Black Heart Loa

by Adrian Phoenix

  “Shuvani!” Maverick’s voice boomed through the still air.

  McKenna straightened, then sprinted up the driveway, her heart skipping a beat when she saw Layne’s Harley parked in front of the house bordered by palm trees at the driveway’s end. Maverick squatted in front of the motorcycle, his gloved hands skimming the tank.

  “Bike’s dinged up some,” Maverick said as McKenna drew up alongside him. “Looks like Layne mighta dumped it in the road. Maybe whoever lives in the house ran him in for medical aid.”

  “Aye, right, not bloody likely,” McKenna said, shaking her head, voice grim. She placed Layne’s helmet on the bike’s seat. “Only a ghost lives here—the wife of the fooking bastard who killed our Gage.”

  McKenna found herself forced to admit that maybe Augustine’s presence inside Layne was a good thing in this instance, since it meant that Babette wouldn’t be able to claim him.

  On the front porch, goggles pushed up on her forehead, Jude rattled the doorknob, then stepped over to the window and peered inside, cupping her hands beside her face. “Don’t see anyone and the place is locked up. Want me to kick in the door?” she asked hopefully.

  At the Harley, Maverick rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Ever since those tae kwon do lessons in Tampa …”

  “No need for wanton destruction, lass,” McKenna said, suppressing a smile. “Not yet, anyway. Let’s get back to searching.”

  Maverick rose to his feet, unfolding his six-three length with fluid grace, waiting for Jude to trot down the stairs and join him. McKenna headed off to the right, while the two scouts swung left. As she walked the length of the house, she saw what appeared to be a large hole dug into the side yard beyond the porch railing. Dirt was heaped on the ground beside the hole. A chill touched McKenna’s spine when she saw shovels lying in the grass.

  Always believed tha’ I would feel it if Layne died, always believed tha’ I would have some instant and immutable knowledge, the fact of his passing emblazoned in fire across my heart.

  But what if I’m wrong?

  McKenna raced breathlessly to the edge of the mudrimmed hole and looked down. Empty. She closed her eyes for a moment, waiting for her pulse to slow from a wild gallop. Once it had, she opened her eyes, then called for Maverick. His keen scout’s eyes would glean every possible bit of information available embedded in the ground.

  Spotting something in the mud, McKenna bent and plucked out a shell casing, a .45, she thought.

  A moment later, a whiff of patchouli and leather told McKenna that Maverick had joined her.

  “Looks like a grave,” he commented. “An unfinished one. And we’ve got a man’s sneaker prints, boot prints topside—two sets, both female—and boot prints down below—male and female—a dog, and what sure as hell looks like wolf prints.”

  McKenna looked at the crouching Maverick. “Wolf prints?”

  The broad-shouldered scout nodded. “Yup, they’re all jumbled up with the dog’s prints, so I ain’t sure how many—two or three. And I’m seeing a barefoot print or two also, but again, I ain’t sure how many—two, maybe three people. Tire tracks—a pickup, I’m thinking. Between the rain and the folks who tromped around here mucking the scene up, hard to read the story.” He shrugged. “Given the wolf prints and the bare feet, we could have us some werewolves.”

  “Werewolves, huh?” Jude said, pacing to a stop beside McKenna. “Ain’t never seen any, but I’d love to. From a safe distance, that is.”

  McKenna sighed and raked her fingers through her hair. “Werewolves wouldn’t’ve taken a human, and especially not an injured human. They woulda just left Layne wherever they found him.”

  “Unless they needed a Vessel for some reason,” Jude tossed in quietly.

  “No, I don’t think so,” McKenna said. “Werewolves don’t hold to their dead the way humans do. They don’t even have cemeteries.”

  “Looks like a bunch of shit went down here,” Maverick mused. “But in all these prints, I ain’t seeing any that match Layne’s boots. I don’t think he was a part of whatever happened here.”

  “Unless he was carried,” Jude said.

  “What are you?” Maverick asked in a low voice. “The fucking harbinger of doom? Unless this, unless that. Holy shit, woman.”

  Jude raised her hands palms out, a gesture of peace. “Hey, just listing possibilities so we can rule them out, that’s all.”

  “So who woulda carried him?” McKenna asked. “And where? No’ to the grave or he’d be in it. Same for the house. I think Maverick’s right, Layne wasnae a part of wha’ happened here. He mighta come along after.”

  Jude nodded. “Could’ve, yeah.”

  Maverick narrowed his eyes. “I swear to shit that I’m seeing chicken tracks down in the grave. Maybe this was gonna be a BBQ pit or something.”

  “For barbecuing mastodons, maybe,” Jude scoffed.

  Maverick glanced up at McKenna. “Nothing here says Layne.”

  McKenna nodded. Raked her fingers through her hair. Her gaze skipped from one scout to the next. “Keep searching,” she told them. “We need to find something that’ll lead us to our clan brother.”

  “Shuvani,” Maverick murmured, rising to his feet, Jude’s quiet acknowledgment heeling his. Both walked away, headed for the opposite side of the yard.

  McKenna closed her eyes again, drinking in the quiet and centering herself with deep breaths of air rife with the scents of mud, sharp cedar, and blossoming roses. She listened to the drip-drip-drip of rainwater from the eaves of the house and the branches of the trees.

  She mentally traced along the edges of the hard knot of dread and anxiety lodged in her solar plexus. Following it back to the moment when she realized something bad had befallen Layne.

  Show me the way.

  At the May Madness Carnival in New Orleans, her intuition had raced her through the hotel, taking her unerringly to the room Layne was in—heart-stopped and unbreathing—when she hadn’t known he was in a room other than his own.

  She called upon that intuitive knowing again.

  Give me a path.

  An image of Kallie Rivière as McKenna had first seen her shaped itself in the darkness behind her eyes: Wearing only a well-filled red lace bra and bikini panties, the dark-haired woman is kneeling beside Layne, her joined hands pressing rhythmically against his chest as she performs CPR on his sprawled body.

  And beyond them, Gage lies unmoving on a blood-soaked bed.

  McKenna’s hands clenched into fists. The image vanished in a furious haze. Her eyes opened and she called for her scouts even as she found herself moving, walking with a determined stride for her Triumph, knowing where she needed to go.

  Bayou Cyprés Noir.

  TWENTY-TWO

  LOUP-GAROU

  Hearing the thump of a pirogue against the house dock, Angélique Boudreau put the blackberry-jam-smeared butter knife down on the counter beside the plate of fried cornmeal mush and wiped her hands against her apron.

  In their high chairs, the twins were busy with their breakfast. Grease gleamed on their pudgy little fingers as they scooped cut-up bits of boudin blanc from the bowls on their trays and stuffed them into their grease-smeared rosebud mouths.

  “You eat. Mama be right back,” Angélique told them.

  Ember smacked her lips happily and wrapped her fingers around her bowl’s daisy-etched rim and banged it against the tray. Chance kept poking juicy pieces of sausage into his mouth without pause.

  “Chew,” Angélique commanded.

  “Tew!” Ember shouted, banging her bowl, her nomad father’s daughter with her dark curls and caramel skin and bicolored eyes—one brown and one green.

  Chance’s skin was lighter and red highlights glimmered in his dark curls, his eyes emerald green like his mama’s. His cheeks bulged with sausage.

  “Chew, p’tit,” Angélique repeated, hands on her jeans and apron-covered hips. “Your daddy may be from Squirrel clan, but that don’t mean you need to sto
re food in your cheeks.”

  “Tew!” Ember crowed with another bowl bang.

  With a sigh, Angélique strode out into the front room in time to see her husband, Merlin Mississippi, swing open the porch door to admit a worried-looking René carrying a limp form over his shoulder.

  “Shuvano,” René greeted Merlin. Then his deep-brown eyes sought and found Angélique. “Traiteur Angélique,” he murmured respectfully.

  “René,” she replied with a nod.

  Merlin stepped aside as Jubilee, Moss, and a Siberian husky followed René inside the house, the smell of damp fur and clothing breezing in along with them.

  Amusement flashed across Merlin’s dark brown face, slanted his full lips, and crinkled up the nomad clan tattoo—the slim silhouette of a running squirrel. “When y’all said you were going hunting, René, I assumed you meant deer,” he said dryly.

  “You and me both,” René said.

  Jubilee waved a hand at the husky. “We decided to chase her for a while instead. Bad decision, that.”

  “Hush, you,” René growled.

  Scowling, Jubilee padded barefoot over to the cold fireplace and leaned one arm against the mantel. Her damp jeans and short-sleeved pale green blouse clung to her curves and her waterfall of silver hair was in disarray. She glared at René for a moment, charcoal brows knitting over cobalt-blue eyes, before folding her arms underneath her breasts and looking away. A muscle ticked in her jaw.

  Angélique studied Jubilee’s muddied and angry aura, the tension in her body language, and realized that this was something more than just the teasing arguments and quibbling she usually witnessed between the girl and her uncle.

  What’s going on? What’s Jubilee so worked up about?

  Jubilee’s identical twin, Moss, looked like a very masculine version of his sister, taller and broader, with short ash-gray hair and a clean-shaven face—and, unlike his sister, cheerful. He sniffed the air hungrily, his nostrils no doubt sucking in the spicy aroma wafting from the kitchen.

  “Smells good, Angélique,” Moss said hopefully.

  “I’ve got fried cornmeal mush and boudin blanc in there along with blackberry jam and scrambled eggs. Got buttermilk biscuits and ham too,” Angélique said. “You finish feeding the twins and you can eat right along with them.”

  Moss’s blue eyes gleamed. He grinned. Without a word, he scampered off to the kitchen, bare feet whispering against the hardwood planks. Ember’s happy shriek greeted him. “Tew!”

  Merlin looked at Angélique and winked. They both knew that she had come out on the good side of that deal.

  The dog trotted over to where Angélique stood and started talking in drawn-out and urgent whoo-whoos, inflections rising and falling, sounding for all the world like she was giving instructions—or orders—on how to care for her pack member.

  Merlin laughed. “She’s got all manner of things to say.”

  “That she does,” Angélique agreed. Taking in the dog’s bicolored eyes, amusement curled through her. She looked at her husband. “You never told me that you had Siberian husky in your bloodline.”

  Merlin regarded her for a moment, his eyes—one a startling and breathtaking sapphire blue, the other deepest brown—glinting. He winked. “You never asked, hun.”

  Angélique laughed.

  “Here, girl,” Jubilee said, calling to the dog. “C’mere.”

  But the Siberian husky ignored her and padded back across the room, nails clicking against the floor, to sit, tongue lolling, at René’s bare feet, her intent gaze of blue and brown fixed on the person slung like a bag of potatoes over René’s shoulder.

  All Angélique could see of that person were mud-smeared jeans and T-shirt and mud-caked boots—no, make that boot, since one seemed to be missing. A soiled sock was all that still clung to his left foot.

  “So who is he?” Merlin asked, folding his muscle-corded arms over his chest and eyeing René’s passenger.

  René shook his head. “Never got his name, me. But he be in a bad way.”

  Angélique’s nostrils flared. A subtle olfactory stew of sweat and pheromones and musk marked René’s burden as a young adult male. Whoever he was, he was seriously injured. The coppery scent of blood curled thick into her nostrils. And not just blood. She sniffed, drawing in his smell, picking apart his recent history.

  Fevered sweat, deep earth, dank mud, wet denim and cotton, the sour stink of a body pushed beyond endurance and shutting down, the musky pheromones of Change.

  “That he is.” Angélique unknotted her apron ties and tossed the apron into the armchair beside the fireplace. Pulling a hair tie from the pocket of her jeans, she tied back her long russet hair.

  She had a feeling a long day lay ahead of them.

  “Take your friend to the back and put him on the table,” Angélique instructed, her voice all business and no-nonsense.

  “No friend,” Jubilee said before René could speak. “We found him planted in the earth just outside o’ Chacahoula, and potioned up with bad juju to boot.”

  Merlin closed the porch door, then glanced over his shoulder at Angélique, his eyes holding hers, his expression grim. “Sounds like black work, hun.”

  Angélique nodded. “It does. But he’s also Change-sick. He reeks of it.”

  Merlin blinked, startled. “Change-sick? Then that means he’s a—”

  “Half-’n’-half,” Jubilee finished. “And we’re all wasting our time. He’s too old for the Change. He ain’t gonna make it.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Angélique pierced Jubilee with a fang-sharp stare.

  “Tais-toi, girl,” René snapped, his gaze also locked on Jubilee.

  There was no mistaking the tension in his voice, in his broad, powerful shoulders, and in his brown eyes. Taller than the majority of the pack at six-five, his wild tawny locks curled to the nape of his neck; his sideburns and beard were the same shade as his hair. And right now, his hair was bristling with quiet fury.

  Jubilee pushed away from the mantel and met René’s gaze. “He’s a half blood. Dangerous. Unpredictable. A fucking freak.”

  Brows knitted together, jaw tight, Merlin started forward, expression furious, but Angélique’s reflexes were faster, her speed quicker than her human husband’s, and she beat him to Jubilee.

  Baring her fangs, Angélique snarled. Her warning was unmistakable: You have stepped out of place.

  Jubilee dropped down into a crouch, panic flashing across her face as she realized exactly what she had just said, and lowered her head submissively, her gaze aimed at the floor. Her body tensed, muscles quivering.

  “I was only talking about the chien de maison we dug up,” she explained hastily. “I never meant Ember and Chance. Never.”

  Fingernails morphing into black claws, Angélique dropped down beside Jubilee and grabbed her by the back of the neck, her claw tips pricking the girl’s skin. The bright smell of fresh blood floated into the air.

  “Say anything like that again,” Angélique said in a coiled whisper, “and you will no longer be welcome in my home.”

  “She ain’t welcome right now,” Merlin said, his voice cold enough to start another ice age. “Get your ass out of my house, Jubilee Fontaine.”

  “Merlin, I’m sorry,” Jubilee said, her gaze still on the floor, her voice low and contrite. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Damn straight you weren’t thinking,” Merlin agreed. “Now get the hell out.”

  Angélique slid her claws away from Jubilee’s neck, the tips dotted with blood, then stood. She curled her hands into fists, claws biting into her palms, and swallowed back her anger as the younger woman jumped to her feet and bolted from the room.

  The porch door slammed behind her.

  Angélique’s belly knotted. Jubilee wasn’t the only loup-garou who believed half bloods to be inferior and, worse, dangerous.

  She felt Merlin’s strong hands on her shoulders, the warmth of his palms through her blouse. She leaned back into hi
m for a moment, drawing strength and calm from his solid, reliable presence, and closed her eyes.

  “You okay, hun?” he asked softly.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m okay. Pissed. Exasperated. But okay.”

  “I’m still with you on the pissed part. And if this closed-minded bullshit ever gets aimed in the twins’ direction, we split. We’ve got options, woman.”

  A familiar argument-slash-discussion, one they’d been having for the last two years, ever since the twins had been born.

  We can join my clan. I refuse to let anyone treat our kids as less, as inferior.

  We’ve got time to educate the pack, show them the flaws in their thinking.

  And if we can’t? That flawed thinking runs deep, hun. Thousands of years. We ain’t got much time before the twins are old enough to realize they are being looked at differently than anyone else in the pack. And why.

  We can do it. We have to do it. You’ve been raised in a human pack—a clan. You know how it is.

  Yeah. I do. I understand the ties of kin and clan. I gave up the road for you. Will you give up the pack for our children—if it comes to that?

  The pack needs me, Merlin. I’m their traiteur.

  Then train another healer and let the pack need them.

  Angélique drew in a breath, pulling her husband’s warm and masculine odor—oakmoss and musky amber—deep into her lungs. She opened her eyes. “Later, cher. Right now we have someone to take care of,” she murmured, sliding out from under his grasp and swiveling around.

  “That we do, but remember, we ain’t finished with this conversation, woman.”

  Angélique lifted an eyebrow. “Now you’re starting to annoy me,” she warned.

  “And that’s different from every other day, how?” Merlin teased.

  “Ask me that in the bedroom tonight, bright boy. And I’ll show you.”

  “Maybe I’ll sleep on the couch. Play it safe.”

  “Oh, it’s much too late for that, nomad.” Shoving past her grinning husband, Angélique walked over to René and the dog sitting patiently at his feet.

  “I apologize for Jubilee,” René said with a slight shake of his head. “Somet’ing’s bothering dat girl, for true, since I know she t’inks de world of yo’ kids.”