1933. Prohibition was at an end, the current economic depression driving a desperate demand for jobs and tax income that only alcohol could provide. Louis Armstrong was now singing as well as mesmerizing the country with his virtuoso trumpet playing. Meanwhile, Benny Goodman had dragged jazz kicking and screaming from the speakeasies into the American mainstream, ushering in the arrival of swing with his clarinet.
Callie had been keeping a low profile for the last five years or so, ever since that fateful night Johnny had ordered her shot. As it happened, he had known exactly what she was all along, while she’d had no inkling. But his bid to keep her with him forever had been a resounding failure. He hadn’t known her nearly as well as he thought he had, and she vowed that one day his miscalculation would cost him dearly.
Of course, first she had to wrap her mind around Brighid, and her explanation.
“I’m a what?” she asked, hand pressed against the phantom pain in her chest.
“A Keeper of the Flame,” Brighid repeated, a small smile twitching her lips. “You are a champion, Calista. And, dare I say it, extremely difficult to kill.”
“So I’m not dead.” Callie’s hackles settled, and she was able to force her stunned mind into action.
“You died,” Brighid said. “But you are very much alive. Your blood is my blood, but it was your sacrifice that brought you to me.”
Callie’s nails bit into her palms, until she was quite sure she’d drawn blood. “If I’d known, I would have shoved him in front of the bullet instead,” she admitted.
“No one would blame you. But despite your intention to end it with Johnny, despite knowing exactly the kind of man he is, you still sacrificed yourself to save his life. Because he is still human—or so you thought.”
“I don’t understand. If not human, is he…” Callie looked around the limitless void. “There’s more to this, isn’t there.”
Brighid nodded, turning the sword in her hands so she grasped it by the pommel, point downward. “The man you know as Johnny Sinclair is actually Mestopheles, demon of the Crossroads. And he conspired with one of the greatest betrayers of our family to make a Keeper—my Keeper—an agent of Hell. Had it succeeded, it would have meant a terrible blow for humanity come the End of Days. There must be nineteen of you to lead our armies in the fight against evil and for the humans stuck in the middle. There can never be any more than nineteen Keepers at a time—had you joined Lilith, it would have been a disaster for us.”
Callie swallowed. “How long? Until this End of Days?”
“It’s impossible to know for certain, but I would guess a century or so. Perhaps a little longer, but I doubt by much.” Brighid stepped forward in her urgency. “You will be ready, I swear it. And you will have all the might of our family—the Tuatha Du Dannan—behind you.”
“I need to take out the bastard who got me shot,” Callie said grimly”
“And we will help you accomplish it,” Brighid assured her. “But it will take time. Time I will do my best to give you.”
“Are you giving me a choice?” Callie asked.
“You always have a choice.”
“Good.” She held out her hand. “Give me the sword.”
And so Callie had followed her love of jazz and her research on Crossroads and paranormal hotbeds to New Orleans. It was as different as a city could be from Chicago, but Callie fell in love with the Big Easy the moment she set foot in the French Quarter and found herself surrounded by raw music blasting through every other door, interspersed with laughter and an almost carnal delight in life itself. She felt herself come alive in the thick humidity, in the rhythms of the city around her. She rented a small room in the heart of it, and felt, for the first time in five years, at home.
She had cut short her wild hair, partially out of practicality, but also out of defiance, since Johnny had reveled what he called the untamed magnificence of her locks. She had done her research on demons, too, soaking up every word she could find on Mestopheles, Master of Crossroads and a coterie of Hell hounds who collected souls when their bargains expired. She scoured the newspapers for several days, searching for anything out the ordinary that screamed “demon activity”.
On the third day, having reveled in both jazz and cuisine in their most startling, unexpected forms, she found what she was looking for in the Picayune. A woman had been found drained of blood. Half-joking rumors of vampires abounded. But everything Callie could find told her it was a loup-garou, a demon hound than tended to run in packs and stake out hunting territory. In other words, is seemed one of Johnny’s Hell hounds had gotten loose.
Ever since she’d taken to hunting as soon as the sun went down, the city beating around her like a drum, pulsing like blood in veins sauced liberally with rum--no city could make a daiquiri quite like New Orleans. She walked the streets where the wood of some of the buildings still bore scars and scorch marks from fires decades old, and stalked the moldy, mossy cities of the dead. Tonight she rolled her shoulder against the stiff fabric of her shirt, a man’s dress shirt tailored for her generous curves.
The tattoo Brighid had branded her with seemed to twinge and burn whenever she found herself on the right track. The Tree of Life now ingrained in her skin forever served as a reminder of what she was, and what she had to become if she were going to beat her former lover at his own game.
Then she found it, in the dim, narrow space between an all night diner and a ramshackle honky tonk that rocked and vibrated with the enthusiasm of its dancing crowd. A pool of neon light from the bar’s flashing, sizzling sign illuminated the little nook just enough that she could make out an out-flung arm.
Another woman’s corpse, drained of blood. One of her shoes had been knocked lose, and her soulless, staring eyes gave her twisted neck and splayed positioning a particularly gruesome cant. There was blood and fur beneath her broken nails.
And of course there was the smell, quite beyond that of cooling corpse slowly rotting in the heat mixing with the pressing stink of the Quarter, driven by the soupy canal. It was the unmistakable miasma of burning fur, and smoking flesh. Loup-garou. In myth, they were werewolves of Haitian descent. In reality, they were Hell hounds answerable to Mestopheles.
She knew she was taking a great risk, that the whole situation could be one of Johnny’s infamous traps. But she refused to turn her back on people in danger. She may be new to her job, but she took it very seriously. She had to be ready—to take on Johnny once and for all, and then for the apocalypse. Hunting Johnny’s hounds was a risk she had to take.
Callie called for an ambulance and waited for it to arrive from a nearby doorway, watched it haul away the poor woman whose Crossroads bargain had ended so bloody. She wondered what the woman had gotten out of it—if it had been worth it.
Then she shouldered her sword, now a comfortable staple in her new life, and began the hunt in earnest.
FIVE