Black Arts jy-7

by Faith Hunter

  The room reeked with the stench of death. He’d lost control of bladder and bowels. Blood had sprayed over the ceiling and walls. Prey, Beast thought at me. Meat. I opened my mouth and sucked in the air over tongue and roof of mouth, through nose, in little spurts of breath. The blood smell was so strong I couldn’t get a taste of the killer.

  Wrassler was behind me, on his mic. The hallway was filling up with people. Filling up with smells. Filling up with voices. I growled and the place went silent. I studied the blood spray on the wall in front of me. “The killer was between five-seven and five-ten.” Without turning around, I said, “Wrassler. Get on the cameras. I want to see every person who came and went down this hallway. And make a copy of the footage.” The cops would want to see it too. Dead humans meant human cops on the premises. “And call Jodi. Give her a heads-up before you call nine-one-one.”

  I heard Wrassler move away and knew that Derek had taken his place. Didn’t smell him or hear him. Just knew it. Beast was high in my brain, studying with me, taking over, evaluating death the way only a true predator can. Closer, she demanded.

  I wiped my shoes on the carpet just inside the door, wiping them hard, to remove any trace evidence. It wasn’t good enough. I should have on booties, but I/we needed to see/scent/taste-this-on-the-air. I stepped around the blood spatter and squatted over the body to look at the neck. The cut was higher on one side than the other, clean, a single cut, like the kind a sword makes in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. And the killer’s scent, buried beneath the stink of blood and bowel, was both unknown and familiar, hauntingly so. I swallowed hard, trying to figure out how everything that had happened fit together. And it didn’t, especially the part about someone trying to kill me in the middle of vamp HQ. I could almost put the other stuff together, but that part fit nowhere. I had random puzzle pieces with no matching edges.

  “Derek. Record.” I heard a soft click and knew he had activated a recording device. “Killer was likely male, killed left-handed, but he knows how to use a blade, how to fight, so he might be right-handed and using his left to throw us off. I’m pretty sure this was done with a single stroke, with a sword. Blade got trapped in the spine and he tore the head off to free it, so he was covered in blood when he finished here. He’s strong. Strong like a vamp.”

  “You think a Mithran did this?” a female voice asked behind me. It was the kind of question a lawyer asked, confirmatory and just a bit disbelieving. It was Adelaide.

  I swallowed before I replied, pushing down on Beast, holding her beneath me. I am alpha, I thought at her. She hissed and twitched her tail at me as she padded away. I got a breath without thinking prey. And meat. “Few vamps would have wasted the blood,” I said, hearing the harsh tone in the harsh words. “But maybe this time, a vamp did. Punishment, maybe?” For a job well bungled?

  I holstered my weapons and backed out of the room, stepping in the same places I’d used before. In the doorway, I pulled off my boots and handed them to Adelaide. “The cops will be ticked that I entered the room. They’ll need my boots for trace evidence. I know exactly where I stepped, so when they get into a pissing contest about it, let me know.

  “I need to see the other guy. His partner.”

  In the room two doors down, I found Tattooed Dude, lying on the floor under a table. I thought he was asleep when I walked in. Then I thought he was dead. And then I realized that he was breathing, his head was still in place, and he was staring at the ceiling. I bent over him and sniffed, seeing the marks on his neck. Someone had been drinking from him. Recently. And they hadn’t been gentle about it. But the scary thing was that there was no scent signature on the wounds or in the room. I didn’t know how that was possible unless someone was carrying a don’t-smell-me charm. Was there even such a thing? Had to be.

  “Get Edmund in here,” I said to the small group of people following me. “I want to know everything this guy knows. I’m going to security.”

  I pushed through the gaggle of blood-servants and out the doorway. Walking in my sock feet, I took the elevator down to the large security/electronic monitoring/conference area. The room was nearly empty. The bronze light fixture and track lights were dim, shadowing the corners of the room. The oval table was nearly bare, and the air smelled of coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts, the sweet scent from a box open on the table. The huge ceiling monitor was lit, showing twenty-seven camera angles from my newest upgrade, but as I watched, one view expanded to fill half of the screen.

  “Footage isolated,” a voice said. To the side, at the control monitors of the security system, Wrassler was standing behind a man wearing fatigues. Angel Tit looked up as I entered and gave me a faint nod, watching to see my reaction at finding him here.

  “I brought him so none of ours had control of the system,” Wrassler said, which was good thinking. Angel was one of Derek’s men, and he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar once. He’d been working to rehabilitate himself, and while he wasn’t worried at seeing me, and didn’t stink of guilt, he was concerned. Being in charge of the electronics while in the middle of a crisis was a huge step forward to acceptance for him. I inclined my head to show I acknowledged all that; his expression of concern melted away.

  Angel pointed to the monitor. “This one shows the hallway outside the interrogation room holding Jimmy Joe James. The guard looked down the hallway, as if called, and someone moving with vamp-speed appears for a moment, enters the room, and closes the door.” The footage showed real-time speed as the guard walked away for a moment, still visible in the camera, but with his back turned. I caught a flash of darkness, a brighter light, and then the guard walked back, up and down the hallway, keeping watch. Moments later, when the guard was facing away, the vamp raced from the room. He’d been only a blur entering, then leaving.

  “Can you show it in slow-mo?”

  “Yeah. But it doesn’t help. The guy was wearing a hoodie with the hood up, and jeans and sneakers.”

  Angel tapped some keys and I saw the same segment slowed down, the digital feed jerky. The guard walked away, the man in dark clothes raced in. Later he raced out. Something looked wrong. “Play the first and the last part again, the killer arriving and leaving.”

  The segment started in the dead time, when the guard pivoted and walked down the hallway. The interrogation room door opened. The shadowy figure showed, entering the room. Yeah. He was wearing a hoodie, and it was pulled low over this face, his only distinguishing features his broad shoulders and narrow waist. Angel clacked some keys and the same figure appeared leaving the room. I said, “One more time, this time cut out all the empty time. When the guard walks, I want to see the coming and going of our killer, as slow as you can make it.”

  I watched the footage. “Again,” I said. “Freeze it with him on-screen, entering the room.” The footage backed up and rolled forward to the correct digital frames, and froze. There were two frames, both blurred, but one showed what I wanted. “Print me out a still.” I pointed. “Of that one.”

  A heartbeat later I heard a printer buzzing. “Okay, now the killer exiting.” The digital shot appeared on-screen, and just as I’d thought, something was wrong and different.

  When he left, the guy was wearing different shoes. I took both stills and studied the blurred photos. I pointed. “Entering, he’s wearing brown lace-up shoes and carrying a bundle under his left arm. This shadow here might be a sword strapped to his waist. Exiting, he’s wearing white running shoes. Maybe different clothes. And the sword is in a different position.”

  “Okay,” Angel Tit said, but his tone added a “so what?” to the agreement.

  “He changed shoes. Probably changed clothes too. Standing in the only blood-free place he could have.”

  “In the doorway,” Wrassler said, “where you stood and wiped your boots.”

  I huffed out a breath. “Yeah. I’m an idiot.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Not Human,” I Said. “Deal with It.”

&
nbsp; My idiocy summed up Jodi Richoux’s thoughts nicely when she learned what I’d done. We were alone in the interrogation room where Imogene had been kept. “You contaminated my crime scene. You willfully walked into a blood-splattered crime scene to inspect a body. Not to check to see if he was still alive, which I could have understood and accepted. But you went in to look over a dead body.” The last two words were nearly shouted. Jodi was not happy.

  She stood in front of me, petite, blond hair bobbed at her jaw, fists on her hips, pushing back the dark gold business jacket that made her look stylish and tough. Tonight she wore her badge on her belt, and her gun in sight, clipped to a simple holster at her waist. “Talk to me, Jane. I need to know what happened.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it with a click of teeth. How could I admit to her that Beast had wanted a good look/smell/taste of air? I sat back in the chair, thinking about what I was about to do, and could see no other way out. However, there was no reason I couldn’t establish some control of the info. “Off the record,” I said. “Take it or leave it.”

  Jodi considered my requirement. “Unless it impacts a crime, I’m okay with that.”

  It was better than I expected. I nodded. “I’m not human.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I’m a Cherokee skinwalker.”

  “What the hell is a skinwalker?” she snarled, in a fair imitation of a predator herself.

  I gave her the short form. “I can take the shape and form of animals of my general size, provided I have enough genetic material to take a reading of it and copy it.”

  “So?”

  “So my sense of smell is good. Way better than human.”

  “Keep going.”

  “I should have been able to tell in the hallway that a dead body was on the other side of the door. Just by the smell. I should have been able to smell the blood. I should have been able to smell the perpetrator coming and going. I couldn’t. So I went inside. Stood over the body and smelled.”

  Jodi sat in the chair beside me and said, “Go on.”

  “I got a hint, but it wasn’t much. You know how, if you glimpse something in the next room, out of the corner of your eye, your brain instantly starts to make a picture out of it? Because our brains are pattern oriented?” She nodded. “Well, I do that with my sense of smell. And I got a hint of a vamp I’d smelled before.” I held her eyes with mine. “But I can’t place it. It’s been muffled, like with magic. And no, I didn’t know scent could be tampered with, but it can.”

  “I’m listening.” Which was cop-speak for keep talking.

  “Adrianna, one of Leo’s scions, and the secondo heir to Grégoire, attacked my house tonight, while I was at HQ. She was trying to kill my friends. They’re okay, but it was close. Anyway, one of the humans involved in the attack said that Adrianna wanted something in my possession.”

  I blinked as a puzzle piece resolved itself. It should have been clear sooner, but I’d had too much unrelated stuff on my brain lately and it had hidden in the depths of my mind until I had time for it to push to the forefront. I couldn’t guess what Adrianna had been after—besides death and destruction. It was possible, however unlikely, that she wanted the blood diamond and thought I had it. Which I did. Sorta. I asked, “Do you remember the Damours’ lair?”

  “Oh yeah. The crazy hideout full of long-chained scions and blood and death, which I got to see after a thousand paramilitary trampled all over.” Her voice, which had softened, barked again.

  I hadn’t shown Jodi the Damours’ lair. After my raid and the silent alarm went off, a neighbor called the cops, after seeing vehicles take off with speed, and a motorcycle ridden off by a woman. The uniforms first on the scene had called the NOPD cops in charge of the paranormal cases, meaning my former boyfriend Rick LaFleur and Jodi. Rick had been okay with it all, but it had taken Jodi a while to get past the fact that she hadn’t been part of the team entering the lair.

  The Damours blood family had fallen into disgrace. They’d been stealing witch children and killing them in black magic ceremonies. Blood magic. Which Jodi knew, as she had been cop-on-scene when I killed the Damours. “Leo had to have known something was up with them, but he hadn’t gone in and cleaned house. Until I showed up. And I don’t know why they got a free ride, not yet.” I was giving all my secrets away tonight, it seemed. I sighed and laced my fingers together, trying to look nonthreatening, which was hard with all the weapons I was carrying. Weapons Jodi had let me keep, which was a huge sign of trust in a cop.

  Carefully, I said, “Our killer vamp? Has to be tied in with Adrianna. And that could mean tied in with the Damours. But I can’t smell him—the killer vamp. Actually, I don’t get a real sense of gender, which is odd. The only thing I can tell you with any degree of certainty is it wasn’t Adrianna herself. And I can’t tell Leo, because he let the Damours’ work unrestrained in his city.”

  “Keeping secrets from the MOC in his own council house,” Jodi said, her tone wry and unamused. “Better you than me.”

  • • •

  I staggered out of the vamp council’s HQ just before dawn, still in my sock feet. I hadn’t seen Leo. I hadn’t discovered what the humans might know, the ones who had attacked my house. I didn’t even know where they were being held. Once Jodi showed up, I had been denied all access. It was her case and she was making sure I knew it. And to cap off my wonderful—not—night, all the way home I kept feeling as if someone was watching me, though I took three unexpected turns and never saw anyone. I was exhausted and worn and growing paranoid and wanted only to sleep.

  But that wasn’t to be. The Kid had found something and was sitting at the kitchen table when I entered, the smell of espresso and strong, hot black tea rich on the air. I didn’t even ask. I just poured a megamug, added three spoonfuls of sugar, and topped it off with most of a container of Cool Whip. I sat at the table with a quiet groan and said, “Tell me.”

  “You do know that mug is for soup, right?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah?” I looked at the mug and said, “Hughn.” And drank. The black China tea hit my taste buds and my bloodstream at the same time. Caffeine and sugar are two drugs that have some effect on skinwalkers, and some days I crave the lift they give me just like a human does.

  “And you do know you left your boots somewhere?”

  “I noticed. I also noticed I ruined a perfectly good pair of socks.” I lifted my foot and let him see the hole in the bottom. “I’m listening,” I said, aware that they were the same words Jodi had said to me not long ago.

  The Kid turned his screen to me. On it was typed I drilled into a bank’s security cameras. I got some shots of Bliss and Rachael.

  I knew instantly that we weren’t speaking aloud because we had an air witch on the premises—and because hacking into a bank’s system was illegal, and a surefire way for the Kid to break his parole. And if Eli was listening, we were so screwed. I sniffed, placing Eli by scent. He was upstairs. I nodded for the Kid to continue.

  The screen disappeared. Behind it was a different screen, one with a fuzzy image on it. It was Bliss, her black hair and very fair skin in shocking contrast. Beside her sat a more fuzzy image of Rachael, her head tilted back, her eyes closed in what looked to be desire, but was more likely a bad case of blood-drunkenness. Over her, obscuring the lower part of Rachael’s face and upper body, was another head. From its position I gathered that the vamp was drinking deeply from Rachael’s jugular. The vamp had red hair, though not curly—just long and flowing. “Adrianna?” I murmured the question. But she still had curly hair when she attacked the house. So I was betting no. Some other redheaded vamp.

  The Kid shook his head. He didn’t know either.

  “Any better shots?”

  He gave me a waffling motion with his hand and punched a button. From another angle I could make out a portion of a face, but it was blurry. The nose was distinctive, maybe a bit too long, a tad too pointed for perfect beauty, which was odd for v
amps. They usually only turned the physically perfect—no matter how mentally ill the human in question might be. I pointed to the nose and then drew my fingers along my own and pulled them together and out as if elongating my nose. The Kid shrugged and held up a finger to the side of his nostril, as if showing me that it could be something else and the poor quality of the shots might be involved in creating an effect that nature hadn’t provided. So the photo was no help. Ducky.

  The man beside her seemed delicate, his hair spiky, his face in shadow. Only the large nose ring and spiky hair set him apart.

  Alex hit another button and a different car appeared on the screen. He typed out This car was behind them. Following, as per three different traffic cameras and the bank camera.

  “Shadowing or tailing?” I whispered. There was a big difference. Shadowing might mean the lead car knew they were there and they were all working together. Tailing meant two forces in opposition.

  Tailing, the Kid typed. “Way back. Can’t tell that the lead car knew.” He punched a button and a different shot of the second car came up. It showed a quarter shot of a man’s head and part of his jaw—black hair, black beard, the kind that lines the edge of the jaw and usually moves up beside his mouth to form a goatee. His jaw was strong and sculpted, his chin might have been square, and something glinted gold on his neck. Dangling earring? If so it was a big one. Vamp? Not likely. Most male vamps didn’t wear big honking hoops.

  How many vamps have beards? I typed into his tablet. How many blood-servants? Thinking about the limo from out of state, I added at the bottom How many Texans?

  Lots, he typed back. Thirteen local fangheads scanned in already, no Texans. I’ll try to do facial matching. At my questioning look he said aloud, “Like facial recog programs, but this one matches parts of a photo with other known photos.” He hit a key and a shot came up. It was from the other side of the street and it took me a moment to realign my brain with the car’s spatial reality. I was looking at the tail car from the other side. Sitting at the passenger window in the backseat was a vamp. The one I’d killed earlier this evening. The now true-dead vamp who had attacked my freebie house had been tailing the vamp who drove off with Katie’s missing girls, which made no sense at all. Another key punch brought up the driver of the second car. Below his face, the Kid typed Macon Brown. Human. Blood-slave, not -servant, this info per your vamp census last year.