Death's Rival jy-5

by Faith Hunter

  Long hours later, I heard a voice in my dreams, softer than the quiet drums. “Aquetsi, ageyutsa.” Granddaughter . . . “Tell me what you did not finish.”

  My mouth refused to open, as if I was caught in a dream, trapped, trapped, trapped. I sucked in a breath so deep and hard it hurt my ribs. I forced open my lids and they parted sluggishly, revealing Aggie through my tangled eyelashes. Aggie’s eyes were black in the dark, calm and quiet, like deep pools of water in a slow mountain stream. She cocked her head, as if she were a robin staring at a juicy worm. We were no longer in the sweathouse, but in the cave where she took me sometimes, and I didn’t know if this was vision or reality or some esoteric blending of the two.

  The drum was deep, a reverberating beat, hollow against the cavern walls of my mind. A heartbeat of sound, steady and soothing. I couldn’t get my mouth to work to ask my question. I didn’t know what to ask.

  Aggie smiled into the scented darkness. “You are stubborn. You are full of resentment. Only failure of the worst sort would cause you to resent failure. To fear it. To grow a tough hide that would make you never back down. Only failure.” She reached into the basket and brought out another smudge stick, fat and aromatic even before she held it to the fire. Yellow flames licked out and up, and light caught her copper-colored cheeks and forehead, darkening the shadows at the sides of her mouth, making her look older than she really was. Drawing out her mouth into a muzzle. Like a wolf.

  I tried to tense, but my muscles failed me. I tried to push upright, but the world whirled around me as if I were drunk or stoned. Aggie’s mother was ani waya, Wolf Clan, Eastern Cherokee. Her father was Wild Potato Clan, ani godigewi, Western Cherokee. Aggie had magic I had only guessed at. Her snout stretched out. Her shadow on the cavern wall was all wolf. Teeth, wolf teeth, glinted in the firelight.

  “My, what big teeth you have, Grandmother,” I mumbled.

  I knew I was trapped in a dream when the wolf laughed. She held the smoking smudge stick into the air and saluted the four directions, north, east, south, west, and north again. The trailing smoke made a pale, thinning square in the darkness. “What did you fail at, Dalonige i Digadoli?”

  I recalled a vision of shadows on the wall. A man riding a woman. My mother. Remembered the stink of semen and death. The soft cries of fear and pain. The slick feel of cooling blood. “I didn’t kill the killer of my father. I didn’t kill the white men who raped my mother.” I told the story of the fractured memories.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I Never Had a Chance to Say Good-bye

  “You were a child of five. You were no match for the white man.” Through my tangled lashes, I saw Aggie One Feather’s wolf snout tilt, like a robin, the motion unsettling, part wolf, part bird, all dream.

  “I swore an oath on my father’s blood,” I said. “I wiped it on my face, in promise.”

  “Are you certain you failed?” Her head tilted far to the side. “Who did you tell of this great crime? Who did you go to?”

  Instantly, I remembered the sharp stick piercing my foot as I ran through the dark, my pale nightgown catching the moonlight through the stalks of corn. The corn towered over my head, the garden never seeming so large in the daylight. Down the hill to my grandmother’s house, the longhouse where she lived with her daughters and their husbands. This was a new memory, and my breath caught before I said, unsteadily, “I went to Uni Lisi, grandmother of many children, Elisi, the mother of my father.” I saw my hand banging on the door. Pounding on it. Saw the door open and the light/heat/brilliant colors blast out. Voices so loud they pulsed against my eardrums. My screaming. The women grabbing up weapons. A hoe. A long knife. My grandmother holding a shotgun. And the long horrible run back through the corn, racing ahead, Elisi letting me lead the way.

  In the sweathouse, my heart raced with an uneven beat, like a broken drum, as my body reacted to the memory and its terror. I saw again my mother, in a heap on the ground, naked in the moonlight. The white men gone. The smell of horses. And man stuff. The sound of her crying. The warrior-woman, my grandmother, putting me on a horse, in front of her, and galloping into the night, her arm a band holding me close. The smell of her sweat and her anger. The smell of the pelt she carried. The feel of her beast roiling under her skin—tlvdatsi—mountain lion. Yet the pelt she carried over her shoulder was black.

  A black panther, my white mind murmured. Elisi was a skinwalker. Like me. A protector of the Cherokee, a warrior of the tribe.

  The door opened, the vision shattered. I sat up.

  Aggie One Feather stood in the doorway, fully human, freshly dressed in the coarse woven robe she wore in a sweat ceremony. Just entering for the session. “I was delayed. My apologies.”

  “No need to be sorry,” I said, sitting up, standing, my legs feeling wobbly. “But I think I’m done for the day. Can I come back? Soon?”

  Aggie tilted her head, just like she had in my vision, but there the resemblance ended. “Certainly. If you’re sure?”

  “Very sure. Thank you.”

  * * *

  Back home, I showered, dressed, and fell on my bed, face in the pillow. It smelled musty. I needed to change the sheets. Wash clothes. Maybe get a life. On that thought, I slept.

  * * *

  The sun was setting when I heard a ringing and forced myself awake.

  I was in my house, or, rather, the house I was using as long as I worked for the blood-master of New Orleans. It was a nice house, two hundred years old, give or take, remodeled to give it all the modern amenities and still have all the old-world charm, at a nice address in the Quarter.

  Yawning, I made my way to the kitchen to see a cell phone lying on two notes, both signed by Troll, Katie’s primo blood-servant and protector. The top note said “Frm: Derek Lee. Angel Tit had no luck with New York contacts.” The second was an invitation to dinner from Katie and her girls. I had missed the girls who lived and worked at Katie’s, and it would be the first relaxing moment in my life recently. I needed some relaxing. The cell started ringing again, so I answered. And heard gunfire. And Bruiser shouting.

  “Jane! Are you in New Orleans? We’re under attack!” The phone shifted and I heard him shouting to the side, muffled, “Get him out of here! Alejandro, Estavan, take four men and get our master to Katie’s! Set up a perimeter. Keep them safe! Hildebert, Koun, take over on the battlefield. Lorraine, Bettina, go with Alejandro. Guard your master and his heir! I charge you with—”

  “I am going nowhere. This is my home! I stay!” Leo shouted, his voice guttural and vamped out. Even over the phone I could feel the power he was drawing upon, the power of all his clan. “I will not run from my enemies!”

  Beast flooded into my system. Phone to my ear, I raced to the side door. I had heard a knock while I slept and hoped it was a delivery. I nearly ripped the door off its hinges. It slammed back against the wall, and I spotted the shipping containers full of my weapons.

  “You are of no use to us burned alive,” Bruiser said, going all upper-class British. “Get to a place of safety until we can formulate a plan. Please, Master!”

  Master? Things were bad if he was calling Leo Master. I lifted the heavy containers and carried them as fast as I could to my bed. Gunfire sounded so close I held the phone away from my ear. I heard sirens, fire and police, and Bruiser’s voice, grunting. I knew that sound, that specific tone of pain. He was hit. Hit bad. The phone fell and clattered away.

  I never had a chance to say good-bye to my father. I had no intention of letting that happen to me again. I tore off the top of the shipping boxes and started to reassemble my weapons.

  * * *

  I bent over Bitsa, the wind tangling my hair, which streamed out in the wind, chilling the necklace of interlocked links that protected my throat from vamp-fang—the new necklace of silver-plated titanium. I took the old bridge over the Mississippi, the pebbled roadway a patterned hum beneath the tires, weaving between cars and trucks of evening traffic, ignoring both speed and safety law
s with abandon. I nearly flew into the countryside on the far side of the river. I could see the light on the horizon miles away. A fire. A big fire.

  The smell of smoke was hot on the wind. Wood, plastic, metal, brick, each has its own scent markers as it burns. So does the smell of burning flesh. Human. Foul and horrible, like spoiled pork. I shifted my weight forward and lowered my head over Bitsa, the Harley moving at the peak of her engineering specs, taking curves at top speed. Beast shared her night sight, the shadows glowing green and silver and blue. Her reflexes allowing me to handle the greater speed. Mine, she whispered into my thoughts. Mine.

  I slowed, turning into the long drive, zigzagging between cars and fire trucks and emergency trucks, red, white, and blue lights strobing the dark, the artificial lights lost beneath the red-orange blaze of the conflagration. Men and women shouted. Water plumed up and over, aiming into broken dormer windows on the roof of the old wooden clan home. Smoke and fire billowed out from the windows of every story; sparks and flames leaped high into the air. Fire demons—tornadoes that sometimes formed above raging fires, sucking the flames into the gyre—spun high above the madness. The smell of magic tingled on the air, hot and spicy as cactus spines. Gunshots sounded in the distance, punctuated by muffled screams and shouted orders. Ahead, near the flames, I smelled Bruiser on the air, Bruiser and his blood, a lot of blood.

  I dropped my Harley and helmet against a tree far from the fire, where the shadows would hide the Benelli strapped to the bike. I raced in, bypassing the cops who tried to stop me. Choosing the ambulance surrounded by the most people, I pushed through the throng, tripped over a hose. Shook off a hand that tried to pull me back. Rounded the ambulance, my boots grinding with my speed. Smelling the blood even over the smoke. Bruiser’s blood. Everything in my life narrowed to that one scent. I dodged another man who tried to stop me, shouting it was too dangerous for onlookers. I jumped into the ambulance. Bent over Bruiser, touched his shoulder, and leaned in to breathe in his scent, my unbound hair sliding forward.

  His shirt had been half cut away, bloody rags still on one arm and half tucked into his trousers. Blood smeared his chest, as did brown Betadine and swathes of white bandages centered on his upper left shoulder and his right chest below his pec. Bags of clear fluid hung from IV stands; one was a plasma expander, the other normal saline. His eyes were closed and his skin was chilled where my hands brushed over his chest. But he was full of vamp blood. He would have some residual accelerated healing.

  I tried to say something, anything, thinking, Are you okay? Or something like that. Something normal. Instead what growled out of my mouth was “If you bleed to death, I’ll kill you and Leo both.”

  A faint smile touched his face, but before he could reply, the paramedic said, “Ma’am, unless you’re next of kin, get out, you.” Frenchy patois. Cajun background.

  “She’s next of kin,” Bruiser said, without opening his eyes.

  “Your wife, she is?” The paramedic sounded incredulous. I ignored him.

  “Sure. She can make any medical decisions for me. My lawyer has the papers.”

  Which was news to me, if it was true. And wife? I shook that away, even as Beast purred a satisfied Mine. “What happened?” I asked, knowing it had something to do with my trips and the vamp who was attacking other MOCs. “This is my fault,” I said.

  He tried to laugh, but his breath caught with pain. I thought I heard something wet and gurgly in his chest, but the paramedic didn’t seem concerned and the sound stopped.

  When he could speak, he said, “You struck the match? Carried the gasoline? Tried to kill my friend and master?”

  Inside, I flinched at the two terms used together for Leo, who was both vamp and monster, but I kept it there, in the dark inside me. I shook my head no.

  “Just after moonrise, Leo was sitting down to breakfast,” Bruiser said. “We heard gunfire. Vamps and blood-servants attacked, killed the gardeners and three security men in the first ten seconds. Inside of fifteen they had us pinned down inside. By thirty seconds, they had firebombed the house and were taking off on trail bikes that they must have pushed in. Then we heard the second wave, gunfire from the surrounding property. It was well coordinated. They were professionals, well trained, and they are still fighting out there.” He lifted a finger and pointed off behind the house. “How can any of that be your fault?”

  I had seen the property from an all-terrain vehicle during my review of Leo’s security systems, and hadn’t liked the easy access to the house. But making Leo move into town and give up his family home hadn’t been an option. When I’d suggested the move, he had lifted a narrow black brow and uttered a laconic “No.” I hadn’t argued and I should have. Now that decision was back to bite Leo. Worse was the knowledge that I was even more involved in today’s fiasco.

  “It’s my fault because the man I killed in my hotel room was the Enforcer of the master vamp who’s challenging and taking other vamps’ territory.”

  Faint humor touched his features, his closed eyes crinkling slightly. “Why do you think that?”

  “Leo’s enemy left me a letter on a dead man.”

  “A? Z? Q?” the paramedic asked, and laughed at his own joke.

  Bruiser’s brown eyes came open slowly, as if they had been glued together. There was pain in his gaze, but also intense concentration and focus. He lifted a finger and touched my hand. I almost jerked away from the contact, his flesh as cold as a vamp’s, but his fingers closed over mine. “When you first saw him in your hotel room, was his gun drawn?”

  The question surprised me nearly as much as the gesture. “I don’t know.” I stared into his eyes, unable to block out his study of me. Unable to not remember. It had been months, and what I recalled about the man had been the initial lack of scent on his person. Unscented deodorant, no cologne, only gun oil and lubricants to mark him as armed, and later, the very, very faint taint of his master—which I could now identify as beerlike, hops and fermentation and the sweet smell of blood. I had been naked, asleep, when he entered the hotel suite, my body hidden behind the mounded bed linens. I had risen, whirling, grabbed the statue beside the bed, and thrown it as both a diversion and a weapon, diving for my Walther 380. His arm had been coming up. “He was turned to the side, right arm down and out of sight, looking at my weapons, going through my blades and stakes with his left hand, when I threw the statue at him. It’s all in the police reports. I didn’t lie about anything.”

  “You shot first?”

  I hadn’t actually seen the weapon until he fired. Spats of sound from an illegal suppressor, like books dropping flat from shoulder height. Then the sound of my weapons firing. The recoil in wrist and shoulder. The stench of gunfire and blood. “No. He shot first.” Which meant that my attacker had been already holding a drawn weapon. An odd tightness in my chest eased.

  “Self-defense. Did he say anything?”

  “No. He went unconscious fast, even though there wasn’t a lot of blood. I thought he was going to live until they told me that he . . . died. Later.”

  “The letter the master Mithran left you. Where is it?”

  I slipped my hand from his and pulled the envelope from my pocket. He chuckled, the laughter holding more pain than comedy. “Read it to me.”

  I unfolded it and read the letter aloud. When I was done, he took the single page and stared at the words. I heard something stutter-thump-give-way, something from inside him. Bruiser’s hand fell to his stomach, the letter fluttering to the floor. The paramedic cursed and pushed me to the side. Bruiser didn’t take another breath, his chest sunken in and still. I pulled the new cell and speed-dialed a landline number I seldom called. I was shocked when Katie—who hated phones—answered with my name, “Jane Yellowrock.” There was rage in the words, but I didn’t think it was directed at me.

  I said, “Leo’s primo is bleeding out. I need someone strong to feed him. Fast.”

  “We have our own wounded. Leo is not alone to suffer assault
tonight. We too are under attack,” she said, unintentionally repeating Bruiser’s words, from what felt like days ago, as he told vamp-warriors to get Leo to safety and to protect Katie. “My Alejandro and Estavan were injured as their carriage drove up. The little priestess is in a healing trance with them. The elder priestess is missing,” she spat. “The others are fighting and dying to ensure our safety. Who do you suggest I send to feed a human?”

  Fury spurted through, me, hot and blazing at her callous disregard of any but another vamp, even a valuable human, like the primo. “I don’t care who you send,” I ground out, “but it better be fast, or so help me, by all I hold holy, I’ll stake and behead you myself, and rip out your fangs and mount them on my necklace.” My breath came hard and fast, as if I’d been running.

  “Deo. You would too. And Leonardo would let you,” she hissed. “I will recall someone from the battlefield. He will be there in moments.” The cell connection ended and the ambulance started to move.

  “Stop,” I said. When the paramedic ignored me, I swiveled on my heel and slid against the driver, shoving him. One handed, I opened the door and continued my momentum, pushing him off his seat and out onto the drive, even as I slid into the driver’s seat, hit the brakes, and threw the ambulance into park. I looked down, ascertained that I hadn’t run over the driver, and said, “If you’d been wearing your seat belt, this wouldn’t have happened.” I looked to the paramedic in back and started to tell him something, but the words died in my throat. He was doing CPR on Bruiser.

  Time slowed into something spiked and thorny, as if each second, each compression to Bruiser’s chest, were a wound stabbed into my soul with a cold iron blade. Again and again. The medic was shouting. Something about getting to the hospital. The driver, also a paramedic, opened the back ambulance doors and jumped inside, black boots landing with twin thumps, two cops behind him. I turned off the ambulance. Opened the door. Threw the keys into the dark. Just before the paramedic body-slammed me.