I looked back at Katie, keeping my feelings off my face. “Keep him alive. Keep yourself safe. Leo values you both.” I paused and tested the words on my tongue before I said them. They tasted of truth. “Leo loves you both. I’ll be back soon.” I walked past Katie, snagging my cell, giving her my back, just as an African lion would give his pride his back, knowing he was bigger, badder than the others. I pushed through the vamps at the door.
I stopped midway and took Koun’s wrist in my hand. He was still cold, pale, and shaky. “Thank you. Leo will be proud of you for saving his primo.” Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed to stand taller. “He is honored to have the great Koun as his warrior. But even more honored that Koun knows when to fight and when to heal.” It wasn’t a lie—or not exactly. Leo hadn’t actually said the words, but he had chosen Koun as one of his four closest scions at a time when Katie was unavailable for duty. That was a lot of trust from a vamp as powerful as Leo Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans and half of the Southeastern states.
There was a lot of divisiveness in Leo’s closest scions, at a time when that seemed dangerous. Maybe I could heal that some. “Leo will grieve the loss of the vam—Mithrans,” I corrected, “Louise and Peter and their blood-servants.”
The Celt met my eyes, his own human blue in white orbs. He turned his wrist to grip mine, his fingers and palm calloused and stronger than mine would ever be. He nodded and let me go.
In the hallway, I met Derek’s eyes, dark and hostile. I opened my mouth to give him orders. Instead, I said, “You are the most brutal human being I have ever met.” I hadn’t intended to say the words, but they matched my thoughts. Deep inside, Beast huffed with amusement.
“Unlike humans, the vamps will heal,” he said shortly, lip curling. “It’s war.”
“The excuse of soldiers for millennia.”
He didn’t react. I didn’t expect him to. “The blood you sent was lost in the fire,” he said. “We got some from them”—he canted his head down the hallway toward the parlor and the cages—“but we need some from the others to compare.”
“I have some in my house from the Seattle clan’s humans.”
“Yeah? I’ll send Chi-Chi for it.”
“Sure. Whatever.” I walked away from him, showing him my back too. I left the house, closing the front door behind me. And dropped against the red-painted door, heaving breaths. “Holy moly.” I put a hand to my chest. “I’m not dead.” And I fought laughter, knowing they might hear me inside. Or smell me. Sweat started to trickle down my sides, sticky and stinking of the aftereffects of fear.
When I had myself under control, I pushed away from the door and melted into the shadows. The night was warm and muggy, and the sweat wasn’t likely to dry. So far, winter in the Deep South was a joke. I needed a shower, fighting leathers, and info. I needed food. I jumped the fence into the narrow alley separating Katie’s from the building next door and walked down the narrow space, checking the cameras I had installed as I moved. Instinct. Habit, to check my security work for Leo’s heir. It all seemed okay.
The brick fence behind Katie’s was taller than I was by far, and I took advantage of the small hand – and footholds as I half climbed, half vaulted it, landing on the other side in the dark, and relaxed. I could tell by the smell that no one was here. I was alone. Safe. For now. Weird how a house that wasn’t mine, and never would be, felt like home.
Inside, I stripped and showered, standing under the heated water, letting it pound my muscles, washing the smoke and blood off me. There was remarkably little blood, and almost none of it mine. I washed my hair, shaved my legs, all the girly things I do so seldom. When I shift and then shift back, the hair is always fully grown again, which, even with my Cherokee-lack-of-hairiness, is a pain to remove. But this time, it felt like therapy, like feeding my girl soul, which I so seldom did.
Afterward, standing in my bathroom in the steam, the exhaust fan going, I coated my skin with pure jojoba oil and plaited my wet hair into a tight French braid. It wouldn’t dry quickly, but the damp didn’t bother me. I dressed with care in my long silk underwear, and when I could put it off no longer, I dialed Leo. He didn’t answer, and I closed the phone.
I opened the bathroom door, heard a click, and stopped in the doorway. Sniffing. Someone was here. I looked around, breathing in silently, slowly, thinking, analyzing the sound I had heard. The click was the kitchen door. I had changed the locks, but that didn’t stop anyone really determined. I switched off the bathroom light, throwing the house into night shadows.
A man had been here. I sniffed again. Yeah, a he. Male. Sweaty. Nervous. A stranger. Just like the stranger in the hotel, the one I’d killed weeks ago. I sniffed again, mouth open. Gun oil. The stink of a gun, recently fired. Herbal shampoo. Not Chi-Chi, here to pick up the blood; not anyone I knew. But if I survived tonight, I’d recognize his scent again.
Soundless, eyes on the bedroom doorway, I stepped to the bed and felt around on the fighting leathers for the holstered Walther and a vamp-killer. I came up with the smallest one, six inches of silver-plated steel, crosshatched steel grip, and gripped it backhanded in my left. Safety’d off the gun, and stepped slowly, weight balanced evenly, into the foyer. Night sight kicked in, the shadows growing lighter, the light through the windows brighter.
By the scent traces, he hadn’t come in through the front door. I stepped across the foyer, paused at the stairs. He hadn’t gone up there, but he had paused here for a while. More nervous. Edgy. I followed his scent back to the kitchen, to the side door. He had come and gone through here. While I was in the shower. Weapons on the bed. Nothing with me but a hair stick I could use on a vamp as a stake. Nothing to defend against humans. Stupid! He could have opened the door and shot me. So why hadn’t he? Because he had come in to kill me and heard the shower go off? Seen the weapons? Assumed I had a functioning brain cell and that I’d be armed, and had decided not to try to kill me. Instead, he had done . . . what?
I moved through the dark house to the kitchen door leading to the ground-floor level of the long, two-story porch. The door was shut, but the wood jamb was splintered where it had been kicked open, light-colored wood splinters on the darker floor. So . . .
I turned and studied the house, feeling, smelling, tasting the air. The blood vials. I raced back to the bedroom and bent over the shipping container. “Crap!” The bag holding the blood vials was gone. Rage boiled through me, Beast’s fury. Mine, she thought at me. Came into my den. Took what was mine. Thief of blood, she thought. Beast was possessive of her belongings. Of my belongings, for that matter. But . . . The laptop was still on the bed, the tiny green light showing standby mode. So was my arsenal. The intruder stole only the blood.
That severely limited who the traitor in Leo’s organization might be. Because only a very few vamps, blood-servants, and humans knew I had the blood, and even fewer might have guessed it was in my house. A human from Seattle might have figured it out, but more likely, the traitor had been in Katie’s house only moments ago. And he or she called the enemy. Mentally, I listed the people in Katie’s tonight. Derek and his boys: Angel Tit, Martini, and Chi-Chi. Katie. Koun. Alejandro and Estavan—vamps of Spanish descent who had been loyal to Leo for centuries. Girrard DiMercy, who had not always been loyal. Five blood-servants. Bruiser. The priestess. Crap. The priestess? She was loony tunes. Or so she appeared. Reach had included her in the list of possible bad guys, Leo’s possible spy. Reach . . . Crap. Reach.