Woman is prey, my Beast thought at me.Smells of fear.
I was a vampire hunter by inclination, training, and trade, but tracking down old and injured blood-servants was one of my least favorite hunts. Old blood-servants were wily and had had decades to pick up all sorts of martial arts moves and sometimes had weapons I wasn’t expecting. Even the little old lady blood-servants, like the one I was looking for.
Miz A had disappeared after a bloody fight at Katie’s Ladies, not long after I got to New Orleans. She had been badly injured, maybe even maimed, and I honestly thought she might have died. Then, yesterday, I got word that she was alive.
Miz A was over two hundred years old, and the words that had been whispered in my ear—literally—had said she was healing very slowly. Too slowly. Something was wrong.
The old woman had been injured on my watch. That made her my responsibility and I hadn’t made an effort to find her. I was feeling guilty enough to go into a grocery store and buy flowers, which I had never donebefore, but there was a first time for everything. I stood over the limited display, debating on roses, which reminded me of funerals and filled my nose with a sweetness that made me sneeze, or daisies and mums, which downright stank. To avoid the funeral floral overtones, I plucked a dripping, stinking bouquet of daisies and mums and carried them to checkout. Then I had to figure out how to carry the flowers on the Harley. I bruised the petals, stuffing them into one of Bitsa’s saddlebags, and knew the reek was going to linger inside.
Stinky plant, Beast thought at me.Why Jane not give catnip?
I’m not sure what effect catnip has on humans or bloodsuckers.
Beast sniffed in derision. I wasn’t a flowers kinda gal.
—
Just after dusk, I pulled up in front of the two-story house just outside the Garden District. It was painted a pale pink with turquoise shutters and a deeper-toned peacock door. There were window boxes above big elephant ear plants and some kind of striped, low-growing leafy things in shades of yellows and greens. Baskets hung near the front stoop, long tendril-y stems tipped with bright pink flowers. The place was pretty and kinda froufrou. I retrieved the grocery-store flowers and knocked on the door. Weirdly it opened. But no one was there. The house was dark inside, and felt empty.
“Come in, dear,” a quavery voice called.
I took a breath, another, smelling... one familiar vampire and one old-lady, human-ish blood-servant, a little on the moldy side, the scents mingled and tangled together. I scented no other beings, vamp or human, on the premises. I loosed an ash wood stake and pulled it free, tucking it into the bouquet. And entered the house.
I flipped switches as I moved through the house, turning on lights. The place was decorated in Early American Doily. There were crocheted doilies everywhere, on every chair, every tabletop, every square inch of space, and on top of them were more doilies, stacked. There were also knickknacks from the 1920s and 1930s: toys, little car models, train models, dolls, stuffed bears, and box-style cameras. Hundreds of them. Not a speck of dust rested on anything. I figured it must take a full-time housekeeper to keep the place this clean.
A faint light and even fainter tinkling came from the back of the house,on the first floor. I stepped into the overstuffed room. Sitting in a rocking chair, dressed in her usual blacks, was Miz A, crocheting. Her hands moved swiftly, too swiftly, too surely. And the tinkling sound I heard came from her, aclink, clink, clinkwith every move of her hands.
On her wrists were handcuffs. The handcuffs were attached to a chain that wrapped around her and attached to the back wall of the house.
Miz A was physically bound. Not mentally, as most blood-servants, but chained.
Slowly she raised her head and looked at me.
Her eyes were wide black pupils in bloody sclera. And as she smiled, I heard a tiny click, but no needle-thin fangs snapped down. Her mouth stayed human. “Did you come to feed me, my dear? I’m so hungry.”
“Holy crap,” I whispered.
“It was unexpected.”
I flinched, as I whirled, just a bit, pulling the stake.
Breath caught in my throat, I stood there, flatfooted, crushing the flowers in one hand, the stake in the other.
Katie Fonteneau was coming down from the second floor, her long silky dress making softshushingsounds. Her ash-blond brows raised together in amusement. “Do you think you can stake me in my own lair?”
I slammed the stake back into the sheath with the others. “My apologies for”—I rolled my hand in the air, searching for the right word—“my general stupidity?”
Katie offered a vamp smile, which is to say, not a human one, and in the doily-covered house it was kinda creepy.
“What was unexpected?”
Katie took the flowers from my other hand and placed them in a pink glass vase, then added water from a pitcher near Miz A, who was clinking steadily as a new doily formed in her hands. “She was too old to survive her wounds. She was given too much blood trying to bring life back into her body, blood she could not process.” Katie moved a stack of doilies and placed the vase on a tiny table near Miz A. She stroked the old woman’s scraggly hair and twisted loose strands into her messy bun. “My darling Amorette was too old.”
Miz A looked up at her and said, “Did you come to feed me, my dear? I’m so hungry.”
Katie smiled slightly, her hand stroking. “Despite her partial fangs and desire for blood, she is neither vampire nor blood-servant. She is not Onorio. Amorette is, perhaps, hanging in the balance, neither human nor Mithran, and not yet one of the long-chained.” Katie looked up at me. “I begged for the Mercy Blade, but he says Amorette is not his charge and will not be for a decade. Leo—” Sudden tears gathered at her eyes, pinkish red. “My Leo says I erred when I tried to heal her. I gave her too much. I—” She stopped. Turned slowly to me, captured my eyes with hers. I felt her pull, her power. It wrapped around me. I stepped back. She whispered. “Yooouuu. You will do this for me.”
“Did you come to feed me, my dear? I’m so hungry.”
