Like the upstairs, this suite was done in white and scarlet, with a bed big enough to play touch football on, white-painted columns for bedposts, a seating area big enough to seat both teams on, tables and chairs at one end of the room, an en suite bath visible through an open door. And a pile of vamps so still they looked like statuary.
Hieronymus took a faint breath and said something I couldn’t hear. I pulled off my helmet and he repeated, “I cannot.”
I stepped closer, feeling the guys behind me keeping pace. “What can’t you do?”
His face warped, as if his skin had been pulled to the side only to resettle like soft clay or putty that, left alone, returned to its original form. Something was hinky here, not what I had expected, not even subconsciously.
I took another step and sniffed, my mouth open to take in the scent of the room, which I hadn’t done since I started down the stairs to Big H’s lair. The smell of vamp was strong and herbal: the floral of funeral flowers, the dry scent of sage. But the smell of sickness was missing, as was the acrid, dusty scent of the spidey vamps.
I walked slowly toward them, the guys on my trail, spreading out and around furniture, keeping the vamps covered. I was close enough that in Beast’s vision, I could see the necklace around Big H’s neck. And I realized that his neck was burned beneath it. It hadn’t been that way before; I was sure of that.
To the female vamp at his feet, I said, “Unbutton H’s shirt.”
An expression of utter relief crossed her face and vanished. She stood gracefully, reaching long, delicate fingers to her master. They unbuttoned Big H’s white shirt, exposing his chest. Which was blistered and pitted and blackened around a shard of iron wrapped in corroded, ancient copper.
“Tag. You’re it,” I said. When the vamps didn’t react, I said, “The Naturaleza tagged you. They put that on you sometime after you hired me to come kill them off and before I got here. It’s controlling you. Isn’t it?”
The female vamp nodded once, then froze.
“If I take it off, will you die?”
Hieronymus’ face twisted again, and I realized it was with the effort to speak. Nothing came out, but his lips moved. He said, “Take it.”
Keeping the vamp-killer to the side, I sheathed the stake, dropped the helmet, and reached up a hand. I touched the copper necklace. Lifted it slowly. The iron wrapped in copper tore H’s skin as I lifted it away. Blood trickled down his chest. There was no clasp, and I wasn’t going to get close enough to lift it over his head. “This is gonna hurt,” I said.
With a single massive jerk, I broke the chain and leaped back.
The vamps collapsed to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. The iron swung on the chain, back and forth, dangling in my fist. Power surged up from it, snaring me in its might. The entire room went black.
And I was falling.
CHAPTER 26
Mr. Prepared for Anything
I was in a dark place, empty and cool. It smelled of wet and age and eons of time. It pressed down on me, heavy and dense and dangerous. It was so dark I couldn’t tell when I closed my eyes. I reached out and the vamp-killer clanged against stone. The fist holding the necklace touched stone on the other side. My heart leaped into my throat. I was underground. I was buried.
But the stone fell away as I continued my turn. A light, faint and dim, appeared to my right. I took a step, another, moving slow and easy. Moving through the underground dark, a tunnel, cold and wet and chill, its dimensions somehow organic, widening and narrowing. A cave. I sheathed the blade and placed my feet carefully, redistributed my weight warily, expecting to find no ground beneath me at every step.
As I moved, I heard the slow plink of water. Smelled water and smoke, heard the crackle of fire licking at cold, dry wood. The passage opened up to reveal a large cavern in the rock, domed, with stalactites hanging down from the roof and stalagmites rising up from the floor, the walls smooth and pearlescent like a shell.
The fire burned near the back wall, its light flickering. I recognized my spirit home, the cavern of my youth, the place where I first learned to shift when I was a child of five. The place I went to in my mind when I was in danger or when I had something I needed to learn. It was a hard place, but it was mine. A place of strength and a place of dreams.
Near the fire sat an old woman, her gray hair in braids hanging down to her lap on either side. Her head was down, staring into the fire, the light showing me only the top of her head and her wrinkled forehead. I thought it was Kathyayini, but the clothes were all wrong. This woman wore no flower-sack clothing, but a cotton shirt in a vibrant yellow, a pullover shirt intended to tie at her throat. It hung open, revealing a necklace of carved and dyed bone and porcupine quills and glass beads. Her skirt was canvas, dyed blue, worn at the hem and belted with worked hide in beads to match the necklace. Tied to the belt was a series of small leather bags, pouches for herbs and minerals.
I paced slowly to the fire. When I stood there, my shadow elongated behind me, I had no idea what to say. This was a Tsalagi elder. A shaman. I should have taken off my weapons. One didn’t wear weapons into the presence of an elder of The People.
“Tsilugi, Dalonige i Digadoli, aquetsi ageyutsa.” Welcome, Golden Eyes, Golden Stone, my daughter.
My legs folded, and I sank to the ground. “Elisi?” She raised her head and the firelight moved over her wrinkled face. Her eyes were amber, like mine. “Elisi,” I whispered. My grandmother.
“Forgive me for coming into the presence of an elder with weapons.”
“You are warrior woman.” She waved away my apology, her hand gnarled and ribboned with veins. “Weapons are part of you. You are a weapon.” She shrugged. “I made you to be so.”
I thought about that, about the memories I had recently gained and refused to look at again, memories of this woman putting a blade into my hand. I had been a child, maybe five years old, the year that everything changed. The hairs rose on the back of my neck, and when I breathed, I tasted sweetgrass and burning oak on the back of my tongue. “When you put the knife into my hand,” I whispered. “That’s when you made me a warrior?”
“Together, we killed a man. Slowly. For killing your father. You remember?”
I nodded.
“You remember the first cut?”
I closed my eyes, sucking in a breath. Remembering.
The blade was too large for my fist. The bone handle was cold, but warmed quickly. I raised the knife to the white thing hanging over the pit, tied with rope. It was a leg. It bucked, trying to get away. Above it came strangled sounds, like a pig full of fear. The leg in front of me was hairy with light brown hairs, and white-skinned, like a dog. It stank of fear, this yunega who had killed my father.
I cut it, the blade opening up a line of red. The thing hanging above squealed again, and piss ran down his leg. I reached up and cut him again.
I jerked back from the memory, back from the fire. I landed on my open hands, my palms on the cold stone floor. Staring at my grandmother.
“To kill a human when so young may change a child,” Elisi said. “May make her a man killer. Sometimes a killer only. You have done well to learn to love. You have done well to bring family into your heart, even though they are family not of your blood or your clan or your tribe. This will keep the darkness away for many years.”
“Did . . . Did you become U’tlun’ta? Did you become stone finger, the liver eater?”
Elisi’s eyes flew from amber to gold, two glowing orbs. Her face melted and folded, bristling with pelt. Two sets of fangs grew, distorting her jaw. She growled the word, “Tsisdu!” And leaped at me.
I landed hard, my body hitting as if boneless, my jaw impacting the floor. My teeth clacked together, the sound strange and clicking. Tsisdu. Elisi had called me rabbit. Prey.
I rolled to my feet in Hieronymus’ room, the necklace in my fist. “Why did you let me take this?” I growled at the vampire on the floor. My voice was on a lower register, my words distorted. I touched my teeth with my tongue and felt fangs. Oh, crap.
Hieronymus pushed to his feet, one hand going to his throat, touching it gently. The blisters weren’t healing, and I knew he needed blood, but he seemed to gather himself. He placed his other hand on his scion, as if to soothe her. “All is well,” he said to her.
His eyes studied me, taking in my features. “I had heard of this, of Leo’s Enforcer, the one who takes the form of a puma.” He dipped his head as if in recognition of something important, something I didn’t understand. I’d have to think about that later.
“This has been foretold,” he said. “This is a time of change, when the old ways return, when old darkness fights for supremacy against that which is new, against the light of the world.”
I had heard those exact words at some point in the last year, but I couldn’t place them. Before I could ask, he went on.
“My heir, Lotus, my erede, she fed from another, pledged allegiance to another, unbeknownst to me.” Hieronymus stroked the hair of the female vampire who had knelt at his feet, his hand soothing her. “When Lotus came to me to offer her blood and her devotion, she reached around to embrace me. And she placed the cursed thing”—he pointed to my fist—“over my head. There is a spell of binding within it.”
“Binding?” I looked at the necklace in my hand.
“The binding of Santa Croce,” he whispered. At my confused look he said, “Il sangue . . .” He struggled for words and said, “The blood on the crosses and the sacrifice of blood, this created the Mithran, the immortal drinker of blood.”
“Master, no!” The female scion raised her fingers to his mouth.
He smiled and caught her hand, twining his fingers into hers. “We have lived with secrets for too many years, my daughter. These secrets have now appeared, as if from the grave, and they bit us. They drained us. Leo sent this creature to right the wrongs.”
Not exactly, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “I know about the creation story,” I said, my mouth moving almost normally now.