Free Easy Pickings by Faith Hunter, Ce Murphy Page B

problems and questions we had right now, how Jane made a living wasn’t one of them. What was an important question, though, was, “How?”
    “How what?” Jane and Laz both looked at me, Jane with the spoon still pointed accusingly at Serena.
    “How is she coming with us? Our car got kind of blown up—” A fact which would give me palpitations if I thought about it, since we’d stolen the damned car in the first place, which meant we’d blown up somebody else’s vehicle. “—and I didn’t see another one anywhere around her house.”
    Lazarus stood, put his hands together in front of his chest, and bowed his head. “Dat,” he said, “dat I can help wit’.”
    ***
    “Eart’,” he said when we were all outside. “It all connected, whether we stand in d’dirt and d’swamps or wet’er we walk d’hard concrete streets of d’city. Take off you shoes.”
    Serena already wasn’t wearing any, and Laz had taken his off when we came outdoors. His were super-shiny black patent leather with buckles and platform heels, not that a man his size needed any more height. I toed my soggy tennies off and wondered how his shoes had come through the swamp fight unscathed. Earth magic, I guessed. Jane pulled her boots off, picked them up, and glowered at them like boot leather was the next thing on her menu. I sympathized: shapeshifting took a lot of energy. It hadn’t been that long ago I’d run through so many shifts that my body had started cannibalizing itself to survive. Just thinking about it made me hungry.
    Once we were unshod, Laz gave a satisfied nod and extended his hands. Serena took one without hesitation. Jane and I looked between each other, our shoes, and the offered hands. Then we both scrambled to tie laces together and throw them over our shoulders before joining hands, me with Laz, Jane with Serena and me.
    Instinct made me edge about three-quarters of a step to the right. Everybody else shifted accordingly, and Laz gave me a startled flash of approval. I shrugged, pleased, and Jane muttered, “What?”
    “Power circle. We were misaligned to the cardinal directions, now we’re not.”
    She went, “Huh,” which was mostly a motion of her eyebrows, and we both looked back at Laz.
    “Eart’, it all de same,” he said again. “We here, we need to be dere. De eart’, it carry us.”
    I triggered the Sight, and was glad I did.
    Rich brown power roared up from the ground we stood on, rushing over Lazarus like a mud bath. It coated him head to toe, all the variation of the swamp. Mud bugs, earthworms, green growing muck, everything that had a spark of life glittered gold within the rising power until they became stars in a blacked-out, man-shaped sky. Lazarus still held my hand, but at the same time he was gone, a cut-away door rife with mystical energy.
    Serena fearlessly stepped through the portal that Lazarus had become, and because she held our hands, we followed.
    I expected it to be cold. The space between stars was, after all, but no: traversing the world through the Lazarus-gate was warm, like drifting in an equatorial sea. Life pulsed within him, small bumps and waves of passion sparking and fading as we passed them by. In the months since my shamanic powers had awakened, I’d rarely felt such serenity—and when I had, it had been in the moments where the power of many adepts came together to create a larger whole. Lazarus, I thought with a grin, contained the power of multitudes.
    A moment later the journey ended and we stepped onto the sidewalk of St. Louis Street in front of Vamp Mojo. Laz came through himself last. Jane and I sat down to haul our shoes on, and I took half a second to notice we were now all opposite the cardinal points where we’d been.
    Neither of us had our shoes tied when the front doors of Vamp Mojo blew open, releasing a heavy, muggy scent of blood and sex. For a gut-freezing moment, all my nightmares came calling.
    Witches and werewolves and something that looked