Easy Pickings

by Faith Hunter

  Neither of us had our shoes tied when the front doors of Vamp Mojo blew open, releasing a heavy, muggy scent of blood and sex. For a gut-freezing moment, all my nightmares came calling.

  Witches and werewolves and something that looked like the swamp itself had come alive, part mud, part rotting vegetation, part God-awful stink of swamp gas. There were two of them, each ten feet tall, built like gorillas, and they moved like nothing I had ever seen before. Faster than the wind, angry as a tornado and just as uncontrolled. I wasn’t even certain they were alive in the biological sense.

  In the Sight, they were a flood of angry power twisted up and shaped into a creature I didn’t even want to admit existed. I could See their magic, how it was hauled out of them in all the various shades of power, and how it was fed back, part and parcel, with a heavy dose of guilt that would turn even the purest of intentions grey. Hell, I could See Katrina, the hurricane-that-wasn’t, and how her Force 5 winds and rain and destructive capability had been lashed down through Amaury’s focal point. He’d been the only one strong enough to become the conduit for a city’s worth of magic thrown against the storm, and when he’d tucked the hurricane’s power into his treasure chest, these things had been born, leashed to his control. Shit. We were so screwed.

  My gaze shot upward, to the whirlpool of black magic spinning above Vamp Mojo. To the eye of it, the hollow center that was the calm in every storm, and my stomach turned to lead.

  Amaury had never released Katrina. He hadn’t diffused or redirected her. He’d taken the combined magics of every adept in New Orleans and had captured a literal force of nature. The Big Easy’s magic users didn’t just owe him. They couldn’t escape from him, not as long as Katrina’s contained rage kept sucking up their magic.

  We were going to have to defuse the hurricane in Amaury’s pocket in order to take him down.

  That was the bad news.

  The good news was that everybody knew vampires didn’t come out in daylight, and the sun hadn’t gone down yet. So instead of Amaury and his vamps, all we had to fight was every other magic user in New Orleans. And they were pumped up on the feedback loop of Amaury ripping their power away, feeding it into Katrina, and having it come back down the line to them with the agony of an imprisoned elemental.

  Nevermind. There wasn’t any good news. We were utterly and completely boned. I said, “Try not to kill anybody,” to Jane, and then we met the onslaught.

  “Crap!” Beast slammed into my mind, her strength and speed into my bloodstream. I jutted my chin at Laz while pulling my M4 and a nine-mil loaded for vamp and were with silvershot. “You take care of the walking bags of mud. I got the weres.” I pointed the shotgun at two wolves in a dead-run and fired. The recoil slammed up my arm.

  The wolves were too close for the silver fléchettes to expand enough to take out both, but the one in front yelped and flipped over backward, dozens of tiny silver knives cutting into his body and front legs. I took more careful aim with the nine-mil and fired pointblank into his chest. He fell and I finished him off with a two tap to his forehead. He started to shift back, his body trying to heal from the mortal wound even as he died, the silver in his system stopping the transition.

  “I said not to kill anything!” Jo was so busy with a ball of blue light and that freaking magical sword I didn’t know how she noticed what I was doing, but her order broke through the sounds of battle anyway.

  “Weres’ bites are infectious!” A third wolf leaped through the open door. He was reddish and huge, with a slavering mouth and two-inch-long canines. I fired a fast two-tap at the wolf, taking him midcenter of his chest. I watched his leap turn into a tumbling, dead, freefall, and only now noticed that I knew this were. I glanced over at the other two dead ones and realized that I’d fought them before, in my Louisiana. They were about to get as dead in this world as they were in mine.

  “Well then don’t get bit by the sons of bitches!” Jo bellowed back.

  I laughed and fired at the two other wolves exploding through the bordello’s door. The M4 round took them both, wounding, not killing. One was instantly blind, and him I’d leave alive. He might heal after we cut all the silver out. The other one was only lame and I finished him off. “Yeah, all of them are sons of bitches. Kinda goes with the whole wolf thing. And when women are infected, they go into permanent heat and insane.”

  Jo grunted something foul under her breath and gave me a short nod without looking my way. I took that as permission to kill the werewolves. She had one witch down, unconscious, and the other on her knees. That witch looked angry, her hair out in a frizzed cloud, her fingers bent into claws as she fought, but she looked scared too, and I figured Jo would be ticked off if I killed the witch for her.

  Serena was fighting a witch too, a tall woman, who weighed three of Serena, maybe four of her, but size is no indication of power, and the skinny witch was holding her own in a fight that seemed to be made of bats and rainbows. Weird.

  Laz was standing in a stinking puddle of swamp mud and rotted vegetation, one Swamp Thing creature down and one to go. But this fight didn’t look so good. Laz was injured, his left knee bent at a weird angle, his weight all on his right. If the sparkling bluish glow was an indication, he seemed to be trying to pull at the earth, but it wasn’t helping much, not with the dead Swamp Thing and a half-foot of asphalt between him and the ground.

  I had fired three of my seven silver shotgun rounds, so I had four left. And a few more in Bitsa’s saddlebags several streets over. I lifted the M4, aimed it at what might be Swamp Thing’s stomach—assuming Swamp Things had stomachs. I mean, what did they eat? And fired.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the big bad ugly piece of mud turned to me and charged. “Crap!” I whirled and took off but I made it only three good paces when muddy water and clumps of bayou mud and dead leaves and what might have been a dead rat shot under my feet. I did a quick dance step at the flood and landed on the sidewalk. The muck smelled like the love child of a hundred rotten eggs, that dead rat, and methane gas from the swamp. And maybe a little like vomit. My gorge rose and I pushed it back down. I would not throw up in front of Joanne Walker. Would not. I looked back to see what had happened, and Laz cut me a sharp smile.

  “Thank you. I needed dat diversion, oui.”

  “You’re welcome.” I scraped the goo off my boots onto the sidewalk curb. It slimed. “I think.”

  Jo fell forward, landing on her knees in the muck. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered. “These jeans were brand new.” She looked up at me. “Think I can get the stink out of them?”

  “With enough bleach and Febreez. Me? I’m tossing the boots when I get home.”

  “Where’s Serena?” Jo asked.

  “She’s over—” I pointed and stopped. The hefty witch was lying in the goo, breathing but unconscious. And Serena was nowhere to be seen. “Crap.” We both looked at Vamp Mojo.

  A huge fireball of blue light shot out the front door of the bordello. Taking the door with it. I dove to the side behind the protection of the wall. Joanne dropped back into the goo. The heavy hunk of steel door flew over Jo’s ducked head and landed with a clang in the mud, sending a stinking wave of it over the far sidewalk. The magics smelled like Serena, like baby powder and fury.

  “Inside?” I said, helpfully.

  Jo laughed. “Ya think?”

  “I hope Amaury doesn’t mind stinking goo on his floors. Let’s go see what trouble Serena is in.” I pulled a vamp-killer, my new one, with the eighteen-inch, silver-plated blade and steel handle and crosshatched grip. I tossed it up and caught it, checking the heft and balance. I was still getting used to it.

  Looking over my shoulder at the sky, I figured we had about twenty minutes until sunset, when every vamp in the city, even the young, unstable ones, would be wide awake. “I’ve only got three silver shotgun rounds and the silver bullets left in this gun. The rest on me are regular ammo, so let’s make this fast.”

  “The rest? How ma
y damn bullets do you have?”

  “Enough. I hope.”

  Jo got a funny look on her face.

  “Vamps and weres are hard to kill,” I said.

  “I so want to get back to my own world.”

  “What, and miss all the fun?”

  Jo, sounding like she didn’t want to, chuckled. Laz spread out his hands and cast a silvery light in front of us. It had a concave shape bowing out before us, and the far edge looked nearly solid, like a shield. Jo seemed to be studying what he did and she twirled the silvery blade in an arc. It made a swishing sound, deadly but pretty, as long as she was on my side. Laz went through the vamp-bar doorway, Jo followed, and I took up the rear.

  Inside, the place was black, no lights, no torches, no nothing. And while vamps don’t go out in the sunlight, they also didn’t have to sleep by day. I’d killed vamps in dark places by daylight before, and Amaury was an old vampire, so he’d have resistance to the need for sleep. And this place wasn’t exactly a decorator’s dream—no windows, no view, no sunlight.

  Laz tossed a ball of blue light into the air. The place still stank of vamp and sex and blood, but there was no one around now, except for Serena kneeling beside a corpse on the stage. It had been burned to a crisp. Not a pretty sight. And the little witch was crying, her eyes wide with shock. I was betting that she had never killed before.

  I checked the position of my stakes, sheathed the blade and toed the body over. I blew out a breath. I knew this werewolf. Her name was Maggie Sweets, and she had been the alpha bitch of the Lupus Pack on my world—i nsane and in permanent heat, the true definition of a slutty bitch. On my world, her head had been nearly ripped off: here, here she had been turned into a crispy critter. Fate had it in for her, it seemed, no matter where she lived.

  I touched Serena’s shoulder. “She was a torturer, a killer, a kidnapper, and rapist. She was insane and sick, with no treatment, no release, no real life.”

  “And so you saying I should be proud of taking a life?”

  “No. But there are levels of remorse, and this is one time not to grieve too deeply.”

  The little witch turned red-rimmed eyes up to me. “All lives got value. All lives count equal: good, bad, kind, mean, murderers, priests, Satanists, children and doddering old men. This woman I have killed has no chance, now. No chance to change, to make good on her past evil. I took from her any chance of redemption.”

  Her words lashed me across the soul like a horsewhip. My face blanched cold. I knew what she was saying. I understood. I had done that too. Often.

  Before I could think what to say, I heard a pop, familiar and dangerous as a gunshot. The sound of displaced air made by a vamp moving fast.

  “Vamps,” I shouted. I pulled the vamp-killer and cut hard right, whirling my body into place as a shield over Serena. Cool blood splattered over me. Crap. It was sundown.

  Beast-sight filled my vision, turning the world into blues and greens and glistening shades of silver. Even without Laz’s witch-light, I could see that I was facing three vamps: Leo, Katie, and Grégoire, all vamps from my world. All friends—if vamps made friends. Seeing them made me hesitate, and Katie slashed in with her talons. I was too slow and took the gash across my forearm. I followed her pivot and popped her on the back of the head with the knife hilt. She fell like a pile of old rags.

  I kicked out, my boot heel hitting Leo in the jaw. He went down. Which was way too weird.

  I heard the swish of a rapier and ducked fast, behind a pillar holding up the roof. On the other side stood Grégoire, holding a sword. On my world, the beautiful, blond, French vamp, who looked about fifteen, was a soldier, a warrior, and adored battle. And he was probably a lot more powerful than he acted.

  His blue eyes laughed at me as his sword danced. “Come out here, beautiful woman, and fight like a man.”

  I swore and pulled the nine mil. Fired two shots, midcenter chest, and when his eyes widened, I said, “Surprise!” And stabbed him with an ash stake into the middle of his body, above his navel. He dropped hard, the sword clattering at his side.

  I looked up to see Jo busy with a werewolf and the little Asian muscle-man who had felt me up when he’d patted me down earlier that day. I’d mentally promised a rematch when I had my weapons again, and now I did.

  Before I could shoot him, Joanne’s sword disappeared. She grabbed the Asian guy by the shirt, slammed him around to bounce his head off a wall, then kneed him in the nuts. He collapsed in a dazed, whimpering puddle, and Jo snapped, “Maybe that’ll teach you to keep your goddamned hands to yourself, asshole,” before turning to deal with her werewolf.

  I couldn’t remember the last time—any time—that somebody had stood up for me. Not just stood up. Protected. I hadn’t known she’d even noticed Mr. Touchy-Feely, and there she was offering up some well-deserved justice. I was touched. In thanks, I shot Jo’s were twice.

  She grunted her own thanks. I liked Jo. She didn’t get all girlie, despite her feelings about not killing things. People. Whatever. ‘course, she hadn’t killed Mr. Touchy-Feely and she’d still taught him a lesson he’d be remembering every time he peed for the next week, so maybe there was something for me to learn there. I’d have to think about it.

  Not right now, though. I checked for Laz—fighting four vamps and looking like he was having fun—then dragged Grégoire across the floor to Leo, dropping him beside his friend. “This was way too easy, y’all. I’ve fought Leo on my world and ended up bleeding. I woudda died if we hadn’t been interrupted.”

  “Your world?” Leo grunted. I had broken his jaw, and he pressed on the broken pieces of bone working them back into place to heal. That had to hurt.

  “Yeah. On my world Amaury is dead, poisoned by drinking from a woman drunk on brandy mixed with colloidal silver water. On my world you are the Master of the City of New Orleans and most of the southeastern U.S. You are freaking powerful. There? I wouldn’t have connected with your jaw, and if I had, I’d a broken my foot. You are powerful on my world, not the weak-as-a-human thing you are here. Your uncle is siphoning your power too, isn’t he? How about you call off your vamps and let me kill Amaury for you?”

  “You would challenge me?” The silken voice was spiked with power, and slid across my nape like rose thorns dipped in molten glass. This was the kind of power I expected from a vamp.

  I turned and faced the Master of the City. And fired four shots into his chest, heart-shots every one, silver ammo. He dropped to his knees. “Yeah. Where I come from, you are true dead, and the world is a better place for it.” I reared back to take his head, and suddenly, he just . . . wasn’t there.

  I leaped to the raised dance floor, a wall at my back, the crispy critter in front of me. I hadn’t heard the tell-tale popping of displaced air, but he was gone. Which was freaky.

  Laz stepped to the stage with me, to my left, and Jo followed, standing out front, her silver sword glowing wildly blue. “Where’s Serena,” she asked.

  “Dat bebe,” Laz rumbled. “I hear bebe cry. From de back of de building.”

  I listened, but heard nothing except a storm brewing outside. Smelled nothing but charred werewolf.

  “The wind is coming up,” Jo said.

  “So?” I asked.

  “So I’m guessing somebody is about to unleash Katrina-in-a-bottle.”

  “And if it gets free?”

  “This city is toast,” Jo said flatly. “Blown away by category five winds and rain and tides strong enough to take out the levee.”

  “Aren’t you a ray of sunshine.”

  Laz laughed. So did Jo, though it didn’t sound happy. “Amaury isn’t a witch,” she said. “He can’t control that much power on his own. That means he’s got a power circle with witches going twenty-four/seven, or he’s got some kind of—” She lifted her sword and waved it in the air. “Some kind of thing. Something like this, that can be charged with magic.”

  “Like an amulet?”

  “Yeah! A storm amulet.”
She looked like she thought that was awesome for about two seconds. Then she looked like she’d actually thought what that meant through, and turned green. The rain outside splatted down in a burst, so hard it sounded like a drum corps in the street. The wind grew louder, its pitch rising to a scream, like a screech owl the size of a bus. It sounded angry.

  A tendril of wind quested into the room, lifting and swirling papers, overturning glasses on the bar, pushing at the tables from underneath, making them rock. And the wind was heated, wet, feeling like the breath of a large animal. The burned body at my feet started to smell worse, a putrefied stench of burned hair and flesh. I. Did. Not. Like it.

  “He’s a power-hungry maniac.” I said. “My bet is an amulet, so he doesn’t have to trust witches to do what he wants. What would the amulet look like? And can we just smash it when we find it?”

  “Crap, you think I know? It could be a toothbrush or a snow globe, for all I know. But I’m dead certain we can’t smash it. Everything would go boom.”

  In the corner, Leo swiveled to his butt and sat up. “Pull the stakes from Grégoire and I will help you.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “For me,” Katie said. She put out a pale, thin hand, slid it down Leo’s face in a caress that was pure sex. “He would do it for me. And for Grégoire. Amaury is dangerous. He feeds from us until we are near death. Without him . . .”

  “Yeah. Without him, Leo takes over and this city is better. Stronger. Which leads us back to the problem. What do we do with the amulet when we find it?”

  Lazarus, with all the serenity in the world, said, “I will take it.”

  Jane barked a laugh. Meowed a laugh. Whatever short-tempered shapeshifter chicks who turned into big cats did when they let out a short, sharp laugh, anyway. “You’ll take it. Really.”

  Laz, who had manifested plenty of sense of humor, didn’t seem to have any now as he nodded once. “Oui, yes. Really.”