Лорел Гамильтон - Rafael

“We’re out of time, Jean-Claude; if you have any advice, now is the time.” I said it out loud and I didn’t care.

Jean-Claude didn’t bother with words, he just shared knowledge and skill at working with supernatural powers. Centuries of practice that he thought might help me now. I got glimpses of memories that went with some of it, but it was like shuffling and then cutting cards, you got hints of images instead of the full card, but it was like I could suddenly count cards and keep it all in my head. If anything that he knew would help me tonight, I had it just like that. Let’s hear it for practice, because we’d started training in the metaphysical the same way we did in the physical. It wasn’t as formal and the groups were smaller and more personal, but we’d never been better at this part of things, except for Richard, who was like a missing piece of our puzzle. I pushed the thought away and realized that it hadn’t been my thought, it was Jean-Claude’s; he felt the loss of Richard more than I did, because I’d found people to fill Richard’s place in my heart and my bed, but Jean-Claude was still looking to fill all the holes that our absent werewolf left for him. Jean-Claude pulled the emotion and thought back and shielded more carefully from me. He was a lot better at cherry-picking what he shared with me; I still had a tendency to do an info dump that included a lot more than I needed to share.

“I will be here if you need me, ma petite , and if the need is great, I will be there in the flesh.”

“Don’t endanger yourself,” I said.

“I will be discretion itself, ma petite .”

The guards at the gate opened them for us, and the SUV glided between them and the energy stole my breath again. “Remember what you have learned, ma petite . Je t’aime. ”

“ Je t’aime ,” I thought, and then I swallowed hard as if I’d changed altitudes. We’d come through a magic circle like my friends that were Wiccan, witches, cast when they were working magic, and just like their circles it was meant to raise power and contain it. It felt like I was inside that giant beating heart; the power was all around me so that it felt like the car was vibrating with it, but I knew it wasn’t real. Magic was like emotions, they both felt real, until you tried to explain them to other people and then they didn’t make any sense.

“Why is there a permanent magic circle here?” Pierette asked; she was looking through the tinted windows of the SUV as if looking for threats, or for who was casting circles.

I answered her question in a voice breathless as if I’d been running. “To keep the power in.”

“We told you this was our seat of power, Anita,” Claudia said.

“The lupanar doesn’t feel like this at all.”

“The wolves are powerful here in this city, but they are not us. The rodere have never been conquered. Never been broken so that we forgot who we are—we are an unbroken line going back thousands of years.” Claudia said it with such pride and with the beating, roaring pulse of their power all around me; she should have been proud.

I felt tears start to build in my eyes, I wasn’t even sure why. I turned to Pierette and clung to her hand. It helped anchor me a little in the pounding surf of magic. “This is what you meant when you said we were all broken here in St. Louis, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“The rodere are not broken,” I said, and felt the first tear trail hot and unwelcome down my cheek.

“No, they are powerful and whole.”

“Is this what we’re all supposed to feel like?”

“I do not know about all, but yes, this is what we are meant to be.”

“Can the leopards be this?”

“Only if we can find our wizards again.”

“Wizards?”

Claudia said, “Without our brujas we would not be rodere.”

“I’ve never met one of your witches,” I said.

“Why would you? You’ve never been here before and they are not bodyguards.”

I felt diminished in the face of the power all around me, or as if I should have power to answer it and I didn’t. The beasts inside me stirred not to rise, but as if they felt my thought. Where is our magic?

It was the hyena who stared up at me with brown eyes and slit pupils. I looked into her eyes and realized that I’d learned earlier today that the hyenas had never lost their magic either. What the hell had happened to the rest of us?

15

I GOT OUT of the SUV with Claudia on one side of me and Pierette on the other. The driver and his wingman weren’t allowed to hang around with us, or more particularly me. They had to drive off and put the SUV out of sight of the main road with the other vehicles. We didn’t want a police officer to do a casual drive-by and wonder about too many cars parked after dark in a warehouse district.

The three of us stood alone with huge warehouses surrounding us except for the gate just behind us and the fence. I wasn’t going over the razor wire. I looked past the few people still outside the warehouses to the river. St. Louis is too large a city for it to be truly dark, but even without the illumination I would have sensed the river. The Mississippi is just too damn big to be ignored this close to it. The energy and flow of it, the sound of it faint and persistent, and water, you knew a big body of water was close by like a big lake, or even the ocean. The river had that kind of aliveness to it.

I realized that the rush and beat of the energy was tied to the river somehow. Had the rodere’s witches, their brujas, used the river as part of their circle of protection, or had the river just been here and they’d worked with it, because they had no choice? Some things are just too vast and too powerful to be ignored. I guess it was a chicken/egg question that didn’t matter. The heartbeat of power used the river like blood to keep it pumping. It was like a huge mystical battery.

“Anita, are you all right?” Claudia asked.

I nodded. “The magic is . . . loud.”

Pierette took my hand in hers, though since we were both right-handed, she had to compromise her gun hand, because she knew I wouldn’t compromise mine. Not here and now with strange magic everywhere and the first few people looking our way.

“It beats through your body like a second heartbeat,” Pierette said.

“You touching me isn’t making it quieter,” I said.

“I felt the energy, but now it’s much more,” she said.

I squeezed her hand and let it go. “If it’s making it worse for you and not helping me, then I’d rather have you with a clearer head.”

Pierette accepted that without question. We were lovers, but she was my bodyguard first and she never forgot that, which was one reason we could date. There were a handful of people looking at us from the door of the nearest warehouse. I should have been able to sense their energy, tell if they were human or shapeshifter, but I couldn’t. The magic all around me was so overwhelming that I was head-blind to anything smaller.

Claudia walked confidently past the group by the first warehouse and we did our best to exude the same air of I have places to go and no time to chat , but one of the men called out, “Claudia, whatcha doing bringing a cat into our house?”

It took me a second to realize he meant Pierette, or maybe he meant me and her; no, that would be plural, cats . Claudia answered him without stopping, “Rafael knows she’s coming.”

I felt the energy react like water that had been disturbed. I knew that one of them was moving toward us. He was like a bad swimmer floundering and making too many waves or like someone trying to be sneaky in the woods but who crashed through the underbrush like a herd of noisy elephants. I didn’t question it, just moved, and I was there before the man could touch Pierette. She was facing him, too. He hadn’t snuck up on her, but it was like the energy all around us made him move slow, or me fast.