Mercy Blade by Faith Hunter
To my Renaissance Man,
who plays guitar and sings me to sleep, never says no to a
challenge, and brings me chocolate
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
(in no order whatsoever)
Mike Pruette, Web guru for www.faithhunter.net and fan.
Rod Hunter, as always, for the right word when my tired brain was stymied, and for making the research trip to Louisiana so much fun.
Joyce Wright, for reading everything I write, no matter how “weird.”
Kim Harrison, Misty Massey, David B. Coe, C. E. Murphy, A. J. Hartley, Stuart Jaffe, Tamar Myers, Greg Paxton, Raven Blackwell, Christina Stiles, and all my writer friends, for being our own unofficial writers support group.
My Yahoo! fan group at www.groups.yahoo.com/group/the-enclave/.
The Puddy Tats fan group.
My cowriters at www.magicalwords.net.
Lucienne Diver, for doing what an agent does best, with grace and kindness.
Last but not least—
My editor at Roc, Jessica Wade, who has helped to sculpt the multisouled Beast in Jane.
Y’all ROCK!
CHAPTER 1
I Didn’t Know You Had a Brain
I rolled over, taking most of the covers with me as I stretched. I felt like a big, satisfied cat—well fed, well loved, and nearly purring with contentment. Beside me, still snoring softly, was Rick LaFleur, my boyfriend. Crap. I had a boyfriend. I was still trying to get used to the idea. We’d been together for more than a month, when he wasn’t disappearing into the underbelly of New Orleans investigating—well, investigating something he had yet to share with me. Or when I wasn’t tied up with vamp HQ security systems. The Master of the City had ordered a total upgrade of the grounds; I was earning my retainer.
Our jobs meant stealing moments when we could.
The relationship with Rick was still new. Still scary. I wasn’t yet sure when to push the barriers of conversation, or sharing of info, and when to hold back. Rick is a cop, so some things he can’t share; my job means keeping clients’ secrets, so ditto on the not sharing. It puts a barrier between us at times.
Worse, part of me was still fighting having him around. It wasn’t that I resisted commitment. Really. Part of me just resisted sharing my territory. I mean, I already shared my body with another soul, and having another person around so much had seriously affected my lifestyle, stealing time from the other half of my dual nature. I hadn’t shifted into Beast in two weeks, and while she had nothing but good stuff to say about my sex life, my big-cat was pacing unhappily at not being allowed out to hunt.
I sat up on the side of the bed and retied my hip-length hair into a sloppy knot at the back of my head, tucking silver-tipped stakes into the makeshift bun. For a rogue-vamp killer, it was an action similar to a cop carrying his weapon with him to the potty. Overkill, paranoid, but once it had kept him alive, so it became habit. Stakes twenty-four/seven had become my new habit.
I eased out of bed and padded naked—except for the gold-nugget necklace I never took off—to the bathroom of my tiny one-room apartment in the Appalachian Mountains. I had given my landlady notice on the place, and Rick and I had motored up from Louisiana on our bikes—his Kawasaki and my bastard Harley—rented a small truck, and cleared out my stuff. All that was left to load was the TV, the bikes themselves, and the last of my linens and clothes. Even the bed had come with the furnished apartment, and I didn’t own much except things I could carry—clothes and weapons. My job usually required a lot of travel, and I wasn’t in a position to own or keep a lot of stuff unless it helped me stay alive.
Starting to wake up, moving in the murky light with ease, I put on water for tea and turned on the coffeemaker. As I worked, I checked on the weather through the window to see a very dark, gray dawn, with lowering clouds and intermittent rain. The thermometer on the tiny porch read seventy-two, not bad for summer in the mountains, though it might hit ninety by noon. We had arrived last night, and had only today in the high country before heading back to New Orleans, where I was living for the next six months, thanks to the retainer I had accepted from the Louisiana vamp council. When that gig was over, I’d have to make a decision where to live, but the past few months had been profitable enough to make that much less worrisome than during my once-upon-a-broke-and-destitute time. And with Rick in my life, it was nice to be sticking around one place for a while.
I sat in a pink painted chair at the kitchen table, waiting as water burbled in the coffeemaker and the flames hissed under the pot. Pink was my landlady’s color, not mine. The shade had never bothered me, as I wasn’t here often enough to care one way or another about the decor, but Rick had teased me unmercifully about the frills, ruffles, tucks, buttons, and florals that Old Lady Pierson had thought appropriate for the rental space under the eaves of her house.
I clicked on the TV to check the time, muting the sound. CNN was on, showing a still shot of a good-looking man with fierce eyes, very black skin, and short-cropped hair. The words “Breaking News” lit the bar at the bottom, followed by “BBC claims existence of were-creatures.”