Shadow Rites

I staggered back to Evan and looked at the working erupting out of him. Compared it to the working stuck in my palm. Tried to put it all together.

The two enemy witches had . . . what? Gotten a sample of my genetic material and used it to create a watching-working tied to me? Then they scanned my house, using it as a distraction so they could drop a DNA spell into me. Yeah. That felt right. Their initial scan had left a back door entry to my house. Using that, they put a similar watching spell in an air elemental gas spell, sent it inside the hedge of thorns ward that had been protecting the house. The Truebloods had breathed the spelled gasses. Their breath had carried it to their blood, and Edmund had done artificial resuscitation on them, probably getting the spell on him/in him that way. Making it worse, Evan had triggered the magical icons at my house, and then here, and gotten knocked loopy, getting more of the magics on him.

But the working on me, while it wasn’t active when Mol scanned me, was still there. Hiding inside me? Yeah. Like the way a spider hides its eggs in its prey. And the moment my blood and vamp’s blood were in the same place, inside a witch circle—or the remains of one—the main part of the attack was activated.

I leaned into Molly and checked her palms. Yeah. Same green magic crap. Lachish’s hands and Ailis’s hands were erupting green stuff too. So the spell had been transferred from one to the other the way one person with the flu might infect another, by touch or breathing. Or when the focal was tripped.

The spell—or part of it—appeared to be intended for us to turn on each other. It was an amazing spell, intricate, multilayered, specific, targeted on a genetic level and then targeted on a multivictim level.

I didn’t know who the attackers were. I didn’t know how to stop the spell. Except to get away from them all. To get Edmund away from them all.

Nausea flooded my mouth with saliva. The taste of blood and acid rose up my esophagus. I vomited again, but this time I felt something different. Something warm near my ear. Cold dripping down my neck. I touched the soft tissue of my throat, in front of and below my ear, and my fingers came away cold and sticky. Blood. Just a trickle.

Right at the place where Leo had bitten me when he tried to force a binding on me. Blood welling in the two spots where his fangs had bitten me. “Well, joy,” I said. I didn’t know if the blood was the effect of entering no time one time too many, or the effect of the attack spell, or some other mumbo-jumbo paranormal crapola. But whatever the reason, it wasn’t going to be good.

I propped my hands on my knees to hold myself up. An unexpected shiver raced through me, raising the hair on my arms and legs in reaction to the cold. I would never be able to defeat Edmund in real time, not as sick as I was. So I pulled a pure wooden stake out of my bun, one with no trace of silver on it, and crab-walked over to him. I shoved it through his shirt into the sweet spot where his ribs came together, where the descending aorta—in both humans and vamps—was. His flesh in no time was rubbery and difficult to puncture. But I leaned into the strike, putting my weight behind it until the stake was buried deep. It wasn’t a heart stick, so he should survive it.

I stood there, cramping like a son of a gun, until I saw his eyelids flicker. When I was able to stand upright against the cramps again, I rammed a shoulder into his belly, below the stake, and rolled him up into a fireman’s carry. I was doing a lot of that lately. Maybe I needed to add more weights to my squat lifts.

Fighting nausea and vertigo, I carried the now-comatose and paralyzed vampire off the property, down Eighth Street to St. Charles Avenue, where cars and people were unmoving, caught in no time. I trudged across the streetcar rails into the Garden District, and hooked a left onto Pryatania Street. My intent was to zigzag to the empty and former Clan Mearkanis Home. But my strength was draining away fast.

Stumbling, two blocks later, I turned again and made my way into the street to avoid a romantic couple frozen arm in arm, laughing, sightseeing along the white walls encircling Lafayette Cemetery Number One. The limestone and marble and whitewashed cement glowed in the night like a beacon. A sound that might have been humor rumbled within me. I was far enough away from the Elms to feel a bit safer and the irony was too much to ignore. I hobbled to the iron gate, which, strangely, was still open, and into the cemetery.

I passed what might have once been a guardhouse, but was now derelict, the roof never replaced after Katrina. The hurricane had left the city bankrupt and unrepaired, and the many cemeteries and their mausoleums and crypts and vaults open to vandalism. The concrete path was cracked and busted. Gang graffiti marked the resting places of the dead. But the family mausoleums still managed to impart that distinctly New Orleans flavor, standing cheek by jowl, with crosses and arched roofs and sun-faded silk flowers at the sealed entrances.

Near the middle of the burial grounds, I stepped off the path and into the narrow space between two humpbacked family crypts and dumped Edmund off my shoulder. And nearly fell on top of him as he left the no time of the Gray Between and almost landed. He was caught by normal time just above the ground, his white dress shirt stained scarlet, the stake buried in his lower chest. I dropped to the dirt-covered cement near him and placed a hand between his head and the cement riser. When I touched him, his body landed with a thump, his head in my hand. I laid it on the cracked and broken ground.

I let myself slide out of no time, into real time. The smell of lime and urine and old, old, old death, combined with Edmund’s blood-scent. I had bubbled time far too much in the last few days. I wondered what the repercussions to that were, and if I might reach the point someday very soon when I could no longer access no time. Well, I had lived without the ability once. I could do it again. Or it could kill me outright. There was that.