Blood in Her Veins (Nineteen Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock) (61 page)

•   •   •

I-10 was a straight shot west, and rest stops, gas stations, and restaurants were few and far between, yet, even with a straight shot and no roadside distractions, the trip to Bayou Oiseau took longer than we expected because of the rain. A front had moseyed in and settled over the lower half of the state like it intended to sign a lease and stay. Beast slept as we drove, and I spent the drive time reading the case notes aloud to the boys so they would be up to speed on the small town and the events that took me over when Bitsa needed a mechanic on my only other trip there.

The inhabitants were mostly Cajun—vamp, witch, and human. The vamps had a bad history of abusing the populace for generations, and they knew (or had known) nothing about the Vampira Carta, which are the legal papers that govern all Mithrans. Worse, the vamps had not been aligned with Leo, and therefore had no oversight.

The witches were unaligned with the NOLA witches. Ditto on the lack of oversight.

In between were the humans who had either taken off for safer environs, joined forces with one faction or the other, or hunkered down to fight a war of attrition.

The Youngers both chuckled when I told them I had played matchmaker and peacemaker between the vamps and witches. I had no idea why they thought it was amusing. The wedding had been beautiful.

Edmund, who had appeared with a pop of air just as we were about to back out of our parking spot in front of my house, was unexpectedly romantic. “I am quite certain that it was the social event of the year,” he said. I wondered if there had been a hint of irony in the statement. Eli grunted. Alex ignored us all, still playing his game.

None of us were particularly happy to have Edmund along, but the vamp had insisted and so had Leo. The MOC—Master of the City—had claimed that Edmund's attendance would be beneficial and give weight and clout to our presence. Whatever. The call was short and unsweet and to the point. “You will take Edmund.”
Click.

Not that he had the time, but Leo had said nothing about Edmund being a primo, which made me think even more that the primo idea was Edmund's alone. A primo would be around often, if Leo gave him to me, and if I accepted him as such, which wasn't likely. If I took Ed on and he turned out to be a pain in the butt, then I'd have to fire him, which would also be a pain in the butt. So far, the vamp had held his peace and kept quiet, not intruding on the comradery the Youngers and I had established, but no way would a vamp be able to maintain subservience to humans and a skinwalker. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I finished my reading of the case notes with, “Mostly, BO is a backwater community of churches, a blood bar, a few shops, a grocery, a couple of restaurants, a B and B, a dozen wild game processors”—which was the polite term for
butchers for hunters' kills
—“alligator and boar hunting, fishing businesses for tourists, an airboat tour guide company, and a few thousand citizens spread over a wide area of bayou, swamp, and sinking land. It needs paint, repaved roads, an influx of tax money, and a general makeover.”

“Looks like the town is finally getting that makeover,” Eli said, as the SUV lurched over ruts in the road. He slowed, his headlights taking in the rain-wet dark.

The two-lane state road we turned onto from I-10 had been freshly graded in the last couple of days, judging by the coarse road surface, in preparation for new paving. The heavily armored SUV bounced over the ruts and splashed through standing pools as we rolled past road-paving machines parked on the sides. In the rain, in the momentary clarity provided by the windshield wipers, I thought that they looked like stalled dinosaurs, which made Beast perk up and look out through my eyes.

Want to hunt dino-saucers. Or cow!

Not on this trip. Just vampires and witches.

My Beast curled up inside, closed her eyes, and pouted. She hadn't been out a whole lot recently, and she was grumpy about not getting to hunt.
Could hunt cow from window of ess-u-vee,
she finished.

The SUV was part of my gear as Leo's Enforcer, and it had all the bells and whistles and onboard computer—as well as the bullet-resistant, multilayer, polycarbonate glass and Kevlar inserts around the cab—that Eli's personal SUV didn't have. I had been shot at recently and appreciated the
protection that the heavy vehicle provided, but the extra weight made a jolting ride on the rough road.

We made it to the small town long after midnight, the few streetlights offering small globes of visual warmth in the downpour. There were dump trucks and construction vehicles and more of the road-grading machines parked everywhere, but in the darkness and the rain, no workers.

The town name meant
bird bayou
, and the first time I saw the quaint little place, I thought it looked like a love child spawned by the producer of a spaghetti Western and a mad Frenchwoman. The main crossroads were the intersection of Broad Street and Oiseau Avenue, which wasn't as pretty as it might have sounded. Broad Street was narrow, and the buildings lining its single-lane cousin were downright ugly. There was only one traffic signal in the entire town, and despite the crossroads being the main intersection, tonight there was no social life either. Everything was at a standstill, and not just because it was so late.

A circle of drenched women blocked the main crossing. Twelve women. The scent of magic was strong in the air, tickling along my skin and making me want to sneeze, despite the insulating rubber tires and the pouring rain, not that insulation worked against magic as well as it worked against electricity. Or at all, actually.

Eli pulled to a stop some twenty feet away from the witch circle, the soaking-wet women illuminated by his headlights. Witch circles can be composed of different numbers of practitioners, and I had seen circles with two, five, twelve, three, four, and nine witches, depending on the geometry and mathematics being used to rout the magical energies. Twelve witches made up the most potent kind of circle, and working with that kind of energy and potential could do scary things, including take over the witches and use their combined life force to power the working, leaving dead witches behind and their magic operational but out of control. These witches were bedraggled and dripping and so involved that they didn't seem to notice or care about the weather. Or us. And oddly, they were standing outside the circle they were working. Which meant that something inside had their full attention.

I tried to make out what it was, even pulling on Beast's vision, but all I saw were dull kaleidoscopic colors, all in the green and blue part of the
color spectrum, with a hint of yellow. It looked locked down, well contained, whatever it was.

“Twelve, eh?” Eli sounded casual, but he had fought beside me when a full circle had changed the local vamps in Natchez into bizarro insectoid creepazoids. Wiping out the vamps had been the worst fight of my life, and I'd had some bad fights to compare it to. “Last time we ran into one of those,” he murmured, “I met Syl. That was a good time in my life.”

Alex made a gagging sound. “Ignore the lovestruck idiot in the driver's seat,” he said. “Can you see what they're doing?”

“The circle looks like a form of Molly's
hedge of thorns
spell,” I said, “but they're outside the hedge. I think I see some kind of circle outside the hedge, but it's weak as well water. There's something in the middle of the street and in the center of the circle.” I squinted to see it better. Tried to look at it from the edges of my vision, focusing on a tree in the distance to make the blue-green fog of dullness. “Is it a . . . a hat?”

Beast rose from her nap and studied the scene through my eyes.
Witches are studying prey.
Which was as good an explanation as any I had.

“I can't imagine why you sound so shocked,” Edmund murmured. “Not so many years ago, most women loved hats.”

“Jane's not most women, dude,” Alex said for me. “And it isn't a hat—it's one of those laurel wreath things that the Greeks and the Romans used to wear.”

At the comment, Edmund sat up straight and leaned across the opening between the front seats to get a better look. As he studied the wreath, he slowly vamped-out, his pupils going wide, the sclera going scarlet, and his fangs slowly dropping with a soft
schnick
of sound on the hinges in the roof of his mouth. “Well, well, well,” he said. “I do wonder what that can be.”

I couldn't have said why, but I had a feeling that Edmund knew exactly what it was, and for whatever reason, he wasn't saying. I thought about calling him on it, but decided to hold my tongue, saying instead, “Down boy. That's a dangerous circle, so no matter what it is, we aren't getting near it.”

I gave directions to the bed-and-breakfast where I stayed last time I was in town and Eli put the SUV in reverse and backed a few feet but didn't pull away. The headlights gave us a clear view of the town and the women,
despite the rain, and I could see him taking in everything, the way Uncle Sam had trained him in the Rangers. If he had to, Eli could now draw an exact replica map of the town for house-to-house warfare. Hopefully we wouldn't need that map or that much bloodshed, but it was a handy skill set.

On the south corner of the intersection, there was a huge, brick Catholic church, the bell tower hiding a tarnished, patinated bell in its shadows. The large churchyard was enclosed by a brick wall, with ornate bronze crosses set into niches in the brick every two feet. On top of the wall were iron spikes, also shaped like sharp, pointed crosses. The sight made Edmund growl and sit back. I just smiled. The church in Bayou Oiseau had been fighting vamps for decades. It never hurt to remind a vampire that he had enemies and that there were ways to fight his power.

To the east of the church, across the road, was a bank, beige brick and concrete, with the date 1824 on the lintel and green verdigris bars shaped like crosses on the windows and door. To my right was a strip mall that had seen better days, brick and glass, with every single window and door in the strip adorned with a cross, either painted or decaled on. The mall featured a nail salon, hair salon, tanning salon, consignment shop, secondhand bookstore, bakery, a Chinese fast-food joint, a Mexican fast-food joint, and a Cajun butcher advertising andouille sausage, boudin, pork, chicken, locally caught fish, and a lunch special for $4.99.

“Is that Lucky Landry's place?” Alex asked.

“That's it,” I said. “Best food in fifty miles.”

Beast thought,
Good meat smell. Lucky is good hunter to hunt so much meat. Want to hunt with Lucky Landry.

Directly ahead of the SUV, catercornered from the church, was a saloon, like something out of the French Quarter—two stories, white-painted wood with fancy black wrought iron on the gallery, long narrow window doors with working shutters, and aged double front doors, the wood carved to look like massive, weather-stained orchids. The building's name and purpose was spelled out in bloodred letters on a white sign hanging from the second-floor gallery,
LECOMPTE SPIRITS AND PLEASU
RE
. It was the town's blood bar, and the only building without built-in crosses at every access point. I rolled down the window and took a sniff. Unlike the last time I was here, I couldn't smell beer and liquor and sex and blood,
only rain and magic. The bar was closed and someone had nailed a cross over the front doors. Somehow that felt like a bad omen.

Eli backed another few feet and his headlights fell on something that had been hidden in the shadows. A small group of people stood in the downpour, about ten feet away from the witches' circle's north point. People, standing, immobile, in the rain. Not breathing. Not doing anything.
Suckheads
. Watching the witches. Wet and undead and scary silent.

In the backseat, my babysitter vamp cocked his head and studied them. Softly he said, “Interesting.” But his tone said it was more than just interesting—it was unexpected, disturbing, and dangerous. Wordless, Eli backed down the street and turned into a narrow alley to bypass the intersection and the . . . whatever was going on there.

Miz Onie's Bed and Breakfast was closed for the night, but the woman was a light sleeper and met us at the door before we could even knock, dressed in a fluffy purple housecoat with her graying hair up in twisty cloth curlers. She was not yet sixty, but was using a cane this time, and her gait looked pained.

“I see you come down de street,” she said, her Cajun accent mellifluous. “Come in out de rain. You rooms ready. Wet clothes go hang on de rack,” she pointed. Without waiting, she led the way up the steps and we followed her uneven, slow steps.

“Are you injured, Miz Onie?” I asked.

Woman is sick. Smells old. Cull her from herd?

No!

Beast chuffed, but I didn't really know if she was being funny or hiding a serious question.

“Broke my ankle back a month ago. Doctor say it a spiral fracture and take longer to heal. Got to wear dis boot, which make
clump-clump
noise, but I making good progress.” She looked at the Youngers. “You not the same boys what come with Jane last time,” she said as we dumped equipment and gear in the hallway upstairs. “Them boys be U.S. military. Who you is?”

I remembered that Miz Onie had liked men in uniform and had given special attention to the men, including huge breakfasts and food left out to munch on all day. “Former U.S. Army Ranger, Miz Onie,” I said, “and his younger brother, Alex. And Edmund Hartley.”

She looked them all over, nodding to herself at the sight of the Youngers. But her eyes squinted when she got to Ed. I couldn't tell from her body language or her scent how she felt about the vamp, but she didn't kick him out. She turned for the stairs and her room on the first floor, walking hunched over, gripping her robe tightly closed with her free hand. “Breakfast at seven. Towels in each bath. This wet weather has me out of sorts and strangely sleepy, so good night, all.”