Dark Heir

My heart stopped. The sounds of battle were sharp, bright, and painful on my ears.

Change! Beast snarled at me.

I changed. I pulled the merged genetic material over me, over us, taking on the half-human, half-puma warrior shape of the War Woman of my clan. Taking it on fully, healing even as I sprouted pelt, as my toes spread and flexed. Retractable claws unsheathed and ripped away burned boot leather, clawed, tore my hands apart. My fingers separated and fisted, healed in front of my eyes, fully formed into the knobby-knuckled, long-fingered shape of my stronger-than-skinwalker hands. Hips and knees and shoulders were bigger, rounder boned. My waist was tiny and solid muscle. I rolled to a sitting position, rain splattering down on me, warm and wet and slick.

I took a breath and it didn’t hurt. “Oh.” It didn’t hurt.

I felt the things in my left hand, warm and tingling and full of power. Holding the fist up, I saw the glow of—

“Jane! Down!”

I ducked a sword cut and rolled through the mud. A smooth, clean cut. The blade smelling of blood. Bruiser’s blood. I rolled out of the way, my weapons clanking and grinding on my misshaped body, up against a wall that stank of old fire. Lightning struck close, rattling the brick of the burned church. A wall nearby, weakened by fire and storm and time, crumbled and fell in a crash. I wiped my hand across my half-human face, focusing on the battle taking place in front of me. In the midst of a rainstorm, a brutal punishing lightning storm, Bruiser and the Son of Darkness were fighting. With swords. The dual swords of the Duel Sang, the blood duel.

How did Joseph find us? The gobbet of his flesh had been burned to ashes by the lightning bolt.

But . . . I looked at my left fist. He could track me through the blood diamond. And perhaps through his own flesh, the hairs in Bruiser’s pocket. I opened the fist, my fingers stretching out, my claws sliding free, gleaming in the wet dark.

In my paw/palm was a new thing. A new weapon? Or something else, something that had never been before. The metal from the iron spike of Golgotha had melted when I shifted and had re-formed around the blood diamond and the sliver of the Blood Cross. The diamond, now glowing with a white light, humming with power, was touching the sliver of ancient wood, the two weapons touching, held in place by hardened iron. It wasn’t the weapon or the shape that Sabina had suggested, but it was . . . curious. Unexpected. Remarkable in so many ways.

It had made itself.

I looked from my hand to the fighting and took a quick breath that flowed in through my nose and mouth, over the scent receptors in flehmen response, smelling, tasting, seeing Bruiser’s blood flow, looking black in the darkness, red in the lightning flashes, hearing the crash of steel and the grunts of pain.

Joseph Santana was uncut, his body looking whole and healed, but as he moved and cut, I caught the stink of burning flesh. He was still injured, still on fire, somewhere deep inside, the reek smelling of pain and fury. I could risk using the weapon in my fist on him, risk a result I couldn’t predict. Or I could—

I reached over my shoulder and hunted for the butt of the Benelli Super 90. It was way around to the side, hanging at a strange angle, one strap too loose on my body, the other too tight. I got my right hand around the stock and tried to draw it.

The new shotgun-shell holder, mounted on the left side of the receiver, caught. The leather had shrunk and tightened in fire and lightning and rain. I twisted and jerked the weapon, trying to free it.

Bruiser took a cut to his left shoulder and fell to one knee. He got his weapon up to block a sword strike. I yanked on the shotgun, and the damaged leather of the spine holster parted. I rolled to my feet and ran, screaming, “Hey, suckhead! Take on someone your own size!” Bruiser fell flat. Joseph Santana whirled to me as I fired. He took the full blast into his chest cavity. The second blast took him in the belly. The third took off part of his right shoulder.

He whipped up his arm. The bracelet on his wrist shot out a silver light. Santana vanished.

I dropped to my knees beside Bruiser. He looked up at me, his eyes too wide with shock and adrenaline. “Hey, gorgeous,” he said, his voice tight with the pain. “What took you so long?”

CHAPTER 28

I Smelled Onorio Blood

“I was busy figuring out stuff,” I said through my half-human mouth. The sounds were odd and distorted, but Bruiser seemed to have no trouble understanding. I ripped open what was left of my med-kit and handed him a slightly scorched sanitary pad, part of Eli’s medic gear, for battlefield wounds. Bruiser slipped the pad under his ruined leather and placed it over his bleeding shoulder. “How fast will you heal?” I asked.

“Fast enough.” He hissed in a breath, held it, released it on a gasp, and asked, “Why?”

“You still got the hairs you took out of Pinkie’s neck?”

Bruiser smiled slowly, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “Yes. What do you have in mind?”

“Let’s hold hands, call his name, click our heels together, and see if this will take us to him. Or bring him to us. Whichever.” I held out the new weapon, part iron, part diamond, part wood sliver. “He’s wounded. The diamond is connected to the bracelet he’s wearing, and to me. And there’s fresh blood on the ground from where I shot him. It might be now or never to finish him.”

Bruiser lifted a hand and curled his fingers around my jaw, a hairy, pelted jaw. “Whatever my lady desires.”

I chuckled and tried to holster the shotgun, but the leather was ruined. All my gear was ruined. I was wearing tatters but managed to find a vamp-killer that was in fairly good shape despite the lightning strike and held the shotgun and the knife in my left hand. I lowered the new weapon—it had to be a weapon, because I’d had to choose to become War Woman to use it—to the ground and smeared it through a splatter of Santana’s blood and sooty mud from the church. I gripped it in my right palm, along with the three hairs Bruiser pulled from an envelope. I closed my knobby pawed fingers around it. “If this works, I’ll shoot him a few times and then cut out his heart.”

“I’ll try to stay out of the way.” Bruiser was laughing at me, that kind of loving laughter that . . . that I’d never experienced before and that sent warm bubbles of happiness dancing through my bloodstream.

I hooked my right arm through Bruiser’s left, noting that he held a long sword in his right. And his bleeding had stopped. Onorio magic.