“Yeah,” I said, blowing out a breath. “Right now I’m going with door number two.”
The wolf huffed with what sounded like disgust and showed me his teeth before turning in a sharp circle and lifting a leg on a Dumpster. He huffed again to make sure I knew he would rather be peeing on me. He dropped his leg and padded back down the alley. If a wolf could show disdain, he just had.
“Well, crap,” I muttered.
*
The rest of my day just got worse. Bruiser needed me to find and corral the humans de Allyon’s death had left running around without a master. De Allyon had used a lot of compulsion on his servants, and when that control disappeared suddenly, there were a lot of displaced, panicked humans running around, most with some version of PTSD from being in his service.
Someone had to deal with the CDC about the vamp plague. They had joined in with Leo’s private lab, working on finding a true cure. Again, me, since PsyLED was a police agency, not a government health agency. Meanwhile, Rick wrapped up his case and left New Orleans without a word—Rick, his unit of nonhumans, and his Soul. I watched him drive off in a new SUV—the kind that looks like a station wagon. It had rental plates, and somehow it looked . . . domestic. I didn’t let tears pool in my eyes until the rental pulled around the corner. Then I blinked them away and went back to work. What else could I do? I worked around the clock with Wrassler and Bruiser and then, all at once, it was all done. Finished. My job was done.
It was midnight, on the night of the new moon. And I was alone.
I got a job offer two weeks later. It was from the elusive Hieronymus, the Master of the City of Natchez. Seemed he had a problem with the remnants of de Allyon’s ungovernable Naturaleza running amok in his city and the nearby hunting territory. He was estimating there were at least twenty vamps hunting humans, and he wanted them removed. The council of Mithrans had offered thirty thousand a head—literally—to take them down. I was thinking about it. A change of scenery sounded like a good idea, and if I took the Younger boys, it would be a good way to test out this partnership idea. Frankly, I was surprised that he’d want one of the people who had shot up his town and left it in disarray to come back, but maybe he felt I needed to clean up my own mess.
I hadn’t heard from Bruiser. Hadn’t heard from Rick, despite the numerous apologies I’d left on his voice mail. Either I’d hurt him so badly with my accusation and lack of trust that he’d just walked away—maybe forever—or he was already in the field again and hadn’t checked voice mail. I could hope it was something simple, though the more time passed, the less likely it was a voice mail problem. I had told him I loved him and then accused him of shooting me. Go, me.
My life was sublimely uncomplicated right now. Which could be a good thing. But was probably not.
I went that night to hunt, deep in bayou country. In the middle of the shift, as the place of the change took me over, and gray light sparkled with the energies of my magics, I discovered Beast’s secret. I found the chain that ran from Beast, across the floor of my soul house to the sleeping form of Leo in the corner of my mind.
As we stood in the silence of the magics of the change, both fully skinwalker and fully cat, I said, He bound you. Not me. He bound you. How . . . ? Oh, crap. It must have been because his blood was in your mouth, in my mouth when we shifted. Even caught in the magic, I felt my breath hitch. I had vampire blood in my mouth at the time of the shift into cat.
Beast was bound to Leo Pellissier. I stared at the silvered chain and cuff that encircled her foreleg.
Best huffed, amused. Leo will be good mate.
The pain of the shift slid into me. “Well, crap.”
Love Jane Yellowrock? Then meet Thorn St. Croix.
Read on for the opening chapter of Bloodring, the first novel in Faith Hunter’s Rogue Mage series.
Available from Roc.
No one thought the apocalypse would be like this. The world didn’t end. And the appearance of seraphs heralded three plagues and a devastating war between the forces of good and evil. Over a hundred years later, the earth has plunged into an ice age, and seraphs and demons fight a never-ending battle while religious strife rages among the surviving humans.
Thorn St. Croix is no ordinary neomage. All the others of her kind, mages who can twist leftover creation energy to their will, were gathered together into enclaves long ago; and there they live in luxurious confinement, isolated from other humans and exploited for their magic. When her powers nearly drive her insane, she escapes—and now she lives as a fugitive, disguised as a human, channeling her gifts of stone-magery into jewelry making. But when Thaddeus Bartholomew, a dangerously attractive policeman, shows up on her doorstep and accuses her of kidnapping her ex-husband, she retrieves her weapons and risks revealing her identity to find him. And for Thorn, the punishment for revelation is death. . . .
I stared into the hills as my mount clomped below me, his massive hooves digging into snow and ice. Above us a fighter jet streaked across the sky, leaving a trail that glowed bright against the fiery sunset. A faint sense of alarm raced across my skin, and I gathered up the reins, tightening my knees against Homer’s sides, pressing my walking stick against the huge horse.