Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(70)

Time spat and shook through me and returned to normal. I watched carefully and the magics vanished. If I hadn’t been using Beast-sight and my own skinwalker abilities, I’d never have seen it at all.

“Joses, son of Judas Iscariot,” I said, pronouncing it Yo-sace, son of Ioudas Issachar, as he had himself two thousand years ago, when he and his brother took the crosses of Golgotha and tried to bring their father, Judas, the betrayer, back to life. “Joseph Santana.”

He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. His heart—not that he had one anymore, since I’d ripped it out of his chest—didn’t beat. I had no idea how he was healing except that his body might truly be immortal. Even without a heart, which I had given to the witches. I needed to call Jodi and see if the heart was still fresh and healthy. If the heart hadn’t begun decomp, that meant that I could take the SOD’s head and the pieces would still live. Which would be freaky.

I thought about the smell of the blood in the blood bottle. And the pink thread on the dog-fanged revenants. Someone had used immortal blood on the head and neck of the dead vamps when they were reassembled for funerals. And they healed. Sort of. Enough to come out of the graves when called. That was why so many were buried in human graveyards and not in the vamp cemetery on the far side of the Mississippi River with the other vamps.

If a sleeper agent had gotten some of that blood to the SOD at any point in the last months, that might be why the Son of Darkness was healing. Callan. Fernand. Amitee. Any of them might have gotten down here. I leaned and sniffed. Caught the stench of the mixed blood from the blood bottle. It still smelled fresh, which never happened with vamp blood until now. I traced the scent with my nose. It had been sprinkled all over the SOD.

This. This was why they had attacked HQ. To get down to sub-five and put blood on the heartless bag of bones.

I turned and walked back up the stairways and walkways and tunnels and passageways and back to the front entrance. Time flipped back and forth between stopped and normal as I walked through it all until I found Wrassler and Derek in conversation and told them what I had discovered. “Get a hose and wash him off,” I said. “It’s probably too late but it’s marginally better than nothing. And find and secure Callan and the Marchands. They’re in this up to their fangs.” When neither moved, I said, “Orders of the Enforcer,” which let them off the hook if there were negative repercussions from my decisions.

“I’ll hose off Joseph Santana,” Wrassler said, speaking of the Son of Darkness. “You handle the detainees.” Derek nodded and turned on a heel without speaking. Wrassler raised his eyebrows and looked at me. “Why does he hate you?”

I shrugged. “My winning personality?”

Wrassler moved off, chuckling and muttering, “Winning personality. Yeah. Sure.”

In the foyer, the cops were still questioning vamps, trying to get in the last interviews before dawn hit and the younger vamps became comatose and the older ones simply walked away. It would be hours before they talked to me, and I was done waiting. NOPD knew where I lived. They could come visit me there. I waved to Eli and walked out the front door.

There was a vamp central SUV parked in the big parking area with the key fob under the mat. I started the vehicle, flipped on the wipers, and drove home. I let my mind rove and wander as I drove, not trying to think anything in particular, not trying to make connections or deduce anything at all. Just letting myself meander internally. I had a bad feeling about a lot of things I had seen tonight and they seemed to lead nowhere. Which meant that they had to have a connection.

I pulled in an empty spot in front of the house and stopped. The lightning hit again, far off this time, and I saw the green sparking glow in my bedroom. The initial traces of understanding washed through me as all the little pieces began to line up for inspection.

The first time I had seen the magical thing called le breloque had been in a storm. A magical storm. A storm god, an Anzu, wanted it. There were magical detonators on normal bombs. Red magics on the snake and on the SOD. Mixed blood on the VIP—very important prisoner. All the Europeans knew we had him, and maybe they didn’t know he was heartless. Heartless. Funny me. Except it wasn’t amusing at all. After seeing revenants rise, I had to concede that the blood might heal the bag of bones. Maybe totally.

Whatever was going on was tied to the SOD, le breloque, the magical storm, the arcenciels trapped in the magical storm, and the European vamps. Leo said he knew they hadn’t come ashore en masse. But they were tied in with everything that was going on, and Leo had to know that. Sooo. Leo knew what was going on and he was letting it happen. Or . . . He had thought he knew. And then Grégoire was taken. Yeah. That.

I turned off the vehicle, got out, and looked up, seeing only cloud-to-cloud lightning. I pulled on Beast’s night vision, however, and I saw a great deal more. Arcenciels dancing in the lightning, not dropping into no-time. Three of them. As if they were trapped in real time.

I walked inside. Wrung out and replaced the sponges by the door. And opened my bedroom door. On my small table was le breloque, glowing green, throwing green sparks. Red motes raced through the green. The top part of the corona was composed of laurel leaves. The bottom was a gold ring with the odd symbols on it. Tonight I had seen a similar gold circlet on the head of a king, his hands all over Katie Fonteneau, Leo’s heir.

Looking down, I saw the red motes and the silver-gray motes of my skinwalker energies inside me. Magic. Magic that had been waiting to find its proper shape and form. Waiting to awaken. The long game. I opened the small footstool and stood on the top rung so I could see the box of magical stuff. It was sparking too, the same colors as the corona that had once been a crown on a king’s head. Carefully, I took the box off the shelf and placed it on the foot of the bed. I opened the box. Inside were magical trinkets, including a particular gem. The Glob had been part of the blood-magic spell that I had interrupted the night the red motes had entered me. Now the device was attuned to me, somehow, something I had known since it had been transformed inside my own lightning-scorched flesh. Lightning had changed it. Changed me.