I flexed stiff fingers that still held a touch of my yellowish stone color, though that faded as though his touch had called my true nature back inside myself.
“More of your swamp witch magic?” I frowned. I had few recollections of that final night apart from fire and evil, though I recalled losing many—including the bayou wolves and the witch who helped us, ifhelpwas the right word.
Sebastian huffed a laugh as the carriage—limousine—rolled forward, humming beneath us. “Science. Time is a wondrous thing, my friend. You will come to see its boons, I am sure. It’s good to have you with me once again. I have missed talking to you.”
“You’re welcome.” A fanatical gleam I recognized entered Sebastian’s eye. “I’m glad you’re with me for this trip.”
I wondered how many I had missed in the last years, how long he had been alone. How he had changed in that time. Myself, also.
“You said it was moving day?” I leaned back and stretched my legs, wiggling my bare toes.
Sebastian smirked. “We need to clothe you with something more appropriate than that, my friend. You stink of…”
That night.
“...smoke,” he finished.
Not that I cared to cast my mind back, only forward for this moment. Reflection could come later. “Where are we headed?”
“New Orleans. There has been a spate of fires I want to investigate. Fires that keep happening.”
A laugh that I transformed into a snort left me. “What’s so special about that?” Perhaps my friend had gone mad in his dotage. Hell, I could even join him.
“The fires won’t go out, and they burn hotter than all the circles of hell. Maybe a man with your talents could help,” he mused.
I tipped my head to one side. “That is a fascination," I acknowledged. “But I have no interest in fighting monster kind with you, vampire.”
“Perhaps.” Sebastian turned away from me, staring out the darkened window, but not before the flicker of a faint smile curled his aristocratic lips. “We shall see.”
“Or I can walk home,” I snarked, beyond frustrated at being woken only to find my best friend recovered and playing policeman while I still ached inside, and worse, that he had expected my heartbreak.
“And scare the locals? The house is sold, Dolion. We live in the French Quarter now. Come with me, Dolion. Something impossible is hiding in the crypts. Something hurting.” He leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees.
“Something like you and me.”
CHAPTER TWO
DOLION
The cramped inside of the speakeasy was made up to look like it had been around for two hundred years even though the building had only existed for twenty. Sebastian updated my vocabulary along with my wardrobe once we arrived in New Orleans and our spacious accommodations that he had organized below street level to knock out all light from his sleeping arrangements. He’d currently dressed me in pale pants that hung loose from my thighs as though my musculature had disappeared sometime in the passing centuries, though I knew it hadn’t. No, the vampire had simply…over clothed me.
A lawn shirt of some description draped across my shoulders but clung to my skin in sticky air. The one thing that hadn’t changed during my deep sleep. The air here was like breathing pure water, even away from the edge of the bayou. But even I recognized the simple pleasure of a shirt that didn’t itch my skin, a craft that was worth the price tag I was certain Sebastian paid for each of the garments.
The depths of my friend’s pockets, it seemed, hadn’t changed in three hundred years.
New Orleans, however, had.
What I recalled as a fledgling pile of goop barely out of its primordial sludge era was a full thriving city complete with enough subculture to put the biggest cities in Europe to shame. Colorful streets displayed a mishmash of culture on the outside warring for dominance while on the inside the people Sebastian introduced me to in short order were clearly defined in their own rights, well immersed in their beliefs and ways.
The city thrived despite the damage that etched its shadow beneath the stunning street front facades. The tiny whisky bar that we sat in was no stranger to this horror. Apparently, a hurricane had ripped the previous structure from its foundations and the town had rebuilt as best it could. Despite its shortcomings, the building and its overcrowded patronage of a certain caliber held a certain charm.
I perched on my bar stool next to Sebastian where he chatted with a witch disguised as a barwench—forgive me, bartender—and tried to make sense of the new world and my place in it.
Or outside it.
The four walls of the speakeasy, already imbued with enough splattered alcohol and other bodily fluids that no wooden tavern should ever have acquired in the space of a mere two decades, shrank with every sip I took of my strange, pale ale. I studied the dregs that clung to the bottom of my fast warming glass as though I could read my future in them.
“You are not wearing yourgris gris,” the swamp witch/bar wench hissed, slamming another beer on the bar top before she pushed it along to her next customer. “Be more careful, Sebastian,” she warned out of the corner of her mouth before her attention switched in the opposite direction. “You pay me now.” She held out her hand to the man with a more imperious nature than she used on my far from favorite vampire of the moment.
