Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

SIGNATURES OF THE DEAD Faith Hunter

It was nap time, and it wasn’t often that I could get both children to sleep a full hour—the same full hour, that is. I stepped back and ran my hands over the healing and protection spells that enveloped my babies, Angelina and Evan Jr. The complex incantations were getting a bit frayed around the edges, and I drew on Mother Earth and the forest on the mountainside outback to restore them. Not much power, not enough to endanger the ecosystem that was still being restored there. Just a bit. Just enough.

Few witches or sorcerers survive into puberty, and so I spend a lot of time making sure my babies are okay. I come from a long line of witches. Not the kind in pointy black hats with a cauldron in the front yard, and not the kind like the Bewitched television show that once tried to capitalize on our reclusive species. Witches aren’t human, though we can breed true with humans, making little witches about 50 percent of the time. Unfortunately, witch babies have a poor survival rate, especially the males, most dying before they reach the age of twenty, from various cancers. The ones who live through puberty, however, tend to live into their early hundreds.

The day each of my babies were conceived, I prayed and worked the same incantations Mama had used on her children, power-weavings, to make sure my babies were protected. Mama had better-than-average survival rate on her witches. For me, so far, so good. I said a little prayer over them and left the room.

Back in the kitchen, Paul Braxton—Brax to his friends, Detective or Sir to the bad guys he chased—Jane Yellowrock, and Evan were still sitting at the table, the photographs scattered all around. Crime scene photos of the McCarley house. And the McCarleys. It wasn’t pretty. The photos didn’t belong in my warm, safe home. They didn’t belong anywhere.

Evan and I were having trouble with them, with the blood and the butchery. Of course, nothing fazed Jane. And, after years of dealing with crime in New York City, little fazed Brax, though it had been half a decade since he’d seen anything so gruesome, not since he “retired” to the Appalachian mountains and went to work for the local sheriff.

I met Evan’s gray eyes, seeing the steely anger there. My husband was easygoing, slow to anger, and full of peace, but the photos of the five McCarleys had triggered something in him, a slow-burning pitiless rage. He was feeling impotent, useless, and he wanted to smash things. The boxing bag in the garage would get a pummeling tonight, after the kids went to bed for the last time. I offered him a wan smile and went to the Aga stove; I poured fresh coffee for the men and tea for Jane and me. She had brought a new variety, a first flush Darjeeling, and it was wonderful with my homemade bread and peach butter.

“Kids okay?” Brax asked, amusement in his tone.

I retook my seat and used the tip of a finger to push the photos away. I was pretty transparent, I guess, having to check on the babies after seeing the dead McCarleys. “They’re fine. Still sleeping. Still . . . safe.” Which made me feel all kinds of guilty to have my babies safe, while the entire McCarley family had been butchered. Drunk dry. Partly eaten.

“You finished thinking about it?” he asked. “Because I need an answer. If I’m going after them, I need to know, for sure, what they are. And if they’re vamps, then I need to know how many there are and where they’re sleeping in the daytime. And I’ll need protection. I can pay.”

I sighed and sipped my tea, added a spoonful of raw sugar, stirred and sipped again. He was trying to yank my chain, make my natural guilt and our friendship work to his favor, and making him wait was my only reverse power play. Having to use it ticked me off. I put the cup down with a soft china clink. “You know I won’t charge you for the protection spells, Brax.”

“I don’t want Molly going into that house,” Evan said. He brushed crumbs from his reddish, graying beard and leaned across the table, holding my eyes. “You know it’ll hurt you.”

I’m an earth witch, from a long family of witches, and our gifts are herbs and growing things, healing bodies, restoring balance to nature. I’m a little unusual for earth witches, in that I can sense dead things, which is why Brax was urging me to go to the McCarley house. To tell him for sure if dead things, like vamps, had killed the family. How they died. He could wait for forensics, but that might take weeks. I was faster. And I could give him numbers to go on, too, how many vamps were in the blood-family, if they were healthy, or as healthy as dead things ever got. And, maybe, which direction they had gone at dawn, so he could guess where the vamps slept by day.

But once there, I would sense the horror, the fear that the violent deaths had left imprinted on the walls, floor, ceilings, furniture of the house. I took a breath to say no. “I’ll go,” I said instead. Evan pressed his lips together tight, holding in whatever he would say to me later, privately. “If I don’t go, and another family is killed, I’ll be a lot worse,” I said to him. “And that would be partly my fault. Besides, some of that reward money would buy us a new car.”

“You don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Moll,” he said, his voice a deep, rumbling bass. “And we can get the money in other ways.” Not many people know that Evan is a sorcerer, not even Brax. We wanted it that way, as protection for our family. If it was known that Evan carried the rare gene on his X chromosome, the gene that made witches, and that we had produced children who both carried the gene, we’d likely disappear into some government-controlled testing program. “Moll. Think about this,” he begged. But I could see in his gentle brown eyes that he knew my mind was already made up.

“I’ll go.” I looked at Jane. “Will you go with me?” She nodded once, the beads in her black braids clicking with the motion. To Brax, I said, “When do you want us there?”

The McCarley house was on Dogwood, up the hill overlooking the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, not that far, as the crow flies, from my house, which is outside the city limits, on the other side of the hill. The McCarley home was older, with a 1950s feel to it, and from the outside, it would have been hard to tell that anything bad had happened. The tiny brick house itself with its elvish, high-peaked roof, green trim, and well-kept lawn looked fine. But the crime scene tape was a dead giveaway.

I was still sitting in the car, staring at the house, trying to center myself for what I was about to do. It took time to become settled, to pull the energies of my gift around me, to create a skein of power that would heighten my senses.

Brax, dressed in a white plastic coat and shoe covers, was standing on the front porch, his hands in the coat pockets, his body at an angle, head down, not looking at anything. The set of his shoulders said he didn’t want to go back inside, but he would, over and over again, until he found the killers.

Jane was standing by the car, patient, bike helmet in her hands, riding leathers unzipped, copper-skinned face turned to the sun for its meager warmth on this early fall day. Jane Yellowrock was full Cherokee, and was much more than she seemed. Like most witches, like Evan who was still in the witch-closet, Jane had secrets that she guarded closely. I was pretty sure I was the only one who knew any of them, and I didn’t flatter myself that I knew them all. Yet, even though she kept things hidden, I needed her special abilities and gifts to augment my own on this death-search.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, huffing in and out, my lips in an O. My body and my gift came alive, tingling in hands and feet as my oxygen level rose. I pulled the gift of power around me like a cloak, protection and sensing at my fingertips.

When I was ready, I opened the door of the unmarked car and stepped out onto the drive, my eyes slightly slit. At times like this, when I’m about to read the dead, I experience everything so clearly, the sun on my shoulders, the breeze like a wisp of pressure on my face, the feel of the earth beneath my feet, grounding me, the smell of late-blooming flowers. The scent of old blood. But I don’t like to open my eyes. The physical world is too intense. Too distracting.

Jane took my hand in her gloved one and placed it on her leather-covered wrist. My fingers wrapped around it for guidance and we walked to the house, the plastic shoe covers and plastic coat given to me by Brax making little shushing sounds as I walked. I ducked under the crime scene tape Jane held for me. Her cowboy boots and plastic shoe covers crunched and shushed on the gravel drive beside me. We climbed the concrete steps, four of them, to the small front porch. I heard Brax turn the key in the lock. The smell of old blood, feces, and pain whooshed out with the heated air trapped in the closed-up home.

Immediately I could sense the dead humans. Five of them had lived in this house—two parents, three children—with a dog and a cat. All dead. My earth gift, so much a thing of life, recoiled, closed up within me, like a flower gathering its petals back into an unopened bloom. Eyes still closed, I stepped inside.

The horror that was saturated into the walls, into the carpet, stung me, pricked me, like a swarm of bees, seeking my death. The air reeked when I sucked in a breath. Dizziness overtook me and I put out my other hand. Jane caught and steadied me, her leather gloves protecting me from skin-to-skin contact that would have pulled me back, away from the death in the house. After a moment, I nodded that I was okay and she released me, though I still didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see. A buzz of fear and horror filled my head.

I stood in the center of a small room, the walls pressing in on me. Eyes still closed, I saw the death energies, pointed, and said, “They came in through this door. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven of them. Fast.”

I felt the urgency of their movements, faster than any human. Pain gripped my belly and I pressed my arms into it, trying to assuage an ache of hunger deeper than I had ever known. “So hungry,” I murmured. The pain grew, swelling inside me. The imperative to eat. Drink. The craving for blood.

I turned to my left before I was overcome. “Two females took the man. He was surprised, startled, trying to stand. They attacked his throat. Started drinking. He died there.”

I turned more to my right, still pointing, and said, “A child died there. Older. Maybe ten. A boy.”

I touched my throat. It wanted to close up, to constrict at the feel of teeth, long canines, biting into me. The boy’s fear and shock were so intense, they robbed me of any kind of action. When I spoke, the words were harsh, whispered. “One, a female, took the boy. The other four, all males, moved into the house.” The hunger grew, and with it the anger. And terror. Mind-numbing, thought-stealing terror. The boy’s death struggles increased. The smell of blood and death and fear choked. “Both died within minutes.”

I pointed again and Jane led me. The carpet squished under my feet. I knew it was blood, even with my eyes closed. I gagged and Jane stopped, letting me breathe, as well as I could in this death-house, letting me find my balance, my sense of place on the earth. When I nodded again, she led me forward. I could tell I was in a kitchen by the cooking smells that underlay the blood. I pointed into a shadowy place. “A woman was brought down there. Two of them . . . ” I flinched at what I saw. Pulled my hand from Jane’s and crossed my arms over me, hugging myself. Rocking back and forth.

“They took her together. One drank while the other . . . the other . . . And then they switched places. They laughed. I can hear her crying. It took . . . a long . . . long time.” I blundered away, bumping into Jane. She led me out, helping me to get away. But it only got worse.

I pointed in the direction I needed to go. My footsteps echoed on a wood floor. Then carpets. “Two little girls. Little . . . Oh, God in heaven. They . . . ” I took a breath that shuddered painfully in my throat. Tears leaked down my cheeks, burning. “They raped them, too. Two males. And they drank them dry.” I opened my eyes, seeing twin beds, bare frames, the mattresses and sheets gone, surely taken by the crime scene crew. Blood had spattered up one wall in the shape of a small body. To the sides, the wall was smeared, like the figure of angel wings a child might make in the snow, but made of blood.

Gorge rose in my throat. “Get me out of here,” I whispered. I turned away, my arms windmilling for the door. I tripped over something. Fell forward, into Brax. His face inches from mine. I was shaking, quivering like a seizure. Out of control. “Now! Get me out of here! Now!” I shouted. But it was only a whisper.

Jane picked me up and hoisted me over her shoulder. Outside. Into the sun.

I came to myself, came awake, lying in the yard, the warm smell of leather and Jane all around. I touched her jacket and opened my eyes. She was sitting on the ground beside me, one knee up, the other stretched out, one arm on bent knee, the other bracing her. She was wearing a short-sleeved tee in the cool air. She smiled her strange humorless smile, one side of her mouth curling.

“You feeling better?” She was a woman of few words.

“I think so. Thank you for carrying me out.”

“You might want to wait on the thanks. I dropped you, putting you down. Not far, but you might have a bruise or two.”

I chuckled, feeling stiffness in my ribs. “I forgive you. Where’s Brax? I need to tell him what I found.”

Jane slanted her eyes to the side, and I swiveled my head to see the cop walking from his car. He wasn’t a big man, standing five feet nine inches, but he was solid, and fit. I liked Brax. He was a good cop, even if he did take me into some awful places to read the dead. To repay me, he did what he could to protect my family from the witch-haters in the area. There were always a few in any town, even in easygoing Spruce Pine. He dropped a knee on the ground beside me and grunted. It might have been the word “Well?”

“Seven of them,” I said. “Four men, three women, all young rogues. One family, one bloodline. The sire is male. He’s maybe a decade old. Maybe to the point where he would have been sane, had he been in the care of a mastervamp. The others are younger. All crazy.”

For the first years of their lives, vampires are little more than beasts. According to the gossip mags, a good sire kept his newbie rogues chained in the basement during the first decade or so of undead-life, until they gained some sanity. Most experts thought that young rogues were likely the source of werewolf legends and the folklore of vampires as bloody killers. Rogues were mindless, carnal, blood-drinking machines, whether they were brand-new vampires or very old ones who had succumbed to the vampire version of dementia.

If a rogue had escaped his master and survived for a decade on his own, and had regained some of his mental functions, then he would be a very dangerous adversary. A vampire with the moral compass of a rogue, the cunning of a predator, and the reasoning abilities of a psychotic killer. I huddled under Jane’s jacket at the thought.

“Are you up to walking around the house?” Brax asked. “I need an idea which way they went.” He looked at his watch. I looked at the sun. We were about four hours from sundown. Four hours before the blood-family would rise again and go looking for food and fun.

I sat up and Jane stood, extended her hand. She pulled me up and I offered her jacket back. “Keep it,” she said, so I snuggled it around my shoulders, the scent of Jane rising around me like a warm animal. She followed as I circled the house, keeping between Brax and me, and I wondered what had come between the two while I was unconscious. Whatever it was, it crackled in the air, hostile, antagonistic. Jane didn’t like cops, and she tended to say whatever was on her mind, no matter how insulting, offensive, rude, or blunt it might be.

I stopped suddenly, feeling the chill of death under my feet. I was on the side of the house, and I had just crossed over the rogues’ trail. They had come and gone this way. I looked at the front door. It was undamaged, so that meant they had been invited in or that the door had been unlocked. I didn’t know if the old myth about vamps not being able to enter a house uninvited was true or not, but the door hadn’t been knocked down.

I followed the path around the house and to the back of the grassy lot. There was a playset with a slide, swings, a teeter-totter and monkey bars. I walked to it and stood there, seeing what the dead had done. They had played here. After they killed the children and parents, they had come by here, in the gray predawn, and played on the swings. “Have your crime people dusted this?”

“The swing set?” Brax said, surprised.

I nodded and moved on, into the edge of the woods. There was no trail. Just woods, deep and thick with rhododendrons, green leaves and sinuous limbs and straighter tree trunks blocking the way, a canopy of oak and maple arching overhead. I looked up, into the trees, still green, untouched as yet by the fresh chill in the air. I bent down and spotted an animal trail, the ground faintly marked with a narrow, bare path about three inches wide. There was a mostly clear area about two feet high, branches to the side. Some were broken off. A bit of cloth hung on one broken branch. “They came through here,” I said. Brax knelt beside me. I pointed. “See that? I think it’s from the shirt the bloodmaster was wearing.”

“I’ll bring the dogs. Get them started on the trail,” he said, standing. “Thank you, Molly. I know this was hard on you.”

I looked at Jane. She inclined her head slightly, agreeing. The dogs might get through the brush and brambles, but no dog handler was going to be able to make it. Jane, however . . . Jane might be able to do something with this. But she would need a blood scent to follow. I thought about the house. No way could I go back in there, not even to hunt for a smear of vampire blood or other body fluid. But the bit of cloth stuck in the underbrush might have blood on it. If Jane could get to it before Brax did . . . I looked from Jane to the scrap of cloth and back again, a question in my eyes. She smiled that humorless half smile and inclined her head again. Message sent and received.

I stood and faced the house. “I want to walk around the house,” I said to Brax. “And you might want to call the crime scene back. When the vampires played on the swings, they had the family pets. The dog was still alive for part of it.” I registered Brax’s grimace as I walked away. He followed. Jane didn’t. I began to describe the crime scene to him, little things he could use to track the vamps. Things he could use in court, not that the vamps would ever make it to a courtroom. They would have to be staked and beheaded where he found them. But it kept Brax occupied, entering notes into his wireless notebook, so Jane could retrieve the scrap of cloth and, hopefully, the vampires’ scent.

Jane was waiting in the drive when I finished describing what I had sensed and “seen” in the house to Brax, her long legs straddling her small used Yamaha. I had never seen her drive a car. She was a motorbike girl, and lusted after a classic Harley, which she had promised to buy for herself when she got the money. She tilted her head to me, and I knew she had the cloth and the scent. Brax, who caught the exchange, looked quizzically between us, but when neither of us explained, he shrugged and opened the car door for me.

The vampire attack made the regional news, and I spent the rest of the day hiding from the TV. I played with the kids, fed them supper, made a few batches of dried herbal mixtures to sell in my sisters’ herb shop in town, and counted my blessings, trying to get the images of the McCarleys’ horror and pain out of my mind. I knew I’d not sleep well tonight. Sometimes not even an earth witch can defeat the power of evil over dreams.

Just after dusk, with a cold front moving through and the temperature dropping, Jane rode up on her bike and parked it. Carrying my digital video camera, I met her in the front garden, and without speaking, we walked together to the backyard and the boulder-piled herb garden beside my gardening house and the playhouse. Jane dropped ten pounds of raw steak on the ground while I set up my camera and tripod. She handed me the scrap of cloth retrieved from the woods. It was stiff with blood, and I was sure it wasn’t all the vampires’.

Unashamedly, Jane stripped, while I looked away, giving her the privacy I would have wanted had it been me taking off my clothes. Anyone who happened to look this way with a telescope, as I had no neighbors close by, would surely think the witch and friend were going skyclad for a ceremony, but I wasn’t a Wiccan or a goddess worshipper, and I didn’t dance around naked. Especially in the unseasonable cold.

When she was ready, her travel pack strapped around her neck, along with the gold nugget necklace she never removed, Jane climbed to the top of the rock garden, avoiding my herbs with careful footsteps, and sat. She was holding a fetish necklace in her hands, made from teeth, claws, and bones.

She looked at me, standing shivering in the falling light. “Can your camera record when it’s this dark?” When I nodded, my teeth chattering, she said, “Okay. I’ll do my thing. You try to get it on film, and then you can drive me over. You got a blanket in the backseat in case we get stopped?” I nodded again and she grinned, not the half-smile I usually got from her, but a real grin, full of happiness. We had talked about me filming her, so she could see what happened from the outside, but this was the first time we had actually tried. I was intensely curious about the procedure.

“It’ll take about ten minutes,” she said, “for me to get mentally ready. When I finish, don’t be standing between me and the steaks, okay?” When I nodded again, she laughed, a low, smooth sound that made me think of whiskey and woodsmoke. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”

I laughed with her then, for several reasons, only one of which was that Jane’s rare laugh was contagious. I said, “Good luck.”

She inclined her head, blew out a breath, and went silent. Nearly ten minutes later, even in the night that had fallen around us, I could tell that something odd was happening. I hit the record button on the camera and watched as gray light gathered around my friend.

If clouds were made of light instead of water vapor, they would look like this, all sparkly silver, thrust through with motes of blackness that danced and whorled. It coalesced, thickened, and eddied around her. Beautiful. And then Jane . . . shifted. Changed. Her body seemed to bend and flow like water, or like hot wax, a viscous, glutinous liquid, full of gray light. The bones beneath her flesh popped and cracked. She grunted, as if with pain. Her breathing changed. The light grew brighter, the dark motes darker.

Both began to dissipate.

On the top of the boulders where Jane had been, sat a mountain lion, its eyes golden, with human-shaped pupils. Puma concolor, the big-cat of the western hemisphere sat in my garden, looking me over, Jane’s travel pack around her neck making a strange lump on her back. The cat was darker than I remembered, tawny on back, shoulders, and hips, pelt darkening down her legs, around her face and ears. The tail, long and stubby, was dark at the tip. She huffed a breath. I saw teeth.

My shivers worsened, even though I knew this was Jane. Or had been Jane. She had assured me, not long ago, that she still had vestiges of her own personality even in cat form and wouldn’t eat me. Easy to say when the big cat isn’t around. Then she yawned, snorted, and stood to her four feet. Incredibly graceful, long sinews and muscles pulling, she leaped to the ground and approached the raw steaks she had dumped earlier. She sniffed, and made a sound that was distinctly disgusted.

I tittered, and the cat looked at me. I mean, she looked at me. I froze. A moment later, she lay down on the ground and started to eat the cold, dead meat. Even in the dark, I could see her teeth biting, tearing.

I had missed some footage and rotated the camera to the eating cat. I also grabbed her fetish necklace and her clothes, stuffing them in a tote for later.

Thirty minutes later, after she had cleaned the blood off her paws and jaws with her tongue, I dismantled the tripod and drove to the McCarley home. Jane—or her cat—lay under a blanket on the backseat. Once there, I opened the doors and shut them behind us.

There was more crime scene tape up at the murder scene, but the place was once again deserted. Silent, my flashlight lighting the way for me, Jane in front, in the dark, we walked around the house to the woods’ edge.

I cut off the flash to save her night vision, and held out the scrap of bloody cloth to the cat. She sniffed. Opened her mouth and sucked air in with a coughing, gagging, scree of sound. I jumped back, and I could have sworn Jane laughed, an amused hack. I broke out into a fear-sweat that instantly chilled in the cold breeze. “Not funny,” I said. “What the heck was that?”

Jane padded over and sat in front of me, her front paws crossed like a Southern belle, ears pricked high, mouth closed, nostrils fluttering in the dark, waiting. Patient as ever. When I figured out that she wasn’t going to eat me, and feeling distinctly dense, I held out the bit of cloth. Again, she opened her mouth and sucked air, and I realized she was scenting through her mouth. Learning it. When she was done, which felt like forever, she looked up at me and hacked again. Her laugh, for certain. She turned and padded into the woods. I switched on my flash and hurried back to my car. It was the kids’ bedtime. I needed to be home.

It was 4:00 a.m. when the phone rang. Evan grunted, a bear-snort. I swear, the man could sleep through a train wreck or a tornado. I rolled and picked up the phone. Before I could say hello, Jane said, “I got it. Come get me. I’m freezing and starving. Don’t forget the food.”

“Where are you?” I asked. She told me, and I said, “Okay. Half an hour.”

Jane swore and hung up. She had warned me about her mouth when she was hungry. I poked my hubby, and when he swore, too, I said, “I’m heading out to the old Partman Place to pick up Jane. I’ll be back by dawn.” He grunted again and I slid from the bed, dressed, and grabbed the huge bowl of oatmeal, sugar, and milk from the fridge. Jane had assured me she needed food after she shifted back, and didn’t care what it was or what temp it was. I hoped she remembered that when I gave it to her. Cold oatmeal was nasty.

Half an hour later, I reached the old Partman Place, an early-nineteenth-century homestead and later a mine, the homestead sold and deserted when the gemstones were discovered and the mine closed down in the 1950s, when the gems ran out. It was grown over by fifty-year-old trees, and the drive was gravel, with Jane standing hunched in the middle. Human, wearing the lightweight clothes she carried in the travel pouch along with the cell phone and a few vamp-killing supplies.

I popped the doors and she climbed in, her long black hair like a veil around her, her thin clothes covering a shivering body, pimpled with cold. “Food,” she said, her voice hoarse. I passed the bowl of oatmeal and a serving spoon to her. She tossed the top of the bowl into the floorboards and dug in. I watched her eat from the corner of my eye as I drove. She didn’t bother to chew, just shoveled the cold oatmeal in like she was starving. She looked thinner than usual, though Jane was never much more than skin, bone, and muscle—like her big-cat form, I thought. Criminy. Witches I can handle. But what Jane was? Maybe not so much. I hadn’t even known shape changers or skinwalkers even existed. No one did.

Bowl empty, she pulled her leather coat from the tote I had brought, snuggled under it, and lay back in her seat, cradling the empty bowl. She closed her eyes, looking exhausted. “That was not fun,” she said, the words so soft, I had to strain to hear. “Those vamps are fast. Faster than Beast.”

“Beast?”

“My cat,” she said. She laughed, the sound forlorn, lost, almost sad. “My big hunting cat. Who had to chase the scent back to their lair. Up and down mountains and through creeks and across the river. I had to soak in the river to throw off the heat. Beast isn’t built for long-distance running.” She sighed and adjusted the heating vents to blow onto her. “The vamps covered five miles from the McCarleys’ place in less than an hour yesterday morning. It took me more than four hours to follow them back through the underbrush and another two to isolate the opening. I should have shifted into a faster cat, though Beast would have been ticked off.”

“You found their lair?” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. “On the Partman Place?”

“Yeah. Sort of.” She rolled her head to face me in the dark, her golden eyes glowing and forbidding. “They’re living in the mine. They’ve been there for a long time. They were gone by the time I found it. They were famished when they left the lair. I could smell their hunger. I think they’ll kill again tonight. Probably have killed again tonight.”

I tightened my hands on the steering wheel and had to force myself to relax.

“Molly? The lair is only a mile from your house as the vamp runs. And witches smell different from humans.”

A spike of fear raced through me. Followed by a mental image of a vampire leaning over Angelina’s bed. I squeezed the wheel so tight, it made a soft sound of protest.

“You need to mount a defensive perimeter around your house,” Jane said. “You and Evan. You hear? Something magical that’ll scare off anything that moves, or freeze the blood of anything dead. Something like that. You make sure the kids are safe.” She turned her head aside, to look out at the night. Jane loved my kids. She had never said so, but I could see it in her eyes when she watched them. I drove on, chilled to the bone by fear and the early winter.

Jane was too tired to make it back to her apartment, and so she spent the day sleeping on the cot in the back room of the shop. Seven Sassy Sisters’ Herb Shop and Cafe, owned and run by my family, had a booming business, both locally and on the Internet, selling herbal mixtures and teas by bulk and by the ounce, the shop itself serving teas, specialty coffees, brunch and lunch daily, and dinner on weekends. It was mostly vegetarian fare, whipped up by my older sister, water witch, professor, and three-star chef, Evangelina Everhart. My sister Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, an air witch, newly married and pregnant, ran the register and took care of ordering supplies. Two other witch sisters, twins Boadacia and Elizabeth, ran the herb store, while our wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were waitstaff. I’m really Molly Meagan Everhart Trueblood. Names with moxie run in my family. Without a single question about why this seemingly human needed a place to crash, my sisters let Jane sleep off the night run.

While my sisters worked around the cot and ran the business without me, I went driving. To the Partman Place. With Brax.

“You found this how?” he asked, sitting in the passenger seat. I was driving so I could pretend that I was in control, not that Brax cared who was in charge so long as the rogue vampires were brought down. “The dogs got squirrelly twenty feet into the underbrush and refused to go on. It doesn’t make any sense, Molly. I never saw dogs go so nuts. They freaked out. So I gotta ask how you know where they sleep.” Detective Paul Braxton was antsy. Worried. Scared. There had been no new reported deaths in the area, yet I had just told him the vamps had gone hunting last night.

There were some benefits to being a witch-out-of-the-closet. I let my lips curl up knowingly. “I had a feeling at the McCarleys’ yesterday, but I didn’t think it would work. I devised a spell to track the rogue vampires. At dusk, I went to the McCarleys’ and set it free. And it worked. I was able to pinpoint their lair.”

“How? I never heard of such a thing. No one has. I asked on NCIC this morning after you called.” At my raised brows he said, “NCIC is the National Crime Information Center, run by the FBI, a computerized index and database of criminal justice information.”

“A database?” Crap. I hit the brakes, hard. Throwing us both against the seatbelts. The wheels squealed, popped, and groaned as the antilock braking system went into play. Brax cussed as we came to a rocking halt. I spun in the seat to face him. “If you made me part of that system, then you’ve used me for the last time, you no-good piece of—”

“Molly!” He held both hands palms out, still rocking in the seat. “No! I did not enter you into the system. We have an agreement. I wouldn’t breach it.”

“Then tell me what you did,” I said, my voice low and threatening. “Because if you took away the privacy of my family and babies, I’ll curse you to hell and back, and damn the consequences.” I gathered my power to me, pulling from the earth and the forest and even the fish living in the nearby river, ecosystems be hanged. This man was endangering my babies.

Brax swallowed in the sudden silence of the old Volvo, as if he could feel the power I was drawing in. I could smell his fear, hear it in his fast breath, over the sounds of nearby traffic. “NCIC is just a database,” he said. “I just input a series of questions. About witches. And how they work. And—”

“Witches are in the FBI’s data bank?” I hit the steering wheel with both fists as the thought sank in. “Why?”

“Because there are witch criminals in the U.S. Sorcerers who do blood magic. Witches who do dark magic. Witches are part of the database, now and forever.”

“Son of witch on a switch,” I swore, cursing long and viciously, helpless anger in the tones, the syllables flowing and rich. Switching to the old language for impact, not that it had helped. Curses had a way of falling back on the curser rather than hurting the cursed.

I beat the steering wheel in impotent fury. I was a witch, for pity’s sake. And I couldn’t protect my own kind. Rage banging around me like a wrecking ball, I hit the steering wheel one last time and threw my old Volvo into drive. Fuming, silent, I drove to the Partman Place.

The entrance, once meant for mining machinery and trucks, was still drivable, though the asphalt was crazed and broken, grass growing in the cracks. The drive wound around a hillock and was lost from view. Beyond it, signs of mining that were hidden from the road became more obvious. Trees were young and scraggly, the ground was scraped to bedrock, and rusted iron junk littered the site. An old car sat on busted tires, windows, hood, and doors long gone. The office of the mining site was an old WWII Quonset hut, the door hanging free to reveal the dark interior.

Though strip mining had been the primary means of getting to the gems, tunnels had gone into the side of the mountain. The entry to the mine was boarded over with two-by-tens, but some were missing, and it was clear that the opening had been well used.

Brax rubbed his mouth, looking over the place, not meeting my eyes. Finally, he said, “I would never cause you or yours trouble, Molly Trueblood. I do my best to protect you from problems, harassment, or unwanted attention from law enforcement, federal NCIC or otherwise.”

“Except you,” I accused, annoyed that he had apologized before I blew off my mad.

He smiled behind his hand. “Except me. And maybe one day you’ll trust me enough to tell me the truth about this so-called tracking spell you used to find this place. I’m going to check out the area. Stay here. If I don’t come back, that disproves the myth that vamps sleep in the daylight. You get your pal, Jane, to stake my ass if I come back undead.”

“Your heart,” I said grumpily. “If you actually have one. Heart, not your ass.”

He made a little chortling laugh and picked up the flashlight he had brought. “Ten minutes. Half an hour max. I’ll be back.”

“Better be fangless.”

Forty-two minutes later, Brax reappeared, dust all over his hair and suit. He clicked the flash off and strode to the car, got in with a wave of death-tainted air, and said, “Drive.” I drove.

His shoulders slumped and he seemed to relax as we turned off on the secondary road and headed back to town, rubbing his hand over his head in a habitual gesture. Dust filtered off him into the air of the car, making motes that caught the late afternoon sun. I rolled the windows down to let out the stink on him. We were nearly back to my house when he spoke again.

“I survived. They either didn’t hear me or they were asleep. No myths busted today.” When I didn’t reply he went on. “They’ve been bringing people back to the mine for a while. Indigents, transients. Truant kids. There were remains scattered everywhere. Like the McCarleys, most were partially eaten.” He stared out the windshield, seeing the scene he had left behind, not the bright, sunny day. “I’ll have to get the city and county to compile a list of missing people.”

A long moment later he said. “We have to go after them. Today. Before they need to feed again.”

“Why not just seal them up in the mine till tomorrow after dawn,” I said, turning into my driveway, steering carefully around the tricycle and set of child-sized bongos left there. “Go in fresh, with enough weaponry and men to overpower them. The vamps would be weak, hungry, and apt to make mistakes.”

“Good Golly, Miss Molly,” he said, his face transforming with a grin at the chance to use the old lyrics. I rolled my eyes. “We could, couldn’t we? Where was my brain?”

“Thinking about dead kids,” I said softly as I pulled to a stop. “I, on the other hand, had forty-two minutes to do nothing but think. All you need is a set of plans for the mine to make sure you seal over all the entrances. Set a guard with crosses and stakes at each one. That way you go in on your terms, not theirs.”

“I think I love you.”

“Stop with the lyrics. Go make police plans.”

Unfortunately, the vamps got out that night, through an entrance not on the owner’s maps. They killed four of the police guarding other entrances. And then they went hunting. This time, they struck close to home. Just after dawn, Brax woke me, standing at the front door, his face full of misery. Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, air witch, newly married and pregnant, and her husband, had been attacked in their home. Tommy Newton was dead. My little sister was missing and presumed dead.

The attention of the national media had been snared, and more news vans rolled into town, one setting up in the parking lot of the shop. Paralyzed by fear, my sisters closed everything down and gathered at my house to discuss options, to grieve, and to make halfhearted funeral plans.

I spent the day and the early evening hugging my children, watching TV news about the “vampire crisis,” and devising offensive and defensive charms, making paper airplanes out of spells that didn’t work and flying them across the room, to the delight of my babies and my four human nieces and nephews. I had to come up with something. Something that would offer protection to the person who went underground to avenge my sister.

Jane sat to the side, her cowboy boots, jeans, and T-shirt contrasting with the peasant tops, patchwork skirts, and hemp sandals worn by my sisters and me. She didn’t say much, just drank tea and ate whatever was offered. Near dusk, she came to me and said softly, “I need a ride. To the mine.”

I looked at her, grief holding my mouth shut, making it hard to breathe.

“I need some steak, or a roast. You have one frozen in the freezer in the garage. I looked. You thaw it in the microwave, leave your car door open. I shift out back, get in, and hunker down. You make an excuse, drive me to the mine, and get back with a gallon of milk or something.”

“Why?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

Her eyes glowing a tawny yellow, Jane looked like a predator, ready to hunt. Excited by the thought. “I don’t smell like a human. The older one won’t be expecting me. I can go in, find where they’re hiding, see if your sister is alive, and get back. Then we can make a plan.”

Hope spiked in me like heated steel. “Why would the vampires keep her alive?” I asked. “And why would you go in there?”

“I told you. Witches smell different from humans. You smell, I don’t know, powerful. If he’s trying to build a blood-family, and if he has some ability to reason, the new bloodmaster might hold on to her. To try to turn her. It’s worth a shot.” Jane grinned, her beast rising in her. Bits of gray light hovered, dancing on her skin. “Besides. The governor and the vamp council of North Carolina just upped the bounty on the rogues to forty thou a head. I can use a quarter mil. And if you come up with a way to keep me safe down there, when I go in to hunt them down, I’ll share. You said you need to replace that rattletrap you drive.”

I put a hand to my mouth, holding in the sob that accompanied my sudden, hopeful tears. Unable to speak, I nodded. Jane went to get a roast.

I slept uneasily, waiting, hearing every creak, crack, and bump in the night. If we smelled differently from humans, would the vampires come after my family? My other sisters? Just after dawn, the phone rang. “Come and get me,” Jane said, her voice both excited and exhausted. “Carmen’s still alive.”

I called my sisters on my cell as I drove and told them to get over to my house fast. We had work to do. When I got back with Jane, my kitchen had three witch sisters in it, each trying to brew coffee and tea, fry eggs, cook grits and oatmeal. Evan was glowering in the corner, his hair standing up in tousles, reading the newspaper on email and feeding Little Evan.

Jane pushed her way in, ignoring the babble of questions, and took the pot of oatmeal right off the stove, dumping in sugar and milk and digging in. She ate ten cups of hot oatmeal, two cups of sugar, and a quart of milk. It was the most oatmeal I had ever seen anyone eat in my life. Her belly bulged like a basketball. Then she took paper and pen and drew a map of the mine, talking. “No one’ll be going into the mine today. Count on it. The vamps killed four of the men watching the entrances, and the governor won’t justify sending anyone in until the National Guard gets here. Carmen is alive, here.” She drew an X. “Along with two teenage girls. The rogue master’s name is Adam and he has his faculties, enough to see to the feeding and care of his family, enough to make more scions. But if he dies, then the girls in his captivity are just another dinner to the rogues. So I have to take him down last. I need something like an immobility spell, or glue spell. But first, I need something to get me in close.”

“Obfuscation spell,” I said.

“No one’s succeeded with that one in over five hundred years,” Evangelina said, ever the skeptic.

“Maybe that’s because we never tried,” Boadacia said.

Elizabeth looked at her twin, challenge sparkling in her eyes. “Let’s.”

“But according to the histories, a witch has to be present to initialize it and to keep it running. No human can do it,” Evangelina said.

“I’ll go in with her,” Evan said.

My sisters turned to him. The sudden silence was deafening. Little Evan took that moment to bang on his high chair and shout, “Milk, milk, milk, milk!”

“It would have to be an earth witch,” Evangelina said slowly. “You’re an air sorcerer. You can’t make it work, either.” As one, they all turned to look at me. I was the only earth witch in the group.

“No,” Evan said. “No way.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the only way.”

At four in the afternoon, my sisters and Evan and I were standing in front of the mine. Jane was geared up in her vamp-hunting gear: a chain-mail collar, leather pants, metal-studded leather coat over a chain vest, a huge gun with an open stock, like a Star Wars shotgun. Silvered knives were strapped to her thighs, in her boots, along her forearms; studs in her gloves; two handguns were holstered at her waist, under her coat; her long hair was braided and tied down. A dozen crosses hung around her neck. Stakes were twisted in her hair like hairsticks.

I was wearing jeans, sweaters, and Evangelina’s faux leather coat. As vegetarians, my sisters didn’t own leather, and I couldn’t afford it. I carried twelve stakes, extra flashlight, medical supplies, ammunition, and five charms: two healing charms, one walking-away charm, one empowerment, and one obfuscation.

Evan was similarly dressed, refusing to be left behind, loaded down with talismans, charms, battery-powered lights, a machete, and a twenty-pound mallet, suitable for bashing in heads. It wouldn’t kill a vampire, but it would incapacitate one long enough to stake it and take its head. We were ready to go in when Brax drove up, got out, and sauntered over. He was dressed in SWAT team gear and guns. “What? You think I’d let civilians go after the rogues alone? Not gonna happen, people.”

We hadn’t told Brax. I glared at Evan, who shrugged, unapologetic.

“What are you carrying?” Jane asked. When he told her, she shook her head and handed him a box of ammunition. “Hand-packed, silver-flechette rounds, loaded for vamp. They can’t heal from it. A direct heart shot will take them out.”

“Sweet,” Brax said, removing his ammunition from a shotgun and re-loading as he looked us over. “So we got an earth witch, her husband, a vamp hunter, and me. Lock and load, people.” Satisfied, he pushed in front and led the way. Once inside, we walked four abreast as my sisters set up a command center at the entrance. Behind us I could hear the three witches chanting protective incantations while Regan and Amelia began to pray.

We passed parts of several bodies. My earth gift recoiled, closing up. There were too many dead. I had hoped to be able to sense the presence of the rogue vampires, but with my gift so overloaded, I doubted I’d be of much help at all. The smell of rancid meat and rotting blood was beyond horrible. Charnel house effluvia. I stopped looking after the first limb—part of a young woman’s leg.

Except for the stench and the body parts, the first hundred yards was easy. After that, things went to hell in a handbasket.

We heard singing, a childhood melody. “Starlight, star fright, first star . . . No. Starlight blood fight . . . No. I don’ ’member. I don’ ’member—” The voice stopped, the cutoff sharp as a knife. “People,” she whispered, the word echoing in the mine. “Blood . . . ”

And she was on us. Face caught in the flashlight. A ravening animal. Flashing fangs. Blood-red eyes centered with blacker-than-night pupils. Nails like black claws. She took down Evan with one swipe. I screamed. Blood splattered. His flashlight fell. Its beam rocking in shadows. One glimpse of a body. Leaping. Flying. Landed on Jane. Inhumanly fast. Jane rolled into the dark.

I lost them in the swinging light. Found Evan by falling on him. Hot blood pulsed into my hand. I pressed on the wound, guided by earth magic. I called on Mother Earth for healing. Moments later, Jane knelt beside me, breathing hard, smelling foul. She steadied the light. Evan was still alive, fighting to breathe, my hands covered with his blood. His skin was pasty. The wound was across his right shoulder, had sliced his jugular, and he had lost a lot of blood, though my healing had clotted over the wound.

I pressed one of the healing amulets my sisters had made over the wound, chanting in the old tongue. “Cneasaigh, cneasaigh a bháis báite in fhuil,” over and over. Gaelic for, “Heal, heal, blood-soaked death.”

Minutes later, I felt Evan take a full breath. Felt his heartbeat steady under my hands. In the uncertain light, my tears splashed on his face. He opened his eyes and looked up at me. His beard was brighter than usual, tangled with his blood. He held my gaze, telling me so much in that one look. He loved me. Trusted me. Knew I was going on without him. Promised to live. Promised to take care of our children if I didn’t make it back. Demanded I live and come back to him. I sobbed with relief. Buried my face in his healing neck and cried.

We carried Evan back to the entrance, where my sisters called for an ambulance. As soon as he was stable, the three of us redistributed the supplies and headed back in to the mine. I saw the severed head of the rogue in the shadows. Jane’s first forty-thousand-dollar trophy.

We had done one useful thing. We had rewritten the history books. We had proved that vampires could move around in the daylight so long as they were in complete absence of the sun. That meant we would have to fight rather than just stake and run. Lucky us.

There were six vampires left and three of us. By now, the remaining ones were surely alerted to our presence. Not good odds.

We were deeply underground when the next attack took place. Jane must have smelled them coming, because she shouted, “Ten o’clock! Two of them.” Her gun boomed. Brax’s spat flames as it fired. Two vampires fell. Jane dispatched them with a knife shaped like a small sword. While she sawed, and I looked away, she murmured, “Three down, four to go,” over and over, like a rich miser counting his gold.

We moved on. Down a level, deeper into the mountain. Jane led the way now, ignoring some branching tunnels, taking others, assuring us she knew where we were and where Carmen was. Like me, she ignored Brax’s questions about how.

Just after we passed a cross-tunnel, two vampires came at us from behind, a flanking maneuver. I never heard them. In front of me, Jane whirled. I dropped to the tunnel floor, cowering. She fired. The muzzle flash blinded me. More gunshots sounded, echoing. Brax yelled, the sound full of pain.

Jane stepped over me, straddling me in the dark, her boots lit by a wildly tottering light. I snatched it and turned it on Brax. He knelt nearby, blood at his throat. A vampire lay at his knees, a stake through her chest. My ears were ringing, blasted by the concussion of firepower. In the light, I saw Jane hand a bandage to Brax and pull one of her knives. Her shadow on the mine wall raised up the knife and brought it down, beheading the rogues; my hearing began to come back; the chopping sounded soggy.

She left the heads. “For pickup on the way out. The odds just turned in our favor.”

I couldn’t look at the heads. I had been no help at all. I was the weak link in the trio. I squared my shoulders and fingered the charms I carried. I was supposed to hold them until Jane said to activate them. It would be soon.

We moved on down the widening tunnel. Jane touched my arm in the dark. I jumped. She tapped my hand and mouthed, “Charm one. Now.”

Clumsy, I pulled the charm, activated it, and tossed it to the left. The sound of footsteps echoed, as if we were still moving, but down a side tunnel. Then I activated the second charm, the one my sisters and I had worked on all day. The obfuscation charm. It was the closest thing in all of our histories to an invisibility spell, and no witch had perfected it in hundreds of years.

Following the directions I had memorized, I drew in the image of the rock floor and walls, and cloaked it around us. I nodded to Jane. She cut off the light. Moments later, she moved forward slowly, Brax at her side. I followed, one hand on each shoulder. The one on Brax’s shoulder was sticky with blood. He was still bleeding. Vampires can smell blood. The obfuscation spell wasn’t intended to block scents.

A faint light appeared ahead, growing brighter as we moved and the tunnel opened out. We stopped. The space before us was a juncture from which five tunnels branched. Centered, was a table with a lantern, several chairs, and cots. Carmen was lying on one, cradling her belly, her eyes open and darting. Two teenaged girls were on another cot, huddling together, eyes wide and fearful. No vampires were in the room.

We moved quietly to Carmen and I bent over her. I slammed my hand over her mouth. She bucked, squealing. “Carmen. It’s Molly,” I whispered. She stopped fighting. Raised a hand and touched mine. She nodded. I removed my hand.

She whispered, “They went that way.”

“Come on. Tell the others to come. But be quiet.”

Moving awkwardly, Carmen rolled off the cot and stood. She motioned to the two girls. “Come on. Come with me.” When both girls refused, my baby sister waddled over, slapped them both resoundingly, gripped each by an arm, and hauled them up. “I said, come with me. It wasn’t a damn invitation.”

The girls followed her, holding their jaws and watching Carmen fearfully. Pride blossomed in me. I adjusted the obfuscation spell, drawing in more of the cave walls and floor. Wrapped the spell around the three new bodies. The girls suddenly could see us. One screamed.

“So much for stealth,” Jane said. “Move it!” She shoved the two girls and me toward the tunnel out. Stumbling, we raced to the dark. I switched on the flashlight, put it in Carmen’s hands. Pulled the last two charms. The empowerment charm was meant to take strength from a winning opponent and give it to a losing, dying one. It could be used only in clear life-and-death situations. The other was my last healing charm.

We made the first turn, feet slapping the stone, gasping. Something crashed into us. A girl and Jane went down with the vampire. Tangled limbs. The vampire somersaulted. Taking Jane with him. Crouching. He held her in front of him. Jane’s head in one hand. Twisting it up and back. His fangs extended fully. He sank fangs and claws into Jane’s throat, above her mail collar. Ripping. The collar hit the ground.

Brax shouted. “Run!” He picked up the fallen girl and shoved her down the tunnel. The last vamp landed on his back. Brax went down. Rolling. Blood spurting. Shadows like monsters on the far wall.

In the wavering light, Jane’s throat gushed blood. Pumping bright.

Carmen and I backed against the mine wall. I was frozen, indecisive. Whom to save? I didn’t know for sure who was winning or losing. I didn’t know what would happen if I activated the empowerment charm. I pulled the extra flashlight and switched it on.

Brax rolled. Into the light. Eyes wild. The vampire rolled with him. Eating his throat. Brax was dying. I activated the empowerment charm. Tossed it.

It landed. Brax’s breath gargled. The vampire fell. Brax rose over him, stake in hand. Brought the stake down. Missed his heart.

I pointed. “Run. That way.” Carmen ran, her flashlight bouncing. I set down the last light, pulled stakes from my pockets. Rushed the vampire. Stabbed down with all my might. One sharpened stake ripped through his clothes. Into his flesh. I stabbed again. Blood splashed up, crimson and slick. I fumbled two more stakes.

Brax, beside me, took them. Rolled the vampire into the light. Raised his arms high. Rammed them into the rogue’s chest.

Blood gushed. Brax fell over it. Silent. So silent. Neither moved.

I activated the healing amulet. Looked over my shoulder. At Jane.

The vampire was behind her. Her throat was mostly gone. Blood was everywhere. Spine bones were visible in the raw meat of her throat.

Yet, even without a trachea, she was growling. Face shifting. Gray light danced. Her hands, clawed and tawny, reached back. Dug into the skull of the vampire. Whipped him forward. Over her. He slammed into the rock floor. Bounced limply.

Sobbing, I grabbed Brax’s shoulder. Pulled him over. Dropped the charm on his chest.

Jane leaped onto the vampire. Ripped out his throat. Tore into his stomach. Slashed clothes and flesh. Blood spurted. She shifted. Gray light. Black motes. And her cat screamed.

I watched as her beast tore the vampire apart. Screaming with rage.

We made it to the mine entrance, Carmen and the girls running ahead, into the arms of my sisters. Evangelina raised a hand to me, framed by pale light, and pulled the girls outside, leaving the entrance empty, dawn pouring in. I didn’t know how the night had passed, where the time had disappeared. But I stopped there, inside the mine with Jane, looking out, into the day. In the urgency of finding the girls and getting them all back to safety, we hadn’t spoken about the fight.

Now, she touched her throat. Hitched Brax higher. He hadn’t made it. Jane had carried him out, his blood seeping all over her, through the rents in her clothes made by fighting vampires and by Jane herself, as she shifted inside them. “Is he,” she asked, her damaged voice raspy as stone, “dead because you used the last healing charm on me?” She swallowed, the movement of poorly healed muscles audible. “Is that why you’re crying?”

Guilt lanced through me. Tears, falling for the last hour, burned my face. “No,” I whispered. “I used it on Brax. But he was too far gone for a healing charm.”

“And me?” The sound was pained, the words hurting her throat.

“I trusted in your beast to heal you.”

She nodded, staring into the dawn. “You did the right thing.” Again she hitched Brax higher. Whispery-voiced, she continued. “I got seven heads to pick up and turn in”—she slanted her eyes at me—“and we got a cool quarter mil waiting. Come on. Day’s wasting.” Jane Yellowrock walked into the sunlight, her tawny eyes still glowing.

And I walked beside her.

Faith Hunter was born in Louisiana and raised all over the South. “Signatures of the Dead” is a prequel to her Skinwalker series, featuring Jane Yellowrock. Blood Trade, the sixth Skinwalker novel, was recently released. Her Rogue Mage novels—Bloodring, Seraphs, and Host—feature a stone mage in a post-apocalyptic, alternate reality, urban fantasy world. The novels are the basis for the role playing game, Rogue Mage, that premiered in 2012. Under the pen name Gwen Hunter, she writes action-adventure, mysteries, and thrillers. As Faith and Gwen, she has more than twenty books in print in twenty-eight countries. She and her husband love to RV, traveling with their dogs to whitewater rivers all over the Southeast.