Faith Hunter - Easy Pickings

I tore my gaze from Antoine, which wasn’t all that hard to do. Sorcerers scared me. “I didn’t say witch. I said sorcerer.”

Jane shrugged. “Same thing. Boys, girls, they all get their own name, but they’re the same thing.”

“They sure as hell aren’t.” Maybe that came out a little strongly, because Jane stopped eating and squinted at me. Gold eyes. Always gold. I hoped mine weren’t ever going to take on a permanent tint. “Witches,” I said, still forcefully, “are earth magic focused through or on a deity. They’re basically good guys. Sorcerers are blood magic and conduits for a big goddamned bad and there is nothing good about them at all.”

Jane’s ears all but perked up, even if big cats didn’t usually have unperked ears to begin with. “Witches here are different from my world, then. What kind of big bad?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s all different faces of one—” I stopped right there and backed up. Jane probably didn’t want a lecture on the various faces of evil in my world, and besides, it probably wouldn’t be much help. “The one I dealt with was in thrall to a serpent called Amhuluk.”

Jane’s eyes narrowed and she jerked her head toward Laz. “He smells like snake.”

I glanced at Laz. He widened his eyes and made a show of sniffing his arms, then turned his palms up—pale and pink, compared to the blackness of his hands, and his fingertips still shining with crawfish juice—with amusement, as if to say “What does snake smell like?”

It was a good question, and I turned to Jane with a bit more ferocity than necessary. “Shit, Jane, I probably smell like snake. Snakes are symbols of renewal, healing, medicine, all sorts of things, besides being the bad apple in the garden.” My metaphor had gotten badly mixed there, but I didn’t let that stop me. “The point is you asked what I Saw, and I’m telling you I See trouble.”

“Just what we’re looking for.” Jane threw her napkin down, got up, and stomped over to Antoine, or she would have, if cats ever stomped. It was more like a slither/slide/hunting/step. I breathed a curse toward the bucket of crawfish and went after her. My people skills left something to be desired, but so far Jane made me look like a paragon of tact and reason. I did not want to be cleaning up evil sorcerer from all over the diner, not if I could help it.

Well, not unless he was the reason we were here. In that case, I might look the other way for a few seconds while Jane got in his face and ugly about it. Lazarus sauntered up to the counter with us just as Antoine turned back from the grill with an armload of artery-clotting, amazing-smelling food.

Between us, me and Jane and Laz, we were about eighteen and a half feet tall, and just about that thick with magic potential. Antoine didn’t have to touch us to know it: I could see that in the sudden shift of expressions across his face. Astonishment first, followed hard by resentment and then sly greed, all of which disappeared so quickly that if they hadn’t lingered in his aura I might not have believed I’d seen them. There wasn’t a hint of any of it in his smile as he slid plates full of food onto the counter, spread his arms wide on either side of them, and leaned toward us with what would have been a good smile if looking at his aura didn’t give me the creeps.

“Welcome to Antoine’s, mes amis. You new in town, yes? I haven’t seen you here before. But not tourists: Antoine’s is for locals. Mardi Gras partiers never seem to find me here.”

I shot a look at Jane. She’d been a regular here in her own world, but this Antoine didn’t know her. That meant there wasn’t another Jane running around this version of New Orleans. I wondered what had happened to her, and then I wondered if there was a me somewhere up in the Pacific Northwest. I still had my police-issue cell phone stuffed in a pocket. I stifled the impulse to pull it out and call the same number, just to see if one Joanne Walker, Seattle Police Department, would pick up.

“We asked around,” Jane said. “A woman called Evangelina Everhart suggested we try this place.”

Antoine’s expression did the same kind of flat dull thing his aura did, again for less than a blink. “Did she now. Master Amaury will have a thing or two to say about that.”

“Amaury?” That was me, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut when both Jane and Antoine gave me a look. At least Lazarus didn’t seem to recognize the name, either, which made me feel slightly better. This world was more like Jane’s than mine. Maybe it was more like Jane’s than Lazarus’s, too. Once we figured out why we were here—and how to get home—I kind of wanted to sit down and compare notes.

“The big man,” Antoine said after a pause just long enough to make me uncomfortable. Long enough to suggest he was looking for the right words rather than just having a casual conversation. “New folk ‘round here are expected to pay him a visit. Evangelina should’ve sent you there, not here. Mighty peculiar that she didn’t.”

“Mister Amaury don’ make crawdads like Antoine,” Lazarus said, sounding very solemn. “Miss Jane here was fierce hungry. Surely Miss Evangelina took pity on d’poor woman an’ sent her here before she had to get gussied up for d’big man.”

Jane turned an incredulous stare at Lazarus while I turned an equally incredulous one on Jane. She no doubt gussied up well—I did, and we could be sisters—but the idea of putting her in anything but sleek black leather already seemed bizarre beyond belief. From Jane’s expression, the suggestion might have been a killing offense.

Antoine, creepy aura or not, had the good sense to see when a knock-down-drag-out was brewing in his diner. He lowered his voice. “Well, you fed now. On the house for being new in town, but you go on, get going to Master Amaury. He’ll be wanting to see you, gussied up or no.”

Jane and I both said “Nuh,” at once and dug into our pockets, throwing cash on the counter until we independently decided it looked like enough to pay for lunch. Neither of us, apparently, wanted to owe flat-auraed Antoine anything. And then we skedaddled, Lazarus tagging along. The door had barely closed behind us before Jane said “Something’s not right. The Antoine I knew would never have called anybody “Master”, and the only Amaury I know about died in the forties. A vamp. If he’s still here, then he’s old and dangerous and—”

“And running this town,” I finished, and shivered.

Outside, the smell of water on the night breeze hit me, powerful and sour, fishy and fierce, like a living thing, the Mississippi just over the levee. It was different here from the world I knew, as if it was laced with magic. And then the smell of wolf hit me, musky and wet with rain and straining for the hunt. Beast raised up in me, growling. I turned to Laz, a vamp-killer in one hand, the growl echoing in the street.

“Jane?”

I ignored the warning question in Jo’s tone. The smell of spiders hit the wind. Laz laughed at whatever he saw in my eyes, and suddenly he smelled like many animals all at once. Skinwalker? I lifted the blade that had pierced his neck and sniffed the traces of his blood on the steel edge. No. Not skinwalker, Beast thought at me. I do not know what it is.

“I don’t know what you are,” I said, stealing Beast’s line, my pitch still half-growl, “but you stink something not-quite-right. And whatever you are, Beast really wants to gut you now and be done with it all.”

“What does he smell like,” Jo asked carefully.

“Like wolf and spiders and snakes. And now like raccoons and nutria and swamp water full of crawly things. He can change his scent at will and he’s playing with us.”