a rabbit’s throat. A ripple in . . . it felt stupid even remembering what I’d thought I’d felt. A ripple in reality. A shift in the way light worked. In the pull of the moon. Followed by Beast’s awareness that the smells were subtly different. I had wanted to shift back to human from my puma concolor form, but Beast had held on until she finished the freaking rabbit before she allowed me to take back over. Then I’d shifted back to human, pulled on my loose cotton clothes and raced my bastard Harley back to the French Quarter to eat a fast meal and pull on my fighting clothes. Whatever had happened, I wanted to be weaponed up.
Now, walking the city, I was carrying more weapons than a Special Forces soldier, my Benelli M4 across my back and four holstered handguns under my leathers, a half dozen silver-plated vamp-killer blades sheathed in my clothes, and a dozen wood and silver stakes in my hair. But the weapons weren’t enough. I was still on edge, smelling and feeling a weird energy dance along my skin. Something was wrong. Really wrong.
I reached the Royal Mojo Blues Company, a blues and rock and roll club I frequented when I needed to let off steam and dance. And the name of the bar was different.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise, a low growl caught in my throat. I knew my eyes were glowing yellow with Beast and I couldn’t force her back down, couldn’t hang on totally to humanity. I had been here last week, danced here last week. It had still been the RMBC.
Businesses changed hands, closed and reopened under new management so often in this town that it wasn’t impossible the bar had been sold. But the sign was old and faded. Now it was the Vamp Mojo. And it smelled—no it reeked—of vamp and human blood. In four days—four short, totally impossible days—it had become a vamp-blood bar. Crap. I stood in the shadows, pulling scents in over my tongue and through my nose in a soft scree of sound.
Leo was inside. But a drunk and well fed Leo. A . . . a passive Leo. One without the energies I’d come to associate with the Master of the City. I smelled Katie, of Katie’s Ladies, and some vamp who scented of power like I had never known in a vamp before. And sex. Lots of sex.
I almost went in, when something else caught my attention. A woman. Just ahead. She was the reason things were different, though how I knew that, I wasn’t certain. But I did. I turned and walked away from the bar. Toward her.
She was tall like me, but with more muscle. Hair cut short, skin paler than my Cherokee, but dang. We might have been sisters. Beast stood in the forefront of my mind and studied her. I could see the energies in her, not pouring off her, but contained, restrained, like high water behind a dam.
Magic. Smell magic. Smell little brother of wolf.
I didn’t have time to ask Beast what she meant. The woman’s eyes were glowing like mine. Yellow. I stopped in front of her, breathing in short puffs and screes of sound. Oddly, she didn’t take offence, even when I leaned in sniffed close to her face, although her eyebrows did go up. She wasn’t a skinwalker, like me. But she was something. “I’m Jane Yellowrock.”
The woman nodded once, and when she spoke I could feel her magic questing out at me. “And I hope that sniffing routine wasn’t commentary. My car doesn’t have air conditioning.” She hesitated before adding, “Joanne Walker. Shaman for hire. Only, you know, not for hire, because it doesn’t work that way. Whatever. Anyway.” She pulled a hand over her face, then looked at me. Waiting.
The way she said it, I knew she didn’t introduce herself that way often. We had just met and she had given me something personal. Which meant I had to give back a gift of equal measure. The words nearly choked me. “I’m a Skinwalker.”
She didn’t even blink, as if she heard people claiming weird crap, like being a mythical supernat, all the time. “Skinwalker, not shapechanger? You’re Native, like me.” Not a question. Not not-a-question, either, though.
“Cherokee. But not a U’tlun’ta.” It was pronounced hut luna, and was The People’s word for one of my species who had gone insane and started eating humans. And Joanne Walker seemed to know what I meant because she nodded, believing me, as if maybe she could see my energies and tell I was telling the truth. Most shamans could truth-tell, and Joanne clearly had that gift to some extent. I said, “Something hinky is happening. Did you do it?”
“No. But I felt something when I crossed the city lines. My magic’s pushy,” she said almost like that was a normal thing to say. “It pulled me here. Wanted me here. Wanted me to see you. And the whole city feels . . . not like home.”
I looked around at the world. “Well, you get to be Dorothy. I’m the lion—after he got his courage back. And I have a feeling that that,” I pointed to a yellow-orange light blasting up between the buildings several streets over “is why we’re here. There’s supposed to be nothing there but partygoers.”
“That.” Joanne glanced that way, then bared her teeth. “Crap. I saw it earlier, but not with the Sight. I thought it was spotlights, not magic. Lots of magic. . . .”
I shook myself as Beast’s pelt quivered and lifted. “It looks nasty.” I sniffed. “And I smell something hot and dry.”
“Brimstone.”
“Like in hell-fire?” She nodded. I sighed out the words, “Well, crap.” Louder, I said, “You need a weapon? Bare hands aren’t going to be much help against something from hell.”
Joanne smiled, never taking her eyes from the orange yellow glow. “I have what I need.”
I looked her over again, wondering what hidden weaponry I’d missed. As far as I could see, I hadn’t. “Yeah. Okay. Whatever. I have a bike, but it’s useless in this crowd. We’ll have to walk.” She nodded, and we turned, me taking point, Joanne at my side, as if we had practiced the movement all our lives.
We got a good six feet or so before I noticed the crowd was parting before us. Not that I blamed them. I would part before us too, because my newfound buddy looked like a badass, which gave automatic street cred to anybody hanging with her. Skinwalker. I hadn’t encountered that one before. I hadn’t encountered much with the kind of confidence she exuded, either. I’d fallen in beside her like we’d been practicing our whole lives. I wasn’t often enthusiastic about going to see what was causing obvious magical awfulness, but Ms. Tall Dark and Yellowrock looked so obviously prepared for anything, the whole idea sort of sounded like fun.
We got about six more feet before I saw the name of the bar we were passing by and let out an amused snort. “Vamp Mojo, huh? I kind of thought New Orleans would shy away from embracing the whole Anne Rice motif.”
Jane slid a look at me. Yellow-eyed look that sent creepies crawling down my spine. No wonder the guys back at my garage in Seattle had stopped talking to me once I went all magic and woo-woo. The golden gaze was just plain unnatural. I was relieved when she answered, because it gave me an excuse to stop meeting her eyes.
Well, it did for half a second, anyway, because she said, “In my world it used to be a dance club owned by a vampire. Now it’s a vampire bar.” She sniffed indelicately. “A blood bordello.”
I laughed. She didn’t. All the rich delicious smells in the air suddenly turned my stomach, and I swallowed bile. “There’s no such thing as vampires.”
This time Jane did laugh, but it wasn’t a particularly delightful sound. “I think I’d like to come from wherever you did. Vamps are at the top of the food chain, here. Literally.”
My feet lost their enthusiasm for heading toward the magical block party. Jane surged on a few steps ahead of me, only turning back when the crowd started closing in again. They didn’t matter; we could still see each other easily, what with the height advantage over two-thirds of the population. I swallowed. “There are really vampires here?”
Jane came back, planted herself in front of me, and nodded, jutting her chin down once. The whole action was an emphatic statement. I, much less emphatic, pinched the bridge of my nose. “Okay. Look, before we go rushing in where angels fear to tread, maybe we should try to get some tiny idea of what we could possibly be facing. I don’t have vampires,” I said. “Werewolves?”
“And werecats. Of the African variety. Lions in prides, Leopards in small groups, though they tend to be solitary hunters. Wolves. All predators. No were-gazelles or were-bovines. Witches. Shamans. You?”
My eyes bugged. I felt them. Another quarter inch and they’d pop right out of my head. “You’re joking. Werecats? Isn’t that, I don’t know, very teenage girl wish fulfillment?”
