Free Easy Pickings by Faith Hunter, Ce Murphy

watched me. There was an outhouse to the side of the house. No car in the drive, but a small electric scooter, which I had no idea how she charged, was leaned against the house.
    I found the basinet in the back room, empty and cold. It hadn’t been used recently, but the dirty diapers suggested that the baby had only been gone a day or two. I pulled the bassinet into the kitchen and set it in front of the crying woman with a firm snap of wheels on the wood floor. She stared at it with tormented eyes.
    “Lissa is your baby, right?”
    “Oui. My bebe.” And she started wailing again.
    Took kit, Beast snarled in my mind. Will kill thief of kit.
    Jo looked at it, and then at me. And she sighed. “Son of a bitch.”
    “Yeah. That pretty well sums up my feelings,” I said as I stirred a half box of oats into the boiling water. Moments later, I dumped the oats into a big bowl, added a fourth of a pound of sugar and all the milk, and ate. While I stuffed my face, Laz bent over the erstwhile enemy and said, gently, softly, “Who dat took your baby, sweetheart, eh? We get him back for you, yes?” Laz gently wiped her face with a tissue he pulled from a box on the jumbled shelves. “What your name, eh?”
    “S-s-s-Serena.” And the girl laid her head on Laz’s arm and bawled.
    It was a totally unexpected tenderness from the big guy and I saw Jo melt. I was feeling a little mushy myself, though that could have been the oatmeal and sugar. Who knew the muscle bound man could be such a knight in shining armor?
    “Monsieur Pellissier,” Serena sobbed into Laz’s arm. “He ask for something stupid, no? A love spell. He want a woman he cannot have—the wife of the Vampire Crewe.”
    Joanne interrupted with an, “Um?”
    “The Mardi Gras Vampire Crewes,” Serena wailed.
    “The Crewes who make the parades, the floats, all that. The biggest Crewe is led by another vampire, a rival to Monsieur Pellissier, and Monsieur Pellissier, he wanted his rival’s human wife to love him instead.” She shuddered in a breath, fresh tears streaking her cheeks. “And when I could not do it, he took my bebe, my little Lissa, and said I would do it or my bebe would die.”
    Anger began to burn through her sobs. Anger and vengeance. I knew a thing or two about those motivators. She still cried, but more quietly now, and the hand clinging to Laz’s big muscular biceps tightened with fury, not sobs. “I told him I would try again, but instead I open a rift into the magic worlds, so I can pull something through. Something strong that might kill Amaury Pellissier. And something came, but I can’t find it. It got free! And if I don’t do what he wants by tomorrow night, Amaury will kill my bebe.” Her rage faded into a frightened whisper: “My Lissa, my bebe… .”
    Jo tilted her head as the story came out, her eyes lost in the distance. I was too busy eating to figure out what had her thinking so hard. I mean, it was easy right? Kill Pellissier and get the baby back.
    Finally, Jo said, “So you opened a rift, and pulled something dangerous through, and we came through too.”
    The girl went still, staring at Laz, who still held her, then at me and Joanne in turn. Jo didn’t seem to notice, focused on Laz as she said thoughtfully to Serena, “And there you are, pulling down a major magic like opening rifts between worlds, but you can’t even do a love spell, and in the meantime Laz puts the kibosh on your attack like he’s not even thinking about it. What the hell does that mean, that we’ve got a higher power threshold in this world than people who live here do?”
    Serena gave Joanne a withering look. Her tears turned on themselves, quenched in sarcasm, an emotion that could let her be brave instead of terrified. “Love don’t come and go with a magic spell, fool. Hate, hate is easy, hate you stir up from all the little black thoughts we all got buried inside us, but love is God bleedin’ through the cracks of weak human souls. I