We all sat as he cried, silent, terrible tears. I wanted to take Eli’s hand, give him a hug, but I didn’t know how. The limo took corners carefully, Shemmy as involved in the pain as we all were. Outside, muted thunder rumbled. My magics stayed silent, contained.
Edmund slid across the seat to him and took up a towel. Silent as well, he dried off Eli, starting with Eli’s head, which he pressed like a benediction. Eli’s neck, shoulders, and arms. He dried Eli’s torso and slid to the floor to dry Eli’s legs and behind his knees. Down to his feet. From the floor, without looking up at Eli, Edmund said softly, “There is no going back. There is no revival of our humans. There is no erasure of our horrors. No healing except of time and she is a vengeful mistress, leaving scars that are forever. But there also is no proof of foreknowledge, only of twenty-twenty hindsight. You guessed. You did not know. Knowing is only for God.” Edmund lifted and dried Eli’s hands. He said, “Your hands are clean. Not stained with blood. You need not carry the blood of your men. Only their memories.”
Eli took a breath that quaked in a sob.
Edmund returned to the seat, next to my partner, his nearness a comfort if Eli wanted it. After that we rode in silence.
• • •
We pulled through Faubourg Marigny, a mostly residential area of the city, and Shemmy pointed out our destination as we rode by, a street-side recon. “You want the double-gallery house with the star jasmine blooming out front.”
It was the wrong season and too cold for jasmine to be blooming. The temps at freezing should have killed the flowers, even if the plant itself survived. A sense of uneaseslid across me. There were few two-story buildings in the nearby blocks, and the brick building housing Caruso Family Funeral Services stood out as different, even though it didn’t have a sign advertising its services. Like most vamp businesses, it didn’t publicize.
I said softly to Edmund, “Vamp funerals and the vamp mortician or morticians who reattached the heads of the dog-fanged vamps. I want to know everything.”
“Clan Bouvier began a climb to power as lesser Mithrans who provided services to and for other, more powerful Mithrans. They cared for scions in lairs, they cared for sick human servants who contracted diseases not eased by their master’s blood, they helped to care for and educate children of the body.”
Vamps sometimes were able to have children of their own bodies, though that was uncommon and I had no idea why. But such children were rare and cosseted and adored. I had killed the creature masquerading as Immanuel, Leo’s “child of his body.” Losing the person he had thought was his son had driven Leo nearly to madness. It was a miracle he hadn’t killed me.
And then it hit me. “Did they care for Immanuel when he was a child?”
Edmund hissed, putting the death of Leo’s supposed son together with the Europeans. “Yesssss...”
The long view. A plan in place for decades. Perhaps for centuries. And then I come along and kill the pretender and set everything awry, force a new plan into motion. “Go on,” I said. Beyond the armored windows, thunder rumbled. The tires sprayed water in the streets up under the floor of the limo as we circled the block, and I could feel the vibration through my boots.
“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 learnedsecrets 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 humanears. “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.
