by Faith Hunter
“Yes. She is . . . weak,” a soft voice said. “Injured.” The accent was vaguely African and touched by French, the vowel sounds mellow and very round.
Fist still at my throat, my blood drying and sticky, wet and fresh, I turned to the driver’s seat as the door closed at my side. I got my first look at Bethany. She had been a black woman when human and was now the blackest vampire I had ever seen. Unlike most vamps, whose skin paled after long years without the sun, her flesh was blue-black, her lips even darker. Her sclera were brownish and her irises blacker than any I had ever seen, blacker than the People’s, blacker than the darkest night. Her hair was knotted and twisted into dreadlocks and worked with hundreds of gold and stone beads; the locks were pulled to the nape of her neck, hiding her ears except for the lobes, which dangled a multitude of gold rings.
Power surrounded her like an aura, but softer in texture than the spiked, mailed fist of Leo’s vamp clout. Bethany’s energies were ephemeral, questing, and carried a scent similar to witch power, but more bitter. I didn’t know what she had been before she was turned, but she was old, maybe the oldest vamp I had ever seen, and full of a strange power. I thought of Sabina Delgado y Aguilera, the old vamp at the chapel, who wore the white wimple of a nun. This power was like hers, slow and roiling, building and moving as an avalanche builds and moves, but with intent and purpose.
Bethany was staring at me, her gaze so dark it was like the sky on a moonless, clouded night in the Appalachians, so deep it was like staring into an ocean trench, empty and fathomless. A primal reaction sent gooseflesh over my skin. Beast did nothing, hunched deep in my mind, watching, worried, nearly—but not quite—fearful. Without taking her eyes from me, Bethany shifted the Porsche into gear and moved along the street. She looked away from me when she turned, guiding the car right, then left. Three blocks later, we were out of the Warehouse District. My shivers worsened. I was pretty sure I was going into shock. I needed to shift.
She pulled the car into a twenty-four-hour gas station with bars on the windows and blinding security lights and eased around back into a garbage-strewn alley. Deep in the shadows, she cut the motor. “You are injured,” she said. “Do you choose to be healed?”
There was something odd about the phrase but I didn’t have much choice. I wouldn’t make it home and didn’t have the energy to shift without the fetishes or boulders. I licked my dry lips and said, “Sure.”
She lifted her hands from the steering wheel and reached out, taking the back of my head in one iron-hard palm; her other palm pressed against my forehead. Her hands were icy cold, as if she slept in a refrigerator. With implacable strength, she bent my head back. I forced down my reaction to her touch. I had agreed to this, whatever this was.
Beast, who had been oddly silent since Leo appeared, came alert and sank her claws into my mind. Dead meat fingers. Trap! Beast thought, drawing up power to fight or run. I am not prey, Beast said. I gripped the door and pulled back. It was too late. Bethany’s hands stopped me, hands cold and hard as black marble. My heart rate trebled. I sucked air to scream.
She licked my throat. As quickly as her cold tongue touched me, Bethany’s fangs struck. I stiffened, stopped, one hand raised, held up in silent protest; Beast hissed. An electric cold suffused my chest, seeming to fill my lungs, my heart, and travel through my arteries like a freezing river, or like the finest rum, poured over dry ice, crackling and burning. My nerves and muscles spasmed.
I had known the damage to my body was there, but the pain had been blunted by shock. Now it hit me with a slashing charge, as if every nerve at once was scraped raw by frozen steel. It lasted one brutal moment. The pain mutated into something chilled and euphoric, like iced vodka swimming with snowflakes. The sensation flushed through me and pooled in my middle like satisfied hungers, like the sensation of falling through frigid air at the top of the world, like nothing I had ever experienced.
I drew in a slow breath, my throat and ribs moving carefully. I was held in the bite of a predator, and moving too quickly could tear out the rest of my throat. Again.
CHAPTER 11
Biting things, too small to eat
Strength poured in, filling my veins and arteries, a stunning, exhilarating, arctic force, as potent as the night sky at the top of a frozen mountain. The weakness that had drained me was gone. Power shuddered through me, cold force and might. Though it reminded me of Molly’s magic, it wasn’t witch power, not exactly. It was something else. Something uniquely Bethany, or uniquely shamanistic. Beast panted in my mind, her breath a frozen mist, killing teeth exposed. As if she lay in a powdery snow, she rolled over, cold, cold, cold beneath her, her rough pelt brushing inside my skin, scoring along bones and nerves. Needing to shift, she was pushed close to the change by the rising energies.
As suddenly as she struck, Bethany slipped back from me, her teeth and mouth and hands sliding away, leaving me slumped in my seat, my head rocked against the side window. Slowly, my vision cleared, the dim night sky coming into focus. The waxing moon rested in the limbs of a young oak. City lights glowed in the near distance.
My heartbeat was a wet susurration, a faint movement through me. My skin was tingling, tight and expectant, as if waiting for the next pain or the next pleasure. I took a breath and the night air was damp, muggy, though the Porsche’s air conditioner hummed steadily. I placed my palms on the seat, pushed myself upright, and swallowed gingerly. I touched my neck, finding crusty blood and tight new skin beneath my fingertips. Healed. I felt . . . pretty good. I looked at Bethany and couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
She sat across from me, swiveled at an angle in the seat, her back to the door, her depthless dark eyes on me. No trace of emotion hovered on her face. She didn’t breathe, didn’t move at all. She might have been a black marble statue.
When she moved to draw breath and speak, it was a shock. “You taste of several vampires. And violence. And the wildness of trees and rock and rushing rivers. You are not human and never have been.” Her head cocked to one side, more lizardlike than birdlike. “I do not think I have tasted one such as you, and I have tasted many.” When I didn’t respond except to wrap my fingers around my own throat, she said, “I gave you a bit of my essence. You will be energized, more powerful for a time.”
I swallowed again and forced out the worrying words. “What is essence? Hope you didn’t try to turn me. I don’t want to wake up all dead and fangy.”
Bethany laughed, and her eyes opened wide as if the sound surprised her. When it passed, a small smile rested on her mouth. “Many would choose to be one of us, even with the ten feral years. No. I did not turn you. If I had, you would be in the near-death sleep of the turned. I shared with you a drop of my own essence, not my Mithran essence.”
I thought about that for a moment, remembering the cold power, then guessed, “Shaman? Were you an African shaman?”
“Yes. You know of my world?”
She seemed almost pleased with the thought, and though that wasn’t what I had meant, I agreed. “Um. Some. A little.” I mean, I could pick it out on a map.
Bethany said, “I was shaman of the Odouranth tribe, a peaceful, farming people.” Her face fell, nearly human pain in her expression, and her voice carried the weight of old, dusty pain when she said, “We were destroyed by the Masai, long before they were called Masai, in the mountains of what is now southeastern Africa.”
I blinked and a picture of sere grass, burned huts, bodies on the ground, bloody and hacked, flashed over the backs of my lids and was gone, leaving only the memory of ancient agony and grief. She looked puzzled. “You saw this. This memory, just now. Yes?”
I nodded once, the motion jerky. Her eyes watched me, her face inert. “No one has seen inside my memories in over a century.”
“I saw,” I said. “But I don’t know why or what it meant.”
“Such a sharing was . . . not unpleasant. Shall we see if more such can be shared?”
I didn’t know how to
respond to that, and she took my silence as indication to go on. “I was considered a woman of great value, and so was captured alive, for my magic. I was given to the son of the conquering chief as a minor wife. And when he died at the next full moon”—her lips moved slowly into a smile, satisfied and unexpected—“I was beaten and sold to a traveling slave merchant who took me to Egypt. There I was sold again, to a Roman, and taken to a new land. The land of the Hebrew.”
Something about the way she said “land of the Hebrew” made me ask, “When? When were you in the land of the Hebrew?”
Sharp bewilderment creased her forehead. “I do not know why I speak to you of this. I have done so only seldom.”
She had already forgotten the shared memory. That lapse was a danger sign of a vamp going old-rogue wacky. When I didn’t reply, she said, “My master was a centurion, part of a legion of soldiers in charge of the destruction of Yerushalayim. Did you know him?”
Yerushalayim, also known as Jerusalem . . . The city was destroyed by the Roman army in AD 70 or so. Did I know him? No, and he’s been dead two thousand years. I didn’t say it. The expression in her eyes made sense now. Rogue. She wasn’t far from going rogue. And she’d had my throat in her fangs. . . . I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry and cracked, and a question fell from them. “Who turned you?”
A little click sounded as her fangs snapped down. Her smile was predatory, as cold and barren as the energies she had shared when she healed me. Slowly, her eyes bled black and her sclera bled scarlet as she vamped out, but the transition was slow, not the eyeblink speed of the others. She seemed in control even as she lost it. Old . . . she was old.
“I was among the first hundred who followed the Sons of Darkness, turned by one who was among the first ten of the Cursed.”
I remembered the term Sons of Darkness mentioned at the party, and that one of them had been contacted by Rafael. I’d also seen the term on a scrap of paper in room 666. She swiveled in the seat, a motion as supple and sinuous as a snake, and put the Porsche into drive. “You are not human. You have been honored to receive my essence and live.” Without another word, her fangs retracted with a soft click, and she pulled out of the alley, around the convenience store, into the street. Moments later she slowed in front of my house and said, “You may leave me.”
I unbuckled, opened the door, and stepped from the car, not ticked off that I’d been dismissed, as I usually was when one of them acted all high-handed. I was satisfied to get away alive. She reached over, pulled the door shut, and the tires ground away from the curb, the car a low throb in the night.
We still didn’t have power and so when I was inside, I lit a single candle, carrying it with me. Filthy, I stripped, tossed the dress into the sink, added soap and water, just in case the dress could be salvaged, and showered off fast. I was almost getting used to the sight of blood rinsing off me and down the drain. Naked, damp hair unbraided and knotted in a ponytail hanging down my back, I dialed Derek Lee. When he answered, I said, “I’m hunting rogue. Want to come?”
His answer was a succinct “Hell yeah.”
“Meet you at your place,” I said, and closed the cell.
When Bitsa and I motored up to his housing unit, Derek and three of his guys were waiting. From the look of them, they were all military or ex-military. Cold, expressionless, ready. They were in jungle camo, boots, and bore a single pair of night-vision goggles. I could smell the steel and gun oil from the street. I didn’t bother to say hi, I just killed the engine, slung a leg over the bike, and kicked the stand down.
“You leaving that nice piece a’ art here?” one of Derek’s guys said.
“Witchy locks. Anyone who touches it gets a shock.”
“What we doing?” Derek asked, moving into the street.
He didn’t introduce his crew; I guessed he didn’t intend me to know their names. Okay by me. Trust had to be earned; it worked both ways. And I was starting out with a lie but there was no help for it. So much for trust. “I want to see if I can track the rogues’ hunting ground, find out if there are any more young ones feeding in the area.” I held up a shard of sharp stone I’d grabbed from the rock garden. “This is spelled. I feel a sort of vibration in the presence of vamps. I can track them with this.” Total lie but it was all I had. I was gonna sniff them out, but I couldn’t say that.
“You leaving it with us when you’re done?” Derek asked.
“Sure. It’ll be nothing but a piece of rock, but you can have it.”
“Onetime spell. Damn witches got no heart,” guy number one said.
Derek lifted a careless one-shouldered shrug of the fighting man. “After you.”
Two hours later I was done. Using the magical rock I had mapped the entire hunting ground of the two young rogues we had killed, and the others killed and beheaded by Derek and his crew. There were no more young feeding in the projects, which relieved my mind, but I had learned nothing new, which was a bummer.
The men followed Bitsa and me out of the projects, threading through the city to vamp headquarters, a cooler full of vamp heads in the backseat of their car. I tried to call ahead, but cell towers, or the erratic power to them, were back down. I pulled up at the front door and unloaded the cooler, surprised at the weight. Vamp heads were heavy. Derek and his soldiers took off, which was still sort of weird, as I knew they worked for Leo.
I rang the bell, and when the same security blood-servant opened it, I handed WWF the cooler. He grunted when he took it and set it on the table inside. “Can I get a check?” I asked.
“Ernestine’s gone home for the night. Call tomorrow.” He opened the cooler and made a face at the smell. I stepped back fast. The dry ice hadn’t done a very good job and the heads were ripe. WWF pulled on latex gloves and inspected the fangs, verified them to be young rogue, and wrote out a receipt. I took it and left, feeling that I hadn’t accomplished a dang thing today.
Wired, unable to sleep, I stripped again, and put the weapons under lock and key so the kids couldn’t find them. Grabbing my puma concolor fetish necklace and my travel pack, I stopped by the kitchen for some warm beef jerky and went out back to the rocks I used for meditation and to shift. I had two hours till dawn and a lot of frustration to burn off.
Yesssss. Hunt, Beast thought at me. I hadn’t hunted in days, and she pressed against my flesh, her pelt abrading me, her claws opening and closing, sharp tips biting into my mind.
Standing on the broken rocks, I pulled the travel pack over my head, adjusted the double chain securing the gold nugget necklace to its proper length, and snapped on the travel pack. Together, they looked like an expensive collar and tote, such as a St. Bernard rescue dog might have carried in the Swiss Alps. I bent over and scraped the gold nugget across the uppermost rock, depositing a thin streak of gold. It was like, well, like a homing beacon, among other things.
Hunt. Kill. Blood and meat. Beast, while always present in the depths of my consciousness, was talking to me as a separate entity now, as a self-aware creature with desires of her own. I looked at the jerky I’d dropped on the ground, knowing she would hate it, but there wasn’t anything I could do, not with the power still off. Besides, Beast needed to roam free for a while, and I needed the more perfect healing that shifting would bring. The drop of Bethany’s essence had kept me alive, and if I had no other experience to compare it to, it would have seemed nearly miraculous. But it wasn’t a substitute for Beast and my own skinwalker magic.
I sat on the boulders, the rock warm beneath me. Mosquitoes swarmed, biting. Beast hissed. Biting things. Too small to eat.
The necklace of the mountain panther—commonly called the mountain lion—was made of the claws, teeth, and small bones of the biggest female panther I had ever seen. The cat had been killed by a rancher in Montana during a legal hunt, the pelt mounted on his living room wall, the bones and teeth sold through a taxidermist. The mountain lion was hunted throughout the Western U.S. but was extinct in the Eastern states, or it had bee
n. Some reports said panthers were making a comeback east of the Mississippi. I could hope. I didn’t have to use the necklace to shift into this creature—unlike other species, the memory of Beast’s form was always a part of me—but it was easier.
I held the necklace and closed my eyes. Relaxed. Listened to the wind. Felt the pull of the moon, growing gravid, nesting the horizon. I listened to the beat of my own heart. Beast rose in me, silent, predatory.
I slowed the functions of my body, my breathing, my heart rate, let my blood pressure drop, my muscles relax, as if I were going to sleep. I lay on the boulder, breasts and belly draping the cool stone in the humid air.
Mind clearing, I sank deep inside, my consciousness falling away, all but the purpose of this hunt. That purpose I set into the lining of my skin, into the deepest parts of my brain, so I wouldn’t lose it when I shifted, when I changed. I dropped lower. Deeper. Into the darkness inside where ancient, nebulous memories swirled in a gray world of shadow, blood, uncertainty. I heard a distant drum, smelled herbed wood smoke, and the night wind on my skin seemed to cool and freshen. As I dropped deeper, memories began to firm, memories that, at all other times, were submerged, both mine and Beast’s, but had been brought closer to the surface by the time in the sweat lodge with Aggie One Feather. Had that been only this morning? It seemed forever ago.
As I had been taught by my father—so long forgotten—I sought the inner snake lying inside the bones and teeth of the necklace, the coiled, curled snake, deep in the cells, in the remains of the marrow. Science had given the snake a name. RNA. DNA. Genetic sequences, specific to each species, each creature. For my people, for skinwalkers, it had always simply been the inner snake, the phrase one of very few things that was certain in my past.
I sank into the marrow hidden in the bones. I took up the snake that rests in the depths of all beasts and I dropped within. Like water flowing in a stream, a whirling current. Like snow rolling down a mountainside gaining momentum, unstoppable. Grayness enveloped me, sparkling with black motes, bright and cold as the world fell away. I slid into the gray place of the change.