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Delilah is our middle sister. A two-faced werecat, her natural Were form is that of a gorgeous golden tabby, long hair with billowing pantaloons. She’s not too good at controlling her shifting in tabby cat form—again the half-human thing. But the Autumn Lord turned her into one of his Death Maidens and she developed a secondary ability to transform into a black panther. The Autumn Lord has decreed that she will one day bear his living child, via proxy father by her lover and fiancé, Shade, who is half–shadow dragon, half-Stradolan—or shadow walker.
Delilah had a twin. Our sister Arial died at birth—we never knew about her till after we moved over ES. Arial lives at Haseofon, the temple of the Death Maidens, emerging only in spirit leopard form. She drops by to help us on occasion, mostly during battles. Delilah was very naïve for a long time, but living Earthside has cured her of that and she’s growing up strong and capable.
And then there’s me, the youngest. Before I was turned into a vampire, I was a jian-tu, an acrobat and spy for the YIA. Hampered by my mixed-breed heritage, I lost control at a crucial moment and landed—literally—in the middle of a nest of vampires. Meaning I fell from my hidey-hole in the cavern roof. Dredge, the worst vamp in OW history, caught me. He tortured and raped me, then turned me. After that, he sent me home, a maddened, crazed creature, to destroy my family.
Luckily, Camille had her wits about her and stopped my attack. The YIA, embarrassed by their fuck-up—they’d sent me in without backup—decided to rehabilitate me rather than stake me. So here I am.
When we were sent Earthside, we thought we’d be pulling a long, leisurely sabbatical, exiled to an out-of-the-way pit stop where we couldn’t fuck up. Little did we know that Shadow Wing, Demon Lord of the Subterranean Realms, was planning a coup on Earth and Otherworld.
He aims to raze both ES and OW to the ground and make them his private stomping grounds. And he’s leading the war on two fronts. Telazhar, his necromancer general in Otherworld, is decimating the land as he leads his army of sorcerers in a war to rival the Scorching Wars of millennia ago. And over here, well… we’re not sure what Shadow Wing’s next step is. But I’m pretty sure we’re going to find out before long.
Eisha clutched her purse as she crossed to my side. The sheets of rain had became a torrential downfall, and she was shivering.
“Do you mind if I sit in your car for a moment? I need to call a friend.”
Shrugging, I nodded. “Get in. It’s cold and you’re going to freeze your ass off while we wait for the cops to get here.” I slid back into the driver’s seat, pushing the airbag out of the way. She did the same on the passenger’s side. I wasn’t sure what to say next. I was already being sued once, and I didn’t relish any more legal problems. And she really didn’t seem all that friendly.
“So you’re from Otherworld? Whereabouts?”
She blinked. “I guess you would recognize that I am. I’ve been over here for about eighteen months. I’m originally from Ceredream. I’m here studying comparative Earthside cultures.”
A lot of budding anthropologists from OW came over to study ES cultures. It was a convenient way to take a long vacation to an exotic land and get educational credit for it.
The arrival of a police cruiser—from the FH-CSI, since I’d called them—saved me from any more small talk. I hurried out of the car, telling Eisha to stay where she was. No use both of us getting soaked through, and she would feel the cold more than I. The officer was Kane—one I recognized—and I ran down what had happened.
“I need to talk to the other driver next.” Kane finished taking my statement. As he tucked away his notebook, the tow truck rolled up.
After pointing out Eisha’s vehicle, we headed back to my car, but Eisha was nowhere in sight.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“She was right here a few minutes ago.” I glanced around. She wasn’t standing in the middle of the street, nor was she near her own car. In fact, there was no sign of her at all.
“Well, fuck. I don’t know. She didn’t seem hurt—where would she wander off to?” A thought struck me. “Maybe she went back to the house—she barreled out of that driveway there.”
I waited in my Jag, and Kane sent his partner up to see if she had returned to the dimly lit house at the top of the drive. A few minutes later, the officer was back. “Nobody there knows who you’re talking about. They said they never had company tonight, and they don’t know anyone by that name, nor anybody who owns an SUV like hers.”
Confused, and more than a little suspicious, we hunted around the area for a while. Fifteen minutes later, we realized that she was nowhere in sight—she’d just vanished. Maybe she’d gone into the woods on the side of the road, but there was no sign of her whatsoever.
Kane finally shook his head. “I’ll get a search party out here. Maybe she was hurt… but something tells me she’s just vanished. Can you still drive your car?”
I tried the ignition and the Jag started up. “Yeah. I lucked out. I think most of my damage is superficial. And I’m not far from home so I’ll just head there and have my sisters take it to the mechanic in the morning.”
“I’ll let you know if we find her. Meanwhile, call her insurance agent and file a claim, I suppose. From what you say, I’m writing it up that she was at fault. But be careful on the way home. We’re in a storm cycle, I think, and it’s supposed to rain like this for several days.”
He motioned for the tow truck to haul Eisha’s SUV off, as I fastened my seat belt. After a moment’s hesitation, I found a knife in my glove compartment. I paused—could they even stuff the airbag back in? Would it ever work again or did they need to replace it? If I sliced through the bag, they’d have to reinstall it full. I frowned, staring at the material that was in the way of my pedals.
Fuck it. I didn’t know enough about cars to make a good guess, so I finally just sawed off the material and dumped it into the backseat. As I pulled out onto the street, my car rattled and clunked, but I wasn’t far from home and I made it safely.
Pulling into the driveway, I turned off the ignition and hoisted my purse over my shoulder. The three-story Victorian we called home loomed against the storm clouds, but it was a welcoming sight. A not-so-much haunted house, even though we were nearing Halloween and Samhain.
So much had changed in the past week… in the past few years… but this was my home. Here, I lived with my wife, my sisters, and their loves, and several of our friends. Come to think of it, I barely thought about life back in Otherworld anymore. I’d come to accept Seattle as home base, and I had the feeling that—given the chance to return to OW—it wouldn’t be such an easy choice.
The past week had been anything but easy.
First, we’d been asked to help out on a case for a couple friends of mine. Tad and Albert, two vampires who worked at Microsoft on the night shift, were worried about Violet, their friend and coworker who had disappeared. We’d started the investigation thinking she’d just skipped town, but had all too quickly figured out that she’d been abducted by a sex slave operation run by Lowestar Radcliffe—a daemon. It was complicated, and involved a lot of hidden factors still, but the upshot was, Grandmother Coyote wanted the daemons stopped and we were in charge of doing so.
Before we could immerse ourselves in the case, my bar had burned down, and we’d been caught in the siege of Elqaneve. The former was heartrending, the latter—traumatic beyond any scope we’d yet experienced. Tens of thousands died as the sentient storm attacked the city, pretty much decimating it. And we’d been there for the throw down. I’d lucked out and been rescued before I could see what was going down in the city proper, but Delilah and Camille had been forced to make their way through the attacks, and the destruction they’d witnessed seemed to have scarred them both heavily.
