“Are you certain you will not go with me, Drusilla? You could stay at my home in Barataria. It is a fine big home, and you could be at peace there.”
Peace. I barely remembered what that felt like. “I can’t go with you, Jean. I hope you can help solve these crimes from the Beyond, but it’s my job to stay here and catch whoever’s doing this.”
Jean nodded. “I suspected such, although I hoped to change your mind. And now I must ask another thing. May we move to your receiving parlor?”
I stared at him a few seconds before figuring out he meant my living room. “Sure, I’ll receive you.”
We walked into the front room and sat on the sofa. He turned sideways to face me, our knees touching. Any other time, his hands would be wandering where they shouldn’t. Now, they twitched on his thighs.
He searched my face, then nodded. “You have been exposed to the loup-garou curse. Do you yet know if you will transform?”
Air left my lungs with an audible
whoosh,
and I had trouble drawing in anything to replace it. My chest tightened. “How did you find out?”
“I met your friend Jacob earlier today in Old Orleans as I sought answers about the Axeman. He described the events of Sunday morning. I am very angry at Jacob for endangering you and being so weak as to flee. In my time, such a man would have been hanged or set adrift.”
Jean reached out and took my hand. His was warm and comforting, which was just wrong. “You did not answer, Drusilla. Will you change?”
I shrugged. “I’m going to test my blood tomorrow morning and might have an answer. Otherwise, I won’t know until full moon week after next and . . .” I didn’t want to put this fear into words but he had to know what was at stake. “Don’t tell anyone. The Elders would kill Jake. They might very well kill me.”
There, I’d said the words, and they felt like truth. If Jake had told Jean, did anyone else know? My only hope was secrecy.
“No one need die,” Jean said. “I have agreed to give Jacob asylum until your situation is settled. However, he must face punishment for his behavior as would anyone under my protection.”
My gaze strayed to the scar that traced across his left jaw line. Jean Lafitte had been a brilliant and charming man, but
Le Capitaine
also had a reputation as a strict master. His men did not break his rules twice. They didn’t live to repeat their mistakes.
“Don’t hurt him.” I couldn’t stand it if Jake was injured again because Jean had some nineteenth-century notion of appropriate manly behavior.
“Jacob will not be damaged. I give you my vow.”
Somehow, I believed him. But Old Orleans operated under constant nighttime, with a steady full moon. Weres could literally run wild twenty- four/seven. “Are you sure he’ll be safe?”
“I assure his protection, Drusilla. You need worry only for yourself. It will land me in good stead with his cousin your enforcer,
oui?
A favor owed by an enforcer is always of value. But I ask this of you. If you do change, do not put yourself in the hands of the wizards, who will use you or worse. Come to me.”
I stared at him, realizing with dismay that this had been the best idea I’d heard so far. Better to be a wolf-girl with Jean in Old Barataria, an outpost of New Orleans’ mirror city in the Beyond, than an inmate in a Greenland institution, hunting muskoxen. Jean was immune to the virus, and immortal. He might be the only one I couldn’t kill.
“But I . . . well, thank you.” Jean had an angle. He always had an angle. Helping Jake might earn him a favor from Alex, but I’d be a valuable bargaining chip in his dealings with the wizards. I knew their secrets but would be outside their jurisdiction. I’d get to live, so it would be a win for me too.
Until I thought of leaving my life in New Orleans behind— leaving Alex behind—and that twisted my gut into tight knots.
“When will you go?” I couldn’t think about what might be coming or why the thought of saying good-bye to Alex brought with it physical pain. I needed to focus on this case, which had just gotten uglier than I’d imagined.
“This very evening,” he said. “My hotel suite is paid until the new year, so I will return to it as soon as I am able to capture the Axeman or I learn the whereabouts of the necromancer.” He stood up. “I should leave now and prepare for my departure.”
I nodded and followed him to the door. The carriage driver had turned the rig around so the mule faced the street, ready to roll. Jean turned, took my hand, and pressed it to his lips. “
Au revoir, Jolie
. Are you certain you will not accompany me? You do still owe me the remainder of our dinner date.”
No more dinner dates for this girl, not anytime soon. I had enough drama in my life. “We’ll finish our dinner date later.”
A good word.
Later
might mean next week, or it might mean in another lifetime.
Jean paused on the bottom step, carrying the empty Coke bottle he’d snatched off the table—ever the entrepreneur, even in a crisis. “If I might make a suggestion, Drusilla, you should speak with my old acquaintance Etienne Boulard about your necromancer.”
“The Regent of Vampyre?” I knew Boulard had moved to the city as soon as the borders dropped, but I didn’t know he and Jean were acquainted. Like all Regents, he was responsible for keeping the vampires in his territory under control. As far as I knew, he was successful at it. They ran a French Quarter bar and, ironically, a thriving company that offered vampire tours of the city.
“I’ve been to L’Amour Sauvage a couple of times just to see what it looked like, but never saw the Regent. Why would Etienne Boulard know anything about the Axeman?”
“Before Etienne was turned vampire, he was a wizard who could do this necromancy,” Jean said. “He can no longer do magic as he once did, but he can perhaps provide you with information.”
“And what’s in this for you?” I hated to question Jean’s motives, but then again, Jean always had a motive.
His smile was cold. “The sooner this necromancer and his Axeman are dealt with, the more quickly life shall return to normal,” he said. “The idea of a wizard controlling the historical undead is disturbing to me,
Jolie
. I did not like to be controlled in my mortal life, and I do not wish to be controlled now.”
A
n average autumn in New Orleans lasts about three weeks, from late October until mid-November. We enjoy the brief respite from humid misery while we can.
The first hint of winter hung in the mist as my feet thudded along the jogging path around Audubon Park—the first day I’d tried to run since fracturing my ribs. The pain set my pace somewhere between a walk and an amble, but the normalcy of returning to my early-morning routine kicked up a few endorphins and left me to ponder the future without panic.
I was trying not to obsess over the loup-garou thing, without much success. The full moon loomed like a dam, a flood of worry and fear building up on one side and a lit stick of dynamite wedged into a weak spot on the other. In nine days, the fuse would either fizzle or blow my world apart. No matter what I focused on or however much I tried to ignore it, that deadline traveled alongside me, heavy and shuffling.
And the necromancer business had me stumped. I’d made an appointment to talk to the vampire Regent tonight, but I simply couldn’t think of any reason a wizard would waste time controlling an undead serial killer. Although if Jean was right that the necromancer had just gotten involved in the last day or two, the wizard might have a target the Axeman hadn’t gotten to yet.
But if you’re a necromancer and you want to knock off an enemy, why not raise any old zombie and give it a kill order? Why a sentient dead guy with an ax fetish, unless you wanted to kill someone specific and have it passed off as just another Axeman murder? After all, if it weren’t for Jean’s ability to monitor everybody else’s business as well as his own, we would have no idea a necromancer was involved.
After my run, I drove back to my house to see if the microscope had arrived. I hobbled upstairs, tripping over Sebastian twice, and stopped in the library door, my heart pounding. A large box sat in the middle of my permanent transport.
I don’t know how long I stood there, frozen in place. But I finally walked to the circle, broke the plane, and dragged the box into the middle of the room.
It took a shaky forty-five minutes to get the box unpacked and set up, and another half hour to work up my nerve. Praying, I used my silver summoning knife to slice into my finger, placed a drop of blood on one slide, topped it with another, and clamped them firmly together.
Squinting into the rubber-rimmed eyepiece, I looked anxiously at the slide through my right eye, then my left. Everything looked fuzzy, so I dug out the instructions again and finally got the thing focused.
I stared through the eyepiece again, holding my breath and then slowly letting my lungs empty. All the components in the blood sample were round. Nothing was curved or oblong.
I searched for “blood under microscope” on my laptop and looked at the assortment of images, which looked a lot like mine. A wash of relief spread through me. I’d check again in a few days. Hell, I might check every day to look for any sign of change. But so far, there was nothing like what Adam Lyle had described.
Maybe I was off the hook. And I’d have good news when Alex arrived in an hour or so for an update on the Axeman case. I wanted to hear his thoughts on the necromancer angle, plus he needed to know that thanks to Jake he was joining the Owe- Jean-Lafitte-a-Favor club, of which I’d been a member for the past three years. I doubt Alex would have the same repayment options Jean had offered me.
In retrospect, I wasn’t surprised that Jean had offered Jake asylum, or that Jake had accepted it. Unlike Alex, Jake found the pirate interesting. He didn’t care that Jean had the hots for me, or that I sort of returned the feelings for a variety of convoluted reasons. After all, Jean might leave me. He might lie to me and use me. But he couldn’t die on me.
Which is more than I could say about Alex, and the thought of leaving him to live in the Beyond brought on the tears I’d been holding at bay for days. When had my former partner—the one I’d decided was too good a friend to risk losing by adding benefits—become a guy I cried over? I was not a crying kind of girl. An hour ago I’d have thought I was experiencing loup- garou hormonal surges, but now I attributed the tears to stress.
Screw that. I put the microscope away, splashed cold water on my face, and re-taped my ribs. On my way downstairs, my cell phone vibrated with a text message from Alex, and my heart sank as I read the word
Axeman
followed by an address only a mile or two from my house. This would be the first attack outside a comfortable walking distance within the Quarter, but if a necromancer was behind it, he could be driving the freaking killer around. The whole game had changed.
I climbed into my Pathfinder and drove toward the Irish Channel address in the text. A couple hundred years ago, the channel had been settled by Irish immigrants who worked on the docks of the nearby Mississippi River. Today, it was a typical New Orleans neighborhood, which meant charming and full of old, interesting architecture, enormous live oaks whose roots pushed up the crumbling sidewalks, and insufficient off- street parking.
Red and blue lights strobed from half a dozen police cars gathered a block ahead of me. I threaded my trusty old SUV along the narrow street, squeezing between an ambulance and a fire engine. Spotting Alex’s Range Rover around the corner on a side street, I turned off and parked behind him.
Rooting through my glove compartment, I finally dug out my fake FBI badge—then realized I had nowhere to put it. Cropped black running tights and a red T-shirt did not give me a pocket, belt, or collar, and I didn’t want to go into a crime scene carrying a purse. Finally, I found a small notebook in the backseat and clipped the badge and a pen to that.
I shouldn’t call the badge a fake, anyway. It was real, because “real close” is how hard you’d have to squint to find the tiny word consultant printed at the bottom.
After locking the car, I strode purposefully toward two officers standing like sentries in front of a small Victorian cottage, its clapboards painted a mint green and gingerbread trim all in eggshell. Only in New Orleans were food-colored houses considered not only normal, but desirable. I’d been thinking about replacing my merlot-and-cream color scheme with something like sage or mocha.
The officers, wearing the black uniforms of the NOPD, didn’t appear nearly as sweet as dark cocoa, with plastered-on scowls and eyes in constant motion. Ken had said the Axeman Deux attacks, with no leads or motive, had made the cops edgy. Having another one happen this soon wouldn’t help.
I got within four feet of them before the older cop, a buzz- cut, middle- aged bulldog of a man who screamed ex- military, settled his cold gaze on me, eyes widening slightly when he realized I wasn’t just out for a morning jog or being a nosy uptowner.
He placed his hands on his hips and adjusted the heavy belt loaded down with a gun and a baton and a pair of clinking handcuffs before sauntering onto the sidewalk to meet me. The belt- jiggle was obviously cop-code for “look what’s coming,” because his companion stayed in the yard but turned a full 180 to watch me approach without a word being exchanged.
“Morning, officers.” When feeling insecure, flash badge. I held mine in front of me like a tiny leather-encased shield clipped to my spiral notebook. “I’m here to meet up with Detective Ken Hachette and my partner, agent Alex Warin. Sorry”—I waved in the general vicinity of my clothes—“the call came while I was running.”
Officer Buzz-cut took the badge. “Ms . . . Jaco?” He pronounced it “Jock-O” instead of “Jake-O,” but I didn’t bother to correct him—we weren’t destined for a lengthy relationship.
I waited while he examined the badge. He couldn’t question its authority, but he didn’t have to like it, either. Local cops didn’t like feds poking around in their murder cases. Female feds? Even worse. He thrust it back at me with a scowl and a blatant look-see at my assets. I’d have kicked him in the nuts if I thought he wouldn’t arrest me and enjoy it.