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“Geneviève?” was all he said.
“Uninjured.” I looked around the room. Drunken revelers were cowering. Several people had guns or knives in hand. The expectation was that someone would come through the door or windows.
A few people hastily snapped those absurd bite collars around their throats. Bite Chokers were useless, but I could see the relief on faces—much like the relief that some had as they held beer bottles or knives that looked untested. There was a market for self-defense items these days. Designed and sold by rich folks in cities where they’d never need to field test those items themselves.
This wasn’tdraugr,though. They had even less need for Bite Chokers. The attackers were alive or I’d feel their presence.
I closed my eyes and . . . let go of my restraints. It was always relief to let my magic free. My magic rolled from Bill’s Tavern into the streets of New Orleans. I felt the dead. Fallen and no longer moving.
“Beatrice?” I started, trying not to wince as I yanked the splinter of my chair out of my leg. “They’re—"
“I know.” She sounded like her civility was barely present. “Gone.”
Her trusteddraugr, the ones she’d summoned, were no more. A half-dozen loyal dead soldiers were now twice-dead. I couldn’t fathom the planning of such an attack—or the brass balls it took to try to take them out. Who would be fool enough to incite the wrath of the queen of the monsters?
“They were aiming for you,” Beatrice said, flicking her hand in the general direction of my wound. “They targeted my lieutenants and my rumored heir. When the ploy to seduce me failed, they resorted to this.”
I blinked at her, not sure whether to ask why I was not spurting blood or about the rumored heir remark or how she knew my thoughts.
Beatrice shook her head. “You’re projecting, Daughter of Mine. And I’ve applied a magical bandage. It should hold for an hour at best.”
I nodded before letting my magic roll out again. I felt no activedraugr.Only Beatrice. No walking dead either. “They’re humans.”
“Yes.” Beatrice bit the word out, and I realized that she’d shoved her emotions into whatever cold, dark place she used to store her rage. This was not a calm woman. She was a about to go hunting—and as much as I disapproved of the way the dead preyed on the living, this was different. She was defending herself.
And I intended to be at her side.
I’d been accustomed to hunting the dead, not the living. A part of me rebelled at the realization that those who attacked were notdraugr.
“I will handle this,” Beatrice half-offered, half-declared.
But these were monsters, too. Beating hearts did not make them innocent. Hate thrived in many a mind.
“Bar the doors,” someone yelled.
I glanced at Christy.
“Got it.” She had passed out guns to Sera and Jesse. “We’ll lock up.”
Eli made an “after you” gesture, and there we were. My fae husband, mydraugrgrandmother, and whatever species-soup I was . . .
It wasn’t the celebration I’d been having, but it would do.
Chapter Twenty-Six
On the street,it was as if we’d imagined the violence. Crowds of people, most in varying states of drunkenness, laughed and meandered. Music poured from bars, and the police were increasingly wary. They weren’t aware that a sniper had shot at me and beheaded sixdraugr—or maybe they didn’t care.
Would I have cared a few months ago?
I couldn’t answer that right now. I thought about the peculiar relationship my home city had with thedraugr, and I wasn’t sure how I felt tonight. On one hand, I swore sometimes we had a higher number ofdraugrbites because our public relations team was too good at their jobs. Somehow the fanged monsters that could envenomate victims—or just tear out throats—were a selling point thanks to a long history of mythologizing the city in fiction. Call them vampires, and suddenly folks forgot what they were. Luckily, whatever rules defined thedraugr, they had a fail-safe: venom from a creature under a century old was unable to infect the living. Enough venom from any of the olderdraugrand a person woke up after death.
On the other hand, there were politics, a brutal sort of vying for power that recalled long ago barbarian tribes that hadn’t yet accepted unification. It seemed vicious up close, but was it any different from more recent wars? Dropped bombs was less personal to the bomber—or drone pilot—but it was still vicious.
Deciding where I fell on the “monsters are bad” scale felt more complicated now that I was the granddaughter of thedraugrqueen. The only thing I still felt for certain was that shooting at me—or those I called family—was not forgivable.
Eli followed me as I tracked the pocket of dead in the city that was marked in my mind as Beatrice. I found her, looking like a raging goddess as she shook a human man. Her fangs were out, and her snake-shaped eyes were glittering in the yellow glow of the streetlights.
“Where did you get the information?” Beatrice demanded, lifting the man to her face as if he weighed nothing. His legs dangled and kicked like a child trying to escape. A rifle was on the ground, dropped there by the man.
