I laughed. It was not what Shoffru was expecting. He hesitated. Just a moment, a fraction of a second. And from somewhere close, I felt the first touch of death magic.

Black and soft as cashmere yarn, glistening with black stars, it settled on Jack, just as the spell on the throwing knife started to work. From every cut, slice, graze, and scratch on his body, blood began to flow. Bliss’ spell combining with the death magic. And as the blood welled, it blackened and fell like ashes on the night air. The two spells working together, evolving.

Shoffru’s eyes went wide. He grabbed something on his neck. The lizard. It came away from his body, limbs reaching, mouth open. Throat extended. Glowing red. Pulling red motes out of the air and into his mouth.

Dang. A magic lizard. My laughter bellowed out over the yard. But from my hand, the three red motes reversed course and flew from me, into the lizard. And through its skin and into Jackie Boy. Shoffru landed on his knees, mirroring Leo’s fall. His blood ran faster, graying and thickening, taking on texture and form, becoming semisolid, a gel, instead of blood. Beginning to pile on the ground at his knees. He turned to Leo, holding out the lizard, and the red motes inside Leo began to fly back, through the air, hurtling into Jack. He was trying to recall his magic, to heal himself from the spell. Trying to draw power from Cym.

The red motes pierced his skin, entered through his mouth. They zipped around inside him. And as he began to shrivel, they bunched up, in the areas of his heart and brain, spinning like tops. When he began to shift and sift into a pile of gray ash, they were still spinning. And I realized that they had to go somewhere when he died. I leaned forward and tossed the thing I had grabbed from the staked second to the grass at Shoffru’s feet. And then I rolled quickly away.

Looked back. It was a gem. Not a diamond. Maybe an opal. A fire opal. Red and glowing with inner heat. The motes dove toward it. Inside it. Leaving their host. And Jack Shoffru dusted to death.

I stared at the gem. Reached over and lifted Jack’s shirt out of his pile of granular ash and shook it clean. And wrapped the opal in it. From the ash, the lizard scampered across the grass and right into the hand of Gee DiMercy. Who winked at me.

I was pretty sure no one saw either of us as we confiscated Shoffru’s magical implement and his familiar. All attention was on Leo, who had made a miraculous recovery. He was standing on his own feet. And he had a vamp in each hand, forcing them to their knees. “Your master is forsworn. Surrender all rights and power or die,” he said. I looked at the second floor and saw Evan. He held out a thumb to me and disappeared back into the room where Eli had been dying.

My partner was alive.

We had won.

Leo was gonna feed.

Oh, goody.

In the far distance, sirens sounded. Lights were on in houses up and down the street. The neighbors had waked and called in the cops. I needed to get Leo into the house or the backyard. I thought of the bodies upstairs. The blood everywhere. This had FUBAR written all over it.

Knowing that the young vamp would hear, I called, “Shiloh. Get our people out of the tree in back, and take Molly and get out of here. Tell Alex to tell all our people to get out of here. Move it.”

With a pop of air, she was at my side. “Yes, Jane,” she said. “This was . . . interesting. Aunt Molly-Lolly said it would be.” I had no idea what she saw on my face, but she laughed. “We’re going.” With another pop of displaced air, she was gone.

I looked over at Leo, with no idea of how to get him to a safer place, one where law enforcement wouldn’t try to arrest him for what he was doing. Human cops wouldn’t understand the dominance, neck biting, and bloodletting taking place. From the corner of my eye, I saw Derek with something over his shoulder, carrying it to Leo’s car down the street. I hoped he got to it in time. Cops would arrest a brother in a heartbeat for carrying a headless body. Arrest first, convict later, ask questions never. I looked up at the window where Eli was. War Women were fairly useless when it came to saving people, but I wanted to be with him anyway.

Bruiser walked across the dark yard to my side. As if reading my mind, he said, “The healers are with Eli. They have him stabilized, but it won’t last. I’ve called for the priestess to help heal him.” The sirens I had been hearing turned in, drawing closer, the combined wails heralding at least four cruisers, maybe as many as six. We had a circus on our hands. “I’ll get Leo to the back,” Bruiser said.

I looked at the MOC. He currently was drinking from a male vamp, and one woman was kneeling in front of him. I did not want to know what she was doing. “Yeah. That might be a good idea.”

He grinned, teeth gleaming in the night. “Remind me to tell you later how splendid you are. How extraordinary. And how beautiful.”

“It would have been even better in the mud, dude,” Derek said, jogging past. “But for chick-on-chick fighting, it wasn’t bad.”

At which point I looked down, to see that I’d fought the last battle in my ripped bra and a pair of bloody jeans. Go, me.

CHAPTER 24

Some Kind of Whammy

The hours before dawn sucked. My people got away just in time, taking with them the guns and ammo, the dead vamp and the human I had killed, and the human Shiloh had shot. Leo took his new people to the backyard. Derek tossed me a black T-shirt as he drove past, so I wasn’t bare when the police arrived, though I smelled strongly of Derek for hours after.

The cops arrived with lights and sirens, a mixed bag of city cops and sheriff’s deputies, which drew all the nosy neighbors out of their houses to the street, rich, older humans in their jammies, talking angrily about the peaceful neighborhood and the evil supernatural types disrupting it all. And generally getting in the way. The cops got in the way too, wanting to know where all the blood came from, and why Eli was nearly dead, and what kind of vamp ceremony was taking place in the backyard at the pool. They tried to stop the elder vamp priestess, Sabina Delgado y Agulilar, from getting to Eli, and one actually drew his service weapon. Bruiser started calling in lots of favors at NOPD headquarters and to the local sheriff to get the police to stand down. Tension was ratcheting up fast.

But the old priestess had little tolerance for human law or conventions. Instead of waiting for Bruiser to work through channels, she put some kind of whammy on the neighbors and the police, which was surely captured on the footage from the cop car cameras. There was nothing I could do about that part; Leo would just have to deal with it later. But whatever she did, the neighbors went back to bed and the cops were suddenly all smiling. They got in their cruisers and left. That wouldn’t be the end of it, but I took what I could get.

Sabina got Eli fully stabilized, his throat healed over, and his blood supply reestablished, but it wasn’t enough. He had lost too much blood and she was afraid that he would turn. Eli would have hated that. So I made the decision to call an ambulance and take him to a human hospital. The transport and paperwork were speedy, and the doctors efficient. Eli was pumped full of other people’s blood, four bags full, in just a matter of hours. His girlfriend, Sheriff Sylvia Turpin, showed up and took over, shoving me out of the picture, which worked perfectly for me. He had a bunch of new scars that he needed to explain to Syl, and since they might technically be my fault, I wanted to be long gone. The only good part in it was that at least I wasn’t having to tell her Eli had died on my watch. The Kid let me know that by ten a.m. Eli was griping about being released, which had to be a good sign.

While dealing with the cleanup at the house on the golf course, I received confirmation from Leo’s lab that the poison on the weapons wielded by Clan Arceneau’s jailbirds was indeed Jimsonweed. Which opened up a whole new area of concern for me. What effect the poison might have on me—on a skinwalker.

I also received final proof, way too dang late, that Shoffru had indeed hosted the coming-out party at Guilbeau’s, a situation I was going to have to remedy. Part of security for the vamps and humans in the Big Easy would mean, in the future, that a social secretary would schedule everything. Not that the vamps had a social sec. That was something they would have to deal with later too. All that took way too long. I was exhausted as the clock neared noon, and was tired of the dried blood crinkling on my skin and the stink of Derek caught in his T-shirt. And just plain tired. Tired to the marrow of my bones.

• • •

When I got home, it was well after noon, but I discovered on my bed a note on a fancy card, in a fancy envelope. Vamp-fancy, which meant calligraphy and high-bond paper and even some gilt. In the note, I was given orders to appear at Katie’s. “Posthaste,” the little note said, which would mean my very first ever meeting with a vamp during the day. That the vamp was Katie was a bit scary. And meant no nap for me.

I took a fast shower, put on clean clothes, so no stench of blood clung to me, and my vamp hunting gear for self-protection. I texted Adelaide Mooney that I had been summoned. She called me back quickly and made some recommendations.

Politely, still digesting Del’s comments, I knocked on Katie’s door.

Troll, trying to look unworried, let me in and secured the door from sunlight. I was about to ask him what the summons meant, but Katie appeared at his shoulder with that little pop of air that meant she had traveled fast from her lair, and since her flesh wasn’t smoking from contact with sunlight, I knew she had been in the lair that I had helped to design and build, in this house, under the stairs. She was dressed in a floor-length brown dress, her blond hair down and catching the lights. She looked human, not vamped-out. I figured that was the best I could hope for.

“Katie,” I said.

“Enforcer,” she said back. Which was not a fortunate start to the interview, centering on my job to protect vamps and follow orders. Which I hadn’t done. “You have news about the ones who took my servants and your friends. News you did not share with me.”

“Yes.” And those ones would be Jack and Cym. I took a steadying breath and drew on Del’s counsel and legalese. “I found them last night. The ones who took your girls and fed them to a newly freed scion are dead. And the girls have become blood-servants of one of Leo’s newest scions, Shiloh Everhart Stone, and they are all well again from the magics that were making them ill. But you know all this. So I’m thinking you really wanted to tell me something else.”