by Faith Hunter
Brute chuffed, sounding a lot like Beast when she laughs. He turned his head to the disintegrating trap and back to me.
I ignored him, one hand holding my stomach, kneading the knot there, and headed back to the snare of thorns. “I ask God for help and he sends me a freaking werewolf?” The wolf yipped and looked again at the trap. Visibly, it was failing, the energies separating. Time wouldn’t wait forever. “Proof that God really does have a sense of humor.”
The creature that was Santana, caught inside the snare, had shifted position while I tossed my cookies and rearranged my friends and talked to a werewolf. Santana’s balance was now on his back foot, his head up, looking at the top of the failing trap, ready to jump. He was going to vault up and over the falling walls. I looked at Sabina, who was tumbling in the air, her clothing in flames. Her hand was blackened bone.
Lastly I looked at Lachish, who was staring through her weak ward at whatever was happening in her time. She looked terrified. She had to know that when the monster was free, he was gonna kill her and her witch friends, who were still sleeping on the singed grass.
I pinched the tip of the sliver of the Blood Cross that was hooked through my clothes. I couldn’t cut out his heart. If I grabbed him, he might time-sync with me, like Sabina had, and kill me on the spot. The sliver should kill him. Or at least hurt him bad enough to give me time to save the others. I laughed, the sound similar to Santana’s laughter—not nearly human. “Pop his bubble,” I muttered.
The wolf came to my side and braced his four feet.
I glanced down, surprised. “I have a service, werewolf,” I whispered. Brute chuffed again. I placed a hand on his back, over his shoulders, and pushed upright. Well, bent over, dizzy and retching, but at least now I had help. Moving slowly, keeping step with me, Brute helped me inch to the deteriorating cage. Once there, I used my free hand—pelted, knobby knuckled, part paw—and I gripped the wood tightly. It felt hot in my hand, as if it were about to burst into flame at the very touch of my fingers. I had a feeling that the sliver and whatever power it held didn’t like my skinwalker magics or the blood diamond magics being utilized in the protective circle, and would just as soon see me dead.
Brute stopped at the boundary of the inner circle / snare, and I pushed up against him, levering my weight higher. I eased my hand through a gap in the trap energies. My hand was shaking, but I managed to align the splinter of wood with a patch of bare skin just above Joseph’s tuxedo coat collar. The SoD didn’t teleport away or get beamed up to Scotty or fold time to fight me, the wyrd spell he was trapped in perhaps not letting him utilize that much of his own power.
I shoved the sliver of the Blood Cross into him.
His flesh was tough inside of folded time, like the rind of a watermelon. I put my back into it and shoved. For my efforts, I got another burn across the back of my arm, but higher up, near my shoulder. I hissed with pain but kept pushing. The wood point pierced him and I saw a blot of blood just as the first flame licked out. I jerked my hand away and fell, rolling back, vomiting. Pure scarlet blood. I tucked into the fetal position. Brute stepped over me, defending me. Dang dog.
Now, Beast, I thought.
Around me, time unfolded with a snap that I felt through the ground, more so than heard. Brute vanished, still caught in sometime else. The outer circle fell. The trap walls fragmented and collapsed. The Son of Darkness screamed, the sound a composite: the wails of a thousand humans wounded in battle, the high-pitched screech of tearing metal, and the deep, broken reverberation of rock rolling from a high place. The vamp death scream squared.
A huge splash sounded from nearby. Sabina hitting the pond. A whoosh of flame and heat scorched close to me. I looked between my elbows to see Santana engulfed in flames.
He reached up with a clawed, taloned hand. And he ripped out a gobbet of flesh. Dropped it on the ground, burning and bitter smelling, hotter than molten steel. He was still on fire, deep inside, his flesh burning even away from the air. He screamed and I covered my ears at the painful pitch. With a pop, he was gone, flames flashing, marking a path, fast, away from the park.
I lay where I fell and vomited. And vomited. And felt my body try to reshape with a burning-slicing torture of fast-mutating skin and muscle. A moment later, I felt a cool hand on my forehead. Healing energies flooded through me. To my side I spotted the bluish illumination of a witch-light. I smelled Lachish. And burned grass. And broiled vamp-flesh, still rare, along with vamp-flesh, well-done, cooked to a crisp. The stench did nothing for my nausea.
On the ground, only inches from my nose but out of the visual range of Lachish, was a charred hunk of something rank and foul. I reached out and pulled the sliver of the Blood Cross free from the hank of skin and hooked it back into my collar. So much for it being a weapon of vamp destruction. Santana had enough strength to get stuck with it and still run away to fight another day. I closed my eyes and let Lachish take away the pain. It wasn’t a complete healing, but her ministrations helped, a lot.
Only when Lachish had pushed the sickness far enough away that I could get to my feet did I tell her about Molly, still unconscious behind the building. Lachish wasn’t happy about what she took to be a poor decision on my part, but I didn’t really care. I wasn’t happy about Molly and didn’t really want to be anywhere near her when she woke. As the coven leader of New Orleans tended to her witches, I gathered up a handful of smoking flesh and the blood diamond, tucked them into the other gobag, gathered up my weapons as best I could, and walked away from the burned remains of the fiasco, into the dark.
The grass felt strange on my bare feet, something half-remembered from the early years in the Christian children’s home, my soles tender and without the calluses that built up in humans. The lights of the park grounds didn’t reach the pond water, but even with Beast resting within me, silent and still, I could make out the blackened wimple and robes the priestess favored. She was sitting chest deep in the pond. I moved toward her in my bare, human-shaped feet until I heard a ripple of water, the sound an alligator makes when it slithers across the surface of a shallow bayou.
“Sabina?” I said softly.
“Stay away, skinwalker, or I may drink you down. I am hurt. And I am not entirely in control when so badly damaged.”
I thought about that, and about the blackened bones of her burned arm, for half a second before I pulled the gobag to me and removed my cell. I punched the number for Del at vamp HQ.
“Jane,” Del said, her tone cool.
“Sabina’s injured,” I said baldly.
Del made a shushing sound of shock. It was hard to hurt an old vamp.
“We need healthy blood-meals for her at Louis Armstrong Park. Tell them to enter through the North Rampart Street entrance, cross the footbridge, and move toward the water. She’s in a lot of pain.”
“Go away, skinwalker,” Sabina said, her words sibilant with warning.
“How much pain?” Del’s voice held a note of concern, maybe even worry.
“Third-degree burns to one arm to start out with. Burns elsewhere. I don’t know how bad.”
“In that state, she’ll kill any human she tries to drink from,” Del said. Which made sense but made me pause. “I’ll send Leo. Sabina can drink from him first, and then, when her pain is eased, she can drink from the humans.”
“Ssssskinwalker . . . I thirsssst . . .”
I took that as evidence that I needed to get moving, and headed toward the street. “That’ll work. But we have a bigger problem. Santana is hurt too, maybe as bad as Sabina. He’s going to need blood to heal. And then he’s gonna be ticked off.”
“Dear God, Jane. What have you done?”
I could almost see Del rubbing her temples and popping Tylenol for the headache I was giving her. “I’m trying to fix a problem that’s been in the making for over a hundred years. Not everything is going according to plan. I’m not surprised about that and neither are you.” She didn’t answer that one.
“Even with humans to help him, life in the twenty-first century is going to be abnormal to such an old vamp. Santana’s going to take a while to get up to speed, unless he has some willing vamp help or takes a vamp prisoner,” I said, thinking about Dominique and making speed away from the water where Sabina lurked. “You need to put all the city’s vamps in lockdown. Now.”
“Is that all?” Del asked, her snippy tone back.
“One more thing,” I said, getting ticked off myself. “I’m trying to fix Leo’s screwups, so make it snappy.” I closed the bullet-resistant Kevlar cover of the cell as I passed the burned grass marking the site of the magical debacle. A witch-light brightened the ground and the witches who were gathered there. All four were conscious, but Molly wasn’t quite ready to take on anything magical, thank goodness. The NOLA coven leader was bent over her, pale healing energies moving across Molly’s face and head. My pal’s eyes were closed. I didn’t want to disturb her, and I hoped she wouldn’t remember the attempt to take the diamond. Or the fist that stopped her. “Lachish,” I said, my voice soft and measured, “you got enough mojo to put up a ward? Sabina is injured and it’s gonna take a while to get blood-meals together.”
“I can. And you can give her this.” She tossed something to me in the dark.
It landed at my toes, and when I picked it up, I felt the warm tingle of healing energies built into a feather tied to a bit of wood. The wood smelled like baby birds and bird poop, and I realized it was a stick from a bird nest, tied to a feather. Interesting choice for an air witch’s amulet. “Good,” I said. “I’ll get this to her. The sooner the better on the ward. Sabina’s hungry and not in very good control. I’ll see you later. I have a master vamp to track.”
No one replied. Knowing that vamp ears were good enough to have heard the conversation, I tossed the stick-and-feather healing charm toward Sabina, before picking up my gear and moving away to North Rampart Street. When I hit the footbridge I saw a ward rise from the ashes of the original witch circle, and I felt safe enough to knead my aching stomach. The witch healing hadn’t been thorough, and the pain still lurked there, knotted and tender. Worse, the hand injured by Joseph’s wyrd spell was marked with faint red tracery again and had started tingling.
Eli hadn’t called, meaning he was still in custody, so I dialed for a taxi as I walked, putting distance between me and the injured vamp. Rinaldo, the cabbie I used most often, wasn’t working now, but he offered to send a pal to pick me up and take me where I needed to go. I turned left out of the North Rampart entrance on foot and looked around for possible danger. The sidewalk was empty and still. Perfect place for an ambush. I stepped into a shadow to hide and watch, following the scents on the air currents. Upwind, no one hid. Downwind was a lot more iffy.
While I waited, I dialed Jodi Richoux on her cell. She answered, which meant that she was still at the crime scene, not in her cavernous office in the bowels of NOPD central. The woo-woo room had no cell reception and never would if the big muckety-mucks at NOPD had anything to do with it.
“I don’t have time for this,” she grated out in lieu of greeting.
“Yeah, you do. I just injured Joseph Santana.”
“What?” Her tone sounded remarkably less irritated all of a sudden. “How? How bad?”
“I stabbed him with a weapon that works on vamps. One I borrowed from a . . .” I wasn’t sure how much Jodi knew about vamp hierarchy, but I decided on truth. “. . . from the priestess Sabina. He was on fire when he got away from me. You need to send out an alert to all your cops that Santana is burned and might be looking for water sources to lair up in, as well as blood-meals to heal with, and better if he can find both together.”
“Do you know how many water sources there are in this city? Hundreds!” Jodi said, her annoyance increasing again.
“That’s the best I can do right now. I need you to let Eli go. I need him to help me track Santana.”
“I need a raise and a better-fitting pair of shoes.”
I chuckled softly. “I’ll take you shopping if you’ll set Eli loose.”
“Bribing me, Yellowrock?” she asked, but her tone finally settled into grudging friendship instead of cop–to–possible suspect. “There’s laws against that. Do I need to haul you in too?”
Which meant that Eli was at NOPD, possibly under arrest, and that I’d been wrong. Jodi was no longer at the scene of the shooting. “Bribing is more along the lines of what Leo might do, not me. I don’t have bottomless pockets.”
“Which doesn’t say whether this is a bribe.”
“It’s not a bribe,” I said, getting grouchy in reaction to her tone. “You need shoes. I need a girls’ day out. You need rest. I need Eli to help me track Santana. When Santana is dead, we’ll do the spa thing and shop, which you know I hate. We’ll ask Adelaide Mooney to come with us. All this is a statement of fact. I’m not offering to buy you a pair of shoes.”
“Too bad. There’s this sexy pair of lipstick red heels at Macy’s in Metairie that I’ve been lusting after.”
I beat my forehead with a fist. Women were so confusing. “I’ll buy the dang shoes if you’ll wear them on a date with Wrassler. That can be a bribe. The rest of this is business.”
There was a hesitation before Jodi said, “That the guy who lost a leg in the fight at vamp central?”
“Yeah. And he’s down and depressed because of the injury and he always had the hots for you. He could use a night on the town.”
“Really?” From Jodi’s tone I had a feeling the shoes were superfluous to any agreement to a date with the big guy. She said, much softer, “You got his number?”
“I do. We got a deal? I need Eli.”
“Sure. Text me his number. You can pick up Eli at NOPD at the Eighth on Royal Street in ten.” The call ended, and by the ease of me getting what I wanted, I guessed that Eli hadn’t been under arrest after all. Cops were sneaky. Not that I minded anything I had just agreed to. I texted Wrassler’s number to Jodi and hopped in the cab that pulled up. “Take me to the Eighth District NOPD. Wait for me there and there’ll be another destination and a nice tip.”
“How nice you gonna be, my sister?” he said.
I looked at the cabbie in the rearview, seeing dark skin and pretty eyes. The left one had a teardrop tattooed at the outer corner. A prison tat. Great. “Twenty. And I’m not in the mood to dicker.”
“Done.” We pulled away from the curb and into the night’s traffic. “You know you’re barefoot, right?”
I snorted. “I noticed. You know you’re an ex-con heading toward NOPD, right?”
“I noticed. But I got nothing to worry about. I found the Lord when I got outta the joint and made my life right. I go to the Baptist church roun’ the block from the Eighth. I know the cops there. You should join us come Sunday. Nothing so good as bein’ right with Jesus, my sister.”
I was being evangelized by an ex-con. How weird was that? Then I remembered the dirty water in the baptismal pool at The Church and I sighed silently. “I might be looking for a new church. I’ll keep it in mind.”
We pulled up in front of the Eighth District Police Department and I got out, unhappy at the sight of broken glass on the sidewalk. “Here,” the cabbie said, handing me a pair of neon green flops. “Client left them in here last week. She paid cash so I couldn’t find her. I washed them shoes good. Was going to give them to the clothes closet at church, but you look like you could use them.”
I might hate the idea of putting on someone else’s shoes, but it was way better than being barefoot on broken glass. I pulled on the flops and checked the cabbie’s name on the license. “Thanks, Zareb.”
“Welcome, my sister. Zareb is African for ‘protector.’ I’m your protector tonight.”
For reasons I couldn’t name, that simple statement brought tears to my eyes. “Thanks,” I said through a tight throat.
“I’ll be waitin’ for you right here unless the cops send me off. Then I’ll be parked beside the chu
rch round the block. I won’t leave you. And if you need a doctor for that belly pain, I got one who work at the free clinic. She’ll see you.”
I dropped my hand from where it had been pressed against my stomach and closed the cab door, thinking about the old saying of people being helped by angels in disguise, and I figured I had just met one, even if only in a small way. Feeling better for reasons that had little to do with logic, I thanked Zareb with a lifted hand and entered the main doors of the Eighth.
The exterior of the French Quarter precinct looked like a fancy hotel, two-storied, pale pinkish stone landscaped with palms and old, flowering magnolia trees. Inside were, arguably, the most friendly cops on the face of the planet. The woman behind the desk greeted me as “Honey,” and told me my boyfriend would be out in a minute. When I said he wasn’t my boyfriend, she offered to take him off my hands and laughed. And directed me to the vending machines with NOPD T-shirts. Seriously. Police T-shirts, hats, and police kitsch. In a vending machine. Even as tired as I was, I loved this town. But I bought a Coke instead and sucked it down for the calories. I had partially shifted and hadn’t eaten. Not smart. The cramping in my belly eased with the Coke, and I bought another, drinking it just as fast.
Twenty minutes later I had Eli in the cab and we were heading back to the house, silent, not wanting to talk in front of the cabbie. Back home, I paid my bill plus tip, accepted an evangelical tract from Zareb, and Eli and I entered the house. We had a lot of catching up to do and not a lot of time left in the night.
* * *
There were a lot of things we needed. An update on any sightings of Santana or unexplained deaths that might be related to him. New wheels—the SUV had been impounded as part of a crime scene. Better garb. New boots. A bottle of antacids, which Eli had and which helped the pain in my gut considerably. A plan to catch Santana, which we didn’t have. A nap that none of us were going to get. And I had to update the Youngers on Molly and the witches, which should take the shortest amount of time. Witches weren’t out to kill or maim us or the community, so that was just info, or so I thought.