I was shaking badly, hunger pulling up through my body. It felt as if someone had reached into me, grabbed the soles of my feet, and pulled me inside out. But eating would have to wait. There were injured here, piled among the dead. And not enough saving hands. Using supplies given to me by the small vamp, working with those less injured, I bandaged and applied pressure, squeezed bags of fluid, forcing saline into the living, trying to stabilize blood pressure. It had been a long time since my emergency medicine class, and my skills were rusty. But the humans here were skilled, and together we kept the less horribly wounded alive until a vampire could feed them, heal the wounded with their blood or saliva. It was messy.
Dawn came before we could finish and I helped the vamps, their humans, and a badly wounded Gee into the narrow stair leading to the lairbeneath the cabin. They would spend the day drinking from one another to heal. Seeing a vamp’s lair was a rarity, usually a sign of great trust, but this time it fell under the category of emergency. I was alone when I closed the hatch beneath the kitchen table and heard the bolts ram home.
“Just me and the bodies,” I said. Which was bad. Vampires who couldn’t be saved had to be killed true dead or risk rising as revenants— mindless eating machines akin to Hollywood’s worst zombies. That meant they had to be beheaded or burned to ash in the sun, thankfully not a job I had signed up for. I called Namida. She was old and powerful enough to be able to answer the phone after dawn, tell me where I was (at the Johnson Clan Home, which gave me nothing but a name, though every little bit helped). She promised human assistance and cleanup via helicopter, which was pretty cool.
There were four tiny silver linings to the night: no one had died in the kitchen, the kitchen was fully stocked with meats of all kinds, the stove was hot, and so was the shower water.
—
I was gone by the time the helo showed up. I saw it through the low-lying clouds as I circled the Johnson clan holdings and found the scent I was chasing. The Duba. I beat my wings and followed the stink. I found their den a hundred miles or so from Foleyet. It wasn’t far as the Anzu flew, but the den was underground. According to the Internet there were no mines in the area, but the opening into the low hillside looked like an old mine, ancient timbers shoring up the entrance, iron rails leading in, the area denuded of trees, spotted with rusted vehicles, buildings in disrepair. The site, whatever it was, had been empty for a long time. I circled, looking for two things—a back entrance and signs of magic. I spotted them both instantly. There were three back entrances, all stinking of Duba and death and broken magic. The mine centered on the crisscrossed ley lines, the jumbled, twisted energies I had seen earlier. It was a place of intense earth magics, where normal—assuming there was a normal—were-creatures had been altered, possibly on the cellular level, by the concentrated, warped energies.
Bad place, Beast thought at me.Do not go in.
Good advice, I thought back. The last time I went into a mine I nearlydied. That wasn’t happening again, especially into a mine flooded with sick magic.
Nothing about this hunt was proving easy. I flew back to the Johnson cabin, shifted, dressed, and checked my cell. I had a signal and placed a call to Alex Younger back home, set the GPS system in the new necklace to broadcast my position, and ate again. Around me, humans carried out the last rites offered to the vamps they served. It was bloody. Messy. Their grief awful.
I was tired. Too tired. Shifting so many times was using up reserves I didn’t have and eating up more calories than I could take in, even with Anzu magic fueling half the changes. In human form, I ate. And ate. When I could talk, I questioned the visiting humans and found that Namida had sent what I needed. She had also sent a special human, Masie, who had mad skills with explosive weapons. Handy, that.
Leaving the others burying the dead and cleaning up, we two flew to the mine again, this time on the helo they had come in, the craft loaded with explosives. At each of the three back entrances, Masie set explosives, enough C-4 to bring down the tunnels and maybe half the mapped cave. The rumble and slam of explosive might was satisfying and properly climactic, dirt, smoke, and debris flying, the ground vibrating like a drum. There was no way to know if Masie had saved us the trouble of killing the weres. Not yet. We’d have to wait until dark. So we set up cameras at the remaining front entrance to track activity and took the helo back again.
—
At sunset, Gee and I landed at the mine and shifted shape. This time I had sufficient clothes, borrowed from the Johnson clan and smelling of vampire and unfamiliar humans, but better than the cold I’d have been otherwise.
“You found the den,” Gee said, when I came out from behind a dilapidated building. He sounded surprised, which was mildly insulting. Deep inside, Beast hissed at him.
I said, “Yeah. Their den is a mine that angles into those ley lines we saw, which are twisted and knotted like a snarl of yarn. The energies coiled there are where I figure the Duba came from in the first place. Some were-creature holed up inside and was changed by the magics down to the genetic level. That change was passed along to the bitten progeny.”
“Ah,” he said, excitement lacing his words. “We will hunt them in the mine?” I could smell anticipation on him.
“Not exactly,” I hedged. I would fulfill my deal with the Anzu to the letter and not one iota more. My plan was down and dirty but effective, and did not include exposing him or me to the gene-altering energies. Or an underground hunt.
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly,’ little goddess?” he asked, suspicion in his tone and body posture.
“Ummm... that?”
His scent underwent a distinct change at the sound of a helo, the blades cutting the air with a deep thrum. “What have you done?” he asked.
I didn’t answer, but I didn’t let him from my sight either.
“You steal the hunt from our bargain?”
The helo dropped through the cloud cover and hovered twenty feet overhead, the downdraft beating the ground, the thunder of the engine like a thousand drums. This was a big mother of a bird. From the fuselage, something dropped, stretched out in the air, and landed, softly as a hunting big cat. And then raced inside the mine. Gee hissed. I laughed.
“This was to beourhunt,” he said.
“We hunted.” When he started to object I said, “We flew. We tracked. You killed one. I killed one. I have officially completed my part of our agreement. We. Are. Done.”
From the mine entrance I heard screams and yowls and sounds that might emerge from a hellpit.
His voice toneless, knowing I wasn’t to be moved on this, Gee said, “There is no honor in this battle.”
“No,” I acknowledged, my voice as dry as his. “No honor at all.”
“Why, then?”
“They bit humans. Those humans will likely become were-Duba. Were-Duba are worse than werewolves. Insane. Violent. Once they shift, they’ll be killed.” I frowned at the mine pit. “By their loved ones. Besides, hunting were-creatures has never been the job of a Mercy Blade or an Enforcer. It’s the job of a grindylow and by the sounds, she’s doing just fine.”
