Cold Reign

by Faith Hunter

  Beast was close to the surface and narrowed my eyes on Soul, adoringly. Littermate, she thought at me. Littermate and not littermate.

  Which made no sense. Beast was working through something.

  I might have blinked, because Soul was gone. After the nonminutes in the bright light of the lightning I had lost my night vision. “Jane?” Edmund queried, spinning in the rain to find me.

  Eli rammed into Edmund and the two fell, rolling in the puddled rain, wrestling. Edmund taking a flurry of blows. Grunts and cursing. Far too much violence for whatever had happened between them to spark this. I wondered if the magic in the storm was causing their aggression, and the riots in the city too. I drew on Beast-strength and waded in. Grabbed an arm of each and spun them around, throwing them both flat into the puddles.

  “Stop it right now!” I yelled. Both men froze, bodies on the ground, eyes moving to me, to each other, and away. “Get up and act like you have some sense. The storm is making people—men in particular—violent and aggressive. Maybe it’s calling the revs and having the same effect on them. Whatever it is, we have to stop it, not fight each other. You idiots!”

  I looked up and caught a glimpse of arcenciels dancing in the storm. I slashed rain out of my face. I was wet to the skin, the silk underwear clinging to me.

  “We should leave and call the police,” Bruiser said. “This is an active crime scene. And it’s possible that PsyLED will have some idea about why the revenants are rising.”

  “Sure. Whatever.” I was still ticked off at Ricky-Bo. Including him or his agency in anything I did was galling. Not so long ago, PsyLED hadn’t existed and vamp physiology was unstudied and unknown to the medical and forensic communities. Now, thanks to a certain fight in Natchez, where my team took down over two dozen vamps, the feds had vamp bodies to study. They probably had lots of knowledge by now. Thanks to me. Thanks to Rick.

  I found and put away my weapons, still wet and gooey, because I had no choice, and led the way out of the cemetery. The entrance of the cemetery was blocked by cop cars. Standing in the rain, beneath an umbrella that was being buffeted by the decreasing wind, was Rick LaFleur. I walked past as if I hadn’t seen him. Bruiser stopped to talk. Men. The rest of us got in the limo and Shemmy lowered the privacy wall to toss us towels.

  “Ms. Yellowrock,” Shemmy said, excitement high in his voice, “Derek and a small team have gone to the Roosevelt to search for an unknown vamp.”

  “Mith—” I stopped. Why should I care how the fangheads wanted to be called. “Go on. They’re heading to search the Roosevelt,” which was a five-star hotel in the French Quarter.

  “Their party includes vamps to create access via mesmerizing. That’s it. Except that Mr. Pellissier sent a new cell for you. Same number, everything up until three hours prior to you losing yours has been restored.” He tossed a new matte-black cell at me, and I caught it out of the air. Like the old one, it had an armored case and was a cell that Leo could track. I flipped it open and scrolled around. Apparently someone had downloaded and backed up all the content from my previous cell every few hours and then downloaded it onto this one already. How kind. Not. Sneaky li’l bastard going through my private info. Rage thrummed through me.

  Beast pressed a paw on my mind and extended her claws, pressing down. Clearing my mind. I had always known that Leo had total access to my official cell, the very reason I carried a throwaway, a burner phone, for private convos. So why my anger? The storm was affecting me too. “Just ducky,” I muttered.

  “What, mistress?” Edmund asked.

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “Yes, mistress.” I could have sworn he was smirking, but there was nothing of that on his face.

  I sighed and followed Edmund’s lead, drying myself off with the big fluffy towels. Fangheads have the best stuff. Top quality all the way. The stink of wet leather and gun oil and New Orleans wet was potent in the car. I also smelled fresh tea and followed my nose to a paper cup of coffeehouse chai latte in a cup holder. I thought I loved Shemmy. I took it and drank. Heaven in a cup.

  Eli, however, just sat, his face scrunched into lines, his hands gripping his weapons, too tight, skin white. I pressed the towel over my head, squeezing the water from my queued hair. From behind the towel I asked Ed, “So you’re my primo?”

  “Yes, m— Yes.”

  “So if you know something, and I need to know it, you’ll tell me.” Edmund didn’t reply and I dropped the towel to settle a mean little smile on him. “Yes or no, primo?”

  “If I can answer, I shall,” he said carefully. Which meant that he might know stuff he had sworn to keep secret.

  Vamps always had secrets. But this should be common vamp knowledge. “Are vamps always beheaded after they die a second time?”

  “If their master is not able to revive them, yes. No Mithran wants to return as a revenant.”

  “And then their heads are reattached for the grave.”

  “Yes. For the services.” I saw enlightenment dawn in his eyes. “But their spines and tendons are not reattached. It’s cosmetic only.”

  “So properly interred vamps shouldn’t be able to rise from the grave, heads in place. Their heads should loll over and bounce as they walk.”

  “No. They should not be able to rise at all.” Edmund looked troubled. He oughta.

  “But the dog-fanged vamps are rising, walking, seeing, eating, and drinking. Making either the vamps themselves different or the method in which they were prepared for the grave different. Who are the vamp morticians?”

  “Mateo and Laurie Caruso,” Edmund said, “of Caruso Family Funeral Services. For the last two hundred years and more.” He sounded unhappy about it. I had to wonder why.

  “Vamps?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about his tone and the unhappy look on his face. “Mateo and Laurie Caruso. Do they have dog fangs?”

  “Yes.” He looked utterly saddened at speaking the word. The kind of sad that spoke of a personal history, one filled with heartbreak.

  “You and Laurie. You used to have a thing, didn’t you.”

  “If by ‘have a thing,’ you mean did we have a romantic relationship once upon a time, yes. We were . . . close.”

  Bruiser got in the limo and began to wipe off on the fluffy towels. The storm had lessened again, and beyond the patting sounds of Bruiser’s towel, I heard nothing. “Shemmy,” I said, “take us to Caruso Family Funeral Services.”

  Bruiser stopped patting and looked at me, then at Ed. Comprehension dawned in his eyes. “Oh. Bouvier clan.”

  Just in case he wasn’t on our page, I said, “Dog fangs. All the risen revs had them. Heads, mouths, eyes, ears, legs, arms, everything works and nothing should work at all.”

  “Yes.” The limo pulled away as Bruiser retrieved a small cell from a pocket of the limo and punched in a number. When Scrappy answered, he said, “Tell the Master of the City that his faithful Enforcer and his faithful Onorio are en route to Caruso Family Funeral Services.” He listened a moment, said, “Thank you,” and disconnected.

  “Faithful?” I asked.

  “There is only one funeral home in the city for Mithrans. If we have to kill the Carusos, I wanted to remind Leo that we do so while still being loyal to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Mithran funerals and burials are very circumscribed, sacred, and private affairs,” Bruiser said. “Almost holy. Without the Caruso family, there will be no one to provide the correct interment procedures for the city’s undead. Things will become difficult.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay. I’ll keep them alive if possible. But if they’re raising the revenants or helping the people who are, then they go down. Unless I can use them.”

  “Understood,” Bruiser said. Then he did a strange thing. He turned off his cell before gesturing that we all do likewise. We all did and then held
the cells tightly beneath an armpit to muffle any remaining mic. “One thing you should know,” he said. “Leo’s eyes among the Europeans has not always been reliable.”

  Leo’s eyes refereed to Leo’s Madam Spy. That she had not always been reliable suggested that she was either easily confused or a turncoat, a double agent, spying for Leo and giving intel to both sides. That sucked. And that was possibly deadly. I nodded and we all turned on our cells. I quickly texted Alex to find and turn off the security system at the funeral home. This was Enforcer business, not cop business. And if the morticians were EV spies, planted here a couple of centuries ago, then we needed to keep the Eurotrash from discovering that we were onto them.

  Eli shook himself. Blinked. Looked around the limo until his gaze settled on Bruiser. “You killed a little girl?”

  Bruiser repeated his previous statements, nearly word for word, his tone careful, his eyes on Eli’s hands, close to his weapons. “Her name was Joan Bennett. She stood four feet nine, and she looked like a child. She was staked and beheaded in nineteen forty-three for killing two of her human servants. Not a child. But you were seeing a child.”

  Eli frowned, his eyes staring into a past only he could see. “A little girl blew herself up. Killed three of my men. Nearly killed me. She was maybe ten.” His eyes filled with tears and he blinked against them. “I saw her coming. There was nothing to suggest that she was a danger, but . . . I knew it. Somehow. And I didn’t take her down. I just watched her walk up to us and . . . If I’d just shot her, my men would have lived.” Eli’s expression didn’t change. His hands clenched and then released. Rain dripped off his fingertips. “I couldn’t do it. I knew what she was going to do and I couldn’t . . . couldn’t do it. I just stood there.” A single tear gathered and fell, trickling down his rain-slicked face. And still his expression was stone.

  We all sat as he cried, silent, terrible tears. I wanted to take Eli’s hand, give him a hug, but I didn’t know how. The limo took corners carefully, Shemmy as involved in the pain as we all were. Outside, muted thunder rumbled. My magics stayed silent, contained.

  Edmund slid across the seat to him and took up a towel. Silent as well, he dried off Eli, starting with Eli’s head, which he pressed like a benediction. Eli’s neck, shoulders, and arms. He dried Eli’s torso and slid to the floor to dry Eli’s legs and behind his knees. Down to his feet. From the floor, without looking up at Eli, Edmund said softly, “There is no going back. There is no revival of our humans. There is no erasure of our horrors. No healing except of time and she is a vengeful mistress, leaving scars that are forever. But there also is no proof of foreknowledge, only of twenty-twenty hindsight. You guessed. You did not know. Knowing is only for God.” Edmund lifted and dried Eli’s hands. He said, “Your hands are clean. Not stained with blood. You need not carry the blood of your men. Only their memories.”

  Eli took a breath that quaked in a sob.

  Edmund returned to the seat, next to my partner, his nearness a comfort if Eli wanted it. After that we rode in silence.

  • • •

  We pulled through Faubourg Marigny, a mostly residential area of the city, and Shemmy pointed out our destination as we rode by, a street-side recon. “You want the double-gallery house with the star jasmine blooming out front.”

  It was the wrong season and too cold for jasmine to be blooming. The temps at freezing should have killed the flowers, even if the plant itself survived. A sense of unease slid across me. There were few two-story buildings in the nearby blocks, and the brick building housing Caruso Family Funeral Services stood out as different, even though it didn’t have a sign advertising its services. Like most vamp businesses, it didn’t publicize.

  I said softly to Edmund, “Vamp funerals and the vamp mortician or morticians who reattached the heads of the dog-fanged vamps. I want to know everything.”

  “Clan Bouvier began a climb to power as lesser Mithrans who provided services to and for other, more powerful Mithrans. They cared for scions in lairs, they cared for sick human servants who contracted diseases not eased by their master’s blood, they helped to care for and educate children of the body.”

  Vamps sometimes were able to have children of their own bodies, though that was uncommon and I had no idea why. But such children were rare and cosseted and adored. I had killed the creature masquerading as Immanuel, Leo’s “child of his body.” Losing the person he had thought was his son had driven Leo nearly to madness. It was a miracle he hadn’t killed me.

  And then it hit me. “Did they care for Immanuel when he was a child?”

  Edmund hissed, putting the death of Leo’s supposed son together with the Europeans. “Yesssss . . .”

  The long view. A plan in place for decades. Perhaps for centuries. And then I come along and kill the pretender and set everything awry, force a new plan into motion. “Go on,” I said. Beyond the armored windows, thunder rumbled. The tires sprayed water in the streets up under the floor of the limo as we circled the block, and I could feel the vibration through my boots.

  “Bouvier took as blood-servants human doctors and nurses and the mortician family, and they turned those who were most loyal. They chose bankers as scions. They made friends among the powerful humans in the city, the politicians, the movers and shakers as they were called. Bouvier did favors. They recruited among these powerful humans for the useful and capable and not simply the beautiful. They also served Mithrans faithfully. Which meant they learned secrets from the Mithrans they attended and from the humans they turned. They grew covertly powerful. And because I believe that I know what information you seek, I will add, the Bouvier clan were allied with the Damours. The clan and blood family shared blood. Fostered scions. They were close.”

  I put together what I knew and was beginning to guess. “And Bouvier’s attachment to Bethany Salazar y Medina, the outclan priestess? Was she part of their little clique?”

  Edmund shifted a puzzled gaze to me. “From time to time, I do believe that she associated with them, though to say she was allied would be incorrect. Outclan priestesses do not align with either clan or blood-family. Why do you ask?”

  “Bouvier appears in a mural on the wall in Grégoire’s house. He had someone I believe was a Cherokee skinwalker on his arm, a skinwalker like me, named Ka Nvista.” But she had smelled like flowers. That was what I’d been told. My own scent smelled of predator and aggression to strange vamps. They hated my scent until a stronger vamp accepted me, and then they settled. No one who had met and smelled the scent of Ka Nvista and then smelled my scent had ever put us together as similar creatures. “I don’t know, but there’s something there. Some connection. Bethany had my blood in a healing just after I arrived in the city. I believe that she knew what I was.”

  “We’ve circled the block, Ms. Yellowrock,” Shemmy said, again pulling past the brick building. “Everything looks okay. I’m parked three houses down. It looks as if the power is out along part of the street.”

  I pulled my blades and cleaned them on the damp towels. The sterling gleamed in the darkness. “You all coming?” I asked the group, keeping my voice casual. They all said yes, even Eli. I shot a glance at Edmund, who gave a minuscule nod. He would watch over Eli. My vamp primo would watch over my human second and business partner. My life was so weird I scarcely recognized it.

  I opened the limo door and got out, into the storm. As I bent forward, rain blasted down my jacket neck, icy and miserable. I now officially hated rain. But I marched through six inches of running water to the two-story house.

  I had learned a lot about New Orleans architecture listening to the boys talk, and a double-gallery house meant that the front façade was composed of stacked front porches with a flat roof over the second-story porch, columns, and a low-pitched roof over the rest. Two windows, sometimes three, like here, and entry doors were traditionally on the right.

  I stepped to the sidewalk and th
rough the small gate, across the porch. I banged once on the door and would have banged more but it opened with a creepy movie squeal of unoiled hinges. Moving fast, I slid into the darker shadows to the left of the door. Bruiser took right, along the wall, and crossed the room. He had a sidearm in a two-hand grip at his thigh, visible as a darker image than Beast’s vision of Bruiser himself, who was lit up in greens and bright silvers, leaving wet splats across the wood floors, beading on the rich Persian carpet. Edmund entered and moved straight across the room, vamp-fast, with a little pop of sound, to the far wall. He carried blades and I’d seen him fight. He was a way better swordsman than me, so I put mine back and readied a .380. I’d rather have a larger caliber, but I might shoot a human by accident. Smaller rounds meant decreased killing capacity.

  I moved, stance balanced, deeper into the small front room. Eli took my place. The only truly human among us, and without low-light goggles, he stood just inside the door, guarding our exit. Caruso Family Funeral Services was unlit, and it smelled odd. Vamp lairs and residences usually smelled of a strange mixture of blood and sex and herbs, but this one smelled of other scents. Dead lilies. Dead something else.

  Dead mice. Dead baby birds in hot summer, rotting in nests, when there has been no rain, Beast thought at me.

  I didn’t ask how she knew that. We moved on, through the business, into the hallway, past offices, empty according to the scents. Bruiser cleared the first room; I cleared the second. The third room took up most of the breadth of the house, a large viewing room, currently empty except for side chairs along the walls. The next room was a carbon copy of the former. The smells grew stronger, coming from the back room, and Edmund was standing to the side of its door.

  “Locked,” he said softly, too softly to be heard by human ears. “Steel bolted at top and bottom. Steel casing. There will be no taking it down, short of explosives.”

  Coms had been left behind. I moved through the dark, back to Eli. “We have a secure door,” I murmured to him. “Steel core in steel frame. Those bolt locks that go into the framing.”