That startled Bruiser out of his funk. "Religion? And vampires?" His tone added, "Are you crazy?" though he didn't say it. But there was something off about his body language.
I looked out over the graveyard, keeping him in my peripheral vision. Calmly, I said, "Vampires and religion should be like oil and water, but they aren't. Because vampires believe. Organized religion pervades everything they do and everything they are--the myths attached to the holy land, their reaction to crosses"--I thought of the priestess, Sabina--"all the formal Christian trappings. There's no such thing as distant history with vamps. All their grudges, alliances, even though they shift, seem to have roots in events that took place hundreds or thousands of years ago. Their history, as humans perceive it, impacts their present, and whoever the rogue maker is, he's been raising young rogues for a long time. He may be driven by something that happened yesterday, a century ago, or two thousand years ago."
Bruiser shifted on his feet, an unconscious adjustment of balance. "I suggest that you not repeat such nonsense to the Mithrans." But his scent change suggested that I was dead-on with my religion and vamp analysis.
I flipped my palm up in a hand shrug and turned away. Over my shoulder I said, "I'm going to walk the perimeter of the grounds. It won't take long." Bruiser didn't reply, and I paced away, walking sun wise--clockwise--around the ring of trees surrounding the cemetery. The sun was hot, the air muggy, sour, and unmoving. Sweat trickled down my spine as I walked, trying to get a feel for the place, something I hadn't allowed myself the previous times I was here. Of course the first time I'd been in the shape of a Eurasian hunting owl, and the other time I was with Rick, so it wasn't as though I had the right senses, time, or opportunity to let the place seep in under my skin, to get to know a patch of ground the way Beast did.
Now I mentally nudged Beast awake and let my senses loose to absorb the place through its smells, the taste of its air, the springiness of the grass beneath my boots, and the magics wafting across the ground. There was power here. Not holy ground power, not ley line power. Not power that has seeped into the earth at old churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, or other places where faith makes the ground holy. Not quite the power of belief. But power nonetheless, of an old and vital kind. Though I couldn't place it, I recognized the taste of it.
I was halfway around the large clearing when the ground became damp, giving beneath me with a squelch. The air cooled, thinned, became wetter, though how that was possible with all the humidity I couldn't have said. I breathed in and scented something peppery and astringent, the faint herbal scent of vamps on the breeze from the woods, the odor itself dry and desiccated. Beneath it was the tang of decaying blood, and a trace of magic. Witch magic. I moved into the trees. The signature of power tingled faintly along my arms. Shade from the trees above me closed out the sun and some of the heat, shadows darkening the ground.
The scent of it pulled me north, along an overgrown trail just wide enough for my feet. A rabbit trail, according to Beast. She sent me an image of a rabbit and flooded my senses with the remembered hot taste of blood. "Thanks for that," I murmured to her, "but I prefer my protein skinned, gutted, boned, cooked, and seasoned." Beast hacked in amusement.
Not far into the woods I found a patch of saplings in a circle of older trees. It looked as if it might have been a ten-foot-round space once, maybe five years ago. Kneeling, I ran my hands over the bare ground, between the roots of the young trees. I found a broken white shell. Traversing the outskirts of the circle, I scuffed the ground, finding more shells. This had been a blood rite circle involving both witches and vamps, and I bet that it was used as the first resting place of one or more new rogues. Whatever was going on now had been happening for a lot longer than I'd been told. Maybe a lot longer than the vamp council knew.
I found two other old circles in the forested land around the vamp graveyard, one younger than the first, one older, which I had missed on my first pass and caught on my second. Back at my bike, I marked their locations on my map, with the approximate length of time they had been abandoned, my guesstimate based on the age of the trees. A city girl might not have been able to tell that part, but I had been raised in the country, and the children's home had used the earth for more than just a playground and parking. We had grown a lot of our own vegetables, and had once reclaimed a patch of land to increase the size of the garden. I remembered the backbreaking work of tree-clearing. I knew how long it took forest to steal back land left fallow too long.