Skinwalker jy-1

by Faith Hunter

  I nodded, and when I could speak casually, asked, “Did you hear anything about a murder over near Westwego? Out that way?”

  “Nope. Why?” When I shook my head, he didn’t press. “So. We going riding?”

  “I’ll think about it after lunch,” I said, and lit the broiler.

  I wasn’t able to turn the conversation around to Anna. How did you ask a guy if he was sleeping with the mayor’s wife, especially when you can’t explain why you have an inkling that he is? So, after a steak, microwaved potato, spinach salad with bacon dressing, and some idle conversation, I said, “Much as I like the idea of horseback riding, I need to bike out to Westwego. Rain check?”

  Rick was again sprawled in his chair, one arm draped over his middle, the other resting over the back of the chair nearest, a Coke can dangling in his fingers. He shrugged. “I got nothing to do. I’ll ride out that way with you and we can stop and get supper on the way back. Make a date of it.” His eyes sparkled. “I know me a good diner, serves the best oyster po’boys in the state. Fried up crackling crisp. It’s not too far from Westwego.”

  I shouldn’t take him with me, not when there might be a house full of dead bodies at the end of the ride. But instead of telling him no, I said, “Sure. Sounds like fun.” And could have slapped myself. But pragmatism reared its head. If I did find dead bodies, I’d need to call the cops, and I’d need a good story. I could practice on Rick.

  It was after five when we headed out of town, the sun still far above the horizon and glaring, the air hot and muggy, burning where it hit bare skin, making us sweat beneath the riding clothes. I would heal from road rash if I took a tumble, but rapid healing was not something I wanted to explain. So I wore jeans, boots, and leather jacket despite the heat. Rush hour traffic was snarled everywhere, but having bikes meant we could weave through stopped traffic. Not exactly legal, but no one had ever stopped me, and Rick didn’t seem like the kind to wait patiently on hot asphalt, breathing exhaust fumes. He followed when I motored between stopped vehicles on 90 and across the bridge.

  The traffic opened out on the other side of the Mississippi and I gunned the motor, Rick at my side. The world looked different from the road, and it took me a while to orient myself, but I eventually found my way to the exit that led through secondary and tertiary roads, and lastly to the crushed-shell drive of the vamp graveyard.

  The drive was blocked by two hinged metal arms on solid stanchions, the arms connected by a chain and secured with a good lock. I slowed to make the transit around the stanchion on the left and gave the bike enough gas to coast along the curving drive, pulling off my helmet and looking the place over. It looked different from nighttime and twenty feet up. I didn’t know what he was waiting for but Rick eventually followed me. I was walking between crypts, the sun broiling down on my bare head when he caught up, his Frye boots crunching shells as he jogged.

  “You did see the No Trespassing signs, didn’t you?” he said.

  “Yeah.” I spotted the Pellissier mausoleum and checked the locks on the barred door. They were top quality and still secure, which meant that Katie was safe, or as safe as an undead drowned in the mixed blood of a hundred vamps and buried in a casket in a vault can be. I swiveled, spotting the St. Martin crypt, and strode that way, peeling out of my leather jacket as I walked. Sweat was dribbling down my spine, under my arms, and pooling in my waistband as I circled the small building. The St. Martin crypt was made of white, dry-stacked marble blocks. Its door was centered on the front between elegant pillars; two windows were close together on the back, windows matching the pointed, arched style of the chapel’s. The crypt had been badly damaged. A section of marble was missing from a corner, broken, as if it had been attacked with a mallet; I knew better. Stone shards were scattered around from the rogue’s mass change.

  Rick swore softly. “Damn kids.” When I glanced at him, he said, “Graveyard vandalism is rampant in this part of the state.” I didn’t bother to enlighten him.

  The building was fourteen by twelve feet, with a stone statue on the peaked roof—a six-foot-tall winged soldier with a bronze sword and shield. Except for the weapons and wings folded to his sides, he was naked. And exceptionally well endowed. I shook my head, not smiling, but wanting to. A sculptor’s vision of St. Martin? Or St. Martin’s vision of an angel?

  Rick caught up with me again. “You do know this place belongs to the vampires, don’t you?” He sounded half amused, half speculative, as if he wondered how I found this place and why I was here, but didn’t really want to ask.

  “Yeah.” I checked the locks and the vault’s barred door. The locks were old and broken. The bars were freshly bent, with shiny metal showing along stress lines. “So?” I opened the barred gate door and pushed on the wooden one behind it. It opened with a soft groan.

  “So, the gate had electronic sensors,” he said. “They’ll send someone to check on us.”

  I looked inside. “Good. They can clean this up.”

  “This” was the destruction of five of the six coffins. They had once rested in stacked stone biers, three high, and each individual bier had a small marble door at the foot end. The marble doors were busted and the coffins inside had been pulled out and slammed against the back wall, if the scars there were a clue. The casket contents were scattered everywhere. Contrary to pulp fiction, vamps don’t blow away in ashes when they die unless they’re burned, so the floor was littered with bones, scraps of ancient dress, boots, a few grinning skulls—one with black hair attached—some gold coins, glittering jewelry, and rotting casket stuffing.

  I gestured inside. Rick bent around the side of the door and looked in. “Crap almighty. Who—shit! Who did this? What’s that smell?” He backed quickly away, a hand over his mouth and nose.

  I was already upwind. “Partly the dead and partly the rogue. I think he spent the day here yesterday.” I calculated the distance from the edge of the woods. It was farther than it looked from the air. “I think he knew the vamps would put Katie to earth, and he hoped to get at the blood in her coffin.”

  “Blood in her coffin?”

  I considered his expression and decided that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t known what the ceremony last night involved. I wondered if any human knew. I also decided it was smarter not to know the answers to his question and smarter not to share the information I had discovered. “Katie’s blood,” I lied. “He didn’t finish draining her.” Which was the truth.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I had to work on my lying. To keep from having to respond to his skepticism, I walked to the chapel. On the way, I passed the other crypt damaged by the rogue, stealing mass. It belonged to Clan Mearkanis, and the damage was greater, two square feet of stone blasted away.

  I reached the chapel. The cross was still lying on the small porch, but no longer glowing or burning. I leaned over it, pulling off my sunglasses to get a better view. The wood was untouched, unscorched by the fire I had seen, and no fresh scent of smoke clung to it. It wasn’t made from carved or cut wood; the crosspieces looked like large splinters ripped from a timber.

  The cross looked old, blackened by time and usage. The four ends were smoothed, as if they had been slightly rounded off by sandpaper and oiled. Or slowly shaped from the repeated caresses of human hands. The two pieces were held together by twisted metal, the finish a green verdigris that had bled into the wood it touched. Old, I thought. Old, old, old.

  Rick took the narrow steps and bent to pick up the cross. I reacted without thinking. Grabbed the waistband of his jeans. And yanked. He flew past me. Made a soft oof when he landed, tumbling, expelling air. I stood, blocking the porch, waiting for him to catch his breath. He groaned and cursed. “Why the hell did you do that?” he grunted. “What did I do this time?”

  “You were about to touch the cross,” I said. “It belongs to a vamp. She’d have smelled your scent on it. Not smart.”

  “Vamps don’t own crosses,” he said. He pushed his elbows under him an
d half sat, legs splayed, feet digging into the shells, making little troughs that ended in mounds at his heels. “Besides, a simple ‘Hey you, stop’ would have worked just fine. Anybody ever tell you that you tend to overreact?”

  “Yeah. A few people. Some of them are dead,” I said, letting my grin out. “I’m not.”

  Rick blew out a sound of disgust and rolled to his knees. “What do you press, anyway? You got arms like a gorilla.” He made it to his feet and stood looking at me.

  Press. As in bench press. I didn’t like his expression. I had received similar looks when I did something a normal human couldn’t, and I usually just made light of it. That worked, mostly because humans didn’t want to recognize otherness, difference, or oddity. They would rather stuff the unusual into an acceptable niche, someplace comfortable, tucking a square peg into a round hole. It was easier for them and a lot less scary.

  I had a feeling Rick LaFleur wouldn’t accept my usual misdirection. There was a certain look in his eyes, harder and more speculative than I expected; not an average-Joe expression, but something else entirely. I couldn’t come up with a single response, so I shrugged and walked to the dead tree. What you can’t fight or explain away, you can sometimes ignore.

  The tree was a dead sycamore, thin bark curling, exposing silvery wood beneath. The branch where I had sat was scored by raptor talons. A small feather rested on the ground, one of mine, and it felt really weird to see it. Had I lost part of me when I lost the feather? If I lost more of me, say if a leg were amputated while in animal form, what would I be missing when I shifted back? How much could I lose and still be me? I tucked the feather in my pocket.

  Scanning the graveyard, I took in the layout, refamiliariz ing myself with the clan crypts. I wasn’t sure if I had missed it last night or forgotten it, but most of the mausoleums had statues on top. Each marble statue was male, winged, had a weapon and shield, and was naked. They could have been carved by the same sculptor, but the faces and bodies of each were different, all male, all beautiful. Angelic defenders of the demonic undead. Weird.

  Rick walked up behind me and I studiously ignored him. I had seen enough, and I was ready to put some distance between the yank-Rick-off-the-porch episode and me. I flipped open my cell and dialed Bruiser as I headed back to the bikes. When he answered, I said, “You got alarms going off at the vamp graveyard?”

  If I surprised him he didn’t indicate it. “Yes. We have a team on the way.”

  “It’s me and Rick LaFleur. Tell them not to shoot us if they get here before we leave. And tell them the rogue did a lot of damage to the St. Martin and Mearkanis crypts last night. I think he spent some time in St. Martin’s, which means either he bypassed the security system, or he has access to it.”

  Bruiser cursed once, eloquently, and his voice dropped into a near snarl when he asked, “You have any more news for me?”

  “No. I’m done. Wait. There’s a cross on the chapel steps. Sabina dropped it, fighting off the rogue. Tell your guys how you want them to handle it.”

  “How do you know she dropped it? And how do you know about Sabina?” His tone was suspicious, the way a murder investigator’s voice is suspicious when he finds a body and a bloody suspect standing over it. Holding the murder weapon.

  I grinned and straddled my bike. “I’m psychic.” I closed the phone and geared up, ignoring Rick as he followed my lead. I got the feeling that he didn’t like playing follow the leader, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. I also had the feeling that he was more than he let on. And I wasn’t sure what I should do about that. Which made us even, in some strange kinda way.

  I kick-started the bike, set my sunglasses in place, leaving the face shield up, out of the way, and wheeled down the drive. It was time to see the house the rogue dived into last night.

  CHAPTER 20

  Crap. I’m starting to like vamps

  The house was at the end of Old Man’s Beard Street. I smelled the blood and death through the open window from halfway down the road and it got stronger as I neared the house. The rogue-liver-eater had indeed killed here. I gunned the engine up the drive, next to the house, stopped, yanked off my helmet, and dialed Katie’s pet NOPD investigator, Jodi Richoux. Rick pulled up next to me and killed his bike too.

  “Jodi,” I said when she answered. “This is Jane Yellowrock. I was following the rogue’s tracks last night, and I got a house with open windows, one with damage consistent with a B and E. Place smells like dead meat.”

  “Hang on,” she said, and I heard muffled conversation for a moment before she said, “Okay. Gimme the address.”

  “It’s on Old Man’s Beard Street, out Highway 90 not far from the Lapalco Boulevard exit, at the end of the cul-de-sac. You might want to send a team. And bring your psy-meter. I’d like to see what it reads.”

  “The team is on its way, and so am I. But give me one reason why I should share confidential information with you.”

  “Because the next time I find something interesting, you want me to call you and not the New Orleans Times-Picayune .” I snapped the phone shut. I did so love toying with cops. Jodi would hate my guts, but she’d share. Of course, if she found the slightest reason to charge me with anything, no matter how minuscule, she would, just to get me back. Tit for tat. I wheeled the bike off the drive and beneath a shade tree.

  “You’re nuts, you know that?” Rick said. “Stark raving crazy, you are.”

  I unzipped my leather jacket, peeled it off, and draped it over the handlebars. “I may be here for a while. You staying or going?”

  “I’m outta here.” He paused, torn by two distinctly different needs. “How do you know the rogue vamp came through here last night?”

  I decided on the truth, as far as it went. I had to practice it on somebody before I tried it out on Jodi. “I followed him partway. Saw him come through here but never saw him leave.”

  “You told the cops the place smells like dead meat. All I smell is fresh cut grass. And lady, I got a good nose.”

  The fragrance of the newly mown lawn across the street did permeate the air, but I had automatically filtered out every scent but the one I was looking for. Not smart. I should have walked around the house first. I really had to work on my lying. Going for surprised and innocent, I asked, “You don’t smell that?”

  Rick’s eyebrows suggested I hadn’t been entirely successful. He dug into his jacket’s inner pocket and held out some folded sheets, paper-clipped together. “The property owners you asked for,” he said.

  I palmed the small wad, tucking it into my shirt. “Thanks.”

  “I’d like to stick around but . . .”

  “But you have issues with cops?”

  “Something like that. I’ll see you later.”

  “Sure. Dancing at the club you play at.” I offered him a half smile. “Beer’ll be my treat.” Nothing like a girl asking a guy out—looked like I was a modern-day gal, after all, or I just wanted to keep an eye on him and his acquaintances. Rick might be on his own rogue hunt, hoping to bag the creature out from under me, taking money out of my pocket. Maybe make a name for himself along the way. Or he might be on some other mission that could impact mine.

  “Yeah. Well.” Which didn’t sound like a ringing endorsement for a date. But then he was probably too bruised to dance, from when I tossed him on his keister. Twice now. He turned a key; the engine of his red crotch rocket turned over and purred. I almost said, “Key starts are for wusses,” but I managed to keep it in. My own bike’s engine was running a little rough, so I had no call to be insulting someone else’s. Still. A keyed start? Where was the excitement and mystery in that?

  I watched him motor off. He didn’t look back. Soon as he was gone, I redialed Jodi. When she answered I said, “You know a local Joe, Caucasian but Frenchy, olive skin, black and black, maybe six feet, slender? Name of Rick LaFleur?”

  She hesitated. “No. Can’t say as I do. But he may go by other aliases,” she said. “Why?” It was the
hesitation that did it. Jodi was lying to me.

  “A source of mine claims he’s doing some low-level work for Katie and a few other vamps. I was checking him out.”

  “Name’s not familiar. But I’ll keep my eyes open. ETA’s under an hour,” she said. “Stay close.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said. I closed the phone and tucked it into my pocket.

  Was Rick running a scam on me and/or the vamps? Reporting to NOPD? A street source giving the cops inside information in return for help on a past legal problem? Was he ratting out the vamps? And if he was, should I care? Should it bother me? No, it shouldn’t. But it did. It bothered me that he might be sharing secrets. It bothered me a lot. I’d rather he was trying to take my hunting gig. “Crap,” I said. “I’m starting to like vamps.”

  Leaving my helmet and leather jacket with the bike, I circled around the house, into the woods, sweating in the humid heat. It wasn’t even summer yet and it was in the high nineties. I tried to imagine what it would feel like in August. A steam bath was trite but it was the closest analogy, and sometimes trite just meant true. A city-sized—heck, a state-sized—steam bath.

  For an instant, the urge for home swept over me. I stopped and closed my eyes as homesickness shook me. I wanted mountains, towering ridges and deep folded valleys. I wanted hemlock, spruce, fir, oak, and mountain maple, babbling brooks and streams spilling off hillsides and under small bridges that echoed hollowly off chasms when a bike clattered across. I wanted cool breezes and nighttime temps that dropped to the forties this time of year. I wanted icy spring showers. I wanted home, not this flat, muggy, wet, heated, miserable place. But here was where I was, and some people loved it with the same passion I felt for mountains. For now, I had a job to do and a way to put money in my pockets. I sucked up the need for home and started into the trees’ shadow line.

  A mosquito landed on my arm and shoved his proboscis into me for a blood meal, which seemed part and parcel of this job. I swatted it, leaving a bloody smear behind. Wiping it on my jeans, I muttered, “Damn bloodsucker.”