It looked like TA hadn’t been completely honest with me—not that the twisty, sneaky time traveler who’d saved my soul from Vlad had ever told anybody the whole story about anything.
TA had told me that Vlad would have started a vampire plague that burned down Chicago if I hadn’t staked him—but the file of future news reports and analysis followed the outbreak from Chicago to LA, Washington, New York, and Boston. Statistically it was impossible that one master vampire could have done all that; the theory had been that maybe one vampire in thirty had proved capable of creating progeny herself. To make it worse, progeny like me that weren’t into all things vampire to start with didn’t inherit a lot of the traditional phobias and compulsions.
Like allergic reactions to religious symbols, or needing an invitation to enter a home. With lots of supervamps like me, not even the superheroes could stop the body count from becoming an unreal statistic—worse than the Big One, last year’s mother-of-all-quakes. Instead iron curfews, fortified sanctuaries, cadaver-dogs, quarantines, cremation of the dead, and nationwide martial law had finally ended the Killing Nights. I watched a helmet-cam video of an armored special forces team burning a screaming nest with flamethrowers, and wondered when I’d died—and how many victims I’d drained first.
One Master Vampire in thirty. I closed my eyes.
Thanks to TA, I’d been Psycho Vlad’s only progeny; with him dead and ashes the Vampire Plague had become just one more Might Have Been. But New Orleans was Vampire Central and there were around twenty of us here now. How many more scattered around the world? When I’d approached the DSA and told them I was progeny, a made vampire, they’d nearly dropped a brick. They’d yanked me out of Chicago with barely time to pack, and I’d spent three weeks at their Camp Necessity while they made sure I couldn’t sire progeny myself (my whole reason for telling them). They’d been right to worry; all it would take was one.
Was a new master vamp in town? The DSA really needed to know this—looking out for stuff like this was really what they’d sent me here for. But I didn’t know. If I raised the alarm all hell would rain down on New Orleans’ vamps, and if I was wrong…
I closed the laptop and sat in the dark for long minutes before heading out.
* * *
I needed to learn a lot more about Acacia’s story and about Angels, which meant talking to a vamp who’d been in town longer than I had—preferably one as unconnected with the circle of courts and establishments as I was, who “floated” around town as much as I did. Much as the man made me want to hurt him, my best possible source was the only other vampire I knew who didn’t keep a court or belong to one: Marc Leroy.
I checked my moonlighting gear: mini-epad, ID to prove that I really was old enough to drink, if only just (it was fake; nobody would believe a driver’s license that said I was twenty-five), my holdout pistol (the little Kel-Tec 9mm I hadn’t had the other night), and plenty of folded cash. I added a blood-kit; we’d never caught Leroy in our net, but a voluntary check would rule him out as Acacia’s sire, whatever he’d been doing at Angels.
So naturally I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t at his fencing school, the Salle D’Armes. One of the teachers told me he’d accepted a bodyguarding job for a Hollywood celebrity come to town. Since he might not get back much before dawn, I didn’t wait.
Vamps had to support themselves somehow. Sable lived off of “gifts” from his court and a door-fee at his place. Angels paid Acacia and Belladonna to hold court there, like having a popular house band. I was studying for a private investigator’s license—the clichéd occupation of “good” vampires—as part of my cover story. Marc Leroy taught fencing and worked as a high-end bodyguard.
As expensive as Leroy was (I’d heard you could buy a car with what he got paid for a night, which had me considering a side-career) only people who wanted to be seen with him hired him so I could probably find him where the party was. The party was everywhere this close to Mardi Gras, but checking a couple of buzz sites on my epad gave me a target; Chris Block was in town and the famously hard-partying singer had been spotted crawling up Bourbon Street, going club to club with an entourage.
This year Mardi Gras was late and spring was early, and I heard the brass notes of practicing bands as I floated over the Quarter in the warm night. When people think Mardi Gras they tend to picture the booze-chugging, boob-flashing, bead-throwing party that takes over Bourbon Street, but it’s a city-wide celebration and the big parades don’t even enter the Quarter’s narrow streets anymore. And Mardi Gras is only the last day of Carnival, the day with the most parties and parades; the party started on Twelfth Night in January and danced through the city till the stroke of midnight sternly announced Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.
Dropping down to street level, I drifted invisibly through knots of tourists thronging Bourbon Street’s bars and clubs. The tickling tones of If Ever I Cease to Love drifted out of a piano bar, mixed with laughter and drunken karaoke to some new hip-hop hit. I didn’t feel any other vampires in the wind, but Bourbon Street wasn’t really one of our favorite haunts; the party here wasn’t about us.
It took me over two hours to find him; contrary to TV scriptwriters, we didn’t come with vampire-detection radars and the only time I could feel another vampire was if they were using influence or if they were dispersed into mist and close enough for me to feel their drifting essence. I finally ran him down in Fais-Do-Do. Bodies packed the Cajun club so tight that if Chris hadn’t been on a table screaming along with a band covering his songs, his biggest fans couldn’t have spotted him from ten feet away. The band was covering badly, but he didn’t care.
Leroy obviously didn’t care either; the noise had nothing to do with him. Propping up the wall beside Chris’ table, he looked bored but his eyes tracked me as I pushed through the crowd. A little influence let me nudge heavier drunks aside without being obvious until I joined him by the wall.
“Where is the licorice cupcake?” he asked when I squeezed in beside him.
“Bite me.” When Sable had brought me to the Midnight Ball, I’d worn the frill-and-lace perkigoth confection I wore for his court. Le-roy’s droll dismissal of my outfit—which I didn’t like either—hadn’t endeared him to me.
It hadn’t helped that his severe black outfit had been tailored tightly enough that if he’d raised his arms over his head his armpits would probably have come unseamed. With his whip-thin, hard-muscled physique, he didn’t need any decorations to look yummy.
Yummy and bored and dismissive, like tonight.
“Charming,” he said.
“Bite me.”
He sighed. “Since you are here, Sable requires something. And please don’t repeat yourself.”
I almost said bite me again just to poke him.
“I’m not Sable’s,” I said instead. Chris hit a warbling high note and I winced. “When is your job done?”
He raised an eyebrow, tapping his thick gentlemen’s cane against the hardwood floor. With most guys canes are a costume prop, an affectation, but I was willing to bet that for him it was a weapon.
“I would guess no more than an hour, given my employer’s current rate of consumption. In any case this is his last stop before taking the party back to his rooms. Join us til then?”
“Sure, torture me.”
“You are not being paid to stay.”
I ground my teeth. When he got so patronizingly French I wanted to shoot him, but I settled in. We had to make an interesting picture together—me in black jeans and leather jacket, him dressed for a state dinner. The pencil-thin beard he wore only made him look more cultured and sophisticated, and our very different complexions—me pale as the moon, him the shade of coffee with cream—completed the contrast.
A little more influence got the server to believe that I was twenty-one (half the time nobody would accept my ID otherwise). She delivered my order of a glass of Blue Moon, a Belgian witbier I’d learned to like, and I settled in.
&n
bsp; We didn’t talk much, and nobody paid attention to us. I did ask where he was from; his diction was perfect but his accent bugged me. He didn’t sound Cajun, and it turned out he really was from France, from Orleans, ironically enough. He wore a heavy silver ring with a fleur-de-lis on it, like someone else might wear a college ring.
Chris had an amazing tolerance for alcohol, but his minders got him moving when it looked like he’d have to be carried if he had one more. The party animal image was good, falling-down drunk, bad, and presumably he had his choice of liquor and drugs waiting back in his hotel suite anyway. Apparently he’d rented the Hotel Monteleone’s penthouse suites so he could hang in the Quarter till the end of Carnival.
I got to watch Leroy work. He never looked at Chris, eyes moving over the press of partiers and street crawlers around him as we walked. The tight one way streets of the Quarter, packed as they were in the run-up to the big night, left no room for a caravan large enough for Chris’ entourage; instead we walked to the hotel, Leroy on alert the whole way. He asked me to wait in the lobby while he got everyone upstairs; after that they were a problem for hotel security.
“My place?” he inquired when he returned.
It didn’t sound like a friendly invitation, but I agreed and we set off. It felt strange, rising into mist with a keen awareness that he floated upward ahead of me. I couldn’t see him—I felt him where our boundaries touched and mingled, and it distracted me so much that I didn’t notice the other vamps. They dropped out of the night air, and suddenly I was flesh and blood in the grip of gravity. I hit the roof below hard enough to knock the wind out of me if I’d needed to breathe. Leroy yelled, which meant he’d gone corporeal too, but my attention was taken by the hooded and masked vamp swinging a machete at my neck.
What the hell?
* * *
Life-and-death fights aren’t conducive to analytical thought and I hadn’t survived by asking why questions in the heat of the moment; I rolled away from my hooded attacker to come to my knees with Kel-Tec in hand, put three shots through his center of mass pop pop pop. He staggered as they punched him, kept coming, and I fell back into mist as his swing cut air where I’d been. He leaped into mist after me, and again I hit the roof, staggering, pulled back into flesh.
I skipped the how did he do that? and went with the instinct that told me where he’d pull himself together. His re-fleshed knee met my boot—a lucky kick. He yelled, fell, lost the machete, and I put the fourth bullet through his forehead. Then I dropped and rolled away as another vamp went solid above me. He landed wrong and I shot him too. Behind me I heard the ringing hits of swinging blades, turned, caught a flash of Leroy facing off a pair with a sword of his own—a sword cane?—before spinning back to my own fight. My first attacker shook off the headshot, snatched up his blade, and whirled into mist as I backed toward Leroy and tried not to trip on the uneven roofing. His buddy kept his own machete pointed at me.
I felt Leroy dance through the mist and back at least twice—not sure how I knew it was him—and then his back found mine.
“Friends?” he asked without turning.
“Not mine.”
“Know them?”
“Seriously? Under the hoods?”
He laughed. “Then fly!” he barked.
I reflexively leapt into mist, felt him do the same and pass through me, fell back into flesh ahead of the will that pulled at me (why had nobody told me a vamp could do that?), landed on my first attacker and used my fistful of gun to club him hard. He staggered but pushed me away, then collapsed to the roof as his head flew off. Leroy flicked blood off his sword as I dropped my useless gun to grab his victim’s machete, and we turned back to back as the three left took flesh around us.
They spaced out to ring us in, machetes swinging, three vamps in Mardi Gras masks under black hoodies, watching as we spun slowly. No threats, no posing or demands, just careful steps in a weird parody of a circle dance.
I was fine with not talking.
The two in my line of sight misted and I felt Leroy do the same before I followed myself. Angling on the one to my right, I felt him changing and raced him back into flesh. He got there first, but misjudged; I came down behind him, swung with a scream, and his head leaped away in a fan of blood.
“Yes!” I shrieked, spinning around. Two of the bastards down, two to—
I heard Leroy shout, felt the bounce as I hit the roof, but couldn’t feel anything else. Or move except to blink at the pair of boots I was staring at. What the hell…
Chapter Seven
“Near-death experiences? I’d give my Taylor Swift collection to have only near-death experiences.”
Recorded interview from The Artemis Files.
* * *
“Aah!” I bolted upright, choked on blood, spit, tried again.
“Take it easy,” somebody soothed.
“What. I. Aaaaa, shit!” Words could not express the awful realization, just before thought disappeared entirely, that I’d been decapitated. I wrapped my hands around my neck and they came away sticky. The ghost of pain, like a necklace of fading papercuts, told me where the slice had been.
If I’d been alive I’d have been hyperventilating—instead I spit more blood as I tried to understand where I was. I’d been laid out on somebody’s kitchen counter under a hanging forest of steel pans and cutlery. In a kitchen that either belonged to a vampire or someone with an obsessive-compulsive cleaning disorder.
“Easy,” Leroy said again as thirst hit me hard enough to freeze coherent thought. I got as far as I need before his arm was in front of my face and I found myself sloppy-sucking on his wrist. I didn’t think to count, but he did and pulled away after a minute. I still felt like I could drink the sea, but at least I could think.
I looked down at myself. My jacket and cami stuck to my skin, tacky with blood. Leroy came around beside me as I pulled at the ruined top.
“What hap— What happened?” I choked again, voice thin. Had my headless body reflexively tried to breathe, pulled blood down into my lungs?
Leroy’s suit jacket was gone, his sleeves rolled up, but none of my blood was on him. He looked curious, like he’d gotten home and wandered into the kitchen for a late snack to find me lying on his preparation counter.
“The other two left when one lost a hand,” he said. “I brought you here.”
“They chopped my head off!” I shrieked, using up my lungful of air. I took a breath, dialed it down, asked the all-important question. “How am I alive?”
He actually rolled his eyes. “Surely you can’t be so unread? To finally kill a nosferatu you must drive a stake through its heart, cut off its head, and burn it to ashes. Or just leave it out in the sun, since Hollywood has successfully dictated that we also spontaneously combust.”
“And it’s true?” Back in Chicago I’d given psycho-Vlad the full treatment out of a need to really express myself—not because I’d known it would take all that to really kill him. I felt my neck again. Clean brown hands covered my sticky pale ones. He gently pulled my hands away and tilted my head to look, like a doctor checking his work.
He smiled. “Fortunately most vampires are not fans of Buffy. We don’t explode into dust at the poke of a well-placed stake or a clean slice. No, in that the old stories prevail.”
“So how did you… reattach…”
“Extended propinquity works very well; I simply held your head to your neck until you decided to pull yourself together.”
“Pull myself—. You did not just say that.”
He looked confused for the first time.
“I know I spoke correctly.”
Someone knocked on the kitchen door, swung it half-open.
“Is it safe in there?” the knocker asked cheerfully.
“Yes, Darren,” Leroy said, smiling. “Enter freely and of your own will.” I snorted; even I recognized that line.
The door opened the rest of the way, and I stared. Beautiful was not an adjective that could be
applied to many men, but Darren was one of them. A tanned blond Adonis in sports shirt, casual pants and loafers, he lounged in the doorway. The cotton shirt stretched tight, showing cut but not bulky muscles; he looked like he ran instead of crunching weights at whatever country club he’d wandered away from. And I was still thirsty.
He winked at me but spoke to Leroy, and I suddenly recognized him: the guy I’d seen at Angels with my sardonic rescuer.
“The roof you sent me to was clear,” he said, “so I figure their friends came back for them. But I found this.” The machete he held up had blood on it. Mine? The one I chopped?
Leroy frowned. “I’d hoped to be able to talk to our attackers.”
“Did you recognize them?”
“No. However, I did remain long enough to take pictures.” He pulled out his cell-phone and turned the screen to me. “Do you know them, Ms. Bouchard?”
Swinging my legs off the table to scoot closer, I choked again. The screen showed two heads, set side by side. Masks off, they wore very surprised expressions.
I stopped myself from shaking my head. Cautiously rubbing my neck, I tried to ignore Darren’s leaning in to look over my shoulder.
“I don’t know them.” I forced my hands back down, fighting the queasy conviction that my head would fall off if I turned it too far. Dammit, vampires didn’t do that! They posed and pouted and engaged in influence-duels if they felt pissy!
And I’d thought I knew all the vamps in town from Emerson’s files, not to mention the mind-numbing round of formal introductions at the Midnight Ball—the fact I didn’t recognize either of them was a seriously disturbing intelligence failure. How many more unknown vamps were there?
Darren just looked cheerfully thoughtful. “I have some pull. If we photo-shop these pictures to remove evidence of their…close shaves, we may be able to enlist the help of the cops.” He caught my eye and smiled sympathetically.
Bite Me: Big Easy Nights Page 4