Dark Heir

by Faith Hunter

  Eli slanted me a glance. He didn’t know Sloan well, because the detective worked opposite shifts with Jodi in the woo-woo department. Eli’s glance said he’d sit silent unless called upon for more. I inclined my head a fraction, saying I got the message.

  “You the ones who called in the medic?” Sloan asked, watching the byplay, his dark skin gleaming under the too-bright lights.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Vamps drained some humans. We got two of the fangheads. Two got away.”

  Sloan stepped to the vamp who had been chewed in two by the barrage of bullets. Then he looked over at the façade of the back half of the house, which was peppered with a lot of bullet holes. He toed the vamp. “Bit of overkill, don’tcha think?” Out in the courtyard, medical personnel were attending to the humans, separating them from a limp pile into individuals.

  “No. She had been drinking on”—there was a microhesitation before I finished—“Joseph Santana, the vamp who killed the fifty-two humans. He’s the most powerful vamp I’ve ever encountered, and his blood gave her extra healing abilities. She didn’t go down and stay down. My partner had to put her down.”

  Sloan stared at me, his eyes narrow. My hesitation had not gone unnoticed. Nor had the unnecessary info I’d offered to cover it up. “He one of the two who got away?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t chase them?”

  “Coulda tried. But we kinda had cops heading our way, aiming guns at us,” I said. “I didn’t want my partner to get shot. Is it okay to take off the cuffs? My fingers are falling asleep.”

  Sloan thought about that for a while, chewing a toothpick, which I thought was a totally noir finishing touch, what with the suit and the tats. After making us wait long enough to bother normal humans, Sloan gestured to one of the three cops standing guard. The cops uncuffed us and stepped back, weapons still at the ready. Sloan gave us a “get up” gesture and we stood, shaking out our muscles. I said, “I called Mr. Pellissier to send over a vamp to feed the humans. Maybe we can save them.”

  “They better not turn ’em,” one of the cops said. “’Cause the only good suckhead is a staked suckhead.”

  The other cop laughed. “Yeah. Like these two. Good shooting, man,” he said to Eli. “Too bad you can’t take ’em all out.”

  Sloan frowned. Vamp racism was rampant in large parts of the city, but the cops were usually better at keeping it hidden. The death of fifty-two humans by one vamp had brought a lot of the latent hatred and fear out in the open. I decided not to respond to the comments, and Eli followed my lead. Sloan gestured to the two cops, stepping out into the courtyard. The last cop looked no less friendly about vamps, but he also looked like the angry, silent type, a guy who had a hard-on for anything and everything that wasn’t like him—white, middle-aged, out of shape, and unhappy.

  Eli and I exchanged glances that were full of meaning, mostly about needing to get on the road and after Santana, but I had a feeling that if we tried to leave, the angry, silent cop would happily shoot us in the backs.

  Sloan returned in minutes, looking grim. “Two human victims have expired, and a third is receiving CPR. A fang— A vampire is here,” he corrected himself, “named Edmund Hartley. You know him?”

  “Yeah. He’s good people. He has a gift for healing. ’Bout this tall”—I held out a hand—“slender, nondescript, mild-mannered looking. Like a librarian.” I leaned around Sloan and spotted Edmund in the courtyard. “Yeah. Him.”

  Sloan frowned. “Okay. I’ll let him feed them. But we’ll keep weapons on him.”

  I figured Edmund would be insulted, but he wouldn’t do or say anything against the weapons. He was too low in the vamp hierarchy to do that. I pointed to the end of the hallway. “Mind if we check out the back of the house? That’s where we think Santana and the other vamp were before they heard gunfire and took off. In which case we’ll need our weapons.”

  “Knock yourselves out,” Sloan said. “I’m calling the ME’s office and Homicide.”

  I took the statement as a hint that if we wanted out of there, instead of getting caught up in the investigation, we needed to slide away without asking permission. We reweaponed and hoofed it to the back half of the house. It was actually set up as a totally independent second home, the décor similar but contrasting to the front half, and more expensive. Lots more expensive. There was leather everywhere—the soft stuff that would make good gloves—and gilt everything, and the crystal chandeliers were even bigger than in the front of the house, the rugs even fancier, and the drapes even swaggier. If that was a word.

  My guess about the drained humans had been right. The crew hadn’t finished cleaning, and there were fresh and old bloodstains here and there. It was getting uglier by the moment. We moved through the house, from the entry beneath the gallery, through the pale yellow and cream kitchen, the breakfast nook, the coffee bar, and the wine bar, taking in the damage. In the wine bar, someone had decided to try a little of everything, and there were empty and partially empty bottles, broken bottles, and spilled wine everywhere. Along with signs that more had taken place there than just a lot of drinking. My chest went tight as I studied the place with eyes and nose.

  There was blood—fresh, not old and brown—here and there, in sprays along the walls, in small puddles—and other bodily fluids. Some of it was human. Some was from the vamps we had killed. Santana had partied there and drank his fill. My ribs hurt as I put it all together. Santana had raped his way through the hostages.

  If we had started the night’s search there, we could have taken him down and saved the humans.

  Eli swore as he recognized what the evidence suggested.

  “Yeah,” I said, the fury so heated beneath my breastbone that it felt like a hot, liquid pool, like molten stone. “I know.” I rubbed my sternum with a fist, trying to ease the pain. We moved on through the house, finding the royal-style bathroom where Santana had bathed in a magnificent marble tub, trying to put out the flame that persisted, burning inside him. There were knives strewn about the place, showing traces of blood. I bent and sniffed one, catching the reek of scorched vamp and the scent of saliva. I had a feeling that Santana had tried to cut the fire out and that Dominique had indeed been there, helping, and had licked the blade clean. This dude needs to die.

  I didn’t realize I had spoken it aloud until Eli said, “Let’s get to it.”

  Under cover of night, we slipped out of the house and into our SUV.

  CHAPTER 19

  Too Much ’Tude and Not Enough Manners

  We followed the stink of the Son of Darkness for miles as the sky lightened with the coming dawn. Santana dipped into pools and bayous and even puddles along the way. Eventually I lost the scent and thought about returning to the house for my bloodhound fetish necklace to keep chasing him, but if we caught up to him, that would have left Eli to take out the Son of Darkness alone, a vamp who was smelling more and more of the stink of madness. Pain can do that to anyone, and a previously poisoned and insane vamp might stand a greater chance of insanity than even a regular vamp.

  Not that I told Eli that my reason for staying in human form was to keep him from having to fight Santana alone. I wasn’t stupid. But before Mr. Macho and I could go home and get cleaned up, we had to check out the locations of the final 911 calls. Thankfully, we could do that on the way back to the house, backtracking through the city.

  The first location was near a small park I wasn’t familiar with—Samuel Square. The address was on Loyola Avenue, a new town house. We rode around the block, scoping out the place, before we pulled over and got out. Dawn was minutes away when I took a deep breath, over my tongue and past the roof of my mouth.

  The smell of blood met my nose instantly. “Oh crap,” I whispered.

  Eli was holding weapons before I could finish the words.

  “Dead humans. And Brute’s hurt,” I said.

  Eli frowned, a real frown, harsh lines bracketing his mouth. There was nothing we could do for the
dead except call Sloan. But a bleeding werewolf was a lethal werewolf. The cures for the werewolf bite, from were-taint contagion, were only sometimes successful and required spending a lot of time in bed with Gee DiMercy and . . . Eli would probably rather shoot himself than go through the cure. I stood a better chance of surviving unchanged than Eli did.

  But the presence of an injured werewolf meant I needed advice and probably help. I pulled my cell and ran my fingers through my contact list. I didn’t have a lot of friends, and the list of the ones who could help with a werewolf were few and far between. Like, two.

  “Call him,” Eli said.

  I knew he meant for me to call Ricky Bo LaFleur, my ex, but I still hesitated, my fingertip hovering over the name.

  “Soul is the other choice, and she’ll follow PsyLED rules and regs. Rick is a cop but he’ll put you, and Brute, and this city, before protocol.”

  I blew a raspberry and punched Rick’s name on the screen. I heard the line open, the near-silent sounds of linens and a mattress moving and groaning. The soft sound of a woman murmuring—Paka, the liquid syllables of her native African tongue, questioning. “It’s okay,” Rick said. “Just work.”

  Just work . . . I pressed my lips together to hold in the retort. Calling him an ass wouldn’t help me.

  The ambient sound changed, then changed again as a door closed. “Jane?” Rick said a moment later. The single word was filled with all sorts of meaning. Is it really you? Why are calling? Are you nearby?

  “Brute’s been injured,” I said, without intro. “I smell his blood. It was probably done by a powerful vamp I’m chasing.”

  “The Fifty-two Killer.”

  “Yeah, but cute names the press have given him don’t begin to tell about this guy.”

  “I’ve been reading into the situation in case I need to come down there.”

  That made sense. Rick knew the city better than any other PsyLED special agent. “I need to know how to capture Brute without getting bit, and how to help heal him. When a were can’t shift—” I stopped midthought.

  Rick laughed, but the low sound was grim, not humorous. “They’re deadly. I have firsthand experience. And I’m betting you can’t sneak up on Brute and knock him out, like you did me.”

  “Yeah. Kinda used that one on him already.”

  “You did always hit first and ask questions later.” He sounded like he was taking a trip down memory lane and it was all rose petals and kisses.

  “How do I stop him?” I bit out the words.

  Rick hesitated, then said, “I left a few things in a public storage unit on Tchoupitoulas Street.” He gave me the unit number. “Do you still have my house key? It fits the lock.”

  An uncomfortable warmth filled me, not sexual, but heated all the same, as if someone had just injected hot-pepper sauce into my veins. “I have it.” Dang it. I had it on my key chain in my pocket. Why hadn’t I tossed it? Was I still— I stopped the thought before it was born. No. I wasn’t. “What do I do?”

  He told me how to get in and what to do and how to deal with Brute. When he started talking about a special rifle, I passed the cell to Eli, who took the particulars. When he was done, Eli listened a moment longer and then said, “Yeah, man. Sorry. But thanks.” He closed the phone and handed it back to me.

  “Let’s go,” I said. Eli nodded and we drove away from the scent of bleeding werewolf. “What did he ask you?”

  “Is she okay? Is she waiting on me?”

  The peppery feeling reared up in me. It was anger, not something softer and sweeter. “Hu-whaaaa-at? Am I waiting on him? Like some lovesick fifteen-year-old with too many hormones and not enough brains? Am I waiting on him? You got to be freaking kidding me!”

  Eli slanted a glance at me, his dark eyes catching the passing park lights. He was amused.

  “Well? Am I?” I asked, and I couldn’t avoid the street-snark head roll.

  “No, babe. I’d say you moved on and up. Way on and way up.”

  “Okay, then.” I sat back in the seat and realized I had just acted like a fifteen-year-old with too much ’tude and not enough manners. I scowled at the street and then felt my mouth curl up into an unwilling smile. “Am I waiting on him. As if.”

  Eli chuckled softly. I relaxed into the seat, my fifteen-year-old-teenager fit passing. I had moved on a long time ago, but something about Ricky Bo still pushed my buttons. Not the hot, jump-in-the-sack buttons, but the hot, want-to-belt-him buttons. They were located in close proximity in my brain. I think they were located close in humans’ brains too, which was why people fell out of love and into fury so easily. Design flaw, I thought, and laughed along with Eli. As he drove, Eli contacted his brother and told Alex to get inside the security system at the storage unit and shut off the cameras. I was tired or I’d have thought of that. Eli was right. I needed a nap.

  Even in the Big Easy, traffic thinned just before dawn, letting us get to the storage unit in record time, where I covered us in the hallway while Eli went inside. The trip would have been a lot faster on Bitsa, but when I saw what Eli left the unit carrying, I shut that thought up. No way could I get away with carting that on a Harley. It was a long, charcoal gray case. A gun case. A honking big gun case.

  Back in the SUV, Eli opened the case and placed the weapon in my lap before driving away. It looked like a . . . I had no idea how to describe the weapon except that it was long barreled, matte black, and looked really high-tech. It was a gun, but a gun like I’d never seen before. “Uncle Sam’s R and D department at DOD would be very unhappy to learn that our friendly PsyLED cop has that pretty baby,” Eli said, sounding satisfied and wearing his smallest smile, the one he saved for military hardware and tactical ops.

  While I inspected the gun, he called Alex again and told his brother to restart the security system. There would be no record of our visit.

  The gun was heavy and had a scope, but no place for a standard magazine or clip. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. What is it and why do we have it?”

  Eli voice took on that pedantic but affectionate tone used by all gun lovers when they talk about a weapon. “It’s the military’s new, fully automatic version of a Dan-Inject dart gun. The man in the field calls it a Bongo, after an African elephant that needed sedation and transplantation to an area with fewer humans.”

  “Fully automatic?” I quoted, turning the weapon in my hands, careful to keep my fingers away from the trigger.

  “In this case, the term doesn’t refer to the method of firing rounds, but to the darts themselves. There are five or six different meds included in each dart, so they can be calibrated in the field to the species and weight for dosing, so one weapon can be used for various different-sized animals. And retrieved and reused.”

  A frisson of fear shot through me. “And they have a sedative that will work on a three-hundred-pound werewolf?” What about skinwalkers? But I didn’t say it. Not yet. If Eli knew the answer to that question, it put our entire relationship on a completely different standing.

  “Seems so,” he said, smelling stress-free and sounding relaxed. “It’s nearly instant sedation—true instant sedation being a thing of novels and the movies. Using civilian and veterinary sedatives, sedation takes ten minutes to half an hour on most species. The military version is faster, taking about half that time because it’s a two- or three-part med. The first part is a fast-acting paralyzing agent. It takes the target down, makes them relaxed, makes their limbs feel heavy. The second part puts them to sleep. For werewolves, there’s a third part, a very slow-acting sedative to keep them under longer, so they can’t start to wake up, panic, shift, and/or bite.”

  Drawing my courage up around me, I said, very softly, “And for me? What does our dear, kind ol’ Uncle Sam have for skinwalkers?”

  Eli’s scent changed, and the look he shot me this time was thoughtful as he processed my question, what it might entail in practice, and what it might lead to in our future. “So far as I know, and so far as my nosy, s
nooper brother can find out, the U.S. military is unaware of what you are, beyond some kind of magical creature. Alex was able to find one report that suggests you’re a witch of some kind, one previously unknown.”

  “They asked you to watch and report on me.”

  Eli’s eyes went hard and cold and he whipped the vehicle over to the curb, braked hard enough to rock the armored SUV on its reinforced undercarriage, and slammed it into park. “You got something to ask me?”

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “The guy who asked you to spy on me? When you decked him, did he bleed much?”

  Eli snorted softly, the sound way more refined than my own snort. He closed his eyes and scrubbed his face, the action showing just how tired he really was. My partner needed sleep, much more than the power naps he’d taken since the death of the fifty-two, since the growing death toll among New Orleans’ marginalized and least protected citizens. Softly, musingly, he said, “You really are a cat, baiting and pouncing on the unwary. And no.” He dropped his hands and met my gaze across the darkened interior. “I didn’t deck him. He was in one piece when I walked away. But any chance of ever serving with the military went down the drain with that decision.”

  There was something in his tone that said the story hadn’t stopped there. “So who’s watching me?”

  “Alex.”

  I didn’t react externally, where a human could detect it, but my heart rate leaped and sped.

  “They approached him when I turned them down. They offered him to end his term of probation. We decided to take their offer, and so he’s been feeding them info for the last few months. He’s a free man now. And whoever it was who wanted info has been firmly convinced that you’re a witch of limited power who came into Leo’s employ by stealth and deceit.”