by Faith Hunter
“Makeup case, shampoo, lotion and perfume stuff, and jewelry case.”
“Jewelry case. Lemme see.” I held out a hand and he tossed me a padded, cloth-covered box, which I caught and unzipped, to reveal a lot of gold. Real gold. Ancient stuff that Adrianna had hung on to for centuries. There was a gold cuff bracelet shaped like a snake climbing her upper arm, and an etched gold torque. The torque was shaped like a half-moon, to rest on her collarbones. She had been wearing the bracelet and necklace the night she and her two pet scions had tried to kill me. Kinda hard to forget something like that.
I ran my fingers over the Celtic symbols on the torque, and magic tingled on my skin. “Why not wear her good jewelry when she went to see the Son of Darkness? The dress she was wearing was fancy, so why not the gold jewelry?”
“Would it interfere with a magical working?” Eli asked, stuffing the lacy nothings back in the luggage.
“She was wearing them the night she was staked by Derek’s men, and that was a mega-spell. So I don’t think so. She was wearing them when the painting was done, and by the clothing, that was a long time before Santana went missing,” I said.
Holding the jewelry case to my nose, I sniffed. The scent of magic on the gold was weak. If the scent had come from a spell or working placed on or in the pieces themselves, then it had been used up long ago. If the gold had simply been in the presence of magic for a long time and had picked up the trace scents, then it might have been there recently. But the scent of magic was definitely there. “I can’t tell if it was ever used in a magical working or not. I’ll have to ask Molly if gold is ever a part of active workings.”
“Gold transmits electricity. Electricity is energy. Magic is energy. Therefore, gold should transmit magic.”
“Yeah.” I zipped up the jewelry box. “Too much of this is all about the past, and the past is written by the victor, if it was written at all.” I frowned as something tickled the back of my mind. “I don’t know. Something feels all wonky about this whole thing.”
“Ya think?” Eli ran his hands over and under the pillows and across the linens, doing a vamp-bed pat-down. Satisfied there was nothing there, he lifted the mattresses, checking under each one before bending to one knee and peeking under the bed. I went to the closet and found three pairs of shoes, two pairs of which were five-inch stilettoes: one pair in black ostrich skin and one pair of high-glam, high-gloss ruby sparkles, like what Dorothy might have worn if she danced on a brass pole for a living. I held up the ruby pair for Eli to see, putting that pole-dancer image together with the lacy undies, and it wasn’t so farfetched. I chuckled at the image and put the shoes back in the closet with the third pair—dainty sandals of gold leather. Odd that she hadn’t packed them.
“What?” Eli asked.
“Nothing,” I said, shaking the image away. “Ask security where Adrianna is. Leo wouldn’t tell me, but they might not know that he told me no.”
Eli tapped his mic and asked the question. And smiled slowly at the answer. “Copy that,” he said. “Meet the Enforcer and me at the door to the secure room.” He tapped off the mic.
“Tell Alex to turn off the cameras on the way there,” I said. “Leo had the security program up on the screen in his office.”
“I do like the way you think, Jane Yellowrock.”
CHAPTER 14
She Blew Blood Bubbles
The jewelry case under my arm, I followed my partner up to sub-three floor and into one of the newly cataloged and mapped inner passageways. We went up half a floor and were met by Juwan. “Legs,” he said, as he swiped his palm over the reader. I nodded and the door whisked open, a modern sound that I associated with polished steel and rubber seals; the air contained in the chamber was let out in a pressurized, icy whoosh. It smelled of Adrianna and blood. A lot of blood.
Instantly, I remembered the first time I saw Adrianna. Red hair, curly and wild, had fanned out around her, flowing to her waist. Resting on her collarbones had been the gold torque etched with Celtic symbols, and the gold snake cuff climbed one upper arm. Her dress was cerulean blue shot with gold threads, knotted toga-like on one shoulder, leaving the other bare. The bare shoulder had been splattered with my blood like a tattoo of my death. She had looked then like some ancient and feral goddess, her blue eyes not quite sane.
This time she was in a small, white, featureless room, one with a smooth, sloped floor, a drain in the center, and steel mesh cages, like small jail cells. It was a scion lair. Her cage was made of woven steel strands, making it pliable but very strong, with a stainless-steel, tray-like bottom. The edges of the tray were cupped to hold an inch of mixed blood congealing in the bottom, and Adrianna’s unbreathing, lifeless body lay coated in the blood like something a chef was about to barbecue. The hole the silver stake had made in her head was still gaping. Gray matter seeped into the blood from the head wound.
“Wait here, please,” I asked Juwan.
“Whatever the Enforcer wants,” he said, succeeding in sounding insulting, while letting me know without saying so that he was checking out my butt. I really needed to take Juwan down a peg. Or three.
Soon, I thought, and recognized that it was Beast thinking, not me.
Hey, Beast. Missed you, I thought back at her.
She chuffed. Good blood smell.
The door shushed shut behind us, leaving Eli and me alone with the brainless fanghead.
“Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and James Wan, move over,” Eli said.
“Who?” I asked as I moved into the room, taking in the sights, smells, and the uncanny silence. This room was not on our maps, and it had been soundproofed. Which was scary all on its own. It was small for a scion lair—the place vamps kept their insane scions until they came through the devoveo, found some control over the hunger that made them little more than ravening animals, and were ready to reenter society and life with humans. What I called the curing process, but not aloud in front of vamps. This room had been constructed with six cages; all but Adrianna’s were empty, which was smart. The smell of all the blood in the steel pan might have driven young vamps into a frenzy.
“Three of the best horror movie directors alive today,” Eli said. “Alex is not gonna believe this. What—” He stopped and moved closer to get a better view of the body. “What is this place?”
“Modern version of a scion lair, but not a typical use of one. This is a blood burial done on the cheap. I smell three vamps’ blood, Leo’s, Bethany’s, and Grégoire’s. All powerful, two of them relatively sane, and all willing to sacrifice some blood to the cause, apparently.”
“Why doesn’t it stink?” Eli asked. “It should be rotting, like vamp blood always does.”
I remembered the real blood burial I had seen before, when Katie, Leo’s heir, had been buried in the blood of all the vamp clans. It had taken quite a while for every vamp in New Orleans to make an offering, but even after the last one donated, the blood still smelled fresh. Not rotting. And vamp blood was supposed to go to rot instantly.
Good blood smell, Beast had thought. And she was right. Which was odd.
“I don’t know. But we keep this to ourselves. Let’s go.” I started for the door.
“Zzzzaaaaa . . .”
I turned and met the insane blue eyes of the naked vampire lying in blood. Adrianna took a breath, and when she blew it out, she blew blood bubbles. Gross. She was alive. Undead. Whatever. It creeped me out. I shoved down on my shock and walked to the cage. With one hand, I lifted and dropped the padlock. It clanged a deep echoing bong in the empty room. The padlock was huge; the shank that went through the cage’s steel rings was bigger around than my thumb. Which was probably smart. Vamps in blood burial came back from being temporarily true-dead extra strong, and more wack-a-doodle than they had been before.
“Zzzzaaaane.”
“I’m here, Adrianna. Next time I see you, I’m taking your head. Fair warning. You’ve survived one time too many.”
“Zzzjjjaaane.”
> “Let’s go,” I said, heading for the door. “We’ve got a Son of Darkness to find.”
“Zzzooosaaaace,” she said.
I stopped at that, the door to the hallway a foot from my nose. “What?” And then it clicked and I turned around. “What about Joses?”
“Heeee . . . Heeee . . . Ccccommme.”
“Groovy. Then I won’t have to hunt him down, will I?” I made a fist and banged on the door. It opened on the first hit, and I nearly hit Juwan in the head with the second bang.
The look Juwan gave me and my fisted hand was insolent and insulting and a put-down to my gender, my race, and my . . . everything. Standing in the narrow hallway, I grinned at him, showing blunt human teeth. Beast rose in me, the gold glow reflected back at me from his dark eyes. His expression didn’t change, but his scent did, warning me.
Juwan attacked.
I blocked the first three punches, expecting him to move in and knock/knee/lever me to the floor—a typical guy move to get the female on the ground where they think she deserves to be—so the fourth punch was unexpected and landed, hard, on my jaw, knocking my head back and making me bite my tongue. The fifth landed in my gut. I actually gave him an oof of grunting reward before I countered with a couple of punches of my own, moving in close.
The next moves were nearly Beast-fast, punching fists, stabbing fingers, bodies maneuvering for leverage to get the other guy down. Juwan danced back and kicked up, the kick a feint, hiding a hand-stabbing thrust to my throat. I dodged the thrust, grabbed his leg, and whipped it high. His own leverage and torqueing force turned him. But Juwan had planned on that, and his other foot came around. Powered by me as I forced up his leg.
The whirling kick landed solidly against my temple, in a move eerily like the sparring between Daniel and Eli only days prior, and I went down with him. Landing under him, limbs tangled, seeing stars. Beast growled low in my throat and swiped my brain with her claws, clearing my muscle memory, if not my eyesight. Still half-blind, deducing his body position from what I could feel, I kicked. Striking with the heel of my foot. Because I wasn’t above hitting a guy where it hurt.
The kick landed. Juwan inhaled with a squeak, curled into a tight V, and started making sounds like a wounded bird, gack, gack, gack. And cupping his genitals. I rolled to my feet and stood over him, my eyesight coming back in patches, like digital pixels.
I normally knew better than to let Beast off her leash in a spar, but Beast didn’t like Juwan any better than I did, and female big-cats don’t play with males. They mate or fight, and killing isn’t beyond them. Juwan’s assault had been a sneak attack, and as far as I was concerned, there were no rules in sneak attacks, not even rules against kicking a man when he was down. I took a breath and blew out my adrenaline. Working my jaw, tasting blood, I palpated my temple, which was bruised. If I’d been human I might have died from that one. I would certainly have been unconscious.
I opened the lair room door and drew on Beast’s strength as I bent my knees and picked up Juwan by his hair and belt, hauling him into the room none too gently. We both grunted, me with effort, Juwan in pain when his head banged into the doorframe with a hollow thump. I tossed his lousy butt into the cage farthest from Adrianna and locked the door, taking the key with me.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you so bad if you had challenged me fairly, in the gym,” I said, my voice sounding like me instead of Beast’s growl.
Juwan’s reply was another gack, and I wondered if I’d ruptured something with that last kick. Not that I cared. I took the jewelry case back from Eli, who was lounging against the wall, looking bored. As we left the room, locking the door, I jutted my chin down the hall, saying, “Too bad I had the cameras turned off. That would have been interesting on YouTube.”
“Babe. He nailed you with that kick.”
“Yeah. He did.” And that look . . . Juwan was a woman hater. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had some unreported assaults in his past. We rounded the corner and took the stairs to the main hallway as my vision came back, along with the beginnings of a headache. Softly, I said, “Tell Alex to do a deeper background on Juwan. Hire someone to talk to people in his past. I want everything back to his first-grade teachers, his first girlfriend, his first everything. I want to know if he was nutso or if he was paid to take me down. Or compelled. I’m betting on compelled, because otherwise he’d have attacked me when I was alone.”
Eli nodded and tapped his mouthpiece, relaying my request to Alex.
I added, “Get him to check and see who spent time with Adrianna, now or in the past. See if you can get a master vamp to drink Juwan and read him—all the way back until he first learned to walk if that’s possible. If Juwan was part of Adrianna’s feeding and/or sex team in the short time she was here, heal him, get him out of security and out of HQ. And while Alex is at it, I haven’t kept tabs on Adrianna’s old blood-servants or scions. Back when, she had two blood-servants, Sina and Brigit, who were moved to Clan Arceneau, if I remember right. She also had two scions, Lanah and Hope, who are true-dead unless Leo found a reason to try to save them too. They need to be checked out.”
Eli nodded. “Relaying that to Alex now. He’ll handle it.”
I nodded and touched my temple again. “I need Tylenol.”
* * *
We were in the SUV and driving away through the crowd—which had settled down a lot—before I remembered that I still had the box of gold jewelry under my arm. But maybe it was smart, after all. Molly might be able to pick up something from the traces of magic on it. As if she sensed the fact that I had thought of her, my cell rang.
“Hey, Mol. What’s up?”
“The coven leader of New Orleans wishes to meet with you and Sabina, the outclan priestess of the Mithrans.”
The formal speech pattern of invitation, and the fact that Molly had called Lachish the coven leader, which was her title, not her first name, meant that Lachish was probably listening in. It also meant that this was likely about the vamp/witch parley scheduled for later this year. A meet-up wouldn’t be a problem, as Sabina was already considering contacting Lachish about the Son of Darkness. Go, me! I gave a not-too-belated, “Am I supposed to ask Sabina?”
“No,” Molly said, a droll note entering her tone. “That’s my delight.”
“I’m in with the whole parley-rapprochement-kiss-and-make-up thing, but I’m a little busy at the moment, trying to find out where the Fifty-two Killer is lairing up in the day. Any chance you can help me with that?”
“Methods to track the killer are the subject matter of the meeting in question,” Mol said.
“Oh. Okay, coolio. I’ll see if I can arrange that. When and where?”
I pulled a spiral notebook out of my gobag—real paper and everything—and took down the info. Still sounding formal, Molly said, “The coven leader asks that you bring something belonging to the vampire who killed the humans in the bar.”
I stopped taking down the info in the little-used notebook. “Why?”
Molly sighed, the sound of her breath loud in the speaker. “I have a feeling we’ll be helping you to locate him so you can stop him. It’s not dangerous,” she said before I could ask, “in theory.”
“Yeeeeah, right.” I vaguely remembered seeing Eli scrape the wall where the Son of Darkness had hung. “I’ll see what I can do. Gotta go. Got another call.” I tapped the screen and said, “Jodi.”
“Not bad, Jane,” she said, sounding a lot more happy than last time we talked. “Leo is playing gracious host for a press conference to coincide with the late news. I want you there too.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, “but I have an appointment shortly and have no way of knowing how long it’ll last.”
“Try to squeeze me in,” she said. Which I took as a command since she used the tone cops do when issuing orders—acerbic and strident—and ended the call before I could reply.
To Eli I said, “We’re popular tonight. Our dance card is filling up fast.”
>
“One thing at a time, Janie. Witches before vamps before cops.”
“Tonight, that works.”
* * *
The meeting with Molly, Lachish, and Sabina was scheduled to take place at sunset in Louis Armstrong Park, a greenway with a theater and other buildings dedicated to the arts. It was a safe place and time for witches to meet. Earth witches would have access to the ground and growing things, water witches would have access to the waterway that wended through the park, air witches would have access to the currents of heated day air and the falling cool of night air, moon witches would have access to the night sky, and vamp-witches would have access to the dark. But first we were meeting Derek in the Garden District to look over a vacant clan home—the property once owned by Clan Mearkanis, where the party took place on the night Joseph Santana had disappeared. Ordinarily, searching a place that a killer had been in more than a hundred years ago would be a stupid waste of time, but Ming had been there that night, and Ming had risen to a position of power over that same clan, in that same house, and not that long ago, at least in vamp terms. There were paintings of Ming and Santana there—maybe. If they hadn’t been painted over by Ming’s heir. And, possibly, Ming might have left documents that might pertain to Santana. Who knew what we might find there? If we were lucky.
We tooled around the heart of the French Quarter, checking on three properties that Santana had owned, one across the street from the Royal Mojo Blues Club, the small house burned and covered with graffiti, one on Conti Street, and a block of buildings on Frenchman Street. There was no sign of or scent of the SoD at any of them.
Even with the detours, we got to the Garden District early, with sunset still ninety minutes off and the sky a hazy gray of smog and clouds. Eli parked on Chestnut Street and we got out, locking the gold stuff in the SUV, setting the alarm, and taking in the neighborhood. Eli whistled and I couldn’t disagree with the notes that said the neighborhood was exclusive and pricey.