How Many Suckheads Got Shot
The conference room was more than a big table centered with Krispy Kreme boxes, surrounded by swiveling leather desk chairs, and a new Krups coffee machine in the corner, it was also part of the security arrangements. A vamp had killed one of the team while he was monitoring the original console, and we had updated the arrangements. Now there were two consoles in HQ itself, one off the front entrance in an armored cubby, and one down here. There was also off-site supervision at Yellowrock Securities, where the Kid could monitor and call in the Marines (or YS) if things went sour at HQ.
Soon we would also have access to the security systems at all the clan homes. Leo, the sneaky suckhead, had once maintained unauthorized, backdoor access to the other clan home systems, but when Pellissier Clan Home burned to the ground, he lost it. With the EVs coming, and the possibility of a real vamp war, we needed to access to everything at multiple sites so if one was hit, we stood a chance of maintaining an overview. Eli had made it clear that in a battle, knowing what was going on and maintaining coms was paramount. The Youngers and I were making that a possibility.
I stepped inside the conference room and looked it over. It was night, though early, so the room held only humans: Derek Lee and his security team were crowded into the large space, most of them staring up at the main, monster-sized video screen over the table. On the screen overhead, was me.
Gee and me. Fighting. In slow motion, which was the only way to see every sword stroke, with Gee moving as fast as any vamp, and me having pulled on at least a tiny bit of Beast-speed.
Gee looked like a dancer, surefooted and lithe, a small, slender man wearing black Lycra beneath black knickers and croissard, both padded with blade-resistant Dyneema. His eyes were glowing a bright blue. Mine were not glowing at all and looked totally human, if a strange shade of amber. Beast had been right when she said she could hide her presence inside me.
As we moved in slo-mo, I looked like a skinny chicken trying to dance and failing. And then dropping to my knees. Gee raising his weapon for a death cut. Eli adjusting the aim of his weapon. The glimpse of humans beyond Gee, in danger of Eli’s friendly fire. If he missed. Eli firing. Gee falling in front of me. I saw me pick up the blue feather and place it in Gee’s croissard. Then I fell across him and into a pool of my blood. Leo vamping out, shouting something.
The sequence replayed again, even slower, and when I dropped to my knees, the person working the console touched the screen over Gee’s face and expanded that small area, to focus on his expression, just after he was shot. It was blurry at this magnification, but his eyes were no longer glowing. He looked horrified. Stunned, perplexed, and, an instant later, grief-stricken. And then he fell.
I turned away from the screen to see Derek staring at me, his dark-skinned face unreadable. Like Eli, he had a battle face, and this was it, giving away nothing. I looked from him around the room and noted that Eli was standing on the far side from Derek, his own battle face on. The two men were warriors, an Army Ranger and a Marine by training and experience, both dark-skinned, though Eli was paler, with a hint of golden in his skin, when he stood in the daylight. And right now I had a feeling that they were working together, covering the room, watching all the people standing and sitting. But watching for what, I didn’t know.
Leo’s voice came over the speaker system. “Girrard DiMercy. The Enforcer is now present. She has seen the proof of your treachery. All have seen the evidence of your deception and disregard for my rule.” The screen blanked and a new scene appeared, of Leo’s office. Gee was on his knees with his arms behind his back. I couldn’t tell from this angle, but he looked bound. Hog-tied. Gee’s head was down and his pretty black hair was hanging forward, against his cheeks. His clothes were bloodstained with red blood, but I knew that, without glamour, his blood was a different color entirely and evaporated instantly upon contact with the air. Ergo, the blood wasn’t his. Some vamp had fed him, ensuring his healing, and left traces on his clothing. It had been a messy feeding, suggesting that Gee DiMercy had been in trouble of dying from the feeding as much as from the shooting.
Leo said, “As Master of the City, I have seen all the evidence and heard all statements except for the victim of your betrayal. I myself was at the scene and was a witness to the altercation and the grievous injury suffered by my Enforcer, Jane Yellowrock. Jane, do you choose to speak to the attack or to the assailant before a ruling is made against him, before I pronounce judgment on this accusation of crime against my Enforcer?”
I looked around for a microphone, and the man at the mass of security camera screens waved me over. I didn’t know him. There were so many here whom I didn’t know now. It disturbed me on various levels. Mostly because it was dangerous. The man at the security console handed me a tiny mic, the size and shape of a bendable straw with a foam pad on the end. “Yes, I have something to say,” I said into the foam piece. “This is Jane Yellowrock, Enforcer to the Master of the City.” Full titles, because this was a trial, and with suckheads, trials usually ended in death. “I don’t know what’s been said or deduced while I was healing, but Girrard DiMercy, the Mercy Blade of New Orleans, was spelled. Look at his eyes in this screen.” I pointed, and the man at the console put that one up on the main screen. “Then back up to the footage before Eli Younger, of Yellowrock Securities and my partner and my second in battle, shot Gee DiMercy. His eyes are glowing blue before. They aren’t after.”
The footage backed up and appeared on the screen. The still shot was cut out and placed side by side with the other one. “He was spelled. We need to talk about how he was spelled, but I have a feeling that the attack on me wasn’t his fault, but was the result of something else.” Like his blue eye of seeing on my palm, which turned green later. I didn’t really know what had caused the attack, but I didn’t want Gee punished if he had been under the influence of a spell. “That’s all I have to say.” I handed the guy the mic and stepped back.
Leo shoved his fingers through Gee’s hair, lifted his head, and leaned in. I heard him sniffing the bound captive. “I smell . . . nothing. No magic. Were you spelled, Mercy Blade? If so, by whom?”
Gee shook his head side to side as best he was able, with Leo’s fingers gripping his hair. “I have said. I do not remember what was shown on the footage. I remember only a training session. I am not innocent of the attack. I have seen that I tried to kill your Enforcer. But I am . . . not certain of anything else. Except that I am consumed by guilt and self-loathing, my master. Something took my goddess magics and”—he shuddered—“something happened that I do not understand.”
Leo dropped the captive’s head and said, “Girrard DiMercy, we have all now spoken. Following the attack, you did scent of error and fear. Following the attack you did appear shocked, fearful, and anguished with sorrow. When you were fed by my secondo, he did read pain and disbelief in your heart and mind. The security images—the footage,” Leo corrected himself, “upholds my initial impression. I rule this, as my new security team calls it, accidental ‘friendly fire,’ the result of magical interference.”
Leo himself stepped in front of the camera, his eyes on Gee. He was holding a curved knife, small, easy to conceal. He bent over Gee and cut downward through the bonds. Gee’s body slumped forward. Leo stood, the steel knife resting on his palm, like an offering.
I had an instant of memory, a single vision, of a hand holding a knife of similar shape, but of different construction—knapped flint set into a curved deer antler hilt and tied with a hide thong. Unlike the one in Leo’s hand, the one in my memory was bloodied.
My father’s knife. Too large for my small hand. As I cut into a man’s arm.
My heart tripped and raced. The image vanished.
Leo set the knife on the desktop and lifted Gee to his feet. Someone had beaten the small man. I narrowed my eyes and looked at Eli, but his attention was on the screen. “You are free,” Leo said. “No one will harm you for fear of my judgment. Go. Find sustenance.”
Gee asked, “Is Jane Yellowrock . . . ?”
“She is in the conference room. She is well.”
“Tell her I am deeply regretful.”
“You may tell her yourself, when next you see her.” Leo turned to the camera eye and said, “That will be all.”
The scene vanished, to reveal a static view of Gee and me on the floor. I said, “Let’s see the rest of it.” I let an Eli-worthy smile touch my lips. “I want to see how many suckheads got shot.”
For a moment the silence in the room was absolute. Then Derek started chuckling. Then the whole room was laughing, including Eli, who was wearing a wry face.
“Four,” Derek said. “There are few things I appreciate more, as Leo’s other part-time Enforcer, than walking into the gym to see blood everywhere, suckheads down and out, and a Ranger walking away with a smoking gun.” Derek crossed the room and held out his hand to Eli. “That was fine shootin’, my brother.”
Eli stared at the proffered palm half a second too long before slapping his hand into it. “Booyah,” Eli said, Ranger-style.
“Hooyah,” Derek said back, Marine-style. Then they both turned to the screen and Derek said, “Play it forward.”
Over our heads the action resumed, and I watched as Leo dropped into place beside me, rolled me over, ripping my shirt. It was so fast it all looked like one move. Considering that Leo had been a warrior on battlefields where death was frequent, up close, and personal, for more years than his security team all combined, it likely was.
The wound up under my arm pumped blood into the air and Eli dropped to his knees next to Leo, medical supplies already in his hands. But Leo didn’t waste time applying pressure. He drew the little knife he had later used to free Gee and sliced the blade through the fingertips of his other hand. Vamp blood didn’t often pump like human blood, except from the stump of a neck or a wound to a major artery, but Leo had been under stress and his blood spurted three feet to land in a stream of droplets on the floor. It glowed crimson in the gym lights. Leo plunged his fingers into my wound. Eli froze for a moment before shoving the supplies back into his leathers.
Edmund ripped his wrist with his fangs and pressed it to my mouth. My lips didn’t close over it, and the blood of a master vamp filled my mouth and dribbled to the floor. Neither vamp seemed to notice the waste, but a young vamp on the sidelines did. She was vamped out, her eyes like black pits opening into a fiery hell, her talons an inch long and sharp as steel. She edged closer. Her mouth moved on words that I couldn’t make out. Derek quoted her, “I’m hungry.”
On-screen, Edmund snarled at her. Eli shot her. That must have been Pauline Easter, the new security scion. Frankly she had shown remarkable control not to fall and feast, with all the blood scents and pheromones that must have filled the air. Biologists had postulated that the scent and taste of blood released something like endorphins into a vamp’s bloodstream. Shot, Pauline fell and the remaining humans ducked, covered their ears, or raced from the room. Dying vamps are noisy. Vamps who might be dying or who think they might be dying are noisy too.
Vamps themselves began racing away. A woman from housekeeping was standing in back of the shot, her mouth open, frozen with fear. Her arms wrapped around her chest as if hugging herself.
On the floor was Gee, a small human-shaped body, a faint bluish haze covering him, unremarked by the others, who probably thought it was simply the video. Gee’s magic was bluish and his blood evaporated like alcohol, smelling like flowers in the sunlight. But in the gym, no one noted anything about Gee. All eyes were on me as, together, Leo and Edmund lifted my body.
Eli stood to the side, a nine-mil in each hand, watching the dwindling crowd, his eyes everywhere except on me. With his fighting leathers and stone-cold expression, he looked like death’s henchman. But I could see the screaming rage beneath the surface. The impotent fury. My partner had been pissed.
The two vamps carried me toward the camera, followed by my partner. Off-scene, something happened, and Eli lifted his right arm, his hand steady as he slowed and pulled off three shots. He was close to the camera now, this one with a mic in it, and I could hear the blasts as more than muffled cracks. The small group passed beneath the camera and out of sight. Eli had been armed with standard ammo. I knew because I saw the young vamp nearest twitch, even with three rounds in her.
The video began again from a different angle, from inside an elevator as they crowded in. No sound on this one. The elevator doors closed. The vamps laid my body on the floor and Edmund lifted my head and pinched my nose, his other wrist still at my mouth. I struggled weakly and swallowed. Again. A third time. At my side, Leo removed his hand from my side. The wounds on his fingertips were healed. Vamps heal fast. Leo resliced his fingers, deeper this time, and he sliced his palm as well before sticking all bleeding parts inside me. On the floor, I gagged and my body spasmed. My flesh was white, tinged with gray. It looked as if I was dying.
The elevator doors opened again to reveal two vamps, both young scions, who vamped out at the sight of me. Eli, without thinking, acting on instinct, raised his weapon and fired. When the mag was empty, he raised the other weapon and fired three more times. The air was filled with the smoke of gunfire, a gray haze. The elevator camera showed the two vamps dropping down into a small heap together. The master vamps lifted me up over the downed vampires and carried me out and down the hall. Eli followed, implacable, changing out the mags for fresh as he paced.
The three disappeared behind a door. Edmund’s door. There was a trail of blood and bloody footprints on the carpet.
The video stopped and the screen went blank except for a single camera, showing the empty gym, a single woman in it, wearing the gray of housekeeping, a bucket on rollers at her side and a mop in her hand as she scrubbed my blood off the wooden floor.
Then the largest screen lightened and a huge version of Bruiser’s face filled it. He was looking straight at me. I realized we were looking at real time now and that Bruiser had a combat face nearly as implacable as Eli’s. “Move closer to the camera,” he said tonelessly.
I stepped closer, knowing he was looking for wounds. I smiled brightly at him, and his expression went from worry to frank disbelief. “Big smile too much?” I asked.
“Yes. That was a patently fake smile.”
“True. But I’m alive. A little wobbly, but alive.”
Bruiser’s eyes narrowed, little creases at the corners. “We’ll talk when I get back.”
And that sounded worrisome, more of the “Why didn’t you shift?” questions. Stuff I didn’t know the answers to. I said, “Yeah. Good,” and nodded, my hair moving on my shoulders, drawing Bruiser’s eyes.
I could see he wanted to say something about the funky braids, but he said instead, “Update.”
Eli stepped beside me and told Bruiser everything that had happened. Then he quoted Bruiser back. “Your turn. Update.”
The cell phone he was holding turned to the world around him. The last of the daylight cast long shadows in a swamp scene. Stagnant water coated with green slime was everywhere. Huge trees pushed out of the water, cypress knees poking through the scum, the strange upward-turned root knobs stabilizing the trees. In the small clearing, the ground rose out of the water, muddy and pitted deeply with footsteps. In the center of the ground were two wooden doors, flush with the earth. Around the doors were arcane symbols drawn inside a witch circle. In the distance gators roared, the primal sound of reptile combat.
Bruiser held out a hand. In it was a length of crumpled, oft-folded foil and the brooch that he had found in the alley, the scarab and the peacocks, pixelated with digital failure. “This is where the brooch led. We can walk across the witch circle and nothing happens, but the feel of hidden magics is quite strong, and there must be a trap inside the doors cued to their opening.
“By the scent there is a vampire inside the door, in the ground. We will open the doors tonight and discover what we may. I’ll have more to say after sunset.” The communications went dark. From beside me, Eli said, “So much for date night, babe.”
* * *
“The Truebloods will be here tomorrow morning,” Eli said as he parked down the street from the house.
Technically and legally it was my house, as I had won it from a vamp in service to her, but we all lived and worked there, so it in reality it was our house. I’d come to New Orleans with a motorbike and the clothes on my back. Now I had a house, full-time work, a business with partners, and a man in my life. I had roots. I belonged. Everything was new and strange.
And because of the new things and people and lifestyle, my bestest pal in the world, and my godchildren, and Mol’s husband, were coming to stay with me. I could offer shelter to her and hers. Also very, very strange.
“I’ll be ready,” I said. “For now, I’ll be out back.”
“No meditation or shifting until you eat. Pancakes with butter and syrup and half a gallon of electrolytes. Except for the new hairstyle, you look like crap.”
“I love you too.”
“I know. Come on.” He opened his door and stepped out into the autumn heat and humidity. “Alex has breakfast started.”
I followed much more slowly into a warm rain that felt like a tepid shower—the typical rain of the Deep South this time of year. Slow drops splatted onto my head and shoulders as I stepped to the sidewalk. “We’re going to eat more food the Kid cooked? He maxed out with the broccoli and cheese. You want us both to die?”
Eli slanted his game face my way for an instant, his eyes moving left and right behind his sunglasses, checking out the street. “I gave him a lesson last Saturday. That was his cooking. No one died.”
“Fine,” I said, reluctance in the word. “I could eat.” It was a lie, I wasn’t hungry at all, but I also knew my body needed calories and lots of them to get me back up to speed. I needed to shift into my Beast form to heal completely, and no way was Eli going to let me go without a meal or three and restorative fluids. As long as it wasn’t blue Gatorade, I thought I could keep it down.
* * *
It was a pretty good breakfast, though it was hours after normal people ate pancakes. Tied into the security system at HQ, Alex had seen all the footage in real time and had followed along with the replays, but he had to be filled in with the details, which Eli did while we ate, his words clipped and staccato. I mostly stayed silent and let them talk.
The syrup was delish, from Eli’s private stash of one hundred percent maple, and the sugar rush was immediate and heady, tempting my appetite. The pancakes were fine, though the texture wasn’t quite as light as Eli’s. It could have been the humidity and the rain that made them a little doughy, but they were filling and easy on my stomach, better than I had expected, and I didn’t feel like hurling with every bite.
Deceptively casual, his face almost pleasant, Eli said, “Let’s spar, before you meditate and shift.”
“Why?” I heard the suspicion in my voice. It was easier for my partner to win a sparring match when I was down and out.
“To see how well the suckhead blood healed you. You’ve had trouble in the past, changing into Beast to heal, and you didn’t change this time when you got stabbed. And when you shift, you can get stuck in puma form when we need you in human form. Beast also wasn’t able to help you with significant speed or strength, and while you’re strong enough on your own, as a skinwalker, Beast gives you an edge. Correct?”
My partner had been paying attention. Close and detailed attention. Reluctantly I nodded. “She tried. The power drained out of my hand into the floor.” I held up my left hand, the one where the spell had ignited. “Spelled.”
Eli’s face tightened, just a smidge. If he was showing that much, I figured he was terrified. He said, “We came close to seeing how you react without Beast assisting you. And it wasn’t pretty.”
Deep inside, I felt Beast growl. She didn’t like that idea. But Eli had a point. If I couldn’t draw on Beast in a fight for some reason, I’d be using my own skinwalker fighting skills and my own pain-damping abilities. I’d gotten used to having Beast as part of me. I wasn’t used to fighting so alone and hoped I’d never have to find out how well or poorly I did without her totally. But in the middle of a fight hadn’t been the time to find out how that situation worked.
If I had access to Beast, but needed to shift into an animal by day, I had no way to shift back until night. It was a quirk in my shifting that had proven problematic in the past. I did feel better, stronger, as much because of the food in my system as the vampire blood.
Once upon a time, drinking vamp blood was a way for a suckhead to attempt to bind me magically. I considered myself, the darkness of the cavern of my soul home, and the fact that a forced binding would never work, which was one big point in my favor. I gestured with a pancake-laden fork for Eli to go on.
“If vamp blood works well enough, it gives us an extra defensive weapon for you.”
I slid a hand to my wound, feeling the thick scar tissue and muscle there. “I don’t think I can take a direct hit here yet.”
“Understood. Eat. Drink. Then decide.” Eli shoved a pitcher of electrolytes at me.
I ate. I drank. And I felt better moment by moment. “Okay,” I said when I finished my third stack of pancakes. “Lift some weights, stretch, and spar. But you go easy on me this time.” It wasn’t something I had ever asked of him and Eli paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, considering.
“Wimp.”
“Totally. All I need is pom-poms and a tutu. Maybe a teddy bear.”
Eli laughed, a real, full-on laugh that warmed my whole heart, and ate.
* * *
The room tumbled end over end and I landed flat on my back with a wham and an “Ooof” that drove the air out of my lungs and made my body spasm with electric shocks of agony. Crap, crap, crap, I thought, tensing against the pain.
My Beast tried to force her way to the surface to take the fight back to Eli, but I was hurting and the purpose of this exercise was to fight with her down, firmly in place and submissive. From the way she was pacing across my mind, like a cat in a cage, I understood that she didn’t like our little test. She didn’t like being unable to force her energies into me when I was being bruised. She didn’t like not forcing a shift on me, into her form, Puma concolor, but she hadn’t been able to do that earlier, when I was dying. Eli was right. I—we—needed to know this.
Waiting game, I reminded her as she squirmed beneath my mental hand. We are ambush hunters.
She growled at me, but subsided. I finally found a breath of air. It hurt going down, as if someone had yanked a rosebush into my lungs. It made a painful sucking sound too, and Eli chuckled, the evil man.
Want to ambush-hunt Eli. We are Beast. We are stronger than human.
Yeah, but we need to be able to hide what we are, and practice makes perfect, I thought back. And we need to figure out what happened today when you didn’t shift.
Seeing eye, she thought. Seeing eye and green magics.
Some magical whammy for sure.
Jane has practiced dying many time, Beast thought at me, snark in her thoughts.
Thanks. I gave some snark back and pressed down on her, holding her still, practicing what I had been working on for the last few weeks, in the meditation exercises that had been assigned to me, holding her in place with a mental hand, not letting Beast assist in a fight, not letting her take over our form, not letting her be alpha. It was important that she learn to stay hidden, or we might end up a captive, taken prisoner, and used by the European Mithrans, the biggest of the baddest suckheads. And they’d be here in a few months. Or, if I was lucky, in a few years.
Beast subsided and I blinked the sweat from my eyes. I had missed the mat again, surely Eli’s intent, and was lying halfway into the hallway. I managed another breath and dropped my hands flat to the wooden floor, faceup, staring at the ceiling twelve feet overhead. The corners were dusty. And the ceiling needed a paint job. And . . . there was a tiny attic access in the corner that I had never paid attention to. Interesting.
“Better,” Eli said, and he tossed me a towel. It landed on my face, also his intent. “Your eyes didn’t start to glow, even when you landed.” I could hear the insulting laughter in his voice when he asked, “Did it hurt, babe?”
I patted my face, neck, and upper chest with the towel and left it on my belly to absorb more sweat through my workout shirt. “Oh yeah. I hurt.” Eli chuckled again, and I added, “You don’t have to enjoy it so much.”
“Sure I do.” He moved to stand over my right side, his face faintly amused, sweat trickling down his temple, his dark skin sheened with perspiration. He smelled of sweat, testosterone, deodorant, and sour clothes. In the New Orleans’s humid heat, sweaty clothes soured quickly, and I was pretty sure the concept of autumn was Mother Nature’s big joke this far south, leaving us in a muggy, wet hell forever.
Eli lowered a hand, palm up, as if offering to help me up, and kept talking. “I take joy where I can find it.”
I had heard the story before and I finished it for him. “One day this old soldier told you, ‘Never pass a watercooler without taking a drink, because you never know when your next one will come.’”
“Beating you is a rarity,” he agreed. “So I enjoy every moment.”
I grunted. Eli was talkative after we sparred, which was a pleasant change from the hard, taciturn man Uncle Sam had shaped him into. I slapped a hand into his and accepted the lift. Eli looked me over, as if checking out a prizefighter or a horse he might buy.
I grunted again and looked myself over. Sweaty and sour, as much as Eli, and sore. And bruised. My pretty braided hair was a goner. But I was feeling a lot better following the weight lifting and stretching we had done before the sparring match. Over two hours of hard activity had eased the aches and pains I hadn’t realized I was carrying around in my body.
“The extra weight looks good on you,” Eli said. “Five more pounds and you’ll be able to stand against the next breeze.”
When I came to New Orleans, I had looked like a poster child for the seriously undernourished, at one hundred twenty-five pounds. I had put on twenty pounds over last Christmas, and in the last month, five pounds more, mostly solid muscle. A little of the weight had landed in the boob department, but I’d never be mistaken for a model, more like the before photo in an advertisement for boob jobs.
“Did I pass for human?” I asked, easing my weight against the wall and letting my head rock back to it with a thump.
“As long the vamps don’t get close enough to smell you, you’ll be fine. Or you can drench yourself in some cheap perfume and overpower their olfactory senses.”
“Pass,” I said, toweling dry. I dropped the towel to the floor and used my foot to mop up more sweat. It had splattered when I landed. I took the time to stretch out the pulled muscles as I worked. “When is the help coming to move the workout room gear and set up the bed?”
“Alex and I can handle it. We decided to transfer it all into the hallway, not to a storage unit. Easier to put back when they go. What do you think about a Murphy bed in there? It would save time. I can put it together.”
“Fine.” I shrugged as we trooped down the stairs. The hallway was extra wide and could indeed hold the equipment. It had enough square feet to set up bunk beds if needed. My BFF, Molly, was coming, with her husband and my godchildren, to attend the Witch Conclave this coming weekend, so both guest bedrooms had to be available. Molly was spending so much time here that I should just let them move in. Which I’d do in a heartbeat if I thought they might stay, but Molly wasn’t fond of New Orleans’s heat, both the temperature kind and the blood-sucking-danger kind. Not that I could blame her.
My cell rang and I trotted into the kitchen where I had left it. On the screen was the pic I had taken of Bruiser. Brown eyes staring right at me. I loved that pic. I swiped and tapped the screen, answering, “Hey,” My voice was too soft, not sounding like me.
I stiffened my back at my tone just as my honey bunch said, “We may have found Ming.” He took a breath that I could hear over the cell, and it sounded uncertain and confused, two things Bruiser never was. “I’m pretty sure she’s alive.”
“Ming of Clan Glass?” I asked, confused. Because Ming of Clan Glass was Blood Master of Knoxville, and so far as I knew she was just ducky.
“No. Ming Zoya of Mearkanis.”
I pulled the cell phone from my ear and looked again at the screen while my brain made a quick series of analyses on the seemingly simple statement.
Ming Zoya had been Blood Master of Clan Mearkanis, but had been kidnapped and presumed killed before I ever got to New Orleans. Her clan, under the leadership of her heir, had been disbanded recently. Her death had set certain things in motion in the world of NOLA vamp politics—things like her successor, Rafael Torrez, taking over Clan Mearkanis, practicing black magic, blood magic, with witch children to sacrifice. He was dead, but the bad things kept on happening nonetheless. Things that were still reverberating. Dangerous things.
“Okay,” I said after a pause that was only a hair too long. I set the cell on speaker and placed it on the table in the clear spot between the snack plates the Kid was filling with his homemade broccoli casserole and sliced ham from Cochon Butcher. Even leftovers from two nights past, they were the best meat in the city.
Filling in my partners as we all sat for what was passing for lunch on this strange day, I said, “Bruiser says he thinks he might have found Ming of Mearkanis. The brooch led you to her? You’re on speaker, by the way,” I added to Bruiser, so he’d keep any lovey-dovey talk to a minimum. There was a low hum in the background of Bruiser’s end that I identified as a vehicle. Bruiser was on the move.
Eli said, “I assume you mean Ming the famous and missing is no longer presumed dead.”
What passed for famous in vamp circles was very different from and much more bloody than what passed for famous among humans. The Ming twins were famous in vamp circles for several reasons: they had both risen to clan Blood Master status from blood-slave status, something that seldom happened, and because one of the twins had gone missing, presumed kidnapped, killed, drained, and eaten by Immanuel, a supernatural creature mimicking a vampire.
I had killed Immanuel, saving a lot of lives and stopping a bigger vampire war than the one that had later taken place, but also setting into action a lot of the problems going on now.
“Correct,” Bruiser said, sounding far more formal than I had expected, as if speaking to the Enforcer instead of his girlfriend. “I tracked the brooch to the west, following it to a water-filled pit in the Waddill Wildlife Refuge. I smelled Mithran when I arrived. So far as I can tell, Enforcer, the imprisoned Mithran, possibly the former Blood Master of Clan Mearkanis, is alive, has been starved, has been secured and chained beneath the water with silver shackles, and is most likely insane with hunger.”
Using my title meant that things were grim in the extreme. “That sounds . . . bad. Dangerous. Do you need me there?” I made a swirling motion to Alex and he went to work. With one hand, he was shoveling in broccoli and cheese with the commitment and momentum only a growing teenaged boy can display. Cheesy broccoli was a new addition to his very short list of favorite foods, so much so that the Kid had even learned to make the dish. With his other hand, Alex pulled one of his electronic tablets close and brought up satellite maps of the Waddill Wildlife Refuge. It was a swampy landmass near the Comite River, near Baton Rouge.
Eli picked up his fork and placed his napkin across his lap, his brown eyes on me. I could tell he didn’t want me to leave.
“No,” Bruiser said firmly. “From what I can deduce, it’s very bad. Leo has dispatched the other Onorios at his disposal to the pit, to retrieve her. They and a dozen human blood-servants are leaving in minutes on a rescue mission.”
That told me even more. Onorios were hard to kill, and they did politically high-level, often dangerous, important stuff. But not usually together. That Leo was sending the two others said a lot about several aspects of this situation. “Oookaaay,” I said, drawing out the word as I continued to put things together. It sounded as if Leo didn’t need me to go on this assignment, which was enough to make me want to happy-dance, despite the sore muscles that were setting up residence in my limbs. Starved vamps were hazardous, blood-sucking, insane killing machines. With my skinwalker metabolism and ability to shift into other creatures to save my life, I was usually very hard to kill—even harder to kill than an Onorio—but that didn’t mean I went looking for a mauling, especially right now. “So this is a call to cancel our date and tell me good-bye so you and your buddies can do hazardous, death-defying Onorio things?” I managed to stifle the plaintive note that wanted to sneak into my voice. We had been busy, and date nights had become few and far between. “Should I take you off speakerphone?”
As if he knew my reaction to Bruiser’s broken plans, Eli chuckled under his breath, a sound that was remarkably wicked.
“Yes and no. Your introduction to the Rock N Bowl will have to be put off for tonight.” His voice warmed slightly, “Though, I would much, much rather be with you, instructing you in the proper body mechanics of bowling, than climbing into a water-filled pit with a starving Mithran.”
Me too. Especially with that emphasis on body mechanics. I fingered my tattered braid. I’d had such plans.
“Your own well-being aside, you are a potential liability, Enforcer.” That made me sit up. “You were attacked in your home with magic, an attack that may have triggered more magic in Gee DiMercy to attack you. Until the spells targeting you are dealt with, you’re a possible liability around all things magical.”
“And how is that gonna be dealt with?” I asked, heat in my tone.
“Leo has contacted Molly Everhart Trueblood to check you out when they get there.” His voice lightened when he added, “And he offered a very nice fee for her professional services.”
“Oh.” I sat back. “Okay. That works.”
“But you aren’t totally off the hook,” Bruiser said. Eli’s eyes tightened and he was eating with practiced, mechanical motions “I have already reported to Leo and, once the imprisoned Mithran is retrieved and safe, Leo wants you involved in the investigation, in your official capacity.”
Official capacity meant my Enforcer capacity, which was why he was sounding so formal. Enforcer was a job I had taken by accident and then accepted for real, not because I liked Leo, but because regular income was important, vamp money was good, I got to learn new stuff about the supernatural world, got time to build my business, got to stay close to the Cherokee Elder who was teaching me about myself and my long-forgotten past, and I got to stay in New Orleans near my . . . well . . . near my boyfriend, or whatever the proper term was for the almost-relationship that Bruiser and I had. But mostly because I was in a position to help my witch friends stay safe; making sure the Witch Conclave went off without a hitch was a big part of that.
Official capacity also meant that I’d be enforcing Leo’s will on whoever had put Ming in a hole in the ground. I’d be executioner, if that was called for. Not my favorite part of the job, but I was good at it. Very good. Usually. I slid my fingers against the scar tissue in my side. It was less ropy and stiff and far less painful. Even when keeping Beast down, as Beta, I healed faster than any human.
Bruiser said, “Once we get the pit drained and Ming of Mearkanis to safety, you’ll need to bring Yellowrock Securities and work up the pit.”
“Oh, hell,” Eli muttered.
“Happy, happy, joy, joy,” I said, knowing my sarcasm was transmitted over the cell. We’d be looking for clues to the witchy, Mithran, or human person or persons who took her, standing knee deep in mud and muck and mosquitoes.
Small biting things. Hard to catch, my Beast thought. I didn’t respond, rolling up a slice of ham and chewing it.
Alex, the electronics whiz part of our team, opened another one of the tablets on the table and created a file to take notes in, typing in the location and what little information we had. “Okay,” I said to Bruiser. “What else do you know so far?”
“According to the photos I’m texting you, the hole she’s in is beneath a rough-cut wooden trapdoor set directly into the ground and covered with leaves. I think the Mithran is chained with silver to a cement wall set in the mud. From the scent, the skeletal remains of humans are in there with her, and if it’s Ming, it’s possibly her blood-servants, Benjamin and Riccard. The water table is so high that the pit is almost full of swamp water. There’s no power to the site, no easy access in, despite the roads that border it and the rutted one that bisects it. We have to bring in massive amounts of pump machinery, generators, fuel to run them, and lights to work by, shovels, tools to break the chains. Maybe wood to shore up the pit,” he added.
Pits didn’t last long in a swamp. They filled up with mud and debris and water. Hungry vamps tended to go psycho fast, so the rescuers would need some kind of cage to secure the vamp. This was looking like a long process. I studied the sat map, tracing with a finger where Bruiser said the pit was. Mouth full, Alex nodded to show he agreed with the location.
Bruiser said, “The small patch of land centered with the pit had a dozen dead crows on it when I got there.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but if I was a witch, I’d be thinking about omens and such. Demons. Bad stuff. “Okay.”
“This will not be easy, love,” Bruiser said, his nearly forgotten British accent creeping in. “I’ll call when we get the pit drained and the Mithran out. It may take two nights.”
Two nights, because vamps catch on fire in the sunlight, so once they got the wooden doors open, they could work only at night, not by day. In the background I heard the unambiguous whine of a helicopter. Bruiser was being flown out, or the other two Onorios were being heloed in. I leaned in to the satellite map, looking for a landing site near the wildlife sanctuary. The most I saw was a muddy turnaround in the middle of the property where the two-rut dirt and mud road crossed it.
“Leo wants you at the Council Chambers to evaluate our photographs when we get the pit open. I’ll call when we get to within half an hour of opening the site so you don’t have to sit around waiting. Try not to irritate him too much. The possibility of finding Ming of Mearkanis has kept him up all day and put him in a mood. He might hurt you.”
I had a feeling that a mood was a big understatement. “He could try. Maybe a little bloodletting would be good for his soul.” If he had a soul. Thought not spoken. Go, me.
“Send the coordinates and photographs as you get them,” Eli added.
“Of course. Take care of her.” Bruiser ended the call.
Take care of her. I smiled and ate some of the Kid’s broccoli casserole. I was better suited to taking care of myself than Eli was, him being human and therefore easier to damage—usually—but it was sweet. And I was learning to like sweet. The casserole wasn’t bad and I said so. The nineteen-year-old grinned and served himself another portion.
Eli patted his lips delicately and said, “Adding an investigation on top of finishing the security arrangements for the Witch Conclave means our schedule will be full. Leo likes pushing you to the edge, keeping his Enforcer busy.” He didn’t have to add, And this time you’re injured.
“Yeah.” With Bruiser gone I might as well work. Not that I got paid extra for the longer hours. Months ago, I had negotiated a contract with Leo at a flat rate plus the Youngers’ salaries and equipment costs. Of course, that flat rate was fairly hefty. “If we need help, pick out somebody, preferably two of Derek’s people, one with law enforcement and one with crime scene experience, to assist at the pit,” I said. “And it looks like I’ll be able to join you at the Elms, after all.”
“Good,” Eli said.
“You both stink,” Alex said, his tone smug. “Go take showers or I’ll put you on veggies and meat for a week.” Alex had been having hygiene issues, and food was the easiest way to get him to comply. It clearly made him happy to accuse us of the same flaw.
“Showers and change,” Eli said. “We leave in thirty.”