Ascanio dropped the innocent act. His eyes turned serious. “I want to come with you.”
“Why?”
“Because I never get to and your father tried to slap you.”
“And how do you know that?”
“You need backup.”
He wasn’t wrong. Given that he was seventeen now, six feet tall, and able to control his aggression enough to think during a fight, I could do worse.
I wrote Went to see Beau on a piece of paper and left it on my desk. “Let’s go.”
I swung the door open a moment before Derek walked through it.
“I heard the conversation. I’m coming,” he said.
Ascanio rolled his eyes. “This will be fun.”
Derek parked himself in the doorway. “You need backup.”
“She has backup.”
“Yes, but someone will have to carry the Prince of Hyenas if he accidentally stabs his pinkie toe, and she isn’t a shapeshifter.”
“Fine.” I headed for my vehicle.
Behind me Ascanio snorted. “Idiot wolf.”
“Spoiled bouda brat.”
“Bigot.”
“Crybaby.”
“Shit for brains.”
“Momma’s boy.”
Universe, grant me patience.
• • •
I WALKED INTO Beau’s office carrying six bottles of root beer and a bucket of fried chicken. Beau raised his head from the paperwork he was reading behind his desk, sniffed the air, and sat up straighter.
Beau Clayton, the sheriff of Milton County, was a man who made his own legend. A few months ago Hugh d’Ambray had come to collect me and take me to meet my father. He went about it in a complicated way, and one of the Pack’s members ended up murdering one of the People’s Masters of the Dead. The People demanded that the Pack turn over the accused. We refused. They would’ve murdered her. She was entitled to a trial.
The People emptied the stables under the Casino and brought a vampire horde to attack the Keep. I was the Consort back then and most of our people were out of town. It was me and some regular Pack members, mostly parents with small children.
I had contacted the Atlanta PAD offering to surrender the guilty woman to their custody, but they didn’t want to risk it. Nobody wanted to risk it, so as a last resort I called Beau Clayton, because one hundred twelve square yards of the Pack’s land lay within Milton County. It had to be the flimsiest excuse ever used to establish jurisdiction.
The People besieged us, bringing hundreds of vampires. The field before the Keep was about to become a bloodbath. Beau Clayton chose that moment to ride between the two lines of fighters. He didn’t bring an army. He brought two deputies, put himself between the Keep and the horde of undead, and told them that he had been lawfully elected sheriff by the people of Milton County. He was the law and he had arrived to take the suspect into his custody. And then he told them to disperse.
I didn’t get to see the end of it all, but war didn’t break out on that field. The People took their vampires and went home. Beau took his suspect into custody and proceeded unmolested to the Milton County jail. People started calling him Beau the Brave.
Looking at Beau, it was easy to see why he would inspire legends. Huge, six foot six, with massive shoulders and powerful arms, he made his big wooden desk look small, but it wasn’t his size alone. There was something unflappable about Beau. A kind of measured steady calm. He knew exactly what his mission in life was: he was the voice of reason and when reason failed, he enforced the law.
“Is that fried chicken?”
“Yes.”
“Virginia’s fried chicken?”
Virginia made the best fried chicken in North Atlanta and never tried to pass rat meat off as chicken tenders. I managed to look offended. “Of course it is. Who do you take me for?”
Beau leaned back. “Might you be trying to bribe a law enforcement official, Ms. Daniels?”
“You bet.”
Beau glanced at Derek. “Gaunt.”
Derek nodded. “Sheriff.”
Beau turned to Ascanio. “And who would you be?”
I almost opened my mouth to tell him he was our intern and stopped myself. He was willing to take adult risks, he would get an adult introduction. “He’s Ascanio Ferara of Clan Bouda. He works with me.”
Ascanio blinked.
Beau took a long look at Ascanio, probably committing the name and face combination to the extensive files in his sheriff memory. “So how’s business?”
“Fair to middling. How’s yours?”
“About the same. Things quieted down a bit in the last six months.”
“It’s because of your name recognition.” I opened my root beer and took a swig. “‘Beau the Brave’ has a certain menacing ring to it.”
Beau grunted.
“Imagine, in about three hundred years, they will tell legends about you,” I said.
“They will,” Derek added. “Beau the Brave, nine feet tall, able to behead ten vampires in a single swing.”
“Never thought about it much,” Beau said. “But if it keeps the ne’er-do-wells from causing mischief, I can live with it.”
“Ne’er-do-wells?” Derek asked.
“I read.” Beau looked slightly offended.
“Ancient literature?” Ascanio inquired. “Did it have words like ‘dame’ and ‘stool pigeon’ in it?”
“Do you make your deputies call you ‘copper’?” Derek asked.
“Have you two ever thought of taking your show on the road?” Beau asked them.
If Beau’s legend grew big enough and enough people believed in it, he would live for a long time and he might even grow taller. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that. He didn’t look comfortable with the whole thing as it was.
“So what can I do for you?” he asked.
I took out the scrap of the article and pushed it across the table toward him.
He glanced at the clipping. “What’s your interest in the Eakle brothers?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Ahh. You’re in the market for a gold winged horse.”
Gold? Julie’s notes said golden in color. “Something like that. Can you tell me more?”
Beau sipped his root beer. “Chad and Jeremy Eakle are Caleb and Mary Eakle’s sons. Nice enough fellows, but not a lot of brains between the two of them. Never been in serious trouble. My deputies had a few run-ins with them some years back, when they were in high school. Nothing too bad, typical petty things bored kids do: throwing beer bottles at stop signs, making bonfires, mooning people off the Cassidy Bridge. The usual. Both have jobs and families now. Both go to church.”
“Sound like good law-abiding citizens,” I said. Making Beau spill the beans faster would require more magic than my father and I could put together.
“Pretty much. Last Saturday, they were drinking beer and fishing in the Blue River Forest. They’d been at it for a few hours, in which they went halfway through a small keg from Jekyll Brewery.”
A small keg in post-Shift Atlanta held three gallons, which meant the two Eakle brothers had put away about a six-pack and change each.
“The day turned hot. Since nobody was around, they’d taken off their clothes to go swimming, when a ‘big gold horse’ with wings walked out of the woods on the opposite bank and started drinking. The two geniuses decided to try to catch it and made it partway across the river, when, according to them, ‘a winged devil’ landed on the horse and told them to run before he devoured their souls.”
Well, that escalated quickly. Winged devil, huh. “And this devil rode the horse?”
“Supposedly.”
So the winged horses were rideable.
“Apparently, the Eakle boys took him seriously, because they got the hell out of the
river and ran naked and screaming through the woods right into a Girl Scout campground, where two rival troops of Girl Scouts were having an archery competition. The Girl Scouts joined forces to subdue the interlopers.”
Ascanio snorted.
Beau’s eyes shone. “When my deputies got there, they were trussed up like two hogs. Jeremiah Eakle sustained an arrow shot to his left buttock. It was determined not to be life-threatening, so the arrow was extracted, and we booked them for indecent exposure and intoxication in a public place. They’ve sobered up and were released on their own recognizance. They don’t remember much, except for the soul-devouring bit.”
Just my luck.
“However, I, being an experienced member of law enforcement, sent one of my deputies to check out their story and collect their clothes, and she recovered some evidence from the scene. Evidence that may be of interest to you.”
Why did I get the sudden feeling that this would cost me? “May I see that evidence?”
“I need a favor,” Beau said.
Of course. “Shoot.”
“There is an elderly woman. Jene Boudreaux.”
He pronounced “Jene” as Zhe-nay.
“She is in her eighties, lives alone, and her neighbors have been reporting odd things. Weird noises, disconcerting smells, and one of them swears he saw her pick up a dead pigeon his cat didn’t finish off the lawn and take it into her house. So I had my people do a health and welfare check. If she was starving and resorting to picking up dead pigeons, we have a moral obligation to do something about it. My deputy went out there. She was muttering under her breath and then out of nowhere she lunged at him and bit him on the shoulder hard enough to draw blood. He took her in after that.”
“Did you check her teeth?” I asked. The teeth were one of the first parts to show signs of a human turning into something else.
“Yes. Normal human teeth. I had a chat with her. We didn’t get anywhere. So we put her in a cell and called down to the psychiatric unit in the city to come and evaluate her. She was in that cell for about an hour. When Connie went to do her rounds, she found the cell door open and the old lady was gone.”
Better and better. “Nobody saw her leave?”
Beau shook his head. “And the cameras weren’t running, since the magic was up. A group of kids walking home from school saw her take off for the woods. We tried to follow her with bloodhounds, but the dogs refused to track. She’s been gone about ten hours. Since you have not one but two members of the Pack at your disposal, here’s the deal. You track down Jene Boudreaux, and I’ll let you examine the evidence you need.”
Even if the evidence was crap, I still owed Beau. “I’ll take that deal, but I want to see her house. I’d like to know what I’m walking into.”
“Fine by me.” Beau raised his voice. “Robby!”
A lanky blond deputy materialized in the doorway.
“This is Robert Holland,” Beau said. “Robert will go with you and provide assistance and legal authority.”
“Folks,” Holland nodded at us.
“Mrs. Boudreaux has been a part of our community for all of her life,” Beau said. “Her husband drove my sons to school in his armored bus when he was alive. She is known to people. I want it to be understood that even if Mrs. Boudreaux isn’t herself, Deputy Holland is the one who gives the all clear. If violence is inevitable, it must be authorized by one of us.”
Fine by me.
• • •
JENE BOUDREAUX LIVED in a small older house typical of the pre-Shift Georgia suburbs: one story, about twelve hundred square feet, a wooden fence and an abundance of plants and hedges up front. The plants had seen better days and the hedges were blocking the windows.
Twenty feet from the house, Derek and Ascanio stopped in unison.
“Odd smell?” I guessed.
“Mm-hm.” Derek inhaled and grimaced. “Smells like hot iron.”
A few feet from the door I smelled it too, a thick, sharp odor. It didn’t smell like anything in particular; it was its own ugly scent that cut across my senses like a knife. Something bad lived here.
Robert Holland put the key into the lock and opened the door. “We confiscated the keys when we arrested her.”
“Did you get to see her at all during any of this?”
He shook his head. “Shannon made the arrest. I do know her. My mother used to run a crafting club, where the older ladies would gather together, socialize, and knit or quilt.”
The knitting circle. More and more of those were springing up, as machine-knit clothes became harder to come by.
“Old ladies come in two flavors: sweet or mean. She was the mean kind. But my momma always tried to include her, until she flat-out refused to come about three years ago.”
The inside of the house was dark. Thick curtains blocked the light. I pulled them aside, letting the day in through the glass patio door. No bars on the frame. Odd. Apparently Jene wasn’t afraid of whatever the magic-fueled night could spawn.
A layer of dust coated the old furniture. Derek tried it with his fingers. “Sticky.”
Not dust, grime. The kind of grime that accumulated after years of willful neglect.
“When did she go weird?” Ascanio asked.
“She was always an odd bird,” Holland said. “She had a real glare on her. I checked the log. We’d been called out before about a year ago. Some kids were playing on the street and being loud. They said she came out of the house and clicked her teeth at them. Scared them half to death. Parents filed a complaint. There were probably incidents before that, but most folks here live and let live, so it’s hard to say.”
Great. Kate Daniels, tracker of old ladies with a biting fetish. And me without my armor.
Derek pulled the glass door open and stepped out into the yard.
No pictures on the walls. No dishes in the sink. Dust on the sink’s edges. Not cleaning is one thing, but when you ran water, inevitably some splashed on the counter. No splash marks disturbed the dust. Ascanio opened the fridge.
“Empty.”
I didn’t have a good feeling about this.
“Kate?” Derek called.
I stepped outside. The yard looked perfectly ordinary. Green grass, shrubs, and bird feeders. Many, many bird feeders in every shape and size. I could see at least two baited cage traps under the bushes.
Derek stepped closer to me.
“I smell one of Roland’s people.”
Great. “Which one?”
“I don’t know. But this scent was at his base when we went to talk to him. Now it’s here.”
I went back inside and moved to the first bedroom. Dark stains marked the round doorknob. I reached into my pocket, drew a length of gauze, wrapped it around the handle, and swung it open.
The stench hit me then, like a slap to the face. Bones tumbled toward me, and I jumped back as they rolled onto the filthy carpet.
“Holy crap,” Holland said.
If the bedroom had carpet at one point, there was no way to tell what color it was. At least six or seven inches’ worth of small animal bones covered the floor. A lot of bird carcasses. A few raccoon skeletons, some cat bones. They probably had a problem with missing pets in this neighborhood. All the bones were clean and smooth. I reached down with my gauze and picked up a small dog’s femur. The marrow had been sucked out.
“Picked clean,” Ascanio said.
She must’ve been throwing them in through the window, because there was no way she could’ve opened the door without all of them falling out.
The bones reeked. Decomposition didn’t smell like that and there was nothing here to decompose anyway. No, this was the sharp odor of the spit she deposited as she licked the bones clean. No wonder the bloodhounds didn’t follow her. This stench made my hair stand on end.
I glanced at Derek. “C
an you follow her trail?”
“Sure. Following isn’t a problem,” he said.
“Let’s do that.” I didn’t want her running around unsupervised in my land, especially if my father’s people were involved, although I had no clue why he was interested in her. This wasn’t my father’s magic, structured, almost scientific in its precision. This was something old and dark that crept about in the night.
“What is she, Kate?” Ascanio asked, as we left the house.
“I have no idea.”
CHAPTER
7
WE CLIMBED DEEP into the Blue River woods. The trees took the brunt of the sun’s assault, but still, the heat baked us. Sweat collected in my armpits despite the deodorant. Another half hour in this heat, and nobody would have trouble tracking us. We’d leave a scent trail a mile wide.
The river cut through the forest from north to south, flowing through a narrow valley bordered by hills. It had formed during a flare years ago, streaming from the now massive Bryon Lake. Nearly all storm drainage in the area ended up in the Blue River through the tiny creeks and swales, and when it rained, the river rebelled and roared. Right now it lay calm, beckoning me with its nice cold water as we crossed the narrow wooden bridge, heading north, deeper into the woods.
I wished I could take a dip. Ten minutes and I would be ready to go hunt old ladies again. Sadly, no dipping would be happening.
The path turned west, climbing up a slope.
Derek grimaced again. He would never complain, but the scent had to be driving him nuts. Ascanio was equally stoic. Neither of them had belittled the other’s wits, fighting ability, or sexual prowess in the last half hour. If I were less badass, I’d be worried.
We’d been walking for another fifteen minutes when Derek paused. Ascanio came to stand next to him. They stared through the trees where light indicated a clearing. We’d reached the top of a low hill.
“Is she close?”
They both nodded.
“The scent is so . . . wrong,” Ascanio said.
I pulled Sarrat out of my sheath. Holland pulled a sword out of the scabbard on his hip. Dark, with a no-nonsense epoxy and leather grip, the blade ran about nineteen inches long and at least an inch and a half wide, with a profile that fell somewhere between a falchion and a Collins machete. Holland held it like he’d gotten it dirty before.