by Faith Hunter
“Yada yada,” I said, standing. “It’s nearly dark, I’ve had no sleep to speak of for days, I’ve been invaded, shot at”—and shot a man, my heart whispered—“been dragged down to the LEC, and kept without food and water, and I’m ready to get outta here.”
Mooney flashed me a wide smile and gestured to the door. I led the way into the hallway, passing by the lady lawyer. She looked like a million bucks. A Paris Hilton, if Paris had unfeigned self-assurance and molecular-deep class. Her suit was form-fitted, her bag was snakeskin, and her hair was twisted up in a sleek French twist. She smelled great. I disliked her intensely for it. Which made me feel all kinds of guilty, and angry for the guilt. “Miss Yellowrock, it’s an honor to meet you,” she said as I passed.
I swallowed down my retort and the sigh that wanted to follow. In the hallway I turned, tucked my jealousy away into some hidden part of me, and put out my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you too.” I managed not to sound grudging, which was unexpected and satisfying.
We shook and she said, “My car is outside. We can speak there.”
I collected and signed for my valuables—except for the gun I’d fired—and meekly followed Mooney outside. Even in the mountains at 2,134 feet elevation, September in the South was sweltering. The muggy heat slapped me like a steamy towel across my exposed flesh. “I know you must be starving,” she said. “Let’s stop for an early dinner so we can talk.” She stepped to a waiting, slightly stretched, black limo, that was, honest to God, a Volkswagen, sparkling in the late afternoon light. I had no idea they even made Volkswagen limos.
Sliding bonelessly into the car, she was as graceful as a swan, and I was all kinds of ungainly clunky as I slid in after her. Brandon closed the door after himself, sat across from us, and the car pulled into traffic, around the loop, and onto College Street.
Mooney said to the driver, “Take us to Mr. Shaddock’s place, please, Erving.” He lifted two fingers in acknowledgment before the privacy window went up. Shaddock’s only restaurant, so far as I knew, was a barbecue joint, and my estimation of the blood-servant went up a notch. Either she was psychic, had deduced by my slouch and my T-shirt that I was a fast-food, meat-and-potatoes gal, or she had researched me. I was betting on the latter. She added, “Two of your security experts will be joining us for the early meal.” She looked at Brandon. “Your brother and the others can handle security for the sleeping Grégoire?”
“They can,” I answered for him, looking the VW over. The limo rode heavy, as if armored, and it had computer screens and cell phones on chargers in discreet little pouches, champagne and beer in a little glass-fronted fridge, and windows so darkly tinted that a vamp could have taken a ride in the daytime and not been charred. It was clear the limo had been hand-built to order. And best of all, there were holstered guns in the side pockets. Immediately I felt better. I always did around guns, as long as they weren’t pointed at me. “May I?” I indicated one particularly interesting weapon that had a grip a linebacker might have used.
“Help yourself.” Her lips curved into a secretive smile, the kind an adult gives a kid when they get a new toy, and I wanted to say something snarky, but figured it might get me banned from the lovely-looking weapon. I eased it out of the case, which was a heavy-duty plastic mounting, not a holster as I had supposed. The weapon wasn’t something I could casually pick up. I had to lift it from its casing. And when I did, I sighed. It was a S&W, X-frame Model 500.
“Holy Moly,” I whispered. The handgun—small cannon—had an overall length of fifteen inches with an eight and three-eighths inch barrel. The cylinder was almost two inches in diameter and nearly two and a quarter inches long. “Holy Moly,” I repeated. Carefully, I thumbed the cylinder open and spun it to reveal five charge holes, each a half inch in diameter.
“You’ll find them loaded with 50-caliber cartridges—sterling silver rounds seated in traditional brass,” she said. “Hand-packed vamp-killers.”
Or werewolf killers, I thought. “This sucker weighs nearly five pounds, fully loaded.”
“And yet you lift it with ease.”
I’d given away something I still wasn’t ready to admit and had no idea how to fix it. I shrugged. “Strong wrists.”
Mooney laughed and crossed her legs. Unlike most women she was wearing hose, and they shushed gently with the motion, drawing Brandon’s eyes to her legs, as she’d clearly intended. Her smile widened and she gave me a look that said, “Aren’t men cute?” Instead of giving that thought voice, she said, “We’ve never been properly introduced. I’m Adelaide Mooney, blood-servant and daughter in life to Dacy, Lincoln Shaddock’s heir.”
I didn’t want to like the woman—she was too . . . perfect. Elegant. Ladylike—but I was starting to. Dang it. “Why is it loaded with silvershot?”
She inclined her head, as if I had done something particularly bright, like a dog with a new trick. Or as if I’d passed a test, something set up to prove I deserved to be in charge of security. Her blue eyes tinted toward a delicate shade of lavender, maybe cornflower blue, and were uncomfortably direct. “Your record is exemplary and your eye for weapons is excellent. You come highly recommended by Leonard Pellissier and by my security researcher, who provided a dossier on you in record time.”
I couldn’t help but be pleased that Leo had said something nice about me. Especially as he’d tried to kill me several times in our short acquaintance. “Let me guess. Reach did my dossier?”
“You use Reach for background?” She sounded gently surprised, perhaps too well bred to sound insultingly startled at what that implied about my net worth.
“Mostly when Leo foots the bill,” I admitted. “Reach is a little pricey for my usual budget.”
“He is that,” she said. It wasn’t quite a disgusted mutter, but it came close. “So it’s likely that he had your information on file, collated, well studied, and ready, and yet he waited an hour to send it to me, hoping to make it look as though he was doing rapid new research.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. “Sounds like Reach.”
“Yes, it does. So. What are you?”
I went still for a long slow moment. Without taking my eyes from her bluish lavender ones, I slowly eased the Smith and Wesson mini-cannon back into the plastic casing. It kept me from shooting her with the big gun.
“As a blood-servant, I have an excellent sense of smell,” she went on. “Lincoln tells me you smell of sex and war and rushing water in a deep glen. He’s poetic, is our Linc. You don’t smell human. So what are you?”
“None of your business,” I said, sitting back, the words coming slowly.
“But it is. You are providing security services for a high-level parley that directly affects my current and future lifestyle, and my decision whether to attempt to become a Mithran or remain a blood-servant. Everything you do and everything you are is my business.”
“Take it up with Leo,” I said.
“I have. He was not forthcoming.”
“Because he doesn’t know what she is,” Brandon said. I had almost forgotten he was there, he’d been so silent and still.
“Impossible,” Mooney said.
“Fact. None of the Mithrans know what she is,” Brandon said, “though Leo’s Mercy Blade may know and simply isn’t saying. He calls her the ‘little goddess.’”
“I’m not a goddess,” I said, sounding disgruntled, knowing I needed to get the spotlight off of me. “But I am hungry.” I looked at Adelaide, thinking rude might work. “You said you were Dacy’s daughter in life, which, as I understand it, means she had you in the natural human way. Before or after she was turned? How old are you? You have to be old.”
Adelaide laughed, a tinkling amusement that made my own laughter sound like a mule braying. “Leo told me you were direct.”
I figured that was a ladylike way of saying I was vulgar, but since I was going that way, I couldn’t gripe. I slouched down in the butter-soft leather and waited, watching her.
“I’m in my early eighties. If I want to keep my youth, it would be wise to risk being turned in the next decade. Which is why I want to know what you are.” She was tenacious. A lawyer would have to be. I sighed but didn’t answer. Adelaide looked at Brandon. “Elf?” Meaning me.
“Leo says no. Grégoire says no. She isn’t elf, were, or anything they know. Though they do scent cats and birds and dogs on her, and she doesn’t own pets.”
I looked out the window. They were talking about me as if I was tied to a lab table, but I couldn’t complain. I’d started the rudeness. They had never smelled anything like me, because the only other skinwalker Leo had ever scented had gone to the dark side and killed, eaten, and stolen the body and life and scent of Leo’s own son. Long before Leo ever got a whiff of him again, he smelled like vamp and family. I had killed the imposter.
I leaned to the small fridge and opened the door, taking out and opening a Yuengling Lager, which gave me something to do with my hands besides shooting the two blood-servants with one of the lovely weapons. After an uncomfortable silence, during which I realized I hadn’t been offered the beer I’d taken, the blood-servants examined me while I scrutinized the city of Asheville in the afternoon light.
The city is in a valley surrounded by mountains, having expanded its borders in all directions. Downtown, however, is small and close; a silent five minutes later, despite the Sunday afternoon tourist traffic, we were pulling up in front of Shaddock’s BBQ. The sign out front showed a picture of two soldiers, Confederate and Union, eating together over a campfire and the remains of a roasted spitted pig. The sign was amusing, as the vamp owner had been turned by a Union soldier vamp on the battlefield of Monocacy, on July 9, 1864. I figured the two soldiers had spent their getting-to-know you dinner over the throat of a human, not a cooked pig, but I’d been wrong before. I climbed out of the car when it stopped and led the way inside, ignoring the sidelong glance shared by the servants. Inside, I took a seat at a party-sized table and watched as Brandon hung his jacket on a hook, revealing broad shoulders and an economy of movement. Clothes were wasted on him. Which was a totally inappropriate thought.
To combat the images of Brandon and his twin posed half-naked on the cover of a romance novel, I ordered three hogshead baskets (the largest order the place offered) of smothered fries, a large Coke, and a number four—pulled pork with all the fixin’s. I was nowhere near finished with the day’s activities and I needed protein, fats, and caffeine until I shifted or slept twelve hours. The two servants ordered and then chitchatted about the weather while we waited for fries and my security guys. I learned that a cold front was moving south fast, and was expected to barrel into the region behind the hurricane. We’d have an end-of-summer storm, heavy rain, followed by sweater weather. Beast purred thinking of a hunt in cool temps, and a snarky smile pulled at my lips.
Brandon lifted his brows at the sight. Adelaide repeated the gesture. It had to be a class thing. It was so polite and understated, and yet so superior. I shook my head and waved my snark away.
The fries and the guys all got to our table at the same time, Derek taking the seat beside me, his thigh shoving my chair down the long table. “Injun Princess,” he said to me. To the other two he said, “B-twin. Pretty lady.”
Wrassler pulled up a sturdier chair from another table. “Legs,” he said to me, and nodded to the others. Both men had scoped out the place and everyone in it upon entering. Wrassler instinctively angled his chair to watch the front entrance. Derek sat to cover the windows, the rest of the building, and the street, as I had. Instinctive, hardwired security measures. They placed their orders and then everyone turned to me. Like choreography.
I suppressed a chuckle and said, “Okay. Sit rep. We got two werewolves in the area. They probably chased us here.” Derek and his boys had slaughtered the Lupus pack, so my use of “us” was truth. “The grindylow swam and/or hitched a ride on a boat from New Orleans, chasing his master, the were-cat Kemnebi, who is vacationing on the Tennessee side of the mountains.”
Brandon went still. “The were-cat is here? And you didn’t see fit to inform us?”
Adelaide looked back and forth between us. “This were-creature is dangerous?”
“No. He’s a high-level ambassadorial type with the Party of African Weres and the IAW,” I said. I narrowed my eyes at Brandon. “He’s sixty miles away and working a monthlong drunk. If you have a problem with not knowing, take it up with Leo. He’s the boss. It was need-to-know. You didn’t need to know, before. Now you do. Get over it.”
I ate several fries while they all took that in, and I nearly moaned with the flavor. The fries were smothered with chili, cheese, jalapeños, red beans, sour cream, and ketchup, like nachos but with potatoes. To die for. Wrassler, the easiest-going guy I knew, had no problem with need-to-know intel, and was making inroads on his basket of fries. Derek was thinking and nibbling on the basket sitting in front of the blood-servants. Who hadn’t touched the greasy bit-a-heaven.
“Lastly, and maybe most important, I was attacked by a blood-servant that none of you claim to recognize.” Adelaide’s back went stiff at the implied insult. You’d a thought I whapped her nose with a newspaper. “And if he wasn’t one of yours, then we have an unknown vamp interested in the parley proceedings.” Which would complicate everything, though complications were nothing new when dealing with vamps.
When Brandon and Adelaide had had time to digest the semi-insult and info, I drank down the Coke and said, “The problems are”—I raised a balled fist, extending a finger—“the werewolves are trying to make the vamps look guilty for the attacks”—I raised another finger—“while simultaneously trying to create mates and rebuild their pack.” I raised a third. “The grindy is chasing them to punish them for attacking humans”—a fourth went up—“and the were-cat is drunk as two skunks in mourning for his dead mate.” My thumb went up, fingers splayed. “Leo and the IAW want me to hunt down and kill the wolves.” I raised the index finger of my other hand. “And that means working at night.” I dropped my hands. “All that, on top of a high-level parley Leo has resisted for decades, humans protesting, media attention, and interest by an unknown vamp. I need to know one thing—can y’all handle security without me for a bit?”
Derek said, “We can handle it. If pretty boy knows how to work a headset.”
“I was working com units when you were in knee britches, sonny,” Brandon said.
“Knee britches? Wrong century, white boy.”
“Stop,” I said, waving the waitress over when she appeared uncertain about interrupting with our meals. The tension at the table was making the staff nervous. “Can you work together or not? ’Cause if you’re going to act like twelve-year-olds, I’ll look for other help. Like Chen.” I glanced at Adelaide, who smiled slightly.
Derek snorted. Brandon swiveled to me. I raised my brows at him, mimicking his hoity-toity expression, and stuffed a forkful of pork in my mouth, sauce on my lips. Deliberately crude.
“We’ll manage,” he said.
“Good,” I said through the food. Then I chewed and swallowed. “You boys chat. I gotta go to the ladies room.” I made my way to the room with the cow on the door, a cow wearing three brassieres with six udders stuffed up high and proud. The bull’s room was just as indelicate, but involved something that looked like six feet of horns and a Speedo. I felt, more than saw, Adelaide follow me. Now what?
CHAPTER TEN
I Sleep with Vamps for a Living
I did my business, aware that she did the same. I stopped at the mirror, undoing my hair and rebraiding it, waiting on her. Women wearing stockings or pantyhose took longer than women in jeans. The lighting claimed I needed some color. Lipstick. Blush. Mascara. Something. I braided my hair, watching her feet in the stall. If they spread and braced she might be pulling a weapon.
Adelaide flushed, opened the door—no weapon—and left the stall, meeting my eyes in the mirror; she washed her hands at the sink, standing beside m
e, still holding my gaze. She was amused, as if she had been betting with herself that I was watching for a gun. I couldn’t help it. I grinned back. She said, “You do yank their chains.”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“As often as possible,” she amended.
I gave a head shrug, a tilt of acceptance. “You wow them with your looks and charm, and keep them in their places panting after you. Looks and charm aren’t my strengths. I have to make do with moxie and muscle.” We still hadn’t met eyes directly, the mirror acting as intermediary. But this woman wanted something from me, and I hadn’t figured out what.
“You really have no idea how beautiful you are.” It was an incredulous statement, not a question, and she looked sad.
I snorted, not trying to be delicate. “I know exactly how beautiful I am. I’m not. I have good bone structure, but striking is the best I can do. Now, when I get all doodied up, and my pal Molly does my face, I do better than striking. But I’ll never be beautiful.”
“Mmm.” Adelaide pulled towels and dried her hands. “They all stared at your backside when you left the table.”
“I have a nice butt. Great legs. No class.”
“You chose to display little class,” she amended again.
I leaned my weight on both hands, against the counter, still holding her eyes in the mirror. I let a bit of snarl enter my voice. “Are you trying to be my best pal?”
“You aren’t making it easy,” she said, exasperated. She leaned in as well, her posture copying mine. “Do you know how difficult it is to find a friend who is as tall as I am? Who doesn’t make me feel like a lumbering giant? Who might understand the life of a blood-servant? Who isn’t chasing after me to get close to my mother?” The last was said with a soft undertone of old anguish.
My face fell. Crap. She was serious. After a long, silent moment, I said, “Yeah. To the tall part.” I studied her cornflower blue eyes. They were earnest, a hard emotion to fake. “So . . . you really are trying to be my friend?”
