by J. R. Rain
“Gossip will tell you of her, in any case,” the colonel said. “She is an elderly free octoroon lady, the illegitimate step-sister of Bernard Mandeville de Marigny, who married my cousin Eugène, a thing against our laws, then won his estate in a court case. Her name is Eulalie Macarty.”
For a minute, I froze in total shock. I mean, obviously it might not be the Eulalie who drove me to the swamp, who hadn’t been elderly, but seriously, how many ‘free octoroon’ Eulalie Mandeville de Marigny Macartys could there be in a city of 180,000? Of course, she wouldn’t know who the hell I was, since our meeting won’t happen for years, but she might give me a link to Marie Laveau, who had turned out to be almost impossible to track down. Far from being as famous for voodoo as Wikipedia made her sound, all that most people like Lalie remembered about her was that she’d been a hairdresser before she retired and sold magic charms in her shop, something that nearly every third street-vendor offered.
Lalie’s best friend Caledonia Corneal attended her that evening, along with a couple of their beaux. They were all polite to me, considering me an older lady, though clearly, the two young guys pursued Lalie. They each got more and more pissed off by the sight of the other one hanging around, so they took opposite sides in the riot that broke out between supporters of the rival prima donnas and started screaming at each other. As we watched from the box overhead, one of them, Emile, slapped the other, Gaston, in the face.
Naturally, this being New Orleans, they found only one possible answer for that: a duel—seriously—at dawn, in a section of City Park, actually called ‘the dueling ground.’
“Wow,” I said to the colonel on the way home, “you sure can’t get away with saying much in this town.”
“Well, naturally, as a lady, you’re exempted from all such constraints, but yes, we Creoles are hot-blooded; to us, honor is everything.” He glanced back gloomily at the family carriage, in which Lalie sobbed her eyes out. He and I walked ahead of it in the glow of the gas streetlights. “It does no good to a young lady’s reputation to have duels fought over her.”
“It wasn’t her fault.”
The colonel shook his head. “It leads to bad blood and poisons her marriage prospects. I should send her away to Savannah or Mobile, I know, but after losing her mother, I couldn’t bear to be apart from her, too.”
So the two dumb bozos, Emile and Gaston, met at dawn under an oak tree hung with Spanish moss. The ‘vamp tree,’ the locals called it because its roots drank much blood. Dr. James, as I now referred to Dr. Bell, had to attend the duel as presiding physician, and so told me all about it after he came by the house to comfort Lalie, who was unable to get out of bed that morning, since she’d stayed awake crying all night. I sympathized with her, as I neither could sleep at night and spent most of my time pining for my kids.
Apparently, since neither young man had any skill at fencing or shooting, they chose to fight with cavalry sabers. Both had been sliced up, but one of the poor guys ended up having several tendons cut before Dr. James stopped the fight on medical grounds.
“He’ll be disfigured for life,” the doctor said. “I only hope that this doesn’t cause Lalie to see him as some sort of tragic romantic figure and dedicate the rest of her life to him.”
He didn’t need to worry. A week later, she met the ‘love of her life’ at the St. Charles Theater. The famous actor Edwin Lyons Hart, and he was the lead in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a play Lalie knew by heart. They would recite scenes from it together whenever he came by to visit. I didn’t pay much attention to their relationship; by now, I’d gotten used to her drama queen act and figured she’d forget all about him as soon as the play finished its run and he went on to his next gig. People were just like that in this time, I’d decided. They didn’t have TV, so they acted out about everything without thinking of the consequences. Life was nothing but a reality show for these people.
Though, Lyons Hart really was totally hot, even better looking than Dr. James. Truthfully, everybody looked better to me, now that my eyes had adjusted to them, at least the younger ones, even with their bad teeth. They were shorter than modern people, but it didn’t matter, because it meant everything wound up built more to my scale. Aside from not being able to see my kids, what drove me the craziest—aside from not being able to take hot showers or use a waterpik—was that I couldn’t get any exercise. No such thing as a bicycle existed; I saw a few draisines or velocipedes, which is what passed for bicycles back then, on the street from time to time, but women weren’t allowed to ride them. Basically, we weren’t allowed to do much of anything, except cook, clean, and have babies. Only men could go to gymnasiums, and there was no way I could go out running at night. Fortunately, being undead, I stood no risk of getting fat and honestly, I didn’t need to exercise, but it would help me work out the tension of being trapped away from my family.
I suppose that’s why the women were all plump, round-faced, and out of shape; with their pale make-up, their masses of curling-ironed hair and big frilly dresses, they looked like big porcelain dolls. These little powder-puff women were actually amazingly strong, even Lalie. The day after the duel, she was in bed with one of her ‘fainting spells’ when the family next door came over to visit with their grandma. Lalie bounced up and started hoisting heavy gilt furniture around so the old lady could sit down comfortably.
If the women equated to pigeons, that made the men scrawny dandies stuffed into tight suits like little bantam roosters. They wore their hair long under stiff, black silk top hats, and every single one of them had some kind of facial hair: mustaches, beards, or both. Some sported Fu Manchus, others Van Dykes or Dundrearies. A few of the farmers from the ‘German Coast’ upriver shaved only around their mouths, like the Amish.
They all smoked or chewed tobacco, even in restaurants or the theater, and brass ashtrays and spittoons littered every room. Women weren’t allowed to smoke or chew, so those who wished to partake took snuff instead, basically snorting the powdered leaf like cocaine. Everything stank of tobacco, because they used it in packing—the servants stored our clothes in it to ward off mildew and mosquitoes. They sprinkled lavender and rosewater everywhere to cover the smell of the chamber pots and the raw sewage outside. A person needed a cast-iron nose, not to mention stomach, to survive. I guess I must have developed one while my hunt for the voodoo queen consumed all my attention.
Adjusting to this weird-ass new life I was stuck in—or maybe it’s more accurate to say weird-ass old life—I didn’t keep an eye on Lalie like I should have. The other reason I failed to notice what was going on with her was that I’d finally managed to meet Eulalie Mandeville de Marigny Macarty.
Meeting people at all entailed a complicated process. I couldn’t just walk up to somebody on the street. I couldn’t email, text, phone, or ring their doorbell and expect to be allowed inside. You sent a ‘boy’ round first with your calling card. To be really forward, one could write a brief note on the back and then wait for a reply. In my case, I didn’t have a calling card, so I wrote a letter on the colonel’s stationary and had Alphonse deliver it in the mule-cart.
No reply ever came.
So on Toussaint Eve, their term for Halloween, I stole up onto the roof of the Macarty’s townhouse as the bells of St. Louis Cathedral tolled midnight. After leaving my nightclothes folded in a neat little heap on the flat rooftop tiles, I stepped to the edge of the roof, and summoned the single flame in my thoughts that held the image of the beast I would become. Feeling free for the first time since I woke up here in the past, I leapt out, arching up and over the dark street below, spreading Talos’ wings, and flew away north to break into Eulalie’s bedroom.
Chapter Seventeen
Eulalie seemed quite surprised to see me.
I mean, for an eighty-five-year-old lady on her deathbed, it must have been quite a shock to be shaken awake by a strange naked woman in the middle of the night. I know I wouldn’t have liked it, but she played it cool.
&nbs
p; I had a big reason to keep this woman alive. That night in the future, Eulalie had let drop that she and the original Marie Laveau were friends. Over the years, something had happened to make the voodooistes and the loups garous mortal enemies, but apparently, it hadn’t yet happened. I needed Marie Laveau on my side now every bit as much as I needed Eulalie; without the help of the voodoo queen’s gris-gris, I had absolutely zero chance of returning to my own time… and to my kids and my guy.
“I knew one of you would come to take me at the end,” she said. Well, wheezed—it was pretty obvious she neared death, probably from lung cancer. I later learned she had been a heavy cigar smoker. “I saw the shadow of your wings on the curtains. Like my mama.”
Whatever. It was near pitch-black in her bedroom, but the windows were brilliant with moonlight.
“Why are you dying?” I blurted, which I admit was kind of a stupid-sounding question. Of course, I was pretty shocked. The Eulalie I’d briefly known in the future looked to be in her early forties and still pretty. She was a half-breed, the result of a union between a werewolf and a vampire. I failed to see any resemblance between that woman and this ancient, withered crone propped up on a stack of pillows.
“I am une métisse. We are weaker, our powers are diluted… I am not immortal like you. Now kill me quickly, and end my suffering… I beg you.”
“I’m not here to kill you, Eulalie. I’m offering you eternal life.” I’d never tried to ‘turn’ anyone before—okay, granted, I had with my son Anthony when he was dying of a rare blood disease, but at the time I had the ability to immediately turn him human again after that using the first of Archibald’s medallions. This time, if I was successful, there wouldn’t be any going back.
Well, hell, I already knew that, didn’t I? Hadn’t the future Eulalie even told me that I’d been the one who’d ‘created’ her? Obviously, it had worked since she’d shown up with her werewolf posse to rescue my ass from Saint-Cyr and had her feelings hurt when I didn’t recognize her. So to save myself in the future, I had to do this now.
Other than hanging around for one hundred fifty-five years.
“Eternal… life?” she asked in a weak whisper. The old lady approached death’s door; her attention wandered. “No, no… I want to be at peace… my soul with le Bon Dieu and all the saints…”
“You’re a werewolf, Eulalie,” I said cruelly. “A hybrid, anyway. You don’t have a soul. I’m your last hope. If you die, that will be the end of you. The final end.”
So, yeah, maybe it was a mean thing to say, but I didn’t have time to sugarcoat things for her. I walked over to her desk and fetched a letter-opener. Using it as a dagger, I sliced a long cut in the flesh below my left wrist. When it began to ooze blood, I tried to drip it down into Eulalie’s open, toothless, mouth. Once she started swallowing, she suckled like a greedy puppy.
The other drawback to this was that my wound kept sealing itself up. I had to keep cutting it open again, over and over, which started to hurt. Once again, I found myself wishing for some kind of owner’s manual; it seemed like everything I’d ever done as a vampire had been learned the hard way. I found myself thinking of the Count Saint-Cyr again. Had he even arrived in the city yet? Now that dude seemed to have all the answers.
Only problem, I had a strong feeling I wouldn’t like any of them.
After about an hour, Eulalie began showing definite signs of recovery, even of returning youth. Tiny white buds popped through her red gums, like a teething baby’s. A normal person would have taken a lot longer to respond, like Anthony did, but Eulalie was already half-vampire, so I guess my blood acted like a giant booster shot.
She licked her lips, and I saw her big brown eyes flicker.
When my friend Fang had been turned—while having sex with Rachel Hanner, a picture I totally didn’t enjoy having in my mind—I’d watched in horror as a dark, evil entity had slithered, hissing, into his body during the vampirification process. I’d half-expected that to happen here and now; in fact, I was sort of half-hoping Elizabeth might choose to leak out of me into Eulalie. But no, my sharpened senses detected nothing. Whatever unholy spirit resided within her had always been there, maybe even from her first moments in the womb; the gift of her vampire mother. Whatever bizarre ritual they’d used to enable an undead womb to conceive a child is something I’ll probably never understand.
Faint mocking laughter echoed in my head.
Her arms and legs still resembled sticks under her nightgown, but Eulalie insisted on getting out of bed and stretching to test her new strength. She still looked like a skeleton in a fright wig. “I haven’t felt this good in years.” She sat again. “Can I start feeding on people soon?”
I assumed that like Kingsley, she’d been digging up corpses in graveyards during her years as a werewolf, but I didn’t ask. “I have a new little slave girl who looks like she will make a very sweet vessel… my maman, Marie Jeanne, was a slave girl, too, you know, a house servant. My daddy, Count Phillipe freed her and me both after I was born.”
“You mean you were born a slave, and you still keep slaves yourself?” I gawked in shock.
“Hush, you’ll wake my ladies maid—she sleeps next door in my dressing room. Why shouldn’t I have my own property? I had to go to court to keep it. Now I’m the richest of the Marignys—or the Macartys.”
“But your servants aren’t property, Eulalie. They’re people, just like—” I started to say ‘you and me,’ but then realized that wasn’t exactly true. “Like your mother before she was turned into a vampire. How did that happen, anyway?”
“She was owned by the same man who ruled the Death’s Head Society, you would say in English. A Frenchman named Dominique. Maman was his favorite vessel until he sold her to Count Phillipe, but by then she had already been turned by him.”
My blood froze at the name. Could that possibly be the same Dominique I’d battled at the Mission Inn in Riverside? The powerful, ancient vampire Kingsley had somehow killed, defending me in the cavern under the Los Angeles River Spillway? It seemed like too huge a coincidence, but, hell, the coincidences were piling up. Here I sat in the bedroom of a woman I’d known for a single night in the far-distant future…
“Dominique and Delphine Macarty Lalaurie killed my parents,” she hissed. “His people lured them into a trap and executed them both with silver bullets, then burned their bodies. Since then, they have hunted the loups garous in the swamps and persecuted all other vampires who oppose their war, like my poor uncle Bernard. Have you seen him wandering the Vieux Carré at night like a ghost? Once he was rich as Croesus; he owned all of this Fauborg Marigny where we live now. It was all the grounds of his estate, Fountainbleau. Now he is a pauper—I make him a small allowance.”
“Eulalie.” I took her gnarled hands in mine. “Listen to me. I know you have a good heart, but when you’re an immortal like we are, it’s really easy to forget your humanity. I want you to promise me that you’ll never do that. A war is coming that will make you free your slaves, even if you don’t want to. Wouldn’t it be better to do that now and pay them wages, instead? That way they’ll always be grateful to you. A vampire can only survive over the long haul on the love and good will of the humans around her.”
“You’re telling me that I shouldn’t take a serving girl for a vessel?”
“Not unless she volunteers.” I sighed. “Eulalie, human blood may taste sweeter and be more nourishing, but over time it robs you of your emotions, your ability to love others. That’s why I try to get on with fresh animal blood. My advice is to have a bucket of ox-blood on order from the Broussard Brothers every morning.” The old lady looked stubborn, so I added, “Remember, your creator can take away the gift of your immortality at any time if she’s dissatisfied with the way you turn out.”
As far as I knew, that was a total lie, but Eulalie caved. I’d seen her love for Wendy Lo, so I knew she’d remained a good person over time. Well, as good a person as I was, I guess.
“Oui, d’accord, Samantha,” she said humbly. “I know in my heart that what you’re telling me is right—Father François would say the same words.”
“And that’s another thing,” I said quickly. “You can’t confess what you are to your priest. Or to any other human soul. They won’t understand.”
“I know. You forget, it has been this way for me since I was born. My life has been nothing but secrets.” This time she sounded like she might cry.
Well, it had been a pretty freaky Halloween for her, I guess, full of tricks, but an unexpected treat, if you view eternal life like that.
Beats the alternative, I always say.
***
I sat in my room, alone.
Thinking about Halloween reminded me of my kids all over again. It also reminded me of the creep who lived down the street from me. “Lived” being the operative word here.
I also thought of the ghost boy, Conner, who still sometimes visited me.
Jesus, not only wasn’t he born yet, but he hadn’t been murdered yet either. His life would be short and tragic, although his ghost was playful and sweet.
So weird. So…damn…weird.
God, was there a way I could save him?
Earlier, I had asked for a quill and parchment from the Colonel, and I was provided what he called a “writing box”, which was kind of like the laptop of the day. The box contained an assortment of inks and quills, drawers for papers, and a leather writing pad.
Within minutes, I had covered myself in ink, but soon got the hang of it. And soon after that, I found myself in a deep meditative state. Which is a good state to be in for automatic writing. Or spirit writing.