“Yes.” The connection ended, but I had no doubt that Reach was ticked off. And maybe worried. If he got caught, it had to be a federal crime.
Security raced in on an electric golf cart, a red light on the top. I started laughing, and the sound had an edge, sharp and caustic. I cut off the laughter. Somehow, Tory was still alive ten minutes later, when the paramedics got there. I slid into the shadows as the real cops showed up, and made my way through the terminal, head down, away from cameras to the ladies’ room, where I pulled off the jacket and washed my clothes, drying them under the hand dryer. It didn’t take long. I had remarkably little blood on me, but I’d still smell like dinner to any vamp who got a whiff. And here I was, going into the clan home of one. My life was totally out of control. I dropped my weight onto the counter, the edge cutting into my palms. I stared myself. I was shaking.
I’d just killed a man.
And my lipstick was still in place, vibrant against my coppery Cherokee skin. As if it never happened.
Nausea rose in my throat, but no tears started. My eyes didn’t fill. They were glowing Beast-gold. I’d left the pilot and Tory to the cops. The blood-slave I’d tied up and the blood-slave I’d killed. I was a traitor and a coward. I closed my lids and breathed, finding a small calm place inside myself. Though he had attacked me, I offered up a prayer for the spirit of my enemy, Cherokee-style, to the Christian God I had worshipped for all the life I remembered. Wondering if there would come a time when God no longer heard me, or worse, when I no longer prayed. That happened sometimes when one wandered into unfamiliar spiritual areas.
When I opened my eyes again, they were my ordinary amber. I finished cleaning up. Jacket back over my weapons, I smoothed the wisps of black hair that had come free, up into the braid and fighting queue. Straightened the hair sticks. Tugged the jacket. I looked long and lean and fashionably unremarkable. No one noticed me as I exited the terminal, careful to avoid the metal detectors.
The car with my initials in the windshield, written in marker on a piece of white cardboard, was waiting out front, and I slid into the backseat. The driver pulled away but wanted to talk about the appearance of the cops. I looked behind us, as if just noticing them, and said, “Really? Huh.” He took that as me not knowing anything, shrugged, and drove into the night.
*
The driver, gathering that I wasn’t the chatty type, concentrated on the road, for which I was grateful. It took us over forty minutes to reach the Romanello Clan Home on the outskirts of Sedona, a long, silent drive. I opened the e-file of the Romanello family dossier and tried to read, but the dark pulled at me. As the city fell away, the sky was so black it looked like being in space, and I had never seen so many stars, not ever, anywhere, not even in the Appalachian Mountains a century ago, before electricity lit up the nights.
There wasn’t enough light to sightsee, but I cracked a window and the smells kept my nose busy. The car’s headlights lit red stone bluffs, spiky foliage, low trees, scrub. I was quickly able to pin certain smells on specific plants. A coyote trotted across the road, stopped, and looked at the slowing car before trotting on. I smelled rodents and maybe some kind of squirrel. Baked earth. Smelled an animal with a musky, odd underscent—armadillo roadkill— half roasted from the late autumn sun.
The clan home of the former blood-master of the city was in a canyon, about halfway up, on a ledge. It was in a position that would have been easily defended in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds. The only way to attack it today, barring helicopter, parasailing, ultralight plane, or parachute, was the road. Or a really horrible hike, a mountain climb, and rappel down from the cliff behind the manor hall.
A mile out, a wrought-iron gate blocked the road. We slowed and stopped at a dynamic camera, one that could be operated via joystick from a security console elsewhere. It was a top-of-the-line model with every bell and whistle on the market: motion-sensor, heat-detector, low-light capability, a PIR sensor—passive infrared—and traditional optical. The screws holding it in place were fresh and shiny. The system was new. The fence that trailed out from the road had motion sensors on it and a current running through its wires.
I rolled my window down and heard a mechanical voice say, “State your business.”
I repeated the words Leo had told me to say. “I am Jane Yellowrock, seeking shelter and hospitality, here under parley rules, sent by Leonard Eugène Zacharie Pellissier, Blood-Master of the Southeastern United States. I am armed, an Enforcer, but offer my word and guarantee that none shall be harmed by my hand except in defense.”
“Wait.”
Well, that was sweet. The camera swiveled to center on my face. I let them stare while I drew on Beast’s night vision and studied the house in the distance. Constructed of brick and the red stone of the land, it was large, with a wraparound porch, huge arched openings on the outside of the porch that protected matching arched windows on the house wall. The windows were uncovered, revealing the inside. Rugs and wood and plaster interior walls met my enhanced gaze, and though I couldn’t see them, I knew there would likely be automatic steel shutters on the inside to protect against sunlight and attack—vamp security.