by Faith Hunter
My entire body stilled. Even the pain seemed to pause for a bright, shining moment. Slowly, I repeated, “‘Surrounded by Mithrans.’ That’s why they want the Mithrans all dead? Because the vamps have access to a rift?”
“But of course. Why else?”
But of course. As if I had known, as if everyone knew. Had I bothered to ask why? Had I asked and accepted some excuse that made no sense? Because this . . . this made total sense. “‘All the others,’” I repeated. Except the rift only I knew about. Well, me and the one arcenciel I had seen come through. Had that one found the others yet? They were searching for her, so no. She was young and the young dragons were more interested in sightseeing and playing and hunting than they were in helping their species accomplish their ends. I frowned, thinking it through. “So if there was another available rift, then Soul and the rest of the arcenciels would give up on the plan to kill the vamps.”
“Not exactly, but a close enough summation. With the goddesses not everything is always so clear.”
“Uh-huh.” Soul hadn’t seemed overly interested in gaining entrée to the rift. But maybe, in reality, she was desperate to do so and had been hiding her need to gain the upper hand in any bargain I might make. I held the long quartz crystal up to the light. “And if I just break it, she might die because she isn’t in her dragon form. So she can’t help me, and without her to interpret for me, neither will the dragons.” And Beast wasn’t responding and I might have hurt her. And I had a terminal illness. And EJ was in the hands of the monsters. Somewhere. Time was very, very short.
The Anzu still hung from the chandelier, looking alternately amused and irritated, though at the moment leaning toward amusement. He recognized that we were bargaining for something and considered me inept.
“Don’t you owe me a boon?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “You utilized my debt to make me your Enforcer instead of Eli Younger.” His eyes were narrow and he was grinning. Enjoying this.
I was frustrated and in pain and getting close to blowing my cool. Which would not help this negotiation. Not at all. I shoved down on my anger and affected a curious expression. “Mmmm. You’re blood sworn to me as my clansman in Clan Yellowrock. Under that relationship, would you consider helping me to track and kill the Son of Shadows, in your Anzu form?”
“My little bird form is outside of that agreement.”
“As the Enforcer to the Dark Queen, would you consider helping me to track and kill the Flayer of Mithrans, in your Anzu form?”
“No matter the relationship, my little bird form is outside of that agreement.” He pushed back from the chandelier, deliberately making it swing, like a kid on a playground. Yeah. Amused. Enjoying himself.
I shifted on the pile of pillows and the Anzu feather tickled my bare stomach. So far as I could tell, I was out of options. “Fine. I have something to offer.” I stopped. I had to be careful. A lie in the midst of a parley might ruin any outcome or negate the terms of the agreement.
“What have you to offer”—the Anzu placed one hand on his chest—“that I would desire?” As if saying he was out of my league when it came to things he might want.
I gave a slight shrug. “If you agree that what I have to offer is vitally important, then I want the following: For you to go on a hunt with me, in your Anzu form, for EJ, right away, today, at the close of this agreement. That you will help me locate and rescue EJ, wearing any form you may have, using all the weapons and contacts at your disposal. That such rescue would include fighting Mithrans, humans, witches, Onorios, and senza onore, using mundane and magical weapons, workings, and curses. And that you help me get arcenciel help,” I added. Not that they had followed through at any other time we had an agreement. “Oh. And you help keep the other arcenciels off Soul’s back.”
The chandelier stopped rocking. The Mercy Blade to the NOLA Mithrans, and one of my Enforcers, dropped to the floor, a twenty-foot drop, and landed easy, crouched on toes and fingertips, just outside the circle. His hair was longer than I remembered and it flew forward as he landed to make a veil around him. Behind the hair, his eyes glittered. “What have you to trade for such perilous services, services that might mean my death?”
I wanted to blast out to him that this was urgent, wanted to shake him, skewer him for making me parley when all I wanted to do was get on the road. I shrugged, aping Leo Pellissier for nonchalance. “The location of a new . . . rift.”
Gee’s muscular, compact body tightened all over, giving away his shock.
I let a tiny Eli-worthy smile escape. “One not catalogued by Soul’s arcenciels. One not hidden beneath the oceans, or in the possession of the Mithrans, or that opens into a mountain.” But known to the one who came through. Not said. Not a lie to break the pact. Not exactly. “One I found some time ago.” To imply, though not to state outright, that I found it long ago. Lying by prevarication.
“I would sell my body into slavery for a thousand years for such knowledge. Every misericord on this planet would.”
“Would the arcenciels fight at our sides for such knowledge?”
“I cannot speak for the goddesses, but it is possible that the ones you call Opal and Cerulean and Pearl would assist for this knowledge.” He tilted his head, oddly like a vamp, or his lizard. “But if you have found such a rift, you are asking for more than this. Do not play games, little goddess. Not with the location of a new rift.”
“A few more things. That you help me find the time circle that’s allowing the Flayer of Mithrans to alter his body. Help me destroy the time circle. And help me save any witches still alive.”
“Is that that the limit of our bargain?”
“Soul said that stepping into a rift would heal me, if it didn’t kill me. After EJ is saved and his captors killed and the boy returned to his parents, I want you to make sure I survive stepping into and back through this rift, safely and not killed, and that I return to this world, at the correct time, through that same rift, healed, with my Beast self and my human self intact. With no loss of abilities or knowledge and with no loss of time.” I didn’t want to be returned a hundred years in the future with everyone I knew dead and gone.
“You would have me step through a rift. With you,” he clarified. There was something in his tone I couldn’t place, but I let it go for now.
“Yes. You or an arcenciel of your choosing, one who will abide by this agreement, if that’s what it takes to get me back safely and healed. I have one of Opal’s scales,” I added, to sweeten the pot, “that I will return as part of this agreement. And lastly, that you will swear this to me by blood.”
“I do so swear. But if you are foresworn, and if there is no rift, I will break all oaths of fealty and honor and take you as my slave for the rest of your life.”
“I do so swear,” I repeated his words back to him.
I blew out the candle. Wrapped my fingers around Soul’s chain and forced myself to stand. Pain ricocheted through my body like a musket ball made of lightning, shattering and cutting and burning. I scuffed out the circle, not that magics had risen when I closed it. In fact, I was pretty sure it had all been for show. But the Mercy Blade was all about show, and I had . . . I had acquired his help. Under my own terms. Leo had taught me well.
“When do we leave?” he asked me.
“I have a gobag to pack. Say, fifteen minutes?”
“Yes.” He looked me up and down. “Do you remember how to fly?” His tone said he doubted it.
“I do.”
“Remove your clothing and meet me at the deck outside your sleeping quarters. We will rescue your little witch, save your buried witches, and heal your illness. Then you will give me the keys to the world.”
Keys to the world? I didn’t like the sound of that, but there was nothing I could do about it. “Fine.”
Gee vanished, like a magician’s trick, poof. I looked at Alex,
who was still leaning against the wall, his face wearing a half grin, as if I had gotten away with pirate’s plunder. Brute was sitting at his side with a grindy clinging to his fur. “He’ll kill you when he finds out you don’t have a rift.”
“I have a rift. I can take him straight to it.”
Alex’s face went through a series of emotions. “No shit?”
“None at all.”
“Daaaang.”
I gave him a half grin. “I know, right? So we have one problem. Big Evan has the magical device that can track EJ. He said he could modify it to be used by anyone. If he already did that, then I need to pick it up, so I need you to find out if he succeeded in the modification, then arrange a rendezvous point, and convince him to stand on top of one of the vehicles with his hand in the air, holding up his marble, and let me pluck it out of his hand. In Anzu form. And my control isn’t very good.”
“So you might claw his arm off?”
“I hope not. But I’m not placing any bets. Now help me to my room so I can pack and strip and jump off the railing outside my second-story window.”
“Do I get to watch?”
It was an ongoing complaint that he had almost never seen me shift. “No. You do not get to watch me shift. But I’ll let you watch me leap out the window.”
“Almost as good.”
Alex stood slightly in front of me and I placed a hand on his shoulder as he led the way to the elevator. “Going up. Lingerie, undergarments, and naked bird ladies on two.”
CHAPTER 19
Beast Is Inside Stupid Anzu Bird
The team and my clan were still miles away when I settled to the floor of my bedroom with the draperies thrown back and the French doors open wide to the icy, dull day. I was naked and shivering, and my skin was tinged slightly bluish, the way flesh looks when it’s oxygen deprived. Or dead.
I pulled the special gobag over my head, situating it to lie beside the doubled gold chain and the gold nugget and the mountain lion tooth. Adjusted the strap for a larger neck. Inside the gobag were a pair of sweats, lightweight shoes, my cell phone (which had a call open to Alex), and a few weapons: a nine-millimeter, two extra mags loaded with silver-lead rounds, one vamp-killer, the arcenciel scale, and six stakes—three ash wood, three sterling. I added three packages of jerky strips and two protein bars. The gobag was heavier than usual, but I needed all the stuff in it, and as far as vamp-killing gear went, I was traveling light.
Vamp-killing. It’s what I did, or had done, prior to taking the gig as Leo’s Enforcer. I was a rogue-vamp hunter. And no way was I leaving home again without the tools of my trade, even if I was flying. I had done this before and it had sucked, but that didn’t matter. I had a job to do and not much time to do it in.
Wrapped safely in a length of bubble wrap and my sweats, tucked into the gobag, was the crystal holding mermaid-Soul. And the Glob. Just in case. Yeah. Just in case.
I dragged the comforter from the bed, over my shoulders, gripped the feather I had taken from a dead Anzu, closed my eyes, and calmed my breathing. Eventually, I felt my heart rate slow. My shoulders relaxed. I slipped into a deeper meditation, where the world was peaceful and calm and there was only soothing light.
I sought the Gray Between. The silver mist of my skinwalker gift rose around and within me. Slowly I fell into the feather, into the bit of dried flesh at the base of the quill. Into the deeps of the Anzu, into the snake that lives at the center of all creatures: the double helix of DNA, as understood by the Cherokee of my own time. Except the genetic structure of the Anzu wasn’t like a human’s. So far as I knew, the feathered Anzu were not native to earth, and had once been worshipped as storm gods, back in Mesopotamia and Samaria, enormous storm gods with claws, wings, a raptor’s beak, sapphire blue blood, and a bad attitude.
Their DNA wasn’t the double helix of Earth creatures. It was a tangled mass of circular strands, glowing like spun glass, emitting light in pale blues and greens. One ovoid spot was denser and darker. It opened its eyes and looked at me. I flinched, knowing what was coming. Fighting my own tension, my own fear.
The oval slowly unfolded, unwound. The genetic structure was, literally, a snake, one holding its own tail in its mouth. Ouroboros, I remembered. The ouroboros focused on me, in the Gray Between, a place where energy and mass are one.
The snake opened its mouth. Let go of its tail. I tensed further but didn’t look away. It struck. Snake fangs pierced my soul. Pain zinged through me like lightning, a massive bolt from a major storm. My bones bent. Darkness took me, blazing and icy.
Through the darkness, I heard Sabina’s voice, from the only other time I had taken this shape, when she told me, “With this action, you walk the sharp edge of a blade between light and dark. You do not cross that edge into darkness, but if you slip, you may bleed.” Yeah, that made it all hunky-dory.
And softer, the words Frenchy and seductive in my memory, Leo Pellissier had written, May your hunt be bloody. May you rend and eat the flesh of your prey. Words he had once sent to me about hunting with an Anzu.
I woke. The night was warmer, strongly scented of the synthetics in the carpet, the drapes, and the cleaning supplies that kept the place Eli-sterile. The snow through the window smelled clean and sharp. Distant stinks of exhaust, gasoline, diesel fuel, added a dark twang to the mélange. The light bouncing off the snow outside and reflecting into the room was a magnitude of lumens brighter. Sounds were sharper. I could hear the dripdripdrip of melting snow, the crack of warming ice, the patter of a rabbit exactly . . . there, in the front tree line.
I was supposed to call for Alex. I lifted my arms and my right finger-feathers brushed the bed behind me, and spread out to a full twenty-foot wingspan. I rose to my feet and stretched, my head swiveling. I had shifted into Anzu.
I was sapphire and scarlet and some sort of ultraviolet color. The glowing UV feathers were up under my wings and on my chest and belly. A darker shade overlay the tips of finger-flight-feathers and tail feathers, black-light glowing and intense to my Anzu eyes. My feet were ten inches from back claw and rear toe, called the hallux, to the longest front toe claw, and knobby joints were covered with glowing orange skin. My beak matched my orange legs, was pointed and curved, a vicious hook on the end. I inspected my spread wings carefully, sapphire flight feathers, the band of scarlet near my shoulder, and another on the back of my neck.
I shook, folded my wings and settled my feathers, feeling each one as it found its place. Like last time, I wasn’t hungry, which was a change from all my other shape-shifts. Usually I had to fuel my shifts with prodigious amounts of food, but something about the soft-lit magic trembling along my wings again suggested that I had pulled the energy from elsewhere.
Beast? I thought, hopefully.
Beast is here. Beast is inside stupid Anzu bird with Jane. Anzu bird is stupid shape, but Anzu shape lets Beast be here with Jane. Beast hunted and killed mooses with claws and strong beak, she thought at me. Want to hunt cow or bison. In Edmund car.
Thank God, I thought.
Beast is not god. Edmund is not god. Anzu is not god.
Something like joy flitted through me. True. And yes, this is good.
I opened my beak and a warbling cry echoed in the heights of the room as I called out, my bird throat trying to make a word. Alex came out as “Aulkxsh.”
The door opened and my younger partner entered. “Dang, Janie. You look dangerous.”
Beast is dangerous. And beautiful, she thought at me. More beautiful than stupid bird.
Dang skippy, I thought back.
I warbled again, trying to say hello. It came out a rippling trill of Ls.
Alex carefully, slowly, raised a hand to my head and stroked my feathers. “You are . . . This is amazing. I wish—” The words broke off abruptly.
Alex wishes to be skinwalker, Beast thought.
Alex wishes t
o fly, I thought back.
Flying is stupid. Beast does not like to fly.
It’s the only way we’ll find EJ.
Beast chuffed in irritation.
I leaned into his hand and let him groom my feathers. Then I caught a flash of color from the open door and I hopped away, out the door and up onto the railing of the balcony. I looked back and said, “Aulkx, callll Evannnn. Remembbbber.”
“I remember,” he said from behind me. “And as Leo once wrote to you, ‘May your hunt be bloody. May you rend and eat the flesh of your prey.’”
With those words, and the memory of the bloodsucking fanghead foremost in my mind, I gathered myself and crouched until my knobby toes touched my breastbone, a position I might achieve in human form—if I broke my legs first. I leaped and threw out my arms. Not arms. Wings. Icy air caught beneath them and my wings beat down. Tips of flight feathers hit the earth and brushed through the snow on the second and third strokes. And then I was lifting, wind in my face, air thin and icy and very, very wet. I tucked my feet and angled my body, rising into the air with each wingbeat. The Anzu Mercy Blade Enforcer flew at my side.
Over the cell phone, I heard Alex’s voice, crackly and yet crisp in my Anzu ears. “Janie, I am tracking. Head to your two o’clock. You’ll see Asheville in the distance. Copy?”
“Coee,” I said in my bird voice, my wings carrying me onto a high-rising thermal. I tilted my feathers and found an air current that let me relax, soaring as the wind lifted me. Below me I smelled people and petroleum products and felt the power of the mountain ridges as the energies rose and built and as air currents met and twisted together.
Alex said, “I-40 should be visible beneath you about now.”
“Cokee,” I said, trying my bird voice again, trying to remember how I had communicated last time, how my mouth worked. It had seemed easier before.
To my side, the air currents underwent a sharp change and I compensated, looking that way. Gee flew to my side and a little behind, riding my draft. Letting me do the work of flying. Useless bird. I caught his eye and he opened his beak, giving a laughing squawk. I whirled. Batted my wings at him.