He smelled wonderful. Sweaty, slightly beery, spicy, and . . . meaty. And very male. Beast was very definitely interested. But suddenly no longer in defensive mode. Heat shivered in my belly, clamping down hard.

“Something tried to rip out your throat,” he said, his fingers feather light on my skin. “Tried to suck you dry. And nearly succeeded. And you healed from it. Fast.”

I stepped back, lifting and setting down each foot, staying centered, balanced. Beast rose in me, gathered. I was on the edge—the edge of what, I wasn’t certain—but something in me wanted to nip, growl, and swat the man around. Either wound him or run. So he would chase me. “Molly healed me in the cave,” I said, sticking to our lie. “She performed—”

“Not on the full moon she didn’t. Your friend Molly is an okay moon witch, but her gift is as an earth witch, herbs and growing things. And dead things, which is why she went in after the blood-family with you and Paul Braxton. I did my research. She can sense dead things. Like vamps asleep in the day.” He shook his head, still moving slowly, his eyes boring into mine. Holding me still with his gaze. Dominant behavior. Mating behavior. Beast liked.

“No,” he said. I felt a spike of shock, as if he had heard my thoughts. But he continued, his words measured and deliberate. “She didn’t heal you. Not underground, surrounded by a buncha true-dead vamps.” Yeah, this Joe had done his homework. He was dangerous.

I felt the move before I registered the tension in his shoulders, his hand forming a claw. To take my neck in his fist. I blocked. Right arm up. Across my body. Fist moving clockwise. My forearm slammed his arm away. One quick step to his side. My foot behind his right leg. I pushed. As he went down, I finished the move. A hard slam to his solar plexus. Maybe a full second of action. His breath whooshed out with a grunt. Pain blanched him, then flushed him.

I walked away. My heart rate hadn’t even sped up.

When I looked back, Rick was rolling to his knees, holding his middle, moving as if he hurt, as if he couldn’t yet catch his breath. No. Not Rick. Not a man with a name. The Joe.

He stared after me. And he laughed. The laughter hurt; I could see the pain in his face. But he laughed. Fun, Beast thought at me. I curled my lips. “Not really,” I murmured. “Ten bucks says he won’t be back.”

Jane can’t kill more-than-five bucks. But I can. Beast shared a memory of feasting on a buck, points of his rack standing within her vision. The buck had been two hundred pounds, eighty pounds bigger than she. His blood was hot, his flesh so full of flavor it made the juices in my mouth run.

“Show-off,” I murmured to Beast. To myself. We both walked on, sharing the only kind of humor Beast and I could. Blood-sport humor.

Rick’s bike was gone when I tooled out of the side garden, braids streaming out behind me, beads clicking, my head sweltering in the helmet, motor rumbling with a heavy, powerful purr. My bike is a Bitsa. Bitsa this and bitsa that. Mostly parts from two 1950 Harley-Davidson FL pan/shovel bikes, modified, not restored to showroom perfection. The bike is dark teal with an iridescent, metal-flake, pearl sheen; it has black shadows of mountain lion forelegs along the gas tank, rising from the seat, between my legs, curved claws extended as if reaching to grab the handles and take over. And in certain light, one can see minuscule flecks of ruby blood streaking the claws. It’s a custom, one-of-a-kind job: the paint color, the artwork, and the bike itself.

Hunting for transportation after my last, very profitable job, had been much like hunting for food, and Beast, who seldom entered my conscious thoughts except when danger threatened, wakened when I started looking six months ago, and hung around for the entire search. My Beast had very specific opinions about vehicles. She had refused to let me buy a car or truck, and had simply spat when I showed her a minivan suitable for stakeouts. But the first time she saw the bikes, rusting and busted in a junkyard in Charlotte, North Carolina, she had approved.

Jacob, the Harley master mechanic who had worked as an engine/chassis builder in a Charlotte NASCAR shop for ten years, was more a Zen Harley priest than a mechanic. He’d not so much rebuilt Bitsa as resurrected her into the perfection only a master mechanic could envision. She was still a basic pan/shovel on the outside, but with modern updates, like a dependable, low-maintenance, quiet-running Mikuni HSR42 carburetor and hydraulic lifters; she was a dream bike. We’d had only one argument over Bitsa. Jacob had wanted to install an electronic ignition, but keys are for wimps. Bitsa had an old-fashioned kick start and always would.

We rolled down the street, the roar of the engine claiming our territory as much as Beast’s scream would announce and claim hers. Her scream, not a roar. African lions roar, panthers don’t. Cougar, puma, panther, catamount, screamer, devil cat, silver lion, mountain lion, and North American black panther, all refer to one beast—the Puma concolor—once the widest-ranging mammal on the North American continent, and one of the three largest modern-day predators other than man. As fierce as they are, pumas can’t roar. They scream, hack, growl, purr, yowl, spit, and make low-pitched hisses, and the young make loud, chirping whistles to call their mothers, but they can’t roar. Beast considers the gift of roaring highly overrated and likely to draw in the white hunter and his guns. Silent and deadly is better, with screams to frighten prey. She didn’t need more. But she liked the roar of the bike. Go figure.

She would likely stay quiescent—she sleeps nearly sixteen hours a day—as shopping, though predatory, wasn’t bloody enough to arouse her hunting instincts. I needed cooler clothes to survive this heat and humidity. The temps had reached mid-nineties, with hotter weather called for later in the week. I also needed to meet the butcher who would deliver my protein needs. To meet the ten-day bonus, Beast and I might be shifting every day, a round-trip ticket, making meat imperative. Five to ten pounds of fresh meat and a half box of oatmeal a day, and that was just to restore from two shifts. If I had to fight or run, I’d need a lot more calories.

As we powered out of the Quarter, accelerating down Charles Avenue, it started raining. From a clear blue sky. I sighed. My hair was gonna look awful.

I arranged an account with the butcher to deliver steak whenever I called in an order, and on the way home spotted a Wal-Mart, where I bought a swimsuit, lightweight cargo pants, shorts, tank tops, and a pair of neon-hued flip-flops. A mile distant, I passed a strip mall with a florist, a small Church of Christ, and a little storefront with calf-length skirts displayed in the window. Intrigued, I stopped the bike, unhelmeted, and went inside.

The skirts were patchwork. Not like something a sixty-year-old hippie would wear, but dainty, flared, delicate confections made of tiny, two-by-four-inch patches of gauze or silk or cotton in vibrant colors. Each one was color coordinated, all blues or teals or reds, and some were embroidered. I lifted a patterned gauze skirt in sea blue and purple and shook it gently. The hem flipped, flirty and cute. I didn’t do cute well, but I liked this. The elastic waist would allow it to ride low on my hips if I wanted it to, or higher, on my waist.

“That would look totally rad on you.”

I glanced at the teenaged girl who was sitting behind the counter with a paperback book in her hand. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. But you gotta see it with this shirt.” She slid from a stool, taking a foot off her height, making her just over five feet, and walked to a shelf, pulling a shirt out. It was a peasant top with a drawstring neckline, made of the same sea blue material, but this time partnered with a paler purple fabric. “And this,” she said, holding a purple and teal stone necklace. “Amethyst and chatkalite. Totally cool with these sandals.” She lifted a pair of purple sandals from the front window, with straps for dancing.

I looked at the freckled girl, grinning. “I suck at putting outfits together and you did it in less than a minute.”

“It’s a gift,” she agreed. “Try ’em on. You want I should pick out another one for you?”

I turned the tags over and winced as I looked around the small store. “It’ll break my budget to leave this store with another one.”

“And it’ll break your heart not to,” she said sagely. “I’ll find you something just as cute but cheaper. Go on.” She flapped a hand at me and I went. I tried on clothes for nearly an hour, a huge record for me. I left the store with two pairs of shoes, two skirts, three tops to mix and match, and the necklace. Six outfits. How could I say no?

Back at the freebie house, the clothes went into the closet with the rest of my meager gear. I travel light, just what will fit into the saddlebags, and the things I can’t live without that get mailed to my new address each time I move, like my tea. The weapons in the closet took up more room than the clothes. A traveling vamp killer has to make do.

I cleaned up and changed into my only other pair of jeans and my Lucchese boots. I had an appointment for dinner at Katie’s. I studied the papers in the envelope Troll had given me, including the info on New Orleans’ vamps, and read over the fine print in the contract, making sure the clause about collateral damage I had insisted upon in our Internet negotiations was still there. If I found that the rogue vamp was being given safe haven and I had to kill one or more vamps to get to him, I didn’t want reprisals. The special clause guaranteed me protection. It was present.

There was also a confidentiality clause stating that I wouldn’t share with the media or anyone else anything I learned about the vampires, their servants, or their households on pain of a slow and grisly death. Not that I planned on going on national TV with an exposé of the vampy and fangy, but it did bring me up short. Even knowing that the clause made perfect sense from their standpoint, the “slow and grisly death” line was pretty gruesome.

Near the bottom, there was a welcome line about needing to hire local contacts and a budget to pay sources who might not talk otherwise. From the way I read it, it looked like the council was willing to cover such expenses, pending Katie’s approval. Sweet.

In the vamp info folder, I found a toll-road sticker for my bike and a list of New Orleans’ seven vampire clans, digital photos of the head vamps, and a breakdown of the vampire power structure. It was similar to a parliamentarian government, with heads of clans sitting on the executive council, and elder vamps sitting on an expanded council. The council made decisions on finances, kept the peace with humans, worked with human law enforcement, and enforced its own laws on its members, including holding down the number of scions, blood-servants, and blood-slaves that one vamp clan might have. Interesting info, but not real useful when tracking one nutso whacked-out vamp that the council hadn’t killed off or even managed to identify.