and power-mad before he was killed on my world, and I could tell he was even worse here. He’d had a few decades longer to work his villain-charms in this world. “Don’t think so,” I said. “We’re not from around here, and we’re not yours to control.
The power shut off instantly. Amaury sat up, clear calculation in his eyes. “Every magic user in this region is mine to control, and their magic mine to use as I choose.” He tilted his head slightly. “It has been so since I held back the waters of Katrina and saved the coast and the city.”
Jo’s lip curled. “You took their power as payment for saving them?”
“I did. It was fair recompense for my services.”
“Sure. Whatever,” I said. “We’ve made the required appearance and now we need to be outta here. We were called here for a purpose. We have business to attend to.”
“Wait.” Joanne kept staring at Amaury like he was something the cat dragged in, but she still ignored me even when I rolled my head until my neck popped and glared at her. “All the magic here flows through you?”
Amaury nodded once. Jo made fists and stood her ground. “Then you’ve got to know what called us here. There’s something that needs doing here, and either you know what it is or you’re not as hot as you think you are.”
The casual insult rolled off her tongue so trippingly it took a moment for Amaury’s expression to go black. Then it shivered back to reasonable so fast I wasn’t sure I’d seen the darkness. Calculation lay beneath the reason, though: he was assessing us, deciding what to say, while Leo watched me a little too intently, a little too much of the predator in his gaze.
“There has been a disturbance,” Amaury finally said.
I grinned, thinking, in the force, but I didn’t say it. Go me. Jo sucked her cheeks in like she was holding back a grin herself, and I had a feeling that if we looked at each other, we’d start to giggle. Not gonna happen. I kept my eyes on Amaury and forced my lips down.
“A girl, a voodooine, was given a task. A simple task, and she failed.” His sneer came and went in a flash, which I thought took a lot of cajones from a guy who couldn’t even maintain a power base without stealing magic from other people. “She was meant to create a love spell, and instead I have sensed a rift and the arrival of a thing I do not recognize. A demon, I should say, which not even my power can locate or contain. Perhaps this demon is why you have been called to my territory.”
I shot Lazarus a hard look and Joanne shot me one. I clamped my mouth tight before I said anything. I might not like how Laz smelled, but if Amaury thought demons were arriving in the Big Easy, it probably wasn’t a good idea to let him know that when I’d said we weren’t from around here, I’d really meant all three of us were from other worlds. He might think we were his demons. Right now he probably figured we were from, like, Pittsburgh. No point in tipping the vamp off—that would be bad for all of us. I ground my teeth and muttered, “Fine. Where do we find your voodooine? If she’s pulling down demons, she’s probably where we should start.”
Amaury gave us a toothy, nasty smile. “The bayou. Ten miles out. If you’re half the magic-makes you say you are, you’ll feel her when you get close. If you’re not . . .”
We left before he finished that threat.
I was very proud of myself. I made it all the way out the door, into sunlight, and halfway down the block before my knees buckled and I had to grab a fence for support. Or Lazarus, as it turned out. I’d been reaching for the fence, but he got there first, and although it would be bad form to mention it to one Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, between the fence and Lazarus, I’d much rather lean on Laz.
Jane, who apparently had the stamina and stomach of a racehorse, because she didn’t look nearly as affected by Amaury as I felt, stopped with her arms crossed beneath her breasts and frowned at me. Good impression of a brick wall, I thought, and wondered if my own shoulders were as imposing. “Didn’t you see,” I wheezed, but of course she hadn’t. I shuddered all over and wrapped my fingers around Laz’s forearm to prop myself upright. “That bastard is writhing with black magic, Jane. He wasn’t kidding. He’s sucking down every last drop of power in this city. I can See it now that I know what I’m looking for.”
I didn’t particularly want to, but I triggered the Sight as I spoke, glancing upward. Amaury’s hideaway was the center of a damned vortex, magic twisting in myriad shades toward the bordello and blackening as it reached it. That was how amalgamated magic tended to work, at least in my world. Either it was born of good intention and all those blended colors went to white, or it was bad news and it all turned black.
“Amaury’s a cesspool,” I said to the sky. “Oil spill. Whatever you want to call it, his aura is bubbling with evil, and I can’t read it, Jane. I have no idea if he was telling the truth. Do you know how long it’s been since I couldn’t read an aura?”
“Most of forever,” Jane guessed, which was actually completely wrong, but also hardly worth correcting. “He smells like blood and sex and lies to me,” she said, “just like any vamp. I figure they’re all lying, all the time.”
“He wasn’t wrong,” Lazarus rumbled. “You, me, d’big cat lady, we all from somewhere else, and somebody brought us t’rough. Maybe it’s dis voodooine. We find her, we get answers, whether Mister Amaury like it or no.”
I said, “I like the way you think,” and heard Jane make a sound that said she didn’t like anything about Lazarus, but that he probably had a point. I didn’t know why I got a free pass from her and Laz didn’t, except for maybe our weird physical similarities overrode her suspicions. I generally trusted the person I saw in the mirror, after all, and although Jane and I weren’t quite that carbon-copied, it was pretty close.
“What if she did bring a demon through?” Jane asked.
“You’re kind of a worst-case-scenario girl, aren’t you?” I tested my legs and found them worthy to stand on, but Laz kept an arm around my waist an extra minute anyway. I didn’t really have any complaints. “I’m not a demon. Are you?” Jane shook her head and we both looked at Laz, whose white teeth flashed brightly as he shook his head.
Jane’s scowl deepened and I wished I had something to throw at her. “Yes, of course, Jane, he’d lie to us if he was a demon. But I would lie to you if I was a demon, and you’d lie to us if you were one, so we might as well just take each other at our words and move on. If the voodooine did bring a demon through and it’s not one of us, well then by gosh we’ve got three adepts to take it down with. And I’ve fought demons before.”
“You fought demons?” Jane said incredulously. “And I thought my life was weird.”
“You turn into a giant panther. Your life is weird. That aside, do either of you know where we’re going?” I wished I had my classic Mustang, Petite. I would feel a lot safer going anywhere with her sturdy steel body and 190 mph engine around me. But I’d left her on the outskirts of the city, its peculiarities—its wrongness—strong enough from out there that I hadn’t wanted to risk her custom purple paint job, nevermind the decade-plus of work I’d put into her.
“Yeah,” Jane said, and jerked her thumb to the indistinct south. “The bayou. But we’re gonna need a vehicle, unless you two can adopt four fast legs.”
“Actually, I can.” We both glanced at Laz, who shrugged apologetically.
“D’hare, oui, I can do dat. D’snake, him too. Young man, old man—”
“Beggar man,” I said under my breath, “thief.”
Laz gave me a sharp, curious look, then flashed that grin again. “Oui, dem too, but de fox, maybe de coyote, dey d’fastest I can do, and dey smaller dan d’cat.”
“Really? My mass stays the same when I change. I’d think you’d make a pretty, er, massive, coyote. You’d keep up with a—”
A resounding crunch interrupted me. Laz and I turned to see Jane reaching through the smashed-in window of a 1987 AMC Eagle station wagon. She flipped the sun visor down, keys fell into her palm, and she jangled them at us. “We’ll drive.”
I gawked, then threw my hands in the air. Stealing cars, what the hell, it wasn’t my world anyway. If there was a Joanne Walker up in Seattle to get blamed for it, I would feel very bad, but if this world had a Joanne Walker, it seemed to me like she should be the one down in the Big Easy, fighting this world’s fight. For a moment I wondered if, if there had been a Jo here, what had happened to her, and then decided I really didn’t want to know and said, “I’ll drive,” instead of pursuing the thought.
I never let anybody else drive if I could help it, even if I didn’t know the territory. I’d been the best driver in
