Black Water
Author: Faith Hunter
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Urban Fantasy; Fantasy; Paranormal; Vampires; Short Stories; Magic; Shapeshifters; Werewolves; Supernatural; Fiction
Description: A Jane Yellowrock story in Blood in Her Veins, featuring nineteen stories set in the Jane Yellowrock universe. When Jane killed a small pack of marauding werewolves, she had no idea that the female had a brother in Angola prison. John-Roy Wayne swore vengeance, escaped prison, and kidnapped two young women. Jane has no choice but to go after the human, who is far worse than she ever expected.

Also by Faith Hunter

The Jane Yellowrock Novels

Skinwalker

Blood Cross

Mercy Blade

Cat Tales (a short-story compilation)

Raven Cursed

Have Stakes Will Travel (a short-story compilation)

Death’s Rival

Blood Trade

The Rogue Mage Novels

Bloodring

Seraphs

Host

The Jane Yellowrock World Companion

Black Water

Stories from the World of Jane Yellowrock

Faith Hunter

InterMix Books, New York

INTERMIX BOOKS

PUBLISHED BY THE PENGUIN GROUP

PENGUIN GROUP (USA) LLC

375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014, USA

USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

BLACK WATER

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

PUBLISHING HISTORY

InterMix eBook edition / September 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Faith Hunter.

Excerpt from Broken Soul copyright © 2014 by Faith Hunter.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18815-0

INTERMIX

InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group
and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

INTERMIX® and the “IM” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

Version_1

This compilation is dedicated to the Kicker. We know who you are.

CONTENTS

Also by Faith Hunter

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Letter from the Author

Chronology of Books and Stories

Black Water

Snafu

Off the Grid

Special Preview of Broken Soul

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Hi, All!

Let me start by making a confession. Honestly? Until the Jane Yellowrock series, I never thought I could even write a short story. The length seemed too truncated to achieve any kind of character development or intensity of suspense. And then I started writing them. Oh My Gosh! The fun of kicking butt in very few words! The shorter format lets me learn things about Jane’s pals that I never did before, and delve into their backstories in ways that I can’t in a novel. It also lets me find and reveal things about Jane that I hadn’t known and sometimes try new weapons for Jane that might not make it into the longer format of a novel. In these two stories, I discovered lots of cool stuff about all the characters.

This collection includes two very long short stories and one shorter vignette. The long stories take place in between existing novels in the Jane Yellowrock series. “Black Water” sees Jane back in Chauvin, Louisiana, where she has some unfinished business, tied up with the family of Rick LaFleur.

The vignette, “Snafu,” is a fun snippet that gives a glimpse into Jane’s untold, early backstory. Fans always want to know how Jane got from the children’s home where she was raised to the job of rogue-vamp hunter. Well, here’s her first day on the job. It introduces Nomad, who becomes more than just a boss. You’ll definitely be hearing more about him in the future.

The last story, “Off the Grid,” is one I’m incredibly excited about. It’s from Jane’s point of view, and it introduces a character named Nell Nicholson. Nell popped into my head one day and I couldn’t shake this idea for a scene: her answering the door to Jane with a shotgun cocked. Who is this woman? Does she always answer the door with a gun? Why? What is she afraid of? Or maybe better—who is hunting her? As I began to explore who she was and what her abilities were, I realized her backstory was fascinating. She’s going to get involved in Jane’s world, and she’s also going to be the star of her own series of novels, debuting next year from Roc.

And finally you’re getting an exclusive preview: the first two chapters of Broken Soul, the next Jane Yellowrock novel. It hits the shelves October 7, 2014.

I hope you enjoy.

Faith Hunter

Chronology of Books and Stories

WeSa and the Lumber King (in the compilation Have Stakes Will Travel)

The Early Years (in the compilation Cat Tales)

Snafu (Prequel)

Cat Tats (in the compilation Cat Tales)

Kits (in the compilation Cat Tales)

Haints (in the compilation Have Stakes Will Travel)

Signatures of the Dead (in the anthology Strange Brew and the compilation Have Stakes Will Travel)

Skinwalker

First Sight (in the Jane Yellowrock Companion Guide)

Blood Cross

Mercy Blade

Easy Pickings (crossover, alternative universe e-novella with C. E. Murphy)

Blood, Fangs, and Going Furry (in the compilation Cat Tales)

Dance Master (in the Jane Yellowrock Companion Guide)

Raven Cursed

Cajun With Fangs (in the compilation Have Stakes Will Travel)

Golden Delicious (in the anthology An Apple for the Teacher)

Death’s Rival

Blood Trade

The Devil’s Left Boot (in the anthology Kicking It)

Beneath a Bloody Moon (a novella in the Jane Yellowrock Companion Guide)

Black Water (in the compilation Black Water)

Black Arts

Off the Grid (in the compilation Black Water)

Broken Soul

Dark Heir

Black Water

Author’s Note: This novella takes place (in the JY timeline) after Blood Trade and before Black Arts.

I took the long, bumpy roads south of New Orleans, to the backwaters of Louisiana, in Terrebonne Parish. I had been there recently with my business partners in Yellowrock Securities, Eli and Alex Younger. With us had been Special Agent, PsyLED, Rick LaFleur, and his supernat team, Brute and Pea. We had been hired to track and kill a werewolf pack, which we had done. We left the place better off than when we found it.

Or so I’d thought.

Until I’d received a text from Harold, who owned the Sandlapper Guesthouse with his wife, Clara. We’d stayed with them, partly because Harold was the uncle of my sorta boyfriend, Rick. Harold’s text was to the point: Man w gun looking for you. Come quick. On the heels of the text had been the news coming from Chauvin, Louisiana, today—video of cops at a crime scene, near the Sandlapper.

The press hadn’t said much except that a rampage had occurred in Chauvin and news vans were on the way with more to follow soon in this “Breaking news report.” Harold didn’t respond to my texts back. And Rick hadn’t replied to my texts asking for details. Harold and Clara were part of Rick’s extended family. He would know what had happened. And he wasn’t saying.

So here I was, riding Bitsa (built with bitsa this and bitsa that, from two rotted, rusted Harley bikes) down the horrible Louisiana roads and into danger—a man with a gun looking for me. Lately my enemies all had fangs, and most weres and vamps didn’t use guns. Humans used guns. I had no idea what human I had ticked off in Chauvin, but I was gifted that way—ticking off people. I had cleaned house, and someone wasn’t happy about it.

***

I pulled into the parking lot of the Sandlapper Guesthouse, on 56, south of Chauvin, wheeled between sheriff deputy cars, a CSI van, and video news vans. The deputies looked relaxed and at ease, so they had been here awhile and had everything under control, but the news teams were still active. Crap. I was gonna get filmed, appear on TV news, and then I’d have to explain to my business partners why I’d come back here, alone, without the team. They needed time off. They were human; I wasn’t. And the last job, here in Chauvin, had been draining. But that argument wasn’t going to fly and I knew it. I’d deal with that later. For now, I needed to get to Harold and Clara.

I cut off Bitsa, set the kick, bungeed my helmet to the back of the seat, stuck my hands in my pockets to appear nonthreatening to the sheriff’s deputies, and headed closer, wearing a friendly smile. I kept my face turned away from the news cameras, but if the media wanted to know who I was, they’d figure it out. There weren’t that many six-feet-tall, long-black-haired Cherokee females anywhere.

The cops studying me wore distinctly hostile faces, hands near gun butts, and I paused at the youngest cop, a redhead with freckles and bright eyes. Trying for innocent, I said, “Hey. What’s going on here?”

“You need to move along, miss,” the older one said, his hand sliding over his gun. The small strap that kept the weapon seated came unsnapped with a tiny click of sound. Somebody was in a mood. But I was smart enough not to say it.

Before I could reply, the wind shifted and I smelled the sickly stench of old blood. Human. I came to a stop, mouth open, breathing in air over my tongue and the roof of my mouth, scenting as my Beast did, with a soft scree of sound. I took the place in more carefully, smelling the old blood, the fresher stink of injured humans, and the nitrocellulose of fired weapons. By the smells, Harold and Clara were on the premises, wounded. I wasn’t sure how that was possible. Cops usually made sure any injured people were taken to a hospital right away.

I couldn’t shake the feeling this was connected to my last job somehow.

The cops were looking at me strangely and I attempted a smile while I took another breath. A hint of magic tingled on my tongue; an old and weary magic. Crap. Where were Harold and Clara?

The mom-and-pop hotel was built on stilts to protect it from high tides and storm surge. The extra height gave every room fabulous water views, with fish-cleaning stations, parking, and rentable, fenced gear lockers/storage units underneath the hotel proper. Fishermen loved it. So had I. Harold and Clara lived on the far side. And there were other ways in, instead of through the cops.

Not waiting to get permission to enter—which I wasn’t going to get in any case—I lifted a hand in what might have been interpreted as a farewell gesture and headed back to Bitsa. I pushed the bike farther into the shadows under the hotel. And slid into the darkness. I pulled my cell. The unit was top-of-the-line, a communication device built for the military, to deflect bullets and work off anything—Internet towers, satellite, Wi-Fi—anything. It also let the Master of the City of New Orleans, Leo Pellissier, keep tabs on my whereabouts. Which reminded me that I hadn’t called to tell him I was coming here. My bad. Currently I had text messages waiting, most from the Kid. I sent back a quick K, not bothering to read them. Alex was wordy and I could digest them later. Unzipping my motorcycle jacket, I drew the nine-millimeter semiautomatic, slid the safety off, and chambered a round without looking. Muscle memory. Handy thing, that. It was an automatic reaction, probably a stupid one, since I’d just been seen by the cops, but I couldn’t make myself put the weapon away. Instead I added to it. With my left hand, I palmed a blade, a silver-plated, steel-edged throwing knife. Silver was poisonous to most supernatural creatures, and everything that might hurt me could bleed. The TV cameras hadn’t followed me. The deputies were shooting the breeze with a medic crew. I’d been forgotten. Good.

As I ascended the back stairs, I evaluated scents. Except for human blood, the acrid residue from fired weapons, and the salty taste of the Gulf of Mexico, nothing I smelled was familiar. Not were, not witch, not vamp, not anything I remembered smelling before, and my repertory of scents was vast, compared to humans’.

I made my way up the last step, as silent as the squeaky, weather-worn wood allowed. The smell got stronger, but oddly it made me relax. The gunfire had happened much earlier, and someone was cleaning up. I smelled bleach. Heard water sloshing. Heard soft cursing and softer laughter. It wasn’t happy laughter, but rather the kind of laughter humans made when they could either laugh or bust out crying. I recognized the voices of Clara and Harold. I chuffed out a relieved breath.

Inside, my Beast relaxed. Humans not dead, she thought at me. I/we knew this.

I slid the small blade out of sight, into its thigh sheath, but thought better of holstering my sidearm. I didn’t want to be unarmed if the couple were under compulsion or had uninvited guests that the cops had missed. I followed the smells to their corner rooms and stopped just outside in the covered walkway. The light was against me. If I bobbed my head to peer in the windows, anyone inside would see me silhouetted against the bright afternoon sky. If there were still cops inside, they wouldn’t like the fact that I’d bypassed their crime scene tape. Weapon by my thigh in one hand, index finger along the slide, off the trigger, I made my way to the door, passing right in front of the windows. The glare obscured everything inside, but no one shot me. That was always a good thing. I tapped on the door and it opened almost instantly.

Harold’s welcoming gaze changed to surprise as it shifted from my face and down to my gun. I shrugged with what I hoped was a good-natured smile, sniffed to make sure there was no magical residue or compulsion on him—just in case—removed the round from the chamber, and holstered the weapon. The extra round went into a pocket.

“Flying carpet?” Harold asked, holding the door open.

“Um.” Which seemed like a perfectly acceptable response to the odd question.

“Thanks for getting here so fast,” he added.

“Oh. Yeah. Sure,” I said, entering the second-floor apartment. I was such a smooth talker.

Except for muscular arms, Harold was a round kinda guy. Round belly, round, bald head, round eyes, and round face, which now had horizontal lines across the forehead and vertical lines along the sides of his mouth. His face reminded me of a pop quiz in a geometry class in school.

The entry was divided by a counter with apparatus and paperwork for guests to sign in. Behind it was the couple’s living quarters. I breathed in the room’s smells and took in dainty, delicate Clara on her knees just inside the door, a bucket beside her giving off the stink of chlorine bleach and soap. She had a sponge in one hand, a small brush in the other, and relief on her face.

“Thank God you’re here,” Clara said.

Before we could get further, my cell rang, an unknown number on it. I answered and said, “Yellowrock Securities.”

“Jane.”

Inside, my Beast sat up and purred. “Ricky Bo, as I live and breathe. You must be calling from your office number.”

“Got it in one, darlin’.”

Instantly, inexplicably, I was irritated, mostly at the “darlin’” but also because this couldn’t be good news. I was standing at a crime scene in his relatives’ home. Rick had to be wanting me to do him a favor. Again. Even though I had yet to be paid by Uncle Sam for the last one. I snarled, “What’s with the darlin’ stuff?”

“I. . . uh.” He stopped talking and then seemed to change, as if he put my mood in a box, sealed it up, and tossed it in the basement. If he had a basement. He turned on his business voice. Cop business. “I need a favor in Chauvin. A big favor.”

I blew out a breath and most of my irritation. He was a cop to his bones and a man loyal to his family, traits I liked. I couldn’t—shouldn’t—get upset when the behaviors resulting from his natural inclinations and his job worked against me. A wordless apology in my tone, I said, “I’m standing in front of Harold now.”

“Yeah? Why?” he asked, voice cautious.

“Because Harold texted me that a man with a gun wanted to see me. I figured that whatever happened could be related to my last job here, and if not, then I’d see what I could do to help your uncle. I’m nice that way.”

I could hear the smile back in his voice when he said, “Yes, you are. And what do you think about the crime?”

“No werewolf stink. No one dead.” I shrugged and punched the screen. “You’re on speakerphone. Local LEOs are gone. Press is still out front. Clara is cleaning up human blood.” I meandered as I talked and placed my finger over one of many holes in the front door, measuring. “There’s evidence of a shotgun being fired into the door.” I sniffed the hole and smelled fresh gunpowder and fresh wood. An interesting combo. “Shot came from inside; door was open at the time. Blood on the wall and floor inside. Crime scene tape, but no CSI around, which tells me there was a crime but it was unimportant, or the cops were too lazy to work it up, which doesn’t sound like your cousin, the sheriff.” I looked at Harold. “What happened?”

Harold said, “Let’s back up. The real crime took place up Highway 56. An inmate escaped Angola two days ago. John-Roy Wayne’s family was in Alexandria and that’s where everyone figured he was heading. Instead he came here. From what the po-lice said, he had no reason to be in Chauvin, so the sheriff’s department wasn’t expecting any kind of trouble. Last night he took two young mothers hostage.”

I had heard about the prison break two days before, and about the massive manhunt that had followed. Angola State Prison was up near the top of the instep of the boot-shaped state, near the Mississippi border. The hellhole was for the hard-timers, the most violent prisoners in the state. Alexandria, Louisiana, was in the middle of the state, almost due north of Chauvin. Chauvin was the wrong corner of a triangle. I was doing lots of geometry today, but I was still confused and let that show on my face.

Harold walked to the sitting area and turned off the muted TV. He flopped on the couch and put his feet on the shabby-chic coffee table, with a small groan of relief. He looked exhausted, dark rings under his eyes. I hadn’t known about the kidnapping, which had probably happened just prior to me leaving New Orleans. But even if I’d known about it, I wouldn’t have put those events together with Chauvin and Harold and Clara. “They came here,” Harold said.

“We were checking in two fishermen,” Clara said, standing, holding one hand out to the side, indicating that I should join Harold in the sitting area. She moved to the sink, where she washed her hands, saying, “John-Roy Wayne busted in the door.”

“I was in back”—Harold thumbed at a doorless opening in the shadows of a hallway—“getting extra pillows and blankets. I heard Clara scream. Not a scream,” he corrected. “More a startled, scared yelp.”

“The man had a gun. He wanted money,” Clara said. I could hear the underlying fear in her voice, and smell the fear-stink from her pores. She had been terrified. Still was, though her hands, drying on a towel, were steady and sure. “And he wanted to know where you were.”

“Me?” I had never even heard of John-Roy Wayne.

“Yeah, you,” Harold said. “He said, ‘Where’s the Cherokee bitch?’” He looked at his wife. “Sorry for the profanity, honey. Anyways, I grabbed my gun and came out here. Moved so fast that I hit the doorway.” Harold held up his right arm to reveal a bandage on the back, just below the elbow. “That’s my blood all over. Took us a while to get it to stop bleeding. The doc at the emergency room said I hit a small artery. At the time, I didn’t even notice. Anyways, Clara, she’s a smart one. She hit the deck when I came charging out. Everyone hit the floor, and I fired at John-Roy. He ran. My rounds hit the door, but I think I missed John-Roy. Anyways, he took off with wheels screeching.”

“In a stolen car.” Clara brought me a glass of iced tea with a wedge of lemon and indicated I should take a seat on the love seat, across from Harold, in the tiny sitting area, and I centered the cell on the table between us. It was all very domestic, considering the circumstances. I took the tea, sat, and sipped. Clara said, “The sheriff thinks he probably stole an airboat off the wharf a mile or so north. One’s been reported missing and the stolen car was found there.”

Over the cell, Rick said, “CSI is on-site. There’s evidence the women were in the car.”

I didn’t want to ask what kind of evidence. I had a bad feeling about what they were going through. A real bad feeling.

“Anyways,” Harold said, which he said a lot, “the fishermen bailed. Haven’t seen them since. But their room is ready anytime they want to come back. Extra pillows and blankets waiting.” From the satisfied way he smiled, I assumed that the men had already paid for the room. Whether they used it or not was up to them.

“The police think he’ll head north along the waterways.” Clara handed me a linen tea napkin, like a cocktail napkin but classier. “They think he’ll likely end up back in Alexandria.”

Rick said, “I’d agree, except for the tiny mention of a Cherokee female. I did some checking. This hasn’t been released to the press, but the female werewolf you killed, Jane, was the prisoner’s little sister, Victoria Wayne.”

My heart fell. I had already begun to consider that, somehow, the crimes were related to me. I’d just gotten the whys of it all backward. Of course, I hadn’t killed the were-bitch, but I was the visible face of Yellowrock Securities. YS’s previous hunt for the “wild dogs” in the area had hit the news about three days after we left Chauvin. My photo, taken directly from the pages of YellowrockSecurities.com, had stared back at me for all of fifteen seconds on the news that night. No one had mentioned the presence of Rick and PsyLED, or the Younger brothers. Just me and the fact that I had stayed in the Sandlapper. Apparently I looked good on the small screen. My partners had made fun of me for being a movie star for days. I had figured that was the end of it. I’d figured wrong.

My fifteen seconds of fame was all it took for John-Roy to decide I’d killed his sister.

Rick went on, relentless in his cop voice, that toneless expression they use when they tell bad news. “The facts, ma’am. Just the facts,” courtesy of Joe Friday on Dragnet. “We had thought that the law enforcement road blocks out of Angola forced him to steer him south, but with Uncle Harold’s statement, I’ve revised that scenario. It’s only been a few days since John-Roy’s sister died, and it isn’t like he had Internet access in the state facility. He’s looking for you, and because of the media, he thinks you’re still in Chauvin.”

That made sense of a sort. “Go on.”

“According to the timeline we’ve developed, he took the women to make travel easier. Their families didn’t notice they were gone until night came and they didn’t come home. No one put two and two together for hours. No one was searching for an armed man traveling south with two females. And by then they were gone.”

“That’s not the only reason why he took the women,” I said softly.

“No. Probably not.” The cop tone was stronger now, harder, colder.

“And he’s got them, down here, in the swamps, somewhere. Because he thinks, what?” I tried to think like an angry human. “His sister died in the area and the media posted it all over that I’d stayed here. So therefore Harold and Clara would know where I was?”

“That’s what we think.”

We. The cops. “Does he have survival skills? Weapons? Friends who might help?”

“Yeah. Also not released to the public. A pawnshop was broken into in Thibodaux,” Rick said. “Guns, ammo, and camping supplies were stolen. Some dehydrated meals. A first aid kit. And John-Roy has a former cell mate living in Galliano. Goes by the moniker Snake. Snake didn’t show up for work this morning. Lastly we just discovered two DBs in a gas station bathroom. We think it might be the work of our missing felon.”

DBs. Dead bodies. I said, “So we have two missing women, probably already traumatized. Two cons, maybe together, maybe not. All four human. And a lot of swamp. Why are you calling me?” I figured I knew, but I believed in laying my cards on the table and I wanted that from my sorta boyfriend.

“John-Roy and Snake are hunting for you. I think once John-Roy regroups and gains access to the Internet and other media, he’ll figure out that you live in New Orleans and he’ll head there. That needs not to happen.”

I realized what he meant. It was hunt for them out here where there were fewer possibilities of collateral damage—meaning dead humans—or have them hunt me in the city, where someone unrelated to the case might get hurt. It was a no-brainer.

“The sheriff’s department might be willing for you to help track the guys.” He didn’t say it, but with his cousin Nadine being the sheriff, it was likely he had already broached the possibility. More of those tangled familial ties. “I’d send Brute to help you track, but I need him here.”

I snorted a laugh. That one I hadn’t expected. Rick’s werewolf partner and I mighta worked together okay for a while, and I was grateful that he saved my life and all, but he was a pain in the butt. “I got another idea who I can get to help.” Not that I’d tell Rick who. Some secrets should go to the grave. “You want to notify Nadine, and tell her to keep her men from shooting me and my team?”

Sarge was related to Rick and Harold and Clara. He was also a lone wolf, a werewolf who ran and hunted alone beneath the full moon, and had done so for decades—sane—all of which was unheard of for werewolves. He was a grizzled war vet and pilot, and at the time I had felt pretty good about not telling the world about him. About not filling him full of silver rounds. I felt even smarter about it now. If he would help me.

“Yeah. Thanks, Jane,” Rick said, his voice softening.

“Why is this so important to you?” I asked. “Your job is hunting supernaturals. This isn’t your sister kidnapped. Your family wasn’t harmed except for a self-inflicted flesh wound. The culprits and victims are human. What’s PsyLED’s interest?”

“PsyLED could give a rat’s ass for this case,” Rick growled, his black big-cat sounding in his voice. “But all this came from our job down there. It’s unfinished business.”

That I understood perfectly. I nodded. “Okay. I’ll stay. I’ll track the escaped prisoner. And I’ll let the sheriff’s office handle hostage negotiation and taking prisoners unless I see reason otherwise. And this one’s on me,” I added. “Like you said. It’s unfinished business. Get Nadine to send all pertinent info to my cell and e-mail.”

I ended the call and dialed the Kid, the electronic genius member of the firm. The Kid—given name Alex—and sometimes still called Stinky because of his occasional lack of personal hygiene—answered, “Jane. Where are you? Eli said we’re doing pizza tonight.”

I took a breath and prepared to accept the consequences of going off on my own. “You guys go ahead. I’m in Chauvin.”

I heard a faint click, a change in the ambient noise on the other end, and Eli, the weapons and tactics guy of the firm, said, “Why?” Never one to waste words, my partner.

“Unfinished business. The escaped Angola prisoner was brother to the were-bitch we took down. John-Roy Wayne picked up an old cell mate and they have two women, young mothers, hostage.”

“We’ll be there in four hours.” The connection ended.

“Well, crap,” I said, staring at the phone.

“They’re your brothers, dear,” Clara said, assuming. “Brothers are like that. They have to protect their sisters.”

I started to say that we weren’t family, but we were all three orphans. We lived together. We did sorta physically resemble each other: Eli and Alex were mixed race, and I was Cherokee, giving us all dark skin and hair. We were more than friends. Family. “Yes,” I said. “My brothers are pains in the neck. Okay if we take our old rooms?”

“I’ll get them aired out, dear,” Clara said.

I carried my empty tea glass to the sink and headed to door. “I’ll be back. I’m heading out to talk to a pilot and borrow a dog.”

Without turning from the sink, where she was washing my glass, Clara said, “Tell Sarge and Chris and their great monster dog that we said hi.”

“Will do,” I said. And took off down the stairs, to wade through the newsies who were waiting for me, blocking both exits, microphones extended. I thought about ignoring them but realized that this might be the best way of keeping the escaped con in the area. I slowed and said, “I have a statement.” The cameras and reporters gathered around me like flies to beer. “I’m Jane Yellowrock. I’m in Chauvin. And I’m hunting John-Roy Wayne. You want me, Johnnie boy? Come and get me.” I climbed on Bitsa and took off, helmet still on the bike, my braid streaming in the wind.

One thing about riding a Harley. You can outpace a news van in no time flat.

***

Beyond a quick glance at the lush greenery, the kind only an earth witch can coax to grow in wintertime, I hadn’t paid much attention to Sarge’s place when Yellowrock Securities hired him to fly us to the kill sites of werewolf attacks. The house was an old tidewater, built on low stilts, with lattice covering the open space beneath. Sarge had been expecting us last time we came. Not so much now. The Vietnam War vet didn’t like most people, and he had the guns to make sure they stayed away.

I pulled into his drive, up to the house, and walked to the door. Knocking was superfluous after the noise of Bitsa, but it was also polite, and good manners had been part of the curriculum in the Christian children’s home where I was raised. I knocked. Sarge opened the door before I dropped my hand. He was holding a shotgun. At his side was PP, short for Pity Party. The part mastiff, part buffalo, part elephant growled at me, showing teeth. Freaking big teeth.

Beast padded to the front of my brain and glowered out at her. Beast chuffed, wanting to take the challenge PP offered. PP growled low, as if she detected a change in my scent, morphing into something dangerous. Most dogs could sense the big-cat of my Beast, my mountain lion, hiding deep inside. Or maybe Pity Party just didn’t like me.

I shoved Beast down and raised both hands in the universal gesture of peace, or maybe the universal gesture of I am not holding a gun. See? Don’t shoot. “Sarge,” I said, “I’m not here to cause you trouble. Or to tell anyone about your secret.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Partly because I need answers to a couple of questions.”

“I’ve never turned anyone. Not once. Ain’t interested in making a pack. Never was. I got what I want. And I’ll defend it to my last dying breath. That about cover it?”

I chuckled and said, “That covers the questions part of why I’m here.”

“What’s the other part? I got lunch waiting.” PP growled again, this time deeper. And Sarge still had the gun leveled at my chest.

“I need a partner and the necessary equipment to help me track down an escaped inmate and another ex-con who took two women prisoner. They took off into the countryside. Waterside. Whatever you call this swamp. The men are violent, armed, have survival equipment and skills. And they’ll kill us as soon as look at us.”

“Long as it ain’t something dangerous, then,” he said, laconic, a twinkle in his eyes. Sarge broke open his shotgun and draped it across an arm, pushing open the door. “Come on in. I reckon we got a lot to talk about. Let her in, PP. And go get Christabel. Tell her we got company.”

The dog was gonna tell someone they had company? Huh.

PP padded away, her claws clicking on the floor. Inside, the house was decorated in French Country, with lots of wood and crockery and copper pots hanging near the AGA stove. There were white quartz countertops and dark green walls with weathered gray cabinets. And flowers everywhere, in vases, in pitchers, stemless blooms floating in shallow bowls. Over the floral fragrances, I could smell Italian sausage simmering on the AGA and pasta and fresh bread and aromatic cheeses. My mouth watered. And it made me feel guilty, to think of my stomach while two young women were being . . . I shook my head to make the images go away.

“Sit a spell,” Sarge said as we entered a great room with matching leather couch, love seat, and recliner, upholstered ottomans, and a beautiful wall hanging over the fireplace, made of different lengths and colors of horsehair, an image suggestive of the black water swamp and the sky under moonlight. “Hope you’re hungry. My wife will insist you join us.” He didn’t sound too happy about it, and placed the shotgun on a small side table instead of putting it away. I took that as a sign to be very careful. Sarge dropped into the recliner in the corner, house wall at his back, windows and doors in his line of sight, and shotgun about a quarter second from his hand.

“I don’t have time to eat,” I said. “I don’t have time to visit. I just need to know if you’ll help me.”

“Sit,” he said again, this time pointing to the chair that put my back to everything important. I wanted to sock him to make him listen to me, but I took a seat catty-corner to him, not the one he’d wanted me to take. It wasn’t the best seat in the house from a defensive standpoint, but it was second best. Somehow my chair choice made a point for me; Sarge chuckled. “So, what do you want me to do for you?” he asked.

“I was hoping you and PP might join me.” He didn’t appear to be opposed to the idea, so I took a quick breath and added, “Both on leashes.”

Sarge didn’t shoot me. He didn’t move at all. I heard ticking, slow and sonorous, and saw the pendulum of a grandfather clock swaying off to my right. The ticking seemed to echo through the house. My palms started to sweat. I didn’t want to fight a werewolf in any form, especially not one with a shotgun close to hand. Weres are fast.

Then Sarge started to chuckle and I unclenched my fists. “You hear that, Christabel? This skinny little thing wants to put a leash on me.”

“It worked for me,” a breathy voice said.

I turned my head, only slightly, and took in the woman standing next to the clock. She was slight, model-thin, like a size zero, with waist-length hair in calico-cat patterns, patches of white and silver, black and brown, blond and reds. I envied her dye job. If it was a dye job. I sniffed. She smelled of trees. Oak, pine, sycamore, sourwood, and sweet gum. She wasn’t human. I wasn’t even sure she was mammalian. I didn’t know how long she’d been there, and that bothered me. I didn’t smell witchy magics on the air, but then, the trees, garlic, and spices were strong enough to mask most any other scent. “Come,” she said to both of us. “Let us break bread.”

Sarge came up out of the recliner like a bullet and I jerked. He laughed again, and I knew the wolf leap had been to push my buttons. I rose from the chair, coming to my feet closer than was polite in human terms. He didn’t back down. I didn’t either. And this close, I could smell the were-stink on him. A low growl came from my other side, reminding me that PP would love to join in a fight.

“Do not toy with the U’tlun’ta, my love,” Christabel chided. “Even if you tree her, she may bite.”

“I’m not a liver eater,” I said, stung.

Christabel shrugged, hands folded at her waist, her hair moving in the air current of the heating vent as she replied, “It is only a matter of time.”

This woman knew what I was. And knew of the curse that clung to my kind, to eventually go insane and start eating people. I forced my breathing to remain steady, calmed my heart rate. I was too close to them to win any kind of fight with the werewolf/husband/protector, his part-mammoth dog, and his wife, the nonhuman whatever-she-was. And Christabel might have some answers to questions about my magic and heritage.

Sarge extended an arm like a refined waiter and said, “After you, my ladies.”

I followed Christabel to the kitchen, Sarge and PP on my heels. I tried real hard not to sweat or let my breathing speed at the thought of them behind me. I didn’t succeed. I heard Sarge pant once in delight or hunger or both.

They indicated a chair, and since it had a decent wall behind it, I took it. “There are women in trouble. Mothers,” I repeated as I sat, to shove my urgency deeper into them, like a needle under a fingernail. Sarge sat at the table and toasted first his wife, then PP, sitting on the floor, her head at Sarge’s elbow, then me, and sipped his wine. “You’d only need to be leashed in front of cops,” I said.

“After lunch,” Sarge said again.

I barely contained a growl and picked up my fork. I stopped before I shoved it into the pasta. Neither of them had started eating. This was a test? Holding my fork in the air, I sniffed, searching for what was wrong. And then it hit me. They were waiting for grace. I wanted to stab Sarge with the fork, but I laid it on the table and lowered my head. But I didn’t close my eyes.

Christabel closed hers and said, “May the all-knowing and all-seeing, the creator gods of the first Word, bless our repasts and our day. We give thanks for life and all that is green, for all water and all rain, for all fish in the seas, for all plants that grow. For sun and moon and earth and sky. We pray for peace between all beings.”

Sarge said, “Father, bless this day, this food, this house, this wife, and this hunt. May the blood of my enemies stain my teeth this day.”

He was going on the hunt. And he wanted to eat people. All righty, then, I thought.

A beat too late, I realized they were waiting for me to pray aloud, round-robin-style. Which I hadn’t done since I left the children’s home. In fact, I hadn’t prayed in, well . . . a while. More guilt wormed beneath my skin and sucked out my spirit, like a leech, attached to my soul. “Ah, maaaan,” I sighed, knowing this was another test. I was gonna have to pray. Aloud. In front of people who didn’t believe anything I did.

Thinking how I might contribute, aware that prayers revealed more about the pray-er than the deity prayed to. Looking back and forth between them, I dredged up the memory of a childhood course about the names of God, and mentally added to it, the way The People, the Cherokee, spoke when they talked to God.

I said, “Um. To El Roy, the God Who Sees Me, I pray. See this food. I am grateful. See this house. Bless it and keep it safe. See this couple. Bless this union. And see the men I hunt. May they be found and given over to the mercies of”—I stumbled my way through—“Elohei-Mishpa, the God of Justice. May Jehovah Sabaoth, the Lord of Armies, give them into my hand in battle. El Roy, see the women the evil ones have stolen. El Rechem, God the Merciful, keep them safe.”

“Jewish?” Sarge asked, open curiosity on his face as he stuffed a forkful of sausage into his mouth.

“Christian.”

“I don’t like Christians.”

“Most of us aren’t likable. But then most people aren’t very likable either, and Christians are people.”

“Huh. You hear that, Christable? This U’tlun’ta is a philosopher.”

“Not a U’tlun’ta, and not a philosopher,” I said, following Sarge’s lead and taking a bite of the sausage, which burst into flavor so intense I thought my head might explode. “I was trained as a War Woman of The People.”

“It is a worthy calling for a U’tlun’ta. These women the prisoner took,” Christabel, said, not waiting for me to deny it. “They are your family?”

“Wouldn’t know them from Eve’s house cat,” I said.

“Eve kept several house cats.” Christabel sipped her wine and ate a piece of pasta as I watched. Her teeth were not the blunt teeth of a primate or an herbivore, but the pointed teeth of a predator. “Her favorite was a tawny Abyssinian named Lilith.”

“Uh-huh.” I shoved in a bite, chewed, swallowed, sipped, swallowed, shoved in another bite. It was delicious. It was decadent. It was also taking too long. I shoved in another bite, watching them.

“If you do not have . . . relation to them . . .” Christabel stopped and started over. “If you do not have relationship with them, why do you wish to hunt for them and kill their enemies? Humans die often in this place. The digested meat and gnawed bones of many humans lie in the muck at the bottom of the bayous, channels, ditches, and lakes. This is a place of death.” She swirled pasta on her fork, stabbed a sausage, and inserted it into her mouth—which opened wider than it should have. I tamped down on the urge to shudder, but she smiled as if she saw it anyway.

“The young of humans are important to the sane among us,” I said, which said a lot and nothing, so I added, “And the females are as well.”

Christabel laughed, a sound more akin to hollow wood wind chimes than true laughter. “You speak lies, U’tlun’ta. I have watched human males rape and kill their young and their women for longer than you can imagine.”

“Yeah?” I put down my fork. It landed with a small clink on the china plate. “My grandmother and I hunted down and killed the men who raped my mother. It was slow and painful and it took a long, long time.”

Christabel laughed again, this time clapping her hands. Her hair floated around her like gossamer strands of silk, fine as spiderweb, fine as the fluffy down of baby birds. “I like this one,” she said to Sarge. “Hunt with her. And bring me the scalps of the ones you kill.”

“Fine,” Sarge said. “I can do that,” as if it was Christabel’s decision that counted. As if, had she said, offhand, “Kill this woman,” he would have stood up and strangled me. “Lemme get my guns and change. We can meet at the dock and take my airboat. You’ll need to move that Hog. I don’t want anyone to think Christabel’s here with company.” While he was gone, I helped Christabel clear the table. She prattled the whole time about recipes. I made noises of agreement and didn’t tell her I don’t cook.

***

It was on my way out that I got a closer look at the wall hanging, the one I’d thought was made of horsehair. It wasn’t horse. It was human hair. And Christabel had told her pet werewolf to bring her scalps. Something told me the command wasn’t metaphorical. Holy crap. One of the nonhuman beings I’d eaten dinner with was an artist with death. I closed the door, mounted Bitsa, and tightened the bungees that held my helmet in place on the back wheel fender. Looking at the sky, I muttered, “I’ll bargain most anything you want to not have to go back in there again. Just sayin’.”

No one answered. I didn’t really expect him to.

PP left the house, strapped into an overcoat-sized harness like a service dog, but this harness didn’t have pockets filled with the TV remote, phone, pencils, paper, and things a disabled person might need. This harness was strapped with weapons.

PP was wearing several handguns and what looked like a Mossberg shotgun on her far side, a Sterlingworth twelve gauge on the side closest. And knives. Lots of them. Her pockets were full of gear. Nothing fancy, nothing Eli would bring along, just guns to hunt with. I liked.

The harness was a good design. I heard no clanking when she trotted up, and PP carried her leash in her mouth. When she reached my bike, she sat and looked at me, waiting, then turned and looked to the back of the house, at the black water, trying to tell me where I was supposed to be.

I gunned Bitsa and followed PP around back, aware that if the bizarre couple wanted to kill me and hide the evidence, I was giving them ample opportunity. And my hair was really long. Christabel could probably do wonders with it.

I wheeled Bitsa beneath the extended overhang of an outbuilding, in the shade and out of any possible rain, checked my weapons, holstered up, added a few extra mags of ammo and a bag of turkey jerky, and joined PP at the shoreline. Sarge’s plane was . . . moored, I guessed, at the dock, and on the other side of it, an airboat had been pulled up onshore. I hadn’t noticed the boat the last time we were here, but then, my attention had been on the thought of flying. Which I hated.

PP’s head turned back to the house at the same instant that I smelled werewolf. I managed not to draw on my host, and also to pivot slowly instead of whirling, but it was a near thing. I had thought Sarge had meant he was going to change clothes to start this hunt, but he had taken me literally when I said he’d be leashed. A big gray wolf sat on the back deck staring at me with eyes the color of rainbow moonstone. Christabel’s hand was on his head, petting his ears as if he were a dog. Whatever magic had hidden his scent, it was gone now, with him in wolf form.

Previously, I had seen Sarge in his wolf from only at a distance, in poor lighting. Seen closer, his coat was silver, each hair black-tipped, black legs and tail, a silver brow with a black stop and a black stripe that ran down his nose. He nudged Christabel, who knelt and strapped him into a harness like PP’s, but his was looser and had a strap up the tail, which would keep the harness in place while in dog form but allow him to change to human form while wearing it.

Once he was harnessed, Sarge picked a leash up in his mouth and carried it to me. As he left her, Christabel caught my gaze and held it with hers. She grinned, her mouth full of sharp, pointed teeth. I nodded once. I understood. If I didn’t bring her family back unharmed, she’d find me, kill me, eat me, and take my scalp for her trophy wall. Though maybe not in that order.

Sarge stopped at my feet and moved his eyes from me to the airboat. I untied the rope and put my back into getting the boat offshore, into the water. When the bow was still on sand, Sarge whuffed and I stood straight, arching my back to loosen the muscles. Sarge and PP leaped into the boat and I followed. There were seat-belt-like harnesses suitable for big dogs on the front bench seat, and seat belts for humans on the upper seat. The key was in the ignition. A storage trunk ran the width of the johnboat, just in front of the prop. There was plenty of gasoline in the tanks, and the steering mechanism was the same as another I’d driven, a stick that controlled the rudders. In moments, I had the canines belted in, and we were practically flying toward the last-known location of the escaped prisoner and his two hostages, the roar of the airboat deafening. There would be no sneaking up on anyone in an airboat.

***

Sheriff Nadine LaFleur was onshore, with haphazardly parked cruisers, a crime scene van, and local law enforcement behind her. Lots of cops and deputies, male, female, all races, dressed in a mélange of uniform styles, street clothes, and business attire designating their branches of law enforcement. The gang’s all here, I thought. Media vans were in the distance with telephoto lenses, trying to see what was going on.

I beached the boat near the small pier off Highway 56, known to the locals as Little Caillou Road, Nadine’s eyes checking out the canines. She ignored PP, as if she’d seen the dog before, but the wolf was a different matter. Nadine wasn’t happy to see him.

As the noise of the airboat abated, law enforcement types spread out, all armed, most carrying shotguns in addition to their sidearms, two with sniper rifles. Every single one of them turned weapons in our direction.

I did my best to look innocent, but the black leather jacket, vamp-killers strapped to my thighs, and bulges of more weapons beneath my clothes didn’t help. Sarge made a barking sound and grinned at the humans like a frisky pup. PP took her cues from him and sat up, barking, looking as pretty as a buffalo-dog can.

“Don’t tease the humans, Fido,” I said. Sarge’s mouth snapped shut and the look he gave me was not playful. “What?” I murmured, for his ears only. “You want me to call you Sarge?” I could see all sorts of things flicker through the wolf’s eyes before he vocalized softly and ducked his head. I’d made my point. I smoothed my wind-tangled hair, keeping my hands visible, tucking the ends into my braid as Nadine approached. The stocky, dark-haired woman was frowning, the stink of hatred and fear in her wake. The cops didn’t like werewolves. Which was okay by me. I didn’t like them either.

I studied the group as they advanced on the airboat. There were dogs and multijurisdictional vehicles and boats and gear. The LEOs were preparing to start a search and rescue, a SAR, for John-Roy and the kidnapped women, but they hadn’t left yet, which was good. Their passage would mess up the air currents and any scents the wind might carry. We were just in time. Ducky.

“What is that?” Nadine jerked her chin at Sarge.

“Sarge loaned me PP, and the wolf came by boat.” Which was not a lie. Go, me.

“Sarge is always willing to loan his dog. That wasn’t my question. Where did you get the werewolf and why don’t I just shoot him where he sits?” One of the snipers raised his rifle and took a bead on Sarge.

“Fido’s people-friendly, won’t bite, and has the best nose in the business. He knows what and who we’re looking for, and because he has a human intelligence coupled with the nose of a hunting predator, and because it isn’t the full moon, he’s our best bet for success. Between the two canines, we hope to find the bad guys, call you to come take them in, and rescue the women.” I looked at the snipers and said, “And if you have standard ammo, not silver, nothing short of an elephant gun will kill him. And then you’ll have a fast-healing, pissed-off werewolf on your hands.”

“Stand down,” Nadine said to her men. To me she said, “Why? What do you get out of it? You think you’re responsible because you killed John-Roy Wayne’s werewolf sister, Victoria?” Nadine was brutally direct. I liked that in a woman.

“Not me. But yeah. My team. A job for which I have yet to be paid,” I added. Nadine responded with a frown, so I finished in a soft voice meant just for her and not the men behind her. “This is a freebie. Now, you gonna let my friends here sniff the stolen car you got cordoned off over there and let us get on the water, or are you just gonna stand here wasting my time?”

Nadine’s eyebrows shot up, she snorted, and she stepped away from the boat. “Let the trackers at the vehicle, y’all,” she called out. “Let’s see what the werewolf and PP can do.”

I released the canines from their seat belt harnesses and snapped on the leashes, made of strong, durable, nylon flex, and jumped from the bow to the hard-packed ground. The cops opened a wedge of space, like a gantlet, for us to pass through. The huge critters at my sides, we walked through the cops to the car. It was sitting at an angle across the faded parking lines, all four doors open. Inside, it was a mess, paper food wrappers, a stuffed animal that looked as if it had spent a year in a city dump, clothes, pillows, and blankets. My sense of smell was much better than a human’s, and I leaned in with the canines, pulling the air over my tongue with a scree of sound. The car smelled of fast food, fear, blood, and semen.

Fury lit in my gut, flashing through me like a wildfire. Sarge swiveled his head to me and growled at the stink and what it might mean. “Yeah,” I said softly to him. Since Crime Scene was finished with the vehicle, I crawled inside and followed my nose until I found the place where the stink came from. It was on the back of the front seat, and beside it was a smear of blood.

“Fido, smell this. See if the blood belongs to the same man.” Sarge wriggled up beside me, far closer than I really wanted the werewolf, and placed his nose near the blood. He gave two quick sniffs and backed away, a canine grin on his face. “She hurt him, didn’t she?”

Sarge chuffed and growled, dipping his head in agreement. The women had been hurt too, though, and the stink of fear and pain was strong in the car.

Louder, without turning my head, I said, “Somebody was beaten in the car. Fido can smell it.” Nadine cursed. I was aware that her men had gathered in a tight circle around us, but their comingled scent was less antagonistic than it had been.

“Was everyone alive when they left the car?” I asked Sarge. He nodded once. “Two women?” He nodded. “How many men?” He dipped his head twice. I looked around, wondering how the other guy got here.

“You got any more vehicles unaccounted for here?” I asked Nadine. “Because John-Roy Wayne probably already had male company when he took off.” Nadine cursed again and sent her men to check vehicle tags. I said softly, “You got the scent?” Sarge whuffed. “Let’s go, then. We’re gonna move real casual, back toward the boat, and soon as we get settled, we’re gonna blow outta here. We’re not gonna be slowed down by cops trying to keep up. We’re not waiting for them to get the SAR team ready and give out little radios and coordinate a plan. Understood?”

Sarge tilted his head at me and licked his chops.

***

Fifteen minutes later my cell buzzed in my pocket. We were far enough away that I couldn’t see the shore, and there had been no pursuit, so I killed the motor, leaving the airboat gliding across the water. I popped the cell and ignored the files on John-Roy, sent to me by Nadine, because I recognized the number from earlier. I said, “Ricky Bo. Yes. No. Yes. And I will.”

“What?” he asked, thoroughly confused, which was what I’d intended.

“Yes, I left your cousin on the shore with the slow, disorganized cops. No, I won’t go back. Yes, we have a scent. And I’ll be careful.”

There was a short silence on the other end and then Rick said, “Good. But you left one question unanswered. Where’d you get a werewolf to hunt with?”

“Yeah, that was the only curious part of the plan, wasn’t it? You do know that Leo had some weres prisoner once. And you do know that there are werewolf packs in the U.S. And you do know that some wolves are sane. I happened to find me one, and he was willing to help. He came to Chauvin, changed into his wolf, and let me leash him. Now, if you don’t mind, I have things to do.” I ended the call, scanned John-Roy’s criminal history file sent to me by Nadine, sent my partners a text, turned off the cell, and removed the battery.

“You still got the scent?” I asked Sarge. He nodded and faced in the direction he wanted me to go, nose into the wind. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

***

It took hours. It took numerous times starting and stopping, backtracking, weaving through glade, swamp, muck, and mud as the air currents wove, splintered, and dissipated. It took Sarge and PP getting off the boat and padding across marshy land, through head-high scrub. It took an hour sitting on a wet bank as the temperature dropped and a lightning storm raged over us, the metal boat pulled up and tied to a stunted tree. It took hours in the unexpected cold and rain for us to get an idea where the stolen airboat had gone. The law enforcement helicopter that had buzzed us several times early on was a distraction, but the storm chased it away.

We made it far north of Lake Boudreaux before Sarge bumped my knee with his nose and stared hard at shore. I pulled in, beaching the airboat on a muddy bank, tangled with roots. On the still air I smelled fire and beef cooking over coals. The sun was going and a mist was rising off the water as icy air moved in. We were running out of time.

“I take it this is as far as we can go in the boat?” I asked. Sarge nodded once and nosed my cell phone. “You want me to make a call for you?” He looked away, indicating I was stupid. Staring at the fancy, bulletproof device, I said, “If I turn it on, they can find us.” Sarge dropped his head to his chest in agreement, lay down, and put his head on his paws. “Fine. Whatever you want.” I inserted the battery and booted it up. “Now what?”

He just stared at me, then tapped the floor of the airboat twice. I tried to remember all the stuff that the device could do, and combined with the tapped paw, I asked if he wanted our GPS. When he looked interested, I pulled up our current location. It took a few questions and more than a few interpretative decisions on my part, but eventually I pulled up a satellite map of our current location.

Not far from us, according to the sat map, was a small island with a fancy house on stilts. Except for a narrow beach and a boat dock, the island was surrounded by water like a moat, with a narrow ring of an islet circling protectively outside the moat. The house could be reached by boat or helo; both methods would give advance notice of our arrival. Parachute landing might go unnoticed. Or wings, if I wanted to go in as a bird and then change back to human—to fight weaponless and naked. Not.

I studied the sat photos. The water between the island and the circling islet was gated on two sides, with only the one area of the island open to the surrounding water, where we could manage a frontal attack. “Now, why would an escaped con head to a house in the middle of nowhere? Unless he was killing two birds with one stone?” I hadn’t really studied the file sent to me by Nadine. I opened and skimmed it again, finally finding a summary of John-Roy Wayne’s arrest history. The guy had been going for a world record in violence.

The info from my partners was more helpful. It contained a list of people who might assist John-Roy, and another list of people he might want to kill just for funzies. “Go, Alex,” I said to myself. “You get pizza for all this.” I thought about the info and about the house not far ahead, on stilts.

“Sarge? Do you know who lives in that well-secured house?” He nodded, his eyes suddenly tight on me. It was unnerving to be looked at with such intensity by any predator, but a werewolf was in a category by himself. I stifled my shudder, and assured myself it was only the cold and the damp that lent me a chill. I was lying but it made me feel better. I said, “If I read a list of names, can you tell me if any of them live here?”

Sarge nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving me. I started with the people John-Roy might want to kill. The wolf made no reaction to any of the names, but when I started on the list of people John-Roy would like to hang with, I got a response. Elvis Clyde McPhatter Lamont. I texted the name to Alex, along with the location of the island house. Moments later, Eli texted back, Kid says Elvis is bad news. Get close. Pick landing site. Keep cell on. I drop in 1900. Eli had already figured out he needed to parachute. He was close. Go, Rangers!

Alex sent me an arrest photograph of Elvis Lamont and a list of his priors, which included kidnapping and running a forced sex slave ring. The tat on his neck would make him easy to recognize. It was an oversized penis. I shared all this with Sarge, showing him the sat maps, and finished with “My partner will be here at seven o’clock. We need to be on that island by then. He’ll use my cell as a homing beacon to jump in.

“It’s gonna be miserable by seven,” I continued. “I suggest we move close to the island, and then hunker. Which sounds like a cold winter swim.” Sarge tilted his head, whuffed with laughter, and tugged on the seat harness. When I released him, Sarge picked up a paddle in his teeth and dropped it at my feet, then leaped over the seats to the storage chest at the base of the propeller cage. Inside was an inflatable, two-person raft.

“Oh,” I said. “Soooo much better.” We’d be crowded, but we wouldn’t have to swim. PP, who had closed her eyes for a nap, whuffed at me. I texted our plan to the guys and spread open the tiny raft, plugged it into the airboat’s battery, and hit the autoinflate button. I had paddled an inflatable raft before, and in short order, we were on board, though sitting low in the water with so many bodies. It took a bit of practice to remember how to navigate with a single paddle, but I managed, and we moved through the sluggish mist and the remains of the storm.

Water plinked onto water between drenchings—when water drummed onto water. It was cold and miserable. And it was helpful. No one would see us unless they had low-light or infrared light devices, and even then they wouldn’t be able to tell what the odd-shaped bundle was. But it was slow going, and even with my Beast to warm me, it was cold.

Rain running down my neck worsened my chill. Rain wasn’t good for riding leathers, unless I got a chance to dry and clean my jacket right away, and that wasn’t happening. Stupid thoughts to keep the ones that mattered at bay. The island, isolated, secure, was a perfect location to break in new women to the forced sex trade. The two kidnapped women, already brutalized, were probably going to be sold for cash.

My mother had been raped by two men, the same ones who killed my father. I had evened the score. The heat of vengeance spread through me at the memories, and while I tamped down on them, I also let them warm me. I could use this anger.

***

After nearly two hours we got close to the house. The light of day had dulled down to mostly nothing, the sunset smothered by clouds, the water hidden by fog. I wished I had Eli’s cool tech devices to see through the fog if there were people patrolling with guns, but I’d have to go on canine noses and skinwalker senses. The house windows blazed with light, haloing the mist. Something bumped the bottom of the boat. Sarge growled, low and full of menace. “Gators?” I whispered. Sarge’s eyes swept the water around us, but eventually he went silent. And I paddled on. It was too cold for gators. I hoped.

My cell buzzed. I opened the titanium case to see the text. Airborne. Where land?

Hoping I was right, I texted back, 170 ft due N my position. Which, if he timed it perfectly, would put him in back of the house. If he missed, he’d be on the house.

Long minutes later my cell buzzed. The text said Ten minutes. Hit shore. Take front door. Careful. Gators in water around house.

“Well, that’s just ducky,” I said.

***

Eight minutes later, we had maneuvered between slivers of islands, past a dock where three boats had been moored—boats now floating free, thanks to a sharp knife severing the mooring lines, moving slowly into the water of the channel. No one was getting off the island tonight. In the pitch-dark, we beached on the one small muddy shore not protected by gators fenced into a moat. Two airboats were moored there. Smoke and voices filtered through the mist, the fog making it hard to tell where they came from. The canines were staring at one airboat and the shore, nostrils flaring. Even in human form, I could smell the prisoners, the kidnapped women. We had the right place. I slipped from the raft and removed the keys from the other airboats and, after a moment’s hesitation, unhooked the gas lines from the motors.

“Sarge?” I whispered. “They might have nighttime vision equipment. They might have guns. Or we could be wrong and our target’s not here.” Sarge snorted, telling me the women were here, and so was John-Roy. “You and PP be careful.”

Sarge grunted and he and PP, still laden with weapons, leaped off the boat and moved into fog-filled shadows. I felt a tingle of magic on my skin that told me Sarge had started to change back into human form. I just hoped he’d brought clothes with him, and grinned at the thought of the war vet, attacking naked. It was my only grin of the day and it faded fast.

***

I checked my cell. My time was up. I drew a vamp-killer and a nine-mil, the metal dry and warm from contact with my body. Weapons to my sides, the blade held back against my forearm, steel handle in a steady grip, I walked toward the house. For the first time in my career, for the first time since I killed my father’s murderers, I was deliberately hunting humans.

My nose was little use in the fog, but I pulled on Beast’s better vision, and the night smoothed out into grays and silvers and greens. The form of a man appeared in front of me, my nose telling me he wasn’t one of mine, though he was facing the house. I walked up to him and bonked him on the head. He fell silently. I searched him quick and came up with a small subgun and a walkie-talkie. They made nice splashes in the water.

I met no one else outside. The house was a two-story mansion on pylons. This close, I could smell people. Humans, lots of them, came and went all the time, but for now, the numbers were few. The night went silent, the voices I had been hearing stopped. I tried the door. I texted Eli: unlocked.

Instantly I got back Go.

I opened the door and stepped inside, into the shadow of a fake ficus tree. Warmth and sensory overload hit me simultaneously, and I looked around, first for people—none—and then for cameras. None also. Which was smart in a way. If you were doing something illegal, you needed to make sure nothing was filmed or recorded. Of course, if you were under attack, the lack of cameras was stupid.

I took a breath. The air reeked of cigars, expensive liquor, pain, fear, sex, and blood. And young females. Beast slammed into me. Kits! she thought at me. Hurting.

She wanted to run straight for the scent, but I clamped down on her. Stealth, I thought at her. Beast snarled but held still. I stepped to the side and took in the foyer. Cypress-wood floors, rugs, smoking lounge to my right, bar to my left. Large-screen TVs in each room. A game room was ahead with pool tables, dartboard, comfy chairs. I moved cautiously into it. And found a stage with a brass pole. No people. Stairs going up and the stink of fear coming down.

A moment later, Eli appeared from the shadows at the back of the house, wearing night camo and loaded for war. He was carrying a pistol with a suppresser screwed on the end, legal in Louisiana. He could fire and the sound, while still loud, was unlikely to carry far. He held up three fingers to indicate how many he had taken down outside, then one finger to show how many he had taken down inside. There was no stink of gunfire or blood, suggesting that he had used nonlethal methods, just as I had. I extended one finger, then used it to point up the stairs. I mouthed, Prison.

My partner’s mouth turned down. He mouthed what I thought might have been No mercy, and he moved up the stairs. I followed. I was halfway up when I heard a woman scream.

Eli ducked right, toward the sound, moving fast in a bent-kneed run. I covered him, seeing a wide hallway running left and right, doors along it, and floor-to-ceiling windows at each, two recliners in front of each window. Which was odd. Until I looked in the closest one and saw a man curled up on a large, four-poster bed, facing away from the glass. Asleep. There were chains on the bedposts and bruises on the young man’s back.

Movement caught my eye and a human-shaped Sarge appeared, coming from the end of the hallway. He carried a shotgun and wore black cotton pants and a T-shirt, his hairy feet bare. PP trotted by his side. There was blood on her muzzle. Sarge began to check all the rooms on the far end of the hall, the scent of his anger strong.

Satisfied that he had my back, I slipped from room to room up to Eli. The recliners in front of the window on the end room both held incapacitated bodies, their heads at odd angles. Not breathing. Very dead. One of them was John-Roy’s cell pal. The other I didn’t know. Sarge had been at work.

Inside the room were two men and two women. The show the men had been watching was ugly. Real ugly. Eli opened the door and said, softly, “John-Roy.” When the man rose, a gun in his meaty hand, the barrel moving toward the door, Eli fired, the sound not much louder than a dictionary dropped flat from shoulder height. John-Roy fell, screaming, a hole in his abdomen. Eli’s next two shots hit the back wall; suppressors made hitting a target at any distance problematic. The second man grabbed a woman and backed from the bed, holding her as a shield.

Eli raced inside. Fast as a big-cat, I followed and centered the sights of my nine-mil on the standing man’s forehead. I didn’t recognize him except for the tattoo of the penis. This was Elvis Clyde McPhatter Lamont, king of the forced sex trade. He wore gold on his wrists and hanging around his neck, but otherwise he was naked, holding a woman, also naked, bleeding, and bruised. But not broken. She looked enraged, her eyes telling me she was ready for anything. Elvis pulled her to the wall.

On the floor, one hand pressing on his belly wound, John-Roy was looking at me. He yelled, “You!” and turned the gun toward me. TV shows where the bad guy always drops his gun are stupid. In real life, it doesn’t happen all that often. Eli shot him, again in the abdomen, off center. Not a miss, a deliberate target. Eli wanted him alive.

I laughed, the sound a register lower than my human voice. It carried menace, fury, and delight, and it was all Beast. From behind me, PP leaped into the room, straight to the woman still on the bed. The huge dog lay down next to her, protecting. Ignoring the man and his hostage, Eli secured the room.

Behind me, Sarge walked in, the grizzled man taking in everything. He closed the door behind him, the sound soft and final. “Son,” Sarge said to Elvis, “I can’t allow you to get away with this. You let the lady go and I’ll let you die easy. You keep her, and I’ll make sure you die slow.” Which sounded pretty generous to me.

But Elvis disagreed. A door I hadn’t noticed opened behind him and before I could react, he was gone. Sarge leaped across the room, a distance a human couldn’t have covered. Sarge rammed into the door as it closed, splintering wood and revealing a steel core. He bellowed.

I ran out of the room and down the stairs, catching a glimpse of Eli dragging John-Roy by the hair. There was no way off the island tonight, in the fog, except by boat. There hadn’t been a land-based boathouse on the sat map—which could have been sadly out of date—but I was trusting that it was up to date and that the men had arrived in the boats that been tied to the docks. I raced that way, out of the house into the black fog of night. Beast, still close to the front of my mind, guided me, her balance assisting mine, her vision lighting the night world. I let her take over.

Can smell nothing new, no female-prisoner smell, no man-predator stink, she thought.

As I reached shore, the lights in the house went out. All of them. “That’s because we got out in front of him,” I murmured, certain. “We’re between him and his getaway boat.” I dropped to a crouch and faced the house.

He came from my right, the woman silent, stumbling, her breath shaking. I heard her take a breath and start to scream, the faint hiss followed by a thump and the sound of a falling body. The reek of fresh blood was strong on the air. One pair of running footsteps came toward me. He’d hurt her to keep her quiet, and then had to leave her when he’d been too harsh. Which just made my job easier. When he appeared out of the fog, I rose fast. And let him rush onto my blade. It caught him low in the abdomen, and I yanked the blade up, severing everything in its path. Hot blood gushed over my hand, and still I lifted the blade, tilting it to the right so it would miss his aorta and his heart. He went limp and I let him fall, taking my blade with him.

Around me the heavens opened and a deluge fell. The lights came back on in the house, showing me not much of anything but shadows and a dying man at my feet. Sarge strode up, picked up my prisoner, and flipped the body into his own airboat. PP jumped up beside him, tongue lolling. “Keys,” Sarge demanded.

I tossed them to him and moments later, the airboat vanished into the mist, the powerful prop roaring. Eli came from my left, through the rain, carrying the woman Elvis had dropped.. “I need to get her inside, into a safe place. She doesn’t need to wake up with a man near her,” he said. “Call this in. Get medic and the law.”

“Yeah,” I said, trudging back to the hell-house. “Sarge took Elvis. What happened to John-Roy?”

“He ran off into the night,” Eli said. “I heard a splash. I think he fell into the moat.”

I thought about that for a moment. A gut-shot man accidently falling into a moat full of gators. Maybe they’d eat him. Maybe he’d drown first. Maybe not. “Good,” I said.

***

The rest of the night was chaos. Nadine and a sheriff from the parish to the north vied for jurisdictional control of the scene, and the FBI showed, kicking them both out because of the human trafficking. Eli and I were allowed to leave at ten the next morning, free to go after long interrogations. Sarge met us at the shore in his airboat. Together we went back to Chauvin. The media circus onshore was unimaginable, but they ignored us, looking like locals with nothing to say, the reporters too busy trying to hire, bribe, or buy a way to the island in the middle of the black water.

***

A month later, I got a package in the mail. It was my vamp-killer, smelling of cleansers and oil, the blade freshly honed. There was no note. No explanation. I didn’t need one. The blade was explanation enough.

Snafu

Author’s Note: Fans are always asking me about Jane’s early life and training, about how she went from the children’s home to rogue-vamp hunter. Well, here’s a small insight into how.

I unstrapped my helmet and sat, straddling the beat-up Yamaha and taking in the storefront. It didn’t look like much. The dirty display windows were covered on the outside by steel bars, and on the inside by cheap, bent, bowed metal blinds. In the creases of the blinds I could make out wood studs and wallboard on the other side, as if the business wanted to make sure no one could see in. ENDERS SECURITY AND PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS, INC. was stenciled on the door. My place of internship and on-the-job training for the next six months. I was eighteen and on my own, after spending the last six years in Bethel Nondenominational Children’s Home. I couldn’t decide if I was excited at the thought of finally being here, or dismayed at the dingy storefront.

Using a steel chain and keyed lock, I attached the Yamaha to the pitted and scored aluminum bike post that was situated near the storm drain. It wasn’t my dream bike, but it would do until I could afford the one I really wanted. And there was no point in making it easy for my only transportation to be bike-jacked. This neighborhood looked anything but safe and secure. Lucky me. Not knowing anything about Asheville, I’d picked Enders out of a list of possible PI and security businesses to take my paid internship for my private investigator’s license. From the broken-down look of things, I’d picked wrong. Closed businesses, run-down buildings, little traffic, and what traffic there was consisted of pimp-mobiles and rusted, dented, kidnapper-style paneled vans.

Eyes on the guys watching me from the street corner, I patted my saddlebags, checking the latches. The teal compartments were secure, held in place with leather straps and small locks. Everything I owned was in the compartments, my toothbrush, shampoo, and a few changes of clothes—jeans and T-shirts. Boots I hadn’t been able to pass up in the “gently used clothing” consignment store.

The August heat had laid a slick of sweat down my back and I unzipped my vintage leather riding jacket, freeing my hip-length braid. I touched the gold necklace that I still wore like a talisman and headed for the door.

The guys on the corner started toward me, both with street swaggers meant to intimidate. Hands lose at their sides. One had a bulge at his navel. Gun, I was guessing. The other slid a hand in his pocket and back out. A short length of rope. Metal on his other fingers. Brass knuckles. Really? I thought. Really? Two armed teenaged boys, younger than me, tattooed, Gun Boy with blondish dreadlocks and Brass Knucks Boy with an Afro, like from the seventies.

I reached the door and twisted the knob. Locked. Some small part of me wasn’t surprised. A slightly bigger part was delighted. Funnnnn, it whispered. I ignored it, as always.

Using the storefront windows, I checked behind me. No one watching. No one approaching from behind. Just me and two gangbangers on the street, in view of the security camera of my new place of business. Which was locked. Yeah, really. Was this a test of some kind? An unlucky accident of timing? I retucked my braid, shrugged my shoulders to relax, and came to a stop, my back to the door. The guys separated, coming between me and my bike, a pincer move that cut off my retreat.

Fun, the crazy part of me murmured again. The crazy part of me that I had just discovered turned into an animal. Like my own personal werelion, except not. The crazy part that had been penned in for years in the children’s home, and wanted out now, to play with the humans, play being in the eyes of the beholder, like a cat playing—with a couple of stupid rats. Yeah. The crazy part of me, the part that the Christian children’s home had worked so hard to knock out of me. It rose and glared at them through my eyes, and I chuffed with laughter, showing my teeth. Wanting them to try something. I couldn’t help it.

Knucks Boy hesitated at my grin, just a slight hitch in his get-along, as Brenda, one of my housemothers, would have said. A tell, as my sensei would have said.

I set my bike-booted feet on the cracked sidewalk, the worn treads giving me good traction, much better than the fancy new boots in the saddlebags. Stupid thoughts for a skinny teenage girl facing two armed men. I should run, bang on the security office door, and scream a little. But I didn’t want to. I wanted this. I pulled in air through my nose and out through my mouth, relaxing further. Fun, the crazy voice panted. Fun . . . fun . . . fun.

“Hey, baby,” Brass Knucks said, coming to a stop about five feet away. “Nice bike. How ’bout we go for a ride on that nice lil’ bike?”

“No,” I said, sounding bored.

“How ’bout we go for a ride on this?” Gun Boy asked, grabbing his crotch.

“Now, why would I want some scuzzy, flea-infested dude with BO and probably STDs?” I asked.

Gun Boy pulled his gun from his pants with a move that was all elbow and lifted shoulder. Nothing economical about it, nothing graceful. As the gun came free, I stepped up, blading my body, and kicked out. A single fluid kick that shoved his gun back into his gut, but with enough force to hurt. Hurt bad. His air whuffed out with a pained grunt and his body bent in two. My leg bent and I clocked him with a knee to the face and a quick, follow-up one-two to his nose. Messy.

I backed away as he fell, kicking the gun under the closest van. I gave Knucks Boy a little four-fingered, come-and-get-it wave and he rushed in with a roundhouse. I ducked and tripped him. Head-butted him with the loose helmet. He landed on the other guy and I followed him down to drop a knee in his back. He made a little squeal as I landed. I caught the loose helmet, and I bopped him in the back of head with it. Kinda hard.

I stole the rope and the brass knuckles from his nerveless fingers and tossed them down the storm drain near the bike. Behind me the lock clicked and the door opened. A laconic voice asked, “You want me to call the police? You know. So you can make a police report?”

I stepped away from my would-be-attackers and considered. “How long do you think they’d be in jail?” I asked. “How much time would they do?”

“Hours and they’ll be back out on the streets,” the voice said. “Then they’ll tie you up in court for weeks, and plea-bargain down to zip.”

“You got it all on camera?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“I want a copy.” I shoved the guys over, out of their pile, and patted them down, removing their ID. I checked the pictures to the IDs and handed them to the man behind me. I said, “Anton Jevers and Wayne Roles Jr.” I met the eyes of the one who was still mostly conscious. “There’s this new thing called YouTube. You can upload video onto it for the whole world to see. I ever see your faces on this street again, I’ll upload the video and everyone who knows you will be able to see you get beat up by a skinny girl in a bike helmet.”

I went for the gun and picked it up with two fingers. I handed it too to the guy at the door, taking him in with quick glance. Younger than he sounded. Blondish. Jeans and tee. Shoulder holster with a nine-millimeter. Scruffy beard. He smelled of coffee and Irish Spring soap.

“What do you want me to do with this?” the guy asked.

“Whatever PIs do with guns they accidently find on their doorsteps, dropped by inefficient muggers, unsuccessful rapists, and dumb-nuts.”

He laughed. It was a nice laugh. “Anton, Wayne, you get on outta here or I’ll call the po-lice on you. And I bet you both got a little something-something on you that the local law would like to confiscate. You,” he said to me, “come on in. I got Cokes on ice and sandwiches in the microwave. I’d have been here sooner, but I was heating lunch and didn’t realize you were in trouble until after the ding.”

It sounded satisfactory to me and I followed him inside. Closed and locked the door behind me. “My intern, I assume,” he said as he popped the tops on Coke cans and shoved a foot-long club sandwich with bacon toward me over the desk. I nodded and took it and bit in, the taste so good and the bacon so hot that I almost groaned. I ate two more bites, taking the edge off my hunger, watching him, studying the office. He was prettier than I’d expected from the half glance I’d taken outside. The office was less dingy on the inside than it looked on the outside too. Three small desks, three desk chairs, folding chairs in the corner. One of those blue plastic watercoolers. Coffeemaker. Small brown refrigerator with a microwave on top. Unisex bathroom. Lockers. Gun safe bolted onto the floor in the corner. Closet. Iron-bound back door. Not bad. It smelled of mice and bacon and gunpowder, a combo that smelled unexpectedly great.

“Power of observation is important in this business,” he said.

I grunted and kept eating. It had been hours since my last meal, and I’d been eating light since I spent my last twenty on the boots. Stupid move, that. Girly move. But they were killer boots. I grinned at the memory.

“My powers of observation told me that you should have run instead of taking on the neighborhood bullies,” he said.

“Thought you said you were busy at the microwave,” I said around a mouthful of bacon and lettuce leaves.

He shrugged. “Whatever. What did your powers of observation tell you?”

“That you set me up. Most likely,” I hedged.

His brow wrinkled up in long horizontal lines that weren’t visible until he looked puzzled. Or maybe mad? I wasn’t sure. I still wasn’t real good at reading people’s emotions, but he smelled angry. Which was a really weirded-out thought. “Do I look stupid?” he asked. “Or like the kind of guy who would let a little girl get hurt? I was coming in through the back with sandwiches, and sticking them in to heat, when I saw it going down on the camera.”

“Fine,” I said. “From outside, I could see the light on through the cracks in the Sheetrock over the windows. The entry door is steel, set in a reinforced steel door casing. Over the door is a camera, the kind that moves. What looks like a water pipe runs up the outside wall in the corner and into the building through a tiny hole bored in the brick. Maybe for a retrofitted sprinkler system.

“Not that I’ve had much training yet, but the place looks like it was set up to survive attack by small-arms fire, Molotov cocktail fire, and maybe even attack by a rolling dump truck. The people inside might get smoked or crushed, but the files might survive, and the attack would be caught on camera to identify the perpetrators.”

I stopped and ate some more. The bacon was really good. The other meat was beef and turkey. Even the lettuce tasted good. I was starving. I licked mayo off my thumb, slurped some Coke, and went on.

“The neighborhood is on the way down, except for the building on the corner, which is undergoing a remodeling, probably because of the way-cool windows on the second and third story.” I set down the sandwich and held my hands out to the sides at angles. “Like this, with the whaddya call it, the cornerstone? Capstone? Like this.” I reshaped my hands.

“Art deco. Yeah. The upgrade is the beginning of the end of crime on this street. I’ll miss Anton and Wayne.”

I spluttered with laughter and held out my hand. “Jane Yellowrock. But I guess you know that, what with your mad powers of observation.”

“Charles Davidson, but call me Nomad,” he said. “Your boss and teacher for the next few months. You got a place to stay until your next paycheck?”

“Nope.”

“Money for a hotel? A furnished room?”

“Nope.”

Nomad sighed. “There’s an inflatable mattress in the closet. Towels. Sheets. Don’t let the cops figure it out—I’m not licensed for renters—but you keep your head down and you can bunk here until you make enough money to get a place. Soon as you get a stash, I know a few people who rent places. You can have cheap and dangerous in a few weeks, or more expensive and safer in a few months. We’ll do a drive-by and you can evaluate how much you want privacy. But that’s for later. Now we got a case.” Nomad stood and wiped his face, gathered up all the papers, and tossed them into a trash can. “Keep the trash emptied. Dumpster out back. Place has roaches. Mice. But you don’t look like the kind of woman who runs from either.”

I shook my head. “What kind of case?”

“Cheating husband.”

“You like domestic cases?”

“Hate ’em. But they make up about seventy percent of a PI’s business. Bring your bike inside and we’ll keep it locked up. Safer. Anton and Wayne are aggressive and stupid and they might think about revenge. You pass your CC yet?”

I nodded. I had passed the Concealed Carry permit the week before I passed my classroom training for my PI license. “No gun. No money. Do I get the internship?”

“Despite the little snafu on the street, yeah. And you won’t need a gun on this trip.” He pointed to the restroom. “Pee while you can. Female anatomy isn’t particularly well suited to long-term stakeouts.”

I nodded.

“Not very talkative, are you?” he observed, cocking his head.

“Nope.” I went into the restroom and closed the door. And smiled at myself in the polished metal mirror over the sink, my amber eyes glowing gold with excitement. “I’m in,” I whispered. “I did it. I got the job.”

It was in a little run-down storefront security and PI business. The pay sucked. And I loved it. I loved it all.

Off the Grid

This story takes place just before Broken Soul. In it, you’ll meet Nell, who will be getting her own series! The first book will be published in 2015.

I’d stayed in Charlotte for two days, overseeing the latest repairs on my bike, Bitsa. She was pretty well trashed, and she’d be a different bike when I got her back, very slightly chopped, with wider wheel fenders, and this time, no teal in the paint job. Jacob—the semiretired Harley restoration mechanic/Zen Harley priest living along the Catawba River, the guy who had created Bitsa in the first place using parts from two busted, rusted bikes I’d found in a junkyard—had shaken his head when I asked when the bike would be ready to ride to New Orleans. Bitsa had been crashed by a being made of light, and the damage was extensive. It sounded weird when I said it like that—a being of light—but my life had gotten pretty weird since I went to work for the Master of the City of New Orleans and the Greater Southeast, Leo Pellissier. Jacob had taken my money but refused to discuss the paint job, saying only that I’d love it. And then he plopped me on a loaner bike and shooed me out of his shop as if I were twelve.

I’d ridden the loaner before, a chopped bike named Fang, and though the balance on a chopper-style bike was different from the easy, familiar comfort of Bitsa, it hadn’t taken long to settle in for the ride to Asheville, where I’d hugged my godchildren, eaten at their mother’s café, and then hit the road for Knoxville, Tennessee. My visit north had been occasioned by a request from Knoxville’s top vamp, the Glass Clan blood-master, to try to solve some little problem she had reported to her up-line boss, Leo. Nothing urgent, but Leo was stroking his clan blood-masters’ egos a lot, now that the European Council vampires were planning a visit.

The ride had been great, the weather not too hot for spring, not rainy or cross-windy, but my cell phone battery hadn’t survived the trip across the mountains, roaming the whole way. I had no communications when I hit the town, and no way to find out contact info.

Without my map app, I had to ask directions, which was kinda old school, and my badass motorcycle mama facade made the Starbucks clerk’s eyebrows rise in concern, but she knew her city and I made it to the Glass Clan Home just after dusk. Not at dusk, which might be construed as an offer to be a breakfast snack for the fangy Glass vamps, but just after dusk, which in early summer meant nine p.m. I was entering the clan home without backup and without coms, with no one in New Orleans knowing I had arrived safely. I was acting in the capacity of the Enforcer of the NOLA MOC, which meant I’d arrive at the Glass Clan Home fully weaponed out, and I wouldn’t be giving up my guns, blades, or stakes to security guards at the door. I wasn’t expecting trouble, but I try to always be prepared. It was kinda the modus operandi of a rogue-vamp hunter turned vamp Enforcer for said MOC.

The house was off U.S. 70, not far from the Confederate Memorial Hall, and overlooking the Tennessee River. I’d Googled the house and seen it from above; it was maybe ten thousand square feet, with a six-car attached garage, a slate roof, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and what might have been a putting green. There was an outbuilding, probably a barn, a deduction made from the jump rings set up on the sculpted lawn. Lots of spreading oak trees shaded the heavily landscaped grounds.

The entrance to the address was gated, and I pulled off my helmet, presented ID, and tried to look both unthreatening and as though I could kill without a thought—a difficult combo—to the camera, before the gate rolled back on small, squeaky wheels. It was the perfect ambience for a visit to a bloodsucker. But the midlevel-grade security gate quickly became wood fencing and trailed off into the night, turning into barbed wire only yards out. No cameras followed the fencing, no motion monitors, nada, nothing. The security sucked unless there were armed human guards patrolling, working with dogs. I’d started out in security and I knew an antiquated system when I saw it.

My Beast liked the low-hanging limbs of the old oaks and sent me an image of her sprawled over one, waiting for deer, followed by another one of her swimming in the river, which I could smell close by. “Maybe later,” I muttered to her. “Business first.” Beast chuffed at me in disgust.

The drive was long and winding, concrete made to look like cobbles, and I could smell horses, a chlorinated pool, clay (maybe for the tennis courts), and the west-flowing river. It was a distinct scent, different from the raw power of the Mississippi by the time it reached New Orleans, different from the North Carolina rivers that flowed east. The Tennessee flowed west, toward the upper Mississippi, a snaky and slow flow, deceptive in its sluggish nature and far more powerful than it looked or smelled. The house the drive led to was an old renovated historical home, the original house made of dull brown river rock, added onto over the years with brick of a similar color.

I left my helmet on the bike seat, adjusted my weapons to be visible but not insulting, and climbed the steps to the front entrance. The door opened before I knocked, and the butler—an honest-to-God butler, wearing a dove gray tuxedo—showed me into the parlor, asked after my ride in, and offered me iced black tea with lemon or mint, which sounded great. I accepted the minty tea, and it appeared in about ten seconds, carried in on a silver tray by a maid, also in gray livery. The butler pointed to the guest restroom with the offer that I might freshen up, which I accepted. I carried the tea glass—draining it—into the powder room and washed up, put on bloodred lipstick, and smoothed my hip-length braid with spigot water. I also plugged in my cell to charge.

My summer riding clothes—jeans and a denim jacket—were sweaty from the day in the sun, and I would rather have showered, eaten, and taken a nap, or shifted to my Beast form and taken that swim in the river, than carry out all the posing and proper etiquette that the older vamps expected, but I didn’t have that choice. Leo’s primo had made the appointment and I liked my paycheck. Back in the parlor, I settled on a comfy leather chair, in a room with as much square footage as the entire first floor in my house. It had high ceilings, attic fans, modern furniture—all leather, of course. Vamps had a thing for dead skin. I rolled my empty glass between my palms, patient as my stalking big-cat.

Blood-Master Glass didn’t keep me waiting, but her entrance was calculated. I caught movement from the corner of my eye as she walked slowly into the room, with a black-suited human and the butler behind her, the servant carrying another tray with more tea glasses, a pitcher, and tiny sandwiches that smelled like cucumber. Taking them all in with a sweeping look, I set the glass down on the coaster that had been provided and stood.

My Beast moved into the front of my brain and peeked out of my eyes, evaluating the blood-master by sight and smell.

The blood-master was elegant, petite, and of Asian descent, with almond-shaped eyes of a peculiar dark honey hue, black hair worn long but up on the sides in a fancy do that probably took a personal servant or two to create, and pale, smooth skin the color of ivory. She was wearing a silk gown of gold and black brocade with touches of crimson embroidery—golden dragons cavorting on a black background that suggested rugged hills, the dragons spitting red fire. Vamps were partial to that particular shade of bloodred. And they liked rubies. Glass was wearing one the size of a robin’s egg on a gold chain around her neck.

The butler set the tray on the table in front of me and said, “The Glass Clan blood-master, Ming Zhane.” Technically, Ming should have changed her last name to Glass when she defeated the clan founder about a hundred years ago, but Ming wasn’t one for abiding by the rules unless they suited her, according to her dossier. Yeah. I had a dossier on most of the vamps in Leo’s hunting territories. My team stayed busy.

The butler withdrew after pouring tea into two glasses and refilling my own. The other human stood to the side and I figured that meant it was time for the fancy chitchat. I nodded, a sort of half bow, and introduced myself. “The Enforcer of Leonard Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans and the Greater Southeast, Jane Yellowrock, at your command, ma’am.”

She smiled, looking pretty much human, except for the paleness, and the thin lines along her eyes contributed to the human appearance. They looked like stress lines, which was odd. Vamps didn’t feel or show stress. Mindless insanity, blood thirst, and a tendency to kill anything that moved, yes. Stress, no.

Ming moved closer and breathed in my scent. Her nose wrinkled as she smelled the predator in me. I had discovered that all vamps could smell the danger that I presented, and until the blood-master of a clan or a city approved of me, they all had a tendency to react with violence. Leo was Ming’s up-line boss, but he was far away and that meant she was top dog here. It was hard not to pull away with her so close, but I held still as she sniffed again. “Your scent is not unpleasing, and the photos in your dossier and on your Internet page do not do you justice,” Ming said. “You are most lovely.”

“I’m just the Enforcer, ma’am. I’m not paid to be pretty.” Her eyes darkened and instantly I knew I’d miscalculated, so I said quickly, “But you’re thoughtful and . . . uh . . . courteous to say so. Your kind of beauty is something I’ll never achieve.” Which was all true. She was a stunner. Ming looked a little mollified, so I revised a line Alex had written into her dossier, and piled it on a little more thick. “Your photos show elegance and loveliness, and your personal presence suggests a powerful magic.” Yeah. I was getting pretty good at blowing smoke up vamps’ backsides, what they called gracious conversation, and I called a load of bull-hockey. But not to their faces.

She tilted her head, one of those miniscule, wrong-angled-move gestures vamps can do, and I figured I was out of the woods as to protocol. She indicated with a wave of her hand that I should sit, and weirdly, her fingers trembled, just a hint. Vamps didn’t tremble either. Ming took the wingback chair beside mine and folded her hands in her lap. The human stood beside her, watching my every move. Ming said, “The master of New Orleans is kind to send assistance in this, our time of need.”

“Yes, ma’am. Blood-Master Pellissier is eager to assist all those loyal to him.” As I said. Smoke up her backside, though my words were still true. Leo was a good master, as far as a blood-sucking-ruler-over-all-he-surveyed type of loyalty went. “How can the Enforcer assist the Glass blood-master and her Mithrans?”

The human in the black suit reached into his jacket at chest level, and I tensed. He stopped the action instantly and then continued, much more slowly. This was Ming’s primo, Asian, slender, and deadly. Very, very deadly in a martial arts kinda way. As if he could break me into tiny little pieces with his fingertips, a hard look, and a toothpick, before I could blink. “A Mithran has gone missing,” he said. “She was last seen with this person.” The man—Cai, no last name, or maybe no first name, I wasn’t sure—pulled out two sheaves of papers, not a weapon, and placed them on the small table between Ming and me.

I lifted one batch of pages and saw the photo of an old man, maybe in his seventies, with sun-lined skin, sunspots, raised and rough age spots, kinda brown and freckled all over. Faded blue eyes. He was mostly bald. A narrow-eyed, mean-looking man, the kind who was raised on whuppin’s, hardtack, and moonshine, and who hated the world. I flipped through the three attached pages. The info said his name was Colonel Ernest Jackson, but there was no mention of military service in the scant record.

The second file showed a digital photo of the vamp in question, Heyda Cohen. She was tiny and very beautiful. Vamps offered people the change for lots of reasons, and personal beauty was high on the list. But Heyda’s intelligent, piercing eyes suggested that she was special in the other ways as well.

“Heyda was in charge of my personal security and she was contacted by that human man”—Ming pointed at his photo—“a communication that carried a threat to me. She tracked him.” Ming’s speech, accented by her native Asian language, sped up and her syntax grew more fractured. “Then she met with that human and three of his followers. In a park. In the city. Then she went away with him. Without contacting us or alerting her support team, who were waiting in the park, watching. They allowed her to leave, as she did not appear distressed. We do not know why she left with him. She did not come home afterwards.” Suddenly Ming was all but wringing her hands, leaning toward me in her chair, shoulders tense. “The man refuses to see us. Refuses to allow us to see her. He hides in his compound and . . .” She glanced up at her primo, and her face crumpled. Her shoulders went up high, and Cai placed a hand on one in tender concern.

I had to wonder why this had been reported as a minor problem, and not the urgent one that a kidnapping represented. Especially the kidnapping of a head of clan security. When I asked that question, Cai said, “Heyda gave us no signal that she was in danger. She often worked with the human community to forge ties. We assumed that was what she was doing. But she didn’t return. She didn’t contact us. That is not like her.”

“In this day and age,” Ming said, “one with cameras and detection devices, there are many places we dare not enter. We are not allowed to protect our own.” Ming’s eyes bled slowly black, her sclera going scarlet, but her fangs remained up in her mouth on their little bone hinges. It was a demonstration of intent and control. “Heyda must be returned to us. Or avenged. If they have made her true-dead, I will drink them all down. Humans go too far in this modern time.”

Aw righty, then. “Did Heyda’s team video the meet? Do you have an idea where she might have been taken?”

“Yes,” Cai said. “We have gathered all video and intelligence related to this situation. The compound’s security is tight, using cameras, guards, and patrolling dogs. And we smell silver in their weapons. We could raid the compound, but my people smell explosives in addition to the other weapons and measures. My master is disturbed.”

I focused on the word making the most impact. “Compound?”

“That human male has land,” Ming said. “It has been in his family for longer than I have been blood-master. He calls his holdings a church, but it is not. It is something else.”

I looked my question at the primo. Cai was standing with his hands loose at his sides, and he shrugged slightly. “They claim the right of religious freedom, but their women are not free to choose.”

“Ah. A cult,” I said, cold starting to seep into my bones as I began putting this together. It had FUBAR written all over it.

“Yes,” Cai said.

A powerful vamp in the hands of a cult likely meant they’d drain her, starve her, torture her, and eventually stake her. And until they finished her off, they would have access to her blood to make them stronger, healthier, and longer-lived, blood that would heal any of their sick. They also would become addicted to the effect of vamp blood on their systems, but people are inherently stupid about addictive substances. The kidnappers—if that was what they were—had to know that the vamps would come after her. So someone in the compound had a reason to drink vamp blood—an important human was sick or dying. Or it was a trap. Either one was a problem. Oh, goody.

“I’ll need everything you have on the cult, the grounds, any legal problems, legal names and aka’s, everything. All electronic info. Anything in paper form needs to be scanned and sent.” I handed Cai a card. “This is my electronic specialist’s contact info. He’ll be collaborating with us on intel. For now, I’ll let him work with you and anyone else we need to talk to. And I’d like to see Heyda’s rooms.”

“Of course,” Ming said. “When will you attack? It must be before dawn.”

“Not tonight.”

“Tonight!” Ming shouted, her fangs dropping down with little snicks of sound, her hands clenched on the chair arms, her talons shining in the lamplight and piercing the expensive leather. She was completely vamped out, that fast. Ming looked fragile, but vamps are freaky strong. I didn’t want to have to stake her to save my life only to have Cai kill me later. And probably a lot slower. So I sat still, unmoving, my eyes on Cai, not running like prey, or fighting like a contender for territory. Not focusing on Ming; keeping my eyes averted. But the hand by my thigh was holding a silver stake. I’m not stupid.

Moving slowly, as if he were reaching out to a wild animal, Cai placed a hand on Ming’s shoulder again, the gesture a soothing caress. He said something in Chinese. Mandarin was their first language, according to Ming’s dossier. Ming turned away, hunching in on herself. It looked as though she fought for control.

Her primo said, softly, “Heyda has been in their hands for four days and four nights. We fear for her.”

“I understand. But I have to know where to place troops, where all the entrances are, and where they might be hiding explosives. The situation was never expressed to me as urgent or an imminent danger, and I don’t have my tactics guy here. Alex is the next best bet. He’s good at finding out things others can’t, so I need his intel or the rescue team might trigger an explosion that will kill them or the hostage.”

“Her name is Heyda. Not hostage,” Ming said, her back still turned.

“I know. I’m trying to get Heyda back to you in one piece. I’ll get back to you before dawn with an update.”

“Quarters have been arranged here for you,” Ming said.

“Thank you for that consideration, but the Master of the City of New Orleans has booked rooms for me uptown.” No way was I staying under a vamp roof, where there might be collaborators in Ming’s capture, or vamps wanting to try skinwalker blood. Or a blood-master on edge. No freaking way.

“As you wish.” Ming, again looking mostly human, turned her face to me and stood. I stood just as fast. Protocol and all that. The butler appeared at the entrance to the parlor like some kind of magic trick—gone one moment, present the next. “I expect a report before dawn. You are dismissed.”

Yeah. Right. I gathered up the papers and followed the butler to Heyda’s rooms, which I searched as well as I was able, getting Cai to take photos of everything and send them to Alex with a text telling him I had arrived and was okay. Before I left, I removed Heyda’s pillowcase from her pillow and took it with me. I might need a scent item to track her and wanted to be ready. I grabbed my cell on the way out, happy to be back in communication with my team.

***

With the cell battery at least partially charged, I called the Kid back home. The Younger brothers were frantic, and I spent the ride to my hotel updating them.

By the time I got checked into the suite—one of those corner rooms with windows on both outer walls, all with a view, a sitting area, a king-sized bed, a desk with computer access, and a fridge—it was two a.m. and I was exhausted. To wake up enough to function, I took a fast, frigid shower, dressed in the clean jeans and T-shirt I had carried up from Fang’s saddlebags, and made my way to the business lounge. Access to that department was quickly facilitated by the hotel night manager, who let me into the computer room for a number of twenties. In the short elapsed time, Alex had gathered more info to add to what we knew. A lot more.

***

A cup of double-strong black tea on the desk beside me, I opened up the file compiled by Alex and read the summary he had prepared. Colonel Ernest Jackson was a third-generation cult member, grandson of the founder of the God’s Cloud of Glory Church, a backwoods religious cult of polygamists who lived on three hundred acres of hillside property not far from Beaver Ridge, which sounded appropriate for the cult in so many ways.

God’s Cloud had a recent batch of problems, however, with papers filed against them by the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services and the Department of Human Services for human trafficking and child endangerment. Reports suggested that they married off their female children long before they were women. Two days prior to Heyda being abducted, there had been an attempted raid on the complex, but the church had clearly been alerted to the law enforcement plans, because by the time the LEOs got there, the access roads to the compound had been barricaded with recently felled trees and booby-trapped with nails, scrap iron, and rolls of rusted barbed wire. The social services types and the cops hadn’t exactly gone home with their tails between their legs, but they were stymied at the front gates of the church compound. It was looking like a combo of Ruby Ridge and the Nevada Showdown.

I had to wonder how the colonel and his pals had gotten off the property to kidnap Heyda and then gotten back in without a law enforcement incident. I made a note to look for hidden entries. Cave passages, maybe? There were lots of caves in the hills of Knoxville. Maybe an undocumented cave accessed the property.

Satellite maps and topographical maps of the area showed ridges of hills running through Knox County vaguely north and south and making a long curve, like a fishhook. It looked like a fault line, but nothing in the maps said so. The rivers ran between the folds of hills with large flatlands between. Tax records indicated that some areas of the hills were affluent, some much less so. I pored over the topo maps, water table maps, survey maps, and photocopied maps from the nineteen fifties and sixties that still revealed logging roads, farm roads, and other access points not on current maps. The satellite maps of the church lands showed buildings, outbuildings, barns, places where large earth-moving projects had been initiated and later finished, and foundations where new buildings were being started. But the most recent sat maps were six months old and there was no telling what was happening there now.

While Beast slept in the back of my mind, bored, I sent texts to Eli, Alex’s former Army Ranger brother, the tactics and strategy part of our three-person-team. I needed him to give me an opinion on the best way into the compound, the most likely location of the missing vamp—anything that looked like a prison or holding cell—and then the best way out.

I got back a single sentence from Eli. This intel sucks.

“Yeah,” I muttered to the empty, quiet room. “It does.”

Still with no plan, I started in on the current legal charges filed by the state of Tennessee. That part of the research was mind-numbing, and meant more extra-strong tea. Lots more. The charges were scary, and if true, meant that the so-called Christians treated their womenfolk no better than the Taliban treated theirs.

Close to dawn, I spotted two names that could mean assistance in my quest. John Ingram and his wife, Nell, had left the church and moved to the other side of the ridge some years past. Outcast or reformed, I didn’t know, but people who had former ties with cults could provide helpful suggestions. So could access to their property, one hundred fifty acres that shared a narrow border with God’s Cloud’s church property. “Oh yeah,” I said to the silent room. “Oooooh yeah.” I sent the couple’s names to Alex for a full workup, and a text to Eli to look at the boundary of the two properties as possible access points.

I was back at the clan home half an hour before dawn, made my report, and then rode Fang into the rising sun and back to the hotel, where I sacked out for four hours of desperately needed sleep.

***

Unfortunately, when I woke, it was to learn that John Ingram had died several years before, and that his young widow had no high school diploma, no GED, no telephone, no cell phone recorded under her name, no computer, and a dozen guns registered to her. She used wood, solar, and wind to power her meager needs, and her house had a well and a septic tank. She had a driver’s license, and paid insurance on an old Chevy truck. Nell lived off the grid. In other words, Nell was a recluse. The only thing she did have was a very active library card. She might be a hermit, but Nell was an eclectically self-educated hermit who had library books checked out on varied subjects, and the books were checked out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Every week. For the last five years.

Nell studied herbs, plants, farming, carpentry, electric wiring, remodeling, world and U.S. history, business mathematics, banking, religious history, and philosophy. Currently she had five books checked out: Philosophy for Beginners, written by Osborne and illustrated by Edney, Solar Power for Your Home, by David Findley; A History of the Church in the Middle Ages, by Donald Logan; Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English; and a trilogy of contemporary romances by Nora Roberts. There were a dozen different music CDs and two DVDs checked out, one a chick flick and the other a techno-disaster thriller. Yeah. Eclectic. But it was Wednesday. And according to the library checkout timetable, which Alex had easily hacked, Nell Ingram always left the library at two p.m.

I packed up and took off on Fang, most of my weapons left in the hotel room so I didn’t scare anyone. My cell was fully charged and I felt as though I was part of the world again. Being so cut off had been creepy. I had no idea when a cell phone had become part of my security blanket, along with the blades, stakes, and guns, but it had.

***

Knox County’s main library library was called the Lawson-McGhee Public Library, located on the corner of West Church Avenue and Walnut Street, with a little public park behind it, and public parking close by, where I left Fang, two spaces down from Nell’s beat-up but scrupulously clean pickup truck, which I confirmed by her license plate number. Security was so much easier in the modern day, with access to so many public records protected by such poor security.

I wandered around the block, scoping out the neighborhood, which had churches, public buildings, trees, and clean streets, and decided the location was pretty, even if the library itself wasn’t. The building looked like something out of the seventies, bulky and blocky. It was built of nondescript brown brick, had few windows, a few emergency exits that sounded an alarm when opened, and no security cameras on the exterior.

As I approached the front entrance, I saw two homeless, bearded guys sitting on the front steps, being rousted by a cop. They needed showers and access to washing machines, but looked as though they preferred to sleep out under the night sky, weather permitting, or in a tent, rather than in a house. One of the guys had dozens of military patches on his old jacket, and the other had only one arm, no prosthesis, and stood with a hard lean to one side, as if he lived with pain.

Just on the off chance that the men were really U.S. veterans, I gave them each a twenty to get a decent meal. Maybe they’d spend it on cheap wine, but how they used my gift wasn’t something I could control. Mostly I just wanted to say thank you for their service, and say it loud enough to remind the cop of that gift. When the homeless men took off, they were happy, the cop was thoughtful, and I was, well, I was still me, a two-souled Cherokee skinwalker who at least now had constant Internet access. But I was in a city I barely knew from previous security jobs, not well enough to rescue a kidnapped vamp. I had no backup, a thought that once would never have crossed my mind but now seemed acutely important. I liked working with the Youngers. I missed working with them, and hated that they were so far away.

I felt the magic the moment I walked inside the library. It wasn’t powerful or deadly like the magic of Molly, my best friend and the mother of the aforementioned godchildren, or cold like most vamps’ magic. At first, this energy had no taste, no smell, and there was nothing I could see, unlike the glowing motes of witch power and the gray place of the change of my own magic. Yet I could sense it on the air, as if it danced across my skin, testing me, trying to get an impression of what I was. I stepped to the side of the entry and worked to exude calm as I studied the place, searching out the person who emitted the odd sensation, and trying to discern what I was really feeling.

I drew on my Beast’s senses. She was awake, deep inside me, alert from the joy of riding Fang through the city. She loved riding a motorcycle, the wind in my/our face, the sights flashing by, the smells that reminded her of home, of the mountain world that we had left behind for the contract in NOLA. It had been supposed to be a short gig, but it had blossomed into a lot more. I opened my lips and drew in the air, the synesthesia-like feeling I rarely experienced reaching up and taking hold of me.

The magic was faint, but not weak, a green-gold with an edge of smoky charcoal gray. It smelled like sunlight on leaves in old-forest woods, and like the fire that would raze it to the ground, the scent indistinct and dampened, as if reined in. No human alive could have followed such a scent, but I had Beast’s senses to draw on, and I had also been a bloodhound a time or two. When I had shifted back to human, I was pretty sure that my Beast had hung on to some of the olfactory senses bred into the tracking dog’s DNA. I located the scent trail walked along it.

Knox County’s main public library had books, a video department, an audio department, and, like any modern library, it also had a room of loaner PCs, which was where the scent originated. I followed it through the library to the computer room, where old-fashioned PCs were kept for public use. The magic was coming from the far corner, from a girl hunched over the screen, her fingers flying over the keyboard as she searched the Internet. I settled into a chair within line of sight of her but from behind, and not close enough so that she’d see me unless she was hunting me. I logged on, watching her from a safe distance. I had only an old driver’s license photo to go by, but I thought that this, this mousy little thing, this unregistered magic user, could possibly be Nell Nicholson Ingram. How ’bout that?

Something about her scent was teasing forward in my memory, my ancient, less-than-half recalled Cherokee memory from a childhood so far in the past that no one alive today could remember. Well, except for the undead, who lived forever if they weren’t staked or beheaded. But there was something I couldn’t place in that scent memory. At least, not yet.

The girl had brown hair, straight and long, tanned skin, slight rings of dirt deep under her fingernails, though she smelled and looked clean. She wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, bibbed overalls (what they once called hog-washers), and lace-up work boots. But the clothes weren’t a fashion statement. More as if they were what she wore because she had to, as if she was too poor to afford anything else. She could be a farmer. Or work in a greenhouse, or for a landscape company, off the books, as there was no record of that on her meager tax forms. She was a woman who put her hands in the soil.

Her magic almost had an earth-witch smell to it, but it felt different. Very different. It wasn’t something I could put into words, but the difference pricked my skin. She was slight but wiry, muscular but not in a bodybuilder way, more as though she did hard physical labor work. And she looked hyperalert, as if she stayed on edge, as though she was always in jeopardy. There was a slight scent of adrenaline in the air, tinged with worry. But she didn’t seem afraid, not exactly. Just tense and vigilant. I managed to snap a photo with my cell.

She whipped up her head and looked around the room, eyes narrow, mouth firm. It was indeed Nell Ingram, older, harder, but her. I bent to the screen, typing in my e-mail addy and sending notification to the Youngers that I’d found Nell. Bent over, I looked involved and unaware of anything around me, while I kept her in my peripheral vision, smelling, knowing that fight-or-flight impulse she was feeling.

After several minutes of indecision, Nell went back to her screen, and I was cautious about centering my attention on her again. Her magic was peculiar, but it clearly had a sensory net of spatial awareness, an ability to tell when she was being studied or hunted. My Beast had the same awareness. Most wild things did.

As I keyed in my e-mail, I kept half an eye on the girl, my mind working on the scent memory. The word came to me slowly, the Tsalagi syllables sounding in my mind, whispery and slow. Yi-ne-hi. Or maybe yv-wi tsv-di. Or a-ma-yi-ne-hi. Fairies, dwarves, the little people, or in her case, maybe wood nymphs would be closer. Mixed with human. Mostly human. Fairies in Cherokee folklore weren’t evil, just private and elusive, and sometimes tricksters, but this girl didn’t look tricky. Just wary. But the magic was woodsy, like the fey, the little folk. In American tribal lore, only the Cherokee had fairies and little people, possibly from the British who intermarried among them for so many centuries.

***

When it looked as though she’d be there awhile, I did a quick search for places to buy personal things I hadn’t brought, like ammo, new underwear, and combat boots. I also found several barbecue restaurants. I had eaten on the run since my lunch in Asheville at Seven Sassy Sisters Café, and I needed a good meaty meal.

Just before two p.m. the girl finished with her research. I closed down my browser and watched her leave the room, then quickly took my place at her computer and looked into the Internet search history. It was an invasion of privacy, but I was intrigued. Nell had spent a lot of time on just four sites, one on a legal case against a polygamist cult out West, one on a site where unusual herbs could be ordered in dried or seed form, one on herbal antibiotics, and one on Greek history, specifically the god Apollo and how similar stories were prevalent in many ancient people’s mythology. I logged off and left the library, following Nell’s scent trail.

She had lingered at the checkout desk and left through the main doors, turning onto Walnut, crossing the street to walk on the far side, away from the unattended police unit parked on the street in designated parking. Then she had crossed back over the street and into the tiny parklike area, where she stood with her back against a tree. Watching for me.

“Busted,” I murmured, pulling my cell. I hit a button, then set it in my T-shirt pocket, where it stuck up above the fabric, videoing everything as I cautiously approached her.

Nell gave me half a smile and slid her hand from behind her. She was holding a small snub-nosed .32. “So busted,” she said back. She had heard me, which was really strange. Even witches didn’t have preternatural hearing. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will,” she said, a faint east Tennessee twang in her words. “Then toss you in the back of my truck, cover you with a tarp, drive slowly out of the city and into the woods, and bury you.”

“You do that a lot?” I asked.

She smiled, and I had the uncanny feeling that she had, indeed, disposed of bodies before. This girl—this woman—was way more than she seemed. Way more than her scant records had indicated. “Who are you?” she asked, sliding the weapon back beside her leg.

“Jane Yellowrock. I’m—”

“The vampire hunter whore who has sex with the vampire Leo Pellissier in New Orleans.” She pronounced it Pely-ser, but I wasn’t going to correct her pronunciation.

“I don’t sleep with fangheads,” I said, unexpectedly stung by the whore accusation. “I do take their money when the hunt is justified, and I do provide security when they pay for it.”

“So. Just a whore of a different kind.”

And that made me mad. I took a step closer and she lifted the weapon again, a hard twist to her lips. “Remember that burial in a remote place.”

“I remember. So let’s talk about the philosophy of whoredom. All people provide services for money. You look like a farmer. You sell jelly and honey and preserves and fresh tomatoes and eggs and veggies to the tourists?” She gave me a scant nod, her long hair moving beside her narrow face. “What does that make you?” I asked. “A vegetable whore?”

She giggled through her nose. The sound was so unexpected that she stopped, midgiggle, her eyes going wide. It looked as though Nell Ingram had forgotten how her laugh sounded. Which had to suck.

“I’m here to find a missing Mithran,” I said. “What you call a vampire. She disappeared with the leader of the God’s Cloud of Glory Church, a man who calls himself Colonel Ernest Jackson. He walked her to his car and drove off with her. This was four, no, five, nights ago. No one has heard from her since.”

Nell’s face paled beneath her tan in what looked like shock. “Then she’s dead,” she said baldly. “Or been passed around so much she wants to be dead.”

I lifted my head. “I’m going in after her. I need your help.”

Nell lifted the .32 again and backed slowly to her truck, opened the door, checked the interior with a swift rake of her eyes, and climbed in. She switched the gun to a left-hand grip, which looked rock solid, the weapon still aimed at my midsection, as though she practiced with both hands, for, well, for moments like now. She started the truck and backed slowly out of the parking spot and pulled down the road. I smelled fear on the air. Nell Ingram was terrified.

I didn’t move, just watching her go. Then I pulled my cell and asked, “You got that?”

“I got it,” Alex said. “I want to marry her. There’s nothing so sexy as a woman who knows how to use a gun, and can hold off a skinwalker with a hard look and a, what was that? A .38?”

My mouth twisted in grim humor. “Worse. A .32.”

“She took you with a .32?” he said, appalled and laughing all at once. “I am totally in love.”

“Shut up, Alex. I’m going to follow her home.”

“Copy that. Restore the cell to video when you get there so we have a record.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I closed the cell’s Kevlar-protected cover and straddled Fang. I turned the key that started the bike, which was one reason why I wouldn’t buy it. Key starts were totally wussy. I rode a Harley, and a real Harley had that kick start. That’s all there was to it. Not that my opinion was shared by many, but it was mine and I was sticking to it.

***

Long miles of city driving and then country roads followed. I stayed out of her rearview, following by scent patterns and dead reckoning. All the way to Nell Ingram’s farm.

I turned off the curving road that switchbacked up the low mountain, or high hill, into the one-lane entrance of a dirt drive, and over a narrow bridge spanning a deep ditch sculpted to carry runoff. The mailbox had no name, only a number, 196, Nell’s address on her tax records. I keyed off the bike, rolling Fang behind a tree where it would be hard to see from the road. The driveway angled back down and curved out of sight through trees that looked as though they had somehow escaped the mass deforestation of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. The trees were colossal. Healthy. Some trees were bigger than three people could have wrapped their arms around. Farther down the drive and up the hill were even bigger trees. The leaf canopies merged high overhead, blocking out the sunlight and creating deep shadows that seemed to crawl across the ground as sunlight tried to filter through, just enough to make a bower for ferns and mosses and shade-loving plants. High overhead, the leaves rustled in a breeze I didn’t feel, standing so far below.

I had no idea why, but goose bumps rose on my arms and traveled down my legs, in a sensation like someone walking over my grave, a saying used by one of my housemothers at the Christian children’s home where I was raised. Creepy but not for any obvious reason. Standing behind the tree, I turned slowly around, taking in the hillside with all my senses. On the breeze I smelled rabbit, deer, turkey, dozens of bird varieties, black bear, early berries, late spring flowers, green tomatoes, herbs, okra-buds, and bean plants, plants I remembered from the farm at the children’s home and from Molly’s garden. But there was that slightly different something on the breeze that made my unease increase. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. For no reason at all.

I had no cell signal, but I texted Alex to look at every sat map he could find and study the land and the mountain, a message that might get to him now, but would certainly reach him the next time I was near a tower. I had a feeling that there was something hidden here, like a place of power, a terminal line, or some place that was holy to the tribal Americans. Some place I should see while I was here, though that was outside of my job.

In the distance, the sound of Nell’s truck went silent, leaving the air still and . . . and empty. No motors, no traffic, nothing sounded as the roar of the truck faded. I could have been transported back a hundred years or more. No cars, tractors, no airplanes overhead. As the silence deepened, birds began to call, a turkey buzzard soared on rising thermals. Dogs barked somewhere close, the happy welcoming sound of well-loved pets. I liked this place. My Beast liked this place.

Want to shift and hunt, she thought at me. Many deer are here, big and strong and fast.

When the vamp is safe, I thought back.

She sniffed and I was pretty sure it was meant to be sarcastic. Vampires are good hunters.

I thought about that for a moment. They were, weren’t they? So, what was Heyda hunting for when she let herself be taken prisoner without a fight? Or . . . what was she protecting? Or whom? I texted that question to Alex too.

The wind changed and I smelled a human. Male. Wearing cologne to cover up the day’s sweat. He wasn’t close and so I closed my eyes, letting the wind tell me where he was.

The topo maps of Nell’s property showed a ridge of rock on the other side of the road, just beyond her land. A likely hiding place for a deer hunter, except the season was wrong and only an idiot hunter would wear cologne that his prey could smell. Unless his prey was Nell.

Slipping into the trees, I moved into the deep shadows. It felt stupid, but the woods seemed to welcome me, until, as I moved away from Nell’s property, the trees became smaller, younger, maybe thirty or forty years old, and the feeling disappeared.

I’m not as silent when walking in human form as I am when walking in my four-footed Beast form but I got close enough for my phone to manage a few photos. A man in camo was sitting in a deer stand, but he wasn’t holding a rifle. He was holding binoculars, and he was aiming them down Nell’s drive. Watching Nell’s house. The deer stand was off Nell’s property, near the juncture where her land met the church’s property and two other parcels of land. Was he protecting her? I had a feeling not, but I’d been wrong before. Weird stuff happened all the time. I moved closer through the brush, placing my feet silently among the leaves left from the previous autumn. I got a better scent, a head and lung full of the man and his feelings, emotions that emanated from his pores. Beneath the cologne, he smelled sweaty, angry, and something else, something I couldn’t quite name. I drew in the air again and this time the pheromones and scent chemicals found their way into my brain. If vicious had an odor, this was it. And possessive. That too.

I sent a third text to the Kid asking who owned the adjoining parcels of land, and to see if he could get drivers’ license photos of the owners and their kids. Satisfied that I had done all I could for now, short of assaulting and then interrogating the spy, I eased away, back to Nell’s driveway and down the two-rut, gravel lane, keeping to the shadows and angling in on the tree line.

As I walked, I felt the faintest of tingles through my boot soles, a magic permeating the ground. It came in waves, like the ocean onto the shore at low tide, a surge, rising and falling away. I figured only a witch or someone like me could sense it, but it was there, a low thrum of power and scent. It got stronger as I neared the opening in the trees ahead, a low rolling yard of maybe three acres.

The house was in the center of the acreage, set at an angle to the drive, showing the front, one side, and providing a glimpse of the rear corner. It was a ranch-style post-and-beam construction with wide-plank siding painted a fading green, white trim on the window and door frames, and dormers in the high-pitched front roof. It had a long front porch with rockers and a swing, the chain rusted. The house had been situated to take advantage of the view, the undulating hills and the distant vista of city buildings. The back porch was screened, and narrow.

The acre-sized garden at the side of the house was fenced with chicken wire to keep out the rabbits and the deer. Even this early in the growing season, there were plants standing tall, flowering, and promising bounty. The lawn had been recently cut, the grass thick and green. I turned on my cell to record video again.

Three dogs announced me, barking like fools, according to Beast, but I had a feeling that Nell had known I was on her land anyway. I was still fifty feet from the house when she stepped from the front door, a shotgun aimed my way. “If it ain’t Miss Busted.” She sounded a lot more poised than most twenty-two-year-old women.

Her dogs caught my scent. As one, their tails dropped and they spread out from her feet, a semicircle of intent and threat. I could hear them growling, that low throaty sound that said I was about to be attacked.

“Yeah,” I said, holding my hands out to the side to show I wasn’t holding weapons. “Sorry to intrude.”

“Liar.”

I thought about that. She was right. I wasn’t sorry to intrude. I’d done it on purpose. “You know you got a guy in a deer stand up the hill”—I thumbed the direction—“watching your place?”

“He ain’t on my land, so I don’t care. If he comes onto my land, I’ll shoot him. You are on my land. Give me one reason I shouldn’t shoot you and give you to my dogs.”

Her aim looked rock-steady and I believed her. But I wondered how such a tiny thing was going to handle the kick of the shotgun. I had tried polite words, information relating to her security, both usually effective in dealing with humans, and Nell Ingram wasn’t interested, but all I had was honesty.

“I told you. Four nights ago, Colonel Ernest Jackson and his so-called church kidnapped a female vampire named Heyda Cohen. You think she’s being raped. I think she’s being drained of her blood too. I intend to get her back.”

Nell’s fear increased, a ripple of unease so strong I could see it prickle over her skin. I’d have been able to smell her reaction if the breeze had permitted. But other than that, Nell didn’t move, didn’t speak. Birds called. The dogs circled closer to me, showing teeth, snarling. I didn’t want to hurt the dogs, two of them old beagle mixes and the other an old bird dog, but I would if attacked. Nell whistled softly and the dogs instantly stopped moving, but they didn’t take their eyes off me.

I wondered what the man in the deer stand was thinking about the standoff. I felt an itch between my shoulder blades, as if he had a scope on me even now. After the silence had stretched out far too long, Nell said, “Going onto the church property is a stupid move, but you don’t look stupid. You also don’t look easy to kill.” She frowned, thinking things through. “What do you want from me?”

“Everything. I want to know everything you know and remember about the compound, the people in it, and their habits. I want to know how they got off the property when the cops had the accesses guarded. I want to know if there are caves leading onto the church land. Then I want access to the compound through your property for my men. And I want to be able to retreat through your property when we’re done. And anything else you might have to offer or suggest.”

Nell laughed, the sound as stuttered and clogged as before. “Don’t want much, do you?”

Honesty seemed to be working, so I pushed ahead with it. “I want lots of stuff. Most of which will put you in danger from the church.”

“Woman, I been in trouble from God’s Cloud of Glory and the colonel ever since I turned twelve and he tried to marry me. Anything you can do to piss him off will just make my day.”

She dropped the weapon as her words penetrated my brain. “Marry you? At twelve?”

“Yeah. He’s an old pervert. Come on in. I got coffee going and food in the slow cooker. Hope you like chicken and dumplings. I missed lunch and I’m starving.”

“I’m always hungry. But twelve?” Nell didn’t smile, but she did call off her dogs. That and an offer to feed me was a start.

***

Nell knew stuff. Nell was like a font of knowledge and wisdom, strength and power, innocence and hard-won independence. I liked her instantly, which didn’t happen to me often. I sat at her antique kitchen table, the boards smooth from long use, the finish mostly gone and the grain of the wood satiny beneath my fingertips. She had an old boom box loaded up with CDs: jazz and blues and even some forty-year-old hard rock, which started while we set the table. And her chicken and dumplings smelled so good I wanted to cry. Trusting her for reasons that had everything to do with her magic and her calm self-assuredness, I turned off the video; I had no desire to record Nell Ingram, She was a private woman and I wanted to honor that.

Nell didn’t offer grace, and when I commented on that, considering her ultra-right-wing background, she said, “I believe in God. I just don’t know if I like him much. I sure don’t like the colonel’s God, but then Ernest Jackson’s going to hell someday. If I get lucky, I’ll be the one to send him there.”

She was fierce, for such a tiny little thing. Sharp-faced, delicate, and lean, with long, slender, strong fingers and hair she had never cut, worn parted down the middle and hanging to her hips. She’d have been almost pretty, if she had tried to be. But Nell didn’t put on airs for anyone. Nell was just, purely, Nell. Pale-skinned where she wasn’t tanned, farmer-John-style clothes, work boots. Capable looking. And man, could she cook! The odors were enough to make Beast want to come out and chow down, the music selection was funky enough to make me want to dance, and Nell had cooked enough to feed herself for a week, which meant that there was plenty for me without the guilt of taking someone else’s food.

As I ate my second helping of flaky biscuitlike dumplings in thick chicken gravy, served up in green, hand-thrown pottery bowls big enough to double as horse troughs, Nell sketched what she remembered of the compound. I was able to overlay her sketch with the sat-map photos of the current compound, and quite a few of the buildings were unchanged, which helped a lot in the planning stage of a raid. She knew which building the colonel lived in and where the jail was. And best of all, she knew where the armaments were stored. “They keep ’em here”—she tapped the uneven rectangle that represented a building—“which is right next to the nursery. They know no one’s gonna blow up the weapons and risk killing all the children.”

“Yeah. That’s . . .” I thought through possibilities and discarded cruel, insane, and evil, to choose “not unexpected.”

Nell snorted, and it wasn’t a ladylike snort; it was a hard, ferocious sound. “It’s the way cowards work.”

I didn’t disagree.

“You asked about caves,” she said. “They got several, but they’re used for storage. So far as I ever heard, they weren’t the kind that went anywhere. But there’s a long crevasse here.” She pointed at my sat map to a darker green area. I had thought it was just a different kind of tree growing close together so the leaves overlapped, but according to the topo map, she was right, it was a narrow ravine. “That’s how they get in and out. A crick runs along the bottom, then goes underground for a ways. It comes back out on the Philemons’ property, and the entrance can be seen from their house. There’s no way past. Trust me. The Philemon family are church related and they let the colonel use their vehicles in return for concessions.”

“Money?” I asked.

“Access to the womenfolk.” Her eyes went harder, a flint green. “Young womenfolk, the ones who don’t agree with the plans made for them by their men.”

“Oh,” I said softly. I had no idea what this woman had been through in her short life, but it sounded as though it might have been pretty horrible. Somehow she had escaped. She had survived. I was curious, but the expression on her face warned me not to intrude. I kept my questions and my sympathy to myself.

Nell knew the history of all the families who were members of the church, and showed me her family’s house on the church grounds. She also posited one reason why Heyda had gone with the colonel. “There’s a family named Cohen in the compound. If one of them was sick or in danger, or was confined to the punishment house, and if they were related, she might a gone with the men willingly, thinking she could do something to help.”

“Punishment house?”

She tapped the drawing she had made and when she spoke her voice was colder than any winter wind. “Here. Where the women are kept until they achieve the proper, scriptural attitude of obedience and do what they’re told.”

I took a chance and asked, “Did you do what you were told?”

Nell shot me look of pure venom. “My life is none of your business.”

“Okay.” I sent another text to Alex to check out the Cohens, but so far, he hadn’t responded. When Nell realized that I wouldn’t bring up her former life again, she quickly became talkative and helpful, but all her reticence did was make me want to know more—a history I knew she wouldn’t share.

The very best thing Nell told me was about the old logging road that twisted through the woods from her property right into the heart of the church grounds. It curved around and under a ledge of rock and hadn’t been visible from cameras in the sky. “Last time I looked, which was this past winter, when we had a couple feet of snow on the ground, they didn’t have the road blocked or booby-trapped, but it’s grown up pretty bad. You’ll havta hoof it in.”

“This may make all the difference in saving the v—Mithran the colonel took prisoner.”

“Sure. One thing,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Vampires. Are they spawn of Satan? That’s what we were taught at the church. And if they’re devils, why help them? Why work for them?”

I gave her a halfhearted shrug. “I was taught the same thing. But I’ve met humans who are surely Satan’s children. And I’ve met vamps who are no worse than the best of us. Except for that whole need-to-drink-human-blood thing.”

She grinned and slid her hands into the bib of her overalls. “I reckon that could be a mite off-puttin’.”

I expected her to ask if I’d ever been bitten, but she didn’t. Private to her core, was Nell. I walked to the door, where she shook my hand, hers feeling tiny but with a grip like a mule skinner’s. I said, “Thank you so much. I have no way of letting you know when we’ll get back here, what with no cell signal, but either tonight or tomorrow night.”

“I’m good for whenever, but you better take out my observer if you want this to go off in secret. I got no idea who it is, but it’s a good guess he reports to the church. Most folk hereabouts do.” She stuffed a plastic grocery bag into my hands, one filled with Ball jars of raw honey and preserves. “If he’s still there, he’ll think you got my name from someone in town and came for remedies or jelly.” She smiled shyly. “I make pretty good jellies and my antioxidant tea is great for colds.”

I smothered my surprise at her use of the word antioxidant. Nell might talk like a country hick and wear clothes that swathed her in shapelessness, but she wasn’t stupid. Not at all. “In that case, I’ll pay my way,” I said, and placed two twenties on the table. Before she could object, I said, “The hospitality was free. I know that. But my partners will love the treats, so I’m paying for them. Period.” She smiled, and her face was transformed from merely almost pretty to downright lovely.

I left Nell washing dishes and walked back up the drive, this time not keeping to the shadows and tree line, but walking out as if I had a right to be there. Fang was sitting just as I’d left it, behind the tree. I started the bike and draped the grocery bag around the handlebars where it could be seen. I dawdled my way down the mountain and back to Knoxville. On the way I ascertained that the deer stand was still manned, and this time I got a good look at him. White male, brown, greasy hair, scruffy beard, pasty-skinned, and wearing camo. I could pick him out of a lineup if needed, but I intended to make sure that he never got a chance to be in one. One way or another, I’d see that Nell Nicholson Ingram’s spy was sent packing or was left to crawl away and lick his wounds.

When I got close enough to civilization to get a cell signal, I found multiple texts from Alex. One of them was excellent news. Leo had made arrangements to fly the Younger brothers in on his private plane, and they were waiting at my hotel. I had been dreading working with unknown vamps and blood-servants when we went into the compound. Eli’s presence raised my expectation of success considerably and I stopped at a barbecue place, bringing in enough food to feed my small army.

***

The rest of the day was busy, kept that way by a long meeting with and Eli, Cai, and Glass Clan’s secondo blood-servant, who was also Heyda’s second-in-command of security and Heyda’s best blood-meal. Her name was Chessy, and she was a local gal, one who looked a lot like Nell—sharp-faced and lean. And if Heyda had been driven insane—a common problem with vamps who had been starved, bled dry, and tortured—Chessy was the most likely person to bring the vamp out alive. Undead. Whatever.

Based on the intel we had received from Nell, we decided not to wait. The longer we put off a raid, the greater the likelihood that we’d tip off the colonel to our plans. We’d go in tonight. And we’d go in without alerting local law enforcement ahead of time, just in case the leaker who had warned the church about the local LEO’s child services raid was also a police officer.

We met at the Glass Clan Home two hours before dusk, and Eli and Chessy laid out the plans to Chessy’s handpicked team. The insertion team was composed of fifteen: Chessy, six vamps all over the age of one hundred, all with military experience, and five humans, ditto on the military backgrounds. Eli and I made fourteen pairs of boots-on-the-ground. Alex would be stationed with access to a satellite phone and talkies at Nell’s place. And we’d have a driver. If we were lucky (if the sat phone worked the way it should), we’d have coms between us, as well as access to the outside world.

We used a beat-up panel van to get across town, one with a logo on the said TRUCK BROKE? WE CAN FIX IT! The number painted under the logo rang back to the Glass Clan Home, where a human was ready to answer and take queries, as part of our cover. The van’s exterior was a crummy rust bucket, but the interior was sealed from light and quite cushy—good for vamps to travel across town anonymously. I’d have to see about getting Leo to consider adding a couple of vans like this to his fleet of vehicles. Remaining unidentified was healthy sometimes.

We parked down the hill and Eli went in alone just before dusk. Silent, using the skills Uncle Sam had taught him in the Rangers, he took out the watcher in the deer stand and carried the man a mile down the mountain to dump him at my feet outside the panel van. The guy was older than I had first assumed, maybe twenty-eight, with a ratty beard, and a body odor that proclaimed he had missed his weekly bath, but believed that cologne made up for good old soap and water. Holy moly, he stank. While he was still unconscious, I secured him with multiple zip strips and Eli and I hefted the human into the van, where he rolled at the feet of the insertion team. We jumped in, slammed the side door, and the van proceed uphill, toward Nell’s place.

One of the vamps wrinkled his nose and said, “Human men are idiots. Present company excepted, and no offense.” He toed the limp form. “This one stinks.”

Eli, not even winded from the exertion, said, “Offense accepted anyway, suckhead.”

The vamp narrowed his eyes at Eli and I turned to the vamp. “Back down. Your comment was insulting and your apology was both lacking in grace and sincerity. Try again. Now.” And I let a bit of Beast into my gaze, seeing the golden glow in the dark of the van.

The vamp ignored me and said, “You let a woman fight your battles for you?”

“Two things,” Eli said, his voice without inflection. “One: I’m not letting you goad me into ruining this mission. Two: the Enforcer is not just a woman, just a human, or just an anything,” Eli added, his masculinity not the least injured. “Once this is over, I’ll beat your ass. But for now, the Enforcer needs your cold undead body to rescue your head of security. Either you are in or you are out. And if you’re out, I’ll happily secure you with silver tape and leave you to burn while we complete this mission.”

The vamp seemed to consider that for a moment. Then he said, “Challenge accepted.”

“Knives,” Eli said. “Numbers limited to two, each no larger than a six-inch blade.”

“First blood,” I said, hoping to keep Eli uninjured, and the vamp alive. “And if the human is injured, he will be healed.”

“Done,” both males said.

“You’re both idiots,” Alex said, grumpy as only a nineteen–year-old, younger Younger could be. “And an apology still hasn’t been issued.”

“Noted,” the vamp said.

Alex started to continue the argument, but I held up a hand and he subsided. A working frenemy was the best I’d get and I sat back as the van took the narrow, twisting road up as night fell.

***

We halted the panel van in Nell’s drive and I went to her door. She opened it before I knocked, her eyes wide and skin pale. She was breathing fast, and with Beast so close to the surface, I could hear her heart beating too fast, and smell her reaction to . . . what? “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Something dead,” she whispered, staring at the truck repair van. “Something wrong.”

“Vampires,” I said. “They won’t hurt you. I promise.”

“Will they hurt the colonel?”

“Planning on it.”

Nell nodded, the movement jerky. “Good. But they still feel wrong.” She closed the door in my face.

To save Nell more discomfort, the vamps and the blood-servants exited the van and raced into the woods, their night vision allowing them to see the narrow opening in the trees where a trail had once woven. They scattered through and along the old farm road, ducking into hiding places. Eli followed, his low-light and infrared headgear allowing him to see as well as the vamps.

I stayed with the driver and Alex as the van rolled across the back of Nell’s three-acre lawn and into the trees, following the trail as far as the vehicle’s city-street-undercarriage could manage before making a twelve-point turn to face back down the mountain. I made sure the van had a working sat signal before slipping out and taking off after the insertion team. As I ran, I pulled on Beast, who flooded my system with adrenaline and shared her night vision, turning the world silver and gray with tints of green.

I caught up with and passed the two vamps who were staying on the road to make sure we all got out, placed to maintain coms with Alex. Both lifted a hand to acknowledge me. I left them in my dust.

Beast chuffed inside me. Hunt. Ready to hunt. Want to kill and eat.

Let’s try not to kill anyone, and the idea of eating humans and vamps is not appealing in the least.

Hunt deer. Soon.

Yeah. Deal, I thought at her, spotting sprinting human-shaped forms just ahead.

***

The race through the woods revealed no barricades, no downed trees, and no booby traps. The colonel hadn’t expected attack from this direction, and the topo maps had shown why—a long vertical drop of nearly fifty feet into the compound. No human law enforcement agency would have been able to manage the descent with any kind of order or speed. And the little slip of a girl who looked like something you could break her in two with one hand tied behind your back was clearly no menace, not with a spy in the trees.

We ducked beneath the rock ledge that hid the old road from the eyes-in-the-sky and sprinted through the deeper dark, around the heart of the ancient mountain, and out the far side. The trees were smaller on this side of the mountain. The underbrush was thick and dense. The land smelled different from Nell’s property. Stressed and sleeping and unhappy. Weird thoughts for another time.

We crested the hill and the compound appeared below us. The hill fell away, a sheer drop seen on the topo maps, but not realized until now. Nearly fifty feet of vertical fall. There was no fence. No barrier. Just the drop. My heart stuttered and sped. The terrain must have seemed like the perfect protection to the church’s security crew.

The vamps didn’t even slow. They raced out and leaped. Down. The humans hardly slowed, slapping lines around tree trunks and leaping off for a fast rappel. At the back of the crew, I was undecided, but still moving fast. Beast slammed into me, the pain so sudden and intense that I tripped over my own feet and rolled off the ledge. The world tumbled around me.

Beast reached up and grabbed a root, swinging me out over the cliff. “Holy crap,” I grunted. The ground was way, way down there. I let her have us. Jumping down cliffs was a Puma concolor thing. The steeper and more impossible, the better. I was just glad my chicken and dumplings had digested. I didn’t want to lose that delicious meal when I landed, broke my legs, and threw up all over the place. But Beast wasn’t planning on any of that.

A tiny rock stuck out about twenty-five feet down. She pushed off with my free hand, accelerating the momentum of our swing, and let go of the root. I/we landed with the left toes of my boot on the rock and pushed off. The rock gave way, tumbling straight down to the vamp who had baited Eli. He caught the rock just as I/we landed in a crouch at his feet, perfectly balanced on my toes and fingertips.

I looked up and growled at the vamp. He took a quick step back, dropping the rock. I/we hacked in challenge. He stabilized his balance and nodded slightly at me, one of the regal nods that old vamps, especially old royalty who had been turned, used to acknowledge one another, or sometimes gave to someone they thought their equal. I had a feeling that someday this vamp and I might tussle and I’d hurt him. Just enough to let him know he shouldn’t have dissed the Enforcer of the MOC of New Orleans. Not even if he was a prince of vamps. Maybe he’d bleed a bit. But for now we had a vamp to rescue. And a bunch of kids too.

I gave him a regal nod back and pressed the button on my mic, a signal that would be relayed to Alex, who, unbeknownst to the vamps, would be calling the local LEOs (currently at a standoff on the blockaded road) in on an emergency raid, up through the secret entrance at the Philemon Family Farm. No way was I rescuing a suckhead and leaving women and children in the hands of cultists who would consider marrying off a twelve-year-old girl. And who had a “punishment house” for disobedient women and girls. No way.

Electric lights lit the compound grounds. The buildings were all painted a blinding white that threw back the security lights and created darker shadows. Path borders were neatly marked with rounded river rocks. The smells of many people and many dogs were strong on the night air. I oriented myself and waited. Four of our vamps had orders to neutralize the dogs and guards on the grounds, and then take down the armed guards keeping out the LEOs. There would be no killed humans to give the LEOs reason to charge vamps with a crime; instead the orders were to deliver a heavy-handed thump on the head to make the humans and canines woozy and then more zip strips to keep both dogs and humans out of the way. A little duct tape to keep them quiet, if needed. But no DBs—dead bodies. None.

The vamps, like my Beast, could spot the dogs by smell alone. More important, we could smell the humans. And vamp blood. It hung thick on the air. The vampires vamped out and slid into the shadows.

I heard thumps and a growl close by, mostly hidden by raucous music from a building on the far side of the compound. It sounded like a bluegrass bland, with banjos and guitars and drums. Playing a rollicking . . . hymn. “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” men’s voices rolling into the night along with the scent of sweat and testosterone. They were in the church, and they smelled and sounded as though they were celebrating. Maybe they were. They had the state of Tennessee’s finest stymied at the front gate.

Following our plan, Chessy and another human and the vampire prince tore off, chasing the smell of Heyda’s blood. A third human followed, covering them from the rear with a nasty-looking fully automatic weapon that bore a strong resemblance to an M4A1 carbine, a semiautomatic rifle that fired a 5.56-millimeter NATO round. U.S. military issue. It would chew up anything it hit. Instant hamburger. I so didn’t want it to be used. If a human died on this raid, Leo and Ming would do all they could to protect the vamps, but the humans could possibly be hung out to dry—which meant that I might spend a long time in jail.

Once the guards were taken care of, Eli took the humans and vamps with the most recent military, boots-on-the-ground experience, and divided them into two groups. Eli’s group vanished into the shadows of the ammo building while the other group stood guard. When exploding ammo was no longer a threat, Eli would make sure there was no footage of tonight’s raid for the cops to find. Eli was good.

The rest of us—those with little or no military experience—headed for the nursery. The door was locked from the inside, but the two vamps with me took the door down. It wasn’t quiet, but it wasn’t as loud as I might have expected either. Vamp reflexes were so fast that when they busted in the door, they caught it before it hit the wall behind. Between that and the loud music, no one heard us except an older woman who was reading the Bible by the light of a flashlight just inside the door. She looked up with her mouth in an O of surprise. The vamp nearest grabbed the human up by the scruff of the neck and set her down gently beside me. While I secured the human and shoved a sock into her mouth to keep her quiet, the vamp disabled an alarm button under the desk by the most simple and efficient method. She broke it with her fist. I liked her style.

Together, we checked on the children, hoping they were all safe and asleep and that there were no more adults who might give a warning. Unfortunately two of the children had been beaten recently. Their scents told us they were bruised and had cried themselves to sleep. The scents also told us who had done the beating—the nurse. Her knuckles still showed the damage. The vamp who had disabled the alarm made sure that she didn’t get a chance to wash her hands and maybe rinse away trace evidence. She knocked the nurse out with a swift and well-delivered left jab. “Nice,” I said.

“Yeah. Bet she’d be tasty.”

“I bet she would,” I said mildly.

The vamp studied her face, and I had to wonder if the human nurse would get a visit one night from a vampire vigilante. Satisfied that the kids were bruised, but okay, and that the older woman was the only guard, I left the nursery in the care of our humans and took my two vamps to raid the punishment house. The men were still singing, and anger had begun to heat my blood.

The punishment house was a small, nondescript building of white siding, post-and-beam construction, with thick walls. No windows. It looked like a nicely kept storage building. But I could smell the pain and fear inside it. So could the vamps. The female vamp who had busted the alarm had attached herself to me, and she took down this door the same way she had the nursery door—a swift kick—though this door took three kicks, and they weren’t quiet. When the door splintered open, we were met with the business end of a shotgun. Which my personal vamp took away in a move that was faster than I could follow in the shadows. It was a single, fluid move of kick, grab the barrel, whip up the gunstock to hit the guard in the jaw, and catch both guard and gun before they hit the floor. It was pretty. It was the last pretty thing I saw in the punishment house. There were four beds in a single room, a bathroom running along the back wall. No privacy curtains. Two women were shackled on the beds, and by the time I found light, they were crying and whimpering.

The vamp looked at them and cursed under her breath. Still moving fast, she broke the wrist cuffs with her bare hands and gathered the women up in the sheets and blankets from the beds. Drawing on her vamp strength, she pulled them close to her on the edge of one bed, murmuring endearments as she gave off a vamp compulsion, the energies cold and icy on my skin. I almost told her to stop, until I realized she was exuding calm, a gentle relaxing vibe that encouraged the women to accept help. I had never seen vamp compulsion powers being used for something good, not like this, and my respect for the vamp went up another notch. She needed a nickname, something better than “the female vamp with a great left fist.”

I stood to the side, weapon ready, watching the darkness outside and the vamp inside, until the women prisoners were sleepy and content, their heads lolling on the vamp’s shoulders. Gently, she laid them down and stood, looking up at me, her hands patting the women into deeper sleep. Softly she said, “I recognize them. This is why Heyda let herself be taken. These are her grandchildren, Berta and Wilhelmina. Berta is in her twenties. Willie is in her forties. They’ve been . . . abused.”

I knew what she meant. I had known by the smells from the moment the door had slammed open and all the scents hit my nose. They had been beaten by several people while secured to the beds and unable to defend themselves. They had then been taught a different kind of lesson by a man. I didn’t realize the extent of my own anger—mine and Beast’s—until I spoke to the two vamps under my command. My voice was a deeper register than my normal human voice. “I smell the stink of sexual predators who hide behind religion. What say we find the man in charge?”

“His blood will be yummy,” the woman said. And she vamped out. Fast.

“Not to kill,” I amended, to the vamp I nicknamed Yummy. “But let’s scare the bejesus outta him.”

“He won’t have any Jesus in him,” Yummy said around her fangs, “but scared blood is the best kind.”

For once I didn’t disagree.

We found the colonel’s house and entered, to the accompaniment of a new hymn from the church, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and I had to wonder if the colonel was singing with the men, bragging to God that his people had defeated the government types at the gates. But he wasn’t singing. He was in bed with three naked girls, one who looked about twenty and two others who looked much, much younger.

The colonel rose to his knees on the mattress and shouted, “Guards! Guards!” I switched on a lamp to see the shriveled, wasted man, his skin hanging in long folds on his lanky, pasty body. His tanned hands were fisted in the hair of a child. She wasn’t crying. She didn’t even seem to be afraid. She was staring out the window into the night, vacant-eyed, empty-souled.

His was the scent on the women in the punishment house. His scent was on the child he held. The anger that was simmering in my blood began to boil. I felt Beast’s claws press against the tips of my fingers. Kill one who hurt kits, she thought.

“Your guards, they’re not gonna help you,” Yummy said between her fangs.

“Vampire! I call upon the Holy Ghost to smite thee, demon of hell!” he roared, shaking the child by her hair. Her body juddered and quivered. But she didn’t make a sound.

“Me and the Big Guy up There are close personal pals,” Yummy said. “He’s too busy at the moment to answer. You’re all mine, baby.”

I reached across Yummy, stopping her forward movement, and took the colonel’s wrist in mine. The girl couldn’t see what I was doing. What I was going to do. Silently, watching his face, I broke his index finger. The colonel cursed and let the girl go. I dropped the colonel’s maimed hand and covered the girl with the blankets. Sometime in the last few moments, the other women had disappeared out the front door into the night.

Yummy laughed, her eyes on me, and said, “Yeah. Just like that.” To the colonel, she said, “The Holy Ghost wants to have a word of prayer with you, old man.” Faster than I could see, she gripped the man around the throat and yanked him to her.

Yummy’s power raced over me like a burst of static electricity, lifting the hairs on the back of my arms. “This one is mine,” she said, her words measured and low. It was a challenge I wasn’t going to argue. I gave her a slow, steady nod. Yummy took the old man out the front door, carrying him by the throat.

It was against the law for vamps to kill humans. My morals and the law were at odds, but . . . I looked at the silent girl, huddling on the sheets, still staring into the dark. I didn’t feel the least bit bad about the colonel. He had been alive when I last saw him. As far as the law was concerned, that was enough to protect me.

Sirens sounded in the distance. We were out of time. Local law enforcement and the state cops had made the trek through the crevasse and were on the premises, somehow with a cop car. I tapped my mic on and whispered, “Time’s up. You got her?”

“We have her,” Prince said. “We are taking her up the cliff now.”

“Let’s go home, boys and girls,” I said into the mic. “See you back at the van.” As I left, I checked the Cohen house out, the one marked on Nell’s map. It looked secure. I smelled women and children. No blood. I hoped their safety was worth whatever Heyda had been through.

***

The drive back was silent except for the sounds of Heyda feeding. She had been out of her mind with anguish and blood-loss when found, and it had been all the vamps could do to get her back to the van. Once off the mountain and heading home, all the humans from her clan fed her, followed by all the vamps. It took a lot of blood to feed a drained and tortured vampire back to sanity. I’d seen a vamp drained into madness before. It was pretty awful.

Heyda’s skin was the blue-white of death, except where she was bruised from beatings. Her head had been shaved. There were dozens of half-healed cuts on her. Her wrists and ankles had been shackled with silver and were blistered, the skin torn and blackened in places. I didn’t know what Yummy had done with the colonel, but no matter what she had done, it wasn’t enough. It just wasn’t.

When we got back to the clan home, Ming met us in the drive. Heyda fell out of the back of the van, into her maker’s arms. Instantly Ming pulled the injured vamp to her and leaned back her neck in one of those not-human movements. Heyda, already vamped out, bit down into Ming’s carotid and started drinking. The other vamps gathered around, the mixed power of vamps rising on the night air in a ceremony that I had seen once, but never completely understood. The prince was part of the mix, his arms around both vamps. I guessed the little challenge between him and Eli was off for the time being, which was fine by me.

The driver closed the side doors and got back in the cab, gunning the motor of the old van and heading away from the clan home, back to our hotel. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the leather headrest.

Yummy hadn’t been with us on the ride home. I figured that was a good thing. It might be good if I never saw the vamp again. But there’s something about the universe that forces us to face our fears and our pasts and our weaknesses. I had a feeling that Yummy and I would cross paths again someday.

On the drive through Knoxville, Alex hacked in to the police coms and informed us that the local and state law enforcement officers were taking a number of children and women into protective custody and had arrested several men and women for various and sundry crimes, with more arrests and charges pending. It wasn’t enough, not with what I’d seen and smelled at the compound, but like a lot of things in my life, it would have to do.

***

The next afternoon, I rode Fang up the hillside to see Nell, to thank her for the help and for the intel. To determine a few things about her. To suggest a few things to her about her security and, maybe, a few things about her future. This time when she met me on the front porch, she wasn’t carrying a gun. She was wearing a long skirt and flip-flops, her brown hair pulled back in a braid, much like the way I wore mine. She was sitting on the swing, whose chain supports had been replaced with new steel that creaked pleasantly when she pushed off with a toe. I hoped the money Alex had left on the front porch last night had gone toward the dress and the chains.

I rode Fang all the way up to the end of the drive and left the bike in the sun, the metal pinging and ticking as it cooled. “Afternoon, Nell,” I said.

“Jane Yellowrock. You’uns come set a spell,” she said in the local vernacular. “I got you some good strong iced tea with honey and ginger in it.”

I never drank tea that way, but it seemed impolite to make a face. I climbed the steps and accepted a sweating tea glass. The green glass was old, bubbled with air like old, handblown glass. It probably was an antique; there were treasures in these hills. I sat, sipped, and was pleasantly surprised by the taste. After a comfortable moment, I said, “You act like you were expecting me.”

“I was, sorta. Don’t know why.”

“Is it because of the magic I feel every time I put a foot on the ground here?”

Nell’s face paled to nearly vamp-white. She whispered, “I’m not a witch.”

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Right? That’s the way you were taught.”

Nell just stared and I felt the land around me rise, as if aware, as if to protect her, the current of intent passing through the foundation of the house, into the porch chair where I sat, and into me. And I caught again the scent of Nell Nicholson Ingram. “My people would have called you yi-ne-hi. Or maybe yv-wi tsv-di. Or even a-ma-yi-ne-hi. You would have been respected and maybe a little feared, but not burned or tortured or beaten.”

Nell frowned, not knowing that her body language was telling me so much about her. About her life in another time, another place, but still so close. Just over the ridge.

“I’m not a witch,” she whispered again, as if saying it so tonelessly, so repetitively over the years, had kept her safe.

“No. Your gift isn’t witch magic.”

Nell blinked. “It’s not?”

I let my mouth curl up slightly. “I’m not even a hundred percent sure it would properly be called magic. More a paranormal gift of some sort, but then, I’m not a specialist.”

“You’re not human either.”

My smile went wider and I sipped the tea, letting her put things together.

“Are you like me?”

I heard the plaintive tone in her words. I knew what it was to be so very alone in the world. I knew that my answer would cause her pain and leave her feeling even more alone. “No.” My smile slid away. “I only ever met one other like me before. He tried to kill me. I had to kill him to save my life. Now I’m alone. Maybe forever.”

Nell looked away from my eyes, holding her green glass in both hands. “Forever is a long time to be alone.”

Nell had been alone since her husband died, according to what Alex had been able to dig up on her—which was next to nothing. Just Nell and her dogs, on this mountain land, for years. “It’s all good,” I said. “Life is good. I do good for humans and for others, outcasts, people in need. I protect the innocent when I can. There may not be others like me, but I found a place for myself. Found friends. People who came to me and we made a family. I have a purpose.”

“You think I need a purpose. You think that living here, making my way, reading my books, and growing things isn’t good enough.” Her chin lifted. “Proust said, ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’ I got new eyes aplenty. I don’t want to leave. I’m not a hundred percent sure I even can.”

I thought about that for a while, as the old bird dog climbed the short steps and curled under Nell’s swing, his tail thumping on the smooth boards. I had been chained to Leo Pellissier once upon a time. I hadn’t been able to leave his side for long without getting terribly sick. Maybe Nell was chained to the land in much the same way. “You never know how far you can travel until you start walking.”

“Who said that?”

“I did. And no one said you’d have to leave the land forever.”

“You already told people about me, didn’t you?”

“I did. I’m sorry. But the vampires who ran across your mountain felt your magic in the land. Felt it thrum up through their feet. They knew you were something special. To keep them from coming after you, maybe changing you whether you want it or not. I told a friend about you. He’ll be coming to talk to you soon. To offer his protection. To try to get you to work with him. Working with him offers you safety from all the others. Working with him will keep the vamps from sniffing around. Working with him will keep you safer from the church, from whoever takes over for the colonel.”

“You made the colonel disappear, didn’t you?”

“Not me. But I didn’t stop the one who did.”

Nell looked out over her land, the lawn rolling down the sloping hill into the trees, something odd on her face. Something I couldn’t read. “The colonel’s heir is Ernest Jr.,” she said, without looking at me. “He’s evil through and through. Junior hates me with a hatred like a forge, burning hot. Hatred like that shapes a man, and never in a good way. Junior will kill me if he gets half a chance. Kill me and take my land.” She sighed, the sound wistful. “Life is like a train tracks, parallel rails, one side blessings, the other side troubles. I’ve been blessed for years. Now I guess I might have to ride the other rail for a while, again.”

“And that other rail, it might prove to be a blessing too.”

Nell shook her head sadly. “Go away, Jane Yellowrock. Go back to your vampires and your witches and your search for whatever you are. Get off my land. Leave me in peace. Please.”

I stood and set the green iced tea glass on a small table. Beside it I placed a card. “This belongs to the friend I mentioned. He’s a cop in PsyLED. He’s a pretty boy, black hair and black eyes. Up here, he’d be called Indian looking, Cherokee, like me. But he’s mostly Frenchy. He’ll take care of you. Get you introduced to his people. Just don’t fall in love with him. He’ll break your heart.”

“You already done that, Jane. You already done that.”

Knowing I had changed this girl’s life forever, I walked down the steps and swung my leg over Fang. “I can’t say I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d do it again. You losing your peaceful life meant getting one hundred thirty-eight physically and mentally abused children out of the clutches of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. And you might not want to admit it yet, but you’d let me do it again too.”

I had done the best I could, despite shoving Nell out of the shadows and into the limelight. She was no longer off the grid. No longer hidden away. The rest was up to Nell. I keyed the bike on and rode off Nell’s mountain and back into Knoxville. I had a private jet waiting on me, a flight back to New Orleans, and the problems that awaited me there. There were always problems with fangheads.

Usually I had buyer’s remorse about taking a job with the vamps. Usually I spent a lot of time in self-recrimination and guilt and second-guessing myself and my choices and my decisions. But just this once, I felt good about a job for the bloodsuckers. A job well done. One hundred thirty-eight children set free. And a pedophile and sexual predator gone missing.

I wondered where Yummy had buried the old man.

I wondered if he had died on Nell’s land.

I wonder a lot of things. But I seldom have answers. Rogue-vamp hunters and Enforcers act in a vacuum, flying by the seat of our pants. And now, flying back to New Orleans in the Master of the City’s private jet, I knew I was flying back into trouble. But I was flying with the Youngers. A girl could do a lot worse.

Read on for a special preview of Broken Soul, the Jane Yellowrock novel coming from Roc on October 7, 2014.

Chapter One

Half-Dressed Vamp Gave a Come-Hither, Toothy Smile

Visiting the Master of the City of New Orleans was always challenging, but it was worse when he was in a mood. Leo Pellissier’s Clan Home and personal residence had burned to the ground not so very long ago, and the rebuilding was taking longer than he thought he should have to wait. Combined with the accidental media release of the upcoming arrival of a delegation of the European Mithrans—fangheads of state to the rest of us—and making the arrangements to house and feed his unwanted guests according to their usual kingly standards, his patience was wearing thin. Any equanimity he might have pretended to was long gone.

His Regal Grumpiness had demanded my presence. Yeah. I had called him that—from a safe distance, on my official, military-grade, bullet-resistant cell phone. I’m brave and all, but I’m not stupid.

I parked the SUV I had been driving lately—one of the MOC’s, a heavily armored gas-guzzler, fitted with laminated polycarbonate glass, the stuff often called bulletproof glass—in front of the Mithran Council Chambers and ascended the stairs, checking over the changes in the building’s security arrangements. The razor wire on the brick fence around the property in the French Quarter had caused quite a stir, various injunctions, and political posturing, but the New Orleans’ Vieux Carré Commission had caved when it was pointed out to them that Leo was currently, technically, something like a head of state or maybe a Mithran ambassador, and the property was, therefore, currently, technically, not quite U.S. territory. The political relationships between the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the United States legal system, and the vamps were murky. Congress was still debating fanghead status and whether to declare them citizens or something else. I was betting on something else as the most likely outcome. It would be cheaper than rewriting the laws to include penalties for human blood drinking; nearly immortal vampires, who were deathly allergic to sunlight, were strong enough to tear out iron bars, fast enough to be difficult to spot on standard security cameras, and had the ability to use their stalking compulsion and their blood to enslave humans and make them want to do stuff. Like let them walk free one night from any high-security prison. It was cheaper to consider them some form of noncitizen and therefore not subject to all U.S. laws.

I was in the middle of upgrading the security of the council house from an embassy-security precaution level to White House–security precaution level, to provide super-duper protection during the EVs’ upcoming shindig. Hence the razor wire; the increased number of dynamic cameras all over, with lowlight and infrared capability; the new, top-of-the-line automatic backup generators in case of power failure; the new automatic muted lighting that was being installed along all the hallways inside; the replacement of the decorative iron-barred gate in the brick fence with an ugly, layered-iron gate that weighed a ton and could resist a dump truck filled with explosives. Just for starters. The measures I had instituted were not Draconian, but they were more stringent than the historical society liked on the outside and that the vamps themselves liked on the inside. All this for the visitation that no one wanted but no one could refuse. Not even the American vamps themselves.

A lot of ordinary humans in the U.S. were unhappy about the planned—but as yet unscheduled—visit by European vampires too, and there had been death threats made against the undead, mostly by extreme right-wing religious hate groups, neo-Nazis, fascist groups, one ultraliberal group, and several homegrown jihadist groups. No one was surprised at the reactions, but security preps had to include explosive, bacterial, and chemical attacks—as in weapons of mass destruction—and electronic attack. Even the State Department was getting in on it all.

But maybe odder than anything was the question that my team at Yellowrock Securities were all asking. Why did the European vamps want to come here anyway?

As the head of YS and one of Leo’s current part-time Enforcers, it was my job to see that the Mithran Council Chambers—aka vamp HQ, aka vamp central—was secure. Go me. His Enforcer-in-training, Derek Lee, was helping and learning the ropes, even as he was trying to adjust to being an occasional dinner for Leo. Submitting didn’t come easy to any former active-duty marine, but several things had persuaded Derek: money; he’d get to kill vamps; he’d get to play with all the toys Uncle Sam and Sam’s R & D department came up with; his men would have constant employment. But there was something bigger too. Derek’s mother had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, and Leo had agreed to feed her his blood to help her heal. Family was more important than pride to Derek. More important than anything else.

It was an uneasy alliance just yet, made worse when Derek’s men had razzed him about the new job as Enforcer requiring him to provide blood-meals for Leo. But the men were settling in as semipermanent security, and most of them had found a vamp to feed. Vamps were hard to resist when they turned on the charm and the compulsion, and even marines had their limits when a gorgeous, half-dressed vamp gave a come-hither, toothy smile.

I went through the security precautions at the council house door, relinquished my weapons, and was led through the building by Wrassler, to Leo, who was clearly not in his office, since we went down the elevator, not up the stairs. I’d known Wrassler long enough to expect an honest answer when I asked, “How’s Leo?”

Wrassler—nicknamed so because he would make a professional wrestler look puny—rubbed a hand over his pate. It needed a shave, and his palm made a rasping sound on the bristles. “He broke a lamp after you hung up on him.” I laughed and Wrassler added, his tone mild, “An original Tiffany worth over thirty thousand dollars.”

I stopped laughing. “Ouch.”

“Mmmm. His Mercy Blade was out of touch for an hour, and Leo needed to blow off some steam without killing anybody, so I invited Brian and Brandon to spar with him. Thanks to them, you’ll get to sit this one out and watch, rather than fight him when he’s annoyed.” Wrassler looked down at me from his several inches of height and said, “It ain’t pretty.”

And it wasn’t. The hot smell of sweat and blood hit me when I entered the small gymnasium and fighting rings, and my Beast perked up at the scent, interested. Brian and Brandon were Onorios, two of three in the entire U.S. They were faster than humans, had better healing abilities than humans, and probably had other mad skills and abilities that I didn’t know about yet. The rarity meant that few people knew what they were truly capable of or what their full abilities were. But it sure wasn’t besting a ticked-off master vamp in full-on kill mode.

Leo was barefooted, wearing black gi pants of a style I’d see him fight in before, his upper body bare and smeared with blood that hid most of his white scars, his black hair plaited flat to his head, except for loose strands flying as he moved. He was vamped out, his three-inch-long fangs clicked down and his pupils black in scarlet sclera. Despite the vampy-ness, he looked in control. Barely. Drawing on my skinwalker abilities, I took a sniff to determine the pheromone level of his anger and aggression.

One of the twins was out, facedown, lying off the fighting mat, his chest rising and falling, so, still alive. The other twin was in play, but his face looked like he’d been used as a punching bag. Which he had been. There was blood all over his white gi, the cloth hiding bruises and torn flesh between the fang rents. The sounds of thuds and slaps and grunts resounded on the air, echoing brightly through the open space. The standing twin spun away and hit the wall. I felt the impact through the floor and my Lucchese boot soles. He slid down the wall, leaving a bloody smear on the painted cement block.

“This isn’t good,” Wrassler murmured to me. “The two of them should have been able to hold their own against him.”

“Hmmm. Who else did you call?” I asked softly, as Leo screamed his triumph into the room, fists raised to the ceiling. My Beast peeked out and purred, and I shoved her down. This not the time, I thought at her.

“Grégoire. He’s on the way.” Wrassler checked his cell. “And Gee DiMercy should be here any minute.”

On his words, Gee DiMercy, Clan Pellissier’s Mercy Blade, walked through the door on the far side of the room. “Hallelujah, Holy Moses,” Wrassler murmured beneath his breath. It was a Southern Bible Belt phrase uttered by people in a certain age group, and though Wrassler looked too young to use it, he drank vamp blood, so he didn’t look his age, whatever it was.

“Your gramma say that?” I asked, as I watched Girrard DiMercy from a safe distance. The Mercy Blade was dressed in tight black pants and a billowing royal blue shirt, and he carried twin flat blades, both long swords with hand-and-a-half hilts for one- or two-hand fighting. His hair was back in a queue, tied with a narrow black band. The first time I’d seen him fight, he’d been saving my butt, and I hadn’t had time to admire his technique. Leo was focused on the approaching man, arms out, hands and talons ready, shoulders tensed, motionless as a crouching predator. Unbreathing, in that statute-still way of the vamps. Funnn, Beast murmured.

“Used to,” Wrassler murmured. “My mama. My daddy.” He added, his tone mesmerized, “Me.”

When he was twelve feet away, the Mercy Blade tossed Leo a blade, the overhead lights glittering on the steel edge. The vamp leaped high and whipped it out of the air, but the small swordsman was already moving. His blade left a long cut on Leo’s side. The Master of the City landed on the balls of his feet and slid away before the blade could bite deep, but his blood flowed fast from the slice.

Beside me, Wrassler tapped the mouthpiece of his headset and called for blood-servants to join him in the gym, his voice soft but demanding. Yeah. No matter what was going on, Leo was gonna be hungry; it would be wise to have donors on hand.

On the mat, the men danced with the swords, their bodies moving with deadly grace. Scarlet droplets flew on the air, the clang of steel so bright and sharp it hurt my eardrums. It was probably stupid, but I walked closer to get a better view.

The stench of pheromones increased and I rubbed a wrist on my nose to keep from sneezing. It was potent and heady, with the reek of violence and an underlying hint of wet feathers from the Mercy Blade and of raw power from Leo. But I’d smelled Leo fighting both ways: out of control and using his anger to power his vamp gifts. The difference was negligible, but it was there. Out-of-control Leo stank, an acrid taint on the air, tart as a rotten lemon. This was the other fighting scent. A show, controlled and planned, no matter how out of control and bloody it looked, no matter how bloody it was.

The fighters pirouetted away and back, the swords so fast they were a blur of light on steel and the clash of menace. Inside, Beast chuffed with delight. Down, girl, I thought at her. We’re not here to get sliced and diced. She huffed and turned her head away from me—a pointed insult.

The men on the mat locked blades and Gee grabbed Leo’s wrist, sticking out a leg and shoving his master across it. Leo landed with a thump. The point of Gee’s blade nicked Leo’s throat. The others in the room went silent, not even the sound of breathing echoing off the bare, white walls.

I lifted my hands and clapped, the sound slow enough to pass for bored. “Onorios heal fast. So do Mercy Blades. But it was a pretty show, boys.”

Leo kipped to his feet, actually breathing now, from the exertion. Off the mat, the twins rolled over, groaning, gasping, and smelling of pain. One of them cursed under his breath about the need for realism being “effing painful.” Gee DiMercy chuckled softly. “Indeed, you are a bruised mess, dear boy.” To me he asked, “And how did you know this was all a play, little goddess?”

Studying Leo, I tapped my nose and then tucked my fingers in my jeans pockets. “You smell different.”

Leo blew off his irritation and looked up at a blast of air from the door. He said something in French, and Grégoire, standing there, said something back. There was a time when I’d wanted to learn Chinese. Now I’d give a bundle to be able to speak French, even though I was betting Leo and his best boy-pal, sparring partner, combat comrade, and probably lover, were rattling off in some archaic form of the language that no human alive today could understand. Leo and Grégoire had both learned the language centuries ago, and languages evolve faster than most people think.

The two vamps helped each of the twins rise, and gave them sips of their own blood to drink to speed the healing. It was a little too much PDA for me, all the lips and teeth and tongues and bare skin, but then, I’m a prude by most standards, even by the cultural criterion of the Cherokee of the eighteen hundreds. I know that for certain because I was alive back then. Cherokee skinwalkers live a long time. And then we go insane and eat people. Go figure. I guess everything has a price.

“Will others discern that we do not fight in a rage?” Grégoire asked.

“I did warn you she would not be easy to dupe,” Gee DiMercy said. He was cleaning his blade as he walked, head down, a soft cloth that looked like silk on one side and chamois on the other stroking the blade in a hypnotic rhythm.

Answering Grégoire, I said, “Probably.” And then asked, “What others?” as I followed the vamps to the door where I had entered.

“The European Mithrans,” Brandon said. He balled up the hem of his torn gi top and wiped his chest. Grégoire’s eyes followed the action with a look that spoke of hunger, and not just blood-hunger. I was pretty sure Grégoire was poly-sexual. Or maybe pansexual. I wasn’t sure whether they were different and didn’t really want to know. That whole prude thing again.

“And you want them to think you’re fighting mad for what reason?” I asked as we pushed into the hallway.

“For les demonstrations,” Grégoire said. “So as to lull them into thinking they can defeat us, of course.” Which made no sense until he added, “They will challenge us to les Duels Sang, no?” His tone was excessively patient, the way an adult sounds explaining something to a three-year-old who’s been asking “Why?” all day long.

Duels Sang. Sang meant “blood” in French. They were training for Blood Challenges, the totally legal duels that established place and importance and right to rule. And were sometimes fights to the death. “Oh,” I said. Then I realized that likely meant me too. “Oh. Well, dang.”

Grégoire laughed again, the sound not unkind. “You will fight wonderfully, little cat. I have seen you.”

“Take Jane to my office,” Leo said to Wrassler. “See that a small repast is prepared and brought up maintenant. We will see to our toilette and join you.”

“Twa-let?” I asked when the males had entered the locker room set aside for bigwigs, and we were alone, heading to the elevator. “Like a French potty? One of those bidets?”

“He meant hot showers,” Wrassler said, “changing clothes. Healing wounds,” he finished, with a particular emphasis.

I nodded, pursing my lips. Hanky-panky. Gotcha. Well, at least they’d let me have food while I waited. Though I had to wonder how long the healing wounds would take. I only had all night, and mant’non could mean anything.

The elevator doors closed behind Wrassler and me. In the past, to reach most of the lower floors, a passenger had to swipe a security card. Now Wrassler rested his palm flat on an open plastic boxlike thing for his handprint to be read. I had implemented the security upgrades, but I’d wanted either retinal-scan devices or units that required a body-temp handprint, displaying adequate blood flow for life, to prevent anyone from cutting off the hand of an employee and using it to get around. Unfortunately, vamps didn’t have remotely human retinas, nor did they show signs of life as measured by a biometric screen, so I’d had to take the chance that no one would try an amputation. The system I had settled for recognized and stored all human employee and vamp handprints and gave the passenger the rights to access only specific floors. There were restrictions for most humans, and—because Leo couldn’t bind me like he wanted—that included me.

I had right of entry via the usual button control panel, to all the normal floors, but none of my measures had gotten me onto any of the mystery floors. Until now. The elevator started going down. “Uh, Wrassler? I thought we were supposed to be going up to Leo’s office. Why are we going down?”

A small explosion of breath escaped Wrassler and he looked up at the display in shock, his face going paper-white. “I don’t know, Janie. Something ain’t right.”

“How many subbasements are there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said again, which was a surprise. “I think five. But I’ve never been down all the way before.” His face looked pale in the bluish light, and his sweat suddenly smelled of worry, which was odd. Wrassler topped my six feet and probably weighed in at 350, all of it hard muscle. He could take being rammed by a rhino and not even look ruffled. Something about his stance and expression made me pull my weapons. A silver stake from my bun and a small throwing knife from my boot. They weren’t much, but they were all I’d been able to conceal past the new security guys. The last crew woulda caught me out in an instant, but the new rotation was not quite up to their level of awareness. Yet.

Beside me, Wrassler also pulled a weapon. It was a handgun—or a small canon; take your pick—the five-round Taurus Judge model .45/.410. It was capable of chambering both Colt .45 ammo and .410, two-and-a-half-inch shotshell ammo. The ammo would punch a hole through a pine tree. Wrassler’s gun had been fitted with a fiber-optic sight, and he held it steady as the doors opened to a storage room. His shoulders relaxed and he holstered his weapon as he repalmed his print, and hit the floor button. The doors closed.

I put away my weapons, analyzing the floor I’d seen. The room had been full of cardboard boxes and old metal-covered, hump-backed steamer chests, the kind that actually went on steamships, full of rich people’s clothes. Or maybe on sailing ships, long before steam. It also contained lots of old books on shelves. And paintings. One or two had been in Leo’s home before it burned to the ground. Or maybe in Grégoire’s clan home. I couldn’t remember, but they were familiar. In one painting, I recognized the spotted fur on the lapel of a man wearing tights and poufy drawers and buckled shoes. Sitting at his feet were three beautiful vamps. One was Grégoire; the other boy and girl were unfamiliar, though all three wore period clothing like the vamp who stood over them. They also wore jewelry, Grégoire a red-stoned ring, the girl a delicate bracelet, and the dark-haired boy a necklace of a bird in flight, set with blue stones.

In another painting was Leo and another vamp, Leo’s predecessor, his uncle Amaury Pellissier. And then there had been the painting of Adrianna and a female vamp in clothing from the eighteen hundreds. Adrianna had tried to kill me on several occasions. Next time I saw her, her head was mine.

“Wrassler? Why’d we draw our weapons on a storeroom?”

Wrassler didn’t look at me when he answered. “Elevator’s been acting up all week. Taking us to the wrong floors. And there’ve been stories. Tales. For years. About a dark floor. Boo stuff.” Which I translated as stuff that went boo and made you jump in fear.

“Okaaay.” The elevator was rising again, and his scent now smelled of relief and the breakdown products of adrenaline. “So we’re good?”

Wrassler nodded, still not meeting my eyes.

“You know . . . Really. I need to see all the lower levels and all the access stairwells to determine the security needs. And I need admittance to them in advance of the Euro vamps’ visit.”

Wrassler pursed his lips as if holding in a comment. We’d discussed this before, and Wrassler had orders from Leo to keep me on the upper floors and the gym level. Leo was being stubborn, which meant that Leo had things to hide. I shook my head and looked from the conflicted blood-servant to the doors with proper elevator etiquette.

“This is essential, Wrassler. You know it is.”

When the elevator stopped again, it opened to the correct floor and we stepped out. I flipped open my fancy cell phone in its upmarket, Kevlar-topped carrying case and hit the number for home. The Kid answered, “YS,” pronouncing it Wise Ass, which he could do without a head slap because of the distance between us.

“Funny. Can you dial in to the elevator system at vamp HQ?”

“It’s not on the communal system, but Eli wired it during the upgrades. Why?”

No one had mentioned wiring the elevator to me, but we could deal with that later. In private. “The main elevator’s been taking people to the wrong floor. Get in and take a look-see, digitally and any other way you can figure out. If you can’t find anything, we need to get the Otis people in here, pronto.”

“Otis?”

“The elevator repair company.”

“Will do.”

I closed the cell. If Eli’s unauthorized wiring had caused these problems, I might be in a world of hurt. Literally. But until I had proof that YS had caused the problems, I’d keep my worries to myself.

***

The small repast in Leo’s office was not small. By the time the waiters—wearing new liveries of black tuxedoes and white gloves—were done delivering food, setting it up to look pretty, and telling us what everything was, I was starving. There was a ten-pound bison roast on the center of the tea table, a copper tray of roasted, stuffed quail, a tray of cheeses, and one of fruit. There were also several bottles of wine—the dusty kind, with dry, curling labels that practically screamed expensive. Things were changing at vamp central and—with the exception of the varieties of meat—I wasn’t sure I liked all the hoity-toity alterations. Something about it set my dander up, as one of my housemothers used to say. “Why all the new duds?”

Wrassler explained while I loaded up a plate. “Leo will be moving into his new clan home, and with the Europeans coming, he wants the serving staff trained to present food and drink in the Continental manner, both here and there, for as long as the Mithran guests stay. Everything is to be perfect.”

He sounded worried and I had a feeling that the last line was a direct quote from Leo. Thinking, I plopped down in an upholstered chair and put my Lucchese-booted feet up on the coffee table. The boots, a gift from Leo, had been damaged the first time I wore them, and Leo had handled the repairs or replacement. I never asked which. They were gorgeous, and having them on the table was perfect for what I wanted to say. “Leo never read The Taming of the Shrew, did he?” I propped my plate on my flat belly and took a long slurp of wine. It tasted like, well, like wine. I grimaced and set the elegant crystal goblet aside. “Got any beer? That stuff is vile. It dries out my mouth.”

Wrassler pressed a button on the oversized desk. “Ask Quesnel for an assortment of beer, please,” he said. When he stood straight, he studied my posture. “Taming of the Shrew? You read Shakespeare?”

I lifted a leg, holding up a boot—black leather with green leaves and gold mountain lions embossed on the shafts. They were hand-constructed, hand-tooled, hand-stitched, hand-everything Lucchese Classics that sold for around three thousand bucks a pair. But they did not belong on a table. I crossed my ankles and set them back on the table.

“Past tense.” I chewed a bite of quail that simply exploded in my mouth with spicy, bacony, wild-bird flavor. “Holy crap,” I said around the mouthful of quail and bacon and some tiny little grain. “This is good.” It was also greasy and bony. I pulled a small bone from my mouth and dropped it on the plate with a piercing, crystal tinkle before licking my fingers. “In high school. For a while I thought I might like to go college. Turned out there wasn’t money in the children’s home budget for a kid whose grades were only a little above average. Anyway, before I figured that out, I took some courses. The story’s based on the concept that if you try to please someone, they’ll only turn on you and look down on you. But if you act like a barbarian—”

“Like the one licking her fingers right now?”

“—then the fancy schmancy folk won’t know how to act and you’ll win by default of not doing the expected thing.”

“I don’t think Leo will go for that, Janie.”

Behind him, the door opened and one of the penguins entered, carrying a tray of cool bottles. Not cold the way we serve them here in the U.S., but cool, the way they serve beer in Europe, the temp of a root cellar. Ick. But I popped the top and drank half of an Einbecker Ur-Bock. “He’ll never impress the Euro Vamps. He’ll have to kill them all or prove he’s something different—more modern and newer than they are. Whatever. But not better at being what they are. Won’t happen no matter how hard he tries.”

Wrassler said a low “Hmmm” as I finished off the quail and started on the bison, picking the meat up with my fingers. I had noted the number of chairs in the small but opulent office, and figured that if I didn’t get my fill now, I might not get anything. It looked like a much bigger meeting than usual, and I had to wonder why we weren’t in the security conference room.

By the time my plate was empty, the men entered, smelling of various colognes and scented soaps and aftershaves. And endorphins. Yeah, they’d gotten happy.

They stopped in the foyer of the office proper, clustered in a fanghead/blood-meal group, and stared at me in what smelled like shock. I grinned up at them and licked my fingers again.

“Little Janie has suggested that we act the Petruchio to the Europeans’ Kate Minola,” Wrassler said, his voice toneless but his eyes dancing as he took in their reactions to my lazy sprawl. “American barbarians.”

Leo tilted his head, studying me, and he did that single-eyebrow-quirk thing that was so classy and that I totally could not do. I’d tried. In that moment he looked completely human, if a bit like he’d stepped out of the pages of a historical novel. He was wearing a shirt with draping sleeves and a round collar that tied at the throat, the ties hanging open. High-heeled leather boots went to his knees, with a pair of nubby silky pants tucked into them. Except for the boots, I’d seen him wear this outfit before. Either he had a dozen of them or he was wearing this pair out. I saluted the group with my beer and slurped, watching them.

Leo chuckled, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. When he laughed, he looked so normal, so human. It was uncanny and kinda scary that one of the most dangerous nonhumans I knew could appear so ordinary. He crossed the office proper and took up my deserted glass of wine. He drank deeply, his eyes still on me over the rim. “Barbarians, eh?”

“And tech experts. Modern people. Just a suggestion,” I said, and sucked the rest of the beer out of the bottle with one long, low-class glug. “So. Wha’s up, dudes?”

Chapter Two

It Is Done . . . Factum Est. Consummatum.

“We have a minimum of three months to prepare for our . . . visitors,” Leo said, the last word sounding forced, as if he’d rather have said invaders or attackers or enemies. Leo leaned over the desk, resting his weight on his fingertips, and studied us from his standing height. Leo wasn’t tall, but his posture gave him a command presence I had used myself.

Dominance posture, Beast murmured at me.

There were a bunch of us in the office, as I’d guessed: Adelaide (Del), who was Leo’s new primo; Bruiser, who was Onorio and Leo’s old primo; Grégoire and the bruised-up Onorio twins; the Mercy Blade, Gee DiMercy; and Derek Lee, Leo’s potential new full-time Enforcer. It was an eclectic group, not what I had been expecting in terms of attendees. Everyone was dressed in what I’d call Victorian Age Chic except for Derek, Adelaid, and me.

Derek was wearing casual slacks and a tailored shirt. Unlike me and my slump, the former marine was sitting upright in his wingback chair, taking notes on an electronic tablet, looking every inch the up-and-coming businessman that he was developing into. Well, except for the shadows in his eyes every time his gaze moved to Leo. He was having trouble adapting to the position of Enforcer, and the requirements that went with the job.

He said, “Six months might be long enough to get your people ready. Assuming that we have the same team here straight through. Rotating out teams means constant retraining. My men need to work with whatever security will be here then, to integrate a real team, people who can almost read each other’s minds in hazardous situations.”

Leo looked at Del, who was wearing a little black sheath dress and low heels, and she checked her own tablet. “Clan teams end their two-month rotations in two weeks. We’ll get a new batch then.”

I interrupted. “Why do you rotate out that way? Why every two months? Why not have a full-time crew here all the time?”

“It is the way things are done,” Grégoire said with a sniff.

It might have been a disdainful sniff, which made me smother a grin. “You mean, the way they did things back in feudal Mithran times?” I asked. “The way the Euro Vamps do things? The way that will let them know exactly what we are going to do and when?”

“Predictability is a liability,” Derek said, agreeing.

I expected Leo to differ, as he usually did when I suggested a change of plans or methodology. Old vamps get set in their ways, the school of thought that went, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” For centuries, sometimes. Instead he asked, “What alternatives do you suggest, my Enforcers?”

Coulda knocked me over with a Mercy Blade feather. If they ever showed their feathers to the world instead of the layered glamours they wrapped themselves in so they’d appear human. “Uhhh,” I said, not prepared for him being agreeable. “A permanent crew here would be good.”

“I got some of Grégoire’s new people in the swamps, training,” Derek said. I looked up at that. I knew he intended to integrate the two security forces—Grégoire’s Atlanta team and Leo’s New Orleans team—at some point, but not that it had already started. “Most of ’em washed out and got sent back to Atlanta. We still got a few sticking with it.”

“You training them like SEALs?” I asked, meaning was he wearing them down to skin and bones and guts, the way Uncle Sam trained his best fighters.

He grinned at me and said, “I’m trying not to kill any.”

“We could bring Grégoire’s crew in as permanent security,” I said to Leo. “We could also make the rotating clan home security teams’ cycles longer,” I suggested.

“Six months at a stretch,” Derek agreed. “And stagger them so that the council house doesn’t get a complete batch of new recruits all at once.”

His voice silky, Leo said, “My Enforcers have been plotting.”

“Nope,” I said. “Just great minds thinking alike.” To Derek, I said, “I’ve suggested that to him about ten times now. He’s kinda stuck in a European rut, doing things the old-country way.”

Leo and Derek both frowned, but Leo said to Del, “Adelaide, compose a letter addressed to the masters of the other clans, detailing the changes and asking if their own security or comfort will be negatively affected by such a modification to protocol.”

Derek frowned at me and I shrugged, even less prepared for Leo to capitulate. Maybe Leo had needed to hear it from a guy? Or maybe he was worried and finally listening to his paid troops? I was betting on the guy thing.

“George,” Leo said. “You will send my card to each of the other clan homes announcing an official visit. You and Adelaide will then deliver the letter requesting the protocol changes, by hand, and introduce my new primo.”

Del looked down at her lap, avoiding Bruiser’s eyes. Bruiser looked at me and smiled as he answered, “Yes, dominantem civitati—Master of this City and Hunting Territories. It shall be as you say.”

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that, spoken in Latin and archaic-sounding English words, words that seemed to have a power of some kind over the others in the room, because their scents changed, smelling bitter, of shock, and maybe a little of horror.

Yes . . . Master of this City . . . It shall be as you say . . . ? And then it hit me. Bruiser didn’t call Leo my master. The phrase he used showed respect to the master of a city, but no more respect or loyalty than anyone might use, anyone unassociated with a master’s household. And the phrase had been all formal, in Latin. Crap. Bruiser had just announced publicly that he was no longer Leo’s . . . employee? Dinner? Sex partner, if he had ever been that? I hadn’t been comfortable enough to ask. Still wasn’t. But the phrase said that he was certainly no longer Leo’s blood-servant. Bruiser’s eyes were warm on me, a little smile on his lips.

My cheeks heated and I couldn’t control the speed of my heart rate. I sure as heck couldn’t control the scent of my pheromones, which were suddenly all over the place. The vamps in the room looked from Bruiser to Leo and then to me, picking up cues from each of us that we might rather have wished kept private. What did this public announcement mean to and for Bruiser? In the odd silence of the room, he let his smile drop and turned to Leo, who was still leaning over the desk, maybe frozen there in shock.

Leo held Bruiser’s gaze for a long moment before turning that predatory stare to me, his nostrils widening as he scented the air. I could feel the ice of Leo’s gaze as he spoke, but I kept my eyes on Bruiser. “Are you certain, primo quondam meus?”

“I am certain, dominantem civitati, magister quondam meus.”

“You give up much,” Leo said, his tone slightly hoarse. As if the words were pulled from him, as if they hurt as they left his mouth. I didn’t know what was going on, but it sounded important. Life-or-death important. And everyone in the room seemed to think so too. There were a lot of wide eyes and very little breathing, even from the humans.

Del, her face white with shock, mouthed a translation. Master of this City. My former master.

Holy Crap. Bruiser was really . . . quitting?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My editor, Jessica Wade. I made her promise me, the day we met in person, to edit the heck out of all of my books and stories. She took me up on that and I am a better writer today because of her insight and her gifts. She works tirelessly on all my projects—during business hours, after hours, between trying to have a life of her own.

My agent, Lucienne Diver, of the Knight Agency. I could not have a better agent and friend. Thank you for all the support.

Faith Hunter is the New York Times bestselling author of the Jane Yellowrock series, as well as the Rogue Mage novels. She lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina.