It looked like I had tried to burn up everything around me. I nearly snorted with disgust at the mess. I needed Aggie One Feather if I wanted to take a trip deep inside my psyche or into my past. But one thing was clear. Gee had been watching me, following me, with his spell. It had been a good one. Nearly perfect.
Drawing on Beast’s stealth attributes, I pulled the gold cross off and dropped it on the pillow, slipped to my bedroom, grabbed my go bag, slung my H&K holster over my shoulder, took up a single vamp-killer blade, a hand full of stakes, and a pair of sandals. I was out the front door before Evangelina and Bruiser were any the wiser. Up the canyon of the street, a heated mist rose from the asphalt on the night-cooled air. The quarter moon hung between the buildings, casting dim shadows. The buildings were ghostly and monochromatic, windows like jack-o’-lantern eyes, lit from within, bright with life, or prison eyes, barred and lit from without, reflective and empty and soulless. The night was oddly silent, the music of countless bars and dance halls and blues palaces a throttled, distant blurred sound. Overhead, storm clouds moved in from the gulf, obscuring half the stars. Rain was coming. Soon and hard.
Standing across the street, I weaponed up, watching in the windows of my own house; Bruiser and Evangelina had just noticed I wasn’t on the living room floor anymore. Bruiser raced up the stairs. Evangelina pushed aside the lacy curtains and looked out into the street. I stepped behind a car parked at the curb and stood where she couldn’t see me. Watching her, I flipped open the throwaway cell phone and dialed Molly.
She answered on the first ring. “What are doing to my big sister?” She nearly snarled. “And what took you so long to call me. I got three weird messages from her in the last half hour.”
I laughed, feeling free and lighthearted. “Evangelina is up to no good all on her own, Molly-girl.”
“I was afraid of that. Her message didn’t sound like her.”
“You mean not all stuffy and uptight and rigid? More like a regular person?”
“Play nice. That’s my sister we’re talking about.”
“We are playing nice. Beast didn’t eat her. But your stuffy big sister was trying to figure out what I am, and I think I burned her in the process.”
“Tell me.”
I left nothing out since our last chat, and it took several minutes. When I was done, Molly was quiet for a long moment, before she said, “Son of a witch on a stick. Okay. I’ll handle my sis. But you need to be ready, big-cat.”
Something tightened deep inside me. “For what?”
“For what you are to come out. Too many people have noticed you down there in the City of Mardi Gras, powerful people and powerful beings. Discovery of a skinwalker, of the Cherokee variety, would ride the news channels for days. You’d be the subject of speculation by TV and radio personalities and panel discussions by knowledgeable idiots. You’re something that no one really knows about, Jane, not anymore, maybe not for centuries. A magical creature of unknown properties, one with a dark and mystical and violent potential. And it’s only a matter of time before it comes out.”
I closed my eyes against her words. “You’re saying I’ll have trouble if . . . when I come out. That people will get in my way, in my face, chase me down, cause me problems.”
“Capture and dissect you if they can. Just like they would my . . . situations.” She meant her children, a sorcerer who had, so far, survived the usual childhood cancers that claimed most male witches, and a witch daughter with two witch genes. A powerful tool in the hands of, well, almost anyone. “Next time you come home, I’ll load you down with protection.”
Home.
The mountains. An image of the moon hanging in the cleft of a mountain gorge, so alike, and so very different from, the vision of the moon over the French Quarter tonight. There, a breeze would be stirring the branches of oak and maple and evergreen, the moon shining on a slow-moving river as the mountain angled up sharply, cracked rock on either side. Mist rose from the black water, still warm from the day. A night bird called, a long trilling tweet. The image gripped me in a desperate, lonely fist.
Home
. I needed to be home, deep in the hills, not in this stinky city surrounded by cars and streetlights and thousands of humans.
But that was Beast talking. I had a job to do. I gripped the phone and opened my eyes on the nightscape of the city of New Orleans. “Okay. So what happened to me tonight and what should I do about it?”
“I think you have a natural protection woven about you from the cave where you first shifted into a bobcat, when you were a kid. Maybe some kind of Cherokee mystical something or other put over you there, put over your soul by your father and your grandmother to keep you safe. Maybe even some latent magic, or a spell to offset the skinwalker natural proclivity to violence and dark arts.”
I raised my head at that. It was the first good news I’d heard about me and my kind in a while.
Yeah
. . .
Why not?
Just because most—okay, all—skinwalkers eventually went nutso and ate humans, didn’t mean that we were
supposed
to do that. The white man brought many contagions. Why not one that changed skinwalkers? Maybe my father and grandmother had come up with something special, some unique and now forgotten ritual that would keep me from that fate. Forever. And maybe the magic of that ritual just burned Evangelina, and stabbed Gee in the eye for interfering.
Yeah
. A grin spread across my face.
Fire magic!
“Because Gee’s magic is bluish,” she went on, “I agree it’s European or Celtic based, which means iron will break it better than silver. The handprints suggest that his magic is something more intrinsic and less ritual-based than my own gift. Meaning that he’ll have defensives built into his skin. If he has skin.”
“What do you mean, ‘If he has skin’?”
“He might have scales or a chitinous shell for all I know. There are all sorts of things that go bump in the night. Questions. One: do you still have his eye on your palm?”
Surprised, I opened my left hand and there, on my palm, was the faint tracing of an eyelid, closed as in sleep. “Yes. Sleeping.”
Molly chuckled, the sound grim. “That’s not low-level magic, to steal part of a spell and make it your own. You can probably track him with it, but if he figures out that you have his eye, he can turn it back on and use it against you. If he comes at you, physically or magically, you’ll need to be fast. Hit him and hit him hard.” Before I could respond, she said, “Your cave. Is it a real place? If so, maybe you should try to find it when you come home again.”
“Maybe,” I said. But if I was honest with myself, it was better than
maybe
. I
could
try to find the cave of my beginnings. I had found a few places from my long-forgotten past already. Excitement zinged along my nerves at the thought. “Thanks Mol. I owe you.”
“No, you don’t. Now say good night to your godchild so I can put her back to bed.”
I heard shifting on the other end of the connection and Angelina said, “Hey, Aunt Jane.” Her voice was heavy with sleep and the natural peacefulness of the very young raised in a loving and safe place. “You beat the blue man. But he’s watchin’ you and you gots to be careful. You gots to watch out for Bruiser and Ricky Bo and the man big-cat. Okay?”
Crap
. The kid knew too much. Even with her parents binding them down, her powerful witch genes were expressing themselves in ways most witch genes never did. She was seeing the possibilities of the future. Of
my
future, which was weird. The girl was scary powerful.
“I’ll be careful. You keep safe and listen to your parents, okay? Be a good girl.”
“Will you bring me a new doll when you come back? A pretty one?”
I chuckled and said, “Yeah. I’ll do that. I love you, Angie Baby. Good night.”
“I love you too, Aunt Jane. Night.”
“Later, big-cat,” Molly said. And she was gone.
I closed the phone, stuffed it into a pocket, and studied the blue eye on the palm of my hand. It looked like an old tattoo, worn, faded, ink dispersing into my skin. I was pretty sure it was fainter than before, as it was evaporating away. If I was going to use it to track . . . I raised my hand and sniffed. Lifted my head and sniffed again. The reek of Girrard DiMercy’s blood filled my nostrils. But it came from close by, not from my hand.
I looked up. And spotted Girrard DiMercy. He was cloaked in the blue mist of a hide-me spell, sitting on a brick abutment just up the block, in a small nook, the minialcove where other men had spied on my house before. What
was
it with that doorway?
The spell clinging to him wavered and shifted, and other things seemed to be hidden beneath it, as if the layers of his glamours had separated and softened, allowing me glimpses of the visions beneath. He hadn’t seen me. I glanced back down at my palm, to see that the blue lines were even fainter.
I slid out of my loose shoes, leaving them on the sidewalk, and stalked silently toward him.
CHAPTER 19
A Fashionista’s Closet Full of Falling Stilettos
Girrard DiMercy was sitting with his eyes closed, face tight and intent, his head back. The blue mist cloak spell wasn’t strong enough to keep me from seeing him; it was too late to hide himself from me. Way too late. I’d seen his handprints on the roof of my soul, marking me as his. And I’d blasted them away. Now, his hands were relaxed, the outer edges of his palms and little fingers resting on his lap, his fingers and thumbs curled toward one another, as if he held a ball loosely. Except for the blue hide-me mist, he wasn’t concealing himself. There was nothing defensive or dangerous about his posture, which made me figure that Gee thought he was invisible, or at least cloaked in night shadows. And one eye was swollen, caked with blood. I’d hurt him for real, just like the wolves had hurt him back in Booger’s Scoot.
I pulled on Beast’s hunting attributes, moving up the street, my bare feet silent on the sidewalk. As I moved, I considered weapons, should I need one. There wasn’t a round in the 9 mil’s chamber and Gee would hear if I readied the weapon for firing. And the H&K was loaded with silver shot. Molly had said steel would probably disrupt Gee’s magic better than silver, so I pulled the vamp-killer. Though the back and the flat of the blade were coated with heavy silver plating, the cutting edge itself was high quality steel.
I stood three feet in front of Gee and I might as well have been in Mexico for all the notice he paid me. He seemed somnolent, his breathing easy, as if he was sleeping, sitting, his body relaxed. The blue mist lay thick on his skin and seemed to swirl slowly with the energies of his spell, growing thin and gossamer away from his body, denser, and tight between his cupped hands. The mist was shaped like a sphere, dissipating entirely beyond the borders of his body, and I realized that the energies themselves formed a working circle that covered his whole physical form. I didn’t know a whole lot about magic, but I did know that most forms used circles to contain the energies, kinda like a force field, to keep anything nasty from escaping, and to hold the energies in place. I wondered what he looked like under his glamours.
I hefted the vamp-killer, moonlight glinting on the silver and steel. I positioned my feet, left foot forward, right foot back, pointed at ninety degrees. Knees bent, my weight evenly distributed, I held the blade point forward and slashed down with a single hard, fast cut, through blue mist. Down toward the stone on which he sat, breaking the circle of his spell.
Time dilated and slowed. I could see the passage of the blade through the mist. The way the steel parted the strands and swirls of the spell. The way they fell away, as if recoiling from cold iron. Light exploded out around the blade. Blue and downy, soft and bright, like sparklers in the night. And still the blade descended. The mist had weight and texture.
Like flesh
, the thought popped into my mind. Heat billowed up my arm, warm and moist. And the smell of cauterized blood. The reek of burned evergreen. The stink of charred jasmine.
Oh
crap
. The spell hid his body. I’d cut Gee himself instead of his spell.
The mist retreated, almost a flinch, and snapped back hard. A punch of power hit me. Electric and solid. Muscle, claws, and something soft, hit me, like a bronze, spiked fist in a down glove, the fist supercharged with electricity. I felt/heard a sharp, sizzling hiss. Stumbled and fell back. Barked my heels on the concrete.
Gee was awake and focused on me, his blueblueblue eyes stabbing.
Something
billowed out and up and over me in a wash of wet, steamy heat. Dark bloodred wings unfurled, beat down. I curled as I dropped, falling. Saw a dark-sapphire feathered beast with crimson breast and wings. Claws like spear points, glinting at wingtips and feet. A splatter of liquid flowers, perfume like rainbows hitting the ground. Sparks shooting up where the blossoms landed.
And he was gone. A raptor scree echoed into the night.
I landed on my butt, half rolling, half skidding across the concrete. My elbows took a bounce, ripping a layer of skin away. I rolled off the sidewalk into the street. And lay there, gasping. “Crap,” I whispered, wincing at the ragged rips of pain. “Cah-
rap
.”
I had never seen such a thing. Not in person. But I knew exactly where I had seen an image of one before. And Leo Pellissier had a lot of explaining to do. I eased to my feet and gathered up my stuff. Gee’s blood had nearly dissipated, evaporating like pure alcohol rather than drying and leaving a residue of ruptured cells like, well, like blood. I found a patch larger than the others and dipped a finger into it. Sniffed. It didn’t smell like human blood, but like pine and jasmine and heated copper. Big surprise. It was gone, evaporated, before I could figure out how to save any of it.
I limped to the house. Slammed back inside. Stared down Evangelina and Bruiser as I entered, throwing my sandals down in the foyer as I passed through and my weapons onto my bed. I went to the bathroom and turned on the shower, sticking my heels, then my arms from elbows to hands under the stream, cursing under my breath at the liquid’s cleansing burn. I pulled out a first-aid kit and applied salve to the wounds, covering them with bandages. It would have to do until I could shift. Then, ignoring the two standing in my bedroom doorway, I opened my closet and yanked out my vamp-fighting clothes.