Have Stakes Will Travel: Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock

Have Stakes Will Travel

Stories from the World of Jane Yellowrock

Faith Hunter

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Copyright © Faith Hunter, 2012

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“Signatures of the Dead” previously published in Strange Brew anthology by St. Martin’s Griffin (original edition: July 7, 2009).

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ISBN: 978-1-101-61166-1

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyrights

Contents

NOTES TO READERS

TIMELINE OF STORIES IN JANE YELLOWROCK’S WORLD

WE SA AND THE LUMBER KING

HAINTS

SIGNATURES OF THE DEAD

CAJUN WITH FANGS

Excerpt from DEATH'S RIVAL

A NOTE TO READERS

Hi, everyone,

With the last short story compilation, Cat Tales, I wrote a letter to you all, and frankly, except when it comes to making up stories, there isn’t a lot left to say (grinning). So today I want to talk a little (very little) about the new shorts.

I’ve always said that when I first envisioned Jane, I “wanted a character who had no past, with seemingly only the future open to her. I wanted a character who was a bit repressed socially, sexually, and emotionally. I wanted a character who was a singularity—the only one of her kind in the world. I wanted a loner in the truest sense of the word.” (Yes, I just quoted myself.)

But seeing Jane from the inside, from her point of view (POV), leaves us seeing Jane only as she sees herself. I wanted to explore how Jane is viewed by those outside her own head, her friends and lovers, and that is what so many of these shorts, some from her past, allow me to do.

For Have Stakes Will Travel, I wrote a piece from Beast’s POV from the years just before the Hunger Times, a piece I titled “We Sa and the Lumber King.” WeSa is Cherokee for bobcat. The Appalachian Mountains were heavily deforested in the late 1880s to the early 1920s, resulting in severe erosion, loss of habitat, horrible flooding with tremendous loss of life, and destruction of the lifestyles of the hardy farmers and the few Cherokee who still lived there. I wanted to show how Beast felt about the men who came in and destroyed her world. “We Sa and the Lumber King” gives you a short-short from Beast’s perspective, with her values and honor system.

“Haints” is a story from Molly Everhart Trueblood’s perspective, which allows us to see Jane as Molly saw her, early in their relationship. Molly, being the earth mother type, feels sorry for Jane in a lot of ways, which was a surprise to me! Until I wrote this story, I had no idea how deep her worry for Jane went. “Haints” allowed me to let their relationship grow a pace or two.

“Signatures of the Dead” was previously published in the anthology Strange Brew, headlining Charlaine Harris, so if you missed it then, you get the chance to read it now. And if you read it then, here is your chance to reread and get a taste of Jane, now that you know her better.

“Cajun with Fangs” was a total blast! It’s from Jane’s point of view and takes place shortly after the ending of Raven Cursed and before the start of Death’s Rival, which is out in October 2012.

Following the shorts, you’ll get a special extra-long preview of Death’s Rival, only available here. Yes, it will be out on October! (Cue the flashing lights and the pom-poms. If you feel like dancing, I suggest a merengue beat and—for the ladies—a full skirt to swish around! For the guys, I have to say, you will look splendid in a tux.) Okay, blatant plug is done.

If I have totally confused you, I’ve also included an updated timeline of stories in Jane’s world to help. I hope you enjoy all the shorts. I thank you for being fans of Jane and Beast.

—Faith

www.faithhunter.net

facebook.com/officialfaithhunter

P.S.—Don’t miss Beast’s Advice Column to humans, which is at her Facebook Fan Page: https://www.facebook.com/faith.hunter#!/pages/Beast/135860763157310 or do a Facebook search for Beast.

TIMELINE OF STORIES IN JANE YELLOWROCK’S WORLD

> > > > “We Sa and the Lumber King”

> > > > A brand-new short story from Beast’s POV, set in the Hunger Times.

> > > > “The Early Years”

> > > > Short story about Jane just after she left the children’s home. Available as part of the Cat Tales e-book.

> > > > “Cat Tats”

> > > > Short story about Rick LaFleur. Available as part of the Cat Tales e-book.

> > > > “Kits”

> > > > Short story about Jane Yellowrock with Molly Everhart Trueblood as a secondary character. Available as part of the Cat Tales e-book.

> > > > “Haints”

> > > > Short story from Molly Everhart Trueblood’s POV, with Jane Yellowrock as a secondary character. Available as part of the Have Stakes Will Travel e-book.

> > > > “Signatures of the Dead”

> > > > Originally published in the anthology Strange Brew, “Signatures of the Dead” is reprinted in Have Stakes Will Travel. It is a short story about Molly Everhart Trueblood, with Jane Yellowrock as a secondary character.

> > > > Skinwalker

> > > > The first Jane Yellowrock novel.

> > > > Blood Curse

> > > > The second Jane Yellowrock novel.

> > > > Mercy Blade

> > > > The third Jane Yellowrock novel.

> > > > “Blood, Fangs, and Going Furry”

> > > > Short story about Rick LaFleur, with Jane Yellowrock as a secondary character. It picks up just after the ending of Mercy Blade. Available as part of the Cat Tales e-book.

> > > > Raven Cursed

> > > > The fourth Jane Yellowrock novel, available January 2012.

> > > > Easy Pickings

> > > > The crossover novella written by C.E. Murphy and Faith Hunter. Jane Yellowrock and Joanne Walker are pulled into a different reality where they have to fight a big bad ugly. This novella stands outside of the Skinwalker series, but slides nicely into this spot. Available as an e-book.

> > > > “Cajun with Fangs”

> > > > A short story from Jane Yellowrock’s POV, set soon after Raven Cursed and before Death’s Rival. Available in Have Stakes Will Travel e-book.

> > > > Death’s Rival

> > > > The fifth Jane Yellowrock novel, available October 2012.

> > > > Blood Trade

> > > > The sixth Jane Yellowrock novel, available 2013.

> > > > > > Author’s note: This story takes place in the Hunger Times of the late 1800s–early 1900s.

We Sa and the Lumber King

I/We climbed stunted tree, sat in twisted limb. High on ledge at top of gorge. Hidden by smoke from man-fire far below. Man-fire burned limbs, leaves cut from trees. Smoke filled air. Sound of axes echoed across gorge. Sound of train whistle split air. Hurt ears. Bad sound. All sound of man was bad sound, but sound of white man was worst sound. No sound of birds. No sound of prey on ground. No good sounds anywhere since white man came to mountains. Below, in gorge, limbs and trees and branches were dropped into water, dropped there by human men. White men.

We sa, little bobcat, said into back of mind, Yunega tsiluga tala tlugvi, tsiluga totsi tlugvi. White man kill white pine trees, kill white oak trees. Asgina. Devils.

Alpha devil is there, I thought at her. White man in gray pelt. Do you understand his words?

Yunega talk is not Tsalagi talk, she said in mind speech. I do not understand.

I flicked ears, twitched tail, and said to her, Alpha devil points with paw to other white men which trees to cut. With paws and tongue, tells them to load dead trees onto flat thing that moves, flat place called train car. Tells them to throw dead limbs and branches into river below. River is full of trees and does not run. Fish die. Animals run away and die. Birds fly away and die. Smoke fills air and I cannot breathe.

I/we had talked in mind-den about this. I said to We sa again, White devils must die. If white alpha devil dies, then all white men will stop killing earth. Yes?

We sa did not answer. We sa shivered in back of mind, in cave-den of mind, in place she had made her own. We watched white men in gorge. We had watched them for two days. We knew where the den of the alpha devil was. We knew he went there at night, always by the same path. Just as deer once used to take same path to water in gorge below, alpha devil took same path to his train-car-den. I had been ambush hunter even before We sa came to me. I knew to study prey.

After long time, shadows began to stretch upon ground. We sa stirred and asked, We will kill yunega asgina? We sa knew this, but still she thought, silent in mind as we watched white man. I do not like to kill humans.

White humans are devils. They kill the earth. I/we will kill them.

But not eat them, We sa said. Elisi, grandmother, say man-flesh makes us sick.

We will not eat him. But I/we will kill killer of hunting territory. Killer of trees and killer of prey.

Man was not good hunter, man was stupid. But man was winning and I/we were losing. After killing alpha male human, I/we would leave this place for deep gorge, many days walk away. We sa knew this. She did not like it, but she understood. We sa had once been human, but not white man human. Tsalagi human—Cherokee. Tsalagi understood how to live with earth and not kill it. Some Tsalagi did not protect the earth, some killed her, but not most. All white men killed earth. White man was evil.

I stood up on paws on tree limb and watched as night dropped darkness over all of earth. When shadows were long and human men left from killing trees to go eat food, I leaped to ground. We sa hid in dark of mind-den, afraid.

I raced down from ledge and trees on sheer part of gorge, place where white man could not get to easily, place of stunted trees and snakes and rock. I leaped straight down, thick tail whirling for balance. Half way down gorge-fall, I twisted like snake, and whipped tail. Changed direction, and landed on tiny ledge. There was small cave in back of ledge. Had once used this place for den to have kits. Liked this place long ago. White man had ruined it. Killed it. I did not go to den now, but pawpawpaw down across tiny ledges, leaping from ledge to ledge, which white men called outcropping, until I reached bottom of gorge. Then I moved in shadows for train car of white man, den of white alpha devil.

Night vision came as sunlight left. Earth turned into silvers and greens and grays. Liked this time of day/night. We sa called it beautiful. I called it safe. Shadows were dark and deep and We sa had explained that humans could not see in dark. I padded through dark over rutted bare earth to den of alpha devil. Curled into darker shadow beneath train car. I waited. I/we are good at waiting. Time passed. Night was dark. No moon stood in sky. Moon had died and would be reborn as kit-moon in one night, tiny and shaped like thin claw. I/we had chosen this night for this reason. We sa closed her eyes, afraid.

When night was full, I alone crept up stairs and leaped high, onto roof of train car. It was warm from sun of day. Was good place to ambush hunt. Looked over edge of train car, to path white man took for food. Was like ambush hunting on ledge in high hills before white man came and sent prey away.

Heard man-paws on earth, loud and scuffling inside dried skin of cow—boots. Man was not balanced and graceful and should not walk on two legs. Would be more quiet and graceful on four legs. But I was happy that white man was stupid and noisy. Listened and watched as he came closer. He carried in one paw much meat. It was cooked, which was bad, but it was meat and I/we had not eaten in two days. We hungered. White man came closer.

I gathered paws close under belly, balanced and steady as rock on flat land. White man came closer. He put one foot on step, one foot still on ground. Was unbalanced on one foot. I leaped. Landed on white man. Hard! Tumbled to ground, tangled in his upper legs. Landed on top of white man. With killing teeth, I ripped out his throat. Then held him by throat as he thrashed. He died. His blood was hot in my mouth. It did not taste good, but I hungered! Wanted to drink!

But We sa put her mind on top of my mind. Tlano! She said. Do not eat!

I snarled but I did not drink blood or eat white man meat. We sa was smart. Blood tasted like blood of buzzard, full of dead things. I took his cooked meat and carried it into night. In shadows, I ate. And listened to sounds of white men when they found my enemy. They gathered together like wolf pack. Like pack hunters. They shouted into night, many white man words. They grabbed white man sticks and made loud noises.

Guns, We sa whispered.

When all the white man’s cooked meat was in my belly, I turned and walked into hills. But that night, the foolish white man pack let man-fire go free. The hills began to burn and burn and burn. Hunger Times were upon us.

I would not come back to my old hunting grounds for many, many years.

> > > > > > Author’s note: This story takes place after the short story “Kits” and before the short story “Signatures of the Dead.” Molly Everhart Trueblood is the narrator.

Haints

“Nothing unusual here, Molly,” she said.

I watched Jane Yellowrock as she crawled across the floor of the old house on all fours. Most adults looked foolish or ungainly when crawling, but Jane was graceful, her arms lifting and moving forward with feline balance, her legs raising and lowering, toes pointed like a dancer, even in her western boots. My friend moved silently in the hot, sweaty room, easily avoiding the bird and mouse droppings, the holes in the old linoleum, and avoiding the signs of recent reconstruction—the broken plaster walls, large holes in the floor, and the shattered remains of the toilet, tub, and kitchen sink in the corner. Her shoulder blades lifted up high with each crawling step, visible beneath her thin T-shirt, her head lowered on the thin stem of her neck, moving catlike. I envied her the grace and the slenderness, but little else. Jane was more alone than anyone I had ever known.

Now she breathed in with a strange sucking hiss. Flehmen behavior, she called it, using her hypersensitive senses to smell things the way a cat would, the way a mountain lion would, sucking air in over her tongue and the roof of her mouth, her lips pulled back and mouth open. Mostly, she did it only when she was alone, because it sounded weird and looked weirder—not a human action at all. But because I had asked her for help, and because no one but me would see her, she did it now, scenting for the smell of . . . of whatever.

As I watched, Jane crawled out of the half-renovated kitchen and into the dining room beyond. We were both dressed in old jeans and T-shirts, clothes that could get filthy and be tossed into the washer, and already Jane looked like something the cat dragged in, which was funny in all sorts of ways. Jane Yellowrock was a Cherokee skinwalker, and her favorite animal form was a mountain lion. She called it her inner beast, which I still didn’t understand, but I figured she’d tell me someday.

I’d met Jane in the Ingles grocery store, when a group of witch haters caught me in the frozen foods section and harassed me. None of us Everharts were officially out of the closet then but most townspeople were okay with my family maybe carrying the witch gene. It was the out-of-towners who had the problem—a group that wasn’t from the religious right, but were just as rabid. I still don’t know what Jane did—she stepped in front of me so all I saw was her back—but the haters departed. Fast. I gave her my thanks and a card to my family café and we parted ways.

The next morning Jane came into the Seven Sassy Sister’s Herb Shop and Café, and nearly cleaned us out of bacon, sausage, and pancakes. The appetite of that morning was because she had just changed back from an animal form and needed calories to make up for the shift, but I didn’t know that then. I just thought it was a crying shame that a woman who was so skinny could eat like that. If I tried to shovel in that much food, even half that much food, I’d weigh four hundred pounds. I think I gained three pounds just watching her eat, that first day.

And then the group of witch haters from the day before started picketing out front. I guess they were in town and figured they should make the most of it. They were carrying signs about not suffering a witch to live—the usual crappola—and chanting, “Save our children! Save our children!” Two cars pulled by and slowed, as if to turn in, and then pulled on away. Such attention was going to be damaging to business.

Jane paid her bill, went outside, and revved up her bike. And revved up her bike. And revved up her bike again. At which point I realized she was doing it on purpose. Then she did something to the engine, and revved it up again. And black smoke came out. So Jane rode in circles around the parking lot, shouting to the witch haters, “So sorry about the noise! I have engine problems!” After about ten minutes of noise, the witch haters left. It was so cool. I thought the twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, were going to have twin cows.

That’s Jane. A loner with a cause. Any cause, as long as it’s protecting someone.

She sneezed, bringing me back from my daydreams to my friend crawling around on the floor of a deserted, possibly haunted house.

The dining room had little floor left, and I could see the ground and the foundation beneath the house, between the struts. Still on her hands and knees, Jane moved into the foyer, circled its perimeter once, ignored the stairs leading to the second story, and crawled into the parlor beyond. I followed, watching from the foyer, which had been exposed when the construction crew pulled off the old boards covering the entrance. Oddly enough, though every other room in the house showed the results of men with mallets and hammers and crowbars, the parlor had still not been touched. The finish of the original handmade woodwork below the chair railing and the moldings at the ceiling were dark and filthy, the plaster between was cracked and split with water damage, and the last bits of old, red wallpaper curled, hanging loose, covered with spiderwebs and the dust of decades.

I stood in the six-foot-wide opening, watching my best friend track through the dust. The flooring beneath the accumulated filth was wood parquet, probably cut from the land the house stood on, milled by the lumber baron who built the house in the previous century. He had died a gruesome death, killed by a bear beside his train car, or so the old story went. His son had married a witch, and their daughter had inherited, and so had her daughter. However, the old house hadn’t been occupied in decades, not since Monique Ravencroft, the most powerful witch in the Appalachians, had disappeared without a trace.

The family had died out except for a son who no longer wanted the property, and the old house had been sold to a local lawyer for his business offices. Construction had begun quickly thereafter. The workers, however, had abandoned the project two days ago, after a flying mallet attacked a plumber standing in an empty room. The construction company owner had asked the local coven in the little township of Hainbridge to investigate, but the women had had no luck identifying the spiritual miscreant. They had called me in to discover if the troublemaker was a ghost, demon, or haint—haint being a term applied, in this part of the woods, to a form of poltergeist, or supernatural energy that usually manifests around a person instead of around a place. Whatever had attacked the plumber, it needed to be identified so the coven could coerce or force it to vacate the premises. Unfortunately, all I’d found was a sense of something dead in the house, and I’d had no luck calling to or talking to any non-corporeal would-be-killer. I hoped Jane, with her hyper senses, might discover something I had missed.

Jane sniffed around the fireplace on the far side of the room, the interior walls black with wood or coal smoke, the old grate rusted through and coated with spider webs. She seemed to find the opening uninteresting, and moved on to the corner. She paused there, repeating the openmouthed sniffing, and looked up, puzzled. “Molly, are you sure there’s something dead here?”

I nodded. I’m from a long family of witches, all of us pretty much in the witch-closet, and while I’m an earth witch, with the gift of growing plants, healing bodies, and restoring balance to nature, I’m a little unusual for an earth witch, in that I can sense dead things. And there was definitely something dead in this house somewhere.

“I smell witch and vamp,” Jane said.

The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up in alarm. “Vampire? There shouldn’t be a vampire here.”

“It’s been years, but I think . . .” She put her nose back to the dust covered floor, sniffed delicately, and started sneezing. She rolled to her feet and crossed the room, sneezing all the way, her nose buried in the crook of her elbow to keep her filthy hands away from her face. I counted twelve sneezes before she stopped and her face was red from the sneeze effort. “I think I smell vamp and witch together,” she said, the back of a wrist to her nose, pressing against more sneezes, “and both of them were bleeding.” She stood beside me and turned to face the room. The evidence of her crawling progression was a clear trail through the layers of dust.

“Moll,” she said, “I dropped a stake.” She pointed to the fourteen-inch-long stake in the corner. “Would you go get it, please?”

“No,” I said instantly.

“Why not? You chicken?”

Anger shot through me. “I’m not going—” I stopped, and the anger filtered out of me. Around me the house seemed to wait, expectant, and I turned in a slow circle, standing in the doorway, letting my senses flow out, seeing the hand-carved woodwork, the once-elegant stairs leading up to the second floor, the carpenter’s ladder against the wall. Smelling the dust, the fresh wood, the dirt under the house, and the sweat of the workers from two days past. Hearing the small sounds an old house makes, the pops and quiet groans. Feeling the breath of the house as air moved through it, cool and moist from the open floor and up the stairs, a faint trickle of breeze. I opened my mouth, as Jane did, and breathed, almost tasting the house, its age, elegance, and history.

Midway around, I closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. The magic I hadn’t noted pricked against my skin, cool and light, old, old, old magic, a spell frayed around the edges, one that hadn’t been renewed in decades. “A ward,” I muttered, “combined with something else. Maybe a keep-away spell. Yeah. I can feel it, feel them both, combined. It was a really good one to have lasted this long.” I opened my eyes and studied Jane. “How’d you sense it when I didn’t?”

“Dust,” she said succinctly. At my puzzled expression, she said, “Every room in this place has been walked over, beaten on, knocked down, and partially renovated except this one. The footsteps all go right up to the entrance,” she pointed down to the floor at our feet, “where they removed whatever had been covering the room. And here they stop. I was the first person to so much as step into the room.”

A small smile pulled at her lips, half-proud, half-embarrassed. “I’m guessing the spell treated me like a big-cat. And since hanging around you and Big Evan so much, I’ve realized that sometimes I can feel witch magics. Cool and sparkly on my skin.”

That was a surprise. Humans can only feel magics when the spell is directed at them, as in a keep-away spell that shocks anyone who touches the spelled item. But then, Jane Yellowrock isn’t human. I can do magic—it’s in my very genes, passed along on the X-chromosome from parent to child—but Jane is magic. And scary sometimes.

“Okay.” I sat on the floor in the foyer, outside the opening to the parlor, and reached out with my magics. Immediately I saw the spell. It was mostly green, smelling of pine and hemlock and holly, marking the caster as an earth witch, like me. I held out my hands and touched the edges of the conjure; it flashed against my fingertips painfully, hot and cold together, with minute darker green flashes of deeper pain. Once I concentrated, I could see the parameters of the incantation and the place it was protecting, the far corner of the room where the dust was deepest. A bit of cloth was in the corner, like a man’s old-fashioned handkerchief, and an old newspaper, the rubber band disintegrated into blue goo from the heat and moisture of the long-sealed room. A curl of wallpaper had fallen across it too. I guessed that the spell was tied to an amulet, probably hidden beneath the trash. I stood and brushed the dirt off my jeans.

“So,” I said, “I guess I need to push through the spell and get a feel for what is causing the problem.” The instant I said the words, a sense of dread fell on me. I knew, completely and totally, that if I went into the room, I was going to die. Worse, my child would die. I sucked in a breath, and it burned my throat. My husband would die. Tears stared in the corners of my eyes. And the deaths would be horrible, painful, tortured deaths. It was illogical and stupid and clearly the results of the spell. But it was also real. I backed away, three unsteady steps. And the spell faded.

“Son of a witch on a switch,” I cursed.

Jane was leaning against the molding in the opening, arms crossed, watching me. “Bad?”

“Totally and completely sucky.” I described what I had been made to feel by the spell. “Whoever created that spell was good. Really, really good. And frighteningly inventive.”

Jane nodded, only her head and the tip of her long braid moving. “The worker who nearly got brained by the magical, flying hammer, was he getting ready to go in here?” she asked.

“Yes. Why?” I asked.

“Because that ladder,” she tilted her head to the metal step ladder, “wiggled when you decided to go in. I figured it was going to fly across the room and hit you if you didn’t back off.” Her lips pulled again in that half smile that was uniquely hers. “I was going to catch it before it hit you, of course.”

“Thanks,” I said, eyeing the ladder. “Like I said. That is a really good spell.” I pointed to the corner. “I have a feeling that the original incantation is tied to something in that corner. Maybe an amulet hidden under the trash.”

Jane nodded and uncrossed her arms. Stepping close, she pushed me farther away from the parlor opening and into the dining room opening on the other side of the foyer. Out of the way of flying carpenter tools, I realized. It was an odd dance-step-of-a-move and Jane grinned down at me. She was a dancer, and I had three left feet and couldn’t follow her; I nearly fell. “Careful,” she said, holding me steady.

“Don’t get hurt,” I blurted.

Jane chuckled softly. “My reflexes are fast.”

“Yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Still . . .”

Jane shook her head in amusement and dropped to her knees again. She crawled into and around the parlor, one shoulder and hip brushing against the walls, just the way a cat would explore a room, around the outer edges first. When she reached the wallpaper and cloth on the far side, she batted the paper away in a move so catlike I covered my face to stifle a giggle. Then Jane grabbed up the cloth in two hands, held like paws, and rolled over with it, sending up clouds of dust. When her sneezing fit subsided, she batted the cloth away too, revealing a snake.

I lifted my hand to warn Jane, which was stupid as she had already lifted the snake to expose it as dry, cracked rubber tubing and small pieces of corroded metal. Jane said, “It looks like some weird kind of stethoscope. And this is the amulet, for sure. My hand is stinging, and some kind of green magic is running all over my skin.” She crawled across the room on three limbs, the stethoscope in her left hand.

It was a weird design, with two earpieces and two flat chest pieces. Near where a doctor’s chin might go, the two pieces were connected with a metal tube that had been wrapped in a circle, like a trumpet’s body, and, like a trumpet, the connecting part was clearly designed to increase and maybe modulate sound waves. The dangling pieces seemed longer than most stethoscopes, and the little circular chest pieces were decidedly old fashioned.

Green magics emanated from them and were climbing Jane’s arm and wrapping around her body. Before she reached the doorway, and before the magic reached her head, she dropped the device and swatted it, just like an irritated cat. The spell instantly went still, into stasis, and Jane crawled out of the room, shaking her head, muttering, “I know. I know. I don’t like it either.” She crossed the entry to the room and stood, brushing off her clothes, scowling. But with Jane a scowl meant nothing; an expressionless face meant even less. At her best, Jane was inscrutable, and I’d always put that down to her being found in the mountains by park rangers, with no memory of anything, no language, no people, no nothing, and then being raised in a children’s home and learning how to socialize—or not socialize—in an artificial “family.”

Now that the amulet was closer, I knelt and studied it. From upstairs the creaks of the old house increased, but when I looked up, nothing had changed. Outside the windows, the wind picked up, and buffeted the house. I shrugged and went back to studying. The chest-pieces were made of some kind of plastic, maybe like that Bakelite stuff that was so popular in the early nineteen hundreds. If so, then that dated the device to that era. My grandmother had Bakelite jewelry and it was quite collectable. The stethoscope was in fairly good repair, even the rubber parts, which one might have expected to disintegrate.

I heard clicks to my side and looked up to see that Jane had pulled a small digital camera out of her boot and was taking pictures of the house and the amulet. I made a small mmm of approval, but the photos might be blurred. Magics did that to photos sometimes.

From upstairs the creaks of the old house increased again, and developed a distinct rhythm. “Molly!” Jane shouted. Suddenly she was standing over me, her arms lifting high. She caught a wooden headboard as it roared down the stairs and slammed at me. “Out!” she shouted again, as she tossed the headboard and caught the flying footboard, using it to deflect a flying drawer or three from a bedroom upstairs.

Crouching to make a smaller target of myself, I raced for the front door, which flung itself open to allow me passage. Jane followed and the door slammed behind her. She pulled me to the street fast, the winds I had noted only moments before dying when we reached the curb.

“Is that the spell or is the house alive?” she demanded.

It might be a dumb or bizarre question to most people, but not to me, and clearly not to Jane. “I don’t know,” I said. I needed to ask Evangelina, my older sister and our new coven mistress since mama retired and moved two towns over to take care of grandma.

“Great. Just ducky.” Jane scowled as she brushed more dust off her clothes. “Fine. One thing I can tell you. A vamp owned that stethoscope. I could smell him all over it.”

* * *

Back in Spruce Pine, I picked up my daughter, Angelina, from the family café where my younger sisters were watching her and arrived home, to our new house, before Big Evan did. My girl was worn out after playing with my wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, which meant she went down for a nap while I fixed supper. I put Angie Baby in her bed and covered her with the blankie that Evangelina had crocheted while Angie was still kicking my insides out in the last horrible month of pregnancy.

When we painted the new house—after we lost the mobile home—I had chosen the soft sage-green color for Angie’s room based on the blankie, which my daughter loved. Darker green leprechauns and brown brownies sat on huge calla lily leaves beneath a magical spreading oak tree. Unicorns pranced in the background and rainbows crossed the horizon beyond the tree, all painted by Regan and Amelia. What they hadn’t gotten in magical abilities they had made up for in artistic ability and talent. It was a room of love.

In the kitchen, I turned up the Aga, stirred the stew I had left bubbling on the stove, and put a loaf of bread in the oven. I also started a pot of brown rice, to stretch the stew so that Jane could join us. I couldn’t pay her for the work this afternoon, so the least I could do was feed her supper.

I knew Evan was home before he even turned into the drive. The wards we had put up around the house warned me, identifying his signature. He came in, work boots clomping, and put his arms around me. Evan is a huge bear of a man, easily six-feet-six, with red hair and beard, lightly streaked with gray. He is older than I am but with witches’ expanded life spans, that matters less to us than to humans. When we met it was love at first sight. Lust at first sight too, but that was definitely the lesser of our earth-shattering reactions to one another. Evan was a witch, one of the rare male witches to survive to adulthood, and we were pretty certain that was why Angie Baby’s gift had awakened so early—she had a witch gene from each of her parents, making her the most powerful witch on earth at this time.

“Who’s magics you been playing around with?” he mumbled into my hair, which tumbled over my eyes and tangled with his beard. Mine was not nearly as bright red as his. “Do I need to worry that another witch caught your eye?”

“Absolutely.” I turned in his arms and wrapped mine around him. They didn’t quite reach around his shoulders, but the fit was perfect around his chest and I clasped my hands together in the middle of his back. “I think you need to remind me that I have the perfect man at home and shouldn’t be playing the field anymore.”

“Is Angie in her room?” His voice turned up hopefully on the end.

I buried my face in the crook of his shoulder. “Napping very deeply. She’s making those little puffs of breath that she does when we just can’t wake her.”

“There is a God.” Big Evan picked me up and carried me to the bathroom instead of the bed, which worked out quite well to remove the sweat of the day from him and the construction dust and stink of vamp and unfamiliar magics off of me.

* * *

When Jane got to the house my hair was still damp, but I was clean—very, very clean—and I was dressed in a T-shirt and a fitted denim shift with full skirt and deep, tucked pockets. I don’t think Big Evan and I fooled her any, because she shook her head and smiled that small smile while looking back and forth between us. I had the feeling she thought we were cute, but at least she wasn’t the teasing type.

She woke Angie Baby and kept her busy in her room while I finished up the evening meal, and then carried my girl to the table. Angie usually fought being put into the high chair, wanting to sit in a regular chair like a big girl, though the table came only to her nose that way and I didn’t trust a stack of catalogues the way my own mother had. But tonight Jane surprised us all with a bright pink booster seat with Angie’s name painted on the back. It had little suction cups on the bottom and a strap that attached it to the chair; another strap attached around Angie’s waist, with an additional strap that looked special-made for Angie’s current baby doll. Angie squealed and chattered and was enchanted with her big-girl chair. And Jane’s face softened at Angie’s obvious delight.

Over stew—heavy on the veggies, light on the beef—Jane told us what she had discovered about the strange stethoscope. “It’s called a Kerr Symballophone, and it was designed in 1940 with two diaphragm chest pieces to allow doctors to hear different parts of the chest in both ears so they could differentiate the sounds from either lung, or from the top and bottom of a single lung, or from the heart and a lung. Kinda neat, really.”

I leaned into my husband and said, “She’s showing off her brand-new emergency medical training.”

“You took an EMT course?” he said, surprised.

Jane gave a minuscule shrug and tore off a hunk of bread. “Finished last month. I figured it might come in handy,” she said, her eyes on the bread and a smile tugging at her mouth, “for the day you finally give in to temptation and shoot Evangelina.”

Evan coughed and turned red. I laughed. I guess it was possible that he didn’t think his feelings about my eldest sister were quite so obvious. “You can’t choose your family,” I said sweetly. “More stew?” Evan nodded and Jane went on as I dipped up another humongous portion for my hubby. The man had to burn ten thousand calories a day.

“Anyway, I went to the Hainbridge Historical Society and did some research.”

“I didn’t even know Hainbridge had a history,” I said.

Evan chuckled, shoveled in a mouthful, and gestured for Jane to go on.

“There was a doctor by the name of Hainbridge living in the city in 1840.” She went back to the bread and dipped it into her stew, watching as the bread soaked up the thick broth. “And in 1870. And in 1910. And in 1940.”

“A family of doctors?” Evan asked.

I remembered the smell of vamp and said, “No way. He wasn’t—”

“Way,” Jane said. “I’ve seen two small portraits, hand painted, seventy years apart, and except for the beard, it’s the same guy.”

“I’ll be,” I said. “I know we have a lair in Asheville. Word is that the head vampire wants to start a barbeque joint in town.” When Evan paused with his spoon in midair, I said, “Down boy. So far, it’s just a rumor.” To Jane I said, “Barbequed ribs are his favorite. So. We had a lair here, way back when.”

She nodded and glanced at Angelina, her look saying there was more to tell but not in front of tender ears. So I had to wait for details, and waiting never sat well with me. I have red hair. Some form of impatience is surely bred into me.

* * *

When Angie Baby was finally down again for the night, and Jane and Evan and I were all stretched out in the tiny living room, Jane finally dished. “Hainbridge was a vamp with a human son. The kid came down with what sounds like leukemia, when he was a child in 1845.”

“Vamps can have kids? I mean, human kids?” Evan said.

“Sounds like it, but it must be really rare.,” Jane said. “According to the records, the doctor tried everything to cure the kid, and instead of curing him, the kid went crazy. The local newspaper called him a lunatic. He was seven.”

“The father tried to turn his son to cure him of the leukemia,” I whispered.

“Yeah. That’s what I got out of it. And from what I’ve read, that’s not permissible, to turn a child. And just as bad, Hainbridge didn’t chain his child up.”

I looked across the room to Angie’s door. It was half closed and I suddenly couldn’t stand it. I stood and crossed to the opening and looked in. Angie was curled on her side, her thumb in her mouth. She didn’t sleep with her thumb in her mouth often, only when she needed comfort, and I had to wonder if she had heard us talking, even in her sleep, and become distressed. I studied the wards on the room and tightened them here and there where they had grown a bit frayed. And I prayed too. I wasn’t much of a prayer, not like Jane. She was a true believer and she prayed religiously—a small joke we shared. I was less . . . confident, less sanguine, about who and what God was, and about why He would give a rat’s behind about any of us. But I prayed anyway—God keep my baby safe. Just in case. And oddly, when I finished, Angie pulled her thumb out of her mouth, sighed, and rolled over. Coincidence was a strange mistress. When I settled in my chair and picked up my tea, Jane went on.

“He was accused of having rabies. The kid was,” she clarified. “He bit several people, tried to chew off the arm of a little girl in town. No one got turned, but the kid disappeared and the doctor stopped practicing and went into seclusion. He wasn’t seen by the townspeople often, but when the war started in 1861, he totally disappeared.”

“The Civil War?” Evan asked.

“Yeah. And when he reappeared in Hainbridge in 1870, several years after the war ended, there weren’t enough people there to remember him. Sherman did a number on the town.”

“Is it true that Sherman was a werewolf?” I asked.

“No such thing as werewolves,” Evan said firmly, raising up the foot of his oversized recliner and pushing back. “No such thing as weres at all.”

Jane and I looked at each other and said nothing. There were witches and vampires and at least one skinwalker. Who can say about werewolves? “Anyway,” Jane said, “when he came back to town, he was all into treatments for lunatics and research.”

“His son was still alive,” I guessed.

Jane shrugged and curled her legs under her. She was long and lean, dressed in a T-shirt and worn-out, skin-tight jeans, her boots left at the door and striped socks on her feet in shades of fuchsia and emerald; the socks were a gift from me. I doubted that she ever wore them unless she came here. Jane Yellowrock didn’t have the most jocular of natures, but she was desperately appreciative of any small gift, which made my heart ache for her.

I shook my head as I remembered the storm that destroyed the mobile home we had lived in until a few months past when Angie’s power awakened way too early and ripped the place apart. Jane had saved us all that night by turning into a mountain lion and calming Angie long enough for Evan and me to bind Angie’s powers tightly to her. As if she knew what I was thinking Jane met my eyes, glanced at Angie’s room, and shrugged as if it had been nothing. It hadn’t been nothing. If I believed in miracles, I’d say that was one.

“So, then he involved some witches who had come over from Ireland—a woman by the name of Ester Wilkins, her daughter Lauran, and her sister Ruth. They’d started a coven, under the covers, so to speak, out of sight, but they provided the doctor with herbal tinctures, decoctions, and concoctions.” She tilted her head. “There’s a difference between decoctions and concoctions?”

“Big difference,” Evan said. I had thought he was asleep, sitting in his big chair, fingers laced over his middle, ankles crossed, and eyes closed. I laughed and he smiled, opened an eye, and blew me a kiss.

“Yeah, okay,” Jane said. “You two need me to leave?”

“Nah,” Evan said, his belly moving with silent laughter. “We took care of that before you got here.”

“Ewwww,” Jane said, shuddering with a breathy laugh.

I threw a couch pillow and hit him squarely in his beard—which just made him laugh harder. “Back to the vamp and witches,” I said, trying to sound prim, but likely not succeeding.

“I don’t know what happened next, but I do have hypotheses,” Jane said. “I think the doctor kept on with his research for decades, coming and going to protect his identity. And then he involved the witches in a more personal way. I think he either tried to get witches to create a conjure to cure his son’s lunatic-ism, or tried to get witches to let the kid drink witch blood to cure it, or he was trying to cure the leukemia that made his son sick in the first place. Or something along those lines. I think he went to a witch one night and tried to force her to help. And of course the witch had warded her house. I think the ward transferred to the stethoscope when she tried to stake the vamp or he tried to drain her.”

“Lots of unknowns in any of those situations,” Evan rumbled.

“True, but any of those scenarios explain what I remember about the smells—” She stopped dead, still not sure what Evan remembered of the mountain lion who saved the day when Angelina had her awakening. “I have a really good nose. I can smell some magics and some vampires.”

Big Evan nodded, his expression unchanged, and Jane went on. “Any of those scenarios explain what I remember about the smells in the house, and the odd way the stethoscope protects the house. But, really, none of the specifics matter,” Jane said. Evan widened his eyes in surprise. Jane leaned forward, turning her body directly to his, her elbows on her knees, her clasped hands hanging between her legs, partially mirroring his posture. “All we need to know for sure are the following.” she held up a closed fist and one finger went up. “Did the stethoscope get the ward by accidental—or even by deliberate—transference?” Another finger went up. “Is the witch’s ghost still in the house, which I don’t think, but is important to know?” Followed quickly by a third finger. “Is the vamp still living or did she kill him true dead with her spell? If she killed him then that makes it blood magic, and much stronger and more unpredictable, right? And blood magic changes how you guys get rid of the spell.”

Big Evan was staring at Jane intently, now. Jane’s lips went up slightly. “What? You didn’t think I was smart enough to figure all that out?” When Evan didn’t reply, Jane said, “The most important thing to figure out, though, is how you guys get paid.”

“We don’t,” I said automatically.

“Why not?” Jane asked, still holding Evan’s gaze. “You get rid of the ward and the apparent poltergeist affect, or the house can’t be used. If the house can’t be used, then somebody is out a lot of money spent on renovations so far. Getting rid of the scary stuff sounds like part of the renovations to me.”

Evan smiled, showing teeth between moustache and beard. “You think the Hainbridge coven is getting paid, but knew that Molly was an easy mark. They planned to let her do the work and they get to pocket the money.”

Jane sat back, her tiny smile in place.

“I am not an easy mark,” I said.

Jane made a snorting sound. Big Evan said, “Sweetheart, you are the biggest mark alive. And that’s why I love you so much. If you weren’t so easy to fool, you’d never have married a big galumph like me.”

“You’re not a galumph,” I said.

“See?” To Jane, Evan said, “What’s the name of the construction company and what’s the house going to be used for now?”

“Hainbridge General Construction. And it’s owned by and is going to become a lawyer’s office.” My husband started to laugh.

* * *

The next morning Big Evan called Shadow Blackwell, the Hainbridge coven mistress, and suggested that I take over the job, informing Shadow that her coven could get a finder’s fee, if one could be properly negotiated. Shadow Blackwell was not pleased, but it wasn’t like she had much to fume about. She had tried to get the job done in an underhanded way, and had been caught.

Once the local coven was out of way, Evan contacted the owner of the construction company, speaking in my name. The contractor had an ironclad agreement with the owner of the property that he would not be responsible for “acts of God” above and beyond what his company’s insurance covered, and that insurance did not cover what amounted to an exorcism. Unfortunately, he had not told the client that his office was haunted.

Lastly, my wonderful husband called the lawyer, one Chauncey L. Markwhite II, who was not a very cheery-natured man and refused to pay one red cent to me for my services. When it was explained to him that all construction had ceased on his property, and would not be starting again until the little matter of magical flying mallets was resolved, he accused Evan of extortion. Which totally ticked off my hot-tempered husband. Evan suggested that it was possible to prove the problem to Chauncey and a meeting was set up for the next morning before the start of business—meaning we were to meet him at his haunted house promptly at 8 a.m. “Promptly,” was the lawyer’s term, and he expected Evan to abide by that. He clearly did not know my husband, who was not one to take orders.

I had kept out of the picture while all phone conversations took place, but I needed to be present during this one, as I would be speaking as the “witch expert,” to keep Evan hidden in the witch-closet. Jane wanted to be present too, as an outside witness, but I privately thought it might be more along the lines of wanting to watch Evan play with a lawyer the way a big-cat often plays with its dinner before killing and eating it.

By prearrangement, Jane was the first to arrive at the haunted house, watching for the lawyer, her cell phone ready. The moment the lawyer’s car got there, she hit SEND and Evan started our car. We were ten minutes out, making Chauncey wait. As Jane had said, “Witches one, Chauncey zip.”

When we got to the house, the front door was hanging open and neither Jane nor Chauncey was to be seen. We both were out of the car while it was still rocking on its suspension, Evan saying, “Good Golly, Miss Molly. You don’t think she mistook him for a bloodsucker of a different sort and staked him, do you?”

I sputtered with laughter and was still laughing when we reached the front porch, which I am certain Evan had intended. Inside, Jane was leaning against the stairs, her arms crossed in her own particular stance, and a grin on her face. It was, by far, the ugliest grin I’d ever seen her wear, and she was making little huffing sounds of laughter under her breath, like a cat. The lawyer was six inches inside the parlor, standing as if frozen. His face was white, his eyes were at half-mast, and his skin stood up all over in goose bumps. Jane looked at us in the doorway. “The spell made you afraid that you or your family was going to die. I wonder what fears Li’l Chucky is experiencing.”

“If we sit and watch until he dies, we don’t make any money,” Big Evan said, sounding totally rational, if unconcerned.

“Spoil sport,” Jane said. But she leaned in and grabbed Chauncey by his collar and yanked him back into the foyer. He took a breath and started gasping; his lips were blue. I had a bad feeling that he had not taken a single breath while he stood, frozen, inside the parlor. His knees gave out and Jane pivoted him to her, holding him off the floor by collar and belt. She gave him a little shake. “That’s the first part of the spell, Li’l Chucky. You wanna work in this room?” she asked him. “You wanna maybe make clients wait in this room for their appointments?”

“No,” he wheezed. “No, I . . . Jesus—”

Jane dropped his belt, slapped his face, and had his pants again, the motion so fast I wasn’t sure what I had seen. “No blasphemy, no swearing, no dirty language. Got it?”

Chauncey nodded. His color was looking better and Jane sat him on the steps to the upstairs. “So it’s a haint, not a demon?” He asked when he’d caught his breath. Jane nodded. “What’s part two of the spell?” he asked her.

Jane. Not me.

I stifled a small smile, watching my friend at work. I had never seen this part of her.

“You spend too much time in the room, Li’l Chucky,” she said, “and things start flying around. Hammers, ladders, broken furniture from upstairs. And I’d say the flying debris is aimed at anything human, and with fatal intent. Now.” She pointed to me. “This nice woman put her life in danger yesterday to figure out what was wrong with the house. She thinks she can undo the spell and free the property for development, but it’s dangerous. So here’s the deal. You pay her a flat fee for her efforts. And you pay her another fee, plus expenses, when she’s successful. You draw up the contract today, and as soon as her husband and I are satisfied, she goes to work. You get left with a usable building with a great history and a haunted house tale to delight your clients. Maybe hang a plaque on the wall to tell about it.”

“How much?” he asked.

Evan named a price that made me wince.

“I spoke to the contractor,” Chauncey said. “He had a deal with the Hainbridge coven for a lot less.”

“They can’t do the work. It’s a complicated spell,” Evan said. “They called in my wife and she can. So you work with her or you can think about it for a few days, while the contractor starts another job somewhere and you get left with an unfinished building.”

“I have a contract with Hainbridge General Construction,” Chauncey said.

“With an ‘act of God’ clause in it. Haints fall under that category.”

“And you can’t negotiate with a haint,” Jane said, amused.

“Will she do the job for what I was paying the coven?” he hedged.

“No. And it isn’t extortion,” Evan said, eyes narrowing. “Haints are dangerous. What my wife will give you is a solution to a bigger problem than you knew you had. Let us know when you make a decision.” With that, Evan hustled me out of the house and Jane followed, her boots pattering down the front steps.

Before we reached the bottom step, Chauncey raced from the house, squealing like a child. A metal bucket barely missed his head. Jane must have been expecting it, because she caught it out of the air and handed it to him, shaking her head. “Bet you had to touch the stove to see if it was hot when you were a kid. Idiot.” But it sounded like good-natured ribbing more than insult. To me she said, “Later, Molly.”

Big Evan said, “See you around Jane,” and opened my car door for me. I got in. Evan came around to his side and got in, his bulk making the old rattletrap rock. Jane keyed on her used Yamaha motorcycle. And Chauncey caved. “Wait,” he yelled. Jane turned off her bike. We got out of the car. To Evan, he said, “I can’t afford the fee you named. I can go, maybe half that.”

Evan and he dickered for a few minutes over price and I had to turn away. My services were going to cost a lot more money than I thought they were worth, but they finally settled on a four-figure sum that meant I could get a new refrigerator and put something toward that new car we’ve been saving for.

“I’ll draw up the contract,” Chauncey said. “I can fax or e-mail it over in two hours.” He looked at me and said, “Can you get rid of the haint today?”

I almost said yes, but Jane shook her head, very slightly. Right. Negotiation. “By Wednesday,” I said. “Sooner, if possible, but I can make no promises.”

“Okay.” He stuck his hand out at Jane. “Deal.”

Jane pointed at me. “Your deal is with the lady and her oversized galumph.”

* * *

We spent the rest of the morning flying spells. I write incantations, conjures, spells—which are pretty much, but not always, the same thing—out in longhand on legal pads. When I reach a point where the spell stops working, I fold it into a paper airplane and fly it across the room. Big Evan balls his up and plays trash-can basketball. What we wanted was a spell that would keep us safe in the house, and a totally separate, but overlapping conjure that would allow us to see the moment in time when the warding/keep-away spell transferred to the stethoscope. That transference had caused all the house’s problems. A spell that should have died had instead mutated and found a way to persist long after its creator was gone. It was going to be tricky, and that was even before we tried to dismantle the spell and free the house.

We spent lunchtime in the Hainbridge Historical Society looking at photos of the people who had lived in the house, and photos of the townspeople, so if we happened to see one or two of them when we went searching for the pivotal, instigating event, we could call them by name. Then Evan and I went home for dinner and explained to Angelina that we’d be going out. She wasn’t happy at being left behind, but when Regan and Amelia showed up carrying an armload of old movies on CDs, a bag of popcorn big enough to feed an entire family for a month, hair color to add blond streaks to their reddish hair, a dozen shades of nail polish, and a bottle of wine, she perked right up. I was jealous of the girls’ night I’d miss, but I was smart enough not to say so. We left the three watching the opening credits of an old black and white version of Cinderella, the scent of popcorn filling the house and the volume on the TV turned up high enough to rattle the walls.

* * *

At dusk, Evan and I entered the house, Jane behind us. I knew she had other things to do—tonight was belly-dance class—but here she was, curious as any cat. And she had brought a cooler with colas, iced tea, and sandwiches, two battery-operated lights, a first aid kit, and a bedroll. She was dressed for business in heavyweight denim jeans with stakes and blades strapped on her waist and thighs. When she saw me staring at the pile of supplies and at her silver-plated knives she shrugged. “Insurance, not that I expect to need any of it.”

Evan, who was carrying a basket filled with candles, a batch of dried herbs, and a small camp stove for heating water, just nodded. “Good thinking. Glad to have you watching our backs.”

It was the first time Evan had shown open approval of Jane, and she ducked her head to hide a pleased smile. I decided they were going to play nice, letting me concentrate on the seeing spell Evan and I had settled on. The math of any spell was hard—altering physical laws by will and intent was a job fraught with danger and the likelihood of mistakes. A loss of concentration, a stray worry, and everything could fall apart—or blow up, which was rare, but a lot more scary.

First thing I did was to damp-mop the foyer, concentrating on the area of floor directly in front of the parlor. Then, while the floor dried, I cleansed the house with a stick of burning dried sage. Once the house was cleansed I asked Jane, “Did you remember to bring your shirt?”

She lifted her brows and handed me a Ziploc bag with her filthy T-shirt from the day before. “You gonna tell me why you need my dirty laundry?”

“I’m going to shake the dust into a bowl and give it back.”

“Least you could do is wash it first,” she grumbled. At my expression she lifted a shoulder and added, “Just sayin’.”

I shook my head and drew a circle about five feet across on the wood floor with white chalk and set a cut crystal bowl in the center. I filled it with bottled water and put the empty in my bag. Using a compass, Evan set new, white, pillar candles inside the circle at the cardinal points, and draped silver crosses around each. Outside, it was getting dark, making it very hard to see in the foyer. No electricity would be used tonight. Jane sat on the bottom step out of the way, her knees drawn up and her arms around her ankles, as Evan lit the candles. I stepped into the circle and closed it with the piece of chalk. Evan backed away toward Jane and set the candle at magnetic north, which was to my left side and back a bit, the parlor opening facing east.

This was to be my ritual tonight, because as an earth witch, my magics were closest to the green magics of the spell we were trying to get a good look at. Evan, an air witch, could only offer support. I gathered my white dress close and sat behind the bowl, cross-legged, the bowl of water between my knees. I opened the plastic bag and held Jane’s shirt over the bowl, shaking it gently, steadily. Dust from the parlor sprinkled onto the still surface of the water. I balled the shirt back up and sealed it into the bag, tucking it under my knee.

Satisfied, I nodded to Evan. From the bag he had carried, he lifted a silver bell with no clapper and the silver mallet that was used to ring it. He also brought out his father’s old, leather-bound Bible—the book Old Man Trueblood had been holding when he was accepted into the church and baptized, when he married, when each of his children were born, and when he died. I wasn’t much of a religious person—nowhere near as spiritual as Jane—but even I knew this book had power.

I took a deep breath and exhaled, repeating the clarifying exercise twice more to settle myself. Everything I did tonight would be in threes. I closed my eyes and nodded to Evan. As I opened my mouth he rang the bell, the clear, pure tone and my words overlapping each time I said the word bell. “Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle.” The three tones seemed to ring on, echoing through the empty house, and continued, three times more with the first word of the next three lines. “Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now.”

I opened my eyes, and without pausing went on into the next three lines, knowing that Evan had the cadence now and would keep up with me, ringing the bell with each first word, even though the method of lines was changing.

“Time of warding. Time of blood. Time of attack.

“Time of betrayal. Time of undead. Time of change.

“Time of vampire. Time of transference. Time of death.”

I fell silent, the bell chimes shimmering through the empty house. As the last tone faded, the water between my knees seemed to brighten. And so did the floor of the parlor. In the far corner where the stethoscope had rested for so long, a soft green glow spiraled up, a mist full of light. Close to the opening of the foyer where the stethoscope rested now, a twin, green, featherlike luminosity rose like smoke, twining and twisting. The mist rose from the floor like smoke, meeting the stained ceiling overhead, pooling against the high corners before spreading and reaching slowly toward the center of the room, overhead. Both tendrils reached the center at the same instant and touched, tentative, like delicate green fingers of budding desire.

A single fixture appeared in the center of the ceiling, an old-fashioned electric ceiling light, bright in the dimness. The magical light of the spell merged with the old light and with its other half and curled back on itself, undulating across the ceiling, to brighten the room, revealing furnishings as they had once been. Where the milky light fell down, back to the floor, tendrils twirled and danced and revealed a moment out of time.

But this scene was not like any time-spell I had ever seen. It wasn’t misty or uncertain, no dreamlike underpinnings or unfinished supports. It was crisp and clear and certain, full of sharp edges. This was not the result of a seeing spell. This was something different, something I had never seen before.

I had been wrong. The spell tied to the stethoscope wasn’t finished. The spell had, instead, created some kind of bizarre bubble universe, a pocket universe, a part of real time, sectioned off, sealed away from the world the rest of us knew, or maybe looping around and around over and over again.

Light blossomed out, opening like a flower in a segment of high-speed photography, to display the room as it had once been. The walls were wallpapered a deep blood-rose shade. The furniture was from the late nineteen-thirties or forties with a velvet upholstered couch in a vibrant wine shade against the far wall, a wheeled tea tray before it, a teapot wrapped in a quilted cozy. Wing chairs were aligned to catch the heat from the fire burning merrily in the fireplace. A card table stood in one corner and a bookshelf across from it. An old-fashioned phonograph, the windup kind with an ornate brass horn, was on a side table, and a squeaky song came from it, a man’s voice sounding hollow, yet inordinately cheery.

A woman sat in a wing chair, a basket of yarn at her feet, a steaming teacup on a side table. She was small with dark-auburn hair, dressed in a robe in a deep shade of navy, over a white nightgown. She was knitting with blue yarn that trailed up from a basket with large skeins, the pile of finished garment on her far side. She seemed to hear a noise and looked up, turning. Her eyes widened, mouth opened. A form fell upon her, the pop of vampiric speed sounding in the room like a gunshot. It was a child, dressed in dark pants and nothing else, his skin the dead-white of the three-day-dead. The vampire child, small but unnaturally strong, leaped, grabbed up the woman and spun her in her chair. She screamed, fear and pain in the harsh note.

My mouth opened to murmur a rejection, but I stopped before it left my mouth. It might affect the efficacy of . . . of everything. They whirled, caught in the remnants of the vampire child’s attacking speed. His fangs latched upon her neck, tearing. Her scream stopped, even as the two of them fell back. There was none of the tenderness of the vampire wooing his dinner, none of the pleasure I had heard could come from a feeding. A single strong sucking sounded and he started to drink, even as they fell into the far corner.

The woman lifted her knitting needles. She stabbed the child.

He screamed, the awful keening note of the undead brought to true death.

I shuddered, knowing I could do nothing to stop this violence. Terrible, horrible violence. A woman and undead child in mortal combat. No wonder the warding spell had gone horribly wrong. It had never been intended to protect against a child, no matter how feral.

Tears started in my eyes and trailed down my cheeks. I caught a breath that ached deep inside. But it wasn’t over.

Another pop sounded. Louder than the first. A man wearing an old-fashioned gray suit and carrying a black medical bag appeared in the room. He dropped the bag and pulled the woman and child apart. Blood pumped from a deep tear in her throat. Scarlet stained her white gown and splattered across the room. The child fell, a wooden knitting needle in his right side, the other in his chest, just to the left of center, a stake, positioned and angled in what looked like a deadly strike.

The woman’s blood pumped over the man’s chest. A stethoscope hung there—the Kerr Symballophone that now rested in the room. The child’s blood splattered as well, a few small drops hitting the man, his face looking fully human, and full of agony.

The three fell against the far wall, knocking over a small table. The man roared a single word, “No!”, vamping out so fast I couldn’t follow the action. He fell to the floor beneath the two, cradling the woman and pulling the stakes from the child. He tore his own wrist and dribbled his blood into the child’s mouth. The vampire scooped the woman’s blood into the mouth of the child as well.

But it was clear the undead child was true-dead. And the woman died as I watched, her pupils growing wide, her face going slack.

The vampire screamed, his fangs nearly two inches long, lifting to the light. His bellow was powerful. As he sat there, the two bodies embraced on his lap, the stethoscope slid to the floor. And he seemed to look right at me.

The vision of the spell faded.

From behind me, Jane said, “Well that sucked.”

* * *

“The only thing that makes sense,” I said, “is for it to be a bubble universe. That’s the only way he could see me looking at him.”

Evan finished chewing before answering. We were sitting in an all-night Taco Bell, and between them, Jane and Evan had devoured a table full of tacos, burritos, gorditos, and chalupas. Crumbs and wadded papers were everywhere. It looked as if a platoon of four-year-olds had had a food fight. “If it’s a bubble universe, then what’s powering it?” Evan asked when he swallowed. “Bubble universes—pocket universes—are theoretical in physics and unheard of in magic since Tomás de Torquemada’s time. And even then they were hearsay as much as heresy. No one’s ever claimed to have made one, or been freed from one, or even found one.” He picked up the last taco. “Bubble universes usually have their own time span, linear but not exactly like ours, like in the fairy tales where time runs differently in Fairy from human Earth. This is more like a time loop, where things happen over and over again, in which case he wouldn’t have seen you unless your viewing the loop disrupted it somehow.” Evan shrugged. “Of course, the vampire could have been looking at something on the floor in his time, not seeing you.”

“He saw me,” I said. “Totally, totally saw me. That electric eye-contact thing.”

Jane was sitting across from us, lounging back, one jeans-clad leg up on the seat beside her, her weapons stowed in our trunk. “He saw Molly,” she said. “No doubt. I was sitting behind her and I felt it too. Vamp zingers. When they vamp out, you can feel their gazes.” She sucked Pepsi through a straw and made a face. Jane liked Coke; Evan liked Pepsi better. The two had spent a friendly ten minutes arguing about the brands before the first part of the meal came. There had followed the silence of carnivores eating—the chomp of strong teeth and the crunch of bones—I mean tacos.

“So if we figure out how to break the spell,” I said, “and reintegrate the bubble of time with our universe . . . can we save the witch?”

“Molly,” Jane said gently. “She’s dead. She’s been dead since the little vamp tore her carotids out and the big vamp tried to save him instead of the witch.” When I looked confused, she explained, “The bigger vamp’s blood might have saved the witch, if he’d been fast enough. He made the wrong choice, and by not saving her, and by adding her blood and his son’s blood into the mix while the spell was trying to save her, he warped the spell and trapped himself in the bubble universe.”

“Holy crap. That makes sense,” Evan said through a mouthful of taco.

Jane and Evan shared a look that had volumes in it. “What?” I demanded. “No, don’t look at each other. Look at me. I do not need protecting. Tell me. What makes sense?”

“The vamp isn’t dead,” Jane said, her brows drawing down as she thought it through.

“Yeah,” Evan said, gesturing with the last bite of taco. “What she said. I’m guessing that his undead life is keeping the looped spell going, and if you break the spell, he’ll attack.”

“And because his undead life force has been powering the spell, he’ll be hungry,” Jane said. “Like hungry for seventy years. That kinda hungry. He’ll be insane with hunger. He’ll have to be put down.” She shrugged by making a tossing gesture with the Pepsi cup. “I’ll do it, if needed. Gratis. Consider it my way of saying thanks for all the dinners.”

“You bring the food half the time,” I said, putting asperity into my tone, feeling guilt worm under my skin. I knew how much Jane got paid to kill a vampire. I understood, logically, how dangerous it was. But unless we went back to Chauncey for money—which might look like a shakedown—that kind of money was not in the budget. Jane had to know that. And I really wanted to put the extra into savings for the new car. Hence the guilt.

“Whatever. Gratis,” she said. “That’s my deal. Take it or leave it. And if you leave it, you can either find another vampire hunter or appeal to the vamp clan up in Asheville. I hear sane vamps are real sweeties.”

“We’ll take it, Jane,” Evan said. “Thanks. So who was the witch?”

“Beats me,” Jane said. “Molly?”

I knew they were working together to protect me, and if I hadn’t been feeling like a thief, I’d have been gratified that they were working together on something. On anything. “Monique Ravencroft,” I said. “She disappeared in the early 1940s. No one has seen or heard of her since.”

“Ahhh,” Jane said. “Her, yeah. Makes sense. Her house was treated as a crime scene, with signs of a struggle and blood at the scene. But there was no body and no one was ever charged for her murder,” Jane said. When I raised my brows at her, she shrugged with the cup again and said, “I did a little research on the house. Found a cold case, a suspended investigation, at that address. No leads, and the principle investigator has been dead nearly fifty years.”

Evan and she locked gazes again and I said, “So?”

“Up to you, galumph,” Jane said.

Evan heaved a breath and said, “If it’s a bubble universe, and if we release the vampire, and if Jane kills him, and if we leave a woman’s dead body from forty years ago, and a dead child vampire—”

Jane interrupted, “If we close this, it could leave a mess. Unless we film it, it’ll be our word against, well, nothing. And whether we film it or not, I’ll have to report the killing of a supposedly sane vamp to the MOC of Asheville. And you’ll be called in to give witness.” Jane looked at Evan. “And you’ll be out of the closet. He’ll smell you’re a witch.”

“And if we don’t close it, we don’t get paid,” I said, grumpily, finally understanding. “Which makes me sound all kinds of mercenary, but we really, really need a new fridge.”

“Suggestion?” Jane offered. When Evan nodded, Jane said, “Ask a cop to come sit in on the undoing spell. I’ll provide him with a stake and some silver ammo. I’ll make sure he takes the killshot. He takes down the vamp. You are each other’s unimpeachable witnesses, he gets any reward from the Asheville MOC, and said vamp won’t smell Evan. By the time vamps get on scene, Evan and I will be gone and the house aired out.” Jane drained her Pepsi cup with an air-rattle of cola through straw. “And if you’re up for another suggestion, also in the paper, there’s a new cop in town, out of New York, name of Paul Braxton. He’ll be used to dealing with vamps and working with witches,” she said. “My bet is that he’ll let Molly stay in the closet to have her as an informant and,” she twirled a hand, looking for a word, “occult specialist. Sorta.”

Evan gave Jane a small salute and she grinned at him, one of the rare, full-on grins I’d seen maybe ten times in our relationship. But her plan did have a certain allure. I looked at it from every side. It wasn’t perfect, but it might work.

* * *

At eleven a.m. the next morning, Evan—who was missing another day of work—and I met with Detective Paul Braxton, out of New York. He had retired to the Appalachian Mountains, gotten bored fast and went to work for the local sheriff. We had found all this out on the Internet before we met at McDonald’s where we introduced ourselves, bought the detective a cup of coffee, and sat.

Braxton was a beefy guy, not as big as Evan, of course, no one is except a few professional NFL linebackers. He had brown hair and eyes, and wore a brown suit from the last decade. “So,” he said, “how can I help you folks?” He put both lower arms on the table and rested his weight forward, his hands cradling the cup of steaming coffee

“I’m a witch,” I said, starting at the most important part. “But I’m not in any police database.”

“Seven Sassy Sisters’ Herb Shop and Café,” Paul said, his voice gravely. “It’s not confirmed, but most locals think your mother was a witch. They also think your older sister, Evangeline, also called Evangelina, is a witch. The rest of you are above reproach, or were until today. Your friend over there, hidden behind the newspaper she isn’t reading, is Jane Yellowrock, a vampire hunter.” He tilted his head at Jane, who I hadn’t even noticed, and turned his attention back to us. Jane’s hands clenched tight, crinkling the paper. “So why call me in and ruin that spotless rep?”

“Jane,” I said softly. “You’re busted. You may as well get on over here.” Jane stood and moved across the room, graceful and nonchalant as any pampered housecat. She slid into the empty seat at the table and passed the detective her card. “We did not need protection,” I said. “And curiosity killed the cat.” Jane chuckled at the not-so-veiled reference to her supernatural nature, but kept her attention on the cop.

“‘Have Stakes Will Travel’” he read from the card. “Cute.” He tucked the card into his inner jacket pocket, including us all when he added, “Talk to me, people.”

“I was hired to get rid of a ghost, demon, or haint—that’s a poltergeist, to you. Instead, I found what might be a bubble universe—my husband says it’s also called a pocket universe—with an unsolved murder hidden in it.” I now had Braxton’s full attention. “To get rid of the problem, as I was hired to, I have to release the universe, which will bring the murder, the murdered, and the accidently killed back to our time. And that will release a vampire who has been without blood since the 1940s.”

“You know,” the cop said, pulling a small electronic tablet out of a pocket and starting to take notes, “I usually spend an hour getting this much information out of an informant. Succinct. I appreciate it, lady. Go on.”

I explained it all to him, and his part in the solution if he was willing. He was. He also agreed to keep my name out of his report if at all possible. And we all agreed to meet at dusk back at the Hainbridge house for an exorcism. His last words to us were, “This will be different. I was afraid I’d be bored in this little town. Here’s my card. Call me if you think of anything else. And I’m Brax, to my friends.” Which sounded like a good way to start.

* * *

At dusk, Brax drove up to Monique Ravencroft’s house in his unmarked police car, parked, and joined us in the foyer. I had already cleansed the house by burning some dried sage, the acerbic smoke strong on the air. The chalk circle, the lit candles, cut crystal bowl, bell, and Bible were in place again, and, with the cop staring at the house and my equipment, I explained what I was going to do.

When I was done, he looked at Evan and said, “I get why you’re here—to protect your wife.” He looked at Jane and said, “What’s your part in this?”

She shook her head. “The vamp I saw was sane, and I don’t have a contract. You, however, can kill a sane vamp if one attacks. Think of me as your helpful witness.” She held out a silver-tipped stake. “Just in case.”

I knew that she had a half-dozen identical stakes in her boot. If Brax missed, Jane would not let the vampire go free. She would take care of—well—everything and everyone around her. It was what she did.

“And this,” Jane handed him a silvered blade, “is for cutting off his head. You know, if needed.”

“Helpful, huh?” Brax shook his head, turning the blade so the candlelight caught and reflected off the silver. “You do know that this is longer than the legal limits on concealed carry for bladed weapons, right?”

“I wasn’t carrying it. It was in my saddle bag on my bike,” she said with her humorless half-smile.

“Uh huh. You Southerners are even more polite and obliging than I was led to believe.”

“That’s us. Just itching to help out the New York Yankee cop.” Jane handed him a sheath for the blade, one that strapped at waist and thigh.

Brax chuckled. “I’ve never used my vamp-fighting techniques, but I’ve kept certified and in practice.” He strapped on the blade and accepted the stake. “I’ve never had to kill a vampire. The Master of the City of New York keeps a firm hand on his underlings. So this is a first for me.”

“We hope you won’t have to kill one tonight,” I said. “We hope he’ll be saner than he looked last.”

“But we won’t bet our lives on it,” Evan said. “If he attacks and you need backup, you can deputize Jane.”

“I’m not the sheriff,” Brax said, “but consider Jane deputized if it’ll keep my butt alive.” He looked at Evan. “Okay, Mr. Trueblood, Mrs. Trueblood. Ready when you are.”

* * *

It didn’t take us long to prepare. I was wearing the same white dress, slightly grimy from the last time I’d worn it here, which I gathered close and sat behind the bowl, cross-legged, the bowl of water between my knees. Just as last night, I opened the Ziploc bag and held Jane’s shirt over the bowl, shaking it with a snapping motion this time. There wasn’t much dust from the parlor left, but what there was sprinkled onto the still surface of the water. I took my three deep breaths to settle myself and nodded to Evan, who lifted the silver bell. As I spoke the words he rang the bell with the silver mallet. “Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle.” The tones were rich and true, echoing through the house. “Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now. Time of warding. Time of blood. Time of attack. Time of betrayal. Time of undead. Time of change. Time of vampire. Time of transference. Time of death.”

As before, the bell chimes shivered through the empty house, leaving the air expectant. As the last tone faded, the water between my knees brightened, and so did the floor of the parlor. Twin, green, luminous feathers of light rose, twining and twisting like smoke, up to the ceiling overhead, pooling against the high corners, spreading toward the center of the room.

The old-fashioned electric ceiling light appeared, adding light to the falling dark, revealing the furnishings of the past: the blood-rose walls, the velvet upholstered couch and wheeled tea tray, the wing chairs and card table. The man’s squeaky song came from the old-fashioned phonograph, hollow and cheery. The small, auburn haired woman once again sat in the wing chair, the basket of yarn at her feet. I heard Brax take a slow, shocked breath.

The woman looked up, turned. Her eyes widened, mouth opened. The small form fell upon her, the pop of vampiric speed making Brax flinch. The child attacked, grabbing up the woman. She screamed. His fangs latched on and her scream stopped, to be replaced by a single strong sucking sound.

The woman lifted her knitting needles. She stabbed the child.

He screamed, the horrible note of true death.

The second pop sounded and the taller, adult vampire appeared. He pulled the woman and child apart. Blood pumped scarlet from her throat, all over her white gown and out into the room. The child dangled, the wooden knitting needles in his body.

The woman’s blood pumped over the man’s chest and the Kerr Symballophone. The child’s blood splattered it again. The man roared the single word, “No!” vamping out and falling to the floor beneath the two, cradling the woman, pulling the stakes from the child. He tore his own wrist and dribbled his blood into the child’s mouth, scooping the woman’s blood in as well. Letting the woman die, the woman he might have saved. Everything was just like the last time I had seen it.

The vampire screamed, his fangs nearly two inches long, lifting to the light. His bellow was powerful. And as he sat there, the two bodies embraced on his lap, he looked right at me. He saw Jane behind me. Saw the cop, and Evan.

Evan rang the bell again, one strong tone for each word of freedom and free, as I released my intent and purpose, saying, “Freedom be and freedom bought, freedom from the dead past sought. Free the house and end this spell. Free the dead to heaven and hell.”

As I spoke, the vampire raced at us. With each tone, he aged and shrank, his tissues draining and flesh caving in. His bloody eyes going feral, rabid, insane. He roared again, this time for blood.

The green light exploded out, the candles snuffed all at once. Dark fell on us. I was yanked back, Jane’s hands shockingly like steel, bruising me. I was shoved into Evan’s chest so hard my breath whuffed out of me. I heard the battle around me as Evan shuffled me out of the house into the night.

But I saw, in the moonlight through the open door, Jane Yellowrock, as she raced toward the vampire, her body moving far faster than human, her eyes glowing golden, her face frozen in a rictus of action, lips pulled back, showing her teeth. And the cop, staking the vampire, but clearly too low, a belly stab. Instantly Jane staked the vampire, one hard thrust in the heart. Brax mirrored her move stabbing up with the knife, roaring with a battle scream. And then I was outside. In the cool night air, the breeze raising gooseflesh on my arms. And silence descended on the dark.

The sounds of battle had gone on for only seconds, but it seemed much longer. The scream of vampire, the grunts of the people, the sound of blows hitting the night. Into the silence, I heard Jane say, “Not bad. You got your first vamp kill. But you have to take the vampires’ heads. Both of them.” And Brax cussed, long and hard, while Jane laughed.

Evan wrapped me in his arms, murmuring to me, “It’s okay. It’s done. It’s okay now, sweetheart.” And I could smell the stink of bowels on the air from the witch who had died so long ago, and only moments in the past.

Jane had told me about her inner beast, and I hadn’t understood, not at all. I was pretty sure I had seen it tonight, however, in the golden glow of her eyes, in the way her lips pulled back like an attacking cat’s. In the pure violence of her body flowing forward, supple and svelte and . . . and violence personified.

I had thought of her as human, as softer than she really was. While Jane Yellowrock had a soft side—the side I saw when she was with Angie Baby, or when she went into “protect mode” around the abused, or when she prayed—she was not human. And she was anything but soft.

I buried my head in Evan’s chest and closed my eyes, blocking out that image of Jane—warrior Jane—attacking. Moments later, she came out of the house and down the stairs, her eyes on me, evaluating, questioning, conjecturing. As if she could smell my new awareness of her on the air. For all I knew, she could.

Behind her, Brax called out to Evan to come help him. He didn’t say why, but my husband patted my arms and left me. The night air was cool on my flesh where he had held me, and I shivered.

Jane lilted up her lips at my shiver, the smile cynical and defensive. “I’m not a big bad ugly,” she said, her voice stiff. “I won’t hurt you. And I’d never hurt your daughter.”

I realized I had hurt her though I had no idea how. “What?” I asked, perplexed. And then it occurred to me that tonight she had allowed me to see a part of her kept hidden until now. I had to wonder if anyone had ever seen her in killing mode. Well, anyone who was still alive. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered again, thinking about warrior-Jane near Angie. She was right. Jane would never hurt my daughter. And Angelina would never be safer than when she was with Jane Yellowrock. “You’re an idiot,” I said, putting all the asperity I could into my voice. “I’m not scared of you. I’m cold.”

Jane blinked, opened her mouth, and closed it, thinking. “You’re not scared of me?”

I shook my head no.

Jane walked away a few paces and came back with her jacket which she wrapped around my shoulders. “Thanks,” she said, which I figured was my line, but I understood what she meant.

“You are welcome,” I said. And she smiled at me, a real smile, soft and full and lovely.

* * *

The police investigation lasted for three weeks, with a complementary media hue and cry over the “unexplained appearance of people from seventy years in the past, all looking unchanged, yet all freshly killed,” and the “witch paraphernalia found at the scene.” The media attention went on until something more interesting happened and the news vans disappeared.

And, of course, even when the crime scene tape came down, I still didn’t get paid. The lawyer didn’t answer or return my calls. The morning my old fridge finally wore out, shutting off with a small cough of what sounded like apology, Jane called Brax. I didn’t want her to, but Jane had a mind of her own and pretty much did what she wanted.

A wire transfer for the full amount appeared in my banking account that afternoon, only minutes after the newly transplanted local cop paid a visit to the lawyer, off the record, and suggested that he pay his bill. Evan and Jane delivered my spanking new fridge that evening, just in time to save my frozen food.

I fixed steaks that night, and the four of us—Jane, Evan, Angelina, and I—sat on the back porch, under the moonlight eating and drinking and talking like old friends. It was a perfect night. Or almost. Until Angelina turned to me and said, “Mama. You gonna have a baby!”

In the shocked silence, Jane leaned in too and sniffed me, delicately, like a kitten exploring the world. “Huh. Angie Baby’s right. And ten bucks says it’s a boy.”

SIGNATURES OF THE DEAD

(Originally published in the anthology Strange Brew)

It was nap time, and it wasn’t often that I could get both children to sleep a full hour, the same full hour, that is. I stepped back and ran my hands over the healing and protection spells that enveloped my babies, Angelina and Evan Jr. The complex incantations were getting a bit frayed around the edges, and I drew on Mother Earth and the forest on the mountainside out back to restore them. Not much power, not enough to endanger the ecosystem that was still being restored there. Just a bit. Just enough.

Few witches or sorcerers survive into puberty, and so I spend a lot of time making sure my babies are okay. I come from a long line of witches. Not the kind in pointy black hats with a cauldron in the front yard, and not the kind like the Bewitched television show that once tried to capitalize on our reclusive species. Witches aren’t human, though we can breed true with humans, making little witches about fifty percent of the time. Unfortunately, witch babies have a poor survival rate, especially the males, most dying before they reach the age of twenty from various cancers. The ones who live through puberty, however, tend to live into their early hundreds.

The day each of my babies were conceived, I prayed and worked the same incantations Mama had used on her children, power-weavings, to make sure my babies were protected. Mama had better-than-average survival rate on her witches. For me, so far, so good. I said a little prayer over them and left the room.

Back in the kitchen, Paul Braxton—Brax to his friends, Detective or Sir to the bad guys he chased—Jane Yellowrock, and Evan were still sitting at the table, the photographs scattered all around. Crime scene photos of the McCarley house. And the McCarleys. It wasn’t pretty. The photos didn’t belong in my warm, safe home. They didn’t belong anywhere.

Evan and I were having trouble with them, with the blood and the butchery. Of course, nothing fazed Jane. And, after years of dealing with crime in New York City, little fazed Brax.

I met Evan’s gray eyes, seeing the steely anger there. My husband was easygoing, slow to anger and full of peace, but the photos of the five McCarleys had triggered something in him, a slow-burning, pitiless rage. He was feeling impotent, useless, and he wanted to smash things. The boxing bag in the garage would get a pummeling tonight, after the kids went to bed for the last time. I offered him a wan smile and went to the Aga stove; I poured fresh coffee for the men and tea for Jane and me. She had brought a new variety, a first flush Darjeeling, and it was wonderful with my homemade bread and peach-butter.

“Kids okay?” Brax asked, amusement in his tone.

I retook my seat and used the tip of a finger to push the photos away. I was pretty transparent, I guess, having to check on the babies after seeing the dead McCarleys. “They’re fine. Still sleeping. Still . . . safe.” Which made me feel all kinds of guilty to have my babies safe, while the entire McCarley family had been butchered. Drank dry. Partly eaten.

“You finished thinking about it?” he asked. “Because I need an answer. If I’m going after them, I need to know, for sure, what they are. And if they’re vamps, then I need to know how many there are and where they’re sleeping in the daytime. And I’ll need protection. I can pay.”

I sighed and sipped my tea, added a spoonful of raw sugar, stirred, and sipped again. He was trying to yank my chain, make my natural guilt and our friendship work to his favor, and making him wait was my only reverse power play. Having to use it ticked me off. I put the cup down with a soft china clink. “You know I won’t charge you for the protection spells, Brax.”

“I don’t want Molly going into that house,” Evan said. He brushed crumbs from his reddish, graying beard and leaned across the table, holding my eyes. “You know it’ll hurt you.”

I’m an earth witch, from a long family of witches, and our gifts are herbs and growing things, healing bodies, restoring balance to nature. I’m a little unusual for earth witches, in that I can sense dead things, which is why Brax was urging me to go to the McCarley house. To tell him for sure if dead things, like vamps, had killed the family. How they died. He could wait for forensics, but that might take weeks. I was faster. And I could give him numbers to go on too, how many vamps were in the blood-family, if they were healthy, or as healthy as dead things ever got. And, maybe, which direction they had gone at dawn, so he could guess where the vamps slept by day.

But once there, I would sense the horror, the fear that the violent deaths had left imprinted on the walls, floor, ceilings, furniture of the house. I took a breath to say no. “I’ll go,” I said instead. Evan pressed his lips together tight, holding in whatever he would say to me later, privately. “If I don’t go, and another family is killed, I’ll be a lot worse,” I said to him. “And that would be partly my fault. Besides, some of that reward money would buy us a new car.”

“You don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Moll,” he said, his voice a deep, rumbling bass. “And we can get the money in other ways.” Not many people knew that Evan is a sorcerer, not even Brax. We wanted it that way, as protection for our family. If it was known that Evan carried the rare gene on his X chromosome, the gene that made witches, and that we had produced children who both carried the gene, we’d likely disappear into some government-controlled testing program. “Moll. Think about this,” he begged. But I could see in his gentle brown eyes that he knew my mind was already made up.

“I’ll go.” I looked at Jane. “Will you go with me?” She nodded once, the beads in her black braids clicking with the motion. To Brax, I said, “When do you want us there?”

* * *

The McCarley house was on Dogwood, up the hill overlooking the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, not that far, as the crow flies, from my house, which is outside the city limits, on the other side of the hill. The McCarley home was older, with a nineteen-fifties feel to it, and from the outside it would have been hard to tell that anything bad had happened. The tiny brick house itself with its elvish, high-peaked roof, green trim, and well-kept lawn looked fine. But the crime scene tape was a dead giveaway.

I was still sitting in the car, staring at the house, trying to center myself for what I was about to do. It took time to become settled, to pull the energies of my gift around me, to create a skein of power that would heighten my senses.

Brax, dressed in a white plastic coat and shoe covers, was standing on the front porch, his hands in the coat pockets, his body at an angle, head down, not looking at anything. The set of his shoulders said he didn’t want to go back inside, but he would, over and over again, until he found the killers.

Jane was standing by the car, patient, bike helmet in her hands, riding leathers unzipped, copper-skinned face turned to the sun for its meager warmth on this early fall day. Jane Yellowrock was full Cherokee, and was much more than she seemed. Like most witches, like Evan who was still in the witch-closet, Jane had secrets that she guarded closely. I was pretty sure that I was the only one who knew any of them, and I didn’t flatter myself that I knew them all. Yet, even though she kept things hidden, I needed her special abilities and gifts to augment my own on this death-search.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, huffing in and out, my lips in an O. My body and my gift came alive, tingling in hands and feet as my oxygen level rose. I pulled the gift of power around me like a cloak, protection and sensing at my fingertips.

When I was ready, I opened the door of the unmarked car and stepped out onto the drive, my eyes slightly slit. At times like this, when I’m about to read the dead, I experience everything so clearly, the sun on my shoulders, the breeze like a wisp of pressure on my face, the feel of the earth beneath my feet, grounding me, the smell of late-blooming flowers. The scent of old blood. But I don’t like to open my eyes. The physical world is too intense. Too distracting.

Jane took my hand in her gloved one and placed it on her leather-covered wrist. My fingers wrapped around it for guidance and we walked to the house, the plastic shoe covers and plastic coat given to me by Brax making little shushing sounds as I walked. I ducked under the crime scene tape Jane held for me. Her cowboy boots and plastic shoe covers crunched/shushed on the gravel drive beside me. We climbed the concrete steps, four of them, to the small front porch. I heard Brax turn the key in the lock. The smell of old blood, feces, and pain whooshed out with the heated air trapped in the closed-up home.

Immediately I could sense the dead humans. Five of them had lived in this house, two parents, three children, a dog, and a cat. All dead. My earth gift, so much a thing of life, recoiled, closed up within me, like a flower gathering its petals back into an unopened bloom. Eyes still closed, I stepped inside.

The horror that was saturated into the walls, into the carpet, stung me, pricked me, like a swarm of bees, seeking my death. The air reeked when I sucked in a breath. Dizziness overtook me and I put out my other hand. Jane caught and steadied me, her leather gloves protecting me from skin-to-skin contact that would have pulled me back, away from the death in the house. After a moment, I nodded that I was okay and she released me, though I still didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see. A buzz of fear and horror filled my head.

I stood in the center of a small room, the walls pressing in on me. Eyes still closed, I saw the death energies, pointed, and said, “They came in through this door. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven of them. Fast.”

I felt the urgency of their movements, faster than any human. Pain gripped my belly and I pressed my arms into it, trying to assuage an ache of hunger deeper than I had ever known. “So hungry,” I murmured. The pain grew, swelling inside me. The imperative to eat. Drink. The craving for blood.

I turned to my left before I was overcome. “Two females took the man. He was surprised, startled, trying to stand. They attacked his throat. Started drinking. He died there.”

I turned more to my right, still pointing, and said, “A child died there. Older. Maybe ten. A boy.”

I touched my throat. It wanted to close up, to constrict at the feel of teeth, long canines, biting into me. The boy’s fear and shock were so intense they robbed me of any kind of action. When I spoke, the words were harsh, whispered. “One, a female, took the boy. The other four, all males, moved into the house.” The hunger grew, and with it the anger. And terror. Mind-numbing, thought-stealing terror. The boy’s death struggles increased. The smell of blood and death and fear choked. “Both died within minutes.”

I pointed again and Jane led me. The carpet squished under my feet. I knew it was blood, even with my eyes closed. I gagged and Jane stopped, letting me breathe, as well as I could in this death-house, letting me find my balance, my sense of place on the earth. When I nodded again, she led me forward. I could tell I was in a kitchen by the cooking smells that underlay the blood. I pointed into a shadowy place. “A woman was brought down there. Two of them. . . .” I flinched at what I saw. Pulled my hand from Jane’s and crossed my arms over me, hugging myself. Rocking back and forth.

“They took her together. One drank while the other . . . the other. . . . And then they switched places. They laughed. I can hear her crying. It took . . . a long . . . long time.” I blundered away, bumping into Jane. She led me out, helping me to get away. But it only got worse.

I pointed in the direction I needed to go. My footsteps echoed on a wood floor. Then carpets. “Two little girls. Little. . . . Oh, God in heaven. They . . .” I took a breath that shuddered painfully in my throat. Tears leaked down my cheeks, burning. “They raped them too. Two males. And they drank them dry.” I opened my eyes, seeing twin beds, bare frames, the mattresses and sheets gone, surely taken by the crime scene crew. Blood had spattered up one wall in the shape of a small body. To the sides, the wall was smeared, like the figure of angel wings a child might make in the snow, but made of blood.

Gorge rose in my throat. “Get me out of here,” I whispered. I turned away, my arms windmilling for the door. I tripped over something. Fell forward, into Brax. His face inches from mine. I was shaking, quivering like a seizure. Out of control. “Now! Get me out of here! NOW!” I shouted. But it was only a whisper.

Jane picked me up and hoisted me over her shoulder. Outside. Into the sun.

I came to myself, came awake, lying in the yard, the warm smell of leather and Jane all around. I touched her jacket and opened my eyes. She was sitting on the ground beside me, one knee up, the other stretched out, one arm on bent knee, the other bracing her. She was wearing a short sleeved tee in the cool air. She smiled her strange, humorless smile, one side of her mouth curling.

“You feeling better?” She was a woman of few words.

“I think so. Thank you for carrying me out.”

“You might want to wait on the thanks. I dropped you, putting you down. Not far, but you might have a bruise or two.”

I chuckled, feeling stiffness in my ribs. “I forgive you. Where’s Brax? I need to tell him what I found.”

Jane slanted her eyes to the side and I swiveled my head to see the cop walking from his car. He wasn’t a big man, standing five-feet, nine-inches, but he was solid, and beefy. I liked Brax. He was a good cop, even if he did take me into some awful places to read the dead. To repay me, he did what he could to protect my family from the witch-haters in the area. There were always a few in any town, even in easygoing Spruce Pine. He dropped a knee on the ground beside me and grunted. It might have been the word, “Well?”

“Seven of them,” I said, “four men, three women, all young rogues. One family, one bloodline. The sire is male. He’s maybe a decade old. Maybe to the point where he would have been sane, had he been in the care of a master-vamp. The others are younger. All crazy.”

For the first years of their lives, vampires are little more than beasts. According to the gossip mags, a good sire kept his newbie rogues chained in the basement during the first decade or so of undead-life, until they gained some sanity. Most experts thought that young rogues were likely the source of werewolf legends and the folklore of vampires as bloody killers. Rogues were mindless, carnal, blood-drinking machines, whether they were brand-new vampires or very old ones who had succumbed to the vampire version of dementia.

If a rogue had escaped his master and survived for a decade on his own, and had regained some of his mental functions, then he would be a very dangerous adversary. A vampire with the moral compass of a rogue, the cunning of a predator, and the reasoning abilities of a psychotic killer. I huddled under Jane’s jacket at the thought.

“Are you up to walking around the house?” Brax asked. “I need an idea which way they went.” He looked at his watch. I looked at the sun. We were about four hours from sundown. Four hours before the blood-family would rise again and go looking for food and fun.

I sat up and Jane stood, extending her hand. She pulled me up and I offered her jacket back. “Keep it,” she said, so I snuggled it around my shoulders, the scent of Jane rising around me like a warm animal. She followed as I circled the house, keeping between Brax and me, and I wondered what had come between the two while I was unconscious. Whatever it was, it crackled in the air, hostile, antagonistic. Jane didn’t like most cops, and she tended to say whatever was on her mind, no matter how insulting, offensive, rude, or blunt it might be.

I stopped suddenly, feeling the chill of death under my feet. I was on the side of the house, and I had just crossed over the rogues’ trail. They had come and gone this way. I looked at the front door. It was undamaged, so that meant they had been invited in or that the door had been unlocked. I didn’t know if the old myth about vamps not being able to enter a house uninvited was true or not, but the door hadn’t been knocked down.

I followed the path around the house and to the back of the grassy lot. There was a playset with a slide, swings, a teeter-totter, and monkey bars. I walked to it and stood there, seeing what the dead had done. They had played here. After they killed the children and parents, they had come by here, in the gray predawn, and played on the swings. “Have your crime people dusted this?”

“The swing set?” Brax said, surprised.

I nodded and moved on, into the edge of the woods. There was no trail. Just woods, deep and thick with rhododendrons, green leaves and sinuous limbs and straighter tree trunks blocking the way, a canopy of oak and maple arching overhead. I looked up, into the trees, still green, untouched as yet by the fresh chill in the air. I bent down and spotted an animal trail, the ground faintly marked with a narrow, bare path about three inches wide. There was a mostly clear area about two feet high, branches to the side. Some were broken off. A bit of cloth hung on one broken branch. “They came through here,” I said. Brax knelt beside me. I pointed. “See that? I think it’s from the shirt the blood-master was wearing.”

“I’ll bring the dogs. Get them started on the trail,” he said, standing. “Thank you, Molly. I know this was hard on you.”

I looked at Jane. She inclined her head slightly, agreeing. The dogs might get through the brush and brambles, but no dog handler was going to make it. Jane, however . . . Jane might be able to do something with this. But she would need a blood scent to follow. I thought about the house. No way could I go back in there, not even to hunt for a smear of vampire blood or other body fluid. But the bit of cloth stuck in the underbrush might have blood on it. If Jane could get to it before Brax did. . . . I looked from Jane to the scrap of cloth and back again, a question in my eyes. She smiled that humorless half-smile and inclined her head again. Message sent and received.

I stood and faced the house. “I want to walk around the house,” I said to Brax. “And you might want to call the crime scene back. When the vampires played on the swings, they had the family pets. The dog was still alive for part of it.” I registered Brax’s grimace as I walked away. He followed. Jane didn’t. I began to describe the crime scene to him, little things he could use to track the vamps. Things he could use in court, not that the vamps would ever make it to a courtroom. They would have to be staked and beheaded where he found them. But it kept Brax occupied, entering notes into his wireless notebook, so Jane could retrieve the scrap of cloth, and, hopefully the vampire’s scent.

Jane was waiting in the drive when I finished describing what I had sensed and “seen” in the house to Brax, her long legs straddling her small, used Yamaha. I had never seen her drive a car. She was a motorbike girl, and lusted after a classic Harley, which she had promised to buy for herself when she got the money. She tilted her head to me, and I knew she had the cloth and the scent. Brax, who caught the exchange, looked quizzically between us, but when neither of us explained he shrugged and opened the car door for me.

* * *

The vampire attack made the regional news, and I spent the rest of the day hiding from the TV. I played with the kids, fed them supper, made a few batches of dried herbal mixtures to sell in my sisters’ herb shop in town, and counted my blessings, trying to get the images of the McCarleys’ horror and pain out of my mind. I knew I’d not sleep well tonight. Sometimes not even an earth witch can defeat the power of evil over dreams.

Just after dusk, with a cold front blowing through and the temperatures dropping, Jane rode up on her bike and parked it. Carrying my digital video camera, I met her in the front garden, and, without speaking, we walked together to the backyard and the boulder-piled herb garden beside my gardening house and the playhouse. Jane dropped ten pounds of raw steak on the ground while I set up my camera and tripod. She handed me the scrap of cloth retrieved from the woods. It was stiff with blood, and I was sure it wasn’t all the vampire’s.

Unashamedly, Jane stripped, while I looked away, giving her the privacy I would have wanted had it been me taking off my clothes. Anyone who happened look this way with a telescope, as I had no neighbors close by, would surely think the witch and friend were going sky-clad for a ceremony, but I wasn’t a Wiccan or a goddess worshipper, and I didn’t dance around naked. Especially in the unseasonable cold.

When she was ready, her travel pack strapped around her neck, along with the gold nugget necklace she never removed, Jane climbed to the top of the rock garden, avoiding my herbs with careful footsteps, and sat. She was holding a fetish necklace in her hands, made from teeth, claws, and bones.

She looked at me, standing shivering in the falling light. “Can your camera record this dark?” When I nodded, my teeth chattering, she said. “Okay. I’ll do my thing. You try to get it on film, and then you can drive me over. You got a blanket in the backseat in case we get stopped?” I nodded again and she grinned, not the half-smile I usually got from her, but a real grin, full of happiness. We had talked about me filming her, so she could see what happened from the outside, but this was the first time we had actually tried. I was intensely curious about the procedure.

“It’ll take about ten minutes,” she said, “for me to get mentally ready. When I finish, don’t be standing between me and the steaks, okay?” When I nodded again, she laughed, a low, smooth sound, that made me think of whiskey and wood smoke. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”

I laughed with her then, for several reasons, only one of which was that Jane’s rare laugh was contagious. I said, “Good luck.” She inclined her head, blew out a breath, and went silent. Nearly ten minutes later, even in the night that had fallen around us, I could tell that something odd was happening. I hit the record button on the camera and watched as gray light gathered around my friend.

If clouds were made of light instead of water vapor, they would look like this, all sparkly silver, thrust through with motes of blackness that danced and whorled. It coalesced, thickened, and eddied around her. Beautiful. And then Jane . . . shifted. Changed. Her body seemed to bend and flow like water, or like hot wax, a viscous, glutinous liquid, full of gray light. The bones beneath her flesh popped and cracked. She grunted, as if with pain. Her breathing changed. The light grew brighter, the dark motes darker.

Both began to dissipate.

On the top of the boulders where Jane had been sat a mountain lion, its eyes golden, with human-shaped pupils. Puma concolor, the big-cat of the Western hemisphere, sat in my garden looking me over, Jane’s travel pack around her neck making a strange lump on her back. The cat was darker than I remembered, tawny on back, shoulders, and hips, pelt darkening down her legs, around her face and ears. The tail, long and stubby, was dark at the tip. She huffed a breath. I saw teeth.

My shivers worsened, even though I knew this was Jane. Or had been Jane. She had assured me, not long ago, that she still had vestiges of her own personality even in cat form and wouldn’t eat me. Easy to say when the big-cat isn’t around. Then she yawned, snorted, and stood to her four feet. Incredibly graceful, long sinews and muscles pulling, she leaped to the ground and approached the raw steaks she had dumped earlier. She sniffed and made a distinctly disgusted sound.

I tittered and the cat looked at me. I mean, she looked at me. I froze. A moment later, she lay down on the ground and started to eat the cold, dead meat. Even in the dark, I could see her teeth biting, tearing.

I had missed some footage and rotated the camera to the eating cat. I also grabbed her fetish necklace and her clothes, stuffing them in a tote for later.

Thirty minutes later, after she had cleaned the blood off her paws and jaws with her tongue, I dismantled the tripod and drove to the McCarley home. Jane—or her cat—lay under a blanket on the backseat. Once there, I opened the doors and shut them behind us.

There was more crime scene tape up at the murder scene, but the place was once again deserted. Silent, my flashlight lighting the way for me with Jane in front, in the dark, we walked around the house to the woods’ edge.

I cut off the flash to save her night vision, and held out the scrap of bloody cloth to the cat. She sniffed. Opened her mouth and sucked air in with a coughing, gagging, scree of sound. I jumped back and I could had sworn Jane laughed, an amused hack. I broke out into a fear-sweat that instantly chilled in the cold breeze. “Not funny,” I said. “What the heck was that?”

Jane padded over and sat in front of me, her front paws crossed like a Southern belle, ears pricked high, mouth closed, nostrils fluttering in the dark, waiting. Patient as ever. When I figured out that she wasn’t going to eat me, and feeling distinctly dense, I held out the bit of cloth. Again, she opened her mouth and sucked air, and I realized she was scenting through her mouth. Learning it. When she was done, which felt like forever, she looked up at me and hacked again. Her laugh, for certain. She turned and padded into the woods. I switched on my flash and hurried back to my car. It was the kids’ bedtime. I needed to be home.

* * *

It was four a.m. when the phone rang. Evan grunted, a bear-snort. I swear, the man could sleep through a train wreck or a tornado. I rolled and picked up the phone. Before I could say hello, Jane said, “I got it. Come get me. I’m freezing and starving. Don’t forget the food.”

“Where are you?” I asked. She told me and I said, “Okay. Half an hour.”

Jane swore and hung up. She had warned me about her mouth when she was hungry. I poked my hubby and when he swore, too, I said, “I’m heading out to the old Partman Place to pick up Jane. I’ll be back by dawn.” He grunted again and I slid from the bed, dressed, and grabbed the huge bowl of oatmeal, sugar, and milk from the fridge. Jane had assured me she needed food after she shifted back, and didn’t care what it was or what temp it was. I hoped she remembered that when I gave it to her. Cold oatmeal was nasty.

Half an hour later, I reached the old Partman Place, a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century homestead and later a mine, the homestead sold and deserted when the gemstones were discovered and the mine closed down in the nineteen-fifties when the gems ran out. It was grown over by fifty-year-old trees, the drive was gravel, Jane standing hunched in the middle. Human, wearing the lightweight clothes she carried in the travel pouch along with the cell phone and a few vamp-killing supplies.

I popped the doors and she climbed in, her long black hair like a veil around her, her thin clothes covering a shivering body, pimpled with cold. “Food,” she said, her voice hoarse. I passed the bowl of oatmeal and a serving spoon to her. She tossed the top of the bowl onto the floor and dug in. I watched her eat from the corner of my eye as I drove. She didn’t bother to chew, just shoveled the cold oatmeal in like she was starving. She looked thinner than usual, though Jane was never much more than skin, bone, and muscle—like her big-cat form, I thought. Crimminy. Witches I can handle. But what Jane was? Maybe not so much. I hadn’t known shape changers or skinwalkers even existed. No one did.

Bowl empty, she pulled her leather coat from the tote I had brought, snuggled under it, and lay back in her seat, cradling the empty bowl. She closed her eyes, looking exhausted. “That was not fun,” she said, the words so soft I had to strain to hear. “Those vamps are fast. Faster than Beast.”

“Beast?”

“My cat,” she said. She laughed, the sound forlorn, lost, almost sad. “My big hunting cat. Who had to chase the scent back to their lair. Up and down mountains and through creeks and across the river. I had to soak in the river to throw off the heat. Beast isn’t built for long-distance running.” She sighed and adjusted the heating vents to blow onto her. “The vamps covered five miles from the McCarleys’ place in less than an hour yesterday morning. It took me more than four hours to follow them back through the underbrush and another two to isolate the opening. I should have shifted into a faster cat, though Beast would have been ticked off.”

“You found their lair?” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. “On the Partman Place?”

“Yeah. Sort of.” She rolled her head to face me in the dark, her golden eyes glowing and forbidding. “They’re living in the mine. They’ve been there for a long time. They were gone by the time I found it. They were famished when they left the lair. I could smell their hunger. I think they’ll kill again tonight. Probably have killed again tonight.”

I tightened my hands on the steering wheel, and had to force myself to relax.

“Molly? The lair is only a mile from your house as the vamp runs. And witches smell different from humans.”

A spike of fear raced through me. Followed by a mental image of a vampire leaning over Angelina’s bed. I tightened my hands on the wheel so tight it made a soft sound of protest.

“You need to mount a defensive perimeter around your house,” Jane said. “You and Evan. You hear? Something magical that’ll scare off anything that moves, or freeze the blood of anything dead. Something like that. You make sure the kids are safe.” She turned her head aside, to look out at the night. Jane loved my kids. She had never said so, but I could see it in her eyes when she watched them. I drove on. Chilled to the bone by fear and the early winter.

* * *

Jane was too tired to make it back to her apartment, and so she spent the day sleeping on the cot in the back room of the shop. Seven Sassy Sisters’ Herb Shop and Café, owned and run by my family, had a booming business, both locally and on the Internet, selling herbal mixtures and teas by bulk and by the ounce, the shop itself serving teas, specialty coffees, brunch and lunch daily, and dinner on weekends. It was mostly vegetarian fare, whipped up by my older sister, water witch, professor, and three-star chef, Evangelina Everhart. My sister Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, an air witch, newly married and pregnant, ran the register and took care of ordering supplies. Two other witch sisters, twins Boadacia and Elizabeth, ran the herb store, while our wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were wait staff. I’m really Molly Meagan Everhart Trueblood. Names with moxie run in my family. Without a single question about why this supposed human needed a place to crash, my sisters let Jane sleep off the night run.

While my sisters worked around the cot and ran the business without me, I went driving. To the Partman Place. With Brax.

“You found this how?” he asked, sitting in the passenger seat. I was driving so I could pretend that I was in control, not that Brax cared who was in charge as long as the rogue vampires were brought down. “The dogs got squirrelly twenty feet into the underbrush and refused to go on. It doesn’t make any sense, Molly. I never saw dogs go so nuts. They freaked out. So I gotta ask how you know where they sleep.” Detective Paul Braxton was antsy. Worried. Scared. There had been no new reported deaths in the area, yet I had just told him that the vamps had gone hunting last night.

There were some benefits to being a witch-out-of-the-closet. I let my lips curl up knowingly. “I had a feeling at the McCarley’s yesterday, but I didn’t think it would work. I devised a spell to track the rogue vampires. At dusk, I went to the McCarley’s and set it free. And it worked. I was able to pinpoint their lair.”

“How? I never heard of such a thing. No one has. I asked on NCIC this morning after you called.” At my raised brows he said, “NCIC is the National Crime Information Center, run by the FBI, a computerized index and database of criminal justice information.”

“A database?” Crap. I hit the brakes, hard. Throwing us both against the seatbelts. The wheels squealed, popped, and groaned as the antilock breaking system went into play. Brax cussed as we came to a rocking halt. I spun in the seat to face him. “If you made me part of that system, then you’ve used me for the last time, you no good piece of—”

“Molly!” He held both hands palms out, still rocking in the seat. “No! I did not enter you into the system. We have an agreement. I wouldn’t breach it.”

“Then tell me what you did,” I said, my voice low and threatening. “Because if you took away the privacy of my family and babies, I’ll curse you to hell and back, and damn the consequences.” I gathered my power to me, pulling from the earth and the forest and even the fish living in the nearby river, ecosystems be hanged. This man was endangering my babies.

Brax swallowed in the sudden silence of the old Volvo, as if he could feel the power I was drawing in. I could smell his fear, hear it in his fast breath, over the sounds of nearby traffic. “NCIC is just a database,” he said. “I just input a series of questions. About witches. And how they work. And—”

“Witches are in the FBI’s databank?” I hit the steering wheel with both fists as the thought sank in. “Why?”

“Because there are witch criminals in the US. Sorcerers who do blood magic. Witches who do dark magic. Witches are part of the database, now and forever.”

“Sun of witch on a switch,” I swore, cursing long and viciously, helpless anger in the tones, the syllables flowing and rich. Switching to the old language for impact, not that it had helped. Curses had a way of falling back on the curser rather than hurting the cursed.

I beat the steering wheel in impotent fury. I was a witch, for pity’s sake. And I couldn’t protect my own kind. Rage banging around me like a wrecking ball, I hit the steering wheel one last time and threw my old Volvo into drive. Fuming, silent, I drove to the Partman Place.

The entrance, once meant for mining machinery and trucks, was still drivable, though the asphalt was crazed and broken, grass growing in the cracks. The drive wound around a hillock and was lost from view. Beyond it, signs of mining that were hidden from the road became more obvious. Trees were young and scraggly, the ground was scraped to bedrock, and rusted iron junk littered the site. An old car sat on busted tires, windows, hood, and doors long gone. The office of the mining site was an old WWII Quonset hut, the door hanging free to reveal the dark interior.

Though strip mining had been the primary means of getting to the gems, tunnels had gone into the side of the mountain. The entry to the mine was boarded over with two-by-tens, but some were missing, and it was clear that the opening had been well used.

Brax rubbed his mouth, looking over the place, not meeting my eyes. Finally, he said, “I would never cause you or yours trouble, Molly Trueblood. I do my best to protect you from problems, harassment, or unwanted attention from law enforcement, federal NCIC or otherwise.”

“Except you,” I accused, annoyed that he had apologized before I blew off my mad.

He smiled behind his hand. “Except me. And maybe one day you’ll trust me enough to tell me the truth about this so-called tracking spell you used to find this place. I’m going to check out the area. Stay here. If I don’t come back, that disproves the myth that vamps sleep in the daylight. You get your pal Jane to stake my ass if I come back undead.”

“Your heart,” I said grumpily. “If you actually have one. Heart, not your ass.”

He made a little chortling laugh and picked up the flashlight he had brought. “Ten minutes. Half an hour max. I’ll be back.”

“Better be fangless.”

* * *

Forty-two minutes later Brax reappeared, dust all over his hair and suit. He clicked the flash off and strode to the car, got in with a wave of death-tainted air, and said, “Drive.” I drove.

His shoulders slumped and he seemed to relax as we turned off on the secondary road and headed back to town, rubbing his hand over his head in a habitual gesture. Dust filtered off him into the air of the car, making motes that caught the late-afternoon sun. I rolled the windows down to let out the stink on him. We were nearly back to my house when he spoke again.

“I survived. They either didn’t hear me or they were asleep. No myths busted today.” When I didn’t reply he went on. “They’ve been bringing people back to the mine for a while. Indigents, transients. Truant kids. There were remains scattered everywhere. Like the McCarleys, most were partially eaten.” He stared out the windshield, seeing the scene he had left behind, not the bright, sunny day. “I’ll have to get the city and county to compile a list of missing people.”

A long moment later he said. “We have to go after them. Today. Before they need to feed again.”

“Why not just seal them up in the mine till tomorrow after dawn?” I said, turning into my driveway, steering carefully around the tricycle and set of child-sized bongos left there. “Go in fresh, with enough weaponry and men to overpower them. The vamps would be weak, hungry, and apt to make mistakes.”

“Good golly, Miss Molly,” he said, his face transforming with a grin at the chance to use the old lyrics. “We could, couldn’t we? Where was my brain?”

“Thinking about dead kids,” I said softly, as I pulled to a stop. “I, on the other hand, had forty-two minutes to do nothing but think. All you need is a set of plans for the mine to make sure you seal over all the entrances. Set a guard with crosses and stakes at each one. That way you go in on your terms, not theirs.”

“I think I love you.”

“Stop with the lyrics. Go make police plans.”

* * *

Unfortunately, the vamps got out that night, through an entrance not on the owner’s maps. They killed four of the police guarding other entrances. And then they went hunting. This time, they struck close to home. Just after dawn, Brax woke me, standing at the front door, his face full of misery. Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, air witch, newly married and pregnant, and her husband had been attacked in their home. Tommy Newton was dead. My little sister was missing and presumed dead.

The attention of the national media had been snared and news vans rolled into town, one setting up in the parking lot of the shop. Paralyzed by fear, my sisters closed everything down and gathered at my house to discuss options, to grieve, and make halfhearted funeral plans.

I spent the day and the early evening hugging my children, watching TV news about the “vampire crisis,” and devising offensive and defensive charms, making paper airplanes out of spells that didn’t work, and flying them across the room to the delight of my babies and my four human nieces and nephews. I had to come up with something. Something that would offer protection to the person who went underground to revenge my sister.

Jane sat to the side, her cowboy boots, jeans, and T-shirt contrasting with the peasant tops, patchwork skirts, and hemp sandals worn by my sisters and me. She didn’t say much, just drank tea and ate whatever was offered. Near dusk, she came to me and said softly, “I need a ride. To the mine.”

I looked at her, grief holding my mouth shut, making it hard to breathe.

“I need some steak or a roast. You have one frozen in the freezer in the garage. I looked. You thaw it in the microwave, leave your car door open. I shift out back, get in and hunker down. You make an excuse, drive me to the mine, and get back with a gallon of milk or something.”

“Why?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

Her eyes glowing a tawny yellow, Jane looked like a predator, ready to hunt. Excited by the thought. “I don’t smell like a human. The older one won’t be expecting me. I can go in, find where they’re hiding, see if your sister is alive, and get back. Then we can make a plan.”

Hope spiked in me like heated steel. “Why would the vampires keep her alive?” I asked. “And why would you go in there?”

“I told you. Witches smell different from humans. You smell, I don’t know, powerful. If he’s trying to build a blood-family, and if he has some ability to reason, the new blood-master might hold on to her. To try to turn her. It’s worth a shot.” Jane grinned grimly, her beast rising in her. Bits of gray light hovered, dancing on her skin. “Besides. The governor and the vamp council of North Carolina just upped the bounty on the rogues to forty-thou a head. I can use a quarter mil. And if you come up with a way to keep me safe down there, when I go in to hunt them down, I’ll share. You said you need to replace that rattletrap you drive.”

I put a hand to my mouth, holding in the sob that accompanied my sudden, hopeful tears. Unable to speak, I nodded. Jane went to get a roast.

* * *

I slept uneasily, waiting, hearing every creak, crack, and bump in the night. If we smelled differently from humans, would the vampires come after my family? My other sisters? Just after dawn, the phone rang. “Come and get me,” Jane said, her voice both excited and exhausted. “Carmen’s still alive.”

I called my sisters on my cell as I drove and told them to get over to my house fast. We had work to do. When I got back with Jane, my kitchen had three witch sisters in it, each trying to brew coffee, tea, fry eggs, cook grits and oatmeal. Evan was glowering in the corner, his hair standing up in tousles, reading the newspaper online, and feeding Little Evan.

Jane pushed her way in, ignoring the babble of questions, and took the pot of oatmeal right off the stove, dumping in sugar and milk and digging in. She ate ten cups of hot oatmeal, two cups of sugar, and a quart of milk. It was the most oatmeal I had ever seen anyone eat in my life. Her belly bulged like a basketball. Then she took paper and pen and drew a map of the mine, talking. “No one’ll be going into the mine today. Count on it. The vamps killed four of the men watching the entrances and the governor won’t justify sending anyone in until the national guard gets here. Carmen is alive, here.” She drew an X. “Along with two teenage girls. The rogue master’s name is Adam and he has his faculties, enough to see to the feeding and care of his family, enough to make more scions. But if he dies, then the girls in his captivity are just another dinner to the rogues. So I have to take him down last. I need something like an immobility spell, or glue spell. But first, I need something to get me in close.”

“Obfuscation spell,” I said.

“No one’s succeeded with that one in over five hundred years,” Evangelina said, ever the skeptic.

“Maybe that’s because we never tried,” Boadacia said.

Elizabeth looked at her twin, challenge sparkling in her eyes. “Let’s.”

“But according to the histories, a witch has to be present to initialize it and to keep it running. No human can do it,” Evangelina said.

“I’ll go in with her,” Evan said.

My sisters turned to him. The sudden silence was deafening. Little Evan took that moment to bang on his high chair and shout, “Milk, milk, milk, milk!”

“It would have to be an earth witch,” Evangelina said slowly. “You’re an air sorcerer. You can’t make it work, either.” As one, they all turned to look at me. I was the only earth witch in the group.

“No,” Evan said. “No way.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the only way.”

* * *

At four in the afternoon, My sisters and Evan and I were standing in front of the mine. Jane was geared up in her vamp hunting gear, a chain mail collar, leather pants, metal-studded leather coat over a chain vest, and a huge gun with an open stock, like a Star Wars shotgun. Silvered knives were strapped to her thighs, in her boots, along her forearms; studs in her gloves; two handguns were holstered at her waist, under her coat; her long hair was braided and tied down. A dozen crosses hung around her neck. Stakes were twisted in her hair like hairsticks.

I was wearing jeans, sweaters, and Evangelina’s faux leather coat. As vegetarians, my sisters didn’t own leather, and I couldn’t afford it. I carried twelve stakes, an extra flashlight, medical supplies, ammunition, and five charms: two healing charms, one walking-away charm, one empowerment, and one obfuscation.

Evan was similarly dressed, refusing to be left behind, loaded down with talismans, charms, battery powered lights, a machete, and a twenty pound mallet suitable for bashing in heads. It wouldn’t kill a vampire but it would incapacitate one long enough to stake it and take its head. We were ready to go in when Brax drove up, got out, and sauntered over. He was dressed in SWAT team gear and guns. “What? You think I’d let civilians go after the rogues alone? Not gonna happen, people.”

We hadn’t told Brax. I glared at Evan, who shrugged, unapologetic.

“What are you carrying?” Jane asked. When he told her, she shook her head and handed him a box of ammunition. “Hand-packed, silver-flechette rounds, loaded for vamp. They can’t heal from it. A direct heart shot will take them out.”

The cop paused, maybe remembering the last time he went up against a vamp with Jane. “Sweet,” Brax said, removing his ammunition from a shotgun and reloading as he looked us over. “So we got an earth witch, her husband, a vamp hunter, and me. Lock and load, people.” Satisfied, he pushed in front and led the way. Once inside, we walked four abreast as my sisters set up a command center at the entrance. Behind us I could hear the three witches chanting protective incantations while Regan and Amelia began to pray.

We passed parts of several bodies. My earth gift recoiled, closing up. There were too many dead. I had hoped to be able to sense the presence of the rogue vampires, but with my gift so overloaded, I doubted I’d be of much help at all. The smell of rancid meat and rotting blood was beyond horrible. Charnel house effluvia. I stopped looking after the first limb—part of a young woman’s leg.

Except for the stench and the body parts, the first hundred yards was easy. After that, things went to hell in a handbasket.

We heard singing, a childhood melody. “Starlight, star fright, first star . . . No. Starlight blood fight . . . No. I don’ ’member. I don’ ’member—” The voice stopped, the cutoff sharp as a knife. “People,” she whispered, the word echoing in the mine. “Blood . . .”

And she was on us. Face caught in the flashlight. A ravening animal. Flashing fangs. Blood-red eyes centered with blacker-than-night pupils. Nails like black claws. She took down Evan with one swipe. I screamed. Blood splattered. His flashlight fell. Its beam rocking in shadows. One glimpse of a body. Leaping. Flying. Landed on Jane. Inhumanly fast. Jane rolled into the dark.

I lost sight in the swinging light. Found Evan by falling on him. Hot blood pulsed into my hand. I pressed on the wound, guided by earth magic. I called on Mother Earth for healing. Moments later, Jane knelt beside me, breathing hard, smelling foul. She steadied the light. Evan was still alive, fighting to breathe, my hands covered with his blood. His skin was pasty. The wound was across his right shoulder, had sliced his jugular, and he had lost a lot of blood, though my healing had clotted over the wound.

I pressed one of the healing amulets my sisters had made over the wound, chanting in the old tongue. “Cneasaigh, cneasaigh a bháis báite in fhuil,” over and over. Gaelic for, “Heal, heal, blood soaked death.”

Minutes later, I felt Evan take a full breath. Felt his heartbeat steady under my hands. In the uncertain light, my tears splashed on his face. He opened his eyes and looked up at me. His beard was brighter than usual, tangled with his blood. He held my gaze, telling me so much in that one look. He loved me. Trusted me. Knew I was going on without him. Promised to live. Promised to take care of our children if I didn’t make it back. Demanded I live and come back to him. I sobbed with relief. Buried my face in his healing neck and cried.

* * *

We carried Evan back to the entrance, where my sisters called for an ambulance. As soon as he was stable, the three of us redistributed the supplies and headed back in to the mine. I saw the severed head of the rogue in the shadows. Jane’s first forty-thousand-dollar trophy.

We had done one useful thing. We had rewritten the history books. We had proven that vampires could move around in the daylight as long as they were in complete absence of the sun. That meant we would have to fight rather than just stake and run. Lucky us.

There were six vampires left and three of us. By now, the remaining ones were surely alerted to our presence. Not good odds.

We were deeply underground when the next attack took place. Jane must have smelled them coming because she shouted, “Ten o’clock! Two of them.” Her gun boomed. Brax’s spat flames as it fired. Two vampires fell. Jane dispatched them with a knife shaped like a small sword. While she sawed, and I looked away, she murmured, “Three down, four to go,” over and over, like a rich miser counting his gold.

We moved on. Down a level, deeper into the mountain. Jane led the way now, ignoring some branching tunnels, taking others, assuring us she knew where we were and where Carmen was. Like me, she ignored Brax’s questions about how.

Just after we passed a cross-tunnel, two vampires came at us from behind, a flanking maneuver. I never heard them. In front of me, Jane whirled. I dropped to the tunnel floor, cowering. She fired. The muzzle flash blinded me. More gunshots sounded, echoing. Brax yelled, the sound full of pain.

Jane stepped over me, straddling me in the dark, her boots lit by a wildly tottering light. I snatched it and turned it on Brax. He knelt nearby, blood at his throat. A vampire lay at his knees, a stake through her chest. My ears were ringing, blasted by the concussion of firepower. In the light, I saw Jane hand a bandage to Brax and pull one of her knives. Her shadow on the mine wall raised up the knife and brought it down, beheading the rogues; my hearing began to come back; the chopping sounded soggy.

She left the heads. “For pickup on the way out. The odds just turned in our favor.”

I couldn’t look at the heads. I had been no help at all. I was the weak link in the trio. I squared my shoulders and fingered the charms I carried. I was supposed to hold them until Jane said to activate them. It would be soon.

We moved on down the widening tunnel. Jane touched my arm in the dark. I jumped. She tapped my hand and mouthed, “Charm one. Now.”

Clumsily I pulled the charm, activated it, and tossed it to the left. The sound of footsteps echoed, as if we were still moving, but down a side tunnel. Then I activated the second charm, the one my sisters and I had worked on all day. The obfuscation charm. It was the closest thing in all of our histories to an invisibility spell, and no witch had perfected it in hundreds of years.

Following the directions I had memorized, I drew in the image of the rock floor and walls, and cloaked it around us. I nodded to Jane. She cut off the light. Moments later, she moved forward slowly, Brax at her side. I followed, one hand on each shoulder. The one on Brax’s shoulder was sticky with blood. He was still bleeding. Vampires can smell blood. The obfuscation spell wasn’t intended to block scents.

A faint light appeared ahead, growing brighter as we moved and the tunnel opened out. We stopped. The space before us was a juncture from which five tunnels branched. Centered was a table with a lantern, several chairs, and cots. Carmen was lying on one, cradling her belly, her eyes open and darting. Two teenaged girls were on another cot, huddling together, eyes wide and fearful. No vampires were in the room.

We moved quietly to Carmen and I bent over her. I slammed my hand over her mouth. She bucked, squealing. “Carmen. It’s Molly,” I whispered. She stopped fighting. Raised a hand and touched mine. She nodded. I removed my hand.

She whispered, “They went that way.”

“Come on. Tell the others to come. But be quiet.”

Moving awkwardly, Carmen rolled off the cot and stood. She motioned to the two girls. “Come on. Come with me.” When both girls refused, my baby sister waddled over, slapped them both resoundingly, gripped each by an arm, and hauled them up. “I said come with me. It wasn’t a damn invitation.”

The girls followed her, holding their jaws and watching Carmen fearfully. Pride blossomed in me. I adjusted the obfuscation spell, drawing in more of the cave walls and floor. Wrapped the spell around the three new bodies. The girls suddenly could see us. One screamed.

“So much for stealth,” Jane said. “Move it!” She shoved the two girls and me toward the tunnel out. Stumbling, we raced to the dark. I switched on the flashlight, put it in Carmen’s hands. Pulled the last two charms. The empowerment charm was meant to take strength from a winning opponent and give it to a losing, dying one. It could only be used in clear life and death situations. The other was my last healing charm.

We made the first turn, feet slapping the stone, gasping. Something crashed into us. A girl and Jane went down with the vampire. Tangled limbs. The vampire somersaulted. Taking Jane with him. Crouching. He held her in front of him. Jane’s head in one hand. Twisting it up and back. His fangs extended fully. He sank fangs and claws into Jane’s throat, above her mail collar. Ripping. The collar hit the ground.

Brax shouted. “Run!” He picked up the fallen girl and shoved her down the tunnel. The last vamp landed on his back. Brax went down. Rolling. Blood spurting. Shadows like monsters on the far wall.

In the wavering light, Jane’s throat gushed blood. Pumping bright.

Carmen and I backed against the mine wall. I was frozen, indecisive. Who to save? I didn’t know for sure who was winning or losing. I didn’t know what would happen if I activated the empowerment charm. I pulled the extra flashlight and switched it on.

Brax rolled. Into the light. Eyes wild. The vampire rolled with him. Eating his throat. Brax was dying. I activated the empowerment charm. Tossed it.

It landed. Brax’s breath gargled. The vampire fell. Brax rose over him, stake in hand. Brought the stake down. Missed his heart.

I pointed. “Run. That way.” Carmen ran, her flashlight bouncing. I set down the last light, pulled stakes from my pockets. Rushed the vampire. Stabbed down with all my might. One sharpened stake ripped through his clothes. Into his flesh. I stabbed again. Blood splashed up, crimson and slick. I fumbled two more stakes.

Brax, beside me, took them. Rolled the vampire into the light. Raised his arms high. Rammed them into the rogue’s chest.

Blood gushed. Brax fell over it. Silent. So silent. Neither moved.

I activated the healing amulet. Looked over my shoulder. At Jane.

The vampire was behind her. Her throat was mostly gone. Blood was everywhere. Spine bones were visible in the raw meat of her throat.

Yet, even without a trachea, she was growling. Face shifting. Gray light danced. Her hands, clawed and tawny, reached back. Dug into the skull of the vampire. Whipped him forward. Over her. He slammed into the rock floor. Bounced limply.

Sobbing, I grabbed Brax’s shoulder. Pulled him over. Dropped the charm on his chest.

Jane leaped onto the vampire. Ripped out his throat. Tore into his stomach. Slashed clothes and flesh. Blood spurted. She shifted. Grey light. Black motes. And her cat screamed.

I watched as her beast tore the vampire apart. Screaming with rage.

* * *

We made it to the mine entrance, Carmen and the girls running ahead, into the arms of my sisters. Evangelina raised a hand to me, framed by pale light, and pulled the girls outside, leaving the entrance empty, dawn pouring in. I didn’t know how the night had passed, where the time had disappeared. But I stopped there, inside the mine with Jane, looking out, into the day. In the urgency of finding the girls and getting them all back to safety, we hadn’t spoken about the fight.

Now, she touched her throat. Hitched Brax higher. He hadn’t made it. Jane had carried him out, his blood seeping all over her, through the rents in her clothes made by fighting vampires and by Jane herself, as she shifted inside them. “Is he,” she asked, her damaged voice raspy as stone, “dead because you used the last healing charm on me?” She swallowed, the movement of poorly healed muscles audible. “Is that why you’re crying?”

Guilt lanced through me. Tears, falling for the last hour, burned my face. “No,” I whispered. “I used it on Brax. But he was too far gone for a healing charm.”

“And me?” The sound was pained, the words hurting her throat.

“I trusted in your beast to heal you.”

She nodded, staring into the dawn. “You did the right thing.” Again she hitched Brax higher. Whispery-voiced, she continued. “I got seven heads to pick up and turn in,” she slanted her eyes at me, “and we got a cool quarter mil waiting. Come on. Day’s wasting.” Jane Yellowrock walked into the sunlight, her tawny eyes still glowing.

And I walked beside her.

> > > > > > Author’s note: This story takes place after Raven Cursed, but before the start of Death’s Rival.

CAJUN WITH FANGS

Bitsa’s atypical roar and black smoke from her exhaust flowed down the bayou in a noxious, rough-sounding echo as I crossed the rickety, picturesque bridge into town. The bike’s shudder had me worried. The Harley had undergone an engine and full systems’ rehab as well as a touch-up paint job recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, and she should be running like a top. But the misfire was getting worse, and I knew I’d never make it over the Atchafalaya River Basin and into New Orleans before nightfall without a mishap. The idea of a breakdown after dark on the stretch of I-10 in southwestern Louisiana’s mostly bayou-swamp-wetland or acres of farmland was not appealing. I hadn’t seen a nice hotel in miles and the mom-and-pop joints I had seen in the last five miles looked like bedbug-infested roach motels.

The little town I’d pulled into was called Bayou Oiseau, on the banks of the bayou of the same name. The weatherworn sign back on 10 had advertised “Tassin Bros Auto Fix, Open Six Days a Week, Except in Gator Hunting and Fishing Season,” which sounded better than nothing. There was no telling if the Tassin brothers could work on a Harley or not, and I had no idea if it was gator hunting or fishing season; but I had a few tools with me, and the shade of a nice live oak, an ice-cold Coke, and a chocolate bar would hit the spot, either way. I could always call someone from New Orleans for a lift, but I was miles out, and owing a favor of that magnitude was not something I really wanted. I had a few hundred in cash on me, enough to grease the oil-stained palms of most motor mechanics—under the table—of course, for a bit of advice, supplies, and maybe some actual help. Though that last part was unlikely.

The town itself was quaint in an unlikely way. Bayou Oiseau, which I thought meant “bird bayou,” looked like the lovechild spawned by the producer of a Spaghetti Western and a mad French woman. At the crossroads of Broad Street and Oiseau Avenue (neither name appropriate for the narrow main street and its ugly, single-lane cousin), the architectural focal points were a mishmash of styles. As I thought that, Bitsa died. I spent a moment trying to kick-start her to no avail and finally sat, as the single traffic signal turned from red to green, balancing the bike and taking in the town in greater detail.

At my left to the south, there was a huge brick Catholic church, the bell tower revealing a tarnished, patinaed bell mostly hidden with decades of spiderwebs and home to dozens of pigeons. The large churchyard was enclosed by a brick wall with ornate bronze crosses set into the brick every two feet. On top of the wall were iron spikes, also shaped like sharp, pointed crosses. To the east of the church, across the road, was a bank made of beige brick and concrete, with the date 1824 on the lintel and green verdigris bars shaped like crosses on the windows and door. To my right was a strip mall that had seen better days made of brick and glass, featuring a nail salon, hair salon, tanning salon, consignment shop, secondhand bookstore, bakery, Chinese fast food joint, Mexican fast food joint, and a Cajun butcher advertising Andouille sausage, boudin, pork, chicken, locally-caught fish, and a lunch special for four ninety-nine. It smelled heavenly. Every single window and door in the strip mall was adorned with a decal cross. The Chinese place also had a picture of nunchucks and a pair of bloody stakes crossed beneath.

“Well,” I muttered. “Wouldja look at this.”

Inside, my Beast purred with delight and peered out at the world through my eyes. My Beast was the soul of a mountain lion, one I pulled inside me in a case of accidental black magic when I was about five years old. She had an opinion about most everything, and ever since she came into contact with a fighting angel and demon, she’s been . . . different. More quiet. Less snarky. And though I’d never admit it to her, I missed her.

Directly ahead of me, catercornered from the church, was a saloon like something out of the French quarter—two story, white-painted wood with fancy black wrought iron on the balconies, narrow windows with working shutters, aged wood, double front doors carved to look like massive, weather-stained orchids. From it, I could smell beer and liquor and sex and blood—common enough in any bar, but even more common in vamp bars. The name of the place was LeCompte Spirits and Pleasure, the words spelled out in blood-red letters on a white sign hanging from the second floor balcony. Whoever had painted it had deliberately let the red paint drip so it looked like blood, a not-so-subtle promise of vampire ownership and clientele.

I pushed Bitsa to the side of the road against the sidewalk and paid the parking meter two quarters. There were cars parked here and there up and down the main intersection, and movement inside the strip mall’s windows. Two hours before sunset, the town’s pace was lazy and relaxed, and the place smelled great. Mostly, the Cajun place smelled great; the blood, liquor, and herbal-vamp smell not so much.

I checked to make sure my weapons were hidden but easy to hand. I was licensed to carry concealed in Louisiana, and there was nothing illegal in my having three handguns and three vamp-killers on my person and under my riding leathers. But advertising it, walking around as if I was ready for a small war, sometimes actually caused trouble. Go figure. I placed my open hand directly over the center of the cross on the front door of Boudreaux’ Meats and pushed.

The man inside moved like I’d thrown a knife at him, ducking fast and sprinting to the left, and when he stood straight, he was holding a shotgun. I stopped dead, elbows bending, hands raising slowly toward my chest in what looked like a gesture of peace but was really just bringing my hands closer to my weapons. “Easy there. I’m not here to rob, kill, or steal.”

“Stranger, you is,” he said in a strong Cajun accent.

“Yeah. My bike died out front. I was looking for the Tassin Bros Auto Fix.”

“Bike?” His face showed honest confusion, clearing thinking bicycle.

“Motorbike. Harley. I just wanted directions and maybe some of that delicious food I’m smelling.” His eyes lost some of the wariness, so I kept talking. “And maybe directions to a place to spend the night if I have to. Some place clean and quiet. I have a card. Okay if I reach two fingers into the zippered pocket?” I pointed at my chest. The zipper was narrow, maybe two inches, way too small for most guns. He nodded, and I slowly lifted my left hand, zipping open the pocket. I dropped two fingers inside and pulled out a business card. When he gestured with the shotgun, I tossed the card to the glass-topped meat cabinet. He caught it one-handed, and the shotgun never wavered. He held it like he’d been born with one in his hand. Probably had.

He glanced at the card and back to me, and back to the card and back to me. “I hear a you before. Dat rogue-vampire killer woman what took to work with Leo Pellissier. You her for real?”

“Yeah. I’m her. How about you put down the shotgun? A girl gets nervous with one pointed at her.”

“How ’bout you open you jacket, reeeeal slow like. You dat Jane Yellowrock for real, you have lots a guns and tings, you do.” He gestured again with the gun, firmed it into his shoulder, and waited.

I lifted my hand slowly and pulled the zipper, the ratchets loud in the silent room, and me not knowing if he wanted me to be Jane so he could kill me for a bounty—there had been a few put on my head by unhappy vamps in the last weeks—or wanted me to be Jane so he could befriend me. And there was nowhere to go in the narrow shop, with walls to either side and glass at my back. I was fast, but not faster than shotgun pellets.

The zipper open, I eased aside the left jacket lapel to reveal the special-made holster and the grip of a nine mil H&K under my left arm. Still moving slowly, I pushed aside the other lapel to display the matching H&K at my waist on the right. The butcher grinned widely, revealing white teeth that would have looked good sitting in a glass, perfect in every way, though I was betting his were real, not dentures. “You is her, you is,” he said. He broke open the shotgun and set it out of sight, moving around the meat counters with an outstretched hand. “I’m Lucky Landry. I a big fan of you.”

I took his hand and we shook, and I felt all kinds of weird about it all and didn’t know what to say. Me? With fans? I opened my mouth, closed it, and figured I had to say something. I settled on, “Lucky Landry. What about Boudreaux?” I asked, indicating the sign saying “Boudreaux’ Meats” on the back wall.

“My father in law.” Lucky crossed his arms over his chest and I saw the full sleeve tat down his left arm. It was of weird creatures—combos of snake and human, with fangs and scales, mouths open in what looked like agony—as red and yellow flames climbed up from his wrist to burn them. It was like some bizarre version of hell. He was maybe late forties, early fifties, Caucasian, with black hair and dark eyes—what the locals call “Frenchy.” “I married the daughter, and when her daddy done died dead, I took over dey business, I did. It a right fine pleasure t’ meet you, it is, Miz Yellowrock.”

“Ummm. Yeah. Pleasure and all. Call me Jane.”

He moved behind the counter, beaming at me. “You hongry, Miz Jane? What I can get you for? I got some fried up gator, fried up catfish, fried up boudin balls bigger’n my fist.” He made one to show me. “I got me fried onion, fried squash, and fried mushroom. My own batter, secret recipe it is, and dat oil is fresh and hot for cooking.”

Beast perked up at the description of the food. Gator. Human killed gator? Human man is good hunter! Hungry for gator. And the picture she sent me was a whole gator, snout, teeth, feet, claws, tail, skin, and all, crusty with batter. I chuckled and sent her a more likely mental picture. Inside, she huffed with disappointment.

“Fried gator sounds good. Boudin balls too. Got beer?”

“I can’t sell you no beer, but I give you one. All my customers, I give one to, I do.” He nudged the tip jar at me and I understood. He had no license to sell beer, but he could give it away, and his customers could tip him to make it worth his while. I dropped a five into the tip jar and he grinned widely. “Beer in dat cooler. He’p you self.” I heard the hiss of gas being turned up, and smelled the gas scent and hot oil followed by the smell of raw meat.

There wasn’t a statewide mandate on selling alcohol, and the voters of each parish could decide the issue. Seemed the voters of this parish had decided to keep it dry. At least officially. I wondered about the saloon across the street, and figured that vamps didn’t have to follow the law around here—which might account for all the crosses everywhere.

I shoved a hand into the ice, grabbed a cold bottle from the bottom, pulled a Wynona’s Big Brown Ale out of the cooler, and made a soft cooing sound. I like the taste of beer, from time to time, and Voodoo Brewery made some of the best microbrews in the South. I popped the top and took an exploratory sip. Though the alcohol did nothing for one of my kind—the metabolism of skinwalkers is simply too fast and burns alcohol off in minutes—the taste exploded in my mouth and the icy beer traced a trail down my esophagus. “Oh, yeah,” I murmured and took another.

By the time the beer was half gone, I had a plate full of boudin balls and fried onion rings in front of me on a paper plate, grease spreading through the paper with a dull brown stain. My stomach growled and I popped a ring in my mouth while breaking open a boudin ball. I made an, “ohhh,” of sound and sucked air over my scalded tongue before I forked in a mouthful of fried boudin. Boudin is miscellaneous pork (though you can get it specially made with special cuts of pork) and white rice and spices, most of which are unique to each butcher or cook, and Lucky’s boudin was excellent. “Dish ish goo’” I said, and I groaned.

Lucky laughed and brought a second plate with the promised fried gator meat. It was flakey and fishy and just as wonderful as the boudin, so perfect I didn’t need the seasoning salt in a big carved stone bowl on the table. Inside, Beast let out a satisfied chuff. I tossed a ten on the table and it disappeared into Lucky’s pocket. Ten minutes later I put down the fork and said, “You are a genius with this stuff. Do you ship your boudin?”

“Everywhere dey a post office, for sure.”

“I’ll be placing an order. Now, about the Tassin Bros?”

“Dis gator huntin’ season. Dey close dat shop for thirty day. Open back on first day nex’ month.”

“Well, crap.” I had really hoped to make it back to New Orleans and my own bed tonight. “Guess I’ll be making do with the tools I have on hand. Any place I can work in the shade?”

“You bes be getting you self to Miz Onie’s bed and breakfast before dark, and work on dat motorbike in da morning. We gots trouble in dis town after dark.” He frowned. “Suckhead trouble wid dey witches, we always have, but dis time dey suckheads gone done too much.”

I flashed on the crosses everywhere in the middle of town, on every window and door, crosses that had been there, in the open, for many more decades than vamps had been out of the coffin and a part of American life. I had a feeling this town had known about vamps for a lot longer than the rest of the world, and I had a moment to imagine—to remember—all the horrible things vamps could do to a town if they decided not to follow the Vampira Carta, the legal document that reined in the predatory and murderous instincts of all vamps.

Before I could ask, Lucky set another plate in front of me, opened and passed me another beer, straddled the chair across the table from me, and said, “Dis one on me.” I had a feeling he didn’t give beer away, and little hairs lifted on the back of my neck, like a warning.

“We had dey suckheads here since eighteen-thirty,” he said, “when de banker’s son, dat Julius Chiasson and he wife, come back from Paris, him a doctor now. Dey all change, dey was, dem and dey son. Dey be gone to Paris for twenty year and dey not aged. Look like same age as dey son, and dey not go out in de sun no more. Tings not too bad for few year, until dey son, Marcel Chiasson, go crazy. Townfolk figger he change to suckhead den and was set free.

“We learn only later dem suckhead supposed to be chain up for ten years befo dey set free. Hard lesson dat was too, but dat another story.

“Wid Dat Marcel Chiasson free, dey slaves, dey start to disappear, one by one. And more suckheads like Marcel appear. Crazy in dey head dey was, each and every one, crazy.”

Despite myself I was drawn into the story. I ate onion rings and gator and drank the free beer, feeling the movement of the sun as it plummeted toward the horizon.

“De priest, Father Joseph, he made dem crosses to be everywhere, on every house and building, and most dey attacks in town stop. He teach dey townsfolk how to kill wid stakes and swords. Den de war come, and all de town boys go off to fight Yankees. Town was dying, it was.” Lucky was turning the stone bowl full of spices in his hands, which were strong and knobby from years of handling heavy sides of meat. He stared into the spice and salt mixture as if it had the answers to all the secrets of the universe. “Father Joseph was turn one night. But he strong in de faith. He rise and he come to the church, holding his craziness inside all by hisself, and he tell dem townspeople to cut off he head. Dey did. But it nearly kill mos dem all.”

His voice softened. “Julius Chiasson and he older brother—human was old man Chaisson,” he clarified, “old, old man by den. Dey know dey have to stop Marcel, cause he still crazy in de head. Dey set a trap. And dey kill dey own.” Lucky shook his head. “Julius’ wife, Victorie, her name was, she went crazy wid grief and attack and kill old man Chiasson, head of family, patriarch. Julius have to stake his wife.” Lucky shook his head and opened his own beer. Took a swig. As he lifted his arm, I saw again the tats, and the flames seemed to ripple and flicker with the motion.

“But he not cut off her head. She rise from de grave, she did, and she kill and kill and kill. Church got itself a new priest, Father Matthieu, and he lead a hunt to kill her. Dey take her head and burn her body in center of de streets jus’ befo dawn, nex morning.” He pointed outside to the crossing of Broad Street and Oiseau Avenue.

“Dem Bordelon sisters, witches all, dey come gather up de ashes for to make hex. And Julius, when he hear of all dis, he make war on dey witches. Kill dem mostly. Dem witches, dey make de hex, and de suckheads caint eat, caint drink. Sick-like. Dey kidnap Dr. Leveroux, kill him when he caint cure dem. Leave his body in middle of town, like warning.”

Lucky pointed at my plate. “Fried gator not good cold. Eat, you.” I shoveled food in my mouth, knowing I should get the heck out of Dodge—or out of Bayou Oiseau—but I was hooked. And I had no doubt that was what Lucky had intended.

“Dem witches join wid dem priests and fight dem suckheads. And war was everywhere, here, in de bayou” —he pronounced it bi-oh, which sounded odd to me— “in de swamp, in the north. In New Orleans, Flag Officer David Farragut was in charge; Louisiana territory was in control of de North. We had no help. Cut off from de rest of de world, we was.” Lucky stood and reached to a phone on the wall, picked up and dialed. “Miz Onie,” he said a moment later. “Dis Lucky Landry. Get you bes room ready. Town got Jane Yellowrock here for de night. Yeah, dat so. Dat room on front of de house, one wid porch out front and green. Purty room it is,” he added to me. “Yeah, I bring her over to you befo de sun set. Yeah, sure.” He hung up and sat back down. “Where I was?”

“Farragut in New Orleans, and war everywhere.”

“Ah. Yeah.” He picked up the bowl again, but this time sprinkled a little of the spice onto the table and set the bowl into the middle of the spices, so when the bowl turned on the surface, it made a soft scratching sound, as if grinding. “Amaury Pellissier hear of our trouble. He come on horseback, him and he nephew, Leo. He kill Julius for not runnin he clan like he should, for not keepin de secret of de suckheads. And den he leave. But he leave behind de swamp suckheads, ones made and set free while dey still in insane.”

He raised his brows to make sure I understood, and I did. Vamps went into devoveo, the insanity that followed the change, for the first ten or twenty years after they were turned. He didn’t seem to know the term, but he was aware of the insanity peculiar to vampires. I nodded that I understood and he continued, his voice as melodic as a song.

“Strongest suckhead, Clermont Doucette,” which came out Cler-mon Doo-see, “make hisself a new clan, become a blood-master. In 1865 dat war end and de slaves go free. Everythin’ change it did. Black folk take off for de north or into de swamp for freedom. Some join dem witches, some join dem suckheads, some leave, some stay, to make a free, human way here on land and swamp, in place dey know.”

And yet, they had problems, which part Lucky hadn’t gotten to yet. “When did the first Cajuns get to Louisiana? I asked.

“Moutons say dey get here in 1760, but my family, de Landry’s, land in New Orleans in April 1764, but dey don’ get here in dis town till 1769.” He smiled his pretty teeth at me and waggled his brows, lifting and shifting the stone bowl from palm to palm like a magician with nifty a trick or a ball player half-tossing his ball between innings. “My granmere one dem Bordelon sisters, Cally Bordelon.”

I began to see a glimmer here. Lucky Landry was way more than a butcher with a melodic quality to his voice. Here was a tattooed man from a witch family, a man with a rogue-vamp hunter suddenly stuck in his town, and in his power. And wouldn’t you know it, Lucky’s family had a Hatfield versus the McCoy’s feud going on with vamps. I narrowed my eyes at him

“Like my history, you do?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I grinned back and set the empty beer bottle on the table with a soft snap. “I’m waiting for you to get to the part where you need me for something.” Lucky’s smile got wider and he pointed a finger at me as if acknowledging a clever point in a debate. “But you’re trying to keep me here until it’s too late to leave town safely, even if I got my bike going again, which isn’t likely.”

“Smart lady, you.”

“If I was smart, I’d have pushed my bike back to I-10 and slept under a tree, where only the mosquitoes would have sucked my blood and the nutria chewed on my bones.”

Lucky laughed at that, his black eyes flashing.

And that was when it hit me. The history he knew so well, his nearly mesmeric story telling. His witch family origins. The flames on his arm that had seemed to waver. The tats were a lot like a scenic tat I’d seen on another man’s arm, chest, and shoulder. Spelled tats. “You’re a male witch,” I said, my voice cold as ice. “And you want me in this war.”

I caught a hint of movement from the corner of my eye, and everything went dark.

* * *

Beast’s claws flexed in my brain, waking me, yet holding me down. Through her memories, I knew instantly that I was in the best room of Miz Onie’s bed and breakfast, lying on the edge of the bed, my hands and feet unbound and hanging over the side. Even without Beast’s memories, I’d have guessed where I was, by the colors I could see through my tangled lashes: the emerald green bedspread, moss green walls, striped green drapery, and greenish fake flowers in a tall vase gave it away. That and the fact that Lucky Landry was sitting in a chair in a wide bay with tall windows and a door. That and the fact that I smelled his special peppers and spices in my hair. All that and the fact that my head was aching, yeah, that was a clue. “You sucker punched me,” I growled, Beast in the tone. “With a spice bowl.”

Lucky nodded. “Sorry bout dat, I am,” though he didn’t sound very sorry, and proved it when he added, “Ruin me a good batch of my special spice mixture.”

Yeah. Funny guy. I grunted and sat up slowly, holding my head with one hand. It was pounding like a bass drum interspersed with clanging cymbals, sharp pain in every pulse. “What do you want?” I snarled when I could, though it came out more like a whisper.

“I tried to call Leo Pellissier. Him no take my calls. I want you to call him and ask him for help.”

“No.”

Lucky’s eyebrows went up and he smiled. But this time the genial Cajun butcher was gone, and a powerful witch smiled in his place. I could feel the power crackle in the air. Male witches were very rare, most of them dying in their youth of childhood cancers. I thought about that for half a second until Beast informed me that Lucky had divested me of my weapons. My leather jacket was hanging open, and my holsters and blade-sheathes were empty. Nary a gun nor a knife nor even a stake was still on me. Which really ticked me off.

I let a bit of Beast flow through me, and knew that my eyes were glowing gold. Beast was an ambush hunter herself, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be ambushed. Lucky’s body tightened at what he saw in my eyes, and he made a little swirling motion with one finger, not hiding that he was preparing a magical defense.

Tension stretched between us, pulling like a rubber band. The door in the bay was open and the night poured in, smelling of night-blooming flowers, the stagnant water of swamp, the fresher scent of a recent rain, and the herbal tang of vamp. I heard a car passing by outside, the engine noise muted, the tires loudly splashing through a puddle.

I had met a few male witches in my life, way more than most people ever met. But as a traveling rogue-vamp hunter, I tended to end up with the supernats of any town I visit. My best pal was earth witch Molly, or had been until I killed her sister. Long story. Anyway, her husband was a witch, still in the closet, still hiding what he was. Her son was a witch, and I’d seen a third male witch die at the hand of a sabertooth lion. Another long story. My life was practically full of them. Now this dude with spell-flames licking up his arm.

“No,” I said again. “I’m not calling Leo. And if you hit me with a spell, I’ll make you regret it.”

“Make me?” He sounded mildly incredulous. Then his mouth pursed in thought. “Some spell you gots on you? To do combat wid me? Some witch spell like dat charm on you bike? Keep away/don’-steal charm?” His finger stopped swirling and the tension in the air seemed to float out the window into the night.

I had no spell, no real defense against magic, but I did have Beast, and I had seen her neutralize spells meant to harm me in the past. So I kept any trepidation I was feeling stowed deep inside, my eyes almost lazy, and I let my lips lift just a tiny bit on one side.

“Okay,” Lucky said. “Why you not call Leo for me?”

“I’m not a deal broker.”

“Mebbe you change you mind when I tell you rest a my story.”

“Skip a few centuries to the part where I rode into town.”

Lucky nodded, lounged back in the chair, and pointed to my side. “Aspirin and water for you headache.”

I didn’t usually take drugs, but I did drink the water while Lucky got to his point.

“Suckhead coonass clan, Clan Doucette, in bayou, gots my daughter.”

I nearly choked, blinked, set down the glass, and shifted into a more comfortable position. “Okay. That I didn’t expect.” Coonass was an insulting word for Cajun, and it was interesting that Lucky, a Cajun himself, called another Cajun coonass. “Okay,” I said again. “I’m listening.”

“When Leo and Amaury Pellissier kill off de blood-master of Clan Chiasson, dey leave suckheads in swamp. No trainin’ dey gots. No law. Some insane for decades. Suckheads and witches in dis town not get along, not never. Now dem suckheads got my girl, stole her dey did. Kidnap.”

Beast shifted her claws in my brain and said, Kit? We will save kit. I nodded, as agreement to Beast and as a signal to the witch in the chair to continue.

“I want her back. Word in de street is Clermont Doucette boy gone turn my girl and run wild with her, or mebe chain her up in he attic for ten year.”

I blew out a sigh and felt part of the pain in my skull decrease. Skinwalkers healed a lot faster than humans, even after getting whapped over the head with a hunk of rock. I touched the sore place on my head, thinking. “Is your daughter a witch? Dumb question,” I answered myself. “Daughters get one of their two X chromosomes from their father. The trait passes on his X chromosome and so of course she’s a witch. Got it. Witches don’t take well to the turn. They sometimes stay in the devoveo for forever.”

“She is witch, yes. Devoveo? Dis mean insane? Insane forever?” Lucky snarled. “Not my girl. No. I kill dem all firs.’”

“Yeah, yeah. I got that you’re ticked and wanting to stake every vamp in sight. You shoulda said all this in the first place, not coldcocked me. Understand that I am not happy and this is not over. But okay. I’ll call Leo.”

Lucky tossed me my throwaway cell, an unlisted one I had purchased at RadioShack. I’d had no calls on it in the last week, not one, because no one knew the number and I hadn’t called anyone to share my new contact info. I hadn’t even stopped at a library on the road to update my website and check for potential jobs, because I knew certain of Leo’s contract employees could tell if I had done so, determine which town I had updated from, and come looking for me. The only way to be invisible these days was to stay totally and completely off the grid. And even then it was hard.

I had to call Leo anyway. My retainer had run out, and I needed to make sure the vamps had received my resignation papers and clarify that I was done working for and with the vamps of New Orleans. The last job in Asheville had done a number on me in lots of emotional ways, and I’d had enough. My retainer had run out two weeks past, and I had mailed back all the electronic devices that tied me to the MOC of New Orleans. In the packet, I had included a letter of resignation, as well as an “intent to vacate” the premises to my landlady.

I had hit the road, sightseeing in the Deep, Deep South in preparation for heading back to Asheville. My belongings were packed in boxes back in my freebie house, ready to be shipped out. It was past time to make sure the chief fanghead understood that I was really going away. Getting him to man up and take over this vamp problem left by his power-crazy uncle back when he was the man in charge and Leo was only his heir would be a suitable and satisfying going-away present. I had been putting off this phone call for days.

“So?” Lucky said. “You gone call?”

“How old is your daughter?” I asked.

“Twenty-two. Firs’ college graduate in our family ever, she is.” His lips twisted into a lopsided smile, one with tears close to the surface. “Her my baby.”

“Name?”

“Shauna Landry.” The tears gathered. Crap. I hate it when people cry. “Black hair like mine, blue eyes from her mama. Beautiful from de day she born.”

I opened the cell and dialed Leo’s number at the Clan Home. The call was answered by an unknown voice, likely an upper level blood-servant I hadn’t met, and I said, “Jane Yellowrock for Leo or Bru—George Dumas.”

“One moment, please. I’ll see if Mr. Dumas is available.”

I figured I’d sit on hold forever, but the line was picked up in less than five seconds. “Jane.”

I couldn’t help the way my heart lightened at the sound of my name on his voice. “Hiya, Bruiser.”

“Where are you?”

“Little place called Bayou Oiseau. It’s in—”

“I know where it is. Are you . . . well?”

“I’m just ducky. Except that I landed in the middle of a war between witches and vamps. One left in full swing by Amaury Pellissier back in the eighteen hundreds, and Leo needs to deal with it. Oh. And I may be a prisoner of the witches. I’m not sure.”

Lucky chuckled softly at that, his power once again flowing through the air and up my arms and legs like either a promise or a threat. Okay. Prisoner. Gotcha.

Bruiser was silent for a moment, probably processing all that I’d said, and still he surprised me with his reply. “How can you not be certain whether you are a prisoner?”

“I’m not in a jail, I’m not handcuffed or chained to a radiator, and so far I’ve only been lightly beaten.”

Lucky shrugged as if to say, Some things are out of my control.

“Lightly beaten.” Bruiser’s voice was low and cold, and I remembered that he grew up in a time when men didn’t hit women. Not for anything. Bruiser had strong protective instincts, and his tone promised retribution to whoever had hurt me.

“Yeah, but I’m fine. Ducky, remember?” Before he could reply, I quickly recapped the history of Bayou Oiseau, told him about the daughter being held by the vamps.

Bruiser listened silently, but at some point I heard a click and figured I’d been put on speakerphone, which meant Leo was listening. When I reached the end of my soliloquy, I said, “Hey, Leo. I just can’t get away from you, can I?”

“No, my Enforcer. You cannot,” Leo said.

Ooookay. I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

“I remember this town and its people; they wanted only to fight. They refused our counsel and when more important political matters required our presence, we left.” Leo paused and I could almost hear him thinking. Patience isn’t my strong point and it was misery to wait, but I managed it. Go me.

“As my Enforcer, you have my authority,” Leo said.

I nearly cussed. That Enforcer thing had been nothing but problems, and it was all my own fault. Dang it. Me and my big mouth. I wished I had never heard the term. “I don’t work for you, Leo.”

The silence over the phone was electric, and I heard Leo take a breath that hissed. He said, “Consider it a new contract, a short term extension of the services you provided under the retainer you have resigned.”

Without waiting for me to reply, he went on. “You have the freedom to handle this situation any way you wish. If you must stake the leader of this so-called clan, one that has not sworn to me, yet exists inside my territory, then you may do so.” My eyebrows went up, but I didn’t say anything and Leo went on. “I will messenger over the necessary papers, and George will contact all legal authorities who might be involved or who might show an interest.” Meaning the local town cops—if any—the parish sheriff and deputies, the FBI, the Louisiana State Police, probably out of the Lafayette office, and PsyLED, the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security. Which reminded me of Rick LaFleur and all the unsettled, unsatisfied elements in our not-really-a-relationship. Bruiser was gonna be a busy boy.

At that thought, almost as if conjured, Bruiser came on the line. I heard Leo in the background again, issuing orders. He sounded pretty ticked off, which made me smile. There wasn’t much I liked better than yanking a vamp’s chain. When Leo’s cultured French voice fell silent, Bruiser said to me, “We will attempt to smooth the way for you, Jane. But I will also send Derek and three of his best to assist.”

“Yeah? What am I being paid?”

He named a sum that would let me laze around for six months if I wanted to splurge, ten if I wanted to scrimp a bit. “It’s hazard pay,” he said, which took the joy out of my reaction. Yeah. I was going into unknown territory against an unknown number of vamps on one side and witches on the other—witches who might not like the way I handled things. “Call me daily with an update,” Bruiser said. “If I don’t hear from you for twenty-four hours, I’ll come myself. If you have been. . . .” He paused as if trying to find the right word and settled on. “Damaged, I will burn a path through the swamp wider than Sherman did during the war,” he promised. “Tell them that. And be careful, Jane.” The connection ended.

“He say you can stake Doucette?” Lucky asked, and his expression went fierce when I nodded. “Who gone burn a path tru’ dis town?”

I closed the phone, knowing that Lucky had overheard a lot of the conversation. “Leo Pellissier’s right-hand meal,” I said. “If I get hurt, he’ll make everyone pay, which means the witches too.” At Lucky’s shock I laughed, but there was nothing humorous in it at all. I had a feeling that Bruiser could be a very dangerous enemy, and it was nice to know he would revenge my death. Nice but cold. Being dead would see to that. So I just had to stay alive all by my lonesome. “Tell me everything you know about the Doucette vamps and everything about the witches. I need to know numbers, strengths, strongholds, and weaknesses. And make sure there are four more rooms available in this B&B. I have some men coming. Oh, and you pay for the accommodations. It’s part of my fee.”

“Dat Leo Pellissier pay you fee. You t’ink you get paid two times?”

I just stared at him and Lucky made a very French gesture, a tossing of one hand in agreement. He leaned forward, fingers interlaced, elbows on his knees, and dished about the vamps. I figured he was giving me everything he had on the vamps, and was holding back about 90 percent on the witches.

* * *

I started work the next morning just after nine a.m., when Derek and his guys motored into town in mud-spattered four-wheel-drive Humvees, vehicles last used in a war somewhere and decommissioned. Derek was a former Marine, still tough as Uncle Sam can make a man, and he ran a group of former military mercenaries who had originally banded together to fight rogue-vamps in their neighborhood in New Orleans. He was muscle and tech support too and had the toys and the know-how to do the job.

Miz Onie, an olive-skinned, dark-haired French woman, was agreeable to renting out her entire B&B, and laid out a huge breakfast for me, Derek, and his Vodka Boys: V. Martini, V. Chi Chi, and V. Angel Tit. Miz Onie might have been pushing sixty, but she appreciated the pretty vision of a man in a uniform, even a paramilitary uniform like Derek’s men wore—camo pants and Marine-green tees. She served up pancakes, several rashers of bacon, two dozen eggs, and a fruit bowl big enough to use as a hot tub.

We cleared the dishes of their edible burdens, then the table of the dishes, and laid out topo maps of the area, the guys using weapons to hold down the corners. “Our intel of the area sucks,” Derek said. “This is all Angel could find on GoogleMaps, and the printed stuff is so pixled out it’s pretty much useless. Everything’s flat so we got only rooftops and treetops to go by, and no one has done a street cam drive-by.”

“No streets,” Lucky said. The former Marine had guns on him in the echo of the first word. “Bayou only way. You want in, you go in by boat or gator-back.” He grinned at his own joke, standing in the door, seeming totally relaxed even with all the guns on him. His bare arms were upraised, holding on to the jambs of the door, the flames along one arm dancing with his power.

I rolled my eyes and said, “Meet the father of the kidnap victim.”

The Vodka Boys made half the guns disappear. The rest went back on the table, holding down the maps. Men and their toys. Of course, I had a vamp-killer in a boot sheath and six stakes in my bun, so maybe I wasn’t much better.

Lucky sauntered over, put a hand on the table, and rested his weight on it as the tattoos danced. “Dat right dere,” he tapped a page, “is Clermont Doucette Place.” The rooftop was reflective aluminum, making it hard to see anything except that there were lots of angles and offshoots, as if the Clan Home had been added onto by whim and caprice for years. The house sat on a narrow tongue of land, a bayou winding around the house on three sides and what looked like swamp on the other. Trash was everywhere, piles of unidentifiable things, but what we could see was not going to make any outright attack easy. Docks large and small were positioned around the house, sticking out into the water, and there were a half dozen outbuildings, animal pens, and even a rusted school bus under the trees. I almost asked how they got the bus out into the bayou, and then changed my mind. More important were the boats; at least six were pulled up to the dock and on shore, and I figured the tree canopy hid more. There were a lot of people at the house.

“I figure he keeping Shauna here.” Lucky pointed to a room away from the moving water, next to the swampy side and sticking out all by itself.

Derek looked at me, his eyes saying what I had figured out. We had way too few men. I stifled a sigh but decided I had to address that now, right up front. “Lucky, we don’t have enough men to launch an attack and get Shauna.” The witch’s eyes flashed fire and his power sparked painfully across my skin, like brushing against cacti. I added quickly, “So I’m going in to talk.”

“Talk is nothin’ to dese suckheads,” he spat. The power in the room skirled like flames and wind, hot, and pulling all the moisture out of the air.

Derek sat back, his arms outstretched along the chair arms, and looked at me, ignoring the angry father. I took his cue and repositioned so Lucky was visible only in my peripheral vision. Sometimes ignoring people’s anger made them calm down. Of course, sometimes it made them shoot everyone in sight. “We can go in just before dusk,” Derek said to me, “when the vamps are waking up and eating breakfast and the blood-servants are busiest. Disable the boats, set up a perimeter. Then you can come in, making a lot of noise. Distract them from anything we might do.” Meaning that if they saw the girl, they’d take her if it was possible, with me being the distraction.

I nodded. “How are you getting in?” I asked. “They’ll hear motors for miles in the flat water and land.”

Derek pointed to what looked like a trail on the map; it was marked with the designation Brown Fox Road. “We drive into there this afternoon and pole in on johnboats.”

Lucky snorted, a very Gaelic and totally dismissive sound, but the burning sensation diminished again. “Polin’ johnboat a skill, not somethin’ you pick up and do.”

Derek lifted a brow. “I poled my first boat when I was five, white boy. I think I still remember how. And my men will do fine,” he added to me.

I nodded. “Okay. Lucky, we need johnboats and something motorized for me to show up in. And before you ask or demand, no. You can’t go with us.” Instantly I felt that spiky power skitter hotly along my skin. “And that’s precisely why,” I pointed at him. “You’re too emotionally involved. You’ll end up getting the men hurt, and maybe Shauna killed.”

Lucky blinked, started to say or do something, then the magic skirled away and died. He dropped his head and stared at the floor for long seconds, his hands opening and closing in fists. “Yeah. Okay. My wife say de same. But I don’ like it.”

I felt it was much too fast a capitulation, but I didn’t smell an outright lie. I said, “Instead, I need you to get the equipment for us and find us two former military men, who still hunt, who still use their skills, and get one to be Derek’s guide and one to be my guide. If you can’t do that and keep out of our way, then the gig is off. You understand?

“I’m not stupid.”

Which didn’t answer my question, but I let it go. He gave me a time when he’d have the equipment ready, picked up Miz Onie’s landline phone, and made two calls. When he hung up he said, “Auguste and Benoît twins, in army dey was. Dey hunt alligator, most years. Dis year dey mama broke hip. Dey not have time to get tags.”

I understood. In Louisiana there was a lottery for the alligator harvest program, and tags to hunt on public swamp and land in gator country were issued only at certain times. If you missed that time, you didn’t hunt, or you paid your hunting license fee and hunted on private lands. The twins didn’t have access to private land, so this year they were sitting around. “Sober?” I asked.

“Mostly,” Lucky said. I figured that was the best I was gonna get.

“Dey got a sister, too. She a sharpshooter, she was. Tough as gator skin. She come along too. You put her in a tree with good line a sight, and she provide cover. Her name Margaud.”

After Lucky Landry left, Derek and his men and I created contingency plans for everything we could think of, giving each problem and plan a code name so we would be prepared to act on a moment’s notice. “Silver” was the code to kill every vamp we could find. “Swim” was the code indicating that each combatant would have to get home the best way he could. “Bogus” was the code for our allies telling lies and setting us up. “Burn” was the code to set everything on fire with incendiaries. “Fubar” meant anything and everything. Fubar was the code I was most worried about. It meant we’d all almost likely die.

* * *

The boat shuddered under my feet, the Chevy engine adding its own vibration as well as noise enough to wake the undead, and the propeller at my back sucked air through its cage as we flew over the water—not in a plane, but in an airboat. The boat had almost no draft, maybe six inches when it was sitting still, and it was eco-friendly except for the noise, which was so loud it could deafen a catfish, and which precluded any form of communication except hand signals. The prop, mounted in the cage at the back of the boat, was wood, handmade by Amish people, which felt all wrong somehow, but added an artistic element to a boat that was designed to skim over the bayou, swamp water, or marshy land. This boat was painted in red and yellow with flames along the sides, similar to the flames on Lucky’s arms, and belonged to the twins. It had two bench seats with heavy-gauge steel arms and leather upholstery in the yellow of the flames. Built-in coolers, tackle boxes, and a shotgun rack completed the Cajun dream-boat.

Benoît had led Derek’s men in two hours ago and they were in place on the clan home property. Auguste was my pilot, sitting in the bench seat above and behind me, working the controls. Margaud sat beside me, a sharpshooter’s sniper rifle in a sling across her back and a heavy, military go-bag at her booted feet.

The brothers might have passed for ogres, each weighing in at an easy three hundred pounds, hirsute, sour with last night’s beer, and both smelling of the fish they had caught and cleaned. Maybe days ago. The men wore T-shirts that might once have been white in another universe or decade, old-fashioned bib overalls, and work boots that looked like they had never seen oil, polish, or even laces.

Margaud was as beautiful as her brothers were ugly, with ash brown hair blonded by the sun, deep brown eyes, and skin tanned golden. She was petite and delicate and looked too small to transport or position the rifle for firing, but she was muscular and fit and carried herself with a capable, confident air. The sharpshooter wore a homemade one-piece camo uni that had been made out of strips of thin cotton cloth in green, brown, black, and tan, like a hand-pieced quilt. Irregular lengths of green yarn rippled from it in the hard wind created by the passage of the airboat, and I realized that it worked like a ghillie suit, but looked a lot more comfortable. I had to wonder what a girl needed a ghillie suit for, but I figured it was for hunting. And if it wasn’t for hunting, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

The siblings were all human and all taciturn—expressionless faces and none talking much even by my standards. It felt weird going into battle with the silent Cajuns at my back, unknowns in a gig more full of unknowns than usual.

We spun through the bayou, whipping around clumps of trees and over long, swordlike grasses. I held on to the bench seat handle with one hand, watching the world fly by. The airboat hit something in the water with a hollow, solid thump under my feet, but Margaud didn’t react and the boat neither slowed nor sprang a leak, so I just gripped the handle harder. If we came to a sudden and total stop, I didn’t want to go flying into the dark water or up against a cypress tree.

I had on ear protectors, my fighting leathers, and all my weapons, including the Benelli M4. They had all been brought by Derek, lifted from my gun safe in the closet of my freebie house in New Orleans. Even in what amounted to autumn in the Deep South, I was sweating, and my hair had come free from the fighting queue, blown back by the wind. It was long enough that I was seriously concerned about getting it caught in the prop, and sat holding it twined around my arm and clasped in one hand, a pose that could have serious image consequences if we were attacked en-route. Auguste had agreed to idle down a quarter mile out and motor in slowly, which would give me time to fix my hair.

It wasn’t like I was trying for a stealth approach. There was no chance we’d surprise anyone, not in a boat that could be heard two or three miles away. So the slow entrance lost us nothing and might actually help, giving me time to look over the Doucette Clan Home, allow Derek’s men to carry out their part of the plan and also give the appearance of courage and strength. Of course, vamps could smell my sweat, so they’d know I was nervous once I was close enough for them to take my scent. And since they had never smelled me, and since they weren’t Leo’s people, my predator scent would really annoy them as well as make them more dangerous.

Hence, I was loaded for vamp with hand-packed silver-fléchette rounds in the M4 and the nine mils. I had my specially made holsters on and had a Heckler and Koch 9 mil under my left arm, one at my right hip, a lovely little red-gripped .380 at my spine, and a .32 six-shooter on my ankle. Most of the weapons were loaded with silvershot. The .380s carried standard ammo; that was for annoying vamps and killing humans, though I didn’t intend to kill any humans. Unless they tried to kill me.

I had six blades on me: four, short-bladed throwing knives and two silver-plated vamp-killers. Ash stakes were sheathing in my right boot, for immobilizing vamps if I could manage that instead of killing them. Three silver stakes would go in my bun, three more in the left boot, should killing vamps be necessary. One had the blood-master’s name on it. Clermont Doucette was a dead man. Which was funny in every way I could look at it.

I wore my silver-plated titanium throat protector and super hard plastic armor at elbows, groin, and knees—places where vamps liked to attack and drink. Looked deadly.

The airboat slowed and skewed to the side in an eddy-move worthy of a powerboat. Margaud jutted her chin at my hair and climbed from the boat onto a tongue of land, and I started to rebraid my hair. Auguste handed us both bottles of chilled water. We were less than half a mile out, and I could see the yellow of the school bus in the distance.

* * *

It was only minutes later, but when Auguste keyed on the airboat motor and blasted out the night sounds, the sun was setting on the horizon, silhouetting the cypress trees and low-growing scrub on the small islets and islands between marsh and swamp and bayou. Night came fast in the bayou.

We left Margaud perched in the branches of a tree with a clear line-of-sight of the front door and most of the Doucette Clan Home. She had her rifle and a night vision scope and several toys that were not civilian legal, and she handled them like a pro. Even so, I didn’t like the idea of leaving anyone alone in the swamp, but the woman’s fierce glare suggested that I should keep that thought to myself.

I went over her report as we made our slow way to the clan home. There were heat signatures for twenty humans, and no indications of vamps anywhere, which meant they were still in their lairs. Under the house were dozens of chickens and several large mammals, what looked like pigs. “Be careful of the pigs,” she said, as her last warning. “They’re mean and dangerous.”

Great. Just ducky. Like vamps weren’t bad enough. Now we had mad pigs to worry about.

Making enough racket to raise revenants, we motored up to the Doucette Place, me sitting so a nine-mil was partially hidden in my left hand, and my right was draped over the arm rest. The lights ahead went dark, making the house hard to see, but giving an added advantage to the vamps, with their near-perfect night vision.

As we roared up, I looked lazy and unconcerned. But my heart was pounding and my Beast was staring out at the lengthening shadows with her predator’s stare, my eyes showing that odd shade of gold peculiar to Beast. With her added night vision, the dark was all greens and silvers and shades of gray, and I could see with a preternatural clarity.

Security met us at the dock, buff male hunks dressed in jeans, muscle T’s, and multiple guns. They smelled human, or nearly so—blood-slaves who had all received recent, copious, but controlled drinks of blood from multiple vamps. The intake had to be carefully measured or the consequences were problematic. Too much blood would get a human blood-drunk and he’d be useless. Too little blood and a human would have less power to draw on. I wondered why the big bad vamps had sent blood-slaves to meet me instead of blood-servants, and it was just one more reminder that these backwoods—or maybe backwater—vamps would be unlike the vamps I’d met in other places. It was possible that these vamps had never even seen the Vampira Carta. These were like vamps from the Wild West, vamps with their own rules and laws and nasty habits and nastier accoutrements.

Like guns, trained on me.

I lounged back in my seat, keeping the Heckler and Koch 9 mil out of sight, a round in the chamber, safety off, and my finger off the trigger and on the guard. I wanted to be ready, but I didn’t want to accidently shoot off a round and punch a hole in the boat. Sinking just off the dock and wading wet and dripping to shore was not the way to make an impression of being strong and in command.

I smelled Derek upwind of me, and as soon as the vamps were up and outside, they would smell my guys too. Best to get inside quickly. Auguste gunned the engine and spun us up to the dock, cut the motor and let us drift until we touched the rubberized edge.

I tossed away the ear protectors and pushed in the earbud the instant we stopped. The night closed in around me in muggy shadows, mist, and the buzz of mosquitoes. And the chock-a-chock sound of a shotgun being readied for firing. The timing was calculated and I laughed softly.

“Copy that, Legs,” Derek said into the com unit to the sound of my laughter. I was tied into the system.

With my free hand I tossed my card onto the dock. Muscles One and Muscles Two looked at each other in confusion. The laughter was unexpected, my relaxed posture (legs stretched out with one bent at the knee) was unexpected, my yellow glowing eyes were unexpected, and now they had to figure out how they were going to manage bending over and picking up my card.

After a long undecided fidget, Muscles Two, who was holding two semiautomatic handguns, holstered one and knelt down, eyes on me, feeling along the wood boards until he had the card, and then stood. He stared down at it, his blood-slave enhanced vision making out the words and his lips moving with the effort. He said, “Dis here say, ‘Jane Yellowrock. Have Stakes Will Travel.’”

“Vampire-hunter? You dat Jane Yellowrock?” Muscles One asked. “Leo Pellissier’s cun—”

Without thinking, I slid my finger around the trigger, raised the Heckler and Koch and shot the guy, a quick, ticked off two-tap. The first bullet caught him in the left thigh, high and outside, dead-on where I’d intended, in a location where one might do minimal damage, but knock out an enemy combatant. The second shot took him in the left elbow. I’d been aiming at his left side, at the waist, where there were few major organs to hit. Muscles One started to fall and lost the shotgun, his breath sucking in for a scream.

Instantly, I moved the weapon to Muscles Two and caught him trying to redraw the weapon he’d holstered. Stupid. He had one still drawn. He shoulda shot me already. When he realized his error, he stopped, nearly as immobile as a vamp, one hand on the weapon in the holster, one with the gun pointed at the dock, his eyes on me, wide like a cat’s. I let a lot more of Beast bleed into my eyes and chuckled again as I gathered my weapon into a two-handed grip, pulled my boots under me, and stood. The airboat wobbled under the weight change and I made sure of my balance before I stepped onto the dock. “I don’t like that word,” I said, over the ringing in my ears.

“Throw it into the water,” I added, nodding to his gun. “Both of them.” I wasn’t leaving an armed bad guy behind me. When he had disposed of both guns, I jutted my chin at the shotgun. “That one too.”

“Hebert kill me, he will,” he said, pronouncing it “A-bear”, a common Cajun last name.

“And I’ll kill you if you don’t,” I lied, sweetly.

Muscles toed the shotgun off into the bayou and Herbert moaned. I wasn’t sure if he was upset over the gun being tossed, or the pain. Maybe both.

The last light went out at the house and I heard the soft shnick of a round being chambered from the front door. I grabbed Muscles and whirled him, stepping quickly behind him, placing the barrel of my weapon against his spine. Muscles went still as an oak board and it was clear that he knew he had a gun at his back and one ahead. “Think they’ll kill you to get to me?” I whispered to him over the ringing in my ears.

I was six feet, two-and-a-half inches tall in my teal Luchesse boots, and my eyes barely peeked over his shoulder. This close, even over the stink of fired weapons, I could identify the four vamps he had fed from by their herbal signatures—wilting funeral flowers, lemon mint, sage and parsley, and something sweet, like agave. I breathed them in, learning what I could of each: gender, race, relationships. In human form I didn’t have the nose of my Beast, but my sense of smell was far better than any human’s, maybe a by-product of the decades I had spent in her form, or perhaps the result of my natural skinwalker abilities. I didn’t have another skinwalker around to tell me stuff like that.

Ahead of me, I heard more weapons schnick and chock-a-chock in firing readiness. Muscles swallowed so hard I felt it through his spine.

“Call out. Tell them who I am.”

Without waiting for a second prompt, Muscles shouted, “Dis here Jane Yellowrock. She come for—” To me he whispered, “What you come for?”

I thought about that. Admitting that I was itching to stake his master would probably not be my smartest move. “As Leo Pellissier’s envoy. He’s heard about the witch girl and wants to talk,” I said softly, knowing that we were possibly close enough for any vamps to hear.

“Leo send her,” Muscles shouted. “She want to talk about Shauna Landry.”

“Tell them we’re walking up to the door. Tell them to stand down.”

“We coming. Put you guns away.”

I didn’t hear any sounds of that, but I pushed at Muscles and we walked toward the front door and up a hill I hadn’t noted from the satellite maps, keeping slightly to the right of the entrance, keeping what I hoped was a clear line of sight for Margaud.

* * *

The hill was a berm of built-up land and the house was on stilts some ten feet higher. I figured the height was to protect against storm surge from the gulf or flood from upstream.

I stopped fifteen feet from the bottom step and called up, “I’m Jane Yellowrock, Leo Pellissier’s Enforcer, here to talk parley with Clermont Doucette.”

“Parley? What dat is?” A deep voice asked from the door.

Mentally I stopped for a long moment. Right. I’m not in New Orleans anymore. “The Vampira Carta had a special section for parley, meaning that one person asks for parley and hospitality and the other accepts the request and offers and guarantees safety. Both agree not to kill the other or act in violence except in self-defense.”

“I don’ believe in dat Latin paper. We gots our own code.”

“Fine. You wanna talk or you wanna fight? ’Cause you will surely lose if you choose fighting.”

He laughed, the sound one of silken delight that vamps employ when they want to cajole and charm. Or insult. I could hear the insolent amusement in this tone. From my right I heard the distinctive sound of a shotgun readied for firing. From my left, I heard the same distinctive sound. And I saw a small red laser appear on the forehead of a vamp lost in the shadows until then. The chuckle died away and the targeted vamp stepped back, behind the door and into safety. A silence filled the night where the Doucette Clan Home stood, the silence of the dead, broken only by the breathing of humans. I counted ten, three of them my guys, two of them Muscles and me, making five more on the porch high over my head.

“How you get your men onto my land?” the vamp asked. “Close to my home?” It was a real inquiry, touched with mild confusion, and it identified the speaker as Clermont Doucette himself.

I didn’t answer his question. Instead I repeated my own. “Talk or fight?”

“Talk,” Clermont said. Before the word died, his men had safetied and holstered their weapons, or broken open the shotguns. A match was struck and an oil lamp was lit inside, visible through an unshuttered window, though I was certain the light I had seen earlier had been electric. The men and women who had previously barred my way cleared a path across the front porch and left the head bloodsucker in the center. A woman carried the lamp from the doorway to a table on the porch and set it down before backing away.

“We talk,” Clermont said. “My house de same as your house, my blood de same as your blood, your safety good as my safety. My word on dis.”

It sounded like a formal saying, the giving of his word, and I knew that meant something to people as old as Clermont. I figured I was supposed to say something back, and I thrashed around in my skull for anything appropriate as a rejoinder. I settled on, “Yeah. I won’t shoot you or stake you unless you attack me first.” After a moment I added, “Or behead you.”

Clermont chuckled, this time with real amusement. “Bring Pierre Herbert for healin’,” he said to someone at his side, and a young human raced down the steps, passing me. I didn’t like having anyone behind me, but I figured Derek had him covered. I gently pushed Muscles away and took a deep breath, trying to settle my heart rate and calm myself. It was never wise to go into a nest of vamps when one smelled worried. Muscles looked at me over his shoulder before moving up the stairs, his feet loud on the plain wooden treads. I followed more slowly, holstering my weapon as I climbed. At the top, Clermont and I looked each other over, taking in details and drawing impressions.

He was tall for a man of his time, nearly six feet, lean and gangly, with dark brown eyes and blondish hair, a combination that seemed common in this area. He was dressed in worn jeans, an ironed white dress shirt, a suit jacket in pale gray or dull blue, and a narrow, charcoal-colored tie. And boots, which somehow surprised me, though boots were ubiquitous in Louisiana. A pair of reading glasses perched on his head and reflected the light.

I don’t know what he thought of me, but he indicated the chair closest and waited until I sat, the gesture of a man of his time for a woman, not the way a warrior would act with another warrior. But I wasn’t in a position to gripe about his good manners. I was now in the nest of vipers, and no matter how good Derek or Margaud was, any Doucette could kill me way faster than my people could react to save me.

Clermont leaned in and sniffed delicately. “What kind of predator you is?”

“Not one that will hurt you or your people unless you try to hurt me first.”

Clermont thought about that for a while, putting together the phrase “try to hurt me,” with the thought that I obviously believed they would not be successful. He nodded slowly and studied me. “I like you boots.”

Which was just weird. I said, “Thanks. Um. They’re Lucchese. I like yours too. Tony Lamas?”

He grinned happily, showing only his human teeth, and pulled up his pant legs to display his boots. “You know boots? Dat a good ting. Tony made dese boot for me hisself in nineteen forty-two. Bes boots I ever have, dey is.” He dropped his pant legs and said, “I got wine, beer, cola, bottled water, coffee, tea. May I offer you some libation to wet you whistle?” he said.

All I could think was, Crap, I have no idea how to handle this. I said, “Uh, thanks but no thanks. I’m fine.”

He spread his fingers as if to say, “Fine. Down to business. State your piece,” which was a lot to gather from a single gesture, but there it was. Clermont crossed his ankles and laced his fingers in what looked like a posture personal to him, back when he had been human.

I wasn’t good at diplomacy, blowing things up and shooting things being more my way, but I gave it a shot. “Leo Pellissier sent me to . . .” I paused and chose my words carefully, “to inquire about Shauna Landry, who, he has heard, is here against her will, to be turned against her will.”

“Why?” When I looked puzzled, Clermont said, “Why Leo, Blood-Master of New Orleans, show an interest in us now? Why not a hundred year ago, or when he take over for dat worthless king Amaury?”

To that I had no answer. After a seriously awkward pause, I said, “I think he thought it was your choice to swear to him, or him to conquer you in a Blood Challenge, and he . . . mmm, he, mmm, respected you too much to come after you.” Which was a lot better than he thought you weren’t worth the effort. Knowing Leo it was the latter.

“Blood Challenge? Like a duel?” Clermont asked.

I hadn’t studied a Blood Challenge but I’d run across the term and that definition seemed to fit the parameters. “Sorta, yeah.”

Clermont seemed to study the night sky. When his head moved, I realized he was in a rocking chair, and it started to squeak as he rocked, a pleasant rhythm in the night. Almost as if he called them to sing, frogs started to croak. I’d heard them before while in Beast form, the deep, almost-aching, nearly demanding basso profundo melody. Crickets joined in the song. A barred owl gave it’s hoot, hoo-hoo-hoo-hooooo. Something large splashed in the bayou out front. A night breeze strengthened and the lamp flame wavered, casting shadows that moved and crawled.

The porch we sat on was maybe thirty feet wide and fifteen deep, the house and its entrance behind us and rooms on either end. This protected it from wind and rain on three sides and yet still provided a view of the bayou out front, the live oaks on the property, and the cypress standing in the water, knees pushed up above the surface anchoring the trees in the silty bottom. The last of the sunset was a pale pink line on the horizon, the sky quickly fading to a dark cerulean overhead.

I shouldn’t have felt so suddenly peaceful, but I did. I let my body relax into the chair, and I realized that I didn’t chill out very often. To take the opportunity in this perilous place was stupid and dangerous, but even knowing that, I let my muscles soften and my backside settle, just a hint, just a bit. “If the offer of tea is still open,” I said, “I’d like a cup of hot.”

“Black,” Clermont said to the shadows. “That good China black what come de mail las’ week. And bring out de girl. She can speak for herself to de famed vampire hunter.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Shauna arrived before the tea, holding the hand of a male vampire. She fit her father’s description and the small graduation photo provided by Lucky. Her hair was pulled back and braided, leaving her face and narrow jaw fully exposed. She was prettier than her photo, or she had already been fed a lot of vamp blood, improving her skin and her vitality. The boy holding her hand was fully vamped out, his two-inch fangs down, his pupils wide and black in blood red sclera; he was close to losing control. If he had been aping human he would have been a pretty-boy, with brown hair to his waist, some braided, some hanging free, an aquiline nose and almond-shaped eyes. Gently, I asked, “You’re Clermont’s son?”

“And heir,” he said, his words only slightly miss-shaped by his fangs. “Gabriel Doucette,” he said, pronouncing it Gab-rel Doo-see. “I can give her everything. A home. A place. A long, full life. I love her.”

While he spoke, the girl held his hand tighter and gazed at him with fierce adoration in her eyes.

Well crap. So much for kidnap or vamp-glamour. I hadn’t studied Shakespeare in high school, but even I knew this was starting to look a little like it was more along the lines of Romeo and Juliet than a kidnap plot. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, however, this story left one family holding all the cards. Lucky Landry had lied to me. Surprise, surprise.

Because he was so close to the edge, I turned my gaze to the girl for a moment, indicating I was speaking to her, before looking off into the night. I said, “Your father thinks you were kidnapped. You’re here of your own free will?”

At the word “kidnapped” power spiked along my arms and settled in my fingertips, an electric pain that promised more if I wasn’t careful. It was an attack spell, something prepared beforehand and waiting, a defensive measure worthy of my friends, the Everharts. And I had a feeling if she let loose with it, I’d get hurt. Shauna’s voice, when she spoke, was calm, determined. “I love Gabriel.”

I thought about that for a moment before turning to Clermont. “How many witches have you turned in the last hundred or so years?”

His brows went up. He opened his mouth and closed it, pursed his lips, thinking. “Four,” he said, his voice quiet, almost buried in the night noises. I could see him thinking, putting two and two together—his history with witches, my question, my being here at all, which, considering the danger I was in, must be important.

Keeping my tone soft and gentle, I asked, “Have you ever seen a witch make the change into vampire?” When he said nothing, I added, “Witches don’t accept the change as well as humans. Witches seldom come out of the devoveo—what you may call the insanity—at all.”

Gabriel growled and his lips pulled back. Beast flooded me with adrenaline. Kit shows killing teeth, she thought at me.

“Gabe!” Clermont barked. But Gabriel didn’t back down.

I kept my gaze in the distance and my voice soft, saying, “Shauna, did you know there’s a strong possibility you could remain insane forever if you get turned?”

She didn’t answer but her eyes widened and her lips parted in alarm. And Gabriel let go her hand. In the blink of an eye, everything went to hell in a handbasket.

Gabriel lunged at me.

A spot of red appeared on his shirt front.

He yanked up my arm, his vampire claws piercing my wrist.

The crack of a rifle sounded in the night.

Clermont moved, his fist impacting his son’s chin.

Gabe’s body snapped back; his claws shredded my flesh.

Twin booms sounded off to either side.

Vamps all around me vamped out.

The smell of blood and vampires filled the night.

I dropped back to the chair and stabbed upward with a vamp-killer, the twelve-inch blade sliding into the belly of a vamp who was reaching for me, fangs first. My angle was wrong to pull the M4, but I managed to get a .380 out. Off-safetied. Fired. Hitting a vamp in the face. Another in the shoulder. Vamps screamed, the piercing, horrible wail of death I could hear even over the acoustic damage of the firearms.

Some small part of my brain knew I’d just sentenced a vamp to a slow, painful, death by silver poisoning with the vamp-killer, but the gun’s ammo was standard, and no vamps would die from that. Humans could, though. Collateral damage. I did not want to hurt the humans.

Derek and one of his men were on the porch. I saw Derek toss two hand grenades into the house, his movements seen as overlays of static images. I closed my eyes and threw an arm over my eyes. The flashbangs took down every vamp inside with the blinding flash and intense noise. More vamps were wailing, my ears vibrating painfully with the high tone.

I opened my eyes in time to see more forms flow up the stairs led by Lucky Landry. Magics spat down his arms from his tattoos and shot out his fingertips. Blue flames whipped among the vamps and humans on the porch.

“Bogus!” I screamed. Derek turned to the witch and hit him with the butt of his shotgun. It wasn’t a weapon Lucky had prepared a defense against. The witch fell like he’d been poleaxed. The forms behind him stopped and stared at their leader. And the vamps turned on them.

Beast shoved her power into me and I threw myself back and up. Taking Clermont around the neck in a sleeper hold, I shoved the vamp-killer at his neck. “Hold!” I shouted.

Everyone on the porch and steps and inside the house went still and silent. My ears buzzed with complaint. Into Clermont’s ear, I said, “Thanks for knocking your kid outta the way so I didn’t have to kill him. And sorry about that hospitality thing and all, but if your suckheads don’t back off, I’ll kill you. Understand?”

Clermont nodded slightly, the silver scorching his skin where it touched. I caught the scent of burned, dead flesh and curled my lips back against the stink. And realized that a sleeper hold was likely useless to a vamp except for immobilizing him. Good thing I’d been holding the blade.

“Derek?” I asked.

He bent over Lucky and checked his pulse and pupils. “He’ll live,” Derek said, his tone unconcerned. “I mighta broke his jaw, though.”

“Margaud. Report,” I said. “Numbers?”

Slightly garbled by my earbud, I made out Margaud’s words. “Vamps? Ten I can count. Witches? Six standing. Dem was under de house, behind de pilings, and their sigs blended in widda pigs. Sorry bout dat.”

Sigs. Heat signatures. Right. I raised my voice. “Witches, sit on the ground. Vamps, sit on the porch. Now!” When no one moved, I said into Clermont’s ear, “Tell them. This gets settled one way or another, and I don’t really care how. Oh, and by the way. I have Leo Pellissier’s permission to take him your head. In writing.”

“Sit,” Clermont said. The vamps and their humans sat. When the witches didn’t follow suit, Derek kicked one witch in the back of the knees. He fell; the rest sat. Derek and his men went around gathering guns and blades. They made a nice pile at the base of the stairs.

When everyone was disarmed and sitting, I said to Clermont, “I stabbed one of your people with a silvered knife. If they get fed enough blood by a strong enough vamp or their master, there is a chance they’ll live. Also, I fired standard ammo, but my sharpshooter used silver-plated. If it didn’t pass clear through him, your idiot son might have a silver slug in his chest. Can anyone here dig that out?”

“Surgeon, I am,” Clermont said, surprising the heck outta me, “or was, long time ago. I still know how to dig out a rifle round. And my blood is strong. I can treat my people.”

“Well, good.” Which sounded lame, but it was all I had.

“You gone call dat Leo? Take my head?”

“I’d rather not. You willing to make your son act like he has some sense?”

“I am. You willing to make Lucky Landry act like he have him a brain he head?”

“I am. I guess that means I’m letting you go, now.”

“Dat be right nice. Pain de neck you is.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. And so did Clermont. As he did, his fangs—which I hadn’t even noticed—clicked back into the roof of his mouth on their tiny little hinges. Vamps can’t laugh—a human emotion—and be vamped out at the same time. I let him go and he bent to the vamp lying on the porch boards. Blood was a dark pool beneath her and she was breathing with the painful rasp of a human who had traumatic lung damage and whose lungs were filling up with blood. Clermont bent over her and held his wrist to her mouth. Her fangs bit into him, and her slips sucked like a starving baby’s, a weak and desperate motion. A minute later, she reached up and grabbed his wrist, holding him to her, and her sucking increased in depth and intensity. A minute after that, Clermont peeled her away and a human man sat beside her, cradling her close so she could latch onto his neck. It was intimate and loverlike, and I turned away. Some things I just don’t need to see.

The witches were sitting on the ground at the bottom of the stairs, three of them laying on hands, healing Lucky Landry. “Margaud?” I said. “We have anything or anyone else on the way or hidden with the pigs?”

“No sir,” she said, sounding like a soldier who had just been censured by her sergeant. “Clear.”

“Derek, Clermont, Gabe, and Shauna. As soon as Lucky can think straight and Gabe has the silver out of his body, we’re gonna have us a nice long talk. We have aaall night.”

* * *

It took two hours to heal all the injured, and while I waited I drank the tea Clermont had promised. It was a delicious, stylish, pungent black from China, described on the package as a Super Fancy Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. Having discovered that we were fellow tea-lovers, he and I talked teas while he dug the slug out of his son. It was bizarre conversation, talking about attractive, chunky, golden-tipped, first-flushes from various provinces in China, India, Sri Lanka, Ceylon, and other places. To a non-tea-lover it was silly talk, and I caught Derek rolling his eyes once as he drank coffee passed out by a beautiful, mixed-tribe, American Indian blood-slave, one who was over a hundred years old and not above teasing the much, much, much younger man with sly looks and come-hither stares. Not that Derek understood that she was a slave-by-choice and old enough to be his great great grandmother. Vamps and their humans are sneaky.

Derek called Auguste and Benoît in. The brothers had been waiting in the dark to remove us in retreat or victory, either one. And then Derek, Auguste, and a vamp went to get Margaud, who didn’t want to abandon her position to sit with the enemy suckheads. She put up a good verbal resistance and fired off three warning shots before I pulled out my earbud. Eventually, someone took her off the air. I didn’t know how Derek finally convinced Margaud into the airboat, but Derek was good-looking and persuasive, or maybe the former military angle worked. Or maybe her brother just picked her up and tossed her on board. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Near two a.m., I judged that everyone was healed and calm enough for discussion and called all the participants to the front porch. There weren’t enough chairs, so Clermont made everyone but the main participants sit on the floor, equaling out one and all. There were vamps and humans and witches sitting side-by-side, close together, sharing floor space without bloodshed. It would have been inspiring had Clermont and I not promised utmost retribution to anyone who caused trouble.

I opened the meeting with a few vampire terms and their meanings, including the devoveo and the doloro, the insanity of freshly turned vamps and the insanity of vamps who suffered the loss of a close loved one. I explained that witches were seldom successfully turned vamp, remaining in the devoveo forever, and ended with a plea for both sides to find a way to end the rift between the races and find a way for the lovers to be together. It was a lot of words for me, with even more mmms and hmms and uhs, and ahs. I’m not a public speaker. Not at all. It’s easier to shoot first and divide up the dead later, but maybe I was growing up.

When I was done, Clermont stood and spoke to Lucky Landry. Lucky was tied to a chair and to the porch railing, just in case, but he listened far better than I expected, maybe because Clermont opened with the words, “I tired a this war between coonass and coonass.”

Despite himself, Lucky chuckled and looked down. He took a deep breath and said, “I tired a it too.” He looked at his daughter, sitting on the floor, hand-in-hand with Gabe, love and determination in her eyes. “You want dis suck— You want dis vampire? You love him for real?”

“I do,” Shauna said. Her chin came up defiantly. “And I’m carrying his baby.”

Lucky pulled in a breath and the flames danced along his bound arms.

“I love him, Daddy. If you hurt him, I’ll never forgive you. Not. Ever. And I’ll spend the rest of my life keeping your grandchild away from you.”

Lucky looked at me. “Suc— Vampires can have babies like human and witch do? Despite we different races? Dem babies not be mule?”

“So far as I know, vamps can have babies, though it’s very, very rare. Whether the children are sterile I don’t know.”

Clermont said, “Dem babies not easy to have in de human way. Vampires treasure dem few. Dey can have babies of dere own, and dey special to us. Special power dey all has. Dis be first vampire-and-witch baby we have. Make him better and more special, I’m thinking.”

Lucky studied his daughter. “He say he. You carrying my first grandson, for real?”

Shauna placed a hand on her belly. “I don’t know how I know, but I know. All you other children has girls, so yes, dis boy be your first. And we already named him.” She looked at Gabe and he lifted their fisted hands to his mouth and kissed her fingers gently. Everyone on the porch said, or had to restrain a soft, “Awwww,” of delight.

“We name our baby by family name and alphabet,” Gabe said, which confused me until they went on.

“Hem be Clermont Jérôme Landry Doucette,” Shauna said, “and we call him Clerjer.” It came out “Clarshar,” and it sounded pretty on her tongue.

Laundry looked at Clermont and said, “Why not JerCler?”

“Dat not alphabet,” the vampire said, deadpan.

Both men laughed softly, measuring one another.

“What we can do to stop killin and killin?” Lucky asked.

“Baptize dis baby in church,” Clermont said. And everyone, even the vamps, took a deep, shocked breath. “Marry dem two in front a de church first, a course.”

Lucky nodded slowly. “Vampire can go in de church?”

“Not so much. But in de yard, yeah, we can do dat. You talk to de priest first, make hem see reason.”

“If he don’ see reason, den dey can marry in my church,” a voice said from the far reaches of the porch. “I marry dem. No need for no priest.”

“Who dat is?” Lucky asked.

A skinny man stood at the back, his face resolute, if pale.

“Preacher Michael? You a blood-slave to dese suckheads?” Lucky said, horror in his voice.

“Dey heal me a cancer wid dey blood. It take a lot a blood, and many month a time,” Preacher Michael said. “I give back to dem when dey need.”

Lucky made a Gaelic-sounding snort. “Well I be dam—uh, I be a monkey’s uncle.”

“And a grandfather,” Shauna said.

A goofy smile lit Lucky’s face. He looked at his erstwhile enemy again and pursed his lips to make the smile less obvious. “But how you keep my girl not crazy?”

Clermont said, “Blood-kin, we call dem. Gabe make her blood-kin. She live mebe two hundred years. She have good long life, here wid my son and wid us, and in town wid you and yours.” He held out his hand and said, “Dat a good enough start for me. Dat good start for you?”

Lucky Landry slapped his hand into Clermont’s and the men shook. “Dat a start. But first ting is, dem two been living in sin. Dey gets marry tonight.”

“Done, my brother. How about now and here? Brother Michael can marry dem in eyes of de church and God and dem get license later what for de state.”

Lucky started to speak and stopped, his mouth open. After a long pause he said, “My wife kill me she not here. . Shauna’s sisters too. No. Dem two gets marry tomorrow night, in town at church. Yes?”

“I say yes,” Clermont said, the men’s hands still clasped.

“Don’t I get a say?” Shauna demanded.

“No!” both men stated. And everyone on the porch laughed.

* * *

Twenty-four hours later, the first vampire-witch marriage in Bayou Oiseau took place in the yard of the Catholic church. A second ceremony followed in the churchyard of the Pentecostal Holiness, One God, King James Church. In both ceremonies, Shauna was wearing her mother’s wedding dress, a creamy satin, full-skirted, hooped gown with puffy sleeves. With it she wore a hat shaped a bit like a satin cowboy hat with a poof of veil on top. She looked stunning, glowing with happiness. Gabe wore a black tuxedo, his long hair in braids and love in his eyes. Just before the start of the first ceremony, he met his bride in the back of church with two dozen roses to carry down the aisle. As he gave them to her he said, “Dese here roses are twelve red and twelve white. Together dem symbol of union between vampire and witch. Every single rose I done clip off its thorn, to symbolize the way I protect you from all harm. Dis for my whole un-dead life.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the church yard.

To finish the night off properly, Leo Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans and most of the Southeast, gave his blessing over my cell phone, in the yard of the Pentecostal church. Everyone in Bayou Oiseau heard it, and heard his invitation to Clermont to come to New Orleans and parley as equals once the baby was born.

Clermont looked at me when the phone call was done and said, “You do dis thing? Set up dis parley?”

I shrugged, smiled, and walked away. What I’d done is tell Leo he was an idiot and to get off his butt and fix this stupid situation with Clermont and the Doucette Clan or I would. What the heck. It seemed to work.

* * *

Once all the official stuff was done, the entire town turned out to eat, drink, and dance the night away. Not that it was perfect. There was a fistfight between a small group of humans and witches against an even smaller group of vampires, but the clan leaders broke it up and made an example of them to the rest. It wasn’t deadly but it wasn’t pretty either. There was another moment of tension when a vampire asked a human woman to dance, but that too got smoothed over, and I didn’t ask how. Most vamps can dance like nobody’s business, and once the human women saw that vamps were willing partners, there wasn’t an empty dance floor for the rest of the party.

I pulled Derek onto the dance floor and kept him there for two numbers. That man can dance!

It was a good night, a better party, with fantastic food and energetic dancing. A great solution to a problem that had been simmering in the Louisiana backwaters for decades. As the locals might say, “Dem coonass clans Doucette and Landry? Dem family now, yeah dey is.” Heck of a lot better than any old Romeo and Juliet–style ending.

And best of all? I got paid.

> > > > > > Read on for a special preview of Death’s Rival,

> > > > > > the next Jane Yellowrock novel,

> > > > > > coming in October 2012 from Roc.

Chapter One

I’m Gonna Need Some Stitches

“Vamps don’t get sick,” I said. “They may go nuts at the least provocation, but they don’t get sick.” Air currents buffeted the small jet; I held on to the phone and the seat arm with white-knuckled grips. Inside me, Beast was purring, enjoying the ride entirely too much for a creature who used to be afraid of flying.

Static fuzzed the connection, but I made out the words “—two of these did. And maybe the third one, don’t know.” If Reach didn’t know something, it was better hidden than the identity of Kennedy’s killer—assuming that there really was a coven of blood-witches on the grassy knoll. Conspiracy theorists have a consensus on that, but there never was any evidence to back it up. “I’m still searching,” Reach said, “but it looks like the masters of the city of Sedona and Seattle are still showing signs of malaise. Boston’s MOC has vanished, and rumor has it the suckhead’s dead.”

Malaise, I thought, unamused, reading the description of their symptoms. It was a heck of a lot more than malaise. In spite of what I’d said, the vampires were sick—maybe dying. “Give me details.”

“According to my latest timeline, this vamp came out of nowhere two months ago and vamps started getting sick, which should be impossible, I know,” he agreed. “Once they were sick, they each got an ultimatum from an unknown vampire to swear him loyalty in a blood-ceremony, or face that master in a Blood Challenge, not something they could survive while sick. As soon as they swore allegiance to the new guy, the vamps got somewhat better. He didn’t kill them once he deposed them, but left them to run the cities as his loyal deputies. Each went from masters of independent strongholds to completely loyal subjects overnight. He’s successfully created a new power base and no one knows how he did it or who he is. Yet.”

“No vamp is loyal,” I said. “They’re all egocentric bloodsucking fiends.”

“True. But rich egocentric blood-sucking fiends, which is why we work for them.”

I grunted. I hated to think of myself that way, but he had a point. I’m Jane Yellowrock, and I used to kill vamps for a living. Until I started working for them. It wasn’t easy money, and I’d dumped the contract with Leo Pellissier, the chief fanghead of the Southeastern U.S., when the retainer ran out. But when Leo had requested my help yesterday, I’d re-upped to resolve this problem, because it was the right thing to do. Leo and his people had been attacked under my watch. Humans had been injured. Blood-servants had died. I’d killed some of them. No one knew who this new enemy was, and now vamps were sick, maybe dying, and a new, powerful vamp had entered the vampire political scene.

Which was why I was in a Learjet flying at way-too-dang-high. I didn’t like flying. Well, I didn’t like flying in planes. Wings are different.

Reach continued to update me on two months of data and to answer a lot of questions. I’d need it. We’d touch down in Sedona in minutes, and assuming I got out alive, I’d be off to Seattle almost immediately. Listening to Reach’s matter-of-fact tone helped to keep my mind occupied and my heart out of my throat. Sorta.

“Okay,” I said. “And you’re—” Leo’s Learjet dropped several feet before leveling out. My mind went blank and I swallowed my dinner—again. “And you’re sure the attack on Leo in Asheville was this same guy who took over Sedona, and Seattle?”

My question wasn’t argumentative. The attack on Leo had happened before any of the others, and had been purely weapon-based, a frontal attack, no disease, no ultimatum, no nothing. I didn’t know what to make of the discrepancy. “If it’s the same vamp,” I said, “his attack on Leo falls completely outside his subsequent M.O. Of course, he did try to kick sand in Leo’s face, and Leo’s people busted his chops. Maybe when that happened he tried this new tack.” I hated guesswork.

The sound of leather squeaking reminded me to relax my grip on the seat arm. I took a breath, blew it out, and drank half a bottle of water to settle my stomach. Computer keys clacked in the cell’s background, sounding like a quartet of castanets as Reach—the best research and intel guy in the business—worked.

“I stopped believing in coincidence,” he said, “about ten seconds before I stopped believing in Santa Claus. It’s like this. Leo visits Asheville, is attacked in a hotel, and wins a gun battle. Within weeks of the attack on Pellissier, Lincoln Shaddock and three of his vamps in Asheville become ill with a brand-new vamp disease. Then Sedona gets sick, then Seattle, and now Boston. They got challenged, swore loyalty, and got better. Leo’s Asheville vamps are still sick, unlike in cities where the MOCs got sick, challenged and defeated, and then received treatment. Shaddock’s peeps are dying—as if it’s a punishment rather than a takeover tool.”

Which thought made me sit up in my chair. Vamps were big on sneak attacks and vengeance. This scenario made all kinds of sense. Shaddock was bound to Leo and an attack on Shaddock was, by extension, an attack on Leo.

Reach went on, “Yeah, it’s outside the attacking vamp’s modus operandi, but the symptoms of Lincoln’s peeps are exactly the same as those of the other masters of the city who fell through the looking glass.”

“Peeps,” I muttered. I knew those vamps. Among the sick ones was Dacy Mooney, Lincoln’s heir. The two were vicious killing machines. The fact that I sorta liked them may have said something not quite sane about me. “We only think the other vamps were treated. We don’t have empirical evidence,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the disease is circumstantial evidence I’m willing to bet on. I think our BBV”—big bad vamp, I thought with a smile—“started in Asheville with a frontal attack, and had to abandon his plans there when Leo’s people kicked his butt, and he left the disease as a punishment, a calling card, a warning, and a threat. The evidence you obtain in Sedona and Seattle will either confirm or deny that theory.”

“Ahhh,” I said. “That makes sense, which is why I pay you the big bucks.” The jet bumped up as if slapped high by a giant hand; then the bottom fell out. The small craft dropped what had to be a thousand feet before catching itself. On air. “Crap,” I whispered.

My things in an overhead compartment thumped around as gravity was again defeated. I wrenched my seat belt so tight it nearly cut me in two.

Inside me, my Beast huffed with amusement.

Beast is the soul of a mountain lion that I absorbed when I was child and fighting for my life. It had been accidental, as much as black magic can ever be an accident. When I shifted, Beast’s was the form I most often took, and her thoughts and opinions counted nearly as much as my own. Fun, she thought. Like chasing rabbits in hills.

I slapped my brain back on, swallowed my dinner yet again, and focused. “Agreed,” I said, wishing I’d turned down this job. “But that theory still leaves questions. Why did the attacking master choose vamp strongholds so far apart on the map? Running three cities at a distance has to be a pain. Why not announce to the world who he is and what he’s doing? Every vamp I know is a megalomaniac and would publicize his conquest. This guy hasn’t.” And the newly subdued master vamps weren’t talking about what had happened on their turf or who their new master was—at all—which was another reason for this flight.

“The attacker is cheating, not challenging, according to the Vampira Carta,” Reach said.

I grunted again. The Vampira Carta and its codicils was the rule of law for the vamps—or Mithrans, as they liked to be called—and it contained laws and rules for proper behavior between vampires, their scions, blood-servants, blood-slaves, and cattle—meaning the humans they hunted. It provided proper protocols for everything, including challenging and killing each other in a duel called the Blood Challenge. The new vamp had challenged his conquests, but there had been no fights. None at all. And Boston, attacked a week ago, had gone off the grid. There had been no communication from that MOC in days. He was presumed to be true-dead.

Reach said, “If an unknown vamp is making a major power play, one that involves vamps getting sick, and Leonard Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans, is attacked, and then Leo’s scions get sick, it’s the same dude.”

“That isn’t quite ipso facto. It’s still more than half speculation.”

“Ipso facto? Janie knows her Latin. I’m sending you a folder on the vamp you’re visiting—the ex-master of Sedona. It’s put together from the files you loaned me to collate and organize.”

Back when I had a working relationship with the head of NOPD’s weird cases (not that the New Orleans Police Department used those words to describe the official department. Local cops called it lots of things, none of them very flattering), I’d had access to NOPD’s supernatural crime’s hard-copy flies. It was kept in the woo-woo room, and I copied copious amounts of info directly into my own electronic files. I was paying Reach an arm and leg to organize the info.

Reach said, “The ex-MOC’s name is Rosanne Romanello. Check your e-mail.”

Peeling my fingers off the armrest again, I pulled the Lear’s laptop across the table to me and logged on, checking e-mail. The Lear had all the office and party bells and whistles and its electronic gear was easier to use at jet speeds than my own. “Yeah. Got it. Thanks.”

“Your business is my pleasure and profit.”

“You oughta get that trademarked.” I hung up the jet’s phone and sat back with the laptop, reading the collated records—which was way easier than finding and reading scraps in individual files. Not that I’d tell Reach that. No way. He’d find a way to make a bigger profit off my now effortless search.

Rosanne Romanello had an exceptionally well documented history. She had been born in 1787 in a small town in Calabria, the eldest child of grape and olive growers and olive oil exporters. A beautiful woman, she had been turned in a violent confrontation with a young rogue. Rescued by her fiancée, Luca, she appeared to die and was placed in the church for the death watch, which ended when she rose on the third night, killed the acolyte who had fallen asleep in the nave, and vanished into the hills. She survived there for four years, a rogue in hiding, until Leo Pellissier, traveling through the countryside one night, saw and chained her so she could grow out of the post-transformation insanity vamps called the devoveo. He had taken her west with him when he returned to the United States, and set her free seven years later, sane and strong.

According to Reach’s notations, there were indications that the relationship between Rosanne and Leo had been more than just passing friendly. Well, duh. Leo believed in something he called the Dark Right, an authority that gave him the right to rule, and that permitted him to sleep with and drink from anyone under his power or his scions’ power. Leo was charming and charismatic, but he was an old-time sleazeball too. I had a lot of sleazeballs in my life right now, and some important people who were seemingly out of my life for good. Old grief welled up in me, but I shoved it back down, hard. There was nothing I could do about the past. Not a thing. And I could grieve the lost relationship with Rick LaFleur later. Much later. I went back to the dossier.

Rosanne had emancipated herself from Leo and risen slowly in the ranks of the U.S. vamps, moving west until she claimed and settled in Sedona. She had been the blood-master of that city for nearly two hundred years, comfortable in her stronghold—literally. Romanello had started an olive oil business much like her family’s, and built an Italian-style fortress-home where she still lived. Over the centuries, she had made friends with several blood-covens of witches and, with their power base, had protected her land and her scions. Until now.

Now things had changed. She had lost in direct Blood Challenge to an unknown master—and she was sick. The digital photos accompanying the file were hard to look at. In one, taken only last month at the full moon ceremonies with her witch allies, she had been stunning, pale-skinned, dark-eyed, almost ethereal in her delicate beauty. The poorquality photo that arrived in Leo’s headquarters e-mail yesterday showed a very different woman. Wasted, wan, with dark circles under her eyes and a dark crust at her nostrils that was presumed to be blood, she looked like death warmed over. Or worse—death still chilled. On the back of her hand was a lump, which looked like a pustule. I didn’t know who had sent the file photo, as it came through a circuitous route and an e-mail account that went nowhere, but it was clearly a cry for help. I was betting on the MOC herself sending it to her former lover and friend, and Reach agreed it was likely.

Leo wanted her healed and restored, his Asheville scions healed and restored, the new master vamp identified so he could kill the bastard, and the vamp disease wiped off the face of the earth. To achieve that end, Derek Lee, my second-in-command, was going to Asheville to get blood samples from Shaddock, and I was supposed to obtain a few vials of Rosanne’s blood. Just walk in and say, “Hey, Ro. Feel like making a donation?” Right. Like that was gonna happen.

Even less likely was my obtaining blood and a cogent report from the vamp-stronghold in Seattle, another conquered master of the city who was reputed to be sick. The should-be-impossible vamp-disease seemed like it was everywhere.

The door to the cockpit opened and the first mate, Tory, stuck his head out. “We’re approaching Sedona’s Mountaintop Airport and will be landing in fifteen minutes. Can I get you anything before we land?”

I thought about my stomach and shook my head. The smoked salmon he’d served, cold, with toast points, a salad, and a light beer, just after takeoff in New Orleans, was still sitting uneasily in my stomach. “No offense, but I’ll just be happy to get my feet on the ground. Locked in this tin can with the mild turbulence you talked about back in New Orleans has not been fun.”

He grinned. “This tin can is a Bombardier Learjet 85, valued at over fifteen million dollars.”

I gulped and tried not to let my shock show. By the way the Tory laughed, I knew I hadn’t been successful. Tory was mid-thirties, not bad looking, standing about five-ten, with a lithe and wiry build, big thighs, like a cyclist, and it was clear that he found me amusing. It had to be the flight nerves.

“If you need anything just press your call button.” He disappeared behind the closed door and I looked around. I was pretty sure most Learjets were not laid out like this one. The cabin was decorated in muted shades of white and taupe. It held four, fully adjustable, heated leather seats, with a galley and full bath between the seating area and the casket in back. Well, not really a casket, and I had been careful not to call it that out loud; vamps didn’t care much for the fictional assumptions that they sleep in caskets filled with dirt from the their homeland burial grounds. But the back portion of the cabin was a cramped bedroom with no windows and stacked bunks. It slept four—six in a pinch—strapped in to the single bunks, in perfect security, allowing vamps to fly by daylight, safe from sunlight, the doors and hatches sealed on the inside. But still. Fifteen million dollars. “Crap,” I whispered.

I went back to my reading, trying to ignore the bumpy ride. Fifteen minutes later, at Tory’s polite request, which I interpreted as orders, I yanked the seat belt again, cutting off the circulation in my legs, and grabbed the armrests as tightly as I could. The small jet dropped—this time on purpose, as the pilot descended for the landing at the private airport outside Sedona.

As a skinwalker—a supernatural being who can change into animal shapes, provided I have enough genetic material to work with—I’ve actually flown, and I far prefer wings and feathers to engines and metal. I knew what it felt like and what it took to land, in terms of wing feathering and variation, flight-feather positional changes, reaching out with front clawed feet, back-winging, tail feathers dropping, and I was relatively certain that the tin can—no matter if it was worth a rather large fortune—did not have the ability to do any of that. Or if it did, a human—a being never designed to fly—was in charge, which was doubly frightening. I’d rather be feathered and in charge.

Deep in the darks of my mind, Beast huffed. Beast didn’t like it when I took the form of an animal other than hers—the Puma concolor—the mountain lion. She especially didn’t like it when I changed mass into something smaller, because she didn’t get to hang around for the ride, though I was pretty sure she had made strides in that regard. After a century and a half—give or take—Beast was evolving, something that might have been helped along by access to an angel named Hayyel not long ago. Long story.

Moments later we touched down. Hard. My teeth clacked together. Relief washed over me like a wave. I took a deep breath, released the armrests, and pushed at the leather upholstery that was now twisted and dimpled by my fingers. They didn’t move back into proper position. Permanent damage to Leo’s toy. Crap.

As we taxied to wherever the Learjet was going to hang out while I did Leo’s bidding, I pulled the laptop to me again and sent Reach a text. “Still waiting on Seattle financial info.” It was a nudge that he didn’t need, but needling Reach to speedier work wasn’t something I got to do often, and was not about to pass up now.

Reach sent back a series of dollar signs by way of answer. “$$$$$$.”

“Funny guy,” I muttered. “Charge Leo all you want.”

I texted back “What about the CS canisters?” The CS canisters were a potential new weapon in the war on rogue-vamps, pressurized colloidal silver water. Vamps didn’t breathe often, but in combat they did sometimes take a breath. If the air had a mist of colloidal silver vapor, the vamps would inhale the poison. It wouldn’t kill them, but it would slow them down. Maybe. And the poison might kill them later. It would certainly hurt them, even maybe burn their skin. I could hope.

Reach immediately sent back “Done. Untested. Delivered to your place soonest.”

An e-mail beeped into my in-box, and I frowned, suddenly feeling helpless and useless. It was from Adelaide, the blood-servant daughter of Dacy Mooney. I opened it and read the short message. It was the same as the last three I’d gotten from her. “Any word? Any cure?” I typed back “Not yet. Will know more by morning.” Of course, her mother and the other vamps in Asheville could die any time, bleeding out from the new vamp disease. Just another reminder that time was of the essence.

I remembered to unplug my cell from the jet’s battery chargers. That reactivated the cell’s GPS tracking device and gave Leo the ability to track me, my calls, my e-mails, and texts all in real time. For all I knew, it gave him the power to listen in on non-phone-call conversations. But the guy was paying me very well, so I wasn’t complaining. Much. And I had two throwaway cells in my luggage for my private calls.

I tossed my go-bag on the seat as the small jet taxied and slowed. I wasn’t going to be in Sedona long enough to get to shift, which ticked Beast off. She knew most everything I did and that meant she knew that mountain lions had been sighted near here. Two large males, probably litter mates, as they had learned the unlikely ability of pack hunting. Instead of going solitary, they were taking down prey together. Like African lions.

Good hunters. Need strong mate, she sulked. Which she had been doing a lot lately.

They’re too dangerous. They’re being hunted. They’ll be dead soon, I thought at her.

Beast growled in anger, but there wasn’t anything I could do about two wild big-cats who had learned a new trick. Not a dang thing. Snarling, she retreated into the depths of my mind, silent, distant, as she had been for weeks, since that accidental run-in with the angel Hayyel.

When the plane finally stopped and the engine whine decreased, Tory appeared in the cabin and opened the door to the outside. The smells of the world blew in on a hot gust. I stopped. Lips parting, eyes closing. On top of everything was the reek of petroleum products, heated plastic and metal, rubber, exhaust, and asphalt, but underneath that was a blend of subtle scents all fused together, unknown trees, flowers, hot sand, minerals I didn’t recognize, herbs still carrying the heat of the day.

Beast rose fast and took over, holding me down, her claws in my mind, painful. I held on to the seat arms again, breathing in through mouth and nose, smelling, tasting, parsing the scents. It was . . . amazing was too trite a word. Too overused. I had no word for the aromatic mixture. It was yellow like sunlight, and red like iron-rich earth. It sang of scarlet and sun and iron, with rare blues and greens, and the land stretched out farfarfar. Magic tingled on the air, the magic of the earth itself, still alive here in this place. Beast wanted to Hunt! Now!

With a hard shove, I pushed Beast back down and unbuckled the belt. Stood. Pulled on my boots—Lucchese western dress boots, dark green snakeskin with a four-inch toe and a three-inch heel—seriously cool boots, the color matching the green vest I wore over the black silk button-front shirt that was unbuttoned to show off a bit of chest.

I unlocked the weapons cabinet where my weapons—both edged and handguns—had been secured for the trip and did a quick but careful check of each. They had thumped around a bit in flight, but nothing had been damaged. I strapped on the shoulder harness for the Heckler & Koch nine-mil under my left arm, checked the .32 six-shooter in one boot holster, and slid a two-shot derringer under my braids. All the guns were loaded for vamp, with silver—which worked well on blood-servants too. I’d checked the weapons exhaustively in New Orleans, and I’d check them again in the car. It wasn’t obsessive-compulsive disorder. Really. It was survival instinct, honed over the years.

I adjusted a new vamp-killer in the sheath of my other boot, carefully and deliberately not recalling the way I lost the old one. That was one of the memories I tried not to think about. The blade was half knife, half small sword, with a deep blood groove along its eighteen-inch length and heavy silver plating except for the sharp, steel cutting edge. Strapped to my waist, under the vest, went two more silvered blades and three backup silver stakes in sheaths and loops. I was going armed to the teeth, into the clan home of a vamp who had once been loyal to Leo and now was under the control of another. A sick vamp. Vampires were unpredictable at best. As Leo’s self-proclaimed Enforcer—which was going to cause me trouble, I just knew it—I was expected to be armed. Everywhere, everywhen.

Normally, half a dozen silver crosses were around my neck, my waist, and tucked into my clothes, but at the moment, there was no reason to cause pain to my hostess on my unexpected and unannounced visit. I carried only one, sterling, in a lead-foil-lined vest pocket. I twisted my tightly braided black hair into a fighting queue around the derringer, and slid four silver-tipped, ash-wood stakes into the bun as hair sticks. I hooked the silver-over-titanium collar around my neck. Protection against vamp-fangs, vamp-hunger, and vamp-anger. Into a pants pocket I tucked a mountain lion fang. I had begun to carry the fetish I used for emergency shifting more often, as my job working for vamps, rather than just staking them, seemed to result in more life-threatening violence, not less.

Lastly, I pulled on my summer-weight wool jacket and clumsily adjusted the fit. It was a gesture I’d been taught to do by the woman who had designed the clothing. It felt silly, but the small tug made my weapons hang right. Though it was November, it was too warm for my silver-studded, armored leather, and I felt naked without it; nothing protected against vamp claws and fangs like silver and leather. But, despite the weapons, this visit was not a challenge, a hunt, or an act of war; it was a fact-finding mission to discover who the enemy was. With the letter of introduction in my pocket, I was supposed to be safe even without the armor. Not that “supposed to be” ever meant anything in my line of work.

And while working for vamps is never smart, Leo’s money was too much of a lure to do anything else just now. I did the little jacket tug again and felt everything fall into place, which was what should happen when a jacket cost nearly five hundred bucks. Way too much for a jacket, but it wasn’t my money, it was Leo’s. I was expected to look good. It was part of my job description. I smeared on bright red lipstick and dropped it into the same pocket as the official cell phone.

Satisfied, I looked up and met Tory’s gaze. He was staring at me, a singularly acute and piercing look. Warmth rose up my neck. I had, effectively, just gotten dressed in front of him. How stupid was that? “Your car is out front of the airport,” he said. “The driver will have a sign in the window that says ‘JY.’”

First a Learjet, now a chauffeur. This felt downright weird. My life was not . . . normal. Not anymore. “I’ll be back before dawn,” I said, and was surprised when my voice sounded professionally polite and not schoolgirl-silly.

I slung the tote with the blood-collection vials over a shoulder and passed Tory on the way out, looking down on his scalp and curly, deep-chestnut-colored hair. He was average height, but in the boots, I stood six-three, bringing my boobs about even with his face. Right. Smothering a sigh, I took in the small airport, or what I could make out from the top of the ramp. The sun had been setting when we took off from New Orleans, and it was only a bit later now than then, with the time changes.

I clattered down the steel steps and into the dusk. My boots made so much noise I missed the sound of cloth moving on cloth, but the scent caught me as I stepped onto the tarmac.

Blood-human-vampire, Beast thought. Guns. Upwind.

To my left.

I drew on Beast-speed and pulled the vamp-killer. Stepped right. Caught a glimpse of a shadow in my path. I smelled the gun oil and the fear-stink. I cut out right, hard. Impact jarred up my arm. A grunt. Reversed the knife and moved fast-fast-fast-forward. Whirled. Into the light. Blinding my attackers. Two. Only two. Blood smell meant I’d hurt the one I’d cut at. On his blood I smelled vamp and something chemical. But there was no time to examine the scent. They came at me together. Moving faster than human. Nearly vamp fast. Crap.

I hit out, feinting, and leaped up, torquing my hips, rotating my body in midair, midkick, at the uninjured one. My heel flew around, speeding up on the pivot point. Time slowed into the consistency of cold maple syrup, each moment containing a snapshot clarity. The bright light and black shadows danced beside and below me. My target moved in the split second before the kick landed. My boot hit his shoulder. Crap. I’d been aiming at his chin.

I landed on my other foot, whirled, ducked, and struck out behind me with the knife. My blade hit metal, the sound the dull clang of a gun, followed by an “oof” of pain. Both attackers were injured now. This one cursed. I managed to drop the stupid blood-collection bag and pummeled the closest guy with a series of left-handed punches and right-handed cuts. Blocked his strikes. Hit him again, this time knocking the gun away. It spun in the air. Into the dark. I bounced back, fighting for balance on the three-inch heels. I came away with his blood on my fist. A shot exploded in front of my face, the muzzle flash blinding me. The ricochet echoed in the concussion.

I blinked hard, trying to restore vision. The first guy I had cut came at me out of the retinal glare. Blinking, I dodged, cut, bent, and whirled away, biding my time until my vision came back, moving fast to make a harder target of myself.

Heart thudding, I heard clattering. Tory. Joining the fight. Idiot man.

One man turned toward him. Pulled another gun. I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but Tory kicked, straight from the hip, his entire body in the move. A practiced, fluid motion that bent his body into a tight V and then snapped it open. I wondered what he studied.

The gun went flying. A shot rang out behind me, sounding dull beneath the concussive damage to my ears. Somebody had an extra gun. It sucks when the bad guys start thinking like me. Tory kicked again, but I smelled his blood. He’d been hit. Enough. I pulled a throwing knife and let it fly, the motion all one thing—pull blade, elbow back, wrist back, shoulder back, set up, throw, wrist snap, release. It took the shooter midchest, just left of his sternum. A lucky hit, between two ribs. The knife hilt thudded into his chest. Blood fountained out.

I whirled to the other guy. He was aiming at Tory, his extra gun in both hands in a Chapman stance. I dove forward. Grabbed his head. Our bodies impacted. I rode him down. Slammed his head into the tarmac.

He went limp. I didn’t. Not even for a split second of victory. I’d been taught better. I banged his head again. Hard. And rolled, kipping to my feet. Tory was dropping back onto the metal steps, his movement so slow it looked arthritic. The fight was over. I remembered to take a breath. My heart thudded into my chest like a jackhammer. Time snapped back to normal speed. I huffed for breath as I checked the two bad guys. One no longer breathing, one down and out.

“How bad?” I asked Tory.

“I’m gonna need some stitches.” He leaned left, hit the railing with his shoulder, and slid down. His blood flowed out, venous, not the fierce, arterial pumping of the man I’d just killed. But still, not good. Not good at all.

Chapter Two

Oh, Goody. I Wasn’t Gonna Get Sucked to Death

The pilot stuck his head out of the door above me, back inside, and then raced down the stairs. “I’ve called airport security and 911. They’re sending an ambulance and the cops,” he said.

I said something that would have gotten my mouth washed out by the house mother at the Christian children’s home where I was raised. “Medical kit!” I demanded. But the pilot was ahead of me and knelt beside Tory, opening the small kit. With actions that were medic-fast, he ripped open boxes and plastic packages and applied a thick layer of gauze over Tory’s wound. Over that he folded a blanket from the jet. The entry wound was low in the upper left quadrant, above his waist, below his ribs. I tried to remember what organs were there and came up with upper colon and maybe spleen. The exit wound was directly behind it and way bigger. The pilot adjusted Tory’s limp body, stuffed another blanket over that one, and wrapped them in place with gauze and a sticky-wrap bandage. He leaned in, applying pressure, his knees on the tarmac. “Come on, boy. Don’t die on me,” he muttered. “Don’t die. Fight. You can fight this.”

I lifted Tory’s feet and propped them on the steel step, got more blankets from inside, all treatment for shock. I’d taken an emergency medicine course between life in the children’s home and life as an adult as the junior member of a security firm. I’d taken a lot of classes in a lot of things. Some of what I’d learned was even useful occasionally.

Needing to be doing something for the man who had thought I needed help, and knowing there was nothing I could do, I secured the unconscious attacker, hands and feet, with double zip strips, cleaned out his pockets, and made a fast reconnoiter of the area while I called Leo’s to report in. Bruiser answered. “We’ve landed. Two blood-slaves—” I stopped. Yeah. Multiple vamps had fed off them. Blood-slaves, not blood-servants. Expendable weapons. “—attacked me as I got off the plane. I took them down, but the first mate, Tory somebody”—I slid a hand over my face. I didn’t even know his last name—“jumped in to help. He’s injured. The pilot called 911.”

Bruiser swore. Vamps took care of their own, avoiding all human agencies when possible, but this time it was too late. “Dan’s a part-timer. Leo’s regular pilot is sick today,” Bruiser said. The phone fell silent as he thought, probably going over the vamp-political implications of Leo’s self-proclaimed and uninvited Enforcer killing someone in the city of another master. Unlike me, Bruiser had a political mind and an elegant surface in addition to his ruthless side, which was the reason he was Leo’s real Enforcer. That and the fact that he had the blood-bond with Leo that I had refused. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get someone there to handle things. You get to the Romanello Clan Home.”

Which was what I’d known he would say, but the words were still cold and heartless. Something twisted deep inside me. As if he knew what I was feeling, Bruiser added, “Or you can stay and spend the next two days answering the questions of local law enforcement.”

He was right. I knew it. Still . . . “Okay. But someone knew we were coming. That list is limited to the pilot and first mate, the pilot who called in sick, any of the vamps y’all told on your end, and Derek Lee and his guys on my end.” Derek’s old team all went by monikers based on vodka drinks: V. Martini, V. Lime Rickey, V. Chi-Chi, V. Hi-Fi, V. Sunrise, V. Angel Tit. Derek had been called V. Lee’s Surrender—a joke with historic connotations. I trusted these guys.

“Derek has new men,” he said.

I thought about that. In some way I had never questioned or understood, Derek was Leo’s before he was my guy. And Derek was merging ten new men in to his team, shooters fresh out of combat, honorably discharged, all with nicknames based on tequila drinks, like T. Sunrise, T. Cheek Sneak, T. Grenada, T. Blue Voodoo, T. El Diablo, and T. Firecracker. They were mixed crew, not all from the same unit, as Derek’s Vodka Boys were, but picked from several different units, or whatever the marines called them. I hadn’t gotten to know them well enough yet to say what I thought of them, except they probably weren’t part of our current stool pigeon problem. “Derek’s new guys were in service overseas when we first got our leak back during the Asheville parley. No. It’s not someone new, unless our bad guy covered his bases and used some big bad mojo to recruit two former military guys—which would be nigh unto impossible. So, I’m telling you, again, you got a leak in vamp security. You had one in Asheville, and you got one now.”

“Noted. You have a mission. Get on it. And see if you can make the security footage of the fight disappear.”

Post-9/11 means there are digital cameras at every mom-and-pop airport in the nation. I disconnected. Checked Tory. He was still breathing. I should have left, but I pulled my phone and called Reach.

“Evening again, Paycheck,” he said.

“I need to make all the outdoor security footage from Sedona Mountaintop Airport disappear. Review it first and see if you can ID the blood-slaves who just attacked me.”

He cursed, and there was a long silence on the other end. Then keys started clacking. “This is going to cost you, Little Janie.”

“Yeah, yeah. Bill it to Leo. Can you do it?”

“Yes.” The connection ended, but I had no doubt that Reach was ticked off. And maybe worried. If he got caught, it had to be a federal crime.

Security raced in on an electric golf cart, a red light on the top. I started laughing, and the sound had an edge, sharp and caustic. I cut off the laughter. Somehow, Tory was still alive ten minutes later, when the paramedics got there. I slid into the shadows as the real cops showed up, and made my way through the terminal, head down, away from cameras to the ladies’ room, where I pulled off the jacket and washed my clothes, drying them under the hand dryer. It didn’t take long. I had remarkably little blood on me, but I’d still smell like dinner to any vamp who got a whiff. And here I was, going into the clan home of one. My life was totally out of control. I dropped my weight onto the counter, the edge cutting into my palms. I stared myself. I was shaking.

I’d just killed a man.

And my lipstick was still in place, vibrant against my coppery Cherokee skin. As if it never happened.

Nausea rose in my throat, but no tears started. My eyes didn’t fill. They were glowing Beast-gold. I’d left the pilot and Tory to the cops. The blood-slave I’d tied up and the blood-slave I’d killed. I was a traitor and a coward. I closed my lids and breathed, finding a small calm place inside myself. Though he had attacked me, I offered up a prayer for the spirit of my enemy, Cherokee-style, to the Christian God I had worshipped for all the life I remembered. Wondering if there would come a time when God no longer heard me, or worse, when I no longer prayed. That happened sometimes when one wandered into unfamiliar spiritual areas.

When I opened my eyes again, they were my ordinary amber. I finished cleaning up. Jacket back over my weapons, I smoothed the wisps of black hair that had come free, up into the braid and fighting queue. Straightened the hair sticks. Tugged the jacket. I looked long and lean and fashionably unremarkable. No one noticed me as I exited the terminal, careful to avoid the metal detectors.

The car with my initials in the windshield, written in marker on a piece of white cardboard, was waiting out front, and I slid into the backseat. The driver pulled away but wanted to talk about the appearance of the cops. I looked behind us, as if just noticing them, and said, “Really? Huh.” He took that as me not knowing anything, shrugged, and drove into the night.

* * *

The driver, gathering that I wasn’t the chatty type, concentrated on the road, for which I was grateful. It took us over forty minutes to reach the Romanello Clan Home on the outskirts of Sedona, a long, silent drive. I opened the e-file of the Romanello family dossier and tried to read, but the dark pulled at me. As the city fell away, the sky was so black it looked like being in space, and I had never seen so many stars, not ever, anywhere, not even in the Appalachian Mountains a century ago, before electricity lit up the nights.

There wasn’t enough light to sightsee, but I cracked a window and the smells kept my nose busy. The car’s headlights lit red stone bluffs, spiky foliage, low trees, scrub. I was quickly able to pin certain smells on specific plants. A coyote trotted across the road, stopped, and looked at the slowing car before trotting on. I smelled rodents and maybe some kind of squirrel. Baked earth. Smelled an animal with a musky, odd underscent—armadillo roadkill— half roasted from the late autumn sun.

The clan home of the former blood-master of the city was in a canyon, about halfway up, on a ledge. It was in a position that would have been easily defended in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds. The only way to attack it today, barring helicopter, parasailing, ultralight plane, or parachute, was the road. Or a really horrible hike, a mountain climb, and rappel down from the cliff behind the manor hall.

A mile out, a wrought-iron gate blocked the road. We slowed and stopped at a dynamic camera, one that could be operated via joystick from a security console elsewhere. It was a top-of-the-line model with every bell and whistle on the market: motion-sensor, heat-detector, low-light capability, a PIR sensor—passive infrared—and traditional optical. The screws holding it in place were fresh and shiny. The system was new. The fence that trailed out from the road had motion sensors on it and a current running through its wires.

I rolled my window down and heard a mechanical voice say, “State your business.”

I repeated the words Leo had told me to say. “I am Jane Yellowrock, seeking shelter and hospitality, here under parley rules, sent by Leonard Eugène Zacharie Pellissier, Blood-Master of the Southeastern United States. I am armed, an Enforcer, but offer my word and guarantee that none shall be harmed by my hand except in defense.”

“Wait.”

Well, that was sweet. The camera swiveled to center on my face. I let them stare while I drew on Beast’s night vision and studied the house in the distance. Constructed of brick and the red stone of the land, it was large, with a wraparound porch, huge arched openings on the outside of the porch that protected matching arched windows on the house wall. The windows were uncovered, revealing the inside. Rugs and wood and plaster interior walls met my enhanced gaze, and though I couldn’t see them, I knew there would likely be automatic steel shutters on the inside to protect against sunlight and attack—vamp security.

A red clay roof had a solar array on its south side and three windmills. Two were modern, tall pipes, white against the black sky, with whirling, spinning tops that looked like serrated blades encased in steel. The third one looked more like a traditional windmill, and on the night breeze I could smell water. Only a little water, maybe pumped into an underground cistern, but a sharp contrast to the arid land.

It was a place of wealth and power, two stories tall, nearly impregnable. I’d seen specs of the clan home, such as existed, drawings made by visitors, but I knew how poorly most people remembered exact dimensions. And no one had mentioned a lair, neither for the vamps nor for their chained-scions, young vamps still in the devoveo of madness after being turned. So there was a lot I didn’t know about the house. I would be flying by the seat of my pants, which I was good at, but it was never safe, and eventually I’d pay the price for my lack of knowledge. I always did.

“Go ahead,” the mechanical voice said. The gate opened with a soft whir and Driver Dude pulled forward, up the hill toward the house. As we moved, low lights along the sides of the drive came on, brightening our way, and screwing with my night vision. Deliberate, I was sure. I closed one eye, peering at the world through the lashes of the other eye.

At the top of the rise, in the shadows of the house, I spotted five men. Each carried guns I could make out in the low light. I couldn’t tell what kind, but I could guess they were modified fully automatic and fully illegal weapons. Ducky. Just freaking ducky. My heart rate sped, and a slow trickle started down my spine. I took a deep breath and blew it out, forcing away the nerves. Fear—and anything close to fear—is not wise when one is in the presence of vamps. They can smell it, and they sometimes like to play with their dinner before sucking it dry.

A dark shadow stood out against a broken-rock wall just ahead, a black triangular shape with coppery glints where the stars picked out brass rounds. Even in the dark, I thought I recognized a belt-fed machine gun, maybe an HK 21 .308 Shorty, one with the standard nine-inch barrel. My breath caught, and, oddly, my fear subsided. If I was right, it was a rare gun and I wished I could just walk over and take a peek. But since it was pointed at me and the guy manning it was wearing nighttime camo and expected to be unseen, I figured that might get me shot. I grinned, showing teeth, feeling better for some reason I couldn’t name.

The driver pulled to a stop in front of the house. Calmer, I studied the house’s perimeter, taking in the rest of the security measures. Three men and a woman exited the front door and stood, widely spaced, in a semicircle around the car. If I planned to jump out shooting, I’d never get them all before I was brought down. Each of the welcoming committee was standing out of the way of direct line of fire of the gunmen. Excellent positioning.

Driver Dude turned off the car and tossed the keys over the back of the seat, which I caught. “I’ll be hiking back to the road for my ride. You leave the car back at the airport. We’ll pick it up.”

My brows rose, though there was no way he could have seen my reaction in the dark. I hadn’t been paying attention to actual turns on the ride, just the scents. Stupid move. I wondered how I was getting back to the airport. “This thing got GPS?”

“GPS-linked, voice-activated HDD navigation system. Just push this button and you’re on.” He opened his door and got out.

Ooookaaaay. I got out too and looked over the car. Lexus sedan, new, a fancy car. I’d have noted all this right away if it had been a motorcycle, and maybe oohed and aahed a bit. Cars were just transportation for me. I pocketed the keys. He waved to the welcoming committee and started jogging back the way we had come. In the distance, I saw headlights moving along the road. His ride, presumably.

I turned to the blood-servants and the vamp awaiting me and repeated the little speech Leo had made me memorize. When I was done, I shut my mouth and waited. No one said anything. The silence stretched. By pulling on Beast’s hearing, I could make out night breezes soughing over rock, tough-leaved plants clacking together with a dry, slithering sound, and the click of insects, hard carapaces and chitinous legs noisy as they ran. I could count the breath of the humans and pinpoint the one, still vamp.

They let the silence build, and it felt dangerous on the night, but Beast was a hunter. Patient. Unmoved by ploys. And so I stood, appearing relaxed, waiting. Once upon a time, and not so very far in my past, this little game would have left me with my knees knocking. I was getting better at vampire games and didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

Finally the vamp said, “You stink of danger. Of the scent of predator, but not one I know.”

“Fancy that,” I said, my voice carrying no trace of emotion. The first time I met Leo and Katie, his heir, they had both hated my scent, but when Leo accepted me, all his vamps had done so too, without a word being spoken. Interesting tidbit to be dissected later. If I lived.

“And you stink of blood. A fresh kill, for Pellissier’s Enforcer?”

The vamp’s tone was harsh and pitiless and demanding. Pretty good for so few words. I said, “I was attacked at the airport. I was forced to kill a blood-slave.” Before he could draw a breath to reply, I added, “Not one of yours, I’m sure.” And I was sure, because I didn’t taste the – slaves scent on the wind and hadn’t detected any scent I smelled here on either attacker. But I wasn’t gonna add that. Let my comment be considered a polite disclaimer with a hint of uncertainty in it.

“We were not expecting visitors.”

I didn’t reply to that, letting the silence work for me now.

“My mistress will not accept you in her sanctuary for long. You have a letter of passage?” the vamp asked. I detected a hint of accent in his tone, maybe Russian or one of the formerly Russian countries.

“I do. I carry a letter of concern for your mistress.”

“Our mistress is unwell.”

“So I hear. Leo sends his regards and his well-wishes to his longtime friend.”

The night fell silent again for a whole minute, which is a long time in the dark with guns pointed at me, before the vamp spoke again. “Come this way.” The light fell on him when he turned, and I recognized Nicolas Nivikov, a former vamp stray, from his photo; the Russian was Rosanne Romanello’s heir. Ro took in all sorts of strays—vamps with no master and no hunting ground. This one had been a rival until they fell in love, and now he was her protector and her heir.

The blood-servants fell in behind me as I followed Nicolas up the low steps into the house. I didn’t like that, but there was no way to refuse. The door opened, held by a blood-servant, ugly muscle who looked me over, taking in the weapons. He didn’t like me carrying and wanted me to know it. I nodded once at him, a single downward thrust of chin. Duly noted.

The interior shutters I’d expected to see were in place, stacked back against the sides of the windows. The décor was done in Italian antiques juxtaposed against modern, southwestern art, with contemporary updates like comfy but traditional Italian leather furniture and soft Hopi-patterned rugs over Italian marble floors. Not that I knew much about Italian stuff, but the dossier on Sedona’s master of the city had been detailed. Very detailed. The place smelled of leather and sage and blood and something vaguely sickly sweet I couldn’t identify.

I was shown into the library, where the smell of leather was strong, mixed with the scent of old paper, ancient ink, and the mold that likes books. There, I waited for over half an hour as various blood-servants and house-vamps came and went, introducing themselves, offering coffee, tea, wine, a snack, a full-course dinner, and an opportunity to freshen my toilette, which I interpreted as a chance to use the little girls’ room. I turned them all down. No way was I accepting anything to eat or drink in this place or back into a closed space with my britches down. I thought it was odd that Ro’s Enforcer didn’t show up and scope me out, but maybe he was watching on the well-hidden security cameras in the corners of the room. I thought about making faces at them, but controlled myself. I understood why the vamps and servants kept me constant company. The vamps wanted to sniff me, and the servants wanted to get a good look in case they had to kill me tonight.

At the thought, Beast rolled over deep in my mind, pulling her paws close under. It was a good position if she needed to launch her body—a strike posture, which meant she was paying close attention to everything, in spite of her silence. My growing sense of unease dissipated slightly knowing that she was awake and aware.

I was perusing the library’s titles when Nikki-Babe appeared in the doorway. “This way, if you please,” he said. I followed him through a receiving parlor into a small office, where a vamp sat in the shadows. The photo I’d seen of her had obviously been taken in this room, but Rosanne’s illness had progressed since. Now she had pustules up her neck and across one cheek. Another was on her lip, as if the disease liked mucous membranous tissue.

She clutched a handkerchief, and blood dotted it. Her nose was bleeding. I had never seen a vamp bleed except from a wound. Had never seen one sick. Freedom from bodily complaints, illness, or needs—with the exception of blood and sex—was supposed to be a benefit of being a vamp. But no more, it seemed. The sickly sweet smell was Ro—the scent of disease and decaying blood.

The room was filled with an odd tension, electric and gluey, as if it stuck to me when it brushed past. I had paused too long, let the silence grow too deep. I didn’t want to approach, but I had been schooled by Bruiser in Mithran visitation etiquette. I had to present my letters of introduction. I stepped to the table and laid the envelopes before her. The official one, Ro handed to Nik. She opened the privately addressed one, the one written in Leo’s own hand with lots of old-fashioned flourishes, the words Ro, mi amore on the envelope. They both read, and when Rosanne was done, she folded her letter and placed it in her desk drawer, which she locked with a small key hanging on a chain around her neck.

“Nikki tells me you were attacked.” Her voice sounded weak and whispery. “They were not mine.”

“I know,” I said gently.

“He also prepared me for your scent, but I find it not entirely unpleasant. You smell of predator and aggression, but also of contact with my Leonardo. He is well? I had heard . . .” She stopped to breathe, little desperate gasps, which nearly made my eyes bug out. Master vamps did not need to breathe except to talk and to fight, and this one had to stop and reoxygenate. Not good. “I had heard he had not recovered from the death of his son. I liked Immanuel immensely.”

“He recovered,” I said shortly. Leo’s state of mind and the death of his supposed son wasn’t a subject I wanted to talk about, since I had killed the creature masquerading as Immanuel. “He’s now concerned about you.”

Rosanne made a very Italian gesture, a slow throwing of her fingers, as if the subject was unimportant. “I was offered a Blood Challenge. I did not contest it. I have a master now.” She shook her head, and with the movements, her sick scent floated into the room. “It has been long since I was . . . mastered. It was difficult at first. But he has left me in control of my own hunting grounds. He has made me his heir of this land.”

This part was the tricky part. To mention her diseased state might be considered insulting. I’d been warned that if I was attacked after entering and being welcomed, it would be when I brought up the obvious. But she had mentioned Leo’s illness, so maybe I had some leeway there too. “Leo is concerned that his old friend is not recovering as quickly as she should.”

The tendrils of tension wrapped around me like the prickly webs of a spider, close and sticking. “I have been sent a treatment by my new master. However, there is only one, and I may not drink as often as I need.”

I thought about that for a moment until I found the translation. The new master had sent her blood-servant or -slave who had the “treatment” in his blood, but if she drank too much he’d die. She had a human drug, a human antibiotic factory to feed on. She was getting enough to keep her alive, but not enough to heal totally. Talk about a way to control your subordinates. Her new master had probably been the one to make her sick and now only he had the power to heal, or at least to keep her alive. No way was she going to thwart him. “And his name?” I asked. When Rosanne didn’t respond, I clarified, “The name of your new master?”

“I may not answer.”

Without turning my head, I glanced at Nikki. His face was closed, as unyielding as a marble statue. No answer there either. Well, crap. “May I ask another question about your master, without giving offense?” What I’d like to do is beat it out of you, but I have my orders.

Ro chuckled, almost as if she had heard my thoughts. Vamps are as adept as any predator at reading body language and interpreting vocal tones as cues, so maybe in a way she had. “Do you know how you were infected?” I asked. “Is the disease associated with your new boss?”

Ro said nothing, but Nikki laughed, and the tone was not happy. “This illness is a scourge upon all of us.”

Which I took as a yes, but that didn’t really help me much. From my memory, I pulled up the formal words for my next request—which was the primary reason for my visit, and the biggest reason I might not walk out of here under my own power. “The Master of the City of New Orleans,” which was Leo’s less formal title, “has dependable and confidential physicians in his employ who might assist with finding a cure. He requests . . .” I took a steadying breath. This was the most dangerous part.” . . . that you allow me to draw a sample of your blood for testing.”

Nikki stepped toward me, vamp fast. I stepped back, toward the door. Beast does not run from predators. The voice in my head reminded me that running from vamps activated the chase instinct. Not that it mattered. The opening was suddenly filled with a blood-servant—the big bad ugly guy who had held the door, all brawn and speed and no brains. The tension in the room shot up like a wildfire hitting a stand of dry pine.

On reflex, I ducked right, backed into the corner of the room, pulled the nine-mil and a vamp-killer, the one I’d killed the blood-slave with. I knew the vamps would smell the fresh blood, even after the thorough cleaning I’d given the blade in the ladies’ room.

Nikki-Babe followed so fast I didn’t see him move. He was so close I could smell who he’d had for dinner. I heard the distinctive click of fangs snicking down on the little hinged mechanism in the roof of his mouth. In a single heartbeat, his eyes vamped out. “Pellissier must still be caught in the dolore of grief to ask such a thing,” he said, black pupils the size of quarters spreading into bloodred sclera. “He is insane still, from the loss of his son.” No trace of white or iris remained in Nikki’s eyes, and no trace of humanity. This was going to hell in a handbasket fast.

I shoved the gun up under Nikki’s chin. “Silver shot,” I warned, on a whisper. He stilled, his eyes twisting back to Rosanne. “Look, lady,” I said to her, “I don’t want trouble. Leo just wants to help. Girrard DiMercy is back with him, and Leo is sane again.”

Ro lifted a hand. The pressure in the room died. “Girrard has returned to him?”

“Yes, and Leo thinks his private lab can find a cure to the sickness.”

She thought about that for a moment. “You know how to do this taking of blood?” I nodded. “You may.” Nikki-Babe started in with a barrage of oddly accented Italian, clearly disagreeing with her decision, but I ignored him. According to the Vampira Carta, she was in charge. I slid away from Nik, keeping him in my side vision, and stepped to the desk. Ro rolled up her sleeve. Oh, goody. I wasn’t gonna get sucked to death.

I holstered the weapons and opened the small tote, taking out the blood drawing kit. I wasn’t skilled at taking blood, but I knew how to do it. I pulled on gloves and tied the tourniquet around Rosanne’s arm. The pustules were here as well, and the smell of the sickness was gag-inducingly strong this close to her. There was a vein right in the middle of her arm, slightly plumped by the tourniquet. I cleaned the bottles and tubes, each with different-colored tops and containing different anticoagulants, with alcohol, and then the sticking site with foamy brown soap and Betadine. I pulled the cap from the needle and stuck the sharp needle under her skin. She didn’t flinch, though I wasn’t experienced with the procedure. If it had been a stake, maybe then . . .

I stifled the thought and pushed the first bottle on, then the next, then four more tubes in succession. When I was done, I popped the tourniquet. Put a square of gauze above the insertion site and removed the needle. Flipped the safety cap closed.

I met Ro’s calm eyes, and she smiled slowly, tilting her head the barest fraction. The expression on her face suggested that she had accomplished a goal, and I was reminded of the photo that arrived at Leo’s from an anonymous source. Yeah. Ro had sent the photo and had known that Leo would send help. She might have preferred an armed rescue, but she trusted Leo or she wouldn’t have allowed me to draw the blood. Vamps were sneaky. I liked that about them. I nodded back slightly to show I understood.

I held the site while I dropped the torn packages, the bottles, and tubes into a zip-lock baggie and sealed it up. I was supposed to label the tubes with name, date, and time, but that could wait. I was ready to get out of here and so was Beast. I could feel her unease padding through my mind like a lion in a cage, back and forth, back and forth.

Chilled moisture soaked my thumb and I glanced at the puncture site to see blood oozing up from beneath my grip. I grabbed more gauze, applied it, and held harder, but the blood welled faster. Vamps don’t bleed. Not like this. “Crap,” I whispered.

Nik pushed me aside and took Rosanne’s arm. And he did something I’d never seen a vamp do before. Instead of licking it clean, he wiped the puncture site, tossing the bloody gauze into the garbage. A vamp ignored blood. Didn’t lick it. And then he spat onto the wound. I almost said eeeewwww but caught myself in time. I realized he was worried she was contagious.

Vampire saliva closes wounds, causing the veins and skin to contract and constrict. It’s usually applied with a tongue laving. This was weird. Okay. This gig was making me rethink everything I thought I knew about vamps, and I had been on a steep learning curve ever since I hit New Orleans.

The tiny wound stopped bleeding. Nikki-Babe looked at me and I nodded my thanks. “I’ll be going now,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” a voice said behind me. I turned and saw a man, human—or as human as the fangheads’ dinners ever are. I knew this guy wasn’t one of Ro’s usual blood-servants; even if I hadn’t been able to smell the new master on him, he wasn’t in the dossier. He was maybe seventy years old, looked twenty-five, and was powerful—meaning that he had fed on the blood of a master for a very long time. Bald, six feet and a smidge, blue eyes, reddish beard needing a trim, casual clothes, shirt half-tucked, as if he’d dressed and gotten here in a hurry. He was a righty.

And he had a gun pointed at my chest.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyrights

Contents

NOTES TO READERS

TIMELINE OF STORIES IN JANE YELLOWROCK’S WORLD

WE SA AND THE LUMBER KING

HAINTS

SIGNATURES OF THE DEAD

CAJUN WITH FANGS

Excerpt from DEATH'S RIVAL