by Faith Hunter
Smell of madness, I thought at her. Strong. Smell of decay, rot. Rot . . . Ahhh. I remembered. Liver-eater. Long years since smelled a liver-eater. Felt her puzzlement. Pushed it away. Sucked in scent, opening mouth and pulling air over fluid-filled sacs in roof of mouth. Tongue extending, lips curling back. Tasting. Scenting.
Set liver-eater scent signature in memory. Named it mad one.
Complex, she thought. Compounded scent signature, many individual scent molecules, pheromones and elements make up its essence. I’ve never smelled anything like it.
Many, yes. Many scents for mad one. In a single bound, leaped to top of boulders. Small mountain. Nothing like my territory—no tall hills, deep crevasses. Easy hunt here in land of flatness. No challenge. Tail-twitching disdain for flatness, no tall trees and wild streams. Gathered self. Jumped to top of wall. Standing. Four feet in line on brick. Crouched, making smaller target. There. Scented vampire. Easy hunt. Only feet away.
No, her voice came.
Drew in night air again. Scent was wrong. This one female. Kill it anyway?
No. Hunt the rogue, her human memory whispered.
Dropped to ground, tail twitching. Eager. Liked hunt. Liked challenge. Liked danger. Moved through shadows of neighbor’s yard to street. No dog scent. Good place to come and go. Sat beneath big leaves of low plant, watching. Learning. Scenting.
Saw him, hidden in shadows, sitting on stoop. Watching house, preying on new den. The male she liked, human with bike. Not hunting. Lazy, giving away position. Breathing smoke, scent like scat, marking territory. Strong enough to defend her? Possible mate? If he could catch her. If he could best her. Not likely. She was strong. Beast made her so, long ago.
Felt her puzzlement. Ignored it. Ignored her. Pondered, breath a soft, thrumming pant of throat tissues. Long past time for her to mate. If he could catch her. Fun.
Moved through shadows, into night. Humans and pets still about. Stupid little dogs barked. Hairy things, smelling of human perfume, dead food, rotten teeth. Scented me, scented Beast. All fell silent. Crouched, tails down. Scuttled away. I hunted, padding through darkness, feral and sleek. Night fully fallen. Humans never saw.
The French Quarter, territory she wanted to hunt, was small. Streets in squares. Buildings built close, squeezed together. Prey could not escape. Hidden gardens. Exhaust. Alcohol, fresh and sweet, and old and sour. Tar on streets, stinky human world.
Sound of music everywhere, loud, raucous. Horns, drums—drums, like sound of beating heart, racing in fear, ready to be eaten. Smell of money, drugs. Pong of sex without mating. Lonely sex. Many female humans standing on tall spikes. Easy prey. Stores filled with paint and canvas, stone and metal. Much food and smell of sleeping. Restaurants and hotel, she thought at me. Smells of her world.
It stank. But underneath stink, other smells sat. Under reek of sewage and stench of dirty river. Under spices humans cook into food. Under odors of humans themselves, perfumed and breathing smoke. Scents of vampires. Many.
Vampire stench was part of ground, part of earth. Their ashes wafted along street, carried in air. Their bones, ground to powder, settled into cracks. Vampire territory, for longer than I lived, even counting time of hunger when I was alpha and Jane was beta. Didn’t know numbers beyond five, but there were many more than five vampires. I marked their territories, setting Beast scent. A challenge.
Centuries, the thought came from her. They have been here for centuries. A long time by human reckoning. Too long for me to understand, or care. Turned back to hunt. Prowled, hiding often in night, scenting, searching. Finding hiding places as moon crossed sky. Crafty, silent, good hunter.
Saw/smelled vampire. Walking alone. Unnoticed by humans. Gliding. Predator. I hunched down in shadow. Jane wished for a cross and stake, Christian symbols to kill evil.
Not evil, I thought at her. Predator. Like Beast. She curled lips as if thought was spoiled meat. Together, we watched vampire stroll out of sight.
Long before dawn, scented old blood. Found street where mad one took down many humans, ate best parts. An alley. Narrow, confined. Walls, straight up like water gorge, but without bold river. Strong reek of blood, blood, blood, much blood. Pong of wasted meat. Scented mad one she hunted. Trying to drink enough to find health again. It was dying.
They cannot die, she whispered.
Dies, I thought back at her. This one sick. Smell of rot.
Above its reek I smelled angry, frightened humans morning after. Telltale stink of guns. Hacked softly at remembered smell. She liked guns. She hunted with guns. I remembered other. Long barrels, gunpowder, pain, fear, scream of big cat. Hated. Long ago in hunger times.
Placing paws carefully, walked through dark, under yellow ribbons, past dying flowers in tall piles. Along middle of narrow defile. Found place where ovulating female fell. And stringy old one, to her side, cobbles saturated with his need to protect, as if she were his kit, his cub. Healthy young male, three paces away. And more-than-five others. Mad one killed, ate slow.
She said, It took its time. She understood time when not measured by moon. Confusing.
Strolled back to alley entrance. Crouched low, belly held off dirty street. Humans walked past, singing, reeking of strong drink and vomit. Then gone. Searched for mad one’s trail. Found none going in. None going out.
Looked up. Coughed approval. After mad one toyed with humans, after eating its fill, mad one went up, along wall like spider or squirrel. Tasty meat, squirrels. Not enough to fill belly. Mad one climbed wall like squirrel. Faint scratches where claws dug in. Worthy prey. Even I could not climb wall like this. I hacked excitement. Good hunt. Mad one powerful, smells captured in blood-stench memory. Humans tried to wash away. Could not hide it.
Heard more humans. Close. Two turned into alley. Dirty, reeking wine, sweat, filth. Humans moved in, trapping. I melted slowly into shadows. Soft warning hack. Beast here. Not hunting, but will defend.
They ignored warning. Stupid humans. They crawled into large paper box. Sounds of crackling cardboard, shifting humans. Dirty smells wafted. Their den. I had passed it without knowing. Dropped head. Shamed. Foolish as cub. Too intent on mad one and smells of hunt, blood, kills. Foolish. Stupid. Kitten mistake.
Two humans bedded down. Sleeping in open. Easy prey if I wanted diseased, sinewy meat. They talked. Quieted. One snored.
Crept along alley to opening. Dawn coming.
“Pretty pussy. Come here, pussycat.”
Looked to side and saw human, eyes open, shining. Hand out. “Come here, pussycat. I got a treat for you.”
Hacked, insulted. Not domesticated. Beast big. And free.
He held out hand, gesturing. Come. Eat. “Pretty pussy.”
She was amused. Beast sniffed, mouth open. Beef. Hamburger. Dead, cooked. Jane liked them. I padded slowly to human, shoulders arching, belly low, pads silent. Human unafraid. Drunk. Sniffed offered treat. Stared at him with predator eyes, seeing Beast reflected, golden, in his. Prey should be afraid. Was supposed to be afraid.
“Pretty pussy, I know you’re hungry. Have some.”
Took offered hamburger. Flipped it back, into throat. Meat and mayonnaise. Swallowed. Walked away. She laughed.
I padded back along own scent trail before sun rose. Important, sun rising. She couldn’t take back her skin once sun rose. She would be stuck in panther form—a good thing—but she would not be grateful. The night belonged to Beast. Only night. Daytime was hers.
Leaped to top of wall. Dropped down inside garden walls. Strolled, loose limbed and satisfied. Drew in scents. Smell of rotting blood was strong—old cattle, dead, killed by others. Rot, sped up by heat, trapped by wet air. Stench of blood in cloths—slain humans and mad one. Mad one had strange blend of scents, small parts of different things, some known, some not. Sniffed at aged blood on cloth. Familiar. The hunt. Yes, good hunt. With flex of muscles, leaped to top of rocks and lay flat, belly to stone. And thought of her.
Grayness covered me. Light and shadow. Bo
nes and sinew flowed and shifted. Cracked and snapped. Pain stabbed deep and she/I groaned with pain. For a moment, we were one. We were Beast, together.
CHAPTER 3
I’m a tea snob
With a last slash of claws across my psyche, Beast was gone and I was left, my flesh and muscles aching, my nostrils deadened, vision drab and colorless, even as the sun lit the eastern sky. Human once again, my hair draped over me like a shawl. My bones ached as if I were old, in mind and soul.
The final slash of pain had been deliberate. Beast had occasionally referred to me as thief-of-soul, and I knew that I had stolen her, somehow, by accident, so long ago I couldn’t remember it, though Beast remembered and sometimes punished me for it. I had feared Beast would not allow me to shift back. There had been times in the past when she held on to her form after dawn, which forced me to keep her shape until dusk or until the moon rose again, part of her punishment.
I don’t know exactly how long I lived as Beast in the Appalachian Mountains, my human self subsumed, hiding from humans, from man with his guns and dogs and fire. It was a long time of danger, of hunger. I feared that it might have been decades, far longer than the normal human or big cat life span, and that my kin were all dead and gone, as lost to me as my own past.
I had vague memories of returning to human form several times over the long years, then shifting back to panther, until the final time I shifted to my human shape. It had happened a few days before I was discovered walking, naked and scarred, in the woods of the Appalachian Mountains. I had appeared to be about twelve and had total amnesia, unable to remember language, or how to think like a socialized human. Unable, at the time, to remember even Beast.
I think something had happened, something deadly. I had scars on my human body, bullet shaped. I think—have guessed—that a hunter found Beast. Shot her. And I changed back into my human form to survive, just as I had once shifted into Beast’s to survive.
When the memory of Beast came back, other fractured, shattered memories came with it. I remembered her kits. I had memories of the hunger times, when Beast was alpha and I was beta. And before that, I remembered a few Cherokee words. Had memories of faces—elders, most of them. Memories that claimed I was a skinwalker. But that was all. I had no clear memories of time, or how or when I became what I—what we—were.
Since then, I had collected skins, claws, bones, teeth, feathers, and even scales of other animals. I had taught myself to skinwalk into other forms. And it always hurt like blue blazes to shift back into being human. Like now.
When I could breathe without pain, I unlatched the travel bag around my neck and rolled stiffly to my feet. I gathered my things and went into the house. Naked, I padded around my freebie-house kitchen, exploring. Like Beast, I was hungry after a shift, but unlike Beast, I wanted strong tea and cereal—caffeine, sugar, and carbs—to restore my sense of self. Comfort foods. I rinsed and filled a kettle and a pot with water, added salt to the pot. Opened a box of oatmeal from the supplies Troll had provided, and spotted the box I had shipped to Katie’s last week. I’d been pretty hopeful about getting the job. Inside were travel supplies, including ziplocked black foil bags of loose tea. I chose a good, strong, single-estate Kenyan-Millma Estate tea. Searching through the drawers and cabinets for a strainer or a tea filter, I found a nook off the kitchen where china, silver, stoneware, and serving dishes were stored in glass-fronted cabinets.
There were a dozen teapots in one cabinet, some Chinese pots—a copper block Yixing teapot and a Summer Blossom Yixing pot, both with square shapes, and one tall Yixing with an elongated spout and top so the steam could cool and fall back into the tea as it steeped. There was one very old, classic Chinese clayware with a rotting bamboo handle. I was entranced. Gingerly, I moved the Chinese pots aside to find two Japanese pots—a Bodum Chambord teapot and an iron pot that looked positively ancient, the crosshatching on the sides almost worn away.
There were English pots in various sizes; porcelain and cast-iron pots with iron handles that rotated across the tops. In the front corner near the door were a dozen tea filters in different shapes and sizes, including a woven bamboo filter that crumbled when I touched it. The cabinet smelled like Katie, though from long ago, the scent muted by time.
I wasn’t sure what I felt about Katie loving tea as much as I did. It was the first time I thought about vamps liking anything besides the taste of blood or alcohol. Vamps went by lots of names, individually and collectively: vampire, vam pyre, sanguivore, damphyr, damphire, calmae, fledgling, elder, Mithran, childe, kindred, anarch, caitiff, and members of the camarilla, among others. I had studied what little reliable info was available about so-called sane vamps, and so far as I was concerned, they were all bloodsucking psychos. It wasn’t easy seeing them in another light, and Katie’s loss of control when she scented me hadn’t helped.
I chose an English eight-cup pot and a filter to match and rinsed them both at the tap. While the water heated and my stomach growled, I found a bedroom suite on the ground floor at the front, showered and dried off, and slung a soft chenille robe, hanging on the bathroom door, around my shoulders. I brushed out my hair and tied it out of the way by flipping it into a knot. I could braid it later.
After dumping my meager belongings on the bed in a heap, I stored my toiletries in the bathroom, my clothes on hangers and wire racks in the closet, and my special wooden box on the top shelf of the closet. The box was only four by four by two inches, give or take, composed of inlaid olive wood from a tree outside Jerusalem. It held charms that had cost me mucho buckos, and were my ace in the hole for killing rogues. The box itself was charmed with a spell to make it hard to see. Not an invisibility charm, but a disguise spell, what my witch-friend Molly called an obfuscation spell. Molly likes big words.
I folded down the sheets and put two vamp-killers— specially designed knives with a line of silver near the edge—on the bedside table. Vamps couldn’t move around in the daytime, but that didn’t mean that their human servants couldn’t attack. If the rogue had one, or more, he might be sane enough to send them after me. A little silver poisoning if he drank after I cut one might make him easier to kill later.
As satisfied with security as I could be without replacing the doors and windows, I took a tour of the house. It was beautiful, something out of a magazine. It had hardwood floors, the boards twelve inches wide, maybe local cypress; intricately carved, white-painted molding at ceiling and floor; wainscoting in one room, which might have been intended as a dining room; walls painted soft, muted colors—latte, off-white, taupe. Charming antique tables and hand-carved chairs mixed in with comfy modern furniture, and sofas and a leather recliner completed the eclectic look. The AC came on as I explored, blowing up the bed skirt, chilling my skin. Fans turned overhead in each of the twelve-foot-high-ceilinged rooms, redistributing the air. A lot nicer than my minuscule one-room apartment under the eaves of an old house near Asheville.
Back in the kitchen, I turned off the fire under the singing kettle and poured the nearly boiling water over tea leaves in the filter in the porcelain pot. While it steeped, I made oatmeal the way my housemother at the children’s home had taught me. Bring slightly salted water to a boil, add whole grain rolled oats—never the instant or quick kind—in equal proportion, and stir until heated through. Maybe a minute. Maybe less depending on my hunger. Dump it in a bowl, add sugar and milk. Eat. With properly prepared tea.
I’m a tea snob. My sensei had introduced me to teas and teaware when I was a teenager and I had made a study of tea after hours, after he had bruised and beaten me into a pulp and somehow along the way, taught me how to fight like a man.
I’d been up twenty-six hours and was exhausted, but I was more hungry than tired, so I ate fast, putting away three bowls of oatmeal. My belly bulged, satisfied, though I got a sleepy wisp of Beast’s disgust and an image of a deer eating grass. Ignoring it, I carried the mug with me to the table and tightened the chenille robe. It was clean, and
I figured whoever had prepared the house for me had left it. Or maybe the previous tenant had forgotten it when he moved out. He. Yeah. The house smelled of male most recently, over the other scents of the ages.
I sipped and relaxed, my feet in the chair across the table, the robe closed chest to shins. The table was old, maybe an antique, though I hadn’t studied antiques. Maybe next year. Or maybe I’d start languages next year; I wanted to learn French, Spanish, and Cantonese—Cantonese because of tea, of course. When I finished the tea—eight cups, four mugs—I rinsed everything and placed pot, kettle, and stoneware on a drying cloth. I tossed the robe at the foot of the bed and crawled between the soft, lightly scented sheets.
Before I slept I called Molly, holding the cell close to my ear.
“Big Cat!” she answered.
“Morning, Mol,” I mumbled, feeling sleep pull at me. “How’s the kits?”
“Kits? You’re still talking like Beast. You hunted last night.” When I mumbled a vague yes, she said, “Catch anything?”
“The rogue smells weird. Beast thinks it’s dying.”
“Vamps don’t die. Don’t eat that, Evan,” she said to her son, without missing a beat. “Crayons look pretty but taste bad. Angie, take the crayons away from him. Thank you. Vamps don’t die,” she repeated to me.
I closed my eyes, sleep so close it paralyzed my limbs, the world darkening. “I know. Weird, huh. You and your witch sisters figure out yet why Christian symbols kill vamps?”
“Not a clue, but the whole family’s looking. Interesting research.”
“Night, Mol.”
“Night, Big Cat.”
I woke at two in the afternoon to the sound of someone knocking. I rolled out of bed, feeling stiff, and pulled the robe on. I was still holding the cell phone and tucked it in the robe pocket. Barefoot, I padded to the front door and looked out through a clear pane in its stained-glass window. On the front stoop was the pretty boy, the Joe. Interesting.
