Skinwalker

CHAPTER 16 Are crosses weapons?

The rogue’s scent continued to change, growing hotter. I remembered the way Leo smelled when he flew through with the sun touching him—scorched meat tainting his usual peppery-almond-papyrus smell. In one way, the heating scent made the rogue easier to follow; in another it was harder. Breakfast smells of bacon and sausage sizzling were hitting the air too, obscuring the warm meat stink of the rogue. I wasn’t as good at parsing smells with my human nose, but I breathed through my mouth gently as I rode, and found the vamp’s scent evolving, like licorice, but more delicate. Maybe hazelnut.

And a hint of sweetgrass. At the thought, I slowed, breathing through my open mouth and nose, straining to find and separate it from the mix of city and river stink. Sweetgrass. One of the ceremonial herbs most loved by The People. I remembered the glimpse I had of his blood-covered face, eagle-sharp chin and nose. Yeah. Tsalagiyi: The thought burbled up from the dark of my mind. He could be a Cherokee turned by a vamp. I could be chasing someone like me.

I pulled onto the shoulder, stopped the bike, and put my boots to the pavement for balance. Closed my eyes. Smelled with everything I had in me, Beast alert and tense, her claws pricking my mind. Sweetgrass . . .

I pulled down the face shield of the helmet. Gunned the bike. Following.

The scent blasted at me under the edge of the shield, intensified, concentrated by speed as I wove through the streets, heading to the river, the same pathway taken when Beast tracked the rogue from the kill zone where he took down the prostitute. The exact same route. Prey, Beast whispered, picturing an animal track through the brush, low down, well worn. The liver-eater was using the same trail home.

Beast rose into my mind as we roared over the river, part of the I-90 snarl, taking the Greater New Orleans Bridge. The Mississippi was a huge sleeping snake, muddy brown and somnolent. And then, in the middle of the bridge, the rogue’s scent disappeared. Just . . . totally disappeared. Traffic was growing heavier. The breeze across the river was strengthening. I didn’t have much time to find it again.

Had I been in a car I would have been in trouble. Much more maneuverable, I wove from lane to lane, breaking traffic laws all over, to the far shore, still unable to pick up the scent. It took a while to get turned around as the road became the Westbank Expressway, snarled with traffic. In Beast form it hadn’t been rush hour, and I had been riding on top of a truck.

I took the bridge back twice, searching up and down the road, scenting the few off-ramps and smaller turnoffs for any hint of the thing I chased. He could have dropped off the expressway onto the ground below at any point. Or, for that matter, off the bridge into the river. Beast sent me a mental picture of a mountain lion with her face to the ground.

“Air scenting is a waste of time,” I agreed. I pulled the bike to the shoulder, stopped, put my boots down, and shoved back the face shield again. Yanked off my sunglasses. Disgusted.

Beast sent me another image, of a pile of poop. Then a third, of bark torn from a tree as if by claws or deer horns. And yet a fourth, of a big cat, hindquarters bent, forelegs stiff, depositing scent from anal scent glands onto a pile of leaves and sticks.

“Territory. You think I can find him by hunting his territory. Places he’s marked as his. But people don’t mark territory, and from what I’ve seen, neither do vamps.”

And Beast sent me an image of Katie’s Ladies. No sign in the window, no neon, but a street number in brass on the door. I hadn’t paid much attention to it. But I got the idea. Track the rogue vamp by things he does, has, and is, things that he doesn’t even realize are markers. Gotcha. And I could start at Aggie One Feather’s and the sweathouse out back. I strapped on my link-mail collar and my other protective equipment. Now I was loaded for vamp.

Aggie had to have heard the bike puttering down the road. It wasn’t like I could hide the sound of the motor. I half expected her to be waiting at the door, but she wasn’t. The house was silent when I rang the bell, except for the electronic hum of appliances and air conditioner, and the smell of cooked bacon. Twined with it all was the rotten stink of the rogue. Beast came alert, her mouth open in my mind, showing fangs. The rogue had come past the house, his skin probably smoking if the scorched smell was any indication, beating sunrise by seconds. The scorched stink made him a vamp. He was leaving mixed evidence everywhere, confusing.

He was fast, faster than anything I ever hunted. I wanted to ignore the protocol of asking permission and just race around back, following the scent. Eagerness gathered inside me, my heart beating hard. The rogue was close. The woods behind Aggie’s house were not just hunting grounds. He did have a lair near here.

I heard footsteps inside. Aggie stepped back in shock when she opened the door, one hand out as if to ward off a blow. Maybe it was the Benelli slung over my back. Maybe it was my expression. “It’s okay,” I said.

She halted backpedaling and swallowed, one fist over her heart, recovering her poise. “What do you want?” she asked, her voice not quite steady. What do you want? Not Come in. She held the door with one hand, barring my way.

I shook my head. There was no time for the polite necessities of dealing with an elder. “The rogue vamp came through your yard. I need to—” I stopped myself, knowing I was botching this, and said instead, “May I hunt in the property behind your house?”

She looked me over and settled herself as I remembered the elders doing, a relaxing of the facial muscles and shoulders, one hand on the door, still holding me out, the other still curled in a loose fist on her chest, the gesture protective. A memory hovered in the back of my mind, foggy, hazy, an old, old woman making the same motions, the remembrance almost in reach for an instant, before it wisped away like smoke. How long? How long ago was that a reality?

Aggie searched my face, her hand now fluttering down like a bird to a branch. I restrained my impatience, riding it into submission, took a deep breath, and blew it out. I waited as she studied me. It seemed a long time, though it couldn’t have been more than seconds.

At last, satisfied, she said, “Yes. You may hunt. But first, my mother wishes to meet with you.” She pushed the door open and stood aside.

“I don’t have time,” I said, my frustration breaking free. “It came by your house.”

“I know. My mother has had trouble sleeping since you told me about it hunting here. She was awake. Listening. She heard it. Felt its hunger. Its anger. We’ve been expecting you.” She stood aside.

Irritated, but not knowing what else to do, I huffed a sigh and started to walk into her house. Aggie held up a hand, stopping me. “Please. Leave your weapons at the door.”

I closed my eyes so she wouldn’t see the flash of fury. I did not have time for this. Then I remembered. To bring weapons into the house of an elder was to bring insult and violence, no matter if the weapons were intended for someone else. Forcing out the words through my teeth, I said curtly, “Sorry.” And though I was in a hurry, I was sorry. I didn’t intend to insult Aggie One Feather. Egini Agayvlge i. But the rogue was so close. . . .

I unstrapped the Benelli and set it on the front porch. If someone came by and took it, I was out a lot of money. I placed the stakes beside it, and the vamp-killers. All three of them. As I divested myself of my weapons, something began to happen to me. My motions began to slow. My frustration began to dissipate, as if seeping out through my pores along with the perspiration of the heated day, or maybe as if the frustration clung to the steel, wood, and silver and fell away from my limbs as I set the weapons aside.

I took off the link collar. The leather gloves. Sitting on the floor of the porch, I removed my boots. I should have taken them off the last time I came. I looked up at Aggie from my perch on the cement. “Are crosses weapons?”

“Do you think they are?”

“Yeah.” I pulled the crosses from my neck. Sock-footed, I stood and bowed my head, patient, waiting. “Gi yv ha,” she said, her voice soft. Come in. I walked into the house and Aggie closed the door, shutting out the world. I followed her through the small house to a tiny back bedroom. Sunlight spilled out, bright, from yellow walls. A double-sized bed was covered by a handmade quilt, pieces of cloth in different patterns stitched to look like a tree, roots at the foot, branches reaching high to pillows. A dresser stood in the corner near a comfortable-looking chair, where a wizened woman sat in quarter view, facing the windows.

She was hunched over, her black hair braided and dangling over her left shoulder. Not a hint of gray marred the tresses. Her coppery skin was crosshatched with lines, furrowed by wind and sun and time, and she turned her head when I stood in the doorway, gesturing me in. Her eyes were bright black buttons. “Gi yv ha,” she echoed her daughter, her voice the soft, whispered cadence of the very old ones, I recalled. “Gi yv ha.” She pointed to a stool near her.

I sat on it, the position putting my face low enough so she could see me from her bent posture. “Li si,” I said. Grandmother .

“My mother’s name is Ewi Tsagalili. Eva Chicalelee,” Aggie said from the door.

I remembered the story Aggie had told me about the little snowbird, Chickelili, whose soft voice wasn’t heard when she warned about the danger of the liver-eater. “Li si,” I said again, ducking my head.

“Pretty girl.” She touched my cheek with cool fingers. Traced the line of my jaw. “No. Not a girl. My eyes fail. You are . . . old,” the old woman said. My eyes flew to hers. Like her daughter, she saw too much. “Very old,” she said.

I stared at my hands, clasped in my lap.

“You carry time beneath your skin. Memories out of reach.”

“V v,” I said. Yes, in the language of The People. Cold seemed to blow along my bones, the ice of blizzard, of frozen winter, remembered from long ago, from the cold of the long trek, the Removal, the Trail of Tears. I shivered once, my sock-covered toes curling. Remembering. Cripes. I was there. . . .

She took her hand away and the memories fell with it. “You should go to water,” she said, speaking of the Cherokee healing ceremony that involved a ritual dunking in an icy stream.

“There is no time, Li si.”

The old woman puffed a breath, a half huff of negation. “When your battle is over, you will come here.” The proclamation wasn’t so much a command as a prophecy. I shivered again, my flesh cold as stone. “We will smudge you. And my daughter will take you to water. Your memories will begin to find their way back to you.”

“V v,” I said.

“My daughter has called you warrior woman. Blood chases after you, rides you. You pounce on your enemy, like a big cat onto prey.” I looked up fast and found her smiling, white dentures like perfect pearls in her mouth. “Go. Fight the enemy. And come back to us.”

I left the house without speaking to Aggie, who had vanished from the doorway of her mother’s room. Sitting in the sun on the heated porch, I pulled on my boots and strapped on my weapons. My fingers shook and the cold still filled my body, remembered cold from the hunger times. The sun warmed me only slowly. I closed my eyes and tilted my face to it, letting its rays touch me as the old woman’s fingers had. Giving myself a moment, just a moment, to breathe. To remember.

The scent of the rogue was fading in the heat. I pushed to my feet and jogged around the house, scenting. The past could wait.

I followed the rogue’s scent into the piney woods, along the nearly invisible path, tracking him into the forest. The soil was heavy with his scent, though with my human nose it lacked the full vibrancy of Beast’s hunt. I passed the places where the elder’s dogs had fed it, their bodies decaying, bones scattered on the damp ground. I smelled the carcasses of four cats, numerous opossums, rodents, and other animals. It hunted here often. And it was always hungry.

I moved slowly. I wasn’t in danger from the rogue . . . providing he was indeed a rogue vamp. He couldn’t stand sunlight. What else could he be? But if he had a human servant, he or she would be near, and human servants had no problem with sunlight. I stopped often and sniffed, rotten meat overlaying the odor of hazelnut and sweetgrass. I dropped to my knees, crawling, nose at the ground. No one was around to notice. The compound, complex scent contained a faded hint of tomatoes, sage, rosemary, and even fainter things I couldn’t name. I circled back where I could push through the brush, and sniffed. Moved from the small path into the trees. It had been a long time since fire had come through, and the underbrush was too thick to go far.

Beast thought the path well trod. To my eyes it was little more than a ribbon of smooth earth. The path was the only way deeper into the woods. Trees and head-high brush closed in. Birdcalls went silent. The slow-moving breeze was saturated with pine sap smell. Mosquitoes found me, buzzing. Was I entering a trap? Beast hadn’t found one, but I wasn’t Beast.

The trees opened out into a clearing remembered from Beast’s hunt. I hunched down, waiting. Nothing moved. As Beast had done, I circled the clearing, but found nothing, no other paths, no trace of scent leaving the woods. Carefully, testing for traps, I moved into the clearing. The soil was rank with the scent of the rogue, heavy with the reek of old blood. The evolving scent had come through here, as if several different beings used the place. Yet I was pretty sure they all were the same being, one undergoing a peculiar metamorphosis that affected his scent in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde revolutionary way. Not a skinwalker. He didn’t smell anything like me. Not a were, if such even existed. Elf? No. A vamp—a very sick, very wacky vamp.

After several minutes, I was satisfied that there was no trap hidden in the clearing. The liver-eater had come here. He hadn’t left here. I scuffed at the ground. Starting on the periphery, at the edge of the piney woods, I stomped on it, around and around, moving in a spiral, ever tighter, toward the interior. In the center of the clearing, the sound of the earth changed.

It rang hollow. Something was buried beneath the ground.

Cave, Beast thought. She was still awake, though sleepy. Its den. Its lair.

“Yeah,” I murmured. I squatted and brushed at pine needles, but they were stuck, glued to a door, set into the ground. Camouflage. I rocked back, resting on one knee and toe and the other foot. The wood of the door was brown, the same shade of the pine needles, weathered and worn, unexceptional looking, with raised panels and a brass knob, the metal pitted and darkened from weather and sun. It was something a middle-class homeowner might use as a front door. Sweat ran down my back and pooled under the mail collar. My breath was steady but too fast.

I swung the Benelli forward and palmed a stake. Reached for the handle. Not knowing what I would do if it was locked. It wasn’t. The door didn’t open as if hinged, but slid back, revealing a hole about three feet wide and five feet deep. A round tunnel moved from the hole north, like a rabbit’s burrow, but wider, big enough for a man to duck-walk. “Crap,” I whispered. I was going to have to go inside.

The walls of the tunnel were damp, roots sticking through and dangling. Mold smell and the decay of a freshly opened grave wafted out. Footsteps had smoothed and hardened the floor of the tunnel just below the opening. Odd-shaped prints dug into the ground just beyond, where the rogue had dropped to knees and hands, the toes of boots poking the ground. I studied the floor, making out only one set of prints. All boots. All the same. If the rogue had a human servant, it wasn’t here.

Eaten, Beast suggested.

I breathed in, sifting out scents: mold, pine roots rich with sap, water close by, wet earth, and something dead. Long dead. Just ahead. I dropped into the tunnel, landing with bent knees, Benelli at the ready, and knelt, letting my eyes adjust. As far as I could see, I was alone. I slung the shotgun back out of the way and palmed my favorite vamp-killer. Its blade was eighteen inches long, heavily silvered, the fuller deep to channel vamp blood away fast, and the hilt carved by Evan, Molly’s husband, from elkhorn. It felt like silvered luck in my palm. This would be close-in work, if I found the thing I was hunting.

Crawling into the earth, into the dark, along the horizontal part of the tunnel, I spotted a satchel. I opened it, revealing clothing. The rogue’s scents wafted out, the reek of the decay and the scent he had worn when he left Katie’s. Scent of the insane and the sane, maybe. Boots were beneath the satchel on their sides. Knee boots, like English riding boots. Bare footprints moved along the tunnel. The rogue had stripped and gone ahead. Naked. How weird was that.

Just ahead, my eyes picked out something white against the gloom. A skull stared at me. Tissue still clung to the bones, wisps of red hair. Leg bones and ribs, no longer attached to feet or vertebrae, were scattered along the tunnel. I lifted the closest bone. A femur. Teeth had scored deeply into it, predator fangs, upper and lower. I was pretty sure I had found the rogue’s human servant. I dropped the bone and crawled ahead. Into the dark.

The ground became wet; the roof sloped down. My jeans’ knees began soaking up water. The tunnel ended abruptly, the ceiling dipping down sharply onto a cement pipe, a county water main. I looked in, to see black water with only a narrow space at the top for airflow. I snapped a root from the tunnel wall and stuck it into the pipe. It didn’t touch bottom. I dropped it onto the surface of the water; the root was snatched away. Frustration brought a growl to my lips.

I eased through the tunnel, shuffling backward. The rogue had found the perfect daytime hiding place. An underground water main. Probably had dozens of potential exits. No way was I going diving. He might not need to breathe but I sure as heck did.

Back on the surface, I sat with my feet dangling into the pit and breathed shallowly. This was indeed a perfect daytime hiding place for a vamp: multiple exits, dark, the water system itself offering built-in escape routes. And if he did happen to come up here, where he left clothes, he’d catch my scent and be gone faster than I could react, even if I fired the Benelli the moment he broke the surface. I’d only get one shot, and if I didn’t kill him instantly, he’d be all over me and I’d be dinner. No point in laying a trap. He could come out anywhere, and probably had clothes at every opening. I was betting he used this site often because of Aggie and her family.

I sighed, stood, and walked back to Bitsa, mud drying in the steamy heat.