them to my body to remove the stink of fear-sweat and the stubborn reek of smoke. Afterward, I dried off, braided my hair, and dressed. The house was dark and silent as I walked to Bitsa. I helmeted up, kick-started her, and drove into the night.
The ride over the river and back into the French Quarter was fast, but less furious than the one this morning. My mind was quiet, my spirit was quiet, and even my emotions were quiet. I was quietness all inside me. I had found a part of me that I had lost. It wasn’t a pretty part, but it tied the lost pieces together. I was born of a war clan. Of a skinwalker clan. We led our people into battle, tribe against tribe, tribe against the white man. When there was no war, we were the executioners.
I remembered the vision of one of the men who had raped my mother, hanging, bucking his body, fighting to get free as the women took their time with him. I blinked the image away, but it was burned into my mind, the memory, once found, now a part of me.
My grandmother had not let evil lie. She had searched the evil ones out, had hunted them down, and killed them in the worst way possible, which was the ancient, long-forgotten way of her skinwalker culture. She had brought justice to the people who depended on her. But there was a narrow, thin line between justice and sadism. Between justice and evil. My grandmother had surely crossed that line, had dumped gallons of blood onto it, obscuring it totally. I wasn’t sure she was any better than the men who had killed my father.
No wonder skinwalkers went crazy when we got old, if we carried that kind of thing with us, inside us. Vengeance and justice were what we did. It was what I was. That spiritual constraint and demand for justice was why I had become a rogue-vamp hunter. Was why I was so good at killing. Living with it had never been easy, but at least I understood more of who I was now, more of why I made the choices I made. And more of the guilt that rested in my heart, a guilt that was trying to reconcile the duties of the skinwalker with the rules of the Christian God.
Now I remembered it. I remembered it all, every cut, every scream, and the joyful rage that rose in me when he died at my hand. I was five years old.
And now I could chose who I would be in the face of evil, in the face of life’s problems, in the face of a vampire who had taken what I stupidly offered him. In the face of who I could become. If I lived long enough, I could decide—rationally and without emotion—how I would deal with Leo’s blood theft. Leo, who was a scorpion with a stinger, and who acted only according to his nature, just as I had, when I was a five-year-old skinwalker, only recently awakened to my shape-changing gifts.
I pulled into the side yard of my freebie house and locked the gate behind me. I lifted Bitsa to the porch and leaned her against the house wall, leaving the helmet on Bitsa’s seat. As I gathered my weapons, I smelled steaks on the grill in the backyard, and my stomach growled like a wild animal. I entered my house, smelling Kid—freshly showered—and Eli, and beer, and potatoes, and . . . Bruiser.
I stopped in the kitchen, placing my guests. They were sitting in the living room, a football game on the TV, and they were talking beer—brands, hops, distilleries. Guy talk. The kitchen table was set for four. I pushed a plate over and placed my weapons with a clatter in the cleared spot, knowing the men had to have heard me—Bitsa alone could wake the undead. I took a beer from the fridge and twisted off the top, drinking it down fast. The alcohol hit my system like a bomb, even with my skinwalker metabolism. I was dry as a bone and the sudden rush felt wonderful. I finished the beer and picked the weapons back up.
I walked silently through the house, avoiding the men, and into my room. I stopped, placed the weapons on the bed, and dropped my blood-stiff clothes to the floor. I dressed in black jeans and a yellow, long-sleeved T-shirt, smoothed and braided my hair, the long plait hanging down my back, still wet. I shoved stakes in, scraping them against my scalp. I strapped one blade to my thigh in plain sight. I didn’t bother with shoes.
Back in the kitchen, the smell of cooking meat blowing in from outside made me salivate. The hunger that had been quiescent all day rose, clawing my stomach like a taloned hand. I hadn’t eaten after the shift. I was starving. But there were things I needed to face before I ate. I opened another beer, the alcohol potent in my blood.
Sipping my beer, I walked into the living room and stood in the opening, my feet apart, one hand loose at my side near the knife. The swinging shelves were in place over the safe room, no hinges showing. If I hadn’t seen the mess earlier, I’d never have known the hidden room was there. The living room looked as if nothing had been done to it; even the construction dust was cleaned up, the room spotless.
The men finally saw me, and the TV went mute, leaving the room in silence. I turned my gaze slowly to the men, the Kid first, then Eli, then Bruiser, and his gaze I held. The tension in the air rose, electric, as if Bruiser were sitting on a live wire. Eli and Alex were watching him, watching me, uncertain, knowing that something was up, but clearly not knowing what.
“Good evening, Jane,” Bruiser said, after an eternity.
I didn’t reply. Just took another sip, waiting.
He stood, and took two steps, as if he thought he might cross to me, and then stopped, a yard from his chair, in the middle of the room. “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .” He stopped and drew in a breath as if air-starved. “I couldn’t stop them. When they forced you.”
Eli came to his feet in a single rolling motion, as if he were all muscle, no bone. He stood between us, but back, so that we formed a tripod with me at the apex. His body was loose in that precombat tension of the best fighting men, and his eyes shifted back and forth between us. The Kid rolled the other way, all elbows and knobby knees, and stood behind the couch, out of the way. I let one side of my mouth rise, just slightly. Eli didn’t know what had happened, but he was ready for anything.
“Jane?” Bruiser held out his hand. It was bruised, purpled, and swollen, as if it had been broken. So was the side of his face. Bruiser had been hit. Hard. It was difficult to injure a blood-servant. It took a vamp.
I indicated his hand with the beer bottle. “Leo do that?”
He looked down and turned his hand over and back, as if seeing the injury for the first time. “Yes. When I disagreed with his tactics.” He looked back at me, his brown eyes catching the lamplight. He raised the hand and shoved it through his hair, sending the brown strands askew. “I thought it was simply a planning session. That was how Leo phrased it when he asked me to bring you. I didn’t know they were planning to force a feeding and binding on you.”
“And when they forced me? And you were holding me on the floor? What then?” As I said those words I could see Eli tense, shifting one pace in for better positioning. I lifted a finger from the beer, stopping him. I wanted to hear this.
Bruiser stood straight, dropping his hands to his sides. He blew out a breath, his face going from supplication to something colder, harder. I liked this Bruiser better. It was more honest. He was Leo’s plaything and blood meal, Leo’s right-hand man, and he always had been. It should have hurt, but the hunger growing inside me and the emptiness that Aggie had exposed when the trapped anger stormed away stopped my pain.
“I was blood-drunk, Jane. I wasn’t able to move, wasn’t able to fight, wasn’t able to stop them. I held you down and they hurt you. They forced me. I want you to know that. It was against my will.”
I didn’t say anything and he added, “When you left, I attacked Leo. He
“No. I explain him,” he growled. “And I apologize for myself. It’s what a primo does.”
He heard his given name and he put it together, understanding that my calling him George and not Bruiser was important on many levels. And he processed the “my Eli.” George swiveled his head to the man standing one
