I had been in my bed for all of one hour, and though the scent of Bruiser from the sheets and from his boxing gloves tied to my bedpost usually filled my head with calm, today his personal aromatherapy wasn’t working. I had rolled over half a dozen times trying to find a comfortable spot. Now the covers were twisted around me, my hair was tangled in a knotted mess, trapping me, and I was ready to explode. I resorted to punching my pillows in growing irritation, not that it helped. “I should give up and find something else to punch. Someone else to punch,” I muttered, thinking of Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans.
My attitude was so bad that my Beast retreated into the deeps of my mind to get away, her paws padding in a jog. “Coward,” I snarled at her. Being two-souled wasn’t easy for either of us.
A soft knock sounded at the front door. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap. The first tap in each repetition more forceful than the others, but barely loud enough to hear through the closed bedroom door. Maybe a preacher. Or a steak salesman. Beast stopped and looked back at me. Excitement zinged through her. Man who sells meat? Cow at door?
I chuckled internally. Could be, I thought back at her. Or a proselytizing vacuum cleaner salesman. Did vac salesmen even exist now?
Is vacuum good to eat? Or salesman? Both? she added hopefully.
The knocking came again, a bit louder. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap. It was a rhythm that Aggie One Feather, my Cherokee Elder, might have drummed. My partner and soon-to-be adopted brother Eli hadn’t answered the door, and I could hear shower water upstairs. I grinned and I was pretty sure I was showing teeth. Lots of teeth. I wondered if they were all mine, but I didn’t really care. I was sleep deprived and ornery and if this was some vamp’s minions calling to cause trouble about the arrangements for the upcoming Sangre Duello, that might actually make my day. I could use a good fight. A blood challenge to the death between Leo and the European emperor and all their pals would surely provide that, but until then, I had the knocking visitor.
I threw off the covers and twisted my long black hair back in a knot. In the black yoga pants and black T-shirt, I looked like a ticked-off ninja. I picked up a fourteen-inch-long vamp-killer I kept on the nightstand and tore open the bedroom door. The knob slammed into the wall behind as I reached the foyer. Eli stopped on the stairs behind me, shower-wet, a weapon at his side. My partner in protect mode. I shared my grin at him and his brows lifted, an infinitesimal gesture that meant loads for the former (and forever) Army Ranger. I didn’t bother to try to figure out loads of what. I peeked out the front, through the tiny slice of clear glass in the layers of bullet-resistant and stained glass window.
On the other side of the door stood a man, facing the street. He was tall, lean, maybe six feet three. Straight black hair hung long, down his back to his hips. Golden skin showed at his clean-shaven jaw, which looked tight with frustration. He was wearing black slacks and black blazer jacket. A white dress shirt collar showed from this angle and he was wearing polished leather cap-toe oxford shoes, what my boss, the Master of the City and walking, talking fashion plate, called a Balmoral. Imported shoes.
It griped my goat that I knew all that. Just another useless thing I had learned hanging around vamps. Another way they had changed me and my life. My irritation flamed.
I yanked open the door. The air swept his scent in. It was vaguely floral. A scent that teased at the back of my mind. Tsalagi. Cherokee scent. Beast surged into the forefront of my brain, landing crouched on silent paws. The man turned.
He had yellow eyes.
Beast thought, Littermate.
What? I said to her.
“Hello, e-igido. Dalonige’ i Digadoli,” the man said, his expression soft but intent. “Nuwhtohiyada gotlvdi.”
How did he know my Cherokee name? I knew those last words: Make peace with me.
The air swirled inside and back out. The man’s nostrils widened as he took a breath. Taking in my scent. His face changed—fear, horror, revulsion, dread. “U’tlun’ta,” he whispered, the word meaning liver-eater, black-magic skinwalker. Evil. Faster than I could follow, he drew a weapon, centered it on my chest.
Inside me Beast tore through, doing . . . something.
In a single instant, the man fired.
Beast screamed.
Time stood still.
The round exiting the weapon was stopped an inch from the barrel. The killer was frozen. Everything was frozen except me. Beast had bubbled time, taking me outside of normal space/time/relativity physics. She had saved my life. Again. “Thanks,” I muttered aloud to her.
She snorted, a half chuff, half growl, staring through my eyes at the man, even as the headache/bellyache/muscle aches hit. It was like a tiny bomb going off behind my left eye combined with a case of the flu, and if the two most recent time-bubbling experiences were an indication, it would only get worse. For now, I was okay-ish. Not perfect. Not totally okay. But able to function.
The stranger was firing one of the new Glock GDP-20s, a military-issued police service weapon. I looked closely to see a hollow-point round. Somehow, being shot at calmed my anger. Using my vamp-killer and muscle power, Beast knocked the round down, changing its trajectory to impact the floor molding. The sound of silver-plated vamp-killer blade hitting lead was a dull tang in the Gray Between. The wood stood the best chance of stopping the round and the hole could be filled with wood filler and painted over. Eli was good at that kinda stuff.
I stepped into the man’s reach and, still using the blade, lifted his notched lapel to reveal a pocket beneath, heavy with a case about the size of a pack of playing cards. Without touching his body, I pulled out the case and opened it to reveal a badge.
“Well. That figures,” I muttered, maybe talking to God, maybe talking to whatever evil spirit had cursed me. “Like I needed the candy sprinkles of a gun-happy cop dumped over my blood duel ice-cream cone.” The badge was a PsyLED shield, issued to the Psychometric Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security, the cops that police paranormals. Like me. But I’d think not even PsyLED would send someone to kill me at my own front door. In the middle of the day. With tourists walking across the street. Maybe the badge was a fake? I looked at the guy. He didn’t look like a killer. There was nothing forgettable about him and most assassins worked to be average and unmemorable. His clothing was well-tailored but more Brooks Brothers and Men’s Wearhouse than Armani. His eyes were wide. Terrified. And he was firing one-handed, his left still rising for a standard two-hand grip. Panic-shot.
Not good ambush hunter, Beast said.
Right. This had been surprised, messy, not well planned. I went back over what had just happened. An assassin or a PsyLED cop came to my door. A Cherokee, one with yellow eyes, who spoke at least some Tsalagi, knew my full Cherokee name, and asked me to make peace. Then freaked out over my scent, called me a nasty name, and shot me. Yeah, that covered it. I leaned in closer and searched his irises for the telltale shimmer of amber contact lenses. There was nothing. A frisson of shock lanced through me and I shoved down on it.
Yellow eyes. Floral scent. Beast calling him littermate. What did Beast mean? My breath was still coming fast. Getting shot at will do that to a girl. I shoved down on my reaction and slipped out of the assassin’s reach without touching him. Last thing I needed was to drag a killer inside a time bubble with me.
Beast said nothing, but I felt faint tremors running through her.
My belly wrenched, a sick, snaking pain, as if my guts were knotting, a reaction to bubbling time.
I stood barefooted in the entry and studied him. The man was handsome. Golden skinned, lightly tanned even in winter. Fine lines at the corners of his eyes. Maybe twenty-five, showing age from spending time in the sun. Or older if he had a good beauty regimen. I sniffed again. Definitely floral, very delicate and faint. Aftershave? Traces of a woman’s perfume? I studied his jaw. Not shaved. But the clean, hairless jaw of some tribal males. The electric shock trying to flood me intensified. My whole body was aching.
I looked up the stairs. Eli, wearing only damp workout shorts, had a steady aim on the man, just over where my shoulder would have been. He had already fired, the round in midair. My bro had fast reflexes after drinking vamp blood for healing. His round would enter the man’s right eye, killing him instantly.
A man had come to my door and tried to kill me. I should let Eli do his job. Except . . . A cop, maybe even a real cop with real badge. Yellow eyes. Floral scent.
Skinwalker, Beast thought at me again. Demanding.
My shock settled. Just having the word spoken between us helped. “Yeah.”
I climbed the stairs to Eli. I needed to talk to him before I did anything. I needed my partner’s tactical and strategic experience. Mostly I just needed Eli Younger to help me get . . . steady. To help me think. My belly seemed a bit better, but the headache was getting worse and rational thinking wasn’t easy. I knocked Eli’s round down too, until it now aimed at the floor. I stood in front of Eli, not certain what to do. Eli would say I should pull him into the time bubble with me. It was the most satisfactory tactic in this battle situation. But spending time in no-time did bad things to genetic structures.
My own was a scrambled mess that might lead to death someday from a brain tumor, a brain aneurysm, a stroke, or maybe bleeding out through my damaged digestive tract. The nausea and headaches were getting much worse much faster, and after today, I had no doubt that they were part of bending/bubbling time. Not that a doctor could tell me what might happen to a skinwalker with damaged genes. Until this minute I’d thought I was the only skinwalker alive. I’d killed the only other one I had met in the last hundred seventy years. He had been u’tlun’ta, killing and eating and replacing people with his own shape-shifting abilities. Black magic even worse than what I had done when I killed Beast and pulled her soul inside with me.
Beast thought, Prey is at watering hole. Attack or hide.
It was the thought concept of a predator cat, a Puma concolor, making me decide.
Bad use of Jane’s minutes, she added, though Beast had little concept of time except now, soon, later, before, hungry, seasons, and moon cycles. Animals didn’t follow time as humans did.
Choose, she demanded. Head hurts.
I gripped Eli’s right arm, pulling him into the time bubble. He stumbled and I caught him, shoving his weapon up and away. “Jane?” he said, almost startled at the time change. Almost but not quite. It was hard to startle one of Uncle Sam’s best, especially as he had been in the Gray Between with me before. He looked at the unwelcome visitor. “Who?”
“Don’t know. Wearing a PsyLED badge.” I held up the badge as proof. “Using the new Glock issued to PsyLED. He speaks some of the language of The People. He called me by my Cherokee name. And then called me u’tlun’ta.”
“He smell like you?”
“No. Floral.” My own scent was a challenge to most vampires, until the team leader accepted me. Then that one’s underlings fell into line and accepted me too. But oral history, things people had told me about a skinwalker who had lived in New Orleans a century and more ago, hinted that at least one other skinwalker had smelled like flowers. At some point soon, I had to track down the vamp who had owned her and ask questions. In my copious free time. Right.
Eli frowned. He checked the altered trajectory of his round, patted my hand, telling me to not let go, which would drop him into normal time. He lifted a thigh rig from the floor and strapped it onto his shower-damp body and seated his weapon in its Kydex holster. He looked me over, seeing too much. “Your head?”
“Bearable.”
Eli grunted. With one free hand, he gripped my arm, making sure we didn’t separate. Together we pattered down the steps, back to the killer. “We still don’t know if all skinwalkers can bubble time or if it’s unique,” he said, “part of you and Beast. We need to make sure he doesn’t learn that you have that skill.”
“It’s on video footage at HQ,” I said.
“Yeah. But that’s in a time and place where witch magic could be playing tricks. Discussing that with cops is a battle for tomorrow. We play it by ear, wronged, in danger, and innocent.” Eli looked the visitor over as if he was a piece of terrain to be taken from the enemy, staring into the yellow eyes, as if looking for contacts. Eli frowned. “Too bad I can’t get his weapon away without pulling him into time with us. Let me get to the left side of the doorframe, weapon drawn, ready to fire. You get into your previous position, and let me go. Then you take the guy out. I’ll take care that the weapon doesn’t fire again.”
“Okay. Modified kata guruma?” Kata guruma was a dramatic, vicious martial takedown.
“Okay by me. Use his hair. Grab his dumplings and give ’em a twist as you slam him down, but toss him inside. We got gawkers.” He meant the tourists on the sidewalk across the street. “I’ll have his weapon long before he hits.”
I shrugged and put the vamp-killer and the PsyLED badge on the floor, out of the way, then stepped into position, my foot touching Eli’s to keep him in my time bubble, my body and hands almost touching the stranger. Eli positioned his hands just above and beneath the killer’s gun hand. “Now,” I said to my partner. Eli moved his foot. Instantly I was alone in the Gray Between. My head spun and spiked with pain. I took a breath to keep from throwing up and blew it out. And dropped the Gray Between. Drew on Beast speed.
The overlapping gunshots sounded, blasting the silence away as I seized the lustrous, slick black hair instead of the back of his neck. Reached between his legs and seized his testicles in a crushing grip. Lifted high, as I pulled his head down low to my right side. And slammed him inside the house and into the foyer floor. Not a textbook move but good enough. All in one faster-than-human motion.
The house shook. The man made a breathless, squealing, squeaking sound. Eli was standing over him, holding the attacker’s weapon and his own, both pointing at the man. Maybe a whole second had passed. He lay on the floor, his hands between his legs. Squeaking still. His golden-skinned face pale as death. His eyes rolled up.
“I will not”—I hesitated—“nuwhtohiyada gotlvdi. I don’t make peace with assassins.” I kicked his foot out of the way and closed the door on the startled cries of the onlookers and the winter air. Winter in New Orleans meant the high sixties, but still. It was the ecologically appropriate thing to do.
“I missed it. What happened?” Eli’s younger brother, Alex, asked, running in from the living room. He hadn’t answered the door. Probably playing some kind of video game and couldn’t be bothered.
“Jane happened,” Eli said, his dark skin picking up the lights through the layers of stained glass and bulletproof glass.
The man on the floor groaned. Eli patted him down and removed a weapon from a leather ankle holster. From a small pocket built in the holster, he also pulled a tooth and held it out to me. The canine tooth was curved and sharp, nearly two inches in length. A big-cat tooth, longer and slightly more narrow at the root end than a Puma concolor tooth, though curved, like all Western Hemisphere big-cats. Whatever species, it was additional evidence that the man was a skinwalker. He carried the genetic material of his favorite animal to shift into in case of injury or near death. He might feel like he was dying, but he’d live. I curled my fist around the tooth. Ignored the bass drum pounding and the ice picks stabbing inside my head. Ignored the desire to hurl my cookies.
Alex brought up kitchen chairs. We all three sat in a small ring around the downed man and watched, as if he was a one-man play. Alex passed around ice-cold bottled Cokes—my favorite way to drink Coke now—and a bag of potato chips. I smothered a laugh at the picture we must have made. I chewed, watching. The man’s color wasn’t getting any better. “How long does it take to get over a testicle twisting?”
“With your grip?” Eli asked casually. “Days?”
Alex made a sound that was mostly “gack” and crossed his legs, suddenly pale even despite his mixed-race heritage.
“Three minutes till he can breathe?” Eli guessed. He reached out and took my wrist, guesstimating my pulse, still saying nothing in front of the outsider about my headache and nausea.
“Better cuff him,” Alex advised. “As entertaining as this is, we got work to do.”
“True,” I said. “And I’m in my jammies.”
“You went to the door in your PJs? Shame on you,” Alex said.
“I know, right? I should comb my hair. Dress. Maybe even makeup. For company, you know.”
“Girly stuff,” Eli said at my makeup comment. Frowning, he dropped my wrist. “You get any sleep?” he asked, but really asking about my sickness.
“Not a lick.” I touched my head and winced. “Of course, now that I’ve exercised a little, I’m sleepy. And we have uninvited company and I can’t go back to bed.”
“Always the way,” Eli said.
“Dude showed up unannounced, and tried to kill you. Double case of the rudes,” Alex said.
The man on the floor gurgled.
“Ice pack?” I suggested.
“Nah. Let him suffer,” Eli said. He bent forward and rested his elbows on his knees, hands together under his chin, watching the man’s ribs try to work. Casually, he added, “He’s turning blue.”
“I see that,” I said.
“You people are sadistic. I’m going back to my game.”
“Shooting and dismembering nonhumans on video? Sadistic, much?” Eli asked, his words sorta mushy, due to his chin on fists.
“Totally not the same,” Alex said, shaking his head, the long, tight curls around his face swinging. “Alien bugs. Exoskeletons. Antennae. Multiple legs. Green goo instead of blood.” The curls stopped swaying. They were tangled, hanging in spirals like a shaggy mop. He needed a haircut. And a shave. Alex had a lot of whiskers on his dark-skinned chin.
I blinked, surprised. His masculine chin. His eyes were deep-set over sharp cheekbones. His shoulders were broad and his arms were well-defined under his T-shirt. Holy crap. He had been doing chores and helping to cook and clean up without being asked for months. Taking showers regularly. Joining us in weightlifting, martial art practice, and sparring workouts, and he had been to the shooting range several dozen times. Alex was . . . adulting. Stinky had grown up into a very nice-looking man.
“What?” he demanded when he caught me gawking, jutting out his chin, peeved. His tone was the one a teenager makes to meddlesome parents. He squinted his eyes and frowned, short-tempered and petulant. A child still.
“Never mind. Just a bad dream. Go back to your game.”
Alex stomped off.
“Kid’s growing up,” Eli said without looking up, reading my mind. “It’s disconcerting.”
“Yeah. It is.” I picked up my vamp-killer and went to my room, setting the blade on the bedside table beside the nine-mil and bringing back my cuffs. “You cuff him. I’ll sit on him in case he’s faking.”
“No way he’s faking. Men do not turn that color from anything else. You cuff him.”
I shrugged, bent over the man on the floor, grabbed his arm, and whipped him facedown. Stepped on his spine. Yanked up his arms. Cuffed him. He made a sound that let me know he had managed a breath. “He’ll live. If he’s a skinwalker he’ll heal even if he has to shift. And I’m not feeling really chatty right now with a guy who tried to kill me.”
The shooter was lying on the very dusty foyer floor, the dust well scuffed around him, smeared all over his nice pants and jacket. We had a renovation going, opening the attic into a third floor, and the dust had quickly become ubiquitous. Even Eli’s super-neat streak couldn’t keep up with it.
Eli said, “He had a big-cat tooth amulet. Like yours.”
“Yeah. He did.” I wore my tooth fetish on a gold chain around my neck, with the gold nugget that tied me metaphysically to the time and place I’d shifted for the first time as an adult. Most days, I hardly noticed the necklace; it was part of me. I also owned several fetish necklaces with the bones and teeth of other predators I might need to change into, and I’d added a few creatures to my collection recently. I had the ability to shift into prey animals of a similar mass, but Beast hated it when I did that. She was a carnivore and preferred to never be a prey animal. She was also grumpy and callously passive-aggressive. I tried to keep her happy.
I closed my door on Eli and the stranger and tossed my black jammies on the bed. I took a half dozen antacid tablets, four aspirin, and two Tylenol. Meds don’t work on me like they do on humans, but at this point I was willing to try anything. I dressed in jeans and layered tees and stomped into an old, scuffed pair of Lucchese boots. They had started out a gorgeous green, but I hadn’t made a habit of cleaning and caring for the leather, and the damp Louisiana air had left them sorta moldy on the outside. I wiped them down with a rag to reveal the color of the leather, which had weathered to a greenish charcoal. They looked like something I’d wear to a barn to muck out stalls. I really needed to pay them some attention. I combed and braided my hair and slashed lipstick on my mouth. Looked at myself in the mirror. Black hair. Amber eyes. Golden-copper skin.
The man had hair the same length and color as mine. I ran my hand down my braid. Same texture. He was Tsalagi. He was skinwalker.
I was no longer alone in the world.
Hope billowed up from some forgotten crevice deep inside me.
But like the last one I found, this skinwalker had tried to kill me too. I shoved down the useless traitor of hope and capped off the fissure. I would not waste emotion on the possibility of finding a skinwalker who didn’t want to kill me. Hope was a lie.
Sometimes life sucked.
I dropped my braid and left my room. In the foyer, the chairs were gone. So was the man. Eli was carrying the stranger to the kitchen, a handful of long hair and the cuffs in his right hand, the man’s belt in his left. The fancy shoes were getting scuffed as they dragged, and by his breathing, it was clear the carry position wasn’t helping his cojones. The stranger had to weigh two hundred pounds, but Eli carried him as if he weighed forty. Eli swung him up and into a chair like a bale of hay and the guy landed with a thump. On his butt, but probably banging his damaged cojones on the wood seat. The man groaned.
“Been there, bub. Hurts like a mother,” Eli muttered, recuffing the man’s hands in front. “I’m making coffee and tea. You act like a normal polite human and I’ll let you have some. And some aspirin. You act stupid and I’ll let my sister at you again. Understand?”
The man didn’t reply, but I swelled up with happiness. Eli had called me his sister, and neither the Cherokee adoption procedures nor the vamp ones had even started.
Alex, apparently over his pique, grunted behind me and said, “My bro’s getting all lovey-dovey in his old age.” I felt something deflate inside me, until he added, “Offering a coffee to a killer. So sweet.”
“I didn’t offer him the best espresso, just some coffee. Standard American. Or one of Jane’s cheaper teas.”
I let the smile that had started at the use of the word sister spread. This was way better than hope. This was real. The thought of family settled me.
I heard a horn beep outside. Eli tossed the man’s badge, his wallet, his key fob, and a pack of gum on the table. “PsyLED ID or a very good fake. Key beeped to a government vehicle with government plates down the street. Appears he drove here alone, but Alex’s systems are keeping watch on the exterior cams for a partner.”
The man lifted his head. His eyes were squinted in pain, but his breathing was slow and regulated as he tried to work through the misery. Skinwalker healing was way better than human. His color was returning. But he didn’t talk.
I said, “While my brother makes us all something civilized to drink, I can duct tape your legs to the chair or you can give me your word of honor that you’ll be good.”
The stranger sat up straighter and tossed his tangled hair back. “Brother?” His voice was graveled with pain. “Not by blood. Mixed race black and maybe Choctaw. Not Chelokay.” Chelokay was another way of saying Tsaligi—Cherokee in the speech of The People. That was intended as an insult, delivered without looking at Eli. Ignoring another warrior was an additional insult. “You’re u’tlun’ta,” he said to me, pronouncing the word a little different from my own hut-luna, though close enough. It was insult number three. On top of trying to kill me. Dude was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, obviously being deliberately bad mannered to see if I’d go u’tlun’ta on his ass. “But you didn’t try to kill me,” he said as if thinking things through. “Why? Since I fired at you. And how did you not get shot? There is no way I could have missed.”
He had not answered my question, instead muddying the emotional waters with insults and turning the table with his own questions. Basic reverse interrogation tactic. Law enforcement tactic. I decided to roll with it for now. “You always shoot unarmed women and ask questions later?”
He looked away at that one. Shoulders tensing in shock. As if just remembering that part.
“In front of witnesses? There were people on the sidewalk.” My tone called him stupid.
His lips were firm and tight. I realized that he didn’t know why he’d tried to kill me. He had reacted on instinct when he smelled me, just like vamps did. Interesting. Last time that happened I nearly had to kill a vamp in Sedona. Time before that I had to threaten Katie and then hurt Leo. “You ever met an u’tlun’ta? They smell like rotted meat.”
His eyes widened in surprise.
Clearly I had hit the nail, and he had never met a liver-eater. I pointed to my chest. “I don’t. I smell like predator. Not pretty flowers like you. Not like dead meat. And I killed the only u’tlun’ta in NOLA.”
“I saw the footage,” he said, no inflection to tell me what he thought about me killing a massive half-human, half–sabertooth lion.
“Uh-huh.” I had still shots. The video was Leo Pellissier’s private in-house security footage. No way should this man have been able to get it. Yet his offhand reply told me he had really seen it. Not good.
Eli placed a mug in front of me. It was really a soup mug, white, with a picture of Santa Claus on it, the dialogue bubble saying, “Jane Takes Care of My Naughty List.” Below that was the body of a dead vampire, staked and his head removed.
The stranger’s eyes took in the mug. “Cup’s a little out of date, isn’t it? You work for the Mithrans now.”
I still killed vamps who got out of line. A lot of vamps. Either his intel was bad or he was being a pain in the butt. I was going for door number two, so I said nothing. Eli placed a tub of Cool Whip on the table and I used the soup spoon to dig out a glob of the white frothy stuff and place it on top of the tea. I added a similar amount of sugar from the restaurant-style pour-decanter and stirred. Eli sat down and placed a cup at his side. Another one with a straw in it went in front of the killer.
“You don’t think I’m going to drink that. It could be poisoned.”
Despite the stabbing headache, which had developed razor edges cutting its way out of the left part of my head and into the middle of my brain, I chuckled softly. Eli gave me a twitch of a smile. We actually had a mug with the words YOU’VE JUST BEEN POISONED in the bottom, so you saw it only after you finished the drink. It was cute.
Eli pulled out a chair and turned it around, sitting, straddling it. He took his own weapon in one hand and his mug in the other and sipped. “We don’t poison. We shoot, stab, cut, slice and dice, eviscerate, disembowel, and decapitate. Sometimes shoot and blow up our enemies. We’ve been known to bury our dead in the swamp. But we don’t poison. Poison is wussy.”
I laughed aloud and drank a gulp of the tea. It was a really good Bombay chai with fresh ginger, strong, and the caffeine might help the headache a bit. The nausea receded. “Now that we’ve laid out the consequences of trying to get feisty again,” I said, “talk.”
The stranger looked at me. His squint was less and his color was almost normal. He leaned in and sipped the coffee through the straw. “If it’s poisoned, it’s good poison,” he said.
I thought about the muscle power of a skinwalker at full strength, and any weak link on the cuffs. “He’s just about healed enough to get free. He’ll be fast. And though you’ve had the hand of Uncle Sam in your training, he could be decades old. He’ll have experience in multiple martial art forms.”
“I’ve sparred with you, Babe. He’s going no place fast, not without a hole in him and leaking a blood trail.” Eli sipped, slouched, seeming relaxed, gun pointed at our violent visitor. “What she said. Talk.”
The man ignored my partner, which showed stupidity on his part, as he studied me. “Not u’tlun’ta? So why do you smell of predator?”
“Talk,” I said, so softly he would have missed it had he been human. “Now.”
His eyes tightened in surprise. For sure he had golden eyes, not black, not eyes of The People, but eyes of a skinwalker. My heart ached. If he was a trap, he was a good one. “I had a speech all prepared,” he said, a swift hint of humor appearing in those golden eyes, “and despite the unfortunate way we have made our acquaintance, I would like to speak the words.”
I nodded. He leaned and sucked up coffee through his straw. Eli sipped. I gulped. Headache eased some more.
The man sat back and tossed a lost strand of hair from his face. It wasn’t a feminine gesture. It stirred a memory in me, one that was tied to the Tsalagi and to my past. A memory of my true youth, before my grandmother had forced me into the shape of the bobcat and cast me into the snow to live or die. That had been on the Trail of Tears. Nunna Daul Tsuny. But the memory was from before that. Just the vision of a man’s long hair being tossed back against a sunset sky.
Then the vision of golden hands braiding that hair before a crackling fire, the strands picking up the light of the comforting flames. My father’s hair. My mother’s hands. Edoda had let no one touch his hair but her. Braiding hair was a spiritual exercise for the Tsalagi, a sharing of power and energy. I had forgotten that. I had let lots of people braid my hair.
The visitor spoke, shattering the memory. “Few people outside of my family know this, and no one in PsyLED except my mentor, who keeps secrets of her own. It isn’t in my PsyLED personnel folder. It isn’t in my records. I’m sharing this with you so you will know I mean it when I say I come to make peace with you. I speak the truth.”
As he talked, the cadence of his speech had changed, the rhythm altering. It was the unconscious linguistic dance of a speaker of The People speaking English.
“I am Cherokee skinwalker,” he said. “I was named at birth Nvdayeli Tlivdatsi of Ani Gilogi, or Nantahala Panther of the Panther Clan. But the name was a thing of sadness, as the Nantahala River was only a memory, lost to our people since the yunega forced the tribal peoples away from their lands to the territories. And since the panthers had been hunted to extinction. It was a name of failure, of loss, a name I hated.”
His eyes were holding mine, trying to read me, trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what. He shifted and his cuffs clinked softly as he rearranged his position. Eli’s weapon followed, as if anticipating the movement.
“When I grew up, I took the name Ayatas Nvgitsvle, or One Who Dreams of Fire Wind, for the raging fires I saw in my dreams.” His lips were chiseled, sharply defined, the tissue dry and smooth, and they moved in familiar ways when he spoke the Cherokee words of his name. The syllables were murmured, just as they ought to be. “I left home, from the Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi, and out to the Wild West, where I stayed for some years.”
My eyes flew to the man’s at the words Indian Territory and Wild West. Eli centered his weapon on the man’s chest in a two-handed grip. I didn’t have to ask if there was a round in the chamber. The use of the words suggested that the man was far older than expected. Maybe nearly as old as I was and I’d been around some one hundred seventy years, not that I remembered much about the first hundred fifty. He had called me e-igido. That felt important, though I couldn’t say why, the word prying at my mind.
I sipped my tea, but I no longer tasted it. Wild West. Terms of an older man. Manners of an older man. Eyes of an older man, one who had seen too much, lost too much. Ayatas was old. Hope spiraled up again, signaling a desire I had forgotten I ever had. Hope, traitorous and volatile, insubstantial as smoke and as difficult to grasp. Hope was a well-baited trap.
“Let him talk,” I said softly. I slurped again, positioned the tea a little to my side, pushed it away, and leaned in. I had his scent now. I had it when he was calm, had it fearful and angry and full of fight-or-flight pheromones, had him pained. If he lied, I’d detect it in his scent. If my head didn’t explode, that is. “Go on.”
“I am Senior Special Agent Ayatas FireWind of PsyLED, in charge of the states east of the Mississippi. My up-line boss is the newly appointed assistant director in charge of all paranormal investigations. Soul. No last name. You know her.”
I nodded, a single drop of my chin in the tribal way. “How are you classified species-wise with PsyLED?”
PsyLED had once been a human-only law enforcement organization created to deal with paranormal creatures who attacked humans or broke human laws. In the last few years, when it became apparent that humans without heavy artillery were no match for paras, the agency had begun to draw on the paranormal community for agents, whom it classified according to species and gift. They might not know he was skinwalker, but they could read his magical energies with a device called a psy-meter. I knew because I’d been read by the device. There was no hiding paranormal abilities, not anymore.
“You’re well versed in PsyLED internal policies,” he said. When I didn’t reply, he added, “I am an unclassified, noncontagious, non-moon-called shape-shifter. No mention of a Cherokee skinwalker in my dossier.”
Skinwalkers weren’t unknown in the mythos. That had to be willful blindness or the influence of someone in high places. “Go on.”
“I had heard of the woman who killed a sabertooth lion. Had heard rumors of the woman who changed shape into a mountain lion in the car of the Master of the City of New Orleans. I had heard she claimed to be Chelokay. Yet had yellow eyes.”
I nodded, breathing slowly through nose and mouth, letting his scent trace over my tongue. As well as I could tell on such short acquaintance, he was speaking the truth. And Soul had been present when I shifted. So Soul was a likely source of his intel. Had she sent him to me? And if so, why not an official meet-and-greet? Why the personal ambush, followed by a weapon-based one? Had Soul expected this? Allowed it to happen?
“The woman’s name was Jane Yellowrock. My research took time to compile, but once it was together, it all suggested she was like me. Skinwalker.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to respond, but I said nothing.
“I have lived in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Wyoming for decades, in law enforcement, as a teacher, a lawyer.” He frowned slightly. “I joined PsyLED ten years ago, and . . .” He shrugged, a very Cherokee gesture, lifting the shoulder blades in back, tilting the head, eyebrows quirking just a bit. “They discovered I was a para. They kept me on. And then there was the evidence of you on YouTube. A video of you walking from a cave, injured, your eyes glowing.”
I knew the video he was talking about and gave him the same shrug back. I wasn’t ready to show interest or ask questions. Not yet. Because I knew way more than this guy seemed to think I knew.
“I made changes and requested this PsyLED territory. Was assigned to New Orleans when the European Mithran emperor showed up offshore. I came here today to make peace with Jane Yellowrock, should she turn out to be who I thought she might be. Soul told me—several times—that she knew you and offered to introduce us, but I thought . . . I hoped . . . it might be a highly personal meeting and wanted it to be private.”
Soul had wanted us to meet. Soul, who knew what I was. Soul, who, despite our sorta friendship, might have had a stronger tie to this man than to me, and let him decide how and when to proceed with an intro.
The frisson of energies that had begun when I first saw the man swept through me again and unexpected tears gathered in my eyes. I blinked them away. He was skinwalker. He was of The People. He had come to make peace with me. This was the first time this had ever happened to me. The first time any one of The People had ever come to me. Had ever wanted to come to me.
Yet, the same words that seemed to offer kinship and tribal welcome made my heart tumble with disappointment, and I struggled to understand why.
“You had an unusual history,” he continued before I could speak. “I wanted to meet you. And if things went well, ask you to take me when I presented papers and letters to Leonard Pellissier, letters of introduction.”
That, I thought. That was what was wrong with this entire scenario. Ayatas wanted info and maybe the opportunity to be present at the fight to the death between the Master of the City, Leo Pellissier, and the European vampire emperor, Titus Flavius Vespasianus. And he wanted me to give it to him.
“So you show up here, planning to give PsyLED a finger on the pulse of the upcoming Sangre Duello,” Eli said. It was his battle voice, soft, unforgiving, ready to kill. He was angry that the man had intended to forge and then use a personal relationship with me to get to Leo. Using me. Why not ask Rick to do this? My ex had his fingers in every pie there was.
“Yes. I . . . I reacted badly to your scent. I shot you. At you. I don’t know why I shot at you or why I missed.” He closed his eyes, his scent smelling of shock and fear, strong and harsh on the air. He had shot at someone while technically on the job, revealing an unexpected lack of control. Professional suicide. That seemed to be sinking in. Ayatas went on. “I put too many of my hopes in this one small basket, in this one meeting. I ruined it and I can’t even explain to you why, except that your scent triggered something in me. I thought you were black magic. The thing our kind fears most. I am sorry, e-igido.”
“What’s eigido?” Eli asked, mangling the word.
The tears I was trying to blink away spilled over and dashed down my cheeks.
I remembered the word as he spoke. The word in his first line when he still stood uninjured at the door.
“E-igido,” I whispered, finally placing the term. “E-igido means ‘my sister.’” I was an only child. My father died when I was five years old, killed by white men in front of me. He might smell of truth, but this man lied. For reasons I couldn’t explain, that final lie cut deep.