“Bouvier took as blood-servants human doctors and nurses and the mortician family, and they turned those who were most loyal. They chose bankers as scions. They made friends among the powerful humans in the city, the politicians, the movers and shakers as they were called. Bouvier did favors. They recruited among these powerful humans for the useful and capable and not simply the beautiful. They also served Mithrans faithfully. Which meant they learned secrets from the Mithrans they attended and from the humans they turned. They grew covertly powerful. And because I believe that I know what information you seek, I will add, the Bouvier clan were allied with the Damours. The clan and blood family shared blood. Fostered scions. They were close.”
I put together what I knew and was beginning to guess. “And Bouvier’s attachment to Bethany Salazar y Medina, the outclan priestess? Was she part of their little clique?”
Edmund shifted a puzzled gaze to me. “From time to time, I do believe that she associated with them, though to say she was allied would be incorrect. Outclan priestesses do not align with either clan or blood-family. Why do you ask?”
“Bouvier appears in a mural on the wall in Grégoire’s house. He had someone I believe was a Cherokee skinwalker on his arm, a skinwalker like me, named Ka Nvista.” But she had smelled like flowers. That was what I’d been told. My own scent smelled of predator and aggression to strange vamps. They hated my scent until a stronger vamp accepted me, and then they settled. No one who had met and smelled the scent of Ka Nvista and then smelled my scent had ever put us together as similar creatures. “I don’t know, but there’s something there. Some connection. Bethany had my blood in a healing just after I arrived in the city. I believe that she knew what I was.”
“We’ve circled the block, Ms. Yellowrock,” Shemmy said, again pulling past the brick building. “Everything looks okay. I’m parked three houses down. It looks as if the power is out along part of the street.”
I pulled my blades and cleaned them on the damp towels. The sterling gleamed in the darkness. “You all coming?” I asked the group, keeping my voice casual. They all said yes, even Eli. I shot a glance at Edmund, who gave a minuscule nod. He would watch over Eli. My vamp primo would watch over my human second and business partner. My life was so weird I scarcely recognized it.
I opened the limo door and got out, into the storm. As I bent forward, rain blasted down my jacket neck, icy and miserable. I now officially hated rain. But I marched through six inches of running water to the two-story house.
I had learned a lot about New Orleans architecture listening to the boys talk, and a double-gallery house meant that the front façade was composed of stacked front porches with a flat roof over the second-story porch, columns, and a low-pitched roof over the rest. Two windows, sometimes three, like here, and entry doors were traditionally on the right.
I stepped to the sidewalk and through the small gate, across the porch. I banged once on the door and would have banged more but it opened with a creepy movie squeal of unoiled hinges. Moving fast, I slid into the darker shadows to the left of the door. Bruiser took right, along the wall, and crossed the room. He had a sidearm in a two-hand grip at his thigh, visible as a darker image than Beast’s vision of Bruiser himself, who was lit up in greens and bright silvers, leaving wet splats across the wood floors, beading on the rich Persian carpet. Edmund entered and moved straight across the room, vamp-fast, with a little pop of sound, to the far wall. He carried blades and I’d seen him fight. He was a way better swordsman than me, so I put mine back and readied a .380. I’d rather have a larger caliber, but I might shoot a human by accident. Smaller rounds meant decreased killing capacity.
I moved, stance balanced, deeper into the small front room. Eli took my place. The only truly human among us, and without low-light goggles, he stood just inside the door, guarding our exit. Caruso Family Funeral Services was unlit, and it smelled odd. Vamp lairs and residences usually smelled of a strange mixture of blood and sex and herbs, but this one smelled of other scents. Dead lilies. Dead something else.
Dead mice. Dead baby birds in hot summer, rotting in nests, when there has been no rain, Beast thought at me.
I didn’t ask how she knew that. We moved on, through the business, into the hallway, past offices, empty according to the scents. Bruiser cleared the first room; I cleared the second. The third room took up most of the breadth of the house, a large viewing room, currently empty except for side chairs along the walls. The next room was a carbon copy of the former. The smells grew stronger, coming from the back room, and Edmund was standing to the side of its door.
“Locked,” he said softly, too softly to be heard by human ears. “Steel bolted at top and bottom. Steel casing. There will be no taking it down, short of explosives.”
Coms had been left behind. I moved through the dark, back to Eli. “We have a secure door,” I murmured to him. “Steel core in steel frame. Those bolt locks that go into the framing.”
“I’ll handle it,” he murmured back.
I turned and he stopped me with a raised hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?” I was honestly curious and maybe he heard that in my voice, because his scent changed, flooding with pheromones of relief.
“Babe.” He shook his head. It was man talk for so much more than just Babe.
“Dude. Yada yada. We good?”
He chuckled. “We’re good.” He holstered his weapon and started digging in his pockets as he followed me down the hallway. “Did Alex get the system shut down?
“I texted him and I don’t hear sirens, so I’m guessing so.”
Eli knelt at the door and pulled a mini flash, one so bright it hurt and I had to look away. “I don’t have goggles. Back away to preserve your vision,” he said to us. To me he added, “Text Alex. Tell him what’s going on.”
I backed to the far end of the hallway where I could cover the entrances and the offices. No one was there, but we had once seen a small room with a witch circle drawn on the floor that allowed mutated vamps to transport in, just like in Star Trek, but without the crazy lights or sound, or Spock or Scotty at the controls. That was in Natchez too, and though this situation was nothing like the one there, something, probably the magic output here, kept reminding me of it.
I texted Alex again and got a text in reply: Security off. Pulled latest building plans. Retrofitted with electronic hurricane and vamp shutters. Walls insulated and soundproofed in 2009 with gel-foam liquid.
I typed back, K.
Got a note in reply. Get the dog-stinking-werewolf out of the house!!!!!! which made me snort out a laugh. Brute had a coat like the offspring of a Brillo pad and a long-haired sheep. When he got wet, he stank, and New Orleans weather meant he stank pretty often. That would get better if I’d bathe him. And Alex would complain less when I got him a mattress of his own. I made myself a note to stop by Walmart and see about a mattress. And a plastic covering like they used in nurseries and nursing homes to protect it from wet and smell. And a bleachable mattress covering. I never wanted a pet and here I had a full-time werewolf and a part-time grindylow. Again with the weird life.
Eli was still busy, and I had my cell out, so I checked my business e-mail. I hadn’t done that in a while and I had offers for two jobs back near Asheville. With an unexpected ache, the mountains in winter called to me. I had a sudden vision of a snow-covered chasm as viewed from some tall, bare-branched tree. The smell of the air was clean and sharp and frozen. Below me, a deer picked his way through the snow. Beast’s vision. Beast’s memory.
I closed the Kevlar cover and stuck the cell in my driest pocket. Maybe I needed to invest in a special dry-pocket something or other. I needed to do more research. There were advantages to being Leo’s Enforcer, and the pretty, pretty toys and gear were part of that.
“Fire in the hole,” Eli said, racing into the office near me, pulling me in after him. I got a glimpse as the others ducked into rooms too.
The whump was more muffled than I expected, shrapnel flying down the hallway, ricocheting off the walls. The freed door whammed against the wall. Soft light, like candlelight, brightened the hallway. The cloud of plastic explosive and detonator blew through the air, an acerbic scent that curled under my tongue and filled my mouth with bitterness. Behind it came the smell of the locked room. Dead things. Dead vamp blood, old and new.