Blood in Her Veins (Nineteen Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock) (10 page)

Wind snaked into room. Grew in strength, like fist with claws. Bashed out windows. Picked up human things and carried them away. Fear smell grew. Woman's, man's, kit's.

Kit was on bed. Afraid. Screaming. Fear like human knives cut inside her. Power was coming from her fear—feeding storm. I—Beast—understood fear.

I leaped to bed, standing over kit. Screamed to wind. Kit safe. Safe with me. I am Beast!

Woman opened eyes. Her fear smell swirled thick into room. Fear of Beast. Woman's mouth moved in soundless cry. Woman was working magic with her hands. Rain poured in, heavy and hard.

I sat on bed. Curled around kit. Holding her with paw so wind with claws would not steal her. I licked her face. Human tears salty. Human skin milky. Smooth. Soft. She made funny sound. Hiccup. Swallowed hard. Crying stopped. Witch kit reached up and took my ears in her hands. Pulled Beast face to her. Stared for long moment, eye to eye. And closed eyes. Not afraid. Not anymore.

I curled legs and body around her. Protected her from rain and wind. Looked at woman. Not human. Powerful witch, like man. Like kit. I purred. Licked kit face.

Witch woman walked to witch man. Took hands. Chanting steadied like calm heartbeat. Power in storm shifted and eased. Rain softened. Warmed. I purred. Panted.

Man and woman worked magic like net, binding power in girl kit. Felt it curl under belly and paws, around small kit body. Time passed. Kit fell asleep.

Storm fell apart. Thunderhead darkening the sky thinned and wisped. Clear sky showed through. Magic disappeared like mist. Floating away.

Man fell over. Dead? No, breathing. Asleep. Empty of magic.

I purred and rested head on kit head. Keeping kit safe.

Storm was gone. Sunlight fell through where roof had been. Woman witch studied me. Fear tainted air, but confused fear. Not run-from-predator fear. I purred. Licked kit face. Moved kit off my leg with paw. Licked face again. Slowly stood. Slowly, slowly, not to frighten woman.

I looked at woman. She looked at me. At necklace on my neck. Jane's necklace.

“Jane?” she whispered. “Oh my God.
Jane
.”

I hacked.
Not God. Not Jane. Beast.

I leaped from bed to land on wet, squishy cloth floor. Padded from room, rain puddles splashing. And out door. Kit safe.

I woke beside my bike, naked and cold, my bones aching. A half-moon and several million stars dusted light to the earth, enough for me to see with my night vision intact. I knew better than to change form in daylight, but I'd had no choice when I shifted into Beast. Now I hurt. I hurt badly.

In an emergency, like today, I could shift into Beast in daylight, but I couldn't change back to human in daylight. Or at least I'd never figured out the mechanism. And it wasn't as if I had anyone to teach me. I was the only skinwalker I had ever heard of. Hence the hours that had passed and the moonlight above me. And me naked and cold and starving.

Shivers gripped me and shook me hard. Teeth chattering, I opened the bike's saddlebags and pulled out my one change of clothes. Dressed but barefoot, I started the bike and rode up the hill into Molly's yard. The trailer was dark but for a candle guttering in a window. I killed the engine. Bare feet on cool earth, I waited. If Molly heard me, if she wanted to talk, she'd come out. If not, then I could ride on. But it would be a lot easier with my boots. Jacket. Helmet. Did she know what I had done? What I was? Crap. I didn't want her to find out this way. I didn't want her to find out at all.

The front door opened. Molly stood on the front porch, her white
nightgown fluttering in the hilltop breeze. I couldn't have said why, but a trembling ran through me, part fear, part . . . something I couldn't name. I kicked the stand down and walked across the lawn, watching Molly's face in the light of the candle. She was smiling. And tears trickled slowly down her face.

I stopped at the bottom of the three steps leading to the tiny porch. And couldn't think of a solitary thing to say. My boots and jeans and torn clothes were folded in a neat stack by her feet. Yeah. She knew.
Crap. She knew
. I hunched my shoulders and tucked each hand under the opposite armpit. And waited for her judgment.

“You—” She stopped and caught a breath. I gathered that she had been crying for a while. “Thank you. You saved my baby.” When I didn't reply, she went on, voice rough through her tears. “We were losing her. She was out of control. Too powerful. Neither of us was ready to deal with that much power. And not so early.” I still didn't speak, and Molly said, “Her power wasn't due until her first menses. Not for years and years. We weren't ready.” She heaved a breath, and it shuddered through her. “We almost lost her.”

I nodded. And still couldn't think of a thing to say.

Suddenly Molly giggled. “What? Cat got your tongue?”

I jerked. An answering laugh tittered in my throat. I stuck my hands in my jeans pockets, shoulders still hunched. “Cute. You're okay with it? With me? Me being Beast?”

“I have no idea what you are, except a big-cat. But you saved my baby, and for that you have my undying thanks, my undying friendship, and any help you may need for as long I can give it.”

Molly had given me three things, and I knew that witches did important things in threes. The cold that had settled in my bones, the ache of the shift that the magic had forced through me, warmed a bit, began to ease. “Well, I'll settle for my socks and boots. My feet are cold.”

“I found them on the lawn,” she said, laughter still in the tone, “and I've let them air-dry, though they're still pretty wet. Would you like some tea? Power is out, but I have a kettle on the camp stove.”

I didn't have time for tea. I had to be on the road, had to get to the job. But that wasn't what came out of my mouth. “I'd love a cup. And, Molly? I'm a skinwalker. And I never told anyone that before tonight. Not anyone.”

“So we can share secrets, is that what you're saying? You're a skinwalker, whatever that is, and my baby is an early-blooming, powerful witch? Come on in. Let's talk. And I'll get you that charm.”

I pulled on my socks and carried my boots into what was left of Molly's house. We had tea. We shared secrets. Weirdly, Molly held my hand while we talked, as if protecting something fragile or sealing something precious. Even more weirdly, I let her. I think that, for the first time in my life, I had a real friend.

Haint(s)

Author's note: This story takes place after the short story “Kits” and before the short story “Signatures of the Dead.” Molly Everhart Trueblood is the narrator.

“Nothing unusual here, Molly,” she said.

I watched Jane Yellowrock as she crawled across the floor of the old house on all fours. Most adults looked foolish or ungainly when crawling, but Jane was graceful, her arms lifting and moving forward with feline balance, her legs raising and lowering, toes pointed like a dancer, even in her Western boots. My friend moved silently in the hot, sweaty room, easily avoiding the bird and mouse droppings, the holes in the old linoleum, and the signs of recent reconstruction—the broken plaster walls, large holes in the floor, and the shattered remains of the toilet, tub, and kitchen sink in the corner. Her shoulder blades, visible beneath her thin T-shirt, lifted up high with each crawling step, her head lowered on the thin stem of her neck, moving catlike. I envied her the grace and the slenderness, but little else. Jane was more alone than anyone I had ever known.

Now she breathed in with a strange sucking hiss. Flehmen behavior, she called it, using her hypersensitive senses to smell things the way a cat would, the way a mountain lion would, sucking air in over her tongue and the roof of her mouth, her lips pulled back and mouth open. Mostly, she did it only when she was alone, because it sounded weird and looked weirder—not a human action at all. But because I had asked her for help, and because no one but me would see her, she did it now, scenting for the smell of . . . of whatever.

As I watched, Jane crawled out of the half-renovated kitchen and into the dining room beyond. We were both dressed in old jeans and T-shirts, clothes that could get filthy and be tossed into the washer, and already Jane looked like something the cat dragged in, which was funny in all
sorts of ways. Jane Yellowrock was a Cherokee skinwalker, and her favorite animal form was a mountain lion. She called it her inner beast, which I still didn't understand, but I figured she'd tell me someday.

I'd met Jane in the Ingles grocery store, when a group of witch haters caught me in the frozen foods section and harassed me. None of us Everharts were officially out of the closet then, but most townspeople were okay with my family maybe carrying the witch gene. It was the out-of-towners who had the problem—a group that wasn't from the religious right, but was just as rabid. I still don't know what Jane did—she stepped in front of me so all I saw was her back—but the haters departed. Fast. I gave her my thanks and a card to my family café and we parted ways.

The next morning Jane came into the Seven Sassy Sisters' Herb Shop and Café, and nearly cleaned us out of bacon, sausage, and pancakes. The appetite of that morning was because she had just changed back from an animal form and needed calories to make up for the shift, but I didn't know that then. I just thought it was a crying shame that a woman who was so skinny could eat like that. If I tried to shovel in that much food, even half that much food, I'd weigh four hundred pounds. I think I gained three pounds just watching her eat, that first day.

And then the group of witch haters from the day before started picketing out front. I guess they were in town and figured they should make the most of it. They were carrying signs about not suffering a witch to live—the usual crapola—and chanting, “Save our children! Save our children!” Two cars pulled by and slowed, as if to turn in, and then pulled on away. Such attention was going to be damaging to business.

Jane paid her bill, went outside, and revved up her bike. And revved up her bike. And revved up her bike again. At which point I realized she was doing it on purpose. Then she did something to the engine, and revved it up again. And black smoke came out. So Jane rode in circles around the parking lot, shouting to the witch haters, “So sorry about the noise! I have engine problems!” After about ten minutes of noise, the witch haters left. It was so cool. I thought the twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, were going to have twin cows.

That's Jane. A loner with a cause. Any cause, as long as it's protecting someone.

She sneezed, bringing me back from my daydreams to my friend crawling around on the floor of a deserted, possibly haunted house.

The dining room had little floor left, and I could see the ground and the foundation beneath the house, between the struts. Still on her hands and knees, Jane moved into the foyer, circled its perimeter once, ignored the stairs leading to the second story, and crawled into the parlor beyond. I followed, watching from the foyer, which had been exposed when the construction crew pulled off the old boards covering the entrance. Oddly enough, though every other room in the house showed the results of men with mallets and hammers and crowbars, the parlor had still not been touched. The finish of the original handmade woodwork below the chair railing and the moldings at the ceiling was dark and filthy, the plaster between was cracked and split with water damage, and the last bits of old, red wallpaper curled, hanging loose, covered with spiderwebs and the dust of decades.

I stood in the six-foot-wide opening, watching my best friend track through the dust. The flooring beneath the accumulated filth was wood parquet, probably cut from the land the house stood on, milled by the lumber baron who'd built the house in the previous century. He had died a gruesome death, killed by a bear beside his train car, or so the old story went. His son had married a witch, and their daughter had inherited, and so had her daughter. However, the old house hadn't been occupied in decades, not since Monique Ravencroft, the most powerful witch in the Appalachians, had disappeared without a trace.

The family had died out except for a son who no longer wanted the property, and the old house had been sold to a local lawyer for his business offices. Construction had begun quickly thereafter. The workers, however, had abandoned the project two days ago, after a flying mallet attacked a plumber standing in an empty room. The construction company owner had asked the local coven in the little township of Hainbridge to investigate, but the women had had no luck identifying the spiritual miscreant. They had called me in to discover if the troublemaker was a ghost, demon, or haint—
haint
being a term applied, in this part of the woods, to a form of poltergeist, or supernatural energy that usually manifests around a person instead of around a place. Whatever had attacked the plumber, it needed to be identified so the coven could coerce or force it to vacate the premises. Unfortunately, all I'd found was a sense of something dead in the house, and I'd had no luck calling to or talking to any noncorporeal
would-be-killer. I hoped Jane, with her hyper senses, might discover something I had missed.

Jane sniffed around the fireplace on the far side of the room, the interior walls black with wood or coal smoke, the old grate rusted through and coated with spiderwebs. She seemed to find the opening uninteresting, and moved on to the corner. She paused there, repeating the openmouthed sniffing, and looked up, puzzled. “Molly, are you sure there's something dead here?”

I nodded. I'm from a long family of witches, all of us pretty much in the witch closet, and while I'm an earth witch, with the gift of growing plants, healing bodies, and restoring balance to nature, I'm a little unusual for an earth witch, in that I can sense dead things. And there was definitely something dead in this house somewhere.

“I smell witch and vamp,” Jane said.

The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up in alarm. “Vampire? There shouldn't be a vampire here.”

“It's been years, but I think . . .” She put her nose back to the dust-covered floor, sniffed delicately, and started sneezing. She rolled to her feet and crossed the room, sneezing all the way, her nose buried in the crook of her elbow to keep her filthy hands away from her face. I counted twelve sneezes before she stopped and her face was red from the sneeze effort. “I think I smell vamp and witch together,” she said, the back of a wrist to her nose, pressing against more sneezes, “and both of them were bleeding.” She stood beside me and turned to face the room. The evidence of her crawling progression was a clear trail through the layers of dust.

“Mol,” she said, “I dropped a stake.” She pointed to the fourteen-inch-long stake in the corner. “Would you go get it, please?”

“No,” I said instantly.

“Why not? You chicken?”

Anger shot through me. “I'm not going—” I stopped, and the anger filtered out of me. Around me the house seemed to wait, expectant, and I turned in a slow circle, standing in the doorway, letting my senses flow out, seeing the hand-carved woodwork, the once-elegant stairs leading up to the second floor, the carpenter's ladder against the wall. Smelling the dust, the fresh wood, the dirt under the house, and the sweat of the workers from two days past. Hearing the small sounds an old house makes, the
pop
s and quiet groans. Feeling the breath of the house as air moved
through it, cool and moist from the open floor and up the stairs, a faint trickle of breeze. I opened my mouth, as Jane did, and breathed, almost tasting the house, its age, elegance, and history.

Midway around, I closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. The magic I hadn't noted pricked against my skin, cool and light, old, old, old magic, a spell frayed around the edges, one that hadn't been renewed in decades. “A ward,” I muttered, “combined with something else. Maybe a keep-away spell. Yeah. I can feel it, feel them both, combined. It was a really good one to have lasted this long.” I opened my eyes and studied Jane. “How'd you sense it when I didn't?”

“Dust,” she said succinctly. At my puzzled expression, she said, “Every room in this place has been walked over, beaten on, knocked down, and partially renovated except this one. The footsteps all go right up to the entrance”—she pointed down to the floor at our feet—“where they removed whatever had been covering the room. And here they stop. I was the first person to so much as step into the room.”

A small smile pulled at her lips, half-proud, half-embarrassed. “I'm guessing the spell treated me like a big-cat. And since hanging around you and Big Evan so much, I've realized that sometimes I can feel witch magics. Cool and sparkly on my skin.”

That was a surprise. Humans can only feel magics when the spell is directed at them, as in a keep-away spell that shocks anyone who touches the spelled item. But then, Jane Yellowrock isn't human. I can do magic—it's in my very genes, passed along on the X chromosome from parent to child—but Jane
is
magic. And scary sometimes.

“Okay.” I sat on the floor in the foyer, outside the opening to the parlor, and reached out with my magics. Immediately I
saw
the spell. It was mostly green, smelling of pine and hemlock and holly, marking the caster as an earth witch, like me. I held out my hands and touched the edges of the conjure; it flashed against my fingertips painfully, hot and cold together, with minute darker green flashes of deeper pain. Once I concentrated, I could see the parameters of the incantation and the place it was protecting, the far corner of the room where the dust was deepest. A bit of cloth was in the corner, like a man's old-fashioned handkerchief, and an old newspaper, the rubber band disintegrated into blue goo from the heat and moisture of the long-sealed room. A curl of wallpaper had fallen across it
too. I guessed that the spell was tied to an amulet, probably hidden beneath the trash. I stood and brushed the dirt off my jeans.

“So,” I said, “I guess I need to push through the spell and get a feel for what is causing the problem.” The instant I said the words, a sense of dread fell on me. I
knew
, completely and totally, that if I went into the room,
I was going to die
. Worse,
my child would die
. I sucked in a breath, and it burned my throat.
My husband would die
. Tears started in the corners of my eyes. And
the deaths would be horrible, painful, tortured deaths
. It was illogical and stupid and clearly the result of the spell. But it was also
real
. I backed away, three unsteady steps. And the spell faded.

“Son of a witch on a switch,” I cursed.

Jane was leaning against the molding in the opening, arms crossed, watching me. “Bad?”

“Totally and completely sucky.” I described what I had been made to feel by the spell. “Whoever created that spell was good. Really,
really
good. And frighteningly inventive.”

Jane nodded, only her head and the tip of her long braid moving. “The worker who nearly got brained by the magical flying hammer, was he getting ready to go in here?” she asked.

“Yes. Why?” I asked.

“Because that ladder”—she tilted her head to the metal stepladder—“wiggled when you decided to go in. I figured it was going to fly across the room and hit you if you didn't back off.” Her lips pulled again in that half smile that was uniquely hers. “I was going to catch it before it hit you, of course.”

“Thanks,” I said, eyeing the ladder. “Like I said. That is a really good spell.” I pointed to the corner. “I have a feeling that the original incantation is tied to something in that corner. Maybe an amulet hidden under the trash.”

Jane nodded and uncrossed her arms. Stepping close, she pushed me farther away from the parlor opening and into the dining room opening on the other side of the foyer. Out of the way of flying carpenter tools, I realized. It was an odd dance step of a move, and Jane grinned down at me. She was a dancer, and I had three left feet and couldn't follow her; I nearly fell. “Careful,” she said, holding me steady.

“Don't get hurt,” I blurted.

Jane chuckled softly. “My reflexes are fast.”

“Yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Still . . .”

Jane shook her head in amusement and dropped to her knees again. She crawled into and around the parlor, one shoulder and hip brushing against the walls, just the way a cat would explore a room, around the outer edges first. When she reached the wallpaper and cloth on the far side, she batted the paper away in a move so catlike I covered my face to stifle a giggle. Then Jane grabbed up the cloth in two hands, held like paws, and rolled over with it, sending up clouds of dust. When her sneezing fit subsided, she batted the cloth away too, revealing a snake.