Page 2

DOLION

Screeches and scrapes, not sobs, broke through my slumber.

Even eternal heartbreak cannot keep me from the incessant chatter of this hellish place.

Grit crumbled into my vision as I stared down at the dark head that resembled neither Gisella, nor her daughter nor the French woman my heart desired even after my decades of dreamless sleep.

“Sebastian.” My world tilted on its axis as I struggled to find my flesh and failed. “Where— how long?” I strove for the right question and changed my mind halfway through a stunted thought.

“You’re awake, mon ami .” Sebastian stopped, his black hair melding with the midnight sky behind him.

No matter how long I had retreated from his world, for it was no longer mine, at least that much had not changed about the ancient vampire. A myriad of questions swam across my mind, but still the vision of the pretty French maid who used to visit my gardens obscured everything.

“How long?” I croaked, choking on the dust that trickled down my semi-stone throat, as though my body rejected the change to my human form.

Or perhaps my more human form, for I feared my monstrous side was a permanent fixture in this hellish life.

And like his child decades ago, Sebastian ignored my plea.

“ Merde, merde . Put him down,” the vampire admonished, as though he wasn’t the one who lifted me in the first place.

“And the right way up. No— Yes. Like that. Don’t be frightened.

It’s not like he’s going anywhere. His legs are stone.

You see? Yes. Much better.” Sebastian swept longish hair from his face and beamed at me.

Like a costumed party goer at Mardi Gras.

“Aren’t you jovial? How. Long?” I ground stone teeth together.

The sound would have rattled my bones to my soul, had I not been in my true form, and it certainly did for the men muttering around me who fortunately stayed outside of my visual range. “Answer me, you?—”

Sebastian raised an eyebrow. “Look who got up on the wrong side of the fountain today.”

I blinked at him. “Would your dead wife approve of that tone, or have sufficient decades passed since you buried her mortal bones beneath this garden?”

Sebastian’s eyes fixed on me, cold and hard. The monster inside him flickered, and I knew that without Gisella present, my stone eternity had reduced to a mere handful of seconds.

I smiled, heartless myself and waited for the head separating blow that would end my wretched existence.

Fucking finally.

A dead hand on my shoulder settled and squeezed. A coolness seeped deep into bones that, horrifically, remembered to feel .

“My friend,” Sebastian murmured in English. “You have suffered.”

“As you haven’t,” I snarled. “Why are we still here?” My body shuddered as circulation resumed into tired limbs, trembling after too long in their fixed position. A ragged breath exited my lungs as I exhaled in full for the first time in, what? Years, decades?

Sebastian smiled sadly. “Centuries, my friend. Welcome to the new world. It is…not what she would have liked. I think.” He shrugged and caught my weak body that was unable to stand alone. “Come to the car. I think you’ll enjoy this next part.”

I stared about, taking in the closely manicured lawns, the brightly clothed servants who wore their hair in short cuts, their little legs sticking out from half sized clothing.

“Do you not pay the townsfolk enough to afford proper clothing?” I muttered, coughing a small shower of grit into his neck.

Sebastian laughed. “Ah, the things I can show you. Perhaps there is joy yet to be found in this world.” He led me across from the fountain, away from the labyrinth that had been my home for—fuck it, I didn’t care how long any more.

Wait, I did. “The year. What year is it? Eighteen hundred? Nineteen?” My brow furrowed when he stopped and stared straight ahead.

I matched the direction of his gaze and my mouth fell open. “Now that is a carriage, Sebastian.”

He laughed, long and loud. “That is a limousine, Dolion, and you have slept for nigh on three hundred years.”

“Did I really?” I let him slide me into the comfortable leather interior of the sleek black carriage with its gloss metal skin. “And you disturbed me after all this time? That is undignified, my friend.”

Sebastian slid in beside me and called out to the man I assumed was our driver. “Indeed but today is special, stone man. Today is moving day.”

“Moving to where?” I tipped my head back to stare at the house he’d rebuilt I last recalled in ashes, searching for any sign of Minette’s grave.

Damnit. I should have asked.

Sebastian’s peculiar coldness wrapped around my hand. “She is with you.” He tapped the back of my knuckles, and released me.

I flexed stiff fingers that still held a touch of my yellowish stone color, though that faded as though his touch had called my true nature back inside myself.

“More of your swamp witch magic?” I frowned. I had few recollections of that final night apart from fire and evil, though I recalled losing many—including the bayou wolves and the witch who helped us, if help was the right word.

Sebastian huffed a laugh as the carriage—limousine—rolled forward, humming beneath us. “Science. Time is a wondrous thing, my friend. You will come to see its boons, I am sure. It’s good to have you with me once again. I have missed talking to you.”

“You’re welcome.” A fanatical gleam I recognized entered Sebastian’s eye. “I’m glad you’re with me for this trip.”

I wondered how many I had missed in the last years, how long he had been alone. How he had changed in that time. Myself, also.

“You said it was moving day?” I leaned back and stretched my legs, wiggling my bare toes.

Sebastian smirked. “We need to clothe you with something more appropriate than that, my friend. You stink of…”

That night.

“...smoke,” he finished.

Not that I cared to cast my mind back, only forward for this moment. Reflection could come later. “Where are we headed?”

“New Orleans. There has been a spate of fires I want to investigate. Fires that keep happening.”

A laugh that I transformed into a snort left me. “What’s so special about that?” Perhaps my friend had gone mad in his dotage. Hell, I could even join him.

“The fires won’t go out, and they burn hotter than all the circles of hell. Maybe a man with your talents could help,” he mused.

I tipped my head to one side. “That is a fascination," I acknowledged. “But I have no interest in fighting monster kind with you, vampire.”

“Perhaps.” Sebastian turned away from me, staring out the darkened window, but not before the flicker of a faint smile curled his aristocratic lips. “We shall see.”

“Or I can walk home,” I snarked, beyond frustrated at being woken only to find my best friend recovered and playing policeman while I still ached inside, and worse, that he had expected my heartbreak.

“And scare the locals? The house is sold, Dolion. We live in the French Quarter now. Come with me, Dolion. Something impossible is hiding in the crypts. Something hurting.” He leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees.

“Something like you and me.”