expected him to say that he had dated a sick human at Blood-Call.
Callan stood, his shoulders back, a sculptor’s model on display. I held in an exasperated sigh. “My former master fed me a woman. He feeds her to lots of us.”
“
“Yes, ma’am.”
My amusement vanished. A Typhoid Mary? A human with a disease that infects vamps? A prisoner, kept to be fed upon?
“Against her will?”
“She’s his prisoner. We all were.”
“Crap.” So what
“No. She is in Atlanta, in my mas—my former master’s lair.”
“So how did de Allyon infect all the vamps in Sedona, Seattle, and other places? Does he fly her around?”
“Lady, I got no idea how he did his thing. It ain’t like I was up high in the pecking order or nothing. But I will say that he never let that woman out of his compound. Like not never.”
I felt my hope deflate. “Is de Allyon in Louisiana?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where?”
“No. Somewhere north, and maybe west. In a little town on a river. I’m not good with directions.”
The comment was so unexpected I almost laughed. Was the guy really dumber than a box of rocks, or was he dissembling, somehow hiding his true mind even from whichever old master vamp had fed him to heal him? That would have made Callan the best spy in history. Nope. He was no spy; Callan smelled of truth. And Callan was intellectually challenged—pretty, but dumb. Nearly every place in the state was north and west of New Orleans. “How did de Allyon know about me? How did he know I was Leo’s Enforcer?”
Callan shrugged. “I don’t know. Somebody tells him things.”
“Yeah. I was afraid of that.” A few more questions convinced me that I had discovered everything that Callan knew. Which was sad in all sorts of ways. Leo had a mole, a dissenter, a spy in his camp. I wanted it to be someone who recently joined the ranks, but it had to be someone who was in Asheville with the parley there, which limited the number of people involved. I had to study the Kid’s deep background search info on the Vodka Boys and the Tequila Boys. I had to unearth the mole. Unfortunately, Callan would be no help at all.
It was nine a.m. when I got back to the freebie house. I’d stayed and eaten breakfast with Deon. My meal had consisted of eggs Benedict, Caribbean-style, with spices and peppers and some really melty, gooey, fabulous Hollandaise sauce. Totally delicious and totally sinful. Eli would have turned up his nose at the fats. I scraped my plate clean.
Back at my house, I found a postal box on the front porch, filled with the CS canisters. They were plain metal canisters, like spray paint cans, but with a lever system on top to lock them on, so they could spray until empty or be stopped at will by the wielder. “Cool,” I said, and packed them away.
Sitting on the couch, I booted up my laptop and opened the file containing the English translation of the Vampira Carta. I scrolled down to the part about the Blood Challenge between masters and checked the footnotes for other info. There were four codicils to the challenge and three histories, none of which were in English. It looked like Latin, probably from a millennia ago. “Crap,” I muttered.
“Anything I can help you with?” Eli asked.
Instantly, I remembered his predawn comment about how I looked in bed. I was pretty sure I blushed and didn’t raise my head for him to see. “Not unless you speak Latin from the tenth century.”
“Free dick dot come.”
I lifted my eyes. “I beg your pardon?”
He laughed and bent over the laptop, typing “www.free dict.com” in my browser. I’m pretty sure my blush was visible even through my Cherokee coloring. He smelled good, all pheromones and self-confidence and man. “Oh. Thanks,” I muttered. Still grinning, he wandered away, leaving behind his scent and the echo of his laughter.
I went to that site and three others, subscribing to two that looked reasonable. I typed out the Latin info and started getting translations, none of which matched exactly. To be on the safe side, I sent snippets to all four sites and compared and contrasted the translations, taking the ones that seemed to match best. I quickly discovered that the VC’s Blood Challenge was instituted in direct response to a blood-feud that took out nearly two thousand humans and vamps in southern Italy in the mid-tenth century. The descriptions of the dead in that history were horrible, humans and vamps drained, torn apart, discarded, their bodies left to see the dawn. It was wanton destruction, leaving even the children of blood-slaves drained and dead in the streets. And a blood-feud was what we had here, what had been staring us in the face all this time, and I hadn’t really understood.
I went back to the date. If the history of Lucas Vazquez de Allyon was correct, he would have been alive back then. Just because his name was Spanish now didn’t mean he hadn’t traveled, or even been Italian—Roman— originally. As I worked, the smell of coffee filled the house, rich, dark, and wonderful. Too bad that coffee smelled so much better than it tasted to me.
Trying to block out smells and the small sounds made by men moving around in my house, I translated segments on blood-feuds, spending two hours before I realized that, basically, a blood-feud was a no-holds-barred free-for-all with winner take all. This one would be blamed on me for killing a man who had likely been intending to murder me the first chance he got.
“Jane,” Alex called from the kitchen. “I got something.”
I put the laptop to sleep and went to the kitchen, stretching on the way in. In the kitchen, I discovered where the coffee smell originated. The men taking over my life had purchased an espresso coffeemaker, a fancy stainless steel version by DeLonghi. According to the box at the back door, the thing cost nearly a thousand bucks. I hoped I hadn’t paid for that.
Before I studied the info Alex had, I put tea together. While the tea water sizzled on the stove top, I pulled up a chair near Stinky. Who definitely was not getting any fast food today. “Show me,” I said.
“Lucas Vazquez de Allyon purchased property in several states, including Louisiana last year. He has property in New Orleans, in Lafayette, and in some little towns between Lafayette and here. I put them on a map.”
It was a melded map, showing topo, streets and street names, bayous, rivers, airports, bus stations, and a lot of other stuff I would need if I had to go to each of them hunting him. “Have you found de Allyon yet?”
“No, but I’m close.”
“Good. Now go take a shower. You’re living up to your nickname.” At his puzzled look, I said. “Stinky. I’ve named you Stinky and it’ll stay Stinky until you remember to shower every day.”
“And when I remember?” he asked, sounding belligerent.
“Then it’ll be Kid.”
“Like Kid Rock?”
“More like Billy the Kid, Cisco Kid, the Durango Kid.” When he still looked puzzled, I said, “Do an Internet search. And it’s a crying shame when an American teenage boy doesn’t know his gunslingers.” I slapped him on the back of the head. “Good work, Stinky.”
I finished making my tea and went back to my laptop. Shortly, I heard footsteps up the stairs and then shower water going. “The Durango Kid? He’s a modern-day shooter.”
I looked up to see Eli standing in front of the open bookcase. He had a habit of standing with his arms loose, one hand near the spot where a military sidearm might go, the other on his thigh where he might wear a military knife. “Yeah. A cowboy six-shooter. There was an old black-and-white film about the Durango Kid.”
“You watch old black-and-white cowboy films.” It was said with a hint of disbelief.
“Yeah. The kind where your people kill off my people and steal our land, and somehow make murder and theft seem heroic.”
