“Alright, alright, calm down.” The male vamp peered into the gloom. “Suppose we do find the shapeshifters. Do we go to Ghastek or do we go to d’Ambray with it?”
“To Ghastek,” Jeff said.
“Yeah, but d’Ambray is higher on the food chain. You can tell Ghastek’s pissed, but he keeps his mouth shut. You know. We could get ahead.”
“And what happens when d’Ambray leaves and Ghastek’s back in charge?” Jeff said.
Get out of here. Go on. Shoo.
“No guts, no glory.” Leonard must’ve shrugged, because his vampire raised his shoulders in a jerky movement.
“We cover our asses and follow the chain of command. Nobody ever went wrong by following the chain of command,” Jeff said.
Something clopped in the shadows. Oh no.
The vamps tensed, like two mutated cats getting ready to pounce.
Cuddles emerged into the open. I had completely forgotten she was there.
Robert put his hand over his face. Desandra rolled her eyes.
“What the hell is that?” Jeff said.
Why me? Why?
“It’s a horse,” Leonard said.
“Are you blind? How is that thing a horse? Its ears are two feet tall.”
“Then it’s a mule.”
“It’s not a mule. The neck’s wrong and the tail . . .”
“What about the tail?”
“Mules have horse tails. He’s got a donkey tail. Like a cow. It looks like a donkey, but the damn thing is at least sixteen hands tall. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s a mule. It’s got a saddle on it, so someone was riding it.”
The male vamp moved forward.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to catch it and see who it belongs to.”
Argh.
Cuddles put her ears forward.
“It doesn’t look friendly,” Jeff observed.
“It’s fine. If she had her ears back, you’d have to watch out. It’s all in the voice. Watch and learn. Come ’ere, girl. Come ’ere . . . Who is a good freaky mule? You are.”
The male vamp inched forward. Cuddles stood just a little bit straighter.
“That’s a good girl.”
The vamp reached for the reins. Its fingers fastened about the leather.
Cuddles screamed. It wasn’t a braying noise, it was an ear-slapping shriek of pure donkey outrage, like someone got hold of a foghorn and tried to strangle it.
“Whoa . . .” Leonard started.
Cuddles reared and tossed her head. The vamp slid on the glass and she dragged him left.
“Whoa . . .”
She dragged him right.
“Come on!”
Cuddles kept turning and rearing, her huge body going up and down, jerking the undead to and fro like a cheerleader with a pompom.
“Oh, you idiot,” the female vamp snickered in Jeff’s voice.
I saw the precise moment Cuddles realized that something was behind her and that something was the same unnatural thing that clung to her reins. Her eyes went big, and she planted her front legs down and kicked. The female vampire flew about twenty feet and smashed into a glass iceberg. Ouch.
The male vamp finally let go, fell, and slid down the glass. Cuddles backed up and braced herself. The male vamp rolled to his feet and gathered itself for a leap.
“Stop!” Jeff moved the female vampire between Leonard’s undead and the donkey.
“I’m going to kill that dumb animal.”
If he touched my donkey, I’d take his vamp apart.
“No, you’re not. It belongs to someone and if you harm it, we’ll have to pay restitution. I don’t feel like having my paycheck docked.”
“The bitch kicked us!” Leonard snarled.
“You put your hands on her. She was defending herself. Come on, the damage is minor. We’ll feed them tonight and nobody will be the wiser. But if some hick shows up claiming we injured his donkey, there will be an inquiry. Ghastek’s walking around like he’s ready to explode. I don’t want to be in his blast area.”
Leonard’s vamp twisted his face into a horrifying grimace.
“We need to move on anyway,” Jeff said. “In five minutes Rowena’s going to come down that hallway for check-in. I don’t want to explain to her that we’ve been playing with what may or may not be a giant donkey instead of sweeping the perimeter.”
The male vamp shook its head and circled around Cuddles, and the two undead took off into the glass labyrinth. We lay still for another five minutes, until they were a mile and a half away.
“I take back what I said about the donkey,” Ascanio said. “She’s awesome.”
I wished Curran could’ve seen this. He’d die laughing.
My heart stuttered for a beat. I slid down the glass, caught myself with my feet, and went to give Cuddles a carrot.
6
BEFORE THE SHIFT, Centennial Park occupied twenty-one acres inside Atlanta, a cheery space filled with engraved bricks, lawns, and beautiful fountains. After the magic hit and the buildings around the park took a dive, it stood abandoned for a few years. Eventually, Atlanta’s witch covens banded together and purchased it from the city along with the nearby ruins. Shortly after they took over, the vegetation within the park rioted. Trees grew, sending thick roots through the neighborhood and spreading massive canopies, as if they had been growing here for hundreds of years. The park tripled in size. Now a dense wall of greenery bordered it, an impenetrable barrier of oaks, evergreen shrubs, blackberry that somehow resisted the frost, and thorns. In the defense department, the witches would make Sleeping Beauty’s evil witch weep with jealousy.
I rode Cuddles next to that green barrier now, heading down Centennial Drive toward the Casino. The shapeshifters flanked me. I kept an eye on the greenery. The witches professed to be friendly to me. Evdokia, one of the three witches of the Oracle, even claimed we were distantly related. But their help was always conditional and right now I didn’t trust anyone.
The bushes ahead of us rustled.
I halted Cuddles and reached for Slayer.
A brown bunny hopped out onto the sidewalk and looked at me.
“Snack,” Desandra said.
The bunny pondered me with tiny eyes and turned toward the shrubs. Right.
“It’s a bunny only part of the time,” I said. “Sometimes it’s a duck. Also, it can be a kitten.”
Robert raised his eyebrows at me.
“We’re being invited to visit the Witch Oracle.” I dismounted and followed the bunny.
“Not again,” Derek growled.
“Why, what’s so bad about the witches?” Ascanio asked.
Derek’s eyebrows crept together. “You’ll see.”
The bunny hopped into the shrubs. The greenery split and pulled to the side, revealing a narrow path.
“Do we have a choice?” Robert said.
“Not really.”
I stepped onto the path. We were short on time, but pissing off witches ranked right between sticking your hand into a hornet’s nest and telling Curran I’d made broccoli for dinner. By now, they had to know that Hugh was in town. If they wanted to see me, it had to be something important.
We passed through the thick barrier of green and emerged into a pine forest. Snow sheathed the ground in a dense blanket. Tall pine trunks towered on both sides of us, as if a Spanish armada were sailing under the snow and only its masts were visible. Past the pines a glade stretched, silver with moonlight. Behind it the translucent walls of a greenhouse rose into the night, sheltering rows of herbs. Centennial Park served as the hub for most of the Atlanta covens and they liked to have herbs in ready supply.
The bunny hopped between the trees. We followed it. Snow crunched under my feet. We really didn’t have time for this. Unfortunately, I needed the Oracle. If Hugh and Roland intended to assault Atlanta, I would need their help and their magic. And I couldn’t afford to ignore their advice. If I refused to see them and they had a magic self-guided missile that could take Hugh out, I would be kicking myself for years.
Derek wrinkled his nose. “Here it is.”
I pulled a strip of gauze out of my pocket and passed it to him.
“What is that smell?” Desandra wrinkled her nose.
Derek ripped the gauze in half and handed her a piece.
The trees fell back and we came to a hill sitting in the middle of a large clearing. Perfectly spherical and smooth, it protruded from the snow, like the cupola of a submerged cathedral. I remembered it as being dark gray with flecks of gold and swirls of green, but the moonlight turned it glossy indigo.
The bunny stopped.
The ground under our feet rumbled. Derek sneezed. Desandra clamped the gauze to her nose. The hill shuddered and slid upward, the snow sliding off its top.
Robert jumped back ten feet. Ascanio just stared, wide-eyed.
A giant head broke free of the snow, its neck a brown mass of wrinkled folds. Hey, pretty girl. Long time, no see. The colossal tortoise stared at me with dinner-plate-sized irises and opened its gargantuan mouth.
Right. The full treatment. Just once, would it kill them to meet me in a gazebo someplace or in a fried chicken joint?
Derek and Desandra doubled over in a fit of sneezing.
The bunny’s fur crawled, boiled, and stretched into the shape of a small black cat. The cat leaped into the tortoise’s mouth.
“Wow,” Ascanio said. “That’s brutal.”
I filed the new item of teenage slang away for future reference.
Desandra pointed at the open mouth, her other hand pinching her nose closed. “In dere?”
“Mm-hm,” I said.
“Fuck dis! I’m stayin’ here.”
“I’m a rat,” Robert said. “I’m not going into a reptile’s mouth.”
Oh boy. Fine time to develop phobias. “It’s fine,” I told them. “They’ll probably cut you off from the conversation anyway.”
“I’m coming,” Ascanio declared.
Derek nodded, holding the rag over his nose, and came to stand with me.
I stepped into the tortoise’s mouth.
• • •
THE THICK SPONGY tongue gave a little under my feet. I went forward, past the roof of the mouth, into the throat, draped with garlands of frozen algae and icicles. Ahead dark ice slicked the floor of the throat tunnel. Last time I came through here, I had taken a bath in what I strongly suspected was tortoise spit. I stepped onto the ice. It held. Score one for me.
“This is awesome,” Ascanio volunteered behind me.
Someone was having entirely too much fun.
The throat tunnel ended and I walked out onto an iced-over pond in the middle of a colossal dome. The walls, dark at eye level, curved up, lightening until they grew transparent at the top. The night sky, studded with stars, spilled moonlight onto clusters of blue icicles suspended from the ceiling. The icicles glowed with soft blue light, illuminating the outlines of rectangular crypts within the walls, each marked by a glowing gold glyph.
In front of me on a rectangular platform waited three women. The first had seen seventy. Life had whittled her down, turning her body skeletal and her face sharp and predatory. She perched in a large black chair like a bird of prey. Maria, the Crone. Next to her a young woman sat in a comfortable chair. Slender, with pale blond hair down to her shoulders, she looked young, barely out of her teens, and delicate. Her power was anything but. Sienna, the Maiden. I had saved her life during the last flare. To the right, in a rocking chair, sat Evdokia, the Mother. Plump, with a heavy braid of reddish-brown hair, she rocked back and forth knitting a sweater out of gray wool. It looked almost done.
The black cat ran to her and rubbed against her feet.
Behind them a large mural showed their goddess, a tall, regal woman standing behind a cauldron that sat at the intersection of three roads. The woman’s three arms held a knife, a torch, and a chalice. A black cat, a toad, a broom, and a key completed the picture. She had many names: the Queen of the Night, the Mother of All Witches, Hekate. Her power was vast and terrible and I was disinclined to disrespect her.