Skinwalker

CHAPTER 19 I’m psychic

He stopped, drawing in his shoulders, breathing deeply, a wet, hacking sound, familiar from Beast. The liver-eater threw his face to the night sky. And he spotted me.

His face was no longer human but a blunted snout, long fangs curving from upper and lower jaws. He had gone furry, a tawny pelt covering his face and arms and down his neck. Jaw elongating, ears rising, pointing. Claws larger than Beast’s by far. His shift stopped there, as if he had control enough to shift only partway. Or maybe he was stuck between forms. The stink of rot was gone, leaving the musky odor of male big cat.

Sabertooth, some part of me thought, stunned. Watching, I hesitated an instant. Missed an air current, an uprising thermal. The twisting air threw me off. I tumbled. My wings fluttered uselessly. I started to spin and reached out with wings and taloned feet, spreading myself, steadying my body in flight as the earth rose fast.

Below me, the sabertooth jumped, reaching high with a clawed hand. An impossible leap. I caught the air and rotated my shoulders, back-flapping hard. A cry escaped me, raptor anger. The rogue’s claws scraped through my flight feathers. I flailed the air, gaining altitude, and screamed again. The rogue landed on all fours. The back of his coat ripped with a dry, rasping tear, golden fur spilling out, a long and ragged mane, his back striped. The stones of a nearby crypt exploded, breaking with a crack and rumble. He was stealing mass. Stealing from stone. The front door of the nonchapel opened. Sabina stepped out.

I screamed at her to get back inside. But my throat and beak called only hoarse, cawing cries. The rogue roared, a sound not human. Turning from me, he raced toward the chapel.

I folded my wings. Dove at his nape. Hit with killing force. Slammed my beak into the base of his skull. A dull, echoing crack. Raked his scalp with talons. He stumbled, shook himself. I toppled to the side. Narrowly evaded his claws. Shoulders rotating, I shot back into the sky.

He leaped at the priestess. I dove, but I couldn’t help. Not against this creature, not in this form, maybe not in human form. I hadn’t understood, but Beast had known. No matter the evidence, this wasn’t a rogue vampire. This was liver-eater, a creature of darkest legend. A creature of black magic.

From the air, my body diving, I saw Sabina pull something from behind her back. Raise it aloft. It was a wood cross. Held in gloved hands. Light blazed from the cross. The creature roared, jumped, shied. Rotated in midair. He screamed a big cat’s pain, like a woman in travail. Landed facing away, a paw over his eyes. He raced away, his body shifting as he sprinted. He went four-footed, his clothes ripping away. A black-tipped mane writhed out. Another crypt exploded, stone shrapnel flying. Sabertooth lion . . . afraid of a cross like a vampire.

I back-flapped, reversing direction, my talons out, wings shoving against the air as if I pushed it away. On the nonchapel porch, Sabina dropped the cross and wrapped her arms across her middle, cradling herself. She moaned with pain, her eyes on me, pupils vamp black, her fangs fully extended. The reek of seared flesh and leather polluted the air.

She took a breath and shouted, “Prophecy!” Claws an inch long extended from the ends of burned suede gloves, constructed to leave the tips of her fingers exposed, like driving gloves or golf gloves, incongruous with the nunlike dress. I wanted to stay, to see that she was okay. Foolish desire for a vamp killer. Instead, I keened in anger and wheeled, following the black-magic skinwalker, who was repulsed by a cross.

He raced across the graveyard, between crypts and into the woods. I flew higher, found a current moving toward the river. Tracking him. There was no way for him to lose me, not in this form. My eyes could follow a mouse at a hundred yards.

He sprinted through the woods, looking often into the sky, at me. A mile later, he crossed a wide road, avoiding car headlights going both directions, running with vamp speed toward a well-lit area, a cul-de-sac where security lights shone, cars and trucks were parked in the street, and the small, square houses were dark. Air conditioners purred. A dog barked. Others took up the warning, a raucous chorus. One house had windows open, a television laugh track spilling into the dark, screen flickering. The rogue burst from the woods. Raced into the open. And dove through a half-open window into the house.

Through the window, I heard snarls, a choked cry. He’s killing someone. Nearby dogs went wild, growling, barking, throwing themselves against chain-link fencing,metal clanking and twanging. I screamed a challenge. Dove. Swooped close. But I was in the air, in winged form. I couldn’t help. And I couldn’t shift back into human form—there was nothing to take mass from, and even if I could risk it, I had left too much of myself back at the garden.

A woman cried out, the sounds gurgling away. I screamed back, damning the sky and the air and the liver-eater. I heard thumps from the house, hollow, reverberating, and then the sound of water falling. A shower, water hitting tile, thudding into a body for a long time. Then there was nothing. The house fell silent. Focusing tightly, I circled higher, watching. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. Helpless, I soared, current to current. The air cooled. A storm raced in on the gulf. Far off, lightning flickered on the dome of the sky. Clouds dimmed the stars. Dawn was near. And still I flew.

A door slammed. A man walked from the house. But it wasn’t the liver-eater. I folded my wings and plummeted close. This man was tall and redheaded, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and an unfamiliar scent. I caught an updraft, not sure what his presence meant. He got into a car. Cranked it up, and drove onto the adjoining street. I followed long enough to place where I was, where the house was, in my bird memory. Dawn was pinking the east sky.

If I met the sun in this form, I couldn’t change back until sunset. Conflicted, struggling with myself, I wheeled and beat the air, back to the garden where I had left most of my mass. I made it just in time, alighting on the topmost stone, wings out, tail feathers wide. Talons on the rocks, scritching rough and rasping. I put a talon on the nugget. And thought about Jane Yellowrock. Human. Scarred. Female. Earthbound. Mass to mass, stone to stone . . .

I pulled the memory of her snake to the surface. I melted into it. Into her. Rock rumbled beneath me. Pain ratcheted along my bones and I gasped. Fell onto the breaking boulder. It split wide. Dumped me to the ground. Knocked out my breath. Jagged rocks tumbled over me.

Stunned and hurting, I lay on the ground, staring at the sky. I was woozy, not sure what had happened, remembering only that I had been Bubo bubo. Hadn’t I? I looked down, proving to myself that I was human. Slowly, the memories came back to me. My stomach growled. I took up the gold nugget and placed the necklace over my head. A golden streak crossed from the east. A bird began to sing. A striped yellow cat walked along the fence between Katie’s place and my garden, watching me.

The boulders in the back garden hadn’t been so lucky. The top one had been reduced to rubble, its largest chunk less than half the size of the original, the smallest like pea gravel. I didn’t like storing mass. I didn’t understand how I did it, and I had the feeling it was dangerous. But so far, I had come back whole. Leaning against the stone, I touched the nugget.

When I turned eighteen and left the children’s home, I headed to the mountains, following some innate imperative north and west. After motoring my bike up Wolf Mountain as far as the dirt road, then a trail, led, I found myself at Horseshoe Rock. I hiked down from it into the woods. At the bottom of a narrow ravine, I scuffed through dry leaves and found a quartz boulder, weather stained, canted down the gully. Through the center of it ran a vein of gold.

In the dark and the rain, I crawled inside a sleeping bag and slept near the boulder. And for the first time in six years, though I had no necklace, no marrow to find the snake within, I shifted. Into a big cat. Beast spoke to me like an old friend, long silenced. For weeks, I/we hunted, ate, visited old dens. Hid from humans. Searched for my/ our progeny. All my kits were gone. All others of my kind were gone. I was the last one. Anywhere.

When I shifted back to human, I dug out a few nuggets of gold and tucked them into a pocket. I later had one strung on an adjustable, doubled gold chain, to carry it with me, while the rest went into a safe-deposit box for a rainy day. If I concentrated, I could sense the gold, no matter where I was, both the position of each nugget and the original vein in the boulder deep in the mountains. It gave me security, a sense of refuge. Of comfort.

Now, shaking, I hung the nugget necklace over my head and went inside. I made it to the stove as my cell rang. “Mol,” I answered, “I’m okay.”

“It’s me, Aunt Jane,” Angelina said, sniffling. “You scared me.”

Stunned, I said, “Huh?”

“Don’t be the bird no more, Aunt Jane. You coulda fell.” She was crying.

I clutched the cell, my frozen heart melting. “Okay, Angie baby. No more bird.”

“I love you,” she murmured. “I gotta go. But Mommy says we’re gonna come visit you.” And the call ended.

After a two-quart pot of oatmeal, one of Beast’s steaks grilled nearly rare—but not quite—under the oven broiler, and a whole pot of strong black tea, I felt more like myself, more or less, though I was emaciated and sick to my stomach, and was experiencing vertigo to the point that I held on to the cabinets or furniture when I walked. Angie was right. What I had done was dangerous. Really bad stupid.

Cold, unable to get warm even after steaming until the hot shower water cooled, I curled up under the covers with a pen and pad, and jotted down what I remembered about the night. The location of the chapel—not nonchapel, but chapel. It had contained a cross and a nun. Well, a priestess, but close enough. That made it a chapel, right? The half-remembered location of the house where the creature entered. Had he killed? The TV had been on. Had I mistaken a sound track for a real murder? Had the rogue-liver-eater gone to ground under the house? Questions, no answers, and a fractured, hazy memory.

My last coherent thought was of the priestess, holding aloft a wood cross, shining with light. Wood didn’t do that, not even in the presence of evil, which is why I always carry silver crosses. Weird. Just plain weird. And weirder still—a vamp holding a cross. How did she survive it? Halfway through my recollections and questions, I fell asleep.

I woke up feeling warm and annoyed. Someone was pounding on my door with loud, impatient fists. I wasn’t sure, but it may have been going on a long time. Couldn’t people just let a girl sleep in? Stiff and sore, I rolled out of bed, trailing covers, found the borrowed robe, and slid it on. Through the glass I saw the Joe, Rick LaFleur.

“Crap.” With ill grace, I opened the front door. “It better be freaking damn important.”

He was wearing jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat that he pushed back by the brim, raising it enough to take me in from head to bare toes. A slow perusal that went from inventory to sensual in a heartbeat. His scent changed from business to sex.

A grin spread across his face. “Please tell me you’re alone and lonely.” When I glared, he raised a hand and reached toward me, moving slowly, as if he thought he might get slapped. Or taken down in the street and left bruised. He brushed a strand of hair back from my face, behind my ear.

Beast woke with a sudden lurch. And purred. She drew a breath and fought me for control. It was payback time for becoming Bubo bubo. I felt her claws in my belly. In the old wound across my chest, tightening. Rick’s fingers trailed along my neck to the collar of my robe, a slow caress across my collarbone and down.

Mastering Beast, I caught his wrist before he got too friendly. “What do you want?” I snarled, holding his hand away from me. I was tickled pink that my voice showed only annoyance, not desire. But I had started to sweat behind my knees and along my spine. Beast wanted him. Badly.

“I came to see if you wanted to ride.”

“Do what?” Images poured into my mind of big cats mating, snarling and drawing blood.

His grin stretched with a kind of sexual teasing I had never mastered. “Horses,” he said, drawing out the word as if I were an imbecile and he could see the images in my mind. “You didn’t come to the club last night, so I came to see if you wanted to go horseback riding.” I dropped his wrist. He let it fall, grin in place.

“I didn’t sleep last night,” I said. “What time is it?”

“It’s four p.m., time to rise and shine, especially in the city that parties till dawn.” He pushed his way inside and I let him, which had to be really dumb. Beast wanted to reach out and slide a hand across his butt as he entered, but I resisted. No freaking way. Her usual payback was less sexual, more in the nature of refusing to shift back when it was time. I think I preferred her stubborn streak to her sensual one.

Beast tightened her claws on me, tearing. It hurt and I gasped in pain. “Put on the kettle,” I said. Spinning on one heel, I went to my room and shut the door. Firmly. Maybe a little more than firmly, but it made my point. I was not happy with Rick LaFleur. But he knew Anna, who had slept with the rogue—no, the liver-eater—when he smelled unstinky. And he had something going on with Antoine, which pricked my curiosity. I wanted to know what Rick knew, which meant I had to spend time with him, get to know him better, pick his brain, always assuming he had one. I needed to go check out the house the liver-eater-rogue had entered. But first—I needed food. A lot of food. I was unexpectedly ravenous.

I brushed my hair, braiding it halfway down my back, tying it off with some yarn I’d seen in a drawer. I dressed in jeans and a spaghetti-strap top. When I looked in the mirror I expected to see dark circles under my eyes, hollowed cheeks, pallid skin. But I looked pretty good, if a lot skin nier than yesterday. The oatmeal and steak for breakfast had helped, but my stomach was growling, and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere until I had protein.

Still barefoot, I padded back to the kitchen and took a steak out of the fridge. Four left. I had to go shopping. But manners pounded into me in the children’s home took precedence over my possible starvation, and I said, “Want a steak?”

“Sure. If you’re having one. Rare. Still kicking.”

Deep inside me, Beast rumbled approval. I flushed a bit at her reaction and wished she’d go back to sleep and find another way to torture me.

Rick sprawled in the chair Bruiser liked, long legs spread, taking up a lot of space. Aware of his body language, of the way his eyes lingered on me, I took out a second steak, co las, and a package of baby spinach put there by Troll. “Hey,” he said, “I got that info you wanted on the property owners out near Lake Catouatchie and the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park.”

I nodded, and when I could speak casually, asked, “Did you hear anything about a murder over near Westwego? Out that way?”

“Nope. Why?” When I shook my head, he didn’t press. “So. We going riding?”

“I’ll think about it after lunch,” I said, and lit the broiler.

I wasn’t able to turn the conversation around to Anna. How did you ask a guy if he was sleeping with the mayor’s wife, especially when you can’t explain why you have an inkling that he is? So, after a steak, microwaved potato, spinach salad with bacon dressing, and some idle conversation, I said, “Much as I like the idea of horseback riding, I need to bike out to Westwego. Rain check?”

Rick was again sprawled in his chair, one arm draped over his middle, the other resting over the back of the chair nearest, a Coke can dangling in his fingers. He shrugged. “I got nothing to do. I’ll ride out that way with you and we can stop and get supper on the way back. Make a date of it.” His eyes sparkled. “I know me a good diner, serves the best oyster po’boys in the state. Fried up crackling crisp. It’s not too far from Westwego.”

I shouldn’t take him with me, not when there might be a house full of dead bodies at the end of the ride. But instead of telling him no, I said, “Sure. Sounds like fun.” And could have slapped myself. But pragmatism reared its head. If I did find dead bodies, I’d need to call the cops, and I’d need a good story. I could practice on Rick.

It was after five when we headed out of town, the sun still far above the horizon and glaring, the air hot and muggy, burning where it hit bare skin, making us sweat beneath the riding clothes. I would heal from road rash if I took a tumble, but rapid healing was not something I wanted to explain. So I wore jeans, boots, and leather jacket despite the heat. Rush hour traffic was snarled everywhere, but having bikes meant we could weave through stopped traffic. Not exactly legal, but no one had ever stopped me, and Rick didn’t seem like the kind to wait patiently on hot asphalt, breathing exhaust fumes. He followed when I motored between stopped vehicles on 90 and across the bridge.

The traffic opened out on the other side of the Mississippi and I gunned the motor, Rick at my side. The world looked different from the road, and it took me a while to orient myself, but I eventually found my way to the exit that led through secondary and tertiary roads, and lastly to the crushed-shell drive of the vamp graveyard.

The drive was blocked by two hinged metal arms on solid stanchions, the arms connected by a chain and secured with a good lock. I slowed to make the transit around the stanchion on the left and gave the bike enough gas to coast along the curving drive, pulling off my helmet and looking the place over. It looked different from nighttime and twenty feet up. I didn’t know what he was waiting for but Rick eventually followed me. I was walking between crypts, the sun broiling down on my bare head when he caught up, his Frye boots crunching shells as he jogged.

“You did see the No Trespassing signs, didn’t you?” he said.

“Yeah.” I spotted the Pellissier mausoleum and checked the locks on the barred door. They were top quality and still secure, which meant that Katie was safe, or as safe as an undead drowned in the mixed blood of a hundred vamps and buried in a casket in a vault can be. I swiveled, spotting the St. Martin crypt, and strode that way, peeling out of my leather jacket as I walked. Sweat was dribbling down my spine, under my arms, and pooling in my waistband as I circled the small building. The St. Martin crypt was made of white, dry-stacked marble blocks. Its door was centered on the front between elegant pillars; two windows were close together on the back, windows matching the pointed, arched style of the chapel’s. The crypt had been badly damaged. A section of marble was missing from a corner, broken, as if it had been attacked with a mallet; I knew better. Stone shards were scattered around from the rogue’s mass change.

Rick swore softly. “Damn kids.” When I glanced at him, he said, “Graveyard vandalism is rampant in this part of the state.” I didn’t bother to enlighten him.

The building was fourteen by twelve feet, with a stone statue on the peaked roof—a six-foot-tall winged soldier with a bronze sword and shield. Except for the weapons and wings folded to his sides, he was naked. And exceptionally well endowed. I shook my head, not smiling, but wanting to. A sculptor’s vision of St. Martin? Or St. Martin’s vision of an angel?

Rick caught up with me again. “You do know this place belongs to the vampires, don’t you?” He sounded half amused, half speculative, as if he wondered how I found this place and why I was here, but didn’t really want to ask.

“Yeah.” I checked the locks and the vault’s barred door. The locks were old and broken. The bars were freshly bent, with shiny metal showing along stress lines. “So?” I opened the barred gate door and pushed on the wooden one behind it. It opened with a soft groan.

“So, the gate had electronic sensors,” he said. “They’ll send someone to check on us.”

I looked inside. “Good. They can clean this up.”

“This” was the destruction of five of the six coffins. They had once rested in stacked stone biers, three high, and each individual bier had a small marble door at the foot end. The marble doors were busted and the coffins inside had been pulled out and slammed against the back wall, if the scars there were a clue. The casket contents were scattered everywhere. Contrary to pulp fiction, vamps don’t blow away in ashes when they die unless they’re burned, so the floor was littered with bones, scraps of ancient dress, boots, a few grinning skulls—one with black hair attached—some gold coins, glittering jewelry, and rotting casket stuffing.

I gestured inside. Rick bent around the side of the door and looked in. “Crap almighty. Who—shit! Who did this? What’s that smell?” He backed quickly away, a hand over his mouth and nose.

I was already upwind. “Partly the dead and partly the rogue. I think he spent the day here yesterday.” I calculated the distance from the edge of the woods. It was farther than it looked from the air. “I think he knew the vamps would put Katie to earth, and he hoped to get at the blood in her coffin.”

“Blood in her coffin?”

I considered his expression and decided that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t known what the ceremony last night involved. I wondered if any human knew. I also decided it was smarter not to know the answers to his question and smarter not to share the information I had discovered. “Katie’s blood,” I lied. “He didn’t finish draining her.” Which was the truth.

“Uh-huh.”

I had to work on my lying. To keep from having to respond to his skepticism, I walked to the chapel. On the way, I passed the other crypt damaged by the rogue, stealing mass. It belonged to Clan Mearkanis, and the damage was greater, two square feet of stone blasted away.

I reached the chapel. The cross was still lying on the small porch, but no longer glowing or burning. I leaned over it, pulling off my sunglasses to get a better view. The wood was untouched, unscorched by the fire I had seen, and no fresh scent of smoke clung to it. It wasn’t made from carved or cut wood; the crosspieces looked like large splinters ripped from a timber.

The cross looked old, blackened by time and usage. The four ends were smoothed, as if they had been slightly rounded off by sandpaper and oiled. Or slowly shaped from the repeated caresses of human hands. The two pieces were held together by twisted metal, the finish a green verdigris that had bled into the wood it touched. Old, I thought. Old, old, old.

Rick took the narrow steps and bent to pick up the cross. I reacted without thinking. Grabbed the waistband of his jeans. And yanked. He flew past me. Made a soft oof when he landed, tumbling, expelling air. I stood, blocking the porch, waiting for him to catch his breath. He groaned and cursed. “Why the hell did you do that?” he grunted. “What did I do this time?”

“You were about to touch the cross,” I said. “It belongs to a vamp. She’d have smelled your scent on it. Not smart.”

“Vamps don’t own crosses,” he said. He pushed his elbows under him and half sat, legs splayed, feet digging into the shells, making little troughs that ended in mounds at his heels. “Besides, a simple ‘Hey you, stop’ would have worked just fine. Anybody ever tell you that you tend to overreact?”

“Yeah. A few people. Some of them are dead,” I said, letting my grin out. “I’m not.”

Rick blew out a sound of disgust and rolled to his knees. “What do you press, anyway? You got arms like a gorilla.” He made it to his feet and stood looking at me.

Press. As in bench press. I didn’t like his expression. I had received similar looks when I did something a normal human couldn’t, and I usually just made light of it. That worked, mostly because humans didn’t want to recognize otherness, difference, or oddity. They would rather stuff the unusual into an acceptable niche, someplace comfortable, tucking a square peg into a round hole. It was easier for them and a lot less scary.

I had a feeling Rick LaFleur wouldn’t accept my usual misdirection. There was a certain look in his eyes, harder and more speculative than I expected; not an average-Joe expression, but something else entirely. I couldn’t come up with a single response, so I shrugged and walked to the dead tree. What you can’t fight or explain away, you can sometimes ignore.

The tree was a dead sycamore, thin bark curling, exposing silvery wood beneath. The branch where I had sat was scored by raptor talons. A small feather rested on the ground, one of mine, and it felt really weird to see it. Had I lost part of me when I lost the feather? If I lost more of me, say if a leg were amputated while in animal form, what would I be missing when I shifted back? How much could I lose and still be me? I tucked the feather in my pocket.

Scanning the graveyard, I took in the layout, refamiliariz ing myself with the clan crypts. I wasn’t sure if I had missed it last night or forgotten it, but most of the mausoleums had statues on top. Each marble statue was male, winged, had a weapon and shield, and was naked. They could have been carved by the same sculptor, but the faces and bodies of each were different, all male, all beautiful. Angelic defenders of the demonic undead. Weird.

Rick walked up behind me and I studiously ignored him. I had seen enough, and I was ready to put some distance between the yank-Rick-off-the-porch episode and me. I flipped open my cell and dialed Bruiser as I headed back to the bikes. When he answered, I said, “You got alarms going off at the vamp graveyard?”

If I surprised him he didn’t indicate it. “Yes. We have a team on the way.”

“It’s me and Rick LaFleur. Tell them not to shoot us if they get here before we leave. And tell them the rogue did a lot of damage to the St. Martin and Mearkanis crypts last night. I think he spent some time in St. Martin’s, which means either he bypassed the security system, or he has access to it.”

Bruiser cursed once, eloquently, and his voice dropped into a near snarl when he asked, “You have any more news for me?”

“No. I’m done. Wait. There’s a cross on the chapel steps. Sabina dropped it, fighting off the rogue. Tell your guys how you want them to handle it.”

“How do you know she dropped it? And how do you know about Sabina?” His tone was suspicious, the way a murder investigator’s voice is suspicious when he finds a body and a bloody suspect standing over it. Holding the murder weapon.

I grinned and straddled my bike. “I’m psychic.” I closed the phone and geared up, ignoring Rick as he followed my lead. I got the feeling that he didn’t like playing follow the leader, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. I also had the feeling that he was more than he let on. And I wasn’t sure what I should do about that. Which made us even, in some strange kinda way.

I kick-started the bike, set my sunglasses in place, leaving the face shield up, out of the way, and wheeled down the drive. It was time to see the house the rogue dived into last night.