Black Arts

“Oh. Suave.” I would never, ever, understand men.

We accelerated down the street and I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. I looked around but saw nothing, and the unease dissipated into exhaustion and lack of sleep. Behind the seat was a blue cooler I hadn’t noticed before. I heaved it over the seat and into my lap.

Eli glanced at it and warned, “The Kid packed it for us. It’s probably full of crappy food.”

He meant it would contain sweets and carbs and he was both right and wrong. We had snack cakes stuffed with creamy centers and slathered in icing, energy bars, nuts, dried fruit, trail mix with Chex cereal in it, three kinds of meat jerky, two energy drinks, and cola. I downed a Coke nearly as fast as Bruiser had drunk the blue Gatorade and opened a pack of the snack cakes. “Caffeine and sugar,” I explained to Eli, who hadn’t asked. He shook his head but held out his hand. Without asking what he wanted, I popped the top of an energy drink before handing it to him. Then I opened a stick of jerky, which smelled like vinegar and preservatives. “Whatever floats your boat,” I said.

Again, I felt that prickle of . . . something on the back of my neck. I pulled the visor down and studied the traffic behind us, but saw nothing odd.

“Only thing that’s been sticking to us is that old red Ford van,” Eli said, reading my worry. “We passed it ten minutes ago. It’s got a yellow Baby on Board sticker on the back window and is driven by a woman in her fifties. Brown hair, wrinkles, about a hundred fifty pounds overweight.”

“Not vamp food, then,” I said. Vamps had a predilection for skinny, and their dinners tended to be fit, young, and pretty for a long time, one of the side effects of sipping on vamp blood in return for dinner and service and sometimes sex. Still, I kept an eye on the van until it turned off into a strip mall.

The second address on our list was on the west side of the river on Lake Cataouatche, in an area that was green with impenetrable foliage as far as the eye could see, houses popping up between swampy land, sitting on acreage too large to be called lots. The houses we passed all had canal access out back and thick, wild vegetation all around, the air already thick with mosquitoes this early in the season.

Eli made a left and slowly puttered down a recently graded dirt road, rocks and shells flipping onto the undercarriage. I checked my cell as the vehicle crawled. The house at the address fit the swank image of one of Leo’s scions, with a three-car garage and a pool to go with the pricey palms, dense landscaping, and red tile that roofed a brick house of maybe five thousand square feet. From the dirt road, we could see a powerboat docked on the water beyond the house and a furnished, screened room in the backyard, bigger than the house on Ulloa Street in town. But the kids’ toys in the yard were a clear contraindication to newly risen vamps. We didn’t even speak as Eli made a three-point turn and headed back the way we had come. Waste of time.

We were almost back to the paved road when I spotted something. “Stop! Back up.” I strained to see what had caught my eye. Whatever it was, it was across the narrow canal. Eli backed up and braked in an opening of the vegetation, black water visible past the thick greenery.

On the other side of the canal was a barren lot with a house situated in the middle. The house was new, with green tile roofing, brick facade, paved drive, separate garage, and blackened earth instead of greenery in a wide arc around the house. Not plowed. More like burned. Debris floated on the faint breeze. It looked as if the landscaping company had scorched the earth prior to new plantings that were scheduled to arrive any minute. It looked dead. It smelled wrong. Even with the wind against me, I should have been able to detect the scent of burned plants and scorched earth through the open window. “What?” Eli asked.

“Is that place on our list?”

He checked his cell while I kept my nose in the open, taking in the few scents that came from that side of the canal. “Not ours, but I just got a list from Adelaide. It’s on that one.”

Something about the barren home site pulled at me. “I want to see that place. Up close.”

“Not a problem,” he said, raising the window and easing on down the dirt road. “I’m pretty sure there’s a bridge somewhere.” He might have been being sarcastic. Getting from one side to the other in the bayou country often meant long detours. Too bad we didn’t have a boat hitched up in back.

• • •

It was dusk when we pulled up in front of the house, the engine rumbling. I lowered my window to see better. A gray tree stood, leafless, the bare wood showing where the bark had peeled away and fallen to the ground. Littered around it were twigs and leaves, shriveled and dark. The shrubbery around the house was dead too, looking burned. Dead grass stood, spiky and broken, black earth in patches, showing beneath. Up close, it still looked burned, and the yard seemed to move as the night breeze lifted the debris. It was ash. Ash. Yet I didn’t smell anything burned. The house showed no signs of being touched by flame.

The moon was rising over the black water, easily seen beyond the house. A low white mist was rising off the water, buffeted gently by slow-moving winds like huge hands were fluffing it.

Dead vamps and granules of ash, I thought. And then I remembered the bouquet in Molly’s hotel room. Dying, the first day I went there, shriveled to ash on my next visit. Molly, not doing magic anymore, according to her husband. And then an older memory. Molly and her sisters fighting Evangelina. Molly, an earth witch, drawing the life force out of the garden, killing every plant, every garden snake, every mouse and squirrel, to save her younger sisters from the elder one.

“Oh. Holy crap on cheese crackers. I am an idiot.” I should have known right then, the moment that Molly used her power for death instead of life, that there would be problems. “A total complete idiot.”

Eli might have laughed through his nose at my swearword, but maybe I was too sensitive. He pulled past the drive and shut off the SUV just down from the house. “No car in the drive. No lights in the house,” he said. He reached over the seat and pulled a low-light monocular forward. This was a new toy, which allowed him to see in the dark with one eye and keep his other eye safe should anyone turn on a light and blind him. “Looks empty. I’ll take the right.”

He slung a hunting rifle over his shoulder as he got out and readied the weapon. “Cells off,” he reminded me. We had agreed to drive unweaponed. Even in Louisiana, citizens might report armed and dangerous-looking drivers. So all the gear was stowed in the floorboards behind us.

Much slower, I turned off my cell and opened the door, the lights off in the vehicle. The night smelled of plants in the distance, water all around, some stagnant and some moving. I smelled a skunk somewhere far off, and something dead closer, something that had been left in the sun to rot. The dying smell of exhaust from the SUV.

The night breeze touched me with tenuous fingers. Hairs that had worked their way from my braid brushed my face. In the distance, a night bird called, but closer to us, nothing moved. I sniffed, smelling old, faint magic. Nothing fresh. No hint of Molly herself on the air.

The magic I smelled was different from anything I had ever scented. It was metallic and brittle, like heated steel and old bones. It smelled like a man’s magic, though why I thought that I had no idea. Evan’s magic was sexless, no more masculine or feminine than Molly’s or her sisters’.

From the backseat, I pulled my M4 shotgun and checked the load. Seven rounds ready to fire, six more in the ammo holder clipped to the weapon. A nine-mil went in my spine holster. I slid a fourteen-inch-bladed vamp-killer onto my calf-strapped sheath.

Eli had moved to the garage and stood to the side, dipping his head back and forth fast, looking in the windows with each forward move. He turned to me and held up one finger. A car was in the garage. From there, my partner crouched and moved right, into the shadows. I moved left across the front of the house. I was exposed, should anyone be looking out, say a vamp or two, with their near-perfect night vision. But nothing moved.

I circled the house, meeting Eli in the back as we both continued on our circuits. He pointed to the side door as the entrance he would use. I nodded and pointed back to the front of the house, miming ringing the bell. He flashed white teeth at me and moved on. He thought I was an idiot for announcing myself instead of busting in, but really . . . We had parked within sight of the house. There were alarm company stickers on the doors and windows. No way would we be able to enter undetected. Why get arrested for B&E when someone might just open the door and invite us in?

I climbed the short steps to the door, set the weapon on safety, and slung the M4 back around. I readied the nine-mil and held it in my left hand, down by my leg. I rang the bell. It chimed inside, three soft, soothing notes. I heard nothing else, but my Spidey senses went on alert. I took a slow breath and stepped back from the door just as it opened. The girl who stood there was willowy and pale, about five-seven, wearing khakis and a long-sleeved T-shirt. She smelled familiar. She was one of the vamps who had been in Molly’s hotel room.

We stared at each other, the night bird starting to call again from far away.

The girl smelled of vamp—leaves and wilted flowers and, oddly, desert air. She had red hair, long and straight, but it was lank and dull, unlike the lustrous hair of most vamps. Her brown eyes were yellowed and sunken, her skin sallow. She looked far more mature than the sixteen she had been when she disappeared. She looked old. But she had Molly’s mouth. Molly’s nose. And a wreath of magic about her head and on her hands, held in place with fingers that worked and braided the magic as I watched. She was a witch, like her mother and her aunts, and her magic smelled of roses with long thorns and the heat of the sun on stone. “Shiloh,” I said, the word a breath of sound. Shiloh took me in from the top of my head to my boots, lingering on the necklace at my throat before dropping to my hands. “Are you going to shoot me?” she asked, her voice a croak, her eyes on the gun at my side. “Because you might as well not bother. I’ll be dead before dawn anyway.”