River Road (11 page)

“Not Jake.” He might break my heart but he’d never hurt me physically. I hadn’t known him that long or that well, but I was a decent judge of character. “The enforcers wouldn’t have let him come back here unless he could handle himself.”

“I hope you’re right,” Alex said, his grim focus on the road ahead. “For all our sakes.”

CHAPTER
11

When my front doorbell rang after dinner, I figured it was Alex, ready to do his alpha dog routine and give me hell about embroiling him in the hot Corvette fiasco.

Instead, I opened the door to a pretty brunette in her early fifties, with soft brown eyes, a clear olive complexion, and an ability to strip a person’s heart bare with a single look. Tish Newman had been a fixture in my life since childhood, present for all the highs and lows as I grew up with the love of her life. Gerry’s death had opened a crevice of pain between us. My fault, not hers.

“I got your message and thought I’d drop by instead of calling,” Tish said, hugging me hard.

Unexpected, unshed tears pressed behind my eyes and I pulled away. I didn’t want a trip down memory lane right now. Stress and magic had worn me down today, and seeing her ripped the scab off a wound that had festered instead of healed.

“I just closed on a modified shotgun house up on Carondelet.” She threw her purse on the coffee table and shrugged off her light jacket. “I can’t decide whether to rent it out for the extra income or move into it myself because it’s closer to work—and closer to you.” She looked around at the double parlors. “You’ve done some redecorating since I was here last.”

I looked around, doing a quick tally. “Yeah, Jean Lafitte shot a hole in that armchair with the fleur-de-lis upholstery and I couldn’t replace the fabric. I burned up the ceiling fan and coffee table with the elven staff. I bled all over the old sofa.”

Since Alex had lived here briefly after the storm, trying to accordion his bulky frame onto a frilly daybed, I’d also turned the downstairs office into a proper guestroom.

Tish didn’t respond, and I turned, expecting to see pity. Instead, she had her teeth firmly clamped together, fighting laughter. She lost the battle, breaking into a bray that made me laugh too. “That’s pathetic, DJ.”

“Yeah.” I smiled at her, unable to shelter my heart by keeping her at a distance. I shouldn’t have tried. “I’ve missed you.”

“How are you, really?” Tish asked. “Are you happy about all the changes, or wish things were back like they were before the storm? The relaxed borders will affect the sentinels and enforcers more than anyone else.”

I had to think about my answer. I missed the innocence of life before the storm, not just my own innocence but the city’s. Before Katrina we all had a deep-seated naïveté that we might have our problems but somehow our foibles would never escalate into a full-out catastrophe. Katrina had been a big eye-opener.

I shrugged. “It is what it is. There’s good and bad. Not like we can do anything about it.”

She smiled. “Very practical. Very Gerry. You’re a lot like him.”

I laughed. “So people keep telling me.” A comparison to Gerry wasn’t necessarily a compliment, although I knew Tish meant it that way. The Elders had viewed him as impulsive and unpredictable, and he’d died in the act of betraying them. I suspected “sins of the father,” as much as my gender and non-warrior status, kept them from giving me the job as sole sentinel. Although after today, I had to admit Alex’s steady nerves and investigative skills had been impressive.

I pulled out the vials containing the water samples and spread another set of testing jars along my worktable. I conducted meetings at my office, but the real business of magic took place here, on this long mahogany table surrounded by shelves of books and the building blocks of spells and potions.

While Tish unpacked her water-testing supplies, I filled her in on the day’s events in Pass a Loutre. “Any ideas on how to do this?”

She picked up one of the vials and poured a few drops into each of three culture dishes. “I’m just going to use a commercial kit for lead and other pollutants, so we can rule them out. There will be some—there always is—but if levels are high enough to make people sick we should be able to tell. The first thing to check for is E. coli. That’ll take a while to test—we’ll have to put the water samples in a growth culture, see if we can grow a colony.”

Ick. “How long will it take?”

“About twenty-four hours, and it has to incubate in the fridge. Forty-eight hours otherwise.”

I’d told Rene three days, which was cutting it close. Moldy leftovers were one thing, but I really, really didn’t want to incubate an E. coli colony in my refrigerator. “The mers can wait,” I said.

She finished setting up her dishes, covered them so Sebastian wouldn’t wander into the E. coli forest, and set them on a shelf. “That should do it for normal pollutants—we’ll know in a couple of days. I don’t have a clue how to detect magical contamination in water, though. We’re going to have to figure out how to do that.”

We left the worktable and eased into the armchairs near the windows. My house had weathered Katrina well. The high ceilings and soft lamps, the tall windows with their old Victorian crown molding, and the slate hearth in front of the coal-burning fireplace gave the room a solid, secure feeling. Nothing says permanence like an old house that has weathered hurricanes, high tides, and a few wars.

“I’ll have to do some research,” I said, thinking about how spending another night pawing through magical texts was the last thing I wanted to do. Would I ever get skilled to the point where I’d just know stuff, and not have to pull all-nighters figuring out obscure things like merman lore and magical water contamination? Would Gerry have known what to do?

“You look exhausted,” Tish said. “You don’t have to do this tonight, do you?”

“I have some mermen ready to kill each other over this, which will bring the Elders in to do damage control, which will piss off the mers in other areas, and then we’ll have a big mess on our hands,” I said. Plus, it would make me look like a doofus. “So, no, it can’t wait. If there really is a problem with the water, there are lots of humans who hunt and fish in that area. What if the food fish are being poisoned?”

She nodded. “Not to mention a couple of dead guys that this Denis Villere or Rene Delachaise might or might not have killed.”

“Not to mention them,” I said. “I can see Rene and Denis killing each other with the flick of a fin. But why would either one go after a college professor? And Doug Hebert wasn’t just killed. He was mutilated, so it was personal. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Denis showed up when he did.”

“Doug Hebert was the one killed?” Tish frowned. “I know him. Well, I know who he is. We worked together for a few months when we were young, but I haven’t seen him in years.” She shook her head. “I didn’t realize he was the victim. Who was the other one?”

I grabbed my notebook off the table and flipped through it. “Jeffrey Klein. Also a Tulane prof.”

Tish paled. “I knew him too, or I did a long time ago. We all worked for the Elders after the war in ’76 but lost touch after that. They were both really mainstreamed. Last I heard they were doing wetlands research, working on some big federal project to try and stop the land loss. They’d had nothing to do with the active wizarding community for years, as far as I know.”

So our professors were doing wetlands research and had been murdered in the wetlands, or at least one of them had. Where Jeff Klein died was still a question mark. Had they stumbled across something they shouldn’t have?

“What did Green Congress wizards do in the war?” I asked. “I thought Red Congress saw all the action—they’re the fighters.”

“We were all young and wanted to be involved, so the Elders gave us odd jobs that didn’t require a lot of physical magic,” Tish said. “Nothing serious or dangerous. I had to check the trackers every day and keep a list of what wizards were in town and where they were going. New Orleans wasn’t very involved—most of the power struggles happened in Europe.”

The feeling of Rene’s anger and Denis’s outright hatred came back to me. “Changing the subject, do you know anything that happened during the war to make the mers hate wizards so much?”

Tish laughed. “DJ, every prete group hates wizards. We’re the biggest group, we have more powers, and we can mainstream easily. The mers aren’t alone, although…” Her brow furrowed in thought. “You know, a lot of the water species were put in kind of detention camps while the postwar treaties were being sorted out. Stripped of their territory, forced to live in a defined space. The mers were probably part of that.”

Maybe Rene and Robert’s father had been one of the mers locked up and stripped of his land. That would certainly be enough to make them hate wizards, especially for Cajun mers who’d already been through it when they’d been forced to leave Acadia.

I filed it away to research later, when I didn’t have more urgent things to figure out. “Okay, back to testing water for magical contamination.” I returned to the worktable and picked up one of the Pass a Loutre samples we hadn’t yet used for testing. “If I can detect magical energy on the surface of things, I wonder if I could detect it in water?”

Tish joined me at the table. “It’s worth a try—that’s one of those stray elven skills your gene pool handed you. I can’t think of a potion or charm that would work in water.”

I looked around the room and, sure enough, Charlie sat propped against the doorjamb. I went over and grabbed it, bringing it back to the table.

“I swear that thing was downstairs when I got here,” Tish said, reaching out to touch it. The staff, under her hand, was an inert stick of wood. “Is it still following you around?”

“I usually have to think about it for it to show up now.” I brushed my fingers along the raised sigils, and it glowed slightly. When I first found it, the thing followed me indiscriminately. Maybe my charm was wearing off.

“Sorry, DJ, but that’s just creepy.”

I smiled. I used to think so. Now, Charlie was sort of like the affectionate pet Sebastian would never be. I’d had a great dog for a while, but it turned out to be Alex. So I was reduced to having a stick of elven wood for a pet. Talk about pathetic.

I took a soft cloth from a drawer beneath the table and polished the wood to a warm sheen. “I’m going to try it using the staff. If I waste all the water, our diving merman’s going to get some more samples tomorrow anyway.”

Tish settled back in her chair to watch as I poured a palmful of the water from Pass a Loutre into my left hand and grasped the elven staff in my right. I closed my eyes and went through the process I’d used earlier in the day, sorting through sounds and senses.

I should have tried meditation using the staff earlier. It amplified everything, clarified the sensory inputs, and helped me release them so I could focus on the energy in the room. Riding above the warm buzz of Tish’s wizard energy were the faint traces of two other powers coming off the water in my hand. The first one, which didn’t surprise me, was the cold, hard buzz of a mer; the other, once I isolated it, clogged my lungs and sped my heart rate, a dense and pulsating sensation I’d never encountered. I dropped the staff, wanting to be rid of its power before the sensations suffocated me.

“What happened?” Tish had stood up and crossed the room without my realizing it. For a few seconds, I’d been lost in the sensations.

Holy crap. Rene was right. Something awful was in that water.

Tish and I batted theories around for an hour but still had no idea what my great discovery meant. Only that whatever was contaminating the water, it wasn’t E. coli.

About eight, Tish left with tentative plans to join tomorrow’s scouting party to Pass a Loutre. I also called Alex and asked him to go so I could stay home and wrestle with the water problem. I didn’t know if Jake was ready to deal with the weirdness we’d encountered today without help and, judging by how quickly Alex agreed to go, I suspected he thought the same thing. Jake would hate it if he knew we were trying to protect him, so he’d just have to never know.

I collapsed on the sofa in my upstairs sitting room, trying to unwind. On TV, chef Bobby Flay was in Kitchen Stadium concocting five courses from a rare species of fish. I felt like I’d had five courses of merman today, and it was a serious overdose. Sebastian sat next to me, giving me the Siamese cross-eyed stare of death until I put a nibble or two of my ice cream on the carton lid for him.

My thoughts raced around the water problem. The fact that I felt mer energy in the sample didn’t really implicate any of them. It could have been residual aura from Rene diving for the water samples. I needed to find out what that other energy was.

Maybe it would help to have someone from another species collect the samples tomorrow. Then if the mer energy was still present, it would move them higher on the suspect list.

I set the ice cream on the coffee table and went to my library for my laptop. I called up the rudimentary database the Elders had sent, giving contact information for the heads of prete groups that had formally settled into the area—or at least the ones they knew about. It was a short list. The Realm of Vampyre had a Regent who’d set up shop in the Quarter, running a tour business. The weregators had a representative in Iberia Parish, the area from which the Villere clan had moved. Neither the fae nor the elves—the other major prete groups—appeared to have moved outside the Beyond.

I paused over the next-to-last name on the list. Interesting. The official representative for the merpeople was Toussaint Delachaise, with an address in Chenoire, St. Bernard Parish, just northeast of New Orleans. Delachaise wasn’t that common a name, even in these parts, so it looked like Rene and Robert were well connected. Was it their father?

The final name on the list was the one I was looking for, but I winced when I saw it. The Greater Mississippi River Nymphs was headed by someone named Blueberry Muffin. Really? A prete who doesn’t understand humans enough to pick an unsuspicious name is probably going to fail at mainstreaming. I didn’t hold out much hope for the nymphs.