by Faith Hunter
The box, Beast thought at me. The box. My fingers sought inside. Touched bone. The world went dark, Beast’s voice the only sound. Mass to mass, stone to stone . . . mass to mass, stone to stone, Beast called to me, old words. Words of power. Words she knew and understood. Words she loved. Mass to mass, stone to stone . . . mass to mass, stone to stone. Beast will be big. Beast will be big!
Gray lights dancing with black motes floated over me. Beneath me the stones cracked and spat brittle, sharp shards into the air. The red thing at my back grew, crackling with sparks. I sank deep into the snake of the jaw I clutched. Saw the pattern. X and Y. So different. So alien. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I can’t do this.
Beast wrenched control away.
And I shifted. Became Beast. Bones popped and muscles twanged with agony. Nerves tore, flames and ice burned along my limbs. My back arched. My throat healed. Pelt sprouted, bristling. Clothes ripped and slid into tangled, twisted bonds. Claws broke the flesh of my fingertips. I threw back my head and screamed.
Tired, so tired. Huffing air. Panting breath. Hot. Tired. I rolled from broken stone, pulled haunches beneath me. Sitting on rocks surrounded by red light. Danger. Red light spilled around me. Beast was big. Sabertooth big. Colors were often grayed in my Beast eyes, but something of her had shifted with me.
Hedge of thorns has been sprung, Jane thought.
I looked at Molly’s protecting magic. Saw Jane-blood-soaked dirt and circle of red witch light. Hedge of thorns sparkled with nothingness, motes black like moonless night. They swarmed like moths, never lighting. Like the magics of the gray place for shifting. I growled. Much power here.
Witch power is usually gray or blue. Why is Molly’s newest magic red?
Placed paw on Jane like paw on kit. Silent. Predator is near. On the other side Leo howled like mad wolf, vamped out. Rogue. Screaming. Caged outside hedge of thorns. My stomach wrenched in hunger. Too many shifts. Not enough food. Worse than hunger times. Better too. I was Big Cat now. Very big.
What have you done? Jane whispered, prey-fear in her thoughts.
I opened mouth and long fangs parted. Sabertooth fangs. Good for killing. Big teeth. I roared. Lion roar, like African lion. Louder than Beast scream. Claiming territory. Claiming self. I am Beast. I/we, together, are Beast.
Leo, chest heaving, stopped at challenge in roar. Big predator roar. I could see him. He could not see Beast. I huffed. Roared again.
Bethany walked around side of house. She was still in skirt and turban. But now she carried spear, bones and bits of stone hanging from it, tied with twine. Raffia, Jane thought. Used by a shaman. Silly Jane thoughts. Now thinking names, words her strength. Stupid words. Words unimportant. Jane nearly died. Words did not save Jane. Only Beast saved Jane. I shoved her down, paw on her chest. Beast is alpha.
Bethany touched Leo. He stilled. Legs wobbled. Sat onto ground, hard. Bethany pulled hair-stick stakes out of his skin. Leo hissed. Moaned. Bethany dropped sticks. Neither was silver tipped, poison to vampires. Leo said silver would not kill him. Lie? Humans lie all the time. Big cats cannot lie, scent of lie is always known. Leo was lucky. I understood lucky. Sometimes Beast ate. Sometimes prey got free. Each was luck, good for one, bad for other.
Bethany looked at hedge of thorns. “I heard the roar. It was much like the lions of Africa, but . . .” She shook her head. “Different.” She put a hand out to touch hedge of thorns. And jerked away.
Huffed in laughter. Panted. Rose and padded two steps to fountain, kicking torn human clothing away. No water poured from fountain top, not with hedge of thorns glowing, but water in bowl was cool. Drank. Thirst gone, I sat. Watched. Predator eyes on shaman. She opened small bag and took out packets. Poured powder into leaves and put some onto Leo’s wounds. She cut her skin. Gave Leo blood to eat. Smelled sweet. Belly rumbled. Hurting.
Leo panted like Beast, needing air. When he had breath, he stood. His eyes still vamped. “She is a were. I felt the power of her change; the energies were familiar, exactly like the workings of the lupus clan.” Tears leaked down his face, bloody with his pain.
Leo wiped his face, blood on his hand. But he stood straight. His eyes looked more human. “But by her roar, she is a werebeast like the one that killed my son and took his place.”
The Dolore, Jane murmured to me. Grief.
“Not a were.” Bethany scented air in short sniffs. “Taste her scent. Not a were, she. Her smell is different from them. Different from the cursed of Artemis, our enemy.” Bethany walked around hedge of thorns. Her feet balanced like cat, her skirt moving. She shook spear with each step, shaman dance, small bones and stones and shells crackling, rattling, like tail of snake-enemy as Bethany circled hedge of thorns. “I do not know what she is, but she is not our adversary.”
“She asked about the Sons, and about the curse. This outsider knows about the curse.”
“I have read the runes.” She stood beside Leo, arms wide, feet apart, toes pointing out. Butt of spear was grounded, held at angle. “The runes warn us of change, change yet again in the world of man. Perhaps this is the change foretold.”
“You would leave her alive?” Leo had human look on face. Shock.
Bruiser walked from house. I growled, though was safe behind hedge. Bruiser’s feet made noises to alert his alpha. “What’s that red light? What’s behind it?”
Humans and vampires do not see beyond light. This is good.
Bethany sniffed air. “Jane is there. And with her may be a lion. It roared.” She touched spear, face sad. “So like home.”
“Or she may be an African lion were,” Leo said, voice stubborn, like Jane.
“No.” Bethany tone was firm. “Not a were.”
Bruiser licked blood from his lips. A large bruise was purple, like flower, from temple to mouth, size of big-cat paw. Remembered Bruiser body on floor. Leo hit him?
Yes, Jane whispered. Yes . . .
“Boss, someone might call the police. The red light is enough to attract the attention of the neighbors. We need to go.”
Bethany turned, walked away. Bruiser took her arm. Leo stared at glow of hedge of thorns. “I do not know what you are,” he whispered. “But you tread on dangerous ground. Leave the curse alone. Do not ask questions about the Sons of Darkness. Do not pry into the devoveo. Our curse cannot be lifted. It has been tried and the price of failure was death to our young. You have never been forced to kill your own child when she lingers, eternally mad. You cannot know the grief it brings. Stop your research. Fulfill your contract. Then go. Do you understand me?”
Beast hacked softly. Understand. But will not obey.
As if he knew Beast’s thoughts, Leo sighed breath he did not need. Followed blood-servant Bruiser, and woman who might be mate to both of them, away. Car started in street. Drove away. Scents faded.
Padded to edge of ward. Placed paw on it. Magic swirled up, tasting of nuts and plants, things Jane would eat, but Beast would not. Red ward fell in shower of sparks and blackness. Smell of burned plants. Strong ward. Good protection. Too small to fit over entire den. Should have been over entire den: Jane house, garden, rocks-of-shift. Then kits would be safe. Anger rose at thought of kits and Bliss. Needed to find them. Kill stealer of kits. Rend flesh and spill blood. Duty of mother.
Hunger tore into belly like predator claws. Padded to house and leaped through broken back window. Went to kitchen and found meat cooked by Molly and Jane. Tore open packs. Clear plastic holding meat. Jerky. Hard and tough. But ate it. Ate it all. Hunger is angry predator.
Went back to rocks. Hunt for kits is Jane hunt. I will give strength. The I/we of Beast will help. But Jane will stalk. I/ we lay on rocks. Thought of Jane. Mass to mass, stone to stone . . . mass to mass, stone to stone. Jane. . . . Pain and gray light sparkling. Pain, pain, pain. Rock beneath groaned and cracked. Mass to mass, stone to stone . . . mass to mass, stone to stone.
I was stretched on the rocks, gasping. The pain was like being flayed alive. It hurt to change so often, so
close together. When I could, I levered myself upright and to my feet, feeling of my face and neck and running my hands over me. My throat had new scars, the flesh ridged, the skin tender and thin. It would take a lot of shifts to regain smooth skin, but at least I seemed to be my usual size.
Whenever I changed mass, I worried that I’d keep some or lose some. I didn’t know enough about physics to guess how I changed mass, or to guess if retaining or permanently losing mass was even possible, and so I avoided mass change, usually sticking to creatures my own size. Beast, on the other hand, liked big, which meant stealing mass from stones. Rock had no genetic structure, was clean material to take mass from. But mass exchange resulted in the rock cracking, shattering, and often exploding.
Stone dust and sharp rock ground beneath my feet when I stood. There wasn’t much left of the boulders placed here for me by Katie of Katie’s Ladies. I looked into the dust and saw paw prints. Huge. Trite but true, they were dinner-plate huge. “You’re crazy,” I whispered to my other half. “Stark raving.”
And worse, Beast had done the impossible. She had taken a male form. I could see in memory, the X and Y chromosomes in the sabertooth’s genetic makeup. I had never done that. Didn’t know how, even now, after the event. Deep inside, I heard Beast hack with amusement.
A heated, burned smell rode the air. The grass was seared where hedge of thorns had burned through. If I dug down, I knew that I’d see burned soil as deep as six feet. My blood had triggered the ward; it had soaked into the grass and dirt all the way from the house to the boulders. I could smell it drying, already decaying. It was a lot of blood. I fingered my neck. The skin there was thin and raw, new flesh, not quite healed. The injury given me by Leo in his crazy Dolore state had been intended to kill me.
Nothing I said had been deserving of the attack, even accusing vamps of killing witch children. The Dolore had made him nutso.
He grieves his children, Beast thought at me. His son who was taken from him, and replaced by liver-eater. His daughter who he killed long ago.
“Oh,” I said softly. “Oh . . .” I hadn’t put his words together that way. “Okay. So it’s what? Dolore times two and I’m a handy punching bag?” Beast didn’t reply. I swallowed and the movement of muscles and tissues ached. I’d had difficulty shifting. It shouldn’t have been so hard. My hand drifted down and found my necklace was gone. The gold nugget necklace that tied me to the boulders here in the yard and to the boulders where I first remembered how to shift, back in the mountains, a white quartz boulder lined through with the same gold that made up my necklace. It was the gold that made my shift easier. Without it, I’d be able to shift only when I had extensive time to meditate my way into the change. Or force it, painfully.
I gathered up the beads that had come from my hair with the previous shift, holding them cupped in my hand, and inspected my clothes. My T was ruined but the jeans had somehow survived the shift and the weight gain, pushed off me as I changed. I tossed them across my shoulder. Undies were ruined. Fuzzy socks okay. I tucked them under my arm. No gold nugget.
Surely the necklace had just been ripped off and left in the kitchen. Surely Leo hadn’t taken it. A shiver that had nothing to do with the warm air on my skin gripped me. My stomach growled with the need for food. Shifting used up a lot of calories. I needed to eat.
This time I went into the house through the door. Inside, I dumped my clothes and turned on the lights to study the mess. I had bled like a stuck pig. It was all over the floor, furniture, walls. Blood smeared by fighting, sprayed by arterial pressure. It was going to be a pain in the neck—pun intended—to clean it all up. And the window was ruined, all that old hand-blown glass shattered out. So much for my plans to keep this place pristine.
I spotted the necklace under the kitchen table, the double chain wrapped around a chair leg as if it had been slung and the force of the throw had snapped the chain around and around. I peeled it free and checked the clasp, which was only a little bent. I straightened it and washed the necklace at the sink, putting it back round my neck before I did anything else.
While oatmeal cooked and a strong pot of tea brewed, I cleaned up the mess. The blood was tacky, already partly dried, but it came off the floor with hot water and a scrub brush. The dirty, bloody water went down the toilet with all the other blood from today. I sprayed the floor with Clorox cleanser and let it soak. I didn’t want to leave any blood evidence should cops ever need to do a crime scene investigation in the house, but removing all traces was impossible without tearing up the floor.
While I ate, I debated shifting again, this time to a rap-tor so I could overfly the city, but I changed my mind. Instead, I dressed in my new vamp hunting clothes, wearing my second pair of new boots—lace-up butt stompers—and made sure I had all my weapons in place, especially my old chain-link collar to protect my neck. If I’d been wearing it, Leo wouldn’t have injured me nearly so badly. I’d have had time to draw weapons on him. Leo might actually be dead. I touched the thin skin, like delicate silk, ridged where the flesh hadn’t knit back smoothly. I wasn’t going anywhere without full garb anytime soon.
I dialed the hospital, expecting the call to go to the nurses’ desk, but it was put through to her room. Molly answered. Against all expectations, she was awake, though groggy. My heart leaped, and my traitorous eyes teared up with her hello.
“Molly?”
“Hey, Big Cat. You saved my life,” Molly said, not sounding strong at all, but terribly weak and breathless. Tears thickened her voice as she broke down. “My babies . . .”
“I’ll save your babies,” I said, helplessness like a heavy weight pressing on my shoulders. “Evan and Evangelina are on the way. I called them. They can help you heal. And then you all can help me with the search.”
“Evangelina’s gonna come in and take over.” She laughed through the tears, the sound forlorn. “Don’t let her bully you.”
“I won’t,” I lied. Evangelina was a take-charge kinda woman. Even Beast was scared of her.
“Do . . . do you think they’re still alive? Do you think someone is hurting them?”
Her voice broke on the question and my breath stopped. When I could speak I said, “Yes. No. I mean, I think they’re alive and being well cared for right now.” I had to believe it. Had to.
Then Molly said, “Whatever they’ve been stolen for, the rite will probably take place on or near the full moon.” She was trying to think like the kidnappers. God help her. But she was right. Any magic performed during a full moon would be highly amplified. And a full moon was soon. Very soon.
Molly choked back a sob. “It’s not much time. Not much time at all.”
“Plenty of time. I’ll have them back before the full moon.” I gripped my cell so hard the plastic gave. “I promise, Mol. I promise on all that I hold holy.”
She sniffed. “That austere and ungiving God you worship?”
I touched the necklace I wore as if it were an amulet or icon—or a cross—the nugget warm from my skin. “Yeah. Him. I swear it. You should have gone home, Molly. You should have gone when I told you to. I’m so sorry I didn’t make you leave.”
“Angie said if we left, a bad man would take us on the road.”
My throat closed up tight. What did it mean, take us on the road?
“I think it was a vision, Big Cat. And because of it I didn’t leave town.” Molly sobbed, her voice sounding broken and torn. “If you had made us leave, I’d have holed up in a hotel. And it would have been a lot worse without you close by. I’d have . . .” She took a breath, and I heard the sob in it. “I’d have died.”
“Crap,” I whispered.
“Yeah. Understatement of the year. And hey, you need to know. Those feelers you asked me to put out to the local covens about them helping with vamps? Not so much as a nibble. No one’s talking. I tried. I really tried.” And Molly was crying again, though her tears were for her missing babies, not my missing info.
When Molly had stopped
crying and fallen asleep, I hung up and dialed Troll, to tell him about the damage to the house. And that I was closer to finding the maker of the young rogues and Bliss. Not exactly a lie, but not really the truth either. Not yet. But soon. I had promised. I’d given my word to Mol. I intended to keep it.
* * *
I inspected my map with the sites of young-rogue vamp attacks pinned on it, remembering the lightning strike in New Orleans City Park where I had witnessed the young-rogue rising. I pulled a scrap of paper to me and began listing what I knew and guessed. I was chasing Rousseaus, one a master-vamp who was violating the Vampira Carta and—by the closely related scent signatures—possibly his siblings. They were Rousseaus who never spent time at the clan home, which meant they could be anywhere in the city. I couldn’t simply bust through the Rousseau clan-home door and stake them. If I attacked before I knew exactly what was going on, I’d give them the opportunity to flee, or worse, put their plans in motion immediately. I was looking for vamps using witch magic and witch children’s blood, maybe doing something to avoid the devoveo. I didn’t have a clear picture of it yet, but it was here. It was right here in front of me. Whatever the heck it was.
I stuffed my supplies in Bitsa’s saddlebags and tore off on the Harley, moist, heated air touching me through the unzipped mesh pockets, otherwise deflected by the new leathers I sweated in. I needed to see what had happened to the newest grave site in Couturié Forest in the New Orleans City Park.
It took time to build the sites where humans were killed, buried, magic was done, and young rogues were raised. Time and magic and privacy. And so far as I knew, there were only three places where that had been done, and only two were still in use. I had to bet that the young-rogue maker would go back to one of them rather than start new elsewhere. I bent over Bitsa and urged her to more speed.
The park was closed this late, but I parked Bitsa a block out and jogged in, searching, following my nose along the paths. The ground wasn’t rain saturated now, but had absorbed the moisture dropped by Ada, and the detritus of hurricane winds had been cleaned up. The smell of damaged trees and rain-beaten plants was still strong, but without the waterlogged, slightly salty reek from before. I left the path and quickly found the ten-foot-diameter circle. I remembered that a cleanup crew had been sent to dispose of the body, and they had obviously been here too. The crosses had been ripped from the trees and the pentagram of shells had been scattered. I could smell the humans who had cleaned the place up, two men and a woman, sweating in the heat of day, sunscreen and deodorant and soap and shampoo scents still on the air. And above the odors of the crew, the more recent scent of a solitary vampire. One who had stolen the children and Bliss. He had stood here, within the last two nights, right where I was standing, studying the scene. And he’d been angry.