Skinwalker

CHAPTER 4 You scare the pants offa me

After lunch, my belly distended and my instincts about Antoine squashed beneath gourmand satisfaction, Rick and I walked along the river on a concrete boardwalk. A musician, sweating in the heat, swayed slowly in a patch of shade, playing a baritone saxophone. The jazz notes were low and rolling as the nearby Mississippi, the tune soulful and plaintive. I tossed a five in the open sax case at his feet and we stood to listen. After the melody, we moved on, the musician offering us a nod and starting another tune, the deep notes following us down the walk.

The air was hot and wet and my shirt stuck to my skin like it was glued on, my jeans damp with heat; yet it was an oddly comforting feeling, like a pelt after a swim and a lazy hour in the sun. I wasn’t good at social interaction; in fact, I totally sucked at it, but the presence of Rick made the afternoon feel sociable, companionable—a good-looking guy, a good meal . . . But work was work, and I figured it was an appropriate time to see if Rick LaFleur was going to be helpful in my investigation, or just a distraction. I wanted to use his local knowledge and contacts, and that superseded any interest in him in a nonbusiness way. Or so I told myself.

Trying for a light tone, I said, “So, bad boy, blight on the family name. Want to tell me why you came to my house and introduced me to Antoine’s delicacies? I’m guessing it wasn’t because you saw me on the street and fell head over heels in love at first sight.”

He glanced at me through the dark lenses once, and I could almost feel him thinking things through. When he stuck his thumbs into his jeans pockets, I figured he had come to a conclusion. He slanted a look at me over the tops of his glasses, his head tilted down, eyes tilted up, considering. It was a well-rehearsed gesture and it set off my play dar. The Joe was a player. The realization was surprisingly disappointing.

“I asked you to lunch to see if we could work together.” He pursed his lips, considering his words. “But something about you bothers me.”

I allowed a smile to start, letting him see a hint of derision in it, but not enough to decide if I was deriding him, or myself.

“I got to tell you, lady, you scare the pants offa me and I don’t know why. And you scared Antoine. I saw it in his eyes.” He pushed his glasses back in place, hiding his expression. “Nothing scares Antoine.”

I kept my light tone. “Your pants are still on. Antoine’s still alive. I’m unarmed. I haven’t killed and eaten anyone. Around here.” I let my smile twist a bit and added, “Yet.” Rick chuckled. “So why am I scary?” I finished.

“I wish I knew. You witchy?”

“Not a witch,” I said, “no.”

“Didn’t think so. You don’t ”—he considered and discarded several words—“you don’t feel like that. But lady, you’re not human.” It wasn’t a question. It was more in the nature of an accusation. And it hit too close to the truth.

I turned on my heel and headed back downriver. “Thanks for the invitation and for the introduction to Antoine.” I didn’t thank him for the lunch because I had paid for my own.

“Hey, hey, hey. Don’t run away mad.”

I turned around, walking backward down the concrete boardwalk, and pulled off my glasses so he could see my eyes. “I’m not running away. And I’m not mad. I’m just not the kinda gal who likes to play games. You watched my house last night, smoking a cigar, hiding on the stoop across the street.” His brows rose and he pulled off his glasses too. Which was only polite and made me see him in a slightly kinder manner. Only slightly. “You make semiaccusations and dance around questions, but you don’t ask, you just prod and poke to see what I’ll do. You take me to a friend who just happens to have some kinda witch magic and get him to read me”—I let some of the anger I felt about that show—“which just ticks me off. So, you see, I’m not mad. I just got better things to do with my time.”

“And that right there”—he raised an index finger as if making a point—“is what scares me about you.” When I stopped and cocked a brow, hands on my hips, sweating in the heat, he said, “Any other woman would have spent the next ten minutes trying to convince me she wasn’t mad. Even if she was. You? You just tell me off. While you walk away. Calm and cool as all get-out. And lady, gals don’t usually just walk away from me.”

My smile twisted hard and I started walking again, backward, aware of a couple sitting on a bench in the sweaty heat, close enough to hear us had they not been necking like teenagers. Not that I cared. “Macho pride?” I asked, louder, over the distance.

“Fact.”

I figured that was true. Women likely flocked to him, hovering like hummingbirds. I had noticed the glances he got at Antoine’s, even from the lady cop, interested, willing. He was pretty and smooth. But I preferred up-front to a smooth player. Any day.

“I’m not most women,” I said, louder, to cover the distance now separating us.

“I know that. You kill rogue vamps for a living. Took down an entire blood-family, you and a witch and a cop. And the cop died.” I stopped walking backward. The couple looked up at the word “died” and focused on me. Blinked. Went back to business.

Rick started walking toward me, lowering his voice. “You and the witch walked out, you half dead, with that scar on your neck. But back then it was four inches wide, red and ridged, brand-new. I’ve seen the video. But you didn’t have it when you went into the mine. I asked people who knew you.”

Damn Internet. A college kid, camping in the mountains, had spotted Molly and me coming out of the mine, into the dawn light, both blood covered, me carrying Brax, Paul Braxton, over my shoulder. Or what was left of him. A young rogue vamp had killed him.

Rick moved toward me, his steps measured, careful, as if he were approaching a wild animal. I tensed and took another step back before stopping. He slowed. Deliberately, I relaxed my fists, took a calming breath, knowing Beast was awake. She always woke when I faced any kind of threat, and I could feel her staring out through my eyes, intense and tightly gathered, ready for danger. I took a slow breath, not wanting to bring her to a killing alertness. But she had gone deadly quiet. Rick stopped directly in front of me, his eyes steady and calm. Studying me. Beast studied him back.

The camper kid had taken a short video with his digital camera when he saw two blood-saturated females walk out of the mine. He had zoomed in on my face, my peculiar amber-colored eyes seeming to glow, an effect that had been blamed on the golden sunrise. What else could it be, right? But it was Beast. And I knew she was staring through my eyes right now.

When word went out that the rogue vamp’s entire blood-family had been taken down at the mine, the videographer had realized he had a moneymaker and posted the footage on YouTube. And Molly and I were famous. Yippee.

His voice a murmured burr, Rick said, “After only six months, that four-inch-wide scar is nearly gone.” His finger lifted and I watched it rise to me, not a threat, not really. Yet I tensed. He traced the scar above my collarbone, thin white lines with thinner crosshatching, evidence of claws and vamp teeth, his finger slow and delicate, as if he traced the wing feathers of a wild bird. “It travels,” he said, stepping so close I could smell the musk of the man, “more than halfway around your neck.”

He smelled wonderful. Sweaty, slightly beery, spicy, and . . . meaty. And very male. Beast was very definitely interested. But suddenly no longer in defensive mode. Heat shivered in my belly, clamping down hard.

“Something tried to rip out your throat,” he said, his fingers feather light on my skin. “Tried to suck you dry. And nearly succeeded. And you healed from it. Fast.”

I stepped back, lifting and setting down each foot, staying centered, balanced. Beast rose in me, gathered. I was on the edge—the edge of what, I wasn’t certain—but something in me wanted to nip, growl, and swat the man around. Either wound him or run. So he would chase me. “Molly healed me in the cave,” I said, sticking to our lie. “She performed—”

“Not on the full moon she didn’t. Your friend Molly is an okay moon witch, but her gift is as an earth witch, herbs and growing things. And dead things, which is why she went in after the blood-family with you and Paul Braxton. I did my research. She can sense dead things. Like vamps asleep in the day.” He shook his head, still moving slowly, his eyes boring into mine. Holding me still with his gaze. Dominant behavior. Mating behavior. Beast liked.

“No,” he said. I felt a spike of shock, as if he had heard my thoughts. But he continued, his words measured and deliberate. “She didn’t heal you. Not underground, surrounded by a buncha true-dead vamps.” Yeah, this Joe had done his homework. He was dangerous.

I felt the move before I registered the tension in his shoulders, his hand forming a claw. To take my neck in his fist. I blocked. Right arm up. Across my body. Fist moving clockwise. My forearm slammed his arm away. One quick step to his side. My foot behind his right leg. I pushed. As he went down, I finished the move. A hard slam to his solar plexus. Maybe a full second of action. His breath whooshed out with a grunt. Pain blanched him, then flushed him.

I walked away. My heart rate hadn’t even sped up.

When I looked back, Rick was rolling to his knees, holding his middle, moving as if he hurt, as if he couldn’t yet catch his breath. No. Not Rick. Not a man with a name. The Joe.

He stared after me. And he laughed. The laughter hurt; I could see the pain in his face. But he laughed. Fun, Beast thought at me. I curled my lips. “Not really,” I murmured. “Ten bucks says he won’t be back.”

Jane can’t kill more-than-five bucks. But I can. Beast shared a memory of feasting on a buck, points of his rack standing within her vision. The buck had been two hundred pounds, eighty pounds bigger than she. His blood was hot, his flesh so full of flavor it made the juices in my mouth run.

“Show-off,” I murmured to Beast. To myself. We both walked on, sharing the only kind of humor Beast and I could. Blood-sport humor.

Rick’s bike was gone when I tooled out of the side garden, braids streaming out behind me, beads clicking, my head sweltering in the helmet, motor rumbling with a heavy, powerful purr. My bike is a Bitsa. Bitsa this and bitsa that. Mostly parts from two 1950 Harley-Davidson FL pan/shovel bikes, modified, not restored to showroom perfection. The bike is dark teal with an iridescent, metal-flake, pearl sheen; it has black shadows of mountain lion forelegs along the gas tank, rising from the seat, between my legs, curved claws extended as if reaching to grab the handles and take over. And in certain light, one can see minuscule flecks of ruby blood streaking the claws. It’s a custom, one-of-a-kind job: the paint color, the artwork, and the bike itself.

Hunting for transportation after my last, very profitable job, had been much like hunting for food, and Beast, who seldom entered my conscious thoughts except when danger threatened, wakened when I started looking six months ago, and hung around for the entire search. My Beast had very specific opinions about vehicles. She had refused to let me buy a car or truck, and had simply spat when I showed her a minivan suitable for stakeouts. But the first time she saw the bikes, rusting and busted in a junkyard in Charlotte, North Carolina, she had approved.

Jacob, the Harley master mechanic who had worked as an engine/chassis builder in a Charlotte NASCAR shop for ten years, was more a Zen Harley priest than a mechanic. He’d not so much rebuilt Bitsa as resurrected her into the perfection only a master mechanic could envision. She was still a basic pan/shovel on the outside, but with modern updates, like a dependable, low-maintenance, quiet-running Mikuni HSR42 carburetor and hydraulic lifters; she was a dream bike. We’d had only one argument over Bitsa. Jacob had wanted to install an electronic ignition, but keys are for wimps. Bitsa had an old-fashioned kick start and always would.

We rolled down the street, the roar of the engine claiming our territory as much as Beast’s scream would announce and claim hers. Her scream, not a roar. African lions roar, panthers don’t. Cougar, puma, panther, catamount, screamer, devil cat, silver lion, mountain lion, and North American black panther, all refer to one beast—the Puma concolor—once the widest-ranging mammal on the North American continent, and one of the three largest modern-day predators other than man. As fierce as they are, pumas can’t roar. They scream, hack, growl, purr, yowl, spit, and make low-pitched hisses, and the young make loud, chirping whistles to call their mothers, but they can’t roar. Beast considers the gift of roaring highly overrated and likely to draw in the white hunter and his guns. Silent and deadly is better, with screams to frighten prey. She didn’t need more. But she liked the roar of the bike. Go figure.

She would likely stay quiescent—she sleeps nearly sixteen hours a day—as shopping, though predatory, wasn’t bloody enough to arouse her hunting instincts. I needed cooler clothes to survive this heat and humidity. The temps had reached mid-nineties, with hotter weather called for later in the week. I also needed to meet the butcher who would deliver my protein needs. To meet the ten-day bonus, Beast and I might be shifting every day, a round-trip ticket, making meat imperative. Five to ten pounds of fresh meat and a half box of oatmeal a day, and that was just to restore from two shifts. If I had to fight or run, I’d need a lot more calories.

As we powered out of the Quarter, accelerating down Charles Avenue, it started raining. From a clear blue sky. I sighed. My hair was gonna look awful.

I arranged an account with the butcher to deliver steak whenever I called in an order, and on the way home spotted a Wal-Mart, where I bought a swimsuit, lightweight cargo pants, shorts, tank tops, and a pair of neon-hued flip-flops. A mile distant, I passed a strip mall with a florist, a small Church of Christ, and a little storefront with calf-length skirts displayed in the window. Intrigued, I stopped the bike, unhelmeted, and went inside.

The skirts were patchwork. Not like something a sixty-year-old hippie would wear, but dainty, flared, delicate confections made of tiny, two-by-four-inch patches of gauze or silk or cotton in vibrant colors. Each one was color coordinated, all blues or teals or reds, and some were embroidered. I lifted a patterned gauze skirt in sea blue and purple and shook it gently. The hem flipped, flirty and cute. I didn’t do cute well, but I liked this. The elastic waist would allow it to ride low on my hips if I wanted it to, or higher, on my waist.

“That would look totally rad on you.”

I glanced at the teenaged girl who was sitting behind the counter with a paperback book in her hand. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. But you gotta see it with this shirt.” She slid from a stool, taking a foot off her height, making her just over five feet, and walked to a shelf, pulling a shirt out. It was a peasant top with a drawstring neckline, made of the same sea blue material, but this time partnered with a paler purple fabric. “And this,” she said, holding a purple and teal stone necklace. “Amethyst and chatkalite. Totally cool with these sandals.” She lifted a pair of purple sandals from the front window, with straps for dancing.

I looked at the freckled girl, grinning. “I suck at putting outfits together and you did it in less than a minute.”

“It’s a gift,” she agreed. “Try ’em on. You want I should pick out another one for you?”

I turned the tags over and winced as I looked around the small store. “It’ll break my budget to leave this store with another one.”

“And it’ll break your heart not to,” she said sagely. “I’ll find you something just as cute but cheaper. Go on.” She flapped a hand at me and I went. I tried on clothes for nearly an hour, a huge record for me. I left the store with two pairs of shoes, two skirts, three tops to mix and match, and the necklace. Six outfits. How could I say no?

Back at the freebie house, the clothes went into the closet with the rest of my meager gear. I travel light, just what will fit into the saddlebags, and the things I can’t live without that get mailed to my new address each time I move, like my tea. The weapons in the closet took up more room than the clothes. A traveling vamp killer has to make do.

I cleaned up and changed into my only other pair of jeans and my Lucchese boots. I had an appointment for dinner at Katie’s. I studied the papers in the envelope Troll had given me, including the info on New Orleans’ vamps, and read over the fine print in the contract, making sure the clause about collateral damage I had insisted upon in our Internet negotiations was still there. If I found that the rogue vamp was being given safe haven and I had to kill one or more vamps to get to him, I didn’t want reprisals. The special clause guaranteed me protection. It was present.

There was also a confidentiality clause stating that I wouldn’t share with the media or anyone else anything I learned about the vampires, their servants, or their households on pain of a slow and grisly death. Not that I planned on going on national TV with an exposé of the vampy and fangy, but it did bring me up short. Even knowing that the clause made perfect sense from their standpoint, the “slow and grisly death” line was pretty gruesome.

Near the bottom, there was a welcome line about needing to hire local contacts and a budget to pay sources who might not talk otherwise. From the way I read it, it looked like the council was willing to cover such expenses, pending Katie’s approval. Sweet.

In the vamp info folder, I found a toll-road sticker for my bike and a list of New Orleans’ seven vampire clans, digital photos of the head vamps, and a breakdown of the vampire power structure. It was similar to a parliamentarian government, with heads of clans sitting on the executive council, and elder vamps sitting on an expanded council. The council made decisions on finances, kept the peace with humans, worked with human law enforcement, and enforced its own laws on its members, including holding down the number of scions, blood-servants, and blood-slaves that one vamp clan might have. Interesting info, but not real useful when tracking one nutso whacked-out vamp that the council hadn’t killed off or even managed to identify.

I signed the contract, input into my cell phone the contact numbers Katie had included, and jumped the brick fence. I didn’t want the blasted Joe to know where I was. He was back in his hidey-hole, watching my yard, smoking another cigar. Making me wonder who he was working for, keeping an eye on me . . . Well, not for the rogue vamp. They were too mentally unstable to keep someone under thrall for extended periods of time. And the Joe—not Rick, just no-name Joe—hadn’t smelled of vamp. But Katie for sure had other enemies. I didn’t even have to ask. Vamps always had enemies, and the older the vamp, the more enemies. Living and dead.

I presented myself at Katie’s back door at seven p.m. on the nose. Troll opened the door and stood there, staring at me, blocking my way in. I feigned nonchalance, while wishing I had come armed, and said, “Evening. I’m supposed to interview the girls.”

“Join them for dinner. Not interview.”

“You say tomato, I say interview. But I’ll be nice. No broken arms or blood.”

I coulda sworn Troll wanted to smile. He pushed open the door, but still kept it blocked with his arm and body. “You disabled all Katie’s security devices.”

“Yep. Contractual agreement.” I slapped the contract on Troll’s chest. “No spying on the help. I’m sure she just forgot to have the cameras removed.”

“You found ’em all. Fast.” He took the contract, but didn’t step aside.

I touched my nose and quoted the short salesgirl. “It’s a gift.” I added, “I can smell security devices.” Which was a total lie. But I could scent out where a human had spent a lot of time in an odd place. Like over the mantel, in the closet, in the kitchen, installing the bugs. “Time for my question. Why did Rick LaFleur show up at my place today?”

Troll tilted his head, thinking. I could see things happening behind his secretive brown eyes, but his body language gave nothing away. Maybe working with a vamp teaches you to keep everything inside. “Rick wanted the job hunting the rogue.”

Okay. That was no surprise. “You ticked off that I got the job and not him?”

“I told Katie to hire you. Rick’s good but not good enough to take on a rogue. My family knows it and asked me to keep him out. Which I did. You tell him that and I’ll gut you like a pig.”

“Thanks for the warning. Any chance he’s working for Katie’s opposition?”

“No chance in hell.”

“So he’s watching my place because he finds me irresistible?”

Troll’s eyes went wide, surprised.

“Yeah. That was my feeling.” I tucked my hands in my jeans pockets and wondered how much longer Troll was going to make me stand in the heat and chat. Cool, air-conditioned air flowed out around us and dissipated fast while I started to sweat. I could feel the silver cross under my shirt, the only thing I wore that could be considered a weapon, gathering moisture. Even my scalp was sweating. “He wants to work with me on the rogue deal,” I said, “and I’m interested in someone with local contacts if he’s legit. And if the council covers the expense.”

“I’ll talk to Katie,” Troll said, shaking his head. “How do you like your steak? Baked potato with the works? Salad?” He finally stepped aside and let me in, shut the door behind me, and locked it.

“Light a match under the meat, and if it’s still mooing I won’t be insulted, anything full of fat on the potato, and salad is for cows. Cola, with caffeine, no alcohol.” I walked into the house, waiting for him to make a move. He didn’t. He just pointed to the right and said, “Katie will leave you alone with them for an hour. The girls gather for dinner in the common room.”

“Okay. And Troll?” He waited. “When I jumped the fence, I noticed that someone installed a security camera recently on Katie’s side of the fence, pointed at her house. Within the last month. The scratch is still fresh. They came in from my side of the fence.”

Troll cursed. He disappeared down a darkened hallway.