“Um,” Eugenie whispered, “is it supposed to be dark?” We’d left New Orleans at a sunny ten a.m.
Oops. Forgot to mention that. “Yeah, it’s always night here, always a full moon.” Actually, there was a grayish hour before dawn and at dusk where one could see, but I didn’t plan to stay that long and Eugenie was on need-to-know status.
“Take a wrong turn, sunshine? And you brought along a friend.”
Jake Warin had walked out of the double doors that led into the center of the house and grinned as Eugenie rushed over and wrapped her arms around him. I smiled; he looked genuinely pleased to see her. In fact, he looked more at ease than I’d seen him in a long time. I’d been too stressed out at the council meeting to notice the absence of the worry lines that had set up around his eyes. He looked like himself again, his pre-loup-garou self. Who’d have thought working as Jean Lafitte’s factotum and living in the Beyond would agree with him so well?
I gave him a quick hug after Eugenie finally let him go. “How’s your boss doing?”
“He’s in a temper.” Jake glanced behind him. “Let me tell him you’re here. Might cheer the old bastard up.”
I choked on a laugh. Somehow, I doubt Jake called Jean “the old bastard” to his face.
Eugenie and I sat on the steps and looked into the darkness. “You can’t tell right now, but we’re only about thirty or forty yards from the beach,” I said. “This wooden banquette stretches almost to the water.” I’d seen the beach in both its dawn and dusk version of daylight.
“I could just lie out here in that hammock and listen to the sound of the waves.” Eugenie closed her eyes. “It’s peaceful. N’Orleans is a noisy city. You don’t realize it so much till you get out of town.”
“Yeah, you got dat right.” She looked at me, and we burst out laughing at my impression of her Yat accent. She was spot-on, though; the water was soothing. After the glacial temperatures of this morning, the Gulf breeze whispered warm caresses across my skin, and the banana leaves flapping against the columns of the house made me want to curl up and nap.
I was so freaking tired. Not just from the all-nighter and a run-in with my first set of fangs, but from the stress of the last two months. Since the borders to the Beyond had officially dropped in early October, life had ricocheted from one disaster to the next. I didn’t see an end to it, or at least not a good one. And my personal life kept getting tangled up with my job. On the plus side, at least I had a personal life. On the minus side, the whole job-relationship balance wasn’t working very well.
“You guys can come in.” Jake reappeared in the doors leading into Jean’s receiving parlor. Beyond that, I knew, we’d find a large sitting room filled with heavy, masculine furniture and lots of polished wood. Bedroom suites were in the back, with what passed for an early nineteenth-century version of plumbing. I had no idea what was up the wide central staircase, except Jake had told me there were windows on all sides with loaded cannons in them. Pirates and Boy Scouts—always prepared.
Jake walked with us through the receiving room. “He’s in here, doing okay but still getting around slower than usual. I’ve gotta say good-bye here, though. Alex sent a courier to say he’s calling in security reinforcements to watch the transports, so I’m heading back to New Orleans.”
In the world of the Division of Domestic Terror, or DDT, the Elders’ preternatural security team, Alex was boss and his cousin Jake a newbie. After a rocky start, both of them now seemed okay with it. Jean had told me once, when Jake first began working for him, that as a soldier Jake was wired to follow orders. And God knows Alex was bossy and liked to give orders. Although, to be fair, he was working on it.
“Yeah, Alex was talking to Zrakovi when we left New Orleans and Zrakovi mentioned the security issue.” They were talking about more than that. I understood why Alex felt the need to keep Zrakovi informed about Eugenie’s situation, but for me, Eugenie’s welfare outranked politics.
“This is beautiful.” Eugenie ran her fingers along a massive mahogany sideboard, on the top of which rested a red velvet sash with fine embroidery on it and, on top of the sash, a silver dagger. That little vignette was Jean Lafitte in a nutshell. Refined gentleman and renegade. Velvet and violence.
“Bonjour, Jolie.”