Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,74
your mouth before you catch flies, Bea,” her eldest sister, Cookie, commented; her voice sounded almost identical to Mama’s—honeyed and cut with brown sugar. Figures as much since she was Mama’s oldest and had been with her the longest. Bea never asked how old either of them was, for it was rude to inquire about a woman’s age, even an Eternal woman. She and Annie Ruth had guessed that Mama had to be nearing four hundred years old, though she’d never appear a day older than forty, and even then, onlookers couldn’t exactly be sure. Cookie appeared to be in her early thirties, she’d surmised, and Bea would forever be eighteen. That’s when her heart stopped.
“Shut up, Carmella,” Sora snapped back. “Have you ever seen anything like this? Didn’t think so.”
Bea winked at Sora, and added, “Yeah. Have you, Cookie? Have you?”
“Don’t say ‘shut up,’” Mama commanded. Even after hundreds of years, Evangeline Turner still liked her girls to be pillars of etiquette.
Their streetcar floated behind another, and the warden yanked a gear to attach their roof cables to the overhead lines.
Baby Bird jumped from her seat and into Daddy’s lap. “When will we get there? Can we go shopping first? Who are all those people? What are they?”
Mama snapped her fingers. “Enough!”
Baby Bird slithered back into her seat.
Daddy handed the warden their address:
435 ESPLANADE AVENUE
PIER #6
New Orleans, LA
The warden navigated the canal streets.
Bea tried to take everything in: how brass bands spilled out of parade-boats, their instruments pointed at the sky and their thunderous music sending ripples through the water; how people followed in their own boats, dancing and waving handkerchiefs and colorful parasols; how the graveyard sat on platforms, the dead raised high above; how massive trees rose like giants out of the murky waters, with red-eyed bats hanging from their boughs. Signs warned folks against swimming because of the bayou gators. Vendor-boats shouted about the best blood mules and sugar-dusted sanguine beignets.
“Are all the Wards like this?” Bea asked her mama.
“No. Each one is unique based on who lives there,” Mama replied.
“Is there always water?”
“No. Just in this one.”
“Why?”
“A vampire pissed off one of the conjure women and she flooded it.”
“How do you get to them all?” Bea pressed. “Can we visit the others?”
“Did you hear me before we left Charleston? You listening, child? Or you just like it when I repeat myself?” Mama snapped her fingers. “We won’t be traveling to the other Wards. We will stay put until it’s time to move on, and I hope Honey makes it quick. I never intended to ever return here, and I don’t want no trouble.”
But sometimes Bea wanted trouble. Anything that made her eternal existence a little more entertaining. Her stomach tangled with all the things she might unravel and uncover in this peculiar version of this peculiar city. But she knew one thing: She’d find eternal love here. An electricity crackled across her skin; the energy of certainty.
They turned off Dauphine Street, and Bea gasped. She knew immediately which house was their new home.
The primrose pink was the color of the blush Mama always wore. Window boxes spilled over with her favorite midnight roses and rimmed a double porch piped with iron-lace. Eight rocking chairs waited, one for each of them. Lanterns hissed, and all the big glass windows flickered warm beams of welcoming light. Through one of the windows, Bea spotted ceilings covered in flowers—an upside-down English garden—and glowing candelabras. A sign dangled above the cream white door—THE HOUSE OF BLACK SAPPHIRES: BEAUTY APOTHECARY AND PHARMACY OF DELIGHTS.
A black tongue of a pier awaited them.
“This one is the most beautifulest ever,” Baby Bird exclaimed.
“That’s not a word,” Cookie corrected.
Baby Bird scoffed. “It’s my word. I can make them up.”
“No, you can’t.”
“She can and it’s called a neologism,” Bea informed.
“Hush,” Mama replied. “All of you.”
The firebird perched on the porch railing, cooing and welcoming the Turners to their new home. Their new gilded coffin of delights. Bea’s heart lifted at the sight of Honey, the hum of mischief lingering right beneath the brown of her skin, and her incisors elongated, ready to bite, ready for mischief.
* * *
“The perfume atomizers go on the second shelf,” Cookie ordered as the Turner girls prepared their beauty pharmacy and apothecary to open to the public tomorrow night.
The Eternal women and vampires of this New Orleansian Ward would be able to get everything they needed: from tonics to keep their complexions clear after starvation periods to drams to lure partners