Death's Rival (10 page)

“That’s all I can ask.”

“Legs, you ask everything of a man.”

The connection ended and I had no idea what he meant.

* * *

I arrived back at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport at ten a.m., exhausted,
sleepless, and shaky from lack of food. Peanuts don’t go far when one is stuck on
a plane for hours. I dragged into my freebie house and stared longingly at the stove.
I wanted food, but I needed something else. I divested myself of anything that might
be considered a weapon—including the two hair sticks and the magic amulet, the pocket
watch I’d stolen off the blood-servant in Sedona. I tucked it into the Lucchese boot
box I use for jewelry. The box wasn’t pretty, but it did the trick.

After a quick shower, I pulled on clean jeans and a tee and checked my e-mail. I had
a succinct one from Reach. It read “Subjects on video at airport are not identified.
Not in any database.”

“I can’t get a break here,” I muttered. Irritated, I took off on Bitsa. I had things
I needed to know, things that might be stuck somewhere inside me, like grease and
hair in a drain, or trees in a creek, backing things up. I was frustrated and tired
and wanted to hit something. Not a good way to be when I needed to think clearly.

I made my way out of the city to Aggie One Feather’s house. Aggie was a Cherokee elder,
and I thought her mother might be a Cherokee shaman—sha-woman?—of sorts, not that
I knew enough of my own heritage to say for sure if that was even possible. But Aggie
had been working with me to find my past, the memories that were stuck so far deep
inside me that they had become part of the framework of who I was, rather than separate
moments that helped to shape me. And while I didn’t like a lot of the things that
had shaken loose inside me, I was learning stuff I needed, and, as she put it, freeing
up my spirit to continue on its journey.

In the Lake Cataouatchie area—which is mostly mosquito-infested swamp—I pulled into
the shell-asphalt street, smelling smoke, and onto Aggie’s white crushed-shell driveway.
The house was small, a 1950s gray, asbestos-shingled house of maybe twelve hundred
square feet, with a screened porch in back. The house was well kept, with charcoal
trim and a garden that smelled of tomatoes and herbs in the morning warmth.

At the back of the property was a small building, a wood hut with a metal roof—a sweathouse—and
smoke was leaking from it, smoke that carried the scents of my past, herbed smoke
infused with distant memories, all clouded with fear and blood. Smoke that spoke of
the power of The People.
Tsalagiyi
—Cherokee, to the white man.

I turned off the bike and set the kickstand. Propped the helmet on the seat and walked
up the drive, shells crunching under my feet. Not much stone in the delta; they used
what was handy, shells. I took the steps to the porch, and pushed the bell. It dinged
inside. Almost instantly, a slender, black-haired woman in jeans and a silk tank opened
the door. Her face was composed, her eyes were calm, but she didn’t speak. She just
looked at me. Waiting. “
Egini Agayvlge i,
” I said in the speech of The People. “Will you take me to sweat?”

For a long moment, she said nothing, studying my face, reading my body language, which
always gave away too much to her. “I have taken one to sweat today already. I am tired.
Come back tomorrow.”

She started to close the door and I said, quickly, “Please.”

Her eyes narrowed, but the door stopped closing. “
Dalonige i Digadoli,
Golden Eyes Golden Rock,” she said with something like asperity, “you have hidden
yourself away from the eyes of your own spirit, hidden yourself away from me, so that
I cannot help you. What do you seek?”

“To know why nothing matters but finishing a job. To know why I’d compromise everything
to see through to the end of a responsibility I accepted, even when it hurts me and
the people I love. To see why I remember an image of a bearded man, tortured and hanging
from antlers.”

“You killed a man in your hotel room,” she accused, her tone without heat. “You killed
the sister of your friend. I saw it on TV.”

I closed my eyes, weariness making me sway on my feet. “Yes.”

“Go add wood to the coals. Make yourself ready. Clear your mind of useless thoughts
and unnecessary pain. I will come.” The door closed in my face. Rudeness from an elder
of The People was almost unheard of, but I had a way of pushing people’s buttons.
Go, me.

In the back of the windowless hut, hidden from the street, I stripped and hung my
clothes on a hook, ran cold water over me from the high spigot, dried off on a clean,
coarsely woven length of cloth, and tied it around me. I ducked and entered the low
sweathouse, stepping onto the clay floor.

I hadn’t told Aggie what I was, but she knew bits and pieces of my story and probably
guessed a lot more. I had originally come here, hoping she could help me find the
child that I once had been so very long ago, before Beast, before I lost my memories,
before the hunger times, which I remembered only vaguely, and before I was found wandering
in the Appalachian Mountains, scared, scarred, naked, and with almost no memory of
human language. I kept coming back because she was doing much more than I asked. She
was showing me also who I was now.

Finding an elder here in New Orleans shouldn’t have been a surprise—The People lived
all over the States—but it still felt like a weird coincidence the universe tossed
my way, like scraps to a dog. Like fate or kismet or whatever, though I didn’t believe
in any of that stuff.

I stirred the coals and added cedar kindling. Flames rushed up and lit the twigs,
sending shadows dancing over the wood walls. Aggie had done some work (or hired it
out, but I was betting on her doing it herself) in the sweathouse. She had added some
more river rocks to the fire ring, and I pushed them closer to the flames. They were
already warm to my hands, but not warm enough for what Aggie wanted. She had replaced
the seating. A six-foot-long log had been cut in half lengthwise, sanded smooth on
the flat sides, and lacquered until the benches shone. Then they had been placed on
low cradle-shaped stands so people could sit on them instead of on the clay floor.
These low benches were slightly higher than the old ones. I was guessing that old
knees were more comfortable at that height. Maybe she was the president of the local
elders, and they held elder meetings here. Assuming she wasn’t the only elder round
about. And assuming they held meetings. . . .

I was clouding my mind with inanities. I had a feeling that Aggie would make me wait
until she thought I had gotten past that part of the process to make an appearance.
“Make yourself ready. Clear your mind of useless thoughts and unnecessary pain
.
”
Yeah. She’d make me wait. I sighed and added more wood. Time passed. The wood crackled
and hissed. I moved from the log to the floor, sitting as modestly one could in a
sweathouse, and I sweated.

When the coals had burned down and the rocks had taken their heat, I dipped water
over them with the hand-carved wooden ladle, from the Cherokee stoneware pitcher that
I coveted. Steam rose, and I sweated some more. When the coals were a red glow below
a coating of ash, I reached into a woven basket and pulled out a tied bundle of dried
herbs, like a very fat cigar: twigs of rosemary, sage, tobacco, which was a new one,
a hint of camphor, other things I couldn’t identify, lots of sweetgrass. I set it
in the coals. The herbs smoked and the smell filled the sweathouse.

I closed my eyes and dropped into the dark of my own soul. Into the cavernlike place
where memories of the
Tsalagiyi
resided. The firelit, smoky cave of my soul home. I had been here before, in this
half-remembered cavern with its sloped ceilings and shifting midnight shadows, with
the far-off plink of dripping water and the scent of burning herbs, of the steady
beat of a tribal drum, hypnotic and slow.

I heard the door of the sweathouse open, a shaft of light across my lowered lids,
quickly darkened as the door closed. Bare feet padded close. Aggie sat across from
me in the cavern of my soul home. I couldn’t smell her scent, only sweetgrass and
smoke and a single breath of the cool, damp air of the cave of my soul.

Warm, wet heat and darkness surrounded us, steam rising from red coals and heated
rocks piled in the center of my spirit place. She started music—drums, steady, resonant.
I think I slept. And dreamed.

Long hours later, I heard a voice in my dreams, softer than the quiet drums.
“Aquetsi, ageyutsa.”
Granddaughter
 . . . “Tell me what you did not finish.”

My mouth refused to open, as if I was caught in a dream, trapped, trapped,
trapped
. I sucked in a breath so deep and hard it hurt my ribs. I forced open my lids and
they parted sluggishly, revealing Aggie through my tangled eyelashes. Aggie’s eyes
were black in the dark, calm and quiet, like deep pools of water in a slow mountain
stream. She cocked her head, as if she were a robin staring at a juicy worm. We were
no longer in the sweathouse, but in the cave where she took me sometimes, and I didn’t
know if this was vision or reality or some esoteric blending of the two.

The drum was deep, a reverberating beat, hollow against the cavern walls of my mind.
A heartbeat of sound, steady and soothing. I couldn’t get my mouth to work to ask
my question. I didn’t know what
to
ask.

Aggie smiled into the scented darkness. “You are stubborn. You are full of resentment.
Only failure of the worst sort would cause you to resent failure. To fear it. To grow
a tough hide that would make you never back down. Only failure.” She reached into
the basket and brought out another smudge stick, fat and aromatic even before she
held it to the fire. Yellow flames licked out and up, and light caught her copper-colored
cheeks and forehead, darkening the shadows at the sides of her mouth, making her look
older than she really was. Drawing out her mouth into a muzzle.
Like a wolf.

I tried to tense, but my muscles failed me. I tried to push upright, but the world
whirled around me as if I were drunk or stoned. Aggie’s mother was
ani waya
, Wolf Clan, Eastern Cherokee. Her father was Wild Potato Clan,
ani godigewi
, Western Cherokee. Aggie had magic I had only guessed at. Her snout stretched out.
Her shadow on the cavern wall was all wolf. Teeth, wolf teeth, glinted in the firelight.

“My, what big teeth you have, Grandmother,” I mumbled.

I knew I was trapped in a dream when the wolf laughed. She held the smoking smudge
stick into the air and saluted the four directions, north, east, south, west, and
north again. The trailing smoke made a pale, thinning square in the darkness. “What
did you fail at,
Dalonige i Digadoli
?”

I recalled a vision of shadows on the wall. A man riding a woman. My mother. Remembered
the stink of semen and death. The soft cries of fear and pain. The slick feel of cooling
blood. “I didn’t kill the killer of my father. I didn’t kill the white men who raped
my mother.” I told the story of the fractured memories.

CHAPTER SIX

I Never Had a Chance to Say Good-bye

“You were a child of five. You were no match for the white man.” Through my tangled
lashes, I saw Aggie One Feather’s wolf snout tilt, like a robin, the motion unsettling,
part wolf, part bird, all dream.

“I swore an oath on my father’s blood,” I said. “I wiped it on my face, in promise.”

“Are you certain you failed?” Her head tilted far to the side. “Who did you tell of
this great crime? Who did you go to?”

Instantly, I remembered the sharp stick piercing my foot as I ran through the dark,
my pale nightgown catching the moonlight through the stalks of corn. The corn towered
over my head, the garden never seeming so large in the daylight. Down the hill to
my grandmother’s house, the longhouse where she lived with her daughters and their
husbands. This was a new memory, and my breath caught before I said, unsteadily, “I
went to
Uni Lisi
, grandmother of many children,
Elisi
, the mother of my father.” I saw my hand banging on the door. Pounding on it. Saw
the door open and the light/heat/brilliant colors blast out. Voices so loud they pulsed
against my eardrums. My screaming. The women grabbing up weapons. A hoe. A long knife.
My grandmother holding a shotgun. And the long horrible run back through the corn,
racing ahead,
Elisi
letting me lead the way.

In the sweathouse, my heart raced with an uneven beat, like a broken drum, as my body
reacted to the memory and its terror. I saw again my mother, in a heap on the ground,
naked in the moonlight. The white men gone. The smell of horses. And man stuff. The
sound of her crying. The warrior-woman, my grandmother, putting me on a horse, in
front of her, and galloping into the night, her arm a band holding me close. The smell
of her sweat and her anger. The smell of the pelt she carried. The feel of her beast
roiling under her skin
—tlvdatsi
—mountain lion. Yet the pelt she carried over her shoulder was black.

A black panther,
my white mind murmured.
Elisi was a skinwalker. Like me. A protector of the Cherokee, a warrior of the tribe.

The door opened, the vision shattered. I sat up.

Aggie One Feather stood in the doorway, fully human, freshly dressed in the coarse
woven robe she wore in a sweat ceremony. Just entering for the session. “I was delayed.
My apologies.”

“No need to be sorry,” I said, sitting up, standing, my legs feeling wobbly. “But
I think I’m done for the day. Can I come back? Soon?”

Aggie tilted her head, just like she had in my vision, but there the resemblance ended.
“Certainly. If you’re sure?”

“Very sure. Thank you.”

* * *

Back home, I showered, dressed, and fell on my bed, face in the pillow. It smelled
musty. I needed to change the sheets. Wash clothes. Maybe get a life. On that thought,
I slept.

* * *

The sun was setting when I heard a ringing and forced myself awake.

I was in my house, or, rather, the house I was using as long as I worked for the blood-master
of New Orleans. It was a nice house, two hundred years old, give or take, remodeled
to give it all the modern amenities and still have all the old-world charm, at a nice
address in the Quarter.

Yawning, I made my way to the kitchen to see a cell phone lying on two notes, both
signed by Troll, Katie’s primo blood-servant and protector. The top note said “Frm:
Derek Lee. Angel Tit had no luck with New York contacts.” The second was an invitation
to dinner from Katie and her girls. I had missed the girls who lived and worked at
Katie’s, and it would be the first relaxing moment in my life recently. I needed some
relaxing. The cell started ringing again, so I answered. And heard gunfire. And Bruiser
shouting.

“Jane! Are you in New Orleans? We’re under attack!” The phone shifted and I heard
him shouting to the side, muffled, “Get him out of here! Alejandro, Estavan, take
four men and get our master to Katie’s! Set up a perimeter.
Keep them safe!
Hildebert, Koun, take over on the battlefield. Lorraine, Bettina, go with Alejandro.
Guard your master and his heir! I charge you with—”

“I am going nowhere. This is my home! I
stay!
” Leo shouted, his voice guttural and vamped out. Even over the phone I could feel
the power he was drawing upon, the power of all his clan. “I will not run from my
enemies!”

Beast flooded into my system. Phone to my ear, I raced to the side door. I had heard
a knock while I slept and hoped it was a delivery. I nearly ripped the door off its
hinges. It slammed back against the wall, and I spotted the shipping containers full
of my weapons.

“You are of no use to us burned alive,” Bruiser said, going all upper-class British.
“Get to a place of safety until we can formulate a plan. Please, Master!”

Master?
Things were
bad
if he was calling Leo
Master
. I lifted the heavy containers and carried them as fast as I could to my bed. Gunfire
sounded so close I held the phone away from my ear. I heard sirens, fire and police,
and Bruiser’s voice, grunting. I knew that sound, that specific tone of pain. He was
hit. Hit bad. The phone fell and clattered away.

I never had a chance to say good-bye to my father. I had no intention of letting that
happen to me again. I tore off the top of the shipping boxes and started to reassemble
my weapons.

* * *

I bent over Bitsa, the wind tangling my hair, which streamed out in the wind, chilling
the necklace of interlocked links that protected my throat from vamp-fang—the new
necklace of silver-plated titanium. I took the old bridge over the Mississippi, the
pebbled roadway a patterned hum beneath the tires, weaving between cars and trucks
of evening traffic, ignoring both speed and safety laws with abandon. I nearly flew
into the countryside on the far side of the river. I could see the light on the horizon
miles away. A fire. A big fire.

The smell of smoke was hot on the wind. Wood, plastic, metal, brick, each has its
own scent markers as it burns. So does the smell of burning flesh. Human. Foul and
horrible, like spoiled pork. I shifted my weight forward and lowered my head over
Bitsa, the Harley moving at the peak of her engineering specs, taking curves at top
speed. Beast shared her night sight, the shadows glowing green and silver and blue.
Her reflexes allowing me to handle the greater speed.
Mine,
she whispered into my thoughts.
Mine
.

I slowed, turning into the long drive, zigzagging between cars and fire trucks and
emergency trucks, red, white, and blue lights strobing the dark, the artificial lights
lost beneath the red-orange blaze of the conflagration. Men and women shouted. Water
plumed up and over, aiming into broken dormer windows on the roof of the old wooden
clan home. Smoke and fire billowed out from the windows of every story; sparks and
flames leaped high into the air. Fire demons—tornadoes that sometimes formed above
raging fires, sucking the flames into the gyre—spun high above the madness. The smell
of magic tingled on the air, hot and spicy as cactus spines. Gunshots sounded in the
distance, punctuated by muffled screams and shouted orders. Ahead, near the flames,
I smelled Bruiser on the air, Bruiser and his blood, a lot of blood.

I dropped my Harley and helmet against a tree far from the fire, where the shadows
would hide the Benelli strapped to the bike. I raced in, bypassing the cops who tried
to stop me. Choosing the ambulance surrounded by the most people, I pushed through
the throng, tripped over a hose. Shook off a hand that tried to pull me back. Rounded
the ambulance, my boots grinding with my speed. Smelling the blood even over the smoke.
Bruiser’s blood. Everything in my life narrowed to that one scent. I dodged another
man who tried to stop me, shouting it was too dangerous for onlookers. I jumped into
the ambulance. Bent over Bruiser, touched his shoulder, and leaned in to breathe in
his scent, my unbound hair sliding forward.

His shirt had been half cut away, bloody rags still on one arm and half tucked into
his trousers. Blood smeared his chest, as did brown Betadine and swathes of white
bandages centered on his upper left shoulder and his right chest below his pec. Bags
of clear fluid hung from IV stands; one was a plasma expander, the other normal saline.
His eyes were closed and his skin was chilled where my hands brushed over his chest.
But he was full of vamp blood. He would have some residual accelerated healing.

I tried to say something, anything, thinking,
Are you okay?
Or something like that. Something normal. Instead what growled out of my mouth was
“If you bleed to death, I’ll kill you and Leo both.”

A faint smile touched his face, but before he could reply, the paramedic said, “Ma’am,
unless you’re next of kin, get out, you.” Frenchy patois. Cajun background.

“She’s next of kin,” Bruiser said, without opening his eyes.

“Your wife, she is?” The paramedic sounded incredulous. I ignored him.

“Sure. She can make any medical decisions for me. My lawyer has the papers.”

Which was news to me, if it was true. And
wife?
I shook that away, even as Beast purred a satisfied
Mine
. “What happened?” I asked, knowing it had something to do with my trips and the vamp
who was attacking other MOCs. “This is my fault,” I said.

He tried to laugh, but his breath caught with pain. I thought I heard something wet
and gurgly in his chest, but the paramedic didn’t seem concerned and the sound stopped.

When he could speak, he said, “You struck the match? Carried the gasoline? Tried to
kill my friend and master?”

Inside, I flinched at the two terms used together for Leo, who was both vamp and monster,
but I kept it there, in the dark inside me. I shook my head no.

“Just after moonrise, Leo was sitting down to breakfast,” Bruiser said. “We heard
gunfire. Vamps and blood-servants attacked, killed the gardeners and three security
men in the first ten seconds. Inside of fifteen they had us pinned down inside. By
thirty seconds, they had firebombed the house and were taking off on trail bikes that
they must have pushed in. Then we heard the second wave, gunfire from the surrounding
property. It was well coordinated. They were professionals, well trained, and they
are still fighting out there.” He lifted a finger and pointed off behind the house.
“How can any of that be your fault?”

I had seen the property from an all-terrain vehicle during my review of Leo’s security
systems, and hadn’t liked the easy access to the house. But making Leo move into town
and give up his family home hadn’t been an option. When I’d suggested the move, he
had lifted a narrow black brow and uttered a laconic “No.” I hadn’t argued and I should
have. Now that decision was back to bite Leo. Worse was the knowledge that I was even
more involved in today’s fiasco.

“It’s my fault because the man I killed in my hotel room was the Enforcer of the master
vamp who’s challenging and taking other vamps’ territory.”

Faint humor touched his features, his closed eyes crinkling slightly. “Why do you
think that?”

“Leo’s enemy left me a letter on a dead man.”

“A? Z? Q?” the paramedic asked, and laughed at his own joke.

Bruiser’s brown eyes came open slowly, as if they had been glued together. There was
pain in his gaze, but also intense concentration and focus. He lifted a finger and
touched my hand. I almost jerked away from the contact, his flesh as cold as a vamp’s,
but his fingers closed over mine. “When you first saw him in your hotel room, was
his gun drawn?”

The question surprised me nearly as much as the gesture. “I don’t know.” I stared
into his eyes, unable to block out his study of me. Unable to not remember. It had
been months, and what I recalled about the man had been the initial lack of scent
on his person. Unscented deodorant, no cologne, only gun oil and lubricants to mark
him as armed, and later, the very,
very
faint taint of his master—which I could now identify as beerlike, hops and fermentation
and the sweet smell of blood. I had been naked, asleep, when he entered the hotel
suite, my body hidden behind the mounded bed linens. I had risen, whirling, grabbed
the statue beside the bed, and thrown it as both a diversion and a weapon, diving
for my Walther 380. His arm had been coming up. “He was turned to the side, right
arm down and out of sight, looking at my weapons, going through my blades and stakes
with his left hand, when I threw the statue at him. It’s all in the police reports.
I didn’t lie about anything.”

“You shot first?”

I hadn’t actually seen the weapon until he fired. Spats of sound from an illegal suppressor,
like books dropping flat from shoulder height. Then the sound of my weapons firing.
The recoil in wrist and shoulder. The stench of gunfire and blood. “No. He shot first.”
Which meant that my attacker had been already holding a drawn weapon. An odd tightness
in my chest eased.

“Self-defense. Did he say anything?”

“No. He went unconscious fast, even though there wasn’t a lot of blood. I thought
he was going to live until they told me that he . . . died. Later.”

“The letter the master Mithran left you. Where is it?”

I slipped my hand from his and pulled the envelope from my pocket. He chuckled, the
laughter holding more pain than comedy. “Read it to me.”

I unfolded it and read the letter aloud. When I was done, he took the single page
and stared at the words. I heard something stutter-thump-give-way, something from
inside
him. Bruiser’s hand fell to his stomach, the letter fluttering to the floor. The
paramedic cursed and pushed me to the side. Bruiser didn’t take another breath, his
chest sunken in and still. I pulled the new cell and speed-dialed a landline number
I seldom called. I was shocked when Katie—who hated phones—answered with my name,
“Jane Yellowrock.” There was rage in the words, but I didn’t think it was directed
at me.