by Melissa Marr
“I’m sorry,” I offered. “For your loss. And your current situation.”
Eli looked between me and Tres. His expression was not damning, but I knew him as well as he knew me. He heard my guilt—and possibly the fact that I felt slightly kinder because of it.
“We should depart, Geneviève.” He motioned toward the door.
“Miss Crowe?” Tres stepped closer. “Could I call upon you? My father didn’t decide to be a mindless corpse. He loved his wife, and he was a good businessman. Smart. Ruthless. There was no way he was going to give up either hobby.”
Eli’s tone of disapproval was abundantly clear even though all he said was “Geneviève . . .”
I held up my hand. If Tres was right, I shouldn’t have been hired to behead Alvin Chaddock. Although they would have needed to warehouse Chaddock senior for at least a decade, they could have had their answers.
“It was a standard contract,” I explained gently. “The ‘make sure my loved one doesn’t eat me or someone else’ deal. Usually, the family hires me, tells me where the deceased is interred, death date, and I verify that they are family. You couldn’t hire me to behead anyone other than a relative. She’s his widow. I just did the job.”
Tres sighed. “I don’t blame you, Miss Crowe, and I actually understand why Alice hired you. I am well aware that my father would have been opposed to being resurrected, but . . . he wasn’t ill. He should be alive still. Properly alive.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, meaning it. “I’m not sure I can help, though. I’m a hired gun, not a detective.”
“If you come across another corpse that seems unlikely to have requested envenomation, will you let me know? I need to know who murdered my father.”
I nodded at him. I didn’t ask what he intended to do. Maybe he was law abiding. Maybe he wasn’t. It wasn’t my business.
After a tense moment, Eli spoke. “There will be a retainer fee, of course, if you want Ms. Crowe to seek intelligence of use to you.”
I shot a look at him.
Eli continued, “And we will require a list of the members of your father’s club. I can set up alerts on the obits for them.”
“Sure. Wait right here.” Tres stood and left us there alone.
“A retainer?” I glared at Eli. “Since when do I get a retainer for sending a text or whatever?”
“Since you’re making decisions out of guilt.” Eli grabbed my hand in his gloved one and squeezed.
I felt deflated. My anger washed away, and I closed my eyes.
Eli and I waited in silence for another few moments.
Tres returned with a sheaf of pages. There were far more members of the hate-group than I’d have expected. Hundreds of people had joined together not only to share hate but to act on it. That might not be what they told themselves they were doing, but once you put your money and time into a group to talk about hate, eventually actions would follow. The worst part was that perfectly “nice” people were capable of irrational hate that destroyed others’ lives or careers.
While I glanced at the sheaf of names in horror, Eli simply took the pages and gave Tres a business card. “Please, let us know if you—or your associates—will need to contact Crowe Services. I can send you a bill for the retainer in this case.”
“Thank you, Eli.” Tres handed Eli his card as well.
I stood.
Tres looked at me and held out another card. Eli reached over and plucked it from Tres’ hand. Apparently, he wasn’t allowing me the courtesy of a number to contact Tres. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be a bitch in front of a client, but I glanced at Eli with anger in my eyes.
Tres added, “It was a pleasure, Geneviève, despite the circumstances.”
“Sure.” I felt like a dunce the moment I said it. Sure? Super professional.
“Perhaps we could meet for lunch to discuss matters?”
“Perhaps,” I agreed.
“Geneviève,” Eli said coldly.
I gave Tres an apologetic smile and followed Eli out of the office. There was not much else to say in front of him.
In a matter of moments, Eli and I were outside, and he was opening the passenger door for me. As ever, Eli was a gentleman, even with a killer as his passenger. I gave him a chilly smile.
I could feel dawn start to come creeping toward us. Within the hour, it would be here. “Give me the card.”
“I shall investigate any leads on the injections,” Eli said.
“Fine.” I paused and held out my hand. “Card.”
Eli handed it to me, and I shoved the card in my pocket.
When we reached my building, I looked at Eli before he could turn off the engine and said, “I’m not a tool to cover up murder.”
His lips pressed together, as if there were words he was refusing to say.
“You were hired. You did a job.” He opened his door and got out to open mine.
I tried to open mine and get out, but he’d locked it. When he opened it, he offered me his glove-covered hand as if nothing was amiss.
I tensed. “I’m frustrated. I can’t just . . . what if the widow killed him?”
“Are you an officer of the law?”
“No.”
“Did you cover up a crime?”
“No, but—”
“You take the world on your shoulders.” He hugged me. “You cannot feel responsible for other people’s misdeeds.”
I knew he was right, but I still felt like I had to help Tres. I didn’t know him, but I wanted to set things right—even though I couldn’t truly do so. Maybe it was the touch of death on Tres that beckoned. Maybe it was worry that I was an unwitting participant in something heinous. Either way, I felt like a mother bear with no target to maul.
Eli motioned toward my building. “Ask me into your home. Let me take care of you.”
“No.” I folded my arms. “I’m fine. I just . . .”
“Feel like you must save people?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t,” he said. “Let me deal with Chaddock.”
“Fine.” I nodded, and then walked to my building door.
I waved over my shoulder because I knew that behind me, Eli was watching. He always waited until I was inside. I didn’t need to look to verify it, but I still did once I opened the door. And he smiled at me.
And despite the way he understood me, I was definitely not sleeping with Eli. Breaking both of our hearts seemed like a terrible idea.
Chapter Eleven
After the Chaddock job, life resumed something closer to the calm I often preferred. I went looking for Marie Chevalier, watching the usual news sources—which these days included various social media accounts and hashtags. No draugr sightings or suspicious kills came across my news. I didn’t find anything when I went out seeking trouble either. In truth, the newly-corrupted draugr weren’t exactly daily events, but there ought to be something. Someone. Instead, everything was silent.
I was in my apartment, pausing between work-outs and toying with Tres’ card. I could call him, if not for the fact that I’d left my phone in Eli’s car. I’d need to borrow a phone or go to a public phone.
For the moment, I would let Eli deal with Tres. That meant I waited to hear about new draugr, and I waited for some sort of information on the injection thing. Unless I got a call on a job or one of my paid-informants who passed on leads said something, I was at a loss. I didn’t get any new job offers. I rested and didn’t leave my home much, not that staying in was a hardship.
My apartment was a full floor of the building, but that’s because no one else wants to live on a ground floor unit. There were plenty of other people who lived in the building, just not low enough for the dead to look in the windows easily. Me? I liked the closer distance to the soil, and there wasn’t any chance that anyone could be buried in the foundation of the building when I lived down there. Yes, that really was something I worried about. Walking dead inside the building could be awkward, at the least.
So, I bought the units next to mine when they came open. Eventually, I owned the whole floor and was little-by-little undertaking a reconstruction that meshed them all. For now, some of the floor was living space, some was work-out space, and one far end unit was basically an intact apartment. I half-planned for my mother moving in there some day. Sooner or later, even the indominable Mama Lauren would grow too old to live on her own in the Outs. Probably.
I was back to attacking my poor practice dummies when Christy stopped by my place midday on the third day. I only knew Christy was there because I saw her on the monitors. My music was loud enough to wake the neighbors a block over if not for my extra insulation and sound-proofing.
Christy Zehr was smarter than ninety-eight percent of the people you’ll meet in life, and pretty as the fairy tale princess you wanted to hate but couldn’t because she’d just given you a dusty page with the antidote to a witch’s spell. She was a towering Black woman who researched freelance and hustled pool, and if I needed to have an alibi, she’d already have called me up and offered it before I’d realized I needed it. Like Jesse and Sera, she was someone I trusted wholly. Unlike Jesse and Sera, she wasn’t a meddler. Jesse was subtle at it, but he was always attuned to me. Sera wasn’t subtle. Christy was somewhere between them, but until I asked a question, she wasn’t usually intrusive.
Christy looked me up and down when I opened the thick door that separated my living space from the stairwell. “What’s wrong?”
We went inside, and I flicked the row of locks on the door. “With me?”
She looked around. My gym was filled with weapons and training dummies. I’d been whaling on the dummies the last couple of days every time I thought about the “Eli situation”—which meant I’d worked out a lot. I was sweaty and gross and no closer to clarity than when I’d started thinking about Eli’s claims that I was being unfair to him.
“You seem off.” Christy followed me into the gym portion of my home.
“Everything okay?”
“Maybe?” I was dripping in sweat, magic zinging around my work-out space like hopped up fireflies. These two units had been stripped to the concrete. I’d covered part of it with wood, but I’d left some of it at crude concrete. Carpet was shit for workouts, and the smell of sweat collected in the fiber.
She looked at me, the magic strobe show, and shook her head. “I’ll listen.”
“Am I wrong—?”
“Often,” she interjected as she plopped down on the floor, toed off her shoes, and made a “continue” gesture.
“About dead things. Am I wrong about doubting that dead things ought to be out and about like they’re you or me?” I grabbed my water-bottle, which was filled with diluted vodka to hydrate my body and organs. I needed both in excess lately.
Christy looked up at me and said, “I like tigers. Beautiful but deadly things.”
“Very different. Corpses aren’t pretty, Chris.”
She waved my objection away. “Work with me.”
I nodded.
“I like tigers,” she stressed. “If I could, I’d have a predator as my pet. Let it eat my enemies. Probably get a dumb-assed collar and nice cage for it. Buy it good steak.”
“Okay.”
“But if the cage door opens and it eats me, people wouldn’t be shocked. Damn stupid if I forgot what it was.”
“Still with you,” I said.
“T-Cell Houses are cages.” Christy rolled her shoulders. “We call them hospitals, but they are prisons for draugr.”
I frowned and punched one of the dummies that was suspended from my ceiling like a fluffy windchime.
“You don’t go into the cages and kill,” she said.
She made sense, but it wasn’t the same. Not really. “I wouldn’t kill a tiger, though. And they don’t talk.”
“What if a tiger gets a taste for human instead of filet?” she asked. “Prowling New Orleans . . .”
“Fair.”
“If tigers had been trying to eat you your whole life, you’d want to kill them even in cages, but you don’t kill every draugr. You think of yourself as a killer, but you only kill the draugr that attack.” Christy shrugged. “That reminds me: Jesse said he needed to talk to you about a blood bag hanging around at the shop.”
And that was the thing that the people in their posh houses didn’t get; when you live outside the fences and answer your own door or even just have a job without a secretary, the dead can reach you. If they stayed in their little T-Cell cages and if they agreed to a bagged lunch diet forever, maybe they’d be sort of okay, but Christy had a good point. If the tiger got out of the zoo, it would eat you and your kid because even fresh filets weren’t enough. Tigers hunt, and we’re all just filet with feet.
Christy hopped to her feet after a minute. “Want to go to the bar? Or you staying in to brood?”
“I need to check on Jesse,” I said, but then it occurred to me again that Eli had my phone.
I’d left it in his car, and he hadn’t dropped it off. I could’ve gone to his house to get it except that meant seeing Eli, and I wasn’t ready for that. I could’ve gone to the bar. I didn’t. I needed a break from him, too, and if an urgent job came up, I knew he’d tell me. No one called my phone other than someone offering work, Christy, Sera, or Jesse. They all either had my address or Eli would answer and tell them I left it behind. It was far from the first time I’d left the damn thing behind.
I wasn’t about to tell Christy where my phone was, so I held out my hand.
“Can I text Jesse? I left my phone somewhere again.” I gestured around the apartment, as if it was there. “Battery dead or ringer off.”
Christy rolled her eyes but handed her phone to me.
“You okay?” I texted.
“Fanger. Bit customer,” Jesse replied.
“Inbound. B.D.” I handed the phone back before Jesse could piss me off reminding me that “before dusk” wasn’t the same as arriving at dusk. His bookshop was in Gentilly, a good five miles away.
Then without thinking much on it, I texted Tres. “Geneviève here. Friend’s phone. Lunch Saturday?”
He needed my help, and I was failing at the urge to resist finding a way to help him. It wasn’t like me to be like this, but it wasn’t an urge that was passing.
I grabbed a quick shower and walked out with Christy, who drove me partway.
“Tomorrow?” she asked when she dropped me off.
“Day after that. I promise.” I paused and added, “I texted Tres on your phone. If he replies to it, will you let him know I’m available Saturday?”
“Tres?”
“He’s a client.”
Christy shrugged. “Friday night?”
“I’ll meet you at the bar,” I swore.
It was late enough that I wanted to be sure she had time to get home safely, and I felt better with a couple miles of walking.
I headed out to look after Jesse, my mood lighter from a few minutes chatting with a friend. When I arrived at the bookshop, Jesse filled me in. A draugr, at least ten to twelve years risen, was coming into the shop every night. It had bitten a customer, who had to be hospitalized for blood loss.
“That must be killing business,” I joked.
“Seriously, Gen?” Jesse scowled at my attempt at levity. “You might not be here behind the counter or tracking inventory, but it’s your shop, too.”
“On paper,” I reminded him, for what must have been the hundred and twenty-seventh time. I fronted the start-up costs the first year, and since then, Jesse had paid me enough to more than cover it. As far as I was concerned, we were square.
These days, Jesse was refusing to remove my name, and I was refusing to cash his checks. Eventually, checks expire, so in the end, the money stayed in his account. “I shredded the last check.”
“Just fix this,” he muttered when I stood grinning at him.
“Upstairs.” I pulled my sword out and dropped it on the wooden counter.
&
nbsp; Then I shooed him away.
Jesse was the sort of man who looked like he wasn’t afraid of much. Muscles. Deep eyes. Dark skin. Gorgeous. Fortunately, Jesse was also secure enough in his manhood that he didn’t object to me being the one with the gun and the sword. He was my brother in heart, and my oldest, dearest friend if we needed to get technical.
He was also completely human, and if there was one person I’d slaughter the world to protect, it was him. We were friends in childhood. Friends as teens. Aside from one very awkward attempt at kissing, we had a long history of being the kind of friends that seem like cousins. And since my mother was an only child and my bio-father was dead, twice dead now, I didn’t have any relatives I knew of. Jesse was the only person, other than my mother, who had been in my life for most of my earliest memories.
Jesse was as protective of me as I was of him, but in vaguely overbearing-big-brothering ways—which was why I still hadn’t told him or Christy or Sera that Eli had been with me at the cemetery. They liked that I had back-up, but they’d seen the way time with Eli got me twisted up. I wanted him. I cared about him. And that made life complicated.
I never told my friends what I was, but they knew where I stood on relationships—and children. And anyone with eyes could tell that Eli was fae enough to need to father a kid or two. The one man I wouldn’t mind keeping around for a while was also the one man I shouldn’t want. It made me surly—and then Eli and I argued. Rinse. Repeat. I knew better.
I also knew that Eli was the only person who could have my back in a fight, and with my magic being unpredictable, I needed the help. It was a case of the proverbial fucked every direction dilemma I seemed to excel at finding.
So, I wasn’t going to tell my friends that Eli had helped me with the Chaddock case. Avoid. Ignore. It was one of my favorite solutions when bash-and-behead wasn’t an option.
I was at the counter at Tomes and Tea, and Jesse was tucked away upstairs watching me on his security cameras. Sometimes I thought Jesse would love to have had magic or something just to be able to keep me safer, but I was grateful that he was wholly human.
