The stink of my anger and my blood and the burned smell of wax and pine coiled inside me with each breath. Ignoring the audience, I ripped off my blood splattered, torn pants and tossed them to the floor, not caring if I flashed an audience. I pulled on the silk long johns and slid into leather biker pants, the zipper ripping the silence. I stepped into socks and the butt-stomper boots. Opening the weapon safe in the closet, I began loading for vamp, sliding each vamp-killer into place, checking to see that each was snug, yet pulled freely. The knife used to stab through Gee’s glamour had a nick in the blade a quarter inch deep, blackened as if by fire; the steel edge around it was shattered. I touched the blackened steel and it flaked away like ashes. It was useless. I could repair the blade, but I’d never trust it again. I could maybe replace the blade into the old hilt, but that would cost more than simply buying a new one. I hefted it into the garbage where it thumped hollowly, steel against plastic. I slid the M4’s soft leather harness over my T-shirt. When it was comfortable, I reached into the safe and pulled out the soft velvet bag holding the vamp weapon Sabina had lent me. The priestess had asked for it back; I’d tried to return it once. Maybe she would be there this time, and I could ask the old vamp some questions about vamps and Mercy Blades and old grudges against Leo and Bruiser without getting my throat torn out. And maybe she knew something about weres, because sure as angels sing, every problem I was seeing started with the appearance of the weres, even before I knew they existed. I stuffed the velvet bag into the leather jacket’s breast pocket.
“Jane?”
Fury blazed up in me. I whirled on Bruiser. “What? What do you want?” His mouth opened, confusion on his face. I let everything I was feeling rip through me. Heat flashed like lightning over my skin. I took a step toward him. “You know, don’t you? What Gee is.” Bruiser took a step back. “Tell me!” I hissed, Beast rising into my eyes. “You tell me what that thing is.”
“Gee? Leo’s Mercy Blade? I don’t know, Jane.”
“It’s the same thing on the floor of Leo’s foyer. I thought it was a phoenix rising, a heraldic emblem. But it isn’t.”
“Phoenix—no. The image in the foyer is an Anzu. A Sumerian storm god.”
“A storm . . .” My voice trailed away, taking most of the anger with it. I backed away from Bruiser, never taking my eyes from him. I sniffed, smelling a trace of shock, but no dissembling, no stress pheromones in his sweat from telling a lie.
“Not the creator god,” he said, “but a minor god, like the ones the Babylonians and the peoples of Canaan worshiped. A mythical creature who rides storm clouds, and who offers his loyalty to a person or family in return for a service, much like royal dispensation or a genie in a bottle. Some religious sects call them watchers, angelic beasts with a fondness for humans. They’ve been compared to dragons, but are much smaller and much more fierce, feathered, beaked, taloned rap-tors. But they aren’t
real
. Why would you think that Girrard DiMercy is an Anzu?” Bruiser’s face was amused. He really didn’t know.
I turned away and pulled on my leather jacket, buckled myself into enough weapons to start a one woman war, and left the house without another word, helmeting up and riding Bitsa out through the side garden entrance into the night. As always, the smells of the quarter were arresting, the combination like a gift to my Beastly half—food, people, vamps, sex, food, exhaust, lots of alcohol in its various forms. But mostly food. The now familiar aromas helped to settle Beast and let me think.
I shook off the last of the rage that had taken hold of me and was left with whirling questions. If Bruiser didn’t know that Gee perhaps belonged to race of beings once worshipped as lesser gods, then, did Leo know? The MOC wasn’t exactly forthcoming with info on his past. I had been snookered with the scattered details Gee had shared about how his parents, the Spaniard and the French woman had named him . . . Leo was French. Had an Anzu sworn fealty to the Pellissier family at some point the distant past? Or perhaps to vamps in general, treating vamps as members of one family? I’d believed everything Gee had said. I was supposed to be able to read body language—Okay, not applicable here. Anzu body language didn’t seem to translate to human. As usual in my life, not knowing the answers to basic questions was dangerous. Hence this visit to Sabina, priestess of the Mithrans, one of the oldest vamps still kicking, the one in town who knew all the answers, even to questions I didn’t know to ask.
My thoughts settling, I rode, letting the traffic pick the pace, the French Quarter packed with tourists and workers out for food, fun, and games.
As I wheeled between cars, I remembered the fractured moments when I had seen Gee transform. His feathers were blue and burgundy. The bird on Leo’s foyer floor was burgundy without any blue. Gee’s eyes were blue with a funky, oily shimmer that moved, like heat rising off asphalt. An effect of his magic, probably. And he was a lot smaller than the human he appeared to be when in his real form. A wingspan of twelve feet, body maybe three or four feet from beak to claws. I’d guess Gee weighed no more than sixty, maybe seventy pounds, just from the glance I had of his body.
The largest albatross had a wingspan as wide, but it weighed only twenty-six or twenty-seven pounds. Some Pterosaurs—prehistoric birdlike creatures—had wingspans up to forty feet and weighed up to two hundred fifty pounds, though I’d never seen anything that suggested they had true beaks or were feathered, but then, what did I know. Fossil discoveries were being made all the time. Maybe Gee was a prehistoric bird, though that conflicted with his comment about going home to heal. And where was home?
The weather was turning, with damp air blowing in off the gulf, sliding beneath a cooler layer of air from the north, or maybe it was the other way around and the cool air was underneath. Well, I now knew a storm god. Maybe I could ask him. A freaking feathered dragon.
I bent over the bike and roared my way out of the city. The night sky was completely overcast, a wet wind was scudding through the trees and gusting across the road, and the temps were now only in the mid-eighties. Cool for summer in New Orleans, not that I expected it to last, but it was better than the hot, wet hell of the past week.
By the time I got to the vamp graveyard I was cooled off and thinking again. Motor puttering loud, I sat outside the gates, boots on the street below me, and phoned Leo on his tracking-device-of-a-cell-phone. When he came to the phone, he spoke before I could introduce myself. “I attacked you when you fled. It was the action of an unchained. I am . . . sorry.”
Leo had just apologized to me.
I closed my mouth on what I had been about to say. Instead, I said. “Okaaaay. Apology accepted.” A sharp silence hung in the air after my words. I figured that was enough of the niceties. “Let me in to the vamp graveyard. I need to see Sabina.”
“Why?” That was Leo, no wasted words, no wasted emotion. Oh—unless it was to try to kill me. He’d wasted a lot on that.
“Open the gate or I’ll just ride on through and you can deal with the dead bodies.” Okay, maybe not so completely calmed down.
I could almost hear the laughter in Leo’s voice, when he said, “And which dead bodies would that be, chère?” It sounded like sha, not cherie, the Louisiana version of the French endearment. And I didn’t like Leo being endearing to me.
I gritted my teeth. “The enforcer-types I’ll stake or shoot when they come to Sabina’s rescue when the alarm goes off.” I gunned the engine. “Now, Leo.”
“Of course, Jane. Whatever you wish. Thirty seconds.”
It was only after I hung up that I realized Leo had sounded like his old self. His old well-balanced, emotionally stable self, from before I killed his son’s imposter and he got stuck in the
dolore
. And then feasted on Katie’s dead blood. And then . . . Gee had fed Katie, who maybe fed Leo again—maybe when asking to become his heir—giving Leo some of Gee’s blood? Vamp feeding arrangements were both gross and impossible to understand. I was getting woozy trying to figure it all out.
Leo being sane was a good thing, but no way did I think it was gonna be
all
good. There had to be another shoe to drop. After the last few days, I was likely to see a fashionista’s closet full of falling stilettos.
When I figured my thirty seconds were up, I peeled out and swerved around the gate, into the cemetery and along the crushed-white-shell drive. It was dark, no security lights, not even a candle burning in the nonchapel where Sabina’s sarcophagus lay, but I had better than average night vision after all the years I’d spent in Beast’s skin and, even without the moon, I could see.
The mausoleums were white marble, each with a naked winged angel on top, also of carved stone, one mausoleum for each clan, except that Leo had killed off a few clans recently. The mausoleums were intact, repaired from one of my previous visits. Contact with me had been a bit rough on vamp real estate.
I swung the bike around and tightened my hand on the accelerator. And braked, dropping the bike into a low-angled skid when my eye caught sight of the angel on the Pellissier vault. I cut the engine, dropped the helmet, and walked away from Bitsa to see it better. It was too dark to be certain, but danged if the winged warrior didn’t have Girrard’s features. “Well, slap me silly,” I muttered. “The guy is everywhere.”
Before I got back to Bitsa, I heard a pop and whirled, grabbing for a stake and a vamp-killer, my heart thumping hard. Sabina was standing between two white buildings, wearing her nunnish white robes, her face serene, or as serene as an undead, blood-sucking monster can get. She wasn’t vamped out, which was good, because my throat protector was lost to the wolves. “You did not request an audience.”
“Cry me a river.” The words slipped out before I could I stop them.
“I do not cry. You are impudent. Rude.”
I blew out my irritation, hoping for an obsequious impulse somewhere inside so I could show proper deference. But there was nothing like that inside me right now. “So sue me.”
Her head tilted to the side in that weird, reptilian thing they do. “Why would I wish to involve the legal system of this country?”
I figured modern snarky comments didn’t translate well to a two-thousand-year-old vamp. “What do you want, little nonhuman?” she asked.
“I want you to tell me about the weres.” When she didn’t answer, I said, “You’re an elder. Among my people, an elder is the keeper of knowledge, history, and the old stories, and they share that wisdom whenever they’re asked.”
“The Cursed of Artemis,” she said, her mouth moving as if the words tasted bad. “Children’s tales.”
“Tales I haven’t heard,” I countered. When she didn’t poof away or try to kill me, I dropped to the ground, sitting in the darkness, my back against a mausoleum wall. A misty rain began, as if condensing out of the heavy air and settling to the ground. I turned my face up to it. “I need to hear the stories, Sabina. Please.” My housemother in the children’s home where I grew up would be tickled with my manners.
Sabina ignored the rain, though her clothing was damp with it. “All myth is based upon some form of truth and history, though twisted and puffed up and hacked away. The tale of the Cursed of Artemis is no different.” The priestess crossed her arms under her breasts and tucked her hands into her sleeves. It looked almost practiced, as if she wanted to appear human, aping human gestures. “Long before the Greeks named her Artemis, was Lolandes, the woman. I have often thought that her legend became confused with, and merged into, the earth goddess, who was common to all ancient tribal peoples. But Lolandes, renamed the Artemis of Grecian lore, was no goddess, but a powerful, long-lived mortal, one sometimes called a witch, though different from today’s witches. She was the most powerful of her kind, in a time when women were revered, when political and religious power was passed through the matriarchal line. She was venerated for helping animals and humans in childbirth and for caring for wild animals.”
Sabina turned her back against the stone wall, standing so close to me that the hem of her robes brushed my leather-clad knee. Beast nudged me to stand, not liking my submissive posture beneath the priestess, but I shoved her away. She went, giving me a huff of disgust.
“Lolandes once had a female bird as pet, a type of falcon, a fierce hunting bird. It was dedicated to her, never needing the jesses or the hood, and returned to her after each hunt, bringing Lolandes the choicest of kills from the hunting fields. The two were inseparable.
“One day at dusk, beneath a full moon, a wolf killed the bird, fighting over a doe they both had targeted. Lolandes cursed the wolf with a disease, similar to rabies, that affects mind and brain. And she took up the body of her bloodied pet and she mourned.”
Sabina paused and I wanted her to hurry it up. But when you’ve lived for two thousand years, what’s an hour or a decade or two? And I needed to hear the tale of the first weres, the Cursed of Artemis. So I schooled my mind to patience and my mouth to silence.
Rain collected on the skin of my face and beaded. The wind gusted hard, then soughed through the tops of nearby pines, needles and branches whispering. A hard blast of rain hit the earth nearby and died. The wind gusted again, stronger. Thunder boomed, far away.
Some minutes later, Sabina said, “The wolf ran into the woods. That night, it bit a civet, a lion, a dog, a snake, and other of Lolandes’ predator animals, those she had cared for until now, transferring the curse of illness to each. The wolf hid by day. The next night, biting a gardener, he passed the curse of Lolandes to the humans. At the next full moon, the gardener changed into the form of a wolf and succumbed to bloodlust. Shortly thereafter other were-creatures began to appear, humans bitten by the cursed, forced to change by the light of the full moon. But the wolf was first. And the wolf’s curse was greatest.”