. And it didn’t, especially the part about someone trying to kill me in the middle of vamp HQ. I could almost put the other stuff together, but that part fit nowhere. I had random puzzle pieces with no matching edges.
“Derek. Record.” I heard a soft click and knew he had activated a recording device. “Killer was likely male, killed left-handed, but he knows how to use a blade, how to fight, so he might be right-handed and using his left to throw us off. I’m pretty sure this was done with a single stroke, with a sword. Blade got trapped in the spine and he tore the head off to free it, so he was covered in blood when he finished here. He’s strong. Strong like a vamp.”
“You think a Mithran did this?” a female voice asked behind me. It was the kind of question a lawyer asked, confirmatory and just a bit disbelieving. It was Adelaide.
I swallowed before I replied, pushing down on Beast, holding her beneath me. I am alpha, I thought at her. She hissed and twitched her tail at me as she padded away. I got a breath without thinking prey. And meat. “Few vamps would have wasted the blood,” I said, hearing the harsh tone in the harsh words. “But maybe this time, a vamp did. Punishment, maybe?” For a job well bungled?
I holstered my weapons and backed out of the room, stepping in the same places I’d used before. In the doorway, I pulled off my boots and handed them to Adelaide. “The cops will be ticked that I entered the room. They’ll need my boots for trace evidence. I know exactly where I stepped, so when they get into a pissing contest about it, let me know.
“I need to see the other guy. His partner.”
In the room two doors down, I found Tattooed Dude, lying on the floor under a table. I thought he was asleep when I walked in. Then I thought he was dead. And then I realized that he was breathing, his head was still in place, and he was staring at the ceiling. I bent over him and sniffed, seeing the marks on his neck. Someone had been drinking from him. Recently. And they hadn’t been gentle about it. But the scary thing was that there was no scent signature on the wounds or in the room. I didn’t know how that was possible unless someone was carrying a don’t-smell-me charm. Was there even such a thing? Had to be.
“Get Edmund in here,” I said to the small group of people following me. “I want to know everything this guy knows. I’m going to security.”
I pushed through the gaggle of blood-servants and out the doorway. Walking in my sock feet, I took the elevator down to the large security/electronic monitoring/conference area. The room was nearly empty. The bronze light fixture and track lights were dim, shadowing the corners of the room. The oval table was nearly bare, and the air smelled of coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts, the sweet scent from a box open on the table. The huge ceiling monitor was lit, showing twenty-seven camera angles from my newest upgrade, but as I watched, one view expanded to fill half of the screen.
“Footage isolated,” a voice said. To the side, at the control monitors of the security system, Wrassler was standing behind a man wearing fatigues. Angel Tit looked up as I entered and gave me a faint nod, watching to see my reaction at finding him here.
“I brought him so none of ours had control of the system,” Wrassler said, which was good thinking. Angel was one of Derek’s men, and he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar once. He’d been working to rehabilitate himself, and while he wasn’t worried at seeing me, and didn’t stink of guilt, he was concerned. Being in charge of the electronics while in the middle of a crisis was a huge step forward to acceptance for him. I inclined my head to show I acknowledged all that; his expression of concern melted away.
Angel pointed to the monitor. “This one shows the hallway outside the interrogation room holding Jimmy Joe James. The guard looked down the hallway, as if called, and someone moving with vamp-speed appears for a moment, enters the room, and closes the door.” The footage showed real-time speed as the guard walked away for a moment, still visible in the camera, but with his back turned. I caught a flash of darkness, a brighter light, and then the guard walked back, up and down the hallway, keeping watch. Moments later, when the guard was facing away, the vamp raced from the room. He’d been only a blur entering, then leaving.
“Can you show it in slow-mo?”
“Yeah. But it doesn’t help. The guy was wearing a hoodie with the hood up, and jeans and sneakers.”
Angel tapped some keys and I saw the same segment slowed down, the digital feed jerky. The guard walked away, the man in dark clothes raced in. Later he raced out. Something looked wrong. “Play the first and the last part again, the killer arriving and leaving.”
The segment started in the dead time, when the guard pivoted and walked down the hallway. The interrogation room door opened. The shadowy figure showed, entering the room. Yeah. He was wearing a hoodie, and it was pulled low over this face, his only distinguishing features his broad shoulders and narrow waist. Angel clacked some keys and the same figure appeared leaving the room. I said, “One more time, this time cut out all the empty time. When the guard walks, I want to see the coming and going of our killer, as slow as you can make it.”
I watched the footage. “Again,” I said. “Freeze it with him on-screen, entering the room.” The footage backed up and rolled forward to the correct digital frames, and froze. There were two frames, both blurred, but one showed what I wanted. “Print me out a still.” I pointed. “Of that one.”
A heartbeat later I heard a printer buzzing. “Okay, now the killer exiting.” The digital shot appeared on-screen, and just as I’d thought, something was wrong and different.
When he left, the guy was wearing different shoes. I took both stills and studied the blurred photos. I pointed. “Entering, he’s wearing brown lace-up shoes and carrying a bundle under his left arm. This shadow here might be a sword strapped to his waist. Exiting, he’s wearing white running shoes. Maybe different clothes. And the sword is in a different position.”
“Okay,” Angel Tit said, but his tone added a “so what?” to the agreement.
“He ch
anged shoes. Probably changed clothes too. Standing in the only blood-free place he could have.”
“In the doorway,” Wrassler said, “where you stood and wiped your boots.”
I huffed out a breath. “Yeah. I’m an idiot.”
CHAPTER 9
“Not Human,” I Said. “Deal with It.”
My idiocy summed up Jodi Richoux’s thoughts nicely when she learned what I’d done. We were alone in the interrogation room where Imogene had been kept. “You contaminated my crime scene. You willfully walked into a blood-splattered crime scene to inspect a body. Not to check to see if he was still alive, which I could have understood and accepted. But you went in to look over a dead body.” The last two words were nearly shouted. Jodi was not happy.
She stood in front of me, petite, blond hair bobbed at her jaw, fists on her hips, pushing back the dark gold business jacket that made her look stylish and tough. Tonight she wore her badge on her belt, and her gun in sight, clipped to a simple holster at her waist. “Talk to me, Jane. I need to know what happened.”
I opened my mouth and closed it with a click of teeth. How could I admit to her that Beast had wanted a good look/smell/taste of air? I sat back in the chair, thinking about what I was about to do, and could see no other way out. However, there was no reason I couldn’t establish some control of the info. “Off the record,” I said. “Take it or leave it.”
Jodi considered my requirement. “Unless it impacts a crime, I’m okay with that.”
It was better than I expected. I nodded. “I’m not human.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I’m a Cherokee skinwalker.”
“What the hell is a skinwalker?” she snarled, in a fair imitation of a predator herself.
I gave her the short form. “I can take the shape and form of animals of my general size, provided I have enough genetic material to take a reading of it and copy it.”
