Unfortunately, the crime scene we’d just left was my business.
“I felt an energy signature that made me suspect Axeman Deux could be the real guy,” I said. “You know—the real Axeman from 1918, one of the historical undead.”
Jake dug into his steak. “Well, sunshine, I know just the guy to fill you in on the comings and goings of famous dead guys.”
I sighed. “Jean Lafitte’s still got his suite at the Hotel Monteleone and I could call him—he’s learned to use a telephone very well.” I knew this because he’d developed the bad habit of calling me at ridiculous hours with grand business ideas such as charging pretes admission to go in and out of Old Orleans— with him taking the pirate’s share of the profits. The man needed a hobby.
There were other members of the historical undead I could contact for gossip and information, however, so I might find another source.
“I’ll handle it later,” I said. “What did you make of the crime scene? Anything different from what the cops found?”
Jake nodded and took a sip of his drink. “I scented something the police didn’t catch, and I think it supports your theory. At least my goddamned sense of smell came in handy for something.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. After punching a few keys, he held the phone out to me. “Scroll through the photos of the shirt. I found it stuck way down under a sofa cushion but couldn’t figure out how to get it past Ken. He took it as evidence.”
I scrolled from photo to photo while Jake went back to the bar for napkins. The images weren’t very good quality but were clear enough to show a white shirt stained red over much of its front, presumably from heavy blood splatters. In one shot, the shirt had been spread out.
“It looks huge,” I said when Jake rejoined me at the table.
“Belonged to a big man, for sure. Which Ken says the victim wasn’t.”
The sound of liquid over ice drew my attention away from the photos. I frowned as Jake refilled his glass. He’d brought a half-empty bottle of Four Roses to the table, his favorite bourbon for as long as I’d known him. He’d leaned on alcohol too hard after coming home from Afghani stan but, again, I went through the litany of reasons for keeping my mouth shut.
Jake was oblivious. “Notice the collar? There’s a couple of close-ups.”
I scrolled through two more shots and looked at the bloodsoaked band collar. The shirt also had a bib front, which wasn’t a style one often saw in men’s clothing these days. “Looks vintage.” I glanced up at Jake. “So, what, the Axeman comes over from the Beyond, hacks this shipping guy to death, then either trots back across the border half naked or brings along a handy change of clothes?”
Jake shrugged. “Hell if I know. When you were reading up on the Axeman, did you see anything about clothes?”
“No, but I’ll have to take another look now that there’s a possibility it’s the real Axeman.” I tried to will my tight shoulder muscles to relax. “Damn it. I really wanted to have a few quiet days until Thanksgiving.”
Since the borders with the Beyond dropped last month, life’s chaos factor had gone viral, and my body ached from both fatigue and stress. Now we had the new DDT office, for which Jake and Alex were the only agents so far, and I’d been promoted to sole sentinel of South Louisiana. The Congress of Elders, grand poobahs of the wizarding world, were in hot negotiations with the major prete leaders about the balance of power as the Interspecies Council was solidified. God only knew what further chaos was in store.
My last case, involving a sociopathic killer nymph and a horde of territorial mermen, paled beside the prospect of a serial murderer from among the historical undead. “The thing that sucks about this, if it is the real Axeman, is that he’s immortal.” I used my fork to submerge the last bite of my pain perdu under a tsunami of syrup. “If I kill him, he just fades into the Beyond, rebuilds his strength, and pops right back over the border.” Kind of like a psychotic jack- in-the-box.
Jake pointed at me with his fork. “Arrest him and have him banned from re-entering modern New Orleans. Case closed.”
“Yeah, eventually.” Visions of red tape danced in my head. The Elders wanted something as mundane as a business lunch justified in triplicate. “Banning a member of the historical undead from New Orleans will take a ream of paperwork and an act of the Interspecies Council, which isn’t fully formed yet. All the Elders and species representatives will have to meet, and they’ll all have to sign off on the warrant. The Axeman could chop up half of the city by then.”
Personally, I thought any of the historical undead with a criminal record should have been automatically banned from the modern world as soon as the borders dropped. But since New Orleans’ most famous undead citizen was a certain French pirate with a list of crimes a fathom deep, that wasn’t likely to happen.
“How about we make it too painful for the Axeman to stay?” Jake tilted in his chair, balancing it on its back legs. “I’ll go to the scene and track him, then let my wolf take over and kill him. The historical undead can’t turn loup-garou, but it’ll hurt like hell while his system rejects the virus, or so I hear. If I kill him every time he comes back, pretty soon he’ll quit coming.”
What a bad idea, on so many levels. We didn’t need a loup- garou vigilante. “You’re forgetting one thing. He could kill you. He’s immortal. You aren’t.”
Jake stared out the window for a few seconds before turning back to me with a cold smile. “Yeah, it’s easy to kill me, isn’t it?” He sipped half-finished drink number three. “One silver bullet and I’m dog food.”
A pang shot through my chest that had less to do with my cracked ribs than with pure heartache at hearing such despair and anger in his voice. I desperately wanted to help Jake, but I didn’t know how to breach the walls he’d put up around himself.
“How much did the blood at the crime scene bother you?” I watched as he chewed enthusiastically on a bite of steak, and hoped the question would open the door to a real talk.
“It made me hungry.” He speared the last chunk of rare meat and held it up, giving me a steady, pissed-off look. “Did it make you hungry?”
I swallowed hard. Was Jake’s control unraveling or was he just trying to push me away? “Did Ken seem curious as to how you knew the shirt was there when the cops missed it?”
“Give me at least one ounce of credit.” Jake finished his last bite and shoved his Styrofoam container away. “You think I don’t know why you went this morning since Alex was gone? The two of you wanted to babysit the wolf, see if I’d lose control and rip off Ken’s head, or start lapping up puddles of blood. Well, I didn’t.”
I tamped down my own angry response. The last thing I wanted to do was accelerate his darkening mood.
Stacking my breakfast container on top of his, I took them both to the big trash can behind the bar. I stopped and looked back at him, a slow realization sinking in. When Jake was turned loup-garou he’d changed—but I hadn’t. Seeing him sit there, staring into another newly filled glass with a simmering temper that had flared in a heartbeat, revealed a hard truth.
I’d been naive. Jake would never again be the easygoing, flirtatious guy I’d met three years ago. Until the people who cared about him accepted what he was now and stopped hoping he’d go back to what he used to be, he couldn’t accept himself. And that comment about the silver bullet scared me. He’d thought about dying.
I wasn’t sure if I could pull him out of this downward emotional spiral, but I had to try.
Jake raised an eyebrow when I walked behind the bar, grabbed a glass, and returned to the table. I poured myself a finger of bourbon and sat across from him. I might not be Jake’s mother, girlfriend, or keeper, but I was his friend.
CHAPTER 3
I took a sip of the bourbon and blinked a couple of times. My eyes watered, and heat rushed all the way down my gullet to create a noxious mix with my pain perdu.
Jake shook his head. “You’re such an amateur.
”
I had no intention of starting a drinking contest. I just wanted to get his attention. Now I had it, and the anger still wafting off him sent chills through me.
I took a steadying breath and dived off the cliff. “I care about you, Jake— wolf and all—and I’m sorry for pressuring you to be something different.” His lack of response propelled me to keep talking. “Tell me what I can do to help, even if it’s just to leave you alone. Talk to me.”
He stared at his glass, then over my shoulder at the street outside, everywhere but my face. My empathy allowed me to feel the war within him as his pride battled his need to open up, and as the wolf battled for dominance over the man.
When he finally looked at me, his eyes weren’t the soft amber I’d hoped to see. They were hard and calculating. “You care about me, do you? Wolf and all?”
“I do care.” He was calling me out. “I just realized I’d been asking you to be someone you aren’t. I’m sorry it took me so long to see that. It wasn’t fair.”
His smile was cold. “So you think we can be friends?”
We’d have to start from scratch, but we could do it. “I know we can.”
He slid his chair around the table until it was next to mine, and I stifled the impulse to put more distance between us. “What about more than friends?”
How much truth-telling did I want? An image came to me unbidden: Jake’s wolf standing over me on that pier last month in his wolf form, teeth bared. “I—”
“Don’t bother to answer the question, sunshine. I can feel your heart speed up without touching you—did you know that? And it’s not speeding up because you want me. It’s because you’re afraid of me. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?”
Probably not very good, but how could I make myself not fear him? How could I slow my heart rate or the rush of adrenaline into my muscles? “No,” I whispered.
He leaned closer, close enough for his body heat to mingle with mine. “Your fear excites me. It makes the wolf want to come out and play.”
With some effort, I forced myself to look him in the eye. I’d always insisted to Alex that Jake would never hurt me, but a few grains of sand had been falling from the hourglass of doubt for a few weeks. Now they’d sped to a fast trickle. Jake wouldn’t hurt me intentionally, but Jake wasn’t always in control.
He leaned back in his chair, his point made. “Well, at least you’re not looking at me with that poor-bastard-what-are-we-gonnado-about-Jake expression. I’m sick of seeing it, from you and Alex both. You want to know why I drink? It’s because of that look. I’d rather see fear on your faces than pity, and the more I drink the less I care.”
My own anger sparked. We might have screwed up, but we’d been trying to help him. “Then tell us how to do better. Help me do better. What do you need from us?”
He rested a hand on my forearm and squeezed a little tighter than necessary. “I don’t need a goddamned thing from either one of you. Just leave me alone and stop watching every move I make.” He looked at me with yellow-gold eyes that had an odd, flat refraction. Wolf eyes. His nostrils flared as he inched closer.
Jake was about to lose control, and I didn’t want to be alone with him anymore. He was scaring the hell out of me, and the wolf part of him liked it.
Tamping down a surge of panic, I pushed my chair back but his hand remained clamped to my arm as if glued. I tried to slow my galloping pulse without success as he slid his chair even closer.
Pulling my arm to his face, Jake inhaled deeply. “Your heart is pounding so hard, it vibrates through my whole body. I can almost taste it.” His voice was a rough whisper against my skin.
“Jake, stop it. I’ve got to go.” I stood and tried to tug my arm away, but he gripped it harder and stood as well, pulling me against him and sending a sharp stab of pain through my ribcage.
“What’s wrong, DJ? You scared?” His words, carried on hot breath sweet with whiskey, tickled across my cheek. Jake’s eyes were completely gone now, replaced by something cold and alien. “You should be.”
Damn it, the wolf was in control. I couldn’t read any emotions but anger and aggression. “Let me go. Now.” Panic surged through my system and I couldn’t stop the overflow of magic that shot from the fingers of the free hand I had pressed against his chest.
He jerked away with an inhuman snarl and a nip at my forearm still clutched in his grip. A burn raced across it as I jerked it away.
We stilled, the moment carved in ice as we both looked at my arm. He’d broken skin. A small scratch, three or four inches long with a deeper jag at the end. Not serious enough to need stitches, but deep enough for the blood to well up and start a slow drip onto the scuffed hardwood floor of the bar.
Deep enough for a little of the virulent loup-garou DNA to mingle with my own.
Deep enough to change my life forever.
Jake took a step backward.
“I’m fine.” I grabbed a napkin from the table and dabbed at the wound with trembling fingers.
Jake hadn’t spoken. When I looked up, his eyes were wide, his gaze fixed on my arm. Terror and arousal roiled inside him as Jake tried to regain control. The wolf wanted to feast, and the man wanted to flee.
“It’s all right.” I pressed the napkin against the cut, as much to get the blood out of his sight as to stanch the flow. My voice quavered. “No big deal. Just a little scratch.”
“I . . . God.” Jake shuddered and backed away.
He whirled and walked behind the bar, pulled a pistol from beneath it, and stuck it in the waistband of his jeans, underneath his sweater. I could see his hands shaking from across the room.
He paused to stare at me one long, soul-cracking second, his eyes gone back to amber and filled with unspoken regret, before walking out the front door and slamming it behind him.
Jake’s footsteps were absorbed into the daily noise of Bourbon Street, and I was alone.
CHAPTER 4
The crack in the plaster ceiling began next to the base of the light fixture and zigzagged a path to the corner of the room. I studied the lightning-bolt pattern, wondering how much pressure would be needed before the crack became a crevice and the whole ceiling came tumbling down on some unsuspecting fool’s head.
I had no idea how long I’d lain on the bed in the vacant apartment across from Jake’s on the second floor of the Green Gator, staring at the potential ceiling disaster hanging overhead. The symbolism didn’t escape me.
Finally, I rolled to my feet, clutched my ribs, and walked to the bathroom with Jake’s bottle of Four Roses that I’d brought upstairs. I took a sip, coughed at the burn, and took another. Then I walked to the sink, used the rest of the bourbon to clean the scratch on my arm, and tossed the empty bottle in the trash.
Alcohol wouldn’t kill the virulent loup-garou strain of lycanthropy, but the pain it caused on the open wound awoke my brain from its fugue. No point in freaking out; too many variables were unknown. When I had answers, I’d panic.
I had no idea if a wizard had ever become loup-garou. As a natural shapeshifter, Alex was immune—he’d been attacked by the same loup- garou as Jake. Ditto for Jean Lafitte. If shapeshifters and the historical undead were immune, perhaps wizards were too. Or maybe my elven DNA would protect me.
Otherwise . . . Otherwise was a horror show. How would it feel to change form? Would the Elders consider me too dangerous to live if I shifted into an uncontrollable wolf who could do magic?
They’d taken a chance on Jake because he’d been human when he was turned—and because Alex pled his case and agreed to be held responsible for his cousin’s actions. Jake didn’t know that. Take my elven skills, which already made the Elders nervous, and make me a rogue wolf who could absorb the negative emotions of others? They’d either turn me into a weapon or put me down like a rabid stray.
Part of me was worried about Jake. Part of me cared where he’d gone and how this would tear him apart. Part of me was concerned that he was probably driving a
round drunk and upset. On some level I made note of those things, but mostly I felt all my fretting over Jake the last few years had been wasted time. We’d still come to this.
Leyla wouldn’t arrive for at least another half hour, and I didn’t want to explain why I was here and Jake wasn’t. She was used to opening up, so I put the key to the apartment back under Jake’s mat, left her a note that Jake might not be coming in, made sure the front door of the bar was locked, wrapped a clean towel around my arm, and exited the back, which had a door that would lock behind me. A tiny courtyard served mostly to store big green trash cans on wheels and give delivery drivers a way to get to the kitchen without having to walk through the bar.
The long, narrow alley between the Gator and the adjacent building could induce claustrophobia on the best of days. By the time I emerged into the gloom of the open street, hyperventilation was imminent. I walked to where I’d parked my SUV around the corner from the Gator and drove home on autopilot, my thoughts a swirl of blood-covered axes and loup- garou scenarios.
Two vehicles were parked behind my house in the small lot I shared with my new neighbor: a spotless black Mercedes convertible and a big, beefy black Range Rover. Alex, who was now a two-vehicle house hold all by himself, had moved into the little green shotgun next door to me last month.
Jake wasn’t the only chicken in town; I wasn’t ready to face Alex.
Instead, I eased my Pathfinder’s door shut with a soft click and hurried to my back entrance. Sebastian, the chocolate Siamese I’d inherited from my father, lay in wait, ready to trip me when I walked inside. It was his hobby. When I stopped and leaned over to pet him, he meowed at me suspiciously and streaked out of the kitchen.
Nothing like an affectionate, welcoming pet to make a girl feel loved.
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