“Okay if I go back to the bedroom?” I approached the guys, who were enthusiastically discussing carpet fibers.
“Sure,” Ken said. “Just don’t—”
I threw up my hands. “I know, don’t touch anything.”
He smiled at that, and it took a decade off his face. “Alex has said that to you a few times, I bet.”
Laughing, I walked down the hallway, avoiding the blood droplets on the polished wooden floors. I’d met Ken shortly after Katrina, when Alex and I had just become cosentinels and were posing as a couple. I’m not sure he’d ever learned our true relationship. Not that I could even define it these days. Friends on the way to being . . . something . . . maybe . . . or not.
Yeah, that relationship was complicated too.
I didn’t need to follow the bloody path to find the room where the murder had occurred; the stench of death led me to the second door on the right. The overhead lights had been left on, and thank God my stomach was empty so I was spared the humiliation of barfing at Ken’s crime scene.
A duvet covered in intricate gold and brown embroidery lay in a heap at the foot of the bed, exposing a bare mattress. The sheets and pillows were missing—probably covered in blood and brain matter and taken by the cops. The top third of the mattress was soaked a deep crimson, and the spatter of red on the wall resembled some horrible Rorschach test.
I went through my ritual again, filtering out extraneous sensory data, focusing on the room. Death, especially violent death, leaves behind a signature, but it was fading.
The human aura was stronger. The place had been covered with cops. But underneath it all, like the high-pitched whine of a mosquito that’s flown too close to one’s ear, the not-quitehuman energy of a member of the historical undead swept across my skin.
Damn it. This wasn’t going to be Ken Hachette’s case. It was
going to be mine.
W
e left the crime scene a few minutes before eight a.m., led out by a grumbling Ken. I was hungry, sore, and edgy.
“We’re gonna stop and get breakfast—want to come?” Jake asked Ken. “My treat. A thank-you for staying up all night.”
The detective unlocked his sedan, which in daylight was a coplike shade of beige. I’d bet the interior was very, very neat. “No, thanks. I gotta sleep a few hours and then hit it again. You never know when this nutcase will be back. I need to figure this thing out. Somehow.”
He didn’t sound hopeful that the figuring out was imminent. If the killer turned out to be the real Axeman, neither was I.
The Quarter remained misty as Jake and I walked toward Bourbon Street and the Green Gator, but the streets had already begun to stir. Shop owners hosed down the sidewalks in front of their businesses, the smell of strong, bitter chicory coffee drifted out of café doors, and delivery trucks blocked the narrow streets while their drivers hauled in another day’s worth of French bread and beer. The cars trapped behind them erupted into periodic bursts of horn-blowing. It all felt comforting and normal after the past few hours.
We stopped at the Old Coffeepot and got takeout orders of
pain perdu
for me and steak and eggs for Jake, then strolled on to the Gator. The bar was closed, so we’d be able to talk about the Axeman crimes without worrying about anyone overhearing words such as
undead
and
preternatural
.
My injured ribs ached, and by the time we got to the Gator, I was hobbling like an arthritic grandmother. Make that an arthritic grandmother with sartorial issues; in the damp weather my hair had puffed up until I felt a blond-woolly-mammoth hair day coming on. Not a look I ever achieved intentionally.
Like most French Quarter bars, the Gator only closed a few hours a day, between four and ten a.m. We had about ninety minutes before Leyla and the early shift workers arrived to start prepping bar food and putting bowls of peanuts on the tables. Gloom had settled in the corners of the long, rectangular room, even with the overhead lights turned on.
Jake opened the massive green hurricane shutters on the outside of the front window to let in some light. He stopped at the bar on his way back to the table where I was spreading out our food. “You want a drink?”
I’d kill for coffee, but didn’t want to wait for it to brew. “Soda’s okay. Whatever’s easiest and caffeinated.”
I opened the first Styrofoam container and grimaced. The steak part of Jake’s steak and eggs had barely left the cow. The red slab of beef looked way too much like the crime scene we’d just left.
My “lost bread,” on the other hand, was perfect. French bread grilled, then deep- fried, floating in butter and syrup. I’d be in such a sugar coma my sore ribs wouldn’t prevent me from sleeping like they’d done most of the last three weeks.
“Learn anything at the crime scene?” Jake took the seat opposite me at the table, setting a soda in front of me and a glass of amber liquid over ice next to his tartare and eggs. It smelled like bourbon.
I focused on my breakfast and bit my tongue so hard I was surprised I didn’t swallow a piece of it. I wasn’t Jake’s mother; I wasn’t even his girlfriend, although we’d tried to make that work. I sure wasn’t his keeper. If he wanted bloody beef and bourbon for breakfast, it was none of my business.
Unfortunately, the crime scene we’d just left
was
my business.
“I felt an energy signature that made me suspect Axeman Deux could be the real guy,” I said. “You know—the real Axeman from 1918, one of the historical undead.”
Jake dug into his steak. “Well, sunshine, I know just the guy to fill you in on the comings and goings of famous dead guys.”
I sighed. “Jean Lafitte’s still got his suite at the Hotel Monteleone and I could call him—he’s learned to use a telephone very well.” I knew this because he’d developed the bad habit of calling me at ridiculous hours with grand business ideas such as charging pretes admission to go in and out of Old Orleans— with him taking the pirate’s share of the profits. The man needed a hobby.
There were other members of the historical undead I could contact for gossip and information, however, so I might find another source.
“I’ll handle it later,” I said. “What did you make of the crime scene? Anything different from what the cops found?”
Jake nodded and took a sip of his drink. “I scented something the police didn’t catch, and I think it supports your theory. At least my goddamned sense of smell came in handy for something.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. After punching a few keys, he held the phone out to me. “Scroll through the photos of the shirt. I found it stuck way down under a sofa cushion but couldn’t figure out how to get it past Ken. He took it as evidence.”
I scrolled from photo to photo while Jake went back to the bar for napkins. The images weren’t very good quality but were clear enough to show a white shirt stained red over much of its front, presumably from heavy blood splatters. In one shot, the shirt had been spread out.
“It looks huge,” I said when Jake rejoined me at the table.
“Belonged to a big man, for sure. Which Ken says the victim wasn’t.”
The sound of liquid over ice drew my attention away from the photos. I frowned as Jake refilled his glass. He’d brought a half-empty bottle of Four Roses to the table, his favorite bourbon for as long as I’d known him. He’d leaned on alcohol too hard after coming home from Afghani stan but, again, I went through the litany of reasons for keeping my mouth shut.
Jake was oblivious. “Notice the collar? There’s a couple of close-ups.”
I scrolled through two more shots and looked at the bloodsoaked band collar. The shirt also had a bib front, which wasn’t a style one often saw in men’s clothing these days. “Looks vintage.” I glanced up at Jake. “So, what, the Axeman comes over from the Beyond, hacks this shipping guy to death, then either trots back across the border half naked or brings along a handy change of clothes?”
Jake shrugged. “Hell if I know. When you were reading up on the Axeman, did you see anything about clothes?”
“No, but I’ll have to take another look now that there’s a possibility it’s the real Axeman.” I tried to will my tight shoulder muscles to relax. “Damn it. I really wanted to have a few quiet days until Thanksgiving.”
Since the borders with the Beyond dropped last month, life’s chaos factor had gone viral, and my body ached from both fatigue and stress. Now we had the new DDT office, for which Jake and Alex were the only agents so far, and I’d been promoted to sole sentinel of South Louisiana. The Congress of Elders, grand poobahs of the wizarding world, were in hot negotiations with the major prete leaders about the balance of power as the Interspecies Council was solidified. God only knew what further chaos was in store.
My last case, involving a sociopathic killer nymph and a horde of territorial mermen, paled beside the prospect of a serial murderer from among the historical undead. “The thing that sucks about this, if it is the real Axeman, is that he’s immortal.” I used my fork to submerge the last bite of my
pain perdu
under a tsunami of syrup. “If I kill him, he just fades into the Beyond, rebuilds his strength, and pops right back over the border.” Kind of like a psychotic jack- in-the-box.
Jake pointed at me with his fork. “Arrest him and have him banned from re-entering modern New Orleans. Case closed.”
“Yeah, eventually.” Visions of red tape danced in my head. The Elders wanted something as mundane as a business lunch justified in triplicate. “Banning a member of the historical undead from New Orleans will take a ream of paperwork and an act of the Interspecies Council, which isn’t fully formed yet. All the Elders and species representatives will have to meet, and they’ll all have to sign off on the warrant. The Axeman could chop up half of the city by then.”
Personally, I thought any of the historical undead with a criminal record should have been automatically banned from the modern world as soon as the borders dropped. But since New Orleans’ most famous undead citizen was a certain French pirate with a list of crimes a fathom deep, that wasn’t likely to happen.
“How about we make it too painful for the Axeman to stay?” Jake tilted in his chair, balancing it on its back legs. “I’ll go to the scene and track him, then let my wolf take over and kill him. The historical undead can’t turn loup-garou, but it’ll hurt like hell while his system rejects the virus, or so I hear. If I kill him every time he comes back, pretty soon he’ll quit coming.”
What a bad idea, on so many levels. We didn’t need a loup- garou vigilante. “You’re forgetting one thing. He could kill you. He’s immortal. You aren’t.”
Jake stared out the window for a few seconds before turning back to me with a cold smile. “Yeah, it’s easy to kill me, isn’t it?” He sipped half-finished drink number three. “One silver bullet and I’m dog food.”
A pang shot through my chest that had less to do with my cracked ribs than with pure heartache at hearing such despair and anger in his voice. I desperately wanted to help Jake, but I didn’t know how to breach the walls he’d put up around himself.
“How much did the blood at the crime scene bother you?” I watched as he chewed enthusiastically on a bite of steak, and hoped the question would open the door to a real talk.
“It made me hungry.” He speared the last chunk of rare meat and held it up, giving me a steady, pissed-off look. “Did it make
you
hungry?”
I swallowed hard. Was Jake’s control unraveling or was he just trying to push me away? “Did Ken seem curious as to how you knew the shirt was there when the cops missed it?”
“Give me at least one ounce of credit.” Jake finished his last bite and shoved his Styrofoam container away. “You think I don’t know why you went this morning since Alex was gone? The two of you wanted to babysit the wolf, see if I’d lose control and rip off Ken’s head, or start lapping up puddles of blood. Well, I didn’t.”
I tamped down my own angry response. The last thing I wanted to do was accelerate his darkening mood.
Stacking my breakfast container on top of his, I took them both to the big trash can behind the bar. I stopped and looked back at him, a slow realization sinking in. When Jake was turned loup-garou he’d changed—but I hadn’t. Seeing him sit there, staring into another newly filled glass with a simmering temper that had flared in a heartbeat, revealed a hard truth.
I’d been naive. Jake would never again be the easygoing, flirtatious guy I’d met three years ago. Until the people who cared about him accepted what he was now and stopped hoping he’d go back to what he used to be, he couldn’t accept himself. And that comment about the silver bullet scared me. He’d thought about dying.
I wasn’t sure if I could pull him out of this downward emotional spiral, but I had to try.
Jake raised an eyebrow when I walked behind the bar, grabbed a glass, and returned to the table. I poured myself a finger of bourbon and sat across from him. I might not be Jake’s mother, girlfriend, or keeper, but I was his friend.
I
took a sip of the bourbon and blinked a couple of times. My eyes watered, and heat rushed all the way down my gullet to create a noxious mix with my
pain perdu
.
Jake shook his head. “You’re such an amateur.”
I had no intention of starting a drinking contest. I just wanted to get his attention. Now I had it, and the anger still wafting off him sent chills through me.
I took a steadying breath and dived off the cliff. “I care about you, Jake— wolf and all—and I’m sorry for pressuring you to be something different.” His lack of response propelled me to keep talking. “Tell me what I can do to help, even if it’s just to leave you alone. Talk to me.”
He stared at his glass, then over my shoulder at the street outside, everywhere but my face. My empathy allowed me to feel the war within him as his pride battled his need to open up, and as the wolf battled for dominance over the man.
When he finally looked at me, his eyes weren’t the soft amber I’d hoped to see. They were hard and calculating. “You care about me, do you? Wolf and all?”