Shadow Rites: A Jane Yellowrock Novel

Praise for the Jane Yellowrock Novels

“A lot of series seek to emulate Hunter’s work, but few come close to capturing the essence of urban fantasy: the perfect blend of intriguing heroine, suspense, [and] fantasy with just enough romance.”

—SF Site

“Readers eager for the next book in Patricia Briggs’s Mercy Thompson series may want to give Faith Hunter a try.”

—
Library Journal

“Hunter’s very professionally executed, tasty blend of dark fantasy, mystery, and romance should please fans of all three genres.”

—
Booklist

“In a genre flooded with strong, sexy females, Jane Yellowrock is unique. . . . Her bold first-person narrative shows that she’s one tough cookie but with a likable vulnerability.”

—
RT Book Reviews

“Seriously. Best urban fantasy I’ve read in years, possibly ever.”

—C. E. Murphy, author of
Stone’s Throe

“The story is fantastic, the action is intense, the romance sweet, and the characters seep into your soul.”

—Vampire Book Club

“An action-packed thriller . . . betrayal, deception, and heartbreak all lead the way in this roller-coaster ride of infinite proportions.”

—Smexy Books

“A perfect blend of dark fantasy and mystery with a complex and tough vampire-killing heroine.”

—All Things Urban Fantasy

“Mixing fantasy with a strong mystery story line and a touch of romance, it ticks all the right urban fantasy boxes.”

—LoveVampires

A
LSO BY
F
AITH
H
UNTER

The Jane Yellowrock Novels

Skinwalker

Blood Cross

Mercy Blade

Cat Tales

(a short-story compilation)

Raven Cursed

Have Stakes Will Travel

(a short-story compilation)

Death’s Rival

Blood Trade

Black Arts

Broken Soul

Dark Heir

Blood in Her Veins

(a short-story compilation)

The Rogue Mage Novels

Bloodring

Seraphs

Host

ROC

Published by New American Library,

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

This book is an original publication of New American Library.

Copyright © Faith Hunter, 2016

Lyrics to the song “Blindsided,” by Bill Blakley, used with permission.

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

Roc and the Roc colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

For more information about Penguin Random House, visit
penguin.com
.

eBook ISBN 9781101636251

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To my Renaissance Man, who kept me sane and calm through the summer of writing, while my brain was worse-than-usual out of kilter. You make life worth
living.

Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency for guiding my career, being a font of wisdom when I need advice, and for applying your agile and splendid mind on my writing.

Isabel Farhi of Ace/Roc for keeping me on time through the edits and copy edits.

Dan Larsen, copy editor, for a fine job at catching all the boo-boos!

Cliff Nielsen . . . for all the work and talent that goes into the covers.

Mindy Mymudes for beta-reading. For being a font of knowledge and a great friend.

Lee Williams Watts for being the best travel companion and PA a girl can have!

Beast Claws! Street Team extraordinaire!

Let’s Talk Promotions at ltpromos.com for getting me where I am today.

Poet and writer Sarah Speith for giving me Jane’s medicine bag. It is still perfect!

As always, a huge thank-you to Jessica Wade of Penguin Random House, the best editor I could have. You make me into a much better writer than I am capable of alone. I don’t know how you keep the high quality up, book after book. You are
extraordinary.

The Fist of a Child

The prickly sensation crawled over my left fingertips, up my fingers, and snuggled into my palm like the fist of a child. For a moment it was pleasurable, and in my dreams, my heart warmed. I thought of my goddaughter, Angie Baby, and smiled in my sleep.

Then something exploded up my hand and arm and into my torso, a magical bomb going off. An electric sensation, like a burning cactus, the thorns on fire, the blooms as weapons blossoming open through me. Scorching thorns ripped through my flesh. The blooms detonated like heat-seeking missiles.

I gasped a single breath that sent a shock wave of pain through me. Opened my eyes as I woke. But I didn’t move otherwise. Lying in the dark. Terror rising. The heat and power of a magical working—a spell, to the mundane world—rolled through me.
Reading me
. My heart raced. My breath came too fast.

Familiar
 . . . I had felt this—or something like this—before. With a tearing sensation, the working ripped out of me and across my bed. And I could breathe. The fear-stink
of my own sweat filled my nostrils, tart and acerbic. My heart raced, an uneven thump against my ribs.

For a moment I knew it, remembered it, and then the memory faded, like a dream upon waking, as if the working was designed to be forgotten. But my Beast reached out and swiped it into her claws, keeping it for me.

Beast shoved her night vision into me and I saw the energies of the working on the walls and ceiling and floor as it roiled slowly, a pale green power that licked its way forward, through my room, leaving nothing in its wake but shadows. Nothing happened. So . . . it wasn’t a magical trigger waiting to be set off. It looked as if it was taking a 3-D picture of everything, like a 3-D laser recording of the room. In preparation for . . . what? Nothing. Yet.

The moment it moved off the bed, I picked up the unsheathed vamp-killer and nine-mil on the bedside table, only inches from the hand where the spell had commenced. Rolled to my feet, careful to keep my soles away from the searching magics. I was dressed in leggings and a tee, both in shades of charcoal so that I could move through the house, only slightly darker than a shadow, without being seen from outside. Or inside, for that matter.

My palm, where the magics first touched me, sent a sizzle of pain up my arm when I gripped the vamp-killer.
Not lightning,
I thought, calming my racing breath.
Not lightning
. I was still getting over having been hit by lightning, but the panic attacks weren’t totally gone yet. The feel of the vamp-killer hilt in my palm settled me, the crosshatched grip, the fourteen-inch silver-plated blade, the perfect balance for hacking.

Forcing calm into myself with each breath, attempting to quiet my heart rate, I tried to decide if running was smart or playing dead was smarter. Since I wasn’t actually dead yet, and since the magics might have been intended to flush me out where someone could hurt me worse, I decided to stay in the house, silent.

As a skinwalker, one who also carries the soul of a mountain lion in my body, I knew not racing away, not taking the offensive, was the more difficult choice. Especially when attacked in my home. Flight or fight was more natural, but
that might get me killed this time. Might get my business partners, sleeping upstairs, killed. They were human. I could heal from most wounds and injuries; humans might not. My heart raced. Breath sped. Muscles tightened.

With my Beast-vision, I followed the magics as they moved slowly through my bath and into my closet. I had left both doors open and so was able to watch as the working rolled through the spaces and the piles on the floor. Sometimes it paid to be a slob. Without a pause, the pale green energies swept over the sabertooth lion skull on the top closet shelf. But the working hesitated and hovered over the small wooden carving of a crow. The carving was positioned over my stash of magical trinkets given to me by my best friend, Molly Everhart, long ago, the crow and its working
hedge
, recharged on her last visit. The box of magical doodads were protected by the crow and its upgraded
hedge of thorns
ward, which spat and spluttered as the magics feathered their way over them.
Hedge of thorns
, renovated to
hedge of thorns 2.0
, had been tested recently. It was, so far, unbreakable, but . . . there was always a first time.

The working brightened and turned reddish, as if trying to read the spells, even encapsulated in the spelled box containing them. The magics grew brighter, a sparking purple, edging toward grape, and then back to scarlet as they tried to penetrate and read. I smelled ozone and a stink like hair burning as the sizzling increased. The meeting of two such workings might trigger something more catastrophic than the sparks and shadows I could see now. I needed to get the guys.

Whatever the working was, its attention was not on me at the moment. I drew on Beast-speed and her energy flashed through me, an adrenaline flush of my skinwalker magics. Slipping the H&K into my right hand, the blade in the other, I leaped over the edge of the pale green working where it had paused and thinned on my floor, its attention in the closet. I landed, a tingling of magic passing through me, my braid slapping my butt. But nothing changed. The scan hadn’t noticed me move. Heart still pounding, I sped out of my room and into the foyer, up the
stairs, three at a time, using Beast-stealth to keep my passage from creating any vibrations that the working might pick up.

It might have been smarter to go inside Eli’s room and speak, but I didn’t know what my partner slept in, and I didn’t need to find out tonight. I stopped outside his door and hissed, the sound softer than air, but I knew Eli would hear it, evaluate it, and determine it was likely me, even in his sleep, picking it out as a “not normal” night sound. You can take the Ranger out of the special forces, but you can’t the special forces training out of the Ranger.

I head a faint shushing sound, maybe a sheet rustling. “Jane?” he whispered from the darkness.

“Magical problems. Silent mode. Weapons,” I said, not much more than a breath, hoping he would understand my intent.

He came out of the room barefoot, his dark skin a shadow in the night, his new weapon harness slung around his head and one shoulder. He was wearing dark pants, his dark skin making him a shadow. He put his head near mine and said, “Deets.”

“Something scanning the house. Magic. Unknown source. I can see it, currently in my bedroom, interested in Molly’s toys and
hedge
. It scanned me and my room on the way in. Now it smells like something overheating and it might go boom on purpose or accident. Ultimate purpose unknown. Person or persons involved unknown.” Which meant one of two things: it came for the toys it had found, or it was temporarily occupied with the toys it hadn’t expected to find, and would eventually return to whatever it had come to do. If curtain number two was the right one, then the toys sidetracked it. But either way, there could still be an explosion.

Eli gave a single nod and glanced into his brother’s room. “Alex isn’t in his bed,” he murmured.

That meant the Kid, Eli’s teenaged brother, and the brains of our business, was still at his online gaming downstairs or was asleep on the couch, also downstairs. I nodded. “No glow from his screens.”

“Copy.”

We moved down the stairs, silent. Two shadows. Automatically avoiding the steps that might creak or shift or groan under our weight. Old houses have alarm systems built into the floors.

The energies were still at work in the closet when we reached the foyer. The stink of burning hair and ozone had been joined by a stench vaguely reminiscent of iron and salt and the stink of stagnant water. Eli’s nose wrinkled. Even if I had been human, it would have been horrible; as it was, I pressed against my nose to keep from sneezing at the stench.

He leaned into my room and said, “Nothing visible,” which meant humans couldn’t see the working. Alex was sleeping on the living room couch, arms thrown out, legs spread, with one hanging over the back of the couch. He was shirtless, wearing a loose pair of Captain America pants, the kind that kids wear, hanging on their hips, baggy at their knees. I grinned, glad of the dark, so he wouldn’t see my amusement when Eli woke him. Alex was a boy on the brink of manhood, and laughter had begun to sting.

Eli touched Alex’s shoulder. When that didn’t wake him, Eli set two weapons on the floor, covered his brother’s mouth with one hand, and shook him with the other. Alex came awake fighting and Eli avoided the flying fists with ease. It looked like long practice. Despite the magical energies in my bedroom, my smile grew wider. Eli bent over his brother and whispered into his ear. When he let go, Alex slid his feet to the floor, stood, shook himself like a dog to wake up, and made his way to his tablets.

Eli gave me a hand signal that meant, in essence, “Where’s the big bad wolf?” not that I’d say that to him. Hand signals were a military thing and he took that stuff seriously. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that the working was still occupied in my closet. I just hoped that the
hedge
was enough to keep the magical attack out and that none of Molly’s toys was accidentally activated. I’d hate to have to rebuild my closet. I pointed to my bedroom and made a chipping motion to suggest it was still
working there. Eli nodded before moving off to survey the windows and doors and, through them, out into the night.

Yellowrock Securities was a well-oiled team, everyone with a job. This was what it meant to be family. Living together. Working together. Fighting together. If we hadn’t been in danger, I might have gotten all teary. But this wasn’t the first time our home had been attacked by magical means in the last months. It almost felt as if someone had painted a target on us. Or on me. Yeah. That.

I went back to the bedroom to study the magical working, standing well outside the paused line of magical energies that marked my floor. The energies were a line of pale light through the bedroom, faintly flickering. The floor and walls beyond, the ones that the magic had already passed through, were unmarked, and the floor and walls on this side were also unmarked, which, with the exception of the pain in my palm, led me to believe that my first impression had been right—a scanning spell. The energies were much brighter in my closet, in my mixed puma/human eyesight, reddish and greenish with sparks of silver flashing through it, the gray of storm clouds.

I caught a whiff of smoke. The scan was setting something on fire. I raced back to the kitchen and grabbed the fire extinguisher, pulling the pin, and stopping again at the closet. A gray cloud, totally physical and fiery in nature, came off the
hedge
. The pale green energies of the attacking scan spluttered and sizzled and I felt the heat signature from where I stood. The sound stopped. The scan withdrew slightly. The stench began to lessen as it filtered into the air and diminished. The smoke dispersed, a long, indistinct tracery across the ceiling. Nothing happened for what felt like two or three minutes. Then the attacking magics tapped on the
hedge
and stopped when it sparked and spat.

I had a better way to see the unfamiliar working, but I wasn’t in the mood to make myself deathly ill unless it was life or death for my partners. The working in the closet flashed again and the line of pale light guttered like a candle going out before strengthening into a pale green hue,
brighter than a Disney night-light. It slipped from the closet and started moving again, taking in the ceiling and sliding toward my doorway.

I backed away, through the foyer into living room, watching the magic as it slithered across the floorboards and up the front wall, tracing the floor in light before passing on. It wasn’t something I could hear with my ears, but I felt a sensation of popping and hissing as magical energies worked their way around and through the front door, pausing to limn it in a fairy-tale illumination that few humans could see.

I stepped away and it paused, as if it had heard or sensed me. I froze, wondering if it would follow me when I moved. If I should run. But it touched the stairs and angled up, climbing slowly.

I slid through the darkness and shadows to Eli, and when he glanced at me, I mimed it rising up the stairs, and pointed to the Kid’s bedroom overhead. Eli nodded and jutted his chin out the kitchen window. He held up two fingers, meaning that we had two people out there who shouldn’t be out there, doing things that tourists in New Orleans didn’t do.

I leaned to the glass and studied the street, at first seeing nothing but a fine mist that hung like a slowly falling fog, a leisurely, Louisiana rain. But when my eyes felt the need to drift away from two different places, I understood. There were two human-shaped forms out there, both hidden beneath obfuscation spells, one standing at either end of the block, in shadows. Not vamps. Not were-creatures. Witches. To a human they would be no more than two blurs, a haze on the night, obscured by the mist, an illusion of shadows in the darkness between the streetlamps. The power of their magic kept me from seeing them well, but now that I knew they were there, the magic itself was something Beast could make out, at least partially.

The working came from both of the hidden forms, two separate pale lines of power that ran across the street to meet and merge just in front of the house into a stronger line of energies. One line was a smooth, weak, pale red, the
magics controlled and even and concise. The other witch’s magic was a pale green, the energies jumping and spitting, slithering like snakes, full of power that seemed to want to sprint away and perform all on their own. The term
wild magics
came to me, power that was feral and uncontrolled and seeking destruction. The red magics were meticulous and skillful, if not so dominant; the green magics were more potent and by far the greater danger. A yard or so after the two lines of witchy power combined, they entered the house through my bedroom wall.

I looked back at my partner and pointed to my eyes and then to the backyard, asking him if anyone was back there. He gave me a down-turned thumb. No other witches were part of the attack. Just two witches, one extraordinarily powerful. And if they hadn’t known before, they now knew about the magical trinkets in my closet.