The wind whipped in, bringing vamp scents, pepper and lily and papyrus, more acerbic scents like turmeric and sage. And human blood. And sex. Always that. Always together. I leaped over the railing—gunwale? side?—and came face-to-face with Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans, and the two minor-level vamps and three human-dinners-on-two-legs who were fanned out behind him. I glanced at each and drew in the air in little bursts of breath, taking in their faces and scents to remember and catalog later. Leo’s territory had grown and there were a lot of newbies I hadn’t gotten to know yet. Worse, we had fangheads visiting from distant U.S. cities who had sworn to Leo, back when an epidemic threatened the U.S. vamps. There were too many newbies to make anyone safe.
I opened my mouth to say hi to the chief suckhead but caught myself. “Pellissier,” I said, much more politely and only a beat too late.
“Enforcer,” Leo said.
“Sir,” Eli said to him. “You heard?”
“I did,” Leo said. “So did the lovely reporter. She has one of the new directional microphones developed by the military.”
“Was it a gift from the MOC?” Eli asked.
“Such is always a possibility.” Leo smiled, the professional smile, the one he shared with the public, one that never reached his eyes. “She was incensed. I am certain the footage will make its way onto the television newscast tonight.
“However, we have a greater problem. Wait for me at my limo.” He stepped gracefully over the side of the boat and dropped to the deck, landing with the poise and balance of a ballet dancer. Or a swordsman. Leo was dressed casually, for him, in a black suit and white shirt. Black shoes, no tie. His shoulder-length black hair was tied back with a black ribbon in a loose queue, and it gleamed in the harsh lights as he strode toward the bodies and the law officers. The MOC was ticked off, his magic pulsing out in a series of waves that raised the hair on my arms.
I glanced back at the reporter and her cameraman, who was working with a mic on a long arm, one that had an inverted umbrella-shaped top. The umbrella part was a clear material that waved slightly in the breeze.
“Jane?” Eli asked.
“Wait,” I muttered. “I want to see this.”
Leo walked to the sheriff and looked up at her. Leo had been well fed as a human and was tall for his time but not for this era. He focused on her eyes and smiled. I felt his power shift and wrap around the woman. She extended a hand. All by herself. Or so it would look to the reporter and her cameraman. Leo accepted it. And his smile intensified, that beguiling, electrifying, terrifying smile of the mesmerizing predator, the stare of the viper, the gaze of the raptor, the snare of the lover, intense and penetrating. His magic whispered along my face and neck and throat, teased through my hair.
“Pansy,” Leo said. “It’s been years.”
“What?” she whispered, her eyes too wide, bewitched. Or bevamped.
“You are as lovely as ever, my darling,” Leo said, lifting her hand to his lips.
My eyebrows went up.
Eli laughed softly, the tone pure evil. “Smart bastard.”
Pansy shook herself like a dog shakes off cold water. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.
“Now, now, you must forgive me for not keeping you close. You were destined for much better things than one of my playthings.”
“What?” Pansy said, disconcerted and with a dawning anger.
But Leo took Pansy’s hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm. Inexorably, he turned her to the side, vamp strength overpowering the human musculature. Pansy’s body language indicated that she was trying to decide what to do: scream, deny, resist. But the half second of indecision sealed her fate as she again met the eyes of the MOC. Her body relaxed and she followed him to the side. Pansy was clearly one of those humans easily mesmerized. Leo’s vamp crew shook the hands of the other law enforcement officers while his humans knelt on the deck, where they began the process of tucking the bodies into body bags. Two of the deputies started to argue, but the vamps did . . . something. And the complaints stopped.
For Leo and the vamps to be using this much power, they surely had fed from the body of the Son of Darkness hanging in the lowest basement at vamp HQ. The blood of that thing was addicting. I really needed to find a way to kill it. I’d tried silver poisoning and cutting out its heart, and so far it hadn’t begun to decompose. Scuttlebutt said it seemed to be healing. Maybe burning the SOD in a kiln or a cremation retort would work.
“Come on,” Eli said. “We need to talk.”
“Okay.” I frowned but followed my partner back along the pier to the limo.
Over the earbuds Alex said, “So Leo used to date Pansy. But he dropped her? And her paranormal-hating is really woman-scorned stuff?” I could hear keys clicking and soft tapping in the background as he checked into Pansy’s past.
“I doubt it,” Eli said. “Though it doesn’t really matter what happened, if anything, between them. That’s how the press and her constituents will read it. With that one line, Leo put doubt on her entire paranormal-hating campaign strategy. Spin. Spin is everything.”
“That’s Uncle Sam’s training, isn’t it?” I asked
Eli slanted a look my way. “That’s pure politics, Babe.”
The chauffeur opened the limo door and Eli and I got in. The privacy panel was up, and Eli turned off his cell. I glanced at mine, hoping for a text from Bruiser, but there was nothing. I turned it off and gave the cell to Eli, and he tucked them both into his gear bag. He turned on a little electronic buzzer inside and zipped the bag shut. The white noise kept anyone from using the cells as listening devices. The limo was swept every day to remove possible bugs. Leo did business in here, and he wanted total confidentiality. Now we could talk freely.
“Leo just ruined her career, didn’t he?” I said.
“Hatred is its own reward.”
“Who said that? Sun Tzu?” Eli was reading The Art of War for the hundredth time.
“Eli Younger. Reworked from some kitty cartoon.”
“So why did we go black?” I asked, talking about the cells.
“Because the Kid sent me a text before we got here. It’s about the vamps’ lower fangs. There was a rogue-vamp blood-family in Bavaria back in the fifteen hundreds. They had upper hinged fangs and stationary lower fangs. They were curved and were used for tearing out the victim’s throats. Naturaleza 2.0.”
Naturaleza vamps treated all humans as prey, to be used, hunted, drunk dry, abused. They called humans cattle. Mithrans, like the vamps in New Orleans, weren’t much better, but at least they gave lip service to the importance of humans. And then the date hit me. “Berkins was turned in 1512.”
“Revenants are most easily raised by their sire or the sire of the bloodline, the big kahuna of the clan bloodline. So if the person who turned him, or said big kahuna, is currently in New Orleans, that person might be able to raise him as a revenant.”
It took a single breath to clarify for me. “An EV is here?”
“Yeah. A European vamp. At least one. That’s what Alex thinks.”
“Why? Why show up and tip your hand about who you are?”
Eli opened the limo fridge, popped two Coke cans, icy and dripping with condensation, and held one out to me. I drank, not even tasting the cola. “Insufficient data.”
“So who would it be? Who would the master be?”