Well, of course! That explained why Niko had felt at home with some of the club-goers inside the Underground. Heidi had suspected that she hadn’t stumbled across the only undead guy in New Orleans being resurrected on Halloween night. That also explained the musty, almost putrid smell that hung heavy in the room, and she definitely saw more than one pair of fangs in the crowd. The room smelled like a combination of her grandmother’s closet and a swamp, but it wasn’t repellant to Heidi.
A server interrupted to take their drink orders, and Heidi grabbed Niko’s hand. “See, Niko? At least two more undead, just like you and Sabine. Will you please have a drink of alcohol now? I think the danger is past.”
Niko relaxed enough to accept Heidi’s order for himself—appropriately, a Zombie.
“That’s a good choice,” said Faina, approving of Heidi’s selection. “Zombies are also known as Skull Punchers.”
Behind her, Niko lamented. “Oh, Mon Dieu.”
“It’s no big deal,” said Erin. “We ordered blood.”
“See?” said Heidi. “No big deal.” Although she did wonder whether her red wine would really be from California.
Faina explained that her two men had sought help from a fallen angel. They were actually originally from the 1920s, from Russia. “So, in their human form as demons, I became very close to Konstantin and Alexei.”
“We get it,” said Dani. “We each have stories like that as well from this past week.”
Faina seemed relieved. “Oh good! So you all remember the visit I told you about from what I thought was a demon when I was twelve? It turns out it was a being called a Lidérc, and he marked me. But he never returned, so when Konstantin and Alexei made love to me, the mark transferred to them. By having sex with me, they took the Lidérc’s mark and transferred it to them. It marked me as belonging to them, and that voided Sargatanas’s hold on them. Yesterday, they defeated him and Vassago, a former fallen angel who was working for Sargatanas, and now they’re human again.”
Heidi was vastly relieved to hear her friend relate a story that was equally as strange as hers. She had been struggling for days over what to tell her buddies, but that burden was diminished by what Faina was telling them.
Now Faina said, “I’m staying here with them. I’m moving to New Orleans permanently.”
The women hugged and high-fived, and then everyone looked to Heidi to describe as best she could the events of the past week. Heidi found that it really helped, being forced to synopsize her week like this. “It’s like this. I ran across strange doings at the cemetery, too, only I accidentally wandered into St. Louis Number Two, where Rémy here was performing some ceremony over the grave of his ancestor’s associate, Dominique You. Niko was just waiting for the chance to be rejuvenated. His grave had been disturbed by Hurricane Katrina.”
Heidi found, as she described the emergence of Baal-Berith riding the snake-horse, his prophecy about the pentalpha, and what might be their misunderstanding about the need to have sex at every intersection of the star, that it didn’t sound all that odd anymore.
Rémy and Niko busted into her narrative to correct a few misstatements. “Marvin wore a white plastic belt,” said Rémy, and Niko reminded her that they had at first thought Marvin’s Corvette would be a ship in the harbor. Her eyes even misted over at memories of the bobble-headed redeemer. She sipped her wine—which really was a cabernet, luckily—and said nostalgically, “Marvin pretended the Gallo was ‘the sacred boon of the thirsty traveler,’ when really, he just wanted to drink some wine.”
“He sounds like quite a character,” Shayla said fondly.
“Oh, he was.”
Shayla frowned. “‘Was’?”
So Heidi had to carry on, and tell the entire story about the cornerstone, the wineskin, and Marvin’s beheading. She realized, as she talked, that what Niko had said was poignantly true. The Cubans were right. Nothing bad happens without something good coming of it.
A week ago, she had been a timid, petrified wreck, afraid her friends would discover her secret, that a loser like Raoul had actually dumped her. And while the events of the past week might at times have seemed like a cosmic test from the Devil himself, everything had happened for a reason.
She was forever entwined with Rémy and Niko. Her life was so much better for it.
Heidi couldn’t wait to hear her friends’ stories. Now she would believe every word because of what she knew was possible. Rémy and Niko had opened her eyes to unimaginable possibilities.
She was a whole new person now.
THE END
WWW.KARENMERCURY.COM
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen’s lives near Napa, California where she shoots archery, collects minerals, plays with her not-so-little Newfoundland pup, and writes smexy romance novels.
For all titles by Karen Mercury, please visit
www.bookstrand.com/karen-mercury
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Redemption Song [Midnight, New Orleans Style 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 17