The four of us headed down the alley. I rubbed my hand where that puppy had jammed a marker. I had to get this thing out, couldn’t be on somebody’s trackin’ screen. The dark city stretched out before us like a maze, black-shadowed streets, yellow edges of light—all wrapped up with knife-sharp corners. Only one safe path led across the Big Easy once the sun went down. We lived in the belly of the alley, gutter water ran through our veins, and the sewer stench was our perfume.
I is the shadow, the fire that burns, the smoke that blinds.
I thrust another spike in my arm and then held my breath.
F’true, I’ll gets the marker out. Soon as my spike halo fades.
CHAPTER THREE
Chaz:
It was late, but an unrelenting crowd of bohemians, gutter punks and tourists still jostled their way through the Quarter, all of them carrying black-market imitations of Jamaican rum punch and Dixie Crimson Voodoo Ale. Musicians gathered on street corners, playing jazz improvisations to passersby, waiting for the steady waterfall of tips that jingled into open trumpet cases. Antiques shops and art galleries lured tourists toward brightly lit windows, and a pair of prostitutes strolled arm in arm, gossiping in French. The Newbie and I had walked from one blues club to another, watched the moon snake its way across the sky. My feet hurt and my head throbbed from my last glass of whiskey. A sure sign it was finally time to end the evening.
But now Miss Margarita was in the mood for adventure. As if her run-in with that genetic monster never even happened.
“I want to see the Cities of the Dead,” she said.
“The Cities of the Dead are gone,” I answered in my best monotone. Nobody needed cemeteries anymore. The empty carcasses left over after resurrection were just piled into incinerators and toasted.
She shook her head. Waist-long platinum waves shimmered.
Why did they always look like Hollywood movie stars, when they should be sucking up worms and dirt? I sighed.
“I’m not stupid, you know. I used to be an attorney. I just, hey, yeah, didn’t want to be one this time.”
I wished I had another drink. Even a migraine would be better than this.
“I know they kept one graveyard—yeah, they did. For tourists. Saw it on the news, babe. You know, before.”
“Before you went in the joint.”
She nodded. She didn’t want to talk about the joint. None of them ever did. I felt bad immediately. I should have let her bring it up first. Tears formed in the corners of black-mascara-rimmed eyes. Maybe she was remembering a husband and a kid that she left behind. Maybe there was a best friend, rotting away in a nursing facility somewhere, waiting for a phone call that would never come. Maybe there was a lifetime of memories crowding to the surface, all struggling to be part of the 50 percent that got to survive.
“Fine,” I said, although it really wasn’t. I shot a pulse beam into the night sky and signaled a taxi. “We’ll go see the last City of the Dead.”
Her eyes darkened when the cab pulled down from a nearby rooftop, gliding through the misty evening fog to stop beside us. I thought she would be happy. Thought she would smile at least—I mean, I did exactly what she wanted. But she just climbed inside the taxi and turned away from me, then stared out the window, hands rolled in tight little balls on her lap.
The cemetery appeared a few moments later, a gothic land of stone and skeleton, hard edges softened by moonlight and transformed into something mythic. We stepped from the taxi, both of us hesitating. The wrought-iron gates screeched when I pulled them open. I wanted to laugh, but for some reason I couldn’t. This was a place where bones marked the transition from life to whatever lay on the other side.
No matter what the Stringers say, this was still a sacred place.
I watched as Angelique moved silently through moon-beams, shadowy fog clinging to her feet. It followed her like a living, breathing creature as she walked from one tomb to the next, poised beside her as she read rusted bronze placards. Names of the dead dripped from her lips. Christophe. Marguerite. Francois. She shook her head, moved on. I realized that she was crying. Something was wrong; some of her circuits weren’t firing right. Tears slipped down pubescent-perfect cheeks. Movie-star lips quivered.
Suddenly I couldn’t focus my eyes anymore. I staggered