To Rick, she said, "The foolish human who draws a useless gun on a Mithran Elder will wait outside."
I looked at Rick, his eyes black in the night, though he didn't look at me. He was staring at the box that might hold part of the Holy Cross. Or might not. He'd been a Catholic schoolboy. The hidden relics of the true cross were part of Catholic lore for two thousand years. He swallowed, the sound loud in the silent chapel, but when he spoke it was with his usual insouciance. "If you aren't out in fifteen minutes, I'll come drag your cold dead body out and give it proper burial."
I laughed softly through my nose. Reached up and pushed the Elvis curl back across his head, letting my fingertips scrape gently over his forehead, my touch demanding his attention. He dragged his eyes to mine. Something blinked back into them.
"Thanks," I said. "But you better get help first. I have a feeling she'd be hard to kill."
"You think?" He touched his throat, straightened his shoulders, and left the chapel, his boots tapping on the stairs leading to the graveyard of the vamps.
"I cannot help you to defeat this evil," Sabina said. "I cannot lift the Blood Cross again so soon. I would not survive a second immolation in a decade." I remembered the painting of Sabina, racing downhill, her arms on fire. Had she nearly died from using it? And again when she chased away the liver-eater? She moved with that lightning speed, leaning over the open stone casket. Close to me. My body reacted, but far too late, with a small spurt of fear and power. She caught my eyes and held me, her mind strong as steel chains, standing so close I smelled the vamp scent of her, dry and heated, like wind over a desert, arid and barren, and beneath the desert scent, oddly, faintly, like dried rose petals. "But I will give you a sliver of it."
My mind went blank like a snow-blown night, no thought, no emotion, nothing. Sabina was giving me . . . what? I had a moment of disconnect. Of being lost in the snow of my own thoughts, cold and confused and disoriented. For a moment that seemed to last longer than it should.
A warning whispered deep in my mind. Not prey. Will not be caught in predator's stare. A silent weight of claws against my brain, pressed down. Slicing.
Surprise flashed across Sabina's face. She broke her stare and turned away, bent and rose and pivoted again, all in one motion, her eyes again holding me in the dim light. "It is priceless. It has left my hands only once before, in all the long years it has been in my safekeeping. You will return it to me when the threat of blood rites is shattered."
I nodded like a toy doll, agreeing to anything, everything, without thought. She had rolled me. My hands went sweaty and clumsy. "With this you are invincible over anything not of the Light. It will destroy the descendants of the Sons of Darkness, even the eldest of the Mithrans. To prick the skin of a vampire with a sliver of the Blood Cross will cause him to burn, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. True-death. All others of the cursed will sicken and likely die.
"But you must use care. It is possible that your kind are cursed of the Dark as well, though from a time long before the cross. If the wood of the Blood Cross pricks your skin, you may fall violently ill. You may die."
My heart shuddered in my chest. "My kind? You know what I am?" My words were only a whisper in the dark of the vampire chapel.
"You are she who walks in the skins of the beasts." She looked down into the bier, as if she would inventory the contents. Or as if she wouldn't look me in the eye. Beast, who had withdrawn into the deeps of my mind, looked out again through my eyes. "The owl . . . It came to me, at a time of gathering and blood, when we put Katherine to earth to heal. It cried out its lonely call to me, a bird of the night, a bird of a different place and time. The owl has long been a harbinger of change, of danger, of loss. You are that beast of change and loss. That harbinger of bitter defeat. Of true-death."
Beast's pelt roiled under my skin, uneasy. I had no idea what to say to Sabina. I hadn't intended anything when I chose the Bubo bubo form to skinwalk in the first time I came here. I'd just needed to be a large bird to conceal my scent, so I could fly here and spy on the vamps, back when Katie had been put to earth to heal. I hadn't known owls meant something to vamps.