Vicious (11 page)

His eyes got wider than my own were at her words, and he nodded in agreement to her demand. I was shocked and terrified at the thought this all was going to continue. What would be next? I was going to her home? And Lea was going to come over for what? A dinner party with a little Pictionary at the end of the evening?

She grabbed my hand and led me out of the store and back into the dangerous night. I couldn’t help but notice as we left that the appalling burn on her hand was now no more than a pink smudge of pigment on her otherwise flawlessly white skin.

Chapter Twelve

Grant

The night somehow seemed even more frightening after we stepped off the voodoo store’s steps and into the old New Orleans’s streets. Sure, I knew I had Anna to protect me and that was a great comfort, but what was that back there? She hadn’t harmed the man, but the whole thing seemed so cruel. It was like a cat playing with a limping bird before she ate it.

But she didn’t eat it. She let him go. He was scared half to death, but he was alive. I had to just keep reminding myself she did not hurt the man, and she only scared him half to death to get some answers. What really bothered me about the whole thing was that cruel interrogation came so easy to her. She performed her part without a hint of regret or a sign of restraint. It looked like she just slipped into an alternate personality like one might slip into a bathrobe.

We walked at a hurried pace, and Anna seemed to have a destination in mind that was unknown to me. Being a good lap dog, I followed her without question for a while. It wasn’t until I began seeing tourist shops and the all too familiar sight of drunken college kids with beads around their necks that I began to realize that we were in the main part of the French Quarter again.

“Where are we going?”

“We are headed to Jackson Square to meet up with a friend of mine. Then we’re going to go back to my home to wait for Lea.”

“Lea? But she’ll kill me.”

“I don’t think she will.”

“Why not?”

“Because she would have to go through all of us to do that and Lea won’t take that chance just to kill you. I think she’s more interested in what I have to say.”

“All of us? How many of you are there?”

She didn’t answer me, and we rounded a corner sharply. She was in a hurry, and I didn’t want to press the matter, but the thought of going into a home full of vampires was not a comforting one. I shuddered a little in a way that I hoped she couldn’t see and tenderly touched the bandage on my neck.

“Anna, what happened in there? I mean, with the burning and your hand?”

“The rosary was made of real silver,” she answered so plainly that it would sound the same if she were telling me she didn’t want pepperoni on her pizza.

“Silver? Silver burns you? I thought that was all folklore, and I thought silver was more of a werewolf-folklore thing.”

She sighed. “It’s one side effect that unfortunately matches up with folklore. After we changed, we developed a severe skin allergy to silver. It burns us.”

I looked down at her hand and saw only a faint pink sign the nasty burn had ever existed there. I suppose with an allergy like that, having the ability to regenerate and heal quickly was a really nice commodity. She stopped explaining, and I stopped asking about it out of respect and a little fear of her silence. Besides, keeping up with her was becoming more and more taxing, and most of my energy was going into maneuvering passed people while keeping Anna in my sightline.

I knew when we had reached Jackson Square even though I had never personally been there. It was one of those places that you had seen on TV enough to recognize it instantly. I remembered all the times I had thought about New Orleans in the past, fantasizing about voodoo and ghost stories that I had heard. The idea of actually being here was intoxicating despite the circumstances. However, this certainly was not the New Orleans I had planned to see, nor was it the beer-soaked Bourbon Street my friends had planned to show me.

There were artists and psychics sitting at their little portable tables all around the square offering to sell you a painting, draw your face or tell your future. There were street performers all around, and I looked into the eyes of every street dancer and wide-eyed tourist to seek out that unavoidable sign they were like Anna. I saw nothing but normal people looking back at me, and it made me uneasy to not know where this friend was lurking in the crowd of human faces.

We rounded another corner of the square, and I spotted who we were meeting before Anna could turn to tell me. Relief flooded through my system when I saw the tiny pixie. There, sitting at a purple tarot table, sat a small slip of a girl with the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. They almost didn’t look real, and they were rimmed with a dark forest green that set her apart from every other human in existence. She was fair skinned just like Anna, and her hair was platinum blond and cut in a very short asymmetrical style.

The girl had what seemed like seven or eight silver necklaces at varying lengths around her neck all adorning crosses in various fashions. The earrings she had were big chandeliers with crosses all over them as well. They clanged against her neck and jingled as she moved her head. She wore a green corset top and a purple skirt, which only accentuated her insanely green eyes. I couldn’t help but stare. Were all vampires gorgeous? Even Lea, before proving to be insanely deadly, had been unmistakably beautiful.

“Hey, Lulu,” Anna said as we reached her table. I stayed a half a step behind Anna and smiled at the pixie Lulu cautiously.

“Hi, Anna. Is this him?”

Lulu cocked her head slightly to the side and looked at me with a smile, much like Anna had before when she was trying to study me. It again reminded me of a dog looking at something sideways while they tried to make heads or tails of it.

“Yes, Lulu, this is Grant. Grant, this is Lulu.”

I held my hand out to the pixie, and she took it with a shake that was firmer than appeared possible for someone of her slight size. Her eyes still searched mine for an answer to a question that I didn’t seem to know, and I was reminded again of the dangerous position I was in. After she had released my hand, she looked at Anna and spoke like I was not there.

“I don’t get it.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a simple wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time sort of thing,” answered Anna.

“Don’t get me wrong, he’s handsome enough, but how does all of this revolve around him?” The pixie smiled again at me like I was a puppy in a store window.

“Wait? How does what revolve around me?”

“She’s trying to figure out how all of this unusual stuff happens to such a normal human being, and where you fit into this whole story. The fact you came up to me is strange to her, and the fact you were the catalyst with Lea, makes you…unusual. While you were sleeping last night, I came by to tell her where I was and what had happened.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess wrong place at the wrong time. But you are out here, and I’m sure people have to come up to you, or else you wouldn’t get any business.”

“Yes,” started Lulu, “but people want their psychics to look otherworldly.” She giggled a little, still looking at me. “They think my eyes are fake, or that I’m magical. Either way, it’s good for my business.”

“Can you really tell the future or read their minds?”

“No,” she said as she giggled again. “We are just really observant. It’s not hard to figure out what humans want to hear just by watching them for a few minutes.”

I stood very still and wondered if she was watching me like that for the same reason.

“Do you have your phone, Lulu?”

“Yes. What happened to yours again?”

“Some drunken girl bumped into me, and it smashed on the floor before I saw Lea.”

“Ah, yes. Well, I suppose this will be an early night for me. Why don’t you go get the car and Grant can help me get my table put away.”

Anna had already dialed a number and was walking away from us. I could still hear her.

“Yes, Marshall, it’s me. We’re coming home now. Put Gabriel in the cage.”

I shuddered again, but I turned my attention to helping Lulu put her candles and cards away in her little black case and folding up her tablecloth. She was still looking at me curiously when I lifted my head from disassembling her portable table.

“What is it? Am I a sideshow?”

“No, I am just perplexed. Trying to figure this out.”

“I think it’s just what Anna said. Wrong place at the wrong time.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to figure out. That wasn’t what I was trying to figure out earlier, and she knows it.”

I was taken aback. This Lulu was so abrupt. She grinned at me slyly as she picked up the table as though it weighed nothing, and I collected the rest of her things. I felt like I was missing some big part of the puzzle here, and it was starting to annoy me.

“Well, if you tell me what about me you are trying to figure out, maybe I can help to shed some light on the subject.”

She giggled again and began to lead me out of the square. It was hard to picture that this creature was a vampire. I would have believed someone if they had told me she was something daintier, like a fairy or something, but a vampire?

“I was trying to figure out what she sees in you. You must know Anna likes you. I mean, you’re human, but you must see that.”

“She likes me?”

“Oh, you humans. No wonder you think I’m psychic. Yes, she likes you, and that fact in itself is intriguing to me.”

“Why?”

“If you knew Anna the way I do, you would know that has never happened.”

We were almost twenty minutes outside of New Orleans before we pulled into the gravel driveway of a large old Southern home fit to be featured in a remake of
Gone With the Wind
. It was painted white with grand columns reaching to the second floor in the front. The land it sat on was remote enough and concealed with trees so any neighbors would be hard pressed to catch a glimpse of the house or its inhabitants. I heard and smelled water but spotted none around, and the oak trees seemed to drip Spanish moss from every limb.

We exited the Toyota sedan that Anna had pulled around, and I nearly kissed the ground when I got out. I had never seen anyone drive so fast. Even though both Anna and Lulu reassured me Anna’s vampire reflexes would keep us safe from any highway hazards, I was still tense as our speed had climbed to above one hundred and ten miles per hour at times.

I helped the girls carry in Lulu’s things out of habit. They graciously let me help even though either one of them could have carried it all themselves. Perhaps they were trying to put me at ease. I had to be useful somehow, and I preferred to pretend they were actually as dainty and weak as they appeared. We walked up a few steps to the patio and then walked to the grand door that was painted a deep red color. It looked like blood, and I instantly tensed.

“Don’t worry, love,” whispered Lulu in my ear. “The red door is a symbol. It’s to show that a place is vampire friendly. A safe haven.”

I thought about the strange hotel that had been our safe haven, and I did remember it had a dark-red door. I took a deep breath and turned the knob. The three of us walked inside and were instantly greeted by three other vampires. First, I saw the man. He was black in the way you might describe a starless night, silky dark and flawless in its appearance. His dreadlocks ran down past his shoulders and his eyes were a chocolate color with a deep rim of dark purple that seemed black from far away. Lulu walked over to him happily and threw her tiny arms his neck and kissed his lips.

It was obvious they were a couple, and after she had pulled away from his face, he flashed a welcoming smile at me. I returned the smile hesitantly before the cage caught my eye. It was shocking at first, and I don’t know why I didn’t notice it sooner, but there in the living room sat a large steel cage fit for housing a tiger.

However, there was no tiger in the cage. Instead, a young man of some sort of Hispanic decent was sitting on a cot and staring at me wide-eyed. I would have thought this was some sort of torture had I not seen those amber eyes with the dark black rim around them. He had that same smooth and flawless skin, but his was an olive tone, and his black hair was slightly curly and cut short in a messy mop on his head. He smiled a little at me in that same curious fashion that all of the vampires smiled at me.

A red-headed young woman was perched in a chair just outside of the cage with her hand on one of the bars protectively. She seemed to be watching over the Hispanic boy in the cage, and the cautious stance she held near him indicated her intense love of the prisoner. What was she afraid I would do to him?

Her hair was thick and wavy, and it flowed like a red downpour to the middle of her back. Her eyes were probably hazel once, but now they practically screamed with amber in the middle and a sharp yellow-green towards the outside with a thick rim of dark brown holding it all together like the rim of a stained-glass window. She looked almost translucent she was so fair, and I could detect the slightest traces of pale freckles around her nose and just below her eyes. They were all so frighteningly beautiful.

“Everyone, this is Grant. Grant, this is Marshall here with Lulu. The redhead over there is Cat, and the one in the cage is Gabriel.”