Jelani smiled, and it was cold. “Don’t underestimate them. Delphine took the boy during an evening walking tour of the Quarter. He was seen leaving with a dark-haired girl right after the tour had stopped at her former mansion.”
Has a sick sense of humor, does she? Bones thought sardonically. Their old home was about the last place he’d expect to find the LaLauries hunting, but it told Bones quite a bit. They were arrogant, which was good. Arrogance and a sense of invincibility were two large points in his favor toward killing them.
“How many ghouls and vampires live in the city?” Bones asked.
Jelani mulled it for a moment. “Year round, a few hundred. At Mardi Gras, that number doubles, easily. Humans aren’t the only ones to enjoy the city’s festival.”
Bugger. Which was why it was an ideal time of year for the LaLauries to hunt, of course. The abundance of people, alive and undead, made them blend that much more into a crowd.
Of course, it would make Bones blend, too. He felt confident he could catch them. What he wasn’t certain about, was how many people they might kill before he did.
“I’ll ring you when it’s finished,” Bones repeated to Jelani, and walked out of the blood-soaked townhouse.
3
The afternoon sun glinted off the countless beads people wore around their necks. The streets weren’t completely clogged yet. More people would venture out once it got dark. It amused Bones that a vampire could be about at this time of day, yet some humans let their excesses from the night before trap them in bed until dusk.
Bones’s only concession to being out in daylight was to wear shades and sunscreen. He wouldn’t burst into flames if the sun touched his bare skin, as the movies so comically claimed. Still, an hour in the sun for a vampire was akin to all day at the beach for an albino. He’d heal almost instantly, but there was no sense using his strength over something as trivial as a sunburn.
He’d already walked the length of the Quarter and back, noting the differences since the last time he’d been here—three years ago? No, it was four, because he’d celebrated the new millennium here. Blimey, the years were blinking by. It had been well over a decade since he’d set foot in London. Once I kill the LaLauries and finish tracking down Hennessey and the other miserable blokes he’s involved with, I’m going home, Bones decided. It’s been too long. I’m even sounding more like a Yank than an Englishman these days.
Only a couple blocks down was the LaLauries’ old house. Even in daylight, there were shadows shifting around it. Residual ghosts. Any sentient spooks who’d died there stayed away from the place, not that Bones blamed them. At night, the house positively crawled with old, despairing energy from its gruesome past. It was no accident that the house had changed hands so many times over the past hundred and seventy years. It was now empty and for sale again as well. Humans might not be able to see the residual manifestations, but they could sense them, on some deep level.
And Delphine LaLaurie, at least, seemed drawn to the house as well. Why else would she pluck one of her victims right in front of it during a tour? Was the irony just amusing to her? Or did she still, after all this time, miss her old home? Was that why the LaLauries kept returning to the Quarter, despite the danger of Marie’s wrath?
Bones came closer to the house. The strong smell of chemicals wafted to him from a store to his right. Salon, he diagnosed, then glanced at his reflection. His hair had been brown for quite some time. Since someone was obviously hunting him, it wouldn’t hurt to alter his appearance.
He entered the parlor, not surprised to find a few people waiting. Every business in the Quarter enjoyed a boost from Mardi Gras, except perhaps church services. He put his name on the list, took a seat, and waited. Forty minutes later, he was brought back by the hairdresser.
“Hi there, what’ll it be?” she asked in a friendly way.
“Color, trim, and wash, if you please,” Bones replied.
“You English have the loveliest accents.” She laughed. “Makes everything you say sound so proper.”
After she washed his hair, she led him to her cubicle. Bones read her name on her beautician’s certificate and gave a snort of amusement.
“Rebecca DeWinter. Was that an intentional reference?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Yeah. My parents loved that book. You’re the first person who’s tied my name to it. Not many people are big readers of the older classics.”
Bones stifled his next snort, because telling her that he still considered Rebecca to be new fiction would require too much explanation.
“I go by Becca, though,” she added, giving his head a last toweling. “So, what are we doing with color today?”
What shade hadn’t he done recently? “Make it blond.”
She blinked at him in the mirror. “Really?”
“Platinum, the whole lot of it.”