I parked Bitsa and went searching, following my nose along a path, over saturated ground, into an area marked as Couturie Forest. Here the trees grew bigger, older, limbs overarching the paths like sentinels, protective and watchful, though that was sheer fancy on my part.
Following the old scent, I skirted fallen limbs and windblown brush on the paths. The few sounds of a city crawling back to life after the storm vanished as I made my way through the trees. There was only the plop of heavy rain-drops, the wet whisper of the wind in the limbs overhead, and the crunch and squish of leaves, twigs, and wet earth under my boots. A sense of tranquility and serenity pervaded the ground and the air, the way an old-growth forest feels, the loamy soil rich and fecund with life. But beneath it all was a trace of something feral. And dead. I left the path, pushing through the night.
Until I came to a vamp grave site. The stink of vamp, dead meat, and old blood had been well washed by Ada but was still potent enough for my Beast-enhanced senses.
The grave site was in a natural open area, a ten-foot circular space surrounded by old trees, rank with a miasma of overlapping scent patterns. I caught the strong recent tang of a lightning strike and charred wood, so much like the scent of burned magical wards that I was undecided on what I was smelling until I spotted the tree against the night sky, blackened and burned, its top half blasted away. The trail of lightning ran across the ground where it had cooked the earth.
I stood at the edge of the site, boots to the ankle in mud and last year's leaves, letting Beast have full rein of my sensory organs. She rose and peered through my eyes, taking in the world. My night vision expanded. My hearing took on the better-than-human enhancement. I drew in air through my nostrils and over my tongue--Flehmen behavior--seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting the place. To Beast it was sensory overload, overlapping into one multisense whole.
Nothing moved but the breeze. The dark was absolute. The wind whipped up for a moment, sending a soft sigh of sound and the patter of rain splattering down. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Beneath the scent of drenched earth, oak, maple, swamp hickory, and cypress, there was the reek of dead, decaying flesh. The herbal scent of vamps. A hint of blood, old and thinned and washed away by the rains of Ada. And a trace of magic, both old and recently discharged. Witch magic. In a vamp graveyard. Okay, that was weird. Vamps and witches did not get along.
I stepped closer and something crunched beneath my boot. Squatting, I lifted a broken white shell from the muddy soil. Carefully, I brushed Ada-blown leaves and detritus away, exposing more shells around the periphery of the open area. Now that I knew they were here, I was able to make out a ring, perfectly circular, made of the small white shells. In the center of the circle was more white, and though I couldn't be sure without getting on my hands and knees, I thought it might form a pentagram.
Beast's reaction made the skin across my shoulders and along my neck prickle like hackles rising. I did not like this. Whatever it was, it was giving me the willies.
The antipathy between vamps and witches was rancorous and long-standing, like a cold war linking and dividing the races, a war that had lasted for hundreds of years, according to Molly, its origins lost in time. Yet, here in this dank and isolated place, encircled on all sides by city and bayou, the air tingled with magic, the ground was saturated with it, and the blood that soaked the soil was charged with it. Minute blue sparkles of magic tasted of nutmeg and sang a note of electric power. The witch power had been coiled, snarled, twisted into a heart of foulness. Dark magic had been done here. Blood magic. I paused and breathed deeply, hoping to find what kind of blood had been spilled--goat, chicken . . . or human? But the blood was too old and the site too exposed to hurricane rain for me to tell specifics.
I stood and dusted my hands off on my jeans, looking into the trees that surrounded this place. I saw a cross, nailed to a tree, about six feet off the ground. Another cross was several feet to the side. There were five crosses in all, nailed to trees at the points of the pentagram, and I wasn't sure, but the crosses might have been silver. Weird. The points of the pentagram on the ground lined up with the crosses on the trees. None of this made sense, not for a vamp grave, not for witch involvement, not for anything. I controlled my breathing, pushed down my fear response.
Across the ground, something moved.
A tiny patch of earth in the middle of the small clearing lifted and fell. A little triangle of soil. The bit of dirt dropped, stilled a moment, and lifted again. Something white poked out. The smell of death roiled out into the night, musty and foul. And the white thing resolved itself into fingers.