Haunted Destiny: A Midnight Dragonfly Bonus Short Story
Read Haunted Destiny: A Midnight Dragonfly Bonus Short Story Online
Authors: Ellie James
St. Martin’s Press
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THIS STORY ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY.
“Haunted Destiny”
Copyright © 2011 by Ellie James.
All rights reserved.
For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
St. Martin’s books are published by
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0342-8
Contents
Chapter 1
Lost souls. Old souls. Tortured souls. They gather in the dance of the shadows, swaying quietly to the whisper of eternity.
I stared at the words, repeating them silently—and trying not to laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”
My friend Harmony shoved a drizzle-ruined strand of blond hair from her face and smiled. “You’re gonna be so great! You’re a natural.”
I grinned back at her. “Yeah, I can see it now. Hello, my name is Marguerite, and I’d like to introduce you to my world.” For effect, I used the same theatrical voice Harmony did when giving her Haunted Garden District tours. “The world of the dead—and the damned.”
Harmony, seated next to me with a cast halfway up to her knee, laughed. “You are so not a Marguerite.”
That was true. But I’d been warned from my very first day working in the French Quarter to never let anyone know my real name. So Rachelle Dugas was banished, and Marguerite took over.
“I still think you could have come up with something better.”
“Like…
Destiny
,” I reminded. That’s what Harmony had tried to talk me into.
The green of her eyes went all devilish. “Or Purity.”
We both laughed at that.
But there was no turning back now. I was Marguerite, and in only a few hours, I was subbing for Harmony and giving my very first tour.
“What about soul mates?” I asked, returning to the talking points she’d scribbled for me. She’d tripped and broken her ankle while leading a group through a cemetery the day before. “Do they dance, too?”
She winked. “I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself,” she said, reaching for a deck of Tarot cards.
Around lunchtime, the French Quarter should have been packed. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays tourists started early (except for the ones who’d stayed out too late the night before. They were usually crawling into bed as everyone else was lining up outside
Café du Monde
.) Artists and street performers and horse-drawn carriages lined the Square.
But hurricanes had a way of changing that.
“You’d think the storm was going to be a direct hit,” I said, watching moody grey clouds bubbling up from the south. “I don’t get why everything is so dead—these are just feeder bands.”
Harmony glanced up from shuffling her cards. “
Drama
,” she said. “Everyone loves to freak out about something.”
That was true. It was, in all honesty, one of the biggest reasons we’d come to New Orleans in the first place. The city had a reputation, a mystique. When you came to the Big Easy, you did things you didn’t normally do. You ate food you couldn’t pronounce and went into shops selling things you’d never seen before, you stayed up insanely late and took a picture next to the Bourbon Street sign post just to show everyone you’d been there. You did a swamp tour—or a ghost tour.
And, even though you told yourself it didn’t mean anything, that it couldn’t possibly mean anything, you nervously approached one of the psychics in Jackson Square, gave them your palm or reached for a Tarot card, and learned what destiny had in store for you.
And, yeah, you freaked out.
Harmony and I saw it every day. It was always the same. Someone would glance at our table in front of the imposing iron fence, beneath a phenomenally huge and massively old palm, then quickly look away. They would walk faster, but then turn back. And you could see the temptation in their eyes.
That was the moment you knew they were yours.
Except on a day like today, when despite the cooler temperature September always brought, the threat of something ominous chased everyone away.
“But who knows,” Harmony said. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe the storm’s going to hook back our way. It’s happened before. Maybe that’s what you felt when you woke up this morning.”
Even before I shot her a quick glance, I knew she would be studying me with those all-seeing eyes of hers. We’d been living together in a little apartment over on Dumaine Street for about four months, but we’d been friends forever. Literally. Our moms had been best friends. Our birthdays were hours apart. If there was such a thing as a soul sister, Harmony was mine.
And even if I hadn’t told her about the weird heaviness I’d woken up with, the invisible weight pressing against my chest, she would have known. Because that’s what Harmony did. She knew things.
So did I.
And yeah, having a best friend who could read your mind made things pretty fun.
Most of the time.
“Not the storm,” I said. That actually would have been cool. I was kinda strange like that. I loved tropical weather, the way the pressure would drop and the trees would bend and the rain would fly in all directions…
“It’s more,” I said. “Something big. Personal.”
Harmony reached for a tangle of blond hair and began to twirl it around a black-tipped finger. “Are you sure there wasn’t a dream, too?”
I looked across the street toward the river, barely visible beyond big fountain and the levee. Harmony could read people, but I could read the future.
“I can’t remember.” I’d tried. I’d closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing like my grandmother had taught me, trying to send myself back. Sometimes it worked, and I could sink back into my dreams and see a little more, understand better what was to come.
The first few times it had freaked me out. Everyone dreams, and lots of people try to interpret all the crazy things that happen. But for them, dreams are just dreams.
Not mine.
At least not always.
Some of mine come true.
“Here,” Harmony said, and when I turned back toward her, I found her eyes glowing like emeralds on fire, with her white-blond hair hanging in an angel-like curtain against both sides of her face.
In her hands, she held the Tarot cards.
“Concentrate on what you want to know,” she instructed. “And shuffle.”
Chapter 2
The weight against my chest pressed harder, and without even realizing what I was doing, I lifted my hand and brought it to the V of my gothic-inspired dress. There I closed my fingers around the smooth edges of the bronze dragonfly my grandmother had given my mother for her sixteenth birthday.
I didn’t need to look down to know that the yellowy green crystal in the center glowed. I could feel the warmth seeping through my flesh.
“Come on,” Harmony urged. “You know the drill. Shuffle, then separate them into three piles. I’ll take it from there.”
She was right. I knew the drill. I’d seen Harmony and her mother do hundreds of readings.
And I’d seen those readings come true time and time again.
But I’d never let her do one for me.
That was the thing about knowing. Everyone thought it would be cool to see into the future, and sometimes it was. But it wasn’t all about getting sneak peeks at what was going to be on a trig exam or the winning lottery ticket.
Sometimes it was stuff you really didn’t want to know. Like when a little girl went missing and you had to tell her parents she wasn’t coming back. Or when you slipped into bed and closed your eyes, and saw yourself kneeling at a grave, sobbing, and you know one day your heart was going to get totally shattered.
No. Knowing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Sometimes it was better to just take life as it came. That way, you only lived things once, when they happened.
Deep heavy stuff for sure, but even at seventeen, I’d learned that.
“No.” Just the thought of touching those cards made me itchy. “I’m good.”
Harmony rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding me? You’ve been a stress-case since the minute you woke up, saying something big is coming. That your life is going to change. That you can feel it.”
Leaning closer, she gave me one of her mystical smiles, made all the more other-worldly by the too-dark red lipstick she always wore when working the Square. (She insisted I was going to have to wear it that night, too. For, yeah, the drama.)
“So let me tell you,” she said against a strong gust of rain-heavy air. “I can, you know.”
I did. I knew. I knew she could tell me.
“
No
,” I whispered, hugging myself.
Harmony stared me down a few seconds longer before giving me one of those deep, I’m-really-annoyed-with-you sighs, and plopping the seriously old deck of cards her great-grandmother had passed down in front of me.
The wind swirled around us, stronger, heavier, bending the crepe myrtles and sending trash scurrying along the cobblestone. The bars were all open, and they, of course, were full. Music played loudly. A few had signs in the window, advertising hurricane parties. But most of the shops were closed. Only a few people hurried with their umbrellas along the sidewalk.
Voluntary evacuations had that effect.
The facts were simple. New Orleans sat below sea level, basically in a bowl. Someday a big storm would come and the city that I loved would go under.
Shivering, I started to look away, doing a double-take as I saw one of the shop owners crouched in a display window with dozens of vacant eyed dolls. Some wore threadbare gowns of Victorian lace. Others showed off antebellum finery. One wore black. Desiree had given each a name and a birthday, and as the first wispy drops from a feeder band swept across the cobblestone between us, she lovingly packed them away, one by one.
“He’s just too beautiful for words.”
I twisted back to find Harmony shielded by our huge tarp, with my sketchbook open in her hands. I always brought it with me to kill time during slow periods.
“Give me that!” I shrieked, but she scooted further back, turning the book to show me the picture she was looking at.
But really, I already knew.
“Maybe that’s it.” She grinned. “Maybe today’s the day you’re finally gonna meet this guy.”
My heart slammed really hard.
“This picture’s new, isn’t it?” she asked. “When did you draw this one?”
From the river, a tugboat wailed.
I thought about changing the subject, but with Harmony that wasn’t a possibility. “A few days ago.”
“There’s more detail than before,” she observed.
There was. A lot, actually. At first, when I’d awoken to find my notebook open at the foot of my bed, the guy had been little more than a shadow. That had been my first night in New Orleans.
Before that, I’d only drawn in my sleep one other time. And yeah, the next afternoon they’d found the girl two grades ahead of me in the swamp, exactly where I’d drawn her.
“Still no idea who he is?” Harmony asked.
I shook my head, gathering my damp frizzy hair into a fist behind my neck. I’d been drawing this guy over and over for months, but I had no idea who he was.
Harmony liked to call him The Guy of My Dreams.
But his name didn’t matter. All I had to do was look at him, and I couldn’t breathe. Touch the line of his face, and invisible fingers tickled the back of my neck. Skim a finger along his lower lip, and feel the kiss whisper through me.
I wanted to think that meant
something
.
His eyes were warm but intense, and I knew they would be blue. His hair was thick, wavy, falling carelessly across his forehead. There was confidence in his sharp cheekbones, and laughter in his smile.
Lost in my own world, I wasn’t aware Harmony had turned the page, until she blurted out a single word. “Mountains?”
I twisted my mouth. The guy sorta made sense. The mountains…not so much.
“I didn’t think you’d ever left Louisiana,” Harmony said.
The rain started to fall harder, sweeping in a horizontal dance from the river. “I haven’t.”
“Then what gives?” she asked, thumbing through page after page of mountain ranges. Those I’d done in colored pencils, with blue skies and white clouds, green trees giving way to snow-capped peaks…with a single dragonfly placed randomly in each.
I’d sketched close to the identical picture fourteen times.
“Who knows,” I murmured, not concerned. I was in the Deep South. There were no mountains around. I was quite sure they had nothing to do with me.