“Her magics, her scent, her person. Yes, and forever. Why do you ask?”
“Your words have been most helpful,” Eli said.
“The trade was acceptable though dreadful, the memories harrowing,” Ming said. “But it was fair. My past is mine again, no matter how horrible. Go away. Find the girl. Bring her to Leo. You are dismissed.”
And for once I didn’t mind the send-off. I wanted out of there too.
The door thumped and sealed. I pulled my cell. Without telling Eli what I was doing, I called Bruiser. When he answered I said, “I need to see the pit. Can you arrange a helicopter to take Eli and me?” When he said yes, I added, “I’ll need to change into bloodhound form when we get there. I need to smell the pit.” I ended the call.
Eli said, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Me neither, but we need to know what the girl was up to. Her scent is . . . I don’t know. Not right. Too strong, too angry, too something. I smelled it last night, but it’s all mixed up in my human brain. I need to shift. I need to figure out what I figured out last night and then forgot when I shifted. And if she was drinking from a vampire, then she wanted the blood to give her power to do more than what we’ve seen so far.” My fear was that she wanted to be able to control people—humans, witches, and especially vamps, all vamps—without sticking them with a pin.
* * *
I had changed clothes in the locker room and was wearing loose, baggy workout pants and a sweatshirt that would have fit Wrassler. I knew that for certain, because the shirt smelled like him. The big guy had lent me his own shift to shift in, which made me smile inside and out.
My bare feet were cold in the helo, and the lack of coms was isolating but gave me time to think. I grew even more chilled when the copter set down. The rotors were still turning as Bruiser opened the side door and the chilly fall night air, filled with helo exhaust, swept inside. It was still dark, though the eastern horizon had grayed slightly when I stepped out onto the half-dried black mud of the landing site. The police were long gone, the scents telling me that they had left only recently, driving out of the Waddill Wildlife Refuge through the two-rut dirt road that bisected the property. The land smelled of swamp and frustrated humans and animals and birds. It also smelled of the Comite River, which flowed nearby.
Eli and Bruiser and I stepped into a metal johnboat and Bruiser shoved off, calling to the pilot, “Wait for us.”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot replied, lighting a cigar. Normally I loved the smell of cigar, but not with my nose so sensitive and the cigar so cheap. Ick.
Bruiser pulled the small engine’s recoil starter, and the sputter filled the night, along with more exhaust, and I sneezed to clear my head of the foul stinks. As he steered us slowly through the wet hell of swamp at night, the air quickly cleared, leaving the swamp stink, of fish, gators, rotting vegetation, and stagnant water. When he finally turned off the small motor and beached us, the sky was lighting.
I had to get this done fast or risk staying in dog form all day. Not gonna happen. I wasn’t going to endanger my memory and identity. Bruiser tied us off, and by prearrangement, he and Eli stepped off the boat, leaving me on it, silent, neither one arguing about my choice, which I appreciated.
I took up the fetish necklace and let myself drop into the meditative state that was easiest to shift from, trying to ignore the men’s soft voices talking. I dropped down and down, and found the snake in the heart of the marrow. The genetic material from the bloodhound whose bones and teeth had been donated to the fetish necklace. Her accidental death had allowed me to use her RNA and DNA to assume her shape.
It didn’t take nearly as long as it used to, to find the coiled snake of bloodhound genetic code. Suddenly I was wrapped in the Gray Between, my bones sliding and snapping and painpainpain like being flayed alive.
* * *
I stepped from the boat, putting my front paws on land, my nose so full of wonderful smells that I nearly fell into the water when the johnboat slid away from shore while my back paws were still on the boat seat. Stupid. I leaped the rest of the way and Bruiser slipped a leash around my neck, presumably so that he would have a way to pull me back if I accidentally went swamp-swimming.
He led me over mud-crusted, muddy, and some semidry ground, my big paws tripping over ruts and a two-liter cola bottle full of human urine. Fortunately it was sealed with the screw-on cap. Unfortunately other humans hadn’t been so kind and had relieved themselves behind trees, on bracken, and in the swamp water itself. The stink of human pee was everywhere.
I stopped and let the scents filter through my brain. There had been eight humans here, working up the crime scene. Seven were male, one was female. Each had his and her own particular scent pattern, and I was far better than I had been at differentiating them. I discovered that I could tell age range, race, health conditions, and that one of the men was sleeping with the woman. Dog noses were amazing.
Beneath the fresh scents were older ones, of Onorios and the humans who had helped to rescue Ming, all familiar from my Beast form. Some known intimately from my hound nose.
I opened my eyes and looked for Eli. I whined. As if able to read my mind even with me in dog shape, he reached into a thigh pocket of his cargo pants and removed a leather drawstring bag. He nursed the object inside to the lip of the bag without touching it, and dropped to his knees. I put my nose on the thing.
It smelled of iron, nitrocellulose, lead, lawn chemicals, magic and . . . the girl. I snuffled all over it, getting drool on it, but making sure I had the scent. I put my nose to the ground and began sniffing the patch of land in a grid pattern. My nose caught the scent instantly. She had been here. She been all over the site. But it had been a while.
I sniffed and learned and sniffed and . . . I understood. I froze, going as still as a vamp. Knowing. Knowing. I held the understanding inside me, my dog body still as a pointer, unmoving as the bits and pieces fell together. The scents filled my head, filled me. Filled everything and . . .
“Jane? It’s nearly dawn. You need to shift.”
I shook myself and whined. Looked up at man. At other man. Shook again, uncertain. Man held new scent pattern to my nose. I sniffed. Female, not Caucasian. Dog. Big-cat.
The part of me that was still Jane ripped aside the nose-suck and shoved the bloodhound away. I leaped to the side, ripping the leash out of Bruiser’s hand, and raced to the boat. I jumped into the johnboat, sending it waffling on the water. Bracing my paws out, keeping my balance, I realized that I was trembling with cold. Even with my dog coat.
I reached into the Gray Between.
* * *
I pulled the oversized sweats on me just as it started to rain. I was colder than I should have been, shivering, but I could worry about that later. “Y’all! I got it. And it’s bad!”
They scrambled into the boat and Bruiser started the engine with a single ripping jerk. Eli took one look at me and opened his gobag. He popped three hand warmers, tucked them under my arms and into my waistband, shook out a rain-shedding blanket, which he wrapped around me. “Thanks,” I said over the boat roar.
The warmth hit me fast and I huddled into the blanket, holding in the heat from the chemical packs. He also opened two Snickers bars and four energy bars, and I ate, not talking, thinking. I had to address the being-too-cold thing, but there were more important things to discuss, the moment we were airborne. This time, Bruiser gave me some excellent ear protectors attached to a headset and I realized that he and Eli had been chatting privately on the trip to the wildlife refuge, chatting and leaving me out. I could worry about that later, adding to the rather long list of things to deal with when my life became normal. Whatever normal was.
I swallowed the last of the Snickers without tasting the chocolate and nuts, and felt more stable as I started in on the energy bars. “I got the scent of the girl witch,” I said over the muted hel
o roar. “It was a mutating scent, fluctuating, morphing into something else.”
“You saying she was a skinwalker, babe?”
I wish. “No.” I looked at Bruiser. “She’s a lot more like an Onorio.”
Bruiser’s eyes met mine for a shocked heartbeat and jerked away, thoughts racing behind his eyes, the vision reminiscent of Ming’s eyes in her cage, too fast to follow. Even his scent was too fast to follow, and my nose was now spectacular by human norm.
“Bruiser?”
“Humans have attempted to become Onorio without a Mithran’s approval, holding the Mithran captive. It has never been successful. Mithrans eventually compel the human to free them and then the humans die. A witch, damping a Mithran’s ability to compel, attempting the same thing . . . If she had the formula . . . It might work. And she would be dangerous. Beyond dangerous.”
I said, “Add it to her being a homogeneous witch, one with two witch genes, one from her father and one from her mother, then things get kinda freaky. And this witch chick is freaky. Bad, sick, nutso, got her panties in a wad, wants to blow up the world, mad über-supervillain freaky.
“Worse,” I said. “Or maybe not worse but adding to the problem in ways I can’t describe, there are other scents. Ming. Iron and salt. Other humans. Two in particular, male, who might be distantly related to her. Cousins. Maybe. Something like that.”
I stuck my nose up and pulled in scents in with a scree of sound. “Problem. Put us down over there.” I pointed. Bruiser relayed my orders to the pilot and the helo banked hard enough to throw me into the seat belt. He turned on the landing lights to reveal a small islet with tire tracks across it. Trusting the tracks, he set the bird down gingerly.
I stayed in the helo, wrapped in the blanket and heated by the hand warmers, but the guys got out. It was light enough out to see that there were a lot of gator slides on the muddy banks. Gators push with legs and clawed feet through muck to the edge of a water source and then push off, letting gravity slide them into the water. The trails were long and slithery. And wide. Big gators. I sniffed. “Humans. There.” I pointed. “And dogs.” I wrapped myself more in the blanket and Bruiser and Eli stepped to the muddy edge.
“Skull,” Eli said, jutting with his chin because his hands were suddenly holding weapons. “There.”
“Another,” Bruiser said, pointing.
“I count three human skulls,” Eli said, “that one shattered, probably by gator teeth and jaws.” He took a number of photos of the crime scene. “Portions of several dog skulls. That one is fresh.” He pointed, and took a last photograph.
“Feeding her dogs wasn’t good enough. Tau wanted magic, and for that Ming needed human blood, I’m guessing at least once a month.”
“Why did she leave the first two humans and none of the other bodies?” Eli asked.
I gave him a small shrug, tilting my head to the side, the gesture mostly hidden by the enfolding blanket. “Smell? The first two were bones already and underwater.”
“And the new bodies floated while decomposing,” Bruiser said, “and the smell of decomposition was horrible to her. Good supposition.”
“Four on the surface,” Eli said. “Concur. Likely more bones in the muck at the bottom. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 16
Dang-Er-Sus?
Back inside the helo, Bruiser said to the pilot, “Pass along these coordinates to the sheriff’s department and the detective handling the investigation of the pit.”
“Yes, sir.”
He switched off the pilot’s access to our coms. “Jane? Love. . . . Clarify for me, please. Were the women here? Was Antoine?”
“Yes. All three. And two human males who were helping Tau bring humans here, but their scents had degraded from rain and the churning of the mud. I think . . . I think that I’d recognize them if I came into contact with them. If I was in bloodhound form. But I can’t say for certain about in human form. There was something awful about their scents. Like drugs, maybe.”
And the stink of Ming, starving and insane and raving. How many had she killed while trapped in the pit? How many were her fault? Any of them? I didn’t know.
“So we can add murder to the long list of crimes committed by Tau and Marlene. The Witch Council of New Orleans could turn over the crimes to the law enforcement authorities,” Eli said.
“Or take them out themselves,” Bruiser said.
“Or call in a hunter,” Eli said.
I knew he meant me. Turning away, I stared out the window at the rapidly approaching New Orleans landscape. “What about the Onorio scent?” I asked.
“I’ll have to ask the priestesses,” Bruiser said. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of this before.”
“The scent wasn’t just Onorio,” I said. “It leaned toward vampire. Maybe a new kind of vamp.” Vamps had an uncanny desire to play with nature and create new things, things that were not bound by the usual strictures of vamp-dom: daylight, silver, blood, the devoveo. What if the double-gened witch had tapped into that desire in Ming and used it? The witch might have turned herself into anything. Something new. Something so powerful that . . . that I couldn’t fight it. Couldn’t fight her.
Eli pulled his cell and read aloud. “Alex found a last will and testament for Mildred and Eugene Nicaud, in 1957, who left four peacock pins to Simon Nicaud and his wife, Alva. Antoine Nicaud was their sole heir and he inherited the four brooches from his parents.”
Four brooches. And Rick had said Antoine was originally from the Pedro Cays, islands south of Jamaica. Rick didn’t know anything about Antoine’s magic or training except he had maybe apprenticed to an African priestess.
Bethany was an African priestess. Bethany had bitten me, to heal me, once. She had access to every part of vamp central. She could have gone into the women’s locker room and scraped my DNA out of the drain. But Bethany was nutso and I couldn’t quite see her being so linear and driven.
Bruiser asked, “Are the names confirmed? Are there photographs of the brooches? Any proof whether they were sold?”
“Four brooches,” I said. I had thought we were in the clear as to the brooches and the witches’ ability to control vamps. I closed my eyes, imagining all the crazy spells they could throw with the two brooches.
Bruiser nodded. “Do we have any insurance listings to confirm where the missing brooches are now?”
“Alex is searching,” Eli said.
“If she still has them,” I said, “and if she is what I think she is, then we’re in big trouble. Tell Alex to check marriage license for Marlene and birth records for Tau. A will for Antoine. Text Molly and have her get to Lachish, right now, about Marlene and Tau Nicaud. She can’t play games anymore. If we’re right, and Tau is the daughter of Marlene and Antoine’s wife, then she might carry two witch genes.” Like Angie Baby, I thought again. “Meaning that she is beyond scary, crazy powerful. She could be a magical nuclear bomb waiting to go off. And, after drinking blood from a vamp who had been eating rotting human flesh, probably just crazy.”
* * *
Eli bundled me into the limo and turned on the heat. Both men turned their backs so I could dress in my own clothes, but I pulled the warm sweatshirt back over my street clothes for the extra warmth and comforting scent. As I dressed, Alex texted more info on the brooches. Eli read and told us, “No records on sale or insurance, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s possible that all four were spelled or that only two were spelled. Alex checked probate and found that Marlene Nicaud was left two brooches and the girl was left two. The women received the brooches about six months ago.” He looked up at me. “That gave them six months to learn how to use the brooches. Six months to bleed Ming of Mearkanis, who we found because the brooch we had tracked to the brooch on Ming. Which means that we could use the two brooches we have to track the other two.”
Bruiser chuckled and the two men
exchanged a complicated fist bump of victory. I said, “Unless that’s what they want you to do.” The men dropped fists, considering. “In which case you would be walking into a trap and go boom.”
“True,” Bruiser said. “And it also means that this started long before you got to NOLA, Jane. So Antoine’s original plan would have been in place before you killed Immanuel. Which means that plan, whatever it was in the beginning, was taken over and subsumed by Tau and Marlene. But it might still be in effect, like a second trap we could walk into unaware, at any time. We need to find Tau and Marlene. Get Alex to do property searches and credit—”
“Being done as we fly,” Eli said.
I added, “They have DNA from . . . maybe all of us.” My cell buzzed with a text and I said, “Molly.” It was a reply to the thread where I asked her about breaking DNA spells. She had texted, and I read aloud, “Piece of cake. Antigenetic spells were some of the first defensive workings ever made. I can put together a couple dozen in a couple hours.”
Bruiser nodded, turning his unfocused gaze out to the sun, rising over the flat wet world in a wash of gold and pinks.
* * *
It was after dawn when we reached home and I was exhausted. I needed to stuff myself on food, needed to sleep, but the house was full and noisy when we entered, and I had a feeling sleep wasn’t going to be mine today, not here. Before the door even closed I spun on a heel, leaving Eli inside, and jogged back to the limo. “Bunk at your place?”
Bruiser opened the door, his eyes warm. “My bed is far more comfortable than a bunk.”
I fell inside and the door closed. “True,” I said. “But right now I’d take the floor if the place was quiet.”
Bruiser’s lips turned up in a smile I didn’t see often. “I don’t think we’ve ever done it on the floor— Well, nearly.” He tapped the limo floor with his toe. “Nearly. On this floor.” A low-key thrill ran through me, but before I could reply he pressed the limo intercom and said, “I have an order to be picked up at Stanley Restaurant on St. Ann Street.”