I ignored everything with variations of drink, drank, or drunk, boobs, party—you get the drift—and made do with three different colors of I FLEUR-DE-LIS NOLA. I also couldn’t resist a tiny pink T-shirt that read: MARDI GRAS PRINCESS. I stuffed that one deep in the bottom of the bag.
As I walked out a young girl walked in. Her T-shirt proclaimed: THROW ME BEADS IF YOU WANT A LOOK AT THESE! I could barely read the words past all the multicolored coils around her neck—and it wasn’t even Mardi Gras.
I headed away from the lights and the music, down a quieter side road. It wasn’t long before footsteps echoed mine. When I glanced over my shoulder, however, I was alone.
As I continued, so did the footsteps. Closer and closer they came. My knife rested inside the fanny pack around my waist. Un-cool yes, but I couldn’t exactly wear a knife on my belt on Bourbon Street. Better loser-ish than dead—that was my motto.
I walked a little faster, trying to give myself time to slide open the zipper and slip a hand within. My fingers closed around the hilt and I spun, grabbing the person behind me by the neck and slamming them against the nearest wall.
It was the Goth girl who’d been selling ice cream and the instant I touched her, I knew she was human. She’d been thinking about school. She was a student at Tulane. The vamp costume was just for show, for the tourists, to make a buck and pay her bills.
“Sorry.” I let her go immediately, allowing the knife to drop out of sight within the pack. “You—uh—” I ran my hand through my hair, embarrassed.
“I scared you,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
I knew better than anyone that if they looked like a vamp, they weren’t. A little girl skipping rope in the sunshine was more likely to be hiding fangs than this one.
She rubbed her throat, eyes dark in her overly powdered face. “Can’t be too careful around here.”
My ears pricked up. “Something strange happen lately?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s New Orleans.”
“Right.” Something strange happened every day. “Sorry,” I repeated.
“Forget it.” She ducked into a courtyard. The gate clanged shut, then it locked behind her, and I was alone once more.
In my room, I turned off the A/C and opened the terrace doors. A breeze had risen along with a thick curved band of a moon and both spilled into my room, one languid and hot, the other cool, liquid silver. I lost my clothes, touched my neck, and changed.
Bright light, cold and heat, my body contorted, becoming something else. I experienced both the pain of the change and the pleasure at bursting forth. In an instant, I could fly.
I doubted anyone would notice a huge, multicolored bird banking over Bourbon Street. They had better things to discover on the ground. Even if they happened to glance up and see me, they’d blame the bourbon.
I sailed out of New Orleans, easily following the scent of brackish water, cypress and rot. The Honey Island Swamp is over seventy thousand acres huge, with more than half of that a government-protected wildlife refuge. There was no way I could check the place for an abandoned church at a crossroads on foot.
Even with wings it took me most of the night, flying back and forth from one corner to the next in a tight grid pattern so as not to miss anything. Broken-down buildings abounded—not just in the swamp but everywhere across New Orleans—and upon landing I discovered that a lot of them were still occupied, and none of them was a church.
I was near to giving up, the sun just beginning to lighten the eastern horizon, turning the blue-black night a hazy purple, when I caught sight of a listing belfry and dived like the phoenix I was into the trees.
The instant I came within ten yards of the place, a screeching began, so loud and horrific I became disoriented and flew into the dripping Spanish moss of a cypress tree. Similar to a spider’s web, but damp and musty, the tendrils clung to my brightly colored wings like a net.
Trapped and panicked fire shot from my beak, and the moss dissolved into nothing an instant before I would have tumbled toward the earth.
But I wasn’t safe yet. The screaming continued as dark, prehistorically huge bat-like creatures sailed out of the belfry. They were large enough to be pterodactyls, if pterodactyls weren’t extinct. Of course extinct was just a word these days.
My breath was a flame, rolling over their darkly ethereal bodies, making them appear like Halloween decorations studded with tiny orange lights. Then the fire went out with a puff, and they kept coming.
I braced for impact, and one flew right through me. I’d have thought it was a ghost-bird, except I felt its talons scrape my bowels, its beak peck at my liver. The pain was like being torn apart from the inside out. Two skimmed either side of me and wherever they touched, agony flared, as though their feathers were tipped with razor blades.
Tumbling toward the earth, I picked up speed as I fell, and the horrible winged creatures followed, shrieking so that my eardrums seemed to rupture and bleed. I hit the ground with a solid thump, and at last blessed silence was mine.
I awoke as a woman, the sun blaring into my eyes. I moaned, laying my arm across my face. I hurt all over.