Belle Chasse

by Suzanne Johnson

  Team Lafitte was a good name. Or maybe, since the people who lived in the small town named Jean Lafitte, Louisiana, sometimes referred to themselves as Lafitians, that would work. Hi, my name is DJ, and I’m a Lafitian.

  Yeah, it had a ring to it. Kind of like Martian, only more bizarre.

  When Jean returned from checking on the transport, I was ready for him. “What were you saying about a coup d’état? What’s happened?”

  Jean poured himself a brandy and handed me my own poison of choice, Diet Coke in a plastic bottle. Rene had brought me a case, and I didn’t let a little thing like a lack of refrigeration bother me. Room-temperature soda held its fizz longer.

  If the conversation went badly, Rene also had brought in a monster-size bottle of Four Roses, Jake’s favorite bourbon.

  My pirate sprawled on the settee, so I claimed his throne. I understood its attraction; the dark buttery leather surrounded me in pillows of comfort. It must have cost a fortune by early nineteenth-century standards, and the room now had the pleasant scent of leather along with cinnamon and polished wood. It was hard to relax, however, until I knew which revolution had begun.

  “Christof arrived with news of a most disturbing nature.” Jean’s emotional aura read like a road map—going in every direction. “Sabine is dead, and Florian has taken control of the Royal Tower and holds it by force. Christof suspects his brother of killing their aunt, but has been unable to get into the tower to find proof.”

  Good grief. Faery had gone into a meltdown.

  “Just because Florian’s moved into the tower doesn’t make him king, does it?” Surely possession wasn’t nine-tenths of a monarchy. The idea of Faery being under the control of that fireball-tossing freakadoodle made my skin crawl. Never mind that he hated me. Worse, he hated his brother, who somehow had ended up an ally of the Lafitians.

  “What is Christof doing about it? He should have canceled taking Eugenie to that funeral.” It was an awful thing to say, but Eugenie couldn’t help Violette by going to her funeral and Christof could help a lot of people—including his allies in this house—if he wrested control of Faery from his brother. The less time Florian had to get entrenched, the easier it would be to oust him from the tower.

  “Christof is quite fond of Eugenie and insisted that he keep his promise to help her, although both Rene and I urged him to do otherwise.” Jean shrugged. “However, it might be a safer place for him at present. Florian has his own followers and they are torturing and murdering Christof’s allies, including their sister Tamara. When Christof left Barataria last evening to see to his affairs at the Winter Palace, he found his home in ruins and his sister dead.”

  Holy crap. She’d been Florian’s sister, too, although she’d clearly chosen sides. All the more reason Christof didn’t need to be sitting in a Catholic church in Shreveport, Louisiana. “What is he going to do?”

  Jean shook his head. “There will be civil war in Faery, I fear, and the concern is that the whole of the nonhuman world will be drawn into it because of another action that Florian has taken. Christof must gather his troops and take control, of course, but this other matter is one we must answer first.”

  What was this we business? We had no part to play in the politics of Faery. I hated to ask. “What else has Florian done and how does it involve us?”

  “Christof sensed elven magic near the ruins of his palace.”

  A chill ran across my shoulder blades and I choked on my hot soda. Between hacking coughs, I managed a strangled question. “He thinks the elves are already backing Florian?”

  Jean stared at me a moment before answering, and I didn’t like the cold look that had settled on his face. It was an expression I could only imagine had preceded some act of extreme violence back in his human life.

  “I do not know if the elves are aligned with Florian or if he has managed to hire at least one elf to help him,” Jean said. “It is likely the latter. But of greater concern is the story Florian intends to take to the next Interspecies Council meeting, if the rumors Christof hears are true.”

  I had a very bad feeling about this. Jean’s aura of scattered emotions had coalesced into one: anger. Deep, deep fury. “What story would that be?”

  “Florian claims to have an eyewitness who will testify that the destruction of the Winter Palace was caused by Christof himself. They will present it as his means of gaining sympathy to his cause,” Jean said slowly.

  Heart pounding, I held my breath. I had a dawning horror of what was coming. “What else?”

  “His witness will swear an oath that the person assisting Christof with elven magic, which is illegal to use in Faery, was you, Jolie.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Holy crap. At the rate charges and accusations were piling up against me, I’d have to sleep the rest of my life—probably a short life—with one eye open, no matter where I lived. Forget about going home; I’d never again see sunlight reflecting off the spire of St. Louis Cathedral.

  “Who is the so-called eyewitness?” I asked Jean, pouring my soda into a heavy glass and adding a generous splash of bourbon. After a moment, I added a second splash. Being framed by faeries earned one an extra dose of bourbon.

  “This person’s name is not one with which I am familiar—Orloff,” Jean said. “One of Florian’s associates, perhaps. It matters not. By naming you, the Summer Prince accomplishes much.”

  However I’d like to think otherwise, I wasn’t that important, so I didn’t see the benefit. I was no longer even gainfully employed. “What does he accomplish, other than probably getting me killed?” Maybe that was enough for him.

  Jean set his drink on a side table and leaned forward. “He rids himself of someone Christof considers an ally and ensures your Elders will not grant you pardon. Perhaps he frightens away some who might otherwise support his brother. Also, by formally aligning you with Christof, he weakens his brother’s standing with the wizards who wish to arrest you. They are more likely to support Florian in his bid for the monarchy if you are his enemy.”

  Maybe I needed a third splash of bourbon. Apparently, being associated with me was political suicide. Thank God Jean thrived on political chaos.

  “Still, Florian got someone to do elven magic in Faery.” I tried to work it out in my head, no easy task. Prete politics these days were too tangled. “We know I didn’t do it, so do you think he is working out a deal with the elves?”

  In which case, the wizards were about to get a big, ugly surprise. I had to talk to Rand to see what was going on.

  The elves and the fae, or at least Florian and his followers, banding together against the wizards? It was the Elders’ worst-case scenario. The wishy-washy vamps, of course, would go with the majority. Maybe the Elders had betrayed me, or saw me as a renegade who’d betrayed them, but I didn’t want to see my people crushed beneath a preternatural freight train.

  “Perhaps they are aligning themselves, although Florian also might simply have hired someone among the elves to do the magic in order to cast blame on you.” Jean lit his pipe, infusing the room with the deep, rich scent of tobacco. It sent a sudden pang of loss through me. Gerry had smoked a pipe, and many of my deepest childhood memories were infused with that sweet scent. I missed him, and wished he were here to rant and rave about what arrogant gits the Elders were, as he always used to do.

  This time, I wouldn’t defend the Elders or dismiss Gerry’s opinions as I so often had. I hated the way my father had died, in a position of weakness. He had placed his trust in a preternatural world that wasn’t trustworthy because of a wizarding world that also wasn’t trustworthy. I understood that now.

  Everyone kept telling me I was Gerry’s daughter, so was I doing the same thing? I studied Jean Lafitte, the undead scoundrel in whom I’d placed my trust, while he, in turn, studied my scrying setup. No, it was different. I trusted Jean because he’d earned it, time and again, being loyal to me if not to the wizards as a group. Sure, he always had an agenda, but didn’t everyone?
He was just smarter than most.

  And unlike Gerry, I wasn’t trying to overthrow the whole prete world and bring about radical change. I just wanted to survive. To get my life back. To have a home. To be with Alex again.

  I wanted peace.

  The likelihood of any of those pipe dreams coming true had just taken another nosedive.

  “What are these items, Jolie? You asked Rene to obtain them for you?” Jean held a cone of patchouli incense to his nose, wrinkled it as if he’d gotten a whiff of two-month-old rotten tilapia, and then sneezed. “Mon Dieu, what is this foul substance?”

  I shoved Florian’s frame job to the back of my mind for now. If I could track down Alex later, he might be able to tell me more—but only if we could safely get Eugenie back from Violette’s funeral. That had to come first. Then Alex. Then setting up something with Zrakovi. Rand, I’d see when he came to visit Eugenie.

  “This foul substance”—I picked up four cones of patchouli from the oversize plastic bag filled with them—“is incense. It’s part of an elven ritual I’m going to try so that we can watch what’s going on at the funeral.”

  I looked around the room. Outside one of the big front windows, tall enough for even Jean to step through onto the front porch, I spotted the full moon, shimmering a soft golden yellow in the indigo night. It was half past two in the afternoon across the border in New Orleans, but here, the full moon floated high in the sky.

  “Is there a table outside I could use?” I asked Jean. “If I could do this by moonlight, I think it would work better.”

  “Perhaps the small table on the verandah might meet your needs. I will place it on the banquette.” Jean hefted the big glass mixing bowl and proved how well I knew my pirate by walking through the open window. I picked up Charlie and the incense, following Jean through the window and onto the porch. The gulf breeze was cool and dry with a fresh, salty tang, and it rustled the leaves of the banana trees that grew around the porch, sounding like the feet of ghost children playing in the dense foliage.

  Jean moved the round, waist-high table to the wooden planks that stretched from the bottom of the steps out to the beach, an old-fashioned banquette or sidewalk. In the modern world, this area was underwater thanks to erosion and rising seas, its view of the Gulf dotted with oil rigs.

  Yet in Old Barataria, frozen in the early nineteenth century by Jean’s own memories, the barrier island of Grand Terre rose from the sea big and solid, with a ridge of live oaks marching across the center and a strip of sandy beach stretching across the Gulf side. North of the long horizontal island lay deep, sheltered Barataria Bay. North of that on the mainland, in the modern world, lay the small town of Jean Lafitte, Louisiana, where the modern Lafitians lived.

  “Mind if I join you?” A male voice with the accent of an educated Englishman sounded from the dark edge of the porch, and my heart stuttered for a moment. I’d been thinking of Gerry, who’d never lost his English accent even after thirty years in New Orleans. After that first jolt and a flash of sorrow, I recognized the dulcet tones of Adrian Hoffman.

  I pitied Adrian despite all the awful things he’d said and done to me in the past. No matter that his weakness and indecision had almost gotten both Alex and me killed.

  He’d be horrified by my pity, but all he’d done wrong, other than being an arrogant jerk like his father, was to fall in love with Terri Ford, vampire assistant of Regent Etienne Boulard. He’d paid for it dearly. No job. A horrific betrayal by his own father, who he then saw murdered a few feet away from him. Abandonment by the fellow wizards for whom he’d worked his whole career.

  Sounded a little like me minus the red-haired vampire lover. If I wanted to host another pity party, misery would have company.

  I waved him over. “Join us. I’m going to watch what’s happening at the funeral, or at least try.”

  He picked up the heavy bowl, which Jean had abandoned on the porch when he moved the table, and brought it down the steps. “How often must I tell you that scrying is an illegal activity and that…”

  I raised an eyebrow and he stopped himself, then we both laughed. “Add it to my litany of crimes,” I said. “It’s getting to be a pretty long list.”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong.” The vehemence in his voice surprised me. Adrian rarely had a kind word for me and, to be fair, it went both ways.

  “We’ve both been betrayed,” I reminded him, and looked away from the raw, bleak misery that settled on his face. Gerry might have died from his own bad decisions, but he hadn’t deliberately sold me out like Adrian’s father had done to his only child.

  “Oui,” Jean said, his voice so soft that the sound of the waves almost overwhelmed it. “There has been much betrayal for all of us.”

  There was nothing else to add; we all were feeling a bit maudlin. I set about measuring the holy water and pouring part of it into the bowl. At each of the four points around the bowl, I set a cone of incense along with an item I’d cadged from Eugenie’s room: a pair of earrings and a bracelet she’d been wearing the night we fled New Orleans, one of a stack of romance novels Rene had brought her on his first haul, and a nail file I’d found on the dresser.

  Despite the flicker of flambeaux along the sides of the banquette, the moon provided the brightest illumination here, and its soft glow reflected on the holy water.

  I glanced at my new wristwatch, which I’d set to Central Standard Time. The mass had been scheduled in a small church just outside Shreveport, followed by a family-only graveside service. If anyone were going to make a move against Eugenie, the most likely spot would be the cemetery—out in the open. Plenty of tombs to hide behind. Plenty of spots to set up a transport.

  I used a match from my portable magic kit, fed a shot of energy from Charlie into the blend of herbs and holy water, closed my eyes, and focused my thoughts on Eugenie.

  “Mon Dieu.” Jean’s exclamation, which came a few seconds later, was tinged with alarm. Good, that meant it had worked.

  “There they are. You’re quite good at this.” Adrian had seen my scrying abilities before; as I recalled, he had been as alarmed as Jean the first time.

  “I’m not this good.” The image on the surface of the water was as clear as a high-definition TV screen—and there was sound, which I’d never gotten doing this at home. “It must be the combination of moonlight, being in the Beyond, and fueling the ritual with the staff.”

  Eugenie sat on a wooden pew with her head down, looking at her hands. She was twisting a gold ring with some type of emerald-cut gemstone around her left ring finger, almost obsessively. I changed the angle of the elven staff to get closer. I’d never seen that ring before; it must have been Violette’s. If Christof’s feelings had progressed to giving her jewelry, I didn’t want to know about it.

  The clarity of the moon-illuminated image showed us every dark shadow under my friend’s eyes, the tear-swollen skin purplish and puffy. I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. I’d been an only child, and Eugenie was the closest I had to a sister. I’d always envied her relationship with Violette a little; they didn’t have much in common in terms of interests or lifestyle, but their family love remained deep.

  My only family bonds were with that insufferable elf Rand, an uncle, Lennox, whom I’d met once, a cousin, Audrey, on whom I’d never laid eyes, and my grandmother in Alabama, who still clung to the hope I’d give up wizardry and come home to marry a human and spawn babies.

  “You possess skill of which I was quite unaware, Jolie.” I looked up to find Jean looking not at the image of Eugenie, but at me. He wore the thoughtful, assessing expression that usually meant he was considering how a situation or person might be used to his advantage.

  That blasted pirate would try to talk me into scrying every hour I was awake, spying on his enemies, who apparently were also now my enemies. The worst part of that realization was that I wish I’d thought of it four days ago.

  “Yeah, I’m just full of surprises.” Jean could schem
e and plot all he wanted. For now, I had to focus on my friend. Make that friends, plural, I guess. Christof was an ally, whether I wanted him or not. I didn’t know what he could do or who he was inside his variety of faux exteriors, so he hadn’t reached friend status. He sat on Eugenie’s left, elegant in his black suit, his demeanor appropriately somber. For me, he had dark hair, and I itched to ask Jean if Christof looked blond to him. I wasn’t sure I wanted the pirate to know about that skill yet, however, because I didn’t yet want Jean’s new BFF to know.

  “Who is the gentleman sitting to the right of Mademoiselle Eugenie?” Jean had finally stopped plotting and leaned over the bowl to see better. I recognized Matt from photos I’d seen at Eugenie’s house. “It’s Violette’s husband.” I didn’t see the twins, or anyone who might be Matt’s parents. They must have been keeping the girls away from the funeral, which was good. If a preternatural catastrophe sent the whole funeral service into the twilight zone, children could make convenient pawns. This family had suffered too much already.

  Christof leaned toward Eugenie and said something I couldn’t hear, then put his arm around her shoulders and settled her closer to him. I didn’t like that move one bit. “Jean, you need to have a talk with Christof. As much as I appreciate him taking Eugenie to the funeral, especially given his political problems at home, he doesn’t need to form any kind of relationship with her. She doesn’t have the political skills to handle it, and with Rand on the warpath…” I shrugged.

  No need to tell the pirate anything more; he was already nodding. “In this matter, I must agree, Drusilla. I will speak to Christof when they return.”

  I was relieved that he agreed, but shouldn’t be surprised. For an intelligent man with the heart of a dreamer, Jean Lafitte also could be extremely practical, especially where politics or money were concerned.

  He watched them a moment longer. “In normal times, I would not begrudge my friend an attachment to such a lovely woman as Mademoiselle Eugenie, but her child’s paternity raises difficulties.”