A Thief in the Kitchen
The name on the mailbox was Doucet, and Elise Kavanagh almost walked away.
She stood on the sidewalk in the wet August dark and stared at the little tin box nailed to the porch post. The letters were hand-painted, white on blue, chipped at the edges. D-O-U-C-E-T. A name she had not let herself say out loud in a hundred years.
The heat sat on the Marigny like a damp hand, and even the cicadas sounded tired.
Elise had not sweated since 1921. But her palms felt strange as she climbed the porch steps, and she did not like it.
It’s a common name, she told herself. Half of Louisiana is called Doucet.
The house was a narrow shotgun cottage, blue paint, white trim, a porch swing that creaked in the hot wind. The kind of house where an old woman had lived for sixty years and grown tomatoes in coffee cans. The tomatoes were still there, dying in their cans along the railing. Nobody had watered them in weeks.
Odile Doucet had died on the first of August. A hundred and one years old. Elise had read the obituary in the car. Survived by her grandson, Remy, a firefighter with Engine Nine.
Two nights ago, an estate-sale company had posted a list of items from this house online. One line near the bottom had made Giorgio de Gaultier set down his silver flask very slowly.
Antique handwritten journal, 1920s, occult interest. Tin box. Inquire.
“Get it before anyone else reads that line,” Giorgio had said. “And Elise. Be quiet about it.”
She was always quiet.
The front door had a cheap lock. Three seconds with a steel pick. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her without a sound.
The house smelled of old coffee, cat, and lemon furniture polish. Under that, faint and sharp, was something that made the skin on the back of her neck go tight.
Oil. Old oil. The kind that had been blessed.
Elise stood very still in the dark hall and let the smell come to her. Her eyes needed no light. She could see the framed photographs. A young man in a fire helmet, grinning, soot on his cheek. An older photograph, black and white, of another man in the same helmet with the same grin. A stern woman in a church hat holding a baby.
And on the side table, under a bowl of keys, a newspaper folded open to the crossword. Half done. In pencil.
Somebody was living here.
“Damn,” Elise breathed.
The listing had said vacant property. She had driven past twice before midnight. No lights. No car.
She listened. No human heartbeat. No breathing. Only the slow, angry purr of a cat somewhere under a bed.
Good. Whoever slept here was out. She would be gone before he came home.
She followed the smell.
It led her straight through the rooms, one opening into the next, to a small yellow kitchen at the back. Gas stove. Chrome table. A calendar from a funeral home, still turned to July.
The smell was strongest near the stove.
Elise crouched. The linoleum by the stove was a square patch of slightly different yellow. Loose. She pried it up, and the board beneath it. A hollow space between the floor joists.
And in the hollow, wrapped in oilcloth, a tin box the size of a family Bible.
The blessed smell rose out of the hole like heat off a summer road. Her eyes watered. Her gums ached, the way they did when the fangs wanted to drop. Her body knew this smell before her mind did. Her body remembered.
Pier Eleven. The river. The crying.
“Not now,” she said under her breath. “You can fall apart in the car.”
She lifted the box out. It was heavy. She unfolded one corner of the oilcloth.
The tin was painted dark green, with a saint stamped on the lid. A man in Roman armor pouring a bucket of water onto a burning house. Saint Florian. Patron of firefighters.
Elise’s mouth went dry.
She did not open it. Not here. She tucked the box under her arm and stood.
That was when she heard the truck.
An old engine with a loose belt, squealing on the turn. It stopped in front of the house. A door slammed. Heavy boots on the porch steps, tired and uneven, the steps of a man at the end of a very long day.
A heartbeat. Strong. Slow. Calm.
A key in the lock.
Elise had perhaps four seconds. Out the back, over the fence, three blocks away before he set down his bag. That was the job. Nobody sees you. Nobody remembers.
She went to the back door.
It was bolted from the inside. Two bolts, one high, one low, and a padlocked chain. Someone in this house had been afraid of something coming in from the yard.
Behind her, the front door opened. The light in the hall clicked on.
“Pistache,” a man’s voice said. Low, rough, warm with exhaustion. “I know. I know I’m late. Don’t start.”
The cat yowled from under the bed like a war cry.
She could break the padlock. Noise. The window. More noise. Or she could walk straight past him, fast, before his tired eyes caught up.
She moved.
He was already in the middle room.
He was very big. Tall enough that he ducked a little in the doorway, out of habit. Broad shoulders under a navy T-shirt with NOFD across the chest. Dark curly hair cut short and damp with sweat. A nose that had been broken once and set slightly crooked. A duffel bag on one shoulder and a paper sack of takeout in his hand.
He smelled of smoke. Real smoke, wood and plastic and wet ash, soaked so deep into his skin that a shower had not reached it.
He stopped. The light from the hall fell across her.
For one long second, they looked at each other.
His eyes were brown. Tired. Then not tired at all.
“Put it down,” he said quietly.
His gaze had gone straight to the box under her arm. Not to her face. Not to her black clothes or her red braid. To the box.
“Sorry,” Elise said. “Wrong house.”
She stepped left. He stepped left. He dropped the takeout bag. Rice spilled across the floorboards.
“That’s my grandmother’s,” he said. “Put it down and walk out, and I won’t call anyone.”
“That’s generous.”
“I’m too tired to be anything else.”
She moved again, faster than a human could follow, meaning to slip under his arm and be gone before he finished turning.
He did not follow her with his eyes. He followed her with his whole body, as if he had guessed where she would go. His shoulder caught hers in the doorway. It was like running into a wall that could think. The box slipped. She caught it. He caught her wrist.
His hand was hot. So hot. Elise had forgotten how hot a living man was.
“Let go,” she said.
“You first.”
She could have broken his fingers. Instead, she turned her wrist against his thumb, the way she had taught a hundred guards to do, and pulled free. She shoved him. Gently, for her. He went back two full steps and hit the wall hard enough to rattle the photographs.
He stared at her, breathing fast. His heart had climbed from slow to quick, but it was not fear. This was a man who had walked into burning houses and back out, and had learned to think while his heart pounded.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re strong.”
“I’m leaving.”
“No,” he said, “you’re not,” and he came off the wall at her.
He was fast for a big man. He did not swing. He went low, the way a man goes when he wants to carry someone, not hurt them. His arms closed around her waist. For half a second, Elise’s boots left the floor.
Something small and cold swung out from the neck of his T-shirt on a thin chain and pressed against her collarbone.
It burned.
Not like heat. Like acid. Like a match held to the inside of her skin. Elise hissed and wrenched away from him so hard that he stumbled. She landed in a crouch by the kitchen table with the box clutched to her chest and her free hand pressed over her collarbone.
The little round medal swung back against his chest. Silver. A man in Roman armor pouring water on a fire.
Saint Florian again.
“What the hell,” he said, staring at her. “Did I hurt you?”
He sounded worried. That was the worst part.
Elise stood. Under her fingertips, a small round mark throbbed, red and angry. It would heal by morning. Probably.
Whoever had blessed that medal had known exactly what he was doing.
“Take it off,” she said.
“What?”
“The necklace. Take it off.”
He looked down at the medal, then up at her. “Lady, you’re robbing my dead grandmother’s kitchen. I’m not taking anything off.”
There was an easier way.
Elise let her eyes change.
She felt it happen, the cool rush behind her face, the world sharpening into silver and shadow. She looked into his brown eyes and pushed. Not with her hands. With the thing underneath her, the hunger and the will that every vampire carried like a second spine.
“You came home,” she said, and her voice dropped into the low, smooth tone that made men put down guns and forget their own names. “The house was empty. You ate your dinner and went to bed. You never saw me.”
It always felt like pressing a thumb into wet clay. Easy. Final.
This time, it felt like pressing her thumb into a brick.
He blinked at her.
“Your eyes,” he said, “are doing a thing.”
Elise stared at him.
“They’re glowing,” he said. “A little. Like a cat’s. Is that contacts?”
“You came home,” she said again, harder. “You never saw me. You will forget—”
“Ma’am,” he said, “I’m going to remember you for the rest of my life.”
The medal on his chest caught the hall light.
Elise closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were just green again.
“Who blessed it?” she asked.
He frowned. “What?”
“Your medal. Who gave it to you?”
“My grandmother. It was her father’s.” He took one careful step toward her, both hands out and open, the way a man walks up to a hurt dog. “Look. I don’t know what’s going on with you. But there’s a fire station six blocks from here full of guys who would love to sit on you until the police come. So let’s make this easy.”
Her father’s. Odile Doucet’s father.
Achille.
The name rose out of the dark of her memory like a body coming up in the river. A young man with a thin mustache and a straw hat, standing in the door of Pier Eleven with a lamp in his hand. Smiling at her. Lighting the fuse.
She looked for Achille in his face and, God help her, she found him. Around the mouth. In the shape of the jaw.
She should take the box and break the window and go. She should never see this man again.
“What’s your name?” she heard herself ask.
He hesitated. “Remy.”
“Remy Doucet.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your mailbox,” Elise said. “Listen to me, Remy Doucet. This box is not old papers. It is the most dangerous thing in this city. And in about five minutes—”
She stopped.
Out front, very softly, a car had pulled up behind his truck. Engine off. No doors opening. Just waiting.
Then another, at the end of the block.
She tilted her head. Four heartbeats. No, five. Fast, ragged, wrong, like an engine running on bad fuel.
Thralls. Hungry ones.
Elise knew whose thralls they would be. Only one vampire in New Orleans kept his servants that starved. Only one had been hunting this box since 1924.
“Remy,” she said quietly. “Do you keep a gun in this house?”
He went still. “Why?”
Glass shattered in the front room.
The cat shot out from under the bed, a grey streak of fury, and vanished down the hall. The front door crashed open against the wall. Something heavy hit the floorboards, and then footsteps, many of them, fast and uneven, pounding toward the kitchen.
Elise set the tin box on the chrome table. She drew the curved black karambit from the sheath at her back and spun it once around her finger.
“Never mind,” she said. “Stay behind me.”
The Man Who Runs Toward Fire
Remy Doucet had been a firefighter for eleven years, and in eleven years he had learned one thing above all others.
When everyone else runs away, look at what they are running from.
The red-haired thief was not running. She stood between him and the kitchen doorway with a curved black blade in her hand, and she was smiling. Not a nice smile. The smile of someone who had been waiting all night for a reason.
So Remy looked at what was coming.
Four men burst through the middle room. Then a fifth. They wore ordinary clothes. Jeans, T-shirts, one man in a cheap suit with the tie hanging loose. But their faces were wrong. Grey. Shining with sweat. Their pupils were huge and black, and their lips were cracked, and the first one in had teeth stained pink, like he had been chewing on raw meat.
Remy had seen faces like that before. On overdose calls. On men who had not slept in a week.
He had never seen them look at a woman the way these men looked at the thief. Like dogs looking at a fence they knew they could not jump.
Then they looked past her. At him. At the green tin box on the table.
“The box,” the man in the suit said. His voice cracked. “He wants the box.”
“He can’t have it,” the thief said.
“You’re one,” the man said. “We’re five.”
“You’re five,” she agreed. “Bring more.”
The first one lunged.
Remy had been in fights. He knew what a fight looked like.
This was not a fight. This was a blender.
The thief moved and she was simply not where she had been. The pink-toothed man swung at empty air, and then he was on the floor with his arm bent in a direction arms did not go. The second man got one hand on her braid. She turned inside his grip like smoke, and the curved blade flashed, and he fell back clutching his thigh, not cut deep, but cut. She was not killing them. She was taking them apart, piece by piece, the way you take apart a burning room. Door. Window. Ceiling. Out.
The third man went around her. Straight for the table.
Remy did not think. He reached behind the refrigerator, where a short fire axe had lived since a break-in on Mamie’s street last spring, and pulled it free. He did not swing the blade. He turned it in his grip and drove the flat back of the head into the man’s ribs.
The man folded. Then he came up again, faster than he should have, his black eyes fixed on Remy’s face. He grinned. His gums were bleeding.
“Pretty fireman,” he said. “He’ll pay double for you.”
He lunged. Remy brought the axe handle up across his body and caught him in the chest and shoved. The man was light, much too light, as if he had not eaten in days. He flew back into the stove.
In the corner of his eye, Remy saw the box on the table.
He saw a choice.
He set the axe down on the table and, under the cover of the noise, he flipped the box lid open. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, a thick brown book tied with a faded black cord. It smelled of old church.
He pushed the book down the back of his jeans, under his T-shirt. He closed the lid.
Behind him, the thief had just thrown a grown man across the middle room.
The man in the suit was the last one standing. He looked at his friends on the floor, then at the box. He grabbed it off the table and ran.
The others ran with him, limping, holding broken arms. Car doors slammed. Tires squealed.
Then it was quiet.
Rice on the floor. Photographs crooked on the wall. The cat hissing from on top of the refrigerator, puffed up to twice his size.
The thief stood in the doorway of the middle room. She was not out of breath.
She was not breathing at all.
Remy noticed it the way he noticed a ceiling about to drop. Her chest did not rise. There was blood on her black sleeve, a long rip from elbow to wrist where one of them had cut her, and he watched, he actually watched, while the skin under the rip pulled closed. Like a zipper. Like film run backwards.
“They took the box,” Remy said. His own voice sounded far away.
“I noticed,” she said.
“You let them.”
“I let them take an empty tin.” She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were doing the thing again. Glowing, faint and green, like a cat’s in headlights. “That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? Before you tried to look clever.”
Remy said nothing.
“I heard you open it,” she said. “I heard the cord slide. I heard you put it down your pants.” She tilted her head. “That’s an interesting place to keep a holy book.”
“How,” Remy said, “did you hear that? Over all of that?”
She didn’t answer.
He looked at her arm. Not a mark on it. He looked at her mouth.
She smiled again, and this time she let him see.
Two of her teeth were longer than the others. Sharp and white and perfectly made, like a snake’s.
Remy’s back hit the refrigerator. The cat yowled above his head.
“No,” he said.
“Yes.”
“No. That’s—” He laughed. It came out wrong. “That’s the tourist shops on Royal Street. That’s—”
“That’s my teeth,” she said. “I’d rather you didn’t touch them.”
She stepped over the spilled rice and stopped two feet in front of him. Close enough that he could feel the cool coming off her, like standing in front of an open freezer on a hot day. Close enough that he could smell her. Not perfume. Rain, and gun oil, and something underneath that he could not name. Something old, like cold stone.
She was a head shorter than him. Pale freckles across her nose, faded, like they had been there a long time ago and were trying to remember how. Green eyes. Red hair in a heavy braid down her back, coming loose at the temples.
She was the most frightening thing he had ever seen.
She was also beautiful, and some stupid, tired part of his brain refused to stop noticing it.
“My name is Elise,” she said. “I work for a man who is very old and very patient. I’m going to ask you for the book. Nicely. Once.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then those men come back. With more friends. And their master doesn’t care about you, or your cat, or your grandmother’s tomatoes.” Her eyes flicked to the front window. “He’ll burn this house down to find one book in the ashes.”
Remy’s jaw tightened.
“That’s a bad thing to say to a firefighter,” he said.
“It’s a true thing to say to anyone.”
He felt the book against his spine. He thought of Mamie in the hospital bed, three weeks ago, her hand like paper in his. The oxygen tube hissing. Her voice so thin he had to lean close.
The tin box, Remy. Under the stove. It was Papa Achille’s.
What’s in it, Mamie?
His sins. Her fingers tightening on his. Keep it from the pale ones. Promise me. Keep it until you know what it’s for.
He had thought she was confused. The morphine. He had promised anyway, because she was dying and she was asking, and you don’t say no to the woman who raised you.
The pale ones.
He looked at Elise. At her white skin under the kitchen light. At her not breathing.
“What are you?” he asked. Very quietly.
She was silent for a moment. Then, just as quietly: “You know what I am.”
“Say it.”
“Vampire,” she said. “Since 1921. Before that, I was a dockworker’s daughter from the Irish Channel who sang in church on Sundays. I have a karambit, a pistol, and a very bad temper. And I’m the only thing in this city tonight that doesn’t want you dead.”
Remy closed his eyes. Opened them. She was still there.
“My grandmother told me to keep this book from the pale ones,” he said. “I’m guessing that’s you.”
Something moved across her face, fast. Not anger. For one second, it looked like grief.
“Your grandmother was a smart woman,” Elise said.
“So that’s a no.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m saying it.” He straightened off the refrigerator. His legs were shaking, but his voice was steady. Eleven years of practice. “You want the book, you can try to take it. But you’ll have to take it off me. And I’m guessing that little burn on your neck says you don’t love that idea.”
Her fingers went to her collarbone. To the angry red circle there, the size of a coin, where his medal had touched her. It had not healed like her arm had.
“You noticed that,” she said.
“I notice things. It’s my job.”
“It’s going to get you killed.”
“Probably,” Remy agreed. “But not tonight.”
They stared at each other. The old refrigerator hummed.
Her phone buzzed.
She answered without looking away from him.
Remy could not hear the voice on the other end. But he saw her change. A soldier’s stillness. Shoulders straight. Chin up.
“Yes, sir,” she said. A pause. “Reginald’s. Five of them. I hurt them, I didn’t kill them.” Another pause. “He has it. On him. No. He’s wearing something. One of Anselm’s.” A long pause. Her eyes moved over Remy, slow, from his face to his chest to his hands. “Yes. I know what the name means.”
What name? Remy thought. Doucet?
“Sir, with respect, he is a civilian.” A pause. Her jaw set. “Understood. Twenty minutes.”
She lowered the phone.
“Who was that?” Remy asked.
“My boss.”
“Your very old, very patient boss.”
“He’s run out of patience,” Elise said. “That happens about once every fifty years. You should feel special.”
“I don’t.”
“You will.” She slid the phone into her jacket. “He wants to meet you. Tonight.”
Remy laughed. “Lady, I just got off a twenty-four-hour shift. I’ve been awake for thirty hours. I pulled a guy out of a car on the interstate this morning. I’m not going anywhere to meet a vampire’s boss.”
“His name is Giorgio de Gaultier,” she said, “and he is the Prince of this city. And he said, and I quote, that you may come with me in your truck, or you may stay here and wait for Reginald’s men to come back with gasoline.”
Remy looked at the shattered front door. At the cat, still puffed up on the refrigerator, ears flat.
Somewhere out there, a car with five broken men in it was driving across the city with an empty box. And when they opened it, they would come back.
“If I go,” Remy said, “the book stays with me. On me. The whole time.”
“Fine.”
“And the cat comes.”
She looked up at Pistache. Pistache hissed at her.
“Absolutely not,” Elise said.
“Then I stay.”
For a long moment, he thought she might actually hit him. Then her mouth twitched at one corner. It was not quite a smile. It was the place where a smile used to be, before she forgot how.
“Get the cat,” she said. “Get your keys. And Remy?”
He was already reaching for the carrier on top of the cabinet. He looked back.
She had moved. He had not heard her. She was right behind him, so close her cool breath, the breath she did not need, brushed the side of his neck. Right over the big vein there. He felt his pulse jump against the skin, hard and fast, and he knew, he knew, that she could hear it.
Her lips did not touch him. They did not need to.
“Whatever you do tonight,” she said softly against his throat, “don’t bleed.”
