Elysian Fields sono-3

by Suzanne Johnson

  Upstairs, I cleaned the small cut again and wrapped it in a bandage, reflecting on the overflowing medicine cabinet in my bathroom. Before Hurricane Katrina had turned New Orleans into what was arguably the world’s most active prete hotspot, I’d never taken so much as an aspirin or had a sprained ankle. Now I had tape for my ribs, glue and ban dages for cuts, instant ice packs, painkillers . . . and the borders between the modern city and the Beyond had officially been down only a few weeks.

  The cut burned and throbbed, and I could imagine my body beginning to change in an explosion of morphing cells and re- spooling DNA. This tiny wound should already be covered with a Band- Aid and forgotten, but instead my arm felt heavy and alien. How much was mental, and how much physical? There were no answers, only an avalanche of questions.

  I stretched out on my bed, curling up under my grandmother’s old-fashioned patchwork quilt that doubled as my bedspread, the elven staff in its usual spot poking out of a deep vase on my nightstand. Some people slept with teddy bears or pets. I had Charlie, an ancient stick of wood the elves called Mahout.

  My muscles ached from the stress of being up all night, the crime scene, and the disaster with Jake. I needed sleep, but my brain writhed with useless what- ifs.

  What if I’d walked out when Jake became argumentative? That might make me a bad friend, but it would have been a smarter thing to do. Why did I have to try and fi x everything?

  What if I’d come home and simply reported Jake’s drinking to Alex, letting him deal with the situation? He loved Jake, no matter how much they fought. But Alex saw life in black and white, and Jake’s current world was painted in shades of gray. I found it comfortable living in a world without absolutes, but it drove Alex crazy. I’d have done neither of them any favors by ratting on Jake without first trying to help.

  What if I shifted at the next full moon? The thought filled me with terror, but I had to confront it. I rolled over and dug my cell phone out of my pocket, clicking on a browser app and finding a November lunar calendar.

  Life as I knew it could be over in ten days. Happy Thanksgiving.

  ***

  In my dream, a man called my name, softly at first, then in a shout. He needed a big serving of shut-the-hell-up.

  I cracked one eye open, discerning a bear-shaped hulk standing in my bedroom door. The elven staff was in my hand and pointed toward the bear without my realizing I’d grabbed it.

  “DJ, put the staff down.” The bear spoke in Alex Warin’s deep baritone.

  Groaning, I sat up and rubbed my eyes with my non-staff- wielding hand. Even my freaking eyeballs hurt. Then the horror came back to me. What the hell was I going to do?

  As soon as I stuck the staff back in its holder—a vase that had begun its life in the late 1800s as a pattern glass celery dish— Alex stepped inside the room and glanced around. Seeing nothing amiss, he walked to the bed and looked down at me, a suspicious frown etching a little worry line between his eyebrows. His unkempt dark hair—always on the shaggy side—made me suspect he’d gotten home late and just rolled out of bed himself. He had the makings of a scruffy midday shadow, which pushed my sexy-as-hell buttons.

  He pinned me with a decidedly unsexy glare. “Well?”

  Loaded question. He looked like a man who’d arrived here with a purpose, but surely the need for an update on a crime scene wouldn’t have put that intense look on his face. “What’s up? I was sleeping. How’s Denis Villere?”

  Denis was the most cantankerous merman I’d ever met, and he liked me almost as well as I liked him, which was not at all. As punishment for causing part of last month’s merman drama, his clan had been consigned by the Elders to an isolated corner of the Atchafalaya Basin. They were already stirring up problems with the local weregators.

  “Denis sends his love.” Alex sat on the edge of my bed. “But I’m not here about that. Jake called.”

  Oookay. Time to tread carefully. “What did he say, exactly?”

  “Not a damned thing. ‘DJ needs you at the Gator.’ Nothing more, and then he hung up on me. I get to the Gator and Leyla says you left a note for her saying Jake might not be in.”

  Alex stretched across the bed, propped on one elbow. Those long-lashed eyes that could simmer like melted chocolate and turn me into mush—not that I’d admit it to him—hardened into squinty orbs as he gave me a once-over.

  I kept the hem of my left sleeve grasped firmly in my fist and under the quilt. “Like what you see?”

  He reached out and put a hand on my left shoulder. The warmth of his skin seeped through my thin sweater. At six-three and at least 240 pounds of solid muscle, he had ample body heat to share even without his shapeshifter genes.

  I could pretend he was getting romantic, but I knew better. He was trying to intimidate me, and it wouldn’t work. Alex wasn’t going to find this scratch on my arm until I figured out how and what to tell him. I wouldn’t lie, but truth can be couched in all kinds of creativity.

  Faster than I could track his movement, he slid his hand from my shoulder to my left wrist and jerked my arm from beneath the quilt.

  “Gotcha.” He shoved up the sleeve of my sweater before I could say traitor and unwrapped the ban dage.

  “Not deep,” he muttered, running his fingers along the scratch. “How’d you do it? Was it . . .” His voice trailed off, and he lifted my arm to his nose. My efforts to pull away were as effective as trying to extract a stick from dried cement. He dropped his head and touched his tongue to the cut.

  “Stop that—it’s gross. Seriously.” I twisted my arm out of his grasp, ready to give him a lecture about canine behavior when he wasn’t in his pony-dog shifted form. Damned shapeshifters and weres. They can scent anything. It’s a freaking invasion of privacy. I needed to start bathing in cheap perfume. Might make me reek like a Friday night slut, but having a good shifter repellent would be worth it.

  Unless I became a loup-garou. The thought left me breathless, as if I’d been zapped with my own elven staff. Alex picked up on that too.

  His expression destroyed any attempt I might make at smartassery. The shaky network of defenses I’d built around myself in the three hours since Jake walked out also crumbled. Alex’s face blanched beneath the remains of his summer tan.

  Nothing scared Alex Warin. Ever.

  “I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.” His voice shook, and his features morphed from fear to fury with the force of a cat five hurricane. I’d never before considered Alex, Mr. Steady, as capable of mercurial emotions.

  “Are you going to kill him, Alex?” I sighed and swung my legs off the edge of the bed, my earlier exhaustion back in triplicate, my ribs and arm throbbing in sync. “Consider what you’re saying and whether you mean it, because we have to be careful. Jake’s life is at risk. Your career and family are at risk. My . . . well, my everything is at risk.”

  Alex blew out a breath and moved to sit next to me. “Better tell me what happened. Everything.”

  I spilled it, from the drinking to the walkout, including my own role in unintentionally accelerating things. Alex stared at the floor, doing a poor job of shielding his emotions. He was scared, furious, and worried. I didn’t have to absorb his feelings; they mirrored my own.

  “Did we put too much pressure on him?” I asked, then answered my own question. “Of course we did, especially me. I thought if I pushed hard enough, believed hard enough, tried hard enough—I could make him into the man he was before the loup-garou attack. That wasn’t fair to any of us.”

  Alex spoke in harsh tones, but the hand he reached out to take mine was gentle. “This is not your fault. We protected him as long and as well as we could.”

  I wiped the heels of my other palm across my cheeks, scrubbing away a few hot tears. Self-pity wouldn’t help me decide my next move.

  I got up and grabbed Charlie. “Come on downstairs. We’ve got another problem.” Might as well further brighten Alex’s day by sharing our newest encounter with the historical undead.


  We spent the next couple of hours bouncing around ideas on the Axeman case, trying desperately to avoid the loup-garou issue. We were both exhausted but knew the NOPD was incapable of containing a historical undead killer even if they caught him in the act. He’d eventually fade into the Beyond. Jean Lafitte was strong enough to remain in modern New Orleans indefinitely because he was so well remembered—not only the pirate himself, but his name.

  Names have power in the preternatural world and the Jean Lafitte Wildlife Refuge, Jean Lafitte National Park, the Lafitte Blacksmith Shop Bar, Lafitte Boulevard, and the town of Jean Lafitte on the north shore of Barataria Bay—they all kept him fueled.

  The Axeman didn’t have a park, bar, boulevard, or town. He could come into the modern world for a while but would eventually fade into the Beyond until he built up enough metaphysical strength to return.

  I did a little math on the notepad I kept in the kitchen for shopping lists while Alex rummaged in my refrigerator.

  “How long’s this pizza been in here? Which one’s the newest?” He held up three cardboard boxes.

  “The one on top’s from a couple of days ago. The others are probably science experiments.” I needed to clean out my fridge. Whenever I had a couple of hours where something wasn’t trying to kill me or I wasn’t trying to keep one prete from killing another.

  Ignoring Alex’s banging as he dug out a cookie sheet and reheated the pizza, I consulted a calendar on my phone and wrote down yesterday’s date, when the last murder occurred. Counting back to the second murder, I hit six days, then another eight days to the first.

  “Eight days elapsed between the Axeman’s first killing and the second, but only six between the second and third.” I stared at the figures. “It makes sense, I guess. More people are mentioning his name and reading about him with each attack, so he gets stronger and can come back sooner. The more he kills, the stronger he’ll get.”

  Alex sat across from me while he waited for his pizza to heat. “So you think maybe four days and he can attack again?”

  I shook my head. “No way to tell. Maybe sooner. The more attacks there are, the more people will talk about them—and him.”

  I looked at the locations and sketched out a map of the French Quarter, ten square blocks of prime real estate on high ground alongside the Mississippi River that, so far, had survived everything man or nature had thrown at it.

  “You mapping out the attack locations?” Alex got up to plate his pizza and then took the chair next to mine.

  “Yeah, look at where they fall, and look at the most active open portal between New Orleans and the Beyond.” I drew a big star over the gardens behind St. Louis Cathedral, near the end of Pirate’s Alley. This was the most central route in and out of the Beyond, via the no- holds-barred preternatural border town of Old Orleans.

  “That solves the question of how the Axeman is getting around.” Alex picked slices of pepperoni off his pizza slice. He considered them too unhealthy, so I ate them.

  The Axeman could easily have walked to all three attack sites. “I think we need to get some help from our contacts within the historical undead and see if anybody’s heard anything.” Alex chewed and gave me an indecipherable look. “I wondered how long it would be before you called in the pirate.”

  Jean and Alex had learned to coexist, sort of, but they’d never be more than antagonists who tolerated each other’s presence as a necessary evil.

  Alex was off base this time, though. “Actually, I was thinking of Louis Armstrong.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I figured summoning Louis Armstrong from the Beyond would be a good diversion from worrying about whether my newly developed low-grade fever had anything to do with the loup-garou virus. It was probably the result of running around in the damp air early this morning. Or so I told myself.

  Alex insisted on staying while I did the summoning, and I didn’t argue. Last time I’d tried it, I’d been trying to get my father and had instead called up a pissed-off voodoo god who wanted to kill me and steal my powers.

  I didn’t want to summon Louis Armstrong and end up with something dangerous. If I wanted to flirt with danger, I’d ring up Jean Lafitte.

  Just because Alex was present didn’t mean he was attentive. While I rolled up the area rug in my library, freeing an open space on the hardwood floor and groaning from the pain the activity caused my ribs, Alex ignored me and stretched out on the sofa with a graphic novel on the Axeman I’d found online.

  Last week, he’d helped me etch three perfect, concentric circles into my library floor while I apologized to all the previous own ers of my century-old home for defacing it.

  Digging the broom out of the upstairs closet, I gave the room a quick sweep to make sure no dust bunnies interfered with the ritual. Sebastian got shut out of the room for the same reason.

  I sprinkled a trail of unrefined sea salt along the outermost circle, then went in search of summoning totems. A biography of Louis went outside the circle at the north point, and a photograph of him on the south. East and west, I placed my iPod scrolled to “What a Wonderful World” and a pen he’d left in his room at the Gator when he’d come across as my spy after the hurricane.

  After walking the circle to make sure nothing was out of place, I knelt and flicked a small knife across the pad of my thumb, squeezing until a big dollop of red fell on the lines. For now and forever, the sight of blood would bring Jake to mind, and not in a good way.

  I shook off the thought and focused instead on Louis Armstrong, envisioning his face as I spoke his name.

  Sometimes, if the object of a summoning is antagonistic or reluctant, it will take a while for the person to materialize. Louis popped up within thirty seconds, wearing a tuxedo and a huge smile.

  I broke the circle and hugged him, which shot pain through my ribcage, and Alex hauled himself off the sofa to shake hands. Louis looked a lot less stressed than the last few times I’d seen him.

  “I been thinking about coming to visit you all, but didn’t know if it was the right thing to do.” Louis followed us downstairs and joined us at the kitchen table, the immaculate black and white of his tux out of place in the kitchen of my hundredyear- old house with its scuffed floors and the vintage chrome and red Formica table I’d found at a yard sale.

  I poured Louis a soda while Alex filled him in on how the city had recovered since Katrina. A long, slow haul. We’d been told after the hurricane it would take a decade to recover. At the time, I’d thought it was an exaggeration; now, not so much.

  “How’s Jake doing? Been seeing him in Old Orleans every now and then and he seems to be okay.” Louis sipped his Coke and got that glazed-over look in his eyes that only sugar and carbonated water can bring.

  Alex and I exchanged raised eyebrows. Jake had been going to Old Orleans?

  “Where did you see him?” Alex asked. “Have you seen him today?”

  Louis shook his head. “Nope, not today. Off and on the last six months, I guess. He comes in and listens to me play, mostly at the place called Beyond and Back. Listens to the other musicians. Has a few drinks.” He shrugged. “Nothing unusual.”

  We pondered that news a few seconds. “Does he meet with anyone over there?” I asked. “Seem to have any friends?” I hoped Jake was building a life for himself, even if it wasn’t one he wanted to share with me or Alex.

  Louis fixed me with a rare frown. “You aren’t trying to get Pops to spy for you again, are you? I wasn’t good at it, and I won’t do it again, especially if you’re wanting me to spy on Jake.”

  He might have been the world’s worst spy ever, in fact, but I wasn’t asking that of him again. I liked the idea that if Jake was hanging out in Old Orleans—the free-for-all zone just across the physical border from the modern city—he had somebody watching his back, even in a passive way.

  “No spying,” I said, and smiled when Louis visibly relaxed. “But there have been three attacks here in New Orleans that look to be the work
of one of the historical undead. A serial killer known as the Axeman. We wondered if you’d heard anything.”

  Louis leaned back and frowned. “I remember when the Axeman was killing folks all over town—was just after the first world war. I was playing in a jazz band with a steady gig on a riverboat, sailing up and down the Mississippi and playing all the way to the parishes and back. Got married ’bout that time.” His mind seemed to float into the past for a few seconds.

  “What do you remember about him?” Alex asked.

  “He was evil.” Louis looked at Alex and then at me. “Lots of folks didn’t even think he was a human—thought he was a devil of some kind. Other folks thought it was a mob thing, you know, ’cause so many of the people he chopped up were Italian.”

  I’d read both theories and thought both were bunk. Not that I didn’t believe in demons—or the Mafia, for that matter. But the Axeman had liked to play sadistic games with the authorities and the newspapers of the day. Demons didn’t send bizarre letters to newspapers claiming to be demons, as the Axeman had. But it was exactly the kind of stunt that would be pulled by a batshit-crazy human.

  “Have you heard anything about him in Old Orleans?” I asked Louis. He could keep his ears open. Technically, that wasn’t spying.

  “No ma’am, but I can tell you how to protect yourself,” he said.

  I hadn’t considered myself a target, but I’d play along. “What’s that?”

  “Get one of my records.” Louis smiled. “That Axeman, he loved him some jazz. Even said in one of his letters to the Picayune that he wouldn’t attack nobody while they were playing jazz. Made business real good for us at the time.”

  Somehow I didn’t think distributing jazz CDs to everyone in New Orleans to play twenty- four/seven would solve our problems. “If you hear anything, will you let me know?”

  “Sure thing. Pops’ll keep his ears open, long as he don’t have to spy.” He paused, his mouth widening in a sly smile. “You got one of those . . . what did you call them . . . cell phones? I’d sure like another one of them.”