I Always Wanted to Shoot Big Bird
I came to in a darkened room that smelled of vamps, human blood, and my blood. I was cold, so cold I couldn’t even shiver, though there was something warm wrapped around me, an electric blanket, I thought, coarse and fuzzy at the same time. Something cool and smooth was against my cheek. Something wet was wiping my side, cleaning the deadened flesh where I must be—or must have been—wounded. The pain that had been with me, even in the darkness of unconsciousness, was mostly gone, leaving a dull ache.
I sighed and my breath came easily, with a sensation that let me know I had been in agony for some time in the very recent past. But the pain was gone and my breath came and went, came and went. But I wasn’t ready to face the real world. Sinking inside myself, I reached for Beast.
She was in my soul home, crouched before a crackling fire. The flames were cool, giving off no heat, and the light within them, light that should have illuminated everything around us, was muted, as if hidden in smoke, except there was no smoke, no scent of fire or fresh-cut wood, no charcoal, no scent of anything. Everything was dark, except for the flames themselves and a shadowy Beast, so dark here that I couldn’t see the stone walls or the rounded stone roof, far overhead. Beast’s eyes were glowing gold, watching me in the darkness. Her golden pelt was dim, as if she sat in shadow, or as if she had taken on the pelt of the black panther, the rare melanistic Puma concolor, her pelt darkened beneath the black hair-tips. A tremor ran through her body.
I examined myself, seeing the leggings, long tunic shirt, and the plain, undecorated moccasins that I had begun to wear here, ever since I accepted that I was War Woman. I bent toward the flame. The medicine bag hanging on the leather thong about my neck swung forward, into the meager light. The green-dyed leather caught the light and faded into darkness, caught the light and faded into darkness as it swung, in time to my breathing, slow and easy. The leather bag filled with herbs had no scent, no herbal aroma, no wild tobacco, nothing. I had a bad feeling about . . . everything.
Jane is foolish kit.
So you tell me.
Jane let ambush hunter wound her with killing steel claw.
I thought he was testing us again. Making sure there was no indication of Beast in our eyes. No evidence of our new abilities. I thought back to what I remembered of the fight. The memory was fuzzy, but the memory of the pain was fresh and startling, of Gee’s blade sliding in under my ribs.
Jane should have allowed Beast to be. She drew out the last word, giving it import and heft, as though being was a weapon I had possessed but had kept sheathed.
I didn’t stop you, I thought back. I reached for you and . . . I tried to remember, but my memory was sluggish, as if the moment I looked for had been washed away by a flash flood.
I got the impression of golden eyes, a flick of ear tabs, and a faint chuffing sound. Beast was there. Waiting.
I don’t understand, I thought at her. What happened?
Litter mate killed him with white man guns. Yet Gee did not die. Jane was dying, but Beast was awake. Beast flicked her ears, thinking. Leo slashed Gee-bird with claws, like male puma slashes younger males, to warn away from territory. There was much shouting and human war screams. There was much I did not understand.
Yeah, well, that makes two of us.
Two. And one. Always. Forever. As Jane understands now and not now.
I reached for you in the fight. I couldn’t find you.
Jane is foolish kit. Beast can hide golden eyes and scent. Beast is . . . She went silent and I realized she was thinking, trying to find words. She settled on the familiar Beast is wise ambush hunter.
Yes. You are.
We are. We are Beast.
I knelt at the fire and rubbed her ears, the pelt not as warm as I expected on my icy fingers. I ran my hands down along her jaw. Her head tilted into me and she scrubbed it hard against me, scent-marking me. I wrapped my arms around her and held her close for a moment, her pelt slightly warmer than my cold skin, her breath a steady almost-purr that was more vibration than sound. She should have been warmer. Much warmer than I was. Puma concolors have a higher body temp than humans. Something was very wrong here. I thought, Are we in danger?
No. They heal us.
In the room where my body lay, I tasted vampire blood. Leo was feeding me. I swallowed. Then I tasted Edmund Hartley’s blood and I swallowed again. The vampire hadn’t been here before. I was certain. Voices were speaking, the sounds angry, but the words were indistinct, as if I had cotton stuffed in my ears. I pulled away from the arguing vamps and human and went back into my solitude.
In my soul home, the flames in front of us flared high for a moment, throwing off sparks. Suddenly they held warmth and light. The walls around us brightened enough to perceive that they were dove-gray rock, smooth and damp with wet. The scent of burning wood teased my nostrils as I took a breath.
Beast stood and shook herself, her loose pelt sliding around her strong frame. She was bigger now, just as I was bigger after my weight gain over Christmas. She would soon be at the top of her weight limit, without altering some genes, turning some on or off, to increase her possible weight. And I didn’t know how to do that safely. But her pelt was warmer, and her flesh beneath was warmer. That was good. My hand slipped from her and she padded into the shadows that lingered at the passageway to her niche, the ledge and shallow notch where she denned. Watching her, I stood. And I woke.
In the real world, assuming it really was real and not some dream that Beast and I lived, I was shivering. The electric blanket was turned up high and the warmth burned my naked flesh, skin that prickled and ached with dryness and age. I was alone beneath the blanket but not alone in the room. I smelled Leo and Edmund and Eli, all close, the peculiar mixed odors of vampire blood, herbal and coppery and floral. And I smelled my blood.
The pain was a dull ache, like a bruise at its worst, a feeling that was hot and cold, raw and dampened all at once. I recognized the sensation. It was the healing of vamp blood. My side and waist were heavy, as if weighted, as if I pushed against something heavy with each breath.
Vaguely I remembered the cool, wet sensation on my side where I had been stabbed. A vamp tongue, laving and healing. All without the slightest hint of sexual desire or heat.
“She is awake,” Edmund said. His voice was close and I realized his arm was around me, outside the blanket, holding me close. It was a protective embrace, the kind a parent offered a sick child. A safe haven in a storm of pain.
“Jane?” Leo asked.
I licked my lips. When I spoke, my voice was a parched murmur, like leaves rubbing together in a dry wind. “Eli?”
“Yes, babe?”
“No fair,” I whispered. “I always wanted to shoot Big Bird.”
Eli chuckled, and I heard the relief in his tone. “He’s not dead. Lead doesn’t kill his type.” His voice hardened. “But it’ll be a while before he gives another lesson. The day he does, you can shoot him. Again.”
“Why?” I asked, and my breath failed me. I wasn’t sure he would understand my question, but he did. Eli always understood.
His voice had that precise but toneless note of a military debrief. “Still under investigation. Gee screwed up or went nuts or . . .” He paused as if there was another possibility, but he didn’t address it. “We don’t know yet. He’d been working with students dressed in Dyneema testicle stretchers, so maybe he thought you were dressed out, until after he stabbed you and you bled all over the floor. Remote possibility is that it could have been an accident.” But I could tell he didn’t believe that one.
That was a lot of chatter from my taciturn partner, a sure sign he was upset. “Dyneema testicle stretchers” was Eli’s term for the proper sword fighting attire, the cloth reinforced with plasticized Dyneema to repel sword cuts and punctures. We wore them during sword fighting lessons, and the thong that went through the legs, holding the chest protector in place, was amazingly uncomfortable for males. So. Accident? Was that even possible? Then I remembered the blue eye in my palm, the eye that seemed to look right at me as it turned green. A memory burned in the back of my mind, struggling to get free.
“Leo? Edmund?” I asked, waiting for the memory to rise.
“Yes, my Jane,” Leo said.
“Yes, my master,” Edmund said.
That “my master” stuff had to be addressed soon. Very soon. There was no way I was taking the vampire to be my primo. Vamps had primos and they were human. Skinwalkers had no primos and certainly not vamp primos. No way. I said, “Your opinion on the accident?”
“I concur with your second’s estimate,” Edmund said, “but the Master of the City is also correct. It was hubris on the part of the misericord. He . . .” Edmund hesitated a bare moment, and made a sound as if he was strangling. Or laughing. “He has issues.”
I smiled in the darkness at the modern term coming from Edmund’s lips. No wonder the words had strangled him.
“Why did you not change into one of your Beast forms, my Jane?” Leo asked.
“I really don’t know . . . I was holding . . .” An eye. It had started out blue, which had felt familiar. The memory came back to me in a rush. When I first met Gee DiMercy, he had used his magic both for and against me. At one point, he had employed his all-seeing blue eye to watch me, in real life and in my soul home. I had seen blue eyes in both palms. Watching me. But this time, they had started blue and faded to the witch’s green.
Gee had been spelled? With a spell like the one on me? Or the one on me had triggered some remnant of Gee’s first spell and found its way back to him? Yes . . . That made a sort of sense. My breathing sped, which caused a thrill of pain to rush through my chest. I thought it through again and it all made sense.
I breathed more slowly, letting the pain ease, trying to figure out what it meant. And whether the eye in my palm was also the reason I hadn’t changed shape. Nothing came to me, and Leo didn’t know about my Beast, the other soul I had pulled inside with me in an accidental act of black magic when I was five years old. He didn’t know about my soul home. I was pretty sure I had never told him about Gee spying on me with magic. But the Master of the City was waiting. “I was holding . . . myself too tightly. I just . . . missed it.” No. It was something else. Something worse. Maybe the result of many things that were worse, all coming together in a perfect storm. That was why Eli had hesitated. He knew there was something else going on too, but if he knew what it was, he wasn’t going to share it here in group therapy. I tried to put it together.
Gee’s magic. Eyes in my palms.
Beast’s magic growing.
The soul of Beast and my soul merging.
Attacks in my/our soul home, signs of magic in a place where nothing outside me/us should ever have been able to get in.
The stink of burning hair, iron, and salt in the scan.
And . . . I had been struck by lightning not so long ago. My hair had burned. So had my flesh. That experience had done something to me. I had shifted into my Beast since, but not in extremis. Not when I had to shift or die. Not when it mattered. And I hadn’t spent much time in my soul home since the lightning strike, only long enough to glance in, not long enough to notice the cold flames and lack of light.
I remembered Beast lying in the dark, her coat the wrong color.
My father’s favorite form had been the black panther.
He had died, changing into his cat too late to save his life.
Was there a connection with the melanistic coat color? Had something happened to my father’s ability to shift? Had he been hit by lightning too? Had something happened to us both? Was it something peculiar to skinwalkers?
The stink of burning hair. Why burning hair?
There was too much that I didn’t know, so I clung to the things I did know. I had family—Eli and Alex. I had Bruiser. I was alive. Beast was still with me. I could deal with everything else. As soon I was sure that I stayed alive. Yeah. That. I took a breath that rattled in my lungs and I coughed, a soft hack of pain.
“My Jane?”
“Not your Jane,” I snapped, but it was spoiled by my raspy, gasping voice. “Your Enforcer. Not your Jane.”
Leo chuckled, a vamp’s hunting purr that made Beast sit up and purr back. I kept the sound inside my head, but Beast liked Leo a little too much for my tastes. “You make the chase so delightful,” he said.
“Stuff it.”
Leo burst out laughing, my purr buried beneath his pure amusement. “Ah, Jane. What shall I do to punish my Mercy Blade for his attack on you?”
“Getting shot was enough,” I said. I remembered that Beast said Leo had cut Gee. “You cutting him was enough. And if all that wasn’t enough, Eli said I could shoot him again.”
I felt Leo’s hand on my face, cool and smooth and utterly inhuman. He stroked back my hair, and his voice was curiously gentle when he said, “I would have been most . . . discommoded had you died.”
“Yeah. That’s why I stay alive,” I said, my native snark coming back online, as if I had rebooted that file, “to keep you from being discommoded.” I’d have to look that one up.
Darkness was closing in on me, the dark of sleep, the sleep of healing. I whispered, “Besides, I think it’s possible that Gee was magicked into attacking me.” I thought back to his eyes, blazing blue. “Something’s wrong. Magic and spells and . . . stuff. Eli. Tell them.” And then I was under, into a place of dreams.
* * *
It was nearly night before I woke up again in Edmund’s bed in his new but still tiny room with its rich furnishings and its interior window. Previously his room had had an exterior window, an indication of a vamp’s low status, and I had helped him improve his status enough to get a better room. Edmund, once a clan Blood Master, had fallen far, and no one had yet told me why or how.
I could feel my breath moving in my lungs, as if I breathed iced air, though the room was warm. My heart was beating slow and hard, a bass drum through my arteries. The electric blanket was turned low, but it felt hot and prickly on my skin. By the staleness of the scents around me, the vamps were gone. Thank goodness.
Shoving pillows behind me, I gathered the blanket tight around me and pushed myself to a sitting position against the headboard. I was naked beneath the blanket. Oh, goody. That meant I’d been naked in front of Leo and Edmund . . . and Eli, who was sitting in a delicate, dainty floral-upholstered chair at a small ormolu table, his eyes on me.
The lamp on the table was off and the room was deeply shadowed, my partner’s face not visible until I pulled on Beast’s night vision. Through her eyes, the room was silver and green, the details sharp and the shadows black as if drawn with india ink. Eli’s expression was grim, set, and he was sitting as still as a vamp. There was a shotgun across his knees. I hadn’t seen the shotgun when we got to headquarters, so either he had gone home to get it or someone had brought it to him. I was betting that he hadn’t left my side and that one of Leo’s security peeps had brought it to him. Probably under duress.
There was a glass of water on the bedside table and I drank it dry, replacing it on the table. I cleared my throat, which still felt scratchy, and said, “Debrief.”
“That bird stabbed you. I shot him. You didn’t shift.”
I had thought that Eli’s voice had been toneless many times in our relationship, but this was even more so. Robotic. Dead sounding.
“I applied pressure. Leo flipped you over and ripped open your shirt. Arterial bleeding went everywhere. You were bleeding out. Leo sliced his fingertips and shoved them inside the wound.”
Eli went quiet again. His jaw worked, tightening and relaxing in the edged shadows. When he began again, there was no indication that he was under strain, except for the total lack of emotion in his voice. “Edmund picked you up. Leo and he carried you here. I shot a couple of vamps who got in the way or got too close. Standard ammo. They’ll live.”
I said nothing, just watched his face. After a long silence, he said, “You didn’t shift.” And this time there was a bare hint of emotion, a simple thread of . . . something.
“I couldn’t. Since the lightning, I’ve shifted when I wasn’t in trouble, in danger, but this time, when I needed to shift or die, I couldn’t.”
“Lightning?”
“I don’t know, but . . .” I stopped and thought before I finished, reluctance in my tone. “. . . there seems to be a correlation.”
“You said the bird might have been magicked to hurt you. Why do you think that?”
“When I first met him . . . Seems like forever. He used his magic to heal me of a werewolf attack.”
My partner gave a slight downward jut of his head to indicate he had heard me and understood.
“Later.” I stopped. “You know the eye on the dollar bill? The one on top of the pyramid?”
Nod.
“I had one of those on each palm. Like a tattoo, the blue color of his magic. I knew he was spying on me. It was in my soul home too, watching me. The eye in my palm this morning was exactly the same eye, but green. In the fight, I saw it again in my left palm, the one the spell started in today. I think I was wrong about the spell being just a scan. I think it did something to me too. I think Gee’s watching eye and the witches’ eye are connected. Somehow. Water?”
Eli poured me another glass from the pitcher beside the bed. It was a cut-crystal pitcher and looked heavy. And I had no energy. I drank the water down. Then two more. I was badly dehydrated and I probably needed a couple of liters of fluid. A gallon of Gatorade might do the trick. I could get that as soon as I was finished with my tale. “In the fight, Gee’s blue eye of seeing was in my palm, open. Then it faded to pale green, the color of the stronger witch’s power. The scent of the spell was weird too: iron and salt and something harsh like burning hair.”
Eli seemed to mull that over, and something in his stance relaxed a fraction.
I let a half smile form on my mouth, and my lips cracked. “Whatever it is, it may still be active. We need a way to thwart the spell.”
“Thwart?” he asked, humor in his voice.
“Magical word. Stuff you’ll learn if you hang around me long enough.”
“It’s what I live for,” he said, a tiny bit of snark in the words. “Is it possible that the spell reactivated the trace of a previous spell in you? Maybe the odd smells were something that tied it all together?”
“Oh,” I said. “That makes sense.” Not that I knew what the smells might mean, but at this point it didn’t matter. I needed to focus on stopping the working, not worrying about the ingredients used in the spell. That was something to deal with later. Simply having priorities made me feel better.
“But if one spell, why not more?” I asked. “And which ones? I’ve been hit more than once with magic of different kinds, from vamp to witch to were. Oh, and arcenciel,” the fabled but factual and existent light dragon. “Let’s not forget the weirdest magical thingy of all.”
“Yeah. That is a problem, babe. One of many. And maybe one of many spells, all the way back to the fight that killed the Damours.”
The Damour clan of suckheads had been composed of blood-magic witches. Blood witches. The kind who used the sacrifice of witch children and teenagers to try some really humongous workings, attempting to bring their long-chained vampire children back to sanity. They had killed hundreds of witches over the centuries, and I had nearly died saving my godchildren from them. In saving them, I had been in the presence of some pretty strong black magic.
Sometimes when one is injured in battle, it comes back in a haunting for years after. In my case that haunting was a sort of magical PTSD, which had caused complications in the merging of my Beast soul and my soul. Like what had happened today. Yeah. It felt as though we were close to figuring out the green magic scan.
“I guess I need to be checked for magical booby traps? And the house too?”
“I called Molly. She’ll do some magical mumbo-jumbo on you when they get here. Check for trace spells. Check the house for same and put in the upgraded hedge of thorns as a ward.”
I shook my head, my hair rubbing the headboard with a scratchy sound. My partner had been a step ahead of me all the way except with the last statement. “They can’t stay with us,” I said. “Too dangerous.”
“I tried to talk him out of staying at the house, but he said hotels were impossible to ward. And they didn’t want to rent a house, stay in a place they weren’t used to. And they already had a permanent circle at your house that they could bring up and use to protect you, us, and them. Did you know that? That they had a witch circle at your house?”
“Not surprised,” I said. “They can call up wards around the place pretty easily.”
“Evan said it was a fortress. Or would be when he got finished with it.”
“How about he leaves us a trigger,” I asked, “so we can use it too?”
“In the works, but not something we can use every day. A ‘one use’ ward that will have to be restored by them. But if we’d had it today—”
“I’d still have been spelled,” I said. “‘One use,’ remember? The spell started in my hand, before we could have gotten any one-use ward up and running. Please don’t blame Evan.”
“Please?” he asked, startled.
“I don’t have the strength to make and enforce demands. Yet.”
Eli made a sound that might have been some form of laughter, if laughter could also sound like grief or released fear. He pulled and flipped open his official cell, with its Kevlar exterior and multipurpose functions, and punched a button. Someone said hello and Eli held it out to me. “Tell Alex you’re okay.”
“I’m okay, Kid,” I said, trying to sound stronger than I was. “I’ll be home soon.”
The Kid cursed worse than anything I had ever heard him say and finished with “Later.” The call ended. Eli gave me the ghost of a smile and closed the cell.
“So,” he said. “What do we do about this little shifting problem?”
We. Always we. “I need to meditate and check out my soul home. Maybe visit with Aggie One Feather. Other than that, I don’t know.”
“Concur.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No.” He stood and walked to the door, opened it, and stopped in the shaft of light from the hallway. “I got some clean clothes from your locker downstairs. They’re in your satchel.” He left the room and closed the door softly, very carefully. He had said satchel. Not purse. Eli had once called it a purse. Once. I’d decked him and he never said it again. I do not carry a purse. But this time there was no teasing. He was fighting slamming the door. Eli was really messed up.
I turned off the electric blanket and rolled slowly to the floor, the blanket sliding across my skin like steel wool. The soles of my feet hurt when I transferred weight to them. I ached deep inside when I moved. Standing slowly to let my body accept what gravity was doing, moving things around inside me, I touched my side with fingertips that were hypersensitive and dry, as if all the moisture had been leached from them, leaving me with mummy skin over skeleton hands. I found a puckered scar up under my arm, higher than I had thought. There was no blood on me or the bed, not wet, tacky, or dried. Someone had stripped me and cleaned me. I smelled of lavender soap and a female human. Thank God for that.
The wound wasn’t right, however. It felt as though it had healed with microscopic shards of glass sticking from inside the new skin. I hissed softly at the touch and tried to see the scar in the small mirror over the delicate table, but it wasn’t a real mirror; it had no silver backing to insult a vamp wanting to see himself clearly and without pain. I couldn’t get a good look, only enough to tell that my hair had come down from the bun at some point and hung in a scraggly, knotted half braid. I slung it out of the way, the movement making me aware of my scent and the smell of Leo and Edmund still on me, almost, but not quite, hidden by the smell of the soap.
Vampires have scent-marked Jane, Beast thought happily.
Gag, ick, and ewww, I thought back.
Beast chuffed with laughter.
Inside the satchel was my soap from home, shampoo, conditioner, and scentless moisturizer. Comfortable clothes I could pull on without too much pain. Someone knew how to dress when injured in the chest. Eli had been injured in the chest. I had never asked how because his brother had nearly gone to prison searching for that info in DOD and Pentagon databases. It was classified. But he knew how to dress for pain. I knew without asking that he hadn’t left my side, so he had sent for the things. There was even a bottle of water in the bottom. Portable. Unbreakable. Nice.
Sitting on a tiny bench, I managed to get into the shower and clean myself of strong-smelling soap and vampire saliva, all without falling down and hurting myself. Again. I slathered on the moisturizer and the jojoba oil soaked in, making my skin feel nearly hydrated. I went back to the satchel.
I dressed in cotton panties and a pair of yoga pants with a soft waistband. There were a selection of tops, and I chose a very tight, seamless Lycra camisole, one that would give my wound some elastic fortification, pressing against it with a steady pressure, not letting cloth or seams rub across it. Wearing it would mean I could go braless. I didn’t think I could wear a real bra, not even a sports bra, until the wound healed properly. Until I shifted into Puma concolor and the wound went away. I stepped into it and pulled the body-hugging cami up from my feet into place. The tight fit felt good on the wound, and the shivery feeling in the tender flesh eased. I slid into a soft gold cowl-neck sweater that I loved.
There was a brush and comb in the bottom of the satchel along with a scrunchie. And my tube of red lipstick, and my stakes that had been in my hair. And my official cell. And my thigh rig with one of Eli’s nine-millimeters in it. I had left mine at home and my shoulder holster wasn’t going to work, not tonight. Eli had known. His thoughtfulness was nearly my undoing. I was thirsty and shaky and tears pooled in my eyes. One fell and landed on my hand while I tried to unsnarl my braid. I remembered the blue eye that had faded green. I needed to talk to Gee DiMercy.
I gave up on my hair and checked the load on the nine-mil, set the safety, and weaponed up. The sweater hung long and I tucked the hem into the top of the thigh rig to keep it out of the way.
A knock came at the door and I said, “It’s open.”
Edmund stepped into the bathroom. I had expected Eli. The vamp stopped with that undead, block of marble thing they do, and he sniffed. A strand of horror in his voice, he said, “You are crying.”
Which made me laugh through the tears. “Yeah. I don’t even know why. I need water. Tears are a stupid waste of it.”
Edmund stepped back into the room and I followed, to the far side of the bed, where he opened a small refrigerator I hadn’t noticed. From it he drew a six-pack of flavored bottled electrolyte water, chilled and icy. He opened the first bottle and handed it to me with a slight nod, like a truncated bow.
“I’m not your master,” I said.
“Drink. Please,” he added. “Slowly, so you don’t become ill.”
And toss my cookies all over his fancy décor. I got it. So I drank. I finished off three bottles of water and set the empties beside the bottle I had finished earlier. The fluid made me feel better, but I probably needed more sugar and electrolytes, because the expected spurt of energy didn’t come. Before I could fall, I sat on the edge of the unmade bed. It smelled of blood and spit and other things I didn’t want to think about. I pulled my snarled wet hair to the front and worried at it. “Who did Eli shoot?” I asked, more to make conversation and keep Edmund from noticing the tremble in my fingers than from any real interest.
“The new cybersecurity expert, for one.”
I glanced up from under my eyebrows. “New—? No one told me about this,” I said. One of our last electronic security experts had died, sitting in the chair in front of his console, attacked by a vamp from behind. It shouldn’t have happened. He should have been able to see the attack coming.
Edmund’s lips twitched. “No. She arrived yesterday, a young Mithran named Pauline Easter, out of Atlanta. When Leo choses a Master of the City of Atlanta, she will go back, fully trained in the proper way to set up cyber protections. Stop fussing with that.” He pushed my hands aside, took my braid, and levered himself on the bed beside me. I stiffened at the unexpected action and had to force myself to relax. In moments Edmund had the knots at the tip unsnarled and was finger-combing my hair. When it was free and hanging in tangled ripples, he took the comb from the satchel and began combing out the knots. I steeled myself for yanking on my scalp, but there wasn’t any. And suddenly I didn’t know what to do with my hands. A vamp, a creature at the top of the food chain, was combing my hair, like . . . I didn’t know like what, except it felt weird.
“I was trained in the art of being a ladies’ maid when I was a young Mithran, newly released from the scion lair,” Edmund said, a faint, amused edge to his voice, as if he was teasing me or testing me.
My eyebrows went up and he chuckled, probably smelling my surprise. The comb slowed and stroked through my hair, smoothing it, soothing me. “I insulted my original master when I first rose undead and was sold into indentured servitude to a Mithran in Charleston,” he said. “She owned a brothel, one of three in the city that catered to the most wealthy. Mithrans were cheaper than slaves,” he added, his voice now edged with a trace of bitterness, like the faint tang of poison in a fine wine. “We healed quickly, we worked nights when humans were sleeping, we didn’t have to be fed often, we could simply be set free on the docks for one or two nights a week to feed.”
“You were starved,” I murmured, and closed my eyes as he combed my hair.
“Yes. Times are . . . much better now, here, in America, for some. For most, I suppose, though the effects of slavery will stain a people with pain for hundreds of years. Eh.” There was a mental of shifting of gears with the syllable. “As a human, I had been educated, overly fond of myself, and a braggart. I was also unskilled in the manners and abilities my new master required, and so was set to menial labor: hauling water, chopping wood, and heating the baths in the elegant old brothel. It was an education I was not prepared for. After a year or two of behavior modification,” he said wryly, “I learned to keep my mouth shut and my thoughts to myself. It was that or starve into madness.
“By taking cuffs and beatings and not complaining, I worked my way up from transporting filth to the drainage ditch leading to the river, to washing dishes and setting tables, to pouring wine and mead and beer for the guests, to training as a ladies’ maid. I was educated, as I said, and learned to turn my gift for words into flattery and blandishment. I developed a silver tongue. The girls liked having a man wait on them, curl their hair, trim their nails, choose their attire for the evening. Someone strong enough to protect them if they called out the safe word, though it was not called such at the time.”
Edmund set the brush down and divided my hair into four sections, then divided the one over my left eye and temple into three more sections. He began to plait this small section in some complicated pattern, not a simple braid, but one where he pulled a few strands loose to hang free with each twist. It felt soft and feathery against my skin. It would never do for fighting, but for now . . . And then I remembered what we were talking about.
“Safe word? That’s a modern term for”—I smiled—“a different kind of bondage.”
Edmund laughed and the sound was a silken warmth that slid under my skin and eased the last of my pain away. He wasn’t exactly using his gift of compulsion on me, but he was doing something. I should probably make him stop, but the sense of discomfort was easing and so I let him continue. “Back then,” he said, “there was no water safe to drink. Everyone drank beer instead or, if they had an extra coin, wine. Stronger spirits were available as well, in every corner of the city. And the beer in Jacob’s House was some of the best in Charleston,” he said.
This time there was a hint of pride in his tone and I wondered if he’d contributed to making the beer. But what beer had to do with brothels and safe words I had no idea.
Edmund said, “The plentitude of alcohol meant that a vast majority of the customers were always drunk, and drunkards are not always careful with their tender paramours. And the management was not in a position to intrude when a paying guest became too heavy-handed. But I was not management. I was neither seen nor heard except when I needed to be.
“When a patron became dangerously inebriated and angry—the two go hand in hand oftentimes—the girl or boy could shout out a word and I would come running. I was adept at calming ruffled feathers and escorting patrons out of the premises.”
“Mesmerizing them?”
He murmured a noncommittal tone.
“Like you’re doing to me now?”
Edmund tied off the small braid and started on the larger one, making it too all feathery and soft. When he was halfway done, he asked, “Was I so obvious? You are difficult to charm.”
Charm? Huh. “Yes, you were obvious. But it helped. I feel better.”
He finished the braid and clipped a gold pin on to the tip. He placed the four empty bottles in the trash and opened a fifth bottle of electrolyte water, placing it in my hand and pointing. “La salle de bain, pour vous toilette, my master.”
Meaning that he knew I had to pee, but much more nicely stated. I drained the water and placed the empty in his hand and, without a word, went back through the door, closing it behind me. I flipped on the light and relieved myself. Put on lipstick without looking in the mirror. When I was done, I finally looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. Only it wasn’t a mirror. It was a screen with a tiny camera eye at the bottom. Its angle didn’t focus on the commode or shower, fortunately. To the eye, I said, “If you’re watching me through this thing, I’ll break it and then every bone in your body.”
“I would never eavesdrop, nor spy on my master’s privacy, nor abuse her trust in me,” Edmund said through the door, amused. Only I wasn’t his master. And obviously he could hear me talk. He was funning me. Right.
I repacked the satchel, double-checked the weapon, replaced the stakes in my braids—which looked fantastic, like something like out of a fantasy movie, if I was an elf princess and not a warrior. If I didn’t have to worry about someone using my hair as a handle to force me to submit. Gorgeous, stupid lustrous black hair, the two braids each with tiny tufts of hair hanging out of every segment, like feathers, wispy and elegant. I really liked it.
I opened the door and said, “I like my hair. A lot. There is no way I can wear it this way on a regular basis, but I’d really like for Bruiser to see me this way.”
Edmund chuckled, a human sound, and said, “I promise to get my master all gussied up for the Rock N Bowl.”
The Rock N Bowl was my date with Bruiser.
The my master form of address really had to go. Unless I agreed to allow Edmund to become my primo, the first vampire primo to a non-Mithran in . . . maybe forever. I shook my head at the faint thread of sarcasm in his tone and his insistence on that master crap, and slung my satchel over my shoulder. As we left the room, I called Eli on my cell. He answered, “Jane. You up?”
“Kinda sorta. Where are you?”
“In the conference room. We have an update from George.”
George was my Bruiser, George Dumas. “On the way.” I closed the cell and walked to the elevator, my would-be primo on my heels. The hallways were empty, smelling predominantly of humans: sweat, blood, sex pheromones, alcohol breath, and vitality. Most vamps were having breakfast.