by Faith Hunter
The front door across from my house was sealed by crime scene tape. I could get in, if I was willing to cut the tape or go around back for a little B&E. I needed to sniff the shooter’s blood to see whether I recognized it. But I just couldn’t make myself.
The street between our houses had been scrubbed free of blood, any final traces washed away by rain. I swiveled and looked at my house. The wood was pocked in several places, holes that had been enlarged by CSI retrieving evidence.
On the cooling evening breeze, I smelled exhaust, steak from inside my house, water from the Mississippi, blooming flowers, Creole and Cajun restaurant cooking with a high percentage of seafood, coffee—the usual French Quarter smells, rich and layered and intense. A spatter of rain pounded down, pebbling the water on the street. Because of the heavy clouds, the streetlights came on early, the sensors claiming night was falling. The old-fashioned globes cast homey yellowed light into the false dusk, but I didn’t feel homey. I felt numb and worn. Tired beyond anything I’d felt in recent months. It would be smarter to move my partners to vamp HQ, and leave myself out as bait. I wondered whether I’d be able to talk them into it.
Our hunting territory, Beast thought at me. We will not run. We will fight.
Neither one of us is very bright, I thought back.
I went inside.
• • •
Over a steak and a beer—which made me feel a little better—I made the suggestion that the boys go to HQ, “to keep Leo safer,” I said, trying for nonchalant.
Eli paused, a bite halfway to his mouth. “So you can be bait and fight Satan’s Three alone?” Eli said, his tone so mild that I instantly realized I had insulted him. Carefully, as if his fork and steak knife were made of glass, he set them onto the plate, the bite of steak forgotten. “No.”
“Not even Alex?”
“That would be up to him,” my partner said, his words measured and precise, his tone and expression giving nothing at all away. “He’s over eighteen.”
“No,” Alex said shortly.
“Okay. It’s what I expected. But I had to ask. It’s”—I shrugged—“polite.”
“Bugger polite,” Eli said. And with that he picked up his fork and shoved the bite into his mouth.
“What my brother said,” Alex said.
I decided this was not the time to discuss house rules and, after a moment, nodded. “Okay. Let’s compare stories.”
I learned that Eli had shown up at NOPD and been taken in to give a statement. He had gunshot residue on his hands, but no blood on his clothes because he had managed to change before he appeared at NOPD. He had admitted that he was the one who returned fire and had turned over the weapon that he’d used. He had been questioned to within an inch of his life before being released with the usual order not to leave town.
I told them all about my day at cop central. Eli shared a few details about his time there too. His Q&A had included Jodi and lunch with the cops—who wanted to say thank you to the man who had saved a cop’s life.
Alex told us about his research and about the dead cop. Everett Semer had been fifty-five and heading to retirement in a little more than a year, with a wife and two kids and grandkids. We watched the coverage on TV and social media and sent a donation in to help the family. And we were relieved to learn that the injured cops were expected to survive.
Sobered, Eli turned off the news and called vamp HQ. I listened, silent and feeling a bit managed and outmaneuvered as he told someone that we would not be in tonight. I stared at him, surprised but not stopping him. When he hung up, he raised his eyebrows. “What? We need to figure out who’s targeting us. And we need a day off from fangheads, which you never take.”
I gave him a dismal smile. “What’s this of which you speak, ‘day off’?”
Instead of answering, he said, “Coke floats for dessert,” which cheered me considerably. Sweets were not Eli’s drug of choice. Eli had no drugs of choice—it was an all-healthy lifestyle for the Ranger.
Over dessert, served in tall glasses with vanilla ice cream and Coke and lots of the resulting foam, Eli turned the conversation to the shooter. “According to what I learned through Jodi, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the bomb builder and the shooter were the same person. Fingerprints match.”
“No way,” Alex said. “Bomb makers and shooters have distinct and different personalities.”
Eli settled hard eyes on his brother, which had to be uncomfortable. Alex jutted out his jaw and stared back. “You’re a shooter,” the Kid said. “You’ve got all the personality markers for a shooter, including high markers for survival, tenacity, independent action, and patience. Bomb makers have different personalities, with lower markers for survival and independence, but higher markers for single-mindedness.”
“You’ve been playing shrink on me?” The question contained no overt emotions, but Eli’s scent changed, with aggressive pheromones tainting the air.
“I have an IQ considerably higher than yours,” Alex said seriously, “with personality markers for insatiable curiosity. It isn’t my fault.”
“Everyone has to take responsibility for our own decisions, actions, and inactions, Kid.”
“Stop,” I said. “We’re not talking about your pasts. We’re talking about the shooter and bomb maker who targeted this house. If it’s a blood-servant, and we think it is, he’s had a lot of years to learn all sorts of things, including how to beat any personality test or even grow a new personality if he needs one. You live long enough, you can overcome most anything, including your own disposition.”
“That from personal experience?” Eli asked.
I stabbed him with a look and let Beast rise in my eyes, just a bit. “You got questions about me, Eli? ’Cause if we start asking questions, we’re all gonna have to answer them.” I let my eyes fall to his collarbone and the scarring there, scarring he had never talked about, scarring that had ended his military career, or had been the impetus for his voluntary honorable discharge, or whatever they called it.
“Maybe it’s time to clear the air,” Eli said, and my heart jumped in surprise before he went on. “But not until after we catch this guy. Then I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours.”
It was a challenge that Eli clearly didn’t expect me to accept. So I did. “Okeydokey.” He didn’t gape like a fish on land, but it was a near thing, and I grinned at him to show I knew I had scored a point. To drive it home, I licked my fingertip and drew a vertical line in the air. “Until then, you got any of the shooter’s blood for me to sniff?”
Eli frowned, actually had a tiny line form between his brows. “Yeah. How’d you know I collected some of the blood?”
“You were too quick to disappear. I figured you followed him and collected some spatter for me.”
“I did.”
I held out my hand. “That blood spatter, please?”
Eli retrieved a plastic Ziploc bag from the counter and opened it before handing it to me. I bent my nose over the opening and sniffed. And rocked my head back in surprise.
“What?” Eli said, knees in a crouch, one hand behind him, going for his weapon. Eli always had a weapon on him, and drawing one was his first action of choice.
I waved away his gun and the stink at the same time. “Nothing. Just, I never smelled a blood-servant like this one. I don’t even need to shift.” I took another sniff and wrinkled my nose. “Ick. Angry, cold and purposed, been drinking from a very old vamp for a lot of years. Old blood-servant, maybe the oldest I’ve ever smelled.” I raised my eyes to Eli as he settled back into his chair. “And our shooter is a she.”
Eli didn’t seem terribly surprised. “Women make good shooters: steady, dependable, and reliable. Good hand-to-eye. Until they have families. Then different instincts kick in and they have a harder time following orders. They think too much.”<
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My feminist side wanted to stick up her head and disagree, but maybe he had a point. What did I know? I took another sniff. The blood was starting to break down and smelled a bit rank, but I caught a whiff of something else. Something almost familiar, but not quite there, not quite envisioned. But whatever it was, little alarm bells went off inside my brain. I resealed the baggie, thinking.
“Are you going to change shape to sniff it?” Alex blurted. “I want to watch!”
“No,” Eli said.
“Yes, I’m going to change. And it’s the same answer you will always get to that question. No, you can’t watch. It’s private,” I said. “Sorry.” But I wasn’t really sorry. Changing, even in extremis, always involved a certain amount of nudity, and no way was I willing to share that with a nineteen-year-old boy/man, no matter how high his IQ was. “I’ll be right back.”
I went to my room and closed the door.
I took my box of fetishes from the top shelf of the closet and removed the one I wanted, bones and teeth strung on a length of jewelry wire. I stripped, sat on my bed, and held the necklace in my lap. Beast had been unusually quiet until I settled down to meditate; then she said, Good nose. Ugly dog.
“Yeah. I know. Sorry.” And I entered the gray place of the change.
CHAPTER 14
Talk to Big Bird
As soon as the dizziness cleared and my head stopped being filled with images and scents, I stepped down from the bed. I had to change the sheets. Buy a new bed. Scrub the bathroom. Good oogly moogly, this place stank.
I made it to the door and scratched on it with my paw. Then, just for fun, I barked, a long arrrooooo of sound. Alex, smelling of garlic, onions, sweat, deodorant, and growing boy—a toxic mixture—opened the door and stared down at me, his eyes big as always when he saw me in a different shape. I considered letting go some gas—a doggie way of stating an opinion on any number of things, but I thought better of it. I walked into the kitchen and ate the raw hamburger that Eli put on a plate for me. The energy required by shifting always left me starving and I hadn’t had to tell my partner. I butted his leg in thanks and he scratched my ears, a familiarity I’d never have permitted in human form but which felt perfect in dog form.
Back in the living room, I stepped up on the sofa and sat, my tail thumping, staring at Eli. Who smelled wonderful to my dog nose, and made me wonder how Bruiser might smell, which nearly made me drool. Associations in bloodhound form were so totally different from human or Beast shape. All the senses were closer together, interwoven, more intricate, and so much more intense, that I could see how easy it might be to let them take over and to lose myself in the textures and blends of scent patterns. I realized that Eli was talking and I woofed to show I was ready for a sniff test.
Inside me, Beast growled. Ugly dog. Good nose, on ugly dog. She thought a moment, and added, All dogs ugly.
Eli came at me with the sealed baggie and I pulled my head away for a moment, already almost overcome by the smells as he pulled the Ziploc open. I shook my head, my ears flapping, and gave a little sneeze to clear my nose before sticking my head forward and my snout into the baggie. I took a small sniff. Then another. And another, breathing deeply as the smells found new places in my doggie brain, forming associations with other scents from the last time I was in this form, from times I took other forms with good scent noses, and also from when I was human—nose-blind, I understood. Humans had so little understanding of the smells of the world around us that if we were sightless, deaf, and unable to touch at all, that isolation might show the difference between a human’s ability to smell and a bloodhound’s ability.
I learned all I could from the bloody cloth, lifted my head from the baggie, and trotted back to my room, closing the door with my nose.
• • •
I was sitting on the bed, firmly in the gray place of the change, when I felt the magics. Like mine, but different. In the location of mine, yet not. L’arcenciel magics. Close. I reached in to the deeps of me and found the genetic form that was mine, that was all Jane, all human, and I ripped it up and out through me, through the energies that glowed with zooming lights, that sparkled like stars, and blazed like comets, through the flesh that needed to become my own. I rolled from the bed to the floor.
And I screamed. Pain like being burned to the bone, being branded, being dipped in molten iron. I threw back my head and found the genetic structure that could weld a sword and shoot a gun. I found myself, my human form. Gasping, I rolled to my backside and to a sitting position, twisted in sheets. Eli stood over me, weapons drawn. Overhead the light shined into the formerly dark room. I grabbed up the sheets and tried to stand but my legs collapsed and I fell.
“Magics,” I gasped. “The light-dragon is here.”
Eli stepped, balanced, lifting his feet one at a time, setting them down in stable position, rooted, as he slowly turned. “Where?”
That’s right. Humans can’t see it in every form. “Close,” I managed. I pulled on my jeans and tee and grabbed my weapons, a little-used eighteen-inch, steel-bladed vamp-killer that hung in a sling on the back of the bed frame and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. I chambered a round, pointed to the front of the house, and followed Eli out of the room.
He forced open the front door and we broke through the crime scene tape and out into the street. The smell of a flash rain was in the air, the stink of lightning. The street ran with water, warm on the asphalt beneath my feet. But the magics faded and disappeared.
• • •
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” I said, as I stuffed my face with the rare steak that Eli had cooked (if a steak this rare can be called cooked) while I shifted back. “But I smelled something in the blood that I’ve smelled before. Or nearly. The shooter smells like one of The People. I need to get another look at the paintings on one of the lower levels of vamp HQ.”
Eli’s mouth pursed. “What does Leo have in all his basements? Sounds more and more like we need to recon down there.”
Remembering the breath-freezing fear response I’d had standing in the elevator in the dark, I said, “Bring flashlights. Maybe that bazooka you keep talking about.”
The look on Eli’s face said I was a scaredy-cat girl. Inside, Beast hissed at the insult, but I didn’t correct him, stuffing my face instead. He’d find out soon enough if he followed through on his recon idea. The bogeyman was in the basement? A scion so special—or so old? One of the long-chained ones?—that he or she was kept alone and out of sight, hidden away until its existence had faded into myth? I said, “There’re cameras in the stairwells. You’ll never get downstairs.”
“Whoa,” Alex said. “We didn’t install cameras there. What kind of cameras?”
“Same make and model we used in the rest of the place.” I flashed him a grin that was all teeth. “I’ll be taking up the need for payment on that design with Raisin and Del. Someone cheated us.”
“More important than that,” Alex said, a look of triumph on his face. “Those cameras have to be monitored somewhere.”
“Nice,” Eli said. “Meaning that we can gain access, take it over, and use it. We can see what’s below stairs.”
I pointed a fork at the Kid. “Make it so, Number Two.”
Alex chuckled once at the old order given by the Next Generation, Star Trek’s captain. It was a single huff of sound, much like one of his brother’s restrained laughs, or Beast’s, and he headed back to his work area, his head already bowed over a tablet.
“If we can get into the system, we can manage an unobserved basement visit,” Eli said. “Until then, I have an update. I just finished the reports of all the eyewitnesses who saw the arcenciel attack in the sparring room.” At my polite but incomprehensible, steak-choked interrogative he said, “None of them match. In fact, none of the descriptions of the arcenciel match, beyond a glittery, shadowy creature.”
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sp; I made a circular motion with my fork to indicate he should continue, before stabbing it into a morsel of meat.
Eli said, “I don’t think it’s mind control. But how about something the snake releases from its body?”
I paused in my chewing and thought about the feel of the scale on my chest, all tingly. I said, “’Ass it. ’ike ellssd.”
“Yeah. Exactly like LSD,” Eli agreed.
I swallowed and said, “What did the lab get on the remains of the arcenciel glop it left on the gym floor after we stabbed it?”
“We don’t— Wait a minute,” Alex called from the other room. He brought over a tablet, made an agreeable sound, and pushed it to me. “This just in.” He pointed to the line he thought most appropriate. It was a line of chemical formula followed by words, which he read aloud. “‘Preliminary reports indicate that this compound is a biologic agent with hallucinogenic properties—a deliriant, mildly psychedelic, and strongly dissociative, likely to cause confusion, emotional euphoria, and forgetfulness, as well as headaches and possible flashbacks.’ None of our witnesses had any physical complaints, maybe because they all drink vamp blood and that keeps their brains healthy enough to withstand the compound’s natural effects.”
None of us mentioned that Eli now fell into that vamp-blood-drinking category, his life having been preserved until he could get to a hospital, after he’d been nearly drained by enemy vamps. I couldn’t resist the glance to his neck where he sported new scars—pale and irregular, above the older scars from his time in active military duty. He narrowed his eyes at me in warning and I went back to the steak, the tablet, and the info contained in the e-mail.
Alex pointed to another line and said, “‘In case of ingestion, normal, healthy humans should break down the substance within hours.’ But it doesn’t say what effect it might have on vamps.”
I scanned the rest of the report as the possibilities of the reactions of humans and vamps went on, but it was all guesswork on the part of the researchers. I had seen the results in person. Eli had read the reports. “Oh goody,” I said. “The arcenciel is a living, breathing, dream-inducing, drug-pushing, see-through dragon. Like one of those frogs people lick in the Amazon, but bigger. And can fly.” I half chewed and swallowed the last of the steak, got up, and went to the bedroom where my thigh rig hung on the back of the bedroom door. I removed the scale and brought it back to the kitchen, feeling the tingles on my fingertips and residual tingles on my chest. I got a roll of paper towels and tore off a stack, setting the scale on top. I sniffed my fingers and felt a change inside my nose and head, like a sudden change of air pressure. “It’s a drug, or maybe a drug and magic, working together.” I washed my hands, scrubbing the fingertips that had touched the scale. “While we’re sharing information,” Alex said, “we got something from George.” He set another tablet in front of me, and stretched his fingers apart while touching the screen, making the text larger. In his formal way of writing e-mails, Bruiser said: