Home > Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(13)

Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(13)
Author: Faith Hunter

“I think we’re done here. I need to get my wife home,” Abrams said, standing, giving a politician’s smile, one that said several things at once. The most obvious was that he was too important to deal with the kind of questioning suffered by the hoi polloi and that he had been far more patient than he had to be. “I can come in tomorrow to give a statement. My wife will be writing hers and sending it in by e-mail. I have your card. If there are problems with that arrangement you can certainly speak with my attorney.”

“Of course, Senator. Thank you for staying and talking to us. If we have further questions we’ll be in touch, but I can’t imagine that will be necessary,” Crowley said smoothly. “Stevens, see them safely to their Secret Service escorts and then to their car, please. Make sure they get away safely. And see Justin Tolliver and his wife in.”

“Yes, ma’am,” a suit said and opened the door. “This way, Senator, Mrs. Tolliver.”

“My brother and his wife had to leave,” Abrams Tolliver said. “Babysitter complications. He said to call and he’d come to you at your convenience.” Abrams held out a hand to Crowley. “Our cards with office and private contact information.”

“Thank you,” Crowley said, though it was clear she was peeved that someone had left her interrogation site.

When they were gone, Crowley turned off the mic and looked around the room. “Comments?”

“One,” I said. “He had a crust of mud on his shoe. It was a dress shoe. Fancy. He was in the city. Why mud?”

“Anything particularly odd about the mud?” she asked, as if humoring me.

“Not a thing,” I said, “if he was a farmer. He’d been in a car and a restaurant, not a field.”

“Nell,” T. Laine said.

“What? You think she’s gonna bite me?”

“Speaking of biting, why did you let Ming of Glass go?” Crowley asked smoothly. It was a cop question, slid in when not expected, hoping to get a reaction.

“Because she wasn’t in the restaurant when the firing started. She drove up later. She waited around for a while in case you needed to talk to her, but then she left. I’ve got her number if you need to talk to her.” I held up my cell.

“You have the Master of the—” She stopped. “You have the number of Ming of Glass in your personal cell phone database?”

“Her security guard, actually.” Whose name I didn’t know. Calling her Yummy would be embarrassing, but the SSSAIC didn’t ask for it. “I wouldn’t call in the daytime. That’s like poking a sleeping lion with a stick.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” Crowley stood and gathered her belongings, her face expressionless, her emotions indecipherable. “Include that information in your report,” she said to me. To the others, she said, “You are all dismissed. I expect reports in my e-mail by ten a.m.”

We all filed out of the room and into the cleanup.

There were three wounded and one dead, not counting the officer, lots of rounds fired, and no one had seen anything. I scanned the files being put together by JoJo and recognized none of the victims’ names. Worse, with the exception of the presence of the senator and the expected presence of Ming of Glass, Jo could find nothing that tied any of the dead or wounded to each other or to the people at the Holloways’ party. The worry about assassination or domestic—or paranormal—terrorism was still a very real possibility.

• • •

Near dawn, JoJo said into my earpiece, “Nell, I got a vamp calling, saying she needs her taxi driver at University of Tennessee Medical Center. She asked for Maggot.”

“Ha-ha,” I said. But I slid off my chair and jogged to my truck. I gave her my ETA and once again appreciated the superheater in the old Chevy.

• • •

Yummy opened the passenger door, looked over the interior, and said, “You have got to be kidding.”

“Nope. You could call an Uber.”

Her face scrunched in distaste; she slid in and closed the door. “Hell, Maggot. Can’t you afford a new car? Doesn’t PsyLED provide you a car? Does it have a radio?” She punched the buttons and twisted the knobs.

“Probably. Eventually. And yes. But it stopped working last week. Buckle up.” I slid her a sideways glance and pulled into the light five a.m. traffic as she complied. “No working radio. We’ll have to talk,” I said.

“About maggots?”

I laughed. “About life. Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m sure you have a dossier on me. Read it.”

“My time’s valuable.” I let my words glide into church-speak. “You’uns ain’t important enough to me to read it.”

Yummy burst out laughing and twisted around in the seat so her legs were splayed, one knee angled at me. “I like you, Nell.”

“Hmmm.”

“You’re not gonna say you like me?”

“My mama taught me to be polite and to not lie. Those two things aren’t always mutually agreeable.”

Yummy laughed again and dropped her head against the back window with a soft thud. Her very pale blond hair swung and fell still. “I was born the first time in 1932 in a little town in South Louisiana. I was turned in 1953 by a vamp named Grégoire, who said he loved me and that we should be together forever. He looked fifteen but in the sack he was truly immortal.” Yummy glanced my way. “He could do things with his mouth . . .”

Yummy was testing the waters, seeing how far she could go. I had learned quickly that no reaction was the best reaction when dealing with paranormal creatures, especially the predatory kind. I didn’t react, just eased through a green light and up behind an early school bus.

Yummy went on. “Sadly, when I woke up dead in 1960—early by Mithran standards—Grégoire had moved on emotionally and sexually and was sleeping with young men and the Master of the City of New Orleans, Leo Pellissier, a former and once-again lover. In the intervening years my brothers went to war and never came back, my father died of a heart attack working in a paper mill, and Mama remarried and moved away.” Yummy’s accent had changed as she spoke, taking on a twang I didn’t really recognize, maybe Frenchy Southern. An accent that was biscuits and gravy with hot sauce and alligator sausage or something. It was slightly like Rick’s when he was tired or angry, but softer, more melodious. She went on, now sounding a little sad, and I had to wonder if she knew she was giving so much away, or if she just needed to talk and didn’t care what she exposed about herself. “Instead of being head-over-heels in love, I was part of the Clan Arceneau blood family. But I was alone, a blood-sucker of little consequence, living with fangheads I didn’t much like and what amounted to human slaves. I was a small fish in a large fishbowl full of predators, all with bigger teeth than I had.”

She looked my way again and I pretended to be wholly focused on the street and the lights ahead. “I wasn’t interested in group sex, in making new slaves, or in helping to run a vamp’s household. So I learned to fight and went to war, as much as women were allowed to in Uncle Sam’s army back then. When I got back, I took on all comers until I killed one of Grégoire’s favorites and he sent me to Ming of Glass. I’ve been here ever since.”

That was a lot more than I expected her to tell me. I made a soft noise as I digested her story.

“Your turn, Maggot.”

I grinned at the windshield and quoted her. “I’m sure you have a dossier on me. Read it.”

When she stopped chuckling, Yummy said, “I like you more and more, Nell Nicholson Ingram. Okay. How’s this? You were raised in God’s Cloud of Glory Church, became a common-law wife to John Ingram at age twelve, and nursed his wife Leah until she died. Then you married him legally and nursed him until he died. You inherited all his land, which shared a boundary with the church, against which you led a war of ignoring and attrition for years. During that time, you educated yourself at the local library and recently got a GED. You joined PsyLED this year. You graduated in the middle third of your class at PsyLED training school and would have graduated higher had you received a traditional education. As it was, you classified as an expert marksman with two weapons, when you finally took the weapons qualification course, top of your class in poly sci, and bottom of your class in interpersonal interactions.”

“Not bad,” I said. Every special agent had to qualify for weapons, and requalify at regular intervals. It wasn’t as rigorous as the military’s qualification, but it was thorough and I hadn’t been certain where I had positioned in the class or what my final ranking would be. My certificates had come in the mail less than a week ago, and I was proud of them. That Yummy knew all that meant the vampires were capable of doing, or buying, deep background research on federal agents. That was something I’d have to think about later. “I’m not good at flirting or making small talk, but I bake good bread and make excellent soup and have even better survival skills.”

“Now that we’re done showing off,” Yummy said, “and since you aren’t about to let me feed on your soft, beautiful neck, how about pulling over and let’s get breakfast.” She pointed to an IHOP. “I’m paying.”

“Deal,” I said, swinging the wheel and popping into the parking spot. “It’s nearly dawn and it’s your skin that’ll be burned crispy, but I’m hungry enough to risk you dying again.”

“Ain’t you just the sweetest li’l thang.”

I grinned at her as I slid from the warmth into the cold and slammed the door. “I may not have fangs, but I can still bite.”

Yummy on my heels, I thought that my mama would have a conniption fit if I was ever dumb enough to tell her I’d had breakfast with a fanghead. Especially since I wasn’t hungry. But making friends with a paranormal creature who could fight might be smart. If friendship was actually happening here. I wasn’t yet sure.

• • •

It was after dawn when I used the inconspicuous keypad to enter the unmarked door between Yoshi’s Deli and Coffee’s On and into the field office of PsyLED Unit Eighteen. As I entered, I gave a halfhearted wave at the very conspicuous roving surveillance camera over the door, and waited until it closed behind me before I slogged up the stairs into the PsyLED offices. I was so exhausted my knees wanted to buckle.

I dropped my gear on the desk in my cubicle and stuck my fingers into the soil of the plants lining the window. A feeling of completeness rushed over me, feeling much like waves rolling over a beach, not that I had ever seen such a thing in person. I’d been close to the ocean when I went to Spook School, but it wasn’t someplace I wanted to go alone. The videos I had seen of the Atlantic made me think of isolation and aloneness and abandonment.

The soil and the mulch and the compost in my plants had the power of the ocean, but without the loneliness and isolation. They were all from Soulwood and connected me to my land instantly. The soil felt a little too dry and I made a mental note to water the plants. As I withdrew my fingers, I brushed them over the herbs, and the mixed scents of three kinds of basil, lemony thyme, and oniony chives filled my nostrils. I locked away my gun and found the coffee machine with my eyes closed.

   
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