by Faith Hunter
“So we have the vamps, the Holy Roman Church, and the witches all after the same thing.”
Edmund was definitely laughing now; his eyes were even twinkling. “The coven has been studying it for three nights, attempting different tests and spells to identify the magical signature—these are the words of Elodie and Gilbert, Mithrans who would speak to me, not my own. The wreath has been resistant to everything, even to being used as a power source for a spell of healing, the most simple and beneficial of all spells. While clearly powerful, the wreath is not assisting and is resistant to anyone spending its stored power.”
“And they called it a wreath?”
Edmund paused, his lips pursing slightly as he thought back. “I called it so. They did not object or suggest another name or title.”
“Go on.”
“The Mithrans want the wreath back, but the witches are in place before dusk and remain in place until after dawn. They are safe from attack by use of a spell that I have never seen or heard of before—what they call an electric dog collar. If anyone touches the faint circle that encloses them, they are instantly zapped with a strong force, sufficient to set a Mithran attacker ablaze, or stop a human heart. Or to send a wood beam catapulting across the square,” he added drily. “A human tried that one and received a broken arm for his troubles.”
I laughed then and took a seat on the small chair inside the room, the gun hanging down between my knees.
“Neither the Mithrans nor their humans can get to the witches,” Edmund said. There is evidence that the love match between the witch Shauna and her husband, Gabriel Doucette, is under strain.”
“No kidding. Okay. You say that the coven has been studying the thing for three nights. What happens at dawn?”
“The Mithrans pop away, as you might say, to their lairs, safely away from the sun, and the witches drop their dog collar spell, pick up the wreath, and walk away.”
“Go wake up the boys, will you? And be prepared for Eli to try to kill you. He’ll be unhappy to have slept past four a.m.”
“I’ll toss a bucket of water on him from a safe distance. That often works for mad dogs.”
Before he could move for the door, I heard a pop of sound and focused on the open gallery door. A form stood there, silhouetted in the faint gray light, his hands raised in a gesture of peace. It was Gabriel Doucette, heir of Clan Doucette, husband of Shauna Landry, the witch who had stolen the wreath. And a vamp.
I was glad I was still holding my weapon, because it was instantly settled on Gabriel’s pretty face. Gabe wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier when I met him the last time, and time and marriage hadn’t made him any smarter. He vamped-out—eyes, fangs, talons, the whole nine yards. Before I could squeeze the trigger and fill him full of silver-lead rounds, Edmund had my visitor’s head in his claws and his body bent back over one knee, exposing Gabriel’s belly and throat. It was clearly a position of forced submission.
“What do you want with my master?” Edmund asked, his power spiking so high it sizzled along my skin like the flare of sparklers, if the burning could be frozen into icicles taught to dance.
Gabriel made a sound like, “Gurk igh ugh eee.”
Edmund eased his hold and said, “Speak the full truth or die,” which was not what I’d come to do, but sounded pretty effective.
“I got to speak to the Enforcer before dawn.”
“You’re speaking to her,” I said.
Gabe’s eyeballs rolled around in his head until he could see me. “I have a . . . a petition for Enforcer of de Master of de City of New Orleans.” Which was formal talk, taken directly from the Vampira Carta. The local suckheads had been studying, it seemed.
“Let him go, Edmund. But if he gets riled, you can take back up where you were.” I frowned at the meek-looking vampire. “You were going to hurt him, right?”
“Yes, my master, his death, for entering your presence uninvited.”
Yeah. That seemed a little strong to me, but I wasn’t going to argue, not with Eli and the Kid still spelled asleep while flying vamps invaded. There might be others wanting to enter. I did glare at the use of “my master,” a title I was not going to accept.
Edmund gave me his meek look in return. He wasn’t bad at it, puppy-dog eyes and all, but I knew a fake when I saw it. Practicing that look in the presence of vamps might have given him extra acting skills, but having been a clan blood-master for so long had unbalanced it in favor of an underlayment of arrogance.
“Whatever,” I muttered. I looked at our prisoner. I didn’t have a real firm grasp on the proper response, except that it was equally formal. I sighed and pulled back the slide on my weapon, ejecting the round. I set it and the nine mil on the small bedside table and moved to the edge of the bed, where I sat again, empty hands dangling. I needed more downtime than I’d gotten. Vamp time was hard on a girl’s beauty sleep. “The Enforcer of the Master of the City of New Orleans and the Greater Southeast United States, with the exception of Florida, will hear you.” When he didn’t say anything I added, “Talk, Gabe. Make it clear, concise, and fast.”
“I the man who responsible for the troubles in this town, I am.”
That was pretty concise. I hadn’t paid much attention to Gabe’s voice when I was here last, trying to keep my skin on my bones and my blood in my veins. But his Cajun syllables were clear and pleasant, a higher tone that contrasted markedly to his father’s deeper voice. “Okay. Let’s hear your side.”
“A vampire man, a Mithran as the Vampira Carta say, he have certain needs.”
My head went back. “If this is about sex, I’m not interested in suckhead infidelity.”
“No, no, no. Not sex. Blood.”
Edmund didn’t bother to hide an amused grin. My prudishness was a source of cynical entertainment among the vamps. I frowned at him and caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the mirror over the vanity. My hair was everywhere, as if I’d fought a vamp in my dreams. I sighed and said, “Edmund, we’re safe here. Go check on the boys. No buckets of water.”
Edmund dropped Gabriel, saying, “As my master commands.” With a pop of displaced air, he was gone.
“Get up and sit”—I pointed to the floral upholstered chair I had just deserted—“and tell me what you did that got all this started.”
Gabriel rose from the floor with the fluid grace of the undead and took the small chair. He was dressed in rain-wet jeans and a camo shirt, work boots, and leather armbands worked in Celtic symbols with the logo of a rock-and-roll band. Around his neck he wore a leather thong with a tiny gold Celtic circle hanging from it. His brown hair fell to his waist, some braided, some hanging free, all of it wet and dripping, which might have made another man look like a soaked dog, but on Gabe, with his aquiline nose and almond-shaped eyes, it just made him prettier. When he bowed his head over his interlaced fingers, his hair touched the floor. It was a graceful gesture, and it was no wonder that the witch, Shauna, had fallen for the pretty boy. “Been a fool, I have,” he said.
That was a good start. I pulled a vamp-killer, which I placed at my side. His eyes went wide and he swallowed, a totally vamp reaction to the presence of a fourteen-inch-long steel blade plated with silver. I reached around and began unplaiting my braid, going for casual and killer all at once. I nodded for him to continue.
His eyes on the weapon, he said, “All dis mess”—he jerked his head to the outside in a gesture that was particularly Cajun and Gaelic and Frenchy—“might . . . pro’lly, have start when Shauna found dat I done drank—one time only—from someone else.” My eyebrows went up in surprise. “Shauna, she got baby blues after our lil’ boy, Clerjer, born.” It came out Clarshar, the name all pretty and flowing syllables of the expectation of peace.
The child had been the first vampire-witch baby born in the traditional human way, as opposed to a vamp turning, in ages. His name had been a hopeful blending of
the names of the leaders of the witches and vamps in the small town, Clermont Jérôme Landry Doucette, the baby being the first and only thing bringing the two opposing groups together in, well, forever.
I nodded again, showing I understood.
“Shauna, her go anemic. Not have blood for me. I have to feed or I go”—his hand made a circle around his ear—“crazy in de head.”
I thought about that. Two young people madly in love. Baby. Weakness. One not able to feed from the other. Postpartum depression. It made sense, on the face of it, for him to drink from someone else. It seemed right and proper, the gentlemanly thing to do, to get sustenance from elsewhere. Except that for vamps, feeding and sex were usually synonymous. “Who’d you drink from?” I frowned at him. “I’m guessing that it wasn’t from your sire or a brother?” Gabe shook his head, his eyes back down in shame. I blew out a breath, and if my sarcasm was a bit strong, I felt it was well placed. “I take it she was pretty?”
“Yeah,” he said after a pause that went on too long. “She is dat.”
“And you had sex with her?”
“No! I no cheat on my Shauna! Her blood-kin to Doucette clan. I no dishonor her like dat.”
“Sooo . . . ,” I said, thinking, my fingers combing through the mess of my hair. “No fun and games.” And then it hit me. “She walked in on you?” Gabe nodded, the motion as jerky as a human. “And it looked like you were having a little too much fun?”
“Yeah. It did dat.”
“Idiot.”
“Yeah, I am dat too.”
“Who was she?” I asked as I started rebraiding my hip-length hair at the base of my head, pulling and slinging each third through the rest.
“You know her,” he said after a few quiet seconds. “Her be Margaud.”
I stopped braiding and narrowed my eyes at him. He glanced up at my silence and the expression on his face said he knew how stupid he had been. Simply put, the three Mouton siblings hated vamps. The three adult children of the family were the former army twins, Auguste and Benoît—alligator hunters and vamp haters from way back—and their sister, who was as beautiful as they were ugly. A trained sniper, Margaud had seen some real-time action in some foreign battlefield. And she hated vamps maybe even more than her brothers did. “Just to clarify. You drank from Margaud?”
“I did.”
“She let you drink from her?”
“I at de bar. All alone on Saturday night. Hongry, I was. She come in, sit beside me, order her a whiskey. We talk a bit. She buy me a whiskey. We talk some more. She say, ‘How you doin’, Gabe? You looking pale.’ She smile. She ask, real sof’-like, ‘You need some-a dis?’ I stupid.”
I don’t cuss as a rule, except sometimes to yank people’s chains, but this was a special case. “You’re a dickhead.”
“I dat too. Before she sit by me? I found later dat she done call Shauna and tell her to come to de blood bar. Dat why Shauna walk into back room when I feeding from Margaud.”
I yanked on my hair, braiding fast, thinking. “You know she was trying to cause trouble, right?”
“I know.” Gabriel sounded ashamed and devastated all at the same time. He looked at me, and his eyes, still human-looking, filled with pale pink tears. “I love my Shauna. I die now of heartbreak, I am. I die for sure, before I drink again.”
Pinkish tears meant, well, not starvation, but certainly long-term hunger. His body looked thinner, as if lanky had been stretched to its limits. His physical control, under the hunger constraints, was pretty amazing. It left me with nothing to say. Margaud was a bitch and Gabe was an idiot. A starving idiot, but still an idiot. I finished braiding my hair and twisted an elastic band around the tip. “Anything else I need to know?”
Gabe’s head dropped even lower, so I couldn’t see his face. His voice a mutter, he said, “When Shauna come through the door and see us, she throw a vase at us, she did. Margaud, her run to Shauna and take her hand, like friend. Say she willing to . . . to share me with Shauna.”
“Oh.” Yeah, That’s a great way to make everything worse.
“Fight, there was. Catfight. I stupid, and blood-drunk just a bit, so long since I drink my fill, and I laugh. Shauna left. Went back to Clan Home, took Clerjer, took the wreath, and disappear.”
“The wreath outside in the witch circle?”
“De same.”
“Margaud set up the whole thing to mess with the vamps and start trouble.”
“Yeah. I tink dat so too.”
Margaud was a beautiful, deadly woman, with ash brown hair, blonded by the sun, deep brown eyes, and skin tanned golden. She was petite and delicate and last I saw her, she had looked too small to transport or position the sniper rifle she had used to give us cover when my team approached the Doucette Clan Home. She was muscular and fit, and carried herself with a capable, confident air, the exact opposite of a woman who’d just had a baby, all full of baby fat and hormones. No matter how unearthly beautiful Shauna Landry Doucette was, the sight of her husband in the other woman’s arms would have hurt. Bad.
The sharpshooter had played a hand and played it well, and now I had not only to try to fix things with the wreath and repair the damage to the marriage, but figure out Margaud’s next move and stop it before it happened.
I frowned. People skills were not among my best talents; I was more a shoot-first-and-bang-heads-together-later kinda gal. “You talked to the witches? To Shauna’s daddy?”
“I try. Him come at me with carving knife, he did. And then him throw spell at me from them fire tattoos on he arm. I get away alive, but barely.”
Lucky Landry was one of the rare male witches, and he had full-sleeve tats down his left arm. They were of weird creatures, combos of snake and human, with fangs and scales, mouths open in what looked like agony, as red and yellow flames climbed up from his wrist to burn them. It was like some bizarre vision of hell.
It wasn’t commonly known, but spells could be tattooed into the flesh of witches for use, and into the flesh of humans for binding them, all of which was strictly illegal according to witch law, but the supernatural inhabitants of Bayou Oiseau had been cut off from others of their own kind for a century, give or take. Things were different here. Everything was different here.
I heard stirring in the boys’ room, male voices, no screaming or shots fired, so Edmund must have been nice in his waking. From the lower part of the house, the smell of bacon rose on the air. Miz Onie was up early, starting one of her amazing breakfasts. I stood and, carrying my vamp-killer, went to the door of the gallery, turning my back on Gabe, which was a pure insult to the vamp, the way an alpha proves strength in the face of a weaker opponent, definitely an insult, almost a dare. One Gabe didn’t take.
Dawn was coming, gray streaks across the dark sky, red clouds in the east. The vamps stood two and two behind each witch, vamped-out, claws and fangs and bloody vampy eyes, pupils like pits into hell that I could see even from here, with Beast so close to the surface, aiding my vision. One vamp spot was empty. “Better hurry,” I said.
I felt the air move and swirl as Gabe leaped from the gallery, slower than most vamps. Blood starved. Stupid man. He appeared as if by magic beside his father, both vamps standing behind the witch at the north point of the circle, usually the leader of the coven. It was hard to make out much about the woman because she stood in a shadow cast by another magnolia tree, drenched and dripping as they all were. She was tall and strongly built, an Amazon fully six feet tall—my height, and she had me by fifty pounds at least, and from here, all of it looked like pure muscle. The vamps moved in, closer, so close that one jerked back as if shocked by electricity.
I don’t catch scents as well in human form as I do in my Beast form, or in tracking dog form, but even from here I could smell the ozone tingle of witch magic, the herbal and blood scent of vamps, the overriding scent of rain. The smells were powerful
and full of the vamp version of adrenaline. The vamps were getting ready to do something.
The shadows changed, shifting, as the sun tried to lift itself over the horizon. Just before the day lightened, the vamps rushed the witches. As one, they slammed into the dog collar circle. The ward sparked, flashed, power so bright I spun away, covering my face with my arm. I heard the awful screams of vamps dying—or thinking they were. A chorus of ululations so high that my eardrums vibrated in pain. I heard/smelled meat sizzle.
The first rays of the sun swept in and, with a small explosion of sound, the vamps disappeared, leaving behind the stink of burned vamp, and the echo of vamps in pain as they rushed into the blood bar and what were probably lairs beneath the ground.
I blinked down and saw humans rush to stand in front of the blood bar doorway. Big men in muscle shirts and carrying truncheons creating a barricade of muscled flesh and iron pipes. The protection of loyal blood-servants.
Behind me, I felt a draft of fast-moving air, and the closet door in my room opened and closed. A vamp, God help me, was climbing into his safe haven for the day. In my bedroom. My life was still getting weirder by the day.
Down below, the witches stood straight and stretched. With a gesture, the Amazon woman dropped the inner hedge of thorns and walked to the center of the inner circle. She picked up the wreath, holding it like a holy relic. In the dawn light it was clearly not a Christmas wreath, but just what we had thought—a laurel wreath or olive wreath, like the ancients used to indicate royalty. The haze of pale magics it contained were grayer, duller, less clear in the brighter light. And even from here, I could smell the magic wafting from it like ozone from a power plant or after a lightning strike. An internal shiver raced along my spine at the thought of lightning. I’d been struck by lightning and nearly died. Never again. Never.
The Amazon walked away carrying the wreath. Just ducky. A magical gadget in the hands of a witch who clearly was powerful all on her own, and who also had the power to draw on the magic of others. A town full of witches, protecting the magical thingamabob. One that my boss would want in his greedy, taloned hands.