Tall, Dark and Paranormal: 10 Thrilling Tales of Sexy Alpha Bad Boys

by Opal Carew

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I hadn’t found anything except a voodoo flower and a picture of a ghost. Neither one had any bearing on what Frank had hired me to do. So instead of answering his question, I asked one of my own.

  “Why did you write the name Adam Ruelle next to the guide’s information?’

  “I didn’t tell you?’ Frank sighed. “My mind is not what it used to be, I’m afraid. Ruelle land has been the favored territory for the loup-garou.”

  Considering Ruelle land was basically a swamp, except for the small area where the house had been built I could see why.

  “Could you rent the mansion?” I asked “I’d like to use it as my base of operations.”

  “I bet I could,” Frank said slowly. “Great idea. You’re going to find the loup-garou; I’m sure of it.”

  “You understand, don’t you, that the possibility of discovering a werewolf is pretty slim?”

  “I understand. But there’s something there. Something new and exciting. Can’t you feel it?”

  I could and I was both frightened and fascinated.

  “Did you see Ruelle?” he asked.

  “According to the locals, he’s been missing for years.”

  “Bullshit! He’s there, and he knows something.”

  “Have you met this guy?” I asked

  “Not him. His... father.”

  “Maybe I should talk to him.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “That seems to be going around.”

  “Find me the werewolf, Diana. I need it.”

  Frank hung up, and when I redialed his number, I got voice mail. I wondered again about the accident that had made him a recluse. Had he fallen on his head? Why would he need a werewolf?

  I shrugged and pocketed my cell phone. Until his checks became as bent as he was, I’d just keep doing what Frank had hired me to do.

  With several hours until I met Charlie, I took a stroll down Bourbon. My feet led me to Royal Street, and from there to a tiny shop tucked back from the others.

  Cassandra’s.

  I stepped inside. The contrast between heated sunshine and cool shadow, frantic noise and a certain peace, made me dizzy. I caught the scent of herbs, spice, heard the trickle of water somewhere in the distance, and music. Not jazz or even the blues. Something folksy with drums. A tune that was as ancient as time.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  I had a sense someone was watching me, which seemed to happen a lot lately, and was making me increasingly paranoid.

  A doorway covered with beads of many colors led into the back. I saw nothing beyond their plastic sheen, which was, I’m sure, the whole idea. I turned toward the retail section of the store, took three steps, and stopped.

  Someone wasn’t watching me; something was.

  A huge, coiled snake occupied a cage in the corner, its eyes dark and unblinking. Eyes of the dead. Long, brown, with uneven black circles all over its body, the reptile appeared to be a python. Was that even legal?

  I inched away. The cage looked secure enough, but I didn’t want to get him excited. There were plenty of other items to view in the snake-free section of the store. Shelves full of bottles, bowls, which were in turn full of... stuff. With none of it marked, I was clueless.

  Several mini cloth sacks stuffed with Lord knows what lay on the countertop. I brushed my fingertip across one of them, and I could have sworn it shimmied on its own.

  “Gris-gris.”

  A woman stood in front of the beaded doorway. How had she come through without making them go clackety-clack?

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  She moved behind the counter, picking up one of the bags. “A gris-gris, meaning charm or talisman. For good luck.”

  Her lack of an accent revealed her to be as much a stranger here as I was.

  “Not bad luck?” In my memory banks gris-gris meant “cursed.”

  “Not in my shop.”

  My shop. This was Priestess Cassandra?

  I’d expected her to be African-American, or perhaps Haitian, since voodoo had taken root and grown there. She’d wear a turban, a flowing dress, bangles on her wrists, huge hoops in her ears.

  Instead, Cassandra was a tiny blue-eyed white girl with a single streak of gray marring the right temple of her short, black hair. Hair that appeared to have been hacked off recently, by someone who did not know what they were doing. The style complemented Cassandra’s high cheekbones and pointed chin, softening them just enough to nudge her toward stunning.

  She was dressed in ratty jeans, a pink T-shirt, and her feet were bare, except for the rings on two of her toes. If not for the premature gray, I would have mistaken her for a coed at Tulane.

  “You have a question?” she asked. “Something bugging you?”

  “You psychic?”

  Her smile was sweet, as if I were a child, though I had to be older than her by several years. “Everyone is at times.”

  I snorted, then realized bow rude that was. “Sorry.”

  Even if I was in town searching for a werewolf, that didn’t mean I bought into voodoo and other mind games. I had my standards.

  She spread her hands. “We believe what we believe.”

  “I do have questions.”

  “Doesn’t everyone? How can I help you... ?” She tilted her head, waiting for me to introduce myself.

  “I’m Diana.”

  “Moon goddess.”

  I’d heard that before, or something like it, in my dream last night

  Cassandra studied my face. “You didn’t know the meaning?”

  “I do, but my parents named me after my grandmother. Knowing them, there wasn’t any discussion of the moon involved.”

  “Names have power and purpose. Cassandra means prophet.”

  “How convenient.”

  She laughed, as if I were the funniest person to come into her shop in years. I took in the herbs, the beads, the snake. Maybe I was.

  Hissing erupted from beyond the chicken wire.

  “Relax, Lazarus. She’s a friend.”

  “Lazarus? As in risen from the dead?”

  “Names have power,” was all she said. “What’s your question?”

  The snake was staring at me again. The idea that the reptile might not die or, if dead, would rise, was a very creepy thought indeed. Weren’t zombies a part of the whole voodoo thing? And snake zombies... I didn’t even want to go there.

  “There’s a flower in the swamp,” I said. “A fire iris?”

  “Yes.” Cassandra moved down the row of shelves and began to pull out a little of this and a little of that, sprinkling the unknown items into a gris-gris bag. “Very powerful.”

  “What does it mean when someone leaves one on your bed?”

  She paused, fingers poised over a basket of what appeared to be dried chicken bones. Then, as if she’d had second thoughts, she took a pinch of red dust instead and scattered it on top.

  “Not ‘welcome to the neighborhood,’ “ she murmured. “Can you bring me the flower?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Hmm.” She turned to a completely different set of shelves and continued to mix and match. “Another question?”

  She hadn’t answered the first. Not really.

  “Do you know anything about a wolf in the area?”

  Her hand froze above a glass jar of what looked like black olives but probably weren’t. “Who are you?”

  “I told you. Di—”

  “Not your name. Why are you here? In New Orleans?”

  I had no reason not to tell her, so I did. “I’m a cryptozoologist. I was hired to find the wolf in the swamp.”

  “Why?’

  “That’s my job. Finding unknown animals.”

  “A wolf isn’t unknown.”

  “In Louisiana it is.”

  “What if there isn’t a wolf? Or at least not a wolf as you know them?”

  “Even better.”

  She cast me a quick glanc
e, then busied herself tying a string around the top of the gris-gris. “There’s a legend about the Honey Island Swamp.”

  “The swamp monster?”

  The snake in the cage echoed her derisive hiss. “Nothing more than an overgrown nutria rat, which scared some half-wits over two decades ago.”

  Interesting theory—and one that explained the legend nicely. Cassandra was both refreshingly levelheaded and disturbingly strange.

  “I meant the legend of the loup-garou,” she continued.

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  “The werewolf.”

  She stared at me for a long moment. “You don’t believe there’s any such thing, do you?”

  I ignored her question to ask one of my own: “Have you seen a wolf?”

  Cassandra moved to the front window and peered at the street. “There’s something out there. Something that comes and goes. Something that kills and is never caught.”

  “Wolves don’t kill people.”

  She turned, and her now-sober eyes met mine. “Exactly.”

  “What’s the legend?”

  In my world, legends often skirted the truth. I needed to listen, to analyze, to pick and choose what was real and what was not.

  “Over a hundred years ago a man was cursed.”

  “Why?”

  “He was a man. Isn’t that enough?”

  My lips twitched. I really shouldn’t like her so much. If she wasn’t nuts, she was at least a charlatan.

  “Every crescent moon he runs as a wolf.”

  That much I knew. “Why not the full moon?”

  “A loup-garou is special.”

  “Why?”

  “You have an awful lot of questions for someone who doesn’t believe.”

  “I’m curious.”

  “He was cursed,” she repeated.

  “Why?” I sounded like a broken record.

  “Because he owned people, and he would not set them free.”

  I should have known. Voodoo came to this country with those who were brought here in chains. I had to say, if anyone had bought and sold me, I’d have cursed their ass, too.

  “So his slaves voodoo-cursed him to become a wolf under the crescent moon?”

  “Not a wolf, a werewolf.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A wolf is an animal, but a werewolf is monster. An evil thing, ruled by the moon and possessed by bloodlust. They’re given life, but they can’t live. They can hate, but they can’t love. They think like a human and kill like a beast, no longer caring about anything or anyone but themselves.”

  I guess I didn’t want to meet one in a dark alley.

  “Why the crescent moon and not the full?” I repeated. “Besides the fact that this is the Crescent City?”

  I’d thought the name and the legend nothing more than an interesting coincidence. However, when dealing with curses, coincidences weren’t always so coincidental. Not that I believed in curses, but some people did. Obviously Cassandra was one of them.

  “The full moon comes but once a month,” she said. “The crescent arrives twice.”

  “Double your cursing pleasure.”

  Cassandra nodded. “A full moon is technically one night only, but each crescent lasts several days, bestowing multiple madness every lunar cycle.”

  “Who was this guy? Simon Legree?”

  I hated that the first name of my beloved husband and that of the legendary bad guy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin were the same, but I hadn’t written the book and Harriet Beecher Stowe had died long before I had a chance to complain.

  “Nobody knows for certain who the man was,” Cassandra said. “In the way of legends, he was probably an amalgamation of every slave owner. Doomed to be damned for eternity by their own greed.”

  “Do you believe a werewolf is running around the Honey Island Swamp?”

  “Maybe there is; maybe there isn’t. But a wolf’s been seen. People have been killed.”

  “What do the police think?”

  “They’re like you. Never believe until they see. No wolves in Louisiana, so the culprit has to be a wild dog, or a coyote.”

  I remembered something Simon had told me. “Wolves won’t tolerate coyotes in their territory. Drives ’em nuts.”

  “Okay.” Cassandra appeared puzzled by my seemingly random thought. “But what about werewolves and coyotes?”

  That I wasn’t sure about.

  “Don’t those bitten by a werewolf become werewolves themselves?” I asked.

  “So the legends say.”

  “Then if there’s a werewolf in New Orleans—and has been for over a hundred years—shouldn’t there be more than one?”

  Cassandra pressed the gris-gris into my hand. “Who says there aren’t?”

  Chapter 6

  The tinkling of the shop bell interrupted our conversation.

  “Excuse me,” Cassandra said.

  “I need to go anyway.”

  I tried to return the gris-gris, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “That’s for you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’ll protect you against the mojo from the flower.”

  “Sure it will.”

  She tilted her head. “What can it hurt?”

  “Depends on what you put in here. Bats’ wings? Puppy dog tails? I’m allergic.”

  Cassandra laughed. “Nothing so ominous. Some herbs, red pepper. Dust from the grave of a believer.”

  I made a face.

  “Kidding,” she said. “I also put in a little something to keep the beasts of the swamp away.”

  “That oughta work.” Along with a gun and a baseball bat.

  “If you’re going to be working in the swamp, I doubt you’ll want the alligators hanging around.”

  I shoved the gris-gris into my pocket.

  “In the old days, people placed charms in their left shoes,” Cassandra continued. “But the old days are the reason a lot of folks wound up lame.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “Keep the gris-gris on you by day and under your pillow by night. Make sure you take it out before the maid sees. Some tend to get a little freaked if they find them.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was teasing. Probably not.

  “Let me know how things work out,” she said. “I enjoyed talking to you.”

  I’d enjoyed talking to her, too. I didn’t have many friends. Hell, I didn’t have any. Once I’d found Simon, I’d let the few I had drift away. I was in a bizarre profession, which didn’t lend itself to camaraderie. I disappeared at the ring of the phone, never knew when I’d come back, forgot lunch dates, could care less about movies. And the other cryptozoologists ...

  Well, they’d as soon steal your Loch Ness Monster as look at you.

  Arriving back at the hotel, I discovered the maid had cleaned my room and departed. I dropped my clothes on the floor, set my phone alarm for an hour before dusk, then shoved the gris-gris beneath my pillow. After the dream I’d had last night ... Well, as Cassandra said—couldn’t hurt.

  I slept like the dead, waking with a yelp when my phone shrilled. No gifts on the bed. My gris-gris was right where I’d left it.

  I got dressed, pocketed the charm, grabbed my camera, my cell phone, and a tote bag to put them in, then went to meet Charlie.

  He was waiting when I pulled up at the dock. The sun cast orange rays through the trees and across his face. For an instant the light took on the shade of fresh blood.

  I pushed aside the disturbing thought. I was the moon goddess, not a prophet if I believed Cassandra’s name-dropping. But what did a moon goddess do?

  The gris-gris weighed heavily in my pocket, and I was tempted to throw the talisman into the drink. Except I didn’t want Charlie to see it. The way he’d behaved this afternoon at the mansion, anything weird might spook him away for good.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I climbed into the boat, and we headed off. Night settled over us l
ike a cool velvet curtain. The stars came out, and the crescent moon rose.

  Charlie turned on the spotlight attached to the front of the boat, and I stared, transfixed, at what seemed like a hundred shining orbs in the water.

  “Gators,” he said. “They like the dark.”

  In the daytime it was easy to believe the alligators were slow and unthreatening. Not very many of them out here at all. But in the night, surrounded by their glowing eyes, every one of which seemed to stare directly at me, they seemed very threatening indeed. I longed to be back on solid ground.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Thought I’d take you to the place where the last body was found.” Charlie pointed straight ahead. “Right up there.”

  “Who discovered it?”

  “Me.”

  “You said you hadn’t seen the wolf.”

  “Didn’t. Friend of mine did.”

  “So it didn’t necessarily kill the man.”

  “Guy’s throat was torn. Paw prints all around him.”

  “Not a coyote?”

  “Coyotes are scavengers and cowards. They wouldn’t kill a man.”

  “Neither would a wolf.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Me and my friend was huntin’ nutrias, found the body. I stayed, while he looked around. Said he saw a wolf disappearing into the tall grass.”

  “He’s sure he saw a wolf?”

  “Huge, black, big head, long legs. He shot it, but the thing disappeared.”

  “He’s sure he hit something?”

  “Found a bit of blood. Nothin’ else.”

  “Isn’t it illegal to shoot a wolf?”

  The species was still endangered in some areas, threatened or protected in others, though their numbers had increased sufficiently in a few northern states for them to be delisted. In other words, wolves could be killed by certain people, with good cause, but not by any old person whenever they felt like it.

  “No law around here like that,” Charlie said. “Ain’t no wolves.”

  “I should probably take a peek at that body.”

  “Already in the crypt, I’m sure.”

  “Crypt?”

  “Whole city’s below sea level.”

  Ah, the singular burial practices of New Orleans. While I wasn’t an expert, I had read something in the guidebook that I’d bought at O’Hare before getting on the plane. For hundreds of years, the citizens of the Crescent City had stacked their dead on shelves inside brick monuments known as ovens. After a year and a day, the body was decomposed enough to dump into a well with all the others who had gone before, making room for the next entrant on the assembly line of death.