The human was in an advanced stage of decomp. The vamp, however, was far less rotten. He had flesh on his torso and long bones, and his joints were still attached with connective tissue. He had no eyelids or lips, as if something had eaten them away. But his eyes were still intact and his jaws were still working at the long-missing flesh of his human partner. Little snap, snap, snap sounds of jaws clicking, his upper and lower canines tapping. Canines like Berkins’. Well, ducky. We had two connections, dog fangs and uniforms.
Over the coms, I heard Alex say, “Holy necrophilia, Batman.”
Eli was sending live video. The vid would be a help if we needed to go over the scene again. Eli muttered, as if to me but really to Alex, “Silence is golden.” Louder he added, “Other than the bodies, looks like fishing line, maybe some shrimping nets, buoys, and a waterlogged tree.”
I made an mmmm sound, drew a vamp-killer, holding it at my side, and squatted over the vamp.
“Don’t get too close, lady,” a Plaquemines deputy said from ten feet away. “It bites.”
The vamp stopped snapping and his head turned slowly toward the deputy. The sclera of the vamp’s eyes were liver-disease yellow and his irises were bright blue. He’d once had a narrow mustache and high cheekbones, a dimpled chin. I had a feeling he had been a very pretty man in his undead state, despite the notch in his left ear, one that had never regrown, suggesting it had been given to him in a prevamp state and never healed properly. His mouth opened, revealing the dog-style upper and lower fangs and his back molars.
Vamp-fast, he lunged at the deputy. Even from ten feet out, the vamp caught the man’s sleeve in his jaws. Everyone screamed. Humans jumped back. Service weapons were drawn.
My vamp-killer shot up almost on its own. Pierced through the vamp’s throat and out the back of his neck. But my aim wasn’t perfect, or the vamp dodged the thrust. The edge slid into the spine at the wrong angle. Sliced along the spinal processes with a skittering force. The bone trapped the edge. I hated when that happened. The vamp’s head slid to the side as the tendons on the right snapped in two. The vamp’s head lolled and the deputy’s sleeve came free as I cut backhand. Jerked the weapon free. The vamp focused on me.
There was no blood in the huge wound. The vamp hadn’t fed on the living since it rose. But the eyes didn’t look away and the thing’s jaws were again snapping fast. Even bloodless, the vampire was healing. I finished the job with a cut that completely severed the head.
“Oh,” the deputy squeaked, backpedaling to the far side. He sounded surprised, but really, what else was gonna happen? That’s the advantage of lots of blade practice and really sharp blades—steel versus flesh wins every time.
The head rolled off. Bounced and landed on the tree. A broken branch speared into the neck and held the head in place like a warning on a castle wall, but low down. I wanted to laugh, but it probably wouldn’t be seemly in front of all the officers.
To Alex I said, “What do you know about this pair?”
“I’ve been cross-checking police reports. Apparently since the rising of Davide Berkins, keeping watch in graveyards is suddenly chic among the NOLA fraternities, and this rising was witnessed,” the Kid said into my earbud. “According to eyewitness reports of the risings, it looks like they crawled out of the coffin together. We now have names and prelim histories. Oliver Estridge is the human and the vamp is Mitchel Hopkins. Histories say the cause of death was a murder-suicide, a lovers’ tiff between vamp and human. They were buried together in 1909.”
“Who made the COD ruling?” I asked.
“Amaury Pellissier.”
“We wanted to question him,” a self-important voice said.
I looked over a shoulder and spotted the owner of the voice. She was the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish, and her photo had been plastered over half the parish for months, on billboards that promised to get supernats out of her parish. She had won reelection, but clearly not for brains.
I raised my eyebrows and wiped my blade on the soaked and stinking cloth of the vamp’s jacket. The blade wasn’t bloody, but it was gooey. I stood, focused on the politician. Keeping my voice toneless, I said, “You wanted to question a rogue vampire.” Sheriff Pansy Knight was a tall woman and clearly wasn’t accustomed to looking up at another woman, but in my combat boots, I was six foot two to three, a good four inches taller than her. I could play nice-nice or I could go for pain-in-the-butt. I was going for PITB but Eli intervened.
“Eli Younger, ma’am, of Yellowrock Securities.” He put out his hand. “Unless you prefer sir. Some sheriffs do. And we aim to be courteous.”
I slid my partner a look but he was focused on the sheriff. I had seen that look before, when he met Sylvia. Maybe things were worse than I thought. Maybe I should have tried to be a marriage counselor. Or romantic relationships counselor. Or cracked their heads together. Whatever.
Pansy narrowed her eyes but took Eli’s hand. “Ma’am is fine.”
To me she added, “We needed to question him.”
My partner might want to be nice. I didn’t, and I laughed. “He’d been dead for a hundred years, Pansy.” She had a girly name. No way was I not gonna use it. “He had nothing left to chat about, not without a master vamp to feed him and try to bring his brain back online. He was an old rogue killing machine.”
“You like killing rogues, don’t you? Makes you feel special?”
Eli dropped her hand fast and the interested look vanished. I just chuckled and sheathed my vamp-killer. “Don’t try to bait me, Pansy. I’m not that easy.”
“I don’t like your kind in my parish.”
My kind? Cherokee? More likely it was the fact that I was a supernat and had been outed slowly over the last few months. Or someone had told her personally. “Oh? So the next time someone tries to eat your high school basketball team, you want me to let the rogue kill kids? And announce to the world that it was your call?” I stepped to Eli, my back to her, an insult when delivered by skinwalkers, and finished over my shoulder with, “The Master of the City will be calling. Have a nice convo.”
“I won’t talk to his kind.”
I chuckled again. “Yeah? Kid,” I said to my other partner, “send this entire thing to the reporter from WGNO. That should make great late-night news, combined with us saving that kid from another rogue. An hour later, post it up on the website and anywhere else you want. When the sheriff apologizes, it can come down. Eli?”
“Got your six,” he muttered. And he sounded pissed. Good. We walked away.
CHAPTER 2
That’s Pure Politics, Babe
The wind whipped in, bringing vamp scents, pepper and lily and papyrus, more acerbic scents like turmeric and sage. And human blood. And sex. Always that. Always together. I leaped over the railing—gunwale? side?—and came face- to-face with Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans, and the two minor-level vamps and three human-dinners-on-two-legs who were fanned out behind him. I glanced at each and drew in the air in little bursts of breath, taking in their faces and scents to remember and catalog later. Leo’s territory had grown and there were a lot of newbies I hadn’t gotten to know yet. Worse, we had fangheads visiting from distant U.S. cities who had sworn to Leo, back when an epidemic threatened the U.S. vamps. There were too many newbies to make anyone safe.
I opened my mouth to say hi to the chief suckhead but caught myself. “Pellissier,” I said, much more politely and only a beat too late.
“Enforcer,” Leo said.
“Sir,” Eli said to him. “You heard?”
“I did,” Leo said. “So did the lovely reporter. She has one of the new directional microphones developed by the military.”
“Was it a gift from the MOC?” Eli asked.
“Such is always a possibility.” Leo smiled, the professional smile, the one he shared with the public, one that never reached his eyes. “She was incensed. I am certain the footage will make its way onto the television newscast tonight.
“However, we have a greater problem. Wait for me at my limo.” He stepped gracefully over the side of the boat and dropped to the deck, landing with the poise and balance of a ballet dancer. Or a swordsman. Leo was dressed casually, for him, in a black suit and white shirt. Black shoes, no tie. His shoulder-length black hair was tied back with a black ribbon in a loose queue, and it gleamed in the harsh lights as he strode toward the bodies and the law officers. The MOC was ticked off, his magic pulsing out in a series of waves that raised the hair on my arms.