I nodded. “It sounds like someone, maybe the Baron, is trying to build up power, maybe even working with other pretes like the vampires. Is that feasible?”
“It’s not only feasible, it’s happened before,” Alex said. “The war in seventy-six saw several prete groups band together, but in that one, the fae sided with the wizards and the vampires
stayed neutral. They’re the most powerful groups in the Beyond except for the elves, who never get involved, so the wizards ended up winning. She didn’t mention the fae, did she?”
“No. But why Samedi? Why would he be the ringleader—even among the old gods, he wouldn’t be the strongest. If there was some organized prete uprising, wouldn’t the fae queens or the vampire regents be pulling the strings?”
“Unless Samedi has a powerful ally on this side. Marie didn’t answer the question about Gerry. Even if it backfired on him, he could have helped set it in motion—whatever it is.”
I started to tell Alex about the dream, then decided against it. It was just a dream, nothing more. In fact, it was surprising I hadn’t dreamed of Gerry before now.
Alex dug his cell phone out of his pocket and placed a call. We really did need that Elder hotline.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005
“Thin line separates hope from hell: Jeff getting back on its feet, but Orleans flat on its back.”
—THE TIMES–PICAYUNE
I
sat in the Pathfinder on Magazine Street after a junk-food run, drumming my fingers impatiently while stewing over my new position in the Elders’ doghouse. After his phone call, Alex had told me Willem Zrakovi was furious at me for summoning Marie Laveau on my own. Then Elder Zrakovi called and told me himself. He was deeply disappointed in my insistence on taking things into my own hands. That stung.
You’d think the Elders would appreciate knowing a bigger conspiracy might be afoot, one that went beyond a missing sentinel, some voodoo symbols, and an angry pirate. But no. I had disappointed them. Deeply.
After my Elder wrist-slapping (Alex assured me that Zrakovi would have chewed me a new one in person if he’d truly been that upset), I’d spent most of the day turning my house into a virtual Bastille against the French pirate. Charms, hexes, potions. Anything I could make up ahead of time and have at the ready. I wasn’t going to be caught unarmed again. I went through my grounding ritual twice and made up a second mojo bag. Couldn’t hurt to have a spare.
I was so jumpy Alex got nervous and insisted we go ahead with plans to get the tree off my roof. Since I thought the tilting cedar might make an easy ladder for Jean Lafitte to climb in my bedroom window, I agreed. For the past week, I’d haggled with different tree services, trying to negotiate a reasonable price. Once Alex heard my lowest estimate had been from a Bobcat driver who wanted $4,000 to take it down, the Warin clan decided to do it themselves.
I’d heard the Winn-Dixie on Tchoupitoulas had reopened a couple of hours a day, and I was out of Cheetos. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have left the house. For a largely unpopulated city, this little unflooded stretch of New Orleans was beginning to feel crowded, and I wasn’t sure where Jean Lafitte might show up. Of course, it was also possible Lafitte wouldn’t come back for revenge at all and I was wasting my paranoia.
Jake’s old Dodge pickup was already parked beside the house when I got back, and I snickered when I saw he’d added a hood ornament from a Jaguar—no doubt to irritate Alex, whose freshly washed Mercedes had been moved out of the driveway and parked across the street. I parked behind Jake. I’d hate to waft any road dust Alex’s way.
An extension ladder rested against the back of the house, and Alex and Jake stood at the foot of it, looking up while a tall, rangy guy poked around at the eave line. When I joined them, the man descended the ladder and introduced himself. Don Warin was one of Alex’s three older brothers—as tall and dark as Alex but with shorter hair and minus the enforcer physique. He looked at me with naked curiosity.
“Oh, Mama insisted I come and help,” he said when I thanked him for driving all the way from Picayune. He grinned and stuck his hands in his pockets to give me the once-over, and his Mississippi accent was thick as cane syrup. “We didn’t think we’d ever see a gal get her hooks in my little brother. I have to report back.”
He looked at Alex. “Mama wants to know when you’re bringin’ her home for dinner?”
Uh, that would be never. I gave Alex a glare I hoped he interpreted correctly as
Not happening. Ever
.
His mouth curved in a smug smile.
Alex and Jake kept their one-upmanship to a minimum in front of Don, and I left them to their business. If they wanted to insist tree removal was man’s work, who was I to argue?
I pulled out another box of Gerry’s stuff. Saturday’s dream hadn’t been anything dramatic like an omen or a telepathic message, but he had told me to find the staff and a journal, so I might as well make sure I’d found all the journals.
A loud bump from the roof jarred the house.
“Watch where you’re putting your big feet!”
“Then get the hell out of my way!”
“Would you two shut up for once?”
I wasn’t sure how much the sawing, banging, and cursing on my roof had to do with my cedar tree.
I opened the box and decided the first thing I should do is sort the notebooks from the correspondence, invoices, receipts, and bank statements, then see if any of the notebooks looked like a journal. If I dreamed of him again, I’d have to teach him a few things about organizing documents.
I sorted awhile, then noticed the elven staff propped against the door that led into the office. Last night, it had been in the library. I went in the kitchen and stuck my head out the back door to make sure the Warin boys, or at least the non-shapeshifting ones, were keeping themselves busy. Coast clear. I returned to the living room and picked up the staff.
As always, it grew warm under my touch and a few sparks burst from the end. On a whim, I pointed it at the ceiling fan turning lazily overhead and shot a tiny bit of magical will into it, just to see if I could speed the fan up. If I could figure out
how to use and control this thing, it might help me increase my physical magic.
“Ack!” The fan sped up all right—after a few seconds, it spun so fast it wobbled on its stem, and black smoke poured out of the motor. The smoke detector began an ear-splitting screech before I could race to the wall switch and turn the fan off.
By the time Jake and Alex hurried in the back door with Don close behind, I had stashed the staff under a sofa cushion and stood underneath the fan wearing what I hoped was a perplexed expression. My hand still tingled from the transfer of energy, but I didn’t feel drained at all. I was beginning to like this staff. I just needed to figure out how to harness it without burning my house down.
“Must be a short in the wiring,” I announced somberly as they came to a halt beneath the fan, which was still puffing rings of noxious black smoke. The air smelled of scorched electrical wiring.
“I’ve installed a million of those things we’ve sold at the store and I ain’t ever seen one do that.” Don took off his Picayune Maroon Tide baseball cap and scratched his head.
“We’ll pick another one up for you at the store and put it in,” Jake offered, while Alex frowned and looked at me skeptically.
“Thanks, Jake. I’ll pay you for it, of course.”
His dimples were deep enough to dive into. “I’ll come up with a special price for you, sweet pea.” I didn’t think his price involved money.
Don stared at Jake, eyebrows raised, then looked at Alex. Clearly, if I was supposed to be Alex’s woman, hell-bent on a course to meet his mama over family dinner, Jake had stepped over the line of common decency. Let them figure it out; I wanted no part of it.
Don and Alex headed out to finish the work, but Jake stayed behind. He closed the door behind them and turned to
look at me, hanging an arm of his sunglasses in the front of his T-shirt.
“Darlin’, I’m getting mixed signals about you and Big Al.” His eyes looked like honey, and I wondered if our dinner date was still going to happen. I sure hoped so.
“Big Al and I are, uh …” I paused. What were we? I couldn’t say we were working together or I’d have to lie and tell Jake I was involved in law enforcement. I winged it. “We are friends, like I said. Nothing exclusive. He really has been helping get my uncle’s place cleaned out.”
His expression softened. “I’m sorry about Gerry. They never found him, did they?”
“Not a sign.” I paused. “It’s been hard. He raised me. He’s more like a father, really.”
He nodded. “I’ve lost people that way, when it’s sudden and you don’t have a chance to say good-bye. The questions eat at you. Even if you know what happened, you still ask why.”
We sat at the kitchen table. “You talking about Afghanistan? Alex told me you’d had a rough time of it.”
Jake stared out the window. “Yeah, half my unit got killed. You start questioning why some people die and others live. You feel guilty because you’re one of the so-called lucky ones. You ask what it is you’re supposed to do with your life to pay for having survived it. Sometimes you wish you hadn’t survived it. If you think about it too much, it can eat you alive.” He looked back at me, and I could see traces of the ghosts that haunted him.
“Don’t suck down all the hurt, DJ. It’ll catch up with you in a bad way.”
I blinked back tears and stared at the table. I wasn’t going to let myself start crying because once that dam was opened I might never get it closed. “I don’t know how to let it out and still keep going,” I said. “How did you do it?”
He laughed—a sharp, bitter sound. “You don’t want to do
it my way, sweetie. I drank too much and shut out everybody that cared about me. Talk to a friend, a relative. Somebody.”
I looked out the window too. There was nobody.
Alex saved me from having to answer by stomping back inside, so full of anger and jealousy he wasn’t even trying to shield it from me. I wiped away a stray tear before he saw it.
Or maybe not.
“What’s going on?” Alex looked at me, ignoring Jake.
I cleared my throat and avoided Alex’s eyes. “I was just asking Jake how Jackie Williams was doing at the club.”
“Packing them in.” Jake leaned his chair back. “It’s crazy how that guy looks like Louis Armstrong, sounds like Louis Armstrong, knows all the Armstrong songs. I don’t know where he came from—he doesn’t talk much. But I’m not complaining. If we try to cram any more people in we’re gonna get called for a fire-code violation.”
Don joined us for a few minutes but had to leave for Picayune. The Twin Spans were still down so he’d have to drive the Causeway, twenty-six miles straight across the middle of Lake Pontchartrain. I thought any bridge so long you lost sight of land had to be dangerous.
“Yeah, Alex, guess it’s time for us to take off, too.” Jake didn’t want to leave me with his cousin. A serious Warin competition was heating up and I was the bone of contention.
“I’m already home. Moved in with DJ just before Rita hit.” Alex gave his cousin a big, doggy grin.
I gave Alex a look that would send lesser men to their knees, begging forgiveness. He ignored it.
“Is that so?” Jake contemplated this new bit of information and cocked his head at me. I couldn’t read his expression and had sworn off taking cheat-peeks at his emotions. A little wave of anger hit me anyway. “Well, then. I guess I’ll see you lovebirds later.”
He grabbed his keys and walked out, letting the door close a little too hard behind him.
I thought about trying the elven staff on Alex. “I liked you better when you were a dog.”
“Don’t get involved with Jake, DJ. Right now he needs to think we’re a couple, unless you’re ready to introduce him to the historical undead.”
I needed to just swear off men. I’d done without one this long anyway, and they were way too complicated.
A
s long as Alex and I were posing as a couple, we might as well go to dinner. A few restaurants had opened in Jefferson Parish, and anything that wasn’t an MRE, a sandwich, or a protein bar sounded like nirvana. We’d just reached the outskirts of Metairie when Alex’s cell rang.
“It’s Ken, from the NOPD,” he said, flipping the phone open. The conversation was brief.
“Another voodoo murder.” Alex clipped the phone back to his car’s visor and took the next exit. We turned around on Veterans and headed back toward New Orleans.
“Where did it happen?”
“In Lakeview—another National Guardsman.”
“Is Ken going to let you look at the crime scene?”
You
meaning
us
.
“I’m not officially on the case yet, but we need to see it anyway.”
We dodged military checkpoints and went back to the house first so I could get my backpack. I ran up the stairs and into the library, hopping around as I tried to simultaneously
pull on my boots and find magical items that might help us sneak into a muddy, roped-off neighborhood with no electricity and lots of cops. At least most of the post-Rita floodwaters had finally drained out of Lakeview.
I procured the ingredients for a variety of spells, stuffed them in my backpack along with my mojo bag, and slipped a light-emitting obsidian amulet around my neck. As I headed toward the door, I tripped over the elven staff, which had placed itself in my path. The thing’s ability to track my movements was downright unnerving.
“Oh no you don’t, buddy. I’m not ready for you yet.”
I took the stairs at a fast clip, sliding at the bottom as I rounded the corner. Alex hadn’t been idle, either. He was nestling his biggest handgun into its shoulder harness beneath a black jacket, and I saw a couple of knives strapped inside the coat. It didn’t bother me a bit. In fact, I hoped he had the grenade and the shotgun loaded for undead pirates and voodoo gods.
We drove the five miles back to Lakeview and parked next to the mountain of storm debris on Pontchartrain Boulevard.
“How far to the crime scene?” I asked, watching the glow on the horizon from the lights in Metairie. Everything on the Orleans side of the 17th Street Canal was dark. Across the narrow canal, on the Jeff Parish side, life buzzed almost at pre-storm levels.
“I’m not sure, just that it’s on Fleur de Lis, a few blocks from the levee breach. We’ll have to walk in from here and stay hidden. Everybody’s twitchy. They might shoot first, then worry about who they’re shooting at.”
I dug in my backpack, handed him a piece of peppermint candy, and took one for myself.
He raised an eyebrow.
“To keep us from coughing. We didn’t bring masks and we’re trying to be quiet. This will help.”
We climbed out of the car, closing the doors softly to avoid being heard, and walked west toward the canal. I tripped over something in the dark—a board or tree limb, or at least I hoped that’s all it was. Alex caught my arm before I went sprawling. Light reflected from the corner of Fleur de Lis, so we approached slowly, peering around the edge of a house at two policemen with light sticks, stripping crime-scene tape across neon yellow sawhorses. Red flashing lights reflected on the police car windows from the ambulance parked a block on the other side of them. The surrounding streets were empty and silent and very dark.
“How’s your pitching arm?” I whispered, opening my pack and feeling around for three small bags of powder. “I want you to throw these bags one at a time in different directions, as far as you can, away from the crime scene. Then we’ll slip over there.”
I also handed him a small vial of fluorescent green liquid. “Before you throw, drink this.”
“What do they do?” He looked at the vial and the bags, frowning.
“Camouflage and fireworks. Just do it.”
Alex shrugged, tossed back the vial of liquid with a grimace, and threw each of the bags in succession, far into the night in different directions. When each bag landed, an explosion echoed through the neighborhood and sent off flares that illuminated the ghostly, empty houses and reflected off small ponds of remaining floodwater. The guardsmen and police shouted as they jumped in vehicles and headed toward the noises.
Alex and I slipped past the barricades and ran toward the house nearest the ambulance. At least Lakeview had lots of empty buildings to hide behind. The bitter taste of my own chameleon potion lingered in my throat. The police and EMTs ahead of us might think they saw movement but we should be well hidden. Unless, of course, one of them was a telepathic wizard.
By the time we’d run the long block, I had to sit on an overturned tree to catch my breath. Alex wasn’t even breathing hard, damn his healthy, protein-shake-drinking hide. I could almost see him biting his tongue to keep from making a smart-ass comment.
Once I could breathe, we crept along the side of what used to be paved roads. Now, as near as I could tell, they were covered with a thick layer of sand. You’d never know asphalt lay underneath. I hadn’t been this close to the breach.
I injected a little energy into the obsidian amulet to help us see without attracting attention, but it wasn’t enough.
“Oof.” Alex grunted and hit something, then I ran into his back. We’d collided with the side of a house, a big one, skewed diagonally in the middle of the road where it had washed off its foundation. Working our way around it was treacherous. I gasped as I tripped again, and ran my hands lightly along the edges of jagged wood, trying to feel my way around the building slowly without impaling myself on anything. Creating a bigger light source was too risky.
Finally, we got within a few yards of the crime scene, and the emergency lights made it easier to see from our vantage point behind an empty house. “Let’s split up, move around, and see what we can. Meet back at that house in the road in fifteen minutes,” Alex whispered.
I stared as he pulled a handgun and three knives out of hiding places in his clothing, thrusting them at me, handles first. Then he peeled off his jacket and shirt, folded them quickly, and laid them on the ground. Shoes came off next, followed by pants and briefs. Flashing red lights bounced off his body.
“Uh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Hot damn
seemed inappropriate given our situation.
He raised an eyebrow. “Stop gawking. I’m going Gandalf on you.”
“Right.” I knew that.
Alex knelt and the air shimmered around him. Within seconds, my old buddy stood in his place. The shift had seemed effortless. Weres suffered through their change, all cracking bones and reshaping skeletal systems. Lycanthropes might be tougher, or so I’d heard, but shapeshifters had a more pleasant time of it.
“We’ll meet back here in fifteen. Guess you can’t wear your watch, so just wing it,” I said. Alex’s Rolex lay atop his stack of clothes. I picked it up and slipped it on my arm, above my Timex. Life wasn’t fair.
Gandalf ran north of the police cruisers and out of sight, so I edged to the left, heading toward the ambulance. I squatted behind a pile of debris and peered around it. A young guardsman lay on a stretcher, his chest rising and falling with rasping breaths. He’d been gutted, and the EMTs worked to secure his spilling organs enough to get him in the ambulance. Another body lay on the ground, covered. Dead. Two of them this time. On cop shows, they call that
escalation
.
My gag reflex tried to kick in, and I closed my eyes and willed it to pass. I eased around the ambulance and tried to see the crime scene through the ocean of legs. A movement caught my eye and I saw Gandalf prowling the opposite side of the circle. He seemed to have a better angle.
“Hey, buddy.” A cop standing at the edge of the onlookers spotted Gandalf and reached down to pet him. Gandalf wagged his tail, gave his best doggie grin, and moved into prime viewing position. Suck-up.
Alex had given me his tracker before he shifted, and I pulled it out of my jacket pocket and checked the signal: a faint pulse. I closed my eyes and let my mind empty so I could feel the energy around me: magic, faint and dissipating. We were too late again. Whatever did this was long gone. All I could tell was
that it was the same cold, liquid energy I’d felt that first day at Gerry’s.
I worked my way around the ambulance to get closer to the wounded soldier, kneeling behind the rear tire. A man wearing a conservative suit and an expressionless cop face squatted beside the stretcher as EMTs hooked up monitors and worked to stabilize the victim. Stress tightened the skin around his eyes as he watched the emergency techs work. He didn’t look like he smiled a lot.
“Detective Hachette, you might as well leave.” The EMT who seemed to be in charge, a woman with a headful of braids and a take-no-prisoners attitude, looked up from working on the injured man and glared at the detective. I took a closer look at Ken Hachette, former Marine buddy of Jake’s and former co-owner of the Gator. He looked to be in his early thirties, and was of African-American heritage and serious demeanor. He’d been the one feeding Alex information about the murders.
“Has he been conscious?” Ken leaned toward the stretcher, looking at the soldier’s face. I crept a little closer, grimacing as my knee hit an empty can. The detective’s sharp gaze shot in my direction, hesitating a second as it passed over where I knelt, hopefully looking like anything other than a short, blond wizard-in-hiding. He turned back to the soldier, holding up a hand and signaling the EMTs to wait.
“We’ve got to get him to the hospital
now,
detective. He’s not going to be talking to anybody for a while.” The EMT bullied him aside, clearing a path to the rear of the ambulance. “In fact, he’ll be lucky if he makes it. Somebody sliced this boy up good.” She blocked my view of the techs as they raised him carefully.
“Where you taking him?” Ken asked the second EMT, a pale young man who looked like he should be at a library, working on his calculus homework. He seemed in danger of either fainting or throwing up.
“Goin’ to EJ,” the woman said. East Jefferson General was across the parish line, only a few miles and a civilization away from this wasteland. “He needs the Big Charity trauma unit, but it’s probably shut down for good after the flood.”
I stole away from the ambulance as she crawled inside with the soldier, then slinked behind police squad cars, trying to stay as close as possible to Ken in case he talked to anyone else. But he got in a light-colored sedan and sped toward Metairie, ahead of the ambulance.
I crept back to the rendezvous point, and Gandalf trotted in a couple of minutes later. He shifted back, pulled on his pants and shoes, threw on his shirt and shoulder holster, and carried his jacket. We retraced our steps to the car, not talking till we got there.
“What did you find out?” I said, panting as we buckled up and headed back toward town.
“One guardsman from North Carolina dead, his throat cut. The other one gutted—you saw him. They don’t think he’ll make it.” His expression was still and serious. “It’s such a waste.”
“Could you see any of the crime scene? I couldn’t get close enough.”
Alex nodded. “Same as before. Dead chickens, candles. The symbol—what did you call it, the vévé? It was drawn on the side of the house nearest the body. Any signs of magic?”
“Dissipating, as usual.”
We fell silent as we drove back into the small section of New Orleans that had working streetlights, and I squinted at the brilliance of them after the blackness of Lakeview.
“It’s only nine,” Alex said. “We’ve already broken curfew, and they don’t seem to be enforcing it anyway. Why don’t we go to the Gator, get something to eat? Jake’s staying open till eleven now. They don’t serve anything except fried stuff, but it beats another MRE.”
I thought fried stuff sounded great. “And we need to talk to our spy. He hasn’t reported in lately.” In fact, he hadn’t told us anything useful yet at all. But Louis seemed to be enjoying himself, Jake was making a ton of money, nobody was getting hurt, and—so far—the Elders hadn’t busted me.
The Quarter was getting more crowded by the day, mostly with soldiers and reporters and construction workers. No one else had anyplace to live, so the daily traffic in and out of the city was a nightmare. Jeeps and pickups lined Bourbon Street near the Gator, so we parked a couple of blocks away on Royal and Alex pulled his coat back on to hide the gun. Had it only been a couple of weeks since I’d chastised him for carrying too many weapons? Boy, had my tune changed.
We’d almost reached the bar when I realized I’d left my cell phone in my backpack. “Give me your keys. I need to go back and get my phone.” One never knew when the Elders might call. “Go on in and order me an Abita. It’ll make Leyla’s day if you go in without me.”
Alex rolled his eyes and tossed me the keys. “Dark or amber?”
“Surprise me.”
I headed back to the car, enjoying the breeze as it came off the river. The air finally had a touch of coolness to it. I loved fall in New Orleans, the one time of year when climate control was optional.
I retrieved my phone and headed back toward the Gator. I’d just reached the alley next to Jake’s building when a man stepped out of the dark and clamped a hand over my mouth. I wriggled against his arm as it locked around my waist and tried to bite the fingers pressed hard against my lips. It didn’t do much good—he was strong. He dragged me the length of the alley and into a dark area behind the bar I hadn’t known was there. Calling it a courtyard would be too generous.