I glanced at Quint, who had accompanied me on this jaunt. She drew her weapons, entered, and cleared the vamp’s personal quarters. The vamp with news was sitting at a table in the corner and didn’t look up as Quint did her thing. From the doorway, I studied the room because rooms told a lot about a vamp’s power, position, and aspirations.
This vamp’s room at HQ was an inside room, windowless, with a Jack and Jill bathroom between it and the room beside it. It was tiny but well-appointed, with a four-poster rice bed and art deco–style furniture. There were trunks against one wall and the closet door was cracked open, revealing carefully folded clothes on shelves and suits on hangers. I had read his dossier on the way over. Santiago Molina had been one of the vamps displaced when Ming of Mearkanis went missing and her clan was disbanded. When she returned, many of her originalvamps went back to her, but others, notably the less powerful or less aggressive ones who had suffered under her cruel rule, had chosen to remain clanless. He had gone from a moderately important vamp to someone who didn’t socialize with other bloodsuckers, and who preferred solitude and the company of a rare human to feed from, instead of group blood feedings and forced orgy sex parties.
In his human life, back in the dark ages, Santiago had been Spanish, an ascetic monk, the kind who spent time in silent prayer and copied ancient manuscripts, and he still carried that mien of the scholar, unwillingly displaced into the twenty-first century. He spoke many languages and read more. The former monk was slight, delicate, and unremarkable, with brown hair and eyes. He was wearing a long tunic shirt with loose leggings and black velvet slippers. And in Alex’s mind he must be utterly trustworthy, because in his room, the vamp had several of the journals Leo had pointed out in the library. There was a glass of white wine beside his elbow.
When Quint was done, she stepped back and I entered. Santiago stood and gave me a stiff bow, as if he wasn’t sure of the niceties. “My Queen,” he said.
“Santiago,” I said. He stared at me, unmoving, that vamp stillness unaffected by heartbeat or breathing. “You have something for me?”
“Oh. Yes, My Queen.” His fingers fluttered to the other chair. “Would you like to sit—” He stopped, flustered, uncertain of the protocol of a royal in his room.
“Yes, thank you,” I said. Quint reached out, but I held up a hand, stopping her. I pulled out the extra chair and sat down. “I understand you have discovered something?”
“Si. Oh. Yes. Yes. I have found two maps inside a journal. One hand-drawn, annotated by several different hands. I would estimate it to be from the late seventeen hundreds.” He carefully placed a piece of high-cloth-content paper on the table. It had been folded into quarters for a very long time, and was missing ink in the cross-shaped creases. “It appears to be from 1719, a map of theAlgiers Point, the swamp before the city was laid out and built.”
Algiers again. I got a buzz of interest. “X marks the spot?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Santiago said, his voice taking on a hint of excitement.
The old map showed the curve of land that still followed the shoreline of Algiers, on the far side of the river. In the general vicinity where we had searched with Brute and the grindylow was a big Celtic cross drawn in red ink. The cross covered the tongue of Algiers from the Mississippi back to the Mississippi along a U-shaped path. To one side of the tongue of land the map had an inked Celtic dragon and to the other side were three skulls, not with pirate crossbones, but just the skulls. The Gulf of Mexico was marked with a swirl like a hurricane and another dragon head rising from the waves.
This map was older than the city of Algiers. Maybe from the time of De Allyon, who had been in the states since the fifteen hundreds. It looked like a treasure map. The other map was newer, like something from an etching, maybe, and had the broken lines of a map that had been printed. It had originally been printed in black ink, though it was faded to grays now.
Santiago tapped the printed map. He was wearing white gloves, the fingertips slightly smudged. “Old Algiers was originally built in 1819, a rough-and-tumble place built up along the riverfront with shipbuilding and ship repair interests, dry docks, sawmills, and lumberyards. There was an iron foundry and ship building on the commercial corridor on the river.” His finger traced the riverfront. “No real streets, no printed maps, mostly swamp and mud, shacks and saloons at that time. But the streets of the city, as it now stands, were planned much later, in 1841, consisting of Algiers Point, McDonogh, Whitney, Behrman, Gretna, and others, as you see here. The streets of Algiers were laid out and built later, according to this map, in 1864.
“This past dusk, your Consort let it be known that you were most interested in churches in Algiers. When Iextrapolate from the two maps, the red X on the map from 1719 lies across these streets, from the 1864 map, but it does not indicate what buildings might have been churches in the past or which churches might have been torn down or destroyed by hurricane and are now something other than churches.”
“That area is three or four times the size of the French Quarter,” Quint said. “Nothing is to scale.”
“Si!”Santiago said. He shifted yet another map out of a pile of papers, this one the touristy kind, and pointed. “It will be difficult to determine which church you may be searching for. At this time, there are eighteen churches in the area beneath the Celtic cross.”
I leaned over the third map. His finger was close to several of the damaged churches that we had visited earlier. “Yes. I see. This may prove helpful,” I said, with the formal politeness of my Christian children’s home upbringing, but not the queen’s formality. “Can you translate the words on the older map?”
“Indeed so, My Queen. This one says, ‘Buried Bones.’ This one says, ‘Beware the Darkness.’ This one says, ‘Here lies evil.’ ”
“Three sayings, three skulls,” I said.
“Yes!” His brown eyes lit with delight. “You comprehend the symbolism. My last master had no use for symbolism.”
“I’m not sure what the dragons mean. Evil?”
“There are small faded lines here”—he pointed—“from the two dragons to the words ‘Here lies evil.’ So yes, it is possible.”
“Thank you, Santiago. I am impressed. Whose journal is that?”
“It belonged to Immanuel Pellissier and one other.”
Which made that question the one I should have led with. I blew out a breath. “Of course it did. Who else?”
“I’m not certain, but someone else took it over midway through the journal.”
A cold shiver of certainty flashed through me. I said, “Show me.”
Santiago opened the journal and showed me severalpages in the front half. “The penmanship is exquisite. It matches the penmanship on the old hand-drawn map, here and here.” He pointed again. “A beautiful hand. But here”—he flipped a page—“there are two pages unused. Journals were expensive. No one wasted paper. And here”—he turned the second page—“the penmanship is vastly different. The ugly hand of an uneducated man.”
His words weren’t intended as an insult, simply a descriptive term. In Santiago’s lingo, I had an “ugly hand,” too, meaning that my writing was messy. I would have sympathized with the writer, but I had a feeling that Immanuel had been eaten by a liver-eater midway through the journal, and the liver-eater’s handwriting was the ugly one—aTsalagiskinwalker, turnedu’tlun’ta, trying to write like a European educated vamp. Even with the memories obtained in the black magic ceremony, the muscle memory wasn’t good enough to pass as equal. “May I?” I said, pointing at the journal.
“Of course, My Queen, of course.” He swiveled the journal around to me.
