Dangerous Calling (The Shadowminds) (11 page)

“Good luck.” She might’ve even meant it. I hung up.

In the kitchen, Bruce and Lionel weren’t speaking. Shane was washing coffee urns and rolling Diana’s words through his head.
—trapped in that house
,
all those years—monster—why would she want me dead—
Upstairs, Diana was sleeping. The vision had taken a lot out of her. Ian, though, was up.

Could a guardian tell when a telepath was in his head? I slipped into his thoughts. The difference between his waking mind and his sleeping one was subtle. He was still difficult to read, still brimming with power. He hadn’t signed up for this, either. He at least had a right to know what was going on.

I went back inside and up to the second floor, to Mina’s old bedroom. The door was closed. I knocked. Ian only grunted, so I pushed it open.

He was wearing an army green tank and black sweatpants, and he was using a bar braced in the bathroom doorway to do pull-ups. The towel he’d spread beneath was dark with sweat. He didn’t stop when I walked in. He kept working, biceps bulging. With each repetition, he counted softly. He stopped when he got to twenty.

“I hope your wing is all right,” I said.

He extended it. I couldn’t even tell where the injury had been. “Like new,” he said.

“Thank you. You know. For saving my life.”

He ignored me and grasped the bar again. On his left forearm, a tattooed row of small, straight lines rippled under cut muscle.

“So. Uh...” There was no easy way to prepare him for this part. “It turns out she’s a vampire.”

He snorted and turned back to his makeshift pull-up bar. “Figures.” He counted off his set again, his voice a heavy whisper.

“They didn’t tell you about vampires in guardian school?”

“Seven. I didn’t get that far. Eight. I kinda flunked out. Nine.”

“Susannah says only a guardian is strong enough to kill her...”

I waited while he finished his set. He grimaced as he pulled himself up for number twenty, held it, and lowered himself slowly to the towel. He wiped his face and neck with his shirt and turned to face me, arms crossed, wings folded and glistening with sweat.

“She’s says you’re not strong enough to take her yet.” It sounded ridiculous, but we’d both seen what she could do.

“Get me close enough and I’ll try again.”

“There might be other ways.” He watched me, expressionless, while I explained what I could do. His face didn’t waver when I told him I might’ve killed him. As though death was something he expected, something overdue, and he was tired of waiting around for it.

“Must be a rush. Getting power like that.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about it.

“You sure you can handle it?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

He raised one eyebrow at me. “If you say so. So I get you juiced, we go after her.” He spread his sweat-soaked towel over the rug, dropped, and started doing pushups. His breath came like a shot after every one. “You hold her down,” he said at the top of a pushup. “I’ll cut her heart out.” Another rep. “Problem solved.”

“Right,” I said, watching him. “Easy.”

Up, down, up. “How hard could it be?”

I shook my head, frowning. “Aren’t you a cop?”

Up, down, up. “Was.” Down. He let his chest touch the floor and stayed there. For a moment I wondered if he’d pushed himself too far and passed out from dehydration. Then he levered himself up to a sitting position and didn’t look at me.

“I think you need to tell me why you killed those men.” It wasn’t what I’d been planning to say, but once the words were out, I knew I needed to know. Was he really bloodthirsty, or had things just gone badly wrong?

“Are you going to kick me out?” His tone was barely even curious.

“I guess that depends. Should I?”

He sighed and rubbed his face. The close-cropped stubble over his skull had gotten longer. I ducked down and forced him to look at me.

“I don’t have to ask, you know. I can read minds.” Though guardians, I was finding, were harder to read than most. They weren’t so much shielded as dense, hard to navigate. I could get into his head, but finding what I wanted was another story. It would be easier this way. I waited.

“Fine,” he said. He stood up and started pacing. I sat down in Mina’s old armchair and let him find his way.

“I’m ex-military. Marines. Joined the state police when I got out. Seemed like the closest thing, you know? And I wanted... It’s hard to explain. I tried selling insurance with one of my frat brothers, but...” He stopped pacing and faced me. “I don’t like feeling useless.”

“I can understand that.”

He went back to pacing. “Anyway, I ended up helping with this...investigation.” He stopped and looked at the pull-up bar, gave a little laugh. “I was just the muscle. They had me sitting outside the house of this girl, one of the accountants over at the River Queen Casino. You know it?”

I nodded, recognizing it from the news report. It had opened a couple of years ago, before I’d returned to New Orleans.

“Anyway, this girl. Emily. Her manager had some shady shit going on, paying out salaries to people he’d fired. She noticed—thought it was a mistake.” He chuffed and shook his head. “That’s the kind of girl she was. Never thought it might be something worse.”

Her face swam in his mind. Pale skin, freckles, red-gold hair and a wide mouth, bright blue eyes a little on the small side. Pretty in that impossibly sweet way some women never lose. Innocent.

Ian shut his eyes and shook his head. “Anyway, she shows him the records, he tells her not to worry about it, and she finally figures out something’s not right. Calls the police. Turns out this manager guy’s been slipping suitcases full of cash to this guy on the gaming control board. Buddy Boudreaux or Broussard or whatever.”

I gasped, but he didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t talking to me anymore. He was confessing, and I could tell this was the first time he’d spoken this story out loud.

“We just needed evidence to take it to trial. A few photographs and her testimony—we would’ve had the sonofabitch. I ended up assigned to bodyguard detail on Emily. We got...involved.” He turned away and looked out the window to the backyard. “I knew I was crossing the line, but you have to know this girl. She was really risking her life.” He took a deep, wavering breath, then faced me. “No point in dragging it out. They found out she was talking to the cops and they killed her. Made it look like a suicide.”

I covered my mouth with my hands. His memories of the events were finally on the surface of his mind where I could reach them. They kept skipping around. I saw him coming upon her pale body, propped in a bathtub in a pool of bloody water. When he spoke, it took me by surprise.

“We didn’t have enough to go to trial, not with her dead. They all got away with it, the bastards. And when I got home that night—well—I was halfway through a bottle of Jack when Frank showed up.”

“Frank?”

“Guardian of Houston. Almost shot him when I saw the wings.”

“I think most people would react differently.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t believe in God and all that shit. But I know the devil is real.”

I didn’t have a response to this. He didn’t seem to need one.

“Anyway, Frank trained me up and put me through the transition. Took months.”

“Transition—so—you mean you weren’t born this way?”

He cocked his head at me. “Nah. Don’t you know how it works?”

“New Orleans hasn’t had a guardian in generations. I didn’t know you guys existed until a few months ago.”

He nodded as though this didn’t surprise him. “We’re not born. We’re chosen. I was just a regular guy until Frank told me I could do this. Anchoring, they call it. That’s why I can’t be too far from my city. Once I got my wings, I was tied to the place.”

“What, like, forever?” Was that what we needed? Someone who loved the city enough to never leave it?

“Doesn’t bother me. Never really wanted to leave. I grew up there, got my whole family there. Only now I can’t see them anyway, so.” He gave a huffing, humorless laugh. “Anyway, first thing I did after I got my wings was track those sacks of shit down. Maybe they weren’t holding the knife, but they damn sure knew who was. I guess I got them spooked.”

His memories shifted. I felt the flash of panic as two men barged into the bedroom where he slept. The painful clench of his hand on the hilt of a knife he pulled from under a lumpy mattress. The crush of flesh as he struck, the blood.

“But it was self-defense. Right?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Could be they only wanted to scare me. This...” He flexed his hands and stared at them, raised and spread his wings. “I’m not used to it yet. The strength.” Remembered emotion boiled to the surface and overtook him. They weren’t the first lives he’d taken, but they were the first he’d taken in panic, the first he’d taken not knowing his own strength. His memory of his bloodstained clothes bristled with details made sharply clear by adrenaline. He closed his eyes under the weight of it.

“So you were arrested? Surely, a jury—”

“They never got the chance. Frank and Susannah—they got me into hiding. I can’t keep the glamour up. Not for very long. If they put me in jail, well...” His wings shimmered in and out of view. “Even if I got off, there’s no way I could keep these hidden. I guess they couldn’t let that happen. So here I am.”

“Here you are.”

“Figure the least I can do is help with your vampire problem. She kidnapped the girl, right? I’ll take her down. End of problem.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “It looks like it’s a little more complicated than that.”

Ian went to the pull-up bar still braced in the bathroom doorway. He gripped it with both hands and looked at me. “Then you’re thinking about it wrong.”

Chapter Eleven

Shane and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the hardware store.

“What about these?” He held up a black fluorescent bulb in a plastic blister pack.

“Do they give off UV light?”

“Not sure.” He peered at the back. “Doesn’t look like it.” He put it back and picked up a standard fluorescent bulb. “What about these?”

“Do we really think light bulbs are going to stop a vampire?”

“Don’t ask me. I didn’t know they existed yesterday.”

“Y’all need some help?”

We both jumped and turned around. A guy with short dreds and a red smock stood behind us. His nametag read, “My Name is Ray and I’m Here to Help!”

“Uh...yeah. We need UV light bulbs.”

“Sure.” He turned, hands still in his smock pockets, and led us three aisles down to a display of outdoor pond liners and plastic frogs designed to spout water from their mouths. “This what you’re looking for?” He pointed to a display labeled
Water Sterilization.

I picked up a bulb in a cardboard box. The package claimed it offered the most powerful UV sterilization on the market. “I think this’ll do.”

“Y’all putting in a pond?” Ray asked.

“Yep,” Shane said. “A big one.”

* * *

We bought them out.

It wasn’t cheap.

Three bags of pond sterilization lights and electrical wiring. I dumped them on the brick patio. The sun was going down, and it felt like an hourglass receding.

“Where do we want them?” Shane asked.

I glanced around the yard and sighed. If I’d had to pick any place in the Quarter to defend against vampire attacks, a two-hundred-year old building full of unlockable windows surrounded by a three-foot wall was the worst possible choice. Couldn’t we at least have one of those fences with spikey wrought-iron finials on the posts? “Everywhere,” I said.

Shane installed the first light, and I stood by, handing him tools and supplies when he asked for them. While we worked, two of the guests—the young guys who’d laughed at Mrs. Robards—came out onto the back patio with a six pack of beer.

“Mind if we sit out here?” the taller one asked. He was wearing a strand of Mardi Gras beads and a shirt that said
I
got WASTED on Bourbon Street.
Classy.

“Go ahead,” Shane said.

“You guys renovating?” The shorter one, a redhead. He had on a Saints cap that looked as though he’d bought it three hours ago at a souvenir shop.

“Bug zappers,” Shane said smoothly.

“Yeah, you guys have some big mosquitoes down here.” Wasted Guy cracked open a beer and grinned at me. “I bet they’d like to carry you off.”

I didn’t smile. “I’m not that easy to carry.”

Shane gave the guy a warning look. He was oblivious. He sipped his beer and gave me a wink. I turned my back on him.

We formed a perimeter around the house, a light every three feet along the wooden fence, the low brick wall, through the patio garden and on the stucco outer face of the main kitchen. Shane’s movements were practiced and quick as he cut and married wires, fixed the sockets to the fence and the eaves. The sun stained the sky orange, and it glowed through the canyons of the quarter.

“You guys aren’t messing around,” Wasted Guy said, spinning one of his empty beer bottles on the table.

“Your comfort is our priority,” I said through my teeth. I was using them to hold a length of wire, since I couldn’t do it with telekinesis.

“
Should we be worried about giving them skin cancer?
” I sent to Shane.

“
I’m more worried about giving him a black eye.
”

“
They’re the only guests we’ve got left.
”

“
If this is the best we can do
,
I’d rather Lionel sold the place.
”

“
Don’t say that.
”

“
Have you seen what’s in his head?
” Shane caught my eye and cast an unfriendly glance toward Wasted Guy, who cracked open his fourth beer. Shane glowered. “
It’s probably better if you don’t.
”

The B&B usually attracted guests who were more interested in the culture than the alcohol, but now wasn’t the time to be picky. Business had been slow, and bookings for the next month were thinner than usual.

Shane installed a final light on the back porch and picked up the remains of the wiring.

“Dinner?” he said.

“Sounds great.”

I leaned in and kissed him, and he wrapped his free arm around me and pulled me in close. Wasted Guy gave off a little jolt of shock, and we both rolled our eyes. Some idiots still thought an interracial relationship was something to be surprised by.

“Come on.” I tugged his arm and went up the back steps, but we both froze when we heard raised voices in the kitchen. We paused on the porch, listening with our minds when we couldn’t make out words with our ears.

“We’ve got enough to see us through.” Lionel’s voice, placating.

“But what happens after that? What happens when we don’t make enough next month? You don’t owe that girl anything—send her off.” Bruce’s voice, angry.

“I can’t do that.” Lionel’s shock was plain. “She needs us. You want me to put her out on the street where that—that thing could get her anytime? Bruce.”

“I know, I know. But what’s going to happen when she comes back?”

“We’ll handle it.”

Bruce huffed out a sigh. “You’ll handle it. You’ll always handle it. What happens when you can’t?”

I chewed on my bottom lip. Lionel and Bruce almost never fought.

“Let’s go around front,” Shane said.

“Yeah.”

We cut through the narrow alley alongside the B&B where Lionel kept the trash bins. We had to levitate them up to get past, but there was no one to see.

“
We still have that cash—
” I began as we made it to the street.

“
It won’t come to that
,” Shane said. I hoped he was right.

We replaced half the bulbs along the front of the B&B and tested them. The violet glow was almost pretty if you didn’t realize what it was.

“There’s got to be something more we can do. I mean, this isn’t actually going to stop her.”

“No,” Shane said. “But hopefully it’ll slow her down long enough for us to prepare.”

“Lionel doesn’t know the rest of it, does he?” I didn’t truly have to ask. I knew Shane wouldn’t have wanted to worry him with Diana’s prediction.

“We don’t even know if that’s real.”

“She seemed pretty certain.”

“We’ll handle it,” Shane said, and the echo of Lionel’s words was eerie. I thought of Bruce’s reply. The same words were in my head, even though I didn’t speak them.
What happens if we can’t?

* * *

I lay awake all night. Partly I was waiting for Annette to show up, planning how I’d rip out her heart. Mostly, I imagined pulling.

The desire snuck up in little, empty moments. I mentally investigated a creaking board on the back porch that turned out to be just the settling of the old house, and when I brought my awareness back in, the thought was waiting for me, an ambush. Ian was only yards away. What if I took a little while he slept; he would never feel it. I shoved the thought aside, checked that our perimeter was still on by feeling for the heat in the bulbs. The desire crowded its way back.
Just once.
Just a little.
Shane’s quiet, even breath was as steady as the ocean. I focused on the rhythm, on the constancy of his presence. It didn’t help.
What if she comes back?
You need this.

I got out of bed and paced the room. It wasn’t just Ian anymore. It was the whole house. The few guests we had left, Lionel, Bruce, Diana. Shane. I watched his chest rise and fall, and a panicked sob choked me. I ran from the room.

I didn’t pay attention to where I was going until I ended up outside on the back patio, UV light making my skin glow lavender.

I could still feel the guests. I could still feel Ian.

The house next door to the B&B, on the opposite side from the converted apartment building where I’d so recently almost died, was a private residence. The owners kept to themselves and mostly lived in Texas, or so we’d heard. They were supposed to have a gardener come once a week, but while they were away, the guy came every other month at best. Sugar gum saplings were turning into trees in the backyard. They weren’t much, but they were something.

I leaned against the wooden fence and pressed my forehead into the grain. The pull wanted Ian. Above all, it wanted Ian. It would make do with Shane, with Lionel, with Wasted Guy or his friend, but it wanted Ian. I focused on the spindly gum saplings, already withering from weeks without water in the heat, but a piece of my focus was still on the warm bodies in the house.

“Hey, iss the bug zapper girrrl.”

I whipped around. On the back porch was Wasted Guy, still drunk. Maybe drunker. I gave him my best glare.

“Saw you down hirrr from my window. Waitin fer somebody?” He grinned. It was lopsided. For a single, terrifying instant, the pull I’d been preparing to sink into our neighbor’s weed-choked yard clawed its way toward him, seeking and starving, knowing his life would blunt the need.

“You shouldn’t be out here.” My voice was hoarse, barely controlled.

“Sez who? You? C’mon, I jus wanna talk to you—” He reached for me. I swatted his hand away with a panicked burst of telekinesis.

“Don’t touch me.”

He staggered back, confused, but fortunately he was too drunk to notice I hadn’t touched him. “Jeez, why you gotta be such a bitch, huh? Just wanna talk. Wha, you don date white guys?”

The question bordered on hostile. Just when I’d thought he couldn’t get any dumber. I clenched my fists.

It would be so easy to knock him out...just a little sip...

I was a hairsbreadth away from snapping, and the realization terrified me. I pushed past him and went straight for the garage, ignoring the way he called after me, ignoring my rampant desire to go back. I had to get out of here, had to get away from all these people.

I could go to Shadow House. Why wait for Annette to recover and come back? There were plenty of guards in that house—I could pull from them, hold her down while I cut out her heart with a goddamn kitchen knife, end this problem. The keys were in Lionel’s truck. I opened the door.

“Don’t go.”

I jumped and hit my head on the door frame. It was Diana.

“What are you doing up?” I rubbed my head.

“You were going to go there. To Shadow House. It’s not a good idea.”

“No I wasn’t.” How could she tell? “I was just going to go for a drive.”

Diana shook her head. “Bad idea. Very bad. You show up in the driveway, Greg comes out with his nine millimeter to distract you, and you won’t have time to stop her before she snaps your neck and drains you dry.”

“Okay.” I shut the door again. When the woman who could see the future told you something was a bad idea, it was a good idea to listen. I leaned against the side of the truck. “What are you doing up?”

“I don’t sleep much.” She stepped down into the garage, walking over to the bay of shelves where Lionel kept his tools. Her hair was out of a ponytail for the first time since I’d met her, and it looked as though she’d trimmed it herself with a blunt knife and no mirror. “I heard them fighting. Your dads.”

“They do that sometimes.” Could she tell I was lying? “It’s fine.”

She cast me a look, and the lead blocks were up again in her mind. Her large dark eyes held mine a few beats longer than normal. Then she turned and picked up a can of black spray paint. “It’s changing—everything’s changing.”

“You mean your visions?”

She nodded.

“Is that...normal?”

“Sometimes. I’m interfering by telling you things. It alters the path.” She picked up another can of spray paint, and another. I was betting there was at least a ten percent chance she was going to spray-paint something just to see what would happen. At least she wasn’t close to Shane’s car.

“I don’t think I should stay here,” she said

“You can stay here as long as you need to.”

“No—I should leave.” She sat down on the concrete and stacked the spray paint cans. One, two, three. It was a very precarious tower.

“Where would you go?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Diana.” I sat in front of her and waited for her to look at me. She didn’t, so I went on anyway. “I got you out of there. I’m not going to just give up and let her take you back because things got hard.”

“You don’t get it.” She stood up fast, and it was only my quick telekinetic response that kept the paint can tower from falling. She walked to the other side of the garage, threading her way through the two cars and staring at the wall. “If she doesn’t kill you and Shane, you’re going to kill her. I want her dead. I do. But I don’t want to be there to see it.” She finally met my eyes.

I remembered the complicated emotions of the much younger Diana watching Annette feed. I didn’t have to know her whole story to understand what this was like for her.

“I’ll make some calls,” I told her. “We’ll figure something out.”

We went back upstairs together, and I paused at the door to her room.

“Try to get some rest,” I told her.

“You too.” Something about the way she said it made me shudder.