by Faith Hunter
Stone dust and sharp rock ground beneath my feet when I stood. There wasn’t much left of the boulders placed here for me by Katie of Katie’s Ladies. I looked into the dust and saw paw prints. Huge. Trite but true, they were dinner-plate huge. “You’re crazy,” I whispered to my other half. “Stark raving.”
And worse, Beast had done the impossible. She had taken a male form. I could see in memory, the X and Y chromosomes in the sabertooth’s genetic makeup. I had never done that. Didn’t know how, even now, after the event. Deep inside, I heard Beast hack with amusement.
A heated, burned smell rode the air. The grass was seared where hedge of thorns had burned through. If I dug down, I knew that I’d see burned soil as deep as six feet. My blood had triggered the ward; it had soaked into the grass and dirt all the way from the house to the boulders. I could smell it drying, already decaying. It was a lot of blood. I fingered my neck. The skin there was thin and raw, new flesh, not quite healed. The injury given me by Leo in his crazy Dolore state had been intended to kill me.
Nothing I said had been deserving of the attack, even accusing vamps of killing witch children. The Dolore had made him nutso.
He grieves his children, Beast thought at me. His son who was taken from him, and replaced by liver-eater. His daughter who he killed long ago.
“Oh,” I said softly. “Oh . . .” I hadn’t put his words together that way. “Okay. So it’s what? Dolore times two and I’m a handy punching bag?” Beast didn’t reply. I swallowed and the movement of muscles and tissues ached. I’d had difficulty shifting. It shouldn’t have been so hard. My hand drifted down and found my necklace was gone. The gold nugget necklace that tied me to the boulders here in the yard and to the boulders where I first remembered how to shift, back in the mountains, a white quartz boulder lined through with the same gold that made up my necklace. It was the gold that made my shift easier. Without it, I’d be able to shift only when I had extensive time to meditate my way into the change. Or force it, painfully.
I gathered up the beads that had come from my hair with the previous shift, holding them cupped in my hand, and inspected my clothes. My T was ruined but the jeans had somehow survived the shift and the weight gain, pushed off me as I changed. I tossed them across my shoulder. Undies were ruined. Fuzzy socks okay. I tucked them under my arm. No gold nugget.
Surely the necklace had just been ripped off and left in the kitchen. Surely Leo hadn’t taken it. A shiver that had nothing to do with the warm air on my skin gripped me. My stomach growled with the need for food. Shifting used up a lot of calories. I needed to eat.
This time I went into the house through the door. Inside, I dumped my clothes and turned on the lights to study the mess. I had bled like a stuck pig. It was all over the floor, furniture, walls. Blood smeared by fighting, sprayed by arterial pressure. It was going to be a pain in the neck—pun intended—to clean it all up. And the window was ruined, all that old hand-blown glass shattered out. So much for my plans to keep this place pristine.
I spotted the necklace under the kitchen table, the double chain wrapped around a chair leg as if it had been slung and the force of the throw had snapped the chain around and around. I peeled it free and checked the clasp, which was only a little bent. I straightened it and washed the necklace at the sink, putting it back round my neck before I did anything else.
While oatmeal cooked and a strong pot of tea brewed, I cleaned up the mess. The blood was tacky, already partly dried, but it came off the floor with hot water and a scrub brush. The dirty, bloody water went down the toilet with all the other blood from today. I sprayed the floor with Clorox cleanser and let it soak. I didn’t want to leave any blood evidence should cops ever need to do a crime scene investigation in the house, but removing all traces was impossible without tearing up the floor.
While I ate, I debated shifting again, this time to a rap-tor so I could overfly the city, but I changed my mind. Instead, I dressed in my new vamp hunting clothes, wearing my second pair of new boots—lace-up butt stompers—and made sure I had all my weapons in place, especially my old chain-link collar to protect my neck. If I’d been wearing it, Leo wouldn’t have injured me nearly so badly. I’d have had time to draw weapons on him. Leo might actually be dead. I touched the thin skin, like delicate silk, ridged where the flesh hadn’t knit back smoothly. I wasn’t going anywhere without full garb anytime soon.
I dialed the hospital, expecting the call to go to the nurses’ desk, but it was put through to her room. Molly answered. Against all expectations, she was awake, though groggy. My heart leaped, and my traitorous eyes teared up with her hello.
“Molly?”
“Hey, Big Cat. You saved my life,” Molly said, not sounding strong at all, but terribly weak and breathless. Tears thickened her voice as she broke down. “My babies . . .”
“I’ll save your babies,” I said, helplessness like a heavy weight pressing on my shoulders. “Evan and Evangelina are on the way. I called them. They can help you heal. And then you all can help me with the search.”
“Evangelina’s gonna come in and take over.” She laughed through the tears, the sound forlorn. “Don’t let her bully you.”
“I won’t,” I lied. Evangelina was a take-charge kinda woman. Even Beast was scared of her.
“Do . . . do you think they’re still alive? Do you think someone is hurting them?”
Her voice broke on the question and my breath stopped. When I could speak I said, “Yes. No. I mean, I think they’re alive and being well cared for right now.” I had to believe it. Had to.
Then Molly said, “Whatever they’ve been stolen for, the rite will probably take place on or near the full moon.” She was trying to think like the kidnappers. God help her. But she was right. Any magic performed during a full moon would be highly amplified. And a full moon was soon. Very soon.
Molly choked back a sob. “It’s not much time. Not much time at all.”
“Plenty of time. I’ll have them back before the full moon.” I gripped my cell so hard the plastic gave. “I promise, Mol. I promise on all that I hold holy.”
She sniffed. “That austere and ungiving God you worship?”
I touched the necklace I wore as if it were an amulet or icon—or a cross—the nugget warm from my skin. “Yeah. Him. I swear it. You should have gone home, Molly. You should have gone when I told you to. I’m so sorry I didn’t make you leave.”
“Angie said if we left, a bad man would take us on the road.”
My throat closed up tight. What did it mean, take us on the road?
“I think it was a vision, Big Cat. And because of it I didn’t leave town.” Molly sobbed, her voice sounding broken and torn. “If you had made us leave, I’d have holed up in a hotel. And it would have been a lot worse without you close by. I’d have . . .” She took a breath, and I heard the sob in it. “I’d have died.”
“Crap,” I whispered.
“Yeah. Understatement of the year. And hey, you need to know. Those feelers you asked me to put out to the local covens about them helping with vamps? Not so much as a nibble. No one’s talking. I tried. I really tried.” And Molly was crying again, though her tears were for her missing babies, not my missing info.
When Molly had stopped crying and fallen asleep, I hung up and dialed Troll, to tell him about the damage to the house. And that I was closer to finding the maker of the young rogues and Bliss. Not exactly a lie, but not really the truth either. Not yet. But soon. I had promised. I’d given my word to Mol. I intended to keep it.
I inspected my map with the sites of young-rogue vamp attacks pinned on it, remembering the lightning strike in New Orleans City Park where I had witnessed the young-rogue rising. I pulled a scrap of paper to me and began listing what I knew and guessed. I was chasing Rousseaus, one a master-vamp who was violating the Vampira Carta and—by the closely related scent signatures—possibly his siblings. They were Rousseaus who never spent time at the clan home, which meant they could be an
ywhere in the city. I couldn’t simply bust through the Rousseau clan-home door and stake them. If I attacked before I knew exactly what was going on, I’d give them the opportunity to flee, or worse, put their plans in motion immediately. I was looking for vamps using witch magic and witch children’s blood, maybe doing something to avoid the devoveo. I didn’t have a clear picture of it yet, but it was here. It was right here in front of me. Whatever the heck it was.
I stuffed my supplies in Bitsa’s saddlebags and tore off on the Harley, moist, heated air touching me through the unzipped mesh pockets, otherwise deflected by the new leathers I sweated in. I needed to see what had happened to the newest grave site in Couturié Forest in the New Orleans City Park.
It took time to build the sites where humans were killed, buried, magic was done, and young rogues were raised. Time and magic and privacy. And so far as I knew, there were only three places where that had been done, and only two were still in use. I had to bet that the young-rogue maker would go back to one of them rather than start new elsewhere. I bent over Bitsa and urged her to more speed.
The park was closed this late, but I parked Bitsa a block out and jogged in, searching, following my nose along the paths. The ground wasn’t rain saturated now, but had absorbed the moisture dropped by Ada, and the detritus of hurricane winds had been cleaned up. The smell of damaged trees and rain-beaten plants was still strong, but without the waterlogged, slightly salty reek from before. I left the path and quickly found the ten-foot-diameter circle. I remembered that a cleanup crew had been sent to dispose of the body, and they had obviously been here too. The crosses had been ripped from the trees and the pentagram of shells had been scattered. I could smell the humans who had cleaned the place up, two men and a woman, sweating in the heat of day, sunscreen and deodorant and soap and shampoo scents still on the air. And above the odors of the crew, the more recent scent of a solitary vampire. One who had stolen the children and Bliss. He had stood here, within the last two nights, right where I was standing, studying the scene. And he’d been angry.
I could taste his fury, building, hot and feral, but controlled for all that. Had he come to raise the young rogue? I remembered the smell of Hurricane Ada’s lightning when I first came here, my curiosity what a lightning strike in the middle of a major working would cause. He’d walked off, angry and alone. His rogue had risen without him. Had risen early. . . .
So where would he go? Where would he start another circle? Someplace where he felt safe? Would he go back to the vamp graveyard, a place where he’d worked for a long time and never been discovered? Vamp-fast, I raced back to Bitsa and fired up my bike. With a screech of wheels, I tore from the park and toward the river, the traffic lazy and slow this time of night.
I called Bruiser’s cell on the way, alerting him that I’d be setting off alarms. He didn’t volunteer to meet me there, didn’t comment that I was alive. He sounded distracted. He promised to turn off the system and hung up. No British gallantry or etiquette in him tonight.
I reached the vamp cemetery and wove Bitsa off the old road and around the gateposts, cutting the engine when I was inside. Exhaust fumes rose around me, poisonous and rank. The silence of the dead filled the night. I unhelmeted and set the kickstand. Pulled the Benelli from its harness rig and checked the load. Again. I clipped a flex strap to it and slung it to my back, easier to pull from than the riding rig.
I set four silver crosses on chains against my chest as a twofer: they’d glow if a vamp was nearby, and they’d poison any vamp who touched them—well, except for Leo, if he was to be believed. I pulled two stakes, careful to make certain that they were both silver tipped, and held them in my right hand, one pointed out, one pointed in. My largest vamp-killer in my left hand, its eighteen-inch blade bright in the night, I stalked into the graveyard.
My night vision was better than most humans’, I figured because of all the years I’d spent in Beast form, so I didn’t need a flashlight. The white marble walls of the crypts were shining pristine beneath the nearly full moon. The white shell pathways glowed against the black ground. Dull reddish light flickered in the stained glass windows of the chapel, a single candle indicating that someone was present. Sabina Delgado y Aguilera, the priestess of the vamps, was home. I wondered if she was taking callers.
I checked the crypts, satisfied that they hadn’t taken damage. Then I walked around the graveyard, taking in the night through nose, mouth, eyes, ears. As I walked, the skin on the back of my neck rose. A feeling of tiny claws skittered up my back. I had a feeling that I’d missed something when I was here last.
I wasn’t prescient. But I was getting a bad feeling.
CHAPTER 16
They killed me already
I checked the old sites for new activity of a rising-rogue sort. There was nothing new at any of them, but at the third one, my feet touching the displaced circle of shells, I smelled something bad. The smell of death, rank and sweet and foul.
I moved upwind into the trees, away from the graveyard. Drawing on Beast’s instinct, night vision, and svelte, lissome grace, I moved between the thickly growing trees, silent, not a leaf cracking beneath my boots. Sweat trickled beneath my leathers. I carried the vamp-killer in my left hand, the Benelli in my right, the butt stock collapsed so I could hold it one handed.
As I walked, the sickly sweet smell of death grew, and beneath it, an even older scent—blood left to rot, the sacrifice for whatever dark magic had been done here. Floating along under the blood and death scent was the ozonelike taint of witch magic. Magic only recently spent. Magic still fresh and potent, smelling of piney woods and mushrooms, roses and fresh-turned earth, with a hint of brine, the scent of an earth witch with strong abilities and affinities for growing things and with the soil itself. Or maybe two earth witches, working in tandem. And under it all was the scent of dark rites. Fear, blood, and sacrifice. My hands clenched on the weapons and I relaxed them only by an effort of will, focusing my attention back on the scent signatures and what they might mean. I didn’t like this. Not at all. The musk of my own fear-sweat joined the heat-sweat trickling down my sides. I unfolded the stock and held the Benelli at ready, able to fire one-handed if needed for a close-range shot, or quickly brace it with my left arm for a more distant one.
I didn’t smell the fresh odor of anyone, maybe not since Ada. So the magic had been set on a timer or a trigger, warded for scent so no one could find it, and was only recently initiated. Since I hadn’t smelled the site or the magics when I was here last, it had likely been under a stasis spell, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t someone coming soon. Or someone approaching from downwind of me. The back of my neck itched, an uneasy worry. I remembered the smell of angry vamp at the city park rising site. He had come back to see what rose, to inspect his scion.
Holding Beast close to the surface, I moved through the trees with catlike grace, slowly lifting and placing each foot. As I moved, I felt for my direction and decided I was heading vaguely north. Beast was better at knowing her bearings than I, but worse at translating and communicating her directional sense. I was sweating heavily, the new leathers’ mesh pockets not a big help without a bike-generated breeze.
A tingle of broken magic brushed across my skin. I stopped. I had found a new ten-foot-wide circle in the trees, the shells still covered by debris from the hurricane. I sniffed, parsing the various scents, analyzing. Something was different here. Vamps rose on the third day after they were turned and died their first death. But from the smell, this one had been in the ground a lot longer. Long before Ada. Something said this was important.
Both instinct and experience told me that the many kidnappings of the witch children were about these vamp risings. With the thought, fear started to rise but I crushed it. I couldn’t give in to emotion until the children were safe. I would not. I forced my mind back to the puzzle.
Why would witches and vamps work together to steal witch children? Why graves with crosses? And why leave a newly
turned vamp longer in the ground? It was senseless. It had something to do with the curse and the curing process—but what? Stopping, I leaned against a tree, my vertebrae pressing through leather into the rough bark. I listened, sending out my senses to taste, scent, hear, feel everything on the night breeze. Traces of magic floated along the skin of my hands and face, appearing tattered, smelling scorched. In Beast-vision, the traces looked much like the broken wards on Molly’s house.
Ahead, something groaned softly and breathed through thick tissue, the sound making me think of a congealed mass. I tossed the vamp-killer lightly up and down in my hand, making sure of a firm, sweat-free grip. Ever more slowly, I moved deeper into the woods, staying downwind. The four crosses on my chest began glowing palely, alerting me to the presence of a vamp.
Something coughed. The sound was human, or almost, long and retching. A glob of something gooey was spat and my stomach wanted to turn. Beast’s hackles rose, the skin and fine hairs along my neck and shoulders reacting to her instincts, in a rippling of raised flesh. She pushed my nausea down and away, looking through my eyes.
I slid through the trees, silent as a predator stalking prey. I saw movement as something paler than the trees lifted. It resolved into an arm, rising to wipe a face. A male, black, wearing a once-white shirt and dark pants, stood in a little clearing just ahead. His feet were bare. Moving drunkenly, he sat on a downed tree, coughing and spitting. I was about thirty feet away, close enough to study him with my better-than-human night vision. The pants resolved into jeans, and the shirt into a long-sleeved dress shirt, sleeves rolled up and a T-shirt underneath. He was about twenty, with tats up the side of his neck and along his arms in full sleeves. The neck tat caught the moonlight, revealing a black widow, red-dotted abdomen the size of a silver dollar beneath his ear, and its legs wrapped around his neck as if it held on while pumping venom into him. I was pretty sure it was a gang tat.
