“I can get six. Guys I trust. Guys who can each do the work of two or three.”
Six guys with the level of training Derek was talking about, on such notice? Alarm stole over me on little kitten feet. Softly, I asked, “You raising an army, Derek Lee?”
“Nothing to worry your pretty little Cherokee head about.”
“I wouldn’t want to have to fight you, Derek.”
“Not to worry, Princess. And not to stick your nose into.”
I was silent a moment, then breathed my irritation out into the cell phone. “Don’t kill anyone tonight unless you have to.” Derek laughed and clicked off. I stared at the phone for a long moment before going back to work.
While the laptop booted up, I pulled out research papers. I had photocopies of one entire file cabinet from the woo-woo room in NOPD, courtesy of the last investigation I’d done. Cops didn’t let civilians have access to their files without very good reasons, and I recognized the honor and the trust that had led Jodi Richoux to send them to me. I kept the papers in boxes, padlocked in the bedroom closet with my weapons and other gear.
The files were from the vampire file and included their histories, wars, clans, and info on individuals, as well as a lot of hooey, better known as information obtained from confidential informants. Jodi had included a few folders from the witch file cabinet containing info on the local witches, but a quick search through the boxes that comprised my filing system revealed nothing about weres.
I updated the file on the vamp war of 1915, including the info from Bruiser about his mother, Lady Beatrice, e-mailed it to Jodi for her records, and Googled weres. There was a lot of stuff on the net in just the last two days. A lot of stuff, though at this point, I could find no other types of weres on the Internet—only cats and wolves. I surfed photographs, some of them Hollywood stills, some that might be real, of weres shifting. Found some viral video of the real thing, of a South American were-cat, a male jaguar who looked deadly in either of his forms. There were interviews with were-cats, putting to rest rumors about rabies among the species, discussing mating habits, and a frank discussion of transmission of the were-contagion, one thing that Hollywood got right—a bite. The cats all agreed that biting a human was against their laws and the one crime worthy of a death sentence. Which meant that Leo and Bruiser were probably safe from reprisals for killing Henri and the other wolves, assuming Roul was serious about pursuing Leo only in human courts of law.
Once, while I worked, I felt ... something. An odd reaction, as if I wasn’t alone. I got up and went through the house, stepping silently, a vamp-killer in hand, listening, watching, scenting quietly. But I was alone. Evangelina hadn’t come in. No one was there and no unfamiliar scents lingered on the air to mark intruders. The sensation wasn’t like my predator senses, alerting me as when something, or someone, hunted me, but it was odd. And it faded quickly.
Back at the laptop, I researched real wolves, and discovered that there were only four kinds in the U.S.—the gray wolf (Canis lupus), Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), the red wolf (Canis rufus), and the coyote (Canis latrans). I hadn’t even known the coyote was part of the wolf family. I’d thought they were a type of wild dog. Around the world, the species and subspecies of wolves was varied, with the gray wolf the largest, and the only one that might be big enough to shift, mass for mass, from a modern-sized human to a beast. I’d seen them change, and there hadn’t been any obvious mass transfer, so I was betting on gray wolf for the weres I’d fought, though the coat color differences seemed more doglike, with a heavy shift toward Siberian husky.
The rest of the morning, I studied the history of weres online, looking into the worldwide mythos while keeping an eye out for anything new that might pertain to skinwalkers, not that I had much hope. I routinely Googled skinwalkers and had never discovered anything about a nonhuman or a subspecies like me. There was a lot of nonsense about weres online, but nothing suggested a skinwalker. As usual.
By noon I was hungry again, tired, and annoyed. Rick still hadn’t called. A small part of my brain was whispering that I deserved to be dumped, that I was nowhere near attractive enough to date pretty boy Rick LaFleur. A bigger part of me was whispering that I deserved to be dumped because I’d abandoned my no-sex-until-marriage, Christian-children’s-home upbringing. I was sleeping with him, I’d skipped church to be with him, and I’d caught myself cussing without my life being in danger. Oh, and I’d been having erotic thoughts about Bruiser when I was sleeping with Rick. Guilt. Guilt like a heavy wool blanket.
Other women didn’t have guilt, I knew that with a certainty. My house backed up to a whorehouse and none of the girls working there seemed to have any guilt at all. But a truckload of guilt was dumped on me for sleeping with one guy. Go figure.
Not able to deal with my own traitorous brain, or thoughts about my possibly traitorous boyfriend, I flopped down on the bed and closed my eyes. And when that made the images in my head worse, I grabbed my gym bag and hopped on Bitsa hoping that a good pummeling at the dojo might help.
My new sensei was a hapkido black belt, second dan, with a black belt in tae kwon do and a third black belt in combat tai chi, though he had given up competition years ago. Everyone who trained with him knew he thought competition was for sissies and martial arts were for fighting and killing. His style was perfect for me, because I studied mixed disciplines and had never gone for any belt. I trained to stay alive, not to look snazzy, all belted up, or to show off a wall full of trophies. My fighting style could best be described as dirty, an aggressive amalgam of styles, geared to the fast and total annihilation of an attacker.
The dojo was in the back room of a jewelry store on St. Louis, open to the public only after store hours, but open to a select few students during the day. I had quickly made it from casual sparring partner to serious student and I had my own key. I parked Bitsa at the curb and turned down the narrow service alley. It was all of thirty inches wide, damp and dim.
I keyed myself in through the small door of the dojo and locked it after me. The long room had wood floors, two white-painted walls, one mirrored wall, and one wall of French doors that looked out over a lush, enclosed garden planted with tropical and semitropical plants. Cats were sunning themselves in the garden, seeming to come and go as they pleased, eating from bowls piled with food pellets, and drinking out of the large fountain shaped like a mountain stream that splashed in one corner. A weak smell of fish suggested that koi or goldfish had once swum in the pool at the bottom of the fountain, but the cats had likely made that an unworkable environment though I had never asked the real reason that the pool contained only plants. The garden was surrounded by two- and three-storied buildings and was overlooked by porches dripping with vines and flowering potted plants. Sensei lived upstairs in one of the upper apartments.
I punched the button that told sensei he had a student, dropped my bag in one corner, and stripped off the jacket and pants hiding my workout clothes—stretchy shorts and T, jogging bra and undies beneath. I unrolled the practice mats and started warming up. Ten minutes later, sensei showed up, though he tried not to let me know he had dropped into the garden from his apartment above.
Most of his students weren’t able to tell when the man literally dropped in, but with Beast’s acute hearing and sense of smell, I always knew. The smell of Korean cabbage he loved so much was a dead giveaway. Sensei, whose real name was Daniel, attacked when my back was turned. Leaped through the open doors, seeing me smiling at him in the mirrored wall as he hurtled through the air. For an instant he frowned. Then he was passing through the air where I had been standing and landed cat-footed to sweep out with his leg. I leaped above it. Kicked with the heel of my foot, straight for his nose. He bobbed his head and shifted his body left. Counter-punched with his right. All in about a half second. And the fight was on.
I was still hiding that I wasn’t human, or at least not fully human, and pulled my punches and kicks, keeping them almost human slow, and almost human strength. I was a lot faster and stronger when I drew on Beast’s abilities. An hour later, I was sweating, stinky, breathing hard, and felt a lot better. And if sensei had a few more bruises than usual, well, I blamed it on Rick.
Not ready to head home, I hopped on Bitsa and tooled my way out of the Quarter to the Shooters Club off Tulane Avenue. I paid my fee and bought regular ammo, as the silver rounds used for hunting vamps was too expensive for practice. Luckily, I had the place to myself because I wasn’t in the mood to be with people. I hung my man-shaped targets and hit the button that shoved the target holder out to twenty feet to start. I’d push it back and back until it was finally at fifty feet, though no handgun is worth much at that range, no matter what shooters do on TV.
I blew off a lot more steam working with my H&K 9 mil, going through three boxes of rounds before I was satisfied with my precision. I wasn’t a bad shot, and I knew a good gun and well-practiced hand-eye shot coordination was essential for a vamp hunter, but I preferred blades and stakes and martial arts to bullets any day. With them, I knew a vamp was dead.
Still, when I was done, I felt better, and bought a new holster at the front of the shop, one made of supple black leather with black sequins, of all things, that might fit with an evening gown. I had a party to attend, and permission to come armed. No one said that I had to look unfeminine just because I was loaded for were and vamp. I had never thought of holsters as sexy, but this one came close.
When I left the shooting range, I dropped by Katie’s Ladies, the whorehouse run by my landlady—when she wasn’t in a coffin filled with vamp blood and healing from a mortal wound. Deon, the three-star chef, answered the door.
The slight, dark-skinned man blocked my way in, one hand on the door, the other on the jamb, his brows raised and mouth pursed. “The help don’ use the front door, tartlet,” he said, in his lovely island accent.
I crossed my arms and cocked out a hip. “Deon, you do know that I could break you in two with one hand tied behind my back, right?”
