Cold Reign

  I’d had a glimpse of the location, however, in the second or so I’d held the map. Enough to guess that it must also be where our missing vamps and Onorios were. Lachish had tracked the magics to St. Louis Street, just off the greenway near where we found the car that took Grégoire. The greenway was three miles long, but this was the third tiny clue that pointed us to this section of the city. We’d been so close. Alex turned his tablet to us, showing a satellite map of the circled area. It was mostly houses except for one larger building that was a warehouse with a false front, a new metal roof, and a lightning rod mounted on the highest point. A lightning rod. In a magical storm with lots of lightning. If lightning struck it, what would the power be used for? To ground a witch-working? To power a working?

  “It’s a trap,” I said.

  “Of course it’s a trap,” Eli said, a grin on his face that looked a little like a death’s head, all ferocious teeth and intent. His expression was like an aphrodisiac to Bliss. Ailis Rogan, that was her real name. “Babe, our day is just starting to get good.”

  I wondered how much of what he was talking about had to do with his need to fight something. At the possibility of violence, he looked chipper and alert and ready to rumble. I felt tired and worn and ready for bed. If my new mattress had been delivered. I’d forgotten about that.

  “No riding to be a hero, Batman, not right now,” Alex said. “Now that we have a location to start from I need to ha—check out all the surveillance cameras nearby. So you and Catwoman get to take naps and I get to work.”

  “Without energy drinks,” I said.

  “Pretty much.” His young face twisted up in what could have been sorrow or laughter. “I think I nearly killed our resident bloodsucker.”

  Yeah. Laughter. Kids think the weirdest things are funny.

  Eli said, “I’m for bed. Ladies.” He lifted two fingers to them in an abbreviated salute or maybe a half-connected hat tip, it was hard to tell, but he headed up to his bed, feet silent on the steps. Bliss’ eyes followed him all the way to the top. He didn’t look back. Eli had been present at the Witch Conclave. So had Bliss. Eli had an admirer.

  “We’ll leave you,” Lachish said. “Call if you need me present when you enter the building.” She placed a card in my hand: copper-colored, metallic coated, with raised lettering. It felt cool to my fingers, as if it had been in the fridge, and it didn’t warm as I held it. Odd. I put it in my robe pocket and gave her a head-tilt/mouth-down-turning expression that meant, I can do that. Lachish opened the front door on the storm and left, Bliss trailing behind her. I realized the young witch had said only a single word while here and wondered if she was in training as Lachish’s assistant. Which would be a cool gig if she got it.

  I grabbed a towel and scrubbed my hair, my gold chain clinking softly against the nugget that kept me tied metaphysically to the location in the mountains where I relearned what it meant to be a skinwalker. I seldom thought about the necklace, but I touched it now. It was warm to my cold fingers. I couldn’t remember when I’d been so cold, not even in the mountains in midwinter when a prolonged freeze would hit. It had to be the storm.

  Satisfied that I had done all I could, I went to my room, closed my door, stripped again, and crawled under the covers of my newly made, brand-new bed. The mattress supported, engulfed, and pampered my body. It was even better than the last one. Being the MOC’s Enforcer had serious perks. I reached up and repositioned Bruiser’s boxing gloves, his scent intensifying for a moment, soothing me.

  As I rolled over, I caught sight of le breloque. It was resting on the table. My insides stilled. I had left it in the SUV, forgotten it even. Yet it was back here. It had followed me. Like a dog to a master. That seemed ominous. But not enough to keep me awake. I let sleep take me.

  • • •

  When I woke, I was human-shaped. The light through the windows was the dark of deep storm clouds and pre-dusk, and someone was knock, knock, knocking on my door, a little like the tall skinny guy on The Big Bang Theory TV show. Five hours had passed, and I rolled over for the first time to get off of the fabo dreamy (ha-ha) mattress. “Be out in a minute,” I said, my voice rough with sleep. I pulled out old comfort clothes, warm sweats from my Appalachian-living days, and made myself decent if not fashion conscious. I smelled tea when I opened the door, a soothing chai made with piri-piri peppers and lots of whole clove. Someone had finished the laundry and there was a white basket loaded with folded clothes to the side. I scooted it inside. The house was mostly dark, lit by tablets and screens and lighted keyboards. I dragged myself to the kitchen.

  In the shadows of the veiled sunset, I met Eli at the table, and of course he looked wide awake and well groomed, though he was nursing a small cup of espresso like it was the elixir of life. I sat in front of the soup mug of tea at my place and added a huge dollop of Cool Whip, stirred it with a soup spoon, and drank a quarter of it in a series of long slurps. Tea, the food of the gods, and I didn’t care what coffee drinkers said about coffee. I wiped my mouth with a sweatshirt sleeve and spotted the cookies, two kinds: white chocolate macadamia nut and lemon-lavender. I took a lemon-lavender and it melted in my mouth. In a voice that was clogged by cookie and sleep, I asked, “Do you know why he waked us up? Woke us up? Whatever.”

  “No. I threatened to shoot him. He kept knocking.”

  “Three bursts?”

  “Yeah. The knocking. Not the shooting. I’d only need one round.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “You two awake yet?” Alex asked from the opening to the living room.

  “No,” we said together. I took another cookie.

  He placed two tablets on the table, on stands, between us, positioned so we could both see the screens. There were images on them. Still shots plucked from security camera footage. The photos were of two vamps as they parked on a street, got out of the car, and vanished around a corner of a building. Sleepiness fell away from me like rain off a metal roof. The woman was exquisite, black-haired and dark-eyed, with alabaster skin and a swan neck. The man beside her, as always, looked cynical and bored and cruel. “Amitee and Fernand Marchand,” I whispered, putting all the relationships in order. I knew, somehow, that all the pieces were on the board now. “The Marchands were brother and sister, formerly of the Rochefort clan in France, and they had been associated with the Damours. The Rocheforts were pals with the dog-fanged vamps in Europe. Leo’s son met Amitee there, when she was still a blood-servant to the Rocheforts and she turned so she could marry him.

  “Amitee hated Leo. From the very first moment she met him,” I said. “And now we know why. She was part of layered plots by the Europeans, probably for decades.”

  “Trained up by Immanuel to hate him?” Eli suggested, draining his espresso and placing the small cup in the light of one screen.

  That made sense. Long before I killed him, Immanuel had been replaced, eaten, by an u’tlun’ta, a skinwalker, a creature like me but one who had done deliberate black magic and taken the place of a living, breathing, sentient being. I had done a lot of bad things, but not that. Never that.

  Alex said, “I haven’t uncovered much in our own files, but your previous researcher had drawn some conclusions based on a series of parties thrown by the Rocheforts back in the 1960s. Parties attended by the elite of the world music scene and by the wealthy and the young royals of the time. Fernand was good friends with Lennon and Harrison before they died. Pete Townshend and Keith Moon. Keith Richards. Lotta rock-and-rollers.”

  I nodded. I recognized some of the names.

  “Leo’s son attended parties. He also socialized with the Damours when he came home to New Orleans,” Alex said.

  “Everything in this entire city and the vamp world seems to come back to the Damours.” I muttered. But then, that was what the bloodsuckers’ long game meant—the single inciting event that tied all the hatreds and deaths together in the vamp wor
ld.

  The original Damour sire had weak vamp bloodlines that left their scions in the devoveo for decades, even centuries, mad, raving creatures referred to as the long-chained. Creatures that were supposed to be put down by the misericords, the Mercy Blades, like Gee DiMercy. Instead, the Damour clan guarded theirs and hid them away, using their slaves on Saint Domingue—before it was liberated in a bloody slave revolt—in breeding experiments to create a bloodline that might help bring the long-chained around. They also performed unspeakable experiments with blood sacrifice and magic, even after they came to the shores of the States. And then Tristan and Renee, brother and sister, married and added their inbred children to the list of the long-chained. And tried to use my BFF’s children, my godchildren, in one such experiment to heal them. They, and their nameless sorcerer brother, were dead. I could almost hear Munchkins singing and celebrating even now.

  “More than that,” Alex said, bringing me back to the here and now. “The parties they gave were often well attended by the paparazzi. Get a look at the dudes in the background.” He held out a tablet and widened a photo into a grainy close-up of a small group of people. “It’s really fuzzy thanks to vamps not photographing well until the digital age, but I’m pretty sure this is Louis Seventh. And these guys”—he pointed—“might be the vamp emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus with Le Bâtard. The three stooges of vamp hierarchy, in the same vicinity as Macario and Gualterio Cardona.” He pointed at two humans in the photo. “You got thoughts about all this, bro?” Alex asked.

  “Lots of thoughts,” Eli said. He stood and went to the espresso machine. I heard him making a double shot, all without turning on a light. Gotta love muscle memory. “The Marchands are the European vamps’ onshore liaisons.”

  Alex said, “Sleeper spies. Foresworn to Leo and all that. Yeah. I had time to download the vid collected from Adrianna’s cage. The Marchands let Adrianna out of the crazy box. I have some security of them leading the way when HQ was attacked. They helped take Grégoire and the B and B twins.”

  Eli sat down with his oversized cuppa. He pointed to the screen with the sat map of the area where the witches said the storm witch was working. And he tapped the building with the lightning rod. “Our people may be in there. We need good intel, absolute one-hundred-percent intel about layout. A reconnaissance mission. And we need better shooters. I don’t want dead local vamps or Onorios on our hands.”

  “There’s more,” Alex said, sounding grim.

  “That’s why you got cookies, isn’t it?” I said. “To butter us up?”

  “Hadda learn something from the suckheads. Give a present when you bring bad news. The Damours were clearly trying to set up NOLA for European vamp takeover, as far back as your arrival.”

  I scratched my fingers through my hair and pulled it over a shoulder, out of the way. “Agreed.”

  “Why? Why did they choose the Damours and the Rochefort clan and Peregrinus and the devil? Why did they chose the Rousseau clan?”

  Because Adrianna—she of head-in-a-cooler fame—was originally a Rousseau, I thought. The rest of it . . . “This is tying my brain in knots,” I said, thinking about Katie, on the inside, her sister a prisoner and a tool of Leo’s enemies.

  “The long-chained,” Eli muttered.

  “Amy Lynn Brown,” I said fast, speaking of the vamp scion whose blood brought scions down from the devoveo in record time. There had been murmurs about her for years before the Shaddock clan in Asheville revealed her. “The EVs planned all along to take over Leo’s territory, but when the news about Amy leaked, they moved up the timetable.” It all made sense. “We have to call—”

  “Already called it in,” Alex said. “Dacy and Leo have Amy under their wings and in a safe room. One that no one knows about. No one.”

  That meant us too. That meant our map of hidden passageways and staircases was still not complete. Dang vamps and their secrets. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s see the rest.” Because Alex never showed all his cards on the first pass.

  In footage from another security camera, we watched as Le Bâtard, Fernand, and his sister walked beneath a light, from another car, this time covered in blood. The date and time stamp were from the night Edmund was attacked with silver and nearly died. I remembered the unfamiliar scents from the night Beast had tracked Ed. The Marchands had a way to mask scent. I remembered the blood bottle. If they drank from that vile mixture, it would likely change them in all sorts of ways. Crap. I hated blood magic.

  “Those sniveling petits, mangeurs de morts.”

  I whirled to see Edmund standing behind Alex, the bookcase door opened to the sleeping nook/weapons room under the stairs. Eli relaxed and removed the mag from a weapon. He had drawn and aimed faster than I’d turned.

  “Silver?” Edmund asked, casual, eyebrows raised at the mag.

  “No, but they would have hurt,” Eli said. Casually he added, “You were talking about sniveling eaters of the dead, I think? Cannibals? Which I understand is an insult of the worst sort for Mithrans.”

  “They were the ones who attacked you, weren’t they?” I asked.

  “I was never certain, but it now seems most likely. Their fighting forms were different from what I teach, and so I thought interlopers on these shores, not our own. But the Marchands came from France, so their styles would of necessity be different.” A strange expression crossed Edmund’s face, something cold and deadly, and was gone before I could place it. “My mistress, may I have permission to challenge the Marchands to Sangre Duello?” He meant blood duel, in the mishmash of languages the Mithrans used. It was a duel to the death.

  “After we get our people back,” I said, “I don’t give a rat’s hairy behind what you do.”

  “I’d take that as a yes,” Eli murmured. “Gear up?”

  “One more,” Alex said, punching a tablet.

  On-screen, we watched as Sabina was escorted inside a warehouse, her hands and arms bound by silver. A prisoner. “She let herself be taken,” I said. “Why would she do that?”

  Edmund’s head swiveled on his neck in that eerie thing they do, that totally not-human, more bird or snakelike movement. “We are not alone.”

  Eli slid from his seat, weapons in both hands. He had one nine-mil pointed at the side door and another pointed at the front door. I’d left all mine in my room. Again. Eli grunted and stuck out a hip to reveal the hilt of a blade. I gripped the weapon in one hand and slid it from the Kydex holster with the softest of snaps. The hilt was crosshatched and a little too large for my grip but good enough. Way better than nothing.

  A soft knock sounded at the front door. Eli and I slid toward it through the shadows. The house was dark, no lights except the glow of screens. On the front porch was Derek. And Rick. Eli looked to me, his eyes appraising my reaction even in the dark. He racked both slides, one at a time, and removed the rounds he had chambered. Holstered his guns and went back to the table. “You called them?” he asked his little brother back in the kitchen.

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “Good. We need help for this one.”

  I stood in the doorway, hands on jamb and door, my arms outstretched blocking the way, staring at them through the dark. Thinking of my partners, Traitors . . .

  CHAPTER 16

  It’s Called Method Acting

  “What good are you to this SAR?” I demanded. A SAR was a search and rescue, what trained people did when a hiker or a kid was lost in the mountains and emergency crews had to go in and find them. We were going into unknown territory to search for and rescue our people. I didn’t have to say it. Rick had known me long enough to understand.

  Eli said softly, “This is likely to become a close-combat situation. What we have is a reconnaissance mission and an NAR. Nonconventional assisted recovery and exfil. Let’s get the terminology right, people.”

  Exfil. Which was short for exfiltration. Got it.
r />   “And Janie is right,” Eli said, mockery in his tone. “You aren’t particularly stable these days, Ricky-Bo. Maybe you should sit this one out.”

  I shot a look at my partner. He was being deliberately provocative, which made no sense. Unless he was testing Rick’s ability to deal with the stress of a mission. Part of mission readiness. Yeah. That.

  Rick’s eyes began to glow, not the gorgeous black of his human days, but the green of his black wereleopard. “I don’t have control of my leopard yet, but I have other were gifts. I can get inside without being seen and look around.”

  “We have cameras for that,” Eli said. “Cameras don’t cheat or lie.”

  “Ouch,” Derek said. “Dude, that one went for the heart. Or the stones.” He grabbed my wrist and twisted it, breaking my hold, pushing his way inside. His body was stronger since he had started drinking vamp blood. His scent had changed too. And tonight he smelled of Leo. The MOC himself had fed his part-time Enforcer. It occurred to me then that I had fed on vamps fairly often in the last months, for healing, and hadn’t gotten noticeably stronger. Just healed. What was with that?

  I quickly blocked the entrance again and felt Beast rising in my eyes but couldn’t see her glowing in Rick’s, not with his cat staring out. “PsyLED wants in on this operation? Why?”

  “Jane,” he said, the single word tender and soft as a breath, voice laced with what might have been pain. Or a really good con.

  “Don’t.”

  He looked away and back and ran one hand through his beautiful hair. Now that he had found his cat, his hair seemed to gleam in the night. “Okay. PsyLED has intel that will be helpful. Has resources that will be helpful. I’m offering them all. To you.”

  “I don’t need your help. I don’t want your help. I don’t need or want you in my life.”

  “Okay. You don’t need anything. Maybe your partners do. And I need something. Just one thing. To explain what happened with Paka when I walked away from you.”