by Faith Hunter
Gee used woad to create the blue. Woad was a European herb, an invasive herb that took over gardens, and, like indigo, was used to make blue dye. Yes. That was important. Invasive herbs took over and killed all else but their own. And here each palm print was marked with a blue eye.
At the time I had first seen the claiming handprints, prints that had allowed the Mercy Blade to track me and watch me, I had also noted a pink flower. A rose, the symbol of Evangelina Everhart, Molly’s sister whom I had later killed for consorting with demons and killing humans. The flower had smelled of roses and wormwood, sweet and bitter both. And it was put there with magic—witch magic.
In my memory, I bent over the fire, the scent rich and herbal and warm, and breathed in the sage and sweetgrass. We—Beast and I—reached to the side and chose a thick sliver of wood, pointed on one end, sawn smooth on the other, one side wild and splintered, one side shaped by hand. A stake. It was dry heartwood, its cedar scent resinous and tart. Heartwood to destroy the vampires we hunt and kill. Our hand closed over it, tlvdatsi claws at the ends of human fingers. Pelt, tawny and thick, rose over the bones of our arms. We hefted it and placed the splintered, sharp end of the stake into the flame. It took light. And we rose into the shadows, the first time I ever saw my promised half-Beast, half-Jane form, cast upon the wall.
Ohhh. This is important. This timing, I thought, my consciousness dividing, partially in the memory, and partially where I sat on the porch.
The roof at the heart of the world reached down to us, to Beast and me as one. With one knobby-knuckled hand, killing claws exposed, we scraped a woad-made eye from a palm on the damp stone. It glittered, lid closed as if sleeping, on our hand. With the other hand, we held the flame to the woad-made handprints. The fire from our torch blazed up, burning the woad, burning the handprints that had taken root. And in the center of each palm on the cave walls, a blue eye appeared, opened, and focused on us. Gee’s eyes, shocked. I stabbed at the eye in the center of one woad palm print and it blinked away, but not before I drew blood. It splashed down onto my hand, copper and jasmine-scented. The woad lit, sizzling and hot. Flames raced up and over the cave, blackened the roof. I stepped away as the flames roared up hot and cleansing. All the handprints took flame, all but the one I had stolen with my killing claws. “Mine,” I growled to it. “My place.”
I crouched on the stone floor and watched as the ceiling at the heart of the world flamed and burned. And was cleansed. It took a long time. And no time at all. And when it was done, I sat at my small fire pit and fed the stake into the coals, letting it too burn away. When the smoke cleared, the ceiling was clean again, only the soot above my small fire blacking the smooth rock. I lay down, folding my body, paws beneath me. And I closed my eyes.
But, though I had cleansed the cave by fire, perhaps the watching eyes were still there, in some arcane manner, leaving some trace of the magic. A trace still potent enough for the green magics of an enemy to find me. Hold me. Harm me.
Even though I had been in the presence of angelic power since then, and had cleansed my spirit and soul with baptismal water and had gone to water in the Tsalagi tradition and . . . had done everything I could think of to protect and purify my soul—something was still there. And I didn’t know why.
CHAPTER 7
Bad and Getting Badder
It seemed possible that the old spells were still present—dormant, latent, but filled with sleeping power, able to offer a magic user a way in to me. And I remembered something else, something more recent, a dark heart beating in the roof of my soul home, like a bird’s heart, fastsfastfast, beating in flight.
Not certain what to do about the old memories, or even if I should push on into my soul home to see what was there now, I eased up out of the calm of meditation and into the sound of slow-dripping water, the tinkle of rain down the gutters, the plink of large, slow drops on wood and stone. And the scent of witch child in my nostrils.
Angie Baby was sitting in front of me, her legs crossed in a mimicry of my own, red Keds on her feet, coral pants and shirt, watching me. Behind her was Little Evan, also known as Evan Junior, or EJ, her baby brother, sitting against the wall of the house, his legs stretched out and a soccer ball in his lap, steadied by both hands.
“Hey, Aunt Jane,” Angie Baby said.
“Hey, Aunt Jane,” Little Evan copycatted.
Around us, night had started to fall, the early dusk of storms passing. Inside the house, lights were glowing through the windows, but I heard no one speaking, no one moving around. I got an unhappy sensation in the middle of my chest. This wasn’t good. I opened my mouth, lips dry and slightly cracked from the remnants of dehydration. “Hey,” I said to my godchildren. Neither replied, so I asked, “Is everyone inside . . . um . . . asleep?”
“Yep,” Angie said.
“Yep,” EJ said.
That unhappy sensation in the middle of my chest grew heavy, like a pebble dropped in water, tumbling deep. “Okay. You have something to tell me?”
“Nope.”
“Nope.”
“Ask me, then?”
Angie laughed, the sound playful and childish and happy, her strawberry blond hair stirring with the motion and resettling around her shoulders. “We want to know about that.” She pointed at my chest.
I looked down at my ratty T-shirt. “Just me.”
“Nope.”
“Nope.”
“You got something inside,” Angie said. “Right there.” She pointed at my chest, at the scar that was still unhealed. “Why you carrying her around, Aunt Jane?”
“Her?” I asked, suddenly confused, wondering if she was seeing Beast’s soul inside me.
“This.” She leaned in and touched my hurting flesh, drawing out something I had never expected to see. A mote of magic, its color uncertain, one moment silver, another red, another black. And then a tint of green. “Blood black magic,” Angie said with utter confidence.
“Holy craa . . .” I stopped, seeing the mote of dark power that she was drawing from my chest into the air. The mote was attached inside me via a length of dark red soul/spirit energy. My heart rate skyrocketed and my breath came fast. Pain flared along the length of the trailing energies and knotted around the healing wound. Each beat of my heart ached and trembled along the magical chain that bound the mote to me. And the mote beat like a tiny heart, but an unfamiliar tempo, out of rhythm with my own, a peculiar antiresonance to my own heartbeat.
I had seen something like it before. The mote of magical power was familiar, as familiar as old scars and fresh wounds. It was part of my history in New Orleans, from the time I saved Angie and Little Evan from being killed by black magic witches searching for more power than anyone should ever need. Red motes of raw, black magic power had invaded me. I had thought them all gone. And this one was no longer just red, it was red and black and silver and blue and green, moving through the spectrum in scintillating patterns of light and shadow.
“When you was saving us,” Angie said, “one got inside. And it’s still there.”
From the time I fought the Damours and the blood diamond and the motes of evil energies attacked me. One stayed inside.
Somehow I had known this, on some deep plane, darker and deeper than I had been able to perceive on a conscious level. Hiding, along with a lot of other magical mumbo-jumbo crap. Chained inside me. I had seen it not so long ago, a black beating heart in the center of the roof of my soul.
Even with the protection of the angel Hayyel, the dark mote of power had been with me ever since the Damours.
I asked, “Angie? Can you yank it out?”
“If I break the chain it might hurt your real heart and you might die, Aunt Jane.” Words so calm, so adult on her lips. Words no witch child so young should ever speak or understand or know.
The mote was chained to me. I remembered the chain I once had to Leo, when h
e tried to bind me and I had instead accidentally bound him. I had broken the chain and the binding, but that was many months ago and partially by accident. I wondered if Beast and I were strong enough to break this chain. A spear of fear stabbed into me from the new wound and I wondered if I would die if I tried to break it. I wondered if it would kill me anyway, or warp me, or drive me to become u’tlun’ta. Liver-eater. The final persona of all skinwalkers when we veer from the path of good into the pathways of darkness. All that thinking took only an instant and I said, “Let it go, then, Angie. Let it go back into me. But keep an eye on it, okay? If it gets wonky, you tell me. Okay?”
“Wonky,” Angie giggled. “Okay, Aunt Jane.”
“Wo’ky. Okay, Aunt Jane,” EJ echoed.
Angie let the mote go and I felt it slide back into me through the scar and between my ribs. Into my heart. Into my spirit. Into my soul home. It hurt, sharp and cutting, as piercing as the sting of Gee DiMercy’s blade. I needed to talk to the little Anzu, maybe at the point of a steel blade. And soon.
Angie stood, EJ moving with her. He tossed the soccer ball to me and laughed, his eyes alight with mischief. I caught it and tossed it back, moving woodenly, without the grace of Beast, who had been silent inside me for too long. Again.
Standing, I followed the children into the house, shutting the door quietly behind me. On the sofa, Molly and Big Evan were curled against each other, Big Evan snoring slightly, his mouth open, lips drooped against his red beard. Molly was slumped on his chest, her baby bump more pronounced than only weeks in the past, her red hair in wild short curls, a nimbus of energy that even slumber didn’t abolish.
Alex was asleep at the small table he used as a desk, his head resting on his arms. Eli was sitting upright at the kitchen table, his eyes closed and jaw loose, but his posture perfect. Silent. Not snoring.
Even Kit-Kit, Molly’s not-familiar cat (because witches didn’t have familiars), was asleep, curled on a shelf with the television screen.
Asleep. All of them asleep. This was so bad on so many levels. “Angie. You know the rules. No magic without your parents’ approval.” And worse, so much worse, the last time I had seen Angie, I had been outside time. I had seen the way her parents’ bindings came free and I had used Angie’s own magic to bind her down, used her own potential to put her in a straitjacket that left her without power, that tied her magics around her in a sheath of binding. And now she had it all back.
The little girl shrugged, and the four people instantly woke up. No snapping of fingers, no magical wyrds of a spell, no wiggling nose, as in an old TV show about witches, before the workings of magic were so well-known. Nothing. Just asleep, then awake. My godchild was scary powerful. The last time I’d seen her put someone to sleep, she had used a “Tu dormies!” wyrd spell, one over the abilities of most adult witches, and all witch children. And at the time, only weeks past, she hadn’t possessed the ability to wake up her victims. Now she did. Crap on crackers. Too much had changed.
Molly scrubbed her face like a child and peeled herself off her husband. Moving gracefully despite the pregnancy, she grabbed me up and hugged me. I hugged back, watching Angie over her head, as my godchild crawled into the chair beside the couch, picked up her doll, and started talking to it, too soft to hear over Molly’s chatter about the trip in. “You’re not listening,” she said.
“Yes, I am. You were tempted to stop in Mobile, but you came in tonight because of the storms getting worse by the minute and the flash floods. I heard.”
“You were meditating, so we left you out there. You okay, big-cat? You don’t look so good.” She patted my waist, holding on to me, her head tilted back to look up. At six feet, I looked down on most women, though not metaphorically, and Molly was no exception.
I hugged her one-armed, and then squeezed Big Evan when he gathered us both up in a bear hug. Which felt weird, the smell of sweat and car and man and magic, the heat of his body. Big Evan and I didn’t hug. Most times we disagreed on everything, but he seemed genial and pleasant and I was loath to disregard that. Even if it too was the result of Angie’s magic.
I didn’t know what to say to them about their daughter, so I said, “I’m good. Other than no sleep and keeping vamp hours.”
Big Evan stepped back, headed for the stairs, pointing to his chest. He said, “Shower. Then bed. Big day coming up. Oh. And tomorrow we check you for booby-trap spells and trace magic.”
Which their daughter had already done. She must have been listening to her parents talk about searching for outside energies left inside me and done her own scan. Little girl with big ears.
“Me too,” Mol said. “We ate on the road, and Eli told us how you were needed back at suckhead central, so you go. We’ll set the wards and we’ll be fine. To get in, just walk through. The wards will recognize you.”
Angie smiled and kissed her doll on the cheek, looking sweet and angelic, like her name, Angelina. But she was so much more than that. She was perhaps the world’s only homogenous witch, with two witch genes, one from each parent. She was terrifying, overwhelming, and I didn’t know what to do about that. It was a problem that had been growing for years and her parents had never really had a handle on the reins of her magical potential. Yeah. Little Big Ears.
“Yeah. Fine,” I said, fingering my T-shirt, feeling the pull of the black mote of power in my chest, remembering the way it slid through Angie’s fingers as it returned to the heart of me.
Molly hugged me again and picked up her son. “Come on, little man. Let’s get you in the tub and then in the bed.” She looked to Eli. “May I bathe him in your tub while Evan’s showering? It’ll speed things up.”
“Help yourself, ma’am,” Eli said.
“Ball!” EJ shouted.
“Tomorrow. Plenty of time for play then.” Molly took Angie’s hand and pulled her daughter from the chair and up the stairs. My last look was of Angie’s smiling face as she made the turn upstairs.
* * *
I said nothing all the way back to vamp HQ, rain sluicing down the windshield and windows of the armored SUV, rivulets that reflected the neon lights of the Quarter, turning them into vibrant, liquid lines of light. Silent while Eli adjusted the air repeatedly as the AC fought the inside condensation of the night storm.
We were late, but I didn’t care, couldn’t seem to find the desire to care about much of anything. He accessed security and drove past the heavy iron gate, which had been affixed with a wrought-iron fleur-de-lis to prettify the design. I hadn’t known the stylized “flower of the lily” had been going up, but I couldn’t complain. The gate had been awfully ugly. Eli pulled into the front drive, parked, and turned off the engine. He sat there, not looking at me, the rain isolating us from the rest of the world. After a time, his thumbs tapped on the steering wheel. “Twenty-seven minutes.”
“What?”
“That’s how much time I’m missing from this evening. Twenty-seven minutes and a few seconds. What happened?”
“Angie Baby put everyone to sleep so she could tell me I had a black magic mote of power stuck inside me and that I’d die if she took it out. I think Little Evan helped. I think Angie’s magic is bringing his magic on early too. I have to assume that the mote made it easier for the witches to spell me. And Gee. As if it’s a weak link in my soul. I think . . . ” I took a deep breath that did nothing to relax me. “I think we’re in deep shit.”
“Hmmm,” he said, probably interpreting my use of the S-word. “Okay. I can handle the shit. You figure out how to fix the black magic whammy.”
I let a tiny smile touch my face. “That’s it?”
“What else is there?” He unlatched his seat belt and stepped into the rain. Feeling oddly buoyant and more optimistic, I followed my partner up the stairs to the doors, the rain dampening my hair and clothes. The scents of vamps and humans and blood and sex filled my nostrils as we passed through two
sets of double doors and out of the rain.
“Legs,” Derek said to me as we shook rain to the marble, fleur-de-lis floor. To his people he added, “Make it fast. Leo’s a bear.”
The security measures and pat-downs at the entrance were hurried, as if they had orders to get us to the conference room pronto, and I noted that no new people were working the entrance, just the Tequila boys and the Vodka boys, Derek Lee’s best and most dependable security personnel, all former military. And then we were in the elevator and on the way down to the conference room, Derek accompanying us, his hands clasped in front of him, his new work clothes looking expensive and well made. Tailored. Far different from the camo-clad man of our first meeting. Of course, I was different too. That night I had been wearing a bloody party dress and carrying the severed head of a young rogue vamp. I glanced at my reflection in the metal door, dressed again in the professional outfit of an Enforcer in conference—as opposed to an Enforcer in battle. Big difference there too. We had both come a long way in a short amount of time.
The doors opened and Derek led the way. I let him. He’d be in charge as Leo’s full-time Enforcer long after I was gone. I had to let him be alpha or turn him into a kitten with no confidence—Beast’s thoughts, not mine, and she knew a lot more than I did about training up a predator.
The conference room was full to bursting with vamps, humans, and that piquant, biting, provocative miasma of scents that said “vamp stronghold.” The stink of too much coffee, too much testosterone, and too little sleep added it its own rich undertext to the pong and I wrinkled my nose. Voices were raised to be heard over the volume on the screens, and men and women stood, straining as if to assist the men on the screen, though we were all too far away to assist in any way.
I was just in time.
The small clearing in the Waddill Refuge was illuminated with bright lights, the kind highway paving crews worked by overnight when traffic allowed them to make real headway without bogging down commuters, slowing commercial transportation, or endangering their own lives in the traffic. Bodies were racing here and there on the scene, so covered with mud and sweat and the beating rain that they were unidentifiable. At least two generators were contending for clamor awards, and the voices of the Onorios and the humans were raised to compete. There were two cameras positioned to capture the whole clearing, the wooden doors in the ground clearly visible in the center. The doors, which were set flush with the ground, had been blown or swept free of the refuse and rotting vegetation that had covered them, and the dead crows had been removed. The doors were stark and weathered in the too-bright light.