awful.”
I snarled, showing her my killing teeth, and bit down, eating at neck, tongue laving fresh blood. Keeping eyes on her, I backed down and bit into stomach. Blood and liver and muscle and good food. Ripped at it and swallowed. Again. Keeping her in sight. She smelled stomach-sick with sweat. I chuffed with amusement. Ate more.
Woman stepped forward, but made herself small. Lifted chin. Showed throat. Deference. Smart shaman- thing. Wise. Curious eyes, full of gold. “. . . you’re Jane, aren’t you?”
I looked at woman, thinking. You hear my thoughts? I asked at her. She nodded. I ate, feeding hunger. Its claws, buried in stomach, tearing, began to release. More than five bites later, I thought at her, Not Jane. Not big- cat. Better than Jane. Better than big-cat. Am Beast. I swallowed. Beast is good hunter.
“No shit.”
I chuffed and ate. Many more than five bites later, I showed her my back and walked off of prey, down to dirt, lithe and lissome, Jane’s words for me. Belly was bulging, satisfied. I sat and cleaned blood from claws and muzzle with rough tongue. Spoke to her like to kit. You may eat.
“Y’know, I thought I was starving, but not so much now. It’s all yours.”
I looked at not-witch woman. She had gathered up Jane’s clothes, where I had pushed them, into the light, folding them like laundry. Her sword was gone. Magic sword? Comes and goes like Beast’s claws?
Not-witch woman grinned. “Yeah, kind of. I keep it under my bed at home. In reserve, you know? Kind of like Jane . . .” She stopped. Looked hard at Beast. Scent changed: scent of caution. Smart shaman-thing didn’t want to offend good-hunter Beast. “Kind of like you and Jane work together, maybe. I bet most people don’t know she’s got a Beast inside. You’re a secret. A sharp dangerous secret. So’s my sword.”
I chuffed. Looked back at still-hot stinky meat. Flipped dirt over it: done. Trash. Defeated.
Not-witch woman smiled again. “You said it, sister.”
There’s nothing to take the wind out of a girl’s sails like a ginormous lion coming along and ripping the head off the demon she was about to fight. I stood there agape while Jane—it had to be Jane—went positively medieval, if medieval people had mountain lions to do their dirty work, on the velociprator’s rainbowy ass.
It took a lot less time for her to do it than it would’ve for me. I had the good goddamned sense to back off when the lion looked like it was ready for lunch, and I wasn’t really even surprised when it—she—started talking in my head. I sent the sword home, watched the lion gorge herself on smelly demon meat, and nearly jumped out of my skin when a third voice intruded on our little conversation: “And heah Ah thought Ah’d be coumin’ to sayve d’daye.”
It took me a couple seconds to get past the rich rolling deliciousness of a Cajun accent so thick it sounded like it’d been poured on with molasses and honey. In that time, Jane-Beast went from sated contented cat to wary prickly lion. I held a finger up, like that would possibly stop her if she decided to make a second lunch out of the new arrival, and turned to see what this Lower World had wrought.
It had wrought the most gorgeous John Henry I’d ever laid eyes on. The guy looked like he’d earned every one of his muscles working the railroad, and the Lower World’s red sunlight just sank into skin so black he couldn’t possibly have had any crackers in his woodpile. He stood about six steps away, and even so I had to raise my eyes to meet his. That never happened. He was NBA tall, had shoulders a little wider than God’s, and wore a wife-beater that showed off beautiful arms and emphasized an equally well-muscled chest. His jeans had blown-out knees and his feet were bare, toes dug into the Lower World’s cool dirt. I had the idea he was introducing himself to it in the same way I had. Almost the same way. He hadn’t cut his foot open to bleed on the ground. Just as well. I was too busy gawking to think about healing foot injuries.
“You are?” he said. Aaah, really, the consonants all swallowed by Southern gentility.
“Smitten,” I said brightly, then shook myself. “Uh. I mean. Joanne. I’m Joanne. That’s, um.” I looked at Beast-Jane and decided not to go there. “That’s a cat. And you’re. . . ?” Utterly gorgeous. Physically flawless, with striking African features. The back of my brain reminded me that perfect people usually weren’t human, and that I should probably check the guy’s aura out, but his physicality was so much more interesting I put it off for a minute. I didn’t want to find out he was one of the bad guys. Not yet, anyway.
He grinned. “Lazarus, but you call me Laz, cherie.”
I deflated ever so slightly. Odds of him actually being named John Henry were, of course, astronomically low, but for a brief shining moment there, I’d had hope. “You better call me Jo.” Because while my romantic life was on an upswing, I still didn’t think it would go over well to explain to a boyfriend so new I wasn’t sure I should even use the word yet just why an unutterably gorgeous Southern gentleman was referring to me as cherie. “Lazarus, huh? Only in the South does that name not even cause a blink.”
“Oh, it causes a blink.” Jane stalked up beside me. I squeaked. I hadn’t even heard her change—not that I knew if shapechanging made noise, since I’d never tried listening to myself while I did it—and I certainly hadn’t heard her putting all her leather and guns and shiny silver bits back on.
Lazarus looked at her, all hot and sexy in her leather, and looked at me, considerably less hot and sexy in jeans and a tank-top. His eyebrows rose. “Sisters?”
Jane and I looked at each other and shook our heads in unison. Laz’s eyebrows went higher. “But power, it runs in family, no?”
“Different families,” I said after a minute, then edged three steps back, like that distance would make it impossible for him to hear me mutter, “Lazarus is a worrying name?”
“Anybody who rises from the dead worries me,” Jane muttered back. Since she was the one who came from a world with vampires, I conceded the point instantly and whether I liked it or not, took a good look at Lazarus with the Sight.
Power flared in him, through him, in earth-rich colors and in a way I’d never seen before. It was like his toes, dug into the earth, absorbed its very strength, and the top of his head, way high up there in the sky—even to my tall perspective—let it flow on out. The reverse happened too, and his fingertips took in the quiet animistic strength of still air and released it as casually, and left the impression that if a hurricane blew his way, it, too, would wash right through him. I had no doubt at all that he could capture and use it for the working of magic, but it didn’t stay in him the way it stayed in me, and it came to him far, far more naturally than it did to the witches I knew. There was no need for a guiding deity, with him. The power just ran through him like a river. Witty as ever, I said, “Wow. What are you?”
He shrugged big broad beautiful shoulders. The outrageousness of his accent started wearing off, becoming easier for me to understand, though he still sounded as old-school Cajun as anything I’d ever heard. “A conduit, mebbe. A gateway. You?”
“A shaman.” I wasn’t going to answer for Jane, even though Lazarus looked at her, too. “A gateway, huh. Are you what brought us here? I mean, not here-here, I did that,” I said with a wave at the Lower World, “but to the Middle World we just left? Because it’s not Jane’s world and it’s sure not mine.”
“Does it matter?” Jane growled. “Stinky is dead. Let’s go home.”
“Are you kidding? Of course it matters. People don’t just go flying off to different universes without a reason. Or they don’t in my world, anyway. So whatever brought us here has got to be impor—”
I stopped talking then, because Lazarus opened his hands wide and became a man-shaped gateway right back to the Middle World.
Passing through the portal—whatever that was—back into the physical world, hurt. A lot. Jo muttered “You’ve got to be kidding,” but she made it look easy, like stepping through a guy who’d turned into a doorway between worlds was simple. Like one step to the next , from light, through a sliver of blackness darker than the armpit of hell, back into a different place was easy, right? Not.
In that one step, Beast’s pelt roiled under my skin like it wanted to burst through my flesh, and her front and back claws sank into my mind like sixteen knives. I hissed out a breath as I stepped from world to world, and felt more than saw tall, African and gorgeous follow me. He smelled . . . odd. Like magic and animals, but not like me. And not like Jo. And Not like a were. And whatever smelled not-like-the-familiar was usually dangerous.
