Off the Grid

Author’s note: This story takes place just before Broken Soul. In it, you’ll meet Nell, who will be getting her own series! The first book, Blood of the Earth, will be published in August 2016.

I’d stayed in Charlotte for two days, overseeing the latest repairs on my bike, Bitsa. She was pretty well trashed, and she’d be a different bike when I got her back, very slightly chopped, with wider wheel fenders, and this time, no teal in the paint job. Jacob—the semiretired Harley restoration mechanic/Zen Harley priest living along the Catawba River, the guy who had created Bitsa in the first place using parts from two busted, rusted bikes I’d found in a junkyard—had shaken his head when I asked when the bike would be ready to ride to New Orleans. Bitsa had been crashed by a being made of light, and the damage was extensive. It sounded weird when I said it like that—a being of light—but my life had gotten pretty weird since I went to work for the Master of the City of New Orleans and the Greater Southeast, Leo Pellissier. Jacob had taken my money but refused to discuss the paint job, saying only that I’d love it. And then he’d plopped me on a loaner bike and shooed me out of his shop as if I were twelve.

I’d ridden the loaner before, a chopped bike named Fang, and though the balance on a chopper-style bike was different from the easy, familiar comfort of Bitsa, it hadn’t taken long to settle in for the ride to Asheville, where I’d hugged my godchildren, eaten at their mother’s café, and then hit the road for Knoxville, Tennessee. My visit north had been occasioned by a request from Knoxville’s top vamp, the Glass Clan blood-master, to try to solve some little problem she had reported to her up-line boss, Leo. Nothing urgent, but Leo was stroking his clan blood-masters’ egos a lot, now that the European Council vampires were planning a visit.

The ride had been great, the weather not too hot for spring, not rainy or cross-windy, but my cell phone battery hadn’t survived the trip across the mountains, roaming the whole way. I had no communications when I hit the town, and no way to find out contact info.

Without my map app, I had to ask directions, which was kinda old-school, and my badass-motorcycle-mama façade made the Starbucks clerk’s eyebrows rise in concern, but she knew her city, and I made it to the Glass Clan Home just after dusk. Not at dusk, which might be construed as an offer to be a breakfast snack for the fangy Glass vamps, but just after dusk, which in early summer meant nine p.m. I was entering the Clan Home without backup and without coms, with no one in New Orleans knowing I had arrived safely. I was acting in the capacity of the Enforcer of the NOLA MOC, which meant I’d arrive at the Glass Clan Home fully weaponed out, and I wouldn’t be giving up my guns, blades, or stakes to security guards at the door. I wasn’t expecting trouble, but I try to always be prepared. It was kinda the modus operandi of a rogue-vamp hunter turned vamp Enforcer for said MOC.

The house was off U.S. 70, not far from the Confederate Memorial Hall, and overlooking the Tennessee River. I’d Googled the house and seen it from above; it was maybe ten thousand square feet, with a six-car attached garage, a slate roof, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and what might have been a putting green. There was an outbuilding, probably a barn, a deduction made from the jump rings set up on the sculpted lawn. Lots of spreading oak trees shaded the heavily landscaped grounds.

The entrance to the address was gated, and I pulled off my helmet, presented ID, and tried to look both unthreatening and as though I could kill without a thought—a difficult combo—to the camera, before the gate rolled back on small, squeaky wheels. It was the perfect ambience for a visit to a bloodsucker. But the midlevel-grade security gate quickly became wood fencing and trailed off into the night, turning into barbed wire only yards out. No cameras followed the fencing, no motion monitors, nada, nothing. The security sucked unless there were armed human guards patrolling, working with dogs. I’d started out in security and I knew an antiquated system when I saw it.

My Beast liked the low-hanging limbs of the old oaks and sent me an image of her sprawled over one, waiting for deer, followed by another one of her swimming in the river, which I could smell close by. “Maybe later,” I muttered to her. “Business first.” Beast chuffed at me in disgust.

The drive was long and winding, concrete made to look like cobbles, and I could smell horses, a chlorinated pool, clay (maybe for the tennis courts), and the west-flowing river. It was a distinct scent, different from the raw power of the Mississippi by the time it reached New Orleans, different from the North Carolina rivers that flowed east. The Tennessee flowed west, toward the upper Mississippi, a snaky and slow flow, deceptive in its sluggish nature and far more powerful than it looked or smelled. The house the drive led to was an old renovated historical home, the original house made of dull brown river rock, added onto over the years with brick of a similar color.

I left my helmet on the bike seat, adjusted my weapons to be visible but not insulting, and climbed the steps to the front entrance. The door opened before I knocked, and the butler—an honest-to-God butler, wearing a dove gray tuxedo—showed me into the parlor, asked after my ride in, and offered me iced black tea with lemon or mint, which sounded great. I accepted the minty tea, and it appeared in about ten seconds, carried in on a silver tray by a maid, also in gray livery. The butler pointed to the guest restroom with the offer that I might freshen up, which I accepted. I carried the tea glass—draining it—into the powder room and washed up, put on bloodred lipstick, and smoothed my hip-length braid with spigot water. I also plugged in my cell to charge.

My summer riding clothes—jeans and a denim jacket—were sweaty from the day in the sun, and I would rather have showered, eaten, and taken a nap, or shifted to my Beast form and taken that swim in the river, than carry out all the posing and proper etiquette that the older vamps expected, but I didn’t have that choice. Leo’s primo had made the appointment, and I liked my paycheck. Back in the parlor, I settled on a comfy leather chair, in a room with as much square footage as the entire first floor in my house. It had high ceilings, attic fans, modern furniture—all leather, of course. Vamps had a thing for dead skin. I rolled my empty glass between my palms, patient as my stalking big-cat.

Blood-Master Glass didn’t keep me waiting, but her entrance was calculated. I caught movement from the corner of my eye as she walked slowly into the room, with a black-suited human and the butler behind her, the servant carrying another tray with more tea glasses, a pitcher, and tiny sandwiches that smelled like cucumber. Taking them all in with a sweeping look, I set the glass down on the coaster that had been provided and stood.

My Beast moved into the front of my brain and peeked out of my eyes, evaluating the blood-master by sight and smell.

The blood-master was elegant, petite, and of Asian descent, with almond-shaped eyes of a peculiar dark honey hue, black hair worn long but up on the sides in a fancy ’do that probably took a personal servant or two to create, and pale, smooth skin the color of ivory. She was wearing a silk gown of gold and black brocade with touches of crimson embroidery—golden dragons cavorting on a black background that suggested rugged hills, the dragons spitting red fire. Vamps were partial to that particular shade of bloodred. And they liked rubies. Glass was wearing one the size of a robin’s egg on a gold chain around her neck.

The butler set the tray on the table in front of me and said, “The Glass Clan blood-master, Ming Zhane.” Technically, Ming should have changed her last name to Glass when she defeated the clan founder about a hundred years ago, but Ming wasn’t one for abiding by the rules unless they suited her, according to her dossier. Yeah. I had dossiers on most of the vamps in Leo’s hunting territories. My team stayed busy.

The butler withdrew after pouring tea into two glasses and refilling my own. The other human stood to the side and I figured that meant it was time for the fancy chitchat. I nodded, a sort of half bow, and introduced myself. “The Enforcer of Leonard Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans and the Greater Southeast, Jane Yellowrock, at your command, ma’am.”

She smiled, looking pretty much human, except for the paleness, and the thin lines along her eyes contributed to the human appearance. They looked like stress lines, which was odd. Vamps didn’t feel or show stress. Mindless insanity, blood thirst, and a tendency to kill anything that moved, yes. Stress, no.

Ming moved closer and breathed in my scent. Her nose wrinkled as she smelled the predator in me. I had discovered that all vamps could smell the danger that I presented, and until the blood-master of a clan or a city approved of me, they all had a tendency to react with violence. Leo was Ming’s up-line boss, but he was far away, and that meant she was top dog here. It was hard not to pull away with her so close, but I held still as she sniffed again. “Your scent is not unpleasing, and the photos in your dossier and on your Internet page do not do you justice,” Ming said. “You are most lovely.”

“I’m just the Enforcer, ma’am. I’m not paid to be pretty.” Her eyes darkened and instantly I knew I’d miscalculated, so I said quickly, “But you’re thoughtful and . . . uh . . . courteous to say so. Your kind of beauty is something I’ll never achieve.” Which was all true. She was a stunner. Ming looked a little mollified, so I revised a line Alex had written into her dossier, and piled it on a little more thick. “Your photos show elegance and loveliness, and your personal presence suggests a powerful magic.” Yeah. I was getting pretty good at blowing smoke up vamps’ backsides, what they called gracious conversation, and I called a load of bull hockey. But not to their faces.

She tilted her head, one of those minuscule, wrong-angled-move gestures vamps can do, and I figured I was out of the woods as to protocol. She indicated with a wave of her hand that I should sit, and weirdly, her fingers trembled just a hint. Vamps didn’t tremble either. Ming took the wingback chair beside mine and folded her hands in her lap. The human stood beside her, watching my every move. Ming said, “The master of New Orleans is kind to send assistance in this, our time of need.”

“Yes, ma’am. Blood-Master Pellissier is eager to assist all those loyal to him.” As I said, smoke up her backside, though my words were still true. Leo was a good master, as far as a bloodsucking-ruler-over-all-he-surveyed type of loyalty went. “How can the Enforcer assist the Glass blood-master and her Mithrans?”

The human in the black suit reached into his jacket at chest level, and I tensed. He stopped the action instantly and then continued, much more slowly. This was Ming’s primo, Asian, slender, and deadly. Very, very deadly in a martial arts kinda way. As if he could break me into tiny little pieces with his fingertips, a hard look, and a toothpick before I could blink. “A Mithran has gone missing,” he said. “She was last seen with this person.” The man—Cai, no last name, or maybe no first name, I wasn’t sure—pulled out two sheaves of papers, not a weapon, and placed them on the small table between Ming and me.

I lifted one batch of pages and saw the photo of an old man, maybe in his seventies, with sun-lined skin, sun spots, raised and rough age spots, kinda brown and freckled all over. Faded blue eyes. He was mostly bald. A narrow-eyed, mean-looking man, the kind who was raised on whuppin’s, hardtack, and moonshine, and who hated the world. I flipped through the three attached pages. The info said his name was Colonel Ernest Jackson, but there was no mention of military service in the scant record.

The second file showed a digital photo of the vamp in question, Heyda Cohen. She was tiny and very beautiful. Vamps offered people the change for lots of reasons, and personal beauty was high on the list. But Heyda’s intelligent, piercing eyes suggested that she was special in other ways as well.

“Heyda was in charge of my personal security and she was contacted by that human man”—Ming pointed at his photo—“a communication that carried a threat to me. She tracked him.” Ming’s speech, accented by her native Asian language, sped up and her syntax grew more fractured. “Then she met with that human and three of his followers. In a park. In the city. Then she went away with him. Without contacting us or alerting her support team, who were waiting in the park, watching. They allowed her to leave, as she did not appear distressed. We do not know why she left with him. She did not come home afterward.” Suddenly Ming was all but wringing her hands, leaning toward me in her chair, shoulders tense. “The man refuses to see us. Refuses to allow us to see her. He hides in his compound and . . .” She glanced up at her primo, and her face crumpled. Her shoulders went up high, and Cai placed a hand on one in tender concern.

I had to wonder why this had been reported as a minor problem, and not the urgent one that a kidnapping represented. Especially the kidnapping of a head of clan security. When I asked that question, Cai said, “Heyda gave us no signal that she was in danger. She often worked with the human community to forge ties. We assumed that was what she was doing. But she didn’t return. She didn’t contact us. That is not like her.”

“In this day and age,” Ming said, “one with cameras and detection devices, there are many places we dare not enter. We are not allowed to protect our own.” Ming’s eyes bled slowly black, her sclera going scarlet, but her fangs remained up in her mouth on their little bone hinges. It was a demonstration of intent and control. “Heyda must be returned to us. Or avenged. If they have made her true-dead, I will drink them all down. Humans go too far in this modern time.”

All righty, then. “Did Heyda’s team video the meet? Do you have an idea where she might have been taken?”

“Yes,” Cai said. “We have gathered all video and intelligence related to this situation. The compound’s security is tight, using cameras, guards, and patrolling dogs. And we smell silver in their weapons. We could raid the compound, but my people smell explosives in addition to the other weapons and measures. My master is disturbed.”

I focused on the word making the most impact. “Compound?”

“That human male has land,” Ming said. “It has been in his family for longer than I have been blood-master. He calls his holdings a church, but it is not. It is something else.”

I looked my question at the primo. Cai was standing with his hands loose at his sides, and he shrugged slightly. “They claim the right of religious freedom, but their women are not free to choose.”

“Ah. A cult,” I said, cold starting to seep into my bones as I began putting this together. It had FUBAR written all over it.

“Yes,” Cai said.

A powerful vamp in the hands of a cult likely meant they’d drain her, starve her, torture her, and eventually stake her. And until they finished her off, they would have access to her blood to make them stronger, healthier, and longer-lived, blood that would heal any of their sick. They also would become addicted to the effect of vamp blood on their systems, but people are inherently stupid about addictive substances. The kidnappers—if that was what they were—had to know that the vamps would come after her. So someone in the compound had a reason to drink vamp blood—an important human was sick or dying. Or it was a trap. Either one was a problem. Oh goody.

“I’ll need everything you have on the cult—the grounds, any legal problems, legal names and AKAs, everything. All electronic info. Anything in paper form needs to be scanned and sent.” I handed Cai a card. “This is my electronic specialist’s contact info. He’ll be collaborating with us on intel. For now, I’ll let him work with you and anyone else we need to talk to. And I’d like to see Heyda’s rooms.”

“Of course,” Ming said. “When will you attack? It must be before dawn.”

“Not tonight.”

“Tonight!” Ming shouted, her fangs dropping down with little snicks of sound, her hands clenched on the chair arms, her talons shining in the lamplight and piercing the expensive leather. She was completely vamped-out, that fast. Ming looked fragile, but vamps are freaky strong. I didn’t want to have to stake her to save my life only to have Cai kill me later. And probably a lot slower. So I sat still, unmoving, my eyes on Cai, not running like prey, or fighting like a contender for territory. Not focusing on Ming; keeping my eyes averted. But the hand by my thigh was holding a silver stake. I’m not stupid.

Moving slowly, as if he were reaching out to a wild animal, Cai placed a hand on Ming’s shoulder again, the gesture a soothing caress. He said something in Chinese. Mandarin was their first language, according to Ming’s dossier. Ming turned away, hunching in on herself. It looked as though she fought for control.

Her primo said softly, “Heyda has been in their hands for four days and four nights. We fear for her.”

“I understand. But I have to know where to place troops, where all the entrances are, and where they might be hiding explosives. The situation was never expressed to me as urgent or an imminent danger, and I don’t have my tactics guy here. Alex is the next best bet. He’s good at finding out things others can’t, so I need his intel or the rescue team might trigger an explosion that will kill them or the hostage.”

“Her name is Heyda. Not hostage,” Ming said, her back still turned.

“I know. I’m trying to get Heyda back to you in one piece. I’ll get back to you before dawn with an update.”

“Quarters have been arranged here for you,” Ming said.

“Thank you for that consideration, but the Master of the City of New Orleans has booked rooms for me uptown.” No way was I staying under a vamp roof, where there might be collaborators in the kidnapping, or vamps wanting to try skinwalker blood. Or a blood-master on edge. No freaking way.

“As you wish.” Ming, again looking mostly human, turned her face to me and stood. I stood just as fast. Protocol and all that. The butler appeared at the entrance to the parlor like some kind of magic trick—gone one moment, present the next. “I expect a report before dawn. You are dismissed.”

Yeah. Right. I gathered up the papers and followed the butler to Heyda’s rooms, which I searched as well as I was able, getting Cai to take photos of everything and send them to Alex with a text telling him I had arrived and was okay. Before I left, I removed Heyda’s pillowcase from her pillow and took it with me. I might need a scent item to track her and wanted to be ready. I grabbed my cell on the way out, happy to be back in communication with my team.

•   •   •

With the cell battery at least partially charged, I called the Kid back home. The Younger brothers were frantic, and I spent the ride to my hotel updating them.

By the time I got checked into the suite—one of those corner rooms with windows on both outer walls, all with a view, a sitting area, a king-sized bed, a desk with computer access, and a fridge—it was two a.m. and I was exhausted. To wake up enough to function, I took a fast, frigid shower, dressed in the clean jeans and T-shirt I had carried up from Fang’s saddlebags, and made my way to the business lounge. Access to that department was quickly facilitated by the hotel night manager, who let me into the computer room for a number of twenties. In the short elapsed time, Alex had gathered more info to add to what we knew. A lot more.

•   •   •

A cup of double-strong black tea on the desk beside me, I opened up the file compiled by Alex and read the summary he had prepared. Colonel Ernest Jackson was a third-generation cult member, grandson of the founder of God’s Cloud of Glory Church, a backwoods religious cult of polygamists who lived on three hundred acres of hillside property not far from Beaver Ridge, which sounded appropriate for the cult in so many ways.

God’s Cloud had a recent batch of problems, however, with papers filed against them by the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services and the Department of Human Services for human trafficking and child endangerment. Reports suggested that they married off their female children long before they were women. Two days prior to Heyda’s being abducted, there had been an attempted raid on the complex, but the church had clearly been alerted to the law enforcement plans, because by the time the LEOs got there, the access roads to the compound had been barricaded with recently felled trees and booby-trapped with nails, scrap iron, and rolls of rusted barbed wire. The social services types and the cops hadn’t exactly gone home with their tails between their legs, but they were stymied at the front gates of the church compound. It was looking like a combo of Ruby Ridge and the Nevada Showdown.

I had to wonder how the colonel and his pals had gotten off the property to kidnap Heyda and then gotten back in without a law enforcement incident. I made a note to look for hidden entries. Cave passages, maybe? There were lots of caves in the hills of Knoxville. Maybe an undocumented cave accessed the property.

Satellite maps and topographical maps of the area showed ridges of hills running through Knox County vaguely north and south and making a long curve, like a fishhook. It looked like a fault line, but nothing in the maps said so. The rivers ran between the folds of hills with large flatlands between. Tax records indicated that some areas of the hills were affluent, some much less so. I pored over the topo maps, water table maps, survey maps, and photocopied maps from the 1950s and ’60s that still revealed logging roads, farm roads, and other access points not on current maps. The satellite maps of the church lands showed buildings, outbuildings, barns, places where large earth-moving projects had been initiated and later finished, and foundations where new buildings were being started. But the most recent sat maps were six months old and there was no telling what was happening there now.

While Beast slept in the back of my mind, bored, I sent texts to Eli, Alex’s former Army Ranger brother, the tactics and strategy part of our three-person team. I needed him to give me an opinion on the best way into the compound, the most likely location of the missing vamp—anything that looked like a prison or holding cell—and then the best way out.

I got back a single sentence from Eli. This intel sucks.

“Yeah,” I muttered to the empty, quiet room. “It does.”

Still with no plan, I started in on the current legal charges filed by the state of Tennessee. That part of the research was mind-numbing, and meant more extra-strong tea. Lots more. The charges were scary, and if true, meant that the so-called Christians treated their womenfolk no better than the Taliban treated theirs.

Close to dawn, I spotted two names that could mean assistance in my quest. John Ingram and his wife, Nell, had left the church and moved to the other side of the ridge some years past. Outcast or reformed, I didn’t know, but people who had former ties with cults could provide helpful suggestions. So could access to their property, one hundred fifty acres that shared a narrow border with God’s Cloud’s church property. “Oh yeah,” I said to the silent room. “Oooooh yeah.” I sent the couple’s names to Alex for a full workup, and a text to Eli to look at the boundary of the two properties as possible access points.

I was back at the Clan Home half an hour before dawn, made my report, and then rode Fang into the rising sun and back to the hotel, where I sacked out for four hours of desperately needed sleep.

•   •   •

Unfortunately, when I woke, it was to learn that John Ingram had died several years before, and that his young widow had no high school diploma, no GED, no telephone, no cell phone recorded under her name, no computer, and a dozen guns registered to her. She used wood, solar, and wind to power her meager needs, and her house had a well and a septic tank. She had a driver’s license, and paid insurance on an old Chevy truck. Nell lived off the grid. In other words, Nell was a recluse. The only thing she did have was a very active library card. She might be a hermit, but Nell was an eclectically self-educated hermit who had library books checked out on varied subjects, and the books were checked out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Every week. For the last five years.

Nell studied herbs, plants, farming, carpentry, electric wiring, remodeling, world and U.S. history, business mathematics, banking, religious history, and philosophy. Currently she had five books checked out: Philosophy for Beginners, written by Osborne and illustrated by Edney; Solar Power for Your Home, by David Findley; A History of the Church in the Middle Ages, by Donald Logan; Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English; and a trilogy of contemporary romances by Nora Roberts. There were a dozen different music CDs and two DVDs checked out, one a chick flick and the other a techno-disaster thriller. Yeah. Eclectic. But it was Wednesday. And according to the library checkout timetable, which Alex had easily hacked, Nell Ingram always left the library at two p.m.

I packed up and took off on Fang, most of my weapons left in the hotel room so I didn’t scare anyone. My cell was fully charged, and I felt as though I was part of the world again. Being so cut off had been creepy. I had no idea when a cell phone had become part of my security blanket, along with the blades, stakes, and guns, but it had.

•   •   •

Knox County’s main library was called the Lawson-McGhee Public Library, located on the corner of West Church Avenue and Walnut Street, with a little public park behind it, and public parking close by, where I left Fang, two spaces down from Nell’s beat-up but scrupulously clean pickup truck, which I confirmed by her license plate number. Security was so much easier in the modern day, with access to so many public records protected by such poor security.

I wandered around the block, scoping out the neighborhood, which had churches, public buildings, trees, and clean streets, and decided the location was pretty, even if the library itself wasn’t. The building looked like something out of the seventies, bulky and blocky. It was built of nondescript brown brick, had few windows, a few emergency exits that sounded an alarm when opened, and no security cameras on the exterior.

As I approached the front entrance, I saw two homeless, bearded guys sitting on the front steps, being rousted by a cop. They needed showers and access to washing machines, but looked as though they preferred to sleep out under the night sky, weather permitting, or in a tent, rather than in a house. One of the guys had dozens of military patches on his old jacket, and the other had only one arm, no prosthesis, and stood with a hard lean to one side, as if he lived with pain.

Just on the off chance that the men were really U.S. veterans, I gave them each a twenty to get a decent meal. Maybe they’d spend it on cheap wine, but how they used my gift wasn’t something I could control. Mostly I just wanted to say thank you for their service, and say it loud enough to remind the cop of that gift. When the homeless men took off, they were happy, the cop was thoughtful, and I was, well, I was still me, a two-souled Cherokee skinwalker who—at least now—had constant Internet access. But I was in a city I barely knew from previous security jobs, not well enough to rescue a kidnapped vamp. I had no backup, a thought that once would never have crossed my mind but now seemed acutely important. I liked working with the Youngers. I missed working with them, and hated that they were so far away.

I felt the magic the moment I walked inside the library. It wasn’t powerful or deadly like the magic of Molly, my best friend and the mother of the aforementioned godchildren, or cold like most vamps’ magic. At first, this energy had no taste, no smell, and there was nothing I could see, unlike the glowing motes of witch power and the gray place of the change of my own magic. Yet I could sense it on the air, as if it danced across my skin, testing me, trying to get an impression of what I was. I stepped to the side of the entry and worked to exude calm as I studied the place, searching out the person who emitted the odd sensation, and trying to discern what I was really feeling.

I drew on my Beast’s senses. She was awake, deep inside me, alert from the joy of riding Fang through the city. She loved riding a motorcycle, the wind in my/our face, the sights flashing by, the smells that reminded her of home, of the mountain world that we had left behind for the contract in NOLA. It had been supposed to be a short gig, but it had blossomed into a lot more. I opened my lips and drew in the air, the synesthesia-like feeling I rarely experienced reaching up and taking hold of me.

The magic was faint but not weak, a green gold with an edge of smoky charcoal gray. It smelled like sunlight on leaves in old-forest woods, and like the fire that would raze it to the ground, the scent indistinct and dampened, as if reined in. No human alive could have followed such a scent, but I had Beast’s senses to draw on, and I had also been a bloodhound a time or two. When I had shifted back to human, I was pretty sure that my Beast had hung on to some of the olfactory senses bred into the tracking dog’s DNA. I located the scent trail and walked along it.

Knox County’s main public library had books, a video department, an audio department, and, like any modern library, it also had a room of loaner PCs, which was where the scent originated. I followed it through the library to the computer room, where old-fashioned PCs were kept for public use. The magic was coming from the far corner, from a girl hunched over the screen, her fingers flying over the keyboard as she searched the Internet. I settled into a chair within line of sight of her but from behind, and not close enough so that she’d see me unless she was hunting me. I logged on, watching her from a safe distance. I had only an old driver’s license photo to go by, but I thought that this, this mousy little thing, this unregistered magic user, could possibly be Nell Nicholson Ingram. How ’bout that?

Something about her scent was teasing forward in my memory, my ancient, less-than-half-recalled Cherokee memory from a childhood so far in the past that no one alive today could remember. Well, except for the undead, who lived forever if they weren’t staked or beheaded. But there was something I couldn’t place in that scent memory. At least not yet.

The girl had brown hair, straight and long, tanned skin, slight rings of dirt deep under her fingernails, though she smelled and looked clean. She wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, bibbed overalls (what they once called hog washers), and lace-up work boots. But the clothes weren’t a fashion statement. More as if they were what she wore because she had to, as if she was too poor to afford anything else. She could be a farmer. Or work in a greenhouse, or for a landscape company, off the books, as there was no record of that on her meager tax forms. She was a woman who put her hands in the soil.

Her magic almost had an earth-witch smell to it, but it felt different. Very different. It wasn’t something I could put into words, but the difference pricked my skin. She was slight but wiry, muscular but not in a bodybuilder way, more as though she did hard physical labor. And she looked hyperalert, as if she stayed on edge, as though she was always in jeopardy. There was a slight scent of adrenaline in the air, tinged with worry. But she didn’t seem afraid, not exactly. Just tense and vigilant. I managed to snap a photo with my cell.

She whipped up her head and looked around the room, eyes narrow, mouth firm. It was indeed Nell Ingram—older, harder, but her. I bent to the screen, typing in my e-mail addy and sending notification to the Youngers that I’d found Nell. Bent over, I looked involved and unaware of anything around me, while I kept her in my peripheral vision, smelling, knowing that fight-or-flight impulse she was feeling.

After several minutes of indecision, Nell went back to her screen, and I was cautious about centering my attention on her again. Her magic was peculiar, but it clearly had a sensory net of spatial awareness, an ability to tell when she was being studied or hunted. My Beast had the same awareness. Most wild things did.

As I keyed in my e-mail, I kept half an eye on the girl, my mind working on the scent memory. The word came to me slowly, the Tsalagi syllables sounding in my mind, whispery and slow. Yi-ne-hi. Or maybe yv-wi tsv-di. Or a-ma-yi-ne-hi. Fairies, dwarves, the little people, or in her case, maybe wood nymphs would be closer. Mixed with human. Mostly human. Fairies in Cherokee folklore weren’t evil, just private and elusive, and sometimes tricksters, but this girl didn’t look tricky. Just wary. But the magic was woodsy, like the fey, the little folk. In American tribal lore, only the Cherokee had fairies and little people, possibly from the British who intermarried among them for so many centuries.

•   •   •

When it looked as though she’d be there awhile, I did a quick search for places to buy personal things I hadn’t brought, like ammo, new underwear, and combat boots. I also found several barbecue restaurants. I had eaten on the run since my lunch in Asheville at Seven Sassy Sisters’ Café, and I needed a good, meaty meal.

Just before two p.m. the girl finished with her research. I closed down my browser and watched her leave the room, then quickly took my place at her computer and looked into the Internet search history. It was an invasion of privacy, but I was intrigued. Nell had spent a lot of time on just four sites, one on a legal case against a polygamist cult out West, one on a site where unusual herbs could be ordered in dried or seed form, one on herbal antibiotics, and one on Greek history, specifically the god Apollo and how similar stories were prevalent in many ancient people’s mythology. I logged off and left the library, following Nell’s scent trail.

She had lingered at the checkout desk and left through the main doors, turning onto Walnut, crossing the street to walk on the far side, away from the unattended police unit parked on the street in designated parking. Then she had crossed back over the street and into the tiny parklike area, where she stood with her back against a tree. Watching for me.

“Busted,” I murmured, pulling my cell. I hit a button, then set it in my T-shirt pocket, where it stuck up above the fabric, videoing everything as I cautiously approached her.

Nell gave me half a smile and slid her hand from behind her. She was holding a small snub-nosed .32. “So busted,” she said back. She had heard me, which was really strange. Even witches didn’t have preternatural hearing. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will,” she said, a faint eastern Tennessee twang in her words. “Then toss you in the back of my truck, cover you with a tarp, drive slowly out of the city and into the woods, and bury you.”

“You do that a lot?” I asked.

She smiled, and I had the uncanny feeling that she had, indeed, disposed of bodies before. This girl—this woman—was way more than she seemed. Way more than her scant records had indicated. “Who are you?” she asked, sliding the weapon back beside her leg.

“Jane Yellowrock. I’m—”

“The vampire hunter whore who has sex with the vampire Leo Pellissier in New Orleans.” She pronounced it Pely-ser, but I wasn’t going to correct her pronunciation.

“I don’t sleep with fangheads,” I said, unexpectedly stung by the whore accusation. “I do take their money when the hunt is justified, and I do provide security when they pay for it.”

“So. Just a whore of a different kind.”

And that made me mad. I took a step closer and she lifted the weapon again, a hard twist to her lips. “Remember that burial in a remote place.”

“I remember. So let’s talk about the philosophy of whoredom. All people provide services for money. You look like a farmer. You sell jelly and honey and preserves and fresh tomatoes and eggs and veggies to the tourists?” She gave me a scant nod, her long hair moving beside her narrow face. “What does that make you?” I asked. “A vegetable whore?”

She giggled through her nose. The sound was so unexpected that she stopped midgiggle, her eyes going wide. It looked as though Nell Ingram had forgotten how her laugh sounded. Which had to suck.

“I’m here to find a missing Mithran,” I said. “What you call a vampire. She disappeared with the leader of God’s Cloud of Glory Church, a man who calls himself Colonel Ernest Jackson. He walked her to his car and drove off with her. This was four, no, five, nights ago. No one has heard from her since.”

Nell’s face paled beneath her tan in what looked like shock. “Then she’s dead,” she said baldly. “Or been passed around so much she wants to be dead.”

I lifted my head. “I’m going in after her. I need your help.”

Nell lifted the .32 again and backed slowly to her truck, opened the door, checked the interior with a swift rake of her eyes, and climbed in. She switched the gun to a left-hand grip, which looked rock solid, the weapon still aimed at my midsection, as though she practiced with both hands, for, well, for moments like now. She started the truck and backed slowly out of the parking spot and pulled down the road. I smelled fear on the air. Nell Ingram was terrified.

I didn’t move, just watched her go. Then I pulled my cell and asked, “You got that?”

“I got it,” Alex said. “I want to marry her. There’s nothing so sexy as a woman who knows how to use a gun, and can hold off a skinwalker with a hard look and a, what was that? A thirty-eight?”

My mouth twisted in grim humor. “Worse. A thirty-two.”

“She took you with a thirty-two?” he said, appalled and laughing all at once. “I am totally in love.”

“Shut up, Alex. I’m going to follow her home.”

“Copy that. Restore the cell to video when you get there so we have a record.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I closed the cell’s Kevlar-protected cover and straddled Fang. I turned the key that started the bike, which was one reason why I wouldn’t buy it. Key starts were totally wussy. I rode a Harley, and a real Harley had that kick start. That’s all there was to it. Not that my opinion was shared by many, but it was mine and I was sticking to it.

•   •   •

Long miles of city driving and then country roads followed. I stayed out of her rearview, following by scent patterns and dead reckoning. All the way to Nell Ingram’s farm.

I turned off the curving road that switchbacked up the low mountain, or high hill, into the one-lane entrance of a dirt drive, and over a narrow bridge spanning a deep ditch sculpted to carry runoff. The mailbox had no name, only a number, 196, Nell’s address on her tax records. I keyed off the bike, rolling Fang behind a tree, where it would be hard to see from the road. The driveway angled back down and curved out of sight through trees that looked as though they had somehow escaped the mass deforestation of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. The trees were colossal. Healthy. Some trees were bigger than three people could have wrapped their arms around. Farther down the drive and up the hill were even bigger trees. The leaf canopies merged high overhead, blocking out the sunlight and creating deep shadows that seemed to crawl across the ground as sunlight tried to filter through, just enough to make a bower for ferns and mosses and shade-loving plants. High overhead, the leaves rustled in a breeze I didn’t feel, standing so far below.

I had no idea why, but goose bumps rose on my arms and traveled down my legs, in a sensation like someone walking over my grave, a saying used by one of my housemothers at the Christian children’s home where I was raised. Creepy but not for any obvious reason. Standing behind the tree, I turned slowly around, taking in the hillside with all my senses. On the breeze I smelled rabbit, deer, turkey, dozens of bird varieties, black bear, early berries, late spring flowers, green tomatoes, herbs, okra buds, and bean plants, plants I remembered from the farm at the children’s home and from Molly’s garden. But there was that slightly different something on the breeze that made my unease increase. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. For no reason at all.

I had no cell signal, but I texted Alex to look at every sat map he could find and study the land and the mountain, a message that might get to him now but would certainly reach him the next time I was near a tower. I had a feeling that there was something hidden here, like a place of power, a terminal line, or some place that was holy to the tribal Americans. Some place I should see while I was here, though that was outside of my job.

In the distance, the sound of Nell’s truck went silent, leaving the air still and . . . and empty. No motors, no traffic, nothing sounded as the roar of the truck faded. I could have been transported back a hundred years or more. No cars, tractors, no airplanes overhead. As the silence deepened, birds began to call, a turkey buzzard soared on rising thermals. Dogs barked somewhere close, the happy welcoming sound of well-loved pets. I liked this place. My Beast liked this place.

Want to shift and hunt, she thought at me. Many deer are here, big and strong and fast.

When the vamp is safe, I thought back.

She sniffed, and I was pretty sure it was meant to be sarcastic. Vampires are good hunters.

I thought about that for a moment. They were, weren’t they? So what was Heyda hunting for when she let herself be taken prisoner without a fight? Or . . . what was she protecting? Or whom? I texted that question to Alex too.

The wind changed, and I smelled a human. Male. Wearing cologne to cover up the day’s sweat. He wasn’t close, and so I closed my eyes, letting the wind tell me where he was.

The topo maps of Nell’s property showed a ridge of rock on the other side of the road, just beyond her land. A likely hiding place for a deer hunter, except the season was wrong and only an idiot hunter would wear cologne that his prey could smell. Unless his prey was Nell.

Slipping into the trees, I moved into the deep shadows. It felt stupid, but the woods seemed to welcome me, until, as I moved away from Nell’s property, the trees became smaller, younger, maybe thirty or forty years old, and the feeling disappeared.

I’m not as silent when walking in human form as I am when walking in my four-footed Beast form, but I got close enough for my phone to manage a few photos. A man in camo was sitting in a deer stand, but he wasn’t holding a rifle. He was holding binoculars, and he was aiming them down Nell’s drive. Watching Nell’s house. The deer stand was off Nell’s property, near the juncture where her land met the church’s property and two other parcels of land. Was he protecting her? I had a feeling not, but I’d been wrong before. Weird stuff happened all the time. I moved closer through the brush, placing my feet silently among the leaves left from the previous autumn. I got a better scent, a head and lung full of the man and his feelings, emotions that emanated from his pores. Beneath the cologne, he smelled sweaty, angry, and something else, something I couldn’t quite name. I drew in the air again and this time the pheromones and scent chemicals found their way into my brain. If vicious had an odor, this was it. And possessive. That too.

I sent a third text to the Kid asking who owned the adjoining parcels of land, and to see if he could get driver’s license photos of the owners and their kids. Satisfied that I had done all I could for now, short of assaulting and then interrogating the spy, I eased away, back to Nell’s driveway and down the two-rut gravel lane, keeping to the shadows and angling in on the tree line.

As I walked, I felt the faintest of tingles through my boot soles, a magic permeating the ground. It came in waves, like the ocean onto the shore at low tide, a surge, rising and falling away. I figured only a witch or someone like me could sense it, but it was there, a low thrum of power and scent. It got stronger as I neared the opening in the trees ahead, a low rolling yard of maybe three acres.

The house was in the center of the acreage, set at an angle to the drive, showing the front and one side, and providing a glimpse of the rear corner. It was a ranch-style post-and-beam construction with wide-plank siding painted a fading green, white trim on the window and door frames, and dormers in the high-pitched front roof. It had a long front porch with rockers and a swing, the chain rusted. The house had been situated to take advantage of the view, the undulating hills and the distant vista of city buildings. The back porch was screened and narrow.

The acre-sized garden at the side of the house was fenced with chicken wire to keep out the rabbits and the deer. Even this early in the growing season, there were plants standing tall, flowering, and promising bounty. The lawn had been recently cut, the grass thick and green. I turned on my cell to record video again.

Three dogs announced me, barking like fools, according to Beast, but I had a feeling that Nell had known I was on her land anyway. I was still fifty feet from the house when she stepped from the front door, a shotgun aimed my way. “If it ain’t Miss Busted.” She sounded a lot more poised than most twenty-two-year-old women.

Her dogs caught my scent. As one, their tails dropped and they spread out from her feet, a semicircle of intent and threat. I could hear them growling, that low throaty sound that said I was about to be attacked.

“Yeah,” I said, holding my hands out to the side to show I wasn’t holding weapons. “Sorry to intrude.”

“Liar.”

I thought about that. She was right. I wasn’t sorry to intrude. I’d done it on purpose. “You know you got a guy in a deer stand up the hill”—I thumbed the direction—“watching your place?”

“He ain’t on my land, so I don’t care. If he comes onto my land, I’ll shoot him. You are on my land. Give me one reason I shouldn’t shoot you and give you to my dogs.”

Her aim looked rock steady, and I believed her. But I wondered how such a tiny thing was going to handle the kick of the shotgun. I had tried polite words, information relating to her security, both usually effective in dealing with humans, and Nell Ingram wasn’t interested, but all I had was honesty.

“I told you. Four nights ago, Colonel Ernest Jackson and his so-called church kidnapped a female vampire named Heyda Cohen. You think she’s being raped. I think she’s being drained of her blood too. I intend to get her back.”

Nell’s fear increased, a ripple of unease so strong I could see it prickle over her skin. I’d have been able to smell her reaction if the breeze had permitted. But other than that, Nell didn’t move, didn’t speak. Birds called. The dogs circled closer to me, showing teeth, snarling. I didn’t want to hurt the dogs, two of them old beagle mixes and the other an old bird dog, but I would if attacked. Nell whistled softly and the dogs instantly stopped moving, but they didn’t take their eyes off me.

I wondered what the man in the deer stand was thinking about the standoff. I felt an itch between my shoulder blades, as if he had a scope on me even now. After the silence had stretched out far too long, Nell said, “Going onto the church property is a stupid move, but you don’t look stupid. You also don’t look easy to kill.” She frowned, thinking things through. “What do you want from me?”

“Everything. I want to know everything you know and remember about the compound, the people in it, and their habits. I want to know how they got off the property when the cops had the accesses guarded. I want to know if there are caves leading onto the church land. Then I want access to the compound through your property for my men. And I want to be able to retreat through your property when we’re done. And anything else you might have to offer or suggest.”

Nell laughed, the sound as stuttered and clogged as before. “Don’t want much, do you?”

Honesty seemed to be working, so I pushed ahead with it. “I want lots of stuff. Most of which will put you in danger from the church.”

“Woman, I been in trouble from God’s Cloud of Glory and the colonel ever since I turned twelve and he tried to marry me. Anything you can do to piss him off will just make my day.”

She dropped the weapon as her words penetrated my brain. “Marry you? At twelve?”

“Yeah. He’s an old pervert. Come on in. I got coffee going and food in the slow cooker. Hope you like chicken and dumplings. I missed lunch and I’m starving.”

“I’m always hungry. But twelve?” Nell didn’t smile, but she did call off her dogs. That and an offer to feed me was a start.

•   •   •

Nell knew stuff. Nell was like a font of knowledge and wisdom, strength and power, innocence and hard-won independence. I liked her instantly, which didn’t happen to me often. I sat at her antique kitchen table, the boards smooth from long use, the finish mostly gone and the grain of the wood satiny beneath my fingertips. She had an old boom box loaded up with CDs: jazz and blues and even some forty-year-old hard rock, which started while we set the table. And her chicken and dumplings smelled so good I wanted to cry. Trusting her for reasons that had everything to do with her magic and her calm self-assuredness, I turned off the video; I had no desire to record Nell Ingram. She was a private woman and I wanted to honor that.

Nell didn’t offer grace, and when I commented on that, considering her ultra-right-wing background, she said, “I believe in God. I just don’t know if I like him much. I sure don’t like the colonel’s God, but then Ernest Jackson’s going to hell someday. If I get lucky, I’ll be the one to send him there.”

She was fierce for such a tiny little thing. Sharp-faced, delicate, and lean, with long, slender, strong fingers and hair she had never cut, worn parted down the middle and hanging to her hips. She’d have been almost pretty, if she had tried to be. But Nell didn’t put on airs for anyone. Nell was just purely Nell. Pale-skinned where she wasn’t tanned, farmer-John-style clothes, work boots. Capable-looking. And, man, could she cook! The odors were enough to make Beast want to come out and chow down, the music selection was funky enough to make me want to dance, and Nell had cooked enough to feed herself for a week, which meant that there was plenty for me without the guilt of taking someone else’s food.

As I ate my second helping of flaky biscuitlike dumplings in thick chicken gravy, served up in green, hand-thrown pottery bowls big enough to double as horse troughs, Nell sketched what she remembered of the compound. I was able to overlay her sketch with the sat-map photos of the current compound, and quite a few of the buildings were unchanged, which helped a lot in the planning stage of a raid. She knew which building the colonel lived in and where the jail was. And best of all, she knew where the armaments were stored. “They keep ’em here”—she tapped the uneven rectangle that represented a building—“which is right next to the nursery. They know no one’s gonna blow up the weapons and risk killing all the children.”

“Yeah. That’s”—I thought through possibilities and discarded cruel, insane, and evil, to choose—“not unexpected.”

Nell snorted, and it wasn’t a ladylike snort; it was a hard, ferocious sound. “It’s the way cowards work.”

I didn’t disagree.

“You asked about caves,” she said. “They got several, but they’re used for storage. So far as I ever heard, they weren’t the kind that went anywhere. But there’s a long crevasse here.” She pointed at my sat map to a darker green area. I had thought it was just a different kind of tree growing close together so the leaves overlapped, but according to the topo map, she was right: it was a narrow ravine. “That’s how they get in and out. A crick runs along the bottom, then goes underground for a ways. It comes back out on the Philemons’ property, and the entrance can be seen from their house. There’s no way past. Trust me. The Philemon family are church-related, and they let the colonel use their vehicles in return for concessions.”

“Money?” I asked.

“Access to the womenfolk.” Her eyes went harder, a flint green. “Young womenfolk, the ones who don’t agree with the plans made for them by their men.”

“Oh,” I said softly. I had no idea what this woman had been through in her short life, but it sounded as though it might have been pretty horrible. Somehow she had escaped. She had survived. I was curious, but the expression on her face warned me not to intrude. I kept my questions and my sympathy to myself.

Nell knew the history of all the families who were members of the church, and showed me her family’s house on the church grounds. She also posited one reason why Heyda had gone with the colonel. “There’s a family named Cohen in the compound. If one of them was sick or in danger, or was confined to the punishment house, and if they were related, she mighta gone with the men willingly, thinking she could do something to help.”

“Punishment house?”

She tapped the drawing she had made, and when she spoke her voice was colder than any winter wind. “Here. Where the women are kept until they achieve the proper Scriptural attitude of obedience and do what they’re told.”

I took a chance and asked, “Did you do what you were told?”

Nell shot me a look of pure venom. “My life is none of your business.”

“Okay.” I sent another text to Alex to check out the Cohens, but so far, he hadn’t responded. When Nell realized that I wouldn’t bring up her former life again, she quickly became talkative and helpful, but all her reticence did was make me want to know more—a history I knew she wouldn’t share.

The very best thing Nell told me was about the old logging road that twisted through the woods from her property right into the heart of the church grounds. It curved around and under a ledge of rock and hadn’t been visible from cameras in the sky. “Last time I looked, which was this past winter, when we had a couple of feet of snow on the ground, they didn’t have the road blocked or booby-trapped, but it’s grown up pretty bad. You’ll havta hoof it in.”

“This may make all the difference in saving the v—Mithran the colonel took prisoner.”

“Sure. One thing,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Vampires. Are they spawn of Satan? That’s what we were taught at the church. And if they’re devils, why help them? Why work for them?”

I gave her a halfhearted shrug. “I was taught the same thing. But I’ve met humans who are surely Satan’s children. And I’ve met vamps who are no worse than the best of us. Except for that whole needing-to-drink-human-blood thing.”

She grinned and slid her hands into the bib of her overalls. “I reckon that could be a mite off-puttin’.”

I expected her to ask if I’d ever been bitten, but she didn’t. Private to her core, was Nell. I walked to the door, where she shook my hand, hers feeling tiny but with a grip like a mule skinner’s. I said, “Thank you so much. I have no way of letting you know when we’ll get back here, what with no cell signal, but either tonight or tomorrow night.”

“I’m good for whenever, but you better take out my observer if you want this to go off in secret. I got no idea who it is, but it’s a good guess he reports to the church. Most folk hereabouts do.” She stuffed a plastic grocery bag into my hands, one filled with Ball jars of raw honey and preserves. “If he’s still there, he’ll think you got my name from someone in town and came for remedies or jelly.” She smiled shyly. “I make pretty good jellies, and my antioxidant tea is great for colds.”

I smothered my surprise at her use of the word antioxidant. Nell might talk like a country hick and wear clothes that swathed her in shapelessness, but she wasn’t stupid. Not at all. “In that case, I’ll pay my way,” I said, and placed two twenties on the table. Before she could object, I said, “The hospitality was free. I know that. But my partners will love the treats, so I’m paying for them. Period.” She smiled, and her face was transformed from merely almost pretty to downright lovely.

I left Nell washing dishes and walked back up the drive, this time not keeping to the shadows and tree line, but walking out as if I had a right to be there. Fang was sitting just as I’d left it, behind the tree. I started the bike and draped the grocery bag around the handlebars where it could be seen. I dawdled my way down the mountain and back to Knoxville. On the way I ascertained that the deer stand was still manned, and this time I got a good look at him. White male, brown, greasy hair, scruffy beard, pasty-skinned and wearing camo. I could pick him out of a lineup if needed, but I intended to make sure that he never got a chance to be in one. One way or another, I’d see that Nell Nicholson Ingram’s spy was sent packing or was left to crawl away and lick his wounds.

When I got close enough to civilization to get a cell signal, I found multiple texts from Alex. One of them was excellent news. Leo had made arrangements to fly the Younger brothers in on his private plane, and they were waiting at my hotel. I had been dreading working with unknown vamps and blood-servants when we went into the compound. Eli’s presence raised my expectation of success considerably, and I stopped at a barbecue place, bringing in enough food to feed my small army.

•   •   •

The rest of the day was busy, kept that way by a long meeting with Eli, Cai, and Glass Clan’s secundo blood-servant, who was also Heyda’s second-in-command of security and Heyda’s best blood-meal. Her name was Chessy, and she was a local gal, one who looked a lot like Nell—sharp-faced and lean. And if Heyda had been driven insane—a common problem with vamps who had been starved, bled dry, and tortured—Chessy was the most likely person to bring the vamp out alive. Undead. Whatever.

Based on the intel we had received from Nell, we decided not to wait. The longer we put off a raid, the greater the likelihood that we’d tip off the colonel to our plans. We’d go in tonight. And we’d go in without alerting local law enforcement ahead of time, just in case the leaker who had warned the church about the local LEO’s child services raid was also a police officer.

We met at the Glass Clan Home two hours before dusk, and Eli and Chessy laid out the plans to Chessy’s handpicked team. The insertion team was composed of fifteen: Chessy; six vamps, all over the age of one hundred, all with military experience; and five humans, ditto on the military backgrounds. Eli and I made fourteen pairs of boots on the ground. Alex would be stationed with access to a satellite phone and talkies at Nell’s place. And we’d have a driver. If we were lucky (if the sat phone worked the way it should), we’d have coms between us, as well as access to the outside world.

We used a beat-up panel van to get across town, one with a logo on it that said, TRUCK BROKE? WE CAN FIX IT! The number painted under the logo rang back to the Glass Clan Home, where a human was ready to answer and take queries, as part of our cover. The van’s exterior was a crummy rust bucket, but the interior was sealed from light and quite cushy—good for vamps to travel across town anonymously. I’d have to see about getting Leo to consider adding a couple of vans like this to his fleet of vehicles. Remaining unidentified was healthy sometimes.

We parked down the hill and Eli went in alone just before dusk. Silent, using the skills Uncle Sam had taught him in the Rangers, he took out the watcher in the deer stand and carried the man a mile down the mountain to dump him at my feet outside the panel van. The guy was older than I had first assumed, maybe twenty-eight, with a ratty beard, and a body odor that proclaimed he had missed his weekly bath, but believed that cologne made up for good old soap and water. Holy moly, he stank. While he was still unconscious, I secured him with multiple zip strips and Eli and I hefted the human into the van, where he rolled at the feet of the insertion team. We jumped in, slammed the side door, and the van proceed uphill, toward Nell’s place.

One of the vamps wrinkled his nose and said, “Human men are idiots. Present company excepted, and no offense.” He toed the limp form. “This one stinks.”

Eli, not even winded from the exertion, said, “Offense accepted anyway, suckhead.”

The vamp narrowed his eyes at Eli and I turned to the vamp. “Back down. Your comment was insulting and your apology was lacking in both grace and sincerity. Try again. Now.” And I let a bit of Beast into my gaze, seeing the golden glow in the dark of the van.

The vamp ignored me and said, “You let a woman fight your battles for you?”

“Two things,” Eli said, his voice without inflection. “One: I’m not letting you goad me into ruining this mission. Two: the Enforcer is not just a woman, just a human, or just an anything,” Eli added, his masculinity not the least injured. “Once this is over, I’ll beat your ass. But for now, the Enforcer needs your cold undead body to rescue your head of security. Either you are in or you are out. And if you’re out, I’ll happily secure you with silver tape and leave you to burn while we complete this mission.”

The vamp seemed to consider that for a moment. Then he said, “Challenge accepted.”

“Knives,” Eli said. “Numbers limited to two, each no larger than a six-inch blade.”

“First blood,” I said, hoping to keep Eli uninjured, and the vamp alive. “And if the human is injured, he will be healed.”

“Done,” both males said.

“You’re both idiots,” Alex said, grumpy as only a nineteen-year-old, younger Younger could be. “And an apology still hasn’t been issued.”

“Noted,” the vamp said.

Alex started to continue the argument, but I held up a hand and he subsided. A working frenemy was the best I’d get and I sat back while the van took the narrow, twisting road up as night fell.

•   •   •

We halted the panel van in Nell’s drive and I went to her door. She opened it before I knocked, her eyes wide and skin pale. She was breathing fast, and with Beast so close to the surface, I could hear her heart beating too fast, and smell her reaction to . . . what? “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Something dead,” she whispered, staring at the truck repair van. “Something wrong.”

“Vampires,” I said. “They won’t hurt you. I promise.”

“Will they hurt the colonel?”

“Planning on it.”

Nell nodded, the movement jerky. “Good. But they still feel wrong.” She closed the door in my face.

To save Nell more discomfort, the vamps and the blood-servants exited the van and raced into the woods, their night vision allowing them to see the narrow opening in the trees where a trail had once woven. They scattered through and along the old farm road, ducking into hiding places. Eli followed, his low-light and infrared headgear allowing him to see as well as the vamps.

I stayed with the driver and Alex as the van rolled across the back of Nell’s three-acre lawn and into the trees, following the trail as far as the vehicle’s city-street undercarriage could manage before making a twelve-point turn to face back down the mountain. I made sure the van had a working sat signal before slipping out and taking off after the insertion team. As I ran, I pulled on Beast, who flooded my system with adrenaline and shared her night vision, turning the world silver and gray with tints of green.

I caught up with and passed the two vamps who were staying on the road to make sure we all got out, placed to maintain coms with Alex. Both lifted a hand to acknowledge me. I left them in my dust.

Beast chuffed inside me. Hunt. Ready to hunt. Want to kill and eat.

Let’s try not to kill anyone, and the idea of eating humans and vamps is not appealing in the least.

Hunt deer. Soon.

Yeah. Deal, I thought at her, spotting sprinting human-shaped forms just ahead.

•   •   •

The race through the woods revealed no barricades, no downed trees, and no booby traps. The colonel hadn’t expected attack from this direction, and the topo maps had shown why—a long vertical drop of nearly fifty feet into the compound. No human law enforcement agency would have been able to manage the descent with any kind of order or speed. And the little slip of a girl who looked like something you could break in two with one hand tied behind your back was clearly no menace, not with a spy in the trees.

We ducked beneath the rock ledge that hid the old road from the eyes in the sky and sprinted through the deeper dark, around the heart of the ancient mountain, and out the far side. The trees were smaller on this side of the mountain. The underbrush was thick and dense. The land smelled different from Nell’s property. Stressed and sleeping and unhappy. Weird thoughts for another time.

We crested the hill and the compound appeared below us. The hill fell away, a sheer drop seen on the topo maps but not realized until now. Nearly fifty feet of vertical fall. There was no fence. No barrier. Just the drop. My heart stuttered and sped. The terrain must have seemed like the perfect protection to the church’s security crew.

The vamps didn’t even slow. They raced out and leaped. Down. The humans hardly slowed, slapping lines around tree trunks and leaping off for a fast rappel. At the back of the crew, I was undecided but still moving fast. Beast slammed into me, the pain so sudden and intense that I tripped over my own feet and rolled off the ledge. The world tumbled around me.

Beast reached up and grabbed a root, swinging me out over the cliff. “Holy crap,” I grunted. The ground was way, way down there. I let her have us. Jumping down cliffs was a Puma concolor thing. The steeper and more impossible, the better. I was just glad my chicken and dumplings had digested. I didn’t want to lose that delicious meal when I landed, broke my legs, and threw up all over the place. But Beast wasn’t planning on any of that.

A tiny rock stuck out about twenty-five feet down. She pushed off with my free hand, accelerating the momentum of our swing, and let go of the root. I/we landed with the left toes of my boot on the rock and pushed off. The rock gave way, tumbling straight down to the vamp who had baited Eli. He caught the rock just as I/we landed in a crouch at his feet, perfectly balanced on my/our toes and fingertips.

I looked up and growled at the vamp. He took a quick step back, dropping the rock. I/we hacked in challenge. He stabilized his balance and nodded slightly at me/us, one of the regal nods that old vamps, especially old royalty who had been turned, used to acknowledge one another, or sometimes gave to someone they thought their equal. I had a feeling that someday this vamp and I might tussle and I’d hurt him. Just enough to let him know he shouldn’t have dissed the Enforcer of the MOC of New Orleans. Not even if he was a prince of vamps. Maybe he’d bleed a bit. But for now we had a vamp to rescue. And a bunch of kids too.

I gave him a regal nod back and pressed the button on my mic, a signal that would be relayed to Alex, who, unbeknownst to the vamps, would be calling the local LEOs (currently at a standoff on the blockaded road) in on an emergency raid, up through the secret entrance at the Philemon family farm. No way was I rescuing a suckhead and leaving women and children in the hands of cultists who would consider marrying off a twelve-year-old girl. And who had a “punishment house” for disobedient women and girls. No way.

Electric lights lit the compound grounds. The buildings were all painted a blinding white that threw back the security lights and created darker shadows. Path borders were neatly marked with rounded river rocks. The smells of many people and many dogs were strong on the night air. I oriented myself and waited. Four of our vamps had orders to neutralize the dogs and guards on the grounds, and then take down the armed guards keeping out the LEOs. There would be no killed humans to give the LEOs reason to charge vamps with a crime; instead the orders were to deliver a heavy-handed thump on the head to make the humans and canines woozy and then more zip strips to keep both dogs and humans out of the way. A little duct tape to keep them quiet, if needed. But no DBs—dead bodies. None.

The vamps, like my Beast, could spot the dogs by smell alone. More important, we could smell the humans. And vamp blood. It hung thick on the air. The vampires vamped-out and slid into the shadows.

I heard thumps and a growl close by, mostly hidden by raucous music from a building on the far side of the compound. It sounded like a bluegrass band, with banjos and guitars and drums. Playing a rollicking . . . hymn. “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” men’s voices rolling into the night along with the scent of sweat and testosterone. They were in the church, and they smelled and sounded as though they were celebrating. Maybe they were. They had the state of Tennessee’s finest stymied at the front gate.

Following our plan, Chessy and another human and the vampire prince tore off, chasing the smell of Heyda’s blood. A third human followed, covering them from the rear with a nasty-looking fully automatic weapon that bore a strong resemblance to an M4A1 carbine, a semiautomatic rifle that fired a 5.56-millimeter NATO round. U.S. military issue. It would chew up anything it hit. Instant hamburger. I so didn’t want it to be used. If a human died on this raid, Leo and Ming would do all they could to protect the vamps, but the humans could possibly be hung out to dry—which meant that I might spend a long time in jail.

Once the guards were taken care of, Eli took the humans and vamps with the most recent military boots-on-the-ground experience, and divided them into two groups. Eli’s group vanished into the shadows of the ammo building while the other group stood guard. When exploding ammo was no longer a threat, Eli would make sure there was no footage of tonight’s raid for the cops to find. Eli was good.

The rest of us—those with little or no military experience—headed for the nursery. The door was locked from the inside, but the two vamps with me took the door down. It wasn’t quiet, but it wasn’t as loud as I might have expected either. Vamp reflexes were so fast that when they busted in the door, they caught it before it hit the wall behind. Between that and the loud music, no one heard us except an older woman who was reading the Bible by the light of a flashlight just inside the door. She looked up with her mouth in an O of surprise. The vamp nearest grabbed the human up by the scruff of the neck and set her down gently beside me. While I secured the human and shoved a sock into her mouth to keep her quiet, the vamp disabled an alarm button under the desk by the most simple and efficient method. She broke it with her fist. I liked her style.

Together, we checked on the children, hoping they were all safe and asleep and that there were no more adults who might give a warning. Unfortunately two of the children had been beaten recently. Their scents told us they were bruised and had cried themselves to sleep. The scents also told us who had done the beating—the nurse. Her knuckles still showed the damage. The vamp who had disabled the alarm made sure that she didn’t get a chance to wash her hands and maybe rinse away trace evidence. She knocked the nurse out with a swift and well-delivered left jab. “Nice,” I said.

“Yeah. Bet she’d be tasty.”

“I bet she would,” I said mildly.

The vamp studied her face, and I had to wonder if the human nurse would get a visit one night from a vampire vigilante. Satisfied that the kids were bruised but okay, and that the older woman was the only guard, I left the nursery in the care of our humans and took my two vamps to raid the punishment house. The men were still singing, and anger had begun to heat my blood.

The punishment house was a small, nondescript building of white siding, post-and-beam construction, with thick walls. No windows. It looked like a nicely kept storage building. But I could smell the pain and fear inside it. So could the vamps. The female vamp who had busted the alarm had attached herself to me, and she took down this door the same way she had the nursery door—a swift kick—though this door took three kicks, and they weren’t quiet. When the door splintered open, we were met with the business end of a shotgun. Which my personal vamp took away in a move that was faster than I could follow in the shadows. It was a single, fluid move of kick, grab the barrel, whip up the gunstock to hit the guard in the jaw, and catch both guard and gun before they hit the floor. It was pretty. It was the last pretty thing I saw in the punishment house. There were four beds in a single room, a bathroom running along the back wall. No privacy curtains. Two women were shackled on the beds, and by the time I found light, they were crying and whimpering.

The vamp looked at them and cursed under her breath. Still moving fast, she broke the wrist cuffs with her bare hands and gathered the women up in the sheets and blankets from the beds. Drawing on her vamp strength, she pulled them close to her on the edge of one bed, murmuring endearments as she gave off a vamp compulsion, the energies cold and icy on my skin. I almost told her to stop, until I realized she was exuding calm, a gentle relaxing vibe that encouraged the women to accept help. I had never seen vamp compulsion powers being used for something good, not like this, and my respect for the vamp went up another notch. She needed a nickname, something better than “the female vamp with a great left fist.”

I stood to the side, weapon ready, watching the darkness outside and the vamp inside, until the women prisoners were sleepy and content, their heads lolling on the vamp’s shoulders. Gently she laid them down and stood, looking up at me, her hands patting the women into deeper sleep. Softly she said, “I recognize them. This is why Heyda let herself be taken. These are her grandchildren, Berta and Wilhelmina. Berta is in her twenties. Willie is in her forties. They’ve been . . . abused.”

I knew what she meant. I had known by the smells from the moment the door had slammed open and all the scents hit my nose. They had been beaten by several people while secured to the beds and unable to defend themselves. They had then been taught a different kind of lesson by a man. I didn’t realize the extent of my own anger—mine and Beast’s—until I spoke to the two vamps under my command. My voice was a deeper register than my normal human voice. “I smell the stink of sexual predators who hide behind religion. What say we find the man in charge?”

“His blood will be yummy,” the woman said. And she vamped-out. Fast.

“Not to kill,” I amended, to the vamp, who I nicknamed Yummy. “But let’s scare the bejesus outta him.”

“He won’t have any Jesus in him,” Yummy said around her fangs, “but scared blood is the best kind.”

For once I didn’t disagree.

We found the colonel’s house and entered, to the accompaniment of a new hymn from the church, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and I had to wonder if the colonel was singing with the men, bragging to God that his people had defeated the government types at the gates. But he wasn’t singing. He was in bed with three naked girls, one who looked about twenty and two others who looked much, much younger.

The colonel rose to his knees on the mattress and shouted, “Guards! Guards!” I switched on a lamp to see the shriveled, wasted man, his skin hanging in long folds on his lanky, pasty body. His tanned hands were fisted in the hair of a child. She wasn’t crying. She didn’t even seem to be afraid. She was staring out the window into the night, vacant-eyed, empty-souled.

His was the scent on the women in the punishment house. His scent was on the child he held. The anger that was simmering in my blood began to boil. I felt Beast’s claws press against the tips of my fingers. Kill one who hurt kits, she thought.

“Your guards, they’re not gonna help you,” Yummy said between her fangs.

“Vampire! I call upon the Holy Ghost to smite thee, demon of hell!” he roared, shaking the child by her hair. Her body juddered and quivered. But she didn’t make a sound.

“Me and the big guy up there are close, personal pals,” Yummy said. “He’s too busy at the moment to answer. You’re all mine, baby.”

I reached across Yummy, stopping her forward movement, and took the colonel’s wrist in mine. The girl couldn’t see what I was doing. What I was going to do. Silently, watching his face, I broke his index finger. The colonel cursed and let the girl go. I dropped the colonel’s maimed hand and covered the girl with the blankets. Sometime in the last few moments, the other girls had disappeared out the front door into the night.

Yummy laughed, her eyes on me, and said, “Yeah. Just like that.” To the colonel, she said, “The Holy Ghost wants to have a word of prayer with you, old man.” Faster than I could see, she gripped the man around the throat and yanked him to her.

Yummy’s power raced over me like a burst of static electricity, lifting the hairs on the back of my arms. “This one is mine,” she said, her words measured and low. It was a challenge I wasn’t going to argue. I gave her a slow, steady nod. Yummy took the old man out the front door, carrying him by the throat.

It was against the law for vamps to kill humans. My morals and the law were at odds, but . . . I looked at the silent girl, huddling on the sheets, still staring into the dark. I didn’t feel the least bit bad about the colonel. He had been alive when I last saw him. As far as the law was concerned, that was enough to protect me.

Sirens sounded in the distance. We were out of time. Local law enforcement and the state cops had made the trek through the crevasse and were on the premises, somehow with a cop car. I tapped my mic on and whispered, “Time’s up. You got her?”

“We have her,” Prince said. “We are taking her up the cliff now.”

“Let’s go home, boys and girls,” I said into the mic. “See you back at the van.” As I left, I checked the Cohen house out, the one marked on Nell’s map. It looked secure. I smelled women and children. No blood. I hoped their safety was worth whatever Heyda had been through.

•   •   •

The drive back was silent except for the sounds of Heyda feeding. She had been out of her mind with anguish and blood loss when found, and it had been all the vamps could do to get her back to the van. Once off the mountain and heading home, all the humans from her clan fed her, followed by all the vamps. It took a lot of blood to feed a drained and tortured vampire back to sanity. I’d seen a vamp drained into madness before. It was pretty awful.

Heyda’s skin was the blue white of death, except where she was bruised from beatings. Her head had been shaved. There were dozens of half-healed cuts on her. Her wrists and ankles had been shackled with silver and were blistered, the skin torn and blackened in places. I didn’t know what Yummy had done with the colonel, but no matter what she had done, it wasn’t enough. It just wasn’t.

When we got back to the Clan Home, Ming met us in the drive. Heyda fell out of the back of the van, into her maker’s arms. Instantly Ming pulled the injured vamp to her and leaned back her neck in one of those not-human movements. Heyda, already vamped-out, bit down into Ming’s carotid and started drinking. The other vamps gathered around, the mixed power of vamps rising on the night air in a ceremony that I had seen once, but never completely understood. The prince was part of the mix, his arms around both vamps. I guessed the little challenge between him and Eli was off for the time being, which was fine by me.

The driver closed the side doors and got back in the cab, gunning the motor of the old van and heading away from the Clan Home, back to our hotel. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the leather headrest.

Yummy hadn’t been with us on the ride home. I figured that was a good thing. It might be good if I never saw the vamp again. But there’s something about the universe that forces us to face our fears and our pasts and our weaknesses. I had a feeling that Yummy and I would cross paths again someday.

On the drive through Knoxville, Alex hacked into the police coms and informed us that the local and state law enforcement officers were taking a number of children and women into protective custody and had arrested several men and women for various and sundry crimes, with more arrests and charges pending. It wasn’t enough, not with what I’d seen and smelled at the compound, but like a lot of things in my life, it would have to do.

•   •   •

The next afternoon, I rode Fang up the hillside to see Nell, to thank her for the help and for the intel. To determine a few things about her. To suggest a few things to her about her security and, maybe, a few things about her future. This time when she met me on the front porch, she wasn’t carrying a gun. She was wearing a long skirt and flip-flops, her brown hair pulled back in a braid, much like the way I wore mine. She was sitting on the swing, whose chain supports had been replaced with new steel that creaked pleasantly when she pushed off with a toe. I hoped the money Alex had left on the front porch last night had gone toward the dress and the chains.

I rode Fang all the way up to the end of the drive and left the bike in the sun, the metal pinging and ticking as it cooled. “Afternoon, Nell,” I said.

“Jane Yellowrock. You ’uns come set a spell,” she said in the local vernacular. “I got you some good strong iced tea with honey and ginger in it.”

I never drank tea that way, but it seemed impolite to make a face. I climbed the steps and accepted a sweating tea glass. The green glass was old, bubbled with air like old, handblown glass. It probably was an antique; there were treasures in these hills. I sat, sipped, and was pleasantly surprised by the taste. After a comfortable moment, I said, “You act like you were expecting me.”

“I was, sorta. Don’t know why.”

“Is it because of the magic I feel every time I put a foot on the ground here?”

Nell’s face paled to nearly vamp white. She whispered, “I’m not a witch.”

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Right? That’s the way you were taught.”

Nell just stared and I felt the land around me rise, as if aware, as if to protect her, the current of intent passing through the foundation of the house, into the porch chair where I sat, and into me. And I caught again the scent of Nell Nicholson Ingram. “My people would have called you yi-ne-hi. Or maybe yv-wi tsv-di. Or even a-ma-yi-ne-hi. You would have been respected and maybe a little feared, but not burned or tortured or beaten.”

Nell frowned, not knowing that her body language was telling me so much about her. About her life in another time, another place, but still so close. Just over the ridge.

“I’m not a witch,” she whispered again, as if saying it so tonelessly, so repetitively over the years, had kept her safe.

“No. Your gift isn’t witch magic.”

Nell blinked. “It’s not?”

I let my mouth curl up slightly. “I’m not even a hundred percent sure it would properly be called magic. More a paranormal gift of some sort, but then, I’m not a specialist.”

“You’re not human either.”

My smile went wider and I sipped the tea, letting her put things together.

“Are you like me?”

I heard the plaintive tone in her words. I knew what it was to be so very alone in the world. I knew that my answer would cause her pain and leave her feeling even more alone. “No.” My smile slid away. “I only ever met one other like me before. He tried to kill me. I had to kill him to save my life. Now I’m alone. Maybe forever.”

Nell looked away from my eyes, holding her green glass in both hands. “Forever is a long time to be alone.”

Nell had been alone since her husband died, according to what Alex had been able to dig up on her—which was next to nothing. Just Nell and her dogs, on this mountain land, for years. “It’s all good,” I said. “Life is good. I do good for humans and for others, outcasts, people in need. I protect the innocent when I can. There may not be others like me, but I found a place for myself. Found friends. People who came to me and we made a family. I have a job. A purpose.”

“You think I need a purpose. You think that living here, making my way, reading my books, and growing things isn’t good enough.” Her chin lifted. “Proust said, ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’ I got new eyes aplenty. I don’t want to leave. I’m not a hundred percent sure I even can.”

I thought about that for a while, as the old bird dog climbed the short steps and curled under Nell’s swing, his tail thumping on the smooth boards. I had been chained to Leo Pellissier once upon a time. I hadn’t been able to leave his side for long without getting terribly sick. Maybe Nell was chained to the land in much the same way. “You never know how far you can travel until you start walking.”

“Who said that?”

“I did. And no one said you’d have to leave the land forever.”

“You already told people about me, didn’t you?”

“I did. I’m sorry. But the vampires who ran across your mountain felt your magic in the land. Felt it thrum up through their feet. They knew you were something special. To keep them from coming after you, maybe changing you whether you want it or not, I told a friend about you. He’ll be coming to talk to you soon. To offer his protection. To try to get you to work with him. Working with him offers you safety from all the others. Working with him will keep the vamps from sniffing around. Working with him will keep you safer from the church, from whoever takes over for the colonel.”

“You made the colonel disappear, didn’t you?”

“Not me. But I didn’t stop the one who did.”

Nell looked out over her land, the lawn rolling down the sloping hill into the trees, something odd on her face. Something I couldn’t read. “The colonel’s heir is Jackson Jr.,” she said, without looking at me. “He’s evil through and through. Jackie hates me with a hatred like a forge, burning hot. Hatred like that shapes a man, and never in a good way. Jackie will kill me if he gets half a chance. Kill me and take my land.” She sighed, the sound wistful. “Life is like train tracks, parallel rails—one side blessings, the other side troubles. I’ve been blessed for years. Now I guess I might have to ride the other rail for a while, again.”

“And that other rail, it might prove to be a blessing too.”

Nell shook her head sadly. “Go away, Jane Yellowrock. Go back to your vampires and your witches and your search for whatever you are. Get off my land. Leave me in peace. Please.”

I stood and set the green iced tea glass on a small table. Beside it I placed a card. “This belongs to the friend I mentioned. He’s a cop in PsyLED. He’s a pretty boy, black hair and black eyes. Up here, he’d be called Indian-looking, Cherokee, like me. But he’s mostly Frenchy. He’ll take care of you. Get you introduced to his people. Just don’t fall in love with him. He’ll break your heart.”

“You already done that, Jane. You already done that.”

Knowing I had changed this girl’s life forever, I walked down the steps and swung my leg over Fang. “I can’t say I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d do it again. You losing your peaceful life meant getting one hundred thirty-eight physically and mentally abused children out of the clutches of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. And you might not want to admit it yet, but you’d let me do it again too.”

I had done the best I could, despite shoving Nell out of the shadows and into the limelight. She was no longer off the grid. No longer hidden away. The rest was up to Nell. I keyed the bike on and rode off Nell’s mountain and back into Knoxville. I had a private jet waiting on me, a flight back to New Orleans and the problems that awaited me there. There were always problems with fangheads.

Usually I had buyer’s remorse about taking a job with the vamps. Usually I spent a lot of time in self-recrimination and guilt and second-guessing myself and my choices and my decisions. But just this once, I felt good about a job for the bloodsuckers. A job well done. One hundred thirty-eight children set free. And a pedophile and sexual predator gone missing.

I wondered where Yummy had buried the old man.

I wondered if he had died on Nell’s land.

I wonder a lot of things. But I seldom have answers. Rogue-vamp hunters and Enforcers act in a vacuum, flying by the seat of our pants. And now, flying back to New Orleans in the Master of the City’s private jet, I knew I was flying back into trouble. But I was flying with the Youngers. A girl could do a lot worse.