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Hey, it couldn’t hurt, right?
“Have you talked to La Sorcière?”
Memere was as much Secret’s great-grandmother as she was mine, but I was the only one who had managed to cultivate anything resembling a warm relationship with the old lady. It was sort of inevitable after living alone with her in the swamp for four years. Still, it felt oddly cold to hear her called by the name of her legend. La Sorcière was a ghost story, something even tourists whispered about when they did boat tours through the swamps.
To me she was the woman who had taught me to be strong and that it was okay to have power and not use it.
But it had never occurred to me to ask her for help. For starters, it would be an enormous pain in the ass just to find her. The Maurepas Swamp was the last place we’d seen each other, but that didn’t mean she would still be there. I had a feeling the only reason we’d stayed in one place so long was because she didn’t feel like uprooting me.
I could go back to the tree house we’d lived in—literally a house inside a tree—but if she wasn’t there, what then? I’d have wasted a full day of searching and not be any closer to an answer.
“No. I need something a little closer to home.” Of course, with the simple act of saying those words out loud, I suddenly knew what I had to do. And boy oh boy was I going to hate it. “Actually, I think I might have an idea.”
“Okay. I gotta run, sweetie. I’ll call you once I’ve killed a false god, ’kay?” She hung up.
You could always count on a McQueen girl to stop a conversation in its tracks.
Chapter Twelve
The Dungeon was one of those New Orleans establishments that managed to be both a tourist trap and also a completely legitimate supernatural haven.
It was tucked down a narrow passage off Toulouse Street, only a hop, skip, and a drunk stagger away from the supreme shitshow that was Bourbon Street.
I was glad I didn’t have to linger on the main drag tonight. As if spending time in a house possessed by a demon wasn’t bad enough, I would prefer not to be stuck in an actual hell on earth.
It was late afternoon, so the streets were mostly filled with middle-aged couples and small gaggles of tourists on walking ghost tours. Man alive did humans love to rub elbows with anything that seemed even remotely paranormal. Somehow, knowing it was real did nothing to dampen their excitement. If anything, when vampires and werewolves were outed, the tourist trade in New Orleans had gone through a new heyday.
“Now be careful everyone, you never know when you might walk by a werewolf. The city is filled with them,” a tattooed tour guide announced dramatically.
All forty-eight of us? Sure, we were coming out of the woodwork.
I huffed an annoyed sigh as I tried to get through them. “Just wait until after dark. The vampires come to you,” I said.
This sent up a furious tittering through the group, which the poor guide was not at all prepared to subdue. Since sunset was imminent, some of them were thrilled with the possibility, while others wanted to go back to the bar immediately. Maybe it wasn’t nice of me to stir the pot, but I was a witch; it was kind of what we did.
Jimmy, the regular guard, was sitting on a chair next to the entrance door, playing on a bright red Nintendo DS. The console looked extra small in his enormous black hands, and infinitely absurd given his shaved head and the large spider tattoo above one ear.
“Aw, come on,” he growled. Typically he wore sunglasses, at least when a more human crowd was around. Right now, however, before things got busy, they were pushed up on his shiny head, giving me an uninterrupted view of his yellow-green reptilian eyes. When he blinked, a pair of clear eyelids closed vertically over the iris before his human lids shut. It was creepy to watch.
He glanced up from his game, hearing me come down the path.
“Do you know how hard it is to catch a Mew?” He waved the device at me.
“Um, I know how hard it is to catch a rabbit,” I offered.
“Na
h. You have an unfair advantage there, don’t you, Princess?”
Aha, he’d finally remembered me. It seemed like every time I came here we played a super-irritating game where he asked me for proof of who I was before he’d let me in. Today he was more interested in catching Pokémon than messing with me, much to my relief.
“I don’t know if it’s an advantage, so much as natural selection.”
“Well, I’d like to naturally select this bloody Mew into my Poké Ball.”
“That sounds dirty, Jimmy. Are you trying to seduce me?”
This got a chuckle out of the big man, who got to his feet and ambled over to the door to open it for me. “Aw, baby girl, you are not nearly ready for me to try seducing you yet.”
