Danse Macabre

by Katerina Martinez

  “Your morning? I thought you went home.”

  “I did… I can’t really get into it here, but you’ll definitely want to hear about it.”

  A shiver ran through me, then. I sighed. “You and Jared are total teases, and you can both go to hell.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Come over, class starts in about twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Nicole hung up, and I set the phone down on the bed beside me. It wasn’t like her to wake up in the middle of the afternoon like that. Nicole was a creature of habit and routine; for as long as I’d known her, she’d been waking up at seven in the morning to meditate, have breakfast, and go to work. She once said no to marathon-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy with me because it would mess up her sleep cycle, and she’d be suffering for weeks while she readjusted.

  A sleep-deprived Nicole was no fun at all.

  By the time I made it downstairs, three of the witches I was meant to be teaching today had arrived. The others made it soon after. The classes I led were mostly about self-defense and using magick to protect yourself, although sometimes I had to help witches learn how to use magick to inflict harm, too.

  There was an old creed that went “and ye harm none, do thou will,” which basically meant, don’t hurt people with magick or magick will come back to bite you in the butt. Speaking as someone who had spent a great deal of time dodging magickal attacks ever since I arrived in New Orleans, I was starting to think that creed didn’t hold much water.

  If there was some kind of karmic feedback for using magick to hurt other people, why didn’t it bite the people who wanted to hurt me?

  Nicole didn’t make it on time to help me lead the class, but I didn’t really need her help to show a couple of young witches how to defend themselves from magickal attacks. I couldn’t share with them the secret to Eliza’s protection, not because I hadn’t tried, but because it didn’t seem to work with anyone but me. Why that was, I didn’t know, but I had luckily come up with an off-brand version of her shield which would work in a pinch, and I made sure as many witches as possible knew how to summon it.

  Eliza’s shield had saved my life more times than I could remember; I wanted mine to save someone else’s, too.

  After the class, Nicole approached me in my office bearing the gift of coffee she’d picked up at the coffee place down the road. “I’m sorry I was late,” she said, setting the cup down on the desk in front of me.

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Unless you were with a significant other last night, I don’t see what could’ve kept you.”

  “Significant? What about insignificant?”

  “Nicole! What are you saying?”

  She laughed and sat down. “Trust me, the truth is far less exciting.”

  “Okay? So, what happened?”

  “Alright, so, I’m going home after the bar, and the city’s asleep, and I’m just alone with my thoughts for the few minutes it takes me to get to my place, when an idea hits me.”

  “What’s the idea?”

  “Remember last night we were talking about how the vampires were slipping through our psychic detection network? I thought maybe it had something to do with the fact that they’ve been drinking witch blood, and maybe that’s somehow given them abilities they didn’t have before, or at the very least it’s making them register as part witch to our network.”

  “It’s a strong theory, you could be onto something there.”

  “Right, well, a thought occurred to me. If that’s true, if they’re somehow using the blood they drink from witches to get past our security, then maybe we can use vampire blood in ways to affect them in ways they don’t expect.”

  She was talking about a practice known as sympathetic magick. Usually, when magick was done, it was directed toward a thing or a place the witch could either see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. Sympathetic magick, though, allowed a witch to affect something far away, without having to be in range with any of their regular senses. That’s where all the stories of witches needing locks of people’s hair before they could do magick on them came from.

  “Okay, but you’re not talking about using magick on any one vampire—you’re talking about somehow using vampire blood to affect all of them in some way. I don’t know if that’s possible.”

  “This is magick we’re talking about, anything’s possible.”

  “Yes and no. Magick has rules, right?”

  “But rules are meant to be broken.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “First you sleep in, then you’re late to a class, and now you’re talking about breaking rules? Where’s Nicole and what have you done with her?”

  She shrugged. “I think I’ve been paying too much attention to you. All your bad habits are rubbing off on me.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t keep too many of them because I’m a bad influence.” I shook my head. “Anyway, what you’re talking about, I’ve never heard anything like it before. Using the blood of one vampire, any vampire, to affect a whole group of them… unless they shared the same—”

  Oh, crap… the lightbulb flashed in my mind, shining brightly as I caught on to Nicole’s suggestion.

  “You get it now?” she asked.

  “Wait… you don’t think… I mean, you don’t think all of the vampires in New Orleans are Marie’s direct blood descendants, do you?”

  “Maybe not all of them, but the new ones?”

  I ran my fingers through my hair, then reached for my coffee and took a sip. “That’s… yeah, I’m not gonna lie, that sounds entirely plausible. Wow.”

  “Wow is right… Maddie, if this idea has any weight, we could have the key to toppling their entire system in a way they can’t defend from, they can’t hide from. Could you imagine sending them all out of New Orleans with a psychic command sent directly into their brains? We’d only need to affect one of them, and the signal would carry through the connection that already exists between all of them.”

  Like dominos. “That could really work… I mean, assuming we can get it to work, it would be exactly what we need.”

  “Yeah, now all we need is the blood of a vampire created by Marie.”

  I sighed and shut my eyes as realization hit me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There was good news and bad news. The good news was, we happened to have someone on our team whose blood came directly from Marie. The bad news was, it was Delphine, and I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen to her if we used her blood as a conduit to affect Marie and her spawn. Between Nicole, Nina, and myself we already had the makings of a pretty powerful trio of witches; if anyone was going to pull Nicole’s theoretical plan off, it was going to be us.

  But would we be able to separate Delphine from whatever magick we would inject into Marie’s bloodline?

  That put a downer on things. On the one hand, there was a possibility that using Delphine’s blood—assuming she was okay with the idea—meant we wouldn’t have to go hunting for vampires, catch one alive, and hope its blood belonged to Marie. Just thinking about the kind of manpower and hours that was going to take made my head spin. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to hurt Delphine, and I didn’t want her or Jean Luc going away because they’d been infected with a psychic command.

  There had to be another way of doing this; there’s always a plan B. Only problem was, I couldn’t see it.

  I spent what was left of the afternoon trying to determine whether Nicole’s idea held water, and while my knowledge of magick was advanced, I couldn’t say with certainty that it would work. I’d never heard of anything like what she’d suggested before, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been done before, only that the information I wanted didn’t exist in the books I’d gone through.

  Jared tried his best to help, but he wasn’t a witch, and he didn’t have the same kind of understanding as me or Nicole, so it was down to the two of us.

  “Sympathetic magick is tricky,” Nicole said, “You can’t just click y
our fingers and make magick happen… you have to ritualize the spell, and sometimes you need more components than just the person’s blood or hair.”

  “Okay,” I said, “So, how do we ritualize this spell? And what kind of components might we need?”

  “The blood, for sure. But what else we’d need depends entirely on what we want to do to them. Do we want to send them out of New Orleans and make them never come back? If we did that with a psychic suggestion, there’s always the possibility that the suggestion won’t take, or that it wont hold. We need something stronger, a bigger deterrent to get them out of the city and make sure they stay out.”

  My stomach turned upside down. “I don’t know if we should be fighting to keep all of the vampires out,” I said.

  “Not all of them, just the assholes.”

  “Right, but who are we to decide which of them are assholes? For all we know, Marie made some vampires who don’t want to wipe us all out.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Have you met any of those?”

  I shrugged. “There’s Jean Luc? Delphine?”

  Nicole tapped her chin with the pencil she’d been using to take notes on her findings. “How is Jean Luc? I feel like I haven’t spoken to him in years.”

  I sighed. “He’s been laying low. Marie’s resurgence really screwed with him, and he blames himself for the… y’know, for the night that Remy was killed.”

  “Why does he blame himself?”

  “He thinks he should’ve seen it coming, at the very least. Thinks he could’ve done better to protect us all.”

  “Marie and Tamara were both three steps ahead of us. It’s a miracle we got out of that entire situation with as few casualties as we did.”

  “I know, but he’s… you know how he is.”

  “Hot?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Deep. Complex. He’s also a vampire. I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole thing eats him up for a couple of centuries.”

  “Centuries! We can’t have him cooped up, wallowing about what happened for centuries. We’ll all be dead before he snaps out of it.”

  “I know, but he won’t let me get close to him. I don’t know what to do.”

  She pursed her lips. “You know why he’s keeping his distance from you really, right?”

  I turned my eyes up at her. “Why?”

  “Really? You’re gonna make me spell it out?”

  She didn’t have to, but I wanted her to anyway. We hadn’t really talked about it before, and I wanted to get her take, untarnished by my own opinions. “Yes.”

  Nicole paused and set the pen down on the table. “Jared,” she said, “Jean Luc has been pulling away ever since Jared entered your life. If you ask me, I think he’s using this situation as a cover for how he really feels.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if he’s… jealous, not that a man like him strikes me as the jealous type, then it’s probably more comfortable for him to fabricate an excuse as to why he doesn’t want to talk to you than to actually face the fact of the matter.”

  “Which is…”

  “That he’s had the hots for you ever since you met, and now he can’t have you.”

  A lump of ice settled into my stomach, setting off an ironically warm pulse that travelled through my entire body, tickling even the tips of my fingers and toes. She was right. Jean Luc and I had been close when this all started, when I moved into his house, when Remy was first introducing himself to me. I could go further than Nicole though; I had a feeling Jean Luc had been pulling away from me ever since he realized I wasn’t Eliza.

  I’d always wondered if the near instant connection and attraction we’d had was because of her, because of our blood relation. It was a source of insecurity, at the very least, and maybe that made me not open up to him as much as he may have liked. Jean Luc and I had of course shared a rocky past, maybe if Jared hadn’t shown up things would’ve been different, but he shouldn’t be hiding from me simply due to our inability to connect romantically.

  I shook my head, shooing the thoughts away. “Anyway, let’s get back to this; I can probably—”

  “Wait,” Nicole said, “I think I found something.”

  “Found what?”

  Nicole handed me the book she’d been reading and fingered a paragraph for me to read. “This mentions Eliza… what book is this?”

  “I don’t know, it’s unmarked.”

  “Unmarked?”

  I checked the spine and dust cover, but found nothing. No inscriptions, nothing carved into the hard, front panel of the book, nothing written into the first page that may talk about who the book belonged to. The book looked like a journal, and it started as such, with an entry going as far back as around the time of Remy’s uprising against the vampires. There, about six pages in, was a note about a witch who was harboring vampires and renegade witches in her magickally protected home. Her name was Eliza, but there was something else; something I didn’t know about, something Eliza hadn’t written about in her own journals but was here, as clear as the bright full moon on a cloudless night.

  Eliza didn’t protect her home on her own, she had help from other, capable witches, and among those named in this book, was “Holy shit... it’s Delphine!”

  “Well, hold on a sec because we don’t know if it’s talking about the same person.”

  I kept reading. I didn’t know who had written the journal, but comparing it to Eliza’s writing, I could tell it wasn’t her. The pen strokes were still light, and delicate, which made me think it could’ve been a woman—though it could just as easily have been a man—and whoever was writing it was another witch, one in Eliza’s camp, but the author never identified him or herself; I got the impression this person wanted to create an anonymous account of what was happening so it could be documented and at least appear unbiased.

  Whoever it was, though, knew their magick, and was close to Eliza.

  “This is huge,” I said, “Do you know if there are any more of these in the library?”

  “Unmarked books? I don’t know, but I can start looking.”

  “You do that.” I picked the book up and stuffed it into my backpack.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to talk to Delphine and see if reading this book shakes any of her memories back to the surface.”

  Nicole got to work, diligently checking through our stores of books for anything that looked like it may have been written by this anonymous author. Meanwhile, I set off to the French Quarter, where I’d be able to find Delphine… and Jean Luc. I was having trouble recalling the last time he and I had a conversation, or even the last time I had entered their home. Sure, it was a haven for vampires, and I respected that enough to stay away from it unless invited—the vampires treated my Garden District home with the same regard and didn’t just show up unannounced.

  The sun had gone down only a few minutes ago, and like a werewolf under the light of the full moon, already New Orleans had undergone its nightly transformation. Canal Street was packed with people from all over, hordes of tourists flooding the French Quarter by way of Bourbon and Royal street. There was music all around, and even from the back of the cab I could smell food, so much food, just about everywhere.

  The deeper one went into the French Quarter, though, the quieter things got. Most of the Quarter’s liveliness happened toward Canal Street, while the vampires’ house was on the opposite end, where the night was quietest, and only the faintest hints of music would reach. The streets were so quiet, in fact, so devoid of people around here, I’d have felt a little uneasy if I wasn’t a witch with awesome powers.

  It was those very same awesome powers that alerted me to the very real possibility that I was being followed.

  I tried not to turn around, tried to not even acknowledge the almost silent footfalls matching my own. For how long had I been followed? I didn’t know. I’d jumped out of the cab two blocks down, as was the vampire’s rule. They didn’t want cars stopping
directly outside their place, because their place was meant to be abandoned.

  If I’d jumped out of the cab two blocks away, though, then whoever was following me must have clocked onto me only seconds after I started walking, because I hadn’t even crossed a single block yet. Careful not to make my actions too obvious, I gripped the book under my left arm a little more tightly and prepared my right hand to do magick with. When I hit the crossing up ahead, instead of going straight toward the vampire’s new corner house, I made a left.

  Sure enough, the person behind me matched my movements; not only the turn I’d made, but also my pace.

  Ah crap.

  The nape of my neck started to prickle the instant before I spun around on the spot, my right hand poised to strike, like a coiled cobra. The shadows clung to the man behind me, but I was able to pick him out of the surroundings and deliver a magick backhand hit that sent him flying into the brick wall immediately beside him.

  The vampire glared and hissed. “Witch,” it spat, but I didn’t engage it in idle chit-chat, instead I readied another magick attack, this time throwing an invisible wrecking ball worth of pressure against it, pinning it to the spot. Desperately it struggled to break free, dead veins popping on its neck, muscles bursting with undead might, but even its superhuman strength wasn’t a match for my magick.

  I held my hand out and continued delivering pulse after pulse of pressure, making sure that vampire wasn’t going anywhere. He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, your usual stalking attire—no gothic cloaks for modern vampires. He had short, wispy black hair, sunken cheeks, and an overbite that looked ridiculous when combined with his sharp fangs.

  “Big mistake,” I said. “Big fucking mistake.”

  “Let me go, witch!” it snarled.

  “Now, why would I do a thing like that? You just attacked me in the French Quarter. If I don’t kill you, the vampires that own this place will.”

  “I’m with those vampires, you idiot.”

  “Really? If you were, then you’d know who I am. Who am I?”

  The vampire snarled, but said nothing. I delivered another pulse of telekinetic power that made the brick around him start to crack. It grunted loudly, not from the pain it was in but from the effort of trying to escape. “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” it said.