by Faith Hunter
I paused in a hallway and thought about the “dark things” that Gee had said were hidden here at HQ, and the things that no one was saying. I pulled my clunky cell and dialed the Kid. “Yellowrock Secur—”
“You know that glitch we were talking about recently?” I interrupted. “The one that sent us all up and down?”
“Someone’s listening?” Alex caught on fast. “The, uh”—he paused, searching for a word that would communicate without giving anything away to any sharp-eared vamps nearby—“winches, gotcha. What can I do for you?”
“Send me there. Stop at the room with all the paintings and stuff, and then send me as far as you can.”
“Oh.” I could tell Alex was thinking that wasn’t such a good idea but he finally said, “Yeah. If you’re sure.”
“I’m in the mood to travel.”
“I can’t get past the security programs to override the system, without an insider’s handprint. At least not yet. I’m working on it, though.”
“I’ll find someone willing.”
“It’s your neck. You want me to stay on?”
He meant stay in contact, the HQ internal communication lines open. “Yeah.” I fumbled in the cover of the cell, pulled out the earpiece he had put there one rainy afternoon when he was playing Q to Eli’s and my James and Jane Bond. I synced the cell to the radio, putting the cell back into a pocket. I had never used the upmarket syncing service but it was handy. “You there?”
“Loud and clear,” Alex answered. And no one at HQ could overhear. Alex was big on back doors. He was a lot like Reach that way.
I walked into the public parts of fanghead HQ, snagging a vamp on my way. It was Mario Esposito, a dark-skinned Italian guy who thought he was way prettier and way more suave than he really was. In his low-heeled loafers, Mario was three inches shorter than me in my boots, and while that wasn’t uncommon, his interest in my chest was unusual. The twenty pounds I’d put on not so long ago had given me some kind of cleavage, and Mario looked like he wanted to get up close and personal with mine. I hooked my arm through his and led the way to the elevator, as Mario shot me his best lines.
“I knew we would one day be together, mio amore. I knew it the first time I gazed at your body, strong and sensual and . . .”
I pushed into the elevator and nuzzled Mario’s ear. “Mario, honey pie, would you swipe your palm and take me to heaven?”
Alex made a quiet gagging noise, one that faded into the background noises, even to a vamp’s sharp hearing. Mario laid his hand over the reader, and hit the button for the third floor.
“Now, please,” I said. “Make it so, Number Two.”
The elevator doors closed. Mario’s mouth descended to my neck. The vamp didn’t notice my disinterest while he pressed his fangs against my skin in invitation, but he did get the downward motion of the elevator. Down and down and down. He pulled his cold lips from my throat and looked up to my face. “We are going down.”
“Yes.”
“Into the dark.”
“Looks like it,” I said, maybe a bit too nonchalantly.
A blade appeared in Mario’s hands, one in each. Fast. Almost as fast as he vamped out into fighting mode. I was impressed. I pulled my nine-millimeter semiautomatic, checked the silver-round load, injected a round into the chamber, and off-safetied. With my left hand, I pulled a small LED flashlight and flipped it to turbo mode. I stuck it into the little strap on my left wrist and shook my arm, satisfied it was secure. I pulled the fourteen-inch vamp-killer and set my feet, carefully balancing my weight.
Around his fangs, Mario asked, “Why do I feel that you were, perhaps, expecting this descent into hell?”
“Because you’re almost as pretty as you are smart?”
“Jesu Christo,” he swore, the word choice odd for a vamp. “I am trapped with a madwoman.”
The doors opened onto a lighted room, the storeroom with the paper records and the paintings. I concentrated on the painting of the four vamps, taking it in fast, Grégoire and his sick little family, memorizing the faces of his sire, his brother and sister, their clothes, and the bird jewelry. The older male was olive skinned and dark haired, with a patrician nose and a dissolute, supercilious sneer that would do Caligula proud. This would be François Le Bâtard, an illegitimate son of French royalty, pederast, abuser of children. Someone of power among the EuroVamps. The younger male, Peregrinus, looked Grégoire’s age, black haired, black eyed, a beautiful fallen angel, his eyes and expression empty. The girl looked even younger, maybe twelve, dressed in a low-cut gown that revealed far too much of a body halted before puberty. Unlike Peregrinus, her face wasn’t blank. She wore a look of terror that seemed to have a scent even after all these years. Grégoire stood to her side, a hand on her shoulder as if to hold her down or give her reassurance, his golden hair pulled back into a braid, his blue eyes staring right at the painter. He was wearing a tight blue outfit with a white shirt and tall boots. And he looked angry. Beyond angry. He wore a fury that appeared unfettered, uncontrolled, as wild as a mustang cornered by a cowboy with intents to capture, tame, and ride him. But the painter who had captured them all. They looked real, as if they could step off the canvas.
Beside the painting was a safe, an old black one with a big handle and a dial. Another painting stood beside it, of two females, both vamps, according to the paleness of their perfect skin. One was Adrianna, a vamp I knew and had killed, twice now. For reasons never clear to me, Leo had brought her back. Other paintings were stacked nearby, including a painting partially hidden behind a trunk. It depicted Grégoire, his siblings, and a small girl child with golden skin and black hair. I had to wonder whether the thing or things that Satan’s Three were searching for might be here, in this huge room. Sadly, nothing jumped up and down waving its arms shouting, Me, me, me! and all I got from the experience was a chance to memorize the faces of my enemies. I needed to have the contents cataloged and photographed. Soon. When I had a free day. I laughed at the thought, feeling Mario jerk in shock at the sound.
Beside me, the terrified vamp cursed in a breath that stank of fear pheromones. He swiped his hand and pressed the main floor button. “A madwoman,” he repeated. The door whooshed closed on the paintings, and Mario started to put away his weapons when he noted I was balanced and ready for . . . attack? Combat? “What have you done?” he hissed.
The elevator dropped again, this time with a little jerk, as if it didn’t really want to go down. “Just checking to see if Peregrinus might be looking for something hidden down here.” Mario started swearing under his breath, the words in Italian and full of religious references.
On second thought, he might have been praying.
CHAPTER 15
If Vamps Could Wet Their Pants
I grunted once just as the doors opened into utter blackness. The stench of death and rotten things whooshed into the elevator. I breathed in through my mouth. The back of my tongue was instantly coated with the reek of the grave, the stench of unwashed bodies, long-dead herbs. Cloying and vile. I steadied myself.
In turbo mode, the flash provided two hundred fifteen lumens and threw a narrow, concentrated beam three hundred seventy-one feet into the darkness. It wasn’t enough. The darkness swallowed the beam of light like outer space. The silence was so profound that it filled the elevator, a hollow, echoing absence of light and sound and life, a long moment of nothingness as I swept the flash from side to side and up and down.
All I saw beyond the elevator lights was darkness with unfinished ceilings and rough-hewn beams far overhead, clay floor just beyond the elevator doors, damp and slick-looking. Old bricks appeared out of the gloom to one side, barely visible, wet and oozing and smelling of magic that held back the ground water. But there was no sound. Only an emptiness so acute it might have echoed into the next universe. I took a breath and it reverberated like a hissing, asthmatic snake. I pulled on Beast’s hearing and vision. And still heard nothing.
Then there it was. A s
ingle, soft drip, bright and clear, the resonance sibilant, as the sound ricocheted around the room. I tried to determine where it originated, but chasing the bouncing sound was like chasing a bunch of rabbits—everywhere at once. The drip sounded again and I followed Mario’s eyes to the left and ahead. I lifted the light there, moving it slowly left to right.
From the dark, a glimmer of something red, flashing to silver. Again. And a breath, like a winter breeze. Beside me, Mario repeatedly pressed his palm on the scanner until the doors whooshed closed. The vamp was swearing like a sailor as his hand jammed onto buttons. The elevator rose. He swallowed, his vamp tissues dry as bike tires, and he started cursing in English to make sure I knew what he was saying. Finally he wound down as the elevator opened to light and the smell of vamps and blood and humans and sex. Normal vamp smells. “You are psicotico,” he spat. “Insane.”
I grabbed his arm before he could disappear. “It was a vamp, wasn’t it? Down there?”
“It might have been Lucifer himself,” he said, jerking free as he strode from the elevator. “Stay away from me.” Mario’s clothes were dark, so I wasn’t sure, but if vamps could wet their pants, he just had. And I wasn’t sure why he was so negatively affected. Vamps always kept their scions chained to walls when in the devoveo, the ten years or more of madness after a human was turned. The sub-five basement had a vamp prisoner. Only one, by the smell. But I could drop that from my inquiries. A scion, no matter how important he or she might have been when human—even a king or queen—wasn’t anything that Satan’s Three would want. If the three were coming after something here at HQ, then it was likely that they were interested in something stored on sub-four. Could Leo have put magical items and artifacts in storage? In the safe hidden in the piles of stuff?
• • •
I left vamp central and headed across the river to Aggie One Feather’s place. I needed knowledge and wisdom and oral tradition. I needed someone who knew stuff and would share it with me openly and honestly. And for free. It was hard making do with bits and pieces of history offered by people who might have reasons to hide that same info. Now that I knew enough to know what questions to ask, Aggie would dish, and the only thing she would make me pay was more honesty and self-assessment. Aggie was all about shining light on one’s deep inner truths and banishing the shadows.
Because of Aggie, I wasn’t the same Jane who had first come to New Orleans. I had learned too much about myself and about my Beast. Too much about what it meant to be a victim and to make others victims. Too much about the dark night of the soul—a poetic way of describing the internal loss of meaning of oneself, and depression. I had looked it up. Because of Aggie, I had survived all that learning and maybe grown up a bit. A very little bit, according to Aggie.
Because of Aggie, because she (and sometimes her aged mother) took me to sweat and took me to water—Cherokee rites and rituals—and because she forced me to remember who and what I was, I had discovered that my inner soul home was my place of greatest strength. I had discovered the first cracks and fissures into the emptiness that was my own past, the first passageways into my own Cherokee memory.
I hadn’t told Aggie much about Beast yet, and I might never. But because of her I had discovered that Beast lived in that same soul home, that same deep cavern of inner sanctum. There, nothing and no one could bind us. There we were invincible, the two of us. I had discovered that our souls, Beast’s and mine, were not only in the same place; they were, to some extent, intertwined, which, so far as I knew, had never happened to a skinwalker. I had no idea what it might mean to me as I aged, as time took us to new and different places, but it had to mean something.
• • •
I turned into the road and cut the engine, coasting the SUV until it stopped, well back from the shell-based drive. I pulled the key and sat in the dark, studying the house and grounds. The security light on the pole at the end of the drive was off, the house and lawn cloaked in the night and illuminated by the moon. The light’s globe was broken. Shattered. The house was dark, though Aggie’s car was in the drive. No TV flickered through the windows. No lights anywhere.
I stared at the house for the space of time between heartbeats. Quietly, I opened the vehicle door, sniffed, and caught the residue of gunfire on the air. Someone had shot out the light. What else had they shot? If someone wanted to hurt me, by hurting my friends, would they know about the One Feathers? Not likely. But anything was possible. Would the two women be able to protect themselves? No. Not against a sniper or a bomb maker.
I let my Beast senses free, questing. The night crashed in, full of the buzz of mosquitoes and the croak of frogs, but empty of any human sounds. No TV laugh tracks. No radio. No conversation. Worse, there was no smell of food on the air. No smell of wood smoke from the sweat house. I raced into the shadows to the house.
I hadn’t noticed when I drew my weapon, but I was holding it in a two-handed grip beside my right leg as I crept around Aggie’s house. As I stepped toward the back porch a soft creak met my ear, slow and repetitive. I halted and timed the sound to about once every two and a half seconds. Someone was on the porch, in the rocker, rocking. Shades of the Bates Motel slashed through my memory.
“Nice night.”
I jerked, just ever so slightly.
“I forgot what it was like to sit out here without the light.”
It was Aggie One Feather speaking, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t talking to me. I achieved a breath that didn’t whistle in fear. Inside me Beast chuffed with laughter and thumped the wall of my soul home with her tail.
“Yup. It nice. How much time till the power company get here?” uni lisi, the grandmother of many children, a Cherokee honorific for an old woman, asked, her tone garrulous.
“In time for your show, Mama.”
“Them kids, they gonna fix our light?”
“Their parents said they’d pay for it, Mama. And Deputy Antonelli said he’d make sure or he’d help us press charges.”
“That good. Good enough.” The rocker rocked on, a peaceful sound in the night. “If I get to watch my Jeopardy!”
I holstered my weapon and called out, “Aggie? It’s Jane Yellowrock. Ummm . . .” I thought about the fact that I always just dropped by. Maybe that wasn’t the nicest thing I could do. “Ummm, are you taking callers?”
“Come around to the porch, Jane,” Aggie called back. “Some kids looking for a place to neck shot out our security light and hit the electric lines.”
Neck? Instantly I thought about vamps and fangs and blood-meals. Then I realized she was talking about hooking up in the backseat of a car. Old-people slang. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” I made my way to the porch and up the stairs. Aggie was right; the porch and the night were nice. The house’s foundation was several feet high, to protect it against hurricane storm surge, and it looked out over a backyard I had never paid much attention to. There were fruit trees and a garden behind a chicken-wired fence, smelling of freshly turned earth and frustrated rabbits. A row of bee boxes stood at the back of the property, the bees silent, the smell of honey soft on the air. I closed the door behind me, making out the location of the two women and the mama cat sitting on uni lisi’s lap. I took a chair. Aggie moved in the dark and I heard a gurgling sound, and smelled cold tea and fresh mint. She pushed a glass across the table to me. I took it and sipped. “Thank you.” A silence filled the space between us, uncomfortable on my part. “Ummm,” I said again.
Aggie made an amused humming sound. My lack of social skills was not a secret to her. Not that she would help me through it.
I puffed out a breath. “That bomb maker I called you about? If she’s who I think she is, then she’s also a sniper and she smells like The People.”
I smelled Aggie’s shock, so strong it might have actually burned through my skin, like an electric spark. Maybe I should have tried some small talk before I jumped into the mess of my life. The weather. Their health. Too late now. “She is War Woman,�
� Aggie asked, “like you?”
“No.” I hesitated. “I don’t think so. She’s female, and a human blood-servant. I don’t think a War Woman would allow herself to be fed upon by vamps. And she’s not someone I’ve ever smelled before.”
“You being a skinwalker,” uni lisi said, unperturbed. “That true?”
I sipped again, my mouth suddenly dry. “Yes, ma’am.”
“That how you can smell what this woman is?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And this woman who smell like The People. She chasing you?”
I started to answer and stopped. Not just targeting me at my house to kill me, but chasing me? If so, was she trying to get me to lead her somewhere? Tracking me everywhere I went? Like to here? “Maybe,” I said, as the possibilities bounced around in my head. What the heck did Satan’s Three want? The things in my possession that were magical. That was all that was left for them to be after.
“I see on the TV, ’bout them little things people stick to cars,” uni lisi said. “So they can follow peoples. You got one on you car?”
My hands went cold on the iced tea glass. I hadn’t checked. I wasn’t used to being a target myself. If I had been a client, I’d have been over the car with a microscope. I set down the tea glass and hit the button for Eli. “Yeah?” he answered.
“You didn’t think to check my vehicle for tracking devices, did you?”
“You were clean this morning. The only way we can be totally sure is to put a camera on it, check it every day, and park it in a vault.”