Bite Me: Big Easy Nights Read online

  “Evening Jacky,” he said, closing the door and dropping a stack of files on the metal table. “You’ve created quite a night for everybody.”

  I slouched, folding my arms. “Negri here set the stage.”

  “I know—he had two extra units on standby all night. Nobody’s blaming you, child. Did you recognize any of the men?”

  Emerson (Ralph W. Emerson, and he didn’t think it was funny) was a dark, dark Creole, bald and cadaverously thin; he always wore black suits and all he needed was a top hat to play Baron Samedi. A senior detective who kept passing up advancement to an administrative job, he worried me enough for me to let the child comment pass.

  I shook my head and Paul put his elbows on the table, pre-empting the debriefing. “I spotted them five nights ago,” he said. “But only the two. Couple of the clubs, always nearby but not close. Last night I saw one of them watching Mama Marie’s. Figured them for hunters, me.”

  “And you thought you’d flush them out yourselves, no close support? Detective, I know you haven’t been here long but we don’t work that way.”

  Paul flushed, ducked his head and nodded. “Won’t happen again. What did you find out?”

  “That you were damn lucky.” Emerson snorted, sliding the files across the table. “These bayou boys had a goal and a plan.” He nodded at me. “They were hunting you, not just any vamp. Their ringleader, Robert Dupree, blames you for turning his sister—he and his cousins figured they’d test the old stories that the way to end a vampire curse is to kill the vampire that gave it.”

  “Me?”

  “You. Doesn’t matter that anyone who knows anything about breakthroughs knows that a vampire can’t create another vamp, any more than any other breakthrough can duplicate his condition. That bit’s still myth, thank God, but his sister was a wannabe-vamp, came to town looking to join someone’s court. Last he heard from her was a text to her cousin going on about meeting you somewhere—described you down to your Bite Me shirt and leather jacket. Said she was working up the nerve to offer herself to you.”

  “So on that he thinks I turned her?”

  “That, and she’s Acacia now, one of the Sisters. He claims that when he found her at Angels she didn’t even recognize him.”

  “Damnation,” Paul said. “What are the odds?”

  Emerson didn’t look away. “That she got a vamp to kill her hoping to be turned? Not bad. And really got turned? Not good.”

  It was the ugliest of the vampire con games; convince some poor sap you’d turn him for enough money, let him taste your blood a couple of times in the setup, take the cash, drain him dry somewhere private, dispose of the body. Breakthroughs, supernatural or superhero, were one in thousands—not much chance of delivering on your promise. I hadn’t caught wind of any of those sickoes, but Emerson had seen a few before I came to town.

  And I knew something Emerson didn’t. What if it’s not a con this time?

  I’d have been corpse-pale if I wasn’t already.

  Paul leaned in. “You can’t be blaming Jacky—”

  “No,” Emerson said, but he watched me like cop watched a perp. “So why are we still here?” I asked. I had to get out.

  “Your cover. If you weren’t working for us you’d be our main suspect. So now that we’ve had this ‘interrogation,’ we’re going to cut you loose.”

  “And them? What happens to them?”

  “There’s not a jury that would convict, but we’ll press charges anyway. They’re both a danger and a flight risk, so we can keep them till the hearing if we need to—even till the trial. While we do our own investigation.”

  He locked eyes with me. “Because whoever accidentally turned her instead of killing her will run the game again. Probably ran it before. So we find him.”

  I nodded. Gathering up the files, he stood as I ground my teeth and tried not to look at my “partner.”

  Well, hell. Paul thought vamps were squirrelly enough already; he was going to hate this. I took a breath. “Emerson? There’s something you should check out.”

  He stopped shuffling papers. “Yes?”

  “When did you serve your last blood warrant on Acacia and Belladonna?”

  “Two weeks ago. Why?”

  Even for a heavy-drinking vampire, recoverable blood-trace from their donors lasted two or three weeks in their veins—which was what made our job possible. I and other observers ID’d underage donors, the precinct got warrants for their DNA and matched them against samples taken from vamps with blood warrants. Penalties started at heavy fines and escalated to jail time.

  “Because,” I said quietly, “if she’s really another vampire’s progeny—even if he didn’t intend to make her—they might have a blood relationship.”

  “A what?”

  Great. How to explain the Bats and the Bees?

  I spread my hands. “The whole turning thing, even the scam, requires blood-swapping, right? And it’s hardly universal, but some vamps have this whole dominance and territorial thing going. If you want to share a more aggressive vamp’s “territory” you have to accept his dominance—usually by sharing his blood.”

  Emerson’s eyes sharpened. “Not by accepting his bite?”

  “You’d think, but no.”

  Paul shifted beside me. “Have you…” he trailed off, obviously thinking of my arrangement with Sable. I smiled, showing fang.

  “He knows better than to try it, but his whole court thinks I drink from his vein. Anyway, Sable’s really really into ‘Lucys’—blonde ingénues—not Minas like me.” I flipped my now very mussed black mane.

  Emerson grunted. “So you’re saying Acacia might owe her ‘sire’…what?”

  “Blood fealty. At the very least, I’d think they’d swap blood once in a while so he could reassert his dominance.”

  The lieutenant looked deeply disturbed, and it surprised me that he didn’t know this little twist of vampire politics; understanding supernaturals was what he did.

  “So how does a blood warrant help us?” he asked. “Wouldn’t we just find traces of whomever he’d recently bit too?”

  I shook my head. “That itself might be worth something. Like Black—like my teacher says, ‘no intelligence is wasted.’ But it doesn’t matter how long we’ve been dead, all of us still carry a little of our own blood. So if you research every old blood warrant…”

  Now he nodded. “We might be able to isolate vampire-markers, and if there are two sets then one of them probably belongs to whomever turned her. That’s good, Jacky. I’ll have forensics get right on it, thank you. Anything else?”

  “Nope. I’m out of here.” I stood and finally glanced at Paul. He looked… like Paul, no evidence of how he’d taken it.

  “Drive safe now,” Emerson said. “And Jacky? Give my regards to your grandma.” He smiled, like he knew she was going to come down on his head like the wrath of God for letting me get hurt in one of his operations. And looked forward to it.

  Mama Marie vs. Baron Samedi. That was a throw-down I’d have paid big money to see any other time; now I didn’t want them coming near each other.

  Paul kept a change of clothes in his precinct locker, and I kept my mouth shut while he dressed and we slipped out the back. Once out the door I stepped into mist. He called my name, but I was gone like yesterday. I floated up into the night, arrowing for home. The trip was a stretch but I didn’t rest once, not till I’d misted in through the vent down to my safe bedroom. Pulling myself together, I stripped and rolled up the sticky remains of my outfit, threw them under the bed. Then I went right into the shower, turning it up to scalding.

  I felt colder than the grave, but corpses don’t shiver.

  What are the odds?

  One night after a successful outing, possibly the one that had made Angels more careful, Paul asked me why I hated vampires; after all, I’d had to have been obsessed with them to become one, right? Breakthroughs, didn’t we all make ourselves what we were?

  Not true, but I c
ouldn’t tell him why.

  There were no vampire “families” since normally each vampire was a lone breakthrough, a one-off just like any other superhuman, but there was no end to the stories of secret Master Vampires capable of intentionally turning their victims, creating vampire progeny—the reason why the con was so easy to pull. I’d hoped there’d really only ever been one. The one who’d slaughtered my parents and turned me. The one I’d staked, decapitated, burned to ash, scattered on Lake Michigan.

  But now I might not be the only vampire progeny.

  I tried to feel the water beating my icy skin.

  You are mine, he’d said. And proved it by killing everyone else I’d belonged to.

  Grams heard me and came upstairs, but not before I’d broken every bit of glass in the bathroom and Paul’s blood swirled in the drain.

  Chapter Five

  On October 15th at 10:13 pm, 9-1-1 recorded a hysterical call from Jacqueline Siggler, screaming, and what sounded like an animal attack in the home of Tony and Charlene Siggler. Responders arrived less than five minutes later to find the adult Sigglers dead, mauled by an unidentified animal, and their daughter missing. A protracted neighborhood search found neither the animal nor the missing daughter, and the mystery remains unsolved.

  David Roush, Strange Crimes.

  * * *

  How can someone as old as Grams be so strong? She pulled me out of the water and glass and wrapped me up, nearly carried me downstairs to the kitchen. Eventually the smell of coffee pulled me out of my funk, and I lifted my head off the table to find a cup in front of me. Ethiopian shade-bean: she’d raided my stash. A little serving pitcher of English cream joined it while the teapot whistled. Grams considered coffee a foreign perversion.

  I wrestled with the robe she’d wrapped me in, finally got the arms right, and flavored my cup while she steeped her tea. She only left the kitchen long enough to let Paul in; I vaguely remembered hearing her call him after getting me to the kitchen table.

  “Holy shit, Jacky,” Paul said, looking me over. With all the tiny cuts lacing my skin, I must have looked like I’d been wrestling rabid kittens. “Are you—”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  Grams snorted and pointed to a chair, dropping a cup of coffee in front of it. He looked at it like it was a bomb, but sat gingerly as I added a little more cream to my cup.

  “Are you really—“

  “Detective Negri,” Grams said, voice cold. “You will tell me why my granddaughter snuck into the house tonight and decided to redecorate her bathroom in red.”

  “Grams!” My teaspoon rang on the table. “Paul didn’t have anything to do with that!”

  “Oh? You were not with him, tonight?”

  “I—yes, I was. But it’s just… news. Someone’s… Dammit, Paul!” I turned on him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were furry?”

  “Fu—” That stopped Grams, whatever she’d been expecting to hear.

  “We got attacked by hunters tonight, Grams. Paul went all wolfman on them, saved my ass.”

  “Language, Jacqueline.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Saved my butt.” Who knew the voodoo queen of New Orleans would have so much in common with the Grande Dame of Chicago? Mrs. Lori would love her.

  “Saved my life,” she corrected with a smile, which iced over when she turned back to Paul. “And who attacked my granddaughter?”

  “Grams, focus. The police have got them and aren’t letting them go. Paul. Furry.”

  She nodded, eyes sharp. “Lycanthrope, but not loup-garou, yes?”

  I blinked. “Loop-what?”

  “Nope,” Paul said. “No curse, ma’am. My momma’s family is rural Italian.” He sighed. “Different stories, so I’m Benandanti—a Good Walker.” He took a sip, looked down.

  “That’s good coffee, chèr.”

  “Thank Grams—I wouldn’t have made it for you.”

  “Jacqueline!”

  I sighed and Paul had the nerve to actually give me a wink. “Non, Madam Bouchard,” he said. “I deserve it, me.” His Cajun English was getting thick.

  I sat back. He was making it hard to stay mad. “So your mom’s family tradition shaped your breakthrough.”

  He nodded, grimacing.

  “But the Negri family, all bayou Cajun, we. Back home the loup-garou a bogyman, hunts horny teenagers out after curfew you know?”

  Grams nodded, understanding. No, Church Pointe, Acadia would be no place for a wolfman; they’d always be waiting for him to eat somebody.

  After that the conversation wandered where I hadn’t wanted it to go, back to the fun we’d had earlier. Grams told Paul to let Emerson know she expected to see him—a comment that went right past me at the time. Miracle of miracles, now that her direst expectations had been fulfilled, she was actually warming to Paul. A little.

  I hadn’t left so much blood in the bathroom that I needed another drink tonight (usually I was good for two or three days) but I actually found myself yawning and trying not to show fang. Grams, who insisted on treating me like the teenager I wasn’t anymore, not even on paper, shooed me up to bed after making Paul promise to stay. After using her bathroom to clean up, I crawled into my coffin and locked it, sealing out the world. I slept like the dead.

  * * *

  My eyes snapped open as I rose out of my dreamless, breathless sleep, and I lay listening for a moment before opening my coffin.

  Letting myself out of my crypt and into my room, I stripped out of my nightgown (I preferred to sleep in a tank top and sleep-shorts, but no, I had to be authentic), and threw on black jeans and a black midriff-baring cotton cami with little white bats on it (authentic, but still better). Snapping my moonlighting gear to my belt under my jacket and thumping down the back stairs into the kitchen, I could hear Grams with a client. Low chants and the smell of scented candles leaked under the parlor door.

  Pulling out my stash and pouring beans into the hopper of my hand-mill coffee grinder, I milled a measure fine and sighed as the rich smell of ground bean rose to overpower the candles and fresh herbs. Unpacking my coffee-box, I carefully scraped the pile of grounds into the terracotta bowl, poured the filtered rainwater Grams had left steaming over it, stirred with my wooden spoon, and counted. At sixty seconds, I poured the brew through my gold-wire coffee strainer, topping off my matching mug. Rinsing my tools, I grabbed the cream pot and sat down.

  Blood gave a kick, but any vamp who claimed it was ambrosia was a pretentious ass and when I wasn’t thirsty I preferred anything that didn’t taste of hemoglobin. I paid homage to the Bean of Life and watched the parlor door.

  Grams hadn’t led big voodoo ceremonies in years (she said she wasn’t athletic enough anymore, and I tried not to imagine what she meant), but she still consulted and I wondered what tonight’s client wanted; gris-gris to snare a lover’s interest? Luck-mojo? Or maybe a curse, although Grams swore she only ever hexed with karma-curses—evil rebounding on the evil-doer.

  I didn’t rush, but neither did they. A careful peek out the heavily-curtained kitchen windows told me the sun had completely set, and I washed my mug and set it in the drainer. I wasn’t on the job tonight—a good thing since I wanted to find my own answers, the big one being if I needed to kill somebody. And I had to start in the last place I wanted to look.

  I needed more information, and I’d been avoiding even thinking about what that meant.

  Going back upstairs, I fired up my laptop—an older model, but overpowered for what I needed it for. Before I’d left Chicago, Blackstone had turned it into an unhackable fortress of encrypted files; he’d even installed a “hard-burn safety” so any unauthorized attempt to physically recover anything would result in an expensive and useless melted lump. Five security answers later, plus three hand signs witnessed by my webcam (the ‘peace’ sign, the middle finger, and the ‘okay’ thumb and forefinger) I was in, staring at a file folder I’d sworn I would never open.

  Chapter Six

&nb
sp; An Omega Event is a breakthrough-created superhuman capable of ending civilization as we know it. The Department of Superhuman Affairs shut down two that I know about: a human-to-computer intelligence transformation that almost took over every internet-linked computer system in the world, and a breakthrough who sucked anyone who got too close to him into a group-mind that spread like a psychic virus. On that one the DSA “quarantined” an entire town, and drone cameras recorded its disappearance microseconds before the nuclear missile “sterilized” it. The public didn’t know about those; the DSA blamed the first on a hacker’s conspiracy and the second on a wormhole that sucked the town into an alternate world (hey, it might be true). They only told me about them because they needed my help to determine whether or not I was the starting-vector for the third.

  Jacky Bouchard, The Artemis Files.

  * * *

  By freeing me from my sire, the Teatime Anarchist had short-stopped the potential Vampire Plague future, but the future-files he’d posthumously left to Shelly and Hope were all about the futures that would never happen now, at least not the same way. Before I left Chicago—less than two weeks after the Whittier Base attack—Hope had given me TA’s “Vampire File”, a copy of all the collected future data from the plague that never happened.

  I really wasn’t interested in my Might Have Been as Vlad the Raving Psycho’s enthralled pet, so I’d left it alone while I’d been the DSA’s guest at Camp Necessity and even coming to New Orleans hadn’t convinced me to open it. After all, the vamps down here were nothing like psycho-Vlad. At least I’d thought that, anyway. Blackstone would be disappointed in me; years learning street smarts as a night-stalking black-clad vigilante, months learning the paranoid art of threat analysis from him, and I’d turned my back on my most valuable data source.

  I opened the file and started reading.

  If my stomach acted at all like a living one, I’d have been sick.