Skinwalker (Jane Yellowrock #1)

“You did see the No Trespassing signs, didn’t you?” he said.

“Yeah.” I spotted the Pellissier mausoleum and checked the locks on the barred door. They were top quality and still secure, which meant that Katie was safe, or as safe as an undead drowned in the mixed blood of a hundred vamps and buried in a casket in a vault can be. I swiveled, spotting the St. Martin crypt, and strode that way, peeling out of my leather jacket as I walked. Sweat was dribbling down my spine, under my arms, and pooling in my waistband as I circled the small building. The St. Martin crypt was made of white, dry-stacked marble blocks. Its door was centered on the front between elegant pillars; two windows were close together on the back, windows matching the pointed, arched style of the chapel’s. The crypt had been badly damaged. A section of marble was missing from a corner, broken, as if it had been attacked with a mallet; I knew better. Stone shards were scattered around from the rogue’s mass change.

Rick swore softly. “Damn kids.” When I glanced at him, he said, “Graveyard vandalism is rampant in this part of the state.” I didn’t bother to enlighten him.

The building was fourteen by twelve feet, with a stone statue on the peaked roof—a six-foot-tall winged soldier with a bronze sword and shield. Except for the weapons and wings folded to his sides, he was naked. And exceptionally well endowed. I shook my head, not smiling, but wanting to. A sculptor’s vision of St. Martin? Or St. Martin’s vision of an angel?

Rick caught up with me again. “You do know this place belongs to the vampires, don’t you?” He sounded half amused, half speculative, as if he wondered how I found this place and why I was here, but didn’t really want to ask.

“Yeah.” I checked the locks and the vault’s barred door. The locks were old and broken. The bars were freshly bent, with shiny metal showing along stress lines. “So?” I opened the barred gate door and pushed on the wooden one behind it. It opened with a soft groan.

“So, the gate had electronic sensors,” he said. “They’ll send someone to check on us.”

I looked inside. “Good. They can clean this up.”

“This” was the destruction of five of the six coffins. They had once rested in stacked stone biers, three high, and each individual bier had a small marble door at the foot end. The marble doors were busted and the coffins inside had been pulled out and slammed against the back wall, if the scars there were a clue. The casket contents were scattered everywhere. Contrary to pulp fiction, vamps don’t blow away in ashes when they die unless they’re burned, so the floor was littered with bones, scraps of ancient dress, boots, a few grinning skulls—one with black hair attached—some gold coins, glittering jewelry, and rotting casket stuffing.

I gestured inside. Rick bent around the side of the door and looked in. “Crap almighty. Who—shit! Who did this? What’s that smell?” He backed quickly away, a hand over his mouth and nose.

I was already upwind. “Partly the dead and partly the rogue. I think he spent the day here yesterday.” I calculated the distance from the edge of the woods. It was farther than it looked from the air. “I think he knew the vamps would put Katie to earth, and he hoped to get at the blood in her coffin.”

“Blood in her coffin?”

I considered his expression and decided that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t known what the ceremony last night involved. I wondered if any human knew. I also decided it was smarter not to know the answers to his question and smarter not to share the information I had discovered. “Katie’s blood,” I lied. “He didn’t finish draining her.” Which was the truth.

“Uh-huh.”

I had to work on my lying. To keep from having to respond to his skepticism, I walked to the chapel. On the way, I passed the other crypt damaged by the rogue, stealing mass. It belonged to Clan Mearkanis, and the damage was greater, two square feet of stone blasted away.

I reached the chapel. The cross was still lying on the small porch, but no longer glowing or burning. I leaned over it, pulling off my sunglasses to get a better view. The wood was untouched, unscorched by the fire I had seen, and no fresh scent of smoke clung to it. It wasn’t made from carved or cut wood; the crosspieces looked like large splinters ripped from a timber.

The cross looked old, blackened by time and usage. The four ends were smoothed, as if they had been slightly rounded off by sandpaper and oiled. Or slowly shaped from the repeated caresses of human hands. The two pieces were held together by twisted metal, the finish a green verdigris that had bled into the wood it touched. Old, I thought. Old, old, old.

Rick took the narrow steps and bent to pick up the cross. I reacted without thinking. Grabbed the waistband of his jeans. And yanked. He flew past me. Made a soft oof when he landed, tumbling, expelling air. I stood, blocking the porch, waiting for him to catch his breath. He groaned and cursed. “Why the hell did you do that?” he grunted. “What did I do this time?”

“You were about to touch the cross,” I said. “It belongs to a vamp. She’d have smelled your scent on it. Not smart.”

“Vamps don’t own crosses,” he said. He pushed his elbows under him and half sat, legs splayed, feet digging into the shells, making little troughs that ended in mounds at his heels. “Besides, a simple ‘Hey you, stop’ would have worked just fine. Anybody ever tell you that you tend to overreact?”

“Yeah. A few people. Some of them are dead,” I said, letting my grin out. “I’m not.”

Rick blew out a sound of disgust and rolled to his knees. “What do you press, anyway? You got arms like a gorilla.” He made it to his feet and stood looking at me.

Press. As in bench press. I didn’t like his expression. I had received similar looks when I did something a normal human couldn’t, and I usually just made light of it. That worked, mostly because humans didn’t want to recognize otherness, difference, or oddity. They would rather stuff the unusual into an acceptable niche, someplace comfortable, tucking a square peg into a round hole. It was easier for them and a lot less scary.

I had a feeling Rick LaFleur wouldn’t accept my usual misdirection. There was a certain look in his eyes, harder and more speculative than I expected; not an average-Joe expression, but something else entirely. I couldn’t come up with a single response, so I shrugged and walked to the dead tree. What you can’t fight or explain away, you can sometimes ignore.

The tree was a dead sycamore, thin bark curling, exposing silvery wood beneath. The branch where I had sat was scored by raptor talons. A small feather rested on the ground, one of mine, and it felt really weird to see it. Had I lost part of me when I lost the feather? If I lost more of me, say if a leg were amputated while in animal form, what would I be missing when I shifted back? How much could I lose and still be me? I tucked the feather in my pocket.

Scanning the graveyard, I took in the layout, refamiliariz ing myself with the clan crypts. I wasn’t sure if I had missed it last night or forgotten it, but most of the mausoleums had statues on top. Each marble statue was male, winged, had a weapon and shield, and was naked. They could have been carved by the same sculptor, but the faces and bodies of each were different, all male, all beautiful. Angelic defenders of the demonic undead. Weird.

Rick walked up behind me and I studiously ignored him. I had seen enough, and I was ready to put some distance between the yank-Rick-off-the-porch episode and me. I flipped open my cell and dialed Bruiser as I headed back to the bikes. When he answered, I said, “You got alarms going off at the vamp graveyard?”

If I surprised him he didn’t indicate it. “Yes. We have a team on the way.”

“It’s me and Rick LaFleur. Tell them not to shoot us if they get here before we leave. And tell them the rogue did a lot of damage to the St. Martin and Mearkanis crypts last night. I think he spent some time in St. Martin’s, which means either he bypassed the security system, or he has access to it.”

Bruiser cursed once, eloquently, and his voice dropped into a near snarl when he asked, “You have any more news for me?”

“No. I’m done. Wait. There’s a cross on the chapel steps. Sabina dropped it, fighting off the rogue. Tell your guys how you want them to handle it.”

“How do you know she dropped it? And how do you know about Sabina?” His tone was suspicious, the way a murder investigator’s voice is suspicious when he finds a body and a bloody suspect standing over it. Holding the murder weapon.

I grinned and straddled my bike. “I’m psychic.” I closed the phone and geared up, ignoring Rick as he followed my lead. I got the feeling that he didn’t like playing follow the leader, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. I also had the feeling that he was more than he let on. And I wasn’t sure what I should do about that. Which made us even, in some strange kinda way.

I kick-started the bike, set my sunglasses in place, leaving the face shield up, out of the way, and wheeled down the drive. It was time to see the house the rogue dived into last night.

CHAPTER 20

Crap. I’m starting to like vamps

The house was at the end of Old Man’s Beard Street. I smelled the blood and death through the open window from halfway down the road and it got stronger as I neared the house. The rogue-liver-eater had indeed killed here. I gunned the engine up the drive, next to the house, stopped, yanked off my helmet, and dialed Katie’s pet NOPD investigator, Jodi Richoux. Rick pulled up next to me and killed his bike too.

“Jodi,” I said when she answered. “This is Jane Yellowrock. I was following the rogue’s tracks last night, and I got a house with open windows, one with damage consistent with a B and E. Place smells like dead meat.”“Hang on,” she said, and I heard muffled conversation for a moment before she said, “Okay. Gimme the address.”

“It’s on Old Man’s Beard Street, out Highway 90 not far from the Lapalco Boulevard exit, at the end of the cul-de-sac. You might want to send a team. And bring your psy-meter. I’d like to see what it reads.”