Dark Heir

We drove through the Warehouse District and I told Eli about the Damours, pointing out the warehouse where they had lived, a building where they kept the long chained secured to metal beds in a big room with a dead human they had fed to their progeny. I pointed out the building vamps used for parties, and an old church now owned by a vamp and kept as a daytime lair, which was weird.

At two of the sites I smelled dead humans and left the SUV, making my way close to the bodies to ascertain that no one was left alive. In New Orleans, it’s warm most of the year and homeless people can live outdoors in relative ease all year round, needing only tarps for rain protection, and lots of bug spray. At the first site I scented two dead middle-aged men smelling of booze, and the cops were already on-site, carrying the cop version of AK-47s and wearing their kill faces. We drove on by.

At the second site I held up a hand, indicating that Eli should wait in the vehicle. I drew my M4 shotgun and moved across the weeds of a vacant lot. I found a dying campfire and an entire family, including a teenager, all curled in sleeping bags. Drained.

I stopped as the scent of this death burned my nostrils, my lungs, scorching through my bloodstream. I moved into the campsite and bent over the boy, drawing on Beast’s senses. He looked too young to even shave. Worse, he was smiling.

I had a hard time drawing a breath. He was smiling.

Something like horror slithered under my skin, and I closed my eyes, turning away, hunching. The thing that had hung on Leo’s wall had done this. I had let him get away. I had let him live when I knew the first time I set eyes on the thing, it needed to die. Leo and I shared responsibility for this death. For all the deaths caused by the monster.

Kit. Killer of kits must die, Beast thought.

“Yeah,” I murmured.

I loosened my grip on the M4 to keep from accidently firing or damaging the weapon with my anger and breathed shallowly until I found a measure of control.

Sniffing the site again, I detected another scent. Brute. The werewolf’s growing anger was pungent on the night wind at the campsite, and I figured that if the werewolf caught up with Santana, there would be a miniwar on the spot. Maybe I’d get lucky and be there to help. I backed away from the camp to the SUV.

Eli pulled from the curb. “Details,” he said quietly, reading my body language.

I shook my head and dialed Jodi. Eli listened as I made my report, and Jodi was quiet, an awful, broken fury flowing across the cell to me, like a wave of emotion. When news of this hit the airwaves, there would be a reaction in the city, one that would put every supernatural at risk, or pit one species against another until full human-on-supernat civil war was possible. But at the moment I didn’t care if every vamp in New Orleans died in their lairs.

With dawn only hours away, my skinwalker metabolism had healed my body enough to allow me ease of movement and breath enough to feel like I’d survive. I still hadn’t seen to Beast, but I would get to her soon, I promised us both. Soon.

Alex had sent us a new address, one that had been called in to 911, about a bad smell and odd lights. The address matched the vacant Rousseau Clan Home in the Garden District, and though we had two other locations to check, we were close enough to Rousseau to take it first. Eli drove around the entire block, getting a feel for the house and grounds, entrance and egress, the layout and footprint of the property. It was going to be hard to approach safely and covertly, but we needed to take a good look. The burned-flesh stench came from around back. “He’s been here,” I told Eli. “Recently. Real recently. As in, could still be here.”

The Rousseau Clan Home was close to the street, and the grounds in front of the home were small but lush, with palms and what might have been a banana tree and night-flowering jasmine. The lot was slim but deep, and the two-story house was weirdly U shaped, narrow across the front, long and deep, with a very narrow hallway and gallery down the right side of the back of the house to the rear of the lot, where the house spread out again. From what we could make out in the security lights of neighboring houses, the back section of the house looked like it might be the same size and footprint as the front half. The pool was in the courtyard, surrounded on three sides by the house and by a tall brick fence on the fourth, giving it privacy. The chlorine smell was strong enough to override a lot of smells, but not the stench of barbecued vamp. And the seclusion wasn’t enough to mute the sounds of splashing.

“Call in fangheads or Derek to assist?” Eli asked.

“I say no, but it’s your call,” I said. “I want access to take down whatever needs taking down, with finality, and without vamps sticking in their noses. But I’ll also heal better than you will.”

“Keep HQ on speed dial and get me help if needed, but I say we go in alone. Stay close,” Eli murmured. “It’s too deep to divide up.” I nodded and we triple-checked our weapons, pulled on the new headsets, leaving the SUV parked on the street, unlocked, windows open, in case we needed to make a faster-than-normal getaway. At the left corner of the lot, partially hidden behind the banana leaves, I boosted Eli up and over the ten-foot brick fence. It was his turn to take point. He tapped his mouthpiece, telling me it was good, and I pulled on Beast’s strength to jump and grab the top, swinging myself over.

“Show-off,” he muttered good-naturedly into his mouthpiece, as we moved along the open left side of the house to the courtyard. The central garden area had been kept up and was lined in more plants, both the flowering and the vegetable variety, and the center was tiled in peachy orangish terra-cotta, the pool perfectly in the middle of the tiled space. We hid in the shrubs, checking the place over.

The courtyard was overlooked by the wraparound second-floor gallery and the patio beneath it on the first floor. The house was dark and the gallery was streaked with the long shadows of predawn. Up there, anyone could be hidden anywhere. In unison, we eased our right earpieces away from our ears, keeping one ear tied into coms and protected against explosive deafness, but allowing us to hear anything closer.

There were low ambiance lights on in the shrubbery, giving just enough illumination to tell us that there was no one in the open, yet the pool tiles were running with water, draining away from the pool. And the runoff looked darker than normal, probably mixed with blood. I was holding a vamp-killer and the M4 loaded with silver, but the stink of blood and vamps and scorched flesh told me it might not be enough. Maybe if Eli was carrying a man-fired missile, an SA-24, I might feel secure. Might. I stood silent, sniffing, letting the shadows and the scents tell me what I needed to know.