Big H didn’t answer for a long time, long enough for the room to brighten through the windows as the sun worked its way toward the horizon and dawn. “Perhaps it is magic.”

“Yeah.” I frowned at his flippancy. “Have your scion deposit my money in the account or I’ll leave you to deal with the magic insectoid bloodsuckers all on your lonesome.” I slung the kit around my shoulders and left the room, trusting Eli to shoot Big H if the vamp tried to chase me down.

As I opened the front doors, the window shades—which must have been on timers or sensors—started to close with a rattling whir. The door closed behind me and Eli and I drove off at a sedate pace.

“Magic?” he asked.

“Vamps are magic of a sort. He was probably yanking our chains,” I said. “But to be on the safe side, see what the Kid has on our circle info. And see how many of our missing humans are witch-born. Something about that conversation has my gut in a twist.”

“Good thinking,” Eli said.

“Did you get the whole Hugh Hefner vibe?”

“I kept looking around for bunnies in corsets.”

“In your dreams.”

“True dat. Eeeevery night.”

I let another smile take over my face. There was something satisfying about banter with Eli Younger, something I had missed while I was depressed and chained in New Orleans. That family feeling, I was guessing. Maybe now that business partner feeling. I realized how much better I was feeling since I got to Natchez. “Huh,” I said. When Eli glanced my way, I waved his curiosity off as unimportant.

“You know there’s an IHOP on Highland Boulevard, don’t you?” he said.

I sat up in my seat. “Nope. But I can always eat.”

“So I noticed. International House of Pancakes coming up.”

Bellies so full it hurt to move, we were back at the B and B as the sky grew noticeably gray. We opened the door, and my pocket buzzed, the number unfamiliar. I picked up. “Yellowrock.”

“Jane, it’s Bobby.” He was whispering and I smiled, remembering the young Bobby telling me secrets one day as I walked him from the school bus to his group home. I started to reply when he said, “Misha’s gone.”

I checked the time. Too late to be a vamp interview/kidnapping. “Gone where?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “She went out last night to see somebody and she didn’t come back. Charly’s still asleep, but when she wakes up, she’s gonna be scared.”

I could hear Bobby’s own fear, a prickly tension in his voice. “I’ll be right there,” I said.

CHAPTER 9

“You Here to Even the Score, Dog Boy?”

I stroked Bobby’s red hair, holding him gently in the hug he needed. “Who did Misha go to meet, Bobby?”

Without letting me go, he pulled me to the table and picked up a manila envelope. “She left you a letter.”

Which did not sound good at all. I accepted the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. I opened the flap and removed a stack of pages, the back part of it printed tourist-trap stuff about local restaurants and plantation houses and sights to be seen in Natchez Under the Hill. The upper part was what looked like printed legal papers, and the very top sheet was a single handwritten letter, signed by Misha.

Hey, girl.

I should be back by morning, but if you are here and have this letter, then things didn’t go like I planned. I have a meeting with a human named Wynonna, a primo blood-servant of a vampire named Charles Scarletti. I am hoping that Wynonna will take me to meet her boss. Wynonna has agreed to be interviewed for the book, and I had to go quickly or risk her changing her mind. If I’m not back by sunrise, and if I don’t answer my cell, would you look after Charly for a few days? And if I’m not back in a couple of days, well, that means the shit hit the fan. (I know, right? Our housemothers would beat us black and blue for cussing.) So anyway, if I’m not back, will you find Charly’s biological father and see that she gets to him? I haven’t seen Randy in years, and, frankly, he doesn’t even know about Charly, but he’s a good guy and my estate and insurance will pay for her continued treatment. Just in case, there are two thousand dollars in this envelope to cover expenses, and the numbers to access my checking account and savings.

Everything you need is in this folder.

And yeah, I know how awful this is of me, but if I don’t come back, I want to make sure Charly doesn’t end up in the system, and I know you will help her. Strange, isn’t it? Of all the people I’d leave my baby with, the one I chose first is the most violent person I know. But also the most honest, ethical, and—in your own way—the most loving. I know we weren’t friends. But I always felt safer with you there. Still do, I guess.

I’d end with “Hugs,” but I know how you feel about them.

Mish

P.S. FYI: Bobby is a sort of a dowsing rod. He gets a salary for it and everything.

“Son of a . . .” The swearwords disappeared into a whisper. I stood holding the letter, my mind full of the white noise of shock. Beast pressed down on my brain with her claws and I took a fast breath, shocked by the pain, but it started me thinking like a security expert again. I opened my phone and checked the time. Misha was way overdue from an appointment with a vamp’s dinner. And that vamp was on my kill list.

I’d been trained as a security expert when I was fresh out of high school, before I started staking rogue vamps for cash. I knew about keeping calm and imposing order on unmanageable situations, but the current situation didn’t feel like an emergency, not with The Princess and the Frog soundtrack playing.

I walked to the TV, where Bobby and Charly were curled up again, Charly under blankets and cuddled up in pillows. Muting and pausing the film, I said, “Bobby, Charly, I need you to think. Did your mommy say where she was going for her meeting?”

“Noooo,” Charly said. “She said you would ask, and she said to tell you that everything you need is in the packet.” Bobby shook his head, agreeing that Misha had said nothing to them.

None of this made any sense. Why leave me a letter telling me what to do if she died? Because that was surely what she had left me. No mother in her right mind would go off and leave her sick child with a mentally challenged man and a crazy biker chick/vampire hunter. Which made Misha mentally unbalanced or with a hidden agenda or in deep trouble. I was betting on a combo, starting with Misha looking for vamp blood to heal her daughter.

I texted the names Wynonna and Charles Scarletti to the Kid with orders to research STAT, then I reread the letter and dumped the packet out on the table. The first thing I saw was the legal paper Misha had drafted and signed to allow me the right to see her book before it was finished. The second thing was a last will and testament. “Crap in a bucket,” I said under my breath. “Crap, crap, crap, crap.”

I realized that they had heard me when Charly giggled and Bobby shook his head. “You still say that, even after you got in trouble for it.”

“Sorry,” I said, feeling embarrassed for no good reason. Crap was not a bad word. It was the shortened name of the marketing genius of the best known flush toilet, John Crapper. Really. It was. But not everyone saw it that way, including a short-term housemother when I was growing up. She hadn’t been with us long enough to make any major changes in our lives, but she had put the kibosh on any “bad words,” including crap. Thanks to my mouth and fighting, I’d practically lived in house detention, with toilet duty—crapper duty—for the three months she lived with us. She was one housemother I had been glad to see go.

I dialed Misha’s cell number and was shunted directly to voice mail. I left a short message and closed my phone. The kids were watching me. Okay, Bobby wasn’t a child, but still. What was I supposed to do? How long was I supposed to wait before assuming that Mish was in trouble and track down Randy, Charly’s bio dad? I looked at the time again and said, “Charly, does your mom have a laptop?”

“My mama has everything,” she said, rolling her eyes. She pointed to a satchel near the neatly aligned running shoes, and I pulled it out and booted it up. While it was working, I called my personal, five-star hacker. He answered, and I asked, “We have a missing mother. Misha had a meeting with Charles Scarletti. He’s on our kill list. Is there a way for me to send you every file off a laptop so you can get started working on it?”

“Yeah, sure. What kind of laptop?” I gave him the name and model of the laptop, and he asked, “Can you get online with it? If you can get online, you can e-mail me everything or just anything that looks interesting. It’ll take a while either way.”

I checked the laptop and said, “Yes. And . . .” I clicked through to discover that no files were password protected, and her e-mail passwords were remembered by her system. “I see several things in her most recent files. I’ll zip them up and send them to you.”

“Good. And bring the laptop and anything else electronic when you come. And don’t think I’ll be doing babysitting duty. Not gonna happen.” He disconnected. Crap. That was exactly what I’d been thinking.

I ordered breakfast on Misha’s room service and while we waited for it to arrive, I asked more questions and called Eli to fill him in on the situation. When he asked what I intended to do with Bobby and Charly, I said, “I’m bringing them back to the house.”

“Jameson is gonna poison your piglet.”

“Yeah. I know.” I raised the volume on the TV and walked away before I went on. “I can’t leave them alone here. My alternative is to call in social services, or whatever they call them in Mississippi. I have a signed piece of paper that says Charly is in my care with permission of her legal guardian. And I think Bobby is emancipated, or as emancipated as he can get. He tells me his grandmother passed on last year and he’s been working for Misha since then, though he isn’t real clear in what capacity. Misha hired him as a dowsing rod. That make any sense to you?”