by Faith Hunter
Gee initiated a move, the lights glinting on his sword, his feet shifting into an advanced move. He is trying to kill me.
Eli fired.
Gee’s body snapped, as if he had been hit with the tip of a whip. Leo shouted. And Gee simply fell to the floor beside me. I sat down, my strength draining away, and looked into Gee’s face, where he was gasping, trying to find breath. I picked up the single dark blue feather that rocked lightly beside him, the only evidence that his glamours had nearly failed when he was shot. I tucked it into the opening of his shirt.
“You can’t heal here, you stupid bird,” I said, remembering our first conversation, the one that had told me wasn’t from Earth, or not an Earth I had ever known. “You might need that feather.” And then I fell over him and the light telescoped down into a tiny pinpoint of brightness that illuminated Eli’s boots. They were standing in my blood.
CHAPTER 4
I Always Wanted to Shoot Big Bird
I came to in a darkened room that smelled of vamps, human blood, and my blood. I was cold, so cold I couldn’t even shiver, though there was something warm wrapped around me, an electric blanket, I thought, coarse and fuzzy at the same time. Something cool and smooth was against my cheek. Something wet was wiping my side, cleaning the deadened flesh where I must be—or must have been—wounded. The pain that had been with me, even in the darkness of unconsciousness, was mostly gone, leaving a dull ache.
I sighed and my breath came easily, with a sensation that let me know I had been in agony for some time in the very recent past. But the pain was gone and my breath came and went, came and went. But I wasn’t ready to face the real world. Sinking inside myself, I reached for Beast.
She was in my soul home, crouched before a crackling fire. The flames were cool, giving off no heat, and the light within them, light that should have illuminated everything around us, was muted, as if hidden in smoke, except there was no smoke, no scent of fire or fresh-cut wood, no charcoal, no scent of anything. Everything was dark, except for the flames themselves and a shadowy Beast, so dark here that I couldn’t see the stone walls or the rounded stone roof, far overhead. Beast’s eyes were glowing gold, watching me in the darkness. Her golden pelt was dim, as if she sat in shadow, or as if she had taken on the pelt of the black panther, the rare melanistic Puma concolor, her pelt darkened beneath the black hair-tips. A tremor ran through her body.
I examined myself, seeing the leggings, long tunic shirt, and the plain, undecorated moccasins that I had begun to wear here, ever since I accepted that I was War Woman. I bent toward the flame. The medicine bag hanging on the leather thong about my neck swung forward, into the meager light. The green-dyed leather caught the light and faded into darkness, caught the light and faded into darkness as it swung, in time to my breathing, slow and easy. The leather bag filled with herbs had no scent, no herbal aroma, no wild tobacco, nothing. I had a bad feeling about . . . everything.
Jane is foolish kit.
So you tell me.
Jane let ambush hunter wound her with killing steel claw.
I thought he was testing us again. Making sure there was no indication of Beast in our eyes. No evidence of our new abilities. I thought back to what I remembered of the fight. The memory was fuzzy, but the memory of the pain was fresh and startling, of Gee’s blade sliding in under my ribs.
Jane should have allowed Beast to be. She drew out the last word, giving it import and heft, as though being was a weapon I had possessed but had kept sheathed.
I didn’t stop you, I thought back. I reached for you and . . . I tried to remember, but my memory was sluggish, as if the moment I looked for had been washed away by a flash flood.
I got the impression of golden eyes, a flick of ear tabs, and a faint chuffing sound. Beast was there. Waiting.
I don’t understand, I thought at her. What happened?
Litter mate killed him with white man guns. Yet Gee did not die. Jane was dying, but Beast was awake. Beast flicked her ears, thinking. Leo slashed Gee-bird with claws, like male puma slashes younger males, to warn away from territory. There was much shouting and human war screams. There was much I did not understand.
Yeah, well, that makes two of us.
Two. And one. Always. Forever. As Jane understands now and not now.
I reached for you in the fight. I couldn’t find you.
Jane is foolish kit. Beast can hide golden eyes and scent. Beast is . . . She went silent and I realized she was thinking, trying to find words. She settled on the familiar Beast is wise ambush hunter.
Yes. You are.
We are. We are Beast.
I knelt at the fire and rubbed her ears, the pelt not as warm as I expected on my icy fingers. I ran my hands down along her jaw. Her head tilted into me and she scrubbed it hard against me, scent-marking me. I wrapped my arms around her and held her close for a moment, her pelt slightly warmer than my cold skin, her breath a steady almost-purr that was more vibration than sound. She should have been warmer. Much warmer than I was. Puma concolors have a higher body temp than humans. Something was very wrong here. I thought, Are we in danger?
No. They heal us.
In the room where my body lay, I tasted vampire blood. Leo was feeding me. I swallowed. Then I tasted Edmund Hartley’s blood and I swallowed again. The vampire hadn’t been here before. I was certain. Voices were speaking, the sounds angry, but the words were indistinct, as if I had cotton stuffed in my ears. I pulled away from the arguing vamps and human and went back into my solitude.
In my soul home, the flames in front of us flared high for a moment, throwing off sparks. Suddenly they held warmth and light. The walls around us brightened enough to perceive that they were dove-gray rock, smooth and damp with wet. The scent of burning wood teased my nostrils as I took a breath.
Beast stood and shook herself, her loose pelt sliding around her strong frame. She was bigger now, just as I was bigger after my weight gain over Christmas. She would soon be at the top of her weight limit, without altering some genes, turning some on or off, to increase her possible weight. And I didn’t know how to do that safely. But her pelt was warmer, and her flesh beneath was warmer. That was good. My hand slipped from her and she padded into the shadows that lingered at the passageway to her niche, the ledge and shallow notch where she denned. Watching her, I stood. And I woke.
In the real world, assuming it really was real and not some dream that Beast and I lived, I was shivering. The electric blanket was turned up high and the warmth burned my naked flesh, skin that prickled and ached with dryness and age. I was alone beneath the blanket but not alone in the room. I smelled Leo and Edmund and Eli, all close, the peculiar mixed odors of vampire blood, herbal and coppery and floral. And I smelled my blood.
The pain was a dull ache, like a bruise at its worst, a feeling that was hot and cold, raw and dampened all at once. I recognized the sensation. It was the healing of vamp blood. My side and waist were heavy, as if weighted, as if I pushed against something heavy with each breath.
Vaguely I remembered the cool, wet sensation on my side where I had been stabbed. A vamp tongue, laving and healing. All without the slightest hint of sexual desire or heat.
“She is awake,” Edmund said. His voice was close and I realized his arm was around me, outside the blanket, holding me close. It was a protective embrace, the kind a parent offered a sick child. A safe haven in a storm of pain.
“Jane?” Leo asked.
I licked my lips. When I spoke, my voice was a parched murmur, like leaves rubbing together in a dry wind. “Eli?”
“Yes, babe?”
“No fair,” I whispered. “I always wanted to shoot Big Bird.”
Eli chuckled, and I heard the relief in his tone. “He’s not dead. Lead doesn’t kill his type.” His voice hardened. “But it’ll be a while before he gives another lesson. The day he does, you can shoot
him. Again.”
“Why?” I asked, and my breath failed me. I wasn’t sure he would understand my question, but he did. Eli always understood.
His voice had that precise but toneless note of a military debrief. “Still under investigation. Gee screwed up or went nuts or . . .” He paused as if there was another possibility, but he didn’t address it. “We don’t know yet. He’d been working with students dressed in Dyneema testicle stretchers, so maybe he thought you were dressed out, until after he stabbed you and you bled all over the floor. Remote possibility is that it could have been an accident.” But I could tell he didn’t believe that one.
That was a lot of chatter from my taciturn partner, a sure sign he was upset. “Dyneema testicle stretchers” was Eli’s term for the proper sword fighting attire, the cloth reinforced with plasticized Dyneema to repel sword cuts and punctures. We wore them during sword fighting lessons, and the thong that went through the legs, holding the chest protector in place, was amazingly uncomfortable for males. So. Accident? Was that even possible? Then I remembered the blue eye in my palm, the eye that seemed to look right at me as it turned green. A memory burned in the back of my mind, struggling to get free.
“Leo? Edmund?” I asked, waiting for the memory to rise.
“Yes, my Jane,” Leo said.
“Yes, my master,” Edmund said.
That “my master” stuff had to be addressed soon. Very soon. There was no way I was taking the vampire to be my primo. Vamps had primos and they were human. Skinwalkers had no primos and certainly not vamp primos. No way. I said, “Your opinion on the accident?”
“I concur with your second’s estimate,” Edmund said, “but the Master of the City is also correct. It was hubris on the part of the misericord. He . . .” Edmund hesitated a bare moment, and made a sound as if he was strangling. Or laughing. “He has issues.”
I smiled in the darkness at the modern term coming from Edmund’s lips. No wonder the words had strangled him.
“Why did you not change into one of your Beast forms, my Jane?” Leo asked.
“I really don’t know . . . I was holding . . .” An eye. It had started out blue, which had felt familiar. The memory came back to me in a rush. When I first met Gee DiMercy, he had used his magic both for and against me. At one point, he had employed his all-seeing blue eye to watch me, in real life and in my soul home. I had seen blue eyes in both palms. Watching me. But this time, they had started blue and faded to the witch’s green.
Gee had been spelled? With a spell like the one on me? Or the one on me had triggered some remnant of Gee’s first spell and found its way back to him? Yes . . . That made a sort of sense. My breathing sped, which caused a thrill of pain to rush through my chest. I thought it through again and it all made sense.
I breathed more slowly, letting the pain ease, trying to figure out what it meant. And whether the eye in my palm was also the reason I hadn’t changed shape. Nothing came to me, and Leo didn’t know about my Beast, the other soul I had pulled inside with me in an accidental act of black magic when I was five years old. He didn’t know about my soul home. I was pretty sure I had never told him about Gee spying on me with magic. But the Master of the City was waiting. “I was holding . . . myself too tightly. I just . . . missed it.” No. It was something else. Something worse. Maybe the result of many things that were worse, all coming together in a perfect storm. That was why Eli had hesitated. He knew there was something else going on too, but if he knew what it was, he wasn’t going to share it here in group therapy. I tried to put it together.
Gee’s magic. Eyes in my palms.
Beast’s magic growing.
The soul of Beast and my soul merging.
Attacks in my/our soul home, signs of magic in a place where nothing outside me/us should ever have been able to get in.
The stink of burning hair, iron, and salt in the scan.
And . . . I had been struck by lightning not so long ago. My hair had burned. So had my flesh. That experience had done something to me. I had shifted into my Beast since, but not in extremis. Not when I had to shift or die. Not when it mattered. And I hadn’t spent much time in my soul home since the lightning strike, only long enough to glance in, not long enough to notice the cold flames and lack of light.
I remembered Beast lying in the dark, her coat the wrong color.
My father’s favorite form had been the black panther.
He had died, changing into his cat too late to save his life.
Was there a connection with the melanistic coat color? Had something happened to my father’s ability to shift? Had he been hit by lightning too? Had something happened to us both? Was it something peculiar to skinwalkers?
The stink of burning hair. Why burning hair?
There was too much that I didn’t know, so I clung to the things I did know. I had family—Eli and Alex. I had Bruiser. I was alive. Beast was still with me. I could deal with everything else. As soon I was sure that I stayed alive. Yeah. That. I took a breath that rattled in my lungs and I coughed, a soft hack of pain.
“My Jane?”
“Not your Jane,” I snapped, but it was spoiled by my raspy, gasping voice. “Your Enforcer. Not your Jane.”
Leo chuckled, a vamp’s hunting purr that made Beast sit up and purr back. I kept the sound inside my head, but Beast liked Leo a little too much for my tastes. “You make the chase so delightful,” he said.
“Stuff it.”
Leo burst out laughing, my purr buried beneath his pure amusement. “Ah, Jane. What shall I do to punish my Mercy Blade for his attack on you?”
“Getting shot was enough,” I said. I remembered that Beast said Leo had cut Gee. “You cutting him was enough. And if all that wasn’t enough, Eli said I could shoot him again.”
I felt Leo’s hand on my face, cool and smooth and utterly inhuman. He stroked back my hair, and his voice was curiously gentle when he said, “I would have been most . . . discommoded had you died.”
“Yeah. That’s why I stay alive,” I said, my native snark coming back online, as if I had rebooted that file, “to keep you from being discommoded.” I’d have to look that one up.
Darkness was closing in on me, the dark of sleep, the sleep of healing. I whispered, “Besides, I think it’s possible that Gee was magicked into attacking me.” I thought back to his eyes, blazing blue. “Something’s wrong. Magic and spells and . . . stuff. Eli. Tell them.” And then I was under, into a place of dreams.
* * *
It was nearly night before I woke up again in Edmund’s bed in his new but still tiny room with its rich furnishings and its interior window. Previously his room had had an exterior window, an indication of a vamp’s low status, and I had helped him improve his status enough to get a better room. Edmund, once a clan Blood Master, had fallen far, and no one had yet told me why or how.
I could feel my breath moving in my lungs, as if I breathed iced air, though the room was warm. My heart was beating slow and hard, a bass drum through my arteries. The electric blanket was turned low, but it felt hot and prickly on my skin. By the staleness of the scents around me, the vamps were gone. Thank goodness.
Shoving pillows behind me, I gathered the blanket tight around me and pushed myself to a sitting position against the headboard. I was naked beneath the blanket. Oh, goody. That meant I’d been naked in front of Leo and Edmund . . . and Eli, who was sitting in a delicate, dainty floral-upholstered chair at a small ormolu table, his eyes on me.
The lamp on the table was off and the room was deeply shadowed, my partner’s face not visible until I pulled on Beast’s night vision. Through her eyes, the room was silver and green, the details sharp and the shadows black as if drawn with india ink. Eli’s expression was grim, set, and he was sitting as still as a vamp. There was a shotgun across his knees. I hadn’t seen the shotgun when we got to headquarters, so either he had
gone home to get it or someone had brought it to him. I was betting that he hadn’t left my side and that one of Leo’s security peeps had brought it to him. Probably under duress.
There was a glass of water on the bedside table and I drank it dry, replacing it on the table. I cleared my throat, which still felt scratchy, and said, “Debrief.”
“That bird stabbed you. I shot him. You didn’t shift.”
I had thought that Eli’s voice had been toneless many times in our relationship, but this was even more so. Robotic. Dead sounding.
“I applied pressure. Leo flipped you over and ripped open your shirt. Arterial bleeding went everywhere. You were bleeding out. Leo sliced his fingertips and shoved them inside the wound.”
Eli went quiet again. His jaw worked, tightening and relaxing in the edged shadows. When he began again, there was no indication that he was under strain, except for the total lack of emotion in his voice. “Edmund picked you up. Leo and he carried you here. I shot a couple of vamps who got in the way or got too close. Standard ammo. They’ll live.”
I said nothing, just watched his face. After a long silence, he said, “You didn’t shift.” And this time there was a bare hint of emotion, a simple thread of . . . something.
“I couldn’t. Since the lightning, I’ve shifted when I wasn’t in trouble, in danger, but this time, when I needed to shift or die, I couldn’t.”
“Lightning?”
“I don’t know, but . . .” I stopped and thought before I finished, reluctance in my tone. “. . . there seems to be a correlation.”
“You said the bird might have been magicked to hurt you. Why do you think that?”
“When I first met him . . . Seems like forever. He used his magic to heal me of a werewolf attack.”
My partner gave a slight downward jut of his head to indicate he had heard me and understood.
“Later.” I stopped. “You know the eye on the dollar bill? The one on top of the pyramid?”
Nod.