“I’ll have to do some research,” I said, thinking about how spending another night pawing through magical texts was the last thing I wanted to do. Would I ever get skilled to the point where I’d just know stuff, and not have to pull all-nighters figuring out obscure things like merman lore and magical water contamination? Would Gerry have known what to do?
“You look exhausted,” Tish said. “You don’t have to do this tonight, do you?”
“I have some mermen ready to kill each other over this, which will bring the Elders in to do damage control, which will piss off the mers in other areas, and then we’ll have a big mess on our hands,” I said. Plus, it would make me look like a doofus. “So, no, it can’t wait. If there really is a problem with the water, there are lots of humans who hunt and fish in that area. What if the food fish are being poisoned?”
She nodded. “Not to mention a couple of dead guys that this Denis Villere or Rene Delachaise might or might not have killed.”
“Not to mention them,” I said. “I can see Rene and Denis killing each other with the flick of a fin. But why would either one go after a college professor? And Doug Hebert wasn’t just killed. He was mutilated, so it was personal. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Denis showed up when he did.”
“Doug Hebert was the one killed?” Tish frowned. “I know him. Well, I know who he is. We worked together for a few months when we were young, but I haven’t seen him in years.” She shook her head. “I didn’t realize he was the victim. Who was the other one?”
I grabbed my notebook off the table and flipped through it. “Jeffrey Klein. Also a Tulane prof.”
Tish paled. “I knew him too, or I did a long time ago. We all worked for the Elders after the war in ’76 but lost touch after that. They were both really mainstreamed. Last I heard they were doing wetlands research, working on some big federal project to try and stop the land loss. They’d had nothing to do with the active wizarding community for years, as far as I know.”
So our professors were doing wetlands research and had been murdered in the wetlands, or at least one of them had. Where Jeff Klein died was still a question mark. Had they stumbled across something they shouldn’t have?
“What did Green Congress wizards do in the war?” I asked. “I thought Red Congress saw all the action—they’re the fighters.”
“We were all young and wanted to be involved, so the Elders gave us odd jobs that didn’t require a lot of physical magic,” Tish said. “Nothing serious or dangerous. I had to check the trackers every day and keep a list of what wizards were in town and where they were going. New Orleans wasn’t very involved—most of the power struggles happened in Europe.”
The feeling of Rene’s anger and Denis’s outright hatred came back to me. “Changing the subject, do you know anything that happened during the war to make the mers hate wizards so much?”
Tish laughed. “DJ, every prete group hates wizards. We’re the biggest group, we have more powers, and we can mainstream easily. The mers aren’t alone, although…” Her brow furrowed in thought. “You know, a lot of the water species were put in kind of detention camps while the postwar treaties were being sorted out. Stripped of their territory, forced to live in a defined space. The mers were probably part of that.”
Maybe Rene and Robert’s father had been one of the mers locked up and stripped of his land. That would certainly be enough to make them hate wizards, especially for Cajun mers who’d already been through it when they’d been forced to leave Acadia.
I filed it away to research later, when I didn’t have more urgent things to figure out. “Okay, back to testing water for magical contamination.” I returned to the worktable and picked up one of the Pass a Loutre samples we hadn’t yet used for testing. “If I can detect magical energy on the surface of things, I wonder if I could detect it in water?”
Tish joined me at the table. “It’s worth a try—that’s one of those stray elven skills your gene pool handed you. I can’t think of a potion or charm that would work in water.”
I looked around the room and, sure enough, Charlie sat propped against the doorjamb. I went over and grabbed it, bringing it back to the table.
“I swear that thing was downstairs when I got here,” Tish said, reaching out to touch it. The staff, under her hand, was an inert stick of wood. “Is it still following you around?”
“I usually have to think about it for it to show up now.” I brushed my fingers along the raised sigils, and it glowed slightly. When I first found it, the thing followed me indiscriminately. Maybe my charm was wearing off.
“Sorry, DJ, but that’s just creepy.”
I smiled. I used to think so. Now, Charlie was sort of like the affectionate pet Sebastian would never be. I’d had a great dog for a while, but it turned out to be Alex. So I was reduced to having a stick of elven wood for a pet. Talk about pathetic.
I took a soft cloth from a drawer beneath the table and polished the wood to a warm sheen. “I’m going to try it using the staff. If I waste all the water, our diving merman’s going to get some more samples tomorrow anyway.”
Tish settled back in her chair to watch as I poured a palmful of the water from Pass a Loutre into my left hand and grasped the elven staff in my right. I closed my eyes and went through the process I’d used earlier in the day, sorting through sounds and senses.
I should have tried meditation using the staff earlier. It amplified everything, clarified the sensory inputs, and helped me release them so I could focus on the energy in the room. Riding above the warm buzz of Tish’s wizard energy were the faint traces of two other powers coming off the water in my hand. The first one, which didn’t surprise me, was the cold, hard buzz of a mer; the other, once I isolated it, clogged my lungs and sped my heart rate, a dense and pulsating sensation I’d never encountered. I dropped the staff, wanting to be rid of its power before the sensations suffocated me.
“What happened?” Tish had stood up and crossed the room without my realizing it. For a few seconds, I’d been lost in the sensations.
Holy crap. Rene was right. Something awful was in that water.
Tish and I batted theories around for an hour but still had no idea what my great discovery meant. Only that whatever was contaminating the water, it wasn’t E. coli.
About eight, Tish left with tentative plans to join tomorrow’s scouting party to Pass a Loutre. I also called Alex and asked him to go so I could stay home and wrestle with the water problem. I didn’t know if Jake was ready to deal with the weirdness we’d encountered today without help and, judging by how quickly Alex agreed to go, I suspected he thought the same thing. Jake would hate it if he knew we were trying to protect him, so he’d just have to never know.
I collapsed on the sofa in my upstairs sitting room, trying to unwind. On TV, chef Bobby Flay was in Kitchen Stadium concocting five courses from a rare species of fish. I felt like I’d had five courses of merman today, and it was a serious overdose. Sebastian sat next to me, giving me the Siamese cross-eyed stare of death until I put a nibble or two of my ice cream on the carton lid for him.
My thoughts raced around the water problem. The fact that I felt mer energy in the sample didn’t really implicate any of them. It could have been residual aura from Rene diving for the water samples. I needed to find out what that other energy was.
Maybe it would help to have someone from another species collect the samples tomorrow. Then if the mer energy was still present, it would move them higher on the suspect list.
I set the ice cream on the coffee table and went to my library for my laptop. I called up the rudimentary database the Elders had sent, giving contact information for the heads of prete groups that had formally settled into the area—or at least the ones they knew about. It was a short list. The Realm of Vampyre had a Regent who’d set up shop in the Quarter, running a tour business. The weregators had a representative in Iberia Parish, the area from which the Villere clan had moved. Neither the fae nor the elves—the
other major prete groups—appeared to have moved outside the Beyond.
I paused over the next-to-last name on the list. Interesting. The official representative for the merpeople was Toussaint Delachaise, with an address in Chenoire, St. Bernard Parish, just northeast of New Orleans. Delachaise wasn’t that common a name, even in these parts, so it looked like Rene and Robert were well connected. Was it their father?
The final name on the list was the one I was looking for, but I winced when I saw it. The Greater Mississippi River Nymphs was headed by someone named Blueberry Muffin. Really? A prete who doesn’t understand humans enough to pick an unsuspicious name is probably going to fail at mainstreaming. I didn’t hold out much hope for the nymphs.
I got my cell and punched in the number. Did I call her Blue? Berry? Muffin?
Turned out to be a non-issue. The woman who answered the phone identified herself as Libby. “Muffi isn’t here right now,” she said, her voice husky and sultry and designed to make a guy roll over and beg. Then again, she was a nymph. How else should she sound?
“I need to hire a diver.” I introduced myself and launched into what I hoped was a not-too-revealing but still coherent explanation of the river problem—excluding anything to do with dead wizards or merman suspects. “I know it’s short notice, but we really need someone to go with us to Plaquemines Parish tomorrow. Do you think Muffi will be back by then?”
“Who else will be going?” Libby asked. “I’m sure Muffi will want to know.”
I wondered how nymphs got along with other species. “Uh, we’ll have a wizard, a werewolf, a shapeshifter, and a merman,” I said. Come to think of it, that assortment would scare me away. At least the undead pirate wouldn’t be along this time.
“I’ll handle it, sweetie. Just tell me where and when, and we’ll have someone there,” Libby purred. “Because we just love fur and fins.”
CHAPTER 12
I returned from my jog a little before six a.m., craving coffee and a shower, maybe at the same time. Alex had begged off running this morning since he’d stayed up late getting Jake prepped for his first official enforcer assignment, so I was surprised to walk in my back door and find him sitting at my kitchen table in his jeans and a black T-shirt. He was drinking the coffee I’d put on before I left and doing what looked suspiciously like paperwork for the Elders. The work had him so engrossed he didn’t look up.
I poured myself a cup of Kahlua-flavored roast and settled into the seat opposite him. “Is that what I think it is?” The Elders loved reports. Early in our partnership, I’d tried to out-report Alex, but it didn’t last long: He was all about following the rules and I was all about procrastination.
“Yeah, figured I might as well do it while—” He blinked at me. “Have you been running? I thought you were still asleep.” The fact I’d just come from outside at the ass-crack of dawn wearing shorts, Nikes, and a T-shirt finally made it past his obsessive alpha brain waves. “I figured you’d back out when I said I wasn’t going.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I liked running now that I was used to it, but I’d never admit it. “I just woke up early.”
He smiled at me. Alex was a serious guy, but when he smiled he looked like a kid. A really big, sexy kid. “I knew it. You like it. You should alternate it with weights. I can pick out some starter hand-weights for you.”
Yeah, that was happening. I closed my eyes as the hot, sweet coffee spread healing caffeine through my system. “I will never lift weights. I don’t need to lift weights.”
Alex scanned my body with a clinical detachment I found alarming. “It’ll be great for your upper body strength. Let me see your biceps. I bet you have no muscle tone.”
I reached in the corner behind me, picked up the elven staff, and pointed it at him. “I have enough to lift this, hound.”
I settled back in my chair, laying the staff on the table. “Oh, by the way, a representative from the Greater Mississippi River Nymphs, possibly someone named either Libby or Blueberry Muffin, will meet you at the office at noon to dive for water samples. Tish Newman is going too.”
After Alex and I talked to Doug Hebert’s widow, I planned to lock myself in my library and figure out what was wrong with the water. Somehow.
Alex sipped his coffee and tried to keep a serious look on his face, but lost. “A nymph named Blueberry Muffin is going? Makes me hungry.” He put a little growl in his voice for emphasis.
I laughed. “Stop being such a guy. Just make sure she dives for some water samples without the mers being in the water. After that, I don’t want to know what you do with her.” Well, actually, I could get every sordid detail from Tish, although the idea Alex might engage in any nymphscapades made me extremely grumpy.
“Jean Lafitte’s not going, is he?” Alex sifted through papers as though the answer didn’t matter, but I hadn’t done my grounding ritual this morning and got a sense of uneasiness wafting from him. Normally, Alex was unreadable.
“No, Jean’s out of the picture unless we have problems with the mers. Why?” I couldn’t interpret Alex’s expression, but thought it looked kind of nervous. He and Jean had coexisted well yesterday once we were past the Corvette issue, but nothing about Jean had ever made Alex nervous. Homicidal, maybe.
“I just asked because I didn’t want to be party to another felony. I do have friends on the NOPD.” Alex got up and poured the rest of his coffee into the sink, but stayed at the kitchen window, his back to me. “Remember I said you owed me for not turning him in for auto theft?”
Uh-oh. “I thought you were being hypothetical.”
“Hypothetically, then, I’ll consider us even after next Saturday.” He still had his back to me.
I felt my own nerves skittering. That was a week from yesterday. “Hypothetically, what might be happening then?”
“My mom’s birthday dinner. She’s expecting my girlfriend to come with me.”
Alex didn’t have a girlfriend unless Leyla had been promoted. Oh, God. I knew where this was going. “And who might that imaginary girlfriend be?”
He cleared his throat. “You know, the one I’ve been seeing since Katrina. The one who works for the FBI, that I met on a case. The one named DJ.”
I banged my head on the table. Alex and I had posed as a couple after Katrina. It had been easier to explain than the whole Tracking-Down-a-Rogue-Voodoo-God thing. Word had eventually filtered back to Mama. But that was three freakin’ years ago.
It took all my resolve to keep my voice calm and not lob my coffee cup at his head. “Why is she expecting your girlfriend DJ to come to her birthday dinner?”
Alex sighed and flopped back into the kitchen chair. “Because I never told her we weren’t really a couple?”
I stared at him, trying to understand how this big hulk of a man who collected weaponry with such relish was afraid of his mother. The woman had to be a class A harpy. A harpy who thought I’d been dating her baby boy for a long, long time. Just kill me now.
“We will not be even after this,” I told him. “You’ll owe me. This is much bigger than covering up a felony.” Plus, I could always come down with a last-minute illness. Come to think of it, I felt feverish already.
Relief washed over Alex’s face. “You’re right. I’ll owe you big-time.”
For someone who hadn’t had a date since the Stone Age, my dance card was looking full between my evening with Jake, Norma Warin’s birthday party, and my dinner date with Jean Lafitte. I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that none of the three guys was human, or even a wizard. Maybe I’d make like a nymph and start collecting species. Rene and Robert were handsome in a volatile, semi-hostile kind of way.
Of course they could also be wizard killers.
I left Alex to finish his paperwork and went upstairs to shower and dress for my new job. What does an investigator wear? As a deputy sentinel, my usual uniform had been jeans and a sweater or T-shirt. But it seemed that if I were going to interview witnesses and such, my look s
hould say “professional” and not “Café du Monde.”
I stared into my closet. Nothing says serious like a suit, and I had one. Only one. I needed to go shopping for a more professional wardrobe.
I took a shower, tugged a fitted gray jacket over a black tank, and shimmied into the black pencil skirt I’d worn to meet Jean Lafitte. Low black pumps raised me all the way up to five-six. I dabbed on a little makeup, wrangled my unruly hair into a loose twist, and I was set.
Since a wizard murderer was on the loose, I stuck the elven staff in my oversized bag, along with more vials for the nymph to collect water samples.
Alex, who’d added a sports coat to his enforcer ensemble in a nod toward dressing up, gave me a crash course in interrogation on the way to the Heberts’ house in Metairie. I’d never admit it, but ever since I’d learned our job as sentinels was expanding to involve prete investigations, I’d been obsessively watching old reruns of Law & Order.
“I’ll do most of the talking,” Alex said. “But don’t be afraid to ask Melinda Hebert questions—trust your instincts.”
My instincts told me to stay home and let him handle it. “So, will we play good cop/bad cop? I want to be the bad cop. I’m not the warm, nurturing type.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Really?”
Jerk. “So, what should I do?”
“Stop watching cop shows, for one thing. Look, Melinda Hebert’s going to be raw—her husband just died and all she knows is what Elder Zrakovi told her when he transported over to give her the news last night.”
At least Zrakovi told her and not Adrian Hoffman, who I suspected had the compassion of a fruit fly. Why that man had the job of being the public face of the Elders, I’d never understand.
Doug’s file had held very little information about his wife. “She’s a human, so I should be able to read her emotions,” I said. “But Doug wasn’t a practicing wizard. He never formally gave his magic up, but he wasn’t active. I don’t know how much she’ll know about anything wizard-related.”
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