Mercy Blade

CHAPTER 19 A Fashionista’s Closet Full of Falling Stilettos

Girrard DiMercy was sitting with his eyes closed, face tight and intent, his head back. The blue mist cloak spell wasn’t strong enough to keep me from seeing him; it was too late to hide himself from me. Way too late. I’d seen his handprints on the roof of my soul, marking me as his. And I’d blasted them away. Now, his hands were relaxed, the outer edges of his palms and little fingers resting on his lap, his fingers and thumbs curled toward one another, as if he held a ball loosely. Except for the blue hide-me mist, he wasn’t concealing himself. There was nothing defensive or dangerous about his posture, which made me figure that Gee thought he was invisible, or at least cloaked in night shadows. And one eye was swollen, caked with blood. I’d hurt him for real, just like the wolves had hurt him back in Booger’s Scoot.

I pulled on Beast’s hunting attributes, moving up the street, my bare feet silent on the sidewalk. As I moved, I considered weapons, should I need one. There wasn’t a round in the 9 mil’s chamber and Gee would hear if I readied the weapon for firing. And the H&K was loaded with silver shot. Molly had said steel would probably disrupt Gee’s magic better than silver, so I pulled the vamp-killer. Though the back and the flat of the blade were coated with heavy silver plating, the cutting edge itself was high quality steel.

I stood three feet in front of Gee and I might as well have been in Mexico for all the notice he paid me. He seemed somnolent, his breathing easy, as if he was sleeping, sitting, his body relaxed. The blue mist lay thick on his skin and seemed to swirl slowly with the energies of his spell, growing thin and gossamer away from his body, denser, and tight between his cupped hands. The mist was shaped like a sphere, dissipating entirely beyond the borders of his body, and I realized that the energies themselves formed a working circle that covered his whole physical form. I didn’t know a whole lot about magic, but I did know that most forms used circles to contain the energies, kinda like a force field, to keep anything nasty from escaping, and to hold the energies in place. I wondered what he looked like under his glamours.

I hefted the vamp-killer, moonlight glinting on the silver and steel. I positioned my feet, left foot forward, right foot back, pointed at ninety degrees. Knees bent, my weight evenly distributed, I held the blade point forward and slashed down with a single hard, fast cut, through blue mist. Down toward the stone on which he sat, breaking the circle of his spell.

Time dilated and slowed. I could see the passage of the blade through the mist. The way the steel parted the strands and swirls of the spell. The way they fell away, as if recoiling from cold iron. Light exploded out around the blade. Blue and downy, soft and bright, like sparklers in the night. And still the blade descended. The mist had weight and texture. Like flesh, the thought popped into my mind. Heat billowed up my arm, warm and moist. And the smell of cauterized blood. The reek of burned evergreen. The stink of charred jasmine. Oh crap. The spell hid his body. I’d cut Gee himself instead of his spell.

The mist retreated, almost a flinch, and snapped back hard. A punch of power hit me. Electric and solid. Muscle, claws, and something soft, hit me, like a bronze, spiked fist in a down glove, the fist supercharged with electricity. I felt/heard a sharp, sizzling hiss. Stumbled and fell back. Barked my heels on the concrete.

Gee was awake and focused on me, his blueblueblue eyes stabbing. Something billowed out and up and over me in a wash of wet, steamy heat. Dark bloodred wings unfurled, beat down. I curled as I dropped, falling. Saw a dark-sapphire feathered beast with crimson breast and wings. Claws like spear points, glinting at wingtips and feet. A splatter of liquid flowers, perfume like rainbows hitting the ground. Sparks shooting up where the blossoms landed.

And he was gone. A raptor scree echoed into the night.

I landed on my butt, half rolling, half skidding across the concrete. My elbows took a bounce, ripping a layer of skin away. I rolled off the sidewalk into the street. And lay there, gasping. “Crap,” I whispered, wincing at the ragged rips of pain. “Cah-rap.”

I had never seen such a thing. Not in person. But I knew exactly where I had seen an image of one before. And Leo Pellissier had a lot of explaining to do. I eased to my feet and gathered up my stuff. Gee’s blood had nearly dissipated, evaporating like pure alcohol rather than drying and leaving a residue of ruptured cells like, well, like blood. I found a patch larger than the others and dipped a finger into it. Sniffed. It didn’t smell like human blood, but like pine and jasmine and heated copper. Big surprise. It was gone, evaporated, before I could figure out how to save any of it.

I limped to the house. Slammed back inside. Stared down Evangelina and Bruiser as I entered, throwing my sandals down in the foyer as I passed through and my weapons onto my bed. I went to the bathroom and turned on the shower, sticking my heels, then my arms from elbows to hands under the stream, cursing under my breath at the liquid’s cleansing burn. I pulled out a first-aid kit and applied salve to the wounds, covering them with bandages. It would have to do until I could shift. Then, ignoring the two standing in my bedroom doorway, I opened my closet and yanked out my vamp-fighting clothes.

The stink of my anger and my blood and the burned smell of wax and pine coiled inside me with each breath. Ignoring the audience, I ripped off my blood splattered, torn pants and tossed them to the floor, not caring if I flashed an audience. I pulled on the silk long johns and slid into leather biker pants, the zipper ripping the silence. I stepped into socks and the butt-stomper boots. Opening the weapon safe in the closet, I began loading for vamp, sliding each vamp-killer into place, checking to see that each was snug, yet pulled freely. The knife used to stab through Gee’s glamour had a nick in the blade a quarter inch deep, blackened as if by fire; the steel edge around it was shattered. I touched the blackened steel and it flaked away like ashes. It was useless. I could repair the blade, but I’d never trust it again. I could maybe replace the blade into the old hilt, but that would cost more than simply buying a new one. I hefted it into the garbage where it thumped hollowly, steel against plastic. I slid the M4’s soft leather harness over my T-shirt. When it was comfortable, I reached into the safe and pulled out the soft velvet bag holding the vamp weapon Sabina had lent me. The priestess had asked for it back; I’d tried to return it once. Maybe she would be there this time, and I could ask the old vamp some questions about vamps and Mercy Blades and old grudges against Leo and Bruiser without getting my throat torn out. And maybe she knew something about weres, because sure as angels sing, every problem I was seeing started with the appearance of the weres, even before I knew they existed. I stuffed the velvet bag into the leather jacket’s breast pocket.

“Jane?”

Fury blazed up in me. I whirled on Bruiser. “What? What do you want?” His mouth opened, confusion on his face. I let everything I was feeling rip through me. Heat flashed like lightning over my skin. I took a step toward him. “You know, don’t you? What Gee is.” Bruiser took a step back. “Tell me!” I hissed, Beast rising into my eyes. “You tell me what that thing is.”

“Gee? Leo’s Mercy Blade? I don’t know, Jane.”

“It’s the same thing on the floor of Leo’s foyer. I thought it was a phoenix rising, a heraldic emblem. But it isn’t.”

“Phoenix—no. The image in the foyer is an Anzu. A Sumerian storm god.”

“A storm . . .” My voice trailed away, taking most of the anger with it. I backed away from Bruiser, never taking my eyes from him. I sniffed, smelling a trace of shock, but no dissembling, no stress pheromones in his sweat from telling a lie.

“Not the creator god,” he said, “but a minor god, like the ones the Babylonians and the peoples of Canaan worshiped. A mythical creature who rides storm clouds, and who offers his loyalty to a person or family in return for a service, much like royal dispensation or a genie in a bottle. Some religious sects call them watchers, angelic beasts with a fondness for humans. They’ve been compared to dragons, but are much smaller and much more fierce, feathered, beaked, taloned rap-tors. But they aren’t real. Why would you think that Girrard DiMercy is an Anzu?” Bruiser’s face was amused. He really didn’t know.

I turned away and pulled on my leather jacket, buckled myself into enough weapons to start a one woman war, and left the house without another word, helmeting up and riding Bitsa out through the side garden entrance into the night. As always, the smells of the quarter were arresting, the combination like a gift to my Beastly half—food, people, vamps, sex, food, exhaust, lots of alcohol in its various forms. But mostly food. The now familiar aromas helped to settle Beast and let me think.

I shook off the last of the rage that had taken hold of me and was left with whirling questions. If Bruiser didn’t know that Gee perhaps belonged to race of beings once worshipped as lesser gods, then, did Leo know? The MOC wasn’t exactly forthcoming with info on his past. I had been snookered with the scattered details Gee had shared about how his parents, the Spaniard and the French woman had named him . . . Leo was French. Had an Anzu sworn fealty to the Pellissier family at some point the distant past? Or perhaps to vamps in general, treating vamps as members of one family? I’d believed everything Gee had said. I was supposed to be able to read body language—Okay, not applicable here. Anzu body language didn’t seem to translate to human. As usual in my life, not knowing the answers to basic questions was dangerous. Hence this visit to Sabina, priestess of the Mithrans, one of the oldest vamps still kicking, the one in town who knew all the answers, even to questions I didn’t know to ask.

My thoughts settling, I rode, letting the traffic pick the pace, the French Quarter packed with tourists and workers out for food, fun, and games.

As I wheeled between cars, I remembered the fractured moments when I had seen Gee transform. His feathers were blue and burgundy. The bird on Leo’s foyer floor was burgundy without any blue. Gee’s eyes were blue with a funky, oily shimmer that moved, like heat rising off asphalt. An effect of his magic, probably. And he was a lot smaller than the human he appeared to be when in his real form. A wingspan of twelve feet, body maybe three or four feet from beak to claws. I’d guess Gee weighed no more than sixty, maybe seventy pounds, just from the glance I had of his body.

The largest albatross had a wingspan as wide, but it weighed only twenty-six or twenty-seven pounds. Some Pterosaurs—prehistoric birdlike creatures—had wingspans up to forty feet and weighed up to two hundred fifty pounds, though I’d never seen anything that suggested they had true beaks or were feathered, but then, what did I know. Fossil discoveries were being made all the time. Maybe Gee was a prehistoric bird, though that conflicted with his comment about going home to heal. And where was home?

The weather was turning, with damp air blowing in off the gulf, sliding beneath a cooler layer of air from the north, or maybe it was the other way around and the cool air was underneath. Well, I now knew a storm god. Maybe I could ask him. A freaking feathered dragon.

I bent over the bike and roared my way out of the city. The night sky was completely overcast, a wet wind was scudding through the trees and gusting across the road, and the temps were now only in the mid-eighties. Cool for summer in New Orleans, not that I expected it to last, but it was better than the hot, wet hell of the past week.

By the time I got to the vamp graveyard I was cooled off and thinking again. Motor puttering loud, I sat outside the gates, boots on the street below me, and phoned Leo on his tracking-device-of-a-cell-phone. When he came to the phone, he spoke before I could introduce myself. “I attacked you when you fled. It was the action of an unchained. I am . . . sorry.”

Leo had just apologized to me. I closed my mouth on what I had been about to say. Instead, I said. “Okaaaay. Apology accepted.” A sharp silence hung in the air after my words. I figured that was enough of the niceties. “Let me in to the vamp graveyard. I need to see Sabina.”

“Why?” That was Leo, no wasted words, no wasted emotion. Oh—unless it was to try to kill me. He’d wasted a lot on that.

“Open the gate or I’ll just ride on through and you can deal with the dead bodies.” Okay, maybe not so completely calmed down.

I could almost hear the laughter in Leo’s voice, when he said, “And which dead bodies would that be, chère?” It sounded like sha, not cherie, the Louisiana version of the French endearment. And I didn’t like Leo being endearing to me.

I gritted my teeth. “The enforcer-types I’ll stake or shoot when they come to Sabina’s rescue when the alarm goes off.” I gunned the engine. “Now, Leo.”

“Of course, Jane. Whatever you wish. Thirty seconds.”

It was only after I hung up that I realized Leo had sounded like his old self. His old well-balanced, emotionally stable self, from before I killed his son’s imposter and he got stuck in the dolore. And then feasted on Katie’s dead blood. And then . . . Gee had fed Katie, who maybe fed Leo again—maybe when asking to become his heir—giving Leo some of Gee’s blood? Vamp feeding arrangements were both gross and impossible to understand. I was getting woozy trying to figure it all out.

Leo being sane was a good thing, but no way did I think it was gonna be all good. There had to be another shoe to drop. After the last few days, I was likely to see a fashionista’s closet full of falling stilettos.

When I figured my thirty seconds were up, I peeled out and swerved around the gate, into the cemetery and along the crushed-white-shell drive. It was dark, no security lights, not even a candle burning in the nonchapel where Sabina’s sarcophagus lay, but I had better than average night vision after all the years I’d spent in Beast’s skin and, even without the moon, I could see.

The mausoleums were white marble, each with a naked winged angel on top, also of carved stone, one mausoleum for each clan, except that Leo had killed off a few clans recently. The mausoleums were intact, repaired from one of my previous visits. Contact with me had been a bit rough on vamp real estate.

I swung the bike around and tightened my hand on the accelerator. And braked, dropping the bike into a low-angled skid when my eye caught sight of the angel on the Pellissier vault. I cut the engine, dropped the helmet, and walked away from Bitsa to see it better. It was too dark to be certain, but danged if the winged warrior didn’t have Girrard’s features. “Well, slap me silly,” I muttered. “The guy is everywhere.”

Before I got back to Bitsa, I heard a pop and whirled, grabbing for a stake and a vamp-killer, my heart thumping hard. Sabina was standing between two white buildings, wearing her nunnish white robes, her face serene, or as serene as an undead, blood-sucking monster can get. She wasn’t vamped out, which was good, because my throat protector was lost to the wolves. “You did not request an audience.”

“Cry me a river.” The words slipped out before I could I stop them.

“I do not cry. You are impudent. Rude.”

I blew out my irritation, hoping for an obsequious impulse somewhere inside so I could show proper deference. But there was nothing like that inside me right now. “So sue me.”

Her head tilted to the side in that weird, reptilian thing they do. “Why would I wish to involve the legal system of this country?”

I figured modern snarky comments didn’t translate well to a two-thousand-year-old vamp. “What do you want, little nonhuman?” she asked.

“I want you to tell me about the weres.” When she didn’t answer, I said, “You’re an elder. Among my people, an elder is the keeper of knowledge, history, and the old stories, and they share that wisdom whenever they’re asked.”

“The Cursed of Artemis,” she said, her mouth moving as if the words tasted bad. “Children’s tales.”

“Tales I haven’t heard,” I countered. When she didn’t poof away or try to kill me, I dropped to the ground, sitting in the darkness, my back against a mausoleum wall. A misty rain began, as if condensing out of the heavy air and settling to the ground. I turned my face up to it. “I need to hear the stories, Sabina. Please.” My housemother in the children’s home where I grew up would be tickled with my manners.

Sabina ignored the rain, though her clothing was damp with it. “All myth is based upon some form of truth and history, though twisted and puffed up and hacked away. The tale of the Cursed of Artemis is no different.” The priestess crossed her arms under her breasts and tucked her hands into her sleeves. It looked almost practiced, as if she wanted to appear human, aping human gestures. “Long before the Greeks named her Artemis, was Lolandes, the woman. I have often thought that her legend became confused with, and merged into, the earth goddess, who was common to all ancient tribal peoples. But Lolandes, renamed the Artemis of Grecian lore, was no goddess, but a powerful, long-lived mortal, one sometimes called a witch, though different from today’s witches. She was the most powerful of her kind, in a time when women were revered, when political and religious power was passed through the matriarchal line. She was venerated for helping animals and humans in childbirth and for caring for wild animals.”

Sabina turned her back against the stone wall, standing so close to me that the hem of her robes brushed my leather-clad knee. Beast nudged me to stand, not liking my submissive posture beneath the priestess, but I shoved her away. She went, giving me a huff of disgust.

“Lolandes once had a female bird as pet, a type of falcon, a fierce hunting bird. It was dedicated to her, never needing the jesses or the hood, and returned to her after each hunt, bringing Lolandes the choicest of kills from the hunting fields. The two were inseparable.

“One day at dusk, beneath a full moon, a wolf killed the bird, fighting over a doe they both had targeted. Lolandes cursed the wolf with a disease, similar to rabies, that affects mind and brain. And she took up the body of her bloodied pet and she mourned.”

Sabina paused and I wanted her to hurry it up. But when you’ve lived for two thousand years, what’s an hour or a decade or two? And I needed to hear the tale of the first weres, the Cursed of Artemis. So I schooled my mind to patience and my mouth to silence.

Rain collected on the skin of my face and beaded. The wind gusted hard, then soughed through the tops of nearby pines, needles and branches whispering. A hard blast of rain hit the earth nearby and died. The wind gusted again, stronger. Thunder boomed, far away.

Some minutes later, Sabina said, “The wolf ran into the woods. That night, it bit a civet, a lion, a dog, a snake, and other of Lolandes’ predator animals, those she had cared for until now, transferring the curse of illness to each. The wolf hid by day. The next night, biting a gardener, he passed the curse of Lolandes to the humans. At the next full moon, the gardener changed into the form of a wolf and succumbed to bloodlust. Shortly thereafter other were-creatures began to appear, humans bitten by the cursed, forced to change by the light of the full moon. But the wolf was first. And the wolf’s curse was greatest.”

“No females who were bitten survived,” I guessed.

“No. They did not. And Lolandes mourned her rash anger for the pain it had brought her animals and was ashamed that humans had been tainted with her curse. But it was too late to stop the change she had brought into the world. A curse cannot be undone.

“Lolandes studied and discovered a way, however, to minimize the damage to the human world, a partial cure that would allow the weres to bring over females and create families and societies, a therapy that would allow them to breed true. The cure”—she paused, as if searching for a word—“mutated the curse into one less easily transferred. She carried the cure to each of the were groups, all but the wolves. Them, she never forgave.”

I’d taken a mythology course as an elective in high school, but I’d never heard this story. When I told Sabina that, she laughed, the sound dry as corn husks in the night. “So much has been lost,” she said. “Yet, the story was told me by an old Roman scholar, one who claimed to have writings from the time of the Babylonians, long before the Greeks stole her name and story and made her a goddess. And it is true that the werewolves are the only moon-touched who carry the original taint, the original curse, unabated by Lolandes’ cure.”

It was a cure that effectively created new species, were-species, human-animal hybrids that could reproduce true. I sat up suddenly, a thought shunting heat through my veins. A falcon was hunting a doe? Not likely. I made a leap of intuition, better known as a wild-haired guess.

Sabina must have heard my heart leap and race. She turned her face to me, her eyes focusing on my throat in the darkness. I froze, waiting, fingers on a vamp-killer at my hip. When she didn’t move beyond the stare, I curled up a knee, one boot sole scraping on the shell path, an elbow braced on my knee. I pulled out the multifunctional cell and went online, checking the timelines of Sumer and Babylonia. “This female hunting bird,” I said, redirecting her back to the subject matter rather than my pulse. “Could it have been an Anzu?”

Sabina shrugged and looked away. “I do not know if the cultures shared the Anzu.”

According to the Internet, the kingdoms of Babylon and Sumer had overlapped in time. It was possible, if unlikely, that Lolandes’—or Artemis’—dead bird of prey had been an Anzu. One of which just happened to be hanging around Leo, the werewolves, and the were-cats, trying to bring the groups together. “Now wouldn’t that be a handy dandy coincidence,” I muttered. “Thank you, Sabina. I am, um . . . honored and . . . humbled?” I drew on my Christian children’s school manners. “Yeah. Humbled that you shared your story.”

Sabina laughed low and turned her head to me again. I heard the slight snick of her fangs dropping into place, and because vamps can’t feel amusement and go vampy at the same time, I knew it was deliberate, not a predator response to the pheromones of stunned reaction that escaped from my pores and sped my heart. I tilted my head up to hers. A smiling, ancient vamp, three-inch fangs exposed, is not a warm and fuzzy sight. Sabina disappeared as quickly as she had arrived, with a little pop of displaced air. Old vamps are fast enough to do that—move the air with a snap of sound.

I rehelmeted and cranked up Bitsa just in time to be hit with a blast of drenching rain. Bitsa is my dream bike; I love her like a part of me. But riding in the rain required changing gear into plasticized riding clothes over the leather. I pulled up to the chapel porch, rooted in Bitsa’s saddlebags for the riding gear and a hand towel. Muttering under my breath about the heat and the stink of my own sweat, I dried off under her front porch and pulled the plastic pants and jacket over the leathers. The heat went up another ten degrees, steam-bath territory. As I dressed, my hand brushed the lump in my pocket, reminding me, and I draped the bag holding the sliver of the Blood Cross on the chapel door handle. It didn’t seem like a smart place to leave it, but I wasn’t taking it home again; I called out, telling the darkness what I had done and straddled Bitsa.

My headlight was thin and reedy, catching the raindrops as they slashed across the beam, creating more glare than visibility. Easing onto the dark-as-soot street I gave Bitsa some gas. Rain-riding was dangerous, especially at night, vision impaired by drops sluicing down the helmet faceplate, two tires speeding a lightweight vehicle with less traction than normal, water a slick layer on the road.

I took the roads slowly, back into the city as the rain slanted and the wind thrashed the earth. Microscopic droplets beat back up into the sky, broken from impact with the ground. Rain collected and ran, filling the ditches and bayous and every low place, ponding up in the streets.

Just before I got to the Mississippi River, I was stopped by the sight of a twelve-foot-long alligator, stretched across the street, jaw open, belly on the still-warm asphalt, taking a shower. I sat there, laughing at the sight, Bitsa growling beneath me. Beast shoved up into my consciousness, thinking, Big teeth. Hard kill. Tough food. I like doe better. Then she looked up at the rain and hissed. Disgusted with the gator and the weather, she curled up inside me, tucking her paws close and wrapping her stubby tail around her for warmth. Beast did not like rain.

I pulled out my camera and snapped a few shots of the gator, which took surprisingly well with the flash. Molly was gonna love this.

Back home, the house was dark. I stripped and hung the plastics and leathers up to dry in the shower, ate, and went online to find a huge zipped file from Reach, waiting in my e-mail box. He’d come through on a host of things, like the list of numbers Rick had called before his phone went dead. I recognized two numbers as belonging to police—Jodi and Sloan—but no others. None to me, for instance. Reach also sent a series of satellite photos of the vamp council headquarters for twenty-four hours before and during the vamp-and-were get-together. It was informative, not only because it showed that someone was willing to pay for satellite time to surveil the vamps but because the surveillance was paid for on the same local bank account that my retainer checks were drawn upon. Interesting. The vamps were paying good money to watch themselves.

And, more important, using Rick’s phone, Reach had narrowed the possible hotels where Rick had been photographed kissing the wigged Safia down to two in East New Orleans. He couldn’t rule out either, but Rick had been there for twenty-four hours before his phone died.

I input the addresses on my handy-dandy cell and got GPS directions on a city map and map app. I wanted to go in right now, guns blazing, and find him, but that would be stupid. It was raining, dark, and I hadn’t reconnoitered either place. I might get Rick or myself killed.

I could call Sloan. Maybe the cops would go in, or maybe they’d just sit outside and watch the place to keep from blowing Rick’s cover. There was no guessing with cops. I had more options than law enforcement officers. I could do things they couldn’t. Lots of things they couldn’t. But not if they were watching. So I didn’t call them.

And that was when the real storm hit. All the rain and wind of the last few hours was only a prelude to the bona fide mama tempest, with gale force winds and rain that beat into the house like the entire Blue Man drum corp. No way was I going back out on Bitsa in this. And Beast didn’t even hint that she wanted to shift. I fell asleep with the raging fury of nature like a lullaby in my ears.