Shadow Rites: A Jane Yellowrock Novel (9 page)

Then the largest screen lightened and a huge version of Bruiser’s face filled it. He was looking straight at me. I realized we were looking at real time now and that Bruiser had a combat face nearly as implacable as Eli’s. “Move closer to the camera,” he said tonelessly.

I stepped closer, knowing he was looking for wounds. I smiled brightly at him, and his expression went from worry to frank disbelief. “Big smile too much?” I asked.

“Yes. That was a patently fake smile.”

“True. But I’m alive. A little wobbly, but alive.”

Bruiser’s eyes narrowed, little creases at the corners. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

And that sounded worrisome, more of the “Why didn’t you shift?” questions. Stuff I didn’t know the answers to. I said, “Yeah. Good,” and nodded, my hair moving on my shoulders, drawing Bruiser’s eyes.

I could see he wanted to say something about the funky braids, but he said instead, “Update.”

Eli stepped beside me and told Bruiser everything that had happened. Then he quoted Bruiser back. “Your turn. Update.”

The cell phone he was holding turned to the world around him. The last of the daylight cast long shadows in a swamp scene. Stagnant water coated with green slime was
everywhere. Huge trees pushed out of the water, cypress knees poking through the scum, the strange upward-turned root knobs stabilizing the trees. In the small clearing, the ground rose out of the water, muddy and pitted deeply with footsteps. In the center of the ground were two wooden doors, flush with the earth. Around the doors were arcane symbols drawn inside a witch circle. In the distance gators roared, the primal sound of reptile combat.

Bruiser held out a hand. In it was a length of crumpled, oft-folded foil and the brooch that he had found in the alley, the scarab and the peacocks, pixelated with digital failure. “This is where the brooch led. We can walk across the witch circle and nothing happens, but the feel of hidden magics is quite strong, and there must be a trap inside the doors cued to their opening.

“By the scent there is a vampire inside the door, in the ground. We will open the doors tonight and discover what we may. I’ll have more to say after sunset.” The communications went dark. From beside me, Eli said, “So much for date night, babe.”

*   *   *

“The Truebloods will be here tomorrow morning,” Eli said as he parked down the street from the house.

Technically and legally it was
my
house, as I had won it from a vamp in service to her, but we all lived and worked there, so it in reality it was
our
house. I’d come to New Orleans with a motorbike and the clothes on my back. Now I had a house, full-time work, a business with partners, and a man in my life. I had
roots
. I belonged. Everything was new and strange.

And because of the new things and people and lifestyle, my bestest pal in the world, and my godchildren, and Mol’s husband, were coming to stay with me. I could offer shelter to her and hers. Also very,
very
strange.

“I’ll be ready,” I said. “For now, I’ll be out back.”

“No meditation or shifting until you eat. Pancakes with butter and syrup and half a gallon of electrolytes. Except for the new hairstyle, you look like crap.”

“I love you too.”

“I know. Come on.” He opened his door and stepped
out into the autumn heat and humidity. “Alex has breakfast started.”

I followed much more slowly into a warm rain that felt like a tepid shower—the typical rain of the Deep South this time of year. Slow drops splatted onto my head and shoulders as I stepped to the sidewalk. “We’re going to eat more food the Kid cooked? He maxed out with the broccoli and cheese. You want us
both
to die?”

Eli slanted his game face my way for an instant, his eyes moving left and right behind his sunglasses, checking out the street. “I gave him a lesson last Saturday. That was his cooking. No one died.”

“Fine,” I said, reluctance in the word. “I could eat.” It was a lie, I wasn’t hungry at all, but I also knew my body needed calories and lots of them to get me back up to speed. I needed to shift into my Beast form to heal completely, and no way was Eli going to let me go without a meal or three and restorative fluids. As long as it wasn’t blue Gatorade, I thought I could keep it down.

*   *   *

It was a pretty good breakfast, though it was hours after normal people ate pancakes. Tied into the security system at HQ, Alex had seen all the footage in real time and had followed along with the replays, but he had to be filled in with the details, which Eli did while we ate, his words clipped and staccato. I mostly stayed silent and let them talk.

The syrup was delish, from Eli’s private stash of one hundred percent maple, and the sugar rush was immediate and heady, tempting my appetite. The pancakes were fine, though the texture wasn’t quite as light as Eli’s. It could have been the humidity and the rain that made them a little doughy, but they were filling and easy on my stomach, better than I had expected, and I didn’t feel like hurling with every bite.

Deceptively casual, his face almost pleasant, Eli said, “Let’s spar, before you meditate and shift.”

“Why?” I heard the suspicion in my voice. It was easier for my partner to win a sparring match when I was down and out.

“To see how well the suckhead blood healed you. You’ve had trouble in the past, changing into Beast to heal, and you didn’t change this time when you got stabbed. And when you shift, you can get stuck in puma form when we need you in human form. Beast also wasn’t able to help you with significant speed or strength, and while you’re strong enough on your own, as a skinwalker, Beast gives you an edge. Correct?”

My partner had been paying attention. Close and detailed attention. Reluctantly I nodded. “She tried. The power drained out of my hand into the floor.” I held up my left hand, the one where the spell had ignited. “Spelled.”

Eli’s face tightened, just a smidge. If he was showing that much, I figured he was terrified. He said, “We came close to seeing how you react without Beast assisting you. And it wasn’t pretty.”

Deep inside, I felt Beast growl. She didn’t like that idea. But Eli had a point. If I couldn’t draw on Beast in a fight for some reason, I’d be using my own skinwalker fighting skills and my own pain-damping abilities. I’d gotten used to having Beast as part of me. I wasn’t used to fighting so alone and hoped I’d never have to find out how well or poorly I did without her totally. But in the middle of a fight hadn’t been the time to find out how that situation worked.

If I had access to Beast, but needed to shift into an animal by day, I had no way to shift back until night. It was a quirk in my shifting that had proven problematic in the past. I did feel better, stronger, as much because of the food in my system as the vampire blood.

Once upon a time, drinking vamp blood was a way for a suckhead to attempt to bind me magically. I considered myself, the darkness of the cavern of my soul home, and the fact that a forced binding would never work, which was one big point in my favor. I gestured with a pancake-laden fork for Eli to go on.

“If vamp blood works well enough, it gives us an extra defensive weapon for you.”

I slid a hand to my wound, feeling the thick scar tissue and muscle there. “I don’t think I can take a direct hit here yet.”

“Understood. Eat. Drink. Then decide.” Eli shoved a pitcher of electrolytes at me.

I ate. I drank. And I felt better moment by moment. “Okay,” I said when I finished my third stack of pancakes. “Lift some weights, stretch, and spar. But you go easy on me this time.” It wasn’t something I had ever asked of him and Eli paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, considering.

“Wimp.”

“Totally. All I need is pom-poms and a tutu. Maybe a teddy bear.”

Eli laughed, a real, full-on laugh that warmed my whole heart, and ate.

*   *   *

The room tumbled end over end and I landed flat on my back with a wham and an “Ooof” that drove the air out of my lungs and made my body spasm with electric shocks of agony.
Crap, crap, crap,
I thought, tensing against the pain.

My Beast tried to force her way to the surface to take the fight back to Eli, but I was hurting and the purpose of this exercise was to fight with her down, firmly in place and submissive. From the way she was pacing across my mind, like a cat in a cage, I understood that she didn’t like our little test. She didn’t like being unable to force her energies into me when I was being bruised. She didn’t like not forcing a shift on me, into her form,
Puma concolor
, but she hadn’t been able to do that earlier, when I was dying. Eli was right. I—we—needed to know this.

Waiting game,
I reminded her as she squirmed beneath my mental hand.
We are ambush hunters.

She growled at me, but subsided. I finally found a breath of air. It hurt going down, as if someone had yanked a rosebush into my lungs. It made a painful sucking sound too, and Eli chuckled, the evil man.

Want to ambush-hunt Eli. We are
Beast
. We are stronger than human.

Yeah, but we need to be able to hide what we are, and practice makes perfect,
I thought back.
And we need to figure out what happened today when you didn’t shift
.

Seeing eye,
she thought.
Seeing eye and green magics.

Some magical whammy for sure.

Jane has practiced dying many time,
Beast thought at me, snark in her thoughts.

Thanks.
I gave some snark back and pressed down on her, holding her still, practicing what I had been working on for the last few weeks, in the meditation exercises that had been assigned to me, holding her in place with a mental hand, not letting Beast assist in a fight, not letting her take over our form, not letting her be alpha. It was important that she learn to stay hidden, or we might end up a captive, taken prisoner, and used by the European Mithrans, the biggest of the baddest suckheads. And they’d be here in a few months. Or, if I was lucky, in a few years.

Beast subsided and I blinked the sweat from my eyes. I had missed the mat again, surely Eli’s intent, and was lying halfway into the hallway. I managed another breath and dropped my hands flat to the wooden floor, faceup, staring at the ceiling twelve feet overhead. The corners were dusty. And the ceiling needed a paint job. And . . . there was a tiny attic access in the corner that I had never paid attention to.
Interesting
.

“Better,” Eli said, and he tossed me a towel. It landed on my face, also his intent. “Your eyes didn’t start to glow, even when you landed.” I could hear the insulting laughter in his voice when he asked, “Did it hurt, babe?”

I patted my face, neck, and upper chest with the towel and left it on my belly to absorb more sweat through my workout shirt. “Oh yeah. I hurt.” Eli chuckled again, and I added, “You don’t have to enjoy it so much.”

“Sure I do.” He moved to stand over my right side, his face faintly amused, sweat trickling down his temple, his dark skin sheened with perspiration. He smelled of sweat, testosterone, deodorant, and sour clothes. In the New Orleans’s humid heat, sweaty clothes soured quickly, and I was pretty sure the concept of autumn was Mother Nature’s big joke this far south, leaving us in a muggy, wet hell forever.

Eli lowered a hand, palm up, as if offering to help me up, and kept talking. “I take joy where I can find it.”

I had heard the story before and I finished it for him.
“One day this old soldier told you, ‘Never pass a watercooler without taking a drink, because you never know when your next one will come.’”

“Beating you is a rarity,” he agreed. “So I enjoy every moment.”

I grunted. Eli was talkative after we sparred, which was a pleasant change from the hard, taciturn man Uncle Sam had shaped him into. I slapped a hand into his and accepted the lift. Eli looked me over, as if checking out a prizefighter or a horse he might buy.

I grunted again and looked myself over. Sweaty and sour, as much as Eli, and sore. And bruised. My pretty braided hair was a goner. But I was feeling a lot better following the weight lifting and stretching we had done before the sparring match. Over two hours of hard activity had eased the aches and pains I hadn’t realized I was carrying around in my body.

“The extra weight looks good on you,” Eli said. “Five more pounds and you’ll be able to stand against the next breeze.”

When I came to New Orleans, I had looked like a poster child for the seriously undernourished, at one hundred twenty-five pounds. I had put on twenty pounds over last Christmas, and in the last month, five pounds more, mostly solid muscle. A little of the weight had landed in the boob department, but I’d never be mistaken for a model, more like the before photo in an advertisement for boob jobs.

“Did I pass for human?” I asked, easing my weight against the wall and letting my head rock back to it with a thump.

“As long the vamps don’t get close enough to smell you, you’ll be fine. Or you can drench yourself in some cheap perfume and overpower their olfactory senses.”

“Pass,” I said, toweling dry. I dropped the towel to the floor and used my foot to mop up more sweat. It had splattered when I landed. I took the time to stretch out the pulled muscles as I worked. “When is the help coming to move the workout room gear and set up the bed?”

“Alex and I can handle it. We decided to transfer it all into the hallway, not to a storage unit. Easier to put back
when they go. What do you think about a Murphy bed in there? It would save time. I can put it together.”

“Fine.” I shrugged as we trooped down the stairs. The hallway was extra wide and could indeed hold the equipment. It had enough square feet to set up bunk beds if needed. My BFF, Molly, was coming, with her husband and my godchildren, to attend the Witch Conclave this coming weekend, so both guest bedrooms had to be available. Molly was spending so much time here that I should just let them move in. Which I’d do in a heartbeat if I thought they might stay, but Molly wasn’t fond of New Orleans’s heat, both the temperature kind and the blood-sucking-danger kind. Not that I could blame her.