I shook my head and fought the urge to make cow eyes and giggle.
From the front of the bar, one couldn’t see the three back booths tucked in a little area set off from the main room and muffled from the worst of the noise. I slid into the last booth on one side of the table, and Jake took the other side. I noticed he kept his right leg almost straight when he slid into the booth. That one definitely hadn’t healed right.
I waited for him to say something, and laughed when he seemed to be waiting for me to start. “I’m not very good at small talk,” I said, feeling every bit the geeky social misfit I was.
“Okay, let’s start with easy things.” He smiled. “You’re a native? You talk like a native.”
I wasn’t sure he meant that as a compliment. “You mean I speak Yat?” Secretly I was pleased. I liked the local accent, its nickname taken from the universal local greeting, Where y’at. “My family in Alabama would come after you with a shotgun for saying such a thing.”
“Alabama.” He grinned. “I like Alabama. Alabama and Louisiana make folks in Mississippi feel good about ourselves—y’all always keep us from ranking dead last in stuff like literacy and life expectancy.”
I laughed, but couldn’t argue with him.
We talked easily for a while. I gave the short explanation of risk management, the perfect cover occupation because either people don’t understand it or find it boring. He talked about the ins and outs of running a business in the French Quarter, and of growing up in Picayune.
He reached across the table and took one of my hands, turning it over and tracing his thumb across my palm. “You and Alex. Am I gonna be stepping on any toes if I ask you out?”
I curled my fingers around his thumb. “Alex and I are just friends. And you already did ask me out, remember?”
Speak of the devil. Alex and Louis rounded the corner and stopped next to the booth. I tried to pull my hand away but Jake held on, watching his cousin.
Alex didn’t react. “Let’s go. Jackie needs to talk to Jake about his performing schedule.”
He was quiet on the walk back to the Pathfinder. I waited for him to bring up the whole Jake handholding thing.
“This is really not a good idea.” He finally spoke up after I’d driven two blocks.
“Jake is none of your business.”
He looked at me, frowning. “I wasn’t talking about you and Jake, although that’s not a good idea either. I was talking about using Louis Armstrong as a spy.”
Oh, that. “What the Elders don’t hear from you won’t hurt them.”
“You don’t think they’ll know?”
I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. They can’t tell which breaches are being used and which ones aren’t. All I know is they’re dragging their feet playing politics instead of looking for Gerry. Plus, three soldiers have died, and there’s some voodoo threat to the wizards in town. At least we’re doing something.”
He gazed out the window. I barely heard him mutter, “Maybe so.”
While Alex pondered his own moral duty to the Elders, I pondered Jake and Alex. And Leyla. Tall, pretty Leyla whose gaze followed Alex around the room like a heat-seeking missile. Not that I cared. Still, I’d be better able to do my job if my curiosity were satisfied.
“So, Alex, why don’t I drop you off at your friend’s place instead of going all the way to my house to get your car? I can pick you up in the morning.”
“No, go on to your house. I might need my car tonight.”
We were already out past curfew. I knew a lame excuse when I heard one. “Why don’t you want me to know where you live? Because you’re living with Leyla?”
He stared at me, his face glowing a little green from the dashboard lights. “Huh? I barely know Leyla. Why would you think I was living with Leyla?”
“So who are you living with? Why is it such a big freaking secret?”
Silence. Eyes straight ahead. Brain racing like a hamster on an exercise wheel.
“It’s not such a hard question, Alex.”
Finally, he sighed. “You aren’t going to like it. But that voodoo symbol in front of your house worries me and I never know when you’re going to do something crazy like go to the morgue.”
Doing crazy things beat doing nothing. “What does that have to do with where you’ve been living?”
“I’ve been living with you. You just didn’t know it.”
I blinked.
“Gandalf,” he said.
“What about Gandalf? You haven’t even seen Gandalf.”
Alex took a deep breath. “I am Gandalf. I’m a shapeshifter.” He still didn’t look at me, even when I ran the Pathfinder onto a sidewalk and jerked it to a stop a foot from a trash pile the size of a small office building.
I stared at Alex’s profile, and the line of dominoes began falling. Alex and Gandalf were never around at the same time. Alex had ties to the were community, which a shapeshifter probably would. He always used the password to cross my security wards even though I told him humans didn’t need to. The reason Gandalf seemed to listen so well was because he had Alex’s brain.
I’d picked up a buzz of energy around him before, but there had always been something else to blame it on. I shut my eyes and sent out my empathic senses, and there it was—that light aura of magic I’d been blaming on wards and magical herbs. What an idiot.
I banged my head on the steering wheel. How many nights had that freakin’ dog been sleeping in my bedroom? How many secrets had I told him? I groaned in mortification. “Please tell me you didn’t understand all those late-night heart-to-heart talks I’ve been having with Gandalf.”
Alex looked sheepish, in a canine sort of way, then grinned. Oh yeah, now the man grins. I didn’t even know he had teeth.
“I know you think I’m hot.” Then the grin faded. “Of course, you think Jake’s hot, too, and Jean Lafitte, who’s not even alive. You’re really screwed up, you know that?”
I couldn’t even look at him. I might have to put in for a transfer. I might have to change my name, abandon magic altogether, move back to Alabama, and marry a pig farmer. My grandmother would be thrilled.
He turned serious. “A lot of enforcers are either shifters or were. You were stubborn and wouldn’t let me stay with you, so I figured I’d give you a more palatable form of protection.” He shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea, although I kept waiting for someone to ask why I kept having to shower at the FBI offices or wander up and find me naked on your porch since it’s the only place I can find to shift back.”
Too much information.
I could be calm and mature about this. I assumed an air of casual curiosity. “Can you only turn into a dog, or other animals as well—a cow or a bat or something?”
“A cow?” Alex looked offended. “Most shifters have a particular form they take. Mine has always been a dog.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or beat him over the head with the elven staff, which I just noticed had made its way to my backseat. I needed to figure out what that thing could do, other than be creepy.
This was a sad turn of events. I had really grown attached to Gandalf. He was a lot easier to get along with than Alex, and he didn’t play with guns.
Another reality hit me. “So you’re telling me you don’t actually have a place to live and we just gave Jake’s spare apartment to Louis Armstrong?”
He gritted his teeth. “Look, part of my job here is keeping you safe to do your job, and I can’t do that living in the Quarter.” He gave me his half twist of a smile that had become a lot less sexy now that I knew it also belonged to my canine confidant. Make that my former confidant.
“You know, it’s kind of a possessive pack thing, too.”
I’m sure my face turned purple. Thankfully, it was dark. “A pack thing? Like, we’re members of a pack? I didn’t think shifters had packs. Don’t even tell me. You’re the alpha, right?”
“You missed your turn.”
I had cranked the Pathfin
der, pulled back onto the street, and had, indeed, missed the turn to my house. I noticed he hadn’t answered the alpha question, but decided to leave it alone for now. I couldn’t handle any more revelations tonight.
Finally, I had to be practical. Even twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn’t have considered a bodyguard. Today, with Gerry still missing, a voodoo vévé painted on my sidewalk, someone targeting wizards on my turf, and an undead jazz musician as my spy, opening my doors to a lying, dirty dog of a shapeshifter sounded reasonable.
Alex moved in.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2005 “Category 5 Rita has N.O. nervous; [Mayor] foresees a much smaller city.”
—THE TIMES–PICAYUNE
CHAPTER 20
Call Tish and report that there’s nothing to report. Check.
Call Adam Lyle at St. Gabriel to confirm there’s nothing new. Check.
Call last appointment Gerry had in his journal before Katrina. Check. Lester Meadows, sentinel of Appalachia, was about to retire and said he’d called to see if Gerry would recommend me for his post. He’d been disappointed when Gerry told him I wouldn’t be interested. This was all news to me.
Call next-to-last appointment from journal: check. Selena Milette, a minor mage who wanted to take the exam for Blue Congress, said Gerry was an arrogant sonofabitch like all wizards.
Call third-to-last appointment: Elder Willem Zrakovi, head of the wizards for North America. No way. Not ready for career suicide, though I did wonder what they’d talked about.
Then I was stuck, and Alex was stuck with me. Everyone had been hustled off the streets and ordered out of town in advance of Hurricane Rita, another killer storm with a wimpy name. She was headed for east Texas or western Louisiana but if she turned sooner rather than later, we’d get clocked again.
People had learned a lesson from Katrina. No casual “maybe I will, maybe I won’t” attitudes about evacuating. This time, the few people in town had run like gazelles, except for me and Alex.
I tried one last time to get him to leave, sharing Gerry’s philosophy about sentinels splitting up during hurricanes. It was annoyingly like the conversation Gerry and I had at Sid-Mar’s two days before Katrina, with the roles reversed. Karma sucks.
“You need to at least go to your folks’ house in Picayune,” I said, explaining the bits about hell breaking loose and weakened levees. He was unloading his stuff in my office, including weights and cases of protein bars and lots of black clothing.
“It’s different this time,” he said. “I’m going to stay at your place, and we know it didn’t flood here. Even if the levees give way again, we’ll be okay.”
“Not all the levees broke, remember. If the Mississippi River levee breaks, this house will be somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. Take the cat to Picayune, at least.”
“Not leaving. Give it up.” He pulled an iron out of a box. “I can use your iron so I don’t need this, right?”
An iron? Was he kidding? God made knits so people didn’t have to iron. “I don’t own an iron. And I don’t need protecting, just in case you’re staying out of some misguided macho thing.”
He smirked. “I’m staying because I wouldn’t trust you not to move to a new address while I was gone. Not that I couldn’t find you now that I have my tracker back. Quit stealing it.”
Damn. Wait. I’d hidden it in my underwear drawer. “You were pawing through my dresser,” I said, eyes narrowed.
“The black bikinis are sexy.”
“Glad you liked them. You’ll never see them again.”
I helped him hang the new library door and install a new dead bolt, thanks to a home-improvement store that had finally opened in Jefferson Parish. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon reading, inhaling all the information we could find on the Baron Samedi and both Marie Laveaus, mother and daughter. Afterward, I sorted a few more of Gerry’s papers while Alex read through journals, starting with the most recent and working backward.
We decided to compare notes over dinner.
“Here’s my big scoop,” I said. “Remember I told you Jean Lafitte mentioned a new partnership before you blasted him?”
Alex nodded, chewing on a slice of vegetarian pizza he’d gone all the way to Metairie to find. I had pepperoni. “So?”
“So, guess who Monsieur Lafitte allegedly had an affair with a couple hundred years ago?”
“Why, are you jealous?”
I took a bite of pizza and wrinkled my nose at him. Our relationship seemed to have devolved into bickering one-upmanship, but at least it was mostly good-natured.
“Marie Laveau,” I said. “Don’t know if it’s true—they would barely have overlapped in their years in New Orleans, and she was ten or twelve years younger than him. But there’s so much conflicting information about when either one of them actually got here, it’s possible. Laveau and Lafitte. Maybe they’re together again.”
Alex frowned and picked up a mushroom that had fallen on the table, popping it in his mouth. “When’s the earliest you think Lafitte could be strong enough to come back from the Beyond?”
I pointed to a wall calendar hanging from the side of the kitchen cabinet nearest Alex. “Tomorrow, the twenty-third. I’ve circled it in red.”
“How sure are you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have a lot of experience with revenge-seeking members of the historical undead. But from what I’ve read, if you send them back violently, they need from one to two weeks to recover full strength. Tomorrow makes a week since you shot Lafitte, and I figure since he’s probably the most powerful of the historical undead in New Orleans he’d need the minimum. The second-strongest is probably Marie Laveau. Everyone here knows who both of them are.” Especially Lafitte, who had a town and a national park and a bayou and God only knows what else named after him.
“So maybe Marie Laveau really is our murderer,” Alex said. “But what would the link with Gerry be, and the wizards?” He paused. “Do you think Gerry would work with her?”
Deep breath. He’s just testing theories. “No. What could it accomplish? I think he caught her coming through a breach and she did something to him.”
Alex had stopped eating and drummed his fingers on the Formica tabletop. It was his one nervous habit. “If your theory is true, you realize Gerry’s probably not alive. If he were injured or being held somewhere against his will, the Elders would know about it—they’d be able to detect his force field unless he’s figured out some way to evade their trackers.”
I toyed with a slice of pepperoni. He wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t thought a hundred times. “I don’t want to think he’s dead. But he’s been missing a week now, and I’m running out of ideas.”
Alex got another slice, and we ate in silence a few minutes. My pizza had lost its flavor.
I pulled out some foil to wrap it up so I could eat the leftovers for breakfast. Alex had finished his.
“You want the rest of mine?” I asked.
“No way. You’re going to end up wearing that pepperoni on your hips.”
Did he think I was too hippy? I wasn’t hippy. “Snob,” I said, wrapping the pizza. It would make a great breakfast. Then I asked, “Did you find out anything interesting in Gerry’s journals?”
“I found some stuff on the staff from his attic. You need to read it.”
We went in the living room, and Alex handed me a journal with the page marked. “You read. I’ll shower.”
Before I began, I flipped over a page to see how long the entry was. At the end of Gerry’s neat handwriting on the next sheet was a drawing he’d done of a wooden staff. Not a staff, but the staff.
Below the illustration, which he’d drawn in meticulous detail, complete with all the odd runes, he’d written Elven Staff, from the Last Age. I tried to remember my elven history lessons with Gerry: Elves had gotten fed up with humans and gone in a snit to their own corner of the Beyond. What was its name … Elfheim. So I guess this staff was from the period just before they took their elve
n toys and went home, minus at least one stick of wood. Gerry had bought it at an auction.
Worked with the staff far into the morning, he had written. I had hoped, with elven blood myself, I might be able to wield it, but it doesn’t respond to me. Perhaps the child can use it when she gets older.
That was weird. I didn’t know Gerry was of elven descent too, only that he was really interested in them. Was I the child? I looked at the date on the entry: 1985. Couldn’t have been me, then. I would have been only five and still living in Alabama with my parents. I’d have to ask Tish who the child might be.
I looked around the room and there the staff was, leaning against one of the bookcases. I’d accepted that it was always going to follow me around like a puppy. It only seemed to happen in my personal space, though—the house and the car. So far, it hadn’t followed me to the Gator or back to Lakeview.
I picked it up and felt the warmth spread through it. Was that the kind of response Gerry was hoping for? I tapped it against the edge of the coffee table and tried sending a tiny pulse of magic into it. Red sparks flew from the tip, smoke puffed from the table, and I smelled charred wood. Oops. I waved the smoke away, coughing, and found a charred place the size of a quarter.
“What’s burning?” Alex wandered in from the office wearing a pair of loose jogging pants and a towel around his neck.
“Uh.” Talk about eye candy. I pried my wanton gaze away and pointed at the table. “I was trying out the staff.”
“Damn.” He touched the burn mark and pulled away a sliver of charred wood. “Have you ever been able to do anything like that before?”
“Please. I’m Green Congress. I was exhausted after churning enough heat to set off my little Jean Lafitte smoke bomb.”
“Did burning up your coffee table tire you?”
“No.” Hmm. If I could learn more about the staff, and how to use it, maybe I wouldn’t need the shooting lessons Alex kept threatening me with.
FRIDAY/SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23–24, 2005 “Flooded again: Breach in Industrial Canal inundates Lower 9th Ward, Arabi … Latest hurricane washes away signs of renewal.”
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