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I hit her low and hard, hearing a bone snap as I jolted her across the cave, claws scraping in treacly sand. The chanting vanished, swallowed as her teeth clicked together hard enough to take a chunk of tongue out. She was an old woman, and stout, and hellishly strong. Why had I never noticed before?
Because you weren't looking, Mitch. Stupid dog.
I clapped a hand over her mouth and got my knee in her midriff, opening my mouth to snarl. Strands of her gray hair came loose as she heaved and struggled, and I had to change a bit to get a mouth human enough to talk with.
"Where is my wife?" I roared, the words splitting and echoing across the cave. "You tell me or so help me I will kill you!"
I still had her mouth clamped closed. How was I going to get information out of her without her mumbling more spells?
Evans shook, her eyes glazed with shock, her leg twisted at an odd angle underneath me. Sweat stood out on her brow, great pearly drops against doughy skin.
I heard, faint and faraway, the knocking of the engine that had followed me up to Lover's Leap. It cut off, suddenly, and other sounds crept into the cave's dense wet gloom.
Little soft padding feet, and a hiss. The obsidian in the middle of the cave chuckled like wet clay tearing apart. I knew that sound—it was the noise suckers made when their prey was close and unaware.
I snapped a glance over my shoulder. Against the foxfire, little pinpricks of light showed—sucker eyes, throwing back only a small point of light since their pupils are so far shrunk. They're all but blind in anything other than almost-darkness, but their heat-sensitivity makes up for it, and a sucker can hear your pulse a mile away.
I heard the faint thud of car doors slamming as they crowded in through the lips of the cave. Some of the pinpricks halted, the shapes slumping as the suckers dropped down to all fours, turning their heads to catch the sound of prey above.
Faint on the wind came a piercing cry, one I'd know anywhere.
"Mitch! Mitchell Black! Where the hell are you?"
Kat? I looked down, and the sorcerer's eyes rolled back inside her head. They're tricky beasts, and once a sorcerer's spell goes far enough it completes itself, whether you interrupt them or not.
I rose unsteadily. A good half-dozen suckers swarmed into the cave, sniffing, probably uncertain of what to do. Without the sorcerer's will guiding them, they would mill around for a few seconds before their pack mentality reasserted itself.
More cries from up above. "Mitch! Mitch goddammit—" Choked off. Of course, if there were suckers down here there would have to be ones up there, it was one of their favorite hunting grounds. Food delivered right to their door.
This is going to be interesting. Mitch, you dumbass.
No time for thought. I shifted and launched myself toward the cave entrance, for light, for love, for Kat.
A GUNSHOT CRACKED PREDAWN HUSH. HARV TOOK HIS foot from the sucker's neck as its head exploded into ash. "One thing I've always hated about this town." He paused as Kat brought the last stake down with a convulsive movement. It sank into sucker flesh like an ax biting deep into wood, and I let up on the thing's throat as it turned to ash. "It's all the damn vampires."
The sheriff holstered his gun. Dense cotton fog was filling the valley, creeping in on little cat feet. To one side, a battered Chevy Caprice painted primer-gray stood with both driver's and passenger's doors open. Gravel ground into my knees as I slumped, breathing heavily, staring at the carnage even now dissolving into dust.
"Are you all right?" Kat dropped her stake and cupped my face in her hands, examining me. "Mitch? Talk to me. Are you okay?"
I du
Kat let go of me and sat back on her heels, sparing a glance at the drifts of dust settling in the stillness. "You were asleep, so I snuck outside to take another look at the garden. Something about that attack didn't seem quite right to me until I found this." She dug in her jeans pocket and dragged out a small leather pouch, humming as it dangled from its strap. Another fetish, probably the one Evans had used to get the suckers to jump Kat in the garden. "I heard a car and hid in the kudzu. Some man in a truck drove up, went into the house, he and Evans came out carrying something that looked an awful lot like a body. I snuck back into the house to get you, but you were gone. Then Evans came back up and sicced her sanguinant on me." A small shrug. "They were confused by the fetish, so after the fight I popped out the window and ran like hell. The truck had disappeared, you were gone, and I had a very bad feeling about it. So I hiked to that other bed-and-breakfast—the one you didn't like, remember? I pounded on the door until they opened up and had them call 911. Turns out Harvey here is an Argentum. Isn't that fu
"Hilarious." I struggled to process this. Kat was alive, sitting right in front of me, and covered in dirt, blood, mud, guck, and the dried remnants of mugwort paste. She had a scrape on her forehead, her cheek was still glaring purple, and one of her hands was bound with a dirty gauze bandage. Her T-shirt was torn, but she'd tied it together, the knot underneath her breasts, her nipples clearly visible against the thin material.
Harv's wide Sam Browne belt creaked as he lowered himself stiffly to one knee. He still moved pretty well, for an old fat man. "God have mercy on these poor bastuds. I been trying to figure out what it is with Lover's Leap for years. Kids vanish all the time, and somehow this place always seems co
"She must have learned it from someone," Kat pointed out. "Where were you, Mitch?"
"There's a cave." I swallowed dryly, my throat clicking. "Under the edge there. Something's in it. Evans is too, and some of her suckers. I think I killed her."
A few moments of absolute silence ruled Lover's Leap. Gray light strengthened in the east, and the fog tightened its grip on Cotton Crossing's points of light.
"Well, goddammit." Harv sounded disgusted. "I woulda liked to question her, son. A cave, you say?"
I wasn't thinking of arresting her, you Southern-fried ape. "Right under the edge." My hands went out, curled around Kat's shoulders. She was alive and breathing, and her blue eyes sparkled as they met mine. She looked happy enough to bust. "I'd take a few people in there with you, though. Looks like an active nest, and there's a chunk of what looks like obsidian. Evans was using it for something."
"Harv called in. There will be a few more Argentum out here by late morning. Can you believe they have to drive all the way from Richmond?"
Sweet merciful Sun. She's alive. "I am going to tan your hide," I mumbled. "Out sneaking around at night."
"I should tan yours, Fido. Going into a nest alone." But she leaned into my hands, and the next thing I knew she was in my arms, stinking of bloodsucker but under that, warm and alive and my Kat.
"I hate to interrupt." Harv hitched up his belt, his small eyes gleaming in the strengthening light. "But they's some more work to be done here, and you'd best help me do it. Then you best be on your way. I can clean this up with a little help from the Ordah, but I don't want folks noticin' you tangled up in'm."