Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers

by Marion G. Harmon

  So I wasn’t checking in with the Master of Ceremonies on this. Not unless I needed to mobilize Midnight Ball assets or do something I simply couldn’t get done without his approval. But it also meant that any solution I came to would need to fit his definition of acceptable.

  Sometimes a staked, decapitated, and cremated vampire was acceptable. This might be one of those times, but I wasn’t going to be hasty.

  I had plenty to do before sunset. Finishing up the Beantown books took another hour and then I walked to Leróy’s fencing school, the Salle d’Armes. Everything was close, in the French Quarter. Leróy’s salle taught competition fencing and cane fighting (La Canne de Combat). After I’d nearly gotten killed by machete-swinging vampires during my first visit to New Orleans, Leróy had offered me serious saber lessons and I’d accepted; bullets could slow vamps down, especially high caliber headshots, but nothing stopped them like decapitation.

  He also helped me train my Vamp-Fu. (He called it Will and Balance, I called it Vamp-Fu to annoy him.) Today was saber work, with Rafe since Leróy wouldn’t be up until sunset. An ordinary human, Rafe couldn’t give my supernatural strength or will a workout, but he was an Olympic-level trainer and worked me hard on speed and style.

  Afterwards I headed over to Esplanade for dinner with Grams; I didn’t live with Mama Marie anymore, but the town’s reigning Voodoo Queen expected her granddaughter to see her at least two or three times a week. She was proud of the family le vampire, more so since I’d become the Daywalker. Since being a breather rather than an undead animated corpse meant I could eat and get something resembling a suntan, I was happy about that myself.

  (Bonus, the fact that now I could sally forth to hunt out any other vamp in his lair in the daytime had turned me into a bogyman with the rest of the vamp community.)

  I crossed Beantown’s threshold just before sunset. Acacia had joined Edwardo behind the counter, and she bounced around the end to hand me a card.

  “Morning, boss! This got dropped for you.” It was a black card with the silver razor crescent of the Midnight Ball. Because MC didn’t know how to text. Or call. I stuck it in my pocket.

  “Thanks, Steph. You need to go out, tonight?”

  She blushed, shaking her head. “Officer Blake dropped by for coffee last night, and we…”

  God save me from shy vampires. “You necked in the stockroom?”

  “It’s not like that! …um, yeah, we did. He’s sweet.”

  “He’s crazy.” Officer Blake was playing with fire just stepping out with a vamp; Acacia, sweet Stephanie Dupree, looked like Barbie, dressed in bright pastels, and loved kitten videos, but she had more issues than a Psychiatrist Monthly subscription. “I’m taking the Cadi, may be out all night. Can you handle it?”

  She nodded uncertainly. The crowd hadn’t thinned much, and wouldn’t until the small hours, but what really worried her was other vamps dropping by when I wasn’t here. But she had my cell number, and Edwardo was an ex-con with a shotgun full of blessed silvershot and a seltzer bottle full of carbonated holy water. He also knew how to swing a machete, not that he’d need any of it; MC had declared Acacia off-limits for any vampy dominance games, and everyone knew I’d rip their heads off if they laid a finger on her.

  But she still went to stay with Leróy when I was out of town.

  I grabbed my keys and cases from the back office, and packed the Cadi; the NOPD never had reclaimed the old Cadillac Paul had found for me (impounded in a drug-cartel bust), and its trunk had room for a body or a vamp needing shade during daylight hours. On the drive to the Garden District, I texted Paul to suggest he spin by for another coffee if he hadn’t skipped town. He’d gotten real protective of Acacia, before my final divorce from the police, and if she was going to be stepping out with a cop I’d rather it was him; at minimum I trusted him to treat her right—and trusted him to go all Benandanti wolf-man on anyone who gave her the least little grief when I wasn’t there.

  Yeah, I’m a romantic.

  I put on Shell’s VR shades after texting Paul, slipped the earbud on. Shell appeared in the passenger seat beside me, ignoring the aluminum case where her butt would be. “So you want to know more about the Garnettes?”

  “Hit me.”

  “They drive an electric car, donate to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, back every environmentalist super-PAC with an office in Washington, and Dad and Mom Garnette are currently away at a spiritual green retreat. They probably decided against another child because having more than one is ‘unsustainable’ or something.”

  I didn’t comment. Since they were leaving their only progeny to raise herself, reproductive restraint could only be a good thing.

  Turning us onto Sabrina’s street, I took us past her home. It proved as nice as it looked from the pictures; smack in the middle of the Garden District, a new house styled to look older rather than an older house recently renovated, it screamed business money. The last of the blue faded from the sky as I parked us down the street to study the house and neighborhood. This block of the Garden District held big tree-edged lots, which cut down the amount of street-lamp light that reached into the yards, and most of the homes didn’t have exterior lights anywhere but their doors. Good.

  “You ready?” When Shell nodded eagerly, I opened the case she’d been sitting in. “Then go, girl.”

  Shell disappeared and the tiny drones I’d foam-packed into the case whirred to life. Cracking the driver side window, I leaned back as the three drones rose and ghosted away into the deepening night. I rose into mist behind them.

  TV gets it wrong: vamps don’t come with a special vamp radar. We can smell each other up close. We’ve got the noses of bloodhounds, which means that we can pick up that slight hint of cellular necrosis (being undead means vampire bodies are dead). Cadaver dogs can smell us, too, but as the Daywalker (the only living vampire) I can hide from both vamp and dog noses.

  We can also smell vamps who’d recently fed (blood-breath), and we can feel a vamp’s projected influence if it touched us. Since in mist-form we are pretty much nothing more than a spread out cloud of water vapor and influence, that means that we are most detectable when floating as mist.

  So mist spread my senses, but also made me more vulnerable; I floated over the Garnette house to come down on the roof of the next home west of it. Sunset had cast its east side into shadow, and the corner of an upper window gave me cover from the street. Back in flesh, I spotted one of the drones covering this side of the property.

  Vulcan had made the handy things for me, and he hadn’t even had to resort to Verne-tech to do it. After my nearly getting stupidly killed on my first visit to the Big Easy, I’d put a lot of thought into how to detect and track other vamps without being detected myself. The answer was laser. A low-power laser can tell a sensor all sorts of things about the medium through which the beam travels—like the humidity of the air. Thinking that way, the answer is a no-brainer; as humid as the Louisiana coast could get, a misting vamp was still a significantly more humid pocket of air. With my Shell-piloted drone vamp detectors pointed in the right direction I could spot a floater from blocks away.

  Shell appeared beside me. “I’m in position. Got a three-sixty coverage going, settled in trees and gutters to save batteries.”

  I smiled. “It’s probably overkill—no vamp would enter a donor’s home through the kitchen.” Because adherence to the role makes most vamps stupid.

  “So we wait?”

  “Yes. Might not get anything tonight. We’re fishing.”

  She frowned, obviously dissatisfied. “Seems kind of boring.”

  “It is. Got anything to make it more interesting?”

  “Well…I looked into her debit card transactions some more? Guess what I found before she went to Angels.”

  “Not a clue.”

  “She attended a Barnabas Cross concert last Halloween.”

  I leaned back against the roof. “Shit.” My favorite word today.

  The
first “real” vampire to show up post-Event, Barnabas still toured with his goth-punk band and of course the limey bastard made New Orleans an annual stop. I’d never met him, but Barnabas Cross was one of the vamps I hated just on general principle. Had she gone with some friends for kicks? Had she been one of the girls he regularly picked out of the audience to take backstage?

  “Yeah, and after that I found a series of purchases at clothing shops catering to goth couture. From the receipts I’d say she’s assembled a complete goth-punk and loligoth wardrobe. Her parents have to be blind.”

  “They’d have to be here to see it. I’ll bet if you check you’ll find she went to Angels while they were out of town. She probably only dresses up when they’re not here.”

  Ghost-girl nodded, worrying her lower lip. I didn’t really know that much about Hope’s BF—I didn’t share, so Shell didn’t either—but I knew from comments Hope had dropped here and there that Mrs. Boyar had raised her alone and been the opposite of a negligent parent. Between her own mom and her experience with Hope’s family, she probably couldn’t imagine a pair like the elder Garnettes, but I’d had several girlfriends in high school who could real easily.

  Would we see anything tonight? I’d figured we had a one in three chance of getting a hit. Paul had said that Sabrina wasn’t leaving home after dark, which meant if anything was going on, then the vamp was visiting her. And vamps who sipped only shallowly could drink from the same donor about every third day for a long time before they became seriously anemic. Why do it that way? Because a situation like this, if it was happening, wasn’t about thirst; it was about sex and dominance.

  Or as they liked to call it, Dark Romance.

  I was right, or we were lucky; just after twelve Shell called out a hit on her nearest drone. From my distant vantage I couldn’t see anything at Sabrina’s bedroom window, but Shell assured me the misting vamp had dropped down from above the house and then vanished. I imagined the girl had left her window open a crack.

  “Now what?” Shell whispered needlessly.

  I didn’t say anything. Now I had do make a decision. This might be cause for a warrant. I could call the precinct, report it, and send an email attachment with Shell’s dated readings. Except that I’d never told the police about my handy vamp-sensors; they’d be easy enough to make, didn’t need a cyber-ghost pilot, and would give them one more way to watch me. So since there was no procedure here, would a judge accept mist-at-a-window readings as sufficient cause?

  I couldn’t be sure, and on top of that, bringing the police in was sure to piss MC off. Every public arrest and prosecution of a vamp was bad publicity, and he’d far rather administer justice in-house. Any vamp who pulled this kind of shit and got caught at it would rather be arrested.

  “We wait. Can you listen?”

  “I can bounce a laser off the window, sure. But why aren’t we doing anything?”

  “Because I don’t know who it is. And if he’s been taking advantage of Sabrina for any length of time, she’ll be enthralled and on his side. Or hers. I’m not going to start a fight on ground I don’t know and where the girl can be hurt, so we wait.”

  That didn’t go over well; ghost-girl pouted, positively mulish. “Fine.”

  Less than an hour later, the Shell’s sensor caught mist again as our vamp lothario left the house.

  “Do we follow?” Shell asked.

  “How far can the battery take the drone?” There was practically no chance that whoever it was would be unobservant enough not to notice me tailing him on the night air. If I could sense him, he could sense me. The drones…

  “Five minutes, tops. Depends on the wind.” Shell looked crestfallen. “I’ll work on that.”

  “Do. And don’t feel bad—I never expected you to. Now it’s my turn.” Being what I was, I was one of only two vamps I knew of who didn’t need an invitation to enter a home. “You be quiet till I’m done.”

  “Gotcha. I’ll just wait out here.”

  I smiled at the sarcasm. Taking off ghost-girl’s shades I turned to mist myself, rising to drift across the property.

  I’d come prepared to commit a little B&E—the Garnette’s home security system was laughably basic—but Sabrina had left the window cracked and I drifted into her teen sanctum. Her frilly four-poster princess bed, matched to the rest of the pastel room, almost made me rethink my decision not to call in the police.

  The teen years are years of trying on different selves, I remembered that. I’d gone the it-girl, cheerleader route in high school; it had meant biting my tongue a lot when classmates in my circle did or said stupid shit, and I’d shed that skin in college, but I’d been as fake as the rest of them. But I hadn’t been stupid about it, and Sabrina had obviously completely embraced the stupid. She might dress goth out on the street but in here she’d gone completely pastel Lolita, turned herself into a total Mina for someone. There wasn’t a hint of goth in the room; in this relationship the vampire was goth, not the pure and innocent mortal victim.

  But this might not be all her; just how much of it was her choice was one of the things I’d come in to find out.

  “Sabrina? Wake up now.” I made it a whisper, but sent influence with it. The girl in the bed stirred.

  “Gareth?” She sat up, only half-awake but pushing her covers away to show me her white Victorian nightgown as she brushed tumbled black locks out of her eyes.

  And now I really wanted to set someone on fire. Gareth. That had been easy.

  “Not Gareth, but you don’t need to be afraid.” I used only the tinniest bit of influence and it was enough to leave her breath shallow, her eyes wide and dilated.

  She nodded sleepily. Seeing a strange woman in black jeans, black top, black leather jacket, looking like a pissed-off Mina after Dracula’d had his full way with her, standing by her bed with murder in her eyes should have triggered a much more energetic response. The girl was so enthralled that any vamp could have told her to take a walk off her roof and she’d do it without thought.

  I sat down beside her, close enough to brush aside her high collar and check her arms to see that he hadn’t bitten her neck or wrists. She didn’t flinch, and I didn’t search the rest of her body to find out where he had; I could guess, and confirmation needed an intimacy I wasn’t going to force on her.

  “I need to ask you a few questions. Is that alright?”

  Yes would have taken too much energy and she just nodded again. It was like playing Twenty Questions, but I asked until I was satisfied. Finally I leaned in, kissed her forehead. “Thank you Sabrina. Now forget that I awoke you and you spoke to me. Go back to sleep.”

  Still so enthralled that I could have given her complete amnesia with a suggestion, she fell back so bonelessly I had to catch her. Tucking her in, I checked her pulse and looked for signs of serious anemia, then went to mist.

  Gareth and I were going to do more than talk. But first I had to get rid of Shell.

  I met Shell back at the car as she brought the drones home, putting the shades back on to do the courtesy of seeing her when I told her she was done for the night. That didn’t help a lot—the kid had heard Sabrina’s interview and was all ready to help me find and stake Gareth—but she accepted it. Ungracefully.

  She’d have still been useful, but I wasn’t going to involve Hope’s BF in murder and that was what it might come to. We said our goodbyes and I put away the earbud and shades before getting on the road. The silent drive gave me time to think.

  I’d never met Gareth, or at least I hadn’t been introduced. That wasn’t strange; since Sable’s attempt at taking over the Midnight Ball, MC had instituted stricter rules about feeding. Now, vampires could only feed from a court or a harem. Courts were basically open parties like Sable used to throw, but could only be held in specific public places like Angels or the rebuilt Lalaurie House. Harems were a string of arranged partners the vamp could visit every three or so nights (with breaks for their recovery), and MC had to know of and approve
all of them.

  Most vamps used the courts. Since I rarely showed up to socialize and never fed at court, everybody assumed I had a harem; only MC knew that I hunted to drink, wiping the memory of the experience with each donor. I would not create or sustain fang-addicts. Hypocritical? Hell yes—especially since MC sent me to visit our harem-keeper’s donors occasionally, to check on their health and continued willingness. One night he’d laughingly let me know that my “visits” were occasions of terror (I didn’t do friendly very well). Being the only vamp in the Big Easy free to hunt was the price I asked for being MC’s boogeyman.

  So I knew Gareth didn’t keep a harem (and even if he did, there was no way in hell that MC would have approved an underage teen), and even if I’d known him personally (and I didn’t recognize Sabrina’s description of him), I might not have known where he slept. Lots of vamps were cagy about that, unless they kept an establishment with enough minions to protect them during the day.

  Of course MC knew where to find everybody—another of the new rules. Driving back through the French Quarter, I called MC and told him I’d gotten his card and would need to see him tomorrow night. And I asked for Gareth’s address.

  “Jacqueline, is this business I would want to know about?” His deep, velvety voice was practically phone-sex.

  “Yes. And I might tell you later.” I smiled when he sighed. He projected the cultured gentleman, but I’d been able to make him slip from perfect tone and diction quite often in the couple of years I’d known him. It was an ongoing project, one I didn’t have time for tonight.

  “Would it be too much, to ask you to fear me a little?”

  Okay, I had a little time. “Yes. Yes, it would. Because you looove me. You want to maaaarry me. You want to—”

  “Jacqueline!” I heard the sound of a door closing, hard, and laughed.

  “So, address?”

  Vampires (other than me) don’t need to breath except to talk. I could hear him breathing to calm down and get his voice straight. “When you have finished your business, you will come?”