“I figure he keeping Shauna here.” Lucky pointed to a room away from the moving water, next to the swampy side and sticking out all by itself.
Derek looked at me, his eyes saying what I had figured out. We had way too few men. I stifled a sigh but decided I had to address that now, right up front. “Lucky, we don’t have enough men to launch an attack and get Shauna.” The witch’s eyes flashed fire and his power sparked painfully across my skin, like brushing against cacti. I added quickly, “So I’m going in to talk.”
“Talk is nothin’ to dese suckheads,” he spat. The power in the room skirled like flames and wind, hot, and pulling all the moisture out of the air.
Derek sat back, his arms outstretched along the chair arms, and looked at me, ignoring the angry father. I took his cue and repositioned so Lucky was visible only in my peripheral vision. Sometimes ignoring people’s anger made them calm down. Of course, sometimes it made them shoot everyone in sight. “We can go in just before dusk,” Derek said to me, “when the vamps are waking up and eating breakfast and the blood-servants are busiest. Disable the boats, set up a perimeter. Then you can come in, making a lot of noise. Distract them from anything we might do.” Meaning that if they saw the girl, they’d take her if it was possible, with me being the distraction.
I nodded. “How are you getting in?” I asked. “They’ll hear motors for miles in the flat water and land.”
Derek pointed to what looked like a trail on the map; it was marked with the designation Brown Fox Road. “We drive into there this afternoon and pole in on johnboats.”
Lucky snorted, a very Gaelic and totally dismissive sound, but the burning sensation diminished again. “Polin’ johnboat a skill, not somethin’ you pick up and do.”
Derek lifted a brow. “I poled my first boat when I was five, white boy. I think I still remember how. And my men will do fine,” he added to me.
I nodded. “Okay. Lucky, we need johnboats and something motorized for me to show up in. And before you ask or demand, no. You can’t go with us.” Instantly I felt that spiky power skitter hotly along my skin. “And that’s precisely why,” I pointed at him. “You’re too emotionally involved. You’ll end up getting the men hurt, and maybe Shauna killed.”
Lucky blinked, started to say or do something, then the magic skirled away and died. He dropped his head and stared at the floor for long seconds, his hands opening and closing in fists. “Yeah. Okay. My wife say de same. But I don’ like it.”
I felt it was much too fast a capitulation, but I didn’t smell an outright lie. I said, “Instead, I need you to get the equipment for us and find us two former military men, who still hunt, who still use their skills, and get one to be Derek’s guide and one to be my guide. If you can’t do that and keep out of our way, then the gig is off. You understand?
“I’m not stupid.”
Which didn’t answer my question, but I let it go. He gave me a time when he’d have the equipment ready, picked up Miz Onie’s landline phone, and made two calls. When he hung up he said, “Auguste and Benoît twins, in army dey was. Dey hunt alligator, most years. Dis year dey mama broke hip. Dey not have time to get tags.”
I understood. In Louisiana there was a lottery for the alligator harvest program, and tags to hunt on public swamp and land in gator country were issued only at certain times. If you missed that time, you didn’t hunt, or you paid your hunting license fee and hunted on private lands. The twins didn’t have access to private land, so this year they were sitting around. “Sober?” I asked.
“Mostly,” Lucky said. I figured that was the best I was gonna get.
“Dey got a sister, too. She a sharpshooter, she was. Tough as gator skin. She come along too. You put her in a tree with good line a sight, and she provide cover. Her name Margaud.”
After Lucky Landry left, Derek and his men and I created contingency plans for everything we could think of, giving each problem and plan a code name so we would be prepared to act on a moment’s notice. “Silver” was the code to kill every vamp we could find. “Swim” was the code indicating that each combatant would have to get home the best way he could. “Bogus” was the code for our allies telling lies and setting us up. “Burn” was the code to set everything on fire with incendiaries. “Fubar” meant anything and everything. Fubar was the code I was most worried about. It meant we’d all almost likely die.
* * *
The boat shuddered under my feet, the Chevy engine adding its own vibration as well as noise enough to wake the undead, and the propeller at my back sucked air through its cage as we flew over the water—not in a plane, but in an airboat. The boat had almost no draft, maybe six inches when it was sitting still, and it was eco-friendly except for the noise, which was so loud it could deafen a catfish, and which precluded any form of communication except hand signals. The prop, mounted in the cage at the back of the boat, was wood, handmade by Amish people, which felt all wrong somehow, but added an artistic element to a boat that was designed to skim over the bayou, swamp water, or marshy land. This boat was painted in red and yellow with flames along the sides, similar to the flames on Lucky’s arms, and belonged to the twins. It had two bench seats with heavy-gauge steel arms and leather upholstery in the yellow of the flames. Built-in coolers, tackle boxes, and a shotgun rack completed the Cajun dream-boat.
Benoît had led Derek’s men in two hours ago and they were in place on the clan home property. Auguste was my pilot, sitting in the bench seat above and behind me, working the controls. Margaud sat beside me, a sharpshooter’s sniper rifle in a sling across her back and a heavy, military go-bag at her booted feet.
The brothers might have passed for ogres, each weighing in at an easy three hundred pounds, hirsute, sour with last night’s beer, and both smelling of the fish they had caught and cleaned. Maybe days ago. The men wore T-shirts that might once have been white in another universe or decade, old-fashioned bib overalls, and work boots that looked like they had never seen oil, polish, or even laces.
Margaud was as beautiful as her brothers were ugly, with ash brown hair blonded by the sun, deep brown eyes, and skin tanned golden. She was petite and delicate and looked too small to transport or position the rifle for firing, but she was muscular and fit and carried herself with a capable, confident air. The sharpshooter wore a homemade one-piece camo uni that had been made out of strips of thin cotton cloth in green, brown, black, and tan, like a hand-pieced quilt. Irregular lengths of green yarn rippled from it in the hard wind created by the passage of the airboat, and I realized that it worked like a ghillie suit, but looked a lot more comfortable. I had to wonder what a girl needed a ghillie suit for, but I figured it was for hunting. And if it wasn’t for hunting, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
The siblings were all human and all taciturn—expressionless faces and none talking much even by my standards. It felt weird going into battle with the silent Cajuns at my back, unknowns in a gig more full of unknowns than usual.
We spun through the bayou, whipping around clumps of trees and over long, swordlike grasses. I held on to the bench seat handle with one hand, watching the world fly by. The airboat hit something in the water with a hollow, solid thump under my feet, but Margaud didn’t react and the boat neither slowed nor sprang a leak, so I just gripped the handle harder. If we came to a sudden and total stop, I didn’t want to go flying into the dark water or up against a cypress tree.
I had on ear protectors, my fighting leathers, and all my weapons, including the Benelli M4. They had all been brought by Derek, lifted from my gun safe in the closet of my freebie house in New Orleans. Even in what amounted to autumn in the Deep South, I was sweating, and my hair had come free from the fighting queue, blown back by the wind. It was long enough that I was seriously concerned about getting it caught in the prop, and sat holding it twined around my arm and clasped in one hand, a pose that could have serious image consequences if we were attacked en-route. Auguste had agreed to idle down a quarter mile out and
motor in slowly, which would give me time to fix my hair.
It wasn’t like I was trying for a stealth approach. There was no chance we’d surprise anyone, not in a boat that could be heard two or three miles away. So the slow entrance lost us nothing and might actually help, giving me time to look over the Doucette Clan Home, allow Derek’s men to carry out their part of the plan and also give the appearance of courage and strength. Of course, vamps could smell my sweat, so they’d know I was nervous once I was close enough for them to take my scent. And since they had never smelled me, and since they weren’t Leo’s people, my predator scent would really annoy them as well as make them more dangerous.
Hence, I was loaded for vamp with hand-packed silver-fléchette rounds in the M4 and the nine mils. I had my specially made holsters on and had a Heckler and Koch 9 mil under my left arm, one at my right hip, a lovely little red-gripped .380 at my spine, and a .32 six-shooter on my ankle. Most of the weapons were loaded with silvershot. The .380s carried standard ammo; that was for annoying vamps and killing humans, though I didn’t intend to kill any humans. Unless they tried to kill me.
I had six blades on me: four, short-bladed throwing knives and two silver-plated vamp-killers. Ash stakes were sheathing in my right boot, for immobilizing vamps if I could manage that instead of killing them. Three silver stakes would go in my bun, three more in the left boot, should killing vamps be necessary. One had the blood-master’s name on it. Clermont Doucette was a dead man. Which was funny in every way I could look at it.
I wore my silver-plated titanium throat protector and super hard plastic armor at elbows, groin, and knees—places where vamps liked to attack and drink. Looked deadly.
The airboat slowed and skewed to the side in an eddy-move worthy of a powerboat. Margaud jutted her chin at my hair and climbed from the boat onto a tongue of land, and I started to rebraid my hair. Auguste handed us both bottles of chilled water. We were less than half a mile out, and I could see the yellow of the school bus in the distance.
* * *
It was only minutes later, but when Auguste keyed on the airboat motor and blasted out the night sounds, the sun was setting on the horizon, silhouetting the cypress trees and low-growing scrub on the small islets and islands between marsh and swamp and bayou. Night came fast in the bayou.
We left Margaud perched in the branches of a tree with a clear line-of-sight of the front door and most of the Doucette Clan Home. She had her rifle and a night vision scope and several toys that were not civilian legal, and she handled them like a pro. Even so, I didn’t like the idea of leaving anyone alone in the swamp, but the woman’s fierce glare suggested that I should keep that thought to myself.
I went over her report as we made our slow way to the clan home. There were heat signatures for twenty humans, and no indications of vamps anywhere, which meant they were still in their lairs. Under the house were dozens of chickens and several large mammals, what looked like pigs. “Be careful of the pigs,” she said, as her last warning. “They’re mean and dangerous.”
Great. Just ducky. Like vamps weren’t bad enough. Now we had mad pigs to worry about.
Making enough racket to raise revenants, we motored up to the Doucette Place, me sitting so a nine-mil was partially hidden in my left hand, and my right was draped over the arm rest. The lights ahead went dark, making the house hard to see, but giving an added advantage to the vamps, with their near-perfect night vision.
As we roared up, I looked lazy and unconcerned. But my heart was pounding and my Beast was staring out at the lengthening shadows with her predator’s stare, my eyes showing that odd shade of gold peculiar to Beast. With her added night vision, the dark was all greens and silvers and shades of gray, and I could see with a preternatural clarity.
Security met us at the dock, buff male hunks dressed in jeans, muscle T’s, and multiple guns. They smelled human, or nearly so—blood-slaves who had all received recent, copious, but controlled drinks of blood from multiple vamps. The intake had to be carefully measured or the consequences were problematic. Too much blood would get a human blood-drunk and he’d be useless. Too little blood and a human would have less power to draw on. I wondered why the big bad vamps had sent blood-slaves to meet me instead of blood-servants, and it was just one more reminder that these backwoods—or maybe backwater—vamps would be unlike the vamps I’d met in other places. It was possible that these vamps had never even seen the Vampira Carta. These were like vamps from the Wild West, vamps with their own rules and laws and nasty habits and nastier accoutrements.
Like guns, trained on me.
I lounged back in my seat, keeping the Heckler and Koch 9 mil out of sight, a round in the chamber, safety off, and my finger off the trigger and on the guard. I wanted to be ready, but I didn’t want to accidently shoot off a round and punch a hole in the boat. Sinking just off the dock and wading wet and dripping to shore was not the way to make an impression of being strong and in command.
I smelled Derek upwind of me, and as soon as the vamps were up and outside, they would smell my guys too. Best to get inside quickly. Auguste gunned the engine and spun us up to the dock, cut the motor and let us drift until we touched the rubberized edge.
I tossed away the ear protectors and pushed in the earbud the instant we stopped. The night closed in around me in muggy shadows, mist, and the buzz of mosquitoes. And the chock-a-chock sound of a shotgun being readied for firing. The timing was calculated and I laughed softly.
“Copy that, Legs,” Derek said into the com unit to the sound of my laughter. I was tied into the system.
With my free hand I tossed my card onto the dock. Muscles One and Muscles Two looked at each other in confusion. The laughter was unexpected, my relaxed posture (legs stretched out with one bent at the knee) was unexpected, my yellow glowing eyes were unexpected, and now they had to figure out how they were going to manage bending over and picking up my card.
After a long undecided fidget, Muscles Two, who was holding two semiautomatic handguns, holstered one and knelt down, eyes on me, feeling along the wood boards until he had the card, and then stood. He stared down at it, his blood-slave enhanced vision making out the words and his lips moving with the effort. He said, “Dis here say, ‘Jane Yellowrock. Have Stakes Will Travel.’”
“Vampire-hunter? You dat Jane Yellowrock?” Muscles One asked. “Leo Pellissier’s cun—”
Without thinking, I slid my finger around the trigger, raised the Heckler and Koch and shot the guy, a quick, ticked off two-tap. The first bullet caught him in the left thigh, high and outside, dead-on where I’d intended, in a location where one might do minimal damage, but knock out an enemy combatant. The second shot took him in the left elbow. I’d been aiming at his left side, at the waist, where there were few major organs to hit. Muscles One started to fall and lost the shotgun, his breath sucking in for a scream.
Instantly, I moved the weapon to Muscles Two and caught him trying to redraw the weapon he’d holstered. Stupid. He had one still drawn. He shoulda shot me already. When he realized his error, he stopped, nearly as immobile as a vamp, one hand on the weapon in the holster, one with the gun pointed at the dock, his eyes on me, wide like a cat’s. I let a lot more of Beast bleed into my eyes and chuckled again as I gathered my weapon into a two-handed grip, pulled my boots under me, and stood. The airboat wobbled under the weight change and I made sure of my balance before I stepped onto the dock. “I don’t like that word,” I said, over the ringing in my ears.
“Throw it into the water,” I added, nodding to his gun. “Both of them.” I wasn’t leaving an armed bad guy behind me. When he had disposed of both guns, I jutted my chin at the shotgun. “That one too.”
“Hebert kill me, he will,” he said, pronouncing it “A-bear”, a common Cajun last name.
“And I’ll kill you if you don’t,” I lied, sweetly.
Muscles toed the shotgun off into the bayou and Herbert moaned. I wasn’t sure if he was upset over the gun being tos
sed, or the pain. Maybe both.
The last light went out at the house and I heard the soft shnick of a round being chambered from the front door. I grabbed Muscles and whirled him, stepping quickly behind him, placing the barrel of my weapon against his spine. Muscles went still as an oak board and it was clear that he knew he had a gun at his back and one ahead. “Think they’ll kill you to get to me?” I whispered to him over the ringing in my ears.
I was six feet, two-and-a-half inches tall in my teal Luchesse boots, and my eyes barely peeked over his shoulder. This close, even over the stink of fired weapons, I could identify the four vamps he had fed from by their herbal signatures—wilting funeral flowers, lemon mint, sage and parsley, and something sweet, like agave. I breathed them in, learning what I could of each: gender, race, relationships. In human form I didn’t have the nose of my Beast, but my sense of smell was far better than any human’s, maybe a by-product of the decades I had spent in her form, or perhaps the result of my natural skinwalker abilities. I didn’t have another skinwalker around to tell me stuff like that.
Ahead of me, I heard more weapons schnick and chock-a-chock in firing readiness. Muscles swallowed so hard I felt it through his spine.
“Call out. Tell them who I am.”
Without waiting for a second prompt, Muscles shouted, “Dis here Jane Yellowrock. She come for—” To me he whispered, “What you come for?”
I thought about that. Admitting that I was itching to stake his master would probably not be my smartest move. “As Leo Pellissier’s envoy. He’s heard about the witch girl and wants to talk,” I said softly, knowing that we were possibly close enough for any vamps to hear.