The front door was unlocked, and when we entered, a brass bell over the door rang with a tinkling sound. It hadn’t been there the last time we were here. Someone had been moving things around; the front room was no longer overcrowded with kitsch and there were no fanged dolls at all. However, the place was so filled with commercial scents that I couldn’t smell anything but the floral-fruity-lavender-cherry-spice combo. I holstered the nine mils I hadn’t even known I’d drawn and pulled the M4, cradling it in my arms.
A young woman stuck her head out of the middle room and called a cheery, “Hello. I’ll be with—” Her accented words came to a complete stop as she focused on the weapons. She had sounded vaguely Russian as she spoke, and now her eyes went wide with fear.
I held up a hand, fingers spread. “It’s okay. We’re here with Big H’s permission.”
“Hieronymus,” Eli corrected.
“Yeah. Him. We’re not here to hurt you or anything.”
Moving slowly, the girl came out from the wall, revealing a slight frame, long, straight hair, and dark eyes. She looked like a child, willowy but tall for her age, the way girls look when they have grown a foot in a year, all knobby knees and elbows below a pink shirt and plaid skirt. Much like I had looked during my first year in the children’s home.
I had no idea what she was doing here or if Big H’s people had cleaned up our mess in the back. We had left an awful lot of blood in the back room. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Nostrana,” she said. Yeah. Middle or Eastern European.
“Have you seen Silandre?” I asked.
“No. She has not been here.”
“How about the back room?” Which was a coward’s way of asking if Big H’s cleanup crew had gotten all the blood out.
Nostrana shrugged. “Someone purchased the entire set, I think. The room was empty when I arrived two days ago. I have been rearranging everything, making it into a doll room.” She stopped, biting her lip, as if she had said too much.
“Nostrana,” I tried to pronounce it like she had, all liquid sounds and sophistication, but it came out sounding flat and Southern. “You work for Silandre?”
“Three days a week, and during the three days of the full moon and the one night of the new moon. It is odd schedule, but I am exchange student in university, so I can make it do.”
“There’s no university anywhere near,” Eli said, sounding cold and hard and managing to call her a liar.
Nostrana’s head came up and she firmed her lips. “I take classes on Internet. And I take bus to campus three days a week.”
“Long trip,” Eli said, still disbelieving, this time almost snide.
“Is not your concern. What do you want?”
I smiled. Nostrana was no pushover. “To look around,” I said, sliding the shotgun into the spine sheath and showing both hands open and empty. Reluctantly, Eli holstered his weapons, but he kept a hand on one. When Nostrana didn’t object, I walked through the disordered room toward her. And felt the tingles on my skin. I stopped. This didn’t make sense. “You’re a witch.”
Her eyes narrowed and she reached into a pocket. “Also not your concern.”
“Witches are disappearing in Natchez. Have you been approached by anyone? Been followed?” I asked.
“No.” Her left hand clutched something in the pocket.
“No need to use magical defense on us,” I said. “We’re going.”
“Please. Quickly. And not to come back unless Silandre is here.”
I jerked my head at Eli and backed away, stepping carefully to the front of the saloon/store and out into the meager sunshine without turning my back on her. I didn’t speak again until we were back at the SUV. “Witches are missing. Vamps are turning into cockroaches, and Nostrana is a witch working for a vamp.”
“If she was telling us the truth,” Eli said.
“She smelled of the truth.” Eli gave me an odd look, one I’ve come to associate with me admitting to being anything nonhuman. Like most of the other times, I ignored it. “I need to talk to Francis.”
Without commenting, Eli started up the SUV and we rode along the Under the Hill streets and passed by the old warehouse/bar where we had fought and survived. Once again, a surge of magic hit me, a sharp, bitter tang in the air. “Stop the car.” Before Eli had come to a complete stop, I was out of the SUV and moving between buildings, following the scent. Within three steps, Eli was behind me. In my pocket, I felt something hot and I dug a hand in, pulling out the coin the tribal elder had given me in the church-that-wasn’t. The silver coin was hot to the touch, the temperature variant a sure sign of witch magics. I reached into another pocket and touched the pocket watch. It too was heated. And stank of old blood.
“Here. It’s here.” I turned in a slow circle, holding the coin out before me, feeling the coin heat and cool, like a childhood game—“You’re getting hot! Cooler. Cooler. COLD! Hot again!” Leading me toward the middle street . . . and as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone.
The coin was now neither warm nor cold and the watch was my body temperature. Maybe the change in temp had been my imagination. Maybe I’d been palling around with supernats for so long that I was starting to scent magics everywhere. I dropped my arm. Stuck the coin in my pocket. The old blood smell of the watch clung to my fingers. “Crap. Okay. Let’s go home, Eli.”
He raised his brows. “You’ll tell me what this little jaunt was about later.” It wasn’t a request. More a command.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Let’s go.” While he drove, I texted. A lot.
• • •
There wasn’t much left of the winter afternoon when we got back to Esmee’s. “I have some dirty work in the garage,” I said.
“We killing the vamp?”
“Francis? I hope not. But we may have to cut off his clothes.”
Eli’s forehead wrinkled. “Say what?”
“Francis is one of the new spidey vamps. I’ve been smelling old blood on Francis, stinky stuff.” Stinky stuff like the pocket-watch amulets, but I didn’t share that with Eli, not yet. “Francis is healing even without blood meals. I think our boy may have something on him that’s helping him heal and transform, maybe even controlling him somehow. It might be what allowed de Allyon to do what he did and control the vamps under him so well, and take over other cities, and be a Naturaleza in a world where all the other vamps were Fame Vexatum.”
Eli shook his head, but I thought it was in surprise, not negation. I pulled out the pocket-watch amulet.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why the priestesses and the European council allowed de Allyon to keep his own territory, operating as a Naturaleza in open violation of the Vampira Carta? And no one tried to stop him?”
“So far as we know,” he hedged.
“So far as we know,” I agreed, as Eli pulled the SUV to the garage. “He had to have something on the other vamps, some kind of weapon or way to protect himself until he discovered the vamp plague.”
“A witch circle,” Eli said, surprised.
“Exactly. Powering some kind of amulet or objet d’foci,” I said, playing on objet d’art, “that allowed him to do all kinds of stuff. Then he discovered the vamp plague and he decided it was the perfect weapon to expand his power base.” I flipped open the pocket watch, catching a whiff of that almost-familiar stink. Remembering where I’d first gotten the amulets—off Naturaleza vamps and humans sworn to de Allyon. “This isn’t powerful enough to be the amulet or focal object. But I think it’s tied in somehow.”
We left the vehicle, walking into the daylight. It wasn’t bright and the sun was hidden behind layers of clouds, but it was daylight. It would do. Inside the garage, the shadows enfolding us, we stood, letting our eyes adjust.