CHAPTER 9
“Okay, WTF?” Sasha walked in an agitated circle as the UCE building sank back down into the swamp and disappeared. “Furies, Erinyes—what’s any of that got to do with the Unseelie or with Vampires?”
“WTF?” Queen Cerridwen asked, looking toward Sir Rodney for clarity.
“A colloquial human expression,” Sir Rodney replied, smiling, “one that is a bit off-color, but warranted given the circumstances.”
“How can you even joke at a time like this? Erinyes may be involved?” Queen Cerridwen paced away. “Do you know how dangerous those entities are? Surely I have done nothing to provoke them.”
“Of course not,” Sir Rodney said, dismissing the concept with a nonchalant wave of his hand. “But I am smiling because that means there is a shadow of doubt regarding your guilt that the Vampires must take into consideration. The Fae are not the only suspects in this travesty, and our wolf allies have found out something that should give everyone pause.”
“Let us hope so,” Hunter muttered as he looked up at the waning sun through the heavy canopy of trees. “We have perhaps a half hour of daylight remaining, and it is my strong suggestion that we all take cover until we hear that the Vampires accept a truce during our investigation.”
“Couldn’t agree more.” Sasha whipped out her cell phone and began dialing with all eyes on her. “I’m going to leave a message at the Blood Oasis,” she said, waiting for the call to connect to voice mail. As soon as it did, she began speaking. “This is Sasha Trudeau with an urgent message for Elder Vlad. Tell him we found an Erinyes wreath serpent skin at the site of Monroe Bonaventure’s mausoleum today and he can check with the grave guards at Golden Estates. They know we were there, since they tried to kill us—just saying. We’ve also entered the find into the hall of records up here at UCE, so before they blow—”
A Fae archer’s scream stopped Sasha’s words mid-sentence. The entire group pivoted quickly just in time to see a muscular stone-hued gargoyle rip open the man’s chest cavity, spilling vital organs and entrails. Garth pulled out his wand from his robe sleeve in unison with Queen Cerridwen, each respectively sending blasts of white hot light and ice as they ran for cover.
Chaos reigned high in the branches. Fae archers attempted to ward off the gargoyle onslaught with silver-tipped arrows, alternately ducking and then crouching to fire. But the sky darkened with an incalculable number of beasts. Sir Rodney was a blur of Fae motion, leaping into the battle high in the branches, blade drawn to protect his men, and sending up sparkling shield pulses to ward off the aerial attack.
For a few seconds, Sasha and Hunter could only look up at the battle taking place above their heads high in the trees. Then several beasts narrowed their red glowing gazes on Sasha and Hunter, spread their leathery wings, screeched, and dive-bombed toward them with vicious talons outstretched.
In less than the time it took to blink, Sasha and Hunter transformed out of their human forms and into their wolves to leave their clothes pooled on the ground. Oddly, the gargoyles stopped their aerial offensive mid-air and simply screeched at both snarling wolves, then turned to fly off to attack the retreating Fae.
Bounding toward a fallen archer drawn between two gargoyles, the pair of wolves rushed in trying to save him. But it was too late. The moment the hissing creatures saw Sasha and Hunter, they flew off in different directions, ripping the archer in two.
Gore pelted the ground from the air. Sasha’s pristine silver coat became matted with blood splatter raining down from the trees as the gargoyles decimated the archers. Hunter moved in and out of the shadows with Sasha like black lightning, his onyx coat wet with Fae blood, their mission to cover Sir Rodney, Garth, and Queen Cerridwen while trees fell from Fae monarch blasts.
Then suddenly the gargoyles pulled back, lifting the darkness from the bayou to allow in the light of the full moon. Five platinum blond Vampire sentries touched down silently, protected by translucent dark energy shields. Their long, flowing tresses lifted off their shoulders from a supernatural source as static fury coursed down their arms and along their billowing black leather coats. Then one dark-haired female Vampire baring fangs slid out of the folds of nothingness to stand by the lead male.
“A message!” the lead Vampire shouted. “Know me as Caleb, the destroyer! I have been sent to deliver word from Elder Vlad.”
It was a standoff; the Fae monarchs and Garth held wands at the ready. What was left of the Fae archers took aim at the six Vampires in the clearing. Sasha and Hunter lowered their heads, poised for an attack lunge. The silence was deafening as they waited for the Vampires to speak.
“We have no fight with you, wolves,” the female Vampire said, cautiously watching Sasha and Hunter. “That is why our gargoyles pulled back. But if you continue to fight with the Fae, we will take that as an invitation to war.”
“Sixty Unseelie Fae have been slaughtered!” Caleb shouted between his fangs, and then tossed the head of one of Queen Cerridwen’s guard gnomes to her feet. “Ten for every Vampire viceroy you subjected to daylight invasion until I deliver you to Elder Vlad, dead or alive, milady. Your choice.”
“Never!” Sir Rodney shouted, his fingertips beginning to dangerously spark. “We have new evidence entered into the hall of records, and you will owe my queen fifty-four Vampire heads for the archers of the Seelie clans that were unnecessarily slaughtered tonight!”
Caleb hissed and then spit on the ground. “ ’Tis truth and a shame that your men were unnecessarily butchered, but that is on your head, however. Were you not allied with your queen and had you allowed her to meet justice for her offenses, Seelie Fae lives could have been saved.” Caleb turned to the female Vampire at his side. “What say you, Mara? It seems that the Fae have joined forces now and one side is just as culpable as the other, yes? Frankly, I can no longer tell them apart; can you?”
“No, Caleb,” Mara said with an angry glare. “The Seelie monarch said ‘my queen.’ How cozy, how familial. how very, very stupid in a time of war and retribution.”
Garth cut a worried glance toward Sir Rodney and then the wolves.
“Seems your elderly advisor also finds this folly. Dismay is written all over his wrinkled face. Shame that you have not heeded his counsel,” Caleb said with an evil smirk. “No matter. Be ye foolish or wise, sixty Fae will die per night until Elder Vlad is satisfied with his request for your queen. We are done for this evening, as we have met our nightly toll from your legions.”
“Then tell Elder Vlad this, messenger,” Sir Rodney said, boldly walking forward. “The Seelie had no hand in violating his viceroys’ graves, nor did the Unseelie. The wolves had no hand in that affair whatsoever, as you know, and I will not involve them as anything more than investigators. We will uncover the truth. We have found evidence of Erinyes at Bonaventure’s tomb—”
“Games and falsehoods that any good wizard could produce from a coven’s shelves,” Mara sneered, staring at Queen Cerridwen. “That is not evidence; it is a pity if it is the best you can do.”
“My best is beyond your comprehension,” Queen Cerridwen said with eerie calm, making the female Vampire back up as ice crusted the ground beneath her feet. “For the price of sixty innocent Fae, there will be blood.”
“Make sure you carry our full and allied Fae message back to your cartel!” Sir Rodney shouted. “Vlad is the fool, a madman foaming at the fangs, if he is to believe that we will allow the Fae to be subjected to torment and death without retaliation. There will be no grave deep enough or a night dark enough to hide him from the Fae onslaught that will leave his ancient bones bleached by the sun! Give him that message, faithful dog!”
“Oh, I shall,” Caleb said in a dangerous murmur. Then they were gone.
Sasha and Hunter shifted back into their human forms and slowly walked to find their clothes. What was there to say? War had just been declared. The Vampires didn’t want to hear jack about possible secondary sources. The Fae were so outraged by the loss of lives tonight that they were beyond reason. Now that the Vampires understood that the Seelie and Unseelie were going to stand as a united front, that meant all the Fae establishments in the center of New Orleans—ones that were blindly frequented by human tourists and locals—would be under attack. And as stubborn as Sir Rodney was once he got a righteous Scottish bee in his bonnet, there’d be no closing a place down for the cause of fear, even if it meant human lives were at risk.
Hunter tossed Sasha her jeans and top, finding their clothing pile first. They said nothing as they dressed and simply listened to the Fae as they gathered their dead and injured.
“We need to help them get to the Sidhe and then warn our people,” Hunter said in a flat tone.
Sasha simply nodded without looking at him and then stooped down to tie her boots.
“Oh. my. God. ” Clarissa stared at Sasha hang jawed as both Sasha and Hunter filled in the team.
“That’s why I need to know everything you can tell me about what a frickin’ Erinys is,” Sasha said, sending her gaze from Bradley to Winters and then Clarissa. “We need to understand why one would be in a graveyard opening vamp tombs, how they come out, when they come out—”
“How to kill them,” Winters added in, staring at his computer screen as he did a database search. “Just sayin’.”
“Right. You took the words right out of my mouth, Winters.” Sasha looked at Doc and Silver Hawk. “If there’s a way to barrier these Erinyes things and gargoyles from establishments in the same way we can keep vamps out with a prayer circle, that would help here as well as at the Fair Lady tavern in town or at Finnegan’s Wake, and Dugan’s Bed and Breakfast.”
Hunter’s grandfather nodded and his expression remained calm, set in the leathery wrinkles of his face. Two long silver braids hung down his chest over his plaid flannel shirt and he breathed in slowly and exhaled slowly, as though in a semi-meditative state.
“Daughter, I have already gone to the four corners of this military facility to say chants and send prayers up to the Great Spirit that the plague of war will pass us by, and it seems that my prayers were answered. The wolf clans have been absolved of any violence. But I will make prayers in the daytime for our Fae friends and to protect humans that visit their sites from harm. This will take time, though. They have many businesses and shops. How long do we have before the next Vampire onslaught?”
“We may have, at most, twenty-four hours until the next bloodletting,” Hunter said, locking gazes with his grandfather.
“I can accomplish that with Doc,” Silver Hawk replied, gaining a nod of agreement from Sasha’s father.
“But Bear Shadow and Crow Shadow should be with you, Grandfather, to protect you as you are sealing a building in prayer. The gargoyles are not bound to the darkness and at dusk they attacked. We have seen what they can do.”
“I have advised Bear Shadow and Crow Shadow not to travel here yet by human aircraft,” Silver Hawk said quietly. “Especially not Crow Shadow, who now has a human mate who cannot enter the shadow realms. I am an old alpha with shaman sight and can easily navigate the shadow paths. You and Sasha are clan alphas and have the protective amber and silver amulets to keep you from accidentally entering a demon portal while in the realm between worlds. It is best that only a few of our people come here to investigate and that we remain as neutral as possible so that we can learn the truth.”
“We can cover them,” Woods said. “Me and Fisher may just be so-called familiars, with a little wolf in our DNA, and can’t shift or whatever, but we are Delta Force trained and can handle a mean M16, an RPG launcher, and ain’t bad on mortars. So if some gargoyle mofos want some action while Silver Hawk is praying around buildings with Doc, we can bring it.”
“Much obliged, Lieutenant. It would sure make me feel better to know you and Fish were out there in a Jeep covering our clan elders,” Sasha said, dragging her fingers through her hair.
“Roger that. Consider it done,” Fisher said, giving Sasha a nod.
“Okay, so whatcha got, Winters?” Sasha walked over to Winters’s computer propelled by nervous energy.
“Wikipedia says—”
“Please,” Bradley muttered, and then stood to go to the crate of books he’d brought to their temporary lab at NAS. “They are chthonic entities, Greek demons of the underworld. ‘The Erinyes’ means, quite literally ‘the angry ones.’ ” He flipped open a page in a thick, dusty tome and began reading, “ ‘The Furies are the same creatures, but the Roman version.’ ”
Looking up, Bradley held the group captive with his minilecture. “They are without number, but the three prominent ones that come to the fore in literature are Tisiphone—who punishes crimes of murder. Her name translates to ‘Avenging Murder.’ Then there’s Megaera, or ‘Grudging,’ and Alecto, ‘The Unceasing.’ They go after those who have sworn a false oath, if they have been called. To call them requires a ritual sacrifice, a live victim, that must be placed in a megaron—a sunken chamber—where they rip the sacrifice to shreds and eat it alive.”
“Great, Brads.” Sasha blew a damp curl up off her blood-splattered forehead, wanting a shower in the worst way. “So, we’ve possibly got an avenging, grudge-holding, unceasing crew of very angry demon bitches in the mix to contend with—ya gotta love it.”
“If we can figure out which one was called or, better yet, who called it, maybe we can find out who’s targeting our local Vampire population.” Doc looked around the group and let his gaze settle on Clarissa. “Between you, me, and Silver Hawk, we ought to be able to do some sort of divination.”
“No,” Sasha said before Bradley could open his mouth to protest. “The Vampires always lie, so they could have sworn a false oath that pissed anybody off from an average tarot card reader to the Devil himself. Until we know how far and deep this goes, I don’t want anybody trying to do a divination on a creature that is some kind of avenging demon, all right.”
“Sheesh,” Winters muttered. “You don’t have to tell us twice.”
“But that’s probably why the Vampires didn’t want to hear our findings. They damn well must know what one of these creatures is, and may simply believe Queen Cerridwen conjured it up from the depths.”
Sasha stared at Hunter’s dirty face, loving him even more for the way his shrewd mind worked. “Which has to be why they want her brought to Elder Vlad, preferably alive. Now that I think about it, their gargoyles didn’t seem to be trying to kill her out in the swamp. They just circled her and Rodney like birds of prey, swooping and diving, making them hunker down while they slaughtered their soldiers. They didn’t even go after me, you, or Garth.”
Hunter nodded. “It is all very curious.”
“Yeah, well, it certainly makes sense why all the local psychics went into hiding. If the Vampires are looking for human diviners, those with a soul who can connect with one of these things and figure out who called it up, I’d take down my shingle for a coupla weeks, too—at least until all of this blows over.” Bradley glanced at Silver Hawk. “So, can you add some extraspecial barriers around Clarissa. just in case?”
“It is done, now that I understand the enemy we face.” Silver Hawk folded his arms over his chest and closed his eyes.
“What say we go check out the local black-magic covens?” Sasha said, looking at Hunter. “They may be shady, but they are human and the Vampires must have gone to them, right?”
Hunter rubbed his jaw and frowned. “Yes, so why would the normal psychics go into hiding, then?”
“Yeah, true.” Sasha let out a hard breath and slumped against the wall. “Shit.”
“When you debriefed us, didn’t you say that the locks were frozen and then shattered, which is how whoever got into the crypts to open them?” Winters glanced between Sasha and Hunter. “Seems real coincidental to me.”
“Yeah,” Hunter said, now giving Winters his full attention along with everyone else in the room.
“Well, the use of cold is in the purview of the Unseelie,” Winters pressed on, pulling up an Excel spreadsheet that he was using to track the facts, “and if the Unseelie were involved, wouldn’t they have the spell-casting know-how to cover their tracks to human divinations? Like, I’m just sayin’, they’d know that the first thing a pissed-off Vampire cartel would do would be try to get a black coven or a really strong diviner to figure out who called up some Erinyes on them, right? And, if you ask me, it really does look fishy that both the lock was freeze-busted and then evidence of this avenging demon was out there. around the same time a human body got buried in the graveyard.. Ahem, let us not forget Mr. Romero.”
“You are indeed a boy wonder,” Sasha said, pushing off the wall she’d been leaning against. “Because let’s face it, the Unseelie could break into the tomb, but a seriously old and powerful Vampire is no slouch in the strength department. One might be able to bust open a crypt door, but it’s quite another thing to be able to physically or even magically drag a superstrong Vamp out into the sun without Unseelie causalities.”
“It would have to be a team effort of several Unseelie working in unison to have that much combined power to overthrow the death struggle of a viceroy,” Hunter said, walking off to stare out the window. “Or it would take the strength of an Unseelie monarch.” He rubbed the nape of his neck and then turned back to stare at Sasha. “Which is why all things point back to Cerridwen, who had both opportunity and motive, unless some rogue Unseelie Fae simply opened the tomb and then. ”
“The avenging demon busted in there and dragged the viceroy out.” Sasha shook her head. “Damn, that’s cold, but that’s exactly how I’d do it to save my side from collateral damage.”
“But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it wasn’t Queen Cerridwen,” Doc said, his worried gaze roaming to each face in the group. “Then what Unseelie would benefit from Vampire wars? Why would they try to bring down the House of Hecate, because this is where all of this could have been going, if Sir Rodney would have turned her away at the castle?”
“And an educated bet was that Sir Rodney would have turned her away,” Sasha said flatly. “Only somebody maybe didn’t expect him to be such a romantic.”
“Ah, the X factor,” Bradley said with a half smile. “Quantity unknown.”
“But that leads us right back to square one. Full circle and no cigar, folks.” Sasha began hunting along the choices of artillery that Woods and Fisher had spread out on the table. “Maybe it’s time to have a conversation with the queen about what her succession plan is if she were to meet a sudden demise. That could tell us a lot.” Sasha picked up a small handheld Uzi and fit in its magazine with a click.
“Before anything, I need to let Shogun know what’s happening.” Hunter rubbed the nape of his neck, becoming agitated. “I have to warn my brother, but he never told me where he was staying.”
Sasha checked both safeties on her weapon and then looked up at Hunter. “Don’t howl. The Vamps might take that as a rallying call to arms from the wolves and get any lone wolf out there accidentally ambushed. But I know who might know.”
Hunter gave her a puzzled look and simply cocked his head with a question in his eyes.
“Amy Chen’s parents have a store near Xavier. She lives with her parents,” Sasha said calmly. “If anyone has his cell number, it would be her.”
“Good answer,” Hunter said, moving straight toward the door, but Sasha flat-palmed his chest with one hand and simply shook her head.
“Don’t freak the Chens out, man. You’re covered in Fae blood splatter and gargoyle gook. Why don’t you take five and give in to a shower—I’m just sayin’.”