Skinwalker

CHAPTER 12 Naked vamps. And the food was naked too

I should have been alarmed. Terrified. Instead, I stretched and sighed. My pain was gone. I flexed my fist, inspected my arm, watching the play of whole muscles beneath unblemished skin. I tugged gently, suggesting by the action that Leo release me. Not fighting him, not jerking free, none of the motions that prey might make. I knew better than to fight myself free from a predator. Attack or play dead if one wanted to stay alive. Edoda’s lessons. Returned to me. A gift of this predator. This killer. So, gently, calmly, I pulled my arm free of his grip. And Leo Pellissier slowly began to seep back into his own eyes.

I smiled at him. And saw surprise swim into his gaze.

“Thank you,” I said, knowing I thanked him more for the return of a memory than for healing. I reached slowly toward him with my healed arm, fingers brushing the skin of his neck. He breathed out with the touch. I curled the tendril of his hair around my fingers, my tendons restored, healed, the motion pain free.

When his eyes were not human but no longer fully vampy, he turned his face into my palm and rested his cheek against my fingers, his black hair caught between hand and face. “What are you?” he asked, wonder in his voice. When I didn’t answer, he whispered, “Your blood tastes of oak and cedar and the winter wind. Tastes wild, like the world once was. Come to my bed,” he breathed on my hand. “Tonight.”

I watched, knowing he was using his vamp voice on me, but not minding so very much. Not right now. He kissed my palm, his hair still tangled in my fingers, his lips cool, but soft. His eyes took mine, his gaze velvet lined but powerful, like a gilded cell. “Come to my bed.”

“No,” I murmured. “Not gonna happen.”

Slowly, he took my wrist in his chilled hand and pulled me from his hair, bending my arm and draping it across my body. He pressed my hand there, his cold, dead hand on my living warmth. His eyes searched mine. “Tell me what manner of supernatural you are,” he asked. “You are not were, I think. You are something I never tasted. Never heard told of.”

I let a faint smile steal over me. “Again,” I said, knowing I was risking whatever harmony currently existed between the head of the vamp council and me, “I’ll share my secrets with you, if you’ll tell me where the vamps came from. Originally. The very first vamp.”

He seemed to consider my bargain. “Why do you wish to know this?” he asked.

I settled into the couch, feeling rested and lethargic and vaguely happy, as if I’d downed a single chilled beer on a hot afternoon. “Because all supernaturals fear something. According to the mythos, weres, if they still exist, fear the moon, the planet Venus, and the goddess Diana, the huntress. A witch I know fears dark things that go bump in the night, demons and evil spirits and fickle djinns. And vamps fear the cross,” I said. “Not the Star of David, not the symbols of Mohammed, not the sight of a happy Bud dha, no matter how strong a believer’s faith or how certain his devotion. But the symbols of Christianity all vamps fear, even if wielded by a nonbeliever. So it isn’t faith that gives the symbols power. Theologians disagree about why. So I’ll trade. Tell me why vamps fear everything about the Church.”

“Our curse is different from the weres’ ancient curse, and different again from the elvish curse—and curses are what made us all.” Pain shadowed Leo’s face.

Elves? Crap. There are elves? And . . . weres. His words claimed that weres were real.

“No,” he said. He stood, fluid and sinuous, more graceful than a dancer. “You ask too much.” He looked around the room. Squared his shoulders as if they carried a burden. “George, I’m ready to leave.”

Bruiser rose from a chair at the table, the chair legs scraping on the wood floor, and crossed the room. Without glancing my way, he lifted and shook out a suit coat, the silk lining gleaming softly as he held it. Leo Pellissier unrolled his shirtsleeves and shrugged the jacket on. “Have the car brought around,” he said.

George flipped open a cell phone and punched a button. A moment later, he said, “Car,” and flipped the phone closed. Succinct, was our Bruiser.

Leo looked at me from his full height as I lay on the couch, unconcerned by the disparity in our positions, knowing, without understanding why, that I was safe, though my soft underbelly was exposed to his dominant position, his claws and teeth. Leo’s eyes burned into me, unvamped, human looking, yet still forceful, piercing, as if he would cut through the layers of my soul and uncover the secrets at the heart of me.

He said, “I heard drums. Smelled smoke. And there was this . . . mountain lion? Sitting beside you? But it didn’t kill you.” In a seeming non sequitur, he said, “They say you were raised by wolves.”

I let a smile fill my eyes. “No wolves.”

His head tilted slightly to the side as he studied me. As he considered whatever it was that he had picked up from my memory. “The cat. It wasn’t you.”

He was getting close. Beast stirred, uneasy. I let my smile widen, as if I found his statement even funnier than the news accounts that I was raised by wolves. “No,” I said. “It wasn’t me.” It was my father. It was a memory of my own lost past. And this, this vampire, gave it back. “Thank you,” I said again, offering no enlightenment.

“Healing is one responsibility of the elders among us. A . . .” He paused, his gaze turning inward, far away, as if caught still in my memories. Or his own? He seemed to shake himself mentally and looked at me, his black eyes faintly mocking. “A duty to those who serve us.”

“I work for you,” I said, feeling a bit smug, “for a price.” I eased my elbows under me and lifted my body to a half-sitting, half-reclining angle. “I’m not your servant. In fact, because you’re paying me to do something I want to do anyway, it seems like you’re more the servant than I am.”

Leo laughed, real humor crinkling the skin at his eyes. “Pert. Rude.”

I acknowledged the accusations with a nod.

“In that case,” he said, “I am happy to oblige.” He studied me a moment longer. “I wish you to attend a soiree tomorrow night.” He held up a hand at the derision and denial that spurted up from inside me. “Most of the vampires in the city will be there. It will be a rare opportunity for you to see them all in one place. We seldom gather in such large numbers.”

I watched his face, and if he had ulterior motives in issuing the invitation, I couldn’t spot them. “I own exactly one little black dress. One.”

“I’m certain it will be fine,” he said without expression. “Wear your hair down. No one will notice the dress.”

I laughed, sputtering with surprise.

“George will pick you up at midnight.” He glanced at his bodyguard and blood-servant. “We’re late. I hear the car.”

George nodded and stepped to the front door. I heard the lock click and the door opened on well-oiled hinges. And Leo Pellissier and his henchman were gone, leaving behind the scent of pepper and almonds, anise and papyrus, ink made of leaves and berries, and the warm scent of his blood and mine intertwined.

There was still time to shift and let Beast roam the night, but for once, the animal in my soul was silent, quiescent. I lay on the couch in the silent house, half napping, taking a moment I seldom allowed myself, to relax. Near six a.m. I found the energy to pull myself from the couch and move into the bedroom. I stripped and soaked my party clothes in a few capfuls of Woolite while I showered, letting hot water scrub the scents and blood off of me.

I was spending a lot of time in the shower these days, but I had to rewash my hair to get the vamp blood out, combing the long length before braiding it into a single French braid. When I was clean, partially groomed for church in a few hours, still oddly relaxed, I wrapped up in the robe and checked the new outfit. Amazingly, all the vamp blood and my blood had soaked out. Pleased that I hadn’t thrown away good money, I left the clothes hanging, dripping in the shower stall, and crawled into bed. I lay there, hearing the echoing plink of water, studying my healed arm as my body relaxed into the mattress.

Leo Pellissier had healed me with vamp blood and saliva. Pretty icky in some regards. In others . . . ? One of the reasons I accepted this job, other than the fact that council-sanctioned vamp-hunting gigs were few and far between, was the half hope, half fear that one of the older vamps might recognize my scent and tell me that they had met my kind before. Leo, who had to be centuries old—older than Katie, if vamp hierarchy made any kind of age-dominant sense—had no idea what I was. As far as I could tell, he didn’t know that skinwalkers existed. But weres and elves . . . He indicated they both were real, existing somewhere.

I pulled the covers over me as the air conditioner came on with a low hum, blowing chilled air into the house. The sheets were softer than any I owned. Probably high-thread-count Egyptian cotton or something. I usually slept on polyester pulled over a lumpy old mattress, but I could get used to these. I made a fist again, feeling the pull of tendon and muscle. The healed flesh over the injury was pale and pinkish against my coppery skin. The young rogue had left slashes in the periphery of the wound, around my arm, like the tines of a bracelet. It was a wound like any wild animal with fangs might have left. Not unlike Beast might have left on the arm of someone she attacked.

Beast stirred. Not a vampire. She spat the thought, repulsed in the same way she would have been at the taste of rotten meat. Me and you. Us. More than skinwalker, more than u’tlun’ta. We are Beast. She fell silent, brooding. Not quite sure what Beast meant about us being more than a skinwalker—and Beast not being in the mood to enlighten me—I turned off the bedside light and tucked my arm under the covers.

Lying curled in bed, I let my mind wander through what I knew of myself, or guessed of myself, what Aggie had told me, what Leo had revealed, and what I had discovered online, letting my thoughts drift, knowing that, once I relaxed, seemingly unrelated facts often connected. The most important? I smiled in the dark to finally remember, to finally know, that I was definitely Cherokee. I was from a line of skinwalkers, with a father and grandmother who’d had eyes like mine. The memory proved that not all skinwalkers were evil, despite the legends and stories.

In Western American Indian tradition, primarily Hopi and Navajo, the skinwalker practiced the art of the curse, lured into the murky study of dark arts to control and destroy. The skinwalker practitioner may have begun his studies with the intent to do good, but always gave in to the desire to take the skin of a human, perhaps to obtain a younger body. He became a murderer and went mad. That walker was depicted as a black witch.

In Southeastern Indian lore, primarily Cherokee, the skinwalker had originated as a protector of The People. But in more modern stories, maybe after the white man came, the skinwalker myths changed, and the skinwalker became the liver-eater, the evil version of the skinwalker, sort of like Luke Skywalker going over to the dark side. But the thing I had seen in the alley had smelled vampy, a vampire underneath the odor of rot. Not skinwalker.

And as for me . . . I am a skinwalker. I had lived for a long time, decades longer than the normal panther’s or the normal human’s life span. I had shifted into cat shape as a child, at some point in my life, probably a point of great danger, and had not gone back except to find the human shape and regenerate. That’s what skinwalkers did. We regenerated back to our remembered age each time we shifted, giving ourselves a longer life span. Leo had given me back much memory of the forgotten times.

The shadow of a bush outside the window moved on the far wall as a wet wind blew. In the distance, I heard the fall of raindrops growing harder, faster as they approached, pushed by storm winds. Limbs swept window screens with a scritch, scritch sound. Thunder rumbled.

Under the covers, I opened and tightened my fist again. Released it. A drowsy thought came to me on the edge of sleep. Why did Leo refer to the men tonight as “his,” as in “cost me the temporary use of one good man . . .”? With the rain falling in torrents, pelting the street and roof and windows with furious force, I fell asleep.

I woke to a blue sky and rain-wet streets, bells tolling in the distance. Half asleep, I rolled from bed. It occurred to me that I had killed a young rogue vamp and given away the bounty. I was nuts.

While a kettle sizzled on the stove top, I dressed in jeans and my best T-shirt, pulled on my boots, and rolled the unused skirt up in Beast’s travel pack, hoping it didn’t wrinkle too badly. I drank down a pot of tea and ate oatmeal as I read the paper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Weird name for a paper anywhere but here. Here it was perfect.

The headlines proclaimed that a local politician had been caught leaving a hotel with a transvestite. The mayor and his wife posed for pictures with the governor and his wife. The Obamas were being featured at an event in France. New Orleans musicians were raising money for rebuilding more Katrina-ruined houses. The weather for the next few days was going to be hot, hotter, and hottest. And wet. Big surprise there—not. The vamp deaths hadn’t made the news. Sad commentary when nothing that happens in the hood makes the news. Or maybe Leo had quashed the story. Who knew.

At ten thirty I helmeted up, left the house, and kick-started the bike for an early morning ride through the city. I wasn’t Catholic, so I wouldn’t be attending services in the Quarter’s big cathedral. I had never fit in with a big, fancy church. But the little storefront church next to the dress shop had looked promising.

I parked the bike in the shade of a flowering tree, its branches arching over and down to provide shade. I stuffed my leather jacket in a saddlebag, pulled the skirt over my jeans, and shimmied them off. Rolling them up, I stuffed them in beside the jacket and removed my worn Bible, which hadn’t come out since I got to New Orleans. Guilt pricked at me but I squashed it.

Though the boots looked a bit odd with the skirt in the reflection of the storefront windows, the skirt hadn’t wrinkled, and it was better than jeans. Some churches were picky about their congregation’s wardrobe. I had no intention of offending, even if I didn’t like the service well enough to return.

The congregation was singing when I slipped in, late, and took a seat on the back row. There were no musical instruments, which was weird, but the congregation sang hymns I knew in four-part harmony, and with the exception of two loud, off-key voices, it was pretty. Before the sermon, they served the Lord’s Supper, which I hadn’t had in a while.

I was letting the cracker soften in my mouth, when something seemed to heat in the back of my mind, and I saw a glimpse of Leo Pellissier’s face in my memory. But the thought, whatever it was, was gone faster than I could grab it.

The sermon was about church doctrine, not exactly a rabble-rousing, heartwarming, or hell and damnation sermon, nothing to get the spiritual juices flowing. But not bad. And the people were nice, most finding me after the sermon and introducing themselves in a confusing blend of faces, names, and scents. The preacher was an earnest man who could have passed for twelve, with a scraggly attempt at a moustache, but he was probably older. Had to be. It was okay. I might return next week. If I was still here.

There was a ladies’ room off the front entrance, where I pulled on the jeans again. I expected the churchgoers to look askance when I emerged in biker gear, but they just smiled harder, if that was possible, showing teeth to prove they wanted me back. No matter what kind of fool motorcycle-gangbanger I might be.

In the parking lot, I chatted about my bike with a few teenagers and an elder who wandered over to make sure I wasn’t selling crack to the kiddies. Bitsa’s a cutie-pie and the boys were entranced. For that matter, so was the elder, though he tried to act all stern. When I caught the eye of an impatient parent, I shooed away the boys and geared up. Waving in the remaining churchgoers’ general direction, I pulled into traffic.

In the packet of papers that came with my contract were the addresses for each of the clan blood-masters. Not their hidden sleeping places, not their lairs, but their public addresses where they entertained, where their mail was sent, and their IRS refunds, and their bills, though it brought a smile to my face to imagine a vamp opening an IRS refund or a Visa bill.

I wanted to drive by as many as I could. Sniff out their dens, in Beast-think. Four blood-masters lived in the Garden District: Mearkanis, Arceneau, Rousseau, and Desmarais. The other masters were farther out, with Leo living the most distant. St. Martin, Laurent, and Bouvier were somewhere in between. The “saint” part of St. Martin was a surprise, but then, what I knew about sane vamps was, well, nothing, until now. I was learning stuff I’d never have believed only a month earlier. Sane vamps were a whole different order of business from rogues.

I motored down St. Charles Avenue and entered the Garden District on Third Street. I zipped up and down the blocks, locating the houses, taking time to park the bike and walk down the street in front of and behind each house, sniffing for rogue, trying not to be too obvious.

Vamp security was good. I was riding past the third house on my list, the address of Clan Arceneau’s blood-master, looking for a place to park the bike for a walk-around, when a security guy stepped outside. He was lean, narrow-waisted, broad-shouldered, and made no attempt to hide the holstered megagun he carried. He wore khakis, a red T-shirt, and a tough attitude that looked military, along with wraparound sunglasses, which looked pretty stupid in the shadows.

I figured, what the heck, I might as well push the boundaries. I gunned Bitsa through the open, six-foot-tall, black-painted, wrought-iron gate, the twisted bars in a fleur-de-lis and pike-head pattern at the top, and braked at the back bumper of a black Lexus parked in the narrow drive. I killed the engine. Kicked the stand and unhelmeted. The guard watched me the whole time, walking out onto the porch, hands at his sides, ready to pull the big ugly gun if he needed to.

Beast awoke at the possible threat and thought at me, Holstered gun, like sheathed claws. No match for us. And, Other one at door. I heard footsteps and knew a second guard had come to the door as backup. If there were only two guards, that left the rest of the house vulnerable.

I smiled at Big-Gun, pulling in the scents of the yard. Chemical fertilizers, traces of yappy-dog and house-cat urine and stool, weed killer, dried cow manure, exhaust, rubber tires, rain, oil on the streets. Big-Gun didn’t smile back, but he must have decided I was harmless because he put both hands on his waist. “Lost?” he asked. He sounded almost friendly. But then I guess you can sound friendly when you’re carrying a small cannon under your arm.

“Nope. I’m looking for Clan Arceneau.”

Slicker than lightning, he drew his weapon. He had clearly been drinking vamp blood, to be so fast. Beast tensed. I stared down the barrel of the cannon. “I’m Jane Yellowrock, the hired gun looking for the rogue vamp. You got a minute? For a nice, friendly visit?”

“Depends. You got ID?” When I nodded, he said, “Real slow. Two fingers. Unzip the jacket. When I’m satisfied, you drop the jacket and turn in a circle. Then you can pull an ID.”

With two fingers, I pulled down the zipper on the jacket, held out one side and then the other, showing that I was not wearing a holster. At his nod, I slid the jacket off and laid it over the leather seat. Holding my arms out, I did a slow pirouette, keeping an eye on the gun. I was certain that Beast could move faster than he could fire, but it wasn’t something I wanted to test.

I stopped when I faced front again and set my smile back in place. Being in the gun’s sights, it had slipped. “ID?” I asked. He nodded. Still using two fingers, I lifted the jacket and revealed the inner pockets. I pointed to one and slid my fingers inside and back out, the ID between them. At his gesture, I flipped it to the concrete pathway and stepped back. He studied it from the safety of nearly six feet in height before backing toward the house.

“Bring the jacket. You’ll be searched at the door. Thoroughly.” He grinned. He was going to enjoy it too. I could accept a little groping or I could leave. Not much in the way of other choices. But . . . this was a chance to see inside.

“I can live with a search,” I said, pulling off my sunglasses so he could see my eyes. “But if it turns to groping, I’ll bust your balls.” Beast rose in me like a wraith. Big-Gun started to laugh, but it disappeared fast, his eyes watching me like I was a bomb about to go off.

“Yeah. Guests in the house,” he said. Which made no sense to me, but seemed to mean something to him. And then I saw his ear wire. The guys were wired into the system.

Big-Gun looked like an instinct kinda guy, the kind who listened to his gut, followed it, and his gut was telling him I was trouble. But his eyes couldn’t see much reason for the reaction, except for the Beast look I had thrown him. Uncomfortable, he kept his eyes on me, as if he thought I might pounce without warning.

To placate him, I smiled sweetly to show I was just a little old thing, female and weak. He wasn’t buying it. I had always wondered what Beast looked like to others. I had tried to see the effect by studying myself in a mirror, but it just didn’t look like that big of a deal to me.

Beast huffed at the thought. Looks like death. Big claws. Big teeth.

Big-Gun waved me in. I picked up the jacket, still with two fingers, and led the way. Inside was another guy, who took my jacket, indicated I was to stand against the wall for the search, and who looked like Big-Gun. Exactly like Big-Gun, except he was wearing a navy blue T-shirt. “Twins?” I asked, putting palms on the wall as I tried to see over my shoulder. They both pulled off glasses and grinned while I did the back-and-forth to compare. “Huh,” I said.

Big-Gun-Red-Shirt did a professional, nongroping search, while Big-Gun-Blue-Shirt went through my jacket pockets. I just smiled when his brows rose at some of the stuff he found, announcing them aloud to the house system. “Four crosses. Small New Testament. Keys, seven of them, two that look like storage unit keys, one safe-deposit key. Three house keys, a gate key, all on a Leo horoscope key chain. One small, pearl-handled folding knife with silvered blade. Velcro tourniquet.” He sent me an interested look. “Tourniquet?” he said again.

I shrugged. “What can I say? Be prepared.” I quoted a Boy Scouts motto.

“Small flashlight,” he went on. “What looks like a tooth. Cuff bracelet, silver.”

“Hey,” I said, delighted. “I thought I lost that. Gimme.” When he placed the ornate silver cuff in my hand, I slid it on my arm and admired the gleam. The twins rolled eyes at the girly reaction, but it had the effect of calming Big-Gun-Red-Shirt down from his Beast-induced state of readiness. “Tooth.” I held out the same hand. It was a tooth from the same panther that comprised my fetish necklace, carried around for emergency shift, when I didn’t have time to do it the easy way, with meditation, in a gold nugget-marked rock garden. He put it in my hand and I tucked it in my jeans pocket. “So. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Brandon,” Big-Gun-Red said, pointing at his own chest. “The ugly one is Brian.” They both laughed as if at an old joke. “Staff quarters are this way.”

Brian behind me, Brandon led me through the three-story house, which was larger and deeper than I would have thought from the outside. Maybe forty-six feet across the front, and twice that deep, the house took up most of the small lot, with kitchen and added-on staff quarters on the back of the lower story.Which was nice, because the walk through the central hallway allowed me to see the layout.

There was a wide staircase in the foyer, leading up into darkness, carpeted with an Oriental rug in shades of blue and gray and black. The dining room and parlor were on opposite sides of the foyer, with hand-carved cherrywood table and chairs and loads of china showing through glass doors of built-in cabinetry in one room, and antique, upholstered furniture, statues, and objets d’art in the other. Our feet made no sound on the carpeted hallway floor. Gilt-framed paintings hung on the right wall in the wide hall, and a mural graced the left.

A few doors were closed to either side. From the scent of coffee and tea, I identified a butler’s pantry that separated the dining room from the expanded kitchen. I got a glimpse of an old-fashioned music room behind the parlor, and smelled mold that was peculiar to old books in the room behind it. But the rooms on the left at the back of the house were for the servants, including security. Brandon opened each as we passed.

There were six bunks in one room, five neatly made, one with a body under the covers, snoring. I smelled blood on him, but as he was still breathing, I figured he was a human blood-slave of the clan and said nothing. I didn’t have to like it, but I wasn’t here to rescue junkies.

Lockers were on one wall of the bunk room, a laundry on the other. A unisex bathroom was on one side of the hallway, a big storage closet across from it, and a tiny cubical marked SECURITY. Inside was a security console with six monitors, each flipping back and forth with different camera angles, viewing the house and grounds from multiple positions. One showed the street. They had seen me coming. They grinned at me, and I grinned back. “Nice setup.”

“It works,” Brian said. “Plus we had heard from the Rousseau and Desmarais security teams that a female biker was in the District. We talk.” I nodded, impressed. “Want sweet tea?” he asked, indicating a break room with minikitchen, table, chairs, sofas, recliners, and TV.

“That would be nice,” I said, on my best children’s home manners. I took a seat at the table while he got out glasses and poured tea, and Brandon went back to the security console, glass in hand. He was close enough to participate in the conversation, sipping, his chair at an angle, one eye on the screens, one on me. “Mind a few questions?” I asked, trying for girly and innocent, but not really fooling either twin, even after the silver bracelet incident.

“As long as they aren’t about the security precautions or systems of the clans, you can ask anything you want,” Brian said. The brothers had mellow voices with a strong Deep South accent, one I had heard only in Louisiana, spoken as if they talked through a mouthful of melting praline candy.

“Ask away,” Brandon said.

So I did. We drank cold sweet tea, which tasted fresh brewed, from good quality loose tea, not the tea dust called fannings in grocery store-quality tea bags. I asked about any recent changes in any vamps they knew—feeding changes, habitat changes, scent changes. The twins were an integral part of the vamp security community, which, I discovered, was a growing and lucrative business in cities with a city blood-master and vamps who were out of the closet. Not all of them were, even now with the improving vamp-human relations.

They volunteered info about social relationships, which clans were feuding, which vamps were entering and exiting affairs of the heart, which clans and individual vamps were having financial trouble, or gambling, or building too many blood-servant relationships, or too few, their habits, feeding times, and the emerging human donor systems that allowed vamps to feed without forming blood relationships. This new change bothered them the most.

I studied them as we talked, and my impression of their military backgrounds was reinforced. These guys were smart, and something suggested they were older than they looked. More like Vietnam War military. Or maybe even World War II. It was clear from their carefully controlled physical motions that they fed on vamp blood often enough to be fast. Not quite vamp fast, maybe not even Beast fast, but faster than any regular human.

I wanted to ask about it but that seemed rude. Like, “So, tell me. How often do you suck vamp?” No way to ask directly and still be polite, so I asked, “These human donor systems. Who sets them up?”

While Brian was pouring more tea, Brandon said, “We don’t know. It’s an Internet thing, like a call-girl site, but for blood donors. Blood for cash. If a vamp needs blood for an evening, he can message the site with contact info, city, cell phone, credit card, and restaurant or hotel where they want to meet. They’re in four cities in the United States: New Orleans, New York, San Fran, and LA. But it’s spreading. We hear that a new branch is opening in Nashville.”

“We’re trying to get a handle on who’s behind it,” Brian said. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing illegal in blood for money. Winos have been selling plasma for decades. And it’s great for vamps who want an occasional safe, fresh-meat snack, but as a permanent lifestyle it isn’t good for the vamp community.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because the blood-slave and blood-servant relationships are special. They give vampires stability,” Brian said. “Emotional, as well as personal and clan security.”

Brandon stood and scooted his chair so he could reposition and still see both the screens and me. He straddled the chair, resting his arms across the back. When he spoke again, it was the voice a master sergeant might have used instructing soldiers or grunts, a clipped and well-thought-out spiel, almost rehearsed. I suddenly had to wonder if the brothers had been watching for me, to tell me this. Since any reliable info on vamps was hard to come by I had to wonder why.

“Vampires,” he said, “are volatile at the best of times. The younger they are, the more high-strung, hot-tempered, impulsive, unpredictable, and capricious they are. Almost erratic.”

“And violent,” I said. “Let’s not forget violent.”

He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “They need good, steady, strong human servants to provide emotional balance and a ready supply of safe, clean blood. Servants who aren’t easily riled to help them navigate the human legal, financial, and social systems. Which is why the blood-slave and blood-servant relationships were put into the Vampira Carta. You know of it?”

I nodded. Troll had mentioned it.

“According to the oldest of us—Correen, who lives here with Clan Arceneau—without this stability, vampires go rogue faster. They need the long-term, lifelong bonding that takes place with the slave and servant relationship. They need it. They need us.”

“Is that what Correen thinks happened with this rogue I’m after? He lost his blood-servant?”

“She thinks it’s possible.”

I tapped my fingernails on the glass, little tinks of sound as I thought. “What’s the difference between slave and servant?”

“Time, money, and monogamy,” Brian said. “A blood-servant is a paid employee who offers work and blood meals in return for a salary, security, improved health, expanded life span, and other benefits resulting from a few sips of vampire blood a month. If the relationship works, then a servant is adopted into the vampire’s family, becomes part of the financial, emotional, and legal running of it, just like an adopted child would be, but with the benefits not dropped when he or she reaches majority. Servants are too important, too difficult to replace, to let grow old, unhealthy, or slow. Of course, getting out of the relationship is problematic from our end too.”

“We’re hooked on the blood,” Brandon offered, “and on the relationship, which is . . . intense.” The brothers shared a quick look that said the type of intense was sexual, but was also something else. Something I hadn’t penetrated yet.

“A blood-slave is a blood-junkie, but one who doesn’t have a permanent master,” Brian said. “Slaves are passed around between masters, usually only inside a family, but not always, and without a contract or the security offered in the longer-term relationship. They’re used for food, fed on several times a month, and might be offered a small salary and an occasional blood sip in return. But slaves do it for the high they get when they’re fed on, not the relationship.”

I rubbed my head, more as an excuse to think than to relieve tension. I had known there was a difference between blood-slaves and blood-servants but the particulars weren’t easy to discover. And I was certain that I didn’t have the full picture now. I hadn’t gained much new info from this conversation, but I had discovered, over the years, that I would eventually use and expand on what I learned. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll think about all this. Okay if I call you with questions?”

“Not guaranteeing we’ll answer, but you can always ask,” Brandon said.

I dropped my hand and stood, stretching. “Okay. So on that note, how about two favors. First, call the other security people and tell them I’m riding around, learning the lay of the land. Ask them not to shoot me if I bike up to their doors.” I grinned to show I was only half jesting. “And . . . tell me. How old are you guys?”

Brian laughed. Brandon sighed, looked at his watch, and handed his brother a five-dollar bill, saying, “We have a standing bet. You asked within the first hour. So I lose.”

“And?” I asked.

The twins exchanged a look, the kind that only those who have worked closely together for years, like old married couples, or twins, share, the kind that says so much more than words. Brandon said, “We were born in 1822.”

I stared. “Crap. You’re old farts.” The brothers laughed, at which point I realized I had spoken aloud. I smiled weakly as they showed me down the hall toward the door, while offering assurances that they would pave the way for me with the other security personnel.

I thought I was done, until I passed the hallway mural. I stopped midstep, midword, midthought. The nighttime pastoral scene was of vamps having a candlelit picnic. Naked vamps. And the food was naked too—alive and human. I couldn’t help my blush when I saw Brandon and Brian were part of the scene, and that they were depicted as being very well endowed. Very, very well endowed. My blush made the brothers laugh, one of those manly he-men laughs that said they were, indeed, well endowed, and that they thought blushing was cute.

Beast is not cute, she thought at me. I took a steadying breath and said, “I recognize you two, and Leo, and Katie.” My blush deepened. “But who are the rest of the . . . um . . . vamps and . . . um . . .”

Brandon took pity on my stumbling and stepped to the mural, pointing. “Arceneau, our blood-master, Grégoire”—he indicated a blond man who looked like he was fifteen when he was turned, like a child beside the lithe and muscular twins—“currently traveling in Europe. Ming of Mearkanis”—he pointed—“now believed to be true-dead, and her blood-servants Benjamin and Riccard. Rousseau and his favorites, Elena and Isabel. Desmarais with his Joseph, Alene, and Louis. Laurent with her Elisabeth and Freeman.” The phraseology had taken an old-fashioned cant, and I wondered if the mural took them down memory lane, bringing out archaic wording.

Brian took up the instruction. “St. Martin, and his blood-servant at the time, Renée. And Bouvier with his favorite, Ka Nvsita.” I reacted with shock. The girl in the painting had long, braided black hair, coppery skin, and lost, lonely eyes that seemed to have a familiar amber tint, much like my own. Her name was Cherokee for dogwood.

Anger rose in me, hot as burning heartwood. “Is she still alive?” I asked, swallowing my anger, to burn in my stomach with sour, acidic fire. I forced my hands to unclench.

“No,” Brandon said. “She died in the twenties. She was a good kid. Her father sold her to Adan Bouvier when she was eleven, back in, what was it?” he asked his brother.

“Maybe 1803 or ’04? She was mature when we came to servitude,” Brian said.

Her father sold her. Like chattel. The vampires hadn’t made my tribeswoman a slave; her own father had. I remembered then that selling their own, like cattle, was once the way of The People. I nodded and moved on down the hall and out of the house into the fresh air before I tried to kill a twin. “Thank you for the tea and the information,” I said when I had myself under control, standing on the porch. “I may call with questions.”

“And we may answer,” Brian said.

“Or we may not,” Brandon said.

I forced a smile on my face, slid into my jacket, strapped on the helmet, kick-started the bike, and got away.

I spent the rest of the afternoon meeting and greeting the blood-servants who worked security in other clan blood-family houses in the Garden District. After sunset, I motored back home, taking my time through the District and the Quarter. Sunday in the city that parties forever was laid-back. Tourists and citizens went to church, mass, or brunch and then visited museums, strolled along the river, shopped, or had dinner at a quiet restaurant. The Quarter’s bookstores, cafés, and small shops did big business. Then came nap time, nearly officially sanctioned nap time in the European style.

At night, the public went back out and started it all over again, the wealthy sitting in elegant restaurants and the penny-pinching back in the cafés. Music played on every street corner. Magic acts and comedy acts spilled into the street along with jazz and blues and every other form of American, African, Island, and European music. Despite the rogue, despite the media vans patrolling the Quarter, and despite having to travel by taxi rather than risk the dangers of walking the balmy streets, people were having fun.

I would join them in a skinny minute, but I had a command appearance at a party full of vamps. I was not looking forward to it at all.