Shadow Rites

by Faith Hunter

  Overhearing her comments, Alex suggested that she contact our lawyer, or better yet, Leo’s lawyer, but that YS couldn’t be held responsible for the actions of a third party, outside the time limits of our contract. That we were being paid to provide security for the event, not the days leading up to it. And that perhaps she could consider how many lawsuits, and defensive spells gone haywire, might have resulted from the same situation had we not discovered the trap several days early. She went away dissatisfied with the financial burden placed on her to get the gardens repaired in such short order, but placated with the thought that greater disaster had been averted.

  While I was glad that the Kid was growing up, I was less happy with the thought that we were missing something. And that the explosions we had triggered with no loss of life had been secondary to a far greater plan of attack yet to come. Or worse, had been intended to lure us into a false state of undeserved triumph. It was all coming together and it was too easy. Nothing in my time in New Orleans had been easy. Which meant it was all going to break loose and soon.

  There were things contained in the subbasements at vamp central that were far more dangerous than the witches, the vamps, or me. Was I looking in the wrong direction for the problems? Blinded by the expected? I didn’t think so. It felt as if I was on the right track. The early attack on the Elms was either an accident or a plan triggered too soon, or it had been intended to get the Truebloods and me out of the way just before the Witch Conclave, when it was too late to change security plans. That would have left Leo without a trained Enforcer and made it easier to kill him.

  I hoped that, for once, there wasn’t a deeper motive or multiple aims or a multilevel plan, and that the witches had one purpose only. Hoped that our witches were too young to have layered goals and century-long discriminations. That their hatreds would be short-term hatreds.

  Hating the Truebloods and the other witches for being willing to parley with the vamps.

  Hating me. For living when Antoine had died.

  Hating Leo. Because his son killed their father/husband.

  CHAPTER 17

  Namaste. Oops, Vamps Don’t Have Souls. Never Mind.

  “I have some home addresses for the Nicaud women,” Alex said as we crawled back into the SUV, “four, to be exact. They moved around a lot. I tracked the last one down just this second. Sending them to your cells, along with GPS and sat pics.”

  The Nicauds lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, on Lamarche Street. The Lower Ninth Ward had been the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, large stretches of the neighborhood under eight feet of water for days. The largest numbers of deaths took place there, human and pet. And the Lower Ninth had received the least amount of revitalization money, which is to say, little beyond tearing down and hauling off the most uninhabitable buildings and homes. There were still boarded-up homes and empty housing lots, little opportunity, and fewer jobs.

  Since the last time Google drove through, with its rotating camera, preserving the world for online viewers, things had changed on Lamarche Street, and not in a good way. Eli drove past the first address and turned around in the intersection of Florida Avenue, driving back slowly. Half a block up he cut the lights and backed into the cracked drive of an empty lot.

  The Nicauds’ most recent address was a weathered brick Creole cottage, two rooms wide, the house visible in the security light of the house next door. The cottage was traditionally symmetrical, with two front doors and two front windows, the shutters closed over each, with smoke damage showing behind and plywood hammered over them. The steeply pitched, side-gabled roof had seen the hand of firemen’s axes as they tried to open a way to control the fire that had destroyed the inside. Someone had tacked a blue tarp over the damage. “There’s a light on inside,” Eli said. “Two figures, adult-sized, human, moving around.”

  He had a mono-ocular on to preserve the night vision in the other eye should something explode and temporarily blind him. He was flipping back and forth between low-light and infrared, studying the house.

  “Looks like a brazier and an oil lamp. Both figures are male. Wait. Under the eaves on the second floor, there’s another figure. Supine. Maybe on a cot.” He studied the view for a while. “We could check it out.”

  I nodded. “Give your brother the keys and let’s go pay them a little visit.” I opened the door, and the scents of the place hit me like a wet blanket wrapped around a sledgehammer. Water from the river. Water standing on the rain-soaked ground. Old smoke, that peculiar, vile stench of a burned-out house. Food cooking over an open flame, maybe a chicken. The stink from an outdoor latrine. Sweat. Unwashed male. Familiar males. I’d smelled them before. And riding over the stinks was the pong of sex and the reek of fear and pain and . . .

  A memory shoved up through me like a clawed fist. My father, beside me on the floor, dead, his blood cooling. My mother, on the floor as well, the white man’s shadow riding her. The smells. The smell of pain and sex. I moved so fast the world blurred. When I stopped, it was to find myself on the narrow front porch, Eli’s hand on my arm, the Benelli against my shoulder.

  “Jane. Wait,” he murmured.

  Pain ratcheted through my bones and settled in my fingers and my jaw. I hissed at Eli, lips snarled back to show killing teeth. My eyes were glowing gold, reflected in his.

  He yanked back his hand and held it up, telling me to stop. Or to be peaceful.

  Peace is human concept. Not predator concept, Beast thought.

  “There’s a woman in pain in this house,” I said. “I smell her blood and the men’s—” I stopped, unable to go on. “They hurt her.”

  “Are you absolutely . . . completely certain she’s been hurt? That she’s not there of her own free will?”

  “I—” I stopped. “Yes.”

  “Is it Tau or her mother?”

  “No. The scent is human. A young female.”

  Eli’s voice went cold, expressionless, what I had come to know as his battle voice. He looked over the house, whispered, “Saw something like this in a little village in . . . elsewhere. Two men with a woman captive, upstairs, bound and gagged. Squatters. Had ’em a woman too beaten to fight anymore.” He made a waffling motion with his hand. “Not saying the situations are the same. This girl could be here by choice, but . . .”

  I didn’t react to the change in his scent except to say, “How’d you handle it?”

  “Small group at the front. Small group at the back. Fast entry, quick clear. The targets didn’t have time to draw weapons.” He hesitated. “Wasn’t supposed to be action, just recon. We had a female with us. When the stairs were cleared, she went up. Came back with the woman.”

  “And?”

  Something that could never have been called a smile ghosted across his face. “Two casualties of war. One female rescued and taken to Uncle Sam’s finest medics. Last I heard she was studying to be a nurse.”

  “Repercussions?”

  “Not everything made it into the reports that night. Let’s be smart,” Eli said. “Let me clear the area.”

  I raised my head and sniffed the air. With Beast-hearing, I heard the girl whimper. Her scent was human. Broken. Sick. I growled when I heard her whimper. From inside a man shouted, “Shut up, bitch, or I’ll give you something to cry about.” I heard the laughter of two men. And the sound of soft sobs from upstairs, all loud enough that even Eli could hear. “She isn’t here of her own free will,” I growled. “I know what rape smells like.”

  “Not disagreeing. Just saying let’s be smart. One minute more. Two at the most. The men are downstairs. Not hurting her right now.” Even more soft, he repeated. “Let me clear the area.”

  I jerked my chin at him and said, “No explosive smell here,” my voice an octave lower, rumbling.

  He nodded and said, “When I’m done, ready to enter, I’ll give a whippoorwill bird call. You know it?” I jerked my head down
to say yes and Eli asked, “Can you get the door open fast?”

  I showed blunt human teeth, attached the M4’s shoulder strap, and slung the shotgun back. I reached out and inserted my clawed, knobby fingers under the edge of the plywood. Instead of my having to pull it, making an ungodly noise, it simply opened about two inches. The plywood had been secured to the shutter and to the door, making it all one single piece, held on by a simple door chain on the inside. I grinned at Eli and showed my teeth again. “Stupid humans.”

  Using his mini flash, he cleared the door of physical, mechanical, and explosive booby traps, then cleared the front porch, making sure there were no booby traps there. Even nonexplosive traps could be deadly and I had raced up here without a plan. Stupid Jane/Beast.

  Eli leaped off the porch; I followed his progress by the slight swish of his legs through the unmown weeds and grasses. I waited. Looked at the SUV. Growled softly, though Alex couldn’t hear me.

  And realized two things. I hadn’t told Eli who the two men were. And I had half shifted on the way across the street. I gazed at my feet. They still fit in the boots. I scrunched my toes, which curled in the toes of the Luccheses. Human-shaped still. Yet another new half form. Now that I was thinking clearer, I pushed the shotgun farther around back and repositioned two vamp-killers for easy access, unseating the weapons from their new hard-plastic holsters. The blades were shorter, but they had really stout tangs and hilts and rounded pommels, good for use as weapons themselves.

  A whippoorwill called, the sound lonely. I ripped the plywood, the shutter, and the door off its hinges. The chain popped free, the stench of fire, unwashed male, and fainter, the fading, ancient scents of Tau and Marlene, roiling out. Before the assemblage fell to the porch, I was inside. Weapons drawn, blades back, against my lower arms. Moving Beast-fast.

  The man in front of me caught sight of me. Started to scream. Began to pull a gun from his pants. I brought my right arm up from my hip. Caught him under the jaw with the pommel. An uppercut. Easy to dodge, easy to just fall away from. But his jaw crunched, blood flew. I stepped over him as he dropped.

  The man behind him was holding a weapon in a street-style grip, out to the side. Stupid. I whirled. The other pommel took him in the cheek. Roundhouse. I/Beast whipped inside the gun hand, which went wide. Whirled. Caught him a backhanded fist to the jaw on the same side. Whipped my blade. Instead of killing him, I slammed the blade down through his lower arm, slicing between the arm bones with a killing claw, slashing down, cutting nerves and tendons as he fell.

  He was out cold, so I performed the same treatment on his other arm. Predator can no longer hurt human girls. I/we ignored Eli, standing in the darkened doorway, the scent of shock leaching from his skin. I went back to the first man. Beast guiding my hand, I cut down his arms the same way.

  Sounding far too casual, Eli said, “They’ll bleed out if you leave them that way. Cops might get involved.”

  I snorted, looking the men over. I blinked. Seeing what I had done. Arterial blood was pumping from both men, wide pools of blood forming beneath them, splattering on the fire-blackened walls with each pulse. My own heart raced. My breath came too fast, uneven, hurting my chest with each inhalation. “Oh . . . crap.” The words were still Beast-deep, rough and grating.

  There were shoes nearby, two pair of work boots, long laces on each. With the bloody blade, I cut the laces free, and wiped and sheathed the vamp-killer on a cloth nearby. Working fast, I created makeshift tourniquets with the laces and dirty spoons lying on the scorched table nearby. The bleeding stopped, but not before I got it all over myself.

  I rose and looked at Eli, still standing in the doorway. Too relaxed, too nonchalant. But he smelled of uncertainty, doubt. I inspected at the men on the floor. My voice still deep, half Beast, half human, I said, “In my tribe, rape was very rare. Women held the power and the land. Men were warriors and hunters. When they . . . misbehaved . . . they were given to War Women. Who meted out judgment.” I toed the hand nearest. “I’ll . . . I’ll see if some willing fanghead will offer them blood. But no matter what, they won’t will be able to hurt a woman again. Ever.”

  “And you’re sure they raped the woman upstairs?” He nodded to the darkness up the narrow steps, barely visible in the oil lantern light. Questioning my judgment.

  My voice dropped even lower. “I smell her on them. They stink of her blood and pain and fear, not fun and games.”

  Eli nodded at that, musing. His scent altered to acceptance. “Good enough for me. Do we free the girl and leave the mess or call the police? And if we call the cops, do we wait?”

  I bent to sniff closer, recognizing something I’d have realized sooner if I hadn’t been so caught up in memories and rage. “Tau,” I said. “They smelled like Tau and Marlene. They helped to care for Ming of Mearkanis in the pit. Brothers, half brothers. Maybe I should have kept them conscious and questioned them before I . . .” Before I cut them up. Beast withdrew from the forefront of my mind, prowling away. Satisfied. But I wasn’t. I looked down at my hands. The hands of a killer. A maimer.

  A memory flashed before me, of a blade sliding slow, down through the bones of an arm as he jerked and thrashed. Heard a man screaming. Saw blood flash, crimson against white flesh. Then it was gone. And I knew that I—or my grandmother—had done this exact thing before. When I was five. When I helped to torture and kill the men who raped my mother and killed my father.

  Eli said shortly, “Shit happens in battle. You don’t think. You just do. And if you’re lucky, you survive to fight another day.”

  But this was now, and . . . I was guilty. I knew it. Something inside me tightened and twisted, tangling up. “Call the police,” I pointed to the grimy ancient flip phone cell near the cooking brazier. “On that. I’ll free the girl.”

  “I’ll free her. She needs to know a man saved her. And your face is kinda scary right now.”

  I touched my jaw with my knobby fingers and felt pelt. Upper and lower canines too long for cat or human. I grunted. Blinked. Saw again the ancient memory of the man I had helped to kill, so long ago. Bucking against the blades. I had just punished these two men, in part, because of the murder and rape that were nearly two hundred years gone. As if the little girl I had been was still alive and well inside me.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Eli added. “We won’t be staying.”

  He dialed 911, gave the dispatcher the address, and, without identifying himself, gave a quick description of what to expect, ending with the words, “There’s a girl upstairs. She’s been held captive. Used. We’re setting her free, but she won’t be able to walk. She needs care.” Eli wiped the cell free of prints and set it down where he’d found it, the dispatcher’s voice asking questions to the empty air.

  He went up the stairs and the girl began a panicked moaning, a muffled “Hunh-hunh-hunh” behind a gag.

  “It’s okay,” Eli said. “I’m here to set you free. Not to hurt you. An ambulance is on the way. You’re safe now.” And he said it again. And again. Over and over. When he came back down the stairs, he was grim and smelled of fury and impotence. The human girl was free and crying, her voice hoarse and dry. In the distance sounded sirens. Eli looked around and said, “You were right.” He analyzed the scene. The men. “Totally right about everything. There’s no sign of female habitation down here. She’s been a prisoner. Nothing here but porn mags and video games.”

  “No electricity,” I said, thinking clearly again. “As if they’re squatting in their mama’s house? Weird.”

  Eli and I left through the doorless front opening, stepped over the door, and raced to the SUV. Alex had the vehicle running and pulled out of the empty drive before we could close the doors. At a sedate pace, he crossed the next intersection and then turned left on the one after. Weaving through the silent streets, he headed uptown, back to the French Quarter, passing cop cars, an ambulance, and two Harleys rid
den by local bike gang members. I missed Bitsa fiercely, but I also knew that missing the bike was just one way of not thinking about the girl, tied to the bed, at the mercy of the men.

  I looked away, out the window, into the night. We had come to track Tau and Marlene. And instead of finding them, I had cut up their . . . brothers? Sons? Whatever. “We could have questioned them,” I said again. “About Tau. And Marlene.”

  “I take it that whatever went down in there wasn’t on the action plan for the night?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Eli replied. “And we lost the chance to learn something. But Janie saved a kidnapped girl. Sometimes, even in the middle of war, we do God’s work, no matter what.”

  I thought about those words as I stared out the window. War Women. We do God’s work, his vengeance. Whether he wants us to or not. I reached into myself and found the memory of Jane, the human-looking part of myself, of ourselves, though I was quite certain that I had never been human. Not at all.

  I climbed across the seat and into the back of the SUV, where I found towels, washcloths, and a bottle of water in a rucksack. I stripped, washed up, and redressed in stretchy pants and a tee. I also found my human shape and let myself flow back into it. It hurt this time, as if in direct proportion to the previous, painless half shift, the agony ripping along my nerves like tiny knives cutting through me, scoring my bones. When I came to myself, I was gasping, grunting softly.

  In the backseat, Eli asked, “You okay, Janie?” overly unconcerned.

  “Ducky,” I managed, sounding human. I wiped my boots as well as I was able and pulled them on too. My stomach growled and I said, “I could eat.”

  “Pulling into a Popeyes right now,” Alex said. “Bucket of chicken and all the fixings coming up.”