“You ever do that to my bed and I’ll kick you out. For good.”
Brute looked at my bed. To a dog, the alpha’s bed was the very best place, the only place, to sleep. I had let him onto my bed on a very few occasions when I was ill or hurt and his werewolf warmth had helped me to heal, but he didn’t have permission to go there at will. I had caught him standing in my doorway more than once, staring at my bed, thinking about jumping up there and rolling his scent all over it, doggie-claiming the alpha bed. But this time Brute looked from the bed to the closed side door. And then to the closet, making a point that he had saved the day. Or the night.
“I mean it,” I warned.
Brute snuffled and sat, looking from the closet to the back door, and then growling, repeating in clear dog-speak that he had saved me. That he deserved a reward. I almost offered him a doggie treat but I knew that this was more than just a desire for a crunchy bone. He tilted his head again and whined, looking at my bed and then at me. This was a werewolf negotiation.
“Fine,” I said, though it wasn’t. “I recognize your service tonight. Therefore I promise to look for a dog bed—” Brute growled again. I blew out a breath that caught the loose black hairs around my face and made them fan out in the dark. “A memory foam mattress I can put in the hallway upstairs for your use—whenever the Everhart/Truebloods are not here, until such time that Evan Trueblood agrees you can stay in the house with Angelina and EJ. Until such time, and when they are here, you will sleep in the weapons room.” I thought over what I had said and figured I had covered most of the angles of a paranormal negotiation. “Agreed?”
Brute snuffled agreement and turned away, to trot back upstairs to his stolen nest. I went to the side door and cleaned up the rainwater. Then I placed a call to vamp HQ and got Del, the primo to Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City. It was the middle of the business day for a vamp household, and the primo sounded confident and in control. We chitchatted for a bit and then I said, “Is the priestess in Council Chambers tonight?” Council Chambers is a more polite way of saying suckhead HQ.
“No. Why?” Del dragged out the words because any proper verbiage from me was always a warning.
“The Enforcer has a formal request to make, of the primo of the Master of the City of New Orleans. May I speak?”
“The primo of the Master of the City of New Orleans is attentive to the Enforcer,” Del said, pure suspicion lacing her words. I was seldom so formal. I was seldom even faintly polite.
“The Enforcer would be honored to call upon, or to receive a phone call from, Sabina, the outclan priestess of the Mithrans.”
“Oh.” Del sounded nonplussed but continued with the proper, somewhat formulaic responses. “I will pass along the message. Is there a subject that should attend the request?”
“Yeah. Tell the priestess that I need to talk to her about Anzus—Anzii?” I queried midsentence, “and le breloque’s purpose—which may or may not have something to do with storms like the ones currently brewing over New Orleans. Please.”
Del repeated it back to me, I said that was perfect, and she went silent, though I could hear her tapping on her tablet. “The primo will happily pass along the request exactly as worded.”
“Thanks.”
“You still owe me a spa day.”
I always owed Del a spa day. “Find a spa with a steam room, massages, and facials, and we can go Saturday and take Jodi.”
“Wait. Who is this and what have you done with Jane Yellowrock?”
“Ha-ha. It’s cold and miserable. A massage, a hot rock to curl up on, and some pampering sounds wonderful.”
The hot-rock part had come from Beast. If Del thought it was odd, she didn’t respond to it. “Deal. And I’ll let you know what the priestess says.”
We disconnected and I found myself staring at my back door. Gee DiMercy shouldn’t have been able to get in. The door wasn’t broken or splintered, and the lock hadn’t looked scratched, so either Gee could pick a lock leaving no traces, which was possible, or he had used magic to get inside, which was also possible.
Gee was a bird, an Anzu, a creature once worshiped as a storm god. We had recently hunted together, both of us in Anzu form. I’d had a good long look at Anzu DNA when I shifted into the form, and that DNA was not from Earth, but it did look a lot like arcenciel DNA. Could there be a connection between all the weird stuff? Between Sabina’s bubo bubo prophecy, the storm overhead, the dead female in the small house, the vamp attack on Edmund, arcenciels (rainbow dragons who could shape-shift into human form), and le breloque . . . Nah, I was reaching. Or hoping that I could tie it all together in one lovely package with a bloody red bow. I had learned that with vamps and other paranormal creatures, it was better to be safe than sorry, and nothing was ever easy. So I had lots of smaller problems and not one gigantic problem with a single resolution.
I checked on Eli, who was still smiling in his sleep, trotted back downstairs, and crashed again, sleeping until a rumble of thunder waked me.
CHAPTER 5
You Look Like Shiii—Crap
Torrential rain was blasting the side of the house, and the old structure groaned against the wind. Even brick wasn’t proof against some storms. I checked the weather on my official cell and found that the storm off the coast had moved closer to shore and a second storm that was sliding south along the Mississippi River Valley hadn’t slowed its descent. If one of the weather fronts didn’t change course, we’d have a big one, a storm of the century according to some reports, though no one in New Orleans was panicking yet and no evacuations had been ordered. Since Katrina and Rita, the back-to-back hurricanes that had devastated the state, most Louisianans took evac orders to heart.
I patrolled the house, checking the windows and doors, putting sponges where rainwater was blowing through, and watching for dark rings on the upstairs ceiling that might mean water damage. I pressed my hand to the shelving unit that hid the weapons room and Ed’s bed beneath the stairs and thought about checking on him. But he had made no demands to be let into the house, and if he wanted outside, he had access on his own through the trapdoor. Vamps were unpredictable at the best of times, and silver-wounded vamps were the worst. Most didn’t live, and the ones who did were pretty nutso for a long time afterward. I worried that waking him might send him rogue and force me to have to kill him. Killing a friend wasn’t something I wanted to do. Ever. Especially a vamp bound to me.