Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(5)
We sat in the dark for all of five minutes before a uniformed officer approached, and we put our hands up where they could be seen. She knocked on the window and Eli let it down. Before I could offer to get out an ID, the woman said, “Younger and Yellowrock?”
“That’s us,” Eli said, turning off the SUV.
She shined a flashlight inside and blinded us. I squinted against the glare. “Leave your vehicle. This way, please,” she said.
Still blinking, I got out of the car and trailed the cop down to the ferry landing, closer and closer to the fish stink. The mist thickened and swirled, coiling and dancing on the altering air temps, moving with the river breeze.
The Belle Chasse Ferry Landing was a narrow two-lane road on a sturdy pier over the water. Well off the shore, the road met a wide wharf where two ferries were moored at a dock or a jetty or something. A late news crew from WGNO, the ABC station in NOLA, were milling around at the end of the road, held back by local cops and crime scene tape. The African-American woman talking into the camera spotted us as we boarded and I heard her whisper, “Jane Yellowrock. Get the shot. Is that the MOC? No. Has to be that hunky partner of hers.”
A cop waved us onto the ferry and out of sight, but I could hear the reporter saying, “Put this with the basketball players’ cell footage from the gym and we are golden.”
Eli breathed a laugh.
“Shut up,” I griped.
He laughed louder.
The chuckles stopped when we reached the end of the boat. Stern? Bow? I wasn’t sure, since both ends were straight, without the curving bow on, say, the cruise ship Eli refused to get on. The ferry was rusted, the red paint missing in many places, and the sidewalls dented. The white structure where the driver stood was in need of a good coat of marine paint. I later figured out it might be called the wheelhouse, and saying the driver steered the boat would have proven me to be woefully lacking in nautical terms. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut.
I leaped to the top of the wide sidewall to get a better view, the rubberized bottoms of my boots gripping the rubberized railing with ease. A small crowd of parish and state dignitaries and uniformed officers from various interconnected agencies policing the river were standing well back of two bodies, which were lying on the deck in a tangle of ropes and netting. There was a buoy of some kind, a few dead fish trapped in the netting, and what looked like a midsized tree. Everything was wet and trails of river water ran off, as if the mess had been pulled from the water and dropped. I didn’t ask how everything got here, didn’t ask permission; I just stepped down to the boat deck and walked in as if I belonged there, then across the mess to the bodies.
From the comment about the human, tangled in the arms and hair of a vamp, I had expected to find a human man with a female vamp, which proved how stilted my own social and sexual expectations were. It was two males, both dressed in the ruins of gray uniforms and leather shoes, one with very long brown hair. Gray uniforms meant a Pellissier Clan blood-servant and scion, the ones who worked in the clan home itself, the ones most trusted. The rotted cloth suggested they too were from the reign of Leo’s uncle, Amaury.
The human was in an advanced stage of decomp. The vamp, however, was far less rotten. He had flesh on his torso and long bones, and his joints were still attached with connective tissue. He had no eyelids or lips, as if something had eaten them away. But his eyes were still intact and his jaws were still working at the long-missing flesh of his human partner. Little snap, snap, snap sounds of jaws clicking, his upper and lower canines tapping. Canines like Berkins’. Well, ducky. We had two connections, dog fangs and uniforms.
Over the coms, I heard Alex say, “Holy necrophilia, Batman.”
Eli was sending live video. The vid would be a help if we needed to go over the scene again. Eli muttered, as if to me but really to Alex, “Silence is golden.” Louder he added, “Other than the bodies, looks like fishing line, maybe some shrimping nets, buoys, and a waterlogged tree.”
I made an mmmm sound, drew a vamp-killer, holding it at my side, and squatted over the vamp.
“Don’t get too close, lady,” a Plaquemines deputy said from ten feet away. “It bites.”
The vamp stopped snapping and his head turned slowly toward the deputy. The sclera of the vamp’s eyes were liver-disease yellow and his irises were bright blue. He’d once had a narrow mustache and high cheekbones, a dimpled chin. I had a feeling he had been a very pretty man in his undead state, despite the notch in his left ear, one that had never regrown, suggesting it had been given to him in a prevamp state and never healed properly. His mouth opened, revealing the dog-style upper and lower fangs and his back molars.
Vamp-fast, he lunged at the deputy. Even from ten feet out, the vamp caught the man’s sleeve in his jaws. Everyone screamed. Humans jumped back. Service weapons were drawn.
My vamp-killer shot up almost on its own. Pierced through the vamp’s throat and out the back of his neck. But my aim wasn’t perfect, or the vamp dodged the thrust. The edge slid into the spine at the wrong angle. Sliced along the spinal processes with a skittering force. The bone trapped the edge. I hated when that happened. The vamp’s head slid to the side as the tendons on the right snapped in two. The vamp’s head lolled and the deputy’s sleeve came free as I cut backhand. Jerked the weapon free. The vamp focused on me.
There was no blood in the huge wound. The vamp hadn’t fed on the living since it rose. But the eyes didn’t look away and the thing’s jaws were again snapping fast. Even bloodless, the vampire was healing. I finished the job with a cut that completely severed the head.