Cold Reign

by Faith Hunter

  “Tell me about the gunfire,” I said when I was done with my inspection.

  Brandon said, “In the middle of the lightning storm from one of Dante’s circles of hell, a car pulled up and six unknowns, male, jumped out and attacked the movers. Fists. Then blades. Before we could intervene, it escalated into gunfire. We got the movers under cover, but a neighbor had already called NOPD. Since it involved gunfire and was in an upscale part of the city, law enforcement showed up quickly. At which point it appeared that the gunmen would turn on the officers.”

  “We stopped them,” Brian said. “I assume Alex will have acquired the security footage.”

  Which I couldn’t wait to see. “Okay. Keep us informed,” I said.

  I wandered through the ground floor of the house, and on the way out, I passed the mural on the wall, the one I had seen before, that attracted my attention on so many levels. I stopped to study it. Closely. More intently than ever. I realized that one of the vamps in the mural had dog fangs. Which Bruiser had to know. “Onorios,” I said, using my Enforcer tone. “This blood-family with dog fangs. Details.”

  Bruiser stepped up on my left, one twin on my right, the other behind me. Onorio scents and heat enveloped me. “Bouvier,” the twin from behind said. His tone suggested that I should know and remember this already. Things were ticking in the back of my brain but not fast enough.

  “Remind me,” I said.

  Brandon, to my side, pointed. “Rousseau and his favorites, Elena and Isabel.” Rousseau was the formal way to refer to a clan head, though Rousseau Clan had been disbanded during the vamp war not long after I got here. His fingers moved. “Desmarais with his Joseph, Louis, and Alene.” The first names indicated a blood-servant or much lesser scion; the vamps were obvious by the fangy display.

  Brian leaned over me, his body touching my spine. “Laurent with her favorites, Elizabeth and Freeman.” Freeman was black and gorgeous and I had little doubt why he was both free and a favorite. “Renee with his master, St. Martin.” He went quiet. St. Martin was associated with the Damours blood-family, the family of witch-vampires I had helped to kill. They had been powerful and evil and dangerous. And their red motes of power were still trapped inside me.

  “Bouvier with Ka Nvista.”

  The vamp master and Bouvier clan head at the time had dog fangs, which I hadn’t noted before. His blood-servant was Cherokee, her name meaning dogwood. She had yellow eyes like mine and she was likely a skinwalker, though no one who was alive both then and now had ever remarked on any similarity in our scents. She was beautiful, with long, braided black hair and lost eyes. Her master would have savaged her beautiful throat with the double fangs. “Bouvier and the Damours. Did they hang together back in the day?”

  “Yes,” Brian said. “They did. As did other masters and scions from time to time. The Damours were a sensual and sybaritic family. They attracted many of the restless young, the dissolute elder, and the bored.” He didn’t sound particularly approving, which relieved me in ways I didn’t take time to look at too closely.

  I pulled my cell and texted the Kid to go through the old records databases to look for all witch/vamps who used to hang with the Damours and see how common the dog-fanged vamps were among the group. But Alex had beat me to it, texting back, I started that research the moment the first dog-fanged revenant appeared.

  Why? I typed back.

  Because everything else bad in this fuc—messed-up city traces back to the Damours, so why not this too?”

  He typed that so I could see his near-cussing. But he was right, and maybe he was more clearheaded than I was right now. Vamps were long-lived and had different views of future plans, potential goals, and multiple methodologies. They could harbor vengeance in their hearts for centuries before they enacted it against an enemy. It was called the long view.

  Do any of Leo’s current scions have dog fangs? I typed back.

  Checking. A moment later he typed back, No.

  I pocketed the cell beneath my now mostly dry poncho and said to the three Onorios, “Thanks. I have things to think about.” They all stepped back, in synchrony, which felt weird, and created a passage out the front door. Just before I reached the door, I turned, retrieved the cell, and stepped back to take a couple of dozen photos, using several different filters, just in case I needed to reference it later. I sent them to Alex’s and my own e-mail addy and text number. Then I pocketed the cell again and left the house. Bruiser waited for me at the limo, holding the door open against the fine, misty rain, but when I slid in, he didn’t follow.

  “Shemmy will take you home,” he said. “I need to be here at dusk with the twins and that’s only two hours away. You haven’t eaten sufficiently. I smell your hunger. Stop for something to eat. Cochon’s maybe.”

  “Shemmy?”

  “His father was Jimmy and his mother was Sheba. Not the queen.” His lips curled up slightly at beating me to the question.

  “Shemmy it is. Does Shemmy have any special gifts, training, or abilities?”

  “Of course. Your second insisted.”

  My second was Eli. “Good to know. Later, then.”

  “Later, love.” He closed the door, leaving me in a state of bemusement. He was British, so calling me love was like Eli calling me Babe. Inconsequential. But it felt like more, as if he was getting closer and closer to the three little words. No one had ever said them to me. No one. Unless I counted the claiming by my werecat ex. But not love. Not ever. I wondered how I’d feel when it happened. If it happened.

  “Howdy, Shemmy.”

  “Miz Yellowrock,” Shemmy said, politely.

  “No need to be fancy.” I swiveled my body around and put my booted feet on the seat. I leaned back my head and blew out a breath that spoke of exhaustion. “Jane is fine.”

  “Jane it is. I hear you give nicknames. What’s mine?” I looked up at Shemmy, who fit the general physical parameters of Derek Lee’s security team—the shaved head, big, muscled, physique of the former military. “You can’t beat Shemmy. It’s perfect.”

  Shemmy pulled away from the curb just as my cell beeped with a call from Alex, and he didn’t wait for me to say hello. “A revenant broke the iron bars over the front doors of a church—a freaking church—on Jackson Ave, walked inside, and killed two people. In daylight. Plus there’s a riot still taking place nearby. It started during the last lightning. Sending you and your driver the address and directions. The storm is bad there, so be careful.”

  “Of course it is,” I said, hearing the wry note in my voice. “On my way. Don’t call your brother. He’s busy at HQ. I’ll handle it.” And Eli was exhausted, not that I’d say that one.

  Alex treated me to a silence fraught with import, the kind that meant he was thinking fast and on several levels. “Sure,” he said, in a tone that meant he disagreed with my assessment. I was drawing a lot of interpretive conclusions. Odd for me. “The revenant is still there,” he said, “and the cops have the building surrounded.” He clicked off.

  “I’m just trying to be nice,” I said to the blank screen.

  I turned the cell off, knelt on the floorboard of the limo, and slid my fingers around the edges of the flooring. The bottom of every limo had a store of weapons, caches that Eli had discovered as part of the latest security upgrades. We had known about the weapons in the sidewalls and nooks and crannies, but that was for handguns. This one had blades and shotguns and silver ammo. I chose a double-barreled shotgun and loaded it with silver-pellet birdshot. I’d rather have my own Benelli and silver fléchette rounds, but there was a problem with collateral damage—humans I might injure or kill by accident. For that reason I took two .380s and set them into old-fashioned leather holsters. I pulled the unfamiliar rig on over my clothing and hooked an adjustable gorget around my throat. There were two motorcycle jackets in the bottom, and I took the smaller one, even though it smelled like L
eo. The scent would indicate to another vamp that I belonged to the MOC, which I hated, but the second jacket was too large.

  I heard a discreet click and Shemmy spoke over the limo’s intercom. “Ms. Yellowrock, Mr. Pellissier wishes you to know that the media is present at the church.”

  “Is it the woman from WGNO?”

  “Carolyne Bonner is indeed at the scene, Ms. Yellowrock.”

  “And how is the local ABC station getting to scenes with revenants faster than anyone else?”

  “It is my understanding that she has been permitted to cultivate a source high in New Orleans’ Mithran politics.”

  Which meant that Leo was letting her into the center of things in case he needed to feed someone news with a slant. This was interesting, but not newsworthy. As I used a speedloader to load silver/lead ammo into extra .380 magazines, I snorted in soft laughter at the word newsworthy. Even I knew my internal play on words wasn’t really funny. Nerves maybe. It had been a long time since I went up against a revenant alone. They were superfast, were hungry as zombies, and never stopped. They were as hard to kill as bayou roaches.

  I closed the deck cover and sat on the bench seat, looking out into the rain. Overhead, lightning flashed cloud-to-cloud, sparking the sky, as if angels were playing laser tag with real laser weapons. Thunder rumbled. The limo plowed through the streets and puddles the size of small lakes. I had lived in NOLA for two years, give or take, and I had gotten used to storms, wind, and rain, rain, more rain. But this was something else. This was making me itchy, getting up under my skin. Inside me, Beast was prowling, the tip of her thick tail twitching slightly.

  Ahead, a mob of kids was playing in the rain. Drenched to the skin, jeans held up in one hand at the waistband to keep the water-heavy denim in place, they stomped and gestured and raced. An instant later, I realized they weren’t kids and they weren’t playing. This was the riot.

  “How many?” I asked Shemmy.

  “I can see . . . fifteen clearly, Ms. Yellowrock. Another twenty or so are half hidden. The fog and rain are so dense that even though I see forms at the street corners, racing back and forth, I can’t tell how many. I can guesstimate we’re looking at more than fifty. NOPD is five minutes out.”

  “Which means more like twenty.” I called Alex and asked, “Do we have an update on the revenant’s location?”

  “Yeah, but we have worse worries. Grégoire says his sire is in New Orleans. Derek says he’s freaking out in HQ. Trying to get outside in the daylight.”

  He was being called, demanded to join his sire. It was a psychic link that the script and fantasy novel writers got right. That calling meant that Le Bâtard was in New Orleans, on the city’s soil. My insides made a little quiver and shake. “Sit Wrassler on him. And give him a job. Get Grégoire to list all the hotels, restaurants, gin joints, and haunts Le Bâtard might frequent. Get him to list all the people he might want to see, steal, or kill. Get another list of all Le Bâtard’s scions and grand-scions. Keep Blondie busy.”

  “Good idea. When did you get all touchy-feely, Janie?” Before I could answer, he said, “The church janitor, name of Babeaux, is holed up in a closet with a layperson. They have cell phones and sent footage out to the press of the revenant. Loading that up to your cell now. Babeaux says he can hear the revenant in the sanctuary, tearing the place up.”

  “Ms. Yellowrock,” Shemmy interrupted. “We’ll have to go directly through the riot to reach the chur—”

  Lightning struck the earth about two feet from the limo. The blast was so bright it seared my eyeballs. The sound so loud it deafened me. It fried the cell’s electronics, burning my hand and adding the stink of burned plastic and ozone to the air I gasped in. The light and thunderclap went on and on as the Gray Between opened up around me. I dropped the ruined phone and it hung in midair.

  I clutched the Gray Between energies to me and shoved the limo door open on the far side of the vehicle. Dashed through the stationary drops, getting soaked, refusing to see the future possibilities in each. I sped through the riot, taking away a gun from a furious-faced teen, tripping his adversary, knocking a bullet from its trajectory toward the ground. I didn’t stop all the violence, but since time was no longer an issue, I made a circuit of the riot area and helped where I could.

  By the time I finished, the lightning bolt had nearly completed its descent and I was having trouble controlling the Gray Between. I was growing claws, and golden hair was sprouting through my skin. Beast was trying to push her way through. Sometimes it didn’t hurt, but this time it hurt. Bad.

  I need hands to pull a trigger and hold a stake and a vamp-killer, I warned her.

  Beast is not doing this, she said back.

  I sprinted toward the church and the revenant. What then?

  Storm. Light from clouds. Magic.

  Something else is pulling my skinwalker magics to the surface? Just like it’s bubbling time.

  Yes.

  Well, that sucks.

  Something moved in my peripheral vision and I looked around, seeing nothing at ground level. I glanced up into the storm. Above me, in the Gray Between, an arcenciel hovered, her wings out and her tail caught in the moment of lashing. It didn’t look like Soul, rather, the other one I knew of, the juvenile arcenciel named Opal. The light dragon was horned and frilled, her long hair copper and brown, her body scaled with red light and a hint of sapphire. She was half human-faced, half dragon. Her teeth were eight inches long, sharp and pearled. The scales of her snake body glistened like the opals for which she was named. Her wings were pearled bronze, marked by small feathered flourishes here and there.

  The Gray Between usually allowed rainbow dragons to see me working outside of time, and since they could bubble time, they could trace my whereabouts through it. This one, though, was not using the ability to bubble time, but was still in normal human time. Dancing in lightning. Magic. Magic was affecting them too. The storm was magic, and more so than I had guessed. It was a good thing humans couldn’t see magic, or the locals would be firing handguns and automatic rifles up at them, hoping to bring down a trophy-dragon.

  The church was white adobe-like stuff on the outside, rain-damaged palms and small trees along the outer walls. Broken concrete and shell-based asphalt paving the parking lot. I dashed into the darkness. The entrance walls were white plaster, recently painted.

  The Gray Between flickered, my joints popped and expanded, and my hips narrowed. Pelt grew down across my face and over my limbs. I darted into the sanctuary, though Catholics probably called it something else. The altar area was a huge arch. Plaster dead saints stood on stands, and plaster angels held up candelabra. Stained-glass windows were pictures of Bible stories. The ceiling had been repaired, and scaffolding was still in place. The smell of paint and age hung on the air, mixed with fresh blood and old death. I passed by a life-sized crucifix. Two church pews hung in the air as if levitated, caught in the moment of no-time. They had been thrown by the revenant.

  She stood, arms raised in fury, about halfway down the center aisle, feet braced to either side of a body. It—he—was dressed in black and might have been wearing a clerical collar, though the blood that drenched his shirt hid that. His bald head was sitting atop the gold cross behind the altar. He looked vaguely surprised.

  The revenant was wearing a dress of rags and one shoe without the heel, the other foot bare. She was scorched, and smoke curled up from her, spiraled and coiled. She was half on fire, burned, psychotic, and a lot rotted. She stank like last week’s roadkill. She had been called from the grave, she had been out in the daytime, and she was the dead undead, so she had good reason for the poor fashion sense and the stench. It had probably been decades since she bathed.

  I pulled the unfamiliar silver-plated vamp-killer and tested its balance by swiping it through the air, loosening up. It was hilt-heavy and was too lightweight for what I wanted. But it
was what I had from the cache in the limo. I pulled it into a backswing. Rushed her.

  The lightning dimmed. Thunder reached its highest pitch. The pews dropped several inches, starting to fall as time unbubbled. I leaped. Vamp-killer high. Screaming.

  Time took a jump, paused, and caught up with me.

  The revenant saw me, heard me, turned her head to me as I left the ground. Opened her mouth to reveal the dog fangs. She leaped at me. Inside my swing. The pews fell with twin crashes and splintered wood flew. Wood shards stabbed me. The vamp and I met about three feet off the ground. Slammed together in midair.

  Her head twisted, a snakelike, inhuman move. Fast as a shark. She bit down. Catching my right shoulder in her fangs.

  We landed hard, her on top, shaking me like a dog. My hand went numb. It dropped the vamp-killer. The weapon and a longer reach were a detriment now, anyway. This was close-in work.

  Left-handed, I pulled a shorter silvered blade from my belt. Gripped it tight in my knobby hand. Stabbed up under her ribs, at her heart.

  Which in a revenant didn’t work. My training and experience were working against me. Muscle memory a hindrance.

  She grabbed my head in clawed hands. Rammed it against a pew. I had a moment of blackness, shredded away by the pain. She shook me again, teeth in my shoulder, hands on my head. She was ripping my arm off. My blood sprayed across the room and up, to spatter on the newly painted ceiling far overhead. I adjusted my grip and stabbed under her left ear. Cut toward me. Severed her carotid and jugular, her trachea and esophagus. Nothing changed. Except my blood pooling, spreading under me. The sound and vibration of her growling into my shoulder stopped.