by Faith Hunter
I smiled and nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
He took a card from his pocket and passed it to me. “Call me next time you want to party. I got access to some stuff. You know?”
“Thanks,” I said, pointing to the card. “Put Rinaldo’s number on back. Never know when I’ll need a cab in the morning.” When he was done, I tucked the card in my pack and walked out the door. Minutes later, Rinaldo pulled up in a yellow cab with a large bluebird painted on the forward doors. He looked me over, waved me closer, and unlocked the doors with an automatic click. I climbed in back and gave him my address. “And I need breakfast. Drive through a fast-food place and I’ll treat us both.”
Rinaldo studied me in the rearview and said, “Yo.”
I took that as a yes and lay my head back. I was exhausted.
The Joe was sitting on my front stoop when I got out of the cab. I had made arrangements with Rinaldo to pick me up in the mornings wherever I happened to find myself. Making nice with a cabdriver was always smart. I had learned the hard way that getting home on my own wasn’t always easy or even feasible. And the places where I shifted back to human weren’t places a cabbie would come unless you were a regular. Thinking I was the party girl my tired face and red lipstick proclaimed, he told me to be careful, call him anytime, and sped off.
I looked at the Joe and sighed. I needed a shower and a pot of tea and my bed. Not this.
“You want to tell me where you were last night?” he demanded.
“No. I don’t. Get away from my door.” When he frowned, I crossed my arms and jangled my keys. “You’re not my daddy, my lover, or my boss. Where I was is none of your business. I’m not in the mood for this. I’m tired and I need a shower and I’ll bust your chops if I have to. Move.”
“I got questions.” He eased to the side and I opened the front door. He stepped in after me, fast enough that I couldn’t have shut the door on him without shoving him back first.
I sighed again as he followed me to the kitchen where I turned on the kettle. “Fine. But I’m getting a shower first. You can wait.”
I closed my bedroom door and stripped, climbing into the hot shower for a personal grooming session. I didn’t have much body hair, courtesy of my Cherokee blood, but what I had came back in every time I shifted, as if I had never shaved. Shifting every night made it a pain.
When I was pretty sure the kettle had been whistling for a long time, I turned off the water, pulled on a ratty T-shirt and shorts and went back to the kitchen, my wet hair soaking through the thin cloth down my back. He was at my kitchen table, sprawled out like he owned the place, his sunglasses near his left hand and his eyes on my legs as I walked to the kettle.
“I took it off the fire and poured it over the leaves,” he said.
Surprised, I lifted the plastic lid of the tea strainer and sniffed. I had left a strong Madagascar Vanilla Sunday Blend in the strainer, sitting in the teapot, waiting. And now it was ready. “Thanks,” I said, and poured it into a twelve-ounce mug, added a dollop of sugar, and stirred. “Want some?”
“I’m good.” He seemed a little less demanding than on the stoop, and after a good wash I was feeling a little more magnanimous. But I had a feeling this conversation was about to get either very physical or very full of lies. I wasn’t in the mood for either.
I had eaten six Egg McMuffins and downed three Cokes, so I wasn’t hungry this morning. Which was probably a good thing. When humans saw me eat, they tended to get bug-eyed at the quantity. Rinaldo had assumed I had the munchies from drug use. I hadn’t told him any different.
I sat across from the Joe and sipped, thinking. I wanted to say I owed him no explanations, but he was a local, with contacts I didn’t have. I could humor him. A little. “Okay. You’re here. I’ve had my shower. I have my tea. I’m listening.”
“Where were you last night?” When I shook my head, he said, “How’d you get out of here without me seeing you?” I shook my head again, letting a smile start, and he narrowed his eyes at me. “How did you spot the camera looking into Katie’s backyard?”
Oh, yeah. The camera. If he had been hoping to do Katie’s security and he missed a camera that I found, that could only make him look bad. “That, I’ll tell you.” I let my smile spread and lowered my eyes to the tea. “I’m good.” I sipped.
He huffed, a belligerent laugh, and let the silence grow, his eyes on me like a weight. But, in the game of waiting contests and which predator will blink first, he broke. His hostility melted in a plosive puff of breath and a faint stench of frustration. “Fine. You got ways of doing things I don’t. You got the job; I didn’t. But a girl was killed last night. By the rogue.”
“I know. I saw him.”
The Joe—Rick, he did have a name—sat up, gathering himself. I put down my mug, freeing my hands, and waited to see what he would do. He was wearing a T-shirt again this morning and, as his biceps bunched, the bottoms of the tats were more visible than yesterday. Definitely claws on the left arm. Something dark and fuzzy on the right arm and shoulder. I wanted to see them, but figured if I asked him to take off his shirt, he might get the wrong idea. I was so tired, I grinned without thinking.
“It isn’t funny,” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “I knew her.”
I held up a hand, palm out, fingers splayed to show I meant no offence, and shook my head. He settled slightly and I picked up my mug again. “I’m sorry for your loss. If it makes you feel better, I wasn’t smiling about the girl.”
“You saw him kill her?”
“No. I was tracking him.” Which was the truth, except Rick would naturally think I was following by sight, not by smell. Here was where our conversation would devolve into lies, partial lies, and total lies, and where I would get tripped up if I made a mistake. “He went around a corner and I paused too long, thinking he might have seen me. He got her before I could react. He’s fast. He went up the wall when he spotted me.” I watched Rick’s face. He was studying mine. “Straight up. I’d always thought that thing about vamps being able to fly or climb walls was myth.”
Rick shook his head. “Only the old ones can climb like that. The real old ones.”
“And you know that how?”
“I know Katie. I asked.”
And she just answered? I remembered Beast’s first foray into the Quarter. The smell of vamps everywhere. There were a lot of real old ones. “I followed from the street as he ran across the rooftops.” Also truth, well, sorta. I finished off the tea and stood to pour another cup, but kept my body at an angle and Rick in my peripheral vision.
“Nobody saw you,” he said. “Cops were on the scene almost instantly.”
It sounded like an accusation again. I shrugged. He was persistent and curious. Persistent and curious people often stick their noses into things they shouldn’t, and this guy looked like a prime candidate for that particular trouble. I needed to point his nose into directions useful to me, keep him where I could see him, use him, and distract him away from things I wouldn’t share. “I need backup on this and I got a budget. You want the job?”
“Yes. And I want to know how you get out of here without me seeing you.”
I glanced back at him. Time for another lie. “You know the saddlebags on my bike?” I turned back to the tea. “Like that.”
He sat back, amazement crossing his face. “You know a witch who can make an invisibility charm?”
Invisibility charms were legend, not reality, so far as I knew, but enough people claimed they existed to merit the lie being taken for truth. “Not quite. But sorta. She calls it an obfuscation charm.” I added more sugar and stirred, keeping my face turned away. I didn’t lie well and I knew it. “You won’t see me come or go unless I’m in the mood to let you.”
He stood and came close, leaning on the counter, facing me, a little inside my personal space. “What’ll I be doing if I work for you?”
I took a breath to answer and felt it stop, felt my ribs freeze in motion. I
inhaled slowly then, drawing in the air. The scent. His scent. I leaned in and pulled the air near Rick through my nostrils, feeling him tense when my face passed close to his neck. I pivoted, standing behind him, leaning in. His hands fisted in shock but I couldn’t stop. I opened my mouth and pulled back my lips, pulling in his scent.
It was familiar. One of the smells on the cloth Beast used to track the rogue. This scent. A woman’s perfume, a woman’s body, so faint on the vamp I had hardly noted it. The Joe—Rick—wore the same scent the rogue carried.
They had been with the same woman. With, as in with. How could anyone, even a human, bear to be with a sick, rotting rogue? Yet I didn’t smell rogue on Rick, only the woman. So why not? Why hadn’t she carried rogue stink back and forth between the two men?
I clamped down on my reaction and stepped to the table. When I set the mug on it, my fingers trembled. I made a fist to hide it. I needed privacy to analyze all this. “Today, nothing,” I said, picking up the conversation as if nothing had happened. “Tonight, I’ll give you some addresses to track down, owner, renter, property owners nearby, that sorta thing.”
“What the hell was that?” he asked.
I shook my head, letting the shorter hairs around my face fall forward. Hiding again. “Nothing. Now get outta here. I need a nap.” Suppressing my trembling, I walked to the door and opened it. Held it wide.
Rick stood by the table for a moment. I was afraid he might demand an answer, maybe a lot of them. I knew what I must have looked like, sniffing him like an animal. I was afraid I’d say something to alert him to what I was or what I discovered. I couldn’t look him in the eyes.
He slid his sunglasses on and walked to the door. And outside. I closed the door behind him and rested my weight on it. Whoever the Joe had slept with last night or this morning, sometime recently, she was sleeping with the rogue vamp too. How could she stand the reek of rot? And why wasn’t it on her too?
CHAPTER 7
Fly it
I needed Mol’s help. I dialed her cell and listened to the rings, leaving a succinct message when I got routed to voice mail. “It’s me. Call. And check the wards again.” I pressed the END button and curled up on my bed with the cell on the other pillow, knowing Mol would call me when she finally checked the messages.
Like most witches, Molly was forgetful. She even occasionally forgot to check her house wards, the ones that protected her home from casual observation by the federal government’s newly established Psychometry Law Enforcement Division, the so-called PsyLED. It was a branch of Homeland Security, and the PsyOffs—PsyLED officers—were still gathering info on the nation’s supernats. So far, Molly’s kids were off the grid. Keeping her home and property from leaking magical energy was the key to keeping them safe.
Desperately sleepy, my limbs feeling weighted with lead, I closed my eyes.
I woke at three p.m. to the sound of knocking on the front door. My bedroom was L-shaped, with the short side on the front of the house. I peeked through the window and saw a marked cop car parked in the street, a man in uniform and a woman in a jacket and khakis on the stoop. I looked in the mirror and frowned at myself. I looked ratty, not the way the out-of-town talent, the hired gun the council had contracted to take down the rogue, should look. If this was Katie’s liaison with the New Orleans police department, then I was going to make a really bad first impression. If Rick had gone to the cops about my seeing the rogue, then I was going to make a worse impression. And I hadn’t washed the blood from my steak meals out of the grass in the backyard. Stupid. Crap.
One of them knocked again, less politely this time. I walked to the foyer, slapped the locks off, and opened the door, holding on to the door and jamb, arms stretched up high. I yawned widely and studied them through slit eyes and a strand of snarled hair. The guy was looking at my legs and the patch of belly showing between tee and shorts when I yawned. He was mid-forties and smelled of Cajun spices and aftershave. Lots of aftershave. I wrinkled my nose. The woman was younger, a little stout, bobbed hair. A lapel name badge said she was Jodi Richoux. Yep. Katie’s liaison. I finished the yawn and said, sounding grumpy, “Yeah?”
She made a face at me. “Jane Yellowrock?”
“That’s me. And you’re Katie’s pal at NOPD. Come on in.” I pushed the door wide and walked to the kitchen, deliberately scratching at my armpit. I didn’t like cops but I did enjoy messing with them. Much like the way Beast liked playing with her food before she killed it. There was a certain kind of challenge to the cat and mouse. “I’m making tea,” I said, over my shoulder. “I don’t have any coffee or donuts for y’all.”
“I understand that you eat a lot of steak,” Jodi said.
And the game begins. I grinned and shoved my hair back from my face. “I’m a carnivore. Veggies are for sissies.” I filled the kettle while the two surveyed the kitchen. “You been talking to my butcher, I take it.”
“Him. A few other people.”
“Have a seat,” I said.
“Mind if I look around,” the guy said, “stretch my legs?”
Pointedly, I looked at his name badge. “Yes, Officer Herbert, I do mind. Have a seat or take a hike.” I pointed at a chair and back to the door.
“And why do you mind?” Jodi asked. “Do you have something to hide?”
“Not especially. I just don’t see any reason to let him paw through my undies without a warrant. Bring me a warrant and you can rattle around all you want. Just know that my landlady had the place wired with cameras. Not much privacy if cameras are rolling twenty-four/seven.” All entirely the truth. Katie had indeed had the place wired. The cameras were simply not rolling anymore. And that part I didn’t share. Life was so much easier without actual lies to remember. The cops looked at one another, startled. I could almost see them rearrange their tactics. I pointed again at the kitchen chairs. “Sit.”
“Abear,” he said, sitting next to the chair I had pointed to.
“Say what?” I put the kettle on the stove and turned on the fire.
“My name. It’s pronounced Abear. The French pronunciation.”
I thought about saying, “Big whup,” but didn’t. No point in stirring the pot just yet. When I didn’t respond, except to open a bag of cookies and slide it on the table for them, Jodi asked, “Where were you last night?” She wasn’t sitting. Jodi was standing at the corner of the table, back a little, so she could see both of us but not get in the way. Interesting position.
“All over.” I leaned into the corner of the cabinets, the counter at my hips, and crossed my arms, putting one foot on the cabinet behind me, as if propping myself up. The fact that the position gave me leverage to leap was not incidental. “I was up and down the street in front of Katie’s Ladies on Dauphine, down St. Louis Street to Royal. I wove around a lot after that.”
“A girl was killed on Barracks Street last night. It’s come to our attention that you might know something about it,” Jodi said.
Well, well, well. Rick had been talking. Was he a source? “Something,” I agreed, making it sound like it wasn’t much.
“You want to tell us about it?” Implied was the threat that if I didn’t want to talk here and now, we could go to the department. Where I could cool my heels for a few days in lockup.
I kept my voice unemotional when I answered. “I was hired to track down the rogue vamp. I followed him there. I was too late to stop him. He had drained and was eating the girl when I arrived. So when he booked, I tailed him.”
“Where did he go?” she asked, her voice tight, her eyes focused tightly on my face.
“Over the rooftops, mostly, and across the river, where I lost him.”
“You should have called us,” she snarled.
“My cell was dead.” Now that was an outright lie, but I wasn’t going to admit that I had paws and couldn’t dial. Nor was I going to say that I wouldn’t have called anyway.
“How did you track him?” she asked. They were both listening with the kind
of intensity cops saved for child rapists and serial killers. And cop killers.
“Line of sight and with a little witch amulet. Tracks vamps. One of a kind and expensive as all get-out.” Lie number two. I couldn’t afford to go much higher and keep my story straight.
“So, you saw him. Got a description of the guy?” Herbert /Abear said.
“Middle height, slender, long dark hair, hooked nose. It was dark and he was fast. That’s all I got. Not enough to work with an artist,” I added, to keep me out of NOPD HQ.
“I want to see this amulet.”
My cell phone rang from the bedroom. “Excuse me.” I grabbed the phone and returned to the kitchen doorway where I could keep an eye on them. The number displayed was Molly’s.
“Witchy woman!”
“Hey, Big Cat. What’s up?”
“Good timing on the call. I got two cops in my kitchen. They wanna know about the tracking amulet you gave me. The one for whacked-out vamps, not the one for humans.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Fly it.”
Molly laughed. When a spell didn’t work, she made paper airplanes out of the scratch pages and flew them across the room to entertain her kids. “Did you have a blood trace to work with?”
“Big-time,” I said.
“Put me on with them.”
I blanked the screen and handed the phone to Jodi. Saved by the bell.
I ate a cookie and listened to the cop chat with Mol. Molly likes cops even less than I do, having had to register as a witch with the local law, but she’d had mostly redneck, hillbilly types as role models. I had met some nifty cops in my time and some were okay. Some, however, were on ego trips, had authority issues, or were chauvinist pigs. Herbert was an ass. I was withholding judgment on Jodi.
The lady cop handed my cell back and I said into it, “Thanks, Mol. I’ll call back later.”
“You having problems down there in the steamy South?” she asked.