River Road (3 page)

Tonight’s singer was merely a good impersonator, and the crowd swayed from a combination of alcohol and happy vibes. I screwed up my courage and scanned the area behind the polished wooden bar that stretched down the left side of the room. No sign of either Jake or Leyla, the tall, model-sexy assistant manager who’d always been in lust with Alex. Not that Alex’s love life was any of my business, as he liked to remind me.

A couple of frazzled guys I’d never seen worked the bar, a sad reminder that even if the Katrina-era Gator stayed frozen in my mind, the real one had moved on.

I carved a path through the bar, making my way past the restrooms and kitchen and up a narrow stairwell near the back door. The sense of déjà vu hung heavy. My last visit here had been on one of the worst nights of my life, but it was long past time to put it aside.

I stopped halfway up the stairs and slid the ridiculous heels off with a sigh of pleasure. I’d snag them on the way out.

After reaching the small landing, I knocked on the door to Apartment B and waited.

“He’s not there, sunshine.”

I whirled to see Jake standing in his own doorway across the hall.

Sometimes, after an absence, people look smaller or plainer than memory has built them up to be. Not Jake. His wiry frame had bulked up in a good way, and he still had the shaggy, sun-kissed blond hair and amber eyes that had made my heart speed up. I hadn’t seen the killer dimples yet, but I knew they were under that stubble somewhere.

“Hi, Jake.” That much was easy. What to say next wasn’t. I’m sorry you got mixed up in my mess and became a loup-garou? I’m sorry you have to lie to all your friends because you’re no longer human? Glad your combat injuries from Afghanistan healed themselves your first full moon?

I just stood there, guilty, mute, and tense, my muscles frozen.

“Alex had a date with Leyla,” Jake said, leaning against the doorjamb and hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans. “You want to leave him a note? Come on in—I’ll get you a pen.” Before I had a chance to answer, he turned and went into his apartment, leaving the door ajar.

My heart thumped in alarm as I remembered the blame and anger in his eyes during our last encounter. I wasn’t sure I could handle a live replay. Still, I followed him inside. I could at least apologize, however useless it might be. I’d tried to apologize once before, when he was trying to figure out what I was and what had happened to him. He hadn’t been ready to hear it.

I closed the door behind me. He’d gone into the small kitchen and was rummaging through a drawer, which gave me a chance to glance around at the shabby, not-quite-so-chic apartment. It still looked as if it had been filled with castoffs from an era when John Travolta wore platform shoes and danced beneath a mirror ball.

Jake handed me a small spiral-bound notebook and a pen. I looked at them a moment before laying them on the scarred wooden dining table.

“Jake, I don’t…” I inhaled and started over. “I’m sorry. About everything. I know it’s my fault that … It was all my fault.” I trailed off, not sure how to continue.

He moved closer, reached out to put a hand on my shoulder, pulled back before touching me. “Let’s not start throwing blame around again, sugar. We’ve already done it once. It’s done.”

He was going to be noble, damn it, which ripped the scab off my guilt and made me realize a part of me wanted him to yell and throw stones. Maybe even needed him to.

“There’s plenty of blame for me, maybe even for Alex,” I said softly. “But not for you.”

He was the victim. A voodoo god had tried to take power in post-Katrina New Orleans, with more than a little help from my late father. Jake got caught in the middle, and ended up a loup-garou. His whole life had imploded while Alex and I walked out with no more than a few mental bruises. My father had died. The whole thing gnawed at me late at night—I tried to stay too busy to dwell on it the rest of the time.

“It’s over, DJ,” Jake repeated. “We shoulda let it go a long time ago.”

The dimples made their first appearance as he stepped back and looked at my feet. “You know how glad I was to see you standing out there with no shoes tonight?” His teasing South Mississippi drawl carried the seeds of forgiveness, and with that realization an almost tangible weight lifted.

I lifted my eyes to meet his warm, honeyed gaze. “I didn’t think you’d ever be glad to see me again.”

He smiled—a little sadly, I thought. “That was true enough for a while. Then, after I’d waited so long…” He shrugged, and I nodded. After a while, it got easier to avoid each other than to have this awkward conversation.

I picked up the notebook and looked at it. I didn’t want to write Alex a note. “I’ll just leave a message on his phone—plus, it’ll annoy him if I call him during his date.”

Jake grinned at me, and that felt good. A mutual enjoyment of tormenting his cousin had always been a bond between us.

He grabbed his keys off the table and followed me into the hallway. “I need to get back downstairs anyway, make sure the new guys haven’t given away all the beer.” He locked the door behind him.

“Business must be doing well if you’re hiring new people.”

We had started down the stairs, but he stopped abruptly. “Alex didn’t tell you?”

I slid my feet into the godforsaken shoes and turned to look at him. This didn’t sound good. “Tell me what?”

“I’m gonna be backing up Alex as an enforcer, so I’ll need more help around the Gator. Been training at Quantico the last six months.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, guppy-like. When we met, Alex had been a full-time enforcer, a member of the wizards’ elite security force. When situations between sentinels and pretes got shot to hell, the enforcers came in and did cleanup. It usually involved killing something. Even now that he worked with me as a sentinel, Alex’s idea of mediation was using smaller ammo in his specially modified guns.

“Uh, congratulations?” I’d never seen that killer instinct in Jake, but as a former Marine he had the military background. As a loup-garou, he’d definitely have the muscle. “You’re happy about it?”

The dimples made another appearance. “Yeah, I am. For the first time since all this shit went down, I know where I belong. Maybe even for the first time since I left Afghanistan.”

I hoped he was right. And I was going to have a little talk with good old cousin Alex to make sure he turned off the crazy rivalry he had with Jake and turned on his nurturing side. He had one; I’d seen it.

*   *   *

I celebrated my bravery in confronting both Jean and Jake in one evening by a stop at the Popeye’s drive-through, where a box of spicy fried chicken and a container of red beans awaited, guaranteed to soothe any residual nerves.

Traffic crawled along St. Charles Avenue, so I wound my way to my house by back streets, pinching off bits of chicken to eat along the way. The pizza place across from me on Magazine had an overflow crowd, and my friend Eugenie Dupre’s house across Nashville was dark, as was the sign for the Shear Luck hair and nail salon she ran from her first floor. Maybe she’d lucked out and had a date with someone who wasn’t technically dead.

I juggled my food and purse—and the heels, which I’d taken off again—trying to unlock my back door. I’d forgotten to leave the kitchen light on, and something tangled in my feet just inside. My knees and shoulder hit the wooden floor hard, along with the shoes, the chicken, and the red beans. Somebody was going to pay.

“Sebastian—you just used up your eighth life!” I never shrieked until I became a reluctant cat owner. Now it happened frequently. A thunder of paws tore across the living room as I staggered to my feet and fumbled for the light switch. Toilet paper wound around both ankles, trailed through the kitchen and living room, and curled out of sight into the downstairs bathroom.

I’d inherited Sebastian, a cranky, cross-eyed chocolate Siamese, when my father and mentor, Gerry, died in the Katrina aftermath. He’d bequeathed me a flooded, moldy house near a levee breach, an extensive library of obscure grimoires, a set of elven skills I hadn’t figured out how to use, a lot of memories. And the world’s most vindictive feline.

After gathering an armload of toilet paper and throwing it in the trash, I tracked down my dinner. The chicken box lay upended in front of the fridge and the red beans had rolled under the kitchen table. The lid had stayed on the beans, but I plucked the biscuit off the floor and looked stupidly inside the box at a single scrawny chicken wing. Suspicious, I stuck my head in the living room. Sebastian sprawled on an upholstered armchair, his black nose buried in a greasy fried chicken breast bigger than his head.

I hissed at him to get his attention. “Feline. Spawn. Of. Satan.”

Not that the grease could do much more damage to the chair since he’d already used its back as a scratching post.

He raised disdainful crossed blue eyes in my direction, then slinked off in a huff when I snatched away the chicken breast and took it to the fridge. Eventually, I’d let him have it, but one should not reward feline insolence.

I took what was left of my dinner, grabbed my purse off the floor, and called Alex to give him a heads-up before I talked to the Elders and began what threatened to be an all-night merpeople cram session. I hadn’t asked Jake where the happy couple had gone on their date, or if it was their first, or whether they’d been doing the nasty for months, although I doubted it. Alex would have bragged.

After five rings, he answered in his surliest voice. “DJ, something better be burning or dying.”

Heh. “Having fun? Didn’t disturb anything, did I?” Music and voices tangled in the background, so he and Leyla weren’t engaged in anything too private. That relieved me, for some reason. Probably because Leyla never liked me much. I refused to entertain the idea of jealousy.

“Can this wait till tomorrow? The next band’s about to start.” His voice rose to match the background din.

Guilt replaced relief. After a few flirtations in the early days of our partnership, we’d agreed to keep things at the friends-with-no-benefits level. The man had every right to go on a date.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, meaning it. “Just don’t make plans for tomorrow.” I gave him the short version of the mer feud/water testing. “And why didn’t you tell me Jake was in enforcer training?”

Long pause. The sound of a guitar being tuned and the trill of a horn filled the space vacated by conversation. “You saw him?”

“No, I learned of his enforcerhood by osmosis. Of course I saw him. Went by the Gator to fill you in on my meeting with Jean Lafitte and he told me all about it. Would’ve been nice if I’d heard it from you.”

“You saw him at the bar? I mean downstairs, in the barroom?”

“No, up in his apartment.” Nosy, much?

“You were alone with him?”

What was the problem? Had Leyla’s flawless café-au-lait skin and big, adoring doe eyes zapped some of his brain cells? I tried not to sound testy. “Well, of course we were alone. What’s the big deal?”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Another pause, then the call ended.

He’d hung up on me.

CHAPTER
3

People jog at dawn for a reason. If they wait, their brains will wake up and convince them there are things they’d rather do. Like have oral surgery.

Which is why I was standing in the Fly at five a.m., half asleep.

A butterfly-shaped section of Audubon Park alongside the Mississippi River, the Fly was one of the few spots in metro New Orleans where one had easy access to the Big Muddy. The majority of riverfront property had long ago been consumed by the stuff of commerce: warehouses, wharves, cruise terminals, port offices. The rest butted against high earthen levees.

I groaned and propped my right foot on the bench beside a concrete picnic table, trying to stretch out a hamstring still sore from last night’s pinwheeling kitchen disaster. Weak sunlight filtered through the massive live oaks hiding the park from the back of the zoo. On the other side, the river flowed wide and gray and choppy. At least the air was cool and the humidity hadn’t yet reached ninety percent. Give it an hour.

Usually, Alex and I ran on the other side of the zoo, in Audubon Park proper. I had an ulterior motive for changing the route—the three empty glass vials in my pocket. I wanted some samples of river water that hadn’t allegedly been poisoned by territorial mermen.

Alex hadn’t arrived yet, but a half-dozen joggers already made their way along the riverfront. By six it would be downright crowded.
Crowded
had been the way of things in the Uptown neighborhoods unflooded by Katrina. Rebuilding hadn’t made New Orleans a modern, efficient city like we’d hoped. Instead, recovery had been a stumbling, lurching journey filled with setbacks, scandal, and drama that somehow fit the city’s dysfunctional charm. Lots of neighborhoods remained sparsely populated, and as every school year ended, a batch of weary storm survivors got discouraged and moved away. Optimistic new folks bent on saving New Orleans from itself replaced them.

That was just the human population. I didn’t want to ponder the number of pretes coming into town now that the restrictions had been lifted, or how long before some powerful species decided it wanted to wrest political control from the wizards.

Gravel crunched to my left, and I turned as a shiny black Mercedes convertible pulled into the parking lot next to my dusty red SUV. Alexander Warin unfolded all six-foot-three-inches of chiseled hotness out of the seat and shot a killer smile at a couple of scantily clad redheads ogling him and his car as they ran past. They might run faster if they realized Alex was a rare true shapeshifter who could turn at will into a chow-pony mix the size of a small European nation, and that he rarely went anywhere without at least one firearm.

I shook my head. He looked edible without trying. His dark hair perpetually needed cutting, which made women want to mother him, while that sculpted body he worked so hard to maintain made them want to smother him. He wore shapeless black track pants that still managed to show off slim hips and a red T-shirt that emphasized broad shoulders. My partner had only to raise one dark eyebrow and women flocked to him like drunken parade-goers begging for beads off a Mardi Gras float. He didn’t do a thing to discourage them.