The Ghosts of Bourbon Street

by Seanan McGuire

  “Are you going to introduce me to your friend, Dominic?” I practically purred, leaning closer still.

  Jermaine shot an alarmed glance first at Dominic, and then at Rose. Also interesting. Finding no assistance in either quarter, he finally, reluctantly, looked at me, and said, “I apologize for my rudeness, ma’am, but I wasn’t sure you would want to have any part in this conversation.”

  I blinked at him. “Uh, what? You bought us all drinks. You came to our table. Why wouldn’t I want to be included?”

  Jermaine looked at Dominic pleadingly. Dominic sighed.

  “The last known member of the Favre family died in the late 1800s,” he said. “Previous to that, they had sent some of their members to the United States to attempt to assist in establishing the Covenant presence here. That would have been long before your grandparents met, and quite probably long before your family’s initial migration. I would have to see the records to be sure, and we both know how very unlikely that is, under the circumstances.”

  “Oh—oh!” I said, realization dawning. I offered Jermaine what I hoped was a non-threatening smile. I wasn’t as practiced with “non-threatening” when the very shape of my face made me look like a danger. The Healys had never been forgiving of deviation from the norm, which meant that Jermaine’s…posthumous condition could have been taken as a good reason to host an exorcism by one of my ancestors. Dominic’s ancestors had apparently been more tolerant. That was a change. “Yes, I’m a Healy. Or well, I’m a Price, because there was a marriage a few generations back and it turns out ‘cute little blonde’ is mostly dominant over ‘tall, brooding, cheekbones that can cut glass.’ But we’re not with the Covenant anymore, and even if the rest of the family was, I wouldn’t be, because Aunt Rose would smack me stupid.”

  “She’s right,” said Rose. “I would.”

  Jermaine looked confused, and then relieved. “So you do know the nature of the woman you’re drinking with,” he said. “I was…unsure.”

  Rose raised her eyebrows. “Hey. I’ve been drinking in New Orleans since the seventies—it took me a while to get here.” The explanation was directed at me and Dominic. Dominic looked nonplussed. He would eventually come to realize that Aunt Rose would go anywhere for a beer. “I hadn’t been a drinker yet when I died, and there’s an adjustment period for new road ghosts. We don’t tend to go too far from home for the first decade or so, while we figure out what we can do.” Her attention swiveled back to Jermaine. “So given that you almost certainly know who I am, you wanna stop with all the vagueness and ‘I was clearly a Covenant member when I died, but I got better as soon as I became the sort of thing I used to destroy,’ and tell us what you need?”

  “Leave it to the Angel of the Overpass to cut straight to the heart of things,” said Jermaine. He smiled broadly for the first time since he’d approached us. The smile made him even more attractive, which wasn’t a thought I needed to have when I was sitting next to my boyfriend. I leaned over and slid my arm through Dominic’s. He gave me an amused look. Jermaine reached out and touched the back of our table’s remaining chair. “May I sit?”

  “If you’re solid enough to plop your butt, then plop it,” said Rose, shifting the chair toward him with her foot.

  “Many thanks.” Jermaine pulled the chair the rest of the way out and slipped into it. “I must say, I was a little bemused when the Angel of the Overpass walked into my bar with a de Luca and a Healy in tow. I thought the end times were finally upon us.”

  “No,” said Dominic gravely. “Merely a slow but growing movement toward sense.”

  “He means he defected,” I said. “I didn’t defect. I was born defective.” Dominic snorted.

  “And I died ignorant of all this bullcrap, which would have been an awesome way to continue my afterlife,” said Rose. “You people are why we can’t have nice things.”

  “I was misguided in life,” admitted Jermaine. “I’m glad to see that some among us can come to that conclusion without needing to die first.”

  “Are you about to ask us to solve your murder?” I asked.

  Jermaine and Rose exchanged a startled glance. Then, to my surprise and mild annoyance, they started laughing like that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Rose slid down in her seat until her nose was nearly level with the table, while Jermaine propped his forehead on his hand. The sound of their laughter was nearly drowned out by the ruckus in the rest of the bar, but the people at the nearby tables still glanced our way, presumably looking for a joke they could be in on.

  I blinked. “What the hell’s so funny?”

  “I have no idea,” said Dominic. “Might I remind you that drinking with the dead was your idea? I would have been perfectly happy watching television in the motel while the mice composed heroic eddas about the sights they had seen since our last stop.”

  “I did like the wording on the Holy Ritual of Look It’s Another Goddamn Cattle Ranch,” I admitted, before kicking Rose under the table. “Hey! Want to tell the living why the dead are laughing at us?”

  “Oh, man, Verity, you are so alive,” gasped Rose, pushing herself back up into her seat. “Most dead people who know that we’re dead don’t need anyone to solve our murders. ‘How did I die?’ is one of the first big questions on every ghost’s mind, and we have a lot of time on our hands. Plus asking the living to solve your murder is sort of, well. Tacky?” She glanced to Jermaine to confirm her word choice.

  He nodded. “It is the height of poor taste to ask a living person to involve themselves so intimately in the affairs of the dead.”

  “I thought murdered people wanted justice,” I said.

  “Haunting is a form of justice,” said Rose. “Plus, when you know who murdered you, you can spend decades getting ready for them to kick the bucket and come into slapping range. It’s like waiting for Christmas. You always know there’s going to be a delicious gift box of throat punching on the other end.”

  “I am really glad I never had Christmas at your house,” I said. “Okay, sorry I assumed you’d want us to investigate your murder, Jermaine.”

  “No harm done,” he said. “My killer was a very sweet young girl who just wanted my money. I wouldn’t have given it to her. I was a living man, I still thought of myself as virile, even if I wasn’t young anymore, and I had uses for what I had. But she kissed me after she poisoned me, and she said she was sorry, and she cried hardest of all at my funeral. I couldn’t stay mad at my own granddaughter. She sings Sundays at a bar down on Deadman’s Alley. Sweetest nightingale you ever heard. We’ve made our peace.”

  “Granddaughter?” said Dominic.

  Jermaine grinned again. The flesh of his face seemed to flicker, and for just a moment an old man was sitting at our table and smiling at us. What hair he had was snowy white, and his clothing drooped around his skeletal frame. Then he flickered again, and he was young and handsome and straight-backed. “I’m older than I look,” he said.

  “We’re all older than we look, but some of us died while we were young and pretty,” said Rose. “What do you want, Jermaine?”

  He took a deep breath, which would have seemed odd to me, except for the part where lungs need to be inflated before they can push air across vocal cords. As long as he was wearing a flesh and blood body—or the simulacrum of one—he would have to play by flesh and blood rules. “You know the ghost krewes?”

  Rose suddenly stiffened. “Keep talking,” she said.

  He did.

  The krewes of New Orleans were a sacred tradition: people who formed loose social clubs—or sometimes tight occult societies—with the sole stated duty of putting together floats for Mardi Gras. Their work wasn’t the candy-ass sort of thing you’d see in a high school Homecoming parade. No, they organized huge, elaborate rolling castles, hiring teams of dancers, drum lines, and everything else it took to transform an ordinary night into an incredible spectacle. They’d always been there, and they always would be, because without them, Mardi Gras might
as well have been the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (which had its own power, although that power was more corporate, and less chaos). Bearing all that in mind, why would the people who ran and lived for those krewes want to do anything else after they died?

  The ghost krewes, according to Jermaine, were associations of dead men and women who believed that the annual Carnival festivities helped to keep New Orleans standing, redrawing mystical lines across the fabric of the city. “We figure we may even be more use than the living,” he said. “We don’t have budgets to pay or permits to file. We just work all year to make the best float we can and then we roll it through the ghostroads, and the world keeps on turning.”

  “Everybody needs a hobby,” said Rose.

  Jermaine’s expression soured. “Seems not everybody thinks so. Someone’s been breaking into our places lately, smashing our floats before we can finish them. If this keeps on, we’re not going to make it to Mardi Gras. It would be the first year the ghost krewes had missed since Carnival began. Even when the living can’t roll out, we do, on Mardi Gras day. It’s part of what makes this city what it is. Our wheels wear down the walls between worlds.”

  “Isn’t Mardi Gras in like, February?” I asked.

  “How can anyone smash a dead man’s float?” asked Dominic. “How does it have substance?”

  “We work with the ghosts of things that were loved,” said Jermaine. “Or hated—same difference, and sometimes you need a little hatred to keep things spicy. We gather them from the city, and we take them to the ghostroads where we can do our work. Anything can be broken, if you know what you’re doing, and where to aim your blows.”

  “Let’s not get too metaphysical here,” said Rose, with a warning glance at me and Dominic. She had always been like that, trying to keep us from learning too much about the lands of the dead while we were still among the living. My Aunt Mary was even worse. She was a different type of ghost than Rose, and her afterlife seemed to be a lot less sunshine and roses. “So someone’s been messing with the ghost krewes. What are we supposed to do about it? I’m a hitcher, so it’s not like my strengths are geared toward anything beyond getting out of dodge, and my niece and her boyfriend are alive, which makes them useless.”

  “Not so useless,” corrected Jermaine. “They can go places the dead cannot.”

  Rose frowned. “Say that again without the portentous.”

  “We think we know the source of the disruptions,” he said. “But there are barriers keeping the dead from entering. When I saw de Luca I thought…” He trailed off.

  “You thought he’d still be so into hunting anything ‘unnatural’ that he’d jump at the chance, and not ask too many questions about how someone who looks alive could be pointing him at a haunted house, apartment building, or whatever else weird-ass thing your harasser has decided to haunt.” Rose yawned, putting her empty glass aside. “Dominic, be a good boy and get your Auntie Rose something with an umbrella and a lot of unnecessary garnish.”

  Dominic raised an eyebrow, but to my great relief, he didn’t argue. “As you wish,” he said, pushing his chair back, and walked toward the bar.

  As soon as he was out of earshot Rose turned to Jermaine and said, with the utmost sweetness, “The Queen of the Routewitches knows my name, little ghost. She has me over for tea on the Ocean Lady on the regular. Dominic is my niece’s boyfriend, and that means he’s under my protection. Are you trying to screw him? Think really hard about your answer.”

  “Not trying as such, ma’am, but I won’t deny that some people could get screwed, if things go badly,” said Jermaine. “We need your help. No more, no less. If you’re so concerned about the living, why aren’t you worried about your niece? She’s as alive as he is.”

  “Maybe more so,” Rose said. “I don’t worry as much about Verity because she doesn’t need me to worry about her. She looks out for herself. Dominic’s still in the shallow end of our weirdness pool.”

  “I do recreational SCUBA,” I said blithely.

  Jermaine looked unsettled. Good. If we could keep him off-balance, he’d be more likely to spill any nefarious plans that he might have involving me, my boyfriend, or my dead aunt. Rose might have been in her grave decades before my I was a glimmer in my mother’s eye, but I was still fond of her, and I wanted to keep her around to irritate the crap out of my children.

  Dominic was coming back, a drink in either hand. One was a horrifying concoction of fruit chunks, umbrellas, and multiple straws. The other was the color of cartoon nuclear waste. Naturally, that was the one he put down in front of me. I eyed him. He smiled.

  “You seemed to enjoy the green drink so much that when I saw them add the contents of an actual glow stick to this one, I knew that it was meant to be yours,” he said.

  “I can’t tell if you’re an alcohol genius, or if you’re trying to fuck with me. Either way, you’re the one who gets to sit in the bathroom with me while I’m puking and crying.” I took a sip of the nuclear cocktail. It tasted like rum, pineapple, and regret.

  “I have a swizzle stick shaped like a little monkey,” announced Rose. “Let’s help the dead man with his problem.”

  Jermaine looked even more unsettled. “That was all that was required? Simian accoutrements for your drink?”

  “I’m a simple girl,” Rose said. “Let us finish our cocktails, and we’re all yours. It’s not midnight yet. We have hours to go before the dawn.”

  Somehow she made that sound like a portent, rather than the sort of thing teenage LARPers say when they’re trying to be cool. I offered her a silent toast with my nuclear cocktail, and got down to the serious business of becoming drunk enough to make ghost hunting in New Orleans seem like a good idea.

  An hour later, we staggered out of the bar and onto the suddenly silent sidewalk. I could dimly hear the parties still raging in the bars to either side of us, and there were people on the other side of the street, happy, laughing, living people with drinks in their hands and smiles on their happily drunken faces. There was no one else on our stretch of sidewalk. A black coach, drawn by two equally black horses, was parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant. A pale woman with lips painted tawdry drugstore red sat in the coachman’s position, her back held ramrod straight by her pinstriped overbust corset. There was even a veil on her little ornamental top hat, hiding everything but those glaringly bloody lips from view.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I demanded, eyes narrowing. I was feeling more sober by the second. Adrenaline will do that for a person.

  “We’ve been slipping into the twilight since I came to join you,” said Jermaine. “I thought you knew. Drink with ghosts, drop beneath the surface of the world you know.”

  “I tried to tell them, but you know how the living can be,” said Rose, rolling her eyes. Jermaine shook his head, and for a moment the two of them were united, a perfect front against the scourge of people who hadn’t yet had the decency to die. Then Rose straightened a bit, breaking their momentary accord, and said, “But Verity has a point. Why are we getting into a coachman?”

  “Because my darling lady Amelia has offered to give us a ride to where we’re going, and it will be faster than traveling either on foot or in that monster of a vehicle my messengers tell me you brought with you.” Now all three of us turned to frown at Jermaine. His smile was quick, cool, and professional. “You don’t think I would have come to speak to you without at least doing the basic surveillance, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You thought I was a Healy. That implies a few holes in your network. So uh, what’s a coachman? The way Aunt Rose said it, I don’t think she was talking about the people who drive the horses around Central Park.”

  “Amelia is a coachman,” said Jermaine, indicating the woman sitting atop the black coach. She turned toward us, and somehow the thin veil still obscured all but the broadest outlines of her features. “She drives straight and true, and always gets her passengers where they’re going.”

 
; “And we’ll be riding in her belly, don’t forget to mention that fun little fact,” chimed in Rose. “Amelia is the woman, and the horses, and the coach. She’s the seats and the reins. They’re rare these days. I haven’t seen a coachman in years.”

  “Most of us moved on years ago.” The voice came from the direction of the lady-carriage, although her bloody lips didn’t move. “With each passing day, the world grows a little farther away from the road that made us. Maybe someday it will decide to start making us again, and won’t that be charming?”

  “Yeah, I can’t wait to meet my first trucker who’s also a truck,” said Rose. She folded her arms, eyeing Jermaine. “Do you swear that she’s on our side?”

  “Not in the slightest,” he said. “But she’s on my side, and for the moment, that should be good enough, shouldn’t it?”

  “I do not like this,” said Dominic.

  “Welcome to the club, I’ll have laminated badges printed up next time we’re near an Office Max and not dead.” I put my hands on my hips and studied Amelia. “You are quite a thing.”

  “Thank you,” she said. There was still no motion from beneath her veil, and I realized that the sound of her voice wasn’t even associated with her face. It was coming from inside the carriage. “I promise not to consume you, little living girl, or your companions. Is that good enough for the troubled hitchhiker, or shall I also offer to tell you the location of my grave?”

  “Aunt Rose?”

  “We’re good,” said Rose, sounding faintly disgusted. “Get into the digestive tract of the hybrid dead woman. Everything’s fine.”

  “It’s a good thing I’ve had a lot to drink tonight,” I said cheerfully. “Hey Amelia, can I ride up front with…er, on you?”

  There was a pause during which I thought that I might actually have startled the lady-carriage. Then she began to laugh. “Oh, yes, please,” she said. “Who knew this night was going to be fun?” The coach doors swung open.