Bayou Nights

by Julie Mulhern

  “It’s not his life that’s at stake, Pére Antoine.” Drake’s voice echoed through the church. “It’s his soul.”

  The priest closed his eyes, shook his head, then wrung his hands. The words he muttered might have been a prayer.

  Simply taking the bundle seemed wrong. What could she do to convince him? Flirting and batting eyelashes were worthless with a priest. The last thing they needed was another enemy. “I have to take this, Father. I have to save him.” The wobble in her voice was genuine.

  The priest’s expression softened. He turned and looked at Drake. “You said you sense evil in the city.”

  “Yes,” Drake replied.

  “Do you know the nature of this evil?”

  Drake nodded. Once. “I believe so.”

  The priest crossed himself then jerked his chin at the bundle in her arms. “What are you going to do with that?”

  Christine glanced around the empty cathedral then squared her shoulders. “We have a rendezvous an hour before midnight.”

  “With whom?”

  “Desdemona,” Christine guessed.

  “You cannot let her have that!” The priest’s words tripped over each other in their hurry to reach her. “You cannot face her alone.”

  “What else can we do?”

  The priest held out his hands as if in supplication. “I know someone who can help.”

  “Who?” Drake demanded. He sounded positively strident.

  A small smile touched the priest’s lips. “Marie Laveau owes me a favor.”

  Drake sat across from her in a dim bar, the sort of place she’d never dream of going. But she’d already spent a day doing things she’d never dreamed of, and drinking in a seedy bar didn’t hold a candle to those things. “Rum,” she told the barkeep. “We’ll take the bottle.”

  “Bacardi?” The man wiped his hands down the front of his soiled apron.

  “That’ll be fine.” She leaned against the back of her seat and sighed.

  Drake’s brow furrowed. “How’s your ankle?”

  Her ankle throbbed with dull pain. “Fine. How’s your arm?”

  “Fine.”

  Drake’s cheeks looked craggy, his lips were thin, and darkness smudged the skin beneath his eyes. If Mattias Drake looked tired, she probably looked like death warmed over. She raised a hand to pat a wayward strand of hair into place then stopped herself. Why bother? Neither Drake nor the man with the dirty apron, the only other people in the little bar, were paying her the slightest bit of attention. She was allowed to look tired. She was tired.

  “What now?”

  Drake’s question brought her attention back to the wobbly table.

  The barkeep deposited a bottle and two smeared glasses on the table.

  “May I have a glass of water, please?” Christine used the last of her energy to flutter her lashes. “A large glass?”

  The man nodded. A moment later, he returned with a pitcher.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He smiled at her, revealing a few missing teeth. “You’re welcome. I’m Sam.”

  She smiled back. “Thank you, Sam.”

  Sam returned to his bar and Drake asked, “Must you flirt with every man you meet?”

  “I wasn’t flirting.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and extended his legs. “You don’t even know when you’re doing it.”

  She most certainly did. Just because she didn’t bat her lashes or simper for him didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of when she did those things. Why didn’t she flirt with Drake? Because she’d sensed from the start that he found flirty women silly, and—Christine’s throat dried—she didn’t want Mattias Drake to think her silly.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Drake sounded concerned. “You look as if you just swallowed something bitter.”

  Christine smoothed any expression from her face. “I’m fine. Shall we see what was hidden in the altar?”

  “Here?”

  “Why not here? We’re in a corner, in an empty bar, and there’s no one here but us…and Sam.”

  They both looked at Sam. A glass of something strong sat at his elbow and he squinted at a racing page.

  “Horse racing?” Drake asked.

  “At Fair Grounds from November to March. The season is almost over.” Christine pulled the bundle she’d retrieved from the altar from the depths of her pocket and rested it on her lap. “Do you have a knife?”

  Drake handed over a pocket knife. She ignored the spark that flashed when his fingers touched hers. At least, she tried. It was hard to ignore the current that zinged from her head to her toes with strategic stops in between. She cut through the twine and pulled away the burlap, revealing a silver flask with elaborate filigree work.

  She looked up and found Drake’s gaze fixed on her and not the flask.

  The expression on his face… Well, Christine resisted—barely—the urge to squirm in her seat or pat the wayward hair into place. Instead, she swallowed and asked, “Will you pour out the rum?”

  “Pour out the rum?”

  She nodded. “We need the bottle.”

  Drake broke the seal, poured rum into the dirty glasses, and then raised his brows as if to ask what now?

  “Just get rid of it.” Christine didn’t care if he poured the liquor on the floor, down his throat, or down a toilet. “We need the bottle.”

  “I can’t leave you.” He held the bottle beneath the table. Rum trickled onto the dirty floor. A moment later, he held up the empty bottle.

  “Rinse it,” she said. “Please.”

  Drake poured some of the water from the pitcher into the bottle, swished it around, and then disposed of it on floorboards that already reeked of distilled sugar.

  Christine held out her hand for the bottle.

  Again their fingers brushed. This time she was ready for the pulse of electricity that shot through her veins. Ready didn’t mean it was any easier to ignore.

  She opened the flask, poured the water within into the rum bottle, then corked it. Next, she took the pitcher and filled the flask with Sam’s water.

  “You’re risking your father.” Drake spoke slowly, as if to a child who didn’t understand the consequences of her actions.

  Christine understood the consequences all too well. “Hopefully, by the time they figure out the switch, I’ll have him safely home.”

  “You truly plan on giving them a fake?” His tone was deeply disapproving. A flush darkened his cheeks.

  “You heard the priest. Letting Desdemona or any of the people who want the water have it would be dangerous.”

  Drake muttered.

  “What?” she snapped. “I couldn’t hear you.”

  “You wouldn’t recognize danger if it walked up and introduced itself.” If faces could storm, Drake’s was a full-force hurricane. His brows lowered and drew together. His lips pulled back from his bared teeth.

  If he hadn’t shown time and again his willingness to protect her, Christine might be frightened. She opened her mouth to argue then snapped it shut. Why did he care if she courted danger to get her father back? “What I do is none of your business.”

  “Of course it is.” He spoke so loudly it drew Sam’s attention away from his racing form.

  Her jaw dropped and she stared at him. Her lips snapped shut. Her gaze fixed on Drake. “How so?”

  “Too many women have died.” His voice sounded wrong, slightly broken—as if life had chiseled a deep divot in the smooth surface of his Yankee granite.

  “Who died?” Christine asked softly. Whoever she’d been, she was a lucky woman. Drake had obviously cared for her. Deeply.

  His gaze landed on the dingy wall above her right shoulder and stayed there. He looked as if he wanted his words back. If a moment ago his face had looked like a hurricane, now his cheeks, his lips, his eyes looked like the aftermath of a storm. Destroyed. Bereft.

  Christine leaned forward, rested her hand on his, and somehow ignored the current betwe
en them. “I’m sorry.”

  Still he stared at the wall. “It was my mother.” He bit down on his lips and closed his eyes, hiding their expression. “She went on an investigation with my father.”

  His mother? Even as sympathy welled in her chest, relief flooded her veins. His mother. Not another woman. “When…”

  “Years ago. When I was a boy.”

  “I’m so sorry.” It was the expected thing to say. A phrase that didn’t begin to express the sympathy that filled her as she considered a young Matthias without his mother.

  “And then, years later”—his voice broke—“my sister insisted on going to Haiti with her husband. Another investigation.” He opened his eyes.

  Bleak. That was the only possible description for their expression.

  “Her throat was cut.”

  No wonder he was so protective.

  Christine squeezed his hand and he shifted his gaze from the wall to her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “I can’t lose you too.”

  For a second, her foolish heart leapt in the air, higher than a fawn, higher than the steeple at the cathedral, higher than hope should ever reach, then she realized what he’d said. He thought of her like a family member, a sister.

  “I’ll be fine.” The words burned the back of her throat worse than straight rum. She jerked her chin at the Bacardi bottle now filled with eternal life. “What should we do with that? Where should we hide it?”

  “My hotel?”

  “What if someone goes there while we’re in Jackson Square?”

  “Your shop?”

  “Same problem.” Although there were countless places to hide the damn thing at her shop.

  “I don’t suppose you could open the altar again?” he asked.

  “I think that was a one-time occurrence.”

  “Why?”

  “The coins don’t feel special anymore. They’re just coins.”

  Drake rubbed his palm across his eyes. “Then where should we hide it?”

  “That’s what I asked you.”

  His eyes flashed with annoyance. Good. Annoyance was infinitely preferable to the desolate expression that took hold when he talked about his mother and sister.

  He slipped his hand from beneath hers but rather than pulling away, his fingers caught hers. Held hers.

  Damn her heart. Why did it insist on leaping? Sister. He thought of her like a sister.

  “Whatever we do, you have to be careful.”

  “I always am.”

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  She wasn’t going to argue with him. Instead she stared at the Bacardi bottle. “Do you have liquor in your room?”

  “Pardon?”

  “At the hotel, do you have liquor in your room?”

  He nodded. “A bottle of scotch. Why?”

  “Sometimes the best hiding places are in plain sight.”

  A slow smile transformed his face. The crags shattered and she caught a glimpse of the man behind all that stone, the brave man who laughed and grinned and teased. That his smile also transformed her organs to mush was neither here nor there. Christine firmed her chin and focused on slowing her heartbeat.

  “Should we go there now?”

  “Fine,” she croaked. She might—might—have done a few slightly reckless things over the past day and a half, but going back to Drake’s hotel room seemed the most dangerous of them all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Andrew Jackson clutched his hat in his hand. His eyes were cast toward the heavens as if he could see through the fog that hid the stars, even as his horse reared on its hind legs. The bronze general was the sole occupant of the square that bore his name.

  It seemed as if they’d been standing in the shadows of Pirate Alley for a lifetime. If truth be told, only thirty minutes had passed. But Christine’s ankle ached, her nerves quivered—from Drake’s nearness or the coming rendez vous, she wasn’t sure—and waiting wore on her like a pair of shoes a half-size too small.

  This lurking in the alley and watching the square was Drake’s idea. She’d just as soon climb up on the pedestal with General Jackson. From there she could see the whole square. “You’re sure about hiding?”

  “I’m sure.” His voice was as dry as the air was wet.

  She leaned her shoulders against the cathedral’s wall, pursed her lips, and sighed softly.

  Drake chuckled, a low sound no one more than a few feet away would hear.

  “What?”

  “You’re not very good at waiting, are you?”

  Driving the tip of her cane into the top of her only ally’s foot would be foolish. “I am too.”

  His brows rose.

  She lifted her cane.

  Drake, as if realizing his instep was in terrible danger, moved away from her.

  “I fret when there’s nothing to do.” Lord knew there was plenty to fret about. They waited for an unknown number of opponents. True, Drake wore more guns than he had hands, but she suspected bullets and gunpowder would do little to stop most of those converging on the square. They carried a flask filled with ersatz water. What if someone tested the water? What would happen to her father then?

  “Do you think Pére Antoine and Marie will come?” she asked. They needed all the help they could get.

  “I have my doubts.”

  She did too. “What about Hector?”

  “I’m not sure if he’s an ally.”

  Her thoughts exactly.

  This thinking alike was nearly as annoying as waiting. She huffed a breath.

  Again he chuckled and again her hand tightened on her cane.

  A movement in the square caught her attention and her heart lodged somewhere north of its usual location. Her eyes strained to see through the murky night. Nothing. Just the breeze wandering through the gnarled arms of a live oak.

  “It’s eleven.” Drake’s voice was so soft she wasn’t sure she’d heard him.

  “They’ll be here.” They—be it Youx or Desdemona or Hector—had to show up. She had to save her father.

  “There.” Drake reached past her and pointed to the corner where St. Peter met Decatur.

  “Who is it?” The darkness hid too much. She saw only a figure.

  “I can’t tell.”

  Whoever it was wore the night like a cloak, hugging the shadows, avoiding the feeble light cast by the lit windows in the Pontalba buildings. Then one by one, the windows faded to black.

  “Damn.” With one word, Drake summed up her disquiet. Who was powerful enough to snuff a city block’s worth of lights as easily as a candle’s flame?

  “That’s Hector.” Now Drake pointed toward the grassy area in the square. Hector strode forward with all the assurance of a man who couldn’t die.

  Where was Pére Antoine? Having Marie Laveau on their side might mean the difference between success and…death.

  A woman’s form appeared a short distance down Chartres Street, near the corner of St. Ann. Christine pointed at her. “Is that Desdemona?”

  “I can’t tell,” said Drake.

  Neither could she. The mist and the darkness kept everyone but Hector hidden from view.

  “Did you bring the water?” The voice came from right next to her.

  Christine jumped, clasped her hand to her throat, and scowled at the ghostly bureaucrat who’d visited her hotel room. “I thought you wanted coins.”

  The ghost shook his head. “We know you have the water. The coins are useless now.”

  “How?” asked Christine.

  The ghost blinked.

  “How do you know I have the water?”

  The ghost adjusted his pince-nez. “My employer knows everything that happens in New Orleans.”

  “Your employer?” Drake reached inside his coat as if searching for a cigar. “You’re dead. Who’s your employer?”

  The little man looked down his little nose then turned all his attention to her. “Where’s the water? If you k
now what’s good for you—”

  “I asked you a question,” said Drake.

  The ghost cast an annoyed glance in Drake’s direction.

  Drake withdrew a knife from inside his suit.

  The bureaucrat yawned.

  “He works for Youx,” said Christine.

  “And who does Youx work for?” asked Drake.

  “No one,” said the ghost.

  A slow, dangerous smile curved Drake’s lips.

  The ghost seemed not to notice.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The ghost shrugged, Drake’s opinion apparently of little or no importance. “You know what he’ll do to your father if you don’t give him the water?”

  Were her hands shaking? Christine snuck a peek. They looked steady, thank God. Her internal wobbles weren’t showing. She lifted her chin. “I don’t deal with bureaucrats.”

  “You’ll wish you had.”

  “Why didn’t you move on? When you died?” asked Drake.

  “It wasn’t my time.”

  “It is now.” Drake slashed the knife through the ghost’s chest, cutting through mist and darkness instead of blood and bone.

  The ghost emitted a high-pitched scream, one that bounced from building to building. Then the bureaucrat faded from view.

  “So much for remaining hidden.” Drake’s voice was wry.

  “You killed him!”

  Drake answered with one short, decisive shake of his head. “He threatened you. Besides, he was already dead. I just sent him where he should have gone when he died.”

  She opened her mouth to argue then closed it.

  “We have plenty of enemies. You’ll hardly miss him.”

  Sarcasm? Now?

  Christine took a step toward Chartres Street.

  “Wait.” Drake caught her arm. “Where are you going? Don’t make yourself a target.”

  She glanced over her shoulder and rolled her eyes.

  “I can make the trade,” he said. “You stay here where it’s safe.”

  “They know where we are. Nowhere is safe.”

  “Let me take them the flask.” He pulled her back, deeper into the alley’s shadows, and his fingers brushed against her cheek. “Please.”

  For a brief second, she was tempted. What a relief to hand over the flask to Drake, to let a big, strong man handle her problems. But, she couldn’t do it. As hard as things were, within her lay the strength to face her problems. She wanted Drake as a partner, not a savior. She shook her head. “No.”