The coach’s mouth opened and closed, and he stared at the kid, who was clearly thinking that beheading a vamp was cool too. “Okay. I guess.”
I looked at Eli, the elder Younger. “Got a body bag?”
“We used the last one. New batch hasn’t arrived.”
“Got a shower curtain?”
“Three,” he said, pulling flat packages from a backpack-style gear bag that hung across his shoulders.
“Mr. Prepared.”
Eli sliced through the packaging and unfolded the shower curtains on the floor. They must have been running low at Walmart, because the shower curtains weren’t clear or white but brightly colored with tropical fish on them. “Cute. Nemo,” I said. Eli didn’t respond. I started to make another crack and Eli said, “Don’t.” So I didn’t. But I did snicker slightly.
Together we rolled the body onto the first Nemo curtain, the stink of long-dead vamp not quite as horrible as I expected, as if the decomposition had been halted during the two hundred years in the ground and the stench had slowed with it. The body’s shoulders and elbows thumped on the plastic, and that was when I focused on his clothes. Davide Berkins had been buried in his butler’s suit: dove-gray pants and jacket, white shirt, and black tie. He was still wearing the tattered remains. But . . . They were Clan Pellissier colors.
With my toes I pushed aside the torn shirt, exposing a poorly executed anchor tattooed on the vamp’s chest, marred by bullet holes. I met my partner’s dark eyes and he gave me a fraction of a nod. Everything about this situation was hinky. We both knew it.
His dark skin catching the light of the overheads, Eli secured the vamp’s limbs with duct tape and then we wrapped the body in the second shower curtain. And then a third. And duct-taped it all once again. The plastic shroud still leaked, but it was better than nothing. And the tape hid some of the embarrassing fish.
Grasping the head by the hair, I extended it over the white plastic garbage bag Eli held open. With the fingers of my other hand, I flipped Davide’s fangs down from the roof of his mouth to inspect them. Over two inches long, strong and thick, but curved more than a regular vamp’s. Even more odd, the vamp had overlarge canines on the bottom teeth too. The teeth were more like an attack dog’s than a vampire’s. The vamp-tooth pattern on the throats of the sailors who had died had been curving, with bottom teeth punctures, confirming this was the killer. The bite pattern and the uniform explained how the MOC had known the name of the rogue we hunted. Davide had been a scion of Leo’s uncle when Amaury Pellissier was the blood master in charge of New Orleans.
I let the teeth go, but the hinge in Davide’s mouth didn’t fold back up and the fangs stayed down. I tilted the head to get a better look and his hair ripped through his scalp, sending the head swinging, throwing bloody spatter. I dropped the head and it landed in the bag with a plasticized squish. Eli tied the orange bag-ties in a knot. I tossed my hip-length hair out of the way, hefted the shower-curtained body over my shoulder, and stood. As a skinwalker-no-longer-in-hiding, I could let my true strength show, and I’m a good bit stronger than a human.
Body hanging behind me, bloody fluid splatting softly on the wood floor and the back of my boots, I looked around the gym and realized I was being filmed by a couple dozen cells. Just ducky. The sounds of multiple sirens echoed through the night, drawing nearer. I wanted to be long gone by the time the cops arrived. “Ummm . . . Thank you for your forbearance,” I said to the room, and skedaddled, Eli right behind me.
Out in the damp night air, Eli beeped open the back of the armored SUV and said, “Forbearance? Babe.”
“I know. I had a brain fart.”
He was almost smiling, which, for the former Army Ranger, was tantamount to a belly laugh. “Forbearance,” he muttered.
Together we tossed the body into the back, put the head beside it, and hopped in the cab. We drove away only moments before the first cop car turned in to the school parking lot. If we got stopped now, with a dead body in back, this could get messy. I was licensed to kill rogue vamps, but not all local law officials knew that or respected that. If they stopped us, the paperwork would be a pain in the butt. But we made it out and started east on 23 back toward home. Without my needing to ask, Eli turned on the heat and the seat warmers, which were a little bit of heaven as far as I was concerned.
On the other side of the windows, the damp air of very early evening turned quickly into a mist, and then into a heavy fog, obscuring the roadway. The streetlights were halos of light in the night haze. Eli slowed, the wipers not much help in the dense vapor that so often passed as air in New Orleans. But it was almost pleasant, driving in the ground cloud, isolated from everything around us. Eli and I had never needed to fill the space between us with chatter or radio hosts or music. We were comfortable in the silence. Well, as comfortable as we could be with a dead vamp in back. And with my stomach growling. I needed calories to make up for the shift from Beast to human, and Eli had promised me steak. Rare. With double-stuffed baked potatoes full of sour cream and bacon. I was starving but didn’t want to compromise and get fast food. Not when I had a feast waiting back home.
We were halfway back to vamp HQ when the SUV’s system dinged and the Kid said over the speaker, “Turn around and head back to Belle Chasse. Sending you the coordinates now. We got more DBs, one fangy, and these are weird.”
DBs meant dead bodies. “Weirder than a vamp who’s been buried for two hundred years rising revenant and killing people?” I asked.
“Pretty much. We got a human tangled in the arms and hair of a vamp, pulled from the river.”
“Any of our people missing?” I asked.
“No one,” he said.
I had been hunting the location on my cell and said, “That’s less than half a mile from the high school. And not far, as the crow flies, from where the sailors’ bodies were found.”
“There’s Navy housing in Belle Chasse,” Alex said, his tone saying he was thinking that might be significant.
“Naval reserves use it now,” Eli said, making a legal U-turn. “That’s two attacks on or near U.S. Navy property. A rev with a seafaring tattoo. Maybe someone or something is targeting the Navy.” Ditto on the serious tone. Eli kept in touch with military types in New Orleans and surrounding areas and he wasn’t averse to talking to grunts, jarheads, missile sponges, squids, coasties, zoomies, and any other insulting name he could think of when conversing with them. The Army Ranger considered himself the best of the best, even better than a SEAL, though there had been intense (physical) discussions (fights) of that subject among members of the military and former military in the past. Insults and physical altercations seemed to be a bonding experience with former and active military alike.
I remembered the anchor tattoo. Had Berkins been a seaman? We needed to see if he had other tattoos. “We’ll check the fangy DBs out,” Eli said to Alex. “Tell Leo to send a car for the remains of the old pervert Berkins. We can meet somewhere near the juncture of Business Ninety and Highway Twenty-Three.”
“There’s a Popeye’s at Lafayette and Westbank Expressway,” Alex said. “You can feed Jane and dump the body at the same time.”
“There’s something distinctly disgusting about that statement, especially when I was promised steak, but Popeye’s’ll do,” I said as I crawled into the backseat and zipped open my larger gear bag. I pulled out better clothes than I had carried strapped around my neck in my Beast gobag.
Brevity itself, Eli ended the call with, “Later.” He glanced once at me in the rearview and I gave him a slight dip of my head. Leo’s uncle’s butler had risen revenant and attacked and killed sailors. Now two more strange DBs, one fangy, pulled from the Mississippi River. Another revenant? We couldn’t talk about it, not with the cells and the SUV’s com system rigged to share every syllable with Leo. But soon. After dawn for sure.
Eli tilted the rearview mirror up to give me privacy and I started stripping. The lightweight clothing I had dressed in when I shifted from Beast to human during the final moments of chasing Berkins wouldn’t do for long. I was cold. My arms and legs and the back of my neck were pebbled and tight with the chill. My gold nugget necklace swung on its chain as I contorted my body in the confined space.