On the cooling evening breeze, I smelled exhaust, steak from inside my house, water from the Mississippi, blooming flowers, Creole and Cajun restaurant cooking with a high percentage of seafood, coffee—the usual French Quarter smells, rich and layered and intense. A spatter of rain pounded down, pebbling the water on the street. Because of the heavy clouds, the streetlights came on early, the sensors claiming night was falling. The old-fashioned globes cast homey yellowed light into the false dusk, but I didn’t feel homey. I felt numb and worn. Tired beyond anything I’d felt in recent months. It would be smarter to move my partners to vamp HQ, and leave myself out as bait. I wondered whether I’d be able to talk them into it.
Our hunting territory, Beast thought at me. We will not run. We will fight.
Neither one of us is very bright, I thought back.
I went inside.
? ? ?
Over a steak and a beer—which made me feel a little better—I made the suggestion that the boys go to HQ, “to keep Leo safer,” I said, trying for nonchalant.
Eli paused, a bite halfway to his mouth. “So you can be bait and fight Satan’s Three alone?” Eli said, his tone so mild that I instantly realized I had insulted him. Carefully, as if his fork and steak knife were made of glass, he set them onto the plate, the bite of steak forgotten. “No.”
“Not even Alex?”
“That would be up to him,” my partner said, his words measured and precise, his tone and expression giving nothing at all away. “He’s over eighteen.”
“No,” Alex said shortly.
“Okay. It’s what I expected. But I had to ask. It’s”—I shrugged—“polite.”
“Bugger polite,” Eli said. And with that he picked up his fork and shoved the bite into his mouth.
“What my brother said,” Alex said.
I decided this was not the time to discuss house rules and, after a moment, nodded. “Okay. Let’s compare stories.”
I learned that Eli had shown up at NOPD and been taken in to give a statement. He had gunshot residue on his hands, but no blood on his clothes because he had managed to change before he appeared at NOPD. He had admitted that he was the one who returned fire and had turned over the weapon that he’d used. He had been questioned to within an inch of his life before being released with the usual order not to leave town.
I told them all about my day at cop central. Eli shared a few details about his time there too. His Q&A had included Jodi and lunch with the cops—who wanted to say thank you to the man who had saved a cop’s life.
Alex told us about his research and about the dead cop. Everett Semer had been fifty-five and heading to retirement in a little more than a year, with a wife and two kids and grandkids. We watched the coverage on TV and social media and sent a donation in to help the family. And we were relieved to learn that the injured cops were expected to survive.
Sobered, Eli turned off the news and called vamp HQ. I listened, silent and feeling a bit managed and outmaneuvered as he told someone that we would not be in tonight. I stared at him, surprised but not stopping him. When he hung up, he raised his eyebrows. “What? We need to figure out who’s targeting us. And we need a day off from fangheads, which you never take.”
I gave him a dismal smile. “What’s this of which you speak, ‘day off’?”
Instead of answering, he said, “Coke floats for dessert,” which cheered me considerably. Sweets were not Eli’s drug of choice. Eli had no drugs of choice—it was an all-healthy lifestyle for the Ranger.
Over dessert, served in tall glasses with vanilla ice cream and Coke and lots of the resulting foam, Eli turned the conversation to the shooter. “According to what I learned through Jodi, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the bomb builder and the shooter were the same person. Fingerprints match.”
“No way,” Alex said. “Bomb makers and shooters have distinct and different personalities.”
Eli settled hard eyes on his brother, which had to be uncomfortable. Alex jutted out his jaw and stared back. “You’re a shooter,” the Kid said. “You’ve got all the personality markers for a shooter, including high markers for survival, tenacity, independent action, and patience. Bomb makers have different personalities, with lower markers for survival and independence, but higher markers for single-mindedness.”
“You’ve been playing shrink on me?” The question contained no overt emotions, but Eli’s scent changed, with aggressive pheromones tainting the air.
“I have an IQ considerably higher than yours,” Alex said seriously, “with personality markers for insatiable curiosity. It isn’t my fault.”
“Everyone has to take responsibility for our own decisions, actions, and inactions, Kid.”
“Stop,” I said. “We’re not talking about your pasts. We’re talking about the shooter and bomb maker who targeted this house. If it’s a blood-servant, and we think it is, he’s had a lot of years to learn all sorts of things, including how to beat any personality test or even grow a new personality if he needs one. You live long enough, you can overcome most anything, including your own disposition.”
“That from personal experience?” Eli asked.