Suzanne Johnson - Elysian Fields

Alex made a growling noise, which I translated as a yes. I let him play caveman and carry me to his truck, settle me into the passenger seat, and fasten my seatbelt. When he wanted to cover me with the Saints throw from his backseat, I called a halt. “Alex, I’m okay. Really.” I did take the throw with my left hand and wipe the water off my face and hair, then handed it to him to do the same. We both looked like we’d been fished out of Lake Pontchartrain.

His eyes, normally the warm color of Hersey’s finest chocolate, were dark pools of angst, and he was broadcasting a tangle of relief and fury and confusion. The man had the most complex emotional signature I’d ever felt. “I don’t like it, but I understand why you need to see. But if you start bleeding again or you faint, we’re out of there.”

By the time he’d walked behind the truck, climbed in the driver’s seat, and called Zrakovi with the change of plans, I was half asleep.

“Talk to me,” Alex said. “Stay awake.”

I rolled my head to look at his profile. “I think I have a concussion.” Or excessive blood loss, or shock. Take your pick.

I couldn’t see his expression as we pulled out of the dark parking lot and sped back toward the I-10, but his voice was soft. “Go through it. Tell me what happened when you got to L’Amour Sauvage.”

Savage Love. What a perfect name. Love was savage, and it hurt.

I started talking. I probably told him the same things more than once. Alex asked questions and kept me awake, but he couldn’t make me alert. When we pulled into an illegal loading zone near the vampire club, I blinked in confusion because I didn’t remember driving through town.

He slapped his FBI hangtag on the rearview mirror, and zeroed in on my shoulder. “You’re bleeding again. You sure you’re up for this?”

“Yes,” I lied. I wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep. I wanted to hide out in Old Barataria, swinging in Jean’s hammock until this all went away. I wanted to go home with Alex and make love as if pleasing each other was all we had to worry about the rest of our lives. I wanted to do anything but deal with more crappy prete and wizard politics.

I opened the passenger door, took a deep breath, and tried to swing my legs out. Wasn’t happening.

“Stubborn woman.” Alex lifted me out of the truck and set me on my feet. I wavered a moment, and we both waited to see if I could right the ship before it sank onto the sidewalk. I stayed upright. Yay me.

He flashed his FBI badge as we walked past the lines waiting to enter the club. Pretty Boy opened his mouth, looked at us, and closed it again. He shoved a clipboard at me, a silver pen attached to it with a velvet ribbon.

“What is it? I’ve never had to sign anything before.”

“It’s a waiver of responsibility,” Pretty Boy snapped. “You’re bleeding. Christ, you might as well wear a flashing chartreuse hors d’oeuvres sign on your head.”

Yikes. I hadn’t thought about that.

Neither had Alex. He stared at my shoulder with renewed concern. “Uh, DJ. Maybe you better—”

“Get me to the office or I will faint.”

I knew I needed medical care but if I could hang on just a little longer . . .

On our way toward the back hallway, I glanced at the table I’d come to think of as belonging to Adrian and Terri, but of course it was empty. I wondered if Terri had taken him to hide out in Vampyre—a part of the Beyond I didn’t care to visit. As Jean Lafitte had noted one time, if I were ever to go there, the vampires, unrestricted by human and prete council law, would eat me.

I walked into Etienne Boulard’s office without knocking. He sat behind his desk, fingers steepled in front of him, and didn’t look surprised at the intrusion. I heard Alex close the door behind him, and when he stepped beside me, he held his modified nail gun. That, Etienne looked surprised to see.

“Do enforcers carry nail guns these days?” He had the gall to look amused, so Alex raised the nail gun and fired. A sharp, wooden nail shot across the room and embedded itself in the wall behind Etienne’s head.

“Next time I’ll aim lower and to the right.” Alex spoke with the don’t-screw-with-the-enforcer drawl he saved for special occasions.

Etienne’s nostrils flared. “Terri is not here. I dared not leave her to your primitive justice system and ordered her to Vampyre under house arrest, although I assure you she will be punished for getting mixed up in this.”

Yeah, well, he wasn’t getting off that easily. “We know about your plot with Lily, and that you referred her to the necromancer Jonas Adamson.” I hobbled to the chair facing him and fell into it. I felt Alex at my back. “And did you realize that Adrian, the wizard who’d been ratting on my whereabouts, was the son of the First Elder?”

For the first time, Etienne looked rattled. “What?”

So he hadn’t known that part of it. Interesting.

He rose and began pacing. Alex shifted the nail gun back and forth, keeping it trained on the vampire. “I thought he only worked for the Elders in a minor role. Merde .” Etienne looked past me, and I turned, trying to keep my shoulder stiff. The sofa on the back wall was partially blocked from view by the open door. But I could see enough of it to tell there was someone lying on it.

Alex stepped over and swung the door shut. The person lying on the sofa was Adrian. He wasn’t moving.

Alex holstered his nail gun and knelt next to the sofa, placing fingers against the side of Adrian’s neck. He shook his head at me. “He’s dead.” He shifted Adrian’s head to the side. “And he’s been fed on recently. No other injuries that I can see.”

She drained him? I stared at Adrian’s body several moments before the truth hit me like a falling Mardi Gras throw. “They’re turning him. Oh my God, they’re turning the son of the First Elder?”

I swiveled back to Etienne too fast, and had to clutch the arm of the chair to stop the room from spinning, which in turn sent a dagger of pain from my shoulder to . . . everywhere. “You’re freaking turning him,” I whispered.

“I didn’t know about his father, and it was his idea,” Etienne said. His voice was calm but his eyes weren’t. “He wanted to become one of us to be with Terri.”

My mind whirled with the possibilities afforded by a vampire who was also the son of the world’s highest-ranking wizard. “Turned who?” Elder Willem Zrakovi stood in the doorway, looking from Etienne, to me, to Alex, and finally behind him, to Adrian. He caught on a lot faster than I had. “Oh dear.”

Not one for hyperbole, Zrakovi.

Thanksgiving dawned cold and clear. I sat with Eugenie in her kitchen, drinking coffee before she headed to Shreveport for family time. We’d had three days to come to terms with this new world she’d never known about, and three days to rekindle our friendship. We still had a ways to go, but we’d gotten a good start.

“So that guy I met before Alex’s Halloween party really was Jean Lafitte? For real?” Eugenie practically quivered with excitement.

“For real. He should be back in town next week. I’ll reintroduce you.” After I had a long, serious discussion with her about Jean’s unique system of bartering favors, which sometimes bordered on the morally ambiguous. She was still half excited, half perplexed by this grand new world Ken Hachette had introduced to her. He’d told her a lot more than Alex or I intended. I think he just wanted someone else with whom he could share the horror of it all.

I wore a borrowed button- front purple blouse and a denim skirt because I could get in and out of them with my mending shoulder. Eugenie had found me a matching sling to rest my arm in, packed a few other things she thought I could wear into a small bag, and was getting ready to deposit me at the Hotel Monteleone. I’d spend my homeless holiday watching the flat- screen TV in Jean’s hotel suite and eating turkey and oyster dressing from room service. Sounded perfect.