Blood spurted everywhere. I couldn’t breathe enough to scream. Amaury flung me across the room and I rammed into another wall, sliding down, half blinded by tears. I managed to catch a breath and my healing magic kicked in, straightening cartilage—ow—and stopping the flow of blood as well as the dripping tears.
That let me see all sorts of exciting things. Serena had been knocked against a far wall amidst fluttering papers that had been tidily piled half an instant earlier. Jane was still caught in the aftermath of the motion that had flung Serena to safety, one arm extended, her very person bristling with energy and preparation. Amaury was already on his feet again, the knife upraised. Jesus, raised over the baby, who was about to be a vampire’s sacrificial lamb.
The biggest cat in the universe leapt on him, and that was all the time I needed.
Amaury had no fear of Beast. He thrust her away as he’d done me. She writhed in the air, landing prepared to pounce, leaping even as her paws touched down. But I bellowed, “Get the kitten!” and she changed the angle of her jump, her body swiveling in midair, her long stubby tail swiveling opposite for balance. The crib went to pieces under her weight, but she came up with a squalling miserable infant’s onesie caught gently in her teeth. Serena’s screams underlined the baby’s.
Lazarus, during all of that, just waited, arms crossed over his chest, watching. That was it. He just stood there, calm, handsome, waiting. I gathered myself while he waited, and this time when Amaury came to his feet, I struck again.
Not his chest. Not his neck. I was pretty sure my sword would obliterate him—it was solid silver, made by an ancient Irish king called Nuada—but I didn’t know what would happen if he died before the amulet was contained. So he spun, protecting his heart, and I—
—I, as infantile as I was gleeful, yelled, “Unhand me, thou shag-eared villain!” and lopped off his right hand, the one holding the dagger.
It was an upward swing, so momentum would kick the stump—was it a stump if it was the free-flying end? It didn’t matter. The stump flew upward a few inches. I turned my sword flat-wise toward it and swung like I was hitting a baseball. The hand, still clutching the dagger, made a bright bloody arc through the air.
Lazarus reached out and caught it as easily as any first baseman, and while Amaury was still screaming with shock, I shoved my sword through his heart and hauled upward, splitting his clavicle, his jawbone, and his brain in two.
Katrina exploded into the study, a force five hurricane unleashed all at once. Wild wind. Lashing rain. Everybody, everything, in fact I thought probably the whole universe, was soaked to the bone before we could even blink. The desk smashed through a wall, then out of the building. We were all, in that instant, dead, and just waiting to realize it.
As fast as she’d come, Katrina shut down again, swallowed by a flare of earth magic that came from the whole bayou country. It surged up, rich earthy stench of life, and wrapped around Lazarus, who wrapped it around Katrina, and quenched her rage.
Beast, not so much dripping as pouring wet, crouched in the silence, a now-silent baby between her paws. The poor kid’s eyes were big as apples, but it gave a sudden happy chirrup and laughed. She reached up and grabbed the big-cat’s ears and tugged. Beast, despite being sopping, licked the little creature, then turned back into an equally wet, none-too-happy, buck-naked Jane.
Serena cried out and scrambled the few steps to her baby, catching the little girl in her arms and clutching her close. Lazarus, looking satisfied, folded his hands over and over the dagger like he was tucking it away, while I stood there and dripped. A bunch of vampires, one of them clutching a healing chest wound, stood in the doorway of Amaury’s study, wheezing and gaping at the aftermath of what had been, at most, a fifteen-second battle.
“What,” said Jane, who had not once used a curse word stronger than “crap” since I’d met her. “What the hell. Was. That?”
Me, I said, “Who are you,” to Lazarus, but it was Serena, cooing and whispering to her baby, who gave me the answer.
She looked up at Laz, tears running down her face, and said, “Papa, yes? Papa Legba, I call you up, no? The gateway god, the link between here and there. These two, they just got pulled in by accident, but you, you came to save my bebe, my Lissa.”
I wheezed just like the vampires were doing. Even I knew who Papa Legba was, the voodoo father figure, brought across from Africa and the Caribbean islands to settle in New Orleans with the slaves.
“Seriously?” I said. “Really? I finally figured out you were a god, but Papa Legba? Really? That’s—”
It was cool. I hadn’t met any African gods before, and Legba was a trickster character, somebody who should be near and dear to the heart of a shaman. I blushed suddenly and shot a guilty look at Jane. Maybe that was why I’d taken so much more of a fancy to him than she had. He was rather literally my kind of god.
She looked like I deserved to feel guilty, but not for liking Lazarus, oh no. She got to her feet, pointing an accusing finger at me even as she went to find her clothes. “You knew he was a god? A god? I don’t do gods, Joanne, I don’t—”
“I swear didn’t know until the last minute! He’s got—you’ve got hellacious shields,” I said to Lazarus, more than a little admiring. “I mean, really, the other gods I’ve met, if I looked at them with the Sight at all they basically burned out my eyes, but you didn’t, not until you had to lose the wraps to get Katrina under control—”
I broke off, eyeing the knife warily. “She’s under control, right? And now what do we do with her?”
“I’ll take her,” Leo, one of the vampires said, and Lazarus finally responded.
Well. He laughed out loud, actually, pure derision. “You think you can control de hurricane, little vampire? Non. She is mine, we are lovers, only I can woo her. You wish to die, you try to dance wit’ her. Otherwise, don’ be a fool.”
“You promised,” the vampire hissed at Jane. “You said New Orleans would be mine.”
Jane paused in the middle of getting dressed to lift her hands. “Hey, I said it was yours on my world. Take it up with the god, why don’t you, not me. I’m just a lil’ ol’ skinwalker. Really, Joanne? A god? And you were being all buddy-buddy with him? Really? And you!” she said to Serena. “You got us all here, how are you going to get us home? How are you going to get him home?”
“Dis my home,” Lazarus said, and we all shut up for a minute. “Dis city, it’s alive,” he said. “Full of magic, full of power. Full of sex and love. Full of food an’ dancing. Dese things, dey feed me. Dey make me strong. I go, the hurricane, she unleashed. I stay, she stay safe, she stay quiet, she come out of her shell bit by bit, when de city need her love. I make her d’ queen of New Orleans, an we dance an party and love all the years long.”
Leo the vampire said, “But—!” and spat dirt, worms, muck, earth, instead of words.
Lazarus just looked at him, and when he’d finally cleared his lungs of muck, Laz said, “You dead, son, an I de god of dis here eart’ right here.” He tapped his foot on the wet floor. “You really want to mess wit dat? Cause if you do, I got more bayou I can fill you up wit’. Lot more bayou.”
The vampire shook his head, wet black curls whipping. Laz looked satisfied. “Dat’s fine, den. You run your business d’way you see fit, boy. Jus’ you don’ mess wit’ me and I won’t mess with you. G’wan now.”
All three vampires fled, which I didn’t think was normal vampire behavior. Jane crowed laughter as they skedaddled, then remembered herself and gave me another glare. “Gods?”