River Road (14 page)

“That’s right.” She smiled, and her aura wrapped around me like a warm blanket. Probably a nymph thing. “I see the fur is here.” She looked back, caught Jake’s gaze, and licked her lips. “I’ve always wanted to taste loup-garou. What fun.”

I poked Tish as soon as Libby swiveled off to ogle Jake up close. “Make sure she sits in the backseat and keeps her claws to herself. Alex doesn’t seem interested, but Jake’s out of his league.”

CHAPTER
13

Two vials sat undisturbed on my worktable, one full of river water, the other empty. I sat in the armchair in the corner, surrounded by discarded grimoires and common spellbooks. Sebastian reclined on the mantel, licking sugar off his paws after upending a kitchen canister. He’d left a trail of white granules through every room of the house.

I was stumped. I’d tried a regression charm on the water to see if I could track where its components had come from, and it hadn’t worked.

I’d tried hydromancy, and got a crystal-clear image of Pass a Loutre, complete with the
Dieu de la Mer
and a topless Libby sunbathing on the aft deck with both Rene and Robert at her side. Who the hell was collecting water samples—Jake and Alex?

I’d tried a dissolution charm to break down the water samples, hoping one element would be unusual enough to give me a clue. No dice.

Sebastian leapt from the mantel to the worktable, missing the vials but knocking the elven staff off with a heavy thud. Yowling, he followed the staff to the floor and tried to bat it around. It rolled toward me, and I snatched it up before he tried to use it as a scratching post and zapped himself into Elfheim. Honestly, why people kept feline pets was beyond me. They won’t fetch. They won’t do tricks. They are only good company when they want something and feel the need to suck up.

I held up the staff, studying it and pondering the elven abilities I’d inherited from my nebulous double line of genetic material. Gerry had given me the ability to communicate through dreams on occasion, although I rarely had reason to use it. The empathy, and the ability to feel and identify magical energy, must have come from my mother’s side of the elven gene pool, but she’d given up her magic about the time I was born and had died when I was six. So I’d never know.

None of those skills seemed to have any use in identifying the water contamination, but what if there were other elven things I could do—things I didn’t know about? Maybe I was approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

Gerry had been fascinated by his elven heritage, and he’d collected not only the staff but all kinds of books on elven magic. I scanned the titles on the shelves, pulling out a worn, leatherbound volume with no title. It was in a mismatched cluster of books Gerry had called black grimoires. He’d picked most of them up in back-alley shops in Europe before he’d been assigned to New Orleans. Some black grimoires contained spells of black magic, but others simply contained unapproved magic. Magic, in other words, the Elders didn’t understand and therefore didn’t sanction. I remembered this one as being elven in origin.

It was almost three p.m., and illegal elven magic goes down better with chocolate, so I went downstairs and settled in on the sofa with a candy bar, a soda, and my book of illegal spells.

I read a lot about nasty-sounding mental magic that elves could do to others, and ways for them to keep wizards’ magic from working on them. There were truth enchantments and allures that would obliterate someone’s force of will. No wonder the elves scared the hell out of everybody.

The only consolation was that they thought themselves entirely too lofty to fool with other pretes so they kept to themselves in Elfheim. Or so I’d heard. Other than Elder Zrakovi, I’d never even met anyone who’d seen an elf.

I finally came across something that might work: an origination allure. I had the basic ingredients—it was assembled like a wizard’s potion but could only be enacted with elven power. Maybe the staff would give my magic enough of an elven spin to work. It was worth a try. Time could be short before someone got seriously ill or the Delachaise-Villere war broke out.

I went upstairs and made sure Sebastian was out of the room before I closed the door—I’d learned the hard way, after he took a sip of the bespelled holy water I used for scrying and had gone on a hallucinogenic kitty trip, that it was best he stay away from magic.

Propping the grimoire on a bookstand, I began assembling ingredients. It was a complex spell, with pinches of botanicals added at different temperatures as the solution heated. I pulled my portable induction range from the storage area beneath the table and plugged it in. Most wizards’ potions that had to be cooked could be done in a microwave, but I was afraid to try it with the elven magic. If the staff was any indication, it was too powerful. Blowing up my house would be counterproductive.

I collected more than two dozen ingredients and began assembling them in a heavy cast-iron pan over the burner, using the remaining Pass a Loutre water samples as my base. By the time I’d raised and lowered the temperature and added pinches of this and bits of that for what seemed like an hour, I thought it was ready.

Retrieving Charlie from the sofa, I returned to the worktable. Should I point the staff at the solution and will a bit of energy into it, or stick the end of the staff in the solution? Would a vision appear above the bowl, or inside the liquid mixture?

“Okay, Charlie,” I said. “Do your thing.” I stuck the end of the staff into the solution and waited. It vibrated, then stilled. My excitement plummeted. Damn, it wasn’t going to work.

Frustrated, I shot a bit of my own energy into the staff, and got an electric zing up my arm in return. As my vision blurred, I pulled the staff away from the solution but couldn’t let go of it.

Searing pain shot through my skull, knocking me to my knees. I rolled to my side, still clutching the staff. My heart raced in panic as the room darkened, and the dustballs on the floor in front of me gave way to a muddy stretch of ground in a swamp. It looked like Pass a Loutre. Had I just fried the inside of my brain to learn the water came from exactly where I knew it came from?

Another thrust of pain pulled me into a fetal position, and I screwed my eyes tightly against it, tears escaping my closed lids. I heard a splash, and cracked them open. Pass a Loutre was gone, and I lay on a rock ledge overlooking a dark body of water under a blackened sky with a mist-shrouded full moon.

What the hell had happened? I tried to sit up, but was paralyzed, my chest heavy, breathing labored. The water in front of me swept past, swift and thunderous, before it narrowed through a chasm between two tall stones. Through the chasm appeared a boat, a small wooden craft carrying a hooded figure who controlled its progress against the churning current using a pole. Yellow reptilian eyes shone from inside the hood, and black wings curled behind its back.

I held my breath, somehow knowing it to be a demon and sure that if it saw me, it would take me to a place from which I’d never return. It would take me to Hades.

As suddenly as it appeared, the image faded, replaced with a floral area rug and dust bunnies. I shuddered and realized I could move again. Cautiously, I opened my grip and let the staff roll free. As soon as I released it, the heavy weight lifted off my chest and I could breathe. A drop of blood dripped onto the floor by my nose. Every time I drew too hard on elven magic, I got a nosebleed and a killer headache.

That was the least of my worries, though. If the vision were true, the contaminated water in the Mississippi River didn’t come from the hands of a territorial merman. It came from the underworld. It came from the River Styx.

CHAPTER
14

My hands shook as I slid the grimoire back into the bookcase and cleaned off my worktable. I grabbed a half-dozen tissues and plastered them to my nose on my way downstairs, tripping over Sebastian. He bounded to the kitchen counter, wanting his dinner. God forbid the River Styx leaking into the Mississippi should interrupt his culinary routine.

The cat food sounded ridiculously loud as it hit the metal bowl. I absentmindedly broke up bits of Friday night’s stolen chicken breast over the food and plopped it on the floor. What would cause water from the Styx to contaminate the river at Pass a Loutre? Did it have anything to do with the mers, or were they victims? And what about the dead wizards?

The clock read six p.m. The soft October sun had already crept below the treetops, so Alex and the gang should be headed back. I dug in my pocket for my cell phone and couldn’t find it, so I went to the guest room for the land-line phone. Most people didn’t have them anymore but I got Internet and cable cheaper by buying the package deal.

I punched in Alex’s cell number and cursed when the sound of some deep-voiced country singer blasted out of my backpack in the living room. Alex had been on a country music kick for a while now, but I couldn’t tell any of those singers apart. I think they were all named Tracy or Trace or Trisha.

If Alex’s cell phone was in my backpack, that meant he probably had my phone. I called my own number, got voice mail, and left him a message he wouldn’t have the password to retrieve. Since I figured I’d hear from him eventually, I heated up a microwave pizza and sat at the kitchen table to eat and wait. A trickle of blood still dripped from my nose, so I added a splash of medicinal bourbon to my soda.

It was almost seven by the time Alex used his key to come in the back door. He set the water vials on the counter, unstrapped his shoulder holster and hung it on the hook beside the cabinets, gun and all, then tossed my cell phone on the table in front of me.

“Your undead boyfriend called and wants you to call him back”—he slipped into a bad Jean Lafitte impression—“to arrange the details for our dinner date,
Jolie
.” He sounded more like Pepé Le Pew, the romantic French skunk from the cartoons.

I flipped to the list of calls received, saw a number for the Monteleone, and shook my head. “Jean Lafitte can use a telephone now. God help us.” The man was learning his way around the modern world entirely too well. Driving, taking showers, and now making phone calls. He’d probably even learned to turn on his lamp.

Alex opened a beer and got halfway into the seat opposite me before he really looked at me. “What the hell happened? You look like Mike Tyson took a punch at you.” His gaze fell to the pile of bloody tissues. “Ah. The staff. What’d you do?”

He moved to the chair nearest me and lifted my chin with one finger so he could get a better look. I let him. Slapping him away would have taken too much energy.

“Doesn’t look too bad. What happened?”

I filled him in on the elven origination allurement and the Styx.

Alex took a sip of his beer, looked at the bottle a moment, then finished draining it in one long guzzle, followed by a belch. Nice. “That was a smart move. But the Styx? This whole thing just gets more and more screwed.”

Tell me about it. He hadn’t just had a close encounter with the ferry into hell.

He got up and plucked another beer from the fridge. “Want one?”

“No, I’m wiped. Too much magic today—mine and the elven stuff both.” Not to mention a little blood loss.

“Come on.” He slid my chair out with me in it and tugged me to my feet, shuffling me toward the living room. “Sofa. Head elevated.”

I collapsed on the sofa and settled on my back with my head on the padded arm. He sat on the other end with my feet in his lap. Touching him made me feel better, safer. I finally relaxed and the pressure in my head eased. This was why Alex and I could never be lovers. We worked too well as friends to jeopardize it, and I didn’t have so many friends that I’d risk losing him.

“Tell me about today,” I said, smiling as he gave me a foot massage. “Except if you keep doing that, I’m going to fall asleep and we have murders to solve, Stygian leaks to plug, mermen to pacify.”

“And nymphs to avoid,” he said. “Did you know they could enthrall people like vampires?”

I sat up, forgetting about my feet. “What? Libby?”

He slouched down on the sofa. “Tish is the one who finally figured it out. I knew Jake was staggering around stupid, but it didn’t seem to work on me. Libby didn’t try to enthrall Tish, so once she figured it out, I got Jake to stop making eye contact with her. Guess it works on weres but not true shapeshifters.”

I didn’t know whether to be horrified or snicker. “What about the mertwins?”

Alex shrugged. “Who knows. They liked her anyway, especially Robert, so it’s hard to tell. Libby ended up staying behind when I left with Jake and Tish. I think she was going back to Orchard with them.”

Great. Now I could add prete matchmaker to my list of skills. “Did she at least get the water samples before she seduced everybody on board—well, except you and Tish?”

“Yeah. She claimed she didn’t feel anything wrong with the water, but she brought the samples back anyway.”

Well, crap. I just realized the only way to test these new samples against the old was to do the origination allurement again. Maybe if I did my grounding ritual first, it wouldn’t affect me so badly. Also, it wouldn’t surprise me this time. Now that I’d had time to think about it, I was pretty sure the demonic ferryman couldn’t see me. It had simply been a vision.

“Since you haven’t mentioned it, I gather you and Jake found no sign of Jeff Klein’s body or the missing cell phone?”

“Nope. I’ll call Ken at NOPD tomorrow and see if he had any luck with the phone logs.” Alex leaned back and closed his eyes. He had impossibly long eyelashes. Why did guys get the good eyelashes? Not that I should be looking at his eyes, or the strong jawline, or the way his thick hair curled around the collar of his shirt.
Friends.

I settled back on the sofa. “We have two dead wizards, contaminated water from the River Styx, and two merclans with a territory dispute.” What a freakin’ mess. “Do you think they’re related?”

Alex lifted his shoulders in a tired approximation of a shrug. “I think it’s too much of a coincidence. I mean, the area around Pass a Loutre’s not exactly a main waterway.”