by Jenna Ryan
She saw him look back down the road. “Would it help if I told you the caretaker’s name isn’t Jack?”
“Maybe. A little.” She sighed and met him halfway. “It would help more if you’d tell me why you think here is safe. This Hummer,” she patted the vehicle beside them, “didn’t exactly break any land speed records getting us to this place. We both know we could have been followed. And you did say if Traynor got us in his sights, we’d be dead.”
“Yeah, I said that.” Reaching inside the Hummer, Tanner killed the headlights and removed their gear. “But if you’ll recall, I also mentioned that Traynor wasn’t the only person who learned his stuff on Hobby’s watch.” He slammed the door, pocketed the keys. “You need to factor in the setting, Rosemary.”
“Meaning you know the swamp better than he does?”
Tanner’s dark eyes gleamed as he took her arm. “The swamp, and everything that goes with it.”
* * *
Tanner seriously doubted Rosemary would see Papa Lucien DuCayne as any kind of caretaker, even one who watched over an abandoned hotel. At eighty-two, Lucien had the use of his right arm and the hand of his left. He rolled around in a wheelchair, and he hadn’t spoken a word aloud since suffering a stroke five years ago.
Until then, he’d been a longtime guest-resident at the Marie. Tanner figured the owners had been too afraid of him to suggest he move out after they closed the place down. Their solution? Let him stay and scare any would-be vandals or squatters away until their financial situation improved.
“Definitely the Overlook Hotel, Deep South,” Rosemary said as they wandered through the deserted lobby.
Cobwebs hung like dusty threads from the high ceiling, and what furniture had been left behind was draped in white sheets. Tanner doubted it eased her mind much to see portraits of voodoo queens past adorning the heavily papered walls.
Even under bad lighting, Rosemary spotted one particular portrait and huffed out a laugh. “Of course she’d be here. Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans. Thus the name of the hotel.” When something, presumably the old elevator, made an echoing clunk and began to hum, she stepped back into him. “I’m not feeling especially safe right now, Tanner.”
“You will,” he said. Although maybe not for a while.
The feeble lights bobbled as the elevator ground to a halt. The old-fashioned cage door clattered open, and Papa Lucien’s wheelchair rolled out.
He spotted Rosemary instantly and used the motorized controls to wheel straight toward her.
“He can’t talk, or walk, but his mind’s perfectly sharp.” Tanner nudged her forward. “Don’t be shy. Lucien isn’t.” He raised his voice. “Papa L, this is Rosemary Sayer. Madeleine Lessard knew her great-grandmother.”
Lucien made a chattering sound, a bit like Morse code. Then his black eyes locked on Rosemary’s face, and he fell silent.
Puzzled, but innately polite, Rosemary smiled. “I’m pleased to meet you, Papa Lucien. I’m not really…Ah. Right. Got it.” She glanced at Tanner, brows raised. “Can you hear him? Can he hear you?” she asked Lucien.
“I can when he wants me to.” Tanner set his pack down. “At the moment he doesn’t want me to.”
On cue, Lucien transferred his solemn gaze, and suddenly, there it was. The word flow in his head that would never feel entirely natural.
“Why come here?” Lucien wanted to know. “Why to me?”
Tanner answered him out loud. “Because someone more proficient than me is tracking her. In fact, there may be two people on her tail.” He waited a beat, before smiling back. “Yeah, I agree, it’s an excellent tail. Not the point, though.”
Exasperated, Rosemary looked from one man to the other. “You’re discussing my butt? Literally? When, as we speak, whatever and whoever are very likely working their way through the swamp? Are you a voodoo priest?” she asked Lucien. Before he could answer, however, she held up a hand and smiled slightly. “Nope. Just got it. You’re a mentalist. Sort of a one-way transmitter. You can send thoughts, but you can’t receive them. You used to have a nightclub act in New Orleans. Your first stroke ten years ago heightened what had previously only been a hit-or-miss ability. You don’t think Tanner plans to hide from the person or people on my excellent tail. You believe he wants to lure him or them to this place, where he figures he’ll have as much of an advantage as is possible under the circumstances. You agree with him, and you’re not against the idea at all, because you get awfully bored being alone so much. Alligators aren’t the best of neighbors, and you’re not overly fond of rats.”
Tanner walked away chuckling. “Lucien says you’re good, and you’re also right.”
“Yep, got that, too.” She tapped the side of her head. “Intercepted the transmission. Sorry.”
“I doubt that. But you are plenty scared, and with reason. Did you ever meet Traynor?” Tanner asked Lucien.
The old man screwed up his thin features. “Only know what you told me when you first moved to the bayou and stayed in this hotel. Got yourself drunk on more than one occasion and spilled more than I reckon you planned to. Boy’s got deep feelings,” Lucien explained, for Rosemary’s benefit and to Tanner’s annoyance. “Had to learn how to bury ‘em. I helped him with that. Madeleine Lessard was a distant cousin of mine. Made me mad as a hornet when she got killed. Made a lot of bayou folk mad.”
“No wonder Leshad’s so fearful.”
Lucien made an audible rat-a-tat sound of laughter. “Is that what her killer’s calling himself? Madeleine, she bastardized the word shadow to insult him. So what does he do? While we’re spitting the name out of our mouths, he’s taking it for his own and proud of it. Thinks it makes him sound mysterious. And now, it defines him. Got weapons and manpower, I expect, to back him up. Convinced himself he’s untouchable. You can’t trap a shadow, after all. Can’t hurt it with bullets or knives. Can’t do much of anything to it by way of harm. Yet for all that, a shadow can still be made to disappear.” The old man’s smile was canny. “Forever, under the right conditions.”
Tanner reshouldered his pack. “You be sure and let me know what those conditions are if they come to you, Lucien. While you’re at it, we could use a face to go with the name.”
“Madeleine must’ve seen his face,” Rosemary mused, picking up her own pack. “I know she can project her image from beyond the grave. I saw her once,” she told Lucien. “She startled me. She even spoke to me. But she didn’t give me anything tangible. Nothing that would lead to Leshad’s downfall.”
“Ah, well.” Lucien spread the fingers of both hands. “It may be she can’t see him in her present state of transition. Such visitations as you experienced are rare at best, and you gotta figure, a soul can’t cross back over all complete. There’s bound to be blank spots. Gaping holes even, between what the flesh-and-blood person might recall and do, and what the spirit alone can achieve.”
Rosemary nodded. “I see what you mean. It’s like every experience we’ve ever had is stored somewhere in our brain. It’s a matter of accessibility for most of us.”
“Or inaccessibility, as the case may be.” Tanner detoured to one of the large front windows. “Bottom line? For whatever reason, inability, lack of time or orders from the other side, Madeleine didn’t give Rosemary a feature by feature description of Leshad. On the other hand, and much as I’d love to simplify things, the fact is, it’s the Reaper we have to worry about, not Leshad himself. And if it turns out that Traynor’s the Reaper, then staying alive’s going to be a hell of a lot bigger challenge than putting a face to the name Leshad.” He ran his gaze down the long access road. “It’s all about priorities, angel. And a little food wouldn’t hurt either. Is your son around, Lucien?”
“Not in the past three days.” The old man motioned for Rosemary to hand him her pack. Which was absurd, so Tanner rejoined her and transferred it to his other shoulder.
“One word about gentlemanly behavior,” he warned Rosemary, who was struggling with a
grin, “and I’ll contact Traynor myself. Which rooms, Papa L?”
The old man rolled off, flapping a hand in his wake. His thoughts drifted back through cobweb sheet and shadow. “Got a few locals in residence, but you can take your pick on the second floor. Not many rooms are fit for habitation, but if it helps, the floors are noisiest at the river end. I’d let the lady choose. Got sheets and such in the closet along the hall behind the kitchen.”
They both heard the cage door rattle into place and the elevator begin its ascent. It seemed to Tanner to climb forever before it stopped.
“Does everyone you know live in attics?” Rosemary held out a hand, wiggled her finger in a gimme motion. “I’ll take my stuff. I’d rather use the stairs if you don’t mind.”
A smile ghosted across Tanner’s mouth. “So would I. That elevator’s a mechanical nightmare. Unfortunately, for reasons that wouldn’t hold water with any fire inspector living or dead, Lucien keeps the stairwell doors sealed.”
“The man can’t use his legs,” she pointed out. “Stairs wouldn’t do him much good in an emergency, and God knows, an intruder who was forced to use the elevator would rouse him from a coma if he happened to slip into one, give him plenty of time to load his shotgun.” Stepping behind him, she rummaged through Tanner’s pack for a flashlight. “Should we hunt up some food and bedding before we take on the mechanical nightmare?”
“Yeah.” Preoccupied, he shone the light she handed him around. “Not sure I like the sound of locals in residence, and Skeeter’s a perpetual concern.”
“Skeeter being the strange son?”
“That’s him.”
She leaned her head around his shoulder. “What makes him strange? I wish I didn’t have to ask.”
“He got into drugs in Miami. Went looking for a high-gloss underworld lifestyle when he was sixteen. He found it, minus the gloss. Lucien couldn’t stop him. No one could. He started out bad and moved on to worse. Got hit, got hurt, wound up with brain damage. He crawled back to the bayou seven years ago and moved in with Lucien when the Marie closed down. He has a lot of scars and a complete lack of healthy perspective. What you have to watch out for most, though, are the episodes.”
She sighed. “What kind of ‘episodes’?”
“Sometimes—a lot of times—he thinks he’s back in Miami, fighting off the five or six gang members who’ve been sent to break him into small disposable pieces. As a rule, he can be talked down.”
“As a rule,” Rosemary repeated without conviction.
They both heard it as they passed the elevator. Glass shattering in a back room.
Sinking her fingers into Tanner’s forearm, Rosemary whispered, “Why was that more terrifying to me than a gunshot?”
“No idea.” He attempted to pinpoint the source and, assuming he remembered the layout, wound up in the kitchen.
He took Rosemary with him as far as the access hall, caught a soft thump behind the swinging doors and set a hand on her stomach. “I need you and your gun to stay outside. If you hear anything you don’t like, duck into the pantry.”
“Living my nightmare,” she muttered, but pulled her Sigma pistol, crouched, and did as he asked.
Casting a quick glance around, Tanner pushed through the right side door.
And walked straight into the butt-end of a rifle.
CHAPTER TEN
The moment the door closed, confusion erupted. No matter how hard she tried to block them, freakish shapes, out of proportion and completely unrecognizable, shot, spun and collided in Rosemary’s head. The silence burst apart in a mindless babble of sound.
Pain, a long, deep shaft of it, sliced through her skull. Clanks and whirs skated along the outer edge of her brain. Were they real or illusions? With so much happening, she couldn’t be sure.
Standing, she braced her spine against the wall and did what she could to shut the pandemonium down. She thought she might be gaining ground when something darted sideways across her senses like a giant zipper and finished the job for her.
As suddenly as it had begun, the cacophony vanished. Nothing remained, no babble, no pain, no confusion. Only a residual clatter of metal in a silence so thick and oppressive it seemed as if the entire swamp had stopped moving. Stopped breathing. Stopped living.
“Okay, that’s too weird,” she said, and breathing out slowly, started to call Tanner’s name.
She glimpsed an outline as one of the kitchen doors crashed open. A large, ungainly man, covered in strips of gray cloth like dirty bandages lurched across the threshold.
A hand, partly wrapped, gripped her by the throat and yanked her forward. The other hand clamped on to her arm and swung her around so her face was jammed against the wall.
“Voodoo queen,” he accused.
“Friend of Papa Lucien’s,” she choked back.
“Witch,” he spat.
Gathering her wits, Rosemary summoned a deceptively calm voice. “Let go of me, Skeeter, before I put a voodoo spell on you.”
His grip tightened, but his tone faltered slightly. “Voodoo,” he said again.
“I’ll do it,” she warned him. “In five, four, three, two—”
He released her so abruptly, she thought for a minute she might actually have thrown the mental punch she’d been considering. But then Skeeter made a gurgling sound, and Tanner drawled, “All play and no work makes Skeeter a scary boy. Move wrong, and I’ll snap your neck. There’s a light switch in the utility room, Rosemary. Reach inside, find it and flip it on.”
“Because under no circumstances could I possibly be in shock.” She rubbed her throat where the imprint of Skeeter DuCayne’s fingers lingered. The moment she discovered the light switch, however, she found herself backpedaling into the utility room. “Wow…” The word emerged on a long note of astonishment. Skeeter resembled a mummy-zombie-street warrior. The only thing that could have drawn her gaze away right then was the blood she glimpsed on the face of the man holding him. “Tanner, your cheek!”
“I walked into something, Rosemary. Don’t waste your sympathy.”
Skeeter had caught him off-guard, she realized. That wouldn’t sit well with Tanner, even if he had ultimately turned the tables.
Skeeter shook like an animal in chains, teeth bared. “I smell a witch.”
“I’m working on it.” Still rubbing her throat, Rosemary slanted him a mistrustful look. The babble threatened to return, but she managed to subdue it. Skeeter had an active if unbalanced mind. “Transformation spell’s at the top of my to-do list.”
The big man gave a snarling jerk, then coughed when Tanner’s forearm tightened around his windpipe. “Where’s Pa?” he squawked.
Tanner flexed his arm again. “We’re not here to hurt Lucien, Skeeter. If he tells us to go, we’ll go.”
“He’s my pa. I’m telling you to go.”
“You’re wrapped in filthy rags and you smell like a sewer. Orders aren’t overly credible coming from you.”
Because he wasn’t facing Tanner, the trapped man glowered at Rosemary. “I say she’s a witch.”
“Oh, screw this,” Rosemary decided and raising a mental hand, slapped his face.
He stumbled backward, rattled enough by the blow that he almost mowed Tanner down.
“You might have warned me, angel.” Tanner caught both his balance and Skeeter. “I’m holding a 250 pound mummy with the reflexes of a cat.”
Skeeter’s eyes glued themselves to Rosemary’s face. “How’d you do that?”
She maintained her benign smile. “Scary, isn’t it?”
When Skeeter swallowed and began blinking at her, Tanner shoved him forward. “I’d listen to the lady if I were you. Her great-grandmother taught your father’s cousin Madeleine a lot of what she knew.”
Skeeter gaped. “You mean she really is kin to a voodoo queen?”
Tanner shook out his arm. “Technically, Skeet, you’re kin to the queen, but I’m in a bad mood, so, yeah, go with that, and bear in mind that Rosemary her
e can probably do a helluva lot worse things than slap your ugly face. Now beat it.” He fingered his bleeding cheek. “Before I remember you’re supposed to be in lockdown at one of the parish hospitals.”
“Of course he is.” But Rosemary sighed the words under her breath and with her head resting on the wall. She waited for the door at the end of the hallway to clank shut. “So now I’ve got a Reaper and a wannabe zombie with serious psychological issues wanting me dead. Not to mention the X factor, Ethan Grimes.” She waited a beat before adding, “And then there’s you.” She regarded Tanner in the stark half-light of the old hotel corridor. “What do you want from me?”
Fixing his eyes on hers, he started forward. A smile grazed his lips as he set a finger under her chin and tipped her head up for a kiss that delved just deep enough to stir up all manner of dark and dangerous feelings. “I’ll let you know, angel,” he said, “when I figure it out myself.”
* * *
“Sir?”
Killian joined Crucible in a booth in a French Quarter coffee house called the Café Parisian. Movies from the 1940s played on a textured projection wall visible from everywhere in the retro-styled room. The bustle was subtle, but constant as the French actors murmured in suggestive tones. People watched, flirted, ate and paid little attention to their neighbors.
Being a cautious man, however, Crucible raised a finger. “Keep it low,” he warned his liaison. “And if at all possible, keep Cutter out of it.”
Killian tried not to smile. “Director Cutter does most of what he does under the table and out of my sight, anyway, so no worries there. He and the others simply want to know if you’ve ascertained the target’s whereabouts. Those are Cutter’s words, not mine,” he added with a light tug on his earring.
“Tell him I have ideas,” Crucible returned. “I managed to get to someone in the bayou, but I haven’t had any word back yet, good or bad.”
“In that case, sir, I’ll apologize in advance and tell you that Director Cutter thinks the swamp might be where Sean Tanner’s living these days. I know the thought’s already occurred to you, but Cutter’s contention is that Rosemary’s stepbrother might have sent her to him.”