Faith Hunter - Black Arts

My mouth opened. And closed on the words I was about to say. Calling a vamp insane might not be the wisest course of action, especially when it hadn’t been demonstrated that she was fully in control of her predatory instincts. When I opened my mouth again, I said, “I’ll find the girls. But I’m not a hired killer.”

“Of course you are. Don’t be foolish.” She turned back to the screen. “We all must accept our natures, and you are a predator.” She sniffed the air without looking at me. “You smell of wild places and violence and blood. You will kill. It is your nature and it is what you have been paid to do.”

The reality of her statement hit me like an icy fist, right in my midsection. Her words were almost like the ones Beast said to me when she called me a killer. Words I denied. Still wanted to deny. Slowly, carefully, I said, “Unless the person or persons who has them is being violent, refuses to let them go, or tries to do them, my team, or me harm, I won’t be killing anyone.”

Katie’s head inclined, a snakelike movement no human spine could mimic. Her face moved half into shadow, and the other half brightened into creamy gold; the dim bulb shaded her hair into honey with pale highlights. Her eyes met mine, dark in the lamplight and full of compulsion. She held me with her eyes, and a deeply twisted gleam brightened her gaze as she parted her lips, the motion slow and sensual. “This I shall accept: You will find my girls. You will free them. You will return them to me, with the names of the ones who took them. I will take care of the rest.”

I knew what she meant. She would take the names I gave her, track them, drain them, and kill them. She would leave their dead bodies where no one would ever find them. And it would be my fault. Totally my fault. As much as if I took their lives myself.

Katie smiled sweetly as the facts found a place in my brain, and returned her attention to the computer screen. “Tom has all the information you will need to locate my employees. You are dismissed.”

I didn’t know how to reconcile her demands, and though my Beast fought me to challenge her, predator to predator, and fight it out on the desktop, here and now, I shoved Beast down and walked away. Katie was my employer and landlady, the owner of my freebie home. Katie was a vamp no one crossed, and if I wanted to keep my own peace of mind and my own blood in my veins, I would need to find a way to deal with Katie wanting to kill the kidnappers—which would totally be my fault, if I gave her the names. But I could worry about that later. Was I a Scarlett O’Hara or what?

Inside me, my Beast—the soul of a mountain lion I had dragged into me during an act of accidental black magic, when I was five years old and fighting for my life—turned her back to me, a predator insult of the worst kind. I held in the frustration the gesture brought on.

Troll, whose real name was Tom, and who was Katie’s primo blood-servant, was waiting for me in the hallway, his face like a stone bust, emotionless and cold. He had been listening.

Dumbly, I followed him to the kitchen, where Deon, Katie’s three-star Jamaican chef, was putting a rack of lamb into one of the commercial ovens he supervised. We sat at the kitchen bar, my right foot on the floor, the other on the bar stool footrest. Troll handed me a paper with all the pertinent info about the missing girls written on it in his neat block printing.

“Is she . . .” I stopped, not knowing what to ask.

“Sane?” he said softly. “I don’t know, but I’m careful around her, treat her with kid gloves. Her girls are careful. According to Mithran definitions, and within Mithran parameters, she’s fine. She’s not drained anyone. She’s injured no one.” He rubbed his bald pate in consternation. Troll wasn’t the most communicative man, but even I could tell he wasn’t finished. “But she’s powerful and strong and different from what she was before the blood-burial.”

With palpable relief at the interruption, he accepted a glass of white wine from Deon, looked at it, swirled it, sniffed it, and sipped it. “Buttery and rich,” he said. “The best Chardonnay to date. Order up five cases.”

He set the glass on the counter and said to me, “I’ve asked around. The few blood-servants who’ve heard of a rising after a blood-burial aren’t real helpful, except to say that all Mithrans who survive are changed, are different. It takes months for the mixed blood to work its way through a Mithran’s system. Sometimes years. And they’re always left with extraordinary strength and speed and what George Dumas calls mental acuity . What she’ll become, I don’t know and can’t say.”

“Ducky.” I looked at the paper and said, “I need to talk to the driver who came to pick up the girls. I also need to talk to the others who were at the party. That isn’t listed here. No names from the party at all.”

“Katie wasn’t informed of the party. The girls were out on the town together, not working for her.”

I tried to put the two sentences together into something that made sense. And then it hit me why Katie was so predatory. “They were working a side job? One without Katie’s approval and one that Katie didn’t get a cut of?”

Troll nodded, then shook his shiny bald head. “I didn’t think so at the time, but with them disappearing, I’m startin’ to reconsider. I was the pickup driver, and I know the girls were there one minute and gone the next, ’cause I talked with one of the waiters. They wouldn’t have gotten into a car with people they didn’t know, so either they left with someone they knew or they were taken.” He ran a hand across his scalp, thinking. “They know better than to stiff Katie, so . . . I don’t know.”

I chuckled at the double entendre and Troll managed a smile. “Unintentional,” he said.

“Sure. Send me photos of the girls. I’ll check it out and see what I can find. On another note, my friend Molly is missing. Her husband thought she might be coming to New Orleans to see me, but she didn’t.” I tapped the paper on the bar top, thinking. “She didn’t see me, that is. I don’t know if she actually came to New Orleans. We’re looking into that. So, if you hear anything about witches, call?”

Troll nodded. “Will do.”

“Now tell me about picking up the girls.”

“Nothing to say. They called for a ride home from Guilbeau’s, per orders of Katie.” I looked my question at him and he said, “For their safety, they call after dark, even on their nights off. When I got there, they were gone.”

I sighed. “It’s never easy.”

“That’s why you get paid the big bucks, Legs.”

• • •

Back at the house, I checked in with Alex. He was hunched over his tablets in the living room, working. The TV was on, the big screen divided into four sections, MSNBC, FOX, a March madness college basketball game, and a black-and-white rerun of an old I Love Lucy show. Counting the four tablet screens, he was watching eight screens, all silent except for the Lucy show, with the laugh track turned up high. Evan sat on the couch with his kids, one snuggled into either arm, watching the show, holding the children as if they’d vanish if he let go. Eli was nowhere in sight, but it was after dark, and time for his nightly chat with his sweetie, Sylvia Turpin, the sheriff of Natchez, so it might be an hour before I saw him again. The front door window and the back windows were boarded over, and oddly, the door had strips of silver duct tape running in horizontal bands across it. I didn’t want to know why.

I bent over Alex’s chair, my weight on one arm on the chair back, and asked softly, “How’s it going?”

“Same thing I’m telling him.” He pointed a finger at Evan. “So far, nothing. Leave me alone.”