Promises to Keep

they tore like flesh. Once he had cut a hole, he padded through it into a quiet, shadowed grove of white birch trees.

In the middle lay a woman, her body bleeding from a thousand cuts, her black flesh burned and slashed, her hair matted, and her moss-green eyes wide with fear.

“No!” she shouted. “You can’t be here! No one can be here!”

“I’m here to help you,” Jay said.

Started to say. Or roar. He wasn’t sure how far he made it before the ground shook, knocking him off his paws. The trees wept. Whatever power had spoken to him earlier had followed him here.

“Is she—”

Before he could finish speaking, he was thrown brutally backward, into his own flesh in the shapeshifter’s room.

He was alone. Her bed was empty, and the door was standing open.

Nothing should have been able to get in or out of the circle he had built, but as he looked around, he realized that several of the stones on one side had fractured before being pushed aside.

What on earth had he just released?

CHAPTER 12

WHATEVER HAD JUST spoken to him in the shapeshifter’s mind, then thrown him out and fractured his circle, had left him so fried that he kept spacing out as he attempted to gather his tools back into their bag. At one point, he jumped when he spaced out for a moment and suddenly found Jeremy standing in front of him, holding a large book titled Ancient Elavie Cultures. The human was looking from the note on the door, to Jay, to the empty bed.

“It’s okay to come in now,” Jay said, trying to focus on the human’s mind but unable to glean anything more than static.

“Did you magic her away somewhere?” Jeremy asked.

“I woke her up, and the next thing I knew, she was gone.”

He wasn’t ready to go into further details, such as promises to destroy Midnight. Maybe he should have asked a little more about that—like How? or When?

Instead, he asked Jeremy, “Are you still awake, or already awake?”

“A combination of the two,” Jeremy admitted. “Having trouble sleeping. Nerves. I thought I’d try to solve our mystery, but I guess it’s a moot point now.”

“What’s the book?” he asked Jeremy. Elavie was SingleEarth’s scientific term for shapeshifters.

Jeremy plopped down to sit on the floor next to Jay.

“The way her power reacted to yours made me think about the way some of the older Elavie, especially the ones from cultures with additional magic, can live hundreds of years or more. When I started looking at the older cultures, I found a reference to the Shantel.”

“You’re on the right track with the age thing. Who are the Shantel?”

“I found them in a book about language, actually. Many of the older shapeshifter cultures make reference to something or someone called a sakkri. The serpiente use the word now to describe a kind of dance, but their myths say that dance is the remnant of an ancient magical ritual. The Mistari use it to mean something said or done to mislead. And the Shantel used the term to refer to the magic that kept them protected, and to the witch who controlled that power.”

Jeremy paused with a self-satisfied smile, obviously finding that little fact interesting enough that it took him a moment to realize he hadn’t yet answered Jay’s question.

“Right,” he said, continuing on. He flipped pages as he spoke. “It took me a while to find anything more about the Shantel, since they were incredibly isolationist, and seem to have entirely disappeared in the last couple centuries. They were shapeshifters—leopards and mountain lions—and were considered one of the great magical powers of the last millennium, up there with the shm’Ahnmik and the Azteka.”

Both of the other cultures Jeremy referenced were mostly gone. There were pockets of Azteka left, but none of their famous bloodwitches, and some believed that the entire falcon civilization—known as the shm’Ahnmik— might have been no more than part of serpiente myth, like the humans’ Atlantis.

“You think the shapeshifter I found was some kind of Shantel witch?”

“The Shantel describe their spirit-witch as white and silver in her leopard form, but ink-black in human form, with white markings to make her power clear to all who see her. Sound familiar?”

The description fit, including the fact that Jay had been given a cougar form with which to seek her.

“She didn’t have a name,” Jay said, recalling that fact from his sojourn within her power. “There was something about her remaining nameless, to—”

“Yes!” Jeremy interrupted, flipping to another page. “It says here the Shantel believed that ‘only by remaining nameless and unclaimed by family or lover could the sakkri commune with and command the immortal powers of nature.’ I don’t have a clue what that means, but any magic-user put in a group with falcons and Azteka has to be scary powerful.”

“I think she’s on our side,” Jay answered uneasily. At least, he hoped she was. The fact that she had disappeared without speaking to anyone didn’t bode well.

“The Shantel were never warlike,” Jeremy continued, still looking down at his book. “Even during Midnight’s reign, they just used their magic to keep their people safe. They never fought back. They’re one of the only shapeshifter cultures we know of that no one ever went to war with.” He looked up at the bed. “Did she say where she was going?”

“She didn’t say anything,” Jay answered.

If she came from such a peaceful culture, Jay didn’t know what she expected to do against Midnight. On the other hand, two centuries in slavery was bound to change a person.

“Jeremy, you didn’t happen to find anyone else who might know about the Shantel, did you?” Jay asked, trying to keep the words casual.

“I’ve been trying to see if any of the older vampires in SingleEarth might know something,” he said, “but I know the humans and witches here better. Vampires don’t often come in for medical attention, you know?”

Who did Jay know who was old enough to have survived Midnight but wasn’t allied or otherwise tied to Midnight? The list was pretty short. Even vampires who disapproved of the slave trade tended to try not to cross the empire. Nikolas and Kristopher, Sarah’s friends, were fifty years too young—and Jay wasn’t certain he wanted to get them involved, anyway. He definitely didn’t want to get Sarah involved, not with Midnight, not when she was still trying to find her place in the vampiric world.

Wait.

There was a group Jay knew, and SingleEarth knew, that rumor claimed had been founded to fight Midnight. Few of their members were vampires, unsurprisingly, but some were shapeshifters or Tristes old enough to remember those days.

The Bruja guilds were technically three groups, known as Crimson, Onyx, and Frost. They had been founded during Midnight’s reign in opposition to the slave-holding vampires, and many of their members still considered themselves vampire hunters, though in recent years they had branched out into other illegal and semi-legal actions.

Frost and SingleEarth had recently managed to find a mutually beneficial and profitable arrangement. Frost provided bodyguarding and other protective services, as well as a strong arm to help SingleEarth with the increasingly complicated process of securing mostly legal documents for individuals whose lifestyles or life spans made anything requiring a birth certificate or social security card difficult.

Jay went to the main SingleEarth office to find the contact information for their Frost liaison. He had to sweet-talk the secretary to convince her to give him the information without reporting the request, but he was soon back in his room and on his cell phone, hoping he would be able to reach someone quickly.