“Ooookay. So you’re here to bite the SOD? That’s it?”
Brute’s eyes narrowed, but the growling stopped, so I went on.
“The werecats might try to come back and steal the SOD.”
The werewolf’s eyes narrowed further in an expression that said the cats could die trying.
“Right. Okay. FYI: There are two different wolf packs in town and one of them may be the crazy kind.”
Brute raised his head, chuffed, and licked his lips.
“The other pack seems to think you’re something like royalty and would be honored to have you hunt the crazy pack with them.”
Brute dropped his head, as if bored by the suggestion.
“Yeah. Well. Thanks for the chat.” I looked up at the thing on the wall over me, speaking to it. “Someday Leo won’t be around and I’ll take your head. Just so you know.”
Joses Santana, the SOD, stuck out his tongue and curled it up at me, as if licking the air. And then he laughed. It was silent but mocking, his desiccated lips curling up and the flesh around his eyes crinkling. Brute chuffed up at me as if the idea of my killing the SOD was long overdue and I might save us all a lot of trouble if I just killed him now. Or maybe that was my fond imagining and the wolf just had indigestion. What did I know?
I took the elevator up, checked out, and took an SUV from the motor pool.
I drove by my house and spotted a PsyLED car out front, a tiny sticker on the back window the only clue. I slowed and rolled down the window, taking a sniff of the car, expecting to scent Rick. I got Ayatas instead.Dang.
I drove on past, thinking about the unfriendly werewolves loose in New Orleans and making pacts with gangs. About Ziggy and the friendly werewolves. About the Sangre Duello and the emperor, who I had ignored for hours as I dealt with were problems. Titus Flavius Vespasianus had been a powerful Roman general who became the Roman emperor. As a human, he and his human second in command, Tiberius Julius Alexander, besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem. Inside the besieged walls were the Jewish, Christian, and Mithran defenders. The siege ended with the sacking of the city, the destruction of the temple, and the enslavement of what pitiful humans remained alive inside the walls. Titus returned home and gained the throne, ruling Rome for two years before he was turned by his vampire concubine, a woman captured from the fall of Jerusalem. He became the undisputed ruler of the Roman Empire and the European Mithrans. He had ruled for two thousand years. Technically, Leo owed him fealty. The legalchallenge of Sangre Duello meant Leo was aiming to behead the king in personal combat. But Titus had been fighting with a sword for hundreds of years longer than Leo. To win, Leo would have to cheat. Fortunately he was pretty good at that.
• • •
Miles away from the city, my weapons and shoes left behind in the SUV, my feet in flops against the mud, I stepped along the path to the bayou, conscious of the tracks of raccoon, dog, deer, turkey, and boar, and evidence of hog destruction, all around me. Wild hogs used their tusks to dig up edibles and left the signs behind. A single wild hog could destroy large swaths of otherwise useful habitat. Beast had killed a boar once and had been badly injured from the experience, but that only increased her desire to hunt and kill another one. This one was in heat, and her musky odor seemed to have settled across the ground all along the path, into the foliage all around, even into the mud itself, obscuring the scents of the other prey and predators.
Hunt boar. Or alli-gator,she thought.Hunt and kill and eat. I hunger.
You’re always hungry.
Yes.
I found the low-hanging branch of a scrub tree and stripped, wrapping an extra pair of flops, my shorts, shirt, and throwaway burner cell tightly in a zippy in my gobag, which I secured around my neck. Adjusted the gold nugget andPuma concolortooth on the doubled gold chain necklace. I sat on the low branch and rocked my feet back and forth, securing my flops in the mud to give me a balanced tripod perch on two feet and my backside. I relaxed. Closed my eyes. Sought the Gray Between of my magics.
Skinwalkers weren’t traditionally moon-called, like were-creatures, but the time of day and phase of the moon did make a difference. It was easier to shift on the three days of the full moon. Easier to shift at night, and harder to shift in the daytime—unless I was dying and a shift meant survival. And the shifting wasn’t a balanced thing. It was a peculiar effect of my skinwalker magicsthat while I could shift from human shape to Beast in daylight, I was unable to shift back to human until night. I wondered if Ayatas had that problem. The thought pushed the Gray Between away from me.
I admitted that I was feeling weird. Different. Emotionally different from my normal. Because of the man who claimed to be my brother. Who had been at my house just now. And I had run away from him.
Coward,Beast thought at me.Must make peace with littermate.
It was the same word she used to describe Eli and Alex. I asked her,Littermate. Like from the same parents or littermate in the same way the Youngers are?
Beast didn’t answer.Dang cat.But that might be why I wasn’t ready to face him, to make peace with him, yet. I wasn’t sure he was the man he said he was.
Coward,Beast thought again.
I blew out a hard breath and turned my thoughts inward. This time I gripped thePuma concolorfang on the gold chain and sank into the genetic structure stored there. This time the gray magics rose. This time I slid sideways into the magical forces, studying the new Vitruvian shape of my energies. They looked stable, like an illustration on a wall in a nuclear reactor.
Beast, ever impatient, reached out and extended her claws. Pricked the magics. The shift took me.Pain, pain, pain. I grunted breaths as my back arched and whipped forward, throwing me to the mud. And then I was lost to the shift.
• • •
Beast sat on Jane’s shoes, front paws in mud, sniffing, pulling in air over scent sacs in roof of mouth. It was good to be puma form. It was good to be in hunting territory. But it was also bad. Jane had seen prints in mud on track. Jane had smelled hog in heat. Jane had not looked beside track, in green plants. Where hunter had paced. Where hunter had followed deer, days past. Hunter on Beast’s territory. Jane had not smelled scent of trespasser.
Jane still slept. Beast did not know yet what to tell Jane.
