The Warrior Vampire(11)

It wasn’t any big secret why her pod had taken up residence in California. For centuries they’d followed the caminos de la magia, invisible highways that covered the globe. Only it was magic that traveled these roads, a trail of bread crumbs called simply El Sendero that the Bororo followed in their eternal quest to protect magic and prevent it from slipping into the wrong hands. From the thousands who made up their tribe they’d divided into smaller pods that consisted of a few to several hundred Bororo and spanned the globe. Naya’s pod had been in Crescent City for almost a decade now. She had no idea how many generations it had taken before they’d wound up here. Naya’s mother and grandmother had been born in what was now Brazil. Naya could only claim a century of years and all of them had been spent in the States.

Her tribe’s history was well documented, though Naya had never been afforded the opportunity to sit down and study it. The sheets of old parchment and ancient animal skins that pre-dated her known history were locked away in a safe somewhere. The elders believed that knowledge belonged only to the worthy. And those not proven had no choice but to accept the mandates of their rulers. Which basically meant if you weren’t a tribal elder—or didn’t sport a pair of balls—you didn’t know shit. Her grandmother had told her stories, though, and she knew that after the Conquistadors had ravaged South America the tribe had traveled north from the rain forests of Brazil and then later through Central America and Mexico before they wound up in the United States and scattered into their individual pods from there.

They followed El Sendero, choosing to vanish from existence, a tribe that for all intents and purposes had become extinct. They became like the chameleon, blending in. Imitating rather than assimilating. Their native language changed as they adopted a more common Spanish, which over the past forty or so years became mostly English. Naya suspected that in a few more decades they’d probably wind up in northern and then eastern Canada, adopting whatever language the locals spoke. French, more than likely. And after that? Alaska? The Arctic? What language did the Inuit speak? Maybe the Bororo would just keep going until they’d migrated their way back to South America so they could start all over again. Her grandmother said that the goddess had given Naya a gift and that’s why magic sang to her. Whether or not any of it was actually true she didn’t know. She simply did what she was told. Just like every woman in her family had done since the beginning of time. There were days, like today, that Naya felt more like a trained hunting dog than an actual member of a family. Paul had called her to heel, and here she was.

“Dude. You were about five minutes away from getting an armed escort over here whether you wanted one or not,” Luz said as she skipped down the front steps to where Naya leaned against her car. “What in the hell are you doing out here, loca? You’re staring at the front door like you’re trying to blow the building up with your mind. Wait.” Luz grabbed Naya by the arm. “You can’t do that, can you?”

Naya laughed as she pushed herself away from the car and peeled Luz’s hand from around her forearm. “Not yet,” she said as she headed for the front steps. “But I’m working on it.”

Luz snickered beside her, an aura of lightheartedness surrounding her slight frame. Naya loved her cousin, but sometimes the girl was too much. She was still more interested in sowing her wild oats than honing her skills. “Let’s go out tonight,” she said as they reached the front door. “There’s a new club that opened in Redding I want to try and I need a wingwoman.”

“I have no desire to drive four hours just to scope out a club. Take Santi,” Naya suggested, and paused before she turned the knob. Something within her resisted every time she came here, as if urging her not to cross the threshold. “He’d be a great wingwoman. Er, man.”

“Santi?” Luz said as if Naya had asked her to go out with her father or something. “I want to give the impression that I’m unattached. Come on, Naya. You know you want to go. You’re wound so tight you look like your string’s about to snap. You could use a little play.”

Naya took a deep breath, turned the knob, and opened the door. “I live vicariously through you, Luz. You get enough play for the both of us.”

“Seriously, Cuz, you suck. You act like you’re a thousand years old already. You gotta flaunt it while you’ve got it, chica. Would it kill you to go out one freakin’ night?”

Naya stopped dead in her tracks as Paul stepped into the foyer. She looked him straight in the eye for a brief moment before averting her gaze to the floor. It killed her that tradition dictated she should lower her eyes in his presence, but the tribal elders—all male of course—had no intentions of jumping into the twenty-first century. The Bororo men weren’t without power. As shifters they could assume an animal form at will, but as far as magia was concerned, their males were impotent. For as long as their people had lived, certain Bororo females had possessed the ability to bend and manipulate magical energy. Naya and Luz were two of very few women left with that power. It made them special, revered among their people. But Paul and the other tribal elders still considered them beneath all males. And that was something that had stuck in Naya’s craw since childhood.