As soon we reached the verandah, Jean raced ahead to the blood-covered body of his half-brother, kneeling beside Dominique and placing a hand against his chest. Even I didn’t need to feel for a pulse to tell he was dead; Jean was going through the motions, and my skin absorbed the tangled ball of anger and anguish wafting off him. A baseball-size chunk had been torn from the side of Dominique’s neck.
Undead or alive, a pirate couldn’t survive the loss of a carotid artery, at least not in the short term.
Christof ran past me into the hallway and out of sight, following a snarling, enormous red wolf. I took a deep breath, said a quick prayer, and knelt next to the body of another wolf. Then I asked for forgiveness for being thankful that this injured loup-garou was Collette and not Jake, or at least it was a female. She was alive, her breath coming in shallow pants. When I touched her shoulder, she opened wide brown eyes and emitted a high-pitched whine, struggling to get up and snapping at me simultaneously.
I fought the urge to move away or show fear, not easy since she’d missed chomping off a finger by mere inches. “You’re safe, Collette, and Jake is okay.”
As was the case with Jake in his wolf form, I wasn’t sure how much her wolf understood but assumed there was at least some cognizance of friend versus enemy. I pressed her shoulders back to the floor, and she let me. “You don’t need to move or shift back into human form until you’ve healed more. Stay here.” Weres and shifters healed better in their animal forms. “Jake is fine; I’m going to find him.”
And also to find Eugenie, I hoped.
The wolf’s responding whine sounded like a yes to me, plus the sounds of shouting and breaking glass had begun filtering down from upstairs, and the stench of blood, thick in this room, threatened to empty what little food was left in my system.
The noise also was enough to bring Jean back to his feet. The anger wafting from him surpassed even that he’d expressed toward Etienne Boulard, the vampire who’d betrayed him so badly back in early November. I knew better than to remind him that Dominique would revive; he was fueled both by Jean’s memories and his own remembered role in New Orleans history. Jean knew that, but it didn’t lessen the pain.
Plus, he’d not tolerate such an invasion of his home and his family.
A writhing pile of vampires formed a bloody, fanged tangle at the top of the staircase. I recognized Terri Ford’s bright red hair, and closed my eyes at the sight of Adrian Hoffman baring fangs and snapping off part of another vampire’s ear. It might haunt my dreams forever.
Jake’s wolf had bulldozed into the mix, and now, with the fight coming to a conclusion, he stopped to howl, dark-maroon vampire blood dripping from his jaws. Chill bumps spread up my arms at the feral, celebratory wail.
What was there to celebrate—more bloodshed? And where the hell was Eugenie? A few of the vampires had fled down the stairway when Jean and I had come running up. Had others gone ahead and taken Eugenie?
“Jacob, donner la chasse!” Jean shouted, stopping the wolf in mid-howl. Jake’s loup-garou looked briefly at his master—I had to call it what it was because, unlike me, Jake had chosen sides without a backward glance. He loped down the stairs and out the open front door in search of the vampires who’d escaped.
Damn it, the big transport I’d set up on the island for Rene to bring in supplies was still open, giving them an easy highway back to whoever hired them. No way they were acting on their own. As soon as the political struggles began, the vampires had been consistently loyal to whoever paid the most or made the most promises.
I pulled Charlie out, slipped my messenger bag over my head, and dumped it on the stairs. “I’m going to shut down that transport before any more of them can escape,” I shouted to Jean, although I doubted he heard me. Wielding his dagger, he was engaged, along with Adrian and Terri, in fending off the remaining vampire, a woman I’d never seen. Hired fangs, maybe. But hired by whom? Maybe Terri, Adrian’s vampire paramour, could give us the answers—she’d apparently used the attack as a way to get out of Vampyre. I just hoped she was loyal to Adrian and not to her leaders.
At the front door, I froze when Christof came up the front steps carrying Rene Delachaise. My heart stopped, hitched, and then raced. “Is he…?”
I couldn’t even say the words. By God, if they had killed Rene, I’d take Charlie and set fire to every vampire I could find even if I had to march through the Realm of Vampyre like General Sherman tearing through a fanged Civil War Georgia.
“He is alive,” Christof said, and his voice was so assured that it calmed me. “Don’t bother going out. The wolf you call Jake has caught and destroyed the two vampires who tried to escape. He is hurt only slightly.”
Destroying a vampire wasn’t simply a matter of stopping their heartbeat. “They’ll regenerate unless—”
“Their wretched hearts will beat no more, as they are no longer inside their bodies. In fact, the hearts themselves are no longer in one piece.” Christof gave me a cold smile that had nothing to do with his weather-making abilities. “It was a better fate than they deserved.”
I brushed aside the image of Jake ripping the heart out of a vampire’s chest and did a body count. Dominique was dead but would revive in time. Collette was healing. Jake was okay. Terri, Jean, and Adrian had used fang and knife and, finally, pistol to dispatch the two vampires who remained in the house. Rene was unconscious. Which left only one person unaccounted for.
Christof had come to the same conclusion. “Where is Miss Eugenie?”
An angry baritone came from our left. “Exactly the question I want answered. Now. Dru, start talking.”
Quince Randolph stood in the front doorway, looking at the carnage like a king surveying the bloody ruins of his realm after a brutal battle. He wore white and didn’t have a speck of blood on him. That didn’t mean he didn’t have blood on his hands in another sense.
“Vous allez mourir, canaille!” Jean rushed down the stairs, bloody blade still drawn, but collapsed when he was still a few feet from Rand. He fell to his knees, then curled up in a ball on the floor, clutching his head. Now the leader of the Elven Synod as well as clan chief for the fire elves, Rand glowed from a fire within, as always when he was angry. By glowing and chanting softly in his guttural elven language, he fought Jean off without lifting one well-manicured finger.
Fortunately, I had ways to punish him. Thanks to our blood bond, I could screech at him loud enough to make him cry without ever opening my mouth. He hadn’t been able to hear me when I was in the Beyond and he was in modern New Orleans, but by God he’d hear me now. I didn’t even try to verbalize, but just screamed. I was shrill, piercing, and as loud as I could imagine a scream being.
Relief flooded Jean’s face just as pain crossed Rand’s, and the elf clapped his hands to his temples. “Dru, you are incredibly rude. You need to be taught manners before you can take your place in Elfheim as the mate of the Synod leader and stepmother to my son and heir.”
I snorted. “Give me some of whatever you’ve been smoking.”
He ignored me. “Tell me where Eugenie has taken my son.”
A very good question. Where was Eugenie?
“You killed her sister, you elven puffer fish. You really think I’m going to tell you anything?” If Rand was asking me where Eugenie was, he obviously didn’t know either. Pretending I did know would give me leverage, however. It might be false leverage but I’d take what I could get until I figured out what was going on. “Eugenie’s two little nieces will have to grow up without their mother, thanks to you.”
Rand blinked at me, a slow closing and opening of those brilliant, clear blue-green eyes so similar to the color of my own, only prettier. “What? Violette is dead? How? When?”
In my peripheral vision, I saw Jean slowly climb to his feet and pick up his dagger. I gave him what I hoped was a subtle shake of my head. Jean couldn’t fight Rand, at least not with a dagger. Mental magic outweighed a dagger, and Jean had nothing to counter it. Rand needed to be controlled, not destroyed. At least not tonight.
I gave him my best sneer, the one I’d practiced in the mirror as a teenager pretending to be a big powerful wizard scaring pretes with a single vicious look. Boy, had I been delusional.
“Stop playing dumb. The same vampires you sent to do your dirty work tonight killed Violette last night in the house where her husband and daughters were sleeping. That’s low, even for you.” I turned my back on Rand and walked away, which I knew would infuriate the arrogant bastard. “Tell me another fairy tale, elf.”
The rest of the audience was forgotten as Rand stalked me across the entry hall and into Jean’s study. I closed the door behind us. It wasn’t that I wanted a word alone with the elf who had lured me into what was essentially a marriage in the elven world. Nor, unfortunately, did I think I was smart enough to outwit him. I simply wanted him away from anyone whose thoughts he could read, which would tell him in a flash that Jean, at least, had no clue of Eugenie’s whereabouts. I hoped she was upstairs, hiding under a bed. I didn’t know how elves’ magic worked on merfolk or faeries.
Elves could read the thoughts of most creatures, however, including wizards—unless the wizard happened to share their blood. Quince Randolph couldn’t learn a damned thing from me, even if there had been anything to learn.
Rand paced the study, his shoulder-length blond hair flowing in loose waves instead of pulled back in his usual ponytail. Tall, long-limbed, with eyes a clear cerulean blue and cheekbones to die for, he wore his usual Russian snow prince garb: white sweater with a pale teal thread woven into it. White jeans. White boots. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dru. I didn’t send the vampires here. Why would I? They’d scare Eugenie, and that could harm my son.”
Damn it. That was the argument I kept stumbling over in blaming Rand for Violette’s death. He might not give a rat’s ass about Eugenie but he would not put his child at risk. The whole reason he was so adamant about getting my friend locked up in Elfheim was not because he wanted control or power or a political bargaining chip—although he’d consider all those things worthy bonus collateral. He wanted to make sure nobody hurt that baby, intentionally or otherwise.
“If you’re innocent, how do you explain being here, searching for Eugenie at the same time a vampire attack is taking place? Even you’ve gotta admit the circumstantial evidence is pretty damning.”
Rand collapsed in Jean’s throne chair; the pirate would have a cow if he knew Rand was infecting his fine leather upholstery with elf germs. “I’ve had people monitoring the transports in and out of the area around Barataria since you escaped with Eugenie. I knew when the merman came here with all those supplies that you were here. I also saw the vampires slip into that same transport tonight and just followed them in. It was careless of you and Lafitte to leave it standing wide open.”
“Uh-huh. Nice try.” Trouble was, I believed him for the same reason I didn’t think he was behind Violette’s death. Vampire attacks tended to be sloppy, bloody things. Rand could be cruel. He’d somehow murdered his predecessor on the Synod, Mace Banyan, by arranging to have him crushed beneath a twin-engine Cessna while it was on the ground. But he was creative in his cruelty. If he wanted to storm Maison Rouge and take Eugenie by force, he wouldn’t use a bunch of vampire hit men as his first strike.
“You don’t know where she is, do you?” Rand leaned forward and brushed a stray strand of hair off my cheek. “You look awful. Need me to send you some clothes or anything?”
Gee, sweet-talk me, why don’t you, Rand? “No, thanks. I have what I need.” Every girl needed wet camo shorts and unraveling sweaters. “And yes, of course I know where Eugenie is. I’m just not telling you. She’s safe, and so is the baby.”
God, help me to be telling the truth in some lying, roundabout way. “Go home, Rand. Let me talk to her and work out a time for you to see her.”
Rand deserved to be a part of his child’s life, even before it was born. He just had to learn how to coexist without bullying Eugenie, threatening her, and scaring her. Like it or not, Rand was as close as she was going to get to an elven midwife, at least until it was time for the birth. Thanks to his already developing ability to mentally communicate with the fetus when he touched Eugenie, he knew the baby was a boy. I wanted Rand to touch her and assure all of us the child was healthy and felt content—he couldn’t communicate verbally with the baby but he could tell if it was frightened or upset. It wasn’t as if we could give Eugenie a stress-free environment, not in these crazy times.
“I’ll just stay here until she comes back from wherever you’re hiding her.” Rand leaned back in the chair, crossed his arms, and assumed the petulant I-am-Elf look that annoyed the hell out of me. “I can outlast all of you.”
Freaking elf. “No you can’t. Jean Lafitte can outlast you. He’s immortal and you aren’t. This is his home. One of the vampires that he thinks you brought here—never mind that you didn’t, he thinks you did—murdered his brother.” I gave him a smile as cold as Christof’s. “Go ahead and sit here in his study, relax in his favorite chair, and act imperious. He will kill you.”
Which might kill me. I really needed to find out what would happen to me if Rand went to the elven version of the Rainbow Bridge, which would help me decide how hard I needed to work to protect him.
I could tell by Rand’s pout that my point had been well made. “Fine. I’ll leave. But I expect to hear from you within twenty-four hours with a firm time for me to see Eugenie. Not a second more.”
We both got up and walked toward the door to the entry hall where, if history repeated itself, a nosy pirate would be eavesdropping. “Or what—you’ll send in a squad of goblin hit men this time?” Goblins would be cheap; they’d usually work for bourbon.
“I won’t have to. I’ll just pay a visit to the shifters’ new Interspecies Council representative. Didn’t take Alex long to blow you off and suck up to Zrakovi for a political appointment, did it? And I hear he has a new girlfriend.”
I gritted my teeth and opened the door to find myself again nose-to-Adam’s apple with the Eavesdropper-in-Chief. “Alex is working to change things for the better from inside the system. You might try it.”
All bluff and no truth. What was Alex thinking? This was the second time I’d heard this business about the Interspecies Council, and since it was doubtful that the Faery Prince of Summer and the head of the Elven Synod were conspiring, my dogboy had some explaining to do. He could send me a locket full of faery repellent but not mention he’d been named to the Interspecies Council? And, excuse me, a girlfriend?
“Drusilla, do not tell me that you have made a bargain with this devil.” Jean refused to clear the doorway.
I didn’t want Rand glowing and chanting and doing his mental torture on anyone else so I stepped between them. “Rand wasn’t behind the vampire attack; I’ll explain later. For now, let him get the hell out of here.”
Jake had shifted back to his human self, pulled on a pair of jeans, and stood at the bottom of the steps, bloody and bruised. I hated to see what Collette looked like; she’d left the room. “I’ll show Mr. Clean to the transport, sunshine.” Jake gestured to Rand. “Get your ass out of here, elf. And don’t even look at me the wrong way or I’ll rip your heart out.”
Literally, I suspected. Rand seemed to think so as well. He tried to give me a hug until I elbowed him in the gut, so he oofed and strode out the door toward Jake, giving wide berth to the glowering pirate.
Twenty-four hours, Dru, he said in my head. Send word to my house in New Orleans.
As soon as he and Jake were out of sight, I went into the front parlor to check on Rene and find out what the hell had happened to Eugenie. To my relief, my favorite merman was sitting up. Sort of. More like he was propped in a sitting position, his eyes at half-mast.
“Hey there, babe, you look like sssssshitzuh.” He squinted at me, not quite focusing.
“Is he drunk?” Rene could drink like the fish he was in his shifted form. I hadn’t thought he could get sloshed.
“Drunk on vampire pheromones,” Christof said, his voice dripping with distaste. “Although he’s had trouble articulating all that happened, I gather several of them fed from him at once, and made it feel quite good.”
Well, he looked happy enough. His head lolled back against the sofa, and his tongue hung out one side of his mouth like a dog’s. Glad someone enjoyed their first vampire bite; mine hadn’t been nearly so pleasant. The vampire regent had spat out my blood and said it tasted foul. Plus, it hurt.
“Did you find out where Eugenie is?” I dropped my voice to a near-whisper. Rand should be well gone by now, but no need to take chances.
Christof grinned, and I realized that, since I still wore Alex’s locket, the almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones and dark hair were his real features. I wondered how he looked to the others.
“It was a quite brilliant plan,” he said. “As soon as he realized what was happening, while the others fought, Rene took Eugenie to the transport and escorted her to the home of … what is that musician’s name … it’s someone you know, Rene said. Lives in Old Orleans.”
I blanked for a few moments, then blinked. “Louis Armstrong?”
“That’s it.” Christof snapped his fingers. “Rene took her to stay with Louis Armstrong.”
Over the years since Katrina, Louis had done me a few favors and he was by far my favorite member of the historical undead, discounting my pirate. But he lived in Old Orleans, and Eugenie could get in way too much trouble in the Beyond’s lawless version of a Wild West border town.
I wanted to sleep in the worst way, but knew I couldn’t until I got Eugenie where I could keep an eye on her. “Guess I better go and find her,” I said, turning to Jean. “You have something else I can wear?”