He frowned and hitched his pants up under his gut by his wide leather belt. “Epona. It’s a Celtic goddess. It means ‘great mare.’”
I smiled at him. “She’s perfect.”
Herbert shrugged, just a hint, but there was pleasure in his eyes. “Yeah. She is dat.”
I heard a hint of Cajun in the words and I nodded to him. “Climb on, Eli.”
My partner’s weight settled behind me, his hands at my waist. We roared toward the crime scene tape, our identities hidden behind helmets and faceplates that smelled like Herbert and a woman. Maybe his wife.
* * *
I let Eli off at the SUV so he could swing by the house and pick up my best gear—my only set of vamp-hunting leathers now. Jodi wanted me geared up, and that’s the way she’d get me—geared up to the max. Riding solo, I sped through the predawn traffic to vamp HQ.
Due to security protocols—ones I had devised—I had to unhelmet at the front gate and a guard with a slavering dog met me in the circular drive. It was Tex, a vamp with a knack for dogs and a love for .45 Old West–style handguns. “Miz Jane,” he greeted me, the Texan twang throwing me off, as it always did. The dog wanted to do a sniff-and-growl greeting of his own, but Tex pulled him back. “Miz Adelaide said for you to come straight to Mr. Pellissier’s office. You got any weapons on you, you got to declare ’em at the front.” He smiled at me, a perfectly normal human smile, no fangs, and joked, “Our Enforcer’s protocols, don’tcha know.”
“She sounds like a real pain in the butt,” I said, feeling my face relax for the first time in hours.
“She is that. But I’m a butt man, ma’am, so I don’t mind.” With that pithy statement, he clicked to the dog and returned to his rounds.
I left the helmet on the bike, set my silver stakes in my hair, where they couldn’t be missed, climbed the steps to the main floor, and was buzzed into the new steel-reinforced airlock system and metal detector, where I was met by a vamp and a human, part of Protocol Aardvark, Procedure B. The human was carrying a cross beneath his shirt, one that glowed in close proximity to the vamp beside him. They looked me over and the vamp stepped back, his nose wrinkling.
“Yes,” I said, “I smell like dead humans. Deal with it. I have no weapons on me except stakes.” I ignored the look that passed between them and assumed the position to allow a pat-down, which was done professionally, with minimal handsy stuff, just the way I’d taught them.
There was a time when I’d insisted that every visitor, even me, be stripped of weapons and escorted through the building, but that rule had proven kinda ridiculous when I’d needed my weapons. Now, with few exceptions, we were doing the declare-and-carry program, and so far it was working.
I knocked on Leo’s door and heard him call, “Vous pouvez entrer.”
I took a breath to steel myself and entered. The entrance was wide, with tapestries hanging on the walls, hiding from casual observers the openings to once-secret hallways, stairwells, and concealed rooms. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I’d discovered all of them, but I’d done a good job of finding and mapping and putting cameras on most.
The rugs were deep beneath my boots, hand-knotted Oriental, Persian, and Chinese silk, each probably worth twenty K and with the ruined hands of child laborers to show for it. Paintings and statues were displayed all over, hung from the ceiling moldings on wire, resting on easels, posed on pedestals. There was no fire in the fireplace, either because it was already too warm in the room or because Leo was in a mood. I came to the entry to the office and stopped. On the gold chaise longue lay someone I’d never expected to see in this room again, and certainly never on Leo’s feeding couch.
“Wrassler?” But the word got stuck in my throat somewhere and never emerged.
The big guy was stretched out, looking down at Leo, who knelt at the security guard’s feet. Foot. Foot and high-tech prosthetic. Wrassler had lost the lower leg only a few weeks past, and without Leo’s blood and Leo’s contacts and Leo’s money, he’d still be recuperating in a rehab center somewhere, getting physical therapy twice a day and eating crummy food. Instead he was learning how to use the new leg and being healed of the arm damage by the Master of the City himself, Leo Pellissier, who, at the moment, was inspecting Wrassler’s lower arm, holding it close to his face, breathing in the scent of the skin. It could have been a lover-like moment, but instead it looked clinical, as Leo pierced the flesh with his fangs, pulled back to study the arm, and licked the new wound. He took a moment to bite his thumb pad and first pressed the bleeding thumb into the fang wounds, then placed his thumb at Wrassler’s mouth. The big guy sucked the blood away the same way another human might take liquid meds from a nurse. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
I stood with my feet shoulder-width apart and my hands clasped behind my back, like a soldier at rest, watching, listening to the bald-headed giant and his master. Remembering that the fanghead on his knees, healing his blood-servant, had allowed the carnage I had only just witnessed. My emotions boiled like hot tar, coating and scorching me, on the inside, where it didn’t show. But I could smell my own scent, which carried the reek of stale fear and the death stench of fifty-two humans, and I knew that Leo could smell them on me also.
But he didn’t turn my way. “Much better,” Leo said. “Make a fist. Open. Close. Again. Yes. Je suis satisfait. This is improving nicely.” Leo stood with the toned and lithe motions of a young, world-class athlete. “The tendon damage is much better. The surgeon did a fine job.”
“Speaking of jobs, sir?”
“Waiting for you when you are well, my loyal and dutiful servant.” Leo turned to include me. “If you can tolerate working avec celle qui marche dans les peaux d’animaux.”
Wrassler nodded to me. “Janie and I understand each other, sir. And Cherokee skinwalkers don’t scare me.”
“Bien.” Leo pulled Wrassler to his . . . feet. And supported him until the human had his balance. Leo handed the big man a cane and said, “Good day to you.”
“And good rest to you, sir. Janie,” Wrassler said to me as he limped past.
When the door shut behind him, Leo sat on the chaise, his knees wide, his elbows on them, hands clasped and dangling between, his eyes on me. His expression was patient, curious, concerned, purely human, his black hair loose around his face. His whole demeanor was harmless, easygoing, kind, and quietly worried, like a parent ready to hear bad tidings about his child’s school grades.