“Of course we will,” Joanne said, and Beast forgot her hunger long enough to rumble approval deep inside my head.
I didn’t look at Jane to see if she agreed. Laz was on my side already, and frankly, we were going to help Serena find her kid if I had to stay in this Somebody Else’s World for a month, because let’s face it. Threatening children is about as low as it gets, and that was without my own personal monogrammed set of baggage on the matter.
I did look at Lazarus. I didn’t have a name for whatever he was. The earth magic he connected to said witch, but the witches I knew needed a coven to pull down the kind of earth power he’d been throwing around so casually. Maybe he was a warlock. I had the vague idea that, traditionally, warlocks didn’t work with covens, though also traditionally, warlocks were men and I’d met a fair number of male witches. Of course, as far as I knew, warlocks were also traditionally bad guys, but Laz was doing a pretty convincing impression of being one of the good guys. Even Jane had softened up when he went all protective and daddy-like with Serena.
The thought that I might just not get all the answers I wanted crossed my mind. I dismissed it with a snort, then scrubbed my hands over my face. “I don’t suppose you know where he’s keeping your baby, Serena.”
I knew the answer before I even asked, though. The kid was back in New Orleans at that blood bordello. All that stood between us and the kid was one vampire channeling every drop of magic in the Big Easy, and all his vampirey minions. No problem. “I don’t suppose,” I said mostly to Lazarus, “that you can use that funky earth magic of yours to fake a love spell. . . .”
Jane coughed on her oatmeal. My ears turned red. “Okay, okay, no, not really. I’m not getting some other poor sap involved in this, not even long enough to be used as a distraction. I just, y’know. Nevermind. How do you stop a vampire?”
“You kill him.” Jane sounded like her Beast had found a human voice, all snarls and deadly business.
As mildly as I could, I said, “I don’t know how to kill a vampire,” but really, I’d known that answer was coming. Amaury wasn’t going to give up his grip on the Big Easy’s magic without giving up his grip on life. Even without Serena’s baby in the picture, it wasn’t like I could really go home again knowing I’d left dozens or hundreds of adepts in magical slavery. Amaury had been a dead man walking since we’d crossed into this world.
Well of course he’s a dead man walking a snarky little voice said in the depths of my skull. I smacked myself in the temple and muttered, “Oh, shut up,” aloud.
Jane banged her bowl down—I’d never seen somebody eat that much oatmeal at once, nevermind so quickly—and stood up with the lithe movement of an angry cat. “I do,” she said. “I get paid for killing vamps. She’s coming with us.”
She pointed her spoon at Serena while my brain stuttered over get paid for killing vamps. I didn’t get paid to do magic. The idea kind of gave me the creeps, actually, and I wondered how Jane lived with it. Then I shook it off, because of the various problems and questions we had right now, how Jane made a living wasn’t one of them. What was an important question, though, was, “How?”
“How what?” Jane and Laz both looked at me, Jane with the spoon still pointed accusingly at Serena.
“How is she coming with us? Our car got kind of blown up—” A fact which would give me palpitations if I thought about it, since we’d stolen the damned car in the first place, which meant we’d blown up somebody else’s vehicle. “—and I didn’t see another one anywhere around her house.”
Lazarus stood, put his hands together in front of his chest, and bowed his head. “Dat,” he said, “dat I can help wit’.”
“Eart’,” he said when we were all outside. “It all connected, whether we stand in d’dirt and d’swamps or wet’er we walk d’hard concrete streets of d’city. Take off you shoes.”
Serena already wasn’t wearing any, and Laz had taken his off when we came outdoors. His were super-shiny black patent leather with buckles and platform heels, not that a man his size needed any more height. I toed my soggy tennies off and wondered how his shoes had come through the swamp fight unscathed. Earth magic, I guessed. Jane pulled her boots off, picked them up, and glowered at them like boot leather was the next thing on her menu. I sympathized: shapeshifting took a lot of energy. It hadn’t been that long ago I’d run through so many shifts that my body had started cannibalizing itself to survive. Just thinking about it made me hungry.
Once we were unshod, Laz gave a satisfied nod and extended his hands. Serena took one without hesitation. Jane and I looked between each other, our shoes, and the offered hands. Then we both scrambled to tie laces together and throw them over our shoulders before joining hands, me with Laz, Jane with Serena and me.
Instinct made me edge about three-quarters of a step to the right. Everybody else shifted accordingly, and Laz gave me a startled flash of approval. I shrugged, pleased, and Jane muttered, “What?”
“Power circle. We were misaligned to the cardinal directions, now we’re not.”
She went, “Huh,” which was mostly a motion of her eyebrows, and we both looked back at Laz.
“Eart’, it all de same,” he said again. “We here, we need to be dere. De eart’, it carry us.”
I triggered the Sight, and was glad I did.
Rich brown power roared up from the ground we stood on, rushing over Lazarus like a mud bath. It coated him head to toe, all the variation of the swamp. Mud bugs, earthworms, green growing muck, everything that had a spark of life glittered gold within the rising power until they became stars in a blacked-out, man-shaped sky. Lazarus still held my hand, but at the same time he was gone, a cut-away door rife with mystical energy.
Serena fearlessly stepped through the portal that Lazarus had become, and because she held our hands, we followed.
I expected it to be cold. The space between stars was, after all, but no: traversing the world through the Lazarus-gate was warm, like drifting in an equatorial sea. Life pulsed within him, small bumps and waves of passion sparking and fading as we passed them by. In the months since my shamanic powers had awakened, I’d rarely felt such serenity—and when I had, it had been in the moments where the power of many adepts came together to create a larger whole. Lazarus, I thought with a grin, contained the power of multitudes.
A moment later the journey ended and we stepped onto the sidewalk of St. Louis Street in front of Vamp Mojo. Laz came through himself last. Jane and I sat down to haul our shoes on, and I took half a second to notice we were now all opposite the cardinal points where we’d been.
Neither of us had our shoes tied when the front doors of Vamp Mojo blew open, releasing a heavy, muggy scent of blood and sex. For a gut-freezing moment, all my nightmares came calling.
Witches and werewolves and something that looked like the swamp itself had come alive, part mud, part rotting vegetation, part God-awful stink of swamp gas. There were two of them, each ten feet tall, built like gorillas, and they moved like nothing I had ever seen before. Faster than the wind, angry as a tornado and just as uncontrolled. I wasn’t even certain they were alive in the biological sense.
In the Sight, they were a flood of angry power twisted up and shaped into a creature I didn’t even want to admit existed. I could See their magic, how it was hauled out of them in all the various shades of power, and how it was fed back, part and parcel, with a heavy dose of guilt that would turn even the purest of intentions grey. Hell, I could See Katrina, the hurricane-that-wasn’t, and how her Force 5 winds and rain and destructive capability had been lashed down through Amaury’s focal point. He’d been the only one strong enough to become the conduit for a city’s worth of magic thrown against the storm, and when he’d tucked the hurricane’s power into his treasure chest, these things had been born, leashed to his control. Shit. We were so screwed.
My gaze shot upward, to the whirlpool of black magic spinning above Vamp Mojo. To the eye of it, the hollow center that was the calm in every storm, and my stomach turned to lead.
Amaury had never released Katrina. He hadn’t diffused or redirected her. He’d taken the combined magics of every adept in New Orleans and had captured a literal force of nature. The Big Easy’s magic users didn’t just owe him. They couldn’t escape from him, not as long as Katrina’s contained rage kept sucking up their magic.
We were going to have to defuse the hurricane in Amaury’s pocket in order to take him down.
That was the bad news.
The good news was that everybody knew vampires didn’t come out in daylight, and the sun hadn’t gone down yet. So instead of Amaury and his vamps, all we had to fight was every other magic user in New Orleans. And they were pumped up on the feedback loop of Amaury ripping their power away, feeding it into Katrina, and having it
