by Faith Hunter
Also on the desk tonight, however, and totally unexpected, was a computer monitor. Katie was a Luddite. She didn’t understand the modern world. She hated changes. She more than hated the electronic changes. And yet she was sitting behind the desk, her eyes wide and entranced—in the human manner, not vamped-out—studying the wide screen.
“Uhhh. Katie?” Great entrance. Almost as if I’d practiced it.
She looked up and tinkled a laugh. It was delicate and soft and feminine and nothing like my own laugh, which was more of a donkey bray. “This is fascinating,” she said. “I have no idea why I feared it for so long.” One fragile-looking hand waved me closer. “Come. See. This is marvelous!”
I stuck my hands into my pockets and stepped around the desk. Katie, wearing a dark orange-red sheath dress with her hair coiled up in a chignon, was staring at some sort of financial spreadsheet, one with dollar amounts upward of five figures—not counting the pennies. And the total at the bottom of the page was in the high six figures.
My eyebrows rose all by themselves. “Yeah. Cool.” I mean, what else could I say?
“Since I rose again, for the second time, this new world is no longer a fearful place.” She whipped her head to me, and her fangs snicked down. “In fact, I fear nothing and no one.”
I managed not to take three quick steps back, which was smart because hunting predators chase things that run away. I held my hands up and open in the universal “peace” gesture and tried to control my breathing and heart rate. “Good by me, Katie. No woman should ever have to be afraid.”
“Yes. Exactly.” Her fangs flipped back into the roof of her mouth with a faint click. She hadn’t vamped out—her eyes had remained fully human. It was a demonstration of control I hadn’t seen in her before, one worthy of a master. Katie had been injured not long after I arrived in NOLA, and to save her undead life, she had been buried with the blood of all the clans of New Orleans, some of which no longer even existed. She had risen crazy strong. And maybe just crazy, until a couple of months ago when she seemed to be settling in. Sorta.
But I was wasting time. It was nearly seven thirty, the kids’ bedtime, and I needed an update on Molly. I wanted to be at home. “Troll tells me you have some missing girls?”
“Bliss and Rachael went to a private party last night at Guilbeau’s Restaurant. They called their driver at exactly two twenty-three this morning. When their driver arrived four minutes later, there was no sign of them. Find them. When you discover who took them, kill him. Funds have been placed at your discretion, though I require a detailed expense accounting, of course.”
My mouth opened. And closed on the words I was about to say. Calling a vamp insane might not be the wisest course of action, especially when it hadn’t been demonstrated that she was fully in control of her predatory instincts. When I opened my mouth again, I said, “I’ll find the girls. But I’m not a hired killer.”
“Of course you are. Don’t be foolish.” She turned back to the screen. “We all must accept our natures, and you are a predator.” She sniffed the air without looking at me. “You smell of wild places and violence and blood. You will kill. It is your nature and it is what you have been paid to do.”
The reality of her statement hit me like an icy fist, right in my midsection. Her words were almost like the ones Beast said to me when she called me a killer. Words I denied. Still wanted to deny. Slowly, carefully, I said, “Unless the person or persons who has them is being violent, refuses to let them go, or tries to do them, my team, or me harm, I won’t be killing anyone.”
Katie’s head inclined, a snakelike movement no human spine could mimic. Her face moved half into shadow, and the other half brightened into creamy gold; the dim bulb shaded her hair into honey with pale highlights. Her eyes met mine, dark in the lamplight and full of compulsion. She held me with her eyes, and a deeply twisted gleam brightened her gaze as she parted her lips, the motion slow and sensual. “This I shall accept: You will find my girls. You will free them. You will return them to me, with the names of the ones who took them. I will take care of the rest.”
I knew what she meant. She would take the names I gave her, track them, drain them, and kill them. She would leave their dead bodies where no one would ever find them. And it would be my fault. Totally my fault. As much as if I took their lives myself.
Katie smiled sweetly as the facts found a place in my brain, and returned her attention to the computer screen. “Tom has all the information you will need to locate my employees. You are dismissed.”
I didn’t know how to reconcile her demands, and though my Beast fought me to challenge her, predator to predator, and fight it out on the desktop, here and now, I shoved Beast down and walked away. Katie was my employer and landlady, the owner of my freebie home. Katie was a vamp no one crossed, and if I wanted to keep my own peace of mind and my own blood in my veins, I would need to find a way to deal with Katie wanting to kill the kidnappers—which would totally be my fault, if I gave her the names. But I could worry about that later. Was I a Scarlett O’Hara or what?
Inside me, my Beast—the soul of a mountain lion I had dragged into me during an act of accidental black magic, when I was five years old and fighting for my life—turned her back to me, a predator insult of the worst kind. I held in the frustration the gesture brought on.
Troll, whose real name was Tom, and who was Katie’s primo blood-servant, was waiting for me in the hallway, his face like a stone bust, emotionless and cold. He had been listening.
Dumbly, I followed him to the kitchen, where Deon, Katie’s three-star Jamaican chef, was putting a rack of lamb into one of the commercial ovens he supervised. We sat at the kitchen bar, my right foot on the floor, the other on the bar stool footrest. Troll handed me a paper with all the pertinent info about the missing girls written on it in his neat block printing.
“Is she . . .” I stopped, not knowing what to ask.
“Sane?” he said softly. “I don’t know, but I’m careful around her, treat her with kid gloves. Her girls are careful. According to Mithran definitions, and within Mithran parameters, she’s fine. She’s not drained anyone. She’s injured no one.” He rubbed his bald pate in consternation. Troll wasn’t the most communicative man, but even I could tell he wasn’t finished. “But she’s powerful and strong and different from what she was before the blood-burial.”
With palpable relief at the interruption, he accepted a glass of white wine from Deon, looked at it, swirled it, sniffed it, and sipped it. “Buttery and rich,” he said. “The best Chardonnay to date. Order up five cases.”
He set the glass on the counter and said to me, “I’ve asked around. The few blood-servants who’ve heard of a rising after a blood-burial aren’t real helpful, except to say that all Mithrans who survive are changed, are different. It takes months for the mixed blood to work its way through a Mithran’s system. Sometimes years. And they’re always left with extraordinary strength and speed and what George Dumas calls mental acuity. What she’ll become, I don’t know and can’t say.”
“Ducky.” I looked at the paper and said, “I need to talk to the driver who came to pick up the girls. I also need to talk to the others who were at the party. That isn’t listed here. No names from the party at all.”
“Katie wasn’t informed of the party. The girls were out on the town together, not working for her.”
I tried to put the two sentences together into something that made sense. And then it hit me why Katie was so predatory. “They were working a side job? One without Katie’s approval and one that Katie didn’t get a cut of?”
Troll nodded, then shook his shiny bald head. “I didn’t think so at the time, but with them disappearing, I’m startin’ to reconsider. I was the pickup driver, and I know the girls were there one minute and gone the next, ’cause I talked with one of the waiters. They wouldn’t have gotten into a car with people they didn’t know, so either they left with someone they knew or they were taken.” He ran a hand
across his scalp, thinking. “They know better than to stiff Katie, so . . . I don’t know.”
I chuckled at the double entendre and Troll managed a smile. “Unintentional,” he said.
“Sure. Send me photos of the girls. I’ll check it out and see what I can find. On another note, my friend Molly is missing. Her husband thought she might be coming to New Orleans to see me, but she didn’t.” I tapped the paper on the bar top, thinking. “She didn’t see me, that is. I don’t know if she actually came to New Orleans. We’re looking into that. So, if you hear anything about witches, call?”
Troll nodded. “Will do.”
“Now tell me about picking up the girls.”
“Nothing to say. They called for a ride home from Guilbeau’s, per orders of Katie.” I looked my question at him and he said, “For their safety, they call after dark, even on their nights off. When I got there, they were gone.”
I sighed. “It’s never easy.”
“That’s why you get paid the big bucks, Legs.”
• • •
Back at the house, I checked in with Alex. He was hunched over his tablets in the living room, working. The TV was on, the big screen divided into four sections, MSNBC, FOX, a March madness college basketball game, and a black-and-white rerun of an old I Love Lucy show. Counting the four tablet screens, he was watching eight screens, all silent except for the Lucy show, with the laugh track turned up high. Evan sat on the couch with his kids, one snuggled into either arm, watching the show, holding the children as if they’d vanish if he let go. Eli was nowhere in sight, but it was after dark, and time for his nightly chat with his sweetie, Sylvia Turpin, the sheriff of Natchez, so it might be an hour before I saw him again. The front door window and the back windows were boarded over, and oddly, the door had strips of silver duct tape running in horizontal bands across it. I didn’t want to know why.
I bent over Alex’s chair, my weight on one arm on the chair back, and asked softly, “How’s it going?”
“Same thing I’m telling him.” He pointed a finger at Evan. “So far, nothing. Leave me alone.”
“Yeah. No.” I swatted him on the back of the head for the rudeness. “My friend, his wife, we’ll ask as much as we want.”
“Whatever,” he grumbled, sounding like the teenaged boy he was. My plate was still on the table, covered in plastic wrap. I picked up a fork and my own electronic tablet and carried them, my cell, and my plate to the stairs, far enough away to not be bothered by the sound track of Lucy roping Ethel into some kind of mischief, but close enough to keep tabs on my extended family.
I shoved in a mouthful of cold steak, chewing while I opened a file and typed in the pertinent info on the case, which I listed as KATIE’S GIRLS. When it was all in and documented, I located Reach’s name under contacts on my cell. I hadn’t called the intelligence specialist in months, not since we got back from Natchez. The reprieve had been good for my pocketbook, and with the Younger brothers as my new partners, I wouldn’t be needing his services nearly so often. But somewhere inside, I had missed Reach’s snark. I pressed the SEND button.
“Speak to me, oh Mistress of the Dark,” he answered.
I let my mouth curl into a smile. “Mistress of the Dark? You used to call me Money Honey.”
“You went for a much Younger man.”
I chuckled at the play on words because it was expected, not because it was funny.
“Alex isn’t as good as me, but he isn’t bad,” Reach said.
“Well, the Younger man is tied up in a search. Are my rates still current?”
“Vamp search rates?”
“No. Two missing twentysomethings, working girls who didn’t come home from a party that was most likely a totally human sex party, but could have been a sex-and-blood party hosted by vamps. I have no data on that yet.”
“Your rates on nonvamp stuff is good. Give it to me.”
“First girl is a witch in hiding, Ailis Rogan, aged twenty-four, looks fourteen, street name is Bliss, Caucasian with black hair and blue eyes. Sending her DOB and numbers via e-mail.” I double-checked the data from Troll’s piece of paper and my tablet as we talked. “Next girl is Rachael Kilduff. Twenty-two. A new tattoo and multiple ear piercings. I’m expecting pics of both girls shortly. I’ll forward them when I get them. The party was at Guilbeau’s.” I spelled it for him. “They called for their driver at exactly two twenty-two this morning. When their driver arrived four minutes later, there was no sign of them.”
“Yeah? Nice place. Five stars and just as many dollar signs. Your party host had money, lots of money if it was a large party.”
“Good to know. I’ll check out the place tonight. Gotta go.” I tapped the END icon and closed the cover. It was one of the newer models, part cell, part tablet, part movie theater, part reader, with more computing power than I would ever need, and with a built-in armored shell, designed by a tech company owned by Leo. The cell was designed for the military, but it came in handy for other violent lifestyles too—like vamp hunting.
I scooted over as Big Evan carried his two children upstairs to their room. Over his shoulder he said, “You can come up for story time.” It was a grudging offer, but it was better than anything else I had from him lately. I sent the e-mail file to Reach and scraped the last of my cold supper off the plate and into my mouth.
“Yeah. Thanks,” I said, satisfied that he didn’t sound more irritated or tell me to choke myself, and followed him up the stairs. Whether he liked it or not, he needed my help, but that didn’t make Evan Trueblood like me much. I settled onto the foot of Angie’s bed, shoving the guns I still wore back and out of the way, and waited while the children said their simple nighttime prayers. After the “Amens,” Evan pulled a padded wingback chair between the beds and sat, opening a thin copy of Little Red Riding Hood. The book looked ancient, the corners bent and worn, and the cover real leather, embossed and stained and dyed decades ago. And the author’s name on the cover was Eldreth Everhart. Dang. An Everhart had translated Grimm’s Little Red Riding Hood. How cool was that?
“Once upon a time,” he read, “a little girl lived in a pretty village near Derbyshire, close by the forest, on the edge of a flowing stream. Her name was Philomena Everhart, but because she wore a red riding cloak, everyone in the villages nearby called her Little Red Riding Hood. One morning, while the dew was still on the roses, both red roses and white roses, Little Red Riding Hood asked her mother if she could visit her granmama Theodosia Everhart, because Theodosia had been visiting the queen for a long while, and Philomena had missed her granmama.”
“Daddy’s a wolf-ees!” Little Evan shouted and giggled.
Wolf? Beast asked. Hate pack hunters. Thieves of meat.
This wasn’t the first time the toddler had called his daddy a wolf today. Just to be on the safe side, I took an exploratory sniff. No. Big Evan hadn’t been bitten by a werewolf. He smelled witchy. I curled up around Angie Baby’s feet as Big Evan continued to read.
“‘That is a splendid idea,’” he read, in a high-pitched voice, “her mother said. Philomena’s mother packed a nice lunch basket for Little Red Riding Hood to take to visit her granmama.”
The children giggled, and I laid my head on my arm, listening. No one had read me stories as a child, so this was . . . amazing. Really amazing. Big Evan reached the line about Granmama. “The wolf crept up to the door, lifted the small latch, and raced inside. Poor Granmama screamed, but the wolf gobbled her up!”
“Our gramma woulda put a spell on him!” Little Evan said.
“She would turn him into a frog!” Angie Baby said.
“A spider!”
“A ant!”
“Shhhh,” Big Evan said, sounding stern, but with poignant laughter twinkling in his eyes. I knew without asking that the poignancy was because Molly was missing.
Both children giggled and some foreign, incomprehensible emotion bubbled up from deep inside. I batted tears from my eyes. When had I become so freaking
weepy?
“The wolf burped, a full and satisfied burp, and patted his tummy where Granmama poked and pushed and kicked in his hairy belly,” Evan said.
“He burped!” Angie said. Little Evan made a fake burping sound, long and gross-sounding. And I laughed through my tears, caught in the good humor of my favorite people in the entire world. And knowing it was up to me to find their mother.
“But the wolf was wily, and he knew that Little Red Riding Hood would never come inside if she saw a wolf. So he looked through Granmama’s chifforobe to find a nightgown and bed jacket that he liked. He added a lace sleeping cap to hide most of his ears and, to hide his wolfish scent, dabbed Granmama’s lavender perfume behind his pointy ears and under his paws.”
“’Cause wolf-ees stinks!” Little Evan shouted.
“Yes, they do,” his father said. “Wolves smell stinky like wet dogs and rotten meat.” Which wasn’t far wrong for the smell of werewolves.
Big Evan went on reading and reached the last line. “Little Red Riding Hood and her granmama opened the basket packed by Philomena’s mother, and shared a lovely lunch with the huntsman. And then they had a long chat.”
Little Evan looked at me said, “He vomicketed her up. Buuurrrpurp.”
“Yes, he did,” I agreed. “Gross, huh?”
“Gross. Night, Aunt Jane.”
“Night, Little Evan.”
“Mommy and Daddy call me EJ.”
“Short for Evan Junior,” his father explained.
“I like EJ,” I said. “It’s a big boy’s name.”
EJ rolled into the curve of his arm and mumbled what sounded like “I’m a big bo.” And closed his eyes. He was asleep. That fast.
I uncurled and kissed Angie Baby’s cheek and left the room to their father. Standing just out of sight, I watched as Evan pulled out his flute and played a soft melody; he was setting wards on his children for protection and health, a form of prayer and power for an air witch. The notes were plaintive and melancholic and held all the need and loss he was feeling for his wife, the mother of the children he loved to distraction. When he was done, he stood for a moment, before leaving the room. In the doorway, he blew a last note, a minor key of longing. And stepped into the hallway.
