While I was glad that the Kid was growing up, I was less happy with the thought that we were missing something. And that the explosions we had triggered with no loss of life had been secondary to a far greater plan of attack yet to come. Or worse, had been intended to lure us into a false state of undeserved triumph. It was all coming together and it was too easy. Nothing in my time in New Orleans had been easy. Which meant it was all going to break loose and soon.

There were things contained in the subbasements at vamp central that were far more dangerous than the witches, the vamps, or me. Was I looking in the wrong direction for the problems? Blinded by the expected? I didn’t think so. It felt as if I was on the right track. The early attack on the Elms was either an accident or a plan triggered too soon, or it had been intended to get the Truebloods and me out of the way just before the Witch Conclave, when it was too late to change security plans. That would have left Leo without a trained Enforcer and made it easier to kill him.

I hoped that, for once, there wasn’t a deeper motive or multiple aims or a multilevel plan, and that the witches had one purpose only. Hoped that our witches were too young to have layered goals and century-long discriminations. That their hatreds would be short-term hatreds.

Hating the Truebloods and the other witches for being willing to parley with the vamps.

Hating me. For living when Antoine had died.

Hating Leo. Because his son killed their father/husband.

CHAPTER 17

Namaste. Oops, Vamps Don’t Have Souls. Never Mind.

“I have some home addresses for the Nicaud women,” Alex said as we crawled back into the SUV, “four, to be exact. They moved around a lot. I tracked the last one down just this second. Sending them to your cells, along with GPS and sat pics.”

The Nicauds lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, on Lamarche Street. The Lower Ninth Ward had been the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, large stretches of the neighborhood under eight feet of water for days. The largest numbers of deaths took place there, human and pet. And the Lower Ninth had received the least amount of revitalization money, which is to say, little beyond tearing down and hauling off the most uninhabitable buildings and homes. There were still boarded-up homes and empty housing lots, little opportunity, and fewer jobs.

Since the last time Google drove through, with its rotating camera, preserving the world for online viewers, things had changed on Lamarche Street, and not in a good way. Eli drove past the first address and turned around in the intersection of Florida Avenue, driving back slowly. Half a block up he cut the lights and backed into the cracked drive of an empty lot.

The Nicauds’ most recent address was a weathered brick Creole cottage, two rooms wide, the house visible in the security light of the house next door. The cottage was traditionally symmetrical, with two front doors and two front windows, the shutters closed over each, with smoke damage showing behind and plywood hammered over them. The steeply pitched, side-gabled roof had seen the hand of firemen’s axes as they tried to open a way to control the fire that had destroyed the inside. Someone had tacked a blue tarp over the damage. “There’s a light on inside,” Eli said. “Two figures, adult-sized, human, moving around.”

He had a mono-ocular on to preserve the night vision in the other eye should something explode and temporarily blind him. He was flipping back and forth between low-light and infrared, studying the house.

“Looks like a brazier and an oil lamp. Both figures are male. Wait. Under the eaves on the second floor, there’s another figure. Supine. Maybe on a cot.” He studied the view for a while. “We could check it out.”

I nodded. “Give your brother the keys and let’s go pay them a little visit.” I opened the door, and the scents of the place hit me like a wet blanket wrapped around a sledgehammer. Water from the river. Water standing on the rain-soaked ground. Old smoke, that peculiar, vile stench of a burned-out house. Food cooking over an open flame, maybe a chicken. The stink from an outdoor latrine. Sweat. Unwashed male. Familiar males. I’d smelled them before. And riding over the stinks was the pong of sex and the reek of fear and pain and . . .

A memory shoved up through me like a clawed fist. My father, beside me on the floor, dead, his blood cooling. My mother, on the floor as well, the white man’s shadow riding her. The smells. The smell of pain and sex. I moved so fast the world blurred. When I stopped, it was to find myself on the narrow front porch, Eli’s hand on my arm, the Benelli against my shoulder.

“Jane. Wait,” he murmured.

Pain ratcheted through my bones and settled in my fingers and my jaw. I hissed at Eli, lips snarled back to show killing teeth. My eyes were glowing gold, reflected in his.

He yanked back his hand and held it up, telling me to stop. Or to be peaceful.

Peace is human concept. Not predator concept, Beast thought.

“There’s a woman in pain in this house,” I said. “I smell her blood and the men’s—” I stopped, unable to go on. “They hurt her.”

“Are you absolutely . . . completely certain she’s been hurt? That she’s not there of her own free will?”

“I—” I stopped. “Yes.”

“Is it Tau or her mother?”

“No. The scent is human. A young female.”

Eli’s voice went cold, expressionless, what I had come to know as his battle voice. He looked over the house, whispered, “Saw something like this in a little village in . . . elsewhere. Two men with a woman captive, upstairs, bound and gagged. Squatters. Had ’em a woman too beaten to fight anymore.” He made a waffling motion with his hand. “Not saying the situations are the same. This girl could be here by choice, but . . .”