River Road (10 page)

I thought about the fading sense of magical energy I’d felt when we arrived—an energy now gone. We’d been here almost three hours. Had his killer been watching us? Had Jeffrey Klein already been left for dead by the time we arrived? Could we have saved him if we’d thought to look for someone else?

Now I was totally spooked. “What about the dead wizards’ families?”

More keyboard clicks. “Douglas Hebert has a wife, but no children,” Hoffman said. “She is a mundane, but knew her husband was a wizard. The Elders will notify her, then you and Mr. Alex Warin can talk to her. Dr. Klein was not married and lived alone. Neither wizard was active in the magical community, and had not been for many years. That’s about all I can tell you.”

While I had Hoffman in a relatively jovial mood, I also filled him in on the tentative territory agreement Rene and Denis had made, contingent on the water problems being resolved.

“What has that mercenary Jean Lafitte’s role been? What is he after?” Hoffman asked.

I looked out at Jean, still deep in conversation with Rene. “I think he and Rene Delachaise have some business dealings he doesn’t want to see disrupted by a mer war.” I decided not to mention the hot Corvette. “If he has another agenda, I haven’t figured it out. Well, except he’s a nosy SOB. What about paying Rene for the use of his boat and for lost wages? We could rent a boat in Venice if you don’t want to pay him.”

Hoffman paused; his breath echoed through the phone in huffy snorts. “Bloody extortionist—he knows the investigation will go faster if we use him, plus we can keep an eye on him. Agree to pay him the going day rate for a boat in that area, and not a farthing more.”

Yeah, I’d be mentioning the farthing to Rene, too, right after the part where I threatened to exile him to the Beyond.

I ended the call and sat in the wheelhouse, procrastinating. I was exhausted. I knew it was a combination of physical magic and stress, but I’d also seen too much death the last few years. Gerry’s death and the revelation that he was my father weighed heavily on me when I didn’t lock it away. Sometimes, the sadness leaked out anyway.

My phone chirped to let me know the battery was low, startling me so that I dropped it on the console. My nerves were shot, too.

But I still had a body to dispatch. I left the wheelhouse and pulled my backpack off the winch platform, digging inside for a small jar of unrefined sea salt and retrieving the elven staff. I stared at the salt for a moment, then swapped it for a jar of iron filings. There were a bazillion insects out here, and my transport needed to be super-strong to avoid being broken by a horsefly or a swamp rat. A boar or a gator, I could do nothing about.

Returning to the bank, I filled Alex in on my conversation with Hoffman while trickling a stream of iron from my fingers. The standard symbols for transport consisted of an interlocking circle and triangle, and I created one around Douglas Hebert’s body. Making solid lines on the uneven soil proved tricky, so I worked slowly.

I studied the insect-covered treasures off to the side, namely Doug Hebert’s excised body parts laid out like gory souvenirs. I would bite off my own nose before I’d pick them up and move them.

Instead, I extended the circle around them, shooing flies away and trying not to breathe too deeply or look too closely.

Touching the elven staff to the transport for an extra kick of energy to complement my own waning powers, I willed magic into the invisible field that arose and quietly spoke the words to send the body to the Elders, along with a mass of teleporting insects. A quick shimmering of air and a few sparks from the end of the staff, and Doug Hebert’s body vanished.

Even using the staff for the ritual, my head swam and my arms and legs felt cast in iron. A transport was one of the most energy-draining actions a wizard could take, which is why we didn’t do it more often and magically fling ourselves willy-nilly around the globe.

I sloshed back to the boat and didn’t protest when Jean leaned over the edge to help me in, still singing the praises of that newfangled shower contraption. Couldn’t argue with him. This wizard needed a bath and a nap.

Alex followed me, even letting Jean help him aboard. In today’s sea of bad behavior, they’d both remained cool and professional. I hadn’t given either of them enough credit.

“You left the transport open?” Alex asked.

I nodded. “If Jake finds Jeffrey Klein’s body tomorrow, he can send it back to the Elders without me having to do it. It’ll hold for about twenty-four hours unless something big like a gator slides through and breaks the energy field. Worth a try.”

If I never visited Pass a Loutre again, it would be okay with me.

CHAPTER
10

Jean took the helm on the return trip, delighting in the novelty of a motorized vessel. He looked at home in the wheelhouse, his sharp blue eyes scanning the coast to our right and the open water ahead. I wondered how he must have looked commanding his heavily armed schooners as they crisscrossed the Gulf, looking for Spanish ships to pillage.

Alex had his cell phone plastered to his ear, putting in the formal request to the head of the enforcers for Jake’s assistance, so I went to talk to Rene, who was leaning against the rail on the portside aft deck. Maybe I could do a little merman fence-mending.

“I’ve been thinking about the water problem.” I stopped beside him, watching the shoreline slide past. He no longer projected hostility, a positive sign. “It doesn’t make sense that either your family or the Villeres would poison the water you want as your hunting grounds.”

He turned dark, long-lashed eyes to study me. “We didn’t do it, so who else could it be? Somethin’ is definitely wrong with that water, babe.”

I stared at the changing vegetation—more trees, fewer reeds—as we got closer to civilization. “I don’t know. But I promise I’ll find out. Just don’t do anything crazy till I’ve had time to find an answer, okay?”

He grunted, probably as close to an agreement as I’d get.

I had a sudden thought. “You say the water contamination seemed stronger today when you swam deeper, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“That means the contamination is probably coming from the riverbed. Maybe it’s something buried in the bottom that keeps sending out poison. It has to be some ongoing thing; otherwise, the poison would already have spread out and be too weak to make anybody sick.”

Rene turned and propped against the rail with his back to shore, frowning. “Makes sense, but that don’t mean the Villeres didn’t do it.”

He wasn’t going to let go of that idea until I could prove him wrong. “I’ll test the water as soon as I get home—it’s the only way we’ll know.” I wondered if the water problem had any connection to the dead wizards or if the deaths, the water contamination, and the mer feud were three separate issues. All it did was make my headache worse.

If mers had populated South Louisiana for centuries, long before the Wizards’ War of 1976, how many more were there now? Were there clans we didn’t know about, scattered all along the coastal areas? Were all merpeople mainstreamed, or did some still live in the Beyond?

“Were you around during the war?” I asked Rene. Like wizards, mers were long-lived, and I had no idea how old he was. He looked about thirty, but looks meant nothing. Jean Lafitte didn’t look much older, and I knew better.

“I was just a kid, but my papa, he had a bad time of it.” He paused a long time, eyes seeming to reflect faraway thoughts. “The wizards weren’t no friends of ours, of any of the water people.”

“Is that why you hate wizards?” Could it be something that old and deep-seated?

His jaw tightened. “I shouldn’t have said that. But yeah, that’s where most of it started.”

“What happened?”

“We ain’t talking ’bout this, babe. You want a history lesson, ask your Elders.”

We lapsed into silence. The wizards required training in magic via a mentoring system, but Gerry hadn’t dwelt much on magical history. I knew the war had begun when a small group of rogue wizards joined forces with Vampyre, Faerie, and a couple of lesser territories in the Beyond and tried to overthrow the wizard gatekeepers. They wanted to pull down the borders between the Now and the Beyond, and they’d almost succeeded. I didn’t even realize the water species had been involved.

We finally got back to Venice. While Alex and Rene made plans for a return trip, I called Letitia Newman, a Green Congress wizard and an old friend I’d seen way too little of the last couple of years. She’d been Gerry’s significant other as long as I could remember, even though they’d never married, and I wondered how she’d coped with his loss. I’d avoided her because it just hurt too much. But Tish worked as a water engineer for the port authority. If anyone could help me figure out what was wrong with the water, it would be her.

By the time I left a message on her voice mail, Rene had gone home and Jean and Alex stood beside the passenger door to my Pathfinder, having a metaphorical pissing match to see who’d be riding in front.

Yawning, I threw my keys at Alex. He caught them in mid-air. Good reflexes. “You drive. I’m going to nap. Play nice.”

After spreading out a newspaper to keep from leaving a pound of bayou mud all over my backseat, I climbed in and quickly locked the door behind me, just in time to keep Jean from following. I would not be napping with the undead.

Fats Domino began singing from my backpack about the time we reached Belle Chasse. “Walking to New Orleans” had been my ringtone since before Katrina. It seemed especially appropriate today since walking to New Orleans was what Jean would be doing if he didn’t stop watching me over the back of the passenger seat. He’d ruined a perfectly good napping opportunity because I was afraid I’d drool or snore, and they’d make fun of me.

I dug the phone out of my pocket and looked at the caller ID. Jake Warin’s name brought a smile to the end of a long, stressful day.

The strains of an old BeauSoleil song filled in the background when I answered the phone, which told me he was calling from the Gator.

“Hey there, darlin’. Is this a bad time?”

That soft Mississippi drawl could make sparks fly out my ears. One conversation Friday night had reminded me of all the things I liked about him. Not that Alex didn’t have the same deep drawl, but he never used it to flirt, or at least not with me.

Jean whispered something to Alex and I knew from their stillness they were both eavesdropping.

“Your timing’s fine, but my phone’s almost out of juice,” I said, looking daggers at Jean. “I’m on my way back from Plaquemines Parish with Alex and Jean Lafitte.”

“Has Samantha been a busy girl today, twitching her nose and doing magic tricks?”

If only. “Today’s show was more like
Bewitched
meets
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. And don’t call me Samantha—she was a witch, not a wizard.”

Jake laughed, and I heard a snort from Alex’s side of the front seat. Jean likely had no idea what we were talking about, not having yet discovered late-night sitcom reruns.

“Yeah, I just got my orders to look for a body out there tomorrow so I’ll need to get the details.”

My heart sank more than it had any right to. He hadn’t called for me. He’d called for Alex. “I’m water problem; Alex is murder problem. Hold on, I’ll put him on.”

“No, wait.”

I put the phone back to my ear. “What?”

“If I wanted to talk to my cousin, I would have called him, wouldn’t I?” The background music changed to a slow Cajun ballad, a sexy swirl of fiddle and accordion.

I smiled again, and saw Alex raise an eyebrow as he watched me in the rearview mirror. “Yeah, I guess you would have.”

“What you doing Wednesday night?”

I had a standing date with a grouchy cat and a DVD, but he didn’t need to know that. “You tell me.”

He chuckled. “Since we’re speaking again, why don’t we do something outrageous. Maybe dinner. Some music—Zachary Richard’s gonna play a set at the Gator. My first marriage didn’t last as long as it’s taken us to go on a real date. Talk about foreplay.”

“I can do outrageous, and I can definitely do Zachary Richard—well, you know what I mean.” I wanted to say I could do foreplay, but knew Alex’s head would explode and Jean would want foreplay defined. “What time?”

Jake and I finished making plans. If he was cracking jokes about his failed marriage that began just before his Marine deployment and ended just after his discharge, he must be handling life okay. Alex shouldn’t worry about him being an enforcer. He was a Marine. Weren’t they always prepared? Or was that the Boy Scouts?

As I ended the call, I glanced at the rearview mirror again and locked gazes with Alex briefly before he turned his attention back to the road. He’d just have to get over it. Jake and I were going to eat dinner at a restaurant and listen to one of my favorite musicians. No big deal.

Around us, ancient live oaks draped with Spanish moss gave way to more suburban clutter, and a burnt-orange sunset eased us toward nightfall. It was only five thirty, but already the shortening days felt like a clock running down and drifting toward winter.

“Your rogue wolf might not have adjusted as well as you hope,
Jolie,
” Jean said in a soft voice. “The loup-garou will find it difficult to live here, where his heart is.”

“Exactly what I’ve been telling her,” Alex said, flicking his glance to my mirror image again.

What strange bedfellows those two annoying busybodies made. I watched the traffic flow around us and ignored them.

“Most of the loup-garou live in the Beyond, right?” Alex asked Jean.

“
Oui.
The legends say the Acadian settlers brought a demon with them, one who appeared as a man unless the full moon shone overhead or he became angered. The loup-garou are larger than your werewolves and do not join packs. Even other werewolves fear them.”

I got sucked in despite my determination to pretend I wasn’t listening. “Since so many weres are mainstreamed, why do most of the loup-garou live in the Beyond?”

Jean and Alex exchanged a look. “Because their self-control is so bad,” Alex said in a flat voice. “They can change in an instant, putting everyone around them in danger.”