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.
CHAPTER 20
Dang. Brass Knuckles are Cool!
It was Sunday, and I left for church in plenty of time for the early service. I hadn’t gone since Rick and I started dating, maybe because he was Roman Catholic and I was nondenominational, or maybe because I was sleeping with him without the benefit of a ring on my finger and guilt pricked me every time I thought about God. Guilt was one big drawback of religion, I thought sourly as Bitsa pootered along.
I got there at sunrise and parked under the tree in the little parking lot of the strip mall where the church rented space, set Bitsa’s kickstand, pulled my Bible out of the saddlebag, and went inside, using the little ladies’ room to change from riding jeans into a skirt. Not that anyone would have said anything about my jeans, even on Sunday morning, but I hadn’t been brought up that way.The church was empty and dim, though I could smell the preacher, an earnest, slender little guy who looked about twelve, so he was here someplace. I sat in the third row and closed my eyes, the Bible on my lap. I had a lot to repent of before I’d be clean enough inside to take the sacrament. And some of the things I’d done, like fighting, saying a few cuss-words that had seemed appropriate at the time, and sleeping with Rick, I didn’t really want to repent of, so I had some praying and thinking to do. I’d been brought up to be better than the person I had become. I knew my housemother never imagined, not in her wildest dreams, that I’d be a rogue vamp killer for hire, sleeping with a cop outside of wedlock, making out with a blood-servant in my shower, letting a witch live under my roof . . . Yeah. She’d be unhappy with me. I was unhappy with myself, especially the part about making out with Bruiser.