Sabina paused and I wanted her to hurry it up. But when you’ve lived for two thousand years, what’s an hour or a decade or two? And I needed to hear the tale of the first weres, the Cursed of Artemis. So I schooled my mind to patience and my mouth to silence.
Rain collected on the skin of my face and beaded. The wind gusted hard, then soughed through the tops of nearby pines, needles and branches whispering. A hard blast of rain hit the earth nearby and died. The wind gusted again, stronger. Thunder boomed, far away.
Some minutes later, Sabina said, “The wolf ran into the woods. That night, it bit a civet, a lion, a dog, a snake, and other of Lolandes’ predator animals, those she had cared for until now, transferring the curse of illness to each. The wolf hid by day. The next night, biting a gardener, he passed the curse of Lolandes to the humans. At the next full moon, the gardener changed into the form of a wolf and succumbed to bloodlust. Shortly thereafter other were-creatures began to appear, humans bitten by the cursed, forced to change by the light of the full moon. But the wolf was first. And the wolf’s curse was greatest.”
“No females who were bitten survived,” I guessed.
“No. They did not. And Lolandes mourned her rash anger for the pain it had brought her animals and was ashamed that humans had been tainted with her curse. But it was too late to stop the change she had brought into the world. A curse cannot be undone.
“Lolandes studied and discovered a way, however, to minimize the damage to the human world, a partial cure that would allow the weres to bring over females and create families and societies, a therapy that would allow them to breed true. The cure”—she paused, as if searching for a word—“mutated the curse into one less easily transferred. She carried the cure to each of the were groups, all but the wolves. Them, she never forgave.”
I’d taken a mythology course as an elective in high school, but I’d never heard this story. When I told Sabina that, she laughed, the sound dry as corn husks in the night. “So much has been lost,” she said. “Yet, the story was told me by an old Roman scholar, one who claimed to have writings from the time of the Babylonians, long before the Greeks stole her name and story and made her a goddess. And it is true that the werewolves are the only moon-touched who carry the original taint, the original curse, unabated by Lolandes’ cure.”
It was a cure that effectively created new species, were-species, human-animal hybrids that could reproduce true. I sat up suddenly, a thought shunting heat through my veins. A falcon was hunting a doe? Not likely. I made a leap of intuition, better known as a wild-haired guess.
Sabina must have heard my heart leap and race. She turned her face to me, her eyes focusing on my throat in the darkness. I froze, waiting, fingers on a vamp-killer at my hip. When she didn’t move beyond the stare, I curled up a knee, one boot sole scraping on the shell path, an elbow braced on my knee. I pulled out the multifunctional cell and went online, checking the timelines of Sumer and Babylonia. “This female hunting bird,” I said, redirecting her back to the subject matter rather than my pulse. “Could it have been an Anzu?”
Sabina shrugged and looked away. “I do not know if the cultures shared the Anzu.”
According to the Internet, the kingdoms of Babylon and Sumer had overlapped in time. It was possible, if unlikely, that Lolandes’—or Artemis’—dead bird of prey had been an Anzu. One of which just happened to be hanging around Leo, the werewolves, and the were-cats, trying to bring the groups together. “Now wouldn’t that be a handy dandy coincidence,” I muttered. “Thank you, Sabina. I am, um . . . honored and . . . humbled?” I drew on my Christian children’s school manners. “Yeah. Humbled that you shared your story.”
Sabina laughed low and turned her head to me again. I heard the slight snick of her fangs dropping into place, and because vamps can’t feel amusement and go vampy at the same time, I knew it was deliberate, not a predator response to the pheromones of stunned reaction that escaped from my pores and sped my heart. I tilted my head up to hers. A smiling, ancient vamp, three-inch fangs exposed, is not a warm and fuzzy sight. Sabina disappeared as quickly as she had arrived, with a little pop of displaced air. Old vamps are fast enough to do that—move the air with a snap of sound.
I rehelmeted and cranked up Bitsa just in time to be hit with a blast of drenching rain. Bitsa is my dream bike; I love her like a part of me. But riding in the rain required changing gear into plasticized riding clothes over the leather. I pulled up to the chapel porch, rooted in Bitsa’s saddlebags for the riding gear and a hand towel. Muttering under my breath about the heat and the stink of my own sweat, I dried off under her front porch and pulled the plastic pants and jacket over the leathers. The heat went up another ten degrees, steam-bath territory. As I dressed, my hand brushed the lump in my pocket, reminding me, and I draped the bag holding the sliver of the Blood Cross on the chapel door handle. It didn’t seem like a smart place to leave it, but I wasn’t taking it home again; I called out, telling the darkness what I had done and straddled Bitsa.
My headlight was thin and reedy, catching the raindrops as they slashed across the beam, creating more glare than visibility. Easing onto the dark-as-soot street I gave Bitsa some gas. Rain-riding was dangerous, especially at night, vision impaired by drops sluicing down the helmet faceplate, two tires speeding a lightweight vehicle with less traction than normal, water a slick layer on the road.