by Faith Hunter
“Does she smell of sex?” I asked.
The brothers glanced at each other again for half a second. Brandon said, “Not sex with a man.”
“I see. Let’s go, Eli. Call us if you need us,” I said to the twins. “If Dominique shows up here, I suggest that Grégoire protect himself. No telling who she might bring with her. And if Grégoire wants to stay at HQ, for any reason, including being attacked by someone close to him, let us know. He may need a convoy and diversions.”
“We’ve seen what the vampire you’re hunting can do,” Brandon said, gravely. “We’ll be careful.”
“Yeah. Do that.”
Back in the SUV, I said, “Idiot.”
Eli said, “I was just having a little fun. And so were they.”
“Maybe.” I leaned my head back on the headrest and closed my eyes as we motored down the street. “But you’re still a pain in the ass.”
Eli choked at my use of language and I smiled into the darkness, letting my shoulders droop into sleep. Eli woke me when we reached the first body of water, a family pool. I didn’t even have to step out of the SUV. I could smell the stench of burned vamp from the open window, along with the smell of pesticides and dog poop. And Brute. But no dead people. I marked it on my map on the cell and closed my eyes until we reached the next site, a fountain in a park I didn’t recognize. It was empty and stinky and tainted with were-taint also. As were three of the other sites. At none of them did I smell Adrianna.
We drove through the Warehouse District and I told Eli about the Damours, pointing out the warehouse where they had lived, a building where they kept the long chained secured to metal beds in a big room with a dead human they had fed to their progeny. I pointed out the building vamps used for parties, and an old church now owned by a vamp and kept as a daytime lair, which was weird.
At two of the sites I smelled dead humans and left the SUV, making my way close to the bodies to ascertain that no one was left alive. In New Orleans, it’s warm most of the year and homeless people can live outdoors in relative ease all year round, needing only tarps for rain protection, and lots of bug spray. At the first site I scented two dead middle-aged men smelling of booze, and the cops were already on-site, carrying the cop version of AK-47s and wearing their kill faces. We drove on by.
At the second site I held up a hand, indicating that Eli should wait in the vehicle. I drew my M4 shotgun and moved across the weeds of a vacant lot. I found a dying campfire and an entire family, including a teenager, all curled in sleeping bags. Drained.
I stopped as the scent of this death burned my nostrils, my lungs, scorching through my bloodstream. I moved into the campsite and bent over the boy, drawing on Beast’s senses. He looked too young to even shave. Worse, he was smiling.
I had a hard time drawing a breath. He was smiling.
Something like horror slithered under my skin, and I closed my eyes, turning away, hunching. The thing that had hung on Leo’s wall had done this. I had let him get away. I had let him live when I knew the first time I set eyes on the thing, it needed to die. Leo and I shared responsibility for this death. For all the deaths caused by the monster.
Kit. Killer of kits must die, Beast thought.
“Yeah,” I murmured.
I loosened my grip on the M4 to keep from accidently firing or damaging the weapon with my anger and breathed shallowly until I found a measure of control.
Sniffing the site again, I detected another scent. Brute. The werewolf’s growing anger was pungent on the night wind at the campsite, and I figured that if the werewolf caught up with Santana, there would be a miniwar on the spot. Maybe I’d get lucky and be there to help. I backed away from the camp to the SUV.
Eli pulled from the curb. “Details,” he said quietly, reading my body language.
I shook my head and dialed Jodi. Eli listened as I made my report, and Jodi was quiet, an awful, broken fury flowing across the cell to me, like a wave of emotion. When news of this hit the airwaves, there would be a reaction in the city, one that would put every supernatural at risk, or pit one species against another until full human-on-supernat civil war was possible. But at the moment I didn’t care if every vamp in New Orleans died in their lairs.
With dawn only hours away, my skinwalker metabolism had healed my body enough to allow me ease of movement and breath enough to feel like I’d survive. I still hadn’t seen to Beast, but I would get to her soon, I promised us both. Soon.
Alex had sent us a new address, one that had been called in to 911, about a bad smell and odd lights. The address matched the vacant Rousseau Clan Home in the Garden District, and though we had two other locations to check, we were close enough to Rousseau to take it first. Eli drove around the entire block, getting a feel for the house and grounds, entrance and egress, the layout and footprint of the property. It was going to be hard to approach safely and covertly, but we needed to take a good look. The burned-flesh stench came from around back. “He’s been here,” I told Eli. “Recently. Real recently. As in, could still be here.”
The Rousseau Clan Home was close to the street, and the grounds in front of the home were small but lush, with palms and what might have been a banana tree and night-flowering jasmine. The lot was slim but deep, and the two-story house was weirdly U shaped, narrow across the front, long and deep, with a very narrow hallway and gallery down the right side of the back of the house to the rear of the lot, where the house spread out again. From what we could make out in the security lights of neighboring houses, the back section of the house looked like it might be the same size and footprint as the front half. The pool was in the courtyard, surrounded on three sides by the house and by a tall brick fence on the fourth, giving it privacy. The chlorine smell was strong enough to override a lot of smells, but not the stench of barbecued vamp. And the seclusion wasn’t enough to mute the sounds of splashing.
“Call in fangheads or Derek to assist?” Eli asked.
“I say no, but it’s your call,” I said. “I want access to take down whatever needs taking down, with finality, and without vamps sticking in their noses. But I’ll also heal better than you will.”
“Keep HQ on speed dial and get me help if needed, but I say we go in alone. Stay close,” Eli murmured. “It’s too deep to divide up.” I nodded and we triple-checked our weapons, pulled on the new headsets, leaving the SUV parked on the street, unlocked, windows open, in case we needed to make a faster-than-normal getaway. At the left corner of the lot, partially hidden behind the banana leaves, I boosted Eli up and over the ten-foot brick fence. It was his turn to take point. He tapped his mouthpiece, telling me it was good, and I pulled on Beast’s strength to jump and grab the top, swinging myself over.
“Show-off,” he muttered good-naturedly into his mouthpiece, as we moved along the open left side of the house to the courtyard. The central garden area had been kept up and was lined in more plants, both the flowering and the vegetable variety, and the center was tiled in peachy orangish terra-cotta, the pool perfectly in the middle of the tiled space. We hid in the shrubs, checking the place over.
The courtyard was overlooked by the wraparound second-floor gallery and the patio beneath it on the first floor. The house was dark and the gallery was streaked with the long shadows of predawn. Up there, anyone could be hidden anywhere. In unison, we eased our right earpieces away from our ears, keeping one ear tied into coms and protected against explosive deafness, but allowing us to hear anything closer.
There were low ambiance lights on in the shrubbery, giving just enough illumination to tell us that there was no one in the open, yet the pool tiles were running with water, draining away from the pool. And the runoff looked darker than normal, probably mixed with blood. I was holding a vamp-killer and the M4 loaded with silver, but the stink of blood and vamps and scorched flesh told me it might not be enough. Maybe if Eli was carrying a man-fired missile, an SA-24, I might feel secure. Might. I stood silent, sniffing, letting the shadows and the scents tell me w
hat I needed to know.
Santana was no longer alone. By the scent patterns I counted five humans, all smelling of stress and fear, probably barely alive from blood loss, and maybe two other vamps, but the scents were hard to read beneath the chlorine and the stink of Santana burning. His being on fire might make him easier to kill, but it wouldn’t make him easier to get along with. I breathed steadily and discerned the vamps’ location on the warm, humid night air. Indicating their scent positions as best I was able, I held two fingers curled down near my mouth, like vamp teeth, then held up four fingers, before pointing in two different directions.
Eli made a cutting motion across his own throat, asking me if they were kill targets. I thought about it, hating to be stuck in this position—the position of deciding who lived and who died. Or, rather, who remained undead and who found true-death. I held out a hand, palm up, as if serving him a plate of hors d’oeuvres. The gesture said, Your choice. I hoped it indicated that if the vamps were prisoners, no. If they were willing participants, yes.
I patted the left side of my chest to indicate a heartbeat and pointed where I smelled humans. Eli nodded and flipped down his ocular. I eased out of the foliage to give him better room and visual access. He flipped back and forth between the low-light and the infrared oculars and used his entire hand to point out where the humans were. All five in one location.
Pulling harder on Beast’s night vision, I spotted something close to the far end of the pool, silvery and . . . The vision resolved into humans, all together, lying in a pile, unmoving but still alive. Barely. Inside me, Beast growled low, the vibration juddering my chest. They had been drained and might be so close to death they couldn’t be saved. This was going to be messy.
For half a second, I debated calling in SWAT and medic, but I decided that the vamps might just finish off the humans if they heard sirens or smelled cops. And I reconsidered calling vamp HQ for backup. It was a risk to do neither, but . . . Undecided, I held up my vamp fang-teeth gesture and then pointed, asking if the vamps were stationary. After feeding, they might show on infrared, but they always showed on low-light. Eli pointed to lounge-type garden furniture beneath the gallery. An unmoving form reclined on each one, which I could see now that he pointed them out. The vamps were the full length of the courtyard apart. I nodded. Then he pointed up and inside the part of the house farthest from the street and made a waffling motion. There was something hot up there, showing in infrared on his PIR device.
Like maybe a vamp on fire. Yeah.
Two on the lower floor near the pool, one or two upstairs. Why couldn’t they all be in one place, easy to herd up and dispatch? I pointed to the vamps on the lounges and mouthed, Go.
We separated and raced in, Eli to the right, me to the left. Eli’s vamp was lying facedown. It raised up and Eli took it—him or her—from behind, his left arm around the vamp’s throat, his right stabbing up into the vamp’s rib cage. In a human it would have been a kidney strike, a killing stroke that would sever the main artery feeding the kidney and the main nerve keeping it healthy. It was said to be so painful that a human taken down couldn’t even draw breath to scream but would bleed out and die on the spot. Silently.
Didn’t happen quite that way with the vamp. The death wail was an instant ululation that echoed off the house walls and into the night. The other vamp leaped high, toward Eli from twenty feet away. If the vamp had used his vamp speed, I never would have had a chance—there would have been a pop of displaced air and Eli dead on the ground. But the vamp was in predator mode and leaped, like a wolf onto prey. Still drawing on Beast, I leaped too, judging the vamp’s speed and direction even as I shoved off with my back foot. We hit in midair, about two feet from Eli and the vamp he was now fighting.
The next moments were blurred images of vamped-out predators, both female, ripping and tearing at us with talons and fangs. The sound of blows landing. And the overwhelming, night-blasting explosion of an automatic subgun as Eli emptied the extended magazine into the vamp he’d stabbed.
Over that, I heard nothing, not even the screaming of both vamps in mortal danger.
Eli’s vamp was falling, mostly in two parts, but still alive, somehow, her face in a rictus of fury. Mine was on the ground, a silver stake in her heart but still clawing at the lawn, trying to reach me. I kicked her over and rammed in a second stake. And then six more for good measure. The stink of nitrocellulose, corroding silver, and vamp blood filled the air. Finally the staked vamp lay still, weirdly not yet true-dead, but close. She looked like she had been in intimate contact with a porcupine. I chuffed out snarling laughter that I couldn’t hear.
The face of the vamp at my feet resolved into someone I knew. I checked out Eli’s opponent, who was unmoving also. I knew them. Lorraine and Cieran, formally of Clan Desmarais, or maybe of Mearkanis. I didn’t remember and it really didn’t matter, because both clans had lost in the vamp war last year and the vamps who had survived had been seconded to Clan Pellissier. In Pellissier they were the lowest of the low, as all vamps from defeated clans were. But more important, they had once served as scions to Adrianna. She had turned them; they were her children. It was no accident that they were here with Santana. It had to have been planned from the beginning, though whether Santana had found them or they had found him and brought him here to recuperate I might never know. Not now. Because no way was I leaving them alive.
Eli was already moving for the nearest door, ramming a new mag home in his small, automatic subgun. I fell into place at his left. The door to the long, narrow hallway that separated the front half of the house from the back was unlocked, and we entered, Eli taking point, which my Beast didn’t like at all. But I knew Eli could survive a frontal attack by using the minigun, and I stood a better chance than he did of surviving an attack from behind.
But the place was empty, cool, the air-conditioning running with a soft hum. It smelled a lot like the Rousseau Clan Home, of old vamp blood and mold, but there was also an overlay of Clorox. In the last few hours, someone had been there to clean. Beneath the smell of cleansers were the fresher smell of human blood and the stink of scorched vamp. Joseph Santana, aka Joses Bar-Judas, aka the Son of Darkness, was there. And so was a female vamp. Dominique. There was no longer any doubt. Inside, I cursed.
My hearing was returning and sirens sounded in the distance, still muffled. Eli muttered, “Dang nosy neighbors, upset over a little weapons fire in the middle of the night.”
I laughed, but it sounded odd, too deep, my Beast close to the surface. From overhead, in the second-floor hallway, I heard a thump and crash. Eli’s gun followed the sound, held close beneath his arm. But nothing came through the floor.
Since the AC was still on, that meant that the power was on, and with one hand, I found a light-switch panel containing eight switches and one of those round dimmer switches. “Lights,” I said, warning him. He flicked his goggles out of the way. I flipped all the switches and stabbed the dimmer. Lights came on everywhere. My eyes watered. Outside, I heard a pop of vamp movement and whirled. A flash of something pale showed in the now-illuminated courtyard, and I smelled the receding stink of burning vamp. Santana was taking off. Over the fence at speed.
The cops were pulling up out front. I wasn’t gonna get a chance to chase Santana down. But I did mark the direction of his exit by the smell and by a glimmer of light in the night. He was still burning, like the way human flesh burned when pure potassium got embedded in it. I was guessing that when he tore the sliver of the Blood Cross out of his neck, he didn’t get all the fire and now was being consumed by the flames of the Blood Cross. I couldn’t think of a better way for him to go, even if it meant war with the EVs.
From the other end of the house, I heard something crash. “Window,” Eli said. Outside there was a muted thump. The other vamp getting away; Dominique making a hasty exit.
I holstered the weapons and dialed Alex. Succinctly, I said, “Call the cops and Leo. We’re at Rousseau Clan Home. Cops are her
e. Santana got away. Dead vamps and drained humans. We need to be able to track Santana. We need medic for drained humans and vamps to heal any that might survive.”
“Copy. Eli?”
“We’re both good.”
The connection ended and moments later, cops rammed the Rousseau front door and the first wave poured into the house. We were standing with our weapons on the floor and with our hands high when the cops raced through the front of the house and into the long hallway. They scooped the weapons into the corner, put us in handcuffs, and shoved us to the floor, where we stayed. I got a good look at the front half of the L-shaped house; the back entrance to the hallway opened into a huge yellow kitchen with modern, fancy cabinetry, yellow- and brown-veined granite cabinet tops with lots of quartz and mica flakes inside that made them gleam in the lights. Beyond, I caught a glimpse of a living area with brown leather furniture, a luscious leather that screamed expensive. I could see a yellow silk rug beneath the furniture that probably went for forty thou, and crystal chandeliers overhead that were probably worth even more. The window treatments were full of tassels and drapes and swags and looked tacky to me, but I probably wasn’t cultured enough to appreciate them. The kitchen was spotless and the smell of Clorox flooded out, suggesting that Leo had—literally—cleaned house to remove any signs of the vamp war. And then Santana had shown up.
With a frisson of worry, I had to wonder if the nearly dead humans had been his cleanup crew.
We sat on the floor, silent and still, not answering questions, until a familiar figure appeared, wearing a fancy suit with prison tats below his sleeves, an incongruous mixture among the uniforms. The detective walked up, stopped, and stared down at us, his face expressionless but still oozing menace. I figured that was a skill he’d learned undercover in prison among gangs. There was still a price on his head set by the gangs, and the powers that be at NOPD didn’t know what to do with the hero cop, so they had dropped him into the basement with Jodi Richoux. “Sloan Rosen, as I live and breathe,” I said. “You do that whole ‘badass in a suit’ look well.”