Black Magic Bayou (10 page)

“I don’t know how else to explain it to you any better. It looked like a fucking demon, what else do you want me to tell you?”

“How many fae have you ever seen in person? They can be pretty creepy.”

“But humans can
see
fae. Only Wilder and I could see this thing.”

“Iiiiiinteresting.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t really my first word to describe it. Plus it knew my name. It said it
knew
me.”

“It knew your name?” All the lightness and joking vanished from her tone, telling me perhaps this was a bit of information worth being worried about.

“It said,
I know you, Eugenia
. Not ‘Genie’ like it overheard someone in the house saying it.
Eugenia
.”

Wilder came in through the side door wearing his grey mechanic overalls and a white T-shirt stained with grease. He wiped his brow with the back of his arm, smearing a black trail close to his hairline.

He looked as though he’d stepped right out of a porno and was going to ask if I needed a tune up.

“You needed a tune up,” he said.

I swallowed hard.

“Genie, focus,” Secret insisted.

“Sorry, did you say something?”

“I asked you if you let it touch you.”

“No.” I replayed the entire scene in the sorority house bedroom, going over it frame by frame. It hadn’t touched me, right? Not that I could remember. I was pretty sure Wilder and I had made it through the door before the thing had a chance to come close to me. “No,” I repeated it more firmly this time.

She made a small, thoughtful sound, and muttered, “Keaty, you’d know what to do. What would you do?”

I don’t think I was meant to have heard it, so I stayed quiet.

When she’d finished debating what her dead former mentor would do in her shoes, she cleared her throat and said, “You might be a little fucked.”

Magnolia, sitting on the couch behind me, clearly heard this because she let out a snort laugh which she then stifled by pretending to sneeze. Once again I was reminded why Mags would never be the ideal candidate to conduct any kind of espionage.

She was also the only one here other than me who was acquainted with Secret and her very particular demeanor. This kind of thing was nothing new for her, and both Mags and I knew that. It was the only reason I didn’t want to rip my hair out over how useless her assessment was.

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“Look, Gene, I don’t want to state the obvious or anything, but a demon is a bit above your paygrade. That’s nothing against you as a wolf, or a witch, or an Alpha, but the last demon I faced stole my identity, and I needed a
magic fucking sword
to kill it. Do you have a magic sword?”

“I do not.” I didn’t have any swords, unlike my crazy-ass sibling who apparently kept them lying around her house.

I added
get a sword
to my mental to-do list.

Hey, it couldn’t hurt, right?

“Have you talked to
La Sorcière
?”

Memere
was as much Secret’s great-grandmother as she was mine, but I was the only one who had managed to cultivate anything resembling a warm relationship with the old lady. It was sort of inevitable after living alone with her in the swamp for four years. Still, it felt oddly cold to hear her called by the name of her legend.
La Sorcière
was a ghost story, something even tourists whispered about when they did boat tours through the swamps.

To me she was the woman who had taught me to be strong and that it was okay to have power and
not
use it.

But it had never occurred to me to ask her for help. For starters, it would be an enormous pain in the ass just to find her. The Maurepas Swamp was the last place we’d seen each other, but that didn’t mean she would still be there. I had a feeling the only reason we’d stayed in one place so long was because she didn’t feel like uprooting me.

I could go back to the tree house we’d lived in—literally a house inside a tree—but if she wasn’t there, what then? I’d have wasted a full day of searching and not be any closer to an answer.

“No. I need something a little closer to home.” Of course, with the simple act of saying those words out loud, I suddenly knew what I had to do. And boy oh boy was I going to hate it. “Actually, I think I might have an idea.”

“Okay. I gotta run, sweetie. I’ll call you once I’ve killed a false god, ’kay?” She hung up.

You could always count on a McQueen girl to stop a conversation in its tracks.

The Dungeon was one of those New Orleans establishments that managed to be both a tourist trap and also a completely legitimate supernatural haven.

It was tucked down a narrow passage off Toulouse Street, only a hop, skip, and a drunk stagger away from the supreme shitshow that was Bourbon Street.

I was glad I didn’t have to linger on the main drag tonight. As if spending time in a house possessed by a demon wasn’t bad enough, I would prefer not to be stuck in an actual hell on earth.

It was late afternoon, so the streets were mostly filled with middle-aged couples and small gaggles of tourists on walking ghost tours. Man alive did humans love to rub elbows with anything that seemed even remotely paranormal. Somehow, knowing it was real did nothing to dampen their excitement. If anything, when vampires and werewolves were outed, the tourist trade in New Orleans had gone through a new heyday.

“Now be careful everyone, you never know when you might walk by a werewolf. The city is
filled
with them,” a tattooed tour guide announced dramatically.

All forty-eight of us? Sure, we were coming out of the woodwork.

I huffed an annoyed sigh as I tried to get through them. “Just wait until after dark. The vampires come
to
you,” I said.

This sent up a furious tittering through the group, which the poor guide was not at all prepared to subdue. Since sunset was imminent, some of them were thrilled with the possibility, while others wanted to go back to the bar immediately. Maybe it wasn’t nice of me to stir the pot, but I
was
a witch; it was kind of what we did.

Jimmy, the regular guard, was sitting on a chair next to the entrance door, playing on a bright red Nintendo DS. The console looked extra small in his enormous black hands, and infinitely absurd given his shaved head and the large spider tattoo above one ear.

“Aw,
come on
,” he growled. Typically he wore sunglasses, at least when a more human crowd was around. Right now, however, before things got busy, they were pushed up on his shiny head, giving me an uninterrupted view of his yellow-green reptilian eyes. When he blinked, a pair of clear eyelids closed vertically over the iris before his human lids shut. It was creepy to watch.

He glanced up from his game, hearing me come down the path.

“Do you know how hard it is to catch a Mew?” He waved the device at me.

“Um, I know how hard it is to catch a
rabbit
,” I offered.

“Nah. You have an unfair advantage there, don’t you, Princess?”

Aha, he’d
finally
remembered me. It seemed like every time I came here we played a super-irritating game where he asked me for proof of who I was before he’d let me in. Today he was more interested in catching Pokémon than messing with me, much to my relief.

“I don’t know if it’s an advantage, so much as natural selection.”

“Well, I’d like to naturally select this bloody Mew into my Poké Ball.”

“That sounds dirty, Jimmy. Are you trying to seduce me?”

This got a chuckle out of the big man, who got to his feet and ambled over to the door to open it for me. “Aw, baby girl, you are not nearly ready for me to try seducing you yet.”

I smiled at him and gave a saucy wink. “My loss.”

“Bossman is upstairs.”

“How’s his mood?”

“That all depends. You here to give him something or take something?”

“Can’t do one without the other.”

He nodded like he knew exactly what I meant. “Taking something then.”

“Yup.”

Jimmy laughed again, only this time it sounded cold and humorless. “Good luck, little lady.”

I loved the sound of that. Nothing like a seven-foot-tall reptile-man looking at you with pity because he knows what you’re up against.

Beau Cain, the proprietor of The Dungeon, was the kind of man people were referring to when they said,
I know a guy.
He was that ephemeral person in the know, someone who could hook you up or take you out. There wasn’t anything that went on in this town Beau didn’t know about or have his fingers in.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure which of my two problems I wanted his help with more. He could probably point me in the direction of the real killer of the Treme bar incident without batting an eyelash. But if I worked with Detective Perry, I could manage the same thing, just with a little more time and effort.

The demon at Tansy’s sorority house, on the other hand, was well beyond my scope. I was in way over my head and needed someone who knew all about the paranormal if I was going to figure out what the thing was and how I could kill it.

If
it could be killed.

I chased that thought out of my mind and ducked under Jimmy’s arm, into the darkness that was The Dungeon. The place was remarkable, really. It looked like a movie set for a BDSM Dracula porno. The walls were covered with salacious Victorian-era etchings, and a casket with bright red lining was propped up at the far wall, just waiting for tourists to pose in front of it.

The place had looked like this long before vampires and werewolves had been made public, and since then a lot of other places had opened trying to capture the same ambiance, but none had succeeded.

What made The Dungeon truly unique was that human patrons could actually rub shoulders with supernatural beasties from time to time. The bar was split into two levels. The main floor housed a regular watering hole where anyone over the age of twenty-one could come in and sip reasonably priced whisky and tequila, and maybe take home a warm body to spend the night with. Or, failing that, there were T-shirts for twenty-five bucks each.

At the back of the bar, though, was a narrow staircase up to the second level, and in order to gain access to the elevated playground, you had to have a little something special in your blood.

Humans weren’t allowed past the guard, with a few very select exceptions.

I waved at the woman lounging at the bottom of the stairs staring at her cell phone screen. Lola, leader of the New Orleans snow leopards, was a long-time personal guard to Cain. I’d been here a couple times to visit my friend Delphine, and Lola now knew me at a glance.

“Hey, Alpha dog,” Lola said. Since she wasn’t a wolf, she wasn’t obligated to be overly respectful of my title. But in Lola’s case I knew she was having fun and not trying to insult me, so I didn’t bristle at the greeting.

She was a big woman. Not in the fat sense, but more like she could probably do a hundred chest presses with me as the weight and not even break a sweat. Her shoulders were broad, and she was muscular enough to make her clothes fit a little too tight. I suspected if she flexed really hard they’d rip right off her Hulk-style.

Lola also looked like a freaking model. She was tall and moved with catlike grace thanks to her leopard blood. Her big frame didn’t seem masculine or bulky. She could kick your ass and stay hot the entire time.

This afternoon her auburn hair was pulled back into its usual high ponytail, which swayed side to side as she came towards me, her arms spread in an offer of a hug. I accepted the warm welcome and was enveloped by her, outmatched in both height and size.

My inner wolf bristled at the closeness of a big cat, but I tamped down my natural urge to growl, because this was someone I liked, and to be perfectly honest I really needed a hug.

“You here to see Del or the big man?” she asked.

Delphine, one of the first friends I’d made when I moved to the city, was Cain’s ladylove. If anyone in the building could rival Lola for a place in Merriam-Webster next to the definition for
Amazon
, it was Del. She was a magnetic ball of pure happiness who made everyone inside her orbit feel like the center of their own private universe.

I
wished
I was here to see Del. She’d make me feel like I could handle this and nothing bad would happen to my pack or my friends. I’d leave here with an inflated ego instead of answers. Too bad for me I needed the information more than the pick-me-up.

“Cain,” I told Lola.

She grimaced before she could stop herself. “You sure, hon? Is it something that might be able to wait a couple of days? He’s not very… Well, he’s not in the best mood today.”

I sighed. “Jimmy mentioned something along those lines. If it could wait, I would put it off, but I don’t think it can.” An alarm went off in my head, reminding me there was something about this whole mess Lola might want to know. “Actually, what I’m here about concerns your leap.” I was awfully proud of myself for remembering to use the right leopard word for pack.

This definitely got her attention. Lola straightened up, her whole demeanor changing from jovial to all business in a flash. “My leap? What could you be involved in that would come back to them? Are any of my girls in trouble?” I couldn’t tell if she was worried or mad; her voice was simply tight and strained. She was like a parent ready to protect or to punish depending on whatever I said next.

“Cassandra is one of yours, right?” I already knew the answer, but it seemed like the polite thing to do was to get confirmation.

Lola nodded. “Is she okay?”

“Right now, yes.”

“What does that mean?” Her voice was slow and quiet, a barely restrained menace at the back of her words. We’d gone from friends to me being the messenger she might want to kill, all in the blink of an eye.

I sometimes forgot how volatile the big cat shifters could be since I so rarely interacted with them. Imagine rubbing a cat’s belly. They loved it for three seconds and then at second four they’d be biting your hand and clawing your skin off. Cat shifters had a very similar tolerance level and would go from calm to enraged in a heartbeat.