Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler
From the private journal of Z. M. Carter, reporter, Chicago American Record
Wednesday, 17 June 1925
Lafayette Cemetary, New Orleans
Sometime after sunset
I woke to a foot kicking me in the side. Thud. Thud. Thud. Not hard enough to hurt, but not soft enough to ignore and go back to sleep … or whatever sort of oblivion was slowly releasing its grip on me.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"Ow," I said none too brilliantly, being only half-awake. "Cut it out."
Thud. Thud. Thud. This time accompanied by murmured conversation. Found another one. Lord, but they're getting irresponsible. Can't hold their liquor. Thud. Thud. Thu—.
"Quit it!" A sleepy snarl ripped out of me and I sat up, blinking and scrubbing the grit from my eyes. I smelled dirt. What? I looked and found myself surrounded by the sarcophagi and funeral markers of the graveyard where I'd buried my mother just that morning. In the dark. Clothes messed up. Grass and dirt, head to toe.
Two men loomed over me and I kicked back until I fetched up against a headstone, thinking what any woman in my position would. Well, doing my best to think anyway. For some reason it was hard to string two thoughts together, much less two words.
"Who—wha—?" I sucked it up and tried again. "What's going on? Who are you? What time is it?" A glance at my wrist showed me nothing but bare skin. My watch was gone. I've been rolled? Damn. Was I drunk? How did that happen? When?
The men traded an eye roll and a headshake and leaned down to haul me up.
"Wait, stop, I'm—."
I slapped their hands away. It was like a kitten batting a Rottweiler. They were strong and lifted me as if I weighed nothing. I thought the worst … and then they started talking and it went beyond worse. Far worse than I ever thought possible.
I wasn't drunk. I was dead, with no memory of how I died or who killed me. And that wasn't half of it. Not only was I dead but undead. That's right. Some inconsiderate bastard killed me, left me, and let me wake up to a singular inescapable fact: I was now a vampire.
No. Dear God, no.
***
It's odd but death wasn't at all what I imagined it. Well, I'll 'fess up: I was too busy when I was alive to spend much time imagining what death would be like, but I can say without reservation that if I had spent a moment trying to imagine it, I never would have imagined this. Not in a million years. Not for a million bucks.
Nope.
And the blows kept coming. I was dead, yes. And what was more, it wasn't Monday, the day I'd buried my mother. It was Wednesday. I'd lost time. Two whole days of it. Did that mean I'd been lying here all that time? Or had I gone home with my mother's family and somehow come back here to die later at the hands of parties unknown? Or had I been killed somewhere else and abandoned here like last week's garbage? I don't know what frightened me more at that moment—knowing I was the undead or not knowing how I got that way.
Was this how it felt to be steamrollered? I certainly felt flattened by it all.
Not that I was given the luxury to stay that way. Messrs. Sam Russell and Royal Lelande, my rescuers, bundled me gently into the back of a rather nice car and drove me somewhere 'safe'. Or so they said as they led me off the cemetery grounds and into the back seat. They said I was something called a Caitiff because I didn't know and therefore didn't officially have a Sire—which would be the bastard that killed me and made me one of the undead. Somehow a vampire had crossed my path and had decided I'd be the perfect snack. I told them I couldn't remember meeting anyone who fit that description. Sam and Royal shook their heads in sympathy. There was a time and a place for this sort of thing, they said, and killing an innocent and leaving her high and dry to deal with the consequences afterward was just low class. It also made their job harder.
Their job? Looking for and finding the newly-made like me.
I wasn't familiar enough with New Orleans to know where they took me. I only know that the car drove through some fancy neighborhood before parking in front of a building that was mighty fancy indeed. A Masonic Temple, if I read the carvings over the entrance right. Vampires as Free Masons? Who knew? Had I not been stuck in the middle of it, I would have laughed. Royal and Sam didn't linger but got me inside and upstairs into a private room. From the talk between them and the servants, this was something of a regular occurrence. Regular enough, at any rate, that provision had been made for this sort of thing.
What sort of thing? Me. Getting me under wraps and giving me the skinny on what it meant to survive as a vampire. And of course, the subject of food and drink came up pretty quick. Would I care for a drink? Still not entirely thinking straight, I gave them my standard polite answer when amongst strangers.
"A glass of water would be nice," I said.
I caught the look they shot each other. What's so funny? I kept my mouth shut while Sam left to fetch me that water. He came back with something not water, redder than any water I'd ever seen. It didn't take a genius to know it was blood and he held it out to me like it was the most natural thing in the world to offer a woman they'd just scraped off the ground in a graveyard. I stepped back, appalled, and would have refused it when the smell hit me.
It hit me hard in my gut, a bright sharp stab of hunger so strong I saw stars. I took that glass and paused, one last hesitation, before taking a sip. I expected to be thoroughly repulsed by it. I wasn't.
I'd once done a story on those who'd gotten addicted to heroin in the field hospitals during the War. One of them, a veteran who was too far gone to care if he shot up in front of a fresh young thing like me, showed me how he did it … and there was no mistaking the reaction that slammed through him. Drinking blood was like that, only much more intense. It was if God Himself had kissed me. Lightheaded from the blazing raw pleasure of it, I didn't question it or resist—I rode the wave as it shot me up to Heaven. I came back to my senses when the glass was empty and I shamelessly wiped my chin and licked my fingers clean. I barely had time to realize what I'd done when Roy asked me if I wanted more. To which I said yes … and it wasn't a fluke: that raw pleasure struck me again as I drank the glass dry. At which point, Royal and Sam traded another look and got me sitting down in a chair. Then they started on my education in earnest.
They said that there were different affiliations amongst vampires, like political parties or ideologies when you get right down to it. Caitiffs. Anarchs. Camarilla. Sabbat. Anti-tribu … and a few other names which escaped me as they literally made no sense though they spoke in English. They told me that those clans and affiliations were opposed to one another and from what they said I figured out that there was an uneasy truce keeping them from tearing New Orleans apart. None of them held a majority … but if what I overheard from Sam and Royal was correct, someone might be trying to tip the balance by making a lot of baby vampires like me.
It was barely more than a decade since the opening shots of the Great War and I'd been old enough—and blessed with enough intelligence—to follow it in the papers. If a vampire war was coming to this town, what better way to flummox your opponent than by flooding the city with problems like me? From what I gathered, rules governing the making of new vampires needed to be observed in order to keep things running smooth. Which making 'babies' irresponsibly threw to a fare-thee-well.
I was lucky, Sam and Royal assured me. I'd been found before some of those other groups did, who would as soon kill me for real as bring me into their fold. Some of them weren't above digging the freshly-dead up, either, for use too beyond the pale for me to comprehend. Voo-dun, I think the word was. I didn't know what it meant, but I was beginning to guess if Royal and Sam were that concerned over my mother's welfare.
But there was no time to worry about that, they said. Their faction, the Camarilla, was led by a Prince. One Delilah Franklin DeFleur. Man or woman, the title was the same and the Prince's word was law. And tonight, the Prince of the City was holding Court, a gathering of vampires, and I was going to be presented to her. It was bad form to run around in a Prince's territory without being properly introduced. Punishment for doing so would be severe. And that was without counting what would happen to me if non-Camarilla got their hands on me instead. Once I was formally adopted into the fold, however, I would have protection from the other factions. Or at least I gathered I would.
I didn't think my clothes would be up to meeting what amounted to royalty. I'd dressed in my very best for my mother's funeral. A genuine Chanel. Black jersey that went to mid-calf—nothing racy like a flapper's dress, though I'd worn those too. At least the dark color hid the dirt that I could still smell on me. My shoes, though, were a complete loss. I'd lost a heel at one point and Sam told me to make the pair even by whacking off the remaining one. Which I did without thinking bare handed … and froze when I realized what I'd done.
I was stronger. Stronger, yes, my instructors said. I was stronger, would hear, see, smell, taste far more keenly than any mortal human. I was immortal now, and it came with some advantages. I would never grow old. I would remain my twenty-five year old self for the rest of my undead life. I would never have children. Dead things can't make life, they said. It didn't mean that the pleasure I could derive from my body was dead—and they made a point in telling me it would be a welcome bonus whenever I fed from the living. I didn't think too deeply on that. I wasn't entirely sure I liked the idea.
Sam and Royal must have caught my expression and they said animal blood would keep me alive, but human blood tasted better, was more effective. I sucked the blood drying under my fingernail—when did I start doing that?—and couldn't deny it. Again, I didn't let myself dwell on why. I simply nodded and tried not to let the idea affect me.
I was starting to think that a certain amount of self-deception would be necessary until I either made peace with the fact I was a blood-sucking undead vampire or found a way to end myself before I killed anyone. It didn't have to come to that, my instructors assured me. Vampires didn't have to kill each time they fed. They didn't? No, child. I needed only a little at a time and I had better keep myself properly fed. If I didn't, if I denied myself the blood for too long, I would frenzy from the hunger and kill indiscriminately.
I couldn't forget how good it felt to drink the blood they'd given me. I understood how powerful it was, what it would drive me to do if I didn't respect it. The reality of it all started sinking in. I wasn't dead and I wasn't dreaming this up. I was a vampire. There was no going back. As Royal and Sam continued to instruct me in the scant time remaining until Court, I kept coming back to two questions. Why was I made? Who made me? Hard on those questions were others, equally important. Where do I go now? Who do I trust? What will I do?
Royal and Sam did what they could but they couldn't answer everything completely before it was time to go. I rose and tugged my dress straight and followed them downstairs where other guests were starting to arrive. It was no different, I told myself, than walking into a hostile room as a junior reporter hungry for a story. I'd faced many a hostile room in a city no less than Chicago, the Mob's stomping ground, where blood ran in the streets like water as they fought to control the lucrative booze trade. Surely I could hold my chin up amongst the blood-sucking undead in a laissez-faire city like New Orleans. So I kept telling myself as I walked out of my old life and into my new one.
God help me.
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