Shadow Rites: A Jane Yellowrock Novel (7 page)

I could feel my breath moving in my lungs, as if I breathed iced air, though the room was warm. My heart was beating slow and hard, a bass drum through my arteries. The electric blanket was turned low, but it felt hot and prickly on my skin. By the staleness of the scents around me, the vamps were gone. Thank goodness.

Shoving pillows behind me, I gathered the blanket tight around me and pushed myself to a sitting position against the headboard. I was naked beneath the blanket. Oh, goody. That meant I’d been naked in front of Leo and Edmund . . . and Eli, who was sitting in a delicate, dainty floral-upholstered chair at a small ormolu table, his eyes on me.

The lamp on the table was off and the room was deeply shadowed, my partner’s face not visible until I pulled on Beast’s night vision. Through her eyes, the room was silver and green, the details sharp and the shadows black as if drawn with india ink. Eli’s expression was grim, set, and he
was sitting as still as a vamp. There was a shotgun across his knees. I hadn’t seen the shotgun when we got to headquarters, so either he had gone home to get it or someone had brought it to him. I was betting that he hadn’t left my side and that one of Leo’s security peeps had brought it to him. Probably under duress.

There was a glass of water on the bedside table and I drank it dry, replacing it on the table. I cleared my throat, which still felt scratchy, and said, “Debrief.”

“That bird stabbed you. I shot him. You didn’t shift.”

I had thought that Eli’s voice had been toneless many times in our relationship, but this was even more so. Robotic. Dead sounding.

“I applied pressure. Leo flipped you over and ripped open your shirt. Arterial bleeding went everywhere. You were bleeding out. Leo sliced his fingertips and shoved them inside the wound.”

Eli went quiet again. His jaw worked, tightening and relaxing in the edged shadows. When he began again, there was no indication that he was under strain, except for the total lack of emotion in his voice. “Edmund picked you up. Leo and he carried you here. I shot a couple of vamps who got in the way or got too close. Standard ammo. They’ll live.”

I said nothing, just watched his face. After a long silence, he said, “You didn’t shift.” And this time there was a bare hint of emotion, a simple thread of . . . something.

“I couldn’t. Since the lightning, I’ve shifted when I wasn’t in trouble, in danger, but this time, when I needed to shift or die, I couldn’t.”

“Lightning?”

“I don’t know, but . . .” I stopped and thought before I finished, reluctance in my tone. “. . . there seems to be a correlation.”

“You said the bird might have been magicked to hurt you. Why do you think that?”

“When I first met him . . . Seems like forever. He used his magic to heal me of a werewolf attack.”

My partner gave a slight downward jut of his head to indicate he had heard me and understood.

“Later.” I stopped. “You know the eye on the dollar bill? The one on top of the pyramid?”

Nod.

“I had one of those on each palm. Like a tattoo, the blue color of his magic. I knew he was spying on me. It was in my soul home too, watching me. The eye in my palm this morning was exactly the same eye, but green. In the fight, I saw it again in my left palm, the one the spell started in today. I think I was wrong about the spell being just a scan. I think it did something to me too. I think Gee’s watching eye and the witches’ eye are connected. Somehow. Water?”

Eli poured me another glass from the pitcher beside the bed. It was a cut-crystal pitcher and looked heavy. And I had no energy. I drank the water down. Then two more. I was badly dehydrated and I probably needed a couple of liters of fluid. A gallon of Gatorade might do the trick. I could get that as soon as I was finished with my tale. “In the fight, Gee’s blue eye of seeing was in my palm, open. Then it faded to pale green, the color of the stronger witch’s power. The scent of the spell was weird too: iron and salt and something harsh like burning hair.”

Eli seemed to mull that over, and something in his stance relaxed a fraction.

I let a half smile form on my mouth, and my lips cracked. “Whatever it is, it may still be active. We need a way to thwart the spell.”

“Thwart?” he asked, humor in his voice.

“Magical word. Stuff you’ll learn if you hang around me long enough.”

“It’s what I live for,” he said, a tiny bit of snark in the words. “Is it possible that the spell reactivated the trace of a previous spell in you? Maybe the odd smells were something that tied it all together?”

“Oh,” I said. “That makes sense.” Not that I knew what the smells might mean, but at this point it didn’t matter. I needed to focus on stopping the working, not worrying about the ingredients used in the spell. That was something to deal with later. Simply having priorities made me feel better.

“But if one spell, why not more?” I asked. “And which ones? I’ve been hit more than once with magic of different kinds, from vamp to witch to were. Oh, and
arcenciel
,” the fabled but factual and existent light dragon. “Let’s not forget the weirdest magical thingy of all.”

“Yeah. That is a problem, babe. One of many. And maybe one of many spells, all the way back to the fight that killed the Damours.”

The Damour clan of suckheads had been composed of blood-magic witches. Blood witches. The kind who used the sacrifice of witch children and teenagers to try some really humongous workings, attempting to bring their long-chained vampire children back to sanity. They had killed hundreds of witches over the centuries, and I had nearly died saving my godchildren from them. In saving them, I had been in the presence of some pretty strong black magic.

Sometimes when one is injured in battle, it comes back in a haunting for years after. In my case that haunting was a sort of magical PTSD, which had caused complications in the merging of my Beast soul and my soul. Like what had happened today. Yeah. It felt as though we were close to figuring out the green magic scan.

“I guess I need to be checked for magical booby traps? And the house too?”

“I called Molly. She’ll do some magical mumbo-jumbo on you when they get here. Check for trace spells. Check the house for same and put in the upgraded
hedge of thorns
as a ward.”

I shook my head, my hair rubbing the headboard with a scratchy sound. My partner had been a step ahead of me all the way except with the last statement. “They can’t stay with us,” I said. “Too dangerous.”

“I tried to talk him out of staying at the house, but he said hotels were impossible to ward. And they didn’t want to rent a house, stay in a place they weren’t used to. And they already had a permanent circle at your house that they could bring up and use to protect you, us, and them. Did you know that? That they had a witch circle at your house?”

“Not surprised,” I said. “They can call up wards around the place pretty easily.”

“Evan said it was a fortress. Or would be when he got finished with it.”

“How about he leaves us a trigger,” I asked, “so we can use it too?”

“In the works, but not something we can use every day. A ‘one use’ ward that will have to be restored by them. But if we’d had it today—”

“I’d still have been spelled,” I said. “‘One use,’ remember? The spell
started
in my hand, before we could have gotten any
one-use ward
up and running. Please don’t blame Evan.”

“Please?” he asked, startled.

“I don’t have the strength to make and enforce demands. Yet.”

Eli made a sound that might have been some form of laughter, if laughter could also sound like grief or released fear. He pulled and flipped open his official cell, with its Kevlar exterior and multipurpose functions, and punched a button. Someone said hello and Eli held it out to me. “Tell Alex you’re okay.”

“I’m okay, Kid,” I said, trying to sound stronger than I was. “I’ll be home soon.”

The Kid cursed worse than anything I had ever heard him say and finished with “Later.” The call ended. Eli gave me the ghost of a smile and closed the cell.

“So,” he said. “What do we do about this little shifting problem?”

We
. Always
we
. “I need to meditate and check out my soul home. Maybe visit with Aggie One Feather. Other than that, I don’t know.”

“Concur.”

“Are
you
okay?” I asked.

“No.” He stood and walked to the door, opened it, and stopped in the shaft of light from the hallway. “I got some clean clothes from your locker downstairs. They’re in your satchel.” He left the room and closed the door softly, very carefully. He had said satchel. Not purse. Eli had once called it a purse.
Once
. I’d decked him and he never
said it again. I do not carry a purse. But this time there was no teasing. He was fighting slamming the door. Eli was really messed up.

I turned off the electric blanket and rolled slowly to the floor, the blanket sliding across my skin like steel wool. The soles of my feet hurt when I transferred weight to them. I ached deep inside when I moved. Standing slowly to let my body accept what gravity was doing, moving things around inside me, I touched my side with fingertips that were hypersensitive and dry, as if all the moisture had been leached from them, leaving me with mummy skin over skeleton hands. I found a puckered scar up under my arm, higher than I had thought. There was no blood on me or the bed, not wet, tacky, or dried. Someone had stripped me and cleaned me. I smelled of lavender soap and a female human. Thank God for that.

The wound wasn’t right, however. It felt as though it had healed with microscopic shards of glass sticking from inside the new skin. I hissed softly at the touch and tried to see the scar in the small mirror over the delicate table, but it wasn’t a real mirror; it had no silver backing to insult a vamp wanting to see himself clearly and without pain. I couldn’t get a good look, only enough to tell that my hair had come down from the bun at some point and hung in a scraggly, knotted half braid. I slung it out of the way, the movement making me aware of my scent and the smell of Leo and Edmund still on me, almost, but not quite, hidden by the smell of the soap.

Vampires have scent-marked Jane,
Beast thought happily.

Gag, ick, and ewww,
I thought back.

Beast chuffed with laughter.

Inside the satchel was my soap from home, shampoo, conditioner, and scentless moisturizer. Comfortable clothes I could pull on without too much pain. Someone knew how to dress when injured in the chest. Eli had been injured in the chest. I had never asked how because his brother had nearly gone to prison searching for that info in DOD and Pentagon databases. It was classified. But he knew how to dress for pain. I knew without asking that he hadn’t
left my side, so he had sent for the things. There was even a bottle of water in the bottom. Portable. Unbreakable. Nice.

Sitting on a tiny bench, I managed to get into the shower and clean myself of strong-smelling soap and vampire saliva, all without falling down and hurting myself. Again. I slathered on the moisturizer and the jojoba oil soaked in, making my skin feel nearly hydrated. I went back to the satchel.

I dressed in cotton panties and a pair of yoga pants with a soft waistband. There were a selection of tops, and I chose a very tight, seamless Lycra camisole, one that would give my wound some elastic fortification, pressing against it with a steady pressure, not letting cloth or seams rub across it. Wearing it would mean I could go braless. I didn’t think I could wear a real bra, not even a sports bra, until the wound healed properly. Until I shifted into
Puma concolor
and the wound went away. I stepped into it and pulled the body-hugging cami up from my feet into place. The tight fit felt good on the wound, and the shivery feeling in the tender flesh eased. I slid into a soft gold cowl-neck sweater that I loved.

There was a brush and comb in the bottom of the satchel along with a scrunchie. And my tube of red lipstick, and my stakes that had been in my hair. And my official cell. And my thigh rig with one of Eli’s nine-millimeters in it. I had left mine at home and my shoulder holster wasn’t going to work, not tonight. Eli had known. His thoughtfulness was nearly my undoing. I was thirsty and shaky and tears pooled in my eyes. One fell and landed on my hand while I tried to unsnarl my braid. I remembered the blue eye that had faded green. I needed to talk to Gee DiMercy.

I gave up on my hair and checked the load on the nine-mil, set the safety, and weaponed up. The sweater hung long and I tucked the hem into the top of the thigh rig to keep it out of the way.

A knock came at the door and I said, “It’s open.”

Edmund stepped into the bathroom. I had expected Eli. The vamp stopped with that undead, block of marble
thing they do, and he sniffed. A strand of horror in his voice, he said, “You are crying.”

Which made me laugh through the tears. “Yeah. I don’t even know why. I need water. Tears are a stupid waste of it.”

Edmund stepped back into the room and I followed, to the far side of the bed, where he opened a small refrigerator I hadn’t noticed. From it he drew a six-pack of flavored bottled electrolyte water, chilled and icy. He opened the first bottle and handed it to me with a slight nod, like a truncated bow.

“I’m not your master,” I said.

“Drink. Please,” he added. “Slowly, so you don’t become ill.”

And toss my cookies all over his fancy décor. I got it. So I drank. I finished off three bottles of water and set the empties beside the bottle I had finished earlier. The fluid made me feel better, but I probably needed more sugar and electrolytes, because the expected spurt of energy didn’t come. Before I could fall, I sat on the edge of the unmade bed. It smelled of blood and spit and other things I didn’t want to think about. I pulled my snarled wet hair to the front and worried at it. “Who did Eli shoot?” I asked, more to make conversation and keep Edmund from noticing the tremble in my fingers than from any real interest.

“The new cybersecurity expert, for one.”

I glanced up from under my eyebrows. “New—? No one told me about this,” I said. One of our last electronic security experts had died, sitting in the chair in front of his console, attacked by a vamp from behind. It shouldn’t have happened. He should have been able to see the attack coming.