I took another step and sniffed, my mouth open to take in the scent of the room, which I hadn't done since I started down the stairs to Big H's lair. The smell of vamp was strong and herbal: the floral of funeral flowers, the dry scent of sage. But the smell of sickness was missing, as was the acrid, dusty scent of the spidey vamps.

I walked slowly toward them, the guys on my trail, spreading out and around furniture, keeping the vamps covered. I was close enough that in Beast's vision, I could see the necklace around Big H's neck. And I realized that his neck was burned beneath it. It hadn't been that way before; I was sure of that.

To the female vamp at his feet, I said, "Unb.u.t.ton H's shirt."

An expression of utter relief crossed her face and vanished. She stood gracefully, reaching long, delicate fingers to her master. They unb.u.t.toned Big H's white shirt, exposing his chest. Which was blistered and pitted and blackened around a shard of iron wrapped in corroded, ancient copper.

"Tag. You're it," I said. When the vamps didn't react, I said, "The Naturaleza tagged you. They put that on you sometime after you hired me to come kill them off and before I got here. It's controlling you. Isn't it?"

The female vamp nodded once, then froze.

"If I take it off, will you die?"

Hieronymus' face twisted again, and I realized it was with the effort to speak. Nothing came out, but his lips moved. He said, "Take it."

Keeping the vamp-killer to the side, I sheathed the stake, dropped the helmet, and reached up a hand. I touched the copper necklace. Lifted it slowly. The iron wrapped in copper tore H's skin as I lifted it away. Blood trickled down his chest. There was no clasp, and I wasn't going to get close enough to lift it over his head. "This is gonna hurt," I said.

With a single ma.s.sive jerk, I broke the chain and leaped back.

The vamps collapsed to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. The iron swung on the chain, back and forth, dangling in my fist. Power surged up from it, snaring me in its might. The entire room went black.

And I was falling.

CHAPTER 26.

Mr. Prepared for Anything I was in a dark place, empty and cool. It smelled of wet and age and eons of time. It pressed down on me, heavy and dense and dangerous. It was so dark I couldn't tell when I closed my eyes. I reached out and the vamp-killer clanged against stone. The fist holding the necklace touched stone on the other side. My heart leaped into my throat. I was underground. I was buried.

But the stone fell away as I continued my turn. A light, faint and dim, appeared to my right. I took a step, another, moving slow and easy. Moving through the underground dark, a tunnel, cold and wet and chill, its dimensions somehow organic, widening and narrowing. A cave. I sheathed the blade and placed my feet carefully, redistributed my weight warily, expecting to find no ground beneath me at every step.

As I moved, I heard the slow plink of water. Smelled water and smoke, heard the crackle of fire licking at cold, dry wood. The pa.s.sage opened up to reveal a large cavern in the rock, domed, with stalact.i.tes hanging down from the roof and stalagmites rising up from the floor, the walls smooth and pearlescent like a sh.e.l.l.

The fire burned near the back wall, its light flickering. I recognized my spirit home, the cavern of my youth, the place where I first learned to shift when I was a child of five. The place I went to in my mind when I was in danger or when I had something I needed to learn. It was a hard place, but it was mine. A place of strength and a place of dreams.

Near the fire sat an old woman, her gray hair in braids hanging down to her lap on either side. Her head was down, staring into the fire, the light showing me only the top of her head and her wrinkled forehead. I thought it was Kathyayini, but the clothes were all wrong. This woman wore no flower-sack clothing, but a cotton shirt in a vibrant yellow, a pullover shirt intended to tie at her throat. It hung open, revealing a necklace of carved and dyed bone and porcupine quills and gla.s.s beads. Her skirt was canvas, dyed blue, worn at the hem and belted with worked hide in beads to match the necklace. Tied to the belt was a series of small leather bags, pouches for herbs and minerals.

I paced slowly to the fire. When I stood there, my shadow elongated behind me, I had no idea what to say. This was a Tsalagi elder. A shaman. I should have taken off my weapons. One didn't wear weapons into the presence of an elder of The People.

"Tsilugi, Dalonige i Digadoli, aquetsi ageyutsa." Welcome, Golden Eyes, Golden Stone, my daughter.

My legs folded, and I sank to the ground. "Elisi?" She raised her head and the firelight moved over her wrinkled face. Her eyes were amber, like mine. "Elisi," I whispered. My grandmother.

"Forgive me for coming into the presence of an elder with weapons."

"You are warrior woman." She waved away my apology, her hand gnarled and ribboned with veins. "Weapons are part of you. You are a weapon." She shrugged. "I made you to be so."

I thought about that, about the memories I had recently gained and refused to look at again, memories of this woman putting a blade into my hand. I had been a child, maybe five years old, the year that everything changed. The hairs rose on the back of my neck, and when I breathed, I tasted sweetgra.s.s and burning oak on the back of my tongue. "When you put the knife into my hand," I whispered. "That's when you made me a warrior?"

"Together, we killed a man. Slowly. For killing your father. You remember?"

I nodded.

"You remember the first cut?"

I closed my eyes, sucking in a breath. Remembering.

The blade was too large for my fist. The bone handle was cold, but warmed quickly. I raised the knife to the white thing hanging over the pit, tied with rope. It was a leg. It bucked, trying to get away. Above it came strangled sounds, like a pig full of fear. The leg in front of me was hairy with light brown hairs, and white-skinned, like a dog. It stank of fear, this yunega who had killed my father.

I cut it, the blade opening up a line of red. The thing hanging above squealed again, and p.i.s.s ran down his leg. I reached up and cut him again.

I jerked back from the memory, back from the fire. I landed on my open hands, my palms on the cold stone floor. Staring at my grandmother.

"To kill a human when so young may change a child," Elisi said. "May make her a man killer. Sometimes a killer only. You have done well to learn to love. You have done well to bring family into your heart, even though they are family not of your blood or your clan or your tribe. This will keep the darkness away for many years."

"Did . . . Did you become U'tlun'ta? Did you become stone finger, the liver eater?"

Elisi's eyes flew from amber to gold, two glowing orbs. Her face melted and folded, bristling with pelt. Two sets of fangs grew, distorting her jaw. She growled the word, "Tsisdu!" And leaped at me.

I landed hard, my body hitting as if boneless, my jaw impacting the floor. My teeth clacked together, the sound strange and clicking. Tsisdu. Elisi had called me rabbit. Prey.

I rolled to my feet in Hieronymus' room, the necklace in my fist. "Why did you let me take this?" I growled at the vampire on the floor. My voice was on a lower register, my words distorted. I touched my teeth with my tongue and felt fangs. Oh, c.r.a.p.

Hieronymus pushed to his feet, one hand going to his throat, touching it gently. The blisters weren't healing, and I knew he needed blood, but he seemed to gather himself. He placed his other hand on his scion, as if to soothe her. "All is well," he said to her.

His eyes studied me, taking in my features. "I had heard of this, of Leo's Enforcer, the one who takes the form of a puma." He dipped his head as if in recognition of something important, something I didn't understand. I'd have to think about that later.

"This has been foretold," he said. "This is a time of change, when the old ways return, when old darkness fights for supremacy against that which is new, against the light of the world."

I had heard those exact words at some point in the last year, but I couldn't place them. Before I could ask, he went on.

"My heir, Lotus, my erede, she fed from another, pledged allegiance to another, unbeknownst to me." Hieronymus stroked the hair of the female vampire who had knelt at his feet, his hand soothing her. "When Lotus came to me to offer her blood and her devotion, she reached around to embrace me. And she placed the cursed thing"-he pointed to my fist-"over my head. There is a spell of binding within it."

"Binding?" I looked at the necklace in my hand.

"The binding of Santa Croce," he whispered. At my confused look he said, "Il sangue . . ." He struggled for words and said, "The blood on the crosses and the sacrifice of blood, this created the Mithran, the immortal drinker of blood."

"Master, no!" The female scion raised her fingers to his mouth.

He smiled and caught her hand, twining his fingers into hers. "We have lived with secrets for too many years, my daughter. These secrets have now appeared, as if from the grave, and they bit us. They drained us. Leo sent this creature to right the wrongs."

Not exactly, I thought, but I didn't say it. "I know about the creation story," I said, my mouth moving almost normally now.

"The priestess of the sepulcher-she told you this hidden story?" Big H asked.

I figured he meant Sabina Delgado y Agulilar, the oldest Mithran I knew. She had told me a lot of stuff that vamps usually keep secret, including the origin of vampires via the crosses of Calvary and Golgotha. I nodded.

He sighed, a sound almost human; he moved slowly to a chair and sat. "Forgive me. I am fatigued from the healing of the medicine. It has been many centuries since I felt thus. I find I do not miss it at all." He stretched out his legs. "I will tell you the rest of the story, of the iron that bound flesh to tree. Ferro chiodo. The others, however, must leave. This is for your ears only."

"I'm not going anywhere, fanghead," Rick growled.

"Yes. You will," I said, studying the vampire Master of the City of Natchez. His bald head was paler than it had been, but his motions were more human than before, something that took control and practice. He was in control of himself and of his people. "Go on. I'm okay. Please," I added, without looking away from the MOC.

I heard Rick growl, and the hiss of whispered words, and then the sound of people and equipment moving away into the stairwell. Big H smiled grimly. "I never heard of such an attack, of using holy water by the gallons against a Mithran's lair. How did you get a priest to bless such a volume of water?"

"Baptismal water," I said, figuring it would get out anyway.

Big H made a hmmm sound, as if rethinking his security arrangements. I had a feeling that drains would be installed in all his lairs soon.

"They're gone." I said. You were speaking of the ferro chiodo. Whatever that is."

"I speak of the iron spikes that bound Christ to the cross," the older man said, his voice reverential, his eyes on the thing in my hand. "But do not think that there is something holy in this tale." His voice took on the pitch of a story told often, and when he spoke, he quoted the same words I had heard spoken by Sabina. "When the sons of Ioudas heard that the master had risen, they went to the mount of the skull to find the cross where he died, to steal the wood bathed in his blood, to work arcane magics with the blood and the cross. But the crosses of the thief, the murderer, and the rabbi had been pulled down, broken up, and piled together, the wood confused and mixed."

Around him, the vamps settled to the floor, watching the Master of the City. Others entered through the broken door and sat there as well. Some small, irreverent part of me saw it as a bunch of preschoolers sitting around at story time, and I had to swallow down my laughter. I figured that if I giggled at the creation story of the curse of the Mithrans, I might get drained in retaliation.

"They took it all, all the wood of the crosses. By dark of night they pulled their father's body from the grave, and with their witch power and arcane rites they laid his body upon the pile of b.l.o.o.d.y, broken wood. My own histories say they sacrificed the life of their small sister on the wooden pile. Others say not. But with arcane rites, they sought to raise their father from the dead. And he rose, though he was yet dead, his soul given over to the night and the dark. Soulless, he walked for two nights, a ravening beast. And he could not be killed, though he rotted and the flesh fell from his bones to writhe upon the ground. And thinking that some benefit might yet be gleaned from their sin, his sons drank the blood and ate the flesh of their father. And they were changed."

I nodded. I had heard the story, almost word for word.

"But what is not spoken of is the iron," he said to me, his cadence changing back to his usual accented English. "Forged metal was rare in ancient times and of great value. For death on a tree, most were hung with ropes made of plants or the ligaments of animals, easy to make and to replace. For iron to be used, the punishment required a swift death. With the holy day of the subjugated people upon them, the Romans who crucified the three required such speed."

Big H's voice took on the storytelling tempo again. "When the Sons of Darkness gathered the wood, they found, piled nearby, the iron that had bound the three, and they gathered it and the wood from all three trees. When their father could not be killed and yet walked the Earth, a rotting corpse, they melted the iron spikes down into one great spike with which to kill their father."

I looked at the necklace in my hand, the sliver of iron wrapped in copper. I opened my mouth to say something, but I had no words. None at all.

"When the Mithrans were forced into the diaspora, the outclan priestesses took the wood of the crosses and created weapons to be used against our kind. The Naturaleza took the iron, and created weapons of binding and control. Two great tribes arose, the Fame Vexatum and the Naturaleza. A war was fought for many years and across many countries, until the Naturaleza heard of the New World. And they came here. Lucas Vazquez de Allyon was one such."

"And with the weapon of the iron spike, or a part of one, and the magics of the witch circle and the sickness that the vamp . . . ires"-I finished the word as an afterthought-"he hoped to take over the New World now, in the twenty-first century, after the first vampires walked the earth."

"Yes. And more." Big H looked up from the necklace I still clutched. "The ferro chiodo creates. With its binding powers it takes that which is and makes that which is darker, stronger. The spirito malign, the immortal that cannot be killed, the thing of legend and nightmare."

"Like the father of the Sons of Darkness."

"When they have the methodology and spell for the transformation, the Naturaleza will stake themselves and rise on the third day. Invincible. No weapon, not even sunlight, will kill them. The only way to defeat them will be to take their heads and it would become a b.l.o.o.d.y, difficult venture."

That sounded pretty sucky. I had a moment to wonder if a bomb might work, and realized that if it blew them apart, it would also take their heads, so yeah. I pulled the fused iron discs out of my pocket. "These are being used for binding witches into a circle."

Real fear crossed Big H's face, wrinkling his forehead up into his bald pate. "How many of those things do you have? And how many witches in the circle?"

"This one was three. The discs got close to one another and they fused. Twelve witches make up the circle, each with her own disc. At midnight tonight, it will be the true full moon. It's likely that the working will be complete then."

"You must find Lotus and take her head before that," Big H said. "I will give you the location of her lair." He smiled slowly, all pretense of humanity peeling away, all fang and vamped-out eyes, the huge black pupils in scarlet sclera like dark pits falling straight into h.e.l.l. "You will destroy my enemy and bring me the blood-iron of the crosses."

The SUV's heater was on full blast. The sun was setting, the evening growing colder and wetter. Ice was starting to build up on the trees and shrubs, and icicles were starting to form on the eaves of houses. We sat in the dark, staring at the house, silent. We'd been here for an hour, waiting. It should have been tense or uncomfortable or something. It should have felt weird. But it didn't. It felt like coming full circle somehow.

We had done this job by the book, researching like crazy, gathering all the records, following all the paper trails. We had then done all the footwork, checking out the properties owned by Lotus, by Silandre, even those owned by Big H. We had checked out so many other places, but they were empty; no lairs or only vacant ones. And all that basic research had been a waste of time. All I had needed was a sc.r.a.p of paper given to me by the MOC of Natchez. He had known where she was all along, but until I ripped away the binding, he hadn't been able to tell me, and none of his people had been able to speak of it either.

Lesson learned-save the MOC first. Then go after his enemy.

Now Bruiser and I were back at the house with the turret, the one where we had found Esther McTavish beheaded, and a charnel room in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

I hadn't gone down to the bas.e.m.e.nt then, hadn't inspected the place. I should have. I had screwed up, thinking that no one was left there.

Now it was just Bruiser and me, waiting in the icy rain for our backup. There would be no debate now, no unexpected visitors, no preacher standing in the rain, praying for us to succeed. No Rick to tear out the throat of a vamp. No Soul to ward us.

We would go in without the Kid or Rick. . . . My hands clenched in the dark. It was just the two of us, because we had snuck out of Esmee's and taken off like bats on fire, leaving behind anything electronic that the Kid could use to track us. We would go in alone because we were the only ones who stood a s...o...b..ll's chance in h.e.l.l of surviving. And everyone knew what happened to a s...o...b..ll in h.e.l.l. I smiled grimly at the thought.

We had found what we were looking for, and Bruiser had called Leo, who had authorized the funds. And then Leo had called in the backup we needed. Leo. Not me. Because he wouldn't have come for me.

A pickup truck pulled in behind us; a bear of a man climbed out of the truck, the whole thing rocking like a toy.

Without speaking, we unbuckled and left the SUV, not locking the doors, and walked around to the back of the vehicle to meet Evan Trueblood, Molly's husband. He stood in the rain like a mountain in the fall, topped by red hair and beard, a man so big he made two of Bruiser, and without an ounce of fat on him.

"How many people now know what I am, what my daughter must be, because of you?"

"Too many," I said. Justified guilt swarmed through me, earned because Big Evan's being a sorcerer had been a secret until I came along. And because his secret was out, Angie Baby and Little Evan, his children, faced future danger. "Leo's vamps know. Rick. But not Rick's partner. Soul. She knows there's a witch because of Rick's spell music, and she might have figured it out, but she hasn't been told, and therefore, PsyLED doesn't know. But when they find out-and they will eventually; that is always a given-we'll be there to protect you and yours."

I could hear his molars grinding. "You know how much I hate you?" he ground out.

"Yeah. I also know that what happened to your wife and to your kids when they were attacked by witch vamps was not the fault of my being evil. Just me being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I also know that the real reason you hate me is that you feel like you didn't do a good enough job of protecting your family. And because you can't stand that thought, you hate me instead."

Evan growled, so much like a bear that I chuckled. "You through being a pop psychologist?" he asked. "Because I'm here to a job and get back home. To my family."

"No," I said. "I'm not done. You need to forgive yourself. I understand misplaced guilt. I totally understand it." Before he could raise one of his ma.s.sive fists and knock me into the next state, I held out the discs from the pocket-watch amulets. As per Evan's instruction, the discs had been removed from the amulets and were now all fused into one circular lump. "Now I'm through."

Evan growled again but extended his hand. I dropped it-them-into his left paw. I placed the iron sliver in its copper wiring in his right hand, just like he had texted me. The moment his hand closed on the small spike-shaped sliver, Evan started to glow a weird yellowish color in the grim gray light.

I looked at Bruiser and said, "Let's do this."

Bruiser was heavily armed, as befitted a true Enforcer, and I was carrying everything I owned that had a point, a sharp edge, or would fire ammo, plus the bag full of stuff Evan had required, under my arm. I drew the shotgun, checked the load, and headed inside, following Bruiser, who broke through the crime scene tape and busted open the door with a well-placed kick. He-man stuff. Which would have made me smile if my face still remembered how.

Inside, the house was cold but dry, the heat off. The electric company hadn't turned off the power, however, and the house had little lights along the walls, like Christmas lights, to show the way. I took the lead and found the hidden door to the bas.e.m.e.nt. Opened it, as I had the first time I was here.

The smell ballooned out, as if it had been under pressure and opening the door released the effluvia. It was horrible. It would never go away, no matter how many cleansers they used, no matter how many coats of paint, how many gallons of chemicals. This smell of the grave never, ever, went away. They would have to burn the place. But now, nearly hidden below the stink of the grave, the place smelled of spidey vamp.

I stepped down the stairs. The men followed, and I turned on lights as I came to the switches, illuminating the room below. The cement floor was a reddish brown-the color of the blood that had seeped into the porous surface. There was no furniture, only bookcases on all four walls, the shelves bare. The place had been cleaned out by the cops searching for an entrance, a vamp lair. They hadn't found one. But I had a new secret weapon, even better than holy water. I had Molly's husband.

I set the shotgun nearby, where I could grab it up in an instant-not that having it handy was gonna help me against the things we had come to kill. The best it would do was slow them down. I opened the bag and took out the full-sized white bedsheet. It was brand new and I ripped the plastic wrap, stuffing the trash into the bag, and spread open the sheet. On it I drew a circle with black marker, the chemical stink vanishing beneath the smell of rot, and left a small opening. Evan, still glowing pale yellow, walked through the opening, and I closed the circle behind him, drawing the black marker onto the sheet, and capped the marker.

Evan sat, his legs bending into the small s.p.a.ce with difficulty. He laid the fused disc on the sheet between his knees, keeping the copper-wrapped iron in one fist. With the other hand, he pulled a small wooden flute.