Back home, I again changed clothes, this time into a stained loose T-shirt and stretchy pants for meditation, soif I decided I could shift, I wouldn’t ruin my clothes. Even in mountain lion form I could get out of the shoddy duds.
Outside, on the back corner of the porch, I curled on the wooden floor, legs in guru position, my spine against the post holding up the porch. Mosquitoes buzzed around me, annoying. In the mountains they would have been mostly dormant by now, the early frost in Asheville killing them off, but here, they were a year-round nuisance.
I blew out a breath that didn’t hurt and relaxed against the post. Though I would rather be sitting on the pile of busted boulders in the back, the rain was falling faster, the storm still coming off the Gulf of Mexico, with lightning flashing across the sky and the roll of thunder. The Truebloods were driving through this and would be here by morning, if not sooner. Neither Molly nor Evan was a water witch, and it would make sense for them to drive straight on through instead of stopping for the night. Though Molly, newly and unexpectedly—to me—pregnant, might need to stop and rest. Selfishly I’d like them to be here as soon as possible, and not just for the company of friends I missed. I could use their opinion on the scan of the house and the magical thingamabob eye on my palm.
Flash floods weren’t uncommon in the flatland of Louisiana, but I knew that Big Evan, Molly’s husband, could handle most anything that happened around him, in the real world and in the metaphysical world of magic. They would be fine. I shouldn’t be worrying about the big bad magical witches who could take care of themselves better than I could.
Lightning slashed the sky open again, striking close. The ground shook, and all around me lights flickered. A shiver raced through me, reaction to the electric energy of nature, and if I was honest, a leftover reaction to being struck by lightning. I took a calming breath and exhaled. No way was I giving in to fear over a little storm. Or a little almost-died-but-didn’t experience. I’d had too many to let them bother me now.
I had more important worries about the scar and the inability to shift when I was in danger and an odd feelingof exhaustion that tugged at my consciousness. But I was having trouble dragging my thoughts back into meditation, seeing the Trueblood’s soccer-mom van sliding into an overflowing bayou, two witches with green merged magic working against them.
I blew out another breath and opened my left hand. It was plain, unmarked, but it was my real source of worry. The memory of the green eye in my palm. An eye similar to the magical impression of the Mercy Blade’s watching blue eye, the eye he had marked me with when we first met and he healed me from a werewolf attack.
Old magic was dangerous. Traces of it were even more so, as time dulled the importance of old spells and the mind forgot the opening into the soul that could be left. The misericord had deliberately marked me long ago. Now he had harmed me, probably partly as a result of his own magic. And I hadn’t shifted. That. Yeah,thatwas the problem.
Holding the old image of the blue eye in my mind, I finally let myself drop away into the place that was the home of my soul, the place I remembered from long and long ago, when I had been a child of five and my father and grandmother—edodaandelisi—had coaxed and forced me into my first change, intowesa—bobcat. That cavern in the Appalachian Mountains that had taken on such importance in my regular, ordinary life, a place that was all memory and healing, a place in my mind and my spirit, and in reality, though the location had been lost to me for going on two centuries. The place that told me what was happening in my own mind and heart, that showed me when I was under attack. The place I went to for spiritual healing.
The place Gee DiMercy had marked with his power over me.
The Cherokee didn’t mark rites of passage on cave walls or lay claim to the caves, not like what the ancient white man did in Europe and in other places of the Americas. They didn’t make handprints on cave walls. Yet Gee DiMercy had made handprints of his own in my soul home, as if claiming my place for his own.
I had been forced to cleanse my soul home with fire and spirit.
I remembered. And I slid down into the memory, like cooling smoke sliding down cave walls.
“Hands,”I had whispered.“Hands on the roof of the world.”My thoughts of that time in my soul home came clear to me.
My own memory of my own words, as I saw the hands marked all over the cave walls all around, and even up to the roof of the dome overhead. They had been blue hands in circles of white, and white-toned hands in circles of blue, pigments applied like signs of ownership fixed to the walls of my soul house.
Each kind of handprint had been made in a different way. I knew this even without acquiring the learning, as if it was part of me. For the blue handprints, the white pigment had been blown through a hollow reed onto the walls in a circular or oval pattern, and then pigments had been crushed and mixed with fat or spit. This paste had been applied to Gee’s hands and the blue prints pressed against the walls. For the white handprints in circles of blue, the procedure had been different, possibly because of the nature of the pigments themselves. I never bothered to discover why the different methods had been employed. The blue pigments had been crushed and sucked up into a reed. A hand had been placed on the cave wall, and the pigments had been blown over it, leaving the unpigmented print in the whitish gray of the cavern rock.
Gee used woad to create the blue. Woad was a European herb, an invasive herb that took over gardens, and, like indigo, was used to make blue dye. Yes. That was important. Invasive herbs took over and killed all else but their own. And here each palm print was marked with a blue eye.
At the time I had first seen the claiming handprints, prints that had allowed the Mercy Blade to track me and watch me, I had also noted a pink flower. A rose, the symbol of Evangelina Everhart, Molly’s sister whom I had later killed for consorting with demons and killing humans. The flower had smelled of roses and wormwood, sweetand bitter both. And it was put there with magic—witch magic.
In my memory,I bent over the fire, the scent rich and herbal and warm, and breathed in the sage and sweetgrass. We—Beast and I—reached to the side and chose a thick sliver of wood, pointed on one end, sawn smooth on the other, one side wild and splintered, one side shaped by hand. A stake. It was dry heartwood, its cedar scent resinous and tart. Heartwood to destroy the vampires we hunt and kill. Our hand closed over it,tlvdatsiclaws at the ends of human fingers. Pelt, tawny and thick, rose over the bones of our arms. We hefted it and placed the splintered, sharp end of the stake into the flame. It took light. And we rose into the shadows, the first time I ever saw my promised half-Beast, half-Jane form, cast upon the wall.
Ohhh. This is important. This timing,I thought, my consciousness dividing, partially in the memory, and partially where I sat on the porch.
The roof at the heart of the world reached down to us, to Beast and me as one. With one knobby-knuckled hand, killing claws exposed, we scraped a woad-made eye from a palm on the damp stone. It glittered, lid closed as if sleeping, on our hand. With the other hand, we held the flame to the woad-made handprints. The fire from our torch blazed up, burning the woad, burning the handprints that had taken root. And in the center of each palm on the cave walls, a blue eye appeared, opened, and focused on us. Gee’s eyes, shocked. I stabbed at the eye in the center of one woad palm print and it blinked away, but not before I drew blood. It splashed down onto my hand, copper and jasmine-scented. The woad lit, sizzling and hot. Flames raced up and over the cave, blackened the roof. I stepped away as the flames roared up hot and cleansing. All the handprints took flame, all but the one I had stolen with my killing claws. “Mine,” I growled to it. “My place.”
I crouched on the stone floor and watched as the ceiling at the heart of the world flamed and burned. And was cleansed. It took a long time. And no time at all. And when it was done, I sat at my small fire pit and fed the stake into the coals, letting it too burn away. When the smoke cleared,the ceiling was clean again, only the soot above my small fire blacking the smooth rock. I lay down, folding my body, paws beneath me. And I closed my eyes.
But, though I had cleansed the cave by fire, perhaps the watching eyes were still there, in some arcane manner, leaving some trace of the magic. A trace still potent enough for the green magics of an enemy to find me. Hold me. Harm me.
Even though I had been in the presence of angelic power since then, and had cleansed my spirit and soul with baptismal water and hadgone to waterin theTsalagitradition and... had done everything I could think of to protect and purify my soul—something was still there. And I didn’t know why.
CHAPTER 7
Bad and Getting Badder
It seemed possible that the old spells were still present—dormant, latent, but filled with sleeping power, able to offer a magic user a way in to me. And I remembered something else, something more recent, a dark heart beating in the roof of my soul home, like a bird’s heart, fastsfastfast, beating in flight.
Not certain what to do about the old memories, or even if I should push on into my soul home to see what was there now, I eased up out of the calm of meditation and into the sound of slow-dripping water, the tinkle of rain down the gutters, the plink of large, slow drops on wood and stone. And the scent of witch child in my nostrils.
Angie Baby was sitting in front of me, her legs crossed in a mimicry of my own, red Keds on her feet, coral pants and shirt, watching me. Behind her was Little Evan, also known as Evan Junior, or EJ, her baby brother, sitting against the wall of the house, his legs stretched out and a soccer ball in his lap, steadied by both hands.
“Hey, Aunt Jane,” Angie Baby said.
