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My blood dropped onto the ground.
One drip . . . two . . .there.
I felt like I was sinking into the soil. Spectral hands reaching down for a body that was meant to be there.
“Christophe Hebert,” I beckoned.
I held my arm up to keep more blood from falling. Eli slapped an adhesive patch over the cut. It’s not all blood and magic in my business, despite what people want to believe. Sometimes it was blood, magic, and cartoon bandages.
“Christophe Hebert, wake for me,” I ordered. I sometimes used prettier words, French or Latin or the occasional Gaelic, for clients, but magic wasn’t rooted in pretty pronunciation. It was in will, genetics, and sometimes emotions.
And blood.
That part was true. My blood had power for the dead.
No one answered my summons, though. Christophe Hebert was not in this grave—which almost certainly meant that he was walking around my tourist-filled city looking for a bite to eat. If we were lucky, he had caught the draugr queen’s attention and she’d already handled it. But Beatrice was dealing with her own issues lately, so I had a strong suspicion that this particular biter was going to be mine to handle.
“If he was injected, what are your minions able to. . .” Eli started, his voice sliding into that cautious tone that meant he was aware he’d broached an awkward topic.
I held up a hand. “I’m not collecting minions, Eli.”
“Would you be able to bond him as you have yourassociatesso we can gather answers?”
I sighed. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t considered it. I had the awkward ability to revivedraugrso he or she was a sentient being upon waking, but who wanted the responsibility of minions? I didn’t call them that, but they wouldn’t object. Tres, who was dead but still running his businesses as if he had never passed, wouldn’t object to anything I called him.
I shuddered.
“Just because Icanfix the newly dead, doesn’t mean I want to. Plus, I don’t know if I even can rouse them once they are already transitioned todraugr. Christophe’s grave is empty, but he is already walking.”
“Swords ready, then?”
Unfortunately, I didn’t quite know how to answer. I had no desire to create my own little army of biters, and the averagedraugrwas a slathering, biting monster the first century, but we’d discovered that I could shorten that period of “toddler” years so that a newly-risen biter was perfectly coherent. I just didn’t like the side effects.
“Stay alert,” I said. “If Hebert is attacking, we take his head. If not, I’ll . . . try to talk to him.”
Eli didn’t question me. There were times when he was in control of our actions, but this was my job, my calling, my fucked-up genetic soup, so in this, I was the decision-making body.
“To behead or not behead,” Eli pronounced in a remarkably adept Shakespearean tone. “Thatis the question.”
“To behead if necessary,” I agreed. I wasn’t immune todraugrvenom, and I had no idea what it would do to Eli if he were to be exposed. Fae biology wasn’t a class in any curriculum in New Orleans—or anywhere in the world as far as I knew.
We were both biological oddities.
“Lead on,” Eli said with a sweep of his arm.
By the time we’d searched the entire cemetery, we’d found no biters, no foolhardy kids tempting fate, only one pair of tourists with their cheap “protection” chokers—as if biters only gnawed on throats. Some genius sold them with a remarkably compelling marketing campaign. “I’ve never been bitten” testimonials scrolled through their ads. No one mentioned that the Bite Chokers weren’t field-tested around actual biters.
“Are you stupid?” I asked.
“Are you a . . .fanger?” the man asked.
“No,” Eli answered, saving me from the half-lie. I was, in truth, sporting fangs these days. After an attempt on my life a few months ago, I was newly fanged.
I lifted a sword and pointed the tip at them. “If I wanted to bite you, that junk wouldn’t stop me.”
“No one wearing this haseverbeen bitten,” the woman started.
“Probably because no one has worn it around a biter.” I looked around at the shadowed graves. If there was a dead thing here, these two would be bleeding already.
