The Red Rope
Marisol
The invitation was a lie, and it was printed on better paper than my rent check.
Heavy cream stock, a deckled edge, one line of copperplate that read The Velvet Hour requests the pleasure and nothing else. No address. No date. Just a wax seal the color of old wine and, on the back, a number written in fountain-pen ink that a woman named Corinne had sold me for four hundred dollars and a promise that I’d never say her name in print.
I wasn’t going to. I was going to say a lot of other names.
At eleven-forty on a Thursday in late October, I stood on Royal Street outside a flower shop that had closed at six, holding the card the way Corinne had told me to, face out, like a ticket to a show. The French Quarter was doing what it always does after dark: brass leaking from a bar on the corner, a couple arguing in Spanish under a gas lamp, the sour-sweet smell of last night’s beer and this morning’s hose-down rising off the flagstones. The air was warm enough to feel like breath. New Orleans doesn’t believe in autumn. It believes in a slightly less damp version of August.
The shop door opened before I could knock.
The woman behind it was fifty, maybe, silver-streaked hair pinned up hard, reading glasses on a chain, a black dress that cost more than my car. She looked at the card. Then she looked at me, and I had the very specific sensation of being proofread.
“Number?” she said.
“Forty-one.”
She didn’t check anything. She just held my gaze for a long second and then stepped aside. “I’m Ines. Upstairs. Don’t touch the lilies, they bruise.”
The shop was dark and smelled of cut stems and cold water. Buckets of roses lined the walls like an audience. At the back, behind a curtain, a narrow staircase climbed into a warm gold light, and from somewhere above came the low hum of a cello and the lower hum of voices.
I’d done this before. Not this, exactly, but the shape of it. I’d posed as a home health aide to get inside a nursing chain that was billing Medicaid for the dead. I’d spent three weeks as a temp at a parish assessor’s office and walked out with a flash drive that got two men indicted. I knew how to wear a story like a coat, how to keep my shoulders loose and my questions small.
But I had never climbed a staircase toward a room full of people who were, if Corinne was telling the truth, about to let strangers drink from them.
I touched the recorder sewn into the seam of my dress. Still there. A tiny thing, no bigger than a guitar pick, clipped under the lining at my ribs. My phone was in my clutch, set to airplane mode, because Corinne had been very clear: They’ll take it at the door if it’s on. They take everything at the door.
I reached the top step and the room opened around me like a mouth.
It had been a cotton factor’s office once, a hundred and eighty years ago. You could tell from the bones of it, the fourteen-foot ceilings, the tall shuttered windows onto the gallery, the heart-pine floors worn soft in paths where men had paced over bales and debts. Someone had taken that history and dipped it in wine. The walls were oxblood. The light came from candles and from low brass lamps with amber shades, and every surface that could hold velvet held velvet: the long chaises, the curtains, the deep chairs in their small islands.
And the ropes.
That was the first thing I wrote in my head, the way I always write the first line before I’ve earned it. The Velvet Hour is a room organized by rope.
They were everywhere, thick velvet cords hung between brass posts, the kind you’d see outside a theater, except these weren’t keeping a line in order. They were drawing a map. Green ropes near the door, around a cluster of armchairs where people sat in pairs and talked, drinks in hand, close but not touching. Gold ropes deeper in, around chaises where hands were on knees and waists and the backs of necks. And at the far end of the room, beneath a carved mezzanine gallery that ran the width of the space, a ring of red.
I didn’t look at the red yet. I made myself look at the people.
There were maybe forty of them. They were not what I’d expected, and I’d expected something out of a music video: corsets, fake fangs, eyeliner like war paint. Instead I saw a man in a rumpled seersucker suit who might have been a law professor. A woman with a gray buzz cut and a cardigan, laughing at something. Two men in their twenties in matching black shirts, holding hands. A tall woman in a sequined gown who looked like she’d come straight from a gala at the museum. Most of them wore a thin velvet band at the wrist, and the bands were colored, too. Green, gold, red.
The ones without bands were harder to describe. They stood a little differently. Too still, in a room where everyone else shifted their weight. Their faces had the smooth, unbothered quality of statues in good light.
“First time.”
A man had materialized at my elbow with a tray of champagne coupes. He was young-looking, sandy-haired, and he said it like a fact, not a question.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’re counting the exits.” He smiled. “Everyone does. There are four. Rule one is that you may use any of them at any time, and nobody will follow you through it.”
“What’s rule two?”
“Ines will tell you. She tells everyone, personally. It’s her favorite part.” He offered the tray. “This is just champagne. Nothing in it. Nothing is ever in anything here.”
I took a glass because refusing would be a thing someone remembered. He moved off toward the gold ropes, and I watched him go, and that was when I noticed that he didn’t wear a band, and that when he passed through a slant of candlelight his skin looked like the inside of a seashell.
Vampires, Corinne had said, on the phone, in a voice so matter-of-fact I’d laughed out loud. Don’t laugh in there. They hear it.
I’d done a lot of reading in the past five weeks. About blood-fetish communities, about the people who call themselves sanguinarians and drink from willing partners with lancets and sterile kits, about kink clubs and consent culture and the history of New Orleans’ long love affair with its own dark legend. I had a folder on my laptop labeled VAMPIRES (LOL).
I’d stopped laughing about three weeks in, when I found the second missing woman.
Ines found me by the green ropes. She had a leather-bound book under her arm, the size of a church hymnal, and she didn’t open it.
“Forty-one,” she said. “Corinne’s referral. Corinne is not supposed to give out her number.”
My stomach dropped and I kept my face exactly where it was. “She vouched for me.”
“I’m sure she did.” Ines studied me over her glasses. “The rules. Listen, because I only say them once and I’ll know if you weren’t paying attention.”
“I’m listening.”
“One. Nothing is taken here that is not offered. Not blood, not a kiss, not a hand on your knee. Offered means said out loud. Two. The rope you stand in is the yes you’ve given. Green, you watch and you talk. Gold, you touch. Red, you bleed.” She said bleed the way someone else would say dance. “You can step back over a rope anytime. You cannot be pulled over one. Three. Every donor chooses a word. Say it once, at any volume, and everything stops. Not slows down. Stops. Four. No donor gives twice in one night, no donor leaves alone, and every donor eats something before they go home. Five.” She finally tapped the book. “What happens in the Hour stays in the Hour. Break that one, and you’ll find that every door in this city that used to open for you has very quietly closed.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“It’s a description.” She tilted her head. “Do you have a word?”
I’d thought about it. Corinne had said they’d ask. I’d picked something I’d never say by accident. “Daylight.”
Something moved behind Ines’s eyes that might have been amusement. “Popular choice. Green band for tonight. You can upgrade next time, if there is a next time.” She clasped the velvet around my wrist herself, quick and practiced, her fingertips cool and dry. “Enjoy the Hour, Ms. Forty-one. Eat something before you go.”
She left me there with my green wrist and my untouched champagne, and I let out the air I’d been rationing and went to stand where I could see the red.
I’m going to tell this part carefully, because I’ve rewritten it in my head a hundred times since and it still won’t sit still on the page.
Inside the red rope, on a wide chaise the color of a bruised plum, a woman lay half-reclined against a man’s chest. She was forty or so, dark hair loose, wearing a slip dress that had slid off one shoulder. Her eyes were open. Her lips were parted. She had the red band on her left wrist and her right hand was fisted in the man’s sleeve, not pushing him away. Holding him there.
His mouth was at her throat.
I couldn’t see his face. I could see the line of his jaw moving, slow, and the way his hand cradled the back of her skull, fingers spread in her hair, thumb stroking behind her ear. I could see her pulse. That was the strangest part. I could actually see it, a flutter under the skin just below where his mouth was, and as I watched it seemed to slow and deepen, as if her whole body were sinking into a warm bath.
She made a sound.
It wasn’t pain. I’d heard pain; I’d interviewed people in hospital corridors. This was the other thing. Low, unguarded, a sound that came from somewhere under her ribs, and her back arched just slightly off his chest, and her free hand slid down to grip the edge of the chaise like she needed something to hold on to. Around the red rope, maybe a dozen people watched, the way you watch someone sing well. Nobody leered. A man in the gold section had his arm around his partner’s waist and she’d leaned into him without seeming to notice she’d done it.
I noticed. I noticed my own skin, the heat crawling up my neck, the way my thighs had pressed together under my dress. I noticed that I’d stopped taking mental notes.
The man lifted his head. There was a single bead of red at the corner of his mouth, and he pressed his thumb to the woman’s throat, gently, and murmured something to her, and she laughed, breathless and drowsy, and put her palm over his hand to keep it there.
A waiter was already at the rope with a glass of orange juice and a small plate of something that looked like pralines.
I turned away and put my champagne down on the nearest ledge because my hand wasn’t entirely steady.
Focus, I told myself. You’re not here for that.
I was here for Dani.
Dani Okafor, twenty-seven, bartender at a place on Magazine Street, my roommate for two years in a shotgun double in the Bywater before I made enough money to live alone and she made enough to stop pretending she liked living with anyone. Dani, who taught me to make a Sazerac and who cried at every dog in every movie and who sent me a photo five weeks ago of a scrap of velvet ribbon tied around her wrist with a caption that said GUESS WHO GOT INTO THE HOUR, followed by a string of devil emojis.
Followed by nothing. Not a text. Not a post. Her apartment had been paid through the end of the month. Her car was still parked outside it. The police took a report and told me adults are allowed to leave town without telling their friends.
Dani was the first. I’d found three more since, all in their twenties or thirties, all people who’d talked online about trying to get into an invitation-only club in the Quarter. All gone in the past four months. Nobody was looking for them very hard, because nobody looks hard for bartenders and dancers and a nursing student with an expired lease.
I was looking. And every thread I pulled led back up that staircase.
I made a slow circuit of the room. I let my eyes rest on faces long enough to remember them. The seersucker law professor had a gold band. The sequined woman wore no band at all and moved like smoke. Above me, on the mezzanine, a few people leaned on the carved railing, half in shadow, watching the room the way the room watched the red rope. Watching was its own rope, I realized. The gallery was for people who wanted to see without being touched. Or for people who wanted to be seen being seen.
I was trying to figure out how to get up there when the cello stopped.
Not dramatically. The musician simply finished a phrase and lifted her bow, and in the half-second of quiet I heard something I’d never be able to explain to an editor: the room changing temperature. Every bandless head turned the same direction, toward the stairs at the end of the mezzanine.
A man was coming down them.
He was tall, and he took the stairs without hurry, one hand trailing the banister. Dark hair, a little too long, pushed back off his forehead like he’d raked it with his fingers and forgotten. A black shirt open at the collar, no jacket, sleeves turned back twice over forearms that looked carved. He was beautiful in a way that wasn’t pretty at all: a strong nose, a hard mouth, cheekbones that threw shadows, and a stillness about him that made everyone else in the room look like they were fidgeting.
He looked thirty-five, maybe. He looked like he’d been looking thirty-five for a very long time.
The room didn’t fall silent. People went on talking. But they talked to him with their bodies: the slight lean as he passed, the turned shoulder, a woman in the gold section lifting her chin as if in greeting. He nodded to some of them. He touched one man’s shoulder in passing, briefly, and the man flushed to his ears.
I knew who he was. I had his name in my folder, with a question mark next to it, from a 1993 property transfer and a 2011 liquor license and a single grainy society-page photo from 1958 in which a man with exactly that face stood at the edge of a Garden District party with a glass he wasn’t drinking from.
Lucien Delacroix. Owner, on paper, of the building, the flower shop, and the shell company that paid for both.
I turned toward the gallery wall, toward a painting of a heron, and studied it with great journalistic intensity.
I listened to his footsteps cross the heart-pine. I listened to them not stop at the gold ropes. I listened to them not stop at the red.
They stopped behind me.
He didn’t touch me. He didn’t need to. I felt him the way you feel a door open in winter, a shift in the air at the back of my neck, and then his voice, low and unhurried and faintly accented in a way I couldn’t place, something older than New Orleans’ usual music.
“It’s a bad painting,” he said. “I’ve owned it for sixty years and I still can’t decide why.”
I turned around.
Up close, his eyes were gray. Not blue, not green. Gray like the river under a heavy sky, and they moved over my face slowly, without apology, like he was reading a page he’d already read and liked enough to read again.
“I’m sure it has sentimental value,” I said.
“Oh, none at all. I lost a bet.” The corner of his mouth moved. “You haven’t touched your champagne.”
“I’m pacing myself.”
“Very wise. Ines tells me you chose daylight.”
“Ines talks a lot for someone with a rule about discretion.”
“Ines tells me everything. It’s the only reason I let her run my life.” He tilted his head, and the candlelight slid along his jaw. “Would you walk with me?”
Every instinct I owned said no. Every instinct I’d been paid for said yes.
“I’ve got a green band,” I said, lifting my wrist. “I think that means I’m only allowed to talk.”
“Then we’ll talk.” He gestured toward the mezzanine stairs. “Green rope goes all the way up. It’s the best view in the house.”
I walked. He walked beside me, not quite close enough to touch, and I was intensely aware of the six inches between his arm and mine, as if the air there had texture. People made room for us. The cellist began again, something slow. On the stairs I let my hand rest on the banister where his had been, and the wood was cool.
At the top, the gallery was nearly empty. A couple at the far end, wrapped up in each other. A woman alone with a book, which struck me as the most decadent thing I’d seen all night. He led me to the railing at the center, where the whole room spread below us, the ropes like veins drawn in velvet, the red ring glowing under its lamps.
“So,” he said, resting his forearms on the rail. “What do you think of my house?”
“It’s very organized,” I said. “For a den of sin.”
That got a real laugh, short and surprised, and the sound did something unforgivable to my spine.
“Sin is very easy,” he said. “Organization is hard. Anyone can open a door and let people do whatever they like to each other in the dark. I wanted a room where everyone knew exactly what they’d agreed to. Where the yes was louder than the music.”
“Is that why the ropes?”
“The ropes are for the people who’ve never had their yes taken seriously.” He was looking down at the room, not at me. “You’d be surprised how many that is.”
I wouldn’t, actually. I thought of Dani, who’d once told me she’d never had a boyfriend who asked before he did anything, as if this were a fun fact about her, like being double-jointed.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, and meant it, which annoyed me.
“Thank you.” He turned his head. The gray eyes settled on mine and stayed. “Now. Do you want to keep pretending, or shall we skip ahead?”
My pulse kicked, hard. I kept my voice light. “Pretending what?”
“That your name is Forty-one.” He said it gently, almost kindly, the way you’d tell someone they had lipstick on their teeth. “That you’re here because Corinne thought you’d enjoy the champagne. That the little device stitched into your dress under your left arm is part of the boning.”
I didn’t move. I’m proud of that. Every muscle in my body wanted to, and I didn’t.
“Marisol Vega,” he said. “Thirty years old. Staff reporter at The Crescent Ledger for six years, two awards from the state press association, one very good piece about a sheriff’s office that misplaced 1.1 million dollars in seized cash. Your byline photo doesn’t do you justice. You’re wearing your hair differently. It suits you.”
The music went on. Below us, somebody laughed. The woman with the book turned a page.
“Should I be leaving through one of the four exits?” I asked, and was pleased that my voice came out dry instead of thin.
“You can. Nobody will follow you.” He straightened from the rail and faced me fully, and for the first time I understood how tall he was, how much of the light he blocked. “But you haven’t found what you came for yet. And I don’t think you’re the kind of woman who leaves before she does.”
“And what did I come for?”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, the dry humor had gone out of his voice, and what was left underneath it was something colder and much older.
“Five donors have disappeared from this city since June, Ms. Vega. Not from my house. From the edges of it. People who wanted in, and were told no.” He held my eyes. “You came to find out who’s taking them.”
My mouth had gone dry. “Five. I only have four.”
“I know,” he said softly. “So did I. Until Tuesday.”
Seven Nights
Lucien
Her heart did a remarkable thing when I said Tuesday.
It stopped trying to hide. For the past twenty minutes it had been running a careful, disciplined rhythm, the pulse of a woman who has practiced lying to security guards and county clerks and men with better lawyers than her. When I’d said her name, it had jumped once and then been wrestled back down by sheer will. I’d admired that. I’d been listening to frightened hearts for two hundred and forty years, and very few of them could be governed.
But when I told her there was a fifth, the discipline went out of it. It beat hard and fast and angry, and under the anger I heard something else, a raw low note that I recognized because I’d been carrying the same one since June.
Grief, waiting for permission.
“Who?” she said.
“Reginald Batiste. Thirty-one. Line cook at a restaurant on Frenchmen. He applied to the Hour in August. Ines turned him down.” I watched her face. “He was last seen Sunday night getting into a car outside his apartment in Tremé. His sister filed a report Tuesday morning.”
“And the others? Dani—” She stopped. The name had come out of her before she could catch it, and I watched her realize it, watched her mouth press flat.
“Danielle Okafor applied in May,” I said quietly. “Ines turned her down as well.”
“Why?”
“Because she’d just come out of something bad and wanted somewhere to disappear into. Ines can smell that. It’s why I hired her.” I paused. “Your friend sent you a photograph of a velvet ribbon. Did she tell you she got in?”
“Yes.”
“She didn’t. She never set foot in this house.” I let that land. “Someone gave her a ribbon and told her she had.”
For a long moment Marisol Vega said nothing. The candlelight from below caught the gold flecks in her brown eyes and made them look lit from inside. She had a small scar through her left eyebrow and a dusting of freckles across her nose that no amount of powder could fully hide, and her mouth, when she wasn’t pressing it into a line, was full and soft and expressive in a way that must have been terribly inconvenient for someone in her profession. She smelled of bergamot and printer ink and the salt of a long humid walk, and beneath all of it, the copper-sweet warmth of her blood, running hot with adrenaline.
I’d fed at nine o’clock. A careful, grateful man named Albert, two swallows, a quarter hour of quiet conversation afterward about his roses. I was not hungry.
I was not only hungry.
“Come to my office,” I said. “I’d like to show you something, and I’d rather not do it with an audience.”
Her eyes flicked toward the stairs. Toward the exits. I watched her weigh it.
“You can leave the door open,” I added. “You can sit nearest it. And you can turn on that little recorder, if you like. I’d prefer you didn’t, but I won’t stop you.”
That surprised her. I saw it in the slight lift of her brows. “Why not?”
“Because I’ve decided to tell you the truth,” I said. “And you’ll find that much easier to believe if you can play it back later.”
My office had been the counting room once. The factor who’d built the place in 1841 had kept his ledgers in it, and I’d kept the ledger desk, a great slab of cypress gone black with age, and the iron safe in the corner. Everyone believed its combination had died with him. I let them. It was the one locked thing in the house that no one ever asked me about.
She took the chair nearest the door, exactly as I’d said she could. She did not turn on the recorder. Interesting.
I sat on the edge of the desk rather than behind it, so we were nearer eye level, and opened a thin folder and turned it to face her.
Five photographs. Five names. Five dates. Beside each, a copy of an application card in Ines’s precise handwriting, and a single line at the bottom: Declined.
She went through them slowly. She touched Dani’s photograph with one finger, just at the corner, and then took her hand away like she’d been caught.
“These are your applicant records,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Who sees them?”
The right question, immediately. I felt something in my chest that I hadn’t felt in a long time, the small sharp pleasure of being understood by someone fast.
“Ines. Myself. And the four hosts who help her screen, who are, like me, not entirely human.” I watched her not flinch at that. “Every declined applicant gets a polite card and a list of other resources. Clinics, support groups, a few softer houses with less stringent rules. Someone has been getting to them first, with a ribbon and a story that they’ve been let in after all, and a car to take them to a party that doesn’t exist.”
“Someone in your house.”
“Someone who has seen that list. Yes.”
“So it’s one of five people.” She looked up. “Including you.”
“Including me.” I didn’t look away. “I’d suspect me too. I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
“Is it you?”
“No.”
Her heart, listening, did not quite believe me. That was fair.
“Why haven’t you gone to the police?”
“And told them what? That I run a very exclusive club where people let me drink their blood, and someone appears to be poaching my rejects?” I smiled without humor. “There are arrangements in this city, Ms. Vega. Old ones. My kind stays quiet and careful, and in exchange nobody looks too closely at why a man in a 1958 photograph still has the same face. The moment I walk into a police station, those arrangements end. For me, and for every vampire who has spent the last century learning to take only what’s offered.”
“So you need someone who can walk in for you.”
“I need someone who can walk in daylight.” I let the word sit between us, the one she’d chosen. “Someone who can read property records and court filings at two in the afternoon. Who knows how to find a car from a partial plate. Who can ask a grieving sister questions without making her afraid. And I need someone inside my house whom none of my people would think to hide from. Someone with no reason to be trusted, and every reason to be ignored.”
She sat back slowly. “A donor.”
“My donor.”
There it was: the word in the air, with all its weight on it.
I watched her pulse climb in the hollow of her throat. I watched her decide not to touch her neck, though her fingers twitched toward it.
“Explain,” she said.
“Seven nights. Starting tonight.” I folded my hands. “Each night you come to the Hour at eleven and stay until we close at three. You wear my color. Black. It means you belong to no rope and every rope. You can walk anywhere in this house, ask anyone anything, sit in on Ines’s screenings, read whatever’s in that cabinet. My people will treat you as they’d treat me, because you’ll carry my scent on your skin, and to them that is a louder signature than any card.”
“Your scent.”
“I’ll have fed from you.” I held her gaze. “Lightly. Only what you offer, only when you offer it. And in exchange, you’ll have this house. You’ll have me, for any question you think to ask. I’ll answer you truthfully, or I’ll tell you I won’t answer. I will not lie to you.”
“And at the end of seven nights?”
“You’ll have your story.” I tapped the folder. “Whatever you find about who did this, you print it. Every word. I have only one condition: you never name a member of this house. Not the ones who give, not the ones who take. They trusted the rope. I’d like them to be able to go on trusting it.”
She was quiet. Below us, faintly, the cello. The old building ticked and settled around us in the warm night.
“Why seven?” she said finally.
I could have given her a practical answer. That it takes about a week of regular feeding for my scent to settle into a donor’s skin so deeply that no one in this city would dare put a hand on her. That I estimated whoever was taking these people would grow either careless or desperate within that time, now that a fifth had brought me out of patience. Both of those things were true.
“Because I want seven,” I said instead. “And I’m too old to pretend I don’t.”
Her heart stuttered. A blush climbed her throat, slow, dark under her brown skin, and the scent of her changed: warmer, sweeter, a thread of something that made my fangs ache in my gums.
I didn’t move. I’d had a long time to learn not to move.
“You know what this sounds like,” she said, a little hoarse.
“I know exactly what it sounds like. Which is why the most important part comes next.” I leaned forward. “You can walk away any night. Any night. In the middle of a sentence, if you like. You keep everything you’ve learned and you owe me nothing. There is no penalty, no debt, no clause. If you never come back after tonight, I will still send you every scrap I find about your friend. I’m not trading her for you. I’m offering you a door. Whether you walk through it is entirely your business.”
“Then why make it a bargain at all?”
“Because you wouldn’t trust a gift,” I said. “And because I’d like something from you, too. I’d rather say so plainly than have you wonder.”
She studied me. I let her. It was a strange thing, being studied by a journalist; it felt less like a woman looking at a man and more like a woman reading a contract for the clause that would ruin her. I’d been looked at with desire and fear and devotion and loathing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been looked at with professional suspicion. I found I liked it enormously.
“I have conditions,” she said.
“I’d hoped you would.”
“Nothing in my drink. Ever.”
“Nothing in anyone’s drink. Ever. That was true before you walked in.”
“No mind tricks. I’ve read the folklore. If you can make people want things they don’t want—”
“I can,” I said. Her eyes widened slightly. I owed her that honesty. “Not easily, and not for long, and I find it disgusting. I haven’t done it in ninety years. I won’t do it to you. If I ever do, you’ll know, because the wanting won’t feel like yours, and you can print that too, with my name on it.”
She swallowed. “No sex.”
I inclined my head. “Your line.”
“I mean it. That’s not on the table. Whatever this is, I’m here for a story.”
“Then that’s where the line is. I’ll keep it.” I let a beat pass. “Even if you ask me not to.”
Her lips parted. “I won’t.”
“Then it won’t come up.”
Her eyes narrowed, as if she suspected she was being teased. She was. “And the biting.”
“Yes?”
“Not until I ask.”
“Not until you ask,” I agreed. Then, because she deserved to know the shape of the man she was making a deal with: “And when you do, I’ll make you ask twice.”
“Why?”
“Because the first time, you’ll ask for the story.” I held her gaze. “The second time, I want you to be asking for me.”
The blush, which had begun to fade, came back so hard I could hear it, a rush of heat under her skin like a tide turning.
She stood up. For one bright, terrible second I thought she was going to the door.
She went to the folder instead. She closed it over the five photographs, and kept her hand flat on the cover, and stood there with her back half to me, breathing.
“Corinne,” she said. “Did she tell you about me?”
“She told Ines she’d sold her number to a reporter. Within the hour. She’s a loyal member, and she was frightened.” I paused. “She also told Ines why you wanted in. She said, She’s looking for her friend, and she’s not going to stop. That was what made me decide to let you climb the stairs.”
Marisol turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder. Something moved in her face that I couldn’t read, which was rare enough to be thrilling.
“If I say yes,” she said, “when does it start?”
“It already has,” I said. “If you want it to.”
She asked for paper. I gave her a sheet of my stationery and a pen, and watched her write the terms out in a fast, slanting hand, as if they were quotes she didn’t want to misremember. Seven nights. Eleven to three. Black band. Truth or refusal, never a lie. Walk away any night, keep what’s learned. No members named. Nothing in drinks. No compulsion. Her line. No bite until asked, and asked twice.
She read it back to me aloud. I agreed to each item, aloud. Then she folded the paper in quarters and put it in her clutch, and only then did she reach under her arm and press the tiny device sewn into her seam.
“For the record,” she said, to the room, crisp as a deposition, “it’s eleven fifty-eight on Thursday the twenty-second. I’m in the office of Lucien Delacroix, owner of a private club on Royal Street, and I’ve agreed to the terms he’s just stated.” She looked at me. “Say yes.”
“Yes,” I said.
She clicked it off. “Now I’ve got you.”
“You have, rather.”
I opened the desk drawer and took out the band. Black velvet, narrower than the others, fastened with a small silver clasp shaped like a crescent. I’d had it made in 1912 and it had been worn exactly four times since. I didn’t tell her that.
“Your wrist,” I said.
She held it out. Left hand, palm up, the green band still at the base of it. I unclasped the green and set it aside. I slid the black around her wrist and fastened it, and I did not let my fingers linger on the inside of her wrist, on the soft place where the blood ran so close to the surface I could feel its heat without touching. I did not.
Mostly.
My thumb passed over the vein, once, when I drew my hand away. The lightest pressure.
Her pulse leapt up to meet it like a fish breaking water.
We both heard it. She went still. I went still. Downstairs the cello reached the end of its phrase and paused, and in the quiet, she said, very softly, not quite steady:
“Is that going to happen every time?”
“Every time,” I said. “Unless you tell me to stop.”
“I don’t know if I want you to stop.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “You have seven nights to decide.”
I stood. She tipped her head back to keep looking at me, and I felt the pull of her throat like gravity: the clean line of it, the shadow under her jaw, that pulse beating there like something tapping at glass. I could have closed the space in one step. I could have tasted the salt on her skin.
Instead I went to the door and held it wide.
“Come,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to my house. And Ms. Vega?”
“Marisol,” she said. “If you’re going to drink my blood, you can use my first name.”
I smiled, slowly, and watched her watch my mouth, and saw her realize, a half-second too late, that the points of my teeth were showing.
“Marisol,” I said. “Whoever did this to your friend has been inside my house for months, smiling at me. When they see you on my arm tonight wearing that band, they’re going to be afraid.” I held out my hand, palm up, the way she’d held out her wrist. “Let’s go and watch who flinches.”
Ask Me Twice
Marisol
Nobody flinched. That was the first problem.
Lucien walked me through his house like a man showing off a garden, my hand tucked into the crook of his arm, and every face that turned toward us did the same thing: looked at him, looked at me, looked at the black velvet on my wrist, and went carefully, beautifully blank.
“Jonah, you’ve met,” he said, and the sandy-haired waiter with the champagne gave me a little bow and a grin that said he’d known exactly who I was when he’d handed me that glass. “Jonah is sixty-one and still dresses like a lifeguard. We’ve stopped trying.”
“I was turned in 1987, Lucien, it’s a period choice.”
The woman in sequins was Celestine. Up close she was even taller than she’d looked from the floor, with a cap of tight silver curls and skin the deep brown of strong coffee, and when Lucien said my name she didn’t offer her hand. She looked at my band for a long moment, and then at him, and said something in French too fast for my two semesters at Loyola to follow.
He answered her in the same language, quietly. Whatever he said, her nostrils flared, and she turned on her heel and walked away into the gold section without a word to me.
“Was that a flinch?” I murmured.
“That was Celestine having opinions.” He didn’t sound worried. “She’s been with me since 1919. She thinks I’m being reckless.”
“Are you?”
“Wildly.”
Marcus was the bartender, broad and bald and gentle-voiced, who promised me a Sazerac on my next night that would make me forget whoever had taught me to make one. I didn’t tell him it was Dani. It sat in my throat anyway.
And then there was Auguste.
He came to us. That was the thing I noted first: everyone else waited to be approached, and Auguste crossed the room. He was golden in a way that seemed almost deliberate, hair the color of old brass, a cream linen suit, eyes a pale clear hazel. He was handsome the way a magazine is handsome. He took my free hand and bowed over it and brushed his lips across my knuckles, and his mouth was cool and dry, and he smiled up at me through his lashes.
“Black,” he said. “Lucien. You’ve given out black.” He straightened, still holding my fingers. “Mademoiselle, do you know he hasn’t done that since Coolidge was president?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Should I be flattered or worried?”
“Oh, both.” He laughed, warm and easy. “We’re brothers, he and I, after a fashion. Same mother, as we say. He’s the serious one.” He finally released my hand. “If he bores you, I tell much better stories.”
“Auguste,” Lucien said mildly.
“I’m only being welcoming.” Auguste spread his hands. “Ines says you’re a writer?”
My pulse skipped. I felt Lucien feel it, through my arm.
“I’m a lot of things,” I said. “Tonight I’m thirsty.”
“Then I’ll leave you to Marcus.” He touched two fingers to his brow in salute and drifted away, and I watched his back across the room, and felt nothing at all except a faint unease that I couldn’t pin to anything he’d done.
“Same mother?” I said under my breath.
“The one who made us.” Lucien’s voice had gone flat. “She and I haven’t spoken in a very long time.”
I waited for more. He didn’t give it, and I let it go, because I was cataloguing a dozen other things, and because my arm was still threaded through his, and every time he shifted, the fine wool of his shirt slid against the inside of my wrist where the black band sat, right over the vein.
By three in the morning I had pages of notes in my head and no idea which of them mattered.
He walked me down himself. The flower shop was dark, the roses breathing cold in their buckets. Ines had pressed a paper bag into my hands at the top of the stairs, warm and grease-spotted, with two beignets inside and a look that said Rule four more clearly than words.
“I’m not hungry,” I’d said.
“You will be in an hour,” she’d said. “And I don’t make exceptions for black.”
At the door to Royal Street, Lucien stopped.
“There’s one thing left,” he said. “For tonight.”
My skin knew before I did. I felt it go tight and alert all over, a fine electric prickle from scalp to the backs of my knees. “The scent,” I said.
“Touch carries a little. A feeding carries more. Tonight, I’d like to take as much as I can without breaking your rule.” He didn’t move toward me. “May I?”
“What exactly are you asking?”
“Your pulse. My mouth. No teeth.”
The street outside the glass was nearly empty. A man went by on a bicycle with a speaker strapped to the handlebars playing old zydeco, the sound swelling and fading. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my fingertips, against the paper bag.
“Yes,” I said.
He stepped in. Slowly, so slowly, giving me every chance. One hand came up and settled at the side of my neck, his palm cool, his fingers sliding into the hair at my nape, his thumb resting at the hinge of my jaw. He tipped my head, gently, to the left. I let him. I watched his face come down toward me in the dark and saw his eyes go half-closed, the gray almost silver.
His mouth touched my throat.
Just touched. Lips, closed, pressed to the place where the pulse beat hardest, just below the corner of my jaw. Cool at first. Then not. I felt him inhale, long and slow, as if he were breathing me in through my skin, and a shudder went through me so hard I had to put my hand flat against his chest to stay upright.
He didn’t move. He didn’t kiss. He simply stayed there, his mouth against my pulse, and let it beat against his lips. Once. Twice. A dozen times. Each beat felt like a knock on a door.
Then his lips parted, the smallest amount, and I felt the faint cool edge of something sharp rest against my skin. Not pressing. Resting.
I made a sound I’d never made in my life.
He lifted his head. His eyes, when they met mine, were not entirely gray anymore. There was a ring of something darker at the center, spreading.
“Go home, Marisol,” he said, very low. “Eat your beignets. Lock your door.”
“Is that a warning?”
“It’s a courtesy.” His thumb brushed once along my jaw, and then his hand was gone. “Tomorrow at eleven.”
I walked to my car on legs that didn’t belong to me. I ate both beignets at a red light on Esplanade with powdered sugar falling all over my dress. And when I got home, I stood in the shower for a long time with my palm pressed to the side of my neck, where I could still feel his mouth, and did not let myself think about anything at all.
At noon on Friday I was sitting on a front stoop in Tremé with a woman named Tasha Batiste, who had her brother’s eyes and none of his patience.
“The cops said he probably went to Houston,” she told me, smoking a menthol with her elbows on her knees. “He’s never been to Houston in his life. He doesn’t like Texas. He says the food’s too loud.”
I took notes in a real notebook, because people talk differently to a pen. I asked her about the car.
“Black. Big. Lincoln, I think. Navigator. My neighbor saw it.” She pointed with her cigarette at a pink shotgun across the street. “She said it had one of those parking stickers on the back window. A parish sticker. Green with gold.”
“Do you know which parish?”
“She said it had a picture of a sugarcane stalk on it.” Tasha shrugged. “Upriver someplace. Reggie didn’t know anybody upriver.”
I wrote sugarcane sticker and underlined it twice. St. James. Maybe St. John the Baptist. The river parishes, the old plantation road, an hour west of the city.
“Did he ever mention a name? Anybody he was meeting?”
She was quiet a long while. Then she stubbed out her cigarette on the step and said, “He said he was going to a party at Miss Honor’s. He was excited. He said she’d seen his application and she thought those people at the club were snobs, and she had a better place.” Her voice cracked on the last word. “He said she had a whole house just for people like him. I thought it was a church thing. I thought, good, somebody’s finally being nice to him.”
I gave her my card. I told her I’d call. I meant it, and I sat in my car afterward for five minutes with both hands on the steering wheel before I could drive.
Miss Honor. I wrote it on the inside of my wrist in ballpoint, just under where the black band would go, so I’d remember to ask.
“I want to see the ledger,” I said, the moment he opened his office door at eleven.
He looked at the ink on my wrist. He looked at my face. He didn’t ask.
“Ines has it,” he said. “Second drawer of her desk. She knows you’re coming.”
I spent two hours with the ledger and with Ines, who answered every question in her flat proofreader’s voice and never once asked me why I wanted to know. Declined applicants since January: thirty-eight. Of those, five missing. All five had been declined for the same reason, a reason Ines had written in the margin each time in the same small hand: Looking to disappear.
“It’s my job to see it,” Ines said. “People who come here to be held, I let in. People who come here to be lost, I send somewhere they’ll be found.” She took off her reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Someone has been using my judgment as a shopping list. I would very much like you to find out who.”
“Does the name Honor mean anything to you?”
Ines went still. It was a small stillness, but I’d spent the day around people who were good at stillness.
“You’ll have to ask Lucien,” she said, and put her glasses back on, and that was the end of that.
I didn’t ask Lucien. Not yet. I went downstairs instead and found a man named Theo, twenty-nine, a red-band regular, a session drummer with forearms like coiled rope and a tired, sweet face, and I sat with him in the gold section and drank the Sazerac Marcus made me, which was in fact better than Dani’s, and which I hated him a little for.
Theo talked the way people talk to strangers in bars at one in the morning. He told me he’d started coming to the Hour after his divorce. He told me it was the only place he’d ever been where someone asked him what he wanted and then waited for the answer.
“Has anyone here ever asked you about other people?” I said. “People who didn’t get in?”
He frowned into his drink. “Once. Back in September. One of the hosts. He asked if I knew anybody who’d been turned away and needed somewhere to go. I thought it was kind of him.” He shrugged. “I said no. I didn’t, then.”
“Which host?”
Theo opened his mouth, and then his eyes slid past my shoulder, and he closed it again.
I turned. Auguste was standing at the gold rope, ten feet away, holding a glass of something red, smiling at us both.
“Mademoiselle,” he said. “Lucien’s looking for you. He’s in the gallery.”
When I turned back, Theo was studying the bottom of his glass like it held the answer to something.
“Thanks for the drink,” he said, though I hadn’t bought it, and went away into the red.
The gallery was darker than it had been the night before. Someone had snuffed half the candles. Lucien stood at the railing in the center, where we’d stood, and when I came up beside him he didn’t turn his head.
“Look,” he said.
Below us, inside the red rope, a woman knelt on a velvet cushion between a vampire’s knees. She was maybe forty, broad-hipped and beautiful in a dark green dress, her hands resting palm-up on her thighs. The vampire was a slender woman with a shaved head and a man’s tailored suit, and she had one hand cupping the kneeling woman’s face, thumb at her lips, and the other at her own wrist, where a thin line of red had opened, and she was holding that wrist just out of reach.
“Blood play,” Lucien said, low, at my ear. “Not every exchange goes one direction. Some of our donors like to be given a taste. Some like to be made to wait for it.”
The kneeling woman leaned forward. The vampire drew her wrist back an inch. Said something. The kneeling woman’s lips moved, a word, a plea, and the vampire smiled and lowered the wrist and let her press her mouth to it, and the kneeling woman shut her eyes and made a sound I felt in the soles of my feet.
“Her word is orchard,” Lucien murmured. “She’s never once used it. She likes knowing it’s there.”
I couldn’t look away. Heat climbed my body in a slow, rolling wave. I was aware of him behind me now, not touching, so close that if I swayed back half an inch I’d be against his chest. The air between us felt charged, as if it were full of static.
“Why are you showing me this?” My voice came out rough.
“Because you came up the stairs looking at me like you wanted to ask something.” His breath stirred the hair at my temple. “And because I’d like you to know what it looks like when someone asks properly.”
Below, the vampire was stroking the kneeling woman’s hair while she drank. The woman’s hands had come up to grip the vampire’s knees. The whole room seemed to lean toward them.
I turned around.
He was closer than I’d thought. My shoulders touched the railing. He didn’t step back.
“Show me,” I said.
“Show you what?”
“The bite. What it does.” I made myself hold his eyes. “I’ve watched it twice. I’ve heard how they sound. I can’t write about something I don’t understand, and I don’t understand this.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and something in his face softened and closed at the same time.
“No,” he said.
The word went through me like cold water. “That was the deal.”
“The deal was that you’d ask, and I’d make you ask twice.” His voice was gentle, and absolutely immovable. “And that was the first time. That was the story asking, Marisol. I could hear it. You’d like to write a very good paragraph about my mouth on your throat.”
“Maybe I would.”
“I know you would. You’d write it beautifully.” He lifted his hand and, for the first time all night, touched me: two fingers under my chin, tilting my face up. “But I’m not going to bite a byline.”
The anger came first, hot and clean. Then, underneath it, worse, something that felt like being seen naked.
“You’re very sure of yourself,” I said.
“I’m very old,” he said. “It’s not the same thing, but from the outside it looks similar.”
I should have stepped sideways. I should have gone downstairs and found Theo again and gotten the name he hadn’t said. I’d had a dozen sharp, professional, entirely sensible thoughts in my head five minutes ago.
Instead I put my hand on his chest. I felt him go still under it, very still, the way he’d been still the night before with his mouth on my pulse. There was no heartbeat under my palm. There was something else: a kind of humming tension, like a wire pulled tight.
“Then what about this,” I said. “Is this the story asking?”
And I rose up onto my toes, and kissed him.
For a heartbeat, mine, he didn’t respond at all. His mouth was cool and still against mine, and I thought, with a hot rush of humiliation, Oh, God, I’ve gotten it wrong.
Then his hand slid from my chin to the back of my neck, and his other arm came around my waist, and he kissed me back.
It was not a polite kiss. It was the kiss of someone who’d been very patient for a very long time and had just been given permission to stop. His mouth opened over mine, slow and deep and sure, and the cool of it warmed against my lips almost at once, as if he were drinking the heat from them. He tasted faintly of red wine and something mineral and old, like rain on stone. His fingers flexed in my hair. The railing pressed into the small of my back and his body pressed into my front, and he was hard everywhere, chest and stomach and thighs, and the hand at my waist spread wide and pulled me in until there was no air left between us at all.
I heard myself moan into his mouth. I felt him answer it, a low sound in his chest, more vibration than voice.
His tongue stroked mine. I felt, for one dizzy second, the sharp edge of a fang against my lower lip, and he froze, and I didn’t, I pressed closer, and he made a sound that was almost pain and tore his mouth away.
We stood there breathing. Or I breathed, ragged and loud, and he stood with his forehead resting against mine and his eyes shut, his hand still fisted in my hair.
“That,” he said, his voice wrecked, “was not the story.”
“No,” I said.
Below us, the cello had stopped. Somewhere in the red, someone laughed softly. I became aware, distantly, that the gallery wasn’t empty, that a couple at the far end had turned to watch us, that the woman with the book had lowered it. I didn’t care. I’d never cared less about anything.
Lucien opened his eyes. The gray was almost entirely gone, swallowed by that spreading dark.
“There’s a room,” he said, “behind the gallery. It has a door. The door has a lock.” His thumb traced the line of my jaw, down, over the place where my pulse was pounding like a fist. “Nothing will happen in it that you don’t ask for. Your line holds. My word holds. But I’d like to be alone with you, very much, for whatever’s left of tonight.”
I should have said no. I’d made rules. I’d written them down on his stationery and folded them into quarters.
“Yes,” I said.
He took my hand. He led me along the gallery, past the couple, past the woman with the book, who smiled at me as if she knew a secret, to a door at the very end I hadn’t noticed: dark wood, carved with vines, so worn at the handle that the carving had gone smooth.
He opened it. Inside, I saw a low lamp, a wine-dark chaise, a fireplace with no fire, shutters closed against the gallery. He let me go in first. Then he stepped in after me, and closed the door, and turned to face me with his back against it.
“Tell me your word,” he said.
My mouth had gone dry. “Daylight.”
“Say it again.”
“Daylight.”
He held my gaze, and reached behind him without looking, and I heard the old iron bolt slide home in the dark.
