Namaste. Oops, Vamps Don’t Have Souls. Never Mind.
“I have some home addresses for the Nicaud women,” Alex said as we crawled back into the SUV, “four, to be exact. They moved around a lot. I tracked the last one down just this second. Sending them to your cells, along with GPS and sat pics.”
The Nicauds lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, on Lamarche Street. The Lower Ninth Ward had been the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, large stretches of the neighborhood under eight feet of water for days. The largest numbers of deaths took place there, human and pet. And the Lower Ninth had received the least amount of revitalization money, which is to say, little beyond tearing down and hauling off the most uninhabitable buildings and homes. There were still boarded-up homes and empty housing lots, little opportunity, and fewer jobs.
Since the last time Google drove through, with its rotating camera, preserving the world for online viewers, things had changed on Lamarche Street, and not in a good way. Eli drove past the first address and turned around in the intersection of Florida Avenue, driving back slowly. Half a block up he cut the lights and backed into the cracked drive of an empty lot.
The Nicauds’ most recent address was a weathered brick Creole cottage, two rooms wide, the house visible in the security light of the house next door. The cottage was traditionally symmetrical, with two front doors and two front windows, the shutters closed over each, with smoke damage showing behind and plywood hammered over them. The steeply pitched, side-gabled roof had seen the hand of firemen’s axes as they tried to open a way to control the fire that had destroyed the inside. Someone had tacked a blue tarp over the damage. “There’s a light on inside,” Eli said. “Two figures, adult-sized, human, moving around.”
He had a mono-ocular on to preserve the night vision in the other eye should something explode and temporarily blind him. He was flipping back and forth between low-light and infrared, studying the house.
“Looks like a brazier and an oil lamp. Both figures are male. Wait. Under the eaves on the second floor, there’s another figure. Supine. Maybe on a cot.” He studied the view for a while. “We could check it out.”
I nodded. “Give your brother the keys and let’s go pay them a little visit.” I opened the door, and the scents of the place hit me like a wet blanket wrapped around a sledgehammer. Water from the river. Water standing on the rain-soaked ground. Old smoke, that peculiar, vile stench of a burned-out house. Food cooking over an open flame, maybe a chicken. The stink from an outdoor latrine. Sweat. Unwashed male. Familiar males. I’d smelled them before. And riding over the stinks was the pong of sex and the reek of fear and pain and . . .
A memory shoved up through me like a clawed fist. My father, beside me on the floor, dead, his blood cooling. My mother, on the floor as well, the white man’s shadow riding her. The smells. The smell of pain and sex. I moved so fast the world blurred. When I stopped, it was to find myself on the narrow front porch, Eli’s hand on my arm, the Benelli against my shoulder.
“Jane. Wait,” he murmured.
Pain ratcheted through my bones and settled in my fingers and my jaw. I hissed at Eli, lips snarled back to show killing teeth. My eyes were glowing gold, reflected in his.
He yanked back his hand and held it up, telling me to stop. Or to be peaceful.
Peace is human concept. Not predator concept, Beast thought.
“There’s a woman in pain in this house,” I said. “I smell her blood and the men’s—” I stopped, unable to go on. “They hurt her.”
“Are you absolutely . . . completely certain she’s been hurt? That she’s not there of her own free will?”
“I—” I stopped. “Yes.”
“Is it Tau or her mother?”
“No. The scent is human. A young female.”
Eli’s voice went cold, expressionless, what I had come to know as his battle voice. He looked over the house, whispered, “Saw something like this in a little village in . . . elsewhere. Two men with a woman captive, upstairs, bound and gagged. Squatters. Had ’em a woman too beaten to fight anymore.” He made a waffling motion with his hand. “Not saying the situations are the same. This girl could be here by choice, but . . .”
I didn’t react to the change in his scent except to say, “How’d you handle it?”
“Small group at the front. Small group at the back. Fast entry, quick clear. The targets didn’t have time to draw weapons.” He hesitated. “Wasn’t supposed to be action, just recon. We had a female with us. When the stairs were cleared, she went up. Came back with the woman.”
“And?”
Something that could never have been called a smile ghosted across his face. “Two casualties of war. One female rescued and taken to Uncle Sam’s finest medics. Last I heard she was studying to be a nurse.”
“Repercussions?”
“Not everything made it into the reports that night. Let’s be smart,” Eli said. “Let me clear the area.”
I raised my head and sniffed the air. With Beast-hearing, I heard the girl whimper. Her scent was human. Broken. Sick. I growled when I heard her whimper. From inside a man shouted, “Shut up, bitch, or I’ll give you something to cry about.” I heard the laughter of two men. And the sound of soft sobs from upstairs, all loud enough that even Eli could hear. “She isn’t here of her own free will,” I growled. “I know what rape smells like.”
“Not disagreeing. Just saying let’s be smart. One minute more. Two at the most. The men are downstairs. Not hurting her right now.” Even more soft, he repeated. “Let me clear the area.”
I jerked my chin at him and said, “No explosive smell here,” my voice an octave lower, rumbling.
He nodded and said, “When I’m done, ready to enter, I’ll give a whippoorwill bird call. You know it?” I jerked my head down to say yes and Eli asked, “Can you get the door open fast?”
I showed blunt human teeth, attached the M4’s shoulder strap, and slung the shotgun back. I reached out and inserted my clawed, knobby fingers under the edge of the plywood. Instead of my having to pull it, making an ungodly noise, it simply opened about two inches. The plywood had been secured to the shutter and to the door, making it all one single piece, held on by a simple door chain on the inside. I grinned at Eli and showed my teeth again. “Stupid humans.”
Using his mini flash, he cleared the door of physical, mechanical, and explosive booby traps, then cleared the front porch, making sure there were no booby traps there. Even nonexplosive traps could be deadly and I had raced up here without a plan. Stupid Jane/Beast.
Eli leaped off the porch; I followed his progress by the slight swish of his legs through the unmown weeds and grasses. I waited. Looked at the SUV. Growled softly, though Alex couldn’t hear me.
And realized two things. I hadn’t told Eli who the two men were. And I had half shifted on the way across the street. I gazed at my feet. They still fit in the boots. I scrunched my toes, which curled in the toes of the Luccheses. Human-shaped still. Yet another new half form. Now that I was thinking clearer, I pushed the shotgun farther around back and repositioned two vamp-killers for easy access, unseating the weapons from their new hard-plastic holsters. The blades were shorter, but they had really stout tangs and hilts and rounded pommels, good for use as weapons themselves.
A whippoorwill called, the sound lonely. I ripped the plywood, the shutter, and the door off its hinges. The chain popped free, the stench of fire, unwashed male, and fainter, the fading, ancient scents of Tau and Marlene, roiling out. Before the assemblage fell to the porch, I was inside. Weapons drawn, blades back, against my lower arms. Moving Beast-fast.
The man in front of me caught sight of me. Started to scream. Began to pull a gun from his pants. I brought my right arm up from my hip. Caught him under the jaw with the pommel. An uppercut. Easy to dodge, easy to just fall away from. But his jaw crunched, blood flew. I stepped over him as he dropped.
The man behind him was holding a weapon in a street-style grip, out to the side. Stupid. I whirled. The other pommel took him in the cheek. Roundhouse. I/Beast whipped inside the gun hand, which went wide. Whirled. Caught him a backhanded fist to the jaw on the same side. Whipped my blade. Instead of killing him, I slammed the blade down through his lower arm, slicing between the arm bones with a killing claw, slashing down, cutting nerves and tendons as he fell.
He was out cold, so I performed the same treatment on his other arm. Predator can no longer hurt human girls. I/we ignored Eli, standing in the darkened doorway, the scent of shock leaching from his skin. I went back to the first man. Beast guiding my hand, I cut down his arms the same way.
Sounding far too casual, Eli said, “They’ll bleed out if you leave them that way. Cops might get involved.”
I snorted, looking the men over. I blinked. Seeing what I had done. Arterial blood was pumping from both men, wide pools of blood forming beneath them, splattering on the fire-blackened walls with each pulse. My own heart raced. My breath came too fast, uneven, hurting my chest with each inhalation. “Oh . . . crap.” The words were still Beast-deep, rough and grating.
There were shoes nearby, two pair of work boots, long laces on each. With the bloody blade, I cut the laces free, and wiped and sheathed the vamp-killer on a cloth nearby. Working fast, I created makeshift tourniquets with the laces and dirty spoons lying on the scorched table nearby. The bleeding stopped, but not before I got it all over myself.
I rose and looked at Eli, still standing in the doorway. Too relaxed, too nonchalant. But he smelled of uncertainty, doubt. I inspected at the men on the floor. My voice still deep, half Beast, half human, I said, “In my tribe, rape was very rare. Women held the power and the land. Men were warriors and hunters. When they . . . misbehaved . . . they were given to War Women. Who meted out judgment.” I toed the hand nearest. “I’ll . . . I’ll see if some willing fanghead will offer them blood. But no matter what, they won’t will be able to hurt a woman again. Ever.”
“And you’re sure they raped the woman upstairs?” He nodded to the darkness up the narrow steps, barely visible in the oil lantern light. Questioning my judgment.
My voice dropped even lower. “I smell her on them. They stink of her blood and pain and fear, not fun and games.”
Eli nodded at that, musing. His scent altered to acceptance. “Good enough for me. Do we free the girl and leave the mess or call the police? And if we call the cops, do we wait?”
I bent to sniff closer, recognizing something I’d have realized sooner if I hadn’t been so caught up in memories and rage. “Tau,” I said. “They smelled like Tau and Marlene. They helped to care for Ming of Mearkanis in the pit. Brothers, half brothers. Maybe I should have kept them conscious and questioned them before I . . .” Before I cut them up. Beast withdrew from the forefront of my mind, prowling away. Satisfied. But I wasn’t. I looked down at my hands. The hands of a killer. A maimer.
A memory flashed before me, of a blade sliding slow, down through the bones of an arm as he jerked and thrashed. Heard a man screaming. Saw blood flash, crimson against white flesh. Then it was gone. And I knew that I—or my grandmother—had done this exact thing before. When I was five. When I helped to torture and kill the men who raped my mother and killed my father.
Eli said shortly, “Shit happens in battle. You don’t think. You just do. And if you’re lucky, you survive to fight another day.”
But this was now, and . . . I was guilty. I knew it. Something inside me tightened and twisted, tangling up. “Call the police,” I pointed to the grimy ancient flip phone cell near the cooking brazier. “On that. I’ll free the girl.”
“I’ll free her. She needs to know a man saved her. And your face is kinda scary right now.”
I touched my jaw with my knobby fingers and felt pelt. Upper and lower canines too long for cat or human. I grunted. Blinked. Saw again the ancient memory of the man I had helped to kill, so long ago. Bucking against the blades. I had just punished these two men, in part, because of the murder and rape that were nearly two hundred years gone. As if the little girl I had been was still alive and well inside me.
“Don’t touch anything,” Eli added. “We won’t be staying.”
He dialed 911, gave the dispatcher the address, and, without identifying himself, gave a quick description of what to expect, ending with the words, “There’s a girl upstairs. She’s been held captive. Used. We’re setting her free, but she won’t be able to walk. She needs care.” Eli wiped the cell free of prints and set it down where he’d found it, the dispatcher’s voice asking questions to the empty air.
He went up the stairs and the girl began a panicked moaning, a muffled “Hunh-hunh-hunh” behind a gag.
“It’s okay,” Eli said. “I’m here to set you free. Not to hurt you. An ambulance is on the way. You’re safe now.” And he said it again. And again. Over and over. When he came back down the stairs, he was grim and smelled of fury and impotence. The human girl was free and crying, her voice hoarse and dry. In the distance sounded sirens. Eli looked around and said, “You were right.” He analyzed the scene. The men. “Totally right about everything. There’s no sign of female habitation down here. She’s been a prisoner. Nothing here but porn mags and video games.”
“No electricity,” I said, thinking clearly again. “As if they’re squatting in their mama’s house? Weird.”
Eli and I left through the doorless front opening, stepped over the door, and raced to the SUV. Alex had the vehicle running and pulled out of the empty drive before we could close the doors. At a sedate pace, he crossed the next intersection and then turned left on the one after. Weaving through the silent streets, he headed uptown, back to the French Quarter, passing cop cars, an ambulance, and two Harleys ridden by local bike gang members. I missed Bitsa fiercely, but I also knew that missing the bike was just one way of not thinking about the girl, tied to the bed, at the mercy of the men.
I looked away, out the window, into the night. We had come to track Tau and Marlene. And instead of finding them, I had cut up their . . . brothers? Sons? Whatever. “We could have questioned them,” I said again. “About Tau. And Marlene.”
“I take it that whatever went down in there wasn’t on the action plan for the night?” Alex asked.
“No,” Eli replied. “And we lost the chance to learn something. But Janie saved a kidnapped girl. Sometimes, even in the middle of war, we do God’s work, no matter what.”
I thought about those words as I stared out the window. War Women. We do God’s work, his vengeance. Whether he wants us to or not. I reached into myself and found the memory of Jane, the human-looking part of myself, of ourselves, though I was quite certain that I had never been human. Not at all.
I climbed across the seat and into the back of the SUV, where I found towels, washcloths, and a bottle of water in a rucksack. I stripped, washed up, and redressed in stretchy pants and a tee. I also found my human shape and let myself flow back into it. It hurt this time, as if in direct proportion to the previous, painless half shift, the agony ripping along my nerves like tiny knives cutting through me, scoring my bones. When I came to myself, I was gasping, grunting softly.
In the backseat, Eli asked, “You okay, Janie?” overly unconcerned.
“Ducky,” I managed, sounding human. I wiped my boots as well as I was able and pulled them on too. My stomach growled and I said, “I could eat.”
“Pulling into a Popeyes right now,” Alex said. “Bucket of chicken and all the fixings coming up.”
“Make mine grilled,” Eli said, “yours too.” He was cleaning my weapons and rigs and sheaths free of blood. When we got home, he’d do a further cleaning with chemical compounds that would eat away at any DNA evidence. Under a Woods light, they might show up as having been exposed to body fluids, but I was a vamp killer. One might expect body fluids.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Alex said.
Once we finished eating, we drove into the night and checked the other addresses listed in the Nicaud women’s records. We found less than nothing. They might have lived at any of the places at one time, but they had taken off, leaving old scent patterns but no forwarding addresses. With nothing else to do and equipment to clean, we headed back to the house. The wards were up and the lights were on when we got there, and we trooped through, the sting of recognition a reminder of what it would have been like had the ward not been set to allow us entrance, and we tried to enter. Crispy critter YS peeps.
Evan was sitting in the recliner when we entered, and watched us as we scattered to different tasks. Me, to wash and bleach my shirt, jeans, and towels. Evan stopped me halfway through the utility room door with the words “Where’s Molly?”
I stopped and backed three feet into the living room. “Say what?” Which was when I caught the smell of magic and frustration. The trip through the ward had blunted my receptors.
“She told me you had texted her to meet you. But from her absence, I gather that was a lie. She never showed up, did she?”
Carefully, choosing words meant to be honest but innocuous, I said, “No. I didn’t text her. I haven’t seen her.” Molly had lied to Evan before, to do something she knew he would consider to be too dangerous for the mother of his children to do alone. And I was thinking about Molly’s addiction to death magic. . . .
“Molly has a natural ability to find trouble,” Eli said. So much for innocuous.
Suddenly something came to me, the way thoughts come to you when you aren’t looking for them. Molly had never touched the brooches, had shown no interest in them, which was really odd for my curious friend. “Where are the brooches? The two we have?”
Evan’s head came up fast and he and Eli dove for the weapons room, opening the bookshelf door. The smell of vamp and steel and gun oil filled the room. Eli didn’t blow out a relieved sigh when he opened the sack and the foil-wrapped brooches tumbled out onto Edmund’s bed, but his shoulders did relax a hint.
Evan took one and unfolded the foil, revealing the green stones. I took the brooch free of the foil and sniffed it. “Nothing,” I said. Evan took it and instantly jumped back two feet, ramming Eli, cursing a blue streak, and dropping the pin as if he had stuck his fingers into a light socket. Overhead I heard a vague thump as Eli leaned around him and picked the pin up with no problem. Evan glared at it, saying, “It’s being used.”
Angie Baby stuck her head around the corner of the bookshelf opening, saw us and all the weapons on the walls, and said, “Coolio!” Just like me. Dang it.
This time Evan cursed under his breath. Molly would be ticked that the secret location of our weapons room had now been irrevocably revealed to the little witch. Aloud, he said, “You will not tell your brother.”
Angie shrugged and said, “Okay, Daddy. But the witches aren’t using the brooches. They’re just using their power and the jew-lery is tied to them, like the black thing is tied to Aunt Jane.”
“Jew-el-ry. What black thing?”
“Ummm . . .” Angie said, uncertain. “Aunt Jane gots a black witchy thing inside her. It’s not dangerous. Well . . . not right now.”
“There’s nothing I can do about,” I said. “When things settle down we can address my little problems.”
“We know where Tau and Marlene went when they left the Elms after booby-trapping it. I tracked them from the apartment building.”
Our heads snapped up and we all saw Molly standing in the doorway. She looked exhausted.
“Where the . . . blue blazes have you been?” Evan shouted, clearly trying not to cuss in front of his daughter.
“We? I?” I said.
“And I saw the residue of Tau’s magic,” Mol added. “But let me get Angie to bed before we talk.”
“Back to bed,” Evan said, pointing out how late it was.
Molly nodded and herded her daughter up the stairs as we followed her out of the weapons room. Eli put the brooches away and locked up. Edmund was standing in the center of the living room, still dressed in jeans and a very expensive, tailored shirt. He had his hands in his pockets, aping human better than most vamps. I narrowed my eyes at him, putting together the unmatched pronouns. Molly had been with Edmund.
I gave him my best human scowl and ignored his interest in the bloody clothes I was taking to the utility space that backed up to my bathroom. I started a load of clothes with bleach, the chlorine strong enough to make me sneeze. The jeans would be a few shades lighter, but at least they would have nothing for a crime scene tech to find. I pulled off my boots and put them in a bucket, spritzing them with a mixture of water and soap and scrubbing the soles with a stiff brush before rinsing them. Edmund hung at the door, watching.
Finally he said, “Shame on you, wasting all that lovely blood.”
A small snicker escaped me and I sat back on my butt, looking up at him. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“I never said you did. However, I would make a far superior hunting partner than Eli and the boy.”
I thought about the scene we had made. About how a vamp might have immobilized the men with his mind, drained them to anemia and weakness, freed and physically healed the woman upstairs, while easing her mind into a peaceful state, then called her attackers to follow him and keep them out of trouble forever. And I wouldn’t have to carry with me the memory that I had maimed the two men. Along with the other memories of things I wish I hadn’t done. I sighed and finished rinsing my shoes, stood, and tossed my socks into the washer. He had a point. I hated that. “Free will, even for the bad guys I hurt. They didn’t have to kidnap and torture a woman. And the Youngers are my partners.”
“And I am your primo.”
“Okay. Noted.”
Edmund gave me a military-like nod of acknowledgment and followed me back into the living room, where I fell into a chair and closed my eyes. Moments later, Edmund served us tea, decaffeinated chai with all the proper trimmings—linen serving napkins, silver teaspoons, a china plate with cookies on it, and sugar and creamer. And humongous stoneware mugs. I laughed even before I saw my mug, because it said so much about my life, the juxtaposition of cheap tchotchkes and antique-expensive-fancy. The mug fell into the former category, new, candy-apple red, and it had a saying on it. “Namaste. Oops, vamps don’t have souls. Never mind.”
Edmund leaned over and sprayed a large upside-down cone of dairy creamer on top of my tea. I met the eyes of my primo as I accepted my mug. “Thank you. For the big mugs and the silliness. I needed both.”
“It is my greatest pleasure to hear you laugh, my mistress.”
Alex said, “I’d say, ‘Get a room,’ but I’m having to say that too much. Besides, I think the modern snark would be lost on the fangy guy. Good cookies, dude.” He bent over multiple tablets at his table-desk, not syncing them up to the main screen.
Molly tapped down the stairs as Edmund finished serving the rest of the cookies and tea and coffee. She stopped in the doorway, capturing Ed’s gaze. “Is there anyone else, anywhere, anytime, who takes precedence over your vow to Jane, to us, and to our children?”
Edmund stood military straight, his hands open at his sides, managing to look vulnerable, despite the fact that he was a blood-drinking killing machine. “No time, not anywhere, not any other person, save my wife and daughter, both long dead these many centuries.”
“Good,” Molly said. “I’ve worked with Tau. I’ve seen her magic, though it was while she was hiding her true power. I saw the signature of it then, felt its resonance. And I’ve seen it now, after she finished drinking from Ming. She’s like Angie. She’s homogeneous. Her father and her mother both carried the witch gene on the X chromosomes.”
My breath hitched. Molly was very close to letting a vampire into her biggest, most dangerous secrets, which was why she had clarified his loyalties. Gotcha. “Antoine didn’t smell like a witch,” I said.
“Recessive genes,” she replied without looking my way, her eyes on her husband. The big man nodded once, very slightly, accepting the risk she was taking, the secrets she was close to sharing. “I touched her magic in the Elms’ backyard. I know the feel of that magic. As soon as Jane told us she lost the scent at the apartment building, Edmund and I went there. Every chance I’ve had, I’ve followed the magical traces.” She gave her husband a tiny smile. “Not alone. I’m not stupid.”
Evan looked at the servile-appearing vamp, who did not meet his eyes.
“That iron and salt odor you smelled at the pit where they held Ming?” Mol looked at me now. “It was Tau after she drank from Ming in huge quantities. Over and over. Tau isn’t a vamp, but she’s no longer just a superwitch. She’s the closest thing to an Onorio and probably more magically powerful than anything ever. Tonight I caught a glimpse of her while I was using a sight working. When she isn’t using her gift, her magics aren’t witch magic, not anymore. When they’re at rest, they look and feel like the magics on Bruiser, except that they flicker like toxic flames, green and ebony. She used the brooches to keep Ming compliant. But she also used them to change herself into something else.”
I placed the half-empty mug on the small table nearest and thought about the scents I had picked up from the witches, some that—knowing this—made sense. I pulled my official cell, called Bruiser, and gave him the information.
He said, “I’ve been talking to the outclan priestesses. They call Tau a senza onore. Loosely translated to dark honor or without honor. There hasn’t been one in a thousand years. This is . . . Be careful, Jane.”
He disconnected and I stared at the dark screen, putting it all together. Senza onore . . . Bethany, one of the outclan priestesses, was on my short list of inside men for getting the witches my DNA material and the DNA of anyone at HQ. I said, “Tau became a senza onore, which I’m guessing is a dark Onorio.”
Alex said, “Translation sites say it means without honor in Italian.”
I had no idea what it all meant except that the Witch Conclave had to be called off. I checked the time on the cell. The city was already full of witches. Lachish had been healed enough to get around in a wheelchair or with crutches. Leo was prepped. He’d never call it off. It was far too late. He’d expect me to pull security measures out of my hat like rabbits. I asked Molly, “Where did you see the witch?”
Molly pulled her husband down beside her on the sofa and Big Evan gathered her close. She leaned into him, their bodies making a nest for her baby bump. “You’re gonna love this, Jane,” Mol said, her eyes closing. “And maybe I should have opened with this, but . . .” She sighed, and I could smell the fatigue on her exhaled breath. “Tau was outside the Elms. Riding a brilliant blue motorcycle, one of those foreign ones with a lot of aluminum and a molded plasticized body.”
“A crotch rocket,” I said, remembering the sounds of the high-pitched engines several times. They had been watching me, keeping track. Probably through the magics in my left hand. I looked at my palm. Nothing there. Didn’t mean that I was free of magic. I wondered how many blue bikes were in New Orleans and the surrounding area.
Alex stated emphatically, “There’s not a single record of Tau owning a bike. But . . .” His fingers tapped whirlwind-fast on a tablet. “There were other witches in the circle where you were struck by lightning. Maybe one of them has a bike. I’ve done a search on them in case one of them was offering sanctuary and assistance to the Nicauds. But I haven’t looked for a bike. Or a bike maybe owned by one of their friends or family members. This will take a while. It would help if I knew the make.”
Molly shook her head. She didn’t know.
Before we left, the Truebloods turned in, safe behind the upgraded ward, one so powerful that even antitank missiles couldn’t penetrate it. Air elemental spells could still penetrate, but not without setting off a big honking alarm now. Evan and Mol hadn’t been able to make a magical filter working large enough to cover the house.
Alex turned in as well, taking the necessary tablets to bed with him to continue the search for conspirators. Eli, Edmund, and I made a trip to vamp HQ, to fill Leo in on the problems in the hope that the MOC might, maybe, put off his participation in the big witch hoedown. Not likely. Not likely at all.