by Faith Hunter
The console—Boeing’s Visual Security Operations Console Sentential, or VSOC, the same sort of system designed for U.S. embassies around the world, but scaled down for private use—was also brand-spanking-new. The system had been installed at Leo’s expense, integrating the existing cameras into new software and new sensors that gave a 3-D view of the grounds, the public rooms of Katie’s Ladies, and, when the girls were working in-house, additional monitoring of their bedrooms. It was a way of keeping them safe, and they didn’t seem to mind.
To me it was pretty icky, and since I knew that Leo was monitoring the security systems of most of the vamp clans, clandestinely and in contravention of the Vampira Carta, and would have access to the downloads, it got doubly icky. Free porn for him. Total lack of privacy for the girls. But I hadn’t said anything about that. It was something I wanted to have in reserve for later. Troll punched a button and I could hear him throughout the intercom system, “Girls, meet in the dining room, please.” With another click he said, “Deon, the girls will need drinks set out, and some of those fruit cups.”
“Cocktails and fruit coming, Tom.” Deon was the new cook. No one would tell me what had happened to Ms. A, the former cook who had been attacked by the liver-eater, as Beast referred to the skinwalker I’d killed. Except to say she wasn’t dead, which was a comfort of some sort. Deon was new, a three-star chef from the islands, who had been offered Ms. A’s position. The very newness of him set my teeth on edge at the moment. I didn’t know Deon, and when something goes wrong with a security system and there’s a new guy around, he becomes a likely suspect for tampering.
“How much of the system was activated?”
“All the outside cameras, public rooms, and hallways. Here, at four fourteen, we have a shot of Bliss leaving the dining room. Twenty seconds later, she enters her bedroom and closes her door. Then nothing until the interference, which isn’t supposed to be possible with this system.”
“It isn’t possible,” I agreed, “for humans. Maybe a witch could interfere with it; I don’t know. Play it again, and slow it down for the last two minutes before the interference.” I followed the sequences one frame at a time and saw nothing unusual. No burst of magic caught on film. And I knew that magic could be seen on film at times, especially digital film, as a scatter of light particles scarring the image. I pin-pointed where each girl was and where Troll was, at the time all the screens went to snow. “Let me see the kitchen.”
On the monitor, I watched Deon, who was slight of form, about five-seven, and gayer than a nineteen fifties chorus-line dancer, as he washed his hands before tackling sushi. Deon had promised me a sushi-making lesson one Sunday afternoon. Beast liked sushi too; it was one raw meat we could both enjoy. But if Deon had done something to Bliss, I’d make him pay. Deon spent ten minutes slicing veggies and raw salmon before looking up, puzzled. And the interference hit. Troll grunted, seeing the perplexed expression on Deon’s face. The new guy had seen or heard something.
“Total time the system was blanked was two minutes and forty seconds.” Troll hit the RESET button. “Long enough for Bliss to get out or someone to take her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Bring it back up and let me see where everyone is after the interference.” No one had moved except Deon, who was looking out the back window of the dining room, heavy drapery pushed free, a sushi knife in his hand, and Troll, who had been working on accounts in Katie’s office before the interference and was standing in front of the console afterward. “She didn’t go out the front door. And if she went out the back door, I’d have . . .” I stopped. I’d have smelled her. Right. “Deon might have seen her.”
“I got a bad feeling about this,” Troll rumbled. “Some-thin’s wrong.”
I checked Bliss’s room, which was decorated in ice blues and grays. There was nothing broken, no evidence of a struggle, and her purse was on a hook in the closet, containing her ID, credit cards, and a wad of cash. I was pretty sure she hadn’t left without it, not willingly.
Her room overlooked a service alley below. I checked to see if the window would open easily, and it did. There was a shed roof below. Though it was twelve feet down and looked pretty flimsy, she could have sneaked out of the house by the window. But that just didn’t feel right. A gust of air blew up, carrying a blood scent. I had smelled Bliss’s blood not long ago, and this wasn’t hers. Someone else had bled outside, where there were also a few indications of residual magic. Nothing important.
I spent another twenty minutes talking to the girls while they drank early cocktails, and to Deon, who was the only one who’d heard anything, though from the side of the house, not the rear. When I asked him why he had looked out the back, he’d lifted his chin. “There be no windows to the side of the house. But good ears, I got, and I heard a thump from there.”
“Okay. Thanks, Deon,” Troll said as the doorbell rang. “That helps.” Deon gave a little wrist flick and carried his unappreciated fruit cups back to the kitchen. Indigo jumped up and raced upstairs. The blonde was taking Bliss’s early customer.
“I’ll look around outside,” I said, my curiosity growing. I left by the back door and flip-flopped around to the side of Katie’s Ladies, to the narrow, unadorned utility area. It was getting darker now, the sky a deeper blue with golden clouds on the western horizon. I paused to get my bearings, and thought I heard a sound, a brief note of . . . something. But it was gone too fast, was unimportant.
In New Orleans, every square inch of possible garden space is heavily planted, with miniature gardens springing up in places homeowners and business owners in other locales would have ignored or overlooked, so the barrenness of the place was a surprise. It was no more than five feet wide, with no entrance from the street in front. The small overhang I’d seen from above was made of plywood, brittle and warped with age, and protected a push mower and gardening supplies. There was no indication that anyone had jumped from the window to the shed roof. I didn’t need to check it. I could go away.
I stopped midturn. Paced back, slowly. The compulsion hit me again. Go away. Nothing to see, nothing to smell, nothing here. The space had been spelled, and I hadn’t noticed when I was here earlier.
Resisting the compulsion, I eased down the alley, breathing in a strong, unfamiliar witchy scent, a trace of Bliss, and the tang of blood. Someone had been casting in the narrow alley. And she had bled here. I looked around and spotted a thin spray of blood up the wall. A bit more was splattered on the ground, as if the wounds had been quickly stanched. I knelt down to get closer to the scent markers on the ground. My nose was an inch from the dirt when I heard the scream, long and broken.
“Jaaaaaaane!”
A door thumped. From my house. It was Molly.
CHAPTER 14
They should all be staked
My heart stuttered painfully as Beast poured power into my bloodstream. The dusky dimness grew brighter, as if a flash had gone off inside my head, as she bled into my vision. A growl erupted from my throat. I whirled, raced toward my house.
Beast-fast, I crossed the yard and leaped, catching the top of the brick fence with one hand and levering myself up and over, the flip-flops lost in the dash. As I was vaulting the fence, I saw a ladder leaning against the brick. It hadn’t been there before. I snarled.
And took in a whiff of vamp. And of witches. The trails overlaid one another in a twisting spiral from Katie’s Ladies to here. Instantly I understood the trap that had sprung. They had taken Bliss, then waited in the alley, hidden under a spell that had subtly encouraged me not to check around the entire house. When I went inside Katie’s, they had simply climbed the fence and come here. Then they’d attacked.
I dropped into a defensive crouch inside the walled garden. There was no siren scream of anything trying to get through the wards. Had Molly not activated the perimeter ward? Had she forgotten after I left the house? I hadn’t waited to see that she was safe.
The smell of blood hit me, rich and fresh. Molly’s.
I/we screamed.
I raced across the porch. A blaze of magics prickled across my skin. The wards are still in place. But they smelled burned, ragged. Someone had blasted a hole through them at the kitchen door. The edges fluttered, singeing the air with the smell of scorched earth and ozone.
Inside, the smell of blood was stronger. Bloody prints tracked across the floor. Beast-fast, I followed them. Molly lay in a spreading pool of blood at the foot of the stairs. Bleeding from everywhere. Her eyes wide with shock, her lips mouthing words. “My babies. He took my babies.”
I wasn’t sure what I did next. I know I called 911. I remember a fast vision of my hands grabbing clean towels from the folded clothes. Tying them over the wounds on her torso with clean sheets. I remember fighting to shift, Beast thrumming through me. I remember tears dripping from my nose and cheeks. I remember shouting to the 911 operator that Molly was hurt bad and the children had been kidnapped.
I remember the paramedics set off the ward at the front door. And I sent them to the side, the ward wailing. And I remember, so clearly, holding Molly’s blood-slick hand in mine when she fought the paramedics who were trying to help her. And the fear on their faces when they looked into mine.
I remember knowing Mol was going to die. Knowing it. Smelling death. Screaming with grief and fear. Calling Leo’s. Demanding help. Begging. But Leo wasn’t home. I remember Bruiser promising to bring Bethany to the hospital. The hesitant sound in his voice; he knew he shouldn’t be helping.
I remember grabbing the photos just taken of Molly and the kids. For the cops. For the AMBER Alert. Rushing with police officers into the street to follow the trail of the witches and the vamps who had invaded my home. Who had stolen the kits. The trail ended in a fading cloud of diesel and a booby-trap spell that sent me tumbling. Sitting up in the street, my palms bleeding from the fall. Jumping into the back of the ambulance.
But it was all mixed up in my head, like dozens of overlapping sound bites, like being in a foreign land, the language all jumbled, the sights alien. I couldn’t save Molly, my only friend. I didn’t know where her children were. Bliss was gone. I was crying and useless. Useless. While Beast screamed and clawed at my mind, trying to force the change on me.
Tulane University Hospital was the only one in New Orleans that kept paranormal medical experts on salary, medicos who dealt with the needs of the supernats and their injuries. Molly was unloaded and carted into the TUH Emergency Department. I claimed to be her sister, so they let me in back, but I had to leave her to sign papers and talk to the cops. Two uniformed cops and a plainclothes guy whose name badge read A. Ferguson.
Ferguson wanted to question me, the kinds of questions cops saved for suspects. I was covered in blood, so I understood the officers being wary, but there wasn’t time to waste. And Beast was too close to the surface for me to find words for them.
I called Big Evan in Brazil, left him a voice mail. Then Molly’s big sister in Asheville. I managed to call Rick. And Jodi Richoux. And Troll.
I coped enough to get my story out to the cops between calls, and Rick talked to one of them while I answered the doctor’s questions and talked to a surgeon who was also an earth witch. I held it together by a thread, juggling answers, questions, information. Right up until Bruiser and Bethany waltzed into the ED.
Everything stopped at that moment. The constant incredible din of the place. The continuous movement. The ever-present sense of urgency. It all stopped. Everyone stood in place, pivoted to get a better look, and stared. Suddenly I could take a breath. A sense of icy expectancy flowed over me, her shaman essence, her healing. My skin tightened into taut peaks by the power that wafted around the vamp, power that smelled of ozone and earth, a lightning storm in the jungle. Beast settled onto her haunches, quiet.
Bruiser stood in the entrance, the glass doors to the ambulance ramp open behind him, Bethany’s hand in the crook of his arm. Bruiser was wearing jeans and an open-neck shirt. Bethany was wearing a full-skirted crimson tribal outfit, her head swathed in an orange turban, an orange shawl over one shoulder. Gold hoops dangled from her ears and a necklace of heavy gold links circled her neck. Her feet were bare. And she was fully vamped out.
The young cop beside me pulled his weapon, but before he could raise it to fire, his partner put out a restraining hand and looked at me. He was human, about five-ten, late forties, a sergeant by his stripes. His partner looked young, still wet behind the ears. And the plainclothes guy, Ferguson, was mid-fifties. Experienced. Canny. He looked from Bethany to me and put things together as his eyes darkened.
“The victim. She’s a witch, isn’t she?” the detective said. I nodded and Ferguson’s mouth curled into a faint sneer. The scent of fear and hatred started to ooze from his pores. He was a closet witch hater. Maybe not so much closet. His voice dropped lower. “And you didn’t think it important to tell us all that? Wasting our time with witch shit?”
“Children aren’t shit,” I growled. He took a step back. The younger cop struggled with his partner to draw his gun, eyes switching from Bethany in the doorway, to the closer threat, me. I curled my hands into fists to keep from clawing out. “You telling me that you wouldn’t have issued an AMBER Alert for two kidnapped children if their mother was a witch? That you’d take a chance on waiting?”
“Witch politics,” Ferguson spat. “Their kids aren’t the concern of normal humans. And that?” He jutted his chin at Bethany, still in the doorway. “They should all be staked.”
In an eyeblink Bethany had crossed the floor and taken the detective into an embrace. It looked like a lover’s touch, carnal, possessive, one hand at his back, the other holding his head. Her fangs braced at his throat. He struggled for a single heartbeat and went still. I shivered in the cold, dry hospital air, sweat chilling on my skin. I had never seen a human forced under by a vamp. They could mesmerize, but not without eye contact. Not without time to establish control. This was fast. And freaky. And illegal. And deadly.
Bethany licked along Ferguson’s throat, her tongue moving between her spiked canines. She breathed in his scent and closed her eyes in what looked like sexual ecstasy. The detective groaned in her arms, aroused, stoned to the gills. He sighed happily and slid an arm around his captor, nuzzling close.
As if she couldn’t hear him, the young cop hissed, “We got to stop her, Sarge. She’s gonna kill him.”
I spared the older cop a glance. “Probably not. But if you can’t control your partner, he might end up dead.” I heard a brief struggle as I turned back to Bethany.
She smelled the detective the way Beast smelled a fresh kill, short snuffling sniffs and long drafts of air. She moaned softly, and the sound raised the hairs on the back of my neck. George moved slowly toward her, adjusting his angle so she would see his approach while he was several feet away. “Bethy, love. He’s not a danger to you. He isn’t food.”
“It would let children be stolen,” she said, her breath on the neck of her prey. “It would let them die, like my babies died.” She lifted her head to Ferguson’s eyes. “Speak the truth, human creature. You have let missing children go without searching for them, yes? You would let these children die?”
He sighed and smiled, stoned on vamp power. “Witch kids. Not human.”
Bethany said, “Some would call me witch and cursed. You would let my children die?”
“Let ’em die. Ain’t natural.” He giggled softly. “Stake you. Gut you. Cut off your head.”
Bethany smiled, then looked at the cop in her arms, her eyes claiming his will. He shuddered along the length of his body as if she shook him. “You will no longer desire to stake the cursed. You will love us. Desire us. You will work to help and to find all children. Speak to this, human.”
His eyelids fluttered. “Wiiii. . . . Will help. . . .” He licked his lips. “Always.” His hands rose and he stroked her face. “Please? Now . . . ? Please.”
“Good.” Bethany patted his face. “This is good.” She struck, her fangs s
licing into his carotid so fast I didn’t see them penetrate. Her lips formed a seal, the suction of her mouth hard. A single drop of blood teared at the corner of her lips. Five long seconds later, she released him and Ferguson slid to the floor, his neck wounds closed and only a smear of blood to show where he had been a meal. “The human will live. It will allow no more children to die.”
“Shit. Shitshitshitshit,” the younger cop said. “Sarge—?”
“Shut up, Micky. Shut up and go to the unit. Don’t do anything. Just sit there.”
Bethany looked at me and cocked her head. “I was brought here to help a witch. I smell her. She is dying.”
The older uniformed cop opened a door and Bethany flowed inside, closing the door behind her. The sergeant pursed his lips, not sure what to do next. He toed the detective on the floor. Ferguson didn’t stir. The cop grinned and it was a nasty sight, as if he thought Ferguson had gotten what he deserved.
I touched his arm. “Thank you. And I’m sorry about not telling you she was a witch, but if I had, some cops might have held off, might have buried the report for a few crucial, critical seconds. So I kept it to myself.”
“Not all of us are sons a’ bitches,” he said. “My only beef is having to write this report.” His radio crackled and he listened to some code words and numbers and flipped open his cell. “ ’Scuse me.” He wandered off. An EMT and a nurse dropped a folding gurney to the floor and picked up Ferguson, depositing him without much care or gentleness. They rolled him aside and left him there. The EMT flicked the cop’s nose as he walked away. It seemed that his confession had been heard and not everyone agreed with his politics or his prejudice.
“You’re barefooted. I’m accustomed to that from Bethany, but not from you.”