Mercy Blade (34 page)

Nettie blushed a deep red. “Sometimes.”

“Ah. Of course.” They could read when they rolled their marks. Sexual attraction had a scent all its own. “Four. Any idea where Tyler Sullivan hangs out when he’s off duty?”

She rattled off the names of four dance clubs. “The chest you wanted is in the foyer,” she added. “You could take it with you, but with the motorcycle . . .” Her words trailed off.

“Right. No trunk. Any way that someone could deliver it to me?”

“Horace will be heading into town later this afternoon for gardening supplies. Give me directions and I’ll see that he drops it off at the right place.”

I gave her the address, and because it was in the Quarter, no directions were needed. I made my way back to the main house through the long shadows of the early Saturday evening, and back to my bike. When I got home, I dialed Sloan Rosen and asked, “Any word?”

“No,” he said. “But Jodi got your message. Don’t touch anything. She has plans.”

The connection ended. I was left out of the loop. As usual.

 

It was a summer Saturday night in the French Quarter, hot, steamy, sultry, and packed with tourists. I was dressed in dancing clothes, which meant a flowing aqua print skirt, a tight cami under a matching top, dancing shoes, and my hair up, out of the way. It also meant stakes in the French braid, two knives strapped to my thighs, three crosses under my shirt, and my tiny derringer buried under the hair, loaded for vamp or were with silver rounds. I was going to party, but any party where I spotted Tyler Sullivan might be a dangerous one.

Going dancing in the middle of an investigation, and with Rick missing, felt stupid on the surface. But there was one bar, owned by Leo Pellissier, where Ricky Bo played with his band, and Tyler hung out, and I could kill several birds with the one club. I also needed a release from the tension between Bruiser and me and a diversion from Evangelina, who was acting downright weird—dancing all around the house, singing and drinking a lot more than I thought she usually did. I left Leo’s cell-gift on the table by my bed and carried my throwaway phone when I locked the door behind me and headed out walking to RMBC.

I took a deep breath of the night air and my head started to clear the instant I left the house, my worries spilling away as my dancing shoes tapped on the old sidewalks, and my skirts swung against my thighs and knees. It was hot out, and wet, the air feeling like it weighed a hundred pounds. But my breathing still felt freer than it had since Rick took off.

The night was redolent of bug spray, hot grease, cooking seafood, and the water that surrounds and passes through New Orleans. Most people think of the city as being along the Mississippi River, but there’s a lot more water than that, with Lake Pontchartrain spreading wide, and bayous winding through it; salty, silty, stagnant smells are everywhere. And the music. Jazzy, bluesy, Southern rock, pop-country heaven. I worked my shoulders back, rolling them to loosen up.

The crowds thickened with both tourists and locals out for the food and music and shopping, and street artists were everywhere. A four-person band played on one corner, trombone, banjo, percussion, and a guitar, a stack of CDs with the name MamaMamba in front of them. They were playing an old Negro spiritual with all the pathos of slavery and pain, and it was spectacular, the woman guitarist tearing up the vocals. I made a mental note to look them up on the Internet and buy a CD or download something.

Across the street from them was a guy in carpenter clothing, carrying a hammer and screwdriver in one hand, a length of two-by-four balancing, wobbling with the slight breeze, on one shoulder. He was perched on a ladder at an angle. Not a stepladder, not a folding ladder, but a fireman-type ladder, one length of wood. Except for the slowly moving two-by-four, he was immobile as a statue. I had no idea how he could stay so still. I dropped a five in his carpenter’s bucket and moved on.

Royal Mojo Blues Company was a thirty-something-year-old restaurant and dance hall that had an outside dining area, a bar, a grill that served great food, and a dance floor I knew as well as I knew my own house. I had danced here several times, a few for Rick as he played sax. And maybe some small part of me hoped he would be here tonight.

The smell of fried food, beer, and faintly of Leo, and the sound of live music blasted its way into the street, an Alabama-style band rocking the house. When I stepped inside, the scents were momentarily overpowering: old and new beer, fried grease, fish, beef, spices and peppers, cleansers, human and vamp scents, marijuana, sweat, and sex pheromones. The place was packed, shouted conversations merging into a background roar, and overpowered by the band.

An ethnically indeterminate, dark-skinned man crooned, shouted, and sang with a smoky voice, eyes closed, swaying his head, mike, and dreadlocks back and forth, one hand at his thigh shaking a tambourine. He was backed up by four musicians on drums, keyboard, bass, and guitar. I waved to Bascomb, the bartender tonight, ignored three men who looked my way with a sexual, predatory interest, and flowed onto the floor, into the crowd, and up to the band. As I moved, I sight-searched for Tyler or Rick. Saw neither.

Dancing alone was never frowned on at RMBC, and couples and singles were pressed together, a writhing mass of dancers. Into the heat and the beat I raised my arms over my head and started to move. One of the courses I took between children’s home/high school/teenaged misery and the freedom of adult life was a year of belly dance classes. The best thing about belly dancing was the freestyle moves it added to my repertoire. I opened with hip pops and shifted into a series of
mayas
, remembering Bruiser’s hands on my hips as we danced. I threw back my head and shoulders and moved with the beat. Segued into a series of circular figure eights, dropping my arms slowly in front of me, hands moving in opposing, mirrored, wavelike motions from above my head to below my hips.

I watched and sniffed for the men I was hunting, but it was vamp I smelled first, up close. The tang was sharp and astringent as wormwood and dusty like dried sage, remembered from the first time I saw her in her office. I knew who she was even before I heard the silky laugh that her kind can give, low and erotic, like vocal sex. She was close, her vamp power cutting like razors against my skin.

I tensed and whirled, facing away from the stage, grabbing the ends of stakes in my hair, searching with eyes and nose and band-blasted ears. Katie of Katie’s Ladies was in the crowd behind me. Watching me. I stepped her way and stopped. Taking her in. Dropping my hands from the stakes. This was a totally different Katie from the mad, zombielike, flesh-eating monster.

Her fangs were snapped back into the roof of her mouth. Her blond hair was clean and brushed, falling like a thick, solid sheet of gold around her as she undulated to the beat. She was wearing a short, teal silk sheath, so tight there was no question that she was naked beneath it. And she was sane, not vamped out, not a nutso killing machine. Her eyes glittered, holding mine, her irises a grayish hazel as she swiveled up beside me, giving that caramel liqueur, sex-on-a-stick laugh. My Beast purred. She liked the sound, she always had, and she liked Katie, in a predator-fascination kinda way. The way a big-cat reacted to cobras, staring and entranced.

Katie’s skin was flawless, pale as alabaster, but with a faint blood blush on her cheeks, indicating that she had fed well and recently. She danced her way around the men from the bar, who had found me, whooped, whistling as she matched her moves to mine. I watched her, leery of this woman, this vamp-predator-woman, being here.

I caught a whiff of Gee. And I understood. Gee had, as he said, found and fed Katie, restoring her to sanity far faster than she would have without his blood.
What the heck
is
that guy?
I nodded to the bar and mouthed over the pulsing music, “Buy you a drink?”

She mouthed back, “I’d rather drink from you.” She did a full body slither, snakelike, ending up with her chest inches from me. Power sparkled off her, electric and cutting, scalding and icy. The three men hooted and hollered.

I had stopped dancing and I shook my head, no. “Bar.”

Katie pouted, her mouth making a little moue and, vamp-fast, moved off the dance floor. I followed Beast-fast, not caring that the men saw my speed.

At the bar, I took the stool Katie indicated, noticing the couple who stood and stepped away, looking confused, their drinks still in front of our confiscated seats. Stifling a sigh, I handed them their drinks and a ten for their trouble, said, “Thanks,” as if they had given up their seats voluntarily, and waved to Bascomb. The noise level was marginally lower here and when he came over I could hear his comment, “Missed you around here, Janie. Good to see you dancing. Miss Katie, a pleasure to see you here tonight. Your usual gin martini?”

The drink sounded perfectly hideous to Beast, but Katie cooed a yes. I asked for a Coke, something sugared and caffeinated. With a vamp—recently insane—near, I might need the kick.

We were silent until our drinks came, and Katie tasted hers, which was bluish green and smelled toxic, delivered in a stemmed glass with an onion on a toothpick in the liquid. She nodded to Bascomb, who moved away for another customer. I cut to the chase. “You drank from Gee DiMercy.”

“I did.” Katie looked at me from under her lashes, flirtatious. “You can smell him on me?” I nodded and she said, “With the taste of his blood on my tongue, I began to awaken, as if from a long sleep filled with dark dreams. And for a delicious, delirious moment I remembered.” She closed her eyes as an expression resembling ecstasy claimed her face. “I remembered the
power
. So very much power. Until Leo drank my power away, my magic was great enough that I might have taken the entire city, might have drunk from every throat I encountered.” She opened her eyes, and in them I could see her emotions as easily I might a human’s. She was grieving, in pain, and though she was sane, there was something frantic, something ecstatic and manic in her eyes that held me still and ready inside, prepared to ward off an attack.

Her fingers fluttered up her throat and down, across her chest and down to her décolletage, resting on the V of her low neckline. “I might have grown fat and content on the blood of this city, not starved as I am, as we always are.” I started to ask what she meant when her face hardened. “But Leo drank from me, drained me, and took it all away.”

I tried to understand what had happened, but my knowledge of vamp physiology and culture was based on killing the crazy ones, and my experience with the sane ones was still limited. Before I could put it into some kind of order, Katie said, “I wish to hire you to kill Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City. How much money will you require?”

I put my Coke on the counter, too surprised to hold the icy glass without spilling it.
Cripes
, she was
serious
. “Um, Katie, I work for the council, for Leo. He pays me.”

Katie said something in French and slammed her martini glass on the bar. The stem broke. Gin, bluish and harsh smelling, splashed over the counter. Her power spat over me like burning sleet, and out across the room. Even the humans flinched, as the air went suddenly arid and electric. The band stopped playing midsong and stood on the small stage, holding their instruments awkwardly. “I hired you. I!” she said in English, her words ringing into the silent room. “You belong to me.”

Belong to
. . . My first instinct to quiet her vanished, and I spoke in a low rush of whispered words. “I don’t belong to anybody. You hired me to do a
job
, which I did. And then Leo extended my contract. I’m not a hired killer, Katie.”

“Of course you are. It is what you do, what you are. It is what all vampire hunters are,
murderers
of my kind.”

Deep inside, Beast growled, exposing killing teeth. She murmured,
Jane is killer. Killer only
. I ignored her. Beast and I’d had this conversation before. I disagreed with her opinion, but there are times for internal debates, and when faced with an unhappy vamp wasn’t one.

Katie glanced up the bar and called out into the odd silence, “Barkeep. Another drink!”

Her words broke a spell over the crowd; on the stage, the players seemed to shake themselves and put down their instruments, announcing a short break. Canned music came over the loudspeaker system, Aaron Neville singing “Jailhouse.” The humans in the place started to move again, recuperating from the blast of vampire energies, and I spotted the ones still unmoving in the crowd. Vamps, three of them. Each of them focused on Katie.

“Katie, why do you want Leo dead?” I asked, keeping an eye on the vamps.

“He buried me with the blood of all the clans,” she said, surprised. When I made a little,
so what
, gesture, she said, “He gave me the power of them all, and then he took it away. He drained me near unto true death. I would still be chained with the scions had not the Mercy Blade found me and set my mind free. It isn’t . . .” She struggled for the right word. “It isn’t
fair
.”

I grinned and picked up my Coke again, draining it to exchange the glass for the fresh one Bascomb brought. The concept of fairness from a vamp was amusing, but I had a feeling that laughing would win me nothing but a battle I wasn’t dressed for. And my momentary concern that Katie might be the vamp trying to get Leo and Bruiser arrested for murder eased. She was too nutso to have arranged the scenario. Bascomb wiped up the mess of Katie’s spilled drink.

When he left, I said, “So, challenge him to personal combat.”

“He has
my
blood,
my
power,” she spat. “I will not win.”

“He challenged you to personal combat when you were unable to fight back at full strength due to the
dolore
, which by vamp law isn’t an issue. But he won and didn’t kill you, which means he respects you and wants you alive.” Katie looked up at that, her drink poised halfway to her mouth, her exquisite eyes opened wide in surprise. “He drank from you against your will, right?” Katie nodded and sipped, her face puzzled. “I don’t know much about vamp law, but I
think
you’re number two in the city, now. Ask him to make you his heir.”