by Faith Hunter
We wove through the city and out into the country, trees crowding against the sides of the road and the smell of water on the night breeze. We crossed over a mostly dried-up, winding bayou three times before pulling on to a drive and winding our way in the deeper dark. The live oaks branched over the narrow driveway, interlacing like fingers to keep out the moonlight. The Acheé house was a traditional tidewater, up on pilings with a front porch that ran the length of the house, a tin roof, and chimneys at both ends. When we got out, the smell of the city was gone and the smell of water and living plants was strong. To the side of the house was a circular open area marked with stones, a perfect witch circle disguised as a sitting area with a gazebo in the center.
I meandered over while Rick went to talk to the LEO guarding the crime scene until the techs could get there. In the open space, no trees were in the way to spoil the moon’s glow, which suggested that a moon witch lived or practiced here. At the gazebo, I bent and spotted the cleverly disguised wheels used to push the structure out of the way when the family’s womenfolk needed some moon time. The stones around the edges were all white quartz, and winter herbs were planted around the outside edge. The scent of rosemary and sage permeated the air here, contained by the chill. I walked around the gazebo, staring up at the moon. The silvery orb was nearly full, and Beast pulled at me to shift and hunt, not demanding, not yet, but making her needs known.
Have not hunted in many moon times, she thought. Jane is selfish.
Yeah, and you’re chained to Leo.
Leo is not here. Leo is far away.
But his primo is here. That gonna make you get all hot and bothered?
Bruiser is good for mate. Will take Bruiser.
“Not gonna happen,” I murmured.
Beast huffed and disappeared, and Rick said, “What’s not gonna happen?”
“No witch circle this full moon unless we get the family back,” I lied. Not so very long ago, I couldn’t lie worth a dang. Now it came easily.
“We have entrée,” Rick said. “Shall we?”
I wanted to say, “When and where?” but managed to keep it inside. I nodded mutely and tucked my hands into my pockets to keep from shaping them over his butt as I followed him up the wooden steps to the doorway. The scent of blood was like a barbed fist to the jaw as Rick opened the door.
The blood was vamp by the smell, and I stood transfixed in the opening, lips parted, sucking in air over the roof of my mouth. Over the biological scent of drying blood I smelled gun propellant, the stench of burned nitrocellulose. And then I smelled the scent of child, witch child, her blood spilled. My fingers curled and my Beast claws tried to press through my fingertips, a piercing pain. I hissed softly.
“Jane?”
I growled and whirled to see Rick holding out a pair of cloth booties and gloves and something white in a plastic baggie.
“Jane?” Rick looked away, turning his head but keeping me in his peripheral vision. A strange dullness tugged at his mouth, catlike, uninterested, while at the same time actively involved in an exchange. It was big-cat body language for Not stepping on your toes. Your territory, your meat. Big-cat manners, intended to defuse an angry mate.
I huffed and felt Beast slide out of my eyes. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. But we need to preserve the crime scene. We need to dress out.”
I took the pile of paper and nitrile and dressed in the white—white booties, white nitrile gloves, white hair cap that shaped itself like a soft mound of bread-dough when I put it on, and white paper robe that tied in back. It was hot and stuffy and I hated it, but I understood the necessity. I didn’t want to leave my own stray hairs in the blood or ruin my clothes. It took me longer than it did Rick, and I followed him inside, placing my feet between blood splotches.
The wolf and his rider waited at the door, and I could feel more than hear the wolf’s low growl deep in his throat. His lips rose to reveal the points of his fangs, and I kept my gaze to the side. Too many species in one spot; the language of body movements was not precise, but a direct gaze was a challenge among all animals, except sometimes humans. Brute didn’t like the smells any more than I did, which made me feel better toward the wolf than I wanted to.
I concentrated on the room, walking around the perimeter first and then through the middle. Amid the visual positioning of the blood and the easily differentiated scent signatures, I put the story together quickly. I went to an opening and along the hall. Here the scents diminished, but they got stronger again when I backtracked and entered the kitchen.
There was blood spatter here. A lot of it. I studied the cheery room with its granite countertops and antique cabinets, tile, and vintage table and chairs. The family spent a lot of time here, cooking together, eating at the casual table.
Carefully, I drew on Beast’s vision to see the magics that swirled. There had been wards in this room, wards of deep green and blue, woven out of love and cooking and family, but something had broken through them and attacked. I centered myself and sought out the patterns. Three adult witches lived here now. Generations before this, maybe as many as eight witches had practiced here, weaving wards of protection. And in the middle of them all, a hole had been torn, the edges waving in the air, blackened and burned. Now that I knew they were here, I could smell them, scorched energies like the stink of lightning and grave earth.
I turned and saw the same thing at the front door: a bigger hole, a hole that had taken the ward off the entire front of the house. It had taken some massive energies to do that. Rick stood at the door, a psy-meter in one hand, held above his head, alternately measuring the magical energies and taking notes on his tablet.
He was also talking to the wolf, giving him instructions. I shook my head in disbelief at the thought of Rick partnering with one of the werewolves who had tortured him for days. The huge wolf took the orders, though admittedly orders posed as suggestions and conversation. I shut them out and returned my attention to the kitchen, following the lines of attack.
Much later, I heard Rick enter behind me. “What do you think?” he asked.
“The vamps came in the front door, four of them, and attacked one witch in the front room. She was armed and fired off several rounds. I counted”—I tilted my head, bringing back the images of the living room—“five casings, so at least that many. Nine mil, silver shot, hand packed most likely. Look for a hand loader set in the husband’s shop.”
“Why do you think that?” Rick asked.
I shrugged. “Can’t say. Something about the round casings on the floor.” I tilted my head the other way, eyes still closed. “Look for tiny pressure points like a vise might make.”
“Okay.” Rick’s tone was halfway between impressed and doubtful.
I went on with my analysis. “She stopped firing. Maybe the gun jammed? And pulled a silver knife. Cut a vamp. But it rode her down, fangs at her throat. Draining her. Another took down the child standing in the hallway. Not so much blood from her, but she drank—” I stopped and sniffed again, turning my head back to the hallway to make sure. “Yeah. Female vamp. And her pals entered the kitchen. Two witches here. The vamps had a charm or something. They went right through the wards on the front of the house and in here and attacked. They were messy, but they were careful too. They didn’t kill anyone, not here. Everyone was alive when they were hauled off. Alive and unconscious, still stinking of fear.”
I opened my eyes and met Rick’s. He was standing close, watching me, our gazes on a level. I smiled at him and knew it was mostly teeth and threat. “Hope you don’t plan on taking any vamps in alive—or undead—on this one. ’Cause I’m gonna take their heads and you better not try to stop me.”
Rick’s lips softened, his stare dropping to my mouth. “How much are you getting per head?”
“Forty K.”
Rick chuckled and shook his head. “And here I am working for Uncle Sam for the price of two heads a year.”
“When you get tired of being cheap labor whose hands ar
e tied by stupid rules, let me know.”
Rick’s Frenchy eyes followed the curve of my jaw like a tender hand. I shivered under the not-touch and felt something hard and cold start to melt deep inside. I had wounded him, but he had forgiven me, I realized, and the coldness melted even faster, running out of me.
“You’ll take me in?” he asked, his voice a purr of sound. “Like a lost kitten?”
“We’d make a good team,” I managed, my voice matching his, purr for purr.
“Yeah. We would. And George? You take him in too?”
All the happy-happy-joy-joy feelings froze solid. “That was low.”
His eyes hardened. “You saying you aren’t interested in the MOC’s sex-and-blood meal?”
“You bringing your Soul in?” I countered. “How about your crazy wolf and the grindy who’d kill us in a heartbeat if we tried to have sex?”
Something flashed between us, something icy and flaming, velvety and thorny, like fear and need, anger and joy, all commingled together. I wanted to reach out and touch him, to break that cold/hot wall between us, but before I could lift my hand, Rick turned to the front of the house, his paper clothing crinkling. The door was still hanging open to the night. “We have company,” he said, his voice displaying none of the emotion I smelled on the air. Vehicle lights sliced through the dark, a van and a car. Crime Scene techs were here, and they’d be ticked that we had entered.
“Good,” I said, on the knot of anger rising in my throat. “Things were getting sticky in here.”
“I like them hot and sweaty better,” Rick said. But he’d turned and was at the door, stripping off his paper and nitrile. Not quite sure what had happened, I followed, picking up a few things I thought we might need on the way. I left my crime scene clothing in a pile with his, remembering a time when I’d had to separate our clothes, which had been tossed onto the floor, so we could dress. I’d lost so much by my own stupidity. My life sucked.
• • •
I waited in the SUV for him and when he got in, Brute again rocking the SUV’s suspension, Rick slammed the door and looked at the stuff in my lap. “You took evidence from a crime scene?”
“Yeah. Arrest me.”
“While the idea of you shackled and bound is appealing, no.” I gave him a hesitant smile and he said, “What do you have?”
“Amulets. At least one witch was a moon witch.” I showed him a moonstone paperweight. “One an earth witch, if you go by the garden. And one was an air witch.” I held up the dried leaves I’d stolen from a bowl on a lamp stand. “There are bowls of dried leaves and twigs and pine needles everywhere, but nothing is scented, like for potpourri. And I can feel the magic on them.” I crunched the leaves slightly and smelled only oak and pine rising from them. “The bowls of windblown leaves are probably set equidistant on the points of a pentacle.”
“Not bad.” Rick started the engine, pulling slowly into the night along the narrow drive, the oak trees sheltering us from the moon until we pulled onto the secondary road. Rick tensed.
“Full-moon problems?” I asked, keeping my tone calm.
“Yeah. Mind if I play my music?” Without waiting for my reply, he hit PLAY on the SUV’s sound system and flute music skirled out. It was a spell, created by my once friend Big Evan to control Rick’s need to turn furry for the three days of the full moon. His tattoos, magic woven into his skin, prevented his turning, and he had nearly gone insane with the pain until Evan had found this treatment.
I looked out the window, knowing I had been cut off. Yet knowing that Rick was as aware of me as I was of him. Knowing that Bruiser and Soul and our past together stood between us, as real as if they fought, swords drawn and blades clashing.
Under my T-shirt was another theft, an old photo of an American Indian woman wearing a homespun dress, soft-looking boots, and a feather woven into her braided hair. Not Cherokee. Maybe Choctaw. She had been staring at me as if begging me to steal her photo. And for reasons I didn’t understand, I had.
CHAPTER 13
Make Ceremony with Me
Sitting on the edge of the bed in Esmee’s house, I took out the old black-and-white photo and studied it. The woman was young, midtwenties, standing with shoulders back, wearing a Western cowboy hat, a gun belt around her hips, Annie Oakley style. Her dress was short for the era, stopping midcalf, revealing the boots that looked like deer hide, embroidered with porcupine quills and beads. The picture frame was wood, carved with tiny grooves that looked exactly like bird footprints, down to the talons at the end of the toes, the wood stained with some greenish-bluish tint that had penetrated the pattern carved into the wood, making the bird feet stand out sharply. The term came to me from high school art history class: counter-relief, or intaglio. Weird to remember that. I had sucked at art.
Misha had been in that class. She had taken to art like a bird to the air, freed by all the media, all the things she could shape and change and bring to beauty. All the things she could control. Unlike the rest of her life, which was out of her control. Like me, Misha had gone to regular counseling. I had gone for the experts to keep tabs on me and try to poke holes in the curtain of memory loss. I wondered why Misha had gone. I had no idea. I also had no idea why I had taken the photo. It had nothing to do with beauty or art. It had everything to do with the woman in the print calling out to me.
I sighed and set the picture facedown on the bed, reaching for the phone. It hadn’t rung, and I held it, waiting. Leo wanted to chat and my bound Beast knew it. It was childish, but I let it chime twice before I punched SEND. “Hi, Leo.” Beast started to purr and rolled over on her side. I could feel the power of her breath rumbling through me.
“What have you done to my heir’s house?” he spat.
I could tell his three-inch fangs had dropped down and he was talking through and around them. “Good to speak with you too,” I said, not because it was true, but to yank his chain. “Hope you are well and chipper and all that. How’s business?” Leo was raised in a more proper time, and when he forgot or ignored the niceties it gave me an opening for insult and snark. He didn’t give me many.
“What. Have. You. Done. With my heir’s house?”
“Ahhh.” I relaxed onto the bed, understanding. I had modified the house I was using in New Orleans and I hadn’t exactly asked permission. Part of the modifications were to take over Leo’s secret lair and make it into a combo safe room and weapons room. “I take it you paid me a visit?”
“There is silver everywhere.”
“Guns too. And ammo. And things that go bang.”
“Silver in my lair,” he grated.
“Yeah. Sorry ’bout that,” I lied, and made sure he could hear that I wasn’t sorry at all.
Leo growled low in his throat; Beast rolled, pulling her paws beneath her, ready to pounce or flee. “My house, Leo,” I said, “for the duration of my stay in New Orleans, as per my contract. No one said I couldn’t redecorate.”
The silence was too long, that potent silence the really old vamps can do, because they don’t breathe or have a heartbeat. “We have much to discuss, my Enforcer.”
“Yeah. I guess we do. I’ll see you when I get back to New Orleans. Meantime, stay out of my house.” I hit END and smiled slightly. Bet that ticked off the MOC.
Beast yawned deep inside and rolled back over. I frowned at her. Beast? You didn’t go nuts at the sound of Leo’s voice. What gives?
Beast is not chaser of squirrels.
It took a moment to realize that she was responding to my go nuts phrasing.
Fast chase, small bite, crunch and gone, she thought. And Beast is still hungry.
But you didn’t get . . . I let the thought trail off. For the first time since Beast was accidently bound to Leo, she wasn’t all Pet me, mate me, rub my tummy with Leo. In fact, she’d been calm. She had gotten good at batting away the magics used against her.
Fierce joy shuddered through me like an earthquake. The urge to shift slammed through like
an aftershock. I hadn’t shifted in so long, afraid of what Beast would do, afraid of losing myself to her binding to the Master of the City. I needed to shift. I needed the healing and the strength that shifting could offer, the renewal. I had denied my nature longer than at any time since I rediscovered my shifting ability when I was eighteen. And I had shoved that need so far down, so deep, that it exploded upward now, as if under pressure, desperate.
I stood, gathered my go-bag, and made my way out of the house, out into the last hours of the night. There were no stones here, not the kind I needed. And then I remembered the pink marble mounting block and made my way to it. It was well hidden beneath the overgrowth of shrubs and the low branches of the tree overhead, and when I climbed deep into the brush, I was hidden from the house. On my knees, I stripped, dropping my clothes in a heap, and strapped the go-bag around my neck with my gold nugget necklace and the mountain lion tooth I had wired to the gold chain. Naked, chill bumps rising on my skin, I bent to the stone and rubbed the nugget over the marble, depositing a small scrape of gold, a homing beacon if I got lost in this unfamiliar place.
I sat on the cold marble, the stone burning its frozen way into my skin, and grabbed the tooth like the talisman it was. I’d been afraid to shift for months. Now, suddenly, all I wanted was to shift and run and hunt and kill something. I blew out a breath and closed my eyes. And thought of the snake that rests at the center of every cell of every animal. The snake that is the RNA of creation. I sought the snake of form that was my Beast. The mountain lion. The Puma concolor.
• • •
I dropped front paws down to ground, back paws still on stone, and stretched hard, feeling new muscles and weight. Jane had lifted metal things and grunted like dog, sweated like horse; she had made me bigger big-cat. I looked over muscular shoulders at body and twitched long, thick tail. I was strong. I was big! Jane was good.
I looked at house and saw human-shaped form on back porch. Watching Beast. It was Bruiser. Bruiser had watched Jane shift into Beast. Bruiser knew all of Jane’s secrets now. I chuffed my displeasure and caught his scent on night air. Bruiser had changed. His scent was no longer Leo’s scent. Bruiser smelled of power and youth and many things that were good. But Bruiser was no longer bound to Leo as he had been. Bruiser was not blood-servant now. Bruiser was other. And full of power.