He shrugged big broad beautiful shoulders. The outrageousness of his accent started wearing off, becoming easier for me to understand, though he still sounded as old-school Cajun as anything I’d ever heard. “A conduit, mebbe. A gateway. You?”
“A shaman.” I wasn’t going to answer for Jane, even though Lazarus looked at her, too. “A gateway, huh. Are you what brought us here? I mean, not here-here, I did that,” I said with a wave at the Lower World, “but to the Middle World we just left? Because it’s not Jane’s world and it’s sure not mine.”
“Does it matter?” Jane growled. “Stinky is dead. Let’s go home.”
“Are you kidding? Of course it matters. People don’t just go flying off to different universes without a reason. Or they don’t in my world, anyway. So whatever brought us here has got to be impor—”
I stopped talking then, because Lazarus opened his hands wide and became a man-shaped gateway right back to the Middle World.
Passing through the portal—whatever that was—back into the physical world, hurt. A lot. Jo muttered “You’ve got to be kidding,” but she made it look easy, like stepping through a guy who’d turned into a doorway between worlds was simple. Like one step to the next , from light, through a sliver of blackness darker than the armpit of hell, back into a different place was easy, right? Not.
In that one step, Beast’s pelt roiled under my skin like it wanted to burst through my flesh, and her front and back claws sank into my mind like sixteen knives. I hissed out a breath as I stepped from world to world, and felt more than saw tall, African and gorgeous follow me. He smelled . . . odd. Like magic and animals, but not like me. And not like Jo. And Not like a were. And whatever smelled not-like-the-familiar was usually dangerous.
I found my balance in the neon-lit blackness and party roar of New Orleans Mardi Gras and looked around. We’d lost time. We had left this plane at daylight. Now it was night. Time in the other place wasn’t linear, which bothered the heck outta me. Jo looked a little nonplused too, and I shrugged at her; she shrugged back, which was nearly a mirror image of mine, and we shared a grin. Time changes were not something I could change, so I’d have to live with it. Seems she felt the same way.
With Beast still pushing speed and power into my muscles and nerves, I pivoted on one foot and pulled two vamp killers, holding then down at my sides, one backhand, one forehand settling my balance, knees bent. “Jane?” Jo asked. I ignored her, but kept my awareness of her to my side.
Laz stepped through the cut-away of his own shape, having to twist his shoulders and bend a little to fit. The portal stuck to his hands, flipping inside-out as he came through, then began to shrink. He packed it up, sparkling blackness wedging smaller and smaller between his hands. Not wanting to be pulled back through, or stuffed back through, I waited until the rip in reality disappeared. Then I moved. Fast.
I twisted, hooked an elbow around his. Slammed one boot against his heel. Stepped behind him and yanked. Twisting him around, keeping him from taking a compensatory step, I let gravity do its thing. He hit hard and bounced, air oofing out of him. I landed atop him, dropping fast, one knee in his gut, but it didn’t sink in nearly as far I’d have liked. Big guy with rock hard abs. Great.
Almost gently, I put my backhand knife at his throat and my forehand knife at his belly. And I grinned. “You smell like spiders. And snakes. And maybe wolf or coyote, with a little bear in it. Magic that smells like sunshine and soot. And I don’t like it.”
“Jesus Christ, Jane!” At a guess, Jo disagreed with my course of action. “He came to help us.”
“Yeah. Coincidently to the same place you went to, but conveniently too little too late.” I put a heap of sarcasm into the word conveniently, just in case he missed my intent. “Can you prove he didn’t bring that thing in the first place? Lure us there?”
“Of course I can’t, but good God, have you ever heard of ask questions first, beat to a pulp later?” I felt, more than saw Jo take a step back. Smelled her reaction. She liked this, this, thing. This thing that was not human, not witch, not shaman, but was pretty. Dang pretty. I could feel his magics rolling under my hands, against my knee on his belly. With Beast-sight, I could see magic too, easier than in my own world, green and yellow and rainbow colors that reminded me of the ruff on Old Stinky.
I firmed my blade against his skin. Okay, maybe I pushed a little, because a bead of blood slid out and trickled down his neck. I let my smile widen as if I’d done it on purpose. And maybe Beast had.
“I was brought heyah, I was.” He laid on the accent and the smile. I could feel a compulsion in his smile, like some kind of “like-me” spell.
I grinned wider, showing my blunt teeth even as Beast’s claws pressed down on my brain, breaking the compulsion. “Convenient,” I said again.
“Stepping through a portal, I was, when I felt dis—” his eyes slid away in thought, “—dis power draw. I stop. I listen. And I follow it to dis strange place, and then I follow it again to underworld of yellow grass. Not my underworld, no. But a thing of darkness pull me there. And any hunter who kill that dark thing,” he nodded and more blood flowed, “is a friend of mine.”
I smelled truth on him and yet I still didn’t believe him. I rose in one long motion and sheathed the unbloodied-blade. The bloodied one, I wiped off on the hem of my tee shirt, then sliced the scrap off. Folded it. And put it in my pocket. And I made sure Pretty Boy and Joanne Walker saw me do it. If she needed something for a blood-spell, we had it. Joanne stared at me. Laz looked disconcerted and scheming all at once.
I looked around, and discovered that we had come out in a different place from where we went in. It felt like a few hours had passed too, but my subjective time sense was getting all mixed up, so I wasn’t sure. We were near the Mississippi, the sour smell of its power wet on the air. “I have to eat,” I said. “Shifting uses up a lot of calories.”
“Calories?” Pretty Boy asked, like he’d never heard of them. “Shifting uses up magic, no?”
Jo startled. “Oh. Oh. Yeah, of course it does. No wonder . . .” I ignored her and jerked a thumb the direction I wanted to go. “Let’s take a walk along the waterfront. There are some really good restaurants and diners there.”
Minutes later, we had taken two turns and I came to a dead stop, staring through a window. The diner was one I knew. And in my world, the proprietor, Antoine, was dead. In my world he’d been an African witch or shaman or something, and he’d been killed by one of my kind. By a skinwalker masquerading as a vamp who had gone nutso and started eating people and vamps. Long story I decided not to tell Jo. She might not understand. Whatever Antoine was, he was a magic user and a really good cook. The smells wafting from his diner were amazing. Stomach growling, I led the way inside. “Don’t shake his hand. He reads magic.”
Joanne shot me a look and put her hands in her pockets. Laz looked interested, but did the same as we skulked through the door. Antoine’s was one long narrow room with a bar on the right and red leather upholstered booths on the left. The place was packed with everything from city blue-collar employees in work boots, to men and women in suits, banker types, out for a bite before heading home to family or empty apartments filled with cats and books. In the far corner sat five cops. A musician perched on a tall stool in a corner played guitar, something Spanish-flamenco and hip all at once. I smelled grass and lots of beer and steamed shellfish and fried foods.