by Faith Hunter
“I’ll handle it,” he murmured back.
I turned and he stopped me with a raised hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?” I was honestly curious and maybe he heard that in my voice, because his scent changed, flooding with pheromones of relief.
“Babe.” He shook his head. It was man talk for so much more than just Babe.
“Dude. Yada yada. We good?”
He chuckled. “We’re good.” He holstered his weapon and started digging in his pockets as he followed me down the hallway. “Did Alex get the system shut down?
“I texted him and I don’t hear sirens, so I’m guessing so.”
Eli knelt at the door and pulled a mini flash, one so bright it hurt and I had to look away. “I don’t have goggles. Back away to preserve your vision,” he said to us. To me he added, “Text Alex. Tell him what’s going on.”
I backed to the far end of the hallway where I could cover the entrances and the offices. No one was there, but we had once seen a small room with a witch circle drawn on the floor that allowed mutated vamps to transport in, just like in Star Trek, but without the crazy lights or sound, or Spock or Scotty at the controls. That was in Natchez too, and though this situation was nothing like the one there, something, probably the magic output here, kept reminding me of it.
I texted Alex again and got a text in reply: Security off. Pulled latest building plans. Retrofitted with electronic hurricane and vamp shutters. Walls insulated and soundproofed in 2009 with gel-foam liquid.
I typed back, K.
Got a note in reply. Get the dog-stinking-werewolf out of the house!!!!!! which made me snort out a laugh. Brute had a coat like the offspring of a Brillo pad and a long-haired sheep. When he got wet, he stank, and New Orleans weather meant he stank pretty often. That would get better if I’d bathe him. And Alex would complain less when I got him a mattress of his own. I made myself a note to stop by Walmart and see about a mattress. And a plastic covering like they used in nurseries and nursing homes to protect it from wet and smell. And a bleachable mattress covering. I never wanted a pet and here I had a full-time werewolf and a part-time grindylow. Again with the weird life.
Eli was still busy, and I had my cell out, so I checked my business e-mail. I hadn’t done that in a while and I had offers for two jobs back near Asheville. With an unexpected ache, the mountains in winter called to me. I had a sudden vision of a snow-covered chasm as viewed from some tall, bare-branched tree. The smell of the air was clean and sharp and frozen. Below me, a deer picked his way through the snow. Beast’s vision. Beast’s memory.
I closed the Kevlar cover and stuck the cell in my driest pocket. Maybe I needed to invest in a special dry-pocket something or other. I needed to do more research. There were advantages to being Leo’s Enforcer, and the pretty, pretty toys and gear were part of that.
“Fire in the hole,” Eli said, racing into the office near me, pulling me in after him. I got a glimpse as the others ducked into rooms too.
The whump was more muffled than I expected, shrapnel flying down the hallway, ricocheting off the walls. The freed door whammed against the wall. Soft light, like candlelight, brightened the hallway. The cloud of plastic explosive and detonator blew through the air, an acerbic scent that curled under my tongue and filled my mouth with bitterness. Behind it came the smell of the locked room. Dead things. Dead vamp blood, old and new.
Eli was just behind Edmund into the room. I moved slower. Holstered my weapons. According to the poster-board-sized note propped on one of two white enamel embalming tables, the Caruso family was long gone. It said, The Caruso family has returned to Europe. Please inform the Master of the City that we are no longer his to rule. Laurie Caruso.
“They knew we were on the way,” Bruiser said.
“There’s dust on the floor and evenly on the poster,” Eli said, bending over the paper. “They’ve been gone a while.”
I looked up at the dim lights. Some kind of battery backups. And a great idea. We needed that in our house. “Ten bucks says they left when the ghost ship entered U.S. territory, whenever that was,” I said.
“Ghost ship?” Edmund asked coldly but politely, his tone telling me that I wasn’t keeping him in the loop.
“You were asleep,” I said, resting my forearms on my weapons. I walked through the room, my wet clothing depositing drops here and there. I explained about the spelled ship in Lake Borgne as Eli checked for booby traps in cabinet doors and the body refrigerators along one wall. I found a bright yellow door marked with a red diamond-shaped fire hazard sticker. Eli cleared it and I went in.
The room was really a closet, metal walls, metal shelves, a sprinkler overhead, battery backup lighting. On the shelves inside the metal room were metal cans of chemicals: formaldehyde HCHO of various indexes—whatever that meant—formalin, something called pro-line primer, pre-injection and drainage fluid, things I felt were pretty normal for human embalming and should be pretty much the same for vamps. There were boxes of lye and an arsenic container. Arsenic hadn’t been used in human burial since the early twentieth century. I spotted a small refrigerator-freezer at the back, the kind advertised for dorms and small break rooms. There had been a larger refrigerator in the main room. I had to wonder why there was a tiny one in the fire closet. I squatted and studied the fridge.
“Babe?”
“Take a look at this. Think it’s booby-trapped?”
I moved back and Eli lay on the slightly dusty floor, his little mini flash checking out the rubber seals and the back. “Good place for a bomb,” Eli said as he worked. “Flammable chemicals everywhere. Contained space is good for creating a high aerosol concentration of said chemicals.” He rolled to his feet, back to the calm and fit Ranger I remembered. “I can’t see anything, but that’s not to say there isn’t a device on the inside, triggered upon opening. I suggest we leave it alone. If Leo wants it open he can get NOPD’s bomb squad in here.”
“Works for me,” I said, backing away and closing the door behind us.
In the main room, Edmund was studying the contents of a cabinet. It was full of supplies in small boxes. Musingly, he said, “The heads of the revenants were reattached with a pale pink silk. The traditional line for Mithran head reattachment is braided silk, a white or pale gray line.” He took a pink box from the shelf and removed a spool of silk. “This is what the Carusos must have used on the revenants. It’s pink and it feels”—he made a face as if something tasted bad—“odd to the touch.”
I took the spool of pink thread from Edmund’s hand and studied it. Outside, lightning bracketed the windows with brilliant light. The thread sparked. Hot, potent magic pulsed into my fingertips and I dropped the spool. “Holy crap on a cracker.” I shook my fingers and stuck them in my mouth. “I’m burned,” I said around the fingers. “Blistered.”
“Whatever is calling the revenants awake is tied to the thread they were preserved with,” Edmund said. “Interesting.”
Eli had checked out the big fridge-freezer and tied a long cord around the handles. He said, “Everyone out so we can open this.” We all moved out of the room for the opening, and with us all standing behind the now-broken door frame, Eli yanked on the cords. Without explosion or fanfare, the doors opened and bright appliance light spilled into the room along with refrigerated air. Overhead, the lights came back on, and I squinted at the glare. “Clear,” Eli said, coiling the cord and sticking it back in his pocket.
There were more fluids inside, and I pulled the cold bottles out, silently reading labels, putting them back. Only one bottle was unlabeled, a brown glass bottle in the door. It was sealed with a cork, which I eased out, like I’d seen Leo do a champagne cork. Decorking seemed to be a guy job, among humans, vamps, and Onorios, like taking out the trash, or hammering nails in boards. Not that I couldn’t do trash and nails. I totally could. But they felt it was a man’s job. Cleanin
g their own toilets, that they were less receptive to. I eased the cork back and forth until it slipped free. The stink of vamp blood filled the room.
Edmund whirled to me. His shoulders hunched, fangs slowly schnicked down on their little hinges. “Edmund?” I asked. His eyes bled scarlet and his pupils dilated. He was vamping out. This was not good. I had a feeling it was bad form to kill your primo on the first full day of business. I pushed the cork back into the bottle. Took a vamp-killer by the grip. “I will end you,” I said.
“And I’ll fill you full of silver, bro,” Eli said. He had two handguns aimed at Edmund’s back. I stepped to my right and out of his angle of shot. “You already got silvered up this week. Twice could finish you.”
Bruiser said, softly, “Jane, call him.”
“Do what?”
“You shared blood. Call him. Someone else is trying to influence him, someone he once trusted and with whom he shared blood. Only a stronger master can ease him from this path.”
“Not sure how to do that.”
“He’s fighting the call. Give him something else to think about.”
“Beast wants to hunt cows from inside your fancy car,” I said instantly. “With the top down and Eli driving around a muddy field. You don’t calm down, I’m taking her hunting.” I leaned closer and grinned, showing teeth. “She’ll claw up your leather upholstery. Maybe scent-mark your carpet.”
Inside me Beast perked up. Hunt cow? In Edmund car with no head? Which I figured was her way saying with the top down.
“Yes,” I replied to her aloud. “With the top down and a mountain lion in the passenger seat. She’ll pull a dead cow into the car and feast on it. Entrails everywhere. It’ll be a bloodbath.”
Edmund swallowed. His lids closed and stayed that way for three seconds. Opened. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh, yes I would. She wants your car. Bad. And she wants to drag a full-grown cow into the seat and sit there, looking out over a pasture while she eats it.”
Beast will hunt cow! In Edmund car!
Ed’s eyes started bleeding back to human-ish. His fangs folded back on their little hinges with a snap. “My car is a Thunderbird Maserati 150 GT. It is a 1957 prototype for which I paid over three million dollars. One does not hunt in a Maserati GT. One does not—”
“If I have to kill you, the car is mine,” I interrupted.
“I—” He stopped. Focused on me. “What happened?”
“I opened this.” I held out the brown bottle. “And you decided to hunt me. Then there’s the storm. I’m guessing some combo of the two?”
Edmund accepted the sealed bottle and brought it close to his nose. He took a tiny sniff. With a pop of displaced air he was gone. I caught the bottle before it hit the floor. “We’ll take this to Leo,” I said to Bruiser.
“Indeed.”
I frowned. Indeed was a Leo word. Formal and . . . Leo-ishy. This place and this bottle were having an effect on my people.
I tucked the bottle under my arm and said, “Let’s go to HQ.”
Fortunately, Edmund was sitting in the limo when we got there, staring out the far window at the storm. I gave the bottle to Shemmy and had him raise the privacy panel. “To keep the smell away from our fanghead.”
I got the feeling that Shemmy was disappointed, that he liked being part of the action, but he complied, opening the communication channel instead.
“Don’t pout, Eddie,” I said, crawling in to sit beside the vamp.
His head turned to me in one of those inhuman gestures they can do. “I am not pouting,” he said distinctly. “Pouting is for children. And my name. Is. Not. Eddie.”
“Good to know. HQ, James,” I instructed.
“My name isn’t James,” Shemmy said, helpfully.
“Picky, picky, picky,” I said.
CHAPTER 11
Did You Know You’re Being Tailed by PsyLED?
On the way to HQ, we got notice from Scrappy, Leo’s secretary, that a small cruise ship was trying to dock and that all sorts of local, state, and federal officials were on site. Leo wanted us to check it out. Of course he did, in a rainstorm that was getting, if possible, worse. This night, like the previous one, was never-ending, and I’d had only a half hour nap, at best.
By the time we made the necessary blocks and avoided one-way streets and congestion caused by the storm, the ship was motoring back down the Mississippi for international waters. I got a quick look at the boat, hoping I could tell if it was the invisible ship in Lake Borgne, but I couldn’t tell diddly. I watched the byplay of the multiagency law enforcement and government people standing and gesturing in the rain.
Bruiser said softly, “On site is one state senator, two ICE agents—immigration officials—two suits from the Secret Service, four marked cars. Two FBI agents, there.” He pointed to the man and woman with oversized umbrellas. “Two detectives from NOPD out in the middle of the night, when there are currently no dead bodies and no weapons of mass destruction. All of this is anomalous.”
“Why don’t you go to talk to them?” I said. “I’m the MOC’s female Enforcer. You can be one of the guys.”
“Or you could just kill them and save us some time,” Edmund snipped.
I swiveled in my seat. “Or you could swim to the cruise ship, climb on board, find out who’s there, what they want, and save us even more time,” I said.
Edmund made a sort of blowing noise and looked away again. I had a feeling the smell of the blood bottle was still getting to him.
“What was in the bottle?” I asked him. “Whose blood?”
“It was . . .” He shook his head. “I do not know. But it reminded me of the aroma of mixed blood, when the Mithrans gathered and Katie was put to the earth, to heal.” He was watching me as if he wanted me to say something, admit something. No way was I admitting that I’d been there in bubo bubo form. Not happening. An uncertain silence built.
Bruiser looked back and forth between us. Having nothing to add to the conversation, he opened the door and said, in one of the typically British turns of phrase that occasionally slipped out of his mouth, “I’ll try not to delay you unduly.” He left the limo, walking to the gathered officers, his body limned by the headlights. He was beautiful, and his butt, in the wet leathers, was simply amazing.
“Stop,” I said to Eli before he could tell me to get a room. My partner chuckled evilly.
Moments later, Bruiser walked back, his body again caught in the lights, rain falling lightly onto him. He got in and said, “No one will talk to us, officially. But I know one of the officers. He’ll talk to Leo. HQ, Shemmy.”
“A cop in Leo’s pocket?” I asked as Shemmy slid the limo into gear.
Bruiser said, “The officer’s father was with NOPD back in the day. He warned Leo about a small group of officers working directly under the mayor of the time. They were planning to get something on Leo, make it look as if he had killed a child, stir public sentiment. Leo was able to head off the trouble, and the officers left NOPD and went to work in other fields. Leo offered the man a boon in return for his information. And he then fed that man his own blood for two years as he fought and beat cancer, an aggressive stage four colon cancer. In Leo’s pocket. Yes.”
Which made me feel all slimy for suggesting it was something else. I didn’t like Leo, but in his own way, he did some good.
My cell pinged and it was Alex. “You’re on speaker,” I said.
“I have all the security video of the ship attempting to dock,” Alex said. “And by the way. Did you know you’re being tailed by PsyLED?”
“I knew,” Shemmy said. “We picked him up on way to the docks. But he was holding back, so I waited to tell you.”
“Rick,” I said, a growl to the name. “Next time tell me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Shemmy said. “Sorry ma’am. He’s parked just down the bloc
k in the alley. Shall I pull up next to him?”
That made me grin. “Sure. Block him in. Let’s consider it an invitation to a private tête-à-tête.”
The limo made a three-point turn as if we were on the way out, at the last moment maneuvering closer to the mouth of the ally, blocking it, and throwing the narrow space into deepest shadow. Rick got out and walked to the limo, though prowled was more in keeping with his grace and balance and catlike movements. He leaned in my open window, studying us all with eyes that saw more than a human’s would.
“Were there vamps on board?” I asked.
His Frenchy-black eyes flicked to me and back to Bruiser. “I’m sure that if Mithrans were aboard, they would have notified the Master of the City according to proper protocol,” Rick said, his voice bland with the lie.
“Riiiiight,” I said.
“Who called you about this incident?” Rick asked. “Nothing went out over the usual channels or the airwaves.” None of us answered. “Move along, nothing to see here.” He stood and went back to his car.
Alex said over the cell, “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”
Eli’s lips twitched, his eyes going from me to Bruiser and back. “Did you really threaten to kill the PsyLED special agent?”
“She did.” Bruiser’s face softened. “HQ, Shemmy. Alex, let’s see the security footage of the ship trying to dock and its passengers trying to disembark.”
“Sending it to the limo computer system,” Alex said. “Flip up your screen.”
Bruiser raised the extra-wide video screen covering the privacy panel. The scene had been captured by several cameras, from different angles, and we watched as a dozen men in military camo and automatic rifles surrounded the space where the gangway—gangplank?—would have touched U.S. soil. On board, a small clump of black-clad humans seemed to be trying to dock the ship. There was no audio, but we got the general idea. A lot of posturing. A lot of shouting through a megaphone. A lot of head shaking. Eventually the ship pulled away. Nothing happened. So who was aboard besides the crew in black? Who were the passengers and why were they denied permission to dock? If it was vamps, they would never do something so public for no reason. And if there were old and powerful vamps on board—the EVs come calling before the agreements were reached—they would have had the ability to get the humans to do anything they wanted, at least long enough to get several vamps ashore and drink from them. Unless one of the cops was a witch. A well-prepared witch might have shielded the law enforcement types from being rolled. If there were vamps on board. There were too many unknowns.