Cold Reign

  I was expected at Aggie One Feather’s soon to be taken to water again, in an ancient Cherokee ceremony of purification and healing. That would help too. And I’d eventually get around to telling my boyfriend about my condition. Maybe. If it didn’t go away fast enough.

  What I hadn’t told Eli was that he was going to water too. Aggie had secured the services of an old Choctaw man to take Eli to water, since women and men had differing ceremonies. And since it meant being naked. No way was I comfortable being around Eli naked. Just . . . wrong. So Eli’s ceremony would not be the Cherokee version, but Aggie thought the Choctaw ceremony would do. Would help. We’d see.

  I turned off the water, dried with an oversized bathsheet that Eli had ordered from some high-end store, oiled my skin, and toweled my hair but left it down rather than drying it. I’m not a girly kinda girl, but I have great hair, or so said Bruiser, black as night, straight as good bourbon. Unbraided, it hung down below my butt, and it would dry faster if I left it loose and long. I pulled on layers: a long-sleeved silky undershirt, long-sleeved cotton tee, fuzzy sweatpants, and wool socks and joined the boys in the main room.

  Eli had showered in his usual ninety seconds and was already lying on the couch, taking up the space of three people. Alex was playing some international war game on his computer, the werewolf Brute at his feet. Pea, or maybe it was Bean, since I couldn’t tell the grindylow littermates apart, was curled on Alex’s shoulders, her steel claws grooming his hair. Which looked horribly dangerous. And Edmund was coming in the side door, wearing a rain-wet, dark suit, a glimpse of his gorgeous collector car, parked in the narrow lane. The smell of storm and vamp blood mixed on the breeze close behind. His knees buckled. He fell forward.

  “Ed!” I shouted.

  Beast shoved into my brain. I/we leaped across the room, Beast-fast, catching my primo before he hit the floor. His blood smeared my hands. He slipped through my grip until Beast’s nails snagged on his clothing. I eased him to the wood floor, his head on my thigh. He was bleeding from dozens of cuts. His dark suit was rain and blood soaked. “Call Leo,” Eli said to Alex. And he sliced his wrist, vertically, to keep from harming the tendons that made hands and fingers work. Placed it at Edmund’s mouth.

  Eli had his battle face on: no emotion. No reaction. Edmund looked dead. His fangs should have flipped down. He should have ripped into Eli’s arm. He should have vamped out, insane with hunger. But he did nothing, which was infinitely worse. Eli pressed his bleeding wrist to Edmund’s mouth, gravity draining the blood in over Ed’s tongue. Some drizzled out his lips. Pooled in his cheek.

  “Come on,” Eli demanded. “Drink, you sorry, fanged piece-a’-shit.”

  Nothing happened. Except watery blood pooled slowly on my floor. “Jane,” Eli said. “Call him.”

  “What?”

  “You’re his master. He’s healed you, so he’s tasted your blood and shared his own with you. Call him. Make him drink. Keep him alive.”

  I started to say I had no idea what he was talking about, but Eli snarled, “Do it.”

  I started to say I didn’t know how, but Edmund looked like death-still dead, real dead, not undead. I closed my eyes and crossed my legs in a half-guru position. Beast? I called my carnivorous half. She didn’t answer, so I took a breath and dropped slowly into the Gray Between. Silver mist shot through with blue-black motes of power filled my mind. Beast? I know you’re here. How do I call Edmund?

  Beast does not know.

  Gimme an idea. He’s . . . dying.

  He is dead. He is dead for longer than Beast is alive.

  Beast didn’t lie well, if at all, except by obfuscation. A thought occurred to me. How did you call kits when they got away?

  She made a little mewling, coughing sound, which wouldn’t help at all.

  Then I remembered the electric velvet feel of Sabina’s magics on the air when she called the Mithran vampires of New Orleans for a gather. And the raw, slicing power of Leo calling his scions to him prior to a feeding frenzy. That magic was all vampire, rich and deep and potent as death itself.

  I reached out into the Gray Between. Took the silver mist and motes of my skinwalker magic into my . . . not hands. Into my mind. I usually used the magic to shift into an animal for which I had enough DNA material. But when I called Beast, it was different. Easier. I . . . I just thought about her, called her into being. I opened my eyes and looked down at the vampire. He was surrounded by the Gray Between. In the mist of my magics, he looked dead, pale and bloody and unbreathing, heart not beating.

  “Jane!” Eli snapped. “Now!”

  I gathered up my magic and slapped Ed with it. A red streak appeared on his cheek. “Drink, you sicko bloodsucker fanghead.”

  Nothing happened. I hit him with everything Beast and I had. And again.

  The vamp coughed. Swallowed. A strangled sound of relief escaped my mouth. Eli put his wrist back at the vamp’s lips. Ed swallowed and swallowed. His fangs flipped down slowly on their little bone hinges. Edmund’s hand lifted to grip Eli’s arm, guiding it more fully to his mouth. His lips closed around the wound, wasting no more blood to dribble on the floor.

  Eli hissed. “Son of a . . . gun.” He grunted in pain as Ed bit deep.

  I let the Gray Between of my skinwalker magic fall away.

  And that was when I smelled the stench of silver mixed with vamp blood. Toxic. Deadly. I touched a slash on Ed’s side and the smell puffed out like putrefaction. Edmund had been cut with silver blades. He was really and truly dying.

  “Alex?” Eli asked. “When?”

  Edmund’s eyes opened, white sclera and brown irises. His gaze focused on me as his eyes bled slowly black and his pupils dilated. Blood flushed into the vessels and his clear sclera went scarlet. He was vamping out, deliberately, controlled, even while poisoned with silver, tortured with blood loss, and dying. He was still dying. Such a slow vamping-out took power, a lot of power, for any vamp, even one in the best of undead health. Especially for a vamp who had been poisoned with silver.

  Alex said, “Leo’s sending Tex, some female named Dacy Mooney, Brandon and Brian, and Wrassler to help.” I started to say something about the names, but Alex continued, his tone full of dread, “It’ll be at least half an hour.”

  His eyes on me, Edmund sucked. And sucked. Time passed. It seemed forever. Eli went slightly pale. Started smiling. He sat on the floor. Boneless and limp. His head tilted to the side and he stretched out beside the vampire, who was still bleeding onto the wood flooring. Silver in Ed’s wounds was keeping him from clotting, from healing.

  “How long?” I asked Alex.

  “Twenty-two minutes before they get here.”

  “He won’t last that long.” I knelt beside Eli and pulled a blade from a sheath at his spine. I slid up my sleeve and sliced my wrist, saying something my house mother would have washed out my mouth for. It hurt. I said it again as the sting expanded and blood welled into the open flesh. Edmund stopped sucking. His eyes were still on me.

  “Take it,” I said. “Don’t make me call you a fanghead piece-a’-crap. ’Cause I will. Now let go of Eli’s wrist and take mine before you kill my partner and I have to take your head.”

  Edmund’s eyes went from mine to Eli’s, and shock flashed across his face. His mouth released, fangs sliding free. “I have taken too much,” he whispered.

  “Yeah. But two vamps are on their way to help. One of them can feed you and the other can heal Eli. Now drink.”

  His eyes went back to the blood that was now coiling around my arm in a spiral. He looked sick, ashy, starved. He needed to drain a few humans to heal, and yet he was holding back from attacking me. “You offer me your blood? Freely?”

  I knew what he was asking. Freely sharing blood was part of the binding ceremony between master and primo. Edmund had freely given me his blood several times when I needed healing. Half of th
e sharing. If I gave him my blood freely, that was a second part.

  Edmund’s eyes fell from my arm to Eli, cradled on the floor. His lips widened the same way Pavlov’s dogs salivated. Unconsciously. Needing.

  “Jane?” Alex asked, warning in his tone. He was standing over Edmund, a silver-plated vamp-killer pointed at the vamp’s cervical spine.

  “Yes,” I snapped. “Freely.”

  Edmund’s eyes whipped back to mine, and I had a moment to wonder if I had been played before he released my partner and snatched my wrist. His tongue cold as a body in a morgue refrigerator, he licked my arm free of the trailing blood and dipped into the wound. The pain was instantly eased, the anesthetic in vamp saliva so effective that he bit through the slash and started sucking and I didn’t even notice.

  The pull was oddly familiar. Kits, Beast thought at me. Suckling. Like kits.

  I blinked, closed my eyes, and the world faded from view. I was in my soul home, the cavern where I communed with Beast, with my own spirit, and with my memories. It was the memory of the first place I ever shifted forms, before I ever stole Beast’s soul in an accidental act of black magic, blood magic. Before my family died. When I was a child and happy. It was the place I went to when I needed healing or solace or when I needed to learn stuff.

  Before me was a fire flickering with warm yellow flames, tossing shadows on the smooth stone walls. The smell of fire eating black walnut wood was slightly sour, dry on my tongue. Across the fire pit was Beast, lying in a curl, so her head was on her paws, thick tail around her side. Golden eyes were staring at me, lazy, happy eyes. At her teats were kits. Suckling. Five of them.

  Like kits, she repeated the thought. Suckling.

  As in the way of dreams, I was suddenly sitting beside her. I put out a finger and stroked the head of the one closest to my ankle. It was soft and warm and smelled of milk. I looked at my other arm in the real world.

  Not exactly, I thought back, seeing nothing remotely kittenlike in the vamp hanging on my arm. But the sensation was pleasant, nothing like the experience of Leo and Katie when they attempted to bind me against my will. I should have killed them for that, I thought.

  Did not want you/us to go back and kill them, Beast said.

  That wrenched my attention from the kits, fast. You stopped me? Understanding rolled over me in a tsunami of comprehension. Stopped me from . . . even thinking about killing them. Didn’t you?

  Jane needs vampires to survive Europeans. Needs vampires to save littermates. To save Angie Baby and EJ and all witch kits, many more than five.

  I could just send Yellowrock Clan into safety. Back to the mountains. Why did you stop me? Secrets. You’re still keeping secrets from me. What do you know? I demanded.

  Edmund sucked and sucked, his mouth moving on my wrist without pain, but with a sensation I couldn’t name. Tingly. Cold.

  Beast went silent for a long time, as the tingles raced up and down my arm and pulsed into my bloodstream with every beat of my heart. My heart rate was beginning to speed. Racing. My breath came fast. Edmund was taking too much blood. Even with all his control, he was draining me. Beast! I commanded.

  She thought, I/we will not die. In the deeps of my mind the kits vanished. Beast rose to her feet. Her lids closed and opened, in the lazy way of cats. She turned and pawpawpaw’d into the dark.

  “Dang it,” I snapped aloud, and opened my eyes. And realized that Edmund’s eyes were on mine. Without asking, I knew what he was thinking, feeling. He had experienced the entire conversation with me. Just like when Leo healed me that very first time. “Oh crap,” I said.

  But Edmund was still dying. Fast. The pool of blood around us was spreading. My sweatpants were soaked with it.

  Edmund released my forearm and reached up toward my face. His fingertips were cold as death, pale and ashen. I reached for him with my skinwalker magics. Felt myself falling into his mind. Into a dream not my own.

  The house was dark, lit only by a single oil lantern in the front room and a single candle in one of the back rooms. The four large rooms that comprised the downstairs were fraught with winter chill, the house buffeted by icy blasts, the timbers creaking. Frost in intricate patterns caught the lantern light, sparkling on the precious window glass. Snow piled against the house in deep drifts and fires burning on the hearths could do little but hold the worst at bay. There were no customers on this blizzard night, snow such as Charleston had never seen—perhaps eighteen inches by morning.

  Yet even in the cold, Sara’s face was too hot. She was feverish, thrashing in ill dreams. She had taken some disease from one of the gentlemen callers over the summer and had not been given time from her duties to be made well. Instead she had been worked and worked, man after man, used and left sicker each time than before. And oft as not giving the patron the same disease she had contracted. Disease not acquired from the air, or some melancholic of the liver, as many chirurgeons suggested, but from the numbers of men she was forced to service and the abuse she suffered in her chambers.

  “Heal me,” she whispered.

  He flinched and found her eyes on his in the night. Once they had been a laughing bright blue, a strange tint in her dark-skinned face. Her coloring—half white, half black—had drawn her much attention from the townsmen. “I have given you my blood a dozen times. It is not enough,” he whispered. “Here. Take watered wine. There is opium in the cup I have stolen from the master. It will ease your dreams and your pain.”

  She turned her mouth from the cup, her blue eyes holding tight to his. “Make me what you are. I know that you can.”

  “No,” he whispered back. “I cannot.” But he had thought of it. He wanted it. But where would he keep her while she wandered in her mind? How would he feed a scion for ten long years of devoveo? “I have no lair to keep you safe. I am but a slave, like you.”

  “No,” she whispered, turning her cracked lips to press a kiss to his hand. “You will never be a slave such as I. You will never be used as I have been. You must turn me . . .”

  The front door opened.

  I was ripped out of the dream. Chest heaving.

  Not dream. But memory. A memory of Edmund’s past. This was bad. This was very bad.

  The stink of vamps and the smell of Wrassler blew in. Help was here. But that also meant that there wasn’t time to deal with the shared memory or to figure out what it might mean. “This stays between us. That I shared your memories,” I whispered to Edmund. “Between us.” The command pulled through my blood, electric, heated, charged with potency. And it bound him to my demand. His eyes widened, a human reaction of surprise and hunger.

  Shock followed through my blood, shock and guilt. Guilt that I had power over him, that I could command him. That I had made him some sort of mental slave. This was what it meant to bind another. This was what Leo had tried to do to me. This was what I had tried to avoid my entire time in New Orleans. And now instead of me being bound, I had bound Edmund. My stomach went sour at the realization and at the knowledge that I couldn’t deal with any of it right now. I needed time to untangle the mess I had made.

  Edmund eased his fangs from my flesh. “Yes, my master,” he murmured, his eyes holding mine, the light hickory-hazel brown irises gleaming. “Do not feel guilt. I am yours to command.”

  I scuttled across the floor. Vamps poured into the house through the front door. Within seconds of the vamps arriving, I bolted to the backyard, pulling up the Gray Between as I stripped. Not thinking. Not thinking about Edmund and what I had done. Rain slashed me with frozen claws, icy and miserable on bare skin.

  It hurt to change fast—it hurt—but I didn’t have time to shift a slower, less painful way, and time was urgent in the storm and rain. The scent of Edmund’s blood and the blood of his wounded attackers would be gone in minutes, the trail lost in the downpour. And I didn’t dare become dog to track waning scent patterns. When I b
ecame any form of tracker dog, I got lost in the scents and feared I’d never find myself again.

  Beast tore out of me. I fell to the ground as Beast thrust herself through my skin, bending and breaking bones, muscles stretching and tearing.

  • • •

  Was heaving breaths, cat-gagging. Alex strapped Jane’s waterproof gobag around my neck. Held plastic cup of vampire blood to nose.

  Smell good. Smell strong. I/we lapped blood. Licked small cup clean. Was still hungry in belly but strongness raced through body.

  Alex slapped Beast on butt.

  Snarled at littermate Alex. Pulled paws under belly and stood. Needed food. Needed cow or deer. Needed to hunt and pounce and kill and eat. Growled. Shook pelt like dog. Was wet.

  “I can’t leave,” Alex said. “Not with vamps in the house. Be careful.”

  Hacked at Alex. Padded to porch, to door where Edmund had come into den. Blood was everywhere. Edmund blood, rich and strong. Licked at blood. Some was good. Some was also silver. Looked up at Alex. Was man now. Held white-man gun in one hand, pointed at floor. Fingers on safe place called slide.

  “I’ll clean up the mess,” Alex said.

  Sniffed with scree of sound, lips back, sucking air over tongue and scent sacs at top of mouth. Smelled strange vampires, their blood mixed with blood of Edmund. Blood. Silver. Death.

  Beast? Jane thought.

  Am Beast.

  Can you smell him? Oh yeah. There it is. I got it.

  Jane nudged Beast brain. You need to stop taking canine scent genes in when we shift to dog. It’s getting crowded in here.

  Strange vampire blood smell. Strange vampire ambush-hunted Edmund. Two vampires. Strong vampires. And humans, more than five.

  Okay. We’ll talk about it later. For now, use those dog scent genes and track back on Edmund’s trail.

  Beast sniffed. Beast wants good nose without being ugly dog. Do not want to be tracking dog, but do want good dog nose. Jane started to think Jane thoughts. To argue. Put paw on Jane and made her silent. Will not talk to Jane about nose.