My finger, still smeared with my blood, touched it. I jerked it away almost instantly, but a faint quiver of electricity shocked through me. It reminded me to call Ed.Edmund Killian Sebastian Hartley,I called. The blood on the Glob sizzled with heat, spitting black motes of power.
My vision went sideways, and I was in a different place. In a room, dark and muggy and... moving. Vibrating engine noise. The bed of a truck or an RV. Metal beneath my cheek. The stench of diesel and rotting blood and death. The sound of sex, bodies hitting rhythmically. Pain rippled through my body as if every muscle were in spasm.Hunger. Hungerhungerhungerhammered me. I pushed it away, feeling the direction of the truck. He was headed north. Toward Asheville.
My mistress?
I was in Ed’s mind. “Ed,” I whispered. “Hang on. You’ll be here soon. We can help you then.”
My mistress,he thought back at me.Stay away. The Darkness is within me.
I turned from the sound of his voice to a small corner in Ed’s mind. A semblance of his body was hunched there, protected at his back but vulnerable from the front. Something shadowy crouched beside him, amorphous, moving but contained, like smoke in a bottle. But the shadow had eyes. They were watching me with intelligence and intent. The Darkness Ed was talking about. An invader in Ed’s brain, in his mind, with him. Possessing him.
The Flayer of Mithrans. In Ed’s mind.
The thing in Ed’s mind spoke.Greetings to She Who Walks in the Skin of Animals. I will drink you down,the smoke said, with Ed’s mental voice. Inside the shadow I caught a glimpse of bloody human teeth and a blade and a sensation of terror. A fast vision opened in the air between us. Ropes and utter agony and the feel of bloody wood beneath my body. It was more memory than dream or threat. In it, the bloody teeth bit down and crunched through small fingers, ripping them off. A scream echoed, high-pitched and shrill. Pain clawed through me as if it were my own. Then in an instant, it was gone. The smoke shape broke and swirled in two different directions, like a tornado inside a tornado, closing over the images.
The Darkness shot toward me. Its mouth opened. Fangs. Dozens of fangs.
With a thrust of power, like blue electricity and thesmell of burning anise, Ed threw me out. The vision ended.
I was back in the circle, lying on the rug, shaking. My tongue was twisted up and around in my mouth as if it was trying to swallow backward, as if it was trying to crawl down my throat. I forced it into place and started coughing. Which jarred the thing in my middle. Pain went through me like a mudslide, darkening and covering everything. I rolled to my side and held myself, shuddering. My throat and tongue ached and when I could let go of my belly, I massaged my throat with one hand. I was cold. Too cold. Throat and hands and feet ached. But the circle was still active. I hadn’t broken it.
It took me two tries to speak, and when I did, every syllable hurt. “They’re starving him. Hurting him. Twenty-four/seven. The Flayer of Mithrans is inside Ed’s brain, trying to take him over.” I rubbed my throat and swallowed, my tongue feeling weird. My throat muscles ached. “I had access to a memory or a vision, as if Ed was fighting back, pilfering things from the Flayer’s memory.”
“How sure are you that Ed’s fighting back?” Evan asked.
“Pretty sure? Nothing else makes any sense.”
“What’s the Son of Deception looking for?” Evan asked, choosing a title that sounded more insulting than the others.
“I don’t know. I’d guess that it’s trying to break into the memories of Leo and me. Maybe take Ed over completely and use him to come after me. Ed’s resisting and counterattacking, but he’s... he’s in bad shape.”
“Why do you sometimes refer to Shimon as it?” Bruiser asked from behind me. I turned my head and saw him. He was a hairsbreadth beyond the edge of the circle, ready to break the circle to save me. Which would hurt him. A lot.
I breathed out a laugh, which hurtmea lot, and waved him away. “Shimon is more than a vamp. I think...” I thought about the shadow, the teeth, the movement of it, and I whispered past the pain in my throat, “I think he can do a sort of psychic possession and control. Andwhile I know that no vamp is human, he feels even weirder than any others I’ve met.”
“He hasn’t been human in two millennia,” Bruiser said. “He’s the oldest vampire undead. It’s likely that he’s also quite insane.”
I described the vision-memory for them. “It felt real. It had texture and temperature and the smell of fresh-cut wood. The stink of a dead body, the cold of blood loss. The sensation of biting off fingers—” I stopped. “There was this awful scream.” I rubbed my upper arms, my skin feeling pebbled and cold. “I think... I think it was the memory of the black magic used to bring their father back to life. But it was all mixed-up and confused.” I remembered the smoke thing. The timbre and flex of the mental words. The twisting, swirling power of tornadoes, so different from anything I’d felt before. The Flayer of Mithrans was... other. I gripped my own throat, feeling my pulse, the beating of my heart.
“You’re pale as a vampire. You should quit now,” Bruiser advised.
“No. I need to call Gee again. He hasn’t answered the last fifty texts or calls, but with the signal boost of the witch circle, he might hear me, wherever he is. Just a feeling, but... I need him here with me.”
“Please, Jane. Don’t overdo it.” Bruiser shifted a hard gaze, sharp as a knife, to the two witches. “Don’t let her kill herself.” It was a threat. And it was so cute I wanted to cry, but I hurt too much to cry.
I managed to sit up and was tickled pink that my blood in the shot glass wasn’t totally dried out, and that I hadn’t spilled it. I folded my legs and took a breath, my eyes on the shot—chalice.Crap. Shot-chalice.I liked. Molly would hate it. “Girrard DiMercy. You swore loyalty to me as my personal Enforcer before I was the Dark Queen, before I even had a clan. By my blood and your word, I call you,” I said. Molly said a heat-wyrdand the blood in the silver shot-chalice boiled in a fast simmer and dried to a crust on the bottom.
In seconds, I felt Gee, feathers fluffing against the cold. He was in his Anzu form and the connection wasclear and sharp. I was seeing through his eyes and the world was bright despite the night, like owl eyes. I knew. I’d been in Anzu shape once and owl more than once. Seeing with a night-hunting raptor’s vision was always weird. In Gee’s sight it wasn’t really dark, the ground was snow-free, and the air felt damp and somehow warm, though the distant trees were leafless. At the far-off tree line, I saw bison, a small herd standing in chest-deep snow, their breath blowing, ice crusted around their nostrils.
Gee was perched in a dead tree over a small pool of steaming water. Steam rose from the hot spring in globes of mist and fell in drops, a mimic of the action of the water bubbling, a luscious warmth. It almost looked like Hot Springs, not so far away, but the landscape was bigger, mountains on the horizon taller. Gee was in Yellowstone Park or someplace like it.
“If you fall in, we could make chicken and dumplings,” I said, aloud and in my mind.
“My mistress is amusing. How might I serve?” There was something snide in both the observation and the question. I decided to ignore it.
“I’m dying and the Flayer of Mithrans, Shimon, has Ed. I need you to heal me if you can, and help me save Edmund.”
“You should have asked much sooner. You are dying and your body is beyond my gifts.”
