Crimson Moon - Never Cry Werewolf Part 16

CHAPTER 18.

Sasha sat across from Hunter and Silver Hawk, while Crow Shadow and Bear Shadow patrolled the perimeter of the leaders.h.i.+p cabin. She felt a hundred times better, even though the information she'd gleaned so far really wouldn't help the wolf Federations fight the charges lobbed by the Vampires.

"It's a possession demon," she said calmly.

"A what?" Hunter stood. "And it tried to attach itself to you?"

"Yeah, pretty messed up what happened in the lab." She looked at Silver Hawk. "A piece of this same thing tried to get inside Sir Rodney and Clarissa, but the Fae blasted it before it could go full-blown. We've gotta get you cleaned out, just in case, all right?"

Hunter paced away from the table, seeming like he was ready to explode from frustration.

The elderly man nodded and released a long breath. "I do not feel like myself."

"Your silver aura is so strong that the thing is struggling within it, most likely," Sasha said in a quiet tone. "Did you touch anyone?"

Silver Hawk looked at Hunter. "Just my grandson."

"Why would a strong sorceress like Lady Jung Suk join a coven?" Sir Rodney said, staring at Esmeralda's crystal ball. "It doesn't make sense."

"It does if you want to ama.s.s even greater power," she said, watching the mist begin to part within the murky globe. "She could feed, like a Vampire, on all the souls in the group, sucking their magic from them, their life force ... If she was given a body by the Vampires, as you say, beloved, then she would want to have a way to get strong enough to one day break their hold and control over her."

"That definitely fits the bill for her personality type." Sir Rodney sat back and rubbed his chin. "But how do we find her?"

"Patience .. ." Esmeralda sighed. "I'm trying to do a little remote viewing, and that requires concentration, all right?"

He held up a hand. "Sorry."

"Thank you," she said, and then gave him a s.e.xy sidelong glance. "I want amnesty forever in the sidhe for this."

"You know that can be arranged," he said, leaning in close to her. "So, when we find this very bad little witch, how do we make sure her Were Leopard doesn't escape back out into disembodied form if we simply shoot her with a silver crossbow shot or something equally drastic?"

"Oh, no," Esmeralda said quickly, now turning to face him straight-on. "You must trap her in silver so her Were Leopard spirit cannot cross that plane. She will separate from the girl's body, pulling her spirit out of it to run from the silver. So mesh and then some sort of strong bars or energy field are required to actually trap her fleeing spirit. But if you want to save the girl, you'll have to pull her away quickly and try to resuscitate her terrified spirit. But to kill a disembodied meansa""

A horrific scream left Esmeralda's throat as Sir Rodney grabbed her by the shoulders.

"What's wrong, love! What's wrong?"

Blood poured from Esmeralda's once lovely eyes, leaving dark holes in the sockets as she clawed at her face.

"I cannot see, help me, help me, she's blinded me!"

Lady Jung Suk slowly walked away from her kitchen sink and dropped the sharp knife into it with a clatter. Blood stained the white porcelain as a satisfied purr rumbled in her throat.

"That will teach you to spy on your elders," she mewed. She went outside in her garden to enjoy the late-morning sun.

Doc squinted as he peered into the microscope one last time and then sat back. "Lab a.n.a.lysis shows that the bites from victims one and two found on the first night the murders began are different from the others at the Bayou House, and the last victim, Lawrence DeWitt, wasn't bitten at all. That was more like some sort of protoplasmic depth charge, go figure. But those mauling victims prior to the ones found at the Bayou House didn't have any trace of that highly volatile demon virus resident in them. Now, why that cooler of tissue samples from there snapped, crackled, and popped like it did doesn't make sense to me. If it's the same contaminant in it as was in the bodies we brought back from Colonel Madison's first mission, then it should have reacted similarly."

"Unless an infected host, like Sasha, wasn't nearby," Bradley said, coming over to the now still samples.

"Bradley, my friend, you just may have a point."

Sasha put the cell phone down on the table and simply stared at it.

"What's wrong? What did Sir Rodney say?"

Sasha closed her eyes and ran her palms down her face. "Esmeralda, a friend of his, was attempting to locate Lady Jung Suk through opening up a remote viewing . . . she'd joined their coven so it was even easier than normal .. . and then something went wrong. Esmeralda's eyes got clawed out."

"d.a.m.n . ..," Hunter murmured.

Silver Hawk nodded. "This is the powerful sorceress I spoke of. The predator within that is extinguis.h.i.+ng the spirit of the girl's body she stole. In three days and nights, once the moon ceases to be full, the girl will float away and become an earthbound spirit. Lady Jung Suk is a being of darkness; she will never let the innocent girl find the Light. .. and she is so much stronger than that young girl."

"Rodney's going off the grid to take Esmeralda back to the sidhe for protection, but he told me what Esmeralda said about how to catch Lady Jung Suk. We owe it to Amy Chen's family to try to save their daughter, if we can." Sasha stood and went to the window.

"I know my brother is distraught about what he witnessed when he went to visit her parents while investigating," Hunter said quietly. "Shogun has not been himself since that time. His smile is slow, and it does not reach his eyes."

Sasha nodded and lifted the hair off the nape of her neck in frustration. "I almost don't care anymore that we only have shaky evidence to link the Vamps to unleas.h.i.+ng an ent.i.ty that killed two humans."

"I know how you feel, Sasha," Hunter said in a gentle tone. "According to UCE rules, they only care that the Vampires may have facilitated the embodiment of Lady Jung Suka"a treasonable offense, due to the fact that she was a criminal found guilty of crimes against the Seelie and was on the run. That would be enough to mitigate any claims they have against us, because under UCE law, thankfully, you cannot have blood on your hands and seek justice. You have to be clean. The Vampires are not."

"But they don't care about that poor girl, or even those stupid kids who thought they could bargain for immortality with the Vampires," Sasha said, waving her arms about. "Something's wrong with a system where any life or anyone is considered a second-cla.s.s citizen."

"And as such," Hunter said slowly, "the UCE will not care about a possession demon on the loose. They only care to know that it is not wolves who have been doing the killings and thus giving the supernatural community undue exposure. They will call for a demon hunt, exterminate it, and then try to do damage control."

"Those are the twin evils that I spoke of," Silver Hawk said in a faraway tone. His gaze went beyond the window to a place they couldn't reach. "One strikes at the life force of an innocent, the other strikes at the life force of a communitya"and in order to bring balance back and clear the wolf Federations, you will have to solve a dilemma that will help others more than it may help yourselves."

"Before we do anything," Sasha said, going to Silver Hawk but not touching him, "we've got to get your aura cleaned."

After days of craziness, they had at least solved the first part of the jigsaw puzzle. They now knew what it was, but had run into the brick wall of trying to figure out where it was. Making things more complicated was the fact that they had to locate the predators but couldn't immediately engage them until they figured out how to stop them.

"That's right," Hunter said, speaking to Shogun in short bursts of information. "We've got like twenty-four more hours to find Lady Jung Suk before she completely patterns over that girl's soul, but if you do locate her, you can't kill her in the conventional manner or you'll hurt the victim."

Sasha watched Hunter as he paused. Both her eyes and Silver Hawk's were on him.

"Yes," Hunter finally replied. "Just scout her location and get back to the sidhe. Sir Rodney is conferring with his top magic advisors there about how to contain and destroy both types of ent.i.ties. Esmeralda was severely injured because she wasn't clear about just how strong a force Lady Jung Suk is. So, brother, I repeat, do not engage the target. Wait for us at the sidhe."

They looked at Hunter as he disconnected the call. Crow Shadow and Bear Shadow had come into the cabin to stand at the ready for the cleansing of Silver Hawk. The elderly man stood slowly and nodded toward Hunter.

"Let us begin," he said quietly.

"They used brick dust in the lab," Sasha said, nervously glancing around.

"That will do in a pinch," Silver Hawk said. "But go to my desk, daughter, and extract the medicine box."

Sasha quickly moved to the handmade, antique roll-up desk and extracted an old silver tin.

"Bring this outside," Silver Hawk said calmly. He then walked past everyone onto the porch and down to the small clearing in front of the steps. "There is a pouch filled with silver shavings and herbs. Make a circle with this around Hunter and me, and then use the eagle feathers to draw another circle around that."

Working with unsteady hands, Sasha began to walk around the two men standing side by side in the front yard. Bear Shadow held the box; Crow Shadow held the eagle feathers. But as she neared the far side of the circle where she'd begun, nasty green ooze rose from Silver Hawk's back, flowed over his head, and tried to smother him.

Hunter grabbed his grandfather to keep him from falling to the ground while trying to yank away the gooey toxin from his nose and mouth. "Close the circle!" he shouted to Sasha. "Quickly!"

Running backward, Sasha closed the circle, trying not to focus on the men who were gagging. Crow Shadow hurriedly brought her the eagle feathers and she raced around the circle, drawing a second perimeter in the dirt. The moment the second circle was drawn, the slime rose up like a giant serpent and began to slither around their bodies. In seconds Silver Hawk had become Silver Shadow, shedding his human form to become his wolf-self. The magnificent ancient being made a stunning vertical leap to go after the slimy head of the attacking ent.i.ty before it could angrily whip around and go after his grandson.

Hunter doubled over, puked, and came up enraged, his wolf taking over his human so fast that his clothes hadn't hit the ground when he went airborne. Both wolves tackled the slime to the ground, decimating it, savaging it, until a piercing, shrill scream echoed in the glen.

The stench of sulfur made Sasha, Bear, and Crow cover their faces with their forearms. As soon as she saw the green pieces twitching like a severed worm on the ground, Sasha took a handful of silver dust and flung it toward the head; then she dusted both Silver Shadow and Hunter for good measure. Both men in the middle of the circle began chanting and walking around the slowly dying thing as it took on a dark, tar-like consistency and began to burn.

"Well done, daughter," Silver Hawk said, seeming much improved. "I will make you a shaman yet."

CHAPTER 19.

Although she had a million questions swirling around in her mind, she only had time for a few before they left North Country by way of the shadow lands. At least now she knew how wicked both predators she was tracking could be. Silver Hawk had gotten a case of the nasties by going on a spirit walk without his amulet and tangling with the thing directly in his vision. Anybody else probably wouldn't have made it, so she was very glad that Silver Hawk decided to come back to New Orleans with her and Hunter, along with Bear and Crow. For this mission, they needed excellent trackers and a serious shaman. Bradley had his brick dust, but silver shavings, ground turquoise, bits of ancestor wolf bones, and white sage herbs was like C-4 next to a cherry bomb.

She and Hunter had also learned a very valuable lesson about how to supercharge their amulets before going into a demon battle, and just the fact that they were wearing them had everything to do with why the thing had only coated them and not penetrated as deeply as it could have.

Now the task was to create a lure. There were four sets of murders to be concerned about, and the killers each had their own signature and agendas, even if those weren't fully clear to her yet.

First, they were pretty d.a.m.ned sure Lady Jung Suk had taken out the two students, Tanya Mays and Jim Batona"plus she'd hijacked poor Amy Chen's body, and injured Esmeralda just for trying to look at her. Then the second set of murders came when something really wicked went after four marines as well as four members of Ghost Finders, Inc., out at the Bayou House, leaving an eyewitness each time, possibly for shock value.

The third murder set came by way of an unknown a.s.sailant who went after the students' Vampire mentor, Ariel Beauchamp, and a few of his lair kittens. Why was anybody's guess, but with it being so close in degrees of separation to the other murders, it had to be a related hit. Death by daylight was something done by someone who knew what they were doing, because Vamps generally didn't just lie there and play dead while one broke into their mausoleums and tried to fry them with the sun.

Then, last but not least, someone or something had killed poor Lawrence DeWitta"who'd arguably deserved it, but the murder still didn't sit right with Sasha. Doc said the green goo wasn't the same demon goo that had popped out of the cooler like a jack-in-the-box ... it was more like some type of cold-water, slow-moving protoplasm, almost like cold algae. She couldn't even wrap her brain around that at the moment.

All of this notwithstanding, they were now stuck with solving four groups of murders when they'd only come down here to clear the wolf Federations of acting against the Vampires prematurely. These horrible events had nothing to do with wolves but everything to do with them. Regardless of politics, the wolf Federations had been thrust into the role of policing a supernatural community obviously gone wild.

Sasha stood in the bayou with the others waiting for Sir Rodney's archers to collect them. Frustration over the situation was clear in the group's body language and hard-set expressions. The familiar whistle in the trees couldn't come fast enough. As soon as the lithe archers appeared on high tree limbs, her group gave them a disgruntled greeting and trudged through the swamp.

It took a bit to get everyone settled in the war room. Sir Rodney was the last to appear.

"How is she?" Sasha said, monitoring the strain in Sir Rodney's expression.

He shook his head. "She will live, but she will never have her beautiful eyes again. It was a travesty ... no one as good of heart as she should have to suffer so."

"I'm sorry," Hunter said, holding Sir Rodney's gaze. "I think I can speak for the group when I say that we were all deeply saddened to hear of her tragic injury."

"Yes ...," Sasha said. "What can we do? Is there anything we can do to make her more comfortable?"

"Thank you all, but no. She has been bespelled, healed as best we can, and the rest is just a matter of time. She is sleeping peacefully now."

Everyone looked down at their clasped hands. It was Shogun who spoke first.

"The only way to give this any meaning is to not allow Lady Jung Suk to take another life. I sat with the parents of Amy Chen . .." Shogun's voice trailed off as he shook his head. "For the first time in my life, I had no words. I did not know how to help those people or to comfort them."

Sir Rodney's most senior magic advisor stepped forward and drew his wand from his billowing sleeve. "We have conferred on the matter of grave consequence," the elderly Gnome said in a wheezing rasp. "Now that we know the life force of the young girl, as well as the energy pattern of Lady Jung Suk's coven, we can find her."

"But you saw what happened to Esmeralda," Sir Rodney said, quickly. "Garth, you may be my advisor, but you are also my eldest friend . . . since my father's rule."

"Unfortunately, Esmeralda is a young witch . . . impulsive and trusting. She was not aware of how dangerous this being was because she had seen her inside the body of the young girl. But we are not so naive." He swept his arm out to indicate the group of old wizards who would work with him. "We are formidable, and have set the crystal miasma to track her within a mirrored globe. This time she will blind herself. But we must work quickly."

"What do we need to do to a.s.sist you?" Shogun asked. "This case is a matter of principle. This abomination is of my distant family line, but Lady Jung Suk is of my blood, nonetheless. As much as I want to, I cannot deny the affiliation. Therefore, after having met the Chens and felt their pain enter my spirit, I must be at the forefront of this battle."

"And I will stand with you on this, brother," Hunter said, returning Shogun's slight bow.

Murmurs of agreement from the others followed Hunter's declaration. Garth, seeming satisfied, signaled to the four Gnomes standing at the perimeter of the room, and they extracted their wands in one synchronized move. They then lifted gnarled hands to catch what dropped down from thin air and brought forward a thick silver mesh the length and width of a king-size bedsheet that looked like silver chain mail. Immediately Shogun stood and went to the far side of the room.

"This is why it is good that your brother and the Shadow Wolves present will be there for your aid. Her body must be captured by this. We can glamour a camouflage in the bayou for it, and our archers can also help drive her into it. But that is where the delicate extraction must occur."

"Yes," another advisor warned. "We must hold the spirit that flees the body in a magic charge, while strong wolves drag the girl away. Someone with healing power must tend to the girl and speak to her frightened spirit, keeping her in the silver mail so as to disallow the soul predator from trying to reenter her."

"Hunter and I are healers, as is Silver Hawk," Sasha said.

"Then let your most seasoned healer work on the girl, while your most fierce spiritual warrior undertakes perhaps the most difficult aspect of this separation." Garth let out a weary breath. "As you know, true immortals have no souls ... we have a different spirit being inside. But a human soul can call the angel Lights. That is what must happen. We can hold her as long as we can, but her disembodied spirit must be sent to the ultimate Light."

"Oh, I so can do that," Sasha said.

Hunter looked at Sasha and then at his brother. "If there needs to be one to pull the girl away from Lady Jung Suk's claws, I have that strength, and my grandfather is the most seasoned healer of our clan ... He will be able to comfort the girl and to keep her weakened spirit light from going out."

"Then what of me?" Shogun said. "I cannot go near the mesh. How can I contribute?"

"Lure her, taunt her, and speak to her through the mirrored miasma that will track her. Tell her you want to have it out once and for all.. . use the years of family hatred to bring her to the trap." Garth looked around and pointed a crooked finger. "But beware. She will not come alone. There will be plenty of battle to be had by all. She will come with her const.i.tuents, we are so sure."