Skinwalker

CHAPTER 15 I was still buck naked

I woke at the sound of a scream. Scream on scream. Women. In terror. Katie’s.

I was up and running before I came fully awake. Grabbing weapons and crosses from the closet. Slinging the shotgun free of its harness. I raced through the house and outside, into the half-light of predawn. Dropping crosses over my head, sticking stakes into my hair. I went over the wall without breaking stride, brick scraping my legs.

“Crap,” I grunted. I was still buck naked. Time to worry about that later. If I lived.

Katie’s back door was hanging open at an angle. Ripped from its hinges. I paused and took in the door; claw marks had scored the wood. The rogue’s compound scent was smeared on the door, the rotten reek uppermost, rank in the air. If what I had figured out in the previous long night was true, it needed to feed. Mad one. Liver-eater. Beast bristled and I growled.

I had just checked the loads, but my hands flew through the motions anyway. Satisfied, I set the stock at my shoulder and moved into the house, placing each bare foot carefully before transferring my weight forward, my hair brushing my back with each step. My breath hurt in my lungs as I tried to breathe silently after the run, unable to draw in enough air; my heart tried to slow from sprinting speed, pounding an erratic rhythm.

The sconce lights were on, but muted, dimmed for the night. I smelled blood, heard crying. Someone else gurgled with each breath, as if breathing underwater, or through a restricted airway. The blood and gurgling came from my right, the dining room, maybe.

An aborted scream tugged me the opposite direction. I took a hard breath, settling myself. Weapon muzzle leading, the butt tight to my shoulder, I moved left down the hallway. Silent, I stepped into Katie’s office. For an instant that lasted forever, I took it in.

Blood was sprayed over the walls and ceiling in huge, glistening gouts. Troll was against the wall. A lamp burned, casting the room into jagged shadows, cutting his face into planes of light and dark, his bald pate shining with sweat. He was watching across the room, cheeks red, fisted hands at his sides. Muscles straining. He grunted with effort. Immobile . Pinned, Beast thought. Not breathing; trying to get free. His skin was both flushed and gray. Tears coursed down his face.

At the desk, across the destroyed room, the rogue vamp was bent, hunched. He held Katie to his mouth, his fangs buried in her stomach. Sucking. Chewing. His hair streamed forward, hiding his face. Black hair. Dark skin showing through, coppery. Like mine. His hands were clawed—not recurved, retractile claws for catching and bringing down prey, but bird claws, for grabbing prey on the fly.

A drop of blood fell from the ceiling. Slowly. Catching the dim light. Landing on my shoulder with a soft, cold plop. I took in a breath, so heavily scented with vamp blood and rogue it was choking.

Faster than thought, pictures of possibility overlay one another in my mind. Me firing. Katie taking some of the poisonous rounds. Me racing in to place the shotgun into his side. Him stopping me with his mind. Me slapping silver crosses all over him, to watch him bubble and burn. Him stopping me with his mind. Me racing in to stake him. Him stopping me with his mind. No good alternatives. I pulled a stake from my hair. Sprinted in. Time went sluggish.

The rogue looked up. Vampy eyes, black pupils the size of dimes in crimson, bloody orbs. He lifted his mouth from Katie. Blood spouted over his face. His tongue was black.

His mind reached out, black tingles of power stinging along my skin. His mind gripped mine. Vampiric and frozen. Stop, he commanded.

Momentum fought his compulsion. I couldn’t stop. Stumbled. Beast reared up. I/we screamed. Caught my balance two steps away. Still moving. The black electric power tightened on me, gripping. Time slowed, taking on texture, thickening to a heavy, oily consistency. Feeling as if I moved underwater, my muscles stretched. I turned the stake for an underarm thrust. A killing strike as I ran. One step.

Gore coated his mouth and chin and spilled down his clothes. Fancy clothes. A tuxedo. A second step. He laughed. The laughter splashed over me like warm honey. Congealing over me. Stop. . . . Blackness took me. Momentum still had me in its grip. His mind . . . closed over me.

But Beast had my soul. With a scream that tore through my brain and out my throat, Beast ripped me free of his control. I crashed into the rogue. The Benelli and my body slid between his and Katie’s. She started to fall. The stake rose up on its arc from near my thigh. Lifting to slash up between us. Aimed into his belly and up, under his ribs. I caught a glimpse of his face. A man. Hawkish nose and chin. Lips pulled back from fangs on both upper and lower jaw. Not something I had ever seen before.

The air shivered. Cold. Icy. And the vamp was gone.

I fell forward, stumbling, catching myself with Beast’s reflexes. Bent-kneed, body in a half crouch, I caught Katie across my thigh. I eased her to the floor. Whirled. Whipped my head, following the rogue’s scent. His complex, compound scent changing. Beast sucked it in, over her/my tongue. Changing . . . liver-eater rot. Something else . . . rogue/not-rogue.

Troll’s breath like a bellows, ragged and hoarse as he knelt beside me. “Katie,” he said, his voice rising on the last syllable. He stopped, his hands hovering just above her, uncertain. Her dress had been ripped away, exposing small breasts with tiny pink nipples. A scar, brown and uniform, marked her upper arm. A fleur-de-lis. A brand, I realized. What the heck?

A hideous wound in her belly started at her rib cage and ended at the juts of her hip bones. Fangs had scored across her skin. A large portion of her torso on the right side was gone. Over the liver. It oozed. Katie had been eaten. “Katie,” Troll whispered. Shock and horror froze him immobile, as he had been when the rogue held him at bay. Beast’s hearing detected a faint thump.

“Her heart’s still beating,” I said, blood pumping once in her throat, up her carotid artery to her brain. “She’s still . . . with us.” Not quite alive. But not gone.

He gathered Katie in his arms, cradling her, pressing a hand over the gruesome hole in her stomach. Her blood covered him to the wrist. I handed him a pillow to press over her instead. He looked up from her, tears drying on his face. Visibly, he pulled himself together, the poise and self-control of an old soldier. “He busted all the phones. Disabled the security system. Get Leo.” Then he looked at me. “You’re naked.”

“I noticed. Did you see him? Did you get a look at his face?”

“No. All I could see was a blur. Vamp mind games.”

Get Leo, he had said. Not yet. I ran from the room, chasing the evolving scents of the rogue. Trying to understand. I had assumed the rogue’s compound scent was like a human’s, changing due to emotional stress, exercise, spices—or in this case, blood—eaten. But this was different. Its scent signature was actually changing, new scents evolving, wiping out others.

Nothing can change its basic, individual, singular, one-in-six-billion scent. We can wash until it’s faint, cover it with chemicals so it’s hard to distinguish, alter it with fear, illness, or age. But the basic, underlying scent, in its most elemental state, is unique, the distinct chemical reactions in the cells of one person, no matter how layered, masked, or compounded. But this guy’s scent wasn’t just compounding. It was altering. I followed it down the hall.

The crying, gurgling, and odor of fresh blood I had noted when I entered the house came strongly from the dining room. I put my back against the hall wall and checked behind me, swinging the weapon back and forth, up the hall and down. A sconce was broken. I stepped over shattered glass. My heart had stabilized with activity into a fast, hard rate, my breath deep and steady. The smell of my sweat was free from fear, marked by concentration and adrenaline.

The dining room was a shambles. The huge carved table was overturned, chairs tossed and broken. Blood was splattered across Katie’s paintings. But the rogue had come and gone. I said softly, “Who’s here? It’s Jane Yellowrock.”

A blond head came out from behind the table, hair streaked with gore. It was Indigo, blue eyes so wide that white showed all around. When she saw me, she scrambled to her feet, around the table, and into my side, bumping me hard. Trembling so forcefully even her skin quaked. She stank of fear.

“Help Miz A,” she whispered, pointing. “She’s bleeding bad.” A stocking-clad foot stuck out from the overturned table, a house shoe hanging from gnarled toes.

“Is your room upstairs?” I asked, my voice dropping low. She nodded yes, her teeth chattering with reaction. “Go up. Lock yourself in.” I pushed her gently toward the hallway. “Find a phone. Call Leo and tell him to get his ass over here. Then call 911. We need cops and ambulances.” Maybe a SWAT team. Or the military.

Indigo looked from me to the hallway. Her breath stopped.

“If he’s still here, he’s downstairs,” I said, barely controlling a frustrated growl. And I knew it was true. His scent on the air currents veered away from the stairs that led to the girls’ quarters. My lips peeled back. “Go!”

I shoved her and jumped over the table, landing beside a skirt-and-apron-covered leg that was attached to the stock inged foot. Miz A was wedged between the table and the wall, her face purpled with bruises and so pale she looked drained. Blood pumped from her upper arm.

I lifted a linen napkin from the floor and tied a tourniquet above the wound, around her arm. I used a long splinter of broken chair to twist it tight, and saw with satisfaction that the blood stopped pumping. Another body was half beneath her in a tangle of chains and blood. Christie. And she wasn’t breathing. I remembered the sound of gurgling.

I had no choice. I released the tourniquet. Blood flowed again, but more weakly this time. I stepped forward, my hip brushing the drapes away to reveal a slice of window and pale gray light. It was near dawn. Finally. Gently, in case she had suffered cervical spinal damage, I straightened Christie’s head, opening her airway. The instant intake of air was reassuring, but if I let go of her head, it was going to flop back again, closing her airway. And Miz A’s tourniquet wasn’t going to tighten all by itself.

“I can do it.”

I whipped the shotgun one-handed, animal fast, my finger on the trigger. It centered on Indigo’s white face as she danced back, both hands in the air, surrendering. “It’s just me!”

“I told you—”

“I have my cell.” She held out a bright pink, multikeyed phone, and slid around the table and under my arm, slapping the cell into my hand as she took Christie’s head, maintaining the airway. “It’s Leo.”

“You know how to keep a tourniquet tight?” I asked, pointing with the wireless.

I was gratified to see her handle the airway with a knee and the tourniquet with her hands. “Red Cross first aid course,” she said. She was still pale and wide-eyed, but seemed calmer. Sometimes it helped with panic to have a job to do.

“Fine.” I lifted a long splinter from the floor and set it beside her. “I reckon you know how to use a stake too.” She wet her lips and nodded. Not that the rogue would let her. I remembered the cloying tug of his mind. Stopping me. But it might help her to feel a little safer.

I put the phone to my ear as I moved back toward the hallway. “Hang on,” I said, then set the cell on an overturned chair. Once I was satisfied that the hallway was secure, I slung the weapon across my back and retook the phone.

“Okay. I know you can’t do the bat thing, but if you want Katie to live to sunset, you better get here before she goes to sleep.” Lore said that vamps who suffer total blood loss and can’t feed before they sleep either wake up rogue or don’t wake at all. I didn’t think Katie could feed. She was too far gone for that. But maybe Leo could help her.

He hesitated an instant, as if checking the time. “I am close. Open the front door.”

Weapon to my shoulder again, I sped to the front. Opened the door. Dull light splashed across the floor, filtering into the room. The security system was not in its console; it was splinters, the shattered security screens in the corner. A single red light flashed on and off.

From outside, I smelled the changing patterns of the rogue’s scent. He was gone. I slung the shotgun on its strap to rest behind my back and pushed the crosses back as well. Better not threaten the vamp I had just called for help, no matter how innocent the mistake. I could use some clothes, however. I looked at the drapery over two narrow windows and considered pulling a Scarlett O’Hara, but before I could act, I felt a cold wind. It whirled past my body, carrying with it Leo Pellissier’s scent.

“Shut the door,” he said from the hallway. Breathing hard. The list of reasons why vamps breathe is short; I could now add “doing the hundred-yard dash” to it. Leo’s usual papyrus scent was overlaid with a faint, scorched aroma, like browned steak with the juices trapped inside. I pushed the front door and it closed with a heavy thud, shutting out dawn light. I heard Leo move into Katie’s office. Heard him curse. And the office door shut.

Sirens sounded in the distance. I ran to the dining room. “Indigo?” The girl looked up, her face tight with concentration. “Cops and paramedics are here. Leo is with Katie in her office. Anyone who goes in there is likely become supper. Understand?” Vamps are unpredictable at night. I had no idea how bad that might get in daylight, one injured, and the other away from his coffin. Or wherever the old ones slept.

Indigo nodded, biting her cheek as if to keep from saying anything. Or maybe to keep from screaming.

“I’m going to dress and go after the rogue. As far as the cops are concerned, I was never here. Okay?” When she looked uncertain, I said, “If I’m in a holding cell for questioning, I can’t be chasing the rogue. I want to find his lair and stake his ass.”

Her face cleared. “I never saw you.” She looked at the wall and yelled to it, “Tia, it’s safe. You can come out now!” A small, hidden door opened in the wall, about four feet off the floor. Tia’s delicate face ducked down and out. “Get the door and bring the ambulance drivers in here,” Indigo said. “Don’t let them into Katie’s office. Not for anything. And Jane is going after that thing. So we’re not going to mention her. Okay?” Tia nodded with childlike certainty. Indigo was clearly at the top of the pecking order. “Go get the other girls out of hiding. Then open the front door, but only to the cops,” Indigo added. She looked at me. And unexpectedly grinned. “You’d better get dressed or some cop is going to think you’re one of us.”

I looked down, nodded, and lifted the stake in my hand as good-bye. I skirted out of the house, avoiding the broken glass, blood and gore. As dawn traced pink and purple and golden streaks across the sky, I jumped the wall and headed home.

I showered off fast to get rid of the scent of Katie’s blood and dressed for vamp hunting in jeans, leather, boots, silvered vamp-killers, crosses, a vial of holy water. Studded gloves and a collar made of sterling silver jump rings overlapping like chain mail, extra ammo, my Bible, and extra stakes went into the bike’s saddlebags. Within ten minutes after I entered the house, I was helmeted, the Benelli strapped to my back. I kick-started the bike and whipped around the block, past Katie’s front door, past the rolling, siren-screaming emergency vehicles. I picked up the rogue’s changing scent, the face shield of the helmet shoved up, out of the way, sunglasses protecting my eyes.

How did he change his scent? If he changed it so easily, and I lost it on the wind, I might not find him again. For that matter, if he could change it totally, maybe I had been near him and not noticed. I wondered why it changed as well as how. Like, maybe it wasn’t something he could consciously control. Like maybe Beast wasn’t totally wrong about the liver-eater stuff. Maybe he wasn’t just a rogue. Maybe he was something more.

Not only humans were being targeted by the rogue, and every rogue vamp in every case I knew of drank exclusively from humans; but here, at least one vamp had gone missing, the woman vamp whose disappearance had made Katie weep with grief. Ming. Then he went after Katie. Maybe there had been others. Or . . . maybe the rogue wasn’t just crazy nuts; maybe he ate livers for a medical reason. Maybe his diet lacked something that human blood wasn’t providing. Maybe he needed blood-rich vital organs like livers to stabilize him. And maybe vamp organs were better than human organs for that. Did that make him a liver-eater from legend? Crap, no. Part of his compound scent smelled like vamp. Ergo, he was a vamp.

The vision of the rogue flashed into my mind. Eating Katie. Like a wild animal tearing at prey, ripping into the organs. Upper and lower fangs. Beast was silent though I knew she was awake. And I knew she agreed. Beast ate that way, liver, heart, kidneys, lungs first. The most protein-, fat-, and mineral-rich parts first. So, he wasn’t a vamp?

I finally had to admit it; I had no idea what I was hunting. I filled my nostrils with scents as the city came to life, stirring for morning business, school, jobs. I tracked the rogue as he all but flew through the streets, the sun chasing him. If I didn’t lose his scent, I’d find where he slept today, maybe his main lair. And kill the bloody bastard. Collect my bonus. And get gone.