Blood in Her Veins (Nineteen Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock) (75 page)

“I missed you so much!” I growled aloud.

“I know, Aunt Jane,” Angie said, her feet kicking. “You and your Beastie big-cat love us, and we love you. Now lemme down! I wanna go inside!” She kicked, her knee narrowly missing my tender belly, and I set her on the pavement.

“Door's open. Your room's ready,” I told her.

Angie took off for the house and I grabbed the luggage from Mol. Being a skinwalker meant being stronger than I looked, and Molly usually packed light. This time was no exception, although the cat cage was getting heavier. KitKit was asleep inside, heavily drugged. And there were scratches up Molly's arms.

I tucked the cage under my elbow and the two bags in each hand.

We were halfway to the house when I heard Angie scream.

I leaped the distance and inside. Dropped the luggage. The suitcase, tote, and cat cage didn't fall. They hung there in the air. I had bubbled time—or Beast had—and I hadn't even noticed. Silver mist and silver-blue motes of power danced around me, coming from within me. Time vibrated and wobbled and my gut twisted tight. Acid rose in my throat. Angie's scream hung on the air, a deep warble, like a siren.

Alex was half standing behind his modified desk in the living room, his eyes wide and fearful. Eli was midleap in the doorway to the living area, drawing his nine mil, his face expressionless. I looked where Eli was looking—into my bedroom. I stepped inside, the deep sound of Angie's scream thudding into my eardrums.

It was coming from Angelina, which I had known, but not the
why
. She was in my closet, on her knees, her hands on and in the
hedge of thorns
. And the hedge, newly modified by Mol, had manacled the little girl's wrists and was giving her a mild electrical shock.

Part of me was horrified and lurched toward her. Another part stopped me. And sent me a shock of vision, of a puma kitten tottering on the edge of a ledge. And my/our clawed paw reaching out to her. Swiping her back
inside the ledge. A little too rough. But making a point.
Teaching kit,
Beast thought at me.

Child abuse,
I thought back, kneeling beside Angie.

Beast chuffed at me in disgust.

Not now,
I thought back at her. Mountain lions and the Cherokee had very different feelings and instincts about how to raise their young, and I wasn't going to argue with my other soul. I studied the hedge, its energies a dull red of smooth shimmering light. In most wards, the energies were a coruscating light pattern, a roiling of thick and thin, fluidlike, waterlike power, or banded like an agate, or ringed like Saturn. Sometimes even a licking flame. But always there were weak spots in it. Not this time. The hedge was a ruby red, smooth as polished glass, except for the manacles that had trapped Angie's hands at the wrists. That was actually a second working wrapped inside the first, blue energies sweeping up out of the hedge and coating Angie's skin. I could see the tiny sparks of electric energy arc out and snap at Angie's flesh.

This was new. Entirely new. Which was important, but it was more important to release Angie from the discomfort it was causing.

Molly's family had created the original
hedge
spell and taken the unprecedented step of sharing it with other witches. They had given it, free of barter, to the New Orleans coven. I had thought it was to cement relations with the different covens, but now I realized that the gift had been an easy one to share because the Everhart sisters had already devised an update.
Hedge of thorns 2.0
. A better, faster, sneakier working. One I couldn't figure out how to break, once it had been initiated, even seeing it out of time.

I saw Angie's pinky finger move. The tiniest little tremor, a quiver of a fingertip. A black light arced out from that fingertip to zap the manacles.

Black light. Black . . . black
magic
full of darkness and prism sparkles. Something I had never seen before, or at least not like this. Black light with a hint of purple, a trace of blue, a faint reddish tinge around the edges. A second arc of black light zapped out. And a third. And the blue manacles began to fail, to disintegrate. Angie was using a type of magic I had never seen before, except once when a crazy vamp clan was about to sacrifice witches to accomplish a blood-magic working. Sacrifice Angie and her baby brother.

This was bad. This was very bad.

Angie was way too young to have access to her magic, which wasn't supposed to manifest until puberty. She had been bound by her parents, her magic tightened around her like a second skin, still there, but not available to her. It was a binding that had been explained to me, how they'd done it, how it worked, like knitting magical swaddling clothes around her. I had seen them renew it as she grew, and it had to be renewed often, but it was a binding she had begun to notice, and probably fight against. And clearly that binding had stopped working. Again.

My gut tightened and twisted again and I pressed a fist against the pain. I hadn't done anything but walk while time was bubbled, but that was enough. Bubbling or twisting or bending time made me sick. If I didn't stop soon enough, it made me vomit blood, and it wasn't a sickness that my Beast was able to heal. My Cherokee Elder teacher, Aggie One Feather,
lisi
, had told me that if I didn't listen to my magic, and kept pushing its boundaries, it would one day kill me. I had a bad feeling that she was right, but I wasn't always in control over it. Sometimes it was instinctive, like if I was in danger of dying, or someone I loved was in danger, then, sometimes, the magic itself took me over. At such times, my own life,
our
own lives, no longer mattered, and Beast would take over our magics and send me into the Gray Between. And bubble time so she could move outside of it.

I started to knead my belly, but the bruise stopped me fast. Pain doubled me over and the acid rose again. I swallowed it down. I didn't have long. I dropped to the floor beside Angie, crossed my legs guru-style, and studied what she was doing. Yeah. Angie was definitely analyzing and breaking the hedge. The manacles weren't hurting her, not like they should have been. She wasn't writhing in pain, she was
mad
.

Pressing my belly gingerly, I let time snap back.

The echo of Angie's furious scream assaulted my ears. The luggage hit the foyer floor. The cat screamed and yowled and the cage tumbled with the cat's acrobatics. Eli landed inside the room. His eyes went wide at the sight of me there. Molly blew in and caught herself with both hands on the doorjamb, her body bowing into the room and back out. Her face was full of fear and shock to find me there. Molly's lips moved tentatively, but no sound came when she said my name.
Jane?

Eli put away his gun and the vamp-killer he had drawn without even noticing.

I turned to Angie and said, “If you don't stop it trying to get into the hedge, I am going to turn you over my knees and tan your little backside.” Empty threat. I'd never hit my goddaughter, but still.

I didn't know what Angie saw in my face, but she finished breaking the manacles with a snap of sound and a flash of light. She jerked her hands away from the hedge and scooted out of the closet, her back still to the door and her mother. Her cheeks were red apples of anger, her eyes flashing with fury. “It's not fair! It's dangerous. It's gonna hurt Mama.”

“There is nothing in that bag that will hurt your mama. She made most of the spells.”

“Not the
workings
,” Angie said, thrusting out her bottom lip. “The shiny lizard that wants to hurt Mama. She's gonna use the scabertoothed lion bone!”

And that shut me right up.

“I have to bind the bones,” she said, “like Mama and Daddy bind me. Or the lizard will find it, and that will be bad! Very, very bad.”

Molly's eyes had gone dark with the realization of what Angie was saying and what her words might mean for Angie's future. Keeping Angie bound was a way to keep her safe, and Angie wasn't supposed to be able to sense the bindings, let alone bypass them or turn them off.

The witch gene was carried on the X chromosome, and due to the scarcity of male witches who lived to adulthood, Angie was one of only a very few witches to ever have received the witch gene from both parents, one on each of her X chromosomes. If PsyLED or the Department of Defense or any other government agency, or worse, some terrorist group, discovered how powerful Angie was likely to become, the fear was that she would disappear into their clutches forever. The development of the psy-meter, a device to measure the magic used by a person or a spell, had made it easy to detect witches. If one was ever used on Angie and she wasn't bound, her secret would be out.

Molly sucked in a breath that sounded strangled and said, “She's free of the bindings.”

Angie jerked and whirled all in one motion, her eyes wide at her mother.

“Might have been free for a long time,” I said, “and her magic is different from yours. Black light with some purple and a trace of blue.” I paused
and took in Angie, whose eyes were full of guilt. “There's a faint reddish tinge around the edges. Arcs of black light were zapping out.
Black
light.” It was raw power, which was unstable, dangerous all by itself, and needed to be soundly reined in by training and the proper workings mathematics. Her parents had made her bindings impregnable, keeping her magics under lock and key. Or so they'd thought.

Angie's mouth fell open in an O. She looked terrified, her shoulders rising, her head ducking. “Uh-oh.”

Molly stood straight and dropped her arms from the jambs. “Come here.”

Angie looked at me and I shook my head. “Forget it.” She was getting no protection from the consequences of her actions, not from me, not when the real consequences of breaking her bindings and using unstable, untrained magic were beyond anything she could imagine. She could harm herself, burn herself, kill someone by accident. She could be taken away, disappeared into a secret government program, and never heard from again.

Angie put a hand to the floor and stood. Her wrists were red where the blue manacles had trapped her, though the signs were resolving rapidly.

“I'm sorry, Mama.” Angie burst into tears. And every bit of my resolve crumpled with her. She threw herself at her mother and wrapped her arms around Molly's waist, hugging her tightly.

“Your room is ready, Miz Molly,” Alex said. “The one directly overhead. I'll bring up the luggage and put it in the hall outside your door.” Which was a terribly polite way to tell Molly she had a private place to take her daughter. The Kid was growing up finally. I gave him a nod of approval and his shoulders went back; an expression that might have been pride swept across his face and vanished. He shrugged and then gave me a faint smile, one slight enough to be Eli-worthy. I gave him one back.

Molly and Angie trudged up the stairs, Molly reprimanding her daughter in angry hissed sibilants, anger that was also suffused with fear. Alex gathered up the dropped bags and followed them at a distance to give them more privacy.

Eli came into my bedroom, his expression noncommittal. “How bad do you feel?”

“Bad enough. But Beast can mitigate some of the problems, now that”—I attempted a joke—“I'm back in time.”

“Not funny,” he said.

“I know.”

Eli held out a hand and I let him help me to my feet. He said, “Let me see your belly.”

That was a lot more intimate than we usually got, but Eli had been a Ranger, which meant that he was a lot more knowledgeable about medical matters than your average Joe. Rangers and other special forces types often did their own battlefield medicine, saving lives on the run. I raised my shirt hem to the bottom of my bra and looked with him. The bruise delivered by the
arcenciel
, Opal, had spread across my belly, dark angry red with a purple point in the very center, spreading to paler red, and then to pinkish beneath my ribs.

Eli pointed to the spot between my ribs. “The xiphoid process is a little spear-shaped bone right there, just above where that thing hit you. If the process gets hit in just the right way, it can tilt in and puncture your liver.” He stepped closer and put a hand on the back of my head and pulled down my lower left eyelid. He frowned, a real frown, with wrinkles on either side of his mouth. “Your lids are too pale. You've lost blood. You need to shift. Now.”

Eli pushed me toward my bed and said, “Now, Jane. I'll sear a steak and slip it in when you tap on the door.” He closed my door, leaving me alone.

I looked back at my belly. It didn't look that awful, but I did feel kinda . . . weird. Tired. Playing with time on top of fighting an
arcenciel
was probably stupid.

I pulled the T off and tossed it and the jeans and the undies to the floor. Sitting on my bed, I thought about Beast. I used to have to wear my mountain lion tooth or be holding mountain lion bones, giving me access to the RNA and DNA in the marrow, using it as a guide to find the proper shape and form. But since Beast and I had merged on a deeper, more spiritual, metaphysical, and purely physical level, I hadn't been stuck with that limitation. Now, though I still needed genetic structure to work with to shift into other animal forms, I could shift into Beast form most anytime I wanted. Easy-peasy.

The silver energies rose around me and I closed my eyes. Reached inside, to the strands of RNA. Once upon a time, I'd had a double strand, just like all other humans, and when I shifted into another animal, it was
into its double strand. Now, Beast's genetic makeup and mine were inextricably paired into tripled strands, each coated with silver and blue-green energies, each sparking darkly.

The change was almost, but not quite, pain this time, as my bones bent and snapped. Pelt sprang out on my arms and legs. My back arched, then threw me forward. Air wheezed from my lungs.