Nico made a sound Nora had only ever heard Frenchmen make—a soft groan of exasperation mixed with frustration and a soupçon of utter disbelief. Nora found it adorable. She didn’t tell Nico that.

“There’s a couple of very nice hotels up this way,” Nora said. “We would have stayed at one, but they were all booked for Halloween. We’ll go into the hotel bar and hang out and if a cute lonely girl shows up, we’ll invite her to our table. Eleven o’clock is prime cute-girl hunting time.”

“My girlfriend wants to watch another girl suck me off. This is not what I had in mind for Halloween,” he said.

“Kinky Halloween is different from Vanilla Halloween,” Nora said. “I should have warned you.”

“Hmm,” was all he said to that, followed soon by a second “Hmm.”

“Here’s the thing, moosh. You’re very sexy when you’re fucking. I like to look at you when you’re fucking. You’re usually pretty guarded, but you’re not so guarded—”

“When I’m fucking, yes.”

“But...when you’re fucking, I’m being fucked. Hard to concentrate on the show when I’m part of the show. Understand?”

He made that sound again.

“It is a power trip, too,” she admitted. “Giving a woman the order to pleasure you? Ordering you to let her?” Nora leaned against a light pole and put the back of her hand on her forehead. “Be still my horny heart.” She stood up and turned around. “Oh...”

“What?” Nico asked. Nora pointed at a green sign nailed to a telephone pole.

“It says the cemetery’s down that way,” she said, pointing down a second street. “You want to see if we can find a ghost before we find a girl?”

“I would much rather go ghost-hunting than girl-hunting.”

“Ghosts first,” she said. “Girls after.”

As they walked to the cemetery down the block, Nora explained to Nico who they were looking for. The Smiling Girl, dead a decade, according to their B&B owner. Very pretty. Went to meet her boyfriend for a tryst, got her throat slit instead.

“And...” Nora continued, “supposedly she’ll walk next to you if you’re stupid enough to stroll through the graveyard at midnight.”

“It’s eleven,” Nico said.

“Maybe she’s up early.”

They stood at the edge of the cemetery next to the iron gate, slightly ajar. Red maples lined the stone fence, and their heavy branches swayed in the wind and dropped scarlet leaves around them. Inside the cemetery, Nora spied row after row after row of gothic-looking tombstones.

“Looks kind of spooky in there,” Nora said.

“It’s a cemetery,” Nico said. “What is it supposed to look like? Cheerful?”

“Good point.”

Hand in hand they entered the cemetery. They stayed on the main path and walked slowly through the graveyard. It wasn’t large—merely one city block—but it was one of the creepier cemeteries Nora had ever visited. Considering she lived near one of New Orleans’s famous crypt yards, that was saying something.

The headstones were so old and weathered that she could barely read the names on them. The trees were overgrown and let in little light from the surrounding streets. She and Nico walked very close to each other, holding hands, and didn’t stray from the path. She wasn’t scared of hands reaching out of the ground or ghosts or demons, but in a cemetery this old and neglected, there was a good chance there were rocks or divots or branches just waiting to break the ankles of unsuspecting tourists.

“What do you think?” Nora asked.

“It’s beautiful,” Nico said.

She glanced around again, saw what he meant. It did look like something off a vintage Halloween postcard.

“Do you ever think about where you’re going to be buried?” Nico asked.

“That’s such a French question.”

Nico laughed softly. “I want to be buried in my vines,” he said. “So my body can nourish them.”

“Too bad. Kingsley already bought a family crypt in New Orleans. You have a shelf.”

“I have a shelf?”

“It’s under my shelf.”

“You’ll be on top of me for eternity?”

Nora nodded.

“I can live with that. No, not live with it...”

Nora laughed and put her arm through Nico’s. They’d made it halfway along the main path and were nearing the bend in the U that would lead them back to the front entrance.

“You see any ghosts?” Nora asked.

“Not a one,” Nico said. “You?”

“No.”

“I don’t see any either,” said a woman standing behind them.