(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS: This story is the fifth in a series, and you may know the drill by now: alternative fiction, not graphic, not cuddly, definitely not PC, entirely made-up except where noted. /// The New Orleans chapters mix real and fictional places. The non-Corbis photos in those chapters are mine. /// Thanks and shared credit to five first-class beta readers: Rocky, Lyraine, D.J., Elles, and Poto. Thanks also to the Devil’s Workshop list for much-appreciated feedback.

E-MAIL: KSimpson@the-devils-workshop.com

CHAPTER NOTES: “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City” is a line from “Kansas City” in the musical Oklahoma!. People who live in KC get tired of being asked whether everything’s up to date there. (It is.)

CHAPTER 1

May

On a perfect spring Saturday,

the thing to do is get outdoors and commune with nature. So I took a stack of CDs, a Discman, a cell phone, a Palm V, and a thermos of iced coffee to the hammock in the back yard and dug in for the afternoon.

Everything was perfectly fine until the shadow fell over me.

I glanced up. Cassie’s lips were moving, but all I could hear was John, Paul, George, and Ringo. That worked. Pushing my sunglasses up higher, I settled back down and closed my eyes.

Seconds later, 120 pounds of implacable blonde landed on me, making the hammock lurch violently, and pulled the headphones off.

“This is reserved seating,” I informed her.

“Not anymore.” Still annoyed, she put the headphones on. “What is this? Abbey Road?”

“It’s a classic.”

She didn’t argue, but she leaned over the edge to bring the rest of the CDs on board. When the hammock finally stopped rocking, and while she flipped through the discs, I took the headphones back and turned up the volume. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was playing; somehow, it seemed only appropriate.

But Cassie reached over to switch the Discman off. I took the hint. “How was lunch?” I asked, taking the headphones off.

She shrugged. “All right, I guess.”

Not all right, then. But that was only to be expected, considering that she’d gone to lunch with some of her old sorority sisters. “Not that I’m not always happy to see you, but I thought you were all going shopping after lunch.”

“I got bored. They talked about their brats the whole time. They’ll probably spend all afternoon at Baby Gap, squealing over jumpsuits.” Irritably, she tossed the CDs back on the lawn. “They made me look at pictures. Hundreds of thousands of pictures. And the kids are all funny-looking. I mean, funny-looking even for babies. What was I supposed to do — say, ‘Gee, maybe he’ll grow up to have a nice personality’?”

“They say Ernest Borgnine is a nice man,” I remarked.

“Don’t try to humor me. You didn’t have to look at a hundred pictures of Ernest Borgnine with food in his hair.”

Sympathetically, I patted her hand. But she was only warming up.

“They talked about diaper services for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! And then they talked about the things the kids stick up their noses. We were sitting in a nice restaurant, Devvy, talking about snot.”

I winced. “Could we change the subject?”

Evidently not yet; she grabbed my shirt collar and got most of the way into my face. The hammock lurched violently again. “I am not having children. Got that?”

“What are you yelling at me for?” I asked, losing patience. “Do I look like a bird? Or a bee?”

“I mean it. I’m not kidding.”

First thing Monday, I was going to call the university and ask whether they had continuing-ed courses in Human Biology; Cassie clearly needed a brushup. “Fine. Got it. No kids. Now, are you done? Because if you’re not, I’m getting up. I can’t fight lying down.”

“We’re not fighting. We’re discussing.”

“We’re discussing loud enough to scare the neighbors.”

She surveyed both adjacent back yards. “I don’t see anybody.”

“They’re probably inside, making tapes for Jerry Springer. They’ll probably get big fat commissions for turning us in. Both of us in this hammock doesn’t look good. So how about getting out now?”

“Jerry can bite me. And I like it here.”

“Then I’ll get out. You can…”

“Quiet,” she ordered, getting comfortable.

I gave up. Sensing victory, Cassie raised her head a little and smiled. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.” The scary part was that I meant it.

The past few months had been better than I could have expected. Right after the first of the year, I’d rented this great house, and I’d come to love it. OK, it wasn’t a suburban dream machine like Cassie’s — just a little brick cottage in Shipley Park, where the artsy types lived. But artsy, of course, means expensive. I’d thought it was way out of my price range.

Two days after the real-estate agent showed me the house, she called to say that the price had dropped. It seemed that the place was haunted.

I wasn’t really surprised. If a person has to have demons, they might as well do her a favor now and then. Besides, Monica and Vanessa had had a fabulous time scaring the owners. There were days when I felt guilty about getting a bargain that way, but then I remembered all the overpriced places I’d rented over the years and considered it even.

So I’d talked the owners into a lease, and I’d moved in. Cassie had too, part-time and unofficially. I was concentrating on the un part of that.

As for work, the less said, the better. Most things were back to what passed for normal around J/J/G, but that wasn’t necessarily good. If only…

Something rang.

“It’s not me,” Cassie said, not moving. “I left mine inside.”

After a series of difficult maneuvers that nearly capsized us, I retrieved my cell phone; Cassie had thrown the CDs on top of it. “Hello?”

The line was silent for a second. “Who is this?”

“Hillary Clinton,” I said politely. “Who did you want?”

A sigh. “Devlin?”

Oh-oh. I frowned and tried to sit up a little. “Mr. Wolfe?”

“I wasn’t expecting you to answer.”

“I don’t know why not. You called my number.”

Cassie had probably forwarded her calls to my phone by mistake again, but just for fun, I was willing to let him think we shared a phone number. And a toothbrush. Maybe even underwear. I could almost hear him debating whether to just hang up.

Finally, he sighed again. “I don’t suppose my daughter is there?”

“She might be. I don’t suppose you want to talk to her?”

Stony silence greeted that question. Rather pleased, I nudged Cassie.

“Wake me up Monday,” she murmured.

“It’s your dad.”

She said a few words that a loving daughter probably shouldn’t say with her father on an open line inches away. But she finally took the phone anyway. “Daddy?”

Trying not to hear either end of the conversation, I tried to focus on something else: birds, traffic, a dog barking down the block. Then I tried to get seriously interested in cloud formations. Nothing helped.

Finally, Cassie said goodbye, hung up, and gave the phone back. Then she looked at me expectantly.

“Everything up to date in Kansas City?” I asked.

She hated it when I said that, which was why I’d said it. But this time, she chose to ignore it. “Daddy’s going to New Orleans next month.”

“Is he, now?”

“For a bankers’ convention.”

I was failing to see why that was interesting, but she still looked intent. “Perfect.”

“He thinks we should go, too.”

Ah. Now she was getting to it. “What for? We’re not bankers.”

“We’re taking over his bank’s account.”

“We haven’t taken it over yet.”

Cassie narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re being difficult on purpose, aren’t you?”

“No. I’m a lot worse on purpose.” Not getting a reaction, I decided to try a straight answer. “I can’t see any reason for us to go, Cass. Don’t get me wrong — New Orleans would be fun sometime. But not in June. And not with bankers. Have you ever been on Bourbon Street?”

“I’ve never been at all. What’s wrong with Bourbon Street?”

I started laughing. There was no way to explain without videotape and maybe police records.

“Daddy thinks it would help if we got to know something about banking,” she persisted.

“We won’t get to know anything there. Believe me.”

An ominous rustle in the black-walnut tree made us look up. Monica was perched on a limb, smiling in a way that I knew would only lead to trouble.

“Don’t listen to her, Cassandra,” my demon called down. “I think you should go. New Orleans can be very educational.”

Cassie squinted up at her. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Vanessa said, “that Pookie there is chicken.”

I scowled at her; she was stretched out on a limb on the other side of the tree, with a big sunhat on her head and a giant margarita in her hand. God, she was annoying when she got in cute moods. “Chicken of what?”

The demon brushed off the question. “I love New Orleans, myself. All that depravity. All that sin.” Her expression went dreamy. “All those sailors.”

Monica snorted. “Please. You couldn’t get a sailor if you used a harpoon.”

That touched off furious activity in the tree, which Cassie and I chose to ignore. While green walnuts rained down around us, and the demons hissed and clawed overhead, Cassie grabbed my collar again. “Come on, Devvy. It’s just for a weekend. It might be fun.”

“It might be fun to drive a railroad spike through my head, too, but I don’t necessarily need to find out.”

“It won’t be all work,” she promised. “We can go sightseeing, and eat Cajun food, and listen to jazz, and eat Cajun food…”

“And suck the heads,” I added.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do with crawfish. Twist the tails off and suck the heads.”

Cassie looked as though she didn’t believe me, but she filed it for later argument. That was just as well; we heard an emphatic “Ha!”, and then Monica was on the ground with us, very happy with herself.

“I sent her to Disney World,” she announced. “Let her get out of that one.”

“I hope she’s not diabetic,” I said.

Cassie tried not to laugh. “Cruel.”

“Thank you,” Monica said, settling on the end of the hammock. “Now, we were talking about New Orleans, weren’t we?”

“You’re not going,” I warned.

“Why ever not?”

“Demons would be overkill in that town.”

Monica shrugged. “I like overkill. So if you’re going…”

“I didn’t say I was.”

My demon glanced at Cassie — and they both smiled. Definitely trouble.

“Still an innocent,” Monica observed, shaking her head. “We’ll talk about this again after she’s worked on you for a while. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have hotel reservations to make. I’m not staying at a place infested with bankers.”

Then she vanished. Cassie was still smiling. But she had the sense to stop when I gave her a Look.

“What does she mean, ‘work on’?” I asked, suspicious.

Cassie kissed me and then got up. “We’ll talk about it later. I’ve got hotel reservations to make.”

Outraged, I watched her saunter into the house. To add insult to the injury, she was humming.

“Maybe I can hire a conjure woman in the Quarter to fix them all,” I muttered.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 2

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER 2

Wednesday, Late June

All the way to New Orleans,

I had long, dark thoughts.

How was this fair? I hadn’t wanted to go on this trip. I’d told everyone to forget it —Jenner, Mr. Wolfe, Cassie, Cassie again, both demons more than once. I’d even told Jack, who was back with J/J/G by default; every creative director in town had turned down Jenner’s job offer. (More to the point, we’d all promised to quit if Walt took it.)

But Jack had only smirked. “Could be worse, Kerry. I could have Kurt go too.”

I no longer believed in degrees of misfortune; when it was bad these days, it was all bad. But threatening to send Kurt along was no threat, because we would just park him in the bars. We’d have to use the Jaws of Life to extract him later, but that could be much later. Say, in a year or two.

Heather and Troy had been no help either; they wanted to go with us. As for Chip…

“Can you bring me back some stuff?” he’d asked. “Beads or voodoo dolls or something?”

Amateur. “How about a baby-alligator head?”

He thought that would be even better. Before I could take it back, Troy overheard, and the next thing I knew, he and Heather were down for alligator heads too. So I told them about a postcard I’d seen in one of the shops:

“Cool,” Troy said. “But we’ll take our heads dead.”

I was still pondering whether the effort of bringing him a live one would be worth it.

But the souvenirs weren’t all that was bothering me. Neither was the bankers’ convention; I’d been bored before. New Orleans wasn’t the problem either. Cassie could find a hundred ways to get into trouble there before breakfast, but that would be true anywhere in the world.

The problem was that I’d be there with her and her father and the demons. And there was no telling where the trouble would start.

We touched down early

on a brutal afternoon; despite the air conditioning, the heat oozed through the airport windows like something sticky, with tentacles. While we waited for our luggage — and waited, and waited — I watched Cassie wander around, exploring. She liked the palm trees. She liked the weirdly dressed tourists. She liked the natives’ accents. But when she got too close to a middle-aged Cajun couple, wanting to hear better, I yanked her back.

“What was that for?” she asked, offended.

I glanced over at the couple, who were very put out that Cassie had been in their space. The woman was giving her death rays. “We’re not in Meridian anymore, Dorothy. Watch who you go up to.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Some Cajuns aren’t big on outsiders. Don’t mess with them.”

“I’m not an outsider. I’m an American.”

“You’re not in America,” I said flatly.

Cassie put her hands on her hips and gave me some attitude about the Louisiana Purchase. I didn’t argue; she’d find out for herself soon enough.

The Marriott shuttle

let us off in the garage, and a bellman loaded our luggage onto a cart. Most of it was Cassie’s. The woman was packed for a month in the jungle — which wasn’t far wrong, given the climate. No wonder rates went down this time of year.

But that, of course, was the logic of the situation. Every convention hotel in the French Quarter was packed to the rafters right now. The locals probably dreaded summer for that reason alone.

The bellman heaved Cassie’s beauty-supplies bag on with the others and paused to mop the sweat off his forehead. Couldn’t blame him; that bag weighed as much as a minivan. “Hot day,” I observed.

“Yes, ma’am. Going to ninety-two.”

Ninety-two. And the humidity was unreal. Whatever they paid these guys, it wasn’t enough, especially after that bag of Cassie’s. Without comment, I dug into my purse for extra tip money as we made for the door.

We were nearly flattened by the first blast of air conditioning. It was like going from a swamp to a meat locker, only more extreme; I half-expected to see peoplesicles stacked up in the lobby.

“Good thing I brought a sweater,” Cassie said, hugging herself. “How do they stand this?”

The bellman overheard and smiled a little. “You get used to it, ma’am.”

Her brow furrowed. “Why?”

Fortunately, he laughed, and I steered her over to the registration desk before she could make things worse. I also mentally added another buck to the tip.

Mr. Wolfe had left a message

for Cassie at the desk, so as soon as we were settled, she called his room. He wanted to take us to dinner, which was fine by me as long as he bought.

While they worked out the details, I checked out the bath. The last thing I expected to find was Vanessa in the tub, so of course there she was, wearing a big straw hat, huge sunglasses, and a mountain of bubbles.

“About time you two showed up,” she said, raising a glass of something pink. “Daiquiri?”

I frowned at the half-empty pitcher on the floor. “Don’t you have your own room?”

“Monica’s using the tub.”

There was probably something to be said for having clean demons. But I couldn’t think what. “Go home, Vanessa.”

“Don’t be silly. I just got here. I haven’t even had crawdads yet.”

“Crawfish.”

“Whatever.” She pulled her sunglasses down to regard me over the tops. “Monica’s going to hate it when I suck the heads. So where are we going for dinner?”

“You’re not invited.”

She pushed the sunglasses back up. “Tosh. Bad girls go everywhere. Do you think the black dress would be too much?”

“You would be too much.”

“Why, thank you,” she said sweetly.

I gave up on her and went back out to see what Cassie was doing. She was off the phone, digging in one of her suitcases, humming tunelessly. I hated to ruin her good mood, but…

“Vanessa’s in there. She’s taking a bubble bath.”

Cassie sighed but didn’t elaborate.

“She’s got a pitcher of daiquiris with her.”

“Good. Maybe she’ll drown. What about the witch?”

“Taking a bubble bath in their room. I think…” I broke off, seeing her eyebrow arch. “What?”

“They’ve got a room?”

“They have to stay somewhere.” Actually, I wasn’t sure that was true; for all I knew, they lived in Hell and commuted.

“A room together?”

“That’s what she said. Go ask her yourself, if you need it firsthand.”

Cassie smiled very slowly, which always meant something bad. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“What?”

“This might be it.”

“‘It’?”

“It. The big It.”

We’d been traveling all day, and between fatigue and the murderous air conditioning, I wasn’t well enough to have this conversation. “‘The big It’?”

“Honestly, Devvy,” she said, a little exasperated, “sometimes I think you have a V chip. I’m talking about sex.”

“No, you’re not. You’re talking about Monica and Vanes…” Then it hit me. Stunned by the force of the impact, I sat down hard on the other bed.

“You seem surprised,” Cassie remarked.

“There’s an understatement.”

“I don’t know why you should be. They’ve been flirting with each other all along.”

“You call that flirting? Changing each other into roaches and toads and spiders?”

“We have our way. They have theirs.”

Yes, but Monica and Vanessa? Together that way? I tried to imagine — and instantly slammed my mind shut.

Cassie laughed and sat down next to me. “You always look on the dark side. You’re not getting the whole picture. Don’t you see what this means?”

“I’m trying really hard not to,” I admitted.

“Think, Devvy. If they get involved with each other, they won’t have time to bother us. They’ll be too busy doing whatever it is that witches do.” I must have looked blank, because she added, “When they do that.”

What language was she speaking? I ran it back again — doing whatever it is that witches do when they do that — and decided that maybe I was just hungry. “Right. Lunch?”

Cassie wasn’t fooled by the change of subject, but maybe she was hungry too, because she just smiled and grabbed her purse.

“Not in the Quarter,” I warned. “Use a belt bag.”

She only argued for five minutes or so before she gave in.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 3

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES:

Beignets are square fried doughnuts covered with powdered sugar. But the restaurant in this chapter (a real one) makes redfish beignets, which are chunks of redfish fried in batter with spices.

CHAPTER 3

We stepped out on Canal Street

in the brassy glare of midafternoon, so strong that it made us shade our eyes even with sunglasses. “I’m blind,” Cassie reported mournfully.

It wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Whether the cause was the asphalt, the store windows, the humidity, or all of the above, everything reflected at street level. And God, it was hot. “We’ll get shade around the corner,” I told her. “C’mon.”

Picking up our pace, we turned down Chartres Street, heading east. The first couple of blocks were a gauntlet I always hated to run, especially at night, but past that…

“Wow,” Cassie said, coming to a dead stop.

And there we were, in the Quarter. It always looked just like the pictures, the way San Francisco did. But no picture had ever captured the smell. It wasn’t bad, exactly — mostly spices, tropical plants, and whatever was cooking in the restaurant you were passing. It was also partly the trash in the streets. And under all that was the Mississippi River. The Quarter smelled just how I remembered. While she fumbled with her camera, I leaned against a lamppost and breathed it all in.

“Find anything to shoot?” I asked her.

“You can’t be serious. I can’t even decide where to look first.”

Across the street, several young men in white aprons were taking a cigarette break outside a restaurant. I thought they would make a good photo and was about to suggest it when they broke into huge smiles. They’d spotted Cassie, of course. She was so charmed that she took their picture.

“I hope that comes out,” she said. “I think they were flirting with me. Want to have lunch there?”

The town was full of waiters who wouldn’t flirt with her, or with Aphrodite herself, but I didn’t feel like talking about it. “I had someplace else in mind.”

Not long after, we were sitting at a wrought-iron table in a small courtyard, drinking beer out of longneck bottles and waiting for redfish beignets. I was already feeling better.

“Are you sure about this?” Cassie whispered again.

I laughed. “Yes. I’m sure.”

She looked around doubtfully. We were in a comfortable spot, shaded by trees and buildings. But viewed from the back, the buildings were seedy, and the trees were full of pigeons — that is, when the pigeons weren’t doing barrel rolls around the courtyard or waddling between the tables. You got used to them after a while, but it was best not to think too much about their presence.

Cassie, however, was thinking. “This can’t be sanitary. I can’t believe the Board of Health doesn’t close this place down. I can’t believe this place doesn’t have a game warden on duty. You’re sure it’s OK?”

“This is New Orleans. Live dangerously.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re in a better mood.” It sounded like an accusation.

I just smiled and drank a little more beer. Then the beignets came. She forgave me after the first bite.

We were on our second round

and waiting for more beignets when Monica and Vanessa popped in. Literally. No one in the courtyard seemed to notice, but everyone else seemed to be several drinks ahead of us.

Cassie wasn’t happy to see demons. “Get lost. The pigeons are bad enough.”

“Manners, Cassandra,” Monica chided.

I scanned them critically. Monica could pass for a person — barely — in that black gown; there were plenty of Goths and artiste types loose in the streets. But no one was going to buy Vanessa. She had on the nun costume again, this time with several strings of Mardi Gras beads.

“What?” she asked. “They’re Catholics here, aren’t they?”

On a hunch, I checked under the table. She was wearing hot-pink plastic jellies instead of nun shoes.

“Don’t blame me,” Monica said peevishly. “I tried to tell her. Now she’s going to order a beer and scandalize the tourists.”

Vanessa tossed her head. “If that’s all it takes, they need to have their little horizons broadened.”

“And you’re just the broad to do it,” Monica snapped.

Cassie and I consulted each other across the table. She smiled knowingly. Not wanting to go there, I sat all the way back in my chair.

“She’s been impossible,” Monica told me. “She jumped on the beds. She got into the honor bar. She wanted to call room service and ask for iced blood, just to see what they’d do. I had to throw her out to get some peace and quiet.”

I was unmoved by her ordeal. “Not my demon. Not my problem.”

“If you’re implying that she’s my problem,” Cassie said, “you’ve been out in the sun too long. I never had a demon until you did.”

So much for feeling better. Impatiently, I looked around for the waiter. He was just coming out with our order. The first sight of Vanessa made him hesitate, but I supposed he was used to ignoring things, because he recovered almost without a hitch. “What can I get for you ladies?” he asked the demons.

Monica tried to order several things that weren’t on the menu but settled for what Cassie and I were drinking. Then the waiter turned to Vanessa. “Sister?”

Sister Vanessa batted her eyelashes devoutly. “Red Stripe. Or maybe Abita. Surprise me.”

I forestalled any questions by giving the waiter a terrible look. He shrugged and wandered off.

“Told you,” Monica grumbled.

“Suppose we sit quietly,” I said, “and watch the birdies. And not talk at all. Would that work?”

That suggestion offended everyone, but it shut them up, which was all I really wanted. No one said a word until the food came.

“Fish?” I asked the demons, to be polite.

They grabbed for the basket at the same time. The feeding frenzy that followed put crocodiles to shame. Cassie and I could only watch as they devoured every crumb. While I wasn’t looking, one of them finished my beer, too.

“Ahhhh,” Monica sighed, looking almost contented. “That hit the spot. And wallowed around. Do you suppose there’s more in the kitchen?”

Cassie offered to go see — which, of course, was her way of leaving me alone with them. I would have words with her later.

To make myself feel better in the meantime, I glared at Vanessa again. Was she kidding? Where the crucifix should have been, she had a yellow plastic dragon dangling off a string of yellow beads. That wouldn’t fly, no matter how many drinks a Louisiana Catholic had.

But she only seemed amused by the scrutiny. “You’re not having a good time, Devlin. Such a pity. How I wish we could make your life a little more…colorful.”

“Pass.”

“Sorry; too late.” She nudged Monica. “What would be fun? Should we tell her about our bet?”

Oh-oh. “What bet?”

Monica scowled at her fellow demon. “You’re not supposed to tell, you halfwit.”

So there were rules, were there? But if there were, Vanessa would simply ignore them. Which she did. “It’s like this,” she told me. “I think this town is going to finally make you run amok. She thinks it’s going to make you throw a great big repression festival. We think we’ve got you either way, but there’s nothing wrong with having a little sport at your expense.”

“Why?”

“It’s what we do. Besides, it’s fun.”

The headache I’d had all morning was starting to come back. “Fun for you. But not for long. Cassie’s going to have a fit when I tell her.”

“She’s not the boss of me,” Vanessa scoffed.

“Do you want to cross her?”

To my surprise, both demons gave it serious thought. Then Vanessa got up and brushed the crumbs off her habit. “I think I’ll go check out one of those voodoo stores. Can’t hurt.”

She vanished. Monica frowned at the empty chair where she’d been sitting. “I’d better go with her. She’ll only get into trouble.”

“And that’s a problem?” I asked. But Monica was already gone.

When Cassie came back, bringing more beignets, I told her everything. The only part that really interested her was the last part.

“I told you something’s up between them,” she said.

I was trying to tell her how little I cared when a huge pigeon swooped down and stole the biggest beignet. In a fit of pique, I threw a bottle cap at it. If the pigeon wasn’t really Vanessa, she probably gave it the idea.

We took the long route

back to the hotel so Cassie could see more of the Quarter — a very long route, because she wanted to explore every shop along the way. The shops would still be there tomorrow and the next day, and the next, but New Orleans had already gotten to her: She wanted to do everything, at the same time, now.

So we window-shopped, inside-shopped, and generally did the consumer tour. She wanted to check out all the galleries, too, but I refused except for Rodrigue’s. I was sorry to see IBM using his Blue Dog in printer commercials; I’d wanted it to stay a cult secret until I could afford an original. Unfortunately, that would be never.

By the time we finally got back to the room, we’d gone miles in the broiling sun, and I was worn out. Cassie either wasn’t or wasn’t going to admit it. While I collapsed on one of the beds, she busied herself laying out clothes, makeup, and hair appliances for the evening. Then she went through my clothes.

I ignored the muttering about all the black in my wardrobe (“I swear, it’s like living with an undertaker”) and flipped through the tour brochures we’d picked up. “How about a cemetery tour Saturday morning and the Garden District in the afternoon? We could even do one of those midnight vampire tours. They’re kind of hokey, but…”

“Why do we need tours?”

“They’re fun. You’ll learn a lot. Especially on a cemetery tour. I know it sounds morbid, but I think…”

“Why do we want to see a cemetery? Just because you’re dressed for it?”

I glanced over. By her expression, she was just playing. Still, I was serious. “It might be your favorite part of the whole trip. You might be surprised. Anyway, we can’t go by ourselves. It’s too dangerous.”

“It’s a cemetery,” she said, all sweet reason. “Everybody’s dead.”

“Not the muggers. There are a million places for them to hide. It’s not safe even in the daytime unless you’re with a group.”

“You worry too much.”

“You don’t worry enough.”

“Well, Devvy, you do it enough for both of us. Why should I bother?”

Dammit. While I tried to come up with a comeback, Cassie laughed and sat on the bed. “Are you going to read brochures all afternoon?”

“I just think we should schedule a few things,” I grumbled. “Tours sell out in nothing flat.”

She reached over to tickle me. “There are private tours.”

“They sell out too.”

“Very private tours,” she added, letting her fingers wander.

I tried desperately to ignore her. “We have to meet your dad in an hour.”

“This is New Orleans. Live dangerously.”

Beaten at my own game. Life was so unfair. “You fight dirty.”

“Learned it from you,” she said lightly.

And I learned it from Monica, if we were talking about the same thing. But it didn’t matter just then; I had a tour to catch.

Mr. Wolfe was waiting for us

in the bar, which was an attraction all by itself. But that stood to reason; Bacco was a major restaurant. Thank God I wasn’t picking up the check.

“I’m having a Perrier,” he said — a tad defensively, I thought. “But if you girls want something from the bar…”

He let the sentence trail off unfinished. Knowing what that meant, I declined. Cassie did too, but grudgingly.

Fortunately, our table was ready.

There wasn’t much talk while we studied our menus. What did I want? Would the waiter lose respect for me if I asked questions? That seemed likely. He looked like he’d been born in that tuxedo, which had as much starch in it as our tablecloth. Good thing we’d dressed up for dinner.

Still uncertain, I surveyed the plates on the tables around us, trying to decide what looked good. Two tables over, a designer-dressed brunette caught my eye. Something about her was familiar. Something bad familiar. She almost might have been Vanessa, except that Vanessa didn’t have that kind of taste in clothes.

Then the brunette caught me staring, and laughed, and I knew I’d been had. It was her, all right. If I’d had any doubt, she destroyed it in the next instant by picking up a crawfish and sucking the head.

Trouble was, it was still a whole crawfish, and she’d put the icky end in her mouth — antennae, beady eyes on stalks, and all.

Revolted, I pushed my chair back, with the idea of telling her to stop it right now or I would kill her.

“Devvy?” Cassie asked.

Before I could think how to explain, Vanessa gave up the game. She spat out the crawfish and, with the deftness of a native, twisted the head off. Then she sucked it the right way, drinking the juices out of the cavity in the back — still a disgusting thing to watch, in my opinion.

No one had noticed her. But now everyone was staring at me. There was nothing to do but sit back down.

Mr. Wolfe was frowning. “Devlin? Is something wrong?”

“No, sir,” I lied.

It had already been a very long weekend. And it was only the first night.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 4

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES:

To the best of my knowledge, there is no American Mortgage Bankers Institute.

CHAPTER 4

Marriott, Early Thursday

Some mornings,

it took Cassie forever to get ready. That morning was one of them. All that walking the day before had finally caught up with her, and it had taken threats and bribes to get her out of bed. She’d demanded the foot massage first, so we were going to be late if she didn’t get a move on.

“I’m all pink,” she fretted at the mirror. “I used sunscreen yesterday, and I’m pink.”

“You look fine.”

“I look like Miss Piggy.”

“You do not. You look f…” A small voice — a voice of Experience — prompted me in the nick of time. “Gorgeous. And a little sunburn is kind of cute on you.”

She stuck her head around the partition, her expression hopeful. “You think so?”

“Know so.”

“In that case,” she said, “I think I’ll keep you.”

“Fine. Now move it, Cass.”

Reluctantly, she went back to work at the mirror. I checked my watch again. Fifteen minutes. We were going to be late; I just knew it. Mr. Wolfe wasn’t going to like that.

Truth be told, though, he wasn’t going to like anything we did this weekend, late, early, or on the dot. I’d had a restless night reliving dinner.

Bacco, Wednesday Night

“About the convention,”

Mr. Wolfe said by way of preface. Then he proceeded to talk forever.

About the convention. He made it sound like a high time, all right. We’d be mingling with mortgage bankers from all over the Midwest, not to mention economists and MBAs. We’d be sitting in on panels and seminars, learning about cutting-edge methodology. We’d be getting a crash course in the business — a chance that few laymen ever got, one that we were fortunate to get.

I didn’t want to go.

While he talked and talked and talked, I poked at my ravioli. Cassie’s appetite was off too. Maybe later, we could lose her father and go to the Café du Monde. I was trying to figure the shortest route there when she dropped her fork with an awful clatter.

“What?” I asked her.

“Weren’t you listening?”

“Yes and no. I was just thinking, just for a second, so I didn’t…”

“He’s afraid we’ll embarrass him.”

Mr. Wolfe straightened his tie — perhaps his way of stalling for time. “I didn’t say that. I said…”

“‘No displays in public,’” she said. “I heard. What do you think we are? Teenagers?”

Furtively, I checked the perimeter. No one was paying much attention. Yet.

“Devvy and I are professionals, Daddy. We’re here on business. You asked us to be here.”

Her father mumbled something I couldn’t quite catch.

“What was that?” Cassie asked.

“I invited you, honey,” he said. “Not her.”

Now he told me.

“I thought we went over this at Thanksgiving,” Cassie retorted. “I thought you were going to accept our relationship.”

“I can’t help what you do on your own time. As long as I don’t think about it, it doesn’t bother me. Much.” He paused, no doubt for emphasis. “But this is business. You can’t parade this kind of relationship in front of these people. They won’t understand.”

“Not the way you do,” I said mildly.

Cassie quit glaring at her father for a second to glare at me.

He went on as though he hadn’t heard. “I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying it is what it is. These are conservative people. You know what they say about being in Rome? You’re in Rome.”

I was trying hard not to take personal offense. “Great. Where do they keep the lions?”

“It’s bad enough that you’re not a Republican,” he continued, still paying no attention to me. “But if they found out that you’re…you’re…”

“A deviant?” she snapped.

“…what you are, it wouldn’t go over well. You might even be asked to leave.”

“I’m not a ‘what.’ And I’m not an idiot either. Do you think I’m going to hang all over Devvy in front of a lot of people?”

I could think of several times when she had but decided not to share that information.

“Are you afraid I’m going to look bad?” she asked. “Or are you afraid you are?”

“Now, Cassie…”

“Don’t you ‘Now, Cassie’ me. If you don’t trust me, you’d better say so now. We’ll be on the first plane out of here tomorrow if you don’t.”

It was a lie, of course; she’d found a few shops that she couldn’t wait to have at. But it stumped her father.

“And something else, Daddy: If we are on that plane tomorrow, I’m never, ever speaking to you again. Got that?”

“Now, Cassie…”

“I mean it.”

He weighed the threat for a few seconds, which made her even madder. She was just pushing her chair back to leave when he threw up his hands.

“It’s not about trust. It’s business. But I suppose you’re a grown woman.”

“For years,” she agreed.

“Your mother and I did the best we could. If that’s not enough, I suppose it’s too late now anyway.”

Cassie smiled thinly. “I accept your apology.”

Was that an apology? Oh, well, as long as she was satisfied, fine. There was no accounting for other people’s families.

“Just do one favor for me,” her father told her.

“What favor?”

“Don’t start playing softball. It’s not ladylike.”

There was long silence at our table. Which I frankly wished I were under.

“Oh, don’t worry, Daddy,” she finally said. “I’m not a lady.”

With that, she got up and swept out of the restaurant, grand as a duchess. I had to do some running to catch up with her at the corner.

Back at the Marriott

After the third time,

I got bored flipping through the city magazine. There was nothing on TV, either. “Cassie? We’ve got to be downstairs in ten minutes.”

“Almost ready,” she said — indistinctly, which probably meant she was putting on lipstick. I checked my watch again. Well, she was getting closer. We might make it yet.

Or not. Moodily, I got up to look out the window at the river. A big ship of some sort was steaming around the bend, blowing its horn. I wondered what it was carrying and whether it was coming or going. I wished I were on board instead of going to a bankers’ convention.

We got downstairs on time,

but we couldn’t find the ballroom and had to go ask the concierge. When we finally found the right place, the doors were closed.

I double-checked the sign outside.

AMERICAN MORTGAGE BANKERS INSTITUTE. That was it.

“What do we do now?” Cassie wondered. “Should we just go on in?”

My suggestion would have been to run for it, but we were grownups; we had to work sometime. As quietly as possible, I pulled the doors open a crack.

And shut them again right away.

She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“There must be some mistake.”

“Can’t be. You heard the concierge. Let me see.”

She opened the doors, and I watched her expression change from curiosity to shock.

We were expecting old men in navy-blue business suits, striped ties, and wingtips. We were expecting everyone to be sitting nicely in chairs. We were expecting a churchlike hush. What we found was a circus, with at least two rings up and running.

Dazed, we took a few steps into the ballroom. The Beach Boys were playing at supersonic volume on the sound system, which was appropriate, because beach balls were flying all over the room. Not a man, woman, or beast was sitting down. There were people up on the dais, milling around a podium, but no business was being done. And even if there were, no one was dressed for it. I’d never seen so many Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts in one place.

Cassie and I looked at our business suits. We looked at each other. She said a bad word.

“I’m going to kill my father,” she promised.

“Wait and see. If he’s allergic to polyester, this would do it.” Suspicious, I looked at the feet of the nearest revelers. Sure enough, most of them were wearing black dress socks with their shorts. “What does the schedule say this is supposed to be?”

She dug into an outside pocket on her briefcase and pulled out a copy of the agenda. “It says, ‘Thursday, 9 a.m.: president’s welcome and keynote address.’”

“Not unless they Mace this crowd first.”

Cassie started to say something to that, but then she noticed a sinister object on a nearby table: a plastic cocktail glass with a toothpick sticking out of it. She picked up the glass, sniffed it, put it down.

“What?”

“I’d say whiskey sour. Devvy, it’s 9 in the morning.”

Yes, for us, but not for men who’d been on Bourbon Street all night. That would go a long way toward explaining the beach balls. Which I hoped would be the only inflatable objects flying around.

“Let’s find your dad,” I suggested.

Slowly and with great difficulty, we wound our way through the crowd. The music was getting louder; now it was Aerosmith. My God, I’d lived to see it all: Aerosmith at a bankers’ convention. The only thing weirder would have been….

Then we saw him. Calvin Wolfe, the terror of Kansas City banking, pillar of the Republican Party, the man who just last night lectured us about business conduct, was batting a beach ball around with one hand and drinking a Miller Lite with the other, soberly attired in a pink polo shirt, green plaid shorts, and a red plastic lei. Fortunately, he wasn’t wearing black socks, because he wasn’t wearing any — just a scuffed-up pair of Topsiders. I had my doubts about the sunglasses, though. He had them hooked rakishly through a buttonhole in the polo shirt, which was just too Joe College for a man his age.

Cassie was staring at him as though he had antlers.

“It may not be what it looks like,” I told her, trying to be comforting.

She gave me a disbelieving look. Then she shoved her briefcase at me. “Hold this. I’ll be back right after I kill him.”

“There are witnesses,” I reminded her — but not very loud.

Mr. Wolfe was having a nice long snort off his beer when his daughter crept up behind him and whacked him between the shoulder blades. Foam flew everywhere. Coughing, he turned to protest…and froze when he saw her.

“Just exactly what do you think you’re doing?” Cassie demanded.

“Me?” He seemed to be genuinely surprised. “What are you doing? You weren’t supposed to come until the afternoon session.”

I’d moved closer, partly to hear better but mostly to interfere in case of emergency. He was slurring his s words slightly, but he seemed about as well under control as possible under the circumstances. Still, I felt in my own briefcase for the pepper spray.

“And now I see why,” she growled. “Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s just business, honey.”

Definite slur this time. She heard it, too, and snatched the beer can away. “You have all kinds of nerve, trying to guilt me out last night when you’re acting like this today. Mom would die of shame.”

“It was just a little insurance,” he soothed. “We don’t want to go telling stories on each other to your mother. You know how sensitive she is.”

“Sensitive? We’ll see how sensitive she is when she brains you with a frying pan. You know what I’ll do? I’ll go buy her a great big one, so she can’t possibly miss.”

Bewildered, Mr. Wolfe glanced around and saw me standing well within earshot. He tried to look stern — a hard trick for a guilty person. “I suppose you heard everything?”

“Pretty much every syllable,” I admitted.

“You’re not going to call Elizabeth, are you?”

Cassie cleared her throat to get my attention and gave me a Significant Look.

“Depends. Are you going to give your daughter a break?”

Mr. Wolfe thought. It took a while; who knew how many beers he’d already had? Then, decisively, he reached into his shorts pocket and came up with a fat wad of bills in a money clip.

“No bribes,” I warned.

Cassie begged to differ; she held out her hand. Her father peeled off two fifties, and I made her quit after the second one.

“Will you be sober when we come back this afternoon?” she asked.

“I’m sober now, honey,” he said.

Then he burped.

Cassie turned on her heel and marched out of the ballroom.

She was still hopping mad

after lunch. I’d taken her to a brewpub that had great crab cakes, which came with sweet-potato fries, which I’d never seen or heard of anywhere else. In retrospect, it might have been better not to have taken her anywhere near beer, but this was the good kind, not dishwater in a can.

It appeased her for about thirty seconds. But she drank it anyway.

We were walking back to the hotel for the afternoon session when I got a feeling that we were being followed. Nothing tangible — just a little prickle down the spine. Feeling stupid about it, I checked over my shoulder. The only people behind us at the moment were several doors behind, and they were too busy looking in store windows to pay us any attention.

Cassie kept on talking, embellishing the story she was planning to tell her mother, and I forced my attention back to her. Everything was fine. It was broad daylight. We were on a very public street. The most menacing thing around was a bored-looking horse in a straw hat, pulling a carriage, and it was no danger unless it stomped us, bit us, or lost its diaper.

But I’d been here before, and I knew the stories: haunted city, cradle of American voodoo, not a place to take lightly. Something dark ran just below the surface. Was I more sensitive to it now, having lived with demons?

Then I remembered who those demons were and almost laughed out loud. Vanessa was about as scary as bunny slippers, and she’d taken a lot of the edge off Monica, too. Right now, the two of them were probably off having blender drinks somewhere, playing with voodoo dolls.

“Devvy?” Cassie said abruptly.

Still cheered by the thought, I smiled at her. “Hmmm?”

“Would you know if we were being followed?”

“Of course we’re being followed. This is the busiest street in the Quarter. Lots of foot traffic.”

“I don’t mean that way. Not exactly.”

Uneasy, I pulled her aside. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure I can explain. It’s just a weird feeling. Like there’s something behind us. Maybe not a person.”

My alarm went off again. The feeling was stronger now, as though whatever was shadowing us had stopped when we did and was biding its time, looking at beads and masks in a shop window, tapping its foot.

Where were demons when you really needed them?

“Let’s keep moving,” I said casually. “Just in case.”

We set out for the Marriott again. Neither of us mentioned that we were walking much faster.

New Orleans Historical Voodoo Museum

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 5

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES:

Maison Voodoo and the Undead tour are made-up but not far off the mark. Marie Laveau (the Voodoo Queen) was a real person; there’ll be more about her later in this story.

CHAPTER 5

Later Thursday

A little before 5,

Cassie and I staggered out of the convention glassy-eyed. We were sober, but in terms of mental damage, we were ten years older than we’d been when we went in.

It had been awful. They’d acted like bankers this time, there hadn’t been a beach ball in sight, and I hadn’t understood a word anyone said the entire afternoon. By the third or fourth speaker, they all looked like Alan Greenspan, even the women. And when some fossil of an economist started talking about dummy variables, my brain imploded.

Regrettably, it hadn’t been fatal.

Cassie said she didn’t want to hear one single statistic for the rest of the day, which was exactly how I felt. We were making for the elevators and freedom when her father caught up with us.

“Where are you going?” he asked Cassie, rather put out. “I wanted to introduce you to some people.”

“It’s 5, Daddy. I’m off the clock. Can we do it tomorrow?”

“They’re busy people. I’m not sure they’ll have time tomorrow.”

I couldn’t imagine why not. Nobody had done anything all afternoon, if you didn’t count the pudgy guy who took a nap and fell off his chair with a crash that woke me up.

“We’ll work it in,” she assured him. “Let’s talk about it later.”

“How about dinner?” he persisted.

“Not tonight. I have a headache.”

Something told me Mr. Wolfe heard those words all the time. He scowled at me as though I’d put her up to it. To annoy him, I shrugged.

“But I’ve already made the reservations, honey,” he told her.

Getting impatient, Cassie punched the up button again. “Then you’ll have lots of room at your table, won’t you? Forget it, Daddy. Besides, I’m still mad at you.”

“But it’s Galatoire’s. Don’t you want to go to Galatoire’s? I’m buying.”

“Headache,” she reminded him.

“But…”

To my astonishment, Cassie clutched her head with both hands and started howling. Very embarrassing, with all those people around. It worked, though; her father cleared out on the double.

And when the elevator finally came, no one wanted to get in the same car with her. So we had it all to ourselves. That worked, too.

The patient made a miraculous recovery

shortly thereafter, and as soon as we finished changing clothes, she dragged me off into the Quarter.

“What if we run into your father?” I asked.

She adjusted her sunglasses. “My father who?”

Point taken. We wandered around for a while, stopped for dinner, wandered some more. At one corner, she tugged me off course and pointed to a sign down the block:

MAISON VOODOO.

“Let’s go look,” she said.

“It’s a tourist trap, Cass. Not the real thing.”

“I don’t care. I’ve never been in a voodoo store before. Please?”

So we went in. Just as I’d expected, it was a typical clip joint, tiny, dark, and crammed with what might or might not be real voodoo goods: gris-gris bags, wooden masks, dolls, little vials of mysterious fluids. But something very atypical was in the store too — something I couldn’t place. It gave me a bad feeling. So did the woman behind the counter. We weren’t the only customers in the store, but from the second we walked in, we had her undivided, unwavering, extremely unpleasant attention.

While Cassie went exploring, I tried smiling at the clerk, who was staring at me with hostile suspicion. I didn’t necessarily believe in voodoo, but there was no point provoking a woman who might turn me into a chicken.

“Look!” Cassie called. “This candle’s called ‘Go Way Evil’!”

The clerk folded her arms and frowned at me harder, so I was careful to smile again before I answered. “They have different names. Some of them are for money, some of them are for luck…”

Cassie emerged from wherever she’d been, clutching a black candle. The glass candleholder was labeled Black Cat. “What do you suppose this one does?”

“It’s probably for bad luck. Put it back.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, Cass.”

Grumbling, she took it back. The clerk’s expression didn’t change; she was still giving me the evil eye. It was starting to feel very familiar — the way I’d felt earlier in the day, when something might have been following us. I really, really didn’t like it. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and pulled Cassie out the door.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

“That woman behind the counter kept staring at me. I think she hates me.”

“And she doesn’t even know you,” she said thoughtfully.

I let that pass. “I’d rather not fool around with voodoo.”

“We weren’t fooling; we were looking. What do they have a store for if they don’t want people to come in and look?” When I didn’t answer, she pressed her case. “You can’t be scared. You told me it’s just a tourist trap.”

“It is. But that woman gave me the creeps. She might know something.”

Cassie shook her head. “You’re losing it, Devvy.”

“Really? And what if she’s back there right now lighting up a Black Cat?”

“Remind me to take you to a good specialist as soon as we get home,” she said blithely.

Fine. Let her be that way. I’d let a tour guide explain about Marie Laveau. Then she’d be sorry.

We walked on in relative silence for about a half-block. A taxi rattled down the narrow street, scattering pedestrians. The sign on its roof — an ad for some Bourbon Street dive — said

EAT, DRINK, AND SEE MARY.

“Tacky,” Cassie observed.

“Very.”

“So where is Bourbon Street from here?”

“You don’t want to go there.”

“Yes, I do. It’s supposed to be colorful.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.”

This went on for a little while. Cassie won. But I got her to agree that we wouldn’t go to Pat O’Brien’s.

Bourbon Street

Getting out of Pat O’Brien’s

was almost as hard as getting in, and we never made it inside the building itself — only to the courtyard. And even the courtyard was so crowded that we’d practically needed machetes to get to the bar.

Cassie was uncharacteristically quiet as we went on down Bourbon, sucking Hurricanes through plastic straws out of paper cups. Maybe she was sulking because we didn’t get the glasses. Or maybe she just wasn’t up to competing with all that noise. Raucous music was blasting out of every bar — Dixieland here, zydeco there, God knew what next door — and the mob in the street was mostly several drinks ahead of us. From all the hooting, shouting, and squealing, we could’ve been at the world’s largest outdoor frat party.

Come to think of it, we were.

“This is awful!” Cassie shouted.

“What?”

“This.” She shook her cup. “What’s in this thing, anyway?”

I’d already worked that out: rum, bourbon, grenadine, and animal tranquilizers. Even my ears were getting numb, and I’d only had a little.

“We don’t have to finish them,” I told her. “Want to throw them away?”

“Where? I don’t see a trash can.”

No, and she wouldn’t see many. The streets of the Quarter were very narrow, and the alleys behind the buildings were even narrower, making it impossible for garbage trucks to get through. So trash went out on the curb. That was bad enough. But when you factored in a few thousand slobby tourists who threw their trash wherever they felt like, you had a real mess most of the time. Business owners hosed off their sidewalks once or twice a day to keep the smell down, but it was harder some places than others. On Bourbon especially, more than trash got into the street, to the point that you had to be very careful where you stepped.

We tossed our cups into the nearest trash pile and tried to move on, but the sidewalk was hopelessly gridlocked ahead. So we had to walk in the street with the worst Hurricane casualties. After a few seconds among them on such a hot night, we weren’t sure that the trash was all that smelled.

“Still think this is colorful?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer, being too busy glowering at a passing drunk. I didn’t see anything odd about him at first. He was just a piglike little man in a Hawaiian shirt, clutching two Hurricanes in his front hooves, drinking first out of one glass and then out of the other. Yes, he was wearing a few too many strings of Mardi Gras beads, but there was no law against that. There was no law against anything in New Orleans really.

But Cassie seemed just upset enough that I leaned past her to take a closer look. Then it all came clear. Those weren’t Mardi Gras beads on the top string; they were tiny plastic female breasts.

How nice for him.

“Did you see that?” Cassie demanded. “Did you see what that little pervert had on?”

“Unfortunately,” I said.

“Well?”

“Well what? I can’t do anything about it.”

“Devvy, he had breasts around his neck!”

“So? Yours are nicer. And there aren’t as many of them.”

She stopped dead in her tracks, stunned.

“What?” I asked.

“Either I’m looped, or you said something almost sweet.”

Surely not. But I had just had that Hurricane. “Well, more than two would be a nuisance,” I said defensively.

“You know what I mean.” She moved closer, mock-flirtatious. “So you think they’re nice, do you?”

“Don’t push it, Cass.”

She nudged me, amused, but dropped the subject as we plowed on through the sea of drunks.

“Revolting,” a familiar voice complained behind us. “Nothing but appliance dealers from Omaha on a toot.”

We turned, not surprised to see Monica and Vanessa. They were both wearing the long black demon gowns this time, but that was all right; they could pass for Goths that way. Not that anyone on Bourbon would be sober enough to notice if they were on fire.

“Why Omaha?” I asked.

Monica made an impatient gesture. “Fresno, then. Or Muncie. It doesn’t matter. Could we get out of here? These filthy beasts keep tramping on my hem.”

“You’re just jealous because they’re not flirting with you,” Vanessa told her.

“Flirting? They’re pinching you.”

“It’s their way,” Vanessa said. “I think it’s kind of cute.”

For once, the rest of us agreed on something; we all glared at her.

“Oh, all right, we’ll go,” she huffed. “It is kind of crowded here. And it’s loud, too. I can hardly hear myself think.”

I bit my tongue, but Monica laughed sharply.

“Well, I can’t,” Vanessa insisted. “It’s messing with my space.”

My demon was ready for that one. “Why, that’s almost Zen of you, Vanessa. Tell me, what is the sound of one brain cell clapping?”

Vanessa hissed at her. Monica hissed back.

“Cut it out,” I told them. “Why are you two bothering us, anyway? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

They said it together: “No.” Cassie looked to the heavens in appeal.

I tried again. “Then why don’t make yourselves useful? Why don’t you go over to Maison Voodoo and smite a clerk for me?”

“Funny you should mention voodoo,” Monica said. “I have an idea. Care to hear it?”

No. Besides, I couldn’t; the music was getting loud again. I motioned to her to wait, and when we got to the corner, we turned off Bourbon. The volume finally dropped about halfway down the block.

“That’s better,” Monica declared. “Now, as I was saying…”

“Can you make her stop?” Cassie asked me.

I shrugged.

“As I was saying, you two are missing half the point of New Orleans. I think you should get acquainted with the dead.”

“Give us a break,” I pleaded. “We had to listen to bankers all afternoon. That’s as dead as I want to get for one day.”

Monica went off on a small tangent about the lecture circuit in Hell, which seemed to consist entirely of economists. While she tried to scare us, Vanessa leaned against a building, looking bored. She yawned. She buffed her nails. Then she reached into her gown and pulled out a brochure.

“I’ve got a better idea,” she said, unfolding it. “Why don’t we go on the Undead tour?”

Unfortunately, both Monica and Cassie agreed.

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop

was the darkest place I’d ever been on purpose. The only light was from oil lamps and candles, and not too many of those. But the place would have been creepy if it had been lighted like Yankee Stadium. No wonder the Undead tour met here.

Apprehensive, I scoped out the room again. It was just a bar now, but Jean Lafitte may have used it as a base in the late 1700s, when it was a blacksmith shop, and there were stories that the building was haunted by dead pirates. Whether or not you believed the stories in broad daylight, you couldn’t help but believe a little in the dark, this close to midnight.

“You seem uneasy, Devlin,” Monica purred. “Nerves?”

I didn’t take the bait. Yes, the tour would probably be stupid; I’d been on one like it before. But there was something about this building that I didn’t like. And whatever it was, the demons might be amping it up a little, just for fun.

A commotion in the doorway drew our attention as the bar patrons parted to let someone in. Squinting in the dark, I made out a battered top hat. Then the newcomer stepped into the clear.

Uncertain, I squinted at him again. “Strange-looking” didn’t quite cover it. He might have been close to seven feet tall even without the hat, draped from shoulder to toe in a heavy black cloak, carrying an old-fashioned lantern. The lantern made sense, but not the cloak; even this late at night, it was still hot. Maybe he had some sort of fever. What little I could see of his face was ghostly pale.

“My God, what is that?” Cassie whispered.

“Our tour guide,” Vanessa said.

She was right. No sooner did she speak than the strange man raised his lantern and called for the tour group. And a cold wave washed through me for no good reason. Whether the tour was hokey or not, there was something wrong about the guide.

I glanced at Cassie. She was clearly feeling it too.

“What don’t we know here?” I asked Monica.

My demon smiled, and in the lantern light, I saw a flash of fangs.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 6

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER 6

Taking that tour

wasn’t the worst mistake we could’ve made, but it wasn’t the best mistake either. I got a bad feeling as soon as we left Lafitte’s, because the tour turned out to be private: just Cassie and me, the weirdo, and the demons.

If you want to look at it a certain way, make that us and three weirdos. Make that double for Vanessa. She’d had a few at the bar and was singing the “Ghostbusters” song to anyone who would listen. Already, a few tourists had slipped her some coins — to shut her up, in my private opinion.

The guide paid no attention. He led us along in silence, lantern swinging, cloak flapping, looking for all the world like Ichabod Crane. The thought didn’t reassure me. This Ichabod was straight out of Washington Irving, without a hint of Johnny Depp.

Monica read my mind and smiled ominously. “Having fun yet?”

No, but she knew that. Irritated, I started walking faster, to put distance between the two of us. The tour guide seemed to sense it and started walking faster himself.

“Would you slow down a little?” Cassie demanded, pulling up alongside.

I dropped back a couple of steps. Immediately, the guide slowed down too. Now, that was odd; he’d never turned around.

We trailed behind him the rest of the way to Jackson Square. When he turned in through a gap in the fence, we followed dutifully, and Monica nudged me. “There’s an interesting piece of sculpture in the square. General Jackson on horseback. You may have noticed it.”

“Once or twice,” I said dryly. There was no missing the thing unless you were blind, and maybe not even then. I’d never much liked it. The context bothered me, too. But if the locals saw any contradiction in having a war monument outside a cathedral, they kept it to themselves.

“Look again,” Monica purred.

To humor her, I did. That was another mistake, and not even blinking hard helped, because the big metal man on the big metal horse was missing his head. Missing his head?

It took a few seconds to connect the dots and come up with the Headless Horseman. The instant I did, the horse slammed its front hooves down on the pedestal and then reared again. Impossible; I knew that. But there it was anyway, snorting and clawing the air like a thing possessed…

“I’m not seeing this!” I shouted.

Cassie turned, surprised. “Seeing what?”

“That! The horse!”

“What about it?”

What was she, blind? I pointed at it impatiently — but it was already too late. Andrew Jackson was back in the saddle with his head on tight, both figures as still as…well, a statue.

“Wait!” I called to the guide. He’d already stopped; how did he do that? Then I rounded on my demon. “Not funny, Monica.”

“Personally,” she said, “I thought it was terribly amusing. You wanted ghost stories, didn’t you?”

“You didn’t need to import one. New Orleans is full of dead people.”

Cassie, who’d stepped back to eavesdrop, frowned slightly. “New Orleans is full of dead people?”

“You know what I mean.” Then, to Monica, “She didn’t see that, did she?”

“See what?” Cassie asked, getting annoyed.

Monica just smiled.

“You don’t scare me,” Cassie told her. “And if you’re trying to scare Devvy, stop it, or I’ll sic Vanessa on you.”

There was a threat. Vanessa was stretched out on a park bench at the moment, snoring, no doubt worn out from her musical interlude and the seventh or eighth martini. She would be about as much help now as Pee-Wee Herman. Wearily, I rubbed my temples.

Whereupon something splattered on the pavement a few feet away. Something disgusting — orange and stringy and slimy, like…

“A pumpkin?” Cassie asked.

Oh-oh. That was the Disney version. Things would get worse in a hurry. Wheeling around, I checked to see what the statue was doing.

The statue was gone.

I’d just drawn breath to tell Cassie to run when I felt the ground rumbling and heard the hoofbeats. The giant metal animal was galloping full out across the square, nostrils flaring, eyes blazing red, making straight for me. Just what I needed: a demon horse. A demon horse the size of a tank, in a bad mood.

There was no time to think or even explain; I shoved Cassie out of the monster’s path and took off running.

Unfortunately, the fence was in the way. The gate was too far off to reach in time, and the bars were too narrow to squeeze through; the only way out was up. Cursing Monica, Washington Irving, Walt Disney, and Tim Burton, in no particular order, I started climbing.

That was when my demon started laughing. A second later, Cassie was rattling the fence, demanding that I get down before I broke my neck. And the hoofbeats had stopped.

I knew even before I turned to confirm it: man and horse were back on the pedestal, nothing but lifeless bronze.

Dammit.

The tour guide shuffled over to the fence and held the lantern up high, the better to study my predicament. Slowly, without a word, he shook his head.

Damn him too. Sulking, I crabwalked back down the fence. Cassie was waiting on the ground, looking as though she couldn’t decide whether to wait till morning to have me committed.

“This had better be good,” she said, with ice on every word.

“Ask Monica,” I growled. “She sent the Headless Horseman after me.”

Cassie didn’t believe it, not even the third time I explained. But a few minutes later, when Vanessa resurrected herself and the tour resumed, we crossed a patch of damp grass. The ground was all ripped up, riddled with holes exactly the shape of a horse’s hooves. Very, very large hooves.

Smugly, I pulled Cassie aside to show her. She didn’t say anything for a moment.

“You could start with ‘I believe you now,’” I prompted.

“I’m thinking.”

“Then you could throw in a ‘Sorry’ or a ‘How can you ever forgive me for doubting you?’ Entirely your choice, but…”

“Don’t push it. I said I’m thinking.”

In Cassiespeak, that was an apology of sorts. Satisfied, I motioned for her to move on.

“Devvy?”

“Repentant One?”

“If it happens again…”

“If it does?”

“I want a boost up the fence,” she said, and marched off.

The night got progressively stranger

from there. Granted, it’s hard to get stranger than being chased by a statue in a public square, but I was learning to expect anything, especially in that town. I wasn’t sure we’d had a normal moment since we got off the plane.

And now we were following Ichabod Crane down a dark street in a bad neighborhood in the company of two demons, one of whom was sozzled. Nope, this sort of thing didn’t happen back home.

While the guide led us on, I tried to get my bearings. There was no telling where we were; we could just as easily have been in Beirut. Up and down the block, the houses were dark, barred, and shuttered; the wall around one house had razor wire strung along the top like a prison fence, with broken glass cemented in for good measure. And these people did all that just to keep out the living. It probably was best not to think about how they kept out the dead.

“There,” the guide said, stopping abruptly. We stopped too — most of us, anyway. Vanessa hadn’t been paying attention, so she crashed into Monica. Hissing ensued.

But the guide didn’t seem to notice; he was pointing out a house across the street, dark like all the others. “I know the last people who tried to live there,” he began, “and this is a true story.”

Even the demons leaned in to listen. The prospect of hearing a true ghost story was too good to pass up.

True or not, it was gruesome enough. The guide told us a butcher had T-boned his family in that house — an actual butcher, who’d practiced on cows till the day he snapped. When the police came for him, he was proud to show off his work. Turned out the man was a craftsman. “Filets,” the guide intoned, “and sirloins and ribeyes. Every cut you can imagine.”

Cassie muttered several bad words but moved closer.

Meanwhile, I tried to think of something else. He was getting to the part of these stories that gave me the creeps: not the cause of the haunting but the haunting itself. Nothing bad had happened to the couple who built the Victorian house we’d seen earlier, for example, but their ghosts still played the piano in the parlor every night — an excellent reason to move, if you asked me. The tour guide said people still lived in the house, though. In fact, he knew the current owners.

I was starting to wonder about his circle of acquaintances.

He was describing the hauntings at this house when I happened to glance at Monica. She was staring at the top floor, transfixed by something, an unearthly red light gleaming in her eyes. I’d never seen her like that before.

Wary, I followed her line of sight. Either I was a little too slow or it was a little too fast, but I caught just a glimpse of something standing in an upstairs window.

I checked Monica again. Still transfixed. That couldn’t be good. Determined to catch the something in the window off guard this time, I snapped my head back toward the house.

At which point Vanessa tapped me on the shoulder, and I shot up in the air like a rocket. “Damn you, Vanessa, did you have to do that?”

“Yes. Come here a second. I need a word.” When I hesitated, she tossed her head impatiently. “Oh, like I would let anything happen to Cassandra. She’ll be fine. Now come on, already.”

With misgivings, I followed the demon a few yards away. Cassie was too engrossed in, or maybe grossed out by, the story to notice.

“It’s about Monica,” Vanessa said.

“What about her?”

“Don’t you think she’s acting…well, weird?”

I exhaled in annoyance. “Says the demon in the glass house. You’re out of your mind on gin.”

“It’s just an act,” she replied. “I don’t want her to suspect.”

“Suspect what?”

“That I suspect her.”

She talked like that anyway, so it probably wasn’t the martinis. And she did seem sober now. Still… “You were a lot of help when that Tyrannosaurus on hooves came after me. How do I know you two aren’t up to something?”

Vanessa smiled faintly. “You don’t. But I’m the only option you’ve got.”

“All right,” I grumbled. “Talk to me. And make it fast.”

It wasn’t until we were back

in Jackson Square that I got a chance to talk to Cassie. Monica had been very quiet since the butcher house, but she’d stuck close to us. And she still had that weird, dull red glow in her eyes.

When the guide finally got Monica’s attention with a haunted-cathedral yarn, I yanked Cassie to one side. “We’ve got trouble.”

“When do we ever not?”

“I’m serious. Do you notice anything strange about Monica right now?”

“As opposed to how strange she usually is?”

She wasn’t taking this seriously at all. Scowling, I pulled her farther aside. “Vanessa thinks something happened to her. She’s afraid she might be…” How could I put this? “Monica might be…”

“Devvy, don’t bore me.”

“…possessed.”

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 7

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTE:

St. Expedite is a New Orleans saint named for a packing crate. The crate in which his statue was shipped was marked EXPEDITE, the workmen at the church took it literally, and the name stuck. Or so the tour guides say.

CHAPTER 7

Cassie could keep a cool head

when she had to. It was one of the things I liked best about her. It was also one of the things I liked least about her. I’d just given her news that should’ve freaked her, and she didn’t even blink.

“You may not have caught all three words,” I said, annoyed. “Monica is…”

“Possessed. I heard you.”

Impossible, if that was all she was going to say about it. “Think, Cass. Work with me here. She’s a demon. She’s possessed. That can’t be good. You might want to have some sort of reaction.”

“Why?”

I glared at her. “To keep me company.”

But Cassie only smiled — that overly tolerant smile, the one she knew I hated. “You know I’d do almost anything for you, pookie. But it’s really, really late. Why don’t we sleep on it now and panic in the morning?”

“I’m not panicking. And stop calling me pookie.”

“Sorry, sugarplum.”

Infuriated, I counted ten and tried to remember whether I loved her.

Finally, she sighed. “Oh, all right, I apologize. I was just trying to take your mind off things. It did work for a second.”

“Which things in particular? There’s a really long list by now.”

“Temper, Devvy. You’re tired.”

“I know that. I don’t need you to tell me that.”

“I mean, let’s not have an argument just because we’re tired. There’s no challenge in that.”

No, there wasn’t, but that wasn’t the point. Trouble was, I was too tired to remember the point. Maybe she really had distracted me. “All right, fine. Let’s just go back to the hotel and get some sleep. Remind me to have at you first thing in the morning.”

“Actually,” she said slyly, “I was hoping you’d have at me tonight.”

“Not what I meant,” I growled.

Cassie laughed and pulled me along toward the street.

I must have slept some

that night, because I had strange, fitful dreams: ghosts playing piano in the parlor; blood running down the dining-room walls; Hannibal Lecter in a white paper hat, selling pork chops. Through it all, Cassie slept peacefully. It drove me crazy. The woman could sleep through anything, under any circumstances. Standing up, in a thunderstorm, hanging on a meat hook — it didn’t matter. She was just like my brother Connor that way. Probably neither of them drank enough coffee.

Along toward dawn, I was having one of those weird dreamlets when something startled me awake. It wasn’t sound or light or movement; it was more like a presence. Uneasy, I ran back over last night’s ghost stories. There’d been one about tourists asleep in a hotel and a phantom Confederate soldier…

No. I was a Yankee, by God, and no dead Reb was going to scare me. In a fit of patriotism, I switched on the lamp.

But there were no dead Confederates in the room. No live ones, either. Only Cassie, still sound asleep — and Vanessa. She was sound asleep, too, lying between us on top of the covers, wearing pink chiffon pajamas, big yellow Tweety Bird slippers, and a pink feather boa.

Criminey.

I was still trying to decide what to do when Cassie stirred. She reached over half-asleep, felt feathers — and instantly woke up all the way.

“She was here when I woke up,” I told her. “I can’t explain the slippers.”

Cassie glanced down at the demon’s feet. She closed her eyes briefly, in weary resignation. Then she grabbed Vanessa’s boa and yanked as hard as she could.

Vanessa blinked a few times, disoriented. “What? Is it morning already?”

“Out!” Cassie shouted.

“Oh, come on, I just got up. Can’t I have room service or something first?”

Cassie grabbed the boa again, sending a storm of pink feathers flying around the room. That caused the demon some annoyance and led to hissing and squealing. I thought it would be a good idea to get up now, so I did.

I’d just finished in the bath when someone knocked. My guess was that it was hotel security.

“Quiet,” I warned the combatants, just for the record; they were paying no attention. Then I opened the door.

Cassie’s father was standing in the hallway.

Mr. Wolfe didn’t seem happy

to see me. It was mutual. Still, he was her father, and it was thirty-odd years too late to do anything about that.

“Good morning,” I said insincerely.

He mumbled something equally insincere. Trying not to be obvious about it, I moved between him and the door to block more of his view of the room. There was nothing I could do about the shrieking, though, but lie.

“TV,” I told him. “One of those nature programs. The

wildebeest are molting.”

Mr. Wolfe frowned. “That would be unusual of them, wouldn’t it?”

Dammit. I was slipping, lie-wise. “Not in Venezuela. Wildebeest there are famous for it. Was there something you wanted, sir?”

“Yes.” He said it a little absently — still working on the zoology, I supposed. Then he shook his head. “Yes. Well. Is my daughter awake?”

“Let me ask her,” I said, closing the door.

Cassie was alone when I turned around. I raised an eyebrow in question; she just shrugged.

“Your father,” I told her. “He wants to know if you’re awake. Are you decent?”

She shrugged again. “He’ll live. Let him in.”

So I let him in. He took in Cassie’s sleepwear — what there was of it — and winced.

“Good morning, Daddy,” she said sweetly. “How nice to see you. Do they not have telephones in New Orleans? Or is your dialing finger broken?”

He scowled at me instead of her, which figured. Cassie smirked at me behind his back, threw on her robe, and vanished into the bath, leaving me alone with him.

“I’ll just make coffee,” I said quickly.

While I started the tiny coffeemaker, I watched Mr. Wolfe check out the room. Too late, I realized that the TV wasn’t even on. Worse, the other bed clearly hadn’t been slept in. I was about to tell some fairy tale about having been brought up to make my bed every morning but decided it would only make things worse.

Fortunately, Cassie came back before he asked. They had a short disagreement about breakfast — he thought she’d agreed to meet him; she said she hadn’t — and finally settled on meeting at the hotel restaurant in half an hour. There was some question on his part as to whether I would be coming along, but she cleared it up for him in no uncertain terms. Then she went back into the bath, slamming the door.

Mr. Wolfe stared at it disapprovingly before he turned to leave. As he did, something across the room caught his eye. Several somethings, in fact, all of them in the unmade bed, all of them pink.

Yikes.

He picked up one of the feathers, studied it for a second, and walked back toward the door. Without a word, he handed it to me.

“Wildebeest,” I said.

He slammed the door on his way out. And I threw the deadbolt.

It wasn’t fair.

Here we were, in walking distance of world-class restaurants, and Cassie’s father wanted to have breakfast at the hotel. Ruefully, I remembered ghosts of breakfasts past, breakfasts at interesting places like the bar with the ceiling fans where you could get Grand Marnier waffles and the joint where they made omelets as big as your head. But the bankers’ convention was still on, and Mr. Wolfe probably wanted to be close to any action there was.

While he and Cassie studied their menus, I sulked a little harder. The dining room was packed with conventiongoers, most of them wearing name tags, most of them more or less sober, all of them full of bonhomie and good cheer. I found that sort of behavior offensive at seven o’clock in the morning.

Then something even more offensive dropped into the chair next to me. It was wearing the nun costume.

“There you are,” Vanessa chirped. “I was looking everywhere for you. Did you order for me yet?”

I glanced nervously at Mr. Wolfe, who was staring at her in slack-jawed disbelief. Cassie, of course, just looked homicidal.

“You weren’t invited,” I told the demon.

“Oh, piffle. You meant to invite me. You going to share the menu, or what?”

Mr. Wolfe cleared his throat. “You’re welcome to join us, Sister, but I don’t believe we’ve met.” Uncertain, he frowned a little. “Is it all right to call you ‘Sister’? I’m afraid I don’t know. I’m Episcopalian.”

Cassie muttered something undaughterly. But Vanessa didn’t mind in the slightest. She bestowed a saintly smile on him and fingered her beads…which drew attention to the bright-red lacquer on her talons. I hoped that Mr. Wolfe, being Protestant, would write it off to Vatican II.

“We’re very liberal in my order,” Vanessa said.

No doubt. The Sisters of Perpetual Vexation, maybe, or the Little Daughters of Hell. In a city that had a St. Expedite, anything was possible. But I didn’t feel like playing along.

“I’m surprised they let you out again,” I told her. “I thought you were only allowed out in groups, with wardens.” To Mr. Wolfe, I added, “M-e-n-t-a-l patient. Don’t say it in front of her.”

“Oh, dear,” the demon sighed. “Still having those delusions, I see. Wasn’t there something about a statue chasing you last night?”

Cassie tried to kick her under the table but got a table leg instead. She got good speed on it, though; all the tableware rattled violently.

Unperturbed, Vanessa gave Mr. Wolfe another serene smile. “We’re old friends. She doesn’t approve of my career. I keep trying to tell her it’s a calling, not a job, but…well, you know how she gets.”

He said he did know. They had a pleasant chat about it. Not amused, Cassie grabbed her knife and aimed at Vanessa, but I blocked her before her father noticed.

“You look familiar,” Mr. Wolfe was telling Vanessa. “I can’t quite place you, but I would swear I’ve seen you before. Have you ever been to Kansas City?”

Fantastic — the man remembered

Thanksgiving. It was a hard one to forget, of course, but there would be no explaining her if he put two and two together. I was working on least-of-many-evils scenarios when Vanessa spoke up.

“You may have met my sister. My sister Victoria. She’s a domestic executive there.”

Now Cassie kicked me under the table — not as hard, but still with authority. Her expression said Not a word.

Meanwhile, her father was turning the idea over. “You don’t mean she’s a maid, do you?”

Vanessa nodded. “That’s what I said. Domestic executive.”

“I see,” Mr. Wolfe said doubtfully. “Well. It’s a new world, isn’t it?”

“Getting newer all the time,” I grumbled.

Cassie kicked me again.

Enjoying the spectacle, Vanessa leaned back in her chair and rocked a few times. Then something seemed to occur to her; she reached into her habit and brought out a pocket watch. I couldn’t help but notice Mickey Mouse on the dial.

“My goodness,” she said, pretending to study it. “I’ve misjudged the time. I’m afraid I won’t be able to join you for breakfast after all. If you’ll just excuse Devlin and me…”

“Excuse who?” Cassie asked sharply.

Vanessa batted her lashes at Mr. Wolfe before she answered. “You may have forgotten, Cassandra. Devlin promised to help me with that problem this morning. That friend who’s in trouble, you know.”

“Trouble?” Mr. Wolfe asked.

“It’s nothing,” she assured him. “Just a little case of demonic possession. The bastards got her. But we’ll get her back. Won’t we, Devlin?”

Mr. Wolfe turned to Cassie — who had dropped her head on the table. “Possession?”

“Figure of speech,” I lied. “Never mind. We’ll be going now.”

Triumphant, Vanessa got up and started to tug me along. But Mr. Wolfe wasn’t ready to dismiss us. “We might want to introduce ourselves properly before you go. I’m Calvin Wolfe. Cassie’s father. And you are…?”

“Sister Ignatz Xavier Innocent Loyola Bonaventure Magdalene,” the demon said promptly. “But call me Vanessa.”

Cassie leaped up before her father could process any of that. “Excuse me a second, Daddy. I’ll be right back. I just want to have a word with Devvy.” Then she grabbed Vanessa. “I want one with you too, Sister.”

Vanessa blew Mr. Wolfe a goodbye kiss as Cassie herded her off. That was the first word Cassie had with her out in the lobby. The second one was about the phony name.

“What’s wrong with it?” Vanessa asked.

“You meant Ignatius, you twit. Ignatz is the mouse in the Krazy Kat cartoons.”

Her demon thought for a second. “I like Ignatz better.”

“So do I,” I said unhelpfully.

“You keep out of this,” Cassie warned. Then she turned on Vanessa again. “And you forget about borrowing Devvy. What do you want with her, anyway?”

“I need her help. We’ve got to get Monica back.”

“What for?”

The demon shrugged. “Well, we don’t have to. But if we don’t, you’re going to wake up with me every morning from now on. Did I mention that I have all the Warner Bros. slippers?”

Both of us considered the possibilities. They weren’t pretty.

“I hate you, Vanessa,” Cassie growled.

“Whatever. We’re out of here.”

Cassie stepped in front of her. “Not so fast. You promise to bring her back.”

“In what color hearse?” Vanessa asked innocently.

“I mean it.”

“Oh, all right, I promise. Is that it? Can we go now?”

“One more thing,” Cassie said. “You bring her back for lunch. If I have to spend the morning alone with my father, I want a reason to live through the morning.”

That was almost hearts-and-flowers talk, coming from her; she must’ve really been upset. So I smiled at her reassuringly. “Meet you right here at 12 sharp.”

“I’m not kissing you goodbye,” she snapped.

“Fine.”

“So don’t expect it.”

“OK.”

We stood there for a second, thinking about it. Then Cassie gave me a quick one.

“I hate you, too,” she said. “A lot. Now go away.”

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 8

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES:

Voodoo altars sometimes honor dead relatives and contain things that those people liked. The altar mentioned here is based on a real one; also see the gratuitous JPEG later in the chapter. /// St. Roch’s Chapel is decorated with body parts from dolls and statues. Don’t ask; I don’t know.

CHAPTER 8

I lighted into Vanessa

the second we hit the street. But it did as much good as blaming the sea for being green; she was who and what and how she was. Finally, I gave up. I still felt conspicuous walking around with a nun in hot-pink jellies, but better those than the Tweety slippers.

“You haven’t said where we’re going,” I remarked.

“No.”

“Will I like it?”

“No.”

Of course not. “We could at least have breakfast first.”

Vanessa considered. “I suppose one of those Grand Martyr waffle thingies wouldn’t hurt.”

“Grand Marnier,” I corrected. “And it won’t hurt a bit. I’ll even let you buy.”

“You wish. I don’t carry money. Even if it is the root of all evil.”

“The love of money is the root of all evil. Everybody misquotes that.”

“It’s a lie, though,” she said, ignoring the edit. “Money isn’t evil. Neither is sex, but you’d never know it from all those TV preachers. How do there ever get to be more of them if they don’t even do it?”

I didn’t want to talk about it. “They lie back and think of England.”

“You don’t want to get too snippy about that, Devlin. Six years of celibacy didn’t do you any good. If it weren’t for Monica…”

“Never mind, dammit. Just tell me what I have to do about her now.”

“Let me see waffles first,” Vanessa said.

An hour later, we waddled out

of the bar, seriously damaged. What were we thinking, having waffles and French toast? Vanessa would recover, being a demon and all, but I wouldn’t be able to eat again for a week.

Well, maybe a praline or several later, but that wouldn’t count.

While we snailed our way through the Quarter, trying not to explode, I thought about what Vanessa had told me over the French toast. A lot of it was nonsense, but so was the idea of a possessed demon, when you came right down to it. And I couldn’t argue with her about the strangeness of the city. It made sense that anything could happen here, because everything already did.

If I believed her — and I hadn’t decided yet — Monica got caught in a spell at the haunted house, which was built on evil ground and had been evil even before the butcher moved in. I suspected the tour guide, but Vanessa said he wasn’t a demon.

“But I saw fangs,” I’d protested.

“You saw dental work,” she’d replied. “He’s just a nutcase who thinks he’s a vampire. Only reason he’s a tour guide is to pay the dentist bill.”

All right, he was out. Loony, but out. Then who or what got to Monica? Vanessa didn’t know. But she figured that if we went looking for it, it would come looking for us. For me, anyway, because Monica was my demon.

I decided not to tell Cassie that part.

“We’ll start here,” Vanessa said abruptly, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk.

Still lost in thought, I looked where she was pointing. As soon as it registered, I said a bad word.

She feigned shock. “Excuse me? In front of a nun?”

“I’m not going in there,” I declared.

“Yes, you are.”

“Not a chance.”

The demon gave me a flinty little smile. “Porky Pig slippers.”

“Don’t threaten me.”

“I can do the dance, too.”

There was a Porky Pig dance? My God, I’d been living in Hell all my life and didn’t know it. “You’re bluffing.”

Vanessa held down her wimple with both hands and started to dance right there on the sidewalk — an awful spectacle that involved hopping. Across the street, a group of tourists stopped to gawk. Not that a person could blame them.

“All right. You win,” I finally said. “Stop that, and we’ll go in.”

She just kept dancing. “You first.”

That did it. I grabbed her habit and practically launched her into the store. But I glared at the

MAISON VOODOO sign before I followed her, as though that might help.

What followed was a nightmare

of chaos, confusion, and property damage that extended all over the Quarter. I remember only pieces now — my brain may have shut down in self-defense — but those pieces are as vivid as neon.

* The trouble at the voodoo shop when that shrew of a clerk snubbed Vanessa.

* The trouble at the voodoo temple when she made fun of the Elvis-and-Barbie altar.

* The trouble in Jackson Square when she played card tricks on the Tarot readers.

* The trouble at St. Roch’s Chapel when she tried to assemble the body parts hanging on the walls.

Vanessa was having a very fine time, poking into everything and meddling wherever she went. Nobody called the police, though, because of the nun costume. You would think that someone would have noticed the Mardi Gras beads, the nail polish, or all that mascara, but people really do see only what they want to see.

Finally, she said we’d done enough for one morning. Truer words were never spoken. We were just about to part company when she noticed that we were back at Maison Voodoo.

“Come on,” she said. “I want to do one more little thing.”

I checked my watch. “Do it without me. I’ve got to meet Cassie in ten minutes.”

“It’s a favor, Devlin. My way of thanking you for being the bait.”

“You could use a different expression,” I told her unhappily.

“Whatever. Doesn’t matter. We should have the bad guys’ attention by now. Couldn’t have done it without you. Now come on. I owe you one.” Her eyes glittered fire-engine red. “I didn’t like that bitch either. This’ll be fun.”

Cassie was waiting impatiently

when I got back to the hotel. “Sorry I’m late,” I told her. “There was a little incident. How was your morning?”

“Guess,” she snapped.

That was about what I’d figured. “Sorry. I’ll buy lunch. You can have two desserts, if you want. Want to try that bistro?”

She muttered something about all the chocolate in the world, which I took for a yes, and we headed out. We were almost there before she remembered. “What incident?”

“A little one. Not worth mentioning. How about all desserts for lunch?”

Not fooled, she pulled me aside, rather less gently than she might have. “Out with it, Devvy.”

“Let go first.”

“Not till you tell me what happened.”

“I don’t see why it matters. The fire’s out now.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Fire? Where?”

“At the voodoo shop. And the clerk’s not a chicken anymore. I made Vanessa change her back. She said she left some feathers on, just for fun, but…”

“Chicken? What chicken?”

Carefully, I loosened her grip on my shirt. “I don’t think the owner even noticed the snakes. They got away in the fire anyway. So everything’s fine.”

“The snakes got away?” she asked, disbelieving. “And everything’s fine?”

“Except for the shoplifting. But Vanessa’s a demon. There’s only just so much I can do about that.”

Cassie let go and threw up her hands in despair. “Stop right there. I don’t want to know.”

“You said you did.”

“I changed my mind.”

That was exactly what I’d wanted to hear. Everything I’d told her was true (except the part about the clerk; she was still a chicken), but the details were better left out.

And I could tell her the rest after lunch. It was always a bad idea to annoy her before she’d been fed.

Inexplicable mermaid tails on Bourbon Street

That morning, Cassie had made a deal

with her father: We would go to the convention all afternoon if we didn’t have to go to the closing reception that night. In return, she wouldn’t rat him out to her mother if he misbehaved — which was likely, because the reception was supposed to be a “South Seas experience.” That was probably code for bankers getting a snootful and prancing around in grass skirts.

Frankly, I didn’t want to see her father in a grass skirt; our relationship was difficult enough as it was.

My relationship with Cassie was going through a difficult couple of hours, too. She was resigned (mostly) to the fact of my field trip with Vanessa, but she hadn’t taken the last part well at all. She’d found us seats in a corner at the back of the ballroom so she could keep bringing it up.

While some banker type at the podium droned on about something, she brought it up again. “I still don’t want to see a witch tonight.”

“And I’m still telling you, you don’t have to go.”

“If you think I’m letting you go off by yourself in New Orleans, you’re out of your mind.”

“I won’t be alone. Vanessa’ll be there.”

“She’s a terrible babysitter.”

I really wished she would quit using that word. “I don’t need one.”

She snorted, just loudly enough to make a few people look around. “You don’t need one. You were just out burning down a voodoo store and letting snakes out, and you don’t need a babysitter?”

“That wasn’t me; that was her.”

“And now you want to go helling around with a witch,” she said, ignoring me. “I don’t think so. How did you find a witch anyway?”

“I told you — that’s why we went to the voodoo store in the first place. For a referral. Vanessa thought…”

“She doesn’t think. She doesn’t have the equipment.”

Resisting the temptation to remind her whose demon she was, I tried again. “I have to do this, Cass. I can’t just leave Monica.”

She glared a hole right through me. “I can’t imagine why not.”

“I’m responsible for her. She wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me. If we can find someone who can help us get her back…”

“She wouldn’t be here if you’d listened to me years ago. I told you celibacy doesn’t work. I told you to get laid. I told you…”

The only person within reasonable earshot — a balding man in a plaid shirt — turned around at that and shushed us.

“Oh, you shut up,” Cassie shot back. “Don’t you have a slide rule to play with or something?”

As discreetly as possible, I made a she’s-crazy gesture, which pacified him. But he got up and moved anyway.

“I saw that, Devvy.”

“Well, you asked for it. Let’s just drop the subject now, all right?”

“This witch had better hope she’s got a really fast broomstick,” she grumbled. “If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to clock her one.”

For the witch’s sake, I hoped so too.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 9

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER 9

Friday Night

We were meeting Vanessa and the witch

at the Café du Monde, so we went a little early to have coffee and beignets first. For Cassie to have beignets, anyway; I was still recovering from breakfast. Disapprovingly, I watched her pour even more powdered sugar on them. Then she added some to her coffee.

“What are you doing?”

She looked up, mildly annoyed. “Neurosurgery. Why?”

“You can’t put sugar in that stuff. It’s already 90 percent sugar.”

“It could use a few more percent.”

So she didn’t like chicory. Fine. I wasn’t crazy about it either, but I’d drink brake fluid if it had enough caffeine in it. “Then don’t drink it.”

“I’m not going to,” she said, dunking a beignet in her cup.

Just watching that made all my teeth hurt. The better not to have to see any more, I turned my chair sideways — which gave me a good view of Vanessa and what had to be the witch heading our way.

My first reaction was disappointment that the witch didn’t look like a witch. She was more or less ordinary, in a ‘60s way, down to the floppy hat with the half-moon on it. The only really abnormal thing about her was her hair, which was long, curly, half-blonde, and half-orange, with some kind of beads braided in. Whatever I’d expected, it was more Baba Yaga than Phish fan.

Vanessa, however, did look like a witch. She was way too vain for the ugly part, but the rest was right out of Central Casting: the black dress, the pointy hat, the black talons, the broomstick. Even worse, she had a little plastic jack-o’-lantern, from which she was distributing candy. When she reached our table, Vanessa smiled brightly and tossed a piece of candy to Cassie, who was finding the whole thing very amusing.

I couldn’t stand it. “Do you not have any shame?”

“This is Devlin,” Vanessa told the witch. “You’ll have to forgive her for being no fun; she doesn’t get out much. And that one’s Cassandra. She’s normal.”

God help us, then. Not being suicidal, I kept that thought to myself.

“Pleased,” the witch said.

Cassie said she was, too. Then she started laughing again. While the witch and Vanessa were busy pulling out chairs, I shook my head at her. But she only stuck out her tongue at me and then popped the candy into her mouth.

“You’ll get used to them,” Vanessa assured the witch.

The witch didn’t look convinced but didn’t say anything. An awkward silence fell over the party.

“So you’re a witch,” I remarked, to make conversation.

The woman looked vaguely offended. “Wiccan.”

“What?”

“I’m not a witch; I’m a Wiccan.”

“What’s the difference?”

She reached into her bag (one of those beaded macramé things; another disappointment) and produced business cards. My weltanschauung took another savage beating; now witches were carrying business cards. I glanced at the one she gave me. It said something about French Quarter Tours, White Magick, and Charms, and it gave a name: Belinda.

Belinda? What kind of name was that for a witch? And even if she wanted to insist on the Wicca thing, weren’t Wiccans supposed to be called Moonchild or Peacehawk or…

“I used to call myself Jasmine Dovefire,” the witch said abruptly, “but it upset too many tourists. OK with that, Devlin?”

Another mind-reader to deal with. Peeved, I reached for the powdered-sugar shaker and poured some into my coffee. The way this evening was starting out, it might be best to get wired.

“Like I said,” Vanessa told the witch, “you’ll get used to them. Now let’s talk about that evil bitch Monica.”

I sensed her behind me a split-second before she spoke.

“What about me?” Monica snapped.

I can’t say exactly what happened

after that, because it all happened so fast. Mostly, I remember widespread panic and flying objects. It was pretty much a food fight with wrought-iron patio furniture tossed in, and the Café du Monde was much too small to contain it. So, probably, was the state of Louisiana. Ten seconds after all the hell broke loose, innocent people on the street were taking collateral damage — and giving it back.

Cassie read the situation very accurately; she grabbed my hand and pulled me out of there even before we heard the first sirens. Then she started running as fast as she could, which was reasonably fast and meant I had to run too. By the time she finally slowed down, we were blocks away, breathing hard. Too winded to yell at her for trying to kill me, I leaned up against a building for support; at least she had the decency to do the same.

We were still huffing and puffing when we saw her on the corner, leaning on a lamppost, breathing normally, looking unnecessarily amused.

“That’s not possible,” Cassie insisted.

No, but Belinda the Witch apparently didn’t know that. She gave us a few more seconds to catch our breath before she sauntered over to us. “Vanessa asked me to give you this, Devlin,” she said.

Apprehensively, I held out a hand, and she dropped a candy into it. A Coffee Nip. The witch!

“Time to go for a walk,” Belinda said.

We must have walked

for an hour, keeping to the back streets of the Quarter, while Belinda the Witch brought us up to speed. What we heard didn’t reassure us. Monica was possessed, all right, but it was voluntary possession. I really had almost seen something on the second floor of the butcher house, because Monica was having an affair with it right now.

It was my own fault for not giving Monica enough to do, the witch added, and she was pretty sure Vanessa was jealous.

(“Told you,” Cassie whispered after that part. I ignored her.)

“But why here?” I asked, not really following. “Why now?”

Belinda shrugged. “This is a tough town. Your demons probably came in here with an attitude, and the spirits didn’t like it. They might be setting them up to knock them down.”

“That part’s good,” Cassie said.

“You shouldn’t be so sure. You don’t know the power of the spirit world here. Where do you think New Orleans got its reputation?”

Did she have her tour-guide hat on or her witch hat? I thought we might want to stick to the subject. “The ‘most haunted city in America’ thing? Easy: the yellow-fever epidemics. The more traumatic deaths you have, the more ghosts you get. If you believe in ghosts. Which I’m not saying I do. What does that have to do with Monica anyway?”

“You both believe in ghosts,” Belinda said with complete certainty. “But I’m not talking about your dead great-great-grandfathers. These are New Orleans spirits. They’re everywhere. The very air is full of them. Can’t you feel them? Right now? Right where you’re standing?”

Cassie and I glanced at each other warily, remembering the invisible Thing that had followed us down the Rue Decatur.

The witch took our silence for agreement. “Life and death have thin boundaries here. That’s why this city is so haunted. Every person walking around the French Quarter has a spirit riding on his shoulder.”

Spirits, schmirits — I was getting a little tired of the mumbo-jumbo. “Yeah? What’s riding on my shoulder? Marie Laveau’s dead parrot?”

To my astonishment, the witch crossed herself. “Don’t mock Madame. You may want her help before this is over.”

“I wasn’t mocking her. I was just…”

“I’ll explain. Let’s sit for a minute.”

The witch steered us over to a small boarded-up building that I hadn’t noticed before, although we might have tripped over it if we’d gone on by; its front steps stretched halfway across the sidewalk. Cassie was wearing white shorts and didn’t look happy about sitting on dirty concrete, but she brushed off a space as best she could. I was about to join her when I noticed the cross molded into the stucco face of the building. Involuntarily, I stepped back. “We can’t sit here. It’s a church!”

“It’s abandoned,” the witch said. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of ghosts?”

Loyally, Cassie tried not to laugh. She didn’t quite succeed. Scowling at her, I took a seat.

It was nearly midnight

when Belinda finally took us back to the safe part of the Quarter. Considerately, she detoured us around the café. She said we shouldn’t worry, though, because she would cast a Spell of Forgetting on the police.

Fine, but I wasn’t done with her yet. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re saying we really have to do this?”

“Only if you want Monica back.” She gave Cassie a warning look. “And you do want her back. If you love Devlin…”

My loved one gave her a heartwarming answer: “Whatever.”

“…you want her demon back. She’s part of her, you know. Just like Vanessa is part of you.”

Having seen that one coming, I’d taken the precaution of grabbing Cassie — a good thing, too, by the violence of her reaction. But the witch only seemed amused again. “It’s like I told you. New Orleans is about three things: food, sex, and the supernatural. You can cover all three if you have a nice dinner after.”

“But in a cemetery?” I protested.

“It’s a gateway. Where better?”

Anyplace, that was where. Before I could say so, however, Cassie jumped in. “We’ll see to it. We’ll be there. Thanks for your help….I guess. What do we owe you?”

“Nothing. My pleasure.”

I snorted. “You’re kidding.”

The witch shook her head. “No, really. Happy to help.”

“I don’t believe it. Nobody does anything for free around here. You people would charge tourists to breathe the air if you thought you could get away with it. What do you get out of this?”

“Oh, I have a sporting interest. You might even say I have a personal interest. You know that evil spirit your Monica is fooling around with?” She paused for effect. “He’s mine.”

Surely I hadn’t heard that right. “He’s what?”

“Mine.” The witch smiled for the very first time — and now I saw why. She had fangs. “See you in the cemetery.”

Cassie sank back against my shoulder, as stunned as I was, as Belinda started to fade out.

“Oh, and Devlin?” the demon added. “That spirit riding around with you?”

I had to clear my throat a few times to answer. “What about it?”

“It’s a hooker. Live with it.”

The last we saw of her, she winked. You could see the red glint in her eye a block away.

Cassie had to walk as fast as she could

to keep up with me on the way back to the hotel. Turnabout was fair play, but that wasn’t the point.

“I’m a demon magnet,” I growled. “A human pincushion. A walking target.”

“You’re exaggerating a little. It’s just her and Monica and V…”

“So far. So far that we know about. I’ve got demons jumping out around every corner. I’ve even got a dead hooker on my shoulder. How is that fair?”

“Relax, would you? It could be worse.”

“How?”

She thought for a fairly long time. “I don’t know offhand. But I’ll think of something. I promise.”

Giving that remark the silence it deserved, I started walking even faster.

“Quit complaining, Devvy. She could have turned you into a toad.”

“Who? Belinda the Witch or the dead hooker?”

Cassie sighed. “If you don’t calm down, I’m going to call room service for sleeping pills. Or a great big mallet.”

“And we’re supposed to do that in a cemetery? A cemetery? In front of dead people?”

“All right, I admit it’s a little creepy. But if we have to make Monica jealous, this would probably…”

“It would probably get us arrested is what it would probably do. The least it would do is get us sent to a halfway house for sex offenders.”

“Devvy, nothing’s illegal in New Orleans. You told me that yourself.”

“Don’t listen to me. It’ll only get you in trouble.”

She started to argue but then saw something and yanked on the back of my shirt. “Look! Do you see that?”

Unfortunately, I did. The woman in question was dressed like an extra in some Discount Vixens on Harleys movie — a few strips of leather here, a few yards of fishnet there — and it was a miracle of physics that she could even walk in those shoes. It was obvious where she was headed and for what purpose. Technically, even looking at her was illegal. But there she was, walking right past the police station without a care in the world.

Cassie nudged me. “Still think we’ll go to jail?”

I hated it all to hell when she was right. “This had better be worth it.”

“I’ll do my best, sweetie,” she said.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 10

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES:

The ritual for entering St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is a voodoo practice and more elaborate than the description here. Like New Orleans voodoo in general, it’s all mixed up with Catholicism.

CHAPTER 10

Saturday

The plan was

to get a good night’s sleep and take a cemetery tour first thing in the morning. As doubtful as I still was about what we might have to do there that night, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to check the place out by daylight. Cassie thought it would hurt even less for us to sneak away early, before her father found out.

That was the plan. The reality was that Mr. Wolfe was even sneakier. He was knocking on our door before the birds were up, determined to spend his last day in New Orleans with his daughter, and no amount of fast talk, sweet talk, or insult could change his mind. It didn’t even matter that Cassie refused to go anywhere without me; he said a day of my company probably wouldn’t kill him.

“I don’t hate you, Devlin,” he added. “I just hate the fact of you.”

“Likewise, sir,” I said.

Cassie told us to knock it off or she’d leave us in the cemetery permanently. Her tone implied under a stone.

It was already murderously hot

by the time the tour formed up, and I was starting to regret having worn a black shirt. Even in shorts and even with a hat, I felt like a duck on a spit. Cassie, on the other hand, was wearing as little as possible and had no sympathy.

“I told you not to wear black,” she said.

“You could feel just the least bit sorry for me anyway. What if I get heatstroke and die?”

“Don’t even think about it, Devvy.”

“Getting heatstroke?”

She pulled her sunglasses down and frowned at me over them. “Dying. If you die and leave me alone with Daddy today, I’ll kill you.”

Cassie had her own logic.

But she also had reason not to want to be alone with her father. The man had on a T-shirt that said

MORTGAGE BANKERS DO IT WITH POINTS and a truly hideous pair of Bermuda shorts. Where did he get off disapproving of me? I might be involved with his daughter, but at least I would never wear yellow-and-orange plaid.

Before I could wipe off the virtuous smirk, though, he saw it.

“Something funny, Devlin?”

I fumbled for an out. “It’s the shirt. The slogan on it, I mean. Very amusing.”

He might have bought it if Cassie hadn’t given me such a sharp nudge. It almost knocked my hat off. While I straightened the hat — and scowled back at her — Mr. Wolfe folded his arms protectively over the lettering on his shirt.

“I don’t dress like this at home,” he growled. “Elizabeth won’t let me.”

Point to Mrs. Wolfe. “You don’t have to explain, sir. I understand. My dad bought a red blazer once. Mom won’t let him wear it out of the house.”

His expression said Point to Mrs. Kerry.

“Fine,” Cassie said, exasperated. “We’ve established that fathers can’t be trusted to dress themselves. Now can we drop it, please? It’s too hot to argue.”

I gave her a spiteful little smile. “Hot? You? Can’t be. You’re not wearing black.”

Without comment, she took my hat off, whacked me with it, and put it back on my head. Crooked. Very nice. She’d be sorry if I really did get heatstroke and die.

A cemetery

is the kind of place no right-thinking person would go for fun. Which, I suppose, is why so many people were lined up outside St. Louis No. 1 that morning. While our tour group waited at the gate for our turn, listening politely to the guide, I made a quick inventory. With few exceptions, we could all have been out on parole from fashion jail. That made me feel better about wearing the hat, anyway. I might look like the queen of the dork people, but no one would care.

Not even Cassie. She’d borrowed the hat a couple of times on the walk to the cemetery, trying to get some shade, and she was still giving it covetous looks.

Pretending not to know what she wanted, I reached into my bag for the bottled water. I’d just uncapped one and was about to offer it to her when a terrible apparition caught my eye. By reflex, I tightened my grip on the bottle and accidentally squirted Cassie.

“Hey! What was that for?”

I nodded in the apparition’s direction. It was on platform shoes but still heading toward us at good speed.

“Dammit to hell,” Cassie muttered.

Vanessa saw that we’d seen her and waved hello. Not seeing her would have been just about impossible. She had on a tiny pink jumpsuit with white polka dots that looked like something an infant would wear, except that an infant wouldn’t have the equipment to fill it out quite that way, and she was carrying a parasol. Also pink. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, she got close enough for me to see the sunglasses, which had heart-shaped lenses. The only thing missing was a poodle. Probably on a pink leash.

“If she says ‘Sweetie darling’ just once,” Cassie warned, “I’m out of here.”

So of course Vanessa yelled, “Cassandra! Devlin! Sweetie darlings!”

“See you,” Cassie said.

I grabbed the back of her shirt just in time. “No, you don’t. You’re not leaving me alone with that.”

“Fine. Then you explain her to Daddy.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but you’d better think fast. She’s coming right toward us.”

She was at that, and she’d definitely been noticed. The men in the tour group who weren’t paralyzed by lust were pushing and shoving to clear a path for her, which was going to cause domestic trouble for some of them. As for Mr. Wolfe…

“Daddy!” Cassie shouted.

He jumped violently. I’d seen guiltier-looking people, but not many.

“You’re married,” she reminded him. “To my mother. You should put your eyes out before you look at something like that.”

While Mr. Wolfe defended his innocence, I filed that remark under Do Not Forget. It wasn’t like I went around looking at people that way, but the consequences might be severe if I did.

“What’s wrong with them?” Vanessa asked.

Startled, I turned to find the demon right in my shadow. “How’d you do that?”

“I’m a de…”

“Never mind,” I said quickly. Both Wolfes had seen her now, and Mr. Wolfe seemed to be struggling with where he’d seen her before.

Cassie rested the prosecution long enough to give Vanessa a withering look. “You.”

“Of course me,” the demon retorted. “You didn’t think I’d let you go off and have all the fun by yourselves, did you?”

“This isn’t fun. It’s research. And it’s all your f…”

“Research?” Mr. Wolfe asked.

I could tell Cassie was mentally kicking herself — which worked for me. “History,” she told him. “That’s what the brochure said. There’s supposed to be a lot of it here.”

“You never liked history in school, honey.”

She glared at her father. “People grow. People change.”

“I’ll say,” Vanessa agreed. “Just look who you’re sleeping with these days.”

Cassie bristled. “If I sleep with her or the Seventh Fleet, it’s none of your business!”

Every head in the area snapped in our direction. I wished she would learn to lower her voice before she said things like that.

“Her dog,” I lied to the nearest observers. “Her little Chihuahua. She sleeps on the bed.”

“You don’t look like a Chihuahua,” Vanessa mused. “More like a…ow!”

Cassie tried to look innocent, without much success.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wolfe was studying Vanessa again. She preened under the attention, batting her lashes shamelessly. It was only a matter of time before something bad happened, but this particular something, we could all do without.

“Maybe I should introduce you,” I said unhappily. “Calvin Wolfe, Va…”

The demon extended a hand to him. “Veronica.”

Brother. “Right. Veronica. She’s…”

“A schoolmarm,” Vanessa said.

Even the eavesdroppers snorted at that. If we hadn’t been in public, Cassie would’ve taken her apart piece by piece; I could tell just by the way she was breathing.

“I’m on vacation,” the demon continued. “We don’t get out much in Dubuque. Have you met my sister?”

Mr. Wolfe blinked in bewilderment. “Your sister?”

“Why, yes. My sister, the sister. Sister Ignatz Xavier Innocent Loyola Bonaventure Magdalene.”

“Ignatius!” Cassie hissed.

Vanessa ignored the prompt. “You might have met her. She gets out and does good works among the tourists. It’s her…missionary position.”

Praying for death, I pulled my hat brim down as far as it would go. There was nothing I could do about not hearing the howls of laughter, though.

“You’re not funny,” Cassie told her.

The demon smiled sweetly. “Wait and see. I’m just warming up.”

Of course she was. We were all going to die of mortification. The up side was that we’d already be in a cemetery.

Vanessa behaved herself

reasonably well, for her, once the tour got started. She gave us a little trouble about going through the gate — she wanted us to knock and ask St. Peter for permission to come in — but we decided to appease her rather than risk another scene. Whether or not she was actually appeased, she did settle down some after that, and we started daring to hope that the worst was over.

But we also made a point of trying not to notice how chummy she was getting with Cassie’s father. And vice versa. Probably it was all harmless. He was a middle-aged man off the leash for a few days, playing at being bad; I supposed it was only natural. Mrs. Wolfe would have to be a full-time job to live with, after all, and I doubted she ever dressed up like that for him. There was no reason to begrudge him a little eyeful.

Turnabout being fair play, though, I wondered what Mrs. Wolfe was doing back home in Kansas City right now.

While I contemplated the state of her parents’ marriage, Cassie was busy snapping photos, some of them of the cemetery. She’d been careful not to take too many of her father and Vanessa so far — just the occasional random 10 or 12 shots, taken purely by accident.

Then the tour guide pulled up in front of a crumbling tomb, and I knew it was time for the natural-cremation story. As discreetly as possible, I pulled Cassie back a few steps. This one was going to freak her.

The world’s scariest recycling bins. A new corpse goes in the top chamber, where the climate burns it to ash. When someone else dies, what’s left in the top chamber goes into the bottom chamber, along with what’s left of who knows who else, and the process begins again. For obvious reasons, most tombs are family affairs.

Cassie stood it fairly well until the very end. The tour guide, who probably lived for the chance to horrify pretty women, looked right at her and said, “If you look through this gap, you can see bones.” She told him what he could do with his bones and stomped away.

Swearing with real feeling, I took off after her. This place wasn’t safe even in the daytime. I’d told her that a hundred times; the tour guide had repeated it twice himself. Anything could be hiding between the crypts — muggers, ghosts, snakes, Klansmen, giant insects from Mars. No way could I leave her alone.

Just as I had Cassie in my sights and was about to close in on her, some red-eyed thing in black stepped out from behind a tomb.

All right, dammit, so I fainted.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 11

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES:

Tour guides tell different stories about the X’s on Marie Laveau’s tomb. Vanessa’s explanation seems to be the right one. It also explains why people leave gifts — roses, coins, candy, disposable lighters, you name it — at the crypt.

CHAPTER 11

The water finally did it.

Later, Cassie said she’d tried everything else, but I suspected she did it on purpose to get even with me for squirting her before.

“Thank God. You scared me,” she said. “Are you all right?”

As far as I could tell, but water was dripping off my hat brim. She must’ve used both bottles. “I think so. What happened?”

“The witch.”

“Which witch? Belinda?”

“She means me, Devlin,” Monica said.

Where was she when I actually wanted to see her? Irritably, I brushed off Cassie’s offer of help and got back up on my feet. “What are you talking about?”

The demon smiled sweetly, showing fangs. “It seems that I scared you.”

She was the red-eyed thing in black? Great — now I had this to live down too. “Well, what do you expect? You shouldn’t go around jumping out at people like that.”

“Don’t blame me. You were already scared.”

I glared at her, with no effect. Monica was stretched out on the roof of a nearby tomb, as imperial as Cleopatra cruising the Nile on the royal barge and very, very pleased with herself about something.

“Aren’t you supposed to be under a rock in the daytime?” Cassie asked her.

Monica laughed. “She still doesn’t like me, Devlin. After all I’ve done for her.”

“All you’ve done for her lately is be a nuisance. I hate to say this, but you’ve been even worse than Va…”

The demon spat out a word that I didn’t recognize, and a patch of weeds at the base of the tomb caught fire.

“Vanessa,” I repeated. “I’m not saying I’m crazy about her, either, but she only wants to ruin me socially. You, on the other hand….”

“Still upset about my little

statue trick,” Monica observed. “No sense of humor at all. Pity.”

Cassie, who had even less sense of humor about Monica’s little tricks, squirted what was left in the second bottle at her. But the water only sizzled when it hit the demon.

“Won’t work,” she told Cassie. “Don’t stop trying, though. I’m just waiting for an excuse to turn you into a hedgehog.”

“Make me a poisonous one, so I can bite you,” Cassie shot back.

Out of patience, I stepped between them. It seemed like I was always having to do that. “Enough with the small talk. What do you want, Monica? Aren’t you supposed to be off being possessed or something?”

For some reason, the demon was genuinely surprised by the question. “Possessed?”

“Whatever. What happened back at that haunted house the other night. Vanessa said…”

Monica burst into uproarious laughter. “She said that? She said I got possessed? And you believed her?”

Cassie and I compared notes silently. This wasn’t good.

“Possessed? How could a demon get possessed?” Monica indulged herself in another fit of hilarity. “You mortals will believe anything. Even the smart ones. Well, you anyway, Devlin.”

“And she wonders why I don’t like her,” Cassie grumbled.

I waved her off, intent on getting to the bottom of this. “What are you saying? That Vanessa lied to us?”

“She’s a demon, Devlin. What did you expect?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “But I still don’t get it. Why would she make up a story like that?”

“To win the bet,” Monica said.

Cassie shook her head. “I don’t believe you. Not even Vanessa would stoop that low. Now, you would have to take an elevator to get up that low in the first place, but…”

“Wait,” I told her, and then turned back to the demon. “What bet?”

“You know what bet. She told you the day we all got here.” When I didn’t get it, Monica exhaled sharply in impatience. “At

that cafe with those redfish things. Think.”

So I did — and then it came to me.

“It’s like this,” Vanessa said. “I think this town is going to finally make you run amok. She thinks it’s going to make you throw a great big repression festival. We think we’ve got you either way, but there’s nothing wrong with having a little sport at your expense.”

“You can’t be serious,” Cassie told her. “That’s not a bet; that’s a difference of opinion. A bet has to be…”

“Something specific. Yes, I know. We made a specific bet. We tried to figure out what would be the single most unlikely thing for Devlin to do in New Orleans — something she could only do here.” The demon paused for effect. “We were talking about Devlin, so of course it had to be something sexual.”

“Just get on with it,” Cassie demanded.

“My pleasure. You’ll enjoy this. Vanessa decided that the single most unlikely thing was for her to get laid in this cemetery. I decided it should be at night. With you, Cassandra.” Monica paused again to smirk at her. “Scarier that way.”

Cassie didn’t bite.

“Anyway,” the demon said, “Vanessa bet she could make it happen. I bet she couldn’t. And I know I’m going to win, because I know exactly how repressed your pookie there is. You only think you’ve helped with that.”

Cassie still didn’t bite. She was thinking.

A little disappointed, Monica turned to me. “So what did she tell you? How was she going to talk you into it? I’m asking out of intellectual curiosity. It’s fascinating to see how Vanessa’s mind doesn’t work.”

Reluctantly, I told her.

“Brain-dead. But creative. Especially the part about stealing another demon’s boyfriend. Where does she get her ideas?”

“It never made a lot of sense to me either,” I said. “But…”

“I’m not stealing him; I’m just borrowing him.”

“What?”

Smugly, the demon snapped her fingers. There was a flash of light, and then something else was on the top of the tomb with her — not quite human and definitely a he.

All I could think at first was how obvious Monica’s taste was. Whether or not he was really a demon, he was a poster-perfect bad boy, all leather and chains and attitude, with a beard that made him look more like Satan than Satan did. He was also very…

Well, you know. I might have switched sides, but I wasn’t dead. And if I ever went back to men, I’d want this one’s phone number.

Guiltily, I glanced at Cassie…who wasn’t even trying to pretend she wasn’t having the same kinds of thoughts.

“Hey!” I yelled.

“Oh, hey yourself. You were doing it too,” she snapped.

On top of the tomb, Monica was finding the situation very amusing. “Trouble in paradise?”

“Not for me,” Cassie said. “He’s looking down my shirt.”

Dammit, he was. And from his angle, he was getting a really good look. Trying not to make a production of it, I yanked Cassie back.

For her part, Monica was no longer amused. “I’ll deal with you later,” she warned the he-demon. “In the meantime…”

Another flash of light interrupted her — this one pink. Vanessa stepped out of it, parasol and all, and made straight for the tomb.

“Too late,” Monica told her.

Vanessa just kept going. Acting on instinct, I checked the male demon’s reaction. He was looking down her shirt too. It figured.

“You can’t win, Vanessa,” Monica said. “I’ve already told them. You might as well pay up now. Give?”

She might as well have been talking to a coffin nail. Grimly, Vanessa closed her parasol and pointed the sharp end at Monica’s head. She fired.

She missed. Monica and the he-demon had already vanished.

“Damn,” Vanessa muttered.

Cassie and I watched the fireball sail on over the tomb and smack a stone angel several feet away — an oddly disturbing sight.

“Oh, well, there’s more where that came from,” Vanessa said. “And the bitch hasn’t won yet. So what big fat lies did she tell you, anyway?”

Friendship had not been entirely restored

by the time we caught up with the tour group, but we’d agreed to give Vanessa a chance to explain. Later. Much later. Way out of Mr. Wolfe’s earshot. For now, we were going to pretend that nothing had happened. True, my hat was still soaking wet, but a few evil stares prevented any questions.

I saved the worst of them for Mr. Wolfe, who was conspicuously glad to see Vanessa back.

And then we reached the Voodoo Queen’s tomb.

All the tour guides tell pretty much the same story. Officially, Marie Laveau was a hairdresser for Creole society ladies. Then as now, hairdressers know all their clients’ secrets, so she had a lot of power for that reason alone. Unofficially, though, she was also the head of the voodoo community, and in New Orleans, that gave her ultimate power.

While our guide gave us the G-rated version of her life, I considered the things he was leaving out — such as the voodoo feasts and orgies she supposedly threw on Bayou St. John. What was it Belinda the Witch had said? New Orleans is about three things: food, sex, and the supernatural. Mam’zelle seemed to have known all that a century and a half ago.

“See all the X’s?” the guide asked the group. “It’s illegal to make them now. But people do it anyway. They use little pieces of brick from other tombs. The X’s are supposed to keep her in.”

A few feet ahead of us, Vanessa snickered.

The guide didn’t appreciate the commentary. “Problem, miss?”

“They’re not to keep her in,” she told him. “They’re to ask her for favors.”

“I see you believe in voodoo,” he said stiffly.

This time, Cassie snickered. Fortunately, we were too far back in the crowd for him to see her.

The tour group hung around long enough for everyone to have their pictures taken with the tomb; then they moved on. But when Cassie and I tried to follow, Vanessa held us back.

“You might need a favor too,” she said.

Funny — Belinda had said the same thing. “What for?” I asked.

Vanessa smiled. “Not you. Her.”

Fine, if she wanted to be that way. Cassie shrugged and held out her hand. The demon fished around in the front of her little pink playsuit — a procedure I was very careful not to watch — and came up with a small chunk of brick. Cassie took it without comment. She thought for a second and then stepped up to the tomb.

“Is this binding?” I asked Vanessa.

“Depends on whether you believe it.”

I couldn’t tell whether Cassie believed it. But she looked determined when she made her X.

The rest of the day passed

without real incident. Vanessa wouldn’t go away, but at least she kept Cassie’s father entertained. We took a Garden District tour, took pictures of Anne Rice’s house, rode the St. Charles streetcar, did the rest of the whole nine yards. To our relief, Mr. Wolfe was ready to pack it in by late afternoon.

Anne Rice’s Garden District mansion

“I’m not quite as young as you are,” he said (grudgingly, I thought) as we walked back into the hotel. “This climate seems to tire me out. I think I’ll just go up to my room and have room service for dinner. I’ve got an early flight tomorrow. Would you mind if we said goodbye now?”

Cassie said she wouldn’t. I wasn’t about to argue. Vanessa was — she wanted to go upstairs with him for a very private goodbye — but I got a grip on her halter straps and offered to yank. She saw it my way.

As soon as Mr. Wolfe was safely on the elevator, we adjourned to the hotel bar, and Vanessa ordered a whole pitcher of daiquiris for herself. Cassie ordered three Scotch-and-sodas, but I made her give one back.

“Absolut citron with ice and a twist,” I told the bartender, “and cut both of them off if they even look like they want tequila shooters.”

The demon pouted. “Killjoy.”

“You’ve already had enough fun for one day. Now suppose you tell us what game you’re playing.”

So Vanessa told. It might have been the Absolut’s fault, but by the time she finished, I was back on board. Monica was right; Vanessa’s plan was brain-dead. But just as Monica knew me, I knew her. She was too arrogant to give Vanessa the slightest chance of winning the bet — or me the slightest chance of surprising her. So she was asking for it. Bet or no bet, it would serve her right to be wrong for a change.

Cassie was on board too. Anything Monica would hate was good enough for her.

“Good,” Vanessa said. “I knew I could count on you. Let’s have one more round to celebrate, and then you two go get a nap. You’ve got a big night tonight.”

For once, she understated something. I just hoped we wouldn’t be a front-page headline in the morning.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 12

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES:

The real Gabrielle’s is outside the French Quarter, nowhere within walking distance of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. The Gabrielle’s in this chapter is a composite. /// Sammy Terry is real (but retired now); the name of his TV show is not.

CHAPTER 12

Saturday Night

Hemingway said hunger

sharpens the senses, which was the last thing I wanted that night, so I took Cassie to Gabrielle’s for dinner. My personal theory was that New Orleans was so haunted because even dead people lined up for tables at Gabrielle’s. For all I knew, the place could raise the dead; the rosemary chicken alone had miraculous powers.

So we had a spectacular dinner, which I hoped wouldn’t be our last on earth, and then set out for the cemetery.

As we walked, I kept checking the sky. The weather had turned for the worse late in the afternoon, and although nothing had happened yet, there’d been thunder for a half-hour or so. As a precaution, I’d brought my little folding umbrella. Cassie had one too but left it at the hotel; she said we could share mine if we had to. Which meant we’d both get drowned, but that was probably the least of our worries tonight.

“Second thoughts?” I asked hopefully.

She smiled. “No.”

Damn.

We were crossing a busy street a short time later when we spotted Belinda the Witch on the other side, leaning against one of those horsehead hitching posts and smoking a cigarette. She had on the hippie-chick getup again, so I guessed she was working.

“It’s about time,” she complained. “Where have you been?”

Cassie shrugged. “Dinner. What’s it matter?”

“It doesn’t really. But there’s a storm coming. If you don’t hurry up, you’re going to get caught in it.” She peered at the sky critically. “Could be any minute now.”

“Any minute” was probably optimistic. The wind had picked up just since we’d left Gabrielle’s, getting more insistent, and there’d already been lightning.

“Want to grab a taxi?” I asked Cassie. “We could have it wait for us outside. Run in, run out, get a ride back.”

“No quickies, Devvy.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant…”

But Belinda the Witch wasn’t interested. “You’re losing time here. Why don’t I give you a lift?”

“Fine. Where’s your car?” Cassie asked.

Belinda took one last drag on her cigarette and then wedged it into the horsehead’s mouth, still lighted. “Don’t need a car. Hold still.”

The next thing we knew, Cassie and I were at the gate of St. Louis No. 1, both of us in one piece but with our clothes smoking a little. Belinda arrived a few seconds later. Somewhere along the way, she had acquired a long black cloak with a red satin lining.

“Hey, Sammy Terry had one of those,” I said. “He wore it every Friday night on ‘Creature Feature.’”

The demon was not amused. But before she could do anything about it, we all heard clucking.

Clucking? Could poultry come back from the dead? And if so, what did it want? Maybe having the rosemary chicken for dinner had been a mistake after all.

The next flash of lightning solved the mystery. A very live, very agitated hen was pacing back and forth on the cemetery wall. I couldn’t imagine what business a hen would have at a graveyard, but…

“Oh. That.” Belinda tossed her head impatiently. “That’s just that bitchy clerk from the voodoo store. She’s probably waiting to see Madame Laveau.”

That explained it, then. But Cassie was lost. “That’s a clerk?”

“Was a clerk. Vanessa turned her

into a chicken,” I said. “I tried to tell you the other day, but you didn’t want to hear it. Remember?”

“You said she changed her back.”

Now she remembered. “Not really. I didn’t think you’d want to know.”

Cassie stared at the chicken with faint hostility. As far as I could tell, it was returning the favor. “I can’t wait to get out of this town,” she finally said.

“First things first,” Belinda told her. “Get on in there. Don’t forget to knock and ask St. Peter to let you in. He’ll open the gate for you.”

“Where will you be?” I asked.

“Around. Observing.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. But it was too late to turn back. Better to go on, not think, and just get it over with.

So we knocked on the gate and asked St. Peter. Slowly, the gate swung open. I’d expected it to squeak, but it didn’t make a sound. As it opened, the wind rose sharply. Ahead in the dark, we could barely make out a row of tombs. Somewhere beyond them, the Voodoo Queen was waiting.

“Hold on to your hats,” Belinda the Witch said. “You could end up miles from here.”

That was exactly what I was afraid of. Screwing up my courage, I took Cassie’s hand, and we went through the gate.

It was like being hit

by lightning. One second, we were walking through the cemetery gate; a split-second later, we were standing in front of Marie Laveau’s tomb. Still disoriented, I rubbed my eyes and then turned to see how Cassie was doing.

Impossible. I blinked a few times and tried again. The result was just the same, though — she was wearing some minimal leather outfit, slit up to here and cut very tight, and boots with lethal-looking heels. The transformation was as startling as Olivia Newton-John’s at the end of Grease. Not that Cassie wasn’t sexy anyway, and not that I went for this sort of thing, but all of a sudden she looked like the very worst of Bad Girls. I thought…

Well, I wasn’t sure what to think. But for some reason, she was staring at me the same way I must have been staring at her. Alarmed, I made a quick check.

Great. That made two of us.

“Belinda!” I shouted.

No one answered. But the wind howled even louder, and thunder and lightning fired off right over our heads.

“Vanessa!”

“Forget them,” Cassie said softly.

She was standing very close; I would never have heard her otherwise. Her fingers traced over the leather on my shoulder, and I noticed that her nails were sharpened to talons like Vanessa’s. As she moved even closer, lightning struck again, and I recognized the hot blue spark in her eyes. It meant hours.

In a cemetery.

“Monica!”

“Up here,” the demon said.

She was sitting on top of the tomb, legs dangling over the front like a sunbather on a pier. I wouldn’t have done that had I been her, but maybe a demon beat a voodoo queen.

Monica surveyed us both with evident amusement. “Interesting look. You’ll get all kinds of attention walking back to the hotel. Cassandra could retail for as much as a twenty if you go down the riverfront.”

Wincing, I waited for the comeback. But Cassie only smiled mysteriously and hooked a finger into my pocket. “Got $20, sweetie?”

“Not on me. Belinda must have stolen…” Then I realized what I was saying. “Very funny, Monica. What do you take? Visa? Texaco cards?”

“Souls, as a general rule. But little bets in the meantime are terribly amusing. This one, for example.” Monica started swinging her legs, kicking the front of the tomb. “I get extra points against your soul for this.”

Uneasily, I watched small chunks of plaster fly off the tomb where she was kicking. Rumor had it that Marie’s daughter was in there too, and Marie II was bad news. I didn’t want to be around if she woke them both up.

Reading my mind, Monica laughed and kicked harder.

“Just ignore her,” Cassie said, drawing me closer. “Come here. We’ve got a bet to win.”

“I’ve got to tell you, Cass, I’m not exactly in the mood.”

She moved in the rest of the way. “Leave that to me.”

So I left it to her. It turned out to be excellent advice. It took a long time to realize that Monica was throwing chips of brick at us, and I didn’t even notice that until one of them bounced off the top of my head.

“Devvy?” Cassie murmured.

“Sweetheart?”

“There’s a witch up there throwing rocks.”

“I know.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

What did I want to do? To minimize the distraction while I thought it over, I held her off a few inches. But she was being very distracting, and there was really nothing to think about. “This,” I said, closing back in.

Judging by her reaction, it was the right answer. While I elaborated on it, thunder roared above us, and the storm finally broke out.

“I can’t watch this,” Monica muttered.

A second later, she vanished in a pillar of fire. I deliberately forgot everything — the cemetery, the bet, the lashing rain — and pulled Cassie up against the Voodoo Queen’s tomb.

What followed broke every rule

in the book. My first coherent thought afterward was Now I know how Madonna must feel all the time. My next thought was Cassie’s father is going to kill me.

His daughter, however, was in a very forgiving mood.

“That was crazy,” I told her. “That was insane.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“You all right?”

She didn’t answer in so many words, but yes, she seemed to be fine. While she answered, I risked opening one eye, just to see whether we really had wound up miles away.

We were still in the cemetery. And we weren’t alone. We had a whole audience of demons, perched on the tombs around us like blackbirds.

We also had an audience of one soaking-wet chicken, staring balefully at us out of one beady eye.

“Cassie?”

“Hmmmm?”

“We’ve got company.”

“Cops or reporters?”

“Worse.”

“What could be worse than reporters?”

“Guess,” I said.

She didn’t have to. Two small explosions went off just then, and when the smoke cleared, Monica and Vanessa were among us. Vanessa had dressed like a demon for the occasion, but being Vanessa, she was still wearing those godawful sunglasses.

This upset the chicken. It didn’t do much for Cassie, either. As for me…

“Belinda!”

“You rang?” the demon asked.

She was right behind us. I hated how demons came and went. I also hated their immunity to the weather: Cassie and I were standing in a downpour, in a high wind, but all the demons were bone-dry, and nothing on them was moving.

“You got us in here,” I told her. “Suppose you get us out now.”

“So soon?”

Impatiently, Cassie brushed her wet hair back with both hands. “Let me handle this, Devvy.”

“You? How?” Oops. “I mean, fine, if you want to try, but…”

Fortunately, Vanessa interrupted before I could dig my grave any deeper. “There’s nothing to handle. I won the bet.” She glanced at Monica and smiled unpleasantly. “Hear that, Your Bitchiness? I won.”

Monica gave her the same smile back, with interest. “It’s just one bet. There’ll be others.”

“And you’ll lose all the others, too. Speaking of which…”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw all the demons leaning forward avidly. Something bad was about to happen. As if to confirm it, the chicken squawked and ducked behind us.

Vanessa frowned at the empty air. “I said, ‘speaking of which’…”

Finally catching the cue, the he-demon we’d seen Monica with earlier stepped out from behind a tomb. He ignored Monica and went straight to Vanessa — and the way they greeted each other made me cover my eyes.

“No!” Monica howled. “Not you too!”

Vanessa came up for air long enough to smirk at her. “First night. Pay up.”

My demon raised a hand ominously, pointing a talon at her. That was only to be expected. But for some reason, Belinda was doing the same thing to Cassie.

Without thinking, I jumped in front of her. “What’s the matter with you? Vanessa’s the one who was fooling around with him.”

Belinda didn’t waver. “Vanessa’s her demon.”

“So?”

“So move, or I’ll zap you too.”

Unexpectedly, Monica took offense. “You’re over the line, girlie. They’re not your property.”

“He is,” Belinda growled.

My demon smiled at her in a way I really didn’t like. “He’s anybody’s.”

There was a point. Most males were sluts, or at least wanted to be. But Belinda was still aiming at Cassie and me, and I wished Monica hadn’t said that.

“I’m still going to zap them,” Belinda told her.

“You can try,” Monica said. “But Marie Laveau might do Cassandra a favor and zap you. You did have her make that X on the tomb, remember?”

The demon wavered. Then she aimed at Monica instead.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Monica told her. “It wasn’t me.”

After a few seconds’ thought, Belinda swung around to target Vanessa and her faithless boyfriend. The he-demon ran like a rabbit. But Vanessa just laughed.

“It’s not funny,” Belinda insisted. “I’ll take all of you out. Starting with those awful humans of yours.”

“Their souls against your powers that you can’t,” Vanessa said. “I’ll bet your friends’ll give me 9 to 5.”

Belinda’s eyes glowed bright red, and the talon she was pointing at Vanessa started smoking. Behind her, I noticed money changing hands among the demons in the audience.

That about did it for me. I grabbed Cassie and started to pull her away. “Run!”

Surprisingly, she pulled back.

“Are you crazy?” I asked. “They’re betting on our souls!”

“I told you, I’ll handle this. Trust me.”

Trust her? She really was crazy. But she was already walking toward the Laveau tomb, full of purpose, as if she knew what she was doing.

And the other demons were watching every step. “Wait!” I yelled.

Cassie paid no attention. Just as the fire started flying behind her, she reached the crypt and put both hands on the top panel. The world stopped for a second — no storm, no wind, no sound. Shoving the dripping hair out of my eyes, I checked the sky.

One heartbeat later, a monster bolt of lightning shot down, and the cemetery went up in purple flame.

When I recovered my wits

— what was left of them — I raced over to where I’d last seen Cassie. She was still standing there, alive, whole, and smiling. Best of all, there wasn’t one single demon around. It was raining again, but who cared?

“Wow,” she said when I finally broke off. “What was that for?”

“For nothing. For everything. For whatever you just did. How…?”

She touched a finger to my lips and nodded to her right. Only then did I notice the clerk from the voodoo shop. Except for a few stray feathers stuck in her hair, she was in human form again — also in shock, but I figured she’d get over it.

“I asked for another favor while I was at it,” Cassie said.

“You don’t mean…”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Devvy.”

“You mean Marie Laveau really…?”

“It might have been Marie II instead. But I don’t think it matters which one it was. Do you?”

I didn’t. It seemed to matter to the voodoo clerk, though; she made a strange gargling noise and ran for it. Not being used to being human again, she ran like a chicken.

Unnerved, I watched the clerk till she was out of sight. Then I happened to glance at the ground where she’d been standing. There in the grass, glowing in the glare of lightning, was a large, perfect egg.

Cassie didn’t seem to mind. She was as calm as though absolutely nothing had happened to her, tonight or ever.

“You look a little rattled,” she said. “Why don’t we go somewhere and have a nightcap?”

How could we just go off and have a drink after all that? Then again, how could we not? The questions could wait. Right now, we were standing in a cemetery in the rain, soaked to the skin, and even Bourbon Street would have to beat that. It was a sure bet that no bartender would kick us out for wearing wet leather.

“Let’s go shock some tourists,” I told her.

We rolled the egg over to the Voodoo Queen’s tomb, by way of a thank-you gift. Whatever hatched would be her problem. Then we left.

The spell came off as soon as we went back through the cemetery gate; we were back in our street clothes, and I had my umbrella again. Acting out of habit, I opened it. But Cassie started laughing.

Right. I closed it again and threw it as far as I could. Then we ran across the street to the Chevron station to call a taxi.

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

To Part 13

Stories page

The Devil’s Workshop

(c) 2001, M.C. Sak

DISCLAIMERS & E-MAIL:

See Part 1.

CHAPTER 13

Two Months Later

There’s no place like home

on a hot summer night if you’ve got a hammock. I’d been contemplating the stars from mine for a while, listening to the comforting sounds of the suburbs: SUVs, golden retrievers, children, crickets, quiet. Every so often, someone would skate by on rollerblades, making all the dogs bark, but mostly everything was quiet.

I was considering falling asleep when Cassie tapped my shoulder. “Share a frappucino with you if you’ll share the hammock with me. Interested?”

Always. I smiled up at her and took the frappucino while she got in.

“Thanks, sweetie. How was your evening?”

“Very peaceful,” I said. “Unlike yours. And I don’t even have to ask you to know.”

“Easy guess. It was a baby shower.” She scooted a little farther into the middle, making herself more comfortable. “Most of them brought their kids. They acted like hyperactive rats in designer baby clothes. Except rats don’t throw food, and they’re pretty much toilet-trained.”

“Technically, Cass, I don’t think that’s possible. The average rat is too short to reach the seat, let alone…”

“Shut up, honey.”

“OK, sweetheart.”

She gave me a little smooch to show she still liked me and then settled back. We watched the stars together for a while, content to listen to the mostly-quiet.

Then glass broke inside the house. A few seconds of shrieking followed, succeeded by a couple of thuds and more breaking glass.

“They’ve been at it most of the evening,” I told Cassie. “Pay no attention.”

“They’ve been at it ever since we got back from New Orleans.”

Aggrieved, I pushed her off. “Did you have to bring that up? I was in a good mood until just now.”

“Oh, come on, Devvy, it wasn’t that bad. Some of it was fun.” She rolled back into place and started playing with one of my shirt buttons. “Some parts more than others, of course.”

“You mean the part where you voodooed those two? Because if you did, you didn’t finish the job.”

“All I had to do was scare them. It worked, didn’t it? They haven’t been too much trouble lately.”

More glass broke inside the house. I raised an eyebrow at her.

“As long as they think I can still sic the Voodoo Queen on them, they’ll behave,” she said.

“Marie or Marie II?”

“Doesn’t matter. They both hate demons.”

I brooded about that for a minute. “Are you ever going to tell me what favors you asked them for?”

“They got us out of that cemetery, didn’t they? They got Vanessa and Monica to back off us. Wasn’t that enough?”

“I know you, Cass. You’re not telling the whole truth. You asked for something else.”

She laughed. “I’ve already got some of it. Look where we are.”

Where, indeed. A week after we’d gotten back, I’d lost my mind and asked Cassie to move in full time. We were mostly settled in now. The demons were taking a little longer about it.

“We probably ought to go see what they’re up to,” I said. “They seem to be in a mood.”

“Do you care?”

I considered. “No.”

Cassie smiled and moved closer. Careful not to tilt the hammock, I got a little more comfortable myself. Putting the hammock up here on the roof had been a great idea, but a person wanted to be extra-careful not to fall out.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll voodoo them again if I have to.”

“Just as long as you don’t voodoo me.”

“Already have, sweetie.”

Then she kicked off Vanessa’s pink jellies. I’d already decided not to mention the heart-shaped sunglasses.

To be continued in

Several More Devils

(c) 2001, K. Simpson

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The Devil’s Workshop