Mercy Blade (2 page)

Our jobs meant stealing moments when we could.

The relationship with Rick was still new. Still scary. I wasn’t yet sure when to push the barriers of conversation, or sharing of info, and when to hold back. Rick is a cop, so some things he can’t share; my job means keeping clients’ secrets, so ditto on the not sharing. It puts a barrier between us at times.

Worse, part of me was still fighting having him around. It wasn’t that I resisted commitment. Really. Part of me just resisted sharing my territory. I mean, I already shared my body with another soul, and having another person around so much had seriously affected my lifestyle, stealing time from the other half of my dual nature. I hadn’t shifted into Beast in two weeks, and while she had nothing but good stuff to say about my sex life, my big-cat was pacing unhappily at not being allowed out to hunt.

I sat up on the side of the bed and retied my hip-length hair into a sloppy knot at the back of my head, tucking silver-tipped stakes into the makeshift bun. For a rogue-vamp killer, it was an action similar to a cop carrying his weapon with him to the potty. Overkill, paranoid, but once it had kept him alive, so it became habit. Stakes twenty-four/seven had become my new habit.

I eased out of bed and padded naked—except for the gold-nugget necklace I never took off—to the bathroom of my tiny one-room apartment in the Appalachian Mountains. I had given my landlady notice on the place, and Rick and I had motored up from Louisiana on our bikes—his Kawasaki and my bastard Harley—rented a small truck, and cleared out my stuff. All that was left to load was the TV, the bikes themselves, and the last of my linens and clothes. Even the bed had come with the furnished apartment, and I didn’t own much except things I could carry—clothes and weapons. My job usually required a lot of travel, and I wasn’t in a position to own or keep a lot of stuff unless it helped me stay alive.

Starting to wake up, moving in the murky light with ease, I put on water for tea and turned on the coffeemaker. As I worked, I checked on the weather through the window to see a very dark, gray dawn, with lowering clouds and intermittent rain. The thermometer on the tiny porch read seventy-two, not bad for summer in the mountains, though it might hit ninety by noon. We had arrived last night, and had only today in the high country before heading back to New Orleans, where I was living for the next six months, thanks to the retainer I had accepted from the Louisiana vamp council. When that gig was over, I’d have to make a decision where to live, but the past few months had been profitable enough to make that much less worrisome than during my once-upon-a-broke-and-destitute time. And with Rick in my life, it was nice to be sticking around one place for a while.

I sat in a pink painted chair at the kitchen table, waiting as water burbled in the coffeemaker and the flames hissed under the pot. Pink was my landlady’s color, not mine. The shade had never bothered me, as I wasn’t here often enough to care one way or another about the decor, but Rick had teased me unmercifully about the frills, ruffles, tucks, buttons, and florals that Old Lady Pierson had thought appropriate for the rental space under the eaves of her house.

I clicked on the TV to check the time, muting the sound. CNN was on, showing a still shot of a good-looking man with fierce eyes, very black skin, and short-cropped hair. The words “Breaking News” lit the bar at the bottom, followed by “BBC claims existence of were-creatures.”

“Crap,” I whispered. Beast awoke inside me with the instant attentive awareness of the predator, and focused through my eyes at the screen. I eased up the volume one notch and drew on Beast’s excellent hearing to listen to the commentator, whose voice-over spoke about the picture of a reporter, blond-haired and fair-skinned, holding a microphone.

“Though no independent confirmation exists, BBC investigator Donald Cooper, seen here in the center of the screen, has released an interview with an African man referred to only as Kemnebi, pictured in the upper portion of the screen. Kemnebi claims to be a were-cat, a black leopard. In the footage that follows we see Kemnebi remove his clothing and shift into a jungle cat. We caution our viewers that the BBC footage is graphic and depicts partial nudity common to his culture.”

I leaned toward the screen and watched as footage began to roll. The man from the still shot, who was carefully filmed above the lower hips for decorum’s sake, began to remove his clothes, dropping them one by one to the floor. He bent, most of him disappearing from the screen as if to remove his pants, and then crossed the room. He was tall and thin, muscles well defined, his skin stretched over a frame without an ounce of fat. He moved with a lissome grace uncommon in humans other than dancers. Still silent, the man knelt on a cushion on the floor, the camera viewing him from the side, the long, lean length of his body gleaming—a lot of skin for an American cable TV network.

Tension raced through me. It could be a joke. No new supernatural being had appeared on the world stage since the vamps and witches came out of the supernat closet after the Secret Service staked Marilyn Monroe while she was trying to turn the president in the Oval Office. No elves, no pixies, no trolls, no brownies, no nothing. Certainly no weres or skinwalkers—or there wasn’t since I killed the only one of my kind I’d ever met. That very old, very nutso skinwalker had stolen the form of a vamp and taken to killing and eating humans and vampires, so it had been a sanctioned kill. Since then, as a shape-shifter in hiding, I was a singularity in the world of humans, vamps, and witches. No longer, if the BBC’s claims were real.
If
.

I closed my fingers on the arms of the chair, digging in with my nails. I’m a skinwalker, not a were; I didn’t know if the magics would be the same, totally different, or only subtly dissimilar.
If it was real
.

The man began to lose focus. A pale fog seemed to sift from his skin and surround him, blurring him, the mist moving slowly, as if caught in a breeze. Dark lights sparkled through the haze, looking like black crystals on the digital footage. It wasn’t exactly the way I looked when I shifted, though a lot of things might affect what I was seeing, from the digital processing software to my cheap TV. But it was familiar. Very achingly familiar.

The black lights surrounding Kemnebi increased as the mist above his skin darkened, deepened. His bones popped, a sickening sound, as they shortened or lengthened and the joints reshaped. He threw back his head, mouth open in what looked like a silent scream, like gut-wrenching pain. Black hair sprouted all over his body. His spine bowed and arched. Canines grew up from his gums, an inch long on the bottom jaw, longer on top. His jaw and skull took on different contours, flowing into a catlike form. I could see the effort and agony as his flesh rippled, stretched, and restructured into something else.

I couldn’t look away from the screen. Cold sweat broke out on my body. I could hear my breath, coarse and uneven over the soft patter of rain on the metal roof. My heartbeat raced and stuttered.

Beast placed a clawed paw onto my mind as if to calm me, her gaze intent on the screen before us.
Beast is not prey
, she thought at me.
Will not be afraid
.

Yeah, right
, I thought back. I never looked away from the transformation on the television. My eyes burned, hot and scratchy. I shivered, skin prickling. Two minutes passed. The fog that was a man wisped away. A jungle cat sat on the floor where once the man had knelt. It had a black coat, with barely visible muted spots that caught the light. Its paws had retractable claws like my Beast’s, but its tail was long and slender, unlike my Beast’s heavy, clubbed version. The black leopard looked into the camera. Huffed. And, I swear, it grinned.

Beast trembled deep inside, her coat bristling against my skin, coarse and almost painful.
Big-cat. Like Beast. But not like Beast.
Beast opened her mouth and chuffed in displeasure, pulling back her lips, showing her fangs deep in my mind, as if the leopard on-screen could see her challenge and her strength.
Beast is better. I/we are better hunter. Stronger.

“Is it real,” said the CNN reporter when the screen flashed back to a still of Donald Cooper, “or is it a hoax? Or maybe it’s only special effects for an upcoming British action-adventure blockbuster. Or”—his voice dropped lower—“may be other supernatural creatures like Kemnebi, the African black were-leopard, have been living among us all along. More on this breaking news as it develops.”

I flipped to the BBC, finding only footage of a war zone somewhere, and began flipping cable news stations for more on the were. There was nothing. Not yet. From behind me, I heard the bed squeak and had a moment to school my face as Rick rolled over and glanced at the television, then stared at me, sitting naked in the stark shadows created by the TV’s glare. He smiled slowly, his eyes roaming over me in the bluish light, his teeth white against his black two-day beard. Even with the stubble—or maybe in part because of it—he was stunning. Black-eyed, slender, my six feet in height or an inch more, he had the smooth golden olive complexion of his mostly French and American Indian heritage. With his shaggy, bed-head black hair, he was by far the prettiest man I had ever known. Just looking at him could make my heart speed up, dance around, and melt into a puddle of happy hormones. Even this morning, when the world was changing around me. “Morning, babe,” he said, voice gravelly with sleep. “What time is it? I smell coffee.”

“Morning, yourself. Sorry I woke you. It’s five a.m. I put on a pot.”

“The rain woke me, not you. How did you live here with the noise?”

The question was rhetorical and I didn’t answer. I’d scarcely noticed the rain on the metal roof. As he slid from the sheets, the light from the TV caught the scars on his chest and abdomen, white against his skin, big-cat claws in harsh relief. He’d nearly died fighting the skinwalker in sabertooth lion form that had tried to kill him while he was undercover for the New Orleans Police Department, something he’d half forgotten. He was alive today only because Beast and I had chased off the skinwalker and called the vampire Master of the City of New Orleans to save him.

Rick stretched his way into the bathroom, the flickering light dappling his skin, his tattoos looking dark and menacing—the golden eyes of the crouching mountain lion and the bobcat on one shoulder visible in the gloom, the globes of red on their claws too bright. Seeing them, I shivered again. I didn’t believe in fate or karma, but the presence of my two cats painted on his body had always seemed like a sign, a portent, that we should, and one day would, be together. And now we were. When one of us wasn’t working.

The bobcat had been the first animal I’d shifted into when I was a child. The mountain lion was my adult beast, and my Beast, the other soul sharing my head. That she was inside with me wasn’t skinwalker magic, but something darker. She was there by accident, but even an accident didn’t make the black magic any cleaner, purer, or more acceptable.

Beast is amused by my guilt, any guilt, even the guilt I feel about stealing her soul. My Beast goes by many names: cougar, puma, panther, catamount, screamer, devil-cat, silver lion, mountain lion, and even the North American black panther, but they all refer to one beast—the
Puma concolor
, which once was the widest ranging mammal on the North American continent, and is still one of the largest modern-day land predators in the continental U.S. other than humans, bears, a few large wolves, and the vamps.

Rick moved toward the coffeepot like steel to a magnet and found a mug in the dark. My heart did a little pitter-patter and a blood flush touched my skin, evidence of Beast’s appreciation of my boyfriend. Since Rick and I had, um, gotten together, my own emotional roller coaster had smoothed out, and her rut had faded. I hadn’t had any more peculiar crying jags, and Beast had begun to purr more often. When Beast is happy, everybody—or everyone in my body—is happy. I heard coffee pouring into the mug and the softer sounds of swallowing. Rick sighed in pleasure, a sound I was learning had many different meanings—food, music, and sex each had its own sigh. Coffee, however, was in a category by itself, being as much relief as bliss.

I looked back at the TV, back on CNN, and saw a still shot of a sitting leopard. I gestured with the remote, keeping my voice light, slightly wry. “Big news. Guy claims he’s a black were-leopard. I just saw him change shape on BBC footage.”

Rick went still, staring at the screen, studying the jungle cat that was sitting with its front paws close, ears pricked forward, preening and purring, making nice with the camera. “Pretty cat,” Rick murmured finally, his voice oddly casual. The “pretty cat” comment made me smile and made Beast huff with something like possessive jealousy, which was amusing on all kinds of levels.

Rick’s fingertips brushed the cat-claw scars on his chest, an unconscious gesture. “It’s got green eyes and a round pupil, like a human. Not cat eyes.”

Shock chased the contentment away. The sabertooth lion that had almost killed him had had round pupils.
Rick was remembering
. “Big-cats have a round pupil,” I said, my voice sounding calm despite my speeding heart rate. “Housecats and some smaller wildcats have a slit pupil.”

Rick grunted, eyes fixed on the screen, his tone mild in counterpoint, as if saying,
Well, how ’bout that
. “Turn it up.”

I did as he requested, and flipped to the BBC channel where the were-cat news was on again, and Donald Cooper was saying, “—quite keen on the hunt, he is, when in cat form. Vegetarians and animal protection organizations the world over will likely put out quite a stink at his diet, which is fresh meat on the hoof, and, according to him, tastes better if he brings down his prey with his were-teeth and claws.”

Beast agreed with the statement, sending me images of a big-cat bringing down bigger prey. It was graphic and bloody and beastly. Beast huffed with amusement and retreated back into the darker parts of my mind.