I normally knew better than to let Beast off her leash in a spar, but Beast didn’t like Juwan any better than I did, and female big-cats don’t play with males. They mate or fight, and killing isn’t beyond them. Juwan’s assault had been a sneak attack, and as far as I was concerned, there were no rules in sneak attacks, not even rules against kicking a man when he was down. I took a breath and blew out my adrenaline. Working my jaw, tasting blood, I palpated my temple, which was bruised. If I’d been human I might have died from that one. I would certainly have been unconscious.
I opened the lair room door and drew on Beast’s strength as I bent my knees and picked up Juwan by his hair and belt, hauling him into the room none too gently. We both grunted, me with effort, Juwan in pain when his head banged into the doorframe with a hollow thump. I tossed his lousy butt into the cage farthest from Adrianna and locked the door, taking the key with me.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you so bad if you had challenged me fairly, in the gym,” I said, my voice sounding like me instead of Beast’s growl.
Juwan’s reply was another gack, and I wondered if I’d ruptured something with that last kick. Not that I cared. I took the jewelry case back from Eli, who was lounging against the wall, looking bored. As we left the room, locking the door, I jutted my chin down the hall, saying, “Too bad I had the cameras turned off. That would have been interesting on YouTube.”
“Babe. He nailed you with that kick.”
“Yeah. He did.” And that look . . . Juwan was a woman hater. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had some unreported assaults in his past. We rounded the corner and took the stairs to the main hallway as my vision came back, along with the beginnings of a headache. Softly, I said, “Tell Alex to do a deeper background on Juwan. Hire someone to talk to people in his past. I want everything back to his first-grade teachers, his first girlfriend, his first everything. I want to know if he was nutso or if he was paid to take me down. Or compelled. I’m betting on compelled, because otherwise he’d have attacked me when I was alone.”
Eli nodded and tapped his mouthpiece, relaying my request to Alex.
I added, “Get him to check and see who spent time with Adrianna, now or in the past. See if you can get a master vamp to drink Juwan and read him—all the way back until he first learned to walk if that’s possible. If Juwan was part of Adrianna’s feeding and/or sex team in the short time she was here, heal him, get him out of security and out of HQ. And while Alex is at it, I haven’t kept tabs on Adrianna’s old blood-servants or scions. Back when, she had two blood-servants, Sina and Brigit, who were moved to Clan Arceneau, if I remember right. She also had two scions, Lanah and Hope, who are true-dead unless Leo found a reason to try to save them too. They need to be checked out.”
Eli nodded. “Relaying that to Alex now. He’ll handle it.”
I nodded and touched my temple again. “I need Tylenol.”
* * *
We were in the SUV and driving away through the crowd—which had settled down a lot—before I remembered that I still had the box of gold jewelry under my arm. But maybe it was smart, after all. Molly might be able to pick up something from the traces of magic on it. As if she sensed the fact that I had thought of her, my cell rang.
“Hey, Mol. What’s up?”
“The coven leader of New Orleans wishes to meet with you and Sabina, the outclan priestess of the Mithrans.”
The formal speech pattern of invitation, and the fact that Molly had called Lachish the coven leader, which was her title, not her first name, meant that Lachish was probably listening in. It also meant that this was likely about the vamp/witch parley scheduled for later this year. A meet-up wouldn’t be a problem, as Sabina was already considering contacting Lachish about the Son of Darkness. Go, me! I gave a not-too-belated, “Am I supposed to ask Sabina?”
“No,” Molly said, a droll note entering her tone. “That’s my delight.”
“I’m in with the whole parley-rapprochement-kiss-and-make-up thing, but I’m a little busy at the moment, trying to find out where the Fifty-two Killer is lairing up in the day. Any chance you can help me with that?”
“Methods to track the killer are the subject matter of the meeting in question,” Mol said.
“Oh. Okay, coolio. I’ll see if I can arrange that. When and where?”
I pulled a spiral notebook out of my gobag—real paper and everything—and took down the info. Still sounding formal, Molly said, “The coven leader asks that you bring something belonging to the vampire who killed the humans in the bar.”
I stopped taking down the info in the little-used notebook. “Why?”
Molly sighed, the sound of her breath loud in the speaker. “I have a feeling we’ll be helping you to locate him so you can stop him. It’s not dangerous,” she said before I could ask, “in theory.”
“Yeeeeah, right.” I vaguely remembered seeing Eli scrape the wall where the Son of Darkness had hung. “I’ll see what I can do. Gotta go. Got another call.” I tapped the screen and said, “Jodi.”
“Not bad, Jane,” she said, sounding a lot more happy than last time we talked. “Leo is playing gracious host for a press conference to coincide with the late news. I want you there too.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, “but I have an appointment shortly and have no way of knowing how long it’ll last.”
“Try to squeeze me in,” she said. Which I took as a command since she used the tone cops do when issuing orders—acerbic and strident—and ended the call before I could reply.
To Eli I said, “We’re popular tonight. Our dance card is filling up fast.”
“One thing at a time, Janie. Witches before vamps before cops.”
“Tonight, that works.”
* * *
The meeting with Molly, Lachish, and Sabina was scheduled to take place at sunset in Louis Armstrong Park, a greenway with a theater and other buildings dedicated to the arts. It was a safe place and time for witches to meet. Earth witches would have access to the ground and growing things, water witches would have access to the waterway that wended through the park, air witches would have access to the currents of heated day air and the falling cool of night air, moon witches would have access to the night sky, and vamp-witches would have access to the dark. But first we were meeting Derek in the Garden District to look over a vacant clan home—the property once owned by Clan Mearkanis, where the party took place on the night Joseph Santana had disappeared. Ordinarily, searching a place that a killer had been in more than a hundred years ago would be a stupid waste of time, but Ming had been there that night, and Ming had risen to a position of power over that same clan, in that same house, and not that long ago, at least in vamp terms. There were paintings of Ming and Santana there—maybe. If they hadn’t been painted over by Ming’s heir. And, possibly, Ming might have left documents that might pertain to Santana. Who knew what we might find there? If we were lucky.