Danse Macabre

by Katerina Martinez

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t even think he can, and psychic magick isn’t my wheelhouse—that’s Nicole’s.”

  “Good thing I’m awake,” Nicole’s voice floated down from the next floor up. I hadn’t even seen her come into view, but there she was, standing at the top of the stairs and slowly making her way down, using the banister for support. She looked pale and tired, like she hadn’t eaten or slept in days, but she was alive, and that was something at least.

  Stunned silence moved through the gathering, until Jared finally spoke for all of us. “What the fuck is going on?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Something terrible is happening in New Orleans. As I sat watching the gathering, I found myself fighting this awful, burning feeling in the pit of my stomach, like someone had skewered it and placed it over a fire to cook. First, we fight a dhampir in the middle of the street, then that thing shows up, and now Nicole wakes up at almost the exact same moment.

  Sure, it could’ve been coincidence, but there was something in the air, too—a charge, like a static current, the calm before the storm. None of this was happening by accident. It was an escalation, one thing after another, and I wasn’t about to ignore my own instincts, not when they’d proven me right before, time after time.

  “We need to go,” I said. “Now.”

  “Go?” Jared asked, turning around, “Go where?”

  “We need to find Marie and the dhampir. Tonight. Before the sun comes up.”

  Delphine moved toward me, and the thing she had tracked into the house, the thing that couldn’t speak and reeked of ash and charred flesh, followed her like a loyal little puppy. “We have no hope of finding Marie,” Delphine said. “She is very well hidden, and even better protected.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think we’d have to try very hard, she’s up to something. I can feel it.”

  “I can feel it too,” Nicole said, “And I want to help.”

  Now that she’d had something to eat and drink, all resemblance to the zombie standing in my living room had gone, but she still had trouble getting up from the couch she’d been sitting on. She was exhausted, spent, she needed sleep—real sleep—but I could see it in her eyes, she wanted to fight, and I had to be the one to tell her to sit on her hands.

  “Nicole… you can’t. You’ve just gone through something… I can’t even imagine what you went through. If it’s even half of what I experienced, you should be sleeping right now.”

  “What I went through was… I don’t know how to describe it. It was like being her prisoner. I could feel her, I could sense her… she had her claws wrapped around me, wouldn’t let me go. She’d ask me things.”

  “You talked to her?”

  Nicole shook her head. “I didn’t. I could feel her trying to break in, prodding, poking, but I didn’t give her anything.”

  “How did you break free?” Jared asked.

  A sly grin spread across her face. “My magick was stronger than hers. She doesn’t have magick—not really. It’s this other witch, the half-witch you’re talking about; she was the one who helped Marie put me under. You say you fought her in the street this morning… that may have been enough to help me wriggle out of her grasp and conjure enough magick to wake up.”

  “But that happened this morning,” Jean Luc said, “It is now night time.”

  “Magick isn’t an exact science,” Nicole replied, “And I don’t really have an answer. All I know is that one minute I was being held down by a powerful force, and the next minute I was stronger than it and able to get away. I don’t know what it means or how I succeeded, but I’m totally gonna take the credit.”

  I nodded and hugged her. “It’s yours to take. I’m just glad you’re awake.”

  Jared flashed me a worried look from across Nicole’s shoulder, pressing his lips into a thin line. I understood his meaning entirely. What if she was allowed to leave for another reason? I couldn’t dismiss the idea, I may even have felt the grumblings of it myself, hiding in the back of my mind, waiting to come up when the dust had settled.

  I separated from her, then addressed the group. “More than ever, then, we have to get moving and we need to find Marie. And if it turns out she’s already looking to come to us, then we should at least choose where the fight will take place.”

  “Should the fight not happen here?” Jean Luc asked. “This is a defensible position, Marie will have trouble fighting us here.”

  “Would you invite your enemy into your own house so they can trash it? She already destroyed one of my homes, I won’t let her take another.”

  “He’s right,” Delphine said, “What if leaving this house is what she wants us to do, if only to strike again at the place where you feel safe?”

  “She won’t,” Nicole said, “Marie doesn’t care about this house or any of our houses—she wants to kill us all. That’s what she’s putting all of her focus into.”

  “Are you sure of this?” Jean Luc asked.

  “I’d bet my life on it. Whatever Marie is up to, it doesn’t involve burning down the places where we live.”

  I nodded. “So, then we’ll go out and find her, and we’ll finish this whole thing once and for all. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of fighting assholes who want to bring our city to ruin.”

  No one said a word, but agreement pulsed through the room like a warm wave. Jared walked up behind me and wrapped a hand around my waist. “We should arm up if we’re going to war.”

  “Yeah… let’s do that. Meanwhile, Jean Luc, see what you can do about locating the dhampir’s home. Nina, Nicole and I will try to track her down with magick, though with Nicole being drained as she is, that may prove difficult. We need to work together on this.”

  “Vampire and witch,” Jean Luc said.

  “Witch and vampire… I think tonight we’d have made Eliza proud.”

  “I know she is proud.” He turned to his people. “Hurry, we don’t have time to waste.”

  Delphine was about to go with them, when she stopped and looked at me. “I would like to stay by your side,” she said.

  “Me?” I asked, “Don’t you want to be with your people?”

  “I am with my people. I was a witch, once; one of Eliza’s friends. It was my magick that helped protect vampires from Remy and his crusade, it was my opinions Eliza sought. I am only a vampire because I was taken away from my people and was turned in a blasphemous ritual… for a long time I have struggled with the thought that I do not belong. Now I know why. I am a bat without wings. I cannot fly with them, but I can run with you.”

  Smiling, I nodded. “Alright,” I said, “Well, in that case, your job is simple… tell us who the hell that is.”

  Delphine looked over at the quiet, shambling shadow at her back. “In truth, I do not know,” she said, “Though I feel he is harmless.”

  “That’s something.”

  “Why he is here, or what he wants—or even how he came to be—is a mystery, though I recall similar strange events happening the night I came back to life.”

  “You mentioned this… could it have anything to do with the dhampir?”

  “Possibly, but we must not assume as much.”

  Nicole stepped in, blinking away the tiredness. “I’ll help,” she said, “If he’ll let me, I can try and open a psychic bridge between us, maybe see if he’ll talk to me that way.”

  Delphine glanced across her shoulder. The zombie nodded, having understood. “It seems he is agreeable.”

  “Let’s head into another room, then. I’ll need quiet… and maybe a stiff drink.”

  Nicole and Delphine moved away from the living room, the zombie trailing behind them. At least it’s not leaving dirt everywhere.

  “You really think we’ll find her tonight?” Nina asked, snapping me out of that line of thought.

  I turned to look at her, nodding. “I think so. I think she’s done with waiting, too.”

  “And if we’re heading into a trap by
sallying forth and meeting her on the field of battle?”

  “Then we’re heading into a trap, but at least we’ll have a shot at killing her. Sitting around in my house all day and waiting isn’t gonna get us anywhere. It hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Meanwhile, Marie has been gaining power ever since we fought that first night.”

  “Right, which means we don’t know what she’s capable of… Maddie, I don’t want to sound like a stick in the mud, but you need to really think about what we’re about to do here.”

  I sighed. “Do we have a choice, Nina?”

  She looked the other way and chewed the inside of her lip. “We could run?”

  “Run? Leave New Orleans?”

  Nina shrugged. “Let the vampires take it. We get away with our lives. Vampires don’t travel far from the cities they nest in, right?”

  I frowned at her. “Number one,” I said, checking things off with my fingers, “Who is to say she’ll decide to leave us alone if we leave? Number two, if we leave, we’re spitting on everything we’ve worked for over the last few months—every fight, every death, every drop of blood spilled, every spell cast will have been for nothing. And number three, New Orleans is my home now, and I’m going to defend it from the likes of Marie. If you don’t want to, you can leave.”

  Nina put her hands up. “Woah,” she said, “I didn’t mean it that way, shiesh. You asked a question and I answered.”

  “Think of a better answer next time.”

  She scowled, then, and walked off.

  I didn’t like the way we’d left things, but I also hadn’t liked what she’d said. Running was an option. Of course it was. We’d leave during the day and the vampires would have a hard time catching us, if they decided they wanted to at all. But I didn’t want to leave. Ever since I’d learned about what happened to Eliza, my life had been dedicated to trying to make things right. I wasn’t about to quit now.

  Without wasting another moment, I grabbed my jacket and headed out, Jared following closely. The plan was to let Nina and Nicole work with Delphine to figure out where the zombie had come from and why it was even here. Meanwhile, Jared and I would go on our own hunt, narrowing the dhampir’s location down by tracing the magick she used near the butcher’s shop earlier on.

  This wasn’t an easy thing to do. Hours had passed, and magick didn’t linger in a place for very long. There was also the problem that other witches also left traces of their passing when the performed magick, and then the dhampir’s signal would get lost in the mix, especially if enough time went by. Lucky for me, a dhampir’s signal was unique enough that when I caught onto it, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it belonged to her.

  Jared drove, following my instructions. Being led around by the currents of magick was like trying to pinpoint the source of a song floating on the back of a breeze, surrounded by fog. You’d go one way and maybe the signal would get a little stronger, but then it would weaken all of a sudden, and you’d have to double back to catch it again before you could attempt to follow it one more time.

  It felt to me like she hadn’t used any magick at all after the confrontation outside the butcher’s shop, which made her even harder to track down. The signal was at its strongest, however, in one of the quieter districts of New Orleans on the other side of the river. Here there were mostly houses, small ones, the kinds owned by those picture-perfect families—the two parents, three kids, white picket fence variety. Her trail had led to this neighborhood, but where exactly she was right now, I couldn’t tell.

  Jared stopped the bike, and I hopped off the back. It was quiet, here. Across the road from me, a woman wearing yoga pants, sneakers, and a work out tank top was walking her dog while talking on her phone. Cars drifted along slowly, their tires hissing as they rolled over the wet asphalt. In a back yard somewhere, another dog was barking at the moon above.

  “This is where she went?” Jared asked.

  “More like where she fled,” I said. “We must have spooked her. I doubt she’d have gone all the way to the Garden District from here just for pig’s blood. There are probably a bunch of butchers along these roads.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to feed too close to home.”

  “Could be… but it could just as easily be that her home was in the Garden District. Her safehouse, though, is probably around here somewhere.”

  “So, what’s the plan?”

  I scanned the neighborhood, noticing the little things like the way the wind was blowing, or the smell of the river. My phone buzzed in my pocket—not a call, but a message from Nicole. Magick not working on our friend, but I think it’s trying to talk.

  I wrote back. See if you can help it talk. Still no luck finding our target.

  She replied instantly. Be careful.

  I let my phone slip back into my pocket. She was here, the dhampir, I knew it. I could sense her. But there was something about her that made her naturally difficult to pin down. Maybe it was her vampire side. Vampires were notoriously good at remaining hidden; maybe being dhampir gave her certain defenses against being picked out by sense alone. I’d have to lure her out, make her come to me.

  “Get ready,” I said to Jared.

  “Ready?” he asked. He hadn’t gotten off his bike.

  “Yeah. Get ready to turn the bike on again in a hurry if we need it, but not yet.”

  “Maddie? What are you doing?”

  I didn’t reply. I looked around for the nearest power transformer, then I raised my hands toward it, concentrated, and at my command, the transformer shorted out with a series of sparks, and the entire neighborhood went dark. But I didn’t stop there. Swirling my wrists lightly, I caused a breeze to roll in from over the river and made it push through the entire neighborhood, making sure to sprinkle a little stardust onto the back of it. These motes of magick were invisible to humans, but to any witch worth their salt, they’d be as plainly visible as fireflies, and they’d tell the witch another was near.

  In this case, I wanted the message to be clear; the lights had gone out, and I was the one who had caused the blackout.

  Already I could hear people’s voices rising in the dark. It wasn’t just the houses that’d had the lights snuffed out, but also the streets. The only lights in the neighborhood came from cars, of from the flashlights of people scrambling about in their houses looking for candles. It wouldn’t take long for the power to come back, but I only needed a few minutes. If this witch was in fact dhampir, then her predatory instincts would kick in, and she’d want to trace the trail of magick fireflies to its source, if not to kill me and drink my blood, then to at least get me out of her turf.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?” Jared asked.

  “I don’t,” I said, “This is only a hunch.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  I shrugged. “Well, then some folks will have to cook dinner a little later than usual tonight. No big."

  “Could be a little big to some people, don’t you think?”

  “Jared, do you want to catch this witch, or do you want to argue about my methods?”

  “I’m not arguing you, I’m just making an observation.”

  A minute passed, then another, and another. Some of the neighbors had stepped out onto their front lawns and were discussing the blackout with other neighbors. Everyone, it sounded like, had a commentary to make about how there was light on the Crescent, and on the other side of the river, so this wasn’t city-wide—it was just happening here—and oh, this was just their luck.

  Distantly I caught the sound of a squad car’s sirens growing closer. It was being followed by a fire truck, and possibly an ambulance. Dammit. They’d be here in a moment, and the dhampir wasn’t taking the bait. I was halfway to coming up with an alternative plan, one that involved not darkness, but fire, when my magick senses tingled, and somehow, I saw her standing across from where I was, on the other side of the street.

  Recognition, on both our parts, was instantaneous, but instead of r
unning she just watched me from across the road. I, however, wasn’t nearly as inactive. I stretched my hand toward her, palm opened wide, then I turned my hand into a fist and made the dhampir sail across to where I was standing, but she was easily able to break out of the telekinetic hold, stopping about twenty feet away from me.

  “You shouldn’t have tried to find me,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have run from us the first time,” I said.

  The dhampir wound back her arm, growled, and pushed a wave of magick at me that was so powerful, it cracked the asphalt and the sidewalk as it hurtled toward me. I dashed around Jared’s bike, putting myself between him and the dhampir’s magick, and then I crossed my arms in front of my face and summoned Eliza’s shield. The dhampir’s magick slammed into me head on, then washed around me like a real wave, dissipating after a second or two.

  “Your shield is impressive, but it isn’t yours, is it?” she asked.

  “What do you know about my shield?”

  “I know more than you could possibly imagine. I’ve seen so much more than you think. Which is why I know what you’re doing here, is only delaying the inevitable. Give in, Madison. Marie will make it quick, and then we can all rest.”

  We can all?

  “Who are you?”

  She snarled at the question, then she started running, taking only three steps before becoming black mist that melted into the dark surroundings. I turned to Jared. “We need to get back to the house,” I said.

  Jared kicked the bike to life and I hopped on the back, fishing my phone out with one hand and directing a message to Nicole. Tell Jean Luc she’s coming to the Garden District from the west, tell him to catch her.

  It was only a hunch I’d had, a fleeting thought that the dhampir would go back to the Garden District, but I decided to trust that hunch because it wasn’t entirely coming from me.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  My hunch had been right after all. By the time Jared and I arrived at outskirts of the Garden District, Jean Luc was there to greet us. With a finger he beckoned Jared follow him, and he did, several streets down to where Jean Luc’s people had intercepted the dhampir and knocked her out. She was a fast and powerful opponent, but she’d been in a hurry to make it back to her home and hadn’t noticed the vampire ambush lying in wait.