Faith Hunter - Have Stakes Will Travel

“Vampire-hunter? You dat Jane Yellowrock?” Muscles One asked. “Leo Pellissier’s cun—”

Without thinking, I slid my finger around the trigger, raised the Heckler and Koch and shot the guy, a quick, ticked off two-tap. The first bullet caught him in the left thigh, high and outside, dead-on where I’d intended, in a location where one might do minimal damage, but knock out an enemy combatant. The second shot took him in the left elbow. I’d been aiming at his left side, at the waist, where there were few major organs to hit. Muscles One started to fall and lost the shotgun, his breath sucking in for a scream.

Instantly, I moved the weapon to Muscles Two and caught him trying to redraw the weapon he’d holstered. Stupid. He had one still drawn. He shoulda shot me already. When he realized his error, he stopped, nearly as immobile as a vamp, one hand on the weapon in the holster, one with the gun pointed at the dock, his eyes on me, wide like a cat’s. I let a lot more of Beast bleed into my eyes and chuckled again as I gathered my weapon into a two-handed grip, pulled my boots under me, and stood. The airboat wobbled under the weight change and I made sure of my balance before I stepped onto the dock. “I don’t like that word,” I said, over the ringing in my ears.

“Throw it into the water,” I added, nodding to his gun. “Both of them.” I wasn’t leaving an armed bad guy behind me. When he had disposed of both guns, I jutted my chin at the shotgun. “That one too.”

“Hebert kill me, he will,” he said, pronouncing it “A-bear”, a common Cajun last name.

“And I’ll kill you if you don’t,” I lied, sweetly.

Muscles toed the shotgun off into the bayou and Herbert moaned. I wasn’t sure if he was upset over the gun being tossed, or the pain. Maybe both.

The last light went out at the house and I heard the soft shnick of a round being chambered from the front door. I grabbed Muscles and whirled him, stepping quickly behind him, placing the barrel of my weapon against his spine. Muscles went still as an oak board and it was clear that he knew he had a gun at his back and one ahead. “Think they’ll kill you to get to me?” I whispered to him over the ringing in my ears.

I was six feet, two-and-a-half inches tall in my teal Luchesse boots, and my eyes barely peeked over his shoulder. This close, even over the stink of fired weapons, I could identify the four vamps he had fed from by their herbal signatures—wilting funeral flowers, lemon mint, sage and parsley, and something sweet, like agave. I breathed them in, learning what I could of each: gender, race, relationships. In human form I didn’t have the nose of my Beast, but my sense of smell was far better than any human’s, maybe a by-product of the decades I had spent in her form, or perhaps the result of my natural skinwalker abilities. I didn’t have another skinwalker around to tell me stuff like that.

Ahead of me, I heard more weapons schnick and chock-a-chock in firing readiness. Muscles swallowed so hard I felt it through his spine.

“Call out. Tell them who I am.”

Without waiting for a second prompt, Muscles shouted, “Dis here Jane Yellowrock. She come for—” To me he whispered, “What you come for?”

I thought about that. Admitting that I was itching to stake his master would probably not be my smartest move. “As Leo Pellissier’s envoy. He’s heard about the witch girl and wants to talk,” I said softly, knowing that we were possibly close enough for any vamps to hear.

“Leo send her,” Muscles shouted. “She want to talk about Shauna Landry.”

“Tell them we’re walking up to the door. Tell them to stand down.”

“We coming. Put you guns away.”

I didn’t hear any sounds of that, but I pushed at Muscles and we walked toward the front door and up a hill I hadn’t noted from the satellite maps, keeping slightly to the right of the entrance, keeping what I hoped was a clear line of sight for Margaud.

The hill was a berm of built-up land and the house was on stilts some ten feet higher. I figured the height was to protect against storm surge from the gulf or flood from upstream.

I stopped fifteen feet from the bottom step and called up, “I’m Jane Yellowrock, Leo Pellissier’s Enforcer, here to talk parley with Clermont Doucette.”

“Parley? What dat is?” A deep voice asked from the door.

Mentally I stopped for a long moment. Right. I’m not in New Orleans anymore. “The Vampira Carta had a special section for parley, meaning that one person asks for parley and hospitality and the other accepts the request and offers and guarantees safety. Both agree not to kill the other or act in violence except in self-defense.”

“I don’ believe in dat Latin paper. We gots our own code.”

“Fine. You wanna talk or you wanna fight? ’Cause you will surely lose if you choose fighting.”

He laughed, the sound one of silken delight that vamps employ when they want to cajole and charm. Or insult. I could hear the insolent amusement in this tone. From my right I heard the distinctive sound of a shotgun readied for firing. From my left, I heard the same distinctive sound. And I saw a small red laser appear on the forehead of a vamp lost in the shadows until then. The chuckle died away and the targeted vamp stepped back, behind the door and into safety. A silence filled the night where the Doucette Clan Home stood, the silence of the dead, broken only by the breathing of humans. I counted ten, three of them my guys, two of them Muscles and me, making five more on the porch high over my head.

“How you get your men onto my land?” the vamp asked. “Close to my home?” It was a real inquiry, touched with mild confusion, and it identified the speaker as Clermont Doucette himself.

I didn’t answer his question. Instead I repeated my own. “Talk or fight?”

“Talk,” Clermont said. Before the word died, his men had safetied and holstered their weapons, or broken open the shotguns. A match was struck and an oil lamp was lit inside, visible through an unshuttered window, though I was certain the light I had seen earlier had been electric. The men and women who had previously barred my way cleared a path across the front porch and left the head bloodsucker in the center. A woman carried the lamp from the doorway to a table on the porch and set it down before backing away.

“We talk,” Clermont said. “My house de same as your house, my blood de same as your blood, your safety good as my safety. My word on dis.”

It sounded like a formal saying, the giving of his word, and I knew that meant something to people as old as Clermont. I figured I was supposed to say something back, and I thrashed around in my skull for anything appropriate as a rejoinder. I settled on, “Yeah. I won’t shoot you or stake you unless you attack me first.” After a moment I added, “Or behead you.”

Clermont chuckled, this time with real amusement. “Bring Pierre Herbert for healin’,” he said to someone at his side, and a young human raced down the steps, passing me. I didn’t like having anyone behind me, but I figured Derek had him covered. I gently pushed Muscles away and took a deep breath, trying to settle my heart rate and calm myself. It was never wise to go into a nest of vamps when one smelled worried. Muscles looked at me over his shoulder before moving up the stairs, his feet loud on the plain wooden treads. I followed more slowly, holstering my weapon as I climbed. At the top, Clermont and I looked each other over, taking in details and drawing impressions.

He was tall for a man of his time, nearly six feet, lean and gangly, with dark brown eyes and blondish hair, a combination that seemed common in this area. He was dressed in worn jeans, an ironed white dress shirt, a suit jacket in pale gray or dull blue, and a narrow, charcoal-colored tie. And boots, which somehow surprised me, though boots were ubiquitous in Louisiana. A pair of reading glasses perched on his head and reflected the light.