Shadow Rites

Chain and mote and flower eye, Beast thought. Three links.

Tripled links, I thought back, and examined more closely the chain that hung from the roof of my soul home. I had thought it looked organic and it was. The chain was the spiritual representation of our twisted genetics. Twisted by all the strange magics I had come in contact with over the time I was in New Orleans. Just as radiation forced mutations on genetics, so the magic had forced a change, a mutation. And that mutation was tied to the dark mote of power at the heart of my soul. And was part of the eye-in-my-palm spell that was tied to me. Through my RNA and DNA. It all made sense, here in this place.

Beast extended all our claws and gathered herself.

Beast, what are you—

She shoved off the floor of the soul home with all four powerful legs and leaped high, catching the pillar in her claws the way she would sink them into tree bark. The pillar should have been slick and slippery as water-smoothed stone, but there were rough edges and a spongy feel to the mineralized column that allowed my claws to sink deep. Beast climbed the pillar just as she would a tree. High, to the top of the cavern. I didn’t look down, but Beast chuffed a laugh at my fear. Beast has leaped much farther.

Fine. Okay. But what the crap are we doing up here?

Beast set her claws and held on, her nose only inches from the woad blue link and the dark pulsing mote as she sniffed, drawing the air in over her tongue and the scent sacks in the roof of her mouth in flehmen behavior. The smell of vampire was stronger here, as were all the scents. And the stink was a mixture of Leo, Gee DiMercy, Joses, the Son of Darkness, and . . . Bethany.

Bethany. Holy crap. When she healed me the first time, she left something inside me . . .

Vampire! Beast snarled. Ambush hunter!

Faster than thought, she snapped at the woad ring. It was the striking of a big cat on prey, canines sinking deep and ripping out. The blue link broke and she yanked it free of the pulsing mote. The edge of the mote burst outward in a shower of blue and silver and scarlet sparks. The chain slid free and fell, slithering around the pillar. The blue link crunched and bled, a bitter taste like the drink Aggie One Feather had given me. And the stink of iron, salt, and burned hair.

Below me on the floor, the silver chain piled up as it fell, rattling like snake scales, a sliding shush of sound that was nothing like the metallic ringing chimes it should have been.

The woad ring in her teeth, Beast backed partway down the pillar and then leaped, free-falling toward the cave floor twenty feet below. Where a silver snake with one huge green eye was coiled, looking up at us, ready to strike.

CHAPTER 10

You Can Try, Witch

Midair, Beast whirled her heavy tail and torqued her body, pushing off the pillar with her back paws, launching herself out and to the side. In a movement worthy of a kung fu special effects movie, she spat out the ring and whipped her body around, catching the snake behind the head. She bit down. Metal and bone crunched, green blood splattered and filled her mouth. Beast whipped her whole body side to side, lashing the snake, thrashing its head against the floor, breaking its spine in a dozen places. Death tremors twitched through its long tail. The emerald slit pupil in the single green eye widened and went still.

The woad ring had gone dull and grayish. The stink of burned hair disappeared. The snake was dead.

Just to be certain, Beast ripped out the snake’s vertebra and spat bone, green blood, and silver scales to the floor. She settled to the cave floor to groom herself. Her tongue was rough and coarse, and pulling green blood and blue woad off her pelt.

Oookaaay. I can’t complain.

Beast is best hunter.

Yes, you are. But we’re still left with my hand all bent back and broken. And what is with that stink of burning hair?

We can shift now. We can become Beast. The Gray Between is ours again, she thought.

I studied the ceiling. The dark mote was still there, but instead of a strong pulsing, it was fluttering, as if Beast’s rough treatment of the woad ring and removal of the chain had damaged it somehow. I remembered it spurting, as if it was alive and had been injured. I pushed to our feet and moved slowly to the other side of the fire pit, to see the mote from that side. There was a small blackened mark there, like a scar.

I went back and pawed the ring. Part of it was missing. What happened to the blue ring?

Beast ate it.

Was that wise?

Tasted of blood of Anzu. Beast chuckled. Makes Beast strong.

I didn’t like the idea of her swallowing the magic of another creature, but it was a bit late to argue about it. What about the smell of Bethany? Bethany was a vamp priestess and she took the term nutcase to new and whacky heights.

Bethany meant to watch, like ambush hunter. Bethany has not done so.

So she, what? Forgot about us?

Beast does not know.

But . . . her magic. Is it dead?

Beast looked away, bored with the topic. Or she didn’t know the answer and wouldn’t let me know that she didn’t know. Dang cat. How about the burning hair? I asked again.

Jane has hair.

Yeah. Dang cat was messing with me. Fine. Ducky. Let’s try this thing.

I padded back to the fire pit and lay down on the cool stone floor. Closing my eyes, I searched out, not my own DNA, but the vision of myself in my human form. I felt the Gray Between as it erupted out of my breastbone, high, near my throat, and spread around me with cool, sparkling radiance I could feel, even sightless. The shift began with my spine and ribs, bones cracking, snapping in two, and reforming. I opened my mouth to scream, but had no breath for one, my lungs half collapsed as they changed and reshaped. This change was as painful as my shifts used to be, and as slow, a ripping, tearing transformation. I opened my eyes as the bones in my left hand and arm, and even higher in my shoulder, began to reform, reshape, realign, and snapped into place. Human. Better, I murmured to Beast. Much better.