Moving on instinct, I pulled on all black—slim pants, tank, lightweight jacket, and black Lucchese boots with hand-stitched cougars on them. As an afterthought, I added the working gorget, one of several Leo had provided for me, this one sterling over titanium chain mail, and tucked my gold nugget and wired cougar tooth necklace into my jog bra, out of sight. Back before Beast and I merged so deeply, the nugget had tied me to her in some mystical way. The tooth held the DNA and RNA of the largest female mountain lion I could find. Between the two, I could find my Beast form even when I was deeply damaged. Now I didn’t seem to need them, but I also couldn’t let them go. Habit. A security blanket. Whatever. I almost never took them off.
As I dressed, I got a good look at my damaged arm. The scars dappled my skin like rain on the surface of a pond, if it was viewed through a spiderweb. Bands and rings of interlaced and interconnected tissue formed a network across my flesh, the white and red of scar tissue. It was pretty awful. More important, the muscles beneath looked atrophied. I stretched and the muscles didn’t give. I eased into the jacket. The sleeve brushed my arm with a sensation akin to fiberglass dipped in acid. I needed to shift and see what was wrong with Beast. And shift back to complete the healing of us both.
Fifty-two humans called to me. My healing would have to wait. Ninety seconds it had taken me to dress.
I double-checked that all my papers were in my wallet. PI license, business license, concealed-carry permit, Yellowrock Security business cards, and my new business cards Leo had provided, the ones that read:
JANE YELLOWROCK
ENFORCER to LEO PELLISSIER
MASTER of the CITY of NEW ORLEANS and the GREATER SOUTHEAST UNITED STATES
It was dignified and offered me protection I might sorely need.
Though it might be smart to show up with every weapon I owned, I elected to go without, except stakes in my hair. Which made me feel naked and weird and caused the space between my shoulder blades to itch. Made the nausea rise in my throat, the world swimming with vertigo as I moved, ignored. I tucked the wallet into my back pocket, smeared on bloodred lipstick, and smoothed the loose hair back into the fighting queue with some gel gook.
I was using the time, the precious seconds, to steady myself. I had been in a battle. I had been wounded and was hurting. I had been socked in the face with the results of my own actions and the future results of actions not yet taken. Not so far in the past, I had let Joses Bar-Judas live, if hanging on a wall in a dungeon can be considered living, and had killed a vamp named Peregrinus instead. I should have taken Joses’ head then. I had known he was evil, as in damned and filthy evil. I had known it on some level I hadn’t understood. He should have been separated from his head the first time I saw him; I hadn’t done the job. I had acted like an Enforcer rather than a rogue-vamp hunter. The fact that I had been injured and lying in my own blood back then didn’t matter. I had not killed him when I had the chance and now fifty-two humans had paid the price.
Later. I’d have to deal with my life later. At the thought, something inside me, something bleeding and broken, went cold. Hard. A bloody stone in the dark of my soul home.
Beast? I asked again.
She didn’t answer, but I felt her breathing and got a sense of awareness. Pain. Patience. Cat feelings that meant leave me alone. I no longer had time to deal with my other soul like I should, so I withdrew from her. For now.
I strode out of my room, catching sight of myself in the full-length mirror. I looked long, lean, and mean. Good. I felt mean. Though I didn’t know whom I was mad at, other than myself and Leo. Not yet. The three of us met in the foyer, where Alex handed us each a tablet. There were photos on the tablets, crime scene photos. “Oh yeah,” I muttered, my thumb taking me through them fast. “Death by vamp.” And that thing inside me, something broken and wounded, began to wail.
* * *
When I first came to New Orleans, I had thought there were only a few parts to the town. I had learned since that there were names to every part of the place, like the French Quarter, the Warehouse District, the Garden District, and Marigny, to name just a very few.
Marigny was a slice of New Orleans–style homes, but with large swathes of it still run-down and in need of rehabbing. Lots of buildings were still vacant after Katrina, so many years ago, but there was an air of things starting to get better, lots of homes and businesses showing fresh paint, new signs, the buildings and homes a mishmash of one-story shotgun houses, double shotgun houses (houses with two front doors, one on either side of the front façade of the house, with windows centered between), Creole cottages, two-story buildings that had been subdivided into apartments, with galleries—not porches, I had learned—on both floors, with modern (and uglier) buildings interspersed.
Eli drove around the congested area, which let us get a handle on how big a space had been cordoned off. Big. Entire blocks of the city. Fifty-two humans. Dead. Because of my decision to let Joses live. Eli pulled in at Washington Square Park, away from the lights, noise, crowds of people, emergency vehicles, and media vans. It was still night when he parked, but I could feel dawn coming.
Sitting in the dark, he said, “The average human has five and a half quarts of blood in him. Fifty-two humans equals two hundred eighty-six quarts.” He stared at me through the dark. “If they were all drained, then there is no way one vampire alone drained fifty-two humans. If it’s Bar-Judas, he wasn’t working alone.”
I hadn’t done the math, but he was right. That much blood meant multiple vamps in a feeding frenzy. I hadn’t gotten the impression of multiple vamps with loss of control from the still shots the Kid had brought up. “So who did he find to follow him,” I asked, “this soon after getting free? When he left his rescuers dead on the floor at HQ?”
Eli said, “The vamp in the cloak.”
I rubbed my arm, but nothing came to me. I went over the vamps I’d seen in the time after the fight with the Son of Darkness. Edmund. Dominique. Grégoire, looking both pensive and worried. And sniffing the air, which was odd but not unexpected. Leo. Others. No cloak. No enemy I recognized.
The blue and red lights were out of sight, but traffic had been blocked off and the locals were out in force. The walk would give us a sense of the emotional integrity of the crowd. We got out and I closed my eyes, sniffing the air. Weed, beer, liquor, sweat, Mexican food from a tiny taqueria that had opened after hours to satisfy the gawkers, excitement, sex pheromones, the smell of banana plants and ginger plants. Water. Urine. Stray cats. Rats. And terror, the kind of stark, sour sweat that scented of loss, of knowing loved ones were dead. On the air I heard a plaintive voice calling, “Is she in there? You gots to tell me. Is my baby in there? Tell me!” Over and over, grief like a dead body weighting down the words.