Shadow Rites

And . . . I had been struck by lightning not so long ago. My hair had burned. So had my flesh. That experience had done something to me. I had shifted into my Beast since, but not in extremis. Not when I had to shift or die. Not when it mattered. And I hadn’t spent much time in my soul home since the lightning strike, only long enough to glance in, not long enough to notice the cold flames and lack of light.

I remembered Beast lying in the dark, her coat the wrong color.

My father’s favorite form had been the black panther.

He had died, changing into his cat too late to save his life.

Was there a connection with the melanistic coat color? Had something happened to my father’s ability to shift? Had he been hit by lightning too? Had something happened to us both? Was it something peculiar to skinwalkers?

The stink of burning hair. Why burning hair?

There was too much that I didn’t know, so I clung to the things I did know. I had family—Eli and Alex. I had Bruiser. I was alive. Beast was still with me. I could deal with everything else. As soon I was sure that I stayed alive. Yeah. That. I took a breath that rattled in my lungs and I coughed, a soft hack of pain.

“My Jane?”

“Not your Jane,” I snapped, but it was spoiled by my raspy, gasping voice. “Your Enforcer. Not your Jane.”

Leo chuckled, a vamp’s hunting purr that made Beast sit up and purr back. I kept the sound inside my head, but Beast liked Leo a little too much for my tastes. “You make the chase so delightful,” he said.

“Stuff it.”

Leo burst out laughing, my purr buried beneath his pure amusement. “Ah, Jane. What shall I do to punish my Mercy Blade for his attack on you?”

“Getting shot was enough,” I said. I remembered that Beast said Leo had cut Gee. “You cutting him was enough. And if all that wasn’t enough, Eli said I could shoot him again.”

I felt Leo’s hand on my face, cool and smooth and utterly inhuman. He stroked back my hair, and his voice was curiously gentle when he said, “I would have been most . . . discommoded had you died.”

“Yeah. That’s why I stay alive,” I said, my native snark coming back online, as if I had rebooted that file, “to keep you from being discommoded.” I’d have to look that one up.

Darkness was closing in on me, the dark of sleep, the sleep of healing. I whispered, “Besides, I think it’s possible that Gee was magicked into attacking me.” I thought back to his eyes, blazing blue. “Something’s wrong. Magic and spells and . . . stuff. Eli. Tell them.” And then I was under, into a place of dreams.

* * *

It was nearly night before I woke up again in Edmund’s bed in his new but still tiny room with its rich furnishings and its interior window. Previously his room had had an exterior window, an indication of a vamp’s low status, and I had helped him improve his status enough to get a better room. Edmund, once a clan Blood Master, had fallen far, and no one had yet told me why or how.

I could feel my breath moving in my lungs, as if I breathed iced air, though the room was warm. My heart was beating slow and hard, a bass drum through my arteries. The electric blanket was turned low, but it felt hot and prickly on my skin. By the staleness of the scents around me, the vamps were gone. Thank goodness.

Shoving pillows behind me, I gathered the blanket tight around me and pushed myself to a sitting position against the headboard. I was naked beneath the blanket. Oh, goody. That meant I’d been naked in front of Leo and Edmund . . . and Eli, who was sitting in a delicate, dainty floral-upholstered chair at a small ormolu table, his eyes on me.

The lamp on the table was off and the room was deeply shadowed, my partner’s face not visible until I pulled on Beast’s night vision. Through her eyes, the room was silver and green, the details sharp and the shadows black as if drawn with india ink. Eli’s expression was grim, set, and he was sitting as still as a vamp. There was a shotgun across his knees. I hadn’t seen the shotgun when we got to headquarters, so either he had gone home to get it or someone had brought it to him. I was betting that he hadn’t left my side and that one of Leo’s security peeps had brought it to him. Probably under duress.

There was a glass of water on the bedside table and I drank it dry, replacing it on the table. I cleared my throat, which still felt scratchy, and said, “Debrief.”

“That bird stabbed you. I shot him. You didn’t shift.”

I had thought that Eli’s voice had been toneless many times in our relationship, but this was even more so. Robotic. Dead sounding.

“I applied pressure. Leo flipped you over and ripped open your shirt. Arterial bleeding went everywhere. You were bleeding out. Leo sliced his fingertips and shoved them inside the wound.”

Eli went quiet again. His jaw worked, tightening and relaxing in the edged shadows. When he began again, there was no indication that he was under strain, except for the total lack of emotion in his voice. “Edmund picked you up. Leo and he carried you here. I shot a couple of vamps who got in the way or got too close. Standard ammo. They’ll live.”

I said nothing, just watched his face. After a long silence, he said, “You didn’t shift.” And this time there was a bare hint of emotion, a simple thread of . . . something.

“I couldn’t. Since the lightning, I’ve shifted when I wasn’t in trouble, in danger, but this time, when I needed to shift or die, I couldn’t.”

“Lightning?”