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  “What kind of special assignment? And why am I hearing it from you instead of Zrakovi?” Elder Z was my boss, not Alex, however Mr. Bossy liked to think otherwise.

  Alex pulled out his wallet and laid a credit card on the table. He was picking up the tab without a negotiation, and I let him. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like what he was about to say.

  “Zrakovi’s going to talk to you tomorrow after the hearing, but I’m all about the not-keeping-secrets-from-each-other thing.”

  Uh-huh. More like, he thought this was such a juicy piece of news he wanted the pleasure of telling me himself, although he didn’t look exactly happy about it.

  “Okay, spill it. What’s my special assignment?”

  “You’re going to be babysitting Jean Lafitte and making sure he doesn’t try to take revenge on anyone for what happened last month.”

  Alex gave me a grim smile and held his glass of port up in salute as the pot de crème congealed into a lump in my stomach. “Good luck with that, Jolie.”

  CHAPTER 4

  I sat in Arnie’s cab off the corner of Tulane Avenue and Broad Street and tried to figure a way to avoid going into the massive Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Building. Fifty years ago, the behemoth of stone and marble had been a marvel of lavish classical architecture. Today, it was a marvel that anyone survived a visit to it.

  The weather sucked, the neighborhood reeked of danger, and the fourth floor was probably already full of pretes behaving badly.

  Even before the post-Katrina flooding submerged the first two floors of the courthouse in grimy water, wiping out case files and evidence, the building had suffered from dwindling city budgets, ongoing political corruption, and a rapidly deteriorating, gang-riddled environment.

  Criminals were everywhere, so of course it made the perfect spot for the first meeting of the Interspecies Council, held after hours to accommodate the vampires. According to Alex (my hotline to the Elders), a horde of Blue Congress wizards, skilled in creation, re-creation, and illusion, had reconfigured the seldom-used fourth floor. The windowless area had been transformed into a meeting space now reachable only via a single transport drawn in chalk on the building’s front steps.

  A shabbily dressed man lounged near the spot where the transport was supposed to be, but I saw bright, sharp eyes beneath the brim of the worn hat tilted over his forehead. Enforcer.

  “Miss DJ.” Arnie glanced in his rearview mirror, eyes widened. “You sure you want to be gettin’ out here? It’s almost eight o’clock. Courthouse been closed awhile, and there’s no reason for a woman to be hangin’ around Tulane and Broad after dark. Nosiree.”

  Unspoken was the “and I’m not coming back for you when you get your ass in trouble” message.

  “It’ll be fine. That’s my friend up there on the steps.” The probable werewolf posing as a vagrant. Alex had been required to make an early appearance to help set up security; thus, my trip with Arnie.

  “Ohh-kay, Miss DJ. You be careful, hear?”

  Yeah, as careful as I could be heading into a roomful of vipers. As sentinel of this region, I’d be part of every council meeting in a non-voting capacity. New Orleans had become the grand social experiment of the prete world. If things worked out here with our open borders to the Beyond, the reasoning went, other cities might drop their borders as well.

  Before the walls fell following the hurricane, I’d been a sort of border guard. Now, my job was part babysitter, part negotiator, part peacekeeper. Prete-related crimes got shunted to Alex and his Division of Domestic Terror investigators, so he’d be at all the meetings as well.

  A loud pop from a few blocks east sent my skin crawling as I exited the cab, and probably accounted for Arnie peeling rubber. He raced through a yellow light on Broad and hightailed it back toward the gentrified, safer confines of Uptown.

  It probably wasn’t a gunshot, or so I told myself. Early Christmas fireworks, maybe, or a backfiring car. Right.

  The faux homeless guy sat up straighter and actually growled when I approached, so I got straight to the point. “Transport?”

  He pushed back the brim of his hat, and I felt his buzzy shifter energy from three feet away. “ID?”

  Definitely an enforcer. They all had that charming gift of gab, including Alex when he went all Neanderthal on me.

  “You’d be doing me a favor if you refused to let me in.” I dug my Green Congress badge from my bag and gave it to him, noting the increased buzz when I touched his hand. Slightly different from what I got off shifters like Alex or my merman friend Rene Delachaise, so I was betting werewolf.

  He glanced at the ID and handed it back. “No such luck, sentinel. You’re on the VIP list.”

  Yeah, Very Insignificant Peon, at least compared to most of those who’d be here.

  Just past him, I spotted the interlocking circle and triangle of a wizard-powered transport etched across several concrete steps in chalk. “Why couldn’t we just transport directly into the courthouse?” I stepped into the transport but waited for Wolfie’s answer before leaving.

  “Beats me. My guess is that the wizards wanted to inconvenience everybody as much as possible, maybe hoping half the council members won’t bother to show up.” He paused. “No offense.”

  “None taken.” He was probably right. The Elders refused to meet in Old Orleans because most of our magic doesn’t work in the Beyond, plus this had the added bonus of forcing the elves to travel in frigid weather, which they would hate. In my late-night research on the Elders’ secure website, searching in vain for useful information on elven reproduction, I had learned that elves were weakened by cold temperatures. Which explained not only Rand’s reluctance to venture outside these days, but maybe my own. I wasn’t anywhere near half elf, but the cold seemed to bother me more than anyone else I knew and had gotten worse, maybe due to our bonding.

  The transport was open and already powered up, so I only had to say the magic words “Interspecies Council” to use it. I knelt and touched a finger to the chalk line, though, to see what kind of wizard had powered it. Definitely Red Congress; the transport was strong. Physical magic was the strength of Red Congress wizards; my specialty was ritual magic, slow but reliable, and not the least bit sexy.

  Unlike any other Green Congress wizard, however, I had a righteous staff of elven origin tucked in my messenger bag. I’d picked this particular bag because Charlie (or, as the elves would insist, Mahout) would fit in it with only an inch or two of wood poking out.

  After a few unpleasant seconds where it felt as if my head were being sucked through a vacuum cleaner hose, I opened my eyes to the magic-enhanced fourth floor of the Criminal District Court Building. The locals just call it “Tulane and Broad.” I’d been here once before, to beg my way out of jury duty, and knew each level of the real building consisted of one long marble hallway with courtrooms and offices on both sides.

  The magical version still had the highly polished gray marble floors, but the transport sat at the edge of a lobby area not much larger than the living room of Gerry’s house. A few benches dotted the edges on three sides; on the fourth wall spread a massive set of double doors in rich mahogany. Beyond, I assumed, was the Interspecies Council’s inner sanctum.

  “ID?” A beefy guy wearing a lot of black leather, including a shoulder holster, stood outside the transport. This one’s energy buzzed more shifter than were, and I wondered what he turned into. True shifters like Alex and Rene could change at will, unlike were-animals, who remained tied to the phases of the moon.

  I pulled out my badge again. When he handed it back to me, I stuck it in my pocket where it would be easier to get at next time. I’d borrowed a trio of red and white sweaters from Eugenie to wear in layers, refusing to make my first appearance before the world’s most powerful pretes dressed in a thrift store coat of eye-gouging plaid. Wearing jeans—the only pants I owned now—and with my right arm in a tasteful black sling, I hoped I looked sufficiently conservative but not
to the point of sucking up.

  Unlike Alex, who I spotted as soon as I slipped through the double doors. He wore a suck-up black tailored suit that highlighted his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and a cream-colored shirt that looked suspiciously like silk, open at the collar. Deep in conversation with an older man who sported a wild Einstein-ish shock of white hair, Alex looked healthy, wealthy, and sexy enough to make me forgive almost any boorish behavior.

  I caught his eye and waved, and got a hot little smile in return, complete with that sexy crease on the left side of his mouth that was almost, but not quite, a dimple. Maybe our relationship was going to make it after all. I’d had my doubts in the last month, but we’d both been working at it, trying to keep the external stuff from blowing us apart.

  I reined in my appreciation and looked around the room, trying to figure out where to sit.

  According to Alex, the room had been patterned after the Supreme Court chambers. A long table stretched across a carpeted platform in front, with chairs that faced the room. Before each chair was a placard inscribed with the council member’s name. I made note of where Capt. Jn. Lafitte would be seated and scanned the rest of the room. A small wooden table sat in front of the dais, with two chairs facing the council, probably for whoever was giving testimony. And rows of seats behind.

  I was prime peanut-gallery fodder, so I plopped myself at the end of the row of seats nearest the front and counted the chairs behind the long table. Fifteen, each with a microphone stand before it.

  Despite my terror at having to testify and dread of seeing Adrian Hoffman and the Axeman again, my adrenaline pumped enough to make the room seem brighter and louder. I’d done a good grounding before leaving Eugenie’s to keep my empathy in check. I didn’t know which species I could read and which ones I couldn’t, so better to be safe.

  “Hey, sunshine. Care if I sit with you?”

  I looked up and smiled. It was the first time I’d seen Jake Warin in weeks, not since I’d fled to Old Barataria to escape the elves and the Axeman.

  I scooted over and Jake took the aisle seat.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered. “You don’t have to testify.” Being here could be dangerous for him; he’d accidentally infected me with the loup-garou virus last month, which in some ways had set the whole ugly elven conspiracy in motion. The Elders still didn’t know about his involvement, and I hoped it didn’t come out today.

  “I’m security for the boss.” Jake’s dimples made an appearance, and his amber eyes twinkled like they had before all this loup-garou mess started. Maybe he was finding his way back to being Jake, and that made me happy. “You know, your pirate BFF.”

  I looked around but didn’t see Jean. “How’s he doing?”

  Jake shook his head. “His body’s healing, but you knew that. His head? Well, let’s just say he is one pissed-off Frenchman.”

  Great, and I had to babysit him. “Throwing tantrums? Making it hard on his people?”

  “Oh no.” Jake looked around to see if anyone was nearby, then lowered his voice. “If Jean’s noisy and carryin’ on, he’s mostly putting on a show. It’s like theater for him, you know? He likes an audience. When he’s really pissed off, he gets quiet. And he’s been like a damned church mouse ever since Thanksgiving.”

  Better and better. “I hear my next assignment will be keeping Jean under control,” I said. “Any idea how I can accomplish such a thing?”

  Jake laughed. “Good luck, sunshine.”

  Yeah, seems like I’d heard those words before.

  Alex joined us, and for the next half hour, we watched as members of the Interspecies Council arrived with varying amounts of fanfare. The people with charges against them were being held in a room behind the dais, which left me free of worrying about seeing Adrian Hoffman again and able to gawk at the pretes.

  The Einstein talking to Alex turned out to be Toussaint Delachaise, my merman friend Rene’s father and council representative for the water species. A sour-faced gremlin represented the group I liked to call “gods and monsters,” sort of a catchall prete class, none of whose components were big enough to have their own representatives. The head of the enforcers, a werewolf who’d been Alex’s boss before he’d begun answering to Zrakovi, filled the were-shifter council seat.

  “Where’s Lafitte?” Alex whispered, then slid his gaze past me. “What the holy hell is that?”

  I didn’t feel self-conscious turning to openly gawk at the newcomers, because a silence had fallen over the room. Everyone else gawked, too. A tall, razor-thin woman with a cascade of silvery-blue hair glided down the room’s center aisle. She wore a heavy blue floor-length coat trimmed in white fur with a long fur tail that slid along the floor behind her like a snake. Trailing her were two men also dressed in long, fur-trimmed coats.

  “Faeries,” I whispered to Alex. “Has to be. They have three council seats.”

  He nodded. “The queen is really … old.”

  I studied the woman, who’d walked onto the dais and taken the seat pulled out for her by one of her male companions, the one with short black hair as opposed to the one with short blond hair. Both men looked to be in their early thirties; the woman was a pickled ninety if she was a day. Although she could be a thousand.

  Note to self: Look up the life span of faeries. I hoped the faery search would be more fruitful than the hours I’d wasted trying to learn about elf reproduction while Eugenie cried in her bedroom.

  Finally, the other council members filed in from the room behind the dais. First came a man too pale and perfect to be anything but vampire. “That’s Garrett Melnick, the head of the Regents,” Alex whispered. “Etienne was going to be their other council member.”

  Melnick looked like actor James Franco if he joined Mötley Crüe. Boyish posing as hair-band grunge, all in black leather.

  The elven contingent of Mace Banyan and Quince Randolph needed no introductions, although they both looked gratifyingly cold. Rand’s gaze locked on to me as soon as he walked in the room, and he smiled. I gave him a finger-wave, the most I was willing to concede, although damned if he wasn’t pretty in his powder-blue snow-prince sweater. He must have a closet filled with every shade of blue.

  We’d had a short conversation last night after Alex and I returned from dinner, deciding the weather was too awful to visit City Park. He’d not been able to tell me much of what to expect today, except to keep my eyes open and be ready to think on my feet. That didn’t bode well.

  “That’s the Elder from Asia, from Tokyo, I think. His name’s Sato,” Alex said, nodding toward the dark-haired man who entered with Willem Zrakovi. Both wore ankle-length black robes.

  “Since when do wizards wear robes?” I whispered. “That’s falling into every human stereotype ever created.” Jeezum. Next thing you knew, they’d be waving around magic wands.

  Speaking of which, I moved my bag containing the elven staff between my feet so I could get at it if I felt the need to wave something around myself.

  “The First Elder thought they’d look more intimidating in robes than in business suits,” Alex whispered back. “They look like they’re on their way to a costume party at Hogwarts.”

  Finally, a handsome black man of indeterminate age walked out of the back, accompanied by a handsome Frenchman whose age I knew all too well.

  Jean Lafitte looked great for a 230-year-old pirate who’d recently died for at least the fourth time that I knew of. He was six-foot-two of alpha pirate, his dark hair pulled back in a short ponytail, his dark blue eyes sharp and serious. He had full lips, a strong chin, and a jagged scar along his jawline in case one forgot how lethal he could be.

  The indigo double-breasted waistcoat emphasized his slim waist, and light-colored breeches were tucked into black leather boots that almost reached his knees. Add the ruffled white shirt and he was ready to attend any nineteenth-century ballroom in style.

  He gave Jake a light, somber nod and let his gaze linger on me a second
before taking a seat next to Toussaint Delachaise. His companion took the center chair and pulled the microphone toward him.

  “If everyone could take a seat, please.”

  This was my first look at Adrian Hoffman’s father, Geoffrey, the First Elder and also the representative for the UK and European Union wizarding communities. I saw the resemblance to his son. He wasn’t as flashy as Adrian, but had the same bone structure, the same good looks, the same haughty bearing. I guess one didn’t become grand poobah of all wizards without cause for arrogance. He’d probably been horrified that his baby boy had fallen for a vampire, conspired with elves, and gotten himself turned.

  I’d spent a lot of my sleepless nights thinking about the First Elder, putting together my theory as to what he knew, and when he might have known it. I was ninety-nine percent certain he was up to his robe-wearing ass in the whole elf-vampire-wizard political mess. I couldn’t prove it, however, so I had no intention of sharing it here unless I got backed into a corner.

  After the introductions, including an awkward moment when Hoffman forgot the Faery Queen’s name and called her Ravine instead of Sabine, the room fell quiet. I waited with my eyes glued to the closed door behind the dais. Of all those charged with crimes, who’d come out first? Would it be Adrian himself, who’d conspired against a fellow wizard and set me up to be killed? Lily, the elf who’d started the whole conspiracy? Etienne, her vampire conspirator? Jonas, the necromantic wizard who’d turned against his own people for money? Or the Axeman of New Orleans, the big, lumbering undead serial killer who’d become the conspirators’ weapon?

  “The first thing I’d like to do this evening,” drawled Hoffman, looking down at a stack of papers he’d placed before him, “is call for the testimony of the person who was at the heart of all the problems experienced in the preternatural world three weeks ago. The person, indeed, at whose feet the bulk of the blame could rightly be placed.”