Dark Heir

The two compartments on the bottom were actually drawers, and one contained a heavy, expandable paper file holding passports, the land deeds Leo had promised, with properties all over, from Barataria to Baton Rouge, bearer bonds, stock certificates, and various paper money stuff. I set the deeds aside for study later. The other drawer contained a single gold bracelet. It looked Celtic in design, heavy, simple, elegant, a snake meant to be worn on an upper arm, so that it appeared to crawl up or down. It was a match to the gold arm bracelet I already had, the one Adrianna had once worn all the time and that tingled of old magic, somnolent or fatigued, the spell held within the gold in need of recharging. This bracelet, however, was strongly charged and full of power. I had no idea what it did, but it reminded me of the blood diamond—potent and dangerous. I thought about taking it, but it wasn’t mine, and while I wasn’t above taking a dangerous artifact from the vamps, I also wasn’t going to do that unless there was evidence of misuse. I hoped the moral imperative of “thou shalt not steal,” didn’t come back and bite me in the butt.

We closed up the safe and spent a few minutes poking around before the last of the caffeine wore off, and then we gathered up the deeds and went home to catch some shut-eye.

* * *

I got four hours of uninterrupted sleep, which was enough to make do, but not enough to be fully mentally functional. I woke spooned in Bruiser’s arms, his bristles scrubbing the skin off my shoulder. It was my favorite way to wake up, and I rolled over slowly, to keep from waking him. He was traditionally handsome in a lot ways, brown hair and eyes, with a firm jaw and sculpted nose, long and sort of bony, a little Roman arch in it. I had a thing about noses, and Bruiser’s was perfect. He had a long, tall physique, muscles in all the right places. When I met him, I had assumed he was a weight lifter, though not to bulging excess, but I’d never seen him with weights in his hands. He was toned and fit. Pretty much perfect. He opened his eyes and smiled, a slow and easy smile, full of promise.

“I like waking up with you,” I said. “You look amazing in my bed, wearing nothing at all.”

He asked, “Finished looking?”

“Not yet, but I can take a breather.”

“Good.” He slid me closer and up under him and his mouth landed on mine. Heat shot out from deep inside me and I tightened my arms on him, wrapped my legs around his. The next few minutes were hard and fast and totally satisfying. And I promptly fell back asleep.

This time, it wasn’t someone else who woke me, but my own overactive brain, which was sharing a confusing caffeine-enhanced dream of the Son of Darkness trying to drink down a human while his mouth was on fire. Totally unsuccessful in a horror-style comic-book manner.

Bruiser was gone, his side of the bed cold. If not for the scents of man and sex that wafted from the sheets, I might have thought I’d imagined him being there—well, that and the present he had left on the pillow. A single scentless lily in a deep scarlet color with hints of purple in it. There was a little green thingy with water in it, on the cut stem to keep it fresh. He brought me flowers almost every time he came over.

Smiling, I crawled out of bed, pulled on raggedy gray sweats, and stumbled into the living room, where the Kid was surfing, transferring, downloading, and organizing data from the jump drives. He looked as if he’d been mainlining meth, red eyed, dark curly hair rising in wild ringlets, his body twitchy, and emitting an odor of stress pheromones and scents I’d come to associate with caffeine, ginseng, taurine, and vitamins from canned energy. There was a huge pyramid of empties at his feet—four name brands of energy drink empties. He usually overdosed like this when he was playing marathon World of Warcraft, but this seemed worse than his usual binge drinking.

“What,” he growled without taking his eyes from the screens.

He was starting to sound like Eli, and maybe a little like me, when he was irritated. Tone mild, I said, “Are we out of energy drinks?”

“Yes. And I know I’ll crash in a bit, but I need to stay on this until I understand it. So again. What. Do. You. Want?”

I cut off an inch of the stem and put the lily in a tall vase with water. “Have there been any reports of humans being drained since Santana left the pool where he fought Brute?”

“No.”

“Hmmm,” I muttered. “I think Santana is still on fire and burning from the inside. I nicked him with the sliver of the Blood Cross, and fire usually moves upward. Like into his throat and head. He needs enormous amounts of human and vamp blood to heal, but if his throat’s on fire, then he can’t drink, and if he can’t drink . . .” My words trailed off.

The Kid chortled. “He can’t heal. Making the city marginally safer than before. All we need to do is find him. If we can.”

I pulled my cell and dialed Edmund Hartley. He sounded groggy when he answered. “I will not offer my blood to a werewolf ever again. Do not suggest it. Go away.”

“Good morning to you too. Is the dog still alive?”

“He is. Sleeping at my feet, bandaged, and healing at a prodigious rate. He stinks like wet mutt. He produces a miasma of gas. He runs in his sleep. He moans. I am not getting any rest, which little has now been interrupted by you.”

“You sound a little like Leo when you’re ticked off. I’ll need to talk to Brute soon. I need to know if the SoD was on fire when they fought.”

“Your needs are always most strange. But I will ask him.” The call ended. I went back to my bed and to sleep.

* * *

When I woke next, my mind was running in circles and I knew I wasn’t getting more sleep, so I threw off the sheets and dressed in jeans and a T, checking a nine mil and sliding it into a spine holster beneath my T-shirt. The Kid’s desk had been abandoned, and I could smell him upstairs. Eli was sleeping upstairs too, the sound of two humans breathing filling the otherwise silent house. I didn’t hear Molly and assumed she had awakened and was away on witchy business, mostly because KitKit was stretched out on the back of the couch staring at me. I rummaged around in the Kid’s papers and found a city map, taking it and the land deeds to the kitchen table and starting a pot of tea, a good Asian black with lots of vanilla and star anise.

While it brewed, I paged through the land deeds, scanning the ancient and not-so-ancient legalese, and setting the ones owned by Joses Santana and his aliases in a neat pile. Once I had them separated, I marked the locations on the map as best as I was able, though over the past hundred years, some streets had changed names and others had disappeared altogether, making some of it guesswork. And then I found two that rang odd bells, one in Barataria, where I had once tracked Leo’s son, Immanuel, before I killed him, and another down in the Warehouse District.