Skinwalker

CHAPTER 20 Crap. I’m starting to like vamps

The house was at the end of Old Man’s Beard Street. I smelled the blood and death through the open window from halfway down the road and it got stronger as I neared the house. The rogue-liver-eater had indeed killed here. I gunned the engine up the drive, next to the house, stopped, yanked off my helmet, and dialed Katie’s pet NOPD investigator, Jodi Richoux. Rick pulled up next to me and killed his bike too.

“Jodi,” I said when she answered. “This is Jane Yellowrock. I was following the rogue’s tracks last night, and I got a house with open windows, one with damage consistent with a B and E. Place smells like dead meat.”

“Hang on,” she said, and I heard muffled conversation for a moment before she said, “Okay. Gimme the address.”

“It’s on Old Man’s Beard Street, out Highway 90 not far from the Lapalco Boulevard exit, at the end of the cul-de-sac. You might want to send a team. And bring your psy-meter. I’d like to see what it reads.”

“The team is on its way, and so am I. But give me one reason why I should share confidential information with you.”

“Because the next time I find something interesting, you want me to call you and not the New Orleans Times-Picayune .” I snapped the phone shut. I did so love toying with cops. Jodi would hate my guts, but she’d share. Of course, if she found the slightest reason to charge me with anything, no matter how minuscule, she would, just to get me back. Tit for tat. I wheeled the bike off the drive and beneath a shade tree.

“You’re nuts, you know that?” Rick said. “Stark raving crazy, you are.”

I unzipped my leather jacket, peeled it off, and draped it over the handlebars. “I may be here for a while. You staying or going?”

“I’m outta here.” He paused, torn by two distinctly different needs. “How do you know the rogue vamp came through here last night?”

I decided on the truth, as far as it went. I had to practice it on somebody before I tried it out on Jodi. “I followed him partway. Saw him come through here but never saw him leave.”

“You told the cops the place smells like dead meat. All I smell is fresh cut grass. And lady, I got a good nose.”

The fragrance of the newly mown lawn across the street did permeate the air, but I had automatically filtered out every scent but the one I was looking for. Not smart. I should have walked around the house first. I really had to work on my lying. Going for surprised and innocent, I asked, “You don’t smell that?”

Rick’s eyebrows suggested I hadn’t been entirely successful. He dug into his jacket’s inner pocket and held out some folded sheets, paper-clipped together. “The property owners you asked for,” he said.

I palmed the small wad, tucking it into my shirt. “Thanks.”

“I’d like to stick around but . . .”

“But you have issues with cops?”

“Something like that. I’ll see you later.”

“Sure. Dancing at the club you play at.” I offered him a half smile. “Beer’ll be my treat.” Nothing like a girl asking a guy out—looked like I was a modern-day gal, after all, or I just wanted to keep an eye on him and his acquaintances. Rick might be on his own rogue hunt, hoping to bag the creature out from under me, taking money out of my pocket. Maybe make a name for himself along the way. Or he might be on some other mission that could impact mine.

“Yeah. Well.” Which didn’t sound like a ringing endorsement for a date. But then he was probably too bruised to dance, from when I tossed him on his keister. Twice now. He turned a key; the engine of his red crotch rocket turned over and purred. I almost said, “Key starts are for wusses,” but I managed to keep it in. My own bike’s engine was running a little rough, so I had no call to be insulting someone else’s. Still. A keyed start? Where was the excitement and mystery in that?

I watched him motor off. He didn’t look back. Soon as he was gone, I redialed Jodi. When she answered I said, “You know a local Joe, Caucasian but Frenchy, olive skin, black and black, maybe six feet, slender? Name of Rick LaFleur?”

She hesitated. “No. Can’t say as I do. But he may go by other aliases,” she said. “Why?” It was the hesitation that did it. Jodi was lying to me.

“A source of mine claims he’s doing some low-level work for Katie and a few other vamps. I was checking him out.”

“Name’s not familiar. But I’ll keep my eyes open. ETA’s under an hour,” she said. “Stay close.”

“I’ll be here,” I said. I closed the phone and tucked it into my pocket.

Was Rick running a scam on me and/or the vamps? Reporting to NOPD? A street source giving the cops inside information in return for help on a past legal problem? Was he ratting out the vamps? And if he was, should I care? Should it bother me? No, it shouldn’t. But it did. It bothered me that he might be sharing secrets. It bothered me a lot. I’d rather he was trying to take my hunting gig. “Crap,” I said. “I’m starting to like vamps.”

Leaving my helmet and leather jacket with the bike, I circled around the house, into the woods, sweating in the humid heat. It wasn’t even summer yet and it was in the high nineties. I tried to imagine what it would feel like in August. A steam bath was trite but it was the closest analogy, and sometimes trite just meant true. A city-sized—heck, a state-sized—steam bath.

For an instant, the urge for home swept over me. I stopped and closed my eyes as homesickness shook me. I wanted mountains, towering ridges and deep folded valleys. I wanted hemlock, spruce, fir, oak, and mountain maple, babbling brooks and streams spilling off hillsides and under small bridges that echoed hollowly off chasms when a bike clattered across. I wanted cool breezes and nighttime temps that dropped to the forties this time of year. I wanted icy spring showers. I wanted home, not this flat, muggy, wet, heated, miserable place. But here was where I was, and some people loved it with the same passion I felt for mountains. For now, I had a job to do and a way to put money in my pockets. I sucked up the need for home and started into the trees’ shadow line.

A mosquito landed on my arm and shoved his proboscis into me for a blood meal, which seemed part and parcel of this job. I swatted it, leaving a bloody smear behind. Wiping it on my jeans, I muttered, “Damn bloodsucker.”

A snake slithered away from my approach and I halted midstep. I wasn’t afraid of snakes, but not being afraid didn’t mean that I particularly liked them. If I got bit, and if it was poisonous, I’d have to shift to deal with the venom. And shifting, even into Beast, was hard by daylight, especially without my fetish necklace.

I wasn’t familiar with local reptile varieties. The snake was three feet long and blackish, with a sort of diamond crosshatching down its length. Not a king snake. Not a garter snake. It rippled across the grass and turned its triangular, spear-shaped head my way. The arrowhead-shaped skull was the most common sign of a venomous snake. Maybe it was a diamondback, though its tail tip didn’t seem to have rattles. It slithered off into the shade.

I moved on, watching my step. If I landed on a snake, the boots would only help if it bit below my knee; above that was skin. I saw no more wildlife and quickly found the place where the rogue came out of the woods. On the lawn there wasn’t much to indicate the rogue wasn’t human, but into the woods a bit, he had run through a muddy patch and left three nice, clear, weird-looking paw prints with claw marks, half human and half something else. Big Cat.

The prints were about thirteen inches long, eleven at the widest point, across the toes. Two of the prints had human-shaped heels, which made it look awkward, something a Bigfoot expert would point to with pride. Deep, slashing indentations indicated the length of the claws—way longer than Beast’s. Big prints. Beast’s paws were about eight inches across, nails about an inch and a half across the recurved length, depending on how they were measured.

Liver-eater, Beast murmured to me, awake, her danger radar active.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t just a vamp. The term “rogue” wouldn’t do anymore, and until I figured out something better, liver-eater it was. It bothered me that Beast knew more about this thing than I did. Would this creature put Beast in danger from the cops?

I had an instant instinct to obscure the tracks, hide the creature’s trail—an instinct from Beast in survival mode. If I hid them, and the cops decided I had messed up a crime scene, I was going to have to start explaining, and that meant lying—lies that would eventually catch me up. So, against Beast’s better judgment, I left the tracks pristine and went to wait on the cops. First, I bypassed around the window where the rogue had entered. The screen was ripped and hanging. Shattered glass in jagged shards jutted from the bottom pane. Blood had dried on the broken ends. As I watched, a fly buzzed through. It didn’t come back out.

Stretched out in a lawn chair, distant enough from a fire ant hill to provide some safety, I pulled out the crumpled batch of property owner info Rick had given me. He had Googled up a map and drawn in the real estate, adding random notes on the taxpayers and owners on the bottom. The pages seemed to be compiled from several sites that collected personal information, most of which I used myself. On the map, the Jean Lafitte park and Bayou Segnette State Park were both colored in a verdant green, and until now, I hadn’t noticed how close they were to one another.

Every predator has its own territory/hunting range. Beast’s largest range had been over a hundred square miles. A large male mountain lion might have a territory of three hundred square miles. I guessed that a sabertooth might claim a proportionately larger range, and wondered if the park properties, as well as New Orleans city proper, fell within the liver-eater’s range.

Long-distance running is problematic for big cats. Aside from cheetahs, most cats are ambush predators, waiting for dinner to pass by and dropping onto it, maybe with a short sprint to finish it off. To avoid building up body heat, we seldom pursue prey at a dead run. Occasionally we are stalk ers, tracking prey by scent and print, but few of us ever run for any length of time.

The rogue had run an amazingly long distance last night. I remembered the sound of the shower running in the small house after the killing ended. Had the liver-eater needed to cool off? Had he taken a cold shower? Was that also part of the reason he slept underwater in the wooded lair, to stay cool?

On the map, I traced the distance between the vamp cemetery, the parks, and Aggie’s house. It was conceivable that all of it was part of the rogue’s hunting ground—and the French Quarter too. But I couldn’t guarantee that the map was drawn to scale; it might all be different from what I was thinking. I’d have to study it later. I folded the papers to the property owner info. A large tract of land bordering Jean Lafitte park was owned by Anna, the mayor’s wife—the woman who was sleeping with Rick and the liver-eater. I hadn’t noticed how much land had been put in Anna’s name. Goose bumps rose on my arms. Beast growled.

I pulled out the next sheet and found that ten property purchases had been made in the last year in Barataria, all single-family homes, most in the two hundred thousand bracket, on or near the waterfront. Many of the properties had been purchased by Arceneau Developments. Clan Arceneau? If so, why were vamps buying up property there?

I was studying the names when the cops showed up, an unmarked car pulling down the street, no crime-scene van in sight. But then, Jodi had only my claim that a crime had taken place. I refolded the papers and tucked them in my boot. I had a decision to make.

Jodi did the usual cop thing: knock on front door, walk around the house, knock on back door, check the outbuilding—which I hadn’t even noticed—look at the broken window with the blood on it, knock on neighbors’ doors, talk to the housewife across the street. My good ol’ buddy Officer Herbert followed in her wake, shooting me glances of hatred that made Beast want to toy with him. I had a feeling that, eventually, she would get her chance. Then Jodi and Herbert went in, guns drawn. After that, a lot of cops went in, some in CSI clothing.

They stayed inside a long time, as the sun dropped lower and shadows lengthened. I heard snatches of soft-voiced conversation through the windows, but I didn’t bother to listen; I didn’t have to—the rank odor of death rode the heated air. The liver-eater had indeed munched on the house’s occupants. Yet I had seen someone exit the house and drive away, which made my half-contemplated and unvoiced speculation correct. The man I saw leave was more than a glamour; like me, the liver-eater must have the ability to shift into another shape, but in his case, he ate his victim, then shifted using the ingested DNA, and strolled out. Just like in the ancient legends of liver-eater. But this one didn’t have a long fingernail.

Beast huffed. Little cat steal Beast. Jane steal Beast. Thief-of-soul.

Despite the heat, cold shivered through me like an icy electric shock. What I did was an accident, I thought. What the liver-eater does isn’t an accident. It’s black magic. Blood magic. Ancient Cherokee blood magic. And shifting changed his basic scent. The rogue could be anybody, anywhere, even someone I had spent time with, talked to. Sunlight might not damage him except when he was in vamp form—how the heck did I know? He could be vamp, witch, or human. Maybe he could look like one of the true-dead whose bones had been disturbed. Had he found enough genetic material to shift into an older vamp’s shape? So, what did I know? He hadn’t attended Katie’s blood gathering. He’d watched and then come out to feed.Yeah. . . . I started cataloguing who had been at the gathering.

The whole time Jodi did her cop thing, I sat, relaxed in my chair, sunglasses hiding my eyes, speculating, letting my mind wander over impossibilities that might not be so impossible. I knew Jodi was letting me wait, hoping I was stewing, deliberately ignoring me. Her way of getting me back for my attitude. As soon as I worked through all the impossibilities, her ploy began to work. I had people to talk to, alive and dead. If I wasn’t going to get inside—and I surely wasn’t—then I needed to be on the move.

Instead, I sat as cop cars piled up in the street and as media vans with satellite dishes arrived. One van had a cherry picker mounted on top, allowing a cameraman a bird’s-eye view of the crime scene. As the news crews set up, the neighbors began to come home to be informed and questioned by the cops. Across the lawn, I heard their shock and smelled their fear. And then the sun set and I started to get hot under the collar, which had to be Jodi’s intent.

Beast, on the other hand, loved every minute of the cat and mouse. And unlike me, she liked lying half asleep in the heat of the sun, if not the fire ants and the mosquitoes that came out to feast. And she liked the game playing. Ambush predators were patient.

I have sharp claws, she thought at me. Human female has only a gun she has been told she cannot fire. She is not Big Cat. She is not even alpha in dog or wolf pack. Not alpha in cop pack. She is nothing.

“She’s a cop who wants to lay a crime on me,” I murmured back, my voice lower than a whisper, my eyes closed behind my glasses against the final rays of late-day glare. “She’s a cop with access to the prints in the woods and the blood on the window and the forensic evidence inside the house. DNA evidence.”

Snake that lies at heart of all things? Beast asked.

“Yes.” Though Beast was unable to grasp the concept of DNA, she understood the snake. “DNA evidence that might prove skinwalkers exist.”

Humans will not see truth. They will say blood is spoiled.

By spoiled, I understood that she meant contaminated. She was probably right. Unlike more primitive peoples, intellectual, well-educated humans just pretended the things they didn’t understand didn’t exist. It was how vamps had survived so long among humans.

Liver-eater is not skinwalker like Jane.

“Fine. So what is liver-eater?”

“Say what?”

I opened my eyes and shoved back the glasses. Jodi was standing in front of me, lips pursed. I’d been so intent on the inner conversation that I hadn’t heard her walk up, but I knew I had spoken too softly for her to hear. I rolled my head around on my neck as if stretching from a nap, and smiled sleepily at her, letting Beast have her way. I extended my arms and laced my fingers like a pianist, pulling on muscles from shoulders to fingertips, cracking two knuckles, as if I had been asleep while she worked, sweating in the heated house. “Sleep talking. Can I go now?” Asking to leave was a sure bet for being made to stay. And leaving before I knew what she had found inside was not what I wanted.

“No. I want to know how you found this place.”

I didn’t bother sitting up, but dropped my sunglasses back over my eyes. I could see that brought all her instincts to the fore and so I smiled. “If you want to see my eyes while you question me, you can take a chair and not make me look into the sunset.” I shrugged, the same in-your-face shrug I had perfected at the children’s home to keep the girls off my back. Bullies need for their marks to care, and despite the fact that Jodi was a cop doing her job and that job was for the benefit of the welfare of the citizens of New Orleans, yada, yada, she was still trained to be a bully. And I just flat-out didn’t like bullies. Not at all.

With ill grace, Jodi took a chair. “How did you find this place?

I shoved the glasses on top of my head.The sky was golden, fuchsia, and violet, the sun balanced on the horizon. It made me squint, but a deal was a deal. “I was tracking the rogue. It covered a lot of territory last night. It ended up here. There’s tracks for it getting inside. No tracks for it leaving.”

“What time did it get here?”

I shrugged, trying for cooperative. “Tracks in the mud in the woods suggest it was some time ago, before sunrise. When I got here, they were dried around the edges, starting to crumble in. Weird tracks, by the way. Like something a witch worked on. Like maybe he’s got access to a spell that appears to alter the shape of his feet. Or something.”

“I saw them. Witches can do that?” she asked. It was real curiosity. Real worry.

“Either that or the rogue can change his body shape. You decide.”

Jodi looked over her shoulder at the crime-scene van and the techs who were walking from the house. “Since vampires came out of hiding, we’ve been speculating on what other nonhumans might be out there.”

I chuckled. “Werewolves?”

“Maybe. Why not?”

“I guess there could be, but I never heard of any. No trolls, no pixies, no fairies either.”

“Would you tell me if you did?” Her eyes were back on me, piercing.

“I would definitely tell you if I had ever met a troll, a werewolf, a pixie, or a fairy. Yes.”

She seemed to accept that, and why not? It was the truth. I do truth pretty well. She looked back to the woods. “We’re going to get casts of the tracks.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “So, you think he used a witch spell to alter the shape of his feet.”

“Or to alter the shape of any tracks he left. If witches can do that. I never asked.”

“I have a contact at a coven. I guess I can ask.” She didn’t sound real thrilled about it. Jodi was still staring at the woods when she said, “The house belongs to the Broussards—Ken, twenty-seven, Rose, twenty-four, no kids, no pets. A neighbor saw Ken’s personal vehicle leaving this morning near sunrise, when she was nursing her baby. Looks like he broke in, killed them, and then stole Ken’s truck.” When I still said nothing, she looked at me, her head rotating slowly on the stem of her neck. “He ate them,” she said.

I didn’t change my expression. Didn’t tense. Didn’t react in any way. I just waited.

“He ate them just like he ate the cops. But this time he didn’t try for subtlety. He hurt them. He tore them”—her words stopped as if her throat closed off, as if a hand choked off her air, but when she took up her narrative her voice was steady—“apart, like a wild animal. Like a pack of wolves.” She shook her head and her neck muscles creaked, she was holding them so tightly. “The only thing left in any way intact was one head and the lower sections of the extremities. Elbows and ankles down. Even the brains were dished out.”

That was new, but I didn’t alter my stance. It seemed the only thing that made Jodi Richoux gabby was silence. I could do silence real well. I waited. “Why did he eat them?” she asked. “Why did he leave the lower limbs? What is he? It. It had fangs. Or a knife with dual blades, about eight inches apart.”

When I realized that the questions weren’t rhetorical, but were a request for knowledge, I said, “I can speculate.” She nodded for me to go ahead and focused tightly on my face, as if to read my soul through the pores of my skin. “First, there isn’t much meat in the lower extremities except for the calves. And that’s only a few mouthfuls—” Jodi flinched, just the barest twitch, but I saw it. It was hard for her to accept that humans were being hunted and eaten. “—even on a well-built man. It—he—was looking for food. I’m guessing he has something wrong with him that makes him need blood and meat. A lot of meat. And human and vamp meat both work for him.”

I sat up and Jodi’s gaze followed me intently. I was ravenous when I shifted. If he was shifting several times a night, or if his shifting wasn’t voluntary, but at the whim of his own body, he’d need huge amounts of protein, massive amounts of food. And humans were the biggest, most available, easiest-to-catch-and-kill food supply on the planet. That made perfect sense. But I couldn’t say that to Jodi. I said, “I think maybe he’s not just rogue, but sick. I think the meat he’s eating is helping him to control his condition.”

“I didn’t think vamps could get sick. I thought that was the purpose of drinking blood for eternity—immortality and all that crap.” Her tone was derisive. Jodi might be Katie’s liaison at NOPD, but Jodi didn’t like vamps. Not at all.

“Maybe it’s rare.” I watched her take that in and mull it over. I waited another beat and said, “I need to see the crime scene.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“Then I’ll call Leo Pellissier. I figure he can pull strings and get me in.”

“No.” She shook her head and blushed slightly, startled. “I need you to wait on that.”

I had just pushed a button. Leo and Jodi? Nah, not with her antipathy to vamps. Something else. So I pushed. “Yes. You can make it happen. It’s the crime scene on your say-so or Leo.” When she hesitated, I said, “I’ve hunted rogues before. I need to see the scene so I can tell if it looks like anything from past kill sites.”

Beast rumbled deep inside, Never hunted liver-eater. Which was true, but not something I was ready to contribute to the conversation. More gently, I added to Jodi, “Leo can make it happen if you won’t. But I’d rather work with you, not him.”

“You’re pretty chummy with Leo. He makes sure I call him Mr. Pellissier.”

“I’m sure he’d like me to be polite too.”

Suddenly Jodi smiled, a wry pull of lips. “You yank his chain like you yank ours?”

I didn’t like being transparent, but I did like the smile, so I answered honestly. “More.”

Jodi chuckled under her breath and stood. “My ass’ll be in the grinder if it gets out you were on a crime scene. Try not to screw with the evidence or bring trace in. And you step where I say and not one step farther.”

“Thanks,” I said, standing slowly, trying for humble and appreciative. I was pretty sure it worked because Jodi led me to the crime-scene van and handed me paper and plastic PPEs. It turned out I needed all the personal protective equipment. The house was a bloodbath. Another trite term. But the only one that fit.