Shadow Rites

Gee used woad to create the blue. Woad was a European herb, an invasive herb that took over gardens, and, like indigo, was used to make blue dye. Yes. That was important. Invasive herbs took over and killed all else but their own. And here each palm print was marked with a blue eye.

At the time I had first seen the claiming handprints, prints that had allowed the Mercy Blade to track me and watch me, I had also noted a pink flower. A rose, the symbol of Evangelina Everhart, Molly’s sister whom I had later killed for consorting with demons and killing humans. The flower had smelled of roses and wormwood, sweet and bitter both. And it was put there with magic—witch magic.

In my memory, I bent over the fire, the scent rich and herbal and warm, and breathed in the sage and sweetgrass. We—Beast and I—reached to the side and chose a thick sliver of wood, pointed on one end, sawn smooth on the other, one side wild and splintered, one side shaped by hand. A stake. It was dry heartwood, its cedar scent resinous and tart. Heartwood to destroy the vampires we hunt and kill. Our hand closed over it, tlvdatsi claws at the ends of human fingers. Pelt, tawny and thick, rose over the bones of our arms. We hefted it and placed the splintered, sharp end of the stake into the flame. It took light. And we rose into the shadows, the first time I ever saw my promised half-Beast, half-Jane form, cast upon the wall.

Ohhh. This is important. This timing, I thought, my consciousness dividing, partially in the memory, and partially where I sat on the porch.

The roof at the heart of the world reached down to us, to Beast and me as one. With one knobby-knuckled hand, killing claws exposed, we scraped a woad-made eye from a palm on the damp stone. It glittered, lid closed as if sleeping, on our hand. With the other hand, we held the flame to the woad-made handprints. The fire from our torch blazed up, burning the woad, burning the handprints that had taken root. And in the center of each palm on the cave walls, a blue eye appeared, opened, and focused on us. Gee’s eyes, shocked. I stabbed at the eye in the center of one woad palm print and it blinked away, but not before I drew blood. It splashed down onto my hand, copper and jasmine-scented. The woad lit, sizzling and hot. Flames raced up and over the cave, blackened the roof. I stepped away as the flames roared up hot and cleansing. All the handprints took flame, all but the one I had stolen with my killing claws. “Mine,” I growled to it. “My place.”

I crouched on the stone floor and watched as the ceiling at the heart of the world flamed and burned. And was cleansed. It took a long time. And no time at all. And when it was done, I sat at my small fire pit and fed the stake into the coals, letting it too burn away. When the smoke cleared, the ceiling was clean again, only the soot above my small fire blacking the smooth rock. I lay down, folding my body, paws beneath me. And I closed my eyes.

But, though I had cleansed the cave by fire, perhaps the watching eyes were still there, in some arcane manner, leaving some trace of the magic. A trace still potent enough for the green magics of an enemy to find me. Hold me. Harm me.

Even though I had been in the presence of angelic power since then, and had cleansed my spirit and soul with baptismal water and had gone to water in the Tsalagi tradition and . . . had done everything I could think of to protect and purify my soul—something was still there. And I didn’t know why.

CHAPTER 7

Bad and Getting Badder

It seemed possible that the old spells were still present—dormant, latent, but filled with sleeping power, able to offer a magic user a way in to me. And I remembered something else, something more recent, a dark heart beating in the roof of my soul home, like a bird’s heart, fastsfastfast, beating in flight.

Not certain what to do about the old memories, or even if I should push on into my soul home to see what was there now, I eased up out of the calm of meditation and into the sound of slow-dripping water, the tinkle of rain down the gutters, the plink of large, slow drops on wood and stone. And the scent of witch child in my nostrils.

Angie Baby was sitting in front of me, her legs crossed in a mimicry of my own, red Keds on her feet, coral pants and shirt, watching me. Behind her was Little Evan, also known as Evan Junior, or EJ, her baby brother, sitting against the wall of the house, his legs stretched out and a soccer ball in his lap, steadied by both hands.

“Hey, Aunt Jane,” Angie Baby said.

“Hey, Aunt Jane,” Little Evan copycatted.

Around us, night had started to fall, the early dusk of storms passing. Inside the house, lights were glowing through the windows, but I heard no one speaking, no one moving around. I got an unhappy sensation in the middle of my chest. This wasn’t good. I opened my mouth, lips dry and slightly cracked from the remnants of dehydration. “Hey,” I said to my godchildren. Neither replied, so I asked, “Is everyone inside . . . um . . . asleep?”

“Yep,” Angie said.

“Yep,” EJ said.

That unhappy sensation in the middle of my chest grew heavy, like a pebble dropped in water, tumbling deep. “Okay. You have something to tell me?”

“Nope.”

“Nope.”

“Ask me, then?”

Angie laughed, the sound playful and childish and happy, her strawberry blond hair stirring with the motion and resettling around her shoulders. “We want to know about that.” She pointed at my chest.

I looked down at my ratty T-shirt. “Just me.”

“Nope.”

“Nope.”

“You got something inside,” Angie said. “Right there.” She pointed at my chest, at the scar that was still unhealed. “Why you carrying her around, Aunt Jane?”