The eyes of the lion and the bobcat, and globes of blood on their claws, were the only unmistakable things left of the exquisite tattoo. In the mass of scar, warped design, and distorted colors, I could make out the shape of the teeth that had bitten him, the werewolf bitch trying to tear the tattoo from his flesh. Firelight lit on the irises. I touched one. My fingertip stilled as the texture of witch magic tingled up from his skin. The eyes glowed hotly, as if throwing back the flames, a molten gold, and seemed to look at me. The taste of magic sparked, tart, citrusy.
I lifted my fingertip and the irises returned to the gold of expensive ink. I tapped it again and the glow returned. The tattoo had been put into his flesh by a witch, a spell that had been interrupted, but I didn’t know the whole story. “The witch who made this, who put a spell into your skin using a tattoo.” Rick made a hmmm of encouragement, the sound half purr. My heart hammered unsteadily. How could I ask this without sounding needy or whiny or stalker-nuts? “Was she a seer?” Which was marginally better than asking him if she saw me in his future. How else would he have my two cats on his body? I wondered if—
“I don’t think so.”
My heart plummeted. Of course not. That was stupid.
“Her name was Loriann. She was doing the dirty work of a half-crazy vampire named Isleen, one of Katie’s get.”
I settled deeper in the pillows and pulled the comforter higher, thinking, Okay, I don’t get some kind of proof that we belong together. But then no one ever does.
“Isleen wanted scions, but there was something wrong with her blood. Hers either never rose or died while chained. So she found herself an old witch, a crone, living out on the bayou with her two grandchildren, and tried to force her to create a spell of binding. When Gramma refused, she killed the old woman in front of the kids and told the eldest, Loriann, she’d kill her brother, Jason, if she didn’t do the job.”
I flinched slightly. One side of Rick’s mouth quirked up with an expression that said, Yeah, life’s a bitch. “Then she fed from Jason and took him away. He was seven.”
I watched his face. “She fed from a child?” A first feeding was almost always sexual in nature, vamp saliva tightening all the pleasure centers in the body and working on the brain like a drug. Feeding from a child under twelve was against the Vampira Carta.
“Yeah. She did. Couple nights later, Isleen and I met up in a bar. And I spent the next few days in an abandoned horse barn, stretched out on a black marble square, chained inside a witch circle as Loriann’s spell was built into me. Then, just like in the movies, at the ninth hour, I was saved and Isleen died.”
Rick had been tortured before, long before the wolves got to him. But he wouldn’t want pity. His eyes held mine, and the breath I took was steady and slow as I forced my emotional reaction to his tale deep inside. “You were saved?”
“Yeah, I was partially free by day and I managed to make some stakes. Isleen and I fought, and I was losing just when Leo and Katie blew the barn doors in and finished her off.”
“Spells of binding. Rick, that’s why the moon can’t call you. You’re already partially bound to something else.” At his expression I said, “And you knew that.” He nodded. “But did you think that Molly and her sisters”—I stopped for a heartbeat. Not Evangelina. I have to be sure of that. I found my place with only a bare hesitation—“might be able to break it for you?”
“It crossed my mind. But I might go furry, and if the spell goes active when I change, it might keep me in cat form, which is not how I want to live my life. At this point, I’m waiting it out. See what happens at the full moon,” he shrugged mildly, which was false body language. Had to be.
I thought about that for a while, about not knowing what your body might do, about living forever in Beast form. I had spent over a hundred years as Beast, and it had changed me. “Okay. I can see that. So. What did Kem send you to do? Buy beer?” Instead of answering, Rick lowered his head and touched my lips with his. I sighed into his mouth and pulled him over me. “I like playing,” I murmured. Rick laughed again, the amused vibrations throbbing through me.
By late afternoon, I was exhausted and lethargic and energized all at once. I watched from beneath half-closed lashes as Rick dressed and left the room. I heard him speak to one of the twins on his way out, and caught the tenor of the exchange, one of those manly tones that said they knew what we had been up to for the last few hours, which they would. Blood-servants can hear better than humans and we hadn’t been trying for silence. We’d been playing. Yeah. For hours. Still smiling, I rose and made my way to the bathroom for a hot shower.
I was still steaming when my phone rang. “Yellowrock,” I said, cutting the water.
“I understand that you believe you have located the grindylow’s lair,” Kemnebi said.
“Yeah. Pretty much.” I had told Rick I had a good idea where the grindy had holed up. It hadn’t taken him long to report back to the black were-leopard. “Do you wish for me to go with you to track him down?”
I pulled my hair to the side so it would drip into the tub instead of on the phone. “Yes.”
“Provide me with the coordinates. My cat will lead the hunt. My . . . associate,” he spat the word, “will assist us.”
I figured that the associate was Rick, the man he planned to kill as soon as Rick shifted. Which was not gonna happen, even if I had to start a supernatural international incident to prevent it. “Fine by me.” I gave him the location, an address in Hot Springs where he could leave his car. “I’ll be there in ninety minutes,” I said.
“Excellent.” The call ended, and so did my long steamy shower. I dressed and dried my hair with the hotel’s blow dryer, braided my hair out of the way into a fighting queue. Slid vamp-killers and wood stakes into my clothing and hair, made sure I was wearing crosses. Last thing, I double-checked that half of my ammo was silver and half was regular. The sun would set in a few hours, and there was no telling what might happen after dark with a pissed-off black were-leopard and empty hunting territory. Into a zippered pocket I placed a mountain lion tooth, my backup emergency tooth for shifting into Beast.
Dressed for hiking and hunting, I found three more messages from Angelina, messages I couldn’t deal with, not and let Big Evan do things his way. But I was going to have to make an appearance at Molly’s. Soon. I exited my room, texting instructions to Derek, not thinking about the blood-servant twins with big ears and bigger libidos. I made it five feet into the common room when Brian was in front of me, nearly vamp-fast. Leering. I almost dropped the cell.
“I just earned twenty from the ugly brother,” he said. I didn’t respond except for the blush starting somewhere below my waist and quickly spreading up my chest. It suffused up my throat and into my cheeks. Brian’s smile widened. “You are a screamer.”
I pursed my lips to keep in an instinctive retort, and pushed past him. This was just teasing. Or jealousy, which made me grin. I was closing the door to the suite when I heard him say, “Derek retrieved your SUV. Do you want to tell us why it was hidden in the driveway of a burned-out homesite?” I didn’t. I closed the door and sent a second text to Derek, thanking him for getting the vehicle back and thinking of all the uses of GPS and how they could trip me up. I had to do better about arranging recovery of my own vehicles. I was getting complacent in the world of vamps, weres, humans, and tech. I needed to take better care.
A little over an hour later I was parked a mile downstream from Evangelina’s, and ready to hunt. The battered, rusted, red pickup truck pulled in beside me, rolling through the mud, with Rick driving, Kem sitting pretty on the front seat. Minutes later we were on the hunt.
The day was warming up enough that I carried my leather jacket through the straps of my backpack, and extra water bottles attached by biners to loops on my hiking pants. Layered T-shirts could be pulled off one by one as needed to cope with warming temperatures. Even in the mountains, the temps could change from cold to warm fast; it was the South, after all.
A frost last night had turned the dogwoods scarlet, started the other deciduous trees into a color change, and shriveled the kudzu. Plants that flowered in fall were budding, opening in fast forward. If the chill held, in two weeks the mountains would be a riot of red and golden hues.
Rick slid a backpack onto his shoulders and we moved down the hill to the noisy, rushing creek, and upstream. Even in human form, the scent of the grindylow was pungent and potent, fishy, with a base scent that now smelled like blood. Kem-cat leaped from rock to rock, Rick and me scrambling to keep up, communicating by hand signals rather than voice to be understood over the water’s roar. We might both have better reflexes and speed than humans, but no human could keep up with a big-cat on the prowl. And there was no doubt that Kem-cat was on a scent.
Like the Puma concolor, the black were-leopard was a solitary hunter, seldom seen in groups larger than three or four, and most often spotted alone. They were the most adaptable of all the big-cats, and unlike their spotted brothers and sisters, lived most often in deeply forested areas, where their dark coloring was most effective. They’d eat anything meaty, storks, baboons, wildebeest, jackals. They liked the taste of domesticated dog. If they could kill it they would eat it. But they were also preyed upon by other big-cats, most commonly the African lion. Ever since finding out that Kem intended to challenge and kill Rick, I had been doing my homework, looking for weak spots in the leopard’s defenses. So far, not many had presented themselves.
I can be male sabertooth lion. Beast hacked deep in my mind, watching Kem leap nearly twenty feet across the rushing stream. I can be big. Beast will protect mate.
Which I knew. And which scared me to death.
The creek was still running high, twisting and turning, carving a deep gulley into the earth. It curved back on itself, and then back again, like a snake in a hurry, whipping back and forth. Where a larger river had the power to cut through obstacles, slowly straightening its path over decades and centuries, small creeks were left to search out the path of least resistance, and this creek had done just that, resulting in a surprisingly compact switchback carved between high banks into the base of the mountain. We passed Evangelina’s house, and Kemnebi stopped on the rock in the middle of the creek. Sniffed the stone. I knew he was smelling Beast when he turned to me and hissed, his golden-green eyes knowing and taunting.