The Casquette Girls

by Arden, Alys

  My face burned with embarrassment, both because it was true and because he knew about my unfortunate past life.

  “So much for your headphones being on all those days in the café,” I snapped.

  He jumped up in front of me, laughing. “No wonder you don’t like me. You have the worst taste in menever!”

  My shoulders burned. I told myself to breathe, but no amount of air to my lungs was going to help.

  “Ever!” he taunted, bouncing backwards down the stairs.

  That was it.

  I sprang up. My arm flung upwards like I was pitching a softball, and then a perfectly round ball of fire flew from my palm and whizzed right past his ear. Stunned, he whipped around and watched it sail another hundred feet. It landed in one of the troughs with a satisfying sizzle.

  My pulse raced.

  “What the eff?” he yelled, twisting back around. “How did…? You just… That was AWESOME!”

  A rush of relief passed through me.

  “Do it again!”

  “You want me to throw fire at you again?”

  “Uh, if it’s coming out of your hands, then yes.”

  "Okay, don't say I didn't warn you." I lobbed another flame, but this time I aimed it directly into the horses’ drinking station. He ran back to me, unable to contain himself.

  “You’re like Super Mario!”

  “You really know how to make a girl feel special.”

  “You’re like Super Mario, but a hot girl.” He blushed a little when he realized the compliment had slipped out.

  My eyes immediately dropped to the ground. I didn’t deserve any compliments after the events of the last few days. I tried to look back up at him; my cheeks burned, remembering our kiss that night in the Tremé.

  “Hey,” he said gently, taking my hand. My heart skipped, and for a second I worried we were back there. But when I looked up, he smiled, quickly let go, and started jogging backwards down the rows to center stage.

  “Hit me!”

  “No, Isaac, I don’t want to burn you.”

  “You aren’t going to burn me,” he scoffed. “Just do it.”

  Without answering, I launched a fireball at him.

  “Again, again, again!”

  My heart rate picked up, and I launched another. Then a third. Just before the first flame hit his face, he raised his hand, and a small gust of wind redirected it thirty feet upwards. He yelled for more. I threw a forth. Fifth. Sixth. Gravity pulled the first fireball down, but right before it fell into his hand, he popped it back up. A smile spread across his face.

  Isaac was juggling my flames, and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

  I walked down the steps, totally mesmerized by the coolest street performance in history. When I got near, he moved the trajectory of the flames, causing me to jump closer. I landed on his foot as the flames circled us, but he didn’t waver. With my back turned to his chest, I craned my neck to watch the flames swirl around us. I even shot a few more into the gentle twister.

  His arms came down, but the flames continued to dance around us, warming the wind. For the first time, my power seemed beautiful. Isaac had this way of making everything he touched beautiful.

  He lowered his head so it was level with mine. “You see, we are better together.”

  A smile that I hoped he couldn’t see came from somewhere deep inside. I slowly inhaled and fought the urge to relax into his chest. “You’re right.”

  “I am?” A fireball fell, squelching into a puddle.

  I turned around to face him. “We are better together. Stronger. The three of us.”

  “Three?”

  “You, me… and Désirée,” I said with a Cheshire Cat-sized grin and jogged backwards. The flames rained down around us as he chased me with his mouth gaping.

  “You mean like a threeso—”

  I chucked another fireball towards his head. He easily flung it out of the way.

  “You better watch out,” he scolded me, catching up. “This city has already burned down to the ground, twice. Right?” He looked at me for confirmation.

  “Someone give the boy a beignet. Yes, every building except the Ursuline Convent, Vodou Pourvoyeur, and my house, apparently.”

  “There was one other building.”

  “Huh?”

  “Weren’t you paying attention at all on our first date?” He winked. “There was one other original French building that survived the fires, but now I can’t remember where.”

  “There was?” The wheels in my head started turning. “There’s no such thing as a coincidence.”

  “What?”

  “Isaac, we have to figure out which other building survived!”

  “I thought we had to stake some vampires?”

  “Don’t you see? Adeline must have lived in my house on Burgundy Street. Marassa at the Voodoo shop. Your ancestor, Susannah, lived at the convent. What if that house belonged to one of the other casquette girls? What if her descendant still lives there?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I grabbed his wrist and took off running. “Now I have a lot to tell you.”

  * * *

  “They should really lock their doors this late at night,” Isaac said as we burst into Vodou Pourvoyeur.

  “No one here has to worry about burglars.”

  “I hope you found some answers,” Désirée yelled from the back of the shop.

  “I did way better than that,” I shouted, dragging a suddenly incredibly uneasy Isaac through the long shop. “I found our third.”

  “Your what?” he asked.

  Désirée looked up from the cauldron she was meddling with. The room was a mess. Books were scattered about. Discarded, crumpled sheets of paper. Herbs, oils, powders. A scattering of bones and other fragments that I’d rather remain clueless about.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Her eyes scanned Isaac up and down. And then she extinguished the fire in the hearth so whatever she was brewing wouldn’t burn.

  “You two are starting to freak me out,” Isaac said. “Can someone tell me what is going on here?”

  “Isaac, show Désirée what you can do.”

  “What?” His eyes widened, and he said my name under his breath.

  “Show her. You can trust Dee. I promise.”

  He looked at Désirée with caution.

  She crossed her arms. “This better be good.”

  His eyes rolled to her, and then suddenly he was gone.

  “Shit! Where did he go?”

  My gaze rose to the wall behind her, where he was perched perfectly still on the top shelf in between an enormous animal skull and what appeared to be two taxidermy bats.

  Désirée craned her neck backwards, and suddenly he launched down towards us.

  “Jesus!” She jumped, grabbing my arm as he swooped over our heads to the shelf behind me.

  I spun around. My eyes didn’t move from him. Unlike our first encounter, the bird wasn’t scary – his shiny, jet-black feathers, his wingspan, his animal grace, all left me momentarily breathless.

  He transformed back to his human form, cracking up with laughter. “Désirée, you should have seen the look on your face.”

  “Anthropomorphic spell. Big whoop.”

  “Anthro-what?” he asked. “Oh yeah, it was a real big whoop for you that day you accidentally turned me into a cat and couldn’t turn me back!”

  “OMG, that was you?” She laughed. “Serves you right for creepin’ me.”

  “I was not creeping you! You were being followed by a vampire!”

  “Oh.”

  “Show Désirée your sketchpad,” I interrupted, trying not to laugh.

  “Not until you tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “That’s what I am trying to do!” I pulled the painting of the casquette girls from my bag along with Adeline’s diary. Désirée pulled out Marassa’s grimoire, and we put everything on the wooden counter and looked at him. He didn’t take his
wary eyes off of Désirée, but conceded and placed the old book of art on the counter. I flipped it open to Susannah’s self-portrait, and moved it next to the painting.

  “What the hell?” Isaac asked, looking back and forth between the two.

  “Goddess help us,” Désirée said. “You are legit.”

  “That’s not all. Go on, Isaac.”

  He looked at me one last time before he raised his hand. A slight wind began to blow back our hair, and soon the scattered mess Désirée had made all over the floor was gently arranged into neat stacks of papers and orderly piles of herbs.

  “Thanks, but that mess meant something to me.” Désirée raised her hand, and the floor’s pattern of wooden planks began to shift like a Rubik’s Cube until all the objects were back to their seemingly chaotic state.

  “Whoa….”

  “Mother Earth,” she said and then pointed to him. “Wind.”

  “Fire,” we both finished as she pointed to me.

  “So… the next question is, who the hell is empowered with water?” Désirée asked. “Who are the other descendants that are supposed to be in our coven?”

  “Excuse me,” Isaac said. “Our what—?”

  “Oh,” I yelped. “That reminds me!”

  I quickly explained my theory about the residences of the old coven being the only French buildings to have survived the great fires of the eighteenth century. “But what was the fourth property?” I asked Désirée.

  “The brothel.”

  We all took off running.

  * * *

  I don’t know if it was the total darkness or the fact that my pulse climbed with every pound my feet made to the pavement, but the block where the brothel was felt particularly creepy. We slowed to a walk.

  Isaac shone his weaponlike flashlight on the mystery residence.

  The brothel was a massive, pink Creole plantation-style house – multiple times bigger than my own house. The kind that you would imagine on acres of land in the middle of nowhere, rather than a few feet from the sidewalk in the middle of a city block. The pink paint was peeling; some of the windows were broken, while others, along with the door, were boarded up – not in a protection-from-the-Storm kind of way, in a decrepit haunted-house-on-the-hill kind of way.

  The first floor sat high on top of a raised basement, which hid the staircase that led to the front door.

  “Do you guys feel that?” Désirée asked as I unlocked the basement door.

  “Yes,” we both replied, although I had no idea what she actually meant.

  Even though the bricked basement was above ground, it was still cold and damp. We hurried up the staircase that led back outside to the sprawling porch. The closer I got to the front door, the warmer I felt, both metaphorically and physically.

  Isaac flicked his flashlight on the dormant gas lamps. After a little mental focus, flames shone through the mucky glass boxes and the smell of burning grime wafted over us.

  Désirée held her hand over the crooked boards on a window, and they popped themselves off one at a time into her hands. She gently placed the wood on the ground, and we peered through the impossibly opaque glass. It was obvious that the building had been abandoned long before the Storm.

  “Look at this,” said Isaac, shining the flashlight on some kind of plaque next to the front door.

  “No!” I moaned, running over. There was an emblem of the Louisiana State Department. “It’s property of the state?” There was also a list of the board of directors, along with the Museum Director. “Ugh, the building is a museum now?”

  “Maybe once upon a time,” said Isaac. “I don’t think it’s been anything for a while.”

  “I know there has to be a clue here somewhere!” I shook the front door handle frantically, too overwhelmed with disappointment to focus on the metal.

  “Adele!” Désirée pulled me away from the door.

  “We’re so close! I can feel it. We have to find out who the previous owner was!”

  “Even if we do,” she aggressively whispered, chasing me back down the stairs, “it’s not like we’d be able to locate them tonight and then convince them they’re a witch who must join our coven to break a three-hundred-year-old curse before some maniac-middle-child vampire kills us all!”

  I sank to the curb, my arms cradling my head.

  The gas lamp exploded behind me.

  “Chill!” she yelled.

  Breathe.

  Without opening my eyes, I knew that Isaac had sat next to me.

  “Hey,” he whispered, his hand lightly touching my back, “whoever the descendant is, they’re probably not even in town because of the Storm, okay?”

  When I didn’t freak out on him, he moved his hand up and down my back until my breathing normalized and I nodded in affirmation. “Y’all are right. We’re on our own for this one. Let’s go back to the shop. We need a plan.”

  Désirée helped me up from the curb and looked over my shoulder at the mess of glass. “Let’s not go back to the shop just yet.”

  * * *

  It’s hard to explain how or why, but everything just changed being around them. It was instantly apparent that we were meant to be together. We decided that the banks of the Mississippi would be the safest place to continue our show-and-tell, because my flames and Isaac’s wind together quickly became unwieldy – river the water was a natural fire extinguisher.

  We hurried down the Moonwalk until we were technically out of the Quarter. Hidden among the few trees that had survived the Storm, we could practice more freely. Every spell we tried became a spectacle, and at one point Isaac produced a gust of wind so strong he accidentally launched Désirée into the river.

  “Stay back!” she screamed when we ran to the water to pull her from the dangerous Mississippi.

  A drooping tree branch suddenly twisted past my head, growing longer and longer until it plunged into the murky water. I just stood gobsmacked while the enchanted vine pulled her from the current.

  I thought she would kill him for it, but at first she was too busy reeling from experiencing the coven’s surge of power. For the rest of the night, however, Isaac couldn’t walk past any fauna without getting his butt smacked by banana tree leaves or, even better, tickled by Spanish moss – which amused me greatly. He took the beatings with grace, but yelled to me through the tickles, “Is this funny to you?”

  “Oui,” I replied with an innocent smile, and he swore he’d get me back for laughing at his misfortunes.

  Any tension among the three of us eased, but it was still strange. There was something extremely personal about casting magic – the secret, fantastical nature of it all. It was hard for me to trust the magic so completely… and to let people in on something I was still jostling with and barely believed myself. Being brought together under extraordinary circumstances had created an immediate bond, but the quickness with which it formed made it feel surreal. Being around Désirée and Isaac calmed me down in a way that I’d never felt around friends before, but somehow this also made me incredibly nervous at the same time.

  Sometime in between Désirée’s river-dunk and sunrise, we ended up back at the shop, settled into the mound of pillows behind the fuchsia curtain. Désirée made Isaac a gris-gris while I gave him the Cliff Notes version of Adeline’s diary and picked little feathers out of his hair.

  As I finished the story of the pirate massacre, he picked up the medallion resting against my chest and rubbed the captain’s eye.

  I filled him in as much as I could, but when I got to the Emilio part of the story, I couldn’t get the death threat out. It was hard enough grappling with the idea of my own mortality, but handing someone else their potential death sentence was too much. Désirée had to finish for me.

  “I knew there was a reason I hated that douchebag!” he yelled after she broke the news.

  “I want to work on this elixir I found in Marassa’s grimoire,” Désirée said with the same light tone as if she wanted to whip up a batch of
brownies. “The original coven had seven members. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  She went out into the shop with her eighteenth-century ingredient list, and I watched through a crack in the curtain as she began to pull an assortment of jars and boxes from the shelves. Isaac was on the floor, glancing at Susannah’s book while he sketched in his own. It had taken him all of thirty seconds to get over the shock.

  He must have felt me looking at him.

  “It helps me think,” he said. “I swear I’m not just doodling.”

  “I know.” I settled under a blanket in the cushions next to him, uncapped a pen, and began translating, but, just like in my dad’s studio, my eyes kept flicking to his artwork. He was sketching my medallion. He swept the pencil across the page, scripting out the letters A.S.G. As he began to layer over the star that covered the monogram, I couldn’t help think about my dad and my mom, and Adeline et le Comte de Saint Germain, and wonder how deep the crazy in my family history went.

  Chapter 36 Circle of Seven

  10th August 1728

  It has been three days, but I still can’t believe that Martine is dead. Although, dead doesn’t seem like the appropriate word, considering I saw her walking— no, dancing in the street last night. I tried to speak with her. I long to know that she is okay. At least, that is what I tell myself, but my true desire, now that she is one of them, is for her to convince them to go back to Paris, or wherever they came from.

  13th August 1728

  My attempts to communicate with Martine have been fruitless. She will not even look at me. Gabriel says this is common with newborn vampires – they often reject their former human families, as part of their transition. And I was the closest thing that Martine DuFrense had to family.

  14th August 1728

  The guilt over the DuFrenses’ deaths consumes me. The guilt lies twice as heavy now, Papa, knowing that not only could I have killed the vampires on our journey across the ocean but also that their presence here seems to have something to do with me. With us.