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We made a swift exit like two normal human beings, and we were halfway down the block, and turning towards Chartres Street, before he noticed Cyril and Thorne behind us, too close, and too conspicuous, and asked if they were going to follow us wherever we went.
"Can't get rid of them," I said. "Price of having the Core in me. Price of being the Prince."
"And you truly are the Prince now, aren't you?" he asked. "You're really trying to make a go of it. You don't want it to fall apart."
"It will not fall apart," I said. "Not this time, not while I have breath in my body. It's more than another coven, more than a gathering of three or four in a new city. It's more than an
ything that ever happened to any of us ever in the past." I sighed. I gave up. "When you see the Court, you'll understand."
"I felt certain you'd already be sick of it," he said. "The Brat Prince becoming the Prince? I would never have predicted it."
"Me neither," I said. "But you know my motto, what it's always been. I refuse to be bad at what I do, and that includes being bad. I won't be bad at being bad. I won't do this badly now either. Wait and see."
"I already see," he said.
"I can make the bodyguards take to the roofs, if you want."
"They don't matter," he said. "You're the one who matters."
We headed down Chartres towards Jackson Square. There was a fancy restaurant cafe on a nearby corner, and he seemed drawn to it, though why I wasn't sure. It was too thrilling just being near him, walking with him as if we'd been walking like this for a hundred years. The night was balmy and almost warm, the way winter nights can be in New Orleans, between colder weather, and the crowds were mostly well-dressed tourists on the prowl, innocent, exuberant the way people become when they are in New Orleans and looking for a good time.
Soon as he was seated at the cafe table, he had his eyes on a couple near the back. I could tell from the manner in which he fixed on the woman that he was listening to her thoughts. He'd gained telepathic power from his new blood, and with time. She was perhaps fifty, in a sleeveless black dress, exquisitely groomed with hair like white nylon, and firm well-molded arms. She wore very dark glasses, which looked a bit ridiculous, and so did the man opposite, who was, however, disguised. She didn't know that he was disguised. His mouth had been deliberately distorted by something artificial that he wore on his gums, and his short uninteresting brown hair had been dyed. She was paying the man to kill her husband and she wanted the man to understand why. The man didn't care at all why she wanted the deed done. He wanted the money and to be gone. He thought the woman was a complete fool.
I sized up the situation easily enough and obviously so did Louis.
When the woman started to cry, the man hastily took his leave, but not before receiving an envelope from the woman, which he slipped into his inner coat pocket without so much as a glance at it. He was gone, off fast, towards Jackson Square, and then she sat there brooding, crying, refused another drink from the waiter, insisting to herself that she had to get her husband out of her life, and this was the way to do it and that no one would ever understand the miserable life she'd lived. Then, leaving a bill on the table, she went out. It was done and couldn't be undone. She was hungry; she would have a good dinner and get drunk at her hotel.
Louis went after her.
I went ahead and drifted around to the Rue Royale entrance of Pirates Alley as she came walking towards me, weeping again, head bowed, shoulder bag clasped to her side, her handkerchief twisted in the other hand.
The huge silent cathedral rose to my right like a great shadow. Tourists trickled by, jostling one another; and she came on, with Louis behind her silently, his face like a pale flame in the half-light as he drew up to her and placed his hand, the hand with the emerald ring, on her left shoulder. He turned her as gently as a lover and tenderly pressed her head to the stone wall.
I stood watching as he drank from her, slipping into her mind now to find him and what he was feeling as all that sweet salty blood flooded his mouth and his senses, as the heart of the woman weakened and slowed. He paced himself, letting her recover ever so slightly--the inevitable images of childhood, fetched in desperation as the body realizes that it is losing its vitality, her head drowsing to her right and his fingers holding her chin firmly--and passersby thinking them lovers, and the voices of the city humming and rustling and the scent of rain coming on the breeze.
Suddenly he collected her in both arms and ascended, vanishing so quickly the tourists walking to and fro never saw it happen, only felt the faintest disturbance in the air. Wasn't there someone there a moment ago? Gone. Gone the scent of blood and death.
And so he was using all his faculties now, his new gifts, the gifts of the powerful blood, gifts he wouldn't have come by in the regular scheme of things for maybe another century or maybe never, ascending to the clouds or just up and up into the darkness until he could find a place to deposit her remains on some remote rooftop, tucked between a chimney and a parapet, perhaps, who knew.
Well, if someone did not dispose of the assassin in the subtle disguise, the murder of her husband would take place as usual though all the reasons for it were gone.
But a distant blast of intelligence let me know that Cyril had taken care of the rascal, feasting on him quickly, and then depositing him in the river, while Thorne had hung back to remain with me. Bodyguards have to feed.
Amel was still gone, after all that talk of wanting to see Louis through my eyes, and I'd closed my mind to telepathic voices, and Louis was gone, and I was hungry and tired from riding the wind, and sick at heart. Innocent blood. I wanted innocent blood, not minds and hearts like sewers, but innocent blood. Well, I wasn't going to drink innocent blood. Not while preaching to so many others that they couldn't drink innocent blood. No. I could not.
I walked down Pirates Alley in the direction of the river, and then along under the porches opposite Jackson Square. The shops were closed up. And it seemed a shame. There were crowds close to the river, and I heard the calliope of the tourist steamboat, and for a moment nothing in the whole world seemed changed from when I'd lived and loved here before.
The streets might as well have been mud, and the gas lamps dim and grimy, and the barrooms packed with deliciously filthy riverboat men and the sound of dice and billiard balls, and carriages might have been crowded in the Rue Saint Peter with people coming from the old French Opera on Bourbon at Toulouse. And it might as well have been the night, long after Louis and Claudia had left me after trying to kill me, that Antoine, my fledgling musician, and I had gone to see the premiere of a French opera called Mignon. I'd been scarred and broken and crushed in soul, led as if blind by Antoine, as people scurried out of our path to get away from the burnt one, yet I'd allowed him to bully me to sit there in the dark with him and hear that lustrous clarinet or oboe begin the overture. Music like that could make you feel that you were alive. It could even make you feel like all the pain in the world was headed someplace glorious that could be shared by the simplest of the beings around you.
Well, what did it matter now?
Rain, light rain.
Dampening the spirits of the line outside the Cafe du Monde. But I loved it, and loved the scent of the dust rising from the wet street.
I moved to the head of the line, and dazzled the waiter in charge to believe I had some special right to a table now, a simple little trick of words and charm and soon I was seated in the midst of the throng, and with my hand locked on a hot mug of cafe au lait. The place was packed and noisy with chatter, and waiters coming and going with trays of mugs and plates of sugar-covered beignets. And the open air moved sluggishly in the wet breeze. I looked up at the slowly churning overhead fans, descended on long rods from the dark wood-paneled ceiling, and I fastened on the blades of the nearest fan and felt myself drifting away from memory and reason and just thinking, I am alone, I am alone, I am alone. Amel is with me night and day, yet I am alone. I am a prince and live in a chateau with hundreds under my roof nightly, yet I am alone. I am in a crowded cafe filled with beating hearts and laughter and the sweetest most innocent merriment and I am alone. I stared at the marble top of the table, at the white powdered sugar heaped on the hot doughnuts, and felt the coffee mug growing colder and colder by the second, and remembered from long ago, my father, my old blind father, sitting up in his wretched bed, hung with all the mended mosquito netting, being fed by a sweet lovely servant girl, and complaining, Nothing is hot enough, nothing is hot enough anymore.
King David dying in the Bible, begging for warmth...and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat....
