“DJ. Thank God.” Alex pulled the gun away from Terri’s head and shoved her toward Adrian, then came to me. He started to hug me, but stopped when he saw my right shoulder. “You’ve been shot. Where’s Lafitte?”
He’d stood in front of me and let me kill him, that’s where. “He’s . . .” I stared at Alex’s hand. “Is that a nail gun?” Why the hell was the king-of-all-weaponry, badass enforcer using a nail gun?
“Wooden nails.” He shook it in Terri’s direction. “Got her attention.”
Terri was whispering to Adrian, but I couldn’t summon the energy to deal with them yet. “How’d you know to come here?”
“Rand got your mental SOS and came to L’Amour Sauvage. He found me in that room off the office. He could trace you here through your bond.”
Thank God. “What’s up with our pointy-eared friends?” Elves didn’t have pointy ears, but I figured it would annoy them. Judging by the seething looks from Lily and Mace, it had. Betony looked stunned, and Rand was headed my way. Awesome.
“What do you know of elven involvement in the attempts to kill you?” Rand glowed a little from within, as if the scene needed any more weirdness. His words were formal, but the eyes that raked me from head to mud-covered boots, pausing on my blood-soaked shoulder, were lit with blue flames.
Leaning on Alex, I filled him in on Lily’s involvement, and Etienne’s, and Terri’s, and Adrian’s. And lest I forget, the absent Jonas Adamson, who was probably trying to figure out a way to escape both the wizards and elves with his life.
I dropped my voice. “Here’s what I could piece together. At first, they wanted the staff destroyed, just to ensure I wasn’t able to use it to help the Elders if the truce was ever broken. Etienne was going to help Lily overthrow Mace for control of the Synod, then form some kind of super-alliance against the wizards to take over the Interspecies Council. When Lily saw how much magic I could do through the regression, and then we bonded, destroying the staff wasn’t enough. They had to destroy me to neutralize you and carry out their plans to take down Mace.”
“Then Lily has incurred the penalty of my choice, including death if I so wish it.” Rand was shouting again, this time at Mace.
“Not here.” Mace gave him granite-face, but he’d been listening and was clearly shaken. “We deal with our own, and you’ll have your wish. But it will be after a formal meeting of the Synod at our Place of Counsel. Tonight. She can’t come.” The latter reference to me. Like I wanted to go anywhere near Elfheim.
Grabbing Lily’s hand and dragging her roughly behind him, Mace pounded past me, going out of his way to brush my injured shoulder. The room turned gray, and I ground my upper teeth deep enough into my lower lip hard enough to draw blood. I would not faint in front of those freak-show elves even if I had to stay alert by chewing my own lips off.
“You going to be okay?” Rand’s voice was soft. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. We need to talk.”
I leaned against Alex, reminding Rand where my allegiances lay. “You know where to find me.” Besides that, every time Rand said we need to talk, something horrific happened.
Only after Rand left did I notice that Terri and Adrian had disappeared. We weren’t far from the open transport. Oh no, he didn’t. “Take me to L’Amour Sauvage. Adrian’s not getting away with this.”
“You’re not going anywhere but to . . .” Alex paused, the pounding of the rain outside filling up the space while he went through the same mental litany as me. I couldn’t go to a human hospital. I needed to be treated by a wizard. My house was in ruins. I couldn’t even sleep in my car under the Claiborne Avenue overpass because my rental car had been hauled away after the house burned. It would be too easy to find me at his house, just in case some of the elves decided to drop in for a chat.
“You can take me back to the Monteleone afterward and we can call a doctor on retainer for the Elders, but first, Sauvage. And before that, we need to talk to Zrakovi. He needs to deal with Adrian and issue a warrant for Jonas Adamson.” I gave Alex a short, garbled version of everything I’d overheard. “He needs to know that Adrian’s up to his neck in this and I’m not letting him sweep it under the First Elder’s rug.”
Alex clipped the nail gun onto his belt and pulled out his cell phone. While he talked—he was really much better than me at reports, even verbal ones—I finally let myself thump to the floor, propping against the wall. It hurt to breathe. On the positive side, my shoulder hurt so badly, my bruised ribs and possible concussion felt almost normal.
“DJ?” Alex touched my good shoulder, startling me awake. Had I fallen asleep or passed out?
“Help me up.” My words slurred but I couldn’t seem to straighten out my tongue.
Alex ignored my outstretched left hand, leaned over, and picked me up, careful not to jar my shoulder. “You aren’t in any shape to go anywhere. I’m taking you to my house. Zrakovi’s sending a doctor.”
“Have the doctor go to L’Amour Sauvage. I need to see this through.” This was personal; Adrian had sold out one of his own. “Please.”
Alex made a growling noise, which I translated as a yes. I let him play caveman and carry me to his truck, settle me into the passenger seat, and fasten my seatbelt. When he wanted to cover me with the Saints throw from his backseat, I called a halt. “Alex, I’m okay. Really.” I did take the throw with my left hand and wipe the water off my face and hair, then handed it to him to do the same. We both looked like we’d been fished out of Lake Pontchartrain.
His eyes, normally the warm color of Hersey’s finest chocolate, were dark pools of angst, and he was broadcasting a tangle of relief and fury and confusion. The man had the most complex emotional signature I’d ever felt. “I don’t like it, but I understand why you need to see. But if you start bleeding again or you faint, we’re out of there.”
By the time he’d walked behind the truck, climbed in the driver’s seat, and called Zrakovi with the change of plans, I was half asleep.
“Talk to me,” Alex said. “Stay awake.”
I rolled my head to look at his profile. “I think I have a concussion.” Or excessive blood loss, or shock. Take your pick.
I couldn’t see his expression as we pulled out of the dark parking lot and sped back toward the I-10, but his voice was soft. “Go through it. Tell me what happened when you got to L’Amour Sauvage.”
Savage Love. What a perfect name. Love was savage, and it hurt.
I started talking. I probably told him the same things more than once. Alex asked questions and kept me awake, but he couldn’t make me alert. When we pulled into an illegal loading zone near the vampire club, I blinked in confusion because I didn’t remember driving through town.
He slapped his FBI hangtag on the rearview mirror, and zeroed in on my shoulder. “You’re bleeding again. You sure you’re up for this?”
“Yes,” I lied. I wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep. I wanted to hide out in Old Barataria, swinging in Jean’s hammock until this all went away. I wanted to go home with Alex and make love as if pleasing each other was all we had to worry about the rest of our lives. I wanted to do anything but deal with more crappy prete and wizard politics.
I opened the passenger door, took a deep breath, and tried to swing my legs out. Wasn’t happening.
“Stubborn woman.” Alex lifted me out of the truck and set me on my feet. I wavered a moment, and we both waited to see if I could right the ship before it sank onto the sidewalk. I stayed upright. Yay me.
He flashed his FBI badge as we walked past the lines waiting to enter the club. Pretty Boy opened his mouth, looked at us, and closed it again. He shoved a clipboard at me, a silver pen attached to it with a velvet ribbon.
“What is it? I’ve never had to sign anything before.”
“It’s a waiver of responsibility,” Pretty Boy snapped. “You’re bleeding. Christ, you might as well wear a flashing chartreuse hors d’oeuvres sign on your head.”
Yikes. I hadn’t thought about
that.
Neither had Alex. He stared at my shoulder with renewed concern. “Uh, DJ. Maybe you better—”
“Get me to the office or I will faint.”
I knew I needed medical care but if I could hang on just a little longer . . .
On our way toward the back hallway, I glanced at the table I’d come to think of as belonging to Adrian and Terri, but of course it was empty. I wondered if Terri had taken him to hide out in Vampyre—a part of the Beyond I didn’t care to visit. As Jean Lafitte had noted one time, if I were ever to go there, the vampires, unrestricted by human and prete council law, would eat me.
I walked into Etienne Boulard’s office without knocking. He sat behind his desk, fingers steepled in front of him, and didn’t look surprised at the intrusion. I heard Alex close the door behind him, and when he stepped beside me, he held his modified nail gun. That, Etienne looked surprised to see.
“Do enforcers carry nail guns these days?” He had the gall to look amused, so Alex raised the nail gun and fired. A sharp, wooden nail shot across the room and embedded itself in the wall behind Etienne’s head.
“Next time I’ll aim lower and to the right.” Alex spoke with the don’t-screw-with-the-enforcer drawl he saved for special occasions.
Etienne’s nostrils flared. “Terri is not here. I dared not leave her to your primitive justice system and ordered her to Vampyre under house arrest, although I assure you she will be punished for getting mixed up in this.”
Yeah, well, he wasn’t getting off that easily. “We know about your plot with Lily, and that you referred her to the necromancer Jonas Adamson.” I hobbled to the chair facing him and fell into it. I felt Alex at my back. “And did you realize that Adrian, the wizard who’d been ratting on my whereabouts, was the son of the First Elder?”
For the first time, Etienne looked rattled. “What?”
So he hadn’t known that part of it. Interesting.
He rose and began pacing. Alex shifted the nail gun back and forth, keeping it trained on the vampire. “I thought he only worked for the Elders in a minor role. Merde.” Etienne looked past me, and I turned, trying to keep my shoulder stiff. The sofa on the back wall was partially blocked from view by the open door. But I could see enough of it to tell there was someone lying on it.
Alex stepped over and swung the door shut. The person lying on the sofa was Adrian. He wasn’t moving.
Alex holstered his nail gun and knelt next to the sofa, placing fingers against the side of Adrian’s neck. He shook his head at me. “He’s dead.” He shifted Adrian’s head to the side. “And he’s been fed on recently. No other injuries that I can see.”
She drained him? I stared at Adrian’s body several moments before the truth hit me like a falling Mardi Gras throw. “They’re turning him. Oh my God, they’re turning the son of the First Elder?”
I swiveled back to Etienne too fast, and had to clutch the arm of the chair to stop the room from spinning, which in turn sent a dagger of pain from my shoulder to . . . everywhere. “You’re freaking turning him,” I whispered.
“I didn’t know about his father, and it was his idea,” Etienne said. His voice was calm but his eyes weren’t. “He wanted to become one of us to be with Terri.”
My mind whirled with the possibilities afforded by a vampire who was also the son of the world’s highest-ranking wizard. “Turned who?” Elder Willem Zrakovi stood in the doorway, looking from Etienne, to me, to Alex, and finally behind him, to Adrian. He caught on a lot faster than I had. “Oh dear.”
Not one for hyperbole, Zrakovi.
CHAPTER 41
Thanksgiving dawned cold and clear. I sat with Eugenie in her kitchen, drinking coffee before she headed to Shreveport for family time. We’d had three days to come to terms with this new world she’d never known about, and three days to rekindle our friendship. We still had a ways to go, but we’d gotten a good start.
“So that guy I met before Alex’s Halloween party really was Jean Lafitte? For real?” Eugenie practically quivered with excitement.
“For real. He should be back in town next week. I’ll reintroduce you.” After I had a long, serious discussion with her about Jean’s unique system of bartering favors, which sometimes bordered on the morally ambiguous. She was still half excited, half perplexed by this grand new world Ken Hachette had introduced to her. He’d told her a lot more than Alex or I intended. I think he just wanted someone else with whom he could share the horror of it all.
I wore a borrowed button- front purple blouse and a denim skirt because I could get in and out of them with my mending shoulder. Eugenie had found me a matching sling to rest my arm in, packed a few other things she thought I could wear into a small bag, and was getting ready to deposit me at the Hotel Monteleone. I’d spend my homeless holiday watching the flat- screen TV in Jean’s hotel suite and eating turkey and oyster dressing from room service. Sounded perfect.
Eugenie had a few hours before her flight to Shreveport, but needed to go on a mystery errand she’d asked me to help her with. She had invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her family, but sitting with someone else’s relatives at Thanksgiving seemed even more pathetic than sitting alone. I’d called my grandmother, finally, to let her know my house had burned. After a few short minutes of conversation about how I should move to Alabama, get married to a nice, steady man, and give up magic, I realized I’d rather spend Thanksgiving alone than with my own family too.
Pathetic.
“You about ready to go?” Eugenie retrieved her small, tapestry- covered suitcase from the corner and shoved a heavy tote bag into my usable hand. I hefted it onto the table and looked inside. “What is this?”
“It’s that good andouille and crawfish boudin we got in LaPlace yesterday, and the caramel doberge I picked up at Gambino’s.”
“They won’t let you take this on the plane.” Besides, I had plans for that doberge. Seven thin layers of cake, caramel frosting, and at least ten pounds on my hips overnight. And here I thought she’d dragged me all over the river parishes yesterday to keep me from wallowing in self-pity. “At least leave the cake. It’ll get crushed. I’ll take it to the hotel with me.”
Eugenie eyed me with way too much wisdom and not an ounce of pity. “You aren’t going to sit in that dead pirate’s hotel room and eat caramel cake by yourself all day, girl.”
No, if she took the cake, I’d sit there and eat Cheetos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups by myself all day. I’d already stocked up.
“Alex gone up to Picayune to spend Thanksgiving with his folks?”
I shrugged, then winced at the pain that shot through my shoulder. I needed to pick up some different body language to indicate my cluelessness. “Dunno. Probably.” I wondered if Jake would make a holiday appearance before heading back to Jean Lafitte’s fight club.
I hadn’t talked to Alex all week. He’d been called off on another enforcer assignment that Ken had been kind of vague about. Something involving gremlins.
I wanted to phone him, but hadn’t worked up the nerve— plus, phones did work both ways. I wanted us to try again, even if it meant decluttering my life of its natural chaos. But I worried that this last episode might have scared him away for good. I thought he might be avoiding me and using gremlins as an excuse.
I followed Eugenie to her car, and climbed in with my bag of sausage and cake.
“Ken tells me there’s a big meeting going on with your . . . people. Are wizards people? I’ve always thought of you as a person.”
I sighed and shifted the bag away from my immobilized arm. “Yeah, we’re people. Well, some of us more than others.” Ken needed a muzzle.
No way Eugenie needed to know about the troubles in preteville. The Elven Synod, Vampire Regents’ Council, and entire Congress of Elders were planning a big sit-down after Christmas to figure out what to do about Lily, Terri, Etienne, and the newest baby vampire, Adrian. The only reason for waiting so long: the Elders had their own housecleaning to do, w
hich might or might not involve removing Geoffrey Hoffman as First Elder, depending on what he knew, when he knew it, and how far he was willing to go to protect Adrian. The final formation of the Interspecies Council was on hold.
I’d been ordered to testify before both the Elders and the bigger prete council, along with Rand, Jean Lafitte, the nowincarcerated Jonas Adamson, who’d been found hiding in a barroom in Old Orleans and been reported by none other than Louis Armstrong, and the Axeman, who’d be brought back by another registered necromancer.
Just shoot me now.
Eugenie hadn’t mentioned Rand since the great unveiling, and neither had I.
He’d come back to town yesterday, which I only knew because he’d been knocking at my mental door, trying to communicate. I was growing adept at ignoring him mentally, and planned to ignore him physically when he tracked me down at the Monteleone. Because he would. He was persis tent, if nothing else. I didn’t know how I felt about my non-husband— it waffled between outright hatred, reluctant tolerance, and morbid fascination. Until I figured it out, I didn’t want to talk to him.
Eugenie bounced the car through Mid-City on potholepocked streets that were mostly deserted. Everyone had something to do on Thanksgiving Day. “Where is it we’re going exactly?” She was supposed to drop me back at the hotel before heading to the airport.
“Just something I want you to see.” Eugenie looked smug, turning right on Carrollton and heading north.
“And you’re going to have time to take me back to the Quarter and then get to the airport? I could drop you off and keep your car if you aren’t afraid for me to drive lefthanded.” I couldn’t believe I was in my late twenties and didn’t have a car, a house, or a stick of furniture to my name. What I did have was a staff and a pile of black grimoires, protected by such a complex of spells I doubt they could ever be destroyed. Alex had boxed them and taken them to his house till I had a place for them.
I needed a serious self-pity party, with cake. I eyed the tote, wondering how I could get the cake carrier out from underneath the sausages without Eugenie noticing.
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