The smell of flaming sage rose on the smoke. Aggie handed us each a cup. “Drink. Then we will find a path through the things that you seek.”
Ayatas drained his cup and said, “I come for counsel about my sister, who is remembered in our clan, who was mourned. For all of my life I heard about Dalonige’ i Digadoli, Yellowrock Golden Eyes, the sister who killed the white men who murdered our father. Who wore the blood of our father, the blood of her vow, until the two men were dead. She was five years old when she made her blood vow and carried it out. Dalonige’ i Digadoli, who attacked a white man on the Trail of Tears and was banished into the snow in the form of gvhe. Bobcat.” He looked at me. “Dalonige’ i Digadoli. Golden Eyes. Our eyes are the gift of our heritage.”
“Skinwalker eyes,” I said. “Uni Lisi of Panther Clan had eyes this color, though she may not have been a grandmother by blood and birth.”
Ayatas nodded, agreeing. “This was the woman who was grandmother to me, as well.”
“There was another woman like us, here in the city a hundred years back or so,” I said. “She had gold eyes too. And she smelled like you. Floral. Sweet. There was also one u’tlun’ta. This was before I took the blood path that I walk today. U’tlun’ta was stalking Aggie and her mother and the bones of their ancestors buried out back. He was killing humans and vampires.”
“You killed it,” Ayatas said. “This is good.”
Time passed again. Aggie added a small split log to the fire and then ladled water from the bucket over the hot stones. Steam billowed and rose.
Sweat gathered and ran across me, taking the toxins out of my flesh and opening my mind. Sweat ran across Aggie’s face and darkened the fabric of her shift. Sweat ran across Ayatas’s bare upper body and down his legs. He sat cross-legged, eyes closed, waiting.
Aggie paused and motioned for me to finish my drink. It was yucky, like heated pond water, but I knocked it back and swallowed, then spat a leaf out of my mouth, into my palm, and wiped it on my shift.
Aggie smiled slightly at my ick expression and said, “The first time I brought Jane here, I told her that blood chased after her. That blood rode her. That she pounced on her enemy, like a big-cat onto prey. I told her this long before I knew her nature or her spirit. But even then I knew that she was not Callanu Ayiliski, the Raven Mocker who likes to steal hearts. Nor was she liver-eater or spear finger, u’tlun’ta.”
She stopped. Aggie had also told me that I walked a fine line between light and darkness and that I could fall into the evil of the skinwalkers, but she didn’t say that to Ayatas, not yet. It wasn’t kindness. Aggie wouldn’t keep an important warning or potential problem hidden. Being kind wasn’t the job of an Elder. So when she continued I wasn’t surprised.
“I have heard it said: ‘The skinwalkers shared the blood of The People. The liver-eaters stole it.’ You both are skinwalkers, from the stories told by the oldest among us, from the time before the white man. You are protectors. Warrior and war woman. You are from among the skinwalkers who led Tsalagi into battle. But all skinwalkers walk the line between light and darkness. It would be better for you to walk that line together.”
Ayatas looked at me from the corner of his eyes and I could tell he didn’t like that idea. So I stuck out my tongue at him. An eruption of laughter exploded from low in Ayatas’s belly, a clear and free tone of merriment, the laughter of a happy childhood. Aggie’s eyebrows went up at my deliberate childishness and Ayatas’s response.
My mouth curled up and I sounded deliberately snarly when I said, “I never got the chance to do that when we were kids.”
Ayatas’s laughter fell away and he tilted his head to study me. “I should have come to you right away.”
“Yeah. You should. Why didn’t you?” I asked. “I mean, really? The real reason.”
As if thinking, Ayatas shook his head, his long braid slinging against him. “Aggie One Feather is right. I grew up with this tale of the five-year-old war woman. The old women would sit around the fire in winter, talking about her, telling family stories of my sister who should have led her clan, who would have sat on the war councils with the chiefs and the Elders and led her people to war.”
Aggie said gently, “You wanted to wait until your jealousy passed.”
Answering Aggie, but still speaking to me, Ayatas said, “I saw the YouTube video of you walking out of a mine entrance with a massive scar across your throat and a dead police officer slung over your shoulder, one you had tried to save. Your eyes were glowing gold. I knew you were that sister. That war woman sister.” He glanced to Aggie and back to me. “Yours were big shoes to follow, when I was young, until I found my way and my place in the world. And so I waited. I let things get in the way; I put that visit on the back burner. I ignored my heart’s urging to come see you. I’m sorry. Really, very sorry.”
I blinked against the sweat that dripped down my face, again stinging my eyes. The room had lightened with the nearness of dawn, pale gray light creeping through the small cracks of the building and along the roof system overhead. We had been here twenty-four hours. “How can you be my brother?” I asked, hearing the desperation in my voice, remembering standing with my father above a roaring river. Remembering my promise to care for the expected child. “After all this time. After all these years.”
He had said the words before, but ceremony required complete candor and understanding. “Our mother was pregnant with me when our father died. I was born on the Trail of Tears. The Great One has timing that doesn’t always make sense to us.”
Aggie asked, “Jane. Are you satisfied with Ayatas’s words?”
“Yes.”
“Ayatas, are you satisfied with Jane’s words?”
Ayatas considered me. “Where were you all those years, sister?”
“I’m sure it’s a long story, but I don’t remember much of it.” I pointed to my head. “Amnesia. The stories the newspapers told about me were real. I spent a lot of time in mountain lion form.” I didn’t mention Beast’s soul inside with me. That was black magic and I needed to know him better before I shared that. Since Aggie didn’t volunteer that information I figured she was okay with a delay. “Stick around. I’ll tell you my stories.”
“I can’t stay long enough to hear the tales of that many years,” he said, his expression oddly kind, an expression I might have seen in the eyes of the Keepers of the Secrets, the most elder of the Tsalagi. Which he was. “But when I leave I’ll be going to Asheville. Hayalasti Sixmankiller has requested my presence. Maybe you should come with me.”
Shock zinged through me like a pinball, an electric bruising. Hayalasti Sixmankiller was our grandmother. “Maybe I will.” If I live that long.
Aggie said, “It is dawn. We will close with a blessing.” She reached for the bundle at her side. I had forgotten it was there and was surprised when she lifted a rock out of its folds. Or not a rock, but a huge, clear quartz crystal. There was a central spire with a multifaceted pointed top. Two smaller spikes were on one side. The three rose together from a base of smaller crystals and a curved bottom of stone. I tensed, eyes darting, searching for trapped arcenciels. There was nothing. Just the clear crystal.
With both hands Aggie pushed aside the fire-warmed river rock that was closest to her knees and placed the crystal in the depression. She held her cupped hands over the crystal and said, “Like the quartz, we are clear of strife, clear in mind, body, spirit, and natural space. Like this small piece of Grandfather Rock, we are part of Earth, safe in Earth, protecting Earth and her plants and creatures. Great One, we offer thanks for what gifts we have, thanks to the Four Directions and the power of the universe.”
Her voice took on a chant cadence as the sweat house brightened still more. “I give thanks in a traditional prayer, altered for Jane’s spiritual path:
“To the Spirit of the Fire who is the East,
“To the Spirit of the Earth who is the South,
“To the Spirit of the Water who is the West,
“To the Spirit of the Wind who is the North.
“To the Redeemer who forgives, whose path Jane follows, who Jane worships.
“We pray and we give thanks to you, Great One.
“We pray. We give thanks for Mother Earth.
“We pray. We give thanks for Father Sky, Grandfather Sun, and Grandmother Moon. For Jane’s Redeemer. For all life, all gifts, all joy, all wisdom. And we pray that we may exist together in peace, with harmony, with balance in all our relations. Wah doh.”
As she spoke the last two words, the dawn sun passed through the small door in the eaves, the door Aggie had opened when she entered. The dawn light illuminated a path through the air, lighting the dust and residual smoke with its muted ray. Alighting on the crystal on the earth near Aggie’s knees. Brightening it, sending the dawn light out in a prism of color and a rainbow of hues. This was Aggie’s version of the traditional Blessing Way. Not exactly something I remembered from the scant years of my childhood, but it was close enough.
Ayatas waited at the fire while Aggie and I showered in the frigid water, dressed, and walked to stand beside his car. Aggie stared at her house, looking as wilted as the herbs from the mediation ceremony. “Will you ride with him or do you need to call your brothers to pick you up?”
“I’ll drive her home,” Ayatas called from behind the sweat house. Skinwalker ears.
Aggie smiled, nodded to me, and walked up the steps to her front door. She moved like an old, worn-out woman, exhausted by life. I had done that to her. I should go back and pour water on her fire pit and wood. Use enough water and she would have to let the pit dry out before she could work again.
Ayatas strode from behind the building, his eyes taking in the way I lounged against his car. “Get in. I’ll take you home,” he said. I opened the door and eased into his cop car, a gray four-door SUV. It smelled like Christmas trees and commercial cleansers and old cigarette smoke. The back was filled with cop gear, including one of the new psy-meters, the kind that measured all sorts of magical energy.
“It meet with your approval?” he asked as he executed a three-point turn in the street. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or curious so I just shrugged. He said, “I poured the bucket of water on the fire. It’ll be at least a day before it dries up enough to take anyone to sweat.”
“She was tired,” I agreed, finding it odd that we had been thinking along the same lines, but that Ayatas had actually done something about it while I had only thought about it. “That stuff about our clan talking about me. You know it wasn’t like that at all, right?” He didn’t respond. “I mean, yes, I made a blood vow. But I didn’t know what I was doing. I was five.”
“Our stories tell of you running through the cornfields and through the woods to the clan longhouse and waking everyone. Then climbing on the back of a horse, riding with Uni Lisi as she tracked the men, then waiting as she shifted to tlvdatsi and trapped them and caught them. Brought them to a cave on clan lands.”
I blinked, remembering the power and speed of the racing horse beneath me, the smell of Uni Lisi’s body, the smoke trapped in her clothes, the acrid smell of herbs, the sickly sweetness of old blood. The memory vanished, as if I had popped a balloon with a pin. Later memories flashed in front of my mind, like flipping the pages of a gruesome picture book.
“I watched our mother and grandmother torture and kill one of the men. And I killed the other one. Uni Lisi put the blade in my hand and pushed me at him. I wanted to do it. I wanted the white man to die. But it wasn’t glory or honor. It was kidnapping and torture and murder.”
Aya nodded and made a turn, his blinker bright yellow. “Things were different back then. Society was different. More blindly, casually cruel. Despite what people call the conservative, fascist, racist, sexist world of today, people were worse in the past.”
I shrugged. “Perspective is everything, Aya.”
He grunted. It sounded like one of mine. And I realized I had used the shorter term. Aya. I stared into the dawning light. A few miles later Ayatas asked, “Are you going to tell me where the Sangre Duello is being held?”
“Asking as cop or brother?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“Then I guess you won’t be telling me anything.”
“Guess not.”
“What’s the history between you and Rick LaFleur?”
Ohhh. That was a zinger from out in left field. I could ignore the question. Or I could answer it and see how he reacted. I turned in my seat, pulling one knee up, to watch his face in the glow of the dash lights as I spoke. “We were a thing. He was undercover and was seducing a wereleopard for info. He got bit. She got executed by a grindylow. He got kidnapped by werewolves and tortured. I rescued him and killed the wolves. He turned. Became a black wereleopard, despite the amount of wolf saliva in his bites. We were still a thing. Sorta. Then he was magically seduced by a wereleopard in heat in front of dozens of people. He left with her. I should have killed her, or stopped him some other way. I didn’t protect him. I let him go because my feelings were hurt and I was embarrassed. We were no longer a thing. It’s uncomfortable and complicated.”
Aya nodded. I realized his hair was still braided and it had left a wet trail down one side of his clothes. “When you killed the wolves,” he said, “it opened a chasm that has since been filled by the Bighorn Montana Pack, with whom Leo has sworn an alliance.”
I shrugged and said nothing.
“Tell me about Rick and Kemnebi. Kemnebi attacked you?”
“Cop or brother?”
“Cop asking.” The slightest of smiles settled on his face. “This is awkward. If I had come before now, we would know one another and I wouldn’t have to be both brother and cop.”
“You screwed up.”
“Yes. And because I did, I now appear to be a top-tier jerk.”
I didn’t argue. I wasn’t going to talk to him about Kem’s demise or Rick’s elevation in status, his wives, or Clan Yellowrock. I was vamp-careful when I answered. “I’m the head of the local wereleopard clan.”
“You’re not a werecat.”
“Nope. But problems arise and have to be solved.”
“Leap of leopards,” Aya said. “Not clan.”
“Leap. I like. Anyway, Rick is now highly ranked in the leap, so he can handle things any way he wants.”
“If Rick loses control of his leopard, that could make for an awkward international incident.”
“Cop talking for sure. And I don’t care.”
Aya sighed. “I don’t know how to blend both the brother and the cop. I feel awkward and foolish and all my words are clumsy.”
“I noticed.” A small smile accompanied my words.
“Yes. Well.” He drove in silence for a while before he sighed. “I don’t have time to build a relationship with you before the Sangre Duello.”
“You may never be able to build a relationship with me.”
“This is true. But I will try. Until then, I have a job to do too.”
“Go for it.”
“As a part of that job, I have to find a way to be at the Sangre Duello.”
“I’m not in charge of royal vamp protocol.”
“That’s Leo’s Enforcer talking, not the sister.”
“Potato, potahto. I have a job too. Talk to Leo’s secundo heir, Grégoire, when he gets in from Atlanta.”
Blandly, Aya said, “He’s back from Atlanta. And I tried. He asked me to have a three-way with Leo.”
I snorted. I didn’t mean to. It just blasted out. My laugh felt vastly different in tone from Aya’s. My laugh was stilted, sarcastic, stiff, as if I had never learned to laugh as a child. Or had forgotten how a hundred seventy years ago. Still, the grin I gave him was bright and teasing and at least it felt natural.
Aya glanced at me and back to the street, his own lips turned up. “According to Adelaide Mooney, Grégoire is totally ‘gaga’ over me, and I should consider myself caught in the crosshairs of an intense and concentrated seduction once the Sangre Duello is over.”
“You should be scared. Very, very scared.”
“I am not a homophobe,” he said. His lips curling higher. I knew that smile. It was mine, seen in the mirror. “The Cherokee Nation accepted same-sex marriage back in 2016. Among the speakers of Diné, the Navajo, the two-spirited are referred to as nàdleehé, or the transformed. The Lakota call the two-spirited the winkte. To be two-spirited is a commonly accepted truth among a lot of tribes; the Mojave, Zuni, Omaha, Aleut, Kodiak, Zapotec, and Cheyenne all accept multiple forms of sexuality. But I’m straight. And even if I wasn’t, there is no way in hell I’m doing a three-way with two vamps.”
“Chicken.”
He laughed, that amazing, carefree laugh. The laugh I might have had except for two white men who killed my father and raped my pregnant mother and then had the misfortune to fall into the clutches of a war woman skinwalker and her blood-vow-bound grandchild. “Yes,” he said. “I accept that judgment. Back to my job. They call you the Dark Queen. Want to tell me why?”
“That?” I said. “That was a cop move. And though I might have told my brother all about it, I’m not telling a cop. Figure it out on your own. And by the way, you must suck as an interviewer.” I shook my head, disgusted.
Rain spattered on the windshield, growing stronger. Lightning flickered in the distance. Silence settled on us, uneasy, though not exactly troubled. We shared genes, no history, no common ground.
“It seems I have no finesse when it comes to you,” he admitted. “But, I have something for you. It’s in the glove box, in a white bag.”
I frowned at him. He got me a present?
As if he read my mind, Aya said, “Uni Lisi—Sixmankiller—overnighted it to me.”
My frown grew deeper, darker, and I stared at the glove box as if it might hold a water moccasin. When the box door didn’t open all by itself and something venomous didn’t slither out, I pulled the handle and spotted car rental papers and a brown-paper-wrapped package. I studied the return address and the name: Hayalasti Sixmankiller, with a PO box number in Robbinsville, North Carolina. The box was light but not empty. I tore the paper, careful to keep the address whole, and set the paper aside. The tape on the box broke easily with my fingernail and I lifted the top off, shoved aside the cotton padding, and saw a medicine bag. It was old—ancient. It was the bag I wore in my soul home. I knew instantly that it was my father’s.
Green-dyed leather on one side, rougher rawhide on the other, much like Aya’s, but so old it was dry-rotting. It should have been buried with him. Or given to his eldest child. Me.
“Oh,” I breathed. And caught his scent. Tobacco, sweetgrass, cedar. The faint but still present scent of the Nantahala River. Tears raced down my face. I touched the bag, and though the edges were crumbling, the center was still pliable enough to take the slight weight. There were hard things inside. A bone? A quartz crystal?
“Uni Lisi put something in it for you. For when you’re ready.”
I nodded. Not ready. Not ready just now. Maybe not ever. “Thank you,” I whispered.
At the house, I leaped out and raced through a sudden deluge to the door. Soaked to the skin, I worked the lock as my brother drove off into the storm. Lightning cracked down, one of the ubiquitous lightning storms of the Deep South.
I finally got the lock open and dashed inside, into chaos and screaming and commotion. Edmund—up after dawn, probably only because of the storm and the darkness it gave the day—and Eli were fighting a woman, both men covered in blood, as were the walls and the floor. With the two of them fighting together they should have killed an attacker in the first two seconds and they hadn’t. Yet, this wasn’t a sparring match. It was too bloody for that. Their opponent was a blond vamp, all claws and talons and rage. It was a testament to my exhaustion that I didn’t even blink at the brawl, though did think that it would be a pain in the butt to get the blood off the walls. Again. But I did smell lemons.
I opened my mouth and let the flavor of her blood flow over my tongue and the roof of my mouth as I slouched in the entry, watching, trying to remember the vamp. And then it hit me. Bruiser’s scion. Nicolle. I frowned, not able to remember her last name, if I’d ever heard it. Bruiser had drained her energies and taken her memories and then gifted her to Ed. I had no idea where Ed had been keeping her, but somewhere not close enough. Someone had gotten to her and claimed her for Clan Des Citrons.
I parsed the scents, smelling lemons and the sharp, sour, stagnant pond scent of madness. Her wrists and ankles bore ligature scars the way vamps’ skin looked when it had been burned by silver.
“Where is she?” Nicolle screamed. “I’ll rip her heart out!”
I figured she meant me. Just a wild guess.
Ed vaulted across the kitchen table, his talons ripping at her. More blood on the walls. Crap. If the lemon clan set her free and tracked her, then they knew where we lived. If she had gotten away—which her scarring suggested—then if I shifted to blood hound, I could follow her back to them. If I was willing to risk losing myself to the hunt and never finding myself again. Becoming blood hound was dangerous.
Beast thought at me, Ugly dog. Good nose. Do not want to be ugly dog tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
I slid my hands into the slits in my clothing and pulled weapons. A wood stake and a semiautomatic nine-mil. It was loaded with regular ammo, but it should slow her down. Nicolle was a young-ish vamp and they tended to be less resistant to weapons of all kinds.
I hesitated, remembering the path of blood Aggie had shown that I was treading. But. I wasn’t killing. I was swatting down a crazy-assed vamp.
“Nicolle!” I shouted.
Everything stopped. And then Nicolle leaped at me, totally vamped out. I raised the gun and fired. Mid-center body mass. She didn’t die but she did scream, that awful ululation of a vamp dying, or thinking they are. She dropped to the ground, landing in a three point balance, a tripod, both feet and one hand. When she thrust herself up, I stabbed low, into her belly, hitting her descending aorta, or whatever passed as such for vamps. She fell. Lay there, paralyzed, leaking onto the wood floors. If our house was ever a crime scene, the cops would think the place had been the home base of a couple dozen mass murderers.
Ed and Eli fell back, exhausted. Ed pushed off his perch almost instantly and went to Eli. “Let me heal you.”
My second set his weapons on the kitchen table for cleaning and pulled off his T-shirt. His dark chest was scored with talon marks and too much blood. Ed sliced his fingers with his blade and went to work healing the bleeding mess. Neither man looked at me.
“Somebody want to tell me what’s happening?” I asked.
Edmund huffed softly through his nose. I was pretty sure he was breathing to make up for the battle and his own blood loss. “She came in through the back. Over the brick wall. From Katie’s.” Fear slammed through me. I turned that way and Ed said, “Dion called. Everyone is fine. He locked the girls in the kitchen and threw holy water on Nicolle.”
I toed her over and spotted a scald on her shoulder and neck. Nicolle glared at me. It was all she could do with the ash wood in her belly. That and leak.
“And she wanted . . .”
“To kill you,” Eli said. “Natch.”
Natch was my word and I shook my head at him.
“She was dropped off at Katie’s by a dark SUV,” Alex said. “Plates reported stolen an hour ago.”
I shifted my body forward to see him and Bodat coming out of the laundry room where they had taken shelter. The Kid was armed with a handgun. Bodat was carrying a broom and was more pasty than usual. He also stank of fear.
“No way to track her back to the enemy,” Alex said.
“Is there always this much blood?” Bodat asked, his voice shaky.
“This is nothing,” Alex said, his voice light but his eyes hard, maybe remembering his own near-death.
“Alex, please call for the Council House’s cleanup crew.” Ed bent and lifted Nicolle into his arms, which must have shifted the position of the stake in her belly because she swiveled her head to me in one of those not-human moves that’s a lot more like a lizard or a bird than a mammal.
“George is mine,” she whispered, the smell of the lie on her breath, leaking from her with her blood and the scent of lemons. “We love each other. We have been lovers for weeks.” When I didn’t react she shouted, “He’s mine!”
“She’s been turned by Des Citrons,” I said. “We need to know where they are. How many they are. What their plans are.”
Edmund hesitated as if weighing my unspoken command to drink her down. “I will discover all that she knows, my mistress, assuming that she knows anything at all.” That sounded as if he agreed with my unspoken request, so that was good. “Rosanne Romanello has decided not to participate in the Sangre Duello. Therefore, I will have Nicolle shipped to Sedona at sunset.”
Nicolle screamed, “Nooooo!”
Ed carried her deeper into the living room, where he opened the hidden door into his sun-protected hidey-hole and slipped inside. The shelving unit closed behind him, cutting off her scream.
“Eli?” I asked.
“I’m good. Coulda used a few more minutes with the fanged healer, but it’s after sunrise.” He looked out the window at the drenching rain before he started up the stairs. I followed, taking in his back. In the human world he would have needed stitches. Maybe a lot of stitches. In the ranger world and the world of vamps, not so much. “What?” he said to me, as if he could tell I was staring at his wounds.
“Ed missed some. You need an urgent care center.”
“Whyn’t you just put pressure on it all and tape me up. Ed can heal me tonight. It’ll be more expedient than a trip to urgent care.”
Expedient was Eli’s word, used whenever I wanted him to get medical care. Home remedies were more expedient than drugs. Pressure and butterfly bandages were more expedient than stitches. “Dumb man,” I said.
Eli shrugged, which made him bleed faster, and led the way to his bathroom.
I pulled the covers over my head, hearing rain scudding against the windows. Not thinking. Not feeling. But I rolled back and lifted the boxing gloves off the bedpost, snuggling with them under the covers. Breathing deeply of Onorio scent. Wishing I could tell Bruiser about the sweat house and the revelations of my past. Wishing he was here with me, holding me.
Dreams dragged me under.
Bruiser texted me after one p.m. with the words, Lunch? My place? Not cooking but got goodies. Will send a car. Subtext: he’ll send a car instead of worrying that I’d walk and confront a killer again. The shooter (if there had been one aiming for him, or me, or both of us, the last time I took a walk) was still missing. The lemon-smelling one. Right.
I texted back, Send car in 15. I’d had nowhere near enough sleep, but the five-plus hours would have to do. Besides, I needed to tell him about Nicolle’s attack and see what Alex had on Clan Des Citrons. I hung the boxing gloves back on the bedpost and crawled out of bed.
I threw on jeans and boots and a leather jacket. It was almost cool enough in NOLA for my traditional winter wear. I kept weapons to a minimum—a couple of stakes, a short-bladed silver-plated knife in my boot, and a single-holster shoulder harness with an old but trusty H&K. Left my hair down. I was ready ten minutes before the car was due and so I woke up Alex, who was asleep on the couch. “Update.”
Alex made a noise that could have come from a seventy-year-old woman as he sat up and woke his electronics. “I got more vid of the car that picked up Dominique at HQ. One was a security cam shot of the car.”
I felt something settle heavily in my midsection, right above my vaunted gut.
“And?” I asked softly.
“Brive-la-Gaillarde, France, is the hunting territory of the Blood Master of Clan Des Citrons. Her name is Julietta Tempeste. And she came to the U.S. on a tourist visa two months ago. She was sucking face with Dominique in the getaway car.”
“Last known address?” I asked.
“Charleston, South Carolina. But I tracked one of her credit cards to a Hampton Inn off I-10, four days ago. She checked out. Probably in town now.”
“Probably sent people ahead to gather up any dissatisfied local fangheads.”
“I’ve put a ping on her credit card use. If she shows up I’ll let you know and get as much of the video of her entourage as possible, with IDs and dossiers. But I got more.”
“Go on.”
“There was another face in the SUV.”
“Crowded.”
“Right. And the face was someone you fought before. Bancym M’lareil.”
I’d staked Cym, but she had gotten away. I should have found her again and taken her head. Hindsight and all that. Regret was a bitch. “I’m betting Dominique took her off the battlefield when I killed Shoffru and healed her. Then they swore to the lemon heads.”
“Probably working with the enemy from the very beginning,” Alex said.
“Thanks, Kid. Bodat?” I nudged him awake where he snored in a chair. “Either shower or you can move the desk to the back porch.”
“I bathed yesterday!”
“Day before, dude,” Alex said.
Bodat sighed and headed for the stairs.
“Hey, Kid,” I said. Alex turned his head to me again. “You done good.” Alex grinned with pride and tilted his head at me in a gesture that was pure Eli.
It was still raining when I got to Bruiser’s third-floor apartment. I knocked before opening the door and toeing out of the Lucchese boots I had pulled on against the rain. The music was turned down low, something bluesy and jazzy all at once and the place smelled heavenly. Bruiser smelled even better when he opened his arms and I exhaled against his chest, sorta melting into him. I was tall, too skinny, but solid muscle and stronger than most men, thanks to my skinwalker abilities. But Bruiser was bigger and taller and though I was capable of taking care of myself, he always made me feel safer. And there was something about a man in a soft flannel shirt and worn-out jeans that hyped up the comfort level for me.
“Are you well, love?”
“I’m just ducky. And you smell fabulous.”
I felt his mouth curl up against the side of my head. “I have smoked salmon, butternut squash soup made with white wine, three flavors of goat cheese, and bruschetta.”
“Sorry. What? I zoned out after smoked salmon.”
He chuckled and took my hand, leading me to the kitchen and the tall white leather stools that fronted the island. It was cool today and Bruiser had kept the tall French doors closed on the temps and the rain so it was cozy in the apartment. He poured me a glass of white wine, ladled steaming butternut squash soup into big soup bowls, and set one in front of me. He was doing the three-course-meal thing. Probably as the only way to get me to eat anything more than the meat.
Tears filled my eyes. I blinked them away, but not before he saw them, or smelled them.
“Jane?” Alarm in his tone.
But I held up my hand and shook my head. “I’m good. Just sleep deprived and tired and . . . and I feel so . . . grateful? Happy?” I reached over and took his hands, squeezing them as I bowed my head, saying a silent thanks. Wordlessly, I listed the ways my life was better, richer, happier. Tears scalded down my face as I silently prayed.
When I stopped, he said softly, “And I am eternally thankful for Jane Yellowrock in my life. Amen.”
I lifted my eyes to his and was startled to see tears pooled there, mirroring my own. Except I was all salty and snotty and splotched, I was sure, and he was still gorgeous.
“There was a time when I believed that I was nothing in life without the Mithrans, without my position with Leo. That without his blood I’d be useless and lacking in value of any sort. And then I met you, a woman with enough power to stand against him, tall and strong and vibrant. Without being dependent on drinking blood.” He kissed my knuckles, released one hand, and lifted his glass in a toast. “You give me courage to be Onorio. To Jane Yellowrock.”
“And to us,” I toasted back and drank. And said, “Holy crap, this is good!” I sipped again. “I actually like this one. It’s really, really good! It’s—” I had no wine-type words to describe it.
“Buttery,” Bruiser said. “You always like buttery whites. It’s excellent with the soup.”
I sopped my face with the cloth napkin and spooned some soup into my mouth. I wasn’t fond of squash, but this stuff was different. “Apples. It has apples in it. And something green and sweet. And chicken stock.”
“Anise,” Bruiser said. He was trying to share with me his own appreciation of wine and fine food. “It’s from the anise, or fennel, plant.”
I placed the cloth in my lap, slung my loose hair out of the way, and sat like the lady one of the housemothers had tried to make of me. “I like it.”
We ate. And ate. And when the soup was gone and the wine bottle was empty and the salmon was picked down to the bones, Bruiser took a warm towel and wiped my hands clean. The towel smelled of oranges and so did his mouth when he kissed me and led me to the couch. “Sit. We need to talk and work for a bit.”
“Yada yada.”
He sat beside me and pulled a soft fuzzy blanket over us. “Yada,” he agreed. “But I can rub your feet while we chat.”
“You are the best boyfriend ever.”
He took my feet and gently squeezed them. “You first.”
I started with the easy stuff, telling him about Aya and Aggie One Feather, the usual debrief stuff. “But there’s something else. The Kid tracked Julietta Tempeste. She came to the U.S. on a tourist visa two months ago. Alex is trying to track her.”
“Clan Des Citrons. Does Leo know?” he asked.
“I texted him an update.”
His fingers worked the kinks out of my feet as he thought it through. Bruiser frowned, the lines on either side of his nose pulling down. Those lines had become deeper with worry and with the problems that piled up against us.
His frown softened. “My turn.” He told me stuff I didn’t half listen to. “Leo got a letter in the mail from the Carusos.”
“The old funeral home directors, the ones who created revenants and the revenant concoction?”
“Yes. The letter was held by their attorneys here in New Orleans, and mailed when it became clear that Titus Flavius Vespasianus would come ashore. They acted against Leo for decades and left under duress because Laurie’s daughter was being held by Titus. They deliberately left that bottle of Titus’s secret revenant potion in their fridge for Leo to find.”
“Deliberately? Are we supposed to fall for that?”
“The lawyer agreed to be bled and read by Leo. He believes it to be true. Leo wants us to save the entire Caruso family if possible, if he wins the Sangre Duello.”
“Easy peasy. Not.”
Bruiser smiled slightly. “Katie is in Atlanta. She invaded the lairs of a dozen Mithrans and ash-staked them in their sleep, disabling them. Then she dragged them to a room filled with silver-plated scion prisons. She’ll start her own negotiations tonight.”
“Katie did that in the daytime?” I enunciated the last word. “Because, vampires.”
“Katie slept in the blood of eight clans. She will be the strongest Mithran in the Americas for quite some time.”
“Meaning that if she wanted Leo’s position she could have it.”
“Indeed.” He kneaded harder into the arch of my foot.
I might have moaned. “You have very talented fingers.”
“I do. And I’ll take you to bed and prove it soon.” His fingers pressed and rolled and crept and knuckled up my calf to a sensitive spot in the middle of my calf.
“Oh . . . Holy moly.”
“Meanwhile, Lawrence is recuperating.” When I got an eyelid to open and looked blank, he said, “Lawrence Hefner. Leo’s valet? Injured in the were attack, trying to save Leo?”
I nodded, closing my eyes. Lack of sleep was catching up to me. “He hates being called Larry.”
“He has protested being in bed with Gee DiMercy, most vociferously. Leo found it necessary to promise to skin Gee alive if he so much as tried anything of a sexual nature with Lawrence.”
Gee would still try something. Something innocuous. Just to give Larry a hard time. I smiled and stretched to give Bruiser access to the tendon on the outside of my other foot.
“Leo told me about the potential three islands for the duel,” I said, “but what happens if the negotiations with Titus end up with us all in international waters, on a boat, instead of on land? Wouldn’t that leave NOLA open for a coup d’état?”
“Not if Edmund is left onshore.”
My breathing almost stopped at that. Edmund. Leo’s heir. One of the top vamp fighters in the United States. “That’s why Leo made Edmund his official heir. To protect New Orleans,” I said.
“And you the Dark Queen,” Bruiser said quietly, his fingers stopping, to simply hold my feet. “Between the two of you, with your ability to timewalk, you could protect the city and her people.”
“He’s planning to leave me ashore if an island isn’t chosen. Son of a gun. I didn’t know,” I said, just as softly, touching my belly and the faint pain there. Indigestion maybe. “I didn’t understand that move on the chessboard. Making me DQ wasn’t because he’s selfish. It was because he’s . . .” I stopped. No way was I going to say Leo Pellissier was a good man. “A good king.”
“Yes. He is.” There was something soft and sad in his tone, as if he wished Leo had been a better man too.
“But if Titus knows all this about Ed and me, that we could hold the city, then . . .” I opened both eyes and said, “Then what?”
“Then he won’t push to have the fight in the water, but on land, land that Leo owns or at least has some appearance of owning. Titus will want to kill you, Edmund, and Leo at the Duello.”
I closed my eyes again, letting the ramifications run through me.
Long pleasurable minutes later, Bruiser said, “Leo has scrapped your idea of having all his people go naked at the opening ceremonies of the Sangre Duello to shock and dismay the EVs.”
“Thank God.” I grinned evilly. “Too cold?”
“Precisely. Though he did profess sadness at not being able to see you naked in your half-fighting form.”
I opened one eye again and glared. “This is the stink-eye. Keep it up and I’ll give you the stink-eye with both eyes.”
“I consider myself warned.” His brown eyes melted me inside. Along with his very, so very talented hands. “The lab has sent a preliminary report of the contents and DNA from the bottle of mixed blood found in the Caruso Family Funeral Services. They have detected the blood of five major players and perhaps a dozen lesser players, all very old and powerful Mithrans, mixed with traces of chemicals, a long list of them. And unlike the usual putrefaction and decomposition of Mithran blood, these chemicals keep it stable for a long period. Months. Perhaps years.”
I opened my other eye, so I could see him with both, this time in concern. “Is it drinkable? Can humans or vamps drink it to be turned?”
“No. But it stops necrosis of flesh, is bactericidal, and speeds healing dramatically.”
“The U.S. military PTBs would give their accumulated right testicles for that formula. Eli told me so.”
The laughter in Bruiser’s eyes went deeper, as if he was envisioning a pile of right private parts and a long line of pained military brass. He said, “As would any pharmaceutical company, any foreign power, any billionaire who wants to live forever without becoming bound to a vampire.”
I almost said, That sucks, but it would have been funny and funny didn’t fit here.
“They have managed to reverse engineer the formula,” he said. “Leo has personally completed preliminary testing. It works.”
“Mmm. And if Leo can reproduce it in quantity, he will have the single most financially lucrative and medically important pharmaceutical product to hit the health profession since penicillin.”
“Indeed.”
Which would give Leo almost unlimited financial revenues, until the patent ran out or someone else reverse engineered it. Right. And Leo would be in terrible danger from outside and inside forces because such a product and such an economic stranglehold would change every financial market in the world. And Leo would have all that power. I sighed. Leo, king of the world.
“Enough talk.” Bruiser put my feet on the sofa, then stood and picked me up. And carried me to his bed. Enough talk indeed.