by Alys Arden
“But why did they want your father so badly, Adeline?” I opened her diary, scanning the pages once more. Why didn’t Nicco make it onto the ship with the rest of his siblings?
Adeline hadn’t allowed herself to be vamp-zapped, but he could have easily found a more innocent fille à la cassette to trick into passage like Gabe had done after Cosette denied him. What made Nicco miss the boat? Nothing seemed more important to Nicco than catching the Count. Does that mean he got a better lead?
I flipped open my notes titled Théories du Complot–Le Comte de Saint-Germain, which was only fitting because at this point, anything I came up with could only be considered a conspiracy.
I tried to look at everything from the Medici point of view, because thinking like a Saint-Germain was clearly getting me nowhere. What could spark a family feud that would span centuries? Why are they so desperate to kill the Count?
I remembered the disgust in Nicco’s voice and the cold look in his eyes whenever I uttered the words “Saint-Germain” in his presence. It still made me shiver. What’s the worst thing someone could have done to Nicco? Killed him? Murdered him? Turned him into a vampire?
Is the Count a vampire?
It was the only reasonable explanation for how he might still be alive centuries later. But he can’t be a vampire—the Count is a witch. In 1728, Adeline wrote that they shared the same powers. He couldn’t be both a witch and a vampire . . . Lisette had lost her magic when she was turned.
As I scribbled out a series of dates to cross-reference, another huge crack of thunder came from outside, and this time the rain poured down with it. The perfect backdrop as my thoughts danced into a dark corner of my imagination—macabre, uninhibited dancing that took my thoughts to family members slain, fortunes stolen, and lovers lost. Because every time I read over my notes, I kept coming back to three things: family, money, and love.
Outside, loud footsteps smacked into the already-forming puddles. I felt the prick of supernatural energy as the footsteps squelched into the entrance and paused. I finished writing my sentence as I said, “NOLA rain too much for you and Chase after all?”
“Excuse me?” asked an unfamiliar voice. I quickly looked up.
A guy with sopping black hair stepped up to the counter.
“Sorry!” I closed the book. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Please don’t be sorry. I’m the one who just tracked rain all over your café.” He glanced back at the trail of water, which somehow seemed like it could have naturally been a part of his industrial look. A little black rain cloud hovering over his head would have perfectly matched his black boots and jeans that had been worn to death, and a blue T-shirt so drenched it looked black too.
“Pfft. Please, it’s New Orleans,” I said, throwing him a clean hand towel. I stretched out my fingers against my palms. Whatever I’d felt when he’d walked in was gone now. Still I remained cautious.
“Thanks.” He wiped off his face and ran the hand towel through his black curls, which also might have been dyed with a tint of blue.
“What can I get you?”
“Uh.” He looked at my tea, and then his eyes looked past me in a way that I’d grown familiar with. He didn’t have any money. “I’m okay. I was hoping the bookstore next door was open. I heard the owner is a dealer of antiquities and has an amazing collection of rare books.”
“He does. And he’ll talk your ear off if you let him.”
“I’d be okay with that.”
I laughed. “Yeah, me too. So you’re in the market for rare books?”
“Um . . . well, I also heard that sometimes he gives away old paperbacks when he runs out of space. The library doesn’t look like it’s reopening anytime soon.”
“Mr. Mauer hasn’t been around too much these days. His house was wiped.”
“That’s too bad. Then I guess I won’t be getting my fix of old-book smell anytime soon.”
I sighed, grabbing a mug. “Arcadian has a really good old-book smell too.”
His gaze wandered to my stack on the counter.
As I turned to pump coffee into the mug, the tingling feeling blinked back. It was faint, but it was there—I was sure of it. I looked over my shoulder, wishing I hadn’t left Adeline’s and Susannah’s books out in the open. I so rarely had customers these days, I’d become lax.
“Are you into family feuds?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You know, vendettas to the death, lovers to long-lost siblings, tumbling monarchies, self-fulfilling prophecies. That sort of thing.”
He leaned on the counter, an intense look of intrigue on his face. “Who are you?” he asked.
I set the coffee down. “Considering you’re the one who walked into my café, I think the question is, who are you?”
“I asked first.”
I pulled two thin paperbacks from the stack, tossed him the copies of Macbeth and Oedipus Rex, and mentally crossed my arms. “A girl writing an essay comparing and contrasting family values.”
“Ah.” He picked up Oedipus. “Well, that one didn’t end well for anyone.”
“Understatement of the year. Feel free to read it with your coffee.” I slid the mug to him. “On the house.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
I passed him the sugar. “Welcome to the South,” I said, because there was something about him that made it clear he wasn’t from around here. I didn’t need magic to know it, just my years of growing up in the Quarter tourist filter.
“Callis,” he said, holding out his hand.
When our palms touched, the feeling came back tenfold. “Adele,” I said, and he peered at me with the same intrigue-slash-caution I was feeling.
We released our hands, and once again the feeling blinked out. He traded Oedipus for Macbeth and took the corner table in the window where Isaac always sat. I shamelessly watched him as he took a sip of the coffee and turned to the first page.
A storm gust rushed into the café’s open door, and a wave of shivers jaunted up my arms. The perpetual humidity made the chill in New Orleans’s winters organ rattling, but shutting the doors would drop the number of customers from a few to zilch. Screw it. It’s too cold today. Before I could get off the stool, the door swung closed. Shit.
The guy looked up to the door and then back to me.
“Cross breeze,” I said. “Happens all the time.”
He looked to a back door that led to the courtyard. It was closed.
I shrugged, trying to play it off. “Or a poltergeist. It’s an old building.”
The corner of his mouth turned up. “Let’s just hope it’s a friendly ghost.”
“Yeah,” I said, struggling to make my laugh sound natural.
He went back to the book. Crisis averted.
I tucked Adeline’s and Susannah’s books under the counter for safekeeping and pulled out a large woolly sweater. It was the color of Christmas trees and hung down to my thighs, completely covering my pale pink babydoll dress when I slipped it on.
Unlike the pervasive undercurrent of danger I always felt around the vampires, any weirdness I’d sensed—or thought I’d sensed—around the book-loving stranger had evaporated. He remained so quiet in the corner reading Shakespeare that it was easy to forget he was there. He didn’t seem particularly interested in me—no stolen glances or inquiries about my past. In fact, he faced the rainy window.
After a while, I refilled his coffee and came back to my stool.
I wrapped my hands into the cuffs of the sweater and buried my face into the cable-knit. I wasn’t sure there was anything that could rid the wool of the lingering Shalimar, which Mémé had drenched herself in every morning, noon, and night. I used to find the scent too pungent, but now it reminded me of her wrinkly hands and her warm kitchen and her Édith Piaf records.
I hugged myself tighter into the sweater and could feel the tears coming as I stared at the back corner, where their slain bodies had grown cold, waiting to be di
scovered. I hoped they’d been unconscious before they died. I hoped one of them hadn’t been forced to watch the other die first, which seemed so much worse than death itself.
Was Emilio that cruel?
A spark squeezed from my fist.
I sucked in a big breath, floated my phone over to the speaker, and soon Ziggy Stardust was dancing through the air like waves of glittering cupcakes.
CHAPTER 10
An Offer Refused
Near the end of the album, the café door opened. I blinked away the tears—not even the Spiders from Mars were enough to pull me through this one.
“Hello, Miss Addie!”
I turned toward the entrance. Chatham Daure, a regular and a family friend, was shaking an umbrella in the doorway. I hadn’t seen him since the funeral.
“Hey, Mr. Daure!” Is that a cat on his shoulder?
“Cold enough for ya?” he asked.
“Organ rattling.” I rubbed my hands together as the cat stood and stretched. Part of me wanted to think this was weird, but the rest of me knew this was just the Daures.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “when Monday rolls around, we’ll be back to T-shirts.”
Chatham Daure made weather predictions with unwavering certainty, in just the same way everyone in his family spoke about the future: like they were reading from invisible scrolls that hung down from the heavens. Just like his mother, and his mother’s mother had been, Chatham was the owner of the Bottom of the Cup Tearoom, the oldest-running psychic shop in the country. It was just across the way on Royal Street, right next to Touchdown Jesus, where the Wolfman’s body had been dumped.
Other than two tiny gold hoops in his left ear, Chatham always looked straitlaced in his thin wire-rimmed glasses and collection of pastel polo shirts. I guess they can’t all be as kooky as Ritha Borges—although today at least he had complemented his preppy attire with the cat.
The guy in the corner, who was still reading Macbeth, looked up.
Chatham set his crescent-handled moon mug on the counter for me. “Glad to know your pa’s raising you right.” He nodded up to the speaker.
“Oh yeah, Mac has a total man crush on Bowie.”
“I know many people in the Quarter who’d be jealous of Bowie, then.”
“Gross.” I slid over the navy-blue moon mug. The inside was covered in stars, and the words WORLD FAMOUS BOTTOM OF THE CUP TEAROOM whirled. The mugs were kind of cheesy—the kind of merch the shop made specifically to sell to tourists—but I liked them. I liked that they were still the same as they’d always been. There was a phase of my childhood when I drank out of nothing but “the moon.”
Chatham’s sons—Caleb, Cameron, and Codi—spanned the years in between me and the twins. We’d all grown up together, French Quarter Rats, and thick as thieves. I was the youngest, and at ten became the last kid standing when Codi transferred to a private school for junior high. The twins, of course, were already at Tulane by then. Now all the Daure boys were at colleges spread across the South, and I only talked to them on holidays when they came in for café au lait and croissants. Or funerals, apparently.
I tried to smile as I grabbed the crescent handle, but Chatham touched my hand, making me pause. “We miss them too, baby . . .”
I nodded and quickly turned to fill his coffee.
Pumping the medium roast, I glanced back. His expression was grim as he slowly walked around the room. The cat jumped down, as if to investigate with him.
“It’s cold in here,” Chatham muttered, maybe to me, maybe to himself. Maybe to the cat. “I don’t know if that will be going away come Monday.” He shook his head. “No. Definitely not.”
“Well, this should warm you up.” I slid out the sugar and nondairy creamer.
The cat came around the counter to meet me, threading between my legs and rubbing its head firmly against my ankles.
“And who are you?” I scooped him up to the counter, which broke, like, ten health-code violations, but none of that seemed to matter post-Storm. “You’re beautiful.”
He purred a barely audible purr and rubbed his head against my hand.
Chatham shook his head, smiling. “Meet Onyx, the newest addition to the Daure household. He popped up just post-Storm, but he’s the kind of creature that makes himself so quickly at home, you feel like he’s been around forever.”
“So soft.” I stroked its back all the way up to its tail.
Chatham picked up the canister of sugar and poured a long stream into his moon. “How are you doing, Adele?”
“I’m fine . . . I mean, all things considered.”
“Your aura begs to differ.”
I laughed.
“It’s not good for your soul, Addie. All of this sadness.”
“My soul can handle it. It’s just hard being here.” I braced myself for a Hallmark line about eternal peace. But he didn’t go there.
“At least they’re together,” he said. “Not even death could take Bertrand and Sabine from each other.”
For a heart’s flicker, I felt a little lighter.
“Adele, I don’t want to overstep here, but I have an idea. One that I think would be good for both you and your soul.”
“Like chicken soup?”
“I’m serious. All I can afford is minimum wage, but I think you’ll find spending time at Bottom of the Cup to be . . . beneficial in other ways. It will do you good to get some space from this place—from Bertrand and Sabine.”
“You talk about them like they’re still here.”
“For you, they are.”
“You must be the only shop in town actually hiring right now.”
“It’s a precarious position to be in, no doubt, always booming in times of calamity: hurricanes, terrorist attacks, Y2K, years of the rapture. Times that leave people looking for answers for the monstrous and unexplainable.” Onyx jumped onto Chatham’s shoulder, settling around his neck like a stole.
“What do you think, Adele?” He looked around the nearly empty café. “I’m sure they could spare you. At least until the city is back up and running.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t.”
“Okay, ten dollars per hour! Mac’s taught you well.”
I shook my head.
“Come on, you’re already well versed in tea.”
“I’m not leaving,” I nearly shouted, unable to stop myself from getting overly defensive. The guy looked over to us from the corner, and I felt my cheeks flush.
Chatham took my hand. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I understand, sweetheart.”
“I’m—I’m not upset. I’m sorry. I just can’t leave.”
Luckily the conversation halted when Ren walked through the door: “Just the man I wanted to see!” he boomed, four poncho-clad people in tow. Pre-Storm the number would have been closer to thirty, but now the eight people in the café felt like a party.
Happy for the interruption, I started pulling mugs down. There was no way I could abandon this place. It just felt wrong. We’d only just buried Mémé and Pépé, for God’s sake. The spoon on my saucer flung itself to the floor on the other side of the counter.
Breathe, Adele.
Chatham bent down to get it, looking at me as he set it back on the counter.
“This gentleman,” Ren said to his tour group, “is the proprietor of the world-famous Bottom of the Cup Tearoom, famous not only for its tarot cards and palm readings, but for being one of the most haunted digs in the world. Grab a cup of chicory from this fine young lady, and then hurry back to the front of the café to hear the story of the strongest specter in the Vieux Carré.”
Whispers buzzed through the group as they dispersed—Ren had that effect on people.
He slapped Chatham on the shoulder. I slid him a mug of coffee, and like clockwork, he reached for the flask in his brocade jacket, but before he could spin off the lid, I reached over and grabbed it from him. “I don’t think so!”
They both looked over to me.
“Excus
e me, young lady, since when do you care how I take my coffee?”
“Since you gave Isaac a black eye.” My voice rose louder than I intended, causing everyone to look our way, including the booklover.
“Oh,” he mumbled. “Would you really call it a black eye?”
My arms crossed.
“She’s right,” Chatham said, extending his palm for the flask. “You need to lay off the bottle.” I handed it to him.
“I really don’t think this is the best time to turn over a new leaf. How ever will I cope with my FEMA caseworker, my insurance agent, the seven people crashing on our living room floor, or the people running this damn town?”
They continued the conversation as I handed mugs of coffee to the others.
“Have you been doing the meditation routine I taught you?” Chatham asked.
“Pfft.” Ren twisted his mustache.
“Well, you should. Your chakras are all aflutter.”
“Regarding my chakras . . . I have a few questions for the cards.”
“You know where to find me,” Chatham said as I passed the sugar to the tourists.
“Oui. Oui. All right, folks.” Ren called the group to the front, and they settled at the window table at the opposite corner of the booklover.
Ren always told Julie’s story in the café rather than the tearoom, because Chatham thought that letting the tourist groups into the shop en masse messed up the energy. I think it was his polite way of telling Ren he was too loud. I’d heard the story a million times, but I poured myself a cup of coffee, refilled Chatham’s, and we both settled in to listen.
“Now, if you’ve found yourself a nonbeliever thus far,” Ren said, “Chatham Daure here can corroborate this next one, him being one of the leading specter experts in the world.”
“I don’t know about all that,” Chatham said, laughing, “but you do learn a thing or two growing up on Royal Street.”
