Callie

It took three days for Eva to heal, even with the full power of the Sanctuary she’d built, and Callie’s combined light and skill besides.

  “Why didn’t you send for someone?” Callie demanded, stemming her friend’s blood loss with every towel in the place. “I know you have ways.”

  Eva swallowed. “All I could do…to get back.” She grinned, and her Irish lilt seeped into her words. “Felt you coming, though, clumsy as a newborn foal. Thought I was gonna have to pull you through myself.”

  “Wasn’t it you who told me we’re immortal, not invincible?”

  “Nah.” Eva muttered, head slipping to one side. “”Must’ve been Brighid. Sounds like her.”

  “How many were there?” Callie asked, wondering how much more blood there could possibly be.

  “Hmmm?” Eva had begun to lose consciousness.

  “Stay with me Keeper, and tell me what happened. How many Hell Hounds were there?”

  “Dunno, exactly. A lot. They came from everywhere.” Eva forced her eyes open. “Five.”

  Callie stilled, and stared. “Five Hell Hounds?” Bloody Hell and all its Fallen Angels, Lucifer included. They had barely handled one, and it had taken the two of them.

  “Dead. Five—no, six. Six dead.”

  Callie sank back onto the bare wood floor. Eva didn’t believe in possessions. She slept on a bare cot and lived out of suitcase smaller than Callie’s. There was always coffee in the cupboards, but little food, because she ate out most of the time. Like Callie, she had never learned to cook—too busy, too many people to save.

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  “What?” Callie came back to the present, to Eva’s pale face.

  Eva gave her arm a weak swat where it was busy trying to hold the rest of her blood in. “Sent that postcard a week ago. What took you so long to get here?”

  “I just got back today. From Vancouver.” Callie got back to work.

  “Not that damned hydra nest again?”

  “You know it?”

  “Every hundred years or so some storm or blooming tourist following some half-brained rumor of Canada’s own Nessie kicks up the proverbial dust, and here we are.” She coughed again, harder this time. “I’m glad you took care of it this time—that particular hunt was getting boring.”

  “This Hell Hound incursion—Eva, what are we going to do?” Callie looked into her eyes, and was truly afraid for the first time since the night Johnny had her shot. “I can’t take him out alone. I don’t think even the two of us can. We need a plan.”

  “We do at that.” Eva winced. “And there goes another pint. I propose step one of our grand master plan have something to do with stitching me up.”

  In between bouts of healing and alternately spoon feeding Eva the soup of the day and a variety of herbal teas Callie chased down every lead she could dig up on the latest rash of loup-garou sightings. Whilst so doing she hoped like hell Eva was coming up with a plan, because they were going to need a real humdinger to get out of this one.

  There were at least four, from what she could gather. Eva had always told her half the hunt involved talking to people. “It’s true people make horrifying witnesses,” she said. “Especially after they’ve been talking to each other, stirring one another up with what they think they know. But talk to enough people, and you’ll find a common thread. Find enough threads, you have a pattern. And then, Callie-girl, you have a hunt.”

  There was nothing Eva loved more than a hunt—the more challenging, the better. Eva was one of the oldest living Keepers, and had lost count of the hunts she’d come home from. She had her favorites, granted, and was known to wax poetical and in excruciating detail when the rum was flowing. And in New Orleans, the rum was always flowing—if only because the water was so utterly undrinkable.

  Four Hell Hounds. At least.

  Damn bloody hell.

  When she got back, Eva was up and about, if limping and holding her side. “You shouldn’t be on your feet yet,” Callie told her. “And we still need a plan.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we have one,” Eva said with a grin as she lowered herself into a chair. “Be a dear and make some tea?”

  Callie moved to Eva’s kitchenette to set the kettle on her ancient stove stop. “Well, thank Brighid. What have you got?”

  “Tea first.”

  “Spoilsport.” But Callie made tea, bolstered by Eva’s return to semi-normalcy and her assurance she had a plan. Eva always had a plan.

  Her buoyed spirits didn’t last long. She handed Eva her tea and sat on the edge of the rickety coffee table across from her friend, and listened.

  It wasn’t promising.

  “Oh, come on Callie-girl,” Eva urged, her Irish lilt in full bloom and a wicked glint in her eyes. “What could be more fun than a game of hide-and-seek in the Big Easy?”

  “Well,” Callie reasoned, “it’s not as though I haven’t been bait before.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Callie now understood where the term “whistling past a graveyard” came from.

  She went to the right bars, asked the right questions, passed twenty-dollar bills to the right people. Needless to say, this was proving an expensive endeavor—but if it turned out the way Eva planned, she would be free of Johnny once and for all. Eva’s plans were magnificent things, full of promise and glorious triumph.

  The problem was, they never quite worked out exactly as planned—a fact Eva was made inordinately delighted by. Callie suspected her fellow Keeper made such grandiose plans specifically to see them blow up in her face, like a child lighting a surreptitious firecracker, tempting fate. Callie might find it equally entertaining, if she weren’t so often at the center of them.

  Callie crossed Jackson Square, pausing at the statue of Andrew Jackson with his hat raised in the air as the wind whipped through every individual branch, leaf, and blade of grass with heightened force, as though the city knew what was coming. To pass the time, and to draw attention to herself, she sang every Billie Holliday song in her repertoire. When that failed to garner so much as a promising bark, she switched to the Irish songs her mother used to sing when Callie was a child: Danny Boy, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, and Parting Glass.

  She walked passed the Square, singing quietly as she went, turning down damp and darkened streets, filled with anticipatory nerves and gratitude at the change in fashion in the last fifty years. Thanks to Eighties’ rock culture, she could now get away with wearing a fluid—if loud—knee-length dress paired with practical combat boots from her last war and a leather motorcycle jacket. She turned down more than one less than promising offer, and finally turned enough corners to take her from the stream of traffic.

  Somehow she ended up in Congo Square without quite realizing it. That’s when it went silent, and still with a sudden drop in pressure and sound that was quite literally breathtaking.

  That’s when the Hounds bayed.

  NINE