•   •   •

I left vamp central and headed across the river to Aggie One Feather’s place. I needed knowledge and wisdom and oral tradition. I needed someone who knew stuff and would share it with me openly and honestly. And for free. It was hard making do with bits and pieces of history offered by people who might have reasons to hide that same info. Now that I knew enough to know what questions to ask, Aggie would dish, and the only thing she would make me pay was more honesty and self-assessment. Aggie was all about shining light on one’s deep inner truths and banishing the shadows.

Because of Aggie, I wasn’t the same Jane who had first come to New Orleans. I had learned too much about myself and about my Beast. Too much about what it meant to be a victim and to make others victims. Too much about the dark night of the soul—a poetic way of describing the internal loss of meaning of oneself, and depression. I had looked it up. Because of Aggie, I had survived all that learning and maybe grown up a bit. A very little bit, according to Aggie.

Because of Aggie, because she (and sometimes her aged mother) took me to sweat and took me to water—Cherokee rites and rituals—and because she forced me to remember who and what I was, I had discovered that my inner soul home was my place of greatest strength. I had discovered the first cracks and fissures into the emptiness that was my own past, the first passageways into my own Cherokee memory.

I hadn’t told Aggie much about Beast yet, and I might never. But because of her I had discovered that Beast lived in that same soul home, that same deep cavern of inner sanctum. There, nothing and no one could bind us. There we were invincible, the two of us. I had discovered that our souls, Beast’s and mine, were not only in the same place; they were, to some extent, intertwined, which, so far as I knew, had never happened to a skinwalker. I had no idea what it might mean to me as I aged, as time took us to new and different places, but it had to mean something.

•   •   •

I turned into the road and cut the engine, coasting the SUV until it stopped, well back from the shell-based drive. I pulled the key and sat in the dark, studying the house and grounds. The security light on the pole at the end of the drive was off, the house and lawn cloaked in the night and illuminated by the moon. The light’s globe was broken. Shattered. The house was dark, though Aggie’s car was in the drive. No TV flickered through the windows. No lights anywhere.

I stared at the house for the space of time between heartbeats. Quietly, I opened the vehicle door, sniffed, and caught the residue of gunfire on the air. Someone had shot out the light. What else had they shot? If someone wanted to hurt me, by hurting my friends, would they know about the One Feathers? Not likely. But anything was possible. Would the two women be able to protect themselves? No. Not against a sniper or a bomb maker.

I let my Beast senses free, questing. The night crashed in, full of the buzz of mosquitoes and the croak of frogs, but empty of any human sounds. No TV laugh tracks. No radio. No conversation. Worse, there was no smell of food on the air. No smell of wood smoke from the sweat house. I raced into the shadows to the house.

I hadn’t noticed when I drew my weapon, but I was holding it in a two-handed grip beside my right leg as I crept around Aggie’s house. As I stepped toward the back porch a soft creak met my ear, slow and repetitive. I halted and timed the sound to about once every two and a half seconds. Someone was on the porch, in the rocker, rocking. Shades of the Bates Motel slashed through my memory.

“Nice night.”

I jerked, just ever so slightly.

“I forgot what it was like to sit out here without the light.”

It was Aggie One Feather speaking, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t talking to me. I achieved a breath that didn’t whistle in fear. Inside me Beast chuffed with laughter and thumped the wall of my soul home with her tail.

“Yup. It nice. How much time till the power company get here?” uni lisi, the grandmother of many children, a Cherokee honorific for an old woman, asked, her tone garrulous.

“In time for your show, Mama.”

“Them kids, they gonna fix our light?”

“Their parents said they’d pay for it, Mama. And Deputy Antonelli said he’d make sure or he’d help us press charges.”

“That good. Good enough.” The rocker rocked on, a peaceful sound in the night. “If I get to watch my Jeopardy!”

I holstered my weapon and called out, “Aggie? It’s Jane Yellowrock. Ummm . . .” I thought about the fact that I always just dropped by. Maybe that wasn’t the nicest thing I could do. “Ummm, are you taking callers?”

“Come around to the porch, Jane,” Aggie called back. “Some kids looking for a place to neck shot out our security light and hit the electric lines.”

Neck? Instantly I thought about vamps and fangs and blood-meals. Then I realized she was talking about hooking up in the backseat of a car. Old-people slang. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” I made my way to the porch and up the stairs. Aggie was right; the porch and the night were nice. The house’s foundation was several feet high, to protect it against hurricane storm surge, and it looked out over a backyard I had never paid much attention to. There were fruit trees and a garden behind a chicken-wired fence, smelling of freshly turned earth and frustrated rabbits. A row of bee boxes stood at the back of the property, the bees silent, the smell of honey soft on the air. I closed the door behind me, making out the location of the two women and the mama cat sitting on uni lisi’s lap. I took a chair. Aggie moved in the dark and I heard a gurgling sound, and smelled cold tea and fresh mint. She pushed a glass across the table to me. I took it and sipped. “Thank you.” A silence filled the space between us, uncomfortable on my part. “Ummm,” I said again.

Aggie made an amused humming sound. My lack of social skills was not a secret to her. Not that she would help me through it.

I puffed out a breath. “That bomb maker I called you about? If she’s who I think she is, then she’s also a sniper and she smells like The People.”

I smelled Aggie’s shock, so strong it might have actually burned through my skin, like an electric spark. Maybe I should have tried some small talk before I jumped into the mess of my life. The weather. Their health. Too late now. “She is War Woman,” Aggie asked, “like you?”

“No.” I hesitated. “I don’t think so. She’s female, and a human blood-servant. I don’t think a War Woman would allow herself to be fed upon by vamps. And she’s not someone I’ve ever smelled before.”