Death's Rival (21 page)

* * *

The night was cold and wind blew through the trees, whispering and sighing, and golden
leaves swirled on the night air. But I was warm in the coat that had once belonged
to the killer of my father. It had been in the saddlebags of his horse, wrapped up
in brown paper and twine. It was too big, but it was warm and red, the color of blood.

The last
yunega
had been brought to the clearing. He was gagged. Naked. Tied. He was lying on his
stomach, screaming into the dirt as
Elisi
pounded deer antlers through his shoulders with a huge piece of white quartz the
size of a human head. I was with the women this time, sitting on a log at the fire,
not hiding. The wind skirled through the clearing, setting the leaves dancing. I pulled
my new coat closer and the women hauled on ropes, lifting the man into the air and
over the fire circle. There was no fire tonight. Tonight the women each held knives.
I too had a knife, my first blade. It felt strange in my hand, cold as the winter
wind, sharp as the pain in my heart at the death of my father. We gathered close.
Etsa
, my mother, made the first cut.

* * *

When I woke much later, it was night, and the sweathouse was cool and empty, the fire
out, Aggie One Feather gone. I was alone. And I knew why Aggie One Feather thought
me angry and full of storms. I
knew
. Slowly I stood and went outside into the night. Winter had come in the past hours.
It was cool, with a north wind blowing. I removed my cloth covering and placed it
in the basket for used sweat clothes. Turning the faucet on, I washed the smoke and
sweat from me, the cool well water sluicing me clean—the washing part of the ritual—a
cleansing after the pain of old memories. On the narrow shelf high above the faucet,
there was a scrub brush, new, still in its plastic wrap, a new bar of soap, and shampoo
in a small bottle like the kind hotels leave on the counters for the forgetful patron.
They were gifts from Aggie. I opened them all and applied them to my body to remove
the stink of fear-sweat and the stubborn reek of smoke. Afterward, I dried off, braided
my hair, and dressed. The house was dark and silent as I walked to Bitsa. I helmeted
up, kick-started her, and drove into the night.

The ride over the river and back into the French Quarter was fast, but less furious
than the one this morning. My mind was quiet, my spirit was quiet, and even my emotions
were quiet. I was quietness all inside me. I had found a part of me that I had lost.
It wasn’t a pretty part, but it tied the lost pieces together. I was born of a war
clan. Of a skinwalker clan. We led our people into battle, tribe against tribe, tribe
against the white man. When there was no war, we were the executioners.

I remembered the vision of one of the men who had raped my mother, hanging, bucking
his body, fighting to get free as the women took their time with him. I blinked the
image away, but it was burned into my mind, the memory, once found, now a part of
me.

My grandmother had not let evil lie. She had searched the evil ones out, had hunted
them down, and killed them in the worst way possible, which was the ancient, long-forgotten
way of her skinwalker culture. She had brought justice to the people who depended
on her. But there was a narrow, thin line between justice and sadism. Between justice
and evil. My grandmother had surely crossed that line, had dumped gallons of blood
onto it, obscuring it totally. I wasn’t sure she was any better than the men who had
killed my father.

No wonder skinwalkers went crazy when we got old, if we carried that kind of thing
with us, inside us. Vengeance and justice were what we did. It was what I was. That
spiritual constraint and demand for justice was why I had become a rogue-vamp hunter.
Was why I was so good at killing. Living with it had never been easy, but at least
I understood more of who I was now, more of why I made the choices I made. And more
of the guilt that rested in my heart, a guilt that was trying to reconcile the duties
of the skinwalker with the rules of the Christian God.
Thou shalt not kill. Turn the other cheek. Pray for those that despitefully use you.
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.
The rules were supposed to uplift the human spirit and make us better people and help
take us to a better place within our own hearts here on earth and after death. I had
helped torture a man to death, and then buried the memory.

Now I remembered it. I remembered it all, every cut, every scream, and the joyful
rage that rose in me when he died at my hand. I was five years old.

And now I could chose who I would be in the face of evil, in the face of life’s problems,
in the face of a vampire who had taken what I stupidly offered him. In the face of
who I could become. If I lived long enough, I could decide—rationally and without
emotion—how I would deal with Leo’s blood theft. Leo, who was a scorpion with a stinger,
and who acted only according to his nature, just as I had, when I was a five-year-old
skinwalker, only recently awakened to my shape-changing gifts.

I pulled into the side yard of my freebie house and locked the gate behind me. I lifted
Bitsa to the porch and leaned her against the house wall, leaving the helmet on Bitsa’s
seat. As I gathered my weapons, I smelled steaks on the grill in the backyard, and
my stomach growled like a wild animal. I entered my house, smelling Kid—freshly showered—and
Eli, and beer, and potatoes, and . . . Bruiser.

I stopped in the kitchen, placing my guests. They were sitting in the living room,
a football game on the TV, and they were talking beer—brands, hops, distilleries.
Guy talk. The kitchen table was set for four. I pushed a plate over and placed my
weapons with a clatter in the cleared spot, knowing the men had to have heard me—Bitsa
alone could wake the undead. I took a beer from the fridge and twisted off the top,
drinking it down fast. The alcohol hit my system like a bomb, even with my skinwalker
metabolism. I was dry as a bone and the sudden rush felt wonderful. I finished the
beer and picked the weapons back up.

I walked silently through the house, avoiding the men, and into my room. I stopped,
placed the weapons on the bed, and dropped my blood-stiff clothes to the floor. I
dressed in black jeans and a yellow, long-sleeved T-shirt, smoothed and braided my
hair, the long plait hanging down my back, still wet. I shoved stakes in, scraping
them against my scalp. I strapped one blade to my thigh in plain sight. I didn’t bother
with shoes.

Back in the kitchen, the smell of cooking meat blowing in from outside made me salivate.
The hunger that had been quiescent all day rose, clawing my stomach like a taloned
hand. I hadn’t eaten after the shift. I was starving. But there were things I needed
to face before I ate. I opened another beer, the alcohol potent in my blood.

Sipping my beer, I walked into the living room and stood in the opening, my feet apart,
one hand loose at my side near the knife. The swinging shelves were in place over
the safe room, no hinges showing. If I hadn’t seen the mess earlier, I’d never have
known the hidden room was there. The living room looked as if nothing had been done
to it; even the construction dust was cleaned up, the room spotless.

The men finally saw me, and the TV went mute, leaving the room in silence. I turned
my gaze slowly to the men, the Kid first, then Eli, then Bruiser, and his gaze I held.
The tension in the air rose, electric, as if Bruiser were sitting on a live wire.
Eli and Alex were watching him, watching me, uncertain, knowing that something was
up, but clearly not knowing what.

“Good evening, Jane,” Bruiser said, after an eternity.

I didn’t reply. Just took another sip, waiting.

He stood, and took two steps, as if he thought he might cross to me, and then stopped,
a yard from his chair, in the middle of the room. “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .” He stopped
and drew in a breath as if air-starved. “I couldn’t stop them. When they forced you.”

Eli came to his feet in a single rolling motion, as if he were all muscle, no bone.
He stood between us, but back, so that we formed a tripod with me at the apex. His
body was loose in that precombat tension of the best fighting men, and his eyes shifted
back and forth between us. The Kid rolled the other way, all elbows and knobby knees,
and stood behind the couch, out of the way. I let one side of my mouth rise, just
slightly. Eli didn’t know what had happened, but he was ready for anything.

“Jane?” Bruiser held out his hand. It was bruised, purpled, and swollen, as if it
had been broken. So was the side of his face. Bruiser had been hit. Hard. It was difficult
to injure a blood-servant. It took a vamp.

I indicated his hand with the beer bottle. “Leo do that?”

He looked down and turned his hand over and back, as if seeing the injury for the
first time. “Yes. When I disagreed with his tactics.” He looked back at me, his brown
eyes catching the lamplight. He raised the hand and shoved it through his hair, sending
the brown strands askew. “I thought it was simply a planning session. That was how
Leo phrased it when he asked me to bring you. I didn’t know they were planning to
force a feeding and binding on you.”

“And when they forced me? And you were holding me on the floor? What then?” As I said
those words I could see Eli tense, shifting one pace in for better positioning. I
lifted a finger from the beer, stopping him. I wanted to hear this.

Bruiser stood straight, dropping his hands to his sides. He blew out a breath, his
face going from supplication to something colder, harder. I liked this Bruiser better.
It was more honest. He was Leo’s plaything and blood meal, Leo’s right-hand man, and
he always had been. It should have hurt, but the hunger growing inside me and the
emptiness that Aggie had exposed when the trapped anger stormed away stopped my pain.

“I was blood-drunk, Jane. I wasn’t able to move, wasn’t able to fight, wasn’t able
to stop them. I held you down and they hurt you. They forced me. I want you to know
that. It was against my will.”

I didn’t say anything and he added, “When you left, I attacked Leo. He
stopped
me.” Bruiser held up the hand as explanation. “He backhanded me into a wall. Broke
my hand and jaw. It was bad enough that I didn’t heal instantly even with all the
Mithran blood in me.” Bruiser dropped the hand. “Leo needed your cooperation once
he read your report and saw the name de Allyon. He remembered the problems his uncle
Amaury had not so long ago, and he thought you wouldn’t agree with his plans. So he
used me to get you. I’m sorry, Jane.”

Not so long ago
. Only a man who had already lived more than a hundred years would think two centuries
was
not so long ago
. I understood what had happened. I even understood my own stupidity in being part
of it. But I was not ready to forgive. “And you defend him?”

“No. I explain him,” he growled. “And I apologize for myself. It’s what a primo does.”

It’s what a primo does.
Yeah. Got that. “Get out, George. Now. Before I decide to let my Eli here hurt you.”

He heard his given name and he put it together, understanding that my calling him
George and not Bruiser was important on many levels. And he processed the “my Eli.”
George swiveled his head to the man standing one pace away. He considered Eli’s positioning,
the placement of his feet, the relaxed posture. The two men, who had just been talking
beer and sports, studied each other now like potential combatants, one trained by
Uncle Sam to kill, the other still so full of vamp blood he was nearly healed in one
day from wounds that would have incapacitated a human for weeks.

George turned his head to me, dismissing the soldier as if he posed no challenge.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Eli’s mouth curl up in a smile. Without looking at
him, I smiled too. It was one of those perfect agreement things that happens sometimes
when two people understand each other on an instinctive level, on a snake-brain level.
Eli and I had fought. We knew what moves we’d make and how fast. If it was needed.
I saw his fingers curl in slightly.

I tucked the thumb of my free hand into my jeans at my waist, to indicate action wasn’t
necessary. Yet. “I’ll do my job for Leo,” I said to George, “but not because of his
forced blood-bond. I’ll do my job because I killed a man in Asheville. Because humans
were killed there and here on my watch. You tell that blood-sucking fiend I said that.

“If there was a dinner invitation, it’s rescinded. Get out of my house. You know where
the door is.” I stepped out of the way and gestured with the bottle at the door.

George’s mouth firmed, an obstinate gesture that said he was going to disagree. But
he didn’t. He walked past me out the door and closed it behind him with a firm snap.
That sound said something important, but I didn’t want to deal with it, not now. I
followed and keyed the dead bolt, then went back to the living room. Eli and Alex
hadn’t moved. I leaned against the wall and finished my beer, watching them.

“Are you okay?” Alex asked.

“Just ducky. But if your brother doesn’t feed me I may eat him.”

Eli laughed at the double entendre, but he went outside to the grill and came back
in with four steaks. The Kid cleaned off a place and put away the unused dishes. We
ate in silence at the kitchen table, companionable silence. I liked it. And I got
the extra steak.

* * *

After dinner, while not-so-Stinky Alex cleaned up the dishes and griped about not
having a dishwasher, Eli and I stayed at the table, going over the day’s intel. “There
might be a correlation we haven’t considered, between the Blood-Call businesses and
the cities where de Allyon has taken over,” Eli said, passing a printout to me.

“I’m listening.”

“De Allyon was making vamps sick. What better way than to have them drink from sick
humans at Blood-Call?”