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When I woke, I was human-shaped. The light through the windows was the dark of deep storm clouds and pre-dusk, and someone was knock, knock, knocking on my door, a little like the tall skinny guy on The Big Bang Theory TV show. Five hours had passed, and I rolled over for the first time to get off of the fabo dreamy (ha-ha) mattress. “Be out in a minute,” I said, my voice rough with sleep. I pulled out old comfort clothes, warm sweats from my Appalachian-living days, and made myself decent if not fashion conscious. I smelled tea when I opened the door, a soothing chai made with piri-piri peppers and lots of whole clove. Someone had finished the laundry and there was a white basket loaded with folded clothes to the side. I scooted it inside. The house was mostly dark, lit by tablets and screens and lighted keyboards. I dragged myself to the kitchen.
In the shadows of the veiled sunset, I met Eli at the table, and of course he looked wide awake and well groomed, though he was nursing a small cup of espresso like it was the elixir of life. I sat in front of the soup mug of tea at my place and added a huge dollop of Cool Whip, stirred it with a soup spoon, and drank a quarter of it in a series of long slurps. Tea, the food of the gods, and I didn’t care what coffee drinkers said about coffee. I wiped my mouth with a sweatshirt sleeve and spotted the cookies, two kinds: white chocolate macadamia nut and lemon-lavender. I took a lemon-lavender and it melted in my mouth. In a voice that was clogged by cookie and sleep, I asked, “Do you know why he waked us up? Woke us up? Whatever.”
“No. I threatened to shoot him. He kept knocking.”
“Three bursts?”
“Yeah. The knocking. Not the shooting. I’d only need one round.”
“Ha-ha.”
“You two awake yet?” Alex asked from the opening to the living room.
“No,” we said together. I took another cookie.
He placed two tablets on the table, on stands, between us, positioned so we could both see the screens. There were images on them. Still shots plucked from security camera footage. The photos were of two vamps as they parked on a street, got out of the car, and vanished around a corner of a building. Sleepiness fell away from me like rain off a metal roof. The woman was exquisite, black-haired and dark-eyed, with alabaster skin and a swan neck. The man beside her, as always, looked cynical and bored and cruel. “Amitee and Fernand Marchand,” I whispered, putting all the relationships in order. I knew, somehow, that all the pieces were on the board now. “The Marchands were brother and sister, formerly of the Rochefort clan in France, and they had been associated with the Damours. The Rocheforts were pals with the dog-fanged vamps in Europe. Leo’s son met Amitee there, when she was still a blood-servant to the Rocheforts and she turned so she could marry him.
“Amitee hated Leo. From the very first moment she met him,” I said. “And now we know why. She was part of layered plots by the Europeans, probably for decades.”
“Trained up by Immanuel to hate him?” Eli suggested, draining his espresso and placing the small cup in the light of one screen.
That made sense. Long before I killed him, Immanuel had been replaced, eaten, by an u’tlun’ta, a skinwalker, a creature like me but one who had done deliberate black magic and taken the place of a living, breathing, sentient being. I had done a lot of bad things, but not that. Never that.
Alex said, “I haven’t uncovered much in our own files, but your previous researcher had drawn some conclusions based on a series of parties thrown by the Rocheforts back in the 1960s. Parties attended by the elite of the world music scene and by the wealthy and the young royals of the time. Fernand was good friends with Lennon and Harrison before they died. Pete Townshend and Keith Moon. Keith Richards. Lotta rock-and-rollers.”
I nodded. I recognized some of the names.
“Leo’s son attended parties. He also socialized with the Damours when he came home to New Orleans,” Alex said.
“Everything in this entire city and the vamp world seems to come back to the Damours.” I muttered. But then, that was what the bloodsuckers’ long game meant—the single inciting event that tied all the hatreds and deaths together in the vamp world.
The original Damour sire had weak vamp bloodlines that left their scions in the devoveo for decades, even centuries, mad, raving creatures referred to as the long-chained. Creatures that were supposed to be put down by the misericords, the Mercy Blades, like Gee DiMercy. Instead, the Damour clan guarded theirs and hid them away, using their slaves on Saint Domingue—before it was liberated in a bloody slave revolt—in breeding experiments to create a bloodline that might help bring the long-chained around. They also performed unspeakable experiments with blood sacrifice and magic, even after they came to the shores of the States. And then Tristan and Renee, brother and sister, married and added their inbred children to the list of the long-chained. And tried to use my BFF’s children, my godchildren, in one such experiment to heal them. They, and their nameless sorcerer brother, were dead. I could almost hear Munchkins singing and celebrating even now.
“More than that,” Alex said, bringing me back to the here and now. “The parties they gave were often well attended by the paparazzi. Get a look at the dudes in the background.” He held out a tablet and widened a photo into a grainy close-up of a small group of people. “It’s really fuzzy thanks to vamps not photographing well until the digital age, but I’m pretty sure this is Louis Seventh. And these guys”—he pointed—“might be the vamp emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus with Le Batard. The three stooges of vamp hierarchy, in the same vicinity as Macario and Gualterio Cardona.” He pointed at two humans in the photo. “You got thoughts about all this, bro?” Alex asked.
“Lots of thoughts,” Eli said. He stood and went to the espresso machine. I heard him making a double shot, all without turning on a light. Gotta love muscle memory. “The Marchands are the European vamps’ onshore liaisons.”
Alex said, “Sleeper spies. Foresworn to Leo and all that. Yeah. I had time to download the vid collected from Adrianna’s cage. The Marchands let Adrianna out of the crazy box. I have some security of them leading the way when HQ was attacked. They helped take Grégoire and the B and B twins.”
Eli sat down with his oversized cuppa. He pointed to the screen with the sat map of the area where the witches said the storm witch was working. And he tapped the building with the lightning rod. “Our people may be in there. We need good intel, absolute one-hundred-percent intel about layout. A reconnaissance mission. And we need better shooters. I don’t want dead local vamps or Onorios on our hands.”
“There’s more,” Alex said, sounding grim.