October 12th

My fingers tapped the kitchen counter, waiting for the pot of water to boil. My eyes kept moving to the clock on the wall.

It wasn't even seven a.m. yet—residual effects of jet lag. Before the Storm, I'd certainly never gotten excited about waking up early for work, but now I was just eager for life to return to normal. My eagerness, however, was no match for my muscles, every inch of which was sore.

I groaned as I bent over to stretch. My legs immediately started to shake. "Thirty more seconds," I whispered and began to replay my afternoon with Ziggy Stardust to distract myself from the pain. I barely made it to the half-minute marker before my torso flung up. The head rush made the magic music box incident seem even more surreal. It wasn't just the keys, and the lightbulb, and the phonograph—everything was different now. And it all felt like a dream.

"There's a logical explanation for all of this. You just have to figure it out." I extended my arm across the counter toward the box of oatmeal and imagined it coming to my hand.

Nothing happened. I felt like a clown.

"Ugh, boil already!" I snapped at the pot.

The fire under the pot seemed to pulse bigger.

Maybe I am going crazy after all?

But then the water began to gently bubble, and I became more excited about breakfast. "Finally . . ."

When the oats formed a hot mush, I sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on top, wishing we had milk. I grabbed the nondairy creamer and then stopped myself. Too disgusting. Without looking, I reached for the cutlery drawer, but before I could grasp the handle, it shot open and crashed into my hip. My yelp faded as a spoon jumped out of the drawer and landed in my hand.

My heart felt like it was going to pound out of my chest. I unclenched my fingers from around the utensil, and it vibrated in my palm. On a whim, I popped the spoon into the air; it dove into my oatmeal and stirred in the auburn swirls. A smile slipped out as the scent of cinnamon danced around the kitchen, reminding me of what our home used to feel like.

Lived in.

***

Without air-conditioning, there was no discernible difference in the temperature when I walked out of my very own steaming bathroom. It was an odd feeling. My father usually kept the house freezing because it got so hot in his studio with all of his torches.

My phone told me there was zero cellular service at present. Lamenting the loss of the Internet, I pushed the plug of an old-school boom box into an electrical socket and was immediately assaulted by voices at varying levels of hysteria. I stopped twisting the dial when I heard a woman with a more grounded tone replying to the DJ.

"The real question is, why isn't anyone talking about the fact that people are still dying around here? Are we all really this desensitized to death? And what is Morgan Borges really doing about the crime? The mayor's curfew doesn't seem to be helping anything; it's making the empty streets easy target zones for predators!"

Evidently, the early hour wasn't keeping people from going at it. I sat at the vanity and attempted to put moisturizer around the scabbing on my face, but I was already beginning to sweat. Don't even think of complaining about the lack of air-conditioning. At least you have a home, unlike Brooke's family.

"Thanks for calling in, ma'am. Do we have our next caller on the line?"

"Hello? Hello? Am I on the air?"

"Yes, ma'am, you are live on the air."

"Oh good, my name's Nora Murphy. My boyfriend is missing, and I wanted to ask whether anyone out there has seen Jaro—"

"Excuse me, ma'am, this is just a morning radio show," the DJ said with care, "but I can give you our hotline number to report missing Storm victims—"

"He's not a missing Storm victim! We've been back from Memphis for over a week. Two days ago, he went out to try to find groceries, and he hasn't been back since." She broke down in sobs. "The cops just tell me he probably bailed on the situation, on New Orleans . . . he never would have!"

"Do you hear that, folks? Something is going on in this city. Fourteen people reported dead and countless reported missing this week."

The woman's sobs became hysterical.

"Ma'am, please stay on the line; we'll collect your information and do whatever we can to help."

I squirted a cloud of mousse into my palms and rubbed it through my quickly drying waves. Without even trying, a flick of my mind twisted the tuner dial.

"Recent figures show that only about twenty-five thousand inhabitants of Orleans Parish have returned. Electricity has been fully restored in Baton Rouge, but there is no timeline yet for Orleans, Jefferson, Saint Charles, or the surrounding parishes. We have reports that all gas stations in Orleans Parish are wiped clean, so make sure to fill up outside the city limits. There's still no news on when any of the major supermarkets will reopen."

I put one leg into a pair of jeans, but then, suffocated by the denim, kicked them off and dug through the mountain of clothes on the bed until I found a lilac cotton sundress I had made at the beginning of the summer. It had a large sash that tied into a bow in the back—a tad dressy for work, but at least my legs and back would be free to breathe. I slipped on black Converse sneakers to tone it down.

Three commercials came on in a row, each one with different attorneys claiming they could help get your insurance settlement. When I couldn't get the radio to turn off on its own, I sprang from my seat and snapped the plastic power button before I could hear the empty promise of another lawyer.

Desperate to be out of the hot attic room, I headed toward the door, but then a thought made me turn around. Souvenirs! I went back to my suitcase and pulled out a T-shirt—a small velvet sack I didn't recognize came flying out with it.

"What the . . . ?"

Opening the drawstrings revealed a matching velvet box with a tiny, folded note. Could it possibly be from Émile? I paused, wondering whether to open the box or the note first, and then feverishly unfolded the stationery. My heart fluttered, pushing my lagging brain to translate the handwritten French faster.

Dearest Adele,

Even though your visit was short, I hope you were able to find joy in the streets of Paris, in the way I do every day. Enclosed you'll find a ring that has been in your father's family for many generations, and now it belongs to you.

I do long for the day when we can be friends.

Bisous,

Brigitte

I was stunned.

Oh Jesus. What if this is her passive way of returning her wedding ring to my father? I popped the box open, and a wave of relief washed over me. It contained a ring of an entirely different sort. Its style was unlike anything I'd ever seen: an opaline stone was nested in a thick silver medallion, like a giant pearl in an oyster shell, encircled by an intricately engraved border.

I slammed the box down on the vanity. Friends? She didn't even say good-bye! How did she slip the ring into my suitcase? I'd only stayed at her house—my grandmother's estate—for one night before my early morning flight home. I hadn't even seen her that morning; the only things that had awaited me were a basket of brioche and her driver to whisk me to the airport.

My subconscious gnawed at me.

Are you really upset to find a note from her? Or just disappointed that it wasn't from Émile? Ugh.

I slipped on my standard silver chain and roughly knotted my hair into a loose bun on top of my head. "He's not your boyfriend. Don't let this ruin the morning."

***

As I approached Café Orléans, I realized how much the outdoor tables, with their heart-shaped chairs, resembled any quaint corner of the Faubourg Montmartre in Paris. Usually I could smell the coffee beans half a block away. Today, not even close. I could, however, hear Chet Baker floating through the open doors, which meant Sébastien must have opened up. Jeanne usually blared Beethoven concertos.

It was sad but not surprising to see the place devoid of customers.

This hour of the morning was usually the café's peak time due to the overlap of the day-job crowd heading to work and the service crowd retiring from the graveyard shift. This morning there was only one guy, nineteen if I had to guess, sitting by himself at the corner table in the front window, sketching on a pad of paper. Messy, dirty-blond hair hung in his face, and large headphones hugged his ears.

"Sébastien?" I yelled. "Tu es là?"

I must have startled the customer, because he appeared a little shocked when he looked up from his pad. As soon as I smiled, his wide eyes went back to his pencil.

A head of perfectly combed and gelled hair popped up from underneath the counter. "Bonjour!"

"Oh my God!"

"Désolé!" Sébastien said, laughing. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"Shouldn't you be behind a microscope, Mr. Neuroscientist?"

"Haha." He blushed and pushed his glasses up his nose. "Mémé's been on the phone with our insurance agent for the last two hours, so I told her I would come downstairs and open up." If asked, he could rattle off ten different international scientists as heroes, but I knew his grandparents came first. Sébastien was well aware he'd never be where he was today if Pépé hadn't worked on a ship running coffee beans from Central America for all those years until he had enough money to open the roasters.

I joined him behind the wooden counter, where the espresso machine was laid out in a million pieces.

"I wanted to make sure there was no mold on any of the parts . . ."

I scavenged elsewhere for caffeine. Usually, we kept several different industrial-sized vats brewed at once. Today there was only one lonely pot of standard coffee 'n' chicory. I poured myself a cup.

"No milk, eh?" I asked.

"Non. No dairy. Nothing fresh, really." He nodded to the empty pastry case.

"I wonder how long it'll be before things go back to normal."

"I have a feeling we'll be redefining what constitutes normal." Always the pragmatist.

I stirred in a spoonful of nondairy creamer.

"Oh!" I pulled three boxes of macarons from my bag. "I brought something for la famille."

"Ladurée?" He kissed my cheeks, tore open a box, and stuffed one of the pistachio confectionaries in his mouth. "Merci, Adele."

"Anything for you." I sipped the light-brown coffee, trying not to cringe from the taste of the fake milk. "So, where should I start?"

He gave me an apologetic look as he eyed the pile of cleaning supplies in the corner.

"Don't worry," I told him. "I'm a professional at this point."

***

Two hours later, I had finished the mopping and the dusting and was at the front of the store, staring at the giant jars on the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

"Are you sure we have to dump all the beans?" I asked Sébastien.

"The Department of Health says yes. All consumables have to be tossed."

"It seems a bit ridiculous to be throwing away food under these circumstances."

"Oui, but we can't take a chance with bacteria. Can you even imagine what's floating around in the water right now? Everything from fecal—"

"Got it! Tossing!" I yelled, pouring a five-gallon jar of Sumatra into the garbage can. Then I poured another. And another. By the time I got through the third shelf, my biceps shook as I lifted the jars over the garbage. Just as it became difficult not to complain, a booming voice filled the room.

"Ma chérie! You're back!"

"Ren!" I jumped down to greet my favorite customer.

His giant arms squeezed me in a bear hug, lifting me into the air.

"Ren . . . crushing ribs . . . can't breathe."

He gently dropped me to the ground. "Sorry about that. It's just been so long."

"It has." I smiled, having forgotten the magnitude of the man's hugs.

René Simoneaux was what people call "a character." He was born and raised somewhere south of New Orleans in the bayou, but he'd been a permanent fixture of the French Quarter for as long as I could remember. At six feet seven inches, Ren was a pale-skinned giant. Black curls rippled down his back and he had a Cajun accent thick as caramel. With his collection of white peasant shirts, red velvet jackets (in winter), black leather pants (year-round), and boots with shiny brass buckles (also year-round), he reminded me of a model from the cover of a cheesy romance novel. The women on his tours fawned over him, never guessing he went home and curled up next to Theis, the guy taking pics at the convent yesterday, a pasty Scandinavian DJ who also had fangs that had been surgically implanted by a dentist or, as I'd once heard him say, by a fangsmith.

"I have something for you, Ren!" I scooted behind the counter and rummaged through my bag.

"For moi?"

I pulled out a large white T-shirt with black gothic script that read, "Equipe Edward!"

"Adele, how many times do I have to tell you?" he said in a very serious tone. "Vampires do not sparkle."

"Okay, fine." I pretended to pout. "I'll give it to someone else."

"No, you will not!" He yanked the T-shirt out of my reach. "Sparkles or not, I am still Team Edward." We both laughed, and he hugged me again.

"Ça va? How was Paris?"

"I hated being away for so long."

"At least you were back in the mother ship."

"I know. That's what everyone keeps saying . . . J'adore Paris!"

I poured him a coffee, slid over the powdered milk, and told him the ten-minute version of my French adventures. "And you? Where did you guys end up?"

"Theis and I drove to Austin with Madame Delphine, thinking we'd be there for only a couple days." Madame Delphine was their white Persian cat. "But once the media frenzy turned into a circus act, we kept driving through New Mexico and into the Grand Canyon. We camped there for a couple of weeks. When things still looked grim, we drove north and stayed with friends in San Francisco. Just got back yesterday."

"Back yesterday and already working?"

Every morning, starting at Café Orléans, Ren led crowds of tourists through the trials and tribulations of the streets of "Naw'lins." There was also a special evening version of the tour, which he touted by promising to spill the secrets hidden in the dark crannies of the Quarter. The odds of even a single tourist being in town right now were slim to none, but he'd still showed up at the rendezvous point, just in case. Admirable.

"I've done enough waiting around in the last two months to last a lifetime," Ren replied.

But for the next hour, waiting was exactly what Ren would do—no one else came through the door. I cleaned until I could barely lift my arms and then took my place on the stool behind the counter. It was sad to see Ren, who was normally polished to perfection, with droopy bags under his eyes and rumpled clothes.

"Ren, tell me a story, s'il te plaît." It was a request I usually reserved for slow August afternoons, when people stayed inside to hide from the heat.

"Hmm . . ." He carefully twirled the end of his waxed mustache. "Do you know the story of the Carter brothers?"

I shook my head and leaned on the counter. I could tell that even though Sébastien was meticulously putting the espresso machine back together, he too was listening.

Ren walked to the middle of the café and brought his fingers to a point. His flair for the dramatic always led me to question how much truth there was to his stories, but their accuracy didn't really matter because his entertainment value was ace.

"The year was 1930. Huey Long was two years into his infamous reign as the governor of Louisiana. The country was still recovering from World War I, and the stock market had crashed less than a year prior. With the breakneck decline in foreign trade, warehouses on the Port of New Orleans emptied, and activity on the docks hushed. Times were hard all throughout the city, and the French Quarter was in dire straits. The buildings were in deplorable condition, many of the historic establishments had been temporarily closed or abandoned, and the Prohibition had created a swell of illegal underground activity. Debauchery ran rampant, even more than usual." He paused to give me a theatric wink.

I rested my head on my hands to get comfortable. He was just warming up.

"John and Wayne Carter were brothers who lived just around the corner from here on Saint Ann and Royal. Other than the charm that was expected of southern gentlemen, they appeared to be just your average men with labor jobs down by the river.

"One cool autumn afternoon, while the Carter brothers were down at the docks, a nine-year-old girl escaped from their house and ran all the way to the police station on Rampart. Her face was gaunt, her eyes were sunken in, and her hair was thin where patches had fallen out. At first glance, she appeared sickly but uninjured. That was until she held out her arms, palms up. The authorities thought her wounds were a botched suicide attempt, but upon further examination, they discovered the cuts had been made in a very precise way—with the skill of a surgeon—as if to drain her blood slowly over time. The little girl was in such a state of shock she was unable to tell her tale, but she kept repeating the words 'help them' over and over again. When the policemen raided the brothers' three-story house, they found—"

"Ahem," a female voice interrupted. "Is anyone here actually working?" The voice belonged to Désirée Borges.

When did she walk in? I'd never even seen her in the café before, but, as far as I knew, we were the only coffee shop in the neighborhood open for business. If you could call it that.

"I'd like a nonfat, vanilla granita. Extra whip."

I stared at her, puzzled she thought we could accommodate such a request.

"Please?" she added, trying to get me to hustle.

"Um . . . We can't make granitas right now. We're barely operational."

"Fine, I'll just have a sugar-free vanilla iced coffee. Soy milk."

"We don't have iced coffee or—"

"It's still summer! Why are you open if you don't have iced coffee?"

I considered mentioning my new Sacred Heart status in hopes that knowing someone as lowly as me would be attending her school might cause her head to explode, thus ending the conversation, but Sébastien intervened.

"Apologies. Between conserving the generator and the mandatory boil-water advisory, we aren't serving anything cold." Far more diplomatic than I'd have been. "And what would iced coffee be without ice?"

"Oh, then I'll just take whatever's caffeinated." She obnoxiously batted her eyelashes. I had to keep myself from making gagging noises. Of course, Sébastien was completely oblivious to her flirtation.

Hoping she wouldn't stay, I poured her coffee into a paper cup, splashed in some sugar-free vanilla syrup, and slid it across the counter with a smile as fake as hers. How the hell am I going to survive Sacred Heart?

Her heels clicking on the pavement outside cued Ren to reclaim the stage. This time, Sébastien stopped fiddling with the machine and leaned on the counter next to me.

"Procéder," I said.

Ren pretended to ponder. "Where was I?"

"The policemen were just getting to the home of the Carter brothers," Sébastien reminded him.

"Oui, oui, merci beaucoup. The policemen waited for John and Wayne Carter to return from work and ambushed them inside their own home. Even though the brothers should have been exhausted after their day of manual labor, it still took over a dozen men to hold them down. When they raided the three-story house, they found seven other people held captive, all with their wrists sliced open. Most of the victims praised God for the miracle of being rescued, but those who had been there for more than a few days begged for death. They screamed that they would never be able to escape the Carter brothers or all the horror they had witnessed.

"The victims claimed that every night, when John and Wayne arrived home from work, the brothers would slice open their captives' flesh and drink the blood directly from their pierced veins.

"The cops found only two dead bodies, but the survivors claimed to have witnessed at least six others come through the front door and never leave. They said that once a victim's blood had been completely drained, the Carter brothers would dispose of the body by shoving it through a trash chute into a bath of acid below. No traces of these bodies were ever found.

"As you can imagine, there was a media frenzy after the arrests. The Carter brothers photographed well and were charming enough to gain a surprising swell of sympathizers—but despite their charisma and good looks, the sadistic killers were sentenced to be hanged. Postexecution, their bodies were laid to rest in St. Louis Cemetery, No. 1.

"Now, here's where it gets interesting . . ."

Sébastien and I exchanged looks.

"I'm sure you know that if you live or, more specifically, die in New Orleans, you might end up buried in an oven tomb, since the high water table makes earth inhumation difficult. You'll spend your eternal slumber in something that not only looks like an oven but literally roasts you, like a slow cooker. In times when the body count outnumbered the tombs available, resting bodies got exactly one year to roast in peace—not a day more, not a day less. Then the crypt keepers would push the crumbling remains to the back and slip in a fresh corpse.

"When the Carter brothers' remains were scheduled to be pushed to the back, the crypt keeper found the tomb empty of bone fragments. No burial clothes. Shoes. There was not a trace of John or Wayne Carter ever having been laid to rest."

Ren drew a deep breath, allowing his audience a moment to ponder the strangeness of his story.

"In all the decades since, no one's been able to explain how the two corpses simply vanished without a trace. The mystery is all that remains."

He took a dramatic bow.

I clapped loudly, and Sébastien joined me before returning to the espresso machine with a smile on his face.

Ren took another bow. Despite the meager audience and the events of the last couple of months, nothing had affected his ability to tell a story.

"John and Wayne?" came an unfamiliar voice from the corner. The sketcher was still there. "As in John Wayne? Do people in this town believe this crap?" His headphones were still on, but he must have turned his music off and listened in on the story.

I scowled, annoyed by his blatant skepticism, but the questions didn't faze Ren in the slightest. On the contrary, the naysaying seemed to enliven him. There was nothing Ren loved more than a debate about the supernatural.

"Oh, people in this town believe far crazier things, young man. But you are probably correct that the brothers were living under false names. Even so, that's who they claimed to be, so that's how the story goes."

"Blood drinkers?" the guy asked, pushing his hair behind his ears. "And do people in this town believe in vampires?"

"The truth is relative," Ren answered, being purposefully vague.

The scientist in the room interjected. "A logical truth is a statement that is true in all possible worlds. As opposed to a fact, which is true only in this world, as it has historically unfolded."

I groaned. Sébastien made my brain hurt.

"Don't bring logic into a discussion about the truth, my boy!" Ren yelled.

Sébastien raised one eyebrow but knew arguing would be an exercise in futility.

Ren looked back at the sketcher. "The truth depends on what you believe in."

The guy closed his sketch pad, slid his pencil over his ear, and looked straight at Ren. "I believe if I ever came across a vampire, I would stake it." He gathered up his things.

"Them are fighting words, son!"

"You have no idea," he mumbled, walking out the door.

The three of us looked at each other with blank expressions and then burst out laughing.

"Testy young fellow!" said Ren.

Suppressing giggles, I apologized on behalf of the sketcher.

"Miss Le Moyne, if you remember only one thing I have ever taught you, let it be this: You can never please everyone. As an artist, if your work doesn't inflame at least part of the audience, then you might as well call it quits and sell insurance. And that goes for you too, Dr. Michel. The world needs more boundary pushers, not more boundary creators."

"Haha. I'll keep that in mind when I'm defending my thesis," Sébastien replied.

Ren nudged my elbow and motioned toward the corner table. "Anyway, he was cute."

"Yeah, Adele," Sébastien teased. "Maybe the two of you could go vampire hunting together."