Dark Queen

The laughter in Bruiser’s eyes went deeper, as if he was envisioning a pile of right private parts and a long line of pained military brass. He said, “As would any pharmaceutical company, any foreign power, any billionaire who wants to live forever without becoming bound to a vampire.”

I almost said, That sucks, but it would have been funny and funny didn’t fit here.

“They have managed to reverse engineer the formula,” he said. “Leo has personally completed preliminary testing. It works.”

“Mmm. And if Leo can reproduce it in quantity, he will have the single most financially lucrative and medically important pharmaceutical product to hit the health profession since penicillin.”

“Indeed.”

Which would give Leo almost unlimited financial revenues, until the patent ran out or someone else reverse engineered it. Right. And Leo would be in terrible danger from outside and inside forces because such a product and such an economic stranglehold would change every financial market in the world. And Leo would have all that power. I sighed. Leo, king of the world.

“Enough talk.” Bruiser put my feet on the sofa, then stood and picked me up. And carried me to his bed. Enough talk indeed.

CHAPTER 13

After I Spill Some Blood and Kill Some People

Some hours later, as we lay cuddled in blankets with pillows stuffed around and behind us, I said, “So Leo isn’t going to do the whole naked bit. But isn’t there something else he can do to discombobulate the EuroVamps? Something . . . I don’t know, American, all muscle cars and Grease-style hairdos?”

Bruiser stiffened, rolled over on top of me, and kissed me hard. “You are not only beautiful but you are bloody brilliant. That, my dear girl, is a lovely thought.” On elbows and knees he rolled from the bed, grabbed his clothes, and was gone before I could think twice. To the empty walls, I said, “Onorios can move almost as fast as fangheads.” I narrowed my eyes at the ceiling. “And I don’t have a car. Dang it.”

But . . . Bruiser called me beautiful. Wow.

I pulled the covers close and fell asleep.

* * *

• • •

I napped for an hour longer and then rolled out of bed feeling pretty dang wonderful. Good enough to check e-mails, answer texts, and return voice mails. And do some research on Julietta Tempeste, head of Clan Des Citrons. There wasn’t much except that Julietta and her predecessors as clan Blood Master had loved lemons—lemon tea, lemon preserves, and drinking from humans who had eaten large amounts of lemons.

I had a blitzkrieg moment. Were lemons grown in Louisiana? And if so, where?

I did an online search and discovered that there were three nurseries and two lemon groves within driving distance of NOLA. One of them had a large B&B, called Lemon Grove Farm and B&B. I dressed, making calls and getting Alex to research each of the places, with an emphasis on the bed-and-breakfast.

By the time I got home, Alex had broken through the security system on the B&B and found evidence that vamps had taken over the place. In stored footage from motion detectors, we saw two unmoving bodies on the floor in the kitchen. People were walking past the living room security camera in total unconcern. There was one very clear image of Dominique. Another that looked like Cym. And we had a name on the owners. The Stephenses, family of five and a dog.

“When were these acquired by the surveil?” I asked.

Alex, his head bent over his screens, said, “Last one was last night, nine twenty-seven p.m. Then, it looks like they dismantled the system. All cameras are currently offline. I have images of people—most of them human, not vamps—beating the cameras with household tools. A broom. A tire iron. Other stuff. They got every single camera. But they forgot to wipe the memory.”

I made more calls and got a team together. Within an hour, an armed party of Derek’s best and I were on the way south and east in a caravan of armored vans. Eli and I took up the entire bench seat behind the driver, our gear in gobags on the floor at our feet, comms units hooked up and tied into the main system at the house, where Alex monitored progress at the B&B and rallied PsyLED to meet us there.

Over my cell, which was hooked into our comms system, he said to Ayatas, “I don’t give a flaming pink flamingo if you’re busy. My sister and brother are on the way there with an armed team to do your job.”

I was speed-loading an extra mag with silver-lead rounds when the words flaming pink flamingo came over the system and I laughed silently. Eli gave a quirked smile, amusement and pride in his eyes.

“PsyLED is lead on this, not Jane,” Ayatas said, his irritation clear. “You inform my sister that she and her team are to stay off-site until we get there.”

“There are dead humans in the still shot I sent you,” Alex said, his tone inflexible and hard and so very adult, “and this is taking place in Leo’s territory, so forgive me if I correct you. Leo has authorized his Enforcer to proceed with ‘all haste.’ His words. I’ve contacted the state police and passed the information along to the governor’s office. Per the MOC, PsyLED is welcome to take part in the rescue operation, but the Enforcer to the Master of the City of New Orleans will not be waiting to engage the enemy.” And I heard a click.

“Did you just hang up on FireWind?” Eli asked.

“Yeah,” Alex said, the word staticky. “You got a problem with that, my brother?”

“Not at all. Just seeking clarification. Our ETA to the B&B is twelve.” Eli pushed his mic away.

The van swayed and bumped and thumped its way along the road, which hadn’t seen much in the way of repaving since Katrina. The potholes had potholes. Air blew into the cab as we weaponed up and went over the online visuals, which were from older satellite pics. Wrassler had a drone ready to launch overhead to acquire on-site visuals of the house and grounds and provide us with more visuals than the ones currently available to us.

Except for me, the entry party were all former military and were equipped with mechanical breaching tools and devices, prepared with varied and dynamic techniques to be used based on what we found on the grounds and inside the house. They were armed with shotguns loaded with silver fléchette rounds, flashbangs, and vamp-killers, among other, less lethal weapons. Thanks to the fact that the house was a B&B, we had excellent intel from the online photos, including photos of the basement with its high-placed windows. Basements were rare in South Louisiana, rare enough to make Alex take a good look at the existing pics.

A mile out, we pulled over. Into my earbuds, Alex said calmly, “The house was built in the 1880s, about twenty feet higher than most in the southern part of the state. It was built on an old Indian mound.”

“Burial mound?” a voice asked.

“No,” Alex said. “The local tribal peoples from as long as two thousand years ago built mounds to live on. Lots of reasons why, but the likelihood of the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya and other rivers to flood was probably the reason. No ghosts,” he added.

The man who had asked chuckled as if it had been a joke. But he sounded relieved.

I heard the soft whirr of the drone when it took off and checked the video monitor on my helmet. Wrassler said, “Drone visuals on your monitors. Vehicle tracks all through the yard and on the grass. Only one car in the drive. There are no vehicles present with vamp-tinted windows.”

That was bad. It meant the likelihood of vamps being on-site had just dropped drastically.

“Taking a chance and dropping the drone down to get a closer look,” he said.

I had seen sites where vamps had lived and eaten and killed and departed. This had all the markers, from the stuffed mailbox to the tire tracks through the lawn to the unused and dirty children’s swing set out back.

“Move out,” Eli said, his voice grim. We were out of the van and jogging through the underbrush, down the road, moving out in a fan and into our assigned positions. I followed Eli up the mound into the winter-dormant foliage that covered a low wall near the carport. I could still smell jasmine. The team began to call in with their op names and positions acquired. One voice added, “Meyer lemon trees fruit year-round. These should be producing and they’ve been stripped of fruit—all fruit, not just the ripe ones. Recently.”