Have Stakes Will Travel: Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock (15 page)

I smelled Derek upwind of me, and as soon as the vamps were up and outside, they would smell my guys too. Best to get inside quickly. Auguste gunned the engine and spun us up to the dock, cut the motor and let us drift until we touched the rubberized edge.

I tossed away the ear protectors and pushed in the earbud the instant we stopped. The night closed in around me in muggy shadows, mist, and the buzz of mosquitoes. And the chock-a-chock sound of a shotgun being readied for firing. The timing was calculated and I laughed softly.

“Copy that, Legs,” Derek said into the com unit to the sound of my laughter. I was tied into the system.

With my free hand I tossed my card onto the dock. Muscles One and Muscles Two looked at each other in confusion. The laughter was unexpected, my relaxed posture (legs stretched out with one bent at the knee) was unexpected, my yellow glowing eyes were unexpected, and now they had to figure out how they were going to manage bending over and picking up my card.

After a long undecided fidget, Muscles Two, who was holding two semiautomatic handguns, holstered one and knelt down, eyes on me, feeling along the wood boards until he had the card, and then stood. He stared down at it, his blood-slave enhanced vision making out the words and his lips moving with the effort. He said, “Dis here say, ‘Jane Yellowrock. Have Stakes Will Travel.’”

“Vampire-hunter? You dat Jane Yellowrock?” Muscles One asked. “Leo Pellissier’s cun—”

Without thinking, I slid my finger around the trigger, raised the Heckler and Koch and shot the guy, a quick, ticked off two-tap. The first bullet caught him in the left thigh, high and outside, dead-on where I’d intended, in a location where one might do minimal damage, but knock out an enemy combatant. The second shot took him in the left elbow. I’d been aiming at his left side, at the waist, where there were few major organs to hit. Muscles One started to fall and lost the shotgun, his breath sucking in for a scream.

Instantly, I moved the weapon to Muscles Two and caught him trying to redraw the weapon he’d holstered. Stupid. He had one still drawn. He shoulda shot me already. When he realized his error, he stopped, nearly as immobile as a vamp, one hand on the weapon in the holster, one with the gun pointed at the dock, his eyes on me, wide like a cat’s. I let a lot more of Beast bleed into my eyes and chuckled again as I gathered my weapon into a two-handed grip, pulled my boots under me, and stood. The airboat wobbled under the weight change and I made sure of my balance before I stepped onto the dock. “I don’t like that word,” I said, over the ringing in my ears.

“Throw it into the water,” I added, nodding to his gun. “Both of them.” I wasn’t leaving an armed bad guy behind me. When he had disposed of both guns, I jutted my chin at the shotgun. “That one too.”

“Hebert kill me, he will,” he said, pronouncing it “A-bear”, a common Cajun last name.

“And I’ll kill you if you don’t,” I lied, sweetly.

Muscles toed the shotgun off into the bayou and Herbert moaned. I wasn’t sure if he was upset over the gun being tossed, or the pain. Maybe both.

The last light went out at the house and I heard the soft shnick of a round being chambered from the front door. I grabbed Muscles and whirled him, stepping quickly behind him, placing the barrel of my weapon against his spine. Muscles went still as an oak board and it was clear that he knew he had a gun at his back and one ahead. “Think they’ll kill you to get to me?” I whispered to him over the ringing in my ears.

I was six feet, two-and-a-half inches tall in my teal Luchesse boots, and my eyes barely peeked over his shoulder. This close, even over the stink of fired weapons, I could identify the four vamps he had fed from by their herbal signatures—wilting funeral flowers, lemon mint, sage and parsley, and something sweet, like agave. I breathed them in, learning what I could of each: gender, race, relationships. In human form I didn’t have the nose of my Beast, but my sense of smell was far better than any human’s, maybe a by-product of the decades I had spent in her form, or perhaps the result of my natural skinwalker abilities. I didn’t have another skinwalker around to tell me stuff like that.

Ahead of me, I heard more weapons schnick and chock-a-chock in firing readiness. Muscles swallowed so hard I felt it through his spine.

“Call out. Tell them who I am.”

Without waiting for a second prompt, Muscles shouted, “Dis here Jane Yellowrock. She come for—” To me he whispered, “What you come for?”

I thought about that. Admitting that I was itching to stake his master would probably not be my smartest move. “As Leo Pellissier’s envoy. He’s heard about the witch girl and wants to talk,” I said softly, knowing that we were possibly close enough for any vamps to hear.

“Leo send her,” Muscles shouted. “She want to talk about Shauna Landry.”

“Tell them we’re walking up to the door. Tell them to stand down.”

“We coming. Put you guns away.”

I didn’t hear any sounds of that, but I pushed at Muscles and we walked toward the front door and up a hill I hadn’t noted from the satellite maps, keeping slightly to the right of the entrance, keeping what I hoped was a clear line of sight for Margaud.

* * *

The hill was a berm of built-up land and the house was on stilts some ten feet higher. I figured the height was to protect against storm surge from the gulf or flood from upstream.

I stopped fifteen feet from the bottom step and called up, “I’m Jane Yellowrock, Leo Pellissier’s Enforcer, here to talk parley with Clermont Doucette.”

“Parley? What dat is?” A deep voice asked from the door.

Mentally I stopped for a long moment.
Right. I’m not in New Orleans anymore.
“The Vampira Carta had a special section for parley, meaning that one person asks for parley and hospitality and the other accepts the request and offers and guarantees safety. Both agree not to kill the other or act in violence except in self-defense.”

“I don’ believe in dat Latin paper. We gots our own code.”

“Fine. You wanna talk or you wanna fight? ’Cause you will surely lose if you choose fighting.”

He laughed, the sound one of silken delight that vamps employ when they want to cajole and charm. Or insult. I could hear the insolent amusement in this tone. From my right I heard the distinctive sound of a shotgun readied for firing. From my left, I heard the same distinctive sound. And I saw a small red laser appear on the forehead of a vamp lost in the shadows until then. The chuckle died away and the targeted vamp stepped back, behind the door and into safety. A silence filled the night where the Doucette Clan Home stood, the silence of the dead, broken only by the breathing of humans. I counted ten, three of them my guys, two of them Muscles and me, making five more on the porch high over my head.

“How you get your men onto my land?” the vamp asked. “Close to my home?” It was a real inquiry, touched with mild confusion, and it identified the speaker as Clermont Doucette himself.

I didn’t answer his question. Instead I repeated my own. “Talk or fight?”

“Talk,” Clermont said. Before the word died, his men had safetied and holstered their weapons, or broken open the shotguns. A match was struck and an oil lamp was lit inside, visible through an unshuttered window, though I was certain the light I had seen earlier had been electric. The men and women who had previously barred my way cleared a path across the front porch and left the head bloodsucker in the center. A woman carried the lamp from the doorway to a table on the porch and set it down before backing away.

“We talk,” Clermont said. “My house de same as your house, my blood de same as your blood, your safety good as my safety. My word on dis.”

It sounded like a formal saying, the giving of his word, and I knew that meant something to people as old as Clermont. I figured I was supposed to say something back, and I thrashed around in my skull for anything appropriate as a rejoinder. I settled on, “Yeah. I won’t shoot you or stake you unless you attack me first.” After a moment I added, “Or behead you.”

Clermont chuckled, this time with real amusement. “Bring Pierre Herbert for healin’,” he said to someone at his side, and a young human raced down the steps, passing me. I didn’t like having anyone behind me, but I figured Derek had him covered. I gently pushed Muscles away and took a deep breath, trying to settle my heart rate and calm myself. It was never wise to go into a nest of vamps when one smelled worried. Muscles looked at me over his shoulder before moving up the stairs, his feet loud on the plain wooden treads. I followed more slowly, holstering my weapon as I climbed. At the top, Clermont and I looked each other over, taking in details and drawing impressions.

He was tall for a man of his time, nearly six feet, lean and gangly, with dark brown eyes and blondish hair, a combination that seemed common in this area. He was dressed in worn jeans, an ironed white dress shirt, a suit jacket in pale gray or dull blue, and a narrow, charcoal-colored tie. And boots, which somehow surprised me, though boots were ubiquitous in Louisiana. A pair of reading glasses perched on his head and reflected the light.

I don’t know what he thought of me, but he indicated the chair closest and waited until I sat, the gesture of a man of his time for a woman, not the way a warrior would act with another warrior. But I wasn’t in a position to gripe about his good manners. I was now in the nest of vipers, and no matter how good Derek or Margaud was, any Doucette could kill me way faster than my people could react to save me.

Clermont leaned in and sniffed delicately. “What kind of predator you is?”

“Not one that will hurt you or your people unless you try to hurt me first.”

Clermont thought about that for a while, putting together the phrase “try to hurt me,” with the thought that I obviously believed they would not be successful. He nodded slowly and studied me. “I like you boots.”

Which was just weird. I said, “Thanks. Um. They’re Lucchese. I like yours too. Tony Lamas?”

He grinned happily, showing only his human teeth, and pulled up his pant legs to display his boots. “You know boots? Dat a good ting. Tony made dese boot for me hisself in nineteen forty-two. Bes boots I ever have, dey is.” He dropped his pant legs and said, “I got wine, beer, cola, bottled water, coffee, tea. May I offer you some libation to wet you whistle?” he said.

All I could think was,
Crap, I have no idea how to handle this.
I said, “Uh, thanks but no thanks. I’m fine.”

He spread his fingers as if to say, “
Fine. Down to business. State your piece,
” which was a lot to gather from a single gesture, but there it was. Clermont crossed his ankles and laced his fingers in what looked like a posture personal to him, back when he had been human.

I wasn’t good at diplomacy, blowing things up and shooting things being more my way, but I gave it a shot. “Leo Pellissier sent me to . . .” I paused and chose my words carefully, “to inquire about Shauna Landry, who, he has heard, is here against her will, to be turned against her will.”

“Why?” When I looked puzzled, Clermont said, “Why Leo, Blood-Master of New Orleans, show an interest in us now? Why not a hundred year ago, or when he take over for dat worthless king Amaury?”

To that I had no answer. After a seriously awkward pause, I said, “I think he thought it was your choice to swear to him, or him to conquer you in a Blood Challenge, and he . . . mmm, he, mmm, respected you too much to come after you.” Which was a lot better than
he thought you weren’t worth the effort
. Knowing Leo it was the latter.

“Blood Challenge? Like a duel?” Clermont asked.

I hadn’t studied a Blood Challenge but I’d run across the term and that definition seemed to fit the parameters. “Sorta, yeah.”

Clermont seemed to study the night sky. When his head moved, I realized he was in a rocking chair, and it started to squeak as he rocked, a pleasant rhythm in the night. Almost as if he called them to sing, frogs started to croak. I’d heard them before while in Beast form, the deep, almost-aching, nearly demanding basso profundo melody. Crickets joined in the song. A barred owl gave it’s hoot,
hoo-hoo-hoo-hooooo
. Something large splashed in the bayou out front. A night breeze strengthened and the lamp flame wavered, casting shadows that moved and crawled.

The porch we sat on was maybe thirty feet wide and fifteen deep, the house and its entrance behind us and rooms on either end. This protected it from wind and rain on three sides and yet still provided a view of the bayou out front, the live oaks on the property, and the cypress standing in the water, knees pushed up above the surface anchoring the trees in the silty bottom. The last of the sunset was a pale pink line on the horizon, the sky quickly fading to a dark cerulean overhead.

I shouldn’t have felt so suddenly peaceful, but I did. I let my body relax into the chair, and I realized that I didn’t chill out very often. To take the opportunity in this perilous place was stupid and dangerous, but even knowing that, I let my muscles soften and my backside settle, just a hint, just a bit. “If the offer of tea is still open,” I said, “I’d like a cup of hot.”

“Black,” Clermont said to the shadows. “That good China black what come de mail las’ week. And bring out de girl. She can speak for herself to de famed vampire hunter.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Shauna arrived before the tea, holding the hand of a male vampire. She fit her father’s description and the small graduation photo provided by Lucky. Her hair was pulled back and braided, leaving her face and narrow jaw fully exposed. She was prettier than her photo, or she had already been fed a lot of vamp blood, improving her skin and her vitality. The boy holding her hand was fully vamped out, his two-inch fangs down, his pupils wide and black in blood red sclera; he was close to losing control. If he had been aping human he would have been a pretty-boy, with brown hair to his waist, some braided, some hanging free, an aquiline nose and almond-shaped eyes. Gently, I asked, “You’re Clermont’s son?”

“And heir,” he said, his words only slightly miss-shaped by his fangs. “Gabriel Doucette,” he said, pronouncing it Gab-rel Doo-see. “I can give her everything. A home. A place. A long, full life. I love her.”