“Missing. Then we need to find him.” Ken pulled a notebook from his pocket, and wrote JAKE at the top of the first blank page. Thinking like a cop. “He saved my life over there, you know. And not just mine.”
“Not quite so simple.” Alex’s voice was a stark monotone. “Jake lost it with DJ last night. He freaked out and took off. He’s not answering his cell and hasn’t been back to the Gator. He’s drinking—a lot.”
I cleared my throat. “This ax attacker doesn’t appear to be human, and with Jake off- radar we’re going to need your help with the investigation.”
Ken set his bottle back on the table with a thud. “What do you mean, he doesn’t appear to be human? Wait. I need another beer.” He pushed out his chair and walked the length of the house to the kitchen, giving Alex and me a chance to exchange nods.
“That wasn’t too bad,” I said with a sigh. “He’s going to be fine.”
T
hings had not been quiet in the Crescent City overnight. Besides the usual gang shooting or two, a young woman had fallen from the third-floor balcony of an unoccupied building in the lower French Quarter a block off Esplanade. Sometime in the early hours of morning, she’d been found in a cold, drizzling rain, blood from a head wound the shape of an ax blade pooling on the concrete beneath her. The bloody ax had been propped against the doorjamb of her bedroom.
The local TV station reran its hour-long special on the original Axeman and dug up a New Orleans history expert, who pointed out that the ax attacks weren’t exactly like the famous series of assaults and murders that occurred during 1918 and 1919. The original Axeman, he said with great authority, had been much less brutal, often using a straight razor to cut his victims’ throats and then going to work with his ax. Furthermore, he rarely arrived with his own ax, but used the one belonging to the victim.
Sorry, professor. Not this time, or at least not so far. Willem Zrakovi, head of the Elders for North America, wanted to talk to me at eleven, so I fed Sebastian, wrapped my ribs, pulled on a skirt and jacket appropriate for a business meeting, and drove to my office. I had no idea of the agenda, but if Zrakovi considered the matter important enough to warrant a special trip to New Orleans from Boston, I probably didn’t want to know.
Unless Jake had turned himself in or gotten in more trouble, no way Zrakovi knew about the loup-garou curse hanging over my head. And he wouldn’t hear it from me.
Tchoupitoulas Street traffic moved light and fast on this gloomy Tuesday morning, so the drive took me less than five minutes. Located near the end of a strip shopping center that backed up to a Mississippi River wharf, my official place of business at Riverside Market resembled a box. Dark green industrial carpet, white Sheetrocked walls, and a sign on the door sure to drive away any shoppers who might wander over from Stein Mart or Walgreen’s: CRESCENT CITY RISK MANAGEMENT. In case anyone needed to discuss genuine insurance-risk issues, mild magical wards around the door made plain-vanilla humans suddenly queasy and ill at ease.
I brewed a pot of caramel-drizzle coffee and fired up my office computer. A jolt of adrenaline washed through my veins when I saw the email from Adam Lyle. I sipped the sweet, rich brew and stared at the subject line a few moments before clicking it open.
Dear Ms. Jaco—or may I call you Drusilla?
I hadn’t told him my real name—I don’t tell anyone DJ stands for Drusilla Jane, no offense to Great Aunt Dru, and I’d registered my email account under
DJ
. But I was the local sentinel, so his knowing my name didn’t mean he’d been checking up on me. No point in being prematurely paranoid. There would be plenty of time for that.
Nice to hear from you again—I’ve been meaning to call and see if you’d like to do lunch sometime
Only if he doesn’t try to read my mind.
and I promise not to read your thoughts.
Ha-ha. A Yellow Congress comedian.
I had to chuckle at your question about wizards being infected with the loup- garou or other were virus—I have a couple of Green Congress friends and this is exactly the type of debate they get into at parties themselves.
Yeah, yeah. We’re proudly geekish.
I can assure you that wizards are NOT immune to were viruses,
Oh, shit.
and the cases I’ve read about were very sad indeed. Not surprisingly, the Elders cannot allow a werecreature with magical abilities to wander free, so a wing of the wizarding mental facility at Ittoqqortoormiit is set aside for them as long as they’ve not injured anyone.
That the Elders had asylums for crazy wizards was news to me. And what the hell was an Ittoqqortoormiit?
As for the other part of your question, the answer is no—a Yellow Congress wizard, even a strong healer, would not be able to tell if a wizard would turn after exposure to a virus such as loup-garou.
Well, crap on a stick.
Much depends on the individual makeup of the wizard, and I’ve heard of a few cases where wizards were exposed but never turned—although only a few. But all I or another Yellow Congress wizard would be able to tell is whether or not exposure had occurred. We can make psychic connections and tell what a person is thinking, but do not have such specific gifts of divination.
That was of no help whatsoever, except . . .
As you know, I’m a psychiatrist. While in medical school, I did a rotation in hematology. One of the things I did as a private project, just out of curiosity, was to look at werewolf blood alongside that of a human. There is a distinctive curved-cell signature in were blood that doesn’t occur in humans or wizards. So I suppose a blood test could theoretically tell a person whether or not changes were occurring on the cellular level if that signature were present, although I’m not sure at what point after exposure the blood change occurs. This is not widely known, so you might use it to stump your friends at the next party!
Call me about lunch!
Adam Lyle
My heart thumped. A blood test. I could find out and maybe, just maybe, this would all be over and we could move on.
I shot off a quick reply to thank him and suggested a date after Thanksgiving for lunch. By then, I’d either be really thankful for my fried turkey or tearing into a raw bird with claws and teeth, spitting out feathers.
Next, I Googled Ittoqqortoormiit.
Awesome. It was a remote outpost of Greenland with a maximum daytime temperature of six degrees, which usually occurred in late July. Nine months of the year, the town of less than 500 never got above zero. My future could take place in a home for insane and homicidal wizards, with possible field trips to hunt muskoxen. On the plus side, I’d be so hot-natured the absurd temperatures might feel pleasant.
Adam’s email had left me depressed and craving pralines, so I made do by adding cream and sugar to my coffee. While waiting for Zrakovi to arrive, I logged onto the Elders’ secure database and clicked on the supplies tab. I was a Green Congress wizard; ordering a good microscope wouldn’t look suspicious.
I ordered it, paying extra for overnight delivery to the transport in my library. I thought about calling Alex, but no point in telling him until I knew something, especially since he and Ken were going over past cases this morning to show our newest coworker how the enforcers operated (a three-word summary: aim, shoot, kill). Afterward, they’d be devising a plan to investigate the Axeman Deux crimes without tripping over the NOPD.
My next contribution to the Axeman investigation would be talking to Jean Lafitte, so I’d left a message for “John Lafayette” at the front desk of the Hotel Monteleone that I needed to see him as soon as possible. New Orleans’ most famous pirate— arguably
the
most famous citizen in her long, storied history— had ensconced himself in the Eudora Welty Suite, paid for with what appeared to be an unending supply of gold he’d either stashed away during his human lifetime or accumulated doing illicit business deals between modern New Orleans and the Beyond. I figured the less I knew about Jean’s business, which also seemed to involve my merman friend Rene Delachaise, the better.
The buzzer over my office door sounded, and I looked up with a smile for Willem Zrakovi. I liked him. He was bureaucratic and prone to arrogance like any wizard at his level, but also fair. When Gerry had gone rogue, and then died as a consequence, he’d not only been kind to me, he’d given me a promotion.
Unlike the man walking in the door behind him. My smile faded at the sight of Adrian Hoffman. They made a real Muttand-Jeff pair. Zrakovi was short, dark-suited, and able to blend in with a crowd of downtown bankers having lunch at the Palace Cafe. Hoffman was tall, handsome, and smooth. He looked like Montel Williams after he’d visited an expensive French Quarter jewelry boutique, his shiny shaven head only out-blinged by the diamond studs in his ears. Except I’d never seen Montel Williams wear such a sour expression.
Zrakovi shook my hand and introduced Hoffman as if we’d never met or, more likely, as if we might need to get off to a new start. Determined to play along, I stuck out a hand and he shook it with a brief smile. Good. We were both going to play nice even though tension and annoyance wafted off him in equal measures, partly because of me and partly because he didn’t like New Orleans.
Admittedly, my hometown wasn’t to everyone’s taste unless they liked air the consistency of cream soup, funny accents, and a penchant for having parades for every conceivable holiday as well as some that were fairly inconceivable. The last parade I watched honored Naked Bike Ride Day. I was still having nightmares.
I pointed them to the chairs at a small round conference table, my curiosity piqued. I’d assumed Zrakovi wanted to talk about getting me a research assistant—he’d mentioned the possibility a couple of times before—or maybe he’d gotten wind of prete involvement in the Axeman Deux murders.
Hoffman’s presence confused me. Zrakovi had dragged him here for his dressing-down in front of me and Alex in my hospital room last month, but I hadn’t talked to him since. I’d thought the man rarely left Elder Central, aka Edinburgh.
Zrakovi took a cup of coffee, grimaced at the first sip, and politely refrained from commenting. Nobody shared my love of flavored coffees, which meant more for me. Hoffman sat to my left, stiff and expressionless.
“Let’s get to it then,” Zrakovi said, setting his cup on the table. “We need to discuss the elves.”
I stifled a groan. Freaking elves. I hadn’t considered that being the subject of his visit.
“I haven’t been using the staff,” I said. Not much, anyway. Just a couple of small fires easily contained, and a little char on Alex’s mantel. “Do the elves still want to meet with me? Oh, and can you think of any reason an elf or faery might be living in the city and masking his species?”
I had enough elven DNA to be claimed by Mahout, the ancient staff of the Fire Elves that I’d found in Gerry’s attic after Hurricane Katrina. He hadn’t been able to use it, but it ramped up my ability to do physical magic until I was the equal of a Red Congress wizard—well, a Red Congress wizard with poor control over her powers. It also quickly drew the attention of the elves, who had thought the revered relic no longer existed.
As soon as they figured out Mahout was the staff I had, they’d begun asking to meet with me. After Zrakovi consulted with the other Elders, he’d ruled that since the staff had claimed me, I had no obligation to return it. Yet they still wanted to talk.
“I’ve set up a meeting between you and the head of the Synod, Mace Banyan, the Monday after Thanksgiving.” Zrakovi picked up his coffee cup, frowned at it a moment, then set it back on the table. “I’ll be attending as well. We’ll discuss what limitations, if any, they want placed on your use of the staff, but frankly I’m not inclined to give them any concessions. It isn’t as if you’re chasing down elves with it.”
I hated Mace Banyan, whom I’d met only once. He had tried to scramble my brains when he caught me unawares during a dinner date with Jean Lafitte in the Beyond last month—at least it felt like brain-scrambling. I had no idea what he wanted, but I was sure only Jean’s threat of violence had gotten me away unscathed. Now I figured what he wanted was Mahout, aka Charlie.
Of course, this meeting might never take place. By the week after Thanksgiving, I could be ensconced in a locked ward in Ittoqqortoormiit—unless my combination of wizard, loup-garou, and elf DNA was determined too dangerous to live.
“Sure, where and when?” I might as well be optimistic about the wolf thing until I began sprouting whiskers.
“I suppose we could meet here”—Zrakovi glanced around at the bare walls—“although the ambience is a bit . . . generic. Maybe get someone to decorate for you if you aren’t inclined to do it yourself. Elves can be odd about their surroundings. Two p.m.”
Well, excuse me for having a life. “I’ve been kind of up to my neck in mermen lately, with no time to worry about office decor.” I kept my expression neutral, but a faint smirk crossed Adrian Hoffman’s lips. What was his role in this? “Will Mr. Hoffman be attending the meeting as well?”
“No, Adrian’s here for another reason.” Zrakovi beamed from Adrian and back to me, either oblivious to the tension between us or, more likely, willfully ignoring it. “He’s going to instruct you in elven magic and help you hone your use of the staff.”
Wha? No!
“Is he an elf?” I refused to look at the man. Instead, I addressed my question to Zrakovi in a calm manner at odds with my inner screaming banshee.
“Adrian did his master’s-levels in elven magic, which has made him a valuable consultant for the Elders, ” Zrakovi said. “He’s quite the expert. We’re lucky he’s available to teach you.”
“Yeah. Lucky.” I turned to Hoffman. At least now I knew how he’d made himself valuable to the Elders. “You’ll be staying in New Orleans for a while, then?”
He finally looked at me directly. “I leased a flat for a month. That should be sufficient time to give you the basics. You asked about an elf or faery hiding in the city—have you met one?”