“Back bedroom of the house.” He yelled over his shoulder at another officer who’d come out to stand on the porch. “Heads up, Matty—legs incoming. Oops, fed incoming, I meant to say.”
I gave him a saccharine smile, made a show of squinting at his badge number as I slowly wrote it in my notebook, and nodded at the other officer.
The scent of blood hit me before I cleared the front room. Ken sat on a sofa facing the door, talking to an el der ly man whose fear and sorrow soaked into my skin. I’d done my grounding ritual this morning, so only the strongest emotions reached me.
Ken knew how to keep his mind a blank. Thank God for the U.S. Marines and the police academy. Note to self: wear your mojo bag while jogging; you never know when you might have to jog over to a crime scene.
“Alex is in the back bedroom, checking out the scene before our guys go in to bag and tag,” Ken said. “Tell him they’re gettin’ impatient.”
“Straight back?” I pointed down the hall, and at Ken’s nod, approached the source of the heavier blood scent, thick and rich and meaty. Everyone says blood smells like copper, but to me it reeks of iron and rust, earthy and viscous.
The metaphysical chaos hit me before I reached the door: the wonky tingle of Alex’s shapeshifter aura, the lingering energy of violence, plus the light undercurrent of not-quite-human energy that told me a member of the historical undead had been here. And mixed with it, the buzz of a wizard’s magic—like a necromancer would leave behind. I’d not felt it at any other crime scene.
I held my breath, pulled the neck of my shirt over my nose to blunt the blood scent when and if I did have to breathe again, and tiptoed into the room. No one was inside but Alex. He squatted next to the bed, studying his surroundings and ignoring my presence. He was focused, engrossed, a man engaged in his calling.
I stared past him at the bed and had to close my eyes, fighting for control of my heaving gut. Thankfully, I hadn’t eaten this morning. Sheets stained the color of raw meat were dotted with clots and chunks I wanted to pretend I hadn’t seen. Blood spattered the lampshade on a nightstand, the pale green walls behind the bed, the hardwood floor.
I had to clear my throat a couple of times before getting words out. “What can you tell?”
“Not much.” Alex stood and walked to the other side, getting another angle on the scene and, unfortunately, giving me a clearer view of the mattress.
“I’m assuming nobody lived through that.”
He knelt next to the nightstand and disappeared from view as he checked under the bed. “Still alive for now. Critical condition, though.”
Being careful not to touch anything, I walked into the postage-stamp-size half bath off the bedroom, trying to get a break from the blood. An old-fashioned white iron pedestal sink sat adjacent to a low white toilet. I gazed in the plain, unframed mirror, and a ponytailed blonde with dark circles under her eyes gazed stared at me. Blood had even spattered the mirror.
I turned back to the gore, watching for a few seconds as Alex contorted to examine every nanoparticle of the bed without touching anything. “Anything different about it? Where did he leave the ax?”
He stood up and shook his head. “He didn’t—and that’s what’s different about it besides the location being outside our French Quarter radius. We’ve combed the house and the grounds and the ax isn’t here. Blood droplets led out the back door, so he must have taken it with him. I’m wondering if it could be a copycat.”
The ax was the killer’s calling card, so not leaving it fell way outside his normal pattern. But the energy signatures told a different story.
“No, it isn’t a copycat,” I said, and Alex stood and looked at me for the first time.
“Tell me how you know.”
I glanced into the hallway to make sure the forensics team was still keeping its distance. “I can still feel the aura of the historical undead here. Plus a wizard’s magic, which I’ll explain when we get somewhere more private. Who’s the victim?”
“A Times-Pic reporter,” Alex said. “So you know this is gonna get played up. This wizard’s magic—it’s important?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to get into it here.” I turned to study the woman’s dresser. A couple of rings and a bracelet looked real enough, but robbery hadn’t been the motive in any of these cases, so the culprit wasn’t a necromancer in need of cash.
I scanned the rest of the cluttered dresser top. A small packet of tissues. Bottles of perfume—what I thought of as pop-culture scents, named after people like Beyoncé and Britney. A spiral reporter’s notebook. A couple of lipsticks lying atop a page of lined notebook paper.
Good grief. Blood spatter had even gone on the wall behind the dresser, except . . . “Alex, come here.”
I pointed at the wall, where the numeral 25 had been written in blood. “What does that mean?”
“We don’t know.” Ken walked into the bedroom and stood next to us, studying the wall. “There was a number at the last crime scene too. It’s one of the details we aren’t releasing to the media. We always hold a few things back to help us filter out crackpot leads and confessions.”
“What was the first number?” I didn’t remember reading anything about the Axeman leaving numbers back in the good old days.
Ken flipped through his notebook. “Fifty-seven.”
Fifty-seven and twenty-five. A chill washed over me. I lived at 5725 Magazine Street.
Alex cleared his throat. “DJ, that’s your house number.”
Ken and I looked at him, then at each other. “Gotta be a coincidence,” he said, but he was frowning. “Right?”
I looked back at the number. “Right.”
But maybe I’d amp up the security wards on my house, just in case.
CHAPTER 12
If zombies and ghouls took over Disney World, with creative direction from Satan, the theme park would resemble the corpse of Six Flags New Orleans. I parked outside the main gate and squeezed past rusted, twisted turnstiles and purple-painted, crumbling offices covered in graffiti.
Six Flags had never been profitable. Folks who come to New Orleans for vacation aren’t usually looking for a Louisianathemed amusement park in the eastern part of the city, far from the Quarter. Plus, underneath the Cajun kitsch, the place was, well, Six Flags. When Katrina hit in 2005, the park sank under six feet of water for more than a month and never reopened.
Years later, here it remained, a distorted, hellish sideshow in the middle of swampy soil. It was tied up in a terminal case of litigation, its rusting roller coaster reaching toward heaven like a monument to the fates of nature and indifference.
The perfect place, in other words, for some discreet lessons in elven staff usage. Or so I’d thought—the site was my bright idea. Now I wasn’t sure. It was eerie, even in the weak sunlight that had finally broken through the clouds, and my nerves had been on edge before learning the Axeman had left bloody numbers at his last two crime scenes that added up to my street address. Were they left under the instructions of the necromancer?
My logical mind said it was a weird coincidence. My panicky, spiraling- out-of-control imagination whispered that maybe I was a target. Except I didn’t know any necromancers, and while I’d pissed off a few people in my day, I don’t think I’d made any mortal enemies.
I wandered past the sculpture of a headless merman next to the roller coaster, which looped and twirled through the sky like a demon sculptor on hallucinogens had carved a statue of rusty metal. Stephen King should set a horror novel here.
A creaking noise sent shivers down my arms and made my fingers tingle, but when I spun around, only the wind revealed itself to me, moving the swinging chairs of a Looney Tunes ride like they were being boarded by a horde of ghost children.
In a burst of creative irony, I’d left Adrian Hoffman a message to meet me by the entrance to the Jean Lafitte Pirate Ship ride, which during better days had taken passengers on a short lagoon trip. Now it looked as if Jean himself might h
ave abandoned it during his human life. Even the water in the murky faux-lagoon had a rusty tinge.
My first task was to set up an open portal for my teacher since he’d told me during our meeting with Zrakovi that he wasn’t comfortable driving in the U.S. Apparently, we uncouth Yanks insist on driving on the wrong side of the road. If I’d been a responsible, mature adult I’d have offered to pick Adrian up, but obviously I wasn’t.
I set my backpack on the “dock” and retrieved a baby- foodsize jar of iron filings. I also had a sizable cache of premade potions and charms in marked vials as well as the elven staff. Lately, the motto Be Prepared was more than a Boy Scout slogan.
I turned in a circle, searching for the best transport spot. Something not likely to be disturbed by the photographers, gang-bangers, and “explorers” who risked arrest to wander out here and take photos or add to the urban art. The land belonged to New Orleans, so the city council wanted to curtail access. They worried that people like graffiti artists (or stray wizards) might fall on a rusty pirate sword or trip over the merman’s missing head and sue them.
For the transport, I found a tangle of weeds next to the entrance to the Gator Bait ride that would give Adrian a great view of the sign when he arrived. On it, a bright green gator in a king’s red cloak and a crown drove an airboat and waved, although the storm-broken sign beneath him now read gator ba_t.
The spot was overgrown enough to camouflage the transport so we could keep it open, but not so overgrown that we couldn’t get in and out easily. I used trails of iron filings to create a large interlocking circle and triangle inside it. Taking the elven staff from my pack, I touched it to the closed transport, muttered a few directives in my South Louisiana version of the ancient wizard Celtic language, and shot enough energy into the figure to fuel the site indefinitely. Once this educational adventure ended, I’d break the transport line and close the connection.
I had plenty of my own native physical magic to power a transport, so using the staff was a bit of overkill, but I figured the first thing Hoffman would do was order me to quit using Charlie until the post-Thanksgiving elf meeting. Might as well wield it while I could.
I took my pack and returned to a bench near the pirate ship entrance, my mind fixated on the Axeman and his necromancer. If the necromantic wizard was planning to direct the Axeman to a specific target or targets, how could we figure out who it was beforehand? We’d been able to find no link between the two targets where numbers had been found.
And the numbers had to be significant. Just on the off chance it was my house number, I typed a reminder into my phone to download a few jazz CDs. Couldn’t hurt.
I’d met Alex for lunch at my house before heading to Six Flags. First, I had to share my good news from the blood test. Alex broke into the rare smile that cracked apart his enforcer façade and revealed the sweet, decent guy he so rarely showed anyone. I’d seen it a few times, but never quite like now. He didn’t say anything, but pulled me into a hug so tight my ribs ached. And I didn’t care.
I didn’t know how Alex felt about me. I wasn’t even sure how I felt about him. But something was growing between us, and I was glad a fur disaster wasn’t going to ruin it.
Although he hadn’t said he was worried about Jake, the sag of relief in his shoulders when I told him his cousin was safe told me more than words. He didn’t even complain about being in Jean Lafitte’s debt.
Once we finally focused on the Axeman, Alex had reluctantly agreed the numbers were probably a coincidence. Once he heard the necromancer angle, however, he helped me gather the supplies to walk the circle around my house, burying packets of magic- infused herbs and stones at regular intervals and reinforcing my security wards.
Before I left for Six Flags, Alex had also called Ken and asked for extra patrols around my neighborhood.
He’d even offered to come with me to Six Flags, but I needed to learn to work with Adrian on my own. We would never be best buddies, but I did want his respect. I didn’t think I could earn it arriving with backup for what was supposed to be simple elf lessons. Right now, the rest was paranoia. “Keep your phone nearby,” I’d told him when I left. “I’ll call you if there are any problems.”
Instead, he’d decided to stay at my house all afternoon and make sure an ax-wielding bad guy didn’t show up. He also planned to call the Elders for a list of locally registered necromancers. When I got home, we’d divide the list and start tracking them down, and then—
“Could you possibly have picked a more disagreeable place to meet?”
Heh. I wiped the grin off my face before turning to greet my new mentor. Wearing a charcoal-colored, tailored suit that probably cost more than a month of my salary, Adrian stood ankledeep in the patch of briars. He held a briefcase and a scowl.
“Sorry.” I tried to appear contrite. “I wanted a spot where an open transport would be camouflaged.”
He gave me a look that would freeze habaneros and high- stepped out of the brush. “I half expected you not to be here. I heard on the television news that another ax attack had occurred. Do you still believe it’s the historically undead Axeman at work?”
“I do.” I gave him a quick rundown while we walked to a bench located near the Lafitte Pirate Ship ride, ignoring his expression of derision at the information from Jean about a necromancer’s involvement.
“Well, obviously the local Regent of Vampyre is the culprit and Lafitte is covering for him.” Adrian assumed an I- smell-turnips expression. “Nasty creatures, vampires. Totally self-absorbed. We should never have allowed them open access to our world.”
In my albeit limited experience I’d found the vampires to be among the most self- regulated of all the species, and I’d never heard a whisper of complaint about Etienne Boulard or any of his people. Vampires were extremely practical. After all, they knew following prete law kept their favorite snack food—i.e., humans—close at hand.
“Have you met our local Regent?” Except for one sample tour with Eugenie, my visits to L’Amour Sauvage and the Tour Blood offices had only exposed me to his human minions. Tonight, I had an appointment to meet the Regent himself.
Adrian’s upper lip curled. “Of course not. Why on earth would I want to meet a vampire?”
Maybe because he was one. A few minutes in Adrian Hoffman’s company could suck the soul out of a banana. “I’m going to talk with him tonight at his bar. It’s not far from your apartment. Why don’t you go with me? I’d like to get your reactions and compare them with my own.”
Yeah, I was sucking up, and he fell for it. “That would be most . . . interesting. Yes, I’ll go.” He almost smiled.
Good. Sucking up done. Now for the real show. “What are we doing today?”
I expected a bunch of dry lectures on elven history and lore, but he surprised me. “Show me what you can do.” He sat next to me on the rusty bench, crossed his legs, and waited for me to perform like a trained seal.
The thing I’d most like to do was point my elven staff at him and set him on fire, but such an act would probably hurt my opportunities for career advancement. “Can you be more specific?”
He rolled his eyes heavenward as if asking the Almighty to spare him from idiots. “What elven skills do you claim to have? We’ll start there. Next time I’ll test you on some other skills known to be elven.”
Wait, this might actually be helpful. My mouth dropped open involuntarily.
He sniffed. “Unless, of course, you’ve highly exaggerated your abilities.”
What a jackass. “Fine. I can do hydromancy. I can—”
“Show me.”
I sighed. “It’s daylight. And we’re outside.” The ideal time to do hydromancy was at night under a full moon and, failing that, indoors in a dark place.
“You’ve a reputation for being creative.” His tone left no doubt as to what he thought of creativity: out-of-the-box thinking sat atop the undesirability scale alongside horrible things like genocide and polite behavior.
>
“Some people consider creativity an asset.” He wanted creative? I’d show him creative. I studied the area around us, grabbed my pack, and walked toward the long midway, filled with a couple dozen dilapidated wooden structures tricked out like French Quarter buildings. Before the hurricane, they’d sold overpriced Cajun- and voodoo-themed souvenirs. The sign leading into the area read PONTCHARTRAIN BEACH, a lakeside amusement park in New Orleans that had been closed years ago. The name had a certain irony now.
The storefront on the end had once been bright yellow, with orange window and door trim and sage-green shutters. Designed to mimic a Creole cottage, the building more resembled something a colorblind do- it- yourselfer had painted using clearance-bin paint from Home Depot, then left to rot for several years. The windows gaped open, and graffiti covered the front. In bright red, VENDETTA; in black, ROACHERY.
Shuddering, I stepped through the open doorway and picked my way around shards of glass and empty display cases, dodging a rodent-like skeleton the size of a terrier and taking shallow breaths to protect my lungs from the chalky smell of dried mold spores—a scent I remembered too well from the post-Katrina city. Gerry’s entire neighborhood of Lakeview had reeked of it for a year.
I knelt in the darkest corner. Not pitch-black, but dark enough to work. My skin jumped and twitched and itched with the feet of imaginary spiders and roaches and God knew what else crawling inside my clothes. At least I hoped they were imaginary.
“What in bloody hell are you doing?”
I started at the sound of the petulant voice coming from the doorway. Adrian had been following closely until I reached the building.
“I’m going to do some basic hydromancy and I need darkness. Come closer—just past the giant mutant rat carcass. I can’t do it any closer to the door.”
Glass crunched under his feet, and he muttered curses at me all the way across the room. A pair of dust-covered, fancy loafers came to a stop about a yard to my left. Had the man thought he was dressing for a garden party?
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