by Faith Hunter
I parked Bitsa and went searching, following my nose along a path, over saturated ground, into an area marked as Couturié Forest. Here the trees grew bigger, older, limbs overarching the paths like sentinels, protective and watchful, though that was sheer fancy on my part.
Following the old scent, I skirted fallen limbs and windblown brush on the paths. The few sounds of a city crawling back to life after the storm vanished as I made my way through the trees. There was only the plop of heavy rain-drops, the wet whisper of the wind in the limbs overhead, and the crunch and squish of leaves, twigs, and wet earth under my boots. A sense of tranquility and serenity pervaded the ground and the air, the way an old-growth forest feels, the loamy soil rich and fecund with life. But beneath it all was a trace of something feral. And dead. I left the path, pushing through the night.
Until I came to a vamp grave site. The stink of vamp, dead meat, and old blood had been well washed by Ada but was still potent enough for my Beast-enhanced senses.
The grave site was in a natural open area, a ten-foot circular space surrounded by old trees, rank with a miasma of overlapping scent patterns. I caught the strong recent tang of a lightning strike and charred wood, so much like the scent of burned magical wards that I was undecided on what I was smelling until I spotted the tree against the night sky, blackened and burned, its top half blasted away. The trail of lightning ran across the ground where it had cooked the earth.
I stood at the edge of the site, boots to the ankle in mud and last year’s leaves, letting Beast have full rein of my sensory organs. She rose and peered through my eyes, taking in the world. My night vision expanded. My hearing took on the better-than-human enhancement. I drew in air through my nostrils and over my tongue—Flehmen behavior—seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting the place. To Beast it was sensory overload, overlapping into one multisense whole.
Nothing moved but the breeze. The dark was absolute. The wind whipped up for a moment, sending a soft sigh of sound and the patter of rain splattering down. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Beneath the scent of drenched earth, oak, maple, swamp hickory, and cypress, there was the reek of dead, decaying flesh. The herbal scent of vamps. A hint of blood, old and thinned and washed away by the rains of Ada. And a trace of magic, both old and recently discharged. Witch magic. In a vamp graveyard. Okay, that was weird. Vamps and witches did not get along.
I stepped closer and something crunched beneath my boot. Squatting, I lifted a broken white shell from the muddy soil. Carefully, I brushed Ada-blown leaves and detritus away, exposing more shells around the periphery of the open area. Now that I knew they were here, I was able to make out a ring, perfectly circular, made of the small white shells. In the center of the circle was more white, and though I couldn’t be sure without getting on my hands and knees, I thought it might form a pentagram.
Beast’s reaction made the skin across my shoulders and along my neck prickle like hackles rising. I did not like this. Whatever it was, it was giving me the willies.
The antipathy between vamps and witches was rancorous and long-standing, like a cold war linking and dividing the races, a war that had lasted for hundreds of years, according to Molly, its origins lost in time. Yet, here in this dank and isolated place, encircled on all sides by city and bayou, the air tingled with magic, the ground was saturated with it, and the blood that soaked the soil was charged with it. Minute blue sparkles of magic tasted of nutmeg and sang a note of electric power. The witch power had been coiled, snarled, twisted into a heart of foulness. Dark magic had been done here. Blood magic. I paused and breathed deeply, hoping to find what kind of blood had been spilled—goat, chicken . . . or human? But the blood was too old and the site too exposed to hurricane rain for me to tell specifics.
I stood and dusted my hands off on my jeans, looking into the trees that surrounded this place. I saw a cross, nailed to a tree, about six feet off the ground. Another cross was several feet to the side. There were five crosses in all, nailed to trees at the points of the pentagram, and I wasn’t sure, but the crosses might have been silver. Weird. The points of the pentagram on the ground lined up with the crosses on the trees. None of this made sense, not for a vamp grave, not for witch involvement, not for anything. I controlled my breathing, pushed down my fear response.
Across the ground, something moved.
A tiny patch of earth in the middle of the small clearing lifted and fell. A little triangle of soil. The bit of dirt dropped, stilled a moment, and lifted again. Something white poked out. The smell of death roiled out into the night, musty and foul. And the white thing resolved itself into fingers.
The hair rose on the back of my neck. Beast growled low in my throat and gathered herself tight. My body tightened, tension thrumming through me. I pulled my favorite vamp-killer and felt better with the elk-horn hilt of the weapon in my hand.
More soil fell away, the patch of earth rolling as something shuffled the surface leaves and scattered the shells. As something tried to rise from the center of the pentagram. The silver crosses at head height began to gleam softly.
Crap, I was witnessing the rising of a newborn vamp. A young rogue. A blood-sucking killing machine. I pulled a stake, making sure it was silver tipped. But Beast held me motionless, watching, curious.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” I murmured, adjusting my grip on the weapons.
Beast hacked with dire amusement.
The thing was skeletal, white-skinned and filthy, arms like sticks as it dragged itself out of the ground, hands and arms, knobby elbows. The head. Clods of dirt fell away. Long hair, tangled and muddy, dragged the grave. I had never seen a first rising, and it was much like Night of the Living Dead in 3-D, but stinkier. The rogue was female. She wore a party dress, a floral print, once pale with big flowers in bright colors, now foul with death fluids, blood, and the mud of the grave. She pulled her hips from the ground, shook her legs and feet free, and took a breath. Whipped her head to me. And found me in the night.
Her eyes almost glowed, bloodshot. Her neck was ravaged with knotted scar tissue. She hissed, snakelike, hungry. Starving. And coming for me. I started toward her, to finish her off.
No, Beast whispered. Not here. Sire will scent her death. Will know you, be able to track you. Run. Like wounded bird. I had a quick image of a bird darting from a nest, one wing held at an angle, drawing predators away. Spinning, I ran through the trees, deeper into Couturié Forest, watching over my shoulder. Behind me, the rogue grunted, sniffed the air like a feral dog, and pulled herself to her knees. I concentrated on getting away from the grave site, far enough to please Beast, who explored the world through my inadequate senses, her urgency pushing me to speed. Moments later, I heard the rogue start to follow, her balance off, her footsteps uneven.
She whimpered, mewling like a kitten. The kit sounds should have brought out the protective instincts in Beast. Instead, she hacked with displeasure and dug her claws into my psyche. I jumped a downed tree and a rill of water, leftover from Ada’s deluge. Beast studied the world as I moved, looking for an ambush site in the dark.
The youngest vamp I had hunted was a year undead. Even then, their entire pasts—memories, sanity, and humanity—were still gone. It took years for a vamp to cure enough to find self-control and not kill any human it found. It took up to a decade to find its own memories lost beneath the hunger. All that was left to a newly risen vamp was the need to eat, drink, and kill for sustenance. The movements and sounds were pretty gross, and I totally got where the myth of zombies came from. Just-risen, young-rogue vamps equaled zombies. Almost literally.
The vamp behind me had lost everything that had made her human, and now she had to start from scratch, relearning how to walk, how to maneuver. Vamp speed, grace, and strength would begin to grow following her first blood meal, after she tracked and drained a victim to death. Or would have followed it, had I not found her first, and prevented that.
Then again, this was my first newly risen vamp. Hearsa
y among the small community of vamp hunters might be just that. The vamp on my trail might not need blood to be able to draw on vamp gifts and move faster than I could.
In a small clearing strewn with storm debris, I found a huge downed tree, its roots ten feet in the air, its limbs pointing to the sky on one side, and crushed by the wind and ground on the other. I leaped up to the horizontal trunk and walked along it to the first branch. Perched on the limb, I hefted my weapons into a better grip and waited. In my mind, Beast went still.
The rogue vamp wasn’t far behind, her scent swirling along the night breezes, her footsteps faltering and noisy in the brush. I didn’t think she had her vamp eyesight yet. Maybe vamp vision was part of the benefits of that first meal. Maybe it took longer. What did I know?
Crap. I was so not ready for this tonight. But at least the fear had settled with the movement and an ambush plan. I spotted her on my trail.
She stopped at the edge of the clearing, her nostrils flaring, her eyes staring and wild with that dull smolder they all had. Skin white, almost glowing in the dark, she didn’t look up in the low branches, but at the ground. She sniffed loudly, air moving through clogged sinuses. She mewled piteously and wiped her face, smearing filth over her skin like accidental camouflage. Tears trickled through the mess. She was crying.
My heart twisted. Stupid to pity the crazed and dead, but I did. On some level, I sympathized. I remembered what it had felt like to be empty of memories, lost and alone, stuck in a body I didn’t remember, among humans. Of course, I’d still been alive. I strangled a sigh, but the vamp must have heard. Her eyes darted up, into the limbs. She hissed. And dashed toward me.
Instead of taking the trunk as I had, she scrambled through the branches directly below me, huffing in hunger, her fetid stink rising. Almost lazily, I dropped from the branches, landing behind her, vamp-killer blade up, stake ready.
She whirled, snarled, reached for me. I stepped into her putrid embrace and touched her chest with the stake. Jaws wide, she rushed into the point. I rammed it home. It was so easy to kill the young. Too easy. The vamp paused as if frozen, her eyes on mine in the night. Humanity bled back into her gaze, puzzled and afraid. “No,” she whispered on her last breath. “No . . .” She crumpled at my feet, landing between two tree limbs, her legs splayed.
I knelt beside her and pulled a miniflashlight. The beam caught her full in the face. Under the filth, snot, tears, and dried blood, she was pretty, or had been. Curly brown hair, greenish brown eyes, short, needle-thin vamp canines, traces of makeup over very white skin. They always took the beautiful ones. I had never seen an ugly vamp. Like pedophiles, they liked them young and charming and pretty.
I set the flash on a limb, the light falling over the girl, and sheathed the vamp-killer, pulling a camera. I took photos from several angles, including a close-up of her face showing her new little fangs, and another of the stake through her heart. Photos were nice, but I needed more. I never trusted stakes. Lore says that a stake to the heart is fatal unless the sire is close by; he can sometimes heal a scion if he gets there in time. I pulled a knife with a slightly curved blade, and lay the edge against the girl’s neck, and put my back into it, cutting. Cold blood gushed over my gloves. A beheading was both final and proof for bounty. Newly risen, newly dead again.
When I was done, I set the head and the flashlight aside and grabbed the rogue by the heels. I pulled her far from the paths, and even farther from her burial site, and left her body for the vamp council’s cleanup crew to dispose of her. If humans got to her first, she’d be hard to identify unless she had prints on file. Besides, the vamps would make sure she disappeared before an autopsy was performed. Since vamps came out of the closet, there had been no reports of vamp postmortems. The bloodsuckers liked it that way.
Until recently this vamp had been human—a daughter, mother, wife, girlfriend, coworker, somebody important to other humans. Now she was dead and gone. Hundreds of people simply disappear each year in the U.S. because they walk away and find another life, or because they’re killed and their bodies never found. I had often wondered how many of the disappeared were vamp kills—wondered and never asked. The humans she left behind deserved closure of some kind, but I was betting that the vamp council wouldn’t give them that. Another dead rogue so soon after the brouhaha of the last one would be bad press. This girl would become one of the state’s missing and never found.
When the body was hidden, I scuffed away the drag marks with a leafy branch, and carried the head to Bitsa. I stuffed it into an oversized Ziplock bag and dropped it into a watertight carryall, which I slung over my shoulder. I didn’t have far to go, but if I was stopped by a cop, the head would be hard—though not impossible—to explain. I carried a copy of my contract with the vamp council in a pocket, and the vamp fangs were a dead giveaway (vamp humor) that I hadn’t murdered a human. Plus, there was a certain cop I knew who would back up my story. Rick LaFleur owed me a favor—a big one. I had saved his sorry butt two times.
I powered Bitsa up and tooled out of the park. Parts of the city—those close to city service buildings, hospitals, and other needed locales—were already back on the power grid, windows bright, doorways spilling light into the streets, and the party that never stopped in the city that was built for partying was back on go. Music and the rich scents of cooking food filled the air. Sirens wailed in the distance, with the sharp pop-crack of gunshots. Cars slid through the half-dark streets, slowing at the streetlights that were functioning, ignoring the rest. Other parts of the city were still pitch-dark, and would take a lot longer to return to life as usual.
Though the windows were all dark, the vamp council headquarters’s white-stucco exterior was lit with lights hidden in the vegetation, the rumble of generators in the background. I braked my bike as I turned into the circular drive, moving slowly, though there were no obstructions, limos, or armored cars, no one to look me over as I rode past, eyes following me the way professional muscle would, with a look that was half assessment, half threat. Of course, there had to be cameras. The place might look empty, but I knew it wasn’t. There was always someone on duty in case of emergency, a contact vamp, with access to all the clan masters.
Parking for the servants and hired help was hidden in back, but I pulled to the front door and cut the engine, lowered the kickstand, and unhelmeted. I was wearing bloody, muddy jeans and boots, was carrying weapons, crosses, and stakes, and I knew I’d have to ditch them all when I was searched, not that I’d even necessarily see a vamp tonight. I’d probably be reporting to a blood-servant flunky. What fun.
Though vamp citizenship was being considered in Congress, at the moment they were treated as aliens, and carrying a weapon beyond the foyer of the council house was tantamount to taking a weapon into a foreign embassy or a federal courtroom, a good way to get jumped on and locked away. I climbed the stairs; the door opened before I knocked. A blood-servant I didn’t recognize let me in—male, tall, well muscled, and bald, he looked like an escapee from the World Wrestling Federation. The guy was seriously big.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. He pointed to a table, where I set down my head bag and removed my weapons. This was my third visit to council headquarters, so I knew the score. When I was done, he motioned me aside and opened the bag. His brows rose when he looked in, but he made no other reaction, just resealed the bag. He patted me down thoroughly, not wasting any effort on being gentle. Handing me the bag, he pointed me to the small waiting room. The big silent type.
I’d been stuck here before on my previous visits, and knew there was food. I opened the refrigerator, taking a can of Coke back to the couch. The TV, set high on the wall, was displaying the weather with Ada’s northward progress mapped out in livid reds, greens, and yellows. I plopped down, popped the Coke, and drank. There were no windows. But at least this time no blood-servant stood guard at the door. Maybe they were starting to trust me. Or maybe there was just no one on duty important enough to guard,
what with Ada just passing. Or maybe I was locked in. Whatever. I was too tired to care.
I waited an hour, which was no surprise. I’d waited longer on a previous visit. I drank two more Cokes and raided the kitchen for food, putting a hurting on a plastic container filled with cookies and crackers. It was near two a.m. when the door opened. The WWF-looking security guy nodded me out and took off down a hallway. I figured he wanted me to follow, and grinned at the mental picture of his expression should I start opening doors and peeking inside instead. He glanced back and frowned as if he could read my mind and didn’t like what he saw. Meekly, I caught up, my head bag on a strap over my shoulder.
WWF Guy took me to the second floor, knocked, and opened a door; the herbal scent of vamp wafted out. WWF stood back for me to enter. Inside was a library, books on shelves and piled all around, and leather chairs with small side tables. Because it was a vamp room, there were no windows. A fire burned in the fireplace with the snap and scent of real wood. An air-conditioned breeze cooled the room. Ambience achieved at the cost of the vamp carbon footprint. Vamps weren’t into being green.
In a chair near the fire, a book open on her lap, sat a vamp I knew, the second in command at Clan Arceneau, Dominique—blond, pale-eyed, and at least two hundred years old. The last time I saw her, Dominique was chained, tortured, and suffering from excessive bloodletting and silver poisoning. I had threatened her and then saved the life of her clan blood-master. I had no idea if she would want to thank me or suck me dry in revenge. After all, I had left her chained. In silver. But she just looked me over as if I were a horse she might buy, or a slave. Dominique’s family had owned a plantation before the Civil War—I had done my homework and knew a lot about the most important and powerful New Orleans vamps.
Her nostrils widened, and I knew she smelled blood. And dead vamp. She went deeply and utterly still. Before I spoke, I too took a careful breath, to see if I recognized the scent of the vamp who had made the young rogue. Dominique wasn’t the sire. The tension went out of me. Not certain of protocol, I said, “You look . . . well.”
