by Faith Hunter
“No meditation or shifting until you eat. Pancakes with butter and syrup and half a gallon of electrolytes. Except for the new hairstyle, you look like crap.”
“I love you too.”
“I know. Come on.” He opened his door and stepped out into the autumn heat and humidity. “Alex has breakfast started.”
I followed much more slowly into a warm rain that felt like a tepid shower—the typical rain of the Deep South this time of year. Slow drops splatted onto my head and shoulders as I stepped to the sidewalk. “We’re going to eat more food the Kid cooked? He maxed out with the broccoli and cheese. You want us both to die?”
Eli slanted his game face my way for an instant, his eyes moving left and right behind his sunglasses, checking out the street. “I gave him a lesson last Saturday. That was his cooking. No one died.”
“Fine,” I said, reluctance in the word. “I could eat.” It was a lie, I wasn’t hungry at all, but I also knew my body needed calories and lots of them to get me back up to speed. I needed to shift into my Beast form to heal completely, and no way was Eli going to let me go without a meal or three and restorative fluids. As long as it wasn’t blue Gatorade, I thought I could keep it down.
* * *
It was a pretty good breakfast, though it was hours after normal people ate pancakes. Tied into the security system at HQ, Alex had seen all the footage in real time and had followed along with the replays, but he had to be filled in with the details, which Eli did while we ate, his words clipped and staccato. I mostly stayed silent and let them talk.
The syrup was delish, from Eli’s private stash of one hundred percent maple, and the sugar rush was immediate and heady, tempting my appetite. The pancakes were fine, though the texture wasn’t quite as light as Eli’s. It could have been the humidity and the rain that made them a little doughy, but they were filling and easy on my stomach, better than I had expected, and I didn’t feel like hurling with every bite.
Deceptively casual, his face almost pleasant, Eli said, “Let’s spar, before you meditate and shift.”
“Why?” I heard the suspicion in my voice. It was easier for my partner to win a sparring match when I was down and out.
“To see how well the suckhead blood healed you. You’ve had trouble in the past, changing into Beast to heal, and you didn’t change this time when you got stabbed. And when you shift, you can get stuck in puma form when we need you in human form. Beast also wasn’t able to help you with significant speed or strength, and while you’re strong enough on your own, as a skinwalker, Beast gives you an edge. Correct?”
My partner had been paying attention. Close and detailed attention. Reluctantly I nodded. “She tried. The power drained out of my hand into the floor.” I held up my left hand, the one where the spell had ignited. “Spelled.”
Eli’s face tightened, just a smidge. If he was showing that much, I figured he was terrified. He said, “We came close to seeing how you react without Beast assisting you. And it wasn’t pretty.”
Deep inside, I felt Beast growl. She didn’t like that idea. But Eli had a point. If I couldn’t draw on Beast in a fight for some reason, I’d be using my own skinwalker fighting skills and my own pain-damping abilities. I’d gotten used to having Beast as part of me. I wasn’t used to fighting so alone and hoped I’d never have to find out how well or poorly I did without her totally. But in the middle of a fight hadn’t been the time to find out how that situation worked.
If I had access to Beast, but needed to shift into an animal by day, I had no way to shift back until night. It was a quirk in my shifting that had proven problematic in the past. I did feel better, stronger, as much because of the food in my system as the vampire blood.
Once upon a time, drinking vamp blood was a way for a suckhead to attempt to bind me magically. I considered myself, the darkness of the cavern of my soul home, and the fact that a forced binding would never work, which was one big point in my favor. I gestured with a pancake-laden fork for Eli to go on.
“If vamp blood works well enough, it gives us an extra defensive weapon for you.”
I slid a hand to my wound, feeling the thick scar tissue and muscle there. “I don’t think I can take a direct hit here yet.”
“Understood. Eat. Drink. Then decide.” Eli shoved a pitcher of electrolytes at me.
I ate. I drank. And I felt better moment by moment. “Okay,” I said when I finished my third stack of pancakes. “Lift some weights, stretch, and spar. But you go easy on me this time.” It wasn’t something I had ever asked of him and Eli paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, considering.
“Wimp.”
“Totally. All I need is pom-poms and a tutu. Maybe a teddy bear.”
Eli laughed, a real, full-on laugh that warmed my whole heart, and ate.
* * *
The room tumbled end over end and I landed flat on my back with a wham and an “Ooof” that drove the air out of my lungs and made my body spasm with electric shocks of agony. Crap, crap, crap, I thought, tensing against the pain.
My Beast tried to force her way to the surface to take the fight back to Eli, but I was hurting and the purpose of this exercise was to fight with her down, firmly in place and submissive. From the way she was pacing across my mind, like a cat in a cage, I understood that she didn’t like our little test. She didn’t like being unable to force her energies into me when I was being bruised. She didn’t like not forcing a shift on me, into her form, Puma concolor, but she hadn’t been able to do that earlier, when I was dying. Eli was right. I—we—needed to know this.
Waiting game, I reminded her as she squirmed beneath my mental hand. We are ambush hunters.
She growled at me, but subsided. I finally found a breath of air. It hurt going down, as if someone had yanked a rosebush into my lungs. It made a painful sucking sound too, and Eli chuckled, the evil man.
Want to ambush-hunt Eli. We are Beast. We are stronger than human.
Yeah, but we need to be able to hide what we are, and practice makes perfect, I thought back. And we need to figure out what happened today when you didn’t shift.
Seeing eye, she thought. Seeing eye and green magics.
Some magical whammy for sure.
Jane has practiced dying many time, Beast thought at me, snark in her thoughts.
Thanks. I gave some snark back and pressed down on her, holding her still, practicing what I had been working on for the last few weeks, in the meditation exercises that had been assigned to me, holding her in place with a mental hand, not letting Beast assist in a fight, not letting her take over our form, not letting her be alpha. It was important that she learn to stay hidden, or we might end up a captive, taken prisoner, and used by the European Mithrans, the biggest of the baddest suckheads. And they’d be here in a few months. Or, if I was lucky, in a few years.
Beast subsided and I blinked the sweat from my eyes. I had missed the mat again, surely Eli’s intent, and was lying halfway into the hallway. I managed another breath and dropped my hands flat to the wooden floor, faceup, staring at the ceiling twelve feet overhead. The corners were dusty. And the ceiling needed a paint job. And . . . there was a tiny attic access in the corner that I had never paid attention to. Interesting.
“Better,” Eli said, and he tossed me a towel. It landed on my face, also his intent. “Your eyes didn’t start to glow, even when you landed.” I could hear the insulting laughter in his voice when he asked, “Did it hurt, babe?”
I patted my face, neck, and upper chest with the towel and left it on my belly to absorb more sweat through my workout shirt. “Oh yeah. I hurt.” Eli chuckled again, and I added, “You don’t have to enjoy it so much.”
“Sure I do.” He moved to stand over my right side, his face faintly amused, sweat trickling down his temple, his dark skin sheened with perspiration. He smelled of sweat, testosterone, deodorant, and sour cloth
es. In the New Orleans’s humid heat, sweaty clothes soured quickly, and I was pretty sure the concept of autumn was Mother Nature’s big joke this far south, leaving us in a muggy, wet hell forever.
Eli lowered a hand, palm up, as if offering to help me up, and kept talking. “I take joy where I can find it.”
I had heard the story before and I finished it for him. “One day this old soldier told you, ‘Never pass a watercooler without taking a drink, because you never know when your next one will come.’”
“Beating you is a rarity,” he agreed. “So I enjoy every moment.”
I grunted. Eli was talkative after we sparred, which was a pleasant change from the hard, taciturn man Uncle Sam had shaped him into. I slapped a hand into his and accepted the lift. Eli looked me over, as if checking out a prizefighter or a horse he might buy.
I grunted again and looked myself over. Sweaty and sour, as much as Eli, and sore. And bruised. My pretty braided hair was a goner. But I was feeling a lot better following the weight lifting and stretching we had done before the sparring match. Over two hours of hard activity had eased the aches and pains I hadn’t realized I was carrying around in my body.
“The extra weight looks good on you,” Eli said. “Five more pounds and you’ll be able to stand against the next breeze.”
When I came to New Orleans, I had looked like a poster child for the seriously undernourished, at one hundred twenty-five pounds. I had put on twenty pounds over last Christmas, and in the last month, five pounds more, mostly solid muscle. A little of the weight had landed in the boob department, but I’d never be mistaken for a model, more like the before photo in an advertisement for boob jobs.
“Did I pass for human?” I asked, easing my weight against the wall and letting my head rock back to it with a thump.
“As long the vamps don’t get close enough to smell you, you’ll be fine. Or you can drench yourself in some cheap perfume and overpower their olfactory senses.”
“Pass,” I said, toweling dry. I dropped the towel to the floor and used my foot to mop up more sweat. It had splattered when I landed. I took the time to stretch out the pulled muscles as I worked. “When is the help coming to move the workout room gear and set up the bed?”
“Alex and I can handle it. We decided to transfer it all into the hallway, not to a storage unit. Easier to put back when they go. What do you think about a Murphy bed in there? It would save time. I can put it together.”
“Fine.” I shrugged as we trooped down the stairs. The hallway was extra wide and could indeed hold the equipment. It had enough square feet to set up bunk beds if needed. My BFF, Molly, was coming, with her husband and my godchildren, to attend the Witch Conclave this coming weekend, so both guest bedrooms had to be available. Molly was spending so much time here that I should just let them move in. Which I’d do in a heartbeat if I thought they might stay, but Molly wasn’t fond of New Orleans’s heat, both the temperature kind and the blood-sucking-danger kind. Not that I could blame her.
My cell rang and I trotted into the kitchen where I had left it. On the screen was the pic I had taken of Bruiser. Brown eyes staring right at me. I loved that pic. I swiped and tapped the screen, answering, “Hey,” My voice was too soft, not sounding like me.
I stiffened my back at my tone just as my honey bunch said, “We may have found Ming.” He took a breath that I could hear over the cell, and it sounded uncertain and confused, two things Bruiser never was. “I’m pretty sure she’s alive.”
“Ming of Clan Glass?” I asked, confused. Because Ming of Clan Glass was Blood Master of Knoxville, and so far as I knew she was just ducky.
“No. Ming Zoya of Mearkanis.”
I pulled the cell phone from my ear and looked again at the screen while my brain made a quick series of analyses on the seemingly simple statement.
Ming Zoya had been Blood Master of Clan Mearkanis, but had been kidnapped and presumed killed before I ever got to New Orleans. Her clan, under the leadership of her heir, had been disbanded recently. Her death had set certain things in motion in the world of NOLA vamp politics—things like her successor, Rafael Torrez, taking over Clan Mearkanis, practicing black magic, blood magic, with witch children to sacrifice. He was dead, but the bad things kept on happening nonetheless. Things that were still reverberating. Dangerous things.
“Okay,” I said after a pause that was only a hair too long. I set the cell on speaker and placed it on the table in the clear spot between the snack plates the Kid was filling with his homemade broccoli casserole and sliced ham from Cochon Butcher. Even leftovers from two nights past, they were the best meat in the city.
Filling in my partners as we all sat for what was passing for lunch on this strange day, I said, “Bruiser says he thinks he might have found Ming of Mearkanis. The brooch led you to her? You’re on speaker, by the way,” I added to Bruiser, so he’d keep any lovey-dovey talk to a minimum. There was a low hum in the background of Bruiser’s end that I identified as a vehicle. Bruiser was on the move.
Eli said, “I assume you mean Ming the famous and missing is no longer presumed dead.”
What passed for famous in vamp circles was very different from and much more bloody than what passed for famous among humans. The Ming twins were famous in vamp circles for several reasons: they had both risen to clan Blood Master status from blood-slave status, something that seldom happened, and because one of the twins had gone missing, presumed kidnapped, killed, drained, and eaten by Immanuel, a supernatural creature mimicking a vampire.
I had killed Immanuel, saving a lot of lives and stopping a bigger vampire war than the one that had later taken place, but also setting into action a lot of the problems going on now.
“Correct,” Bruiser said, sounding far more formal than I had expected, as if speaking to the Enforcer instead of his girlfriend. “I tracked the brooch to the west, following it to a water-filled pit in the Waddill Wildlife Refuge. I smelled Mithran when I arrived. So far as I can tell, Enforcer, the imprisoned Mithran, possibly the former Blood Master of Clan Mearkanis, is alive, has been starved, has been secured and chained beneath the water with silver shackles, and is most likely insane with hunger.”
Using my title meant that things were grim in the extreme. “That sounds . . . bad. Dangerous. Do you need me there?” I made a swirling motion to Alex and he went to work. With one hand, he was shoveling in broccoli and cheese with the commitment and momentum only a growing teenaged boy can display. Cheesy broccoli was a new addition to his very short list of favorite foods, so much so that the Kid had even learned to make the dish. With his other hand, Alex pulled one of his electronic tablets close and brought up satellite maps of the Waddill Wildlife Refuge. It was a swampy landmass near the Comite River, near Baton Rouge.
Eli picked up his fork and placed his napkin across his lap, his brown eyes on me. I could tell he didn’t want me to leave.
“No,” Bruiser said firmly. “From what I can deduce, it’s very bad. Leo has dispatched the other Onorios at his disposal to the pit, to retrieve her. They and a dozen human blood-servants are leaving in minutes on a rescue mission.”
That told me even more. Onorios were hard to kill, and they did politically high-level, often dangerous, important stuff. But not usually together. That Leo was sending the two others said a lot about several aspects of this situation. “Oookaaay,” I said, drawing out the word as I continued to put things together. It sounded as if Leo didn’t need me to go on this assignment, which was enough to make me want to happy-dance, despite the sore muscles that were setting up residence in my limbs. Starved vamps were hazardous, blood-sucking, insane killing machines. With my skinwalker metabolism and ability to shift into other creatures to save my life, I was usually very hard to kill—even harder to kill than an Onorio—but that didn’t mean I went looking for a mauling, especially right now. “So this is a call to cancel our date and tell me good-bye so
you and your buddies can do hazardous, death-defying Onorio things?” I managed to stifle the plaintive note that wanted to sneak into my voice. We had been busy, and date nights had become few and far between. “Should I take you off speakerphone?”
As if he knew my reaction to Bruiser’s broken plans, Eli chuckled under his breath, a sound that was remarkably wicked.
“Yes and no. Your introduction to the Rock N Bowl will have to be put off for tonight.” His voice warmed slightly, “Though, I would much, much rather be with you, instructing you in the proper body mechanics of bowling, than climbing into a water-filled pit with a starving Mithran.”
Me too. Especially with that emphasis on body mechanics. I fingered my tattered braid. I’d had such plans.
“Your own well-being aside, you are a potential liability, Enforcer.” That made me sit up. “You were attacked in your home with magic, an attack that may have triggered more magic in Gee DiMercy to attack you. Until the spells targeting you are dealt with, you’re a possible liability around all things magical.”
“And how is that gonna be dealt with?” I asked, heat in my tone.
“Leo has contacted Molly Everhart Trueblood to check you out when they get there.” His voice lightened when he added, “And he offered a very nice fee for her professional services.”
“Oh.” I sat back. “Okay. That works.”
“But you aren’t totally off the hook,” Bruiser said. Eli’s eyes tightened and he was eating with practiced, mechanical motions “I have already reported to Leo and, once the imprisoned Mithran is retrieved and safe, Leo wants you involved in the investigation, in your official capacity.”
Official capacity meant my Enforcer capacity, which was why he was sounding so formal. Enforcer was a job I had taken by accident and then accepted for real, not because I liked Leo, but because regular income was important, vamp money was good, I got to learn new stuff about the supernatural world, got time to build my business, got to stay close to the Cherokee Elder who was teaching me about myself and my long-forgotten past, and I got to stay in New Orleans near my . . . well . . . near my boyfriend, or whatever the proper term was for the almost-relationship that Bruiser and I had. But mostly because I was in a position to help my witch friends stay safe; making sure the Witch Conclave went off without a hitch was a big part of that.