Rusted Veins: A Sabina Kane Novella (4 page)

Giguhl shook his head. “Nope. The roommate found Candy’s diary. He thought it might help.”

Before I could respond, Adam hung up the phone. “That was Rhea,” he said. “She’s been in touch with Cadence’s family, but none of them have heard from her since she left New York.” His shoulders dropped. Seeing the defeat in his expression made me feel like an ass. Here I was feeling selfish when he was the one grappling with guilt over leaving the girl. “Rhea did say the last time they knew of Cadence’s whereabouts she was in Los Angeles, so chances are good Brooks’s waitress really is her.”

I went to him and put my arms around him and squeezed. “It’s not your fault.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, it kind of is. We had problems long before I met you, but I could have broken it off better.”

I sighed. “Well, you can apologize to her once we find her.”

Both males paused. “Does that mean you’re in?” Giguhl asked.

“I’m not totally heartless,” I said, filling my tone with plenty of martyrdom. “I’m capable of putting my personal discomfort aside to help Adam’s old…friend.”

Adam shot me a smile that made me feel like I’d gotten a gold star at life. “Let’s head out, then.”

Madame Zenobia’s Voodoo Apothecary was housed in a two-story building in the middle of Bourbon Street. While many of the shops in that area were tourist holes, Zen’s place was an actual working voodoo emporium run by a bona fide voodoo priestess. Sure, the store got its share of foot traffic from the curious looking to buy a voodoo doll to take home as a souvenir, but the store was the real deal.

Since Halloween was just a couple of nights away, the population of the French Quarter was higher than usual. Instead of flashing to the store and risk being seen materializing out of thin air, we drove. We had to park several blocks away and then walk through the Quarter, weaving our way through the sea of inebriated humanity. When I’d first come to New Orleans, this overwhelmingly vulnerable mass of humans was both a temptation and an annoyance. But now, being in the middle of all that energy put a little extra spring in my step. For a city so focused on the past and so intimate with death, New Orleans was very much alive.

Giguhl, on the other hand, wasn’t so enchanted. “This sucks balls,” he groused from my arms.

“Ixnay on the talking in publicay,” Adam said.

The demon cat hissed in response. You’d figure he’d eventually get used to the fact that he simply couldn’t be seen in public in his seven-foot-tall, green-scaled demon form. “Just think of it this way,” I said, keeping my eyes forward, “if you couldn’t change into the cat body, you’d never be able to leave the house.”

“Humph.” The pissy feline flexed his claws against the sensitive skin of my inner arm.

“Ass cat.”

“Trampire.”

“All right, you two,” Adam sighed.

I pressed my lips together and sidestepped a drunk coed puking in the gutter outside of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. I soldiered ahead, determined not to let the demon’s bad mood or the specks of puke on my boots ruin my mood. I’d been traveling so much on council business that having a few days to hang out with the old gang in my new hometown felt a little bit like a vacation. Maybe it’s twisted and selfish to look at hunting down a drug-addicted mage who may or may not be in major trouble as a lark, but whatever. I never promised to be selfless. I’d only promised to help.

A few moments later, we arrived at Zen’s shop. The double doors out front were wide open and a warm glow from inside invited passersby to duck in and explore. And there was plenty to see. Every inch of wall space was filled with masks and shelves full of colorful bottles and gourd rattles and crosses and skulls. The air smelled of dust and dried herbs and something dark and spicy I couldn’t begin to identify. When we walked in, a little silver bell rang near the back of the store, where a curtain separated the selling floor from the offices in the back. To the right of that was a staircase that led to the sleeping quarters upstairs and Zen’s workshop.

Zen came out from behind the curtain. When she saw us standing there, she whispered something to the girl behind the counter and walked over to join us. Her braided black hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a long, loose gown covered in a batik print. On another woman the dress would have looked frumpy, but she managed to make it look both elegant and earthy. Her face was tense and she didn’t waste breath with pleasantries. “Brooks is upstairs.” Then she turned on her heel and made her way up the steps, expecting us to follow.

She led us to the second-floor workroom, where she made all of her tinctures, poultices, and gris-gris bags. Drying chicken feet hung alongside bundles of sage and other herbs dried from long lines attached to the ceiling. A long wooden table, glossy and dark with age, bisected the room. Brooks stood on the side opposite the door when we all filed in. In front of him was a thick, leather-bound book, which he closed when we entered. “Where y’at?” His tone lacked the jovial Southern charm it normally contained.

Giguhl leapt off my shoulder onto the table and went to his friend. “How you doing?” He plopped his furless butt right next to the diary. I noticed Zen’s eyebrows rise, but she didn’t protest the cat tainting her sacred workspace.

Brooks shrugged and pushed his thick black frames higher on his nose. “Worried.”

“Is that Cadence’s diary?” I asked, ready to get down to business.

“Yeah. I hate to invade her privacy, but it’s all we have to go on.”

“Did you find anything?” Giguhl prompted.

Brooks nodded. “She had several diaries in her apartment, going back years. This one covers the last four years.”

Adam tensed beside me. A quick look in his direction and I realized he was staring at the book in question as if it were a snake. That’s when it hit me that the same diary that could help us find her might also contain secrets about her and Adam that he might not want me to know.

Part of me, the side ruled by the demon of bad choices, wanted to grab it and flip back to the time when she and Adam were together. But my more practical angelic side reminded me that picking that particular scab would only lead to unnecessary pain. The old me would have told the angel to take a hike and tackle the Changeling for the diary, but the new me, the one who enjoyed happiness and peace in my life, grabbed her man’s hand and squeezed. This was awkward for me, but it had to be hellish for Adam.

He squeezed back and forced a smile before releasing my hand. “So what did you find out?”

Brooks didn’t quite meet Adam’s gaze. A sure sign he’d read the pages my bad-choices-side wanted to read so much. “For the last couple of weeks, her entries have mentioned the same name repeatedly.”

“Well?” Giguhl asked.

“Damascus White.”

Oh shit
, I thought. “Damascus White, as in the leader of the New Orleans vampire coven?”

Brooks nodded and held up the book. “The weird thing is that even though she’s pretty detailed with her entries, whenever she mentions Damascus, she’s very sketchy.” He opened the diary and read from it. “This entry is dated a week ago. ‘Damascus called again. He won’t take no for an answer.’”

Adam and I exchanged a look. “Why would the leader of the vampire coven be asking out a mage?” I asked.

“You’re assuming a lot,” Zen said. “He could have been asking her anything.”

I nodded. “True. But still, with his resources, it seems odd he’d resort to asking a mage for help.”

“Have you met him?” Brooks asked.

I grimaced and shook my head. “Not formally.”

“Wait,” Giguhl said. “Does that have something to do with what you said last night about not being on good terms with NOLA’s vamps?”

I hesitated before nodding.

Several pairs of judgey glances shot my direction. “What did you do?” Giguhl asked on a sigh.

“It’s all because of that time we came here to look for Maisie.” My grandmother, Lavinia, had kidnapped my twin sister, Maisie, and brought her to New Orleans a couple of years earlier. Adam, Giguhl, and I had spent a few weeks in the Big Easy looking for Granny Dearest and ended up having a huge battle in a cemetery that ended in her demise. Good riddance. “I guess Damascus took over as the leader after a lot of New Orleans’s vampires got recruited by Lavinia and her goons. Apparently we killed several of his friends, though.”

Several groans filtered through the room.

“And then when we moved to town permanently, I was so busy trying to get the Dark Races Council up and running that I neglected to set up a meeting with White and he took it as a deliberate snub.”

Adam frowned at me. “How do you know all this if you’ve never met him?”

I shrugged. “Nyx told me. Apparently White went to her to lodge a complaint. She called to tell me about it, but I guess the harm had already been done because when I offered to meet with him, he refused.”

“Yep, that sounds like Damascus,” Zen said, nodding.

“Wait, you know him?” I asked.

“Of course. Not that it’s anything to brag about. He’s a real jackass.”

One of my favorite things about Zen was she didn’t mince words. Plus she was an excellent judge of character. I blew out a resigned breath. “Well, if we want to get to the bottom of this, we’re going to have to talk to him. Do you think you could arrange a meeting?” I asked her.

She laughed. “Please. He would never accept an invitation from a human.”

“Well,” Brooks said, “we definitely need to talk to him. The last entry in Cadence’s diary mentions that she finally agreed to meet with him.” He looked up. “That was the night before she went missing.”

Everyone looked at me expectantly. “Crap. All right. I’ll talk to Nyx.”

Brooks’s face cleared. “Thank you so much, Sabina.”

OCTOBER 29

Nyx agreed to meet me the next night at Muriel’s, one of my favorite restaurants in the Quarter. Luckily, she’d decided to stick around town after the council meeting to enjoy the Halloween festivities.

The room the maître d’ put us in held a single table and two walls covered in racks of wine. A third wall held a large window that looked down on Jackson Square and the inky expanse of the Mississippi at night. Down on the street below, revelers were dancing through the streets in costumes with plastic cups of Abita or hurricanes from Pat O’Brien’s clasped in their hands.

Nyx looked up as I approached. “How do you think they’d react if they knew monsters like us actually exist?”

I frowned at her pensive tone. “They’re all too drunk to care.”

I took my seat next to her and ordered a drink from the hovering fae waiter who’d shown me to the table. He was of slight build and had long hair pulled back into a neat queue; most humans wouldn’t know he wasn’t one of their kind. I only knew he was fae because of the telltale lavender scent rising off his pale skin. I was glad he wasn’t a vamp who might report the details of our chat back to Damascus White.

“So,” Nyx began, “how was the trip to Europe? I didn’t get to ask during that clusterfuck of a council meeting.”

I rolled my eyes at the memory of the drama between Queen Maeve and Mike Romulus. “Everything was fine. Just glad to be home for a while. How are things in L.A.?”

She sighed. “I’ve got some old-school vamps protesting the laws we just passed allowing our race to interbreed with the others.”

“Nothing too violent, I hope.”

She made a dismissive noise. “Nothing I can’t handle. Slade is meeting with some of them this week to try and make them see sense.”

I laughed. “If anyone can set them right…” I let that comment drift off. As close as Nyx and I were, the fact she had been with my father and was now sleeping with my ex was still a bit of an awkward topic. Don’t get me wrong, I thought she and Slade were perfect for each other, but it was still kind of odd.

The waiter delivered our drinks and proceeded to share that night’s specials. We both ordered—two steaks, bloody. Once he was gone, Nyx leaned forward across the table.

“You going to tell me the real reason you asked for this dinner?” she asked. “Not that I don’t enjoy your company, but you don’t normally go for the girls’ night.”

I took a sip of my Sazerac. “I need a favor.”

“Of course,” she said immediately. “Anything.”

“I need to set up a meeting with the head of the NOLA coven.”

“Damascus White? Why?”

“One of Brooks’s friends is missing and we have reason to believe she’s been in contact with White recently.”

She paused before answering. “You believe he’s involved in her disappearance?”

This is where I had to be careful. Even though Nyx and I were good friends, outright accusing one of her own with foul play was not a smart move. “We have no reason to believe he’s directly responsible. Just want to see if we can piece together a picture of her activities before she disappeared. Her diary indicated she had a meeting with him. We’re hoping he might be able to shed light on what she was into.”

“Okay,” she said. “I can arrange it for whenever you prefer.”

“Sooner the better,” I said. “Thanks, Nyx.”

She smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Just be prepared for him to refuse.”

A thin vein of embarrassment wove its way into my voice. “I was kind of hoping you could do some gentle arm twisting if that turned out to be the case.”

She laughed. “I see. Well, I can try, but I’m afraid it’s not like the old days when your grandmother ran the race.”

My grandmother, Lavinia, had been the Alpha female in the triumvirate of vampires who had controlled the race for centuries. She’d led through a combination of violence, cunning, and more violence. Now, the structure of the vampire government was much more democratic, which was a good thing, even if it was damned inconvenient sometimes.

“Just do what you can. I promise to tread lightly with him.”

Nyx made a strangled noise that one might mistake for a chuckle. “Just be prepared. You may have to do some groveling.”

“We’ll see.” I pushed down the annoyance that rose at the humor in her tone. Adam’s ex had better really be in trouble and not just off on a lark or I was going to kick her ass when we found her.