Skinwalker jy-1

by Faith Hunter

  Though my nose wasn’t as good as Beast’s, I still had better olfactory senses than any human. Standing in my backyard, I held the bit of cloth to my nose and breathed in, parsing the pheromones and proteins that made up the four distinct scents, three of them human and heavy with fear, alive when their blood was spilled. Perhaps Beast’s memory helped, but I could actually partition the human scents into one female and two male humans. And beneath it all was the scent of the thing I was chasing. I drew in its chemical signature. Vamp. Definitely vamp. Weird vamp, rotting vamp, but vamp. I shuddered with relief, allowing myself a small moment to relax at the certainty. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a skinwalker gone bad.

  Returning to the bit of cloth, I isolated the differing chemicals in it, finally detecting the faintest tang of the woman the rogue had been with. Caught the smell of sex. And something even fainter, that I hadn’t placed. Or perhaps hadn’t remembered. I breathed in again. Shivered. Breathed in yet again, this time through open mouth, tongue extended. Chill bumps rose on my skin. My breath stopped. The scent of The People. I sat down heavily, landing unsteadily on the steps to the back porch. Is the rogue vamp I’m hunting . . . Cherokee?

  One hand on the top, supporting my weight, I jumped the brick wall over to Katie’s at just after five, over at the spot where the security camera had once been secreted. As I jumped, pivoting my weight on one arm, I took a quick look. No camera. There was a small scar on the brick. Since it was gone, and I therefore wouldn’t give away what I was doing to whoever had put it there, I gripped the top of the wall and let my body swing against the brick, in a rappelling stance. I sniffed the site and was surprised at the commingled scents I found.

  On top, fresh and bright, was the smell of the Joe. Rick LaFleur. He had removed the camera, likely at Troll’s command. Beneath the Joe’s scent, however, was another, fainter scent, and the weird thing was, I recognized it. The camera had been placed by Bruiser, the muscle who worked with Leo Pellissier, the head of the vamp council in New Orleans.

  Why would Leo feel it necessary to keep an eye on Katie? It smacked of nasty politics in the council. Big surprise there. I pushed off from the wall and landed softly. Turned to the house and was surprised to see Troll standing in the open back door. He made a snorting sound, his gaze measuring the wall. He was holding himself up with both hands on the door, his skin the pallor of old parchment, yellowed and brittle, especially the dull dome of his bald head.

  I stuck my hands in my jeans pockets and strolled over, trying to look like every human could drop from a fifteen-foot wall without injury. “You look like death warmed over,” I said.

  “Anybody ever tell you that phrase is insulting to the members of a vampire’s household?” His rough voice sounded even more scratchy than usual, dry as stone dust.

  I laughed, feeling a bit mean, not liking myself for it. “No, but I’ll try to remember that. You get enough blood from last night’s donation?” And that was why I was angry. A vampire nearly killed someone I was sorta starting to like, and he wasn’t ticked off, so I had to be, right?

  “Not enough from Rachael. But Katie allowed me a small drink from her wrist.”

  I didn’t react, though anger and disgust pinged through me. Yuckers. Troll stepped aside and I walked in. “You still look awful,” I said.

  “I’ll survive,” he said. “But you’re in trouble.”

  “Yeah?” I felt my hackles rise and wanted to growl. “With who?”

  “Katie had to go out last night to feed, to make up for the blood loss. Between what that bastard Leo took, and what she gave back to me—before she fed—she was depleted. She won’t be up early tonight, and she won’t be feeling too well when she does rise. So if you have anything to tell her, you might want to run it by me first.”

  Confused, I said, “And all this has to do with someone being mad at me?”

  He said, pointedly, “Katie told you to be here by dawn to report. You didn’t show.”

  Crap. I remembered that, now. “At sunrise I was on the other side of the river, the Jean Lafitte park, on the trail of the rogue vamp. Unlike Katie, I can’t turn into a bat and fly home.”

  Troll chuckled, the sound oddly sad. “Don’t let Katie hear you say stuff like that. She hates the myth that vampires turn into bats. In fact, with the exception of a few fiction writers who happened to get it right, she’s pretty pissed at everything the media has portrayed about her kind.” He turned on lights as he led me through the house. “So. Bat talk aside, you want to tell me what you discovered?” I filled him in, succinct to the point of brevity, with no mention of Beast, of course. He said, “Huh,” when I finished, and pointed to the dining room. I figured I was dismissed and went in.

  The girls were gathered around the table again, all of them looking sleepy eyed and a bit wan. Especially Rachael, who was lounging back in her chair. There was a bandage on the inside of her elbow at the antecubital vein. Dark circled beneath her eyes and she was sipping something neon green through a straw in a crystal glass. It looked and smelled like Gatorade. Not the sort of drink that belonged at the formal table with all the silver, china, and crystal. I’d never understand the rich and dead or their servants.

  Miz A appeared, her wrinkled face seeming more creased but smiling in welcome. I resisted kissing her cheek as if she were an old auntie, which was a weird impulse and could get me slapped, or worse, and said, “I don’t guess I could have the meal I didn’t get last night?”

  A smile repositioned the wrinkles all over her face. “Tonight’s steak is bourbon pepper, but you may order it served rare if you like.”

  “I like. And if it’s not asking too much, I’d also like a baked potato and iced tea. No wine.” She nodded.

  When she left the room, tottering on legs that seemed weak beneath the long skirts, I looked over the “girls.” I needed to find a way to get them to open up to me. Sorta like I had once needed to get a house full of twelve-year-old girls to open up to me, when I was first sent to the children’s home. I wondered if bonding would be any easier now that I was twenty-nine—according to my totally fictitious though totally legal birth certificate—and spoke English.

  Tia smiled sweetly if a bit sleepily at me and ate something green from a salad plate. The silk robe was gone. Tonight she wore a silk lace bustier that shoved her boobs up proudly, an opal necklace nestling in her cleavage.

  My gaze settled on Christie, who was wearing about fifty tiny braids—a lot like the way I often wore my hair—and a face full of silver in her eyebrows, nose, ears, even around her collarbone. The silver rings had chains running through them, connecting her nostrils to her ears and points between, all dangling little bells. Bells everywhere, even up under her peekaboo bra, which had the cups sealed with latches tonight. Thank God. The girl, who couldn’t be more than twenty, was wearing a dog collar with wicked-looking spikes. Christie shook her braids back when she took a bite of salad, and the bells tinkled.

  To fit in, I tasted the salad, mixed greens with lots of spices in the dressing. Something bacon-y, which I instantly loved. “Christie,” I said, chewing, “I like the bells.”

  She raised the mismatched rings in each brow, considering. “Lucky you.”

  I laughed. Nope. It wasn’t going to be easier now that I was grown. I hadn’t fit in then, with a bunch of orphaned or semiorphaned girls, and I wouldn’t fit in now with a bunch of . . . girls. “Christie, you and Rachael. Tell me what you know about the vamps in this town. Especially the council.”

  The girls looked at each other and at me. “Not much about the politics,” Christie said.

  “Does Leo visit any of you? For . . .” I didn’t know how to phrase it and I just stopped.

  Christie laughed, the sound taunting. “For blood? Sex? Or maybe combo entertainment, fun and games and dinner afterward?”

  I managed to keep a blush under control. “Yeah.” I stuffed in another bite of greens and broke off a piece of roll. It was flaky and sweet and left traces of b
utter on my fingers.

  “We all get a visit from Leo when we first come here,” Rachael said, her vivid eyes on me and her voice toneless. “He gets first try. He calls it the dark right of kings.”

  I had heard of the divine right of kings, where a monarch had the right to deflower any virgin or use any woman he fancied, often on the night before her wedding. It was archaic rape, similar to the slave owner visiting his slave in her cabin, or having her brought to him. No way to say no. Rape in any form had always brought out the—I half smiled at the thought—the Beast in me. Rachael looked at Christie when I smiled. I didn’t need Beast’s nose to tell me Leo scared the crap out of Rachael. Leo Pellissier was shooting to the top of my list of people I didn’t like. I needed to interview the bloodsucker. My grin twisted in grim satisfaction. “I need to talk to old Leo, but since I burned him with a silver cross yesterday, I doubt he’ll be agreeable.”

  Rachael looked at me, nervous laughter burbling in her chest. “You burned him? And he didn’t kill you?”

  “He thought about it. Katie healed him. If she hadn’t, I might’ve had to stake him.”

  The table went silent. No one moved. Every eye was on me.This sort of thing had happened occasionally when I was in the home, when I said something that came out weird. I looked at the little witch, her white skin and jet-black hair contrasting in the candlelight. This girl had touched me on some level the first time I saw her. I had felt a subtle connection, which had to be a mistake, didn’t it? But it was there, nonetheless, and my voice was softer when I said, “Bliss, right? What did Leo say when he . . .” The correct word eluded me.

  “You have trouble with this, don’t you,” she said. It wasn’t mocking. The tone was gentle, almost pitying. “With what we do, I mean.”

  I almost said, “You could be with a coven learning how to do witch stuff,” but I caught myself. Just in case she didn’t know what she was. “Where are you from?”

  Bliss lifted a shoulder, and I realized she was wearing a silky gauze top that laced across the front like an old-timey corset if it had been put on backward. Her small breasts were pushed up and fully visible through the cloth, a necklace dangling between them. Suddenly I felt like a voyeur. “I was raised in foster care, so that means I’m from everywhere and nowhere.”

  So that meant she might not know she was a witch. Katie knew, didn’t she? Couldn’t vamps smell witch? I’d have to ask. “I have trouble with it, yeah.” I looked around the table, making eye contact. We had finished our salads, and I didn’t have to be told that the meal was more silent than usual. Without even volunteering that I’m a predator, I make people wary.

  “Any of you have an idea who the rogue vamp is? Maybe someone’s been acting different? Maybe something weird about one of Katie’s vamp customers? She has vamp customers, right?” They all nodded, and from the force of it, I gathered that Katie had a lot of vamp customers. “A vamp acting weirder than usual? Even someone who smells different?”

  “They all smell weird,” Bliss said.

  “No, they don’t,” a dark-skinned woman said. “But you’d have to define weird in totally different ways to cover some of Katie’s clients.” I was pretty sure her name was Najla.

  “How do they smell?” I asked.

  The other girls looked at Bliss. She said, “Like old leaves. Sometimes mold. If they haven’t bathed in a while they can smell like old blood. You know. Like a woman in her period. I have a really good sense of smell,” she insisted.

  I’ll bet you do. I could tell this had been a sore point with the others. “Do any of them smell sick? Infected?”

  “No.” Bliss glanced around the table. “I know you think I’m crazy, but they all smell.”

  Before any of them could reply, I said, “Najla, right?” to the dark-skinned girl. She had an on-again, off-again accent that I couldn’t place, but then accents weren’t my strength. Like Bliss, I was better at scents. “Let’s talk weird. First, where are you from? Wait,” I said as the girls laughed and Najla narrowed her eyes at me. “That didn’t come out right. What I meant was, I want to hear about weird and vamps, but first, I’d like to know where you’re from.”

  “None ’a your business,” she said.

  “Katie says it is,” Miz A said as she shuffled back into the room. She was pushing a cart that smelled of spices, charcoal, and meat. Beast rumbled appreciatively. “Anything she wants to know, you tell her.”

  Najla tossed her head. “My parents and I emigrated here from Mozambique when I was four.” I rotated my fingers, giving her a little tell-me-more gesture, and she said, “From a place called Namaponda. You might find it on a map. If the map was big enough.”

  “And your parents?”

  “Dead.” When I waited, she grudgingly said, “Car crash when I was fifteen. Katie took me in. Don’t look at me like that. I was turning tricks on the street to buy food. She brought me in, made me finish high school before she would let me work. Tried to send me to college. But I was good at making men happy.” Whatever she saw on my face made her bristle. “I want to retire before I’m forty. What other job can you name where a girl fresh out of high school can pull down two hundred K a year and retire in less than twenty years? Name me one.”

  “Modeling. Acting. Music business.” Grudgingly I added, “If you’re lucky.”

  Najla nodded emphatically. “I never had a lucky day in my life except the day Katie found me. I got close onto a mil in stocks and bonds and gold. I’ll have two mil, easy, in five more years, with compounding interest and dividends, assuming the market goes where I think it will.”

  I was shocked. Two million for turning tricks? Najla laughed. “I can see it now. You think a girl should work hard and retire at sixty-five. That’s bullshit.”

  Miz A slapped Najla on the shoulder as she set a plate in front of her. “Miss Katie don’ allow dirty talk at the table.”

  Najla rubbed her shoulder. “Sorry,” she mumbled. Miz A put a plate in front of me. The steak hung off at ten o’clock and four o’clock and leaked bloody juices into the trough of the china and onto a larger plate beneath. The potato was stuffed with all sorts of goodies, including bacon and sour cream. I smiled, my mouth watering. “Thank you. This looks wonderful.”

  “Nearly two pound of Black Angus, yeah. Tom say you like meat.”

  “Tom is my hero. So are you. So is the cook.”

  Miz A chuckled and finished serving the girls. I had enough etiquette training to know I had to wait until we were all served before I dug in. And enough self-restraint to resist Beast, who woke up at the scent and wanted me to eat the meat with my hands. “You may eat,” Miz A said. I watched and picked up the proper fork and the serrated knife. And cut into the steak.

  When I put the first bite into my mouth I groaned. The girls all looked at me. “Sorry,” I said as I chewed. “This is the best piece of meat I ever put in my mouth.” Which made the girls break up and dig into their own meals, laughter reflecting off the walls like tinkling silver.

  Inadvertently, I might have just made friends. Bordello humor. Who’d a thunk it?

  CHAPTER 9

  I really love rock and roll

  I learned little that was useful over dinner, at least not about the rogue. If I ever needed to tie up a lover and whip him, however, I had plenty of info. I think the girls just liked to see me blush.

  Katie hadn’t arrived by the time I finished my meal, so I left without seeing her. However, on the way out, I took a circuitous route, openly scoping out the place, and found Troll in her office. He was leaning over that ancient desk, bent over papers, his laptop turned so I couldn’t see the screen. That seemed significant, so I pulled on Beast’s stalking attributes and stepped into the room, silent as the predator Katie had called me.

  Troll turned as I approached, which gave credence to the old legend that when a vamp willingly shares blood, some of its speed and extra-keen senses get passed along. Faster than I could focus, Troll hit a key and the screen wen
t blank, but the man himself smiled, a welcoming expression that surprised me.

  I said, “I see you removed the camera from the back fence. Any reason why Leo Pellissier would spy on Katie?”

  He frowned. “Leo didn’t put up that camera. He couldn’t. Spying is against the Vampira Carta.”

  I laughed, a sharp cough of sound. “The what?”

  “The Vampira Carta.” He lounged back and I spotted the .45 on his other side, within reach. Troll was antsy or scared or something worse. I guessed that getting one’s body drained of blood could do that to a guy. “What do you know of vampire history?” he asked.

  “Frankly, except for finding new ways to kill them, vamps don’t interest me much.”

  The easy humor left his face. “In Katie’s presence you use the term ‘vampire’ or the more proper term, ‘Mithrans.’ ‘Vamp’ is insulting.”

  I sat on the arm of a chair, a position that allowed me to see the doorway in my peripheral vision and Troll full on. It also gave me leverage to launch myself in any direction without a change of balance. Troll grinned at my choice as if he’d had a mental bet on it. Considering that I hadn’t seen this chair before, and that I suddenly scented Katie on the air, maybe the bet was more than mental. I wondered if she was in the foyer watching on the security screens. I said, “Mithrans. As in the mystery of Mithras in ancient Roman lore?” Troll looked impressed until I said, “The whole thing is on Wikipedia, you know. Anyone can look it up. Not that the vamps and the Mithrans have been linked absolutely. Unless you just did. I might have to update the site.” I was joking, but Troll didn’t seem to catch that.

  He glanced at his laptop in irritation and I grinned. The real world was catching up with the vamps. Mithrans. Whatever. They couldn’t like it. However, more than half of what was available about vamps in books and online was bogus, fiction, or wishful thinking, sometimes a mixture of all three. And nowhere was there an explanation of why vamps were affected by Christian symbols. It was my personal quest to find out about that, not that I’d had any luck.