by Alys Arden
PRAISE FOR THE CASQUETTE GIRLS
“In this Southern Gothic love letter to the spookier side of New Orleans’s storied past, Arden spins out a moody tale of magic and mystery . . . A thoroughly satisfying page-turner and a strong debut.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Debut author Arden offers readers a full plate of Southern Gothic atmospherics and sparkling teen romance in a patiently crafted tale that will best reward careful readers . . . Satisfying teen entertainment but also a cathartic, uncompromising tribute to New Orleans.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A slow-burning novel in the tradition of Anne Rice.”
—Rue Morgue Magazine
“A smart story with a surprising amount of emotional depth . . . in the grand tradition of Buffy and The Lost Boys.”
—IndieReader
“Nothing short of a stunner . . . It’s as if Arden took her life experiences within the Vieux Carre, assembled a few Hogwarts students as Avengers, channeled Magneto into Wednesday Adams, and drenched the process in Parisian detail.”
—Examiner.com
“Eerie, magical, and gritty, getting into the grimy seams of New Orleans in the tradition of Anne Rice or Poppy Z Brite.”
—SP Reviews
ALSO BY ALYS ARDEN
The Casquette Girls Series
The Casquette Girls
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Alys Arden
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503940000
ISBN-10: 1503940004
Cover illustration by Galen Dara
Cover design by Maeve Norton
Map illustration by Mystic Blue Signs
Chapter heading designs by Christy Zolty
To the generations of Medici, whose lives were more lush and enigmatic than the pages of fiction.
And to the Starman. You’ll always be alive in Adele’s world. RIP.
CONTENTS
START READING
PART 1 The Secrets
My guiding principle…
CHAPTER 1 Brooklyn Boy
CHAPTER 2 The Corpse Whisperer
CHAPTER 3 Death by Mold
CHAPTER 4 Never Trust a Vampire
CHAPTER 5 Casa Medici
CHAPTER 6 Breathe
CHAPTER 7 ASG
CHAPTER 8 Street Smart
CHAPTER 9 Supernatural Sensation
CHAPTER 10 An Offer Refused
CHAPTER 11 Voodoo Soup
CHAPTER 12 Location, Location, Location
CHAPTER 13 Magic vs. Mundane
CHAPTER 14 Marked
PART 2 The Unseen
By the pricking…
CHAPTER 15 Blue-Tent City
CHAPTER 16 Morning Star
CHAPTER 17 Broken Moons
CHAPTER 18 Floating Kisses
CHAPTER 19 The Corpse Whisperer Strikes Again
CHAPTER 20 Vampire Catacomb Academy
CHAPTER 21 Sword, Cross, or Coin
CHAPTER 22 Bottom of the Cup
CHAPTER 23 His and Her Marks
CHAPTER 24 Fourth Time’s a Charm
CHAPTER 25 I Spy
CHAPTER 26 Blue Room, Blue Book
CHAPTER 27 Murder by Proxy
CHAPTER 28 Another Night, Another Dream
CHAPTER 29 Le Chat Noir
CHAPTER 30 Forever the Alchemist
CHAPTER 31 Twin-Flames
CHAPTER 32 Julie
CHAPTER 33 Elixir of Life and Death
CHAPTER 34 Dead Dogs, Dead Girls
CHAPTER 35 Witch Killer
CHAPTER 36 Bloodsucker
CHAPTER 37 Let Him Go
PART 3 The Maleficiums
If you don’t…
CHAPTER 38 Knockout
CHAPTER 39 The SS Hope
CHAPTER 40 Time
CHAPTER 41 The Binding
CHAPTER 42 The Carter Brothers
CHAPTER 43 La sauvez
CHAPTER 44 Animarum Praedator
CHAPTER 45 Save Jade
CHAPTER 46 Ma mère
CHAPTER 47 The Fifth Element
CHAPTER 48 The Maleficiums
CHAPTER 49 Brooklyn Girl
CHAPTER 50 Family Matters
CHAPTER 51 The Romeo Catcher
EPILOGUE Dead Mothers Club
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART 1
The Secrets
My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.
Franz Kafka
CHAPTER 1
Brooklyn Boy
The water tastes like mudpies as it rushes my throat—a mix of dirt, oil, and unimaginably foul dregs turns my screams into garbles. My lungs jerk for air, but there’s only more water to inhale. It fills my ears, dulling the sounds of branches snapping and porches cracking as the river smashes down the street. I kick wildly as the current swoops at my feet, pulling us deeper with each passing second. My fingertips break the surface, but waves roll into my chest, pummeling us back down, debris scraping my arms as I try to shield it away. I no longer hear her screams. One more breath of water will be the end.
Don’t panic. Dominate. Panicking is not an option.
My feet thrash, searching for the street to push us back up to the top, but there’s only water—below me, above me, filling my lungs like lava.
Fight the current, Isaac. Dominate.
But there’s only water.
A gasp jerked me awake. My arms flailed as I dropped the five feet from the crappy mattress and crashed onto my hip on the stainless steel floor. Turning on my back, I lay there in the darkness, heart racing, trying to catch my breath. I’m not drowning. It was a dream.
I moved my wrist close to my face and pushed away the swath of embroidered bracelets covering my watch: 0100 hours. Just like every other night.
Over the last four months, I’d lost count of the number of times I’d fallen out of the bed, but I still hadn’t moved to the bottom bunk, despite my roommate having moved out to shack up with a nurse he’d met at a blood drive back in September.
I rolled onto my chest, pressed myself up, and then back down. “One.” Moving to the bottom bunk is admitting defeat. “Two.” The nightmare winning. “Three.”
It will go away.
I used tricks to not think about the nightmare during the day—stuff the shrink had told me after my mom died. “Focus excess energy into a creative outlet,” he’d advised. I sketched more hours of the day than not, and now I was doing metalwork in Mac’s studio. Check. I pressed myself faster to the floor.
“Nine,” I said into the darkness. “Ten.”
“Engage in physical activity to relieve excess anxiety,” he’d said. Work covered that. Plus the patrolling. And the training. Check. The burn moved up my arms into my shoulders as I pounded through ten more. I welcomed the pain; at least I was alive to feel it.
“Twenty.”
Lastly, he’d always said, “Talk to someone about it.”
It’s just a stupid fucking dream—just stop thinking about it.
But that’s the problem: it wasn’t just a dream. It was a memory. My first day in New Orleans, or my second? Third? It all became a blur once the levees started breaking. There hadn’t been nearly enough of us. Not enough muscles to pull people out, and not enough medics to patch people up. Not enough social workers for the kids or shelters for the animals. There weren’t enough military to stop the looting or enough supplies for people in the convention center. There hadn’t been enough of . . . anything.
Four months later, every time I slept, I drowned.
I always woke from the fall with raw lungs, as if I’d been choking on the water all over again. “Thirty.”
Focus on things you can control. Things you can affect.
I thought about the roof I was nearly finished rebuilding with my crew. I thought about flying. I thought about all the places in New Orleans I wanted to sketch—all the sights burned into my memory. I thought about Adele, although I’m not sure how much control I had of that situation. I wished she were here right now. I’d tell her about the nightmare. “Forty.”
Pfft. No, you wouldn’t. “Forty-one.”
I thought about losing her, and the push-ups went faster. She picked you, I reminded myself. Sometimes it didn’t feel like it, with that asshat locked in the attic half a mile away.
I engaged my core, shifting some of the weight off my wrists. “Forty-six. Forty-seven.”
Niccolò Medici.
“Fifty.”
“Fifty-one.” I pushed harder. You have to be stronger.
“Fifty-three. Fifty-four.”
Quicker.
“Fifty-five.”
Smarter.
“Fifty-six.”
More in control.
“Fifty-seven.”
If you’re going to protect people.
“Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty.”
My arms shook just like they had in the floodwaters. A million push-ups won’t make you stronger than Mother Nature. I slammed through ten more.
“Seventy.”
And a million push-ups will never make you as strong as them.
When I got to eighty, I collapsed onto the floor and turned over, the stainless steel cool against my sweaty back.
The coven already defeated the Medici clan.
It was true, but I didn’t need a crystal ball to know the fight wasn’t over.
My back arched, and I sprang to my feet. Not exactly with the deftness of Bruce Lee, but a move I’d been practicing relentlessly. I’d have it down soon.
In autopilot mode, I stepped into my worn-down sneakers, pulled the laces, and ran out the door, down the hallway, and up the stairs as quietly as I could, until my breath was louder than my steps.
On the outer deck, I broke into a sprint. I knew exactly how many steps it was to the edge of the SS Hope, the shithole I called home—which I was quite certain was the gateway to Dante’s inferno and one morning I would actually wake up in hell. But it’s fine. Really. Half the population of New Orleans had it a lot worse.
One. Two. Three steps up the sidewall, and I kicked off the rail and leaped out into the darkness, the moon guiding my swan dive. Hold it. Steady. Warmth spread through my body in an explosion of prickles, and just before my head made contact with the water, I swooped back up.
Higher.
Higher.
Higher.
The wind zipped through my feathers. This was the way to stop thinking about the dream. To stop thinking about failed levees and water crashing over us. This was the way to feel close to my mom.
When I flew, everything felt coated in a thin layer of magic—somewhere in between real and celestial.
In the air, it was easy to realize I couldn’t control everything. I could be sharper and faster, and I could perfect my swoops and dives, but I was still in the hands of Mother Nature, whose silent black sky dripped crystal stars above me—the flecks of light enough for my bird vision to see perfectly below. I caught the current and glided down the street, through the oak trees and the lingering protection spells on Esplanade Avenue.
Before I’d come down south, I thought I had everything figured out. It was just before my eighteenth birthday: I’d spend one last summer painting the faces of sticky-handed kids down at Coney Island, one last summer surfing the Rockaways with the guys from the neighborhood, and one last summer tumbling around Sherri Steinman’s backseat before she returned to SVA and pretended I didn’t exist. Then one more year at Stuyvesant before I broke my pop’s heart and told him I wasn’t going to Columbia, his alma mater, and instead was going to Parsons or Pratt to study fine art or maybe industrial design—that I hadn’t quite decided. It’d taken half my summer cash just to pay all the application fees for both schools, so he wouldn’t find out.
SAT, check. Early admissions application, check. Portfolio, check. International volunteer work, check. Essay on “The Importance of Street Art in Urban Development,” bullshit extracurriculars, and good-enough grades. Check. Check. Check. Other than a million absences due to being dragged around by my pop’s office, my record was perfect for art-school admittance officers.
But then the Storm hit and everything changed.
That’s how we ended up in New Orleans . . . how I became a high school dropout and ended up living on a navy ship. And how I met the girl of my dreams. So, planning was for the birds. That’s the other thing I hadn’t planned for: being a witch.
I veered from the river and swooped over the Moonwalk, over the train tracks, and up over the amphitheater, which was my favorite place in the city. Adele had taken me there, not the night of our first kiss or anything like that—no, that was in a mold-infested Storm house, moron, Isaac. We’d been in the amphitheater the night Adele first showed me her magic. Before that we’d had a million secrets; now we didn’t have any. Now I didn’t keep anything from her.
Well, at least I tried not to. Really, really tried not to.
My wings tilted, and I made a wide turn onto Toulouse, cruising past Le Chat Noir, Mac’s club. From the outside it looked completely shut, but if you felt for it, you could sense the vibrations coming from the back of the property. Then again, maybe it was just me? Most of my senses were amplified when I turned, or “transmuted,” as Désirée called it. Sometimes I even felt like my brain worked better this way.
The magic was extraordinary, but new; sometimes it was still hard to fathom.
It was still hard to believe we pulled off Halloween night. Contained the vampires, and reinstated the curse our ancestors had cast three hundred years ago. But what if the curse doesn’t hold and they escape again? Sometimes I think I’m stressed out more now than when they were on the loose, which was probably exactly what Niccolò Medici wanted.
Fucker.
And so, paranoia made the convent a regular part of my patrolling route. But not yet. After the club, it was always Vodou Pourvoyeur.
Only in New Orleans would the biggest political family in history also be the biggest witching family in town. Actually, that makes perfect sense. Just one meeting with Désirée’s gran and her bags of bones, and you knew there was nothing to worry about at the shop, but I always did a full loop anyway, because Désirée and I were connected now, magically speaking. Dee loved to act blasé when it came to magic, anything to do with family tradition—which I could relate to: her family produced witches like mine produced military pilots, generation after generation, and there was no chance in hell I was going down that route—but Dee secretly loved it all. And if I knew her, she wasn’t sleeping right now either. She’d probably been up all night working on finding our other coven members, one of our current points of disagreement.
I just didn’t care about finding the other members. I was perfectly content with her and Adele and my Air powers. Plus, with only half a coven, we could never give the Medici what they wanted—we couldn’t break our ancestor’s curse.
I glided over the brick wall
that surrounded the back of the Borges property. In the middle of the post-Storm-ravaged city of brown and gray and rust, the Borges courtyard was an oasis that rivaled the botanical gardens in Brooklyn. Earth witches.
Banana trees and elephant ears towered over the brick wall, while ferns and vines crawled over every inch, between blossoming flowers whose shades of marigold and plum made you feel like you were somewhere way more exotic than Louisiana. Part forest. Part jungle. All magical.
I loved the hidden sanctuary.
I flew into an herb bed whose perfectly symmetrical rows of Kelly-green basil leaves were far too large to not have been magically modified. I practiced swooping in and out, like it was my personal obstacle course.
“Infected,” a voice said, startling me so abruptly I nearly crashed into an enlarged sunflower. Throughout my weeks of patrolling, no one had ever been in the courtyard at this hour.
“Crimes against . . .” Her voice petered out, but I recognized it—Désirée’s gran, Ritha. Definitely not someone I wanted to think I was a trespasser, but instead of hightailing it out, I swooped low along the algae-coated, bricked path, curious about these murmurs of a crime.
“Not right. Not right,” she muttered. “This town is not right . . .”
I dropped to the ground, hiding beneath blue flowers whose petals hung over me like blooming bells.
“Something’s upsetting the balance.”
I peered out between the drooping flowers to get a better look at the vine-entwined enclave in the garden where she sat. A single candle flame cast the shadows of ivy onto her headdress, which gleamed white in the dark night. A cement fountain of a horned creature obstructed my view of whoever she was speaking to. I hopped a few steps closer but still saw no one else.
“Not mundane crimes,” she said.
My feathers pricked up, telling me to get the hell out, but crime convo was my catnip—birdnip—and kept me there against my better judgment.
“Everything is linked,” she said, her head falling forward and then bobbing back up.
I hopped a few steps closer. What’s linked? The crime wave?
“Supernatural. Ripples.”
Are they talking about the vampires? Because that crime wave is over. You’re welcome, Ritha.