Cold Reign

Eli was just behind Edmund into the room. I moved slower. Holstered my weapons. According to the poster-board-sized note propped on one of two white enamel embalming tables, the Caruso family was long gone. It said, The Caruso family has returned to Europe. Please inform the Master of the City that we are no longer his to rule. Laurie Caruso.

“They knew we were on the way,” Bruiser said.

“There’s dust on the floor and evenly on the poster,” Eli said, bending over the paper. “They’ve been gone a while.”

I looked up at the dim lights. Some kind of battery backups. And a great idea. We needed that in our house. “Ten bucks says they left when the ghost ship entered U.S. territory, whenever that was,” I said.

“Ghost ship?” Edmund asked coldly but politely, his tone telling me that I wasn’t keeping him in the loop.

“You were asleep,” I said, resting my forearms on my weapons. I walked through the room, my wet clothing depositing drops here and there. I explained about the spelled ship in Lake Borgne as Eli checked for booby traps in cabinet doors and the body refrigerators along one wall. I found a bright yellow door marked with a red diamond-shaped fire hazard sticker. Eli cleared it and I went in.

The room was really a closet, metal walls, metal shelves, a sprinkler overhead, battery backup lighting. On the shelves inside the metal room were metal cans of chemicals: formaldehyde HCHO of various indexes—whatever that meant—formalin, something called pro-line primer, pre-injection and drainage fluid, things I felt were pretty normal for human embalming and should be pretty much the same for vamps. There were boxes of lye and an arsenic container. Arsenic hadn’t been used in human burial since the early twentieth century. I spotted a small refrigerator-freezer at the back, the kind advertised for dorms and small break rooms. There had been a larger refrigerator in the main room. I had to wonder why there was a tiny one in the fire closet. I squatted and studied the fridge.

“Babe?”

“Take a look at this. Think it’s booby-trapped?”

I moved back and Eli lay on the slightly dusty floor, his little mini flash checking out the rubber seals and the back. “Good place for a bomb,” Eli said as he worked. “Flammable chemicals everywhere. Contained space is good for creating a high aerosol concentration of said chemicals.” He rolled to his feet, back to the calm and fit Ranger I remembered. “I can’t see anything, but that’s not to say there isn’t a device on the inside, triggered upon opening. I suggest we leave it alone. If Leo wants it open he can get NOPD’s bomb squad in here.”

“Works for me,” I said, backing away and closing the door behind us.

In the main room, Edmund was studying the contents of a cabinet. It was full of supplies in small boxes. Musingly, he said, “The heads of the revenants were reattached with a pale pink silk. The traditional line for Mithran head reattachment is braided silk, a white or pale gray line.” He took a pink box from the shelf and removed a spool of silk. “This is what the Carusos must have used on the revenants. It’s pink and it feels”—he made a face as if something tasted bad—“odd to the touch.”

I took the spool of pink thread from Edmund’s hand and studied it. Outside, lightning bracketed the windows with brilliant light. The thread sparked. Hot, potent magic pulsed into my fingertips and I dropped the spool. “Holy crap on a cracker.” I shook my fingers and stuck them in my mouth. “I’m burned,” I said around the fingers. “Blistered.”

“Whatever is calling the revenants awake is tied to the thread they were preserved with,” Edmund said. “Interesting.”

Eli had checked out the big fridge-freezer and tied a long cord around the handles. He said, “Everyone out so we can open this.” We all moved out of the room for the opening, and with us all standing behind the now-broken door frame, Eli yanked on the cords. Without explosion or fanfare, the doors opened and bright appliance light spilled into the room along with refrigerated air. Overhead, the lights came back on, and I squinted at the glare. “Clear,” Eli said, coiling the cord and sticking it back in his pocket.

There were more fluids inside, and I pulled the cold bottles out, silently reading labels, putting them back. Only one bottle was unlabeled, a brown glass bottle in the door. It was sealed with a cork, which I eased out, like I’d seen Leo do a champagne cork. Decorking seemed to be a guy job, among humans, vamps, and Onorios, like taking out the trash, or hammering nails in boards. Not that I couldn’t do trash and nails. I totally could. But they felt it was a man’s job. Cleaning their own toilets, that they were less receptive to. I eased the cork back and forth until it slipped free. The stink of vamp blood filled the room.

Edmund whirled to me. His shoulders hunched, fangs slowly schnicked down on their little hinges. “Edmund?” I asked. His eyes bled scarlet and his pupils dilated. He was vamping out. This was not good. I had a feeling it was bad form to kill your primo on the first full day of business. I pushed the cork back into the bottle. Took a vamp-killer by the grip. “I will end you,” I said.

“And I’ll fill you full of silver, bro,” Eli said. He had two handguns aimed at Edmund’s back. I stepped to my right and out of his angle of shot. “You already got silvered up this week. Twice could finish you.”

Bruiser said, softly, “Jane, call him.”

“Do what?”

“You shared blood. Call him. Someone else is trying to influence him, someone he once trusted and with whom he shared blood. Only a stronger master can ease him from this path.”

“Not sure how to do that.”

“He’s fighting the call. Give him something else to think about.”

“Beast wants to hunt cows from inside your fancy car,” I said instantly. “With the top down and Eli driving around a muddy field. You don’t calm down, I’m taking her hunting.” I leaned closer and grinned, showing teeth. “She’ll claw up your leather upholstery. Maybe scent-mark your carpet.”

Inside me Beast perked up. Hunt cow? In Edmund car with no head? Which I figured was her way saying with the top down.

“Yes,” I replied to her aloud. “With the top down and a mountain lion in the passenger seat. She’ll pull a dead cow into the car and feast on it. Entrails everywhere. It’ll be a bloodbath.”

Edmund swallowed. His lids closed and stayed that way for three seconds. Opened. “You wouldn’t.”

“Oh, yes I would. She wants your car. Bad. And she wants to drag a full-grown cow into the seat and sit there, looking out over a pasture while she eats it.”

Beast will hunt cow! In Edmund car!

Ed’s eyes started bleeding back to human-ish. His fangs folded back on their little hinges with a snap. “My car is a Thunderbird Maserati 150 GT. It is a 1957 prototype for which I paid over three million dollars. One does not hunt in a Maserati GT. One does not—”

“If I have to kill you, the car is mine,” I interrupted.

“I—” He stopped. Focused on me. “What happened?”

“I opened this.” I held out the brown bottle. “And you decided to hunt me. Then there’s the storm. I’m guessing some combo of the two?”

Edmund accepted the sealed bottle and brought it close to his nose. He took a tiny sniff. With a pop of displaced air he was gone. I caught the bottle before it hit the floor. “We’ll take this to Leo,” I said to Bruiser.

“Indeed.”

I frowned. Indeed was a Leo word. Formal and . . . Leo-ishy. This place and this bottle were having an effect on my people.

I tucked the bottle under my arm and said, “Let’s go to HQ.”

Fortunately, Edmund was sitting in the limo when we got there, staring out the far window at the storm. I gave the bottle to Shemmy and had him raise the privacy panel. “To keep the smell away from our fanghead.”

I got the feeling that Shemmy was disappointed, that he liked being part of the action, but he complied, opening the communication channel instead.

“Don’t pout, Eddie,” I said, crawling in to sit beside the vamp.

His head turned to me in one of those inhuman gestures they can do. “I am not pouting,” he said distinctly. “Pouting is for children. And my name. Is. Not. Eddie.”