Anyway, our witches made it rain . . . in the building. Somehow the rain slowly cut back on the cloud cover, and though I felt damp and extremely cold, I also discovered I was close to the inner door, the one leading into the second, large room. Gradually, I became aware that I could see; the room had started to glow with light, and I could discern shapes. One bounded toward me on legs that seemed not-quite-human, and Debbie Pelt’s face snarled at me. What was she doing here? She’d stepped out the door to show the Wiccans which way to find safety, and now she was back in the room.
I don’t know if she could help it or not, or if she’d just gotten swept up in the madness of battle, but Debbie had partially changed. Her face was sprouting fur, and her teeth had begun to lengthen and sharpen. She snapped at my throat, but a convulsion caused by the change made her teeth fall short. I tried to step back, but I stumbled over something on the floor and took a precious second or two to regain my footing. She began to lunge again, her intent unmistakable, and I recalled that I had a knife in my hand. I slashed at her, and she hesitated, snarling.
She was going to use the confusion to settle our score. I wasn’t strong enough to fight a shape-shifter. I’d have to use the knife, though something inside me cringed at the thought.
Then from the tags and tatters of the mist came a big hand stained with blood, and that big hand grabbed Debbie Pelt’s throat and squeezed. And squeezed. Before I could track the hand up the arm to the face of its owner, a wolf leaped from the floor to knock me down.
And sniff my face.
Okay, that was . . . then the wolf on top of me was knocked off and rolling on the floor, snarling and snapping at another wolf. I couldn’t help, because the two were moving so quickly I couldn’t be sure I’d help the right party.
The mist was dispersing at a good rate now, and I could see the room as a whole, though there were still patches of opaque fog. Though I’d been desperate for this moment, I was almost sorry now that it’d arrived. Bodies, both dead and wounded, littered the floor among the paraphernalia of the coven, and blood spattered the walls. Portugal, the handsome young Were from the air force base, lay sprawled in front of me. He was dead. Culpepper crouched beside him, keening. This was a small piece of war, and I hated it.
Hallow was still standing and completely in her human form, bare and smeared with blood. She picked up a wolf and slung it at the wall as I watched. She was magnificent and horrible. Pam was creeping up behind her, and Pam was disheveled and dirty. I’d never seen the vampire so much as ruffled, and I almost didn’t recognize her. Pam launched herself, catching Hallow at the hips and knocking her to the floor. It was as good a tackle as I’d ever seen in years of Friday night football, and if Pam had caught Hallow a little higher up and could have gotten a grip on her, it would have been all over. But Hallow was slippery with the misty rain and with blood, and her arms were free. She twisted in Pam’s grasp and seized Pam’s long straight hair in both hands and pulled, and clumps of the hair came off, attached to a good bit of scalp.
Pam shrieked like a giant teakettle. I’d never heard a noise that loud come out of a throat—in this case not a human throat, but a throat nonetheless. Since Pam was definitely of the “get even” school, she pinned Hallow to the floor by gripping both her upper arms and pressing, pressing, until Hallow was flattened. Since the witch was so strong, it was a terrible struggle, and Pam was hampered by the blood streaming down her face. But Hallow was human, and Pam was not. Pam was winning until one of the witches, the hollow-cheeked man, crawled over to the two woman and bit into Pam’s neck. Both her arms were occupied, and she couldn’t stop him. He didn’t just bite, he drank, and as he drank, his strength increased, as if his battery was getting charged. He was draining right from the source. No one seemed to be watching but me. I scrambled across the limp, furry body of a wolf and one of the vampires to pummel on the hollow-cheeked man, who simply ignored me.
I would have to use the knife. I’d never done something like this; when I’d struck back at someone, it had always been a life-or-death situation, and the life and the death had been mine. This was different. I hesitated, but I had to do something quick. Pam was weakening before my eyes, and she would not be able to restrain Hallow much longer. I took the black-bladed knife with its black handle, and I held it to his throat; I jabbed him, a little.
“Let go of her,” I said. He ignored me.
I jabbed harder, and a stream of scarlet ran down the skin of his neck. He let go of Pam then. His mouth was all covered in her blood. But before I could rejoice that he’d freed her, he spun over while he was still underneath me and came after me, his eyes absolutely insane and his mouth open to drink from me, too. I could feel the yearning in his brain, the want, want, want. I put the knife to his neck again, and just as I was steeling myself, he lunged forward and pushed the blade into his own neck.
His eyes went dull almost instantly.
He’d killed himself by way of me. I don’t think he’d ever realized the knife was there.
This was a close killing, a right-in-my-face killing, and I’d been the instrument of death, however inadvertently.
When I could look up, Pam was sitting on Hallow’s chest, her knees pinning Hallow’s arms, and she was smiling. This was so bizarre that I looked around the room to find the reason, and I saw that the battle appeared to be over. I couldn’t imagine how long it had lasted, that loud but invisible struggle in the thick mist, but now I could see the results all too clearly.
Vampires don’t kill neat, they kill messy. Wolves, too, are not known for their table manners. Witches seemed to manage to splash a little less blood, but the end result was really horrible, like a very bad movie, the kind you were ashamed you’d paid to see.
We appeared to have won.
At the moment, I hardly cared. I was really tired, mentally and physically, and that meant all the thoughts of the humans, and some of the thoughts of the Weres, rolled around in my brain like clothes in a dryer. There was nothing I could do about it, so I let the tag ends drift around in my head while, using the last of my strength, I pushed off of the corpse. I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Since I had no thoughts, I filled up with everyone else’s. Almost everyone was thinking the same kind of thing I was: how tired they were, how bloody the room was, how hard it was to believe they’d gone through a fight like this and survived. The spiky-haired boy had reverted to his human form, and he was thinking how much more he’d enjoyed it than he thought he should. In fact, his unclothed body was showing visible evidence of how much he’d enjoyed it, and he was trying to feel embarrassed about that. Mostly, he wanted to track down that cute young Wiccan and find a quiet corner. Hallow was hating Pam, she was hating me, she was hating Eric, she was hating everyone. She began to try to mumble a spell to make us all sick, but Pam gave her an elbow in the neck, and that shut her right up.
Debbie Pelt got up from the floor in the door and surveyed the scene. She looked amazingly pristine and energetic, as if she’d never had a furry face and wouldn’t even begin to know how to kill someone. She picked her way through the bodies strewn on the floor, some living and some not, until she found Alcide, still in his wolf form. She squatted down to check him over for wounds, and he growled at her in clear warning. Maybe she didn’t believe he would attack, or maybe she just fooled herself into believing it, but she laid her hand on his shoulder, and he bit her savagely enough to draw blood. She shrieked and scrambled back. For a few seconds, she crouched there, cradling her bleeding hand and crying. Her eyes met mine and almost glowed with hatred. She would never forgive me. She would blame me the rest of her life for Alcide’s discovery of her dark nature. She’d toyed with him for two years, pulling him to her, pushing him back, concealing from him the elements of her nature he would never accept, but wanting him with her nonetheless. Now it was all over.
And this was my fault?
But I wasn’t thinking in Debbie terms, I was thinking like a rational human being, and of
course Debbie Pelt was not. I wished the hand that had caught her neck during the struggle in the cloud had choked her to death. I watched her back as she pushed open the door and strode into the night, and at that moment I knew Debbie Pelt would be out to get me for the rest of her life. Maybe Alcide’s bite would get infected and she’d get blood poisoning?
In reflex action, I chastised myself: That was an evil thought; God didn’t want us to wish ill on anyone. I just hoped He was listening in to Debbie, too, the way you hope the highway patrolman who stopped you for a ticket is also going to stop the guy behind you who was trying to pass you on the double yellow line.
The redheaded Were, Amanda, came over to me. She was bitten here and there, and she had a swollen lump on her forehead, but she was quietly beaming. “While I’m in a good mood, I want to apologize for insulting you,” she said directly. “You came through in this fight. Even if you can tolerate vamps, I won’t hold that against you anymore. Maybe you’ll see the light.” I nodded, and she strolled away to check on her packmates.
Pam had tied up Hallow, and Pam, Eric, and Gerald had gone to kneel beside someone on the other side of the room. I wondered vaguely what was happening over there, but Alcide was shimmering back into human form, and when he’d oriented himself, he crawled over to me. I was too exhausted to care that he was naked, but I had a floating idea that I should try to remember the sight, since I’d want to recall it at my leisure later.
He had some grazes and bloody spots, and one deep laceration, but overall he looked pretty good.
“There’s blood on your face,” he said, with an effort.
“Not mine.”
“Thank God,” he said, and he lay on the floor beside me. “How bad are you hurt?”
“I’m not hurt, not really,” I said. “I mean, I got shoved around a lot, and choked a little maybe, and snapped at, but no one hit me!” By golly, I was going to make my New Year’s resolution come true, after all.
“I’m sorry we didn’t find Jason here,” he said.
“Eric asked Pam and Gerald if the vampires were holding him, and they said no,” I remarked. “He’d thought of a real good reason for the vamps to have him. But they didn’t.”
“Chow is dead.”
“How?” I asked, sounding as calm as if it hardly mattered. Truthfully, I had never been very partial to the bar-tender, but I would have shown a decent concern if I hadn’t been so tired.
“One of Hallow’s group had a wooden knife.”
“I never saw one before,” I said after a moment, and that was all I could think to say about the death of Chow.
“Me, neither.”
After a long moment, I said, “I’m sorry about Debbie.” What I meant was, I was sorry Debbie had hurt him so badly, had proved to be such a dreadful person that he’d had to take a drastic step to get her out of his life.
“Debbie who?” he asked, and rolled to his feet and padded away across the filthy floor strewn with blood, bodies, and supernatural debris.
13
THE AFTERMATH OF A BATTLE IS MELANCHOLY AND nasty. I guess you could call what we’d had a battle . . . maybe more like a supernatural skirmish? The wounded have to be tended, the blood has to be cleaned up, the bodies have to be buried. Or, in this case, disposed of—Pam decided to burn the store down, leaving the bodies of Hallow’s coven inside.
They hadn’t all died. Hallow, of course, was still alive. One other witch survived, though she was badly hurt and very low on blood. Of the Weres, Colonel Flood was gravely wounded; Portugal had been killed by Mark Stonebrook. The others were more or less okay. Only Chow had died, out of the vampire contingent. The others had wounds, some very horrible, but vampires will heal.
It surprised me that the witches hadn’t made a better showing.
“They were probably good witches, but they weren’t good fighters,” Pam said. “They were picked for their magical ability and their willingness to follow Hallow, not for their battle skills. She shouldn’t have tried to take over Shreveport with such a following.”
“Why Shreveport?” I asked Pam.
“I’m going to find out,” Pam said, smiling.
I shuddered. I didn’t want to consider Pam’s methods. “How are you going to keep her from doing a spell on you while you question her?”
Pam said, “I’ll think of something.” She was still smiling.
“Sorry about Chow,” I said, a little hesitantly.
“The job of bartender at Fangtasia doesn’t seem to be a good-luck job,” she admitted. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to find someone to replace Chow. After all, he and Long Shadow both perished within a year of starting work.”
“What are you going to do about un-hexing Eric?”
Pam seemed glad enough to talk to me, even if I was only a human, since she’d lost her sidekick. “We’ll make Hallow do it, sooner or later. And she’ll tell us why she did it.”
“If Hallow just gives up the general outline of the spell, will that be enough? Or will she have to perform it herself?” I tried to rephrase that in my head so it was clearer, but Pam seemed to understand me.
“I don’t know. We’ll have to ask our friendly Wiccans. The ones you saved should be grateful enough to give us any help we need,” Pam said, while she tossed some more gasoline around the room. She’d already checked the building to remove the few things she might want from it, and the local coven had gathered up the magical paraphernalia, in case one of the cops who came to investigate this fire could recognize the remnants.
I glanced at my watch. I hoped that Holly had made it safely home by now. I would tell her that her son was safe.
I kept my eyes averted from the job the youngest witch was doing on Colonel Flood’s left leg. He’d sustained an ugly gash in the quadriceps. It was a serious wound. He made light of it, and after Alcide fetched their clothes, the colonel limped around with a smile on his face. But when blood seeped through the bandage, the packmaster had to allow his Weres to take him to a doctor who happened to be two-natured and willing to help off the books, since no one could think of a good story that would explain such a wound. Before he left, Colonel Flood shook hands ceremoniously with the head witch and with Pam, though I could see the sweat beading on his forehead even in the frigid air of the old building.
I asked Eric if he felt any different, but he was still oblivious to his past. He looked upset and on the verge of terror. Mark Stonebrook’s death hadn’t made a bit of difference, so Hallow was in for a few dreadful hours, courtesy of Pam. I just accepted that. I didn’t want to think about it closely. Or at all.
As for me, I was feeling completely at a loss. Should I go home to Bon Temps, taking Eric with me? (Was I in charge of him anymore?) Should I try to find a place to spend the remaining hours of the night here in the city? Shreveport was home for everyone but Bill and me, and Bill was planning on using Chow’s empty bed (or whatever it was) for the coming day, at Pam’s suggestion.
I dithered around indecisively for a few minutes, trying to make up my mind. But no one seemed to need me for anything specific, and no one sought me out for conversation. So when Pam got involved in giving the other vampires directions about Hallow’s transportation, I just walked out. The night was quite as still as it had been, but a few dogs did bark as I walked down the street. The smell of magic had lessened. The night was just as dark, and even colder, and I was at low ebb. I didn’t know what I’d say if a policeman stopped me; I was blood-spattered and tattered, and I had no explanation. At the moment, I found it hard to care.
I’d gotten maybe a block when Eric caught up with me. He was very anxious—almost fearful. “You weren’t there. I just looked around and you weren’t there,” he said accusingly. “Where are you going? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Please,” I said, and held up a hand to beg him to be silent. “Please.” I was too tired to be strong for him, and I had to fight an overwhelming depression, though I couldn’t have told you exactly why; after all, no
one had hit me. I should be happy, right? The goals of the evening had been met. Hallow was conquered and in captivity; though Eric hadn’t been restored to himself, he soon would be, because Pam was sure to bring Hallow around to the vampire way of thinking, in a painful and terminal way.
Undoubtedly, Pam would also discover why Hallow had begun this whole course of action. And Fangtasia would acquire a new bartender, some fangy hunk who would bring in the tourist bucks. She and Eric would open the strip club they’d been considering, or the all-night dry-cleaners, or the bodyguard service.
My brother would still be missing.
“Let me go home with you. I don’t know them,” Eric said, his voice low and almost pleading. I hurt inside when Eric said something that was so contrary to his normal personality. Or was I seeing Eric’s true nature? Was his flash and assurance something he’d assumed, like another skin, over the years?
“Sure, come on,” I said, as desperate as Eric was, but in my own way. I just wanted him to be quiet, and strong.
I’d settle for quiet.
He loaned me his physical strength, at least. He picked me up and carried me back to the car. I was surprised to find that my cheeks were wet with tears.
“You have blood all over you,” he said into my ear.
“Yes, but don’t get excited about it,” I warned. “It doesn’t do a thing for me. I just want to shower.” I was at the hiccupping-sob stage of crying, almost done.
“You’ll have to get rid of this coat now,” he said, with some satisfaction.
“I’ll get it cleaned.” I was too tired to respond to disparaging comments about my coat.
Getting away from the weight and smell of the magic was almost as good as a big cup of coffee and a hit of oxygen. By the time I got close to Bon Temps, I wasn’t feeling so ragged, and I was calm as I let us in the back door. Eric came in behind me and took a step to my right to go around the kitchen table, as I leaned left to flick on the light switch.
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