by Faith Hunter
The room was unlike the one Grégoire slept in, with its tapestries and fancy antiques and carpets. Leo’s room had wooden floors, pale blue walls, and a four-poster bed with intricate carvings. There were three armoires, all closed; a single chair, a small table, and a bookshelf full of old books and scrolls and wax tablets, of the sort he had owned before his former home burned to the ground. Some things had been saved from the flames, perhaps these.
I pulled the chair into the corner and sat, silent, watching, a nine-mil in one hand. Just in case.
Katie entered after me, bringing Leo’s dismembered fingers for reattachment. A hand reached out and snatched away the dagger in Leo’s back. Edmund brought gray silk thread and a medical bag for sewing. Someone else took a liquor bottle off Leo’s shelf and cleaned the fingers, dousing them in copious amounts of ethanol. Edmund grabbed the bottle and shoved it away, saying, “One does not use a thirty-year-old Macallan for dismembered Mithran limbs. One uses vodka.”
I heard the words coming out of my mouth before I could help it. “Doesn’t that cause cell damage?”
On his bed, Leo laughed, as if at my naïveté, and clasped Edmund’s hand with his own. “I wish a taste of that elixir before you put it away. It’s obscene to open that bottle and not taste.” Someone found two cut crystal glasses and poured some of the Macallan in each, added a splash of water, and the two men clinked glasses. Sipped. Edmund sighed, the sound so longing that I had to figure he’d had nothing so nice since he lost his own clan. Lesser vamps probably didn’t get the good stuff.
“Sire,” Edmund said in thanks.
Around him other, even lesser vamps opened ancient surgery supplies from Edmund’s medical bag and doused them with vodka. There was nothing in sterile packets, and the part of me that remembered my emergency medical classes cringed. But then, vamp physiology was not human in any way. So what did I know?
“Do you remember the last time I replaced a body part?” Edmund went on. “You offered a much less fine drink.”
“We were on a battlefield,” Leo said, his voice regaining something akin to the mellifluous tones it usually carried. “Scotch doesn’t travel well, not in saddlebags in summer.”
“Rotgut,” Edmund said. “Swill.”
“’Twas all we had, mon amie,” Leo said, his laughter containing a faint wheeze of pain and grief over Grégoiré’s kidnapping. Leo looked at me. “Save him.” I nodded.
“Let’s flip you over, sire, so the priestesses can heal your back. Removing that blade was unwise, whoever did it. Blades should be removed from bodies—even Mithran bodies—in the presence of a skilled surgeon or a master with particularly potent blood. Even a master can bleed out if the placement was especially skilled.”
“What if the blade was silvered?” a voice asked from the corner of the room.
Edmund looked up at that. Sipped, while surveying the onlookers. Perhaps he was remembering his own brush with silvered death only a day or so past. “In that case, yank it out and bleed yourself inside the wound. Feed the Mithran. And pray.”
If anyone thought the order to pray was odd, no one said so. In fact, a tiny vamp at the edge of the bed dropped to her knees and started praying to a handful of beads. It wasn’t a prayer like I remembered from the Christian children’s home where I grew up, and it was full of stuff about Mary. I figured it was Catholic and I had been wrong about her praying to the beads themselves. Another person dropped and started praying too, also with beads, this one talking to Allah.
Vamps. Praying. This was crazy. Except that their sire and master was injured, and his death would set into motion perilous changes. If Leo fell, with his city in chaos, and the EVs arrived, all of Leo’s people were in danger of a second and true-death. I secured my weapon and escaped to the elevator and down, to find another madhouse where the NOPD bomb squad was defusing and removing bombs in the ballroom. The cops escorted me back into the elevator and instructed me to go up a level and out the front door.
Unfortunately, a crime scene investigation was taking place there. Two dead and drained gang members—kids—lay on the floor and the security system just happened to have gone out during this battle, so there was no internal surveillance of the fight or the deaths. The cops seemed to find that suspiciously convenient and wanted to talk to everyone present. Including me. And while Eli, who was sitting in a folding chair in the security room, had proof of our whereabouts on his thumb drive, taken from Adrianna’s prison, he didn’t volunteer that just yet. He wanted to upload the video first before turning over the drive to the cops, so we were stuck. Sitting. Waiting.
Alex, who had followed everything on video, called and talked to his brother about the fights he was reviewing on the security feed. Skinwalker hearing allowed me to hear it all. Alex had video of the ballroom brawl, or most of it, and he had the battle in Leo’s office. “Le Bâtard and four other vamps came in through the secret side-gate entrance,” he said.
Dread swarmed through me like hornets. I hadn’t secured the gate after I entered. Nor had Eli. We had been keeping our exit open, but in hindsight that had been stupid. Very stupid.
“Grégoire fought, but Le Bâtard threw some kind of spell at him and Grégoire fell. That was when the sword-fighting vamps rushed Leo, five to one, and cut him to pieces. When Leo fell, they took Grégoire and retreated.”
“Ask him if he can follow their vehicle,” I said.
“Working on it now, Jane,” Alex said.
“Have I told you recently that you do a great job?” I asked the Kid.
“Words are nice, but I’d rather have a car.”
Eli snorted and ended the call.
We sat in the security office near the front door, unmoving, silent. I was thinking through the last hours, tying the events from now into events from months and months past. Tried to make sense of it all. Le Bâtard wanted Grégoire. Everything else was a feint? No, that left out the revenants and the ship at the dock and the invisible ship in the lake and the attempt to free Adrianna, and the bombs in the ballroom. Vamps never had just one goal for anything they did, thinking far ahead on the chessboards of their games. They always had multiple goals. Le Bâtard would take what he could from each attack. Yeah. That.
Dawn was approaching when a minor vamp walked up to me and handed me a box. It was plain, white, no tape, no bow, so it wasn’t a present. “From your primo, Edmund Hartley. With his compliments. He said to tell you that disturbing the priestesses was not necessary. His exact words were, ‘Brawn and bullets beat magic.’”
I let a corner of my mouth curl up, wondering if he had shot Adrianna to get the bracelet off her. Not asking, but still curious. I opened the box and inside was a gold snake, the one from Adriana’s arm. And she had put up a fight getting it removed, if the blood on it was an indication. I sniffed the blood. The crazy woman’s, all right. I rubbed my fingers over the gold, which was slick and shiny and slightly warm to the touch.
“Legs?”
I looked up. “Oh. Hey, Wrassler. ’Sup.”
“I’ve been standing here for a good thirty seconds, talking to you.”
Eli was watching me with narrowed eyes. Not concerned, exactly, but piercingly interested.
I raised the snake to Wrassler and asked, “Does this feel wrong to you?”
Wrassler was a seriously big man, like World Wrestling Entertainment big, and though he’d lost a leg and full use of one arm, he still fit the size ratio. Even more since he muscled up after the injury. He was big and bald and my friend. He took the snake and handed it back, fast. “It’s spelled. Something dark.”
I held the snake, drawing on Beast vision. Something dark, like a fog of moisture, wrapped around my fingers. I hadn’t noticed that about the bracelet until now. The dark shadow was in the shape of a snake. The snake in the center of all things was what skinwalkers used to shape-shift. What if it was magic that worked contrar
y to my own? What if someone had given it to Adrianna knowing that I’d take it? I was full of conspiracy theories lately, but vamps lived for that stuff. I had no desire for anything dark magic in my life. I frowned at the snake. “You got a big hammer?”
“There’s a maul in the tool shed out back. You want me to beat it out of shape, Enforcer?” He used the last word to remind me that because I was one of Leo’s Enforcers, what I wanted had significance and weight, but I had to formulate a request into a specific order.
“Yes. Beat it out of shape. Then take it somewhere and have it melted down. Then give it to the witch coven and have them Break it. Charge the spell-cost to Leo.” Break was a magical working to stop and destroy another magical working. I put the snake back in the box and instantly felt better. The box, though plain, was an anti-magic box. Cool. And yeah. The magic in the snake was of an attack variety, going after my own, maybe striking anyone’s magic. “Once it’s broken, bring it back to me.”
“For the Enforcer.” It sounded formulaic.
I figured that was agreement, and I gave him the box. “Thanks, Wrassler. How’s the dating life?”
The big guy took the chair beside me. It creaked under his weight. “I never thanked you for setting me up with Jodi.”
“I didn’t set you up.”
Wrassler scuffed a palm and sausagelike fingers over his bald pate. “Potayto, potahto. I’m crazy about that girl.”
“I’m glad.” And I was. Jodi was a cop, a successful woman in a man’s world, but she had been lonely. So had Wrassler. They had thrown mournful, meaningful, lovesick glances at each other for months. They were perfect together.
“I’m gonna propose.”
My happy romance-is-everything thought pattern crashed and burned. Jodi would have a conflict of interest if she married a blood-servant of the Master of the City. She would not be allowed to maintain her command of the woo-woo department of NOPD. She would be demoted, pushed aside until she was totally ostracized and powerless. And she would never leave the force. And Wrassler would never leave Leo. Jodi was totally human. Wrassler was a blood-servant and would live for a couple hundred years. This looked like a disaster waiting to happen. I hadn’t thought this through. “Uhhh.”
“I got the ring.” Wrassler was holding out a small, black velvet jewelry box. He opened it with a thumb. Inside was a yellow gold ring with three diamonds the size of pencil erasers. I knew next to nothing about diamonds, and even I knew they were flawless. Nothing else flashed like that. Wrassler stood, pocketing the velvet box. “Just so you know.” He walked away, the snake box in his other hand.
Lightning struck down. The Gray Between opened around me. Time skidded, twisted, started, and stopped. In the nonmoments that took place, I caught a glimpse of the security system at my side. The lights, which should have been green or blinking green, all went red.
The lightning was shorting out the system. I turned in my chair and saw the snake box in Wrassler’s hand. It was shining red, a line of red light, rippling like lightning coming from the front doors, crackling, hitting the snake, and then shooting through the floor. And down.
Toward the Son of Darkness.
CHAPTER 13
Landing with a Thump on the Polar Bear Rug
I spun up and into a sprint. Almost reached the main elevator before I realized it would never open for me, not in no-time, even if the cops and crime scene techs hadn’t commandeered it. I whirled and raced for the stairs. Shoving the door open took effort and muscles strained to the limit. I dodged people on the stairs, more people than usual, thanks to the main elevator and half of HQ being off limits.
I took stairs, then hallways, then more stairs. It had taken weeks to map all the no-longer-secret passageways and stairways in the joint, and I was sure we had missed some. The architect had both a funny sense of humor and a good idea about hidey spots and ambush locations. I wound down and down. Past sub-four, where fanghead prisoners, like Adrianna, were kept, and into the lowest sub-basement, sub-five.
It was cold and dank and wet down here. The walls were spelled to keep out the water that would have otherwise dripped in and filled the place, thanks to the high water table in New Orleans. It was so wet right now that the whole place would be a swimming pool in minutes if the working failed. There was a faint hint of mold. A stronger tang of blood. And the reek of unwashed vamp. The Son of Darkness hung on the wall, still wearing the blood- and filth-encrusted clothing he’d worn when I had taken him down. The serial killer was still pulp and goo but was mostly human-shaped now, his long bones nearly back in place, his facial structure beginning to look normal. But his body was surrounded by a nimbus of red, a glow just like the one on the snake box. “Bingo,” I said.
Time spat and shook through me and returned to normal. I watched carefully and the magics vanished. If I hadn’t been using Beast-sight and my own skinwalker abilities, I’d never have seen it at all.
“Joses, son of Judas Iscariot,” I said, pronouncing it Yo-sace, son of Ioudas Issachar, as he had himself two thousand years ago, when he and his brother took the crosses of Golgotha and tried to bring their father, Judas, the betrayer, back to life. “Joseph Santana.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. His heart—not that he had one anymore, since I’d ripped it out of his chest—didn’t beat. I had no idea how he was healing except that his body might truly be immortal. Even without a heart, which I had given to the witches. I needed to call Jodi and see if the heart was still fresh and healthy. If the heart hadn’t begun decomp, that meant that I could take the SOD’s head and the pieces would still live. Which would be freaky.
I thought about the smell of the blood in the blood bottle. And the pink thread on the dog-fanged revenants. Someone had used immortal blood on the head and neck of the dead vamps when they were reassembled for funerals. And they healed. Sort of. Enough to come out of the graves when called. That was why so many were buried in human graveyards and not in the vamp cemetery on the far side of the Mississippi River with the other vamps.
If a sleeper agent had gotten some of that blood to the SOD at any point in the last months, that might be why the Son of Darkness was healing. Callan. Fernand. Amitee. Any of them might have gotten down here. I leaned and sniffed. Caught the stench of the mixed blood from the blood bottle. It still smelled fresh, which never happened with vamp blood until now. I traced the scent with my nose. It had been sprinkled all over the SOD.
This. This was why they had attacked HQ. To get down to sub-five and put blood on the heartless bag of bones.
I turned and walked back up the stairways and walkways and tunnels and passageways and back to the front entrance. Time flipped back and forth between stopped and normal as I walked through it all until I found Wrassler and Derek in conversation and told them what I had discovered. “Get a hose and wash him off,” I said. “It’s probably too late but it’s marginally better than nothing. And find and secure Callan and the Marchands. They’re in this up to their fangs.” When neither moved, I said, “Orders of the Enforcer,” which let them off the hook if there were negative repercussions from my decisions.
“I’ll hose off Joseph Santana,” Wrassler said, speaking of the Son of Darkness. “You handle the detainees.” Derek nodded and turned on a heel without speaking. Wrassler raised his eyebrows and looked at me. “Why does he hate you?”
I shrugged. “My winning personality?”
Wrassler moved off, chuckling and muttering, “Winning personality. Yeah. Sure.”
In the foyer, the cops were still questioning vamps, trying to get in the last interviews before dawn hit and the younger vamps became comatose and the older ones simply walked away. It would be hours before they talked to me, and I was done waiting. NOPD knew where I lived. They could come visit me there. I waved to Eli and walked out the front door.
There was a vamp central SUV parked in the big parking area with t
he key fob under the mat. I started the vehicle, flipped on the wipers, and drove home. I let my mind rove and wander as I drove, not trying to think anything in particular, not trying to make connections or deduce anything at all. Just letting myself meander internally. I had a bad feeling about a lot of things I had seen tonight and they seemed to lead nowhere. Which meant that they had to have a connection.
I pulled in an empty spot in front of the house and stopped. The lightning hit again, far off this time, and I saw the green sparking glow in my bedroom. The initial traces of understanding washed through me as all the little pieces began to line up for inspection.
The first time I had seen the magical thing called le breloque had been in a storm. A magical storm. A storm god, an Anzu, wanted it. There were magical detonators on normal bombs. Red magics on the snake and on the SOD. Mixed blood on the VIP—very important prisoner. All the Europeans knew we had him, and maybe they didn’t know he was heartless. Heartless. Funny me. Except it wasn’t amusing at all. After seeing revenants rise, I had to concede that the blood might heal the bag of bones. Maybe totally.
Whatever was going on was tied to the SOD, le breloque, the magical storm, the arcenciels trapped in the magical storm, and the European vamps. Leo said he knew they hadn’t come ashore en masse. But they were tied in with everything that was going on, and Leo had to know that. Sooo. Leo knew what was going on and he was letting it happen. Or . . . He had thought he knew. And then Grégoire was taken. Yeah. That.
I turned off the vehicle, got out, and looked up, seeing only cloud-to-cloud lightning. I pulled on Beast’s night vision, however, and I saw a great deal more. Arcenciels dancing in the lightning, not dropping into no-time. Three of them. As if they were trapped in real time.