Shadow Rites

The doors opened and Derek led the way. I let him. He’d be in charge as Leo’s full-time Enforcer long after I was gone. I had to let him be alpha or turn him into a kitten with no confidence—Beast’s thoughts, not mine, and she knew a lot more than I did about training up a predator.

The conference room was full to bursting with vamps, humans, and that piquant, biting, provocative miasma of scents that said “vamp stronghold.” The stink of too much coffee, too much testosterone, and too little sleep added it its own rich undertext to the pong and I wrinkled my nose. Voices were raised to be heard over the volume on the screens, and men and women stood, straining as if to assist the men on the screen, though we were all too far away to assist in any way.

I was just in time.

The small clearing in the Waddill Refuge was illuminated with bright lights, the kind highway paving crews worked by overnight when traffic allowed them to make real headway without bogging down commuters, slowing commercial transportation, or endangering their own lives in the traffic. Bodies were racing here and there on the scene, so covered with mud and sweat and the beating rain that they were unidentifiable. At least two generators were contending for clamor awards, and the voices of the Onorios and the humans were raised to compete. There were two cameras positioned to capture the whole clearing, the wooden doors in the ground clearly visible in the center. The doors, which were set flush with the ground, had been blown or swept free of the refuse and rotting vegetation that had covered them, and the dead crows had been removed. The doors were stark and weathered in the too-bright light.

There were white-painted figures on them, the markings recognizable as runes, sigils, symbols of arcane power. The sight of them made my skin crawl. The last time I had seen so many powered-up runes in one place had been when I fought for the lives of my godchildren.

Eli placed a cup of tea in my hand and I closed my cold fingers around the ceramic cup, smelling Irish Breakfast blend tea, the water still simmering from the steeping boil. He also waved a Krispy Kreme donut under my nose and I took it too. Ate. Drank. Watched the humans on the screen back away from the doors as the Onorios closed in, Brandon and Brian from the sides, in a pounding, splattering rain, each of them lifting a leg and stepping over something, possibly a witch circle in the ground. A hint of green flooded the screen before it pixelated out to a series of overlapping rectangles in shades of gray and green, the grinding sound of static replacing the roar of generators. The circle was still active, still full of arcane power. Magic and digital images and sometimes even cellular transmissions had trouble merging energies. A moment later, the screen cleared and a collective relieved scent filled the room.

The Robere twins looked unchanged until I got a clear view and focused on their legs, which were missing pants. The charred remnants hung to midknee, exposing lower legs, scarlet with burns and weeping blisters. Interesting. They had fought off a witch circle.

I ate and drank and wondered what power Onorios had to step inside an active witch circle and survive. Hopefully. The boys standing on the closed doors were too pretty to die in an explosion of magic.

I drank the cooling tea and finished off a donut and unabashedly Onorio-watched while the stink of vamp-worry increased in the air around me and the men on the screen worked. There were a lot of vamps in the conference room, and once upon a time, I might have been on pins and needles, ready to defend myself at any moment. Here . . . crap. I was one of the big cats. No one looked at me twice, no hint of challenge, no need to prove themselves against me. I had both hands full. I was eating and drinking and relaxing in the presence of the apex predators of the food chain.

I took a second donut and ate it, blueberry this time, the powdered sugar falling like pollen over my shirt as I ate. I took another cup of tea when it was offered, this time by a blood-servant, and drank a different blend, something with spice in it. I had never been waited on hand and foot. Never. But I could see why people got used to it.

I was changing.

Before I could dissect that thought, the screens showed a pixelating image of the Roberes, shuffling back, bending in tandem, each grasping a handle in the doors. Which brought me back to the night I was struck by lightning while standing in a witch circle. I had been blown out of the circle when I was struck. Lightning and magic had burned me crispy. I had no idea what that event meant to my life, my future, or my Beast, but I shook off the nagging worry.

Bruiser knelt from just ahead of the camera, his clothes soaked to the skin in the pouring rain. He was holding the foil-wrapped brooch in one hand and a gallon milk carton of what looked like fresh blood in the other. That gave me pause for several reasons, one, because, except for scions in the devoveo, vamps hate any blood that isn’t instantly fresh and from the veins or arteries of their blood-servants or blood-slaves, and two, because how many humans had he bled to get a gallon of unclotted blood, and three, how did he do that logistically? I had a mental image of six or eight humans at a long table, slicing their arms open and holding them over a humongous funnel. I chuckled at the vision and took the last bite of donut, grinning and saluting Leo with the dough treat when he looked around, annoyance on his face.

The room around me fell quiet, only the roar of machinery and voices on the screen breaking the silence. The Robere twins strained and the doors lifted. I could hear the creak of water-expanded wood over the generators. The cameras that I had thought were stationary moved forward, clearly shoulder-mounted, to peer into the hole as the harsh lights fell inside to expose a watery hell of . . . not much.