YOUR MAJESTY, WE HAVE TO STOP,” AMELIA SAID, and the queen gave a flick of her hand that might have been agreement.
Terry was so exhausted she was leaning heavily against the railing of the stairs, and Patsy was looking almost as haggard out on the gallery. The nerdy Bob seemed unchanged, but then he’d wisely seated himself in a chair to start with. At Amelia’s wordless signal, they began undoing the spell they’d cast, and gradually the eerie atmosphere lessened. We became an ill-assorted bunch of weird people in a courtyard in New Orleans, rather than helpless wit nesses to a magical reenactment.
Amelia went to the corner storage shed and pulled out some folding chairs. Sigebert and Wybert did not understand the mechanism, so Amelia and Bob set the chairs out. After the queen and the witches sat, there was one remaining seat, and I took it after a silent to and fro between me and the four vampires.
“So we know what happened the next night,” I said wearily. I was feeling a little silly in my fancy dress and high-heeled sandals. It would be nice to put on my regular clothes.
“Uh, ’scuse me, you might, but the rest of us don’t, and we want to know,” Bob said. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he ought to be shaking in his sandals in the queen’s presence.
There was something kind of likable about the geeky witch. And all four had worked so hard; if they wanted to know the rest of the story, there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t hear it. The queen raised no objection. Even Jade Flower, who had resheathed her sword, looked faintly interested.
“The next night, Waldo lured Hadley to the cemetery with the story of the Marie Laveau grave and the vampire tradition that the dead can raise the dead—in this case, the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. Hadley wanted Marie Laveau to answer her questions, which Waldo had told Hadley the ghost could, if the correct ritual was followed. Though Waldo gave me a reason Hadley agreed to do this on the night I met him, now I know he was lying. But I can think of several other reasons she might have agreed to go with Waldo to St. Louis Cemetery,” I said. The queen nodded silently. “I think she wanted to find out what Jake would be like when he rose,” I said. “I think she wanted to find out what to do with him. She couldn’t let him die, you saw that, but she didn’t want to admit to anyone that she had created a vampire, especially one that had been a Were.”
I had quite an audience. Sigebert and Wybert were squatting on either side of the queen, and they were wrapped up in the story. This must be like going to the movies, for them. All the witches were interested in hearing the backstory on the events they’d just witnessed. Jade Flower had her eyes fixed on me. Only Andre seemed immune, and he was busy doing his bodyguard job, constantly scanning the courtyard and the sky for attack.
“It’s possible, too, that Hadley might have believed the ghost could give her advice on how to regain the queen’s affections. No offense, ma’am,” I added, remembering too late that the queen was sitting three feet away from me in a folding lawn chair with the Wal-Mart price label still hanging on a plastic loop.
The queen waved her hand in a negligent gesture. She was sunk in thought, so deeply that I wasn’t even sure she heard me.
“It wasn’t Waldo who drained Jake Purifoy,” the queen said, to my amazement. “Waldo could not have imagined that when he succeeded in killing Hadley and reported it to me, blaming it on the Fellowship of the Sun, this clever witch would obey the order to seal the apartment very literally, including a stasis spell. Waldo already had a plan. Whoever killed Jake had a separate plan—perhaps to blame Hadley for Jake’s death and his rebirth . . . which would condemn her to jail in a vampire cell. Perhaps the killer thought that Jake would kill Hadley when he rose in three days . . . and possibly, he would have.”
Amelia tried to look modest, but it was an uphill battle. It should have been easy, since the only reason she’d cast the spell was to prevent the apartment from smelling like garbage when it finally was reopened. She knew it, and I knew it.