by Faith Hunter
I walked inside. Wrung out and replaced the sponges by the door. And opened my bedroom door. On my small table was le breloque, glowing green, throwing green sparks. Red motes raced through the green. The top part of the corona was composed of laurel leaves. The bottom was a gold ring with the odd symbols on it. Tonight I had seen a similar gold circlet on the head of a king, his hands all over Katie Fonteneau, Leo’s heir.
Looking down, I saw the red motes and the silver-gray motes of my skinwalker energies inside me. Magic. Magic that had been waiting to find its proper shape and form. Waiting to awaken. The long game. I opened the small footstool and stood on the top rung so I could see the box of magical stuff. It was sparking too, the same colors as the corona that had once been a crown on a king’s head. Carefully, I took the box off the shelf and placed it on the foot of the bed. I opened the box. Inside were magical trinkets, including a particular gem. The Glob had been part of the blood-magic spell that I had interrupted the night the red motes had entered me. Now the device was attuned to me, somehow, something I had known since it had been transformed inside my own lightning-scorched flesh. Lightning had changed it. Changed me.
Right now, it was being charged by the magical storm outside. I didn’t touch it. Not this time.
Alex knocked softly on the door. I grunted and he stepped inside. “Two hours ago, two humans were allowed ashore from a cruise ship that may or may not have had vampires as other passengers. Their reason for being allowed on U.S. soil was stated as being ‘to deal with government and public officials and appropriate paperwork.’”
I closed the box and put it back on the shelf. Slid my hand away from the hedge of thorns that protected it. Alex said, “Brandon and Brian were at the dock as Leo’s lawyer and interpreters when they heard that Grégoire had been taken. They left the docks midnegotiation. An international incident seems to be brewing between what might have been European blood-servants, representatives of the Master of the City, and the U.S. government. The mayor’s spokesperson is making a political commotion and squawking to the media about the MOC walking out of negotiations.”
“Did Leo call the Roberes off?”
“No. That was unilateral.”
“So, not Leo’s decision.”
“True. It’s still a problem.”
“But not an Enforcer job at this point in time.”
“No. But Grégoire and Brian and Brandon all are missing.”
I remembered the painting in Leo’s office, Katie in bed with a man, a woman peering in through the window as the last piece fell into place. I knew who all three players from that painting were. “Katie was having sex with the king, the emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus himself,” I muttered.
“What?”
I shook my head, as if to shake up the things rattling around inside it. “I’ll be right back.” I went through the side door, across the porch, and back into the rain as I dropped to the ground. By now I had been so wet for so long that I didn’t even notice it except for the cold. That was pretty miserable, and I shivered. I passed my boulders and stopped at the fountain. It was a huge marble tulip full of rainwater to the petaled rim, with a miniature naked woman sitting atop, the sculpture finely detailed. It no longer splashed, because I had turned off the water, but the statue was of Katie, naked, complete with fangs. She rose from the middle of the fountain bowl, a small, carved stone perfection, a masterwork.
This house had been Katie’s before she lent it to me and then gave it to me as payment for a service. I used her teapots to make tea. Sat on her furniture. I never liked her, but I had never worried that she was a threat. Bedbug crazy, yes. Dangerous, no. I turned from the fountain, raced up the shattered boulders in the former rock garden, and leaped for the brick fence, less than twelve feet from the top of the rock pile. I got a toehold on a small irregularity and shoved up. Now that I didn’t have to hide what I was, I vaulted over and landed on the far side, splashing down.
I trotted to Katie’s back door and banged.
Troll, Katie’s primo blood-servant, opened the door, almost as if he had been expecting me. He looked pale in the predawn light, as if he had been fed on too often and too deeply. He was wearing a T-shirt under a hoodie and thick jogging pants against the growing cold. He was huge, all muscle and toughness, and the winter clothes were tight on his torso, loose on his lower legs and arms, layered for the weather. “Little Janie,” he said.
“Troll. The Enforcer of the Master of the City of New Orleans and the greater Southeast USA needs to see the paintings of Katie.”
His face didn’t change but his scent did. A faint, barely-there alteration. It gained the taint of despair. I thought he might refuse me, but the title of Enforcer obligated him to back away. Only Katie herself could refuse me.
It was nearly dawn, in the middle of an unusual and epic storm. Katie’s Ladies was empty of clients, the girls in their rooms doing whatever working girls who catered to vamps did in their off hours. I walked through the house. Troll followed me, and together we stopped at each painting of Katie, studying them all, one by one.
The house was elegant if slightly overdone, decorated in hundreds of shades of gold from palest yellow to darkest golden brown. There were paintings and statues and objects d’art everywhere, a lot of them of Katie. I ended up where I had intended, in the parlor, gold silk fabrics and the bigger-than-life artwork of a nude Katie hanging on the wall. I had first seen the painting when two vamps were tortured in this room, in silver cages. One was Callan. The vamp from the ballroom.
That horrible night, I had kept my eyes on the portrait of Katie to keep from having to watch the cruelty. That made me a coward in my own eyes, but my cowardice was something to think about another time. Or maybe never.
Now I studied the oversized portrait in detail, deliberately.
Katie was naked as a jaybird, standing on a mussed tapestry of some kind, in a field, with a brook nearby and lots of trees. The painting was done in daylight, with shadows falling as they would have in sunshine, which meant it was painted before Katie was turned. In the distant background was a building. Not a castle, more like a fancy palace. Behind Katie was a pedestal, and on the pedestal were two crowns, one resting at an angle over the other. But the brushstrokes and the colors of the pedestal were different from the cracked and shiny patina of the rest of the portrait.
I reached out and touched them, comparing the textures of the paints. The pedestal and crowns had been added later. I felt Troll moving closer, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I said, “I don’t remember this painting when I upgraded the house’s security system, soon after I got to New Orleans.”
Troll didn’t reply.
“It was added after Katie redecorated, wasn’t it?”
He remained silent, immobile. I didn’t turn, but I felt and smelled Troll’s tension and something like pain. More softly I asked, “It was sent here, wasn’t it? It was a message. That the Europeans were coming and that Katie was to remember old loyalties.” My fingers stroked again over the pedestal and its crowns. Crowns that, at some point, had been joined together and were currently glowing with each lightning strike in my bedroom.
I turned to Troll, studying him. He looked tired, worn, beaten. Avoiding my eyes, he slowly sat on the gold couch, fingers dangling between his knees, his sleeves hanging to his middle knuckles. He shook his head, the soft lights tacking across his bald dome. “I kept hoping that Leo would come here, would drink from me. Would know what my mistress was doing. He didn’t. He remained far away.”
As if Leo had known . . . “When did the painting arrive?”
“Just after you came to New Orleans. Prior to the first visit by the weres and the successful parley.”
Were-creatures had come out of the closet recently, and the Party of African Weres and the International Association of Weres had visited Leo and reached a political accord, in what had
probably been direct defiance of the Europeans.
“You know I have to stop her.”
“And you know I can’t let you harm her.” In a move that would have impressed a vamp, Troll snapped his hands. Two small handguns dropped into his palms.
I was already moving. Kicked up my leg. Stepping into the motion, adding momentum and spin. He was a big guy, but a well-placed kick to the wrists beat weight lifting any day. I followed it up, stepping closer and swinging a fist into his jaw. The impact sent his jaw swinging, broken. My other fist landed slightly higher, a direct hit to his temple. He went down. Landing with a thump on the polar bear rug several feet away. Out cold.
On a human, the force and location of the hits would likely have resulted in a need for surgery on his jaw and possibly permanent brain damage. Movies that show the injured getting up and continuing the fight are just stupid. Most no-holds-barred fights end in less than a minute.
I took away the guns, sliding them out of the metal harness that had snapped the weapons into his palms. Secreted them in the couch cushions. While he was out, I sent a text to Eli and then did a back-side pat-down on Troll. Ignoring the broken jaw, I flipped him over and did a front-side pat-down, which was when I discovered the blades in his underwear. If he had been conscious I might never have found the blades. As it was, I turned my head to the side and worked in my peripheral vision when I removed them. They were warm and slightly sweat-damp. He might have tried to kill me, but I liked Troll and I never wanted to get this personal with the big guy. And he was Rick’s uncle back a few generations. I might need Rick. No point in making him mad for getting fresh with a family member.
I needed somewhere to put Troll. I made a quick call on Katie’s landline phone, as I had forgotten my own cell back at the house. I grabbed an arm and rolled the big guy to a sitting position and then up into a fireman’s carry, keeping one of his broken wrists in mine. His scent changed as I repositioned him. I staggered under the weight. “Holy crap, dude. What do you weigh? Four hundred pounds?”
“Three fifty,” he said, his words muffled by the broken jaw. “Wimp.”
“I broke your jaw and both wrists,” I said as I carried him out the front door into the rain. Grunting. Breathing too hard. “Don’t wimp me.”
“I been drinking Katie’s blood for over a hundred years. You think I couldn’t evade if I’d wanted to?”
“So you wanted to be taken down?”
“I wanted to be taken to Leo and read,” Troll said, “with no one the wiser.”
I walked out the door and stood in a soft rain in the dawn light and thought about his too-soft words. Then I started hiking down the street, his weight making my joints ache. After a block, I said, “You can’t say no to Katie, who is working with the EVs as a spy in Leo’s camp. But you think the EVs are going to backstab her once they’re finished with her. So you want Leo to know, and then take her down easy and lock her away. Give her a chance to become loyal to him again.”
“Katie’s always been loyal to Leo,” he said. More sadly he added, “She loves him to the moon and back. But Le Bâtard has her younger sister prisoner. A vamp scion named Alesha Fonteneau.”
“And the bastard is threatening Katie with killing the sister?”
“Yeah. Alesha is . . . was Leo’s foremost spy in the European vamp camp, the one Leo calls Madam Spy. Le Bâtard found out. He hurt her. Bad. Sent photos to Katie. She lost it. Now stop asking me questions. I hurt. Get Leo to read me.”
“Okay. Thank you, Troll.”
He rumbled a laugh, the sound more pain than mirth. I walked on. Around me traffic increased, but no one even slowed down to look at me. In New Orleans I was either too dangerous to notice or just another street artist on the way to the corner I paid the city to use. Either way, not their business. A few minutes later, Troll said, “For reasons I don’t fully understand, I trust you, Jane Yellowrock. Don’t make me regret all this.”
“I’m a sweetheart,” I said, doing a little bounce and readjust. He grunted when his gut landed on my shoulder. “What’s not to trust?”
When he could speak again he said, “You’re a stone-cold killer, Janie. But you got morals. If this city survives, it’ll be because you turned the tide.”
“Your jaw healed already, didn’t it?”
“Close to eighty percent, yes.”
“Pretend to be unconscious when Derek takes you to HQ.”
“Will do.”
A heavily armored SUV pulled to the curb and the hatch opened. I dumped Troll into the back and pressed the button to close the hatch. I leaned in the passenger window to see Derek at the wheel. He looked like hell, wrinkled and rumpled, smelling of vamp blood, sweat, and gunpowder, a coms earbud in his ear. “Take him to Leo. He tried to kill me. He needs to be bled and read, and not by Katie.”
“You think she’s in with everything that’s happening now?”
“She’s in love with Leo. If she’s a traitor to him, then Leo’s enemies have to have some kind of leverage, forcing her.”
I spun away, through the rain. “Legs!” Derek shouted.
I did another one-eighty, back to the window. “Alex is on the coms channel. He said you forgot your cell and he has a message for you.” Derek put a finger to his ear. “Got it,” he said to Alex. “There was a bank robbery overnight and the robbers raided over a hundred safe-deposit boxes. He says you had boxes in the vault.”
Boxes that had previously been filled with my magical trinkets. Including le breloque and the Glob. But I had already removed the magical items and stored them in the closet at the house. Where Alex was, alone. The blood that wasn’t frozen in my veins plummeted to my feet.
Littermate! Beast growled.
“Alex,” I whispered. Louder I said, “Call Gee. Tell him to get to my house. To fly like a bird! Call Alex and tell him to get into the safe room! Now!” I whirled and raced through the rain and the water running in the streets and down the sidewalks.
“Jane? What? What? Alex?” he said. “Alex!” The SUV’s engine roared and tires splashed as Derek pulled the SUV around and headed back to my house. Troll was still in back.
I raced through the rain and water, feeling the pull on my waterlogged boots, splashing through water that reached my shins in places. Glanced up once. No arcenciels. Where were they right now? I tried to pull on the Gray Between, but it stayed stubbornly locked down. Fear did that sometimes. And of course, now that I needed to stop time, I couldn’t access it. No lightning to help me along, and Beast wasn’t responding. Without the time to center myself and meditate, my magic was not perfect. With the storm, it was downright undependable.
Taking the most direct route, I dove inside Katie’s Ladies, raced through it, leaving the doors open, the walls rattling, and out into the rain in the backyard, toward my home. I pulled on Beast’s strength. Gathered myself. Leaped.
In the instant of pushing off, Beast burst through me. Pelt sprouted on my hands and arms beneath my soaked jacket. My body wrenched, hips changing shape, feet trying to grow wider in the now-ill-fitting boots. Waist shrank, shoulders expanded, rounded, stretched. My upper teeth erupted with fangs, the bones rearranging. I grunted in agony, the sound part-growl. Hunger clenched my insides. Too many half-shifts, not enough food to fuel them.
At the crest of the brick fence, I shoved off with a reshaped palm and landed in a crouch in the backyard. The iron gate to the side of the house was broken and hanging open, the metal twisted back and over. The side door of the house was in splinters. Again.
Beast-fast, I pulled one of the mostly useless .380s and racked a round into the chamber. My knuckles were too large to handle a gun, and I held it slightly to the side, three fingers pointing away, as I slid my pinkie over the trigger. It was an unconventional firing grip and my fingers were likely to get smashed when it fired, but it was all that still fit.
With my le
ft hand I yanked a vamp-killer free. It all took three steps as I raced across the yard and into the house.
Alex was nowhere to be seen, but there was a bloody shotgun pattern on the wall, the holes made by .30-.06 buckshot, with a head-shaped section missing. Below the pattern, on the floor, was a revenant, trying to get back up. Hard to do with no face, no eyes. I took his head with a single swing of the vamp-killer. The head slid across the room and spun on its ear, beneath the kitchen table, where it banged around on the table and chair legs like a macabre game of pinball.
Tearing into my bedroom, I took another head. Blood erupted into the air and over my hands. This one had fed more recently and . . . I realized I’d just killed a vamp and not a rev. I dropped the blade and grabbed for the head, whirling in midair. Missed, its hair flying.
Her hands went limp. The body fell. She dropped le breloque. It bounced and rolled across the floor. Her head bounced too, landing upright, facing me. Female, blue-eyed and needle-fanged. Blowback on her face from where Alex had shot the rev. She was a stranger, like the others, old and long dead.
Fear I hadn’t perceived released my heart.
I picked up le breloque, hooking the magical instrument over my arm, blood splattering. I also took the Glob and shoved it into a pocket, getting blood on it as well. That couldn’t be good. The Glob warmed me all over in an instant, as if it knew what I needed and sent it to me, part of its lightning magic. I picked up the vamp’s head by the hair. I’d carried them this way before, hair being the most expedient handhold.
As I moved through the apartment, I realized that sword practice with the vamps in La Destreza had given me a lot more skill with my blades. Not so long ago, taking a head was a multistrike proposition, sometimes ending with a little sawing or hacking—though the extra strength of my half-form helped.
Wind whooshed through the house, wet and cold and miserable. I stood in my bedroom, holding a king’s magical crown and a vamp’s head. Her hair was tangled around my fingers like a twisted wet brown tail. A cell phone began to buzz, some reggae bell tone, probably Derek calling my partner. I’d moved fast.