“I’ll tell them, Miss Sookie. They’re real sweet to me.”
“Good fella. Be quick, be quiet.”
He nodded, and was gone into the darkness.
The smell around the building was intensifying to such a degree that I was having trouble breathing. The air was so permeated with scent, I was reminded of passing a candle shop in a mall.
Pam said, “Where have you sent Bubba?”
“Back to our Wiccans. They need to make three innocent people stand out somehow so we won’t kill ’em.”
“But he has to come back now. He has to break down the door for me!”
“But . . .” I was disconcerted at Pam’s reaction. “He can’t go in without an invitation, like you.”
“Bubba is brain damaged, degraded. He’s not altogether a true vampire. He can enter without an express invitation.”
I gaped at Pam. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She just raised her eyebrows. When I thought back, it was true that I could remember at least twice that Bubba had entered dwellings without an invitation. I’d never put two and two together.
“So I’ll have to be the first through the door,” I said, more matter-of-factly than I was really feeling. “Then I invite you all in?”
“Yes. Your invitation will be enough. The building doesn’t belong to them.”
“Should we do this now?”
Pam gave an almost inaudible snort. She was smiling in the glow of the streetlight, suddenly exhilarated. “You waiting for an engraved invite?”
Lord save me from sarcastic vampires. “You think Bubba’s had enough time to get to the Wiccans?”
“Sure. Let’s nail some witch butt,” she said happily. I could tell the fate of the local Wiccans was very low on her list of priorities. Everyone seemed to be looking forward to this but me. Even the young Were was showing a lot of fang.
“I kick, you go in,” Pam said. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek, utterly surprising me.
I thought,
I
so
don’t want to be here.
Then I got up from my crouch, stood behind Pam, and watched in awe while she cocked a leg and kicked with the force of four or five mules. The lock shattered, the door sprang inward while the old wood nailed over it splintered and cracked, and I leaped inside and screamed “Come in!” to the vampire behind me and the ones at the back door. For an odd moment, I was in the lair of the witches by myself, and they’d all turned to look at me in utter astonishment.
The room was full of candles and people sitting on cushions on the floor; during the time we’d waited outside, all the others in the building seemed to have come into this front room, and they were sitting cross-legged in a circle, each with a candle burning before her, and a bowl, and a knife.
Of the three I’d try to save, “old woman” was easiest to recognize. There was only one white-haired woman in the circle. She was wearing bright pink lipstick, a little skewed and smeared, and there was dried blood on her cheek. I grabbed her arm and pushed her into a corner, while all about me was chaos. There were only three human men in the room. Hallow’s brother, Mark, now being attacked by a pack of wolves, was one of them. The second male was a middle-aged man with concave cheeks and suspicious black hair, and he not only was muttering some kind of spell but pulling a switch-blade from the jacket lying on the floor to his right. He was too far away for me to do anything about it; I had to rely on the others to protect themselves. Then I spotted the third man, birthmark on cheek—must be Parton. He was cowering with his hands over his head. I knew how he felt.
I grabbed his arm and pulled up, and he came up punching, of course. But I wasn’t having any of that, no one was going to hit me, so I aimed my fist through his ineffectually flailing arms and got him right on the nose. He shrieked, adding another layer of noise to the already cacophonous room, and I yanked him over to the same corner where I’d stashed Jane. Then I saw that the older woman and the young man were both shining. Okay, the Wiccans had come through with a spell and it was working, though just a tad late. Now I had to find a shining young woman with dyed red hair, the third local.
But my luck ran out then; hers already had. She was shining, but she was dead. Her throat had been torn out by one of the wolves: one of ours, or one of theirs, it didn’t really matter.
I scrambled though the melee back to the corner and seized both of the surviving Wiccans by the arm. Debbie Pelt came rushing up. “Get out of here,” I said to them. “Find the other Wiccans out there, or go home now. Walk, get a cab, whatever.”
“It’s a bad neighborhood out there,” quavered Jane.
I stared at her. “And this isn’t?” The last I saw of the two, Debbie was pointing and giving them instructions. She had stepped out the doorway with them. I was about to take off after them, since I wasn’t supposed to be here anyway, when one of the Were witches snapped at my leg. Its teeth missed flesh but snagged my pants leg, and that was enough to yank me back. I stumbled and nearly fell to the floor, but managed to grasp the doorjamb in time to regain my feet. At that moment, the second wave of Weres and vamps came through from the back room, and the wolf darted off to meet the new assault from the rear.
The room was full of flying bodies and spraying blood and screams.
The witches were fighting for all they were worth, and the ones who could shift had done so. Hallow had changed, and she was a snarling mass of snapping teeth. Her brother was trying to work some kind of magic, which required him to be in his human form, and he was trying to hold off the Weres and the vampires long enough to complete the spell.
He was chanting something, he and the concave-cheeked man, even as Mark Stonebrook drove a fist into Eric’s stomach.
A heavy mist began to crawl through the room. The witches, who were fighting with knives or wolf teeth, got the idea, and those who could speak began to add to whatever Mark was saying. The cloud of mist in the room began to get thicker and thicker, until it was impossible to tell friend from foe.
I leaped for the door to escape from the suffocating cloud. This stuff made breathing a real effort. It was like trying to inhale and exhale cotton balls. I extended my hand, but the bit of wall I touched didn’t include a door. It had been right there! I felt a curl of panic in my stomach as I patted frantically, trying to trace the outline of the exit.
Not only did I fail to find the doorjamb, I lost touch with the wall altogether on my next sideways step. I stumbled over a wolf’s body. I couldn’t see a wound, so I got hold of its shoulders and dragged, trying to rescue it from the thick smoke.
The wolf began to writhe and change under my hands, which was pretty disconcerting. Even worse, it changed into a naked Hallow. I didn’t know anyone could change that fast. Terrified, I let go of her immediately and backed away into the cloud. I’d been trying to be a good Samaritan with the wrong victim. A nameless woman, one of the witches, grabbed me from behind with superhuman strength. She tried to grip my neck with one hand while holding my arm with the other, but her hand kept slipping, and I bit her as hard as I could. She might be a witch, and she might be a Were, and she might have drunk a gallon of vamp blood, but she was no warrior. She screamed and released me.
By now I was completely disoriented. Which way was out? I was coughing and my eyes were streaming. The only sense I was sure of was gravity. Sight, hearing, touch: all were affected by the thick white billows, which were getting ever denser. The vampires had an advantage in this situation; they didn’t need to breathe. All the rest of us did. Compared to the thickening atmosphere in the old bakery, the polluted city air outside had been pure and delicious.
Gasping and weeping, I flung my arms out in front of me and tried to find a wall or a doorway, any sort of landmark. A room that had not seemed so large now seemed cavernous. I felt I’d stumbled through yards of nothingness, but that wasn’t possible unless the witches had changed the dimensions of the room, and my prosaic mind just couldn’t accept the possibility. From around me I heard screams and sounds that were muffled in the cloud, but no less frightening. A spray of blood suddenly appeared down the front of my coat. I felt the spatter hit my face. I made a noise of distress that I couldn’t form into words. I knew it wasn’t my blood, and I knew I hadn’t been hurt, but somehow that was hard for me to believe.
Then something fell past me, and as it was on its way to the floor I glimpsed a face. It was the face of Mark Stonebrook, and he was in the process of dying. The smoke closed in around him, and he might as well have been in another city.
Maybe I should crouch, too? The air might be better close to the floor. But Mark’s body was down there, and other things. So much for Mark removing the spell on Eric, I thought wildly. Now we’ll need Hallow. “The best-laid plans of mice and men . . .” Where’d my grandmother gotten that quote? Gerald knocked me sideways as he pushed past in pursuit of something I couldn’t see.
I told myself I was brave and resourceful, but the words rang hollow. I blundered ahead, trying not trip over the debris on the floor. The witches’ paraphernalia, bowls and knives and bits of bone and vegetation that I couldn’t identify, had been scattered in the scuffle. A clear spot opened up unexpectedly, and I could see an overturned bowl and one of the knives on the floor at my feet. I scooped up the knife just before the cloud rolled back over it. I was sure the knife was supposed to be used for some ritual—but I wasn’t a witch, and I needed it to defend myself. I felt better when I had the knife, which was real pretty and felt very sharp.
I wondered what our Wiccans were doing. Could they be responsible for the cloud? I wished I’d gotten to vote.
Our witches, as it turned out, were getting a live feed from the scene of the fight from one of their coven sisters, who was a scryer. (Though she was physically with them, she could see what was happening on the surface of a bowl of water, I learned later.) She could make out more using that method than we could, though why she didn’t see just a bunch of white smoke billowing on the surface of that water, I don’t know.
Anyway, our witches made it rain . . . in the building. Somehow the rain slowly cut back on the cloud cover, and though I felt damp and extremely cold, I also discovered I was close to the inner door, the one leading into the second, large room. Gradually, I became aware that I could see; the room had started to glow with light, and I could discern shapes. One bounded toward me on legs that seemed not-quite-human, and Debbie Pelt’s face snarled at me. What was she doing here? She’d stepped out the door to show the Wiccans which way to find safety, and now she was back in the room.
I don’t know if she could help it or not, or if she’d just gotten swept up in the madness of battle, but Debbie had partially changed. Her face was sprouting fur, and her teeth had begun to lengthen and sharpen. She snapped at my throat, but a convulsion caused by the change made her teeth fall short. I tried to step back, but I stumbled over something on the floor and took a precious second or two to regain my footing. She began to lunge again, her intent unmistakable, and I recalled that I had a knife in my hand. I slashed at her, and she hesitated, snarling.
She was going to use the confusion to settle our score. I wasn’t strong enough to fight a shape-shifter. I’d have to use the knife, though something inside me cringed at the thought.
Then from the tags and tatters of the mist came a big hand stained with blood, and that big hand grabbed Debbie Pelt’s throat and squeezed. And squeezed. Before I could track the hand up the arm to the face of its owner, a wolf leaped from the floor to knock me down.
And sniff my face.
Okay, that was . . . then the wolf on top of me was knocked off and rolling on the floor, snarling and snapping at another wolf. I couldn’t help, because the two were moving so quickly I couldn’t be sure I’d help the right party.
The mist was dispersing at a good rate now, and I could see the room as a whole, though there were still patches of opaque fog. Though I’d been desperate for this moment, I was almost sorry now that it’d arrived. Bodies, both dead and wounded, littered the floor among the paraphernalia of the coven, and blood spattered the walls. Portugal, the handsome young Were from the air force base, lay sprawled in front of me. He was dead. Culpepper crouched beside him, keening. This was a small piece of war, and I hated it.
Hallow was still standing and completely in her human form, bare and smeared with blood. She picked up a wolf and slung it at the wall as I watched. She was magnificent and horrible. Pam was creeping up behind her, and Pam was disheveled and dirty. I’d never seen the vampire so much as ruffled, and I almost didn’t recognize her. Pam launched herself, catching Hallow at the hips and knocking her to the floor. It was as good a tackle as I’d ever seen in years of Friday night football, and if Pam had caught Hallow a little higher up and could have gotten a grip on her, it would have been all over. But Hallow was slippery with the misty rain and with blood, and her arms were free. She twisted in Pam’s grasp and seized Pam’s long straight hair in both hands and pulled, and clumps of the hair came off, attached to a good bit of scalp.
Pam shrieked like a giant teakettle. I’d never heard a noise that loud come out of a throat—in this case not a human throat, but a throat nonetheless. Since Pam was definitely of the “get even” school, she pinned Hallow to the floor by gripping both her upper arms and pressing, pressing, until Hallow was flattened. Since the witch was so strong, it was a terrible struggle, and Pam was hampered by the blood streaming down her face. But Hallow was human, and Pam was not. Pam was winning until one of the witches, the hollow-cheeked man, crawled over to the two woman and bit into Pam’s neck. Both her arms were occupied, and she couldn’t stop him. He didn’t just bite, he drank, and as he drank, his strength increased, as if his battery was getting charged. He was draining right from the source. No one seemed to be watching but me. I scrambled across the limp, furry body of a wolf and one of the vampires to pummel on the hollow-cheeked man, who simply ignored me.