All I saw beyond the elevator lights was darkness with unfinished ceilings and rough-hewn beams far overhead, clay floor just beyond the elevator doors, damp and slick-looking. Old bricks appeared out of the gloom to one side, barely visible, wet and oozing and smelling of magic that held back the ground water. But there was no sound. Only an emptiness so acute it might have echoed into the next universe. I took a breath and it reverberated like a hissing, asthmatic snake. I pulled on Beast’s hearing and vision. And still heard nothing.
Then there it was. A single, soft drip, bright and clear, the resonance sibilant, as the sound ricocheted around the room. I tried to determine where it originated, but chasing the bouncing sound was like chasing a bunch of rabbits—everywhere at once. The drip sounded again and I followed Mario’s eyes to the left and ahead. I lifted the light there, moving it slowly left to right.
From the dark, a glimmer of something red, flashing to silver. Again. And a breath, like a winter breeze. Beside me, Mario repeatedly pressed his palm on the scanner until the doors whooshed closed. The vamp was swearing like a sailor as his hand jammed onto buttons. The elevator rose. He swallowed, his vamp tissues dry as bike tires, and he started cursing in English to make sure I knew what he was saying. Finally he wound down as the elevator opened to light and the smell of vamps and blood and humans and sex. Normal vamp smells. “You are psicotico,” he spat. “Insane.”
I grabbed his arm before he could disappear. “It was a vamp, wasn’t it? Down there?”
“It might have been Lucifer himself,” he said, jerking free as he strode from the elevator. “Stay away from me.” Mario’s clothes were dark, so I wasn’t sure, but if vamps could wet their pants, he just had. And I wasn’t sure why he was so negatively affected. Vamps always kept their scions chained to walls when in the devoveo, the ten years or more of madness after a human was turned. The sub-five basement had a vamp prisoner. Only one, by the smell. But I could drop that from my inquiries. A scion, no matter how important he or she might have been when human—even a king or queen—wasn’t anything that Satan’s Three would want. If the three were coming after something here at HQ, then it was likely that they were interested in something stored on sub-four. Could Leo have put magical items and artifacts in storage? In the safe hidden in the piles of stuff?
? ? ?
I left vamp central and headed across the river to Aggie One Feather’s place. I needed knowledge and wisdom and oral tradition. I needed someone who knew stuff and would share it with me openly and honestly. And for free. It was hard making do with bits and pieces of history offered by people who might have reasons to hide that same info. Now that I knew enough to know what questions to ask, Aggie would dish, and the only thing she would make me pay was more honesty and self-assessment. Aggie was all about shining light on one’s deep inner truths and banishing the shadows.
Because of Aggie, I wasn’t the same Jane who had first come to New Orleans. I had learned too much about myself and about my Beast. Too much about what it meant to be a victim and to make others victims. Too much about the dark night of the soul—a poetic way of describing the internal loss of meaning of oneself, and depression. I had looked it up. Because of Aggie, I had survived all that learning and maybe grown up a bit. A very little bit, according to Aggie.
Because of Aggie, because she (and sometimes her aged mother) took me to sweat and took me to water—Cherokee rites and rituals—and because she forced me to remember who and what I was, I had discovered that my inner soul home was my place of greatest strength. I had discovered the first cracks and fissures into the emptiness that was my own past, the first passageways into my own Cherokee memory.
I hadn’t told Aggie much about Beast yet, and I might never. But because of her I had discovered that Beast lived in that same soul home, that same deep cavern of inner sanctum. There, nothing and no one could bind us. There we were invincible, the two of us. I had discovered that our souls, Beast’s and mine, were not only in the same place; they were, to some extent, intertwined, which, so far as I knew, had never happened to a skinwalker. I had no idea what it might mean to me as I aged, as time took us to new and different places, but it had to mean something.
? ? ?
I turned into the road and cut the engine, coasting the SUV until it stopped, well back from the shell-based drive. I pulled the key and sat in the dark, studying the house and grounds. The security light on the pole at the end of the drive was off, the house and lawn cloaked in the night and illuminated by the moon. The light’s globe was broken. Shattered. The house was dark, though Aggie’s car was in the drive. No TV flickered through the windows. No lights anywhere.