Beside him lay a human. Crap. Beast had killed a human too? I put it together quickly, realizing that the vamp had cheated and sent a human into the park on a different tangent, so that if I did get the drop on him, the other guy could take me out.
I pushed up slowly and dragged myself to the bodies. I had killed two beings tonight, one human. From the looks of the body, Beast had gone a little bonkers over the kill. She had savaged the human’s side. Not good. She knew not to eat, but killing two opponents must have led her to the brink. She had tasted human flesh.
I closed my eyes and held them shut for a long moment, not sure what my religion permitted about this. Not sure how to pray. For that matter, I wasn’t certain what my tribal forefathers would pray in a time like this either. I settled on the truth. “I didn’t want to kill,” I murmured to God. “Forgive me that I am violent and cold and a killer. Forgive me that I tasted my enemy when he attacked.” For a moment, I could taste human blood on my tongue and my stomach roiled. I remembered the words of my cruel grandmother. “We do not eat the bodies of our enemies. It is forbidden. It makes us sick.” What it did was make us even less human and drive us closer to the threshold of U’tlun’ta. Now I understood.
I had no tears. I felt oddly empty, as if God hadn’t heard. As if God would never hear me again. I had killed and tasted human meat. My stomach rebelled, twisting in pain. Something else to deal with someday. Maybe. For now, I stripped the jewelry from his clothes, leaving his weapons beneath him. I didn’t want my fingerprints on them anywhere. While I searched, my fingers tingled with magic and I pulled a pocket watch amulet from his pocket, just like the amulet carried by the blood-servant I had taken down in Sedona, the one Rosanne Romanello drank from. Now I had two magic things that I had no idea what to do with, three if I counted the blood-diamond in the safe-deposit box. I was amassing a hoard of magic things I couldn’t use but was honor-bound to protect. Ducky.
I dressed in the night, surprised that my clothes still fit. Beast had stolen mass from the concrete lion and given it back, seemingly perfectly, despite the possible presence of organic matter—shells, maybe. I shuddered at the thought of organic matter buried somewhere in my body. I had no idea what it might do to me later. Maybe nothing. Maybe . . .
I would look the same to the gathered vamps, all except for my eyes, which were yellow now, the contact lenses lost in the shift. I pulled my hair back into a coil and slid into the flip-flops, shivering in the cold breeze.
I walked down the path to Big Guy’s head and stared down at him, his eyes looking up into the sky. Dead. By my hand. “I’d honor you, if you were honorable,” I said. Instead, I lifted the head by his ears and walked down the path to the Peristyle, my hair blowing in the icy wind, my feet aching from the cold. Hungry, needing to eat.
The wind was at my back, blowing my scent and the scent of blood before me.
I was determined to end this night as I had started it, with moxie and magic. Holding the head by one ear, I pulled my hair around and let the wind carry it before me across my left shoulder. A long gray and white flight feather was caught, tangled in my hair, and I pulled it free, holding the feather out to the side with the head.
The Peristyle came into view, the vamps lined up in the center, staring upwind, toward me. When I was close enough I raised my voice and called out, “Pellissier wins. De Allyon’s Enforcer is dead at my hands and teeth.”
De Allyon stepped forward, his entire body vibrating with emotion, his fists clenched. “That is not possible!” he shouted into the wind.
“Why? Because you gave him a knife?” I called back. “Because you sent a human behind him to make sure I died? Your Enforcer fell on his knife and lost his head. And your human is dead with him.” I threw the human man’s jewelry into the Peristyle, and it clanked as it landed.
“Did de Allyon deceive us?” Sabina asked. “Was there deception in a gather?”
“The human woman lies!” the enraged vamp screamed. “It was her own knife!”
“Not mine.” I called on Beast’s speed, racing past the table holding my weapons and through the pavilion, palming what I needed in the hand, hiding one behind my lower arm and the extension of the twelve-inch feather, holding another along the length of my leg—more sleight of hand, dependent on the sight of the severed head and the feather to keep their eyes from the weapons I’d grabbed. “And I am not human.” Beast glared at de Allyon through my eyes and I knew they glowed golden. I/we growled.
De Allyon drew back. “You cannot be. I drank down all of your kind.”
“Wrong. I’m alive.” I tossed the severed head at him. Beast shoved her strength and speed into me. The world went silvery gray. Everything around me dilated and slowed. I turned the stake in my left hand, its base against my palm. De Allyon caught the head, looking down into the face. He looked back up at me, disbelief in his eyes, his neck exposed.
We ambush, Beast whispered to me. I had all the time in the world. I dropped the white feather that had been caught in my hair. As it fell, I stepped back, twisted my body forward, stabbed with the stake I had hidden. The sharpened steel tip parted de Allyon’s ribs, pushed through his cartilage, deep into his flesh. The heart muscle resisted, rubbery and moving. I could feel it beat once, up through the wood in my grip. The steel tip pierced the heart and slammed through, the four inches of silver plating and the ash wood poisoning him. The wing feather was still falling as my fist hit against his chest.
The wood and silver in his chest should have immobilized him, should have stopped his heart. But his heart kept beating.