To Wrest Our Bodies From the Fire: The Panther Chronicles, #2

Prologue

Lizard thought that he was dreaming. There was pounding…and then, with a rush of air to the lungs, he was awake and coughing.

The smell of cordite and gunpowder assaulted him as the noise established itself as not inside his head, but just above.

A strange thumping sound, like boots kicking, coming from up on the roof, and the whump whump whump of a helicopter rotor.

Then Cotton’s voice shouted from downstairs.

Wake up! Wake up! They’re coming in! followed quickly by the bam, bam, bam and the splintering crash of wood exploding inward. The downstairs door was being battered down.

Lizard shook himself upright on the raspy carpeted floor, raking a hand across his eyes to clear them. His other hand was already on the rifle he’d fallen asleep next to. The rapid fire of automatics, punctuated with the carefully placed shots from a .45, cracked through the small building from downstairs.

Light flashed through the doorway every time a gun fired. The light was jagged, smoky. Gunfire was the only light aside from the streetlights outside the chicken-wire–reinforced windows. The skylight in the center of the room was a black rectangle of night.

What time was it? The flashing gunfire shattered the room as he scanned for movement with night-adjusted eyes.

There was the table where they put together propaganda and held meetings. The ersatz kitchen on a card table in the corner. The odd assortment of chairs.

And the sandbags forming little squares just big enough to hold a man or two near the windows, stacked three feet high. Not as well fortified as the ground floor, but protected all the same.

Was anyone else in the room? PeeWee nodded at him from his place against the far wall. Lizard could just make out his bulky shape, his ragged natural, and the handgun, point up, ready to level at the first person who dared come up.

Go, PeeWee breathed out. Lizard crawled toward the door at the top of the stairs, crouching just beside it, ready for whatever came through. The scent of discharged guns wafted up the stairs. What the hell was going on down there?

A shot ricocheted off the outside of the doorframe. Bracing his shoulder against the wood, rifle reaching around the corner, Lizard fired down the stairs. No clue if he hit anyone.

More shots came toward him; bullets lodged in the ceiling and a shard from the doorframe nicked his ear.

Lizard hissed out and shot another round at the boots coming up the stairs. There was a grunt, and a body slammed against the wall. Got something that time.

They’re shooting back! he heard. Then more boots on the floor. The stairs? Coming up? No. No. Going out. The pigs were leaving.

PeeWee’s eyes got wide at that. Lizard bet his were, too.

He exhaled. A moment of relative quiet. The house settled. Some rustling. Breathing. The ringing in his ears. The right one stung. He chanced a hand up. Blood.

Then Geronimo Pratt’s voice came from downstairs. Okay! We got a few minutes. Get what you need!

PeeWee told Lizard to hold on and ran, combat boots thumping down the wooden steps.

He came back shortly. More ammo is coming. Stay put.

Lizard itched to open the gun slats in the walls, but the light would only draw fire. It was so fucking dark still. The glowing tips of the hands on his watch face pointed to 5:20. Damn.

Peaches and Tommye thundered up the stairs, heading to the far corner where desks were set up with phones. The women dragged heavy rotary phones off the desks and crouched in the spaces underneath, shoving the chairs aside.

Immediately, they began making calls, the phone dials rasping and clicking in cycles of short, long, long, long, short, short, long.

Peaches must have been calling for backup; her low voice was urgent, words cutting in and out of Lizard’s awareness, warring with Tommye’s softer voice, somehow calm in the middle of all the mess. Tommye must’ve been talking to the news. Reporters down with the cause. Or at least holding out some sympathy for a group of Panthers getting shot out by the pigs.

The panting of his own breath sounded loud in the relative quiet, and he fought to slow his breath down. That Chinese shit Geronimo Pratt was always on about in training. Quiet the body, you quiet the mind.

That cat had given him the gun he held now at 2:30 that morning, around the time Lizard bunked down on the floor.

Just a few hours ago.

Roland Freeman ran up the stairs with fresh bullets, carrying his own rifle. The comrades downstairs would also have Molotovs and pipe bombs. Lizard knew that, because he’d made up a bunch just days before. They’d be useful if the pigs made it back into the house. Keep them out of the room. No use upstairs though, with the chicken wire in the way.

Noise started up again. Not deafening, but confusing to the mind. Helicopters whumping. Shouting men. More gunfire. The women’s voices raising as much as they dared, trying to cut through the clamor to the people on the other end of the line, without giving exact physical positions away to the pigs just outside the building.

Shifting onto his knees, Lizard got the balls of his feet under him and crouched in a run across the room toward the windows.

Once there, he struggled to reload, sweat running down his body. There was still barely any light.

Must be 5:30 in the morning and he was crouched next to a door in a room fortified with sand in the walls and sandbags around every window, a rifle slick in his hands. He didn’t want to pause to wipe them, but his grip kept slipping. Should’ve wiped the whole gun down, but there wasn’t any time.

His hands rasped down the chinos he’d slept in, one at a time, then back to the wooden stock, leaning against those bags packed tight against the walls, three feet high.

The bags that were keeping him alive.

An incendiary burst against the window, punching the glass. Lizard ducked his head on impact, to save himself a face full of glass knives. The chicken wire held. The incendiary didn’t make it through.

Someone shouted Fuck! and an explosion happened down below, in the street.

More shouting. More gunfire. Walkie-talkies crackling through the open window.

"Ssshhhhhupp!" and the clink of a projectile against chicken wire. Tear gas seeping through. Damn. One hand on his rifle, the other patted pockets. No smokes. His eyes started to sting.

Any smokes in the room? Lizard called out. PeeWee tossed a packet over. He slid out two, then tossed the packet toward the women under the desks.

Quickly breaking the cigarettes off near the base, he shoved the filters up his nose. The scent of tobacco and mint warred with the scents of gunpowder and gas.

1

Jasmine

The magic pricked at my fingertips, ready to burst out and drown someone’s ass. Any minute now.

My bare feet were practically wearing a hole into the flowered rug on the floor of my small white bedroom off Aunt Doreen’s kitchen. I paced, black rotary phone dangling from my right hand, receiver held up to my ear with my left.

There wasn’t much room for the pacing. From my door, to the single bed with its white chenille spread and pile of paisley and denim pillows, past the student desk under the window reflecting morning dark beneath its sheer white curtains.

Che Guevara looked down at me from the wall, alongside an op art poster of a gorgeous woman, whose perfectly round natural was framed by flower mandalas. Black is Beautiful, the poster read. She gazed at me from beneath the orange and yellow flowers framing her head.

I sighed. May all the Powers damn Terrance Sterling, head of the Association of Magical Arts and Sorcery, whose clipped voice was now lecturing in my ear.

Heat rose off my skin like boiling water, despite the chill of an Oakland, California, December morning. That was the sorcery, rising on my anger, wanting out. I was figuring out one of the perils of being a Water Sorcerer was that the more my powers increased, the more they played with my emotions.

I needed air.

I set the heavy black phone down on the desk, Terrance’s voice still squawking in my ear. At 6:30 on a rainy Monday morning, the little desk lamp cast a pool of light over the books and desk, forming a golden puddle that spilled over on the roses hooked into the rug.

Leaning across the narrow, white-painted wood desk, I cracked the window open, letting in the fresh scent of rain tinged with the brackish water of the bay. Rain pattered onto the glass. There was the added note of biscuits baking coming in from under the door.

That would be Aunt Doreen, baking away her fury. My stomach growled at the warm, yeasty smell of the biscuits, and the percolating coffee. I hadn’t really eaten for a couple of days. Too tense to keep much down.

You have to…

Damn. Terrance never did like to let anyone talk. Especially a member of the younger generation as he called it. Younger generation my ass. He was going to listen.

Terrance… The man was still going.

"No. You have to listen! I yelled. I don’t care how much more magical experience you have! You and the rest of your cronies up on your fine hill in that fine mansion don’t know anything about what is going on in your own backyard!"

The streets of Los Angeles felt like they had been on fire for three years. But the white folks with money seemed to neither know, nor care.

No. It can’t ‘wait until later in the day.’ You think I’m happy to be up this early, hearing that folks are getting shot to hell down there?

A particularly large crash sounded from the kitchen. Aunt Doreen must be picking up on my frustration through the door. Either that, or I said that last bit much louder than I thought.

Really, listening to Terrance go on and on about our responsibility to one another, and to the magic, and for the good of the Association itself, and how we couldn’t get involved in politics because we remembered what happened last time….

I was pretty much ready to send a strong magical zap down the phone wires and into his ear. This cat was so full of crap. My middle class upbringing be damned.

Bourgeois folks never noticed much until something exploded across the newspaper headlines as they sipped fresh squeezed orange juice from tiny curved glasses. They would tsk and turn the page as they dipped their toast into the runny yolk of a perfectly cooked egg.

I wasn’t far from that, growing up. My parents tried to shelter me from the realities of the world outside our white-picket–fenced neighborhood. Yes, I got the talk about avoiding being alone with white men, and always walking home from school with a friend.

And I knew my father sometimes had trouble getting jobs, and my mother had things she just never told me about.

But it still wasn’t the reality I saw people living with every day since the Panthers had woken me up. It was all around me here in Oakland, and now that I could see it, it was down in Watts and the parts of South Central my family just never much made it into.

The sorcery was still rising on my skin, and the scent of ocean grew stronger. So was the taste of cinnamon…Aunt Doreen again. That was the scent of her Fire. She was all up in here with me, inside my energy field, closer than usual. We only got that intertwined when something had us both upset at the same time. Usually we kept better walls around our magic. Took care to not spill over. Control the bleed.

But this was big. The cops were in the middle of raiding the LA Panther’s HQ as we spoke. I’d woken instantly, on the first ring of the phone in the kitchen, knowing it meant trouble because I’d smelled the gunpowder in my dreams.

Aunt Doreen had met me in the kitchen when I was still on the phone with my boyfriend, Jimmy, who was calling from Oakland HQ with the news from Los Angeles.

We had argued about who should call Terrance Sterling and alert the Association that there was a magical need.

He’ll listen to you, Doreen. You’re in his age group while I’m still considered wet behind the ears.

"But I’m more likely to kill that man, she said, full lips pressing almost straight into a line. You better make the call. If you can’t convince him, I’ll get on the phone and wup his behind."

So here I was, with the long phone cord snaking under my bedroom door, shut to try to muffle the increased banging from the kitchen. I was trying to convince a wealthy white man whose life had been too comfortable for too many years that people were in immediate danger a forty-minute drive from his fancy home.

Trying to convince a man who had spent too many years exercising the arts of magical diplomacy. Keeping the peace among once-hating factions who had finally agreed to work together.

We can’t be sure who is right in this situation, Jasmine. And you know the Association doesn’t involve itself in these sorts of disputes. His voice grated my spine like tin on a chalkboard.

Yeah. That was Terrance all right. Mister I once was a powerful sorcerer, but now I find it best to not get involved. A honky with too much money and power who never did a damn thing with either.

I was sick of that. It was time to force his hand.

We didn’t need diplomacy; we needed folks angry enough to throw some magic up between the tear gas and the bullets in order to save some people’s lives.

It was time to bring the Association into this thing my friends in the Party were calling a war.

And it wasn’t going to happen through Terrance Sterling.

Goodbye, Terrance. I cut the call short.

I looked at the pile of books and my notes from last night. Damn. I should have been working on a paper this morning instead of dealing with crisis. I also had a statistics test to study for.

It was the last week of classes and I couldn’t care less.

Welcome to the real world, Jasmine Jones, I said. The real world where cops shot at my friends, my boyfriend was an actual shape-shifting panther, and there was out–and-out war in the streets.

I needed my sorcery. Listening to the rain, and smelling the distant bay, I began to breathe water into my pores and exhale it out again. The power of it built inside my belly and rose until it cascaded down my arms and toward my hands.

To become a badass sorcerer, I needed to be free.

To be free, I needed this connection to the Element that had marked me at my birth.

To be a badass sorcerer, I couldn’t let Terrance and his hang-ups hang me up. That cat was too beholden to the Man. For every little thing.

The whole Association of Magical Arts and Sorcery were hip deep in the muck of the oppressors. Even though the Association always insisted we didn’t work in politics, no one in America got that much money from keeping their hands clean.

Well, the Association was just going to have to deal with Jasmine Jones.

2

Doreen

Up to her elbows in soapy hot water, Doreen scrubbed at the mixing bowls and spoons. The water scalded her hands but that felt good in a perverse way. It stoked her irritation.

That damn Terrance Sterling. She slammed the spoons into the rinse water and leaned on the sink, staring out the window into the dark and rain. The sky was barely growing lighter, the black night turned dark gray. It would likely stay that way all day because she had to go out in the weather to work at the florist shop.

The red-and-white–striped kitchen curtains framed the darkness with too much cheer. That was irritating, too. Her face looked back at her, slightly wavery. A forty-three-year-old woman with a pale blue satin wrap protecting her hair, the lines deeper around her mouth than they used to be.

She supposed she was still a good looking woman overall, and her lover, Patrice, certainly told her she was, but at the moment Doreen didn’t much look like it, or care.

The fury wasn’t leaving. It only increased. It shook inside the slender layer of fat hard-packed around her middle-aged waistline, and stomped itself out through her feet in their crocheted slippers on the linoleum floor.

Fire was Doreen’s Element, unlike her niece, who was Water, deep and strong.

She could smell salt water still rolling out under Jasmine’s door, although she must have hung up by now because Doreen no longer heard the occasional sharp cracking of the girl’s voice, like a mighty wave smacking the side of a rock.

The immovable rock that was Terrance Sterling’s perfectly groomed silver-gray head. Doreen couldn’t recall the last time she’d been so pissed off.

She wanted to blast Terrance’s head clean off his neck. But he’d probably like that. It would be proof that Doreen was using magic again.

Terrance was conveniently ignoring the major piece of magic she and Jasmine had just orchestrated days ago.

There had been a standoff with the police at DeFremary Park, where they and the community had worked together to build a dome of light, water, and fire as the Black Panthers—both shifter and human—roared and the cops’ bullets bounced off the shield.

The people were victorious that day. The police had rolled out, leaving a celebration behind in the city park.

They had proved that sorcery and politics not only mixed, but were effective.

After years away, Doreen was smack dab in the middle of magic again, training people for battle who shouldn’t have to ever fight. People like Patrice, a woman who had been a close, beloved friend for years, until the power of magic and danger had unlocked some lust beneath the love.

And Drake, a thirteen-year-old boy who should have nothing more on his mind than school and playing baseball or reading comic books.

But if they didn’t fight, what else were they going to do? Jasmine had convinced Doreen of that, at least.

Black people have to fight back, Aunt Doreen. Otherwise, they’ll make us slaves again.

She had the truth of it, there. Smart girl. And brave. Kind of like Doreen used to be before they shot her Hector in the dry, gold hills of Southern California, then chopped his gorgeous, mountain lion head off, leaving his carcass to rot.

She bowed her head. By all the magic in her soul, she couldn’t let that happen again.

Okay, Aunt Doreen. Finish your dishes and get the biscuits out the oven before they burn, Jasmine’s voice said from behind her.

Doreen pulled the plugs on the big double sink and wiped her hands on a clean terry towel while the water sucked itself down the drain.

Grabbing two red quilted hot pads, she pulled the trays out of the oven.

Jasmine was dressed already, in purple cords and an orange turtleneck that brought out the warm highlights in that beautiful face of hers. She’d thrown a black-and-purple V-neck poncho over the whole ensemble, warding off the morning chill.

Doreen was all too conscious of the fact that she was still in her blue chenille robe.

Coffee’s done, Doreen said. Pour me one, too, please.

Jasmine strode across the kitchen floor in her stocking feet—never could get the girl to wear her slippers—and took two coffee cups from the cupboard.

I need some of this in me before I start to talk, okay? Jasmine said.

Fine with me, girl. Sit yourself down. But get the jam and butter out first. And some cream.

They were both buying time so they wouldn’t start shouting, but their Elements crashed up against each other all the same. Doreen sighed and reined her Fire in a bit. When two sorcerers were upset, it was easy for things to escalate.

No need for extra drama until she knew what was what.

As she pulled out a chair at the red-topped Formica table, Doreen could tell Jasmine struggled to tamp down the blue, watery energy that favored her.

Stirring some cream into the coffee, Doreen finally spoke. What did he say?

Jasmine smeared butter onto a biscuit she’d pulled apart. Bunch of bullshit.

Oh girl, that mouth of yours.

Jasmine eyed the strawberry jam. I’m just not sure what else to call it, Doreen. That man is so full of it. It makes me angry and then makes me tired. Him and that whole damn Association can kiss my ass. Their bourgeois bullshit is gonna get more folks killed. Folks who don’t have to die. If only they’d get off their magical asses and actually help someone other than themselves for a minute.

Her hooded eyes met Doreen’s. So young. So angry. Doreen knew that feeling.

Am I going to need to talk to him, then?

"You’re gonna need to kick his ass, is what you’re gonna need to do. But I’m not