“Yeah. He did.” I wore my tooth fetish on a gold chain around my neck, with the gold nugget that tied me metaphysically to the time and place I’d shifted for the first time as an adult. Most days, I hardly noticed the necklace; it was part of me. I also owned several fetish necklaces with the bones and teeth of other predators I might need to change into, and I’d added a few creatures to my collection recently. I had the ability to shift into prey animals of a similar mass, but Beast hated it when I did that. She was a carnivore and preferred to never be a prey animal. She was also grumpy and callously passive-aggressive. I tried to keep her happy.
I closed my door on Eli and the stranger and tossed my black jammies on the bed. I took a half dozen antacid tablets, four aspirin, and two Tylenol. Meds don’t work on me like they do on humans, but at this point I was willing to try anything. I dressed in jeans and layered tees and stomped into an old, scuffed pair of Lucchese boots. They had started out a gorgeous green, but I hadn’t made a habit of cleaning and caring for the leather, and thedamp Louisiana air had left them sorta moldy on the outside. I wiped them down with a rag to reveal the color of the leather, which had weathered to a greenish charcoal. They looked like something I’d wear to a barn to muck out stalls. I really needed to pay them some attention. I combed and braided my hair and slashed lipstick on my mouth. Looked at myself in the mirror. Black hair. Amber eyes. Golden-copper skin.
The man had hair the same length and color as mine. I ran my hand down my braid. Same texture. He was Tsalagi. He was skinwalker.
I was no longer alone in the world.
Hope billowed up from some forgotten crevice deep inside me.
But like the last one I found, this skinwalker had tried to kill me too. I shoved down the useless traitor of hope and capped off the fissure. I would not waste emotion on the possibility of finding a skinwalker who didn’t want to kill me. Hope was a lie.
Sometimes life sucked.
I dropped my braid and left my room. In the foyer, the chairs were gone. So was the man. Eli was carrying the stranger to the kitchen, a handful of long hair and the cuffs in his right hand, the man’s belt in his left. The fancy shoes were getting scuffed as they dragged, and by his breathing, it was clear the carry position wasn’t helping his cojones. The stranger had to weigh two hundred pounds, but Eli carried him as if he weighed forty. Eli swung him up and into a chair like a bale of hay and the guy landed with a thump. On his butt, but probably banging his damaged cojones on the wood seat. The man groaned.
“Been there, bub. Hurts like a mother,” Eli muttered, recuffing the man’s hands in front. “I’m making coffee and tea. You act like a normal polite human and I’ll let you have some. And some aspirin. You act stupid and I’ll let my sister at you again. Understand?”
The man didn’t reply, but I swelled up with happiness. Eli had called me his sister, and neither the Cherokee adoption procedures nor the vamp ones had even started.
Alex, apparently over his pique, grunted behind meand said, “My bro’s getting all lovey-dovey in his old age.” I felt something deflate inside me, until he added, “Offering a coffee to a killer. So sweet.”
“I didn’t offer him the best espresso, just some coffee. Standard American. Or one of Jane’s cheaper teas.”
I let the smile that had started at the use of the wordsisterspread. This was way better than hope. This was real. The thought of family settled me.
I heard a horn beep outside. Eli tossed the man’s badge, his wallet, his key fob, and a pack of gum on the table. “PsyLED ID or a very good fake. Key beeped to a government vehicle with government plates down the street. Appears he drove here alone, but Alex’s systems are keeping watch on the exterior cams for a partner.”
The man lifted his head. His eyes were squinted in pain, but his breathing was slow and regulated as he tried to work through the misery. Skinwalker healing was way better than human. His color was returning. But he didn’t talk.
I said, “While my brother makes us all something civilized to drink, I can duct tape your legs to the chair or you can give me your word of honor that you’ll be good.”
The stranger sat up straighter and tossed his tangled hair back. “Brother?” His voice was graveled with pain. “Not by blood. Mixed race black and maybe Choctaw. NotChelokay.”Chelokaywas another way of sayingTsaligi—Cherokee in the speech of The People. That was intended as an insult, delivered without looking at Eli. Ignoring another warrior was an additional insult. “You’reu’tlun’ta,” he said to me, pronouncing the word a little different from my ownhut-luna, though close enough. It was insult number three. On top of trying to kill me. Dude was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, obviously being deliberately bad mannered to see if I’d gou’tlun’taon his ass. “But you didn’t try to kill me,” he said as if thinking things through. “Why? Since I fired at you. And how did you not get shot? There is no way I could have missed.”
He had not answered my question, instead muddying the emotional waters with insults and turning the table with his own questions. Basic reverse interrogation tactic.Law enforcement tactic. I decided to roll with it for now. “You always shoot unarmed women and ask questions later?”
He looked away at that one. Shoulders tensing in shock. As if just remembering that part.
“In front of witnesses? There were people on the sidewalk.” My tone called him stupid.
His lips were firm and tight. I realized that he didn’t know why he’d tried to kill me. He had reacted on instinct when he smelled me, just like vamps did. Interesting. Last time that happened I nearly had to kill a vamp in Sedona. Time before that I had to threaten Katie and then hurt Leo. “You ever met anu’tlun’ta? They smell like rotted meat.”
His eyes widened in surprise.
Clearly I had hit the nail, and he had never met a liver-eater. I pointed to my chest. “I don’t. I smell like predator. Not pretty flowers like you. Not like dead meat. And I killed the onlyu’tlun’tain NOLA.”
“I saw the footage,” he said, no inflection to tell me what he thought about me killing a massive half-human, half–sabertooth lion.
“Uh-huh.” I had still shots. The video was Leo Pellissier’s private in-house security footage. No way should this man have been able to get it. Yet his offhand reply told me he had really seen it. Not good.
Eli placed a mug in front of me. It was really a soup mug, white, with a picture of Santa Claus on it, the dialogue bubble saying, “Jane Takes Care of My Naughty List.” Below that was the body of a dead vampire, staked and his head removed.
The stranger’s eyes took in the mug. “Cup’s a little out of date, isn’t it? You work for the Mithrans now.”
I still killed vamps who got out of line. A lot of vamps. Either his intel was bad or he was being a pain in the butt. I was going for door number two, so I said nothing. Eli placed a tub of Cool Whip on the table and I used the soup spoon to dig out a glob of the white frothy stuff and place it on top of the tea. I added a similar amount of sugar from the restaurant-style pour-decanter and stirred.Eli sat down and placed a cup at his side. Another one with a straw in it went in front of the killer.
“You don’t think I’m going to drink that. It could be poisoned.”
Despite the stabbing headache, which had developed razor edges cutting its way out of the left part of my head and into the middle of my brain, I chuckled softly. Eli gave me a twitch of a smile. We actually had a mug with the wordsYOU’VE JUST BEEN POISONEDin the bottom, so you saw it only after you finished the drink. It was cute.
