Susan and Deputy Kelly took Chet off to jail to test the blood, or whatever they did at jails, and Leona, Ned, Jack, and I headed over to her RV, for lack of anything better to do. I texted Mike and Ruby, and then we sat in lawn chairs outside and Ned opened a very nice bottle of wine.
That’s what he called it—a “very nice bottle of wine,” then he told me it was five o’clock somewhere (it was actually almost five o’clock in Dead End, too, so I was fine with that). I wasn’t exactly a wine expert, but my taste buds were very happy with it, so I was inclined to believe him.
“That is one nice rig,” Jack said, checking out the giant silver-and-black behemoth of an RV.
“Yes, I got it for under three-hundred grand, if you can believe that,” Ned said, with the fervor of a true enthusiast.
“And then Everett thought I bought it, and threatened me,” Leona said in a shaky voice.
“Everett?” I didn’t even know Everett and I wanted to punch him. Aunt Ruby must be rubbing off on me.
“Everett is Carstairs’ illegitimate son who thinks Leona cheated him out of his inheritance. He’s quite a nasty piece of work,” Ned said, his elegant face hardening. “I set him straight on the RV issue.”
“But he called me some very bad names,” Leona whispered. “They weren’t true. I was never unfaithful to Trey, although he cheated on me all the time, including with Everett’s mother.”
“I’m so sorry,” I told her. “Nobody deserves that.”
Jack stood up and started pacing with such intensity I could almost hear the swish of his tiger tail. “Nasty enough to kill banshees to get back at you?”
Leona’s mouth opened into a perfect O. “That’s—no. No. I never thought of that, but what would it gain him? He wants to break Trey’s will and get all of his money, even though I offered to split the estate with him right down the middle.”
“What would his motivation be for killing other banshees, Jack?” I asked.
“Maybe to shake Leona up so much that she didn’t have the nerve for a legal fight?” Jack abruptly shrugged and sat down next to me. “I don’t know. But I don’t believe in coincidence. Especially when murder is involved.”
Ned looked like he was trying the idea on for size, but he finally shook his head. “Maybe. But he lives in California, trying to be a movie star, and the attacks have been on this side of the country.”
I stretched out my legs, took a deep breath, and asked the questions I really didn’t want to ask.
“So let’s put Everett aside for now. Brenda. How did you know her?”
Leona looked at Ned, who leaned forward in his chair and answered. “Well, I knew her first, of course, since I’ve been with NABR longer.”
Jack glanced at me.
“The North American organization for Banshee Rights,” I told him.
He shoved a hand through his hair and slouched down in his chair. “Of course.”
Ned continued. “Leona is new to the group, since her husband wouldn’t let her join, officially—”
“But now I’m president,” Leona interjected, a little of her perky spirit returning, in spite of the dead woman.
Ned patted her knee. “And a very fine president, too,” he replied warmly.
“Anyway…” I prompted, thinking this was going to be a long story, at this rate.
“Anyway, the banshee disappearances started about a year ago. Six that we know of, over the course of the past year. A few banshees have gone missing before, but we always assumed it was the usual thing—”
This time, Jack, ex-rebel commander and newly minted private eye, interrupted. “The usual thing?”
“Sometimes it is just too hard to keep on going,” Leona said, her quiet voice filled with sadness. “Always seeing deaths, having people hate you for a curse that you can’t control…sometimes it’s too much.”
“They shouldn’t hate you for that,” I said, not really knowing if I meant her curse—or my own.
“But they do. Everybody hates banshees. We cry out the hour of their deaths,” she said, staring off into space.
Jack didn’t look at me. But he reached over and took my hand, and I tightened my fingers around his.
“So Brenda was helping us investigate a lead,” Ned said, and then he drained his glass of wine.
Jack and I looked at each other in mutual frustration.
“What lead?”
Leona blinked. “Oh. I’m sorry. It’s been an…eventful…day. Even before Brenda.”
“We were talking on the NABR email loop earlier this year and realized that the disappearances all circled around the southeast United States. But when we tried to talk to the police or P-Ops, nobody wanted to hear it,” Ned said, pouring us all more wine.
“And then we had our first real clue,” Leona said. “Perrin Jones went missing, and his mother had a find-a-phone app, because Perrin is a college student with a penchant for getting into trouble.”
Jack tilted his head. “There are male banshees?”
“Yes. Not many, but yes,” Leona said. “Ned is one, of course.”
Of course.
“We traced his phone here,” Ned added.
Jack put his glass down on the little metal table and leaned forward. “Okay, I have a few more questions. First, you have an email loop?”
Ned frowned at him, so Jack shook his head and rattled off his remaining questions. “Two, it was here? In the RV park? Did you tell the police?”
“Here in the swamp,” Leona said, waving an arm in the direction of Black Cypress. “The last ping showed it right smack in the middle of the swamp, and then the phone signal shut down, probably destroyed or out of power.”
Ned chimed in. “And no, we didn’t bother with the authorities, because they’d never believed us before. We heard you were here, and of course we know about you, so—”
“So seeing me was just a lucky coincidence,” I finished, shocking myself with how bitter I sounded.
Leona stood up and took a step toward me, but she stopped when I shook my head.
“Oh, Tess, it wasn’t like that at all. I’d always planned to come visit you as soon as I could and get to know you again,” she said, almost pleading.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the mood for pleading. “Sure. Fine. But Brenda? She was helping with all of this why, exactly?”
Leona sat down hard, as if the muscles in her legs had quit working. “But we told you. Brenda is—was—a banshee, too.”
Jack and I drove across town to my house in complete silence. I didn’t know how to process everything that had happened to me, and Jack was keeping his thoughts to himself.
When he stopped in the small gravel-covered space that served as my parking lot, I was more than ready to go inside and cuddle my cat alone. But he turned off the truck.
“Here we go again. But this time it’s dead bodies and banshees,” he said, staring out the windshield. “Is it me? Is it Dead End?”
“How can you even say that? This is my family,” I told him, clenching my hands into fists.
“And Jeremiah was mine.” Jack’s uncle had been murdered—literally—by an evil witch, and it was the first case Jack had solved, with my help, when he came back to Dead End.
“Jeremiah was my family, too,” I said quietly. I’d worked for him for ten years and loved him like another uncle.
“I know. And we solved that case. Now we’ll solve this one.” He opened his door, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Jack. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I’m not your babysitter. I’m your friend. Also, your cat likes me,” he said smugly.
I couldn’t argue with that.
I loved my house. I’m kind of a homebody, odd for a twenty-six-year-old, I know. It was small, and nearly a hundred years old, but it was mine, and I took good care of it. It was white with deep-blue storm shutters, and I had flowers in pots on the porch. I could feel all my tense muscles relaxing as I walked up to my front door.
Jack had never owned a house. He’d told me a little bit about his life as a soldier, and then as a rebel, and finally as a rebel leader. Ever since the supernatural creatures of the world had come out into the open to take their place in society, there had been some that tried to fit in and others who tried to take over.
Some of the older vampires were the worst of the lot. Jack and his comrades-in-arms had held the line between the power-mad and truly evil of the supernatural creatures and the rest of us—the humans and the normal, non-evil supes. He’d taken part in fighting back a demon invasion, too, in the lost continent of Atlantis when it rose from the sea after 11,000 years—lost no longer.
The Atlanteans considered him a friend and brother, even the Atlantean king, who’d married an American woman. The news had raved for months about the social worker who’d become a queen. Jack said Riley—Queen Riley, who also happened to be Quinn’s sister—was a very nice woman.
I couldn’t imagine meeting royalty, so I took his word for it.
When I unlocked the door, Lou ran out and leapt on me, purring loudly. My sweet cat. I’d named her Lieutenant Uhura after a Star Trek character I’d been watching when she’d shown up on my porch, bedraggled and emaciated, one rainy night. Since then, we’d kept each other. She loved me fiercely but didn’t like most other people. The trauma that had happened to her when she was a kitten, mangling the tip of her tail, had made her aloof and wary of strangers.
Oddly enough, she loved Jack.
He lifted her off my shoulder and stroked her back, and her purr grew to a ridiculously loud level.
“Traitor,” I said, laughing.
Jack grinned. “It’s a cat thing, remember?”
“Are you staying for dinner, then? I’m not sure I have enough food to feed you,” I told him, kicking off my shoes and heading for the kitchen.
“We can order pizza.”
“Or you could order pizza at home, and I could go to bed early,” I said pointedly, glancing back at him. “Still don’t need a babysitter, Jack.”
He gently dumped Lou on the couch, then followed me into the kitchen. “I’m your friend. If somebody was killing all the tiger shifters in the country, would you leave me alone to tough it out?”
No way in hell. I had a shotgun, and I knew how to use it.
I fed Lou, who appreciated me, and ordered pizza for Jack, who was a pain in the butt. Then I came up with a good argument.
“I’m not a banshee,” I pointed out.
“No, but if anybody knows you’re related to Leona, especially if this Everett jerk is involved, how will they know the difference? You could become collateral damage,” he said, in a reasonable voice.
“I hate when you use the reasonable voice,” I muttered, giving in. There was no point arguing with a tiger. “I may as well buy you a cat bed, you stay over here so much.”
Jack grinned at me and reached into the fridge for a beer. “I already have a great cat bed here.”
It wasn’t until a few hours later, after pizza and a rousing game of Street Fighter on the Xbox, that I discovered what Jack thought was a ‘great cat bed’ for a five-hundred-pound tiger.
Mine.