by Faith Hunter
Official capacity also meant that I’d be enforcing Leo’s will on whoever had put Ming in a hole in the ground. I’d be executioner, if that was called for. Not my favorite part of the job, but I was good at it. Very good. Usually. I slid my fingers against the scar tissue in my side. It was less ropy and stiff and far less painful. Even when keeping Beast down, as Beta, I healed faster than any human.
Bruiser said, “Once we get the pit drained and Ming of Mearkanis to safety, you’ll need to bring Yellowrock Securities and work up the pit.”
“Oh, hell,” Eli muttered.
“Happy, happy, joy, joy,” I said, knowing my sarcasm was transmitted over the cell. We’d be looking for clues to the witchy, Mithran, or human person or persons who took her, standing knee deep in mud and muck and mosquitoes.
Small biting things. Hard to catch, my Beast thought. I didn’t respond, rolling up a slice of ham and chewing it.
Alex, the electronics whiz part of our team, opened another one of the tablets on the table and created a file to take notes in, typing in the location and what little information we had. “Okay,” I said to Bruiser. “What else do you know so far?”
“According to the photos I’m texting you, the hole she’s in is beneath a rough-cut wooden trapdoor set directly into the ground and covered with leaves. I think the Mithran is chained with silver to a cement wall set in the mud. From the scent, the skeletal remains of humans are in there with her, and if it’s Ming, it’s possibly her blood-servants, Benjamin and Riccard. The water table is so high that the pit is almost full of swamp water. There’s no power to the site, no easy access in, despite the roads that border it and the rutted one that bisects it. We have to bring in massive amounts of pump machinery, generators, fuel to run them, and lights to work by, shovels, tools to break the chains. Maybe wood to shore up the pit,” he added.
Pits didn’t last long in a swamp. They filled up with mud and debris and water. Hungry vamps tended to go psycho fast, so the rescuers would need some kind of cage to secure the vamp. This was looking like a long process. I studied the sat map, tracing with a finger where Bruiser said the pit was. Mouth full, Alex nodded to show he agreed with the location.
Bruiser said, “The small patch of land centered with the pit had a dozen dead crows on it when I got there.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but if I was a witch, I’d be thinking about omens and such. Demons. Bad stuff. “Okay.”
“This will not be easy, love,” Bruiser said, his nearly forgotten British accent creeping in. “I’ll call when we get the pit drained and the Mithran out. It may take two nights.”
Two nights, because vamps catch on fire in the sunlight, so once they got the wooden doors open, they could work only at night, not by day. In the background I heard the unambiguous whine of a helicopter. Bruiser was being flown out, or the other two Onorios were being heloed in. I leaned in to the satellite map, looking for a landing site near the wildlife sanctuary. The most I saw was a muddy turnaround in the middle of the property where the two-rut dirt and mud road crossed it.
“Leo wants you at the Council Chambers to evaluate our photographs when we get the pit open. I’ll call when we get to within half an hour of opening the site so you don’t have to sit around waiting. Try not to irritate him too much. The possibility of finding Ming of Mearkanis has kept him up all day and put him in a mood. He might hurt you.”
I had a feeling that a mood was a big understatement. “He could try. Maybe a little bloodletting would be good for his soul.” If he had a soul. Thought not spoken. Go, me.
“Send the coordinates and photographs as you get them,” Eli added.
“Of course. Take care of her.” Bruiser ended the call.
Take care of her. I smiled and ate some of the Kid’s broccoli casserole. I was better suited to taking care of myself than Eli was, him being human and therefore easier to damage—usually—but it was sweet. And I was learning to like sweet. The casserole wasn’t bad and I said so. The nineteen-year-old grinned and served himself another portion.
Eli patted his lips delicately and said, “Adding an investigation on top of finishing the security arrangements for the Witch Conclave means our schedule will be full. Leo likes pushing you to the edge, keeping his Enforcer busy.” He didn’t have to add, And this time you’re injured.
“Yeah.” With Bruiser gone I might as well work. Not that I got paid extra for the longer hours. Months ago, I had negotiated a contract with Leo at a flat rate plus the Youngers’ salaries and equipment costs. Of course, that flat rate was fairly hefty. “If we need help, pick out somebody, preferably two of Derek’s people, one with law enforcement and one with crime scene experience, to assist at the pit,” I said. “And it looks like I’ll be able to join you at the Elms, after all.”
“Good,” Eli said.
“You both stink,” Alex said, his tone smug. “Go take showers or I’ll put you on veggies and meat for a week.” Alex had been having hygiene issues, and food was the easiest way to get him to comply. It clearly made him happy to accuse us of the same flaw.
“Showers and change,” Eli said. “We leave in thirty.”
CHAPTER 6
Uncle Sam–Mandated GPS
I closed the Kevlar cover on the cell and carried it into my bedroom to shower, dress, and gather gear. The jeans and T-shirt on the bed had been perfectly suitable for bowling later on tonight but had no place in vamp HQ when trouble was brewing and Leo was in a mood. They also had no business at our first stop.
To visit HQ, I’d rather be wearing leather vamp-fighting gear, the kind with silver chain-mail armor between the outer leather and inner silk lining, and plasticized armor at elbows and groin, but I’d ruined all mine and the replacements hadn’t arrived. Since I started changing into a midshift cat—one with a vaguely humanoid shape and proportions but the hind paws, claws, and pelt of a Puma concolor, the mountain lion form of my Beast—I’d gone through all my fighting leathers and a goodly number of boots. Fighting vamps was expensive, and today’s ruined clothes just added to my financial irritation.
Clean and smelling fresher, my skin again lightly oiled with a gift Bruiser had sent me, a mixture of jojoba and coconut oils, I strapped a vamp-killer on my right thigh, two silver stakes on my left, and slid into loose-fitting black pants, a tight camisole, and a gold-toned, long-sleeved T-shirt. The pants had slash pockets with holes in the bottoms so I could reach the weapons. Of course I couldn’t put the cell or lipstick in them, but there were pluses and minuses for everything in life. The long sleeves of the shirt were so the shoulder holster didn’t chafe my scarred skin. The TV shows and movies that show the female heroine wearing tank tops and shoulder rigs are stupid. Those things would blister a girl’s underarms and side boobs in a heartbeat, even without the injury I sported.
I added my gold nugget necklace on its doubled gold chain around my neck. It was the one that tied me metaphysically to the location where I had changed into my Puma concolor form for the first time in years, after I graduated from the Christian children’s home where I was raised. When I was having trouble shifting, it helped to wear the talisman, linking me back to the past and the power of that first shift.
I checked the .380s, making sure they held standard ammo, since I wasn’t planning to hunt vamps, but I put a box of silver ammo, a change of shoes, and my go bag in my leather satchel.
Sliding into the black jacket was easy, as it had been tailored for me with weapons in mind by Melisende, Modiste du les Mithrans. Or the tailor and designer to fangheads, whichever works. And since I didn’t plan on shifting, even partially, I pulled on socks and the newest pair of Lucchese boots. They had been a gift from the master suckhead and he seemed pleased when I wore them. Maybe wearing them would make him less moody. I had often wondered if vamps had PMS, but I’d managed never to ask.
I plaited my hair in its dull, boring French braid
and wrapped it into a bun, not a fighting queue, which was much more uncomfortable and much tighter, sliding some of the thin hair-stick stakes into it. Three wood and two cast in silver. Just in case I needed to really hurt someone fangy. Silver poisons vamps, especially a heart thrust. Young ones die fast. Older ones die too, just more slowly, unless a powerful master vamp decides to allow the dead to drink their blood. Leo had done that more than once—save a vamp I had killed. It kinda ticked me off.
I left my room and met Eli in the kitchen. He was giving last-minute instructions to the Kid, who was elbows deep in dishwater. That had been the deal. Eli cooked, Alex did the dishes, though the Kid had begun to step up in the chores department, which was helpful. He was growing up. We shared the laundry and the cleaning between visits by the housekeeping services. Mostly I did nothing and Eli and the Kid did everything, including groceries and major repairs on the house. I was a lazy bum in my own home. But it worked for us all, since they got free room and board.
Eli was dressed in fighting leathers. And lots of guns, stakes, and vamp-killers, two with fourteen-inch-long blades, none of which was suitable for the Elms, our first stop. I scanned him head to combat-booted feet and asked, “Why?”
“Not going to HQ unarmed,” he said, his combat face in place. “Besides, one of us gets to look pretty. I guess that’s me.”
I shook my head, smeared on scarlet lipstick, and dropped the tube in my satchel. I could see Eli wanting to say something containing the word purse, but he refrained. Which was wise. I was feeling much stronger.
My cell rang and I opened it, my mouth falling open. My eyes hit Eli’s and he muttered urgently, “Alex. Trace.”
The Kid was getting bigger, but he still moved with the erratic clumsiness of a teenager. He knocked over the condiments on the table trying to dry his arms and open a tablet at the same time. He met my eyes and said, “Go.”
I punched the CALL button above the Darth Vader smiley-face and said, “Reach. What’s kicking?”
At the name, Eli whipped to the switches and plunged the kitchen into dimmer light. Then he started circling the house, checking the doors and windows, and out into the street. The Kid pulled up another tablet and studied the footage from those new top-of-the-line security cameras he had installed outside around the house. It all happened with practiced speed.
“Money Honey,” the caller said. “Didn’t know if you’d take my call.”
It sounded like Reach. And Money Honey was what he called me once upon a time when we had done business together. Before he dropped out of sight after supposedly being tortured by a human and her vampires for the data he had collected on vamps and other supernats over the years. My mouth pulled down in a “Could be him” expression as Eli moved past, silent, predatory.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Are you serious? How am I?”
“Fine. Whaddaya want?”
He said, “They found Ming. Beware.”
If he knew that much, then Reach still had his tentacles in HQ security. Or in my security. The Kid was still trying to close all the back doors into both systems but, like trying to track back to Reach’s location, it was taking time. Alex was tapping on one tablet while another ran the tracer program. I forced out a laugh. “Beware?” I said. “Seriously? Beware? That’s a little, I don’t know, horror movie, puerile, don’t you think?”
“Puerile? And you fault me for Beware? Money Honey, there is nothing so horrifying as reality.” The call ended.
I said something that my house mothers in the Christian children’s home where I grew up would have washed out my mouth for. I said it again for good measure.
“We’re clean,” Eli said, returning from a perimeter search.
Alex said, “Cameras are good. Premises are secure.” He rearranged his tablets and continued. “I caught the call between three cell towers in Chicago. Forty thousand people live in the area. Hundreds of businesses.” He tapped a screen again and repeated my curse word. His brother slapped the back of his head. “What!” Alex said, rubbing his head and pointing at me. “She said it first.”
Eli slapped the back of my head, dislodging a stake, which I caught Beast-fast. I could have dodged the slap, but I had it coming. We had rules in the house, and no cussing was one of them. And I had made that one, which meant I had to abide by it more than the others did.
Still rubbing the back of his head, Alex said, “The number is a cheap burner cell, but it’s one of the newer ones that has GPS, as mandated by Uncle Sam. It’s turned on. It’s moving. I’m tracking it.”
“Uncle Sam–mandated GPS?” I asked, putting the stake back in place and checking the bun for lose hairs.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Well, the government asked for them. Politely. On the hush-hush. Most companies complied. The request came from Homeland Security, so they could trace all the cells of possible terrorists once they identified them. All you need is the number, the proper software, and access to the cell companies through the government’s back doors, and you can activate the GPS.”
“Alex!” Eli barked. Alex had been hacking again, and though his parole was over, all it would take was one mistake to make Homeland Security revoke it. They had the power to do anything.
“I’m safe. No worries, my brother,” he added in the New Orleans patois.
“Reach would know that,” I said, “so he’s using one just so we can track him?”
“Messing with us. Chances are he tossed it into a passing bus.”
“But you know he’s in Chicago?”
“With a ninety percent certainty,” Alex said, “partially based on the idea that he wants you to find him. As soon as I know more, I’ll be checking nearby security cameras for footage of him.”
Reach might want me to find him? Huh. “Keep us in the loop.”
Eli and I left via the front door, which he had recently repaired, using a false stained glass window to keep it from breaking every time someone tried to kill us. Which happened with depressing regularity. My partner beeped open the armored SUV provided for us by Leo for as long as I worked for him and we found our way into the traffic. New Orleans traffic was always bad, but this time of day it was usually stalled in a bumper-to-bumper crush in the French Quarter. Heck. Everywhere. According to the traffic updates on the SUV’s computer screen, today it was less dreadful than usual, and we made it to the site of the upcoming Witch Conclave in good time, two hours before night fell.
The witches had rented out the Elms Mansion and Garden at St. Charles Avenue and Eighth Street for the weekend for the Witch Conclave. The house was a two-story home with period décor and filled with period pieces, from marble fireplaces, delicate antique parquet flooring, swags and draperies and tassels and vases and rugs and silver and priceless antique wooden furniture. It was elegant and a little froufrou, appropriate for a conclave that would house some two hundred witches and some of their human partners and spouses for a daylong meeting, most of the witches female. If a dictionary or the tourist department needed a photo to illustrate the phrase New Orleans mansion, the Elms would have been perfect.
The biggest part of the security measures would be handled by the witches themselves, with wards, once they were all in place. Yellowrock Securities had been hired to oversee the off-site things, like parking and transportation, as well as the security of the house and grounds until the wards went up. The logistics of our part was beginning to look like a nightmare, which matched the nightmare of the second area of our responsibility. Or my responsibility. The part where I was responsible for Leo’s safety. As Enforcer, I held the well-being of his undead un-life in my hands. He’d be there to meet and greet, to give a speech, and to share a meal with the witches, probably to indicate to them that vamps were something more than fanged and taloned killing machines with a special hatred for witches. I wondered if they would fall for it. And if they would all sign papers
swearing fealty to one another. That swearing was important to the future safety of the entire city when the Euro Vamps came. There was a lot riding on this conclave.
Which was why today’s meeting was so important. In every respect, the mundane security measures suggested by YS had been turned down. The house’s owners had nixed the installation of cameras for fear we would ruin the hand-carved wood and plaster-of-Paris moldings. The double front doors were stained glass. Real stained glass, perfect for breaking with a grenade or a rocket launcher or a well-placed fist if the wards went down, and they had refused when we offered to replace the doors with five-inch-thick steel. Too trashy by far for the Elms.
A four-story building overlooked one side, with plenty of vantage sites for sharpshooters. The mansion’s windows were not bullet-resistant polycarbonate glass and the owners had refused to allow us to replace the window glass in the room where Leo would be delivering his speech—the Grand Ballroom, with its white Italian sandstone fireplace, European tile, Doric columns, Irish linen wall hangings, and, of course, the grand piano. And lots of windows. Traffic was permitted on every street around Elms Mansion, and the powers that be in NOLA had refused to shut down the side streets even if it meant better safety for the citizens. Stupid city ordinances. All it would take was one inciting incident and this would FUBAR all the way, dead citizens and a witch/vamp war.
We parked on a side street and knocked politely on the front door for our official visit. The previous discussions and tour had been all online, so the meet and greet and real-time walk-through were essential. The woman who answered was tall, middle-aged, graceful, and elegant. Instantly I felt like a knobby-kneed teenaged girl with broccoli in her teeth. Oh, crap. I had forgotten to brush my teeth. I kept my lips tight against them as I said, “Jane Yellowrock and my partner at Yellowrock Securities, Eli Younger, ma’am.” Eli handed her one of our business cards, gave a little half bow, which was a real classy maneuver. I’d never have thought of it.