Blood Cross: A Jane Yellowrock Novel

by Faith Hunter

  Amy filled him in, leaning across the counter, chatting with the rich customer. “It’s, like, two hundred years old, with walls three feet thick. The woman who owns it is one of the old vampires, kinda creepy, you know, like real old? Not humanlike at all. She uses the back half, all three stories, the lower one for storage for her businesses, and the top two floors for living. If you call her living.”

  “I’ve seen vamps, but not an old one. What’s she like?”

  The back of the building sported a windowless lower story and wide, arched windows on the two top floors. I hadn’t consciously noted it but they’d been heavily draped. Cars could be pulled into the lower level through the garage-style door using an automatic opener or the keypad. Perfect vamp lair.

  “Short. Pretty, in a pale-as-death way. But not real human-normal.” Amy took up a strand of shoulder-length hair and twirled it around and around her fingers as she thought. “One night she shows up here, asks me if I’m interested in being a blood meal for a friend of hers. She’d pay me, like she was a pimp or something. I was so not into that. I told her no, thank you. And she stands there, unmoving, not breathing, for over two hours. I had customers and we had to work around her, like she was a statue or something. It was freaky, you know? And then I looked up and she was gone. When I checked the security cameras, she just disappeared. Like she teleported out something, except the door opened real fast and closed.”

  “How did she get in and out? Is there a door from her part of the warehouse to here? Or to one of the other stores?”

  “No way. She’s real into security. She’d freak if we had a way to her side. Daddy thinks she bribed a fire marshal to keep the sections separate against local fire regulations.”

  While the two decided on a time to hook up for the evening, dinner and maybe more, I said, “Derek, this looks promising.” More than promising. By the scents, I knew this was it. Had to be. Tension shot through me. “How do you want to do this?”

  “I copy. You wait here till my boys say they’re ready. We got monkey stuff.”

  “Monkey see, monkey do?”

  “No. If you see no evil and hear no evil, you can’t rat anyone out. No offense.”

  I smiled. “None taken. Security cameras?”

  “Will go out exactly thirty seconds before the doors blow. On my mark, start around back. When you hear the blow, move fast.”

  “Got that.”

  “Copy, Injun Princess. The word is copy.”

  I just grinned and waited. All along the street, true night fell. New Orleans is at its best at night, balmy air like a caress, smells of the river and cooking foods, people walking leisurely, languid after a hot day at the office. I felt rising tension, mixed excitement and fear, knowing I could be on the verge of getting back Molly’s kids. I checked the foot traffic. “Derek? What about foot traffic?”

  “We’re okay out back. On my mark, and thirty, twenty-nine . . .”

  I started Bitsa and motored with the countdown as I followed the lethargic after-work crowd. I was at the back parking area when a muffled boom took me by surprise. And took out all the lights in the block. “Go, go, go, go, go!” Derek shouted into my headset. Adrenaline shot through me. Beast reared up high in my mind, claws piercing. I gunned Bitsa and raced through the human-sized door, now hanging by one hinge, just behind a man carrying a shotgun and a sword, a black satchel over his back. Derek? Maybe.

  I abandoned the bike just inside. Pulled the Benelli and opened out the folding stock. The smell of vamp was overpowering. Rousseaus. Lots of them. The point man moved through the darkened building, checking everything out with his goggles, giving report as he moved. By the commentary, he was twenty feet in front of Derek.

  “Hallway, clear. Left, clear. Right, clear. Stairway”—a door banged open and a cool shaft of air fell into the hallway—“clear on this level. No bogeys noted above. No way down.”

  Left meant a room to the left. Right was a room to the right. There was no downstairs. I understood. Over the headset came “Garage clear. Two vehicles. Both cool to the touch. Garage exterior door, one interior door for entry. Locked. Steel reinforced. Hinges on inside. Camera down.”

  From outside came the words “Fire escape clear. No doors or windows opening. No movement.”

  “Hallway door, no window,” the man in front of Derek said. “Locked, reinforced, hinges inside.”

  “I got it,” Derek said. He knelt in front of me. I didn’t watch what he did, but covered us from behind. Just in case one of the rooms had a doorway we hadn’t seen. Or a concealed exit. Or a hungry vamp sleeping under a table.

  “Back.” Derek and the point man backed up and we each entered a room, Derek with me. “Five, four”—I covered my ears to protect them from the explosion—“three, t—” The explosion took out his words. Dust blew into the hallway, along with the smell of rotten meat and old blood. It was a charnel house effluvia. Derek cursed.

  The point man disappeared inside the dark opening. We’d been in about forty seconds, according to my time sense. I was expecting human servants. Armed. So far, nothing.

  “No live ones,” the point man said. “All dead. Lights.” Derek and I rushed inside as the point man pulled off his goggles and knelt, weapon up and ready to fire. The lights flickered once and came on. The sudden illumination sent a shock of tingles through me. Followed by a shock of another sort.

  The windowless room was fifty by forty, give or take, with a fifteen-foot-tall ceiling. The walls were painted a soft coral, oriental rugs were piled deep, and leather furniture, tables, lamps were scattered in small groups, as if someone had wanted the place kept appealing. Except for the far corner where the floor was concrete with a drain in its gently sloped center. Along the walls in that corner were cots made of blackened steel and chained to the cots were vamps. No humans, no witches. I counted quickly. Nine vamps on ten cots. The tenth cot was covered by rumpled, stained sheets.

  “We got cameras,” someone said as we entered.

  At the sudden appearance of humans—of bloody meat, to the vamps—they all vamped out, screaming and wailing and fighting the restraints. Steel cut into wrists and ankles, and the smell of fresh vamp blood mixed with the reek of old, decaying vamp blood. The empty cot bothered me. A lot.

  I scanned back and forth, the Benelli at ready. Behind me, the point man was letting in the others from the garage entrance. They raced to take out the inside cameras and I heard the shhhhft of spray cans, the chemical smell adding to the reek in the room. “We got nine vamps restrained. One missing. Seal exits,” Derek said, reading my mind. The door to the garage shut firmly.

  “I got the door,” Point Man said, heading back to the door we had come through.

  That left us with four shooters inside. I moved across the room to the concrete-floored area. It was about ten-by-ten with a showerhead hanging over the drain; a lever and a handheld sprayer on a long tube hung nearby. Soap and clean cloths were in a basket, and liquid bath soap and industrial cleaners stood on a narrow, wheeled table. Above it were butcher tools, the blades looking well used and well cared for, sharp. The narrow table was clean but blood lined the cracks. I bent and sniffed. A lot of blood. For a long time. From a lot of humans and not a few vamps. Under the table was a zippered body bag, and it wasn’t empty.

  Trepidation climbed up my spine on cold gluey feet. I swung the Benelli out of the way and knelt. My fingers were quivering as I opened the zipper. A vamp face appeared. Not Angelina. Not Little Evan. Not stuffed together into the body bag. The vamp’s head was separated from the body. True-dead. And he’d begun to stink. Like, really stink. He’d been dead long enough for his skin to be slippery and oozing. I rezipped the bag. Sniffed again. There was no scent of the kits. No scent of Bliss. They weren’t here and hadn’t been here. But maybe upstairs?

  I stood and repositioned the shotgun as I walked between the cots. There were little racks above each bed holding what looked like medical charts with ID and medical details on eac
h, which included date of birth. I stopped at the two teenagers, a boy and girl on thick foam mattresses, Adora and Donatien Damours, brother and sister. The family resemblance was evident even beneath the vamped-out teeth and eyes. Both wore clean hospital gowns and bowties, both had been showered and their blond hair washed. Both had long faces, with firm chins, high foreheads. Both were hungry. Gaunt. Starving. I looked around. They all were starving. The girl was trying to lick her own wrist where she was bleeding, but her shackles kept her too far away. She was mewling with need. I checked the other ID cards.

  Sick things. Kill them, Beast murmured as I read.

  I agreed, but there were reasons not to, important reasons, primarily Angelina and Little Evan. Besides, killing the long-chained wasn’t covered by my current contract, which made this a job for the council. “No Tristan Damours,” I said. “So maybe the rumors are right and he found sanity. Or maybe that’s him in the body bag.”

  “Company,” a voice said in my headset. Over the speaker I heard the sound of feet clattering on stairs. Someone was coming down the inside stairs. “Heat signature is human. Two of them. Wait, one. There’s a vamp with them.” They weren’t trying for stealth either. I could hear them without the headset.

  “Another on the fire escape,” a second voice said. “Moves like human.”

  “Let’s have a chat with our hosts,” Derek said.

  The men quick-stepped toward the stairwell but positioned themselves outside. One man threw something. I closed my eyes and covered my ears just in time. The explosion shattered through my hands, against my eardrums. The flash-bang took out the humans descending the stairs. I had no idea what effect it might have on a vamp except to make him mad.

  Derek and his boys raced into the confined space and brought down three forms. The humans were on the floor, incapacitated by the noise, but the vamp was fine, if by fine that meant really vampy and ticked. But he wasn’t fighting, which was odd. Derek’s men shackled them all, the humans in steel, the vamp in silver. I stepped into the stairwell.

  The vamp hadn’t fought because he had been snared with a silver mesh net formed of tiny interlocking crosses; his face and hands were burned and blistered. Derek had thrown the net, bringing down the vamp with no fight at all. I fingered the glowing mesh. “Now, this is cool. I got to get me one of these.”

  “I’ll send you to my supplier later,” Derek said. “Silent alarm went out three minutes ago. We probably got another three minutes before the cavalry shows up. Either make him true-dead or talk fast. The silver mesh will make him uncomfortable enough to maybe chat a bit.”

  “Good.” I toed the vamp. He wasn’t pretty, a recent, partially healed scar marking the left side of his face diagonally from outer brow, alongside his nose, across both lips, to the right side of his chin. He looked tough, a warrior, given vampire life for some great sacrifice, maybe. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen. And I had seen him at the vamp party at the Old Nunnery. “Where are the witches?”

  He spat at me. Before the spit fell, Derek landed a kick in the vamp’s side. He oofed with pain. I knelt beside him so he could smell my scent. And I pulled a vamp-killer, my favorite knife, eighteen-inch blade with a hand-carved, elk-horn handle, a gift from Molly’s husband. His eyes widened and he met mine, pulling a vamp glamour. “Release me.” The words reverberated through me, aching with need. Beast put a paw on my mind, and pressed down, giving me control I lacked on my own. I took a breath, feeling the sticky command dissolve. He tried again. “Release me and I will give you all that you desire.” English wasn’t his first language, his accent vaguely Italian.

  Derek shook his head. “We’re Leo’s. We got protection from vamp mind control.”

  “Tell you what, bubba,” I said, “you tell me where the Damours are, and maybe I’ll let you live.”

  His eyes bled back to half-human, the whites less bloody, the pupils less black and wide. I was pretty sure his irises would be brown when he wasn’t vamped out. “You do not fall to me?”

  “She’s the Rogue Hunter,” Derek said. “She don’t fall to nobody.” He was staring at the far wall, gun at the ready, not letting his eyes meet the vamp’s, a weird look on his face.

  “I have heard of this one. You follow her? A woman? She is not even human.”

  “She’s more human than you. Now answer the nice lady or she’ll blind you. I know you can heal from it, but it’ll be painful. And time-consuming.”

  More human than you? Nice lady? And he didn’t react when the vamp told him I wasn’t human. . . . Great. Can’t a girl keep a secret or two?

  “What are you? You do not smell of witch, like my mistress and masters.”

  I was right. Renee, her brother/hubby, and currently unnamed other brother were witches/vamps, no longer members of the long-chained, and no one knew how long the adults had been sane. They were witches who practiced dark magic, yet who had survived the purge. And they were killing witch children in spells. More and more, it all made sense.

  I pivoted on a heel and went back to the long-chained ones. I sniffed, mouth open, along the bodies of the Damours’ three-hundred-year-old teenagers. They fought and growled, tearing at their shackles as I did so, fought to get to me, to the blood in my veins. I caught a whiff, buried under the scent of vamp. Both children carried the witch gene.

  CHAPTER 20

  Thief-of-kits. Die.

  Ignoring the men and vamp on the stairway landing, I raced up the stairs and into the apartment. I disabled a man with a knife, a chef by the smell of his clothes, bonked him on the head with the pommel of my vamp-killer, and left him unconscious at the entry. The apartment was opulent in red and white, lots of white marble, white-painted wood, lots of red fabric. The color of blood seemed to appeal to vamps as a decorating scheme. Go figure. I breathed the place in, scenting. It reeked of human blood donors, multiple vamps, pain, and sex. I raced from room to room, some with beds, some without, one with a complicated rack hanging from the ceiling, chains and tools of a bloody trade organized on shelves. There was a drain here too. There was no indication in the apartment’s scents that the kits or Bliss had ever been here. I abandoned it for the third floor.

  This was a private place, one huge room, divided into sections by furniture groupings. The place reeked of the Damours, their scent patterns overlapping and intermingled. I knew what they wanted now, I knew what they were trying to do, and the knowledge made the stink stronger, darker, permeated with evil, though surely that was only my imagination.

  A large dining area was to my right with a table to seat twelve; a larger living space was ahead, with lots of leather. Two sleeping areas were just beyond, each with king-sized beds made up with fur. Lots of real fur. Vamps liked lounging on dead things. By the smell, this was a major lair of the Damours. I made sure the huge apartment was empty, finding a small but ornate bathroom tucked away in a nook, but no other individual rooms. Again the decor involved a lot of marble—floors, walls, pillars holding up the roof—but the color scheme was black and red, with black marble and deep scarlet fabrics. I stopped and turned, scenting with mouth open. Something was wrong. Something was missing.

  No humans, Beast murmured. No human blood. They do not feed here.

  “Or they don’t feed on human blood here.” My body tightened, hard and sharp.

  I walked to the beds and lifted a pillow to me. Bliss’s scent wafted out. Bliss and sex. The Damours were feeding off witches. Fury-fear spiraled up in me, flaming and icy, electric. Angelina? I climbed across the bed, mouth open, dragging in air over tongue and nose with a scagghing sound. Relief shuddered through me. Angie hadn’t been savaged here. But what I did smell brought me up short.

  The vamp on the landing below had been in the beds of the Damours, recently. So had other vamps, including Bettina, Rousseau Clan master. I lifted a pillow and breathed in her scent, the stink of her sweat. It was laced with fear. She had not been here willingly. She had wanted to escape them. I should have gone to visit
when she asked.

  “Princess?”

  I twisted on one knee and saw Derek at the door.

  “We’re ready to take the heads of the rogues on the cots.”

  “Belay that. Until we find the kids, these particular rogue vamps get a pass. If we kill them, then there’s no reason to keep Angelina and Little Evan alive.”

  He nodded his head, but it was resigned. “Fine. We can use them as bait.” He looked at his watch. “Time.” He meant time to go.

  “One more minute,” I bargained.

  “Baldy just disabled one of my men and took off. Sixty seconds and me and my men are outta here.”

  Discarding any pretense of human speed, I raced from the bed and slammed open the armoires on the back wall, the doors rocking and banging as I passed. They faced the windows, all of them dark wood, carved with curlicues and flowers and leaves, dragons and gargoyles, faces out of legend and nightmare. Vamp scent roiled out of each until the next to last. And from it witch scent rose, fresh and potent and powerful.

  I paused, hands clenching on my weapons. “They were here. The children.” There was a mattress on the floor of the armoire, sheets and a blanket, small shackles on long chains. And a doll. A black-haired doll with yellow eyes, like mine. Ka Nvsita. The doll I gave to Angie.

  Icy fear sliced through me. Tears stung my eyes. I sheathed the shotgun and picked up the doll. The scent of Angie’s fear and the salt of her tears were ripe in the doll’s clothes. But there was no scent of blood. I thanked God for small favors as I closed the door and secured the doll inside my leather jacket. “They were here only moments ago. How did they get by us?”

  I looked at the last two armoires. Maybe . . . ? The next held paintings, stacked in tightly. I yanked one out and saw a witch circle and pentagram. And vampires. And children. And lots of blood. “Derek? Get a couple of men up here and take these”—I nodded to the paintings—“as many as you can.” He started to refuse but I passed him the painting. His mouth twisted down, hard, and he spoke into his headset.