by Faith Hunter
“And to us,” I toasted back and drank. And said, “Holy crap, this is good!” I sipped again. “I actually like this one. It’s really, really good! It’s—” I had no wine-type words to describe it.
“Buttery,” Bruiser said. “You always like buttery whites. It’s excellent with the soup.”
I sopped my face with the cloth napkin and spooned some soup into my mouth. I wasn’t fond of squash, but this stuff was different. “Apples. It has apples in it. And something green and sweet. And chicken stock.”
“Anise,” Bruiser said. He was trying to share with me his own appreciation of wine and fine food. “It’s from the anise, or fennel, plant.”
I placed the cloth in my lap, slung my loose hair out of the way, and sat like the lady one of the housemothers had tried to make of me. “I like it.”
We ate. And ate. And when the soup was gone and the wine bottle was empty and the salmon was picked down to the bones, Bruiser took a warm towel and wiped my hands clean. The towel smelled of oranges and so did his mouth when he kissed me and led me to the couch. “Sit. We need to talk and work for a bit.”
“Yada yada.”
He sat beside me and pulled a soft fuzzy blanket over us. “Yada,” he agreed. “But I can rub your feet while we chat.”
“You are the best boyfriend ever.”
He took my feet and gently squeezed them. “You first.”
I started with the easy stuff, telling him about Aya and Aggie One Feather, the usual debrief stuff. “But there’s something else. The Kid tracked Julietta Tempeste. She came to the U.S. on a tourist visa two months ago. Alex is trying to track her.”
“Clan Des Citrons. Does Leo know?” he asked.
“I texted him an update.”
His fingers worked the kinks out of my feet as he thought it through. Bruiser frowned, the lines on either side of his nose pulling down. Those lines had become deeper with worry and with the problems that piled up against us.
His frown softened. “My turn.” He told me stuff I didn’t half listen to. “Leo got a letter in the mail from the Carusos.”
“The old funeral home directors, the ones who created revenants and the revenant concoction?”
“Yes. The letter was held by their attorneys here in New Orleans, and mailed when it became clear that Titus Flavius Vespasianus would come ashore. They acted against Leo for decades and left under duress because Laurie’s daughter was being held by Titus. They deliberately left that bottle of Titus’s secret revenant potion in their fridge for Leo to find.”
“Deliberately? Are we supposed to fall for that?”
“The lawyer agreed to be bled and read by Leo. He believes it to be true. Leo wants us to save the entire Caruso family if possible, if he wins the Sangre Duello.”
“Easy peasy. Not.”
Bruiser smiled slightly. “Katie is in Atlanta. She invaded the lairs of a dozen Mithrans and ash-staked them in their sleep, disabling them. Then she dragged them to a room filled with silver-plated scion prisons. She’ll start her own negotiations tonight.”
“Katie did that in the daytime?” I enunciated the last word. “Because, vampires.”
“Katie slept in the blood of eight clans. She will be the strongest Mithran in the Americas for quite some time.”
“Meaning that if she wanted Leo’s position she could have it.”
“Indeed.” He kneaded harder into the arch of my foot.
I might have moaned. “You have very talented fingers.”
“I do. And I’ll take you to bed and prove it soon.” His fingers pressed and rolled and crept and knuckled up my calf to a sensitive spot in the middle of my calf.
“Oh . . . Holy moly.”
“Meanwhile, Lawrence is recuperating.” When I got an eyelid to open and looked blank, he said, “Lawrence Hefner. Leo’s valet? Injured in the were attack, trying to save Leo?”
I nodded, closing my eyes. Lack of sleep was catching up to me. “He hates being called Larry.”
“He has protested being in bed with Gee DiMercy, most vociferously. Leo found it necessary to promise to skin Gee alive if he so much as tried anything of a sexual nature with Lawrence.”
Gee would still try something. Something innocuous. Just to give Larry a hard time. I smiled and stretched to give Bruiser access to the tendon on the outside of my other foot.
“Leo told me about the potential three islands for the duel,” I said, “but what happens if the negotiations with Titus end up with us all in international waters, on a boat, instead of on land? Wouldn’t that leave NOLA open for a coup d’état?”
“Not if Edmund is left onshore.”
My breathing almost stopped at that. Edmund. Leo’s heir. One of the top vamp fighters in the United States. “That’s why Leo made Edmund his official heir. To protect New Orleans,” I said.
“And you the Dark Queen,” Bruiser said quietly, his fingers stopping, to simply hold my feet. “Between the two of you, with your ability to timewalk, you could protect the city and her people.”
“He’s planning to leave me ashore if an island isn’t chosen. Son of a gun. I didn’t know,” I said, just as softly, touching my belly and the faint pain there. Indigestion maybe. “I didn’t understand that move on the chessboard. Making me DQ wasn’t because he’s selfish. It was because he’s . . .” I stopped. No way was I going to say Leo Pellissier was a good man. “A good king.”
“Yes. He is.” There was something soft and sad in his tone, as if he wished Leo had been a better man too.
“But if Titus knows all this about Ed and me, that we could hold the city, then . . .” I opened both eyes and said, “Then what?”
“Then he won’t push to have the fight in the water, but on land, land that Leo owns or at least has some appearance of owning. Titus will want to kill you, Edmund, and Leo at the Duello.”
I closed my eyes again, letting the ramifications run through me.
Long pleasurable minutes later, Bruiser said, “Leo has scrapped your idea of having all his people go naked at the opening ceremonies of the Sangre Duello to shock and dismay the EVs.”
“Thank God.” I grinned evilly. “Too cold?”
“Precisely. Though he did profess sadness at not being able to see you naked in your half-fighting form.”
I opened one eye again and glared. “This is the stink-eye. Keep it up and I’ll give you the stink-eye with both eyes.”
“I consider myself warned.” His brown eyes melted me inside. Along with his very, so very talented hands. “The lab has sent a preliminary report of the contents and DNA from the bottle of mixed blood found in the Caruso Family Funeral Services. They have detected the blood of five major players and perhaps a dozen lesser players, all very old and powerful Mithrans, mixed with traces of chemicals, a long list of them. And unlike the usual putrefaction and decomposition of Mithran blood, these chemicals keep it stable for a long period. Months. Perhaps years.”
I opened my other eye, so I could see him with both, this time in concern. “Is it drinkable? Can humans or vamps drink it to be turned?”
“No. But it stops necrosis of flesh, is bactericidal, and speeds healing dramatically.”
“The U.S. military PTBs would give their accumulated right testicles for that formula. Eli told me so.”
The laughter in Bruiser’s eyes went deeper, as if he was envisioning a pile of right private parts and a long line of pained military brass. He said, “As would any pharmaceutical company, any foreign power, any billionaire who wants to live forever without becoming bound to a vampire.”
I almost said, That sucks, but it would have been funny and funny didn’t fit here.
“They have managed to reverse engineer the formula,” he said. “Leo has personally completed preliminary testing. It works.”
“Mmm. And if Leo can reproduce it
in quantity, he will have the single most financially lucrative and medically important pharmaceutical product to hit the health profession since penicillin.”
“Indeed.”
Which would give Leo almost unlimited financial revenues, until the patent ran out or someone else reverse engineered it. Right. And Leo would be in terrible danger from outside and inside forces because such a product and such an economic stranglehold would change every financial market in the world. And Leo would have all that power. I sighed. Leo, king of the world.
“Enough talk.” Bruiser put my feet on the sofa, then stood and picked me up. And carried me to his bed. Enough talk indeed.
CHAPTER 13
After I Spill Some Blood and Kill Some People
Some hours later, as we lay cuddled in blankets with pillows stuffed around and behind us, I said, “So Leo isn’t going to do the whole naked bit. But isn’t there something else he can do to discombobulate the EuroVamps? Something . . . I don’t know, American, all muscle cars and Grease-style hairdos?”
Bruiser stiffened, rolled over on top of me, and kissed me hard. “You are not only beautiful but you are bloody brilliant. That, my dear girl, is a lovely thought.” On elbows and knees he rolled from the bed, grabbed his clothes, and was gone before I could think twice. To the empty walls, I said, “Onorios can move almost as fast as fangheads.” I narrowed my eyes at the ceiling. “And I don’t have a car. Dang it.”
But . . . Bruiser called me beautiful. Wow.
I pulled the covers close and fell asleep.
* * *
• • •
I napped for an hour longer and then rolled out of bed feeling pretty dang wonderful. Good enough to check e-mails, answer texts, and return voice mails. And do some research on Julietta Tempeste, head of Clan Des Citrons. There wasn’t much except that Julietta and her predecessors as clan Blood Master had loved lemons—lemon tea, lemon preserves, and drinking from humans who had eaten large amounts of lemons.
I had a blitzkrieg moment. Were lemons grown in Louisiana? And if so, where?
I did an online search and discovered that there were three nurseries and two lemon groves within driving distance of NOLA. One of them had a large B&B, called Lemon Grove Farm and B&B. I dressed, making calls and getting Alex to research each of the places, with an emphasis on the bed-and-breakfast.
By the time I got home, Alex had broken through the security system on the B&B and found evidence that vamps had taken over the place. In stored footage from motion detectors, we saw two unmoving bodies on the floor in the kitchen. People were walking past the living room security camera in total unconcern. There was one very clear image of Dominique. Another that looked like Cym. And we had a name on the owners. The Stephenses, family of five and a dog.
“When were these acquired by the surveil?” I asked.
Alex, his head bent over his screens, said, “Last one was last night, nine twenty-seven p.m. Then, it looks like they dismantled the system. All cameras are currently offline. I have images of people—most of them human, not vamps—beating the cameras with household tools. A broom. A tire iron. Other stuff. They got every single camera. But they forgot to wipe the memory.”
I made more calls and got a team together. Within an hour, an armed party of Derek’s best and I were on the way south and east in a caravan of armored vans. Eli and I took up the entire bench seat behind the driver, our gear in gobags on the floor at our feet, comms units hooked up and tied into the main system at the house, where Alex monitored progress at the B&B and rallied PsyLED to meet us there.
Over my cell, which was hooked into our comms system, he said to Ayatas, “I don’t give a flaming pink flamingo if you’re busy. My sister and brother are on the way there with an armed team to do your job.”
I was speed-loading an extra mag with silver-lead rounds when the words flaming pink flamingo came over the system and I laughed silently. Eli gave a quirked smile, amusement and pride in his eyes.
“PsyLED is lead on this, not Jane,” Ayatas said, his irritation clear. “You inform my sister that she and her team are to stay off-site until we get there.”
“There are dead humans in the still shot I sent you,” Alex said, his tone inflexible and hard and so very adult, “and this is taking place in Leo’s territory, so forgive me if I correct you. Leo has authorized his Enforcer to proceed with ‘all haste.’ His words. I’ve contacted the state police and passed the information along to the governor’s office. Per the MOC, PsyLED is welcome to take part in the rescue operation, but the Enforcer to the Master of the City of New Orleans will not be waiting to engage the enemy.” And I heard a click.
“Did you just hang up on FireWind?” Eli asked.
“Yeah,” Alex said, the word staticky. “You got a problem with that, my brother?”
“Not at all. Just seeking clarification. Our ETA to the B&B is twelve.” Eli pushed his mic away.
The van swayed and bumped and thumped its way along the road, which hadn’t seen much in the way of repaving since Katrina. The potholes had potholes. Air blew into the cab as we weaponed up and went over the online visuals, which were from older satellite pics. Wrassler had a drone ready to launch overhead to acquire on-site visuals of the house and grounds and provide us with more visuals than the ones currently available to us.
Except for me, the entry party were all former military and were equipped with mechanical breaching tools and devices, prepared with varied and dynamic techniques to be used based on what we found on the grounds and inside the house. They were armed with shotguns loaded with silver fléchette rounds, flashbangs, and vamp-killers, among other, less lethal weapons. Thanks to the fact that the house was a B&B, we had excellent intel from the online photos, including photos of the basement with its high-placed windows. Basements were rare in South Louisiana, rare enough to make Alex take a good look at the existing pics.
A mile out, we pulled over. Into my earbuds, Alex said calmly, “The house was built in the 1880s, about twenty feet higher than most in the southern part of the state. It was built on an old Indian mound.”
“Burial mound?” a voice asked.
“No,” Alex said. “The local tribal peoples from as long as two thousand years ago built mounds to live on. Lots of reasons why, but the likelihood of the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya and other rivers to flood was probably the reason. No ghosts,” he added.
The man who had asked chuckled as if it had been a joke. But he sounded relieved.
I heard the soft whirr of the drone when it took off and checked the video monitor on my helmet. Wrassler said, “Drone visuals on your monitors. Vehicle tracks all through the yard and on the grass. Only one car in the drive. There are no vehicles present with vamp-tinted windows.”
That was bad. It meant the likelihood of vamps being on-site had just dropped drastically.
“Taking a chance and dropping the drone down to get a closer look,” he said.
I had seen sites where vamps had lived and eaten and killed and departed. This had all the markers, from the stuffed mailbox to the tire tracks through the lawn to the unused and dirty children’s swing set out back.
“Move out,” Eli said, his voice grim. We were out of the van and jogging through the underbrush, down the road, moving out in a fan and into our assigned positions. I followed Eli up the mound into the winter-dormant foliage that covered a low wall near the carport. I could still smell jasmine. The team began to call in with their op names and positions acquired. One voice added, “Meyer lemon trees fruit year-round. These should be producing and they’ve been stripped of fruit—all fruit, not just the ripe ones. Recently.”
I took a breath, mouth open, drawing in air over my tongue and through my nose with a soft scree of sound. I covered my mic and said to Eli, “Death. Several days old. Multiple people. I don’t smell . . . I don’t smell, or hear, activity.”
&nbs
p; He covered his mic and said, “Copy that. Didn’t know you could smell activity.”
I shrugged. It wasn’t something I could explain. It fell under a category of weird, like people who could walk into a house and tell if anyone had been there recently. Movement of air currents. Presence or absence of faint sounds or echoes. Whatever.
Eli said, “Tracks in the yard are hours old. I think they bugged out.”
“And left the bodies,” I said.
* * *
• • •
We were both right. By the time PsyLED got there, we had called the coroner and left the house to the five human corpses and the dead dog. I didn’t want to think about what Des Citrons had done to the people in the B&B. But I knew this. I’d kill them when I found them.
I sent a text to Alex. Make sure this was a random kill site. No attachment to Leo or any clan.
He sent back, Roger that. The kid was growing up.
* * *
• • •
Five hours after I leaped out of bed to go to war with Des Citrons, Shemmy dropped me off at home. Eli had reached the house an hour before and I envied him the hot shower he had undoubtedly taken, as I entered the house, hearing the sound of hammers and a skill saw from the third floor, and men talking from the living room. Neither group heard me, so I stopped in the shadows of the door to eavesdrop.
Edmund said, “Titus agreed to the location, and proposed the first-round combatants. His people and Leo’s are close to deciding on a time to begin. Thank you,” he interjected as if he’d been given a glass of wine or a really good cookie. “Leo dispatched Derek Lee and an initial security crew, his entire housekeeping crew, and the combined and motley gangs of tattooed and disreputable-looking carpenters, electricians, and plumbers to the accepted house.”
“Security is Jane’s and Yellowrock Securities’ job,” Alex said. “Why weren’t we sent?”