by J. R. Rain
“The what?”
He then said the n-word, and when I didn’t respond, added the word ‘slaves.’
“You comprenday the English tongue right enough, do you, ma’am?” asked the other man.
I nodded. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand him—I just couldn’t wrap my head around whatever the hell was going on with these two. I mean, had I stumbled across some kind of crazy-ass Ku Klux Klan cult? I noticed they were both wore tin badges; maybe they worked for a security patrol at a private gated community or something. If they wanted to think I’d been ‘outraged,’ then maybe that could work.
“Yeah,” I said. “A bunch of guys attacked me and stole all my stuff. Then they dumped me back in the swamp, but they were white, not black.” The two men looked at each other. “I was wondering—if you can take me back to your office, I can call a friend of mine in the NOLA PD. Lieutenant Labruzzo. Or if you’ve got a cell on you…?”
They just shook their heads at me. Obviously, they didn’t know what I was talking about. “We’ll find you a blanket or some such thing to cover yourself, ma’am,” said the first one with the sword. “And then we’ll send word to your family. Begging your pardon, first you’ll be needing to give a statement to the city police since a crime has been committed. Boy!”
A small crowd of African Americans had gathered to watch us; one of the older kids, wearing a torn burlap serape that went almost to his knees, stepped forward.
“Run along down to the hoosegow, boy, and tell the sergeant all you seen here. Say O’Leary requests him to send out a berlin to fetch the lady in question. Git away with you now—and no lollygagging, mind. Now then, about that family of yours, ma’am, they’ll likely be fair out of their wits with worry. What would be the name and address I should give the city police?”
The second guy took off his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders.
“Moon,” I said. “My name is Samantha Moon. I’m… visiting here. I’ve been staying at a hotel.”
“Would be your husband’s name, as well? So I should send for Mr. Moon?”
“My husband is—” I almost said ‘dead,’ which was the truth, but I was keeping that a secret. “My husband disappeared some time ago. We live in Fullerton.” Again with the blank stares. “Fullerton? You know, Orange County? California?”
“You’ve come here all the way from the State of California?” Now the two men looked quite flabbergasted, as though I’d claimed to be from another planet.
A creeping unease came over me. Something here had gone very, very wrong.
Chapter Thirteen
After that, things went from bad to worse.
Not at first—O’Leary and Counihan, the two ‘Plantation Policemen,’ as they called themselves, behaved like complete gentlemen, watching over me like I was Helen of Troy and swearing to ‘string up the blackguards that done this Devil’s business’ to me. By which he meant my so-called violation and being dumped in the swamp. The people in the shacks outside the Hopkins Plantation, the backwater I’d landed in, were really nice to me, too, after they got over their shyness. An old man cut me a gunnysack to wear, along with a rope sash, and one of the grannies brought a bucket of water and washed me down while he was cutting it. Then after she’d dressed me, she fed me a bowl of watery hominy grits and collard greens while the kids stared at me eating it like I was a zoo animal.
A terrible suspicion started to gnaw at me inside, but asking questions got me nowhere; everybody just shook their heads, no matter what I said. I think they all thought I’d been driven wacko by my ordeal in the swamp, so they basically humored the crazy lady.
That was better than what happened after the ‘berlin’ arrived. It turned out to be an enclosed black carriage pulled by two horses. It had no windows, except for a little, barred hole in the back, and its sides were painted with a golden seal featuring three fleurs-de-lis with ‘City of New Orleans Police Department’ painted below it. A huge white guy with a bullet head and literally a red neck drove it, dressed like a sailor all in white with a red kepi for a hat. He climbed down from the driving board and roughly tried to wrestle me toward the open door of the carriage.
“Here now, there’ll be none of that!” said Counihan sharply. “I’ll thank you to be civil to the lady!”
“Lady?” the man scoffed. “What, her? She’s no lady! Ain’t nothing but a whore. Probably drunk and out carousing late with the darkies and their hoodoo. Go on, into the paddy wagon with you; I won’t have any lousy Micks interfering with the mayor’s justice.”
O’Leary pointed his rifle at the city guard. “She’s quality, and don’t you forget it, you bloody Kaintuck! I know right enough where you live—treat Mrs. Moon with the proper respect, or you’ll find us at your door some dark night with a stretch of hemp cut to the right measure for that fat throat of yours.”
The city policeman snorted, but then made a low bow to me like he was escorting Cinderella to the ball. “Your carriage awaits, your ladyship.”
“I have to ride in… this?” I asked O’Leary. I had one foot on the step and the rank outhouse odor of the darkened carriage assaulted me from the open door. The buzzing of horseflies surrounded me. By now, my suspicions had morphed into a certainty. For one wild moment, as the carriage door shut behind me, I thought about trying to transform. I’d never done it during daylight before; I didn’t even know if I could.
“Sorry, ma’am,” O’Leary said in a low voice through the barred window. “It ain’t far. But you can’t be wandering around the city, not in your state. That Constable Gosling’s bent, but he’s not the worst of that lot. Just mind you steer clear of Lieutenant Dalgo and his people, and you’ll be all right.” Pay-pul, he pronounced it. “You’ll be in good hands with the colonel, you’ll see.”
The colonel? Okay, I was obviously stuck in a Gone With the Wind theme park. Or maybe a Kentucky Fried Chicken farm.
Or I was simply hallucinating…
Ever gone for a ride in a horse-drawn cart—one with no springs? If you have, then you know there was no way I could stand there for long trying to peer out through the bars of that little porthole of a window. I felt like I was being shaken and rattled to death. The wooden carriage wheels hit every rock and pothole in the gravel road, and it threw me from side to side so badly I could barely keep my seat on one of the narrow wooden benches. From time to time, I caught a glimpse of sky or trees through the grill, then the spire of a church. At some point, we started rumbling along on bricks or cobbles, and I thought my teeth might fall out. I caught glimpses of the tops of buildings out the tiny window. The smell of rotting garbage and sewer nearly made me retch. Voices from street hawkers came from every side above the clop-clop-clop of horses’ hooves.
Finally, we stopped. Steps clattered outside, and then the back door flung open. “Out you come, missy!” boomed the constable’s voice.
I’d had enough.
“Your choice,” I said. “You can try to drag me out of here, in which case you’re going to wind up with a couple of broken bones, or I can walk out of here on my own. First, you have to answer me a simple question.”
The big bearded red face peered into the gloom at me. Past his shoulders, I could see some manner of courtyard and black prison gates, another man in a white uniform, women walking on the street outside wearing hats and long dresses and carrying parasols. And horses. Lots more horses.
“Well then, spit it out!” he bellowed.
“What year is this?”
He burst into laughter. “That must have been some wild hoodoo bash you was at, all right! It’s scrambled your wits like an egg, girlie. Why, the year is the very same as when you were last sober, likely enough: 1861.”
I guess deep down I’d known it, at least ever since I’d gotten to the Hopkins Plantation, but hearing him say it still hit me like a punch in the gut. Even though I felt like I’d gone crazy and dreamed the whole thing up, it didn’t occur to me to doubt him, either. I mean, what I saw o
n every side as I stepped down from the carriage could be some elaborate fake or Hollywood special effect. It had to be the real deal. I could just tell.
Way too real.
Somehow, the voodoo queen had sent me spinning back in time; one hundred fifty-four years back in time, to be exact. So I was totally in a daze of shock as he marched me across the courtyard and up a narrow flight of stairs into the parish prison, or ‘calaboose,’ as he called it, a red brick building covered with peeling whitewash. The words ‘Keep Away From The Bullpen’ had been painted on the wall to one side of the ward entry door, whatever that meant. He took me down a long gloomy hallway and locked me in a cell.
I hardly noticed. My mind was reeling. I realized that the life I knew, and everything in it—Tammy and Anthony, Kingsley, Mary Lou, Allison, Fang; everyone I knew and cared about—didn’t exist anymore. I mean, they existed, but only in the future, many years from now. For anyone else, this would have been a death sentence, but I knew that being a vampire, I could survive long enough to be with them again. In fact, all I had to do was stay alive, then on the date of my ‘disappearance’ make sure I showed up in Fullerton.
It might seem to them like I’d never gone anywhere, though I would feel one hundred fifty-five years older…
That’s a hell of a long time, even for a vampire. A lot could happen in those decades. I could be hunted down and killed somehow. Or I might turn into a whole different person, like Eulalie had accused me of—for example, what if Elizabeth somehow slipped out and took me over? Or what if vampires got Alzheimer’s or some equivalent when they got too old? Completely aside from the fact that I loved and missed my kids and wanted to get back to them as soon as possible, I had a support system in place in Orange County… Trusted friends who knew my needs and kept me supplied with blood and a committed lover who knew my secret and understood my other appetites.
At the very least, I’d have to build a new life, a new support system. More importantly, I couldn’t bear to be separated that long—two human lifetimes! It wasn’t fair! I wanted to be with them too much to let that happen. No, I had to get back to them somehow!
Logically, I had only one chance of that happening, like one in a bazillion.
Eulalie had told me that the voodoo queen who’d sent me back in time was the descendant of the greatest of all the Marie Laveaus, the one whose tomb I’d visited. ‘1881’ was the date of death on the bronze plaque. That meant she would still be alive here in New Orleans. Somehow, I had to meet and convince her to send me forward in time. Supposedly, the original Marie Laveau was the greatest and most powerful of all of them. It stood to reason that if anyone would know the secret of reversing her great-great-great-grand-daughter or whatever’s magic spell, it would be her. Right?
Okay, it didn’t give me much to bank on, but at the moment, I didn’t have anything else.
More heavy clattering footsteps interrupted my train of thought, followed by the grating of a key in the lock of my cell door. Constable Gosling had returned, followed by a short dapper man in a fancy uniform and a waxed mustache.
“See here, Lieutenant, I told you so,” the big redneck said. “Ain’t she a pip? And look at those rings. Must be worth a small fortune.”
The lieutenant, obviously the ‘Dalgo’ I’d been warned about, stared coldly at me for a few minutes. “Where did you steal these?” His accent was a weird mix, like Eulalie’s; half-French, half-Southern drawl.
“I didn’t steal them,” I said, flexing my fingers. Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to deal with more than the two of them.
“You lie. Gosling, bind her wrists and hoist her up on the hook. I’ll do the whipping myself.”
“Aw, Lieutenant, you said I could have her first…”
“I go first. You know the rule. I am an artist, not a savage like you. The sight of blood-red stripes on white female flesh arouses my admiration.” Then Dalgo smiled at me. “Feel free to scream all you wish, mademoiselle. No one will disturb us here…”
Chapter Fourteen
You know what? He was right.
If anyone had heard Gosling hit the floor after I crushed his Adam’s apple with a backhanded chop, they might have come running. They would have stopped me from kicking the side of Dalgo’s knee, then driving Gosling’s nightstick into his diaphragm. He glanced at me in surprise—and hate—but didn’t fall over, like in the movies. Instead, he grabbed my throat in one of his white-gloved hands. He had a lot of strength for a little guy; for a moment, we just stood there swaying—before I brought the stick up, and smashed his nose to jelly.
And he screamed for the first time.
I hadn’t used a stick since my federal agent training days, and I found this one a little lighter and clumsier than the modern carbon alloy ones. So it took some playing with to get used to; I poked both his eyes shut as he continued to grapple with me, then gave his mouth a sideways whack that smashed out several teeth and, I’m guessing, fractured his jaw. That last scream of his definitely sounded kind of strangled and half-hearted.
Arms grabbed me from behind and hoisted me up in the air, as if in the grip of a grizzly bear. Fights never go like they do in the movies or on TV; the constable had obviously recovered from having his voice box destroyed, and even though he wheezed like a bellows, he still had enough strength to lift me up toward a rusting butcher’s hook dangling from the stone ceiling of the cell. I kicked back at him, but he seemed indifferent to that, so I did the one thing they don’t teach you in combat training. For the most part, I try to avoid thinking about having fangs. But every now and then, I run into a situation where they really help. I leaned down and chomped into his beefy forearm, then began tearing at his flesh, hoping to find the ulnar artery in his wrist. Hot blood poured down my chin, but I didn’t let it go down my throat.
You couldn’t call the sound he made then a scream, exactly; more of a squeal. Still, rather impressed me in his condition.
The taste made me hungry. Soon, I would have to feed, and the moment the thought occurred to me, like clockwork, Elizabeth emerged from the shadows of my mind, whispering. “Yesss, yesss. Out… let me out… let me out…”
For once, we kinda thought the same thing. I wanted out, too.
The constable raised me higher, trying to hang me by the nape of my neck on that hook. I snapped my head back into his face, then, when he staggered backward, rammed my elbow into his injured throat. He sank to his knees, gasping for breath, leaving me on my feet, as if I’d been lowered by a forklift. I turned around and gave his billy club a workout on him, and I’m here to tell you, that dude had one hard head.
In fact, all these 1860s people seemed to be hardheaded and tough as nails. If I’d whacked a couple of modern guys around like that, they’d be sobbing and begging on the floor in fetal positions. Lieutenant Dalgo somehow managed to stagger to his feet again and didn’t go down until I cracked his skull.
At that point, it occurred to me what all this might look like to any other policemen who happened to wander by. Things definitely needed staging, as cops call any crime scene that’s been rearranged by the perpetrator. I dragged Dalgo, who seemed to be either dead or dying, across the cell so it looked like he’d been physically confronting the unconscious Gosling, then dipped the Lieutenant’s sword, a long military sabre like you see Marines wear on dress parade, into the constable’s blood and put it in his hand. Last, I placed the billy club in Gosling’s hand. When I finished, the tableau looked pretty convincing from a high school play standpoint.
Obviously, it would never have fooled Detective Sherbet or any of my other friends in the Fullerton Police Department for five seconds, but hey, I was most definitely not in Kansas anymore. I’d gone back to the days before DNA and fingerprints, so if I stuck to my story, hopefully, somebody higher up might believe me. That is, if anyone noticed me leave.
Maybe not, though; I wore a potato sack drenched in blood. And my mouth was covered in gore. Amazingly enough, Dalgo had a spotless starched whit
e handkerchief in one of his breast pockets, so I used it to clean my mouth, especially my teeth. I didn’t want to wander around the calaboose looking like the bride of Dracula.
Of course, the literal bride of Dracula never strayed very far from me, did she?
Anyway, I admit I had to fight hard not to give in to temptation. While I detached the key ring from Gosling’s belt, he started groaning and choking on the blood in his windpipe, so it poured out of his mouth. Instead of draining him, I gave his head one last goodbye tap and reluctantly walked away. I unlocked the cell door and stepped out into the corridor.
My plan, if you could call it that, was to try to sneak out quietly. If anybody stopped me, I’d give them a mental poke and compel them to forget they’d ever seen me. Vampires had been doing that to mortals since vampires existed. Luckily, American English didn’t seem to have changed too much in a century and a half, so I wouldn’t exactly have to fake it in a foreign language. However, my plan lasted about half a minute, just about long enough for me to walk down the dimly lit arched hallway, and straight into a tall, old, grey-haired man in an even fancier uniform than Dalgo’s. His eyes shone a bright, brilliant blue, and they seemed to look right through me. Behind him stood two other cops who looked pretty surprised to see me.
The old dude didn’t. In fact, he seemed to be expecting it. “Ah,” he said, bowing his head slightly, “You must be the distressed young lady found on the Gentilly Road by the Plantation Police. Sergeant Dupont here was just telling me about you. My apologies, ma’am. I hope that your terrifying experiences will not prejudice you against our fair city.”
He sounded half-French like Dalgo, but with more of a Downton Abbey kind of accent, so I tried to channel that show (a favorite of mine) when I answered.
