by Faith Hunter
Leo pulled in another breath, his chest rising, then falling, the sound of the breath whispering through his fangs. We were balanced on the blade of a knife. Leo could go either way: kill his son’s murderer and the witches he now smelled in my home, or withdraw and save the child. The Vampira Carta prohibited the killing of children, even witch children, and killing a witch could revoke the unstable peace between the races. But his grief was out of control. Had been for days now. And witches were the sworn enemies of vampires, though I didn’t yet know why.
“Are you a vampire?” Angelina asked, for once ignoring me.
The torches flickered in a sudden gust, bringing her scent down from the upper porch. Bubble bath and the warmth of her skin caught in the humid night breezes, swirling down to the ground to mix with vamp pheromones and smoke. The vamps with Leo each took a step back. “Mama says you eat people.”
Leo swallowed. “We do not eat people,” he said, his voice carefully neutral, laced with his refined, formal French accent. “And you may not play with fire. It is dangerous. We . . . we will return to visit at a later time,” he said.
He looked at me, his hatred so bright it burned in his black eyes. “This is not finished. My son will be avenged.”
“I already avenged your son,” I said. “I killed his murderer. I paid his blood debt and left you the body of your enemy.” I had said the words before—the last time he’d visited me, insane with grief. They had worked then. I could hope they worked now.
Leo blinked. The fire in his eyes seemed to flicker and die. Something else filled the void, a hint of some softer emotion—confusion, uncertainty, perhaps—swimming through the grief. He met my eyes, held my gaze with that hypnotic focus the very old ones have.
And he was gone. Just . . . gone. Air currents swirled hard after his passage. The vamps stared up at the child on the porch above.
“Come inside, Angie,” Molly said from overhead, her voice rough with fear. “You too,” she said to me, though she couldn’t see me from her position. I heard boards creak, and the door to the veranda closed.
“He would have led us to murder a child,” a female vamp said.
“He didn’t know,” another said, closing the kerosene container he had opened.
“He is the master. He should have known,” the female vamp insisted. “He should not have led us here.”
“Dolore,” a third vamp said. I didn’t know the word, but there was a hushed reverence in her voice that lent it importance. “We must decide.”
“I will not chain my master,” the fourth vamp said. “I will not. I warn you now. There will be war.”
The four vamps looked from one to another. Then, as a unit, they turned to me. And stared. I felt the weight of their eyes, holding me in place, my cross held high.
“We will uphold the Vampira Carta,” the woman said. “It is law.”
The pressure in the small yard drained away fast, as if a stopper had been pulled and the tension and anger sucked down. Much more slowly than Leo, but still faster than any human, the vamps left. Their scents weakened, dissipating on the erratic winds. Down the street, I heard a car start, the sound low, like a powerful growl. Headlights cut the misty dark as it passed my freebie house, and vanished into the night.
I swiveled on a bare foot and went inside, pulling the door shut behind me. I leaned against it and remembered how to breathe, hearing my heart pound in my ears, an uneven pain in my chest. I dropped the cross around my neck, swept my hair out of the way, twisting it up high, and shoved the stakes into a makeshift bun. My fingers were quivering in the aftermath of near battle.
A moment later, I felt the wards snap on over the house, the feel of magic a soft buzz on my skin. I knew Molly would be beating herself up for not activating them sooner tonight.
I hadn’t been ready for attack. I would never have thought that Leo would make such a public, violent move. Which was pretty stupid in my twenty-twenty hindsight.
I went to my room and weaponed up, putting blades through their respective loops in my jeans and strapping on wrist and calf sheaths, checking and adding a new handgun in its shoulder holster, laying the shotgun across the foot of the bed. It wasn’t overkill. It was necessary to cool my fear. Though the wards were back up on the house, and Molly and the kids were safe, I couldn’t banish the vision of Leo, vamped out.
If I’d been properly weaponed earlier, I might have had a fighting chance against the vamps in my yard. Well, I’d still likely have died, but I’d have taken a few of them with me. I’m good. Real good. Arguably, the best in the business. Just not good enough to take on a whole blood-family of vamped-out master monsters alone. Monsters with fire. Hands shaking with the aftershock, I made the decision that I would go rogue hunting that night. If it wasn’t too muggy, I’d wear a skintight skullcap, but that wasn’t gonna happen. I used the hair as a weapon holder instead, shoving in stakes that looked like hair sticks, making sure I grabbed silver-tipped ones for maximum damage. I felt better with each weapon, calmer, more secure.
The kettle on the gas stove emitted a soft, steamy whistle, the precursor to the piercing one that would push through soon. It seemed like aeons since I had put it on. I stopped a moment, bracing a hand on the closet door. I closed my eyes and half prayed a single word of thanks. That had been close. I returned to the kitchen and turned off the gas, pouring the water over the tea leaves in the strainer, into the white enamel pot beneath. I stared at the steam rising from the tiny hole in the whistler spout as shock boiled up in me like the steam in the kettle.
Leo Pellissier had come to burn down my house. He had brought gallons of kerosene, torches, and his undead scions to carry out the burning. He had wanted me to die in the fire. He had been prepared to break windows, pour in accelerant, and torch the place. Literally. I shivered in the night air and put down the kettle. It was almost never cold in the Vieux Carre, the French Quarter of the old town, but the hurricane had brought cooler, wet air from the gulf. At least that was what I told myself. Uncertain, I pulled the elk-horn hilt of my favorite vamp-killer, its silvered blade shining blue in the light of the hurricane lamp. I resheathed the weapon, making sure it was loose and easy to draw.
Knowing tea would help calm me, I poured two cups of hot chai, added sugar and a generous dollop of room-temp whipped cream to each, and placed them on a tray with a stack of cookies and the lit lantern. Moving in a cone of light, I carried them to the front of the house. Another hurricane lamp flickered at the top of the stairs. I set the lamp from the kitchen on the ground floor near the staircase, the flames tossing amber light into the rooms, peaceful and safe, a bright counterpoint to the conflagration that nearly was.
Carefully, carrying the tray, I walked up the shadowy steps. The children’s room was over my own, to the left of the stairs. Tonight it was dark, the wide space unlit by the lion-shaped night-light. Yet, even dark, the room fairly crackled with wards and witch power. In addition to her warning and protective wards over the property to deflect intruders, Molly had set wards over the children for health and healing.
There was a third type of ward Mol called a hedge of thorns around the rocks in my garden. It was quiescent; the trigger to activate it was my blood, poured over the ground. Pretty macabre, but she wanted to protect me even after she was back home in the mountains, and the hedge was a last-ditch shielding, one that would seal me in over the rocks where I could shift into Beast form and heal, if I found myself in life-threatening danger. Beast was the only animal I could shift into without effort, and without having genetic material from which to take the pattern. She was something outside my skinwalker magic—something I thought a typical skinwalker wouldn’t carry within her. Beast was another soul living inside me, revenant of a mountain lion whose skin I had hidden in for far, far too long, and she had her own goals, memories, needs, and secrets. She wasn’t always easy to live with, but she did help keep me alive.
The inside ward over Angie’s and Little Evan’s room was shaped
so that even I couldn’t enter without setting off an alarm. But I could check in, making sure the kids were okay. I’m not the motherly sort, so it felt strange to have children in my home, and even stranger to feel protective. Fiercely, violently protective, as Beast’s maternal instincts, so different from my own, spilled over into my human consciousness.
With my exceptional night vision, I could see well enough into the dim room. Little Evan was stretched out, covers thrown off, his fists tightly balled, arms to either side, his cheeks puffing with each breath. On the bed closer to the door, Angelina was curled into a ball beneath the covers, her face as angelic as her name. Both were, amazingly, already asleep. Kids.
“They won’t disappear in a wisp of smoke,” a soft voice said behind me.
I smiled, feeling rueful, wondering if Molly had set a ward I had never detected, one that notified her when someone even approached the children’s doorway. Probably.
“Just checking,” I said. Holding the tray in front of me, I turned, finding Molly in the shadows of the wide hallway. Her long, thin nightgown fluttered in the air from the open windows; her red ringlets hung down her back. She looked like something from the nineteen hundreds, except for the iPod around her neck. I set the tray on a little spindled table in the hall and offered her one of the mugs. Molly crossed the wide hallway on bare feet and took it.
“No one can get in,” she said, sipping. “Not through my ward. Or at least not without fireworks going off. You don’t have to prowl the house with butcher knives.”
I pulled and flipped a knife. The blade caught the lamp, bright and glittering, the narrow, deep flukes along the blade appearing almost ornamental with their silvering, making the weapon strong, flexible, lightweight, beautiful, the blade’s silver plating poisonous to vampires. A work of art. It was a new blade. I really liked it. “Not a butcher knife. It’s a vamp-killer.”
“It’s a claw, is what it is,” she said, the wry tone becoming drier, sharper. “I counted. You’re wearing ten. Just like your Beast’s front paw claws.”
I shrugged. It was true; I had ten. As a skinwalker, I had a preference for big cats—puma, African lion, leopards, but mostly for the mountain lion form. It was easiest to be Beast. If I ever discover a skinwalker psychiatrist, I’m sure he’ll apply some Jungian or Freudian school of thought to me, and the weapons I choose will be a big part of the analysis.
“Are you going hunting in human form?” she asked, her voice now carefully emotionless. When I nodded, she said, quietly, “Be careful, Big Cat. He’s not finished grieving. If he has laid a trap, you might slip past him as Beast, but not as Jane.”
“I know,” I said. “But I have a job to do. And the sooner I get it done, the better.” I slid the vamp-killer into its loop. “I still wish you and the kids would go back home.”
She hesitated for an instant, clearly remembering Leo Pellissier and his vamp goons. She shook her head. “Not until Big Evan gets back from Brazil and the contractor has the new room closed in. A house with no walls means I can’t ward it properly.” She held up a hand to stop my protests. “We’re in less danger here than we are in the hills without Big Evan. And you know we’ve had . . . trouble lately. My kind aren’t exactly popular. I’ll go back in two weeks like we planned. Besides”—her tone had turned ironic, and she sipped her tea—“you actually need us now. Angie’s the reason why Leo didn’t burn the house down around you. He won’t be back, at least until he can make sure of killing only you and not a houseful of children. And the wards will never be down again.”
I flinched just the tiniest bit. She had a point. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be careful.” I took my own mug in hand, the stoneware warm and oddly comforting. “See you in the morning. Night, Molly.”
“Night, Big Cat.”
Downstairs, while I sipped hot tea, I put on my silvered chain-mail collar over the gold-nugget and chain necklace I never took off, added a couple more crosses, tied and strapped on my new steel-toed boots, and put on a thick denim jacket I’d picked up in a shop catering to farmers to replace the leather jacket lost in my last vamp fight. Another was on order, but until it arrived, denim would have to do. I holstered my big-ass shotgun across my back. I tugged on my hair to make sure it was difficult to grab. Long hair made a handy-dandy handle to pull in a fight, and once an opponent had it, the fight was over. Rapists and vamps liked victims with long hair. Made them easy to control. I could cut it, but I’d never shifted with short hair and didn’t know if that would alter the process.
Dressed for hunting, I left the house, feeling the wards sizzle across my skin, heatless and bright, like holiday sparklers in the hands of Molly’s children. I helmeted up, fired up Bitsa—my bastard Harley, put together from bits of this and bits of that—and opened the side gate. I re-locked the new padlock with my new key—which hadn’t kept out the vamps—and pulled into the street. Note to self: Find out how high vamps can jump. Build brick walls and gate higher.
I guided Bitsa through the streets, heading vaguely north. Streetlights were out in most of the city, the few hanging traffic lights swinging slowly on their supports. Trash was piled in corners, fluttering or soaked. Signs were down. Water gurgled down gutters from roofs, raced along street gutters, and in some low-lying places flowed along the streets, hiding the pavement. I watched the curbs when I traversed these, keeping Bitsa out of deeper water. I didn’t want to drown her out.
Though most everything was closed—bars, restaurants, shops, and dance clubs—cars were parked all over, along the streets, in the tiny, privately owned parking lots scattered through the Quarter. Lanterns, lamps, and candles lit windows. People sat at tables on second-story balconies, by lamplight, and the smell of food wafted down. Tinny music came from open windows; battery-powered boom boxes perched on ledges shared a soft dissonance of musical tastes. Live music, a guitar, saxophone, and drum came through an open bar door. Tables inside were lit with candles, a generator roaring in back. Small businesses that depended on the tourist trade twenty-four/seven, just to make the rent, were opening, despite the lack of city power. More generators began to hum. As power was restored in some areas, neon lights appeared here and there, advertising food, liquor, and entertainment. I motored out of the Quarter, past the church I attended most Sundays—though not today, no thanks to Ada—and quickly into less fashionable areas.
I had been in New Orleans’s version of the projects before, when I was taking down two young-rogue vamps who were feeding indiscriminately and killing their prey. Rogues came in two varieties: the very, very young, and the very, very old. But both were whacked-out, hungry, and deadly. These young rogues were feral for a different reason from the old ones. Vamps spent the first decade of life chained in a basement—figuratively speaking as Louisiana had few basements because of the high water table—nutty as fruitcakes and dangerously wild. A good master cared for his young until they cured properly—regained sanity and memories—or staked them if they didn’t.
My contract said I was supposed to find the vamp breaking vampire law and tradition and take him out. Or her. I would be paid a bounty for every young rogue I staked and beheaded, and the vamp council had a cleanup crew on standby to dispose of bodies and scrub kill sites, should I need their services. The council wanted to avoid any police involvement, so I wasn’t supposed to call in the cops unless there was just no help for it.
Since I had taken down this sire’s progeny—a young male and his even younger mate—only recently, I had an old trail to follow, but that meant I needed to find safe passage through the projects while I hunted. Which meant I had to talk to some men. Dangerous men.
The half-familiar streets had been dark enough when I last came through here. That time I had been overdressed for the locale, underdressed for the job of hunting vamps. It was a lot darker now, the night lit only by the twinkle of lanterns, flashlights, and candles as I advertised my arrival with Bitsa’s guttural snarl.
The place smelled better than last time, th
e hurricane having washed away the odors of urine, garbage, cooked cabbage, rats, roaches, and deep-fried foods. The smells of poverty and a food-stamp diet. I passed a heavily graffitied sign that might have said Iberville Housing at one time.
I couldn’t see anyone, but I felt eyes on me as I motored past, looking tough, well armed, and full of moxie. All of that wouldn’t keep me alive, but it might make the locals pause just to see what kind of fool came into their territory at night and alone. When I was pretty sure I had the right housing unit, or at least close to it, I slowed to a stop and killed the motor. Knees knocking, a fine tremor in my hands, I unhelmeted, secured the helmet to the bike, and pulled a vamp-killer and shotgun. It was loaded for vamp, but the hand-packed silver fléchette rounds would kill humans too.
Shouting, I called into the darkness, “I’m looking for Derek Lee, ex-marine, if a marine can ever be called ex. Did two tours in Afghanistan, one in Iraq.”
My voice echoed in the night. From a house behind me, I heard the distinctive sh-thunk of a bolt-action rifle being readied for firing.
CHAPTER 2
Have stakes, will travel
In one of Bitsa’s tiny rearview mirrors, I saw a slice of light followed by a pinpoint of red. A laser-targeting sight. Crap. The killing spot between my shoulder blades began to itch. So I got louder, raised my voice as thunderously as I could. “Derek told me he thought he’d be safe when he came home to the United States. Instead, he found his neighborhood was full of blood-sucking vamps. He had to go back to war just to keep his family out of harm’s way. So I’m looking for Derek. He knows me as Injun Princess.” I didn’t necessarily love the nickname, but it seemed to amuse Derek.
My voice fell away. If Derek didn’t find me now and give me safe passage, I figured I’d be in a lot of trouble. For the second time tonight. Beast rose in me as the seconds dragged by. Minutes passed, feeling like hours. I started to sweat in the humid air, a betraying trickle lazing its way down my side. My heart beat a bit too fast, fear leaching into my bloodstream. I hated being passive. And I hated standing there with weapons drawn, awaiting my fate.