by Faith Hunter
In an act that I had never, ever wanted to experience again, Beast reached through me and brought up the Gray Between, the gray place my skinwalker energies were stored. No, I thought at her. She ignored me. Time slowed fractionally, then more. And again, to a consistency of tar, a hot, clinging thickness to the air. The thing was Joses Bar-Judas. A Son of Darkness. Leo’s prisoner. Until now.
The last time I saw him, he had been a sack of bones hanging on the wall of the lowest subbasement, crucified there with silver spikes, held in place with silver chains and several pocket watches, each containing a piece of the iron spike of Golgotha. He had been a dried-out, leathery husk of a thing, nowhere near human, blackened all over, with insane, glittering black eyes. He’d also been overly chatty for a nutcase with a dried-out strip of jerky for a tongue. And I had thrown a silver knife into his throat to shut him up.
In hindsight I could see that might have been unwise.
CHAPTER 2
Warp My Sexual Development Forever
His black eyes settled on me and his mouth opened slowly, so slowly, to reveal a maw full of cracked and broken teeth, brown with age, and fangs like tusks in his upper and lower jaws. Even in the time bubble created by my Beast and me, Joses Bar-Judas could see me, see us. Power rippled across him, sparking white and black, colder than an arctic snow, hotter than volcanic ash falling from a flaming sky. The power didn’t so much dance across his skin as sizzle. So unbelievably powerful. And that was new. That meant he’d fed, and well.
I didn’t know how it had been arranged or carried out, but the fight among vamps on sub-three and -four had been a diversion. For this guy.
In the bubble that let me stand outside of time, he altered course, shifting trajectory fractionally, heading right for us. Eli was squeezing the trigger of the subgun. From inside the bubble I could see the silver-lead rounds leaving the muzzle of the gun, spiraling and twisting, half an inch at a time, a puff of black dust exploding out with each round. And Joses, a Son of Darkness, ducked to evade them. He was that fast.
Faster than HQ’s ambient time, I unsheathed a silver-plated vamp-killer. Leaped forward, taking the time bubble with me, ducking beneath the rounds blasting forward and the hot brass discharging out to the side of Eli’s gun. My right arm extended in front of me, point forward, more like the way one would use a sword than the way one would hold a knife in a knife fight. I heard the deep tones of a voice in my earpiece, the word so slow the sound was meaningless.
I pushed off with my toes, stretching into the lunge, feeling the new muscle memory of sword practice supporting my intent. Joses opened his fingers, exposing his hand. Around his neck was a gold chain, like a necklace, with red things dangling from it like rubies. On his wrist he wore a bracelet, half-hidden by the tatters of clothing, or maybe tatters of half-mummified flesh; it too was shiny gold.
My eyes latched onto his black ones, his desiccated lips moving. Shock thrummed through me like the single tone of a large bell, recently struck, vibrating, a pounding pulse of surprise.
As the vibrations hit me, I realized that the pulse wasn’t just shock, but was part of the word I’d been hearing. Joses Bar-Judas was speaking that word. That wyrd. A spell of darkness encoded into a single word, the power released when it was spoken.
The first syllable slid along my blade, heating it red-hot. Before I could react to the heat starting to burn where I gripped the hilt, it rolled up my arm, singeing the leather, heating the silver-over-titanium chain links between the outer leather and the silk lining. Over my shoulder and neck. The wyrd of power slammed me in the face like a sledgehammer.
Even in the time bubble, I was knocked backward, hard, my head whipped forward and back, my arm shoved down. I struck the wall, spine and back of my head first, then my limbs, ricocheting. My whole body shuddered at the impact of the power.
The time bubble popped.
I was rammed down into the marble floor, feeling my whole body hit and bounce. Just before everything went dark, I saw Joses Bar-Judas skitter out the door. Into the dusky . . . sunlight.
* * *
I woke slowly, with a headache pounding like I had been tucked into a fifty-five-gallon drum and someone was beating on it with a mallet. My gut was twisted, a gripping torture that felt as if I had swallowed a nest of live rattlesnakes and they were attacking me all at once. “Holy crap on crackers with . . .” I gagged, retched, doubled up on the floor, as my adnominal muscles contracted and my lungs forgot to breathe. The bout of pain and nausea lasted forever before it began to ease. After too long a time, I was able to force a hand between my chest and thighs and press against the knot that used to be my belly. I licked my lips, unable to think, and not remembering what I’d been saying.
“Jane?” The voice was tinny and far away. Oh yeah. Someone had been calling me.
I managed to inhale, my ribs protesting. Strongly. But the smells that hit my nose were of nitrocellulose, burned gunpowder, blood. Lots of blood. Battle. I had to get better, fast.
“Jane!” the tinny voice shouted.
I grunted. Managed to slit open my eyes. The light was blinding. I scrunched them shut and waited out a dozen of the painful mallet-pain-heartbeats. When the ache seemed to be abating, I tried opening them again. I was lying on a white marble floor, on my side, with my back against a gray-white wall and my head turned at a painful angle. Over me hung a painting, crooked on the wall. I blinked groggily at it to see a blond woman with grayish hazel green eyes, wearing some kind of gauzy evening gown, her shoulders bare, her décolletage mostly bare too. I knew her. Katie. Katie the vampire. I knew vampires. I worked for vampires. Right. And I was sick because Beast had taken over and forced me to fold time. At least this time when the bubble of time popped, I wasn’t throwing up blood.
Using one hand and both feet, I shoved myself upright, to a sitting position, knees bent up to my chest. The other hand fell, limp, pain ripping up my arm as it landed on the floor. There were blisters on the hand, the kind you get if you accidently pour scalding-hot tea on yourself. I’d done that at my sensei’s dojo when I was a kid. It had required a trip to the emergency room, but the blisters had healed really fast. Because I was a skinwalker. It was all coming back.
The hand hurt when I tried to open it, and I sucked air through my teeth as I released the thing I was holding. It clattered to the floor. It was a knife, scorched, ruined. The blade, once silver-plated steel, was warped, the edge wavy, the silver blackened where it had melted and formed runnels before cooling again. The leather-wrapped hilt was blackened except for the shape of my hand. A vamp-killer. I kill vampires. It’s what I do. Right.
“Janie! Answer me or I’m calling the cops!”
The memories finally started moving, a slow cascade that morphed into an avalanche. Alex. Coms. Eli. Derek. Joses. Holy crap. The Son of Darkness.
I raised the unblistered hand and tucked the headset back in place in one ear. “I’m here, Alex,” I whispered, my throat so dry it hurt to breathe. “How long have I been out?”
“Ninety-seven seconds out totally, another hundred forty getting your wits back.” He cursed foully and didn’t apologize for it, so I knew he was scared. The four minutes, plus or minus, didn’t seem like a long time, but in battle that could feel like forever, especially to the people watching and not taking part, unable to help.
“Update,” I said.
“Eli and Derek and three security guys are running through the Quarter, chasing a smoking fanghead-zombie thing. I guess no one told the zombie-vamp that the sun was up and he needed sunscreen.” Alex made a sound that could have been an attempt at laughter but fell far short. His levity was a crack at sounding macho, when he was really in panic mode.
I decided to not respond to it, saying instead, “Tell them to be careful. Joses has a wyrd of power and he knows how to use it.”
“I know.” Alex’s voice went grim. He sounded harder, older, than he had only this morning. “We all know. Debrief,” he said, ready to c
atch me up to date on the missing four minutes. “Eli put a mag and a half into him as you went all Jedi knight and attacked. In the next half second, Joses used the spell on you. Eli jumped behind the half wall. He wasn’t hit. Derek appeared from the hallway and filled the zombie with silver. He took a spell-hit too, but not near as strong as yours. He dropped back through the doorway and out of line of fire. Then Eli put nearly a full magazine into the zombie’s back. The vamp didn’t use the spell this time, but the rounds didn’t even slow him down.
“He took off outside, leaving a trail of smoke. Eli and Derek’s men followed. Derek, when he could stand again, pulled you against the wall, out of the way, and went after them.” He took a breath that sounded suspiciously tearful. I didn’t comment on it. Just waited.
“Jane?” Before I could reply, he went on, his distress deeper. “Next time there’s trouble at an entrance, stay behind the damn wall. It was built to protect you from every single thing that hit you, vamps, magic—”
“Eli’s okay,” I said, softly.
“You don’t know that. He isn’t answering on coms.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding why he was so rattled. “He’s probably busy,” I said gently. “And he’s off premises, so they’ll be communicating by talkies or cell. And they probably haven’t had time to sync their phones into your system.” Then, to give him something to do, I said, “Tell me what’s happening on the other floors.”
He took another breath, this one more stable but still wet sounding. “Yeah. Okay. I’m monitoring coms from off-site, so I don’t have access to the remote joystick for the dynamic cams. But on sub-three we have vamps feeding in the hallways. Just a word of warning—don’t go down there. I had to turn off the video. I need to scrub my eyeballs with bleach. There’s stuff happening down there that’s gonna give me nightmares and warp my sexual development forever.”
“Yeah. I’m real worried about that.” Not.
“How bad are you hurt?” he asked. “Do you need to shift?”
I blinked and looked up. Right. He could see me on the security camera. Beast? I thought at her. She didn’t reply, and I had to wonder if the blast of magic had hurt her. I shook my head to clear it and sought the Gray Between, the place where my skinwalker magics rested. And it wasn’t there. I . . . couldn’t sense it at all. Fear twisted through me like frozen barbed wire, burning where it touched.
Using the action to cover my reaction, I pushed myself to my knees, then to my feet, with my unblistered left hand. My gut was roiling, and I retched, the spasm making the pain worse for a terrifying space of time, but I didn’t vomit blood. Always look on the bright side. I’d had a housemother who used to say that, at the children’s home where I was raised. I wasn’t sure how that related to the sickness I experienced after folding reality, but it wasn’t bad advice. I might try it as soon as I could stand upright again. Walk again.
With the toe of my boot, I tapped the scorched vamp-killer. The blade shivered and split, sharp shards of steel flying up and tinkling down to the marble. With my left hand, I lifted my right arm against my waist, feeling blisters burst along my lower arm. The pain was like sliding my arm through burning cacti. It was all I could do to keep from screaming, but I held my breath until the agony eased, keeping silent for the Kid. Moisture leaked into the silk lining, feeling cold and slimy beneath the roasted leather.
Even though he was not yet of legal age, I knew better than to treat Alex like a child, and since I knew he could see my face, I answered honestly, “I’ve had better days. Continue.” As Alex talked, I opened the med-pocket on the thigh rig and pulled out a roll of self-adhesive sticky bandage, fashioning a makeshift sling so I could keep the arm in place. The material was black, like my leathers. Eli liked military medical stuff, and so a lot of our medical gear was plain white, stark black, or army camo. In this case, the color would make my injured condition less of an issue until I could see to it.
“Sub-four floor is calming. Leo’s there. He’s pis— He’s not happy. But he’s not raging either. Wait. He’s heading down.”
“Down to sub-five?”
“Yeah. And cameras are off-line there. Working to get them back on system, which would be easier if I was there or if Angel Tit was on duty.” Angel Tit was Derek’s best coms and security guy, and we all worked well together, but he was out of town and new people meant less reliable help. “Leo’s moving fast, Grégoire right behind. You better hurry.” Grégoire was the best fighter the American Mithrans had and was utterly devoted to Leo. He was also Leo’s right-hand boy toy.
Hurry. Right. “Keep me in the loop when you hear from Eli and Derek.” The Kid grunted again, sounding remarkably like his big brother. I sheathed the stake I had dropped, unaware I had even drawn one in the fight, found a bottle of water in my gobag, and took a sip to moisten my throat. I wanted more but had discovered the hard way that anything on my cramping stomach made me throw up. A lot. Recapping the bottle, I pulled a handgun, one with an ambidextrous grip, so I could hold it in my left. My injured right arm was now cradled against my belly so I wouldn’t bump it on something and maybe pass out. Again.
With the elevator out, I wound my way up to and through the ballroom and out a set of stairs that led only up again, then around through the walls and back down. In the past few weeks, we had mapped most of the secret stairways, elevator shafts, and passages and installed electric lights with battery backup. They were low-maintenance, low-level illumination, in this case just tiny button lights down one side of the stairs, though some of the larger stairways had two sets of lights, one on either side of the casing.
Alex came back on, saying, “Police just got reports of, and I quote, ‘a man on fire, running through the streets, being chased by gang members.’ So I guess black guys have to be gang members, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice low so as not to carry as I made my way down and around and down again, to the landing at the bottom of sub-five, the fifth-floor subbasement. I smelled blood on the updrafting air, vamp and human, and lots of it. From sub-four I could hear sounds that let me know the vamps were getting happy and well fed. I adjusted the grip on the weapon and gasped when I joggled the right arm. Something was very wrong with that. Beast should have sent me some relief by now. I could hear her panting in the back of my mind, and I got an image of her lying on a rock floor, licking her paw pad. Right front limb, just like mine. Yeah. She was hurt, but I’d have to deal with that later. Hang on, girl.
“Jane?” Alex said again. “There are reports of a white wolf joining the chase with the gangbangers.”
I hesitated an instant. A white wolf had to mean Brute. We hadn’t seen him in weeks. So how did he know a vamp—that vamp—was free? Brute had bitten Joses Bar-Judas the last time I’d seen him, and when one supernat takes a bite out of another, anything might happen, maybe even some mystic mumbo-jumbo-tracking thingamajimmy. Crap. Something else to worry about later. My list was getting really long.
I succeeded in getting the pocket door on sub-five open, and light and my blood-scent flooded the darkness beyond, illuminating the clay floor and the bodies, their vampire and human blood a mixed stench that made my stomach roil again.
Leo was kneeling over them. He was vamped-out, three-inch fangs extended on the hinges in the roof of his mouth, his eyes like black pits in bloody sclera. Leo was scary, but after seeing the Son of Darkness in all his magnificent horror, Leo looked nearly human. I chuffed with pained laughter at the thought, and Leo whirled to me.
His nostrils flared and shrank, his lips pulled back, as he smelled/tasted me on the air. His shoulders lifted, his talons spreading, claw-like. “You are injured,” he hissed. “I smell your blood, your burned flesh.”
“You know, Leo, the last few minutes have really sucked. And if I have to fill you full of silver and then fight my way outta here, it’s only gonna suck more. So how about you pull up your big-boy panties and let’s see what’s happened in this FUBARed afternoon.”
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nbsp; Behind him, Leo’s second-in-command, Grégoire, unsheathed his weapon, which was way more threatening and way less sexy than one might imagine. With two fastfast steps, Grégoire positioned himself between Leo and me, his sword pointed at my throat. I didn’t take my eyes off the MOC.
Leo blinked. Blinked again. His fingers softened their positions, relaxing; his talons slid back into the sheaths across the tops of his fingers that hid them when he was faking human. His eyes bled slowly back to human, and something like humor entered his eyes. Leo opened his mouth, and the fangs snicked back on their hinges. “I assure you I do not wear big-boy panties, or panties at all, a fact I will gladly allow my Enforcer to investigate at some later time.” He stood straight, losing that hulking-monster-in-a-dark-alley posture he’d been holding. And I saw that his hands, mouth, and jaw weren’t bloody. He hadn’t killed anyone. Yet.
Grégoire resheathed his sword and stepped to the side, his eyes taking in everything and everyone in the room. Vamps are hard to read at the best of times, but right now, Grégoire looked like stone, a fierce, furious, and oddly worried statue, some golden warrior carved by Michelangelo. He was sniffing, taking in the scents, and his scowl deepened as he moved around the perimeter of the room.
“Yeah. No, thanks. I’ll take your word for it.” I pointed the barrel at the bodies. “Who?”
“The fools who transgressed and betrayed me,” Leo said.
Feeling a little safer, now that he sounded rational and Grégoire was otherwise engaged, I entered the room, leaving the door open. I had a flashlight, but no way was I putting the gun away just for some light. My eyes adjusted to the dark more slowly than usual, and I approached Leo with my body bladed, weapon down at my thigh, knowing that, injured and with Beast out of things for now, I was in no shape to fight my boss. If he went nutso, I’d have to shoot him. And run.