by Faith Hunter
The rogue/skinwalker began to slowly sink to the floor, fighting the compulsion, his body moving a fraction of an inch at a time as his own kinetic energies were used to bind him. I looked around, able to move only my eyes. I couldn’t even breathe beyond a shallow intake of air, not nearly what I needed in the interrupted aftermath of fighting. But at least the rogue was similarly trapped. Neither of us could move with conscious choice. The footsteps grew closer. I heard others behind them. One, perhaps two more witches.
“Stop,” several said together.
The command was much more than a set of letters arranged into a single syllable. It was an intricate spell, a general, all-purpose, spoken word—a wyrd—wrapped around a spell, intended to stop all kinetic energy, except the speaker’s own, within a predetermined radius. And it did. I lay on the floor, trying to relax, trying not to fight for the breath I so desperately needed. Everything around me took on a shimmering hue, bright and sharp, amplified by the spell’s power. It was brightest around the rogue, where the silvery energies began to tighten and constrict as he fought the forces bearing down on him.
The witch moved into view. Antoine. Behind him was the woman I had seen in the Royal Mojo Blues Club in the secret meeting. They walked up the last three steps, moving easily, human slow. The woman stopped at the landing, her long skirt swaying. Antoine stood before her, his locks tied back, curiosity on his face. He was wearing sneakers, a button-down shirt open at the collar, and threadbare jeans. A half dozen or so wicked-sharp blades were strapped at his belt, blades with steel and green stone handles. His cooking knives. I wanted to giggle but I didn’t have the breath. My sight was growing darker at the edges, a sign of oxygen deprivation. I needed to breathe. Soon. A glance at the liver-eater showed his face ashen. His eyes livid.
Antoine pulled a knife as he advanced on the rogue, who still wore the beautiful face of Leo’s son. But, like the walls that had rippled at Antoine’s wyrd, and the air that held too much power in check, his flesh rippled slightly. The rogue was tiring, his exhaustion draining his control; he was losing his focus. The rot stench intensified. His skull bones took on an odd fusion of features, part human, part lion, while his skin slipped from hue to hue, a coppery, olive, pale, tawny pelt patchwork underlain with sickly, yellowed skin and pustules. His hair slid from blond to ashy brown to black with scraps of pelt. His flesh—the snake in his bones—wanted to return to its Cherokee form, seeking the original pattern, while his intent and fear pushed his body toward other forms.
His skin darkened, lightened; his hair flowed black and long. His eyes went from a tint so dark they looked black, to a softer tone, yellowish, like mine. From above me, kneeling, he turned those eyes, those so-familiar eyes, to me. Recognition again flared there. He saw Beast within me, close to the surface, barely harnessed. He hissed in a breath so hoarse it sounded as if he breathed in through glue.
Antoine moved through the kinetic energies trembling in the air. He knelt beside Immanuel, one knee on the carpet, close to my face. I could see the frayed seam in the denim, and the two men just beyond.
In an instant I put it together. The rogue was trying to take over Leo’s position of power, using Grégoire’s form and monies to buy land for his new clan. In a perfect position to carry out his plan, he was the one creating instability in vamp politics. Like I said before, could I be any more stupid?
“We thought it might be you,” Antoine said. Immanuel’s eyes flitted to him. “But when Clan Arceneau was buying up all the land, we thought it was the woman Mithran, little Dominique, seeking control of her clan, or seeking to begin a new clan-family and expanded hunting ground.”
Antoine shifted, blocking my view, his back to me, his body standing within the outstretched claws of the rogue. “Or, we think perhaps it was Blood-master Arceneau, eh? You lead us to think that, yes? The ‘traveling in Europe’ was ruse? You have him, Arceneau, bound in silver, stash him somewhere?” He chuckled at whatever he saw in Immanuel’s expression. “And then Anna join us. Tell us something about you become strange. . . .”
The rogue, the liver-eater, twitched a claw. Only a fraction. At the movement, the charm lying in my palm grew hot, burning. Oh crap. The charms. They were reacting to my fear and Antoine’s spell. They were intended to protect me. Clearly at least one of them had identified a threat to me and was trying to react. The burning increased, gathering, intensifying in the center of my hand. I wanted to scream. As my skin blistered I managed a gasp, soft, almost silent.
Neither of the two looked my way. Antoine reached out and touched the rogue’s paw, one finger on the tip of a claw. “I don’ know what you are, mon, but you not Immanuel. Not Immanuel, long time pass. Decades, maybe. You steal Immanuel shape, yes? And this sabertooth shape. How you do that? You kill a witch and take her power? Yes? No? No matter. Your time here done. I no miss de heart, like dis petite chat.”
With a quick flick of his wrist he jerked the stake out of Immanuel’s chest. Blood flew. Splattering me. A droplet landed on the charm. The crimson drop bubbled and spat, releasing the heating stench of rotten meat. It mixed with the reek of my burned flesh as the charm bristled with power. I gagged on the pain. Tears blurred my eyes. I wasn’t supposed to hold it once it was activated. I was supposed to throw it at the danger. It was supposed to detonate, but only on the cause of the danger, not on me. Holding the charm was having an unexpected effect on the incantation embedded in it. My hand is burning.
Antoine flipped his knife, lowered it to Immanuel’s neck. The blade pressed in. More blood spurted. I managed a strangled scream as the charm fully activated. Burning a hole into my palm. My fingers spasmed closed. Increasing the pain tenfold.
The charm detonated. Taking with it Antoine’s kinetic spell. Everything happened fast, in overlapping images. The concussion of energies was a backwash of agony as I sucked in a breath, filling my air-starved lungs.
The liver-eater’s outstretched arms ripped inward, closing on Antoine’s body. The liver-eater slashed through Antoine’s thin shirt. Tearing deep into the witch’s back at waist and neck. A deadly embrace. With a violent jerk, Antoine’s spine gave way with two distinct popping sounds. I grunted out a choked warning. Too late. The liver-eater fell forward onto four legs. Shimmering. Shifting. Fangs and pelt and massive musculature ripped through his clothes.
The female witch, half forgotten, screamed and rushed forward. The liver-eater slashed at her with one massive paw. Took off half her face, throwing her away, out of sight.
I gripped and raised the Benelli in my uninjured hand. Pulled an arm under me and levered my body up. Gathered my legs beneath me.
He roared. Leaped at me. The half man, half sabertooth landed over me, the weight a jolt I felt through the floor. Moves and fights like a human, Beast thought at me. Not like Beast.
I had no time to react. Except. My finger squeezed the trigger. Shots boomed.
Silver-shot impacted the beast’s chest, neck, and face. The fléchettes tore through him with brutal efficiency. Blood and gore back-splattered over me. The liver-eater jerked to the side. I stopped firing, watching as he fell, slowly. He hit the carpet, his body encased in silver energies, black motes of dark power dancing, red flames of heat whirling and gusting.
Belatedly, I threw the other charm at him. It hit him in the center of his chest. The explosion rocked me, rolling me, shoving me against the wall. Fire erupted out of the beast’s chest. Witchy fire. He roared.
Statues along the hallway exploded. He shifted fully into the sabertooth cat. Striped tawny coat, with short, powerful legs, a stubby tail, and six-inch upper canines. His lower canines were shorter, only a couple of inches, if the word “only” ever applied to a sabertooth. Round, human-looking pupils stared at me, glinting with vengeance. He stood a good five hundred pounds of cat-fury, and . . . he was drawing in power from my charm, pulling it inside him. Using it. The fire of the spell went out. The charm plinked to the carpet, smoking, its energies used up. The sabertooth atta
cked.
Fights like human! Beast is better! Beast roared into my head, into my eyes. But there wasn’t time to shift. No time to draw mass so we could fight on equal terms. The sabertooth leaped. I rolled against the wall. Gripped two vamp-killers. The sabertooth landed, jarring the house. Beast rolled me onto my back. Exposing my belly.
The sabertooth took the bait. Claws outstretched, it rose up and dropped down. Landed on my chest. Driving the breath from me with a woof of air and pain. A sharp crack of broken ribs. Stabbing me. The huge cat rose up again. Dropped. Batted me over. Straddled my body and dropped his head. To tear out my throat.
Now! Beast screamed. I thrust up with the knives, deep into his chest. The blades slid along his ribs, one catching and grinding to a stop. But the other slipped deeply, under ribs, slicing cartilage, cutting lungs. Finding heart. I felt it when the blade slid into the heart cavity, a slight give in the resistance.
The lion roared. I rolled as he bit. He caught my shoulder. His teeth punctured, cutting through leather into flesh. With my good hand, I shoved the hilt of the knife with all my might. Swiveling the hilt against and into his body. He shook his head. Rending and tearing. My entire body quaked and snapped. I thought my shoulder would rip free.
He slowed. Shuddered. Gasped, his nostrils fluttering. His eyes met mine, shock and understanding in the depths. His paws swept me up, claws piercing through my jacket, into my skin. Silver light blazed over him, the energies buzzing like sound waves, like the pressure of fast-moving water, over me. The black motes of power shocked where they touched me.
He was trying to throw off mass. He was trying to shift. He was trying to steal my form. Once again, Beast did . . . something. Deep inside my mind I felt her—saw her—an image of Beast twisting in midair, tail rotating, claws outstretched as if to grab prey.
Liquid gushed out of Immanuel’s mouth, out of his nose, out of the holes in his chest, thick and viscous. Smelling like rotten meat, like old death, rancid and fetid as an open grave.
He backed up, dropping me. I landed hard, knocking my head, unaware that he had lifted me so high. I managed to take in a breath. Pulled the last of the vamp-killer blades. And the last of Molly’s charms.
I rose to my knees in the slimy mess pooling beneath the sabertooth. Got one foot beneath me. And shoved with it, hard, shifting my weight, the power of my whole body, into the motion. Turned the blade point out as I moved. And pierced through his eye, into his brain.
He made no sound, just dropped to his belly, his legs gathered beneath him. But a back leg splayed free, sliding. He was losing control.
With my burned hand, I flipped Molly’s charm at him. It hit his damaged chest. I hadn’t wasted any of the spell’s energies this time by burning my own flesh. None of its power had dissipated into the air in reaction to a spoken wyrd spell. And the creature was too injured to take the power for himself. It was all there, ready and contained.
It exploded inward, into the lion. It took apart every organ, the shaped concussion shredding and bursting every blood vessel, tearing his chest cavity apart. A magic hand grenade. Flesh and bone blasted away. Fluid flooded out of him, foul and choking. His remaining bone and muscle shifted, grinding into a different configuration. His skin split and re-formed, the pelt shimmering away.
I scuttled back, cradling my injured arm, unable to take my eyes from him. The silver energies darkened, forcing a change on him, compelling the shift. They seemed to shudder; the black motes blinked away for an instant. The rogue fell to the carpet, his head in the foul mess that had come from within him. The silver light bathed him in a soft fog.
And then, even that wisped away.
On the carpet was a half-naked man. Or mostly a man. His scalp was still partly cat, his hands still paws. But his torso and limbs appeared mostly human, though the joints were oddly turned, his knees bent the wrong way for a primate. He was a huge man. Larger than he had been as a human, still carrying the mass of the unfinished shift. Three hundred pounds of pure muscle. One side of his face was Cherokee. The other half was Immanuel. Both halves had long killing teeth in upper and lower jaws.
I toed him with my foot. He wasn’t breathing. No pulse beat in his throat. There was no heart left to beat in the ruined chest. The liver-eater was dead.
I had exterminated a skinwalker. Perhaps the last one besides me.
I knew that I should feel grief. Shock. Sorrow. But for now, all I felt was Beast’s triumph. Killed Big Cat, I/we, together! Beast is victor! she screamed into my mind.
Standing over the rogue, in the ruins of the upper hallway of Leo Pellissier’s home, I stared into the face, noting the hair on its scalp had made the change to long black hair so much like my own. Noting the brown skin, slightly deeper brown than my own golden hue.
Beast said, Escape. Now. Details of the next few minutes, the next few hours, raced through my mind. First, stop my bleeding. I needed to apply pressure to my shoulder. Fumbling, I opened a pocket inside my jacket and pulled out my tourniquet. It took a moment to remember how to use it. Evidence of shock. With teeth and my good hand, I opened the loop and applied it above my shoulder joint, pulling it tight, securing the Velcro. The strap caught on the head of my humerus, exposed through the flesh. I nearly gagged with pain.
Beast stared at the blood running down my hand, off my fingers, onto the floor. Shift.
“I can’t,” I muttered. “Not now.” She growled at me. But the tourniquet was working; the blood dripping from my fingers slowed. I glanced at Antoine. Dead. And I’d killed him. I was too numb to feel grief or shame or anything beyond the momentary ecstasy of surviving, a joy already blurring with pain and shock. I knew my charm had killed him just as much as the liver-eater, but I’d have to deal with that later.
I found the woman, also dead, her neck at an impossible angle. She was the woman I had seen, all right, the one in the long skirt, entering the meeting with Anna and Rick. They had indeed been tracking the rogue. And from what I had learned, using Anna to do it.
I had to get out of here. But first, I had to make sure I got paid. I needed proof of death to fulfill my contract. I pulled my camera out and took a dozen photos, then repeated the process with the cell, though these shots would be less clear. I e-mailed the photos to myself, pocketed the cell and camera. I pulled my knives out of the liver-eater’s flesh and wiped them on my jeans. I limped past Antoine, down the stairs, to my bike, hoping to get out of here before Leo arrived and figured out that I’d just killed his son—or what had passed for his son. I didn’t have enough energy or moxie to fight the blood-master of New Orleans.
I managed to get Bitsa back down the steps into the drive. Managed to kick-start the engine, mostly one-handed. There was only one car in the drive as I motored past. Empty. I wondered who had left. And why.
CHAPTER 26
Untender mercies of the human world
I made it home before I bled to death, grabbed steaks, and dropped them on the grass out back. Stripped and fell in a heap on the cracked boulders in the garden, fractured stone stabbing into me. I needed to shift to heal but there wasn’t time to do it right, using the fetish necklace. Instead, I reached for the coiled form of Beast in my memory and pushed. Gray light and black motes flowed over me. The pain was heat like a branding, like being flayed alive, like being skinned while my heart still beat. I shifted, screaming.
I lay on broken stones. Panting. Rose and stretched, from back paws up spine, to front claws, to killing teeth, in a long, smooth motion. Leaped to ground in a single silky arc. Ate much raw, cold steak. Cold and dead, but full of life. Satisfied, I drank water from vampire fountain.
She asked, Shift? Please? Properly servile. Asking for alpha. I dropped belly to ground and gave her alpha control.
No longer bleeding, with all the visible results of the attack mended, I began to hide proof of my involvement. Just in case I was accused by human law enforcement after the fact in Antoine’s death. Just in case there had been security cameras
in Leo’s hallway that I never saw.
I rinsed blood off the bike and the grass with the garden hose, mopped up the mud and blood from the porch and house floor. Carried my clothes to the shower. Standing under the spray, I washed and rinsed my clothes, letting the filth of the liver-eater flow away. The leather coat was ruined, rips in the shoulder where the liver-eater had chewed through to skin. The silk T-shirt was a goner, but the boots and jeans could be saved. If I managed to get off the slop that had dried to gluelike hardness on the way home. I’d take the boots to a shoe repair place in the morning. If I lived through the rest of the night. I washed myself repeatedly with soap and shampoo, rinsing between sudsings until the stench was gone.
I dried off on a fluffy towel, and left all the clothes hanging, plinking water. Most of my wardrobe hung there now. My phone rang. I checked the number and answered while dressing. “I’m alive.”
“You could have called,” Molly said, huffy. But I heard worried tears in her voice. “Call me when you can.” She hung up.
I packed, knowing that I still had a lot of things to do to assure my safety. If I couldn’t get them done in time, before Leo figured out what had happened and came after me in a vamp rage, then I had to be ready to run. I ate a bowl of oatmeal, finishing a big box with the last of the sugar and the milk. The shakes left me then, though I still felt a strange weakness deep inside. Something that could have been grief. I shoved it down deep. Locked it away. If I lived, I’d take time to look at and deal with the emotions later.
When I was pretty certain I could handle myself, I called Bruiser.
“Where are you, Yellowrock?” he asked, in lieu of a hello.
“At my house. You’re at Leo’s place?”
“Yeah. On the upstairs landing standing in a pool of putrefying sludge. What’s Antoine doing dead? And this woman? You kill them? And what’s this thing with him?”
“The thing killed Antoine and I killed the thing. It’s what’s left of the rogue. And Bru—George,” I amended. I hesitated, softening my voice. “Look at the Anglo half of his face. The rogue was masquerading as Immanuel. I’m pretty sure it . . . killed Leo’s son and took his place.”
