I’d stayed in Charlotte for two days, overseeing the latest repairs on my bike, Bitsa. She was pretty well trashed, and she’d be a different bike when I got her back, very slightly chopped, with wider wheel fenders, and this time, no teal in the paint job. Jacob—the semiretired Harley restoration mechanic/Zen Harley priest living along the Catawba River, the guy who had created Bitsa in the first place using parts from two busted, rusted bikes I’d found in a junkyard—had shaken his head when I asked when the bike would be ready to ride to New Orleans. Bitsa had been crashed by a being made of light, and the damage was extensive. It sounded weird when I said it like that—a being of light—but my life had gotten pretty weird since I went to work for the Master of the City of New Orleans and the Greater Southeast, Leo Pellissier. Jacob had taken my money but refused to discuss the paint job, saying only that I’d love it. And then he plopped me on a loaner bike and shooed me out of his shop as if I were twelve.
I’d ridden the loaner before, a chopped bike named Fang, and though the balance on a chopper-style bike was different from the easy, familiar comfort of Bitsa, it hadn’t taken long to settle in for the ride to Asheville, where I’d hugged my godchildren, eaten at their mother’s café, and then hit the road for Knoxville, Tennessee. My visit north had been occasioned by a request from Knoxville’s top vamp, the Glass Clan blood-master, to try to solve some little problem she had reported to her up-line boss, Leo. Nothing urgent, but Leo was stroking his clan blood-masters’ egos a lot, now that the European Council vampires were planning a visit.
The ride had been great, the weather not too hot for spring, not rainy or cross-windy, but my cell phone battery hadn’t survived the trip across the mountains, roaming the whole way. I had no communications when I hit the town, and no way to find out contact info.
Without my map app, I had to ask directions, which was kinda old school, and my badass motorcycle mama facade made the Starbucks clerk’s eyebrows rise in concern, but she knew her city and I made it to the Glass Clan Home just after dusk. Not at dusk, which might be construed as an offer to be a breakfast snack for the fangy Glass vamps, but just after dusk, which in early summer meant nine p.m. I was entering the clan home without backup and without coms, with no one in New Orleans knowing I had arrived safely. I was acting in the capacity of the Enforcer of the NOLA MOC, which meant I’d arrive at the Glass Clan Home fully weaponed out, and I wouldn’t be giving up my guns, blades, or stakes to security guards at the door. I wasn’t expecting trouble, but I try to always be prepared. It was kinda the modus operandi of a rogue-vamp hunter turned vamp Enforcer for said MOC.
The house was off U.S. 70, not far from the Confederate Memorial Hall, and overlooking the Tennessee River. I’d Googled the house and seen it from above; it was maybe ten thousand square feet, with a six-car attached garage, a slate roof, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and what might have been a putting green. There was an outbuilding, probably a barn, a deduction made from the jump rings set up on the sculpted lawn. Lots of spreading oak trees shaded the heavily landscaped grounds.
The entrance to the address was gated, and I pulled off my helmet, presented ID, and tried to look both unthreatening and as though I could kill without a thought—a difficult combo—to the camera, before the gate rolled back on small, squeaky wheels. It was the perfect ambience for a visit to a bloodsucker. But the midlevel-grade security gate quickly became wood fencing and trailed off into the night, turning into barbed wire only yards out. No cameras followed the fencing, no motion monitors, nada, nothing. The security sucked unless there were armed human guards patrolling, working with dogs. I’d started out in security and I knew an antiquated system when I saw it.
My Beast liked the low-hanging limbs of the old oaks and sent me an image of her sprawled over one, waiting for deer, followed by another one of her swimming in the river, which I could smell close by. “Maybe later,” I muttered to her. “Business first.” Beast chuffed at me in disgust.
The drive was long and winding, concrete made to look like cobbles, and I could smell horses, a chlorinated pool, clay (maybe for the tennis courts), and the west-flowing river. It was a distinct scent, different from the raw power of the Mississippi by the time it reached New Orleans, different from the North Carolina rivers that flowed east. The Tennessee flowed west, toward the upper Mississippi, a snaky and slow flow, deceptive in its sluggish nature and far more powerful than it looked or smelled. The house the drive led to was an old renovated historical home, the original house made of dull brown river rock, added onto over the years with brick of a similar color.