“Sounds messy. That why you stink?”
I chuckled and my shoulders slumped. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You save everybody?”
“We didn’t save anyone. There was nothing in the house except bodies several days old.”
“Huh.” Kathyayini pursed her lips, her mouth wrinkling up like a dried plum. “There shoulda been a witch circle there.”
“There was nothing.”
“You sure? No circle painted on the floor?”
My head came up. “Crap! There were black arcs painted on the floor in each room. Not a circle, but something.”
“Quarter circle? Like the whole house was the circle? You not very bright if you don’t see that.”
“Couldn’t be a witch circle. It was broken by the walls of the house.”
Kathyayini pursed her lips, the wrinkled skin drawing up like a dried apple. “Some circles are symbolic, proof of power used somewhere else.”
I hadn’t known that. Once again others might pay because I didn’t know enough of the arcane. I pushed off the dais and landed on the floor below the podium. “I have to get back there. Now!”
“No.” She waved a hand at me as if my intention was of no interest to her. “You got to sit down and listen. We got things to talk about.” When I took a step away, she narrowed her eyes at me and said, “Sit!” There was power in her command, so strong my knees buckled. I grabbed the dais to keep from falling and I sat. She pulled a strip of cloth from a pocket of her bib and pointed at my thumb. It was still bleeding, which was odd. My skinwalker metabolism would usually stop the bleeding of a scratch quickly. I wrapped my small wound and gripped the cloth over it, applying pressure.
“What have you learned so far?” she asked, though it was more command than request.
“That an old Spaniard, a conquistador, was a vamp. He drank down the power of the best warriors of the Tsalagi and then used some of their blood to make amulets, maybe using the iron from the spikes of the crosses to give his magic power.”
“Hah. You not so stupid as I think.”
“At some point,” I went on, “he figured out how to use the amulets to focus enough power to keep the rest of the vamps in the U.S. and Europe at bay, so he could practice Naturaleza, free from interference, for centuries in Atlanta. That was enough for him until he discovered a way to make vampires sick. And then he concocted a plan using the vamp plague to take over the entire U.S. But Leo Pellissier stood in his way. Leo and me.
“I killed Lucas and his heir took over the amulets and added a full witch circle to the mix. The added power created transformational magic. I think the purpose of the magic was to make a super vamp able to be truly immortal, withstand the sun, silver, crosses—every weakness that vamps have. And the magic was tested by creating revenants to see what came back. And what has come back so far is monsters.”
“Not bad.” She patted my knee. “But let’s talk about the Tsalagi warriors from long ago. They not all dead. Are they?”
She means skinwalkers. “Uh, no, ma’am.”
“You killed the other one.”
My eyes whipped to hers, and she smiled in the light of the three candles. “You been here many moon cycles, setting things in motion. Stopped other things. Maybe that other Tsalagi like you was supposed to do something important for this old Spaniard, and you killed him instead. What you think that might be?”
I shook my head in confusion, trying to rearrange my thoughts and the things I thought I had figured out into some new semblance of order. “Maybe Immanuel was supposed to kill Leo, so de Allyon could take over?”
“And so, maybe you the catalyst for his plan, not the plague. Or maybe both together. You showing up in New Orleans caused him a headache, I betcha.” She cackled with laughter. “And he tried to kill you, yes?”
I remembered the attack in a hotel in Asheville. “That was to kill Leo.”
“You not so smart now. Old blood drinkers got plans on top of plans, everything tied together like a big knot”—she held her hands out as if gripping a soccer ball—“like a clock, around and around. He was doing bunch of things at once and you stopped all of them. He had to rethink his plans.”
I felt a chill, like a winter wind over a graveyard. “Everything I’ve done since I got to New Orleans has brought me here, to this moment.”
“Now you see? You getting smart now.”
“If you knew all this, why didn’t you tell me last time?” I ground out, my frustration making my voice loud enough to echo through the old building. Outside, lightning hit the earth close by, lighting the inside of the church in a flickering burst of power. “You gave me a riddle that made no sense.”
“Eh. You figured it out.” She flapped a hand at the unimportance of it all. “Musta made some sense, it did. Besides, what make you think I knew everything last time? What make you think I know them this time? What make you think any of this is real?” She swept an arm around the old church, to include herself. “If none a this is real,” she said, “where it all come from?” She tapped my head with a bony finger. “You knew lots of it already. I just gave you a nudge with my riddle.”
I pushed her finger away and passed my hands over my face, pressing in on my eyeballs. I could smell my own blood soaking into the cloth. My bleeding still hadn’t stopped. “Okay. What do I do next?”
“What you think you do next?”
“I think I have to figure out how to use the quarter witch circles in the old house”—I stopped, remembering another circle, the one in the refrigerator of the other house—“because the witch circles will take me somewhere else. Where the witches are.”
“Now you talking like a smart girl. Get. I got stuff to do.”
“But—”
“Don’t forget to save us. The Acheé witches, we in big trouble.”
Lightning hit the top of the church with a sound like doom. The candles went out. And I was sitting on the ground, in the grass, in the middle of a downpour. My jacket was behind me, the three pocket watches were on the ground in front of me, and I was holding the red iron disc in one hand and a bloody silver coin in the other. I put the watches in separate pockets and the iron coin in the zippered one. And trudged back the way I came. Between one step and the next, I was in the daylight, staring at a shocked Alex. He was only a foot away, his eyes wide and his mouth open.
“You disappeared. And then you came back. Like . . . like magic or something. And why are you all wet?”
I grunted sourly, striding to the truck. “Get in and drive.”
We went back to the old saloon and bar where Eli and I had rescued the three girls chained in a bathroom, where I had shifted into Beast to save my life. As he drove, I loaded my shotgun and the nine millimeter I had emptied into a spidey vamp and weaponed up over the soaked clothing. When the Kid braked at the curb, I found one of Eli’s huge flashlights, got out, and went to the bar. I yelled over my shoulder, “If I’m not out in fifteen minutes, call Eli!”
The door was covered with a piece of plywood and taped over with crime scene tape. There was a gap at the bottom, and I wriggled my fingers under the wood and got a good grip, braced one foot on the doorjamb, and yanked.
The door groaned up and out at an angle, nails pulling out of the wood. When it was high enough to get through, I ducked and went inside, drawing a nine-mil and turning on the flash. My sense of smell told me the place was empty, but I scanned the front room and behind the bar to make sure before I took the long hallway to the back.
The women’s restroom was empty but still smelled of pain and fear. The door in the back of the building was missing, allowing in a lot of light. The refrigerator stood open once again, either because the cops left it that way or because vamps had used it since then. I was betting on vamps. I stood in the doorway, studying the white-painted circle in the center of the fridge. “Flying by the seat of my pants could get me killed this time,” I said to myself.
Beast answered, We are Beast. We are more than Jane and big-cat.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I pulled the three watch amulets out of my pockets and laid them on the floor of the fridge, inside the white circle. Then I stepped over and into the center of the circle, unzipped the pocket, and took out the thrice-made red iron disc. It was clumsy, but I held the weapon and the flash in one hand, and bent my knees, spread my feet into a modified shooting stance, and with my other hand pressed the disc into the bloody cloth.
The floor fell out from under my feet. My stomach lurched. Vomit rose in my throat.
I landed hard in the dark, dislodging the flashlight. Dropping it. It landed with a hollow thud and rolled, illuminating a place I had never seen before. It was a tiny square room, maybe three feet on a side. It stank of old earth and blood and the dusty reek of spidey vamps.
I’d just been transported through space by a witch spell. Nausea danced a tango up my esophagus again, but I swallowed it down. Kirk and Spock never spewed after a transporter trip, I thought, panicky giggles close on the heels of the thought. That would be totally uncool. I managed a shuddery breath and locked the giggles and the nausea away.
Just beyond the walls, I heard a voice. Eli. Eli?
I put it together fast. I had to be in a hidden room in the house we had raided at dawn. Back where I started from. Well, that was ducky. But it explained the quarter arcs in each room—symbolic of a place to land. Picking up the flash, I inspected the small space. The walls were painted black, with strange symbols all over them in a reddish-brown color. The symbols meant nothing to me, except I thought they were runes, stuff I had seen at Molly’s. I had a feeling these were painted with blood mixed with other stuff. What else would a psycho vamp paint witch symbols with but blood? My breath came faster and I breathed through my mouth and nose to take in the scent/taste/texture of the air in the coffin-sized place. As there was nothing to shoot, I holstered my weapon. I had no idea why a witch circle would deposit me here, but there had to be a reason.
