The Ghosts of Bourbon Street

by Seanan McGuire

  “Do they teach you Covenant boys how to talk like characters out of old gothic novels, or is that some rare talent that you just happen to possess?” Rose sounded genuinely curious, which was almost the worst part of all. “Because I gotta tell you, kid, if Alice ever turns out to be right about Tommy boy still being among the living, I want to be there for the snooty-off.”

  “I’m trying not to terrify him by dumping too much of the family weird on him at once,” I cautioned.

  “So you take him drinking with me? Verity, honey, we need to have a talk about what ‘normal’ means, and how anything that involves the phrase ‘let’s summon my dead aunt’ doesn’t fall into that category,” said Rose, tugging us off the street and into a narrow alley that looked like it might collapse inward on us at any moment. Doors were open every ten feet or so, and the enticing sounds of jazz and laughter drifted out into the alleyway.

  “Baby steps,” I said. I pointed to a nearby door. “How about that one? I like the window décor.” It was all skulls and decoratively colored glass bottles, and it had the faintly warped sheen that I associated with carnival glass and age.

  Rose followed my finger, and shook her head. “No can do, sweetie. You can’t afford the cover charge.”

  “What?”

  She stopped dead, leaving us with the choice of either stopping with her or yanking our arms out of hers. We chose the more polite option, even though it meant that the three of us were completely blocking the alley. “Close your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Dominic and I exchanged a glance, and then did as we were told. Rose pulled her arms out of ours. The sound of music faded like someone was twisting the knob on a radio, replaced by the distant sound of shouting and traffic.

  “Open them,” said Rose.

  I did.

  The alley was empty. There were no open doors. Half the windows that had been there only a moment before were gone, and the ones that remained were dark. The nearest window—the one that had been filled with strange lights and decorative bottles only a moment before—had been broken and poorly repaired with a sheet of water-stained plywood that covered the damage but did nothing to conceal it, turning the empty pane into a blind and staring eye. Something scurried past, low to the wall, moving with the quick anxiety that I associated with rats and tailypo.

  “What—” I began.

  “How—” Dominic exclaimed.

  Rose shook her head, cramming her hands down into the pockets of her borrowed coat. “You’re walking with the dead. You’re walking with the dead in New Orleans, which is sort of like dipping yourself in steak sauce and strolling through a dog pound. All the animals come quick as a whistle to check you out.”

  “Are you implying that those were…what, ghost bars?” asked Dominic.

  “Nah, big guy, implication is for the living. Wastes too much time for the dead. I’m saying that those were ghost bars. I’m saying that when you walk with the dead, you see the dead; it’s a side effect of standing too close to the boundary. Only since neither of you is even sick, you can’t tell what’s happening when the twilight begins bleeding through. Most healthy people would never see the bars around us.” She gestured to the blank brick walls. “They’d see a shortcut that was sometimes a little chillier than it ought to be, and if they heard a saxophone blowing where there wasn’t supposed to be a jazz band, they’d dismiss it. Illogic is hard. The closer someone is to the dead, the more they’ll see. The really close—mediums, people who are dying, people who have loaned a coat to a hitcher and then stuck with her for some reason—may see the bars as we see them. Might go in. Might even buy a drink, if the hitcher they’re with is vindictive and petty.”

  “Persephone and Hades,” I guessed, winning me a confused look from Dominic.

  Rose nodded. “Persephone and Hades, the Goblin Market, all the old stories about eating food in Faerie—this is where they connect to the modern world. Don’t go drinking with the dead in their own places. Bring them into the places of the living and they can show you great kindness. They can make your world infinitely better. But if you go to their places, if you drink their casket-brewed spirits, you’ll never be seen in the lands of the living again.”

  “You know, Aunt Rose, there are easier ways to say you’d rather go to a fancier place,” I said. The hair on the back of my neck was standing on end, and I was suddenly aware of just how cold and damp the air in the alley was. It felt like we had somehow wandered into winter, in a place where winter didn’t belong.

  “Then let’s go to a fancier place,” she said, pulling her hands out of her pockets and once more linking her arms through ours. She pulled us toward the mouth of the alley and we went willingly. Somewhere in the dark behind us, a lone saxophone played a slow, sad series of notes. Neither Dominic nor I looked back.

  It seemed to be for the best.

  Half an hour later, we were firmly ensconced at Marty’s on Bourbon Street, which was either exactly the kind of bar people went to New Orleans for, even down to the purple gel skulls covering the overhead lights, or was exactly the kind of bar that made the natives of New Orleans curse the tourist trade. (Again, see the purple gel skulls covering the overhead lights.) Despite—or perhaps because of—the terrible décor, Marty’s had some of the best prices on Bourbon, and their selection of rum-based drinks was not to be sneered at.

  I was staring into the sweet depths of my second mai tai when my phone began to ring. I dug it out of my purse, glared at it, and brought it to my ear. In my sweetest reality show voice, I said, “This is an unlisted number. Now hang up before I call the police.”

  “Hello to you, too, Very,” said my brother’s voice. He sounded harried, which was normal, but not panicked, which meant this might actually be a social call. “Where are you?”

  “Alex?” I said, eyes going wide. “Is that you?”

  “In the thankfully un-petrified flesh. Do you have a minute?”

  Anything that involved the phrase “thankfully un-petrified flesh” sounded like something I needed to worry about. I glanced across the table to Dominic and Rose, and pitched my voice a little louder. “Sure! We’re just rolling into New Orleans to check out a party that Rose told us about, but I can always make time for you.” That wasn’t technically true—we were already in New Orleans, and there was no party—but goading my big brother was my holy duty. A party would upset him way more than having drinks in a public place.

  Rose turned away from her attempts to cajole Dominic into ordering another drink, frowning in bemusement. ‘Party?’ she mouthed.

  ‘Later,’ I mouthed back.

  “Rose as in Rose Marshall, the hitchhiking ghost?” asked Alex.

  I nodded vigorously, even though he couldn’t see me. “Uh-huh.”

  “Very…” Now he sounded even more harried. It was good to know that some things never changed.

  Making my voice even perkier, I said, “It’s a dead man’s party. Don’t worry about it. Everybody’s welcome.”

  Rose snorted with amusement, clearly realizing what I was doing.

  There was a long pause before Alex said, “Okay, well, try to keep your soul inside your body, I don’t feel like going wandering around the afterlife trying to put you back together. Is Dominic there?”

  Out of all the things he could have said, that was possibly the one I had expected least. “What?” I asked. “What do you want Dominic for?”

  “I need to ask him a question, okay? Now can you put Dominic on the phone?”

  “What—”

  “The girl I’ve been sort of dating is in the kitchen right now, and she says she’s with the Thirty-Six Society,” said Alex. I froze. There was nothing I could think of to say in answer to that, and quite a few things that weren’t really answers to anything at all. He continued, “Since I don’t have any contacts in the Society right now, I just need to confirm that she’s not Covenant. So please, can you put Dominic on the phone?”r />
  “Oh, um, sure. One sec.” I put my hand over the phone. “Uh, Dominic? My brother wants to talk to you. Are you cool with talking to him?”

  “Your…brother?”

  “Yup. Guess you’re getting more of my family this trip than you were expecting.” I held the phone out toward him, eyebrows raised, and waited for him to take it.

  Dominic hesitated before reaching out and plucking the phone from my hand. He raised it to his ear and said, briskly, “Hello?” A pause. “Yes, Verity told me. What did you need to discuss with me?”

  The second pause was longer. Rose leaned toward me, asking softly, “What’s going on?”

  “Alex banged a girl from the Thirty-Six Society.”

  “Whoa.” Rose whistled, impressed. “An Aussie, huh? They’re supposed to be demons in the sack.”

  “Everything is about sex and booze with you,” I said mildly.

  Rose shrugged. “I play to my strengths.”

  “No, because there are no Australian Covenant agents.” Dominic’s voice brought our attention crashing back to him. “Not unless they’ve managed to recruit an expatriate—and that would be unusual enough that I would have heard about it if it had happened before I quit the Covenant. Since I didn’t hear about it, any Australian recruits would have to have joined quite recently, and would not have completed training, much less been given field assignments. Why?”

  The third pause was shorter. “Well, I can assure you she’s not one of o—one of theirs.” He winced. I leaned over and put my hand on his arm, and he flashed me a strained but grateful smile. “Miss Tanner may not be who she claims, but she is not Covenant.”

  “Only one member of our generation is that stupid,” I said. Dominic’s smile broadened, turning indulgent. That was all I’d really wanted.

  He chuckled into the phone. “If the Covenant knew you were there, you would have more than a lone pseudo-Australian agent to contend with, and if they were going to try something so complicated, they would have sent her to Australia, not to the middle of nowhere.” A pause. “It is only the truth. She cannot be one of the Covenant’s agents. It makes no sense.”

  “Did he just call Ohio the middle of nowhere?” asked Rose.

  “Could’ve been worse,” I said. “Could’ve been Michigan.”

  Dominic was still on the phone. “You’re very welcome. Now, if you will excuse me, a dead woman is trying to convince me to drink something that comes in layers.” He sniffed. “I expect to be carrying your sister back to the motel.”

  That appeared to conclude the conversation. He stayed on the phone just long enough for Alex to say his goodbyes, and then held the phone out to me, saying, “He hung up. It is almost a relief to learn that you come by your phone technique honestly, and not because you have decided to conduct a one-woman vendetta against civility.”

  “Says Batman,” I said, making the phone vanish back into my pocket. “Alex is really good at getting himself into trouble.”

  “Says Catwoman,” said Dominic. I blinked at him. He blinked back. “What? I thought she was Batman’s nemesis. Am I doing this wrong?”

  “No, but when I tell my sister I met a man who makes Batman jokes, she’s going to try to seduce you. Don’t worry about it, Annie’s methods of seduction generally consist of offering to loan you comic books and trying to drop you down pit traps.” A waitress walked over to us. I stopped talking. She began taking drinks off her tray and placing them on the table. I blinked before raising a hand to signal her to stop. “I’m sorry, not our table. We didn’t order anything that green.”

  “Or that served in a souvenir skull mug,” said Rose.

  “They’re from the gentleman at the bar,” said the waitress, sounding tired. She finished unloading her tray. “He sends his complements.” Her mood improved when I tipped her generously. I’d been in her shoes, back when I worked at the Freakshow, and I knew she wasn’t paid enough to put up with this bullshit.

  “Bartender to waitress, waitress to us,” I said, claiming the electric green cocktail with the bits of kiwi floating in it. “Drinks are unlikely to be drugged, and thus must be consumed for the sake of furthering our understanding of the people of New Orleans.”

  “Damn straight,” said Rose, pulling the skull mug toward herself. She lifted it, took a sip, and froze. Literally froze: nothing living can go as still as a dead person who suddenly feels threatened.

  I lowered my green cocktail untasted. “Rose?”

  “The man who sent us these drinks isn’t alive.” Rose pushed her drink away again, turning to scan the bar with narrowed eyes. “Fuck.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Dominic.

  “Because it’s smoking and full of chunks of fruit and at least three different types of hard liquor, based on the color, and it tastes like water,” spat Rose. “Nothing the dead have to give me has any flavor. That’s part of what it means to be a hitcher. If the bartender gives me a drink, that’s one thing, but when a dead man buys it for me? Unless he’s another hitcher in a borrowed coat, or something else that bridges the lands of the living and the dead—PS, this guy isn’t—then I get nothing. I get water.”

  “Should we be worried?” I asked. Mentally, I was reviewing the items I had in my pockets—a little salt, the stub of a candle, a lot of knives. I hadn’t been expecting to go ghostbusting while I was out on the town with my dead aunt, which might have been a tactical error on my part.

  “Dunno,” said Rose, rolling her shoulders in an elaborate shrug. She raised her hand and waved to the man at the bar, signaling for him to approach our table. Dominic and I both stared at her, and she shrugged again, seemingly unconcerned. “What? The fastest way to find out if someone’s messing with you is to ask him.”

  “Aunt Rose, I know you’ve been dead for a long time, so maybe you’ve forgotten what it’s like to worry that someone is going to murder you for funsies? But we’re the living.” I pointed between Dominic and myself. “Living people worry about whether the dead guy in the bar is trying to get them drunk so he can wear their skins like an ill-fitting leisure suit.”

  Dominic snorted.

  I turned to frown at him. “What? You don’t agree with me on the ‘let’s be faintly concerned about the dead guy buying us drinks’ issue?”

  “Verity, I love you, but the day that I become concerned someone is going to wear your skin like, ah, ‘an ill-fitting leisure suit’ will be the day I become convinced that you have been secretly replaced by some sort of doppelganger,” he said. “You carry more knives than many high end cutlery stores. No one is going to skin you without your permission.”

  “This is all very charming, in a disturbing sort of way, but zip it,” said Rose. “Dead boy is on his way over.”

  I zipped, and we all turned to watch our deceased benefactor’s approach.

  Like Rose, he looked young. Unlike Rose, he looked like he’d died after he was legally allowed to enter places like this one—early to mid-twenties maybe, no older, but definitely no longer a teenager. His skin was dark enough to make his teeth seem very white, and his hair was cut close to his scalp, a style which didn’t tell me much about his date of death. He could have died any time in the last hundred years with that hair. His clothing was up-to-date, combining tight denim jeans with a button-up blue striped shirt, but again, that didn’t have to mean anything. A lot of ghosts, like Rose, have the ability to change their clothing to look like anything their hearts desire. She had a tendency to revert to what she’d been wearing when she died if she was startled or hurt in any way—and yes, it’s possible to hurt the dead—but otherwise, her wardrobe was limited only by her imagination, and her imagination was surprisingly flexible.

  He was tall and slim and handsome enough that I would have given him a second look if I hadn’t known that he was dead. He stopped a few feet away from our table, close enough to talk while still giving us our space. I respected that even as I continued to study him intently, looking for any sign of his ghostly nat
ure. There are a lot of different types of dead people. Some are essentially harmless, again, like Rose. Others…

  There’s a reason that ghost hunters disappear sometimes. Not the ones who get the television deals. The real ones, the ones who work quietly and publish books through academic presses or small “kook” houses, the ones who go into places where no one smart dares to go. The problem with believing in ghosts is that sometimes the ghosts decide to believe in you, too, and sometimes those ghosts get lonely, and decide to start keeping pets.

  “Howdy,” said Rose. “Thanks for the drinks.”

  “Hello,” he said. His voice was rich and deep, with the distinct roll of a Louisiana accent. He was probably a native then, given how young he’d apparently been when he died. “I hope you don’t think I’m being forward. I just wanted to offer you a welcome to our fair city, and hoped that some fine beverages might earn me the right to ask you a question.”

  “Ask away,” said Rose, holding up her original drink—the one that had been bought by Dominic, and thus had actual flavor to it.

  To my surprise—and Rose’s, judging by the way her eyes widened—the man turned to Dominic, cleared his throat, and said, “Good evening. My name is Jermaine Favre. I understand that this may be an awkward question, given the company you are currently keeping, but…are you a member of the de Luca family?”

  Dominic went very, very still. Carefully, he put his glass aside, and asked, “Favre? To what are you sworn, sir?”

  “That’s a difficult question to answer, given my current circumstances,” said Jermaine. He spoke slowly, obviously choosing his words with care. “There was a time when I was sworn to the sword and the secret, and to the covenant made between mankind and our Father. I am afraid that my faith has wavered since then, due to certain unavoidable changes in my perspective.”

  I frowned, suddenly realizing what was striking me as strange about the whole conversation. Jermaine had spoken to Rose, and was speaking to Dominic, but he hadn’t acknowledged me at all. I leaned forward, and saw him stiffen slightly, his body shifting to be just a little further away from me. Interesting.