Skinwalker (24 page)

“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.”

“And?” I asked.

The twins exchanged a look, the kind that only those who have worked closely together for years, like old married couples, or twins, share, the kind that says so much more than words. Brandon said, “We were born in 1822.”

I stared. “Crap. You're
old
farts.” The brothers laughed, at which point I realized I had spoken aloud. I smiled weakly as they showed me down the hall toward the door, while offering assurances that they would pave the way for me with the other security personnel.

I thought I was done, until I passed the hallway mural. I stopped midstep, midword, midthought. The nighttime pastoral scene was of vamps having a candlelit picnic. Naked vamps. And the food was naked too—alive and human. I couldn't help my blush when I saw Brandon and Brian were part of the scene, and that they were depicted as being very well endowed. Very, very well endowed. My blush made the brothers laugh, one of those manly he-men laughs that said they were, indeed, well endowed, and that they thought blushing was cute.

Beast is
not
cute
, she thought at me. I took a steadying breath and said, “I recognize you two, and Leo, and Katie.” My blush deepened. “But who are the rest of the . . . um . . . vamps and . . . um . . .”

Brandon took pity on my stumbling and stepped to the mural, pointing. “Arceneau, our blood-master, Grégoire”—he indicated a blond man who looked like he was fifteen when he was turned, like a child beside the lithe and muscular twins—“currently traveling in Europe. Ming of Mearkanis”—he pointed—“now believed to be true-dead, and her blood-servants Benjamin and Riccard. Rousseau and his favorites, Elena and Isabel. Desmarais with his Joseph, Alene, and Louis. Laurent with her Elisabeth and Freeman.” The phraseology had taken an old-fashioned cant, and I wondered if the mural took them down memory lane, bringing out archaic wording.

Brian took up the instruction. “St. Martin, and his blood-servant at the time, Renée. And Bouvier with his favorite,
Ka Nvsita
.” I reacted with shock. The girl in the painting had long, braided black hair, coppery skin, and lost, lonely eyes that seemed to have a familiar amber tint, much like my own. Her name was Cherokee for dogwood.

Anger rose in me, hot as burning heartwood. “Is she still alive?” I asked, swallowing my anger, to burn in my stomach with sour, acidic fire. I forced my hands to unclench.

“No,” Brandon said. “She died in the twenties. She was a good kid. Her father sold her to Adan Bouvier when she was eleven, back in, what was it?” he asked his brother.

“Maybe 1803 or '04? She was mature when we came to servitude,” Brian said.

Her father sold her. Like chattel. The vampires hadn't made my tribeswoman a slave; her own father had. I remembered then that selling their own, like cattle, was once the way of The People. I nodded and moved on down the hall and out of the house into the fresh air before I tried to kill a twin. “Thank you for the tea and the information,” I said when I had myself under control, standing on the porch. “I may call with questions.”

“And we may answer,” Brian said.

“Or we may not,” Brandon said.

I forced a smile on my face, slid into my jacket, strapped on the helmet, kick-started the bike, and got away.

I spent the rest of the afternoon meeting and greeting the blood-servants who worked security in other clan blood-family houses in the Garden District. After sunset, I motored back home, taking my time through the District and the Quarter. Sunday in the city that parties forever was laid-back. Tourists and citizens went to church, mass, or brunch and then visited museums, strolled along the river, shopped, or had dinner at a quiet restaurant. The Quarter's bookstores, cafés, and small shops did big business. Then came nap time, nearly officially sanctioned nap time in the European style.

At night, the public went back out and started it all over again, the wealthy sitting in elegant restaurants and the penny-pinching back in the cafés. Music played on every street corner. Magic acts and comedy acts spilled into the street along with jazz and blues and every other form of American, African, Island, and European music. Despite the rogue, despite the media vans patrolling the Quarter, and despite having to travel by taxi rather than risk the dangers of walking the balmy streets, people were having fun.

I would join them in a skinny minute, but I had a command appearance at a party full of vamps. I was not looking forward to it at all.

You may call upon me

I checked myself out in the closet mirror, halfway disgusted at the prospect of spending time at a vamp party when I could be tracking down the rogue, and halfway scared to death—and not only at the thought of being surrounded by vamps. My one little black dress was V-necked, thigh-length microfiber that could be scrunched into a travel pack and never show wrinkles. The dress had a built-in bra, was skintight across my chest, plunged enough to make a man look twice, and had narrow straps, and the skirt moved well for dancing. The skirt fabric was cut into various-sized squares that hung point down from the asymmetrical waist and fluttered around my legs. In three-inch heels, my legs looked like they went on forever. I did a little dance step and the squares flipped up higher here and there, showing more skin.

I adjusted the length of the chain until the gold nugget hung a half inch above the neckline, between my breasts. Put on earrings, the old-fashioned kind that held on with screws or little hinged bobs. I had my ears pierced when I was a teen and wore earrings like all the other girls. But the first time I shifted, after I was free and out on my own, my lobes came back healed. I tucked the panther tooth the twins had discovered into the specially made pouch in my undies—the one that usually held a collapsed stake.

I don't own or travel with much makeup. I brushed on a bit of blusher, lined my eyes in black, and added a swish of mascara. Buffed my nails, all twenty of them. Put on three shades of red lipstick before I settled on one. I'd never be beautiful. But I was . . . interesting.

I wondered if any of the vamps would know what I was by my scent. And if I should wear a vamp-killer strapped to my thigh. Just in case. Reluctantly, I decided against a weapon, though I hid a small silver cross in a minuscule bag that also held keys, ID, one credit card, a twenty-dollar bill, and the lipstick. It went on a narrow strap over my head and a shoulder.

I almost left my hair down—it was a nearly four-foot-long veil that hung below the hem of the dress—but at the last minute, as headlights lit my front door, car engine idling, I braided it halfway and clipped a clasp in. I opened the door before he knocked.

Bruiser stood there, dressed in a classic tuxedo, a simple crimson cummerbund, his hair slicked back to reveal a widow's peak and sexy little mole next to his hairline. “Wow,” I said before I could stop myself.

He chuckled, pleased, and looked me over, not hiding his perusal of my legs. “Wow yourself. You clean up nice for a vampire-hunting motorcycle mama.”

“Thanks,” I said, shutting and locking the door behind me. A chauffeur stood beside the open door of a black, slightly stretched Lincoln limo. It could hold six passengers on two bench seats, but there were only the two of us. A privacy partition was up between the driver and the back. Bruiser indicated I should slide in first, and he waited, watching my legs—Bruiser was a leg man, for sure. He slid in beside me and the door closed. The car pulled from the curb and into the night. The suspension was so good the car felt like it floated, and the leather seats were so soft they could have been glove leather, cradling me like a baby. A girl could get used to this.

“I'm guessing you aren't wearing weapons,” Bruiser said dryly, still looking me over. “I was supposed to search you, but I see no place for stakes, knives, or guns.”

I couldn't help it; I had to toy with him. It was something I had picked up from Beast—a desire to play with my prey. I slanted him a look from the corner of my eye and said, “I own vamp-killer sheaths I can strap to my inner thighs.”

“Yeah?” he said, his eyes on my legs and the little skirt. Bruiser was looking at me the way a woman liked a man to look at her. Appreciation without condescension or objectifying. It was nice. It had been a long time for me, and never by a man who looked so good in a tux, slender, lithe, and elegant. A mental image popped up, of Rick LaFleur in a tux, and nearly made me salivate. I pushed the vision away. “Are you wearing them now?” he asked.

I just smiled, figuring when we arrived I'd either have to lift my skirt or be frisked. And I wondered how I'd react to either.

Bruiser settled back and offered me champagne. I refused. With my metabolism, alcohol filtered out of my system quickly, but I was also unused to it and didn't want to show up at the party sloshed. As we rode, Bruiser pointed out hotels and businesses that catered to vamps, and private homes of the rich and fangy. I nodded a lot and said little, keeping pace with landmarks and street signs as we headed out of the French Quarter, in case I needed to get back alone.

Bruiser asked what drew me to my line of work. I mumbled something about the security business leading to other things. He asked about my dress. I answered with where I bought it—Ross Dress for Less. He chuckled so I didn't volunteer what it cost, which was twenty bucks on sale. I wanted to squirm. It was the kind of small talk I hated. Eventually I fired the same questions back to him, except the one about the dress, of course. “Where is this party?” I asked during an extended conversational lull.

“The Pellissier clan home. Its purpose is to welcome Leo's two newest blood-family members into public life. It should be interesting for you.”

“New vamps?” My curiosity went up a couple of notches, and so did my interest. “New as in, ‘This is the first time they've been unchained from the basement' ?”

Bruiser raised a brow, amused at my deliberate gaucherie, and I suddenly felt better about the conversational footing. “You would do well not to refer to them as ‘vamps,' and Leo is not the kind of sire who keeps his scions chained. But yes, this is the first time they will move among humans in a social situation. You've had a chance to study the folder Katie gave you, with photos of the clan blood-masters?”