by Alys Arden
Another crash came, followed by an explosion of smashing glass and laughter. What an asshole. The sounds grew louder. I was getting closer. I slipped from bedroom to bedroom and back out into the L-shaped hallway that overlooked the first floor, until there was only one more door left.
There’s nowhere else to hide.
I slipped through. Unlike the other rooms upstairs, which had all been sleeping quarters, this was an office, full of antiques. A regal desk with a tufted-leather chair sat in front of inset bookcases, and the room was decorated with fancy-looking rugs and statues—but there was no sign of intruders.
Shiny wooden pocket doors led to an adjoined room, which I guessed would be the street-facing room with the balcony I’d seen on Royal. I stepped toward them and paused.
A crash came from behind the sliding door. Then another, more violent. Something being hurled against a wall?
A peal of laughter floated out.
Dominate.
I grabbed a statue of a waistcoated rabbit holding a pocket watch off an end table, slipped inside the doors, and crept in, keeping close to the wall so no one could sneak up behind me.
A haze of moonlight shone through the long windows on the left wall, pouring over the enormous fireplace. The remains of vases, clocks, and tchotchkes were shattered over the marble floor in front of the hearth, and . . . a tiny figure? A wave of chills swept over my naked shoulder blades.
A little girl with long, stringy black ringlets, wearing a dingy white dress, stood with her back to me, facing the fireplace, whose mantel was empty except for an enormous mirror. She was surrounded by glittering glass, and had one arm extended into the moonlight, as if holding something out, but there was nothing in her hand.
Broken porcelain crunched underneath my feet, and she glanced back over her shoulder. Her eyes popped wide. She straightened up and dropped her arm to her side, her fingers still curled as if she was squeezing an invisible ball.
What is she doing? Playing a game?
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said, setting down the rabbit on the floor.
“You’re not my brother.” The tone in her voice sent the hairs on the back of my neck straight up.
She was as pale as a person with a pulse could be.
“Is your brother here too?” I asked. Maybe he was the vandal?
She nodded slowly, but her cold little stare never let up, as if warning me not to mess with her.
She began to tremble.
“Hey,” I said, trying to be comforting, keeping my distance. “Are you okay?” Is there such a thing as a kid-bloodsucker?
Her fingers slowly tightened into a fist, her arms tensing and expression hardening. Then she released a huge breath. “Drat!” she yelled, looking angrily at me, like I’d just spoiled her tea party.
She’s not a vamp, you moron; she’s just a kid. A very weird kid.
“Stina!” a guy cried from another room, his footsteps drawing rapidly closer. “Celestina, where are you?”
He swung through the doorway but stopped short when he saw me, his ecstatic expression dissipating. His eyes slanted at me, then moved to her. “Stina, are you okay?”
I became acutely aware I was just standing there shirtless with a little girl. “I was just out running and heard something.”
“Isn’t it a bit late to be . . . running?” The guy looked only a few years older than me. He was as pale as the girl and shared her dark, curly hair. His white button-down shirt hung loosely over dark jeans. Also dingy. “Do you often go running after curfew?” he probed, taking a step toward me.
“Do you often break into people’s houses at two o’clock in the morning?” I snapped. “I mean, assuming this isn’t your place.”
He sighed. “We used to live in one even more grand, before everything went to complete and total hell. Right, Celestina?”
“I’m hungry.”
“I know, love.” He held out his hand. Her eyes were such a dark shade of blue that, with her pale skin, she appeared dollish. “Things won’t always be like this . . . We’ll come out on top again, that I can promise you.”
As she walked over and took his hand, I felt like shit. There were people in need all over the state, and I knew better than to jump to conclusions. I also knew that if I was homeless and the city was half-abandoned, I wouldn’t squat in the shittiest house on the block when there were places like this.
“Come on, sweetheart, maybe we’ll find something to eat next door.” They walked to the door.
“Wait,” I said, again thinking about how cold it was outside and the little girl.
“Do not try to stop me,” the guy said. “I will make you regret it.”
“No. It’s none of my business. You stay. I’ll go.”
He nodded appreciation, and the little girl smiled—both creepy and cute at the same time.
I glided around the Borges and over to the convent, my feathers prickling, making me aware of how weirdly unsettled I felt. I didn’t know if it was the funeral, finding Adele at the convent, or the strange squatter.
All of the above.
I circled the attic, flying even closer to the shutters than usual, making sure there wasn’t so much as a rattle coming from inside. But tonight it wasn’t enough to put me at ease. Instead of going straight for the roof like I normally did, I investigated the entire property, looking for unlocked doors or windows. When I couldn’t find any, I had no choice but to go down one of the chimneys, which I hated doing because it was dirty and there were usually decaying rats, but when you spent your days fixing houses, vandalizing didn’t come easy.
I held my breath and dove in, hoping not to lose too many feathers on the way down.
In a half tumble, half roll, I burst out of the fireplace onto the wooden floor, turning back into my human self, coughing out soot.
After pausing to brush myself off, I ran up the stairs to the third floor. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find, but the padlock was intact, exactly how we’d left it earlier. I gave it a tug, and breathed a sigh of relief.
I imagined Adele coming here, unlocking the door with a swoop of her fingers, moving down the hall, and closing the distance between her and Nicco.
She stopped at the final door, Isaac.
“But why did she come here in the first place?” I yelled, smacking the wooden door.
Breathing heavily, I backed away. I hated this place.
No, I just hated him. No, I hated vampires. All of them.
I swooped back onto Royal Street, and a familiar voice sung out, loud and jovial like a pirate, singing the kind of song that everyone knew the words to but no one knew the name of. Each line slurred more than the one before because, also like a pirate, an unmarked bottle of booze hung from his left hand—the moonshine he and Mac were bootlegging. Ren was a giant man, but his knees were getting closer to the sidewalk with every step.
He shouldn’t be so wasted out on the streets at this hour. The thought made me feel as old as my pop, but then again crime in the city hadn’t actually downturned much since we captured the Medici.
As I debated whether I should walk him home to the Marigny, he collapsed.
“Ren!” I glided down with the current, nearly biting the pavement when I dropped beside him. “Ren, what’s wrong?”
“Alessandro?” he asked as his eyes rolled back in his head Exorcist-style.
“Whoa, buddy, stay with me.”
“Alessandro, is that you?”
“Ren, it’s Isaac. Did you take something?”
“Bbbbbrrrbbb,” his lips blew out like a baby’s. “If there was something in this city to take, you think I’d be drinking this shite?”
He brought the bottle to his mouth, missed, and poured moonshine all over his face. He shot up into a sitting position and clocked me with a right hook.
“Fuck, Ren!”
I backed away, still cursing, and he looked down at his own fist, massaging it as if it had taken him by as much surprise as it ha
d me.
“Hey, it’s the Yankee!”
He tried but couldn’t stand on his own, so I offered him a hand and pulled him up.
“Sorry about that, sonny.”
I tried to reply, but my vision was still spinning, making it difficult to articulate words.
“How’s Adele? Mac warming up to you yet?”
I rubbed my jaw and spit blood on the ground, trying to figure out if it was my lip or tongue. Both felt numb. When I looked back up, Ren’s hands were coming for my chest, and he knocked me back down to the ground.
“What’s your problem, Ren?” I snapped, baffled, as I pushed myself away. When he continued toward me, I jumped up, not wanting to have to take a swing back at one of the French Quarter’s most beloved characters.
He lunged, but this time I was ready—he might have been bigger, but he was on another planet. I grabbed his arm and jerked it behind his back. His knees buckled, and for a flash I thought it wasn’t just a drunken stupor and that he was going to try to flip me.
“Dude!” I yelled. “Have you lost it?”
A flash of blue and red responded, along with a quick blurp of siren.
“Back away,” a cop said through a speaker.
Eff this. The cop can take him home.
As the car door opened, I released Ren’s arm and took off.
Before either of them could look my way, I was already two stories up, gliding toward the moon.
CHAPTER 9
Supernatural Sensation
November 25th
Head in my hands, elbows on the counter at Café Orléans, I read Adeline’s second-to-last journal entry four times, as if there might be some kind of hidden code beneath the words and I just wasn’t getting it. Really I was procrastinating broaching the coven-speak with Isaac. In a weird way the incident at the attic had brought us closer, and I didn’t want to spoil it. So I’d told myself I had until I finished reading the journal—because technically I was doing coven research—then I had to suck it up and ask him to join the cause. I’d managed to stretch my reading out for nearly a week already.
I just wished I had a better reason to tell him than “because.”
A gentle breeze came through the open door. The temperature had dropped; a storm was coming. I took a sip of my chamomile tea, trying to ignore the Wolfman’s replacement DJ droning in the background.
“The chief of police is imploring people to stay off the streets at night and to obey the mayor’s mandatory curfew. Police response is still slow. NOPD is operating at thirty percent, and the crime rate is outpacing them like a Formula One at the dog track.”
I debated switching it off, but a quick glance at Isaac sitting at the corner table told me he was listening—busy sketching—but also listening intently, judging by the stern furrow in his brow. He was obsessed with the city’s crime reports.
“The body was called in by Gentilly neighbor Lori Broussard, who we got a hold of earlier today.” The radio crackled as the woman spoke. “When I found him, I didn’t know dat was Mr. O’Keefe! His body was so white, I thought it was one of those washed up Storm-corpses people been talking ’bout. But I guess dat’s what happens when you dead. White. White. Looked like he been dead foreva, but I know dat ain’t true ’cause I just saw ’em Tuesday. He was going to help his daughter get that damn blue tarp stay up on her roof.”
The DJ cut back in. “Based on the police statement, the victim’s home showed signs of breaking and entering, looters, most likely. The deceased is survived by two daughters.”
You know the world’s gone mad when your first thought after hearing about a murder is Thank God it wasn’t the vampires I accidentally let loose. The sad truth was, New Orleanians had been killing each other since long before the Medici had showed up to town, and now that the vampire problem was taken care of, we were back to the regularly scheduled human-on-human crime, which was less frightening for some reason but far more depressing.
I looked up at Isaac and caught him glancing at me as he sketched. I playfully rolled my eyes, shaking my head.
“Busted,” he said, smiling.
I hated it when he sketched me, but he was so good, I was finding it impossible to ask him to stop.
He closed his sketch pad and started packing his bag; my heart sank a little. The café used to be my second home, but now I hated being alone here.
“You’re leaving?”
“I’m meeting Chase over at the Moonwalk to train.”
“Like you need more training . . .”
“Did you hear the same crime report that I just heard?”
“Nothing new.” I was far more desensitized to the city’s crime than Isaac was.
“I mean, I can stay if you need—”
“No, I’m fine. Go run obstacle courses with Chase, or whatever it is the two of you do.”
“One of these days I’m going to drag you along.”
I snickered. “Yeah, right, maybe me and Dee.”
“You laugh, but it will happen—just wait. You’ll both be able to throw a stake from a hundred feet.”
My back stiffened. “You guys practice throwing stakes? You told Chase—?”
“Relax.” He walked up to the counter. “We don’t train with stakes. We train with footballs and rope and bricks and branches and whatever else is lying around. It’s not like we can go to the gym.”
I certainly didn’t need to ask what, or who, was in Isaac’s head for target practice. He tried to play it off, but he’d been on edge ever since the day he found me in the attic. But just as we promised, we didn’t talk about it.
“Adele.” His tone was suddenly more serious. “If they ever get out of the attic, I’m going to be ready.”
“Isaac, I’m not going to open the—”
“I’m going to be more prepared, that’s all I’m saying. We all need to be.” He leaned over the counter onto his elbows.
I gently brushed the hair from his cheek, careful not to touch the bruised area near his eye. “Your shiner’s almost gone. I still can’t believe Ren hit you.”
He shook his head but didn’t respond. His eyes were glued to my right cheek, where the thin white line stretched up to my eye—the scar left by his claw. He’d only stopped apologizing after I forced him to, but sometimes his eyes still said: I can’t believe I did this to you.
I leaned over the counter and softly touched my lips to his, ending the silent exchange. As I lingered in the moment, I could feel his thoughts slip away, and my insides turned to goo.
Thunder cracked outside, and I broke the kiss with a smile. “Rain. Looks like you can’t train with Chase and will have to stay.” I thumbed through the embroidery thread bracelets that covered his left wrist—the mismatched colors and patterns a stark difference to his great-grandfather’s military watch hidden beneath them. I loved it all mixed together.
He curled his fingers, touching my wrist. I tried not to smile. “Yeah, right, this is a guy who willingly jumps out of planes into wildfires. He’d never let me live it down.”
Those were the words he said, but he wasn’t exactly running for the door anymore. My eyes flicked to the journal next to our elbows and I remembered my mission.
“I was thinking . . .” My pulse accelerated so quickly I lost my words.
He slipped his hands into mine. “You were thinking . . . that you want to come throw stakes?” I knew he was joking, but still, the comment made me retract further.
“What is it?” He squeezed my hands.
Oh God, Adele, just ask him. He’s obsessed with his magic; he should want the coven’s power to grow. To find the other descendants.
But the image of him throwing stakes overtook me. “Um . . . while you’re out training, could I . . . borrow Susannah’s sketchbook?”
His hands broke away. I knew it was ridiculous to ask him to leave his most precious magic in my possession, but it was the first thing that popped in my head. He slung his knapsack on the counter and pulled out the leather
-bound book.
“Of course you can.” He leaned over the counter and kissed my cheek. “I trust you.”
“Merci beaucoup,” I said, kind of surprised. I would have been a bit more Gollum-like with Adeline’s diary. For a second I was glad for its French so no one would ever ask to borrow it.
He smiled. “You’re up to something.” His eyes dropped to the medallion hanging against my chest—right next to his feather. “And I like it.”
“Have fun staking imaginary vampires.”
“Oh, I will. I’ll call you later.”
I nodded, a bit stunned, and watched him walk out the open door. Isaac trusted me so much that he was willing to loan me his family’s grimoire, and without so much as a question about my sudden interest again in all things magic. Yet here I was speaking in half-truths to him. I had to find a way to tell him about Brigitte. I didn’t want there to be any secrets between us. I was already struggling enough keeping things from my father.
“. . . and that brings the crime rate up to—”
I snapped off the radio.
No more, for God’s sake.
In the silence, I pulled his grimoire into my chest and hung on to his presence. I knew it would only take a few seconds for the sadness to creep in like a low-lying fog and permeate every pore of my being. The little corner café used to feel like an extension of Mémé and Pépé’s living room, but now when I was here, the guilt poured over me like wet cement. It was inescapable. Not that I didn’t try, hiding in the pages of fictional tragedies—I looked at the stack of assigned school books on the counter. I should have been reading them right now, but every spare second of headspace I had was consumed with my mission to help my mother.
I turned back to Adeline’s diary.
Not only had the pages not given me any new answers this time around, they hadn’t even given me a direction. No rabbit hole to jump down. No bread-crumb trail to follow. I could recite the pages by heart—in two languages—which was not something I could say about my half-written lit essay sitting under the pile of books.
Adeline seemed just as mystified in 1728 as to why the Medici were after our family as I was now. The only thing crystal clear was that their vendetta had started long before Adeline locked Gabe in the attic, killing Giovanna in the process. I trembled at the thought of the Medici brothers ever finding out it was Adeline who’d killed Giovanna. Like they didn’t hate my family enough.