Son of the Shadows

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.