CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was getting dark when I arrived at Lumiere. The Uber dropped me off outside of my house about fifteen minutes after picking me up, but I didn’t stay in Lumière for long; all I needed to do was pack some clothes and my laptop into my backpack and take a shower. The longer I stayed, I knew, the more chance I had of running into Nicole. When I looked out of my bedroom window across the street, I saw the lights in Maison d’Azur—Azure House, were on.
The instant I thought it would be safe for me to leave the house, I took to my front gate and made a brisk break for the end of the block where I turned onto Dauphine street. I decided to get something to eat before going back to Jared’s, seeing as beignets were all I’d eaten since yesterday, and found myself stopping at a burger place close to Jean Luc’s house.
It occurred to me that we hadn’t talked since the evening of the attack. I needed to warn him about Tamara’s intentions before anyone did anything stupid, so I chose to visit before grabbing something to eat.
The house stood near one of the old cemeteries in the city, Saint Louis Number One, and it was the house Jean Luc had arranged for him and his family to live in after they had awoken. For months, he had refused to tell me where it was, not because he didn’t trust me, but because he didn’t trust his family around me. But a couple of weeks ago, while making preparations for the night that ended in tragedy, he had offered me his address as a symbol of goodwill toward me, and as a show of how much trust he had in his family.
I never thought I would have to visit the place, though. It was one thing to know there was a house full of vampires at the heart of Crescent City, it was quite another to just show up at the door unannounced—especially if you were the kind of person who possessed a pulse and several pints of warm blood in your veins.
I stopped just short of the vampire house on Saint Louis Street and couldn’t help but stare. It had a brick red façade with black bannisters running all along the gallery, and unlike my own, the house itself was only a portion of a much larger building which went almost all the way around the block. From the next floor up, I thought, you could probably look out and see all the way to the cemetery on the other side of North Rampart Street.
Some of the lights were on, so I approached the front door and knocked three times. When Jean Luc opened the door, he seemed almost surprised to see me.
“Madison,” he said, hurrying me inside, “What are you doing here?”
“It’s good to see you too,” I said as I made my way through the door and into the narrow corridor beyond it.
He shut the door. “You mistake my meaning, I simply hadn’t expected to see you again for at least a couple of days still. The streets aren’t safe.”
“I know, but I guess I was in the neighborhood…”
I trailed off. The last time I saw him, he had been covered in blood. Whose, I didn’t know. Maybe his, maybe it belonged to witches, maybe it belonged to other vampires. He had that same monstrous look about him then as he did the night in the airport, moments after killing Bernarde. At the time, it had frightened me somewhat. Now, he looked more like the gentle man I knew. Even though I was in a house full of vampires, I didn’t feel threatened in the slightest.
“How are you, Jean Luc?” I asked, after a pause.
“I am well,” he said.
“And the rest of your family?” I asked.
Jean Luc gestured for me to go deeper into the house, and I acquiesced. “They are also well,” he said.
“What happened to them? During the... mess… they all disappeared.”
“Yes, they lured some of the vampires away from the house, splitting the attacking force so their numbers might be more easily managed.”
“I wouldn’t say anything about that night was easy.”
“It wasn’t, but it could have been worse. We should count ourselves lucky there was only one casualty.”
Hearing Remy being spoken of like that stung, but I was able to hide my wince well enough. “Yeah,” I said, “Lucky.”
He motioned me through a door on my left, and I entered what looked like a living room. The moss colored thick shades that he must have used to block out the daylight were still down. Pictures of hills and oceans hung on the walls, a piano sat at the other end of the room next to a fireplace, and standing like macabre statues around the dining table were Sebastien, Philippe, and Delphine. The other vampires weren’t present.
“Hi,” I said, waving meekly.
The two men nodded, while Delphine approached and took one of my hands. “I am so relieved you weren’t hurt.”
“Thank you. It was close, but I’m glad you weren’t hurt either.”
“I want to apologize for my behavior. I don’t expect you’ll understand how I was feeling, but I promise it will not happen again.”
“It’s okay, we were all scared.”
Delphine then returned to the dining table. Jean Luc motioned for me to sit on one of the sofas in front of the cold, black fireplace, and I did. It was comfortable enough, but I sat straight, back upright, hands on my lap.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Jean Luc said, “I cannot say Remy was a good man, not entirely, but he did do some good things at the end of his life. If redemption is what he sought, he had put himself on the right path.”
“I feel… I feel the same way, but I’m also going to miss him.”
I didn’t want to tell Jean Luc of my private lessons with Remy, about how he had taken me on as a student of magick—of his magick. I didn’t think it was relevant information, anyway. That Remy had donated his house, his time, and had poured his efforts into restoring the witching community of New Orleans was enough for most people to know about him.
“What Marie did was unforgivable.”
“Marie? That’s her name.”
“Yes. Marie Boucher. She was a wealthy woman in life, and an even wealthier woman in death. Her goal was to buy as much of New Orleans as she could get her hands on, and when Remy rose up against the vampire overlords of the land, she lost everything she had spent hundreds of years trying to build. Her wrath runs deep.”
“Well, so does mine,” I said, without thinking. “I’ve had it with old women coming into the city demanding what’s theirs. This is our home. People are dead and injured. It has to stop.”
“I agree.”
“So, you’ll help me find Marie?”
“Absolutely not.”
Angry heat began to rise into my cheeks. He had done this once before when Bernarde was alive and killing people. His priority had been keeping me out of danger, out of trouble. I had thought by now he would have grown out of that overprotectiveness, but here it was, manifest in the flesh, ready to wrap me up in a straitjacket and throw me into a padded, white room to keep me from hurting myself.
“You can’t keep me from her, Jean Luc.”
“I’m not trying to, but I know you well enough to know the way your mind works. You’re emotional, and you would sooner throw yourself into the fire without considering the consequences.”
“She has to pay for what she did.”
“She does, but in order to defeat her and her brood, we must call the witches and form a unified front. If you were to call a meeting, somewhere private, we could all discuss—”
“There won’t be a meeting,” I said, turning my eyes away from him.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“They’ve abandoned me, Jean Luc.”
“Abandoned? Who?”
I looked at him again. “The witches. They’ve sided with a witch named Tamara; she’s Remy’s ex-wife, and she wants things to go back to how it was before I moved here. She wants to make New Orleans a witch only city.
“That’s absurd,” Delphine said, from the other side of the room. “Who is she to make that claim?”
“Delphine, please,” Jean Luc said. “I need to understand. You are saying the witches of New Orleans want all vampires gone—including us. Does that mean you’ll be hunting us also?”
“No!” I snapped, “Of course not. I fought for you, Jean Luc. For you and your family. But they wouldn’t listen to me. Not even Nicole listened to me.”
“Nicole has sided with Tamara?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m on my own now, so there won’t be any meetings, or any witches helping. I’m the only witch you have to help fight Marie away. Maybe, if we’re able to do it before Tamara gets what she wants, we can restore order to the city.”
“What you’re asking to do… without help, I simply do not see how we will be able to achieve it.”
“So, what, we’re supposed to do nothing?”
Jean Luc stood up. “I’m not suggesting we do nothing; what I’m suggesting is that we weigh our options, of which we now have very few. Marie is a clever, ancient vampire. She will not be easily tricked, and there was only one witch with the power to send her away. He is now dead.”
“That’s not true.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t it?”
“Remy… was teaching me.”
“Teaching you what?”
“His magick. I’m not as good as he was, not yet, but I know more now than I did a few months ago.”
“And a few months of knowledge is supposed to be enough for you to kill a four-hundred-year-old vampire?”
“Maybe it is.”
He looked at Delphine, then back at me. “Madison, it isn’t that I don’t trust you, or that I don’t believe in your abilities, but this discussion is moot. I will not help you find Marie until we have a plan on how to deal with her that does not involve some kind of frontal assault.”
I stood up, now, and squared up to him. “I don’t want to argue with you, Jean Luc, but you can’t keep putting me in a box. If you could have done something about Marie, you would have done it by now, which means you need my magick. I’m not asking you to take me to her tonight. You’re right, going up against her now would be insane. What I want is to make sure, when the time comes, you won’t try and keep me away.”
He shook his head. “I have no intention of keeping you away. What I want is for there to be no more deaths.”
“I want that too.”
“Good, now I must excuse myself from you for the night, but Delphine will accompany you back home.”
“I’m not going home,” I said.
Jean Luc stared at me as if trying to read my face, but didn’t ask any questions. “Very well. But I still insist Delphine accompany you; the streets aren’t safe.”
Refusing her would have probably led him to ask the very questions he had clearly chosen not to ask, so I agreed to let Delphine be my chaperone. She wouldn’t appreciate a good burger like I was about to, but I was sure she’d appreciate the company of someone other than Jean Luc. I liked him, but he wasn’t from this time. I was.
She and I had much we could offer each other.