She stabbed forward.
I ducked back and blocked her knife hand with my left, shoving up and around in a whirling motion.
She snapped at my exposed arm. Biting at me. Her teeth grazing my skin.
U’tlun’ta.Liver-eater. The evil of the skinwalker, to eat the living and take their form.
She wanted to be Jane Yellowrock.
She wanted to be the Dark Queen.
The Glob sucked the last of the amulet’s power away.Le breloquedid... something. Grandmother froze.
I swiped her face with my claws. They caught the edge of her jaw. Down her throat. Caught the thong around Grandmother’s neck. I ripped away her charm. Her blood splattered across me.
The stench ofu’tlun’tafilled the sweathouse. Grandmother dropped, curled to her knees, and shifted. In a second and a half. She simplybecameBubo bubo.
The shift falling away, she flew at the door. Her claws and body battering it. I hadn’t latched it. The door opened, and she flew into the daylight.
Bubo bubo. The Eurasian eagle owl.
I stood still, Grandmother’s amulet hooked into my claws, swinging. The owl was not native to this continent.
When I had to fly, the eagle owl was my bird of choice, even though it wasn’t a bird native to the western hemisphere. It had been hard to get the bones. Not impossible, just freaking difficult.
Bubo buboeagle owls were part of a prophecy told to me by Sabina, the outclan priestess. The one burned by the Firestarter. I’d once had a vision of grandmother leaping at me and calling me a rabbit. Rabbits were choice food for owls.
I had always assumed the owl in theBubo buboprophecy was me, but... this and the memory... I had a memory of Sabina and Grandmother in a Cherokee war council. Sabina was agigadanegisgi. Blood taker. Had Sabina tried to buy me when I was a toddler?
“Jane?” Aya whispered.
Aya was an officer of the law, working with PsyLED. He had to know that we had a real problem here, and not one that his department was equipped to handle. I lifted the amulet in my oversized, half-form hand and studied it. It was a rough diamond, big as a pecan-half, knotted with hide thongs.
Diamond.
Things came together.
Diamond.Like my Glob. It too had been a diamond, a reddish blood diamond, filled with the magic of the sacrifice of witch children. Had Grandmother been using the diamond to direct her magic, or had the energy been coming from the diamond itself? Was this one of the amulets the fangheads were always searching for? How had Grandmother gotten it? Had she stolen it from Sabina when the vamp tried to buy me? Was this the blood price for a skinwalker child?
“Holy crap,” I whispered as the amulet cooled. My voice was Beast-low and growly.
“Jane?” he asked again. “I couldn’t move. How... What did she do?”
I looked from the amulet to Ayatas. I was going to have to explain, and I didn’t know what words to use.
Something about his body posture changed, and I was suddenly seeing Ayatas FireWind, cop, not Aya, brother. “Did you see the magic?” he asked.
“Saw it, smelled it. You remember the stories about spear finger, liver-eater, andu’tlun’ta.” Aya nodded. “And you remember that I killed one.” He gave a small cop nod. “Thatu’tlun’ta... He smelled like Grandmother.”
Aya breathed in and frowned fiercely, making long grooves from his nose to his chin and two sharp lines between his eyebrows. “Is that what I smell? Like rotten meat cooking on a spit?”
“Yes. And the stench is worse than the last time I met anu’tlun’ta. She did black magic—blackwitchmagic—with this”—I indicated the amulet—“and she’s changing, Aya. Changing intou’tlun’ta, the cannibalistic evil creature that our kind all seem to become when we get old. She’s hiding that change behind spells she bought from witches. And she attacked me with this.” I held up the dead amulet in my knobby fingers. “It’s a diamond. Or it was. Now it’s black and”—I stopped. I pulled the Glob and tapped Sixmankiller’s stone with it. The diamond cracked and its internal matrix shattered in my palm—“dead. Still intact, but cracks running all through it, ruined down to the cellular level.”
“What is that?” Aya demanded about my ugly weapon.
“It’s the blood of sacrificed witch children, a piece of the Blood Cross, a round ingot melted from the Spike of Golgotha, one of the vampire blood diamonds, and my flesh and blood sealed together by me being struck by lightning.”
Aya’s frown vanished and was replaced with a scant smile. “You have lived a long and fascinating life, my sister.” It could have been an accusation, but it wasn’t. It was spoken in that tone that cops use when speaking to one another.
