“This is so not fair,” Shiloh spat.
“Thanks, Jane,” Molly said, her tone nowhere near calm and reasonable. Behind her, Big Evan smiled, the expression barely visible behind his full red beard. Molly shoved her own bouncy red curls out of her face and scowled at her niece, her words still strident. “You need formal schooling. It’s not an option. No witch in New Orleans can take you on to train,not with the work taking place putting together the Witch Conclave. The Charlotte coven accepted you as a student for six weeks and assured us of your safety. You. Need. Training.”
“I’m not going.” Shiloh stamped her foot.
I curled my lips under to keep from laughing aloud. I had never seen a vamp stamp their foot.
“And you can’t make me. Right, Enforcer?”
That’s what happened when you got three redheaded people, two of them witches, and one a witch-vamp, all in the same room with a Cherokee skinwalker. Trying to get them to work together to solve our problem had been difficult. Actually, impossible, so far.
I’m Jane Yellowrock. I was on my own, hunting and staking rogue vamps when I was Shiloh’s age. Now I’m the Enforcer to the MOC of NOLA and, with my partners, I run Yellowrock Securities, Inc., chasing and fighting “things that go bump in the night.” I can do tough. But I’d rather fight a ten-foot alligator with my bare human hands—buck naked— than deal with a teenager.
“No. They can’t,” I said, and I thought poisoned darts would shoot from Molly’s eyes. I grinned and stood, pulling my cell. “And I can’t.” On the cell’s face, I tapped the name Leo Pellissier, my boss and the Master of the City of New Orleans. I handed the girl the cell. “But he can.”
“I’m not talking to him,” Shiloh said, her eyes bleeding scarlet, her pupils dilating vamp-black.
I just laughed, the sound a little catty, a little mean, and shook my head. “Take the phone before he answers or I’ll stick you under my arm and carry you to vamp HQ and watch him convince you. It won’t be pretty.”
Shiloh ripped the cell out of my hand and said, “What?” A moment later she scowled and added, “Sir. What, sir? It’s Shiloh, sir.” She turned away and hunched her shoulders. I smiled at Molly and her husband Evan. It was a fake smile but it was all I had left, and it was nicer than the one I had shown Shiloh.
Molly’s niece had disappeared at age fifteen, a runaway. That same year, she had reappeared in New Orleans, in a teen shelter, just in time to be swept up by the Damours, witch-vampires who were looking for witch children to use in black-magic, blood-magic sacrifices for a big-ass spellto... never mind. It’s convoluted. But I could still feel the chill in my bones from the day I discovered she had been taken. Soon after, Shiloh had been turned and used by vamps to accomplish their own ends.
Except for running away to New Orleans—and look how badly that had gone—Shiloh had never made a single decision in her own life. She had lived every moment at the behest of others, and she had suffered trauma. Her mother had commited murder and killed her father. Witches had abandoned the girl. Vamps had used and abused her. Her remaining family hadn’t known what to do with a witch-vamp.
All that made me want to let her go, let her make this decision with her own life, let her face the consequences on her own. If she was the only one to face repercussions, I’d likely let her go. But that wasn’t going to happen. If Shiloh Everhart Stone let a witch working explode, or bit a tourist, or, God help us,both, it would create major reverberations throughout the witch and vamp worlds. The whole country might face the results with her. And there wasn’t enough of me to protect everyone.
Her eyes slowly bled from half-vamped-out to simply human, which was good. I didn’t want to have to fight the girl. Despite her power, I might hurt her. And despite her freedom in the human world, and her insistence on being in control of her vampire gifts, the control of vamps as young as Shiloh was minimal.
Shiloh Everhart Stone had long straight red hair, dark eyes, and a pointy, not quite perfect nose. Her skin had that glowing, pinkish look that well-fed vamps always had. Leo had decided that a hungry witch-vamp in a training camp full of witches trying to learn their magic might be tempting fate, and so, today, she had been given a coterie of humans to feed upon every night when she woke. I thought it was a great idea, but Shiloh had dug in her heels about relocating, and when an Everhart went stubborn, it was like trying to get the moon to rotate to Mars. Not gonna happen by any power I had.
Well, except the power of Leo. He too wanted her to make her own decisions, to be grown-up and wise. He wanted her to see the wisdom of the move and agree to it. He wanted her to learn that control she so desperately lacked.
“Yes, sir, it was a mistake,” Shiloh said to Leo. “But no one got hurt. I have control. I do,” she said softly. Moments later, her shoulders droppedin defeat. She had sworn to Leo, she had drunk his blood and he hers. She literally couldn’t say no to him. Under other circumstances I might have felt guilty for playing the blood-tie card. But not this close to the Witch Conclave.
She ended the call and handed the cell back. There were perfectly human tears in her eyes, until she set her gaze on me. Then they vanished and the familiar tilt lifted her chin again. Stubborn. “This issonot fair,” she spat at me. “You didn’t have to call him.”
“You used the term Enforcer,” I said, my tone still mild. “You’re a vamp now. You’ve had lessons on the Vampira Carta and its codicils.” The VC was the legal papers by which all Mithran vamps lived and died. “What happens when you use a title?”
Shiloh dropped into a chair, glared around the room, and huffed out a breath she didn’t really need. “It activates the responsibilities and protocols and bindings and legal mumbo-jumbo that goes along with it.” The mutinous expression finally vanished. “I should have just asked my aunt Jane.”
I hid my grin and glanced at Evan, who was sitting across the room from us in Shiloh’s recliner. He had claimed it upon entering and, at six and a half feet tall and well over three hundred pounds, he could sit anywhere he wanted. Even in a vamp’s favorite chair. He was sipping a beer and shaking his head. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know he was thinking about his own family and how soon he’d have a teenaged daughter to deal with. A powerful teenaged witch daughter who had access to more magic than all the three witches in the room together. Big secret, that part about Angie Baby.
“Aunt Jane would defer to your witch aunt,” I said.
The window next to Shiloh’s head exploded inward. Something small and dark whipped across the room.
I dove for Molly and wrapped her in my arms, making a cage of my limbs as I spun across the floor and under a table, taking the weight and force of the rolling dive onto my body, on elbows and knees and spine. My braid, down and loose, caught under us and I yanked it free. “Stay put,” I growled at her. My Beast was close to the surface, her cat-voice rough and coarse.
From the back of the house I heard the sound of a shotgun breach closing. The blood-servants were on the way. That left the missile up to me. I tossed my braid and shifted my body, rolling to the thing that had been thrown inside.
Glass was still flying through the room as Beast shoved me across the floor. Seeing the object as I reached for it. A brick. With a note tied on.
For freaking crap’s sake.
I checked the brick with more senses—smell (no explosives), sight (no explosives). I picked it up—touch (no explosives). It was just a brick with a note, folded over, a name on the outside. Tied with twine in a neat bow. I stood, seeing ahedge of thornswitch ward lifting around the house. Evan had whistled it up in seconds flat, which meant it had been in place and ready to rise as needed. Pretty nifty, that.
The blood-servants stood at the doorway, a man with a shotgun leveled at me. The others with knives and a nine-millimeter and a tiny .380. All aimed at me. I set the brick down on the floor and stood. Held up my hands, trying for innocent, but that was hard for a six-foot-tall Cherokee chick so weaponed up that I looked like a walking arsenal. “Not me,” I said. And then I chuffed, catlike laughter. “I come in peace.”
