Blood Trade (Jane Yellowrock #6)

I grinned and went through the house to the bloody bedroom in back. I might be becoming too dependent on him, but it was great to have a partner who could read my mind. The room was splattered with vamp blood, the once-white carpet saturated, as were the walls, the bedspread, and the kitsch for sale.

My vamp captive was unmoving. He should be true-dead. He didn’t have much left where his chest used to be, and silver to a vamp’s heart should have killed him. Even if his maker had been a thousand-year-old master and poured his powerful blood into the vamp’s mouth the instant he fell, the silver should have killed him. That much silver and that much blood and tissue loss should have killed any vamp of any age, and the only way he should have survived was if he was buried with the commingled blood of all the nearby clans. Or just buried, and maybe—not likely, but maybe—he might rise three days later as a revenant. I’d never had to kill a revenant, but it was reputed to be messy, bloody work. Revenants and young, uncured vamps were where the myth of zombies came from. I remembered the way the vamps had moved in the dark, under the trees. Though the vamp should be dead, as I stood over him I could actually see the tissue of his chest grow out, healing. Even revenants didn’t heal like that. I was getting a bad feeling about all this.

I dumped Eli’s bag of supplies onto the bed and discovered silver handcuffs with silver spikes on the inside and outside. Ankle cuffs made the same way. A neck cuff was included, and maybe it was being surrounded by the remembrances of slavery in this lovely little town, but the collar reminded me of the collars slaves used to wear. This one was silver and spiked, and a metal handle came out of the side to better control the captive.

Shoving away my disgust, I clapped the restraints on the vamp, wrapping Eli’s silver chain through the ankles and wrists, and then pulled tight so the vamp was curled up and fastened in the fetal position. Last, in spite of my revulsion, I applied the handled neck collar, because if he came to on the ride home, that could be deadly. I removed my vamp-killer from his shoulder, cleaned all three blades on the bedspread, and sheathed them.

In the bathroom, I ripped down the shower curtain—pink, of course—and lay it in the doorway. Then I used the collar handle to roll the vamp in the plastic. With the mess and gore contained, I dragged him across the room, through the house and outside, where Eli and I manhandled him (vamp-handled him? I wondered grimly) into the back of the SUV, and got in the front seat. Eli swung the SUV into a five-point turn and gunned the vehicle back up the bluff as we started home.

“Hey. What about our ATV?” Buddy asked.

“I’ll see you get home. You can get your ATV when you can both walk under your own power.” Eli added, “Make sure your brother drinks a lot of fluids, and none of it beer or shine or wine or malt liquor or regular liquor. Get him some Gatorade. Feed him liver for the next three months or so.”

One of the men gagged but no one replied, and the ride to the boys’ single-wide trailer was made in silence except for monosyllabic directions. We were met by four pit bulls chained to trees in the bare-dirt front yard. A rusted red pickup truck was up on blocks near the front door, a disused chicken coop was to the left of the trailer, and a patch of what looked suspiciously like marijuana and turnip greens growing together was to the right. Everything was lit like the noonday sun by two security lights, bright enough to see that the front door was open and the trailer was missing several windows, the holes blocked by grocery bags and duct tape. Eli helped the men inside, and Esmee and I waited in the safety of the SUV.

When Eli got back in, he said, “Those two boys are one match away from a bonfire or an explosion. They’re living on borrowed time.”

“How so?” Esmee asked.

But Eli just shook his head and spun the wheel into the night. I caught a whiff of something like ether and I swiveled my head back to the trailer. Ether was often used to make methamphetamines. Great. Esmee was friends with idiots who aspired to be drug lords.

“Where do you want to keep our fanghead guest?” Eli asked.

“Big H should be sending a silver vamp cage to Esmee’s.” Even as I said the words, a car pulled up beside us and a vamp rolled down the passenger’s window, flashing us some fang and waving before easing in behind us to follow us back to the B and B. Eli laughed, a breathy sound, part amazement, part disbelief, and shook his head.

We were met back at the house by a stranger standing on the front porch. “Oh, dear,” Esmee breathed when she caught sight of him in the headlights.

“Your son?” I asked.

“Yes. That tattletale Jameson must have called him.” Her tone didn’t portend good things for the chef-cum-bodyguard.

She opened the door and slid to the ground the instant the SUV rocked to a halt. I figured she would slink up to him and take a tongue lashing. Instead she squared her shoulders and stormed up to the man. “Gordon. You will mind your manners. If you open your mouth for so much as one word of condemnation or one of your legal-based tongue lashings, I will rewrite my will and leave everything to Jane Yellowrock.” She stormed past him and inside, slamming the door.

“Oh, crap,” I said. Eli burst out laughing. I followed Esmee to the front door and the steely-eyed man there. Before he could open his mouth and take out his ire on me, I said, “I don’t want her money. I don’t want your money. I am not responsible for her chasing out after the vamps. She went with—”

“Her vulgar druggie friends.”

“Yes. And they won’t be taking her anywhere anytime soon.”

Gordon, a fair-haired, blue-eyed man wearing a dress shirt and dress pants under a tailored wool jacket, lifted his chin. “And why might that be?”

“Because by his symptoms,” Eli said, coming up behind me, “one lost about half his blood supply, and he won’t feel up to hunting anytime soon. Their transportation is still parked Under the Hill. And we have the boys’ weapons.” Instead of going to the hatch, which would have exposed the bloody pink shower curtain to the world, he opened the back passenger’s door and reached behind the seat to lift three shotguns, broken open so they wouldn’t fire, and four handguns, all of their magazines missing. “From the quality, I assume that these are your mother’s?” He handed over a shotgun, a rifle, and two handguns to Esmee’s son.

“Good lord. She’s gone bonkers.”

“No,” I said. “She’s just bored. When’s the last time you took her shooting or fishing or shopping?” I made it more of an accusation than a question, and followed it up with a left hook. “Big, fancy lawyer hands off his mother to the help and then wonders why she acts out? Spend some time with her other than holidays, and maybe she’ll stop.” I grabbed the vamp med kit that had somehow survived the hellish night and set it inside the house door.

“I’m not a practicing lawyer,” Gordon said. “I’m a judge.”

“That’s what you heard out of what I just said?”

Behind me, I could hear Eli’s soft laughter. “Still,” he said. “The lady has a point.”

“Humph,” I said, and thought, Lady? Me? I went back outside and met the vamps just getting out of the car that had followed us. I waved them back into their older-model Caddy, saying, “In back, in the garage. Eli, will you bring the car around?” Gordon stood on the front porch, looking nonplussed. I had the feeling he wasn’t used to being ignored in his mother’s home. I also had the feeling that he would have a lot to say about a vamp being kept caged in the garage, so I wasn’t going to tell him.

In minutes we were in the garage, the delivery vamps standing back, watching, as we worked to assemble the silver cage, which was bigger than the ones I’d seen in Leo’s city, bigger and woven with silver-tipped barbed wire. Ingenious and horrific, and the pointy bits had traces of dried blood on them that I could smell. I removed the silver chains in which I’d bound the injured vamp, and Eli tossed him inside. I locked the cage shut.

“He true-dead, he is,” one vamp said, sounding very Cajun. He was wearing a searing-bright lime green shirt, bright enough to reflect the moon. Big H’s vamps were nothing like Leo’s, style-wise. “Why you cage him?”

“No one wit’stand dat much silver,” the other one said, tucking his long blond hair back behind both ears. “Him come back rev’nat, two, tree day from now, you don’ take his head.”

“That’s the usual way,” I agreed. “But this fanghe— vamp is coming back alive. Or undead. Whatever. He’s healing.” I pointed to the fresh flesh on his ribs. “Half an hour ago, he didn’t have ribs. Now he has skin over a rib cage and organs inside it.”

The vamps leaned in and studied the prisoner. “Him smell wrong, he do,” Blondie said.

“Stink, he do,” Limey said. “Like smell of poison and rot in ground and blood magic. Like dem new vamps brought by dat de Allyon, what come and try to take over Hieronymus’ territory.”

“Different kind vamps, dey was,” Blondie said.

“Yeah,” I said. “About those different kinds of vamp. Did de Allyon actually come to Natchez himself, or did he send an intermediary?”

“Hem come,” Limey said, sounding disgusted.

Blondie snorted. “Hieronymus be sick wit dat vamp plague, or de Allyon not take over.”

“Hem and he humans go first to Hieronymus, invade his sleeping lair, place what should be secret but he know it,” Limey said, making sure I understood that it had been an inside job. “De Allyon come out in charge, big man, act like king wit he queens on he arms.”

“Den dey tell us Fame Vexatum is ended and humans is prey again, to take and drain and kill. Our priest say no, and de Allyon kill him.”

My ears perked up. Priest? But before I could ask, they went on, and because they were so chatty, I didn’t want to derail them with my curiosity.

“We call Leo Pellissier in New Orleans for help, we did,” Limey said. “And we wait.”