by Faith Hunter
Finally I heard a door open. A voice called out, “Last time you hunted vamp in a dress and party shoes. Looks like you learned something, princess. Yo’ mama mus’ be proud.”
My heart jumped into my throat and did a little tap dance before I swallowed it down and found my voice again. “If I’d ever had a mama, maybe so,” I called back.
“Thought you was a Injun princess,” he said, walking toward me with that measured step grunts learn early.
“Princess of my very own nook in a children’s home,” I said, softer. “Age twelve to eighteen. Now I’m still princess of my domain, but it’s a bit far from here. You in charge of this one?”
He chuckled. “This domain? This lovely, sweet-smelling, clean, and pretty little patch of turf? Nominally speaking. Watchu want, Princess?”
“Safe passage. To hunt for the sire of the rogues we killed.”
He laughed again, this one lower, knowing, and just a bit brutal. “Thanks for the money you sent our way, for the dead-vamp heads. It came in handy to buy more ammo. To kill the ones who came after.”
“There’ve been more?”
“Six.” He flicked a lighter and held it away from his body, using it to see me by before touching it to a cigarette—half tobacco, half weed by the smell—as he drew air through the paper and herbs. His face was lit in the flame, his black skin moist with perspiration, black shirt and dark clothes nearly invisible. The steel butt of a handgun rested in the waistband of his pants. I waited as he evaluated me in the light of the flame. “We got the heads in a cooler, kept that way with dry ice, since Ada came through. Crips are moving in too, some say with backing from a breakaway clan. We’re getting low on supplies and ammo, but Leo ain’t answering his cell. And we ain’t getting paid no bounty.”
“Ah,” I said. He was making a deal. I felt Beast show teeth at the idea of negotiation. She believed in fighting first and talking after—over the blood and guts of her enemies. “Leo’s grieving the death of his son.”
Derek snorted at the term “death.” I acknowledged, “As much as the dead can die. But he’s not himself exactly.”
“Rogue?”
I thought about the face and form standing in my small yard, vamped out. Thought about the dissension in his ranks. “Not yet. But something’s funky. One of his scions used the word or the name ‘Dolore.’ You know it? Or her?” Derek shook his head no. I said, “Yeah. Me neither.
“I can send word of your kills to the vamp council. Get permission for you to talk to them. I’d even go with you to tell them they owe you. Sort of an emissary.”
Derek blew smoke away from me in a long pale streamer. “Now, that would take some balls.” He looked me over. “You got any?”
I grinned and let Beast shine in my eyes for a moment. I didn’t know what he saw in the poor lighting, but he nodded.
“Okay. I’m not interested in talking with any fang-heads except Leo, and I’m not wild ’bout talkin’ to him these days. How ’bout this? You talk, you get a deal, you keep twenty percent for the negotiation. And you leave our names out of it.”
Now, that was interesting—the marine wanted to remain anonymous. “How ’bout I turn in the heads for you on my own bounty, which is twenty thousand a head, keep nothing, but you guarantee me safe passage through here while I hunt? And you back me up if I need help while I hunt for more. Deal?”
Derek thought about it a moment. “We’ll need guns. Like the one you got pointed to the ground.”
“You got six heads at twenty K a pop,” I said. “Get your own.”
Derek laughed. “Yeah, you got balls. May be crazy as hell, but you got balls. Okay. Deal. You get the best you can from the fang-heads, and me and my boys will assure you safe passage and act as backup for your hunt. Course, you cheat us and my boys will carve you up like a jack-o’-lantern.” His teeth showed white in an ugly smile. “I’m accessible by cell. My card.”
His card? I swallowed down a half-hysterical twitter as he pulled a card two-fingered from his chest pocket. I accepted it and tucked it into my own without trying to see the number in the dark. I handed him one of mine; he held it to the lighter and chuckled at the line. ‘Have Stakes, Will Travel,’ huh?” The lighter went out. “You are one crazy chick.”
I just smiled, feeling the lessening of tension in the air.
“If the council puts a bounty on Leo,” he added, “I want in on the gig. Got me?”
Surprise burrowed through me. “I thought Leo was your friend.”
“Is. But if the man’s going rogue, he’d want to be brought down. Told me so once, a long time ago. Deal, Injun Princess?”
“Deal, Derek Lee. Now, how about telling your boy to lower the rifle he has pointed at my back? Being in night sights and lasered up on makes me all itchy.”
Derek laughed. “Juwan,” he called. “Twizzlers.”
I hoped “Twizzlers” was a code word for “A-OK,” and relaxed slightly when Beast’s intuition said the sharpshooter’s interest had moved away from my spine. I wasn’t sure how I knew when I was no longer in the sights of a gun, but it was something to do with Beast’s hunting instincts.
“Nice doing business, Princess.”
“Ditto, Derek.” I kick-started Bitsa, sat, and walked her in a circle before giving her gas. Over my shoulder, I called to him, “I’ll be starting at the place we killed the young rouges. I won’t get shot there, will I?”
Derek shook his head and gave me an uplifted thumb in reply. I took that to mean that I would not get shot and that the place was safe to reconnoiter. I hoped I was reading him right.
The bike at a full-throated roar, sweat drying on my spine, I made my way down the dark, wet streets.
I did my best hunting in Beast form, but didn’t want to take time to go back to the house and shift. It wasn’t something I did easily away from home base, not even when that home was only on loan to me for the duration of my contract. But in human form I still had a few better-than-human senses—thanks to a century, give or take, spent in beast form—and could chase scents fairly well from Bitsa’s back. Having a starting point helped.
I motored to the abandoned housing unit where I had taken down a female young-rogue vamp only a few days past. The place had acquired inhabitants; whether they were bona fide, deed-holding owners, renters, or squatters, I didn’t know or care. I just hoped Derek was right about my safety and I wouldn’t get shot as a trespasser.
Engine thrumming, I eased my bike down the narrow street and around to the side of the unit, cut the motor, and stalked around back. The smell of blood was faint, well washed by Ada, but under the scents of fertilizer, grass seed, and the mixed odors of kids and a small dog, I could still pick up the faint tang of vamp blood. I scouted around until I was satisfied I had the scent in my memory, then tracked to the place where Derek and his pals had taken down the female’s sire, a teenaged kid, turned, and left to run wild—the rogue who had attacked a friend of mine and left her for dead. The smell was stronger here, as some vamp blood had splattered onto a brick wall, up high in a spot protected from rain. Standing against the wall, under the eaves, I breathed in the smell, my mouth open, so I drew it in through both nose and mouth, the way a cat takes scent.
And I caught the faint under-tang of another vamp. The teen male rogue’s sire. I hadn’t been looking for it last time I was here, too busy trying to stay alive. And the scent was familiar in an I-may-have-sniffed-it-before kinda way, or a sniffed-its-kid-sister kinda way.
After several long, deep breaths, cementing the disparate scents of chemicals and pheromones in my scent-memory, I walked back to Bitsa and kicked her to life. And I began to backtrack. The scent was pretty well washed away by the rain and I figured I’d have a hard time following it anyway, but the young male rogue had come and gone this way several times, and his scent was on trees and up under porches, places where the rain had missed. It was slow going, but I made my way out of the projects, heading toward Lake Pontchartrain.
&nbs
p; It took me more than two hours to track the male rogue’s path, off Filmore Avenue in a wooded area near a bayou, in a park in the middle of New Orleans. As I rode around it, I realized that the park wasn’t that far from where I started out in the projects, yet the acreage was so large that Beast felt at home. I hadn’t known it was here, and from the smell of trees, water, and a multitude of human scents, the park was huge. The storm had dropped limbs onto the paths leading in and torn down signs, but I finally found one that identified it, unimaginatively, as New Orleans City Park.
I parked Bitsa and went searching, following my nose along a path, over saturated ground, into an area marked as Couturié Forest. Here the trees grew bigger, older, limbs overarching the paths like sentinels, protective and watchful, though that was sheer fancy on my part.
Following the old scent, I skirted fallen limbs and windblown brush on the paths. The few sounds of a city crawling back to life after the storm vanished as I made my way through the trees. There was only the plop of heavy rain-drops, the wet whisper of the wind in the limbs overhead, and the crunch and squish of leaves, twigs, and wet earth under my boots. A sense of tranquility and serenity pervaded the ground and the air, the way an old-growth forest feels, the loamy soil rich and fecund with life. But beneath it all was a trace of something feral. And dead. I left the path, pushing through the night.
Until I came to a vamp grave site. The stink of vamp, dead meat, and old blood had been well washed by Ada but was still potent enough for my Beast-enhanced senses.
The grave site was in a natural open area, a ten-foot circular space surrounded by old trees, rank with a miasma of overlapping scent patterns. I caught the strong recent tang of a lightning strike and charred wood, so much like the scent of burned magical wards that I was undecided on what I was smelling until I spotted the tree against the night sky, blackened and burned, its top half blasted away. The trail of lightning ran across the ground where it had cooked the earth.
I stood at the edge of the site, boots to the ankle in mud and last year’s leaves, letting Beast have full rein of my sensory organs. She rose and peered through my eyes, taking in the world. My night vision expanded. My hearing took on the better-than-human enhancement. I drew in air through my nostrils and over my tongue—Flehmen behavior—seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting the place. To Beast it was sensory overload, overlapping into one multisense whole.
Nothing moved but the breeze. The dark was absolute. The wind whipped up for a moment, sending a soft sigh of sound and the patter of rain splattering down. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Beneath the scent of drenched earth, oak, maple, swamp hickory, and cypress, there was the reek of dead, decaying flesh. The herbal scent of vamps. A hint of blood, old and thinned and washed away by the rains of Ada. And a trace of magic, both old and recently discharged. Witch magic. In a vamp graveyard. Okay, that was weird. Vamps and witches did not get along.
I stepped closer and something crunched beneath my boot. Squatting, I lifted a broken white shell from the muddy soil. Carefully, I brushed Ada-blown leaves and detritus away, exposing more shells around the periphery of the open area. Now that I knew they were here, I was able to make out a ring, perfectly circular, made of the small white shells. In the center of the circle was more white, and though I couldn’t be sure without getting on my hands and knees, I thought it might form a pentagram.
Beast’s reaction made the skin across my shoulders and along my neck prickle like hackles rising. I did not like this. Whatever it was, it was giving me the willies.
The antipathy between vamps and witches was rancorous and long-standing, like a cold war linking and dividing the races, a war that had lasted for hundreds of years, according to Molly, its origins lost in time. Yet, here in this dank and isolated place, encircled on all sides by city and bayou, the air tingled with magic, the ground was saturated with it, and the blood that soaked the soil was charged with it. Minute blue sparkles of magic tasted of nutmeg and sang a note of electric power. The witch power had been coiled, snarled, twisted into a heart of foulness. Dark magic had been done here. Blood magic. I paused and breathed deeply, hoping to find what kind of blood had been spilled—goat, chicken . . . or human? But the blood was too old and the site too exposed to hurricane rain for me to tell specifics.
I stood and dusted my hands off on my jeans, looking into the trees that surrounded this place. I saw a cross, nailed to a tree, about six feet off the ground. Another cross was several feet to the side. There were five crosses in all, nailed to trees at the points of the pentagram, and I wasn’t sure, but the crosses might have been silver. Weird. The points of the pentagram on the ground lined up with the crosses on the trees. None of this made sense, not for a vamp grave, not for witch involvement, not for anything. I controlled my breathing, pushed down my fear response.
Across the ground, something moved.
A tiny patch of earth in the middle of the small clearing lifted and fell. A little triangle of soil. The bit of dirt dropped, stilled a moment, and lifted again. Something white poked out. The smell of death roiled out into the night, musty and foul. And the white thing resolved itself into fingers.
The hair rose on the back of my neck. Beast growled low in my throat and gathered herself tight. My body tightened, tension thrumming through me. I pulled my favorite vamp-killer and felt better with the elk-horn hilt of the weapon in my hand.
More soil fell away, the patch of earth rolling as something shuffled the surface leaves and scattered the shells. As something tried to rise from the center of the pentagram. The silver crosses at head height began to gleam softly.
Crap, I was witnessing the rising of a newborn vamp. A young rogue. A blood-sucking killing machine. I pulled a stake, making sure it was silver tipped. But Beast held me motionless, watching, curious.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” I murmured, adjusting my grip on the weapons.
Beast hacked with dire amusement.
The thing was skeletal, white-skinned and filthy, arms like sticks as it dragged itself out of the ground, hands and arms, knobby elbows. The head. Clods of dirt fell away. Long hair, tangled and muddy, dragged the grave. I had never seen a first rising, and it was much like Night of the Living Dead in 3-D, but stinkier. The rogue was female. She wore a party dress, a floral print, once pale with big flowers in bright colors, now foul with death fluids, blood, and the mud of the grave. She pulled her hips from the ground, shook her legs and feet free, and took a breath. Whipped her head to me. And found me in the night.
Her eyes almost glowed, bloodshot. Her neck was ravaged with knotted scar tissue. She hissed, snakelike, hungry. Starving. And coming for me. I started toward her, to finish her off.
No, Beast whispered. Not here. Sire will scent her death. Will know you, be able to track you. Run. Like wounded bird. I had a quick image of a bird darting from a nest, one wing held at an angle, drawing predators away. Spinning, I ran through the trees, deeper into Couturié Forest, watching over my shoulder. Behind me, the rogue grunted, sniffed the air like a feral dog, and pulled herself to her knees. I concentrated on getting away from the grave site, far enough to please Beast, who explored the world through my inadequate senses, her urgency pushing me to speed. Moments later, I heard the rogue start to follow, her balance off, her footsteps uneven.
She whimpered, mewling like a kitten. The kit sounds should have brought out the protective instincts in Beast. Instead, she hacked with displeasure and dug her claws into my psyche. I jumped a downed tree and a rill of water, leftover from Ada’s deluge. Beast studied the world as I moved, looking for an ambush site in the dark.
The youngest vamp I had hunted was a year undead. Even then, their entire pasts—memories, sanity, and humanity—were still gone. It took years for a vamp to cure enough to find self-control and not kill any human it found. It took up to a decade to find its own memories lost beneath the hunger. All that was left to a newly risen vamp was the need to eat, drink, and kill for sustenance. The moveme
nts and sounds were pretty gross, and I totally got where the myth of zombies came from. Just-risen, young-rogue vamps equaled zombies. Almost literally.
The vamp behind me had lost everything that had made her human, and now she had to start from scratch, relearning how to walk, how to maneuver. Vamp speed, grace, and strength would begin to grow following her first blood meal, after she tracked and drained a victim to death. Or would have followed it, had I not found her first, and prevented that.
Then again, this was my first newly risen vamp. Hearsay among the small community of vamp hunters might be just that. The vamp on my trail might not need blood to be able to draw on vamp gifts and move faster than I could.
In a small clearing strewn with storm debris, I found a huge downed tree, its roots ten feet in the air, its limbs pointing to the sky on one side, and crushed by the wind and ground on the other. I leaped up to the horizontal trunk and walked along it to the first branch. Perched on the limb, I hefted my weapons into a better grip and waited. In my mind, Beast went still.
The rogue vamp wasn’t far behind, her scent swirling along the night breezes, her footsteps faltering and noisy in the brush. I didn’t think she had her vamp eyesight yet. Maybe vamp vision was part of the benefits of that first meal. Maybe it took longer. What did I know?
Crap. I was so not ready for this tonight. But at least the fear had settled with the movement and an ambush plan. I spotted her on my trail.
She stopped at the edge of the clearing, her nostrils flaring, her eyes staring and wild with that dull smolder they all had. Skin white, almost glowing in the dark, she didn’t look up in the low branches, but at the ground. She sniffed loudly, air moving through clogged sinuses. She mewled piteously and wiped her face, smearing filth over her skin like accidental camouflage. Tears trickled through the mess. She was crying.