by Faith Hunter
In the scant seconds that the servants hesitated, Solene said, “Hedge of thorns.”
The words surprised me, because that was my BFF’s family’s spell, but it seemed to have gotten around, even to this backwater.
An inside circle flared up, reddish and sullen in the remaining daylight, the ward enclosing the wreath. A half second later she said, “Electric dog collar.” The outer circle, looking like little more than a pale shimmer, raised up. The witches were protected. I had the feeling that Solene hadn’t needed my help anyway. I had a feeling she had all sorts of offensive and defensive spells ready to toss at the humans, some of them deadly.
“Where the heck did you get that laugh?” I muttered to Eli.
“Borrowed it from a Taliban commander who thought he had us pinned down one night in Afghanistan. He didn’t. But until we filled him full of holes, he had the Bela Lugosi laughter down pat.”
“Gave me the shivers. Keep it in your repertoire. I like it.”
Eli gave me a lip-twitch grin.
The front doors blew off the blood bar.
I dropped to a crouch, Beast slamming into me. Eli dashed for cover. Dragging Alex by the collar. The humans in the street screamed, ran, or were knocked off their feet, depending on where they were positioned relative to the blast. The witches turned as one and looked at the bar, then, while the humans were still reeling, turned back and continued whatever the heck they were doing. The sign that had hung over the bar, LECOMPTE SPIRITS AND PLEASURE, landed in the street and bounced. I couldn’t hear it over the concussive damage to my ears, but it splintered and broke. I snarled and sucked in the wet night air, over my tongue and the roof of my mouth. The smell of explosive magic was an overriding stench filling the street, nearly hiding the smells of blood, sex, and liquor, and the stink of vamps.
Overhead, thunder boomed and the skies opened, not droplets, not drops, but bucketfuls. A deluge like something from Noah’s time, solid sheets of rain like standing under a waterfall during a spring flood, the rain pounding on me. Instantly I was drenched. “Well, crap.”
Night fell with the rain, the world darkening. Beast’s vision flared over mine, a greenish silver overlay of energy and life, everything clearer than my human vision. The Gray Between rose around me, from within me. Pain flashed through my flesh and sizzled through my neurons, intense and blinding, lighting up my nerve endings, searing my flesh. Then was gone. I stood from my crouch and growled, stalking to the door of the bar.
At the first hint of trouble, Eli had shoved his brother into a hidey-hole under the second-floor gallery and Alex crouched there, arms wrapped around himself, hiding his laptop from the mist that sprang up from the ground as the huge raindrops hit and splashed, creating a saturating mist along with the soaking rain. The Kid’s long curls were wet and dripping, plastered to his skull. But he was safe.
I got a glimpse of my hands. Pelt-covered, knobby knuckles. Beast had shifted me into my half-puma, half-human form. But there was no pain, and the change ground to a halt before my bones cracked and split, incapacitating me for way too long in the midst of a battle. Beast was getting good at this.
My hearing was already healing, and I made out screaming, the wail of a vamp dying, the nearly ultrasonic pulses that made my healing eardrums shudder.
From the bar doorway, flames flashed. Witch magic. Had to be Lucky.
I pulled on Beast’s strength and speed and jumped. Shoving off from the street and landing twenty feet away, just inside the door. Impossible for a human. Piece of cake for a Puma concolor. When I touched down, I instantly pushed off again and landed, rolling under cover of a pool table. It was on fire but only on the felt top and one leg.
I took in the fight. Vamps in the corners of the room. Witches and humans in the center, the remains of a protective ward scorched into the floor. The vinyl floor tile was on fire, melting. Draperies on a low stage were blazing, the flames not just licking up the rotted fabric, but roaring up. Smoke filled the room.
There was a burst of thunder inside. Magic parched my nostrils. A human-sounding scream was quickly cut off. Something heavy landed on the pool table over me and I heard an ominous crack. The top of a pool table is made of quarried slate, and it’s strong. I bowed my body in and rolled. Across the burning floor. To the feet of Clermont Doucette, fully vamped-out. His fangs braced at the carotid artery of a furious Bobbie Landry. A threat not yet carried out.
A shotgun boomed.
Everything went still. Silence vibrating with the gunshot. For an entire second that felt like an eternity.
A baby’s cry broke the mute waiting.
I swiveled my head, locating the sound. Gabe stood at the edge of the stage, vamped-out, lips curled back from narrow, pointed fangs, eyes blacker than the pit of hell, set in pale pink sclera. Still starving. Idiot. And then I realized he was holding a baby in his arms. A witch I didn’t know was at his feet, bleeding. Unconscious. And somehow he hadn’t fallen on her to feed. Gabe had unplumbed strengths.
Shauna was standing in a hedge of thorns. Staring at her husband and baby. She wasn’t afraid. Something I didn’t have time to examine.
Lucky Landry was inside a triangle, a ward I had never seen before. He threw something at a vamp on the stage near Gabe. The unknown vamp screamed, an ululating howl of pain, and started bleeding from his nose and mouth. He fell, writhing on the stage.
Eli raced across the room, heading for the stage. Lucky threw a second spell. It hit Eli, bowling him across the room, against the far wall, so fast it was a blur. I saw him hit. My heart stopped everything, went into some kind of no-thought-no-feel mode as Eli’s head conked the wall and he slid down it. I growled and aimed my M4 at Lucky. “I don’t want to kill you. Don’t make me do this.”
Lucky swiveled his head to me and his eyes widened.
Clermont, within inches of me, his speech impeded by his fangs, said, “What you are?”
Lucky’s eyes slid past me and he said, “What dat?”
I followed his eyes to the pool table.
Atop it was this . . . thing.
I swiveled and fired. Six shots, silver fléchette, hand-packed rounds, silver for the creatures of the dark. As I fired, Lucky threw a combustion spell at the thing. Flames rolled around it and off, onto the flaming felt of the pool table. Mud, dried by the flames, cracked and dusted down. If my rounds had done it harm, I couldn’t tell.
Part frog, part boar, part alligator. Frog body and back legs, boar tusks and bristly hair and little twirled tail, a frog mouth and snout, full of alligator teeth. And arms muscled like a gorilla but covered in horned scales. The thing was dripping mud and foul gore. Whiffs of tar, the tart stink of rotten lemons, and the perfume of the grave came from it, fish and dead birds and rotten gator meat, days dead. A demon from the deeps of the darkest hell. I had seen one before and it only took seeing one once to know them all. And from Lucky’s face, it wasn’t one he had called.
With strange double pops of air, Clermont disappeared and reappeared, this time holding a sword with a slightly curved blade, not quite a broad sword, too wide and curving to be a dueling sword. The blade was black except along the honed steel edge and point. The cross-guard was a swirl that swept back, protecting the hilt and his hand, to knot around the pommel. A Civil War–era sword, old and dependable.
He rushed across the floor and cut a long slice, deep into the swamp thing. The demon screamed and black blood welled up. I had a half second to notice the dark magics within the blood, then the wound clotted over like tar cooling.
I retreated toward Lucky, which was also closer to Eli, lying unmoving against the wall. His eyes were half-open, the whites showing. His chest moved as he drew in air, and something inside me unclenched, sending relief shivering through me. He was still alive.
The demon spread a grin, half its face opening to reveal teeth no frog ever had, spiked and barbed
and curved back. It should have roared, but instead it flexed its shoulders and laughed, a deep, dark reverberation. The notes made Eli’s laugh sound innocent, a schoolboy at a silly prank. This was the laughter of a devil with a torturer’s joy of blood and misery.
Clermont’s eyes continued to vamp-out, growing blacker than I had ever seen them. Gently he put Bobbie Landry behind him and said to her, “Take Shauna and Gabe and Clerjer. Door to left of stage and down, into lair. Make my fool son drink from my primo and my secundo. Tell dem all, Sacrement! Dey know what to do.”
Bobbie shot a look at Clermont, then at Lucky, her eyes wide with fear, the calculating kind of fear that can keep its head in the midst of bombs and explosions and even demons from hell. As if it wasn’t there, she reached through Shauna’s hedge ward and shoved the girl. Hard. Shock on her face, Shauna stumbled out of her ward, toward the door. “Mama? How . . .”
With one unladylike fist, Bobbie roundhoused Gabriel, catching Clerjer as he dropped the child. The baby over one shoulder, she grabbed a handful of Gabe’s long hair and tried to haul him across the stage, not bothering with gentleness. My kinda woman—take no prisoners, no back talk, and no stupidity. Shauna, seeing what her mother was doing, took her baby, laid him across her own shoulder, and added her strength to Gabe’s deadweight.
They disappeared behind the stage just as the flaming draperies lit the ceiling overhead with a wind-whipping roar. The heat flowed like a burning wave across the ceiling, seeking the air at the doorway, the flames billowing and rolling like a boiling, upside-down river, like water gone mad. The entire ceiling was afire, the heat so fierce that I crouched to get my body an inch or two lower. I smelled wood smoke and burning hair. Mine. The smoke raged down, black and suffocating.
Into the inferno Edmund raced, two long swords flashing in the red-scorched heat. He and Clermont attacked the swamp demon. If I’d had the time, if my partner weren’t down, I would have stood there slack-jawed, watching them. Edmund Hartley with swords was a thing of utter beauty. Thrust, whirl, lunge, lunge, lunge, thrust, whirl, the cage of flashing steel so fast that, even with Beast-vision, I couldn’t follow it. It was a glittering, flickering dance of death that slashed gobbets of mud off the demon and sent them flying. They hit the walls and quivered, orienting themselves back to the battle, as if the mud gobbets could see the demon, even without eyes, as if seeking a way back. Lucky tossed preprepared workings at the dismembered parts and they drooped into flaccid nothingness, sliding to the floor, where they lay inert.
Satisfied that all were safe-ish, for the moment, I raced to my partner. Kneeling, I rolled Eli up across my shoulder and back, and raced to the doorway. I dumped him there in an ungainly pile and shoved him into the street, into the rain. Freshly wet, I raced back inside, the rain so cool it felt delicious on my charred scalp.
Lucky was coughing, but he and Clermont were moving with purpose around the swamp thing, staying out of Edmund’s way, flanking the creature. The three warriors scarcely looked at one another, but seemed to read intent, matching maneuvers as though they had worked paramilitary tactics together for decades. Clermont surged forward and hit the floor, rolling under the pool table. As he ran, Lucky spun to one side and pulled something from his pants pocket; he threw it, spinning, red-hot, and smoking. It hit the thing under the arm, silent. Just like a ninja throwing star, but one that had been in a furnace all day, glowing with fiery magic.
The star disappeared inside the swamp thing with a sizzle of sound. The creature hissed and laughed again. It licked its lipless mouth with a wide, brown frog tongue. Lucky tried the preprepared working that had been successful on the dismembered body parts, but on the bigger mass of demon, the spells simply rolled off it and went out in poufs of broken energy.
Edmund spun his body in again and this time cut off one of the thing’s hands. Black blood bubbled out of the stump. The hand landed across the room. Lucky’s spell disabled it and the fingers melted, the hand liquefying into water and runny mud.
In the open doorway, I saw a form jump into the room, and time slowed. Not the Gray Between, the new power I had learned to use, not the one that was likely to kill me one day. No, this was the slow-down of time that warriors experience in the heat of battle, where the human body goes into overdrive and is able to see, hear, feel, and evaluate at hyperspeed. I studied this new thing as it leaped, while it was still in the air. Slight yet bulky. Small yet managing to appear hulking. Hairy, apelike. Weaponless. Not a threat. I ruled it from my attention before it landed.
Still with that battle speed upon me, I saw the demon on the table as it bent its knees and jumped to the floor. The old floorboards shattered beneath its weight, its bizarre feet buried in fragments and shards of wood that pierced its flesh. Its blood splattered into the room, reeking of acid, black as tar. The thing roared in agony, but it didn’t leap out of the hole it had made. It just stood there, ankle-deep in splinters of pain.
The other, smaller form had landed, flat-footed in the smoke, and was searching the room. And I knew who it was. If I hadn’t seen her in the camo uni before, I might not have recognized her. The ensemble was homemade, a one-piece, hand-tied, quilted outfit of green, brown, black, and tan strips of thin cotton cloth. Each strip was attached to the base garment with thread or knots. Irregular lengths of green yarn rippled from it in the hot wind of the fire, with rare pinkish, strawberry red, purple, and blue bits of thread interwoven. It was Margaud’s lightweight ghillie suit, made for wearing in the heat and wet of Louisiana, but this time it was soaked from the torrents pouring outside and hanging weirdly, the strips of cloth flapping wetly, her boots making muddy puddles. Around her was a glow of power, a pale reddish light of a ward, the kind witches sometimes make and sell to humans, a one-off spell contained in a charm. A miniward. Short-lived and weak, but better than nothing. And it also seemed to have some don’t-see-me properties, as no one looked her way but me.
Lucky shouted and threw a flaming blast of power at the frog thing. Nothing happened to it, the fire parting and rising to smack into the smoke overhead. Adding to the heat. Edmund crouched from the heat, his swords still flashing. Vamps were highly flammable. Ed had to get out, and soon.
Margaud lifted her legs and mimed stepping forward, without leaving the circle of the ward’s energies. The thing echoed her movements, but stepping out of the hole. And it all came together for me.
The first time I saw Margaud wearing the weird ghillie suit, I had wondered what she needed the suit for. At the time, I figured it was something she had made to celebrate her sharpshooter days, something she wore when hunting in the swamps and bayous, despite the occasional brightly colored bits of thread. Now I realized the uni was something more, something magical, a suit that she wore to protect herself and to . . . to call the thing in the bar? To control the demon?
Wondering if I could die from fire, from burning to death, I inhaled to shout, and started coughing. I hacked out the words, “Lucky, put out the fire.” And he must have understood.
The witch wrenched his attention from the swamp thing to me, then to the ceiling. His eyes widened in surprise. I don’t think he had noticed the flames until that moment. He pulled something from a pocket and threw it with one fist, up into the ceiling. It stuck and the flames twirled around it, whirling back the way they had come, toward the metal star stuck in the ceiling and the slight hole it had made there. Cool, wet air rushed into the room from the busted door. The roar of the fire diminished and was gone in seconds. But so was the light, the electricity ripped away, along with the flames. I saw the room in overlays of green and silver, and hot spots that continued to smolder.
The creature unsheathed claws from its muddy body and swiped at Clermont.
The vamp sidestepped the claws, the motion beautiful and neat, no wasted movement, no wasted energy. He cut again. Sidestepped. Cut. Sidestepped. The creature roared each time, but its wounds clotted over. Clermont step
ped back and Edmund stepped in, cutting, cutting, cutting, lunging over and over. Just before each of the creature’s motions, Margaud moved, its body following hers in a peculiar, macabre dance.
Lucky was watching her, as I was, and he reached again into his pocket and withdrew something that sparked when it hit the air. He threw it hard, a baseball pitcher’s fastball. It smacked into the ghillie suit and stuck. Flames licked up, burning, even in the wet cloth.
The creature stepped forward and backhanded Lucky. The witch spun through the air and cracked into the pool table, bending in ways no human body was intended to. His ribs splintered with brittle snaps. The table was no longer on fire, and Lucky gripped the scorched felt, curling his fingers into it to stay upright. But I heard the bubbling wheeze when he tried to inhale. He had lung damage. He grunted and his face went white.
Margaud’s ghillie suit roared up in flame, and she screamed. The swamp thing walked to her. It wrapped her in its arms and the flames sizzled out, smothered in mud and swamp water. I could hear Margaud gasping and the stink of her terror was clear and sharp, even over the reek of burning homemade ghillie suit.
The demon turned from her and it seemed to have found its way. It stepped forward and struck at Clermont, its claws gouging deep into the vamp’s belly, sending him flying too. Edmund danced out of the way. The other vamp, the one who was down on the stage, groaned, catching the demon’s attention. The creature fisted its hands and raised them high. I tried to fire the M4, but it clicked. Empty. The mud thing brought its fisted hands down on the unconscious form. Bones splintered and cracked.
I reloaded the M4 with regular shot, my movements efficient and spare, Beast fast, but still too slow. I raised the shotgun and aimed at the thing. Then shifted my aim for Margaud. I had never killed a human except in defense of my life or in defense of another. I hesitated, uncertainty filling me. What if Margaud wasn’t actually directing the thing? What if I had it all wrong? I fired. The round hit the ghillie suit and spread. But nothing penetrated. The shot stopped, hot and smoking. And fell to the floor with pings. Her ward, which had seemed so weak, was more than it had appeared. Much more.
