Faith Hunter - Easy Pickings

Lazarus stood, put his hands together in front of his chest, and bowed his head. “Dat,” he said, “dat I can help wit’.”

“Eart’,” he said when we were all outside. “It all connected, whether we stand in d’dirt and d’swamps or wet’er we walk d’hard concrete streets of d’city. Take off you shoes.”

Serena already wasn’t wearing any, and Laz had taken his off when we came outdoors. His were super-shiny black patent leather with buckles and platform heels, not that a man his size needed any more height. I toed my soggy tennies off and wondered how his shoes had come through the swamp fight unscathed. Earth magic, I guessed. Jane pulled her boots off, picked them up, and glowered at them like boot leather was the next thing on her menu. I sympathized: shapeshifting took a lot of energy. It hadn’t been that long ago I’d run through so many shifts that my body had started cannibalizing itself to survive. Just thinking about it made me hungry.

Once we were unshod, Laz gave a satisfied nod and extended his hands. Serena took one without hesitation. Jane and I looked between each other, our shoes, and the offered hands. Then we both scrambled to tie laces together and throw them over our shoulders before joining hands, me with Laz, Jane with Serena and me.

Instinct made me edge about three-quarters of a step to the right. Everybody else shifted accordingly, and Laz gave me a startled flash of approval. I shrugged, pleased, and Jane muttered, “What?”

“Power circle. We were misaligned to the cardinal directions, now we’re not.”

She went, “Huh,” which was mostly a motion of her eyebrows, and we both looked back at Laz.

“Eart’, it all de same,” he said again. “We here, we need to be dere. De eart’, it carry us.”

I triggered the Sight, and was glad I did.

Rich brown power roared up from the ground we stood on, rushing over Lazarus like a mud bath. It coated him head to toe, all the variation of the swamp. Mud bugs, earthworms, green growing muck, everything that had a spark of life glittered gold within the rising power until they became stars in a blacked-out, man-shaped sky. Lazarus still held my hand, but at the same time he was gone, a cut-away door rife with mystical energy.

Serena fearlessly stepped through the portal that Lazarus had become, and because she held our hands, we followed.

I expected it to be cold. The space between stars was, after all, but no: traversing the world through the Lazarus-gate was warm, like drifting in an equatorial sea. Life pulsed within him, small bumps and waves of passion sparking and fading as we passed them by. In the months since my shamanic powers had awakened, I’d rarely felt such serenity—and when I had, it had been in the moments where the power of many adepts came together to create a larger whole. Lazarus, I thought with a grin, contained the power of multitudes.

A moment later the journey ended and we stepped onto the sidewalk of St. Louis Street in front of Vamp Mojo. Laz came through himself last. Jane and I sat down to haul our shoes on, and I took half a second to notice we were now all opposite the cardinal points where we’d been.

Neither of us had our shoes tied when the front doors of Vamp Mojo blew open, releasing a heavy, muggy scent of blood and sex. For a gut-freezing moment, all my nightmares came calling.

Witches and werewolves and something that looked like the swamp itself had come alive, part mud, part rotting vegetation, part God-awful stink of swamp gas. There were two of them, each ten feet tall, built like gorillas, and they moved like nothing I had ever seen before. Faster than the wind, angry as a tornado and just as uncontrolled. I wasn’t even certain they were alive in the biological sense.

In the Sight, they were a flood of angry power twisted up and shaped into a creature I didn’t even want to admit existed. I could See their magic, how it was hauled out of them in all the various shades of power, and how it was fed back, part and parcel, with a heavy dose of guilt that would turn even the purest of intentions grey. Hell, I could See Katrina, the hurricane-that-wasn’t, and how her Force 5 winds and rain and destructive capability had been lashed down through Amaury’s focal point. He’d been the only one strong enough to become the conduit for a city’s worth of magic thrown against the storm, and when he’d tucked the hurricane’s power into his treasure chest, these things had been born, leashed to his control. Shit. We were so screwed.

My gaze shot upward, to the whirlpool of black magic spinning above Vamp Mojo. To the eye of it, the hollow center that was the calm in every storm, and my stomach turned to lead.

Amaury had never released Katrina. He hadn’t diffused or redirected her. He’d taken the combined magics of every adept in New Orleans and had captured a literal force of nature. The Big Easy’s magic users didn’t just owe him. They couldn’t escape from him, not as long as Katrina’s contained rage kept sucking up their magic.

We were going to have to defuse the hurricane in Amaury’s pocket in order to take him down.

That was the bad news.

The good news was that everybody knew vampires didn’t come out in daylight, and the sun hadn’t gone down yet. So instead of Amaury and his vamps, all we had to fight was every other magic user in New Orleans. And they were pumped up on the feedback loop of Amaury ripping their power away, feeding it into Katrina, and having it come back down the line to them with the agony of an imprisoned elemental.

Nevermind. There wasn’t any good news. We were utterly and completely boned. I said, “Try not to kill anybody,” to Jane, and then we met the onslaught.

“Crap!” Beast slammed into my mind, her strength and speed into my bloodstream. I jutted my chin at Laz while pulling my M4 and a nine-mil loaded for vamp and were with silvershot. “You take care of the walking bags of mud. I got the weres.” I pointed the shotgun at two wolves in a dead-run and fired. The recoil slammed up my arm.

The wolves were too close for the silver fléchettes to expand enough to take out both, but the one in front yelped and flipped over backward, dozens of tiny silver knives cutting into his body and front legs. I took more careful aim with the nine-mil and fired pointblank into his chest. He fell and I finished him off with a two tap to his forehead. He started to shift back, his body trying to heal from the mortal wound even as he died, the silver in his system stopping the transition.

“I said not to kill anything!” Jo was so busy with a ball of blue light and that freaking magical sword I didn’t know how she noticed what I was doing, but her order broke through the sounds of battle anyway.

“Weres’ bites are infectious!” A third wolf leaped through the open door. He was reddish and huge, with a slavering mouth and two-inch-long canines. I fired a fast two-tap at the wolf, taking him midcenter of his chest. I watched his leap turn into a tumbling, dead, freefall, and only now noticed that I knew this were. I glanced over at the other two dead ones and realized that I’d fought them before, in my Louisiana. They were about to get as dead in this world as they were in mine.

“Well then don’t get bit by the sons of bitches!” Jo bellowed back.

I laughed and fired at the two other wolves exploding through the bordello’s door. The M4 round took them both, wounding, not killing. One was instantly blind, and him I’d leave alive. He might heal after we cut all the silver out. The other one was only lame and I finished him off. “Yeah, all of them are sons of bitches. Kinda goes with the whole wolf thing. And when women are infected, they go into permanent heat and insane.”