Skinwalker

I’d need to put the vamp-hunting tools out of sight for my interview. My hostess might be offended. Not a good thing when said hostess held my next paycheck in her hands and possessed a set of fangs of her own.

A guy, a good-looking Joe standing in a doorway, turned his head to follow my progress as I motored past. He wore leather boots, a jacket, and jeans, like me, though his dark hair was short and mine was down to my hips when not braided out of the way, tight to my head, for fighting. A Kawasaki motorbike leaned on a stand nearby. I didn’t like his interest, but he didn’t prick my predatory or territorial instincts.

I maneuvered the bike down St. Louis and then onto Dauphine, weaving between nervous-looking shop workers heading home for the evening and a few early revelers out for fun. I spotted the address in the fading light. Katie’s Ladies was the oldest continually operating whorehouse in the Quarter, in business since 1845, though at various locations, depending on hurricane, flood, the price of rent, and the agreeable nature of local law and its enforcement officers. I parked, set the kickstand, and unwound my long legs from the hog.

I had found two bikes in a junkyard in Charlotte, North Carolina, bodies rusted, rubber rotted. They were in bad shape. But Jacob, a semiretired Harley restoration mechanic/ Zen Harley priest living along the Catawba River, took my money, fixing one up, using the other for parts, ordering what else he needed over the Net. It took six months.

During that time I’d hunted for him, keeping his wife and four kids supplied with venison, rabbit, turkey—whatever I could catch, as maimed as I was—restocked supplies from the city with my hoarded money, and rehabbed my damaged body back into shape. It was the best I could do for the months it took me to heal. Even someone with my rapid healing and variable metabolism takes a long while to totally mend from a near beheading.

Now that I was a hundred percent, I needed work. My best bet was a job killing off a rogue vampire that was terrorizing the city of New Orleans. It had taken down three tourists and left a squad of cops, drained and smiling, dead where it dropped them. Scuttlebutt said it hadn’t been satisfied with just blood—it had eaten their internal organs. All that suggested the rogue was old, powerful, and deadly—a whacked-out vamp. The nutty ones were always the worst.

Just last week, Katherine “Katie” Fonteneau, the proprietress and namesake of Katie’s Ladies, had e-mailed me. According to my Web site, I had successfully taken down an entire blood-family in the mountains near Asheville. And I had. No lies on the Web site or in the media reports, not bald-faced ones anyway. Truth is, I’d nearly died, but I’d done the job, made a rep for myself, and then taken off a few months to invest my legitimately gotten gains. Or to heal, but spin is everything. A lengthy vacation sounded better than the complete truth.

I took off my helmet and the clip that held my hair, pulling my braids out of my jacket collar and letting them fall around me, beads clicking. I palmed a few tools of the trade—one stake, ash wood and silver tipped; a tiny gun; and a cross—and tucked them into the braids, rearranging them to hang smoothly with no lumps or bulges. I also breathed deeply, seeking to relax, to assure my safety through the upcoming interview. I was nervous, and being nervous around a vamp was just plain dumb.

The sun was setting, casting a red glow on the horizon, limning the ancient buildings, shuttered windows, and wrought-iron balconies in fuchsia. It was pretty in a purely human way. I opened my senses and let my Beast taste the world. She liked the smells and wanted to prowl. Later, I promised her. Predators usually growl when irritated. Soon—she sent mental claws into my soul, kneading. It was uncomfortable, but the claw pricks kept me alert, which I’d need for the interview. I had never met a civilized vamp, certainly never done business with one. So far as I knew, vamps and skinwalkers had never met. I was about to change that. This could get interesting.

I clipped my sunglasses onto my collar, lenses hanging out. I glanced at the witchy-locks on my saddlebags and, satisfied, I walked to the narrow red door and pushed the buzzer. The bald-headed man who answered was definitely human, but big enough to be something else: professional wrestler, steroid-augmented bodybuilder, or troll. All of the above, maybe. The thought made me smile. He blocked the door, standing with arms loose and ready. “Something funny?” he asked, voice like a horse-hoof rasp on stone.

“Not really. Tell Katie that Jane Yellowrock is here.” Tough always works best on first acquaintance. That my knees were knocking wasn’t a consideration.

“Card?” Troll asked. A man of few words. I liked him already. My new best pal. With two gloved fingers, I unzipped my leather jacket, fished a business card from an inside pocket, and extended it to him. It read JANE YELLOWROCK, HAVE STAKES WILL TRAVEL. Vamp killing is a bloody business. I had discovered that a little humor went a long way to making it all bearable.

Troll took the card and closed the door in my face. I might have to teach my new pal a few manners. But that was nearly axiomatic for all the men of my acquaintance.

I heard a bike two blocks away. It wasn’t a Harley. Maybe a Kawasaki, like the bright red crotch rocket I had seen earlier. I wasn’t surprised when it came into view and it was the Joe from Decatur Street. He pulled his bike up beside mine, powered down, and sat there, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He had a toothpick in his mouth and it twitched once as he pulled his helmet and glasses off.

The Joe was a looker. A little taller than my six feet even, he had olive skin, black hair, black brows. Black jacket and jeans. Black boots. Bit of overkill with all the black, but he made it work, with muscular legs wrapped around the red bike.

No silver in sight. No shotgun, but a suspicious bulge beneath his right arm. Made him a leftie. Something glinted in the back of his collar. A knife hilt, secured in a spine sheath. Maybe more than one blade. There were scuffs on his boots (Western, like mine, not Harley butt-stompers) but his were Fryes and mine were ostrich-skin Luccheses. I pulled in scents, my nostrils widening. His boots smelled of horse manure, fresh. Local boy, then, or one who had been in town long enough to find a mount. I smelled horse sweat and hay, a clean blend of scents. And cigar. It was the cigar that made me like him. The taint of steel, gun oil, and silver made me fall in love. Well, sorta. My Beast thought he was kinda cute, and maybe tough enough to be worthy of us. Yet there was a faint scent on the man, hidden beneath the surface smells, that made me wary.

The silence had lasted longer than expected. Since he had been the one to pull up, I just stared, and clearly our silence bothered the Joe, but it didn’t bother me. I let a half grin curl my lip. He smiled back and eased off his bike. Behind me, inside Katie’s, I heard footsteps. I maneuvered so that the Joe and the doorway were both visible. No way could I do it and be unobtrusive, but I raised a shoulder to show I had no hard feelings. Just playing it smart. Even for a pretty boy.

Troll opened the door and jerked his head to the side. I took it as the invitation it was and stepped inside. “You got interesting taste in friends,” Troll said, as the door closed on the Joe.

“Never met him. Where you want the weapons?” Always better to offer than to have them removed. Power plays work all kinds of ways.

Troll opened an armoire. I unbuckled the shotgun holster and set it inside, pulling silver crosses from my belt and thighs and from beneath the coat until there was a nice pile. Thirteen crosses—excessive, but they distracted people from my backup weapons. Next came the wooden stakes and silver stakes. Thirteen of each. And the silver vial of holy water. One vial. If I carried thirteen, I’d slosh.

I hung the leather jacket on the hanger in the armoire and tucked the glasses in the inside pocket with the cell phone. I closed the armoire door and assumed the position so Troll could search me. He grunted as if surprised, but pleased, and did a thorough job. To give him credit, he didn’t seem to enjoy it overmuch—used only the backs of his hands, no fingers, didn’t linger or stroke where he shouldn’t. Breathing didn’t speed up, heart rate stayed regular; things I can sense if it’s quiet enough. After a thorough feel inside the tops of my boots, he said, “This way.”

I followed him down a narrow hallway that made two crooked turns toward the back of the house. We walked over old Persian carpets, past oils and watercolors done by famous and not-so-famous artists. The hallway was lit with stained-glass Lalique sconces, which looked real, not like reproductions, but maybe you can fake old; I didn’t know. The walls were painted a soft butter color that worked with the sconces to illuminate the paintings. Classy joint for a whorehouse. The Christian children’s home schoolgirl in me was both appalled and intrigued.

When Troll paused outside the red door at the end of the hallway, I stumbled, catching my foot on a rug. He caught me with one hand and I pushed off him with little body contact. I managed to look embarrassed; he shook his head. He knocked. I braced myself and palmed the cross he had missed. And the tiny two-shot derringer. Both hidden against my skull on the crown of my head, and covered by my braids, which men never, ever searched, as opposed to my boots, which men always had to stick their fingers in. He opened the door and stood aside. I stepped in.

The room was spartan but expensive, and each piece of furniture looked Spanish. Old Spanish. Like Queen-Isabella- and-Christopher-Columbus old. The woman, wearing a teal dress and soft slippers, standing beside the desk, could have passed for twenty until you looked in her eyes. Then she might have passed for said queen’s older sister. Old, old, old eyes. Peaceful as she stepped toward me. Until she caught my scent.

In a single instant her eyes bled red, pupils went wide and black, and her fangs snapped down. She leaped. I dodged under her jump as I pulled the cross and derringer, quickly moving to the far wall, where I held out the weapons. The cross was for the vamp, the gun for the Troll. She hissed at me, fangs fully extended. Her claws were bone white and two inches long. Troll had pulled a gun. A big gun. Men and their pissing contests. Crap. Why couldn’t they ever just let me be the only one with a gun?

“Predator,” she hissed. “In my territory.” Vamp anger pheromones filled the air, bitter as wormwood.

“I’m not human,” I said, my voice steady. “That’s what you smell.” I couldn’t do anything about the tripping heart rate, which I knew would drive her further over the edge; I’m an animal. Biological factors always kick in. So much for trying not to be nervous. The cross in my hand glowed with a cold white light, and Katie, if that was her original name, tucked her head, shielding her eyes. Not attacking, which meant that she was thinking. Good.

“Katie?” Troll asked.

“I’m not human,” I repeated. “I’ll really hate shooting your Troll here, to bleed all over your rugs, but I will.”

“Troll?” Katie asked. Her body froze with that inhuman stillness vamps possess when thinking, resting, or whatever else it is they do when they aren’t hunting, eating, or killing. Her shoulders dropped and her fangs clicked back into the roof of her mouth with a sudden spurt of humor. Vampires can’t laugh and go vampy at the same time. They’re two distinct parts of them, one part still human, one part rabid hunter. Well, that’s likely insulting, but then this was the first so-called civilized vamp I’d ever met. All the others I’d had personal contact with were sick, twisted killers. And then dead. Really dead.

Troll’s eyes narrowed behind the .45 aimed my way. I figured he didn’t like being compared to the bad guy in a children’s fairy tale. I was better at fighting, but negotiation seemed wise. “Tell him to back off. Let me talk.” I nudged it a bit. “Or I’ll take you down and he’ll never get a shot off.” Unless he noticed that I had set the safety on his gun when I tripped. Then I’d have to shoot him. I wasn’t betting on my .22 stopping him unless I got an eye shot. Chest hits wouldn’t even slow him down. In fact they’d likely just make him mad.

When neither attacked, I said, “I’m not here to stake you. I’m Jane Yellowrock, here to interview for a job, to take out a rogue vamp that your own council declared an outlaw. But I don’t smell human, so I take precautions. One cross, one stake, one two-shot derringer.” The word “stake” didn’t elude her. Or him. He’d missed three weapons. No Christmas bonus for Troll.

“What are you?” she asked.

“You tell me where you sleep during the day and I’ll tell you what I am. Otherwise, we can agree to do business. Or I can leave.”

Telling the location of a lair—where a vamp sleeps—is information for lovers, dearest friends, or family. Katie chuckled. It was one of the silky laughs that her kind can give, low and erotic, like vocal sex. My Beast purred. She liked the sound.

“Are you offering to be my toy for a while, intriguing nonhuman female?” When I didn’t answer, she slid closer, despite the glowing cross, and said, “You are interesting. Tall, slender, young.” She leaned in and breathed in my scent. “Or not so young. What are you?” she pressed, her voice heavy with fascination. Her eyes had gone back to their natural color, a sort of grayish hazel, but blood blush still marred her cheeks so I knew she was still primed for violence. That violence being my death.

“Secretive,” she murmured, her voice taking on that tone they use to enthrall, a deep vibration that seems to stroke every gland. “Enticing scent. Likely tasty. Perhaps your blood would be worth the trade. Would you come to my bed if I offered?”

“No,” I said. No inflection in my voice. No interest, no revulsion, no irritation, nothing. Nothing to tick off the vamp or her servant.

“Pity. Put down the gun, Tom. Get our guest something to drink.”

I didn’t wait for Tommy Troll to lower his weapon; I dropped mine. Beast wasn’t happy, but she understood. I was the intruder in Katie’s territory. While I couldn’t show submission, I could show manners. Tom lowered his gun and his attitude at the same time and holstered the weapon as he moved into the room toward a well-stocked bar.

“Tom?” I said. “Uncheck your safety.” He stopped mid-stride. “I set it when I fell against you in the hallway.”

“Couldn’t happen,” he said.

“I’m fast. It’s why your employer invited me for a job interview.”

He inspected his .45 and nodded at his boss. Why anyone would want to go around with a holstered .45 with the safety off is beyond me. It smacks of either stupidity or quiet desperation, and Katie had lived too long to be stupid. I was guessing the rogue had made her truly apprehensive. I tucked the cross inside a little lead-foil-lined pocket in the leather belt holding up my Levi’s, and eased the small gun in beside it, strapping it down. There was a safety, but on such a small gun, it was easy to knock the safety off with an accidental brush of my arm.

“Is that where you hid the weapons?” Katie asked. When I just looked at her, she shrugged as if my answer were unimportant and said, “Impressive. You are impressive.”

Katie was one of those dark ash blondes with long straight hair so thick it whispered when she moved, falling across the teal silk that fit her like a second skin. She stood five feet and a smidge, but height was no measure of power in her kind. She could move as fast as I could and kill in an eyeblink. She had buffed nails that were short when she wasn’t in killing mode, pale skin, and she wore exotic, Egyptian-style makeup around the eyes. Black liner overlaid with some kind of glitter. Not the kind of look I’d ever had the guts to try. I’d rather face down a grizzly than try to achieve “a look.”

“What’ll it be, Miz Yellowrock?” Tom asked.

“Cola’s fine. No diet.”

He popped the top on a Coke and poured it over ice that crackled and split when the liquid hit, placed a wedge of lime on the rim, and handed it to me. His employer got a tall fluted glass of something milky that smelled sharp and alcoholic. Well, at least it wasn’t blood on ice. Ick.

“Thank you for coming such a distance,” Katie said, taking one of two chairs and indicating the other for me. Both chairs were situated with backs to the door, which I didn’t like, but I sat as she continued. “We never made proper introductions, and the In-ter-net,” she said, separating the syllables as if the term was strange, “is no substitute for formal, proper introductions. I am Katherine Fonteneau.” She offered the tips of her fingers, and I took them for a moment in my own before dropping them.

“Jane Yellowrock,” I said, feeling as though it was all a little redundant. She sipped; I sipped. I figured that was enough etiquette. “Do I get the job?” I asked.

Katie waved away my impertinence. “I like to know the people with whom I do business. Tell me about yourself.”

Cripes. The sun was down. I needed to be tooling around town, getting the smell and the feel of the place. I had errands to run, an apartment to rent, rocks to find, meat to buy. “You’ve been to my Web site, no doubt read my bio. It’s all there in black and white.” Well, in full color graphics, but still.

Katie’s brows rose politely. “Your bio is dull and uninformative. For instance, there is no mention that you appeared out of the forest at age twelve, a feral child raised by wolves, without even the rudiments of human behavior. That you were placed in a children’s home, where you spent the next six years. And that you again vanished until you reappeared two years ago and started killing my kind.”

My hackles started to rise, but I forced them down. I’d been baited by a roomful of teenaged girls before I even learned to speak English. After that, nothing was too painful. I grinned and threw a leg over the chair arm. Which took Katie, of the elegant attack, aback. “I wasn’t raised by wolves. At least I don’t think so. I don’t feel an urge to howl at the moon, anyway. I have no memories of my first twelve years of life, so I can’t answer you about them, but I think I’m probably Cherokee.” I touched my black hair, then my face with its golden brown skin and sharp American Indian nose in explanation. “After that, I was raised in a Christian children’s home in the mountains of South Carolina. I left when I was eighteen, traveled around a while, and took up an apprenticeship with a security firm for two years. Then I hung out my shingle, and eventually drifted into the vamp-hunting business.

“What about you? You going to share all your own deep dark secrets, Katie of Katie’s Ladies? Who is known to the world as Katherine Fonteneau, aka Katherine Louisa Dupre, Katherine Pearl Duplantis, and Katherine Vuillemont, among others I uncovered. Who renewed her liquor license in February, is a registered Republican, votes religiously, pardon the term, sits on the local full vampiric council, has numerous offshore accounts in various names, a half interest in two local hotels, at least three restaurants, and several bars, and has enough money to buy and sell this entire city if she wanted to.”

“We have both done our research, I see.”

I had a feeling Katie found me amusing. Must be hard to live a few centuries and find yourself in a modern world where everyone knows what you are and is either infatuated with you or scared silly by you. I was neither, which she liked, if the small smile was any indication. “So. Do I have the job?” I asked again.

Katie considered me for a moment, as if weighing my responses and attitude. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve arranged a small house for you, per the requirements on your In-ter-net web place.”

My brows went up despite myself. She must have been pretty sure she was gonna hire me, then.

“It backs up to this property.” She waved vaguely at the back of the room. “The small L-shaped garden at the side and back is walled in brick, and I had the stones you require delivered two days ago.”

Okay. Now I was impressed. My Web site says I require close proximity to boulders or a rock garden, and that I won’t take a job if such a place can’t be found. And the woman—the vamp—had made sure that nothing would keep me from accepting the job. I wondered what she would have done if I’d said no.

At her glance, Tr—Tom took up the narrative. “The gardener had a conniption, but he figured out a way to get boulders into the garden with a crane, and then blended them into his landscaping. Grumbled about it, but it’s done.”

“Would you tell me why you need piles of stone?” Katie asked.

“Meditation.” When she looked blank I said, “I use stone for meditation. It helps prepare me for a hunt.” I knew she had no idea what I was talking about. It sounded pretty lame even to me, and I had made up the lie. I’d have to work on that one.

Katie stood and so did I, setting aside my Coke. Katie had drained her foul-smelling libation. On her breath it smelled vaguely like licorice. “Tom will give you the contract and a packet of information, the compiled evidence gathered about the rogue by the police and our own investigators. Tonight you may rest or indulge in whatever pursuits appeal to you.

“Tomorrow, once you deliver the signed contract, you are invited to join my girls for dinner before business commences. They will be attending a private party, and dinner will be served at seven of the evening. I will not be present, that they may speak freely. Through them you may learn something of import.” It was a strange way to say seven p.m., and an even stranger request for me to interrogate her employees right off the bat, but I didn’t react. Maybe one of them knew something about the rogue. And maybe Katie knew it. “After dinner, you may initiate your inquiries.

“The council’s offer of a bonus stands. An extra twenty percent if you dispatch the rogue inside of ten days, without the media taking a stronger note of us.” The last word had an inflection that let me know the “us” wasn’t Katie and me. She meant the vamps. “Human media attention has been . . . difficult. And the rogue’s feeding has strained relations in the vampiric council. It is important,” she said.

I nodded. Sure. Whatever. I want to get paid, so I aim to please. But I didn’t say it.

Katie extended a folder to me and I tucked it under my arm. “The police photos of the crime scenes you requested. Three samples of bloodied cloth from the necks of the most recent victims, carefully wiped to gather saliva,” she said.

Vamp saliva, I thought. Full of vamp scent. Good for tracking.

“On a card is my contact at the NOPD. She is expecting a call from you. Let Tom know if you need anything else.” Katie settled cold eyes on me in obvious dismissal. She had already turned her mind to other things. Like dinner? Yep. Her cheeks had paled again and she suddenly looked drawn with hunger. Her eyes slipped to my neck. Time to leave.

I smiled as I slid into my jacket, not ignoring the barrel of the .45 pressed into my neck, but not reacting to it either. “You’re human. Sure you want to risk standing so close to me?”

I felt him hesitate and whirled. Set my head to the side of the gun. Knocked his right arm across his body with my raised right fist. Twisting my hand, I took his wrist and lifted. And slammed against his left shoulder with my left hand, forcing him to the floor. It took maybe a half second. Deep in my bones, I felt my Beast spit. This was fun.

“Not bad,” he said, his inflection still composed. I knew I’d been baited. Had known he would want to know if he could have taken me. “What discipline?”

He was asking what form of martial arts I studied. I thought a minute. “Dirty,” I said. He chuckled. I pressed down just a bit on his shoulder joint. “Put the weapon down.”

He placed the .45, a well-kept Smith & Wesson, on the floor and pushed it away. He could still get to it, but not before I hurt him bad. I took my weight off his shoulder and released his wrist, stepping back and setting my feet, balanced for his next move. But he didn’t make one. He stood and tucked his thumbs into his waistband, a surer sign of peace than palms out. Thumbs in meant he couldn’t strike out fast, while the universal gesture of peace was an easy way to mentally disarm an opponent and then kill him when he let down his guard.

“There’s a hapkido black belt, second dan, practices after hours in the back of a jewelry store on St. Louis. I’ll call in an intro if you want.”

“That’d be nice.” I waited, easing down a smidgen. Just enough for him to see it, but not enough to get sucker punched.

“Anything else I can do you for?” he asked companion-ably.

“Sure. Where can a girl buy a good steak for grilling?” Meaning where can I get good raw meat, but phrased in a socially acceptable way.

“Place I stocked your fridge from is the best. Thirty pounds of sirloin.”

This time I controlled my reaction. My love of animal protein wasn’t on my Web site. Not anywhere.

“I left directions to the butcher and a fresh market on your kitchen counter. Butcher delivers,” he said, “seafood, beef, any kinda bird, alligator”—my Beast perked up at that—“mudbug, veggies, you name it.”

“Mudbug?” I let a small smile cross my face, sure I was being baited again.

“Crawfish. Best steamed in beer, in my opinion. I left directions to eateries, too.”

“Much appreciated.”

He sighed and dropped his weight to one hip. I smothered my grin. “You’re not going to tell me where you hid the weapons, are you?” he asked.

“Nope. But I promise not to break your knee if you’ll reposition your weight back on both feet.”

He laughed, the happy laugh of a contented man, and adjusted his weight back evenly. Still dangerous, but not sneaky dangerous. “Not bad, Jane Yellowrock.”

“Right back at you, Tom.”

“You can call me Troll. I kinda like it.”

I nodded. “Sounds dangerous. Mean.”

“Not me. I’m a pussycat.”

I glanced at the armoire and back at him with a question in my eyes.

“Sorry,” he said and took three steps back.

Without taking my eyes off him, I reached into the armoire and gathered my weapons in small batches, inserting them into the proper straps and sheaths, all but one stake, which I leaned into the darkest corner. I carried the shotgun. I had to work to get its harness strapped on and I wasn’t taking chances with Tommy Troll. I grinned at the thought and he thought the smile was for him. Which it was, sorta. “Thanks for an interesting evening,” I said.

“Welcome to New Orleans. See you tomorrow night.” He lifted a large mailing envelope off a table at his side and handed it to me. I felt several things inside: what I took to be a stack of cash, trifolded papers (most likely the contract), flat pages, and a couple of keys. “Thanks,” I said. I nodded and opened the narrow door, stepping into the night.

I stood with my back to Katie’s, remembering to breathe, forcing down the fear I had controlled, subjugated, strangled till now. I grinned. I’d done it. I had faced down a civilized vamp, had lived to tell the tale, and had successfully taken away both cash and a job. Beast found my relief amusing. When I could walk without my knees shaking, I stuffed Katie’s folder into the envelope and went to my bike.

The night wasn’t dark, not in Jazz City. The glare of streetlights and neon beer signs fell in odd patterns and cast warped shadows across the cityscape, the effect of moisture in the air from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchar train. The bodies of water bracketed New Orleans, giving the city its famous stink and air so wet that rain sometimes fell from a blue sky. So I smelled the Joe before I saw him. But I knew where he was. Upwind, relaxed. The smell of gun oil and ammo no stronger than before.

He was sitting on a low brick wall one storefront over, a balcony above him, the old building at his back. He had one leg up, the other dangling, and the shadows hid the left side of his body. He could have a weapon hidden there. Okay, I was paranoid. But I had just bested a vamp on her home territory and then made nice-nice with her bodyguard. My glands still pumped adrenaline and my heart was suddenly pounding.

Keeping him to my side, I went around my bike and strapped the shotgun harness on top of my jacket, sliding the weapon into the special sheath made by a leathersmith in the mountains near Asheville. I checked the saddlebags and saw the finger smudges on the polished chrome. Gloved. No prints. But I bet touching my locks had hurt like a son of a gun. Making it look like I was getting a closer look, I bent and sniffed. The Joe’s cigar scent was faint, but present. I raised my head and grinned at him. He touched the brim of an imaginary cowboy hat, a faint smile on his face.

I straddled the hog and sat. He slid off his glasses, and his eyes were dark, nearly black, a sign of mixed European and American Indian lineage. “Still hurting?” I asked, letting my voice carry on the damp air.

“A little tingly,” he admitted easily. After all, if he had intended me not to guess it was him, he wouldn’t have stayed around. “Witchy-lock?”

I nodded.

“Expensive. You get the job?” When I raised my brows politely he said, “With Katie. Word on the streets is the council brought in out-of-town talent to take down the rogue.”

“I got the job.” But I didn’t like the fact that everyone in town knew why I was here. Rogue vamps were good hunters. The best. Beast snarled in disagreement but I ignored her.

He nodded and sighed. “I was hoping she’d can you. I wanted the contract.”

I shrugged. What could I say? I kick-started the bike. Fumes and the roar drove Beast back down. She didn’t like the smell, though she did approve of my method of travel. To her, hogs were totally cool. I wheeled and tooled away, keeping an eye on the Joe in the rearview. He never moved.

Moments later I switched off the Harley, sitting astride the too-warm leather seat as I looked over the narrow, two-story, old-brick French house. It was around the block and backed up to Katie’s Ladies. The front door had a stained-glass oval window in the center and was protected from the elements by a three-foot-wide second-story veranda with a freshly painted black wrought-iron railing. A similar door opened on the upper porch, and neither looked particularly secure. There was a narrow lane down the right side, locked behind an ornate seven-foot-tall wrought-iron gate. Lots of wrought iron, half the spikes topped with fleur-de-lis, the rest with what could have been stakes. Tongue-in-cheek vamp humor. Before coming here, during the preliminary research phase of this job, I had learned that the fleur-de-lis was New Orleans’ official city symbol and had been popular for ages in France, from whence many of the vamps had emigrated during the pre-Napoleonic purges of the French Revolution. Seemingly useless bits of knowledge often were the difference between success and failure.

House and gate had to be two, three hundred years old. I tried the larger, older of two keys, four inches in length, a heart shape on one end. The lock clicked and I squeezed the latch, two bars that compressed to unfasten the gate. It opened without a squeak. Boots on cobblestones, I walked my Harley inside and pulled the gate closed behind me. The latch clicked and I relocked it before walking the bike down the two-rut garden lane beside the house. Or storefront, or boardinghouse. From the smells, it had been lots of things at one time or another.

A careful driver could have gotten a car back here. A small car. But the lane was clearly intended for walkers, or maybe horseback riders. There were all kinds of plants, some with long stems and elephant ear-sized leaves of various color combinations. There were climbing roses and jasmine and a few other things I recognized, but my knowledge of botany was limited. Several plants were flowering and smelled heavenly. I caught a hint of catnip. Beast made a hacking sound deep inside. I wasn’t always sure what that meant, but it was a reaction of some sort used during both positive and negative discoveries. In this case, maybe it was a sign of recognition.

The house was narrow on the street side, but long, with a deep second-story wooden balcony covering a ground-floor porch that overlooked the tiny side lane and back garden. I could see chairs on the porch, a few tables. More wrought-iron trellises and rails served to keep people from falling off. The porch on the lower level was slate floored, with more iron. The house had tall windows closed with French shutters, five windows on each story, and there was one door on each floor with stairs near the back leading between. Four doors total, all flimsy. Not much security.

I could check out the interior of the house later. The back garden first. I pushed the Harley on around. The garden widened into a thirty-by-forty-foot rectangular space at the bottom of the lane, and was exquisite. It was surrounded by ornamental yet entirely functional brick walls fifteen feet high, and was lined with plants of all varieties. A big fountain splashed in a corner, water pouring from a huge marble tulip with a miniature naked woman sitting atop. The sculpture was finely detailed, a masterwork, and I noted the statue’s resemblance to Katie. Tiny fangs were a dead giveaway. I wondered how many houses she owned on this block. Maybe all of them. You could do some powerful estate planning when you had lived over two hundred years. Maybe three hundred. Maybe more.

Over the city sounds and even with the roar of the Harley still affecting my ears, I could hear the tiny motor powering the pump. Other than that, and the sound of an unfamiliar night bird, the garden was silent.

Across from the fountain, sown with dozens of healthy plants, were three large boulders and half a dozen smaller ones brought in by the crane Troll had mentioned. Katie was right. The gardener had done a good job; the boulders looked like they had been here forever.

I set the kickstand and walked the garden, looking for wires, scuffs on the brick, signs of work other than the gardener’s. I spotted them fast, a scuff near the left back corner, too high to be from a spade, and a well-concealed electrical line running from the security light down to the brick wall.

I pulled off the straps that secured my shotgun and set it aside. The jacket followed, and, sitting down on a conveniently placed bench, I tugged off my boots. I gathered three loose cobblestones and dropped them into my T-shirt. They landed against my skin at my waist, held in place by my belt. Then I pulled the bench to the wall, spat on my hands for effect more than necessity, and leaped.

The brick wall was irregular, with some bricks forming depressions and others sticking out just enough for a rock climber to know what to do with them. I hadn’t climbed Everest, but I’d lived in the Appalachians and had taken a few classes. I had taken at least a few classes in lots of things.

I caught a slightly protuberant brick and swung out, catching another with my toes, pushing up for a second handhold, another toehold. I reached the top of the fence and studied it. There was no barbed wire, no broken glass embedded in concrete, no trip wires. Nothing. A half-assed job, security-wise.

I pulled myself to the top and stood, surveying the yard next door. A small dog, more hair than meat, growled at me. Beast was rising in my mind as the moon rose and darkness fell, and she spat at it, not that the stupid little dog could tell. I reined her back and, because she understood that the safety of the den was paramount, she let me. I was better at human things, and she didn’t mind me taking over as long as it wasn’t dangerous. Then it got a bit harder to submerge her instincts.

I walked along the wall, taking in the scents of the place, the brick warm beneath my bare feet as I scrutinized the garden with eyes and nose and considered the walls on the houses adjacent to my freebie-house wall. I came to the back corner where the scuff was and toed a tiny lump, brushing away dirt that had been carefully sprinkled there. I reached down and pulled the miniature security camera from the duct tape holding it in place. The tape made little snapping sounds as it broke.

The electrical wires powering the camera came free as well, and I turned the camera lens to me, holding it level. I smiled at Katie, or maybe Troll. Or maybe a security firm. I shook my head. I held up the index finger of my free hand and shook it slowly side to side. Then I raised the camera and brought it down on the wall, lens first, and broke it into pieces. I did the same thing to the other two cameras.

I wasn’t worried about ticking off Katie. My Web site was firm about my privacy requirement, and I insisted it be part of my contract. What could she say? “Oh, dearie me, I forgot they were there . . .”? Yeah, right.

When I was sure I had all the ones within easy reach, I positioned myself and studied the camera mounted on the neighbor’s wall. I didn’t want to smash the window next to it. I pulled my T-shirt out and caught the three cobblestones. I hefted them, getting their balance and weight. I had never been as good at throwing as I was at other sports. I threw like a girl. It took all three stones but I smashed the last camera.

Satisfied, I dropped from the wall, not bothering with the brick handholds. With the cameras gone I didn’t need them. I gathered up my belongings and, barefoot, unlocked the door with the smaller key on the big ring. I went through the house fast, locating cameras. I busted two hidden behind grilles, one in an air return, one in a fanlight in the twelve-foot-high ceiling, which I hit with a broom handle. Several others. Finding security devices in a house was a lot harder than in a garden. I’d have to go over it later in better detail, but for now, I had a lot to do. First things first—a call to Molly.

Molly, a powerful earth witch and my very best friend, answered, children giggling and splashing water in the background. “Hey, witchy woman. I’m here. I got the gig,” I said. Molly gave an ululating yell, and I laughed with her.

Vamps and witches came out of the closet in 1962, when Marilyn Monroe tried to turn the U.S. president in the Oval Office and was killed by the Secret Service. There was a witness, Beverly Stumpkin, a White House maid, who ran for her life. The Secret Service quickly set up a suicide scenario for the actress and staked her in her bedroom. Not that anyone believed she had offed herself with a wooden stake to the heart and a garroting wire that beheaded her. The government tried to track down the maid, but she got away clean. Sloppy work all the way around.

Some gossip rag got wind of the real Monroe story and managed to do what the Secret Service couldn’t.They found the maid. Within weeks the lid was blown off the age-old myth. Vamps, and then witches, came out of the closet. If there had been other supernatural beings, it seemed like a good time for them to come out too, but so far no elves, pixies, wood nymphs, or merpeople had appeared. No weres or skinwalkers or shifters of any kind either. I was a singularity in a human world that wouldn’t like me if it knew about me, which meant I had to keep my secret close. And that meant that I had to live without true backup. Except for Molly.

“I’m proud of you,” she said. “Here, talk to the dirtiest child in the world. Maybe she’ll let me finish her bath.” The phone made muted rubbing noises, as if she held it under her arm. I waited patiently.

Molly Meagan Everhart Trueblood, the witch who had spelled my saddlebags, knew all about me. Mol came from a long line of witches. Not the kind in a pointy black hat with a cauldron in the front yard, and not the kind like the Bewitched television show. Witches aren’t human, though they can breed with humans, making little witches about fifty percent of the time, and normal humans the other fifty.

Young witches have a poor survival rate, especially the males, most dying before they reach the age of twenty from various kinds of cancers. The ones who live through puberty, however, tend to live into their early hundreds. Mol was forty, looked thirty, and was fearless.

I had wondered whether witches and skinwalkers had similar genetics.The witch trait is X linked, passed from generation to generation on the X chromosome. About ninety percent of the witches who live to maturity are female; only a few sorcerers, the term some call the male witch, survive in each generation. Nobody knows why witches have such a poor survival rate, but Molly was one of the lucky ones when it came to kids. So far. She had married a sorcerer, Evan, and they had a son, Little Evan, and a daughter, Angelina—Angie. Both have the witch X gene. The girl is a prodigy. And she is only six years old.

Most witches come into their gift slowly, around puberty. Angie came into her gift at age five, and it was atomic bomb potent. Mol postulated that her daughter has a witch gene on both of her X chromosomes, one from her dad, one from her mom, which, if true, would make the girl one of the most powerful witches on the planet, and someone that everyone would want, from the U.S. government’s black ops programs, to the council of witches, to the Chinese, the Russians, you name it. And anyone who didn’t have her would want her dead. Molly kept Angie’s power level under wraps, a lot like I kept what I was under wraps. And she and Evan warded their children and their property with protection, healing, and lots of prayers.

A delicate, sweet voice said, “Hi, Aunt Jane.” My heart started to melt. Beast stopped pushing and sat, panting, in my mind. Kits, she thought at me, happy.

“Hi, Angie. Are you giving your mother a hard time in the bath?”

“Yes. I’m being a bad girl.” She giggled again. “I played in the mud. I miss you. When you coming home?”

“Soon. I hope. I’ll bring you a doll. What kind do you want?”

“Long black hair and yellow eyes. Like you.”

Cripes. My melting heart was a pile of goo. “I’ll see if I can find one,” I said past the lump in my throat. “For now, let your mama get you clean, okay?” Molly had needed backup when Angie’s power erupted. I had been there for her and we had been friends ever since, back-to-back, including when I took down the rogue vamp’s blood-family last year in the Appalachian Mountains, rescuing her sister in the process.

“Okay. Here, Mama. Aunt Jane wants you. And then she’s gonna go play.”

Into the phone Molly said, “Play, huh?”

“Yeah. You and Evan checked the wards around your house?”

Molly made a sound, half pshaw, half grunt, and I heard water falling into water as she lifted Angelina out of the bath. “Twice tonight. You have fun. Call me.”

“I will.” Feeling twenty pounds lighter, I left my belongings in the middle of the parlor floor and opened the fridge. Thirty pounds of fresh meat took up the center shelf. Beast hissed in anticipation, even though she hated to eat cold. I ripped the butcher paper off a five-pound stack, stuck it in the microwave for a bit, just enough to take the chill off, and, while it heated, gathered supplies. When the bell dinged, I carried the meat outside, a roll of paper towels under one arm, my travel pack and a zipper satchel under the other. Already it felt weird walking on two legs, as Beast moved up from the deeps into my thoughts.

I set the stack of raw, bloody steaks on the ground and wiped my hands. Beast wanted to lick them, but I refrained. I had that much control left. I stripped off my clothes, leaving them in a pile. My stomach was rumbling. I was panting, salivating. Hungry, she thought at me.

I am a skinwalker, and so far as I know, the last of my kind anywhere. If I have the right quantity of genetic material, I can take the shape of most any animal, though it’s easier if the species is the same mass as I am. Borrowing mass to fill out the genetic requirements of a larger animal is painful and dangerous, and I haven’t tried it often. It’s equally difficult to skinwalk in the body of a smaller animal, as I have to release mass, dump it somewhere, and that always means dumping some of what I am, some of my consciousness, and leaving it behind. The fear that it won’t be there when I return is enough to keep me my own size most of the time. Beast hissed at the thought; she didn’t like it when I shifted into the form of another animal.

Beast. She is something outside my skinwalker nature—a whole other entity, sharing my body, and sometimes my mind. If I try to rein her in when she wants to come through, she sometimes forces her way in anyway; I don’t have complete control over her. And I know, in my bones, that if other skinwalkers exist, they don’t have a Beast soul living inside. I’m not sure how we ended up together, and thinking about it always leaves me feeling vaguely uneasy, though I have an inkling that Beast knows and is keeping it from me.

I pulled the travel pack over my head and positioned the gold nugget I wear around my neck on a double gold chain, usually under my clothes, but now swinging free. Together, they looked like an expensive collar and tote, like a Saint Bernard rescue dog might have carried in the Swiss Alps. I bent over and scraped the gold nugget across the uppermost rock, depositing a thin streak of gold. It was like, well, like a homing beacon, among other things.

Yesssss. Hunt, Beast thought at me. Big!

Beast was ready to scope out this new territory, but she had an unfortunate aggressive tendency and had, upon occasion, taken on a pack of dogs, a wild boar, or some other animal it might have been smarter to leave alone. When I first shifted in a strange place, her aggressive tendencies always came to the fore and she demanded that I take on mass, adding to my natural one-hundred-twenty-plus pounds, drawing on the fetish of the African lion to skinwalk. “Big is dangerous,” I murmured to her. “We’re just looking around tonight. Big later.”

She panted in derision. Big always better. Big now!

But I could tell she wouldn’t push the issue. Beast, while always present in the depths of my consciousness, was talking to me as a separate entity now, as a self-aware creature with desires of her own. And for her, hunting was more important than winning an argument tonight.

Going back to the steaks and the paper towels, I placed the three bloody vamp cloths on the ground, securing them with a pot of geraniums. I climbed the boulders and sat, the rock warm beneath me. Mosquitoes swarmed, biting. I had forgotten about them. Beast hissed.

I opened the zipper bag and pulled out one of the bizarre necklaces inside, the one I used the most, like a totem or fetish, but so much more. The necklace of the mountain panther, commonly called the mountain lion. It was made of the claws, teeth, and small bones of the biggest female panther I had ever seen. The cat had been killed by a rancher in Montana during a legal hunt, the pelt and head mounted on his living room wall, the bones and teeth sold through a taxidermist. The mountain lion was hunted throughout the western United States but was extinct in the eastern states, or it had been. Some reports said panthers were making a comeback east of the Mississippi. One could hope. I didn’t have to use the necklace to shift into this creature—unlike other species, the memory of Beast’s form was always a part of me—but it was easier.

I held the necklace and closed my eyes. Relaxed. Listened to the wind, the pull of the moon, still sickle shaped, hiding below the horizon. I listened to the beat of my own heart. Beast rose in me, silent, predatory.

I slowed the functions of my body, slowed my heart rate, let my blood pressure drop, my muscles relax, as if I were going to sleep. I lay on the boulder, breasts and belly draping the cool stone in the humid air.

Mind slowing, I sank deep inside, my consciousness falling away, all but the purpose of this hunt. That purpose I set into the lining of my skin, into the deepest parts of my brain, so I wouldn’t lose it when I shifted, when I changed. I dropped lower. Deeper. Into the darkness inside where ancient, nebulous memories swirled in a gray world of shadow, blood, uncertainty. I heard a distant drum, smelled herbed woodsmoke, and the night wind on my skin seemed to cool and freshen. As I dropped deeper, memories began to firm, memories that, at all other times, were half forgotten, both mine and Beast’s.

As I had been taught so long ago—surely by a parent or perhaps a shaman?—I sought the inner snake lying inside the bones and teeth of the necklace, the coiled, curled snake, deep in the cells, in the remains of the marrow. Science had given it a name. RNA. DNA. Genetic sequences, specific to each species, each creature. For my people, for skinwalkers, it had always simply been “the inner snake,” the phrase one of very few things that was certain in my past.

I took up the snake that rests in the depths of all beasts. And I dropped within. Like water flowing in a stream. Like snow falling, rolling down a mountainside. Grayness enveloped me, sparkling and cold as the world fell away. And I was in the gray place of the change.

My breathing deepened. Heart rate sped up. And my bones . . . slid. Skin rippled. Fur, tawny and gray, brown and tipped with black, sprouted. Pain, like a knife, slid between muscle and bone. My nostrils widened, drawing deep.

She fell away. Night came alive—wonderful, new scents, like mist on air, thick and dancing, like currents in stream, yet distinct. Salt. Humans. Alcohol. Fish. Mold. Human spices. Blood. I panted. Listened to sounds—cars, music from everywhere, voices talking over one another. Gathered limbs beneath, lithe and lissome—her words for me.

Ugly man-made light, shadow-stung vision.Yet clear, sharp. She never saw like this. Scented like this. I stretched. Front legs and chest. Pulling back legs, spine, belly. Little clicks fell away. Things from her hair rolled off boulders. Delicately, with killing teeth, lifted necklace she dropped. Hopped from boulders. Landed, four-footed, balanced. Studied garden. No predators. No thieves-of-meat. Dropped necklace near food. Sniffed. Hack of disgust. Old meat. Dead prey. Long-cooled blood. Tip of tail twitched, wanting chase. To taste hot blood. But stomach rumbled. Always so, after change. Hunger. She left this, an offering.

I ate. Long canines tearing into dead meat. Filled stomach. Cold food did not appease need to hunt. Afterward, licked blood from whiskers and face. Pack and collar in way, but . . . important. Her things.

Memory she buried under skin began to stir. Ahhh. Hunt. For one of them. Drew in night air. Delicate nostril membranes fluttering, expanding, relaxing. Many new smells, some with value, some without. Unimportant: close-by smell of flowers, fresh-turned earth, mouse cowering in boulders, small snake on brick. Important: fish, pungent, sour. Salt. Old, still water full of tiny living things. Houses, many, ancient wood and brick. Bike she rode. She—Jane.

Strolled to it, muscles long and supple. Foul smells: gasoline, rubber, metal, wax, fainter smell of new paint. Magic tingle on whiskers. Good bike. Silent-not-dead now, roaring heart still. I approved of it and of her, sitting in wind, smelling world. Fast speed, too swift for hunters to follow. Her territory wherever she wished it to be. Jane hunted wide.

Stepping with care, though new den was walled and safe from humans. Prowled garden and lower porch of house. Drank from water running over man-carved stone. A good place. I coughed softly, approving.

Hunt, the command came again, from her. Long hairs along shoulders lifted in anticipation. Scented air. Food on breeze. Human food, dead, cooked. Human urine. Dog. Domesticated cat. Hacked in disapproval of being owned. Even she didn’t own me.

Smells of den grounds settled in olfactory memory. Went to pot. Sniffed cloth trapped there. Drew in scent. Blood. Fear. Humans, three. Alive when blood spilled. One female, ovulating, ready to mate. One man, old, wizened. Likely stringy, tough. New smell to skin.

Melanin, Jane whispered. He was a black man.

Last one was male, no melanin, young, healthy. All smelled of fear.

Beneath it all . . . was scent of rogue. Drew it in over tongue, over roof of mouth. Isolating. Parsing scent. Old. Very, very old. Anger. Madness. Many scents in layers, different parts of rogue.

Complex scent, she thought. Like many scents overlapping, compounded. How strange. And what is that smell? Image of her wrinkling weak, useless human nose.

Smell of madness, I thought at her. Strong. Smell of decay, rot. Rot . . . Ahhh. I remembered. Liver-eater. Long years since smelled a liver-eater. Felt her puzzlement. Pushed it away. Sucked in scent, opening mouth and pulling air over fluid-filled sacs in roof of mouth. Tongue extending, lips curling back. Tasting. Scenting.

Set liver-eater scent signature in memory. Named it mad one.

Complex, she thought. Compounded scent signature, many individual scent molecules, pheromones and elements make up its essence. I’ve never smelled anything like it.

Many, yes. Many scents for mad one. In a single bound, leaped to top of boulders. Small mountain. Nothing like my territory—no tall hills, deep crevasses. Easy hunt here in land of flatness. No challenge. Tail-twitching disdain for flatness, no tall trees and wild streams. Gathered self. Jumped to top of wall. Standing. Four feet in line on brick. Crouched, making smaller target. There. Scented vampire. Easy hunt. Only feet away.

No, her voice came.

Drew in night air again. Scent was wrong. This one female. Kill it anyway?

No. Hunt the rogue, her human memory whispered.

Dropped to ground, tail twitching. Eager. Liked hunt. Liked challenge. Liked danger. Moved through shadows of neighbor’s yard to street. No dog scent. Good place to come and go. Sat beneath big leaves of low plant, watching. Learning. Scenting.

Saw him, hidden in shadows, sitting on stoop. Watching house, preying on new den. The male she liked, human with bike. Not hunting. Lazy, giving away position. Breathing smoke, scent like scat, marking territory. Strong enough to defend her? Possible mate? If he could catch her. If he could best her. Not likely. She was strong. Beast made her so, long ago.

Felt her puzzlement. Ignored it. Ignored her. Pondered, breath a soft, thrumming pant of throat tissues. Long past time for her to mate. If he could catch her. Fun.

Moved through shadows, into night. Humans and pets still about. Stupid little dogs barked. Hairy things, smelling of human perfume, dead food, rotten teeth. Scented me, scented Beast. All fell silent. Crouched, tails down. Scuttled away. I hunted, padding through darkness, feral and sleek. Night fully fallen. Humans never saw.

The French Quarter, territory she wanted to hunt, was small. Streets in squares. Buildings built close, squeezed together. Prey could not escape. Hidden gardens. Exhaust. Alcohol, fresh and sweet, and old and sour. Tar on streets, stinky human world.

Sound of music everywhere, loud, raucous. Horns, drums—drums, like sound of beating heart, racing in fear, ready to be eaten. Smell of money, drugs. Pong of sex without mating. Lonely sex. Many female humans standing on tall spikes. Easy prey. Stores filled with paint and canvas, stone and metal. Much food and smell of sleeping. Restaurants and hotel, she thought at me. Smells of her world.

It stank. But underneath stink, other smells sat. Under reek of sewage and stench of dirty river. Under spices humans cook into food. Under odors of humans themselves, perfumed and breathing smoke. Scents of vampires. Many.

Vampire stench was part of ground, part of earth. Their ashes wafted along street, carried in air. Their bones, ground to powder, settled into cracks. Vampire territory, for longer than I lived, even counting time of hunger when I was alpha and Jane was beta. Didn’t know numbers beyond five, but there were many more than five vampires. I marked their territories, setting Beast scent. A challenge.

Centuries, the thought came from her. They have been here for centuries. A long time by human reckoning. Too long for me to understand, or care. Turned back to hunt. Prowled, hiding often in night, scenting, searching. Finding hiding places as moon crossed sky. Crafty, silent, good hunter.

Saw/smelled vampire. Walking alone. Unnoticed by humans. Gliding. Predator. I hunched down in shadow. Jane wished for a cross and stake, Christian symbols to kill evil.

Not evil, I thought at her. Predator. Like Beast. She curled lips as if thought was spoiled meat. Together, we watched vampire stroll out of sight.

Long before dawn, scented old blood. Found street where mad one took down many humans, ate best parts. An alley. Narrow, confined. Walls, straight up like water gorge, but without bold river. Strong reek of blood, blood, blood, much blood. Pong of wasted meat. Scented mad one she hunted. Trying to drink enough to find health again. It was dying.

They cannot die, she whispered.

Dies, I thought back at her. This one sick. Smell of rot.

Above its reek I smelled angry, frightened humans morning after. Telltale stink of guns. Hacked softly at remembered smell. She liked guns. She hunted with guns. I remembered other. Long barrels, gunpowder, pain, fear, scream of big cat. Hated. Long ago in hunger times.

Placing paws carefully, walked through dark, under yellow ribbons, past dying flowers in tall piles. Along middle of narrow defile. Found place where ovulating female fell. And stringy old one, to her side, cobbles saturated with his need to protect, as if she were his kit, his cub. Healthy young male, three paces away. And more-than-five others. Mad one killed, ate slow.

She said, It took its time. She understood time when not measured by moon. Confusing.

Strolled back to alley entrance. Crouched low, belly held off dirty street. Humans walked past, singing, reeking of strong drink and vomit. Then gone. Searched for mad one’s trail. Found none going in. None going out.

Looked up. Coughed approval. After mad one toyed with humans, after eating its fill, mad one went up, along wall like spider or squirrel. Tasty meat, squirrels. Not enough to fill belly. Mad one climbed wall like squirrel. Faint scratches where claws dug in. Worthy prey. Even I could not climb wall like this. I hacked excitement. Good hunt. Mad one powerful, smells captured in blood-stench memory. Humans tried to wash away. Could not hide it.

Heard more humans. Close. Two turned into alley. Dirty, reeking wine, sweat, filth. Humans moved in, trapping. I melted slowly into shadows. Soft warning hack. Beast here. Not hunting, but will defend.

They ignored warning. Stupid humans. They crawled into large paper box. Sounds of crackling cardboard, shifting humans. Dirty smells wafted. Their den. I had passed it without knowing. Dropped head. Shamed. Foolish as cub. Too intent on mad one and smells of hunt, blood, kills. Foolish. Stupid. Kitten mistake.

Two humans bedded down. Sleeping in open. Easy prey if I wanted diseased, sinewy meat. They talked. Quieted. One snored.

Crept along alley to opening. Dawn coming.

“Pretty pussy. Come here, pussycat.”

Looked to side and saw human, eyes open, shining. Hand out. “Come here, pussycat. I got a treat for you.”

Hacked, insulted. Not domesticated. Beast big. And free.

He held out hand, gesturing. Come. Eat. “Pretty pussy.”

She was amused. Beast sniffed, mouth open. Beef. Hamburger. Dead, cooked. Jane liked them. I padded slowly to human, shoulders arching, belly low, pads silent. Human unafraid. Drunk. Sniffed offered treat. Stared at him with predator eyes, seeing Beast reflected, golden, in his. Prey should be afraid. Was supposed to be afraid.

“Pretty pussy, I know you’re hungry. Have some.”

Took offered hamburger. Flipped it back, into throat. Meat and mayonnaise. Swallowed. Walked away. She laughed.

I padded back along own scent trail before sun rose. Important, sun rising. She couldn’t take back her skin once sun rose. She would be stuck in panther form—a good thing—but she would not be grateful. The night belonged to Beast. Only night. Daytime was hers.

Leaped to top of wall. Dropped down inside garden walls. Strolled, loose limbed and satisfied. Drew in scents. Smell of rotting blood was strong—old cattle, dead, killed by others. Rot, sped up by heat, trapped by wet air. Stench of blood in cloths—slain humans and mad one. Mad one had strange blend of scents, small parts of different things, some known, some not. Sniffed at aged blood on cloth. Familiar. The hunt. Yes, good hunt. With flex of muscles, leaped to top of rocks and lay flat, belly to stone. And thought of her.

Grayness covered me. Light and shadow. Bones and sinew flowed and shifted. Cracked and snapped. Pain stabbed deep and she/I groaned with pain. For a moment, we were one. We were Beast, together.

The final slash of pain had been deliberate. Beast had occasionally referred to me as thief-of-soul, and I knew that I had stolen her, somehow, by accident, so long ago I couldn’t remember it, though Beast remembered and sometimes punished me for it. I had feared Beast would not allow me to shift back. There had been times in the past when she held on to her form after dawn, which forced me to keep her shape until dusk or until the moon rose again, part of her punishment.

I don’t know exactly how long I lived as Beast in the Appalachian Mountains, my human self subsumed, hiding from humans, from man with his guns and dogs and fire. It was a long time of danger, of hunger. I feared that it might have been decades, far longer than the normal human or big cat life span, and that my kin were all dead and gone, as lost to me as my own past.

I had vague memories of returning to human form several times over the long years, then shifting back to panther, until the final time I shifted to my human shape. It had happened a few days before I was discovered walking, naked and scarred, in the woods of the Appalachian Mountains. I had appeared to be about twelve and had total amnesia, unable to remember language, or how to think like a socialized human. Unable, at the time, to remember even Beast.

I think something had happened, something deadly. I had scars on my human body, bullet shaped. I think—have guessed—that a hunter found Beast. Shot her. And I changed back into my human form to survive, just as I had once shifted into Beast’s to survive.

When the memory of Beast came back, other fractured, shattered memories came with it. I remembered her kits. I had memories of the hunger times, when Beast was alpha and I was beta. And before that, I remembered a few Cherokee words. Had memories of faces—elders, most of them. Memories that claimed I was a skinwalker. But that was all. I had no clear memories of time, or how or when I became what I—what we—were.

Since then, I had collected skins, claws, bones, teeth, feathers, and even scales of other animals. I had taught myself to skinwalk into other forms. And it always hurt like blue blazes to shift back into being human. Like now.

When I could breathe without pain, I unlatched the travel bag around my neck and rolled stiffly to my feet. I gathered my things and went into the house. Naked, I padded around my freebie-house kitchen, exploring. Like Beast, I was hungry after a shift, but unlike Beast, I wanted strong tea and cereal—caffeine, sugar, and carbs—to restore my sense of self. Comfort foods. I rinsed and filled a kettle and a pot with water, added salt to the pot. Opened a box of oatmeal from the supplies Troll had provided, and spotted the box I had shipped to Katie’s last week. I’d been pretty hopeful about getting the job. Inside were travel supplies, including ziplocked black foil bags of loose tea. I chose a good, strong, single-estate Kenyan-Millma Estate tea. Searching through the drawers and cabinets for a strainer or a tea filter, I found a nook off the kitchen where china, silver, stoneware, and serving dishes were stored in glass-fronted cabinets.

There were a dozen teapots in one cabinet, some Chinese pots—a copper block Yixing teapot and a Summer Blossom Yixing pot, both with square shapes, and one tall Yixing with an elongated spout and top so the steam could cool and fall back into the tea as it steeped. There was one very old, classic Chinese clayware with a rotting bamboo handle. I was entranced. Gingerly, I moved the Chinese pots aside to find two Japanese pots—a Bodum Chambord teapot and an iron pot that looked positively ancient, the crosshatching on the sides almost worn away.

There were English pots in various sizes; porcelain and cast-iron pots with iron handles that rotated across the tops. In the front corner near the door were a dozen tea filters in different shapes and sizes, including a woven bamboo filter that crumbled when I touched it. The cabinet smelled like Katie, though from long ago, the scent muted by time.

I wasn’t sure what I felt about Katie loving tea as much as I did. It was the first time I thought about vamps liking anything besides the taste of blood or alcohol. Vamps went by lots of names, individually and collectively: vampire, vam pyre, sanguivore, damphyr, damphire, calmae, fledgling, elder, Mithran, childe, kindred, anarch, caitiff, and members of the camarilla, among others. I had studied what little reliable info was available about so-called sane vamps, and so far as I was concerned, they were all bloodsucking psychos. It wasn’t easy seeing them in another light, and Katie’s loss of control when she scented me hadn’t helped.

I chose an English eight-cup pot and a filter to match and rinsed them both at the tap. While the water heated and my stomach growled, I found a bedroom suite on the ground floor at the front, showered and dried off, and slung a soft chenille robe, hanging on the bathroom door, around my shoulders. I brushed out my hair and tied it out of the way by flipping it into a knot. I could braid it later.

After dumping my meager belongings on the bed in a heap, I stored my toiletries in the bathroom, my clothes on hangers and wire racks in the closet, and my special wooden box on the top shelf of the closet. The box was only four by four by two inches, give or take, composed of inlaid olive wood from a tree outside Jerusalem. It held charms that had cost me mucho buckos, and were my ace in the hole for killing rogues. The box itself was charmed with a spell to make it hard to see. Not an invisibility charm, but a disguise spell, what my witch-friend Molly called an obfuscation spell. Molly likes big words.

I folded down the sheets and put two vamp-killers— specially designed knives with a line of silver near the edge—on the bedside table. Vamps couldn’t move around in the daytime, but that didn’t mean that their human servants couldn’t attack. If the rogue had one, or more, he might be sane enough to send them after me. A little silver poisoning if he drank after I cut one might make him easier to kill later.

As satisfied with security as I could be without replacing the doors and windows, I took a tour of the house. It was beautiful, something out of a magazine. It had hardwood floors, the boards twelve inches wide, maybe local cypress; intricately carved, white-painted molding at ceiling and floor; wainscoting in one room, which might have been intended as a dining room; walls painted soft, muted colors—latte, off-white, taupe. Charming antique tables and hand-carved chairs mixed in with comfy modern furniture, and sofas and a leather recliner completed the eclectic look. The AC came on as I explored, blowing up the bed skirt, chilling my skin. Fans turned overhead in each of the twelve-foot-high-ceilinged rooms, redistributing the air. A lot nicer than my minuscule one-room apartment under the eaves of an old house near Asheville.

Back in the kitchen, I turned off the fire under the singing kettle and poured the nearly boiling water over tea leaves in the filter in the porcelain pot. While it steeped, I made oatmeal the way my housemother at the children’s home had taught me. Bring slightly salted water to a boil, add whole grain rolled oats—never the instant or quick kind—in equal proportion, and stir until heated through. Maybe a minute. Maybe less depending on my hunger. Dump it in a bowl, add sugar and milk. Eat. With properly prepared tea.

I’m a tea snob. My sensei had introduced me to teas and teaware when I was a teenager and I had made a study of tea after hours, after he had bruised and beaten me into a pulp and somehow along the way, taught me how to fight like a man.

I’d been up twenty-six hours and was exhausted, but I was more hungry than tired, so I ate fast, putting away three bowls of oatmeal. My belly bulged, satisfied, though I got a sleepy wisp of Beast’s disgust and an image of a deer eating grass. Ignoring it, I carried the mug with me to the table and tightened the chenille robe. It was clean, and I figured whoever had prepared the house for me had left it. Or maybe the previous tenant had forgotten it when he moved out. He. Yeah. The house smelled of male most recently, over the other scents of the ages.

I sipped and relaxed, my feet in the chair across the table, the robe closed chest to shins. The table was old, maybe an antique, though I hadn’t studied antiques. Maybe next year. Or maybe I’d start languages next year; I wanted to learn French, Spanish, and Cantonese—Cantonese because of tea, of course. When I finished the tea—eight cups, four mugs—I rinsed everything and placed pot, kettle, and stoneware on a drying cloth. I tossed the robe at the foot of the bed and crawled between the soft, lightly scented sheets.

Before I slept I called Molly, holding the cell close to my ear.

“Big Cat!” she answered.

“Morning, Mol,” I mumbled, feeling sleep pull at me. “How’s the kits?”

“Kits? You’re still talking like Beast. You hunted last night.” When I mumbled a vague yes, she said, “Catch anything?”

“The rogue smells weird. Beast thinks it’s dying.”

“Vamps don’t die. Don’t eat that, Evan,” she said to her son, without missing a beat. “Crayons look pretty but taste bad. Angie, take the crayons away from him. Thank you. Vamps don’t die,” she repeated to me.

I closed my eyes, sleep so close it paralyzed my limbs, the world darkening. “I know. Weird, huh. You and your witch sisters figure out yet why Christian symbols kill vamps?”

“Not a clue, but the whole family’s looking. Interesting research.”

“Night, Mol.”

“Night, Big Cat.”

I woke at two in the afternoon to the sound of someone knocking. I rolled out of bed, feeling stiff, and pulled the robe on. I was still holding the cell phone and tucked it in the robe pocket. Barefoot, I padded to the front door and looked out through a clear pane in its stained-glass window. On the front stoop was the pretty boy, the Joe. Interesting.

He was standing at an angle so he could view the street and keep the door in sight. The too-cool, all-black look was gone. He was wearing well-worn five-button jeans and a tee so white it had to be brand-new, with scuffed, worn, stained, once-brown leather sandals. The sunglasses were still wrapped around his face. His nose had been broken once. A small scar across his collarbone disappeared into the shirt. On one bicep, I saw the fringes of a tattoo. I couldn’t see much, but it was a good quality tat, something dark with globes of red, like drops of blood, the ink bright and rich. An Oriental job, maybe. He hadn’t shaved, but the gnarly look suited him. I’d known kayakers—paddlers, river rats—who sported the look almost as well.

As if he sensed me, the Joe turned his head and removed his glasses. Black eyes looked at me through a tiny clear pane. The Joe didn’t appear to be armed. He had come to the front door in plain sight of anyone who happened by. I hadn’t heard the bike and smelled no fresh exhaust. He’d walked? He was alone. So I opened the door. Heat rolled in, sticky and heavy with moisture. “Morning,” I said.

He smiled. It was a really good smile, full lips moving wider before parting, to show white teeth, not perfectly straight, but uneven on the bottom. Something about the canted teeth pressing against his lower lip was unexpectedly appealing. His eyes traveled from my face down my body and back up in leisurely appreciation. “Actually, it’s afternoon,” he said.

I nodded and my hair fell forward, knotted in a half bun, bead free. I had forgotten to take the stone and plastic beads out before I shifted. Dang. Now I’d have to round them up out of the dirt. “So it is,” I said.

“You weren’t here last night.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “I knocked. Walked around. The bike was in the back, I could see it through the gate. But there were no lights on, no sound or indication of movement. You weren’t here.”

It wasn’t a question so I didn’t answer; it wasn’t quite an accusation, but it was close. This Joe was paying entirely too much attention to me and I had to wonder why. I was pretty sure he hadn’t fallen in love with me at first sight when I motored by him yesterday. I let a small smile start and he went on, a hint of amusement now in his eyes.

“When I checked with Tom, he said you had disabled all Katie’s security cameras. In eight minutes flat.” He knew Troll. More interesting. I quirked a brow, his amusement grew, and he said, “Tom said you gave him a nickname, but he wouldn’t tell me what.”

“You got a point, waking me from my nap?” I asked.

“Yeah. Let’s go for a late lunch. You can call Tom for an intro. Fair warning, though. He’ll tell you I’m trouble.”

I rested a hip against the door and considered. Whoever he was, he knew Troll, which made him a local boy; I needed someone with local contacts and connections, and it wasn’t too early in the investigation to start cultivating sources. With his looks and cocky attitude, I pegged him for a bad boy with associations in all the wrong places, making him perfect for the job. And even bad boys have to eat. “What do you have in mind?”

“Crawfish, hush puppies, beer. Salads if you want ’em,” he added, but sounding as if salads were an afterthought. Something he included because girls liked them.

“I’ve never had crawfish.”

“So?” He drew out the word, waiting.

“You got a name?”

“Rick LaFleur.”

“Walking or bikes?”

“Walk. I’ll show you the Quarter. Or part of it.”

I’d seen the Quarter last night, but I nodded anyway. “I’ll get dressed.” I pushed the door and the Joe’s hand caught it, holding it open two inches. I could see more of the tat, four points just above the bloody globes. And another tat on the other shoulder. Black and gray.

“You’re not going to ask me in?”

“Nope.”

“Kinda blunt, aren’t you. Fine. How long?”

“Ten minutes, tops.” Rick’s brows went up in disbelief. This time when I pushed the door, he didn’t try to hold it. He musta wanted to keep his fingers.

I dialed Katie’s Ladies, and when a sleepy-sounding female answered, I asked for Tom. Like Rick promised, Troll labeled him trouble, but then offered more. Rick LaFleur was his nephew, a good kid gone bad. Went to Tulane, got a degree, then went to work for a scumbag as muscle for hire. When his new boss went to jail for tax fraud, Rick started doing odd jobs: unofficial security, protection gigs, strong-arm stuff, and some low-level security jobs for the vampire community, Katie especially. He knew people. He had skills usually cultivated by thugs and thieves. Perfect for my needs. Troll suggested I stay away from Rick. I told him I’d take his recommendation under advisement.

Hanging up, I brushed my teeth and hair and dressed in yesterday’s jeans, a tank top, and my one pair of sandals in four minutes. No weapons. Not in broad daylight. Not in heat like this. I slashed on a swish of lipstick. Red. War paint, of a sort.

I opened the door and pulled it closed behind me, locking it. Standing on the empty stoop, I saw Rick across the street. His bike was in the shade of a low tree and he was chaining it to the trunk. He stood in surprise, tossed his keys and caught them, tucked them in a pocket. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the lenses, but I was pretty sure he was looking me over again.

I pulled my hair back and tied it in a ponytail. The ends hung lower than my hips, curling, kinking in the humidity. I had straight black hair. No curl. Not ever. Not even after I brushed the braids out. Until now. The day was wet and hot. Hotter than I’d ever felt it. And it wasn’t even full summer.

My stomach growled. I pulled on sunglasses and stepped into the street, meeting him halfway. “Rick, your great-uncle said you were full of unrealized potential and info,” I said.

He quirked a half grin, amused by my blunt manner. “A blight on the family name,” he agreed. “And you’re Jane Yellowrock. The out-of-town talent.”

“You want to chat, let’s do it somewhere with air-conditioning and beer.”

Rick laughed, flashing the sexy little tooth, and gestured to the sidewalk in an exaggerated bow, like a carnival barker. He smelled good—heat, male sweat, and the faintest touch of scent, like Ivory soap. I resisted the desire to sniff the side of his neck and up behind his ear, but could do nothing about the hungers rising in me, pushing against my skin like a pelt. Beast’s hunger, Beast’s nature. I sighed. Beast wanted me to mate. She was getting pretty insistent about it, kinda like a mother wanting her daughter to settle down, get married, and have babies. A mother image with fangs and claws. This full moon, when Beast was closer to the surface, and harder to control? Was gonna be a bitch.

It was too soon to pump him for information, so we chatted about the weather, bikes, and music on the five-block walk—the Joe mentioned that, among other things, he played saxophone in a few local bands. It was casual conversation of the get-to-know-you variety, and we ended up in a dive near the river, one long narrow room with a bar on the right and red leather upholstered booths on the left. I’d have wondered at Joe’s choice except the place was packed with everything from city blue-collar employees in work boots, to men and women in suits. Banker types. Maybe a few musicians. I smelled grass on some. And in the far corner sat three cops. I’d learned that if cops liked an eatery, the food was good.

The cement floor had once been painted red, the paint worn off except in the corners; the walls were a sun-faded and moisture-streaked midnight. The bar was chipped Formica, black with sparkles in it, and a darkened mirror ran the length of the wall behind the bar. Dirty glass shelves in front of the mirror were stocked with a jillion bottles of liquor; some were dust covered, with curling labels. A fine set of cooking knives, with green stone inlaid handles and wicked-sharp blades, lay in an open, velvet-lined tray, gleaming in the overhead lights.

There was no music, which, as I had discovered last night, was odd for the Quarter. But here, people talked. A dozen conversations wove through the air with the scent of food. The dive smelled heavenly of beer steam, grease, and seafood so fresh it still smelled of salt and sea.

The black man behind the counter wore a crisp white jacket, a tall chef’s hat, and a smile. He patted the bar in front of the only two empty round seats and slid over little plastic bowls of hot sauce, ketchup, and tartar sauce. The Joe—Rick—and I sat in the indicated spots. The cook never said a word, just started dishing up food into red plastic baskets lined with newspaper to soak up the grease. He shoved baskets of hot onion rings, hush puppies, and round fried balls the size of golf balls at us; it smelled like heaven.

I tossed a scalding hush puppy into my mouth and bit down, sucking in air to cool my burning mouth. I groaned with delight. “This is good,” I said through spiced, fried corn bread and scalding lips. “Better’n good. Wonderful.” The man behind the counter set two mugs in front of us, again without asking, full of amber, frothy beer. I drank fast to cool my mouth and tried the onion rings. They too were fried, with beer-batter crust, and they crunched like God Himself had made them in His own kitchen. Lastly I tried the unknown fried balls and bit through the crust into highly spiced, ground hog meat and rice.

“Boudin, dat is, right dere,” the cook said. “Good, yes?”

“I’m in love,” I said to the cook as I chewed. “If you aren’t married, please consider this a proposal.”

He smiled, his face creasing into deep, dark chasms, exposing the biggest white teeth I’d ever seen in a human. “Your gal, I like her, I do, Ricky-bo,” he said, in what I assumed was a Cajun accent. He glanced at me, a twinkle in his eyes. “But you bes’ tell her ’bout my Marlene. I don’ like it when a new customer end up bleedin’ on my clean, purty floor.”

Rick, a half grin on his face, was sitting with both elbows on the bar, a hush puppy in one hand and his beer mug in the other. He slanted his eyes at me. “Marlene is his wife. Two hundred fifty pounds of jealous, dangerous woman.”

“And beautiful,” the man said. “Don’ forget beautiful, you.”

“Slap-dead gorgeous,” Rick agreed. “Like molten lava on the dance floor. Makes men moan just watching her. But she carries a fourteen-inch knife strapped to her thigh. In a garter.”

“Jealous,” the cook said again, sliding a steel mesh basket into a vat of hot fat, his chef’s hat canted to one side. “Deadly, she be, yeah.”

“Killed a woman in here last year,” Rick said. He pointed at the floor three feet away. “Woman tried to flirt with him. Died right there.”

Finally realizing I was being teased, I tossed another onion ring into my mouth and said as I crunched, “Buried her out back, I’m guessing? Under a full moon? Chants and drums?”

“Under a tree,” the man said, laughing. “Marlene done fount her a nice stone from de funeral home. It say, ‘Here lay fool woman done been messin’ wid my man.’ ” He dried off a hand and held it over the bar. “Antoine.”

“Jane,” I said, wiping grease off my fingers.

“Antoine never forgets a face or a customer,” Rick said. “And he knows everything there is to know about this town.”

“Handy,” I said. I took his hand. It was big, long fingered, and smooth, and when I gripped it, the world seemed to slow down. Like a big bike after a long ride, energies pumping hotly, ready to roll, but puttering down to nearly nothing. Silence when the motor stops, silence almost as loud as the engine, thrumming and cavernous. Antoine stared at me. I stared at him.

His palm tingled with power, prickly and keen, like static electricity running just beneath his skin. Witchy power, like Molly’s, yet different in a way I could immediately discern. His pupils widened, his lips parted. Something passed between us. A moment of . . . something. Crap. What is this? I seldom felt Beast in my thoughts unless I was in danger, but she was suddenly alert, hunkered, belly down, claws pricking my soul with warning.

Antoine’s grip tightened. “Very please’ to meet you, I am, Miss Jane,” he said formally.

The prickly power traveled up my arm, questing. Beast coughed, the sound a warning deep in my mind. Antoine tilted his head in surprise, as if he’d heard her. “Likewise, Mr. Antoine,” I lied, my lips tingly, almost painful, as I resisted the questing power. It slid around my puny attempt to block it. Beast reached out a paw and placed it on the energy that was rising within me. Pressed down on the current. And stopped the sensation.

“Likewise,” I repeated. He released my hand, breaking the . . . whatever it was. The world crashed in, loud, boisterous. I took an onion ring and ate it, but the taste was now unpleasant, metallic, faintly bitter. I gulped beer. The odd taste washed away with the yeasty, peaty ale.

“Come anytime,” Antoine said. I looked back up, meeting his eyes. They seemed to be saying something more than his words. “We have at night de music and dancing, sometime.”

“Spills out in the street,” Rick said. “If you like to dance.”

I liked to dance. But maybe not here.

Except for the moments when he gripped my hand, Antoine had been working while chatting. He placed a bucket, like a gardening bucket, on the bar between Rick and me. Beer- and sea-flavored steam curled up, hot with pepper and spices. Rick reached, drew out a crawfish, its red shell curled. I was pretty sure the crustacean had been tossed alive into boiling beer.

I looked at Antoine, seeing nothing of the power that had tried to search through me. I had never felt anything like that before, and the man’s genial face seemed to imply that nothing had happened. If he could play innocent, I could certainly play stupid. But I wondered what he had picked up about Beast as he held my hand. Thoughtful, I ate another hush puppy. Rick had brought me here. He had wanted Antoine to read me. I tried to decide if that ticked me off.

Rick met my eyes in the dim mirror, holding up a four-inch-long crawfish as if in demonstration. His face held a hint of laughter and a warmth that claimed he was interested in me, if it was real. It had been some time since I’d seen that particular look in a man’s eyes. Maybe since I met Jack when I went into the security business. Not many men wanted to date a girl who could toss them into a corner and stomp them into the dirt. I didn’t need protecting and men seemed to sense that. It bothered a lot of them.

And . . . while I hadn’t been a nun, I hadn’t taken the dating world by storm either. I had friends who juggled several men, in and out of bed, at a time, but I was a one-man kinda woman. So far. And that man had been and gone a long time ago. I decided not to get mad about the reading. Not just yet, anyway.

To get the proper crawfish-eating protocol, I watched Rick as he broke the shell apart across the body, just above the tail, and pulled out the flesh. He ate the mouthful of seafood and then saluted me with the two pieces of mudbug shell. “Suck de head,” he said, like someone else might have said, “Cheers,” and he sucked the head part. I heard a liquid slurping. Rick smacked his lips and took another crawfish. I shrugged and broke apart the shellfish as he had, ate the meat, which turned out to be spicy with hot peppers, garlic, and onion, and beery. Good. Really good. Then I sucked the head as Rick had, and the spices exploded in my mouth.

He laughed at whatever was on my face, and said, “I forgot to tell you. The spices seem to concentrate in the head cavity.”

“No kidding,” I managed, half strangling on the potent stuff. “You forgot.”

Antoine laughed with Rick. “Dis boy been coming here for twenty year. He always done forget.”

The air was hot and wet and my shirt stuck to my skin like it was glued on, my jeans damp with heat; yet it was an oddly comforting feeling, like a pelt after a swim and a lazy hour in the sun. I wasn’t good at social interaction; in fact, I totally sucked at it, but the presence of Rick made the afternoon feel sociable, companionable—a good-looking guy, a good meal . . . But work was work, and I figured it was an appropriate time to see if Rick LaFleur was going to be helpful in my investigation, or just a distraction. I wanted to use his local knowledge and contacts, and that superseded any interest in him in a nonbusiness way. Or so I told myself.

Trying for a light tone, I said, “So, bad boy, blight on the family name. Want to tell me why you came to my house and introduced me to Antoine’s delicacies? I’m guessing it wasn’t because you saw me on the street and fell head over heels in love at first sight.”

He glanced at me through the dark lenses once, and I could almost feel him thinking things through. When he stuck his thumbs into his jeans pockets, I figured he had come to a conclusion. He slanted a look at me over the tops of his glasses, his head tilted down, eyes tilted up, considering. It was a well-rehearsed gesture and it set off my play dar. The Joe was a player. The realization was surprisingly disappointing.

“I asked you to lunch to see if we could work together.” He pursed his lips, considering his words. “But something about you bothers me.”

I allowed a smile to start, letting him see a hint of derision in it, but not enough to decide if I was deriding him, or myself.

“I got to tell you, lady, you scare the pants offa me and I don’t know why. And you scared Antoine. I saw it in his eyes.” He pushed his glasses back in place, hiding his expression. “Nothing scares Antoine.”

I kept my light tone. “Your pants are still on. Antoine’s still alive. I’m unarmed. I haven’t killed and eaten anyone. Around here.” I let my smile twist a bit and added, “Yet.” Rick chuckled. “So why am I scary?” I finished.

“I wish I knew. You witchy?”

“Not a witch,” I said, “no.”

“Didn’t think so. You don’t ”—he considered and discarded several words—“you don’t feel like that. But lady, you’re not human.” It wasn’t a question. It was more in the nature of an accusation. And it hit too close to the truth.

I turned on my heel and headed back downriver. “Thanks for the invitation and for the introduction to Antoine.” I didn’t thank him for the lunch because I had paid for my own.

“Hey, hey, hey. Don’t run away mad.”

I turned around, walking backward down the concrete boardwalk, and pulled off my glasses so he could see my eyes. “I’m not running away. And I’m not mad. I’m just not the kinda gal who likes to play games. You watched my house last night, smoking a cigar, hiding on the stoop across the street.” His brows rose and he pulled off his glasses too. Which was only polite and made me see him in a slightly kinder manner. Only slightly. “You make semiaccusations and dance around questions, but you don’t ask, you just prod and poke to see what I’ll do. You take me to a friend who just happens to have some kinda witch magic and get him to read me”—I let some of the anger I felt about that show—“which just ticks me off. So, you see, I’m not mad. I just got better things to do with my time.”

“And that right there”—he raised an index finger as if making a point—“is what scares me about you.” When I stopped and cocked a brow, hands on my hips, sweating in the heat, he said, “Any other woman would have spent the next ten minutes trying to convince me she wasn’t mad. Even if she was. You? You just tell me off. While you walk away. Calm and cool as all get-out. And lady, gals don’t usually just walk away from me.”

My smile twisted hard and I started walking again, backward, aware of a couple sitting on a bench in the sweaty heat, close enough to hear us had they not been necking like teenagers. Not that I cared. “Macho pride?” I asked, louder, over the distance.

“Fact.”

I figured that was true. Women likely flocked to him, hovering like hummingbirds. I had noticed the glances he got at Antoine’s, even from the lady cop, interested, willing. He was pretty and smooth. But I preferred up-front to a smooth player. Any day.

“I’m not most women,” I said, louder, to cover the distance now separating us.

“I know that. You kill rogue vamps for a living. Took down an entire blood-family, you and a witch and a cop. And the cop died.” I stopped walking backward. The couple looked up at the word “died” and focused on me. Blinked. Went back to business.

Rick started walking toward me, lowering his voice. “You and the witch walked out, you half dead, with that scar on your neck. But back then it was four inches wide, red and ridged, brand-new. I’ve seen the video. But you didn’t have it when you went into the mine. I asked people who knew you.”

Damn Internet. A college kid, camping in the mountains, had spotted Molly and me coming out of the mine, into the dawn light, both blood covered, me carrying Brax, Paul Braxton, over my shoulder. Or what was left of him. A young rogue vamp had killed him.

Rick moved toward me, his steps measured, careful, as if he were approaching a wild animal. I tensed and took another step back before stopping. He slowed. Deliberately, I relaxed my fists, took a calming breath, knowing Beast was awake. She always woke when I faced any kind of threat, and I could feel her staring out through my eyes, intense and tightly gathered, ready for danger. I took a slow breath, not wanting to bring her to a killing alertness. But she had gone deadly quiet. Rick stopped directly in front of me, his eyes steady and calm. Studying me. Beast studied him back.

The camper kid had taken a short video with his digital camera when he saw two blood-saturated females walk out of the mine. He had zoomed in on my face, my peculiar amber-colored eyes seeming to glow, an effect that had been blamed on the golden sunrise. What else could it be, right? But it was Beast. And I knew she was staring through my eyes right now.

When word went out that the rogue vamp’s entire blood-family had been taken down at the mine, the videographer had realized he had a moneymaker and posted the footage on YouTube. And Molly and I were famous. Yippee.

His voice a murmured burr, Rick said, “After only six months, that four-inch-wide scar is nearly gone.” His finger lifted and I watched it rise to me, not a threat, not really. Yet I tensed. He traced the scar above my collarbone, thin white lines with thinner crosshatching, evidence of claws and vamp teeth, his finger slow and delicate, as if he traced the wing feathers of a wild bird. “It travels,” he said, stepping so close I could smell the musk of the man, “more than halfway around your neck.”

He smelled wonderful. Sweaty, slightly beery, spicy, and . . . meaty. And very male. Beast was very definitely interested. But suddenly no longer in defensive mode. Heat shivered in my belly, clamping down hard.

“Something tried to rip out your throat,” he said, his fingers feather light on my skin. “Tried to suck you dry. And nearly succeeded. And you healed from it. Fast.”

I stepped back, lifting and setting down each foot, staying centered, balanced. Beast rose in me, gathered. I was on the edge—the edge of what, I wasn’t certain—but something in me wanted to nip, growl, and swat the man around. Either wound him or run. So he would chase me. “Molly healed me in the cave,” I said, sticking to our lie. “She performed—”

“Not on the full moon she didn’t. Your friend Molly is an okay moon witch, but her gift is as an earth witch, herbs and growing things. And dead things, which is why she went in after the blood-family with you and Paul Braxton. I did my research. She can sense dead things. Like vamps asleep in the day.” He shook his head, still moving slowly, his eyes boring into mine. Holding me still with his gaze. Dominant behavior. Mating behavior. Beast liked.

“No,” he said. I felt a spike of shock, as if he had heard my thoughts. But he continued, his words measured and deliberate. “She didn’t heal you. Not underground, surrounded by a buncha true-dead vamps.” Yeah, this Joe had done his homework. He was dangerous.

I felt the move before I registered the tension in his shoulders, his hand forming a claw. To take my neck in his fist. I blocked. Right arm up. Across my body. Fist moving clockwise. My forearm slammed his arm away. One quick step to his side. My foot behind his right leg. I pushed. As he went down, I finished the move. A hard slam to his solar plexus. Maybe a full second of action. His breath whooshed out with a grunt. Pain blanched him, then flushed him.

I walked away. My heart rate hadn’t even sped up.

When I looked back, Rick was rolling to his knees, holding his middle, moving as if he hurt, as if he couldn’t yet catch his breath. No. Not Rick. Not a man with a name. The Joe.

He stared after me. And he laughed. The laughter hurt; I could see the pain in his face. But he laughed. Fun, Beast thought at me. I curled my lips. “Not really,” I murmured. “Ten bucks says he won’t be back.”

Jane can’t kill more-than-five bucks. But I can. Beast shared a memory of feasting on a buck, points of his rack standing within her vision. The buck had been two hundred pounds, eighty pounds bigger than she. His blood was hot, his flesh so full of flavor it made the juices in my mouth run.

“Show-off,” I murmured to Beast. To myself. We both walked on, sharing the only kind of humor Beast and I could. Blood-sport humor.

Rick’s bike was gone when I tooled out of the side garden, braids streaming out behind me, beads clicking, my head sweltering in the helmet, motor rumbling with a heavy, powerful purr. My bike is a Bitsa. Bitsa this and bitsa that. Mostly parts from two 1950 Harley-Davidson FL pan/shovel bikes, modified, not restored to showroom perfection. The bike is dark teal with an iridescent, metal-flake, pearl sheen; it has black shadows of mountain lion forelegs along the gas tank, rising from the seat, between my legs, curved claws extended as if reaching to grab the handles and take over. And in certain light, one can see minuscule flecks of ruby blood streaking the claws. It’s a custom, one-of-a-kind job: the paint color, the artwork, and the bike itself.

Hunting for transportation after my last, very profitable job, had been much like hunting for food, and Beast, who seldom entered my conscious thoughts except when danger threatened, wakened when I started looking six months ago, and hung around for the entire search. My Beast had very specific opinions about vehicles. She had refused to let me buy a car or truck, and had simply spat when I showed her a minivan suitable for stakeouts. But the first time she saw the bikes, rusting and busted in a junkyard in Charlotte, North Carolina, she had approved.

Jacob, the Harley master mechanic who had worked as an engine/chassis builder in a Charlotte NASCAR shop for ten years, was more a Zen Harley priest than a mechanic. He’d not so much rebuilt Bitsa as resurrected her into the perfection only a master mechanic could envision. She was still a basic pan/shovel on the outside, but with modern updates, like a dependable, low-maintenance, quiet-running Mikuni HSR42 carburetor and hydraulic lifters; she was a dream bike. We’d had only one argument over Bitsa. Jacob had wanted to install an electronic ignition, but keys are for wimps. Bitsa had an old-fashioned kick start and always would.

We rolled down the street, the roar of the engine claiming our territory as much as Beast’s scream would announce and claim hers. Her scream, not a roar. African lions roar, panthers don’t. Cougar, puma, panther, catamount, screamer, devil cat, silver lion, mountain lion, and North American black panther, all refer to one beast—the Puma concolor—once the widest-ranging mammal on the North American continent, and one of the three largest modern-day predators other than man. As fierce as they are, pumas can’t roar. They scream, hack, growl, purr, yowl, spit, and make low-pitched hisses, and the young make loud, chirping whistles to call their mothers, but they can’t roar. Beast considers the gift of roaring highly overrated and likely to draw in the white hunter and his guns. Silent and deadly is better, with screams to frighten prey. She didn’t need more. But she liked the roar of the bike. Go figure.

She would likely stay quiescent—she sleeps nearly sixteen hours a day—as shopping, though predatory, wasn’t bloody enough to arouse her hunting instincts. I needed cooler clothes to survive this heat and humidity. The temps had reached mid-nineties, with hotter weather called for later in the week. I also needed to meet the butcher who would deliver my protein needs. To meet the ten-day bonus, Beast and I might be shifting every day, a round-trip ticket, making meat imperative. Five to ten pounds of fresh meat and a half box of oatmeal a day, and that was just to restore from two shifts. If I had to fight or run, I’d need a lot more calories.

As we powered out of the Quarter, accelerating down Charles Avenue, it started raining. From a clear blue sky. I sighed. My hair was gonna look awful.

I arranged an account with the butcher to deliver steak whenever I called in an order, and on the way home spotted a Wal-Mart, where I bought a swimsuit, lightweight cargo pants, shorts, tank tops, and a pair of neon-hued flip-flops. A mile distant, I passed a strip mall with a florist, a small Church of Christ, and a little storefront with calf-length skirts displayed in the window. Intrigued, I stopped the bike, unhelmeted, and went inside.

The skirts were patchwork. Not like something a sixty-year-old hippie would wear, but dainty, flared, delicate confections made of tiny, two-by-four-inch patches of gauze or silk or cotton in vibrant colors. Each one was color coordinated, all blues or teals or reds, and some were embroidered. I lifted a patterned gauze skirt in sea blue and purple and shook it gently. The hem flipped, flirty and cute. I didn’t do cute well, but I liked this. The elastic waist would allow it to ride low on my hips if I wanted it to, or higher, on my waist.

“That would look totally rad on you.”

I glanced at the teenaged girl who was sitting behind the counter with a paperback book in her hand. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. But you gotta see it with this shirt.” She slid from a stool, taking a foot off her height, making her just over five feet, and walked to a shelf, pulling a shirt out. It was a peasant top with a drawstring neckline, made of the same sea blue material, but this time partnered with a paler purple fabric. “And this,” she said, holding a purple and teal stone necklace. “Amethyst and chatkalite. Totally cool with these sandals.” She lifted a pair of purple sandals from the front window, with straps for dancing.

I looked at the freckled girl, grinning. “I suck at putting outfits together and you did it in less than a minute.”

“It’s a gift,” she agreed. “Try ’em on. You want I should pick out another one for you?”

I turned the tags over and winced as I looked around the small store. “It’ll break my budget to leave this store with another one.”

“And it’ll break your heart not to,” she said sagely. “I’ll find you something just as cute but cheaper. Go on.” She flapped a hand at me and I went. I tried on clothes for nearly an hour, a huge record for me. I left the store with two pairs of shoes, two skirts, three tops to mix and match, and the necklace. Six outfits. How could I say no?

Back at the freebie house, the clothes went into the closet with the rest of my meager gear. I travel light, just what will fit into the saddlebags, and the things I can’t live without that get mailed to my new address each time I move, like my tea. The weapons in the closet took up more room than the clothes. A traveling vamp killer has to make do.

I cleaned up and changed into my only other pair of jeans and my Lucchese boots. I had an appointment for dinner at Katie’s. I studied the papers in the envelope Troll had given me, including the info on New Orleans’ vamps, and read over the fine print in the contract, making sure the clause about collateral damage I had insisted upon in our Internet negotiations was still there. If I found that the rogue vamp was being given safe haven and I had to kill one or more vamps to get to him, I didn’t want reprisals. The special clause guaranteed me protection. It was present.

There was also a confidentiality clause stating that I wouldn’t share with the media or anyone else anything I learned about the vampires, their servants, or their households on pain of a slow and grisly death. Not that I planned on going on national TV with an exposé of the vampy and fangy, but it did bring me up short. Even knowing that the clause made perfect sense from their standpoint, the “slow and grisly death” line was pretty gruesome.

Near the bottom, there was a welcome line about needing to hire local contacts and a budget to pay sources who might not talk otherwise. From the way I read it, it looked like the council was willing to cover such expenses, pending Katie’s approval. Sweet.

In the vamp info folder, I found a toll-road sticker for my bike and a list of New Orleans’ seven vampire clans, digital photos of the head vamps, and a breakdown of the vampire power structure. It was similar to a parliamentarian government, with heads of clans sitting on the executive council, and elder vamps sitting on an expanded council. The council made decisions on finances, kept the peace with humans, worked with human law enforcement, and enforced its own laws on its members, including holding down the number of scions, blood-servants, and blood-slaves that one vamp clan might have. Interesting info, but not real useful when tracking one nutso whacked-out vamp that the council hadn’t killed off or even managed to identify.

I signed the contract, input into my cell phone the contact numbers Katie had included, and jumped the brick fence. I didn’t want the blasted Joe to know where I was. He was back in his hidey-hole, watching my yard, smoking another cigar. Making me wonder who he was working for, keeping an eye on me . . . Well, not for the rogue vamp. They were too mentally unstable to keep someone under thrall for extended periods of time. And the Joe—not Rick, just no-name Joe—hadn’t smelled of vamp. But Katie for sure had other enemies. I didn’t even have to ask. Vamps always had enemies, and the older the vamp, the more enemies. Living and dead.

I presented myself at Katie’s back door at seven p.m. on the nose. Troll opened the door and stood there, staring at me, blocking my way in. I feigned nonchalance, while wishing I had come armed, and said, “Evening. I’m supposed to interview the girls.”

“Join them for dinner. Not interview.”

“You say tomato, I say interview. But I’ll be nice. No broken arms or blood.”

I coulda sworn Troll wanted to smile. He pushed open the door, but still kept it blocked with his arm and body. “You disabled all Katie’s security devices.”

“Yep. Contractual agreement.” I slapped the contract on Troll’s chest. “No spying on the help. I’m sure she just forgot to have the cameras removed.”

“You found ’em all. Fast.” He took the contract, but didn’t step aside.

I touched my nose and quoted the short salesgirl. “It’s a gift.” I added, “I can smell security devices.” Which was a total lie. But I could scent out where a human had spent a lot of time in an odd place. Like over the mantel, in the closet, in the kitchen, installing the bugs. “Time for my question. Why did Rick LaFleur show up at my place today?”

Troll tilted his head, thinking. I could see things happening behind his secretive brown eyes, but his body language gave nothing away. Maybe working with a vamp teaches you to keep everything inside. “Rick wanted the job hunting the rogue.”

Okay. That was no surprise. “You ticked off that I got the job and not him?”

“I told Katie to hire you. Rick’s good but not good enough to take on a rogue. My family knows it and asked me to keep him out. Which I did. You tell him that and I’ll gut you like a pig.”

“Thanks for the warning. Any chance he’s working for Katie’s opposition?”

“No chance in hell.”

“So he’s watching my place because he finds me irresistible?”

Troll’s eyes went wide, surprised.

“Yeah. That was my feeling.” I tucked my hands in my jeans pockets and wondered how much longer Troll was going to make me stand in the heat and chat. Cool, air-conditioned air flowed out around us and dissipated fast while I started to sweat. I could feel the silver cross under my shirt, the only thing I wore that could be considered a weapon, gathering moisture. Even my scalp was sweating. “He wants to work with me on the rogue deal,” I said, “and I’m interested in someone with local contacts if he’s legit. And if the council covers the expense.”

“I’ll talk to Katie,” Troll said, shaking his head. “How do you like your steak? Baked potato with the works? Salad?” He finally stepped aside and let me in, shut the door behind me, and locked it.

“Light a match under the meat, and if it’s still mooing I won’t be insulted, anything full of fat on the potato, and salad is for cows. Cola, with caffeine, no alcohol.” I walked into the house, waiting for him to make a move. He didn’t. He just pointed to the right and said, “Katie will leave you alone with them for an hour. The girls gather for dinner in the common room.”

“Okay. And Troll?” He waited. “When I jumped the fence, I noticed that someone installed a security camera recently on Katie’s side of the fence, pointed at her house. Within the last month. The scratch is still fresh. They came in from my side of the fence.”

Troll cursed. He disappeared down a darkened hallway.

There were six girls, and a seventh met me in the hallway as I entered. Three girls were Caucasian: a blonde, a crimson-haired beauty with emerald eyes, and a white-skinned, black-haired girl who caught my attention with the witchy energies around her. Three of the girls were dark skinned—one with skin so black it looked blue in the candlelight, one South Asian who looked twelve, and one with coffee-and-milk skin, hazel green eyes, and kinky blond hair. The seventh was different. She jingled as she took her seat, pierced, tattooed, and dangling rings from eyebrows, lips, nose, ears, navel, and nipples. She was wearing low-rise velvet harem pants and a peekaboo bra, so I wasn’t guessing. And she wore a braided leather whip over one shoulder. The whip looked so supple it likely left no marks on human skin.

“I’m Christie,” she said. “You looking for work? ’Cause Katie already has a full house.”

Before I could answer, the walls vibrated as if electricity quivered through them. And a vampire screamed. The sound shivered, ear-piercing, like nothing in nature and nothing man had made. So high-pitched it came closest to sounding like a police siren. It was the sound they made when they died.

Beast flashed into me and I whirled, raced down the hallway, faster than a human could follow. I raced past Troll, opened the door, and slid into the room where I had been interviewed. Katie stood there, fully vamped out, claws extended, canines a good two inches long, pupils black and huge in bloodred eyes. The stench of wormwood filled the room.

Cripes. Beast slid to a halt. Troll pushed me aside and stood in front. The doorway behind filled with lovely ladies.

“Go back to dinner,” Troll murmured softly, a measured monotone. Katie’s face flashed to him. She raised her claws and hissed, animalistic. Beast understood. Fear. Killing frenzy. I got a single image of Beast attacking a doe. And her fawns. Raging, terrified, hungry. I backed out the door and closed it, standing with the girls in the dim hallway, surrounded by their perfumes and whispery clothes.

“I’ve never seen her like that,” one whispered.

“I have. Tom can handle her.” But there was a trace of uncertainty in her voice.

I said, “Let’s go back to the dining room. She can smell us out here.”

“How do you know?” Christie asked, close on my left.

I looked at her, my vision adjusted to the low light. Her eyes were wide and she cradled the whip in both hands, so tightly her knuckles were bloodless. I couldn’t exactly reply, “Because Beast can smell her.” I settled on a shoo ing motion and took a step in that direction, knowing that herd mentality would make them follow. Beast had once informed me that humans were hunters only by luck and because they had opposable thumbs. Otherwise they were prey. And not very tasty at that. I had been too scared of the inference to question her further. I really didn’t want to know if I/we had eaten humans. Really, really didn’t.

Back in the dining room, a black woman, distant relation to Methuselah, shuffled in wearing a floor-length black dress, a starched white apron, and loose house shoes, her sparse gray hair in a bun. She was pushing a cart laden with salad bowls. Without speaking further, Katie’s ladies filed around the table and sat. I took one of three empty places, in the middle, not at the foot or head of the table. “Thank you,” I lied, when a salad bowl settled on the spotless white tablecloth in front of me. I didn’t have anything against salads—especially when they came smothered in bacon dressing—I just didn’t crave them.

“You are most welcome,” she said, her soft voice accented, but with what native language I didn’t know. She placed a wineglass near the right side of my plate, and a water glass on a coaster to protect the dark wood beneath the cloth. I took one look at all the silverware and felt a faint panic. At the children’s home I used a knife, fork, and spoon. Drank milk. Prayed over my food. Washed dishes. Since then, I had eaten with fingers over the kitchen sink or with claws in the grass and not thought much about it.

I watched the girls as they each lifted a silver—cripes, real silver—fork and started eating salad with oil and vinegar dressing. No bacon. As a guest, I was gonna havta eat it too. It had been weeks since I remembered to bless a meal, which brought on a fit of guilt, and, though it probably made me a bad guest in a vamp’s home, I closed my eyes for thanks before selecting a similar short-tined fork and eating. As I chewed, I took in the room. Paintings hung in gilt frames, all portraits of Katie in various stages of undress. Heavy brown and black striped drapes covered windows on the far wall, tied in place with big tassels and fancy ropes. A thick, modern-looking rug in the same shades was beneath the table, black silky fringe on two ends.

When the salad was gone, I said, “Katie wants me to talk to you girls about the—”

Katie appeared in the doorway. Didn’t move into view, simply appeared. Vamp fast. Beast threw back my head and shoved my chair from the table with a squeal. Katie’s shaking hands braced on the jamb to either side of the door as if to hold her up. Her hair hung down in a snarl. Blood coated her lips and chin. “Jane. Come,” she said, breathless.

Her eyes looked human, and her canines were snapped back into the roof of her mouth, but she smelled of fear and fresh blood. Beast bristled. Not knowing what else to do, I followed Katie to the office, holding Beast down with an effort of will; she hated tagging along to another predator’s den. As I followed, the vamp turned on the sconce, brightening the hallway with a touch of human color. But the scent of blood was growing stronger. Beast fought to get free and my lips curled to expose killing teeth I didn’t yet have. Katie didn’t glance my way.

In the office, the scent of blood and meat was so strong my stomach knotted. Contrary to books and movies, humans can’t smell fresh blood, only old and decomposing blood, but Beast can. She gathered herself and growled, low in my throat. Troll sprawled on the leather love seat, blood clotted on his throat and T-shirt, his outer shirt ripped open. His skin was grayish blue, his eyes rolled back in his bald head. His chest rose with a shallow breath. Beast settled to her haunches in my mind, waiting to see what I’d do.

“I hurt him,” Katie said, her voice astonished.“I . . . I took too much.” She looked at me with empty eyes, the eyes of a child who had made a grave mistake and didn’t know how to fix it. I relaxed my fingers, which had formed into fighting claws, and crossed the room, keeping Katie in sight. Kneeling, I checked Troll’s pulse. Thready and weak, way too fast. His skin was cold and ashen, shocky. I inspected his neck. The punctures were neatly constricted closed. At least he wasn’t losing any more blood. I adjusted his head slightly to open his airway, hoping Katie hadn’t broken his neck while feeding, hoping I hadn’t just paralyzed him.

Among the courses I had taken since I graduated from high school had been an emergency medical technician class, but I didn’t have supplies to help him. I traveled too light. “He needs a transfusion,” I said, “and fluids. Call 911.”

“No.” Still moving on the edge of vamp speed, she knelt, the motion graceful and wilting, and lay the back of her hand on Troll’s cheek. The gesture looked tender and caring, in stark contrast to her refusing her employee medical attention.

“Why not?” I said, keeping my tone steady.

“They will arrest me.” She looked at me across Troll’s body, distressed and helpless. Yeah. Right. “I have supplies,” she said. “I know you are capable of inserting an intravenous needle. You studied medicine. Rachael and he share a blood type. She can donate.”

Katie had clearly studied my Web site well, and had discovered that I was a certified emergency medical technician. I sat back on my heels, though Beast sent me an image of vulnerability, a cat with belly exposed. When I could speak without a challenge, which could stimulate a vamp on edge, I said, “Are you out of your freaking mind?” Okay. Not challenge-less, but better than what I wanted to say. “I’m not gonna start an IV and give somebody blood. If I gave the wrong type I could kill him. Not gonna happen.” I stood and looked down at Katie, at the desperation in her eyes.

“Do you know what happens to vampires in jail?” she asked. “We are chained in a dark room, without blood, and left to rot.”

“That’s just an Internet myth.” At least I hoped it was. Laws for equal rights and legal protection of supernats was not something Congress was eager to push through. Most of their constituents hadn’t exactly laid out the welcome mat to the vamps and witches when they’d been revealed a few decades back. Troll moaned, ashy, his breathing shallow. His carotid pulse fluttered like a dying bird. “Call your doctor,” I bargained, beginning to feel desperate.

“He is too far away. If you will not help with the transfusion,” Katie said, “then at least start intravenous fluids.” She stood and went to the bar.

I swiveled so my back was never turned to her, and watched as she opened a door on the bar to reveal a well-stocked medical supply cabinet. Well, looky there. How handy, I thought, feeling sarcasm ripple through me. This wasn’t the first time Katie had needed to treat a wound. Who woulda thunk it. I wondered how close to the killing edge Katie was. Lore claimed that vamps who started making blood mistakes late in life sometimes went feral, like the rogue I was hunting. Interesting. In a maybe-deadly kinda way. Beast didn’t like this. And neither did I.

Still keeping Katie away from my back, I checked the expiration dates on the saline and the sterile needles and went to work. I tied on a tourniquet and found a vein, inserted an eighteen-gauge needle. It was a large-bore needle, suitable for giving blood, and had to hurt, but Troll didn’t even flinch. I attached the line of fluids to the Jelco valve and turned on the saline, open all the way. Katie watched as I squeezed the bag to force fluid into Troll’s system faster. “He needs a doctor,” I said, hearing the near snarl in my voice.

“Will you make the call?” she asked, plaintive.

“Why don’t you?”

“I don’t know how,” she said. I looked up in surprise. Katie handed me a cell phone. “I know the correct number is in the phone book inside that but I do not know how to use it. And I do not wish to leave him, to go . . . back and find the number.”

Back. To her lair, I thought, deciding it must be too far away to make the trip easily. Yet she was here, on site, before the sun set. That gave me pause, though I didn’t let her see me react. I punched a few buttons on the phone and found the address book.

“Ishmael Goldstein,” she said.

I scrolled down, found the name, and punched SEND. The number rang on the other end and I relayed the message to the man who answered. When he questioned who I was, I gave Katie the phone and then had to show her how to hold it to her ear. She confirmed what I had said and I hung up. “You don’t know how to use a cell phone?” I asked.

Katie shrugged elegantly, her eyes on Troll. “Things change so quickly. There was a time when only fashions changed, not how one lived. Now, to live requires constant adaptation. I do not like it.” She looked at me, and some of the helplessness fell away. Her voice strengthened and her shoulders went back. “I have a telephone. But not like Tom’s. He handles all matters of an electronic nature for me. It is his job. A matter of employment.”

“So I see.” I kept my voice neutral. If she heard a trace of snideness in my tone, she chose not to react. “You want to tell me why you went feral on me?”

Katie placed a long-fingered hand on her throat. “When I woke I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t place it. And then Leo contacted me.” From my research, I knew Leo was Leonard Pellissier, the head of the vamp council in New Orleans. “He told me that Ming never woke. Her human servant entered her lair. . . .” Katie stopped to breathe, but vamps didn’t need much air except to talk. That alone would have told me she was upset, even without seeing Troll near death. “She was missing. There was much blood in her crypt. Hers, by the scent.” She looked at me. “Leo is on the way here.”

On the heels of her statement, the doorbell rang. I figured with Troll a little under the weather, it fell to me to open the door and provide security. I gave Katie the saline and showed her how to squeeze the bag. With her occupied, I went through Troll’s pockets looking for weapons. I found a specially designed, steel, twelve-inch-long, single-bladed, silver-edged vamp-killer. With a rogue on the loose it made sense for Katie’s bodyguard to carry one. I had a few myself.

Troll had it strapped to his thigh with an opening in his pocket that allowed him to slide a hand in and withdraw the knife. Without getting too friendly, I unstrapped the sheath and strapped it on my own leg. His .45 I carried, safety off, finger on the trigger, from the office into the foyer. On the way, I opened the closet door where I had previously deposited my weapons and retrieved the stake I had left in the corner. It was always smart to have a stake handy when meeting a vamp on unfamiliar territory. I tucked the stake in my waistband and hoped I didn’t hurt myself with it. It was wicked sharp.

There was no peephole in the door—no weak spot for someone to shoot through—but I spotted a modified high-boy; its hinged top opened to reveal a series of monitor screens, part of the house’s security system. There were a half dozen camera screens—most of them showing unoccupied bedrooms—and one was a small screen displaying the front stoop. Early night had fallen and the door lights had come on, revealing two men, a well-groomed guy wearing a dark suit, and a larger, broad-shouldered bruiser. Leo Pellissier and his right-hand man, blood-servant, and muscle. I held the gun out of sight, pulled the small silver cross from around my neck, took a deep breath, centered my footing, and opened the door. The muscle, seeing an unfamiliar face and the suddenly glowing cross, drew a knife and attacked.

I sidestepped fast and stuck out a foot. He tripped. Oldest trick in the book.

I was on him before he hit the floor. Riding him down. Troll’s .45 rammed against his spine at the base of his skull. We hit. Bounced. My heart pounded. Beast growled.

Faster than thought, the vamp’s weight fell on me. His hands encircled my throat. Tangled in my braids. He hissed. Fangs extended with a soft snap. They brushed the side of my neck, a predator’s killing bite.

I rammed back my head. Connected, skull to something softer. Heard an oof of expelled breath. The pressure on my throat lessened. I slapped the cross on the back of the vamp’s hand.

He howled. Fell away. I rolled, pulling the guard with me, until we lay on the floor, the gun at his neck, his body on top of, and protecting, mine. The reek of human sweat and vamp pheromones bathed the air. This one smelled of anise and old paper, maybe papyrus, and ink made of leaves and berries.

“I’ll shoot your blood-servant if you move again,” I said, my voice pitched low and cold. Leo paused, that inhuman, vampy shift from combat to utter stillness that was so startling. “If you listen, I’ll let him live,” I bargained. The stillness went deeper. I felt the servant gather himself and I clawed my hand around his throat, fingernails digging into his windpipe. I shoved the muzzle hard under his ear. “If you resist, I’ll rip out your throat, then behead your master. Pick and choose.” A shocked silence filled the foyer. Slowly, he went limp. “Wise move.

“Leonard Pellissier.” I focused on the dark form, silhouetted by the streetlight flooding the open doorway. “I’m Katie’s out-of-town talent,” I said, using the Joe’s phrase. “The tracker and hired gun the council contracted to take out the rogue. I don’t want to kill either of you, but I will if I have to. The blood you smell was not spilled by me. I am not your enemy.” Well, not right now, but nobody was taking notes. “Back. Off.”

He backed. I tightened my grip on the bruiser. “You gonna play nice?” I felt him swallow under the pressure of my hand.

When he spoke it came out in a whistle from the pressure I had on his windpipe. “Yes.” I heard truth in his tone, smelled it on his body, along with Leo’s scent of ownership, the smell of vamp. I released my hold. He rolled to his feet and I followed him upright, keeping him between Leo and me. He reached around and shut the outer door. When he moved to face me, in front of and slightly to the side of Leo, I switched the safety on the gun. I was lucky it hadn’t gone off while we rolled around on the floor. It was stupid to wrestle while holding a gun, even while facing down a vamp. Not that I could have figured out a better way. I had been between a rock and a fanged place.

“You don’t smell human. What are you?” Leo said. Trying out his vamp voice on me, smooth and honeyed, and promising me a really good roll in the hay.

“Stop that,” I said. “It doesn’t work on me.”

“She growled, boss,” the bruiser said. “When she took me down.”

“I heard her. What are you?”

“None of your business,” I said.

“Whose blood do I smell?” Leo asked.

“Katie—” I stopped, not knowing what to say. Admitting that Katie had made a mistake by taking too much blood was on a par with saying an adult human had pooped his pants or eaten his own boogers. Really gross or stupid. Accidentally killing prey was a young vamp error, not something an ancient vamp did. Ever. And not the kind of thing a good employee said about her employer. The silence stretched, and Leo’s brow went up. Just one. Waiting.

“I was forced to reprimand a member of my staff.” Katie stood in the hallway, wearing a dressing gown that shimmered like silk. She was clearly naked beneath it, the thin fabric blood free and molding to her thighs. Not what she had been wearing. “May I ask that your blood-servant assist with the transfusion?” she asked. “It is not my intent to lose him.”

I understood immediately. It was okay to nearly kill someone as discipline, but not by accident. Feudal attitudes, something the vamps had left over from, well, from feudal times. I understood it, but I didn’t have to like it.

Leo glanced at his servant and the man looked reluctantly from me to him before he nodded. It was clear he didn’t like the idea of leaving me alone with his boss, but he was willing if Leo gave the go-ahead. Leo inclined his head. Regal, giving permission. Bruiser rolled his head on his shoulders, and I heard two cracks as his spine realigned itself. He gave me a hard look, promising to kill me slowly if I acted out again, and went down the hallway, his booted feet silent on the wood and carpets. Predator silent.

“Your new guardian used a cross on me,” Leo said, holding out his left hand. A livid burn, blistered and seeping, marked his hand, in the shape of the cross. Silver. I wanted to grin but that seemed impolitic. Katie moved to him and knelt at his feet.

“Humble apologies, my master,” she murmured, as her blond hair fell forward, hiding her features. “May I be allowed to offer healing, or do you wish to chastise her yourself?”

Crap. I tensed. Leo lifted one corner of his mouth at my faint motion and speared me with his eyes. I stared back, though I didn’t meet his gaze. Black eyes, coffee-and-milk skin, dark hair falling in soft waves to his shoulders. French lineage, maybe. Aristocratic and elegant. His photos lied. In them he looked ordinary. In person the vamp was drop-dead gorgeous. The drop-dead part would have been funny if I didn’t feel like an insect about to be stepped on.

His smile widened, as if he read every thought in my head, from gorgeous to squashed. “If she dishonors me again,” he said, “I will kill her, rogue vampire to be contained or no.” He held his injured hand to Katie. She did something behind the curtain of her hair and I smelled vamp blood. A moment later, she stood and raised her bleeding wrist to Leo. He took it in one hand and pulled her to him, the motion exposing the side of her body as the robe fell open. The whites of his eyes bled red; the pupils expanded black as he vamped out. He put her wrist to his mouth, bit, and closed his lips around the wound. And he sucked. But his eyes were on me.

I felt the pull of his mouth as if he drank from my wrist. Heat blossomed in my belly. Beast rumbled a growl I just barely controlled. Leo chuckled deep in his throat, drinking. I couldn’t help myself. I slid my fingers around the hilt of the vamp-killer. Those red-as-blood, black-as-death eyes followed the motion. And then looked into my own eyes. I resisted everything I saw there. Everything he made me want. Son of a freaking sea lion. This guy was good. Powerful as the devil himself. I looked away, at the floor, knowing he saw it as weakness.

I felt the cross grow warm and tucked the silver icon in my back pocket, hoping the glow didn’t attract Leo’s attention. No one knew why vamps reacted to Christian symbols and the symbols to them, and I didn’t figure that now was the time to ask.

Moments later, Leo pushed Katie away. He raised his left hand, inspected the mostly healed skin, and wiped the blood smear from the corner of his mouth. And licked it. He was laughing at me. I could see it in his eyes. He was also testing to see if the sight of a vamp drinking would shock, repel, or excite me. Beast was interested, from a strictly predator standpoint, but that wasn’t the emotional reaction Leo was watching for.

Katie knotted the belt of her robe, her eyes glittering behind the veil of her hair. “You may go,” she said softly to me. “Report back before sunrise. You may speak to the girls then.”

I was dismissed. And Katie was ticked off. I nodded once and backed down the hallway. In the office, the bruiser was attaching an archaic-looking, Y-shaped tubing from a girl to Troll. The right blood type was the redheaded girl with emerald eyes, Rachael. From her place on the couch, recumbent, she stared at me, expressionless. The bruiser followed her gaze.

I put Troll’s weapons on the huge desk, noting that the center part was darkly tanned leather, worn and distressed. “Troll will need these,” I said. “Tell him thanks.”

“Troll?”

I tried to smile and found my mouth didn’t want to. “Tom.” I pointed to his patient. His expression altered with amusement and he pointed at himself. “You’re Bruiser,” I said.

“I have a name,” he said. “I’m George Dumas.”

I looked him over. Six-four, weight lifter, but not to bulging excess; rather, he was slender and toned, brown eyes and hair. Clean-looking with a sculpted nose, long and sort of bony. I had a thing about noses and his was primo. Not that I would tell him. “So what,” I said, not sure why I was being rude except that I didn’t want to express an interest in someone who might become an enemy. His eyes widened at the insult.

I left the room and took the narrow hallway to the back door, the one that led to the garden. As I pulled the door closed behind me, I heard the doorbell ringing. Probably the first of Katie’s Ladies’ party customers. Not something I wanted to see.

I went back over the wall and got ready to shift. Time to hunt.

Clean of cold beef blood, I breathed in stink of human blood and vampire spittle on cloth she left under plant bowl. Dead humans and it. The sick thing. Mad one. Short, fast sniffs drew scent deep inside. And . . . found something new. Not noticed before. Opened mouth, extended tongue, hard, lips back. Pulling scent across roof of mouth. Yessssss.

Plant pot rocked. Predator hackles rose. Placing paw on pot, batted it. Pot rolled. Scattered plant, roots, soil. Alive? Motion like porcupine. Not good eating. Pain. Careful of spines, batted again. It rolled. Injured!

Crouched. Unsheathed claws. Swatted. Hard. Pot-animal rolled to bench, hit, broke. Kill! Bounded up. Landed crushing weight on pot. Gripped broken body in claws. Soil spilled out from split like blood. Injured prey again pot, now broken. Sniffed, smelling man-blood on base. Smell of mad one. And faint odor of . . . other. Scent not in memory, not exactly. But also familiar. I rumbled deep. Spat.

Hunt. Command from deep inside. She was impatient. Shoved her down. Silent.

I flexed shoulders and leaped to fence top. Paused. Landed on other side. Crept to side of neighbor-den, beneath bushes. Into night. Circled block to front of Katie’s. Mad one, rogue vamp, had been here. Heartbeats ago. Fresh/rotten scent overlay Leo’s and Bruiser’s. It tracked them. Waited in doorway, across street. I counted—two doors down. Watching, hiding in shadows. Rancid reek of excitement, mixed pheromones. Complex odors.

Vamp form of adrenaline, she thought. Knew about adrenaline. Tough meat if slow kill, or long chase. Better eating to lie in wait, drop on prey. Fast killing strike. But sometimes fun to chase, play with food. Difficult to choose. Tender meat or fun.

Scent called. Strange smell that almost was. Sick thing moved on. Keeping to shadows, its excitement potent. Hunting. Cars passed. Followed when shadows fell again, nose low. Smelled prey-scent beneath mad one’s footsteps. Human female, walking. Sex-smells, many partners. She was unmated, searching. Loneliness was forceful, buried in scent.

I remembered true mating, before she came. Before we became Beast. Her surprise stirred, deep inside. Memories of before times were buried deep, beneath after times with her. Shocked her. She struggled. I batted away thoughts like plant pot. Useless. Later. Hunt.

More-than-five blocks later, smelled fresh blood. Crouched in shadow of alley wall. Crept forward, paw, paw, paw into darkness, belly hairs dragging across dirty stone of man-road. Mad one crouched in man-light. Wrinkled. Dry. Rotted. Stink of rich new blood. Human. Eating sounds. Mad one ate without regard for thief-of-food. Gray light and blackness formed over it. It seemed to shift. To change. Wrinkles faded. Rot smell died.

I hunched close to road. Padded close. Within range. Gathered all power in. Weight balanced. Silent. Sprang. Through air. Long tail revolving for stability. Forelegs reaching. Unsheathing claws. Lips back. Mouth open. Killing teeth bared.

It looked up. Glimpse of face, pale in dim light. And was gone. Gone. Fast.

Shock flooded through. Overshot place where mad one was, and now was not. Passed through empty air. Retracted claws. Lifted paws to break fall. Crashed hard into brick wall. Weight on one pad, bending into it. Body whipping. Hard slam. Bruising shoulder. Ramming hip. Drop to ground, eyes searching.

Strange sound. Look up. There. On ledge, one, two stories. Too high to leap. It clung to window ledge. Looking down. Laughing. I growled, spat. It jumped. High, to roof-top, running. Not hiding escape. I raised head. Screamed frustration. Echoed. Wild.

Get away, she thought. Get away and shift back. White men with guns. Image was memory, one we shared. White men hunting big cat.

Her thoughts came to fore. She was expert in man-world. For now, we shared control. Raced to alley opening. Down block. Into shadows. Creeping around tall, blocky truck. Hummer. Siren sounds. Police. Near kill.

Sped through dark, avoided human prey-groups. One witch family, celebrating, power leaking in sparkles. Almost back to Katie’s. Sick scent suddenly overlapped. Fresh.

Hunched, nose low. Mad one came back this way. She went silent. I bent, took over. Drawing short steady drafts, air and scent, tongue extended to taste/smell. Looked at sky. Sunrise far off. Crouched. Followed, silent in night. I am good hunter.

Mad one crossed bridge over big river. Bridge full of cars, light. No shadows to slink across. I climbed high on steel. Truck drew near below, spitting clouds of poison. Pulled paws close. Timed passage like running prey. Leaped.

Claws and paws hit, scrambled. Metal scratched beneath. Crouched, catching balance. Like riding buffalo, rocking, claws scrabbling, instinct seeking flesh.

On far side of big river, city thinned, smells changed. Less death: sour river water, dead fish, alcohol, exhaust. More prey: domestic and feral cat, many dogs. Big rats—nutria. She had studied. Twenty-pound rats. Good to eat? Birds—prey and predator. Owls hunting. Bats. Squirrel, small mouthful. Mosquitoes, too small to catch. Swamp. Spill-waters emptying into lakes around New Orleans. Still-water stretched ahead. Sharp, pointed moon reflected on top.

Truck slowed. I jumped, landed. Drank water full of plant stuff and crawly things. House squatted in dark, down short road, just ahead, man-light in windows like predator eyes. No other houses near. Moved on bent legs, tail tucked close, following scent, to house, warded with power. Not witchy power. She came alert. Remembering. The People, she thought.

Her kind. Cherokee. I pushed her down. My hunt. Followed scent of mad one around property. Domesticated cat, dog-scent. Pets inside, with humans. In back, in trees, was low, wood hut. Sweat lodge, she thought, her excitement high. An elder lives here. I remember!

Inside, I put paw on her mind, demanding silence. Padded to lodge. Ground rank with mad one. Scent followed path, into woods. Well-used path. Lair near? Or it hunted elder.

No! she thought. Vision of kits, helpless. To be protected, she demanded. Such is an elder. I forced her down, deep, silent. She struggled. Swiped at her with inside claws, scoring her mind. This is hunting. She fell silent, angry, worried.

Tracked mad one into woods, pines, firs, oak, maple, sweet gum. Soil heavy with rotten stench. Elder’s dogs had fed it, two dog bodies decaying in brush. This was hunting ground.

I moved slowly, tail held straight behind. Remembering speed of mad one. Didn’t move like sick prey. Moved like wind, unseen. Fast. I stopped often, scenting air. Circled back, sniffing, into trees. No fire had cleaned forest; underbrush was thick. Path only way. Trap? Mad one would understand traps.

Trees opened into clearing, floor of pine needles. Hunched down, waiting. Nothing moved. Slowly, I circled open space. Found nothing, no out-moving path, no trace of scent leaving. Carefully moved into clearing. Soil rank with its scent, heavy with reek of old blood. Liver-eater rot. It hadn’t left. Yet was not here. Puzzling. A game and hunt for her, for Jane.

I looked at sky. Little night left. I/we were far from new den, from rock she marked to find place. Far from food that did not have to be stalked. Much dead cow in cold place in den.

Refrigerator, she thought at me. In the freebie house.

Turning, I padded back down path.

Near dawn I stopped at edge of city, in safe place, full of shadows. Garden near house where family slept. One snored. Jane awoke, clamored to be alpha. If I did not shift, Beast would be all day; she would not. But bad in this hunt. I/we slid beneath plant. Crouched. Let her come. I/we shifted. Gray place like half-dark of cave swallowed me. Light and dark, lightning in storm-torn sky. Bones slid, popped. Pain cut through like a thousand knives.

Hissed. Was gone.

I needed calories, fast, but first I needed clothes. I pulled off the pack and unrolled my clothes. Carrying them so tightly rolled meant they were always horribly wrinkled, but it was better than going naked. I slid into jeans and tee and strapped the pack, now containing only money, cell phone, keys, and weapons—a stake, a cross, and my derringer—to my waist and slipped on the thin-soled shoes. No bra, no undies. But covered. I wrapped my long hair in a knot, out of the way. At least it always shifted back untangled. Squaring my shoulders, I moved into the dawn, out from the eaves of a house. I had no idea where I was on a map, but my cat senses said I needed to head northeast. And I needed food. My stomach growled loudly.

In the early light, I spotted a convenience store and bought a candy bar for the calories, a Coke for the caffeine energy punch, and a new tube of lipstick. I took them to the bathroom, where I cleaned up, washing my face and arms, scrubbing beneath my nails. I’d need to call a cab, and no self-respecting cabbie would stop for someone who looked as if she slept in her clothes under a bridge abutment. As soon as I was more presentable, I went back to the cashier, paid for a second candy bar and put on my best I-partied-all-night, world-weary look.

“Can you tell me where I am?”

He laughed. He was maybe eighteen, pimply chin, greasy hair, and smelled of weed and last night’s beer. “You’re near Lapalco Boulevard.”

“I just came from woods, a swamp, and a lake that way.” I pointed. “What’s there?”

He laughed again, thinking me too much a party girl to remember where and with whom I’d spent the night. Which was what I wanted him to believe. His leer was a pain, but I could live with it. “Jean Lafitte National Historical Park? Maybe Lake Catouatchie? There’s several lakes out that-away.”

I held up a five. “This is yours if you call me cab. Someone I can trust to get me back into the Quarter.”

He leaned over the counter, resting his weight on an elbow. “I’m off in a couple hours. I can take you.”

I smiled, looked him over as if interested, and shook my head. “Tempting, but I got to be at work in an hour. I need fast as well as trustworthy.”

He sighed and pulled a cell phone. “You ought to reconsider. Jobs are a dime a dozen. Good fun is a lot harder to come by, and we could have some fun.” I shook my head again, this time adding a rueful, regretful smile, and he punched in a number. The person who answered said, “Bluebird Cab,” so I relaxed. I might be a bit paranoid but paranoid sometimes pays off.

He pressed the phone to his ear, cutting off the sound. “It’s Nelson. I’m at work, but there’s this chick who needs a cab into the Quarter.” He looked at me. “You got cash? It’s gonna cost you.”

I held up a ten and a twenty. “After that I’m tapped out till payday,” I lied. Too much cash might make me a mark. I didn’t want to start my day having to break someone’s arm.

“She’s got money. Sure.” He hung up. “Five minutes. My cousin Rinaldo. He’s okay. Married with five kids. Works third shift and drives a cab to keep ’em all fed. I tried to explain to him about birth control, but he ain’t the brightest bulb, you know what I mean?” He was trying to make a joke, and laughed as if he was really funny.

I smiled and nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

He took a card from his pocket and passed it to me. “Call me next time you want to party. I got access to some stuff. You know?”

“Thanks,” I said, pointing to the card. “Put Rinaldo’s number on back. Never know when I’ll need a cab in the morning.” When he was done, I tucked the card in my pack and walked out the door. Minutes later, Rinaldo pulled up in a yellow cab with a large bluebird painted on the forward doors. He looked me over, waved me closer, and unlocked the doors with an automatic click. I climbed in back and gave him my address. “And I need breakfast. Drive through a fast-food place and I’ll treat us both.”

Rinaldo studied me in the rearview and said, “Yo.”

I took that as a yes and lay my head back. I was exhausted.

The Joe was sitting on my front stoop when I got out of the cab. I had made arrangements with Rinaldo to pick me up in the mornings wherever I happened to find myself. Making nice with a cabdriver was always smart. I had learned the hard way that getting home on my own wasn’t always easy or even feasible. And the places where I shifted back to human weren’t places a cabbie would come unless you were a regular. Thinking I was the party girl my tired face and red lipstick proclaimed, he told me to be careful, call him anytime, and sped off.

I looked at the Joe and sighed. I needed a shower and a pot of tea and my bed. Not this.

“You want to tell me where you were last night?” he demanded.

“No. I don’t. Get away from my door.” When he frowned, I crossed my arms and jangled my keys. “You’re not my daddy, my lover, or my boss. Where I was is none of your business. I’m not in the mood for this. I’m tired and I need a shower and I’ll bust your chops if I have to. Move.”

“I got questions.” He eased to the side and I opened the front door. He stepped in after me, fast enough that I couldn’t have shut the door on him without shoving him back first.

I sighed again as he followed me to the kitchen where I turned on the kettle. “Fine. But I’m getting a shower first. You can wait.”

I closed my bedroom door and stripped, climbing into the hot shower for a personal grooming session. I didn’t have much body hair, courtesy of my Cherokee blood, but what I had came back in every time I shifted, as if I had never shaved. Shifting every night made it a pain.

When I was pretty sure the kettle had been whistling for a long time, I turned off the water, pulled on a ratty T-shirt and shorts and went back to the kitchen, my wet hair soaking through the thin cloth down my back. He was at my kitchen table, sprawled out like he owned the place, his sunglasses near his left hand and his eyes on my legs as I walked to the kettle.

“I took it off the fire and poured it over the leaves,” he said.

Surprised, I lifted the plastic lid of the tea strainer and sniffed. I had left a strong Madagascar Vanilla Sunday Blend in the strainer, sitting in the teapot, waiting. And now it was ready. “Thanks,” I said, and poured it into a twelve-ounce mug, added a dollop of sugar, and stirred. “Want some?”

“I’m good.” He seemed a little less demanding than on the stoop, and after a good wash I was feeling a little more magnanimous. But I had a feeling this conversation was about to get either very physical or very full of lies. I wasn’t in the mood for either.

I had eaten six Egg McMuffins and downed three Cokes, so I wasn’t hungry this morning. Which was probably a good thing. When humans saw me eat, they tended to get bug-eyed at the quantity. Rinaldo had assumed I had the munchies from drug use. I hadn’t told him any different.

I sat across from the Joe and sipped, thinking. I wanted to say I owed him no explanations, but he was a local, with contacts I didn’t have. I could humor him. A little. “Okay. You’re here. I’ve had my shower. I have my tea. I’m listening.”

“Where were you last night?” When I shook my head, he said, “How’d you get out of here without me seeing you?” I shook my head again, letting a smile start, and he narrowed his eyes at me. “How did you spot the camera looking into Katie’s backyard?”

Oh, yeah. The camera. If he had been hoping to do Katie’s security and he missed a camera that I found, that could only make him look bad. “That, I’ll tell you.” I let my smile spread and lowered my eyes to the tea. “I’m good.” I sipped.

He huffed, a belligerent laugh, and let the silence grow, his eyes on me like a weight. But, in the game of waiting contests and which predator will blink first, he broke. His hostility melted in a plosive puff of breath and a faint stench of frustration. “Fine. You got ways of doing things I don’t. You got the job; I didn’t. But a girl was killed last night. By the rogue.”

“I know. I saw him.”

The Joe—Rick, he did have a name—sat up, gathering himself. I put down my mug, freeing my hands, and waited to see what he would do. He was wearing a T-shirt again this morning and, as his biceps bunched, the bottoms of the tats were more visible than yesterday. Definitely claws on the left arm. Something dark and fuzzy on the right arm and shoulder. I wanted to see them, but figured if I asked him to take off his shirt, he might get the wrong idea. I was so tired, I grinned without thinking.

“It isn’t funny,” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “I knew her.”

I held up a hand, palm out, fingers splayed to show I meant no offence, and shook my head. He settled slightly and I picked up my mug again. “I’m sorry for your loss. If it makes you feel better, I wasn’t smiling about the girl.”

“You saw him kill her?”

“No. I was tracking him.” Which was the truth, except Rick would naturally think I was following by sight, not by smell. Here was where our conversation would devolve into lies, partial lies, and total lies, and where I would get tripped up if I made a mistake. “He went around a corner and I paused too long, thinking he might have seen me. He got her before I could react. He’s fast. He went up the wall when he spotted me.” I watched Rick’s face. He was studying mine. “Straight up. I’d always thought that thing about vamps being able to fly or climb walls was myth.”

Rick shook his head. “Only the old ones can climb like that. The real old ones.”

“And you know that how?”

“I know Katie. I asked.”

And she just answered? I remembered Beast’s first foray into the Quarter. The smell of vamps everywhere. There were a lot of real old ones. “I followed from the street as he ran across the rooftops.” Also truth, well, sorta. I finished off the tea and stood to pour another cup, but kept my body at an angle and Rick in my peripheral vision.

“Nobody saw you,” he said. “Cops were on the scene almost instantly.”

It sounded like an accusation again. I shrugged. He was persistent and curious. Persistent and curious people often stick their noses into things they shouldn’t, and this guy looked like a prime candidate for that particular trouble. I needed to point his nose into directions useful to me, keep him where I could see him, use him, and distract him away from things I wouldn’t share. “I need backup on this and I got a budget. You want the job?”

“Yes. And I want to know how you get out of here without me seeing you.”

I glanced back at him. Time for another lie. “You know the saddlebags on my bike?” I turned back to the tea. “Like that.”

He sat back, amazement crossing his face. “You know a witch who can make an invisibility charm?”

Invisibility charms were legend, not reality, so far as I knew, but enough people claimed they existed to merit the lie being taken for truth. “Not quite. But sorta. She calls it an obfuscation charm.” I added more sugar and stirred, keeping my face turned away. I didn’t lie well and I knew it. “You won’t see me come or go unless I’m in the mood to let you.”

He stood and came close, leaning on the counter, facing me, a little inside my personal space. “What’ll I be doing if I work for you?”

I took a breath to answer and felt it stop, felt my ribs freeze in motion. I inhaled slowly then, drawing in the air. The scent. His scent. I leaned in and pulled the air near Rick through my nostrils, feeling him tense when my face passed close to his neck. I pivoted, standing behind him, leaning in. His hands fisted in shock but I couldn’t stop. I opened my mouth and pulled back my lips, pulling in his scent.

It was familiar. One of the smells on the cloth Beast used to track the rogue. This scent. A woman’s perfume, a woman’s body, so faint on the vamp I had hardly noted it. The Joe—Rick—wore the same scent the rogue carried.

They had been with the same woman. With, as in with. How could anyone, even a human, bear to be with a sick, rotting rogue? Yet I didn’t smell rogue on Rick, only the woman. So why not? Why hadn’t she carried rogue stink back and forth between the two men?

I clamped down on my reaction and stepped to the table. When I set the mug on it, my fingers trembled. I made a fist to hide it. I needed privacy to analyze all this. “Today, nothing,” I said, picking up the conversation as if nothing had happened. “Tonight, I’ll give you some addresses to track down, owner, renter, property owners nearby, that sorta thing.”

“What the hell was that?” he asked.

I shook my head, letting the shorter hairs around my face fall forward. Hiding again. “Nothing. Now get outta here. I need a nap.” Suppressing my trembling, I walked to the door and opened it. Held it wide.

Rick stood by the table for a moment. I was afraid he might demand an answer, maybe a lot of them. I knew what I must have looked like, sniffing him like an animal. I was afraid I’d say something to alert him to what I was or what I discovered. I couldn’t look him in the eyes.

He slid his sunglasses on and walked to the door. And outside. I closed the door behind him and rested my weight on it. Whoever the Joe had slept with last night or this morning, sometime recently, she was sleeping with the rogue vamp too. How could she stand the reek of rot? And why wasn’t it on her too?

Like most witches, Molly was forgetful. She even occasionally forgot to check her house wards, the ones that protected her home from casual observation by the federal government’s newly established Psychometry Law Enforcement Division, the so-called PsyLED. It was a branch of Homeland Security, and the PsyOffs—PsyLED officers—were still gathering info on the nation’s supernats. So far, Molly’s kids were off the grid. Keeping her home and property from leaking magical energy was the key to keeping them safe.

Desperately sleepy, my limbs feeling weighted with lead, I closed my eyes.

I woke at three p.m. to the sound of knocking on the front door. My bedroom was L-shaped, with the short side on the front of the house. I peeked through the window and saw a marked cop car parked in the street, a man in uniform and a woman in a jacket and khakis on the stoop. I looked in the mirror and frowned at myself. I looked ratty, not the way the out-of-town talent, the hired gun the council had contracted to take down the rogue, should look. If this was Katie’s liaison with the New Orleans police department, then I was going to make a really bad first impression. If Rick had gone to the cops about my seeing the rogue, then I was going to make a worse impression. And I hadn’t washed the blood from my steak meals out of the grass in the backyard. Stupid. Crap.

One of them knocked again, less politely this time. I walked to the foyer, slapped the locks off, and opened the door, holding on to the door and jamb, arms stretched up high. I yawned widely and studied them through slit eyes and a strand of snarled hair. The guy was looking at my legs and the patch of belly showing between tee and shorts when I yawned. He was mid-forties and smelled of Cajun spices and aftershave. Lots of aftershave. I wrinkled my nose. The woman was younger, a little stout, bobbed hair. A lapel name badge said she was Jodi Richoux. Yep. Katie’s liaison. I finished the yawn and said, sounding grumpy, “Yeah?”

She made a face at me. “Jane Yellowrock?”

“That’s me. And you’re Katie’s pal at NOPD. Come on in.” I pushed the door wide and walked to the kitchen, deliberately scratching at my armpit. I didn’t like cops but I did enjoy messing with them. Much like the way Beast liked playing with her food before she killed it. There was a certain kind of challenge to the cat and mouse. “I’m making tea,” I said, over my shoulder. “I don’t have any coffee or donuts for y’all.”

“I understand that you eat a lot of steak,” Jodi said.

And the game begins. I grinned and shoved my hair back from my face. “I’m a carnivore. Veggies are for sissies.” I filled the kettle while the two surveyed the kitchen. “You been talking to my butcher, I take it.”

“Him. A few other people.”

“Have a seat,” I said.

“Mind if I look around,” the guy said, “stretch my legs?”

Pointedly, I looked at his name badge. “Yes, Officer Herbert, I do mind. Have a seat or take a hike.” I pointed at a chair and back to the door.

“And why do you mind?” Jodi asked. “Do you have something to hide?”

“Not especially. I just don’t see any reason to let him paw through my undies without a warrant. Bring me a warrant and you can rattle around all you want. Just know that my landlady had the place wired with cameras. Not much privacy if cameras are rolling twenty-four/seven.” All entirely the truth. Katie had indeed had the place wired. The cameras were simply not rolling anymore. And that part I didn’t share. Life was so much easier without actual lies to remember. The cops looked at one another, startled. I could almost see them rearrange their tactics. I pointed again at the kitchen chairs. “Sit.”

“Abear,” he said, sitting next to the chair I had pointed to.

“Say what?” I put the kettle on the stove and turned on the fire.

“My name. It’s pronounced Abear. The French pronunciation.”

I thought about saying, “Big whup,” but didn’t. No point in stirring the pot just yet. When I didn’t respond, except to open a bag of cookies and slide it on the table for them, Jodi asked, “Where were you last night?” She wasn’t sitting. Jodi was standing at the corner of the table, back a little, so she could see both of us but not get in the way. Interesting position.

“All over.” I leaned into the corner of the cabinets, the counter at my hips, and crossed my arms, putting one foot on the cabinet behind me, as if propping myself up. The fact that the position gave me leverage to leap was not incidental. “I was up and down the street in front of Katie’s Ladies on Dauphine, down St. Louis Street to Royal. I wove around a lot after that.”

“A girl was killed on Barracks Street last night. It’s come to our attention that you might know something about it,” Jodi said.

Well, well, well. Rick had been talking. Was he a source? “Something,” I agreed, making it sound like it wasn’t much.

“You want to tell us about it?” Implied was the threat that if I didn’t want to talk here and now, we could go to the department. Where I could cool my heels for a few days in lockup.

I kept my voice unemotional when I answered. “I was hired to track down the rogue vamp. I followed him there. I was too late to stop him. He had drained and was eating the girl when I arrived. So when he booked, I tailed him.”

“Where did he go?” she asked, her voice tight, her eyes focused tightly on my face.

“Over the rooftops, mostly, and across the river, where I lost him.”

“You should have called us,” she snarled.

“My cell was dead.” Now that was an outright lie, but I wasn’t going to admit that I had paws and couldn’t dial. Nor was I going to say that I wouldn’t have called anyway.

“How did you track him?” she asked. They were both listening with the kind of intensity cops saved for child rapists and serial killers. And cop killers.

“Line of sight and with a little witch amulet. Tracks vamps. One of a kind and expensive as all get-out.” Lie number two. I couldn’t afford to go much higher and keep my story straight.

“So, you saw him. Got a description of the guy?” Herbert /Abear said.

“Middle height, slender, long dark hair, hooked nose. It was dark and he was fast. That’s all I got. Not enough to work with an artist,” I added, to keep me out of NOPD HQ.

“I want to see this amulet.”

My cell phone rang from the bedroom. “Excuse me.” I grabbed the phone and returned to the kitchen doorway where I could keep an eye on them. The number displayed was Molly’s.

“Witchy woman!”

“Hey, Big Cat. What’s up?”

“Good timing on the call. I got two cops in my kitchen. They wanna know about the tracking amulet you gave me. The one for whacked-out vamps, not the one for humans.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Fly it.”

Molly laughed. When a spell didn’t work, she made paper airplanes out of the scratch pages and flew them across the room to entertain her kids. “Did you have a blood trace to work with?”

“Big-time,” I said.

“Put me on with them.”

I blanked the screen and handed the phone to Jodi. Saved by the bell.

I ate a cookie and listened to the cop chat with Mol. Molly likes cops even less than I do, having had to register as a witch with the local law, but she’d had mostly redneck, hillbilly types as role models. I had met some nifty cops in my time and some were okay. Some, however, were on ego trips, had authority issues, or were chauvinist pigs. Herbert was an ass. I was withholding judgment on Jodi.

The lady cop handed my cell back and I said into it, “Thanks, Mol. I’ll call back later.”

“You having problems down there in the steamy South?” she asked.

“It’s interesting.”

“So, maybe I’ll come visit sooner than we planned. Kill that rogue so it’s safe.” She laughed and cut the connection. I hit END and set the phone on the counter.

“So. May I see the amulet that tracked the vampire? And a demonstration?”

“No and no. Goes back to that warrant thing. Bring me a piece of paper and I’ll share. Till then, no way.”

“Why don’t you like cops, Miss Yellowrock?” Herbert asked.

“I like some cops just fine. But I don’t like all cops just like I don’t like all dry cleaners or all street sweepers or all nurses. The job is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily attract the best people. You want to go have a beer, maybe take in a movie, I might find you’re charming as hell and the salt of the earth. So far, right now, I’m not too terribly impressed.”

“She’s glib,” he said to Jodi, sounding mean and malicious. His face had twisted as I spoke and now he looked a little on the cruel side too.

“Shut up,” Jodi said to him.

I laughed. “What you really want to know is how I found the rogue when you couldn’t and why the vamp council hired me when they had enough money to hire the French Foreign Legion. Then you want me to promise to bring you anything I find out, including any interesting facts or info on my boss and her cronies, the vamp council.”

Jodi opened her mouth, then closed it on whatever she had been about to say. Her eyes had sharpened, however. I grinned at her. Ate another cookie. Let the silence build in the kitchen. After a few minutes, Jodi said, “What are you?”

I hadn’t expected that. It was one thing for the supernatural community to know I wasn’t human. It was something else entirely for mundane law enforcement to know; cops might tell PsyLED. I held myself still when I wanted to spring across the table, claws slashing. Beast was awake and listening. Beast was of a mind to gut them and ask questions while they die. I held her down. After a pause a fraction too long, I put a thoughtful, agreeable tone in my voice and said, “I’m the best rogue-vamp tracker on the East Coast.”

So. Who squealed? The only ones who knew I wasn’t human were Katie, Troll, Bruiser, and Leo. I bit into another cookie and talked around the crumbs. Back to being rude, crude, and deliberately disagreeable. Back to giving the cops something to think about other than my more subtle reactions. “I don’t have an aversion to sunlight or silver, I like garlic and old Bela Lugosi movies, and I attend church. I can’t do spells and my witch pals tell me I’m not one of them. So I guess that makes me human, though that often puts me in bad company.

“I’m licensed to carry in most of the southeast states, and could get a waiver in the rest of the states.” I swallowed and went on. “I have a hundred-percent track record. Most recently, I took down seven of seven in a raving-mad, young-rogue blood-family. I’m proficient, though unrated, in street fighting and swordplay, and I’m a good marksman. All that you can get off my Web site. I’m guessing you want to know something not on the site.”

I raised my brows and let my most insolent grin start. “I’m straight. I wear size seven shoes. I like steak. Oh, wait, you know that already. I like to dance, and this verbal boogie with you two makes me think I’ll go dancing tonight.” I shrugged.

“One thing you left out.” Jodi flashed a small black case at me, about the size of a pack of cards. It had a dial on it, like a Geiger counter, and the needle was pointing a little over halfway along the face, at sixty-two. The sight of it chilled me to the bone. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Beast raised her lips and showed her teeth in threat. I smiled and ate another cookie. “Why you set off my psy-meter,” Jodi said.