The sabertooth took the bait. Claws outstretched, it rose up and dropped down. Landed on my chest. Driving the breath from me with a woof of air and pain. A sharp crack of broken ribs. Stabbing me. The huge cat rose up again. Dropped. Batted me over. Straddled my body and dropped his head. To tear out my throat.

Now! Beast screamed. I thrust up with the knives, deep into his chest. The blades slid along his ribs, one catching and grinding to a stop. But the other slipped deeply, under ribs, slicing cartilage, cutting lungs. Finding heart. I felt it when the blade slid into the heart cavity, a slight give in the resistance.

The lion roared. I rolled as he bit. He caught my shoulder. His teeth punctured, cutting through leather into flesh. With my good hand, I shoved the hilt of the knife with all my might. Swiveling the hilt against and into his body. He shook his head. Rending and tearing. My entire body quaked and snapped. I thought my shoulder would rip free.

He slowed. Shuddered. Gasped, his nostrils fluttering. His eyes met mine, shock and understanding in the depths. His paws swept me up, claws piercing through my jacket, into my skin. Silver light blazed over him, the energies buzzing like sound waves, like the pressure of fast-moving water, over me. The black motes of power shocked where they touched me.

He was trying to throw off mass. He was trying to shift. He was trying to steal my form. Once again, Beast did . . . something. Deep inside my mind I felt her—saw her—an image of Beast twisting in midair, tail rotating, claws outstretched as if to grab prey.

Liquid gushed out of Immanuel’s mouth, out of his nose, out of the holes in his chest, thick and viscous. Smelling like rotten meat, like old death, rancid and fetid as an open grave.

He backed up, dropping me. I landed hard, knocking my head, unaware that he had lifted me so high. I managed to take in a breath. Pulled the last of the vamp-killer blades. And the last of Molly’s charms.

I rose to my knees in the slimy mess pooling beneath the sabertooth. Got one foot beneath me. And shoved with it, hard, shifting my weight, the power of my whole body, into the motion. Turned the blade point out as I moved. And pierced through his eye, into his brain.

He made no sound, just dropped to his belly, his legs gathered beneath him. But a back leg splayed free, sliding. He was losing control.

With my burned hand, I flipped Molly’s charm at him. It hit his damaged chest. I hadn’t wasted any of the spell’s energies this time by burning my own flesh. None of its power had dissipated into the air in reaction to a spoken wyrd spell. And the creature was too injured to take the power for himself. It was all there, ready and contained.

It exploded inward, into the lion. It took apart every organ, the shaped concussion shredding and bursting every blood vessel, tearing his chest cavity apart. A magic hand grenade. Flesh and bone blasted away. Fluid flooded out of him, foul and choking. His remaining bone and muscle shifted, grinding into a different configuration. His skin split and re-formed, the pelt shimmering away.

I scuttled back, cradling my injured arm, unable to take my eyes from him. The silver energies darkened, forcing a change on him, compelling the shift. They seemed to shudder; the black motes blinked away for an instant. The rogue fell to the carpet, his head in the foul mess that had come from within him. The silver light bathed him in a soft fog.

And then, even that wisped away.

On the carpet was a half-naked man. Or mostly a man. His scalp was still partly cat, his hands still paws. But his torso and limbs appeared mostly human, though the joints were oddly turned, his knees bent the wrong way for a primate. He was a huge man. Larger than he had been as a human, still carrying the mass of the unfinished shift. Three hundred pounds of pure muscle. One side of his face was Cherokee. The other half was Immanuel. Both halves had long killing teeth in upper and lower jaws.

I toed him with my foot. He wasn’t breathing. No pulse beat in his throat. There was no heart left to beat in the ruined chest. The liver-eater was dead.

I had exterminated a skinwalker. Perhaps the last one besides me.

I knew that I should feel grief. Shock. Sorrow. But for now, all I felt was Beast’s triumph. Killed Big Cat, I/we, together! Beast is victor! she screamed into my mind.

Standing over the rogue, in the ruins of the upper hallway of Leo Pellissier’s home, I stared into the face, noting the hair on its scalp had made the change to long black hair so much like my own. Noting the brown skin, slightly deeper brown than my own golden hue.

Beast said, Escape. Now. Details of the next few minutes, the next few hours, raced through my mind. First, stop my bleeding. I needed to apply pressure to my shoulder. Fumbling, I opened a pocket inside my jacket and pulled out my tourniquet. It took a moment to remember how to use it. Evidence of shock. With teeth and my good hand, I opened the loop and applied it above my shoulder joint, pulling it tight, securing the Velcro. The strap caught on the head of my humerus, exposed through the flesh. I nearly gagged with pain.

Beast stared at the blood running down my hand, off my fingers, onto the floor. Shift.

“I can’t,” I muttered. “Not now.” She growled at me. But the tourniquet was working; the blood dripping from my fingers slowed. I glanced at Antoine. Dead. And I’d killed him. I was too numb to feel grief or shame or anything beyond the momentary ecstasy of surviving, a joy already blurring with pain and shock. I knew my charm had killed him just as much as the liver-eater, but I’d have to deal with that later.

I found the woman, also dead, her neck at an impossible angle. She was the woman I had seen, all right, the one in the long skirt, entering the meeting with Anna and Rick. They had indeed been tracking the rogue. And from what I had learned, using Anna to do it.

I had to get out of here. But first, I had to make sure I got paid. I needed proof of death to fulfill my contract. I pulled my camera out and took a dozen photos, then repeated the process with the cell, though these shots would be less clear. I e-mailed the photos to myself, pocketed the cell and camera. I pulled my knives out of the liver-eater’s flesh and wiped them on my jeans. I limped past Antoine, down the stairs, to my bike, hoping to get out of here before Leo arrived and figured out that I’d just killed his son—or what had passed for his son. I didn’t have enough energy or moxie to fight the blood-master of New Orleans.

I managed to get Bitsa back down the steps into the drive. Managed to kick-start the engine, mostly one-handed. There was only one car in the drive as I motored past. Empty. I wondered who had left. And why.

CHAPTER 26

Untender mercies of the human world

I made it home before I bled to death, grabbed steaks, and dropped them on the grass out back. Stripped and fell in a heap on the cracked boulders in the garden, fractured stone stabbing into me. I needed to shift to heal but there wasn’t time to do it right, using the fetish necklace. Instead, I reached for the coiled form of Beast in my memory and pushed. Gray light and black motes flowed over me. The pain was heat like a branding, like being flayed alive, like being skinned while my heart still beat. I shifted, screaming.I lay on broken stones. Panting. Rose and stretched, from back paws up spine, to front claws, to killing teeth, in a long, smooth motion. Leaped to ground in a single silky arc. Ate much raw, cold steak. Cold and dead, but full of life. Satisfied, I drank water from vampire fountain.

She asked, Shift? Please? Properly servile. Asking for alpha. I dropped belly to ground and gave her alpha control.

No longer bleeding, with all the visible results of the attack mended, I began to hide proof of my involvement. Just in case I was accused by human law enforcement after the fact in Antoine’s death. Just in case there had been security cameras in Leo’s hallway that I never saw.

I rinsed blood off the bike and the grass with the garden hose, mopped up the mud and blood from the porch and house floor. Carried my clothes to the shower. Standing under the spray, I washed and rinsed my clothes, letting the filth of the liver-eater flow away. The leather coat was ruined, rips in the shoulder where the liver-eater had chewed through to skin. The silk T-shirt was a goner, but the boots and jeans could be saved. If I managed to get off the slop that had dried to gluelike hardness on the way home. I’d take the boots to a shoe repair place in the morning. If I lived through the rest of the night. I washed myself repeatedly with soap and shampoo, rinsing between sudsings until the stench was gone.I dried off on a fluffy towel, and left all the clothes hanging, plinking water. Most of my wardrobe hung there now. My phone rang. I checked the number and answered while dressing. “I’m alive.”

“You could have called,” Molly said, huffy. But I heard worried tears in her voice. “Call me when you can.” She hung up.

I packed, knowing that I still had a lot of things to do to assure my safety. If I couldn’t get them done in time, before Leo figured out what had happened and came after me in a vamp rage, then I had to be ready to run. I ate a bowl of oatmeal, finishing a big box with the last of the sugar and the milk. The shakes left me then, though I still felt a strange weakness deep inside. Something that could have been grief. I shoved it down deep. Locked it away. If I lived, I’d take time to look at and deal with the emotions later.

When I was pretty certain I could handle myself, I called Bruiser.

“Where are you, Yellowrock?” he asked, in lieu of a hello.

“At my house. You’re at Leo’s place?”

“Yeah. On the upstairs landing standing in a pool of putrefying sludge. What’s Antoine doing dead? And this woman? You kill them? And what’s this thing with him?”

“The thing killed Antoine and I killed the thing. It’s what’s left of the rogue. And Bru—George,” I amended. I hesitated, softening my voice. “Look at the Anglo half of his face. The rogue was masquerading as Immanuel. I’m pretty sure it . . . killed Leo’s son and took his place.”

Bruiser breathed heavily, started to speak, and stopped. He took another breath, processing what I had said. I stayed quiet, letting him think it through. After what felt like a long wait, he said, “Where’s the body?”

Great. Right to the heart of the matter. “I’m guessing the . . .” I couldn’t call it a skinwalker, could I? Not when no one but the dead thing and I seemed to know what we were. “. . . thing ate it. Just like it ate the bodies of the other people it caught. It wasn’t Immanuel.”