As Blue turned to continue her mission, an elderly man who appeared to be very drunk and too spritely for his own good came up and grabbed at her, but she smiled and dodged away with practiced grace. He stumbled into a poker table, upset the game and caused all manner of profanity to bloom. Then Blue was on her way again.
Lawson removed a thin Marsh-Wheeling cigar from inside his coat and lit it at the flame of a lamp on the bar. He drew the smoke in and exhaled it, aware that he might appear to be a man in need of sunlight but that he was far removed from the human breed. And growing further removed, it seemed to him, with the passage of every night. Even in this hothouse, he was always cold. True rest was something denied him, for in the daylight he slept as the vampires did: one part tranced, gathering strength for the hunt, and another part on edge, senses questing, fearful of discovery and the power of the sun to sear his flesh and burn his eyes out. Though he appeared strong and indeed was—also in the way of the vampire—his body was withering inside. He could not eat food, he could drink only a little, the taste of water sickened him, and the blood need was a constant pressure. The cattle blood was a poor substitute for what his transformation from human to monster desired, and though he fought it with all his power of will he did on occasion find a derelict in the darktime streets of New Orleans and take what he needed to survive a little longer.
It was LaRouge he needed to find. She, who had turned him. If he could find her, and drink her dry…
He recalled what he’d been told by another vampire, a legless Confederate named Nibbett, there in the root cellar where they’d kept him near the devastated battlefield of Shiloh. After you feel and see and you are, you won’t care to go back. Only way…is to drink the ichor from the one who’s turned you. Drink it all down. Then you go back to what you were, and you age. Hell, some of ’em would turn to dust, if that was to happen. Ain’t gonna be a thought in your head, though. All that goes away. You’ll see. Trust an ol’ rebel, Cap’n. Once you get turned…you ain’t ever gonna want to go back.
Lawson had escaped that house of hell by cutting off Nibbett’s head with a butcher knife. He had been pursued by the horde, had jumped from a bridge into a river and that was the beginning of his story.
Where it might end he dared not think. If LaRouge and the Dark Society could not take him into the fold, bend and break him into becoming a true monster intent on consuming the life’s blood of men, women, and children, they would have to destroy him. Tear him to shreds, scatter what was left of Trevor Lawson across the bloody fields of their war against humanity.
He was an if, and he could not be allowed to let others question their fates.
They were out there, watching him. They tracked him with powers and senses much older and keener than his own, he was sure. They waited for him to walk into a snare, and thus he was always so careful where he stepped. And yet…how else to reach LaRouge, but to let them get their claws on him?
He blew smoke toward the ceiling, his face grim and his eyes cold, and he watched the girl earning her five silver dollars.
She went to the group of men standing around the big Put & Take spinner. She touched on the right shoulder a tall, lean, black-haired man with streaks of gray at his temples. He was wearing a black suit and was clean-shaven, showing a chiselled profile that would have served him well among the ladies of New Orleans. He turned from the game, gave Blue a thin-lipped smile…and then his right hand came up and seized her chin with what appeared to be violent intent. The man was smoking a stub of a cigar, and he removed it to lean toward Blue and kiss her roughly on the mouth. When the man pulled back, the slick smile still on his face, Lawson saw Blue make a mistake.
Her eyes darted toward the bar and Lawson. They showed fear, and Lawson knew the man had seen.
But the man gave no reaction. He released her, said something to her, she nodded and walked away just as the saloon girl in the pink lemonade dress was moving in. A few heartbeats passed, and then the man slowly turned his head toward the bar, where his sharp-eyed gaze slid from one face to another until he came to the two he’d never seen before.
Lawson by this time was not looking directly at the man but could feel himself being examined. Now there was a sense of impending danger in the room; the man was not a vampire, but he had the second-sight of a born survivor. When Lawson next looked, the man was still standing at the spinner but he was tracking Blue as she pushed her way toward the roulette table. Lawson took a drink of blood and whiskey and said to Ann, “We’ve been discovered.”
To her credit, Blue was still working for her money. At the roulette table she touched on the shoulder a heavy-set, brown-bearded gent who wore a black skullcap and a brown leather jacket with a fleece collar. This man, like the first, was intent on the game and gave no response. Lawson glanced quickly toward the gamblers at the spinner, and though the spinner was going around in a blur of red, white and black numbers the man who had seized Blue’s chin was smoking his cigar and watching the girl as a cat might watch a mouse.
Blue approached another man at the roulette table. This man’s back was to Lawson and Ann, but he had a mass of curly dark brown hair and he was wearing a navy-blue coat. She touched his shoulder, he looked up at her, showing a profile that included a full beard, and she leaned her head down and spoke.
Lawson could see her mouth form the last word.
Omaha.
“Get ready,” Lawson said.
“For what?” Ann asked, but she was already as tense as an arrow about to fly from its bow.
He answered, “Anything and everything.”
Eric Cavanaugh stared up at Blue for a few seconds as if he hadn’t understood. The wheel was spun and he had not put down a bet. The little wooden ball clattered and clattered and clattered. The young man—older-looking than his father had described and made older and nearly unrecognizable by the beard—turned around to peer through the layers of smoke toward the bar. Blue was already on her way back to get her coins. Lawson’s right forefinger went up to touch the brim of his Stetson, and both Eric and the gambler at the spinner saw.
There was a moment where the young Cavanaugh turned back to the roulette wheel and Lawson thought the rich man’s son had no idea what was happening or what was about to happen. Lawson smoked his cheroot and waited, patience being one of his remaining virtues…and suddenly Eric stood up from the table and began to wend a path to the bar.
At once, the clean-cut gambler at the big spinner—Deuce Mathias himself, Lawson guessed—tossed his cigar stub into a spitoon and started moving. Not toward Eric, but toward the heavy-set figure in the black skullcap. Whatever was going on, Mathias didn’t like it and he was alerting either Presco or Rebinaux.
Blue reached the bar first. She took the coins with a speed that would have been admired by any creature of a vampiric nature.
“You did well,” said Lawson. “Thank you.”
“Ain’t exactly sure what I d…did.”
Ann said, “Company’s coming.”
She didn’t mean only Eric Cavanaugh. She meant that the oily-looking gambler Lawson had pegged as Deuce Mathias was approaching. Behind him the heavy-set man had paused to alert the younger one with the mop of brown hair at the Faro table. Mathias was wearing a gunbelt though the actual pistol was hidden by his black coat. The other two began their advance through the crowd as well, and they also were packing iron. None of them appeared to be appreciative of this sudden intrusion by strangers.