Cold Reign

  “Who made the COD ruling?” I asked.

  “Amaury Pellissier.”

  “We wanted to question him,” a self-important voice said.

  I looked over a shoulder and spotted the owner of the voice. She was the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish, and her photo had been plastered over half the parish for months, on billboards that promised to get supernats out of her parish. She had won reelection, but clearly not for brains.

  I raised my eyebrows and wiped my blade on the soaked and stinking cloth of the vamp’s jacket. The blade wasn’t bloody, but it was gooey. I stood, focused on the politician. Keeping my voice toneless, I said, “You wanted to question a rogue vampire.” Sheriff Pansy Knight was a tall woman and clearly wasn’t accustomed to looking up at another woman, but in my combat boots, I was six foot two to three, a good four inches taller than her. I could play nice-nice or I could go for pain-in-the-butt. I was going for PITB but Eli intervened.

  “Eli Younger, ma’am, of Yellowrock Securities.” He put out his hand. “Unless you prefer sir. Some sheriffs do. And we aim to be courteous.”

  I slid my partner a look but he was focused on the sheriff. I had seen that look before, when he met Sylvia. Maybe things were worse than I thought. Maybe I should have tried to be a marriage counselor. Or romantic relationships counselor. Or cracked their heads together. Whatever.

  Pansy narrowed her eyes but took Eli’s hand. “Ma’am is fine.”

  To me she added, “We needed to question him.”

  My partner might want to be nice. I didn’t, and I laughed. “He’d been dead for a hundred years, Pansy.” She had a girly name. No way was I not gonna use it. “He had nothing left to chat about, not without a master vamp to feed him and try to bring his brain back online. He was an old rogue killing machine.”

  “You like killing rogues, don’t you? Makes you feel special?”

  Eli dropped her hand fast and the interested look vanished. I just chuckled and sheathed my vamp-killer. “Don’t try to bait me, Pansy. I’m not that easy.”

  “I don’t like your kind in my parish.”

  My kind? Cherokee? More likely it was the fact that I was a supernat and had been outed slowly over the last few months. Or someone had told her personally. “Oh? So the next time someone tries to eat your high school basketball team, you want me to let the rogue kill kids? And announce to the world that it was your call?” I stepped to Eli, my back to her, an insult when delivered by skinwalkers, and finished over my shoulder with, “The Master of the City will be calling. Have a nice convo.”

  “I won’t talk to his kind.”

  I chuckled again. “Yeah? Kid,” I said to my other partner, “send this entire thing to the reporter from WGNO. That should make great late-night news, combined with us saving that kid from another rogue. An hour later, post it up on the website and anywhere else you want. When the sheriff apologizes, it can come down. Eli?”

  “Got your six,” he muttered. And he sounded pissed. Good. We walked away.

  CHAPTER 2

  That’s Pure Politics, Babe

  The wind whipped in, bringing vamp scents, pepper and lily and papyrus, more acerbic scents like turmeric and sage. And human blood. And sex. Always that. Always together. I leaped over the railing—gunwale? side?—and came face- to-face with Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans, and the two minor-level vamps and three human-dinners-on-two-legs who were fanned out behind him. I glanced at each and drew in the air in little bursts of breath, taking in their faces and scents to remember and catalog later. Leo’s territory had grown and there were a lot of newbies I hadn’t gotten to know yet. Worse, we had fangheads visiting from distant U.S. cities who had sworn to Leo, back when an epidemic threatened the U.S. vamps. There were too many newbies to make anyone safe.

  I opened my mouth to say hi to the chief suckhead but caught myself. “Pellissier,” I said, much more politely and only a beat too late.

  “Enforcer,” Leo said.

  “Sir,” Eli said to him. “You heard?”

  “I did,” Leo said. “So did the lovely reporter. She has one of the new directional microphones developed by the military.”

  “Was it a gift from the MOC?” Eli asked.

  “Such is always a possibility.” Leo smiled, the professional smile, the one he shared with the public, one that never reached his eyes. “She was incensed. I am certain the footage will make its way onto the television newscast tonight.

  “However, we have a greater problem. Wait for me at my limo.” He stepped gracefully over the side of the boat and dropped to the deck, landing with the poise and balance of a ballet dancer. Or a swordsman. Leo was dressed casually, for him, in a black suit and white shirt. Black shoes, no tie. His shoulder-length black hair was tied back with a black ribbon in a loose queue, and it gleamed in the harsh lights as he strode toward the bodies and the law officers. The MOC was ticked off, his magic pulsing out in a series of waves that raised the hair on my arms.

  I glanced back at the reporter and her cameraman, who was working with a mic on a long arm, one that had an inverted umbrella-shaped top. The umbrella part was a clear material that waved slightly in the breeze.

  “Jane?” Eli asked.

  “Wait,” I muttered. “I want to see this.”

  Leo walked to the sheriff and looked up at her. Leo had been well fed as a human and was tall for his time but not for this era. He focused on her eyes and smiled. I felt his power shift and wrap around the woman. She extended a hand. All by herself. Or so it would look to the reporter and her cameraman. Leo accepted it. And his smile intensified, that beguiling, electrifying, terrifying smile of the mesmerizing predator, the stare of the viper, the gaze of the raptor, the snare of the lover, intense and penetrating. His magic whispered along my face and neck and throat, teased through my hair.

  “Pansy,” Leo said. “It’s been years.”

  “What?” she whispered, her eyes too wide, bewitched. Or bevamped.

  “You are as lovely as ever, my darling,” Leo said, lifting her hand to his lips.

  My eyebrows went up.

  Eli laughed softly, the tone pure evil. “Smart bastard.”

  Pansy shook herself like a dog shakes off cold water. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

  “Now, now, you must forgive me for not keeping you close. You were destined for much better things than one of my playthings.”

  “What?” Pansy said, disconcerted and with a dawning anger.

  But Leo took Pansy’s hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm. Inexorably, he turned her to the side, vamp strength overpowering the human musculature. Pansy’s body language indicated that she was trying to decide what to do: scream, deny, resist. But the half second of indecision sealed her fate as she again met the eyes of the MOC. Her body relaxed and she followed him to the side. Pansy was clearly one of those humans easily mesmerized. Leo’s vamp crew shook the hands of the other law enforcement officers while his humans knelt on the deck, where they began the process of tucking the bodies into body bags. Two of the deputies started to argue, but the vamps did . . . something. And the complaints stopped.

  For Leo and the vamps to be using this much power, they surely had fed from the body of the Son of Darkness hanging in the lowest basement at vamp HQ. The blood of that thing was addicting. I really needed to find a way to kill it. I’d tried silver poisoning and cutting out its heart, and so far it hadn’t begun to decompose. Scuttlebutt said it seemed to be healing. Maybe burning the SOD in a kiln or a cremation retort would work.

  “Come on,” Eli said. “We need to talk.”

  “Okay.” I frowned but followed my partner back along the pier to the limo.

  Over the earbuds Alex said, “So Leo used to date Pansy. But he dropped her? And her paranormal-hating is really woman-scorned stuff?” I could hear keys clicking and soft tapp
ing in the background as he checked into Pansy’s past.

  “I doubt it,” Eli said. “Though it doesn’t really matter what happened, if anything, between them. That’s how the press and her constituents will read it. With that one line, Leo put doubt on her entire paranormal-hating campaign strategy. Spin. Spin is everything.”

  “That’s Uncle Sam’s training, isn’t it?” I asked

  Eli slanted a look my way. “That’s pure politics, Babe.”

  The chauffeur opened the limo door and Eli and I got in. The privacy panel was up, and Eli turned off his cell. I glanced at mine, hoping for a text from Bruiser, but there was nothing. I turned it off and gave the cell to Eli, and he tucked them both into his gear bag. He turned on a little electronic buzzer inside and zipped the bag shut. The white noise kept anyone from using the cells as listening devices. The limo was swept every day to remove possible bugs. Leo did business in here, and he wanted total confidentiality. Now we could talk freely.

  “Leo just ruined her career, didn’t he?” I said.

  “Hatred is its own reward.”

  “Who said that? Sun Tzu?” Eli was reading The Art of War for the hundredth time.

  “Eli Younger. Reworked from some kitty cartoon.”

  “So why did we go black?” I asked, talking about the cells.

  “Because the Kid sent me a text before we got here. It’s about the vamps’ lower fangs. There was a rogue-vamp blood-family in Bavaria back in the fifteen hundreds. They had upper hinged fangs and stationary lower fangs. They were curved and were used for tearing out the victim’s throats. Naturaleza 2.0.”

  Naturaleza vamps treated all humans as prey, to be used, hunted, drunk dry, abused. They called humans cattle. Mithrans, like the vamps in New Orleans, weren’t much better, but at least they gave lip service to the importance of humans. And then the date hit me. “Berkins was turned in 1512.”

  “Revenants are most easily raised by their sire or the sire of the bloodline, the big kahuna of the clan bloodline. So if the person who turned him, or said big kahuna, is currently in New Orleans, that person might be able to raise him as a revenant.”

  It took a single breath to clarify for me. “An EV is here?”

  “Yeah. A European vamp. At least one. That’s what Alex thinks.”

  “Why? Why show up and tip your hand about who you are?”

  Eli opened the limo fridge, popped two Coke cans, icy and dripping with condensation, and held one out to me. I drank, not even tasting the cola. “Insufficient data.”

  “So who would it be? Who would the master be?”

  “The Kid thinks it might be Louis Seven.”

  Yellowrock Securities had recently received info about the European Court of Mithrans. Louis VII was a powerful vamp in the inner cadre of the vamp-emperor. He had been a king himself in France when human, and had been called Louis le Jeune, or Louis the Young. Or the Younger, for short. Funny about the way it matched with the Youngers’ last name. “Okay. Louis Seven. Was he on the roster as one of the EVs we might expect as part of the parley?”

  “Yeah.” The European vamps were planning to take over the U.S. hunting territories and cattle, which meant coming to visit Leo—a visit he couldn’t refuse—and then killing Leo. The negotiations for how many vamps, which ones, how many of their humans, and how long their stay would be had been ongoing for months. I hadn’t bothered to do much more than scan the bios of the players because they kept changing with every diplomatic snag. “The Kid sent me a history lesson on Louis the Young,” Eli said. “You want it?”

  “Not really. But I don’t think I have a choice.” I sounded grumpy because I didn’t particularly care for history, but with the layered motivations of the long-lived Mithrans and Naturaleza, history was not only important, it was vital to staying alive. History had always been about people I loved being dead, or undead people trying to kill me or Leo, or both. I slouched back on the leather seat, prepared to be bored.

  “Louis was a Capetian King of the Franks from 1137 until his supposed death at age sixty, in September 1180. But he was really turned by Eleanor of Aquitaine during their marriage. He swore to the Vampira Carta, but he’s bloodthirsty and still thinks of himself as the French king.”

  “Yada yada yada. Old fangheads. Got it.”

  Eli leaned toward me, elbows on his knees, hands dropped and fingers folded loosely together holding his Coke. “This is where it gets interesting. The line of the Capetian Kings ruled France from 987 to 1316, thirteen generations in almost 330 years. Then the line ran out of male heirs and the direct line of the House of Capet came to an end in 1328, when there was no surviving male heir. When the last Capet died, the throne passed to the House of Valois.” Eli went silent.

  I sat up and stared at him. His posture was casual and relaxed, deceptively so. The lights through the heavily tinted windows created shadows that seemed to crawl across his face. “Valois,” I said. “That’s important. Somewhere in my notes Grégoire was intro’d as Blood Master of Clan Arceneau”—I dredged up the phrasing—“of the court of Charles the Wise, fifth of his line, in the Valois Dynasty, turned by Charles—the well beloved, the mad—the son of the king.” Grégoire, or Blondie, as I called him when I was being obnoxious, was Leo’s secundo heir. And Leo’s BFF. And Leo’s lover. “If a Capet or a Valois is in town, then Grégoire could be in danger?”

  “And Leo. And some of his people. And if Alex’s line of reasoning is correct, one or more may be here. In the city.”

  “Ahead of the official parley. Sooo. Maybe to cause trouble to divert our attention from something bigger. Or as part of a sneak attack, to be followed by a bigger sneak attack? Something they’ve been planning for years? Decades?” I put it together with what I already knew. “A king of France—” I interrupted myself as a stray thought intruded and went backward in history. “And Hugh Capet was turned by . . . ?”

  “The bag of bones hanging in sub-five basement in vamp HQ.”

  “Well, crap.” I rolled the half-empty cola can across my forehead, hoping the chill would cool off my brain. The Son of Darkness, or what was left of him, was hanging in the lowest sub-basement of the Mithran Council Chambers, and he was Leo’s source of power, an addictive blood-meal, and nothing but trouble, even back when he was sane-ish and free. As a piece of undead flesh with no heart, he was a bargaining chip or an excuse for a vamp war.

  Everything in the vamp sub-basements was trouble, from the paintings and mementoes stored there, to the SOD, to the redheaded bloodsucker prisoner named Adrianna. I’d killed her a few times already, and each time Leo had brought her back. She was a future problem, though, not part of this.

  Deep inside, Beast thought at me, Cold mountain stream. Good water. Not stinky water here. Want to go home.

  “I know,” I muttered. “I know.” I waved away Eli’s questioning expression and drank down the Coke, hoping for a boost in my metabolism. Caffeine and sugar are two of the few stimulants or depressants that work on my kind. “So the vamps who are rising revenant are tied into the historical line that sired Grégoire.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it too big a jump to be worried that any still-living vamps who were made by the Capetians might respond too? Like Grégoire?”

  “Might have already done so,” Eli said grimly. “We’ve been out of pocket.” He reached for the gear bag and returned my cell. We’d been offline for a little over five minutes. That was about the max we could manage while working. We turned on the cells and I texted the Kid about dinner, with a phrase that meant record our conversation. It said simply, “Takeout from Marlene’s.” Alex would record everything said and we could go back over it later, picking out details.

  “I have a feeling that Leo’s appearance at the wharf tonight wasn’t happenstance but to prove something to himself,” Eli said. “Now we just have to get him to tell us what and either confirm or d
eny our speculation.”

  “I’ll get right on that.” I tucked the cell in my jacket pocket and finished off the Coke as the limo door opened and wet, fog-dense air billowed in. Rain was starting, which would decrease the fog but make driving just as dangerous. The chauffeur stood there with an umbrella over his boss. Leo slid across the seat: dry, elegant, relaxed, and satisfied. The devil in an eight-thousand-dollar Brioni suit. Lights pulled up behind us, a second limo arriving. The six others—vamps and humans—raced through the rain to the car and tossed two body bags inside to the floor, and five of them got in after. They pulled away at speed. The sixth vamp came to the window where Eli sat and tapped. When the window went down he held out his open palm. “Key fob,” he said. It was Tex, a vamp turned in the eighteen hundreds, tall, rangy, and with a distinct Texan accent.

  “Why?” Eli asked.

  Leo said, “I’ve arranged to have your vehicle taken to the Council Chambers where you may retrieve it, that we might speak in privacy.”

  It was an order, politely stated. Tex would take our SUV and do exactly as Leo had said, but during that time it would be searched for information about us and our activities and scoured for bugs, and new GPS devices would be implanted in case the one in the SUV’s computer system was somehow disabled. All this because I refused to be bound to Leo, which would have allowed him access to my mind and guaranteed my loyalty. He had tried a forced binding once and it hadn’t worked out so well for either of us. Binding a two-souled skinwalker is harder than it looks.

  Expressionless, Eli handed over the fob. Tex gave me a minuscule apologetic shrug, trotted to our vehicle, and drove away, too fast for conditions. The window went up and Leo’s limo followed more slowly, the tires silent on the asphalt, the movement of the vehicle almost undetectable.

  “Update?” Eli asked.

  Leo sighed, a totally unnecessary breath, and let his TV-bonhomie face fall into more normal, arrogant lines. “It has been a vexing evening.” He reached for a bottle of champagne I had only noticed as part of the background, in a silver bucket. He went through the process of opening the top, as if the steps soothed him. When the cork burst out with a soft pop, he poured the bubbly stuff into three glasses and passed us each one. Out of politeness, I sipped. I’m not fond of alcohol, except a good malty beer, but maybe Leo would talk fast if I seemed to go along. The bubbly wasn’t as good as Coke—not even as good as canned Coke—not that I’d ever say that. I’ve learned a few things in my time in NOLA, and keeping my mouth shut is one of them. Well, most of the time.