by Faith Hunter
Panic clawed at me, and I fought through the pain, forcing my lungs to expand. Air whooshed in with a sucking judder. I gasped in several breaths.
“Dang cat,” I wheezed. “This tub is freaking cold!”
Inside me, Beast whistled with laughter. Which was a new sound. I had a feeling it portended nothing but trouble.
I reached a hand to the tub’s edge and saw my knobby knuckles. I was in half-form. Which was pretty brilliant, actually. I could stay in half-form longer than human. My belly gripped my insides in hungry claws and growled. I patted it. “Gimme a minute,” I said to it.
I pulled myself out of the tub and into our room, closing the bedroom door. Bruiser and I had this wing to ourselves most of the time, but I was fairly prudish. Nudity was not one of my comfort zones.
I opened my closet and turned on the light. Smart lights had been an option, but if we wanted to move around in the dark, with bad guys outside, then smart lights were stupid. The bright lights illuminated the mirror and the hanging rack for my brand-new armored leather. Seven sets, four in different shades of matte black, and three sets in colors. There was more armor in New Orleans, with and without leather exteriors; I had an extensive armor wardrobe. I chose a charcoal camo set. The moon was nearly full, making pure black foolish.
I held the armor up in front of me and studied myself in the cheval mirror. I never turned out the same way twice when I shifted into half-form. This time I was a six-foot-tall monster with human-looking amber eyes, furred cat ears placed high on my head, a half-human / half-cat nose on a cat snout, extralong canines, and my black hair to my waist. I had a mixture of skin and pelt on my face, human boobs with skin, pelt down my back, thighs, lower belly, and legs. I’d never win a beauty contest, not even in a cat show. I grinned at my reflection, and I was horrible to look at. Yeah. I was enough to make even a vamp pause in fear. I was the shapeshifting, skinwalker, Dark Queen of the Mithrans.
I dressed fast and pulled on the special boots that expanded to the sides to fit both human and half-form paws. I strapped on the Benelli spine harness, a double-thigh holster rig in case I shifted back to human and needed the nine-mils, and slid my blades into the blade sheathes. I debated on the sword, but I still sucked at swordplay, even with the last six months of practice. I braided my hair and twisted it into a sloppy bun. If an enemy got close enough to grab my hair, I was already dead. Into a pocket, I stuffed the Glob, a magical thingamabob that sometimes did things to protect me. I was scary and armed to the teeth. Literally. I snarled, seeing my fangs. I was at war, and I needed every weapon I had.
My warlord, Grégoire, aka Blondie, and my primo, Edmund, who I had started calling Eddie the Great on cell calls just to needle him, were taking over the European world in my name. They were pals of mine, as much as fangheads can be pals. Eddie was also the emperor of Europe, the Blood Master of all the European territory, and my vamp primo. It was complicated.
In my name, Grégoire, Edmund, and my warriors had defeated the last powerful vampires who were still active in Europe. Not that I had planned all the vamp bloodshed, but to keep European humans and witches safe from marauding bloodsuckers, and to reassert peace, I had let it happen. Yeah. In my name. I hated vamp politics.
Unfortunately, the dregs—and some of the remaining most powerful vamps—of Europe had escaped to all points of the globe, the strongest heading here to take my position. Leo had been fighting European vamps for centuries, and things had only gotten worse when I arrived on the scene.
I loped downstairs into the kitchen to find three vamps and a human, Koun, Tex, Thema, and Alex. And that was an amazing sight—a blue-and-black-tattooed Celtic warrior in modern night camo armor, a gunfighter from the Old West wearing six-shooters on each hip and an ARGO Benelli shotgun like mine strapped to his back on top of buckskin-toned armor, a black warrior in matte black armor, a woman so powerful she sometimes wore silver in her ears as a warning to others—silver being a dangerous, burning, sometimes even an incapacitating allergen to vamps—and Alex, a mixed-race human . . . not teenager. He was an adult now. A very pretty adult with curly ringlets, slightly greenish brown eyes, muscles, and a sense of self-confidence that oozed from his pores along with the garlic stink. The four of them were standing around the bar, checking comms and weapons. Lots and lots of weapons.
I walked around them and stopped, seeing the mess on the floor. “Dang cat!” I found the Clorox cleanser and sprayed the dried blood. The vamps watched, still as statues, until I grabbed the paper towels and started to clean the floor.
Tex grabbed my arm. “No, Janie—My Queen,” he amended.
“Why not? My cat did this.”
“We weren’t sure if you wanted the floor left this way. But you ain’t cleaning the mess. It’s not, uh, seemly. For a queen.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to stamp my feet. My clan were working hard to make me act like a queen, like the Dark Queen of the Mithrans, which I was but which I hated. So far, I pretty much sucked at it.
I blew out a frustrated breath, placed the roll of paper towels in his hand, and walked between the vamps, muttering about dang cats. Opening the fridge, I took out a stack of well-marbled steaks, turned on the stove grill, and switched on the fan above it. I tossed a steak onto the grill and waited. Behind me, Tex and Koun cleaned up my mess. Thema was above cleaning up after a cat. She lounged against the wall, polishing a blade, her black eyes on the glinting steel. Not that she missed anything happening around her.
The steak began to sizzle. When it was slightly brown on one side, I salted it and flipped it and salted that side too. When it was mostly no longer raw, I turned off the burner, opened a package of oversized naan, which was the best bread ever made on the face of the earth, and tossed the steak into the middle. I bit into the steak sandwich. Nothing in this world was as good as ultrarare beef. Except maybe oatmeal, and there wasn’t time for that too. I needed the calories that I had used up shifting. My skinwalker magic helped power my shifts, but there wasn’t enough magic inside me to do it all, and I was once again skinny as a rail, so I had to eat, a lot, to make it through a shift. And when shifting multiple times, like in the middle of the night, I needed to eat a huge amount of food. “Let’s go, then,” I said, chewing. “We got enemy vamps to behead.”
“For this alone, I would call you queen,” Thema murmured happily, her accent rich with her African heritage.
“Hey, Alex,” I said, grinning around the macerated steak. “Put away the queen’s raw steaks and clean up the grill, wouldja?”
He narrowed his eyes at me, so much like his brother that I burst out laughing—which sounded like a cat growling. I was still laugh-growling around the steak and bread as Koun pulled the SUV along the winding drive. Behind us, four more SUVs followed. Koun was deeply focused on the task of negotiating mountain turns, but I realized that he was smiling. A harsh, stoic man, a warrior to a Celtic queen, a Roman slave, soldier, fanghead for nearly two thousand years, he smiled too seldom.
Watching him from the corner of an eye, I leaned the seat back, propped my funky-looking boots on the dash, and licked the steak grease from the fingers of one hand. I ripped more meat and bread off and chewed noisily. Licked some more. My tongue was part cat, and its rough surface cleaned things up nicely.
Koun’s smile spread slightly. “My Queen should perhaps know that modern manners are relatively new in the world, that her lack thereof is not shocking to me, as it was to Leo Pellissier and his ilk. In my day, we ate with our fingers and licked them clean. It is an efficient method of eating, allowing a hungry person to get all the fat and nutrients from their skin.”
Ilk? I grunted, wondering if I could make him laugh. “Squatting over an open fire, meat on a spit, and then you rubbed bear grease and ashes into your skin as grooming?”
Calmly, a strange light in his eyes, Koun said, “Ashes are efficient topical antibiotics, as is rendered ani
mal fat. My Queen is deliberately attempting to insult me?”
“I’m tribal. My ancestors probably did the same at one point. But yeah. Goading you. Being difficult. Seeing where the chinks in your armor are.”
Eyes on the road, Koun lifted his eyebrows, his pale eyes twinkling. “I have no chinks. I am perfect.”
I snickered. “Yeah. Okay. Glad you told me. I musta missed the announcement.”
He laughed, and his shoulders relaxed beneath the armor. Bingo. Mission accomplished.
I knew a lonely redheaded witch-vamp who might like Koun if he was happy more. Not that I was going to matchmake. Nope. No way. Especially not from within my clan, where my interest could be considered by some to be an order. Ick. However, I could do things to make Koun feel like smiling more often, though so far, the only things that seemed to get a rise out of him were battle, me goading him, and me being crude—the Leo comment to the contrary.
I finished my sandwich, used premoistened handwipes kept in the glove compartment to clean up, and pulled up the address on my tablet so I could study the area where we were headed. Time passed.
“How many people are we bringing to this fight?” I asked.
“Us, three other Mithrans, and six humans,” Koun said. “And, as you might say, a buttload of weapons.”
“The humans are not to engage the enemy,” I said.
“My Queen will leave all such decisions to the chief strategist of Clan Yellowrock and the Dark Queen’s Executioner,” he said mildly, giving me his official title.
I grinned, showing my extralong canines. “You gonna make me, you blue-skinned Smurf-boy?”
Koun burst into laughter for two full seconds before clamping off the amusement, his rock-hard abs shaking just a bit. I was making progress. His wide eyes said that he didn’t hear his own laughter often, and never twice in one day. He swallowed and forced his face into its usual emotionless, unreadable expression. “Yes, My Queen. I will tie you to the back of the SUV and leave you behind, to keep you safe, while the human warriors and your Mithrans secure the house and grounds.”
“You can try it, but I’ll beat your butt, Elmo.”
Koun’s breath shook with silent laughter. His tone heaped with sarcasm, he said, “My Queen. I am happy to be either Smurf or Muppet, should it please Your Majesty, but Grover is the blue furry creature. Not Elmo. And if we have an accident whilst your feet are on the dash, the safety balloon will break both legs, likely your pelvis, and possibly your spine. You can shift to heal, I know this, but we have insufficient steaks for that.”
“Airbag, not safety balloon.”
“My deepest apologies for my error, My Queen.” Yeah. Definite snark in the “my queen” part.
I called that progress. “Direct route,” I said. “And speed it up, slowpoke. You may consider that an order, Smurfy.” He maintained his leisurely pace, but I elected not to swat him with my claws. Instead I went back to the sat maps.
Our target was a small house on East Avon Parkway, up near Beaver Lake. I went through sat pics and street-to-street Google cams, getting a feel for the topography. A block out, I closed the tablet and checked my weapons. Put the special cat-ear comms set on. “Testing. Yellowrock.”
Into my ear, Alex, back at the inn, said, “Got it, Janie.”
Koun stopped a half block out, and I opened the door. We were downwind. I caught the scent of battle. “Blood. A lot of blood,” I said.
“And silence. We are perhaps too late.”
I snarled. Bruiser might be injured. Or dead. Adrenaline shot through me.
If he was dead because Koun didn’t drive fast enough, I’d behead my self-appointed chief strategist of Clan Yellowrock. I pulled on Beast speed, her night vision, her stealth, and raced into the darkness. Not that Koun would lose me, not with nighttime vamp vision and vamp speed. I pulled the Benelli and vamp-killer blade. Leaped over the back fence. In midair I spotted people lying in the dark under the stars, everything looking green-gray-silver in Beast eyes. Dead vamps. Dead humans.
Beast leaped to the front of my mind. Not ours, she thought. She was right. The scent patterns said that some of our people were wounded but suggested that none of the dead were ours. I/we landed silently in the grass.
Bruiser was standing in front of a post, where a vamp was secured with silver-plated zipties, his right hand on the vamp’s head, his left on the fanghead’s neck, holding him stretched up high. My honeybunch was alive. Relief shot through me until I realized he was draining and force-changing the vampire, binding him, compelling him to give up all his secrets and loyalty.
I knelt on my toes and one knee in the shadows, watching, still downwind, breathing in the stench of vamps and blood, flowers and spice, death a sickly sweetness. Breathing like a cat, the air pulled over scent sacs in my mouth.
The vamp beneath Bruiser’s hands twitched, shook. His mouth opened, and his fangs clicked back into the roof of his mouth. His eyes bled back to human, changing from vicious killer to drug-happy in the space of seconds. “My master,” he said. “I am yours. May I taste your blood?”
I didn’t react. Not where anyone could see it or smell it. But I hated this. Bruiser was different—not less human than ever before, yet not more human. He was silent more than usual and most often did winery chores alone. He claimed to be only introspective and a smidge melancholy, as if that definition and explanation made it okay. Eli said Bruiser was depressed but had a right to deal with it in his own way, at least for now. The scent wafting from Bruiser on the night air was determined and yet full of self-loathing. He was doing this to keep me safe. To keep his people and my people safe. But he didn’t take joy in it. He hated what Leo had made him and hated even more what he was becoming. I feared that, eventually, he would begin to hate the person he was doing this for. Even though he disagreed with my opinion, I feared that protecting me might drive him away from me.
I looked away from my Consort and found Lincoln Shaddock leaning against the house. The tall man’s eyes were on me. A lot of thoughts raced through me, formed into understanding, and settled.
The Master of the City of Asheville had been feeding my Consort. Not often. Onorios weren’t vamps and didn’t have to drink often. But they had to have some vamp blood to survive. Shaddock would know exactly what Bruiser was feeling. Would know how conflicted Bruiser was about mentally draining and chaining vampires to his will, and even how he felt about drinking blood to make his physical powers stronger, blood he desperately needed because he had tried to live without it in the fame vexatum method of blood-starvation practiced by Mithrans. Bruiser had hoped that he would grow more mentally powerful, but the starvation had left him physically famished.
While he was weakened, we had been attacked in Asheville on Shaddock’s titled hunting territory. Bruiser had tried and failed to drain our most recent enemy’s Onorio, Monique Giovanni. That powerful Onorio had been working with the Flayer of Mithrans and would have defeated Bruiser had their mental battle not ended when it did. Monique was still around and would eventually come after him to finish the interrupted battle. So Bruiser was training hard to learn to do something he hated: binding the minds of vampires with the power of his mind.
Bruiser’s emotions were twisted and distorted, a coiled mash of love and protective instincts for me, and miserable memories of Leo’s influence—Leo who had made blood-servants bound to his will and desires. Bruiser’s history and his new powers often left him shut down, emotionally distant, deep in thought, and trying to hide all that.
Eli said Bruiser would be fine, that he was watching my Consort, and that Bruiser had a handle on it all. I trusted the elder Younger to read Bruiser and keep him safe, but this period of emotional healing was hard.
To the side, Eli appeared, directing a large group of unwashed, smelly humans from a garage to gather beneath the porch roof. “You’re safe now,” he was saying softly, ge
ntly. “You can go home. Your torturers are dead.” He directed two of our humans to pull the dead enemies faceup. “See? Dead.”
Eli swiveled his gaze my way, frowned to see me here, but nodded, a single thrust of his head, as if acknowledging the inevitable. “We haven’t finished clearing the house.”
“Copy that,” I said.
I adored my adopted brothers. Eli was battle-worn, tired, stretched thin both mentally and physically, but gentle and kind enough to worry about others, like the people he had rescued. Working with me had made the Younger brothers way more than just “financially comfortable.” It had made them kinda rich and had given them a purpose they had been looking for. They were my co-heirs of Clan Yellowrock, and all the properties and monies that entailed. They would protect me with their lives. But in return, I could never keep them safe. Being the Dark Queen was a two-edged sword, and the people I protected always ended up cut and bleeding.
Feeling Eli’s eyes on my retreating form, I turned and leaped back over the fence. Sheathed and harnessed my weapons. Stalked back to the SUV.
Koun’s armored butt was against the SUV’s grill, his booted feet crossed at the ankles. He was in armor. Yeah, I should have paid closer attention to that. Koun fought naked, more or less. Or he used to. Everything was changing. I stopped near him, taking in the armor, which I had thought was camo but was matte black, swirled with midnight blue dye in the colors and patterns of his tattoos. Nifty. He was alone; Tex, Kojo, Thema, and the humans were elsewhere. Koun was studying the area on satellite maps, his expression back to its usual hauteur.
“My Queen,” he said by way of greeting. But he didn’t look up and he didn’t sound happy. In fact he sounded really ticked off. “My Queen,” he said again, “hurdled an eight-foot fence alone, without backup or intel.”