by Faith Hunter
A snake slithered away from my approach and I halted midstep. I wasn’t afraid of snakes, but not being afraid didn’t mean that I particularly liked them. If I got bit, and if it was poisonous, I’d have to shift to deal with the venom. And shifting, even into Beast, was hard by daylight, especially without my fetish necklace.
I wasn’t familiar with local reptile varieties. The snake was three feet long and blackish, with a sort of diamond crosshatching down its length. Not a king snake. Not a garter snake. It rippled across the grass and turned its triangular, spear-shaped head my way. The arrowhead-shaped skull was the most common sign of a venomous snake. Maybe it was a diamondback, though its tail tip didn’t seem to have rattles. It slithered off into the shade.
I moved on, watching my step. If I landed on a snake, the boots would only help if it bit below my knee; above that was skin. I saw no more wildlife and quickly found the place where the rogue came out of the woods. On the lawn there wasn’t much to indicate the rogue wasn’t human, but into the woods a bit, he had run through a muddy patch and left three nice, clear, weird-looking paw prints with claw marks, half human and half something else. Big Cat.
The prints were about thirteen inches long, eleven at the widest point, across the toes. Two of the prints had human-shaped heels, which made it look awkward, something a Bigfoot expert would point to with pride. Deep, slashing indentations indicated the length of the claws—way longer than Beast’s. Big prints. Beast’s paws were about eight inches across, nails about an inch and a half across the recurved length, depending on how they were measured.
Liver-eater, Beast murmured to me, awake, her danger radar active.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t just a vamp. The term “rogue” wouldn’t do anymore, and until I figured out something better, liver-eater it was. It bothered me that Beast knew more about this thing than I did. Would this creature put Beast in danger from the cops?
I had an instant instinct to obscure the tracks, hide the creature’s trail—an instinct from Beast in survival mode. If I hid them, and the cops decided I had messed up a crime scene, I was going to have to start explaining, and that meant lying—lies that would eventually catch me up. So, against Beast’s better judgment, I left the tracks pristine and went to wait on the cops. First, I bypassed around the window where the rogue had entered. The screen was ripped and hanging. Shattered glass in jagged shards jutted from the bottom pane. Blood had dried on the broken ends. As I watched, a fly buzzed through. It didn’t come back out.
Stretched out in a lawn chair, distant enough from a fire ant hill to provide some safety, I pulled out the crumpled batch of property owner info Rick had given me. He had Googled up a map and drawn in the real estate, adding random notes on the taxpayers and owners on the bottom. The pages seemed to be compiled from several sites that collected personal information, most of which I used myself. On the map, the Jean Lafitte park and Bayou Segnette State Park were both colored in a verdant green, and until now, I hadn’t noticed how close they were to one another.
Every predator has its own territory/hunting range. Beast’s largest range had been over a hundred square miles. A large male mountain lion might have a territory of three hundred square miles. I guessed that a sabertooth might claim a proportionately larger range, and wondered if the park properties, as well as New Orleans city proper, fell within the liver-eater’s range.
Long-distance running is problematic for big cats. Aside from cheetahs, most cats are ambush predators, waiting for dinner to pass by and dropping onto it, maybe with a short sprint to finish it off. To avoid building up body heat, we seldom pursue prey at a dead run. Occasionally we are stalk ers, tracking prey by scent and print, but few of us ever run for any length of time.
The rogue had run an amazingly long distance last night. I remembered the sound of the shower running in the small house after the killing ended. Had the liver-eater needed to cool off? Had he taken a cold shower? Was that also part of the reason he slept underwater in the wooded lair, to stay cool?
On the map, I traced the distance between the vamp cemetery, the parks, and Aggie’s house. It was conceivable that all of it was part of the rogue’s hunting ground—and the French Quarter too. But I couldn’t guarantee that the map was drawn to scale; it might all be different from what I was thinking. I’d have to study it later. I folded the papers to the property owner info. A large tract of land bordering Jean Lafitte park was owned by Anna, the mayor’s wife—the woman who was sleeping with Rick and the liver-eater. I hadn’t noticed how much land had been put in Anna’s name. Goose bumps rose on my arms. Beast growled.
I pulled out the next sheet and found that ten property purchases had been made in the last year in Barataria, all single-family homes, most in the two hundred thousand bracket, on or near the waterfront. Many of the properties had been purchased by Arceneau Developments. Clan Arceneau? If so, why were vamps buying up property there?
I was studying the names when the cops showed up, an unmarked car pulling down the street, no crime-scene van in sight. But then, Jodi had only my claim that a crime had taken place. I refolded the papers and tucked them in my boot. I had a decision to make.
Jodi did the usual cop thing: knock on front door, walk around the house, knock on back door, check the outbuilding—which I hadn’t even noticed—look at the broken window with the blood on it, knock on neighbors’ doors, talk to the housewife across the street. My good ol’ buddy Officer Herbert followed in her wake, shooting me glances of hatred that made Beast want to toy with him. I had a feeling that, eventually, she would get her chance. Then Jodi and Herbert went in, guns drawn. After that, a lot of cops went in, some in CSI clothing.
They stayed inside a long time, as the sun dropped lower and shadows lengthened. I heard snatches of soft-voiced conversation through the windows, but I didn’t bother to listen; I didn’t have to—the rank odor of death rode the heated air. The liver-eater had indeed munched on the house’s occupants. Yet I had seen someone exit the house and drive away, which made my half-contemplated and unvoiced speculation correct. The man I saw leave was more than a glamour; like me, the liver-eater must have the ability to shift into another shape, but in his case, he ate his victim, then shifted using the ingested DNA, and strolled out. Just like in the ancient legends of liver-eater. But this one didn’t have a long fingernail.
Beast huffed. Little cat steal Beast. Jane steal Beast. Thief-of-soul.
Despite the heat, cold shivered through me like an icy electric shock. What I did was an accident, I thought. What the liver-eater does isn’t an accident. It’s black magic. Blood magic. Ancient Cherokee blood magic. And shifting changed his basic scent. The rogue could be anybody, anywhere, even someone I had spent time with, talked to. Sunlight might not damage him except when he was in vamp form—how the heck did I know? He could be vamp, witch, or human. Maybe he could look like one of the true-dead whose bones had been disturbed. Had he found enough genetic material to shift into an older vamp’s shape? So, what did I know? He hadn’t attended Katie’s blood gathering. He’d watched and then come out to feed.Yeah. . . . I started cataloguing who had been at the gathering.
The whole time Jodi did her cop thing, I sat, relaxed in my chair, sunglasses hiding my eyes, speculating, letting my mind wander over impossibilities that might not be so impossible. I knew Jodi was letting me wait, hoping I was stewing, deliberately ignoring me. Her way of getting me back for my attitude. As soon as I worked through all the impossibilities, her ploy began to work. I had people to talk to, alive and dead. If I wasn’t going to get inside—and I surely wasn’t—then I needed to be on the move.
Instead, I sat as cop cars piled up in the street and as media vans with satellite dishes arrived. One van had a cherry picker mounted on top, allowing a cameraman a bird’s-eye view of the crime scene. As the news crews set up, the neighbors began to come home to be informed and questioned by the cops. Across the lawn, I heard their shock and smelled their fear. And then the sun s
et and I started to get hot under the collar, which had to be Jodi’s intent.
Beast, on the other hand, loved every minute of the cat and mouse. And unlike me, she liked lying half asleep in the heat of the sun, if not the fire ants and the mosquitoes that came out to feast. And she liked the game playing. Ambush predators were patient.
I have sharp claws, she thought at me. Human female has only a gun she has been told she cannot fire. She is not Big Cat. She is not even alpha in dog or wolf pack. Not alpha in cop pack. She is nothing.
“She’s a cop who wants to lay a crime on me,” I murmured back, my voice lower than a whisper, my eyes closed behind my glasses against the final rays of late-day glare. “She’s a cop with access to the prints in the woods and the blood on the window and the forensic evidence inside the house. DNA evidence.”
Snake that lies at heart of all things? Beast asked.
“Yes.” Though Beast was unable to grasp the concept of DNA, she understood the snake. “DNA evidence that might prove skinwalkers exist.”
Humans will not see truth. They will say blood is spoiled.
By spoiled, I understood that she meant contaminated. She was probably right. Unlike more primitive peoples, intellectual, well-educated humans just pretended the things they didn’t understand didn’t exist. It was how vamps had survived so long among humans.
Liver-eater is not skinwalker like Jane.
“Fine. So what is liver-eater?”
“Say what?”
I opened my eyes and shoved back the glasses. Jodi was standing in front of me, lips pursed. I’d been so intent on the inner conversation that I hadn’t heard her walk up, but I knew I had spoken too softly for her to hear. I rolled my head around on my neck as if stretching from a nap, and smiled sleepily at her, letting Beast have her way. I extended my arms and laced my fingers like a pianist, pulling on muscles from shoulders to fingertips, cracking two knuckles, as if I had been asleep while she worked, sweating in the heated house. “Sleep talking. Can I go now?” Asking to leave was a sure bet for being made to stay. And leaving before I knew what she had found inside was not what I wanted.
“No. I want to know how you found this place.”
I didn’t bother sitting up, but dropped my sunglasses back over my eyes. I could see that brought all her instincts to the fore and so I smiled. “If you want to see my eyes while you question me, you can take a chair and not make me look into the sunset.” I shrugged, the same in-your-face shrug I had perfected at the children’s home to keep the girls off my back. Bullies need for their marks to care, and despite the fact that Jodi was a cop doing her job and that job was for the benefit of the welfare of the citizens of New Orleans, yada, yada, she was still trained to be a bully. And I just flat-out didn’t like bullies. Not at all.
With ill grace, Jodi took a chair. “How did you find this place?
I shoved the glasses on top of my head.The sky was golden, fuchsia, and violet, the sun balanced on the horizon. It made me squint, but a deal was a deal. “I was tracking the rogue. It covered a lot of territory last night. It ended up here. There’s tracks for it getting inside. No tracks for it leaving.”
“What time did it get here?”
I shrugged, trying for cooperative. “Tracks in the mud in the woods suggest it was some time ago, before sunrise. When I got here, they were dried around the edges, starting to crumble in. Weird tracks, by the way. Like something a witch worked on. Like maybe he’s got access to a spell that appears to alter the shape of his feet. Or something.”
“I saw them. Witches can do that?” she asked. It was real curiosity. Real worry.
“Either that or the rogue can change his body shape. You decide.”
Jodi looked over her shoulder at the crime-scene van and the techs who were walking from the house. “Since vampires came out of hiding, we’ve been speculating on what other nonhumans might be out there.”
I chuckled. “Werewolves?”
“Maybe. Why not?”
“I guess there could be, but I never heard of any. No trolls, no pixies, no fairies either.”
“Would you tell me if you did?” Her eyes were back on me, piercing.
“I would definitely tell you if I had ever met a troll, a werewolf, a pixie, or a fairy. Yes.”
She seemed to accept that, and why not? It was the truth. I do truth pretty well. She looked back to the woods. “We’re going to get casts of the tracks.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “So, you think he used a witch spell to alter the shape of his feet.”
“Or to alter the shape of any tracks he left. If witches can do that. I never asked.”
“I have a contact at a coven. I guess I can ask.” She didn’t sound real thrilled about it. Jodi was still staring at the woods when she said, “The house belongs to the Broussards—Ken, twenty-seven, Rose, twenty-four, no kids, no pets. A neighbor saw Ken’s personal vehicle leaving this morning near sunrise, when she was nursing her baby. Looks like he broke in, killed them, and then stole Ken’s truck.” When I still said nothing, she looked at me, her head rotating slowly on the stem of her neck. “He ate them,” she said.
I didn’t change my expression. Didn’t tense. Didn’t react in any way. I just waited.
“He ate them just like he ate the cops. But this time he didn’t try for subtlety. He hurt them. He tore them”—her words stopped as if her throat closed off, as if a hand choked off her air, but when she took up her narrative her voice was steady—“apart, like a wild animal. Like a pack of wolves.” She shook her head and her neck muscles creaked, she was holding them so tightly. “The only thing left in any way intact was one head and the lower sections of the extremities. Elbows and ankles down. Even the brains were dished out.”
That was new, but I didn’t alter my stance. It seemed the only thing that made Jodi Richoux gabby was silence. I could do silence real well. I waited. “Why did he eat them?” she asked. “Why did he leave the lower limbs? What is he? It. It had fangs. Or a knife with dual blades, about eight inches apart.”
When I realized that the questions weren’t rhetorical, but were a request for knowledge, I said, “I can speculate.” She nodded for me to go ahead and focused tightly on my face, as if to read my soul through the pores of my skin. “First, there isn’t much meat in the lower extremities except for the calves. And that’s only a few mouthfuls—” Jodi flinched, just the barest twitch, but I saw it. It was hard for her to accept that humans were being hunted and eaten. “—even on a well-built man. It—he—was looking for food. I’m guessing he has something wrong with him that makes him need blood and meat. A lot of meat. And human and vamp meat both work for him.”
I sat up and Jodi’s gaze followed me intently. I was ravenous when I shifted. If he was shifting several times a night, or if his shifting wasn’t voluntary, but at the whim of his own body, he’d need huge amounts of protein, massive amounts of food. And humans were the biggest, most available, easiest-to-catch-and-kill food supply on the planet. That made perfect sense. But I couldn’t say that to Jodi. I said, “I think maybe he’s not just rogue, but sick. I think the meat he’s eating is helping him to control his condition.”
“I didn’t think vamps could get sick. I thought that was the purpose of drinking blood for eternity—immortality and all that crap.” Her tone was derisive. Jodi might be Katie’s liaison at NOPD, but Jodi didn’t like vamps. Not at all.
“Maybe it’s rare.” I watched her take that in and mull it over. I waited another beat and said, “I need to see the crime scene.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“Then I’ll call Leo Pellissier. I figure he can pull strings and get me in.”
“No.” She shook her head and blushed slightly, startled. “I need you to wait on that.”
I had just pushed a button. Leo and Jodi? Nah, not with her antipathy to vamps. Something else. So I pushed. “Yes. You can make it happen. It’s the crime scene on your say-so or Leo.” When she hesitated, I said, “I’ve hun
ted rogues before. I need to see the scene so I can tell if it looks like anything from past kill sites.”
Beast rumbled deep inside, Never hunted liver-eater. Which was true, but not something I was ready to contribute to the conversation. More gently, I added to Jodi, “Leo can make it happen if you won’t. But I’d rather work with you, not him.”
“You’re pretty chummy with Leo. He makes sure I call him Mr. Pellissier.”
“I’m sure he’d like me to be polite too.”
Suddenly Jodi smiled, a wry pull of lips. “You yank his chain like you yank ours?”
I didn’t like being transparent, but I did like the smile, so I answered honestly. “More.”
Jodi chuckled under her breath and stood. “My ass’ll be in the grinder if it gets out you were on a crime scene. Try not to screw with the evidence or bring trace in. And you step where I say and not one step farther.”
“Thanks,” I said, standing slowly, trying for humble and appreciative. I was pretty sure it worked because Jodi led me to the crime-scene van and handed me paper and plastic PPEs. It turned out I needed all the personal protective equipment. The house was a bloodbath. Another trite term. But the only one that fit.
CHAPTER 21
The Lord of the Manor
I stood just inside the front door, the window where the rogue entered to my left. A trail of blood splatters marked the wall from the window for six feet, evidence that he’d wounded himself badly on the glass. It was the kind of splatter arterial blood makes, pulsing sprays, arcs that dribbled down the wall. Ten feet inside the door was a blood-drenched leather recliner where a man had once sat. His body had molded the chair to his form; now blood pooled in the depression. It still looked damp, tacky to the touch. There were two slippers on the floor under the foot-rest, which was up, the back of the chair pushed nearly flat, facing the TV.
