by Faith Hunter
“The conclave is flying me in, so I have to go. I don’t know the arrangements yet, but I’ll see you soon.”
“Wait! Are you staying with us?” I asked. “And are you bringing KitKit?” KitKit was Molly’s cat and familiar—not that witches have familiars, and suggesting such a thing to a witch is as big a faux pas as suggesting that vamps sleep in coffins. But the cat helped to keep Molly’s death magics in control, so technically, Molly had a familiar. Weird. But Molly Megan Everhart Trueblood was never ordinary.
Molly blew out a breath and the last of her anger with it. “Damn cat,” she muttered, letting me know her kids were close by. “KitKit has categorically refused to get in a travel crate, and I have the scratches to prove it. So I’ve drugged her, stuffed her in, booked the fastest flight I can, with the fewest layovers, and hope to all that’s holy that she’s still asleep when we arrive. And yes. I’d like to stay with you, since cats aren’t welcome in most hotels. The kids are staying with Evan because of, you know, crazy suckhead vampire who might be able to do magic, in your town, killing people. I’ll let you know about the meeting. Gotta go.” The call ended without my getting a chance to update her on the mess she was walking into in New Orleans. I thought about calling her back, but there should be time to do that when she was on the ground. And besides, if the witches had been talking to the cops, Molly might know more than I did.
I looked up at Alex. “Call Katie’s housecleaning service to get in here fast.”
“Good thing we kept the litter box,” he said. “Texting the cleaning service in to clean and to move my stuff to Eli’s bathroom.” His thumbs paused over his tablet. “Kids coming?”
“No.” I quoted Molly’s comment about the vampires as I lifted the last slice of the Special and took a big bite. Around it I said to Eli, “You do know that even the spinach pizza has carbs and fats, don’t you?”
“Shhh,” Alex said. “I told him it was fat-free, organic veggies, tofu, and goat cheese.”
I chuckled through the mouthful and drank down Coke. It felt wrong on some level to stop and eat and take a break and chat and laugh. Fifty-two humans were dead and it was our job to find the killer, but we had all learned over the years, separately and together, to take a break when we could, sleep when we could, and eat when we could. That if we met a killer vamp when we were hungry, sleepy, tired, and emotionally drained, we’d lose and lose bad. So we took our break, and we ate, and we recharged. We had to.
When there was nothing left in either take-out box, I shoved the last half slice into my mouth and pointed to my room. “Weapon up.” Except it came out more like ’Wa’on’uu.
“Yeah,” Eli said. “Full gear. Just in case Joseph Santana was stupid enough to go back to his old lair.”
“Before you leave, there are contracts to sign, messengered over from the governor’s and the mayor’s offices. The powers that be have signed them already, and our lawyer has approved the language. And so have I,” Alex added, sounding just a bit smug. Alex was self-taught, but the boy genius could read legalese like the best attorney in town. I trusted his evaluation. We all did. But no way was I gonna tell him. His head was too big already.
* * *
Most of Esplanade Avenue in the Quarter was well preserved, well kept, and not cheap digs. The address where Joses had laired long ago, the night Leo had essentially taken him captive, and where he might even now be asleep, in a hole in the walls or floor, or under the house in a vault, was a two-storied, narrow-fronted house that was nearly four times deeper than it was wide, with two different kinds of columns holding up the short front gallery and the roof. The wrought-iron front gate and iron lattice-style gallery fencing didn’t match either, but were still quintessential New Orleans. The front windows were narrow and long, with working shutters, and the house had lots of fancy woodwork, potted ferns, blooming flowers in hanging baskets, and fancy little tasseled awnings over every side window. Most important, the address sported a small, gaited parking area in back and evidence of retrofitted central air. Due to the parking and the five air-conditioning units, there was no courtyard area or garden, but I figured the owners were more concerned about protecting the Bentley Mulsanne and the brand-new Mercedes-Benz coupe parked in back than in growing their own fresh flowers and veggies.
New Orleans’ pretty, aboveground vamp lairs were never what I was expecting, not with my Asheville background of mountain caves and underground nests. Here, they were usually aboveground, often delicate and sweet-looking, painted in pastels like lavender and morning-glory pink and sunshine yellow. So unvampy.
Leaving most of my visible weapons on the car seat, I went through the small gate to the front porch, rang the bell, and stepped to the side of the door, out of the way. The door was solid wood, old but well preserved, painted charcoal, with a bronze mail slot in the middle.
Eli waited at the street, the SUV idling and a nine mil loaded with silver aimed at the door, just in case the vamp we were looking for answered his own door in the daytime.
The woman who opened the door was surprising. She stood maybe four feet six and was even skinnier than I had been before I bulked up; she probably still shopped in the children’s department. Her hair was bobbed straight at the chin and dyed a stunning shade of pink, a color that enhanced her remarkable eyes—an emerald so vivid that I forgot to sniff her out. Literally. When I did take a breath of the ice-cold air that was billowing out, she smelled of lilacs, sea salt, copier toner, and blood-servant. She was wearing a severe, dark green suit and a frilly blouse in a pale shade of jade green. On her lapel she wore a brooch composed of clustered pearls and an emerald that even I knew was priceless.
She lifted her arched, pink eyebrows and asked, “May I help you?” Her voice was Minnie Mouse with a severe cold, both high-pitched and husky.
I passed her a business card—the personal one that read, JANE YELLOWROCK, and below that, HAVE STAKES WILL TRAVEL. It was sort of a joke, one appreciated by the older blood-servants and vamps who remembered the black-and-white cowboy TV series. The pink-haired woman was no exception. She tittered.
“Do I welcome a modern-day paladin onto the premises?” Before I could respond, she motioned me in with a grand gesture. “Welcome, Ms. Yellowrock. Will the elder Mr. Younger be joining us as well?”
I motioned Eli in and heard the distinctive sound of a round being ejected from the chamber as he walked up to me. He handed me my sidearm, which I rechecked and holstered. The woman didn’t bat a lash. She closed the door behind us and gestured to us to sit, saying, “You may call me Pinkie. I fulfill the requirements of maître d’hôtel here at Acton House.” On someone else the nickname and the hair might have been laugh-worthy, but on Pinkie it worked. She was tiny, but there was something about Pinkie that demanded respect and good manners. She had an accent I couldn’t place, but it wasn’t French, Spanish, or Germanic. Maybe Swedish? Or some kind of Russian-type language?
As in most houses of its kind, the front room took up the full sixteen-plus feet of house width and the rest of the house went straight back, each room opening into the next, until a stairwell offered other alternatives. The furniture was period antiques: lots of carved dark wood, curlicues, marble tops, blackened mirrors in gilt frames, old paintings of unsmiling humans and vamps in stiff poses, uncomfortable-looking furniture, old rugs, lots of doodads, and that pervasive old-house smell—camphor, dry-rotting wood, delicate cotton, and fading vegetable dyes. The couch I sat on was as hard as a board and stank of old horsehair and dust mites.
Pinkie took a seat on a tiny upholstered chair, just big enough so that her toes touched the rug beneath. She was wearing patent leather Mary Janes. She was adorable. A weird part of me wanted to hug her, but I had a bad feeling that underneath the cuteness, she was armed and dangerous.
“How can I help you?” Pinkie asked. “The new primo was not very forthcoming, except to say that I was to have the private room keys in hand.”
“We need to see the lair of Jo
ses Bar-Judas,” I said.
Pinkie’s forehead formed neat little rows of wrinkles in confusion.
“Joseph Santana,” Eli said. “That lair. It’s supposed to have been locked for decades.”
“Since he vacated the premises under unusual circumstances,” Pinkie said, nodding. “Yes. Room two-oh-one. Come with me, please.” She stood and led the way through the next room, which was a formal dining room with a gas-log fireplace. Over her shoulder, as she moved to the right and into a short landing, she said, “I’ve always wanted to see the best guest suite.”
“Guest suite?” I asked. “This is a what? A vampire boardinghouse?”
“Yes. Of a sort,” she said, starting up the stairs. “Acton House was widely used back in the day, before the Mithrans acquired the property they now use as their Council House. Visiting Mithrans had special needs and requirements back then, don’t you know. Humans to safeguard them by day, to give them alibis when necessary, protection from light, access to suitable paramours, healthy blood supply, safe and comfortable sleeping arrangements, and access to European five-star chefs. Acton House provided it all, and we still do, when called upon, though at the moment, our rooms are empty.”
“You’ve never taken a sneak peek at the sealed room?” Eli asked.
“Of course not,” Pinkie said, surprise in her voice and in her scent. “That would have been a betrayal of trust.” Our footsteps were hollow in the wide stairwell, and faintly, I heard a tinkle, as of metal tapping metal. We passed a heavily curtained window that let in no light. “Though I didn’t know it when I took this contract—not back then, so long ago—taking that peek, as you put it, would have contaminated the scene with my skin cells, my hair, and my scent. I do watch all the latest crime shows,” she said, as if letting us in on a big secret. “An addict of them, in fact. And I’m aware that a sealed crime scene is most important.” Her pink head nodded in agreement with herself, shiny pink hair rocking back and forth.
We reached the second floor and entered a very narrow hallway leading back toward the front of the house. The hall was no more than twenty-four inches wide, and as I looked both ways along it, I saw four doors to the rear, one at the stairs, and one at the front. Six rooms, maybe four of them bedrooms, assuming some of the vamps shared a bathroom.
“So you didn’t seal the room yourself?” Eli asked from behind me.
“No. Certainly not. I haven’t been caretaker here that long. My predecessor, Professor Acton himself, the scion of the owner, followed the orders of the heir of the master of the city at the time and sealed the room. It was sealed the very morning that young Master Pellissier gave the order. No one has entered since.”
I put it all together. Young Master Pellissier would have been Leo. Who was having his humans tear HQ apart looking for records about Joseph. Gotcha.
And Pinkie wasn’t kidding. Maybe a television magician could have gotten through without leaving a trace, but no normal human or vamp could have, not unless the film and fiction writers were right when they suggested that vamps could turn into smoke and slide under doors and through cracks. From the hallway, the door was padlocked, three metal strips screwed into the woodwork of the jamb and through rings set in the door; each ring had a lock, besides the one in the door itself. Over the years, the wood had swelled from the Louisiana humidity, and the house’s foundations had settled, pulling the framework out of plumb and sealing the door tighter still.
Pinkie pulled a ring of keys from a pocket and held them close as she read the labels. Starting at the top, she unlocked each padlock, bending back the metal strips as she worked. The metal wasn’t overly pliable, and it groaned as it was bent, but tiny little Pinkie was a lot stronger than she appeared.
When the door was unlocked, she indicated that it was ours to open. Eli slipped in front of me, knelt, and pulled a small light, checking all around the edges for . . . I had no idea, not in such an old room, but Mr. Paranoid didn’t heal as well as I did, so I let him take whatever precautions he wanted. Once he was assured it was safe, he stepped back and I took the old metal knob in my hand, feeling the lines that had been etched or pressed into the metal when it was made, leaves, I thought, or a fleur-de-lis. Then I thought about a shotgun set up to fire when the door opened, and I stepped to the side. Eli and Pinkie both stepped to the other side, as if reading my mind. I twisted the knob, which made a dry, creaking sound, made much worse as I pushed on the door, swollen into place, wood against wood. I set my shoulder to it, the door groaning like a human dying, still thinking about the possible shotgun. But no gun went off.
The smells that rushed out of the dark, overheated room were mice, damp, mold, old wood, rotten linens, old blood, and . . . dead vamp.
CHAPTER 11
A Sleepover with My Bestie, Adrianna
Death, even old death, has a smell.
The vamp skeleton was lying on the floor beside the bed, her head a few feet away.
“Holy Mother of God.” Pinkie crossed herself and took a step back. I took two steps in and closed my eyes to get a better scent pattern of the dead and of the room. I breathed in through mouth and nose, but making no noise. Not a true, catlike, flehmen behavior, just some good breaths of the sealed space, and I found that I could identify varying scent signatures of several people—vamps and humans—who had spent time in the room. There was no recent sign of Joseph Santana or anyone else, just old, old, old smells.
Once I was satisfied of that, and of the scents I had taken in, I opened my eyes and gestured Eli in. He stood to my left, the open door to his side, his body positioned to cover the hallway, the room, and me. Security was second nature to him. Together we studied the dead vamp and the scene before us.
She had met true-death wearing a long, vertically striped blue dress with a high waist, ribbons, lace, and a locket pinned to her chest. Her head had met true-death wearing long blond hair up in a bun, and a perky hat. The mice had been at it all, and her hair had been a nest for more than one family of rodents. Said nesters had eaten the soft parts of the vamp, but surprisingly, most of her bone structure and tendons were still intact, if dried out and brittle looking.
When Acton House had been retrofitted for AC, this room hadn’t been included in the renovations. Room 201 had a door that would open out onto the front gallery and tall, narrow windows, all sealed shut, which accounted for the heat, all with shutters, which were latched closed from the inside.
More critter nests were between the shutters and the window glass. Yet more had taken the best location inside—within the pillows and mattresses on the four-poster rice bed. The bed was hand carved and had been made up with silk sheets and feather pillows, faded and disintegrating, but probably the height of style and comfort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Curiously, I didn’t sense any mice in the room now, but maybe the heat had driven them out. Maybe the room was their winter home. I suppressed a grin, which I knew Pinkie would consider unseemly.
The floor was wood; the walls had been papered. Moldy shreds of pink roses and darker pink stripes were falling in curls where the walls weren’t blood splashed. There, it was brown and dried and had been partially eaten by mice. The rugs were gnawed and threadbare but had once matched the wallpaper in color tones. A bedside table held a hurricane lamp, a carved ivory and wood pipe, and a book, along with the ubiquitous rodent droppings.
A turn-of-the-previous-century bathroom stood open and looked as awful as the rest of the suite. The chifforobe doors were closed and warped, a key dangling from a chain on one little knob. A pair of shoes lay in a corner near a small overturned chair. A tea cart was beside the chair, its contents splattered with blood. From the spatter I could tell that the teapot had been broken prior to the beheading.
Eli pointed to a place on the wall where no blood marked the wallpaper. The killer had likely stood there and taken the blood spatter with him when he left. Great lot of good that observation did us. Any clothes and trace on the killer would have been
long gone by then, and the blood silhouette wasn’t over-helpful except to suggest height, which had been average.
I moved farther inside and pulled my cell phone, taking photos and sending them to myself and to Alex. The days of memorizing a crime scene and drawing it out on pads of graph paper were long gone. So were pads of graph paper, probably.
To the side of the dead vamp I saw a gleam and carefully stepped around her outstretched skeletal left hand to get a good photograph. The shiny thing was a quartz crystal, the kind found in nature, but this one had been a really spectacular specimen before it was busted. I had seen one in this condition before. They were used by master vamps and by witches as cages for arcenciels. The sentient, shape-shifting dragons of light were from another plane, beings who could slow or bend time the way I could, but much better. The master of such a creature could force it to bend time or could borrow its magical ability to that end if he knew how, making the master an unbeatable adversary. But if the dragon creature got free, its bite was dangerous at best and could be deadly if untreated, even to vamps.
And oddly, Bruiser had mentioned arcenciels as part of his research, research initiated by Leo, who had been in this room on the day that the Son of Darkness had been hidden from the world. Leo had surely seen the shattered crystal that day, but I knew for certain that he’d had no idea what it had been used for, because an arcenciel had bitten him not long ago, which was when we had all learned the nature of the creatures and their poisonous bites. At some point after being bitten, the Master of the City had mentally added the busted crystal in this room together with the existence of arcenciels and with the condition of the Son of Darkness so long ago, and sent Bruiser searching.