But I did notice a black SUV, paralleling my progress one street over. Black SUVs were a dime a dozen, but this one . . . Had I seen it from the corner of my eye while the light thing attacked me? It looked familiar. I slowed, and the black vehicle continued on. Paranoid me.

When I got back to my place, I stepped from the SUV and inspected the damage. It looked like the kind that could be caused by a two-hundred-fifty-pound deer in a full run ramming an ordinary vehicle. But unlike a deer accident, there were no short brown hairs or blood in the indentations. No indication or evidence of what had hit the vehicle, though the rain may have washed some away. I had seen the sort of thing that hit me before, several times, in fact. The first time was when it wrecked Bitsa, my Harley, and most recently in Chauvin, Louisiana. It had been all teeth with vaguely humanoid features. Had the creature I had seen down south been the same species as the thing that hit my SUV? Maybe the same creature? And did this mean the creature was hunting me? Not a happy thought.

Feeling the damp in my bones, I shook off my misery, entered my house, acknowledged the guys sitting in the main room with a wave and a promise of info, and went to my bedroom, closing my door. I stripped and climbed into a shower, letting the steam and the water pressure pound the stress out of me.

•   •   •

The thing that had attacked my vehicle was similar to the being that was my ex-boyfriend’s partner in the department called PsyLED under the umbrella of Homeland Security. Her name was Soul and she was brilliant and curvy and gorgeous and deadly. And not human. When lives were at stake, she moved like the thing I’d seen, the thing that had now attacked me in the streets several times. The thing I had seen splashing in the water of the canals, like a dolphin playing, below Chauvin, Louisiana. A thing others didn’t seem to see at all, except for Bruiser, with his Onorio magics. Whatever she was, Soul changed form in a swoosh of light, just like the things, the light-beings, though she didn’t smell like one. Thinking of Soul and Chauvin made me think of Ricky Bo. Which just ticked me off.

Before I went back into the main room, I dressed and texted Soul, not that she had come here, or done anything substantive, when I saw the previous things. But informing her seemed the right thing to do. Another thing like you attacked my SUV. Dented it. I listed the time and sent the text. And stared at the screen, hoping Soul would call or text me back, but she didn’t. I knew how hard it was to step up and deal with the “I am not human” problem, but I had hoped Soul would come through sooner rather than later.

Back in the main room, I curled up on the couch and said, “Update.”

“Not trying to be rude or anything, Janie, but you look like crap,” the Kid said.

“It’s been an interesting night.”

To my side, Eli appeared, carrying a huge mug of tea, smelling of spices, with a dollop of Cool Whip on top. He put it in my hands and wrapped my fingers around the warm stoneware. His hands held mine on the heated mug, his flesh warm over mine. It was an odd, kind, unexpected thing, that touch. Tears burned under my lids. “Thanks,” I whispered, not trusting my voice for more than that.

“Alex is right,” Eli said aloud. He dropped into the chair across from the couch, watching me. “Debrief. Take it slow.”

As I sipped, I filled them in, step by step, while the Kid typed up a report. We had discovered that it helped to have a running record of the weird stuff in our lives and business.

When I got to the part about the thing in the basement, Eli asked, “What did it smell like? Did you recognize it?”

“No. It was . . .” My nose crinkled, remembering the oppressive dark and the stench.

“You didn’t have a record of the scent in your skinwalker memory?”

“The closest I can come to it is to say that it smelled like a village full of sick and dead humans, mixed with the strong odor of lightning, and the scent of vamps when they had the plague. And vinegar. Sick and dead and dying and electrified salad dressing all at once.” I shook my head as if shaking away the memory. “Anyway, we went back up the elevator and I got the heck outta Dodge.”

The Kid said, “Otis Online Repair did a diagnostic and told us nothing we didn’t already know. The palm scanner and the button control panel are functioning according to specs, just as our own diagnostic showed. They speculate that the problem with the elevator may be an electrical pulse in the HQ wiring, maybe something not digitally traceable in the control panel. I pulled up an electrical schematic of vamp central.” He whirled the laptop to display a floor plan with varicolored lines on each floor, including five layers of basement, which was really unusual, what with New Orleans’ high water table. “The basements should be permanently flooded from water seeping in from the ground, but they aren’t,” I said, “which means that magic went into the construction. Some kind of spell that keeps water outside the basement walls.” Which meant witch assistance in the building process several hundred years ago. But what was most interesting were the different-colored lines threaded through the building, floor to floor.

“The colored lines,” he said, “are the electrical systems according to date of installation. The red lines are the original installation in—get this—1890. Most of the original wiring has been updated, some parts repeatedly, for decades,” Alex said. “Some were torn out—that’s the yellow—and replaced, especially after insulated copper wires first came on the market to replace the original uninsulated ones. The major updates were done in 1893, 1906, 1947, 1969, 1998, and again in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina. In fact, all the rewiring dates followed major hurricanes, and twice in that time, all of the aboveground floors were totally rewired due to a storm surge that supposedly flooded the basements from above.”

“So the spell that keeps water from seeping in through the walls won’t stop it from entering from above.”

“That’s what I’m getting,” Alex agreed. “But according to what I can find online and in the databases of vamp HQ, the lines in the two lower basements have never been upgraded, and are still in use.”

“And the two lower basements would have suffered the most from aboveground flooding, so that excuse to rewire was bogus. If our problem isn’t the control panel of the elevator—which is the most likely suspect—then maybe something about the wiring—”