Black Arts

CHAPTER 8 B-b-b-b-bad to the Bone

The clatter and the smell of blood shocked the vamp, and he crouched. I was already launching myself through the air, right at him, intending to knock him to his back and place the blade at his throat. Beast took over the leap. The vamp and I collided, almost gently, my open left hand catching his right shoulder, gripping hard, my right hand moving across his body with a fast swipe, like claws. No! I thought at her. Alive! But I couldn’t wrench control away.

The blade caught his throat just below his larynx. My momentum and mass-in-motion carried the sharp edge through his tissue with only the slightest resistance, to jar into his spine.

We hit the ground and I tucked, rolling across him, letting go the vamp-killer handle to keep from damaging him any more. Bending my arms to take the fall, cradling my head down, curling my spine into the somersault and instantly up to my feet. I was splattered with vamp blood, cool and sticky on my skin. He hadn’t fed recently, which ruled out Naturaleza vamp.

I smelled the silver that finished the job of killing him true-dead. No one to question. I snarled at Beast, I needed to question him.

She growled back, Hunter of kits. Must die.

Furious, I pulled my blade free of his flesh, wiped both it and the throwing knife on his clothes, free of blood, and left him lying in the street. With Beast’s vision and Evan’s spell, I could see two forms wrapped together in the lee of the house at two o’clock, both a vibrant orange, both human. Wrassler had the human in a sleeper hold, and eased him to the ground as I raced up. “It’s me,” I whispered. “Stay here. I’m checking the back.” I sprinted around the brick fencing, pulling Beast’s speed through me. I leaped high, grabbing the fence with one hand and swinging myself over, the brick grinding into my human-soft palms.

Stupid Jane. Needs paws.

Yeah. And living attackers.

Beast didn’t reply.

I landed inside the fence, silently, in a crouch. From the second story at the back of the house, I heard a single shot. Rifle fire. An oof of pain and expelled breath was followed by the sound of a body hitting the ground. I found the human, the bright orange of her body warmth half hidden by the pile of mostly crushed boulders in the garden. I crawled to her on all fours, keeping the stones between me and the last vamp. The human didn’t smell of blood, and when I touched her, my fingers found a vest beneath her clothes. It had to be one of the new combat vests just released on the market—Kevlar, silver mesh, and fibers spelled against magic. The woman was alive and unharmed, except for, maybe, a broken rib or two. Which was nothing short of a miracle, considering the range. But the breath had been knocked out of her.

To my side, I saw a pale amber form moving away in the dark. Vamp fast, she vaulted the fence and disappeared. I knew her. I’d been right. Adrianna. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play,” I muttered.

Beast snorted softly. Knowing that Eli would have me in his sights, I sheathed my blades and gave the “all clear” signal by tapping my head. I opened my cell and dialed Wrassler. “I got a human. Alive, but having trouble breathing.”

“I got one taking a nap.”

“Bring yours inside. Front door. Ring the bell. And just so you know, Adrianna got away.”

The woman at my knees sucked in a breath that sounded pained—her first since she was shot. “Bet that hurts,” I said softly. I confiscated a fully automatic weapon with a full thirty-round mag. There were other magazines on her person, enough rounds to chew through the back of the house and anyone inside. I lifted her up and tossed her over my shoulder, glad that my secret was out and I didn’t have to hide what I was anymore. Her newly found breath oofed out once again, along with her scent. She stank of Adrianna and something else, something vaguely familiar, but the blood and Adrianna’s reek overpowered it and I couldn’t isolate the scent marker.

I carried the human along the side porch and in the side door. And dumped her to the floor at Big Evan’s feet. Without looking at them, I handed the weapons to Eli and he chuckled nastily as he looked the midsized subgun over. I yanked three zip strips out of his utility belt and secured the woman’s hands. It only took about seventy-five pounds of force to break a regular-sized zip strip. Let’s see her break three of the bigger ones at once.

“Let Wrassler in the front door, please,” I said to Eli as the bell rang. “He has another prisoner.” Eli headed to the door, his footsteps silent.

“You remember me telling you about the Damours?” I asked his retreating back. He made a waffling motion with one hand. “Adrianna was part of the Damours’ blood family, and was a mind-locked anamchara to one of the top people in the family. When I killed the Damours vamps, Adrianna was there. Leo saved her when I killed her lover, for reasons I’ll never know.” I glanced at Big Evan. He knew all about the history of the Damours. The witch-vamps had been trying to sacrifice his children when I killed the fangheads true-dead. Though memory was a dicey thing—especially when one was technically insane—Adrianna had to know that I was the one who killed her anamchara. Vamps liked vengeance, so she thought she would kill me and mine. I got that. But it wasn’t enough to make it all sit easily with me. There was still too much that didn’t fit. Unless . . .

I looked at it another way. Unless there was more than one thing going on. Maybe some of the weirdness had something to do with the European Council coming to visit. I put that possibility on the back burner of my brain.

I dialed the council house and asked to be put through to Edmund Hartley. “We’re safe,” I said. “Thanks to you. Talk to me. I need to know everything pertinent that you drank out of Tattoo Dude.”

“It was my pleasure,” Ed said. And the way he said it meant way more than a simple “You’re welcome.” But he went on, his words succinct. “In order of your earlier queries, the man I questioned was under heavy compulsion. The two were supposed to alert Adrianna when you would be within their influence, and kill you while Adrianna attacked your home to steal something of value. They don’t know what it was.

“Adrianna gave the men the weapons. They knew the blades were poisoned, but not what the poison was or if a witch was involved in making it. Neither Grégoire nor Dominique knew about the attack—a suggestion that was insulting but necessary,” he added. “No one else at Clan Arceneau knew about the attack so far as he knew. No one else here at the council house knew of it. He did not know if there were more attacks planned. He was compelled, and quite well.”

The men had been at HQ for weeks. So that put the planning of the attacks on me and my home back much earlier than that. It took time to set up a compulsion, even longer to get the men so deeply under that they would attack me in front of witnesses, though a violent compulsion might work faster in a violent human, last longer without reinforcing. I didn’t know.

If Adrianna wanted vengeance for the death of her lover, then attacking my house and my friends and my person . . .Yeah. Adrianna had been busy. Vamps strategized with the long view and might wait decades—centuries even—to carry out a plan. Yet Adrianna had seemed too unstable to make any of this work. So, either I had read her wrong or her kind of crazy was the kind that got things done. Or I was missing something.

I needed to talk to Adrianna. And by talk I meant communication of a kind that made my blood run cold just thinking of it. But no one around me was safe as long as Adrianna ran around free. I wondered if Leo would give me leave to go after her. I need to talk to the MOC. I needed to decide how far I’d go to keep my people safe. I said, “Thanks, Ed. We’ll talk later.”

I closed the phone in its bulletproof case as Wrassler entered, his treads heavy on the wood floors. The door closed behind him and he dropped his burden on the floor beside the woman. The man made a satisfying whomp when he hit. Evan whistled a note and I knew the wards were back up. The big man stood in the foyer, watching us across the rooms; I figured he was trying to control his temper and not accidentally zap the prisoners. “Evan, you got any magical truth-serum-spell-whammies up your sleeve? ’Cause we need some answers from these two, and now.” I rolled the human woman over, faceup. She was muscular, a bodybuilder who also worked on endurance training. Her arms were buff, and her thigh and calf muscles beneath the black skintight running suit were long and lean. She wore her hair short and slicked back with gel, and her eyes were darkly lined in black. She stared up at me with disdain.

Evan stepped closer and looked the woman over as I frisked her again, finding a knife I’d missed before, a thin, narrow-bladed weapon sheathed in a thigh pocket. “Cute,” I said. “I guess it would be corny to say”—I pulled my vamp-killer with its fourteen-inch blade—“this is a knife.” She narrowed her eyes and didn’t laugh. Some people have no sense of humor.

“I got whammies,” Evan said, “but they won’t work on these two.” When I looked my question at him, he bent down and yanked a metal charm off the woman’s neck. The chain broke with a snap and she grunted again. Fear spread over her face, and she looked around, as if startled. Evan said, “Somebody’s been mixing vamp compulsion with magic on them.”

As soon as the chain broke, the smell of old blood hit me, and I realized that the compulsion charm had been activated with blood. I backed away, wrinkling my nose.

“Where am I?” the woman demanded, struggling to rise, her bound hands pushing at the floor. Her body took on the scent of confusion and, beneath it, the smell of fear.

Prey, Beast whispered to me.

“You don’t remember coming to my house with a submachine gun and enough ammo to finish a small war?” I asked.

Her eyes went wide. “Are you nuts?”

“You came to my house! My home!” I shouted. I wanted to hit her with my fist, or with my claws, slashing open her face. But I controlled myself, gulped a breath, and shoved down on my fury, because the woman on the floor in front of me was truly, completely confused. Adrianna had been part of the Damours’ black magic rituals. Seemed she had learned something from them. Maybe picked up a few magical things, like amulets that made humans willing conspirators in crimes. And I didn’t beat someone to a pulp for being brainwashed by magic, no matter how satisfying it might feel while I did it.

I said, “Wrassler, would you be kind enough to drive these two to vamp HQ and see if Edmund Hartley will drink them and their memories. I need proof who ordered this.” Because I was going to hurt that person. Badly. Yeah. And every dime I had said it was Adrianna.

“You do know that among Mithrans, such acts are said to be close to Naturaleza methods?” Wrassler asked, his voice neutral and without inflection.

I thought about Edmund’s tone when he said it was his pleasure, and the spike in the center of my soul grew colder. “Noted,” I said shortly.

Wrassler looked into my face and shrugged. “Sure. I’ll ask.” He held out a hand to Eli for more strips, and the two men zip-stripped the humans to within an inch of not breathing before carrying them to the SUV still parked in the middle of the street. I stood at the door and watched as they also loaded the dead vamp. If Leo’s usual rates for killing vamps who acted out and put humans at risk applied to this guy, I’d just made a few thousand bucks. Somehow that fact, and the fact that I had just told a vamp it was okay to abuse a human, didn’t make me very happy. Anger roiled under my skin, building up like steam with no place to go. I wasn’t liking myself much. Not at all. But I also didn’t know what to do different. I didn’t know how to protect the ones I cared about without crossing lines. Lines I might not be able to cross back.

Once Wrassler was gone, Evan leaned against the doorway, one arm up to support and balance him, his head resting back against his palm as he stared up. Almost as if speaking to the painted wood, he said, “You asked if witches were working with the vamps. When we broke the chain on her charm, I heard a voice, whispering, like a spell being worked long-distance.”

“Well, that’s just ducky,” I said.

The big guy nodded as if he agreed with my sarcasm, dropped his arms, squared his shoulders, and walked to the safe room. He opened it with a touch of his hand, and the bookcase swung open to reveal the room beneath the stairs, narrow and tight, the stone-lined walls and wood shelves hung with weapons of all kinds, a bed and emergency supplies along one wall, and a trapdoor in the floor for escape.

He brought his children out of the safe room, the Kid following along. I expected Alex to look upset at having been placed with the children, and then he raised a long-barreled weapon from beside his leg and handed it to his brother. “You need to teach me how to use it,” Alex said simply, his face tight with responsibility and the dawning reality of the world as a dangerous place, a place he wasn’t prepared to survive on the training he had so far. “Something more than ‘Point and shoot.’”

“Noted,” Eli said.

The smaller children were sleeping deeply, a spelled sleep that had kept them silent, out of harm’s way, and safe from playing with the weapons in the room. Evan carried them both up the stairs while Eli and I took care of securing the house, which meant putting weapons and noisemaker alarms at the windows and doors. You don’t always need a fancy electronic security system. Fog can make some systems useless, and if witches are involved, they might have ways to eliminate or decrease even a magical system’s effectiveness. I’d seen it happen—once—to an Everhart-Trueblood ward, a hole blown into it, leaving the edges tangled and frayed.

A pyramid of empty cans was a nifty, low-tech way to be alerted to a B&E.

When Evan came back down, I picked the conversation back up. “You can hear long-distance spells?”

“Sometimes. If the spell is directed at me, if the speaker isn’t in a vault with no outside air flow, and if the working isn’t warded against it, which most practitioners don’t bother to do.” He went to the kitchen and brought back three cans of Coke. We each popped a top and took a swig. “Warding against long-distance listening requires more energy, and not many witches have the ability. Since I’m not officially registered with PsyLED—yet—not everyone knows I’m an air witch.” The weariness in his tone pulled at me. His wife was missing. His children were in danger. Because they were my friends and my extended family, they were my responsibility. And I hadn’t helped much so far.

I looked down at my drink can for a moment. It was my fault that Big Evan was out of the closet in any way. Maybe my fault that Molly was in New Orleans, and therefore her family in harm’s way. Again. “I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling the weight of guilt. I stared at my hand and clenched my fist, remembering the feel of hot blood spurting over my hand as I killed the violently psychotic witch Evangelina, Molly’s sister, the demon-caller. Remembering. Knowing I had no choice. Yet knowing that I’d hurt Molly beyond imagining.

“No help for it,” Evan said, reading my body language. “Once Evie brought her power play public, in front of cameras, it was only a matter of time before someone looked closer at the Everharts and, by extension, me.”

But I knew he was thinking about the children upstairs. The witch gene was X-linked, meaning it passed through the X chromosome. Molly was a witch, Big Evan was a witch. There was a one hundred percent chance that all their daughters would have the X-linked gene and be witches. There was a fifty percent chance that any son, like EJ, would be a witch, making him predisposed to the childhood cancers suffered by almost all witches, cancers that killed almost all males. And there was also a fifty percent chance that any girl child would have the witch gene on both X chromosomes, making her a weapon, dangerous, something to be feared or desired. The Trueblood children had already been in danger, as Everhart children, the descendants of a known witch, a danger made far worse by me when I let others in on Big Evan’s secret. I had done it to save Rick LaFleur, my ex. I had done it with all good intentions. And like most of the things I do when flying by the seat of my pants, my action had unintended consequences.

My anger, my protective instincts, which had seemed to be cooling, flared hot again. “I have to go back to vamp HQ,” I said, “and see what Edmund found out from the humans Wrassler took back. I’ll be home after dawn.”

Eli tossed me a set of keys, which I caught single-handed. “Take the SUV. Weapon up. And don’t surrender them at the door. Be careful.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said. But I did as he said, and weaponed up fully, holstering four semiautomatic handguns, my Benelli M4 shotgun loaded for vamp with silver shot—rounds made with sterling fléchettes—two vamp-killers, and twelve stakes in my bun before I left—the new stakes with small buttonlike ends to make them easier to shove through flesh. As I departed the house, I heard Evan singing softly, “B-b-b-b-bad. B-b-b-b-bad to the bone,” George Thorogood’s version, his singer’s voice low and rough and not hiding the anger and fear inside him.

As Evan sang, Eli chuckled, his eyes telling me that I looked good, real good, and that if other people hadn’t been present he would have been ragging me about being a totally kick-ass, hot chick. I just shook my head and closed the door on the lyrics. The sad part? I probably was bad to the bone. As if listening in to my darker thoughts, Beast whispered softly inside my skull, Jane is killer only, a litany she had begun not that long ago, and which, for reasons I didn’t understand, made me feel really awful.

• • •

Vamp HQ was lit up like a ballpark, lights in every bulletproof-glass window, humans and vamps patrolling the grounds. I pulled to the security gate and let my window slide down. “Jane Yellowrock to finish business and see Leo.” The words sounded harsh, half growl, and I felt Beast pad to the front of my brain, shoulders rolling with each step, sleek and predatory, and I wondered what the person on the far side of the security camera saw in my eyes.

Without an acknowledgment, the gate rolled open. I parked out front and strode up the steps two at a time, adjusting my bun stakes after the ride in the SUV. I pushed through the air lock doors and stared at the triplets standing there, waiting to take my weapons. They musta seen something because they looked at one another before speaking to me. I beat them to the punch and gave them a grin that couldn’t have been pretty. I said, “You can try. I’ll leave you all three bleeding on the nice slick marble.”

The three backed away, one of them speaking sotto voce into his mic. “Jane Yellowrock is on the premises. She is armed and dangerous.”

“Good call,” I said to them as I stalked through the building, heading for the prisoners. Wrassler was standing in the hallway when I got there, at parade rest, if parade rest meant looking relaxed, feet spread on the carpet, with two handguns drawn, held down beside his legs. “Did Edmund question the others from the security meeting?” I asked.

He nodded. “All but the one who actually attacked you. He saved that one for you.”

“What did you learn?”

“No one liked the two tattooed security men, especially the women.”

I narrowed my eyes, knowing what that likely meant. “Has Hawk Head given you any trouble?”

“Not a peep. We let the uninvolved ones go after Edmund fed on them, and vetted them. Edmund is looking pink and a little too happy, by the way.”

“Which warms my heart,” I snarked. But not hearing a peep from the prisoner was strange. Disquiet pattered down my back on sticky, padded feet, and I drummed my fingertips on my thighs before saying, “Okay. Open it.”

The smell of blood hit first, and I shoved Wrassler aside, stepping into the room. At some point in the last instant, I’d drawn my weapons, a nine-mil in one hand, a vamp-killer in the other. But I wouldn’t need them.

Hawk Head was dead. The hawk and scalp were on one side of the room, attached to his skull, which was sitting on the back of a chair like a stage prop. The rest of the body was on the other side of the room, on the floor, spread-eagle. Or spread-hawk. The body was posed like the raptor on the scalp. He’d been beheaded, like a vamp.

The room reeked with the stench of death. He’d lost control of bladder and bowels. Blood had sprayed over the ceiling and walls. Prey, Beast thought at me. Meat. I opened my mouth and sucked in the air over tongue and roof of mouth, through nose, in little spurts of breath. The blood smell was so strong I couldn’t get a taste of the killer.

Wrassler was behind me, on his mic. The hallway was filling up with people. Filling up with smells. Filling up with voices. I growled and the place went silent. I studied the blood spray on the wall in front of me. “The killer was between five-seven and five-ten.” Without turning around, I said, “Wrassler. Get on the cameras. I want to see every person who came and went down this hallway. And make a copy of the footage.” The cops would want to see it too. Dead humans meant human cops on the premises. “And call Jodi. Give her a heads-up before you call nine-one-one.”

I heard Wrassler move away and knew that Derek had taken his place. Didn’t smell him or hear him. Just knew it. Beast was high in my brain, studying with me, taking over, evaluating death the way only a true predator can. Closer, she demanded.

I wiped my shoes on the carpet just inside the door, wiping them hard, to remove any trace evidence. It wasn’t good enough. I should have on booties, but I/we needed to see/scent/taste-this-on-the-air. I stepped around the blood spatter and squatted over the body to look at the neck. The cut was higher on one side than the other, clean, a single cut, like the kind a sword makes in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. And the killer’s scent, buried beneath the stink of blood and bowel, was both unknown and familiar, hauntingly so. I swallowed hard, trying to figure out how everything that had happened fit together. And it didn’t, especially the part about someone trying to kill me in the middle of vamp HQ. I could almost put the other stuff together, but that part fit nowhere. I had random puzzle pieces with no matching edges.

“Derek. Record.” I heard a soft click and knew he had activated a recording device. “Killer was likely male, killed left-handed, but he knows how to use a blade, how to fight, so he might be right-handed and using his left to throw us off. I’m pretty sure this was done with a single stroke, with a sword. Blade got trapped in the spine and he tore the head off to free it, so he was covered in blood when he finished here. He’s strong. Strong like a vamp.”

“You think a Mithran did this?” a female voice asked behind me. It was the kind of question a lawyer asked, confirmatory and just a bit disbelieving. It was Adelaide.

I swallowed before I replied, pushing down on Beast, holding her beneath me. I am alpha, I thought at her. She hissed and twitched her tail at me as she padded away. I got a breath without thinking prey. And meat. “Few vamps would have wasted the blood,” I said, hearing the harsh tone in the harsh words. “But maybe this time, a vamp did. Punishment, maybe?” For a job well bungled?

I holstered my weapons and backed out of the room, stepping in the same places I’d used before. In the doorway, I pulled off my boots and handed them to Adelaide. “The cops will be ticked that I entered the room. They’ll need my boots for trace evidence. I know exactly where I stepped, so when they get into a pissing contest about it, let me know.

“I need to see the other guy. His partner.”

In the room two doors down, I found Tattooed Dude, lying on the floor under a table. I thought he was asleep when I walked in. Then I thought he was dead. And then I realized that he was breathing, his head was still in place, and he was staring at the ceiling. I bent over him and sniffed, seeing the marks on his neck. Someone had been drinking from him. Recently. And they hadn’t been gentle about it. But the scary thing was that there was no scent signature on the wounds or in the room. I didn’t know how that was possible unless someone was carrying a don’t-smell-me charm. Was there even such a thing? Had to be.

“Get Edmund in here,” I said to the small group of people following me. “I want to know everything this guy knows. I’m going to security.”

I pushed through the gaggle of blood-servants and out the doorway. Walking in my sock feet, I took the elevator down to the large security/electronic monitoring/conference area. The room was nearly empty. The bronze light fixture and track lights were dim, shadowing the corners of the room. The oval table was nearly bare, and the air smelled of coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts, the sweet scent from a box open on the table. The huge ceiling monitor was lit, showing twenty-seven camera angles from my newest upgrade, but as I watched, one view expanded to fill half of the screen.

“Footage isolated,” a voice said. To the side, at the control monitors of the security system, Wrassler was standing behind a man wearing fatigues. Angel Tit looked up as I entered and gave me a faint nod, watching to see my reaction at finding him here.

“I brought him so none of ours had control of the system,” Wrassler said, which was good thinking. Angel was one of Derek’s men, and he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar once. He’d been working to rehabilitate himself, and while he wasn’t worried at seeing me, and didn’t stink of guilt, he was concerned. Being in charge of the electronics while in the middle of a crisis was a huge step forward to acceptance for him. I inclined my head to show I acknowledged all that; his expression of concern melted away.

Angel pointed to the monitor. “This one shows the hallway outside the interrogation room holding Jimmy Joe James. The guard looked down the hallway, as if called, and someone moving with vamp-speed appears for a moment, enters the room, and closes the door.” The footage showed real-time speed as the guard walked away for a moment, still visible in the camera, but with his back turned. I caught a flash of darkness, a brighter light, and then the guard walked back, up and down the hallway, keeping watch. Moments later, when the guard was facing away, the vamp raced from the room. He’d been only a blur entering, then leaving.

“Can you show it in slow-mo?”

“Yeah. But it doesn’t help. The guy was wearing a hoodie with the hood up, and jeans and sneakers.”

Angel tapped some keys and I saw the same segment slowed down, the digital feed jerky. The guard walked away, the man in dark clothes raced in. Later he raced out. Something looked wrong. “Play the first and the last part again, the killer arriving and leaving.”

The segment started in the dead time, when the guard pivoted and walked down the hallway. The interrogation room door opened. The shadowy figure showed, entering the room. Yeah. He was wearing a hoodie, and it was pulled low over this face, his only distinguishing features his broad shoulders and narrow waist. Angel clacked some keys and the same figure appeared leaving the room. I said, “One more time, this time cut out all the empty time. When the guard walks, I want to see the coming and going of our killer, as slow as you can make it.”

I watched the footage. “Again,” I said. “Freeze it with him on-screen, entering the room.” The footage backed up and rolled forward to the correct digital frames, and froze. There were two frames, both blurred, but one showed what I wanted. “Print me out a still.” I pointed. “Of that one.”

A heartbeat later I heard a printer buzzing. “Okay, now the killer exiting.” The digital shot appeared on-screen, and just as I’d thought, something was wrong and different.

When he left, the guy was wearing different shoes. I took both stills and studied the blurred photos. I pointed. “Entering, he’s wearing brown lace-up shoes and carrying a bundle under his left arm. This shadow here might be a sword strapped to his waist. Exiting, he’s wearing white running shoes. Maybe different clothes. And the sword is in a different position.”

“Okay,” Angel Tit said, but his tone added a “so what?” to the agreement.

“He changed shoes. Probably changed clothes too. Standing in the only blood-free place he could have.”

“In the doorway,” Wrassler said, “where you stood and wiped your boots.”

I huffed out a breath. “Yeah. I’m an idiot.”