River Road (7 page)

He leaned on the rail, uncharacteristically silent.

Curious, I lowered my empathic barricades enough to take his emotional temperature. As a former human, he broadcast his feelings like a megawatt radio station. He didn’t know about that particular skill of mine, and that’s the way I wanted to keep it.

A whisper of melancholy seeped into me. Jean was lonely, and spending time on his old stomping grounds made him feel it more acutely.

I fingered the mojo bag in my jeans pocket and let the magic smooth his emotional fingerprint from my mind, but a residue of my own sadness remained. I didn’t know how it felt to live well past all of the people I cared about, but I knew too much about loss and loneliness. Jean suddenly seemed a lot more human.

“Where do you live in the Beyond?” I knew he spent time in Old Orleans, that preternatural free zone between the modern city and the Beyond proper. It was like a New Orleans theme park with all the city’s historical time periods represented in one finite area, on warp-drive. I’d been there once and didn’t want to go back.

“I live in Old Barataria,” he said, his voice soft. “It looks much as it did when I commanded my men there. I have a fine house on the beach. There are no—” He waved his hand in the air. “Bah. I do not know the word for the towers men use to find oil.”

“Derricks,” I said. The Louisiana waters were rife with them. Huey Long sold our coastline to Big Oil long before I was born.

I watched him lean over the rail, so natural and at ease on the deck of even a small boat such as this. Where I had to concentrate to steady my balance as the
Dieu de la Mer
cut through the waterways, his stance was effortless and natural as we passed the outpost of Pilottown and approached the choppy east pass connecting the Mississippi to the Gulf.

“What happened to your house in Barataria, when you left?” I asked.

His jaw tightened. “The Americans burned it, even after I helped them win their little war.” That would be the little War of 1812.

Jean was different than most of the historical undead, who were uncomfortable in the modern world. Even when summoned by a wizard or a magically adept human, they’d go back to their corner of the the Beyond without a fight. Not Jean. He liked keeping a foot in both worlds.

“Would you really want to live in modern New Orleans, where so many things have changed and you have to hide who you are?”

He glanced at me over his shoulder, then stood and slid an arm around my waist, tugging me against him. “Is that an invitation, Drusilla? I believe there would be many advantages to living in your modern world.”

Fine. We’d had a nice conversation. I’d started to genuinely like him, even to glimpse what a burden he might carry. Now we were back to smarmy innuendo.

“No, it is not an invitation,” I snapped, slapping his arm. “And everybody calls me DJ. Only you and my grandmother call me Drusilla.” Which should tell both of us something.

“Bah.” He looked as if he’d smelled a rotten fish. “That is not a proper name for a beautiful woman.”

“I think it suits her just fine.” Strong hands slipped over my shoulders as Alex joined us, standing so close I could feel his body heat radiating into my back. Had nothing to do with the weather; shapeshifters ran hot. Had nothing to do with affection, either. He squeezed my shoulders a little too hard for it to be a show of solidarity. I’d probably have bruises. He was marking his territory.

We rounded a curve, crossing the easternmost branch of the river’s mouth, and wound our way to Pass a Loutre, a wildlife management area that wasn’t so much a place as a series of waterways providing entrance into the vast Birdfoot Delta. Other boats would pass occasionally, it being hunting season for various swamp critters, including, apparently, wild boar.

Finally, Rene navigated the
Dieu de la Mer
across a secluded bayou and through a twisting, turning set of channels. I understood the old stories now, about fishermen unfamiliar with the area who’d sailed into these marshlands and never found their way out.

The water was dark and murky, and the vegetation ranged from thick stands of trees overhanging the banks to, more often, wide swaths of marsh grass with vistas so broad I swore I could see the Earth’s curvature. Birds squawked and cawed overhead, and the air smelled of saltwater and algae.

Alex had been silent after succeeding in his mission to drive Jean to the other side of the deck. We leaned on the rail, side by side. He spoke softly. “Are you really going to dinner with that clown?”

The clown in question cleared his throat from his spot a few feet behind us, just in case Alex didn’t mean for him to overhear.

“It’ll be fine,” I whispered. “We’ll have dinner, and then he swore he’d forget all the crap I promised him after Katrina.”

Alex shook his head. “Just watch your back. And take the staff with you.”

“Rene! Le bateau—arrêtez!”
Jean bellowed suddenly, pounding on the side of the wheelhouse.

What the hell? Alex and I ran to Jean’s side of the deck, and I caught my breath. Denis Villere sat on the bank holding a shotgun. A few feet away from him lay a man.

A man who was way too bloody to still be breathing.

CHAPTER
7

After tethering the
Dieu de la Mer
a few yards down the bank, Rene joined us on the aft deck. Already in FBI mode, Alex was pulling on his shrimp boots. Denis hadn’t moved.

“You”—Alex pointed at Jean and Rene—“stay onboard.” He frowned at my bootless feet. “DJ, you stay too, at least for now.”

“I got extra boots probably fit you if you need ’em, babe.” Rene headed back into the wheelhouse and began digging through a bin. He emerged a few seconds later holding a pair of white rubber boots with big, glittery silver fish on the sides. Their sheer outrageousness was cool. I wanted them.

“Thanks.” I sat down and pulled them on in place of my running shoes. I was going to have to buy my own shrimp boots when I got a chance. The last couple of years, there always seemed to be a swamp or a flooded house I needed to wade through.

By the time I stood up, Alex had splashed ashore. He squatted next to the body as he talked to Denis in a low voice. Surely it had to be a body. The man’s lower legs were the only parts of him not covered in blood. Alex looked up at me and shook his head, and I shivered despite the sun.

Alex and Denis exchanged sharp words I couldn’t make out. Finally, the mer thrust the shotgun at Alex, butt first. He looked mad as hell, which seemed to amuse Rene. What a jackass. Nothing about this was funny.

Giving a wide berth to the area immediately surrounding the body, Alex waded back to the boat, cracked open the shotgun, unloaded it, and handed it to me. Smart man. I wouldn’t hand me a loaded gun, either. He stuck the shot in his pocket and climbed onboard, Denis’s stony stare drilling holes in his back.

“Is there any way you can tell if our dead guy is human?” Alex asked. “If he is, I need to call the Plaquemines sheriff. If not, we need to call the Elders.”

“I might be able to tell.” I lowered my voice. “You think Denis did it?”

“He says no, that he was just coming to watch the water sampling to make sure Rene didn’t pull any funny shit, but who knows. Guy looks like he’s been dead a while, and he wasn’t killed with a shotgun.”

“He ain’t one of my people, or a Villere either one,” Rene called from the foredeck, in case we didn’t know he was listening. “Man’s too tall to be a mer.”

If the guy had been dead several hours, anybody could’ve done it, including Rene or even Jean. “How about an animal attack?” I asked Alex. “One of those wild boars you guys were talking about?”

“No, he was definitely carved up with a knife. Something sharp that could cut through muscle and bone, like a filet knife.” Alex shifted his eyes to where Rene and Jean sat in the shade on the foredeck, looking daggers at Denis. “You know, like a hunter or fisherman might use. It would take somebody strong.”

Well, hell. Could be Denis. Could be Rene or Robert or T-Jacques or just about anybody else in Southeast Louisiana. “Leave me alone a minute and see if I can feel anything.”

Back in the old days, before Katrina, the sentinels had sophisticated equipment to tell us when a preternatural came across the border from the Beyond. Now, there were so many pretes strolling in and out of the region we’d quit using the trackers. I’d have to do it the hard way. Or, more accurately, the elven way.

Alex joined Rene and Jean on the shaded foredeck and motioned for Denis to climb up. With the back of the boat to myself, I walked to the rail nearest the body and closed my eyes. My daily grounding rituals to control my empathy involved focused meditation, and I used those skills to shut out the extraneous sensations, including the weight of four pairs of eyes watching me.

First, I honed in on the sounds. The caws and croaks of the swamp birds, an occasional splash, water lapping in soft swells against the side of the boat, buzzing flies in a frantic aerial dance around the body.

Shutting those out, I took note of the smells. Fish. Muddy water. Grass. The iron-rich tang of blood.

I let it all go, except what I could feel on my skin. The warmth of the soft October sunlight, an occasional pale wisp of breeze that was gone so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it—and overlapping washes of energy.

Every living thing has an aura, and my empathy—an elven skill—lets me feel it. I recognized Alex’s and Jean’s distinctive signatures, and the overwhelming sensation, fluid and cold, that came from a double dose of merman. But beneath it all, as faint as that gentle puff of wind, lay another spike of power, familiar but just beyond my grasp. I couldn’t pin it down long enough to identify it.

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes, the sunlight bringing tears as it seared into my retinas. The exertion to isolate so many sensations had ratcheted my headache from woodpecker to jackhammer.

“Something’s there, but I can’t be sure what,” I said, joining the others. “I might be able to tell more if…” I swallowed a rising swell of nausea. “It might help if I touched him.” Touching amped up the elven magic.

Alex snorted. “Forget it. I won’t have you barfing on my crime scene.”

Oh,
his
crime scene, was it? Nothing raises a girl’s hackles like being treated like a girl, even if she’s acting like a girl. Besides, if I wanted the Elders to treat me like an equal partner in this job, I couldn’t wimp out. “If you can look at it, I can look at it.”

“Okay, but I’m warning you. It’s one of the ugliest I’ve seen, and there’ll be no yarking on the body.” He had obviously mistaken me for some delicate flower from his past. Alex eased over the side of the boat into the shallows. I sat gingerly on the rail and swung my legs to the outside, said a quick prayer to whatever saint kept wizards from crime-scene yarking, and jumped. I splashed like a whale but managed to land on the big white shrimp boots and remain upright.

“Try to walk in the footprints I’ve already made,” Alex said. “If we need to call the sheriff we’ll catch hell for mucking up the scene.”

My feet slid around inside Rene’s boots and my soaked jeans weighed me down as I clomped along the muddy bank like Bigfoot. I kept my eyes off the body as long as possible, but eventually it was in front of me and there was nowhere else to look. My crab cakes threatened a second appearance.

“You okay? You’re turning green.” Alex rubbed my back like a mother soothing a fractious baby but I had no doubt he’d use that same hand to jerk me away from the dead man if I even hinted at a gagging noise.

“I’m okay.” I finally looked at the body. Really looked, trying to understand it. “What happened to him?” My voice came out in a strangled whisper.

Alex squatted beside the gruesome wreckage that a few hours ago had been a man. “Has ritual killing written all over it. My guess is what actually killed him was a slashed throat.” He made a horizontal motion across the guy’s bloody neck. “And parts of him have been cut off.”

He pointed at the groin, a ragged, bloody hole where the guy’s genitals had once been, and at the face. I tried not to think of hamburger, but couldn’t help it. The tip of the man’s nose and one eyeball had taken a vacation. His remaining brown eye stared at the sky, registering shock at the indignity of his final moments.

“The tips of his fingers have been cut off, and the entire ring finger of his left hand,” Alex said.

“Think he had an angry wife?” I looked away, gazed over the grassy marshland, and tried to settle my churning guts. “You sure an animal didn’t do it? You know, bite the … stuff off?”

“Nope, it was human—or prete. Look to your left.”

The missing parts were lined up in a neat row on the bank a few feet from the body, and were already covered in ants and flies. The finger still had a wedding ring on it. My head swam at the horror, and I couldn’t imagine the fury or madness that would spur someone to do such things. I hoped the poor guy was dead before the chopping started.

I’d never been squeamish before, but it seemed like a good time to start. I turned my back and took a deep breath to stop the horizon from spinning. A deep breath turned out to be a bad idea. I couldn’t wimp out now. This was something only I could do, and I needed to do it.

I knelt near the man’s feet with my back to him, swallowed hard, and forced a hand down to rest fingertips on his ankle. The skin felt cold and immobile. Somehow, it helped that it didn’t feel like flesh. I cleared my thoughts, letting my mind process the sensations as sunlight and shadow played across my eyelids. A faint trace of familiar magic pulsed in the air, and it wasn’t coming from me.

I opened my eyes and swiveled to stare at what was left of the man’s bloody face.

“What is it?” Alex put a steadying hand on my shoulder as if he expected me to collapse in a mewling heap. I might when I got home, alone, but not now.

“He’s a wizard,” I said. “Or either he’s human and another wizard was here recently—I mean a wizard other than me. The sensation is fading, but I’m sure of it.”

Alex and I both turned to study the pair of mermen on the boat, who’d stopped glaring at each other so they could watch us. Jean sat behind them, making a big show of polishing a dagger on the hem of his shirt. I suspected he was keeping it close at hand in case the mers started fighting.