I inhaled, and the harsh chemicals of the white man’s world assaulted me. Wax, smoke, cleansers, dyes in the fabric beneath my head, exhaust, mold and sour water, old wood, paint, human sweat. The smell of witch and blood-servant. Vamp-stink from Bruiser’s skin, fading now. Riding over it all was the stink of scorched flesh and pain pheromones. Mentally, I catalogued my body, and found nothing wrong, no pain, no injuries. Not my burned flesh, then.Finding nothing to defend against in the scents or the silence of the room, I relaxed. Despite the reek, I felt . . . okay. Not sleepy. Not unhappy. But calm, full. Satisfied, as if I’d eaten a big meal and then taken a nap. And I felt like myself, which was a thought for later, when I had time to analyze the vision, maybe with Aggie One Feather as my guide.
Movement caught my eye through my lashes, and I saw Evangelina bending over, only feet away, a cloth and a spatula in her hands as she scraped at a tabletop. Her hair hung down in a heavy red tangle, a splendor of curls that caught the lamplight, longer and thicker than I remembered it. A rosy halo surrounded her, an aura in shades of ruby, maybe the aftereffects of using her power. White gauze bandages circled both forearms, six inches wide, heavily padded from elbow to wrist. They were new. They were defensive wounds. The sight of them made me want to laugh.
Evangelina had tried to take advantage of me when I asked her for help. She had tried some kind of witch-spell-empowered hypnosis on me, trying to learn what I was. Possibly trying to set a watch-me spell into my soul, tracing it in over Gee’s spell, so she could influence me in some way. Tricky-witch. But she paid the price. Savage victory swept through me like a cold wind. She had tried something magical on me, just as Gee had. And Beast and I had won.
Bruiser was sitting on the couch, watching Evangelina, his eyes hooded and intense. They were talking about me, and he asked, “How did she melt the candles?”
“Stop asking me that,” Evangelina snapped. “I didn’t know an hour ago, and I don’t know now.”
“So speculate.”
“Jane isn’t human. She isn’t witch or shaman or vampire,” she said, her irritated tone suggesting that this was repetition. “She isn’t anything associated with the Dark or anything of the Light. She isn’t an angel, a demon, or a ghost—not that I’ve ever seen any of those things, but she doesn’t fit the archetypes. She has no intrinsic magic that I can see or feel, but she did magic. Low level, but intense. She has some strange Cherokee magic, which is probably how she healed the wounds I bandaged after she fought Leo in the street.” Evangelina stood and wiped the spatula off into a paper bag. Softened wax fell into it with a soft thump. “It was magic,” she said, surprise in her tone. “We’ll know more when Molly calls me back.”
I had forgotten about the wounds that had healed when I shifted. Foolish kit mistake, Beast growled.
“Is she going to be all right?”
“I. Don’t. Know. Stop asking. But I’m sure she’ll be fine”—she hissed in pain as her wounded arm bumped her side—“whatever she is.” Evangelina left the room, her bare feet padding on the floor. Bruiser stood; I closed my eyes as he came into my field of vision, but not before I saw the ruby aura that surrounded him. It was the exact hue of Evangelina’s aura. I remembered the pinkish glow on Bruiser’s skin in the shower. I remembered their postures when I interrupted them earlier. Romantic. Rosy. I had thought it was her shirt . . . Crap. She was spelling him. Now why would Evangelina love-spell the prime blood-servant of the Master of the City, during negotiations between their races? I breathed out a sigh. Just one more worry.
They still didn’t know I was awake. Bruiser followed Evangelina out of the living room into the kitchen and I rolled soundlessly to my knees and up to my feet. Looked around the room. Huh. I had made a mess. All three white candles had melted to a sooty mass, dripped all over the end table and onto the floor. The two feathers, the small silver knife, and bell, were caught in the softened wax. The feathers were ruined, but the other things would be okay after a good cleaning. There was a small gray spot on the ceiling that looked like a shadow, but wasn’t. It was soot and wax from the fire that had melted the candles. Cushions were everywhere. A pillow had several scorched holes in it, as if ashes had fallen across it. A cup of tea I hadn’t noticed before had turned over, the reddish liquid splashed and the cup handle broken.
It looked like I had tried to burn up everything around me. I nearly snorted with disgust at the mess. I needed Aggie One Feather if I wanted to take a trip deep inside my psyche or into my past. But one thing was clear. Gee had been watching me, following me, with his spell. It had been a good one. Nearly perfect.
Drawing on Beast’s stealth attributes, I pulled the gold cross off and dropped it on the pillow, slipped to my bedroom, grabbed my go bag, slung my H&K holster over my shoulder, took up a single vamp-killer blade, a hand full of stakes, and a pair of sandals. I was out the front door before Evangelina and Bruiser were any the wiser. Up the canyon of the street, a heated mist rose from the asphalt on the night-cooled air. The quarter moon hung between the buildings, casting dim shadows. The buildings were ghostly and monochromatic, windows like jack-o’-lantern eyes, lit from within, bright with life, or prison eyes, barred and lit from without, reflective and empty and soulless. The night was oddly silent, the music of countless bars and dance halls and blues palaces a throttled, distant blurred sound. Overhead, storm clouds moved in from the gulf, obscuring half the stars. Rain was coming. Soon and hard.
Standing across the street, I weaponed up, watching in the windows of my own house; Bruiser and Evangelina had just noticed I wasn’t on the living room floor anymore. Bruiser raced up the stairs. Evangelina pushed aside the lacy curtains and looked out into the street. I stepped behind a car parked at the curb and stood where she couldn’t see me. Watching her, I flipped open the throwaway cell phone and dialed Molly.
She answered on the first ring. “What are doing to my big sister?” She nearly snarled. “And what took you so long to call me. I got three weird messages from her in the last half hour.”
I laughed, feeling free and lighthearted. “Evangelina is up to no good all on her own, Molly-girl.”
“I was afraid of that. Her message didn’t sound like her.”
“You mean not all stuffy and uptight and rigid? More like a regular person?”
“Play nice. That’s my sister we’re talking about.”
“We are playing nice. Beast didn’t eat her. But your stuffy big sister was trying to figure out what I am, and I think I burned her in the process.”
“Tell me.”
I left nothing out since our last chat, and it took several minutes. When I was done, Molly was quiet for a long moment, before she said, “Son of a witch on a stick. Okay. I’ll handle my sis. But you need to be ready, big-cat.”
Something tightened deep inside me. “For what?”
“For what you are to come out. Too many people have noticed you down there in the City of Mardi Gras, powerful people and powerful beings. Discovery of a skinwalker, of the Cherokee variety, would ride the news channels for days. You’d be the subject of speculation by TV and radio personalities and panel discussions by knowledgeable idiots. You’re something that no one really knows about, Jane, not anymore, maybe not for centuries. A magical creature of unknown properties, one with a dark and mystical and violent potential. And it’s only a matter of time before it comes out.”
I closed my eyes against her words. “You’re saying I’ll have trouble if . . . when I come out. That people will get in my way, in my face, chase me down, cause me problems.”
“Capture and dissect you if they can. Just like they would my . . . situations.” She meant her children, a sorcerer who had, so far, survived the usual childhood cancers that claimed most male witches, and a witch daughter with two witch genes. A powerful tool in the hands of, well, almost anyone. “Next time you come home, I’ll load you down with protection.”
Home. The mountains. An image of the moon hanging in the cleft of a mountain gorge, so alike, and so very different from, the vision of the moon over the French Quarter tonight. There, a breeze would be stirring the branches of oak and maple and evergreen, the moon shining on a slow-moving river as the mountain angled up sharply, cracked rock on either side. Mist rose from the black water, still warm from the day. A night bird called, a long trilling tweet. The image gripped me in a desperate, lonely fist. Home. I needed to be home, deep in the hills, not in this stinky city surrounded by cars and streetlights and thousands of humans.
But that was Beast talking. I had a job to do. I gripped the phone and opened my eyes on the nightscape of the city of New Orleans. “Okay. So what happened to me tonight and what should I do about it?”
“I think you have a natural protection woven about you from the cave where you first shifted into a bobcat, when you were a kid. Maybe some kind of Cherokee mystical something or other put over you there, put over your soul by your father and your grandmother to keep you safe. Maybe even some latent magic, or a spell to offset the skinwalker natural proclivity to violence and dark arts.”
I raised my head at that. It was the first good news I’d heard about me and my kind in a while. Yeah . . . Why not? Just because most—okay, all—skinwalkers eventually went nutso and ate humans, didn’t mean that we were supposed to do that. The white man brought many contagions. Why not one that changed skinwalkers? Maybe my father and grandmother had come up with something special, some unique and now forgotten ritual that would keep me from that fate. Forever. And maybe the magic of that ritual just burned Evangelina, and stabbed Gee in the eye for interfering. Yeah. A grin spread across my face. Fire magic!
“Because Gee’s magic is bluish,” she went on, “I agree it’s European or Celtic based, which means iron will break it better than silver. The handprints suggest that his magic is something more intrinsic and less ritual-based than my own gift. Meaning that he’ll have defensives built into his skin. If he has skin.”