by Faith Hunter
The last armoire wasn’t an armoire. When I pulled the door, a black space yawed open, a narrow stair leading down into darker night. The smell of sex, witch, and vamp led down. I remembered the utility area on the side of the building. I hadn’t seen a door but one could be hidden there easily enough. “Derek?” When he looked at me, his shotgun out, braced across his body, I said, “They went this way. It leads down. Look for a passageway through the garage or a door to the outside. I’m taking the stairs.”
Derek cursed with a marine’s efficiency and disappeared, directing two men to take the paintings and get them into the van. I started down the stairs.
Beast, already close to the surface, shoved her way into my forebrain. Pain gathered at my fingertips as if claws pushed through. Pelt roiled just under my skin, aching, wanting to be free. My eyes adjusted to the lack of light. I can see well in murky dark, but my vision is no match for vamp eyes, which can see in total dark. I found the stairs by feel, the treads deeper than normal with maybe a twelve-inch drop per riser. My steps were slow and careful, my mouth open to scent, short snuffs drawing in air.
According to the scent markers, vamps and witches had come this way only moments ago, but no echo of sound remained except for my feet on the treads. They were hollow like wood, not quite smooth, not freshly sanded and lacquered. The passageway smelled old beneath the reek of vamp and witch-fear, with a moldy undertone of tea, indigo, rice, and cotton. And lots of human women and more human fear, though most from long ago.
Maybe it was an original passageway from the eighteen hundreds, or earlier, and had been remodeled into the back of the armoire as an escape hatch. An image came to me, bright and sharp, though I’m not gifted with vision. Maybe just stuck with a too-strong imagination, mixed with the fear in the smells. But I saw black women, wearing chains and little else, the scents of melanin from their skin, and iron and blood and fear, semen and degradation. A slave ship captain had used this passageway to test out his cargo before he sold them. I knew it with certainty and an impotent fury burned in me, the fury of a people who had served in slavery, much like the imported Africans. The fury of a woman, understanding hopeless captivity. The fury of Beast, feral and untamed.
Anger burned along my nerves and tingled through my skin. I nearly missed a step deeper than the others. And then was brought up short on the next three that had lower risers, as if the stair risers had been sized to create discomfort and confusion. I walked down the narrow passage, my eyes adjusting to the blackness, my other senses expanding, reaching out, testing the air. The echoes dulled, shortened, and I knew I was at the bottom. Ahead of me was a faint line of light. I reached out and found a leverlike handle. Pushed down on it. A door opened. Three men dressed in black ringed the door. I scented Derek and raised my hands. “Just me,” I said, my voiced clotted with fury and failure. “Just me.”
“We never saw this door in the shadows. If they came through here, they’re long gone,” Derek said.
Over his head, the moon was rising, the first night of the three-day-full moon. The three days most usually associated with the dark arts, with the moon change of weres, with Beast’s sex drive. If the Damours intended to sacrifice the kits and Bliss, they’d do it during the full moon for optimal results.
I walked to the curb, smelling the fading scents of vamp and witch. And an overlay of diesel exhaust. They were gone. I had no idea where their captors had gone to find safety. Once again I was back to square one. I took a breath that hurt my lungs. Tears stung my eyes. I was nearly out of time.
I walked back into my house, smelling Evangelina Everhart, the eldest of the witch sisters, and Big Evan, Molly’s still-in-the-closet sorcerer husband. And smelling Molly. She raced to my arms when I came in the side door. Slammed into me, holding me tightly. Over her shoulder Evan looked at me, his gaze murderous, his red beard vibrating with contained fury, promising retribution for the loss of his children. I hadn’t been very good to Evan; I had placed his wife in danger more than once, nearly gotten him killed once, and now allowed his children to be stolen. The fact that I hadn’t been present when they were taken had little relevance in his mind. Or in mine either, if I was honest.
“You don’t have to worry about how to kill me,” I said to him. “If I don’t get your children back, I’ll be dead trying.”
“Better be,” he rumbled. “Or I’ll skin you alive, pelt and flesh.”
Evangelina, who didn’t know I was a skinwalker, looked back and forth between us in confused consternation, then took solace in food and tea, as was her wont. She dished up a hearty stew from a pot on the stove, scooped a round of brown rice in the center, placed small salad bowls at each plate, and dumped buttery biscuits from a steel tray into a basket. Comfort foods. “Sit. Eat,” she commanded. I peeled Molly out of my arms and passed her to Evan, who looked as if he was ready to rip her away from me. I removed the shotgun harness and laid it across the kitchen cabinet, but other than that, I remained fully armed.
I sat, picked up my dinner spoon by feel, and dipped it into the stew and rice.
“Tell me,” Evan said. I put down my spoon and blinked at my tears.
“No. She eats first,” Mol said sharply. “Look at her. She’s about to drop.”
I lifted my spoon and shoveled in the stew. Intellectually, I knew it was good, but it could have been ashes for all I cared. I ate mechanically, emptying my bowl in minutes. Snubbing the salad, I took four biscuits and placed them on the bread plate, dumped honey and butter on them, and applied the spoon to them too. When I was finished, Molly brought me another bowl of stew. And then another. I was eating as tears rolled down my face, and I realized that none of the others was eating at all. They were watching me. When I finished my third bowl, I sighed and pushed away the empty dishes. Without looking at any of them, I wiped my face, took my tea mug in hand, and started talking. I told the tale. All of it except the parts about Beast; I took credit for her contributions and for once she didn’t seem to mind.
As I ate, Evangelina told about the witch coven she had visited. They had claimed they knew nothing about the attack on my house, but there were inconsistencies in the story they told, and Evangelina could tell they were keeping things back. Also, only three members met with her, when there were supposed to be five adult members in the coven. So something was hinky, not that Evangelina would ever use such a term.
Before she finished, while I was still eating, a knock sounded and Rick opened the side door. I’d heard his Kow-bike and knew he was coming. I introduced him around and Evangelina dished him up a bowl of stew.
He sat and dug into the food; halted with mouth full, chewed, and swallowed. “Dang, this is good.” He looked at Evangelina. “You cook this?” When she nodded, he looked at me and said, “No offense, but our date’s off. I have to marry her.” My tears had dried and I twitched a strained smile. He was trying to lighten an impossibly dark situation, and I appreciated that. Not that it would work. He went back to the stew, dipping a biscuit into it and sopping up the juice. He also changed the subject.
“I got news from the files. I spotted something when I was photocopying the witch and vampire files.” Too involved with the meal, Rick didn’t notice the intense interest of the three witches at the table. I was pretty sure he knew Molly was a witch, but not the others.
“That witch vamp Renee and her husband were once—when they all were human—the owners of the clan’s blood-master, Bettina.” My mouth fell open. Rick grinned at my reaction. “Bettina was sold by Tristan Damours in 1770 to a vamp madame named Bethany who shipped her to New Orleans and put her to work as a sex slave in the Quarter. Bettina had a gift for satisfying customers and she and Bethany ran a successful business.”
Bethany had owned slaves? I shook my head, wondering about the rift between Bethany and Sabina during the Civil War. If it hadn’t been about slaves . . .
“Later she got sick—I talked to a nurse I know and he thinks it sounds like the clap. Bettina was tur
ned at Bethany’s request to save her life.” Rick pulled papers from his leather jacket and passed them to me. I took the pages, opening them to expose a photo of Bettina, decked out in the clothes of a soiled dove, a corset, pantaloons, and a shawl.
“Bethany didn’t turn her?” Evangelina asked.
“No. She’s out-clan, and no out-clan can turn a human. They can’t offer safety during the chained years, so they can’t turn anyone. No protection. And at the time, the info of the Rousseau curse of insanity was still a secret. When he was asked, the Rousseau master agreed to turn her and adopt her into his clan.”
He turned a page and pointed to a line written in a flowery cursive script. “Bettina was set free by accident, here in New Orleans—no one says what kind of accident—when she was still rogue. She went hunting for the Damours to kill them. She failed. When Bettina became blood-master of her clan, she had power over Renee and tried to kill the long-chained Damours. Renee stopped her. No record of how.”
He stuffed half a flaky biscuit into his mouth and talked through it. “Bettina is our way in. We need to talk to her. If we can find her.”
I felt a vibration and opened my cell. It was Derek Lee. “Yeah?”
“I’m out front. Take these pictures. They give my men the willies.”
“How many did you get?”
“All of them.”
“Who came when we got out of there? Cops?” I didn’t look at Rick, but he was looking at me, speculation in his gaze as he ate.
“No cops. Human blood-servants and slaves. I left a man watching from across the street. They’re loading the long-chained ones into an eighteen-wheeler. Cleaning out the place. My man’ll get a tracking transmitter on it if at all possible. That’s what you meant by using them as bait, isn’t it?”
I could hear the grin in his words. “Thanks.”
“Let us have the bounty on the heads of the long-chained and that’ll be thanks enough.”
I remembered the faces of the raving vamps. The way the girl vamp licked at her own arm, trying to taste her own blood. On one hand, it seemed wrong to give them true-death if there was any chance at a sane future, but not if that future sanity was promised at the death of children. “They’re yours.”
I closed the cell and stood, looking down at the witches. “I have some evidence.” Rick looked up at that, his expression saying clearly that he wasn’t sure he should be here. “Don’t ask,” I warned him. He sat back and set down his spoon.
“I have a feeling this stuff isn’t pretty. It might involve the ceremonies where vamps sacrifice witch children.” Molly touched her mouth, her fingers quivering. “If you can’t handle it, go upstairs. And you,” I said to Rick, “you stay out of sight and don’t look at the deliverymen.” I went to the door.
Derek Lee already had a half dozen paintings on the porch. I grabbed two in each hand and carted them inside. They were in heavy gilt frames, each weighing about forty pounds, a lot heavier than they’d felt back at the lair, with adrenaline surging and Beast close to the surface. I propped the paintings against the couch and went back for more. The van roared off as I worked. There were fifteen paintings. Rick was lining them up on the floor, propped along the furniture.
Her mouth in a tight line, Evangelina was changing the order, separating the paintings into two groups, one group on one side of the room, facing the other. I closed the door when I brought in the last one. Molly was in Evan’s arms, her face in his shoulder. I could smell her fear. Evan’s fear was subsumed beneath a rising anger. Evangelina’s scent was more complex, her emotions tightly controlled.
Rick was ignoring me, studying the paintings. I joined him. This wasn’t the first time that I had gotten important info from vamp paintings. “Good thing vamps chronicled their every important move in oil on canvas,” I muttered. “Self-obsessed bloodsuckers that they are.”
Evangelina said, “That trait may have come from the fact that silvered mirrors reacted to them and didn’t show their reflections well. So they sat for paintings to see how they looked.” She had separated the paintings into two groups according to time period, one batch with the female participants dressed in belled skirts, big sleeves, and corsets that came to a point below the navel, and for the men, knee pants, lace and satin, ugly big-buckled shoes, with white hair piled up tall. The other batch depicted people—well, vamps and witches—in high-waisted, slender dresses that showed a lot of cleavage, delicate shoes, and natural-colored hair.
Though the participants changed through the years, all of the ones in charge of the ceremonies held knives and had fangs. Some of the vamps in the center of the witch circles and pentagrams had fangs and were clearly raving; in several paintings, they were the two teenagers I’d seen in the warehouse, the long-chained ones. The sacrificial children were dead, their throats cut, lives forfeited in the pentagram’s center. In others, they were being drunk from as they died.
In the later depictions, the experiments had changed several times. One showed the long-chained ripping out the throats of the sacrifices and drinking them down. In one, the adult was, I guessed, Renee. Her husband and her two children were in the circle, savaging a human. Two younger, fangless children were being sacrificed by Renee, a silver knife held high. On the latter canvases picturing both Damours, a bearded vamp was assisting the ceremony. The brother? Wasn’t he supposed to be the last of the three to find sanity? I rearranged the order of two paintings and smiled grimly. “Evangelina, you’re the educated one. What time periods are we seeing?”
“I never made a study of fashion,” she said dryly, “but I’d say the older batch is from the seventeen hundreds and the more recent from the early eighteen hundreds. This one”—she tapped a painting in which the participants wore modern-looking clothes—“I’d say came from the nineteen seventies.”
“That’s what I figured.” In it, only the children were in the circle, feeding on a witch child. Adults stood outside, at points of the pentagram. They bore striking resemblance to one another. They had to be the Damours.
“You understand this?” Rick asked. “Because I sure don’t.”
“There were no notes of the Rousseau experiments from the seventeen hundreds. Nothing was destroyed in the fire.” I turned one of the oils into the light better to study the face of the strange vamp. I wondered who he was. “These paintings were the records of experiments, shipped to the States, probably in the frames, but behind other, less important paintings. Some of the later ones were maybe painted here. But whenever they were painted, this is the Rousseau record of the experiments to rid the clan of insanity.”
“They could be transported, hidden behind other paintings, but in plain sight, and no one would ever know,” Evangelina said.
There were definite differences in the styles of the paintings as well as the experiments. In the older set, there was no pentagram in the witch circle. No crosses on the trees. In the more recent batch, all the elements I’d seen in the young-rogue burial sites were present. Except . . . “In the older ones, the circles and pentagrams are made by cutting into the earth, like with a spade. In the newer ones, the circles are made with other things. Something that looks like powder or flour in one, flowers in one. Feathers. And stones in two, one with pebbles, one with shaped stones, like bricks.”
“And the sacrificial athames in the older depictions are steel. The most recent ones indicate silver,” Evangelina said. “The vamps in charge change.”
“And there’s this bearded guy. He’s in . . .”—Evangelina counted—“six of the later paintings. Look at his position. Almost as if he’s in charge now. And I’m betting that necklace on his chest in all the paintings is an amulet that lets him draw power from the others.”
I studied the amulet. I didn’t know much about gems, but it looked like a pink diamond or a washed-out, pale ruby, about the size of my thumb from the last knuckle to the thumb tip, faceted all over. It was on a heavy gold chain, a thick casing holding the gem, the casing shaped of horns an
d claws. It looked barbaric, brutal, and powerful, an artifact from a distant time and place.
“That’s what they intend for my babies?” Molly asked. She was standing where she could see all the paintings at once, her hands fisted so tightly her fingers were white, fear and grief and fierce anger on her face. I wanted to promise that I’d get to the children in time, that I’d save them. But the promises were for me, not for her. Molly knew what we were up against now. I nodded instead and went to the last painting from the eighteen hundreds. It was different from all the others. In it was an extra figure racing downhill, her white dress flying back with her speed, eyes blazing, holding a flaming, bloody cross. Sabina Delgado y Aguilera coming to the rescue, her face in a rictus scream of pain, her arms on fire, flames licking up toward her body. The vamps in the circle were running away, faces full of terror.
Sabina had known exactly what I was describing when I told her about the young rogue and the witch circle in the woods. She had known and hadn’t told me.
A soft knock sounded at the door and Molly whirled, the reek of her rage and panic bitter on the air. No one had set wards. I peeked through a sliver of clear glass, glanced back once to see Rick with his weapon drawn and Evan with his hands out in a warding gesture. I opened the door. Two witches stood on the shallow stoop. I had never seen them before, but I recognized their scent.
Beast reared up fast, her pelt pressing against my skin, her claws sharp in my fingertips. Thief-of-kits! Beast lunged into my mind. Flamed into my eyes.
One witch, petite and blond, stepped back fast, shock on her face. Threw up her hands, palms out, power gathered there. Before she could throw the spell, I leaped. Was on her, a vamp-killer at her throat. Her thief-of-kits scent oily in my nose. “Any reason I shouldn’t just kill you where you stand?” I growled.