Nostrana shrugged. “Someone purchased the entire set, I think. The room was empty when I arrived two days ago. I have been rearranging everything, making it into a doll room.” She stopped, biting her lip, as if she had said too much.
“Nostrana,” I tried to pronounce it like she had, all liquid sounds and sophistication, but it came out sounding flat and Southern. “You work for Silandre?”
“Three days a week, and during the three days of the full moon and the one night of the new moon. It is odd schedule, but I am exchange student in university, so I can make it do.”
“There’s no university anywhere near,” Eli said, sounding cold and hard and managing to call her a liar.
Nostrana’s head came up and she firmed her lips. “I take classes on Internet. And I take bus to campus three days a week.”
“Long trip,” Eli said, still disbelieving, this time almost snide.
“Is not your concern. What do you want?”
I smiled. Nostrana was no pushover. “To look around,” I said, sliding the shotgun into the spine sheath and showing both hands open and empty. Reluctantly, Eli holstered his weapons, but he kept a hand on one. When Nostrana didn’t object, I walked through the disordered room toward her. And felt the tingles on my skin. I stopped. This didn’t make sense. “You’re a witch.”
Her eyes narrowed and she reached into a pocket. “Also not your concern.”
“Witches are disappearing in Natchez. Have you been approached by anyone? Been followed?” I asked.
“No.” Her left hand clutched something in the pocket.
“No need to use magical defense on us,” I said. “We’re going.”
“Please. Quickly. And not to come back unless Silandre is here.”
I jerked my head at Eli and backed away, stepping carefully to the front of the saloon/store and out into the meager sunshine without turning my back on her. I didn’t speak again until we were back at the SUV. “Witches are missing. Vamps are turning into cockroaches, and Nostrana is a witch working for a vamp.”
“If she was telling us the truth,” Eli said.
“She smelled of the truth.” Eli gave me an odd look, one I’ve come to associate with me admitting to being anything nonhuman. Like most of the other times, I ignored it. “I need to talk to Francis.”
Without commenting, Eli started up the SUV and we rode along the Under the Hill streets and passed by the old warehouse/bar where we had fought and survived. Once again, a surge of magic hit me, a sharp, bitter tang in the air. “Stop the car.” Before Eli had come to a complete stop, I was out of the SUV and moving between buildings, following the scent. Within three steps, Eli was behind me. In my pocket, I felt something hot and I dug a hand in, pulling out the coin the tribal elder had given me in the church-that-wasn’t. The silver coin was hot to the touch, the temperature variant a sure sign of witch magics. I reached into another pocket and touched the pocket watch. It too was heated. And stank of old blood.
“Here. It’s here.” I turned in a slow circle, holding the coin out before me, feeling the coin heat and cool, like a childhood game—“You’re getting hot! Cooler. Cooler. COLD! Hot again!” Leading me toward the middle street . . . and as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone.
The coin was now neither warm nor cold and the watch was my body temperature. Maybe the change in temp had been my imagination. Maybe I’d been palling around with supernats for so long that I was starting to scent magics everywhere. I dropped my arm. Stuck the coin in my pocket. The old blood smell of the watch clung to my fingers. “Crap. Okay. Let’s go home, Eli.”
He raised his brows. “You’ll tell me what this little jaunt was about later.” It wasn’t a request. More a command.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Let’s go.” While he drove, I texted. A lot.
• • •
There wasn’t much left of the winter afternoon when we got back to Esmee’s. “I have some dirty work in the garage,” I said.
“We killing the vamp?”
“Francis? I hope not. But we may have to cut off his clothes.”
Eli’s forehead wrinkled. “Say what?”
“Francis is one of the new spidey vamps. I’ve been smelling old blood on Francis, stinky stuff.” Stinky stuff like the pocket-watch amulets, but I didn’t share that with Eli, not yet. “Francis is healing even without blood meals. I think our boy may have something on him that’s helping him heal and transform, maybe even controlling him somehow. It might be what allowed de Allyon to do what he did and control the vamps under him so well, and take over other cities, and be a Naturaleza in a world where all the other vamps were Fame Vexatum.”
Eli shook his head, but I thought it was in surprise, not negation. I pulled out the pocket-watch amulet.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why the priestesses and the European council allowed de Allyon to keep his own territory, operating as a Naturaleza in open violation of the Vampira Carta? And no one tried to stop him?”
“So far as we know,” he hedged.
“So far as we know,” I agreed, as Eli pulled the SUV to the garage. “He had to have something on the other vamps, some kind of weapon or way to protect himself until he discovered the vamp plague.”
“A witch circle,” Eli said, surprised.
“Exactly. Powering some kind of amulet or
We left the vehicle, walking into the daylight. It wasn’t bright and the sun was hidden behind layers of clouds, but it was daylight. It would do. Inside the garage, the shadows enfolding us, we stood, letting our eyes adjust.
Eli said softly. “Francis is one of the revenants. He’s faster and stronger than anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah. And what I’m thinking is that some of the revenants have been killed true-dead more than once and brought back. And that every time they get brought back, there are more changes.”
Eli let that sink in a bit, staring off at the horizon. “What’s your strategy?”
“I’m gonna tell him to strip. Then when he doesn’t, I’m gonna pull his cage into the yard, out back where the kids can’t see it happening, and let him burn for a while. Then if he doesn’t give me what I’m looking for, I’ll kill him and cut his clothes until I find it.”
“You sound mighty cheerful about it.”
“I am.”
Eli shrugged with his eyebrows, which was really cool, and followed me into the dark.
• • •
The interrogation didn’t take long. Even with his accelerated healing powers, Francis Adrundel was no match for the sun. After two minutes outside, smoking and blistering and screaming, he emptied his pockets. I picked up the pocket watch and tucked it into my other pocket. I didn’t know what the watches did, but I had an idea that getting them together could eventually be a problem.
Once I was done, I called Clark, Big H’s primo, and asked him to send some blood meals by to feed Francis. The
• • •
I had timed it well. An hour before sunset, I called my escorts into the dining room. Bruiser was back, with no explanation of where he had gone, Soul was dressed in silver-colored gauzy clothing that reminded me of moonlight, and Rick was glowering, wearing earpieces with his magic-spelled music coming from them. Brute and Pea looked beautiful and cute and deadly. Part of me wanted them on my team, and the other part of me knew that would be a mistake. I’d eventually have to kill the wolf and I really didn’t want to kill anything that an angel had cursed.
“Soul, can you do another magical scan for Misha? Or maybe a scan for a full witch circle?”
“I have tried questing,” she said softly, “and found nothing because of the interference. All I could detect was the massive magical energies in Natchez and Under the Hill.”
“Okay. Bobby and I are going for a ride,” I told them.
