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here nearly the whole time. When I noticed that Valerie had left the saloon, I went in search of her, and I heard your voices as I came up the stairs."

"I never heard you," Marsh said.

Joshua smiled. "I can be very quiet when it suits my purposes, Abner."

"That woman," Marsh said. "She's... she offered to... hell, she's just a goddamned..." The words would not come. "She ain't no lady," he finished weakly. "Put her off, Joshua, her and Ortega both."

"No."

"Why the hell not?" Marsh roared. "You heard her!"

"It makes no difference," Joshua said calmly. "If anything, what I heard makes me cherish her all the more. It was for me, Abner. She cares for me more than I had hoped, more than I dared expect."

Abner Marsh cussed furiously. "You ain't makin' one goddamned bit of sense."

Joshua smiled softly. "Perhaps not. This is not your concern, Abner. Leave Valerie to me. She will not cause trouble again. She was only afraid."

"Afraid of New Orleans," Marsh said. "Of vampires. She knows."

"Yes."

"You sure you can handle whatever we're steamin' into?" Marsh said. "If you want to skip New Orleans, say so, damn it! Valerie thinks..."

"What do you think, Abner?" York asked.

Marsh looked at him for a long, long time. Then he said, "I think we're going to New Orleans," and both of them smiled.

And so it was that the Fevre Dream steamed into New Orleans the next morning, with dapper Dan Albright at her wheel and Abner Marsh standing proudly out on her bridge in his captain's coat and his new cap. The sun burned hot in a blue, blue sky and every little snag and bluff reef was marked by golden ripples on the water, so the piloting came easy and the steamer made crack time. The New Orleans levee was jammed with steamers and all manner of sailing ships; the river was alive to the music of their whistles and bells. Marsh leaned on his walking stick and watched the city loom large ahead, listening to the Fevre Dream call out to the other boats with her landing bell and her loud, wild whistle. He had been to New Orleans many a time in his days on the river, but never like this, standing on the bridge of his own steamer, the biggest and fanciest and fleetest boat in sight. He felt like the lord of creation.

Once they had tied up on the levee, though, there was work to do; freight to unload, consignments to hunt up for the return trip to St. Louis, advertisements to take in the local papers. Marsh decided that the company ought to see about opening a regular office down here, so he busied himself looking at likely sites and making arrangements for starting a bank account and hiring an agent. That night he dined at the St. Charles Hotel with Jonathon Jeffers and Karl Framm, but his mind kept wandering away from the food to the dangers that Valerie had seemed so afraid of, and he wondered what Joshua York was up to. When Marsh returned to the steamer, Joshua was talking with his companions in the texas parlor, and nothing seemed amiss, though Valerie-seated by his side-looked somewhat sullen and abashed. Marsh went to sleep and put the whole thing from his mind, and in the days that followed he hardly thought on it at all. The Fevre Dream kept him too busy by day, and by night he dined well in the city, bragged up his boat over drinks in taverns near the levee, strolled through the Vieux Carre admiring the lovely Creole ladies and all the courtyards and fountains and balconies. New Orleans was as fine as he remembered, Marsh thought at first.

But then, gradually, a disquiet began to grow in him, a vague sense of wrongness that made him look at familiar things from new eyes. The weather was beastly; by day the heat was oppressive, the air thick and wet once you shut yourself off from the cool river breezes. Day and night, fumes rose up stinking from the open sewers, rich rotten odors that wafted off the standing water like some vile perfume. No wonder New Orleans was so often taken by yellow fever, Marsh thought. The city was full of free men of color and lovely young quadroons and octaroons and griffes who dressed as fine as white women. But it was full of slaves as well. You saw them everywhere, running errands for their masters, sitting or