by Faith Hunter
“Adelaide Mooney, Leo’s primo and legal counsel, formally a blood-servant of Lincoln Shaddock of Asheville.” I caught up on a few breaths and sat in an empty chair, before continuing. “George Dumas, Onorio, former primo to Leo Pellissier. Lee Williams Watts, personal assistant to Mr. Pellissier. Eli Younger, of Yellowrock Securities, second to the Enforcer of Leo Pellissier. And the Enforcer, Jane Yellowrock.” I pointed to myself.
“Mr. Pellissier and others, please meet PsyLED Senior Special Agent Ayatas FireWind, direct subordinate to Assistant Director Soul, in charge of the eastern states, recently promoted and moved from a western law enforcement territory. He is an unclassified, noncontagious, non-moon-called shape-shifter.”
Leo said, “It was my understanding that Rick LaFleur was the PsyLED agent over my territories. Has he been deposed? Deceased?”
“I’m technically Agent LaFleur’s superior in PsyLED chain of command. I expected him to be here for this meeting. He must have been held up.” Ayatas gave a charming smile and added, “I’ve already discovered that New Orleans’s traffic is difficult to navigate.”
I managed to control my shock. Rick was coming here? When had Ayatas called him? A tap sounded on the door and a faint scent wafted beneath. Rick. Standing, I unlocked and reopened the door. “Special Agent Rick LaFleur,” I said as my ex entered.
Rick nodded but didn’t meet my eyes. The black wereleopard took the only other seat, beside mine.
Beast growled inside. Bad mate. Did not scent-mark Jane. Did not look at Jane. I ignored her. She thought at me, Rick is not mate now?
No. Rick is not mate. Not now. Not ever again.
I retook my seat and looked over the room, taking in the mingled scents. Six men, four women. Multiple paras and humans, in a room built for half that number of creatures. Rick looked different. His hair had been stark black. Now there were long, thick strands of silver-white all through it. His face was furrowed and lined and he looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. I frowned, not knowing what it might mean but having no way to ask.
Leo inclined his head and added, “My Enforcer neglected to mention many of our titles and lands, including her own. Jane Yellowrock, Enforcer to the Master of the City of New Orleans and . . . the Dark Queen.”
Rick slanted me a look, a sad smile on his face. Bruiser watched Rick watching me. Ayatas frowned slightly, obviously searching for some correlation for Dark Queen in his studies. “Means a formality in place for the upcoming duels,” I lied. “Scrappy?”
Lee leaned toward the table, her red hair swinging at her shoulders, and prepared cups of coffee or tea to our usual specifications, and then cups for the guests, as was appropriate for low-level humans and low-level, nonvamp paras.
Ayatas said, “I am honored to have sparred with the Master of the City of New Orleans and even more honored to take refreshment with him and with his people.” He accepted the coffee, black, and sipped. “The coffee is very good.”
Huh. Not bad. I leaned back, cup in my left hand, my right in a faux pocket, fingers on the small weapon strapped there. I sipped, keeping my eyes on Ayatas in case I had read him all wrong and he was here to kill Leo or maybe all of us.
The scents in the room were overlapping and heavy. Vamp, blood, skinwalker, werecat, Onorio human.
I sipped and breathed through my mouth, tasting the scents. There was nothing of anger or hostility present, despite the testosterone and general irascibility, so I concentrated on the tea instead of the diplomatic chitchat. Boring, dull, tedious, and mind-numbing conversation. And thankfully, not dialogue the Enforcer had to pay attention to beyond listening for cues that could lead to violence, anything that meant I needed to shoot someone. If anything else came up, Scrappy would send me a memo and then beat me over the head with it until I read it.
Ayatas was droning on and on about the duel and the technicalities of the law regarding hosting and broadcasting and gambling. And the tax status of said gambling monies. He used phrases like the Interstate Wire Act, the Department of Justice, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, and the Bradley Act, some of which might have been the same things. Or not.
Ayatas wanted to be present, no matter where the Sangre Duello took place. Right. Like Leo was going to allow a cop on-site—unless he had claws in the cop’s life and total control over him. Again, I got to ignore it all, which was a good thing, because booooring. And then the meeting was over and Leo and his cadre, including Bruiser, Rick, and Ayatas, stood for small talk.
I didn’t look at my ex, slipping out the door as he greeted the other special agent and Bruiser. I might have stayed or pressed my ear to the door, listening in, but I caught a scent that made my hackles rise. Beast snarled and growled softly deep inside. Werecat. Were-big-cat. Have smelled big-cat before. Am alpha.
She was right. We were alpha to the werecat I smelled in the hallway. It was the scent of the black wereleopard Kemnebi, part of the International Association of Weres and the Party of African Weres.
Black wereleopards were from Gabon in the African Congo. Kem’s mate had turned Rick. The female had then been summarily executed for the deed, leaving a lot of bad feelings between the survivors. To keep Rick safe from Kem, I had sorta become alpha over him and claimed my ex. It was complicated. And Kem was in HQ.
My life was a soap opera with fangs and fur.
I tapped on my comms unit. “Update on weres,” I said. A voice I didn’t recognize verified all I had deduced by scent. Dang. I trotted up the hallway and took the elevator, tracking Kem’s personal aroma.
According to the scent patterns, Rick and Kem had met in the foyer, among a group of weres, several of whom were unfamiliar and not catty, and Kem had embraced Rick. That must have been awkward.
I sniffed, pulling in the air over my tongue as Beast would do, parsing the scents. Two African werelions, whom I had met. And . . . oddly, I smelled werewolves. Leo and the wolves still didn’t get along, and most hated me, since I’d killed off an entire pack. The dogs and cats didn’t get along. The mismatched group had a grindylow with them, one I hadn’t sniffed before and who, presumably, had traveled with the Africans. Grindys were supposed to keep the peace, but they were good only for were-on-human violence. Were-on-were or were-on-vamp wasn’t covered in the grindy’s job description. According to the scents, the various para groups had separated and some had moved off to different areas of HQ.
“Legs? Everything all right?”
I looked up in surprise to see Wrassler standing over me. I put my shoulders back and dropped my arms. “How long have I been standing here?”
“Immobile? Hunched over, sniffing the air like somebody’s brought in Hot-N-Now Krispy Kremes? ’Bout three minutes.”
I explained the problem to Wrassler. “And if a law enforcement officer, say Rick LaFleur, dies here, on land that isn’t technically U.S. territory, but technically belongs to Leo, then Leo also has to act as judge and jury and I have to be executioner. And we’ll be right back where we were before Leo made peace—sorta—with the were coalition. We could have a war.”
“So you think the weres are here to sabotage the duel?”
“Maybe?” I pulled my cell and texted Alex: Werecats and werewolves in HQ. Check status. To Wrassler I asked, “Where are they now?”
Wrassler limped to the doorway on his prosthetic leg and called to the woman at the small room to the right of the entrance, a room that held a compact version of HQ’s communication and security control system. “Location of the weres?” he asked.
“On the elevator,” a woman’s voice said. “Hell. It’s going down. Should be going up to the library. No weapons on the scanner or pat-down. Dogs and cats in same elevator. Guided, guarded by Tequila Antifreeze.” She cursed foully. “Elevator cam shows Antifreeze is out cold.”
To access any of the floors, the elevator required a palm print, but the print could be made u
nder duress. I met Wrassler’s eyes. “SOD,” we both said at the same time. Side by side, we whirled for the stairs.
“SOD’s guards?” I asked.
“Two. Human. You can move faster than I can,” Wrassler said. “Go! I’ll get a team to meet you there.”
I pulled on Beast-speed and raced down the steps, my feet barely touching every third or fourth tread, my hands shoving me off the landings and pulling me around tight corners. If they killed the Son of Darkness we could be in trouble. Besides, that was my job.
Slowing on sub-four, I let Beast into the front of my brain. She took over my footsteps and my body movements, making me silent. Stealthily, I moved to the bottom of the hidden stairs, in the shadows of sub-five. The lowest basement at vamp HQ had a claylike floor, poor lighting, and a distinct scent that combined stale walls, damp, mold, the herbal and funeral-flower-sweet stench of vamps, a hint of something tart, and the particular stink of the Son of Darkness. The elevator was to my right on the far end of the basement space and the SOD hung to my immediate left, shackled to the wall by silver. The bag of bones and goo was Leo’s ace in the hole to any act of war by the Europeans. They had tried to get him back several times, but taking him by magic or dragging the heartless—literally—and broken thing up five flights of stairs while fighting a pitched battle had proven impossible.
The SOD had gone by many names in his life; the most recent was Joses Santana, preceded by Joses son of Judas, and before that, Yosace Bar-Ioudas. He was one of two sons of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Jesus. Joses and his brother were the fathers of all fangheads. His blood was so strong that he had survived poisoning by a rainbow dragon, silver poisoning, and the removal of his heart. I was particularly proud of the heart removal as that had been my coup, but I should have broken my word and taken his head, because he was still a threat and a danger to us all.
I could hear people talking just ahead and below, and no more blood scent than usual. No battle. No danger. At the moment there was no threat of the SOD getting away and no humans or vamps to protect, so I eased up and pressed against the wall in the shadows to evaluate everything. Why were they here? What did they want? And why were they all together? I was downwind from the group. The stench of SOD and various were-creatures was overpowering, rushing up the stairs.
Two guards lay on the clay floor, bound and gagged, mad as heck, but not out cold. Over them was chained Joses Santana. The SOD had begun to heal, even without a heart, and looked human rather than like a sack of broken bones and slime. His legs and arms were in the right places, his joints aligned the correct way, and his eyes seemed to be focusing on the group in front of him, though his mouth hung open at an angle and his dry triangle of a tongue protruded to one side between oversized fangs. He was a little more hairy than once before, but that was likely just an oddity of his healing. Or of the werewolf who bit him from time to time. Life in vamp HQ was weird.
The mixed were-group stood in a small semicircle facing the vamp prisoner, but slightly to my left, in front of me. Asad, the African werelion, and his wife, Nantale, in human form, were in the forefront of the grouping. Were-creatures mostly corresponded with the body-weight-to-mass ratio, making Asad a huge man and his lion a midsized-to-smaller cat. He was black skinned, with coarse hair in shades of black streaked with lighter brown, and he wore white robes in the Arabian style. Asad looked human enough until you saw his eyes, a lion-gold with a predatory gleam. The man was a war chief for his human tribe, the Fulani, and his wife, Nantale, looked like a Nubian goddess, even without the cloth of gold and all the beaten gold jewelry she had worn when I saw her last. She was tall and muscular with broad shoulders and long legs.
The other werecat was my personal pain in the butt. Tall and thin, his muscles were well defined, his ebony skin stretched over a frame without an ounce of fat. Beautiful, he had the sculpted features of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus with full lips and tip-tilted eyes blacker than a moonless night. Like Asad, he was dressed in the flowing white outer robe of an Arabian prince, and beneath it, he wore black that vanished into the shadows, regal garb, which . . . I stopped. Dang it all. Kemmie was wearing an emblem sewn on his robes, a lizard eating his tail. I hadn’t seen that emblem in months, and hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but the tail-biting lizard looked like something that had been stitched into the clothing worn by the blood-servants of Jack Shoffru, one of Leo’s sworn enemies, now dead. Some of Shoffru’s people had survived, and the living and the dead had been wearing a similar emblem embroidered on their inner shirts. Had someone taken over Shoffru’s clan, suborned Kem, and come back for Leo? Was this happenstance or a declaration of war?
There were three werewolves, four if I counted my wolf. And I did. Brute stood in front of the SOD as if guarding him, fangs bared at the grouping, growling low, a sound that shivered up through the clay floor and the walls like the vibration of a generator. He had seriously huge teeth, and at over three hundred pounds, the white werewolf was big enough to take on Asad and maybe live to tell about it. He’d put on weight in the time I’d known him, but even bulked up he couldn’t defeat the whole crew. I could envision the werewolves bearbaiting Brute while the cats tore the SOD to pieces. Or stole him off the wall.
Unless Brute timewalked.
The wolves were in human form, and I spared a glance to take them in. Two white, one black, all of them young, hip, dangerous. There had once been half a dozen small packs in the Mountain States. Then a new guy had emerged, taken over, and united the packs from several states into the Bighorns, making a megapack. The social structures of were-creatures were nothing like human social structures, and werewolf packs were the most abnormal of the weird and strange, having no wolf females. Werewolves were temperamental, and without a strong pack leader, they fought. A lot.
On the floor behind the wolves was Tequila Antifreeze, putting a hand to his skull. Someone had knocked him down. He’d been injured the last time he followed orders. I didn’t want him—or anyone—hurt like that again. For now, they hadn’t killed Antifreeze.
Beast stared at the bad guys. Beast is best ambush hunter.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. I thought, trying to decide who to take out first.
Asad took a step closer to the SOD, licking his lips, his wife at his side. Had they gotten a taste of the SOD before Brute got there? I looked up at the cameras and made a mental note to get someone to check the feed.
The midsized grindylow hiding above the weres wasn’t a surprise, as the creatures tended to appear whenever were-creatures went near humans. This one was bigger than Pea and Bean, but still the neon green of a juvie, and cuter than any steel-clawed killer had any right to be. She was perched on a beam up high, watching.
At that moment Brute must have caught my scent because he stopped growling and glanced at the stairwell. Into the sudden silence, the visitors started speaking.
“What is it?” one of the wolves asked in a British accent. It was the black guy. He leaned in, sniffing the SOD. To the wolf beside him, he said, “I can’t believe that you brought me here to look at this. Pathetic artwork, if that’s what it is. And the stench is dreadful. The vampire bitch must have no nose at all.”
Vampire bitch? I thought.
“Not art. This thing is alive,” Asad said. “The fanghead female told me it is very powerful. The blood drinkers value it greatly. If we take it and drink from it we will grow in strength and power and be able to defeat the bloodsuckers.”
“Do tell. It bloody well reeks of several old vampires, rotting blood, and wet wolf.”
“You smell the dog at his feet,” Nantale said, dismissive.
“Call werewolves dogs again and I’ll slit your throat and eat your entrails before you can blink,” the British wolfman said with a patently false smile. “As long as we rescue the white wolf, I don’t really care what you do with the artwork.”
Rescue?
Stupid dog thinks Brute is prisoner, Beast thought at me.
The werecats took a collective step forward, crowding Brute. His growl came back, louder, deeper. His hackles rose, shoulders hunched.
“Phillip, I don’t think he’s a prisoner,” one of the wolves said, warning in his tone.
The third wolf drew a weapon and racked back the slide.
The faintest footsteps sounded on the stairs behind me. Help was on the way. Beast-fast, I drew a vamp-killer and the Walther PK .380. Stepped from the stairs into the shadows, into a decent firing position.
“Bugger it all. Are you insane?” the Brit demanded of the wolf with the gun.
Overhead, the grindylow shivered and gathered herself for a launch.
The armed wolf pointed the business end of the gun at Phillip.
“What the bloody hell?”
Raising my voice I said, “Who let the kitties and puppies down here?”
The small group whirled to me. The wolf with the gun snarled. Stepped away to get a line of fire and pointed it at me, back to Phillip, then at Brute, indecisive, his body rotating slowly, leaving him open to attack. My own aim was steady on him, but I didn’t want to fire into what sounded like internal werewolf politics. My killing a were in HQ could complicate a lot of things.
“Antifreeze, you okay?” I asked.
He mumbled, “I was taking them to the library. They said they had an appointment with Ernestine. It wasn’t on the calendar, so I called her. She said to send them up, that she’d meet them there. After that, I don’t know. I don’t remember how I got here.”
It hadn’t been willingly. Ernestine was the vamp accountant, a withered, wrinkled ancient woman I called Raisin. People met with her all the time, but not usually in the library, and the mention of a female vamp indicated that the weres had had inside help in staging this FUBAR. Dang it.
The wolf with the gun growled; aimed it steadily at me. I whipped my blade into a modified La Destreza stance and took two steps, edging between them and the SOD and Brute. I gave them my best menacing grin. Beast glowed through my eyes, a bright golden shade. The wolves stared.
