by Faith Hunter
Screaming sounded all around me. The other witch begging, Molly shouting my name. Evan roaring. But the witch’s terror was so strong it was sweet in my nostrils and mouth, heady. Her blood was mine. I slid the blade across her flesh, only a fraction. The witch’s skin spilt. She was crying. I inhaled, smiling, showing killing teeth. Whispered, “Thief-of-kits. Die.”
It was Evangelina who placed her hands on my arms, power flowing up from her fingers like cool bayou water, drawing away my rage, her voice soothing. “Wait. Not yet. Not just yet. Jane, let her go. I have her. She will not get away.”
I met her eyes, my voice hissing and guttural. “Thief-of-kits.”
Amazingly, Evangelina smiled, and suddenly she was beautiful, greenish eyes sparkling, her face young. “And we have her now. She will not get away.” She pushed at the vamp-killer, a gentle pressure. I blinked, Beast vision overlapping with mine. Evangelina’s peace chilled my killing heat. Soothed me like a hand down my pelt. I let her press the weapon away. My fingers slowly opened, one at a time. I released the witch. Under Evangelina’s hands, my rage eased, settled back, and found a resting place, like a sun-warmed rock in my mind. Unsteady, blinking in the sharp man-light, I stepped back. I was still holding the knife. It was the one Evan had carved for me and when I looked up, I saw his eyes on the hilt.
“Please come inside,” Evangelina said to the two witches, her tone genial and gracious, a hostess asking guests in. “And you will tell us everything.” Her lips twisted into a smile that made my heart stutter. “Or I will kill you myself.”
My Beast liked this woman. She was wise and strong.
I went inside and busied myself making tea. Ignoring the stares from the others. Finding my place, myself again, inside Beast’s angry heart.
The witches’ story was simple, and so stupid that it was believable. A vampire sorcerer, a male witch who had been turned, had come to their small coven, five women of the same bloodline, who worked together. He’d claimed he had proof that Leo Pellissier was kidnapping and killing children who carried the witch gene, killing off the next generation of witches to cement his waning power. He had proved he was more powerful than Leo by walking in the last rays of the sun. They had believed his story. Against the wishes of the city’s other covens, they had agreed to help. Working with them, he had identified several undocumented witch children and teens and staked out the perimeters of their homes.
When the attack came against Bliss, protected behind only electronic security, without wards, the vamp and the two witches were watching. Two vamps, most likely Renee and Tristan, had spelled Bliss, who had come out of her room through the window. The watching witches had attacked to save her. But the vamp who had befriended them turned on his witch helpers, joining the Damours. Both witches were injured.
The Damours had placed an amulet on each witch’s chest, into her blood, and drained her power. Carrying Bliss and forcing the wounded witches, they had climbed over the fence and blasted their way through the wards on my house. They’d taken the children and gotten away, dropping off the conned, injured, magically drained witches to make their way home in the dark.
“Why didn’t the vamps drain you?” Rick asked.
“One tried. The little girl who lived here hit him with something,” the smaller blonde said. “I didn’t see what, but it stopped him. He looked at her, and then he let us go. It was weird.”
Angelina. Angelina had caught his attention. With her strong powers bound just under the surface, Angie Baby was the perfect sacrifice. I wanted to rip the heads off the witches’ shoulders for their stupidity.
“We were both pretty bad off, drained of our gifts,” the other witch said, “but as soon as we could, we came straight over here to tell you.” The witches looked at each other and back to me, fearfully. The women were sitting around the kitchen table, Rick leaning against the cabinet, Evan standing in the doorway, as if he couldn’t be any closer to the grouping or he would kill someone. Evan was a huge man. If he lost his temper, he might be dangerous. I stood off to the side, silent, knowing that Beast was still in my eyes, the full moon holding her close to the surface. For now, she was content to let me remain alpha, but I didn’t expect it to last.
The smaller blonde said, “I’m Butterfly Lily. My mom is Feather Storm.” When she saw Evangelina’s brows go up, she grinned. “Okay, not our real names, our coven names, and the only ones we’ll give you tonight.” Her smile fell away as if the tissue beneath broke apart and pulled the emotion with it.
“We thought we were doing the right thing, saving witch children, working with the vampires to heal the rift between our races. Picking the winning side.” Butterfly Lily ducked her head and her voice went softer. “Mom and I are not real powerful. Mostly we’re used as routing for group workings.”
She said to Evangelina, “We brought him to our coven. He promised to help us catch the kidnapper. We believed him. He was convincing.”
Evangelina said nothing, her expression both sad and condemning. She sighed. “Go on.”
“I know. It was stupid. We were stupid. He had us watch the vamps for weeks. Had us track them to their parties and to their lairs. Gathering information.”
There had been five witches outside of the vamp party, under a glamour. Hiding. Watching. This coven. Doing the dirty work of the Damours.
“He got us to track down every nonaligned witch and witch child in the city so he could protect them. He said that once he had enough evidence to prove that Leo Pellissier was kidnapping witches, he was going up against the blood-master of the city. When he won, he’d declare peace with us and sit down to negotiate.”
I was fighting an enemy I’d never met face-to-face. An enemy I’d seen only on canvas and in the young faces of his children. I wanted to weep.
Feather Storm said, “The city’s covens are . . . really mad at us. We’ll help any way we can.”
Beast under control, I left the room, and brought back the painting that showed the ones I thought were the three Damours and their children. I shoved the painting in front of the women and they recoiled from it as if it were evil. “These are the witches who took the children?” I asked. When the witches with the silly names nodded, I looked at Rick. “If all three of the adult Damours are sane, that means the blood magic ceremonies worked at some point for adults, but didn’t work on children. They’re experimenting on strangers, turning them, changing the ceremony each time, trying to find what will succeed. That’s what this is all about. This is the proof. It’s a way to bring people over without the insanity of the devoveo, the young-rogue state, and to allow the long-chained to find sanity. It ties everything together. And it means they’re close to a solution to the devoveo.
“They know if they’re caught they’ll be killed and there will be another purge, so they’re attacking first, forging alliances with two strong clans, undermining Leo’s power base, pumping up his enemy Rafael. I have a feeling they might be getting the Crips to fight other gangs too, keeping the police too busy to see what’s about to happen, which is a war with Leo. Tell Jodi. See what you can put together.”
My cell rang and I answered. Derek said, “No dice, Princess. My guy got a transponder onto the truck taking the long-chained, but the security found it. We lost ’em.”
My heart fell. “Okay, Derek, thanks.” I disconnected and looked at my guests. “I’m going out,” I said. “I’ll be back.” They fussed and yelled and made a stink, but I reweaponed up, got back on Bitsa, and took off.
I should have slashed his tires. Now there was nothing I could do about Rick following me on his Kow-bike. Not a dang thing.
CHAPTER 21
Will not be caught in predator’s stare
I had no idea how late it was and I didn’t care. I called Bruiser and told him what I needed. Unlike my houseguests, he didn’t argue. When I reached the vamp graveyard, I roared around the gate and up the shell drive to the chapel without setting off any alarms. I killed the bike and stalked to the
steps. The Kawasaki came to a halt behind me. The night fell silent. I didn’t glance back, but I could smell gun oil and knew Rick had drawn his weapon.
I raced up the steps. Banged my fist against the chapel door. It echoed within and against the crypts behind me. I heard the softer scrunch of shell as Rick left his bike and joined me, standing a little to my left.
There was no answer to my knock and Beast, fighting her own fierce frustration, bled strength into my blood in a raging of power. I gripped the door handle and turned. Threw my body against the painted wood. The door slammed open, banging into the inside wall. With Beast’s night vision I took in the place at a glance.
The chapel was one long room, white-painted walls and backless wood benches in rows. Moonlight poured through red-paned stained glass windows, tingeing everything with the tint of watered blood. At the front was a tall table holding a candle and a low bowl of incense, smoking, filling the air with the scent of rosemary, sage, and something bitter, like camphor. A rocking chair sat beside the table, and on its other side, a low stone bier carved with a statue lying faceup, marble hands crossed on her chest. I strode to the bier and identified the carving as Sabina. It was her coffin. I had a feeling she slept in it.
I pushed the stone cover, bending and putting Beast’s strength into it. The top moved with a heavy, grating sound, stone on stone. It weighed several hundred pounds. I heaved, breathed with a groan, shoving, the air painful in my lungs. I moved it a few inches. Behind me a lighter clicked and flame brightened the room as Rick lit candles. Holding one, he joined me and we looked through the narrow opening, into the crypt.
The stone bier held no coffin, but was padded and lined with tufted white silk. There were boxes inside and I pulled three of them out the narrow crack I had made. With a callous disregard for vampire history, I opened each, exposing in one a bit of parchment from a scroll. It was so old it was crumbling, bits of brown flaking away. I closed the box and lifted the next one. There was a name burned into the top, Ioudas Issachar. Which meant exactly nothing to me. Opening it, I found a velvet-lined interior, cradling the cross the priestess had used to dispel the liver-eater when it attacked her.
“That’s the cross in the picture,” Rick said. “The one the burning vampire was carrying.”
I pulled it from its velvet bed and Rick moved the candle closer. She had called it the Blood Cross. The wood was unshaped, tightly grained, the pieces like rough stakes, the splintered ends smoothed and oiled. The wire that wrapped the two pieces, shaping them into a cross, was brass, green with verdigris. The cross was weighty, much heavier than it appeared, and it was old. Ancient. I held it to my nose and smelled no smoke, no flames, and the wood was discolored only by time, not fire.
“You would dare to steal from me?” Before I could turn, Sabina was on me. Her eyes were vamped out. Her fangs snapped down. Faster than I could draw a breath, she bent me back across her knee. Claws pierced through my leathers and chain mail, her fingertips drawing my blood. “Thief,” she hissed.
Sabina’s hinged fangs slowly swung down, three inches long, white in the candlelight, touching my throat above my collar. My throat was barely healed from Leo’s mauling; I might not survive this one. A harsh schnick sounded and Rick held the barrel of his gun to her temple. She didn’t react. But Rick no longer moved. The taint of fear poured from his pores. She had immobilized him with her mind. He couldn’t even breathe. I knew what it felt like to be held like that. The adrenaline-spiked terror.
I swallowed. A bead of cold sweat trickled from under my arm and touched a pricked spot on my side, stinging. “No. Not steal. Borrow. Whatever this is, it works like a weapon on vampires. I just need it to save three witches, two of them children, who will be sacrificed in the next few hours or days.” I felt her tighten, a near-human reaction, to my words. “I need to use it like you did, when you raised the flaming cross and chased the vampires away from the blood magic they tried.” Her body reacted again, easing, softening. I heard Rick take a strangled breath. “Let me use the Blood Cross,” I whispered. Her head snake-tilted, the motion eerie. “Do you claim to be our savior, then?”
“I don’t think it’s likely,” I said.
“Yet you dare to touch the Blood Cross. The cross of the curse. The cross of Ioudas Issachar.”
“Ioudas Issachar,” Rick forced out, the Ss sibilant with his straining. “Judas Iscariot.”
The priestess and I looked at Rick. His face was grayish, his eyes fighting panic. I felt Sabina release him enough for him to draw a full breath. “Ioudas Issachar,” he breathed again. “Judas Iscariot.” His eyes tilted to me. “Catholic school. Latin 101.”
“You know the history of sin and shame that is our birthright?”
Rick’s expression said he had nothing else to offer. I took a shot and said, “The Sons of Darkness. And the Blood Cross.”
Sabina’s expression didn’t change, but when she opened her mouth she laughed. The sound was lonely as a wolf howl, the power in it thudding into the walls and making the window glass ring. The candle flames wavered with its vibration. A desolate humor, bitter as wormwood, slicked my skin with its desperation. “The Sons of Darkness.”
Just as she had taken us over, she released us. Faster than I could follow, she was gone; the candle flames fluttered, nearly guttering in the small whirlwind of her movement. She was across the chapel in an eyeblink. She stared at the cross in my hands. It was glowing faintly now, a curious phosphorescence. Rick took several gasping breaths, loud in the silence, his knuckles white on his weapon. We shared a glance, and he blinked, breathing hard, deciding. Something moved deep in his black eyes, like the trail of an alligator in dark water.
Carefully, he slid the 9 mm into his shoulder holster. His hand was shaking, a fine tremor as if an electric current flowed through him. The gun wouldn’t have killed Sabina fast enough to do us any good anyway, even if it was loaded with silver shot and he emptied the clip at her. She was too old. She would have killed us both as she died. Rick controlled his breathing, and moved, standing at my side, our shoulders touching, facing the priestess.
“Who were they?” I asked. “The Sons of Darkness? What is the Blood Cross?”
Sabina stood, white in the disturbed candle flames, wavering with the shadows. Resignation and something more intense than relief flashed over her. An emotion so sharp it left a residue on her flesh like a scar, like a battle ended, and then it was gone.
She took a breath she didn’t need and sighed. Her eyes bled back to near-human, her fangs clicked back into the roof of her mouth. When she spoke, it was with the formal cant of an oft-repeated quote. “ ‘Ioudas Issachar, son of Simeon, then one of the twelve, went to the chief priests, and said to them: What will you give me, and I will deliver him unto you? Hearing it, they were glad, and they promised they would give him money. And they gave unto him thirty pieces of silver.’ You know this story?”
“The story of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of the Christ.”
“The thief,” she said. “The murderer. The bringer of evil.”
I nodded.
“ ‘And the thief betrayed his master with a kiss of love. And the great teacher and healer, he who was without sin, was killed upon a cross. And Ioudas hanged himself. His body was buried.’ All know this. And though all believed that he was dead, the tomb was empty, and the teacher walked among his followers. They claimed he rose from the dead. But what the Christian scriptures do not say is what happened on the fourth day.
“When the sons of Ioudas heard that the master had risen, they went to the mount of the skull to find the cross where he died, to steal the wood bathed in his blood, to work arcane magics with the blood and the cross. But the crosses of the thief, the murderer, and the rabbi had been pulled down, broken up, and piled together, the wood confused and mixed.”
A frisson of presentiment washed over me, chilling my skin, slowing my blood. My hands clenched on the Blood Cross. I looked at it, at the wood that was glowing wit
h a strange, steady warmth.
“ ‘They took it all. By dark of night they pulled their father’s body from the grave, and with their witch power and arcane rites they laid his body on the pile of bloody, broken wood. Some say they sacrificed the life of their small sister on the wooden pile. Some say not. But whatever rite they used, they sought by their magic to raise their father from the dead. And he rose, though he was yet dead, his soul given over to the night and the dark. Soulless, he walked for two nights, a ravening beast. And he could not be killed, though he rotted and the flesh fell from his bones to writhe upon the ground. And thinking that some benefit might yet be gleaned from their sin, his sons drank the blood and ate the flesh of their father. And they were changed.’ ” Her eyes focused, coming back as if chased, returning to the now from the story she told, the history she recounted. Sabina looked back and forth between us. A bloody tear trailed down her pale cheek though her face was empty, hard and cold as a carved stone.
“ ‘They rose, but not as they had hoped. Because of this abomination of evil magic, they were cursed to live only in the night, Sons of Darkness, they and their descendants. They craved blood ever after, rising each night, feeding and killing. And after a time they made others of their kind. But the progeny rose as ravening beasts, bloody murderers. The devoveo.’ ” Her face was almost pensive. Almost, but the difference, the . . . lack . . . was unsettling.
“As we inherited the curse, so we inherited the wood of the Blood Cross. Though it often kills the bearer, burning her unto true-death, with it we can bring much power against blood rites and evil. It is our only salvation.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. Not quite. Not . . . really. “The cross.” I lifted it, stared at it. The soft phosphorescent glow brightened under my gaze. Prickles moved across my shoulders like my pelt rising. Rick took a half step away, brought himself up short with a visible effort. Staring at the cross I held. “The Blood Cross. It’s wood. Wood from the cross of . . .”—I took a breath that ached, cold and dry, like breathing down ashes—“Christ?”