Huntress, Black Dawn, Witchlight Read online

  “Get out of here,” she whispered to the skinhead.

  He shut his eyes. When he spoke it was in a kind of moan. “You’ll just chase me.”

  “No.” But she understood his fear. She was a huntress. She’d chased so many people. So many humans…

  Jez shuddered violently and shut her eyes. It was as if she had suddenly seen herself in a mirror and the image was unbearable. It wasn’t Jez the proud and fierce and beautiful. It was Jez the murderer.

  I have to stop the others.

  The telepathic call she sent out was almost a scream. Everybody! This is Jez. Come to me, right now! Drop what you’re doing and come!

  She knew they’d obey—they were her gang, after all. But none of them except Morgead had enough telepathic power to answer across the distance.

  What’s wrong? he said.

  Jez stood very still. She couldn’t tell him the truth. Morgead hated humans. If he even knew what she suspected…the way he would look at her…

  He would be sickened. Not to mention that he’d undoubtedly have to kill her.

  I’ll explain later, she told him, feeling numb. I just found out—that it’s not safe to feed here.

  Then she cut the telepathic link short. She was afraid he’d sense too much of what was going on inside her.

  She stood with her arms wrapped around herself, staring between the trees. Then she glanced at the skinhead, who was still huddled in the sword fern.

  There was one last thing she had to do with him.

  Ignoring his wild flinching, she stretched out her hand. Touched him, once, on the forehead with an extended finger. A gentle, precise contact.

  “Remember…nothing,” she said. “Now go.”

  She felt the power flow out of her, wrapping itself around the skinhead’s brain, changing its chemistry, rearranging his thoughts. It was something she was very good at.

  The skinhead’s eyes went blank. Jez didn’t watch him as he began to crawl away.

  All she could think of now was getting to Uncle Bracken. He would answer her questions; he would explain. He would prove to her that none of it was true.

  He’d make everything all right.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jez burst through the door and turned immediately into the small library off the front hall. Her uncle was sitting there at his desk, surrounded by built-in bookcases. He looked up in surprise.

  “Uncle Bracken, who was my mother? How did my parents die?” It all came out in a single rush of breath. And then Jez wanted to say, “Tell me the truth,” but instead she heard herself saying wildly, “Tell me it’s not true. It’s not possible, is it? Uncle Bracken, I’m so scared.”

  Her uncle stared at her for a moment. There was shock and despair in his face. Then he bent his head and shut his eyes.

  “But how is it possible?” Jez whispered. “How am I here?” It was hours later. Dawn was tinting the window. She was sitting on the floor, back against a bookcase, where she’d collapsed, staring emptily into the distance.

  “You mean, how can a vampire-human halfbreed exist? I don’t know. Your parents never knew. They never expected to have children.” Uncle Bracken ran both hands through his hair, head down. “They didn’t even realize you could live as a vampire. Your father brought you to me because he was dying and I was the only person he could trust. He knew I wouldn’t turn you over to the Night World elders.”

  “Maybe you should have,” Jez whispered.

  Uncle Bracken went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “You lived without blood then. You looked like a human child. I don’t know what made me try to see if you could learn how to feed. I brought you a rabbit and bit it for you and let you smell the blood.” He gave a short laugh of reminiscence. “And your little teeth sharpened right up and you knew what to do. That was when I knew you were a true Redfern.”

  “But I’m not.” Jez heard the words as if someone else was speaking them from a distance. “I’m not even a Night Person. I’m vermin.”

  Uncle Bracken let go of his hair and looked at her. His eyes, normally the same silvery-blue as Jez’s, were burning with a pure silver flame. “Your mother was a good woman,” he said harshly. “Your father gave up everything to be with her. She wasn’t vermin.”

  Jez looked away, but she wasn’t ashamed. She was numb. She felt nothing except a vast emptiness inside her, stretching infinitely in all directions.

  And that was good. She never wanted to feel again. Everything she’d felt in her life—everything she could remember—had been a lie.

  She wasn’t a huntress, a predator fulfilling her place in the scheme of things by chasing down her lawful prey. She was a murderer. She was a monster.

  “I can’t stay here anymore,” she said.

  Uncle Bracken winced. “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He let out his breath and spoke slowly and sadly. “I have an idea.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Rule Number One of living with humans. Always wash the blood off before coming in the house.

  Jez stood at the outdoor faucet, icy-cold water splashing over her hands. She was scrubbing—carefully—a long, slim dagger made of split bamboo, with a cutting edge as sharp as glass. When it was clean, she slipped it into her right knee-high boot. Then she daubed water over several stains on her T-shirt and jeans and scrubbed them with a fingernail. Finally she whipped out a pocket mirror and examined her face critically.

  The girl who looked back didn’t much resemble the wild, laughing huntress who had leaped from tree to tree in Muir Woods. Oh, the features were the same; the height of cheekbone, the curve of chin. They had even fined out a bit because she was a year older. The red flag of hair was the same, too, although now it was pulled back in an attempt to tame its fiery disorder. The difference was in the expression, which was sadder and wiser than Jez had ever imagined she could be, and in the eyes.

  The eyes weren’t as silvery as they had been, not as dangerously beautiful. But that was only to be expected. She had discovered that she didn’t need to drink blood as long as she didn’t use her vampire powers. Human food kept her alive—and made her look more human.

  One other thing about the eyes. They were scarily vulnerable, even to Jez. No matter how she tried to make them hard and menacing, they had the wounded look of a deer that knows it’s going to die and accepts it. Sometimes she wondered if that was an omen.

  Well. No blood on her face. She shoved the mirror back in her pocket. She was mostly presentable, if extremely late for dinner. She turned the faucet off and headed for the back door of the low, sweeping ranch house.

  Everyone looked up as she came in.

  The family was in the kitchen, eating at the oak table with the white trim, under the bright fluorescent light. The TV was blaring cheerfully from the family room. Uncle Jim, her mother’s brother, was munching tacos and leafing through the mail. He had red hair darker than Jez’s and a long face that looked almost as medieval as Jez’s mother’s had. He was usually off in a gentle, worried dream somewhere. Now he waved an envelope at Jez and gazed at her reproachfully, but he couldn’t say anything because his mouth was full.

  Aunt Nanami was on the phone, drinking a diet Coke. She was small, with dark shiny hair and eyes that turned to crescents when she smiled. She opened her mouth and frowned at Jez, but couldn’t say anything, either.

  Ricky, who was ten, had carroty hair and expressive eyebrows. He gave Jez a big smile that showed chewed-up taco in his mouth and said, “Hi!”

  Jez smiled back. No matter what she did, Ricky was there for her.

  Claire, who was Jez’s age, was sitting primly, eating bits of taco with her fork. She looked like a smaller version of Aunt Nan, but with a very sour expression.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “We waited dinner almost an hour for you and you never even called.”

  “Sorry,” Jez said, looking at all of them. It was such an incredibly normal family scene, so completely typical, and
it struck her to the heart.

  It was over a year since she had walked out of the Night World to find these people, her mother’s relatives. It was eleven and a half months since Uncle Jim had taken her in, not knowing anything about her except that she was his orphaned niece and that her father’s family couldn’t handle her anymore and had given up on her. All these months, she had lived with the Goddard family—and she still didn’t fit in.

  She could look human, she could act human, but she couldn’t be human.

  Just as Uncle Jim swallowed and got his mouth clear to speak to her, she said, “I’m not hungry. I think I’ll just go do my homework.”

  Uncle Jim called, “Wait a minute,” after her, but it was Claire who slammed down her napkin and actually followed Jez through the hall to the other side of the house.

  “What do you mean, ‘Sorry’? You do this every day. You’re always disappearing; half the time you stay out until after midnight, and then you don’t even have an explanation.”

  “Yeah, I know, Claire.” Jez answered without looking back. “I’ll try to do better.”

  “You say that every time. And every time it’s exactly the same. Don’t you realize that my parents worry about you? Don’t you even care?”

  “Yes, I care, Claire.”

  “You don’t act like it. You act like rules don’t apply to you. And you say sorry, but you’re just going to do it again.”

  Jez had to keep herself from turning around and snapping at her cousin. She liked everyone else in the family, but Claire was a royal pain.

  Worse, she was a shrewd royal pain. And she was right; Jez was going to do it again, and there was no way she could explain.

  The thing was, vampire hunters have to keep weird hours.

  When you’re on the trail of a vampire-and-shapeshifter killing team, as Jez had been this evening, chasing them through the slums of Oakland, trying to get them cornered in some crack house where there aren’t little kids to get hurt, you don’t think about missing dinner. You don’t stop in the middle of staking the undead to phone home.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have become a vampire hunter, Jez thought. But it’s a little late to change now, and somebody’s got to protect these stupid—these innocent humans from the Night World.

  Oh, well.

  She’d reached the door of her bedroom. Instead of yelling at her cousin, she simply half turned and said, “Why don’t you go work on your Web page, Claire?” Then she opened the door and glanced inside.

  And froze.

  Her room, which she had left in military neatness, was a shambles. The window was wide open. Papers and clothes were scattered across the floor. And there was a very large ghoul standing at the foot of the bed.

  The ghoul opened its mouth menacingly at Jez.

  “Oh, very funny,” Claire was saying, right behind her. “Maybe I should help you with your homework. I hear you’re not doing so great in chemistry—”

  Jez moved fast, stepping nimbly inside the door and slamming it in Claire’s face, pressing the little knob in the handle to lock it.

  “Hey!” Now Claire sounded really mad. “That’s rude!”

  “Uh, sorry, Claire!” Jez faced the ghoul. What was it doing here? If it had followed her home, she was in bad trouble. That meant the Night World knew where she was. “You know, Claire, I think I really need to be alone for a little while—I can’t talk and do my homework.” She took a step toward the creature, watching its reaction.

  Ghouls were semi-vampires. They were what happened to a human who was bled out but didn’t get quite enough vampire blood in exchange to become a true vampire. They were undead but rotting. They had very little mind, and only one idea in the world: to drink blood, which they usually did by eating as much of a human body as possible. They liked hearts.

  This ghoul was a new one, about two weeks dead. It was male and looked as if it had been a bodybuilder, although by now it wasn’t so much buff as puffed. Its body was swollen with the gas of decomposition. Its tongue and eyes were protruding, its cheeks were chipmunklike, and bloody fluid was leaking from its nose.

  And of course it didn’t smell good.

  As Jez edged closer, she suddenly realized that the ghoul wasn’t alone. She could now see around the foot of the bed, and there was a boy lying on the carpet, apparently unconscious. The boy had light hair and rumpled clothes, but Jez couldn’t see his face. The ghoul was stooping over him, reaching for him with sausage-shaped fingers.

  “I don’t think so,” Jez told it softly. She could feel a dangerous smile settling on her face. She reached into her right boot and pulled out the dagger.

  “What did you say?” Claire shouted from the other side of the door.

  “Nothing, Claire. Just getting out my homework.” Jez jumped onto the bed. The ghoul was very big—she needed all the height she could get.

  The ghoul turned to face her, its lackluster bug-eyes on the dagger. It made a little hissing sound around its swollen tongue. Fortunately that was all the noise it could make.

  Claire was rattling the door. “Did you lock this? What are you doing in there?”

  “Just studying, Claire. Go away.” Jez snapped a foot toward the ghoul, catching it under the chin. She needed to stun it and stake it fast. Ghouls weren’t smart, but like the Energizer Bunny they kept going and going. This one could eat the entire Goddard family tonight and still be hungry at dawn.

  The ghoul hit the wall opposite the bed. Jez jumped down, putting herself between it and the boy on the floor.

  “What was that noise?” Claire yelled.

  “I dropped a book.”

  The ghoul swung. Jez ducked. There were giant blisters on its arms, the brownish color of old blood.

  It rushed her, trying to slam her against the chest of drawers. Jez flung herself backward, but she didn’t have much room to maneuver. It caught her in the stomach with an elbow, a jarring blow.

  Jez wouldn’t let herself double over. She twisted and helped the ghoul in the direction it was already going, giving it impetus with her foot. It smacked into the window seat, facedown.

  “What is going on in there?”

  “Just looking for something.” Jez moved before the ghoul could recover, jumping to straddle its legs. She grabbed its hair—not a good idea; it came off in clumps in her hand. Kneeling on it to keep it still, she raised the slim bamboo knife high and brought it down hard.

  There was a puncturing sound and a terrible smell. The knife had penetrated just under the shoulder blade, six inches into the heart.

  The ghoul convulsed once and stopped moving.

  Claire’s voice came piercingly from behind the closed door. “Mom! She’s doing something in there!”

  Then Aunt Nan’s voice: “Jez, are you all right?”

  Jez stood, pulling her bamboo dagger out, wiping it on the ghoul’s shirt. “I’m just having a little trouble finding a ruler….” The ghoul was in a perfect position. She put her arms around its waist, ignoring the feeling of skin slipping loose under her fingers, and heaved it up onto the window seat. There weren’t many human girls who could have picked up almost two hundred pounds of dead weight, and even Jez ended up a little breathless. She gave the ghoul a shove, rolling it over until it reached the open window, then she stuffed and maneuvered it out. It fell heavily into a bed of impatiens, squashing the flowers.

  Good. She’d haul it away later tonight and dispose of it.

  Jez caught her breath, brushed off her hands, and closed the window. She drew the curtains shut, then turned. The fair-haired boy was lying perfectly still. Jez touched his back gently, saw that he was breathing.

  The door rattled and Claire’s voice rose hysterically. “Mom, do you smell that smell?”

  Aunt Nan called, “Jez!”

  “Coming!” Jez glanced around the room. She needed something…there. The bed.

  Grabbing a handful of material near the head of the bed, she flipped comforter, blankets and sheets over so they trai
led off the foot, completely covering the boy. She tossed a couple of pillows on top of the pile for good measure, then grabbed a ruler off the desk. Then she opened the door, leaned against the door frame casually, and summoned her brightest smile.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  Claire and Aunt Nan just stared at her.

  Claire looked like a rumpled, angry kitten. The fine dark hair that framed her face was ruffled; she was breathing hard, and her almond-shaped eyes were flashing sparks. Aunt Nan looked more worried and dismayed.

  “Are you okay?” she said, leaning in slightly to try and get a look at Jez’s room. “We heard a lot of noise.”

  And you’d have heard more earlier if you hadn’t been watching TV. “I’m fine. I’m great. You know how it is when you can’t find something.” Jez lifted the ruler. Then she stepped back and opened the door farther.

  Aunt Nan’s eyes widened as she took in the mess. “Jez…this does not happen when you can’t find a ruler. This looks like Claire’s room.”

  Claire made a choked sound of indignation. “It does not. My room’s never been this bad. And what’s that smell?” She slipped by Aunt Nan and advanced on Jez, who sidestepped to keep her from getting to the pile of blankets.

  Claire stopped dead anyway, her face wrinkling. She put a hand to cover her nose and mouth. “It’s you,” she said, pointing at Jez. “You smell like that.”

  “Sorry.” It was true; what with all the contact she’d had with the ghoul, and the dirty knife in her boot, she was pretty ripe. “I think I stepped in something on the way home.”

  “I didn’t smell anything when you came in,” Claire said suspiciously.

  “And that’s another thing,” Aunt Nan said. She had been glancing around the room, but there was nothing suspicious to see except the unusual clutter—the curtains hung motionless over the shut window; the pile of bedding on the floor was still. Now she turned to face Jez again. “You didn’t call to say you were going to miss dinner again. I need to know where you go after school, Jez. I need to know when you’re going to be out late. It’s common courtesy.”