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  Into my earpiece, I heard Alex ask, “Did I just see Leo carrying Adrianna, still with her head, up to his office?”

  I nodded, then said, “Yeah. Creepy, I know. But he wants her alive.”

  “But she tried to kill you. More than once. She was a pig. And now she’s a brain-dead pig. Hungry for a good meal of bacon and scrambled brains, anyone?”

  I chuckled at the sophomoric humor, the laughter bumping my arm, the pain reverberating all through me. “Stop. Please. And follow Del on the cams. Tell me what’s up with her.”

  “She took the stairs to Leo’s office. She was standing in the hallway when he went past.”

  “And he didn’t look at her.”

  “Correctomundo. A bad case of lovelorn, brokenhearted girl stuff?”

  “Yeah.” And something else to ask Bruiser. How to make Leo fall in love. I grinned, picturing his face when I asked.

  CHAPTER 3

  Not My First Time at This Rodeo, Sugar

  I stood out of the way while Eli, stinking of sweaty leather and failed deodorant from his dual runs in the sun, took ambient magical readings. The psy-meter needle was everywhere, flipping from one side—zero magical ambiance—to one hundred: redline magical activity or resonance. Most of the activity was on the wall where Joses had hung, crucified for a hundred years, give or take.

  Yeah. Lots of magic juju, its distinctive pins-and-needles taint brushing my nose, as if trying to induce a sneeze, the stink of vamp and human blood, the reek of fear and anger. And if purpose had a scent, it too was part of the miasma of sub-five.

  No one had said so, but I knew that Leo was in danger from this guy, a threat like I had never fought before and had no way to look up or research. And the world’s best research guy, Reach, was gone, vanished in the wind. Not that I missed him, the two-faced, backstabbing bastard. But. I was still worried about him. How stupid was that?

  No, there was no Reach with his in-depth database to help me discover how Joses might intend to twist witch magic and vamp mojo together and turn them into a weapon, one served up with vengeance and a side dish of insanity. Alex was good. But he wasn’t Reach. Or Reach before he’d been tortured by Satan’s Three and gone on the run. Assuming all that story he’d given me was true. Which it might have been. Probably was. Reach had disappeared, gone off the grid. No one in the vamp-hunting community—which was small and growing smaller by the day—had heard from him.

  When Eli finished measuring once, he did it all again, this time marking the measurements down on a tablet that was synced to Alex’s console, like a map of magical stuff—substance and activity. Smart. If I hadn’t been hurting so bad and fighting the need to hurl, I’d have applauded.

  When he was done I let him come to me, and I looked over his work. “Deets and conclusions?” I asked.

  “The Headless Wonder,” he pointed at Mario, “has marginal amounts of magical residue on his clothes. His hands are suffused with it, and so is his right wrist.”

  I looked at Mario, remembering the egotistical guy who had thought I was coming on to him and slobbered all over me while I used him to get down the elevator. I wasn’t proud of that, nor the “means to an end” mentality that had gone along with it. I bent and studied Mario’s wrist, noting that the skin was abraded in a circular pattern. I imagined what Mario would do if someone had offered him a magical bracelet, and yeah, he’d have put it on. He wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge. And the bracelet had left residue on his flesh.

  Eli pocketed the tablet and went to the wall where Joses had hung. He pulled a packet of sterile gauze from a pocket in his pants that held medical supplies and opened the paper packet. With the roll of gauze, he scraped at some dried gunk left on the wall—blood, skin cells, gross fluids—and put the gauze back in the opened packet and into his gobag.

  I grunted in approval. I should have thought about it and hadn’t. Evidence gathering was my bag, not my partner’s, but Eli had been studying the how-to of the PI business, saying he wanted to know everything about the business he had bought into. It had paid off.

  “Mario and Adrianna brought something—or maybe more than one something—magical down to the basement,” Eli said, his words echoing my own conclusions. “Using it, or them, and the humans, they freed Joses.”

  “Why the humans?” I asked.

  Eli looked at me strangely. “Because the stakes are silver. And there’s no device or cloth or gloves on the floor or on the vamps that they could have used. No claw hammer. No burned fingers. Hence, they had a human or humans to help.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Of course. Obvious. Except when pain was thrumming through your gut and brain, short-circuiting everything logical.

  “You okay, Janie?” Eli asked.

  Alex said over the headphones. “No. She’s hurt. She did that thing again where time slows down for her, and she was nauseous from that, though she seems better now. From what I could make out in the vid, the spell hit her right hand first, and it’s bandaged into a sling, so I’m guessing she has burns on her right hand and arm.”

  Eli closed the psy-meter, clamped it between his left arm and his body, and held out his right hand, a signal that demanded I let him see. The gestures were efficient and military. I just stared at his hand, the dark skin outlining the pale palm. “Jane?” he asked.

  “I don’t—” I stopped and blew at a strand of hair that had worked its way loose from the fighting queue I had braided this morning. It wanted to dangle in my face and tickle my nose. “I don’t think I can.”

  Eli pulled something from a pocket, and I heard a click the same moment that a bright light landed on my hand, pressed against my waist. Eli said nothing, just studied the hand, all blistered and juicy and weeping flesh. “Second-degree burns. How far up does it go?”

  “My shoulder? Maybe?”

  Eli said, “Alex. If Edmund is still on premises, get him into a private room, with some human females to act as duennas. Send one of them down here to get Jane and escort her up as soon as everyone is assembled. It’s daylight, so she can’t shift into her cat and then shift back. She’d be stuck in Beast form until sunset. And Jane’s waited a little too long to get the sleeve off. It’s got to be cut off and it’s going to be bad.” He looked at me, his face lit from below. “You are an idiot.”

  “Um. Yeah. Okay.” He was right. What could I say? Except, “My Beast is supposed to ease the pain. She hasn’t. So maybe there’s something wrong with her too.”

  He shook his head, confused. “Your Beast? Your skinwalker magic?”

  Right. I hadn’t told him everything about Beast, the other soul now twined with mine. I’d have to add a total soul-baring to my social calendar. A strange sound, like the first note of a shattered laugh, escaped my mouth before I pressed my lips together to hold it in. When the sound was under control and shoved down deep, I said, “For all intents and purposes, yeah.”

  “The spell that hurt your arm, you’re saying it also hurt your magic?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  Eli tapped his mic. “Bro, I’m sure you’re on top of it already, but if not, start a search of all the security cameras to see what the dead vamps brought down to the basement.”

  “Done it. Every single security camera they passed shows the same thing. Two vamps and ten humans walking into security, where they killed Martini. Then taking the stairs to the basements. They met another vamp on sub-four, female, wearing a scarlet cloak with a hood.” And we didn’t have sufficient cameras in sub-five yet. Of course. Dang it.

  “A human female, blood-servant to Leo, named Zelda, is on the way down,” Alex said. “Red hair, green eyes, freckles, five-five, one-sixty, all muscle and boobs.”

  As he finished the description, the elevator opened, and I realized that there had been no ding, no tone to tell us it was there. Curious. Useless, but curious. A woman stepped through the doors and paused, one hand holding the doors open. Eli looked from his tablet and the photo the Kid had sent.
“Verified,” he said into the mic. “Other female for the healing? Vamp?”

  “A woman named Gretchen, who Janie calls Titan Two. And Edmund, because they liiike each other.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the insinuation and then remembered that there were security cameras in most rooms. The Kid may have seen a healing session with Edmund not so long ago, one in a small room off the locker room. Great. Just freaking ducky.

  To me, Eli said, “Go,” and pointed to the elevator.

  Rather than deal with the problems in sub-five, I went.

  Every step jarred my gut and my arm, as if knowing what was about to happen made everything infinitely worse. And since getting the leathers off was going to be way worse than Eli expected—because I would refuse to let them cut off my leathers—maybe my arm was indeed putting out caution alarms.

  The elevator doors closed, leaving me in the tiny mobile room with Zelda. I turned off my headset and cleared my throat; she slanted a look up at me. “I only have two sets of fighting leathers, the fancy ones for when I officially act as Enforcer, and this set that I keep in the back of the SUV.” She didn’t reply, a look of polite inquiry on her face her only reaction. “I need more than one pair,” I explained. “They’re expensive and it takes time to get them made, time I may not have if I have to go after the thing from sub-five.” When she looked confused, I said, “I’m trying to say that I don’t want you to cut the sleeve. I can be healed of a wounded arm, but I can’t do without the fighting leathers.”

  Persistently polite and reasonable sounding, she said, “Leathers are part of your expense account as part-time Enforcer and acting head of security. Why not order four or five sets?”

  “Yeeeeah . . . ,” I drew out the word. “About that. Allowing Leo to provide them for me is binding me to the MOC a little more closely than I want.”

  Puzzlement in her tone, she said, “It’s common knowledge that you can’t be bound. Our master tried and was not successful.”

  “That’s not—” I stopped and looked up at the camera in the corner. There was a mic hidden in it, so whoever was on coms would hear, meaning Alex and a stranger, neither of whom I wanted in on my business. Zelda seemed to catch my discretionary look up and went silent. The elevator stopped and, without responding to her comment, I followed Zelda off the elevator to a floor and hallway I didn’t go to often—the living quarters of the permanent staff.

  One of the rooms was Del’s, and I didn’t so much remember which room that was as pick up her scent as we passed it. A scent of heartbreak clung to the air. Del was suffering as Leo’s primo, and I had no idea how to help her through it. It was girly stuff, like love and blood-servant stuff. Binding stuff. Sex-with-vampire—ick—stuff.

  Zelda paused outside a door and, her voice pitched low so only I would hear, said, “There is job-bound, there is emotion-bound, and there is blood-bound—all kinds of binding. Then there is stupid-bound. In this case, I think you’re stupid-bound. Even I can smell your blood.” She opened the door and entered the room, leaving me standing in the hallway with a frown pulling down on my face.

  Stupid-bound? I looked at my hand. It was worse. It was gonna hurt like crazy to pull the sleeve off. And there was gonna be blood and that clear wound fluid—serous fluid, that was it—all over the inside silk. I’d never get the blood-scent out, and every vamp around would be able to smell me coming. She was right. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Stupid-bound.

  I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me. There were three people waiting in the room: Zelda, another human female whom I recognized as Titan Two . . . and the vamp I was expecting, Edmund Hartley. He was slight, quiet, watchful, and nondescript. A vamp no one would notice in a crowded room. But his history and personal experience said that he was much more than that.

  The room smelled of vamp and blood and sex. It was an outer-wall room with a window, which was covered by steel, electronic blinds on the outside and a padded velvet board on the inside, and metal bands that secured the board in place, making it very hard to remove and endanger a sleeping vamp. It was a room for a low-level vamp because, even with the precautions, it was dangerous for vamps by day. Yet this room was clearly used as a lair, and by the scent, by Edmund. And Zelda. His sex and dinner partner. Edmund had fallen a long way from clan blood-master to slave, with an outer room at vamp HQ. I was still learning that story.

  “Cut it off,” I said to Zelda. “You’re right.” To Titan Two, I said, “There are plastic braces at the joints, silver-over-titanium chain link everywhere, and some Dyneema. It’s gonna be hard to cut off.”

  Titan Two held up a pair of leather snips, a pair of metal snips, and a box cutter with a new-looking blade. “Not my first time at this rodeo, sugar,” she said, trying a Texan accent and not making it work at all.

  I sighed. “Yeah. Right.” Beast? I thought. She still didn’t answer. It occurred to me that since I had accepted the soul-binding between us, maybe what healed me healed her. Vamp healing coming up. Hope you like Edmund.

  Beast chuffed back, the sound full of pain.

  * * *

  Getting the leathers off hurt. Hurt like I had never expected. It was a three-person job, Titan Two cutting and snipping, Zelda easing the leather back and ripping my damaged flesh off with it, and Edmund shedding his own blood and using his tongue to heal. Unlike other times I’d been vamp-healed, times when the wounding was finished and only needed vamp saliva and blood to make it feel all better and scar quickly, this time a rewounding was taking place at the same time as the healing, and the vamp saliva had no way to keep up with the pain. I screamed a few times. I cried all the way through, the nose-dribbling, sobbing, hiccupping, whining kinda crying. I smelled the stink of my burned and broken and torn flesh and the scent of my own blood and tears. It was . . . bad. Really, really bad.

  When it was over, I fell asleep, my body so full of endorphins, adrenaline breakdown products, and Edmund’s saliva and blood that sleep was the only possible reaction. Only vaguely did I wake when someone bandaged my arm and later pulled a T-shirt over me. I knew by the smells that I wasn’t in danger, and so couldn’t bother to rouse myself before dreams smothered me back under.

  * * *

  The dream was an odd one, full of confusing images, of white and black wings and claws, as if a white bird and a black bird were fighting. Of rain and lightning and the sensation of being cold, so cold I knew I was dying. Of someone speaking Cherokee, the Tsalagi words for God, chanting, “Yehowa, Edoda,” words for Great Spirit. “Unequa, adanvdo.” And “Anidawehi,” the word for angels. “Yehowa. Edoda. Unequa. Adanvdo. Anidawehi. Unequa, anidawehi—help me, accept me as sacrifice, or set me free.”

  I came to myself with a gasp of fear, lying in a bed, on clean sheets, still wearing my leather pants, my boots off, my upper body swaddled in a soft T-shirt that I recognized by feel and scent without having to open my eyes. The dream faded as the scents and sensations of the real world took over. The shirt was a fuzzy purple long-sleeved T with a colorful red-striped dragon on the front. It was my shirt, given to me by a vamp and a witch, with the power of healing woven into the fibers and into the dragon on the front. It was ugly, but the healing worked into it had lasted through several healings and repeated washing and drying. I loved this ugly shirt.

  Edmund was cradled around me, his arms around my waist, which, with vamps, usually meant a need and request for sex, but he was so relaxed that he had to be sleeping. He sighed, relaxing further, a boneless slump, the breath telling me two things—he was asleep and probably dreaming of being human, and that he’d recently drunk fresh blood. It was Zelda’s, and I smelled Zelda on the other side of him. Oh goody. A ménage à trois sleepover.

  The light was dim, and even with my eyes still closed, my time sense told me that the sun was still up outside. The feeling of well-being and the lack of pain told me that I was safe. I had time to rest and to think and to put things together. And time to worry.

  I had gotten use
d to Beast being able to mute my pain with her own body chemicals, so accustomed to it that I no longer thought about how often I drew on her gift. If the new soul-binding, the fighting ability, and the time-bending powers of our half-Beast form were gonna make it harder to deal with a purely human injury, that was a serious drawback, one I needed to figure into any future fighting circumstances, along with the gut-wrenching downtime required when I was forced to use the time-bending / reality-folding gift that was new to us.

  Or maybe today’s inability to use her pain-muting capacities was just because of the magical origin of the injury. I had to make time to meditate and check out Beast in my soul home. I could feel her there, and something wasn’t right. But before I could concentrate on me, I had a list of Enforcer stuff and vamp-hunter stuff to do.

  First was to talk to the priestesses and see how to track Joses Bar-Judas and how to kill him. I had a feeling he’d be leaving a swath of dead humans in his wake unless I got to him first.

  Second was to figure out where Leo had taken Adrianna and make sure she wasn’t going to cause problems on her own again. Second and a half was to find out what the magical jewelry that Mario and she had been wearing did, so I could counter it next time we met up. Third, once I had the Son of Darkness beheaded, was to research how she had known Joses Bar-Judas and make educated guesses on how Leo planned to use her brain-dead (hopefully) self.

  Fourth was to check in on Del. Try a little girl talk.

  Fifth was to talk to Jodi, my contact in the New Orleans Police Department. NOPD’s woo-woo room might have records I hadn’t found yet about Joses. Now that he was free and possibly a danger to the public, I needed to tell her about Joses and accept the figurative butt whupping I was likely to get for keeping his presence a secret. And . . . injured humans. There had been injured humans in the basement, and it was unlikely that they all survived being turned. I was supposed to report dead humans to the local law, and I’d been too hurt to think clearly about that. Now I had no way to determine if there were dead humans or not. Leo would never tell me, nor would his people.