“Jane?”
Fury blazed up in me. I whirled on Bruiser. “What? What do you want?” His mouth opened, confusion on his face. I let everything I was feeling rip through me. Heat flashed like lightning over my skin. I took a step toward him. “You know, don’t you? What Gee is.” Bruiser took a step back. “Tell me!” I hissed, Beast rising into my eyes. “You tell me what that thing is.”
“Gee? Leo’s Mercy Blade? I don’t know, Jane.”
“It’s the same thing on the floor of Leo’s foyer. I thought it was a phoenix rising, a heraldic emblem. But it isn’t.”
“Phoenix—no. The image in the foyer is an Anzu. A Sumerian storm god.”
“A storm . . .” My voice trailed away, taking most of the anger with it. I backed away from Bruiser, never taking my eyes from him. I sniffed, smelling a trace of shock, but no dissembling, no stress pheromones in his sweat from telling a lie.
“Not the creator god,” he said, “but a minor god, like the ones the Babylonians and the peoples of Canaan worshiped. A mythical creature who rides storm clouds, and who offers his loyalty to a person or family in return for a service, much like royal dispensation or a genie in a bottle. Some religious sects call them watchers, angelic beasts with a fondness for humans. They’ve been compared to dragons, but are much smaller and much more fierce, feathered, beaked, taloned raptors. But they aren’t real. Why would you think that Girrard DiMercy is an Anzu?” Bruiser’s face was amused. He really didn’t know.
I turned away and pulled on my leather jacket, buckled myself into enough weapons to start a one woman war, and left the house without another word, helmeting up and riding Bitsa out through the side garden entrance into the night. As always, the smells of the quarter were arresting, the combination like a gift to my Beastly half—food, people, vamps, sex, food, exhaust, lots of alcohol in its various forms. But mostly food. The now familiar aromas helped to settle Beast and let me think.
I shook off the last of the rage that had taken hold of me and was left with whirling questions. If Bruiser didn’t know that Gee perhaps belonged to race of beings once worshipped as lesser gods, then, did Leo know? The MOC wasn’t exactly forthcoming with info on his past. I had been snookered with the scattered details Gee had shared about how his parents, the Spaniard and the French woman had named him . . . Leo was French. Had an Anzu sworn fealty to the Pellissier family at some point the distant past? Or perhaps to vamps in general, treating vamps as members of one family? I’d believed everything Gee had said. I was supposed to be able to read body language—Okay, not applicable here. Anzu body language didn’t seem to translate to human. As usual in my life, not knowing the answers to basic questions was dangerous. Hence this visit to Sabina, priestess of the Mithrans, one of the oldest vamps still kicking, the one in town who knew all the answers, even to questions I didn’t know to ask.
My thoughts settling, I rode, letting the traffic pick the pace, the French Quarter packed with tourists and workers out for food, fun, and games.
As I wheeled between cars, I remembered the fractured moments when I had seen Gee transform. His feathers were blue and burgundy. The bird on Leo’s foyer floor was burgundy without any blue. Gee’s eyes were blue with a funky, oily shimmer that moved, like heat rising off asphalt. An effect of his magic, probably. And he was a lot smaller than the human he appeared to be when in his real form. A wingspan of twelve feet, body maybe three or four feet from beak to claws. I’d guess Gee weighed no more than sixty, maybe seventy pounds, just from the glance I had of his body.
The largest albatross had a wingspan as wide, but it weighed only twenty-six or twenty-seven pounds. Some Pterosaurs—prehistoric birdlike creatures—had wingspans up to forty feet and weighed up to two hundred fifty pounds, though I’d never seen anything that suggested they had true beaks or were feathered, but then, what did I know. Fossil discoveries were being made all the time. Maybe Gee was a prehistoric bird, though that conflicted with his comment about going home to heal. And where was home?
The weather was turning, with damp air blowing in off the gulf, sliding beneath a cooler layer of air from the north, or maybe it was the other way around and the cool air was underneath. Well, I now knew a storm god. Maybe I could ask him. A freaking feathered dragon.
I bent over the bike and roared my way out of the city. The night sky was completely overcast, a wet wind was scudding through the trees and gusting across the road, and the temps were now only in the mid-eighties. Cool for summer in New Orleans, not that I expected it to last, but it was better than the hot, wet hell of the past week.
By the time I got to the vamp graveyard I was cooled off and thinking again. Motor puttering loud, I sat outside the gates, boots on the street below me, and phoned Leo on his tracking-device-of-a-cell-phone. When he came to the phone, he spoke before I could introduce myself. “I attacked you when you fled. It was the action of an unchained. I am . . . sorry.”
Leo had just apologized to me. I closed my mouth on what I had been about to say. Instead, I said. “Okaaaay. Apology accepted.” A sharp silence hung in the air after my words. I figured that was enough of the niceties. “Let me in to the vamp graveyard. I need to see Sabina.”
“Why?” That was Leo, no wasted words, no wasted emotion. Oh—unless it was to try to kill me. He’d wasted a lot on that.
“Open the gate or I’ll just ride on through and you can deal with the dead bodies.” Okay, maybe not so completely calmed down.