“Exactement,” Jean said, nodding in approval like a teacher whose dunce pupil had finally come up with a rare bit of insight. “It might be that the mers simply want an excuse to fight over the marshland, as they tend to be a people of fierce temperament, or it might be that something else has fouled the water. Either way”—he reached out to brush a stray curl from my cheek—“it is a wizard matter, non?”
If the water was oil-slicked or polluted, it was not a wizard issue, but if there was even a chance it involved pretes … Damn it. He’d done the right thing by getting me involved.
His mouth curved into a smug smile. “From your expression, I know you realize my actions were correct. As you are an intelligent woman, I knew you would recognize this, so I have taken the liberty of arranging a meeting with both Rene Delachaise and Denis Villere tomorrow at the eleventh hour.”
He was so damned pleased with himself, I couldn’t help but return his smile. Big mistake. Give the pirate an inch and he’d take a fathom.
The strong fingers I’d been admiring slid around my wrist, and he traced small circles over my palm with his thumb. “Now, Jolie, we should renegotiate the repayment of your debts.” He stroked his hand slowly up my arm. I shivered as a tingle of warmth spread through me, and raging rouge danced a hot second-line across my face.
As much as some shameful part of me relished being the object of any handsome man’s desire—even a technically dead man—I couldn’t encourage him.
“Look, Jean. I like you. You’re a very desirable man.” The hand stroked a little higher and squeezed my shoulder. Oh, boy. I searched for the right turn of phrase, one that didn’t include the word dead. “But we kind of have an age difference.”
More than two centuries’ worth.
Chuckling, he pulled his hand away, and I checked him out as he walked to the wet bar for another brandy, all powerful grace and lean muscle. The air practically moved out of the way to make room for him.
Stop looking.
He turned back to me. “You still cling to the old world, Jolie. Things have changed. I might be older than you, as you say, but you do not fit into the human world any better than I.”
I stared at him, frowning, troubled that I couldn’t think of a good comeback, troubled that he was right, in a warped kind of way. “Still—”
“Still, Drusilla, you owe me for saving your life. Why not repay me in a way that would be pleasing to both of us? You cannot afford to buy me a house, non?”
I had no answer for that and I felt my moral high ground turning to mud, so I stood up and gave him a little finger wave, grabbing my purse and striding toward the door. “Gotta be going. See you at the meeting tomorrow.”
“Jolie.” His voice did that deep, sexy dive again. “What if one simple thing would erase all of your obligations to me?”
I stopped at the door with my back to the room, one hand on the knob, having an internal war. Jean was a devious pirate who always operated with an ulterior motive. On the other hand, he came from an era where favor begat favor. He wouldn’t let this drop, no matter how much I wanted it to go away. One way or another, I’d pay.
“Okay, what?” I turned from the door and gasped. He’d followed me across the room on sneaky pirate feet and stood a scant few inches away. Heart thumping, I got a close-range view of his chin as he flattened his arms against the door on either side of my head, forming a big, warm cage.
“Just a simple meal with me—what your modern people call a dinner date,” he whispered, leaning down to plant a light kiss on the side of my neck.
I closed my eyes and inhaled his scent of tobacco and cinnamon for a moment before pushing him away and pinning him with my best steely glare. “Just dinner?”
He raised an eyebrow. “You wish there to be more? Then, perhaps a stroll after dinner. Perhaps a kiss.”
Except for the kiss part, this could work. Dinner would be public and painless, and how many people got to dine with a legend? Jean was handsome and could be entertaining when he wanted to be.
“So, just to clarify.” I ticked off points on my fingers. “We have dinner. We talk. Maybe we stroll. We do not kiss. And then I owe you nothing.” I couldn’t see a loophole.
“Mais oui, I agree.” He stepped closer and rested a hand on my waist. “Shall we seal our bargain with a kiss?”
“No, but we can shake on it.”
He stared at my outstretched hand a moment, then took it in his own and lifted it to his lips. Just an old-fashioned kind of guy. Accent on old.
He reached around me and opened the door. “I will meet you at your office at nine tomorrow, Drusilla. We will talk to the mermen.”
In my haste to escape before he thought of any other debts or requests, I reached the lobby before it occurred to me: How did he know where my office was? How did he plan to get there? And what did one wear on a dinner date with an undead pirate?
CHAPTER 2
I cursed Jean Lafitte as I hoofed it toward my parking place in Outer Mongolia. A blister shot pain through my right foot from the accursed high heels, and my arch threatened total collapse. I rarely wore heels. In what part of my warped brain did Jean Lafitte rate heels?
“Hey, baby, trade ya some beads for a kiss.” A short, stocky guy slung an arm around my shoulders and got his beer-breath way too close to my nose. Why did everybody want to kiss me tonight? Well, an undead pirate and a drunken fraternity boy. My man-magnets must be on high beam.
“In your dreams, junior.” I punctured my words with a sharp elbow, which he didn’t appreciate if the unsavory names he spewed my way were any indication. Lucky for him I didn’t have my elven staff with me, or I could have fried him into next week. People from other places like to call New Orleans sin city, but it’s been my experience that most of the sin is being committed by alcohol-soaked tourists.
It was only eight thirty, but crowds already swept along Bourbon Street in waves. Fratboy and his friends had been at it a while, judging by his eau-de-brew. By midnight, Bourbon would be wall-to-wall party hounds, which is why locals rarely ventured here—unless, of course, they had a business meeting with a pirate.
Fratboy and his pals dropped back to wield their charms on a group of drunken college girls who seemed more appreciative, so I shouldered my way a couple more blocks. Once I hit St. Louis Street, I’d ditch the crowds and cut over to my parking spot on a side street.
The familiar sign of a neon dancing alligator holding a cocktail caught my eye just before I turned off Bourbon—the Green Gator. A stab of sadness gutted any lingering annoyance with Fratboy, almost stealing my breath. I hadn’t been to the Gator since the emotional days after Katrina, when everyone had been operating in a fog of post-traumatic stress and the preternaturals were making their power play to move into modern New Orleans.
Their scheme had worked. By the time the metaphysical dust settled, Alex had gone from rival to partner to best friend. His cousin Jake, who owned the Gator, had started out as a guy I thought might be Mr. Maybe and ended up a loup-garou, the werewolves’ biggest badass—attacked by a werewolf simply because he had the misfortune of knowing me.
I hadn’t seen Jake since a week after the attack. He blamed me, and I deserved it.
Still, Alex lived in one of the apartments over the Gator and I needed to tell him about the mer feud and our impending day-trip to Plaquemines Parish. I’d just have to pull up my big-girl pantyhose and go inside. Maybe it was time I saw Jake again.
A jazzy version of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” enveloped me in sound as I entered. I squinted through the crowd at the small stage on the right side of the long, rectangular barroom to see if the singer was a good impersonator or the real undead king of jazz—one never knew when he might pop over for a tune or two.
Tonight’s singer was merely a good impersonator, and the crowd swayed from a combination of alcohol and happy vibes. I screwed up my courage and scanned the area behind the polished wooden bar that stretched down the le
ft side of the room. No sign of either Jake or Leyla, the tall, model-sexy assistant manager who’d always been in lust with Alex. Not that Alex’s love life was any of my business, as he liked to remind me.
A couple of frazzled guys I’d never seen worked the bar, a sad reminder that even if the Katrina-era Gator stayed frozen in my mind, the real one had moved on.
I carved a path through the bar, making my way past the restrooms and kitchen and up a narrow stairwell near the back door. The sense of déjà vu hung heavy. My last visit here had been on one of the worst nights of my life, but it was long past time to put it aside.
I stopped halfway up the stairs and slid the ridiculous heels off with a sigh of pleasure. I’d snag them on the way out.
After reaching the small landing, I knocked on the door to Apartment B and waited.
“He’s not there, sunshine.”
I whirled to see Jake standing in his own doorway across the hall.
Sometimes, after an absence, people look smaller or plainer than memory has built them up to be. Not Jake. His wiry frame had bulked up in a good way, and he still had the shaggy, sun-kissed blond hair and amber eyes that had made my heart speed up. I hadn’t seen the killer dimples yet, but I knew they were under that stubble somewhere.
“Hi, Jake.” That much was easy. What to say next wasn’t. I’m sorry you got mixed up in my mess and became a loup-garou? I’m sorry you have to lie to all your friends because you’re no longer human? Glad your combat injuries from Afghanistan healed themselves your first full moon?
I just stood there, guilty, mute, and tense, my muscles frozen.
“Alex had a date with Leyla,” Jake said, leaning against the doorjamb and hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans. “You want to leave him a note? Come on in—I’ll get you a pen.” Before I had a chance to answer, he turned and went into his apartment, leaving the door ajar.
My heart thumped in alarm as I remembered the blame and anger in his eyes during our last encounter. I wasn’t sure I could handle a live replay. Still, I followed him inside. I could at least apologize, however useless it might be. I’d tried to apologize once before, when he was trying to figure out what I was and what had happened to him. He hadn’t been ready to hear it.
I closed the door behind me. He’d gone into the small kitchen and was rummaging through a drawer, which gave me a chance to glance around at the shabby, not-quite-so-chic apartment. It still looked as if it had been filled with castoffs from an era when John Travolta wore platform shoes and danced beneath a mirror ball.
Jake handed me a small spiral-bound notebook and a pen. I looked at them a moment before laying them on the scarred wooden dining table.
“Jake, I don’t…” I inhaled and started over. “I’m sorry. About everything. I know it’s my fault that … It was all my fault.” I trailed off, not sure how to continue.
He moved closer, reached out to put a hand on my shoulder, pulled back before touching me. “Let’s not start throwing blame around again, sugar. We’ve already done it once. It’s done.”
He was going to be noble, damn it, which ripped the scab off my guilt and made me realize a part of me wanted him to yell and throw stones. Maybe even needed him to.
“There’s plenty of blame for me, maybe even for Alex,” I said softly. “But not for you.”
He was the victim. A voodoo god had tried to take power in post-Katrina New Orleans, with more than a little help from my late father. Jake got caught in the middle, and ended up a loup-garou. His whole life had imploded while Alex and I walked out with no more than a few mental bruises. My father had died. The whole thing gnawed at me late at night—I tried to stay too busy to dwell on it the rest of the time.
“It’s over, DJ,” Jake repeated. “We shoulda let it go a long time ago.”
The dimples made their first appearance as he stepped back and looked at my feet. “You know how glad I was to see you standing out there with no shoes tonight?” His teasing South Mississippi drawl carried the seeds of forgiveness, and with that realization an almost tangible weight lifted.
I lifted my eyes to meet his warm, honeyed gaze. “I didn’t think you’d ever be glad to see me again.”
He smiled—a little sadly, I thought. “That was true enough for a while. Then, after I’d waited so long…” He shrugged, and I nodded. After a while, it got easier to avoid each other than to have this awkward conversation.
I picked up the notebook and looked at it. I didn’t want to write Alex a note. “I’ll just leave a message on his phone—plus, it’ll annoy him if I call him during his date.”
Jake grinned at me, and that felt good. A mutual enjoyment of tormenting his cousin had always been a bond between us.
He grabbed his keys off the table and followed me into the hallway. “I need to get back downstairs anyway, make sure the new guys haven’t given away all the beer.” He locked the door behind him.
“Business must be doing well if you’re hiring new people.”
We had started down the stairs, but he stopped abruptly. “Alex didn’t tell you?”
I slid my feet into the godforsaken shoes and turned to look at him. This didn’t sound good. “Tell me what?”
“I’m gonna be backing up Alex as an enforcer, so I’ll need more help around the Gator. Been training at Quantico the last six months.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it, guppy-like. When we met, Alex had been a full-time enforcer, a member of the wizards’ elite security force. When situations between sentinels and pretes got shot to hell, the enforcers came in and did cleanup. It usually involved killing something. Even now that he worked with me as a sentinel, Alex’s idea of mediation was using smaller ammo in his specially modified guns.
“Uh, congratulations?” I’d never seen that killer instinct in Jake, but as a former Marine he had the military background. As a loup-garou, he’d definitely have the muscle. “You’re happy about it?”
The dimples made another appearance. “Yeah, I am. For the first time since all this shit went down, I know where I belong. Maybe even for the first time since I left Afghanistan.”
I hoped he was right. And I was going to have a little talk with good old cousin Alex to make sure he turned off the crazy rivalry he had with Jake and turned on his nurturing side. He had one; I’d seen it.
* * *
I celebrated my bravery in confronting both Jean and Jake in one evening by a stop at the Popeye’s drive-through, where a box of spicy fried chicken and a container of red beans awaited, guaranteed to soothe any residual nerves.
Traffic crawled along St. Charles Avenue, so I wound my way to my house by back streets, pinching off bits of chicken to eat along the way. The pizza place across from me on Magazine had an overflow crowd, and my friend Eugenie Dupre’s house across Nashville was dark, as was the sign for the Shear Luck hair and nail salon she ran from her first floor. Maybe she’d lucked out and had a date with someone who wasn’t technically dead.
I juggled my food and purse—and the heels, which I’d taken off again—trying to unlock my back door. I’d forgotten to leave the kitchen light on, and something tangled in my feet just inside. My knees and shoulder hit the wooden floor hard, along with the shoes, the chicken, and the red beans. Somebody was going to pay.
“Sebastian—you just used up your eighth life!” I never shrieked until I became a reluctant cat owner. Now it happened frequently. A thunder of paws tore across the living room as I staggered to my feet and fumbled for the light switch. Toilet paper wound around both ankles, trailed through the kitchen and living room, and curled out of sight into the downstairs bathroom.
I’d inherited Sebastian, a cranky, cross-eyed chocolate Siamese, when my father and mentor, Gerry, died in the Katrina aftermath. He’d bequeathed me a flooded, moldy house near a levee breach, an extensive library of obscure grimoires, a set of elven skills I hadn’t figured out how to use, a lot of memories. And the world’s most vindictive feline.
Afte
r gathering an armload of toilet paper and throwing it in the trash, I tracked down my dinner. The chicken box lay upended in front of the fridge and the red beans had rolled under the kitchen table. The lid had stayed on the beans, but I plucked the biscuit off the floor and looked stupidly inside the box at a single scrawny chicken wing. Suspicious, I stuck my head in the living room. Sebastian sprawled on an upholstered armchair, his black nose buried in a greasy fried chicken breast bigger than his head.
I hissed at him to get his attention. “Feline. Spawn. Of. Satan.”
Not that the grease could do much more damage to the chair since he’d already used its back as a scratching post.
He raised disdainful crossed blue eyes in my direction, then slinked off in a huff when I snatched away the chicken breast and took it to the fridge. Eventually, I’d let him have it, but one should not reward feline insolence.
I took what was left of my dinner, grabbed my purse off the floor, and called Alex to give him a heads-up before I talked to the Elders and began what threatened to be an all-night merpeople cram session. I hadn’t asked Jake where the happy couple had gone on their date, or if it was their first, or whether they’d been doing the nasty for months, although I doubted it. Alex would have bragged.
After five rings, he answered in his surliest voice. “DJ, something better be burning or dying.”
Heh. “Having fun? Didn’t disturb anything, did I?” Music and voices tangled in the background, so he and Leyla weren’t engaged in anything too private. That relieved me, for some reason. Probably because Leyla never liked me much. I refused to entertain the idea of jealousy.
“Can this wait till tomorrow? The next band’s about to start.” His voice rose to match the background din.
Guilt replaced relief. After a few flirtations in the early days of our partnership, we’d agreed to keep things at the friends-with-no-benefits level. The man had every right to go on a date.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said, meaning it. “Just don’t make plans for tomorrow.” I gave him the short version of the mer feud/water testing. “And why didn’t you tell me Jake was in enforcer training?”
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