by Nancy Gideon
Because she didn’t ask him what he thought, he didn’t offer an opinion, saying instead what he knew she needed to hear. “You and the job are a coin. You can’t separate one side from the other. It’s not a random toss, detective. Sandra Cummings couldn’t be in better hands than yours. And neither could Mary Kate. You know that. You know that even though it hurts you. You’d give anything to find justice for them both because you still suffer for those wrongs done to them. They know you won’t let them down.”
“It’s all I can do for them now. I can take up their cause. I can’t let this girl’s death go unpunished.”
Her voice grew stronger as the inner determination that powered her through her often-ugly days clicked into place. Her hold on him loosened, secondary to the spinning of her thoughts. And a deep, dark worry began to gnaw at Max as he remembered where Mary Kate Malone’s cause had led her.
“Help me, Max.”
His breath stopped for a moment. “How?”
“Help me find out who scared and hurt and killed this girl, and help me punish him. Will you do that for me?”
“I would do anything for you, Charlotte. Not for your badge. For you.”
“Then promise me. Promise you will.”
He was hearing the bargaining voice of Mary Kate Malone, weighing his guilt against her grievances. He should heed the wariness whispering that he needed to have Charlotte spell out more specifically what she wanted him to do. Instead, he said, “I will. I promise. I love you, Charlotte.”
No reply in kind. Just a quietly relieved “Thank you, Max.” Her arms relaxed about his neck and she nuzzled his throat with a sleepy sensuality.
“Let’s get you to bed.”
“Yes,” she murmured. “Take me to bed, Savoie.”
He lifted her easily, carrying her through the dark apartment, heading for the bedroom. He freed one hand to pull down her carelessly arranged covers, then sat her on the mattress edge. Her arms went up agreeably so he could skim off her T-shirt. He was grateful to see plain ivory cotton beneath it instead of the naughty confections she sometimes wore to shock his libido into reckless overdrive. She flopped onto her back and obligingly canted her hips up so he could peel down her snug jeans. He was very, very careful not to let his hands graze her soft skin. He was rolling off her socks when she sat up. As his head lifted in question, her palms scooped beneath his jaw, holding him in place for a rather sloppy kiss.
Because his willpower turned to melted wax the second she touched him, he quickly leaned back out of her reach.
“You taste like cigarette butts floating in stale beer, detective.”
She was too groggy to whip up more than a mild grumble of irritation. “Considering what you’ve been known to dine on, I had no idea your taste buds were so discriminating.” She crawled up to her pillow, dragging the sheet to her chin. As she burrowed in with a weary sigh, she murmured, “Would you lock up for me?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.”
Even as she spoke, Cee Cee’s eyes were closing beneath the pull of exhaustion. The rips of emotion were finally at a manageable ebb. She would sleep, deep and dreamlessly now, and when she awoke, a new sense of purpose would be waiting.
She never heard him leave the room. And when she opened her eyes, it was morning.
She was immediately aware of two things. Her mouth tasted like her socks had been lying in it, and the sheets beside her were empty. She rimmed her teeth with her tongue and grimaced. Her breath had probably driven him out of the room. She lay on her back and listened for him, hearing no movement in the apartment. But that wasn’t unusual. Max Savoie moved like a ghost.
Thinking of which, she let her gratitude toward him for chasing her ghosts away deepen into a feeling that still surprised her at times. And because it made her a bit uncomfortable, she focused on a simpler, safer emotion. Lust.
“Max?”
A glance at the clock told her there was time for what she had in mind. Perhaps even twice. She smiled as her mind began to clear—and then she became more aware of the silence.
“Max?”
There was no sign of his clothes—just hers where he’d laid them after putting her to bed. The covers beside her were undisturbed because he hadn’t shared them with her.
Damn.
When she’d asked him to lock up, she hadn’t meant behind him.
Three
MAX WALKED THROUGH the French Quarter, half listening to the sounds of the city that woke only after sunset. The other half of him ruefully considered the warning he’d never thought to heed: that Charlotte Caissie would only hurt him.
He’d been in love with her for almost half of his life, though he’d barely spoken a handful of words to her for eight of those twelve years. Since the first fateful time they’d crossed paths, she’d become one of only three people he’d ever trusted.
She’d hit him like a locomotive while he stood frozen on the tracks, unable to move out of the way even as the whistle shrieked in warning. His emotions had been a train wreck ever since. He’d simply not been prepared for her. He’d been startled, then amused when she got in his face, that sassy, sexy mouth ripping into him as if he was some small-time pickpocket rather than the power behind the most powerful criminal in New Orleans. And he could think of nothing else but how those lips would taste.
She was a cop, the antithesis of everything he’d been since Jimmy Legere took him out of the swamps. Legere had groomed him from the time he was led away from the decomposing body of his mother to be the perfect weapon to wield against his enemies. A fierce, emotionless killer, he’d been feared since he was a teen. He’d heard them say he murdered without conscience, but that wasn’t true. He hadn’t measured the right or wrong of what he did against the tremendous need to repay the man who’d rescued him. Doing whatever was asked of him. Without question, without pause. Until Charlotte Caissie.
She and her friend Mary Kate Malone had been held hostage in a dockside warehouse by a couple of Legere’s goons as leverage to keep Charlotte’s cop father from testifying. They’d been little more than children in the hands of cruel, amoral men, and Jimmy swore to him that the plan was never to harm them. But harm them they had, in ways that still sickened him to the soul. So he’d stepped in to free them, but not until he’d debated for long hours over doing so without Jimmy’s permission. A delay that cost the two girls unforgivable suffering.
To make amends, he’d acted as an avenger for the adult Mary Kate’s crusade to protect the weak and vulnerable—beginning a chain reaction of conflicting loyalties that ended with Mary Kate lying in a California hospital in a coma from which she might never awaken, and with Jimmy Legere in a vault in St. Louis No. 1, where he would remain forever. And still it wasn’t enough.
What did he have to do to be worthy of her?
He paused to toss some bills into the open case of a sax player on the corner of Chartres and St. Ann. He didn’t notice how much it was, but the young black man in his top hat and colorful patchwork jacket sputtered with gratitude and demanded he name a song. “Play something foolishly sentimental,” Max said.
He walked along the edge the square to the melancholy tones of the horn, thinking how perfectly they echoed the dark brooding of his soul.
How could Cee Cee have doubted him that morning?
He understood the needs of her job. Considering the circumstances, he’d expected her and her partner to come calling. But not to have her look at him through those flat, sharklike cop eyes when it was just the two of them alone and demand he prove his alibi.
He’d been angry, insulted. He was still pissed about it now. So he’d gone to her apartment to force a confrontation. Was it too much to expect her to believe him, to believe in him, when he’d surrender everything for her? Everything.
The pain of her distrust cut him in two.
But he hadn’t gotten the chance to vent his irritation. Instead, she’d wound him up by the heartstrings and spun him like a top.
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Help me, Max.
Didn’t she know what she was asking? Wasn’t it enough he’d sacrificed the man he’d thought of as a father? Did she expect him to turn upon his own kind, too?
He growled in self-disgust. He was pathetic. He’d had to force himself to walk away from her, from the temptation of lying beside her, for fear she’d have him rolling over like a dog begging favor with his feet waving in the air.
I promise.
What the hell had he just given away over a few tears and the press of feminine curves?
Anything. Everything.
Was that what being in love did to the male of the species? Even if he was a male of another species?
Suddenly he stopped in midstride, in midthought, and went completely still.
His breath caught.
Awareness of something unexpected crept over him, a faint prickling, and suddenly he was all icy gooseflesh.
He continued walking, his senses all turned outward now, sweeping like psychic radar. What was it? Who was it? He’d felt this strange quiver of energy once before, but its source was a mystery then, just as it was now. He casually skimmed the sidewalk and business fronts with his gaze, not sure what he was looking for. But he could feel it. Power. Focused. Nearby. Unmistakably from one of his own kind.
Then, it was gone. As quick as it had come over him, the feeling disappeared. Just like that. A stranger had reached out to ring his doorbell, then run away before he answered.
Disturbed and restless out in the open, Max moved with swift purpose. Dodging down mist-draped backstreets, away from the pulse of the city nightlife, into shadows lying dark and faintly menacing, he sought out an unmarked back door. He tapped in a distinct pattern, and it opened to a newly discovered world.
Cheveux du Chien. Hair of the Dog. The name amused him with its appropriateness. The moment he stepped inside its unique patrons welcomed him, touching his psyche lightly on a preternatural level like the warm embrace of family. The experience was still new enough to make him shiver at the strangeness of it.
“Mr. Savoie,” the darkly lovely female at the door crooned with more invitation than necessary, “your table is ready.”
He followed the twitch of her skirt down the long hall that opened into a multitiered nightclub, all nonreflective black paint, ductwork, and pulley-systemed warehouse chic. Tonight heavy metal music assaulted the eardrums, and from the shadows, eyes gleamed red and gold.
His kind.
Charlotte Caissie had given them, and him, a name. Shape-shifters.
Jacques LaRoche stood at the bar. A huge, bald mountain, he ran the dockworkers who’d once been under the hand of Victor Vantour. The owner of the exclusive club with its unnatural clientele, LaRoche was a conduit through which all information flowed. Max had sought him out down on the wharf earlier that day, but he’d been unavailable. Their relationship was tenuous. It wasn’t quite friendship—not without a little more trust. But there was a foundation of respect. And underlying it, fear. Because of what Max was, and what he could do that no other in the room could match.
He was a pureblood.
Up until a month ago, he hadn’t known what that meant. He hadn’t known there were any others even remotely like him. He hadn’t known what he was, except that he was different.
“Savoie,” LaRoche called out, his voice booming. Big, bold, aggressive, he never spoke quietly, never moved cautiously. Only to Max Savoie was he subservient. He pulled out a chair and dropped down at Max’s table. “Where’s your scrappy little girl tonight? She doesn’t hold a grudge, does she?”
“If she did, you’d certainly know about it by now.”
LaRoche chuckled. He harbored an instinctive dislike for most humans, but Charlotte Caissie had earned his reluctant admiration. She was a fighter. And she held Max’s heart in a fierce, greedy fist.
“Who killed Sandra Cummings?”
LaRoche’s smile faded. “No foreplay first? Won’t even buy me a drink?”
“I need to know. My girl recognized the way she died as by one of us. She came to me for answers.”
His eyes narrowed warily. “Are you going to give them to her?”
“Depends on what I hear. What have you heard?”
“No one here is any fan of Cummings. He interferes in our means of making a living, crowding us out with his condos and his resorts. We can’t get work there because we have no papers. Many have expressed a wish to run him down in a dark alley. But murder his child? No. That’s not our way. That’s the human way. It was your way, Savoie. Look to them, not among us.”
Max considered that. So if not one of them, then who? Who recognized him for what he was, enough to orchestrate a killing that would point to him and his? Who would benefit from laying the blame at his door? Everyone. The rival bosses, Cummings’s people, the police, even factions within his own cadre of followers. And he needed to know why. Quickly. Not just to satisfy his promise to Charlotte, but for his own survival.
“Has anyone you don’t know been hanging around lately?”
A laugh. “Do you think I recognize every shifter in New Orleans?”
“Probably, if there’s work to be done or money to be spent.”
Another loud chuckle. “Two things that rarely escape me.” He thought a minute. “No one comes to mind. We’re a pretty tight clan. We can sense outsiders.”
Knowledge, Jimmy always told him, was power. And he had so much to learn.
“Jacques,” he began casually, “why is it that you never sensed what I was, or I who you were, until the first night I came in here?”
LaRoche leaned back, getting comfortable. “We call it a glimmer, that sense we get of one another. It’s not quite smell, not touch, not sight. In some, it’s just a whisper. With the stronger ones, it’s a signature. The cleaner the bloodline, the less diluted by mingling with humans, the stronger the glimmer. I can recognize most of those here tonight by the vibration of their glimmer.”
“And me?”
“Sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?”
“In here, yes. You’re unmistakable. But out there, no. There’s no feel of you at all. But you must know that.”
He didn’t, but he had to be careful. He couldn’t afford to let LaRoche discover how little he knew about what he was. He’d had no one to teach him the finer points, only the broad, brutal aspects of his powers.
He tested the surroundings, able, if he concentrated, to separate out the subtle impressions. Vibrations. Like variations on the same note, similar yet distinct. Interesting.
“So it’s not something everyone can control?”
LaRoche was looking at him strangely. “No. We’re on all the time, like high- or low-watt bulbs. But you can switch it on and off. That’s why we feared you. Because we couldn’t sense you as one of us. What a gift that must be—that control that comes with being of pure blood.”
A gift.
“You’re special. You’re blessed.”
He could hear his mother’s voice telling him those things over and over. Was this what she’d meant?
“Any others like that around here?” Perhaps out on the streets, casting off an unrecognizable signature? Killing young women with careless or perhaps very purposeful indiscretion?
“Around here, no.” LaRoche’s manner wasn’t so relaxed now.
“But you know of others,” Max pressed.
“Yes.”
“Where are they?”
“Up north. They come down here now and again.”
“For what?”
“Whatever they want,” LaRoche snapped with an aggravated sharpness. “Why the interest? This isn’t something we talk of. It’s something that we try to forget exists. I suggest you try that.”
Their waitress stepped between them to refresh their drinks. LaRoche had water with a greater part of Jim Beam. As the waitress leaned in over Max’s shoulder to refill his water, her other hand rested lightly on his back.
“Can I ge
t you anything else, Mr. Savoie?”
Her voice was a velvet ripple. He turned toward her, only to get a face full of voluptuous bosom bared by the low V of her shirt.
His gaze jumped awkwardly away. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
When she straightened, her nose brushed his hair and he heard her inhale his scent. He held his breath until she stood away.
“If you think of anything, my name is Amber.”
LaRoche laughed at Max’s anxious expression. “Amber, you’ve an eye for the fellas.” As she started to scowl, Jacques patted her fanny. “You seen any strangers around lately? Someone not of our clan?”
She removed his hand from her hip, then smiled at Max. “There is one who comes to mind. Older fella, keeps to the shadows. I heard he asked after you, Mr. Savoie, like he knew who you were but had never seen you before.”
Max’s insides tensed. He heard the whisper of his mother’s warning. “They’ll find you. They’ll hurt you. They’ll take you away.”
LaRoche was studying him carefully, maybe seeing more than Max would like. He gave Amber’s rump a squeeze. “You tell me if you see him in here again, will you? Think you can remember, sugar?”
She shrugged. “Sure, boss. That’s easy. He left about ten minutes ago, after a couple a shots and a beer.” Her gaze slid over Max. “Be happy to be on the lookout for you, Mr. Savoie.” She slapped at Jacques’s hand, ignoring his grin.
LaRoche followed the swivel of the waitress’s hips appreciatively. “You lucky dog. Ah, to be you for just one night.”
Max frowned. What a novel idea. He’d always wished to be anyone else. Anyone human. “Why?”
“Look around. You could have any one of them.”
Max scanned the smoky room. Every female gaze was either blatantly or covertly fixed on him, he realized with an uncomfortable start. And the glimmers they gave off pulsed with heat. More alarmed than aroused by the interest, he shut himself off so he wouldn’t feel the caress of their roving desire.
“I already have all the woman I want.”
LaRoche shrugged. “But she’s not of us. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. A shame to waste such a delightful perk of being what you are.”