by Faith Hunter
“I love your brother,” I said.
“Cougar.”
“Am so.”
CHAPTER 22
Cast into the Day
According to Alex, who was read into the current action on Eli’s headset, the safe was a standard design for this model, with thick outer doors and five inner compartments. Leo’s combination numbers worked on only three of the inner doors, however. Someone had changed two of them; the right upper and center lower drawers were unavailable to us. The left upper contained velvet and leather bags that looked perfect for holding magical toys, but they held only gems and gold coins, none of which felt or smelled of magic. My life was totally off any kind of solid foundation when a fortune in gems and gold was uninteresting.
I counted the bags. Seven dark blue velvet bags contained rough, uncut gems, three red velvet bags contained faceted gems, mostly diamonds and bright red rubies, which vamps adored, and two padded silk bags contained pearls as big as my thumbnail, which Eli proclaimed were South Sea pearls and worth a fortune. I didn’t ask how he knew that. Courtesy of Uncle Sam, he had traveled the world and he knew lots of things I never would. The leather bags held the gold, some of which had been minted into uneven coins stamped with Spanish words and old-fashioned heads that Eli said were likely from the time of the Spanish invasion of the Americas. One bag held old earrings and bracelets etched and pressed with symbols that might have been Aztec or Mayan. Not counting the archeological value, I guessed the weight of the gold to be around ten pounds; Leo had his own bank. We put everything back where we found it and closed that compartment.
The two compartments on the bottom were actually drawers, and one contained a heavy, expandable paper file holding passports, the land deeds Leo had promised, with properties all over, from Barataria to Baton Rouge, bearer bonds, stock certificates, and various paper money stuff. I set the deeds aside for study later. The other drawer contained a single gold bracelet. It looked Celtic in design, heavy, simple, elegant, a snake meant to be worn on an upper arm, so that it appeared to crawl up or down. It was a match to the gold arm bracelet I already had, the one Adrianna had once worn all the time and that tingled of old magic, somnolent or fatigued, the spell held within the gold in need of recharging. This bracelet, however, was strongly charged and full of power. I had no idea what it did, but it reminded me of the blood diamond—potent and dangerous. I thought about taking it, but it wasn’t mine, and while I wasn’t above taking a dangerous artifact from the vamps, I also wasn’t going to do that unless there was evidence of misuse. I hoped the moral imperative of “thou shalt not steal,” didn’t come back and bite me in the butt.
We closed up the safe and spent a few minutes poking around before the last of the caffeine wore off, and then we gathered up the deeds and went home to catch some shut-eye.
* * *
I got four hours of uninterrupted sleep, which was enough to make do, but not enough to be fully mentally functional. I woke spooned in Bruiser’s arms, his bristles scrubbing the skin off my shoulder. It was my favorite way to wake up, and I rolled over slowly, to keep from waking him. He was traditionally handsome in a lot ways, brown hair and eyes, with a firm jaw and sculpted nose, long and sort of bony, a little Roman arch in it. I had a thing about noses, and Bruiser’s was perfect. He had a long, tall physique, muscles in all the right places. When I met him, I had assumed he was a weight lifter, though not to bulging excess, but I’d never seen him with weights in his hands. He was toned and fit. Pretty much perfect. He opened his eyes and smiled, a slow and easy smile, full of promise.
“I like waking up with you,” I said. “You look amazing in my bed, wearing nothing at all.”
He asked, “Finished looking?”
“Not yet, but I can take a breather.”
“Good.” He slid me closer and up under him and his mouth landed on mine. Heat shot out from deep inside me and I tightened my arms on him, wrapped my legs around his. The next few minutes were hard and fast and totally satisfying. And I promptly fell back asleep.
This time, it wasn’t someone else who woke me, but my own overactive brain, which was sharing a confusing caffeine-enhanced dream of the Son of Darkness trying to drink down a human while his mouth was on fire. Totally unsuccessful in a horror-style comic-book manner.
Bruiser was gone, his side of the bed cold. If not for the scents of man and sex that wafted from the sheets, I might have thought I’d imagined him being there—well, that and the present he had left on the pillow. A single scentless lily in a deep scarlet color with hints of purple in it. There was a little green thingy with water in it, on the cut stem to keep it fresh. He brought me flowers almost every time he came over.
Smiling, I crawled out of bed, pulled on raggedy gray sweats, and stumbled into the living room, where the Kid was surfing, transferring, downloading, and organizing data from the jump drives. He looked as if he’d been mainlining meth, red eyed, dark curly hair rising in wild ringlets, his body twitchy, and emitting an odor of stress pheromones and scents I’d come to associate with caffeine, ginseng, taurine, and vitamins from canned energy. There was a huge pyramid of empties at his feet—four name brands of energy drink empties. He usually overdosed like this when he was playing marathon World of Warcraft, but this seemed worse than his usual binge drinking.
“What,” he growled without taking his eyes from the screens.
He was starting to sound like Eli, and maybe a little like me, when he was irritated. Tone mild, I said, “Are we out of energy drinks?”
“Yes. And I know I’ll crash in a bit, but I need to stay on this until I understand it. So again. What. Do. You. Want?”
I cut off an inch of the stem and put the lily in a tall vase with water. “Have there been any reports of humans being drained since Santana left the pool where he fought Brute?”
“No.”
“Hmmm,” I muttered. “I think Santana is still on fire and burning from the inside. I nicked him with the sliver of the Blood Cross, and fire usually moves upward. Like into his throat and head. He needs enormous amounts of human and vamp blood to heal, but if his throat’s on fire, then he can’t drink, and if he can’t drink . . .” My words trailed off.
The Kid chortled. “He can’t heal. Making the city marginally safer than before. All we need to do is find him. If we can.”
I pulled my cell and dialed Edmund Hartley. He sounded groggy when he answered. “I will not offer my blood to a werewolf ever again. Do not suggest it. Go away.”
“Good morning to you too. Is the dog still alive?”
“He is. Sleeping at my feet, bandaged, and healing at a prodigious rate. He stinks like wet mutt. He produces a miasma of gas. He runs in his sleep. He moans. I am not getting any rest, which little has now been interrupted by you.”
“You sound a little like Leo when you’re ticked off. I’ll need to talk to Brute soon. I need to know if the SoD was on fire when they fought.”
“Your needs are always most strange. But I will ask him.” The call ended. I went back to my bed and to sleep.
* * *
When I woke next, my mind was running in circles and I knew I wasn’t getting more sleep, so I threw off the sheets and dressed in jeans and a T, checking a nine mil and sliding it into a spine holster beneath my T-shirt. The Kid’s desk had been abandoned, and I could smell him upstairs. Eli was sleeping upstairs too, the sound of two humans breathing filling the otherwise silent house. I didn’t hear Molly and assumed she had awakened and was away on witchy business, mostly because KitKit was stretched out on the back of the couch staring at me. I rummaged around in the Kid’s papers and found a city map, taking it and the land deeds to the kitchen table and starting a pot of tea, a good Asian black with lots of vanilla and star anise.
While it brewed, I paged through the land deeds, scanning the ancient and not-so-ancient legalese, and setting the ones owned by Joses Santana and his aliases in a neat pile. Once I had them separated, I marked the locations on the m
ap as best as I was able, though over the past hundred years, some streets had changed names and others had disappeared altogether, making some of it guesswork. And then I found two that rang odd bells, one in Barataria, where I had once tracked Leo’s son, Immanuel, before I killed him, and another down in the Warehouse District.
I had been to both locations before. At the Warehouse address, I had found the scent of my godchildren, in a closet, where they had been kept, kidnapped, until the Damours needed them for a black-magic, blood-magic sacrifice to power the blood diamond. I had always assumed that the Damours owned the property, and perhaps they had at the time I was there last, but way back when . . . Yeah. Way back when, the Son of Darkness had owned the property. He had owned land in Barataria too, under the name of Jesreal St. Anna. St. Anna/Santana. With vamps, there was no such thing as coincidence. Heedless of damaging them, I folded the deeds and left the house, closing the door quietly behind me.
Outside, it was midday and hotter than one of Dante’s circles of hell. It was a wet heat and my clothes stuck to me instantly as I slid my shades over my eyes. The whole world smelled of urine, sweat, and river water. I hated Louisiana in summer. I hated the summer smells, the summer mosquitoes, and the summer everything. I hated lack of sleep. It was hard to be charming when I was sleepy. But charming was overrated.
I beeped open the SUV and slid it into traffic. This time Eli slept through my escape. Go, me.
Due to the larger-than-normal group of picketing humans in front of and along the side of HQ, it took longer to make it the few blocks to the Council House than it did to find the deed I was so ticked off about. Dang Louisiana cars. I slowed in front of the gate and put on my blinker. I half felt, half heard the gunshot. And the odd splat/squeak at my side.
I flinched and dropped low in the seat.
Beast reared up in me. Predator! Gun, she screamed inside me.
Almost as one unit, the crowd crouched and started to run. I could hear their screams. The second shot hit the SUV window. It left a dark, rounded mark in the glass, spiderwebbing out. A third shot followed, but the window held. I yanked the wheel and roared into the Council House drive, slamming to a stop in front of the iron gate as I dialed HQ security, the back of my car hanging out in the street. Behind me there was shouting, and I got a glimpse of a horse, one of the mounted police units that patrolled the Quarter. Sirens sounded close by.
“. . . —n I assist you?” a man’s voice came from my cell, barely heard over the screaming.
“It’s Jane! I’m out front! Security code Alpha Attack! Someone in the crowd took a shot at me. Let me in. Now!” I heard more shots, more sirens in the background. I didn’t want to be responsible for a cop, a horse, or a pedestrian getting shot. “Now! Now! Now!”
The massive iron gate rolled back and I was admitted by whoever was on security console detail, and I parked just on the inside of the iron gate as it rolled shut, offering me protection I didn’t have otherwise. “Thanks,” I said, gasping, heart pounding. I had been shot at. “What do you see?” I asked security.
Beast thought at me, Stay in den. Safe here.
Yeah, I thought back. Okay.
Through my cell, security said, “Right now, there are three cop cars in the street and one pissed-off mountie. Sorry, Janie. Unhappy mountie. They got three people in custody, but I don’t see any weapons on the suspects. The second-story window is open, drapery blowing in the breeze.”
Another voice said, “Hang on, Legs. Let me check the feed on the other cameras. I’ll let you know when it’s clear to exit the vehicle.”
The second voice belonged to Vodka ChiChi, a guy I had worked with for some time. A guy I trusted. The first guy was one of the newbies, and I didn’t remember his name, let alone trust him yet.
I breathed deeply, waiting for an all clear to exit the vehicle. Three minutes passed. As my heart rate slowed to something closer to normal, I sat up in the seat and my eyes tracked all the security updates, noting where a camera hadn’t yet been installed. I would’ve bet money that the missing camera would have been the one that best covered my getting shot at.
Since Leo’s security people were handling the installation of the outside cameras, I’d have to have a word with someone, and I was now so far beyond grouchy that I figured I’d make a really good point. More minutes passed. My former sleepiness was buried under adrenaline, leaving me twitchy and testy and ill-tempered. I stopped my fingers where they were tapping out a rhythm on the wheel, and gripped the leather instead. It was mostly nerves, but nerves were not what I wanted to display when I entered vamp HQ. I concentrated on breathing deeply and slowly. But I wanted to tear off someone’s face with my claws.
“Janie, Sloan Rosen just called. He wants the vehicle,” ChiChi said over my cell connection.
“Fine. He can clean my pee off the seat,” I said, only halfway joking.
ChiChi laughed. “The shot definitely came from the second-story window. Cops have the place sealed off, but it looks as if the shooter got away. The other people in custody appear to be bystanders who mouthed off a little too much.”
I took my life in my hands as I opened the door. Wet, heated weather blew in and I realized I was drenched in sweat. An attack from nowhere was harder than actual battle. At least in battle, I usually knew whom I was fighting. An ambush was scary, and my body was still reacting. Beast’s body was still reacting. Dang.
I stepped out of the SUV and crouched at the door, inspecting the damage. The first slug had flattened into and against the driver door, at my left upper arm. The window shots were likewise embedded. If the rounds had been larger caliber, if any of them had penetrated, I’d have taken a heart shot or a head shot. My sniper was a good shot at short distances, with what looked like rifle rounds—not handgun rounds, and not frangible varmint bullets or ones that entered, expanded, and ripped holes as they exited. This looked like a bullet designed for complete penetration, in and out, the intent being to punch a knitting needle–sized hole, plunge through the victim (deer or, in this case, me) and out the other side into whatever was on the other side. My passenger door. Because of the short range and the minimal damage to the armored SUV, I was betting the cops would recover traditional “deer-getter” .30-06 rounds from the premises. A hunting round fired by every good ol’ Southern boy who hunted—a blue million of them around there. Unless they found prints or got lucky, my shooter was in the wind and would never be found.
“Whoever had drawn a bead on you, they were a really good shot,” a woman said from behind. My hands clenched, resisting the urge to jerk, yelp, or pull the nine mil and shoot.
Moving as if I didn’t feel like I had a target painted on my back, I turned to her and saw three other armed security personnel in the drive area. Silent, I left the vehicle and strode up the stairs, the guards racing to fall in behind me, weapons pointed at the street. They had come outside at the sound of gunfire. Stupid, from a security standpoint, but . . . nice. Really nice. Over my cell, and from the guard’s headsets, I heard ChiChi say, “All clear. All clear. All clear.”
Inside HQ, one of the guys worked a bottle opener like a bartender and passed out Cokes to the small crowd; we clicked bottles and drank. I drained mine, the caffeine and sugar hitting my system and mitigating the adrenaline breakdown, which could make anyone feel nauseous. I accepted a second bottle. Then I thanked them for their fast response and told them to never do it again. “Seriously, y’all. I appreciate the sentiment. But you do not abandon your post without specific orders or danger to the target. I was in a Clan Pellissier armored SUV, safe from anything but a rocket launcher, and even then, I’d have some protection. Never race to a gunfight without intel. For all you know, someone had a gun to my head forcing me to ask for help. Or the shooter might have been waiting to draw you out the door and take you all down.”
“Yes, ma’am,” one of them said, sounding snarky, half laughing. “Next time we’ll leave you hunkered down by enemy fire.”
I recognized him as one of Grégoire’s new people from Atlanta, but I couldn’t recall his name. “You do that. And when I get my title back, I’ll make sure of that upon order of the Enforcer,” I said, this time letting steel and some of the leftover adrenaline into my voice. His eyes slid to the side. “I was in an armored vehicle. Afterward, I had an armored vehicle between me and the shooter’s position. You aren’t even wearing vests.” I poked his chest hard enough to leave a bruise, so he’d think about what a bullet might have felt like. “He could have mowed you all down. Dead heroes are useless to me, people. I need people who think.”
I set my Coke down with a hard thump, holding my arms out to the side. “Inspect my weapons and add them to the list of documented blades, stakes, and guns currently on the premises,” I instructed, bringing the small group back from battle to proper protocol.
Protocol Aardvark, Procedure B was still in effect, and I had weapons, which always made me feel better, even when I couldn’t use them, such as in the SUV, being fired upon. Shoving the nine back into my spine holster, I said, “Take my personal belongings out of the vehicle and make sure that Detective Sloan Rosen gets the SUV. See that a new vehicle is made ready for my use and placed out back.”
A female said, “Yes, ma’am. I’ll take care of it.” She was blond, and I remembered her from . . . sometime. Sometime when I wasn’t being shot at. I forgave myself for not remembering.
I looked at the snarky man and said, “There’s an empty camera mount on the outer wall at the corner. Find out why the camera isn’t installed, and see that it gets up by nightfall.”