Elysian Fields

by Suzanne Johnson

  “You have some big furniture pieces that need to come out, don’t you? I’ll get them.” Rand tossed a paper sack on the steps next to me, pushed past us, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Yeah, hello to you too, and thanks for asking before you went inside,” I called after him. Presumptuous jerk.

  “See, he can be so thoughtful.” Eugenie propped her elbows on her knees. “But he didn’t even look at me. Sometimes I don’t think I even know who he is.”

  This conversation was dipping further into the pool of surrealism. “You really haven’t known him that long.” I measured my words. “You guys went from handshake to full-tilt almost overnight.”

  She laughed, flipping a strand of auburn hair out of her eyes. “We all can’t be you and Alex, with three years of foreplay.”

  “You had foreplay for three years?” Rand stood behind us in the doorway, holding the sofa. The whole sofa. Without straining. “Let me get past you and set this on the curb, then I want to hear about three years of foreplay.”

  I would not be discussing foreplay with Quince Randolph. And who the hell could walk around carrying a sofa—even one without arms or legs? I doubt Alex could have managed that.

  Rand settled the sofa skeleton next to the street, then arranged my collection of trash bags next to it.

  “Looks like you’re about done except for sweeping it out.” He ran fingers through his hair and pulled it back into a tail very similar to mine, binding it with an elastic band from his pocket. “When you decide on your new furniture, let me know and I’ll bring you some plants from the shop.”

  “Aw, that’s so sweet.” Eugenie was hopeless. “Isn’t it, DJ?”

  “Yes. Sweet.” Rand and I exchanged meaningful looks.

  Mine said: I don’t know what you are up to, but I will. His said: I love a challenge— or so I imagined it, since I couldn’t read him.

  Rand settled on the step below Eugenie and leaned back against her knees, which gave her a chance to begin trying to weave his thick hair into a braid. She was a hairdresser; she couldn’t help herself.

  “You spent the night at Alex’s.” Rand jerked his head away from Eugenie’s clutching fingers, which stopped braiding once his words sunk in.

  “You what? Did you . . . How was . . .” Eugenie huffed at the questions she wanted answers to but wasn’t willing to ask in front of Rand because she knew damned well I wouldn’t talk.

  “How was it you happened to know my house had been broken into?” Alex and I had wondered about that this morning after Rand left. The doors weren’t standing open. He either saw the Axeman go in or out, or had been snooping around and looking in my windows. I voted for number two.

  Rand smiled at me and paused a moment too long. Oh God help me, he was going to say something outrageous. “I came by with some beignets, hoping we could share breakfast. When you didn’t answer the door, I got worried and looked in the window.”

  “You were bringing her breakfast?” Eugenie’s surprise and hurt flared around her aura, and I winced. Damn him.

  “I knew she liked beignets, so I picked some up from Café du Monde after I went to the market this morning.” Rand’s gaze held steadily to mine as he nudged the paper sack. I wanted to rip his eyeballs out and chop them up for Sebastian to eat.

  “I need to go.” Eugenie stood up and almost tripped on her way down the steps. Rand reached out to steady her, but let her go as soon as she regained her balance. She turned to look at him, uncertainty in her eyes.

  “You need to leave too, Rand,” I said. “Maybe you and Eugenie can have dinner.” If he could read my moods as well as I suspected, he’d know I meant it, as well as my underlying message: Hurt her, and he’d have to deal with me.

  “I’d like that,” he said, grinning, before he turned to follow Eugenie across the street.

  I wasn’t sure which he meant: he’d like dinner, or he’d like to deal with me.

  CHAPTER 18

  I wouldn’t be able to talk to the other local necromancer until tomorrow morning, so rather than sit around and imagine horrific loup-garou scenarios or, worse, pack my bags for a life in the Beyond, I decided to try summoning the Axeman. Ever since Etienne had suggested it last night, I’d been thinking about how best to do it.

  I’d strengthened the security wards on my house again, jumping at every gust of wind, then wandered from room to room to make sure the new window glass remained reinforced and the curtains closed. As if sensing my discomfort, Sebastian twined between my ankles at every turn, clingy and skittish.

  After Katrina, Alex had left a couple of small grenades at my house and I had them locked in the bottom shelf of my library cabinet along with the really strong painkillers and a few particularly dangerous potions ingredients. Now, I removed them and gingerly set one on my worktable. After much inner debate, I put the other behind a vase on the mantel of my front parlor. Alex had assured me they were the best things for destroying zombies. The Axeman wasn’t a zombie, but he still might need destroying.

  Alex had been called to Monroe on a DDT case, to take down a vampire who’d ignored warnings to shut down his gaming operations. He’d exposed his fangs to a roomful of gamblers and had been turned in by none other than Etienne Boulard, his own Regent. With Alex out of town and Jake gone, that left Ken Hachette as my primary backup. As much as I liked Ken, he didn’t have enough experience to handle the Axeman or a necromancer.

  Still, I’d vowed not to charge into any more dangerous situations alone, so I pondered my backup options. Louis Armstrong would be no help in a fight if the Axeman escaped, although I guess he could play some jazz. Jean Lafitte would be more useful if things turned violent, but I needed someone who was straightforward and agenda-less.

  I called my favorite aquatic shapeshifter, Rene Delachaise.

  Two hours later, the merman arrived on my doorstep carrying a big plastic bag. “Hey, babe.”

  We hugged a long time. It had been less than a month since his twin brother Robert had died at the hands of a nymph we’d all trusted—the same woman who’d killed Tish. He’d saved me from drowning, fishing me out of the river and administering the CPR that cracked my ribs. And we’d done a power share that left us living inside each other’s heads for about seventytwo hours, which, freaky as it was, had led to a deep mutual respect. Rene was a good man.

  “You doing okay?” I stepped back and took a look at him. Like most mers, Rene was of short-to-average height, about five-nine, but he was shapeshifter strong. He had a wiry, tanned body, a thick South Louisiana accent, dark liquid eyes that showed the stress of the past month, and an impressive set of tattoos that spread across every bit of his skin I’d seen—and I’d seen a lot. Like most shifters, Rene had no body issues.

  “Some days are better than others.” He retrieved his bag from where he’d set it on the floor inside the front door. “How ’bout you?”

  I could think of Tish some days without crying now, and could remember more good times than bad. “Yeah, same here.”

  “I brought dinner. Just caught these yesterday.” He led me into the kitchen and pulled a big plastic bucket out of the bag, along with a pile of old newspapers. In the bucket was a mountain of shrimp and new potatoes, both boiled with enough cayenne to clear out my sinuses for a month.

  He spread the newspaper on the kitchen table and dumped the shrimp and potatoes out on it. “Is this a social call, babe, or you come up with some crazy shit for us to do?”

  I pulled a couple of beers out of the fridge and set them on the counter. “Hey— the power share thing was crazy but you’ve gotta admit it was fun.”

  “Yeah, you right.” He grinned, reminding me how it had felt to be in his head while he swam through the marshy waters near the mouth of the Mississippi River. “It was nuts. Want to try it again?”

  “No way.” We settled in at the table and began eating the shrimp and potatoes with our hands. “But I do have another adventure you might find interesting.”

&
nbsp; “I knew most of that,” he said after I’d filled him in on the Axeman case. He pulled the tail off a fat shrimp and popped it in his mouth. “The pirate’s been staying in the Beyond trying to find the killer, but he ain’t showed up. So Jean Lafitte thinks he’s in N’Orleans most of the time now. Jean, he’s still nosing around trying to find out what wizard is pulling the strings.”

  Rene and Jean had been business partners for quite a while now, so it made sense he’d be keeping up.

  I washed down a red-hot potato with my beer. “I’d hoped Jean had found something. When you see him, ask him if he can figure out why I’d be the target.” I shared the information about the numbers at the crime scene, and the Axeman’s arrival at my house. “You notice I don’t have any furniture in my living room? He broke it all.”

  “So, what’re we doing tonight, babe? Furniture shopping or huntin’ down the Axeman?”

  “Neither.” I smiled. Rene liked anything that might lead to a good fistfight, and he was surprisingly open- minded for a mer. As a species, they tended to be surly and pigheaded. “We’re going to summon the Axeman. Bring him to us.”

  Rene frowned and scratched at his goatee. “And why would we want to do that, exactly?”

  “If I can get him contained in my circle, I might be able to force him to tell me the name of the wizard that’s controlling him.” Chances were, the Axeman didn’t like being controlled any more than Jean Lafitte would, so I hoped he wouldn’t resist.

  Rene shook his head, but his mouth tipped up at the edges a few seconds before he started laughing. “You are one crazy chick. What you need me to do?”

  “Provide moral support.” We put away the plates and walked toward the stairs to the second floor. “Maybe kill him if he escapes the circle.” Kill being a relative term when it came to the historical undead.

  Rene followed me up the narrow staircase. “I can do that.”

  Only the strongest circle for this one. While Rene lounged on the sofa and did dramatic readings from a book on merpeople lore, I gathered iron shavings, unrefined sea salt, and ash, and carefully filled in the etched circles. Red candles for strength and gold for power rested at the four compass points.

  Also around the circle I placed items associated with the killer. The ax he’d left in my house after ransacking the living room. A photocopy of a letter the Axeman had allegedly sent to the Times-Picayune in 1919.

  Esteemed mortal, it began, They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a demon from the hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axeman.

  It went on and on in that vein. I shook my head. You couldn’t make up stuff like this.

  To my collection, I added a photo of one of the 1919 murder sites, a house on the Westbank of the Mississippi River. And, finally, Alex’s graphic novel about the infamous Axeman of New Orleans.

  Since I couldn’t use a real summoning name to force him into being truthful, I placed two rubies inside the circle on which I’d worked a truth-inducement charm.

  I laid the silver ritual knife on the worktable in my library and looked at my setup. It just needed a little of my blood as a summoning medium, and I’d be good to go. I’d have to decide whether to use my own physical magic to fuel the ritual or mix my magic with that of the elven staff.

  I turned to Rene. “You ready?”

  He laid the book aside and walked around the circle to study what I’d done. “Where do you need me?”

  “Anywhere as long as it’s not close enough to accidentally break the plane of the circle. If he gets out, we have to catch him.”

  Rene hopped on my big worktable, dangling his legs off the side. “This is as close as I’m gettin’, babe. Unless I need this.” He pulled a pistol from inside his shirt, released the safety, and laid it on the table beside him.

  “Let’s hope you don’t need it.”

  I knelt next to the circle and cut yet another finger. At least I didn’t have to worry about scars from cutting the same finger over and over. Thanks to the freaking loup-garou virus, I was healing everything in a few hours. Rene had sensed it in me almost immediately but had promised to keep his mouth shut, and I trusted him.

  Once the blood hit the circle, I closed my eyes and called on the Axeman to come forth.

  “Holy shit.”

  I opened my eyes at Rene’s soft curse and stared at the Axeman of New Orleans. He had been in the Beyond; we’d lucked out.

  He was well over six feet, and broad. His black suit coat had wide lapels and reached to his thighs. A black fedora cast a shadow over his eyes, but they had no light in them, no life. They weren’t the eyes of a dead man; they were the eyes of a monster.

  He took off the hat and gave a slight bow, revealing dark hair slicked straight back from his forehead. “Greetings, esteemed wizard. I was most distressed to have missed you last eve ning.”

  I just bet he was. “Why are you trying to kill me?”

  He grinned at me. His teeth were crooked and yellowishblack. Serial killers in 1918 couldn’t afford dental care, apparently. “I am not trying to kill you.”

  “You have to answer me truthfully. The stones bind you to the truth.”

  He looked down at the rubies and kicked one of them with the toe of a dainty-looking button-top shoe. It bounced against the invisible plane of the circle and landed on the wooden floor with a clatter. “I spoke the truth.”

  Interrogating an uncooperative prete was a thankless task.

  Rene jumped off the table and came to stand beside me. “Why are you trying to attack her?”

  The Axeman examined his new questioner with great interest. “You are not human or wizard. What are you?” “I’m the guy who’s going to kick your ass if you don’t answer my question.”

  I bit my lip to keep from smiling. I knew there was a reason I liked Rene. He couldn’t kick the Axeman’s ass and he knew it. But it didn’t keep him from antagonizing the guy. And if called upon to do so, he’d try to kick the guy’s ass until he couldn’t kick any longer.

  “I have been ordered to attack this one, perhaps to kill, but I don’t know why. Ours not to reason why; ours but to do or die.” He treated me to another big, grotesque grin. Great. We had an undead serial killer quoting Tennyson.

  “Who ordered you to attack me?” Here was the real question.

  The Axeman frowned. “I know not his name.”

  Okay, it was a man. That didn’t help much. Both Etienne and the new age shop owner were male. “What does he look like?”

  I hadn’t met the new age necromancer yet but if Axeman said dark hair, it let Etienne off the hook.

  “I have not seen him. He remains hidden from my sight when he summons me.”

  I paced outside the circle, thinking. “Is your summoner a vampire?”

  The Axeman blinked. “I do not know.”

  I huffed in frustration.

  “When you gonna attack again?” Rene asked.

  The Axeman didn’t answer. Instead, he looked up as if hearing a voice, then looked back at me with animation in his eyes for the first time. “I’m being called.”

  He disappeared. Just like that. One second he was there, the next he was gone.

  “What happened?” Rene walked around the outside of the circle as if the Axeman might be hiding. “I thought he couldn’t leave on his own.”

  That made two of us. “I’m guessing the necromancer summoned him again, and it pulled him out of my circle.” I released his name anyway before breaking the plane. No point in leaving an open door for him to return.

  Rene propped his hands on his hips. “Does that mean the necromancer’s magic trumps yours?”

  It sure looked that way.

  CHAPTER 19

  Rene insisted on sleeping in my guest room since Alex wasn’t due back until noon the next day, so we stayed up half the night playing poker. By the
time it was over, he owed me five pounds of oysters and a ride in his shrimp trawler. Gerry had taught me some things well, and how to play a mean seven-card stud was one of them.

  Rene also insisted on going with me to visit Jonas Adamson, the only registered necromancer in Southeast Louisiana besides the vampire Regent. He ran a shop in the lower French Quarter and publicly claimed to be a witch. Witches were minor mages who got little respect in the wizarding world, so for a wizard to proclaim himself a witch—even for commercial reasons—was incomprehensible.

  I found a parking place about four blocks from Peaceful Easy Feelings. It was starting to feel like winter, which in New Orleans meant wind and bone- chilling damp. Around us, people snuggled inside sweaters and jackets as they hurried along the streets. Rene the aquatic shapeshifter and DJ the soon-to-be- loup-garou wore short sleeves and thought the wind felt refreshing. Damn it.

  A bell chimed over the door when we entered the shop, and a middle-aged man dressed in an embroidered hippie-gypsy purple tunic looked up from behind the counter. “Be with you in a minute—just look around.” He resumed a conversation with a young woman asking about the different ingredients and cost of an herbal concoction to banish negative spirits from a house she was buying.

  Rene and I wandered the narrow, crowded aisles, studying the assortment of candles and pouches of herbs that promised everything from cash windfalls to true love to fertility. I saw nothing that warded against ax-wielding dead guys, pending wolf hood, or creepy prete neighbors.

  I hadn’t told the necromancer I was coming. Not so long ago I would have considered it a breach of etiquette to drop in unannounced. Call me jaded, but now I figured the less warning people had, the less time for them to devise lies and subterfuges. They might slip up and be honest.