“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 sweetgrass 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 piss 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, crap.
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 bloody, 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.”