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  “I saw you come out of Sebastian’s house a little while ago,” I said.

  He shrugged. “For some perverse reason, he left me his house. I’m rebuilding it so I can sell it. I want no part of that house.”

  “Because of the murder?” Rachel leaned forward.

  Quentin’s face flushed. “Of course you know about that.” He sighed. “That poor kid, his poor parents—he was their only child, you know.”

  It took me a second to realize he was talking about me. “I can’t imagine what kind of pain that must be,” he went on. “But that was Sebastian all over. He never gave a shit about anyone else. He probably thought it was funny to leave me that damned house.” He scratched his head. “I guess I’ll never know why he did it. I mean, I’d like to think he did it to, you know, try to reach out to me—make amends of a kind, I guess.”

  “He’s lying,” Rachel whispered in my head. “He knows more than he’s saying.”

  “How can you be so sure if you can’t read his thoughts?”

  She gave me a look. “So, you don’t know what your brother was up to before he died?”

  He looked away. “It sounds crazy when you say it out loud.”

  “See? He didn’t cut his family off completely.” “Trust me, Mr. Narcisse,” Rachel said, “there’s nothing you can say that will shock or surprise us.” She gave him a very thin smile. “You wouldn’t believe the things we’ve seen.”

  Quentin got up and walked over to the French doors. He stood there for a moment, framed in the light from the street, before he turned back around and gave us both a terribly sad smile. “I never believed in any of the family stories, you know.” He folded his arms and shuddered. “The notion that we were destined to rule over all the witches . . . no, I couldn’t believe that.” He shook his head. “If the Narcisse family truly had such a destiny, then why had we spent so many generations living on boats in the swamp?” He laughed bitterly. “Delusions of grandeur—stories spun at night after dinner to make sense of a poverty so intense . . . What good had witchcraft done my family? So much death and destruction, none of it made any sense to me, but Sebastian ?” He walked back and sat again on the edge of the bed, leaning forward. “He believed it. He believed every bit of it. He thought our family was stupid to sit around and wait for it to happen. He thought we—he—could make it happen. . . .” His voice trailed off for a moment. “I don’t know what he did to get his money, how he came to own that house. But he left the swamp when I went to college. I came here to go to school—and he came too. We shared an apartment at first, up near the campus on the lakeshore. I had hoped coming to New Orleans would change his mind, once he saw there was a life, that there were possibilities outside the swamp.” He shook his head and gave us both a little smile. “We used to dance, you know—at the Brass Rail. It was what we did for money. For me, it paid my way through college. Sebastian? He moved into his own place—said he needed to have his privacy.”

  “Why?” I asked, although I thought I knew.

  “You want to fuck him, don’t you? Should I leave you to it, then?”

  “Get out of my head, you bitch!”

  “I don’t know,” he replied with a shrug of his muscular shoulders. “I figured he was branching out into escorting.” His face flushed. “We both got offers at the Brass Rail when we danced there, but he stopped dancing once he got his own place.” Quentin laughed harshly. “He told me once it was his powers that provided for him when I warned him about it, you know—that he needed to be using condoms and taking care of himself.” He absently scratched his stomach. “But even after I got out of school and got a job—I work at the Whitney Bank as a loan officer—Sebastian . . . I don’t know. Does this all sound as crazy to you as it does to me?”

  “What about your parents?” Rachel asked, giving me a warning glance.

  “We never knew our parents. They died when we were young. We were raised by our grandmother Narcisse, on a houseboat in the swamp.” He made a face. “We were the last of the Narcisse. Our father was the only son of an only son. And she supported us by telling fortunes, lifting curses, performing exorcisms on ignorant swamp people. Our powers.” He laughed. “The demented ravings of a sad old woman living on the edge of a swamp and Sebastian trying to tell me he was using his powers here in New Orleans. The last time I saw him was a week or so before he died. He was all excited—he’d figured out a way to become even more powerful and wanted me to join him in his plan. Because we were identical twins, together we could obtain even more power. He was insane, of course. And he killed that college boy.” His voice was bitter. “And you wonder why I wanted no part of him or his life?”

  I closed my eyes and remembered lying on the bed in the back room of the house on Orleans Street, my ankles and wrists tethered to the bedposts, the candles burning while Sebastian chanted his spell, fearing that he was going to kill me—as he slit my wrist and drank my blood to add the power of a vampire to that of a witch.

  “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Narcisse,” Rachel said with a smile, standing and offering him her hand.

  I reluctantly stood up and shook his hand. Again, I felt the same electric shock I had the first time our hands came into contact with each other.

  But this time, from the look on his face, I could tell that he’d felt it this time too.

  CHAPTER 7

  I couldn’t get Quentin out of my mind as we went down the stairs in his building. I wondered what his skin would feel like. I could remember how silky Sebastian’s had felt before things had turned so ugly, before I found out that he wasn’t interested in me but wanted to drain all of my blood and drink it.

  “Can you go more than five minutes without thinking about sex?” Rachel said snidely from behind me. “Not that I mind, usually—gay sex is so much hotter than hetero, or even lesbian sex, for the most part—but you’re wearing me out already.”

  I opened the door at the foot of the stairs and stepped out into the damp night air. It had gotten cooler while we were inside, and the air felt wet. I looked up, and while the clouds still had that pinkish tint to them, they were definitely darker and moving faster than they had been. It meant rain was coming. “So, are you a lesbian?”

  “I’m a vampire,” she replied as we started up Orleans. “When I was a human, I considered myself a lesbian. Since I turned”—she shrugged—“sometimes, when I’m in the mood, I have sex with a man.” She smiled at me. “I think a lot of it had to do with fear, but since I’m a vampire now, I don’t fear any man. Any man who tries to overpower me or force me into anything”—she made a snapping sound with her tongue—“crack goes his neck.”

  “Charming.” We crossed at Bourbon.

  She gave me a sour look. “We’re vampires, Cord. Get used to it. We’re predators. We survive on the blood of humans, and we can kill them.”

  “So it’s okay for us to be sociopaths?” I climbed the steps to my front door and unlocked it. “Killing humans every chance we get?”

  “I didn’t say that. Are you always so literal?” She slammed the door shut behind her and plopped down onto the couch. “Our job is to protect humans, you know. Vampires who go around killing, well, that’s what part of our job as Nightwatchers entails.”

  I turned the dead bolt just as the entire house lit up with a flash of lightning. “What exactly does that entail?”

  Rachel said in a rather snotty voice, “Your primary concern should be Jared, you know—not what the Nightwatchers do or whether you’ll get to fuck Quentin Narcisse this evening.”

  Stung, I started to answer her when I realized something didn’t feel right about the house. I closed my mouth and walked over to the pocket doors, sliding one back, just as thunder roared so loudly the entire house shook. Rain started pounding against the window on the far side of the room as I walked over to the bed and looked down at him.

  Jared was still lying there on his back, his eyes closed, his bare chest moving up and down as he breathed shallowly. I sat
on the bed and leaned over him, staring intently at his face. It’s not him, I thought, looking around the room and seeing everything exactly the way I’d left it. What’s different? What’s wrong with the house? I closed my eyes and tried to sense it, put my finger on whatever it was that I was feeling.

  “What is it?” Rachel stood in the doorway, her arms folded over her breasts. “What are you feeling?” She smirked. “This doesn’t feel like another one of your pornographic daydreams.” She walked over to the bed and gently brushed Jared’s bangs off his forehead. She lifted first his right eyelid, then his left. “He’s okay, and from the looks of it, his conversion is going well—his body is adapting to the second infusion of blood from Nigel.” She looked over at me and said gently, “I know you worry about him. He’s going to be okay.”

  I turned around and glared at her. “No, he isn’t going to be okay. He’s never going to be okay again—”

  “Stop.” She reached over and grabbed my wrist. “Listen to me, okay? What’s done is done. Are you going to feel guilty about this for the rest of eternity?” She shook her head. “I may have been a vampire for only twenty years, but I know that we can’t hold on to things the way we could when we were human. Trust me, I’ve seen what happens to vampires who obsess. . . .” She dropped my wrist and shuddered. “You don’t want to end up like that. Just trust me on that one.” She looked at me, and her eyebrows knit together over her nose. “What are you feeling? I can sense something—”

  “I don’t know.” I got off the bed. “Something’s wrong. I just can’t figure out what it is.” I shivered and closed my eyes as there was another roar of thunder.

  “Just focus,” she replied, also standing up. On the bed, Jared rolled over onto his stomach and mumbled something. She leaned down and pulled the blanket up to cover his bare butt. “Pretend like the feeling is a string and grab on to it with both your hands—in your mind, I mean.”

  “Everything seems okay to you?” I tried doing what she suggested, but it didn’t work. Whatever it was, was just outside my mind’s eye. I pushed past her and walked down the hallway, opening every door and checking every room. They were all empty, exactly as they were the last time I’d looked at them. But as I searched that side of the house, the feeling that something was wrong kept growing stronger. I walked back into the living room, and into the kitchen and down the other side of the house. I opened the door to the back gallery and walked out. A cat glared at me from the top of the wire table and proceeded to clean himself.

  The rain was pouring off the roof into the courtyard like a waterfall. The pavement was under a couple of inches of water already. Lightning flashed again, close enough so that angry red spots filled my vision and the hair on my head stood up. I started to say something, but the clap of thunder was so loud Rachel couldn’t hear me. She looked at me quizzically.

  “I can’t figure it out,” I said, sitting in one of the chairs.

  “I know it’s frustrating,” she said, sitting across from me at the wire table. “I mean, I can sense what you’re feeling—”

  Get out of my head!

  “—but I don’t feel it other than that.” She made a face. “Which doesn’t make any sense. You can’t be more sensitive than I am. If you were, you’d be able to . . .” She ran her hands through her hair. “Maybe . . .”

  “Maybe what?” The cat glared at us both and jumped down from the table. He walked over to the edge of the gallery and looked up at the steady stream of water coming down from the roof. He looked back at me, leaped onto the fence, and down into the yard next door.

  “Nigel didn’t want me to say anything—he didn’t see any point in worrying you unnecessarily—but there’s always issues when witches are involved.” She frowned. “It’s possible that Sebastian changed you somehow. Did you notice anything odd before you came back here?”

  I shook my head. “Other than being a vampire?” I asked sarcastically. “Having to sink my teeth into humans and drink their blood in order to survive? Gee, what could possibly seem odd to me? Let me think for a minute.”

  To my surprise, she threw her head back and laughed, long and hard. When she was able to finally speak again, she grabbed my hands with hers and pressed them to her lips. “Oh, Cord, Cord! I’m beginning to understand what Jean-Paul saw in you. You remind me—” Her voice broke off. She looked stricken and turned away. “You remind me of my friend Philip.” Her voice shook as she said the words.

  “Philip?”

  “It’s a long story. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about him.” She looked away from me, watching the streams of water coming from the roof. “After we solve this problem and everything’s okay around here, yeah.” She turned back to me. “We might even end up as friends, you know.” One corner of her mouth went up, and she raised an eyebrow. “Most people find me charming.”

  I found that unlikely but didn’t say it out loud. Maybe she didn’t mean it that way, but it was annoying to be referred to as “a problem.”

  But while she’d distracted me from thinking about it, whatever I was sensing in the house had faded away into nothingness, as if it had never been there. I took a deep breath and walked back into the house, leaving her sitting there on the gallery. I shut the door behind me and closed my eyes. I focused, like she told me to do earlier. I could feel it, and reached out for it in my mind, grabbing it with a mental hand.

  And there it was—a faint greenish glow, a kind of essence of something that was slowly fading away, even as my mind was finally able to see it.

  It was gone in another instant.

  “Okay, what the hell was that?” I whispered as I walked through the kitchen. I could see that the rain was lessening—the storm was moving on.

  Rachel’s words came back to me.

  If there was something wrong with me—if Sebastian had done something to me, altered me in some way—why hadn’t Jean-Paul or any of the others ever noticed? Why hadn’t Nigel—and Rachel, for that matter—noticed? Especially Nigel. If he’d been around since the beginning of human history, surely he could sense if I wasn’t a normal vampire.

  As if there was such a thing as a normal vampire.

  The whole thing was making my head hurt.

  I walked into the bedroom and watched Jared. He had rolled back over onto his back. His chest still rose shallowly as he breathed. He’d shrugged off the comforter again, and he was aroused.

  It was a really remarkable cock.

  I sat down on the bed and stared at him, willing myself to not become aroused. It was wrong. He was gestating, converting from human to vampire, and taking advantage of him while he was in that state was no better than raping a girl passed out from drink, the way some of the brothers back at Ole Miss used to do.

  But it was tempting—oh so tempting.

  “Are you constantly horny? You’re worse than a thirteen-year-old.”

  “Stay out of my head, Rachel.” I closed my eyes and imagined a wall going up around my mind, keeping her out.

  “Nicely done,” she said, her voice fading.

  I touched his forehead. His skin was cool, and I could feel his breath on my arm.

  I remembered meeting his parents, how kind they’d been to me, and once again felt sorrow and guilt at what I’d done to him rising within me.

  What story would be concocted to explain to them what happened to their son? Undoubtedly they were worried—he hadn’t come home that night; he’d simply vanished. Had they already contacted the police? Was there an alert out for him? I closed my eyes.

  I’d never really known how Jean-Paul had fixed things with the fire so my parents had believed me to be dead. All I knew for sure was there were two bodies in that house when it burned—Sebastian and another who had been identified as me. I’d been an only child. My birth had been difficult, and after a long, horrible labor that had almost killed her, my mother had been left unable to have another child. She liked to remind me of how difficult my birth had been when I disagreed with her or di
sobeyed. By the time I was a teenager, I could say the words along with her. But because she couldn’t have another child, she had clung to me—they both had. I sometimes wondered why they never considered adopting—it certainly would have made sense with their deep religious faith—but as far as I knew, it was never even considered an option. As much as I’d hated them for trying to control every aspect of my life, planning my future and forcing their hateful religion down my throat, I had loved them, which was what had made trying to break free from them so difficult. My high school friends had envied me my parents, who’d never missed a game or a play or anything I did. There was never a question I’d go to college, and they’d bought me a secondhand car when I got my driver’s license. So many of the kids I went to school with had parents who could barely afford to clothe them, let alone send them to college or get them a car or give them an allowance.

  But it was all a trap too. How could I tell them that their much-loved only son was gay, was an abomination in the eyes of the religion that was so much a part of their lives? Could they turn their backs on the Church of Christ and realize I was actually born this way, gay by the grace of God and not by choice?