by Faith Hunter
A sound like a silver bell echoed in the chamber.
I turned around. The beautiful man stood in the tunnel behind me, no wings, no halo, but so beautiful that Michelangelo would have killed to carve his likeness. Hayyel smiled at me, an expression so sweet it broke my heart. “As your Alex might say, hatred is fear on illegal drugs, a passion that would defeat love. And so there is always war.”
“Hate is fear on steroids,” I corrected.
He tilted his head and walked closer to me in my vision. His smile faded. “More arcenciels work to find a way to go back two thousand years in the past. Soon there will be enough of them in agreement to make the leap.”
“To destroy the Sons of Darkness.” I hadn’t known it took a lot of them to time-jump so far, but it made sense. The vamps I knew who had been collecting them had all seemed to want more than one. “You want to use me to stop them. I’m a pawn on a chessboard to you, just like I was to Leo Pellissier.”
He frowned slightly and I felt my insides quiver in dismay. I didn’t want him unhappy.
I realized he was manipulating my emotions. “Stop it,” I said. “Do that again and I’ll walk away.”
He lifted his chin, scowling as if I had pointed out a flaw in his perfection. And maybe I had. Humans were supposed to have free will—but I wasn’t human. He could manipulate me any way he wanted. I wondered if his boss knew he was trying to alter the current reality on earth. And then I wondered, not for the first time, if he was one of the fallen. Had I been played by an angel of the dark posing as one of the good guys?
“I am not among the fallen,” he said, throwing back an arm as if sweeping back a wing in disgust. “I do my duty. No more.”
“No more? Uh-huh.” Liar, liar, pants burning in the fires of hell. There was more here than I was being told.
“You, however, have not done your duty. More than once you have held a trapped arcenciel in your hands and have not ridden it to correct the evils you have seen. I gave you power.” He pointed to my middle. “You did not use it. Instead you play this game as half of a beast, hiding from the magic that is yours to use.”
I touched my belly, confused. He had to know. But . . . “All the magic, all the timewalking, gave me cancer. I’m dying in my human form.”
And I coulda sworn Hayyel was . . . surprised. “The power makes you stronger.”
“It tore my DNA into shreds. Last time I looked, it was four strands instead of two. I told God I was sick. I prayed. I shifted. I’m still sick. Timewalking and the weird magics in my middle are killing me.”
The door in the sweathouse opened. The vision dropped away. Frigid air swooshed in. The smell of vamp churned around me.
I whirled. Saw everything, backlit by the dim night against the snow. Two vampires stood in the open doorway. Strangers. Male and female. Vamped out. Armed to the teeth.
They went for weapons.
Beast shoved power into me. Speed. Tearing the blade from my belt, I attacked. Leaped. Dove into the snowy world, blade out to one side, claws out on the other. Whatever they expected, I wasn’t it. They didn’t move fast enough. The vamp-killer cut through the body of the one on the right, midline, at the waist. My arm and shoulder jerked with the impact. Left claws went higher, taking out the flesh below the collarbone, the left side of the throat, neck, up the back of the jaw and ear. One swipe. I landed off-balance. Tucked and rolled. Smelled Eli. I kept rolling. Three shots rang out. Three more. Three more. Three more. I came up behind a tree, stayed tucked. Located Eli in the dark. Sitting in a tree. Cold-suited. Headset with oculars and mic. Heard the faint clicks of a weapon mag being replaced with a fresh. I inspected the vamps. Both were still down on the snow. I took my first breath.
The vamps smelled strange. Acidic. Like boiling vinegar. I almost expected the snow beneath them to melt and boil, but nothing happened. The vamps stayed down. Eli dropped to the ground, silently moved through the trees and up to the bodies, his weapon out.
“Any more of them?” I asked.
Eli said softly, into a mic, “Activity?” To me, he said, “No. Alex found these two working their way in from the main road, through the trees. They startled a deer and it ran into the path of a laser monitor or we might have missed them. I’ll be installing more cameras in the morning.”
“Get Evan to help. He might be able to set some kind of far-ranging magical warning thingy in place.”
“I’ll be sure to ask for a magical warning thingy.” He sounded amused. I grinned at him in the dark, showing lots of fang and teeth. He snorted softly. “They skirted the house and the cottages, taking photos, then came here, as if they had notification you were inside.”
“Or someone told them about the sweathouse. Construction crew? Delivery help? How trustworthy are Kojo and Thema?”
“Shaddock says they’ve been bled and read and he knows the recesses of their minds.”
“But?”
“Kojo and Thema are centuries older than Lincoln Shaddock,” Eli said. “Not sure I’d trust the MOC on this.” He tapped his mic. “Copy,” he said into it. To me he added, “Kojo and Thema are on the way to carry the two back and interrogate them. Don’t attack the friendlies.”
I grunted and walked around the bodies, looking them over, checking pockets—empty—and clothing labels. Expensive Parisian clothing. Expensive Italian shoes. They carried a good dozen blades and two handguns each. I confiscated everything and started to close the sweathouse door. There was blood splattered on the wood in a swoosh I recognized, thrown from my claws. I had wondered if the house needed to be smudged before it could be used. Now it needed to be purified, ritually cleansed. Crap. I walked away, to face the creek farther down the hill.
On the frozen breeze, I smelled ginger, fresh-cut grass, and the trace of jasmine that identified the vamps Kojo and Thema. Didn’t turn around. Didn’t want to see them carting away our victims, enemies, and whatever else they were. Heard the two pick up the possibly dead vamps and carry them away.
I’d come back at dawn and cleanse the sweathouse, in case my new spiritual Elder came calling through the snowfall. For now, I followed Eli back to the inn, ate a half gallon of ice cream and a container of previously cooked pasta, some of Shaddock’s fantastic BBQ ribs, and half a chicken, cold from the fridge. It was an odd combo, but I needed calories and the sensation of eating solid food. Satisfied, I crawled into the bed next to Bruiser and fell instantly asleep.
* * *
* * *
The sky was only faintly gray when I stood outside the sweathouse door again, hesitating, surprised, seeing that someone—Eli—had washed off the splattered blood. I touched the wood and looked around, up in the trees and rock ledges. He wasn’t visible, but I caught his scent on the air. I said, “Thank you.”
“Welcome,” Eli said, his voice coming from far off, keeping watch. “Want company for a bit?”
I smiled slightly. “Sure.” Knowing I was safe, I went inside, squatted at the fire pit, and studied the fire-starting paraphernalia. In the center of the pit, I emptied out a plastic zipped bag of flammable stuff: well-dried slivers of beech and sycamore bark, lint, and what could have been Brute’s wolf hair. I untied a double handful of kindling, slivers of pine and cedar heartwood, and layered that over the lint with larger splits of well-dried oak. A book of matches allowed me to light the fire, the sudden illumination and acrid stench of phosphorus mixing with potassium chlorate, sulphur, and burned hair.
I sat on the cold ground, babied the flame as the kindling began to burn. Spotted a six-pack of bottled water and downed two in succession as the flames caught the dry wood. I sat at the fire and Eli entered, took a place across from me, his movements silent. He smelled like snow and a little like protein bars. He squatted so we were on a level and I could feel his eyes on me.
“Janie, what’s up?”
I thought a moment and went with the tr
uth. “The sweathouse has been complete for, what? Weeks? And I already got blood on it.”
“You’re talented.”
My half-form laugh sounded like a kitten growl. “Yeah. I’m good at blood. And death. And killing people.”
“Janie.” He sounded pitying. Which I hated. “You sitting here for a while? I’m going to check on the two fangheads and get some grub.”
“Grub.” I shook my head, smiling. “You mean a pile of greens and a chunk of steamed fish. Yeah. I’m going to sit here for a bit.” I met his eyes in the firelight. “Have you slept at all?”
“Enough.” He stood and put his hand on the top of my head for a moment in what felt like a benediction or blessing. He left me to my thoughts and closed the door on the dawn air. I felt, more than heard, him moving away.
I fed the fire. Added an oak log. Opened the herbs in the packages, put a stick of dried rosemary to the edge of the flame, and watched as it flared and smoked and scented the air. Thought about Hayyel and the dream. Vision. Whatever. Time passed. I began to sweat. My pelt darkened and lay flat to my skin. I hadn’t known I could sweat in this form. It made me itch. I drank water. Scratched. Added herbs to the flame.
One packet of dried herbs was a white sage smudge stick and I held the tip to the fire, where it blazed up, faded to red hot, then to a smoking black ash. I stood and lifted the smoking smudge stick to the north, east, south, and west, the smoke rising and filling the small building. A peculiar sense of contentment began to fill me, as amorphous as the smudge smoke. I fed the fire and relit the smudge. I carried the smudge stick to the four corners of the room. Held the smoke high and watched it climb to the rafters. I prayed. Sat back down.
After a time, the door opened. The heat that had built up whooshed away. I didn’t react in fear or surprise at the sudden interruption. I just sat there, smelling Eli and a woman on the air. He was close by, had brought her to me, which meant she was safe.
The woman stood in the open doorway, lit behind by snow and daybreak before she stepped inside and closed the door. She took off a coat and hung it on a hook by the door. Topped it off with a knitted hat that was crusted with snow. Unlaced snow boots and toed them off. She turned to me and put her hands on her hips, surveying me in the light of the fire. She didn’t run screaming at my half-form or rap my knuckles, so I looked her over too.
She was mid- to late sixties, stout, with broad shoulders and a belly. Her arms beneath a pullover shirt and a loose sweater were strong, brawny. Her hips and thighs beneath jeans were muscular. She had jowls and a saggy neck. A complicated steel-gray braid hung over one shoulder to her waist. Her appearance was not the whole of her at all. She was stern, stable, well rooted in herself, a steel blade of a woman. “Aggie said you were a skinwalker but not a liver-eater. A shape-shifter but not a were. You look like a monster.”
“I am a monster.”
She snorted. “No doubt. You stink. Go jump in the creek. I checked and there’s a deep pool just downstream of a log that fell across it. When you get back, strip and put on a tunic. I’ll be smudging your sweathouse.”
I thought about arguing, about telling her I had already smudged the building, but she likely had her own measures. I stood and moved to the door. She stepped aside. I went out into the cold and the door closed behind me as I looked around in the dull dawn light. I spotted Eli. So much for him taking a break. He was twenty feet high in a leafless tree, the branches a black etching in the grayness. He was securing a camera on the tree to cover the entire area. He paused and sat back on the branch he straddled, one hand on the camera. Wind gusts had died away and the air was so still and so cold it fairly crackled. The smoke from the sweathouse smelled strong and heavy, the air so lifeless that the smoke had fallen back to the ground and made a smoke-fog hanging two feet off the snow. I looked in the direction of the creek and back to Eli.
“The vamps?” My breath blew in a cloud and rested on the air.
“The silver rounds are proving to be a problem. They’re too young to recover as fast as I’d like. Maybe I should have shot them a little less.”
“Mmmm. Maybe, maybe not.” I stuck a thumb at the creek. “I have to jump in the water.”
“Better you than me.” Eli grinned at me, that rare, fully open grin, showing teeth. “The water’s about thirty-eight degrees. You’re gonna freeze your ass off.”
“Well, crap.”
Eli laughed. “Swimming hole is that way.” He pointed more downstream.
I walked to the creek, following a trail through the snow broken by the Elder. The bank where she had stood was twelve feet above the water; the far bank was low, sandy, and littered with driftwood and plastic water bottles sticking up above the snow, and raccoon poo that rested atop the frozen white blanket. Deer tracks showed that a herd drank from here, only yards from the house, almost as if they were taunting Beast. I found the log across the water and walked out over it, my paw-feet sure on the iced-over bark. The pool below me was deep and still and green. From upstream came the splashing of a small drop. Farther downstream the water picked up its pace again, louder with whitewater. I stripped and tossed my clothes to the bank. Took a breath. Closed my nose flaps. Stepped off the log. Plunged down. Deep. Blackness closed over me.
My entire body went into spasm at the cold. I forgot how to swim, how to breathe. How to even float. My heart raced. Panic chased through me. My throat closed up entirely. My feet hit bottom and buried to the knees in the muck. Blackness was intense. A waterlogged tree was jammed into the bottom beside me, branches broken. I hadn’t thought about that possibility. I could have impaled myself. The only light was up, toward the air, where dawn was brightening the sky. I was growing cold fast. I reached out and pushed against the dead tree, pulling my buried feet from the mud and clay and rotting vegetation, and shoved off toward the surface.
I breached like a dying whale. Gasping in a breath that spasmed through my chest. Forcing my arms to move, I swam to the bank, my limbs already stiff and clumsy. I splashed too much trying to get to the high bank and then I had to figure out how to get up it. I grabbed twisted roots that seemed to come from a sycamore, pulling my weight up the nearly vertical hill. At the top, I staggered, so cold my heart was doing funny things. My pelt was drenched and I shook to get the water off, feeling like a dog as water shot out in a fine spray.
I sat on the snow, landing hard on a hidden root, my breath ragged and coarse. By my left knee, lying on top of the snow, was a brownish feather, eighteen inches long, wide near the shaft, narrowing midway down at the notch. The flight feather of a golden eagle. I looked up, from the feather to the sky, searching for the raptor, but saw nothing, and then down, along the trail the Elder had taken to and from the creek. Twenty feet upstream, her tracks marred the snow next to mine. There was no way she could have thrown this feather unless she tied it to a rock. The feather was resting on top of the snow, leaving no indentation, only the markings of the quill and, more faintly, the barbs, as if it had fallen slowly from the sky.
Carefully, I lifted the feather. Pulled myself to my feet, my knobby hands on a low branch of a tree. I was so cold I had stopped shaking and was feeling almost warm, which was a dangerous sign of hypothermia. That told me my half-form was subject to extreme temperatures. Good to know, if I survived the cold this time. Holding the feather in my right fingers, I pulled my icy but dry clothes on over my damp pelt and trudged to the sweathouse, my bare paw-feet barely lifting from the snow.
My toes caught a root. I tumbled into a drift. Face-planted. And the snow didn’t feel cold. Great. I was freezing to death. I managed to struggle upright, to my feet. Eli was laughing, a hearty chuckle on the morning air. If my hands had worked, I’d have flipped him off. As if he knew what I was thinking, he laughed harder. I held on to the feather and, feeling like a drowned rat, made my way back to the sweathouse. Opened the door. Heat boiled out, steamy and herbal, and I closed the
door behind me fast, breaking out into a shiver so violent my fangs clattered.
CHAPTER 8
Pain Is a River . . . and Anger Like a Great Fire
The woman wasn’t watching me, so I set down the feather, stripped at the door, hung my damp clothes on an empty hook, and pulled on a shift from the stack on the table. Woven unbleached cotton with little nubs in the weave. I hauled it over my shoulders and tugged it down my wet body, and when I wasn’t an embarrassment to myself, I picked up the feather and dropped my body at the fire pit, letting the heat soak into me. “That s-s-s-s-sucked.”
“Mmmm. It was supposed to. I am Savannah Walkingstick of Long Hair Clan, an Elder of The People.”
“Not my c-c-c-clan,” I chattered, “not a skinwalker.”
“No. There are no skinwalkers left among the Tsalagi.”
Which meant she didn’t know about my family. Interesting. “I’m here.”
“You are a self-described monster. Skinwalkers were once the men and women who led us into battle. According to my grandfather, the last one was put down like a rabid dog in 1872, in Oklahoma, for eating the liver from the still-living body of a small child.”
She was baiting me. Deliberately. Were her words part of the ceremony? Or was she just mean? Or . . . she was afraid of me and this was a form of defense. Yeah. That.
I let her words sink in as I shivered, remembering the vision of Eli killing me when I turned into a liver-eater. Maybe there was a reason to fear me. I reached back and pulled my messy braid around to drip on the clay floor, my movement releasing the odor of wet cat. I placed the feather on the floor between my bent knees. “Why are you here? Why did Aggie One Feather pick you to lead me through ceremony and not someone like Hayalasti Sixmankiller? We’re in the same clan.” I leaned in toward the fire, though the heat was intense and my shivering increased.