“Of course,” Zrakovi said, glancing at his watch for the third time. “I can give you ten minutes. What’s the problem?”
Alex looked at me. “DJ, don’t you need to be heading to Old Barataria, to check on Lafitte?”
Oh hell no. “I can wait a few more minutes, thanks.”
“No,” Zrakovi said, clueless to the relationship dynamics swirling around him. “I really would feel more at ease knowing you were on your way.”
“I don’t have a car,” I said, glaring at Alex. “I’ll have to call a cab. By the time Alex has discussed his delicate situation, it should be here.”
By God if he told Zrakovi about Eugenie’s pregnancy, I would sauté his boy parts and feed them to the cat.
He stuck a hand in his pocket, retrieved his keys, and tossed his key ring to me. “Take the Range Rover and leave it near the cathedral. I’ll get a ride from Jake and pick it up later. I have another set of keys.”
Alex had never, ever, ever offered to let me drive his vehicle, even before I’d proven a talent for burning them. But he and Zrakovi stood and stared at me, waiting for me to leave. Zrakovi tapped his foot, and I could tell he itched to take another look at his watch.
“Fine. See you later.”
I walked out, got in Alex’s SUV, drove across the street, and parked next to Eugenie’s back door. She didn’t know it yet, but we were going to visit a pirate.
CHAPTER 8
I wedged Alex’s behemoth vehicle into a semi-legal space two blocks from St. Louis Cathedral, then texted him to let him know where it was. The only message I added was “heater works well.” I didn’t mention that Eugenie was with me, or that I’d already driven out to my half-finished house in Lakeview to change into clean clothes, attempt some quick—and useless—research on elven reproduction, and cook up a quick healing potion for myself and a second one for Jean Lafitte.
Alex didn’t deserve bonus information.
“You’ve been stewing all the way across town and back,” Eugenie said, pulling her coat around her more tightly. The high temperature today was supposed to be twenty-five but at least it was sunny and the sky was a rich shade of blue. I’d reluctantly donned my orange and purple nightmare of a coat. “You might as well tell me what’s bothering you so I can reassure you and tell you it doesn’t matter. Then I can enjoy visiting Jean Lafitte. I’m so excited I can’t stand it! So tell me now.”
I blew out a frustrated breath and swiveled in the seat to face her. “I might be wrong. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Alex is telling Willem Zrakovi about the baby. That’s why I wanted to get you out of the house—in case Zrakovi decided to pay you a surprise visit.”
Eugenie blinked, her eyes clear and guileless. She was such a good person; I hated to even think of her getting drawn into the messy world of prete politics. “Zrakovi’s the wizard boss, right? I mean, that’s okay, isn’t it? He seemed like a good guy the one time I met him, although I didn’t know he was a wizard.” She paused. “Anyway, I don’t know why he’d care, but you always say you like him. So it’s okay for him to know, right?”
I willed my tight shoulders to relax. I shouldn’t assume the worst of Zrakovi. He’d always been fair. But he also had his potential First Elderhood on the line, so caution was in order. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. I just wanted you to come with me today in case he got the bright idea to pop over and take you by surprise.” I tried not to think about Alex’s assessment that Zrakovi would assume he had a say in whatever Eugenie decided to do. Might as well not worry about that unless it happened.
“Zrakovi will be interested in how you decide to handle things with Rand because the elves and wizards aren’t always on the best of terms,” I explained. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.
Eugenie shrugged and opened her car door. “Well, I’m feeling good for a change and I’m tired of being sick and scared. What Quince Randolph doesn’t know won’t hurt him, at least not today. I want to visit the pirate’s lair and I’m not going to let that stupid elf or your paranoid wizards ruin it.”
Maybe she understood more than I gave her credit for.
I got out, pressed the button to activate Alex’s alarm, and stuck the keys in my bag. If he came and got the SUV before we returned, we’d have to take a cab back to Eugenie’s. I could break in the Elders’ credit card. This whole visit to the Beyond was Zrakovi’s idea anyway.
“Tell me what to expect. Does Jean Lafitte live in a house in the swamps kind of like a fishing camp?” Eugenie stuck her hands in her coat pockets and hunched her shoulders. I had found a pair of buttery soft black leather gloves in Alex’s backseat and had stolen them, even though they made my ugly coat look even shabbier.
“Jean’s not a fishing camp kind of guy,” I said. Most of the fishing camps around South Louisiana were simple wooden houses built on piers over the wetlands or bayous. Not the Frenchman’s style. “Jean’s pirate lair is a two-story house overlooking a narrow stretch of beach on the Gulf side of Grand Terre Island,” I said. “In our time, nobody lives there and most of the island has gone underwater.”
“I’ve been to Grand Isle a few times.” Eugenie sidestepped a local shop owner sweeping the sidewalk in front of his door. “Jake’s living with Jean now, right?”
“Actually, there are a bunch of people who live on Grand Terre. You know, people Jean remembers from his human life.” Specifically, a bunch of undead pirates, fueled by Jean’s memories. Their village of thatched-roof cottages lay adjacent to his mansion, as big an inequality in the afterlife as in the actual life. But only one guy in Jean’s real life had ever challenged his authority, and the guy didn’t live very long.
“Oh-em-gee.” Eugenie practically danced across Decatur Street. “A bunch of pirates. Do they sit around and drink rum all day? Are they all French? Are there women there? What do they wear? Are all the pirates as hot as Jean?”
Oh boy.
“Jean prefers brandy to rum.” It struck me that I probably knew a whole lot more about Jean’s likes and dislikes than was good for me. “The pirates are all nationalities, I think, but they mostly seem to speak French and not English. There are women there, but I don’t know how many. Jean dresses a whole lot better than the average privateer—for God’s sake, don’t call them pirates in front of him. And no, most of them are not the least bit hot.”
In fact, half of those I’d seen urgently needed a trip to the dentist.
“We aren’t going to be there long,” I warned her, in case she had delusions of hanging around to meet the undead pirate of her dreams. Been there, done that. Well, okay, I hadn’t done that. “I just need to see how Jean’s doing and when he’s planning to come back to New Orleans.” And then get back to Alex’s and see if I needed to do damage control, depending on what Zrakovi’s reaction to the news had been.
“How bad was Jean hurt? Did that vampire bite him?”
I hoped curiosity didn’t kill the human. “No, he has a stab wound, but I don’t think it’s too serious. He’s probably immune to vampire bites.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you got bit and you didn’t even get an orgasm out of it. I guess True Blood isn’t true after all.”
Thank God for small favors. The road to O-Town was somewhere I never wanted to travel with Garrett Melnick or any other vampire.
We walked the length of Jackson Square, stopping to look at the work of a couple of artists who’d set up their sidewalk shops for the day.
“Look.” Eugenie stopped in front of an acrylic painting of a mustached man with curly dark hair, hooded eyes, and a big hooked nose. He looked like he’d steal the hubcaps off your grandmother’s Cadillac.
“It’s Jean Lafitte, our most famous pirate,” the artist said. “He was quite a character.”
She had no idea. She also had badly missed the mark on his looks. His hair wasn’t that curly, he’d been clean-shaven the whole time I’d known him, his nose was straight and in perfect proportion to the rest of his featu
res, and he didn’t have hooded black eyes. Still, he might find it entertaining. “How much?” I asked.
“Fifty for the print, but I can sell you the original for only fifteen-hundred.”
I handed her my Elder Express card. “The print’s fine, thanks.” The Elders could pay for it. I hadn’t been given a per diem and, besides, pirate bribery was likely to be required on an ongoing basis if I had any hope of keeping Jean in check.
Tucking the rolled print under my arm, I led Eugenie down Pirate’s Alley, the narrow passage with the cathedral on one side and shops on the other. Local lore claimed it got its name from the pirates who once hung out here, but seeing as how the alley runs between a church and the old “Calaboose” prison, where Jean’s brother Pierre had done hard time, it seemed an unlikely spot for pirate frivolity.
“Turn here.” I led Eugenie in the gate to St. Anthony’s Garden, which lay across the alley from Faulkner House Books. I’d had a contentious run-in with a crabby undead William Faulkner and some of his author cronies shortly after Hurricane Katrina, but he rarely came across from the Beyond. Unlike Jean Lafitte, most of the historical undead were content to let the modern world chug along without their ongoing presence.
“How does this work, exactly? I’m getting nervous.” Eugenie seemed to finally have grasped what we were about to do. It’s not every day a person leaves one world behind to visit another.
“It’s sort of like squeezing through a really tight space, but it only lasts a few seconds.” I pointed to where the transport of colored stones and glass lay, masquerading as a rock garden. “I checked, and there’s nothing that should hurt the baby or you.” At least it wouldn’t hurt a human baby, and I assumed half-elven spawn were of much hardier stock.
Since being officially named to the Interspecies Council, Jean had paid for a private transport to be set up between the French Quarter and his house in the Baratarian outpost of Old Orleans, the anything-goes border town between modern New Orleans and the Beyond proper. On my first visit to Barataria’s Grand Terre, the island south of New Orleans where Jean had lived in his human life and in whose magical version he now resided, I’d had to transport to a remote sand dune and walk a mile of dark, pirate-strewn beach to find him. In the modern world, Grand Terre was a federally protected wildlife area.
I stepped into the transport and pulled Eugenie in behind me. “Nice rocks,” I said for the benefit of a couple of tourists wandering past. They didn’t need to see two women disappear into thin air. Once they’d turned the corner, I knelt and touched a finger to the edge of the transport, willing a flash of my native physical magic to power it.
“Holy shit!” Eugenie squeaked, and threw her arms around my shoulders, as if the transport weren’t squeezing me enough. At least the healing charm had gotten the pain from my gunshot wound within range of bearable. I’d need another application tonight.
“Close your eyes,” I told her. “It helps.”
The air around us settled, and I opened my eyes to the wide verandah of Chez Lafitte, lit with flambeaux that flickered against the red brick of the house walls.
“Um,” Eugenie whispered, “is it supposed to be dark?” We’d left New Orleans at a sunny ten a.m.
Oops. Forgot to mention that. “Yeah, it’s always night here, always a full moon.” Actually, there was a grayish hour before dawn and at dusk where one could see, but I didn’t plan to stay that long and Eugenie was on need-to-know status.
“Take a wrong turn, sunshine? And you brought along a friend.”
Jake Warin had walked out of the double doors that led into the center of the house and grinned as Eugenie rushed over and wrapped her arms around him. I smiled; he looked genuinely pleased to see her. In fact, he looked more at ease than I’d seen him in a long time. I’d been too stressed out at the council meeting to notice the absence of the worry lines that had set up around his eyes. He looked like himself again, his pre-loup-garou self. Who’d have thought working as Jean Lafitte’s factotum and living in the Beyond would agree with him so well?
I gave him a quick hug after Eugenie finally let him go. “How’s your boss doing?”
“He’s in a temper.” Jake glanced behind him. “Let me tell him you’re here. Might cheer the old bastard up.”
I choked on a laugh. Somehow, I doubt Jake called Jean “the old bastard” to his face.
Eugenie and I sat on the steps and looked into the darkness. “You can’t tell right now, but we’re only about thirty or forty yards from the beach,” I said. “This wooden banquette stretches almost to the water.” I’d seen the beach in both its dawn and dusk version of daylight.
“I could just lie out here in that hammock and listen to the sound of the waves.” Eugenie closed her eyes. “It’s peaceful. N’Orleans is a noisy city. You don’t realize it so much till you get out of town.”
“Yeah, you got dat right.” She looked at me, and we burst out laughing at my impression of her Yat accent. She was spot-on, though; the water was soothing. After the glacial temperatures of this morning, the Gulf breeze whispered warm caresses across my skin, and the banana leaves flapping against the columns of the house made me want to curl up and nap.
I was so freaking tired. Not just from the all-nighter and a run-in with my first set of fangs, but from the stress of the last two months. Since the borders to the Beyond had officially dropped in early October, life had ricocheted from one disaster to the next. I didn’t see an end to it, or at least not a good one. And my personal life kept getting tangled up with my job. On the plus side, at least I had a personal life. On the minus side, the whole job-relationship balance wasn’t working very well.
“You guys can come in.” Jake reappeared in the doors leading into Jean’s receiving parlor. Beyond that, I knew, we’d find a large sitting room filled with heavy, masculine furniture and lots of polished wood. Bedroom suites were in the back, with what passed for an early nineteenth-century version of plumbing. I had no idea what was up the wide central staircase, except Jake had told me there were windows on all sides with loaded cannons in them. Pirates and Boy Scouts—always prepared.
Jake walked with us through the receiving room. “He’s in here, doing okay but still getting around slower than usual. I’ve gotta say good-bye here, though. Alex sent a courier to say he’s calling in security reinforcements to watch the transports, so I’m heading back to New Orleans.”
In the world of the Division of Domestic Terror, or DDT, the Elders’ preternatural security team, Alex was boss and his cousin Jake a newbie. After a rocky start, both of them now seemed okay with it. Jean had told me once, when Jake first began working for him, that as a soldier Jake was wired to follow orders. And God knows Alex was bossy and liked to give orders. Although, to be fair, he was working on it.
“Yeah, Alex was talking to Zrakovi when we left New Orleans and Zrakovi mentioned the security issue.” They were talking about more than that. I understood why Alex felt the need to keep Zrakovi informed about Eugenie’s situation, but for me, Eugenie’s welfare outranked politics.
“This is beautiful.” Eugenie ran her fingers along a massive mahogany sideboard, on the top of which rested a red velvet sash with fine embroidery on it and, on top of the sash, a silver dagger. That little vignette was Jean Lafitte in a nutshell. Refined gentleman and renegade. Velvet and violence.
“Bonjour, Jolie.”
I turned to the sitting room door, and he stood framed in the doorway, back in his casual loose cotton tunic, black pants, and black boots. Our glances caught and held, and we didn’t have to say it: He was glad to see me, and I was glad to see him. I had needed visual reassurance that he was okay, even though in theory I knew he couldn’t be killed. The events of last month had changed the tenor of our relationship. I just couldn’t quite put a finger on how it had changed, or what it meant.
After what was probably a couple of seconds too long, he turned his attention to Eugenie. “Welcome to my home, Mademoiselle Eugenie. This is an
unexpected and delightful surprise.”
She started to shake hands with him, then half-curtsied, then threw her hands in the air. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to greet a famous pir … uh, privateer.”
He laughed and took her hand, raising it to his lips for a kiss. “This is the proper way for ladies and gentlemen of my time.”
Yeah, Jean was just an old-fashioned guy.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Jean led us into the sitting room, which was much as I remembered it from last month. Lots of dark wood, plush fabrics, and wealth. The “gentleman pirate” had been an extremely rich man in his human days, so I guess it was only right that his immortal version continue to enjoy the spoils of his piratical plundering.
“I needed to talk to you about political stuff, and Eugenie needed an adventure.” An escape, more like, but I hadn’t decided whether or not to confide in Jean about that. Eugenie’s situation was absolutely none of his business, but I’d found him to be a source of surprisingly sound advice. He read people very, very well, which made his betrayal by Etienne Boulard sting him all the more. On the other hand, he was often narcissistic, scheming, and way too smart for his own good.
From a delicate writing desk, I picked up what looked like a scrimshaw sailing ship and held it up to the lamplight, trying to tell if it was carved of real ivory. A deafening clang startled me into dropping it, and I made a nifty midair catch. Heart pounding, I turned to see if hordes of undead British troops were storming the beach, but I found only Jean ringing a large handbell loud enough to wake the undead.
What would arrive at that summons? A flock of maidens bearing refreshments? A pirate legion, come to do the master’s bidding?
I had only a few seconds to wait before a young woman appeared from the porch. She had a tousled mane of black hair, a perfect tan, and eyes the color of jade. She was stunning, and I forcibly stomped down the spark of jealousy that sprang to life, beating it to ashes. Jean’s personal life was no concern of mine.
“Drusilla, Eugenie, this is Collette.” Jean presented her without further explanation, which I found extremely annoying.
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