"Misha said he was a primo blood-servant," I said. They were usually well-off and lived on the vamp's premises, where they were handy to do laundry or clean the pool or, in this case, do the books. And be available for s.e.x and dinner, of course.

The Kid said, "He's more likely a vamp's occasional snack, and Misha was using him for background info. And before you ask, no, there's no answer at his home or office."

"We've got the time, and nothing else to do until eight. Let's do a run-by," Eli said, studying the addresses on satellite maps. "If the office and the house are empty, we can check them out and be back in plenty of time. If there are people there and it looks okay, then we've had a nice drive."

By check them out, I knew Eli meant "break into and look around," which sounded fine to me, except for any getting-caught-and-slapped-in-jail part. Our eight p.m. meeting was with Hieronymus, a meet and greet to sign contracts. Eight was just after breakfast time for a vamp, and we wanted to be armed and dangerous and ready for anything.

"And about that other thing," the Kid continued. "Charly's leukemia? I verified that she's on chemo, on six different kinds of meds, including prophylactic antibiotics, some supplements to mitigate the effects of the round of chemo she finished last week, and one I can't p.r.o.nounce or find online."

"Misha took her daughter away from home and on the road, on business, the day after she finished a round of chemo?" I asked, startled. "I am not happy with Mish. But I guess there's some reason for what looks like total stupidity. I mean, okay, she has a book deal going, but surely any publisher would delay a deadline for a sick child."

Eli said succinctly, "Deductible and twenty percent."

"Oh. Yeah." Insurance and medical bills were not things I had to worry about, not with my skinwalker metabolism and healing.

"She has her job as on-air personality at Torch News," the Kid said, "and full benefits. But according to her financial records, Charly's uncovered medical bills are already at twenty thousand dollars. I don't know what she got for her book deal, but that's a lot of dough."

"Okay, Misha has to bring in large amounts of cash and fast," I said. "But still. The day after a round of chemo?" I shook my head. "Something feels hinky."

Back in the SUV, Eli pulled out and headed west, over the Mississippi. Lately, my whole life seemed to be spent crossing the Old Miss.

We took 84, also known as John R. Junkin Drive, across the river and into Vidalia. Eli found the business, and we both noted the Closed sign and the dusty Christmas tree in the front window. I didn't need to look at Eli to know how strange that was. We drove around several blocks, looking for banks and ATMs, which had the best security cameras, and any other businesses that looked profitable enough to have cameras running. When we were satisfied that we had a line of entry that would be un.o.bserved, we parked the truck near a trailer park and meandered back on foot, moving with enough purpose that we looked like we belonged, but not with so much intent that we looked like we were working ourselves up to rob someplace.

When a cop car motored toward us, Eli's entire gait changed into bada.s.s street thug, and he took my hand. I cozied up to his shoulder and giggled like some mindless girl in love. Beneath his jean jacket I felt a blade sheathed to his arm and muscles hard enough to crack a coconut. The cop glanced at us but didn't react otherwise.

When I figured he was gone, I glanced back and let go of Eli. "Not bad," he said.

"Not bad, yourself. Where did you pick up that swagger?"

He didn't reply and I didn't really expect him to. We were at the fence a block behind Bryson Ryder's office. We split up, and Eli took the direct route along the fence. I strolled down three more buildings and walked along a narrow path between two that had been visible on Google. What had I ever done without satellite mapping systems?

I turned at the corner and walked by the front entrance again, seeing no one nearby, and I texted to Eli quickly, Go. I heard a muted thump and a moment later I walked up the steps to the small house-turned-storefront, and Eli let me in. I was. .h.i.t with the smell of mold, dust, and human. Fainter was the smell of vamp, mixed varieties, like the way an herb store might smell if all the canisters were emptied onto the floor and allowed to dry rot. A little chamomile, some red pepper, rose hips, lilies, and dandelion, and a hint of vanilla, but all old. Nothing fresh.

Eli was wearing black nitrile gloves and tossed a pair to me. I caught them out of the air, two-handed. Black gloves were way cooler than blue or green. I had even seen where they made purple, fuchsia, and neon yellow, but I was partial to the black.

"No active security," Eli said to me. "Looks like it was turned off and never turned back on. Backup battery is dead." Talking on a headset to his brother, he said, "Booting up." He started up the computer, murmuring quietly as the Kid walked him through the dull intricacies of breaking into an old PC. The Kid had wanted to come along, claiming it would make our job ten times faster. Eli had vetoed that. The little felon was in Mississippi by the good graces of a lenient judge, and no way was Eli going to let anything criminal come within ten feet of him. No. That was for us. Lucky me.

Gloved, I looked the place over. There was dust everywhere, even on the PC keyboard and the phone. There were spiderwebs in two ceiling corners. A roach motel behind the desk was full. That was one thing about the Gulf states: roaches were everywhere. They were the size of a wrestler's thumb, crunched like bubble wrap and squirted green goo when you stomped on them, and sometimes even busted up and leaking they'd still crawl away. I'd learned to hate roaches. They were fearless. Not that long ago I found one crawling under my toilet seat. I managed not to scream and inform the boys that I was truly a girl, but it was a near thing. And it wasn't the first time my privacy had been so rudely interrupted.

The answering machine-an old digital model-had a blinking light. I pulled a tiny recorder the Kid had given me and hit RECORD on the mini recorder, then PLAY, on the machine, half listening as it played. Bryson hadn't answered his messages in weeks. Maybe months. One of the last ones was Misha's voice, still listed under "new messages," as if it hadn't been played. Which was odd. The calendar on the wall was still on October of last year. There was a dead plant in the corner. Whoever Misha had talked to, it was beginning to look like it wasn't Bryson Ryder, unless he had gone into hiding for some reason that let him abandon his business and yet talk to a reporter. Which was not impossible, but was highly unlikely.

On one side of the back door that Eli had kicked in there was a miniature kitchen with a small steel sink, a cheap microwave, and a tiny brown fridge, like one a college student would have kept in his dorm. The fridge stank of rotten broccoli and mystery meat, but at least Bryson's body hadn't been carved up and forced inside. A bathroom was on the other side of the door, and the water in the toilet suggested that it hadn't been flushed in ages, an iron-brown ring showing where water had evaporated.

I pulled open a file cabinet. It wasn't locked. The files inside were hard copies of his customers' yearly taxes, three five-foot-long drawers' worth. Nothing personal had been kept in the drawers that I could see. But in the bottom one I noticed a name on a file: CONSTANCE PERRAULT. Next to it was COLEMAN PeRODEAU. Both were vamps. According to Reach's preliminary research, both were lower-level scions of Hieronymus. I did a quick look for the clan Misha mentioned-Clan Pet.i.tpas. Just as I'd thought, there was no such listing.

One knee on the floor, I flipped through the files and recognized more vamp names, blood-servants, and commercial businesses owned by the same. "Eli. Got something." He looked up from the PC. "Misha was right about one thing. Bryson Ryder is the tax consultant to the fanged and their dinners." I pulled out a file from the H's. "Including Hieronymus."

"I have something too. There's nothing new on his computer for the last six weeks. But before that, it looks like Bryson somehow got on Hieronymus' bad side. There is a file of e-mails for each of his vampire clients, and under Hieronymus' name is a series of thinly veiled threats written by the MOC's lawyer. Legal threats," Eli clarified. "Bryson was being threatened with a lawsuit."

I tucked the mini recorder into a pocket and made sure everything appeared undisturbed while Eli went for the SUV. Just a little B and E and electronics theft before my afternoon snack.

Bryson's home was a comfortable brick place, added on to since the Google street photos had been taken, with a big live oak shading the front yard and a mailbox full of mail at the curb, envelopes and flyers sticking out. "Not good," I said.

Eli said nothing as he parked behind a new-model car in the drive, but he checked his weapon and chambered a round as he got out, taking point as we moved to the front door. He carried the gun one-handed, pointed down beside his leg, where it couldn't be seen from the street. It seemed like a bit of overkill, but I unb.u.t.toned my jacket so I could get at both of my weapons and walked facing the road, keeping an eye on the yard, street, and the neighbors' houses at our rear.

It was typical suburbia for this time of day: quiet, no traffic, no activity. Ryder's car had a lot of cat tracks up and down the hood and the front window. A children's tricycle was by the front tire, on its side, and a doll lay on the walkway to the door, looking as if it had been outside for a while. The smell hit me about ten feet from the door. Something was very wrong at the Ryder home. I stopped and put all sensory clues together. "Eli. We got bodies inside."

He stopped too, not asking how I knew, but his bearing went from vigilant to hyperalert. He held his gun now in a two-hand grip pointed at the ground in front of him. "Details."

"Old blood. A lot of it. Sickly sweet. It's been there a while."

"Let's go." He moved back to the SUV and got inside.

I followed, buckling myself in as he drove away. All I could see was the doll and the tricycle. "A family is dead for weeks and somehow no one's noticed yet?"

"You smelled the time frame?" he asked as he pulled back onto 84, heading for the river.

"Part of it. Another part was cat tracks on a new car, the mail in the box, and toys left out in the weather." As we were crossing the river, I thought about calling Misha and telling her that her contact was dead, but I just burgled his office, so the less I told the press, the better, old friend or not.

Below us on the water, a barge loaded with train cars and two tugs were pushing slowly upstream, the wake turbulent behind and beside them. The barge was sitting low in the water, and it had to take a lot of power to fight a current so heavily laden. "Does it bother you that I can smell blood?" I asked Eli. Meaning: does it bother you that I'm a skinwalker? But not said.

Eli looked at me from the corner of his eye. "No. I'll make sure a report is called in to the police about Ryder and then I'll have Alex monitor the police bands and obtain copies of the reports. We'll know what the cops do without getting involved."

"The Kid can do that?"

"My brother can do almost anything," he muttered. He didn't sound very happy about it.

CHAPTER 4.

Have Stakes, Will Travel. Amusing.

An hour later, cops were swarming all over the Ryder place, and the Kid kept us updated on what the cops found. Four bodies, two adults and two children, all in advanced stages of decomp. COD was officially undetermined, but from police chatter, it sounded like a vamp attack. If that was true, then Big H had decided to handle things himself instead of following through on the threatened lawsuit, or Ryder made some vamp mad, or . . . or . . . I didn't know what. Something was really hinky here and I wasn't a big believer in coincidence. No matter what was really going on, I should give a heads-up call to PsyLED. Which meant calling Rick.

Esmee was taking her nap, Eli was going through the stolen electronic files on the vamps, and the Kid was helping while illicitly listening to the Vidalia police channels. Jameson was clanking around in the kitchen, listening to opera, and the maid, his wife, who had nodded politely to me before scuttling away, mop in hand, was cleaning. I was in the middle of nothing and feeling antsy, so I took my cell and went for a walk on the grounds. The backyard was enclosed by an eight-foot-tall brick wall and boasted a multicar garage, a pool, and gardens that my friend Molly would have adored. I didn't see any of it as I walked, holding the cell phone in my hand, staring at the contacts list on the bright screen.

PsyLED had issued new rulings that went into effect in the New Year. Now when humans were injured or killed by possibly paranormal means, law enforcement and private citizens were required to call PsyLED so one of their investigators could take psychometric readings. Rick was the special agent in seven states in the Southeast, including Louisiana and Mississippi. The cops would call. Eventually. But jurisdictional conflicts meant it would be later rather than sooner, and valuable evidence might be lost. I had almost asked Eli to make the call, but that had smacked of cowardice and so here I was, in the winter-chilled garden, surrounded on all sides by dormant vegetation, my knees knocking and a thumb poised over the phone. I put a foot on a garden bench and spun around so that I was sitting on the bench's back, feet on the seat, the garden spread out around me. The live oaks and magnolias near me whispered to one another, birds twittered and squawked, and two gray squirrels raced around a tree trunk, chittering, tails snapping. I could smell rain on the breeze. I really didn't want to do this. I hit SEND.

I had a mental image of Rick pulling out his phone, staring at the screen, knowing it was me, and remembering the last time we spoke, when I accused him of trying to kill me. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I was so stupid. With my idiotic accusation, I had caused irreparable harm to a relationship that could have gone somewhere.

After four rings, I heard Rick say, "Jane."

That was it. Just my name. Not h.e.l.lo, not missed you, not a rampage, which might have meant feelings for me. Just my name. I sighed slowly. "Yeah." I wanted to say, How are you? Do you forgive me for being stupid? I miss you. Instead what came out was, "I think it's possible that vamps drained and killed a family of four in Vidalia, Louisiana. And there are Naturaleza vamps in the area."

"Business," he said.

I couldn't tell if he was disappointed or not. "Yeah. I guess."

After a moment he said, "Do the local LEOs know?"

"Local law got a tip. They don't know the COD yet. It's my understanding that the bodies were too far gone to make a determination without postmortems. But they've sent for the local medical examiner, so they'll know soon."

"Why are you informing me instead of the local law?"

Because I wanted to hear your voice. No way was I saying that. "They'll get around to it. A national-media type claims to have spoken to him recently, but if the smell is anything to go by, he musta been doing that while dead. The timing is hinky. I thought you'd like a heads-up." But I wanted to hear your voice. Okay, I was being stupid and girly. But I wanted to hear his voice.

"Where are you and how did you find it?"

I filled him in on everything except the B and E, and when I was done, he said, "I'll make a call. I'm in Tennessee right now and don't know if I can get away, but someone will be coming. They'll take over."

Which meant that someone would discover that Ryder's office had been burgled. Oh, goody. I didn't respond, and after an uncomfortable silence, Rick disconnected. I closed the cell and sat in the weak winter sun, beating myself up.

When I stood, I noticed a large stone beneath the nearest maple tree. Pocketing the phone, I walked over to it and realized that it wasn't a stone from here or from anywhere around here. It was rounded and vaguely flat on top, maybe eighteen inches high, and, weirdly enough, it was pink. Pink, white-veined marble. I bent over it, and two feet away in the brush, I spotted a rusted steel pole about three feet tall with a verdigris metal lion on top. A mounting block and horse tie, remnants of a nonindustrial past, a slave past, if the age of the thing was any indication.

I sighed again and made my way back inside. I so did not fit in here. Not at all.

Back inside the house, I discovered that an hour had pa.s.sed and that the Kid had made headway on our stolen e-records and on Mish. He had discovered how my old acquaintance had used her reporter's job contacts to get a nonfiction book deal on the nation's vampires and the people who feed them, love them, care for them, or hunt them. Harder to find was info about Charly, but the computer whiz had succeeded without even being asked. The little girl had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL. Her doctors narrowed the diagnosis to a type called T-cell ALL, a form of the disease that had a less-than-rosy prognosis. Charly had started on something called induction therapy, chemo with a mix of drugs I couldn't p.r.o.nounce. Then her white count dropped and the oncologist took her off chemo for ten days to allow her body to gain strength. He had given her permission to travel as long as she didn't overdo it.

Misha had ten days to do the research that would allow her to write a book that would help pay for her daughter's possible cure. She had been desperate when she called Reach to get him to help her make contacts in the vamp world, and already one of her contacts was dead. I thought about Misha doing anything she could to raise enough money to protect her daughter. And I remembered one of Beast's memories of a male big-cat invading her den and killing her young. Beast had tracked down the cat, ambushed him, and killed him. There was a common thread there, one that made me uncomfortable for reasons I didn't understand.

As dusk drew closer, I joined Eli in the breakfast room, where paperwork was scattered across the table. Eli glanced up at me and without preliminaries said, "Cops are doing their thing with Ryder. You maybe oughta call your gal pal now. Get that guilt off your soul."

"That obvious?" I asked. When he didn't answer, I punched in Misha's number and was shunted directly to voice mail. I said, "Your contact, Ryder, is dead. Call me." To be on the safe side, I texted her the same message.

With nothing better to do and a gut feeling that things were going to go very wrong very soon, I dove into the research sent to me by Reach and the scant intel collected by the Kid. There was something about this town. Every time I came here, things seemed to get so freaking complicated.

It was after dark when I got dressed for my interview with Big H. Going into the presence of unknown vamps was never safe, despite the PR that let the world think they were s.e.xy and sparkly and only mildly dangerous fun. I wanted to go in to his presence armed to the teeth, but sometimes carrying a big stick could actually start a fight. For this howdy-doody interview there would be no leathers. I had brought dress pants in a winter-weight wool, and I pulled them on over stretch leggings, and stomped into my green snakeskin Lucchese boots. Into each boot went a sheathed knife, one with the hilt visible and one hidden deeper down. I wore a white silk shirt with billowy sleeves and a velvet vest with slits for the throwing knives and silver stakes, which I limited to three each. The loose-sleeved jacket was tight across my shoulders-all my clothes were, but I would put off a trip to Leo's designer as long as possible. The old woman terrified me. My hair I braided and twisted up in a high bun, and put more stakes in it, pushed down so I could ride in the SUV without stabbing myself.

From a shelf in the closet, I removed the box I used for my jewelry. It was a Lucchese boot box, old and starting to show the wear, but it did the trick, and though I had no intention of dressing up, the box also held some of my protective gear. I opened the flap, and sitting on top of the socks that protected my small collection of jewelry was a carved bone coyote earring. I had no idea how I'd gotten the earring, which was a mystery for another day. I'd woken up from a crazy dream and it was lying on the bed beside me. Just the one. And I didn't wear earrings. This one tingled of magics, as if it had been spelled once long ago, but something about it was still magically active, literally. The little sucker moved around. I kept the coyote in a sock. I had put the two magical pocket-watch amulets inside socks too, and now they cradled the coyote on either side. Weird. But then, my whole life was weird these days.

I dumped the pocket watches into a sock together again, and wiped my fingers on my pants. The amulets smelled like meat. Like thinned blood. Kinda gross. They were not something I wanted to keep, but since I had no idea what they did, I was loathe to toss them into a river or something. From beneath the socks, I removed a black velvet box. Inside was my chain-mail throat protector, which I latched on, the silver over t.i.tanium cold on my throat and chest. I put the boot box away.

At seven-thirty, Eli and I were driving through the dark, on our way to the meeting with Hieronymus, bristling with weapons and with Leo's vamp med kit resting on the back seat. Though silence was usual between us, this time Eli said, "So. How do you want to handle this?"

"Too many unknowns. When I do this kind of thing I just fly by the seat of my pants."

"And if the vamps go into a feeding frenzy for some reason and attack?"

"We were invited, so I don't expect trouble. That said, if something goes wrong we shoot, stake, and run."

Eli actually smiled. "I love my job."

I answered his grin with one of my own. "Yeah. Me too." I went back to studying the photos of the vamps I was to meet, photos the Kid had loaded up into an electronic pad that looked like something out of the future. Big H reminded me of a bust of some ancient Greek king, but bald. Like, the guy didn't even have eyelashes. And then there was his love and heir, Lotus, a lovely female vamp from somewhere in Asia. In one photo, she was standing next to Big H and she looked like a teenager, her black hair a veil of silk drawn to one side and hanging below her waist, wearing some kind of kimonolike robe and scarlet shoes. H's sons, Zoltar and Narkis, were next in the file. Zoltar meant "life," which the vamp no longer possessed, and Narkis meant "daffodil." I shook my head. Vamp names were weird. The boys were prettier than their father, but not by much. I also looked over the profiles of the local clans' blood-masters, primos, and secondos. There were photos of bars and warehouses and businesses in the file too, properties owned by vamps.

"We're in On Top of the Hill," Eli said of the old historical district. "Destination?" I gave him the address, turned off the tablet, and set it in the side pocket of the SUV.

Hieronymus didn't ask us to meet at his Clan home, which was an antebellum plantation home outside of town, but rather in an old warehouse in Natchez Under the Hill. Under the Hill had been changed drastically by the earthquake of 1811, an earthquake so violent that it altered the course of the Mississippi River. The eddies, floodwaters, violent swells, floating debris-including trees and fully laden, crewless boats carrying whiskey, furs, flour, hardwood lumber, and other items from the North-landslides, and avalanches had taken off over a hundred acres of the old streets. And when they were rebuilt, and then rebuilt again under General Ulysses Grant, they were much different from the original.

There were three Under the Hill streets, each over a half mile long, forming tiers or terraces, running parallel with the river. Each street cut into the slope, making sharp-angled hairpin loops on the ends that put Lombard Street in San Fran to shame, while innumerable little cross-street alleys zigzagged up and down the hill between houses and gardens and businesses. Earlier incarnations of Under the Hill had offered no attempt at beauty, but once vamps came out of the coffin, when Marilyn Monroe tried to turn the president in the Oval Office, it was discovered that vamps had made Under the Hill their home, digging into the earth of the hill, making dwellings and businesses in the half-cavern buildings. With Beast vision overlaying my own, like my version of 3-D gla.s.ses, I could see witch magic everywhere-reds, yellows, silvers, and greens all infused with black and silver and gold sparkles of power. It seemed concentrated in three places, one location on each street, the three forming the points of a triangle with the apex at the hilltop.

We were meeting at a warehouse on the middle street, Tin Alley, near the old McHenry's Gambling Establishment. The building was an old redbrick two-story and was situated on a corner, up against the sidewalk. The twelve-foot-tall wooden front doors were banded with rusted iron and open to the night air. Music, sounding like live stringed instruments, flooded through and into the street. The windows were narrow and covered with solid iron shutters, sealed tight. The place was a firetrap, with limited exits and gas lighting-I could smell it on the night air-and vamps were flammable. How stupid was all this? It had to be something to do with the history of the city and Big H's clan, something ritualistic. Vamps were big on history and ritual, having lived through most of the former, and the latter allowing the predatory hunter clans to live in proximity to one another without all-out war.

We drove around the block before parking, weaving between the fancy cars of the fanged and wealthy. Vehicles lined the streets, as there was no parking in front or at the side, only a tiny lot in the back that was packed with cars secured behind a twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence with razor wire on the top. Inside it were a dozen black Lexuses, three Caddys, and one old Bentley, its cream paint gleaming under the streetlight. At each car stood a human blood-servant-security types-armed and dangerous. Several smoked, and I lowered my window an inch to test the air. Floating over the herbal scent of vamp and the stink of gas lighting, I smelled cigars, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and marijuana.

"Sloppy." Eli said.

"Yeah. And no limos, no armored cars; just ordinary cars right off the car lot. That's odd."

"Or you've been spoiled by Leo and his uber-rich cronies."

Which wasn't something I wanted to consider, but was a possibility.

Along the side street, the building boasted three arched openings sized for horse-drawn carts and wagons, solid-looking wooden doors closed over them. An alley ran along the other side, a windowless brick expanse two stories tall, the upper story painted with an old ad for Brown & Williamson Tobacco. The back of the building had only one entrance on the ground floor and it was sealed shut, guards standing to either side, both wearing vests with small sub guns of a make I'd never seen, tucked under their arms.

Eli murmured a soft curse. "They're carrying German UMP .45s. Even people with military connections have a hard time getting those, and they cost a fortune. Now you know why there aren't any limos. They put their money into firepower."

I pulled on Beast's night vision to get a better look. I had seen pics of the UMP on the H&K website. It was a vicious little weapon. Not worth a dang at any distance, but it would chew a body in half at close range.

Fully automatic weapons were never covered in the const.i.tution's ruling on citizen militia members owning and carrying guns. They were not used for hunting. They were used for killing sentient beings. Period. Which is why I didn't carry them, own them, or want them around, despite the number of such weapons Eli owned, and despite how handy they would be against vamps.

I looked over the guards' heads to see a second-story door open for fresh air. "I don't like the fact that there's only one door open on the ground floor."

"I'll stay by the entrance while you talk business."

"And shoot anybody who tries to lock us in."

"That's the idea." We were both packing silver shot rounds, so shooting a bad guy with fangs meant he'd likely stay down. Shooting a human with anything had the same effect, but I was not here to kill anyone. That was not in the plans.

Eli parked the SUV one block down, doing a fast parallel parking job but with one front tire on the sidewalk. When I looked my question at him, he said, "Saves us time if we get blocked in and have to jump the curb."

I studied the area and realized he had chosen a spot that would let us pull out over the sidewalk and down a side street. I was used to bikes and they were easy to get out of narrow s.p.a.ces, so I didn't think about getaway routes as a matter of course. Eli made me think outside my own coffin-sized box. I got out to adjust the weapons on my person, and the smell of vamp hit me like a wrecking ball. I put a hand on the SUV to steady myself and sniffed. A vamp smorgasbord met my nose and I opened my mouth, drawing in air over my tongue. Beast reared up in my mind and sniffed with me, parsing the scents.

Good vampire smell, Beast thought.

I grimaced. Not that long ago, Beast had thought vamps smelled like things to hunt. Not so much now that she was chained to Leo-something I had to correct as soon as I figured out how. My new mantra: Get free from Leo.