I bent over and braced my hands on my knees, cussing under my breath. It was over. And all for nothing. No witches. Not one.
No one spoke as we tugged the last spidey vamp into the sun and walked out through what was left of the front door. We were met with cops and guns, all pointed at us. I held up my hands and dropped to the porch floor, glad to see I was sitting in a spot clear of smoking bodies and goo.
These were city cops and they were strangers, men and women I might have seen after the debacle in the three-story building de Allyon had rented and refurbished. But I didn’t really know any of them. And they were yelling at us.
I was deaf from the fighting. We all were, so whatever they were ordering us to do, none of us could hear. I pointed to my ear and shook my head. “We’re deaf!” I shouted to them. I pointed to the house. “We killed the things inside. The things inside killed the people in back.” I figured that would buy us some time until someone who knew us got here.
Even as I had the thought, Sylvia arrived, no lights, no siren, because it wasn’t her jurisdiction. She wasn’t on duty, but whatever Syl said caused the cops to lower their weapons. They didn’t put them away, not then, but at least they weren’t pointed at us.
With Soul’s help, the cops found a torn place in the ward and entered. Three of them checked out the house, and two of them came out gagging. The other one was stone-faced, evaluating us in light of the death inside.
I looked at Soul and shouted, “Better than seventy percent.” She laughed and dropped down beside me, shaking her head, her platinum hair falling around her face. Her clothes were dirty and she had green goo drying on her face, but otherwise she looked as beautiful as ever.
Soul sobered. “The witches are not here.”
My own mirth dimmed. “No. And the ward is still going. I don’t understand it.”
“Me neither,” she said. And Soul looked worried. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her worried.
While the cops did the cop thing, I emptied my pockets of the three busted amulets and spilled the parts onto the porch in front of me. I had never taken a pocket watch apart, but figured the wheels and gears were part of it. Also the spring and the little button screw. But the discs were sort of a surprise. They looked like iron with a coating of bright copper. I turned one over and over, seeing nothing special about it, but nothing useful either. Until I pushed one close to another one. They ratcheted together like magnets, becoming one thing.
I blinked, not sure what I had seen, but absolutely certain that it wasn’t good. I put the one free iron piece into a pocket that had a zipper to keep it closed; I didn’t want them getting anywhere near each other. Sitting there as the day brightened around me, I tried to fit the pieces together, and I remembered a tiny bit of info that had never fit anywhere.
“Long years past,” Kathyayini had said, “was cold iron, blood, three cursed trees, and lightning. Red iron will set you free.” Which had made no freaking sense then and made none now. Except that now I had some red iron. She had also said, “Shadow and blood are a dark light, buried beneath the ground.”
Shadow and blood. Shadows like the shadow land of the old church. Blood like in blood magic—black magic. I had done black magic once, as a child. It was how I’d gotten Beast. Buried beneath the ground. Like my soul home? The cavern I always saw when I was doing spirit work with Aggie One Feather?
“If the cops will let me go,” I said, “I have a woman to see. She might have answers.”
“I’ll see to it,” Soul said, “I’d have done it sooner, but I couldn’t hear until now.” She took a cleansing breath and pulled a black case out of a pocket and flipped it open. Inside was a gold badge with the letters HS in gold relief, and below them, in smaller lettering, PSYLED. Soul, a VIP in Homeland Security, was about to pull rank.
• • •
Eli gave me the keys to the SUV, but I was too tired to drive, so the Kid drove. Which was scary on a whole different level. I didn’t even know the Kid had a license. If he did. I had also forgotten he was here, but he’d been monitoring the action from the street with his brother’s military observational toys and filming the action—I guessed in case we all died and he had to report it to the police and PsyLED. As we pulled into the early traffic, I eased the small silver coin from my pocket, the one with the sea serpent on one side and the square on the other.
Fingering the small silver coin, I gave him directions, and wondered if Kathyayini would come to me in the daytime.
CHAPTER 23
Vampire Blood. Mixed with Something.
The lot was vacant, lit by bright morning sun. But no church. Just an empty space. I recognized trees I had seen the night I came here, and when I looked hard, I could see the outlines of an old foundation, mostly gone, marked more by the way the grass grew than by any rise in the ground or scattered stone or brick.
“Wait here,” I said to the Kid. “If I disappear, don’t freak. But if I’m not back in an hour, tell Eli to bring Soul here. She might be able to find me.”
The Kid looked at the lot, at me, and back at the lot, his brows creased together. “Disappear? Like into some kinda interdimensional space-time fold?”
I huffed a laugh. “Been there, done that once, a long time ago.” The Kid’s eyes bugged out. “Long story. This didn’t feel like that. Not exactly. But maybe there were similarities. Last time I was on the outside of the bubble. This time maybe I was on the inside.”
“Can I film it?”
I started stripping off the weapons and the weapon harness, because one should never take weapons into a consecrated place or into the presence of an elder. “Go for it,” I said. “But I’m guessing you won’t see a thing.” I thought a minute. “Maybe a lot of fog.”
Weapon free, with nothing on me except the silver coin, pocket watches, and the discs, I got out of the SUV. Took a slow breath and blew it out. Another. And wished I’d taken the time to get a shower. I was rank with the sweat of battle. I squared my shoulders, gripped the coin between the index finger and thumb of my right hand, and walked between the trees. Nothing happened.
I sat on the ground in front of where I thought the front doors of the church had once been and crossed my knees—which was not a comfortable position in the leathers and boots. The sun was warm on my shoulders, the fickle winds of the Mississippi chasing away the night’s chill. I pulled off my leather jacket and set it behind me. Finally got my shirt straight, now that the weapon harness was off.
My socks were still twisted. I wanted tea. Breakfast. My stomach growled. Nothing else happened. I studied the amulets and the iron discs. And realized that the stuff I thought was copper was actually something far darker. It was blood. I lifted one and sniffed it, pulling on Beast’s senses. Vampire blood mixed with the iron itself. And with . . .
I dropped the disc, staring at it on the grass. Skinwalker blood. It all came together.
Lucas Vazquez de Allyon had killed off my kind everywhere he could. But one miniature painting I had seen in an old book had depicted him holding a bowl of blood, with dead and drained skinwalkers from the Panther Clan everywhere around him on the ground. Skinwalkers like me.
I looked at the silver coin in my hand. Kathyayini had known what I was. Somehow she had known. As I fingered the coin, I found a sharp edge, just a spot where the coin had ground against something sharper or harder once. I spat on my thumb and rubbed it on my jeans, cleaning it, and pressed the pad of my thumb on the coin. Nothing happened. I gripped it in my left hand and cut into my right thumb with a hard, fast motion. My flesh tore. A shock of pain flashed through me.