Jake and I walked up the rise in silence and hugged before he turned and started back toward the beach. I stepped into the transport set into the marshy sand and watched him walk away. I didn’t know when I’d see him again, which hurt. What happened to him wasn’t fair, but if Hurricane Katrina had taught us anything, it was that sometimes fairness was only a lucky twist of a capricious wind.
***
Ignoring the stares from tourists, I trudged through the plush Monteleone lobby as fast as my bare feet could slap along the cold marble floors. Fortunately, it was busy mid-afternoon check-in time, so none of the hotel staff paid any attention to the limping woman in an early nineteenth-century gown flashing too much cleavage, clutching her ribs, and holding on to a two-foot-long cracked stick of wood as she rushed through their fine establishment.
I stepped onto the elevator with a young couple wearing blinding white tennis shoes—the sure sign of tourist-hood. New Orleans wasn’t the cleanest city, and most of us quickly abandoned white footwear unless, like shrimp boots, they could be hosed down.
The couple tried to stare at me without staring, but finally I said, “Pirate re-enactment. Lost my shoes.” They laughed and said how much they loved New Orleans. Such spirit. Such zest for life. Such character.
They had no idea.
I’d been up for more than twenty- four hours with very little to eat, so the closer I got to Jean’s suite, the more exhaustion weighed on me. I needed a shower, something from room service (charged to the account of “John Lafayette”), and a nap, in that order.
First, though, I had to call Alex and see if he was too angry to sit down and talk strategy after Jean arrived. Whatever we did, Alex and Ken needed to be in on it.
He answered his cell on the first ring. “Where the hell is she, you son of a bitch? I might not be able to kill you permanently, but I can make you suffer.”
It took a second to realize he’d seen the Monteleone on his caller ID and thought it was Jean. “It’s me, Alex.”
A heart beat of silence. “Where are you? What room?”
I flipped over the key card I’d thrown on the coffee table, but it didn’t tell me a number. “Eighth floor. Eudora Welty Suite. I—”
“Do. Not. Move.”
“I—” I’d been about to say give me an hour for a shower and bring me something to wear, but he’d already hung up.
Damn, this wasn’t going to be easy. I wanted to wrap my arms around Alex, to have him hold me and tell me everything was going to be okay. I didn’t want to argue with him, or feel like I couldn’t be what he wanted.
I figured there was time for at least a quick shower before he arrived—twenty minutes to drive to the Quarter and another ten to find parking. It should be longer than that before Jean arrived.
Groaning, I shucked bits of period clothing along the thick carpet as I shuffled toward the bathroom. I glanced around the bedroom suite, wondering if Jean had left anything of interest, like clothing. The color scheme of royal blue and cream carried over from the huge sitting area outside, with a brass chandelier overhead. Too bad I didn’t have time to plunder fully, but I did open the armoire and find a thick white hotel robe on a heavy wooden hanger next to shelves piled with folded pirate clothes.
The hotel would charge for the robe, but I was racking up debts to Jean at an alarming clip. What was one more?
The warm water, soap, and shampoo stung my cut and bruised feet, but turned my sore muscles to rubber. I was healing at a nice, slow, wizard rate. The concrete scrapes along the side of my face had scabbed, but I had a big, dark bruise the shape of a bedpost across my ribcage where the Axeman had slung me.
When I was growing up, I never saw Gerry come home with bruises and cuts and broken bones. I’d like to think the world in which I was a sentinel had gotten a lot more brutal than his pre-Katrina days. I didn’t much like the other option—that I wasn’t very good at my job.
I’d just toweled off and shaken the loose water out of my hair when I heard Alex calling my name. The man must have sped through town and parked on the flipping sidewalk. And how did he get in the suite? It sounded like he was right outside the bathroom—
“Wait!” I scrambled for the hotel robe as he opened the door. “Let me—”
“God, DJ.” I barely had a chance to see the dark circles under his eyes before he’d pulled me against him. One arm held me to his chest so tightly it hurt my ribs, while the other hand touched my hair, my face, my shoulders. “You scared the shit out of me. When I saw your house . . .”
I’d ask about the house eventually. Right now, I had everything I needed, and as much as I wanted to be cool and sexy and detached, all I could do was wrap my arms around his waist. Everything was such a damned mess. I don’t know how long we stood that way, him rubbing my back and holding me close.
Finally, he loosened his grip and I stepped back, wiping my eyes with the too-long sleeve of the robe.
“Where have you been?” His voice was rough, and his control was shot. I could feel the emotions rolling off him, making me shiver. Fear, relief, anger, all in one big shapeshifter tangle.
“Didn’t you get my message?” I grabbed his hand, holding it between mine. I needed to touch him.
“I got this stuck under the windshield wiper of my truck.” He dug in his jeans pocket with his other hand and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. He shook it out and held it up. Expensivelooking, handmade paper with two words of looping, ornate handwriting I recognized as Jean’s: “Drusilla lives.”
Oh good Lord. I should have known not to trust Jean to do more than the bare minimum. “I’m sorry. I asked Jean to get word to you that I was in the Beyond, at Barataria. I had to escape through a transport and didn’t want . . . I couldn’t . . .” The tears started again, and I dashed them away impatiently. Of all the times to turn into a whiny girl, this wasn’t it. “Is Sebastian . . .” I couldn’t finish a sentence.
Alex hugged me again. “He’s okay. I found him hiding in the bushes behind my house about twelve hours after the fire. I should’ve known you were with Lafitte, but I was afraid the elves had you, especially with Randolph missing too.”
“He’s—”
Alex stepped back and placed a finger across my lips. “It’s gonna be complicated. It’s gonna give me a headache. Probably acid reflux too. And I’ll end up doing something illegal. So don’t tell me. Not yet.” He leaned down and kissed me, then traced his fingers across the cuts on my face, following his fingers with his lips.
This was a bad idea. We had too much unresolved. We had too much . . . damn. He slipped his hands inside the robe.
His voice was low and husky against my ear. “Were you wearing that lace- up thing I found on the floor out there?”
I struggled to breathe as he worked his way down my neck. “Corset. Yeah. Wearing.”
He growled against that sensitive spot where neck meets shoulder and nudged the robe aside till it slipped off and puddled at my feet. “Take it home with you. I want to see you in it.”
Uh-huh. I could do that. As soon as I finished unbuttoning his stupid shirt. How many buttons did one shirt need?
By some stroke of divine providence, I opened my eyes while Alex’s back was to the door to the outer suite and I was camouflaged by his body. So my “holy crap” was muffled by my dive for the floor and the abandoned robe.
Jean lounged in the doorway, grinning. “Do not mind me, Jolie. I would enjoy the sight more without le petit chien in the way, but”—he shrugged—“Je prends du plaisir où je peux en trouver.”
I think that translated roughly as taking pleasure where one found it, and I hoped he wasn’t suggesting a threesome because as intriguing as that sounded in theory, it was a horrible idea.
I’d like to say I was woman enough, but I really, really wasn’t.
CHAPTER 37
The Eudora Welty Suite was beginning to feel like home, which was pathetic since it was much nicer than anyplace I’d ever lived or probably e
ver would.
After a nap, a shower, and a couple of good meals, I’d bought emergency magical supplies using my own credit card. Alex had miraculously found my abandoned purse in my driveway beside the slightly baked rental car. With the supplies, I cooked up a couple of simple potions on a hot plate I’d bought and set up in the suite’s abbreviated kitchen.
After going through my grounding ritual and making up a new mojo bag, I wrapped my sore ribs in athletic tape, strapped a lightweight Kevlar vest over a t-shirt, then pulled my enormous new white Hotel Monteleone sweatshirt over that. I looked like the Michelin Man.
The elven staff, sturdy and straight as it could be inside its coating of duct tape, fit into a sleeve I’d stitched to the thigh of my new jeans, using a portable sewing kit from the gift shop and the denim I’d trimmed off the bottom where they were too long. Made a great camouflaged holster. I tucked a silver knife into a boot and clipped a small grenade to my belt loop within easy reach; Alex had retrieved it from my mantel. He thought the Axeman had found the grenade I’d left on my worktable and triggered it after setting my house on fire. Thus, the explosion.
I’d pulled my hair into a ponytail, then braided it and wrapped it in a low knot at my neck, minimizing its effectiveness as a handle with which to haul me around. Lesson learned.
Everything I wore except the knife and grenade were the products of a quick shopping trip in the Quarter. They were also the only clothing I now owned besides a robe stolen from Jean Lafitte and some underwear from an overpriced Quarter boutique. Alex had broken the news that little from the upstairs of my house would be salvageable except for Gerry’s black grimoires, which appeared to have been protected with some kind of spell. The downstairs of the house was iffy because of smoke and water damage from the firefighters.
In theory, I knew it was all gone, that a big chunk of my life had disappeared in smoke and flame. I hadn’t seen it, though, so it didn’t seem real. Not seeing it helped me tuck it away in the back of my mind, where it waited like a coiled rattlesnake, waiting to spring up and sink its poison into me. I knew it would strike, but not when.
My watch had been crushed when Rand tackled me on Magazine Street and dragged me away from the fire, so I paced the suite, watching the minutes crawl past on the digital bedside clock. Jean was late, and I wasn’t sure whether to be worried or annoyed.
He’d gone to L’Amour Sauvage to see Etienne and let slip the details of my plans for the eve ning. I thought it was risky for him to go alone and had urged him to take Alex or Ken or Rene—or even pull Dom or one of his other men out of the Beyond. Jean was convinced his vampire buddy had no role in the Axeman business.
I thought his trust was misplaced. Sadistic Lily had been in Etienne’s office on my first visit, which gave him a connection to the elves. And the snippet of the phone call I’d overheard the last time I saw him kept replaying in my head. Etienne Boulard was up to something, and now Jean was an hour behind schedule.
I jumped when my new cell phone rang, its preset ringtone sounding like something from a Martian disco. My nerves were shot.
“Where are you?” Alex spoke in a stage whisper. He and Ken were waiting at my house, where I should have been twenty minutes ago.
“Jean still isn’t back. I’m afraid he’s been compromised. Etienne might be our guy.”
Alex chuffed into the phone. “You want to change the plan?”
I did a quick mental run-through of different scenarios. “I’ll come without him and hope he got the message delivered. If the vampire’s taken control of Jean and is sending him to kill me, I don’t want to be trapped at the hotel with all these people nearby.”
One thing about the Jean-as- necromancer-bait plan worried me. I didn’t know if I could kill him, even knowing he was trying to kill me, even knowing he’d come back to life in the Beyond and heal as good as new. Last time we’d tried to hurt each other was early in our relationship, and even then I wasn’t sure either of us was serious about it. I sure as hell couldn’t blow him up with a grenade.
But we both knew the risks and had agreed that, if this worked, it was the best chance to catch the necromancer. If it didn’t work, nothing lost.
Jean, Alex, Ken, and I had gone through every scenario we could think of to keep Jean from falling under the necromancer’s true control. Mostly, it consisted of him interpreting the necromancer’s commands very literally. Kill DJ could be interpreted as Kill DJ someday. Or Stab the girl could mean any girl, or a stab wound to the toe.
Rand had made a quick, tense trip to New Orleans before returning to Elf heim—he’d taught me an elven spell that might help me track the line of magic from my attacker back to the necromancer, regardless of whether it was the Axeman or Jean being controlled. He was convinced one of the elves was behind this whole mess, and had gone back to Elf heim to spread the word that I’d be at my house tonight, digging through what was left after the fire.
I’d called Adrian and told him the same thing, explaining why I needed a few days off from my elf lessons. He actually asked if I needed help, which surprised me.
And just to cover my bases, I’d called the necromancer Jonas Adamson and set up a phony meeting with him next week to talk about new potions regulations, slipping in the information about my eve ning plans.
If Etienne, Adrian, Jonas, or a Synod member was either our leak to the necromancer or the necromancer himself, we should be in business.
I pulled the sweatshirt down to cover the grenade and headed down the softly lit, thickly carpeted hallway of the Monteleone’s eighth floor and back through the lobby.
My hand trembled as I hit the remote to unlock Ken’s nondescript tan sedan that had been left on the curb with his NOPD hangtag in view. God, I hoped this plan worked. Prayed the staff would power Rand’s tracking magic and be one of the elven skills I could control. He’d written down the words and told me what should happen, but it was all guesswork.
I also prayed nobody else I cared about got hurt.
As we’d agreed beforehand, I parked on Nashville beside the house instead of in the enclosed parking area behind it, the better to make a getaway if needed. Even in the illumination from the streetlights, the house looked a mess, and for the first time I realized how hard this was going to be—not the necromancer tracking, but seeing my home in ruins.
I fingered the crime scene tape crisscrossed over the back door, then ducked under it and went inside. I let out a whoosh of breath, relief draining the adrenaline from my muscles at the sight of my kitchen, or what little I could see of it from the wash of light coming from the street and the fluorescent lanterns Alex and Ken had set up around the rooms. The power had been cut to the house the night of the fire.
Alex and Ken were here somewhere, watching, waiting.
The acrid odor of charred wood, smoke, and damp burned my lungs and made my eyes water. The old Formica kitchen table with red-covered chrome chairs I’d found at a garage sale sat undisturbed but for a coat of ash from the ceiling above it. It could probably be saved. Dried mud covered the wooden floor.
I swallowed hard and stopped at the doorway into the double parlors. There hadn’t been much left in here anyway since I’d even destroyed my lawn chair, but the old millwork had been water-soaked. Some of it might be salvageable, but it was hard for me to look past the ruin to see the redeemable.
Most of the things in the room— bits of jewelry, a shoe, a seared pan I’d used in my library for stirring charms—shouldn’t have been there. They belonged upstairs, where Alex had told me nothing was left and the floor was suspect. Everything I’d worked for lay mixed in with chunks of plaster or covered in inky sludge, all the more gruesome for the shadows cast by light from the lanterns sitting in two corners of the room.
I knew it was just stuff, but sometimes stuff is important. Sometimes, stuff holds us together. Stuff bookends our lives, and stuff defines them.
I don’t remember dropping to my knees. I was just suddenly there, flashing bac
k to my first look at the wreckage of Gerry’s house after Hurricane Katrina had sent the Seventeenth Street Canal flowing through it. I couldn’t help but go back, the first of the losses that had lined up like macabre dominoes over the last few years. The loss of my house became the final domino that threatened to bring back every unshed tear I’d choked down.
How much loss should one person have to endure? How much could one person endure? I’d asked that question before, but the hits kept coming, pressing so hard on my heart I couldn’t breathe, weighing so heavily it seemed as if I should sink through the floorboards.
Arms reached around me and the last voice I expected whispered, “Hush, baby girl.” Eugenie sank to her knees beside me, pulled me into her arms, and rocked me like a child.
If God was listening, maybe He’d sent her as a gift. Someone else I thought I’d lost but who’d made her way back to me.
“I’m sorry.” My voice was ragged with sobs, but I finally choked out that inadequate excuse for an apology. For not being able to tell her who and what I was. For the damage to our friendship. For hurting her and letting it go on so long without finding a way to make it right.
“Shhh. I’m sorry too. I let things that don’t matter get in the way of protecting what does matter. Us. You’re still my best friend, DJ.”
“You too.” I hugged her back. “I will tell you everything when tonight is done. Everything. I swear it.”
And I meant it. I couldn’t pay lip service to our friendship and then lie to her at every turn.
A clatter in the guest room, followed by a curse, reminded me why we were here. Alex came into the parlor as Eugenie and I clambered to our feet, both sniffling and puffy-eyed. Ken remained out of sight. Probably praying for God to spare him from women crying during a stakeout.
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