Mercy Blade

CHAPTER 11 Don’t Beat Yourself up over It

While I was dealing with the cops, the press had regained consciousness en masse and discovered that cameras were still capable of filming. They caught footage of werewolves trotting away, or being carried out like dead dogs. Of wounded humans and well-fed vamps. They garnered half a dozen impromptu interviews, sending the feed out live again, before Leo—who had managed to subdue Katie—shut them down. The feed had been picked up by FOX and had gone out to the nation, but it was after two a.m. and the hullabaloo was less than it might have been. So far. After dawn things would change. After dawn, everything would change.

To keep fallout to a minimum, Bruiser ushered the press to the greenroom with promises of medical treatment for their bumps and cuts, with assurances of interviews with cops, vamps, any were-creature who was willing to chat, and blood-servants. He’d have promised them most anything to get them away from the ballroom and its blood splatters, blood pools, and evidence of chaos. Like sheep, they followed him and settled in the greenroom—not that it was green—paying no attention to the lock on the door that was designed to keep them safe. The fact that the lock was on the outside to keep them in wasn’t discussed or discovered until after it clicked shut.

They made a ruckus and there would be hell to pay later, but the short-term benefits seemed worth it to Leo and Bruiser. I’d been confined in the greenroom before and it was comfortable, as much as a temporary lockup can be, with couches, a TV, and food humans can consume. They were also given a nurse, as promised, two vamps to chat with, Innara and Jena, and an armed guard for their own protection. Uh-huh, right. It wasn’t my decision, but it was easier to get things done without the constant interference.

I told Roul and his were-bitch—whose face was still covered—to gather their wolves, and picked out a room for them to wait in. I had a police videographer take digital footage of them as they entered for verification of cuts, injuries, and bloodied muzzles—which they all had. I told Roul to keep them all in wolf form until the cops got to them for collection of physical evidence, but watched them change back to their human forms almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I was glad I’d chosen a room with a security camera to document which wolf was whom. I found them some clothes, and made a call to the kitchen for a dozen meat trays. Much like me, weres needed calories to make the change and they were ravenously hungry. I left them when they started looking at me like I was dinner.

It was clear that there were things going on under the surface of the political tug-of-war, beneath the bloodletting and the personal combat, things that I had no clue about, things that would pose bigger problems later if I didn’t handle them properly now. And I was surely messing up from lack of knowledge, an unclear vision of vamp and were history, and my own shortcomings. But I kept at it. The job was my responsibility.

One of the Vodka boys took a camera to get pics of the ballroom, and moments after he got the first shots, the cops ran him off and stationed a guard there, labeling it a crime scene.

The little green guy turned out to be missing. I made a run to the security room to have the techs pull footage of the hallway near Leo’s office and the carnage in the ballroom and the hallway near the green guy’s room. I hoped that by slowing down the digital feed, we might see him come and go. Within seconds of isolating that footage and slowing the speed down, we saw the green ... whatever it was ... exiting his room. Angel had missed it. I caught an expression of self-loathing cross his face. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. Yoda with fangs can move. Like, faster than human eyes can follow.” Angel just shook his head and cursed under his breath. “Keep scanning footage. Make sure we have copies of everything. I’ll be back,” I said.

I answered so many questions and dealt with so many problems in the half hour after the cops arrived that I starting feeling befuddled; I retired to the nearest ladies’ room for a break, where I saw to my personal comfort, and then leaned against the wall at the sink, closed my eyes, and rested for just a moment. When I opened my eyes a few minutes later, I felt a little better. It wasn’t exactly a minivacation, but it was an oasis of calm in a frenzied night.

I checked my phone, feeling a stab of disappointment when there were no calls from Rick. Stupid, to miss a guy who had only been in my life a few weeks and might be cheating. The thought pierced. Rick might be cheating on me with the were-cat female while undercover. I shoved the pain down hard. Later. Thoughts for much later.

To brighten my night, I had a voice mail from Molly, telling me a joke she’d heard about “puddy tats” that had sent her into hysterics. She was giggling so hard I couldn’t understand a word she said, but her laughter lightened my heart. I saved the message for a future smile.

Putting the cell away, I caught sight of myself in the full-length mirror. I looked tired, pale, and hungry, like some cheap blood-junkie. I needed color and food. I’d managed to hang on to the tiny purse during the clash and freshened my mouth with red lipstick.

Much like the way I’d decorated my face with my father’s blood. The thought stabbed up from the deeps of my mind and twisted, tearing like the killing strike of a barbed blade. I hadn’t mourned Edoda, my father. I hadn’t avenged his death.

I swore softly, the sound sibilant in the bright room. I would mourn and worry later. The job was what counted at this moment. I smoothed my hair back again and scratched my scalp, which was starting to ache, and adjusted the bun and the stakes thrust through it. “The job. Right,” I whispered to myself.

Since the sandwiches were locked in with the press, I slipped out of the restroom and made a quick trip through the kitchen, where I picked up a serving tray of cold shrimp and another one of cheese, which I ate on the way back through the foyer, gulping fast. I dumped the empty platters on a small table and followed the newest arrival to Leo’s office, where all the action was. The guy I followed was the coroner.

It looked to me like Safia had been mauled to death, but the coroner had to make an official pronouncement before the legal investigation could proceed. Louisiana, like a lot of states, has a coroner system in place instead of a medical examiner system. A coroner is an elected official—a person winning the job in a popularity contest, who may, or may not, be as well trained as the job requires. A medical examiner is fully certified, usually a pathologist with training in the related fields of law enforcement, anthropology, and forensics, and is appointed by a politician. We got lucky. The New Orleans assistant coroner who showed up was both—a pathologist with a degree and a vote-winning smile who was being groomed for the office of head coroner. He was also part witch. And Jodie’s cousin, Peter Richoux.

Jodi and I stood in a small crowd in the hallway outside Leo’s office as Peter worked. The reek of blood, buckets of it, starting to go bad, was sickly sweet. Leo stared at the dead woman, Kemnebi at his side. There was no sign of Katie, but Leo looked wan and drained—pun fully intended.

Peter at work consisted of standing and studying the body. For the first time, I allowed my eyes to linger on Safia and catalogue her injuries. Safia was golden skinned, black haired, dark eyed, a small woman but with long legs and delicate fingers. The henna tats on her hands and feet swirled up her limbs to stop at her knees and midway between her elbow and shoulder. If weres shifted like I did, then they lost all body paint in a shift, making the tats expensive in terms of time. If the paradigm held true, the tats also proved that she hadn’t shifted tonight.

Kemnebi was staring at her, grief and horror on his face. He closed his eyes and his body went still for a moment, hunting-predator still, and when he opened them, all emotion was gone from his face. He stared at the scene as if he looked over the corpse of a stranger. But I had seen the vulnerability and anguish.

Her clothes were bloody. She lay on blood-soaked carpet, saturated and squishy beneath her. Her throat was gone, ripped away in three-claw tears, revealing her cervical spine and more about tendons and vessels and muscles than I needed to know. There were puncture marks on her chest between breast and shoulder. Defensive wounds showed on her knuckles; her fingernails were stained with blood and tissue. Hair was caught in the wound, blond like Katie’s. Or maybe my assumption that Katie killed her was faulty. Maybe a human had done the dirty deed, or a vamp, or werewolf. And Katie came upon the scene later. But it didn’t look good for Katie.

Safia’s abdomen at her waist had been gored, ripped into, the descending aorta pulled free, and savaged. It was the work of a large, fanged predator. Likely Katie. I parted my lips and breathed in through my open mouth. The stink of blood and big-cat was overwhelming. The coroner opened his bag at his side, set a plastic sheet under his knees, and bent over Safia.

Peter Richoux had light brown hair and fair skin with a smattering of freckles across his nose that made him look much younger than his actual age, and the perplexity on his face as he studied the corpse subtracted several more years, making him look all of twelve.

He pulled a digital pocket recorder and murmured into it the location, time, date, and the condition of the body when he found it. Kneeling beside Safia, the recorder on a thong around his neck, he opened a black bag and removed a small temperature and humidity monitor that he set on the floor. He took out a cylinder, screwed open its top, removed a long, slender thermometer with a metal tip on the end. He made a tiny cut on Safia’s side, over her liver, with a scalpel, and inserted the thermometer several inches into the cut, checked his watch, again noted the time. He began checking for signs of lividity or rigor. I had seen forensics workups a number of times in my years as a PI and a vamp hunter, but never on a human-looking girl who had been transformed into meat and blood.

He was about five minutes into his practiced routine when Peter stopped and looked around. “Anybody know what the normal body temperature of a were-cat is? When she’s human? And do they form rigor like a human? This is my first were, here, y’all. And it’s not like there are manuals on this species yet.”

Leo turned toward his were-cat guest, his demeanor stating that Kemnebi was the only one capable of providing an answer, and distancing himself from the questioning. The cops in the room looked the African man over, taking in his robes, checking for signs of blood spatter, and calculating his relationship with the deceased. Tension almost crackled in the air, though Kemnebi had no emotion on his face and nothing in his voice when he said, “We stiffen in death just as humans do. Her normal resting temperature is thirty-nine degrees.”

I figured he meant Celsius. Peter pulled out a fancy electronic device like a PDA, only with more bells and whistles, punched some numbers on the keypad and said, “One oh two resting temp.” He looked at the thermometer and his other equipment, punched in some more numbers, and said, “Current temp indicates victim has been dead approximately two hours. Give or take a half hour.”

I spoke into my mike. “Angel. Focus on footage from one hundred fifty-five minutes ago. Find out where everyone was. Make a chart. Note where everyone is at ninety minutes ago. Pull the feed focused on the doors of private rooms and bathrooms. Whoever did this got bloody and needed to shower and change.”

“On it, Legs.”

At least until the DS arrived, which was going to be a good four more hours, meaning after sunrise, Jodi was in charge. She stared at me hard, her cop face on, irritated and anything but deferent, even when she transferred the look to Leo. “There’s a blood trail from the body, and if your people,” she shot a look to me and back, “hadn’t trampled it and contaminated the crime scene, we might be able to pinpoint the killer tonight. As it is, this is going to take a long time to process.”

Leo nodded once, inscrutable and royal, as if giving her permission to continue. I just shrugged. I wasn’t a cop. She had her job; I had mine. My body language must have communicated my thoughts because Jodi’s eyes narrowed and she said, “According to the guys looking over the security footage, Katie was seen running down the hallway on this floor. She was the only person—including the vic, so far—caught on film in this hallway the entire night. Until we know different, I want Katie downtown, under wraps, for questioning.”

“That will not be possible,” Leo said. He looked elegant and urbane and ... clean. Leo was blood free. He’d found a place to wash up before the cops arrived. Contamination of a prime witness was gonna tick Jodi off when she figured that out.

“It’s not up to you,” she said.

The tension in the room went up a notch, a shivery, almost painful proof of Leo’s power. His head rocked to the side in that oddly reptilian motion, the vamp-gesture that always made my skin crawl. “Do you have a place devoid of even the merest hint of sunlight? Do you have chains capable of controlling a Mithran? Do you have ways to meet the dietary needs of a Mithran?”

Jodi swore again. Leo smiled, the expression not remotely human.

“Y’all keep tripping over the same old argument,” I said, annoyed. “Can’t you folks get over the logistics for a minute? Leo, where is Katie? Is she secure, protected, and how long will she be whacko? Can we get a CSI tech to her safely to collect samples and her clothing? Oh. And will she remember anything about tonight when she does get her head on straight?”

“Katie is shackled in a subbasement, under guard, and being fed in such a way that she is unable to harm the donor, despite her mental state,” Leo said. “She will likely regain her sanity over the course of the next moon, and will remember nothing about tonight. I will collect any samples from her that are needed, under the direction of, and witnessed by, law enforcement.” Surprisingly, he went on, offering unrequested information. “Her rising was supposed to be another thirty days from now, enough time to process the blood that healed her and find herself sane amongst the madness.” He looked at me. “Her head has never been on twisted.”

That was debatable, and I let a small smile curve my lips, but Jodi spoke before I could refute his claim. “What was the victim doing in this office?”

“I have no idea,” Leo said. “It was not by invitation.”

Jodi looked at Kem. “Was she sent to steal something?”

Kemnebi smiled. “To my knowledge, the Mithrans have nothing of value to us.” Which sounded like so much insult. He swiveled his head and made a small bow to Leo. “Except the prospect of peace and political alliance in the world of humans.”

This was why I was never gonna make it as a politico. Slap, insult, kiss and make up, tease, bait and switch.

Leo bowed back, matching the bow for depth and duration. “The Mithrans of the Louisiana Territory are honored to work with the were-cats of Africa.” I figured it was part of the diplomatic stuff until another possible meaning sank in. It might have been two conspirators agreeing to cover each other’s backs. I analyzed the words as the others talked, not liking the ambiguities at all.

“What do you keep in this office?” Jodi asked.

“My personal and clan records: financial, historical, and diplomatic, current and cached.”

Jodi looked around the room and I could see the avarice in her eyes. It was like a treasure trove to a cop who catalogued such information, and Jodi’s team did. “Did Katie do this?” she asked, gesturing to the body.

“Traditionally, Masters of the City have handled Mithran lawbreakers,” Leo said. “Until our status is clarified with Congress, there is no legal reason to change that.”

“That isn’t what I asked,” she said.

“No. It isn’t.” He stood there, looking superior and dazzling and the tension in the room went up another notch.

“He won’t incriminate her,” I said. I looked at Kemnebi. “Kemmy, baby, how’s your nose?” His brows went up, whether at the meaning, the nickname, or just being addressed by a woman, I didn’t know, so I pushed. “’Cause if you can smell the attacker, it’d be a big help.”

“I am not a dog to sniff out murderers.”

Jodi’s eyes narrowed. “You calling cops dogs?”

“I think he’s talking about the wolves. Seems big-cats and wolves aren’t best buddies.” My earpiece crackled and I said, “Angel has the footage pulled up and the monitors ready.”

Jodi looked at the coroner, her cousin. “Peter, you okay here? Need anything?” Peter didn’t look up, but grunted and made a little shooing motion with one hand. I took that as a desire to be alone and led the way to the stairs. On the way I heard that the little green guy had been found swimming in the fountain in the back yard. “Looks like the backstroke,” the voice said over the ear-com system. “The water’s bloody.” I heard the sounds of water splashing and soldiers cursing, and the voice said, “His clothes show traces of blood and he doesn’t seem to understand English. He’s gibbering at us.”

I dropped back to Kem and said, “What species is the green guy you brought with you?”

“He is a grindylow,” Kem said, “from Britain.”

“Grindylow, like in Harry Potter?” Jodi asked.

“Harry Potter? No.” There was no mistaking the expression on Kem’s face as anything except contempt. Harry wasn’t his favorite fictional character.

“What’s a grindylow, then?” Jodi asked.

“They are ... pets. Most of the time. Guardians, occasionally. Less often, the enforcers of were-law. They are of limited intelligence, similar to a small child, or a chimpanzee.” He looked up, as if trying to remember something. Or as if taking time to concoct a lie. “They like water and prefer cold climes. But they will stay with their ... master, no matter the climate change.”

“Right. Uh-huh.” There was something in his tone that set my teeth on edge.

“Is there any way he gutted Safia?” Jodi asked, deliberately crude, watching his reactions.

Kem’s face contorted for an instant, twisted by the grief he was keeping so tightly bound. Then his face smoothed again. “The grindy is much like—was much like—Safia’s puppy, devoted to her in every way. I can think of few reasons that he would harm her.”

Few reasons, not none. It wasn’t a denial. I shot a look at Jodi, who nodded. She was playing bad cop. “The grindy was swimming in the back fountain,” I said. “Blood on his clothes, but well washed off. A couple of our guys yanked him out and have him in custody.”

“I’ll send CSI to bag his clothes.” She looked around at the hallway, shaking her head. “This whole place is a maze of areas we need to contain. We don’t have enough men.”

“Well, let’s see if the security footage lets us narrow it down some,” I said.

The large security-conference room was an assault on my senses. The room was filled with people. The bronze light fixture and track lights I hadn’t noticed before were lit up like torches. The oval table was cluttered with papers, laptops, cell phones, and electronic devices. The air was heavy with smells and noise: a stink of sweat, stress pheromones, the acrid reek of anger, the tang of old tobacco and coffee, the greasy scent from a plate of food that had been picked over and left on the table; a cacophony of voices, phones ringing, electronic beeps, miscellaneous clatter, and coffee was gurgling in the back of the room. The huge monitor hanging from the ceiling was lit up, showing twenty camera angles. It was chaotic and Beast sent me a sleepy vision of rats running across the ground in panic before she closed herself off from me again. I was relieved that she was at least watching. Beast often noted things I missed.

A thin, mid-sixties woman—who had geek written all over her—and Angel looked up as we entered. Angel swiveled his chair and gave me a small nod, as if glad to see me. “Miz Yellowrock, the CSI lady tech and I have narrowed the pertinent camera angles down.”

He looked at the woman and she shrugged. “I’m no lady. Sonny.”

He snorted softly. “You got to stop calling me that, Gramma.” They both chuckled and Angel pointed to the right side of the big monitor. “This one shows the hallway outside Mr. Pellissier’s office, these show the ballroom from three angles, this revolving sequence shows the victim exiting the ballroom and making her way to the office, these two show the wolves exiting unmonitored rooms as their counterparts jumped through the ceiling in the ballroom, the rest show the grounds, the room Yoda with fangs was in, and several shots of him in various areas of the compound. He only appears for a moment or two at a time, easy to miss.” He looked at me. “No excuses, ma’am, just the facts.”

I had a feeling the gramma had helped restore his equanimity. They were an unlikely team, the young, black, ex-marine communications/ET tech and the middle-aged, white CSI tech, but their partnership seemed to be working.

He returned his attention to the screen. “The views showing the hallways that connect the ballroom to the office are over to the left. We’re dealing with two hours of digital feed from over seventy cameras, so there’s a lot still to go through and a lot more that might be found, but so far these are the pertinent ones, bookmarked for easy retrieval.

“I also took the liberty of going through the camera footage of the walls and the back courtyard trying to narrow down the time the wolves came over, if they came that way,” Angel said. He tapped a camera. “A chef gathering herbs looks up, right here, as if he heard something overhead. Four thirty-two this afternoon. Then, at five seventeen, a guard hears something and looks up. It might give you a timeline for interrogation.”

“Police don’t interrogate. We question,” Jodi murmured, but there wasn’t any heat behind the disputation. Angel’s Tit cocked a brow in disbelief.

We watched silently, the little group gathered behind Angel’s chair, and we proved one thing. Unless she had been moving at warp speed and had done a time jump, Katie didn’t kill Safia. We had a time stamp of the little assistant entering Leo’s office at twelve forty-seven. It might not stand up in court, being only the flare of her dress from her left hip down and one raffia sandaled left foot as she entered the office, but she moved like Safia.

Nearly an hour later, just before she appeared in the ballroom, Katie raced through the front door, unseen by the guards, and all but flew up the hallway and into the office, moving fast. Even with the feed slowed down, she was a blur, but it was her, no doubt. The dried blood was a dead giveaway, even from behind. Exactly twenty-six seconds later she exited. There was fresh blood on her face, but according to the coroner, Safia had been dead nearly an hour by then. So ... maybe Katie had some leftovers?

I wanted to smile at my whimsy, but my face was frozen with exhaustion. Beast was bored with the investigation. She was sleeping somewhere inside me and the lack of her conscious awareness was enervating.

We went through the footage several times at various speeds. Found two things. The most important one was—an intruder had been in the ballroom.

The unidentified person was hard to see, and his position was unlikely at best. The toe of a boot was visible in one of the ballroom’s ceiling-mounted cameras. A booted person had literally hung around in the arched ceilings, unseen, for hours before the party started, and then, when the wolves made their dramatic appearance, had disappeared. No unidentified person had appeared in any other footage, not so far.

Leo seemed to stop several times in the evening, motion arrested as if he smelled something, and look around the room and up in the ceiling, much as he had when he first entered the ballroom. But he never seemed to discover the source of whatever—or whomever—it was he smelled. I was guessing it was the booted person in the arches. The boot and Leo’s scent searches reminded me of Gee, but I kept my suspicions to myself.

The second interesting thing was a little conspiracy brewing. The vamps were passing a little note around, small enough to be cupped into a hand. Every vamp it came into contact with stared at the note for a long moment, looked grim, and passed it on. That footage appeared to interest Leo but was likely unrelated to the murder. When a being is potentially immortal, life has to become terribly boring. What is there to do but suck blood, have sex, and conspire? But Leo had just won a bloody war; he didn’t need another; neither did the city of New Orleans. So Leo followed the activity and note around the ballroom, reviewing the footage several times, taking names and looking dour. I asked for some footage sections to be bookmarked and a list kept so we could find everything easily when needed.

It became apparent that the note originated with Amitee Marchand, formally of the Rochefort clan in France, and her brother Fernand. The fiancée of Leo’s deceased son was plotting behind his back and I bet myself that they were not planning a surprise birthday party for their master. Leo, grimly satisfied, was clearly memorizing all the players in the little conspiracy, whatever it might be. When he rotated his hand in a little go ahead gesture, Angel spun around in his chair, his hands dangling off the chair arms, his posture relaxed and confident. “The next part is Gramma’s,” Angel said.

“Cheeky kid,” the older tech said. “There’s a lot of things that don’t add up, but this one might—or might not—be one of the most important.” She keyed up a final monitor. It showed Tyler, Bruiser’s second in command, talking to two of the weres, Roul and the woman, in a hallway after the fiasco in the ballroom. And there was something in his body language that suggested agitation.

Leo asked, “Where is Tyler now?”

“In the back garden,” Gramma said, “with the leader of the armed children.”

“She means he’s with Derek,” Angel said.

“Miss Yellowrock, please see that Tyler is escorted directly here.” Leo’s voice hadn’t changed, his still-as-death body language hadn’t shifted. But I knew he was ticked off. I could smell anger pheromones coming off him. He added, “By two of your men.”

Two? Oookaaay. I keyed my mike, the action repeated so many times tonight it was second nature. “Derek, please escort Tyler to the security room. One of your men to each side, one behind.” If Leo thought Tyler needed two humans to keep him under control, I figured overkill might be wise.

There was a slight pause while Derek interpreted my words, then said, “Will do.”

Tyler looked like a well-coiffed, twenty-something, disingenuous kid, but he moved like a trained soldier. And he was smart. He knew he hadn’t been summoned for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. As soon as the men pushed through the doors, he took the initiative and said, “What’d I do, boss?”

Leo nodded to a chair, and Tyler took it. “Remove your weapons, please.” Tyler did, like a well-trained soldier, removing the clip from the semiautomatic handgun and ejecting the round in the chamber, lining up two additional clips beside it, and setting two knives beside the weapon. Leo said nothing, just watched and breathed. And I realized he was smelling changes in Tyler’s body chemistry. I took a shallow breath through nose and mouth and caught the smell of sweat, manly, not rank, soap, antiperspirant, beef and mayo. No worry, no fear.

“Please observe your actions in the footage and explain.”

Tyler nodded once, faced the monitor, laced his fingers together across his lap, and waited. Angel pointed to the specific camera image and set it in motion. Tyler moved across the screen and I heard a single hard heartbeat from his chest as he watching himself engage the werewolves in conversation. Then Tyler smiled at the monitor. “She looked gorgeous, boss, what I could see of her. And you said to be nice to the guests. I figured that included the uninvited ones. I took the opportunity to see if she was available. Hey,” he placed an open palm on his chest and grinned widely, his eyes twinkling, “I’m just a guy. You can’t fault me talking to a good-looking lady.”

Leo watched him for a long moment, evaluating. Tyler just sat there, relaxed and waiting. “You may go,” Leo said, “but leave your weapons here, and do not leave the compound.”

“Got nowhere else to go, boss.” Tyler stood and left the room.

Leo’s eyes followed him, barren and remote. Softly, he said, “I have never fed from him. Who feeds my second?”

Bruiser said, “Alejandro, boss.”

Leo nodded, his face empty, his eyes distant. “Alejandro has been with me for more than a hundred years. He has my blood.”

It sounded arcane and archaic, a feudal lord claiming one of his own.