I was better than all the others. I'd chosen this. The choosing gave me strength and ambition.
The whole world seemed different. With dhampir powers I could see farther, run faster, hear more. But as a vampire everything became magnified. Colors flared, agonizingly bright and surreal. Sounds reached me long before they should, altering my sense of time and place.
I unwound myself from Jimmy's embrace, the slide of our skin so intense I could literally hear the hair on his legs swish; the blood coursing through his veins hummed like a song.
When he spoke, I flinched at the volume. "Do you like it?"
"Mmm," I purred.
He took my hand and led me to the mirror above his dresser. That bit about vampires having no reflection? Total BS. I could see both of us—along with our flam-ing eyes and sparkly fangs. It was a good look for me.
I fingered Sawyer's turquoise. I was now as strong as the woman of smoke, and while I wore this, she couldn't touch me.
The bitch was toast.
I laughed, the sound deep, throaty, and utterly demonic. I liked it so much, I laughed again.
A heated breeze blew in through the window. The breath of evil, it smelled like brimstone, and I drew it in like ambrosia.
The wind called me closer; I peered through the bars and up to the top of the mountain. The full moon shone across a gathering mist. Rain tumbled from the sky, but only on the peak, and the dormant volcano rumbled.
The rain is a woman, Whitelaw had said.
Old Navajo legends that hinted of the truth.
"The woman of smoke," I murmured.
She was here, and she was waiting for me.
CHAPTER 33
"How are we going to get out?" Jimmy asked.
I turned reluctantly away from the mountain, which had begun to rumble my name.
Phoenix, it said. Come to me.
Jimmy stood by the golden door, dressed in black jeans and a tee that read Hannah Montana. In my old life that would have been hysterical. In this one, all I could think of was how sweet the blood of a child.
I didn't even consider clothes for myself. Such trivialities meant nothing to me anymore.
"They aren't going to open it," I said as I joined Jimmy. "Sawyer can't."
"And Summer won't."
This close to the exit, the heat of the metal made every inch of my skin throb like a bad sunburn. The thought of touching it made my fingers sting.
"How did you plan to get out?" he asked.
I hadn't planned, I'd just moved forward. I really needed to stop doing that.
My skin is my robe.
Sawyer's voice came to me out of the past. I turned away from the pulsing heat of the golden door and strolled back to the window—the only way out. Beyond it lay the mountain, where she awaited me. If I were a bird--
I tilted my head, suddenly understanding what Sawyer had meant.
I faced Jimmy. "Do you have a knife?"
Jimmy pulled his switchblade out of his pocket.
Stupid question.
I took the weapon and carved a bat into my forearm. The image resembled the icon for Batman—a stick bat at best, Id never been much of an artist—but I was pretty certain it would do the trick.
It began to heal almost immediately. I never thought I'd wish my preternatural healing abilities away, but right then I did.
"What the hell?" Jimmy growled as the blood dripped from my arm and onto the floor. He inched closer, tongue flicking across his lips, still-glowing eyes fastened on the rolling river of red.
"It's the only way." Reaching up, I removed the turquoise from around my neck and set it on the windowsill.
“How am I going to get out?" he asked.
"You aren't." I pressed my palm to the steadily healing bat carved into my arm.
Seconds later I took the chain into my mouth, flapping my black wings harder to offset the downward pull of the turquoise as I headed upward toward the full silver moon that hung above Mount Taylor.
Jimmy shouted something, but I wasn't listening. I wanted no one at my side when I met the woman of smoke. I'd always known it would come down to her or me.
Instead, the sonar that accompanied my shift—the ability of bats to "see" by sound—took over. The term blind as a bat had come about because bats use their incredible sense of hearing rather than sight to fly in the dark.
Now that I was a bat, I realized that it wasn't exactly sound but feeling. A buzzing awareness all around me that there flew a mosquito, ahead loomed a tree, and soon, very soon, I'd reach the mountain and my destiny.
The moon's glow made the whirling mist atop Mount Taylor luminescent. The rain had stopped, and I circled, unable to see the ground beneath, but somewhere in that fog I felt her.
I dropped through the shroud, making use of my bat supersenses to avoid trees, rocks, and one evil Navajo witch. A few feet from the earth, I reached for, then became, myself, landing in a crouch that allowed me to scoop up the turquoise and flip the chain around my neck. Just in time, too.
Naked as I, the woman of smoke stepped from the fog. "A bat," she murmured. "How ... cliche"."
"An evil spirit bitch," I returned. "Right back atcha."
"This will be a fight to the death," she said.