River Road (8 page)

“I can’t speak for the other two but I’m sure it wasn’t Jean,” I whispered, hoping they couldn’t hear me. “Ritual murder’s not his style. He’s more direct.” There was a famous story of another pirate, only one, who dared question Jean’s authority, calling him out while Jean was having his dinner. The pirate Lafitte walked outside his house, shot the guy in the heart with barely a blink, then went back inside and resumed his dinner. No added drama. No wasted effort.

Alex looked at Jean. “I agree. He’d have slit the guy’s throat and let him bleed out. This kind of slaughter takes rage, and our mers have plenty of rage. Be nice if we knew whether our vic was a wizard or if we should add a wizard to our suspect list.”

We needed to search the area—with at least one fewer witness. Jean and Rene couldn’t leave because we needed them to get home, but Denis’s continued presence only increased the likelihood of a fight.

“I’m going to put a tracking charm on Denis so he can’t disappear back into the Beyond or the swamps, unless you need him to stay here,” I said, standing. “It’ll make keeping the peace a lot easier.”

“Yeah, long as you’re sure we’ll be able to find him when we need him. He better not make me chase him down.” Alex jingled the shotgun shells in his pocket. “Tell him I’m keeping the gun till he’s cleared. And tell Rene we’re going to be here a while.”

I’d be really popular with the mers once I delivered all those messages. “I think I’ll see if Rene will still get the water samples for us since he has to hang around anyway.” I could fill a couple of vials in the shallows, but I wanted water from the deep areas where the mers got sick.

I made my way back into the water, and although Denis reached over the side to help me aboard, he didn’t look happy about it. I shivered at the cold energy from his hand—a much stronger signal than when we’d met back at the Black Velvet. Maybe he was nervous, or maybe he was turning on some merman mojo to intimidate me. If he thought that would work, he had the wrong wizard.

“You don’t have to stay,” I said. “I just need you to accept a tracking charm so we can find you. We’ll want to talk to you again.”

“You won’t blame dis on me.” The anger shimmered around Denis like a cloak. “Wizards ain’t gonna mark me like a criminal. Screw dat, screw your goddamn treaty, and screw you and every other wizard.”

He turned and stalked toward the far edge of the deck, jerking his shirt over his head. That freaking merman thought he was going to jump overboard and swim out of here? Over my dead elven staff.

I raced to retrieve it from my backpack, which I’d left in the wheelhouse. By the time I ran back, the urgency had passed. Jean held the mer in a tight armlock, dagger point resting above the jugular. He was spitting a torrent of French in the shorter man’s ear, and from the glower on Denis’s face, he understood every word of it. I really needed to take French lessons.

“Let him go, Jean,” I said. “I’m sure Denis wants us to find the real killer.” I was getting really tired of the angry-merman crap too, but Jean didn’t need to accelerate it. Besides, he was clearly on Team Delachaise in this brewing war, and everybody knew it.

Denis’s eyes flashed defiance. I’d never been face-to-face with such open hatred, and it shook me. Why did the mers hate wizards so badly?

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sure you’re telling the truth about not killing this guy, but we need to be able to find you later so we can officially rule you out.”

He slipped his gaze from me to Rene, who’d been lounging against the side of the wheelhouse, watching the show. He’d stripped off his own shirt, probably ready to shift and chase down Denis as soon as he hit the water.

“You mark me, you gotta mark him too, bitch,” Denis said.

I flinched, but let it pass and looked at Rene.

He gave a slight nod. “Sure thing, babe. I got nothin’ to hide. Wasn’t me sittin’ on the bank with a dead guy.”

“Terrific,” I said. “Tracking marks for everyone.” Except Jean, who’d gone back in the wheelhouse and was reading a book. I squinted through the windows and blinked at the sight of his face scrunched into a frown over
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
. Just in case this day hadn’t been surreal enough.

“Do this thing, and let me go.” Denis’s hiss brought my attention back to the mers at hand.

I knelt and pulled my portable magic case from the backpack. Tracking charms were one of the common recipes I kept mixed in advance, and I pulled out a vial of ground pine bark mixed with corroded bronze and iron sulphate, plus a couple of squares of parchment.

“I need a drop of your blood to activate this.” I looked up at Denis, who crossed his arms, his mouth a taut line across his face.

“I ain’t gonna bleed for a wizard.”

“Stupid sonofabitch fish-for-brains.” Muttering, Rene dropped to his knees beside me, pulled a penknife from his pocket, and jabbed the sharp tip into the pad of his index finger.

“Thank you.” I tapped a small amount of the metallic powder on the parchment and held it out. He squeezed a couple of drops of blood atop the powder, and I stirred it with my finger, sending a miniscule jolt of energy into the mixture to activate it.

“Where you want it?” I stared at Rene’s chest and arms, where elaborate tattoos of animals and fish frolicked. I could study him for days and not see it all. The body wasn’t bad, either.

“Don’t matter—ain’t gonna hurt my ink, right?”

I shook my head. “It isn’t permanent.”

He held out his arm, and I pushed it down to rest on my knee. Swiping my finger through the blood-fueled ink I carefully drew an eye inside a triangle inside a circle, using his forearm as my canvas. As soon as the circle was complete, the ink glowed silver and seeped into his skin, clearly visible over his own tats.

“Won’t wash off?”

“Nope.” I hoped Denis was paying attention. “It won’t come off until I take it off, even when you shift.” I held Rene’s arm a moment longer, tracing my non-bloodied finger along an eel that curled its way between wrist and elbow. The skin was slightly ridged along the lines of ink. “How did you get these to stay?” Weres and shifters heal just about anything. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be able to have tattoos.

“Put salt and vinegar with the ink and it holds okay. Or use acid. Fades a little so you have to add extra color.”

I shuddered. Rene Delachaise had an extremely high pain tolerance. Good thing to know.

“Do this if you’re gonna do it, wizard.” Denis knelt beside me with his own knife, and I readied the mixture. Once the blood was added, he turned his back. “Put it where I don’t have to see it and think of you.”

I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be on the Villere Christmas card list.

As soon as the tracking charm was applied, Denis stood, strode to the far side of the deck, and leapt into the water without a word. By the time I got to the rail, he’d disappeared.

“How long does it take you guys to shift?” I folded the parchment squares and sealed them inside envelopes in my pack. I could use the leftover ink to track them down later, if needed. “That seemed really fast.”

Shifting was easy and almost instantaneous for Alex as a true shapeshifter. Weres usually had a harder time.

“Bout thirty, forty seconds for me, prob’ly faster for someone old as Denis,” Rene said. “We shift underwater.”

“Thanks, by the way. You made that a lot easier.”

“Wizard owes me a favor, that’s a good thing, babe.” He poked at the tracking mark on his arm. “What’s next?”

I turned to see where Alex had gone. He moved slowly amid the vegetation inland from the body. Seeing photos of the marsh, I’d always assumed the grass was the height of, well, lawn grass, but some of this had grown so high I could see only part of Alex’s head.

“Are you still willing to get the water samples?” I asked Rene.

“Might as well. Gotta stay here anyway.” He pointed down the bank. “Around that bend is where one of my people got sick. Also where T-Jacques Villere was supposed to have been, so I figure he was the one poisoned the water.”

“Is it going to make you sick to swim in there?” All the Elders needed was a litigious bunch of mers claiming we’d forced them to swim in contaminated water. The inter-species governing council hadn’t even been set up yet. Every group, including the wizards, thought they should be in charge of it.

“Don’t plan on staying down there that long.” As he talked, Rene had been ridding himself of clothes and I took a deep breath as he shucked the jeans. I hated working with weres and shifters. They’d get naked at the mere mention of changing form. I’d seen way more of Alex Warin than I should have, not that the view was bad. And not that he didn’t like being admired, the dog.

Still, I studiously dug in my backpack for the empty vials and tried to hand them up to Rene without getting an eyeful of merman.

“You a little shy, babe?” Rene took the vials and, damn it, I had to see what he was going to do with them. It wasn’t like he had pockets. He’d hung a pouch around his neck, and placed the small tubes inside it.

“Of course I’m not shy but—” I gawked, not at Rene’s hard, tanned body per se but at a particular bottle-nosed dolphin tat where I didn’t know tats could go. I felt myself turn the color of a ripe tomato.

“Oh, I wish you wasn’t a wizard.” Rene laughed as he walked to the opposite side of the deck, where the water was deepest. “I’d take you home with me,
chère
.”

The weirdness factor in my life had shot into the ozone. As soon as the splash sounded from Rene’s departure, I checked on Alex again. He’d need me to help him search, but I knew he wanted to look alone first. He was the investigator here, even if I hadn’t yarked on his crime scene.

I walked back to the wheelhouse, half wishing Jean had dog-paddled off with Rene so I could stretch out on the bench for a nap. I hadn’t burned much magic to zap the mers or to fuel the tracking charms, but the more of my limited physical magic I used, the less juice I had until I could sleep and replenish my metaphysical batteries.

“How do you like Eudora Welty?” I asked.

Jean looked up at me, brows knit. “Among your modern women, to what does the word
brassière
refer?”

I tried to gauge whether he was serious or starting another round of inappropriate banter. “What did it mean in your time?”

He mumbled in French a moment, trying to translate. “One used it on the arm if it had been broken, as a brace.”

“And why are you asking about brassieres?” I hadn’t read any Eudora Welty in a while, but didn’t recall her writing about underwear.

He brandished the book. “To her friend, a woman is offering”—he began reading—“a ‘pink brassiere with adjustable shoulder straps,’ as if this were a desirable thing to have. This woman, however, did not break her arm. So it is perhaps an article of clothing?”

I bit my lip. He would take offense if I laughed at him, and then I’d owe him even more favors. “It’s a woman’s undergarment, sort of like a corset, only smaller.” Surely even pirate women wore corsets.

“Ah.” His gaze settled on my chest, and a smile ticked up the corners of his mouth. “You will show me this article of clothing?”

Uh-huh. When Britney Spears became president. “We have a murder victim on our hands. No time. Sorry.”

“That is unfortunate,” Jean said, returning his attention to the book. I didn’t think he was referring to the dead man.

CHAPTER
8

A splash and thump near the front of the boat diverted my attention from Jean and his preoccupation with Eudora Welty’s underwear. Alex had levered himself aboard and was rooting through boxes and other paraphernalia on the aft deck.

“What are you looking for?” I shucked my denim shirt and draped it across the top of my backpack. Only the fear of an inter-preternatural incident kept me from peeling off the jeans still heavy and wet from my earlier splashtastic landing in the water.

“You got any Ziploc bags or anything we could use for evidence?”

“What did you find?”

“I think it’s our guy’s clothes, back in the grass.” Alex picked up a covered bucket and looked inside, wrinkling his nose as he clamped the lid back on and set it aside. “Bait.”

His focus settled on my backpack.

“Oh, no. You aren’t using my pack for murder evidence,” I said. “Don’t make me sic Charlie on you.” Yeah, I had named the elven staff. It was as much a pet as Sebastian and treated me with more respect.

Behind me, Jean leaned over the side of the boat and pulled up Rene, back in human form and shaking off water like a dog. He gave me four stoppered vials of water and a glowering scowl before going into the wheelhouse to get dressed. I held the vials up to the light; it was a lot cleaner-looking than what I’d collected in New Orleans early this morning. I unstoppered it and sniffed, but it smelled like brackish water, nothing else.

Yet when Rene returned and leaned against the side rail, he looked a little green around the gills—which had probably been literally true a few moments earlier.

“That water is some nasty shit, wizard,” he said. “First time I been that deep since the problems started. You lock Denis Villere up, and his boy. Otherwise, me and Robert, we’ll take care of it ourselves.”

I was beginning to think the mers just wanted to fight, period. The water gave them a convenient excuse. “You have to give me time to test it,” I said. “Two days, three tops.”

“Maximum,” Rene said. “And only if the Villeres stay away from us.”

Like I had any control over where Denis and T-Jacques and all the other little Villeres dipped their fins.

Alex joined us. “You got any plastic bags we can use for evidence?” he asked Rene.

The mer’s expression shifted from irate to neutral for Alex, who as a non-wizard was automatically more popular than me. Rene retrieved a roll of heavy-duty plastic trash bags from a wooden trunk under the bench in the wheelhouse. “These work?”

“Thanks.” Alex pulled a couple of bags off the roll. “This’ll go faster if you help search,” he told me. “If it turns out to be a sheriff issue, we’ll just have to get the Elders to send in one of their cleanup teams to reconstruct the scene unless…” He handed me a bag. “Can you do that kind of thing?”