Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(53)

Eli shook himself. Blinked. Looked around the limo until his gaze settled on Bruiser. “You killed a little girl?”

Bruiser repeated his previous statements, nearly word for word, his tone careful, his eyes on Eli’s hands, close to his weapons. “Her name was Joan Bennett. She stood four feet nine, and she looked like a child. She was staked and beheaded in nineteen forty-three for killing two of her human servants. Not a child. But you were seeing a child.”

Eli frowned, his eyes staring into a past only he could see. “A little girl blew herself up. Killed three of my men. Nearly killed me. She was maybe ten.” His eyes filled with tears and he blinked against them. “I saw her coming. There was nothing to suggest that she was a danger, but . . . I knew it. Somehow. And I didn’t take her down. I just watched her walk up to us and . . . If I’d just shot her, my men would have lived.” Eli’s expression didn’t change. His hands clenched and then released. Rain dripped off his fingertips. “I couldn’t do it. I knew what she was going to do and I couldn’t . . . couldn’t do it. I just stood there.” A single tear gathered and fell, trickling down his rain-slicked face. And still his expression was stone.

We all sat as he cried, silent, terrible tears. I wanted to take Eli’s hand, give him a hug, but I didn’t know how. The limo took corners carefully, Shemmy as involved in the pain as we all were. Outside, muted thunder rumbled. My magics stayed silent, contained.

Edmund slid across the seat to him and took up a towel. Silent as well, he dried off Eli, starting with Eli’s head, which he pressed like a benediction. Eli’s neck, shoulders, and arms. He dried Eli’s torso and slid to the floor to dry Eli’s legs and behind his knees. Down to his feet. From the floor, without looking up at Eli, Edmund said softly, “There is no going back. There is no revival of our humans. There is no erasure of our horrors. No healing except of time and she is a vengeful mistress, leaving scars that are forever. But there also is no proof of foreknowledge, only of twenty-twenty hindsight. You guessed. You did not know. Knowing is only for God.” Edmund lifted and dried Eli’s hands. He said, “Your hands are clean. Not stained with blood. You need not carry the blood of your men. Only their memories.”

Eli took a breath that quaked in a sob.

Edmund returned to the seat, next to my partner, his nearness a comfort if Eli wanted it. After that we rode in silence.

? ? ?

We pulled through Faubourg Marigny, a mostly residential area of the city, and Shemmy pointed out our destination as we rode by, a street-side recon. “You want the double-gallery house with the star jasmine blooming out front.”

It was the wrong season and too cold for jasmine to be blooming. The temps at freezing should have killed the flowers, even if the plant itself survived. A sense of unease slid across me. There were few two-story buildings in the nearby blocks, and the brick building housing Caruso Family Funeral Services stood out as different, even though it didn’t have a sign advertising its services. Like most vamp businesses, it didn’t publicize.

I said softly to Edmund, “Vamp funerals and the vamp mortician or morticians who reattached the heads of the dog-fanged vamps. I want to know everything.”

“Clan Bouvier began a climb to power as lesser Mithrans who provided services to and for other, more powerful Mithrans. They cared for scions in lairs, they cared for sick human servants who contracted diseases not eased by their master’s blood, they helped to care for and educate children of the body.”

Vamps sometimes were able to have children of their own bodies, though that was uncommon and I had no idea why. But such children were rare and cosseted and adored. I had killed the creature masquerading as Immanuel, Leo’s “child of his body.” Losing the person he had thought was his son had driven Leo nearly to madness. It was a miracle he hadn’t killed me.

And then it hit me. “Did they care for Immanuel when he was a child?”

Edmund hissed, putting the death of Leo’s supposed son together with the Europeans. “Yesssss . . .”

The long view. A plan in place for decades. Perhaps for centuries. And then I come along and kill the pretender and set everything awry, force a new plan into motion. “Go on,” I said. Beyond the armored windows, thunder rumbled. The tires sprayed water in the streets up under the floor of the limo as we circled the block, and I could feel the vibration through my boots.

“Bouvier took as blood-servants human doctors and nurses and the mortician family, and they turned those who were most loyal. They chose bankers as scions. They made friends among the powerful humans in the city, the politicians, the movers and shakers as they were called. Bouvier did favors. They recruited among these powerful humans for the useful and capable and not simply the beautiful. They also served Mithrans faithfully. Which meant they learned secrets from the Mithrans they attended and from the humans they turned. They grew covertly powerful. And because I believe that I know what information you seek, I will add, the Bouvier clan were allied with the Damours. The clan and blood family shared blood. Fostered scions. They were close.”

I put together what I knew and was beginning to guess. “And Bouvier’s attachment to Bethany Salazar y Medina, the outclan priestess? Was she part of their little clique?”

Edmund shifted a puzzled gaze to me. “From time to time, I do believe that she associated with them, though to say she was allied would be incorrect. Outclan priestesses do not align with either clan or blood-family. Why do you ask?”