Back in the main room, I curled up on the couch and said, “Update.”
“Not trying to be rude or anything, Janie, but you look like crap,” the Kid said.
“It’s been an interesting night.”
To my side, Eli appeared, carrying a huge mug of tea, smelling of spices, with a dollop of Cool Whip on top. He put it in my hands and wrapped my fingers around the warm stoneware. His hands held mine on the heated mug, his flesh warm over mine. It was an odd, kind, unexpected thing, that touch. Tears burned under my lids. “Thanks,” I whispered, not trusting my voice for more than that.
“Alex is right,” Eli said aloud. He dropped into the chair across from the couch, watching me. “Debrief. Take it slow.”
As I sipped, I filled them in, step by step, while the Kid typed up a report. We had discovered that it helped to have a running record of the weird stuff in our lives and business.
When I got to the part about the thing in the basement, Eli asked, “What did it smell like? Did you recognize it?”
“No. It was . . .” My nose crinkled, remembering the oppressive dark and the stench.
“You didn’t have a record of the scent in your skinwalker memory?”
“The closest I can come to it is to say that it smelled like a village full of sick and dead humans, mixed with the strong odor of lightning, and the scent of vamps when they had the plague. And vinegar. Sick and dead and dying and electrified salad dressing all at once.” I shook my head as if shaking away the memory. “Anyway, we went back up the elevator and I got the heck outta Dodge.”
The Kid said, “Otis Online Repair did a diagnostic and told us nothing we didn’t already know. The palm scanner and the button control panel are functioning according to specs, just as our own diagnostic showed. They speculate that the problem with the elevator may be an electrical pulse in the HQ wiring, maybe something not digitally traceable in the control panel. I pulled up an electrical schematic of vamp central.” He whirled the laptop to display a floor plan with varicolored lines on each floor, including five layers of basement, which was really unusual, what with New Orleans’ high water table. “The basements should be permanently flooded from water seeping in from the ground, but they aren’t,” I said, “which means that magic went into the construction. Some kind of spell that keeps water outside the basement walls.” Which meant witch assistance in the building process several hundred years ago. But what was most interesting were the different-colored lines threaded through the building, floor to floor.
“The colored lines,” he said, “are the electrical systems according to date of installation. The red lines are the original installation in—get this—1890. Most of the original wiring has been updated, some parts repeatedly, for decades,” Alex said. “Some were torn out—that’s the yellow—and replaced, especially after insulated copper wires first came on the market to replace the original uninsulated ones. The major updates were done in 1893, 1906, 1947, 1969, 1998, and again in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina. In fact, all the rewiring dates followed major hurricanes, and twice in that time, all of the aboveground floors were totally rewired due to a storm surge that supposedly flooded the basements from above.”
“So the spell that keeps water from seeping in through the walls won’t stop it from entering from above.”
“That’s what I’m getting,” Alex agreed. “But according to what I can find online and in the databases of vamp HQ, the lines in the two lower basements have never been upgraded, and are still in use.”
“And the two lower basements would have suffered the most from aboveground flooding, so that excuse to rewire was bogus. If our problem isn’t the control panel of the elevator—which is the most likely suspect—then maybe something about the wiring—”
“In that case, most likely, water is seeping through the walls,” the Kid interrupted, “and is collecting on or dripping on the wires. That would cause the stuff you’re seeing, brownouts and blackouts and loads of glitches. The electrical is tied into everything from food storage to the computers to the security systems.”
“Ducky.” The word sounded as tired as I felt. “Just freaking ducky.” Because our jobs had just gotten harder and we all knew it.
“I’m waiting for a final arrival time for the Otis repair people. I’m aiming for after six a.m. on whatever day they can come. You’ll want to have security personnel with each member of the repair team.” We both looked at Eli.