and three video feeds came up on his oversized monitor, but I had no idea what I was looking at. As I puzzled out the video, Alex went on, “Isn’t her mausoleum inside a church? And made of stone?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What am I seeing?”
“The vamp graveyard. It’s on fire. Everything is on fire. Every single thing. All the stone.”
“All.” I leaned to the screen, picking out the crypt where Leo was buried. It was in flames, fire licking up and down the stone, eating through the door. Tears gathered in my eyes. “Don’t let Bruiser see this when he gets back,” I said softly.
“Copy that,” Alex said. “I got Wrassler on cell. HQ was under attack too, but they’re handling it. The big problem is at NOLA PD, Eighth District. Bloodsuckers have attacked there too.”
It took a moment for me to figure out what he meant and even then I didn’t believe it. “Vamps attacked NOPD? The human police?” A sinking feeling rose from my toe pads to the top of my head, making it hard to think. Vamps did not attack human law enforcement. It wasn’t done. Ever. Except that there was a war among vamps in Europe and they were attacking humans there. And now here. I watched the screen as multiple recorded events played out on it. Everything was changing. “Who are the attackers?”
“They didn’t leave calling cards,” he snapped. “The witnesses and the security footage indicate they’re speaking some language I don’t recognize. I’m trying to ID them with facial-rec software, but that’ll take forever if I can’t narrow it down to country of origin.”
“Do you think they’re working with the fangheads here?”
“No. They didn’t seem to know you were no longer in New Orleans. They were trying to draw out the Dark Queen,” Alex said. “Wrassler sent a pic of a message they left at the front door of NOLA HQ. It specifically demanded that your head be tossed out to them, no longer attached to your body. Clan Bouvier provided armed assistance to the police until they had things under control again.”
“Good.” The last thing NOLA vamps needed was problems with the local cops. “Play Sabina’s message again.” I watched the stone of the graveyard and the marble of her mausoleum burn as I listened to the priestess’s message.
“I am badly damaged.” That horrible cough sounded as if she was hacking up a lung. “Near true-death. The larger fragments of the Blood Cross are destroyed.” Cough. “My mausoleum is on fire.” Long silence. “I dig through the earth . . . with the last sliver of the cross in the Americas.”
My cell dinged and I answered, “Wrassler? You okay?”
“We’re fine, Leg—” He stopped just as he was about to call me Legs. His voice changed into the formal tones he once used for Leo. “Empress. But there are police in the front entrance. “What are your orders, my queen?”
My queen. Bruiser was in a sleet storm. Ed was skinned like a deer for butchering. Eli was taking care of business in a bivouac in freezing conditions in an unheated church—the best possible place for humans seeking shelter from vamps. The Asheville MOC knew nothing about NOLA. I was on my own.
I said something that my housemothers at the Christian children’s home where I grew up would have washed out my mouth for. With lye soap and a spanking too, most likely. Alex found it all highly amusing, blowing a teenaged snortle through his nose.
I said, “First order of business, I will not be referred to as queen. Got that?”
Alex asked, “Is that a royal decree?”
I swatted the back of his head.
Alex rubbed the spot as if I’d hurt him, but he was grinning. “You want Gee and Shaddock in here?”
I showed my fangs at him in what might be called a smile, in some universe, and nodded. “Please.”
Laughter and his normal New Orleans accent in his voice, Wrassler said, “I miss you people.” Without giving us time to respond, he went on, “Alex, see if they might be speaking Romansh.”
“Romansh?” he asked.
“It’s spoken in some EU countries,” Wrassler said. “There’s some of the former Atlanta vamps on the video too, five who took off rather than submit to Katie when she took over as Master of the City there, and three I recognized on the video footage as having fled when Rosanne Romanello defeated the New York City MOC. They were all with the fangheads who attacked us, so it’s a mixed bag,