Mercy Blade (36 page)

“I see. She is your shaman?”

“Elder. Elder of the People. Of
Tsalagi
.”

“She’s seeing someone, I think, a counselor. That’s good, Jane. That’s very good. I want you to relax. There’s no need to struggle or feel worried or anxious. This heart of the world is your soul home. The place where you envision your soul to be. It’s safe and warm and all yours.”

I nodded, relaxing once again. On the cave wall, Beast’s shadow flicked an ear tab. I put out a hand and stroked her pelt along her neck, down across her shoulder. Her muscles and sinews were strong. Her breath smoothed, and she purred softly.

“Jane, tell me what you are.”

“Evie, no!”

“Shut up. Tell me what you are.”

The worry rose again, like smoke from old coals. My shadow self tilted its head, ear tabs flicking, snout wrinkling to show killing teeth, sharply pointed. “No,” I said. It came out hoarse, chuffed. A warning.

“Stop it, Evangelina.” Bruiser’s voice. “This is wrong.”

“Fine,” the woman snapped. A long moment later she spoke, her voice again calm, soothing. “Jane. I want you to remember the last time you looked into this place. I want you to compare it to now. I want you to layer one vision over the other.”

“Yes.”

I/we are Beast. Better than Jane. Better than big-cat
, Beast thought.
We are
more.

“Yes.” My voice dropped, a low growl of sound.
My place. My den.
Mine. This was the cave from
before
. Long before. The rounded, damp roof of stone, the walls melting like wax. The pillars reaching up and down. Light glinting through the darkness. The scent of burned herbs and wood smoke. The drums. The smell of blood and fat and earth and the sweat of the People.

“Search out the differences, Jane. Tell me what you see. Tell me what you remember.”

I stood on four legs and two. The shadows on the wall merged into one, a form with no certain shape, both cat and human, furred and skinned, four pawed and two footed. A shadow shimmering with black motes of light.

I turned slowly, walking in a circle. My breath a pant. Seeing. On one wall were circles and swirls painted in soot and fat and crushed pigments. Carved into the stone were arrows pointing to the right. Lines parallel. Lines like waves—the symbols of the People. And there were paw prints. They padded across the rounded stone roof of the world, big-cat paws in the red of old blood. Human footprints walked beside the paw prints, up and over the roof of the world. Side by side.

I reached out a hand/paw and touched them. They were cool to my touch. The paw and footprints had not been here, the last time I was here in the flesh, as a child of four or five. This was the cave of my being. Evidence of my life. There were also white man symbols, brought here since Jane had been alpha, diamonds and stars, signs and ciphers, and an image of a cross that burned.

My eyes followed the paw prints up across the walls, onto the roof, and into the far corners, where the light did not burn so brightly, where shadows crouched like spiders and hung like bats. And there I saw the hands. Hands did not belong in this place. The Cherokee did not mark rites of passage or lay claim to the caves, not as the ancient white man did. They did not make handprints on cave walls. The hands were not of Jane or of cat. They were
other
.

“Hands,” I whispered. “Hands on the roof of the world.” I tilted my head to see them. Blue hands in circles of white. White hands in circles of blue. Pigments, signs of ownership applied to the walls of my soul house. I growled low, pulling back lips to show killing teeth.

I could see how it had been done, how each kind of hand-print had been made. For the blue handprints, pigments had been crushed and mixed with fat or spit. The paste had been applied to the hand and the blue prints pressed against the walls. For the white handprints in circles of blue, the pigments had been crushed and sucked up into a reed. A hand had been placed on the cave wall, and the pigments had been blown over it, leaving the un-pigmented print. It was as if to say,
I have been here. This is
my
place
.

“Woad,” I said. “Woad.” And I struggled upward from the darkness as I understood. Woad. Yes.
Woad
. Woad was a European herb, an invasive herb that took over gardens, an herb used to make blue dye.
Gee did this. Gee used woad to mark my soul house.

I fought the pull of the heart of the world. I tried to stand, but the weight of the world was great, holding me down. “He came
here
. He marked
my place
.” I growled, exposing killing teeth, my tongue finding them blunt and human. Hands fisted, blunt nails pressing into palms.

“Relax, Jane. It’s okay, Jane. You are safe in your soul room. You are safe here. And we can make him go away.”

I looked up, seeing the handprints. And beside one was a pink flower. A rose. It hadn’t been there a moment past. I tilted my head, studying the rose, considering its meaning in this place of my soul. It smelled of roses and wormwood, sweet and bitter both. And it was put there with magic—witch magic. Evangelina had set her spell on me, tracing the lines of the Mercy Blade’s magic. Beast snorted, a hacking blend of anger and amusement. “Fire,” I whispered. “
I
can make them both go away. With my fire. The fire in my soul home.”

“Fire is dangerous, Jane. Let’s think of another way.” She sounded fearful.

Beast is not afraid. Beast is strong.
“Fire,” the word was growled.

“No, Jane,” she crooned, “I want you to step away from the place of the soul. From the place where the hands are printed on the ceiling. I want you to come back to me, to us, to yourself, here in your house.”

“House is not mine,” I said. “Cave in the heart of the world is mine. Is ours.”

“I know,” she soothed.

In the cave at the heart of the world, I/we stood, the weight of the world heavy and thick against us. Our shadows rose with us. And they merged, merged, part
tlvdatsi
, part Dalonige’i Digadoli, part cat, part human. Our shadow was beautiful. Fearful. Deadly. The flames in the fire pit danced and rose. Water dripped. Drums beat faster, deeper, the beating heart of the world.
The I/we of Beast
, we whispered.
Together we are more than big-cat and Jane.

We bent to the fire.

“Jane don’t—” White woman spoke, and I/we closed her voice out. Pushed it out of the cave. We bent over the fire, the scent rich and herbal and warm, and breathed in the sage and sweetgrass. We reached to the side and chose a thick sliver of wood, pointed on one end, sawn smooth on the other, one side wild and splintered, one side shaped by man’s hand. A stake. It was dry heartwood, its cedar scent resinous and tart.
Heart wood to destroy the vampires we hunt and kill.
Our hand closed over it,
tlvdatsi
claws at the ends of human fingers. Pelt, tawny and thick rose up over the bones of our arms. We hefted it and placed the splintered, sharp end of the stake into the flame. It took light. And we rose into the shadows.

The roof at the heart of the world reached down to us. With one hand, killing claws exposed, we scraped an eye from the cold stone. It glittered, lid closed as if sleeping, on our palm. With the other hand, we held the flame to the woad-made handprints. The fire from our torch blazed up, burning the woad, burning the handprints that had taken root. And in the center of each palm, a blue eye appeared, opened, and focused on us. Gee’s eyes, shocked. I stabbed at the eye in the center of a palm and it blinked away, but not before I drew blood. It splashed down onto my hand, copper and jasmine-scented. The flames blackened the stone of the roof and the woad lit, sizzling and hot. I stepped away as the flames roared up hot and cleansing. All the handprints took flame, all but the one I had stolen with my killing claws. “Mine,” I growled. “My place.”

I crouched on the stone floor and watched as the ceiling at the heart of the world flamed and burned. And was cleansed. It took a long time. And no time at all. And when it was done, I sat at my small fire pit and fed the stake into the coals, letting it too burn away. When the smoke cleared, the ceiling was clean again, only the soot above my small fire blacking the smooth rock. I lay down, folding my body, paws beneath me. And I closed my eyes.

I breathed out, and the movement of my chest, the contracting of my ribs, woke me. As the breath left me, I lay unmoving, as if still asleep, yet cracked open my eyes, seeing through my lashes. I focused on the ceiling twelve feet above me. It was smooth and painted white; shadows crouched in the corners, unmoving and without purpose, unlike the shadows of my vision, which had seemed alive and filled with evil intent. I was lying on my back with my head on a cushion, my body on a hardwood floor. I hadn’t started out in this pose, but had been moved, positioned so I could breathe easily. My clothes were intact, so I hadn’t shifted.

I inhaled, and the harsh chemicals of the white man’s world assaulted me. Wax, smoke, cleansers, dyes in the fabric beneath my head, exhaust, mold and sour water, old wood, paint, human sweat. The smell of witch and blood-servant. Vamp-stink from Bruiser’s skin, fading now. Riding over it all was the stink of scorched flesh and pain pheromones. Mentally, I catalogued my body, and found nothing wrong, no pain, no injuries. Not my burned flesh, then.

Finding nothing to defend against in the scents or the silence of the room, I relaxed. Despite the reek, I felt . . . okay. Not sleepy. Not unhappy. But calm, full. Satisfied, as if I’d eaten a big meal and then taken a nap. And I felt like myself, which was a thought for later, when I had time to analyze the vision, maybe with Aggie One Feather as my guide.

Movement caught my eye through my lashes, and I saw Evangelina bending over, only feet away, a cloth and a spatula in her hands as she scraped at a tabletop. Her hair hung down in a heavy red tangle, a splendor of curls that caught the lamplight, longer and thicker than I remembered it. A rosy halo surrounded her, an aura in shades of ruby, maybe the aftereffects of using her power. White gauze bandages circled both forearms, six inches wide, heavily padded from elbow to wrist. They were new. They were defensive wounds. The sight of them made me want to laugh.

Evangelina had tried to take advantage of me when I asked her for help. She had tried some kind of witch-spell-empowered hypnosis on me, trying to learn what I was. Possibly trying to set a watch-me spell into my soul, tracing it in over Gee’s spell, so she could influence me in some way.
Tricky-witch.
But she paid the price. Savage victory swept through me like a cold wind. She had tried something magical on me, just as Gee had. And Beast and I had won.

Bruiser was sitting on the couch, watching Evangelina, his eyes hooded and intense. They were talking about me, and he asked, “How did she melt the candles?”

“Stop asking me that,” Evangelina snapped. “I didn’t know an hour ago, and I don’t know now.”

“So speculate.”

“Jane isn’t human. She isn’t witch or shaman or vampire,” she said, her irritated tone suggesting that this was repetition. “She isn’t anything associated with the Dark or anything of the Light. She isn’t an angel, a demon, or a ghost—not that I’ve ever seen any of those things, but she doesn’t fit the archetypes. She has no intrinsic magic that I can see or feel, but she
did
magic. Low level, but intense. She has some strange Cherokee magic, which is probably how she healed the wounds I bandaged after she fought Leo in the street.” Evangelina stood and wiped the spatula off into a paper bag. Softened wax fell into it with a soft thump. “It was magic,” she said, surprise in her tone. “We’ll know more when Molly calls me back.”

I had forgotten about the wounds that had healed when I shifted.
Foolish kit mistake
, Beast growled.

“Is she going to be all right?”

“I. Don’t. Know. Stop asking. But I’m sure she’ll be fine”—she hissed in pain as her wounded arm bumped her side—“whatever she is.” Evangelina left the room, her bare feet padding on the floor. Bruiser stood; I closed my eyes as he came into my field of vision, but not before I saw the ruby aura that surrounded him. It was the exact hue of Evangelina’s aura. I remembered the pinkish glow on Bruiser’s skin in the shower. I remembered their postures when I interrupted them earlier. Romantic. Rosy. I had thought it was her shirt . . .
Crap
. She was spelling him. Now why would Evangelina love-spell the prime blood-servant of the Master of the City, during negotiations between their races? I breathed out a sigh. Just one more worry.

They still didn’t know I was awake. Bruiser followed Evangelina out of the living room into the kitchen and I rolled soundlessly to my knees and up to my feet. Looked around the room. Huh. I had made a mess. All three white candles had melted to a sooty mass, dripped all over the end table and onto the floor. The two feathers, the small silver knife, and bell, were caught in the softened wax. The feathers were ruined, but the other things would be okay after a good cleaning. There was a small gray spot on the ceiling that looked like a shadow, but wasn’t. It was soot and wax from the fire that had melted the candles. Cushions were everywhere. A pillow had several scorched holes in it, as if ashes had fallen across it. A cup of tea I hadn’t noticed before had turned over, the reddish liquid splashed and the cup handle broken.