by Faith Hunter
Beast thought, Beast needs dead cow for magic.
No. You don’t, I thought back.
She chuffed at me, cat laughter.
“And so are we,” Moll said. “Put on the crown. Take up the Glob. And here’s a lancet set.” She tore open some sterile packets, arranged everything on a silver tray, and held it out to me. “Clean your finger with the alcohol, prick your finger, and let three drops of blood fall into the silver chalice.”
I took the tray from her and fought laughter because this circle was supposed to be sacrosanct and laughing at her here seemed rude. “This isn’t a chalice,” I said, straight-faced, holding it up. “This is a silver shot glass.”
“If I say it’s a chalice, it’s a chalice,” Molly said, her eyes narrowing.
“Bossy,” Evan said.
“Stop saying that.”
“She’s so sexy when she’s bossy,” Big Evan said to me.
“TMI,” I said. “Waaay too much TMI.” Molly glared at me and I flapped a hand at her. “Okay, fine. Whatever. Your shot glass is a chalice.”
Inside the open circle, we were in a triangle, with Big Evan at north, his largest flute in his lap, Molly to his right with her plant, and me to his left with my Glob and le breloque at my knees. “Closing the circle,” Evan said, his voice deep and sonorous in the empty room. He blew a single note on his flute, a basso sound that echoed in the ceilings and made my flesh quiver. The breathy tone felt potent and imperative, as if something deeply significant was happening. Magic swept across my skin as the circle closed and some version of a hedge of thorns rose over us.
I shook the strange sensation off and plopped le breloque onto my head. Its magics shivered through me. The crown seemed to adjust to my head size, as if it knew I was about to call on it, as if this was something more than trying on a hat. Maybe it had felt the circle closing and reacted to the power. Or maybe it was once again claiming me. I’d intended to give the thing to the NOLA witches, but with Lachish Dutillet spending time in a null-room prison, I’d never gotten around to it. Never thought about it again. Which was interesting, but a thought for another time.
The alcohol was cold on my fingertip and I squinted my eyes and made a face as I stabbed myself with the lancet. Which hurt bad for such a tiny wound. I dripped three drops of my blood into the silver shot—um—chalice. “Okay. What now?”
“This is your magic, Jane,” Molly said. “Do your thing.”
“My thing.” Crap. Flying by the seat of my pants was how I got into this mess. But Moll was right. My magic wasn’t witch magic. She couldn’t help me. Carefully, I sought my skinwalker magics, the silver energies of the Gray Between, shot through with motes of darker power, now bound with the pentagram of witch magics inside of . . .
Inside of me.
Witch magics. Timewalking magics. Le breloque magics. Glob magics. Vampire priestess magic. My own magics. And the magic of an angel of the light. All bound together in a body with shredded DNA. I studied the red mote zipping along the star pattern of magics in my middle. And the silver and charcoal motes of my own power zooming along with it, adhering to the new pattern. And the faint, barely there shadow of black magic that had jumped into me.
Hayyel, the angel, had told me something about the pattern of my magics. What was it? I pulled the memory from the deeps of my mind, but it was half-formed, half-remembered. Something like, The new configuration of energies within you is a new strength. He said he had healed my soul home. And then he disappeared. Had Hayyel done this to me? Had he let my DNA get scrambled and let me get sick, so that I would . . . what? Die? A plan by the Almighty to get me to do something? If so, what? The disease within me had to do with timewalking. With changing time. So that meant . . . it had to do with fangheads and maybe the rainbow dragons, who wanted vamps to have never been. Yeah. That was a lot of help. Not.
I blew out a breath and tried again. Studying the magics. Wondering what an angel might want. Hayyel had been partly responsible for the making of the Glob. Sooo . . . Well-worn thought paths trampled down again.
The Sons of Darkness had been trying to bring their father back from the dead and steal power that wasn’t theirs when they dug up their father’s body and gathered the iron spikes and the wood of the crosses of Golgotha. They were trying to be as powerful as Jehovah and raise someone from the dead. They hadn’t known which implements of torture and death belonged to the murderer or the thief or the innocent, so they had used all of it. They had messed up. When they raised their father from the dead, he was a monster, whom they had been forced to kill and then chop into tiny bits to keep him dead. Hayyel knew all about the creation story of the vampires. Did he intend me to timewalk and fix something in the past? Or stop someone else from doing that and messing up the here and now? Or something else, even more obscure?
Surely an angel of the light, assuming he was one, wouldn’t have done something without the direction of the Almighty. Except . . . doing things on their own is how angels supposedly fell from the light and entered the dark in the first place. Over and over. I’d been over this ground so often my mind knew the patterns and I was getting nothing new, except that maybe Hayyel didn’t have a job for me. Maybe he hadn’t been part of causing the cancer. Maybe it was all just timewalking, which actually made more sense than an angel needing me to do something for God. Yeah. Okay. That was a relief.
I picked up the Glob. It contained a splinter of the Blood Cross and the Blood Diamond, powered by the magic of sacrificed witch children, and some iron discs made from the melted-down spikes of Golgotha. I turned it over in my hands.
My finger, still smeared with my blood, touched it. I jerked it away almost instantly, but a faint quiver of electricity shocked through me. It reminded me to call Ed. Edmund Killian Sebastian Hartley, I called. The blood on the Glob sizzled with heat, spitting black motes of power.
My vision went sideways, and I was in a different place. In a room, dark and muggy and . . . moving. Vibrating engine noise. The bed of a truck or an RV. Metal beneath my cheek. The stench of diesel and rotting blood and death. The sound of sex, bodies hitting rhythmically. Pain rippled through my body as if every muscle were in spasm. Hunger. Hungerhungerhunger hammered me. I pushed it away, feeling the direction of the truck. He was headed north. Toward Asheville.
My mistress?
I was in Ed’s mind. “Ed,” I whispered. “Hang on. You’ll be here soon. We can help you then.”
My mistress, he thought back at me. Stay away. The Darkness is within me.
I turned from the sound of his voice to a small corner in Ed’s mind. A semblance of his body was hunched there, protected at his back but vulnerable from the front. Something shadowy crouched beside him, amorphous, moving but contained, like smoke in a bottle. But the shadow had eyes. They were watching me with intelligence and intent. The Darkness Ed was talking about. An invader in Ed’s brain, in his mind, with him. Possessing him.
The Flayer of Mithrans. In Ed’s mind.
The thing in Ed’s mind spoke. Greetings to She Who Walks in the Skin of Animals. I will drink you down, the smoke said, with Ed’s mental voice. Inside the shadow I caught a glimpse of bloody human teeth and a blade and a sensation of terror. A fast vision opened in the air between us. Ropes and utter agony and the feel of bloody wood beneath my body. It was more memory than dream or threat. In it, the bloody teeth bit down and crunched through small fingers, ripping them off. A scream echoed, high-pitched and shrill. Pain clawed through me as if it were my own. Then in an instant, it was gone. The smoke shape broke and swirled in two different directions, like a tornado inside a tornado, closing over the images.
The Darkness shot toward me. Its mouth opened. Fangs. Dozens of fangs.
With a thrust of power, like blue electricity and the smell of burning anise, Ed threw me out. The vision ended.
I was back in the circle, lying on the rug, s
haking. My tongue was twisted up and around in my mouth as if it was trying to swallow backward, as if it was trying to crawl down my throat. I forced it into place and started coughing. Which jarred the thing in my middle. Pain went through me like a mudslide, darkening and covering everything. I rolled to my side and held myself, shuddering. My throat and tongue ached and when I could let go of my belly, I massaged my throat with one hand. I was cold. Too cold. Throat and hands and feet ached. But the circle was still active. I hadn’t broken it.
It took me two tries to speak, and when I did, every syllable hurt. “They’re starving him. Hurting him. Twenty-four/seven. The Flayer of Mithrans is inside Ed’s brain, trying to take him over.” I rubbed my throat and swallowed, my tongue feeling weird. My throat muscles ached. “I had access to a memory or a vision, as if Ed was fighting back, pilfering things from the Flayer’s memory.”
“How sure are you that Ed’s fighting back?” Evan asked.
“Pretty sure? Nothing else makes any sense.”
“What’s the Son of Deception looking for?” Evan asked, choosing a title that sounded more insulting than the others.
“I don’t know. I’d guess that it’s trying to break into the memories of Leo and me. Maybe take Ed over completely and use him to come after me. Ed’s resisting and counterattacking, but he’s . . . he’s in bad shape.”
“Why do you sometimes refer to Shimon as it?” Bruiser asked from behind me. I turned my head and saw him. He was a hairsbreadth beyond the edge of the circle, ready to break the circle to save me. Which would hurt him. A lot.
I breathed out a laugh, which hurt me a lot, and waved him away. “Shimon is more than a vamp. I think . . .” I thought about the shadow, the teeth, the movement of it, and I whispered past the pain in my throat, “I think he can do a sort of psychic possession and control. And while I know that no vamp is human, he feels even weirder than any others I’ve met.”
“He hasn’t been human in two millennia,” Bruiser said. “He’s the oldest vampire undead. It’s likely that he’s also quite insane.”
I described the vision-memory for them. “It felt real. It had texture and temperature and the smell of fresh-cut wood. The stink of a dead body, the cold of blood loss. The sensation of biting off fingers—” I stopped. “There was this awful scream.” I rubbed my upper arms, my skin feeling pebbled and cold. “I think . . . I think it was the memory of the black magic used to bring their father back to life. But it was all mixed-up and confused.” I remembered the smoke thing. The timbre and flex of the mental words. The twisting, swirling power of tornadoes, so different from anything I’d felt before. The Flayer of Mithrans was . . . other. I gripped my own throat, feeling my pulse, the beating of my heart.
“You’re pale as a vampire. You should quit now,” Bruiser advised.
“No. I need to call Gee again. He hasn’t answered the last fifty texts or calls, but with the signal boost of the witch circle, he might hear me, wherever he is. Just a feeling, but . . . I need him here with me.”
“Please, Jane. Don’t overdo it.” Bruiser shifted a hard gaze, sharp as a knife, to the two witches. “Don’t let her kill herself.” It was a threat. And it was so cute I wanted to cry, but I hurt too much to cry.
I managed to sit up and was tickled pink that my blood in the shot glass wasn’t totally dried out, and that I hadn’t spilled it. I folded my legs and took a breath, my eyes on the shot—chalice. Crap. Shot-chalice. I liked. Molly would hate it. “Girrard DiMercy. You swore loyalty to me as my personal Enforcer before I was the Dark Queen, before I even had a clan. By my blood and your word, I call you,” I said. Molly said a heat-wyrd and the blood in the silver shot-chalice boiled in a fast simmer and dried to a crust on the bottom.
In seconds, I felt Gee, feathers fluffing against the cold. He was in his Anzu form and the connection was clear and sharp. I was seeing through his eyes and the world was bright despite the night, like owl eyes. I knew. I’d been in Anzu shape once and owl more than once. Seeing with a night-hunting raptor’s vision was always weird. In Gee’s sight it wasn’t really dark, the ground was snow-free, and the air felt damp and somehow warm, though the distant trees were leafless. At the far-off tree line, I saw bison, a small herd standing in chest-deep snow, their breath blowing, ice crusted around their nostrils.
Gee was perched in a dead tree over a small pool of steaming water. Steam rose from the hot spring in globes of mist and fell in drops, a mimic of the action of the water bubbling, a luscious warmth. It almost looked like Hot Springs, not so far away, but the landscape was bigger, mountains on the horizon taller. Gee was in Yellowstone Park or someplace like it.
“If you fall in, we could make chicken and dumplings,” I said, aloud and in my mind.
“My mistress is amusing. How might I serve?” There was something snide in both the observation and the question. I decided to ignore it.
“I’m dying and the Flayer of Mithrans, Shimon, has Ed. I need you to heal me if you can, and help me save Edmund.”
“You should have asked much sooner. You are dying and your body is beyond my gifts.”
My heart fell. With everything else not working, I had placed all my healing hopes on Gee.
He fluffed his wings and made a sound that might have been pain. “I am not refusing assistance out of pique or stubbornness. I cannot fly. I am healing from battle, little goddess. In addition to all that, I owe you an answer to one question, not a boon, thus I will not come to you now. I will bide here until I am well enough to fly, and then I shall come, as a favor to my mistress, whom I serve. A favor to evaluate her death throes and determine if some help is yet available. I am not optimistic about your chances for continued life on this plane.”
He was still snide, but I could live with it. He was also splitting hairs, like in vamp parley, but he was making important distinctions.
“I accept that,” I said.
“For now, take up the blue feather and hold it when you are in pain. It will help.”
Being pain-free was enough for now. “Blue feather, no pain,” I said. “Got it. Who are you fighting? Are you in Yellowstone?”
“Not all of my battles are the battles of the little goddess. Fewer are for my mistress. Even fewer than that are your concern.”
Which told me to mind my own business. Gotcha.
He lifted a wing and shut off communication. But not before I saw the bright blue blood on the feathers of his chest. And the sliver of steel sticking from the wound. Gee was lethally allergic to anything made of iron.
I was back in the circle. I whispered, “Well, that sucked.” And I passed out.
* * *
* * *
I woke up outside of the circle, on the recliner in the TV room. The chair was warm. I felt oddly pain-free, and raised a hand, touching my middle, fiercely hopeful that the thing inside me might be gone. Nope. Still there. But my fingers closed on something. A feather. That had to mean I had been talking in my . . . trance? Whatever. Aloud.
I opened my eyes to see Bruiser standing guard over me, a fierce expression on his face, the beard making him look like a knight from some olden times. Alex was at his screens. The outside cameras showed the whiteout of blizzard snow. Eli was at the fireplace, guarding the grounds and house and everyone inside it, armed to the teeth and wearing his newest possession—lightweight military armor—over his clothing. His head and eyes moved from windows to doors to useless screens. Molly and Big Evan weren’t in the room. Everyone remaining seemed way too tense.
To Bruiser, I asked, “Y’all didn’t kill my bestie when I fainted, did you?” My voice was ragged and raw.
“No,” Eli answered for him, sounding unamused, “but it was a close thing.”
“Okeydoke,” I said. “First things first. Thanks for the feather.”
Bruiser nodded. “It was in the plastic bin in your closet.”
“It helps,” I said, surprised. “Like, a lot.” Feeling hopeful for the first time in months, I said, “So. What do we do about Shiloh?”
Bruiser said, “I updated Clan Shaddock. Lincoln is sending us two Mithrans and blood-servants capable of running an inn. Or the Official Winter Court of the Dark Queen of the Mithrans.”
I let that settle through me for a moment. Two unknown vamps here, at my home. With the kiddos. No way. They would be housed in the cottages. In fact, that was where Shiloh would go as soon as help arrived. If Shiloh hadn’t needed vamp blood to heal I would refuse the help, but I couldn’t do that either. Rock, meet hard place.
To occupy my hands so they didn’t betray my shock, I tucked the feather into my waistband, under my shirt and resting against my skin. The pain, now at a safe distance, felt almost like a remembered wound, an old bruise. “These vamps—”
“Vetted. Old, powerful, and not witch haters,” Bruiser said.
“Okay. But . . . Official Winter Court of the Dark Queen.” I looked up at him. “I’d prefer Yellowrock Appalachia, but I’m not going to able to avoid that DQ stuff, am I? All the pomp and circumstance and bloodletting.”
Bruiser’s brown eyes bored into mine, as if he was trying to find a way to keep my blood and body and soul all together by force of will. He took a breath so deep it was as if he drew it from his toes, as if he hadn’t taken one in hours. “I would protect you from it if I could.” A smile formed in his eyes and drew up his lips. “However, it has been my experience that you tend to rush toward any firefight, not away. I do not think you will try to avoid the fury of the storm that is any Mithran.”
“I have been known to step in where angels fear to tread.” Hayyel, specifically. Tentatively, I swung my feet to the floor and sat up. “Not bad. Gee gets points for this.” I pointed to the feather under my shirt. To Alex, I said, “Update.”