I glanced over the photographs of the bawdy houses, pausing at Katie's. In front of the house a blond woman posed, standing against a light pole, back arched, her skirts and petticoats tossed high to reveal long, slender legs, garters and stockings, and low boots. Her dress was open, displaying a lot of cleavage. It was Katie, her fangs displayed as carnally as her body.
The house she stood in front of was French with lots of black wrought iron in a fleur-de-lis pattern, and had a second-story balcony over the front. Gaslights burned in the early evening, reflecting on window glass. The narrow door had a leaded glass window in the upper half, and was very familiar to me. The house in the photo was where I currently lived. Great. I was living in a former whorehouse.
But a vamp on film? I hadn't known it was possible, yet, as I thumbed through the pages, I found several vamp photographs, bodies and fangs on exhibition, each one signed by the well-known Storyville photographer Ernest J. Bellocq. Bellocq had managed to photograph a number of famous vamps of the time, despite the inability of vampires to reflect on the silver used in both daguerreotypes and the later wet collodion-process photographs. I wondered how he had done it. Most people thought vamps had been photo-proof until digital cameras had appeared. And yet, here was the proof that someone had figured out how to do it.
Katie might have answered my questions about vamp history, but she was unavailable, sent to earth to heal the wounds that would have led to her final death. My first few days in New Orleans had resulted in pretty major changes in some of my employers' lives.
I stopped at one erotic photo of two vamps posed together. Katie was sitting on a bar, bottles of liquor lining the wall behind her, her head thrown back in what looked like pure carnal ecstasy. Her breasts were exposed, her skirts hitched around her waist. Her bare legs were spread. A man knelt between them, clearly servicing her with his mouth. The man looked like a fashion plate, even involved in the intimate activity. He was wearing a short-waist coat, trendy in the day, slim pants and boots, and a top hat. The top hat was still in place, as was the long black hair he wore combed back and tied in a queue. Leo Pellissier.
A strange heat pulsed through me. Remembering when Leo healed me of a wound that would have left a human facing surgery, maimed, and in serious rehab. That had been erotic too, and he had only been licking my arm. Chill bumps rose on the back of my neck.
I shook my head and pushed away the memory and the sensations that warmed my skin. I removed the camera from my boot and took photos of the photos. Thank God for digital cameras. I was honest enough to admit that I might not need all of these for my investigation, but an investigator can never know too much backstory.
I drew another file from the history folder. This one was marked Vampira Carta, which was the vamp's code of law. According to the lawyer who had done the paperwork for my license, in it was the legal justification for hiring rogue hunters, which made my livelihood dependent on it. A notation on the front cover indicated the papers had been found during the construction of the Iberville Housing Projects, on the site of the old Storyville. Iberville was the housing project where I'd killed a vamp, where Derek Lee lived. Curious, I opened the file.
It was set up a lot like the Magna Carta, with a preamble and numbered paragraphs of importance. If I remembered right from high school, the Magna Carta had thirty-seven paragraphs. The Vampira Carta had twenty-two. I wondered which document was actually older. It was written in an old form of English, or maybe Latin; fortunately, a translation started at the bottom.
The first paragraph read:
Preamble: Jules, Blood Master by the shame of sin, Master of the Guilty of England, Ireland, and Aquitaine, sends solemn greetings to all to whom the present letters come. Concerning the liberties of the dead and living, we submit this great charter to the Blood Master of Europe, the lord Lucius, our father of the Mithrans.
I turned the page. There wasn't another. The translation stopped, or the next page had been removed. I searched through the history folder, but the rest of the translation was gone, or had never existed. I set the pages on the table and quickly snapped off six shots, folded the history info back up, and went to work on other stuff. I wondered if the vamp council would let me have a translated copy of the carta, and what kind of story I'd have to use to get them to hand it over.
At the back of the file was a handwritten list in pencil on lined paper, of names and words titled Anomalies. When I read them, my skin went all prickly.
Anomalies
Sabina Delgado y Aguilera--shaman, Vampire, out-clan (meaning?), Cross? Second gen?
Bethany NLN--shaman, Vampire, out-clan (meaning? related to Sabina?), Cross? Third gen? War?
Sons of Darkness? What the hell are they?