Faith Hunter: Blood Cross

“I can send word of your kills to the vamp council. Get permission for you to talk to them. I’d even go with you to tell them they owe you. Sort of an emissary.”

Derek blew smoke away from me in a long pale streamer. “Now, that would take some balls.” He looked me over. “You got any?”

I grinned and let Beast shine in my eyes for a moment. I didn’t know what he saw in the poor lighting, but he nodded.

“Okay. I’m not interested in talking with any fang-heads except Leo, and I’m not wild ’bout talkin’ to him these days. How ’bout this? You talk, you get a deal, you keep twenty percent for the negotiation. And you leave our names out of it.”

Now, that was interesting—the marine wanted to remain anonymous. “How ’bout I turn in the heads for you on my own bounty, which is twenty thousand a head, keep nothing, but you guarantee me safe passage through here while I hunt? And you back me up if I need help while I hunt for more. Deal?”

Derek thought about it a moment. “We’ll need guns. Like the one you got pointed to the ground.”

“You got six heads at twenty K a pop,” I said. “Get your own.”

Derek laughed. “Yeah, you got balls. May be crazy as hell, but you got balls. Okay. Deal. You get the best you can from the fang-heads, and me and my boys will assure you safe passage and act as backup for your hunt. Course, you cheat us and my boys will carve you up like a jack-o’-lantern.” His teeth showed white in an ugly smile. “I’m accessible by cell. My card.”

His card? I swallowed down a half-hysterical twitter as he pulled a card two-fingered from his chest pocket. I accepted it and tucked it into my own without trying to see the number in the dark. I handed him one of mine; he held it to the lighter and chuckled at the line. ‘Have Stakes, Will Travel,’ huh?” The lighter went out. “You are one crazy chick.”

I just smiled, feeling the lessening of tension in the air.

“If the council puts a bounty on Leo,” he added, “I want in on the gig. Got me?”

Surprise burrowed through me. “I thought Leo was your friend.”

“Is. But if the man’s going rogue, he’d want to be brought down. Told me so once, a long time ago. Deal, Injun Princess?”

“Deal, Derek Lee. Now, how about telling your boy to lower the rifle he has pointed at my back? Being in night sights and lasered up on makes me all itchy.”

Derek laughed. “Juwan,” he called. “Twizzlers.”

I hoped “Twizzlers” was a code word for “A-OK,” and relaxed slightly when Beast’s intuition said the sharpshooter’s interest had moved away from my spine. I wasn’t sure how I knew when I was no longer in the sights of a gun, but it was something to do with Beast’s hunting instincts.

“Nice doing business, Princess.”

“Ditto, Derek.” I kick-started Bitsa, sat, and walked her in a circle before giving her gas. Over my shoulder, I called to him, “I’ll be starting at the place we killed the young rouges. I won’t get shot there, will I?”

Derek shook his head and gave me an uplifted thumb in reply. I took that to mean that I would not get shot and that the place was safe to reconnoiter. I hoped I was reading him right.

The bike at a full-throated roar, sweat drying on my spine, I made my way down the dark, wet streets.

I did my best hunting in Beast form, but didn’t want to take time to go back to the house and shift. It wasn’t something I did easily away from home base, not even when that home was only on loan to me for the duration of my contract. But in human form I still had a few better-than-human senses—thanks to a century, give or take, spent in beast form—and could chase scents fairly well from Bitsa’s back. Having a starting point helped.

I motored to the abandoned housing unit where I had taken down a female young-rogue vamp only a few days past. The place had acquired inhabitants; whether they were bona fide, deed-holding owners, renters, or squatters, I didn’t know or care. I just hoped Derek was right about my safety and I wouldn’t get shot as a trespasser.

Engine thrumming, I eased my bike down the narrow street and around to the side of the unit, cut the motor, and stalked around back. The smell of blood was faint, well washed by Ada, but under the scents of fertilizer, grass seed, and the mixed odors of kids and a small dog, I could still pick up the faint tang of vamp blood. I scouted around until I was satisfied I had the scent in my memory, then tracked to the place where Derek and his pals had taken down the female’s sire, a teenaged kid, turned, and left to run wild—the rogue who had attacked a friend of mine and left her for dead. The smell was stronger here, as some vamp blood had splattered onto a brick wall, up high in a spot protected from rain. Standing against the wall, under the eaves, I breathed in the smell, my mouth open, so I drew it in through both nose and mouth, the way a cat takes scent.

And I caught the faint under-tang of another vamp. The teen male rogue’s sire. I hadn’t been looking for it last time I was here, too busy trying to stay alive. And the scent was familiar in an I-may-have-sniffed-it-before kinda way, or a sniffed-its-kid-sister kinda way.

After several long, deep breaths, cementing the disparate scents of chemicals and pheromones in my scent-memory, I walked back to Bitsa and kicked her to life. And I began to backtrack. The scent was pretty well washed away by the rain and I figured I’d have a hard time following it anyway, but the young male rogue had come and gone this way several times, and his scent was on trees and up under porches, places where the rain had missed. It was slow going, but I made my way out of the projects, heading toward Lake Pontchartrain.

It took me more than two hours to track the male rogue’s path, off Filmore Avenue in a wooded area near a bayou, in a park in the middle of New Orleans. As I rode around it, I realized that the park wasn’t that far from where I started out in the projects, yet the acreage was so large that Beast felt at home. I hadn’t known it was here, and from the smell of trees, water, and a multitude of human scents, the park was huge. The storm had dropped limbs onto the paths leading in and torn down signs, but I finally found one that identified it, unimaginatively, as New Orleans City Park.

I parked Bitsa and went searching, following my nose along a path, over saturated ground, into an area marked as Couturié Forest. Here the trees grew bigger, older, limbs overarching the paths like sentinels, protective and watchful, though that was sheer fancy on my part.

Following the old scent, I skirted fallen limbs and windblown brush on the paths. The few sounds of a city crawling back to life after the storm vanished as I made my way through the trees. There was only the plop of heavy rain-drops, the wet whisper of the wind in the limbs overhead, and the crunch and squish of leaves, twigs, and wet earth under my boots. A sense of tranquility and serenity pervaded the ground and the air, the way an old-growth forest feels, the loamy soil rich and fecund with life. But beneath it all was a trace of something feral. And dead. I left the path, pushing through the night.

Until I came to a vamp grave site. The stink of vamp, dead meat, and old blood had been well washed by Ada but was still potent enough for my Beast-enhanced senses.

The grave site was in a natural open area, a ten-foot circular space surrounded by old trees, rank with a miasma of overlapping scent patterns. I caught the strong recent tang of a lightning strike and charred wood, so much like the scent of burned magical wards that I was undecided on what I was smelling until I spotted the tree against the night sky, blackened and burned, its top half blasted away. The trail of lightning ran across the ground where it had cooked the earth.