My second was Eli. “Good to know. Later, then.”
“Later, love.” He closed the door, leaving me in a state of bemusement. He was British, so calling me love was like Eli calling me Babe. Inconsequential. But it felt like more, as if he was getting closer and closer to the three little words. No one had ever said them to me. No one. Unless I counted the claiming by my werecat ex. But not love. Not ever. I wondered how I’d feel when it happened. If it happened.
“Howdy, Shemmy.”
“Miz Yellowrock,” Shemmy said, politely.
“No need to be fancy.” I swiveled my body around and put my booted feet on the seat. I leaned back my head and blew out a breath that spoke of exhaustion. “Jane is fine.”
“Jane it is. I hear you give nicknames. What’s mine?” I looked up at Shemmy, who fit the general physical parameters of Derek Lee’s security team—the shaved head, big, muscled, physique of the former military. “You can’t beat Shemmy. It’s perfect.”
Shemmy pulled away from the curb just as my cell beeped with a call from Alex, and he didn’t wait for me to say hello. “A revenant broke the iron bars over the front doors of a church—a freaking church—on Jackson Ave, walked inside, and killed two people. In daylight. Plus there’s a riot still taking place nearby. It started during the last lightning. Sending you and your driver the address and directions. The storm is bad there, so be careful.”
“Of course it is,” I said, hearing the wry note in my voice. “On my way. Don’t call your brother. He’s busy at HQ. I’ll handle it.” And Eli was exhausted, not that I’d say that one.
Alex treated me to a silence fraught with import, the kind that meant he was thinking fast and on several levels. “Sure,” he said, in a tone that meant he disagreed with my assessment. I was drawing a lot of interpretive conclusions. Odd for me. “The revenant is still there,” he said, “and the cops have the building surrounded.” He clicked off.
“I’m just trying to be nice,” I said to the blank screen.
I turned the cell off, knelt on the floorboard of the limo, and slid my fingers around the edges of the flooring. The bottom of every limo had a store of weapons, caches that Eli had discovered as part of the latest security upgrades. We had known about the weapons in the sidewalls and nooks and crannies, but that was for handguns. This one had blades and shotguns and silver ammo. I chose a double-barreled shotgun and loaded it with silver-pellet birdshot. I’d rather have my own Benelli and silver fléchette rounds, but there was a problem with collateral damage—humans I might injure or kill by accident. For that reason I took two .380s and set them into old-fashioned leather holsters. I pulled the unfamiliar rig on over my clothing and hooked an adjustable gorget around my throat. There were two motorcycle jackets in the bottom, and I took the smaller one, even though it smelled like Leo. The scent would indicate to another vamp that I belonged to the MOC, which I hated, but the second jacket was too large.
I heard a discreet click and Shemmy spoke over the limo’s intercom. “Ms. Yellowrock, Mr. Pellissier wishes you to know that the media is present at the church.”
“Is it the woman from WGNO?”
“Carolyne Bonner is indeed at the scene, Ms. Yellowrock.”
“And how is the local ABC station getting to scenes with revenants faster than anyone else?”
“It is my understanding that she has been permitted to cultivate a source high in New Orleans’ Mithran politics.”
Which meant that Leo was letting her into the center of things in case he needed to feed someone news with a slant. This was interesting, but not newsworthy. As I used a speedloader to load silver/lead ammo into extra .380 magazines, I snorted in soft laughter at the word newsworthy. Even I knew my internal play on words wasn’t really funny. Nerves maybe. It had been a long time since I went up against a revenant alone. They were superfast, were hungry as zombies, and never stopped. They were as hard to kill as bayou roaches.
I closed the deck cover and sat on the bench seat, looking out into the rain. Overhead, lightning flashed cloud-to-cloud, sparking the sky, as if angels were playing laser tag with real laser weapons. Thunder rumbled. The limo plowed through the streets and puddles the size of small lakes. I had lived in NOLA for two years, give or take, and I had gotten used to storms, wind, and rain, rain, more rain. But this was something else. This was making me itchy, getting up under my skin. Inside me, Beast was prowling, the tip of her thick tail twitching slightly.
Ahead, a mob of kids was playing in the rain. Drenched to the skin, jeans held up in one hand at the waistband to keep the water-heavy denim in place, they stomped and gestured and raced. An instant later, I realized they weren’t kids and they weren’t playing. This was the riot.
“How many?” I asked Shemmy.
“I can see . . . fifteen clearly, Ms. Yellowrock. Another twenty or so are half hidden. The fog and rain are so dense that even though I see forms at the street corners, racing back and forth, I can’t tell how many. I can guesstimate we’re looking at more than fifty. NOPD is five minutes out.”
“Which means more like twenty.” I called Alex and asked, “Do we have an update on the revenant’s location?”
“Yeah, but we have worse worries. Grégoire says his sire is in New Orleans. Derek says he’s freaking out in HQ. Trying to get outside in the daylight.”
He was being called, demanded to join his sire. It was a psychic link that the script and fantasy novel writers got right. That calling meant that Le Batard was in New Orleans, on the city’s soil. My insides made a little quiver and shake. “Sit Wrassler on him. And give him a job. Get Grégoire to list all the hotels, restaurants, gin joints, and haunts Le Batard might frequent. Get him to list all the people he might want to see, steal, or kill. Get another list of all Le Batard’s scions and grand-scions. Keep Blondie busy.”
“Good idea. When did you get all touchy-feely, Janie?” Before I could answer, he said, “The church janitor, name of Babeaux, is holed up in a closet with a layperson. They have cell phones and sent footage out to the press of the revenant. Loading that up to your cell now. Babeaux says he can hear the revenant in the sanctuary, tearing the place up.”
“Ms. Yellowrock,” Shemmy interrupted. “We’ll have to go directly through the riot to reach the chur—”