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But this woman needed her now.
Moaning a feeble protest, she dashed back to the woman’s side and dropped down to her knees. She saw the bullet hole above her heart and knew that the exit wound would be much worse—how she knew, she had no idea—but she had to stop the blood flow. She clasped her hands one over the other and pressed them over the wound. Hot blood pumped between her fingertips, the force of it startling her. Rising on her knees, she clamped down harder.
The forest rustled and shook, as if something enormous was on its way. She crouched over the woman, naked and terrified, and she began to lose it, shaking, panting.
Stay with it, she ordered herself. You’re her only hope.
But I have to get to the man.
She began to spin out of control, confronted with two equally high priorities. He was lying so still…his body can go for four to seven minutes without oxygen, and then he’s dead…
“I have to go,” she said aloud.
The woman groaned and half opened her eyes. They looked strange, unworldly, with dark irises that swallowed her pupils. Still, there was light in them, and Izzy studied the pain and fear in her gasping, grimacing expression.
I put that pain there. I shot her.
The woman’s mouth moved. “Andre,” she whispered faintly, as her eyes rolled back in her head.
The world tilted and shifted as Izzy swallowed hard. For the time being, her decision was made.
“All right, then. I won’t leave you,” Izzy promised.
Chapter 2
The gunshot and the howls startled Jean-Marc out of the murderous tirade directed at his cousin. He shifted his direction toward the sound, realizing that Isabelle had found a gun, and that she had shot one of the pack. Her victim was in bigger trouble if it was her Medusa, a versatile weapon whose barrel could hold multiple calibers of ammunition—ammo that carried not only a physical payload, but magical spells that could kill demons and stop hearts.
“Vite, Alain!”
He crashed through the underbrush, the faces of his werewolf friends racing through his mind. Leaping over a tree root, he launched his perception into the air and looked down on the bayou, searching for her, then Seeing her head bent over a prone figure. He couldn’t tell who it was; but he—or she—wore no armor. A werewolf most likely, then.
Non, non. He was sickened, enraged…and filled with horror. He had sworn to protect the werewolves of New Orleans. No one ever had, despite the centuries-old pledge of the House of the Flames “to stand between le loup-garou and le Diable Himself.” Like so much else, the Bouvards had failed to honor their word, but, when Jean-Marc arrived to serve as Regent, he had immediately put the Cajun werewolves under his personal protection.
“Alain! Damn you, hurry up!”
As he loped through the dense live oaks and cypresses, sloshing over loamy bayou earth, he prepared a fireball and clenched it in his fist like a grenade, knowing that he would never use it directly against Isabelle herself. But he might have to slow her down if she tried to shoot him with the Medusa. And if a battle-maddened, grief-stricken werewolf came after her, he knew what his choice must be there, too, although he was as close to the Cajun pack as if they were his blood family.
But she…she was his life.
And then he pushed himself into Isabelle’s mind and Saw her surroundings as she saw them. He knew where she was lurking—behind the makeshift sacrificial altar where an unsouled New Orleans police officer writhed in agony at this very moment. There was someone on the ground, lying in a pool of blood, and she was trying to staunch the wound—Ah non, it’s Caresse!
Fury roared inside him like a demon. Caresse was the mate of Andre, the alpha werewolf, and this crazed bitch had shot her. She deserved to have her neck wrung.
Do it, said the voice inside his head. Kill her.
Calme-toi, he told himself as he clenched and unclenched his fists. The blackness is on you. Calme-toi.
He knew she might shoot him. He could stop her with a burst of magical energy, but the first time he had done such a thing, he had stopped her heart.
He eased into her line of sight, muscles tensed for battle, fireball in his fist.
“Stop! Stop right there!” she ordered, grabbing her Medusa and rising just enough to rest her elbows on the trunk so she could take aim. Moonlight dappled her face as she stared him down. Her chest was heaving. She was naked, covered with blood and mud, and her hands were shaking.
“Mes amis!” Jean-Marc called, hoping to get through to any werewolf who was coming after her. “Je suis Jean-Marc! Je suis là!” My friends, I am Jean-Marc. I am here. He howled in the werewolves’ language, warning them, preparing him.
Then Andre, the wolf pack’s alpha, staggered into the clearing in his human form. He took one look at Isabelle, and Caresse bleeding beside her, and rushed toward them.
“Caresse, ma femme,” Andre said. “Ah, non. Non, non.” He took a step forward. Another, each one a lurch of traumatized outrage. “Who did this, ma petite?”
Isabelle gestured at him with her gun.
“Stop right there,” she ordered. “Both of you. And raise your hands.”
“Andre,” Jean-Marc warned, eyeing the Medusa, “keep back.”
“Jolie, what are you doing?” Andre gasped at Isabelle. “What happened?”
“Back,” she said, aiming at him. To Jean-Marc, “Get rid of that ball of fire. If you do anything, make one move, I’ll shoot him.”
“Jean-Marc, what is wrong with her? Is she bewitched?” Andre demanded. “Isabelle, it’s us.”
“I am. I’m what’s wrong with her,” Jean-Marc said dully. He was sorry he had taught her how to defend herself so well. He lifted his hands above his head. The fireball floated for a second or two, then extinguished. He heard the poor, gibbering police officer on the altar and sent out a spell to quiet the man. He could do nothing more to give him peace. If the man died without his soul, he would thrash throughout eternity in mindless anguish.
That would have been my fate, he reminded himself, if Alain and Isabelle had not intervened.
Non, a voice whispered inside his head. Your eternity would have been glorious. An unending existence of pleasure. They stopped it. They robbed you.
He shut out the insinuating whispers and focused on Isabelle. By his patron the Grey King, despite everything, she was uncannily beautiful, possessing a light that had long ago abandoned Lilliane, if it had ever been there in the first place. He had no idea why his calming spell on her had lost its potency, allowing her to run from him. Perhaps it was because she was half Bouvard and half Malchance, an unknown quantity to him.
“And now?” he asked her. “They are coming, Isabelle.”
Her chest rose and fell. Her nostrils flared. He honed in on her, intent, trying to See inside her.
I need to get to him, Isabelle thought.
Jean-Marc knew she wasn’t sending out her thoughts. Maybe she had forgotten that he could read her mind if she neglected to cloak it. But he received a clear image of Pat Kittrell’s face and absorbed Isabelle’s intense fear for his life. So something of her past had resurfaced. Perhaps that was a sign that the shock was wearing off. He tried to push Pat’s image more firmly into her mind, cloud her actions with an overwhelming urgency to get to him. He would manipulate her without compunction if it served his ends—to keep her alive and save Caresse.
“Let us tend to her,” Jean-Marc said. “Then I swear I’ll find Pat for you.” He sensed her confusion and sent out more images into her mind—Pat, struggling for breath, calling her name, Izzy. “Pat. Your lover. The man you need to save.”
She wavered. He felt her anguish, her bewilderment, as if they were physical entities tearing at his skin, his hair, and he knew that while the connection between them had weakened, it was not gone. He concentrated, trying to strengthen it with magical energy, make her trust him, make her listen.
“He doesn’t call me Isabelle,” she said tightly. “You do.” She was quiet a moment. “He calls me Izzy.”
So she had some memory, then.
“Put the gun down, Izzy,” he said, as calmly as he could manage. He glanced back down at Caresse, whose face was turning blue. His heart skipped a beat. The Shadows weren’t healers and never had been, but even he could see that Caresse had little time left. “She needs—”
His words were cut off as the world exploded.
Izzy screamed.
The mud to her left geysered upward in a plume; the bayou water to her right shot straight up as if from a broken fire hydrant. The ground beneath her feet shook so violently that she dropped to her knees. Instinctively she flattened against the mud, shouting, “Incoming! Incoming! Duck and cover!” As soon as she was stable, she made a tripod with her elbows and shot off another round with her Medusa.
Its report was soundless, but she’d hit a target: something in the darkness bellowed with pain. As if in reply, scarlet pinwheels of light blossomed above drooping cypress treetops, obliterating the moon. White and red flares peppered the landscape like dueling fireworks. She shot off more rounds, having no idea what was coming yet sure that they meant to kill her.
They who? What’s happening?
Something sizzled along the length of her body, breaking her concentration. She looked down as a catsuit and body armor appeared fully formed on her body. She yelled and batted at it, but it was on to stay, and after a couple of seconds she realized it wasn’t hurting her in any way and was preferable to being naked. It was identical to Jean-Marc’s except that on the bicep of the clinging second-skin, there was some kind of patch depicting a trio of white flames that looked very familiar.
I belong here, she thought, jerking as a layer of deep indigo light completely surrounded her. Oh, my God, is that my aura?
“Protect yourself!” Jean-Marc leaped in front of her, his back to her as he spread his legs wide and shot off rounds from an Uzi he hadn’t had before. He followed them with one of the balls of fire he could make with his hands. “Make a shield now!”
She had no idea what he was talking about, and no time to wonder about it, as an incoming blur of white light slammed into the field of blue. Panic turned her blood to ice as she caught her breath, ducked her head and pulled the trigger—realizing too late that Jean-Marc stood directly in her line of fire.
“Arête!” he yelled at her, as he dove for the mud. Landing on his belly, he rolled onto his left elbow, his face contorted in a combination of terror and fury. A ball of fire erupted from his right hand, engulfing the space between them. Heat slapped her icy face and she reflexively looped her finger around the trigger as he lobbed a second fireball. A tiny object pierced the center of the fiery globe and exploded—it was her 9 mm cartridge—and he chanted in a language she didn’t understand, speaking rapidly and firmly as he pointed his fingers at her.
Invisible hands grabbed her and propelled her into the air. Five feet above his prone body, she hovered in smoke for a few heartbeats, and then she plummeted, landing beside him in the mud. Shifting patterns of blue and black undulated in her field of vision as he flung his arm around her and pressed her to the ground.
“Don’t shoot at me!”
She smelled oranges, roses, hot metal, oil and something else—blood and death. He moved his fingers in a circle and the gun shot out of her grasp. She lunged for it as he grabbed it out of the air.
“Give that back!” she bellowed, lunging at him, slithering and sliding in the mud as she scrambled over his body and grabbed at the gun. He wrapped his free hand around her forearm, pushed himself to a standing position and dragged her toward the closest tangle of bayou undergrowth. When the catsuit and armor had appeared, so had boots; inside them, her stockinged feet were cut and bleeding. He turned to her, rage spinning in his dark, hooded eyes. His white teeth were clenched and he looked horrifically feral, more like an animal than a man. His chest began to heave, his hand to tighten around her arm. Painfully.
“Ow,” she blurted, her knees buckling.
Glaring at her like a madman, he held her upright and shook her hard. Her head snapped back and forth; blindly she batted at him, then began to kick at his shins, slipping and sliding over wet leaves and wetter earth as he kept her gun out of reach. His hard features blazed with fury and he shook her again, hard.
“You shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have let you.” He was growling the words at her. “I could just…by the Grey King…je suis fou…” He bared his teeth and cold, hard fear smacked against each vertebra in her spine like a steel mallet on ice cubes.
He’s inhuman, she thought. Werewolf. Monster.
“Jean-Marc, calme-toi,” said a voice behind them—the dark-skinned man with the dreadlocks, Alain, had appeared and was sprawled on the ground beside the woman she had shot. The other man, Andre, had fallen down beside him. “Find your center. Pull yourself out of the blackness. I need help here. Caresse is dying.”
Jean-Marc whipped around, whirling her behind him like a rag doll as Andre erupted into an eardrum-shattering barrage of howls. His face began to lengthen; his eyes, to glow golden and fierce. His backbone popped through his skin as glossy, silvery-black fur sprouted in tufts along his face, his chest, his abdomen, his thighs. His fingernails stretched into claws.
Weaving and transforming, he lurched toward Jean-Marc and her. Where a man had stood, a hunched, demonic creature covered with glossy black fur roared at her and clacked the air with its elongating jaw.
Jean-Marc remained in front of her as deep indigo surrounded her. She looked through it, as if it were a veil draped in front of her face; then wisps of black drifted across her field of vision, like tattered lace or lazing smoke. Her ears buzzed; her skin burned and tingled as if she had fallen into a snowbank. Acid flooded her mouth. Rigid with fear, she stiffened and stumbled backward.
Hide, stay away, a voice whispered urgently.
She knew she mustn’t let the blackness touch her. And yet something from deep within her urged her forward, tempted her to reach out her hand to it, let it taste of her, caress her…
It will feel wonderful, said a different voice, with velvety softness overlaid with lush desire. There is nothing in this world that compares with it…let it have you….
The tendril of black hovered at eye level between her and Jean-Marc’s back; it turned itself toward her, revealing itself: it was an ebony serpent with glittering, jet-black eyes that blinked at her as it pulled back on itself, eyes gleaming, as if to strike—
Yessssss, you are ssssomewhere near, Isssssssssabelle…
She caught her breath and leaped backward, half falling out of the indigo as energy sizzled over her shoulders and the back of her head like steam. She had moved out of the bubble. The black snake struck, smacking against the blue barrier, and vanished with a hiss.
Blinking her eyes rapidly, she watched as Jean-Marc pointed the Medusa straight into the air, telegraphing that he had it, but was not going to immediately use it. Ten feet away, the creature that had been Andre wagged its enormous head back and forth, as if in refusal. It took another lurching step forward. Its growl vibrated through Izzy’s boots.
“Andre, c’est moi,” Jean-Marc said in French. Then he himself growled, the implied threat laid over a warning. The werewolf answered, deep and angry, lowering its head as it stared at the woman lying in blood on the ground.
“Jean-Marc is trying to remind him that you didn’t mean to hurt her,” Alain translated. “And that she needs healing magic now, or she will die.”
So she’s not dead, Izzy thought with relief.
“I didn’t mean to shoot her,” she told him. “I know her, don’t I? I know all of you.” She ticked her head toward the werewolf, although she was too frightened to look directly at it. “I know him.”
“Andre has risked his life to save yours more than once,” Alain replied. “He promised to watch out for you, always. My cousin is reminding him of that now.”
“I don’t remember,” she whispered, her mouth as dry as dust. Who would want to remember any of this?
Jean-Marc kept speaking to the werewolf, even, calm, firm. Alain moved his hands over the bleeding woman, never taking his eyes off the scene as it played out before him.
“Jean-Marc, I am at a loss. We need Bouvard magic.” Alain shifted his dark eyes to Izzy. “Can you not help?”
“Non, she cannot, thanks to you,” Jean-Marc replied bitterly. “Maybe I can.”
He lowered the revolver to his side as he strode past the towering werewolf, which watched every move and kept growling, hunkering down slightly as if it were about to pounce. Jean-Marc ignored it, although Izzy had no idea how he could.
“Andre, I am attending to your mate,” Jean-Marc said in English. Then he repeated the words in French. Next, he growled. The werewolf growled back, but it remained taut, its eyes darting around, its huge teeth glistening.
Jean-Marc moved his fingers and a bandage appeared—simply appeared—out of nowhere. He placed it against the wound and turned to Andre.
“Et voilà,” he said. Then he looked up at Izzy. “I’ll make another shield for you. Stay inside this time.” He began to move his fingers again.
She shook her head as she gestured at the still-glowing layer of light, blue and ethereal. “There’s something in it. Something bad.”
“The Devourer’s taint.” He sighed heavily. Beside him, Alain steadfastly looked down, pressing his hand over the bandage. Blue light emanated from his palm. “The good news is that the 9 mm rounds must not be magical,” Jean-Marc said. “Caresse’s heart was not stopped.”
A second explosion nearly shook Izzy off her feet. A third followed immediately after. She reached out and grabbed onto a tangle of vines, remembering then that she had hit someone with her second bullet. She darted into the thick tangle to find a man dressed in a black catsuit like hers, with black Bouvard body armor and their trio of flames insignia on the breast. He was lying on his back with his eyes open.
“Jean-Marc,” she called.
He came to her side immediately, looked where she pointed and aimed his Uzi at the man. Kicking at him with his boot, he grunted, then kicked him hard. She flinched. The man did not.
“Dead.” Jean-Marc was pleased.
She fell against the tree with a sob.
“Stay calm.” His voice held no warmth. “This is a crisis situation. There are going to be casualties.”
“This man. Caresse,” she rasped.
