Suzanne Johnson - Elysian Fields

“Denis sends his love.” Alex sat on the edge of my bed. “But I’m not here about that. Jake called.”

Oookay. Time to tread carefully. “What did he say, exactly?”

“Not a damned thing. ‘DJ needs you at the Gator.’ Nothing more, and then he hung up on me. I get to the Gator and Leyla says you left a note for her saying Jake might not be in.”

Alex stretched across the bed, propped on one elbow. Those long-lashed eyes that could simmer like melted chocolate and turn me into mush—not that I’d admit it to him—hardened into squinty orbs as he gave me a once-over.

I kept the hem of my left sleeve grasped firmly in my fist and under the quilt. “Like what you see?”

He reached out and put a hand on my left shoulder. The warmth of his skin seeped through my thin sweater. At six-three and at least 240 pounds of solid muscle, he had ample body heat to share even without his shapeshifter genes.

I could pretend he was getting romantic, but I knew better. He was trying to intimidate me, and it wouldn’t work. Alex wasn’t going to find this scratch on my arm until I figured out how and what to tell him. I wouldn’t lie, but truth can be couched in all kinds of creativity.

Faster than I could track his movement, he slid his hand from my shoulder to my left wrist and jerked my arm from beneath the quilt.

“Gotcha.” He shoved up the sleeve of my sweater before I could say traitor and unwrapped the ban dage.

“Not deep,” he muttered, running his fingers along the scratch. “How’d you do it? Was it . . .” His voice trailed off, and he lifted my arm to his nose. My efforts to pull away were as effective as trying to extract a stick from dried cement. He dropped his head and touched his tongue to the cut.

“Stop that—it’s gross. Seriously.” I twisted my arm out of his grasp, ready to give him a lecture about canine behavior when he wasn’t in his pony-dog shifted form. Damned shapeshifters and weres. They can scent anything. It’s a freaking invasion of privacy. I needed to start bathing in cheap perfume. Might make me reek like a Friday night slut, but having a good shifter repellent would be worth it.

Unless I became a loup-garou. The thought left me breathless, as if I’d been zapped with my own elven staff. Alex picked up on that too.

His expression destroyed any attempt I might make at smartassery. The shaky network of defenses I’d built around myself in the three hours since Jake walked out also crumbled. Alex’s face blanched beneath the remains of his summer tan.

Nothing scared Alex Warin. Ever.

“I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.” His voice shook, and his features morphed from fear to fury with the force of a cat five hurricane. I’d never before considered Alex, Mr. Steady, as capable of mercurial emotions.

“ Are you going to kill him, Alex?” I sighed and swung my legs off the edge of the bed, my earlier exhaustion back in triplicate, my ribs and arm throbbing in sync. “Consider what you’re saying and whether you mean it, because we have to be careful. Jake’s life is at risk. Your career and family are at risk. My . . . well, my everything is at risk.”

Alex blew out a breath and moved to sit next to me. “Better tell me what happened. Everything.”

I spilled it, from the drinking to the walkout, including my own role in unintentionally accelerating things. Alex stared at the floor, doing a poor job of shielding his emotions. He was scared, furious, and worried. I didn’t have to absorb his feelings; they mirrored my own.

“Did we put too much pressure on him?” I asked, then answered my own question. “Of course we did, especially me. I thought if I pushed hard enough, believed hard enough, tried hard enough—I could make him into the man he was before the loup-garou attack. That wasn’t fair to any of us.”

Alex spoke in harsh tones, but the hand he reached out to take mine was gentle. “This is not your fault. We protected him as long and as well as we could.”

I wiped the heels of my other palm across my cheeks, scrubbing away a few hot tears. Self-pity wouldn’t help me decide my next move.

I got up and grabbed Charlie. “Come on downstairs. We’ve got another problem.” Might as well further brighten Alex’s day by sharing our newest encounter with the historical undead.

We spent the next couple of hours bouncing around ideas on the Axeman case, trying desperately to avoid the loup-garou issue. We were both exhausted but knew the NOPD was incapable of containing a historical undead killer even if they caught him in the act. He’d eventually fade into the Beyond. Jean Lafitte was strong enough to remain in modern New Orleans indefinitely because he was so well remembered—not only the pirate himself, but his name.

Names have power in the preternatural world and the Jean Lafitte Wildlife Refuge, Jean Lafitte National Park, the Lafitte Blacksmith Shop Bar, Lafitte Boulevard, and the town of Jean Lafitte on the north shore of Barataria Bay—they all kept him fueled.

The Axeman didn’t have a park, bar, boulevard, or town. He could come into the modern world for a while but would eventually fade into the Beyond until he built up enough metaphysical strength to return.

I did a little math on the notepad I kept in the kitchen for shopping lists while Alex rummaged in my refrigerator.

“How long’s this pizza been in here? Which one’s the newest?” He held up three cardboard boxes.

“The one on top’s from a couple of days ago. The others are probably science experiments.” I needed to clean out my fridge. Whenever I had a couple of hours where something wasn’t trying to kill me or I wasn’t trying to keep one prete from killing another.

Ignoring Alex’s banging as he dug out a cookie sheet and reheated the pizza, I consulted a calendar on my phone and wrote down yesterday’s date, when the last murder occurred. Counting back to the second murder, I hit six days, then another eight days to the first.

“Eight days elapsed between the Axeman’s first killing and the second, but only six between the second and third.” I stared at the figures. “It makes sense, I guess. More people are mentioning his name and reading about him with each attack, so he gets stronger and can come back sooner. The more he kills, the stronger he’ll get.”

Alex sat across from me while he waited for his pizza to heat. “So you think maybe four days and he can attack again?”

I shook my head. “No way to tell. Maybe sooner. The more attacks there are, the more people will talk about them—and him.”

I looked at the locations and sketched out a map of the French Quarter, ten square blocks of prime real estate on high ground alongside the Mississippi River that, so far, had survived everything man or nature had thrown at it.

“You mapping out the attack locations?” Alex got up to plate his pizza and then took the chair next to mine.

“Yeah, look at where they fall, and look at the most active open portal between New Orleans and the Beyond.” I drew a big star over the gardens behind St. Louis Cathedral, near the end of Pirate’s Alley. This was the most central route in and out of the Beyond, via the no- holds-barred preternatural border town of Old Orleans.

“That solves the question of how the Axeman is getting around.” Alex picked slices of pepperoni off his pizza slice. He considered them too unhealthy, so I ate them.

The Axeman could easily have walked to all three attack sites. “I think we need to get some help from our contacts within the historical undead and see if anybody’s heard anything.” Alex chewed and gave me an indecipherable look. “I wondered how long it would be before you called in the pirate.”