He turned his head, his chiseled nose sharp as a stone axe in the lamplight behind him. He bit his lip; a drop of blood eased out, sliding down his chin. He placed his bloody mouth on my arm. The pain receded like a wave drawn back from shore. I gasped, breath hissing in through my lips as if he’d kissed me. He met my eyes and smiled, his mouth curling against my flesh. He sucked gently on my arm, lapped at torn flesh, his tongue laving, our blood mingling in my wounds. The pain vanished fully and I shivered hard at the loss, my muscles easing.
Vamp saliva really is an analgesic, I thought. I relaxed against the upholstered couch. My belly warmed. Fluttered. I sighed, the sound uneven. Leo chuckled against my skin, the vibrations of laughter pulsing through my arm like blood.
He pulled away a fraction of an inch, his lips parted, revealing long, slender canines, white as bleached bone. He placed his teeth on his bottom lip and bit down again. Blood welled in his mouth. And he bit into my wrist at the damaged vein. I gasped and jerked my arm back, but he held on tight. He wasn’t feeding on my blood. He was forcing his blood into me.
The sound of drums returned. Shadows danced on stone walls. Tunics and leggings, fringed and beaded cloth and deer hide, cotton dresses swaying. Sage and wormwood, rosemary and mint filled the air. Sweetgrass smoke billowed around me. Shadows closed over, dancing. Dancing. Cedar and sage burned, the aromatic smoke rising like dreams. Diaphanous, gossamer as butterfly silk, the smoke touched me. Drums beat into my veins. The night wrapped around me like the hand of God. And I fell into sleep. A deep, deep sleep. Dream and memory, both ancient, came together, melded like an alloy into one.
Slowly, I dragged my eyes open, my lids sluggish and heavy. Drums . . . Drums . . . I raised my head. Shadows danced, grotesque and monstrous on stone. Stone everywhere, flickering from campfire flames.
Night. Darkest night. I looked up, searching for the moon, the stars. And saw only the curve of the world above me, stone on stone, melting down like the white man’s candles. Pooling, dripping, melting stone.
Underground. The caves . . . Caves? The thought, alien here, vanished.
My father’s face, half lit by flame, half shadowed, as black as death, loomed over me. “Edoda,” I whispered. Father . . . His eyes were yellow, like mine. Not the black of The People, the chelokay, an alien thought whispered, but the yellow eyes of u’tlun’ta, the skinwalker.
Edoda smiled and I breathed in his pride with the herbed smoke—stern, yet full of laughter. An old woman appeared beside him in the night, her face crosshatched with life and age. Her skin pulled down in long droops and stretched up in sharp lines. And her eyes—yellow eyes like mine—were lively and full of tenderness. “A s dig a,” she murmured. Baby . . .
I breathed in a new scent, burning, sweet, choking. The drums took on depth and power. The beat reaching into my blood, into my flesh, melding my heartbeat with it. Taking me over.
“We sa,” my father whispered. Bobcat . . .
Time passed. The drumbeat mellowed. Edoda sat close, his flesh hot in the chill air. The old woman, his mother, u ni li si, grandmother of many children, sat beside him, her fingers tapping on a skin-head drum. The echoes of her fingertips on the skin beat through me, vibrating deep. Touching sinew, bone, and marrow.
“A da nv do,” she crooned. Great Spirit . . .
“Follow the drum,” Edoda said.
I looked at the cave wall, at the shadows dancing there, swaying with exhaustion. The beat of the drum filled me, slow and sonorous, echoing through the cave.
Warmth settled onto me. Fur tickled me. On the wall of dancing shadows, I saw myself as the cat rested on me, ears pointed, tufts curling out. Pelt brushed my sides. My legs. We sa . . . bobcat. My face. The overlay of cat face, above my own. Settling onto me, a cured skin.
A necklace of claws, bones, fierce teeth—Edoda settled it over my head onto my shoulders. “Reach inside,” Edoda murmured. “Breathe inside. Into we sa, into the snake within.” The snake in the skin of the cat . . . Magic tingled along my sides, into my fingers as I slid down, inside the bobcat pelt. Dreaming. Floating in grayness.
Drunken, drugged, a distant voice thought. Mild surprise merged with the drumbeat. I saw the snake resting below the surface, encapsulated in every cell of the hunter cat. In its teeth and bones, in the dried bits of its hardened marrow. A snake, holding all that we sa was. The awareness of where the cat and I differed. Where we were the same. And how easy it would be to shift from my shape, into the bobcat. So simple. With understanding came purpose and desire. Clarity. The longing to shift into the snake within we sa. The desire to become bobcat.
My first beast. My first shift. I let go. I melted, as the stone melted in the cavern above. Taking the shape of bobcat. Pain radiated out, like spokes of the white man’s wheels. Yet distant, caught up in the drums, and so, not quite a part of me. The shadows on the stone merged and glittered, gray and dark and light. All color bled out of the night. And I was bobcat.
The world was grayer, duller to my eyes. But when I took my first breath as we sa, the scents exploded inside me, heavily textured and layered, yet distinct. Smoke, sweat, bad teeth, bear fat, white man’s whiskey, blood, herbs. Hunger tugged at me.
I tilted my head and looked at my father, my pointed ears and tufts of curling ear hair moving shadows on the stone. Edoda, beside me, had shifted as well. The beast he had chosen was tlvdatsi, mountain panther. Killing eyes met mine, round pupils in amber irises. Marauder claws flexed and stretched on the earth. I hunched, making myself small in fear.
Beneath the smells of fire, dancers, and the cat, my father’s scent was all but lost. All but. Not quite. I breathed him in, Edoda caught beneath the pelt of the shift.
My father was there, clinging to humanity as he looked out at the world through the eyes of predator death. Purring, he nudged me, forcing me to my feet, four legs offering better balance than two. I followed him through the no-longer-so-dark cave, into the night.
Scents and sounds were volatile, intense, so full of power they felt like knife wounds. Air touched my pelt, telling me everything about the world around me. The direction of the wind. The moisture content in the air. The nearness of storm clouds. The season of the year. The last rain was still wet in the dirt beneath my padding paws. I heard the running feet of rodents, an owl overhead in a tree, two does up the ridge, chewing. The owl lifted wings. Night birds hunted and called. Every sense was powerful and concentrated. I flexed out my claws, smaller versions of Edoda’s, but no less dangerous to my own prey.
Edoda, tlvdatsi, led me into the rhododendron thicket, trunks writhing from bare earth, leaves forming a canopy less than the height of a man above, teaching me to hunt. I followed, watching, scenting, hearing, learning how to bring down a rabbit. My own prey sat still as stone in the brush. Until a fear-crazed rush. I leaped. My claws sank deep, teeth ripping into the back of its neck. I gave the small prey a single shake, breaking its spine. Edoda teaching me to kill and to eat. The feel-taste-scent of blood and food, the crunch of bone and hot meat.
The night closed in with the taste. All scent wisped away. I lay on the couch in my freebie house, eyes closed. I remembered. I knew. I knew what I was, from the very beginning. When I appeared out of the forest I wasn’t the twelve-year-old girl the white authorities had thought I was. I was far . . . far older. And I had spent a much longer time in Beast’s skin than I had thought.
I shivered. I opened my eyes. To meet the vamped-out gaze of a far greater predator, canines exposed, lips drawn back in a slight snarl.
CHAPTER 12
Naked vamps. And the food was naked too
I should have been alarmed. Terrified. Instead, I stretched and sighed. My pain was gone. I flexed my fist, inspected my arm, watching the play of whole muscles beneath unblemished skin. I tugged gently, suggesting by the action that Leo release me. Not fighting him, not jerking free, none of the motions that prey might make. I knew better than to fight myself free from a predator. Attack or play dead if one wanted to stay alive. Edoda’s lessons. Returned to me. A gift of this predator. This killer. So, gently, calmly, I pulled my arm free of his grip. And Leo Pellissier slowly began to seep back into his own eyes.
I smiled at him. And saw surprise swim into his gaze.“Thank you,” I said, knowing I thanked him more for the return of a memory than for healing. I reached slowly toward him with my healed arm, fingers brushing the skin of his neck. He breathed out with the touch. I curled the tendril of his hair around my fingers, my tendons restored, healed, the motion pain free.
When his eyes were not human but no longer fully vampy, he turned his face into my palm and rested his cheek against my fingers, his black hair caught between hand and face. “What are you?” he asked, wonder in his voice. When I didn’t answer, he whispered, “Your blood tastes of oak and cedar and the winter wind. Tastes wild, like the world once was. Come to my bed,” he breathed on my hand. “Tonight.”
I watched, knowing he was using his vamp voice on me, but not minding so very much. Not right now. He kissed my palm, his hair still tangled in my fingers, his lips cool, but soft. His eyes took mine, his gaze velvet lined but powerful, like a gilded cell. “Come to my bed.”
“No,” I murmured. “Not gonna happen.”
Slowly, he took my wrist in his chilled hand and pulled me from his hair, bending my arm and draping it across my body. He pressed my hand there, his cold, dead hand on my living warmth. His eyes searched mine. “Tell me what manner of supernatural you are,” he asked. “You are not were, I think. You are something I never tasted. Never heard told of.”
I let a faint smile steal over me. “Again,” I said, knowing I was risking whatever harmony currently existed between the head of the vamp council and me, “I’ll share my secrets with you, if you’ll tell me where the vamps came from. Originally. The very first vamp.”
He seemed to consider my bargain. “Why do you wish to know this?” he asked.
I settled into the couch, feeling rested and lethargic and vaguely happy, as if I’d downed a single chilled beer on a hot afternoon. “Because all supernaturals fear something. According to the mythos, weres, if they still exist, fear the moon, the planet Venus, and the goddess Diana, the huntress. A witch I know fears dark things that go bump in the night, demons and evil spirits and fickle djinns. And vamps fear the cross,” I said. “Not the Star of David, not the symbols of Mohammed, not the sight of a happy Bud dha, no matter how strong a believer’s faith or how certain his devotion. But the symbols of Christianity all vamps fear, even if wielded by a nonbeliever. So it isn’t faith that gives the symbols power. Theologians disagree about why. So I’ll trade. Tell me why vamps fear everything about the Church.”