Sabina shook her head slowly, her mantle rustling. “Little Leo, what have you done? Is there enough blood in all the world to heal you now?” Which did not sound good. She looked at Bruiser and addressed her comment to him. “Your master is close to death. When the spell falls, I can give him my blood, but I cannot restore him. He will need much blood. Much.”
I stepped around Gee, observing him from every angle I could, looking for additional weapons; there were none that I could see. But there was a nasty gash on one arm, old and half healed. I had a feeling I might have given him that one when he was sitting outside my house. Because my guns were loaded with silver shot, and silver wouldn’t kill an Anzu, I pulled two steel-edged vamp-killers and set my balance. Waiting.
Bruiser stepped to a wall phone, an old-fashioned one that had a dangly tangled cord. Our cells were useless underground. He dialed two digits, like on an intercom, and said, “Evie, we’re ready down here. Send down ten blood-servants as soon as they’re free of the spell and pronounced healthy. Leo’s badly wounded. Yes.” Phone to his ear, he nodded to Sabina and then looked at me. “Kill Gee if he resists.” Into the phone he said, “Go.” And hung up.
An instant later, everything fell. The
hedge
fell, the red light vanishing in a burst of white light. Sabina fell forward, toward the bed and Leo. And Gee fell to the floor.
He hit the bloody rugs like a broken marionette, air woofing out of him, ending in a grunt as I landed on him, one knee in his belly, a position I’d landed in a lot lately. He lay there, gasping, my knife at his throat, his eyes on mine. There was no evidence of fight in him. And no weapons that I could see.
“I did not wound my lord,” he gasped. “I tried to protect him from the wolves.” I sniffed carefully, parsing the disparate scents to their distinct origins. Under the reek of Leo’s blood, I smelled Roul, another werewolf, and the were-bitch. And faintly, I scented Rick. He had been here, or someone wearing a lot of his blood had been here.
I chanced a quick look at the bed. Sabina was sitting on the mattress, one hand gently at Leo’s lower back, one at his nape, holding him the way she might a small child. His lips were at her neck, sucking hard, his eyes closed and his face twisted as if with a great effort. It was bizarrely like watching a kid try to suck a thick milkshake through a straw, and I wanted to laugh, until I remembered who was handy to provide him a blood meal if he got well enough and violent enough to take one. My sense of humor was gonna be the death of me one day.
“Let me go to him,” Gee said. “I can heal him.”
“Not until Leo can tell us what happened here,” Bruiser said, his voice tight, his gaze glued to Leo and Sabina. I glanced at the bed, seeing Sabina’s skirts stained red, the white linen fabric wicking up the unclotted blood from the mattress.
Leo pulled from Sabina, his fangs still snapped down, his eyes vamped out. “Crap,” I murmured. Where was the blood-servant cavalry from upstairs?
But Leo said, “Girrard,
mon ami
,” and let loose a bunch of French I couldn’t begin to follow, not with only my high school Spanish. Too weak to get up, Leo held out his hand.
“Let Gee up,” Bruiser said. “Leo says Gee saved his life, and killed a werewolf to do it.”
I looked at the blood on the floor and bed. Now the quantity made sense. I stood slowly and backed away, but I didn’t put the blades up. Not yet.
Gee seemed to flow to his feet and across the room, to Leo. Sabina stepped back, the holes over her carotid artery closing as the vamp saliva constricted blood vessels and flesh. Though Leo had worked hard to suck her dry, she looked no worse for the wear. I had to wonder, as I always did, who she drank from. She had no scions and no blood-servants. None of the outclan did. But that was a mystery for another day.
Near midnight, all the blood upstairs had been cleaned up, and thanks to the healers and Gee, no one had died. Low level blood-servants and -slaves were hauling rugs and lugging the mattress up the switchback stairs from Leo’s lair, stuffing linens into plastic bags to be burned. Higher level blood-servants were heading down the stairs to return minutes later, wobbly-kneed and drained. And I was watching everyone and everything, Gee at my side. “And once again, you’re at the scene just in time to help avoid major problems,” I murmured to Gee. “Fill me in?”
The Mercy Blade shrugged, a Gaelic-Frenchy shrug, all grace and delicacy. “I was watching the clan home to keep it safe, when the wolves struck the Master of the City. It was just before dawn, and I”—he placed a hand on his chest—“disrupted their plans. My presence and my small magics, trapped in the witch’s
hedge of thorns
, kept my lord Leo alive until you came.”
I nodded once, distracted, shunted to the sidelines. The sheriff and his were-deputy were sitting in Leo’s office with Jodi Richoux and a governor’s assistant. Yeah, I’d ratted out the deputy. He had known what his buddies had done and couldn’t stay away. He had also taken the call, sent in by Sloan Rosen, to drop by the clan home to check things out. The betting bunch had laid odds the deputy would be fired and arrested, unless he accepted a plea bargain and told us where the wolves were holing up. It didn’t look likely. The events of the night had now coincided with Jodi getting a judge to sign a warrant for Tyler Sullivan’s room at the clan home. Only his room, nothing else. Any Louisiana judge knew not to rile the Master of the City.
Jodi had found the shells and the gun where I’d told her they were and an arrest warrant had been issued for Tyler Sullivan. I didn’t envy whoever told Leo about the snake in his midst.
In the main room of the clan home, vamps loyal to Leo, and blood-servants loyal to their masters, had gathered. Katie was with Leo, giving him a feeding strong enough to finish his healing, and timely enough to guarantee she would be named his heir. The fangheads and walking blood-meals were all talking about it. And I guess it was exciting, if you lived and breathed fanghead politics—not that vamps lived or breathed.
For now, I’d had enough of vamps, weres, witches, ancient Sumerian gods, and even little green guys who liked to swim in fountains. I just wanted Rick, alive and well. I wanted to take him home, to my mountains, where we could be safe. Home to Beast’s hunting territory.
But wishes were a waste of time. I’d broken my lease and had nowhere to live except for New Orleans. For now, I had a cheating boyfriend to find and save. If it wasn’t already too late.
Unfortunately, I had no idea where to start.
Near two a.m., Bruiser found me sitting on the front steps in the shadows of the outside lights, feeding the last crumbs of burger to the barn cats. I was fighting sleep and depression in equal measure, and when he sat down next to me, I didn’t look his way. Silence stretched between us.
I sniffed shallowly, detecting the smell of his blood, fresh and thin, and the scent signature of Leo, the trace chemicals telling me the MOC was out of danger. Low levels of toxic stress compounds meant Leo was fine, and the fact that Bruiser was alive beside me proved that Leo hadn’t crashed and burned, which was a good thing. My job as Rogue Hunter would have meant that I’d have to stake Leo.
“Are you the new primo?” I asked finally. “Or maybe the re-primo?”
Bruiser chuckled tonelessly. “I suppose I am.”
“Good. I need back into vamp HQ to look at the party tapes again. I need to go back to the beginning.”
“Why?”
“Rick is still miss—” I stopped, breathed past the tears that flooded my eyes and constricted my throat. “Everything started with the party. That’s as good a place as any to start looking.”
Bruiser flipped open his cell phone and speed dialed a number. Thirty seconds later, I had total access to everything in vamp HQ, including the rooms I’d never been in. Yeah me! So why should I risk everything by telling Bruiser? I shouldn’t. I stood, taking the steps to Bitsa in the azaleas. I stopped. Stared at the ground, hidden in the dark. I was gonna blow the top off Bruiser’s can of worms. And I just knew it was gonna cost me, eventually. “You know Evangelina put a spell on you, don’t you?”
Bruiser had stood when I did, but more slowly, and halted, half crouched, when I spoke. “Evie . . .” He stepped toward me and changed the question. “How do you know?”
“I can see it. She has a pinkish haze of magics all around her lately. And now so do you. It got to us”—I paused, glad of the dark to cover my blush—“in the shower. Be careful, Bruiser. Something’s going on with
Evie
.”
I kick-started Bitsa and eased her onto the drive. Only when I got to the street did I pause and helmet up and rearrange my gear. Then, exhausted and heartsore, I gunned the bike and headed back into the city.
“And you discovered this when?” I asked Wrassler.
“Not me. Not us. The cops found it the night after the were-cat died, when they were taking the office apart. Far as we know, till then, only Leo knew it was here. And he didn’t tell.”
Wrassler and I had entered through Leo’s main office doorway, tearing down the crime-scene tape. Yeah, it might make the cops’ jobs harder, but I didn’t really care about that. I cared about stuff no one had told me, that might help me solve the murder and save Rick. Wrassler and I had talked things through until my head was spinning, but it was beginning to come together. The cops had found a second hidden entrance in Leo’s office.
I’d gotten a good look at the first hidden passage. It was like something out of a horror movie, but without the lights or scary music: a stairway spiraling down to a narrow, light-less corridor between rooms to the outer wall. There, a lever opened a passage to the sidewalk, an egress if one was supernat-fast enough. The passageway smelled of were-cat, werewolf, vamp, dead fish, and cops. And Rick’s blood, dried drops marked by crime-scene cones. If I had made nice-nice with Jodi, she might have told me there was blood, and I might have known early on that Rick was in trouble, but I’d been too busy to make better friends with the local cops.
The mixture of scents was confusing—the wolves and cats and vamps all in one hidden place. It seemed everyone knew about the passageway but me.
Now, we stood in front of the newest surprise—Leo’s office’s
second
hidden entrance. The passage had been found when the cops started taking out rugs and wall hangings splattered with crime-scene blood. It entered the office from behind the fireplace, the passageway eight feet high and twenty inches wide, leading to the next room, which had its own secret entrance—a private elevator. The tiny brass cage had access to hidden passages on every floor of vamp HQ, including the crawl space to the domes above the ballroom where the wolves had waited. The elevator smelled only of dead fish, were-blood, and Rick’s blood. All the blood was old and dry, I guessed lost the night of Safia’s murder. But the fishy smell . . . “I need to see the room the grindylow used,” I said, not letting myself react to the blood smell or what it could mean.
“Okay by me. Little sucker trashed it. And now he’s gone. No one’s seen him in days.”
The room set aside for visiting security was way more than trashed. It was wet, stinking of mold, ripped, and shredded. The grindy had let the tub overflow until the carpet was soaked, had shredded every piece of fabric and drenched the scraps, maybe trying to make himself a grindy den, a wet place like home. Days later, in the damp climate of Louisiana, untouched by anyone due to the visitor’s status, mold had set in.
I knelt and studied the grindy’s claw marks. The edges of the tears were smooth, not ragged, indicating razor sharp claws. I wouldn’t want to fight the little sucker, not even if I had a cannon and way better armor. They were three clawed, like a sloth, the center one longer than the two beside. Just like the wound in Safia’s throat, which was just weird. Why kill her here, not back in Africa?
Because she had been a good little girl until she met Rick?
The grindy’s scent was definitely fishlike, but not any fish Beast had ever encountered. I drew up the bloodhound-memory of smells as I stood over Safia’s body. I remembered fish. I had thought it was her supper. Stupid, to make a determination without evidence.
As far as I could tell, under the fish and mold smell, Rick hadn’t been in the grindylow’s rooms. I pulled the door shut and wandered back to the hidden elevator, hands in my jeans pockets. “Okay, how does this sound?” I said to Wrassler, who filled up the hallway behind me. “Rick infiltrated the Soniat Hotel, undercover, as a busboy or something, during the early, clandestine discussions with Leo and the Vampire Council. Safia met the cop. She was bored. Interested in a pretty boy.”
Wrassler added to my narrative. “Somehow she knows about this passage. The night of the big bash, she arranges to get him inside HQ for some hanky-panky.”
“Hanky-panky.” I quashed my reaction to my words. This was a
job
. Not my heart breaking. “Okay. He’s in, with her, coming up the passageway. Somehow, Rick is injured,” though not badly, because I hadn’t smelled his blood-scent over Safia’s blood loss. “Tyler goes into the office, where he shouldn’t be, catches them together. Safia is shot by Tyler to frame Leo and Bruiser. Tyler runs. Safia starts to shift. Then the grindy kills the person he was here to protect. Which makes no sense.”
“Unless she’d tried to turn the cop,” Wrassler said.
And the final piece fell into place. Kemnebi had said the grindylows
are . . . pets. Most of the time . . .
But he’d hesitated when he said
pets
. As if that description hadn’t been his first choice. Pain gripped my stomach, burning. I said, “It all makes sense, like a woven scarf with all its knots, but only two pieces of string.”
“Girly analogy.”
I stuttered a laugh, surprised, but the laughter cleared my head. “Bite me. String one: Tyler wants revenge on Bruiser and Leo for something—I don’t know what, so don’t ask. He came over in the 1960s to work a frame, maybe something longstanding with the Marchands or the Rochefort clan in France, since he was working security for them. But for whatever reason, he had to abandon his plan. He’s been waiting for a chance to finish it for years. Tyler comes back with the wedding party, starts his plan all over again, shoots Safia to set up Bruiser and Leo as murderers. Tyler runs, changes clothes, reappears in the ballroom in the middle of the fight. We never notice he’s gone.