Bruiser swiveled his head to me. “You do know how to make friends and influence people, Jane Yellowrock. I’ve said that to you before, but some sarcasm bears repeating.”
“Yeah? Then let me influence you one more time. Send some people who are loyal to you to find Tyler and bring him in. He’s in this up to his neck and sinking fast.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Think so, yeah. Well enough to convince Leo. And I already informed NOPD.”
Bruiser thought about that for a moment, maybe thinking that the hired help should have informed Leo and him before the cops. But he inclined his head in a brief bob, relief and thanks and something that looked like thwarted
need
on his face. “I’ll call on the way to get Sabina and send a team for him.”
“You can find him that fast?”
“If Tyler has his phone with him, yes,” he said standing and moving down the stairs for his car parked below.
I thought about my cell and the GPS tracking device in it. “One more thing,” I said. Bruiser paused. “The wolves who attacked Leo have Rick LaFleur and he’s been hurt. If I can—”
“I have no idea where the wolves are. But if I hear something, I’ll let you know. Before I call the police.”
Yep, the hired help had been put in her place, but it wasn’t like I could gripe about it when I was asking a favor. “Thanks.”
The cars all pulled away, leaving me alone in the shadows with burgers and a bag of clean clothes. I rolled the bag’s top closed and headed back to the barn to change. No need to advertise my bloody state if Leo’s fanged henchmen were arriving. Old blood never turned a sane vamp on, smelling like death, like leftovers spoiled in the fridge, but the predator in them might want to take a closer look at my wounds. No need to give them a reason to make me defend myself.
As I approached the barn, the wind carried the reek of old blood before me and the barn emptied in a stampede of squeals and thrashing hooves, while barn cats of every size and description gathered, some twining around my ankles and jumping up on stall doors to get a better view. I was under no illusions that it was
me
that attracted them. It was the blood and the burger bag.
Inside, I stripped and sniffed myself. Though all my blood and the chicken blood had been groomed off me by Beast or flaked away when I shifted, wearing the clothes had left me stinky. I found a hose and drain in a grooming area and washed, the chill water hitting me with a shock. It must be well water, because my shower water never got this cold. It was almost as cold as mountain water. While I rinsed, I drank from the hose, feeling my tissues swell like a sponge as I rehydrated.
When I was cleaner, I dried off using two towels I found folded in a stack. They were clean but rough, smelling of detergent and only slightly of horse, which was a nice scent after my own old blood smell. I dressed in clean clothes, jeans and a tee. “Mine,” I said to the cats, shoving them away from my food bag, and hearing an echo of Beast when she claimed things. Or people.
I shoved my feet into socks and the butt-stompers, and stuffed the stiff, bloody leathers into the small duffel. I wished for a brush, but made do with finger-combing the hip-length mass before braiding my hair and sticking stakes back into it. Dressed, I felt more secure, safer, though I knew better than most how little protection clothing really was. Last, I located the mangled silver collar that Beast had found at Leo’s and hidden. “Dang,” I murmured, turning it to the light as I made my way back to the house. It had defended me from multiple vamp-fang attacks and not been the worse for wear. Wolf fangs, backed up by powerful jaws, had ruined it. The pattern and some of the silver rings could be salvaged, but it wasn’t going to be cheap.
Back at Bitsa, I placed the clothes and most of the weapons into the saddlebags, and reloaded the shotgun. I strapped it to the bike, knowing that if the cops did get called, I’d have to hide them. The M4 smelled freshly fired, and there was no good reason to have a fired weapon and bloody clothing at the scene of a bloodbath. For now, I strapped vamp-killers on each thigh and hip, and the one holster that wasn’t bloody under my left arm. The strap rubbed uncomfortably on the tender skin of my recent wounds.
With as much accomplished as I could under the circumstances, I sat on the front steps of the house and nibbled the last burger, tossing bits of cheese and beef paddies to the cats that followed me from the barn. They were still milling around me when Bruiser and Evangelina, who seemed to be glued to his heels, got back, Sabina in the backseat. Three more cars pulled in within moments of one another, a human blood-servant/bodyguard/driver and a vamp in each. I recognized Innara, one of the coleaders of Clan Bouvier, and Koun and Hildebert, Leo’s warrior scions, and noted that none of the vamps had been part of the conspiracy-whispering taking place at the vamp/were sleepover that had started all this. Bruiser had chosen well.
As they left their cars, doors slamming, I got to see what vamps wore in the their free time, when they weren’t trying to kill me or attending a black-tie event. It was jeans for the guys and cotton pants and silk tank for Innara. Sabina was in her typical nunnish robes. She probably didn’t own anything else. The bodyguards were dressed in jeans and jackets to hide the array of weapons each carried. We looked one another over, assessing danger levels, and decided we didn’t have to react. I gave a little head bob to acknowledge them, and got one back from each, security personnel greetings, all business.
I gave a little head bow to Sabina, knowing that there was something more I should probably do to acknowledge her status, but I didn’t know what it might be. She wasn’t
my
priestess, after all. The vamps gathered around the open front door and breathed in, nostrils expanding and contracting as they scented, a weird, almost choreographed body movement, bizarre to observe on the non-breathers.
“Wolves,” Hildebert said, his lips curling into a snarl. His fangs snapped down. I tensed, readying myself for a vamped-out rage, but his pupils didn’t expand, his sclera didn’t bleed scarlet. He was ticked off but in control. For now.
“Gone,” Innara said. She bent and dipped her head, folding her body in a way that would have been distinctly uncomfortable for a human. It was creepy looking, like a lizard, her fingers outspread and her upper body whipping side to side. She took short sniffing breaths, following scent signatures. “For some time. I count ten or more. One was the woman. Her level of excitement is extreme. She is still in heat and smells”—Innara sniffed in little puffs of indrawn breath—“ill.”
The others nodded as they drew in the air. “Twelve altogether,” Koun said. “And the smell of magic is sharp and bright on the air. But what is that other scent?”
“Cat of some kind,” Hildebert said.
“I saw Kemnebi when I got here,” I said, to lead them away from thoughts of me, “in the tree line, hiding, watching. And there are barn cats. Maybe one of them, you know, got inside.”
“Yes,” Innara said. She looked at me under her lashes, assessing and suspicious. Which didn’t make me happy at all. “Perhaps.”
As soon as the vamps had sniffed their fill, the former—and surely soon-to-be again—prime blood-servant explained what they might expect to see immediately inside. He finished by saying, “I’ve sent Alej andro and Estavan for Bethany, but they may be some time convincing her to help us, and Evangelina doesn’t think we can wait for the stasis spells to wear off, in case that triggers some other disaster.
“We can’t see her wounds, but by the amount of blood Nettie has lost, she’s close to death. I suggest that Koun be at her side when the stasis spell falls, as he has the most experience treating battlefield wounds. If she has to be brought over to save her, are you prepared for a youngling?”
Koun shrugged his massive shoulders. “If need be, I will take her. She has the signing of the paperwork and contracts?”
“Yes,” Bruiser said, and I instantly wanted to get a look at the paperwork a blood-servant wannabe-scion signed just in case they got injured on the job. Talk about your worker’s comp. “Sabina,” he said, “you will need to be with me in Leo’s lair.”
My ears perked up. I wanted to see Leo’s lair. But I also wanted to see what Koun did to heal Nettie. I wished I had a body for each soul, so I could be in two places at once. Deep inside, Beast snorted with amusement.
“Hildebert, according to Jane, it appears that the wolves bit some of the servants gathered in the formal room. We’ll need to deal with the more serious injuries first. Then, when everyone is stable, we’ll see if Bethany and Sabina are able to help them. Perhaps we can keep most of them from being infected by the were-contagion.”
Hildebert said something guttural, but cussing is a universal language. I got the point.
“I called Gee. He can heal them of the bites if he gets the message in time.”
Bruiser looked at me strangely and I got the feeling that he hadn’t known that. “Jane, you will be with Sabina and me. When Evangelina drops the spell, you deal with Leo’s opponent. Sabina will assist with Leo.”
“And you?” I asked.
“I’ll figure that out when Leo is stable.” Bruiser turned his attention to Evangelina. “Can you get us in place without setting off the stasis spells?”
“Jane can take you and the priestess in. I’ll get the guys in.”
Bruiser asked me, “Is there a stasis spell around the security console? I need to see the status monitor and make a few adjustments.”
“No,” I said, sounding grumpy. “Just follow in my trail. If I move left or right as if to avoid something, even if you can’t see anything, don’t deviate. The spell covers every bit of blood splatter, and there’s a lot of it.” Bruiser and Sabina close on my trail, I stepped across the threshold and led the way across the Anzu heraldic device to the security closet. “From here on back I don’t see any spells of any kind.”
Bruiser opened the door to the console and a moment later, he said, “Splendid. No one changed the passwords.” He clacked around on some keys and scanned a series of screens. “You were right, Jane. Tyler’s password is listed. He let them in.” Bruiser backed out of the narrow space, and indicated the hallway.
“We’ll take the stairs down and I’ll call you when we’re in place,” he said to Evangelina, who was still in the foyer, standing in front of Leo’s huge warriors.
I hadn’t known there
were
stairs down, but considering the artificial hill this place was built on, it made sense. I followed them, Sabina’s skirts swishing as she moved. I had noticed once before that her feet never made a sound, but her starched skirts did. It was weird, but all vamps were eerie. The old blood smell floated back from her as we walked, making my stomach turn on the greasy burgers and boudin balls.
There were bloody prints and smears all over the kitchen, most leading outside through a delivery door. The stairs were behind the kitchen, in a narrow nook between a walk-in refrigerator and a butcher shop-sized cutting board. The only indication that something was there besides wall was a small entry keypad. Bruiser pressed seven keys, placed his open hand on the wall, and pushed. The wall opened inward soundlessly, the stink of decomposing blood whooshing out, to reveal a dark hallway. When Bruiser stepped in, the overhead light came on, a motion detector at work, and revealed a steeply descending, switchback stairway, a metal handrail on one side and slick painted wall on the other.
Leo had made use of the interior space of the hillock under his house; the center of the mound had been hollowed out and reinforced. I spotted three security cameras and laser motion detectors. Not that they had done him any good, but it was hard to design a security plan for
any
eventuality. And I figured werewolf attack hadn’t been high on the designers’ minds.
We started down, Bruiser’s and my boots clomping echoes off the bright walls. Blood, smelling of wolves and Leo, had dripped all over the stairs, smeared with paw and boot prints, all dry.
The door to Leo’s lair was at the bottom, where Bruiser entered more numbers on another keypad. The door opened with a gust of air, a rotten blood and wet dog scent whooshing out along with a dull red light, to reveal the room. Leo’s home-base lair was a small apartment consisting of a sitting area and a king-sized, four-poster, pewter bed with a headboard of curlicues and fleur-de-lis. And a lot of blood. The sheets and pillowcases were drenched in it. The rugs below were sloppy wet with it. And Leo was in the middle of it all, half lying on the mattress, his position changed from the first time I’d seen him. His bare right foot rested on a rug, his left on the mattress, and he was leaning back against a mound of bloody pillows wearing black pants and a once-white shirt. His face and body were slack, his skin so white he looked like a mannequin, waxy with death. His eyes were closed. And his chest was still, breathless, with that vamp undead-death thing.
My silver-tipped stake was at his feet, bloody and well-used.
Hedge of thorns
encircled the bed, casting a reddish light over everything, giving Leo the only color he had, making the blood appear even more vibrant and deadly. But unlike the spell that protected my boulder garden, this one hadn’t burned the rugs or walls and stopped short of the ceiling. And it seemed to provide an additional purpose than simply a last-ditch bolt-hole activated by the primary’s blood. This one was a trap. Caught in the
hedge
, held a foot off the floor, was Girrard DiMercy.
CHAPTER 23
“Rock and Roll, Legs”
Gee was trapped in the spell like a moth in the strands of a spider’s web, his body suspended above the floor, caught in a fighting posture. When we entered, his eyes swiveled our way. That, and breathing, assuming a storm god had to, were the only movements he could make. His swords lay on the bloody rugs, the edges coated with dried gore. But the blades were pointing away from Leo, and Gee’s back was facing the bloody bed. Yet, the stake was on Leo’s side of the
hedge
. “He was either defending Leo from attack,” I said, “or running away when the
hedge
came up.” And only Leo could tell us which.