by Faith Hunter
Praise for the
Jane Yellowrock Novels
“A lot of series seek to emulate Hunter’s work, but few come close to capturing the essence of urban fantasy: the perfect blend of intriguing heroine, suspense, [and] fantasy with just enough romance.”
—SF Site
“Jane is a fully realized, complicated woman; her power, humanity, and vulnerability make her a compelling heroine. The fight scenes are exciting and the New Orleans setting is absorbing, but it’s the ever-evolving bond between Jane and her Beast personality that keeps this fun series fresh.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jane Yellowrock is smart, sexy, and ruthless.”
—#1 New York Times bestselling Kim Harrison
“Readers eager for the next book in Patricia Briggs’s Mercy Thompson series may want to give Faith Hunter a try.”
—Library Journal
“Hunter’s very professionally executed, tasty blend of dark fantasy, mystery, and romance should please fans of all three genres.”
—Booklist
“In a genre flooded with strong, sexy females, Jane Yellowrock is unique. . . . Her bold first-person narrative shows that she’s one tough cookie but with a likable vulnerability.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Seriously. Best urban fantasy I’ve read in years, possibly ever.”
—C. E. Murphy, author of Magic and Manners
“The story is fantastic, the action is intense, the romance sweet, and the characters seep into your soul.”
—Vampire Book Club
“An action-packed thriller. . . Betrayal, deception, and heartbreak all lead the way in this roller-coaster ride of infinite proportions.”
—Smexy Books
ALSO BY FAITH HUNTER
The Jane Yellowrock Novels
Skinwalker
Blood Cross
Mercy Blade
Cat Tales
(a short-story compilation)
Raven Cursed
Have Stakes Will Travel
(a short-story compilation)
Death’s Rival
The Jane Yellowrock World Companion
Blood Trade
Black Water
Black Arts
Broken Soul
Dark Heir
Blood in Her Veins
(a short-story compilation)
The Soulwood Novels
Blood of the Earth
The Rogue Mage Novels
Bloodrings
Seraphs
Host
ACE
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Faith Hunter
Excerpt from Blood of the Earth copyright © 2016 by Faith Hunter
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Lyrics to the song “Where’s The Fire” (as performed by Roddy Rockwell) by Bill Blakley, used with permission.
Ebook ISBN: 9781101991411
First Edition: May 2017
Cover art by Cliff Nielsen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
To the Hubs,
my Renaissance Man,
Always and Forever.
In Memory of my father,
Bobby B. Prater,
who taught me to be analytical.
Those debate lessons around the dinner table
have stood me in good stead.
Contents
Praise for the Jane Yellowrock Novels
Also by Faith Hunter
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1: Holy Necrophilia, Batman
CHAPTER 2: That’s Pure Politics, Babe
CHAPTER 3: You Offer Me Your Blood? Freely?
CHAPTER 4: Put Down Your Pin Sticker
CHAPTER 5: You Look Like Shiii—Crap
CHAPTER 6: Peyote Made Everything Weird
CHAPTER 7: The Crown of the Orcs
CHAPTER 8: A Felon with Employment Offers from the DOD
CHAPTER 9: Sword of the Enforcer
CHAPTER 10: Their Heads Should Loll Over and Bounce as They Walk
CHAPTER 11: Did You Know You’re Being Tailed by PsyLED?
CHAPTER 12: A Six-Foot Snowfall in Hades
CHAPTER 13: Landing with a Thump on the Polar Bear Rug
CHAPTER 14: If It’s Ass You Want . . .
CHAPTER 15: A Case of the Cheerfuls
CHAPTER 16: It’s Called Method Acting
CHAPTER 17: Pawpawpaw. Silent. Beast Was Best Ambush Hunter.
CHAPTER 18: Yada Yada, Physics, Yada Yada
CHAPTER 19: Hung in the Sleet like a Sad Sack of Potatoes
CHAPTER 20: Your Faith Has Waned and All but Disappeared
CHAPTER 21: The Shooter Fired a Last Shot
CHAPTER 22: Shove It Up Your Royal Ass
Excerpt from Blood of the Earth
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Bill Blakley for granting me use of the lyrics to the song “Where’s the Fire”, as performed by Roddy Rockwell.
Melissa McArthur for help with characters and histories.
Sarah Spieth and MG Brown for info on New Orleans port.
Margot Dacunha for French translations.
Kayleigh Webb at ACE, for all your wonderful PR work to make this book fly off the shelves.
Lucienne Diver of The Knight Agency for guiding my career through the hard times of the last twenty-four months. I survived it because I knew I had you in my corner.
Let’s Talk Promotions at http://www.ltpromos.com for excellent PR help and for managing my fan pages. You ROCK!
Cliff Nielsen . . . for all the work and talent that goes into the covers.
Mindy Mymudes for beta reading. For being a font of knowledge and a great friend.
Beast Claws fan club. You ROAR!
Lee Williams Watts for being the best travel companion and PA a girl can have.
Jessica Wade of Ace / Penguin Random House. You make me a much better writer than I am capable of alone. I don’t know how you keep the high quality up, book after book. You are extraordinary.
CHAPTER 1
Holy Necrophilia, Batman
I slid across the slick gym floor in the lightweight boots, a fourteen-inch, silver-plated vamp-killer in one hand, the other hand back in a fist. I slammed the fist into the vamp’s head, deflecting the fang-strike away from the boy’s throat. Caught the collar of the fanghead’s jacket and spun him after me. Around me. His rotting jacket ripped. I stuck out my boot. Shoved him across my foot.
He crashed to the floor. As he fell, I raised the pommel of the blade a
nd brought it down onto the top of his head. It connected with a satisfying bonk. The vamp’s eyes rolled back, yellowed sclera exposed.
I stomped his chest to make sure he was staying down. Brought the vamp-killer across his throat and took off his head except for an inch of spine and a few stringy tendons. The stink of sweat and fear and blood hit me when I took a breath, my first good one in the last ten minutes. I registered the screams of the teenagers and adults in the gym but discounted them as panic, and the stink in their sweat as terror. There was no smell of death, so the rev hadn’t gotten to them. I took another breath. And a couple more to restore the oxygen levels and throw off some carbon dioxide from my full-out sprint.
Eli Younger stepped close, weapons pointed at the floor, his matte-black fighting leathers a faint gleam in the overheads. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “Silver didn’t stop him,” he said. “Six shots.”
“Maybe you missed,” I said.
Eli snorted. He flipped the vamp’s jacket open with the barrel of his weapon. I counted the holes in the vamp’s chest, all but one centered or slightly to the left. The last shot was placed slightly to the right of the chest. Not that my business partner had missed. Eli had aimed there in case the vamp’s heart was on the wrong side of the body. It’s a rare medical phenomenon but it happens. My partner was nothing if not thorough and efficient.
The fingers of the dead vamp’s left hand twitched. Twitched again. The tendons on his neck regrew right before my eyes. His jaws snapped. Eyes opened and glared at me.
I raised the vamp-killer over my head. Eli leaped back, out of the way. The vamp-killer swished through the air as I brought it down with every bit of my skinwalker strength, the steel edge and silver-plated flat of the blade flashing with the overhead gymnasium lights. A clean downward cut severed the bloodsucker’s head from his cervical spine. The blade thunked into the floor. The head rolled. The fingers quit twitching. In my peripheral vision, I saw a man hit the floor.
I toed the body. It was dead. He was dead. Again. Davide Berkins had died the first time in 1512. The second time in 1825. And the third time, today. Or tonight. At the moment his head was gone, so maybe he’d stay down. Revenants were vamps who died a second time and came back again, usually on the third day after they were buried, and usually because they hadn’t been properly interred. They were mindless, hungry killing machines and hard as heck to put down.
There were a lot of questions, but most important was, how had he come back after almost two hundred years in the grave? How had he clawed his way out of his grave in St. Louis Cemetery Number One—in clear view of half a dozen partying Tulane frat brothers—while escaping, and managed to drain and eat three sailors before vanishing two nights past? Why hadn’t silver worked against him? And last, how did I keep something similar from happening again?
Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans and surrounding territories, had sent me to the neighborhood of Belle Chasse to deal with a rash of rogue-vampire sightings and the deaths of three U.S. sailors in port. It wasn’t an old-fashioned NOLA Navy Week, when U.S. warships from everywhere docked and the sailors took leave in the streets, but there were three military ships from the 4th Fleet in port in advance of a multinational maritime exercise operation in the Caribbean. Or that was the scuttlebutt. By the end of the week there would be multinational cruisers, frigates, and supply ships as part of the seagoing maneuvers and war games. Not that they called it that anymore. It was now referred to as a “cooperative effort,” and this one involved Brazil, Peru, and three other South American nations, and the U.S. Navy boats—ships?—had gotten into port only three days past.
The Navy personnel had been granted twelve-hour liberty, and three sailors hadn’t made it back by midnight the first night. NCIS-NOLA had discovered the bodies twenty-four hours later, drained and dead, in the woods just off Yorktown Street. I hadn’t seen the bodies, but I’d read the reports. One kid was eighteen and so green he still didn’t shave. Davide Berkins was the cause. Davide was dead. I’d give myself a back-pat, except that it had taken me twenty-four hours and an attack in a school gym to track him. The rev had been active for well over forty-eight hours. I had to believe that we’d find more bodies.
Taking down the old rogue wasn’t technically part of my job as the Enforcer of the MOC, but as the nation’s foremost expert on rogue vamps—vampires who went nutso and started killing their dinners—I had agreed to go, at speed. The younger Younger, my other business partner, was still negotiating my contract for the hunt, and though I’d never have told Alex this, I’d have done the job for free. Suckheads who kill humans go down. Period. Suckheads who kill kids, like the kid sailor, go down with extreme prejudice.
“Leo will be pissed,” Eli said, about me killing the rogue.
I showed teeth. It wasn’t exactly a smile. Leo had wanted the vamp alive, to question, claiming his own blood was strong enough to bring the rev’s brain back online. Leo wanted a lot of stuff and it was my greatest—okay, second-greatest—pleasure in life to frustrate him.
From the site where the sailors’ bodies had been found, I’d tracked the rogue through neighborhoods to his daytime lair, and from there to the Belle Chasse high school. This guy had been a killer, pedophile, and Naturaleza bloodsucker in his vampire life, and so I hadn’t given him a chance despite Leo’s demands. The six chest shots and the beheading had seen to that.
Oddly, there wasn’t a lot of blood, which was peculiar for a vamp who had drained three young men two nights before, though I wasn’t complaining. But . . . I leaned over and took a sniff. The blood smelled wrong. Though what the blood of a thrice-dead vamp should smell like I didn’t know. I remembered his eyes. The pupils had been wide and black, but the sclera hadn’t been scarlet with blood, but yellowed and sick-looking. Also odd.
I wiped my vamp-killer on the dead guy’s clothes and looked around the gym. The teenagers had been screaming at the top of their lungs when I dashed inside. They had fallen strangely silent when I whacked off the vamp’s head. There was a scent of shock and horror in the air, not surprising since a bloodsucker had walked into high school basketball and cheerleading practice and attacked. I looked around at the floor. Three humans down, counting the teenager Eli was helping to sit. The boy was nursing a badly broken right arm and was sweating and pale with shock, but his throat was intact. Eli checked the pulse of the male adult wearing street clothes, probably a parent. He was out like a light, but the nod Eli gave me assured that he had only fainted. The man in a high school polo shirt was also alive, though bleeding from the nose and mouth, unconscious. Probably a concussion. We’d gotten here before the rogue did more than break the kid’s arm and knock out the assistant coach who tried to intervene.
“You kids okay?” I asked the gymnasium at large.
“You’re Jane Yellowrock,” a scrawny boy in shorts and practice jersey said.
“Yeah.”
“You killed him,” a girl in a short skirt and cross-training sport shoes said.
“More or less. Yeah.”
“Thank you,” a tall, balding man said. He was weaving carefully through the players and I took him to be the head coach. He might have played B-ball himself once, before the years gave him a paunch and limpworthy bad knees. He stopped just beyond the body. “I’ve called police and an ambulance, but what do we do about”—he gestured to the trickle of blood and body—“the mess?”
“I’ll take the body and the head. The mess is yours.”
“Call a cleanup service,” the teenager suggested. “The kind that does crime scene cleaning. I saw it on a CSI rerun last night. It was cool!”
The coach’s mouth opened and closed, and he stared at the kid, who was clearly thinking that beheading a vamp was cool too. “Okay. I guess.”
I looked at Eli, the elder Younger. “Got a body bag?”
“We used the last one. New batch hasn’t arrived.�
�
“Got a shower curtain?”
“Three,” he said, pulling flat packages from a backpack-style gear bag that hung across his shoulders.
“Mr. Prepared.”
Eli sliced through the packaging and unfolded the shower curtains on the floor. They must have been running low at Walmart, because the shower curtains weren’t clear or white but brightly colored with tropical fish on them. “Cute. Nemo,” I said. Eli didn’t respond. I started to make another crack and Eli said, “Don’t.” So I didn’t. But I did snicker slightly.
Together we rolled the body onto the first Nemo curtain, the stink of long-dead vamp not quite as horrible as I expected, as if the decomposition had been halted during the two hundred years in the ground and the stench had slowed with it. The body’s shoulders and elbows thumped on the plastic, and that was when I focused on his clothes. Davide Berkins had been buried in his butler’s suit: dove-gray pants and jacket, white shirt, and black tie. He was still wearing the tattered remains. But . . . They were Clan Pellissier colors.
With my toes I pushed aside the torn shirt, exposing a poorly executed anchor tattooed on the vamp’s chest, marred by bullet holes. I met my partner’s dark eyes and he gave me a fraction of a nod. Everything about this situation was hinky. We both knew it.
His dark skin catching the light of the overheads, Eli secured the vamp’s limbs with duct tape and then we wrapped the body in the second shower curtain. And then a third. And duct-taped it all once again. The plastic shroud still leaked, but it was better than nothing. And the tape hid some of the embarrassing fish.
Grasping the head by the hair, I extended it over the white plastic garbage bag Eli held open. With the fingers of my other hand, I flipped Davide’s fangs down from the roof of his mouth to inspect them. Over two inches long, strong and thick, but curved more than a regular vamp’s. Even more odd, the vamp had overlarge canines on the bottom teeth too. The teeth were more like an attack dog’s than a vampire’s. The vamp-tooth pattern on the throats of the sailors who had died had been curving, with bottom teeth punctures, confirming this was the killer. The bite pattern and the uniform explained how the MOC had known the name of the rogue we hunted. Davide had been a scion of Leo’s uncle when Amaury Pellissier was the blood master in charge of New Orleans.