Chapter 9

The passenger door opens, cutting off my laughter. I hiss, crouching on the seat like an animal preparing to defend itself.

A browned hand partially covered with a black leather glove reaches for me. “This is not a good place for you to be, cher.”

L. Martinus helps me out, steadying me when I wobble on bare feet. I ache all over, both from D. Webster’s abuse and the crash. I’ve lost the flip-flops somewhere, but I don’t have any interest in retrieving them. I wonder if I should be sad about D. Webster. He ruined my health, and probably my life.

He’s somehow dry, though the storm rages around us. I’m soaked to the skin in seconds. Taking a drag from his cigarette, he exhales and passes it to me. I take it, staring at the glowing tip like I’ve never seen it before.

The smoke is bitter and harsh, barely remembered. But my hands have the proper muscle memory for the act and I put the butt to my lips.

The first drag makes me cough, just like it did when I was fifteen and bummed a smoke from my very first crush. He’d been the boy from the wrong side of the tracks my daddy would have had heart failure over. His name was...

“I remember you now.” I say.

“Do you?” He smiles and wraps his coat around my shoulders.

“Lucian Martinez.” I take another drag from the nearly spent cigarette and stub it out on the concrete wall. “You changed your name.”

“Oui. Ain’t no good being Cajun here,” he says, his soft patois giving me a shivery thrill just like it did when I was in high school.

“And you lost the Creole,” I accuse.

“That too,” he agrees.

I sigh and lean against the wall, sliding down until my butt hits concrete. “You better go,” I say. “Someone is going to catch up with me sooner or later. You don’t want to be around when they find me.”

“Oh, I think I’ll manage.” He reaches out a hand and pulls me to my feet. “But you have a choice to make, and I want you to ask yourself a very important question.”

He cups my cheeks, his large hands warm and comforting. I lean into him, enjoying his subtle musk. Somehow it smells a little like both of us. The storm eases, and I look up into his fathomless brown eyes. “What question? And what choice?”

A choice is a novel thing these days. I’m realizing that I haven’t had one in a very long time. Not about my activities, my work, my partner. It’s all been arranged and planned, right down to my food. And my mental stability, taken away at the whim of someone I knew and had no reason not to trust.

“Do you want to stay in New Orleans?” he asks.

“No.” That choice is easy. The city isn’t alive anymore. I don’t think she’s been alive for a very long time. Laissez les bons temps rouler is a state of mind, embodied by the New Orleans of the past, not of its present or of its future. She lives in my memories of beads and feathers, masks and Voodoo, mausoleums and the scent of a stormed tossed river. “No, I don’t want to stay,” I repeat.

“Wise decision,” Lucian agrees. He tilts my face up and kisses my forehead. Reaching into his shirt pocket, he pulls something out, cupping it in his fist so I can’t see it. “Now for my question.”

A shaft of sunlight trickles through the dwindling clouds left by the storm. It strikes his face, bathing him in a golden glow. He looks perfect, almost angelic, yet his eyes glitter with a metallic sheen, lightening almost to copper. His pupils narrow, turning into slits. He blinks and the illusion is gone.

“Do you trust me?” he asks, opening his palm to reveal a silvery capsule. It has no distinguishing mark, and looks solid. “I want you to make another choice, Natalie Delphine. Trust me and swallow this pill, and you’ll never see New Orleans again.”

I don’t ask what it is. I know he won’t tell me. I clutch my oleander charm, maybe in hopes of getting some guidance from it. “Pills are what got me into this mess,” I say drily.

“Indeed.” He holds it out and waits, unconcerned when sirens blare from the towers set atop the city wall.

“What are you?” I ask. He’s not the boy I remember. He’s different, somehow. Despite the oddities I saw in his eyes, they are warm and kind. He isn’t going to force me to decide either way.

“Human,” he says, giving me a gentle smile. “But with a little something extra. Want to find out what it is?”

“Said every drug dealer ever,” I mutter.

We hear pounding footsteps and shouts. I don’t have much time left to decide. What’s left for me here, though? A lifetime in an institution? No thanks. Even if what Lucian gives me is fatal, it’s better than that.

I snatch the capsule from his hand and swallow it down.