by Anna Windsor
Everything felt … dark.
Kill.
Now.
John’s muscles bunched. His lips pulled back from his teeth. Damn, but his head hurt. Were his teeth getting longer?
Ben didn’t come at him. The three Bengals who had fallen scrambled away into the shadows.
Kill …
“No,” John growled, grabbing his head with both hands, like he could keep his brain from ripping in half.
Second by second, he reclaimed his thoughts, his self-control. He refused to lose focus, like when he used to be in battle, bullets flying. No panic. No distractions. Eyes on the goal and nothing more.
After a time, he lifted his head to see Ben staring at him, fully human and frowning. He was back to jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, and he looked modern enough now, except for the giant sword belted to his waist. The angular, exotic lines of his face made him seem stern and even more regal, like a pharaoh displeased with a subject at his feet. “You fought better, John, but you must keep Strada managed. In a true battle, he would have had you.”
John couldn’t do anything but nod, swear to himself, and hate the Rakshasa bastard in his head for turning him into a liability and holding him back. How could he return to any kind of real fighting or real life, even just long enough to wipe out the Rakshasa, if he couldn’t keep Strada stuffed where he belonged?
“It did take longer this time,” Ben allowed, as if he might be trying to make John feel better. “And a harder blow.”
The energy in the room shifted, and John stayed down on his knee because he knew Elana had just entered the sparring chamber.
Ben and the rest of the guards bowed, then moved to a respectful distance as the little woman approached John. Elana glowed in her silver robes. Today her silvery hair had been braided down the center, making the ribbon-like scars on her face tighter and more visible. After weeks of working together, Elana had stopped bothering with introductions and pleasantries where John was concerned, and she usually came straight to the point.
“Are you watching Camille?” she asked. “Carefully?”
Couldn’t stop if I wanted to.
“Every day.” John stood and lowered his head once, quickly, to acknowledge Elana. “I come here when she’s sleeping, but otherwise, wherever she is, I’m close.”
Elana’s frown eased, but not by much. “Does she have much contact with other Sibyls?”
“Outside her own group? No. She attends meetings with the Occult Crimes Unit before and after patrols, but I don’t see her socialize.” John rubbed his sore jaw, impressed at how fast it was feeling better from Ben’s punch. Strada’s body healed about as fast as Sibyl bodies healed, which was pretty fast.
Elana paced back and forth in front of John for a few seconds. “Have you ever noticed some of her own kind watching her outside of her awareness?”
This question disturbed John, and he scrutinized Elana more carefully. She looked a little distracted, but otherwise pretty much normal. “You mean—fire Sibyls?”
“Yes. The older ones.”
“The Mothers? No.” John glanced at the chamber ceiling reflexively, half expecting to see through it to the streets of New York City so he could discreetly hunt for ancient Irish women giving off smoke. Elana stopped pacing and faced him, gazing at him with her strange white eyes. “If the Mothers come close to you, Strada’s essence will react to them, I think. Not in a positive fashion.”
She looked like she might be ready to walk off and end their contact for now, but John managed to get out a question before she turned away. “Do you think Camille’s own people might move against her? Why would they do that?”
Once more Elana hesitated, and she seemed to choose her words very, very carefully. “I honestly don’t know what the fire Sibyls might do, but yes, that’s one possibility I’m guarding against. The why of it—let’s revisit that later.” She gestured to one of her guards, who brought forward a polished wooden staff John had gotten to know a little too well for his own liking.
He stood straighter, then loosened his stance and got ready, regulating his breathing and throwing all of his focus on Elana.
Elana’s smile revealed tiger-like teeth, extending. Sharp claws dug into the staff as white fur lined her tiny arms.
John sank to his knees, eyes straight ahead, chin up, watching and waiting for his cue. His fists were clenched, for all the good it would do. Would she strike first this time, or give him a warning? He never knew.
Ben and his boys formed a line in the distance, watching just as closely.
“Get up, John Cole,” came the growled command. “Get up so I can knock you down again.”
( 10 )
Camille crouched at the warehouse’s basement window and squinted to see through the low, smeared glass. The reflections from nearby building lights and street-lamps obscured most of the room, which seemed darker than the moonless night they’d endured so far, even to her very sensitive eyes. Cold air burned her nose, yet it barely numbed the dead-skunk stench of blood and dung and perverted elemental energy. The dinar around her neck felt warm and tingly, but it wasn’t giving off the frenetic heat she had noticed the night she came close to the Rakshasa Eldest. With no sign of those bastards anywhere despite repeated searches, they were back to regular patrol schedules, some strategizing, and a lot of grumbling and worrying.
Bela knelt beside her on her left, completely zipped into her bodysuit and mask, gripping the copper half-moon charm Camille had fashioned for her after their first round of battles with the Rakshasa. The metal, crafted to remove any impurities and treated with elemental energy, helped Bela magnify her terrasentience—her ability to sample the earth and see what had touched it. Since they were dealing with a basement, Bela was the logical choice to check it out.
“Perfect,” Andy grumbled from Camille’s other side, droplets of water freezing on her leathers and face mask as she leaned to the side to see if she could get a view of the warehouse basement. The iron half-moon charm Camille had made for her bounced against her ample chest. “Nothing like the Garment District at midnight when it’s already frigging cold. I think the OCU hates us. Couldn’t we be the group hunting for potential Rakshasa hideouts on the Upper East Side?”
“I might have pissed off Calvin Brent,” Dio muttered from Andy’s right. She was on her hands and knees trying to see through a spiderwebbed crack in the glass, and she wasn’t wearing her face mask, either. Her long blond hair looked stiff in the frigid semi-darkness. “He asked me out and I turned him down.”
Camille and Andy glanced at Dio at exactly the same time.
“You turned down—” Camille started, but Andy finished.
“The acting director of the OCU. Fucking wonderful. He’ll be sending us to explore all the landfills next, or maybe the sewer treatment plants.”
“Why’d you say no, Dio?” Camille watched fog rise with each word she spoke. She did her best not to think about John Cole’s green eyes and the way his deep voice made her breath come short, or the fact that he’d probably never be able to ask her out. “All that thick brown hair and that big smile—Cal Brent is gorgeous. Plus he’s refined and classy, kinda like you.”
Dio’s cheeks flushed as she fiddled with her own half-moon charm, pure silver, and maybe the prettiest and most delicate pendant Camille had made, with its carefully etched wind rune added after Dio chose it. “I don’t date. And neither do you, so don’t give me any shit.”
“I’m not saying date.” Camille rubbed her hands together, wishing she could feel her fingers, and wishing that every mention of men and dating didn’t take her right back to the same mental place. Strada was a demon. A demon. Not the new home for John Cole’s soul. She’d never even known John Cole, and he was dead. Gone forever. “Why don’t you just go out with Cal, Dio? Give it a try and see what happens.”
“Unlike other people at OCU headquarters, Cal’s not an asshole,” Andy added, leaving it unsaid that the unit’s current acting director
, Jack Blackmore, on sabbatical visiting all the Motherhouses, was an asshole—or at least a great big stubborn jerk.
“Not an asshole.” Dio shifted her weight to get a closer look at the window. “Yeah, see, that’s where Cal Brent and I would be a lousy match.”
Andy tugged at the edges of her face mask. “Hey. You’ve mellowed. You haven’t blown down any buildings for, what, a few months now?”
“I think the perverted energy is from a voodoo ritual, not Rakshasa activity.” Bela broke into the conversation before Camille could offer her opinion on whether Dio had mellowed—which was … sort of. Maybe.
Bela sat back and let go of her copper charm. “That’s the good news. The bad news is, the priest—the houngon—is nobody we’ve dealt with before, he’s definitely practicing voodoo, not Vodoun, and the energy feels too wild and strong for humans to manage.”
Camille bit back a groan. Interrupting a voodoo ritual could be more dangerous than letting it run its course. Half-conjured gods could get really pissed, and they were a bitch to send back to their own plane of existence. Even worse, with Vodoun and its dark perversion, voodoo, it wasn’t just about having a good grip on the paranormal and all the aspects of a proper ritual. If the gods—the loas—didn’t know you personally or really appreciate your offering, there was a good chance they’d eat you.
Camille’s back went stiff as the taste and smell of flames in the air doubled, then tripled. “There’s fire down there. A lot of it. Gunpowder, too. I’m going to use the coin to get a better sense of what’s happening.”
Bela agreed with a fast nod.
Camille’s heartbeat increased with each fraction of a second, and the dinar around her neck gave off a low vibrating hum. She rested her fingers against the agitated metal and let her energy flow into the coin. Her mind reached out, out, and—
An image of red-robed dancers slammed into her awareness.
“Spinning,” she said aloud, trying to keep her breath and balance as she watched the crazed women whirl past her mind’s eye. A fast, hard rhythm thudded in her ears, in her blood. “And drums. Two guys on goatskin drums.”
The warehouse basement unfolded before her, illuminated by her pyrosentience, bathed in the essence of fire. The big space seemed to pulse. Then it rippled. Then it started to change.
Crimson smoke.
Gunpowder burning.
The sweet, sweet smells of rum and blood and pork made Camille’s stomach flip.
Pigs. Pig blood. Lots and lots of pig blood.
Not good.
No straight-up Vodoun ritual involved the sacrifice of pigs.
Camille’s fingers burned against the dinar and her teeth started to chatter from the force of the energy rushing through her enhanced connection with fire. “Petro,” she managed to get out of her mouth. “Fire magic. There’s a bókó—a sorcerer, and he’s perverting energy, calling on evil. He and his boys are summoning one of the Petro loas. My money’s on Kalfou.”
The crimson air in Camille’s vision shifted, and she had the vague impression of a leering skull with horns, then a huge, wicked-looking man who could double for portraits of Lucifer.
Fire. Rage. Vengeance. Murder.
That’s what she tasted now.
Smoke blasted all through the warehouse basement.
The drums went quiet.
“They lost control.” Camille’s words choked in her throat, but she forced them out in a hot, fast rush as her sense of the dancers splintered. No more dancers. “Kalfou’s here. He ate them.”
Bela grabbed Camille’s arm and yanked her away from the warehouse windows. Andy and Dio dived in the other direction just as all the glass in the warehouse basement windows exploded.
A blast of Dio’s wind energy blew a thousand shards away from them, but it didn’t do much for the heavier wave of pig blood. Dio shoved herself up, swearing and wiping pig blood off her face and dispersing clouds of glass dust as Camille staggered to her feet and managed to yank her scimitar out of its scabbard. The blade was burning, but not because she set it on fire. Flames scorched half the alley, crackling against bricks and walls and stones. Andy was smoking and washing herself with water energy at the same time, but she was coated in elementally charged pig blood, and it wasn’t coming off. Bela tamped the fire on her hair with a burst of earth power, and Dio’s wind pushed the heat back into the warehouse, but it just kept coming.
“Draw him out to us,” Bela shouted from behind Camille. “Better to fight in the open than close quarters.”
Breath catching hard in her throat, Camille charged toward the ruined windows, opened herself to the flames billowing into the alley, and pulled the fire into her essence. It filled her. Crammed into her. Her skin ached and swelled outward, and her jaw locked as she held back a scream from the pain and pressure. Not enough. Not yet.
Keep going. More. More!
She soaked up as much of the blaze as she could stand, and still more. She had to stop. She was going to explode, but the coin drew the fire even faster, even harder.
There. Enough. Might just be enough.
Sword in one hand and dinar in the other, she let out the scream she’d stifled, firing all the pent-up fire energy with it, straight out of her mouth. She focused her strike at the center of the warehouse basement, at the wide expanse of perverted energy running like lava in every direction.
Contact, then—
Heat blasted back across Camille’s face, into her, through her. The dinar seared her palm. She hit her knees so hard that pain cracked through her legs and back. Her scimitar stayed in her grip, but she let go of the scalding coin and felt the sizzling metal bounce against her bodysuit. Her senses went dull from the shock and weight of Kalfou’s backwash, and she saw the onrushing loa through a red-orange haze of disaster.
Camille got up. No strength. She couldn’t lift her blade. She could feel her quad behind her, needing her to make a good first strike, and she couldn’t do anything at all.
The angry god stormed through the warehouse basement wall like it was made of spit and paper. Bricks tumbled. Plaster pelted Camille’s cheeks like dozens of stinging fists. Pig blood seemed to rain down from the sky. Kalfou towered over her, towered over all of them, huge and red and horned and lighting up the night. The god was growing, roaring so loudly the sound seemed to drill to the center of Camille’s mind.
Wound him.
She had to do something, had to help her quad do damage to Kalfou. Enough pain and injury, and the god would retreat back to where he belonged. They needed to cut him with elemental metal. They needed to batter him with elemental energy. They needed to hurt whatever they could see, whatever they could touch.
“Hit him!” Bela yelled. “Hit him now. Hard! Hard!”
Andy’s darts and Dio’s knives whistled past Camille as she shook her head back and forth trying to dislodge the numb, dead feeling in her head and arms. Bela ran by her, taking the lead, swinging her serrated blade at the big god’s ankles.
Kalfou swiped a clawed, flaming hand at Bela.
Camille hurled herself forward, scimitar dragging, and knocked Bela out of the way.
What felt like a thousand pounds of stone and fire slammed into Camille’s side. Sulfurous clouds choked into her lungs as she wheezed against the agony. Fireballs blasted around her as she flew and fell out of control, flailing, trying to keep hold of her scimitar. Gone. No weapon. Heat cracked brick and asphalt in every direction, or maybe it was her head and shoulder when she slammed into the pavement. She didn’t feel the impact.
That couldn’t be good.
Water washed over her, and wind, and earth energy. Her chest—ribs—Goddess. Squeezing. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see anything but a mountain of fire with claws and horns and red, hungry eyes.
Get up.
Mindless now. Experience. Instinct. She drew in the flames the thing was throwing off, then let them go again.
Bela was back at the god, hacking at his legs. Darts riddled
his belly. African throwing knives lodged in his face, glowing silver-red, dripping down across his curled, snarling lips.
Get up.
Kalfou was coming straight toward Camille. He seemed to know she was the one who had poked him with fire energy when he was still in the warehouse, and he was way beyond pissed. Whatever. She coughed, and some of her own blood splattered the pavement in front of her face, sizzling to black stains in the crushing storm of heat. She’d been knocked down in combat training at Motherhouse Ireland dozens of times. Hundreds.
Get up and fight.
“Screw you,” she mumbled at the god through her cracked, bleeding lips. When she rolled over to get to her knees, she cried out from the stabbing pains in her chest and ribs.
“Stay down. I’ll take care of this.” John Cole’s voice rumbled through Camille’s awareness, cutting under the god’s bellowing.
She saw the barest flash of movement as he ran past her and leaped at the god, just a blur of jeans and T-shirt and glowing silver.
My blade. He’s got my scimitar!
Cole—Strada? Whoever he was, he was swinging the sword in wide arcs, sending sprays of burning pig blood in every direction. His T-shirt burned in ten places at once, leaving bare muscle to flex and scorch as he fought. Some kind of power rolled off him in waves, dueling with the god’s elemental energy as he cut the creature. His skin had to be on fire, blistering, but he never slowed down, never stopped hacking with her scimitar again, again, again.
Her quad’s battle cries ripped into her consciousness, yanking her to her feet, but she couldn’t quite stand. Half her body felt broken. Somehow she got her right arm up, got hold of the dinar as Bela, Andy, and Dio drew closer to Kalfou, exploiting the damage Strada—or Cole, or whoever he was—was creating.
