Rene frowned and scratched at his goatee. “And why would we want to do that, exactly?”
“If I can get him contained in my circle, I might be able to force him to tell me the name of the wizard that’s controlling him.” Chances were, the Axeman didn’t like being controlled any more than Jean Lafitte would, so I hoped he wouldn’t resist.
Rene shook his head, but his mouth tipped up at the edges a few seconds before he started laughing. “You are one crazy chick. What you need me to do?”
“Provide moral support.” We put away the plates and walked toward the stairs to the second floor. “Maybe kill him if he escapes the circle.”
Kill
being a relative term when it came to the historical undead.
Rene followed me up the narrow staircase. “I can do that.”
Only the strongest circle for this one. While Rene lounged on the sofa and did dramatic readings from a book on merpeople lore, I gathered iron shavings, unrefined sea salt, and ash, and carefully filled in the etched circles. Red candles for strength and gold for power rested at the four compass points.
Also around the circle I placed items associated with the killer. The ax he’d left in my house after ransacking the living room. A photocopy of a letter the Axeman had allegedly sent to the
Times-Picayune
in 1919.
Esteemed mortal,
it began,
They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a demon from the hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axeman.
It went on and on in that vein. I shook my head. You couldn’t make up stuff like this.
To my collection, I added a photo of one of the 1919 murder sites, a house on the Westbank of the Mississippi River. And, finally, Alex’s graphic novel about the infamous Axeman of New Orleans.
Since I couldn’t use a real summoning name to force him into being truthful, I placed two rubies inside the circle on which I’d worked a truth-inducement charm.
I laid the silver ritual knife on the worktable in my library and looked at my setup. It just needed a little of my blood as a summoning medium, and I’d be good to go. I’d have to decide whether to use my own physical magic to fuel the ritual or mix my magic with that of the elven staff.
I turned to Rene. “You ready?”
He laid the book aside and walked around the circle to study what I’d done. “Where do you need me?”
“Anywhere as long as it’s not close enough to accidentally break the plane of the circle. If he gets out, we have to catch him.”
Rene hopped on my big worktable, dangling his legs off the side. “This is as close as I’m gettin’, babe. Unless I need this.” He pulled a pistol from inside his shirt, released the safety, and laid it on the table beside him.
“Let’s hope you don’t need it.”
I knelt next to the circle and cut yet another finger. At least I didn’t have to worry about scars from cutting the same finger over and over. Thanks to the freaking loup-garou virus, I was healing everything in a few hours. Rene had sensed it in me almost immediately but had promised to keep his mouth shut, and I trusted him.
Once the blood hit the circle, I closed my eyes and called on the Axeman to come forth.
“Holy shit.”
I opened my eyes at Rene’s soft curse and stared at the Axeman of New Orleans. He had been in the Beyond; we’d lucked out.
He was well over six feet, and broad. His black suit coat had wide lapels and reached to his thighs. A black fedora cast a shadow over his eyes, but they had no light in them, no life. They weren’t the eyes of a dead man; they were the eyes of a monster.
He took off the hat and gave a slight bow, revealing dark hair slicked straight back from his forehead. “Greetings, esteemed wizard. I was most distressed to have missed you last eve ning.”
I just bet he was. “Why are you trying to kill me?”
He grinned at me. His teeth were crooked and yellowishblack. Serial killers in 1918 couldn’t afford dental care, apparently. “I am not trying to kill you.”
“You have to answer me truthfully. The stones bind you to the truth.”
He looked down at the rubies and kicked one of them with the toe of a dainty-looking button-top shoe. It bounced against the invisible plane of the circle and landed on the wooden floor with a clatter. “I spoke the truth.”
Interrogating an uncooperative prete was a thankless task.
Rene jumped off the table and came to stand beside me. “Why are you trying to attack her?”
The Axeman examined his new questioner with great interest. “You are not human or wizard. What are you?” “I’m the guy who’s going to kick your ass if you don’t answer my question.”
I bit my lip to keep from smiling. I knew there was a reason I liked Rene. He couldn’t kick the Axeman’s ass and he knew it. But it didn’t keep him from antagonizing the guy. And if called upon to do so, he’d try to kick the guy’s ass until he couldn’t kick any longer.
“I have been ordered to attack this one, perhaps to kill, but I don’t know why. Ours not to reason why; ours but to do or die.” He treated me to another big, grotesque grin. Great. We had an undead serial killer quoting Tennyson.
“Who ordered you to attack me?” Here was the real question.
The Axeman frowned. “I know not his name.”
Okay, it was a man. That didn’t help much. Both Etienne and the new age shop owner were male. “What does he look like?”
I hadn’t met the new age necromancer yet but if Axeman said dark hair, it let Etienne off the hook.
“I have not seen him. He remains hidden from my sight when he summons me.”
I paced outside the circle, thinking. “Is your summoner a vampire?”
The Axeman blinked. “I do not know.”
I huffed in frustration.
“When you gonna attack again?” Rene asked.
The Axeman didn’t answer. Instead, he looked up as if hearing a voice, then looked back at me with animation in his eyes for the first time. “I’m being called.”
He disappeared. Just like that. One second he was there, the next he was gone.
“What happened?” Rene walked around the outside of the circle as if the Axeman might be hiding. “I thought he couldn’t leave on his own.”
That made two of us. “I’m guessing the necromancer summoned him again, and it pulled him out of my circle.” I released his name anyway before breaking the plane. No point in leaving an open door for him to return.
Rene propped his hands on his hips. “Does that mean the necromancer’s magic trumps yours?”
It sure looked that way.
R
ene insisted on sleeping in my guest room since Alex wasn’t due back until noon the next day, so we stayed up half the night playing poker. By the time it was over, he owed me five pounds of oysters and a ride in his shrimp trawler. Gerry had taught me some things well, and how to play a mean seven-card stud was one of them.
Rene also insisted on going with me to visit Jonas Adamson, the only registered necromancer in Southeast Louisiana besides the vampire Regent. He ran a shop in the lower French Quarter and publicly claimed to be a witch. Witches were minor mages who got little respect in the wizarding world, so for a wizard to proclaim himself a witch—even for commercial reasons—was incomprehensible.
I found a parking place about four blocks from Peaceful Easy Feelings. It was starting to feel like winter, which in New Orleans meant wind and bone- chilling damp. Around us, people snuggled inside sweaters and jackets as they hurried along the streets. Rene the aquatic shapeshifter and DJ the soon-to-be- loup-garou wore short sleeves and thought the wind felt refreshing. Damn it.
A bell chimed over the door when we entered the shop, and a middle-aged man dressed in an embroidered hippie-gypsy purple tunic looked up from behind the counter. “Be with you in a minute—just look around.” He resumed a conversation with a young woman asking about the different ingredients and cost of an herbal concoction to banish negative spirits from a house she was buying.
Rene and I wandered the narrow, crowded aisles, studying the assortment of candles and pouches of herbs that promised everything from cash windfalls to true love to fertility. I saw nothing that warded against ax-wielding dead guys, pending wolf hood, or creepy prete neighbors.
I hadn’t told the necromancer I was coming. Not so long ago I would have considered it a breach of etiquette to drop in unannounced. Call me jaded, but now I figured the less warning people had, the less time for them to devise lies and subterfuges. They might slip up and be honest.
“Any of this stuff real?” Rene held up a sexual potency tonic.
“No way. It’s illegal to sell real magical potions and spells and, besides, I lived inside your head for a couple of days, remember? You don’t need any help in that area.” Sex and money and food—welcome to the life of a merman.
He took a step closer to whisper. “Never done it with a wizard, though, babe.”
I elbowed him in the ribs and laughed. “Don’t even think about it.”
Since Mr. New Age wasn’t paying any attention to us, I picked up a few of the herbal pouches and held them to my nose, deciphering the scents. Some of them—love potions, pouches to attract wealth, and Rene’s sexual potency tonic—were obvious fakes unless our necromancer had stumbled upon some secret not yet known to wizardkind.
I sniffed at a pouch that promised protection. I could isolate the bergamot, eucalyptus, heather. Common herbs. No aura of magic came from the pouches.
“Can I help you find something?”
New Age Guy came from behind the counter and approached us with a friendly lift of the eyebrows. The goodwill faltered as he got closer. “Have we met?”
I glanced around to make sure no one else was in the store. “Are you Jonas?”
“Yessss . . . And you are?”
I held out a hand, which he looked at a second before shaking his head. “Sorry, I don’t do handshakes. Nothing personal. Too many germs.”
Too bad. I’d found handshakes a harmless way to do empathic mental pat downs of new acquaintances. “No problem. I’m DJ Jaco, the sentinel for the region. I need to ask you a few questions.”
His wizard’s energy and nervousness spilled out unchecked. “I’ve had this shop open for almost six years. Your prede cessor cleared it with the Green Congress. I don’t sell anything illegal here.”
I held up my hands. “Wait, wait, wait.” I didn’t give a crap what he sold in his shop to gullible tourists unless the potions were real. Then we’d have to talk. Later. “I want to ask you some questions about necromancy.”
Jonas’s eyes widened, and he turned to Rene. “And you are?”
The mer crossed his arms over his chest, which highlighted all the smooth muscle packed into those wiry limbs. “I’m her bodyguard.”
I rolled my eyes. Rene was having way too much fun.
Jonas seemed to accept my having a bodyguard as perfectly normal. “Let’s go in the back.”
He flipped the open sign on the door to closed, thumbed the deadbolt forward, and led us behind the checkout counter and through a curtain of shiny, clinking black and gold beads. Sort of half goth, half New Orleans Saints.
We walked through a storage room filled with stacked boxes stamped with rare earth supply inc., but in the back of the room, nestled behind a partition, I spotted a small worktable filled with jars and bottles. It looked not unlike my own workspace, where I mixed real potions and charms. Jonas’s aura had relaxed since learning I wasn’t there to talk about his shop inventory, but I’d bet most of Jean Lafitte’s gold he was selling real potions to human clients and using the new age shop as a front.
We entered a small office about the size of a walk- in closet, with barely enough room for the institutional metal desk covered in peeling green paint and two straight-backed chairs. My bodyguard propped himself against the doorjamb with his hands in his pockets and his surliest expression while Jonas and I took the chairs.
“What can I tell you?” Jonas sat in one chair and pointed me to the other. “First, I have to say I was so excited to hear our new sentinel was Green Congress. It’s about time!” His hazel eyes blazed out of a pale face that had spent too many days inside, his hair a cloud of thinning orange- red that jarred with the purple tunic.
Buttering me up wouldn’t help him when I came back to investigate his potions sales and ingredient purchase rec ords, but for now I agreed with him wholeheartedly. It
was
about time the Elders recognize that not only Red Congress wizards could be sentinels, the old gits. There were a handful of Greens and Blues working as sentinels around the world, but I was the first non-Red in the U.S. Physical magic was faster and the Elders equated that with power.
“Thanks, but I’m here to talk about necromancy— namely to ask if you know of other practitioners in the area, maybe someone new who hasn’t registered yet.”
“Doesn’t work that way. Once registered, always registered.” He held up a forearm sporting a tattoo of an N inside a pentacle inside a circle. “The only other necromancer I know of in this area is the new vampire Regent.”
I studied his tattoo. “This is some sort of tracking charm?” I knew necromantic wizards were required to register with the Elders, but hadn’t realized they were tracked.
“Yes. I could move anywhere in the world and they’d know about it. I wouldn’t have to reregister. Of course”—he leaned toward me in a show of conspiratorial Green Congress fellowship—“most necromancers don’t register. Unless they’re caught raising a body, who’s going to know?”
Holy crap. There could be necromancers living on every corner. I should have realized this. After all, I used elven magic all the time without the Elders knowing it.
“So why register at all?”
He smiled and leaned back. “Only registered necromancers get official jobs. I get called by the Elders to help with dispute cases—you know, when they need a corpse raised to answer a question or clarify a point. There’s money in it, although the Elders are tightwads. Most necromancers register so they can have an extra source of money. I love running this shop, but at least half my paltry income is from official necromantic jobs and I still can’t make ends meet.”