Skinwalker jy-1 Page 17

  I was letting the cracker soften in my mouth, when something seemed to heat in the back of my mind, and I saw a glimpse of Leo Pellissier’s face in my memory. But the thought, whatever it was, was gone faster than I could grab it.

  The sermon was about church doctrine, not exactly a rabble-rousing, heartwarming, or hell and damnation sermon, nothing to get the spiritual juices flowing. But not bad. And the people were nice, most finding me after the sermon and introducing themselves in a confusing blend of faces, names, and scents. The preacher was an earnest man who could have passed for twelve, with a scraggly attempt at a moustache, but he was probably older. Had to be. It was okay. I might return next week. If I was still here.

  There was a ladies’ room off the front entrance, where I pulled on the jeans again. I expected the churchgoers to look askance when I emerged in biker gear, but they just smiled harder, if that was possible, showing teeth to prove they wanted me back. No matter what kind of fool motorcycle-gangbanger I might be.

  In the parking lot, I chatted about my bike with a few teenagers and an elder who wandered over to make sure I wasn’t selling crack to the kiddies. Bitsa’s a cutie-pie and the boys were entranced. For that matter, so was the elder, though he tried to act all stern. When I caught the eye of an impatient parent, I shooed away the boys and geared up. Waving in the remaining churchgoers’ general direction, I pulled into traffic.

  In the packet of papers that came with my contract were the addresses for each of the clan blood-masters. Not their hidden sleeping places, not their lairs, but their public addresses where they entertained, where their mail was sent, and their IRS refunds, and their bills, though it brought a smile to my face to imagine a vamp opening an IRS refund or a Visa bill.

  I wanted to drive by as many as I could. Sniff out their dens, in Beast-think. Four blood-masters lived in the Garden District: Mearkanis, Arceneau, Rousseau, and Desmarais. The other masters were farther out, with Leo living the most distant. St. Martin, Laurent, and Bouvier were somewhere in between. The “saint” part of St. Martin was a surprise, but then, what I knew about sane vamps was, well, nothing, until now. I was learning stuff I’d never have believed only a month earlier. Sane vamps were a whole different order of business from rogues.

  I motored down St. Charles Avenue and entered the Garden District on Third Street. I zipped up and down the blocks, locating the houses, taking time to park the bike and walk down the street in front of and behind each house, sniffing for rogue, trying not to be too obvious.

  Vamp security was good. I was riding past the third house on my list, the address of Clan Arceneau’s blood-master, looking for a place to park the bike for a walk-around, when a security guy stepped outside. He was lean, narrow-waisted, broad-shouldered, and made no attempt to hide the holstered megagun he carried. He wore khakis, a red T-shirt, and a tough attitude that looked military, along with wraparound sunglasses, which looked pretty stupid in the shadows.

  I figured, what the heck, I might as well push the boundaries. I gunned Bitsa through the open, six-foot-tall, black-painted, wrought-iron gate, the twisted bars in a fleur-de-lis and pike-head pattern at the top, and braked at the back bumper of a black Lexus parked in the narrow drive. I killed the engine. Kicked the stand and unhelmeted. The guard watched me the whole time, walking out onto the porch, hands at his sides, ready to pull the big ugly gun if he needed to.

  Beast awoke at the possible threat and thought at me, Holstered gun, like sheathed claws. No match for us. And, Other one at door. I heard footsteps and knew a second guard had come to the door as backup. If there were only two guards, that left the rest of the house vulnerable.

  I smiled at Big-Gun, pulling in the scents of the yard. Chemical fertilizers, traces of yappy-dog and house-cat urine and stool, weed killer, dried cow manure, exhaust, rubber tires, rain, oil on the streets. Big-Gun didn’t smile back, but he must have decided I was harmless because he put both hands on his waist. “Lost?” he asked. He sounded almost friendly. But then I guess you can sound friendly when you’re carrying a small cannon under your arm.

  “Nope. I’m looking for Clan Arceneau.”

  Slicker than lightning, he drew his weapon. He had clearly been drinking vamp blood, to be so fast. Beast tensed. I stared down the barrel of the cannon. “I’m Jane Yellowrock, the hired gun looking for the rogue vamp. You got a minute? For a nice, friendly visit?”

  “Depends. You got ID?” When I nodded, he said, “Real slow. Two fingers. Unzip the jacket. When I’m satisfied, you drop the jacket and turn in a circle. Then you can pull an ID.”

  With two fingers, I pulled down the zipper on the jacket, held out one side and then the other, showing that I was not wearing a holster. At his nod, I slid the jacket off and laid it over the leather seat. Holding my arms out, I did a slow pirouette, keeping an eye on the gun. I was certain that Beast could move faster than he could fire, but it wasn’t something I wanted to test.

  I stopped when I faced front again and set my smile back in place. Being in the gun’s sights, it had slipped. “ID?” I asked. He nodded. Still using two fingers, I lifted the jacket and revealed the inner pockets. I pointed to one and slid my fingers inside and back out, the ID between them. At his gesture, I flipped it to the concrete pathway and stepped back. He studied it from the safety of nearly six feet in height before backing toward the house.

  “Bring the jacket. You’ll be searched at the door. Thoroughly.” He grinned. He was going to enjoy it too. I could accept a little groping or I could leave. Not much in the way of other choices. But . . . this was a chance to see inside.

  “I can live with a search,” I said, pulling off my sunglasses so he could see my eyes. “But if it turns to groping, I’ll bust your balls.” Beast rose in me like a wraith. Big-Gun started to laugh, but it disappeared fast, his eyes watching me like I was a bomb about to go off.

  “Yeah. Guests in the house,” he said. Which made no sense to me, but seemed to mean something to him. And then I saw his ear wire. The guys were wired into the system.

  Big-Gun looked like an instinct kinda guy, the kind who listened to his gut, followed it, and his gut was telling him I was trouble. But his eyes couldn’t see much reason for the reaction, except for the Beast look I had thrown him. Uncomfortable, he kept his eyes on me, as if he thought I might pounce without warning.

  To placate him, I smiled sweetly to show I was just a little old thing, female and weak. He wasn’t buying it. I had always wondered what Beast looked like to others. I had tried to see the effect by studying myself in a mirror, but it just didn’t look like that big of a deal to me.

  Beast huffed at the thought. Looks like death. Big claws. Big teeth.

  Big-Gun waved me in. I picked up the jacket, still with two fingers, and led the way. Inside was another guy, who took my jacket, indicated I was to stand against the wall for the search, and who looked like Big-Gun. Exactly like Big-Gun, except he was wearing a navy blue T-shirt. “Twins?” I asked, putting palms on the wall as I tried to see over my shoulder. They both pulled off glasses and grinned while I did the back-and-forth to compare. “Huh,” I said.

  Big-Gun-Red-Shirt did a professional, nongroping search, while Big-Gun-Blue-Shirt went through my jacket pockets. I just smiled when his brows rose at some of the stuff he found, announcing them aloud to the house system. “Four crosses. Small New Testament. Keys, seven of them, two that look like storage unit keys, one safe-deposit key. Three house keys, a gate key, all on a Leo horoscope key chain. One small, pearl-handled folding knife with silvered blade. Velcro tourniquet.” He sent me an interested look. “Tourniquet?” he said again.

  I shrugged. “What can I say? Be prepared.” I quoted a Boy Scouts motto.

  “Small flashlight,” he went on. “What looks like a tooth. Cuff bracelet, silver.”

  “Hey,” I said, delighted. “I thought I lost that. Gimme.” When he placed the ornate silver cuff in my hand, I slid it on my arm and admired the gleam. The twins rolled eyes a
t the girly reaction, but it had the effect of calming Big-Gun-Red-Shirt down from his Beast-induced state of readiness. “Tooth.” I held out the same hand. It was a tooth from the same panther that comprised my fetish necklace, carried around for emergency shift, when I didn’t have time to do it the easy way, with meditation, in a gold nugget-marked rock garden. He put it in my hand and I tucked it in my jeans pocket. “So. Can we talk?”

  “Sure. Brandon,” Big-Gun-Red said, pointing at his own chest. “The ugly one is Brian.” They both laughed as if at an old joke. “Staff quarters are this way.”

  Brian behind me, Brandon led me through the three-story house, which was larger and deeper than I would have thought from the outside. Maybe forty-six feet across the front, and twice that deep, the house took up most of the small lot, with kitchen and added-on staff quarters on the back of the lower story.Which was nice, because the walk through the central hallway allowed me to see the layout.

  There was a wide staircase in the foyer, leading up into darkness, carpeted with an Oriental rug in shades of blue and gray and black. The dining room and parlor were on opposite sides of the foyer, with hand-carved cherrywood table and chairs and loads of china showing through glass doors of built-in cabinetry in one room, and antique, upholstered furniture, statues, and objets d’art in the other. Our feet made no sound on the carpeted hallway floor. Gilt-framed paintings hung on the right wall in the wide hall, and a mural graced the left.

  A few doors were closed to either side. From the scent of coffee and tea, I identified a butler’s pantry that separated the dining room from the expanded kitchen. I got a glimpse of an old-fashioned music room behind the parlor, and smelled mold that was peculiar to old books in the room behind it. But the rooms on the left at the back of the house were for the servants, including security. Brandon opened each as we passed.

  There were six bunks in one room, five neatly made, one with a body under the covers, snoring. I smelled blood on him, but as he was still breathing, I figured he was a human blood-slave of the clan and said nothing. I didn’t have to like it, but I wasn’t here to rescue junkies.

  Lockers were on one wall of the bunk room, a laundry on the other. A unisex bathroom was on one side of the hallway, a big storage closet across from it, and a tiny cubical marked SECURITY. Inside was a security console with six monitors, each flipping back and forth with different camera angles, viewing the house and grounds from multiple positions. One showed the street. They had seen me coming. They grinned at me, and I grinned back. “Nice setup.”

  “It works,” Brian said. “Plus we had heard from the Rousseau and Desmarais security teams that a female biker was in the District. We talk.” I nodded, impressed. “Want sweet tea?” he asked, indicating a break room with minikitchen, table, chairs, sofas, recliners, and TV.

  “That would be nice,” I said, on my best children’s home manners. I took a seat at the table while he got out glasses and poured tea, and Brandon went back to the security console, glass in hand. He was close enough to participate in the conversation, sipping, his chair at an angle, one eye on the screens, one on me. “Mind a few questions?” I asked, trying for girly and innocent, but not really fooling either twin, even after the silver bracelet incident.

  “As long as they aren’t about the security precautions or systems of the clans, you can ask anything you want,” Brian said. The brothers had mellow voices with a strong Deep South accent, one I had heard only in Louisiana, spoken as if they talked through a mouthful of melting praline candy.

  “Ask away,” Brandon said.

  So I did. We drank cold sweet tea, which tasted fresh brewed, from good quality loose tea, not the tea dust called fannings in grocery store-quality tea bags. I asked about any recent changes in any vamps they knew—feeding changes, habitat changes, scent changes. The twins were an integral part of the vamp security community, which, I discovered, was a growing and lucrative business in cities with a city blood-master and vamps who were out of the closet. Not all of them were, even now with the improving vamp-human relations.

  They volunteered info about social relationships, which clans were feuding, which vamps were entering and exiting affairs of the heart, which clans and individual vamps were having financial trouble, or gambling, or building too many blood-servant relationships, or too few, their habits, feeding times, and the emerging human donor systems that allowed vamps to feed without forming blood relationships. This new change bothered them the most.

  I studied them as we talked, and my impression of their military backgrounds was reinforced. These guys were smart, and something suggested they were older than they looked. More like Vietnam War military. Or maybe even World War II. It was clear from their carefully controlled physical motions that they fed on vamp blood often enough to be fast. Not quite vamp fast, maybe not even Beast fast, but faster than any regular human.

  I wanted to ask about it but that seemed rude. Like, “So, tell me. How often do you suck vamp?” No way to ask directly and still be polite, so I asked, “These human donor systems. Who sets them up?”

  While Brian was pouring more tea, Brandon said, “We don’t know. It’s an Internet thing, like a call-girl site, but for blood donors. Blood for cash. If a vamp needs blood for an evening, he can message the site with contact info, city, cell phone, credit card, and restaurant or hotel where they want to meet. They’re in four cities in the United States: New Orleans, New York, San Fran, and LA. But it’s spreading. We hear that a new branch is opening in Nashville.”

  “We’re trying to get a handle on who’s behind it,” Brian said. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing illegal in blood for money. Winos have been selling plasma for decades. And it’s great for vamps who want an occasional safe, fresh-meat snack, but as a permanent lifestyle it isn’t good for the vamp community.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the blood-slave and blood-servant relationships are special. They give vampires stability,” Brian said. “Emotional, as well as personal and clan security.”

  Brandon stood and scooted his chair so he could reposition and still see both the screens and me. He straddled the chair, resting his arms across the back. When he spoke again, it was the voice a master sergeant might have used instructing soldiers or grunts, a clipped and well-thought-out spiel, almost rehearsed. I suddenly had to wonder if the brothers had been watching for me, to tell me this. Since any reliable info on vamps was hard to come by I had to wonder why.

  “Vampires,” he said, “are volatile at the best of times. The younger they are, the more high-strung, hot-tempered, impulsive, unpredictable, and capricious they are. Almost erratic.”

  “And violent,” I said. “Let’s not forget violent.”

  He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “They need good, steady, strong human servants to provide emotional balance and a ready supply of safe, clean blood. Servants who aren’t easily riled to help them navigate the human legal, financial, and social systems. Which is why the blood-slave and blood-servant relationships were put into the Vampira Carta. You know of it?”

  I nodded. Troll had mentioned it.

  “According to the oldest of us—Correen, who lives here with Clan Arceneau—without this stability, vampires go rogue faster. They need the long-term, lifelong bonding that takes place with the slave and servant relationship. They need it. They need us.”

  “Is that what Correen thinks happened with this rogue I’m after? He lost his blood-servant?”

  “She thinks it’s possible.”

  I tapped my fingernails on the glass, little tinks of sound as I thought. “What’s the difference between slave and servant?”

  “Time, money, and monogamy,” Brian said. “A blood-servant is a paid employee who offers work and blood meals in return for a salary, security, improved health, expanded life span, and other benefits resulting from a few sips of vampire blood a month. If the relationship works, then a servant is adopted into the vampire’s family, becomes part of the financial
, emotional, and legal running of it, just like an adopted child would be, but with the benefits not dropped when he or she reaches majority. Servants are too important, too difficult to replace, to let grow old, unhealthy, or slow. Of course, getting out of the relationship is problematic from our end too.”

  “We’re hooked on the blood,” Brandon offered, “and on the relationship, which is . . . intense.” The brothers shared a quick look that said the type of intense was sexual, but was also something else. Something I hadn’t penetrated yet.

  “A blood-slave is a blood-junkie, but one who doesn’t have a permanent master,” Brian said. “Slaves are passed around between masters, usually only inside a family, but not always, and without a contract or the security offered in the longer-term relationship. They’re used for food, fed on several times a month, and might be offered a small salary and an occasional blood sip in return. But slaves do it for the high they get when they’re fed on, not the relationship.”

  I rubbed my head, more as an excuse to think than to relieve tension. I had known there was a difference between blood-slaves and blood-servants but the particulars weren’t easy to discover. And I was certain that I didn’t have the full picture now. I hadn’t gained much new info from this conversation, but I had discovered, over the years, that I would eventually use and expand on what I learned. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll think about all this. Okay if I call you with questions?”

  “Not guaranteeing we’ll answer, but you can always ask,” Brandon said.

  I dropped my hand and stood, stretching. “Okay. So on that note, how about two favors. First, call the other security people and tell them I’m riding around, learning the lay of the land. Ask them not to shoot me if I bike up to their doors.” I grinned to show I was only half jesting. “And . . . tell me. How old are you guys?”

  Brian laughed. Brandon sighed, looked at his watch, and handed his brother a five-dollar bill, saying, “We have a standing bet. You asked within the first hour. So I lose.”