Well, not unless he was the reason we were here. In that case, I might look the other way for a few seconds while Jane got in his face and ugly about it. Lazarus sauntered up to the counter with us just as Antoine turned back from the grill with an armload of artery-clotting, amazing-smelling food.
Between us, me and Jane and Laz, we were about eighteen and a half feet tall, and just about that thick with magic potential. Antoine didn’t have to touch us to know it: I could see that in the sudden shift of expressions across his face. Astonishment first, followed hard by resentment and then sly greed, all of which disappeared so quickly that if they hadn’t lingered in his aura I might not have believed I’d seen them. There wasn’t a hint of any of it in his smile as he slid plates full of food onto the counter, spread his arms wide on either side of them, and leaned toward us with what would have been a good smile if looking at his aura didn’t give me the creeps.
“Welcome to Antoine’s, mes amis. You new in town, yes? I haven’t seen you here before. But not tourists: Antoine’s is for locals. Mardi Gras partiers never seem to find me here.”
I shot a look at Jane. She’d been a regular here in her own world, but this Antoine didn’t know her. That meant there wasn’t another Jane running around this version of New Orleans. I wondered what had happened to her, and then I wondered if there was a me somewhere up in the Pacific Northwest. I still had my police-issue cell phone stuffed in a pocket. I stifled the impulse to pull it out and call the same number, just to see if one Joanne Walker, Seattle Police Department, would pick up.
“We asked around,” Jane said. “A woman called Evangelina Everhart suggested we try this place.”
Antoine’s expression did the same kind of flat dull thing his aura did, again for less than a blink. “Did she now. Master Amaury will have a thing or two to say about that.”
“Amaury?” That was me, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut when both Jane and Antoine gave me a look. At least Lazarus didn’t seem to recognize the name, either, which made me feel slightly better. This world was more like Jane’s than mine. Maybe it was more like Jane’s than Lazarus’s, too. Once we figured out why we were here—and how to get home—I kind of wanted to sit down and compare notes.
“The big man,” Antoine said after a pause just long enough to make me uncomfortable. Long enough to suggest he was looking for the right words rather than just having a casual conversation. “New folk ‘round here are expected to pay him a visit. Evangelina should’ve sent you there, not here. Mighty peculiar that she didn’t.”
“Mister Amaury don’ make crawdads like Antoine,” Lazarus said, sounding very solemn. “Miss Jane here was fierce hungry. Surely Miss Evangelina took pity on d’poor woman an’ sent her here before she had to get gussied up for d’big man.”
Jane turned an incredulous stare at Lazarus while I turned an equally incredulous one on Jane. She no doubt gussied up well—I did, and we could be sisters—but the idea of putting her in anything but sleek black leather already seemed bizarre beyond belief. From Jane’s expression, the suggestion might have been a killing offense.
Antoine, creepy aura or not, had the good sense to see when a knock-down-drag-out was brewing in his diner. He lowered his voice. “Well, you fed now. On the house for being new in town, but you go on, get going to Master Amaury. He’ll be wanting to see you, gussied up or no.”
Jane and I both said “Nuh,” at once and dug into our pockets, throwing cash on the counter until we independently decided it looked like enough to pay for lunch. Neither of us, apparently, wanted to owe flat-auraed Antoine anything. And then we skedaddled, Lazarus tagging along. The door had barely closed behind us before Jane said “Something’s not right. The Antoine I knew would never have called anybody “Master”, and the only Amaury I know about died in the forties. A vamp. If he’s still here, then he’s old and dangerous and—”
“And running this town,” I finished, and shivered.
Outside, the smell of water on the night breeze hit me, powerful and sour, fishy and fierce, like a living thing, the Mississippi just over the levee. It was different here from the world I knew, as if it was laced with magic. And then the smell of wolf hit me, musky and wet with rain and straining for the hunt. Beast raised up in me, growling. I turned to Laz, a vamp-killer in one hand, the growl echoing in the street.
“Jane?”
I ignored the warning question in Jo’s tone. The smell of spiders hit the wind. Laz laughed at whatever he saw in my eyes, and suddenly he smelled like many animals all at once. Skinwalker? I lifted the blade that had pierced his neck and sniffed the traces of his blood on the steel edge. No. Not skinwalker, Beast thought at me. I do not know what it is.
“I don’t know what you are,” I said, stealing Beast’s line, my pitch still half-growl, “but you stink something not-quite-right. And whatever you are, Beast really wants to gut you now and be done with it all.”
“What does he smell like,” Jo asked carefully.
“Like wolf and spiders and snakes. And now like raccoons and nutria and swamp water full of crawly things. He can change his scent at will and he’s playing with us.”
Jo said, “Jane, look, he—” She stopped, exhaled noisily, then muttered, “Look, let me try something, okay? I’m a shaman, right? You’re okay with that?” She waited an instant for me to nod, then nodded in return and said “Keep your nose open.”
Her eyes went gold as she spoke. Mine were gold all the time. Hers were green most of the time, but I could practically smell her pulling power down, and with the pull came the color change.
And a scent change. It was like she was pulling Beast, or something like Beast, into her. She smelled of snakes, all of a sudden, and then of coyotes, and for half a second I even got an avian smell off her. Not a bird I knew. Something huge. Something dangerous. Her skin shivered a little, but she didn’t change into any of the things I smelled. They were still part of her, right under the skin.
After a minute she let the magic go and wheezed a bit. “Okay, that was horrible. I don’t usually do that. But—look, did my scent change?”
I gave a wary nod and Joanne’s shoulder’s dropped. “And does that make you want to stick a knife in me?”
“Maybe a little bit.”
She snorted a laugh. “Great. No, see, my point is we’re obviously all three coming from different magic backgrounds. Laz looks like a witch to me. Connected to the earth on a really deep level, and hooked up to some kind of god on the other side. My witches don’t do shapeshifting, but I bet your shamans don’t carry coyotes under their skin either.” Her eyebrows went up challengingly, and I had to nod an agreement. “Okay,” Jo said again. “So can we get past the pig-sticking impulse and accept that Laz’s magic isn’t like yours any more than mine is? We’ve got to find out what we’re all doing here, Jane. We might very well need all three of our talents to do that.”
Beast huffed and stepped back, claws sheathed. “Not my world,” I grumbled, slamming the weapon back in its sheath. “Looks like my world, smells like my world on the surface, but the magics are turned all inside out and upside down.” I eyed Laz, “And it stinks. Let’s go.”
“Where?” Jo asked, with that careful tone still in her voice.
“To Vamp Mojo, the vampire bordello that, in my day, was a rock-n-roll, jazz, dance club, and bar. Any place that smells of blood and sex that strongly has to be central to our being brought here.” I saw Jo shrug and Laz grin. I really hated that grin. It was too pretty by half, and pretty boys were dangerous any way you looked at them. But the other two seemed to think my killing Laz was not a good idea. Which totally sucked.
I turned and led the way, keeping an eye on Laz and Jo in the windows of storefronts as we passed. As we walked, I talked and braided my hair, which had come back loose and straight as it always did after a shift. Then I twirled the braid up into a bun, and arranged my weapons in it, the stakes working like hairsticks, and my derringer hidden underneath. Insurance, just in case. “In my world,” I said, “Amaury, assuming it’s the same guy, is dead. He was the former Blood Master of New Orleans. Powerful. Old.” The other two considered that as we walked.