Le Petit Chaton Avec Les Griffes
My orders came in the form of a call from Bruiser, which woke me from my nap. I flipped open my cell, shoved my hair back from my face, pulled it around, over my shoulder, and rolled into a sitting position on my bed. “Bruiser.”
Instead of his usually flirty hello, or his pleasant British-style greeting, he simply said, “Bring your weapons tonight. The master wants to spar.”
“Uhhh.”
“Nine p.m.”
“Spar?” I said, incredulous. But I was talking to the silent room. Bruiser had disconnected. I had never sparred with Leo before. Our only physical altercation was when Leo attacked me in the street one night when he was in the grieving process that vamps called the dolore. Basically, vamps just lived too long. Loss of a close loved one who had been with them for hundreds of years could make them lose it mentally, unless they had a Mercy Blade, the magical beings that helped vamps maintain mental and emotional control. At the time I killed his son, Leo didn’t have one, and he had nearly killed me. I closed the cell. “I don’t want to spar with Leo. Stake him, maybe. But not spar,” I said to my room.
I remembered the last time Leo had put his hands on me, and I shivered. He had forced a feeding. It wasn’t the only time I’d been attacked and fed upon by a vamp—most vamp-hunters have been bitten once or twice—I had even been healed from some bad vamp-fighting injuries by way of a vamp bite. But Leo’s bite was the only time the feeding had been done to bind me to a master vamp’s will. I thought about Leo’s apology. And about fighting him. My lips parted slowly and I chuffed. Forgiveness might be a lot easier if I had the MOC under the heel of my boot.
I checked the cell and saw that I had hours before I would have to fight the Master of the City of New Orleans. Time for a long stretch, time to get dressed, and plenty of time to plan. I crawled from bed and started stretching, the smells of something rich, meaty, and spicy coming under my bedroom door.
? ? ?
After a meal of BBQ ribs and salad, I pulled up the dossier on Jack Shoffru that Jodi had sent me. The file was dense with material: pdfs of scanned, handwritten notes from decades in the past, more recent reports from Interpol and the FBI, and still more recent reports from the Drug Enforcement Agency. The info was well structured, however, evidence of Jodi’s handwork and organizational skills. But the older, handwritten notes were the most interesting. It was historical documentation that Jack Shoffru had been contemporaries with Jean Lafitte, which meant he had been contemporaries with Leo. I sat slowly on my bed, making sure, cross-referencing dates, even downloading the file to my old laptop to see better on the bigger screen than the tablets.
I created a new file titled What-If, and typed in my notes, questions, and worries in bullet points. Mostly I had a lot of conjecture, and not a lot of facts. Okay—none. I had a lot of guesses. But they seemed to hint at a picture, or maybe several pictures, even if there was no mass to the smoke and mirrors at this point. I needed more facts.
Vamps’ lives went on for so long that the past was knotted and woven into the present in layers, sometimes in layers of blood. Like the blood diamond and the vamps and witches who had used it over the centuries. My breath caught. What if Molly’s kidnapper knew about the blood diamond? My what-ifs could be a lot of things and I shouldn’t be getting paranoid.
Too late. I had thought about the diamond and now it had me in its claws.
I checked the time and patted myself down to remove weapons. Even though I was licensed to carry in most of the Southern states, it sometimes wasn’t worth the hassle that could come from carrying them. Where I was going, weapons were a surefire way of getting attention from the po-po.
Weaponless, I grabbed my keys and left the house on Bitsa. There were eight or nine banks in the French Quarter/Central Business District area, and I’d picked the closest one for my banking needs and the safe-deposit boxes I rented. I didn’t think about them much, but . . . I had a fair number of evil toys in my possession. Well, in the bank vault, but it was pretty much the same thing. I parked and walked into the bank just before closing.
Minutes later, I was standing in a private room, no security cameras, no bank attention, and three bank boxes sitting in front of me. It had been a little bit of a hassle getting them to let me open all three boxes, but when I told the teller that she’d have to open them back and forth so I could rearrange my valuables, she gave in.