Back in the main room, I curled up on the couch and said, “Update.”
“Not trying to be rude or anything, Janie, but you look like crap,” the Kid said.
“It’s been an interesting night.”
To my side, Eli appeared, carrying a huge mug of tea, smelling of spices, with a dollop of Cool Whip on top. He put it in my hands and wrapped my fingers around the warm stoneware. His hands held mine on the heated mug, his flesh warm over mine. It was an odd, kind, unexpected thing, that touch. Tears burned under my lids. “Thanks,” I whispered, not trusting my voice for more than that.
“Alex is right,” Eli said aloud. He dropped into the chair across from the couch, watching me. “Debrief. Take it slow.”
As I sipped, I filled them in, step by step, while the Kid typed up a report. We had discovered that it helped to have a running record of the weird stuff in our lives and business.
When I got to the part about the thing in the basement, Eli asked, “What did it smell like? Did you recognize it?”
“No. It was . . .” My nose crinkled, remembering the oppressive dark and the stench.
“You didn’t have a record of the scent in your skinwalker memory?”
“The closest I can come to it is to say that it smelled like a village full of sick and dead humans, mixed with the strong odor of lightning, and the scent of vamps when they had the plague. And vinegar. Sick and dead and dying and electrified salad dressing all at once.” I shook my head as if shaking away the memory. “Anyway, we went back up the elevator and I got the heck outta Dodge.”
The Kid said, “Otis Online Repair did a diagnostic and told us nothing we didn’t already know. The palm scanner and the button control panel are functioning according to specs, just as our own diagnostic showed. They speculate that the problem with the elevator may be an electrical pulse in the HQ wiring, maybe something not digitally traceable in the control panel. I pulled up an electrical schematic of vamp central.” He whirled the laptop to display a floor plan with varicolored lines on each floor, including five layers of basement, which was really unusual, what with New Orleans’ high water table. “The basements should be permanently flooded from water seeping in from the ground, but they aren’t,” I said, “which means that magic went into the construction. Some kind of spell that keeps water outside the basement walls.” Which meant witch assistance in the building process several hundred years ago. But what was most interesting were the different-colored lines threaded through the building, floor to floor.
“The colored lines,” he said, “are the electrical systems according to date of installation. The red lines are the original installation in—get this—1890. Most of the original wiring has been updated, some parts repeatedly, for decades,” Alex said. “Some were torn out—that’s the yellow—and replaced, especially after insulated copper wires first came on the market to replace the original uninsulated ones. The major updates were done in 1893, 1906, 1947, 1969, 1998, and again in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina. In fact, all the rewiring dates followed major hurricanes, and twice in that time, all of the aboveground floors were totally rewired due to a storm surge that supposedly flooded the basements from above.”
“So the spell that keeps water from seeping in through the walls won’t stop it from entering from above.”
“That’s what I’m getting,” Alex agreed. “But according to what I can find online and in the databases of vamp HQ, the lines in the two lower basements have never been upgraded, and are still in use.”
“And the two lower basements would have suffered the most from aboveground flooding, so that excuse to rewire was bogus. If our problem isn’t the control panel of the elevator—which is the most likely suspect—then maybe something about the wiring—”
“In that case, most likely, water is seeping through the walls,” the Kid interrupted, “and is collecting on or dripping on the wires. That would cause the stuff you’re seeing, brownouts and blackouts and loads of glitches. The electrical is tied into everything from food storage to the computers to the security systems.”
“Ducky.” The word sounded as tired as I felt. “Just freaking ducky.” Because our jobs had just gotten harder and we all knew it.
“I’m waiting for a final arrival time for the Otis repair people. I’m aiming for after six a.m. on whatever day they can come. You’ll want to have security personnel with each member of the repair team.” We both looked at Eli.
“Okay by me. I’m always up for a rappel down an elevator shaft. I’ll make coffee,” Eli said, sounding psyched. He disappeared into the kitchen. The Kid and I blinked and shook our heads in unison. Eli had weird ideas about what was fun.
When he came back, bringing with him the smell of espresso and a mug, I said, “Now we get to talk about my SUV. I got attacked again, just like that time that thing, whatever it was, attacked me on my bike.” I looked at Eli. “The SUV is damaged.”
Eli dropped back into a chair across from me, his eyes crinkled up in delight. “Really? Leo will be so ticked off at you for damaging his loaner. Can I watch you tell him?”
“Thanks for the heartwarming concern. Leo won’t care. Raisin, now, she’ll care,” I grumbled. “She’ll probably take the repairs out of my pay.” Raisin was the name I had given to Ernestine, the in-house CPA, the woman who ran all things of vamp financial natures, and kept the vamp social calendar. She was, like, three hundred years old, and got decades older every time I saw her, dry and wrinkled and old, like an unwrapped mummy, and she wrote my checks—yeah, old-fashioned checks written with a pen dipped into ink—and paid the vamp taxes and kept the bills and paid the food service vendors and clothing expenses and collected tax money and tribute money from the subservient clans and worked with financial advisors to make money with the money she collected. And she took care of paying for cars. And paid repair people. And she didn’t like me because I cost money. Raisin terrified me, maybe because she had authority and wasn’t above slapping the back of my hand with a ruler to punish a transgression.
“Being boss has to suck.” Eli looked positively happy about my having to face Raisin.
“Yeah. Back to the thing that attacked me? It was probably caught on a security camera in front of the Cigar Factory on Decatur.”
“On it,” the Kid said.
“The last time I was attacked in the streets, I was on Bitsa and was hurt pretty bad. This time, it didn’t get near me, but I was surrounded by steel and glass, so maybe it can’t tolerate either. Bruiser injured it that time with a steel blade.” It had happened in the gray place of the change, which I hadn’t gotten around to telling the guys about. The weird thing was that I’d never seen a nonmagical being in the gray place until Bruiser strode into it. Somehow. And Bruiser and I had, so far, managed to not talk about that. In fact, I had managed for us to not talk about much at all, except for work. Nothing personal. Nothing about . . . us. Whatever we were. But from the looks I’d gotten this evening, that wasn’t gonna last. Whatever space Bruiser had been giving me in the wake of Ricky Bo’s betrayal was used up. He was gonna do . . . something. Whatever. And soon. That left a hollow feeling in my middle, and I drank deep from the tea, licking the melting Cool Whip off my lips.
“So, steel,” Eli said. “Possible to hurt it, then, as long as we’re faster than it is.”
“Good luck with that,” I said.
The Kid was still typing, his fingers clacking on the keys. He might like touch screens and the newest model of tablets, but when it came to reports, Alex was old-school, using an ergonomic keyboard and Microsoft Word. All important files were encrypted and triple backed up, unimportant files were just backed up and e-mailed to himself. For his birthday, as a surprise, I had opened accounts for him online at three different electronics stores. Of course, I had put a limit on all of them—I wasn’t that stupid.