Cold Reign

  “Where’s the fire that was in your eyes whenever you were close to me? Where’s the fire? Don’t you realize, just how much you mean to me?”

  Bruiser and I danced to the song of heartbreak and lost love. When it was over, I looked up. Rick LaFleur was gone.

  CHAPTER 22

  Shove It Up Your Royal Ass

  We were called to vamp HQ just before dawn, with orders to run by the house first and pick up a few items. Leo offered assurances that we would be allowed to leave with everything we brought, so I agreed, though with misgivings. Bruiser was now wearing all his weapons. I was weaponed up and also carrying two magical items, the Glob hidden in a pocket and le breloque in my hand. Laden with the belongings we had been ordered to bring, Bruiser and I stood before Leo’s office like supplicants or children at the principal’s office. Scrappy, who had led us in, as if we needed to be shown the way, knocked and opened the door.

  We entered.

  The smell of Leo—papyrus and ink and black pepper—hung strong on the air. We heard a tapping, as if on a laptop, soft but unsteady, and I remembered the damage to Leo’s hand. The furniture was back in its place, businesslike instead of raunchy-orgy-ménage à trois–like. Leo was sitting behind his desk, dressed in casual clothes, things I thought he probably slept in when he wasn’t doing sex and blood—thin knit black pants with a loose long-sleeved shirt. His hair was back in a short queue, looking as if it had been trimmed again. The Master of the City was pale and was wearing slippers, but he was upright and working.

  He stopped typing and indicated the two wingback chairs, his fingers still taped in place where they were reattaching. Bruiser and I sat, the magical crown on my lap, out in clear view. It felt weird to have it exposed this way, but Leo didn’t even glance at it.

  It wasn’t silent in the office. Soft instrumental music, piano and violin, Vivaldi maybe, played on the speakers in each corner, surround sound rising and falling to low ebbs. Leo leaned across the table he used as a desk and rested his chin in his hands, studying us over the short distance. One piece ended and another began before he spoke. “I did not know if you would come,” he said to Bruiser.

  “You are no longer my master, but you are the master of this city,” Bruiser said, formally. But then he added, “And you are the best master I could imagine. You always have been. Even in the midst of madness and misery and pain, you have put your people first. I honor that now and always.”

  Leo looked down, but I thought I caught a hint of surprise and tenderness in his eyes before they were shuttered. He tilted his head in acknowledgment. His lips curled up slightly. “You may wish otherwise soon. My plans are all for naught,” he admitted. “Two centuries of moves and countermoves, wasted.” He lifted his eyes to me. “You took Adrianna’s head?”

  “I did.”

  “She was the favorite of Titus Flavius Vespasianus. There were those who said she would be Titus’ queen one day. She was my bargaining chip. My last checkmate move in a match that would clear the board without war and death.”

  “Cry me a river,” I said.

  Leo burst out laughing and sat upright in his chair, dropping his arms to the desktop.

  “This isn’t a game,” I said, over his laughter, leaning in. I placed a palm on his desk and rested my weight on it. “It’s only a game when you play.”

  Leo’s laughter slid away, and he sat back, creating distance between us again. “It takes two to play? Perhaps. But a game is better than a war, my Jane.”

  “Are we at war?” I asked.

  “I do not know. Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the emperor of the European Mithrans, has accepted my offer of Sangre Duello. It is now a new game, with new rules.” Leo held Bruiser with his eyes for a moment, something in the depths I couldn’t read. Then he looked back at me. “Will you stand with me, becoming more than my Enforcer? Will you become my dark queen, to fight beside me?”

  Bruiser tensed, the reaction more a scent than a movement.

  A queen was a king’s wife, right? Was this some kind of funky proposal? Or was a queen something else in the vampire world? I wasn’t sure what to answer, whether this required a special Mithran-politics reply or something more crude on my part, like blowing raspberries. There was something too thoughtful about Leo tonight, something that felt wrong, something too planned, too devious. It made me edgy. I decided to walk a careful track between the two responses. Being terribly obvious about it, I stood to my full height and set my hand on a silver stake at my side. “I would be a pitiful second in a duel. And no way am I anyone’s queen. So, no. No queen stuff.”

  Wisely I didn’t add that I was a War Woman and a skinwalker and Bruiser’s love. I didn’t need anything at all from Leo Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans. But there was no reason to rub his face in it.

  Leo inclined his head, as if my answer didn’t surprise him. “Grégoire, Le Valois, Le Orleans, is my secundo in the duel against Titus’ primo or his secundo, should the emperor choose to make that move on this new board we play. If you will not be my queen, then will you be my Enforcer in truth? You would be the first Enforcer of such power and position in the long history of Mithrans.” He added, “If you still honor that position.”

  Bruiser said, carefully, “Jane, according to Mithran precedent, this negotiation, this proposal and the position of Enforcer, and the primo Leo gifted you with . . .” He stopped, as if turning lots of things over his mind and memory. With a hint of laughter in his voice, he finished with, “In many ways, this makes you a queen in your own right, beneath the heel of no king.”

  I hesitated, feeling that something in all this chitchat was still wrong, but the blood challenge with the emperor might be the only thing that would keep Angie Baby and her family from being held in vamp cages, slaves of the EVs, or worse, dead. It might prevent a vamp war, a major vamp war, with the resulting death of hundreds of vamps and other paranormals, maybe thousands of humans. And . . . a queen in your own right, beneath the heel of no king. Ahhh. This wasn’t chess. It was five-card stud. I couldn’t be blood-bound. I was Leo’s wild card. I was between a rock and hard place, flying by the seat of my pants, as always. There was really no choice. “Sure,” I said, putting as much snark as I could into it. “Why not.”

  Leo’s smile teased out again before he shifted his eyes to Bruiser. “And you, my Onorio. Will you stand by me?”

  “I will. As will the Roberes.”

  “Three Onorios,” Leo mused. “Perhaps it will be enough, now that you have come into the first of your powers.”

  Bruiser held the eyes of his former master, unblinking. I wondered if Leo had learned that Bruiser had drained a vamp. Leo answered my unspoken question with his own.

  “And your Mithran scion?” he asked, his tone silky. “The one you bound?”

  Bruiser frowned unhappily. “I have gifted her to Edmund.”

  Leo’s eyebrow quirked up in surprise, calculation flashing through his eyes. “Indeed? Ahhh . . . Indeed.”

  Bruiser didn’t reply, and I didn’t know what the emphasis on the last word meant. Bruiser did, however, and he glanced at me and away. I was missing something.

  “Katherine and Alesha have been restored. Alesha offered much intelligence about the plans and preparations of our enemies. They are being fed as we speak.”

  “Completely restored?” Bruiser asked. “In all ways?”

  “Katie is no longer my heir. I could not allow her that position without great loss of face.”

  “And your heir?” Bruiser asked, his voice going hard. “You will not saddle one of us with that.”

  Leo looked at me wryly. “That gift belongs to Edmund Hartley.”

  Bruiser sucked in a breath, his eyes going wide.

  I started to rear back at the alarm pumping through him. “What—”

  Before I could get the word out, Leo moved. Popping to my side fa
ster than I could see. He jerked le breloque out of my hand and placed it on my head.

  The sizzle of power shocked through me, the same sensation I had felt when I’d looped the wreath around my arm.

  Bruiser dove for Leo, but the Master of the City was faster and popped back behind his desk. They grappled across the expanse, sending the laptop crashing to the floor. A lamp. The music went silent. The sound of blows landed. Grunts and curses. The smell of blood. I sat through it all, feeling what had just happened. I had been crowned. With le breloque. A magical item that controlled the weather. That collected power to be used for magic. That vamps and witches had fought over.

  Fear coursed through me as the tingle of magics slid around me, to tangle onto my bones. I dropped deep into my soul home, the cavern dark and chilled, a fire burning in the center, the air tinged with hickory smoke. There was strange light glowing in the cavern, centered in the ceiling overhead. I looked up to the doomed ceiling, seeing the center, above the fire. Light spread out from that center height like the plumage of a bird, like angel wings, feathering down. The light was growing brighter, illuminating my soul home.

  From the base of the stone walls, a golden fire rose, cold blaze licking up the damp rock. The flame tips were shaped like the leaves of le breloque. The power of the magical device was trying to take over my soul home. Was trying to take over me. Giving me some new power, some new responsibility. Heavy. Onerous and oppressive. In the vision of my home, my knees buckled. I fell to the ground near the fire.

  Leo had asked me to be his queen. I had said no. He had seemed fine with my reply. He hadn’t been. That sneaky little suckhead.

  Beast padded close, her golden pelt shining in the odd lights. Leo is good ambush hunter. Crown is making Jane different. Do not like what crown is making Jane.

  She was right. Le breloque was making me . . . making me . . . something. I didn’t know what.

  Jane has choice, Beast thought at me.

  I remembered the words Hayyel had spoken about me making good choices. This was surely one. “No,” I said. “I refuse.”

  Beast chuffed in approval.

  Above me, the wings fluttered. Lifted. Resettled. Covering the dome of my soul. The light from them spread. The licking flames of the corona’s power died down. Flickered. Vanished.

  The Glob in my pocket warmed. Sparked with electricity. I pulled it free and lifted it. Held it high. “I will not accept the magic. I have my own.”

  Swiftly, the Glob drained le breloque. The vision of my soul home, shot through with brilliance, dimmed and disappeared. I was back in Leo’s office, holding the Glob over my head. Over the sound of the scuffle I thought I heard the whisper of angel wings.

  I reached up and took the wreath off my head, looked it over, and said simply, “Stop.”

  The fight stopped. Bruiser was bleeding and Leo’s severed and reattaching fingers were at an odd angle. “It didn’t work.” I hooked the crown over my arm. “I don’t know what you intended to happen, but it didn’t take.” I thunked the crown with a fingernail. The sound reverberated in the room.

  Leo looked horrified. Bruiser looked relieved, the kind of desperate relief he might have expressed when I called him from the boat to say I was alive. “I’m not a queen.” I thunked the corona again. “I’m leaving now. And if you ever try to crown me again, I’ll cut off your head and shove it up your royal ass.” I looked at Bruiser and added, “You coming?”

  Bruiser remembered to breathe. Leo started laughing.

  I grinned at them both. A Beastly grin, all teeth and violence.

  Without another word, I left the Mithran Council Chambers, a crown over my arm, my honeybunch at my side.

  • • •

  Due to a twist in diplomacy and an aggressive move on Leo’s chessboard of vamp politics, the invasion of New Orleans was over, but the danger wasn’t past. A blood challenge might be worse than anything we had faced to date. But I had my team and my love by my side. And I still had myself, my own soul—both of them. Together we could survive.

  We might, just maybe, even win a challenge to the death.

  Read on for an excerpt from the first book in Faith Hunter’s Soulwood series,

  BLOOD OF THE EARTH

  Available now from Roc.

  Edgy and not sure why, I carried the basket of laundry off the back porch. I hung my T-shirts and overalls on the front line of my old-fashioned solar clothes dryer, two long skirts on the outer line, and what my mama called my intimate attire on the line between, where no one could see them from the driveway. I didn’t want another visit by Brother Ephraim or Elder Ebenezer about my wanton ways. Or even another courting attempt from Joshua Purdy. Or worse, a visit from Ernest Jackson Jr., the preacher. So far I’d kept him out of my house, but there would come a time when he’d bring help and try to force his way in. It was getting tiresome having to chase churchmen off my land at the business end of a shotgun, and at some point God’s Cloud of Glory Church would bring enough reinforcements that I couldn’t stand against them. It was a battle I was preparing for, one I knew I’d likely lose, but I would go down fighting, one way or another.

  The breeze freshened, sending my wet skirts rippling as if alive, on the line where they hung. Red, gold, and brown leaves skittered across the three acres of newly cut grass. Branches overhead cracked, clacked, and groaned with the wind, leaves rustling as if whispering some dread tiding. The chill fall air had been perfect for birdsong; squirrels had been racing up and down the trees, stealing nuts and hiding them for the coming winter. I’d seen a big black bear this morning, chewing on nuts and acorns, halfway up the hill.

  Standing in the cool breeze, I studied my woods, listening, feeling, tasting the unease that had prickled at my flesh for the last few months, ever since Jane Yellowrock had come visiting and turned my life upside down. She was the one responsible for the repeated recent visits by the churchmen. The Cherokee vampire hunter was the one who had brought all the changes, even if it wasn’t intentional. She had come hunting a missing vampire and, because she was good at her job—maybe the best ever—she had succeeded. She had also managed to save more than a hundred children from God’s Cloud.

  Maybe it had been worth it all—helping all the children—but I was the one paying the price, not her. She was long gone and I was alone in the fight for my life. Even the woods knew things were different.

  Sunlight dappled the earth; cabbages, gourds, pumpkins, and winter squash were bursting with color in the garden. A muscadine vine running up the nearest tree, tangling in the branches, was dropping the last of the ripe fruit. I smelled my wood fire on the air, and hints of that apple-crisp chill that meant a change of seasons, the sliding toward a hard, cold autumn. I tilted my head, listening to the wind, smelling the breeze, feeling the forest through the soles of my bare feet. There was no one on my property except the wild critters, creatures who belonged on Soulwood land, nothing else that I could sense. But the hundred fifty acres of woods bordering the flatland around the house, up the steep hill and down into the gorge, had been whispering all day. Something was not right.

  In the distance, I heard a crow call a warning, sharp with distress. The squirrels ducked into hiding, suddenly invisible. The feral cat I had been feeding darted under the shrubs, her black head and multicolored body fading into the shadows. The trees murmured restlessly.

  I didn’t know what it meant, but I listened anyway. I always listened to my woods, and the gnawing, whispering sense of danger, injury, damage was like sandpaper abrading my skin, making me jumpy, disturbing my sleep, even if I didn’t know what it was.

  I reached out to it, to the woods, reached with my mind, with my magic. Silently I asked it, What? What is it?

  There was no answer. There never was. But as if the forest knew that it had my attention, the wind died and the whispering leaves fell still. I caught my breath at the strange hush, n
ot daring even to blink. But nothing happened. No sound, no movement. After an uncomfortable length of time, I lifted the empty wash basket and stepped away from the clotheslines, turning and turning, my feet on the cool grass, looking up and inward, but I could sense no direct threat, despite the chill bumps rising on my skin. What? I asked. An eerie fear grew in me, racing up my spine like spiders with sharp, tiny claws. Something was coming. Something that reminded me of Jane, but subtly different. Something was coming that might hurt me. Again. My woods knew.

  From down the hill I heard the sound of a vehicle climbing the mountain’s narrow, single-lane, rutted road. It wasn’t the clang of Ebenezer’s rattletrap Ford truck, or the steady drone of Joshua’s newer, Toyota long-bed. It wasn’t the high-pitched motor of a hunter’s all-terrain vehicle. It was a car, straining up the twisty Deer Creek mountain.

  My house was the last one, just below the crest of the hill. The wind whooshed down again, icy and cutting, a downdraft that bowed the trees. They swayed in the wind, branches scrubbing. Sighing. Muttering, too low to hear.

  It could be a customer making the drive to Soulwood for my teas or veggies or herbal mixes. Or it could be some kind of conflict. The woods said it was the latter. I trusted my woods.

  I raced back inside my house, dropping the empty basket, placing John’s old single-shot, bolt-action shotgun near the refrigerator under a pile of folded blankets. His lever-action carbine .30-30 Winchester went near the front window. I shoved the small Smith & Wesson .32 into the bib of my coveralls, hoping I didn’t shoot myself if I had to draw it fast. I picked up the double-barrel break-action shotgun and checked the ammo. Both barrels held three-inch shells. The contact area of the latch was worn and needed to be replaced, but at close range I wasn’t going to miss. I might dislocate my shoulder, but if I hit them, the trespassers would be a while in healing too.