There are many traps in her mind. I will do my best to protect you.
First, he needed to be something fast and powerful, to get through the brambles. A stag would have been nice, but Jay had never had the opportunity to study one well enough to know its thought patterns. A lynx would be too small. Wolf?
Here.
The thought came along with the overwhelming sense of … not a house cat. Not a lynx or a bobcat. Bigger. Mountain lion.
That would work.
Jay stretched his new body and felt the forest respond with wary interest. This form was known to it. Was the shapeshifter a cougar?
He fought his way through the forest, his lithe body wriggling out of the way when branches tried to form a cage, and his thick fur shrugging off even the worst of the brambles.
As he reached Midnight’s black iron fence, crows and ravens began to dive-bomb, shrieking. He batted them out of the sky, his jaws sending feathers and avian blood splattering as he made his way inexorably closer.
He changed shape only momentarily, and a much smaller cat slipped easily between the black iron bars, before the mountain lion was running across the open front yard.
He struck the front door with claws extended. The building itself began to bleed and writhe.
Where are you? he called.
She was in there, somewhere.
Acting on instinct, he shredded the door, and the walls next to it. They looked like hardwood and stone, but they tore like flesh. Once he had cut a hole, he padded through it into a quiet, shadowed grove of white birch trees.
In the middle lay a woman, her body bleeding from a thousand cuts, her black flesh burned and slashed, her hair matted, and her moss-green eyes wide with fear.
“No!” she shouted. “You can’t be here! No one can be here!”
“I’m here to help you,” Jay said.
Started to say. Or roar. He wasn’t sure how far he made it before the ground shook, knocking him off his paws. The trees wept. Whatever power had spoken to him earlier had followed him here.
“Is she—”
Before he could finish speaking, he was thrown brutally backward, into his own flesh in the shapeshifter’s room.
He was alone. Her bed was empty, and the door was standing open.
Nothing should have been able to get in or out of the circle he had built, but as he looked around, he realized that several of the stones on one side had fractured before being pushed aside.
What on earth had he just released?
CHAPTER 12
WHATEVER HAD JUST spoken to him in the shapeshifter’s mind, then thrown him out and fractured his circle, had left him so fried that he kept spacing out as he attempted to gather his tools back into their bag. At one point, he jumped when he spaced out for a moment and suddenly found Jeremy standing in front of him, holding a large book titled Ancient Elavie Cultures. The human was looking from the note on the door, to Jay, to the empty bed.
“It’s okay to come in now,” Jay said, trying to focus on the human’s mind but unable to glean anything more than static.
“Did you magic her away somewhere?” Jeremy asked.
“I woke her up, and the next thing I knew, she was gone.”
He wasn’t ready to go into further details, such as promises to destroy Midnight. Maybe he should have asked a little more about that—like How? or When?
Instead, he asked Jeremy, “Are you still awake, or already awake?”
“A combination of the two,” Jeremy admitted. “Having trouble sleeping. Nerves. I thought I’d try to solve our mystery, but I guess it’s a moot point now.”
“What’s the book?” he asked Jeremy. Elavie was SingleEarth’s scientific term for shapeshifters.
Jeremy plopped down to sit on the floor next to Jay.
“The way her power reacted to yours made me think about the way some of the older Elavie, especially the ones from cultures with additional magic, can live hundreds of years or more. When I started looking at the older cultures, I found a reference to the Shantel.”
“You’re on the right track with the age thing. Who are the Shantel?”
“I found them in a book about language, actually. Many of the older shapeshifter cultures make reference to something or someone called a sakkri. The serpiente use the word now to describe a kind of dance, but their myths say that dance is the remnant of an ancient magical ritual. The Mistari use it to mean something said or done to mislead. And the Shantel used the term to refer to the magic that kept them protected, and to the witch who controlled that power.”
Jeremy paused with a self-satisfied smile, obviously finding that little fact interesting enough that it took him a moment to realize he hadn’t yet answered Jay’s question.
“Right,” he said, continuing on. He flipped pages as he spoke. “It took me a while to find anything more about the Shantel, since they were incredibly isolationist, and seem to have entirely disappeared in the last couple centuries. They were shapeshifters—leopards and mountain lions—and were considered one of the great magical powers of the last millennium, up there with the shm’Ahnmik and the Azteka.”
Both of the other cultures Jeremy referenced were mostly gone. There were pockets of Azteka left, but none of their famous bloodwitches, and some believed that the entire falcon civilization—known as the shm’Ahnmik—might have been no more than part of serpiente myth, like the humans’ Atlantis.
“You think the shapeshifter I found was some kind of Shantel witch?”
“The Shantel describe their spirit-witch as white and silver in her leopard form, but ink-black in human form, with white markings to make her power clear to all who see her. Sound familiar?”
The description fit, including the fact that Jay had been given a cougar form with which to seek her.
“She didn’t have a name,” Jay said, recalling that fact from his sojourn within her power. “There was something about her remaining nameless, to—”
“Yes!” Jeremy interrupted, flipping to another page. “It says here the Shantel believed that ‘only by remaining nameless and unclaimed by family or lover could the sakkri commune with and command the immortal powers of nature.’ I don’t have a clue what that means, but any magic-user put in a group with falcons and Azteka has to be scary powerful.”
“I think she’s on our side,” Jay answered uneasily. At least, he hoped she was. The fact that she had disappeared without speaking to anyone didn’t bode well.
“The Shantel were never warlike,” Jeremy continued, still looking down at his book. “Even during Midnight’s reign, they just used their magic to keep their people safe. They never fought back. They’re one of the only shapeshifter cultures we know of that no one ever went to war with.” He looked up at the bed. “Did she say where she was going?”
“She didn’t say anything,” Jay answered.
If she came from such a peaceful culture, Jay didn’t know what she expected to do against Midnight. On the other hand, two centuries in slavery was bound to change a person.
“Jeremy, you didn’t happen to find anyone else who might know about the Shantel, did you?” Jay asked, trying to keep the words casual.
“I’ve been trying to see if any of the older vampires in SingleEarth might know something,” he said, “but I know the humans and witches here better. Vampires don’t often come in for medical attention, you know?”
Who did Jay know who was old enough to have survived Midnight but wasn’t allied or otherwise tied to Midnight? The list was pretty short. Even vampires who disapproved of the slave trade tended to try not to cross the empire. Nikolas and Kristopher, Sarah’s friends, were fifty years too young—and Jay wasn’t certain he wanted to get them involved, anyway. He definitely didn’t want to get Sarah involved, not with Midnight, not when she was still trying to find her place in the vampiric world.
Wait.
There was a group Jay knew, and SingleEarth knew, that rumor claimed had been founded to fight Midnight. Few o
f their members were vampires, unsurprisingly, but some were shapeshifters or Tristes old enough to remember those days.
The Bruja guilds were technically three groups, known as Crimson, Onyx, and Frost. They had been founded during Midnight’s reign in opposition to the slave-holding vampires, and many of their members still considered themselves vampire hunters, though in recent years they had branched out into other illegal and semi-legal actions.
Frost and SingleEarth had recently managed to find a mutually beneficial and profitable arrangement. Frost provided bodyguarding and other protective services, as well as a strong arm to help SingleEarth with the increasingly complicated process of securing mostly legal documents for individuals whose lifestyles or life spans made anything requiring a birth certificate or social security card difficult.
Jay went to the main SingleEarth office to find the contact information for their Frost liaison. He had to sweet-talk the secretary to convince her to give him the information without reporting the request, but he was soon back in his room and on his cell phone, hoping he would be able to reach someone quickly.
He realized he had walked out on Jeremy without a word of explanation or apology. Jeremy probably wouldn’t take it personally.
A voice answered the phone, “Lydia’s Candy Shop, please hold.”
Was there was some kind of code he was supposed to give? For all he knew he had dialed a wrong number and this actually was a candy shop.
Maybe he should go back to the secretary and check on how to handle this, or even go through official channels. Better safe than sorry? But which was safer—going through official channels and possibly dragging SingleEarth into the mess he might have made, or trying to do this on his own so at the worst he was the only one likely to end up sold into slavery?
By the time someone came back on the line, Jay had decided it didn’t hurt to try.
“Thank you for holding. How can I help you?”
“This is Jay Marinitch. I’m calling from SingleEarth, and I—”
“Is this the best number to reach you?” the voice asked, interrupting.
“Um … yes,” he replied. “It’s my cell phone.”
“I’ll have someone call you back.”
The line went dead.
It could still be a rude candy shop, but the likelihood he had reached Frost was high. Jay left his room and scavenged the kitchen while he waited. The breakfast pickings were pretty slim. He picked up a stale donut, and then his phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Jay Marinitch?”
“Yes?”
Candy or mercenaries?
“I was told you called. What can I do for you?”
This was why he hated phones. “May I ask who’s calling?” he asked.
The voice on the other side of the line laughed and said, “No. You called us. What do you need?”
Not a candy shop. He might still make an ass of himself, but at this point, who could blame him?
“I need some information,” he said, “or a contact who can get me that information. Someone familiar with a culture that went extinct around the fall of Midnight but who isn’t allied with Midnight.”
A slight pause from the other side of the line—man or woman? Jay couldn’t tell.
“What culture?”
“The Shantel. I want to know about their magic, and their spirit-witch, the … sakkri.”
“Aah.” A short pause, and then, “I’ll call you back.”
The phone beeped, and the screen announced, Call Lost.
Weird.
Jay wasn’t used to cloak-and-dagger, at least in the metaphorical sense. Cover businesses and cryptic, androgynous phone voices made him antsy.
He wanted to hunt, the way a cheetah hunts, just for the pure joy of tearing into something and bringing it down. He needed to take on Midnight; it was a cancer in the free world, run by vicious, evil creatures who didn’t hesitate to violate any natural law in their quest for domination. But that hunt required careful planning, and coordination with other hunters. Caution. Patience. And now, wandering, waiting for someone else to give him information.
The winter morning was crisp and freeze-the-bones cold, so even with his heavy jacket on Jay had to use a thread of power to keep himself from shivering.
You all right?
The faint mental touch from Lynx made him smile. Restless, he answered, but not hurt. Where are you?
Not far. Lynx liked Haven #2. There were just enough big-predator shapeshifters for their scents to scare away coyotes, the only local predator that could be a danger to him. Also, Caryn knew Lynx, and always kept a stash of turkey jerky on hand. Do you need me?
I’m okay, Jay answered, just as his phone started vibrating. It was the same voice as before.
“If you’re sure you want to meet with her, I can set you up with someone who specializes in archaic magic. But I’ll warn you, she might eat you alive.”
“Literally or figuratively?”
“That depends on whether or not she likes you.”
“Fantastic. How do I set up the meeting?”
The individual on the other side of the line took information about Jay’s location and means of transportation, then gave him an address and the instruction to, “leave within the hour if you don’t want to be late.” Then the caller hung up, without saying whether Jay was looking for a short balding woman with a rose between her teeth or a giant ferret.
Going hunting? Lynx asked in response to Jay’s increased excitement.
Going talking first, he replied. But hopefully we’ll hunt soon.
CHAPTER 13
JAY COULDN’T BEGIN to recall where he had left his gloves, though he wished he did when he set his hands to the steering wheel. He half expected his GPS to swear at him for waking it up when it was so cold.
He programmed in the address from the mysterious telephone voice and let out a whine when he realized it was almost three hours away. He wouldn’t get there until noon, if he didn’t hit traffic.
After an hour on the highway, he turned on to progressively smaller, more winding roads. Midday became early afternoon, and he hadn’t yet arrived, because he had needed to drop his speed to avoid spinning out on the increasingly common patches of black ice on the badly plowed, poorly marked back roads.
Whoever he was visiting, she didn’t like visitors. Jay missed the unmarked driveway the first time and had to turn around. His tires got a beating as he bumped his way across potholes big enough to bury a body in.
Finally he reached the house, which was overhung by several bare maple trees.
I hope this is the right place, Jay thought as he walked up the narrow, recently shoveled path. There didn’t seem to be a bell, so he knocked on the door.
The person who answered the door was a young woman, maybe twenty years old at most, whose brown eyes had dark circles beneath them. She exuded no particular thoughts but a sense of bone-deep weariness that made Jay want to curl up and sleep for a month just looking at her.
“Are you the person I’m supposed to meet?” he asked.
She stared at him for long, silent moments before saying, “I doubt it. Rikai’s in her study. I think she’s expecting someone.”
Rikai!
The phone caller’s warning made sense now; like vampires, Tristes needed to feed, but they did so by absorbing raw power instead of by taking blood. Of the three Wild Cards, Jay had been excited to meet Xeke but hadn’t ever wanted to meet Rikai.
Nervously, Jay followed his guide to the study.
The walls in the hallway were painted a cool gray-rose color above wood paneling that had been stained silvery birch. The floor was carpeted in a two-tone beige. The overall effect was stylish but not warm.
Rikai’s study was lit by only two candles—a fat pillar on top of the fireplace mantel, and a beeswax taper on a short table near the door. They barely illuminated the full wall of glass-front bookcases, a desk scattered with unidentifiable objects, and two chairs
that were somehow ominous. Maybe Jay was simply crediting the atmosphere to the chairs, but he didn’t want to sit down.
It took a moment for him to realize Rikai was even in the room, partially because her long black hair matched a body sheathed from neck to ankle to wrist in more black, but more so because his mind registered nothing.
Jay had occasionally met people who could put up walls against him, or who tried to fight his power. He had rarely met an individual who was a complete blank.
“Jay Marinitch,” she said. Her voice had a soft lilt, lower than he might have expected, like the sound of ocean waves moving over sand. “Of the Marinitch witches. Please, sit.”
Jay looked to the chair nearest him, and hesitated.
“The power you’re sensing isn’t intended for you,” Rikai said. “If you can’t bring yourself to overcome your instincts enough to sit in a chair to speak to me, you might as well leave now.”
Jay sat, even though doing so made his skin crawl. The chair was nice enough, but whatever power Rikai had going on here made his teeth ache.
Rikai leaned back in her deep, plush chair, stretching her legs out in front of her and propping her feet on some kind of twisted sculpture that apparently doubled as a footrest. Her dark eyes had a strange shine to them as she looked at Jay.
“So. Why do you want to know about the Shantel?”
“Do I need a reason?” he asked. He wasn’t coy by nature, but he hadn’t expected to be asked why by a contact set up through Bruja.
“You’re a witch, an empath, and a hunter. You are not a scholar. You are tainted by all sorts of interesting power, though.”
“Such as?”
“Answer my question, and maybe I’ll answer yours.”
She leaned forward, bending at the waist, reminding him of a praying mantis. He had a powerful feeling that it would be unwise to lie to her.
“I think I’ve met a Shantel,” he answered. “Specifically, a sakkri. I’d like to know more about her abilities.”
“Out of pure idle curiosity, oh?” Rikai replied. “How very SingleEarth, but utterly unlikely for you. Where did you stumble across the spirit-witch of a dead civilization?”