by Faith Hunter
Later. I’d have to deal with my life later. At the thought, something inside me, something bleeding and broken, went cold. Hard. A bloody stone in the dark of my soul home.
Beast? I asked again.
She didn’t answer, but I felt her breathing and got a sense of awareness. Pain. Patience. Cat feelings that meant leave me alone. I no longer had time to deal with my other soul like I should, so I withdrew from her. For now.
I strode out of my room, catching sight of myself in the full-length mirror. I looked long, lean, and mean. Good. I felt mean. Though I didn’t know whom I was mad at, other than myself and Leo. Not yet. The three of us met in the foyer, where Alex handed us each a tablet. There were photos on the tablets, crime scene photos. “Oh yeah,” I muttered, my thumb taking me through them fast. “Death by vamp.” And that thing inside me, something broken and wounded, began to wail.
* * *
When I first came to New Orleans, I had thought there were only a few parts to the town. I had learned since that there were names to every part of the place, like the French Quarter, the Warehouse District, the Garden District, and Marigny, to name just a very few.
Marigny was a slice of New Orleans–style homes, but with large swathes of it still run-down and in need of rehabbing. Lots of buildings were still vacant after Katrina, so many years ago, but there was an air of things starting to get better, lots of homes and businesses showing fresh paint, new signs, the buildings and homes a mishmash of one-story shotgun houses, double shotgun houses (houses with two front doors, one on either side of the front façade of the house, with windows centered between), Creole cottages, two-story buildings that had been subdivided into apartments, with galleries—not porches, I had learned—on both floors, with modern (and uglier) buildings interspersed.
Eli drove around the congested area, which let us get a handle on how big a space had been cordoned off. Big. Entire blocks of the city. Fifty-two humans. Dead. Because of my decision to let Joses live. Eli pulled in at Washington Square Park, away from the lights, noise, crowds of people, emergency vehicles, and media vans. It was still night when he parked, but I could feel dawn coming.
Sitting in the dark, he said, “The average human has five and a half quarts of blood in him. Fifty-two humans equals two hundred eighty-six quarts.” He stared at me through the dark. “If they were all drained, then there is no way one vampire alone drained fifty-two humans. If it’s Bar-Judas, he wasn’t working alone.”
I hadn’t done the math, but he was right. That much blood meant multiple vamps in a feeding frenzy. I hadn’t gotten the impression of multiple vamps with loss of control from the still shots the Kid had brought up. “So who did he find to follow him,” I asked, “this soon after getting free? When he left his rescuers dead on the floor at HQ?”
Eli said, “The vamp in the cloak.”
I rubbed my arm, but nothing came to me. I went over the vamps I’d seen in the time after the fight with the Son of Darkness. Edmund. Dominique. Grégoire, looking both pensive and worried. And sniffing the air, which was odd but not unexpected. Leo. Others. No cloak. No enemy I recognized.
The blue and red lights were out of sight, but traffic had been blocked off and the locals were out in force. The walk would give us a sense of the emotional integrity of the crowd. We got out and I closed my eyes, sniffing the air. Weed, beer, liquor, sweat, Mexican food from a tiny taqueria that had opened after hours to satisfy the gawkers, excitement, sex pheromones, the smell of banana plants and ginger plants. Water. Urine. Stray cats. Rats. And terror, the kind of stark, sour sweat that scented of loss, of knowing loved ones were dead. On the air I heard a plaintive voice calling, “Is she in there? You gots to tell me. Is my baby in there? Tell me!” Over and over, grief like a dead body weighting down the words.
Someone else shouted, “I din’ hear no shots. What kill dem peoples?”
Another one of the crowd shouted, “Tell us what goin’ on!”
“Is she in there? You gots to tell me. Is my baby in there?”
“Damn cops!”
Under all the smells, beneath the worried muttering and angry catcalls, I scented a hint of aggression, not ugly, not yet, but on the edge. For now the words were mostly curiosity, not yet tuned to revenge. But it would all change. Soon. As soon as word went out that a vamp had done this.
I opened my eyes and found my partner, his back to the vehicle, searching the night. Eli had elected to wear black dress pants and a starched black shirt, no tie, shiny shoes, like a civilian. And no weapons. Without even talking about it, we were on the same page, my partner and I, in sync, which was one reason that we worked so well together, that mental consciousness of each other, like soldiers in battle, with situational awareness and comrade-in-arms mindfulness. Not that he was weaponless. Eli could kill with his bare hands. For that matter, so could I.
Eli’s eyes flicked my way and back to darkness. “You gonna make it through this, Janie?”
“Yes,” I said. But I heard the feeble note in my tone.
“This isn’t your fault. You had no way of knowing.”
I shook my head and gestured him into the street.
The sounds of our footsteps were lost beneath the crowd noise and the squeal of a siren pulling away, allowing us to move silently through the dark. As we neared the commotion, Eli’s head went up, his shoulders back, and he led the way down the middle of the street, like a dance that left us striding side by side on the potholed blacktop. He looked like what he was. Dangerous. And so did I. People seemed to sense that we were trouble, or maybe that we were part of the entertainment, because the hangers-on, the curious, the partygoers rubbernecking at disaster, parted as we neared, leaving a wide gap straight down the block to the sawhorses and crime scene tape that blocked the road.
We were closer to the old woman shouting, “Is she in there? You gots to tell me. Is my baby in there? Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”
My lips parted and my breath came fast and shallow.
“Is my baby in there? Tell me!”
A cop watched us as we neared, and sadly it was my old pal Officer Herbert—pronounced A-bear, in the French manner, he had told me the first time I met him. He was a career cop, mid-forties, smelling of Cajun spices and lots of aftershave, his familiar scent picked up over the crowd. He was also was a chauvinist pig, an ass, mean just for fun, and downright malicious. He hated anything that wasn’t human, male, straight, and white, including me. Herbert’s face twisted as we walked up, looking us over for weapons, backpacks, anything he could use to cause us trouble, the intent unmistakable on his face. I had gotten on his bad side at our first meeting, and I had never been in the mood to make nice-nice with him. I still wasn’t in the mood to try. Not tonight.
“Tell me! My baby, my baby my baby mybabybabybabybaby . . .” The woman sat on the curb nearby, arms around her knees, rocking, rocking, in time with the lament. The stink of grief and fear and cheap wine was a fog around her. “My baby, baby, baby, baaaby . . .”
“Morning, Dickhead,” I said softly, using the same name I’d called Herbert the first day I met him. In front of Jodi. This time in front of Eli, who goggled in shock. Well, his right eye twitched. A little.
“You wanna take a ride down to NOPD?” Herbert barked, his hand going to his gun.
I grinned, letting my own meanness show, a shadow of the heated turmoil boiling in me. “Not my idea of a fun first date. If I dated dickheads with badges.” I wanted him to attack. I wanted him to hit me so I could hit him back. Suddenly, I wanted to hit something and I didn’t care what.
Herbert’s face went purple, and had he been seventy pounds lighter and twenty years younger, he would have dived over the barricade and tackled me to the ground. As it was, Jodi appeared behind him, like a magician materializing out of the gloom, and placed a hand on his arm. “Jim, why don’t you take a break. You’ve been on sixteen hours already. Grab something at the taqueria. On me.” Jodi placed a ten in his pudgy hand and nudged him
over. Herbert shot me a look promising all sorts of horrible things, and went.
“You like yanking his chain,” she said mildly. Too mild. She was holding herself on a tight leash.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s an ass. One you used to bait me when we first met. It was necessary at the time; I understand that. And it never stopped me from being your friend. But it never made me like him.”
Jodi appeared to mull that over as she checked us out, giving particular attention to Eli. She knew his military history and his penchant for going heavily weaponed. But whether from exhaustion or because she recognized a familiar face in a foxhole, she didn’t linger. “I won’t apologize for doing my job,” she said, still mild.
“Jane Yellowrock,” a female voice shouted in the distance.
Crap. The press. My stomach did a somersault. “And I won’t apologize for doing mine,” I said, which, at the moment included ticking off Herbert, holding my wounded arm steady, and trying not to throw up. “The media has now recognized us and is starting to point parabolic and shotgun mics at us. You want to let us in?”
Jodi let her eyes travel behind us to the media. Bright lights began moving our way as people started running toward us. “Those things won’t pick up much past eight feet, so you’re safe. But yeah. I need you inside.” She lifted the crime scene tape just as a woman came running up, mic in hand, shouting my name, her cameraman jogging behind her. We three walked away, leaving her and her cronies speculating into their mics about why the vampire hunter turned vampire lover was there. Vampire lover. They had been wondering online and on air for months whether Leo and I were sleeping together. Idiots.
We said nothing as we followed Jodi to the corner building, the blue lights turning our skin to zombie gray. Men and women, uniformed and plainclothes, moved grimly. They had set up a temporary morgue under tents, the cloth sides hiding the gurneys waiting for the legal types and the crime scene techs to release the bodies to be taken for forensic postmortems. But with multiple victims, processing started at the scene, often proceeded close by, and finished on a stainless-steel table at the morgue.
Until now, I had hoped that the number of casualties had been wrong. Five, maybe. Eight. Not fifty-two. But the portable crime scene said otherwise. It was bad. Really bad.
The two-story building Jodi led us to was large enough to support two or three businesses on the ground floor, and on the second floor, multiple apartments with a gallery, enclosed with decorative wrought iron. Holding up the gallery, matching wrought-iron poles marked the space between the sidewalk and the street, giving the lower floor protection from the sun. It was a nice-sized building, the multiple windows and doors on the first floor having jalousie windows above each, and on the second floor there were key-design windows and doors. Over it all was a fancy brickwork soldier course. I thought there might have been dormers in the roof, making a third floor a final residential area or artist’s atelier, but my visual angle wasn’t right to tell for certain. The building was stuccoed or plastered, hard to tell in the strobing lights. The windows and doors were all shut, and I could hear the hum of an air conditioner running.
The smell of death reached out and grabbed me.
CHAPTER 5
I Will Cut out His Heart . . . I Will Bring It to You
Inside the main entrance, which was located on the corner, beneath an elaborate curlicued door header, Jodi handed us each a stack of paper clothing and pointed us through a narrow space along one wall. The inside of the building was hidden from our eyes, but the smells . . . they told the tale. Alcohol of every kind, old toilets, fried food—the scents of a bar and grill. And over it all rode the stink of bowels, urine, the sweet reek of blood starting to go bad.
Eli glanced at me, his eyes hard, holding both a warning and a question in his expression. I shook my head, not having an answer to whatever he needed to know. Sitting on a long bench, we pulled on the paper booties, long white paper jackets, and white hats, which looked like poofs of dough on our heads. Lastly, we snapped on nitrile gloves, the medium blue the county preferred.
Jodi stuck her head around the corner and motioned us out. She was similarly dressed, in paper and nitrile, and when we made our way around the partition into the main room, we saw everyone dressed in the paper clothing. All the living, that is.
My eyes tried to take it in as my nose went on overload with death-death-death. The dead were wearing colorful party clothes, jeans, skirts, boots, ballerina shoes, gold chains, T-shirts, button-downs, running shoes, capri pants, sandals, peasant blouses, tank tops, wifebeaters; every manner of casual dress seen at a New Orleans bar in a summer heat wave was represented. The dead were slumped at tables, lying on the dance floor, crumpled behind the bar, two prone halfway in the men’s room door, one supine on the bar, as if she had been dancing the cancan and then lay down to sleep, her dress still thrown high, over her head. Some had bloody throats with signs of multiple puncture marks, the way victims look when several vamps have been at them but didn’t feel the need to rip and tear. Fastidious, deadly vamps. Others were slumped so that I couldn’t see their throats, and still others’ heads were turned around on their spines, facing the wrong way. When the vamps were done, they had broken the humans’ necks. It was much worse than the photos. It always is.
I ground my teeth and crossed my arms over my chest, gripping them with my hands. The pain that had hidden, subdued, in my flesh throbbed up my arm and hand like a bomb going off at the pressure of my fingers. Along with the pain, the pinpricks came back, tingling hot along my skin. I wanted to curse or scream. Punch something. I should have killed Joses Bar-Judas, taken his head where he hung on the wall. I had known in my gut that he was evil incarnate. I could see it in his eyes, even without proof of any wrongdoing. And I had done nothing. Worse, much worse, I had let him get by me. I had let him get free. To do this. This horror.
Hunched into myself, I turned around slowly, taking in the room. The band members were all lying with their instruments, two with guitars in hand, one guy with a trumpet, another with a sax. A girl on drums, looking as if she fell asleep across her base drum, curly dark hair with bright pink stripes painted in. Her dress was hiked up around her waist, as if—
I didn’t finish that thought. But my blood heated and my heart rate sped as I forced myself away from my own shock and back to the crime scene. To that moment. To that problem. To that flood in the midst of the deluge of problems.
Eli had said that draining fifty-two humans meant 286 quarts of blood. How many humans had been drained? How many vamps had been there? How many vamps were on the rampage?
“Tell me,” Jodi said, the words too calm.
I pushed all the questions away as the anger and guilt that accompanied them flamed high in the dark places of my soul. “You already know vamps did this. What do you want with me? Why am I in the middle of this?”
“I’ll file your sympathy away for later consideration,” Jodi said evenly.
I started to reply and clamped my mouth shut on the words. Closing my eyes, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about all this.” I swept my left hand out around me and regripped my injured arm. When I took a breath, it stuttered on a sob that I swallowed down.
“Okay. I wanted you to know exactly what this city is dealing with. So that you will tell me if you recognize the vampire who did this.” Her tone was mild, so placid, so carefully bland, her words so precise. “Vampire,” she enunciated, rage leaking into the two syllables, contained under pressure, as if she was close to explosion. “Singular.”
“The math doesn’t—” I stopped and looked again at the humans who showed no bloody throats and realized that the humans who appeared to have deformities had no other injuries. Their heads had been twisted around until their necks broke, but there were no fang marks, no sign of draining, and none had the pale-pale flesh of the drained. Not all fifty-two had been taken for feeding. Most of them had been killed without blood loss. Vamps didn’t do that to their cattle. Th
ey might bleed their dinners dry, but they didn’t kill them with their blood still inside.
I looked along the ceiling and found the security cameras, two of them, one pointed at the bar, the other at the dance floor and the cash register. One vamp, she had said. Joses Bar-Judas was old enough to have that kind of power. The words like the ashes of death in my mouth, I said, “Show me.”
She led the way out of the bar and back to the place where we’d dressed. She had us remove our personal protective equipment and toss the PPEs into a bag. In a crime scene, everything would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb for trace evidence that we might have picked up and carried out by accident.
Jodi led the way outside, into the muggy heat of predawn, and into a tent set up with bright lamps, a long table, and a whiteboard. There was nothing there, not yet. But soon the table and the board would be filled with evidence and notes and comments that would later be put into computerized records. Few police departments could afford the kind of fancy computer system seen on TV cop shows, and NOPD was among the poor law enforcement departments, so the whiteboard would be front and center in the ongoing investigation. In the distance, a generator roared, a huge one, to provide power for the evidence gathering.