Cold Reign, Page 2

  I let the teeth go, but the hinge in Davide’s mouth didn’t fold back up and the fangs stayed down. I tilted the head to get a better look and his hair ripped through his scalp, sending the head swinging, throwing bloody spatter. I dropped the head and it landed in the bag with a plasticized squish. Eli tied the orange bag-ties in a knot. I tossed my hip-length hair out of the way, hefted the shower-curtained body over my shoulder, and stood. As a skinwalker-no-longer-in-hiding, I could let my true strength show, and I’m a good bit stronger than a human.

  Body hanging behind me, bloody fluid splatting softly on the wood floor and the back of my boots, I looked around the gym and realized I was being filmed by a couple dozen cells. Just ducky. The sounds of multiple sirens echoed through the night, drawing nearer. I wanted to be long gone by the time the cops arrived. “Ummm . . . Thank you for your forbearance,” I said to the room, and skedaddled, Eli right behind me.

  Out in the damp night air, Eli beeped open the back of the armored SUV and said, “Forbearance? Babe.”

  “I know. I had a brain fart.”

  He was almost smiling, which, for the former Army Ranger, was tantamount to a belly laugh. “Forbearance,” he muttered.

  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.

  “Heathern,” I accused in my best Appalachian mountain accent, lifting the skin from the box he’d tossed it in. “I’ll rescue the poor, cast-aside crispy bits. Yes, my precious, I’ll eat you,” I cooed to the fried flesh. Biting down.

  Eli didn’t even look my way, but he did let the faintest sound of a sigh escape. Long-suffering, that’s Eli. As I licked my fingers clean, he got out and unwrapped the body, took a few dozen photos, and then transferred the remains to the back of an armored Lincoln that pulled up beside us. Visible inside the tinted glass were Wrassler and Jodi, who were interrupting a date to run a fanghead errand. Neither looked happy at the interruption. Jodi was a cop. Dating Wrassler, head of operations at vamp HQ, had to be some kind of conflict of interest. Having a dead body in the back had to be some other kind of conflict of interest. I fluttered my fingers at her and held up thumb and pinkie, telling her I’d call. She frowned at me but pointed at her nails. She wanted mani-pedis, which was a waste of time and money for me since every time I shifted into animal form, the paint peeled off. Being a skinwalker is tough on the girly part of life.

  As they pulled away, Eli closed the hatch and took a private call, standing at the back of the vehicle, and I deliberately didn’t listen in, figuring it was his girlfriend, Syl. When he got back inside, his mouth was tight, and he wore what I called his battle face. Utterly expressionless, utterly focused.

  “Problem?”

  “Personal.”

  I shrugged. Eli and his snuggle-buns were on the outs because he refused to go on a cruise with her. I didn’t know the particulars and didn’t want to. “Good. I’m not a marriage counselor.”

  Eli shrugged back. It was the action of a man pretending not to care but who cared very badly. I had seen the same expression and body language on him when my own honeybunch had dropped by for the game. Eli on the couch, pretending to ignore when Bruiser’s feet and mine intertwined in a wool-sock-footed twiddling match. It hadn’t been romantic. It had been playful and silly. But Eli had turned to stone. Yeah. Things were bad between Eli and Syl.

  Not long after, we turned off Highway 23 onto Avenue G, passing Plaquemines Parish government buildings, one-story structures constructed of white metal siding and stained clapboards, and various flags flying overhead. In the parking lot there were two cop cars, government cars, and parking for the parish levee, the manmade hill constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi within its banks. At the top of the levee, blue lights flashed into the night.

  We crested the levee’s artificial hill, pulled over, braked, and watched. Multiple law enforcement agencies were present, some of them crime scene techs wearing white hazmat-type suits, complete with masks, gloves, and booties. And there was a stink of dead fish I could smell even in human form, even inside the SUV. “This is not what I expected for a vamp and a human pulled from the water.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” Eli said. He handed me a coms set and I put on the gear, clipping the cell-phone-sized unit to my belt and inserting the earbud. Eli did the same and tested the connections to Alex. We were live.

  We sat in the dark for all of five minutes before a uniformed officer approached, and we put our hands up where they could be seen. She knocked on the window and Eli let it down. Before I could offer to get out an ID, the woman said, “Younger and Yellowrock?”

  “That’s us,” Eli said, turning off the SUV.

  She shined a flashlight inside and blinded us. I squinted against the glare. “Leave your vehicle. This way, please,” she said.

  Still blinking, I got out of the car and trailed the cop down to the ferry landing, closer and closer to the fish stink. The mist thickened and swirled, coiling and dancing on the altering air temps, moving with the river breeze.

  The Belle Chasse Ferry Landing was a narrow two-lane road on a sturdy pier over the water. Well off the shore, the road met a wide wharf where two ferries were moored at a dock or a jetty or something. A late news crew from WGNO, the ABC station in NOLA, were milling around at the end of the road, held back by local cops and crime scene tape. The African-American woman talking into the camera spotted us as we boarded and I heard her whisper, “Jane Yellowrock. Get the shot. Is that the MOC? No. Has to be that hunky partner of hers.”

  A cop waved us onto the ferry and out of sight, but I could hear the reporter saying, “Put this with the basketball players’ cell footage from the gym and we are golden.”

  Eli breathed a laugh.

  “Shut up,” I griped.

  He laughed louder.

  The chuckles stopped when we reached the end of the boat. Stern? Bow? I wasn’t sure, since both ends were straight, without the curving bow on, say, the cruise ship Eli refused to get on. The ferry was rusted, the red paint missing in many places, and the sidewalls dented. The white structure where the driver stood was in need of a good coat of marine paint. I later figured out it might be called the wheelhouse, and saying the driver steered the boat would have proven me to be woefully lacking in nautical terms. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut.

  I leaped to the top of the wide sidewall to get a better view, the rubberized bottoms of my boots gripping the rubberized railing with ease. A small crowd of parish and state dignitaries and uniformed officers from various interconnected agencies policing the river were standing well back of two bodies, which were lying on the deck in a tangle of ropes and netting. There was a buoy of some kind, a few dead fish trapped in the netting, and what looked like a midsized tree. Everything was wet and trails of river water ran off, as if the mess had been pulled from the water and dropped. I didn’t ask how everything got here, didn’t ask permission; I just stepped down to the boat deck and walked in as if I belonged there, then across the mess to the bodies.

  From the comment about the human, tangled in the arms and hair of a vamp, I had expected to find a human man with a female vamp, which proved how stilted my own social and sexual expectations were. It was two males, both dressed in the ruins of gray uniforms and leather shoes, one with very long brown hair. Gray uniforms meant a Pellissier Clan blood-servant and scion, the ones who worked in the clan home itself, the ones most trusted. The rotted cloth suggested they too were from the reign of Leo’s uncle, Amaury.

  The human was in an advanced stage of decomp. The vamp, however, was far less rotten. He had flesh on his torso and long bones, and his joints were still attached with connective tissue. He had no eyelids or lips, as if something had eaten them away. But his eyes were still intact and his jaws were still working at the long-missing flesh of his human partner. Little snap, snap, snap sounds of jaws clicking, his upper and lower canines tapping. Canines like Berkins’. Well, ducky. We had two connections, dog fangs and uniforms.

  Over the coms, I heard Alex say, “Holy necrophilia, Batman.”

  Eli was sending live video. The vid would be a help if we needed to go over the scene again. Eli muttered, as if to me but really to Alex, “Silence is golden.” Louder he added, “Other than the bodies, looks like fishing line, maybe some shrimping nets, buoys, and a waterlogged tree.”

  I made an mmmm sound, drew a vamp-killer, holding it at my side, and squatted over the vamp.

  “Don’t get too close, lady,” a Plaquemines deputy said from ten feet away. “It bites.”

  The vamp stopped snapping and his head turned slowly toward the deputy. The sclera of the vamp’s eyes were liver-disease yellow and his irises were bright blue. He’d once had a narrow mustache and high cheekbones, a dimpled chin. I had a feeling he had been a very pretty man in his undead state, despite the notch in his left ear, one that had never regrown, suggesting it had been given to him in a prevamp state and never healed properly. His mouth opened, revealing the dog-style upper and lower fangs and his back molars.

  Vamp-fast, he lunged at the deputy. Even from ten feet out, the vamp caught the man’s sleeve in his jaws. Everyone screamed. Humans jumped back.
Service weapons were drawn.

  My vamp-killer shot up almost on its own. Pierced through the vamp’s throat and out the back of his neck. But my aim wasn’t perfect, or the vamp dodged the thrust. The edge slid into the spine at the wrong angle. Sliced along the spinal processes with a skittering force. The bone trapped the edge. I hated when that happened. The vamp’s head slid to the side as the tendons on the right snapped in two. The vamp’s head lolled and the deputy’s sleeve came free as I cut backhand. Jerked the weapon free. The vamp focused on me.

  There was no blood in the huge wound. The vamp hadn’t fed on the living since it rose. But the eyes didn’t look away and the thing’s jaws were again snapping fast. Even bloodless, the vampire was healing. I finished the job with a cut that completely severed the head.

  “Oh,” the deputy squeaked, backpedaling to the far side. He sounded surprised, but really, what else was gonna happen? That’s the advantage of lots of blade practice and really sharp blades—steel versus flesh wins every time.

  The head rolled off. Bounced and landed on the tree. A broken branch speared into the neck and held the head in place like a warning on a castle wall, but low down. I wanted to laugh, but it probably wouldn’t be seemly in front of all the officers.

  To Alex I said, “What do you know about this pair?”

  “I’ve been cross-checking police reports. Apparently since the rising of Davide Berkins, keeping watch in graveyards is suddenly chic among the NOLA fraternities, and this rising was witnessed,” the Kid said into my earbud. “According to eyewitness reports of the risings, it looks like they crawled out of the coffin together. We now have names and prelim histories. Oliver Estridge is the human and the vamp is Mitchel Hopkins. Histories say the cause of death was a murder-suicide, a lovers’ tiff between vamp and human. They were buried together in 1909.”