I stared at the house for the space of time between heartbeats. Quietly, I opened the vehicle door, sniffed, and caught the residue of gunfire on the air. Someone had shot out the light. What else had they shot? If someone wanted to hurt me, by hurting my friends, would they know about the One Feathers? Not likely. But anything was possible. Would the two women be able to protect themselves? No. Not against a sniper or a bomb maker.
I let my Beast senses free, questing. The night crashed in, full of the buzz of mosquitoes and the croak of frogs, but empty of any human sounds. No TV laugh tracks. No radio. No conversation. Worse, there was no smell of food on the air. No smell of wood smoke from the sweat house. I raced into the shadows to the house.
I hadn’t noticed when I drew my weapon, but I was holding it in a two-handed grip beside my right leg as I crept around Aggie’s house. As I stepped toward the back porch a soft creak met my ear, slow and repetitive. I halted and timed the sound to about once every two and a half seconds. Someone was on the porch, in the rocker, rocking. Shades of the Bates Motel slashed through my memory.
“Nice night.”
I jerked, just ever so slightly.
“I forgot what it was like to sit out here without the light.”
It was Aggie One Feather speaking, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t talking to me. I achieved a breath that didn’t whistle in fear. Inside me Beast chuffed with laughter and thumped the wall of my soul home with her tail.
“Yup. It nice. How much time till the power company get here?” uni lisi, the grandmother of many children, a Cherokee honorific for an old woman, asked, her tone garrulous.
“In time for your show, Mama.”
“Them kids, they gonna fix our light?”
“Their parents said they’d pay for it, Mama. And Deputy Antonelli said he’d make sure or he’d help us press charges.”
“That good. Good enough.” The rocker rocked on, a peaceful sound in the night. “If I get to watch my Jeopardy!”
I holstered my weapon and called out, “Aggie? It’s Jane Yellowrock. Ummm . . .” I thought about the fact that I always just dropped by. Maybe that wasn’t the nicest thing I could do. “Ummm, are you taking callers?”
“Come around to the porch, Jane,” Aggie called back. “Some kids looking for a place to neck shot out our security light and hit the electric lines.”
Neck? Instantly I thought about vamps and fangs and blood-meals. Then I realized she was talking about hooking up in the backseat of a car. Old-people slang. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” I made my way to the porch and up the stairs. Aggie was right; the porch and the night were nice. The house’s foundation was several feet high, to protect it against hurricane storm surge, and it looked out over a backyard I had never paid much attention to. There were fruit trees and a garden behind a chicken-wired fence, smelling of freshly turned earth and frustrated rabbits. A row of bee boxes stood at the back of the property, the bees silent, the smell of honey soft on the air. I closed the door behind me, making out the location of the two women and the mama cat sitting on uni lisi’s lap. I took a chair. Aggie moved in the dark and I heard a gurgling sound, and smelled cold tea and fresh mint. She pushed a glass across the table to me. I took it and sipped. “Thank you.” A silence filled the space between us, uncomfortable on my part. “Ummm,” I said again.
Aggie made an amused humming sound. My lack of social skills was not a secret to her. Not that she would help me through it.
I puffed out a breath. “That bomb maker I called you about? If she’s who I think she is, then she’s also a sniper and she smells like The People.”
I smelled Aggie’s shock, so strong it might have actually burned through my skin, like an electric spark. Maybe I should have tried some small talk before I jumped into the mess of my life. The weather. Their health. Too late now. “She is War Woman,” Aggie asked, “like you?”
“No.” I hesitated. “I don’t think so. She’s female, and a human blood-servant. I don’t think a War Woman would allow herself to be fed upon by vamps. And she’s not someone I’ve ever smelled before.”
“You being a skinwalker,” uni lisi said, unperturbed. “That true?”
I sipped again, my mouth suddenly dry. “Yes, ma’am.”
“That how you can smell what this woman is?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And this woman who smell like The People. She chasing you?”
I started to answer and stopped. Not just targeting me at my house to kill me, but chasing me? If so, was she trying to get me to lead her somewhere? Tracking me everywhere I went? Like to here? “Maybe,” I said, as the possibilities bounced around in my head. What the heck did Satan’s Three want? The things in my possession that were magical. That was all that was left for them to be after.
“I see on the TV, ’bout them little things people stick to cars,” uni lisi said. “So they can follow peoples. You got one on you car?”
My hands went cold on the iced tea glass. I hadn’t checked. I wasn’t used to being a target myself. If I had been a client, I’d have been over the car with a microscope. I set down the tea glass and hit the button for Eli. “Yeah?” he answered.