Cold Reign

by Faith Hunter

  Eli said, “I don’t get it.” I studied the agents and cops on the screens. “Let’s get stills of the plainclothes people and see if we can match them up with known local witches. Send the stills to Jodi and Lachish Dutillet.” Jodi ran the woo-woo department of NOPD. Lachish was the leader of the NOLA coven. If one of them didn’t know the witch, then he or she was very well hidden.

  “Can we get video from farther downstream and from across the river?” I asked.

  “You think this might have been a ruse? Yeah, okay. If it was the European vamps, they knew they wouldn’t be allowed ashore,” Eli said.

  I lifted my thumb, twisting the palm open, in a What else could it be? gesture.

  “It’ll take a while,” Alex said, “but yeah, I can pull from private security video.”

  Shemmy said, “HQ is down one block. Just so you know, the PsyLED agent tailed us here.”

  “Of course he did,” I muttered. But Rick didn’t try to follow us through the back gate. He rolled away through the rain into the darkness. Over the coms system I heard Alex say, “The cruise ship that was trying to dock? It just vanished. The Coast Guard vessel following it downriver said it was there one second and gone the next. They’re tracking it by its wake now, but it’s nearly impossible in the dark.”

  “Copy,” Eli said.

  It was still predawn as we pulled in behind Derek and his top men. Some were team Tequila, from the first time I met him, and some were team Vodka. There was not enough left of either team to make one single full unit. There had been battles. Too many battles. Too many injuries and deaths.

  We deserted the limo under the porte cochere, Bruiser and Edmund parting and moving in different directions. Eli hung with me and gave Derek one of those manly nods that accepted the other’s presence without being too happy about it. Everybody around here had a history. “Any luck?” I asked Derek as we went inside out of the wet and cold.

  “Le Bâtard and Louis—the Deadly Duo—haven’t been to the Roosevelt, or the Hotel Monteleone, or Dauphine Orleans, or the Omni.”

  Deadly Duo. I liked that. I liked even better that Derek had started assigning nicknames the way I did. Not that I’d ever say so. Instead, I said, “You covered a lot of territory.”

  “We broke up into small groups. Less conspicuous. Each group took a vamp to let us get where we needed.” He grimaced, his full lips scowling, as he said the last part. Derek hated working with vamps. Hated that they could roll most humans so easily. But he used the tools at his disposal, always had.

  He continued, “One team did get a tip where an unknown vamp might be. It seems there’s a five-star vamp inn we didn’t know about.”

  “Not the Acton House?” The Acton House was where famous vamp visitors of the twentieth century had stayed, including the Son of Darkness, one of the most powerful vamps in the world, on the good part of his visit. Since then, the SOD had been hanging on the wall of Leo’s basement. Worst vacation spot ever.

  “The St. Emilion House,” Derek said, leading the way into the lower, back entrance and up in the elevator. “According to our source, it’s discreet, gated, and has ten staff per bloodsucker. We did a drive-by. Place also has more cameras than Fort Knox. I doubt that it has anyone staying there right now because it’s for sale. I called Scrappy on the way back and she asked Leo about it. It’s one of the properties that went on the market after the last vamp mini-war.”

  The elevator doors opened and Eli placed the blood bottle in my hands. As the doors closed on us, he drew his weapons. Derek and I both raised our brows at him. “Edmund was a little aggrieved when he smelled the contents.” Eli nodded at the bottle. “If Leo loses it, I can shoot him, standard ammo. It’ll at least slow him down and let us get a door between us.”

  Derek let a grin pull at his mouth. Like Eli, he was former military and if he showed amusement it was for a reason. “Legs, I think I’ll tag along to see how this goes down.” He led the way from the elevator to Leo’s office and knocked on the door. When Scrappy answered it, Derek said, his face emotionless, “The Enforcers and Yellowrock’s second.”

  Scrappy was looking relaxed and more rested than the last few times I had seen her. She stood aside and left as we entered, the smell of pepper and papyrus and the fainter scent of ink on the air. And blood. Scrappy looked mighty happy as she left. I wondered if Leo’s redheaded assistant had been lunch.

  We moved silently across the piled carpets in the hallway, and the perfume of other vamps infused the air. The faint trace of tea in Katie’s scent and Grégoire’s pale green odor of freshwater streams and summer gardens, this time overlaid with a dissipating reek of fear. And then blanketed with the scent of recent and sweaty sex. Lots of sex.

  The furniture had been moved out, a few essential pieces shoved back, to line the walls: the desk, its chair, the armoire, which had been pushed to the side, and a smaller-than-normal tea tray were still present. A second built-in fireplace had been exposed on the wall where the armoire had been and it was burning merrily. A round, king-sized bed had been placed in the center of Leo’s office, a silk fitted sheet hiding the mattress itself. It was covered with velvet throws; chenille throws; a puffy, fluffy, silky comforter; a dozen or so pillows; and three vamps in various stages of undress. I stopped hard at the end of the hallway. There were things I so did not want or need to see. I already wanted to stab out my eyeballs.

  Leo (pretty sure he was buck naked) lay closest to us, on his side, his bare feet dangling over the edge of the mattress, a thin, shiny sheet tossed over his hips, his head on his arm. Long black hair dangled over the side, curling on the ends. Katie was in the middle and definitely naked, the small fleur-de-lis brand on her upper arm darker than I remembered, the scar brown and uniform. She had been branded before she was turned, possibly as a crime of the French state of the time. Delicate and erotic, she was posed languidly on the mattress, facing Leo, the covers underneath her. Grégoire, farthest from the doorway, was at her back, one arm holding her close to him, spooning, his face buried in her nape, her ash-blond hair tangled in his lighter locks. At least he was under the covers. Mostly. The important bits.

  “Boss,” I said calmly.

  “Do you know why the revenants are rising?” he asked, opening his eyes, cutting to the chase.

  “Yup.”

  Leo brushed the hair out of this eyes and sat up. His hair was longer than I remembered, a good six inches longer. It lay on his shoulders and across his chest in a tousled disarray. Sex on a stick. “Proceed,” he said.

  I filled him in on the discoveries of the day, including the pink silk line we found at the funeral parlor. “We also found a bottle of something that made Edmund freak out. It’s possible that it’s used in the embalming process. Maybe it—”

  Leo thrust out his hand in a give it to me gesture, imperative.

  I looked at Eli, who moved into the room where he could cover all the vamps. He centered one weapon on Leo, the other on Grégoire. “You get Katie,” he instructed Derek. Leo vamped out. So did Katie. Grégoire didn’t move except to twitch the arm that hung off the edge of the mattress.

  “Blade,” I said to Eli, assuming that the boy wonder already had one in hand.

  “Got it.”

  “Explain yourselves,” Leo said around his fangs, in the soft velvety tones of the mesmerizing fanghead.

  Derek sighed and drew a weapon. “Standard ammo, boss. You try to kill us, go into a feeding frenzy, we’ll shoot you, let you heal. Come back at a better time.”

  “It’s what a good Enforcer does,” I said. Leo scowled at me, but I stepped close and extended the bottle to him. The Master of the City of New Orleans, way underdressed for a business meeting, wrapped his pale fingers around the neck of the bottle and pulled it from me. Without removing it, he sniffed the cork. Stopped, his eyes narrowing, his head tilting to the side as if to access an old memory. But he didn
’t go nutso or try to eat me. Instead, his fangs retracted, his eyes bleeding back to human. He was beautiful and, for a moment, uncertain, perhaps even terrified, though he hid it instantly. He extended the bottle to me. I took it and stepped back.

  Leo took a breath deeper than he needed for speaking, as if to settle himself, and said, “This contains the blood of Louis the Seventh. And Le Bâtard. And a dozen others I recall from long ago.” He lifted his brows. “And the blood of Titus Flavius Vespasianus.”

  As Leo spoke, Grégoire peered out with one beautiful blue eye. The scent of fear pulsed into the room. “I told you that Le Bâtard is here.”

  Leo said, “We have no eyewitness proof of his presence in the city. Be still, my love.” But things were moving in the back of Leo’s eyes, like pieces on a chessboard, rearranged and reorganized and reconsidered. Leo was still in the game. Musingly, he said, “If the age of the rising revenants and the scent of this blood are indicators, some plan of our enemies has seemingly been in place for two hundred years. The Caruso Family were originally Clan Bouvier, but if they have been the willing spies of the Europeans, they may have set a strategy in motion that we only see with the rising of the revenants.”

  Grégoire’s face slowly eased away from Katie’s shoulder, his eyes bright with tears. “I told you. I am doomed.”

  Leo leaned back, exposing waaaay too much of himself, and stroked Grégoire’s pale white shoulder. Katie pulled a golden comforter over Blondie. “You are safe, my darling,” she said. “Remember that you are safe here. We three are enough to defeat them all.”

  “No one is doomed,” Leo said softly, a faint smile on his face, his eyes turning to me in speculation. “We are quite safe. All is according to plan.”

  I frowned, not liking that I seemed to be part of his plan. “You know why the revenants are rising,” I guessed.

  Leo rolled back to us, set his eyes on me, and readjusted his silk covering. Thank God. “Revenants rise from the second death when they are not put properly in the ground. There are myths that they might be raised by choice and the will of their masters, for use in battle, where there is a need for confusion, fear, and where large numbers of inconsequential bodies might be lost without harm to the plan of battle.” He stopped, watching us all.

  He wasn’t going to tell us outright. Either he was playing with us the way a predator played with his dinner, or he wanted to see if we could figure it out on our own. I hated guessing games. “Okay. You brought your core people into HQ. You think Le Bâtard and Louis Seven are in town. You think the boat that tried to dock is tied into some arcane plan by the Europeans. You think it’s possible that the Europeans are . . .” I stopped, realization dawning. I met his eyes. “You think they’re sitting offshore, ready to come ashore the moment agreement is reached on the parley, not giving you time to get plans laid. You think they’re raising revenants to make it harder for you to keep order in your city, and to turn the local officials against you.”

  “You are becoming sagacious and perspicacious, my catty Enforcer. Titus Flavius Vespasianus was a powerful general, who became the Roman emperor Titus,” Leo said, crossing his ankles, bending his elbow, and propping his head on a hand. The scant covering slipped again, just enough, and I willed my eyes to not look down. “As a human, he and his second-in-command, Tiberius Julius Alexander, besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem, which had been occupied by its Jewish and Mithran defenders. The siege ended with the sacking of the city and the destruction of its famous Second Temple. He returned home and gained the throne, ruling Rome for two years before he was turned by his vampire concubine, a woman he captured from the fall of Jerusalem. He is the undisputed ruler of the European Mithrans.”

  I remembered the story of Sabina, the other outclan priestess. She had been turned early in the time of the first vamps. “Sabina?”

  “No. Not Sabina,” Katie said. She pulled a chenille throw from beneath her and wrapped it around herself fully.

  Thank God. One covered, two to go.

  She slid out of the bed, stood, and went to the armoire, from which she removed two bottles of wine, both red, and three glasses. “Another turned him. Long true-dead.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth, but she had no reason to lie.

  “Though Titus Flavius Vespasianus signed the Vampira Carta,” Leo said, speaking of the legal papers that passed for law among vampires, “he did so against his will. He is still the ruler of the vampires, all vampires, Mithran and Naturaleza. Humans are cattle to him. No one has successfully stood against him, though my uncle Amaury successfully kept these shores from his influence.”

  “Titus Flavius is strong,” Katie said, applying a corkscrew to the first bottle. “Not as powerful as the Sons of Darkness, but his blood is potent. Some say it is by way of blood magic.”

  “The kind of stuff the Damours used?” I asked.

  “Titus Flavius visited the island of Saint-Domingue during the time the Damours were landowners and slave owners there, free to pursue the most vile forms of magics,” Leo said. He rolled off the bed, not taking the covers.

  I averted my eyes fast, but not fast enough. I got the full frontal nudity and I could smell Derek’s concealed amusement, laughing at my nude-body-squeamishness. This was one reason I’d never make it as a full-time Enforcer. Eww. I found myself staring at a painting of Katie, one I hadn’t seen before. In it she was naked—Katie was always presented in a state of undress—lying in a bed with a man wearing a crown and nothing else. It was night through the windows of the painting, a quarter moon hanging in the evening sky. A woman stood at the window, her dark-skinned face shadowed, only her eyes bright, vaguely familiar. She was watching the couple. I couldn’t place her but her eyes drew me. I might have met her. But the context didn’t come to me. I played a timeline game, going back to the moment I met my first vamp—Katie—and moving through until now. I knew those eyes, but who she was, I didn’t know, not with her forehead, lower face, and hair hidden.

  The timeline game was better than watching Leo, Katie, and Grégoire, who still occupied the bed, his nether regions and his delicate boyish face covered, thank God. Grégoire looked fifteen, and he had been horribly abused by his creator, Le Bâtard. Katie crawled back into the bed and gathered Grégoire in her arms, his back to her now, covering her from chest to midthigh, her arms around him, holding a glass to his lips. He took the glass and sipped, and Katie’s arms dropped into his lap. To his . . . Oh. My. God. I needed blinders. Or a fork to stab out my mind’s eye. Stab, stab, stab. I stared at the fire, hoping the flames would blind me to the rest of the room.

  Standing naked, Leo took a glass of the red wine as well, the bowl cupped in his palm, and rolled the liquid up around the rim and back. “Good legs,” he said, holding the glass to the light, one arm high. Showing off. Naked. Dang it. And my nickname was Legs. Which he knew. Leo sniffed the wine in tiny sharp bursts. “A nice blend of Merlot with a sterner, later-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon. Full in body, lush velvety tannins, and intense plum and blackberry flavors. The Europeans will hate it. See that Lee orders a dozen cases.” He was smiling when he said it. “Overnight delivery. And the other red?”

  Katie passed him a second glass. “It is sweet.”

  Leo tasted and made a face. “Indeed it is. Too sweet for me to simulate enjoyment. That one may be struck from the list.” He handed it back and looked at me. “My Jane.”

  I heaved a sigh. In the painting, the king had his hands all over Katie. Maybe it wasn’t so good to be staring there. “Yes.”

  “You seem dismayed at my lack of attire. This is your doing. We are practicing our parts in the grand play that will shock and amuse the Europeans.”

  I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

  “You once suggested that we play Petruchio to Katherine’s shrew.” He gave Katie a small bow. “My apologies, mon coeur.”

 
She shrugged a perfect shoulder. “I was a shrew to him. I was a shrew to all of them. It was the title I deserved. But only you conquered my heart, Leo.”

  “Are we done here?” I asked.

  “When Titus Flavius Vespasianus arrives, you will play your part, my Jane. Until then you are dismissed.”

  I grabbed the blood bottle, turned tail, and ran. Well, actually turned on a toe and walked out of the room and back to the limo. But with very long strides. Eli kept up with me and I could tell he was laughing. When the door closed on us I said, “Speak and die.”

  He laughed aloud. The sound was so rare, and so unexpected, that I didn’t kill him.

  • • •

  We took a long detour on the way home, past the Acton House, which was currently empty and for sale. I remembered the death of the most recent proprietor, a tiny woman with pink hair, someone I hadn’t thought to protect and who had died thanks to my lack of foresight. Guilt, my old friend, raised her ugly head and sank claws into me. Moments later, we pulled up in front of a larger house with a small, discreet FOR SALE sign out front.

  “St. Emilion House,” Shemmy said.

  “It would be a good investment,” Eli said, his tone too even to be casual.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Why? We have a house. And you said we could rearrange the space to make it work.”

  “We can. This one would make a great investment for the Europeans’ visit.”