by Faith Hunter
In the crowd, several humans panicked, and Bruiser’s eyes tracked them. “Yes, My Queen,” he said.
Loudly Koun said, “Let it be recorded. The Dark Queen has shown mercy to her enemies. My blade shall not be fed. For now.”
I thought that was a little too poetic and hopeful, but I didn’t say so.
* * *
* * *
It was an hour before dawn when my team and I left HQ via the front door. Beast lent me her night vision, turning the world silver and gray and vibrant green.
Jane did not let I/we/us drink vampire blood, Beast thought at me. Jane wasted good strong vampire blood.
Maybe next time we’re in Beast form, I thought back.
We were halfway down the long steps when the Glob grew suddenly, blisteringly hot in my pocket. “Attack,” I shouted, warning. I leaped from the stairs, out of the way. Midair, Beast-fast, I yanked the Glob from its padded pocket, pulled open another pocket, and wrapped the Glob in the hanky I kept there so I could hold it. Raising the weapon high over my head, I landed in the parking area on toe pads and one knobby hand, protected at my back by the building. A familiar place. I’d try not to die this time. Eli and Bruiser dropped to either side of me. Koun and Thema in front of me. Lightning flashed from the sky and exploded in the center of the parking area. Blinding. I blinked against the retinal burn to see a faint glow in the center of the parking area.
Ka stood there.
Grandmother was standing at one side, Monique, her head leaking, was propped at her other side.
“Nice magic trick,” I muttered.
Thema laughed.
But the Glob went so hot it burned through the cloth in my hand. The stench of scorched cotton and u’tlun’ta sweat filled the air. I had grabbed from the wrong pocket. The cloth wasn’t a clean hanky. I had grabbed the scrap of Grandmother’s cloth shift from the sweathouse.
Hayalasti Sixmankiller threw back her head in a wordless scream. Her back arched. Her polluted skinwalker magic rushed out of her, toward the heating Glob and her sweat. She started to shift, changing shape. Grandmother’s hair lit with flames that shot high. Aya leaped at her, the two forms tumbling into the darkness.
Ka took a step toward me. Her body wavered, shimmered. Shifted. Aurelia took the next step forward. She wavered. Again she was Ka, and her eyes were wild, like a rabid fox, trying to hold her thoughts together. But she was full of arcenciel blood. “I miscalculated,” she said, as magic coiled and swirled around her, and once again she was Aurelia.
The Firestarter was more sane, and this one’s magic was untouched by the Glob, but I could see it, a thick mist of black and scarlet buzzing with motes of orange power. The mist of energies was heavy, held protected by a thin layer of foul green. “I need another host to stabilize my forms,” she said.
Grandmother stepped in from the dark, looking just fine.
Where was Aya?
“She is mine,” Grandmother said.
Ka reappeared. “I need the locket,” Ka said. “Join me, sister.”
Sister . . . Shock scorched through me. Turn of phrase? Or some kind of horrible reality?
“Join us,” Ka said.
“No way under heaven,” I said.
Everything happened fastfastfast.
Fire swirled around Ka/Aurelia’s hand as she raised it high. The fire formed into a ball of power so bright it blinded. She whipped back her arm to throw it.
Eli fired. Ka took five shots midcenter.
“Nooo,” I whispered, the sound lost beneath the gunfire.
Ka/Aurelia staggered. Healed in Ka shape. She morphed back into the Firestarter. Faster than I could follow, she curled her hands. That waiting magic gathered in her palms. She threw two fireballs. Dead center at us. The fireballs scarcely left her palms when they sputtered and died.
Pearl and Opal dove at Aurelia, who was holding an iron blade.
“Iron!” I shouted.
The two dragons vanished. Eli fired again. And again. He changed out mags. Kept firing. Ka laughed, changing forms over and over. She flung a hand at Eli. A different magic slithered toward him, snaky and twisted.
Opal reemerged for a second and shouted.
Eli’s weapon misfired.
Opal’s magic batted Ka’s away and she disappeared again.
My heart stuck in my throat.
Eli was okay.
Ka walked toward me, closing the space between us.
Opal and Pearl reappeared, their inner light flashing, blinding. Opal thrashed her barbed tail at Ka.
Ka jumped out of the way. Slipped past the barbs and continued toward me, dancing past the tail.
Knowing he would hear even over any gunfire deafness, I whispered, “Koun.”
Koun rotated around us all, his body in a graceful, deadly spin, splendid in the night.
Eli pulled two more weapons, but he didn’t try to fire, his eyes tracking between Ka and me.
Koun’s executioner ax stretched out behind him, a longsword in his other hand. In a perfect cut, his sword took Ka’s right hand. His body spinning, his ax took Monique’s head. Opal and Pearl swooped down and caught the head. The two arcenciels flipped again, tails in graceful arcs, throwing rainbow lights against the stairs and the outer walls. The arcenciels vanished. Taking the head with them, like a trophy.
Ka lifted her stump and stared at it. It pulsed blood. A lot of blood.
Monique didn’t bleed much. Her body simply folded down into a heap. She was gone.
Koun tripped Ka, slammed his sword hilt across her jaw hard enough to stun her, and watched her head bounce on the concrete. He knelt beside her and applied a tourniquet to her stump. Ka shook her head but didn’t fight. She held her stump to her horrified face, the blood still oozing out. With her other hand, she reached over and picked up her severed hand. Koun snapped multiple null cuffs onto her head and each arm. She shimmered and tried to shift, but she had waited too long, the null cuffs doing their job. There was no way she could change shape in the hope of reattaching her hand. Koun used silver plated zip strips to secure Ka’s elbows together behind her back, and her ankles together.
From down the street, tires squealed. The stink of vamp rose on the air before weakening as cars pulled away. I knew this smell. Some of the makeshift clan we had fought in Asheville had been waiting for phase two of an attack that hadn’t started well. The backup troops were now abandoning ship. Shaun MacLaughlinn and his clan of misfits and psychopath fangheads had been part of the assault. Shaun and I were on a collision course. The day he no longer had a head couldn’t come soon enough.
Aya reappeared from the darkness.
Relief scoured through me. My brother was alive.
Grandmother was draped over his shoulder. I smelled Aya’s blood. She had wounded him again. He had not killed her. Again. But this time Grandmother was wrapped in null cuffs, six sets of the new cuffs created by the Seattle coven for the military and PsyLED, shackles that stopped all magical activity. The null cuffs were duct tapped in place. Yet, even bound, Granny shimmered and changed shape. Her magic was stronger by far than Ka’s. She formed from Hayalasti Sixmankiller into a white female with gray hair. Into a young blond woman. And then she shifted again and again, back to back, so fast I almost missed it. She was . . .
Sabina.
She had killed and eaten Sabina.
I had seen Sabina when we left the warehouse after the attack there. Grandmother had been in the air at that time, a huge bird. She had to have taken Sabina between then and the last conversation in Raisin’s office . . . and eaten the priestess. I hadn’t kept the outclan priestess protected. The ancient vampire hadn’t been safe here in my own city.
Grandmother screamed when she saw me. “You! You are the cause of all of this!” She writhed in Aya’s arms. Aya nearly fell back, struggling to hold her. “Kill her, my son!” she screamed.
“No. I renounce you,” Aya said, his voice thick and full of history and pain.
Ka began
to moan, weeping softly.
Bruiser knelt beside Grandmother in the parking area and wrapped his long fingers around her head. “Shhhh,” he whispered. “Shhhh. All is well.”
Grandmother whimpered and shook. She became Sabina again. Sabina looked at me. I knew in that moment that Sabina was, in some form, in some manner, still fully conscious within Grandmother, just as Beast was alive in me. Or . . . perhaps just as I was alive in Beast. That was a scary thought.
“I was a fool. I thought I could reason with her as I did so long ago. I let her take me,” Sabina said.
“All is well,” Bruiser whispered, his lips close to Sabina / Grandmother’s forehead, his hands gripping there.
She writhed and shifted again into Grandmother. “All is not well,” Grandmother gasped, breathing fast. Her entire body was quivering. “All has not been well since that one”—she looked at me—“killed Tsu Tsu Inoli.” She looked at Aya, “He was mine. He was in place. Ka and I were ready to return the world to its rightful form.” She screeched, “She killed my son!”
“Tsu Tsu Inoli.” Aya murmured a translation from Tsalagi. “Mark Black Fox. Who is Mark Black Fox?”
“That name’s in Immanuel’s journal,” I said softly. “I didn’t bother to read the context.”
“I will give you the power I gave to Tsu Tsu,” Grandmother said to Aya. “The power I tried to give to Ka N’vsita. Together we can retake our power, can take our rightful places in this land. We can go back in time to the massacre and kill the destroyer. We can restore the power of the skinwalkers. Then we can kill all the vampires,” she screeched, “just as your sister and I killed the white man who killed your father.”
I flinched. My father had been killed by two white men when I was a child. Grandmother had put a blade into my hand and taught me how to kill, cutting them slowly until they bled to death. Now she wanted to kill vamps. Probably all the vamps. I remembered the drawing in de Allyon’s La Historia de Los Mithrans en Los Americas, from so long ago: skinwalkers dead all around the powerful vamp. Only one Cherokee skinwalker woman had still been alive, at his feet. Had Gramma heard about the massacre? Or was that drawing of the skinwalker woman actually Hyalasti Sixmankiller? Had she been there? Perhaps that massacre could have been the beginning of her u’tlun’ta magic.
“Help me kill them all!” Gramma screeched, writhing in their hands. “Help me to go back and kill the destroyer!”
Yeah. My nutso crazy gramma wanted to timewalk and stop that event.
Timewalking back beyond even a few minutes meant changing everything. In Eli’s terms, going back to the fifteen hundreds would be a precision strike, and no matter how careful, the consequences could be catastrophic. I remembered the vision of the dead world, a world without life. Was that the most likely outcome of Ka and Gramma going back in time?
Was that why they needed three skinwalkers?
Aya said, “I remember the tales you told us, Grandmother. I remember the tales of the killing field of skinwalkers, slaughtered by the hand of Lucas Vasquez de Allyon.” He turned his amber eyes to me. “I will speak these words aloud so my sister and her court will know them to be true. I heard the old tales. I did not know my Grandmother wished to change that history. I did not understand it was even possible.”
“I’m not sure it is,” I said. “The potential for a screw-up that changes history way more than she expects is . . . I don’t even know how to measure it. The arcenciels haven’t gone back in time to fix what they consider the worst crime in all of human history because getting there without catastrophic failure is so difficult. And they’re the masters of timewalking.”
Aya inclined his head. He continued, “Grandmother, hear me. You cannot control your own skinwalker gifts, let alone a time-jump so far into the past. Even should Jane and I agree to help, even with all the magical amulets you might find or steal, you would not be likely to end up in the right place and time. It has been too many years. You have told many different versions of the destroyer and the killing fields, Grandmother. The exact place and time are lost to you. You do not remember. And worse,” he took a slow breath and met her eyes, “you are no longer sane, Grandmother.”
She screeched and writhed in his hands, her shape changing over and over. “You will help me! I command it!”
“No. You are u’tlun’ta.” Aya’s words were formal, carefully spaced. I knew he wanted to be speaking Tsalagi, but for us, he spoke English. “Not as a law enforcement officer of PsyLED, but as an Elder of The People, I take you into custody. Wrapped in null cuffs, you shall be delivered to the null prison managed by the council of witches, and you shall be judged by your clan before being taken to the top of the mountains and thrown from the high places. Hayalasti Sixmankiller,” he pronounced, “you have lost your soul.”
He had said something similar once before and I recognized the words as an Elder’s judgment. He was going to kill Grandmother.
The old woman sagged in Aya’s and Bruiser’s hands, sobbing, and for a moment she sounded almost sane. “I tried so hard. I had everything prepared. All we needed was George Dumas and my granddaughter. With them, we could have avenged our people, destroyed the drinkers of blood who killed all of my people, all the skinwalkers whom I loved. Our people would return to us. Tsalagi would rise again, would become our own.” She stared at Aya. “Do not do this, my child. Do not unmake what I have worked for so long. The Tsalagi can rise as a people, today, now, under skinwalker rule.”
“The Rule of Three,” Bruiser murmured. “Three Onorios, three skinwalkers, plenty of Mithrans, and an outclan priestess. Three times three times three, with their power growing exponentially with each of the groups of three. Three icons with arcenciel blood and scales. And the remaining slivers and ingots from the iron Spike of Golgotha. And a cup of arcenciel blood. They could have done anything. Anything they ever wanted.”
“With the fresh arcenciel blood from Storm’s death,” I said, “it’s possible that they could have timewalked back to the massacre of skinwalkers. They could have killed the Spaniard vamp—de Allyon.”
Grandmother looked at me. Though she was still fighting Bruiser’s magic, her eyes were taking on that strange cast of light that an Onorio’s mind-bound slave always got. Bruiser was still draining her. I hated Onorio binding. So did my Consort. But to keep our people safe, he would attempt anything that needed to be done.
Grandmother struggled against his hands and said, “Shaun is still here. His plan is still in place. He has not been defeated. He will come for us, for he needs the power we possess. You have not yet won.”
“And Mainet Pellissier?” I asked.
“Maaaineeet.” She laughed at the name. “The Heir thought to change history to his own desires. I let him think he would win. But we three—Ka, you, and I, granddaughter—together we have the power and the amulets and the place where true power is chained. Only we know where it is.”
More crazy talk. Or more angel talk. Crap.
“Ka’s caught and bound and brought to nothing. And so are your plans,” I said.
“We can take Shaun’s place and together we can defeat the Heir to the Sons of Darkness.”
“Not working with you, old woman. You have no honor.”
Grandmother screamed again. Her body writhed and shifted, bones cracking and splitting, partial shapes resolving and sliding away. Somehow the men kept hold of her.
Bruiser, his face white from the strain of trying to control a mad skinwalker, let her go and hunched his body away from Grandmother. Skinwalkers can’t be bound—or even controlled—easily, and Grandmother, perhaps, not at all.
Aya stared down at the woman who had raised him. There was pain and horror and a grieving misery in his eyes.
Grandmother shifted to Sabina, who looked at me. “Protect the amulets from the invaders. Keep our kind and your kind and the witches, as well, safe from the place of binding and shape-changing and freedom.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“You will find it,” the priestess said. “But you cannot let the one who ate me live. Kill her now. Take and protect the amulets. Save the place of power and the being who is chained there.”
Aya said, “Her death is the duty of her clan and her children. But—” He looked at me, his expression shifting through indecision to something harder. “Her trial before the elders will take time to arrange. I am an officer of the law as well as an elder of the Tsalagi. I have a duty. May I borrow a vehicle to take them to the witch null prison?”
He couldn’t kill her. I got that. It might be a horrible decision to leave her alive, but . . . Gramma was Aya’s responsibility. Not the Dark Queen’s. I blew out a breath, knowing I was putting off the inevitable. “Yeah.”
I addressed the vamp I trusted more than anyone knew. “Koun, will you arrange a security team to help. Eli and I will be . . . ummm . . .” I smiled weakly, “tied up here.”
“Yes, My Queen.”
CHAPTER 18
Who Knew with Suckheads?
Crap started again at dusk. I rolled over, finding myself in Leo’s old bedroom. Mine now. There were people shouting in the hallway and over my earbuds, which were laying on the bedside table. No gunshots, no announcements about being attacked, so that was good.
I was fully human, still with about twenty-five extra pounds of muscle, my head on Bruiser’s pillow beside the crown, which had come off again as I slept and changed shape. He was gone of course, because he needed less sleep than I did. I was sweating and miserable and threw off the covers so the AC could cool me. Outside the door, something thumped. Loud.
I hadn’t missed all this at the inn, in the mountains, in my place of peace: the constant violence, ornery vamps, and a heat wave in midfall. According to the weather app on my cell, temps had reached ninety during the day and were still in the eighties.
And then I remembered. I flopped over, the horror flashing through me.