“We’ll be right there,” I said, closing the cell. To Eli I said, “NOPD. Yesterday.”
The SUV pulled off the bridge and headed for the main police department building. As we drove, I texted Rick’s Soul about the thing that had attacked me in the street. It was short and sweet. “Something like you attacked me in the street in NOLA. Call for details if interested.” Duty done. Now I could stop thinking about it. Then I checked the e-mails from the vamps who had responded to my query about the party at Guilbeau’s. And came to a stop on one.
According to a vamp from Clan Arceneau, Jack Shoffru had been there. At the party. So had Adrianne. And they had gotten together then. Hooked up was the phrase the vamp used, and while it felt all wrong for a vamp to use the modern phrase, it also felt all kinds of right. Jack and Adrianne had met at the party. And everything since then had gone wrong for the rest of us.
I was still putting things together when we reached the woo-woo room. “You look awful,” Jodi said to me. “And is that cat hair on your clothes?”
I looked down. “Yeah. Sadly.” I looked back at her. “Thanks. You look awful too.”
She was still wearing the shoes she had worn to the vamp shindig, her body smelled of exhaustion and anger and sweat, mascara was smeared under her eyes, and if she had started out wearing other makeup, it had succumbed to the hours since, all of which led me to believe that Jodi hadn’t been home yet to shower, change, or sleep. She looked at her watch, which was odd to see. So few people wore watches these days, using their cells to keep track of the time. Cells that didn’t work down here. Right.
“Long day. Long two days,” she amended. “I need sleep.” She looked over my shoulder, which was difficult for a woman so much shorter than me. “You have no social skills, so I introduced myself to Eli and Alex this morning, after the party, when they came to pick up your busted bike, clothes, and other assorted crap strewn all over the streets. And let me tell you, that is not my job, keeping track of you. You made a huge mess, and tied up traffic in the Quarter for two hours. . . .”
Yada yada yada. I tuned her out, set a hip on the table edge, and let her rant for a while. Eli leaned against the wall and took in the woo-woo department’s war room, the room with all the whiteboards and the pictures of missing witches. Alex sat in a chair, head bent over his electronic tablet in the typical geek way of avoiding contentious situations.
When Jodi ran down, I said, “Shiloh?”
“She was turned shortly after she disappeared,” Jodi said. “She’s still in the devoveo, in a lair somewhere. Probably.”
Now, that I didn’t see coming. A peculiar icy distance flowed through me, crackling with surprise, as I tried to fit that into the picture of vamp history and politics I had put together when I talked to Leo and Del and—
“Made by who? Leo?” Eli asked.
My head wrenched around so hard I feared my neck would twist right off. “Leo?” Something else I hadn’t considered. Heat raced through me, furious, blazing anger. “That lying, evil bloodsucker,” I growled. “I shoulda staked him after I wiped the floor with him.”
“That sounds like something I would like to have seen,” Jodi said wryly, “but no. Not Leo. A vampire named Renee Damours, formerly of the Damours blood-family and of Rousseau Clan, now presumed deceased.”
The anger racing through me had no place to go, and I took a breath, trying to calm it, but deep inside, Beast was growling. Showing killing teeth. Kitssss, she hissed inside me.
My fists bunched and my fingertips burned with pain. I had killed Renee, as Jodi well knew. She had been there the night when I killed several Damours at the same time and place where I had staked Adrianna. And taken the blood diamond. And if Adrianna hadn’t been crazy as a loon ever since, Leo would have known I’d had the diamond because he’d brought Adrianna back from her second death. Which meant that Leo had done the Vulcan mind-meld thing with her to bring her back from whatever insane and broken place she had been in, but the shattered shards of Adrianna’s brain had clearly not given him that info. However, maybe he had learned from her that that Shiloh was a fanghead, chained to a wall somewhere. But he hadn’t told me.
And Adrianna had hooked up with Jack Shoffru. Which meant that what Leo knew about all that stuff, so did Shoffru. The vamp Leo had subjugated and drunk from. Full circle.
Leo knew about Shiloh. And he hadn’t told me, even when he held me, comforted me. But then Leo was nothing more than a cruel, sick suckhead.