Derek lifted a careless one-shouldered shrug of the fighting man. "After you."
Two hours later I was done. Using the magical rock I had mapped the entire hunting ground of the two young rogues we had killed, and the others killed and beheaded by Derek and his crew. There were no more young feeding in the projects, which relieved my mind, but I had learned nothing new, which was a bummer.
The men followed Bitsa and me out of the projects, threading through the city to vamp headquarters, a cooler full of vamp heads in the backseat of their car. I tried to call ahead, but cell towers, or the erratic power to them, were back down. I pulled up at the front door and unloaded the cooler, surprised at the weight. Vamp heads were heavy. Derek and his soldiers took off, which was still sort of weird, as I knew they worked for Leo.
I rang the bell, and when the same security blood-servant opened it, I handed WWF the cooler. He grunted when he took it and set it on the table inside. "Can I get a check?" I asked.
"Ernestine's gone home for the night. Call tomorrow." He opened the cooler and made a face at the smell. I stepped back fast. The dry ice hadn't done a very good job and the heads were ripe. WWF pulled on latex gloves and inspected the fangs, verified them to be young rogue, and wrote out a receipt. I took it and left, feeling that I hadn't accomplished a dang thing today.
Wired, unable to sleep, I stripped again, and put the weapons under lock and key so the kids couldn't find them. Grabbing my puma concolor fetish necklace and my travel pack, I stopped by the kitchen for some warm beef jerky and went out back to the rocks I used for meditation and to shift. I had two hours till dawn and a lot of frustration to burn off.
Yesssss. Hunt, Beast thought at me. I hadn't hunted in days, and she pressed against my flesh, her pelt abrading me, her claws opening and closing, sharp tips biting into my mind.
Standing on the broken rocks, I pulled the travel pack over my head, adjusted the double chain securing the gold nugget necklace to its proper length, and snapped on the travel pack. Together, they looked like an expensive collar and tote, such as a St. Bernard rescue dog might have carried in the Swiss Alps. I bent over and scraped the gold nugget across the uppermost rock, depositing a thin streak of gold. It was like, well, like a homing beacon, among other things.
Hunt. Kill. Blood and meat. Beast, while always present in the depths of my consciousness, was talking to me as a separate entity now, as a self-aware creature with desires of her own. I looked at the jerky I'd dropped on the ground, knowing she would hate it, but there wasn't anything I could do, not with the power still off. Besides, Beast needed to roam free for a while, and I needed the more perfect healing that shifting would bring. The drop of Bethany's essence had kept me alive, and if I had no other experience to compare it to, it would have seemed nearly miraculous. But it wasn't a substitute for Beast and my own skinwalker magic.
I sat on the boulders, the rock warm beneath me. Mosquitoes swarmed, biting. Beast hissed. Biting things. Too small to eat.
The necklace of the mountain panther--commonly called the mountain lion--was made of the claws, teeth, and small bones of the biggest female panther I had ever seen. The cat had been killed by a rancher in Montana during a legal hunt, the pelt mounted on his living room wall, the bones and teeth sold through a taxidermist. The mountain lion was hunted throughout the Western U.S. but was extinct in the Eastern states, or it had been. Some reports said panthers were making a comeback east of the Mississippi. I could hope. I didn't have to use the necklace to shift into this creature--unlike other species, the memory of Beast's form was always a part of me--but it was easier.
I held the necklace and closed my eyes. Relaxed. Listened to the wind. Felt the pull of the moon, growing gravid, nesting the horizon. I listened to the beat of my own heart. Beast rose in me, silent, predatory.
I slowed the functions of my body, my breathing, my heart rate, let my blood pressure drop, my muscles relax, as if I were going to sleep. I lay on the boulder, breasts and belly draping the cool stone in the humid air.