Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers

by Marion G. Harmon

  “We’d need him here tonight,” I cautioned. “This could go pretty fast.”

  “I gotcha. No worries—I’ll book him ultra-luxury class to New Orleans, even charter a jet if I have to. We need to get one anyway.” She gave me a mock-salute and vanished.

  I wasn’t sure if unleashing ghost-girl on this was a good idea, but that was one genie that wasn’t going back in the bottle. I called MC and told him about stage two of the plan so he could be ready. He told me he was on the other line with my “travel agent.” Shell worked fast.

  And I needed to sleep. At least a few hours, then I’d be good to go.

  Our shared “crypt” was as secure as Gareth’s, with the added bonus that it connected by the vent system to every room and all of the wall-sharing shops on my street—MC had bought all of them. Going to mist I floated down into it to sleep beside Acacia. Settling in, I decided to make a day of it. She’d be surprised to find me there when she woke.

  “So you didn’t kill Gareth. I saw the police report. That was nice.” Tonight Shell wore a black t-shirt that read I’d rather be breathing.

  “I’m not nice. I wasn’t even nice before.”

  Acacia looked around. “Um, who are you talking to?” Her eyes widened and she whispered “You can’t hear Charley, can you?”

  I sighed. Breakfast—orange juice for Acacia (she got no nutritional value from it, she just liked the taste) and an omelet and juice for me—was turning out awkward with one of the girls at the table unable to see or hear the third. I tapped Shell’s earbud as explanation, but Acacia’s frown remained.

  “But you are nice.”

  “Only to you.”

  “Before what?”

  “What?”

  Acacia actually rolled her eyes. “You said you weren’t even nice before.”

  “Before I died.” I ignored Shell, who was laughing at her end of the table. Our little kitchen would have been pretty tight if she were really here.

  “Oh. Well, I’m glad you got better.”

  This was how a lot of conversations with Acacia went; I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she meant.

  Acacia wasn’t stupid; in fact, she was rather smart. She’d been dumb in the way that too many fang-fans were, and it had gotten her months of horror at the hands of Sable, a serial killer turned vampire who’d made her his little torture pet. Undead, she’d been recyclable. That much trauma, even erased from her brain, had left her fragile and scattered and not at all interested in the Children of the Night vampire scene anymore. She was even a little phobic of other vamps, with the exception of me, Leróy, and strangely, MC.

  And with everything going on, I wanted her close to home. “About new inventory—” My cell chimed. It was Paul.

  “Karl Notts.”

  Gotcha. “Whose Karl Notts?”

  “A local public defender. One of the slimier ones. He arrived to see Mr. Minns—your Gareth—twenty minutes ago. Chère, am I going to know about this one?”

  “Nope. Did he come alone to offer his services?”

  “Yes. This isn’t part of something, is it? A setup?”

  “The arrest is legit, Paul. It’s exactly what you and Emerson wanted.” But almost certainly what they hadn’t expected. “The evidence is solid and he confessed. He’s your guy. We just need to know who he talks to, there’s someone he knows who we need to get to know. Nothing to do with the case.”

  “Okay. Is it— Be careful, Jacky.” He hung up.

  I closed the phone. “Got to go. New inventory?”

  Acacia nodded. “I’ll take care of it. Paul’s coming round when he finishes his shift. Is that alright?”

  “Sure, you can take him and throw a Frisbee in the park if he doesn’t chase the rabbits.”

  She scowled. “That’s not nice.”

  “Told you I wasn’t. Don’t wait up.”

  Shell let me get myself dressed and us out on the street before she opened her mouth again. I’d decided to walk to Leróy’s school after calling MC and telling him who they needed to follow. And since it had been awhile, I dressed as bait. Bright skimpy club wear, junk in my hair, Shell’s shades, I looked like I’d wandered away from the Bourbon Street clubs.

  “So, Gareth?” she started.

  “What about him?”

  “You gave him to the cops because of this thing? What were you going to do? If this hadn’t come up?”

  I looked her over. She’d swapped to a matching club outfit and was trying on a swagger. She looked like a teen who’d crawled out her bedroom window to find some grownup fun; if she really had been I’d have scared the shit out of her and sent her screaming home. “You were pretty hot to do something extreme about him last night.”

  “Yeah, well…” She looked…guilty. I stopped on the sidewalk, focused my eyes on her. Yeah, yeah, she wasn’t really here; I could tell myself that all night, but she had the whole reality-plus interaction down so cold it didn’t make a difference.

  And it didn’t make a difference from her end, either; someday I was going to need to find out just how “real” her reality-emulator interface made this for her. Right now she wouldn’t meet my eyes. Guilty. And worried?

  Ghost-girl was scared. I’d scared her. When had I—

  I’d kept her shades and earbud on me last night. I hadn’t put them back on, but I’d kept them with me.

  She’d turned them back on.

  “How much did you listen to last night?”

  “I—I shut it down when you went to Lalaurie House.”

  Where MC’s electronic security might have spotted an active signal. Right. So she’d heard my whole interaction with Gareth. She’d been pretty good about not letting on when I’d called her late this morning, but her laughter tonight at the breakfast table had been nervous and I’d missed that.

  Hands in my jacket, I bunched my fists. “You want to know what I’d have done to him, if not for this business. You want to know what I do down here, where Hope’s not—where the Sentinels aren’t watching. I’m being me.”

  “But what does that mean? Are you a supervillain?” It was almost a wail.

  “Am I— Shell, I swear to God—” A big hand came down on my shoulder, spun me around and almost to the ground. I snarled “What?” before seeing the snub-nosed revolver being shoved in my face.

  The guy behind it almost stepped back at my look before rallying. “Give me your purse, bitch! We’re going to have some fun!”

  “Oh, for—” I snatched his gun away, breaking his trigger finger in the process. It went off, shooting Shell to no effect. “I’ll be right back.” Like she could actually stay on the sidewalk when I half pulled, half carried my mugger and would-be rapist into the bushes.

  I didn’t ask his name and when I was done I took his pistol and wallet, leaving his cash. Putting influence behind my words, I let him know that I’d give his ID to friends. If any of them saw his face in New Orleans again, they’d be the last ones to see him before Judgement Day.

  Then I let him go. He’d pissed himself, but that didn’t slow him down.

  I wiped my lips. “So what were we talking about?”

  Shell’s eyes were wide as saucers. “You just— You—”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I just. I don’t feed the addicts, Shell. I take donations from guys like him.” And others too, but I didn’t let them remember it and didn’t want to complicate the explanation. “To answer the question you’re trying to ask, kid, I wasn’t going to kill Gareth. I’ve killed only two vampires, both lots worse monsters than him. I haven’t killed anyone else who wasn’t trying to kill me, but Shell, I’m not nice. I wanted to kill him. I could have killed him and lost zero sleep over it.”

  Looking up and down the street, I started walking again. “I can pass for a superhero if you squint, but not down here. I’m what I need to be for this patch of darkness, and if you have a problem with that—”

  “No! No.” Ghost-girl took a breath, kept pace with me. “I was just— I’m sorry
, I just, I didn’t want you to be what I thought you…”

  She tapered off, but I got it. She didn’t want me to be a killer. Too late for that, but I made myself smile. “It’s okay. It’s okay, and I can take it from here if you don’t want to sidekick for this.”

  “No! We’re helping someone, right? I want to help.”

  “Yeah, we’re helping someone.” We kept walking.

  The Salle d’Arms remained open after dark, but the nature of its students changed a bit. Leróy taught a few nights a week, drilling MC’s boys and girls in Vamp-Fu. He and Vessy danced across the floor of the salle, trading saber cuts and parries as they danced in and out of mist. Everyone else watched.

  Since the point of Vamp-Fu was to incapacitate the other vamp and we could take stabby wounds anywhere but the heart (and even that unless it was wood), legitimate scoring meant slices to the arms and neck. Take a vamp’s sword-hand off, and you were halfway there, take his head off and you were home; you could reattach everything later if you wanted, but he was out of the fight.

  (Leróy also taught stake fighting—basically knife fighting that cut to the heart of the matter—but stake vs. saber was mostly a losing proposition. The needle stakes I kept up my sleeves were a vampire’s ninja-weapons, good for targets you either surprised or found asleep.)

  When the flurry of mist-flesh-mist-flesh exchanges and cuts ended with Vessy dropping his point and stepping back, a line of red at his neck, they exchanged salutes with their blades and Leróy handed him a handkerchief to keep the blood off his shirt. Most vamps played to the whole aristocratic and sexy vampire cliché, with varying degrees of success. MC played it more aristocratic and scary, playfully aristocratic, effortlessly scary. Marc Leróy didn’t play—he breathed aristocratic sensibility. And boredom. Or disdain. He was the only black vampire I knew (fixation with pasty undead bloodsuckers apparently being pretty much a white thing), and he managed to communicate his feelings about most of vampire society around us without so much as a single snark or insult. I was jealous.

  Also a little in lust; the guy was seriously hot. When we first met he’d thought me just another silly child-of-the-night vamp and aimed his disdain at me. To be fair, I’d been dressed totally loligoth at the time, but I’d burned to express my opinion of him with a stake and I’d still wanted to jump him.

  “Jacqueline.” He dismissed Vessy from his focus, eyes raking my club-slash-hooker outfit. “No practice tonight? Or do you intend to use improvised weapons?”

  Vessy and I exchanged glances. “Sorry, Marc, business tonight. Midnight Ball business.”

  He nodded slowly. “My office?”

  When Leróy closed his office door, shutting out the ring and shouts and stomping thuds of the salle, I introduced Shell by simply turning on my cell and setting it to speaker.

  Shell did her usual good job of introducing herself; the kid wasn’t the quite as earnest and determined as Hope, but she made up for it in cheerful enthusiasm. Then I explained what was happening—it was the first time both of them had heard all of it. Leróy was grinding his teeth by the end.

  “So they’ve come.”

  “Not the ones that attacked you and Claire in Canada. At least we don’t think so.”

  “Nope,” Shell said. “I checked. Those guys were part of a bunch of weekend-warrior hunters, Order of St. George guys. Bunch of religious bigots, seriously unorganized. The Catholic Church kept trying to reign them in, finally threatened the entire bunch with excommunication and they disbanded.”

  I stared at the phone. Shell had disappeared so as not to split my focus. “When did you find that out?”

  “Soon as you said Claire’s name just now. I checked the police reports in Canada, did a search of related incidents, you know, research. And you’ve got trouble.”

  Leróy looked ready to break things. “There is more?”

  “Yup. A couple of the Georges didn’t give up—just made lateral career moves. They joined Spezielle Ressourcen. That’s Special Resources, a European outfit.”

  The name rang a bell, somewhere in my memory. “And what does Special Resources do?”

  “They’re like Special Solutions—they match superhumans to jobs. But they’re not superhumans themselves, they recruit them.”

  “We’re worried about recruiters?”

  “When I say recruit, I really mean acquire. There are lots of buyers willing to pay big bucks for superhuman assets they can control. They mostly operate in Europe, Africa, and Asia so you might not have heard of them. And they’re bad news—if they’re here then they might not want a war but they can fight one.”

  “They’ll bring superhuman assets.”

  “Whatever they think they’ll need to deal with any vampy opposition.”

  Despite the situation Leróy choked a bit, grimace twisting into a smile. “‘Vampy opposition?’”

  I shrugged, pulling out my epad. “She’s hung around me too long. Show us, Shell.”

  She linked with me and started scrolling faces and numbers across my screen. A multimillion-dollar company, it was privately owned (and didn’t Kurt Leitner, majority owner and CEO, look like a real piece of work). It had wide reach, deep assets they could draw on, and Leitner was willing to burn assets to get more. Just the kind of people who would be interested in the worst possible uses for a master vampire.

  Shit. So they might have gone looking for Claire, thinking to pick up a handy vampire-assassin or something. Leróy had disappeared with her, so they’d probably expected to find him playing Renfield to Claire’s Lady Dracula. They’d have been shocked as hell to find he’d turned, and that would have tipped them to Claire’s nature. They couldn’t know that Claire was a master vampire, but the odds of Leróy—her childhood friend—also going vamp were miniscule. Nonexistent once they researched his background and interests.

  And they had a market for monster-makers.

  Leróy took the pad from me to look at the Interpol reports. Murder, kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking, the list of crimes imputed to them read like an FBI Most Wanted List. Of course their lawyers maintained it was all lies or rogue actors. “So we leave. Now. I wake Claire and we go. We have prepared for this.”

  I chose my words carefully. “You can’t just run, Marc. They know about Claire now, you’ll always be looking over your shoulder and someday they’ll be there. Them or someone like them.”

  “You think I should—” He bit the rest off, but his eyes promised murder. He knew how I’d been made, what I’d done to my maker, and what I thought the only rational choice was.

  But meeting Claire had introduced me to one line I couldn’t cross. I couldn’t kill Sleeping Beauty, even if waking her might trigger a vampire apocalypse. But waking Claire…

  “No, Marc. I don’t. But I don’t think you should wake her up. Better to run with her as she is. I can—”

  “We do not need your help. As I said, we are prepared. And you should go, now.”

  “Marc, please—”

  He pushed my pad at me, turned away. “No. Go, Jacqueline. And thank you. You have been a good friend.”

  I stared at his back. I had an eight-inch needle stake in my sleeve. Damn you, Leróy. I could stake him. MC could order Vessy and the rest to lock down the salle while we took Claire and Leróy out of here as freight. We could find every Special Resources employee in New Orleans and send them home in their own boxes. We could—

  I left.

  “So, what are we going to do?”

  Shell had reappeared before I hit the street, but kept quiet for the first two blocks. As fast as I was walking, that wasn’t long.

  I didn’t look at her. She asked again a block later, ignoring the night crowd as we turned down Royal Street.

  The only idiot drunk enough to touch me ran when I looked at him.

  I got control of myself only when I realized I was walking in a widening circle of empty street. Partiers and strollers were ducking into bars and cafés, stepping into the s
treet, going the other direction, whatever they had to do to get clear of the oppressive weight of my ice-cold influence.

  “Is he coming?” It was almost a growl, but Shell understood me.

  “He just landed. Just needs to know where to go—we’ll never even see him till it’s time. But it won’t work now, will it?”

  I finally stopped. With no useful destination, I stepped aside to let foot-traffic pass, put my back against the cool wall of the fine establishment I’d stopped beside.

  “No. Maybe. No.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  My cell chimed and I looked at it. Well who knew? MC could use a phone. “You guessed right, Jacqueline. Mister Knotts passed a message from Gareth. They contacted Raphael with their proposition.”

  I kept my voice level. “And he knew what to tell them?”

  “He did.”

  “Leróy won’t cooperate.”

  “I know.”

  I closed my eyes. “Jacob, do you trust me?”

  “I trust you to do what needs to be done.”

  He couldn’t see me wince. “Then you need to help Leróy. The rest—the rest goes as planned, tonight. Call when it’s time.” I hung up, looked at Shell. “What are we going to do? Something immediate and extreme.”

  Five hours later, Shell and I watched the black van pull up to the front of the Salle d’Armes. Real inconspicuous; it might as well have been a hearse. The driver didn’t turn off the engine and Scarhead came out first (I really was going to need to start calling him Rafael), and looked up and down the street.

  When nobody started shooting, or even paid attention, he gave the all-clear on his radio and two more stepped out. Even in shadow I recognized Leróy. Although I’d only seen her once, sleeping, the young woman on his arm was unmistakably Claire.

  And here we go.

  Beside me, ghost-girl wore a t-shirt that read You want to do what? “Yeah, this isn’t at all risky. You know this is crazy. Right?”

  I shrugged. “One way or another, they’re not getting their master vampire.”