by J. R. Rain
At least that’s what Dr. James told me after he’d had a few too many brandies last night. I guessed he felt as hooked as a Gulf redfish.
“Will they really show up?” I asked Eulalie, regarding the werewolves.
“I don’t know.” She glanced at the window, shrugging. “They trust us, I think, but not the others.”
“But there are only six of us. There must be like dozens of them.”
“Few loups-garous are able to shapeshift when the moon is not full. Those who can are as strong as most vampires, but those who cannot live in mortal fear of your kind.”
“Our kind now,” I said.
“I can never truly be one of you.” She shook her head with a sad smile. “My heart belongs to both worlds. So I have more to gain than anyone if this peace treaty is signed between them.”
Just before we reached the lakeside, the road ended and the carriage had to stop. Leaving the driver shivering under his cloak—even though it couldn’t have been any colder than about sixty-five degrees, we got out and walked—Eulalie carrying a glass-bulbed oil lantern even though we all had excellent night-vision. The saw grass underfoot became marshier and marshier and the trees thicker; luckily, I’d remembered how I’d ended up looking the last time I’d been down to the swamp, so I’d borrowed a pair of Pelagie’s riding boots for the occasion.
We found the lone figure of Arthemise Bouligny standing in a clearing higher than the surrounding marshland. She’d had the same idea of what to wear as me, I guess, except she’d jumped the shark and wore a complete riding habit: thick blue coat, boots, gloves, and a rolled-up veil beneath her top hat. She looked like an English lady out fox hunting. I wondered if she’d actually ridden here, because her boots had spurs.
“Mais où sont les autres?” asked Bernard in surprise, then, remembering I was there, switched to English. “Where are the others, Arthemise?”
“I don’t know. I stopped at Jules’ house before I came, but he was not at home, and his servants could not find him. I waited as long as I dared, but I did not want to be late.”
Jules d’Avezac was the white-haired school president I’d met at Eulalie’s, as I recalled. The other dude, Victor de Boré, looked like a big bullfrog. Speaking of bullfrogs, I noticed that the ones around us, who had been kicking up a racket like a drum and bass rave, had all shut up.
“And de Boré?” asked Eulalie into the silence.
The four of us became aware of a presence approaching. At first, it looked as though floating cat’s eye marbles surrounded us, drawing closer in the night. Then the half-moon came out from behind the clouds, and the glowing spots became human eyes attached to human bodies emerging from the shadows.
…If you can call werewolves human. There must have been about twenty of them led by the unmistakable figure of Doctor John coming out of the swampland, and I couldn’t help but notice that one of the guys behind him was handsome and wide-shouldered just like my Kingsley, and had that wolfish look around the jaws. Yeah, I definitely had a type, and he and Kingsley were it.
Of course, considering how they outnumbered us, we’d be in pretty deep shit if Doctor John’s people changed their mind about signing. I knew I could transform at will, and I had a strong feeling Eulalie could as well, but her brother Bernard lacked the power, being too new. Arthemise, I had no idea.
Peaceable or not, Doctor John joined us in the clearing, followed by the hunky wolfman. The rest of the loups garous pressed forward on every side.
“Yo’all heard what these vampires say dey want—peace wid us!” Doctor John bellowed to his followers.
A low murmur rose from them at his words. Most white, a few women, all in their human forms.
“But can we trus’ dem, I hear you say? Dat is de question. All right, I let dem read deir piece of paper to you now so you can judge for you selfs.”
Bernard Marigny’s stepped forward to read the document aloud. He and Eulalie had drawn it up together in both English and French; I figured they’d had a lot more experience in the law courts than I did, so I’d only made a few suggestions. They’d decided to call their rebel group the ‘Casquette Krewe’ since so many of them were descended from the original casquette girls.
Actually, I’d expected there to be a lot of arguing among the werewolves, who I knew from experience rarely agreed on anything, but they surprised me. A few grumbles happened during the reading, and a growing hum of voices as it drew to an end. This turned into louder shouts and calls at Doctor John. A few of them clapped.
“So we are all agree?” he yelled back. “We sign de paper?”
A roar of approval greeted his words.
We ran into a problem when it came time to actually do the signing by the light of Eulalie’s lantern. It turned out that Doctor John didn’t actually know how to write his name. So he scrawled a big X in his blood. The big, handsome guy signed next as Beauregard Boudreau Clay. Not that I looked especially hard or anything…
After the ‘Council of Seven’—the top dogs in the werewolf world—had signed, it was our turn. The four of us did the same, pricking our arms and drawing our blood to dip the quill pen in. I worried that the other two rebel vampires hadn’t shown up, and that sort of made all the big talk in the treaty sound a little dumb. Bernard and Eulalie wrote it as binding on all who joined us in future, including our descendants, for perpetuity.
That meant forever. Considering who did the signing, supernatural immortal beings, I figured it stood a chance of actually being observed that long.
No sooner had the thought popped into my head than I was proved wrong. A sickeningly familiar twang came from somewhere in the trees, followed by the hiss of something in flight, then a thud, and a loud scream.
“Crossbow bolts!” I yelled. “With silver tips! The Têtes de Mort are attacking!”
We’d been betrayed.
All at once, the night air erupted in shrieks and snarls as the loups garous reacted to the onslaught. They scattered. Some ran; a few, those who could transform themselves on the spot into their lycanthrope form, stood their ground or charged their attackers, including both Doctor John and Beauregard Clay. For a moment, the four of us vampires stood on our own.
“Can you transform?” I asked, but it was too late for Arthemise.
A dark bolt came hurtling out of the darkness and buried itself in her heart. Before she’d even bitten the dust, I’d begun my own metamorphosis; so had Eulalie, turning into the small, dark gold-colored she-wolf I’d first seen at Six Flags.
“Bernard,” she said in a guttural voice once her transformation was complete.
Meanwhile, I had burst out of my clothes and hovered off the ground.
“He cannot…”
I flew higher and grasped the scruff of his jacket with my talons. He was the heaviest dude I’d ever tried to fly with. Would I be able to lift off with Eulalie clinging to my other leg? I had only one way to find out. Crossbow bolts whizzed around us, streaks of silver in the dark.
“Jump!” I called down to Eulalie. “Grab my other leg and hold on!” I realized it would have been better for me if she hadn’t changed into her were-form; like her brother, I could have just hoisted her up by her clothes.
“No, no—go!” she screamed back. “Now, at once! I will meet you at the carriage.” Like a flash, she zoomed off into the darkness. Okay, so be it. I shot upwards close to tree height, and as I did, I looked down to see Delphine Macarty Lalaurie and Dominique de Pérignon standing below. I’d had the satisfaction of watching him die in the future, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t kill me now in the past, like the sting in a scorpion’s tail.
A shock ran through me at the sight. I’d last seen the infamous Lalaurie and Dominique in my own time; both looked like different people now. Not younger, but somehow older. I realized that a constant diet of human blood over the course of a century and a half had given them both fresh youth… or at least the illusion of it.
Neither of them recognized me, of cour
se, since they hadn’t yet met me, but killing me would mean no more to them than swatting a gnat, regardless. As I flapped away as fast as my wings could carry the two of us, Dominique took his shot.
Somehow, it missed; it whistled past my ear so close I swear it tore a few bristly hairs off, but that’s what saved us. Instead of transforming himself and chasing after me, Dominique took the time to reload, crank his crossbow back into the cocked position and shoot again.
This time he didn’t miss; his bolt hit Bernard, who gave a single choked cry from below me.
Once I made it out over the mangrove trees, I took off like a bat out of hell.
Or a half-dragon out of hell.
Chapter Twenty-six
Voodoo drums and the howls of werewolves filled the night over screams and the sounds of battle. Even a few gunshots—maybe a few of the loups garous had brought along pistols loaded with silver bullets. It would have taken a lot braver man than Eulalie’s coachman not to turn the carriage around and hightail it back in the direction of the Old Spanish Fort.
By the time I passed over it, he’d whipped the horses halfway back there. So I flew on for another quarter mile and landed in the muddy track, where I changed back to human form. Which meant I was naked again… sigh. Bernard had become unconscious; the crossbow bolt pierced his upper back, but I couldn’t tell whether it had hit his heart or kidney. I stripped off his frock-coat and put it on. It stank of tobacco, stale sweat, and perfumed powder. Right about then, I’d have killed for a pair of mom jeans from Walmart.
I discovered the curled up treaty document stuffed into a pocket; somehow, he’d managed to save it. I took a moment to wonder if Doctor John—and the good-looking Mr. Beauregard Clay—had survived, too. I had no way of finding out.
Enough daydreaming. I pulled the bolt out of Bernard’s back with a single brutal yank, something I’d have never done if he’d been a normal person. But hey, he played in the big leagues now. If the tip had missed his heart, he’d survive, blood loss, silver poisoning and all. If it hadn’t, then he would be dead anyway.
I tore off his shirtsleeves and used them to bind the wound, then checked his breathing. As I did this, a lone feral figure dashed out of the dark at us, fangs bared. I reared up in a defensive crouch, then caught a glimpse of gold in the creature’s furry hide.
“It is me,” Eulalie growled, dropping beside her half-brother. A couple weeks ago, they’d been old and frail, at death’s door and too sickly to even visit each other—werewolves lived a long time despite not being immortal. As far as I knew, half-breeds had even less time, only three or four times that of a normal person. Now, they frisked around in bed together and dashed through the swamps and bayous in the middle of the night, surviving mortal wounds. “Is he…?”
“He’ll live,” I said and stood.
No such things as headlights existed yet, but Eulalie’s carriage had a pair of shuttered lamps on its front that cast a feeble flickering beam out across the horses’ sweating flanks into the night. Its harness jingled and its undercarriage creaked and rattled as it approached. Warned by the noise, Eulalie transformed.
Compared to mine, a werewolf’s return to human form was ugly. Really ugly. I knew from dating Kingsley what to expect: she went down on all fours, snarling and grunting like an animal, her skin and muscles in a rictus of agony as they reassumed their normal shape. Even after the change finished, spasms of pain continued to ripple across her face for another minute or two.
“Um, Eulalie—don’t you want to put Bernard’s shirt on?”
She crouched in the grass, naked. To the coachman, the three of us must have looked like refugees from the Playboy mansion after a fire drill. She surprised me by giggling.
“Jacques is old and has seen many things,” she said. “Including me many times when I was younger. I always keep a change of clothing in the trunk; I am certain something will fit you, too.”
Jacques halted the horses when he saw us; I hoisted Bernard onto my back and carried him to the carriage where Eulalie opened the door for me. He groaned and tried to sit up in the forward seat.
“But you are so strong, Samantha,” said Eulalie. “Even in this shape. I will never be so strong as you.”
“Maybe,” I said once the door closed behind us and the coach resumed driving. “But I’m not strong enough to fight the Têtes de Mort on my own. Where were the other two, d’Avezac and de Boré tonight? One or both of them is a traitor.”
“You think so?” Eulalie gasped in shock at the suggestion.
“Do you know of any other people who knew where we were meeting the loups garous tonight? Neither of them showed, and Dominique and his gang knew exactly where to find us.”
“She is right,” gasped Bernard. “It must be… we trusted them with all our secrets…”
“Tell me more about them,” I said, thinking of the young woman who’d just been raped and murdered. “Is either married? Or have children? Has either been accused of molesting young girls?”
“No, no, nothing like that! D’Avezac is a bachelor; he has never married. De Boré is a widower, and he is also a great boor. He lives only for money. He is a cruel master to his slaves, but a fair-minded businessman. He has helped us all financially. D’Avezac is a brilliant scholar and teacher. He likes to translate Sir Walter Scott into the French, loves opera, and music…”
“Music?” I said. “Does he teach music?”
Half-brother and sister looked at each other.
“Yes,” said Bernard, who seemed to be getting stronger. “It is a hobby for him now he is retired from the College of New Orleans. He’s on the board of regents of the Ursuline Academy…”
Bingo, I thought.
The lights of the amusement park came into view, reflecting on the inky waters of the bayou.
“If I can’t fight them, neither can you two,” I said. “The Têtes de Mort know where you live, know that you’re all alone now and have no allies. They’ll be coming after you both next, likely at your homes. Is there anywhere safe you can go?”
The two began to argue in French. Their discussion was loud but brief.
“You are right,” Bernard said. “I apologize. We must hide for a time. Our family still owns a small summer cottage in Mandeville no one knows of. You can find us there when this is over. We have much to thank you for, Samantha Moon; you have already saved our lives twice. It would be foolish to disregard your warning now.”
“But what of you?” Eulalie asked. “You will be in even greater danger now yourself. They know who you are, and they have seen your face.”
I shrugged. I’ve always wanted to say, ‘danger is my middle name’ and this seemed like the perfect time. Only thing, I didn’t exactly feel very brave at that minute. More like the world’s biggest sitting duck.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said when I got out of the carriage at the train station, dressed in Eulalie’s hand-me-downs. I tried to come up with some comforting reason why they shouldn’t be worried, but I had nothing. Though, Lalie would probably be quite pissed at me for losing her riding boots.
Oh well, maybe she wouldn’t need them for the honeymoon. Not like she’d married Russell Brand…
My luck held. The last train out of the Spanish fort back to the city left at midnight. Like everything in New Orleans, it ran ten minutes late, so I made it aboard with seconds to spare. By the time I got home, Lalie had already gone to bed. That should give me enough time to get a replacement pair from a shop downtown. Not everything a vampire uses their powers of mind control is earth-shattering.
The old lady next door told me that weddings in New Orleans were ‘modest affairs.’ She claimed she hadn’t received any wedding gifts, and receptions and honeymoons were unheard of in her day. I guess a lot had changed since then. After I made a shopkeeper forget about a pair of riding boots, Lalie and I spent most of the next day getting bathed and having our makeup put on for it, then having our nails and hair done. Bricky wound up in charge of ha
ir and makeup; she hadn’t allowed us to call in Marie Philome or any of the other local hairdressers to do the job. At the moment, they considered it stylish to wear it long and parted in the middle but to pull most of it back so your ears showed, then curl or braid the strands that fell down your back. This last part took hours. They used a heated curling tong for this, so the room filled with the smell of burning hair. Bricky insisted the bride needed a sort of extension on top and weaves in her curls, but I refused to let her add anything artificial to mine. They looked none too clean, and I didn’t want to pick up head lice.
Besides, the weaves, which consisted of wads of hair gathered from brushings, were called ‘rats.’
“You are so fortunate to have truly natural hair, Sam,” Lalie said. The hysterical weeping fits had passed; now she just looked sort of noble and tragic, like her favorite heroine from the world of the theater, Camille.
“Everybody has natural hair, Lalie,” I said, “yours is gorgeous.” Both of us were brunettes, but while my hair tended to be darker, Pelagie’s had rich glossy highlights of copper and chestnut.
“But yours curls all by itself.”
Next came the dresses. Luckily, the bustle hadn’t been invented yet, but they had no shortage of corsets, so we had to be laced into ours from behind by the maids before they slipped our chemises and petticoats on over our heads, these white and silk, as opposed to the dark grey cotton ones we wore out in the street. For tonight’s reception, Lalie had to look her best as the bride, and I as the matron of honor.
Even after we had mostly dressed, a lengthy delay occurred while Lalie selected and rejected various dancing slippers, cried over them, then grudgingly accepted some. Servants brought tea, and somehow, most of the day slipped away, until the time came for us to be conveyed like Cinderella and her vampy godmother in the colonel’s coach to the St. Charles Hotel ballroom.