Still gagging, the pain of the shift and the fight-or-flight chemicals raging through me, a different pain ripped into my belly.Hunger.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice nearly as rough as her burned vocal cords. “Thanks for nearly drowning me.” I focused on her. She was charred and skeletal, her eyes huge and black, her fangs down on their little hinges, vamped out. Hairless. Naked so far as I could see. Like bones covered with black cracked leather.
“I saved the relics,” she said. “All are buried here, beneath the chapel, in the mud outside this tunnel.” Her other hand rose from the water, gesturing at the walls of the tunnel and the mud-soaked earth beyond. Her claws were fully extended, black as obsidian, sharper than steel knives. Woven around her fingers was a gold chain, dangling with a dozen tiny charms. “You must protect them.”
“Okay. But I have questions aboutBubo bubo—”
She reached out and placed her palm on my forehead. Her fingers stretched along the top of my head. Her claws dug in, holding me in place. My vision changed.
My mind was filled with images, memories, something that might have been concepts and emotions, but all rambling and confused and demented. I began to slide off the low wall into the water. Sabina steadied me. Again I wanted to hurl as my brain spun around.
Glimpses of the Firestarter, Aurelia Flamma Scintilla, through Sabina’s memories. A hard woman, a stone statue chiseled from a block of anger. The priestess wore black robes, a silver cross on her chest. A vision of the woman throwing a fireball at a group of vampires. Old memory. Old death. Old friends, burning. The stench of vamp flesh on fire. The piercing ululation of vamps dying.
A vision of Ka N’vsita, a child with black hair down to her hips. Yellow eyes. Ka, who was a skinwalker, like me. Ka, related in some way to Grandmother. Ka, who, rather than me, was...sold... to Sabina by my grandmother. The sound of amulets and money clinking into Grandmother’s palm. Sabina and Ka, walking out of a longhouse and into a forest with the child’s hand clasped in the vamp’s. Tenderness filling the old vampire. Love. Protective instincts as old as time. Ka, dozens of memories of her, all flashing by. Ka, learning how to ride a horse sidesaddle as the white women did. How to dance while wearing a corset, petticoats, and a heavy dress. Standing in a witch circle, trying to work magic. Ka, grown, standing with Adan Bouvier, looking at him with love in her eyes, while fear grew in Sabina’s heart at the thought of losing her.
One of Sabina’s memories solidified. It was of Ka, standing with the Firestarter, Immanuel, and a blond man whose face was turned away. They stood in a cemetery with no crosses, no angels. It reminded me of the Jewish graveyard in NOLA. The women were talking, wearing clothing from the 1950s. Ka took Aurelia’s hand. In the trees was an owl.
A Eurasian eagle owl,Bubo bubo.Grandmother... Sabina. In the same place.
The memories whirled again. I saw the images of a morerecent cemetery, peaceful, the moon hanging in the trees. Ka stood in the moonlight near a mausoleum in the vamp graveyard.
My heart leaped in my chest.Ka.Wearing modern clothing, jeans and a T-shirt with running shoes. Sabina walked out to the porch of the chapel, waiting to see what her guest wanted.
Ka looked up and saw Sabina. Their eyes met. The connection was electric. Unexpected.Wrong.The skinwalker rushed toward her. Tackled her. Fighting. Claws and fangs. Blood and speed. The stench of foul things and fury. Sabina had not fought a duel or hand-to-hand in decades. Perhaps centuries. But she was strong. She threw Ka off and raced into the chapel. Slammed the door and dropped the beam over the entrance.
Ka was alive. A wave of shock washed through me. Alive, or a really good illusion of her. Was that possible?
Through the scarlet windows, Sabina watched what happened next. The Firestarter appeared out front, standing on the far side of the cemetery. Aurelia raised her arms. I realized when this entire scene took place. It was the night of the fire in Leo’s graveyard, eight or nine months ago.
Ka, as I had feared, was working with the Firestarter.
Orbs of flames roared out from Aurelia’s hands and then in from everywhere. Fire tornadoes swirled high, fire devils, lifted on the rising wind. Trees exploded in the background. The stone of mausoleums charred and split. The statues on top of each one breaking and melting. One shattered, raining molten metal and shards of stone everywhere. She targeted the chapel. The heat like magma, so hot everything was afire instantly. The pews, the lectern, the small table. The rocking chair rocking as the flames blasted across it. Sabina. Her white robes on fire. Her hair on fire. Her skin burning.
Magic in the fire. Hatred in the fire. Curses in the fire.
Burning, screaming, Sabina slid the lid off her crypt and gathered all the relics she kept hidden there. Boxes and bags and books in sealed containers, all tossed into a larger fireproof bag and tossed into the back of the crypt even as she burned. Into the space she had made, Sabina crawledand pulled the heavy stone top over her. The fire in the chapel was cut off. Using something that didn’t burn, she batted at the flames consuming her body.
I could feel her pain, hear her screams, the ululation of a vampire dying. Except she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t consumed.
But the heat from the burning building was growing. The temperature inside the stone was rising. She crawled through more stuff to the bottom of the crypt and felt along the base until her fingers found a small niche. Inside was a tiny metal ring. She turned it. Straining against the base of the heavy vault, she began to shove a hidden doorway open, across the floor. But even with her vampire strength, it took too long.
Heat penetrated the stone, fissures formed, fine cracks. The rock fractured, splintered, and exploded. Superheated stone shards pierced her. Again, her body was enveloped in flames. Sabina howled with pain, the sound drowned by the roar of the fire.
I was screaming with her. Her pain, my pain.
The crack in the floor widened. Sabina and the bag of relics dropped into the darkness. Hit the dirt beneath. She pulled the stone back over her.
Rolling in the dirt beneath her crypt, she put out the flames on her body. Rolling, rolling, the flames dying. Breathing hard, she pulled the crypt’s stone floor closed until the metal ring in the vault’s stone base clicked closed. She had told me once that she would not live through another burn. This one was much worse than the last. Sabina dug into the soil as if digging her own grave. Searching for a hint of magic.It should be here. Just here,she thought.Four feet from the right corner of the foundation wall.But the wood was on fire only inches above her. The floor beneath the stone vault and above her head began to give way. Heat broiled down.
And then she felt a tingle of magic and dug with all her might. Dug and pulled the bag of relics after her. Covering herself over with the dirt, she clawed into the earth. Away from the heat. Into the tunnel she had prepared centuries ago. The fire above was magical, burning hot enough to crack the stone foundation and break the last of the oldwater working in the tunnel. Water from Louisiana’s high water table began to seep in and the dirt beneath her turned to mud.
There were only a few inches of water that night, but it was winter cool, and Sabina rolled in it, trying to ease the horrible heat in her body. Crying. She wept with pain and failure because she had lost Ka so long ago. Lost her skinwalker to Adan Bouvier amid proof of black magic. She had been unable to keep the child safe. “Ka,” I whispered, one hand holding on to Sabina’s scorched arm, the two bones feeling hard as steel beneath my fingers.
Sabina’s memories fell into me again. The night the cemetery burned, Sabina buried the relics in the foundation and crawled away through the mud, even as water in the tunnel continued to rise. Then she was elsewhere and else-when. I saw an image of a human cemetery inside New Orleans. Broken stone angels were everywhere.
Sabina’s hand tightened on my head, her vamp claws cutting into my scalp. Blood, warm but cooling, ran down my scalp and dripped into the dank water.
There was a vision of a letter written in a language I didn’t know. But from Sabina, I knew what the message told her. Ka was alive. She had been found living in a chateau outside of Paris. The letter was official notification that Ka, an Onorio herself, had joined forces with asenza onore.
