Shadow Rites: A Jane Yellowrock Novel (26 page)

“On one!” Eli called out.

Ailis cursed with great force and even more imagination about donkeys and male body parts. I stuttered in laughter as a ward opened over us.

“Three.”

I opened Lachish’s fingers so I could see her palms.

“Two. One.” The explosion was shocking, and I felt a concussive blast knock into the ward at the same moment that two green eyes appeared in Lachish’s palms. Staring at me. The ward Ailis had raised shivered and shook, the energies blasting up in a shower of purple sparks. The eyes seemed to look around me and I closed the palms, fast.

The tree branch where Eli was stretched out in a shooter’s stance fell with a crack. My partner rolled backward along the limb, tucked, pushed off with one foot, and rolled to the side. Another branch broke. Both limbs hit the ground. He leaped and landed, rolled again to his feet, the target pistol nowhere in sight, and a small subgun I hadn’t even noticed on him, held at firing position. Above me,
Ailis’s palms were marked with staring green eyes. She squeaked and the protective ward spluttered and fell.

I motioned to Eli to hold his open palms out. There was a faint gleam of green in both. His eyes held mine in the darkness as I heard what might have been laughter in the air. It wasn’t his. And while it wasn’t mad, maniacal laughter, like something from a serial killer TV show, it wasn’t ordinary giggles from girls’ night out either. It left a bad taste in my ears. So to speak. I opened Lachish’s palms, and the eyes were gone. I smelled a hint of iron and salt and I knew that the witches responsible for this working had been watching, though from nearby or with the witch equivalent of a crystal ball, I didn’t know.

Molly shouted, “The wards are all down! The offensive working is no longer active.”

The paramedics trotted over, one with an oversized orange supply kit. They started to Evan first, but a man appeared in front of them with a small pop of sound and said, “See to the lady first, if you please.” I felt the power of vampiric compulsion flow through the damaged yard. “I’ll see to the gentleman. I’m a doctor,” he added, sounding and looking perfectly human, probably to keep the human paramedics relaxed and calm.

Really?
I thought.
Dr. Edmund Hartley
. But why not? He was old enough to have taken out a few years of his very, very long life to go to medical school. Of course, he might have attended in the seventeen hundreds. And of course, he didn’t need medical training to heal.

Pushing outward with his compulsion, he said to the medical personnel, “Lachish Dutillet is a witch, so you’ll want magical protection while you assess her and secure her for transport to Tulane University Hospital. The beautiful Ailis should be able to provide you with that assistance.”

Ailis gave him a look that would have cured leather, but he ignored it. The two might have had a history. Interesting.

Tulane University Hospital was the only hospital in New Orleans that kept paranormal medical experts on contract. They also had medical and technical personnel who dealt with the needs of supernats and their injuries.
And they had, on at least one occasion, allowed vampires into the ER to treat dying patients.

Edmund turned to me. He was dressed in a black tuxedo with a burgundy hankie and cummerbund, and very shiny patent leather shoes. There was a faint five o’clock shadow along his jaw, which I thought might be the first time I had ever seen a vamp with ungroomed facial hair. Fangs dropping with a tiny
schnick
, he said, “I haven’t fed tonight.”

“Noted,” I said, and pointed at Evan.

“As my mistress requires.” The words were quite clear, despite being spoken around the fangs. He offered me a tiny bow that managed to come across as mocking.

Something that smelled like cinnamon with a hint of anise and . . . maybe chocolate mint wafted from Edmund. He smelled like a bakery. I said, “Alex and the Robere brothers will draw up the primo papers tomorrow. I’ll approve them and get the signing witnessed.”

“Agreed, my mistress. And then they may be stored at the Mithran Council Chambers along with all such legal writs.”

I narrowed my eyes and answered without agreeing to that, “Heal your other master. Please.”

Edmund gave a deeper bow and actually clicked his heels together, a military tradition that went back centuries, though no one but me might have heard the patent leather tap. He knelt beside Evan and pulled off his tux jacket, tossing it to the grass. With deft motions, he rolled up both sleeves of his pristine dress shirt. As if just seeing her, he offered Molly a truncated bow and, at the same moment, bit into his own left wrist with a quick, tearing action that almost seemed graceful. Or ritualistic.

He lifted Big Evan’s head off the ground and held the bloodied flesh over Evan’s mouth, allowing several ounces to dribble in. Vamp magic and witch healing magic grew on the air, competing and blending, like spices that weren’t usually used together, but that somehow worked. The air took on a piquant tang, with a hint of red peppers.

Evan swallowed. His hands glowed green.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“No!” The Gray Between exploded out of me. I threw myself at Edmund. Faster than the speed of sound. Faster than time. In the instant of the leap, in the moment of no time, I took it all in.

Edmund halted in the act of turning to me. Eli was swiveling with the subgun, pivoting on one heel, the other foot held up, stationary in the air. The green magics around Evan’s hands were an unmoving cloud of gas and icy sparkles. Molly was frozen too, her hands reaching for Evan’s face, her brow crinkled as if she knew something had just gone wrong. Really badly wrong. There were green clouds of gas on her hands as well, but on Molly, the spell was shot through with blackness. Her death magics had been activated.

As I leaped through time, my belly was already cramping, tearing, ripping along my side where something had never healed quite right. I caught Edmund by the shoulders, jerking him into my arms, into the bubble of time, with me. Whatever was happening, whatever spell had been activated in the instant before I leaped into the Gray Between of time, was still happening. Edmund’s eyes vamped out. His taloned hands reached for me, gripped the back of my head. Jerked me to him. His head tipped back. Fangs struck at me, like a snake striking at prey.

Deader Vampire

I whipped my body back and busted him in the mouth with my elbow. Not the best way to strike an opponent, but at close quarters it was all I had. The blow slammed his lips against his teeth and fangs. Ripped the inside of my elbow on a fang, mixing our blood. Magic wrenched through us both. His eyes went wider. He snarled.

Still moving, I threw Edmund away from me, my hands in his blood and mine. He slid from the bubble of time, into the night, hanging in thin air. I tumbled forward, beneath him, and came up on my hands and knees. Vomited blood in a scarlet gush. Nothing new there, not with Gray Between and its nasty during-effects and aftereffects. My belly cramped in a molten fist of agony. Normal. Dying again . . .

I pushed to my feet and wiped my bloody mouth on my wrist. And looked at my left palm. A green eye was glowing in the center of it, the lid open and smeared with vampire blood and my blood. Mixing us together in the dark working. This was bad. But the vampire was now in real time and I wasn’t. The spell was stuck in real time, in
Edmund’s time, not whatever bubble of time the rest of me was stuck in.

“Crap.” I had guessed right, in that singular instant before I grabbed my primo. This part of the layered and multipurpose spell was triggered by vamp blood and my blood at the same place and the same time as witches. Though the attacking working had probably been constructed with Leo in mind, not Edmund. Edmund, the only vamp here, had now been spelled to attack me, just as Gee had been.

I staggered back to Evan and looked at the working erupting out of him. Compared it to the working stuck in my palm. Tried to put it all together.

The two enemy witches had . . . what? Gotten a sample of my genetic material and used it to create a watching-working tied to me? Then they scanned my house, using it as a distraction so they could drop a DNA spell into me. Yeah. That felt right. Their initial scan had left a back door entry to my house. Using that, they put a similar watching spell in an air elemental gas spell, sent it inside the
hedge of thorns
ward that had been protecting the house. The Truebloods had breathed the spelled gasses. Their breath had carried it to their blood, and Edmund had done artificial resuscitation on them, probably getting the spell on him/in him that way. Making it worse, Evan had triggered the magical icons at my house, and then here, and gotten knocked loopy, getting more of the magics on him.

But the working on me, while it wasn’t active when Mol scanned me, was still there. Hiding inside me? Yeah. Like the way a spider hides its eggs in its prey. And the moment my blood and vamp’s blood were in the same place, inside a witch circle—or the remains of one—the main part of the attack was activated.

I leaned into Molly and checked her palms. Yeah. Same green magic crap. Lachish’s hands and Ailis’s hands were erupting green stuff too. So the spell had been transferred from one to the other the way one person with the flu might infect another, by touch or breathing. Or when the focal was tripped.

The spell—or part of it—appeared to be intended for us to turn on each other. It was an amazing spell, intricate, multilayered, specific, targeted on a genetic level and then targeted on a multivictim level.

I didn’t know who the attackers were. I didn’t know how to stop the spell. Except to get away from them all. To get Edmund away from them all.

Nausea flooded my mouth with saliva. The taste of blood and acid rose up my esophagus. I vomited again, but this time I felt something different. Something warm near my ear. Cold dripping down my neck. I touched the soft tissue of my throat, in front of and below my ear, and my fingers came away cold and sticky. Blood. Just a trickle.

Right at the place where Leo had bitten me when he tried to force a binding on me. Blood welling in the two spots where his fangs had bitten me. “Well, joy,” I said. I didn’t know if the blood was the effect of entering no time one time too many, or the effect of the attack spell, or some other mumbo-jumbo paranormal crapola. But whatever the reason, it wasn’t going to be good.

I propped my hands on my knees to hold myself up. An unexpected shiver raced through me, raising the hair on my arms and legs in reaction to the cold. I would never be able to defeat Edmund in real time, not as sick as I was. So I pulled a pure wooden stake out of my bun, one with no trace of silver on it, and crab-walked over to him. I shoved it through his shirt into the sweet spot where his ribs came together, where the descending aorta—in both humans and vamps—was. His flesh in no time was rubbery and difficult to puncture. But I leaned into the strike, putting my weight behind it until the stake was buried deep. It wasn’t a heart stick, so he should survive it.

I stood there, cramping like a son of a gun, until I saw his eyelids flicker. When I was able to stand upright against the cramps again, I rammed a shoulder into his belly, below the stake, and rolled him up into a fireman’s carry. I was doing a lot of that lately. Maybe I needed to add more weights to my squat lifts.

Fighting nausea and vertigo, I carried the now-comatose
and paralyzed vampire off the property, down Eighth Street to St. Charles Avenue, where cars and people were unmoving, caught in no time. I trudged across the streetcar rails into the Garden District, and hooked a left onto Pryatania Street. My intent was to zigzag to the empty and former Clan Mearkanis Home. But my strength was draining away fast.

Stumbling, two blocks later, I turned again and made my way into the street to avoid a romantic couple frozen arm in arm, laughing, sightseeing along the white walls encircling Lafayette Cemetery Number One. The limestone and marble and whitewashed cement glowed in the night like a beacon. A sound that might have been humor rumbled within me. I was far enough away from the Elms to feel a bit safer and the irony was too much to ignore. I hobbled to the iron gate, which, strangely, was still open, and into the cemetery.

I passed what might have once been a guardhouse, but was now derelict, the roof never replaced after Katrina. The hurricane had left the city bankrupt and unrepaired, and the many cemeteries and their mausoleums and crypts and vaults open to vandalism. The concrete path was cracked and busted. Gang graffiti marked the resting places of the dead. But the family mausoleums still managed to impart that distinctly New Orleans flavor, standing cheek by jowl, with crosses and arched roofs and sun-faded silk flowers at the sealed entrances.

Near the middle of the burial grounds, I stepped off the path and into the narrow space between two humpbacked family crypts and dumped Edmund off my shoulder. And nearly fell on top of him as he left the no time of the Gray Between and almost landed. He was caught by normal time just above the ground, his white dress shirt stained scarlet, the stake buried in his lower chest. I dropped to the dirt-covered cement near him and placed a hand between his head and the cement riser. When I touched him, his body landed with a thump, his head in my hand. I laid it on the cracked and broken ground.

I let myself slide out of no time, into real time. The
smell of lime and urine and old, old, old death, combined with Edmund’s blood-scent. I had bubbled time far too much in the last few days. I wondered what the repercussions to that were, and if I might reach the point someday very soon when I could no longer access no time. Well, I had lived without the ability once. I could do it again. Or it could kill me outright. There was that.

A bat flitted down between the crypts, did a little ungraceful, unballetic pirouette and flew back out. If I had felt a little more alive, I might have laughed again. Instead I let the Gray Between go, rolled to the side, and vomited. More blood fell from the spots in my neck, and this time when I put my fingers there, I felt small slits, the kind that fangs might leave if vamp blood didn’t constrict the pierced blood vessels and close off bite wounds.

I pulled my cell, which was working again, and called Leo. His new secretary answered and I said, “Hey, Scrappy. Tell Leo to send help to the Lafayette Cemetery Number One. My new primo has been staked and I’m pretty sure I’m about to pass out.” She tried to say something, but I interrupted, gave the mausoleum family name, and ended the call. Then I reached again for my powers and Beast shoved through me in a blinding rage. It was a tearing, stabbing, slicing, flesh-being-flayed-from-my-bones shift. I rolled away from the vampire, hearing my own rough scream in the night. And I was gone.

*   *   *

Claws tore through Jane clothes. Pushed out of Jane shoes. Pawpawpaw to darker shadow. Gathered paws beneath body, tight. Curled tail around body. Panting for breath. Heart racing away from big predator Beast could not see.

Beast was safe in space between human-dead-places. But felt wrong. Cold.
Hungered
.

Looked at vampire.
Edmund
. Was dead. Did not breathe. Heart did not beat.

Beast stretched out neck and sniffed vampire. Blood smelled fresh. Meat smelled good. But cold. Like meat from white box refrigerator. Sniffed again, lips pulled back to show killing teeth. Sucking in air over tongue and scent
sacs in roof of mouth.
Scree
of sound. What Jane called flehmen response. Smells rushed in. Mouth watered. Smelled
good
.

Was
hungry
.

But . . . was wrong to eat Edmund.

But Edmund was dead. Was good to eat dead. But not all dead. Jane would be mad if Beast ate Edmund. But Beast was cold. Felt
wrong
. Breath did not feel right. Heart did not feel right. Coldcoldcold. Heart rushing like rabbit into hole, with Beast chasing after.

Looked up at sky. Did not know what to do.

Bat flew into small space, chasing small biting things, too small to eat.
Mosquitoes
. Hate mosquitoes. Edmund smelled good to eat.

Pawed closer to Edmund body. Sniffed in small bursts of breath. Smelled
so good
. Could . . . just taste . . .

Thought about taste. About taste of vampire blood. Jane ate vampire blood. Made her well when she was sick. Made her strong when she was weak. Beast should be able to taste vampire blood too. But not eat meat. Thought about tasting and not eating. Was human way to think. Was hard to think human. Thoughts of right and wrong for humans. For Jane, though Jane was not human. Was confusing.

Pawed closer, until Beast side touched vampire side. Cold meat vampire. Cold Beast body. Stretched out neck and sniffed blood. Goodgoodgood blood. Cold, strong blood could fix cold Beast. Touched edge of lips to blood. And licked.
Blood so good
. Licked and licked. Licked all blood from wound. Tongue found tip of stake. Stopped. Thinking again. Wood in vampire blood stopped vampire from being . . . alive. Undead. But wood did not kill old vampires, only young vampires. Old vampires could live if wood came out.

Thought. Licked wound, pressing deep with tongue, until all blood was gone. Stake was still there. Rose on haunches and pressed jaw to Edmund belly. Gripped stake in killing teeth. Pulled stake. Dead flesh made sucking sound, as if trying to hold stake. Stake came free and Beast
backed away, teeth in wood. Stake had Edmund blood on it.
Good blood.
Sat and held bloody stake in paws, licked. Was good. Beast shivered and was no longer cold. Licked all blood off stake.

Looked up at new smell of vampires. Shadows walked and stopped at opening between human-dead-place-buildings. Knew shadows of vampires. Snarled.
My stake!

“Allors,”
Leo said.
“Jusqu’à present. Je ne le crois pas.
”

“Is that a stake?” Grégoire asked, pointing killing claw, what Jane called sword, at Beast.

Beast snarled again and let stake fall. But did not attack vampires. Felt good. Felt warm.

“Indeed it is,” Leo said. “Was she eating him?”

Grégoire waved tip of sword at Beast and walked nearer.

Beast showed killing teeth. Growled. But vampire was not afraid. Laughed at Beast. Was bigger predator. Pressed Beast belly to ground. Beast backed slowly into darkness. Stayed down, smelling blood. Was blood on paws and pelt. When vampires did not follow, Beast stopped. Groomed paws with tongue. Was good blood. Beast felt warmer and warmer.

Watched as small, paler vampire knelt at side of Edmund, dead vampire. Deader vampire. Beast chuffed with amusement.
Deader vampire.

“This shall be an interesting story, no doubt,” said Grégoire.

Beast chuffed again. Felt good. Liked good vampire blood. Wanted more.

“We need to feed him, my friend.”

“His master should feed him.”

“His master is a puma.” Grégoire made sound like laughter. “I fear she is more inclined to eat him than to save him.”

Good vampire blood. Dead vampire meat.

Jane came awake inside Beast, beta to Beast’s alpha.
Holy crap,
Jane thought.
Are you . . . drunk?

Am warm. Can eat vampire meat?

No!

Snarled.
Jane is not good to Beast. Will not let Beast hunt cow in Edmund car. Will not let Beast eat Edmund.

What? Never mind. Back away.

Beast snorted in disgust. Backed deep into darker shadows.

“
Merci
, Jane,” Leo said.

Not Jane. Beast. Like vampire blood. Made Beast warm.

You were cold?

Was sick.

Jane went silent, thinking hard human thoughts. Beast did not listen. Jane was beta.

Leo dropped to knees beside Edmund. Held out wrist to Grégoire sword. Small pale vampire flicked point of steel over Leo skin in fast, killing strike with steel killing-claw. But cut only wrist. Sword pointed back at Beast. Good smell of vampire blood filled small space. Leo dribbled blood into Edmund mouth. Dribbled blood over stake wound. Smeared blood onto wound with fingers and stuck finger into wound.

Mosquitoes flew into space between small human-dead-places. Bats flew in. Leo made Grégoire cut wrist again and fed Edmund. Beast wanted to taste Leo blood, but Grégoire sword was pointed at Beast. Big steel killing claw. Was good hunter.