number one,” Joe said aloud.
It had to be. Rachel was correct. Tsumi and her crew would want to be as near as possible to the highest concentration of humans. That would be the French Quarter, of course. And St. Louis Cemetery number one was at the far outer edge of the Quarter, on Basin Street.
“Let’s go,” Joe said. “Maybe some of them are still there. ”
“Right,” Kevin agreed. “Or they might bring a ‘date’ back there for a quick bite.”
Joe frowned and looked over at Kevin. He was relieved to see that, despite the play on words, his lover was merely being sarcastic, not actually finding humor in their situation. Their relationship was young enough that they were still finding out new things about each other every day. Yet with Kevin, he hadn’t been disappointed yet. It kind of scared him.
The four shadows were silent as they descended upon St. Louis Cemetery number one. They moved across the street in a dark wave, blending with the night, and each kept his or her own counsel. In the event that there were still members of Hannibal’s clan at the cemetery, they didn’t want the vampires to have any warning of their arrival.
Like all the local burial grounds, the corpses in St. Louis number one weren’t actually buried. Instead, the cemetery itself was like a miniature stone city, with row after row of granite and marble crypts, inside of which coffins would be laid on the ground or stacked on top of one another, depending upon how large the family had been.
Hundreds of crypts. And a long stone wall, with sealed “doors,” six high and an infinite number of corpses wide, where those who could not afford crypts would lay shoulder to shoulder until the apocalypse, or until the stone crumbled away untended. Whichever came first.
Somewhere, not far from the entrance if the guidebooks were to be believed, was the grave of Marie Laveau, the legendary voodoo queen of New Orleans. Having seen more than his share of real magick, Joe had a healthy wait-and-see attitude toward voodoo. But so far, the coven had had no contact with voodoo or its practitioners, and certainly not with the supposedly immortal queen of them all.
With Rachel and Kevin on his left and Stefan on his right, Joe stepped deeper into the cemetery. There was a long aisle in front of them that ran off deep into the darkness. It was the path obviously most traveled by tour guides and their charges during the day. It didn’t make sense that Tsumi and the others would have broken into a crypt where their vandalism could so easily be discovered.
“Kevin,” Joe whispered, breaking their silence.
The other three shadows gathered around him. Joe glanced around nervously, and had a strange flash of his childhood, when he and his friends would run in a neighborhood cemetery at night. Even though they knew that ghosts and ghouls and vampires didn’t really exist—and what an irony there—they couldn’t help but be a bit frightened anyway.
In a way, Joe realized, children’s fears were far more practical than their parents’ weary confidence that such things were merely fantasy. But then, the whole world had learned that lesson six years ago. The terrors of childhood would never again be so easily brushed aside.
Joe glanced around the cemetery again, but he sensed nothing, saw nothing, and he could tell that the others felt the same way.
“We’ll split up,” he whispered. “Rachel and I will take to the air. Stefan, you and Kev walk through. Try to determine which section of the cemetery is least traveled.”
Each of the others nodded in assent. Joe glanced at Rachel.
“Pigeons?” she asked.
“Right,” Joe agreed. “Nice and inconspicuous.”
With Rachel at his side, Joe began to change. His body warped and twisted painfully and, somehow, its mass disappeared into the air around them and he became a fat, dirty pigeon. Together, they took flight, soaring up and over the cemetery.
From above, Joe saw Stefan and
Ursula K. Le Guin
Thomas Perry
Josie Wright
Tamsyn Murray
T.M. Alexander
Jerry Bledsoe
Rebecca Ann Collins
Celeste Davis
K.L. Bone
Christine Danse