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“I noted that,” she said mildly. “Are the kids alive?”
“Yeah. A person in a mask tried to inject one of them, and a guard inside is missing a lot of his face. Nodraugrhere now, but the grave of Marie and Edward Chevalier is broken out. I’m guessing it was her that killed the guard.”
The calm tone was gone. “There’s a car about two blocks away. You and the children—”
“I’m good.” I interrupted. “Marie’s long gone, I guess. I’ll be sure the kids are secure, but—"
“Miss Crowe! You don’t know if she’s still there or nearby. You need to be relocated to safety, too.”
“Honest to Pete, you all need to worry a lot less about me,” I said.
She made a noise that reminded me of my mother. Mama Lauren could fit a whole lecture in one of those “uh-huh” noises of hers. The woman on dispatch tonight came near to matching my mother.
“Someonecutthe lock,” I told dispatch. “What we need to know is why. And who. And if there are other opened cemeteries.” I paused. “And who tried to inject the kid.”
I looked at them. They were in a small huddle. One of them dropped and stomped the needle. I winced. That was going to make investigating a lot harder.
Not my problem,I reminded myself. I was a hired killer, not a cop, not a detective, not a nanny.
“Kid probably ought to get a tox screen and tetanus shot,” I muttered.
Dispatch made an agreeing noise, and said, “Please try not to ‘find’ more trouble tonight, Miss Crowe.”
I made no promises.
When I disconnected, I looked at the kids. “Gerry, right?”
The kid in the middle nodded. White boy. Looking almost as pale as me currently. I was guessing he was terrified.
“Let me see your arm.”
He pulled his shirt off. It looked like the skin was torn.
“Do not scream,” I said. My eyes shifted into larger versions of a snake’s eyes. I knew what it looked like, and maybe a part of me was okay with letting them see because nobody would believe them if they did tell. They were kids, and while a lot had changed in the world, people still doubted kids when they talked.
More practically, though, as my eyes changed I could see in a way humans couldn’t.
Green. Glowing like a cheap neon light. The syringe had venom.Draugrvenom. It wasn’t inside the skin. The syringe was either jammed or the kid jerked away.
“Water?”
One of the kids pulled a bottle from his bag, and I washed the wound. “Don’t touch the fucking syringe.” I pointed at it. “Who stomped on it? Hold your boot up.”
I rinsed that, too. Venom wasn’t the sort of thing anyone wanted on their skin unless they wanted acid-burn.
“Venom,” I said. “That was venom in the needle. You could’ve died. And”—I pointed behind me—“there was adraugrhere. Guy got his face chewed off.”
They were listening, seeming to at least. I wasn’t their family, though. I was a blue-haired woman with some weapons and weird eyes. The best I could do was hand them over to the police and hope they weren’t stupid enough to end up in danger again tomorrow.
New Orleans had more than Marie hiding in the shadows.Draugrwere fast, strong, and difficult to kill. If not for their need to feed on the living like mindless beasts the first few decades after resurrection, I might accept them as the next evolutionary step. But I wasn’t a fan of anything—mindless or sentient—that stole blood and life.
Marie might have been an angel in life, but right now she was a killer.
In my city.
If I found the person or people who decided to release Marie—or the woman with the syringe--I’d call the police. I tried to avoid killing the living. But if I found Marie, or others like her, I wasn’t calling dispatch. When it came to venomous killers, I tended to be more of a behead first, ask later kind of woman.
Chapter Two
