Dude Has Ugly Legs
Followed handler into house. Smelled . . . smelled things. Smelled people. Smelled witches. Knew them, but not how. Not where. Was important. And . . . sounds came in fog of confusion. Was important.
Trotted to low thing with witches. Snuffled witch crotch and . . . knew witch. Evan! Evan jumped with excitement! Made sound like rabbit in brush! Barked with happiness! Evan . . .
Angie. Little Evan. Kits. Smelled Eli. Alex. Molly and Evan!
Tail wagged, body wagging too. Happyhappyhappy! Snuffled Molly, asleep on couch. Had puppy in womb. No. Had baby. Godchild. Angie. EJ. Kits.
With names, human words, came memories of . . . Jane. I twisted my head to Eli and woofed softly.
“You’re back?” he asked.
I dropped my head. Lifted it. And trotted to my room. I pushed the door shut, but not before I heard him mutter, “Thank God.”
* * *
At nearly three thirty in the morning, I came out of my room, fully dressed and fully weaponed up, because the feel and smell of steel and silver and wood gave me a false sense of security. In the living room and kitchen I smelled coffee and witch and magic and . . . Crap.
I had never said it aloud, but I had a feeling that Beast kept part of the bloodhound’s olfactory genetics each time I shifted back from it. That genetic stealing might be making it harder to shift from hound to human. No. Not saying that. Not thinking that. Instead, when I closed my door and Eli and Alex looked up at me, I put a hand on the holstered nine-mil and leaned my back to the door. I said, “The devil will wear mukluks and a fur bikini before I spend that much time in bloodhound form again.”
“Roger that,” Eli said, sounding laconic, but smelling vastly relieved. “You’re okay?”
“Ducky. But it was too close. How long was I in dog form?”
“About six hours.”
“Next time, we cut it to three. Maybe two.”
“Good by me,” he said, sounding better, smelling better.
“Molly and Evan are upstairs?”
“Sleeping. Evan said to keep your nose out of his privates.” Eli laughed at me, but he had the decency to do it under his breath.
My face burned lightly with a flush of embarrassment. “Is he okay? Is Lachish okay?”
Eli said, “His legs are a little itchy and the skin feels tender. The hair hasn’t grown back yet and Alex said he modeled his smooth calves for everyone.”
“Dude has ugly legs,” I muttered.
Eli said, “Lachish will be okay, barring side effects. Leo sent someone to feed her. The witches have set up a healing circle. Molly is fine.”
We’d need to get the last names of the witches from Lachish. As soon as possible. “Have you heard anything about Edmund? I think I stabbed him.”
Eli breathed another laugh and turned back to the kitchen. I heard oil sizzling and smelled the scent of pancakes cooking. Maple syrup. Chai with tiny piri-piri peppers in it. Eli had found the peppers at a market, this batch imported from Portugal, and he had been adding them to my spiced tea.
I followed him in. My mouth watered and my belly cramped—with hunger, not the sickness of the Gray Between time shifts. I used a lot of calories shifting, and shifting so many times had left me little more than skin and bones. I hadn’t weighed, but my pants were hanging on my hipbones.
“Edmund will be fine,” Eli said. “He’s at HQ, being pampered, vamp-style.”
Which meant with blood and wild and bloody sex. Ick. “Oh. Good.” Worry slid off me like water down mountain stone, and I slipped into my chair as he placed three pancakes on my plate and poured on the syrup and melted butter. I sniffed first. I couldn’t help myself. It was heaven. Digging in, I ate everything on the plate, and then three more platefuls. And bacon. A pound of bacon. And the entire pot of tea, with extra sugar and lots of heavy fat cream.
Out front, a motorcycle roared by. Moments later it returned at a much slower pace. I lifted my head, listening, as the sound of the engine again faded. I was either paranoid or I wanted my bike back. I hadn’t known Bitsa was so ruined when it was damaged last. Dang it.
Need Bitsa, Beast thought. Nose in air. Good smells.
The bike didn’t return and I went back to eating.
When I was finished, my belly was rounded against my pants and I felt marginally better. I checked Eli out, and saw that he was fully dressed, even down to the combat boots and weapons. Neither one of us had slept, but it looked as though he was ready for more fun and games.
“What did you learn?” Eli asked.
“Not much that relates to the witches, except that according to the scent patterns, they’re mother and daughter. Lachish said she didn’t know who the witches were, but she had to be lying. A mother-daughter team in the city, in her coven? She knew. And she didn’t tell us.”
“Lachish lied,” Eli said, laconic. “Surprise, surprise. Probably thought she could handle it in-house and not have to turn it over the Enforcer of the vamps.”
“It also opens up the possibility that Lachish is secretly working against the conclave.” I gave a halfhearted shrug. “Not likely but we can’t completely discount it.”
Eli made gesture that said, People are strange.
“If you’re up to driving,” I said, “I’d like to go to vamp HQ and talk to Ming. The one in the cage, not the other one.”
“I’ll clean up the dishes,” Alex said, “and then hit the sack.”
I looked at him in surprise and then at his plate. He’d eaten like the still-teenaged boy he was and I hadn’t even noticed. But he was acting like a grown-up. I said, “Cool. Thanks.”
He shrugged. “The ward is up and you won’t trigger it going out, so—” His tablet dinged and Alex snatched it up. “Oh yeah. Hang on. I got the witches’ names.” He keyed on three different tablets at once. “Oh yeah. Piece of cake. I got names and social media pages for a mother-daughter team who were at the witch circle where you were struck by lightning. I’d still like Lachish to verify, but until then, I sent the photos to your cells.”
“Names?” I said.
“Tau and Marlene Nicaud.”
I was tired beyond belief, but a fierce victory shot through me. We had IDs. And maybe a relationship that would lead us to motive. And then to stopping the witches.
“You done good, Kid,” Eli said. And he scrubbed Alex’s head in a noogie, what looked like true, if painful, affection.
Alex gave an abbreviated nod and looked away, but I could smell the pleasure in his scent. “I’ll keep digging and send the info to your cells. Go on. Get stuff done.” He made a little shooing motion with his fingers.
“SUV is at the curb,” Eli said, leading the way to the door. Silently I followed.
The city that never said no to a party was still going strong, musicians on street corners, artists trying to attract the loitering tourists. More motorcycles sounded in the distance, like a whole club of them heading for Bourbon Street. I kept my eyes out the window and said, “Would you be so kind as to update me about my time as a dog?”
Eli said nothing for a long stretch of time, during which we passed a silver space rocket on the sidewalk, in front of a bar. Riding the rocket as if it were a bar bull was a half-naked woman, long purple wig hanging down her back, most of her boobs hanging out of the top part of a black corset, with garter straps on the bottom part of the corset, holding up golden-glittered fishnet stockings. She was also wearing a red sequined thong, and shaking her backside at the street while a bunch of drunk college boys applauded and a biker in a Saints helmet wolf-whistled. A local cop shook his head. Only in New Orleans.
Then Eli started talking, and as he did, the memories of the time as Beast and as a hound dog came back. I chuckled at the parts where I sniffed people’s crotches, but really, it wasn’t funny. It was scary. I had lost myself and Eli knew it. But I knew my partner. He wouldn’t let me stay in dog form that long again.
And it was possible that all the shifting from species to species had helped with my healing. I ran my hands over my belly and down along my right side. No pain. No tenderness. No nausea. For a gal who had just nearly lost her mind into the olfactory sense of a bloodhound, I felt pretty dang good.
He finished the story with “And that is the story of Jane in bitch form.”
I slanted a look at him without moving my head. “You’ve been waiting all night to get the chance to say that, haven’t you?”
Eli’s lips twitched. “Yes, I have. I also brought along pieces of one of the icons I shot, in case we need a vamp to sniff them.”
“Smart. That saves you from a head smack for calling me names.”
“Ohhh. I’m so relieved. I was shaking in my boots, babe.”
* * *
We went through the usual security measures at the entrance, and Ro Moore, the self-proclaimed Alabama backwoods hillbilly, boxer, wrestler, and MMA cage fighter, did the pat-down, under the supervision of Brenda Rezk, the security person from Atlanta. It was professional and deft, and I said, “Thank you,” when she was done, shaking my jacket back into place. As I readjusted my weapons, Derek Lee showed up. I hadn’t seen Leo’s other Enforcer and I knew that he and Eli needed to have a chat about what had happened at the Elms and in the cemetery with Edmund, but it would have to wait. “I’m here to see Ming of Mearkanis.”
“Clan Mearkanis no longer exists,” he said, his words clipped. “Ask for something else.”
Derek and I’d had issues from time to time. Tonight, he was gonna be difficult and I didn’t have the emotional fortitude to deal with it like a grown-up. Like Alex. Which was amusing. So I went for my go-to snark and looked Derek over, as insolently as I could. He was wearing a hand-stitched dress shirt, Italian lace-up dress shoes, and cuffed pants with a perfect half break. I know that kind of stuff now because I live in New Orleans and I hang with people who spend gazillions on clothes. His mouth went tight at the way I was looking him over, and I grinned at him, showing teeth as I stepped up to him, into his personal space, so my height would work for me. I tilted my head down, to his ear, and whispered, “I can handle this one of several ways. Eli and I can walk away and go to the scion room alone. I can go to Leo and tell him you’re being a butt-head. Or I can kick your ass. Right here. Right now. In front of your people.”
He stepped closer and whispered back, “You can try, little girl.”
“Stop it,” Eli said, shoving us apart. “What’s wrong with you two?” He twisted his body so we were the width of his shoulders apart. I put another few feet between us, and Derek stepped back too. Formally, stiffly, as if passing along an order to a higher-ranked soldier, Eli said, “Lee. We need to see Ming Zoya, who was once Blood Master of Clan Mearkanis. Do you wish to lead the way?”
Derek frowned and blinked. “Yeah. . . . What just happened?”
“Were you at the Elms tonight?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Crap,” I said, checking out my hands and his. They looked okay, but they might not be. “We got bigger problems than I thought.” Not that I knew what do to about any of it. And then it hit me. “Hair,” I said. “From the locker room shower drain. I always use the one on the end. They got my DNA here.” That was where the witches who attacked me got the stuff that tied the spell to me. And they might have gotten other people’s DNA the same way. Vamps. Blood-servants. Anyone. Everyone.
Eli’s lips went tight as he processed that. “We got an inside man. In HQ. Someone with access to the women’s locker, which means security and housekeeping.”
“Which means,” I said, “that they could have all our samples. Crap. We need to change the protocols and create a more stringent burn policy for everyone. Though it’s clearly too late. Even the EVs could have our samples by now.”
“We’ve been stupid,” Derek said.
I pulled my cell and texted Molly the problem. To the others, I said, “Here’s hoping Molly can come up with something to counteract DNA spells. And fast.”
Derek shook his head as if thinking of the numbers of people in security and housekeeping who might have gone into the locker room. Or maybe thinking of the work that went into creating a new protocol. Silent, he led the way to the scion lair, which was reached by a circuitous route, up- and downstairs, through recently discovered hallways, and, as best I had ever figured, the lair might actually be located between two floors, half in one and half in the other. I nodded to the security guy, who nodded back, one of the many new ones I hadn’t gotten to know yet. He opened the door and we three went inside, into the smell of mixed vamp—almond, lily, and a tiny hint of rot.
Derek stayed with his back against the door and I sent him a quick, assessing look. He was staring down, frowning, thinking. He raised his hands and ran them over his buzzed scalp, his frown deepening. Eli and I went to the cages.
Ming-the-not-sane, not-Mearkanis, now technically just Ming Zoya, though she might not know that, was awake. She had been showered, cleaned up, fed a lot of blood, if her state of healing was any indication, and had been dressed in black silk, the kind of clothing her sister wore. She was curled up on a beanbag-type lounger, and, unlike her fellow caged vamp, Adrianna the nutso, Ming Zoya looked relatively coherent. Her black hair wasn’t yet silken and long, and her scalp showed through in some places, but her face had regrown flesh and she looked mostly human, if a lot older yet than her twin.
Adrianna was dressed in skinny jeans and a halter top, with ballet slippers and a gold chain necklace, and was snuggled down with a furry-looking blanket that reminded me of a bearskin but was synthetic. Her blue eyes crinkled with humor and she laughed when she saw us. It was perfect laughter for a horror movie where the bad guy was a basement-dwelling, serial-killer clown.
Ming said calmly, “She laughs because of the scents you carry. One of you is both cat and dog and human. She finds that amusing.”
Okay. That was interesting and unexpected. I asked, “You know what she’s thinking or has she been talking?”
“She has spoken to me, but the English words are confused and make little sense, except for the punishments she will mete out to one she calls Jane Yellow Rock. It is an odd name, and I thought it was confusion too, until you arrived to visit with me. You are she?”
I belatedly realized that I had been rude by vamp standards and dipped deep for some formal phrases that would fix things. “Forgive me.” That was always a good one to start out with. “I hadn’t expected to see Ming Zoya of Mearkanis Clan so healed and well. I’m Jane Yellowrock, Enforcer, along with Derek Lee”—I indicated the man at the door—“for Leo Pellissier, Blood Master of New Orleans and the greater Southeast, with the exception of Florida. And this is my business partner in Yellowrock Securities, Eli Younger.”
“Two humans in such positions of power?”
“We have our uses, ma’am,” Eli said, snark subdued but strong on his scent.
“There was no offense intended.”
Eli gave her a light nod. “No offense taken, ma’am.” A bald-faced lie.
Ming gifted him with a slight smile. “With the exception of Florida,” she quoted. “Leo has spread his borders.”
I thought about the current events Ming had missed out on. I wanted answers, so maybe a little chatty quid pro quo would grease the wheels of an info exchange. “The Master of the City of Atlanta, Lucas de Allyon, created a vampire plague and infected several small holdings across the United States, then took them over without proper Blood Challenge. He was securing and expanding his power base against the protocols of the Vampira Carta. He came to New Orleans and challenged Leo. His Enforcer and I fought and the challenger died. Then I killed Lucas de Allyon in combat when he attacked outside the protocols of the Vampira Carta. Leo freed the masters de Allyon had infected, and his lab found a cure, which he offered freely.”
Ming had watched me raptly as I spoke, her black eyes seeming calm and at rest, the way a kung fu master seems at rest just before he lops your head off with his bare hands. “Leo has never done anything for free,” she said. “Much has transpired since I was taken.”
“About that,” I said before she could come up with questions about her clan. “Do you know who took you? Who held you? And what they were doing with you? What happened?”
Ming’s lips turned up, but the expression never touched her eyes. “What do you know of my blood-servants, Benjamin and Riccard?”
So much for me steering the conversation.
Eli said, “My brother ran a search on them. They disappeared when you did.”
Ming’s face didn’t change, but her scent did. Sorrow. Grief. And what might be stoicism. “And my heir?”
And here we go with the clan stuff I was trying to avoid. “Your heir, Rafael Torrez, took over, aligned with a female vampire from Clan St. Martin.” I pointed at my archenemy. “He started practicing black magic with the Damours, and was taking part in a blood-magic ceremony with witch children to sacrifice. He died at the hands of two of his men.” I indicated Derek.
Ming inclined her head to show she had heard, her gaze on Adrianna. Her black eyes slowly, very, very slowly, vamped out. But her fangs were still up in her head, which meant she was in total control, far from what I had expected. Adrianna, however, vamped out fast and threw herself at the mesh that held her. Twisted steel mesh was a poor substitute for silver-plated steel, but it held her.
“I see,” Ming said. “Rafael betrayed our clan and turned against the Master of the City. With that one?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And you did not take her head?”
“I’ve killed her any number of times, including the time Rafe died, but Leo keeps bringing her back. Something about the European Vamps making a trip here soon. Or soon in vamp time. This century maybe.”
Ming went silent, letting that settle inside while she watched Adrianna, who might have been listening. With my peripheral vision, I saw the other vamp throw herself onto the beanbag and stretch like a cat, her eyes on my partner, trying to attract Eli’s attention, her fangs out and her boobs nearly so. Eli ignored her antics. Realizing that only Ming was actively watching her, Adrianna stuck out her tongue.
Ming said, “Rafael deserved his true-death. Leo and I will discuss the woman. If she bonded with my heir, who was then Blood Master of Clan Mearkanis, then she is mine to claim.” Which was news to me, but was probably covered in the Carta or one of its codicils.
“Rafael’s betrayal and death. How badly did they affect my clan?” Ming asked.
This was the sticky part, but I had a feeling that Ming Zoya had already guessed, just from my greeting to her, and was likely to prefer truth over anything else. Still, I spoke softly and with a grieving tone in my voice when I said, “A vampire war followed. Clan Mearkanis was disbanded following the conflict, as were three other clans who rebelled against Leo. Because it was believed that you were true-dead, your clan home was given to the witches in recompense for the Damour blood-family killing their children.”
Ming drew in a breath, things taking place in the darkness of her eyes—calculations and games and machinations and politics. She said, “This is of interest. I thank you for the candid responses, no matter how distressing the reception. My sister is overly concerned about my state of mind, and underconcerned about my need for information. Your words will be useful during my discussions with the Master of the City.”
Leo might be ticked off that I gave information to her, info that she might turn against him soon. Which made me smile. It was always a pleasure to frustrate the MOC.
Still watching Adrianna, Ming said, “The man who took me from my lair was known to me. His name was Antoine.”
I drew in a breath, slowly, between my teeth. Antoine. Antoine Busho, or other spellings. The magic user who had read me the first time I came to New Orleans. He was dead. But . . . Antoine . . . Pieces began to fall into place in my brain. Rick had said that Marlene was Antoine’s wife, way back when I met the magic user. And Antoine was part of Ming’s being taken, kidnapped, tortured. Part of the spell that erupted in my palm, the spell that started all this crazy crap. And Marlene was his wife. And Tau . . . Tau was his daughter. The daughter of a magic user who had trained in a form that made him smell like something other than a witch. A shaman of some kind, maybe.
Ming said, “He had once been a chef of some repute, but his use of opiates had brought him low. He owned a diner where Benjamin and Riccard, my favorite blood-servants, often dined. Antoine was a magic user, of island and African descent, though his scent did not speak of witch. Because Benjamin and Riccard trusted him”—the scent of grief from rose from her—“I trusted him. He broke that trust, entered my lair, and pierced me with the point of a brooch. He had the assistance of Rafael and two Mithrans I did not see, whose scent I did not know.”
The number of Mithrans, even in an over-vamp-populated city like NOLA, was fairly limited. But then, the helpful, betraying vamps might have been from Atlanta, paving the way for the attempted takeover. Or unaligned vamps from a backwater clan. Heck, it could be anyone, even Euro Vamps . . . Could they have started plotting and scheming so early on a visit? Easy answer: Yes. They lived for centuries. They connived with the long view in mind.
“The pin and the brooch were spelled,” Ming continued, her voice strong but her grief unabated, “and when he threaded the pin through my flesh, I became compliant like a human who tastes Mithran blood and is addicted from the first moment. He cut my flesh and sprayed my blood throughout my lair, and overturned the furniture that it might appear I was taken by force, though I was agreeable to anything from the first moment I wore it. Even being put in a pit in a swamp, I was docile.”
She looked up at me, her eyes still vamped out, empty of emotion, dark, cold, harsh. Scary as heck. “I do not know why I was taken or why I was kept alive, but I remember much, and more returns to me. Antoine drank from me and I was unable to cloud his mind while the pin of the spelled brooch was upon me. He asked me questions about the Pellissier clan and about Leo and about his son and I answered. I had no gift for beguilement while pierced by the brooch.”
She transferred her gaze to Eli and it was as if a fifty-pound weight had been taken off my shoulders. She might not have been able to mesmerize humans while she was pinned, but she did now. And she was using that gift. “Eli. Derek. Don’t look at her.”
Both men flinched, hesitated, and turned away. No argument. How cool was that?
Ming said, “You spoil my entertainment, woman who smells of cat and dog. You are a shape-shifter?”
It was my turn to flinch and hesitate. But my secret wasn’t exactly a secret anymore. And if she knew what I was by my scent, then she might have met another skinwalker before. “Yes. You know of my kind.” I made it a statement instead of a question, hoping she would elucidate.
Ming simply shrugged, which baited and hooked me. And she knew it. She was good at this. Without answering she went on. “The water had not risen in the pit at that time, and it was dry. Antoine gave me humans to drink upon, a different one each time. They were the homeless, the addicted, the outcast members of society. I drank and they were taken away. But—” Her dark eyes filled with tears, bloody and thin, and they ran in slow trails down her perfect skin. “Then he brought a stray animal. I did not wish to drink, but he commanded me. Every time he came he brought another one. I became sick. My blood dried up in my vessels. It was horrible, horrible, horrible.” She didn’t blink, didn’t move, and yet the tears ran in steady streams to drip off her cheeks and onto the black silk she wore.
“He fed me dogs. He made me drink from dogs . . . I had forgotten. The brooch let me forget. The brooch kept me mesmerized and drugged and . . . But I now remember. I remember.” Her tone said she was ready for vengeance, and she clenched her hands. She breathed, and it was a quaking breath, as if her lungs and throat wanted to collapse, and she breathed again, calming. “And then he vanished. Much . . . much . . . later, the girl came. She and another woman brought me two humans and chained them in the pit with me.
“I tried to be gentle with them, but it had been so long . . . I was so hungry . . . And the witch girl did not return for such a long time, long after I had drained the humans and killed them, after I ate their rotted flesh and sucked dry their bones.” Ming blinked and took a breath, exhaled. I smelled blood on her breath this time, the scent of Katie, the most powerful vampire in New Orleans, and the only other one I knew of who had eaten dead flesh and survived. Katie hadn’t been sane, even by vamp standards, in a long time, but she had kept her promise to feed Ming after she got here. Point to Katie.
“The girl drank from me then. But my mind was not true. I do not know why she drank or what she gained from my words or my blood, except that something in her changed with each taste of me.
“She left the dead in the pit with me. And I ate.” Ming closed her eyes. “Eventually she brought me more humans. One a month, on the full moon, when I was so starved that I had no control. These she threw in with me, into the water, where they thrashed and the stink of their fear was an aphrodisiac to me.
“I was mad. I drank as the Naturaleza drink, to the death. Of all of them. I killed.”
I said nothing. What could I say?
Ming’s unblinking eyes tracked to me. “I am free from Antoine. I drank from the girl, his daughter. Her magic was strong. Stronger than any I remember in all my life.”
Of course it was. Because Tau was the daughter of two witches, so she had a fifty percent chance of being a double-gened witch like Angie Baby. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. This explained why the spells she threw were so complex and powerful. Like Angie, she could likely craft with her mind, with a single thought, without the work and mathematics that other witches needed to craft a successful working.
Ming asked, “The witches. They are dead?”
“Antoine is. Tau, not yet, but soon. She no longer has the brooches and can’t trap another vampire. And I plan to . . .” Kill her? No. “To bring her to justice.”
Ming thought about that for a while, her eyes transferring again to Adrianna, who was lying back on the beanbag, her long legs up, feet propped on the mesh above her. Ming said, “You killed Antoine?”
“No. Leo’s son, Immanuel, killed him. And then I killed Immanuel.” Enough with the history lesson, I thought. “Would you recognize Tau and the other woman if I showed you photographs?”
Ming gave a single downward nod, and Eli held out his cell, with photos of the witches in question. On the screen were photos of Tau and Marlene Nicaud from social media. Ming turned away from Adrianna, and Ming’s blackened gaze fell on the cell screen. “Yes,” she said. Eli’s eyes flicked to me and back and he paged through the last ones. “Tau. And this one. Mother and daughter,” she said, her tone bitter. “They are the two who put humans in the pit with me. And to save myself, I killed the humans. Until then, I had never killed a human. Never.”
“Would you recognize her magics if you saw them again?”
“Her magics, her scent, her person. Yes, and forever. Why do you ask?”
“Your words have been most helpful,” Eli said.
“The trade was acceptable though dreadful, the memories harrowing,” Ming said. “But it was fair. My past is mine again, no matter how horrible. Go away. Find the girl. Bring her to Leo. You are dismissed.”
And for once I didn’t mind the send-off. I wanted out of there too.
The door thumped and sealed. I pulled my cell. Without telling Eli what I was doing, I called Bruiser. When he answered I said, “I need to see the pit. Can you arrange a helicopter to take Eli and me?” When he said yes, I added, “I’ll need to change into bloodhound form when we get there. I need to smell the pit.” I ended the call.
Eli said, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Me neither, but we need to know what the girl was up to. Her scent is . . . I don’t know. Not right. Too strong, too angry, too something. I smelled it last night, but it’s all mixed up in my human brain. I need to shift. I need to figure out what I figured out last night and then forgot when I shifted. And if she was drinking from a vampire, then she wanted the blood to give her power to do more than what we’ve seen so far.” My fear was that she wanted to be able to control people—humans, witches, and especially vamps, all vamps—without sticking them with a pin.
* * *
I had changed clothes in the locker room and was wearing loose, baggy workout pants and a sweatshirt that would have fit Wrassler. I knew that for certain, because the shirt smelled like him. The big guy had lent me his own shift to shift in, which made me smile inside and out.
My bare feet were cold in the helo, and the lack of coms was isolating but gave me time to think. I grew even more chilled when the copter set down. The rotors were still turning as Bruiser opened the side door and the chilly fall night air, filled with helo exhaust, swept inside. It was still dark, though the eastern horizon had grayed slightly when I stepped out onto the half-dried black mud of the landing site. The police were long gone, the scents telling me that they had left only recently, driving out of the Waddill Wildlife Refuge through the two-rut dirt road that bisected the property. The land smelled of swamp and frustrated humans and animals and birds. It also smelled of the Comite River, which flowed nearby.
Eli and Bruiser and I stepped into a metal johnboat and Bruiser shoved off, calling to the pilot, “Wait for us.”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot replied, lighting a cigar. Normally I loved the smell of cigar, but not with my nose so sensitive and the cigar so cheap. Ick.
Bruiser pulled the small engine’s recoil starter, and the sputter filled the night, along with more exhaust, and I sneezed to clear my head of the foul stinks. As he steered us slowly through the wet hell of swamp at night, the air quickly cleared, leaving the swamp stink, of fish, gators, rotting vegetation, and stagnant water. When he finally turned off the small motor and beached us, the sky was lighting.
I had to get this done fast or risk staying in dog form all day. Not gonna happen. I wasn’t going to endanger my memory and identity. Bruiser tied us off, and by prearrangement, he and Eli stepped off the boat, leaving me on it, silent, neither one arguing about my choice, which I appreciated.
I took up the fetish necklace and let myself drop into the meditative state that was easiest to shift from, trying to ignore the men’s soft voices talking. I dropped down and down, and found the snake in the heart of the marrow. The genetic material from the bloodhound whose bones and teeth had been donated to the fetish necklace. Her accidental death had allowed me to use her RNA and DNA to assume her shape.
It didn’t take nearly as long as it used to, to find the coiled snake of bloodhound genetic code. Suddenly I was wrapped in the Gray Between, my bones sliding and snapping and painpainpain like being flayed alive.
* * *
I stepped from the boat, putting my front paws on land, my nose so full of wonderful smells that I nearly fell into the water when the johnboat slid away from shore while my back paws were still on the boat seat. Stupid. I leaped the rest of the way and Bruiser slipped a leash around my neck, presumably so that he would have a way to pull me back if I accidentally went swamp-swimming.
He led me over mud-crusted, muddy, and some semidry ground, my big paws tripping over ruts and a two-liter cola bottle full of human urine. Fortunately it was sealed with the screw-on cap. Unfortunately other humans hadn’t been so kind and had relieved themselves behind trees, on bracken, and in the swamp water itself. The stink of human pee was everywhere.
I stopped and let the scents filter through my brain. There had been eight humans here, working up the crime scene. Seven were male, one was female. Each had his and her own particular scent pattern, and I was far better than I had been at differentiating them. I discovered that I could tell age range, race, health conditions, and that one of the men was sleeping with the woman. Dog noses were amazing.
Beneath the fresh scents were older ones, of Onorios and the humans who had helped to rescue Ming, all familiar from my Beast form. Some known intimately from my hound nose.
I opened my eyes and looked for Eli. I whined. As if able to read my mind even with me in dog shape, he reached into a thigh pocket of his cargo pants and removed a leather drawstring bag. He nursed the object inside to the lip of the bag without touching it, and dropped to his knees. I put my nose on the thing.
It smelled of iron, nitrocellulose, lead, lawn chemicals, magic and . . . the girl. I snuffled all over it, getting drool on it, but making sure I had the scent. I put my nose to the ground and began sniffing the patch of land in a grid pattern. My nose caught the scent instantly. She had been here. She been all over the site. But it had been a while.
I sniffed and learned and sniffed and . . . I understood. I froze, going as still as a vamp. Knowing. Knowing. I held the understanding inside me, my dog body still as a pointer, unmoving as the bits and pieces fell together. The scents filled my head, filled me. Filled everything and . . .
“Jane? It’s nearly dawn. You need to shift.”
I shook myself and whined. Looked up at man. At other man. Shook again, uncertain. Man held new scent pattern to my nose. I sniffed. Female, not Caucasian. Dog. Big-cat.
The part of me that was still Jane ripped aside the nose-suck and shoved the bloodhound away. I leaped to the side, ripping the leash out of Bruiser’s hand, and raced to the boat. I jumped into the johnboat, sending it waffling on the water. Bracing my paws out, keeping my balance, I realized that I was trembling with cold. Even with my dog coat.
I reached into the Gray Between.
* * *
I pulled the oversized sweats on me just as it started to rain. I was colder than I should have been, shivering, but I could worry about that later. “Y’all! I got it. And it’s bad!”
They scrambled into the boat and Bruiser started the engine with a single ripping jerk. Eli took one look at me and opened his gobag. He popped three hand warmers, tucked them under my arms and into my waistband, shook out a rain-shedding blanket, which he wrapped around me. “Thanks,” I said over the boat roar.
The warmth hit me fast and I huddled into the blanket, holding in the heat from the chemical packs. He also opened two Snickers bars and four energy bars, and I ate, not talking, thinking. I had to address the being-too-cold thing, but there were more important things to discuss, the moment we were airborne. This time, Bruiser gave me some excellent ear protectors attached to a headset and I realized that he and Eli had been chatting privately on the trip to the wildlife refuge, chatting and leaving me out. I could worry about that later, adding to the rather long list of things to deal with when my life became normal. Whatever normal was.
I swallowed the last of the Snickers without tasting the chocolate and nuts, and felt more stable as I started in on the energy bars. “I got the scent of the girl witch,” I said over the muted helo roar. “It was a mutating scent, fluctuating, morphing into something else.”
“You saying she was a skinwalker, babe?”
I wish. “No.” I looked at Bruiser. “She’s a lot more like an Onorio.”
Bruiser’s eyes met mine for a shocked heartbeat and jerked away, thoughts racing behind his eyes, the vision reminiscent of Ming’s eyes in her cage, too fast to follow. Even his scent was too fast to follow, and my nose was now spectacular by human norm.
“Bruiser?”
“Humans have attempted to become Onorio without a Mithran’s approval, holding the Mithran captive. It has never been successful. Mithrans eventually compel the human to free them and then the humans die. A witch, damping a Mithran’s ability to compel, attempting the same thing . . . If she had the formula . . . It might work. And she would be dangerous. Beyond dangerous.”
I said, “Add it to her being a homogeneous witch, one with two witch genes, one from her father and one from her mother, then things get kinda freaky. And this witch chick is freaky. Bad, sick, nutso, got her panties in a wad, wants to blow up the world, mad über-supervillain freaky.
“Worse,” I said. “Or maybe not worse but adding to the problem in ways I can’t describe, there are other scents. Ming. Iron and salt. Other humans. Two in particular, male, who might be distantly related to her. Cousins. Maybe. Something like that.”
I stuck my nose up and pulled in scents in with a scree of sound. “Problem. Put us down over there.” I pointed. Bruiser relayed my orders to the pilot and the helo banked hard enough to throw me into the seat belt. He turned on the landing lights to reveal a small islet with tire tracks across it. Trusting the tracks, he set the bird down gingerly.
I stayed in the helo, wrapped in the blanket and heated by the hand warmers, but the guys got out. It was light enough out to see that there were a lot of gator slides on the muddy banks. Gators push with legs and clawed feet through muck to the edge of a water source and then push off, letting gravity slide them into the water. The trails were long and slithery. And wide. Big gators. I sniffed. “Humans. There.” I pointed. “And dogs.” I wrapped myself more in the blanket and Bruiser and Eli stepped to the muddy edge.
“Skull,” Eli said, jutting with his chin because his hands were suddenly holding weapons. “There.”
“Another,” Bruiser said, pointing.
“I count three human skulls,” Eli said, “that one shattered, probably by gator teeth and jaws.” He took a number of photos of the crime scene. “Portions of several dog skulls. That one is fresh.” He pointed, and took a last photograph.
“Feeding her dogs wasn’t good enough. Tau wanted magic, and for that Ming needed human blood, I’m guessing at least once a month.”
“Why did she leave the first two humans and none of the other bodies?” Eli asked.
I gave him a small shrug, tilting my head to the side, the gesture mostly hidden by the enfolding blanket. “Smell? The first two were bones already and underwater.”
“And the new bodies floated while decomposing,” Bruiser said, “and the smell of decomposition was horrible to her. Good supposition.”
“Four on the surface,” Eli said. “Concur. Likely more bones in the muck at the bottom. Let’s go.”