by Faith Hunter
I opened my mouth, scenting, pulling in the world with a harsh sucking sound. My breath came fast, almost painfully, in gasps that resounded off the trees and filled my head with partial memories. I have been here. I have been here. Home . . .
The elevation fell away, quickly and furiously, trees and leaves and ferns flashing past as I followed the water down. A deer froze off to the side, and I slowed. Crouched. Stopped. Fixed her with a steady stare. Her scent flooded my mouth and body, and I started to salivate, staring at her. I panted, studying the doe. I don’t know what she saw in my gaze, but she whirled and bounded over a fallen tree, moving fast, uphill. My muscles tensed, bunching tight, as if to follow. I held myself still, hands gripping the boles of saplings to either side.
Meat! the voice said.
“No,” I whispered.
The presence within me, the voice that spoke to me, the . . . the weirdness that set me so much apart from the other girls, hissed, frustrated. And growled, stirring as if alive. With long practice, I shoved the voice down and moved on, away from the fresh meat. Deeper into the trees, the light dimming into colorless false dusk. Holding on to trees to keep my balance, catching myself when gravity took over and the earth fell away.
Artificial evening took over from the afternoon as the sides of a tight crevice closed in, and the rain became drenching, wetting through to my skin, down into my waterproof boots and the collar of my denim jacket. Shadows dappled and moved as if alive. Rain coursed down the mountain.
Nothing looked the same. Everything looked the same. I have been here. I have been here. Home . . .
The trees, which had once been huge and old—older than the ravens and the owls, old as the sky and the earth itself—had been raped by the white man, cut and butchered and carted away on trains, leaving bare earth and eroded soil. Now they had been replaced by saplings. I remembered both—the old, massive trees and the barren earth. I remembered the time of hunger. I remembered young trees, when the world tried to regrow . . . the world before and the world after. And a world of fire, when flames consumed everything and the few remaining animals raced in panic. For a moment I saw fire, red and scorching, the mountainside black with suffocating smoke. And the flood that followed, wiping out what little was left.
I had studied the history of the place. I was remembeso was rering the early nineteen hundreds, when white men stripped the entire Appalachian Mountains bare of trees. Matching my memories, there had been a fire . . . here. A time long before I was born. Surely it had been long before I was born. Yet I remembered.
I leaped over a rill of water and vaulted over a fallen tree, my palm abrading on the wet, rough bark. Now the trees were somewhere in between in size, no longer saplings, but not yet old, not yet wise. Less than a hundred years in age. So much smaller than my earliest memories. And still I plunged down, into the ravine with the water and the rain. Searching.
Something white caught my eye. I stopped. Frozen. Still. Where had I seen it? What?
Rain rolled down my face to hang on my nose and jaws, to drip from the end of my braid. I was at the bottom. Too far right. I moved left, slightly uphill, my feet squishing with the wet that rolled down my ankles into my boots.
I saw the glimmer of white quartz beneath a matting of soil and decades of leaves. I raced to it, knelt, and brushed away the detritus that hid it. And saw the faint line of gold trailing through the quartz. I touched my necklace. The same gold. The same exact gold: from this place, from this rock.
I sobbed hard, a concussive explosion of trapped agony. It was real. All this time. The memories, the dreams. All real.
Unbalanced, I slid downhill, my feet unsteady on the steeply pitched hillside. Caught myself on trailing branches and an oak trunk. Trying to think. How had white man not seen dalonige’i? The yellow rock. The gold he lusted after. How had it remained hidden?
Slightly above me, the ground around the boulder gave way, carrying with it pebbles and dirt and a few fist-sized rocks. Erosion had hidden the boulder. Floods had uncovered it, hidden it, and uncovered it again. And though the trees had been raped from the earth by the white man, though they had trampled all over the chasm, they had missed it. The boulder was still here.
My feet, precariously perched in the mud, slid out from me, and I sat down hard, landing with a splat in a runnel of water. A roar of white water sounded nearby, running off Horseshoe Rock above, the runoff grown to a river in the rain. Leaves bowed down, and droplets still drummed, and creeks appeared that had been empty only moments ago. Long minutes passed. I leaned a shoulder against the white quartz stone. Lifted a hand to rest against it, my fingers splayed on the cool stone. It’s real. . . .
Rain raced over me, dribbled through my fingers on the quartz. I’d found it. I had found the place of my dream. The only thing I had of my past. The one thing that the voice that possessed me and I agreed upon. This rock.
What had happened here? How long ago?
A shiver caught me up. I was so cold. My fingers were blue gray against the white quartz. I stood and moved uphill to a slightly more level place and stripped, tossing my wet clothes across a branch, careless even with the jacket and boots. I opened my knapsack and pulled out my sleeping bag, glad that the pierced and tattooed greenie t="oed grewho sold it to me had insisted that I buy the best rainproof brand. I dried off as well as I was able and climbed inside the bag, zipped it closed, and tied off the hood that protected my face. A minitent.
Encased, I curled into the fetal position and stared at the rock, unable to take my eyes off of it. My shivering eventually eased. The day died. As long as there was light, I stared at the white quartz boulder. With the thin vein of gold running up its side.
Dreams began the moment darkness fell, the night wet and chilly and utterly black. I was so deep in the chasm that there was no sky, no moon, no stars, not even clouds to spit out the rain. Yet rain still fell. My body vibrated, shuddering with tremors that I felt in every muscle, every nerve fiber, every cell. My flesh sparked and tingled, itching and painful, like a bad sunburn. In my dream I untied the sleeping bag and looked down inside. At my body.
If clouds were made of light instead of water vapor, they would look like this, like me, all sparkly silver, thrust through with motes of blackness that danced and whirled. The vaguely human-shaped mist coalesced, thickened, and eddied around me. Was me.
In my dream I stared as night rain beat down on the sleeping bag. I saw the snake in my body, deep in my cells, thousands of snakes, millions, each a double helix of snakes, twisted and writhing. And I saw the other snake, in my memory. The snake of the voice. The snake of the presence.
And I . . . shifted. Changed.
The grayness enveloped me. My body bent and flowed like water—or like hot wax, a viscous, glutinous liquid, full of gray light and gray shadows and black motes of power. The bones beneath my flesh popped and cracked. Pain arced through me like lightning. I heard my grunting scream, muted for lack of breath. The agony was a blade, slicing me bone from bone, nerve from nerve, fiber from fiber. Agony that went on and on. Whirling like a tornado of torture.
My breathing changed.
The light that was my body grew brighter, the dark motes within me darker.
Both began to dissipate. I slept.
Day came slowly, rain dropping with sharp splats onto the wet ground. Night bird sounds gave way to morning birds.
Hard to catch. Not enough to eat. My stomach rumbled, low growl of the hunter.
I crawled from bag, leaving behind earrings and gold necklace on wet cloth. I stepped from the sleeping bag, unsteady on four feet. Paws. With claws. I flexed my claws out, happy to see them clean and bright, slightly yellow in pale dawn. It had been long. Many years. Many moons. She was in control too long this time.
I—Beast—stepped down the slope to water, to a pool gathered in a shallow basin below the white boulder. The rock that tied us together as one. She did not remember why. But I—Beast—did. I am good hunter. I forge
t nothing.
I lapped at pool ak med at pnd then, hungry, snatched at human-bag of human-food. Bloodless, dead meat. But here. With strong claws, tore into bag and into other bags, scattering smoked meat across ground. Wolfed it down. Salty. Cold. Satisfied for now. Sat, grooming, above the water pool. In its reflection saw a mountain lion sitting, eyes golden, with human-shaped pupils. Puma concolor. Mountain lion. Big-Cat.
Heard scurrying in leaves. I froze. Slow steps sounded from downhill. Dainty. From upwind. Four legs. Tiny hooves. Smelled deer.
Leisurely sniff. Hunger rumbled. Prey. Slow hunch. I curved into earth. Wary, cautious placement of paw, paw, paw, silent into lee of white rock. Deer came down for water. Paused, head up, eyes going wide. Tensed.
I launched. Up. Claws out. Lips pulled back. Killing fangs exposed.
Deer leaped.
In midair, I twisted, a sinuous move, claws out. Sinking deep. Blood flooding like life. Struggle of prey, legs flailing. With a single wrench, snapped neck. Doe quivered. Died. Flesh in jaws was strong with muscle, wet with blood. Taste flooded my mouth.
I held. Unmoving. Feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling. Long moments later, her heart stopped, I dropped her, licking mouth and bloody paws and claws. Looking around for any who would steal.
Theft happened here once. Theft of prey and theft of life. Now this was a good place. Alone. With blood-food. I screamed. Claiming this place. My territory. Mine! Satisfied, I settled to the throat of the deer and ripped into warm meat.
Cat Tats
Rick raised his head, the tendons in his neck straining. Nausea roiled in his stomach and up his throat at the slight movement, and he dropped his head back. He was lying faceup. The rafters were barely visible over his head in a dusky, gloomy light. The familiar scent of hay and horses was strong in his nostrils, but it wasn’t the hay of his parents’ barn. There was an acrid undertang to this scent, as if the box stalls hadn’t been mucked out in a long while, and it was musty, as if horses hadn’t used the premises recently. He rolled his head to the side and saw a shaft of light filtering through dusty air, falling through a wide crack in the wall. No. Not Dad’s barn. He’d never let it get in this condition.
This place was abandoned.
He almost called out, but something stopped him, some wise wisp of self that wasn’t still hazy from the raspberry Jell-O shooters. He tried to sit up, but pain shot from his hands and pooled in his shoulders like liquid fire. His arms were bound.
He craned to see, blinking to clear his vision. His arms were pulled up high in a V and shackled with old-fashioned iron cuffs chained to rings. His legs were stretched out too, similarly secured, his body making a dual V. He was naked. Instantly his body constricted and his breathing sped. He struggled to rise and discovered that he lay on a wide black square stone, cool to the touch despite the Louisianarips heat. On the ground around the stone, touching the four corners, was a circle of metal, black in the light.
Terror shot through his veins, clearing the last of the alcohol out of his system. His heart pounded. His breath came fast, gasping. He broke into a hot sweat, which instantly cooled into a clammy stink.
He jerked his arms and legs hard, giving it all he had to pull himself free. But nothing gave. The pain multiplied in his legs and arms like lightning agony, at shoulders and groin with liquid fire. His wrists and ankles burned, the iron cuffs binding him, cutting into his flesh. He turned his head to the side and retched, but his stomach was empty and his mouth dry as desert sand.
When the nausea passed, Rick dropped his head back. Forced himself to breathe deeply, slowly, despite his racing heart. To analyze. To think. To be calm. He closed his eyes and mouth, and worked to slow his mind, to contain his racing fear. Around him the barn was silent. Lifeless. Where the hell am I?
When he was calmer, he raised his head again, and studied everything he could see, everything he could hear, analyzing it all. The barn was old, of post-and-beam construction, the frame of twelve-by-twelve beams fitted together with pegs and notches and the vertical boards of the walls nailed in place to the frame. There were four box stalls, one on each corner, with a tack room on one side between two stalls, and opposite the tack room, between the stalls on the other side, was a wide space to saddle and groom horses. The center area was an open passageway more than twelve feet wide, with moldy hay stacked on the wall opposite the double front doors. It had to be more than fifty years old, and the wood showed signs of termites and the kind of damage only time and disuse will provide. Foliage grew up close to the sides of the barn, vines and tree limbs reaching into the interior. Part of the tin roof was missing, and birds flew in and out, twittering and cooing. He could hear no sound of engines, which meant he was miles from any highway, miles from any airport, from any city, far from help. He could hear the faint sound of water rippling, echoing, a soft trickle, like a bayou moving sluggishly nearby. Rarely, he could hear a plop as something fell into the water. All of that was bad. But at least he was alone. For now. That much was good.
When he was calmer, he looked down at himself. If his body had been a clock, his arms would have been nearly at ten and two, and his legs close to eight and four. It looked familiar, and from his alcohol- and drug-fogged brain came an image: He was positioned like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Like an archetype. Bound in a witches’ circle, on a square altar. Like a goat for slaughter.
Was it the full moon? The new moon? Was he the sacrifice in some black-magic ceremony? A long shiver racked down his spine. Rick had a lot of specialized training under his belt, but nothing he’d learned in his criminal justice classes at Tulane, at the police academy afterward, or in the focused and elite training provided by his current covert employers had prepared him for this.
Judging from the angle of the sunbeam, the sun was setting. Or rising. The beam fell across the barn onto a rat-eaten saddle and bridle, and a bedraggled red horse blanket across a joist. As he watched, a bird alighted on the blanket and pecked, eating whatever it found in the ripped, rotting cloth. It pulled out a bit of C oufaint s stuffing and, with a flutter of wings, carried it away into the darkness of the rafters. To the side, against the nearest stall wall, was a glass of water, with a red straw in it. His mouth felt even drier at the sight, but there was no way for him to reach it. Rick dropped back his head.
In the academy, he had attracted the attention of the black-suits in the Justice Department. He had been co-opted for an undercover assignment, and given a plausible story and a believable problem that got him “kicked out of NOPD.” He’d jumped on the opportunity, even though it had meant a false arrest for assault, even though his family couldn’t know. And even though, if successful, he’d be alone with vamps, without backup. On the surface, he was a pariah to the cops, but he’d been working to infiltrate the vamps’ organization for the New Orleans Police Department, the local FBI field office, and some high muckety-mucks in the DOJ.
A pretty face and a checkered past, along with the police training and the criminal justice degree from Tulane, had made him the perfect hire as part of a security detail for one of Leo Pellissier’s scions, Roman Munoz. Munoz was a low-level vamp scumbag needing muscle for hire. Rick had worked himself up in Munoz’s organization, and when his new boss went to jail for tax fraud—the first successful vamp conviction in Louisiana, courtesy of Rick’s tips, passed to his handler—Rick had migrated into odd jobs for the vampire community: protection gigs, strong-arm stuff, and security. Watching for the golden opportunity to draw the eyes of the MOC—the Master of the City—Leo Pellissier.
Across the barn, a field mouse with tiny round ears scampered across the floor and into a hole. Above Rick, wings fluttered, sounding larger than the sparrow-sized bird. He tried his bindings again, trying to think. Getting nowhere.
He had proven himself and was now an established and trusted part of the lower-level vampire organization. He knew people. He had skills usually cultivated by thugs and thieves, and yet, thanks to his LaFleur upbring
ing in New Orleans society, he could blend in almost anywhere, even in the upscale Mithran culture. He was versatile, smart, and willing. The vamps seemed to like him and were using his services. Lately, he had done some work for his uncle, who was security chief and primo blood-servant for Katie of Katie’s Ladies, which put him one step closer to Pellissier.
He’d been undercover now for more than two years, a long time by covert standards. When his successful stint undercover was done, he would be perfectly placed to move up quickly in law enforcement. But the most recent assignment had proven complex. He was trying to discover where the Mithrans kept their rogues, the new vampires who were bitten and turned but not yet ready for public view. And he was trying to find out something—anything—about the MOC’s financial structure. Both had proved elusive, but he had been making headway.
Until his ego let him think he was about to get lucky with Isleen of the cute smile and the bounteous breasts. And the big fangs. A girl. He had been brought down by a girl. He was so damn stupid.
The last thing he remembered was the bar and Isleen, the girl vamp he’d been trying to pick up. And succeeding. Blond, blue eyed, about five two, and built to please a man, she had flirted steadily with him, even buying him drinks. . . . When did a gorgeous bo Ca glt mbshell ever have to buy a guy drinks? Stupid. Yeah, that was him.
He tried to raise his arms; the shackles burned his wrists. He lifted his head again, studying the stone and the witch circle. The stone was polished smooth, not with a high shine but with a matte luster. But it was dusty, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. And one corner was broken off, with a long crack weaving brokenly toward the center. The circle looked like iron in the dim light, but iron would interfere with any spell casting. So maybe silver, highly tarnished. Or copper? Could some witches use copper? But why had a vampire turned him over to the witches? The two races hated each other.
