CHAPTER 8
I really should get back to monster killing but this is a memoir about the job. And part of the job, when you get past dumb-grunt me monster killer, is finding out about the monsters. Tracking them down. Figuring out how to kill them. So you’re going to have to bear with me.
When I got back to New Orleans nothing much had changed. MCB was still riding our asses. We’d gotten in a replacement for Evans and with the loup-garou infestation under control, New Orleans was only mildly impossible to manage. My first week back, besides the meeting with Madam Courtney and trying to track the mava paṇauvaā, we had some calls, but it was all the usual shit. Nothing terribly interesting.
Milo was a bomb-in-pig-stuffing, kifo-killing machine. He’d baited every single eruption site and gotten another hit. There hadn’t been any more new attacks since we’d gone on the offensive.
So the second day I was back I took the hair samples to Madam Courtney’s residence. Despite the fact that I knew the door was probably unlocked, you don’t barge into a hoodoo woman’s house. So I waited for her to let me in. Strangely enough, her house wasn’t nearly as decorated with charms and trinkets as her office, so a lot of those were probably just for show.
“Them the girls?” she asked as I pulled out the baggies with hair samples.
Pro-tip: Carry rubber gloves and ziploc bags with you at all times. There are things you don’t want to touch with your hands and you have to take tissue samples for Confirmation of Kill.
In this case I had four plastic baggies with the names written on them. Tracey Morrison, Meghan Hawkins, Marcella Simpson, and Sherri Harvey. Two blondes, a strawberry blonde, and a bottle blonde with brown roots. Those and memories were about all that remained of those four girls. Morrison, Hawkins and Simpson were all positively identified as being sacrificed. Harvey had been separated off from the other girls and presumably sold to some other bastard who wanted a virgin sacrifice.
“Yes, ma’am.” I handed over the baggies.
We’d moved to the small kitchen table in the room for this and she pulled out each one carefully and laid them out on a white cloth. Then she closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep with her hands held out over the hairs. She stayed like that, head down for a bit, then her eyes flashed open.
“This one is alive,” she said, holding up the strands of bottle-blonde hair from Sherri Harvey. “The loas can’t find her, she’s warded, but she still lives. The rest is gone. Two is in heaven. One, this one,” she said, holding up Marcella Simpson’s hairs, “her soul be held in a vessel of the unclean. But this one be alive here to earth.”
“That’s…odd. Given what this ring does I’d have thought she’d be heart-ripped by now.”
“The loas say she wasn’t totally without sin.” Madam Courtney ran the hairs through her hands, eyes closed. “She was a wild one, this one. Hard life. Sad. But still alive. Worse, now. She’s gone evil, this one.”
“Joined the group?”
“Can’t rightly tell. But she gone to the Black, can tell that. The loas see a darkness clinging to her. Now to try and figure out why the G-man thinks you have something to do with it.”
She started by casting the bones, looking for more information on the girls or those who had held them. On the ones who were dead, there was little information. But when she cast upon Sherri Harvey, the one still alive, she got more and asked for one of my hairs. I was shaved bald so I had to clip a fingernail. Then she cast them together, holding the strands of hair and a fingernail in her hands, eyes closed.
“It is true,” she said in a deep voice, eyes now open and unseeing. “You are the alpha and omega of this taking. You were the one who started this. And you shall be the one to finish it.”
“Madam Courtney, that makes no sense!”
“You are bound to your brother. Cain and Abel. Yin and yang. You brought this to the world through that binding. You are the source of this taking. You shall be its end.” Her eyes closed and she shuddered and lay back in the wooden chair, exhausted.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. The White loas are angry. Fearsome anger! But not at you. You may have somehow caused this, but not maliciously. You are not the true culprit. That I’m sure of now. The loas are not mad at you, but they’re angry as hell at your brother, though.”
I didn’t know how it made me feel to have it confirmed that Thornton was behind this. Certainly not surprised.
“He is an instrument of evil as sure as you were chosen for good.” Madam Courtney paused to take a big gulp of rum. “You’re the beginning and end but he’s the whole middle. These sins are his doing. The loas was clear on that.”
“Then I get the Cain and Abel reference, because the minute I find him I’m going to go full-on Cain.”
“That would appear to be your calling.” My real estate lady heartily agreed with my murder plans.
“Can you find him?”
“Doubt it. Even with a hair or such. Sure he’s warded as well. What I might be able to find is this one,” she added, picking up Marcella Simpson’s hair. “This one is the power for an unclean vessel. I can feel the vessel. Ain’t far off. Not New Orleans near, but it moves.”
“Moves?”
“I can feel it moving now,” she said, her voice deepening again. “Traveling. Feeding. Defiling. The monstrous vessel is warded. The soul, though, the soul of the innocent cries out for release. For heaven. For peace. It is tormented within that vessel. It longs for heaven, for a rescuer. This soul I can find, Mr. Gardenier. This soul you can find.”
She opened her eyes and shook herself again.
“Them loas be all over this. Angry loas. I can see them warrior loas. They be shakin’ out their wings, shakin’ off the dust of centuries, ready to fly they so angry! Find these and you may have no job to do! The loas will rip their black hearts out with fiery hands! Come back in three days. I’ll have something you can track this soul down with.”
The sooner the better to track down my stupid brother, but I could make use of those days. “Good. I have to see a woman about a horse.”
* * *
This time I wasn’t meeting in an out-of-the-way house. This time I strode through the halls of power unafraid. This time I was meeting power players right in the open. Because this time in DC, I going to bring a smack-down to MCB.
Convincing Garrett to arrange the meeting with the senior member of the Republican side of the aisle, a senator from Oklahoma, as well as the chairwoman, a Democrat congresswoman from California, had been tough. My point was that it was do or die. Trying to duck and cover on slander like this only worked so long.
“We’re nearly late,” Bert said, looking at his watch.
“Nearly is not the same as late,” I said. “I have no intention of turning up forty minutes early.”
“You’d better have something concrete,” the congressman’s aide said.
“MCB doesn’t have anything concrete. I’m going to give the committee the same thing the MCB’s been peddling but with the details left in. And a week from now I’m going to hammer it home with a stake.”
* * *
“Honorable Chairwoman,” I said, shaking her hand.
I cordially detested Congresswoman Jeanette O’Brien (D, CA) and the same could be said in reverse. She was a huge proponent of my mother’s side of the argument, “give monsters a chance.” Mostly, I was sure, because of round-robin funding. Give the monster advocates grants and they sent money back to fund the congresswoman’s campaigns. Then there was the fact that, like most members of the Select Committee on Unearthly Forces, she had never personally dealt with the aftermath of a group of vampires.
When I’d started doing the same round robin with PUFF money, it had upset the apple cart. But since my funding had been “cross-aisle”—not one dime of monster-lover grant money ever went to Republicans—she had to give at least lip service to paying attention lest she lose support from the Democrat side. That was the only reason she was giving me the time of day. I had been allotted ten minutes in front of the Select Committee to make my case.
“Mr. Gardenier,” she said, shaking my hand then taking a seat behind her big desk along with the rest of the politicians. “You begged for this meeting. Make it quick.”
“As I’m sure you all know, I’ve recently been slandered by the MCB. I would like to point out that slander is their stock in trade. Often necessarily, but anyone associated with this committee should recognize that when someone uses slander on a daily basis for their job, using it for politics becomes second nature.”
“Uh-huh…And you expect me to believe the MCB has been feeding us maliciously motivated lies?”
“Far from it. It’s incompetence, which given that our country depends on the MCB for protection from the most heinous of all enemies, is far far worse. It was slander based upon incompetence and for purely political ends.”
“You’ve lost me.” Senator Vaughn was one of the slower committee members. “Which was it?”
“Both. I did the same thing MCB did. I went to a spellcaster and had a reading done on the location and status of some of the victims. I obtained hair samples from some of the victims’ families and took them to a very powerful White voodoo woman in New Orleans. She confirmed most of what the MCB said.”
“Then MCB’s investigation could hardly be called slander,” the chairwoman said. “The only reason you haven’t been arrested is that Gary stuck his neck out for you. He’s rapidly run out of favors. This meeting is his last one.”
Garret Terry didn’t look very happy when she put that out there so brazenly.
“I said most. The alpha and omega part, yes, but that basic information, Madam Chairwoman, is useless without good analysis. Which MCB screwed up entirely. I’m sure they got a very strong reading that I was involved, but that is because spirits were practically screaming that I needed to be involved in the case. I’m the one who is supposed to end it. Get me involved. Make me a part of it!”
She actually laughed out loud. “When hell freezes over.”
“So you’re saying you’re not involved in the ring?” another congressman asked.
“Do you seriously think I’ve got time to kidnap children?” I snapped. “No, I am not. But what the casting actually meant was that to stop the ring I had to become involved—in the investigation. I am the omega. He who shall end it. The only one who can end it for whatever reason.”
“How?” Senator Vaughn asked.
“I’ll do what MCB should have done two years ago. I’ll track the souls of the victims. Because I am not incompetent.”
“You strolled in here thinking that we’re just going to take you at your word, just because some two-bit New Orleans parlor witch you dredged up contradicts the report provided by the multibillion-dollar federal agency.” The chairwoman snorted. “That’s pretty incompetent.”
“Give me a week and I’ll find and shut this kidnapping ring down myself. I’ll do in two weeks what the MCB hasn’t been able to do in two years.” I sure hoped I wouldn’t come to regret that promise.
“Ahem, Chad, I should probably point out that if you do so, the MCB will simply say that you were involved all along, and are now just covering your tracks,” Congressman Terry said.
“I’m sure they will. Which illustrates the real problem here. Anything can be considered ‘being involved,’ actual intent and actions be damned. Madam Chairwoman, all the illustrious members of the committee, are you aware that you are fundamentally in the same position as Congressman Terry?”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“You take money from people who are involved in necromancy. You have close supporters who are potentially PUFF-applicable.”
“How dare you say that!” the congresswoman shouted.
“Because it is true? So does Congressman Bouvrier, Senator Coshan, Senator Vaughn—I can continue listing members of the committee, Republican and Democrat. And each and every one of you, daily, have interaction with those who work with the supernatural, just from MCB agents alone. They, in turn, have contact with necromancers. A casting about any one of you, even those who consider themselves sacrosanct, would probably turn up similar connections.”
“It certainly isn’t on purpose, but I can guaran-damn-tee that all of us have gotten donations from some slimy individuals,” Congressman Terry said.
There was some muttering, nodding, and shrugs. Most of the committee didn’t care about me one way or the other, but they didn’t like the idea that the MCB could hit them with the same hammer.
“All and equally. Which brings up the real problem. MCB used a poorly done, badly analyzed casting to attack a member of your committee. Congressmen Terry has done no wrong, except associate with a falsely accused man. As MCB can do at any time they choose to any one of you they want.”
“The MCB wouldn’t do that to one of us,” insisted Vaughn.
“They just did. Are you going to allow MCB to jerk your leash? The way it’s set up, isn’t the leash supposed to be on them? Are you willing to relinquish that power and let MCB decide, through slander and lies which are their stock in trade, who is and who is not to be on your committee? Because the second you let MCB have that power, they will take it from you, and never give it back.”
“Boy has a point,” Senator Bouvrier said thoughtfully.
“That is a very serious accusation,” a congresswoman snapped.
“I’m not making an accusation. I’m making an observation. I don’t care. This is politics. You choose your bedfellows; the congressmen and senators choose theirs. That’s how it works. MCB should not be deciding who is and is not acceptable on this committee based on that. If they made it on the basis of who has the worst contacts, many of your supporters could pass that test. Nor could you. So are you going to let them decide through whisper campaigns?”
About half the committee seemed thoughtful about the idea of an out-of-control MCB. The other half wanted me to get cancer and die. That was a better ratio than I’d hoped for.
“Your time is up,” the chairwoman said. “We’ll look into this.”
“Please do,” I said, standing up. “In the meantime, I have a case to solve.”
* * *
I picked up the soul tracker from Madam Courtney after getting back from DC. Now I just had to make good on my promise to track them down. For which I would need help.
“You want to take somebody else?” Franklin said.
New Orleans seemed to be heating up again. The full moon was on the way and we didn’t need more people missing, but this was something that had to be done now.
“I kind of told the Select Committee that I’d have the case solved by the end of the week.”
Franklin groaned.
“Which means tracking down and terminating a kidnapping ring that uses at least two wights that we know of. Can I take two wights? Sure. Can I take two wights, some armed humans and probably some other undead at the same time? Not so sure. I need backup.”
Franklin groaned again, louder this time. This was why I didn’t ever want to be a team lead. “Damn it, Chad.”
“Come on, Franklin. Just one good guy.”
“Got a new guy arriving today.” Franklin sighed. “Fresh out of training. I need him here but maybe this will give him some more experience before the full moon.”
“I know beggars can’t be choosers, but a newbie? I don’t have time to babysit a newbie. I promised Congress.”
“He’s good. Or should be. Former SEAL chief.”
“Great,” I said, grimacing. “A fuckin’ squid. What’s his name?”
“Sam Haven.”