Death's Rival

I didn’t know much about the town. Natchez, named after the tribe of Indians sold into slavery by the Europeans, was the first major Mississippi port city north of New Orleans, and had once been a major hub of steamboat travel and trade. It had been a bigger place before the war—the Civil War—and had struggled to hang on since. Union troops hadn’t burned it to the ground, and after the war ended, Natchez had been left with swamp, forest, bayous, a checkered and notorious past—all set high upon a bluff above the Mississippi. It also had lots of fancy, prewar buildings, antebellum homes, churches, graveyards, and old live oak trees swathed in moss. After the war, the town also had hundreds of freed slaves needing work and carpetbaggers by the dozens bringing in an influx of cash. Its location and history allowed it to survive and thrive when most other towns around the South had suffered.

 

Natchez was rife with gossip. The locals knew everything. When we stopped for gas, Wrassler chatted up a local girl working inside behind the counter. In minutes, he’d learned most everything that had happened to the town in the last twenty years. Back in the limo, Wrassler moved his massive bulk into the car, shut the door, and said, “You were right, Kid.” To the rest of us, he said, “De Allyon has been hiding in plain sight here, having taken over from the local MOC, Hieronymus—who owes Leo allegiance and loyalty and who did not call his boss to report the presence of an enemy.” He started the limo and pulled into the street. “Funny how Leo’s research guy didn’t know any of this. Not you, Kid,” he said to Alex, “but that other guy the master uses.”

 

I laid my head back on the leather upholstery and thought about our leak. Leaks. Whatever. Not only was someone sharing info with our enemy, but our own intel sources had left us high and dry on what was happening in Leo’s organization. That needed to be addressed, eventually, once this crisis was over. With vamps, there was always something. *

 

As for this little out-of-town gig, the possibility that there was more than one leak—Angel Tit and a snitch in Leo’s camp—came back and perched in the forefront of my brain, like a buzzard over roadkill. Was there a chance that the spy was Reach himself? Reach had electronic fingers in everything, and he was nearly paranoid about security. If he was the spy, he’d already have taken down Leo’s security and finances and, well, just about everything. Reach had that kind of . . . reach. I let a bit of humor bubble up through my worries and forced my shoulders to relax. They had crawled up my neck to my ears with tension at the thought of Reach as a traitor.

 

“It isn’t Reach,” I said politely. “Go on, please?” Who said I didn’t have class?

 

Wrassler met my eyes again in the rearview, and I couldn’t see enough of his face to tell what he was thinking, but he went on. “According to my date, Hieronymus initially billed himself as a producer, which was a new one for vamps, but fit the town perfectly.”

 

“How so?” Eli asked.

 

“Look around,” Wrassler said, his eyes back on the road. “On the backs of slaves and then cheap manual labor, the town fathers kept the place looking both spiffy and old. To supplement tax revenues, the good-ol’-boy town fathers have always looked outside farming, shipping, and transportation. Mississippi might be rife with the usual blunders and nepotism and thievery of any bureaucratic government, but their film commission pushed the beauty of the town to the outside world.”

 

My brows went up at his vocabulary. I’d had no idea Wrassler could pronounce the words, let alone use them right.

 

“Natchez made a name in Hollywood. Movies, TV, and documentaries have been made here and the politicians were hoping that the new residents would bring another—the new residents being the owners of a newly renovated three-story building in the middle of historic downtown. Or maybe they call it uptown here.” He glanced up at me again and this time I could see his grin. “All that and I get to go dancing. I am a happy man.”

 

Wrassler danced? Somehow the muscle-bound burly guy didn’t strike me as the dancing type. “Wrassler, you have a way with words and a way with women,” I said.

 

We rode toward town, past shacks, trailer parks, and advertisements for tours of plantation homes, and took in the sights. The place was like something out of a Civil War movie, and we spotted some magnificent antebellum homes between the huge trunks and trailing limbs of live oaks. Most of the old homes were the traditional, Tara-in-Gone-with-the-Wind–style of whiteboard with lots of pediments and architectural elements made out of marble and wood, and wraparound porches. Two-story, sometimes with fancy gabled windows in the roofline. Some of the sprawling monstrosities had iron or brick privacy walls, horses prancing in the whiteboarded fields out back, and multicar garages with living space—presumably for servants—overhead. Even in town we saw homes that belonged on the covers of magazines.

 

We started at Canal Street and worked our way in. For blocks, the town had businesses in old buildings from the eighteen hundreds: art galleries, restaurants, grills, boutiques, a bookstore, and in the middle, we passed by the town’s most recently refurbished three-story building, restored, revamped (pun intended), and once owned by Hieronymus, Blood Master of Clan Hieronymus, now owned by a dead man, and being refurbished by Lucas Vazquez de Allyon, who was soon to be a true-dead vamp.

 

As we circled the block, Eli slid down the window and took dozens of shots of the building with a camera set on burst mode. The old windows on the ground floor were swathed in silver velvet draperies, hiding the building’s interior. The windows in the two upper stories had functioning copper shutters, all closed. If not for the plans on file with the county, we’d have no idea what the interior was like.

 

We circled back around and followed GPS instructions to the bed-and-breakfast we had rented on the outskirts of town. It was a huge, three-story place landscaped with the ubiquitous live oaks and magnolias, acres of pecan trees, azaleas, and even flowering trees, which was odd for this time of year. Bruiser leaned close to the dark-tinted windows and said, “Japanese apricot and Higan cherry. Lovely.”

 

Eli grunted and said, “This place is gonna be a bugger to secure.”

 

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