ANZU, DUBA, BEAST

Faith Hunter

“We will hunt. Ready yourself. We leave after dusk. Gee.”

I hated orders. But I owed Girrard DiMercy—the vampires’ Mercy Blade—a hunt, which he had won from me in return for information. Gee had a good memory, but his timing sucked.

I flicked the note against the fingers of my other hand, thinking. With vamps and their playthings, you have to be one step ahead, and thinking things through had proved better than attacking first and asking questions later.

Gee expected me to shift into something like a hawk or an owl and hunt at his side, while he shifted into the thing he really was under layers of glamour. If that happened, he’d set all the parameters and I’d be little dog to his big dog—earth bird to his Anzu. So far as I knew, the feathered Anzu were not native to earth, and had once been worshipped as storm gods. Big honking storm gods with claws, wings, a raptor’s beak, and attitude.

“Does Leo know about this invitation?” I asked, crumpling the note. Leo was the fanghead-vampire Master of the City of New Orleans and my boss. Gee’s boss too, in a way.

The blood-servant-messenger’s face broke into a smile that said I had asked a question he could answer. “Yes, ma’am. He knows. My master said, ‘May your hunt be bloody. May you rend and eat the flesh of your prey.’”

“Well crap.” I had plans. I was spending a four-day weekend with my sorta-boyfriend, eating and sleeping and everything my heart and body desired, in bed. Plans. And the following Tuesday, I was flying to Asheville, North Carolina, to spend a few days with my BFF Molly, to see the ultrasound of her baby, the one where the doc tells if it’s a boy or a girl. And then I was gonna pick up my Harley, Bitsa, from the repair shop in Charlotte. Finally. Big plans. Leo liked jerking my chain, and he would feel just peachy messing with my life.

But…it was only Wednesday. The hunt we bargained for was for twenty-four hours. I should be back by Thursday night. Friday morning at the latest. I’d still have a few days to myself and my honeybunch. Plus, Gee didn’t know that I had aces up my sleeve. Well, not exactly aces. More like Jokers, both of them wild, cards that didn’t belong in the deck of cards the Mercy Blade expected to deal. “Hmmm,” I said.

The helpful human said, “Mr. DiMercy and the Master of the City have requested the courtesy of a reply.”

“Did they, now. Well, tell them I said this.” I shut the door in the servant’s face. Turned the lock. Pulled my official cell phone, the Kevlar-cased one that allowed the Master of the City to track me, listen in on me, and read all my texts. It was daytime and he was probably in bed, but no way could I just take this. Vamps had a thing for pecking order. I couldn’t refuse the invitation, but I was neither blood in Leo’s fangs nor at the bottom of the suckhead hierarchy. I was the Enforcer to the MOC. This required more finesse than my usual hammer-and-machete-style of retort.

I scrolled for Leo’s number. It was listed under Chief Fanghead.

As a skinwalker—a supernatural being who can shape-shift into animals, provided I have enough genetic material to work with—I’ve actually flown, and not just in planes. But Gee might not know that. A familiarity with flight was my first wild Joker.

Deep in the darks of my mind, my Beast huffed. Eat order from Gee, she thought at me. 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 flying.

We made a promise, I thought back at her. I wandered to my room as I punched Leo’s number.

Promises are stupid human things. We are Beast. Eat note.

Beast is opinionated, with a mind and feelings of her own. I had pulled her soul into my body in an act of accidental black magic when I was five years old, while fighting for my life. That was back in the eighteen hundreds. Skinwalkers, even the two-souled, can live a long time.

The cell trilled the first ring. Thinking that I would balk at the order, Leo would keep me waiting.

My second wild Joker was a blue feather. Not so long ago, I came upon the glamoured body of a slain Anzu. She had looked perfectly human, albeit dead, except for the bright blue feathers on the floor around her body, downy and fluffy, catching the air currents and waving at me as if alive.

I hadn’t intended to take a feather. I had forgotten I had stolen one. I’m guessing that Beast did it while I wasn’t looking, a theft she had accomplished using my hands while my mind was occupied with more important things, which is scary in all sorts of ways. I hadn’t discovered the feather until much later, in my collection of magical trinkets, but had never used it because taking the form of a sentient being was one of the darkest kinds of evil. Black magic. Unless I had permission. “Jane,” Leo answered my call. “You have refused Girrard’s invitation.”

“Nope. But I need to talk to Sabina.” Sabina was the woo-woo priestess of the Mithran-Vamps and she lived in the vampire cemetery. I’d need permission to enter.

There was a long pause, and I was sure Leo’s brain was clicking through all the possibilities of why I’d need to talk to the eldest of the local Mithrans. “One moment.”

A much longer pause later, I heard the sounds of movement and the shush of fabrics and soft-voiced instructions. The ambient noise changed and I knew I was being put on speakerphone, which made no sense. Until a voice spoke. “I am here,” Sabina said.

I blinked and opened my mouth. Closed it. This saved me hours of afternoon traveling across the Mississippi and back. But I had to do this right. I drew on the scraps of vamp etiquette I had learned in my time as Leo’s Enforcer and said, “Sabina Delgado y Aguilera, outclan priestess of the Mithrans, keeper of the sacred grounds, keeper of the Blood Cross, arbiter of disputes, I have a question and…uh…and I wish you to determine if the path I wish to take is one of sin.”

“If I say it is sin, will you take another path, my child?”

“Yes.”

“Speak.”

I took a deep breath. “I want to know if it’s black magic for a skinwalker to shift into the same kind of creature as Gee.”

The silence on the other end of the connection was total. And then, in the background, Leo laughed. It was one of those vampire laughs, the kind that writers and producers and other creators of fiction got right. Seductive, warm, enticing, like heated silk sliding across my skin. A laugh that reminds you vamps are predators, built to seduce and charm before they kill. The liquid notes cut off in mid-peal, interrupted by a gasp of surprise or pain.

“You wish to know if this will turn you to the path of u’tlun’ta,” Sabina said, “the demon your kind becomes when they eat of sentient flesh.”

Chills raced over me. U’tlun’ta was what my kind became when we got old and went insane and started eating people. “Pretty much, yes.”

“Is the Anzu alive, and will you eat her flesh?”

“No!” I looked at the blank screen in revulsion, put the cell back to my ear, and said, “No. She’s dead and I didn’t kill her.”

“What do you use for the snake that resides in the heart of all beasts?”

The words Sabina used froze me for several heartbeats. They were skinwalker words, for a skinwalker concept. “A feather,” I whispered.

“With this action, you walk the sharp edge of a blade between light and dark. You do not cross that edge into darkness, but if you slip, you may bleed.”

“I’ll try not to slip.”

The call went dead. I dropped to my bed. I had no idea if I’d be able to shift into an Anzu. No idea if there was enough genetic material in the core of the feather to allow me to shift. No idea if Gee would kill me at first sight. Or, for that matter, how much an Anzu weighed. Even though I’m a magical creature, I am still bound by the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy. Taking on extra mass or leaving part of myself behind is dangerous. Flying by the seat of my pants never got any easier. No winged pun intended.

Stepping around piles of clothes and boots, junk mail, and a small stack of the Times Picayune, I picked up my gobag and shook the grindylow out of the folds. The neon-green, kitten-sized thing spit at me and showed me her steel claws. “Stop that,” I scolded. She wrinkled her nose at me and leaped to my shoulder. Grindys kill were-creatures. It’s their mission. This one liked nesting in my clothes. Absently, I patted her, and she cooed at me, nuzzling under my ear.

I packed a special gobag with a change of clothes, lightweight shoes, and my cell phone. I laid out the weapons candidates and then weeded them down, ending with a nine millimeter, extra mags, six stakes: three ash-wood, three sterling. And one vamp-killer—a steel-edged, long-bladed, silver-plated knife created especially for beheading vampires.

It’s what I did, or had done, prior to taking the gig as Leo’s Enforcer. I was a rogue-vamp hunter. And no way was I leaving home without the tools of my trade.

Packed, I left my room and skidded to a stop. My business partners were standing in the foyer just in front of my bedroom door. Alex Younger had a mulish set to his jaw, though at nineteen, he pretty much wore that expression all the time. Eli Younger, the elder Younger, stood with arms crossed, a speculative gleam in his eyes. I handed him the note.

He un-clumped it, read the three sentences, and some infinitesimal hint of tension in his face relaxed. “Payback’s a bitch,” he said, giving the note back. And I wasn’t sure who was getting paid back, me for making a bargain, or Gee for enforcing it. “I guess you won’t be needing us?”

I shouldered my gobag. “I have no idea where we’ll fly for this hunt, but Gee said something about elk or moose when this first came up, so I’m guessing somewhere far north.”

Elk? Moose? Beast perked up. Moooses and elks are bigger than cows?

Pretty much, I thought back at her.

Do not eat note.

I chuckled and passed the grindy to Alex. “Start your vacation early. Go play. Take in a movie, go visit Sylvia, start a new video game. Whatever. I’m sure I’ll be somewhere way off, where there aren’t many people. And then I have plans.”

“Fly for this hunt?” Eli quoted me.

“Yeah,” I said, going for casual. “Thought I’d try to shift into an Anzu.”

Things took place behind Eli’s eyes, things too fast to catch, but the tension was back, hiding beneath the skin of his face. “Watch yourself,” he said, heading up the stairs to pack a bag. “It’s hunting season in some northern states and it would ruin my weekend if you got shot out of the sky. I’d have to go find your body. Track down and kill whoever shot you. Spend the rest of my life in jail. Totally not in my long-term plans.”

“What my bro said.” Alex tossed me a box wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. I caught it as he continued, “But I’ll be here, so keep your official cell on, and wear that.” He pointed at the box. “I can track you anytime you’re within range of a tower or within range of a satellite, which should be nearly universal coverage these days. If you stay too long in one place, I’ll assume you’re in trouble and send Captain America.” He thumbed at his brother.

* * *

Sunset had freshly bruised the skies. I was in the backyard, holding the Anzu feather, sitting on chilled boulders, naked except for my gobag (full of clothes, weapons, and equipment) and the necklaces around my neck. My gold nugget necklace and the new tracking necklace—looking like gold, but much more useful—and gobag were extra loose. I took several slow breaths. Concentrated on my heartbeat. Let my shoulders droop. The first stars came out as the sky darkened. I dropped into a meditative state, reached down into the tip of the blue feather, into the snake that lives at the center of all creatures: the double helix of DNA, as understood by the Cherokee of my own time. My skinwalker magics rose, vibrant, luminous, the silver and gray of the Gray Between. I dropped deeper, into the dried flesh at the base of the feather.

Anzu genetic structure unfolded before me.

The DNA wasn’t a double helix, common to Earth creatures. It was a tangled mass of strands, spun in circles, glowing like glass, pale blue and green light. One ovoid spot in the slowly spinning circle was denser and darker. It opened its eyes and looked at me. Unfolded slowly. The genetic structure was a snake, holding its own tail in its mouth. Ouroboros, the name came to me. The ouroboros focused on me, in the Gray Between, a place where energy and mass are one.

The snake opened its mouth. Let go of its tail. And struck. Before I could jerk away, snake fangs pierced me. Pain shot through me as if I had been hit with a Taser. I screamed. Bones bent. Darkness took me, blazing and icy.

* * *

I woke. The night was cool, humid, strangely scented. Chemical stinks of exhaust, gasoline, diesel fuel, coffee, food, and hot grease were familiar, but sights and sounds were different. The world was orange and silver, my vision so intense it was like looking through a scope, each line of light and shadow vibrant and intense. Something moved. My eyes found it instantly. Even in the dark, I could see individual hairs on a small mouse, hunting along the brick wall, hear its nails click on the concrete.

The music from a club several streets over was a booming din that hurt my ears. The house band’s off-key rendition of One Way Out would have made the Allman Brothers cringe. A motorcycle engine in the distance was cutting out. Cars motored through the French Quarter. A jet overhead slowed, descending for landing.

I lifted my arms and my right fingers brushed the wall nearest, ten feet away. I jerked back, rolled to my feet, and looked around, my head swiveling and turning; I had shifted shape. A warbling sigh sounded in my throat as I took myself in.

I was blue and scarlet and some sort of glowing color that might only be seen in ultraviolet. The glowing feathers were up under my wings and on my belly. A darker version overlay the tips of flight fathers and tail feathers, glowing with black-light intensity to my bird eyes. My feet were long, with clawed toes, ten inches from back claw to longest toe claw, with glowing orange skin over knobby joints. My beak was pointed and curved, a vicious hook on the end. It matched my orange legs. I spread my wings again, carefully, inspecting sapphire flight feathers, with a band of scarlet near my shoulder and another on the back of my neck—which I could see with the head-swiveling thing I could do. I had a twenty-foot wingspan. I shivered, settling my feathers, and I could feel each one as it found its place. I was freaking gorgeous. I also wasn’t hungry, which was a change from all my other shape-shifts. Usually I had to fuel my shifts with prodigious amounts of food, but something about the soft-lit magic trembling along my wings suggested that I had pulled the energy from elsewhere.

Beast can kill many mooses with claws and strong beak, she thought.

My hearing grew clearer, sharper. People were talking everywhere. A whiteout of noise.

In the house, I heard Eli speak, his voice soft and dangerous. “Bro.” My head tilted that way. “You go out there and I’ll deck you.”

“But it’s been an hour. Aren’t you worried about her?”

“No.” But there was the sound of a lie in the single word. Aw. Eli was concerned about me. I should razz him for it.

But…I was shaped wrong to go inside. I was shaped wrong to open a door. I imagined raising my huge foot and trying to grip the doorknob. I laughed at the vision, the sound warbling, unexpectedly loud. The back door opened on the last note. “Jane?”

I froze. But…parrots could talk. I warbled again, trying to say hello. It came out a rippling trill. As Eli and the Kid raced out, I tried again, and this time, there were words mixed into the warble. “Thish ish warble warble intersh-ting.”

“Janie?” Alex asked.

“Babe?” Eli asked. And he started laughing.

I lifted a clawed foot and said, very distinctly, if slowly, “Crack your skull like walnut.”

Eli shut up, but there was still laughter on his face. The Kid went back inside where I could hear him laughing his head off saying, “Big Bird. Big blue bird. Holy shit.” Laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.

I narrowed my eyes at Eli.

“Babe. I know you could crack my skull like a nut. But you’re also funny looking.”

I swiped at him with my wing, which banged into the porch support with a thump that freaking hurt. I warbled a word that I never would have spoken in English. Which made Eli laugh harder. Mid-laugh he drew a weapon and injected a round into the chamber. Aimed at me. I ducked. But he didn’t fire.

Air whooshed down. Nearly knocked me off my perch on the cracked boulders. A foreign warble, an interrogative, carried on the air as I regained my balance. I turned to see an Anzu, smaller than my hundred forty-five pounds but a far brighter blue, alight on the brick wall surrounding the backyard.

He gleamed in my bird vision, ultraviolet blues and purples and a shocking ruby at shoulders and throat. He smelled like feathers, heat, and the down we line our nests with. He settled his feathers and cooed.

“Gee?” I managed.

“Jane? How have you…?” his words wisped, warbling but crisp and clear.

“Ummm. I had a feather.” The consonants sounded like sharp tocks, but it was understandable. Sorta.

“You took a feather from Urgggglllaaammmaaah’s body.” He tilted his head. “Did you ask her consent?”

“She was kinda dead. So I asked Sabina. She said it was okay.”

“Did she?” Gee considered that. “This is acceptable to me. Come. We must hurry or our prey will escape us.”

I cocked my head at my partner. “I’ll call when I’m back.” He nodded. I hunched down and leaped, hopping to the top of the brick fence surrounding the backyard. It was easier than I had expected.

“Tis only the launch that is difficult.” Gee said, trilling what might have been laughter, expecting me to face-plant. He threw himself into the air.

I know the glory of soaring, wingtips splayed, tail feathers twisting in subtle harmony with updrafts. And how to land, wings tilting just so, feathering down into a controlled fall with flight-feather positional changes and wing angle alterations, the variation slowing the descent, carrying me to a perch.

I gathered myself and dropped down until my knobby toes touched my breastbone, a position I might achieve in human form—if I broke my legs first. I leaped and threw out my arms. Wings. Air caught beneath me and I beat down. The long wingtips hit the earth and brushed brick before I managed a second stroke. And then I was lifting, wind in my face, air heavy, full of moisture. I tucked my feet, caught a rising thermal over the street, hot asphalt stink in my lungs. Beat downward again and again.

Below me, New Orleans glittered like diamonds, the Mississippi a black snake slithering through. I caught a second thermal and soared upward, Gee just ahead. I adjusted my flight position to his left, which decreased my wind resistance, things I knew by instinct and genetics. We rose higher, leaving the earth behind. Intermixed below us I could see circles and triangles in all the colors of the rainbow and long lines of something blue below the surface.

In this form, I could see magic far better than I could in human or Beast-form. The magic of full circles and smaller workings. And the long blue lines beneath the surface were…ley lines. I had never seen them like this before. And they were so beautiful they made my soul ache.

Anzu is good, Beast thought at me, sniffing the air. Like Anzu.

I cooed back at her.

I had no idea where we were going and I didn’t care as my wings carried me, untiring, across the darkness of the world. Hours passed.

* * *

After midnight, Gee descended toward the faint lights of a small township. In the distance, ley lines glowed bright. They seemed like a nexus of some sort, a snarled clump of earth magics. I knew next to nothing about ley lines but they looked dangerous. Overloaded. As we spiraled down, they fell from view and I smelled freshwater lakes and streams, the richness of untouched earth and uncut forests, stone, crude oil, and much more faintly, the stink of old blood.

The scent grew stronger. A lot of old blood. And the stink of were, species unknown. It was a type I had never scented before. Not wolf, not big-cat, something more musky, though the scent was overpowered, fading even as we flew by.

Gee circled and dove, alighting on the edge of a house roof. I landed atop an abandoned car. The huge ranch house was in a clearing, at the end of a long empty road, the sharp piney scent of trees all around, trying to overcome the stink of vampire and human blood. The battle was at least a month old, the season having frozen, melted, and washed most of it away. What was left was the stench of fury, desperation, fear, and death.

I remembered Leo’s words, quoted by the blood-servant who had delivered my invitation. “May your hunt be bloody. May you rend and eat the flesh of your prey.”

Leo had known what Gee was taking me to hunt. “Well, crap,” I said.

Gee trilled with mocking laughter.

Beast, who had been remarkably silent, growled to me, Jane should have eaten note.

I squatted down on the hood, chest to toes, and fluffed my feathers against the cold, trying to piece together the battle. My Anzu night vision picked out the entire house as if it was day, not darkest night, body fluids glowing as if they were under a black light.

The attackers came in through the front door, through the front windows, through the garage doors at the back, like a home invasion on steroids. The damage looked as if battering-rams had been used, huge holes punched right through the thin wood of the garage door, the front door knocked off its hinges, the frame shattered. I leaped to the front door and leaned inside.

The fight had been bloody, but the invaders hadn’t used guns. All the gunfire destruction was from the back wall and hallway, toward the entrances and windows. At least five vamps and ten humans had died in the parts of the house I could see. And so far as my senses could tell me, not one of the attackers had been injured. I still couldn’t identify the species of were, their scent hidden beneath the grizzly stinks of death.

There were no bodies. They had been carried off and buried or burned. But the crime scene hadn’t been worked up. There was no crime scene tape, no sharp smell of fingerprint powder, no carpet taken up for analysis. The house hadn’t been cleaned. Something was really wrong here.

* * *

“You coulda warned me to bring a coat,” I grumbled as we trudged down an unpaved road, pea-gravel crunching beneath my thin-soled shoes. Suddenly, just bam, the road became paved, for no reason, but it was easier to walk, so I wasn’t griping. I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged myself for warmth. Gee seemed unaffected by the cold, but glamour and shape-shifting were very different things. I was cold and starving. He wasn’t. “Where are we? It’s still fall and there’s freaking snow on the ground.”

Gee drawled, “We have alighted in Foleyet, little goddess, a tiny hamlet in Ontario, Canada.”

“I’m not a goddess,” I said by rote. I checked my cell. Nothing. Nada. No bars. Ducky. Just freaking ducky.

Gee turned off the road and around an abandoned building, the windows boarded over. The back door opened before us, light pouring into the night. The herbal stink of vamp and the rancid smell of old blood boiled out. I dropped my arms, leaped back a dozen feet. When I landed, I was holding a silver stake and a vamp-killer. Gee laughed, sly, mocking.

Holding the door was a vamp, a tribal woman, black-haired, black-eyed, tall and lean, similar to my own six feet of height and build, but she was utterly gorgeous. “It’s our honor to receive the Enforcer of the Master of the City of New Orleans,” the vamp said. “Why do you draw weapons?”

I slammed my weapons back into the sheaths. “Because I wasn’t informed I would be meeting with Mithrans,” I said, catching up with Gee. “Your species likes to play games.” And I stuck out my foot, neatly tripping Gee over his own feet and mine, feeling better when Gee landed face first in the hard dirt and dusting of snow. “His does too. My apologies,” I said to her. I drew on my training and said, “Additional apologies for my scent. It’s considered a provocation by many Mithrans and that’s unintentional.” I took the two stairs and stopped in the doorway.

The woman leaned out and sniffed delicately before backing inside, her hands indicating welcome. “Namida Blackburn, of Clan Blackburn. We’d been told you smelled of predator, but all I detect is wind and storm clouds.”

Interesting. “No insult was intended with the weapons,” I said. I turned around and shut the door in Gee’s face. My big-cat liked to play games too. Grinning, I faced Namida. “How may the Enforcer of the MOC of New Orleans assist you?”

* * *

The problem was simple, and not. Something were-tainted had attacked the local vamps, every full moon night for the last three months. In multiple attacks, three blood-families, vamps and their humans, had been decimated in remote areas, killed, eaten. The MOC of New York had declined to assist. The MOC of Toronto had declined to assist. The MsOCs of Chicago, Montreal, and Minneapolis had declined. In desperation, the local vamps had contracted (for an outrageous sum) the werewolf clan of Wisconsin. The wolves had flown in, taken one sniff, returned the down payment, and flown out. The Montana wolf clan hadn’t returned calls. The local law and the Canadian Mounted Police had declined to assist, calling it a suckhead problem.

I could see why. The photos of what, in my part of the world, would have been crime scenes were horrible, and I had seen some pretty horrible stuff in my time. “I’m not familiar with many were-creatures. What do you speculate?”

“If it was a natural creature then I’d say a small, deformed brown bear.” She shuffled the photos and showed me a clear print, one in a pool of dried blood. “Eh. The claws are too long and wide but the paw shape is bear. They grow to a thousand pounds. This one’s four hundred?” she guessed.

I frowned and pulled the borrowed flannel shirt and down vest tighter across me, swirling the caramel-apple-flavored moonshine she had poured for me. Moonshine was the drink of choice here, not the New Orleans’ tea or coffee. “It smelled like were,” I murmured, “but even at four hundred pounds, the Mass to Energy Ratio is off for the average human-to-were conversion.” And then things came together: the magical fuel for the shift to Anzu, the timing of this hunt. The sight of the twisted ley lines we had seen in the air. Magic here was messed up. So were physics. So were the weres. “Well dang,” I muttered.

“What?” she asked.

I waved it away. “Nothing. Leo wanted it taken care of, so I’ll take care of it,” I said, sipping the moonshine and finishing off the pile of smoked elk meat and fresh bread. It had assuaged the hunger from my shift. Anzu magic only worked to fuel the shift one way, and I had eaten enough for four humans, but Namida didn’t begrudge my caloric needs. “I’m on salary. What does Leo get out of this deal?”

“We align with him.” The words were spare, without emotion.

“Uh huh.” Namida and Leo had negotiated under the vamp system of parley, kinda like a peace treaty with the white man, with just about that much fairness. I’m Cherokee, so I know how “fair” works. “Fine. I’ll need stuff, to include clothes, weapons, food, maps, and something that carries the weres’ scent. Leo will reimburse you for my supplies.”

Namida’s eyebrows went up in amused surprise.

I canted my head, wearing a half-smile. “He sent me in return for your loyalty. I say he pays for expenses. In the long-run, you might have gotten the worst part of the bargain. Of course if I get killed on this gig, then I got the worst part.” I checked my cell phone which displayed local time, so I’d acquired a signal at some point. I still had hours before dawn. If I was lucky, I’d find the weres’ hidey hole before morning, shift, and come back in my human-form and shut them down. Nights were long this time of year.

“Thanks for the meal.” I handed her my partial list of weapons, and her eyebrows went up again. Yeah. It was a lot. But if I could hit the were-creatures with fragmentation grenades, or their hidey-hole with the C4, I’d injure them enough to take them down, no matter how big they were. And I wasn’t too particular about bringing in magical killers of humans alive and uninjured.

“Gee, you can come in,” I said, without raising my voice.

The back door opened and Gee DiMercy minced in. He looked like a twenty-one year old Mediterranean man, delicate and pretty in the shadows, until he got a good look at our hostess and he suddenly morphed into something older and harder. The shift looked like a trick of the light, but I knew better. Light didn’t make you suddenly six inches taller and give you a three-day beard. Gee was now a black-haired, blue-eyed warrior, tough and elegant all at once, the kind of man who can track, shoot, and dress an elk without breaking a sweat, and dance a gavotte at a black-tie soiree in the evening.

“Madam,” he said, taking her hand and bending over it in European old-world charm. “I am Girrard DiMercy. You are Namida? You are as beautiful as your name. Star Dancer, yes?”

The vampire tilted her head, amusement sparkling in her black eyes, with a hint of interest. “You speak Ojibwe?”

“Sadly, no. But I knew a Chippewa woman by that name, many seasons past. She was lovely, but never so lovely as you.”

Namida laughed and looked at me. “I see why you tripped him.” She slid her hand from Gee’s. “Kill the things that are killing my people and you have my permission to court me, little misericord. Until then, you two need to get cracking, eh?” Namida went to the far corner of the abandoned room and brought back a plastic baggie. The closer she got to us the worse the stink. She held it out. “One of my people managed to hurt the attackers. These are three samples of blood that isn’t human or Mithran. Good luck.” With that, she walked past us and out the back. She paused there, one hand on the door, and said to us, “I’ll have all this stuff,” she waved my list in the air, “by dawn.” She closed the door behind her.

Gee stared after her, a hand on his chest and murmured, “I am in love.”

“Uh huh.” I pushed him to the door. Outside, Namida was gone, the night even colder. I opened the baggie and stuck it beneath his nose. Gee nearly threw up, but now we both had the scent. I placed the baggie beneath a rock on the top step. Between retches, he managed to say, “Duba. Kerit.”

Using a cell phone provided by Namida, I wiki’d it and discovered that the Duba kerit was a cryptid, a creature never proved to be alive, also called Ngoloko, Nandi, Chimosit, and other less pronounceable names. It was a half-bear, half-hyena, and it was carnivorous, vicious, and nearly impossible to kill, except with silver. It also ate the brains of its victims—so, zombie were-bear-hyenas. Bears were solitary except for mothers and cubs, and hyenas lived in groups, making our prey an improbable were-hybrid. One that stank and scared the crap out of Gee. Just ducky. But we had its scent. Anzu had a great sense of smell and were able to follow a scent over very, very, very long distances. We walked out of town and I made Gee turn his back so I could strip, repack my gobag, and shift again. Back on the wing, we soared over Foleyet in widening circles. A snow storm blew in, ice stinging my eyes. I discovered that I had nictitating membranes and the discomfort eased.

Within an hour, a hundred miles from Foyelet, we caught the scent of the were-Duba. Heard screaming. Gunshots—two shotgun blasts.

I tilted my head down and folded my wings.

“Jane! No!” Gee shrilled.

I dove at the surface. The piercing wind whistled sharp. Lights below were blurred by snow and driving wind. A dozen rounds sounded from semi-automatic handguns. I smelled the stench of blood, human and Duba. The smell of wood-smoke.

The screams cut off.

A large log-cabin came into view, metal roof, smoking fireplaces, backyard fenced with tall planks. Cars inside the yard. Children’s toys. A green and blue swing set.

I landed hard. The gobag slammed forward. My body rocked with momentum, wings slashing out to catch my fall. My wing hit something. Duba. It was holding a human head in its claws. It dropped the head and charged.

In the moment of attack, everything slowed, a thick, gluey bending of time. The falling snowflakes sluggish. The spin of the head the Duba had been chewing, its long, blond, bloody hair in a whirl, bearded face with two inch fangs. True-dead. My own body still tilting. My chest hitting the ground. The thing in mid-leap, hyena jaw and ears, bear nose and shoulders, hyena forelegs and bear back, paws a mix of the two. Bloody snout. Black-spotted tongue. Huge.

Scent and sight of a child in the broken window, her face filled with fear and fury. Smoking gun her hands. The stink of silvershot in the were-blood.

The Duba’s mouth opened, roaring. It leaped toward me.

I’d have died. But Gee hit the earth running, in human form, swords drawn. He attacked. Time crashed back over me. A tsunami of sound. The swords of the Mercy Blade whirled into the arcane forms of the Spanish Circle—La Destreza. The attacking Duba flipped to the side in mid-leap and landed near the Anzu. Already bleeding. The swords were a cage of death that cut and cut and cut. The Duba bled, the silvered blades like acid in the wounds. The stink of silver and Duba blood filled the small area. The Duba screamed in fury.

Other Duba raced from the house into the black night, carrying various body parts. Dinner. One turned and looked back at us, roared. The reverberation beat on my ears like a bass drum.

I caught my balance and screamed an Anzu challenge.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Like I could fight in this form.

The Duba who had screamed raced toward me. I folded my wings and slid between two of the parked cars. And thought about my human form. So very different from the form of the Anzu, so banal and ordinary and…Prey, Beast thought at me. She took over the shift and forced me away, a clawed paw on my mind.

Bones shifted and broke and slid and cracked into place. Muscle reformed. Feathers became pelt. Beast screamed our challenge.

Leaped to the top of nearest car, long tail spinning for balance. Saw Duba attack Gee from behind. His head in her claws. She was mammal, and carried milk for young in long teats. The male Gee had fought was dead at her feet. Mate. Duba female killing Gee.

Leaped again, rotating body and tail. Stretching out front claws. Landed on top of female Duba. Bit her head. Blood was hot and stinky. Like meat of old possum on hot road, long dead. Killing teeth scraped skull, holding. Reached around and sank claws into Duba throat. Ripped with claws, tearing and shredding flesh of throat. Blood flew. Duba let go of Gee. Mercy Blade fell. Bloody heap of flesh.

You can kill the Duba or help Gee, Jane thought at me. Not both.

Female Duba shook self like dog in water and raced for broken wood of hole in fence, black night beyond. Beast sank claws in. Duba leaped. Jagged spines of bloody wood bit into Beast flesh at shoulders and back. Should let go. But twisted forelegs in moves had seen Gee’s sword make, claws biting deep.

Duba fell. Beast tore into throat, savaging flesh. Tore off Duba head. Spine cracking. Carried it to lighted side of fence. Raced to Gee. Dropped head. Gee blood everywhere. Gee could not heal self of injury. Needed Jane. Needed hands and—

“I got this.”

Whirled. Paws and claws out, head down. Snarled. Saw little girl who stood at window. Little girl holding gun and rags and…with fangs. Is not child. Was small vampire female.

“Don’t make me shoot you, eh?” She held up gun. Pointed at Beast. Beast snarled. Looked to Gee. Growled. “Go change shape,” she ordered. “I talked to Namida Blackburn, so I’m unimpressed with the display of teeth. Go.” She shooed with hands as if to a send a kit out to play in grass. Beast snarled again and walked back to cars. Changed.

* * *

I was shaking badly, hunger pulling up through my body. It felt as if someone had reached through me, grabbed the soles of my feet, and pulled me inside out. But eating would have to wait. There were injured here, piled among the dead. And not enough saving hands. Using supplies given to me by the small vamp, working with those less injured, I bandaged and applied pressure, squeezed bags of fluid, forcing saline into the living, trying to stabilize blood pressure. It had been a long time since my emergency medicine class and my skills were rusty. But the humans here were skilled, and together we kept the less horribly wounded alive until a vampire could feed them, or heal the wounded with their blood or saliva. It was messy.

Dawn came before we could finish and I helped the vamps, their humans, and a badly wounded Gee into the narrow stair leading to the lair beneath the cabin. They would spend the day drinking from one another to heal. Seeing a vamp’s lair was a rarity, usually a sign of great trust, but this time it fell under the category of emergency. I was alone when I closed the hatch beneath the kitchen table and heard the bolts ram home.

“Just me and the bodies,” I said. Which was bad. Vampires who couldn’t be saved had to be killed true-dead or risk rising as revenants—mindless eating machines akin to Hollywood’s worst Zombies. That meant they had to be beheaded, thankfully not a job I had signed up for. I called Namida. She was old and powerful enough to be able to answer the phone after dawn, tell me where I was (at the Johnson Clan, which gave me nothing but a name, though every little bit helped.) She promised human assistance and cleanup via helicopter, which was pretty cool.

There were four tiny silver linings to the night: no one had died in the kitchen, the kitchen was fully stocked with meats of all kinds, the stove was hot, and so was the shower water.

* * *

I was gone by the time the helo showed up. I saw it through the low-lying clouds as I circled the Johnson Clan holdings and found the scent I was chasing. The Duba. I beat my wings and followed the stink. I found their den a hundred miles or so from Foleyet. It wasn’t far as the Anzu flew, but the den was underground. According to the Internet there were no mines in the area, but the opening into the low hillside looked like an old mine, ancient timbers shoring up the entrance, iron rails leading in, the area denuded of trees, spotted with rusted vehicles, buildings in disrepair. The site, whatever it was, had been empty for a long time. I circled, looking for two things—a back entrance and signs of magic. I spotted them both instantly. There were three back entrances, all stinking of Duba and death and broken magic. The mine centered on the crisscrossed ley lines, the jumbled, twisted energies I had seen earlier. It was a place of intense earth magics, where normal—assuming there was a normal—were-creatures had been altered, possibly on the cellular level, by the concentrated, warped energies. Bad place, Beast thought at me. Do not go in.

Good advice, I thought back. The last time I went into a mine I nearly died. That wasn’t happening again, especially into a mine flooded with sick magic.

Nothing about this hunt was proving easy. I flew back to the Johnson Clan cabin, shifted, dressed, and checked my cell. I had a signal and placed a call to Alex Younger back home, set the GPS system in the new necklace to broadcast my position, and ate again. Around me, humans carried out the last rites offered to the vamps they served. It was bloody. Messy. Their grief awful.

I was tired. Too tired. Shifting so many times was using up reserves I didn’t have and eating up more calories than I could take in, even with Anzu magic fueling half the changes. In human form, I ate. And ate. When I could talk, I questioned the visiting humans and found that Namida had sent what I needed. She had also sent a special human, Masie, who had mad skills with explosive weapons. Handy, that.

Leaving the others burying the dead and cleaning up, we two flew to the mine again, this time on the helo they had come in, the craft loaded with explosives. At each of the three back entrances, Masie set explosives, enough C4 to bring down the tunnels and maybe half the mapped cave. The rumble and slam of explosive might was satisfying and properly climactic, dirt, smoke, and debris flying, the ground vibrating like a drum. There was no way to know if Masie had saved us the trouble of killing the weres. Not yet. We’d have to wait until dark. So we set up cameras at the remaining front entrance to track activity and took the helo back again.

* * *

At sunset, Gee and I landed at the mine and shifted shape. This time I had sufficient clothes, borrowed from the Johnson Clan and smelling of vampire and unfamiliar humans, but better than the cold I’d have been otherwise.

“You found the den,” Gee said, when I came out from behind a dilapidated building. He sounded surprised, which was mildly insulting. Deep inside, Beast hissed at him.

I said, “Yeah. Their den is a mine that angles into those ley lines we saw, which are twisted and knotted like a snarl of yarn. The energies coiled there are where I figure the Duba came from in the first place. Some were-creature holed up inside and was changed by the magics down to the genetic level. That change was passed along to the bitten progeny.”

“Ah,” he said, excitement lacing his words. “We will hunt them in the mine?” I could smell anticipation on him.

“Not exactly,” I hedged. I would fulfill my deal with the Anzu to the letter and not one iota more. My plan was down and dirty but effective, and did not include exposing him or me to the gene-altering energies. Or an underground hunt.

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly,’ little goddess?” he asked, suspicion in his tone and body posture.

“Ummm…that?”

His scent underwent a distinct change at the sound of a helo, the blades cutting the air with a deep thrum. “What have you done?” he asked.

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t let him from my sight either.

“You steal the hunt from our bargain?”

The helo dropped through the cloud cover and hovered twenty feet overhead, the downdraft beating the ground, the thunder of the engine like a thousand drums. This was a big-mother-of-a-bird. From the fuselage, something dropped, stretched out in the air, and landed, softly as a hunting big-cat. And then raced inside the mine. Gee hissed. I laughed.

“This was to be our hunt,” he said.

“We hunted.” When he started to object I said, “We flew. We tracked. You killed one. I killed one. I have officially completed my part of our agreement. We. Are. Done.”

From the mine entrance I heard screams and yowls and sounds that might emerge from a hellpit.

His voice toneless, knowing I wasn’t to be moved on this, Gee said, “There is no honor in this battle.”

“No,” I acknowledged, my voice as dry as his. “No honor at all.”

“Why, then?”

“They bit humans. Those humans will likely become were-Duba. Were-Duba are worse than werewolves. Insane. Violent. Once they shift, they’ll be killed.” I frowned at the mine pit. “By their loved ones. Besides, hunting were-creatures has never been the job of a Mercy Blade or an Enforcer. It’s the job of a grindylow and by the sounds, she’s doing just fine.”

Gee said, “When first we met, I thought you foolish, inept, and too gullible to work for the Master of the City. But you have grown shrewd, crafty as a cat in your dealings with the Mithrans.” It didn’t sound like a compliment but I didn’t react. He looked up at the sky. “There are still moose and elk to be hunted and eaten, and a night of flying before us. Shall we?”

I looked at the mine and back to him. “Let me slip into something more appropriate.” As the sounds of death echoed up from the mine and the last rays of sunset streaked the sky purple, I slid in to the shadows, stripped, stuffed my clothes into the gobag, and found the shape of the blue-feathered Anzu. With the Mercy Blade on my tail feathers, I streaked for the sky.