Shadow Rites

by Faith Hunter

  There were white-painted figures on them, the markings recognizable as runes, sigils, symbols of arcane power. The sight of them made my skin crawl. The last time I had seen so many powered-up runes in one place had been when I fought for the lives of my godchildren.

  Eli placed a cup of tea in my hand and I closed my cold fingers around the ceramic cup, smelling Irish Breakfast blend tea, the water still simmering from the steeping boil. He also waved a Krispy Kreme donut under my nose and I took it too. Ate. Drank. Watched the humans on the screen back away from the doors as the Onorios closed in, Brandon and Brian from the sides, in a pounding, splattering rain, each of them lifting a leg and stepping over something, possibly a witch circle in the ground. A hint of green flooded the screen before it pixelated out to a series of overlapping rectangles in shades of gray and green, the grinding sound of static replacing the roar of generators. The circle was still active, still full of arcane power. Magic and digital images and sometimes even cellular transmissions had trouble merging energies. A moment later, the screen cleared and a collective relieved scent filled the room.

  The Robere twins looked unchanged until I got a clear view and focused on their legs, which were missing pants. The charred remnants hung to midknee, exposing lower legs, scarlet with burns and weeping blisters. Interesting. They had fought off a witch circle.

  I ate and drank and wondered what power Onorios had to step inside an active witch circle and survive. Hopefully. The boys standing on the closed doors were too pretty to die in an explosion of magic.

  I drank the cooling tea and finished off a donut and unabashedly Onorio-watched while the stink of vamp-worry increased in the air around me and the men on the screen worked. There were a lot of vamps in the conference room, and once upon a time, I might have been on pins and needles, ready to defend myself at any moment. Here . . . crap. I was one of the big cats. No one looked at me twice, no hint of challenge, no need to prove themselves against me. I had both hands full. I was eating and drinking and relaxing in the presence of the apex predators of the food chain.

  I took a second donut and ate it, blueberry this time, the powdered sugar falling like pollen over my shirt as I ate. I took another cup of tea when it was offered, this time by a blood-servant, and drank a different blend, something with spice in it. I had never been waited on hand and foot. Never. But I could see why people got used to it.

  I was changing.

  Before I could dissect that thought, the screens showed a pixelating image of the Roberes, shuffling back, bending in tandem, each grasping a handle in the doors. Which brought me back to the night I was struck by lightning while standing in a witch circle. I had been blown out of the circle when I was struck. Lightning and magic had burned me crispy. I had no idea what that event meant to my life, my future, or my Beast, but I shook off the nagging worry.

  Bruiser knelt from just ahead of the camera, his clothes soaked to the skin in the pouring rain. He was holding the foil-wrapped brooch in one hand and a gallon milk carton of what looked like fresh blood in the other. That gave me pause for several reasons, one, because, except for scions in the devoveo, vamps hate any blood that isn’t instantly fresh and from the veins or arteries of their blood-servants or blood-slaves, and two, because how many humans had he bled to get a gallon of unclotted blood, and three, how did he do that logistically? I had a mental image of six or eight humans at a long table, slicing their arms open and holding them over a humongous funnel. I chuckled at the vision and took the last bite of donut, grinning and saluting Leo with the dough treat when he looked around, annoyance on his face.

  The room around me fell quiet, only the roar of machinery and voices on the screen breaking the silence. The Robere twins strained and the doors lifted. I could hear the creak of water-expanded wood over the generators. The cameras that I had thought were stationary moved forward, clearly shoulder-mounted, to peer into the hole as the harsh lights fell inside to expose a watery hell of . . . not much.

  Foul, brackish water, muddy and greenish with algae, filled the pit up to about a foot from the doors. Mold and slime coated the edges of the contained pool and climbed up the warped wood and crumbling concrete walls of the pit. Raindrops spattered down, making concentric circles on the surface.

  Bruiser tilted the gallon bottle and drizzled some of the blood into the water. It spread like crimson ink, dropping quickly from sight. Nothing happened. Seconds ticked by and he dripped some more blood in. Something sallow rose, a yellowed-brown bowl, the color of smoked bone. A fringe of blackness floated up around the bowl. Hair. That was hair. And the bone bowl was the top of a skull. The head tilted back and a ravaged face lifted from the water, eyelids thin as paper, bluish as they opened over black eyes in grayish, yellowed sclera. A vamp. Eyes vamped out. But without the blood to make the transition to blood-drinking predator work.

  The mouth appeared, lips blackened, the teeth looking human, but the augmented jaw opened too wide to be human, more snakelike, unhinged to spread wide. The cheeks were hollows with tendons clearly delineated and the skin over the facial bones was so desiccated it was mummified.

  Someone near me whispered, “Is it your twin, Ming?” The man’s voice continued to speak as if he had been answered, an Asian language, cursing by the tone, the syllables harsh with pain. I knew that voice but glanced back to be certain. It was the primo and Enforcer to Ming Zhane of Clan Glass, called Cai, no last name or maybe no first name. The primo of Ming Zhane was slender, dark-haired, and deadly in the kung fu, Bruce Lee kinda way. The moment I had met him I had known that he could break me into tiny little pieces while yawning. Beside Cai, a woman hissed in a breath and began to weep and whisper in the same language, Mandarin, which established that Ming Zhane was in the room, watching her sister’s rescue.

  The scent of horror, vampire dread, and panic began to seep into the room, a stale scent of rotting flowers and old blood. I felt Leo’s power flow into the room, cold as the tundra in some frozen Arctic land. Saw him take a breath. His action repeated as every vamp in the room breathed in and out together. The tingle of vamp magic rose, itchy and unpleasant, Leo, holding it together, holding his people together. The stale scent of panic began to fade.

  On the screen, the creature’s jaw opened even wider and fangs nearly three inches long slowly swiveled out with a grinding sound, as if long unused.

  Bruiser tilted the gallon milk bottle over the opened maw. Blood fell down and trickled into the mouth. The throat swallowed. And swallowed. And drank and drank, growing more effortless with each swallow. She drank the whole bottle of blood. Bruiser moved the plastic container away and Brandon, or maybe Brian—with the mud it was impossible to tell the twins apart—knelt beside him, a blade at his wrist. With a clean upward slice he gashed open the artery and positioned it above the blackened lips, his strong blood pulsing down. The mummified vampire drank, straining upward, taking in enough blood to feed a Naturaleza vamp—the kind who drink down and kill humans for funzies—for days. Onorios have powerful blood and they can lose a lot more than a human can before suffering the consequences, but even with that, it looked like a lot of blood to lose. The other twin bled himself next. And then Bruiser, but he lay on the ground and cradled the skeletal head in one hand, allowing the vampire to bite into his wrist. Which the fanghead did with surprising gentleness, her fangs just grazing into the artery, not sinking deeply, not tearing flesh and tendons, not breaking bone. Ming of Mearkanis, once a Blood Master of a Mithran clan, drank.

  I had seen Leo after he was drained. It hadn’t been pretty and he hadn’t been sane for a long time after. This vamp was peaceful. Passive. It had to be the foil-wrapped brooch keeping her sluggish and relaxed. Which meant that witches, somewhere, somewhere close by, had a way to tame a vampire. Control a vampire. Use a vampire for something that I couldn’t even imagine.

  Suddenly the Witch Conclave, where the vamps and witches would sign peace accords for t
he first time in forever, so far as I knew, was in serious danger. This was bad and getting badder. I licked my fingers and slid a hand down to make sure the vamp-killer could be easily accessed.

  Beside Bruiser, long, thick black tubes snaked into the water. The sounds of pumps came on, adding to the clamor on the screen. The water level in the pit began to go down. Inside the pit, more of the captive became visible. Bony neck that was nothing more than tendons and spiny processes and working esophagus. Shoulders and collarbone and upper ribs. Rotting clothing. Pinned to the remains of the shirt or blouse, and through her flesh as well, was a twin of the brooch on the ground beside Bruiser, this one filmed with scum, but recognizable. Through several inches of water, the gems glowed with greenish energies that pixelated as soon as the water dropped below them, leaving a series of rectangular irregularities in the footage.

  As the water went down, the wood and concrete wall was revealed, the wood blackened, the shell-based concrete crumbling. Iron rings had been set into the concrete, rusty but still strong. Blackened silver chains were looped around and around them, and wound across the vampire. Where they touched her, blackened skin showed and one Robere brother set to work with huge metal snips, the kind used by rescue workers to free bodies trapped in car accidents, powered by yet more generators. The chains fell away and the vamp slid deeper into the water, reaching up with her freed arms to grab Bruiser, pulling him into the water with her, a splash we could all see but not hear over the pumps and generators and the occasional shrill calls of human voices.

  Brandon and Brian lay on the sides of the pit and reached in to support the two. Behind them, in the shadow of the lights, something else yellowed and broken appeared. I knew what it was even before the shapes came clear, what they had to be. Skeletons. Human skeletons. Chained as Ming was chained. The bones had been broken, splintered, torn apart. Even across the distance, it was clear that the bones had been gnawed, the marrow sucked clean. Ming, if it really was Ming, had killed humans and eaten them, which meant she would be mad, insane with rot. I’d seen it before, the madness that came to a vamp from eating dead flesh. It was bad. Really horrible.

  Beside me I felt movement and turned from the screen to see Katie, Leo’s heir, and all I could think was speak of the devil . . .

  Katie had eaten dead flesh. And while she was the most powerful vamp in the land—for entirely different reasons—she was also officially nutso. She leaned to me and whispered, “I have tasted of the darkness of death, and I lived. So shall Ming Zoya of Mearkanis.”

  “Ummm. Yeah,” I breathed. “Okay.” I eased away from her vibrant energies, but she gripped my upper arm in taloned hands, too close to the unhealed scars. I felt the cutting edge of her claws through my clothing. I dropped the empty teacup; it hit the carpet and rolled. So much for feeling safe in a room full of blood drinkers.

  “I will feed my old friend of the massed blood that is mine from the gather. Together we will find the cursed fools who did this. And we shall hunt and destroy them.”

  Which made no sense at all.

  Leo said, “Katherine, my love. Come to me.”

  Instantly Katie let me go and practically slithered into Leo’s arms. Across the way, Grégoire, Leo’s secundo heir, watched the two, his face impassive. I had no idea what was happening between them; the ménage à trois had never made any kind of sense to me.

  On-screen, Bruiser was trying to remove the brooch pinned to Ming’s flesh, but the slightest touch caused her to writhe and rave in pain and madness. Bruiser stopped attempting to remove the ornament and stared at the nearest camera as if searching out Leo. The Master of the City leaned into a mic and said, “Bring her home. And bring the chains that bound her, that I might scent of them.”

  And in that moment I accepted how dire things might really be. If a witch had done this, Leo would know. If a vampire had done this, Leo would know. If a were-creature, Leo would know. And there would be vengeance and retribution. No matter who had imprisoned Ming, nothing good would ever come of it. New Orleans vamps had been through one war already, a war that had resulted in the destruction of half its clans. There was no telling what might happen if there was another vamp war so close to the Euro Vamps arriving. Or if the vamps and witches went to war. Whoever had done this had been brilliant. Sadistic and brutal, but brilliant. Everything I had hoped for, worked for, sacrificed for, to keep my godchildren safe, to keep the human population of New Orleans and the greater Southeast safe, to keep all the witches in the U.S. safe, was about to unravel all at once.

  Plots within plots, schemes within conspiracies within intrigues. The vamp way. And I had little hope of figuring it out and stopping it in time.

  Something sharply angled appeared at the top of the screen and was lowered into the pit. It was the wooden box that looked way too much like an oversized coffin for my comfort. To keep from saying so, I picked up a donut, stuffed it into my mouth, and chewed. When the transport box settled into the muddy bottom, Bruiser lifted Ming in his arms and placed her inside. Then he climbed inside with her, holding her like a lover, as a winch lifted the big box slowly out, the pseudocoffin wanting to swirl and twist, but held steady by the Roberes.

  When the box rested on the churned-up land, lying flat in the mud, the twins rinsed the two figures with clean water from blue five-gallon bottles, the kind people drank from in doctors’ offices and in places where clean drinking water was scarce. The rinse water drained between the slats of the boards until it ran nearly clean. When they were finished, the boys handed in what looked like a foam mattress pad and pillows and blankets, tucking everything around the woman as Bruiser, his wrist still in her mouth, eased his body out. He whispered something to Ming of Mearkanis and she released his wrist. Quickly a human crawled into the box and settled beside her, offering his wrist. Another human crawled in on the other side.

  No way would I have done that. No freaking way. Humans were crazy.

  “How long, George?” Leo asked, his voice deceptively soft. “How long has Ming of Mearkanis been in the pit?”

  Bruiser gestured off to the side, and the pumps went silent. One generator went dead, leaving only one to speak over. He tapped a mud-crusted earbud I hadn’t noted and repeated, “How long?” He looked at the camera and leaned into a mic held by the operator, the screen falling off to an uneven angle as the human operator did double duty. “I would say perhaps two years. No more.”

  Leo shook his head and the scent of anger grew again, spiking high in the overcrowded room.

  “Dominantem civitati—Master of the City and Hunting Territories of New Orleans,” Bruiser said, his words and tone formal and low. “It is unlikely that the witches who attacked your Enforcer are responsible for this horror. Not alone. Not without help. Even with magic, two strong people would not have the physical strength to accomplish this: Digging a pit. Reinforcing it with concrete and magic. Kidnapping a Blood Master and putting her here. This was done by heavy machines and a group of people, humans and witches, working in concert, over time.”

  I nearly dropped my donut in surprise.

  Leo’s eyes landed on me, his expression telling me to be silent. I wondered if it was polite to be filling my belly while watching the rescue. Probably not. Probably rude as heck. Feeling peevish, I finished off that donut and took another. Leo’s expression morphed into feeble amusement before he turned back to the screen.

  “But,” Bruiser went on, still speaking formally and carefully, as if by rote, or as if he knew how fragile everyone here was, watching and not being able to help or retaliate, “witches have been here. Two witches. The scent of their magical energies are everywhere, in the runes, the sigils, in the water, and on Ming’s flesh. They may not have instigated the crime, but they have perpetuated it and maintained it. Ming has been repeatedly bled, by knife to her throat, to feed one who felt no bloodlust and was not overpowered by compulsion. In fact, Ming of Mearkanis is not a
ble to mesmerize at all at this time. It must be the effect of the brooch, and I cannot remove it alone. It must be done by the Master of the City, under controlled circumstances.”

  I thought about the brooch pinned through her flesh. Magic working on a vamp. Not good. In fact, very bad.

  Bruiser continued with his report. “The two humans in the pit with her have modern dentistry, ruling out them being her primo and secondo blood-servants, Benjamin and Riccard. Whoever these humans are, it’s unlikely that they signed papers to serve the Mithrans. We have taken photographs of the skeletons, which we have sent ahead. Local law enforcement will need to be called, quite soon, sir.”

  Leo’s lip curled at the idea of human law enforcement, but his gaze narrowed and he said, “As soon as Ming of Mearkanis is in flight, you may contact the parish authorities and tell them that the pirate pit revealed something other than treasure. There will be no mention of Ming. The identity of the humans may lead us to the perpetrators.”

  Which totally let Eli and me off from having to do a crime scene workup on the pit. A sense of relief filled me, making me know just how much I had not been looking forward to Yellowrock Securities being involved in that.

  “Yes, sir,” Bruiser said, his tone impassive.

  “Well done, Onorios of New Orleans,” Leo said. “We await you and your precious cargo. Godspeed.”