Dark Queen (Jane Yellowrock #12)

I shrugged. “Perspective is everything, Aya.”

He grunted. It sounded like one of mine. And I realized I had used the shorter term. Aya. I stared into the dawning light. A few miles later Ayatas asked, “Are you going to tell me where the Sangre Duello is being held?”

“Asking as cop or brother?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Then I guess you won’t be telling me anything.”

“Guess not.”

“What’s the history between you and Rick LaFleur?”

Ohhh. That was a zinger from out in left field. I could ignore the question. Or I could answer it and see how he reacted. I turned in my seat, pulling one knee up, to watch his face in the glow of the dash lights as I spoke. “We were a thing. He was undercover and was seducing a wereleopard for info. He got bit. She got executed by a grindylow. He got kidnapped by werewolves and tortured. I rescued him and killed the wolves. He turned. Became a black wereleopard, despite the amount of wolf saliva in his bites. We were still a thing. Sorta. Then he was magically seduced by a wereleopard in heat in front of dozens of people. He left with her. I should have killed her, or stopped him some other way. I didn’t protect him. I let him go because my feelings were hurt and I was embarrassed. We were no longer a thing. It’s uncomfortable and complicated.”

Aya nodded. I realized his hair was still braided and it had left a wet trail down one side of his clothes. “When you killed the wolves,” he said, “it opened a chasm that has since been filled by the Bighorn Montana Pack, with whom Leo has sworn an alliance.”

I shrugged and said nothing.

“Tell me about Rick and Kemnebi. Kemnebi attacked you?”

“Cop or brother?”

“Cop asking.” The slightest of smiles settled on his face. “This is awkward. If I had come before now, we would know one another and I wouldn’t have to be both brother and cop.”

“You screwed up.”

“Yes. And because I did, I now appear to be a top-tier jerk.”

I didn’t argue. I wasn’t going to talk to him about Kem’s demise or Rick’s elevation in status, his wives, or Clan Yellowrock. I was vamp-careful when I answered. “I’m the head of the local wereleopard clan.”

“You’re not a werecat.”

“Nope. But problems arise and have to be solved.”

“Leap of leopards,” Aya said. “Not clan.”

“Leap. I like. Anyway, Rick is now highly ranked in the leap, so he can handle things any way he wants.”

“If Rick loses control of his leopard, that could make for an awkward international incident.”

“Cop talking for sure. And I don’t care.”

Aya sighed. “I don’t know how to blend both the brother and the cop. I feel awkward and foolish and all my words are clumsy.”

“I noticed.” A small smile accompanied my words.

“Yes. Well.” He drove in silence for a while before he sighed. “I don’t have time to build a relationship with you before the Sangre Duello.”

“You may never be able to build a relationship with me.”

“This is true. But I will try. Until then, I have a job to do too.”

“Go for it.”

“As a part of that job, I have to find a way to be at the Sangre Duello.”

“I’m not in charge of royal vamp protocol.”

“That’s Leo’s Enforcer talking, not the sister.”

“Potato, potahto. I have a job too. Talk to Leo’s secundo heir, Grégoire, when he gets in from Atlanta.”

Blandly, Aya said, “He’s back from Atlanta. And I tried. He asked me to have a three-way with Leo.”

I snorted. I didn’t mean to. It just blasted out. My laugh felt vastly different in tone from Aya’s. My laugh was stilted, sarcastic, stiff, as if I had never learned to laugh as a child. Or had forgotten how a hundred seventy years ago. Still, the grin I gave him was bright and teasing and at least it felt natural.

Aya glanced at me and back to the street, his own lips turned up. “According to Adelaide Mooney, Grégoire is totally ‘gaga’ over me, and I should consider myself caught in the crosshairs of an intense and concentrated seduction once the Sangre Duello is over.”

“You should be scared. Very, very scared.”

“I am not a homophobe,” he said. His lips curling higher. I knew that smile. It was mine, seen in the mirror. “The Cherokee Nation accepted same-sex marriage back in 2016. Among the speakers of Diné, the Navajo, the two-spirited are referred to as nàdleehé, or the transformed. The Lakota call the two-spirited the winkte. To be two-spirited is a commonly accepted truth among a lot of tribes; the Mojave, Zuni, Omaha, Aleut, Kodiak, Zapotec, and Cheyenne all accept multiple forms of sexuality. But I’m straight. And even if I wasn’t, there is no way in hell I’m doing a three-way with two vamps.”

“Chicken.”

He laughed, that amazing, carefree laugh. The laugh I might have had except for two white men who killed my father and raped my pregnant mother and then had the misfortune to fall into the clutches of a war woman skinwalker and her blood-vow-bound grandchild. “Yes,” he said. “I accept that judgment. Back to my job. They call you the Dark Queen. Want to tell me why?”

“That?” I said. “That was a cop move. And though I might have told my brother all about it, I’m not telling a cop. Figure it out on your own. And by the way, you must suck as an interviewer.” I shook my head, disgusted.

Rain spattered on the windshield, growing stronger. Lightning flickered in the distance. Silence settled on us, uneasy, though not exactly troubled. We shared genes, no history, no common ground.

“It seems I have no finesse when it comes to you,” he admitted. “But, I have something for you. It’s in the glove box, in a white bag.”

I frowned at him. He got me a present?

As if he read my mind, Aya said, “Uni Lisi—Sixmankiller—overnighted it to me.”

My frown grew deeper, darker, and I stared at the glove box as if it might hold a water moccasin. When the box door didn’t open all by itself and something venomous didn’t slither out, I pulled the handle and spotted car rental papers and a brown-paper-wrapped package. I studied the return address and the name: Hayalasti Sixmankiller, with a PO box number in Robbinsville, North Carolina. The box was light but not empty. I tore the paper, careful to keep the address whole, and set the paper aside. The tape on the box broke easily with my fingernail and I lifted the top off, shoved aside the cotton padding, and saw a medicine bag. It was old—ancient. It was the bag I wore in my soul home. I knew instantly that it was my father’s.

Green-dyed leather on one side, rougher rawhide on the other, much like Aya’s, but so old it was dry-rotting. It should have been buried with him. Or given to his eldest child. Me.

“Oh,” I breathed. And caught his scent. Tobacco, sweetgrass, cedar. The faint but still present scent of the Nantahala River. Tears raced down my face. I touched the bag, and though the edges were crumbling, the center was still pliable enough to take the slight weight. There were hard things inside. A bone? A quartz crystal?

“Uni Lisi put something in it for you. For when you’re ready.”

I nodded. Not ready. Not ready just now. Maybe not ever. “Thank you,” I whispered.

At the house, I leaped out and raced through a sudden deluge to the door. Soaked to the skin, I worked the lock as my brother drove off into the storm. Lightning cracked down, one of the ubiquitous lightning storms of the Deep South.