Skinwalker

CHAPTER 7 Fly it

I needed Mol’s help. I dialed her cell and listened to the rings, leaving a succinct message when I got routed to voice mail. “It’s me. Call. And check the wards again.” I pressed the END button and curled up on my bed with the cell on the other pillow, knowing Mol would call me when she finally checked the messages.

Like most witches, Molly was forgetful. She even occasionally forgot to check her house wards, the ones that protected her home from casual observation by the federal government’s newly established Psychometry Law Enforcement Division, the so-called PsyLED. It was a branch of Homeland Security, and the PsyOffs—PsyLED officers—were still gathering info on the nation’s supernats. So far, Molly’s kids were off the grid. Keeping her home and property from leaking magical energy was the key to keeping them safe.

Desperately sleepy, my limbs feeling weighted with lead, I closed my eyes.

I woke at three p.m. to the sound of knocking on the front door. My bedroom was L-shaped, with the short side on the front of the house. I peeked through the window and saw a marked cop car parked in the street, a man in uniform and a woman in a jacket and khakis on the stoop. I looked in the mirror and frowned at myself. I looked ratty, not the way the out-of-town talent, the hired gun the council had contracted to take down the rogue, should look. If this was Katie’s liaison with the New Orleans police department, then I was going to make a really bad first impression. If Rick had gone to the cops about my seeing the rogue, then I was going to make a worse impression. And I hadn’t washed the blood from my steak meals out of the grass in the backyard. Stupid. Crap.

One of them knocked again, less politely this time. I walked to the foyer, slapped the locks off, and opened the door, holding on to the door and jamb, arms stretched up high. I yawned widely and studied them through slit eyes and a strand of snarled hair. The guy was looking at my legs and the patch of belly showing between tee and shorts when I yawned. He was mid-forties and smelled of Cajun spices and aftershave. Lots of aftershave. I wrinkled my nose. The woman was younger, a little stout, bobbed hair. A lapel name badge said she was Jodi Richoux. Yep. Katie’s liaison. I finished the yawn and said, sounding grumpy, “Yeah?”

She made a face at me. “Jane Yellowrock?”

“That’s me. And you’re Katie’s pal at NOPD. Come on in.” I pushed the door wide and walked to the kitchen, deliberately scratching at my armpit. I didn’t like cops but I did enjoy messing with them. Much like the way Beast liked playing with her food before she killed it. There was a certain kind of challenge to the cat and mouse. “I’m making tea,” I said, over my shoulder. “I don’t have any coffee or donuts for y’all.”

“I understand that you eat a lot of steak,” Jodi said.

And the game begins. I grinned and shoved my hair back from my face. “I’m a carnivore. Veggies are for sissies.” I filled the kettle while the two surveyed the kitchen. “You been talking to my butcher, I take it.”

“Him. A few other people.”

“Have a seat,” I said.

“Mind if I look around,” the guy said, “stretch my legs?”

Pointedly, I looked at his name badge. “Yes, Officer Herbert, I do mind. Have a seat or take a hike.” I pointed at a chair and back to the door.

“And why do you mind?” Jodi asked. “Do you have something to hide?”

“Not especially. I just don’t see any reason to let him paw through my undies without a warrant. Bring me a warrant and you can rattle around all you want. Just know that my landlady had the place wired with cameras. Not much privacy if cameras are rolling twenty-four/seven.” All entirely the truth. Katie had indeed had the place wired. The cameras were simply not rolling anymore. And that part I didn’t share. Life was so much easier without actual lies to remember. The cops looked at one another, startled. I could almost see them rearrange their tactics. I pointed again at the kitchen chairs. “Sit.”

“Abear,” he said, sitting next to the chair I had pointed to.

“Say what?” I put the kettle on the stove and turned on the fire.

“My name. It’s pronounced Abear. The French pronunciation.”

I thought about saying, “Big whup,” but didn’t. No point in stirring the pot just yet. When I didn’t respond, except to open a bag of cookies and slide it on the table for them, Jodi asked, “Where were you last night?” She wasn’t sitting. Jodi was standing at the corner of the table, back a little, so she could see both of us but not get in the way. Interesting position.

“All over.” I leaned into the corner of the cabinets, the counter at my hips, and crossed my arms, putting one foot on the cabinet behind me, as if propping myself up. The fact that the position gave me leverage to leap was not incidental. “I was up and down the street in front of Katie’s Ladies on Dauphine, down St. Louis Street to Royal. I wove around a lot after that.”

“A girl was killed on Barracks Street last night. It’s come to our attention that you might know something about it,” Jodi said.

Well, well, well. Rick had been talking. Was he a source? “Something,” I agreed, making it sound like it wasn’t much.

“You want to tell us about it?” Implied was the threat that if I didn’t want to talk here and now, we could go to the department. Where I could cool my heels for a few days in lockup.

I kept my voice unemotional when I answered. “I was hired to track down the rogue vamp. I followed him there. I was too late to stop him. He had drained and was eating the girl when I arrived. So when he booked, I tailed him.”

“Where did he go?” she asked, her voice tight, her eyes focused tightly on my face.

“Over the rooftops, mostly, and across the river, where I lost him.”

“You should have called us,” she snarled.

“My cell was dead.” Now that was an outright lie, but I wasn’t going to admit that I had paws and couldn’t dial. Nor was I going to say that I wouldn’t have called anyway.

“How did you track him?” she asked. They were both listening with the kind of intensity cops saved for child rapists and serial killers. And cop killers.

“Line of sight and with a little witch amulet. Tracks vamps. One of a kind and expensive as all get-out.” Lie number two. I couldn’t afford to go much higher and keep my story straight.

“So, you saw him. Got a description of the guy?” Herbert /Abear said.

“Middle height, slender, long dark hair, hooked nose. It was dark and he was fast. That’s all I got. Not enough to work with an artist,” I added, to keep me out of NOPD HQ.

“I want to see this amulet.”

My cell phone rang from the bedroom. “Excuse me.” I grabbed the phone and returned to the kitchen doorway where I could keep an eye on them. The number displayed was Molly’s.

“Witchy woman!”

“Hey, Big Cat. What’s up?”

“Good timing on the call. I got two cops in my kitchen. They wanna know about the tracking amulet you gave me. The one for whacked-out vamps, not the one for humans.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Fly it.”

Molly laughed. When a spell didn’t work, she made paper airplanes out of the scratch pages and flew them across the room to entertain her kids. “Did you have a blood trace to work with?”

“Big-time,” I said.

“Put me on with them.”

I blanked the screen and handed the phone to Jodi. Saved by the bell.

I ate a cookie and listened to the cop chat with Mol. Molly likes cops even less than I do, having had to register as a witch with the local law, but she’d had mostly redneck, hillbilly types as role models. I had met some nifty cops in my time and some were okay. Some, however, were on ego trips, had authority issues, or were chauvinist pigs. Herbert was an ass. I was withholding judgment on Jodi.

The lady cop handed my cell back and I said into it, “Thanks, Mol. I’ll call back later.”

“You having problems down there in the steamy South?” she asked.

“It’s interesting.”

“So, maybe I’ll come visit sooner than we planned. Kill that rogue so it’s safe.” She laughed and cut the connection. I hit END and set the phone on the counter.

“So. May I see the amulet that tracked the vampire? And a demonstration?”

“No and no. Goes back to that warrant thing. Bring me a piece of paper and I’ll share. Till then, no way.”

“Why don’t you like cops, Miss Yellowrock?” Herbert asked.

“I like some cops just fine. But I don’t like all cops just like I don’t like all dry cleaners or all street sweepers or all nurses. The job is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily attract the best people. You want to go have a beer, maybe take in a movie, I might find you’re charming as hell and the salt of the earth. So far, right now, I’m not too terribly impressed.”

“She’s glib,” he said to Jodi, sounding mean and malicious. His face had twisted as I spoke and now he looked a little on the cruel side too.

“Shut up,” Jodi said to him.

I laughed. “What you really want to know is how I found the rogue when you couldn’t and why the vamp council hired me when they had enough money to hire the French Foreign Legion. Then you want me to promise to bring you anything I find out, including any interesting facts or info on my boss and her cronies, the vamp council.”

Jodi opened her mouth, then closed it on whatever she had been about to say. Her eyes had sharpened, however. I grinned at her. Ate another cookie. Let the silence build in the kitchen. After a few minutes, Jodi said, “What are you?”

I hadn’t expected that. It was one thing for the supernatural community to know I wasn’t human. It was something else entirely for mundane law enforcement to know; cops might tell PsyLED. I held myself still when I wanted to spring across the table, claws slashing. Beast was awake and listening. Beast was of a mind to gut them and ask questions while they die. I held her down. After a pause a fraction too long, I put a thoughtful, agreeable tone in my voice and said, “I’m the best rogue-vamp tracker on the East Coast.”

So. Who squealed? The only ones who knew I wasn’t human were Katie, Troll, Bruiser, and Leo. I bit into another cookie and talked around the crumbs. Back to being rude, crude, and deliberately disagreeable. Back to giving the cops something to think about other than my more subtle reactions. “I don’t have an aversion to sunlight or silver, I like garlic and old Bela Lugosi movies, and I attend church. I can’t do spells and my witch pals tell me I’m not one of them. So I guess that makes me human, though that often puts me in bad company.

“I’m licensed to carry in most of the southeast states, and could get a waiver in the rest of the states.” I swallowed and went on. “I have a hundred-percent track record. Most recently, I took down seven of seven in a raving-mad, young-rogue blood-family. I’m proficient, though unrated, in street fighting and swordplay, and I’m a good marksman. All that you can get off my Web site. I’m guessing you want to know something not on the site.”

I raised my brows and let my most insolent grin start. “I’m straight. I wear size seven shoes. I like steak. Oh, wait, you know that already. I like to dance, and this verbal boogie with you two makes me think I’ll go dancing tonight.” I shrugged.

“One thing you left out.” Jodi flashed a small black case at me, about the size of a pack of cards. It had a dial on it, like a Geiger counter, and the needle was pointing a little over halfway along the face, at sixty-two. The sight of it chilled me to the bone. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Beast raised her lips and showed her teeth in threat. I smiled and ate another cookie. “Why you set off my psy-meter,” Jodi said.

Sixty-two was halfway between a vamp at midnight and a moon witch on the full moon. Pretty dang powerful. I had wondered what I would read. Psy-meters, or psychometers, had been written up years ago in policemag.com. They were expensive, and, according to the magazine, only used by federally funded law enforcement agencies like the FBI, the CIA, and PsyLED. I had figured I would never see one, but here was a psy-meter in little old New Orleans. Lucky me.

“I hang around witches,” I said, my tone nonchalant. “I have some powerful witch amulets. Molly washed my clothes before I left Asheville.” I shrugged, lifting one shoulder, and ate another cookie though the crumbs stuck in my throat. “Pick one. I don’t really care.”

“We don’t much like witches in New Orleans,” Herbert said.

“Why not? They did their best to steer Katrina and Rita and Ivan back into the gulf,” I said. The cop’s face twisted in prejudice and hatred. Ahhh. I’d found his hot button and the reason he was brought to visit me. Beast could smell the adrenaline bead into Herbert’s sweat. This guy was a serious witch hater. Which ticked me off.

“Not their fault that one coven didn’t have the power to send major storms packing,” I said, flicking crumbs off my T-shirt onto the floor. “Mother Nature’s bigger than any one family. But they did get Katrina to drop from a category five to a cat-three at landfall. You gotta give them credit for that.”

He stood, placing his hands on his gun butt and his night-stick. “Don’t gotta do nothing.”

“You gotta be a dickhead,” I said, mildly. “No help for it.”

He started around the table. I grinned at him. Beast nearly purred. Fun . . . I saw an image of her playing with an injured rabbit and let my grin widen. But I carefully didn’t move from the corner. Jodi said nothing, watching us speculatively. Yeah. She’d picked her position.

“We don’t like witches in N’awlins, no better’n we like vamps,” Herbert said, moving in on me slowly. He hooked a chair with his foot and slung it aside with a screech of wood. Beast watched him through my eyes. Fun . . . She gathered herself. I held her still. “Vamps, who killed a dozen cops and ate ’em like they were meat. And you’re working for the cop killers.”

When he was two feet away, Jodi grabbed his arm and said sharply, “Jim. Go wait outside, please.”

“Yeah,” I said, pushing things and unable to help myself. “No one knows if the cameras in the walls also have audio or if they’re straight video. You might just appear on YouTube making an ass outta yourself, and spouting off something NOPD would consider seriously anti-PC. The vamps bring a lot of tourist money in. I bet no one wants to annoy the moneymakers.”

“The vamp council can kiss my—”

“Jim! Outside. Now.”

He jerked away and stomped to the front door. He slammed it on the way out. I laughed and felt a bit guilty all at once. Though Beast was having fun, I didn’t particularly like the fact that I enjoyed baiting the law. It wasn’t smart or safe.

“You’re not going to help us, are you?” Jodi asked, her voice so soft that it might not have carried to the imaginary audio pickups.

“I’m going to kill the rogue who’s killing your cops, your hookers, and your tourists. Sounds like help to me.”

“Are you really human?” she asked again, her voice soft with real curiosity.

“I already addressed that question.”

“Your papers claim you’re twenty-nine, but you act like a fifteen-year-old kid half the time and a fifty-year-old grandmother the other half. You carry yourself like a street fighter, you set off my psy-meter, which means you’re leaking power, carrying power of some kind, or generating power, and you deliberately taunt a cop when you might need us.”

“You brought him here to see what I would do when he got stupid,” I guessed, but making it like a statement. Jodi had the grace to blush. I huffed a laugh. “Good cop/bad cop works only in the movies. I have your cell number, Jodi. I’ll call if I need backup. I’ll call if I need information. And I’ll call if there’s anything that NOPD needs to know.”

“Why didn’t you just offer that right up front?”

“Why didn’t you just ask for it right up front?”

Jodi stared at me, uncertainty in her eyes. I said nothing. She said nothing. After a good minute of that, she heaved a breath and turned to the door. “Thank you for your time.”

Silent, I followed her to the door and locked it after her. When they pulled away, I walked to the bedroom and threw myself onto the bed. Could I be any more stupid? Could I?

Beast purred in happiness. Fun . . .

I wished that Molly would call. On the heels of the thought, the phone rang. I rolled over, yawned at the ceiling, and answered. Molly’s number showed on the readout. “How’d you do that? You’re a witch, not a psychic.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Angie told me.” We were both quiet for a moment at that one. The girl was scary strong. When Angie came into her power, she had been terrified, magic rushing out of her in a maelstrom, destroying the trailer they lived in at the time. When I rode up, it was to see the metal roof peel back as if with a can opener. Not knowing what was going on, I raced inside, right into the magic. And I shifted. It scared the pants offa Big Evan, who hadn’t known what I was. Molly can keep a secret.

Evan and Molly had been trying to bind the girl’s power, to keep it controlled until Angie was older and could handle it. Power, oddly similar to the gray place I saw when I shifted, was blowing through, ripping at everything. Angie was screaming. It was crazy. Beast, unafraid, had padded right up to the child and curled around her. Purring. Angie had gripped Beast’s ears and pelt and hung on, screaming. Which had left Molly and Evan free to work. Without asking, I knew Molly was remembering too. Into the silence I asked, “Let me talk to her?”

Angie’s little voice said, “Aunt Jane? You got my doll yet?”

A lump grew in my throat. It often did when I talked to Angie. Beast had adopted her like a kit, and so both parts of me loved her. “Not yet, darlin’. But soon.”

“Okay. I love you.”

The lump in my throat spasmed painfully. “I love you too.” Kit. Cub, Beast murmured, sleepy and longing. When Molly came back on, I said, “So. You want to come visit me here in the hot, muggy, Deep South.”

“You kill that rogue and we’ll come. Evan’s talking about finally adding on to the house after six months of dithering. I am not going to live in a house open to the elements, with carpenters and bricklayers traipsing through.” Unsaid was the fact that the house would remain unwarded during the construction. “Later, Big Cat,” she said. “And stop messing with the cops. Angie said you were playing with them.” The connection ended.

Too wired to go back to sleep, I dropped over at Katie’s Ladies, knowing it was too early for the girls to be up, but worried about Troll. The woman who had served dinner last night answered the door and peered up at me over her bifocals.

She waved me in and I followed as she tottered back to the dining room, her long black skirts swishing. “This way,” she said over her shoulder. “I am having a lovely little Assam black. Would you join me?”

“Assam black” meant tea. “I’d love a cup,” I said, meaning it. I needed caffeine.

“Sugar? Milk?”

“Sugar,” I said, remembering the tea cabinet at the freebie house. Had this woman been part of Katie’s love of tea? Maybe served it to her when Katie lived in the house?

I asked, “What do I call you?”

The small smile widened as she sat near a teapot wrapped in a cozy. “I am Amorette. The girls call me Miz A.” She waved to a place, indicating I should sit.

“Thank you, Miz A.”

I took the chair she indicated and accepted the delicate china cup, saucer, and a silver teaspoon. And a cloth napkin. I had a feeling Miz A did everything with old-world formality, but wondered how she dealt with the silver-kills-vamps problem. Gold tableware maybe? “Thanks,” I said, sipping. It was smooth, dark, rich, and wonderful. I told her so as she settled in next to me, a tiny pixie of a woman with skeletal fingers.

“I’m so happy you like it.” She twinkled at me over her cup rim. “This single-estate Assam is my current favorite. Most young people prefer coffee.” She grimaced. “Tea is underappreciated in today’s world.”

“I’m a tea drinker. I have a nice Assam at home, and a single-estate Kenyan, a Millma. I’ll bring some leaves over if you like.”

“That sounds lovely. Please do,” she said. She passed me a serving tray with delicate cucumber sandwiches and crackers with cream cheese, smoked salmon, and something pickled and strong on top. Maybe capers. I ate two and accepted a second cup of tea before I asked about Troll, remembering to use his proper name.

Miz A sighed. “Tom is alive, weak, and healing, asleep upstairs, the dear man. It was a near thing, I fear. And poor little Katherine would have been devastated to lose him. They have been together for over seventy years, you know.”

I nearly spluttered the tea at the “poor little Katherine” and the “seventy years” comments, but was saved when one of the girls wandered in, wearing a moss green silk robe and fuzzy pink slippers. It was Tia, the girl with the coffee-and-milk skin, hazel green eyes, and kinky blond hair of her mixed-race parentage. “Morning, Miz A. Got any coffee?” she asked, her eyes half closed.

Miz A looked at me, her eyes saying, See? Coffee, not tea. Such a shame. “Coffee is in the kitchen.”

Moments later, Tia joined us at the table and downed half a mug of scalding coffee in seconds. “Ahhhh. God, I’m beat. I need a vacation.” She opened her eyes wide as if stretching her lids, yawned, and said, “Maybe Rio. Maybe Carlos will take me.”

The way she said it made me realize that Tia was an innocent, even if she was one of Katie’s ladies, an innocent because she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. She looked at me and seemed to wake up for the first time today. “You’re the hired vampire killer. Don’t kill Carlos, okay?”

“Ummm,” I said, not knowing how to reply.

“Carlos is not a rogue,” Miz A said. “He is safe from retribution. Did you have a nice time last night, dear?”

Tia reached for a cucumber sandwich. “Carlos is a dream. Mr. Leo and Miss Katie say I can be a blood-servant soon, if they get the right offer.”

“Offer?” I said, hearing the edge in my tone.

Miz A patted my hand. “I will explain. Tia,” she said to the girl, “take your coffee and snack upstairs, yes? Miss Jane and I must speak privately.”

“Oh.” Tia nodded sagely, her ringlets bobbing. “Business. I gotcha.” She gathered up a handful of sandwiches and made her way out of the room. The girl glided like a dancer, her big fuzzy slippers sliding on the wood floor. At the door she turned and said, “Thank you for not killing Carlos.” Before I could formulate a reply, she was gone.

“Offer?” I repeated. “Slavery was abolished a long time ago.”

Miz A nodded and topped off my tea. As she poured, she said, “It seems Tia’s parents were unaware of that. They were selling their twelve-year-old daughter out of the trunk of their car.” At my hissed breath, Miz A nodded, her wrinkled face looking grim as she placed another salmon cracker on my plate. “My Katie heard about the girl’s . . . situation. She put an end to it, but it was too late for her proper development. She had been badly scarred, emotionally. Katie has spent a great deal of time and money rehabilitating Tia, and trying to find the right protector for her.” Miz A looked up at me, her black eyes suddenly snapping. “She cannot live alone and she is too sexually aware and vulnerable to simply be set free on the city’s streets. She would end up used, homeless, and destitute. A husband might eventually desert her. A vampire master will provide for and protect her for as long as she lives. She needs only the proper arrangement.”

I had no idea how to respond to that so I ate my pretty little sandwich and didn’t say a word. When I could get away, I thanked Miz A for the tea and snack, jumped the fence, and fired up Bitsa, needing to blow the vamp webs out of my head. What can you say to logic built upon pragmatism and compassion? But it gave me the willies.

I tooled around the Quarter on Bitsa, sniffing things out, finding places where vamps frequented, but not discovering more fresh rogue trace—or maybe rotten rogue trace is the right phrase—even though I motored along last night’s route. Finding my way into the Lake Catouatchie area—which is mostly swamp and infested with mosquitoes, and which Beast had entered off-road along the sick vamp’s trail—wasn’t fun. But I finally caught the distant scent of rogue and tracked it. I ended up on a dead-end, crushed-shell street in the middle of nowhere.

I slowed my bike at the dead end and stopped, putting my feet down, the motor rumbling softly beneath me like a big cat’s purr. The house was small, probably built in the 1950s: a gray, asbestos-shingled house of maybe twelve hundred square feet, with the screened porch I vaguely remembered seeing in the back. It was well kept, with fresh-painted charcoal trim, a new roof, and a garden that smelled of herbs in the midday heat.

In human form, something called to me from the house. Distant memories, things clouded in smoke and fear and blood. And the sound of ceremonial drums. The power of The People. Tsalagiyi. Cherokee, to the white man. Cold prickles raced along my skin. Tsalagiyi was a Cherokee word. I remembered it.

A sweathouse was out back. An elder of The People lived here. And the rogue had hunted here, close, too close. Stalking him? Her? I shivered in the heat, hope and fear crawling through the sweat beading on my skin.

Not quite sure what I intended, I turned off the bike and set the kickstand. Propped the helmet on the seat. I walked up the crushed-shell drive, shells crunching under my feet. In the Carolinas, roads and driveways were coated with gravel when unpaved, and stone was mixed in with asphalt when paving was used. Not much stone in the delta; they used what was handy. Shells. Dim-witted thoughts, my mind steering away from the fact that I was walking up the drive to an elder’s house. I took the steps to the porch, noting only then that the house was on brick pylons, raising it up above hurricane flood line. I pushed the bell. It dinged inside.

I stood in the heat. Waiting. Sweating. Flies and bees buzzing around, the distantly remembered scent of sage and rosemary hanging on the air. And no one came. This is stupid.

I pushed the bell once more as I turned away and was startled when the door opened. I don’t know what I had expected, but the slender, black-haired woman in jeans and a silk tank wasn’t it. She didn’t speak. She just looked at me. My shivers worsened. Time did one of those weird rocking things where the earth seems to move.

“Gi yv ha,” she said, and held open the door.

Come in. . . . She had said, Come in. And I understood her words.