Skinwalker jy-1

by Faith Hunter

  Some of the vamps formed into smaller groups, to chat or plot or whatever vamps did at undead nonfunerals. Oddly, they talked about the stock market and the latest flare-up in the Middle East, like any well-educated group of humans. It was almost as disorienting as hearing them quote Jesus. Then, one by one, they called for their rides on cell phones, and the limo and fancy car procession reversed itself. First to arrive were last to leave. That pissing contest again.

  When all the vamps were gone, I was ready to take wing back to my garden and shift into something with arms. But Sabina still stood, head down, white skirts fluttering in the breeze. She spoke without raising her voice, her tones heavy now with an accent I didn’t recognize. “It has been many years since I heard the call of the Bubo bubo,” she said. She looked up at the tree, her face bright in the scant moonlight. “I know not if you are real, or prophecy, or the mad imaginings of an old, old sinner.” She shook her head slowly, her predator eyes on me. Though I was raptor, and afraid of little, I wanted to lift wings and fly far away. My flight feathers shivered and my taloned feet danced on the limb. “If you are prophecy, if you are the breath of God on my stained and darkened soul, then know this, and take my words back with you to paradise. We still seek forgiveness. We still search for absolution.”

  When I didn’t move, she bowed her head and walked to the nonchapel, so graceful her skirts scarcely swayed. She shut and barred the door. I watched as she doused all lights but one, a single flame in the night. Silence settled on the graveyard. I lifted my wings and launched myself, swooping low over the grounds, seeking currents to gain altitude.

  I banked and soared over the nonchapel, ready to fly home; then I heard the now familiar grating of a crypt opening. I canted once more over the cemetery, seeking with raptor eyes designed to spot the smallest prey, and with keen ears, half expecting to see or hear Katie. Instead, a man walked from a crypt, hunched and gaunt, and reeking of the grave. The rogue.

  He closed the wood door to the crypt and pushed shut the wrought-iron gate protecting it, his movements uneven, almost human slow. His feet were bare and filthy, his hands sticklike, skeletal. His clothes were ratty and torn, ill fitting, not the same long coat and wool slacks he had left at the water’s edge in the pit behind the shaman’s house. His head was down, hair straggling over his face, obscuring it. But I knew him by his rotten stink, his gait, and the set of his bony shoulders. He didn’t move like any vamp I knew. I soared silently past, so I could read the clan name on the mausoleum. St. Martin.

  The rogue tripped and swayed across the grassy ground to the Clan Pellissier vault. He fell against the barred doors and gripped them with pale white hands, shaking them. The quiet rattle sounded loud and harsh in the silent night. His actions grew frantic, his fingers beating the locks, clawing past the iron bars into the door, his face pressed against the metal. He mewled piteously, like a small, hungry animal. I could hear him breathing, snuffling, as he smelled the mixed vamp blood, the aroma a rich blood scent on the wind, stronger than his rot.

  He slammed his palms against the bars and pushed away with a final clang. Furious, he lurched to the nonchapel. I circled tighter, watching. His fingers brightened with heat and gray sparkles of power. An energy signature I recognized. I circled down fast, watching as claws grew on his fingers, hooked and curved, longer than Beast’s. He was shape-shifting.

  Crap. This thing wasn’t a rogue vamp. It was a were. Or a skinwalker. Beast was right. This was indeed a liver-eater.

  CHAPTER 19

  I’m psychic

  He stopped, drawing in his shoulders, breathing deeply, a wet, hacking sound, familiar from Beast. The liver-eater threw his face to the night sky. And he spotted me.

  His face was no longer human but a blunted snout, long fangs curving from upper and lower jaws. He had gone furry, a tawny pelt covering his face and arms and down his neck. Jaw elongating, ears rising, pointing. Claws larger than Beast’s by far. His shift stopped there, as if he had control enough to shift only partway. Or maybe he was stuck between forms. The stink of rot was gone, leaving the musky odor of male big cat.

  Sabertooth, some part of me thought, stunned. Watching, I hesitated an instant. Missed an air current, an uprising thermal. The twisting air threw me off. I tumbled. My wings fluttered uselessly. I started to spin and reached out with wings and taloned feet, spreading myself, steadying my body in flight as the earth rose fast.

  Below me, the sabertooth jumped, reaching high with a clawed hand. An impossible leap. I caught the air and rotated my shoulders, back-flapping hard. A cry escaped me, raptor anger. The rogue’s claws scraped through my flight feathers. I flailed the air, gaining altitude, and screamed again. The rogue landed on all fours. The back of his coat ripped with a dry, rasping tear, golden fur spilling out, a long and ragged mane, his back striped. The stones of a nearby crypt exploded, breaking with a crack and rumble. He was stealing mass. Stealing from stone. The front door of the nonchapel opened. Sabina stepped out.

  I screamed at her to get back inside. But my throat and beak called only hoarse, cawing cries. The rogue roared, a sound not human. Turning from me, he raced toward the chapel.

  I folded my wings. Dove at his nape. Hit with killing force. Slammed my beak into the base of his skull. A dull, echoing crack. Raked his scalp with talons. He stumbled, shook himself. I toppled to the side. Narrowly evaded his claws. Shoulders rotating, I shot back into the sky.

  He leaped at the priestess. I dove, but I couldn’t help. Not against this creature, not in this form, maybe not in human form. I hadn’t understood, but Beast had known. No matter the evidence, this wasn’t a rogue vampire. This was liver-eater, a creature of darkest legend. A creature of black magic.

  From the air, my body diving, I saw Sabina pull something from behind her back. Raise it aloft. It was a wood cross. Held in gloved hands. Light blazed from the cross. The creature roared, jumped, shied. Rotated in midair. He screamed a big cat’s pain, like a woman in travail. Landed facing away, a paw over his eyes. He raced away, his body shifting as he sprinted. He went four-footed, his clothes ripping away. A black-tipped mane writhed out. Another crypt exploded, stone shrapnel flying. Sabertooth lion . . . afraid of a cross like a vampire.

  I back-flapped, reversing direction, my talons out, wings shoving against the air as if I pushed it away. On the nonchapel porch, Sabina dropped the cross and wrapped her arms across her middle, cradling herself. She moaned with pain, her eyes on me, pupils vamp black, her fangs fully extended. The reek of seared flesh and leather polluted the air.

  She took a breath and shouted, “Prophecy!” Claws an inch long extended from the ends of burned suede gloves, constructed to leave the tips of her fingers exposed, like driving gloves or golf gloves, incongruous with the nunlike dress. I wanted to stay, to see that she was okay. Foolish desire for a vamp killer. Instead, I keened in anger and wheeled, following the black-magic skinwalker, who was repulsed by a cross.

  He raced across the graveyard, between crypts and into the woods. I flew higher, found a current moving toward the river. Tracking him. There was no way for him to lose me, not in this form. My eyes could follow a mouse at a hundred yards.

  He sprinted through the woods, looking often into the sky, at me. A mile later, he crossed a wide road, avoiding car headlights going both directions, running with vamp speed toward a well-lit area, a cul-de-sac where security lights shone, cars and trucks were parked in the street, and the small, square houses were dark. Air conditioners purred. A dog barked. Others took up the warning, a raucous chorus. One house had windows open, a television laugh track spilling into the dark, screen flickering. The rogue burst from the woods. Raced into the open. And dove through a half-open window into the house.

  Through the window, I heard snarls, a choked cry. He’s killing someone. Nearby dogs went wild, growling, barking, throwing themselves against chain-link fencing,metal clanking and twanging. I screamed a challenge. Dove. Swooped close. But I was in the air, in winged
form. I couldn’t help. And I couldn’t shift back into human form—there was nothing to take mass from, and even if I could risk it, I had left too much of myself back at the garden.

  A woman cried out, the sounds gurgling away. I screamed back, damning the sky and the air and the liver-eater. I heard thumps from the house, hollow, reverberating, and then the sound of water falling. A shower, water hitting tile, thudding into a body for a long time. Then there was nothing. The house fell silent. Focusing tightly, I circled higher, watching. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. Helpless, I soared, current to current. The air cooled. A storm raced in on the gulf. Far off, lightning flickered on the dome of the sky. Clouds dimmed the stars. Dawn was near. And still I flew.

  A door slammed. A man walked from the house. But it wasn’t the liver-eater. I folded my wings and plummeted close. This man was tall and redheaded, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and an unfamiliar scent. I caught an updraft, not sure what his presence meant. He got into a car. Cranked it up, and drove onto the adjoining street. I followed long enough to place where I was, where the house was, in my bird memory. Dawn was pinking the east sky.

  If I met the sun in this form, I couldn’t change back until sunset. Conflicted, struggling with myself, I wheeled and beat the air, back to the garden where I had left most of my mass. I made it just in time, alighting on the topmost stone, wings out, tail feathers wide. Talons on the rocks, scritching rough and rasping. I put a talon on the nugget. And thought about Jane Yellowrock. Human. Scarred. Female. Earthbound. Mass to mass, stone to stone . . .

  I pulled the memory of her snake to the surface. I melted into it. Into her. Rock rumbled beneath me. Pain ratcheted along my bones and I gasped. Fell onto the breaking boulder. It split wide. Dumped me to the ground. Knocked out my breath. Jagged rocks tumbled over me.

  Stunned and hurting, I lay on the ground, staring at the sky. I was woozy, not sure what had happened, remembering only that I had been Bubo bubo. Hadn’t I? I looked down, proving to myself that I was human. Slowly, the memories came back to me. My stomach growled. I took up the gold nugget and placed the necklace over my head. A golden streak crossed from the east. A bird began to sing. A striped yellow cat walked along the fence between Katie’s place and my garden, watching me.

  The boulders in the back garden hadn’t been so lucky. The top one had been reduced to rubble, its largest chunk less than half the size of the original, the smallest like pea gravel. I didn’t like storing mass. I didn’t understand how I did it, and I had the feeling it was dangerous. But so far, I had come back whole. Leaning against the stone, I touched the nugget.

  When I turned eighteen and left the children’s home, I headed to the mountains, following some innate imperative north and west. After motoring my bike up Wolf Mountain as far as the dirt road, then a trail, led, I found myself at Horseshoe Rock. I hiked down from it into the woods. At the bottom of a narrow ravine, I scuffed through dry leaves and found a quartz boulder, weather stained, canted down the gully. Through the center of it ran a vein of gold.

  In the dark and the rain, I crawled inside a sleeping bag and slept near the boulder. And for the first time in six years, though I had no necklace, no marrow to find the snake within, I shifted. Into a big cat. Beast spoke to me like an old friend, long silenced. For weeks, I/we hunted, ate, visited old dens. Hid from humans. Searched for my/ our progeny. All my kits were gone. All others of my kind were gone. I was the last one. Anywhere.

  When I shifted back to human, I dug out a few nuggets of gold and tucked them into a pocket. I later had one strung on an adjustable, doubled gold chain, to carry it with me, while the rest went into a safe-deposit box for a rainy day. If I concentrated, I could sense the gold, no matter where I was, both the position of each nugget and the original vein in the boulder deep in the mountains. It gave me security, a sense of refuge. Of comfort.

  Now, shaking, I hung the nugget necklace over my head and went inside. I made it to the stove as my cell rang. “Mol,” I answered, “I’m okay.”

  “It’s me, Aunt Jane,” Angelina said, sniffling. “You scared me.”

  Stunned, I said, “Huh?”

  “Don’t be the bird no more, Aunt Jane. You coulda fell.” She was crying.

  I clutched the cell, my frozen heart melting. “Okay, Angie baby. No more bird.”

  “I love you,” she murmured. “I gotta go. But Mommy says we’re gonna come visit you.” And the call ended.

  After a two-quart pot of oatmeal, one of Beast’s steaks grilled nearly rare—but not quite—under the oven broiler, and a whole pot of strong black tea, I felt more like myself, more or less, though I was emaciated and sick to my stomach, and was experiencing vertigo to the point that I held on to the cabinets or furniture when I walked. Angie was right. What I had done was dangerous. Really bad stupid.

  Cold, unable to get warm even after steaming until the hot shower water cooled, I curled up under the covers with a pen and pad, and jotted down what I remembered about the night. The location of the chapel—not nonchapel, but chapel. It had contained a cross and a nun. Well, a priestess, but close enough. That made it a chapel, right? The half-remembered location of the house where the creature entered. Had he killed? The TV had been on. Had I mistaken a sound track for a real murder? Had the rogue-liver-eater gone to ground under the house? Questions, no answers, and a fractured, hazy memory.

  My last coherent thought was of the priestess, holding aloft a wood cross, shining with light. Wood didn’t do that, not even in the presence of evil, which is why I always carry silver crosses. Weird. Just plain weird. And weirder still—a vamp holding a cross. How did she survive it? Halfway through my recollections and questions, I fell asleep.

  I woke up feeling warm and annoyed. Someone was pounding on my door with loud, impatient fists. I wasn’t sure, but it may have been going on a long time. Couldn’t people just let a girl sleep in? Stiff and sore, I rolled out of bed, trailing covers, found the borrowed robe, and slid it on. Through the glass I saw the Joe, Rick LaFleur.

  “Crap.” With ill grace, I opened the front door. “It better be freaking damn important.”

  He was wearing jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat that he pushed back by the brim, raising it enough to take me in from head to bare toes. A slow perusal that went from inventory to sensual in a heartbeat. His scent changed from business to sex.

  A grin spread across his face. “Please tell me you’re alone and lonely.” When I glared, he raised a hand and reached toward me, moving slowly, as if he thought he might get slapped. Or taken down in the street and left bruised. He brushed a strand of hair back from my face, behind my ear.

  Beast woke with a sudden lurch. And purred. She drew a breath and fought me for control. It was payback time for becoming Bubo bubo. I felt her claws in my belly. In the old wound across my chest, tightening. Rick’s fingers trailed along my neck to the collar of my robe, a slow caress across my collarbone and down.

  Mastering Beast, I caught his wrist before he got too friendly. “What do you want?” I snarled, holding his hand away from me. I was tickled pink that my voice showed only annoyance, not desire. But I had started to sweat behind my knees and along my spine. Beast wanted him. Badly.

  “I came to see if you wanted to ride.”

  “Do what?” Images poured into my mind of big cats mating, snarling and drawing blood.

  His grin stretched with a kind of sexual teasing I had never mastered. “Horses,” he said, drawing out the word as if I were an imbecile and he could see the images in my mind. “You didn’t come to the club last night, so I came to see if you wanted to go horseback riding.” I dropped his wrist. He let it fall, grin in place.

  “I didn’t sleep last night,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “It’s four p.m., time to rise and shine, especially in the city that parties till dawn.” He pushed his way inside and I let him, which had to be really dumb. Beast wanted to reach out and slide a hand across his butt as he entered, but I resisted. No frea
king way. Her usual payback was less sexual, more in the nature of refusing to shift back when it was time. I think I preferred her stubborn streak to her sensual one.

  Beast tightened her claws on me, tearing. It hurt and I gasped in pain. “Put on the kettle,” I said. Spinning on one heel, I went to my room and shut the door. Firmly. Maybe a little more than firmly, but it made my point. I was not happy with Rick LaFleur. But he knew Anna, who had slept with the rogue—no, the liver-eater—when he smelled unstinky. And he had something going on with Antoine, which pricked my curiosity. I wanted to know what Rick knew, which meant I had to spend time with him, get to know him better, pick his brain, always assuming he had one. I needed to go check out the house the liver-eater-rogue had entered. But first—I needed food. A lot of food. I was unexpectedly ravenous.

  I brushed my hair, braiding it halfway down my back, tying it off with some yarn I’d seen in a drawer. I dressed in jeans and a spaghetti-strap top. When I looked in the mirror I expected to see dark circles under my eyes, hollowed cheeks, pallid skin. But I looked pretty good, if a lot skin nier than yesterday. The oatmeal and steak for breakfast had helped, but my stomach was growling, and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere until I had protein.

  Still barefoot, I padded back to the kitchen and took a steak out of the fridge. Four left. I had to go shopping. But manners pounded into me in the children’s home took precedence over my possible starvation, and I said, “Want a steak?”

  “Sure. If you’re having one. Rare. Still kicking.”

  Deep inside me, Beast rumbled approval. I flushed a bit at her reaction and wished she’d go back to sleep and find another way to torture me.

  Rick sprawled in the chair Bruiser liked, long legs spread, taking up a lot of space. Aware of his body language, of the way his eyes lingered on me, I took out a second steak, co las, and a package of baby spinach put there by Troll. “Hey,” he said, “I got that info you wanted on the property owners out near Lake Catouatchie and the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park.”