Together we tossed the body into the back, put the head beside it, and hopped in the cab. We drove away only moments before the first cop car turned in to the school parking lot. If we got stopped now, with a dead body in back, this could get messy. I was licensed to kill rogue vamps, but not all local law officials knew that or respected that. If they stopped us, the paperwork would be a pain in the butt. But we made it out and started east on 23 back toward home. Without my needing to ask, Eli turned on the heat and the seat warmers, which were a little bit of heaven as far as I was concerned.
On the other side of the windows, the damp air of very early evening turned quickly into a mist, and then into a heavy fog, obscuring the roadway. The streetlights were halos of light in the night haze. Eli slowed, the wipers not much help in the dense vapor that so often passed as air in New Orleans. But it was almost pleasant, driving in the ground cloud, isolated from everything around us. Eli and I had never needed to fill the space between us with chatter or radio hosts or music. We were comfortable in the silence. Well, as comfortable as we could be with a dead vamp in back. And with my stomach growling. I needed calories to make up for the shift from Beast to human, and Eli had promised me steak. Rare. With double-stuffed baked potatoes full of sour cream and bacon. I was starving but didn’t want to compromise and get fast food. Not when I had a feast waiting back home.
We were halfway back to vamp HQ when the SUV’s system dinged and the Kid said over the speaker, “Turn around and head back to Belle Chasse. Sending you the coordinates now. We got more DBs, one fangy, and these are weird.”
DBs meant dead bodies. “Weirder than a vamp who’s been buried for two hundred years rising revenant and killing people?” I asked.
“Pretty much. We got a human tangled in the arms and hair of a vamp, pulled from the river.”
“Any of our people missing?” I asked.
“No one,” he said.
I had been hunting the location on my cell and said, “That’s less than half a mile from the high school. And not far, as the crow flies, from where the sailors’ bodies were found.”
“There’s Navy housing in Belle Chasse,” Alex said, his tone saying he was thinking that might be significant.
“Naval reserves use it now,” Eli said, making a legal U-turn. “That’s two attacks on or near U.S. Navy property. A rev with a seafaring tattoo. Maybe someone or something is targeting the Navy.” Ditto on the serious tone. Eli kept in touch with military types in New Orleans and surrounding areas and he wasn’t averse to talking to grunts, jarheads, missile sponges, squids, coasties, zoomies, and any other insulting name he could think of when conversing with them. The Army Ranger considered himself the best of the best, even better than a SEAL, though there had been intense (physical) discussions (fights) of that subject among members of the military and former military in the past. Insults and physical altercations seemed to be a bonding experience with former and active military alike.
I remembered the anchor tattoo. Had Berkins been a seaman? We needed to see if he had other tattoos. “We’ll check the fangy DBs out,” Eli said to Alex. “Tell Leo to send a car for the remains of the old pervert Berkins. We can meet somewhere near the juncture of Business Ninety and Highway Twenty-Three.”
“There’s a Popeye’s at Lafayette and Westbank Expressway,” Alex said. “You can feed Jane and dump the body at the same time.”
“There’s something distinctly disgusting about that statement, especially when I was promised steak, but Popeye’s’ll do,” I said as I crawled into the backseat and zipped open my larger gear bag. I pulled out better clothes than I had carried strapped around my neck in my Beast gobag.
Brevity itself, Eli ended the call with, “Later.” He glanced once at me in the rearview and I gave him a slight dip of my head. Leo’s uncle’s butler had risen revenant and attacked and killed sailors. Now two more strange DBs, one fangy, pulled from the Mississippi River. Another revenant? We couldn’t talk about it, not with the cells and the SUV’s com system rigged to share every syllable with Leo. But soon. After dawn for sure.
Eli tilted the rearview mirror up to give me privacy and I started stripping. The lightweight clothing I had dressed in when I shifted from Beast to human during the final moments of chasing Berkins wouldn’t do for long. I was cold. My arms and legs and the back of my neck were pebbled and tight with the chill. My gold nugget necklace swung on its chain as I contorted my body in the confined space.
I went back to Eli’s last statements. “And the Navy reserves housed near the attacks means what?” I asked.
“No idea,” Eli said. “But the attack on the sailors and the gunpowder tattoos on the butler bothered me. Now we have another vamp DB on or near an old naval port. Did you see the skull and crossbones with sword? On Berkins’ other arm?”
“No,” I grunted, zipping my jeans and weaponing up. My fighting leathers would have been nice, but they were back at the house. “Wait.” I looked up at the back of his head. “Gunpowder?”
Eli made breathy laughing sounds and said, “Back in the day, sailors didn’t have ink. They made do with what they had, like gunpowder mixed with urine. Tattoos had significance and more than a little superstition in them. I think there might have been a name inked in as part of the tattoo, but it was blurred by time and scarring. He might have more, and they might lead us to whatever made him rise revenant. Alex, make sure whoever picks up the body gets photos, front and back and the soles of the feet.”
“Copy,” Alex said, over coms.
Tattoos. Naval history. Back in the day, vamps had crossed the oceans the same way humans had, via ships, so seafaring blood-servants were likely to have been a thing back then. Confluence of thought processes was becoming more and more common the longer my partners and I worked together, though it seemed like a stretch to think this was an attack on the Navy based on such scant evidence. Not that I was saying that to Eli. I finished dressing and crawled back up front. I didn’t get cold, as a rule, but this weather was abnormally cold for the Deep South. I buckled in and braided my black hair by feel.
We pulled through the Popeye’s and I ordered a sixteen-piece, spicy, “Bonafide Family Meal.” The fried chicken smell overpowered the dead-vamp stink—intensifying because the heater was on—and the food was fabo. I had tracked the thrice-dead fanghead in Beast form, and the shift back to human had left me hungry. Shifting used energy, and skinwalkers used calories to shift. As we waited for the body pickup, I ate fourteen chicken pieces, the mashed potatoes, and all the biscuits, leaving the slaw, the green beans, and two bird legs for my healthy-eating partner. While we waited, parked in the shadows, he inhaled the veggies and peeled the fried layer off the chicken before munching down.