Nine Lives of an Urban Panther

by Amanda Arista

  She backed away from them like they were a snake. “No, Prima. I’m in this. If nothing else, I can provide surveillance.”

  My gaze fell to Jane. “You don’t have to do this.”

  The woman ran her hands up her arms. “I know, but I still came.”

  I gave her a small smile. “Thank you.”

  I turned to Tucker. “Vision said it was a big snake thing.”

  “Great. Know how to kill one of those?”

  “Generally, I’m finding that decapitation works for most things.” I shrugged.

  As I turned toward the sculpture center, I felt like I was missing something important. I had my Riko, the Key Holder, my wise man, and a horse.

  Another wave of energy flowed out from the sculpture center. What I didn’t have was time.

  I slipped my shoes off at the edge of the fence. “Ready?”

  “You don’t want to know the answer,” Jessa said.

  Security had already been disabled. The green shrub maze that held the wonders of the Nasher collection was black and I was glad for the puddles of light from the almost full moon as I slunk along the edges of the stone pathway.

  Kandice circled high above the garden and said she’d signal if she saw something. We really hadn’t worked out more details than that. Plans never really seem to work out well for us anyway.

  I took a left at the Rodin and then another left at the Picasso. The blue-period sculpture was particularly impressive in the moonlight.

  I stopped as I hit the opening for the reflection pool.

  There was nothing there. Slowly, I let my borders down. I was wrong. The Veil had been shredded, and without my borders, I smelled the blood spilled on the ground and the power that permeated the air.

  We were too late. The evil had already been done. The sacrifice already made. My skin crawled with the residual energy still clinging to everything.

  Slowly, I stepped toward the reflecting pool, and my bare foot landed in a puddle of warm blood.

  I grimaced as I slowly brought up my foot and wiped it on the clean stone walkway beneath me.

  Only when I leaned over the reflecting pond did I get the full brunt of what was going on here. It was the smell that gave him away. That heady, sharp, exotic smell of acrid plants and musk.

  Spencer. This literally had him all over it. The water was infused with it, the air around this place. It smelled like every nightmare I’d had in the past six months.

  Had he been the one to cross over? There was enough blood. But I’d know if he was that close. And he would know that I’d know because he was a part of me and I a part of him.

  But who was the sacrifice?

  There was rustling in the bushes, but it wasn’t Tucker. I knew it before I’d called his name.

  The beings were dark, almost nothing more than shadows in my periphery. And they were cold. Anti-life. Like the trail throughout Chaz’s house.

  What the hell was Spencer playing with now?

  A spray of water hit me before the jaws of the massive snake. I put my arm up, but the beast still caught my arm in its jaws and the shear force of it knocked me up and off the stone bench around the pond. As we landed, the huge fangs pierced my forearm.

  The snake’s body was easily three times the weight of a normal man and triple the length. It landed on top of me and tried to rip my arm off with a violent shake of its massive head. The snake reared back, taking me with it and opened its mouth. I tore my left arm free from its mouth and reached out with my right hand to rake my claws down one length of its head, a claw sinking into the fleshy part of its eye.

  The thing hissed and I matched it with an equally horrifying scream. I got to my feet on its left side and it took a moment to resituate itself. I needed less than that moment to shift.

  My hind paws spread, I leapt at the thing’s throat. My fangs met with scaly flesh and I bit down hard. Thick hot blood poured out of it in fast spurts. The thing spasmed as I rode its falling body to the ground. I raked my claws down its exposed underbelly.

  That’s when it started to coil, just about the same time my shifters broke into the circle. I was wrapped up in three thick coils quicker than I could say double crap.

  With every movement, it grew tighter and tighter around me. I released its bleeding throat to get a better angle to escape.

  Gunshots blasted next to me and I felt the impact of Tucker’s buckshot into the beast. The snake cringed and uncoiled for a moment.

  I pulled on all my strength to push the beast away from me. When I had a little room to wiggle, I shifted back into arms and legs and fought even harder to crawl out of the coils.

  The snake curled in on itself, hissing at both me and Tucker.

  I held my arm and tried to shake off the pain. “I got this. Get that Veil closed.”

  Tucker threw me the shot gun. I caught it with my left hand and nearly dropped it. There was a tingling sensation up my arm and I didn’t think it was carpal tunnel. I looked down for a brief moment to see the two perfect fang bites through my forearm. It was going to leave a mark.

  I took in a deep breath and flexed my hand. My arm was going to be fine and this thing wasn’t going to see daylight.

  The snake opened its wide, white mouth and its fangs glistened in the moonlight.

  “Stop showing off.”

  The snake lunged out again. Because of its size, it wasn’t as fast as the snakes on the National Geographic channel, but I was still as fast as all those panthers.

  I rolled forward and to the right. It left the beast extended in the wrong direction and left me with a quick opportunity.

  I pointed the shot gun at the back of its head and fired. The force threw me back a few steps as it slammed into my shoulder. My right ear rang with the echo of the blast,

  But it didn’t stop the snake. The smell of its blood filled the space between us, but it wasn’t dead.

  What kind of monster was this? By the increased numbness in my arm, it was poisonous, and by the bear hug it had just tried to squash me with, it was a constrictor. Twelve-gauge buck shot didn’t hurt it and it had been bleeding from a neck wound for nearly five minutes and didn’t seem to be slowing down.

  So what’s nearly indestructible, larger than life, and hangs around rips in the Veil? My instincts told me what it was and I really wished my instincts were wrong once in a while. It was a Bigger. I’d fought one of these before and finally killed it after it had done a clog dance on my chest.

  I also knew that if it had come through the Veil, Spencer had not. His plan hadn’t worked. That was a little piece of happy that made me fight harder.

  I tried to shoot at it again, but it was only a two-fer shot gun. The snake struck at me again and I deflected the massive head with the butt of the gun.

  I grabbed at one of the massive fangs and ripped. The sickened sucking sound of the fang coming out by the root echoed through the night.

  That’s when shadows came out of the hedges. I thought it was just my slightly poisoned eyes playing tricks on me, but the shadows solidified into beings that surrounding us. An easy twenty against our five. Crap didn’t even begin to cover this one. Triple crap wasn’t even enough.

  Without another thought, expletive or no, I pulled at every tie I had. I called my pack to me. Peter was in his office; the Rosario boys were watching TV. And Tyler—Tyler was drinking alone somewhere. I sent out the message like a text through our connection: Your Prima needs you; wear comfortable shoes.

  I called them to me because I was about to get my ass kicked. But I left that part out.

  “Sonuvabitch,” Tucker said, but I felt his fear as he too looked around the dark circle.

  “Hello, baby sister.” The things, these shadow creatures were all speaking at once. Not in his voice but it had the same smug tone as Spencer.

  My skin tightened at the mere phrase. My stomach lurched. Everything good within me revolted at the words that echoed around in the night.

  “Lovely evening.
Like my new toys?”

  “Not really.”

  Keeping the snake in my periphery, I looked over at Jessa, who was pulled tightly into Tucker’s arm and away from the pond.

  It had a glow to it. Something soft and lavender.

  “Jessa. Close it, now.”

  “Vi.”

  “Now!”

  Jessa jumped and grabbed a silver knife off Tucker’s belt. She drew the bright edge of it down her wrist and let the blood fall into the rippling water.

  “Look at the fairy dance.”

  I looked back at the snake and slowly turned to see Nash and Jane frozen, a line of the shadow men behind them.

  A dark ribbon of smoke curled up and turned solid around Jane’s neck. She gasped and had to stand on her tiptoes as the black fingers tightened around her throat.

  Immediately I sent a stream of energy to them, to all of them, even Jessa, whose blood I could feel running down her arm as if it were my own.

  “Now,” Spencer ordered.

  The shadow things attacked and the snake struck again. Distracted by the sudden gunfire from Tucker, the snake caught me in the shoulder. I was knocked backward on the stone ground and the force drove its fang deep within my shoulder.

  I cried out as the poison burned through my shoulder. No getting away from this one. But hey, it was only one fang full of poison now.

  I only had moments of action left, if the numbness in my left arm was any indicator. I went to shift, knowing that I could inflict the most damage with claws rather than sarcasm.

  The snake was on top of me again, just about to coil. I was about to shift when one of the shadow things touched me and I couldn’t. Like the magic was gone. Sucked out of me.

  I kicked at it and the thing was as solid as a man but without features like a shadow.

  “A snake heart’s in the torso,” Nash called out before I heard a shadow man strike him so hard that I tasted his blood.

  My good hand gripped the fang in my hand. The torso? Where the hell is a torso on a twenty-foot snake?

  The first coil managed to get around me and began to squeeze. I stabbed wildly at the shadow thing with its claw wrapped around my ankle. A cold chill was creeping up my leg.

  I ripped at the snake’s head with my quickly dying hand and stabbed at its eye and throat with the fang. It was like trying to kill a bear with a butter knife.

  As the snake coiled tighter and tighter, I felt the rest of my pack close in.

  A silver blade flashed out of the darkness and into the back of the snake’s neck. I followed the blade up the steely arms and straight into the eyes of Tyler. My lost boy Tyler.

  The snake released the bite on my shoulder, its spinal chord now severed.

  Tyler went after the beast at my leg.

  I pried the jaw from my shoulder. Nails on a chalkboard had nothing on the sucking sound of a fang coming out of your shoulder: it’s officially the worst sound in the world.

  As I sat up, the world spun, but I was focused enough to take the fang still in my hand and stab it through the snake’s hide and rip down as far as I could. If I’ve learned anything from the movies, it’s to make sure that the monster was actually dead.

  The blood looked black in the moonlight and I reached in and pulled out what felt like the thing’s heart. The smooth muscles beat slowly and stopped in my palm. I felt the light fade away into just another dead monster in front of me.

  A hand appeared before me. Tyler’s face was splattered with blood. “Can’t touch those shadowy things unless they are feeding, but then you can still kill ’em quick enough.”

  I slid my bloody hand into his and he carefully pulled me to my feet. My knees went weak as the poison ebbed further down my side, making my upper torso go numb. His hand slipped easily around my waist as I leaned against him. “Tyler,” I breathed.

  “Prima.”

  “Hell of a homecoming.”

  “See things haven’t changed.”

  I looked up at him, at his warm brown eyes, at the dimples that were set around his mouth. When he looked down at me, I knew it was exactly that. A homecoming. My boys were back.

  It strengthened my core. “Get me something to kill these things with.”

  Tyler winked and was gone from my side. Tucker had obviously reloaded and was blasting away the ones he could. Nash was making mincemeat of one in the corner, while being only slightly minced himself, and in a gleaming white shirt, Peter was there with a short silver knife already covered in black.

  A shadow thing flew at me and I ducked, though frankly it was more of a crumple. It flew over me and straight into the pond.

  “Crap,” Jessa cried out.

  “What?” I pulled myself up.

  “The other side keeps changing, from Neveranth, to places here, back to the Neveranth. It’s not stable.”

  “I suggest you make it stable before—”

  I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have even thought it, because then it would have just been my few against the shadow men.

  If I hadn’t thought it, there wouldn’t have been an explosion of water and five vampires rolling out of the pond. They crawled gracefully out of the surface of the water, silver swords in hand.

  “Holy . . .” was yelled across the garden.

  “Crap,” I completed as I watched dumbstruck from the ground behind one of them. I knew exactly what they were. My borders shot, I could feel their ice-cold energy radiating in their chests. They looked out at my pack members, who stopped fighting for a moment.

  “Who killed Emilio?” The man was slender with bright white hair that looked odd against his black attire.

  My first thought was he was trying to way too hard. I pushed myself up off the stone ground and held my now nonfunctioning arm. “Who’s Emilio?”

  “Our Source. Which one of you is Jordan?”

  His ice blue eyes grazed over the men, even the shadows faded for a moment.

  I licked my lips. “That would be me.”

  I really didn’t expect everything to be like I’d written, like Nash and I had talked about. I’d expected speed, but in the blink of an eye, the man’s hand was around my neck and I was slammed to the ground, the stone breaking beneath me as well as a few ribs within me. I was almost glad for the poison’s numbing agent.

  Tucker tore after him and was met with the silvery slice of a blade to the back of his knee by another vampire warrior. He fell hard to his knees and I felt the blood run down my leg.

  The man with the blue eyes leaned over me and I realized that they weren’t just blue; they were glowing blue, like Jessa’s glowed lavender. There was that fairy likeness.

  His fingers dug into and around my throat. “I will take your blood for taking his.” His own fangs pressed down on his lower lip. Good to know that part was true.

  I gurgled out. “I didn’t do it.”

  “At least he took a bite out of you.”

  The panther lashed out and I clawed four neat lines down his face with my injured arm. I couldn’t feel it, but it was still a fighting hand.

  The vampire flinched enough that I was able to arch and get a leg around his neck. With a prayer to my sensei that one didn’t need actual feeling in their extremities to leg lock someone, I trapped his slender neck behind my knee and locked my foot behind my other leg as I rolled him backward.

  He arched over my straightened leg and I rammed my fist into his gut. His hands darted out for his dropped sword, but I caught his hand in a thumb lock.

  “I did not kill your Emilio,” my voice was scratchy, liked I’d had a cold for four days. “We’ve both been set up.”

  “He said you’d say that,” the man who had struck down Tucker said.

  My eyes darted upward and the man flinched. “Spencer?”

  The shadows spoke again. “Isn’t this fun, little sister?”

  It was enough of a distraction to allow my grip to falter for a moment. The vampire cart wheeled over me and ripped his head from the lock.
He knelt no more than an arm’s length away.

  “Who are you?” The vampire’s eyes burned brighter as he wiped the blood from his cheek.

  “I am Violet Jordan, Prima of the Dallas Pride. And you are?”

  There was a cry from the skies and I looked up to see Kandice’s dark shape against the moonlight. More? More were coming?

  The darkness swarmed. It seemed to come out of every crack in the stone and solidify into men.

  Chaos erupted. The blue-eyed vampire went for his sword and began hacking and slashing everything that came near him. I heard the screams of my pack members as they too fought off the dark creatures. I pulled myself to the edge of the pond, where Tucker had rallied next to Jessa again.

  From across the pond, Jessa looked up at me with lavender flashing wildly in her eyes. “Throw them in the pond.”

  I nodded and with the rest of my strength, I pushed the information out to my fighting pack along with as much extra power that I could muster. Weakened by the action, I struggled to get to my feet.

  With a long deep breath that slowed the action around me, I released the Haverty Legacy that beat wildly to be set free. The power blew my hair over my shoulders and drew the attention of everyone in the group. It spun around me, ready for the fight.

  A large brown hawk swooped down and dropped a yellow something at my feet. I carefully picked it up and smiled. Tucker’s Taser.

  I didn’t have to wait long to see what would happen if you hit a shadow man with a stun gun. One came at me. I ducked and stuck the thing in the chest with the pointy ends and squeezed the handle. The moment the metal prongs hit its chest, it exploded in a puff of black ash and cinders that floated upward and got caught in the power that swirled around me. Like a vampire in the movies. But ironically, not like the ones in real life.

  The shadows swarmed one of the vampires and he was left a normal corpse on the ground.

  I only had a moment to rip off the spent cartridge of the Taser as another shadow flew at me. I ducked and stuck it in the chest with the exposed metal prongs and pulled the trigger. Black embers rained around me and I smiled. So, they are vulnerable when they are feeding and don’t like electricity. Good to know.