by Faith Hunter
Which was a whole ’nother kettle of fish entirely.
* * *
Leo’s old limo was a charred shell, and so we borrowed Grégoire’s brand-new, heavily armored, slightly stretched Lincoln. I had helped design the bespoke limo from the ground up, taking ideas from a limo owned by one of Leo’s scions, and from the latest defense industry specs. It had a three-quarter-inch steel plate underneath to protect the occupants from possible bombs, and dark, polycarbonate-armored glass windows to protect them from daylight and gunfire. The car had a special braking system and heavy-duty suspension to accommodate the weight.
Inside, it was a work of art, with a long U-shaped steel-construction seat covered with cream-colored, butter-soft leather, a bar, flat-screen TV, satellite phone and Internet uplink, and cool weaponry that would rival anything Q would have designed for James Bond, including a Mossberg 590 twelve-gauge shotgun mounted under the longest section of window seat that ran along the driver’s side. There were three handguns on mounts near the bar, hidden along the passenger-side windows, all of them nine millimeter, with plenty of extra magazines secured in pockets along the sidewall.
The limo was black, low-slung, and totally cool. It only got about six miles to the gallon, but I hadn’t been worried about being green; I had been worried about being alive. I also hadn’t thought this through or I’d have ridden Bitsa. Or ridden in the gear truck that followed, just me and the driver. Instead, it was Eli and Alex. And Bruiser. And me. In a limo. Together. Driven by Wrassler.
Alex rode shotgun, occupied with video games and a music collection of head-banging rock, playing while search programs ran in the background on three laptops. I took the far backseat, facing forward, slouching, with my legs half on the seat, one foot on the floor. Studying the two men. They were as different as possible and all I could do was compare and contrast them.
Bruiser, on the long side seat, was wearing brown dress pants that had been made to order, polished Italian leather dress shoes, with a starched dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned, corded arms. He was even wearing a tie, silk, of course, though it was loose at the neck. His legs were stretched out, crossed at the ankles, and he sat with his hands laced together across his lap. He was wearing a tiny gold pinky ring, and he was the picture of elegance, marred only by the compact handgun under his arm.
Eli took the seat facing backward, and was wearing button jeans, scuffed combat boots, and a skintight T, with a shoulder holster, an ankle holster, and probably three or four blades concealed on him somewhere. A wrinkled denim jacket lay on the seat near him. All in black. He looked dangerous and in control. Yet, in a hand-to-hand fight, Bruiser would win. Despite his casual and relaxed demeanor, he was full of vamp blood. He’d be faster, stronger, meaner, and though I’d never fought Bruiser—except the first time I ever saw him, when I’d gotten the drop on him—he’d had a hundred years to practice martial arts, and I was betting he fought like he danced. Perfectly balanced, and totally in control.
As we pulled away from the curb, Bruiser swiveled his head to me. And looked at the floor. Reminding me of the times we had landed on a limo floor. And almost done something I’d likely never regret. I tilted my head and slammed down hard on the blush that wanted to rise. Eli looked back and forth between us, taking in everything and drawing his own conclusions.
Fortunately, before I could feel too uncomfortable, Eli reached for the remote and turned on the television to Fox. The two men started into a discussion of politics and I closed my eyes and feigned sleep as we hit the road out of New Orleans.
The surfaces of most major highways in Louisiana are horrible, composed of concrete with expansion joints every ten feet or so. The joints rose in the heat of summer and stayed deformed forever, creating a rocking, bumpy ride, noisy and unpleasant even in the limo. But for me, it felt soothing, like a rocking chair, and my fake sleep quickly turned into real sleep. We were rolling into Natchez when I woke and I stretched, touching my mouth to make sure I hadn’t drooled in my sleep.
I didn’t know much about the town. Natchez, named after the tribe of Indians sold into slavery by the Europeans, was the first major Mississippi port city north of New Orleans, and had once been a major hub of steamboat travel and trade. It had been a bigger place before the war—the Civil War—and had struggled to hang on since. Union troops hadn’t burned it to the ground, and after the war ended, Natchez had been left with swamp, forest, bayous, a checkered and notorious past—all set high upon a bluff above the Mississippi. It also had lots of fancy, prewar buildings, antebellum homes, churches, graveyards, and old live oak trees swathed in moss. After the war, the town also had hundreds of freed slaves needing work and carpetbaggers by the dozens bringing in an influx of cash. Its location and history allowed it to survive and thrive when most other towns around the South had suffered.
Natchez was rife with gossip. The locals knew everything. When we stopped for gas, Wrassler chatted up a local girl working inside behind the counter. In minutes, he’d learned most everything that had happened to the town in the last twenty years. Back in the limo, Wrassler moved his massive bulk into the car, shut the door, and said, “You were right, Kid.” To the rest of us, he said, “De Allyon has been hiding in plain sight here, having taken over from the local MOC, Hieronymus—who owes Leo allegiance and loyalty and who did not call his boss to report the presence of an enemy.” He started the limo and pulled into the street. “Funny how Leo’s research guy didn’t know any of this. Not you, Kid,” he said to Alex, “but that other guy the master uses.”
I laid my head back on the leather upholstery and thought about our leak. Leaks. Whatever. Not only was someone sharing info with our enemy, but our own intel sources had left us high and dry on what was happening in Leo’s organization. That needed to be addressed, eventually, once this crisis was over. With vamps, there was always something.* * *
As for this little out-of-town gig, the possibility that there was more than one leak—Angel Tit and a snitch in Leo’s camp—came back and perched in the forefront of my brain, like a buzzard over roadkill. Was there a chance that the spy was Reach himself? Reach had electronic fingers in everything, and he was nearly paranoid about security. If he was the spy, he’d already have taken down Leo’s security and finances and, well, just about everything. Reach had that kind of . . . reach. I let a bit of humor bubble up through my worries and forced my shoulders to relax. They had crawled up my neck to my ears with tension at the thought of Reach as a traitor.
“It isn’t Reach,” I said politely. “Go on, please?” Who said I didn’t have class?
Wrassler met my eyes again in the rearview, and I couldn’t see enough of his face to tell what he was thinking, but he went on. “According to my date, Hieronymus initially billed himself as a producer, which was a new one for vamps, but fit the town perfectly.”
“How so?” Eli asked.
“Look around,” Wrassler said, his eyes back on the road. “On the backs of slaves and then cheap manual labor, the town fathers kept the place looking both spiffy and old. To supplement tax revenues, the good-ol’-boy town fathers have always looked outside farming, shipping, and transportation. Mississippi might be rife with the usual blunders and nepotism and thievery of any bureaucratic government, but their film commission pushed the beauty of the town to the outside world.”
My brows went up at his vocabulary. I’d had no idea Wrassler could pronounce the words, let alone use them right.
“Natchez made a name in Hollywood. Movies, TV, and documentaries have been made here and the politicians were hoping that the new residents would bring another—the new residents being the owners of a newly renovated three-story building in the middle of historic downtown. Or maybe they call it uptown here.” He glanced up at me again and this time I could see his grin. “All that and I get to go dancing. I am a happy man.”
Wrassler danced? Somehow the muscle-bound burly guy didn’t strike me as the dancing type. “Wrassler, you h
ave a way with words and a way with women,” I said.
We rode toward town, past shacks, trailer parks, and advertisements for tours of plantation homes, and took in the sights. The place was like something out of a Civil War movie, and we spotted some magnificent antebellum homes between the huge trunks and trailing limbs of live oaks. Most of the old homes were the traditional, Tara-in-Gone-with-the-Wind–style of whiteboard with lots of pediments and architectural elements made out of marble and wood, and wraparound porches. Two-story, sometimes with fancy gabled windows in the roofline. Some of the sprawling monstrosities had iron or brick privacy walls, horses prancing in the whiteboarded fields out back, and multicar garages with living space—presumably for servants—overhead. Even in town we saw homes that belonged on the covers of magazines.
We started at Canal Street and worked our way in. For blocks, the town had businesses in old buildings from the eighteen hundreds: art galleries, restaurants, grills, boutiques, a bookstore, and in the middle, we passed by the town’s most recently refurbished three-story building, restored, revamped (pun intended), and once owned by Hieronymus, Blood Master of Clan Hieronymus, now owned by a dead man, and being refurbished by Lucas Vazquez de Allyon, who was soon to be a true-dead vamp.
As we circled the block, Eli slid down the window and took dozens of shots of the building with a camera set on burst mode. The old windows on the ground floor were swathed in silver velvet draperies, hiding the building’s interior. The windows in the two upper stories had functioning copper shutters, all closed. If not for the plans on file with the county, we’d have no idea what the interior was like.
We circled back around and followed GPS instructions to the bed-and-breakfast we had rented on the outskirts of town. It was a huge, three-story place landscaped with the ubiquitous live oaks and magnolias, acres of pecan trees, azaleas, and even flowering trees, which was odd for this time of year. Bruiser leaned close to the dark-tinted windows and said, “Japanese apricot and Higan cherry. Lovely.”
Eli grunted and said, “This place is gonna be a bugger to secure.”
“Yeah,” I said to them both. That’s me, full of chatter.
I left the men to unload and I knocked on the door. I was let in by the owner, a skinny, wrinkled woman with shocking red hair and no fashion sense. She was wearing gray velour elastic-waist pants pulled up over her tiny, rounded belly, a purple shirt, yellow house shoes, and an olive green scarf printed with red and blue flowers. A string of pearls that had to be at least fifty inches long was wound around her neck and rested across her belly.
“You must be Esmee,” Bruiser said from behind me. He leaned past to take her hand and insinuated himself into the foyer. “I’m George Dumas.”
“Ohhhh, Mr. Dumas,” she twittered. “I am so honored to meet you. Anyone who knows the president is always welcome here.”
“He was very complimentary about your home and domestic servants, and I understand that you took very good care of him and Nancy while they were here.”
“Such a nice couple,” she said, her voice high-pitched and girlish. “And even though they were Hollywood types, they seemed quite well bred.”
A Hollywood president, married to Nancy? The Reagans? And Bruiser knew them? Sometimes I forgot that he was over a hundred years old. While he took care of the particulars, I reconnoitered the house. The downstairs was something like out of a movie set or the way really rich people lived, with antique wood furniture juxtaposed with more modern comforts, parquet floors in tri-colored woods, silk rugs, copper-coffered twelve-foot ceilings, and a maid and chef, which meant we wouldn’t leave a mess or have to cook. There was a living room, dining room, kitchen, butler’s pantry, wine closet, coffee bar, wet bar, billiards room, music room, TV room, servant’s toilet, powder room for guests, a coat closet bigger than a small garage, and a mudroom with a full bath off the back entrance. I stuck my head out and saw a six-car garage to the left and a pool in the center of the enclosed garden. The wall around the backyard was over eight feet tall. No one would be getting in unless they could jump like I could or pole-vault in. The upstairs had eight bedrooms and five baths, and slept sixteen easily, more in a pinch—plenty of room for the rest of the men when the gear truck got here. The third story, up under the eaves, was where the servants slept and I backed out quickly when I realized I was in private quarters.
The place was amazing. I did not fit in here. Not at all. But I wasn’t complaining.
I picked the smallest room and crawled into the bed. It was like lying down on air, and I punched the mattress. It swallowed my fist and then slowly returned to a flat plane. It was that memory foam stuff. I kicked off my boots, tossed my bra to the side and my weapons on the bed, curling up next to them. I had a feeling that I would get no sleep while I was here, so I was going to catnap when I got the chance. I was asleep in minutes.
I woke to the sound of gunfire, my hands grabbing for weapons.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
And Then He Changed His Pants
I analyzed the sound patterns as I checked the Walthers, stuck one in my waistband against my spine, and shoved extra magazines in pockets. The gunfire was coming from downstairs, and I hadn’t seen a shooting gallery. It was still daylight out, which meant no vamps, and I was betting there were no weres or witches living openly here; therefore it was a good guess that we were under attack by humans. De Allyon’s people had heard we were here, and decided on a preemptive attack. “Dang small-town gossip factory,” I whispered.
I opened the door and slid into the hallway, trying to get my sleep-clogged brain up to speed and remember the layout of the house. I shut the door behind me and quickly checked the other rooms. I didn’t smell anyone, but it would be stupid to risk leaving an enemy behind me in case the external security had already been breached. Each room was empty and I closed the doors, leaving myself in shadow.
Beast moved up through me, padding softly, her head low and shoulder blades high, stalking. My vision sharpened as she slid into the forefront of my brain. I moved right, to the stairs, and down, my back against the wall, my bare feet silent, listening to the number and placement of shots, and wishing I had grabbed up my nine-mils. The weapons had better stopping power.
The gunfire was coming from the front and the back, which told me that they hadn’t gotten inside yet. By the level of gunfire, I could tell that there were three bogeys at the front entrance, but only one defensive shooter inside. There were at least five bad guys in the backyard. So much for only pole-vaulters getting in over the back wall. A shotgun sounded from the back, a double-barreled boom-boom. We hadn’t brought any shotguns. Had someone gotten inside?
A .380 held at my thigh in a two-hand grip, I stuck my head around the back entry opening, looked around, and stepped back, assimilating what I had seen. Eli and Wrassler were on either side of the back entrance. In the mudroom, the back window was busted out, and Esmee stood there, an old pump shotgun at her shoulder. Her scarlet hair was in disarray, and she had a fierce grin in place as she reloaded. Three pistols were on a tall stool by her hip. Oookaaay. An eighty-year-old Annie Oakley. I peeked back again. A small black low-riding SUV was parked in the yard; it hadn’t been there before. Wrassler was taking aim at the wall of the garage, and when a head peeked out, he fired, a fast three-tap. He killed some brick, but the man jerked back.
“How many?” I called out between shots.
Eli swiveled his head over his shoulder as he ejected one magazine and slammed in another. “Five that I can count.” His face was set in the emotionless lines of the soldier under fire, but his eyes were fierce. “Alex is in the garage. He went back out to get one of his electronic things. I don’t think they know he’s there.”
I dialed Alex’s phone, hoping it was on vibrate or that the sound of his ring tone was hidden under the gunfire. When he answered, I said, “Are you safe?”
“Are you freaking kidding me?” he whispered. “There are people with guns everywhere!”
&n
bsp; “Are. You. Safe?”
“Yeah. For now.”
“Where?”
“I locked myself in the limo.”
I chuckled. “Good move. Stay there.”
I ended the call and said, “Kid’s good. He’s locked in the limo.”
Eli fired off three shots. Wrassler fired off three shots and ejected his magazine. In the mudroom, Esmee fired off two rounds and I nearly went deaf.
“I’ll reload,” Wrassler said, starting on the empty magazines.
“I really need to teach the Kid how to shoot,” Eli grumbled. But some of the fierceness had left his eyes.
“I’ll check on the front,” I said. “It’s gone quiet.” Placing my bare feet carefully, I stepped through the house, from room to room, checking each one as I moved. When I reached the front of the house, I spotted Bruiser on one knee behind a sofa, which would provide zero protection from bullets, but did hide him from sight. Three empty magazines and a semiautomatic were at his knee. He was out of ammo or his nine-mil had jammed. In a two-hand grip was an old, long-barreled pistol, one I hadn’t seen before. He was waiting for a frontal assault to come through the door. Idiot.
A shadow moved near the entrance. Then another. Two forms rushed through, moving with the speed of freshly fed blood-servants. I started to lift my weapon.
Bruiser moved and everything happened out of order. Faster than I could process. He straightened his back, raising above the sofa. Fired four shots, so close atop one another that they seemed to overlap, with the barest hint of a pause between shots two and three as he readjusted his aim. The two blood-servants fell, the one in front sliding sideways, hitting an easel holding an ugly painting, sending both spinning. Bruiser practically flew across the sofa and caught the painting. The other blood-servant fell with a hollow thump. Bruiser set the painting on the sofa. The easel landed with a crash on the floor. He checked the two he had dropped.
