Dark Queen

“I noticed.” A small smile accompanied my words.

“Yes. Well.” He drove in silence for a while before he sighed. “I don’t have time to build a relationship with you before the Sangre Duello.”

“You may never be able to build a relationship with me.”

“This is true. But I will try. Until then, I have a job to do too.”

“Go for it.”

“As a part of that job, I have to find a way to be at the Sangre Duello.”

“I’m not in charge of royal vamp protocol.”

“That’s Leo’s Enforcer talking, not the sister.”

“Potato, potahto. I have a job too. Talk to Leo’s secundo heir, Grégoire, when he gets in from Atlanta.”

Blandly, Aya said, “He’s back from Atlanta. And I tried. He asked me to have a three-way with Leo.”

I snorted. I didn’t mean to. It just blasted out. My laugh felt vastly different in tone from Aya’s. My laugh was stilted, sarcastic, stiff, as if I had never learned to laugh as a child. Or had forgotten how a hundred seventy years ago. Still, the grin I gave him was bright and teasing and at least it felt natural.

Aya glanced at me and back to the street, his own lips turned up. “According to Adelaide Mooney, Grégoire is totally ‘gaga’ over me, and I should consider myself caught in the crosshairs of an intense and concentrated seduction once the Sangre Duello is over.”

“You should be scared. Very, very scared.”

“I am not a homophobe,” he said. His lips curling higher. I knew that smile. It was mine, seen in the mirror. “The Cherokee Nation accepted same-sex marriage back in 2016. Among the speakers of Diné, the Navajo, the two-spirited are referred to as nàdleehé, or the transformed. The Lakota call the two-spirited the winkte. To be two-spirited is a commonly accepted truth among a lot of tribes; the Mojave, Zuni, Omaha, Aleut, Kodiak, Zapotec, and Cheyenne all accept multiple forms of sexuality. But I’m straight. And even if I wasn’t, there is no way in hell I’m doing a three-way with two vamps.”

“Chicken.”

He laughed, that amazing, carefree laugh. The laugh I might have had except for two white men who killed my father and raped my pregnant mother and then had the misfortune to fall into the clutches of a war woman skinwalker and her blood-vow-bound grandchild. “Yes,” he said. “I accept that judgment. Back to my job. They call you the Dark Queen. Want to tell me why?”

“That?” I said. “That was a cop move. And though I might have told my brother all about it, I’m not telling a cop. Figure it out on your own. And by the way, you must suck as an interviewer.” I shook my head, disgusted.

Rain spattered on the windshield, growing stronger. Lightning flickered in the distance. Silence settled on us, uneasy, though not exactly troubled. We shared genes, no history, no common ground.

“It seems I have no finesse when it comes to you,” he admitted. “But, I have something for you. It’s in the glove box, in a white bag.”

I frowned at him. He got me a present?

As if he read my mind, Aya said, “Uni Lisi—Sixmankiller—overnighted it to me.”

My frown grew deeper, darker, and I stared at the glove box as if it might hold a water moccasin. When the box door didn’t open all by itself and something venomous didn’t slither out, I pulled the handle and spotted car rental papers and a brown-paper-wrapped package. I studied the return address and the name: Hayalasti Sixmankiller, with a PO box number in Robbinsville, North Carolina. The box was light but not empty. I tore the paper, careful to keep the address whole, and set the paper aside. The tape on the box broke easily with my fingernail and I lifted the top off, shoved aside the cotton padding, and saw a medicine bag. It was old—ancient. It was the bag I wore in my soul home. I knew instantly that it was my father’s.

Green-dyed leather on one side, rougher rawhide on the other, much like Aya’s, but so old it was dry-rotting. It should have been buried with him. Or given to his eldest child. Me.

“Oh,” I breathed. And caught his scent. Tobacco, sweetgrass, cedar. The faint but still present scent of the Nantahala River. Tears raced down my face. I touched the bag, and though the edges were crumbling, the center was still pliable enough to take the slight weight. There were hard things inside. A bone? A quartz crystal?

“Uni Lisi put something in it for you. For when you’re ready.”

I nodded. Not ready. Not ready just now. Maybe not ever. “Thank you,” I whispered.

At the house, I leaped out and raced through a sudden deluge to the door. Soaked to the skin, I worked the lock as my brother drove off into the storm. Lightning cracked down, one of the ubiquitous lightning storms of the Deep South.

I finally got the lock open and dashed inside, into chaos and screaming and commotion. Edmund—up after dawn, probably only because of the storm and the darkness it gave the day—and Eli were fighting a woman, both men covered in blood, as were the walls and the floor. With the two of them fighting together they should have killed an attacker in the first two seconds and they hadn’t. Yet, this wasn’t a sparring match. It was too bloody for that. Their opponent was a blond vamp, all claws and talons and rage. It was a testament to my exhaustion that I didn’t even blink at the brawl, though did think that it would be a pain in the butt to get the blood off the walls. Again. But I did smell lemons.

I opened my mouth and let the flavor of her blood flow over my tongue and the roof of my mouth as I slouched in the entry, watching, trying to remember the vamp. And then it hit me. Bruiser’s scion. Nicolle. I frowned, not able to remember her last name, if I’d ever heard it. Bruiser had drained her energies and taken her memories and then gifted her to Ed. I had no idea where Ed had been keeping her, but somewhere not close enough. Someone had gotten to her and claimed her for Clan Des Citrons.

I parsed the scents, smelling lemons and the sharp, sour, stagnant pond scent of madness. Her wrists and ankles bore ligature scars the way vamps’ skin looked when it had been burned by silver.

“Where is she?” Nicolle screamed. “I’ll rip her heart out!”

I figured she meant me. Just a wild guess.

Ed vaulted across the kitchen table, his talons ripping at her. More blood on the walls. Crap. If the lemon clan set her free and tracked her, then they knew where we lived. If she had gotten away—which her scarring suggested—then if I shifted to blood hound, I could follow her back to them. If I was willing to risk losing myself to the hunt and never finding myself again. Becoming blood hound was dangerous.

Beast thought at me, Ugly dog. Good nose. Do not want to be ugly dog tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I slid my hands into the slits in my clothing and pulled weapons. A wood stake and a semiautomatic nine-mil. It was loaded with regular ammo, but it should slow her down. Nicolle was a young-ish vamp and they tended to be less resistant to weapons of all kinds.

I hesitated, remembering the path of blood Aggie had shown that I was treading. But. I wasn’t killing. I was swatting down a crazy-assed vamp.

“Nicolle!” I shouted.

Everything stopped. And then Nicolle leaped at me, totally vamped out. I raised the gun and fired. Mid-center body mass. She didn’t die but she did scream, that awful ululation of a vamp dying, or thinking they are. She dropped to the ground, landing in a three point balance, a tripod, both feet and one hand. When she thrust herself up, I stabbed low, into her belly, hitting her descending aorta, or whatever passed as such for vamps. She fell. Lay there, paralyzed, leaking onto the wood floors. If our house was ever a crime scene, the cops would think the place had been the home base of a couple dozen mass murderers.

Ed and Eli fell back, exhausted. Ed pushed off his perch almost instantly and went to Eli. “Let me heal you.”

My second set his weapons on the kitchen table for cleaning and pulled off his T-shirt. His dark chest was scored with talon marks and too much blood. Ed sliced his fingers with his blade and went to work healing the bleeding mess. Neither man looked at me.

“Somebody want to tell me what’s happening?” I asked.

Edmund huffed softly through his nose. I was pretty sure he was breathing to make up for the battle and his own blood loss. “She came in through the back. Over the brick wall. From Katie’s.” Fear slammed through me. I turned that way and Ed said, “Dion called. Everyone is fine. He locked the girls in the kitchen and threw holy water on Nicolle.”