I stopped at the living room entrance, watching the Kid. “Your guards will be here in a bit. Keep the shotgun handy until they check in and prove to be ours.”
“Yes, Mooooom,” he said, without looking up. But there was a gun on the floor at his feet.
“While we’re gone see if you can find a link between Adrianna, Titus, Louis, Bethany, Katie, and Bâtard, or any combination of the above. Something that would tie them all together for hundreds of years.” I thought about the painting in Leo’s office. Yeah. There could be something in historical records.
Alex looked up at that one, his young face pulled tight in thought. “Adrianna is British. Maybe Celtic? The Romans conquered the British Isles before the first Mithran was created. If a Roman took servants and slaves back to Rome, Adrianna could have been one. Then when Titus came back from the holy lands a vamp, he might have bought her. Ended up with her somehow. Turned her himself?” He shrugged. “Too many variables.”
“She didn’t have Celtic or tribal tattoos that I noticed. But if you’re right, then that would make her as old as the priestesses. A first- or second-generation vamp.” I remembered the first time I saw her, as she attacked me at a party. Cold power had flowed from her like icy air from a glacier; her red hair, curly and wild, fanned out around her; and her blue eyes were not quite sane. Adrianna was powerful enough to be a master of a blood family, but in New Orleans she had only risen to the position of first scion of St. Martin. If she was a sleeper agent, planted in Clan Pellissier decades, even centuries before . . .
“And you killed her.” Alex’s eyes held mine. “And Immanuel.”
Both of us were thinking about how that might affect everything relating to all that was going on. None of it felt good. I’d been trying to kill Adrianna from the first moment I saw her. Now I had succeeded. And I had to wonder if I had messed up monumentally.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” he said into the silence. “You should take some of your magical stuff. Just in case. Lock it into the weapons cache in the back of the SUV.”
“Are you worried they’ll attack here and take it?”
“I’m worried that you need more weapons than we think. Take a few of them. Keep my brother alive.”
I stepped into my room and picked up le breloque. It vibrated against my fingertips as I slipped my arm through the circle to carry it. A shock of power rammed up my arm and I nearly dropped it. “Stop that!” I said to it.
Alex laughed in the other room. “You talking to inanimate objects?”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” I muttered, too low to hear. I left the small box of magical trinkets, except for the former blood diamond, now called the Glob, a weapon designed with my blood, body, lightning, and magic. A weapon I had no idea how to use. I wasn’t worried about it falling into the wrong hands. The only hands that could use it were mine. And I had a bad feeling that an angel had plans for it.
At the thought, my cell rang. Molly’s number. Molly, who should be at the bottom of a gorge with no cell reception, camping. I answered, knowing who it was, who it had to be. “Angie?”
“Aunt Jane. My angel is watching over you.”
My eyes teared up. I found it hard to speak for a moment. “Thank you, Angie Baby,” I managed. The call ended. I had a feeling that if I called back, the call wouldn’t go through, to the bottom of a gorge. I was pretty sure that Angie’s magic had made the call happen. I looked around the room for Hayyel, who wasn’t there. “Okay. I’ll take any help you might want to give.”
I carried out the cooler and the magical stuff. The former blood diamond I tucked into my gobag when I got to the SUV. The others went into the weapons cache as the Kid suggested. Ordered. Whatever. I did as I was told.
• • •
New Orleans was old. Like hundreds of years old, one of the first port cities, back when the land was colonial and run by the . . . European monarchs. Right. There were parts of New Orleans that had burned and not been restored, where buildings had been demolished or had fallen down and hadn’t been rebuilt. Other sections hadn’t been fully restored from Katrina. Still other areas had been upgraded and spiffed up to look pretty nifty. The Greenway fell into both categories. Currently, parts of it were muddy, weedy, eroded chunks of real estate, surrounded and segmented by walkways and ill-kept streets, sections of which hadn’t been paved since the days of the Kingfish, Huey Long, and his huge modernization and reform of Louisiana. Long had possibly been a demagogue, but he had built roads and bridges and infrastructure and he had believed in and worked for the people. Not much good had happened in the state since he was assassinated at age forty-two. The greenway upgrades were an attempt to correct that.
The Lafitte Greenway had been created in 2016 on land that had, until that point, been ignored. The bicycle and pedestrian path was a twelve-foot-wide multiuse trail along the linear park, a nearly three-mile stretch connecting the French Quarter to Bayou St. John. The greenway also linked to the neighborhoods on either side via St. Louis Street and Lafitte Avenue. Counting the houses and businesses and warehouses along the length of the park-in-progress, it was a heck of a big place to hide enemies, especially in the rain and the dark.
We thought we knew where the vamps and their prisoners were hiding, but it never hurt to be careful. Eli and Derek, in separate armored SUVs, took different streets along the greenway; Derek was on Lafitte, with Rick, Brute, and Gee, checking out the neighborhoods for anything that felt or looked wrong; and Eli, Edmund, Bruiser, and I toured the St. Louis side. We drove slowly, in meandering circles, the storm runoff abated just in time for more rainfall. Three blocks from the warehouse, Eli spun the wheel, taking us along a side street to circle each of the blocks, studying every house, empty lot, business.
The wind and rain again increased, almost as if the storm had spotted us and worsened on purpose. I checked my cell and followed the progress of the spiral arms of the storm on weather radar. No, something was, for once, coincidence. The newest wave of rain and lightning was right on time. The weather map showed red blobs within the storm band where dangerous wind and hail were, and pink bands where sleet was falling. It was cold for New Orleans, temps now hovering well below freezing. Not normal.
I closed my cell and took in the industrial buildings, many marked with mixed gang signs and some really artistic graffiti. We passed little empty lots, a few two-story Creole town houses, and lots of Creole cottages. The residences were painted vibrant shades of purple and yellow and rusty red, most with small gardens anywhere soil could be found, along the sidewalks and between the houses in the narrow pass-throughs. There were also pots everywhere, most pulled up close to the houses and under front porches, many covered with plastic against the cold.
One house, painted a rich green and white that I could make out even in the dark, in the flash of headlights, sported a claw-footed bathtub on the ground in front of the front porch. On the porch itself were several huge planters and an honest-to-God urinal all planted with winter veggies and winter flowers. Everything was beneath plastic shower curtains printed with flying tropical birds. Because—New Orleans.
We circled slower as we neared the warehouse, the suspected lair of our enemies, windows down, Bruiser and Eli in front, comparing notes on tactics for getting inside, me behind the driver’s seat, my nose out the window, sniffing. I caught the smell of blood at one house, but there were people sitting in the front window, watching TV, so I figured it wasn’t a dead body. And I caught the smell of vamps, unknown vamps, powerful and deadly, the herbal scent of lemon verbena and anise and the rich scent of leather. Had to be Le Bâtard, Louis Seven, and the strangers from the dinghies. I smelled the Marchands, the little traitors, and a faint trace of Sabina. Riding above the scents was the tingle of magic, though that might be from the storm, which was gathering strength. Wind pummeled the SUV, gusts rocking the heavy vehicle.
Overhead, the clouds danced with lightning, and when I pulled on Beast-vision, I spotted arcenciels pirouetting in the flashes of power. Soul, Opal, and two others. Now there were four of them: one in blues and greens and crystal brightness, one copper tones and flashing brass, one in opal shades of fire and stone, and the last one in silvers and grays and glimpses of moonlight. They were stunning. But no one except Gee and I could see them. To the others they were simply lightning flashing cloud-to-cloud. And I worried. Why were they still here? Why were they not outside of time? Were they stuck in the clouds? Arcenciels could be trapped in crystal and ridden, their magic stolen by the person who rode them. Their time-altering abilities used. It was telling that they were here, in real time, not in their own little bubble of time, and that my time magics were malfunctioning.