Beast, who had been remarkably silent, growled to me,Jane should have eaten note.
I squatted down on the hood, chest to toes, and fluffed my feathers against the cold, trying to piece together the battle. My Anzu night vision picked out the entire house as if it was day, not darkest night, dried body fluids glowing as if they were under a black light.
The attackers came in through the front door, through the front windows, through the garage doors at the back, like a home invasion on steroids. The damage looked as if battering rams had been used, huge holes punched right through the thin wood of the garage door, the front door knocked off its hinges, the frame shattered. I leaped to the front door and leaned inside.
The fight had been bloody, but the invaders hadn’t used guns. All the gunfire destruction was from the back wall and hallway, toward the entrances and windows. At least five vamps and ten humans had died in the parts of the house I could see. And so far as my senses could tell me, not one of the attackers had been injured. I still couldn’t identify the species of were, their scent hidden beneath the gruesome stinks of death.
There were no bodies. They had been carried off and buried or burned. But the crime scene hadn’t been worked up. There was no crime scene tape, no sharp smell of fingerprint powder, no carpet taken up for analysis. The house hadn’t been cleaned. Something was really wrong here.
—
“You coulda warned me to bring a coat,” I grumbled as we trudged down an unpaved road, pea gravel crunching beneath my thin-soled shoes. Suddenly, just bam, the road became paved, for no reason, but it was easier to walk, so I wasn’t griping. I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged myself for warmth. Gee seemed unaffected by the cold, but glamour and shape-shifting were very different things. I was cold and starving. He wasn’t. “Where are we? It’s still fall and there’s freaking snow on the ground.”
Gee drawled, “We have alighted in Foleyet, little goddess, a tiny hamlet in Ontario, Canada.”
“I’m not a goddess,” I said by rote. I checked my cell. Nothing. Nada. No bars.Ducky. Just freaking ducky.
Gee turned off the road and around an abandoned building, the windows boarded over. The back door opened before us, light pouring into the night. The herbal stink of vamp and the rancid smell of old blood boiled out. I dropped my arms, leaped back a dozen feet. When I landed, I was holding a silver stake and a vamp-killer. Gee laughed, sly, mocking.
Holding the door was a vamp, a tribal woman, black-haired, black-eyed, tall and lean, similar to my own six feet of height and build, but shewas utterly gorgeous. “It’s our honor to receive the Enforcer of the Master of the City of New Orleans,” the vamp said. “Why do you draw weapons?”
I slammed my weapons back into the sheaths. “Because I wasn’t informed I would be meeting with Mithrans,” I said, catching up with Gee. “Your species likes to play games.” And I stuck out my foot, neatly tripping Gee over his own feet and mine, feeling better when Gee landed face first in the hard dirt and dusting of snow. “His kind does too. My apologies,” I said to her. I drew on my training and said, “Additional apologies for my scent. It’s considered a provocation by many Mithrans and that’s unintentional.” I took the two stairs and stopped in the doorway.
The woman leaned out and sniffed delicately before backing inside, her hands indicating welcome. “Namida Blackburn, of Clan Blackburn. We’d been told you smelled of predator, but all I detect is wind and storm clouds.”
Interesting. “No insult was intended with the weapons,” I said. I turned around and shut the door in Gee’s face. My big-cat liked to play games too. Grinning, I faced Namida. “How may the Enforcer of the MOC of New Orleans assist you?”
—
The problem was simple, and not. Something were-tainted had attacked the local vamps, every full moon night for the last three months. In multiple attacks, three blood-families, vamps and their humans, had been decimated in remote areas, killed, eaten. The MOC of New York had declined to assist. The MOC of Toronto had declined to assist. The MOCs of Chicago, Montreal, and Minneapolis had declined. In desperation, the local vamps had contracted (for an outrageous sum) the werewolf clan of Wisconsin. The wolves had flown in, taken one sniff, returned the down payment, and flown out. The Montana wolf clan hadn’t returned calls. The local law and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had declined to assist, calling it a suckhead problem.
I could see why. The photos of what, in my part of the world, would have been crime scenes were horrible, and I had seen some pretty horrible stuff in my time. “I’m not familiar with many were-creatures. What do you speculate?”
“If it was a natural creature, then I’d say a small, deformed brown bear.” She shuffled the photos and showed me a clear print, one in a pool of driedblood. “Eh. The claws are too long and wide but the paw shape is bear. They grow to a thousand pounds. This one’s four hundred?” she guessed.
I frowned and pulled the borrowed flannel shirt and down vest tighter across me, swirling the caramel-apple-flavored moonshine she had poured for me. Moonshine was the drink of choice here, not New Orleans tea or coffee. “It smelled like were,” I murmured, “but even at four hundred pounds, the mass-to-energy ratio is off for the average human-to-were conversion.” And then things came together: the magical fuel for the shift to Anzu, the timing of this hunt. The sight of the twisted ley lines we had seen in the air. Magic here was messed up. So were physics. So were the weres. “Well, dang,” I muttered.
“What?” she asked.
I waved it away. “Nothing. Leo wanted it taken care of, so I’ll take care of it,” I said, sipping the moonshine and finishing off the pile of smoked elk meat and fresh bread. It had assuaged the hunger from my shift. Anzu magic only worked to fuel the shift one way, and I had eaten enough for four humans, but Namida didn’t begrudge my caloric needs. “I’m on salary. What does Leo get out of this deal?”
“We align with him.” The words were spare, without emotion.
“Uh-huh.” Namida and Leo had negotiated under the vamp system of parley, kinda like a peace treaty with the white man, with just about that much fairness. I’m Cherokee, so I know how “fair” works. “Fine. I’ll need stuff, to include clothes, weapons, food, maps, and something that carries the weres’ scent. Leo will reimburse you for my supplies.”
Namida’s eyebrows went up in amused surprise.
I canted my head, wearing a half smile. “He sent me in return for your loyalty. I say he pays for expenses. In the long run, you might have gotten the worst part of the bargain. Of course, if I get killed on this gig, then I got the worst part.” I checked my cell phone, which displayed local time, so I’d acquired a signal at some point. I still had hours before dawn. If I was lucky, I’d find the weres’ hidey-hole before morning, shift, and come back in my human form and shut them down. Nights were long this time of year.
“Thanks for the meal.” I handed her my partial list of weapons, and her eyebrows went up again. Yeah. It was a lot. But if I could hit the were-creatures with fragmentation grenades, or their hidey-hole with the C-4,I’d injure them enough to take them down, no matter how big they were. And I wasn’t too particular about bringing in paranormal killers of humans alive and uninjured.
“Gee, you can come in,” I said, without raising my voice.
The back door opened and Gee DiMercy minced in. He looked like a twenty-one-year-old Mediterranean man, delicate and pretty in the shadows, until he got a good look at our hostess and suddenly morphed into something older and harder. The shift looked like a trick of the light, but I knew better. Light didn’t make you suddenly six inches taller and give you a three-day beard. Gee was now a black-haired, blue-eyed warrior, tough and elegant all at once, the kind of man who can track, shoot, and dress an elk without breaking a sweat, and dance a gavotte at a black-tie soiree in the evening.
“Madam,” he said, taking her hand and bending over it in European old-world charm. “I am Girrard DiMercy. You are Namida? You are as beautiful as your name. Star Dancer, yes?”
The vampire tilted her head, amusement sparkling in her black eyes, with a hint of interest. “You speak Ojibwe?”
