by Faith Hunter
“When I first came to New Orleans,” I said, “there were eight clans: Mearkanis, Pellissier, Rousseau, Laurent, Desmarais, Bouvier, St. Martin, and Arceneau.” I counted them off for Eli. “Of the eight clans, four once kept official clan homes in the Garden District: Mearkanis, Arceneau, Rousseau, and Desmarais.” Now, thanks to a vamp war—small by vamp historical standards, but still pretty influential—there were only four clans, Pellissier, Laurent, Bouvier, and Arceneau. “That leaves three fancy digs in the Garden District empty: former clan homes for Mearkanis, Rousseau, and Desmarais.”
Eli chuckled, an evil sound. “Some might say you’ve been rough on the fangheads in New Orleans.”
More like an opportunistic bunch of vamps had used my appearance and the death of Leo’s heir at my hands to start a coup d’état, and had failed, but I didn’t go there, except to acknowledge, “Some might. This”—I waved my arm like a game show host at the grand old house—“was Mearkanis Clan Home. According to what we now know, the Son of Darkness attended a party here the night he disappeared.”
“And you think we may find something here about Santana?” There was something in Eli’s tone that said he thought I was either dense or thinking a little too wishfully.
“I don’t know what we’ll find, but with vamps it’s always layers of things, starting back before God made turtles.”
Eli took the place in like a soldier, checking out high locations in neighboring houses where an enemy might place a sniper, noting the lack of tall fences and razor wire, with only the ubiquitous wrought-iron fencing at the front and a stuccoed brick wall at the side street. A stepladder or an excellent high jump was all an attacker would need to gain access to the grounds. The windows weren’t barred, or high off the ground, or secured except for shutters and thumb latches. There were numerous entrances and, yeah, easy access via two streets.
“Nightmare,” Eli muttered.
I was pretty sure he didn’t see the huge, two-storied, pink stucco home as a New Orleans architectural archetype, with its multiple galleries and arched green wrought iron, or its porte cochere, discreetly located in the back. Or its double bays or arched windows. And the grounds with the ancient live oaks and palms, flowering shrubs, and flawless lawn. For Eli, it was all secondary to security. I thought it was pretty and wondered how many years I’d work security before I lost the ability to simply enjoy a setting.
One of Leo’s armored SUVs pulled up and parked behind our vehicle. I remembered when the former marine in the passenger seat drove an old panel van and I rode a way-cool Harley bike. Now I was driving an armored SUV, wearing combat boots and leathers. He was dressed in casual trousers and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the tie loose at his throat like a businessman—and he had a driver. I couldn’t say I liked the changes in either of us. It was definitely a different Derek, though still looking fit and trim and in fighting form. Drinking vamp blood will do that to a guy.
Derek got out of the passenger side, giving the place the same once-over Eli had, and he frowned. I hadn’t expected Derek there and didn’t like his body language or the scent he was giving off, both of them aggressive and defensive, a spiky scent full of testosterone. He pivoted on one foot, like a soldier in maneuvers, and looked us over. And frowned. “Wait here,” he said to the driver and closed the door.
“You like this setup?” Eli asked him, gesturing to the house.
Derek shook his head, his eyes hard. “Hate the place. But designing the security for it was before my time.”
“Historical commission would have refused any changes,” I said, casually. “In cases like this it’s monitoring and armed guards or nothing.”
“People are insane,” Eli said.
“Not really,” I said. “The inside of the house would have been full of hungry and sleepy vamps by day, and hungry and grouchy vamps by night. It’s my guess that anyone who broke in would become some vamp’s dinner.”
“That is one kind of security,” Derek said. “But guns level that playing field.” Changing the subject, he said, “Leo said you might want to check out the place for traces of Joseph Santana. While I’m here, he also wants me to start an eval on upgrade needs, to include physical structure, interior, and security, which I’ll turn over to a few contractors and designers for cost analyses.” Which verified my claim about the layered motives for everything Leo did.
Derek jangled some keys. “Let’s check out the inside.”
The best word for the house was magnificent. Though bizarre had its place in the description too. And cold, even in the heat wave, with the AC on and run up to frigid. The vibes the place gave out said it had not been a happy place, while the décor suggested that if money could have bought happiness, the vamps and humans who had lived there would have experienced unrelieved joy.
Marble foyer, lots of fancy woodwork moldings and window trim. Wide-plank flooring, leather upholstery, burled-wood antiques that I thought might be from the Art Deco period. There were old-fashioned hand-painted wallpaper and a staircase that could have come straight out of The Sound of Music movie. Or maybe out of Gone with the Wind. Whatever. The big problem with the ambiance, besides the pervasive cold and the deep silence, was the bloodstains. Like, everywhere. A battle had been fought there. Maybe more than one. And while the bodies had been removed, the mess hadn’t. A major fight for clan dominance had taken place there. Or . . . or Leo had massacred every vamp in the place. The old blood still had a stink to it. So did the old fear and horror.
I glanced at Eli and he tilted his head at me. He’d seen what I had. But when I looked at Derek, he looked . . . something. Something still. Something not right. Tense and surprised and . . . something. He pulled a weapon from his spine holster, a small semiautomatic, and checked the weapon. It made that unambiguous schnick as a round entered the chamber, ready to fire. Eli did the same with three weapons, but he reholstered two of them.
I could have told them that no one had been there in months, but they’d have still gone through the procedure. The place had that kind of atmosphere. We separated and the guys started quartering the downstairs.
I trailed after Eli, moving slowly, letting my mind wander again through the history of Clan Mearkanis. The clan had been led by Ming, who disappeared from her sleep lair and was presumed dead. Immanuel was believed to be her killer. Which was oddly like what had happened to the Son of Darkness. Rafael Torres, her heir, had taken over as blood-master and immediately launched a covert war against Leo. He had wanted to be master of the city.
Neither of Clan Mearkanis’ leaders had reputations of happy-happy, joy-joy, and the house vibes said it had been a painful and difficult place to live for a long time, even before all the blood was spilled. And then Ming disappeared and Rafael took over. Rafael had not been a nice man and had taken an instant dislike to me. And I mean, really. What’s not to like? When he was taken out in the vamp war, his clan had been disbanded and subjugated into the surviving clans.
More important, Rafael had been Adrianna’s blood-master and mind joined to her. She had suffered horribly when he died. And when she was staked. Most vamps wouldn’t have survived either, let alone both. And Rafe had been behind her original attack on me. Crap. So much to remember. Vampire relationships were all tangled and snarled into a bloody and politically disruptive history. Keeping track of all the enemies I had made and the ones I had gained by proxy was getting to be really difficult. I needed an outline tree of them all. Maybe I’d get the Kid to make me one.
The Mearkanis house was huge, with a living room, a dining room, a great room that opened into a kitchen with a sitting area around a gas fireplace, and another sitting area with a breakfast table in a bay window and planters on low shelves and hanging from a tarnished bar in the ceiling, all full of dead plants. There was a tea bar, coffee bar, and wet bar, and in the kitchen proper were marble countertops above fancy painted cabinets and top-of-the-line appliances and a brick oven, like you might find in a pizzeria.
There was a big mudroom off the back that opened onto a laundry room. There were back stairs switchbacking up that I presumed were servants’ stairs.
And everywhere I looked were bloodstains. In the foyer, on the dining room table, splattered all along the living room wall’s bookcases, in the brick oven, for Pete’s sake. It was worse on the stairs, as if a group had been herded there and systematically killed off. And by the smell, it wasn’t only vamps who had died. Humans had died there. Adrianna had survived the massacre and the war itself. I didn’t smell her blood or her presence anywhere.
I hadn’t been part of the vamp war. If I had, would all these people have died? Could I have kept them alive? I crossed my arms over my chest and tucked my hands under my armpits against the pervasive cold. This sucked. I started up the stairs, pausing at the bloodstains on the landing. The stains didn’t make sense. Just from the grouping, I was guessing four vamps had died there, but the scents said only two had died. It didn’t make sense.
The second story was marginally better, decorated the way a whorehouse might have looked in gold-rush days with silk, antiques, and lots of bedrooms. There were only a few bloodstains, these behind doors, in closets, in bathrooms, places where vamps had hidden. In one room two humans had died protecting a vamp, part of a defensive action behind a barricade of bullet-shattered furniture. The master suite no longer had Ming’s tastes, having been transformed into a man cave for the new blood-master, all heavy furniture, with hunting trophies hanging on the walls: deer, elk, and one moose head over the bed. I closed the door and opened the one next to it; this one belonged to Adrianna, her scent flooding out. And she had been there recently. But not through the hallway. Not through the house at all, or I’d have smelled her.
I walked in and stopped, taking in her room. It was long and narrow, the walls painted a deep rose shade and centered with a canopy bed laden with silk sheets and draperies and tasseled ties in half a dozen shades of pale shell pink, with a silk rug on the floor in the shape of an ammonite shell. It was pale shell pink too. Not colors I’d have associated with Adrianna. Scarlet or royal blue, maybe even gold, but not pink.
There were no bloodstains there. I bent over the bed and caught the scent of Adrianna, fresh and strong. She had slept there within the last week, and not alone. I pulled down the comforter to see several long scarlet hairs on the pillow, entangled with as many blond hairs. The feather mattress beneath was shaped into one depression wide enough for two bodies, yet no scent of human wafted from the sheets. She’d been there without her human blood-servants, which was odd behavior for a vamp unless the assignation was with another vamp and it was secret. I breathed deeply of the mingled scents. Adrianna had taken a vampire lover. The scent was familiar, but mixed with Adrianna’s scent and her perfume, it was difficult to distinguish at first. It almost smelled like . . . Dominique. Dominique, who was heir to Clan Arceneau, second to Grégoire, Leo’s lover. If I was right, then this horrible situation was about to get sticky in the political and vamp-bedroom sense.
Dominique had reason to detest me, for not understanding a stilted invitation once upon a time, leaving her chained in silver and starving. Old history to me. Probably like yesterday to her.
At the closet I opened the doors to see a line of hanging dresses, skirts, and blouses, all in silk. Folded on slender, stacked shelves were rows of silk knit T-shirts. Shoes were tucked in little pockets hanging on the back of the doors, the heels sticking out for easy color coordinating, and three sets of shoe pockets were empty, matching the number of pairs found in Adrianna’s room at HQ.
I felt around, running the clothing through my hands, checking every seam, every pocket, every hem. I pulled out every pair of shoes, checking the toes, and in the bottoms of the hanging shoe pockets. I reached around everything on the shelves, bunching my hands on the silk for anything hidden. The upper shelf of the closet held hats, and I checked each one. Nothing.
In the narrow bureau beside the closet were drawers full of underthings, in lace and more silk. Adrianna had a serious silk fetish. The bottom drawer was empty, and I dropped to one knee so I could sniff the drawer. Until recently, paper had been stored there, along with something faintly magical, like maybe Adrianna’s gold jewelry that was now, and still, in the SUV. Maybe the gold jewelry Santana had escaped with. Beside the bureau was an indented place on the rug, roughly rectangular, like the shape of the bottom of Adrianna’s suitcase, found in HQ.
I went to the window, which was unlatched, opened it, and leaned out, seeing the lattice on either side of the opening. They looked like lattices for vines and flowers to climb, but they were made of sturdy metal painted dark green to match the hurricane shutters. The two vamps had climbed up and inside instead of coming through the house. Weird.
Back in the hallway, I looked into each room and counted, evaluating the mattresses. If the vamps had double bunked and pulled out sleep couches, more than twenty could have stayed on the second story. Nearly thirty had certainly died there. Leo had won the vamp war. I didn’t like him very much right then.
I went through the place again, taking the time to look at the paintings, which were stacked on long, narrow shelves on the walls, made of molding turned upside down, to make deep nooks. The paintings were propped in the nooks, some two and three deep, but set in place so you could tell the subject matter. One room had portraits, and I went through them until I found a gilt-framed one that had to be Santana. He was heart-stoppingly gorgeous. And he was wearing a bracelet on one wrist, made of overlapping gold leaves. No stones showed, but it looked like the bracelet I had seen when he escaped HQ. In the crook of his arm was Adrianna. She stared at him with a look on her face that was . . . passionate, avaricious, jealous, claiming, afraid, and victorious all at once. The artist had been a master to paint all that into her expression. It was terrifying. And it explained everything.
A third story was under the low pitched roof, and Eli and Derek were there, standing in the entrance, not speaking, each seeming lost in his own thoughts, except that Derek was watching Eli from the corners of his eyes. I pushed between them and through the opening. It was hot, decorated for low-level blood-servants or blood-slaves, and had been trashed. Or the humans who had lived there were trashy. Either way. Pizza boxes, beer cans, dirty laundry, unmade beds, and personal belongings were scattered everywhere. But at least no one had died under the eaves. No bloodstains.
Silent, we took the back stairs to the kitchen, where the guys went through the cabinets and refrigerator, which was growing something black and slimy and smelled of rancid meat and soured blue cheese. Sotto voce, Eli asked me, “Anything?”
I shook my head no and waffled my hand. “Adrianna and a vamp who smells vaguely like Dominique slept here for several nights in the last week. No papers in her room. No one died there.”
Derek said, “Leo wants this place usable. Suggestions?”
I frowned at Derek, and Eli said, “From what I see, you need a forensic cleaning crew in here, new wallpaper or an artist to restore the painted wallpaper if it’s worth keeping. New rugs where any old ones can’t be cleaned.”
“And,” Derek said, sounding perfectly sincere, “a good smudging to get rid of the dead people hanging around.”
My social skills were such that I didn’t know if Derek was being serious or not. He looked serious, and he smelled serious, but . . . Dead people? Ghosts? I looked around the kitchen again, seeing the bloodstains. Creepy, yes. But ghosts?
“We’re going,” I said. “Sunset is close and we still have no idea where Santana is.” I pivoted on a heel and headed back to the front, the guys following more slowly.
Behind me, Eli said, “If Leo wants it usable for vamps and not to sell, the place needs a tech update. From what I’ve seen, Clan Mearkanis’ tech was stuck in the late nineties.” He nodded to a small desk near more plants. There was an old PC on it, with a tower, a fat monitor, and a stack of discs.
“And a total security overhaul,” Derek added
, “with full attention to motion sensors inside and out, and alarm upgrades on windows and doors. We can sub this out or do it ourselves. How much and how long would it take?” he asked Eli.
I answered, sounding cross, “Yellowrock Securities doesn’t care. We have a job: to find Santana. Nothing more.”
His tone placid, Eli said, “If Leo pulls some of his own team off of the HQ updates and off his clan home, the security part could be done in a month. But other than that, what Janie said. We’re busy.”
A tone sounded and Derek pulled his cell. “I gotta take this.” Turning for the front door at a jog and leaving us behind, he said, “Lee here. Go ahead.”
The door closed behind him and the quiet of the old house closed around us, the icy air pressing against my skin. “Eerie,” I said. Eli was frowning and looked puzzled, but not about the temp. I asked, “What’s wrong?”
My partner gave a minuscule shrug, a closed-off gesture that didn’t invite conversation, as his eyes followed the high ceilings and traversed the walls, moving from blood spatter to blood spatter, and along the floors from splatter to splatter. Though patience wasn’t my strong suit, I figured Eli would get around to talking when he knew what he wanted to say, so I wandered into the foyer, waiting.
Finally Eli followed me to the entrance, his boots as silent as mine. He said, “You know, most women would have pestered me for answers to their questions.” I shrugged. We had already established that I wasn’t most women. “So, yeah,” he said. “Something’s wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it. I understand why Leo wanted us to check this place out, but why send Derek too?”
“He said security evaluations, remember?”
“Derek could do that alone,” he said. “Why are we all here together?”
Something did feel wrong about that, but I hadn’t been able to tell what. Now the strange feeling in the room seemed to press in on me more firmly, my body shivering once from the cold. “Yeah. He could.” I moved so I could see Leo’s new Enforcer out the windows. He was facing the side street and he looked angry, but his position was such that I couldn’t read his lips, even if I’d known how. I moved to another window to check on Derek’s driver, but the SUV’s tinted windows didn’t let me see in. Derek looked back at the house and I stepped away from the windows, though I knew the light was such that he couldn’t see in. Derek reached inside the SUV and pulled a weapon, readied it for firing. I didn’t like this. I unsnapped the holsters on my nine mils, freeing them for drawing. Eli was staring out the windows, watching Derek, his face expressionless.