“You can explain the difference to me later,” Xeke said. “For now, you look about ready to fall over.” He reached into Jay’s jacket pocket to retrieve his car keys. “I’ll drive.”
“Thanks,” Jay whispered.
He took a few steps, and then felt himself being lifted.
Jay shut his eyes.
“You are one mellow witch,” Xeke observed.
“You’re relaxing to be around,” Jay replied.
“You’re not helping my ego.”
“Your ego doesn’t need help.”
By the time the car had warmed up, Jay was asleep.
He dreamed of the barren wasteland he had found in Brina’s mind. As he walked across the scalding sand, his skin started to char, peeling and flaking into black ash like a Hollywood vampire in the sun.
He woke alone on a comfy sectional sofa. A note on the coffee table said:
I had to get to a screening. Feel free to stay as long as you like, and help yourself to anything from the kitchen. Your car is in the parking lot.
—Xeke
Was the excuse genuine, or had Jay’s host left because he wasn’t sure how his hunter guest would act once out of Kendra’s territory?
Intrigued by this chance to learn a little more about a man he had long admired, Jay began to look around. Instead of a bed, the largest room boasted a bank of three computers, one of which had been left on, with a video camera plugged into it, and was now flashing the message Import Successful.
Hoping for a sneak peek at Xeke’s next work, Jay pressed Play. The video was raw footage of an interview.
“It’s a controversial subject,” the woman in front of the camera was saying. She looked vaguely familiar to Jay, but he couldn’t place her. “Even today, many serpiente consider Anhamirak and Ahnmik gods. People do not like having their gods studied scientifically.”
Now Jay recognized her—she was one of the parabiological researchers working with SingleEarth to investigate the history of serpiente shapeshifters. SingleEarth’s scientists had established that vampires, most witches, and all shapeshifters had a link to a particular elemental power called Leona, an immortal being of immense power. Scientists were still trying to figure out what made all her magical descendents so different from each other.
“Would you share your theories with me?” Xeke prompted from off-screen.
“Well.” The researcher fidgeted a moment, and then seemed to recall that she was on camera. “Serpiente myth describes a time when they possessed incredible magic, which was wielded by the priests and priestesses of a group called the Dasi. Oral tradition tells of a creature named Leben who tried to take over the Dasi by impersonating their god. The Dasi’s leader seduced Leben, and to win her favor Leben gave them all their second shapes.” She paused, and with a shrug explained, “Unfortunately, this ‘gift’ triggered a series of natural disasters that nearly wiped out the civilization. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of the new shapeshifters died in the upheaval, a horrific number when you consider that we’re talking about a pre-dynastic Egyptian village, not a modern city.”
“You say ‘natural disasters.’ Were they natural, or magical?”
“Well.” That word seemed to be her method of pausing to gather her thoughts. “We know now that Leben is one of Leona’s creations. He is directly responsible for the genesis of every shapeshifter living today. My theory is that the serpiente gods Anhamirak and Ahnmik were actually elementals, just like Leona. Like all their kind, they gain power through their mortal bonds. When Leben claimed their worshippers for Leona, Anhamirak and Ahnmik fought back. Either Leona deliberately started killing the new serpiente to weaken their elementals or the serpiente’s deaths were a natural consequence of elementals fighting. An earth elemental gets angry, and you get an earthquake—that kind of thing.”
“Why would Leona challenge another elemental in the first place?” Xeke asked.
“These days, Leona is unrivaled in power, with thousands of bonds. Back then? As far as we know, she had three vampires, and a small band of witches with nowhere near the power that the serpiente attribute to their ancestors. Leona may have worked through Leben to eliminate the competition.”
Ancient immortal soap operas, Jay thought, imagining a reality television show in which a bunch of elementals were trapped on an island together. Chuckling, he stopped the video and went looking for the rest of his belongings.
He found his jacket, tie, and vest hung carefully on a coat-rack by the front door, with his shoes beneath them. Xeke had apparently decided he shouldn’t sleep in his full monkey suit and noose.
Noose. The image of Brina dangling with a broken neck, unable to move until one of her slaves cut her down, rose into his mind once more. Jay had seen plenty of violence in his past, but he had never experienced such a black gulf of emotional pain as had driven Brina to try to destroy herself. Delving so deeply into her mind had forced him to feel it the way she did. To feel himself swinging there.
He shivered as he stepped out the front door.
He was in a small apartment complex, set well back from the road and backed up against the forest. Tasteful white lights on the trees out front reminded Jay that this was Christmas Day, or would be once the sun rose.
His car was nearby, and a quick check of the GPS made it clear he was across town from Kendra’s gala. Few vampires were powerful enough to bring other living creatures with them when they did their teleportation trick, and even for those who could, it was a rough trip for both parties. The lack of bedroom made it clear that this wasn’t Xeke’s only or primary home; he had probably dropped Jay here because it was the shortest drive.
Jay was a little stiff from sleeping restlessly on a couch, but a short walk would fix that. He liked trees.
But there was something … odd … about this forest.
He hesitated at the edge of the woods. It wasn’t the fact that he was in dress shoes and tuxedo pants, anticipating trudging through the snow. It was …
Something.
Yet something else pulled him forward, and Jay Marinitch wasn’t one to resist the call of unnamed, unidentified forces suggesting he wander into a dark and unfamiliar forest.
The woods were beautiful, illuminated by the moonlight trickling through naked branches to bounce off the snow beneath. What surprised Jay was the lack of animal tracks. The snow had fallen two days before. Why weren’t there signs of foxes, rabbits, and deer?
When he finally did sense life, he pursued it.
What he found, curled in the snow, was a woman with skin and hair the color of the night sky, and white streaks like moonlight in her hair. She wasn’t sleeping, but neither was she awake. She was just lying in the snow, in a long gown covered in frost.
Her breathing was barely more perceptible than her hypothermic thoughts. When Jay knelt and set his fingers to her throat, he felt that her pulse was steady. He touched her arm, and a whisper of magic replied. A shapeshifter of some sort? That would be good. Shapeshifters were very sturdy.
He put a hand over her heart and slowly trickled warmth into her body, wondering who she was and what might have brought her to be here like this.
Most breeds of shapeshifter had certain defining features. The Mistari-tigers were of African-Asian descent. Serpiente tended toward dark hair with fair skin. The lions were black in human form, but this woman wasn’t just black in the way that humans were; she was actually black, like coal. Lynx would have been able to guess her breed by her smell, but Jay couldn’t.
She stirred slightly, moaning.
Jay tried to reach for her mind, but it fluttered away, as elusive as a faerie.
As he continued to pour warm power into her, he sensed her body remembering injuries both recent and from long ago. There was a sense of resignation in her flesh, and a memory less substantial than scars that remembered cut and burned flesh, broken bones, blood flowing.
And an even deeper agony.
Suddenly, that agony lashed out at Jay.
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He staggered backward and thudded into the snowdrift behind him. His connection to the shapeshifter had been completely severed.
Wind whipped through the forest, making the trees shiver and groan in sympathy. The air rippled like heat rising from pavement. A force whispered to him, She must come home.
The force that spoke was … maybe not malevolent, but maybe so. He knew only that it was powerful, and it had stopped him from helping the woman.
She can’t go home if she dies here, he thought.
He lifted her gently in his arms. If he couldn’t keep her warm with his magic, he had to find another way. He wished he hadn’t locked Xeke’s door behind him. He arranged her in the backseat of his car, wrapped in an emergency blanket. He wanted to call SingleEarth’s healers for advice, but his cell phone was still dead. The best he could do was turn on his GPS and ask it to take him to the closest SingleEarth Haven, which was #2.
Perfect; his cousin Caryn Smoke worked at the clinic attached to #2. Caryn was twenty, just a year older than Jay, and hadn’t yet finished her formal medical training, but she was already one of the best magical healers he knew. He had recently received an engagement announcement from her, though he couldn’t remember who she was marrying, or when. Hopefully it hadn’t been a Christmas wedding. He wasn’t sure what would become of the shapeshifter if Caryn wasn’t there to help.
CHAPTER 6
HE REACHED SINGLEEARTH shortly after dawn, while the winter sky still had that gray-and-purple tone, as if it weren’t sure if it wanted to stay dark, get bright, or catch on fire.
After pulling up to the main entrance, Jay left his car running while he went inside to get help. The shapeshifter’s body temperature had returned to normal during the trip, but he still hadn’t been able to wake her, which meant this was a case for doctors and witches trained in healing, instead of a hunter with a rudimentary knowledge of magical and mundane first aid.
“Can I help you?” the receptionist asked as Jay looked around, hoping to find Caryn loitering conveniently nearby.
“I have a woman in my car out front,” he answered. “She’s a shapeshifter, she’s unconscious, and I can’t wake her.”
The receptionist pressed a button on her desk and said, “Medical needed at main entrance.” Two of SingleEarth’s EMTs appeared within moments. The receptionist echoed what Jay had just told her, looking at him only to ask, “What breed?”
“Not sure. You need a witch to look at her, though.”
“Bring her in,” the receptionist told the EMTs. To Jay, she added, “We have plenty of trained doctors on staff. If it looks like she needs magical care—”
“Where’s Caryn?” he interrupted. Jay had napped a couple hours at Xeke’s place, but he still needed real sleep, of the variety that he liked to regularly engage in for six to eight to twelve hours. He didn’t have patience for a bureaucratic runaround from a receptionist who normally dealt with things like shapeshifter obstetrics, minor human injuries and illnesses, and non-critical mystical mishaps.
Winter Village, her mind answered, as she said, “Ms. Smoke is not—”
“Never mind.” Though few shapeshifters and fewer witches celebrated Christmas, enough SingleEarth members did that Haven #2 had set up a “Winter Village” in the events hall.
Sure enough, Jay found Caryn there, arranging brightly wrapped presents around a half-dozen evergreen trees whose piney scent had filled the large room. While Caryn meticulously adjusted wrapping and ribbons, her mind raced through thoughts of schedules, dance lessons, and food. Something about a caterer and cake.
“Caryn?”
She turned with an expression that was half smile and half frown. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Medical needs you,” he said.
“They haven’t paged me.”
“Trust me.”
“Jay …” Caryn shook her head and bit back an explanation of why the triage process Jay was trying to circumvent existed. Caryn was the only witch regularly at this haven. If she were called for every skinned knee and headache, she would never have time to sleep or eat. “Fine,” she said. “What’s the issue?”
She followed him toward the medical wing as he explained.
“Was she with the others you called in earlier?” Caryn asked as she waved aside the triage nurse and started checking the shapeshifter’s vitals. Pulse was steady, though slow. Breathing even. Temperature slightly elevated for human norms but well within most shapeshifter norms.
“No. I went to a Christmas party and stayed with a friend after.” And Kendra’s house was … hmm. The name of the town was on the tip of his tongue. “Well, I found her in the woods, a bit ago.”
“Which woods?” Caryn asked.
Behind the apartment complex, which had been named … nope.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he answered.
Caryn took a deep breath, mentally counting to ten, before she said, “Well, she’s in good hands now. Why don’t you go get some sleep? Your usual room is empty.”
Finally—permission to sleep! Jay didn’t need to be told twice. He picked up the key at the front desk, stretched out on the sun-streaked bed the moment he entered his room, and then let his mind settle into the shape of cat.
His body didn’t change, but mentally he was cat. A house cat, who lived only to laze about in the sun and be pampered. And one of the things cats liked most was to sleep long, long hours, which was why cat was one of Jay’s favorite things to be.
The Jay-cat dreamed of forests. Of pouncing on butterflies and stalking motes of dust as they drifted in the warm air. Bit by bit, though, he realized something bigger was hunting him.
He crouched low, trying to hide. He swiveled his head slowly, looking around, but couldn’t find the source of his unease.
Grass rustled like bones creaking back to life. The rocks themselves groaned in response, making his body ache and his skin twitch. He growled.
He woke grumpy, sore, and more tired than he had been before his nap. His sunbeam had left with the morning, his headache had returned, and he knew the mysterious shapeshifter from the woods was somehow responsible.
Jay had too much magic to mistake outside power for a mere dream. Something was trying to communicate with him, something powerful enough that even in cat form, his unconscious mind had instinctively wanted to hide.
Well, whatever it was had ruined his attempt to sleep, which as far as Jay was concerned was a hangable offense.
Hanging.
He still couldn’t get Brina out of his head. Could this dream have been a manifestation of her pain, or an impression from the mind of someone else he had encountered at Kendra’s? His dreamscapes often echoed lingering bits of the strongest minds he encountered.
No. Vampires didn’t rattle him like this. This was something more powerful, more alien.
His stomach rumbled. Still lost in a strange jumble of kitty and witch thoughts, he sought the kitchen.
To a cat, scents were more powerful than sights, and the scents in SingleEarth were always exciting. There were humans and witches and shapeshifters of every kind. Some SingleEarth havens were huge complexes where hundreds of individuals lived, but Haven #2 was small, just a few buildings. Residents mostly cooked for themselves.
People said hello as he opened the refrigerator, trying to figure out if there was something he could make quickly and easily.
Bacon … mmm, that had promise.
He tossed four strips into a frying pan and turned the knob on the stove, listening for the click-whump sound of the gas going on.
As he waited for the bacon to begin crackling, a nagging feeling at the back of his neck whispered to him, warning, There is something out there, something big. It’s creeping up behind you, and you’re making bacon?
Food is important, he thought, trying to reason with his own mind.
Survival is critical.
Okay. Fine. He would look in on the shapeshifter, see how she was doing,
and maybe figure out the stupid mystery of the ominous lurking power. Maybe she was a hyena or lion or some other predator that his cat mind had sensed and blown out of proportion in his subconscious?
Jay lay his bacon on top of some napkins and carried it with him as he returned to the medical building. The strange shapeshifter was being examined by a human doctor whose mental patter gave him away as Caryn’s fiancé. Underneath his forethoughts, which were mostly concern for the still-unconscious woman, he had dance steps on the brain. What was it about dancing?
“Have you tried asking the serpiente?” Jay suggested.
The human jumped, spinning around. “What?”
Why did so many of his conversations begin with people asking, What?
“About dancing. You and Caryn are both so stressed about it. Why don’t you ask the serpiente? They’ve danced professionally for thousands of years.”
“Thanks, but we’re going for a more traditional—I mean, traditionally human—well, traditionally— We’re not going for serpiente style dancing, um …” He trailed off when he realized he didn’t know who he was talking to.
“I’m Jay Marinitch,” Jay provided. “We’ve met, but only once.” Jay wouldn’t have had the foggiest idea what this young doctor-in-training’s name was, either, if it weren’t for the convenient name tag reading Jeremy Francisco, Medical Assistant. “How is she?”
“Nervous enough to shatter,” the human answered with a shake of his head. “We’re supposed to go by my mother’s this afternoon—for Christmas, you know. It’s the first big family event Caryn’s come to, and—” He broke off, looking sheepish. “You meant the patient, didn’t you?”
Jay had meant the patient, yes, but now— “You don’t really think they’d hurt her, do you?”
“What? No, I … Wait. Jay. I remember you now,” he said, thinking, Caryn was right. He is always this way. “One of my uncles had a bad run-in with a shapeshifter psychopath a long time ago, and now most of my family is of the opinion that not-human equals bad. When I first told them I was in SingleEarth and marrying a witch, a lot of them talked big and bad. Some of the worst of that still goes through my mind when I’m worried, but I would never bring her anywhere I thought she would be in danger.”