Broken Soul

Derek took my hand from his arm, but instead of dropping it, he curled his fingers around my wrist and pulled my hand into a soldier’s handclasp. I gripped his wrist back. “They were soldiers for the United States. We’ll honor them with a soldier’s burial.”

We stood nearly eye to eye in the hallway, arms clasped. “Okay. Good. You want me there, I’ll be there. If not, I’ll understand. I’ll contribute to the families’ funds. And I’ll get Amy Lynn to feed your man. With a little luck and her super-duper special vamp blood, he might be back in as little as two years, rather than the standard ten.”

He released my arm and I let him. He said, “Savin’ my mama is worth part of my soul. And bein’ Leo’s Enforcer sounded—”

He stopped, and I could guess what it had sounded like. Easy job, lotsa money. But it had been a devil’s bargain. It always was, with fangheads.

Derek went on. “I don’t understand how fangheads think. Why not call in the law for the dead humans?”

“Leo had a hard time getting the human LEOs to leave, the last time one of his people died in this building. Leo has control issues and danger on his turf.” Derek didn’t reply so I said, “Honestly, I don’t really care what Leo does about the law.” Oddly, it was true. Once upon a time I called in the law every time a human incident took place. But it never did any good. Leo was his own law. Always had been. Probably always would be. And I was the Enforcer who carried out his law. I had quit, but not really. I was still doing the job and wouldn’t stop even when Peregrinus was dead. I still had a contract with Leo as his Enforcer for a cool half mil. And with the EuroVamps coming, this job might be the only way to keep my friends alive.

My forehead wrinkled as a thought occurred to me. “The last time someone died here, it was one of the new guys. Wayne something? He had what I thought was a hawk tattooed on his scalp. But maybe it was a peregrine?”

“I’ll check back. Make sure.” He pulled his cell and started thumbing around for photos of the crime scene.

“I know vamps work ahead, plan things for decades,” I said thoughtfully, uncomfortable with the direction of my thoughts.

“Centuries.”

“Yeah. For real. But it would be hard to put that incident together with the EuroVamps and Satan’s Three, and Reach.”

“No, it wouldn’t. Not for a fanghead.” He stopped thumbing on the screen. “Not a falcon. No. It was a hawk. And it was done in reds and browns, not the blue tattoos on the wrists of the fanghead and his human.” He turned the cell to me and I studied the photo of the top of Hawk Head’s scalp. The hawk tattoo looked nothing like the peregrine falcons sported by Peregrinus’ followers, and his wrists were bare. “Hawk,” Derek insisted.

“Okay. But . . . let’s keep that in back of our minds, okay? I don’t like coincidences.”

“Jane?” Derek didn’t often call me by my given name. It was Legs or Injun Princess. Not Jane. I looked my question at him. “You’re a Christian. How could you do that? When you were five? How could you do it now?”

“I don’t know.” I laughed shortly. “I probably need therapy.”

“Yeah. We all probably do.”

•   •   •

The team was assembled in the security conference room, including a few new faces.

I remembered Wrassler telling me he was trying to get help. Carefully, I said to Derek, “Your people?”

“Grégoire’s people from Atlanta,” he said. “They’ve been in training in the swamps for the last six weeks,” he reminded me. “Basic training. Leo fed on all of them. They’re loyal and integrated into the communications channels. Training isn’t up to my standards yet, but they’ll do in a pinch.”

I looked them over and shook my head. They were covered in mosquito bites, were sunburned, skinny, rangy, scruffy, and hard-eyed. They looked like they’d been rode hard and put up wet, as a horse-loving roommate in the children’s home used to say, and they had the body odors that claimed they had been in-country without access to bathhouses for a looong time. But they also looked ready to go to war, with that hair-trigger awareness the battlefield soldier always wore. I nodded at them by way of welcome.

“They’ve been read in on the deets,” Derek added. “We can talk freely.”

Which hadn’t even occurred to me. My mind had been too busy on other stuff to sweat things like humans without enough info to understand what was going on. “Too much went wrong tonight, guys,” I said. “Angel, I need to see everything you have on camera. And you’ll note that the stuff on the secondary control panel you installed has been integrated into this one, and a bill for the design has been submitted to Raisin. To Ernestine,” I amended. One of the texts had been from the Kid telling me he had found and assimilated the secondary set.

Angel Tit’s eyebrows bunched and he glanced at Derek. “Told you she’d figure it out. Told Leo and Del she’d figure it out. Told all’a y’all she’d figure it out.” Derek grunted and Angel punched some spots on his integrated control screen. Security footage appeared on the overhead video screen. I watched the new men studying the videos as if their lives depended on it. And maybe they did.

The action lasted half an hour, with time not matching up anywhere as we followed from camera to camera, watching as men and women died, as Wrassler was mangled, as trained solders tried to ignore the changing of time and fought back. As the digital feed sputtered and went all blocky at times just as it had before from the presence of the arcenciel. But this time, the arcenciel was on-screen for only some of the occurrences of the pixelating blocks. “What’s causing the interference?” I asked.

Angel swiveled in his chair and grinned at me. “This time it wasn’t caused only by the light-dragon. This time the interference followed the vamp Peregrinus. I did manage to get some clear shots of him. These might explain it.”

I stared at the still shots plucked from the video. The fanghead was moving at vamp speed, and on regular digital camera footage, he would have been a pixel-blur, but on the new cameras, he was fairly clear—dark hair, dark pants, white shirt, leather belt, and boots. Necklace. But the jewelry looked different from the painting in the records room, and also different from the spare, stripped-raw moments when I had seen the vamp in person. Now the necklace looked larger, darker. Different.