Again, I felt that prickle of . . . something on the back of my neck. I pulled the visor down and studied the traffic behind us, but saw nothing odd.
“Only thing that’s been sticking to us is that old red Ford van,” Eli said, reading my worry. “We passed it ten minutes ago. It’s got a yellow Baby on Board sticker on the back window and is driven by a woman in her fifties. Brown hair, wrinkles, about a hundred fifty pounds overweight.”
“Not vamp food, then,” I said. Vamps had a predilection for skinny, and their dinners tended to be fit, young, and pretty for a long time, one of the side effects of sipping on vamp blood in return for dinner and service and sometimes sex. Still, I kept an eye on the van until it turned off into a strip mall.
The second address on our list was on the west side of the river on Lake Cataouatche, in an area that was green with impenetrable foliage as far as the eye could see, houses popping up between swampy land, sitting on acreage too large to be called lots. The houses we passed all had canal access out back and thick, wild vegetation all around, the air already thick with mosquitoes this early in the season.
Eli made a left and slowly puttered down a recently graded dirt road, rocks and shells flipping onto the undercarriage. I checked my cell as the vehicle crawled. The house at the address fit the swank image of one of Leo’s scions, with a three-car garage and a pool to go with the pricey palms, dense landscaping, and red tile that roofed a brick house of maybe five thousand square feet. From the dirt road, we could see a powerboat docked on the water beyond the house and a furnished, screened room in the backyard, bigger than the house on Ulloa Street in town. But the kids’ toys in the yard were a clear contraindication to newly risen vamps. We didn’t even speak as Eli made a three-point turn and headed back the way we had come. Waste of time.
We were almost back to the paved road when I spotted something. “Stop! Back up.” I strained to see what had caught my eye. Whatever it was, it was across the narrow canal. Eli backed up and braked in an opening of the vegetation, black water visible past the thick greenery.
On the other side of the canal was a barren lot with a house situated in the middle. The house was new, with green tile roofing, brick facade, paved drive, separate garage, and blackened earth instead of greenery in a wide arc around the house. Not plowed. More like burned. Debris floated on the faint breeze. It looked as if the landscaping company had scorched the earth prior to new plantings that were scheduled to arrive any minute. It looked dead. It smelled wrong. Even with the wind against me, I should have been able to detect the scent of burned plants and scorched earth through the open window. “What?” Eli asked.
“Is that place on our list?”
He checked his cell while I kept my nose in the open, taking in the few scents that came from that side of the canal. “Not ours, but I just got a list from Adelaide. It’s on that one.”
Something about the barren home site pulled at me. “I want to see that place. Up close.”
“Not a problem,” he said, raising the window and easing on down the dirt road. “I’m pretty sure there’s a bridge somewhere.” He might have been being sarcastic. Getting from one side to the other in the bayou country often meant long detours. Too bad we didn’t have a boat hitched up in back.
? ? ?
It was dusk when we pulled up in front of the house, the engine rumbling. I lowered my window to see better. A gray tree stood, leafless, the bare wood showing where the bark had peeled away and fallen to the ground. Littered around it were twigs and leaves, shriveled and dark. The shrubbery around the house was dead too, looking burned. Dead grass stood, spiky and broken, black earth in patches, showing beneath. Up close, it still looked burned, and the yard seemed to move as the night breeze lifted the debris. It was ash. Ash. Yet I didn’t smell anything burned. The house showed no signs of being touched by flame.
The moon was rising over the black water, easily seen beyond the house. A low white mist was rising off the water, buffeted gently by slow-moving winds like huge hands were fluffing it.
Dead vamps and granules of ash, I thought. And then I remembered the bouquet in Molly’s hotel room. Dying, the first day I went there, shriveled to ash on my next visit. Molly, not doing magic anymore, according to her husband. And then an older memory. Molly and her sisters fighting Evangelina. Molly, an earth witch, drawing the life force out of the garden, killing every plant, every garden snake, every mouse and squirrel, to save her younger sisters from the elder one.