by Faith Hunter
And if the SOD Two is in this hemisphere, he’ll be attacking my people. People that I left in the lurch when I abdicated. I nodded Beast’s head and she sat again, wrapping her tail around her paws. I remembered the sound of my primo’s shields tearing. The sound of his voice as he screamed. The silky feel of his blood as it ran across his flesh. As he was ripped away from me. That had been a psychic attack on Ed. It would take a megastrong vamp to rip him away from me.
Alex said, “I’m still looking but I haven’t found SOD Two entering the U.S. Not anywhere. And it’s hard to hide a large contingent of bloodsuckers.”
“The SOD’s numbers?” Eli asked from the fireplace, where he had taken up his usual position.
“Grégoire estimated fourteen fangheads. Forty-five humans. Fifty-nine bodies.”
I noted that he didn’t say warm bodies.
Alex pounded the keys some more. “Okay,” he said. His voice rising in pitch. “Yes. A ship called The Scarlet Dragon was found floating off of Palm Beach in Florida yesterday. Abandoned. The Coast Guard boarded and found a crime scene to beat all crime scenes. Fourteen people were found drained of blood in the galley freezer, stacked up like firewood. The crew and all of the staff were among those in the freezer.”
“Assuming that Grégoire is correct,” Bruiser said, the words coming slowly, “then Shimon took the ship from wherever the Bombardier landed, and sailed here.” His syntax changed, becoming the formal, measured phraseology and tone I had heard when Bruiser was primo to the Master of the City of New Orleans, the tone he’d used when he made official pronouncements in the court. “Unless we are much mistaken, Shimon Bar-Ioudas, the Flayer of Mithrans, the younger Son of Darkness, is in the States.”
Even in Beast form, my heart froze. I had thought I was done with all this. I was an idiot. There had always been two Sons of Darkness. Two sons of Ioudas Issachar—Judas Iscariot—two fathers of all vamps, two black witches who had used the wood and iron spikes of Golgotha to bring their father back from the dead, and who had been the first blood drinkers. No way was I going to be allowed to avoid him. Shimon Bar-Judas. Holy crap.
“ICE and PsyLED believe an upper-level vamp came ashore in Florida, but they don’t know who they’re looking for or where he is,” Alex said, fingers clacking keys. “Every alphabet agency in the U.S. is a week behind. Looks like they’re acting on the assumption that the fangheads are headed to New Orleans. If they’re right, that gives us time to prepare and to warn your people.”
I remembered Sabina, the outclan priestess of the U.S. Mithrans, saying, once, of the elder Son of Darkness—Shimon’s older brother—Joseph Santana, aka Joses Bar-Judas, aka Yosace Bar-Ioudas, “He cannot be brought to true-death, Jane Yellowrock. He is all that we have to bargain with. He is all that we have to keep his brother, Shimon Bar-Judas, at bay. And Shimon has always been the more dangerous of the two.”
So of course I beheaded Joseph and fed his true-dead head and body to Brute. In hindsight? Crap. I’d do it again.
I needed to be human. It was night, dark enough for me to shift. I could shift into Beast day or night, but shifting back to my human form was a problem until after dark.
Beast wants cow. Beast hungers.
Later. I stood and trotted up the stairs and along the hallway to the suite I shared with Bruiser, through the soothing tall-ceilinged bedroom, decorated in cream and stone and soft green, into the cream-and-stone bath and the doorless shower. Sat. And thought about being human.
Pain sliced along my bones like obsidian knives. Shifting was never the same way twice. Sometimes more pain. Sometimes less pain. Either way, it wasn’t a piece of cake. Bones snapped and joints tore. I screamed.
* * *
* * *
I woke on the cool tile of the shower. Naked. Clean. Dying.
All the strength and energy I’d experienced as Beast were gone, leaving me exhausted and in pain. My skin was pale, my bloodless fingers almost white on the gray tile instead of their previous golden tones. I pressed on my middle, feeling the hard, pointed ends of the tumor in my belly. It was star-shaped, like my own, new, blended power. And like the new magics, it was deadly. The tumor was stealing all my circulation, using all my muscle protein to feed itself. My hair was a black tangle of lusterless shadow. I was a mess.
The only positive thing in all this was that while I was in Beast shape—which was healthy—the tumor didn’t grow. Beast’s body was just dandy. Staying Puma concolor gave my clan time to search for cures that might work on a two-souled Cherokee skinwalker. Chemo was out. Traditional and tribal forms of medicine hadn’t worked so far. The tumor was magic-based, and my pals the Everhart-Trueblood clan were compiling possibilities. But so far? Nada. Nothing. Zip. The star-shaped magic constantly fed the tumor it had created, and it was growing as if it was on steroids.
I pushed myself to my knees and pulled up on the tiled half wall until I was standing. Woozy. Weak. I straightened my spine, forced air in and out of my lungs, and went to the sink and the small tray where the CBD oil and hemp oil were kept. Both oils came from the cannabis plant, but the hemp oil was made from seeds and the CBD oil was made from a single strain of flowers and leaves. Eli had found a supplier who was top-notch, and the quality of the oils was too, making it the most expensive body oil I’d ever used. I took a CBD dose orally—a little bitter, a hint of turpentine—and rubbed more CBD oil on my body, applying it to my belly and the bottoms of my feet to decrease pain. I used the hemp oil on the parts of my back I could reach, shoulders, arms, and legs, to combat dry skin.
I moved out of the frigid bathroom and pulled on warm velour sweats and wool socks. The clothing was baggy and hid some of my weight loss. Having cancer sucked.
I took a peek in the tall mirror and saw a skinny, sick woman whose odd amber eyes were hollowed out in her sallow-skinned face. Again I put my shoulders back and walked out of the suite. And into Bruiser’s waiting arms. He had been standing in the hallway, giving me privacy to dress. He did that all the time now—gave me privacy. As if he knew what it took to psych myself up to face the world in human form. I leaned into him. He cradled me gently enough that my middle didn’t ache where we touched. I breathed against his down-filled vest, smelling the feathers, the clean outdoors, the slightly citrusy, slightly spicy Onorio scent.
“I love you,” he said, his tone fierce. His arms tightened on me, restrained yet claiming.
Turning my head, I rested my forehead against his cheek and jaw. The beard was long enough to be soft on my skin. “I love you too. Can’t wait to see the beard grown in full.”
“I have a robust and manly beard,” he agreed. “It is a wonderful thing to behold.”
“I have no doubt.” I was smiling when I pulled away. He picked up a milkshake from the hall table and circled my hands around the insulated tumbler. The shake was the purplish blue of blueberries, bilberries, and tart cherries. I hated the cold, but the ice cream was the easiest thing my human form could digest, and the berries were full of antioxidants and minerals and stuff Eli thought was important. I took a slow pull through the oversized metal straw, needing the calories to pay for the energy I’d used in the shift. Because I wasn’t on chemo, I didn’t have as much nausea as other cancer patients, but the first food on my stomach was still not easy. Bruiser took my free hand and laced our fingers together. Slowly we ambled down the hall.
“How is your vineyard?” I asked, seeking a moment of normalcy before the battle to come. The youngest grapevines had been planted just prior to the nasty divorce that culminated in my buying the property for such a great price. Most of them had survived the winter well enough, but we’d had two weeks of springlike weather and some of them had begun to leaf out. The late freeze had stressed the young vines.
“Remarkably well. And now that an earth witch is on the way, I can hope for a boost in growing power for the vines.” I was drinking down the shake and di
dn’t reply. He asked, “Are you okay, love, if they stay in the big house with us? If the last Son of Darkness is out and about, I’d like to keep us all close.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Let’s see. Two adult witches, one who has imperfect control over death magics, one precocious, dangerous, out-of-control double-X-gene witch girl-child, one male witch child, also already exhibiting early magical ability, one infant still at the breast, said death-magic witch lactating and hormonal, her husband trying to hold it all together while still hiding in the male-witch-sorcerer closet, all running around screaming and making a mess, both physical and magical. And they might accidently kill us all. That?”
I chuckled. What he described sounded like heaven. And by his tone, Bruiser wasn’t against the idea of company. My sweetcheeks had been quiet for several weeks, maybe even a little depressed, not that he had said so, but it was there in his tone, in his body language, in his scent. I figured he was dejected because Leo was gone and I was dying, but maybe also because he didn’t have a job, a purpose, anymore. He was a type A personality and had been gainfully employed for a century, handling social and political situations with powerful paras and managing a powerful vamp’s clan, businesses, servants, and money. He had made life-and-death decisions daily and nightly for VIVs (very important vampires) and their blood-dinners, dealing with human and vamp politics and high-stakes business. Now? He was my nursemaid. Maybe he needed this crisis. “I’m happy they’re coming,” I said.
“Good. I’ve given them the Thomas Wolfe Suite and the Charles Frazier Suite. They have a connecting door so Molly and Evan can keep eyes on the little ones. I’ve ordered in supplies and food, to be delivered at eight in the morning. And extra ammo. I’ve already put linens on the beds and in the baths.”
I swung my eyes his way. My honeybunch had mad skills for social niceties, courtesy of an English boyhood and a hundred years or so as the primo to the former MOC of New Orleans. And he was doing linen? Yeah. He needed a purpose. I had been spending the majority of my time as Beast, so I hadn’t noticed who had what jobs around the inn, but we hadn’t brought servants. So someone had to be taking care of laundry and dishes and household things. Usually that meant Eli, but he’d been upgrading security measures everywhere and making himself useful with a hammer and nails on the unfinished cottages. “Sounds good,” I said, pressing the elevator button. “Let’s see where we stand with Shimon and his merry band of blood drinkers. We may have to travel once we find him.”
“Love.”
I tilted my head back at him as the doors closed on us.
“We could call in some other monster hunters. Nomad and his cohorts.” Nomad was my first boyfriend and he taught me all about fighting vampires, then deserted me when I got in trouble. Nomad had also been bitten by werewolves, not that I’d told Bruiser that story. Maybe someday. My face must have shown my reaction to Nomad’s name.
“Rick LaFleur?” he suggested. Another former boyfriend, no less annoying, but not a bad guy. In fact, he had been pretty great during the recent unpleasantness. And I needed to have a talk with him, one-on-one, and clear the air, now that I had a better grip on what magic did to people’s will. But later. If I lived through this.
“Ayatas?” he proposed when I remained silent, pushing, making it clear that we needed backup. Ayatas FireWind was my brother, and though things were better between us, they weren’t so great that I wanted to call him for support. He worked for PsyLED, the senior Special Agent in Charge of the eastern U.S. In the past, he had put his job first, before family, or at least before me. I wasn’t at war with him, but I was a long way from trust.
Yeah, we’d need help of some sort, but I shrugged, noncommittal yet unimpressed with Bruiser’s recommendations. Ed was in trouble. The last remaining Son of Darkness was nearby, probably planning revenge on me for feeding his brother to the dogs, so to speak. We needed to warn all the law enforcement agencies, and we had to warn my people in New Orleans to be ready. That was my political home base. That was where the attack would come because almost no one knew we were no longer in NOLA.
“Your clan Mithrans and Shaddock’s Mithrans?” he suggested, pushing just enough that I knew he was worried.
Lincoln Shaddock was the newly promoted local Master of the City of Asheville, and the protector of the most valuable vampire in the world, Amy Lynn Brown—the only vampire whose blood could shorten the time a newly turned vamp spent in the devoveo—the ten years of nutso-crazies vamps went through before they “cured,” like bacon, and found reason again. If they found their sanity at all. Many did not, or had not before Amy Lynn had come along. Any attacker would want to obtain Amy Lynn pronto, meaning she was in danger. The MOC owed me favors and loyalty since I’d made him master of his own territories and hunting grounds.
“Sure,” I said. “We’re in Shaddock’s territory, and any invading vamps might look me up eventually, so we should notify Shaddock and get his advice, but only call in an army if we need to.”
Bruiser gently squeezed my hand. The doors opened. Shoulder to shoulder, we stepped from the elevator to the main level and the central living area.
* * *
* * *
The winery part of Yellowrock Clan Home in the mountains, what I called Yellowrock Appalachia, was a big building off to the side of the inn, with a grape press, colossal stainless steel wine tanks and fermenters, and a Borelli bottling line, whatever that was. It was all top-of-the-line stuff that had made Bruiser’s eyes go wide when he first saw it.
The inn was designed in a large, wide-mouthed, blunt-nosed V-shape, with the entrance and main public area in the blunted point of the V and the two V wings containing five suites each, on two stories. When he first saw the place, Alex had called it a “humongous, freaking big house.” He was right. With a stone façade and four massive, wood, unshaped timbers that rose from the entry-level floor to the top of the second-story domed ceiling, actual trunks all twisted and golden and gorgeous. The trunks were the kind of logs one might expect to see in a Hobbit home, but bigger, and had been blasted with corncob grit to polish them, making them shimmer softly.
Besides the five family bedrooms and five guest suites, there were twelve one- and two-bedroom cottages, with entrances on both the inn and the gorge/creek sides. Three of the cottages were finished and set up as vamp lairs; nine of the more outlying units were unfinished, barely dried in. The previous owners had big aspirations.
The inn’s central main rooms had been designed with weddings, tours, and other public events in mind and had originally consisted of a public tasting room, wine shop, gift shop, bakery, two half-finished kitchens, and summer café. In the last months, all that had been converted, giving us a chef’s kitchen with commercial fridges and freezer, and a baker’s kitchen with three commercial ovens, a real brick pizza oven, and commercial mixers. We had three dining spaces, multiple sitting areas, and a game room with space for a future pool table, all currently unfurnished.
The TV lounge and office space was located against the outer wall and walled off from the rest of the living areas. In it, Eli had installed an egress access in the floor, leading to a ladder and a wide tunnel that the previous owners had hoped one day would be a personal wine cellar and a doomsday bunker with its own outside entrance.
We entered the central part of the inn. The two-story, vaulted, tongue and groove, natural wood ceilings and marble floors meant the air was always just a little chilly in winter and the audio ambience was bright, sharp, and echoing. Even with the four polished golden timbers and the warm cream color of the two-story wallboard walls, even with the fans pushing warmer air down into the living space, even with the heated floors in some rooms, it wasn’t homey. Not yet. Not even with fires burning in the three fireplaces. It still looked like a public space for weddings. Bruiser had ordered furniture and rugs to turn it into a home, but they hadn’t arrived, nor had most of the furn
ishings beyond the bedroom furniture for the suites. The main area was open and empty, so we lived in the kitchens and the TV lounge/office, where we ended up now.
I placed the empty insulated shake cup in Bruiser’s hand and sat gingerly on the comfy recliner. Bruiser had purchased the chair just for me, and it had a push-button mechanism that laid me back and raised my feet. Bruiser covered me with a soft, fuzzy blanket and turned the chair’s warmer up. I sighed in relief. I was always cold these days. A game was on the big screen, as usual, muted, the score and team names on the bottom banner. I ignored it and gave my attention to Alex. Bruiser disappeared with my empty tumbler and returned to position a cup of ginger-honey green tea on the small table at my elbow.
“What do we have?” Bruiser asked. He took an oversized pillow off the sofa, dropped it beside my chair, and sat on it, resting one arm across my raised foot stand.
Eli told the house system—which Alex had named Merlin—to turn on the lights, and the hidden fixtures in the ceiling and along the walls came on. They threw dark gold highlights across Bruiser’s dark hair and caught lighter tones in his beard. In jeans and flannel shirts, he looked nothing like the primo to the Master of the City of New Orleans he had been when we first met. Eli, wearing jeans and layered T-shirts, took his position at the stone-faced fireplace, facing the room and all the entrances. It was the location that allowed him to see the foyer, out a front window and a back window, and into the kitchens and mudroom. He was armed, a double thigh rig and a shoulder holster, nine-mils in each. He was always armed, but the in-your-face abundance was a new addition. He was worried and I wasn’t sure why.
Alex spun in his office chair, facing us, and glanced at his brother. Eli nodded. They had been talking. Or hiding something. From the sick and dying me, too weak to deal with troubles. I glowered at them. Hurting, feeling the winter chill, I pulled the fuzzy blanket over my shoulders and watched the guys settle in. Inside me, Beast thought, Littermates. Mate. Strong den, safe against predators. Beast is . . . what Jane calls happy.