Page 18 of Girl Between (Dana Gray FBI Mystery Thriller #5)
Dana mentally scolded herself as she quickly showered.
She cranked the hot water near scalding, as though there was a chance she could burn off her self-loathing.
But she knew no amount of lather, rinse, repeat would wash away her embarrassment.
Though Hotel Monteleone’s luxurious bath products were at least soothing the ache of her muscles.
A moment more of enjoyment and Dana turned the faucet to the right, assaulting herself with brutally cold water. She forced herself to endure the torture a bit longer, hoping to shock herself back to reality. Because what she’d done last night … that wasn’t her.
She didn’t want to be someone who woke up with a different stranger each morning, having to retrace the foggy recesses of her memory to figure out where and with whom she’d been. Not to mention how reckless such behavior was.
Stepping out of the shower, she toweled off and rushed to get ready for work. Downing the café au lait and beignets room service had delivered, she promised herself she’d do better, starting now.
Dana had come to New Orleans to escape, but all the alcohol and avoiding had only prolonged the truth that she still wasn’t ready to face. But it’d been long enough. It was time to put her life back together. No more running. No more hiding between then and now. She needed to make a decision.
As always, she turned toward research. Her work kept her focused on what was truly important—bringing light to the darkness.
She wasn’t sure she still could. She’d certainly been tested and lost a bit of her faith in herself and the beliefs that drove her.
But Dana still had to try. She believed she’d been put in this world to devote her life to death.
If she couldn’t do that, she wasn’t sure what she had left.
And that terrifying thought made her willing to keep trying.
Rushing through the ornate lobby filled with cascading flower arrangements and dazzling chandeliers, Dana stepped out onto Royal Street, the pavement already warm beneath the thin soles of her sandals.
Truthfully, she loved spring in New Orleans.
It was warm, and the sun was ever present, ready to kiss her normally pale skin, making her scars less visible.
If only my internal wounds were as easily erased.
Dana turned right, heading toward Canal and away from the bustle of buzzing tourists already flooding the Quarter. She had many courses to correct, but with each footstep, she couldn’t help feeling that finally, she was back to walking the right path.
Dropping her change into the toll collector, Dana took her seat on her usual streetcar.
It rumbled merrily along, the humid Louisiana air kissing her cheeks and drying her hair as she gazed out the open windows at the beautiful historic homes in the city’s Garden District.
A short jostling ride down St. Charles and she was at 1122 Jackson Avenue, entering her own stunning Double Gallery home.
The New Orleans Arts tracing the bloodlines of the original settlers of La Nouvelle-Orléans.
Dana donned her white gloves, slipped the magnifying panel in place, and unlocked the climate-controlled case that protected the manifest logs she was currently working on.
She’d been through sixteen already. Today she opened number seventeen, hoping to see a familiar family name among the passengers who’d come here by choice or force. Logging each name, Dana found herself wondering what stories each would tell if they had the chance.
The 1700s were a tumultuous time for the fledgling city of New Orleans. Disease, crime, fire, and famine ran rampant, slowing progress and claiming lives for much of the early years. And that was before the stories of the occult began to surface.
Vampires, werewolves, witches, and Voodoo queens all lay claim to the city. Planting seeds of folklore that grew into a veritable gumbo of tall tales that New Orleans was known for. It was Dana’s job to suss out the truth.
From Bram Stoker to Anne Rice, vampirism had always been culturally iconic, but a renewed interest was recently born in New Orleans when a 16th century mask was found during a renovation of the old French Market Inn, a hotel in the French Quarter.
The Decatur Street staple had been everything from a bakery, emporium, and postal center of sorts, housing and supplying colonial soldiers and aristocrats alike before it was converted into the modern-day hotel enjoyed by flocks of French Quarter tourists.
Hauntings there were widely reported by guests but weren’t surprising given the city’s history.
In true New Orleans fashion, For Sale signs boasted “Haunted Property” on one side, while the other advertised “Not Haunted.” It was a running joke among locals that New Orleans was a place to find and lose yourself. A place where one could exist between worlds.
Having been here this long, Dana tended to agree with the sentiment. Which only made her lean further into her research.
For years she’d been studying the origins of vampirism, fascinated by the Venetians who both celebrated and persecuted modern vampirism.
Believing vampires were responsible for the spread of plagues like the black death, early Italian corpses were often buried with bricks in their mouths to prevent the “shroud-eaters” from feeding on the dead.
When Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, uncovered a mass grave of such burials on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in a Venice lagoon, it vaulted Italian vampires to stardom.
The discovery and recognition of this ritual sparked international debate about the truth behind the legend of vampires.
And when the remains of a corpse wearing the Venetian death mask was uncovered in New Orleans beneath the French Market Inn, the two worlds were forever connected.
What made the mask special was that it would be the earliest evidence that Italians, by way of Venice, had secretly arrived in the French colony years before history previously believed. It might not seem overly exciting to most, but to Dana, this discovery completely rewrote history.
From the Muffuletta to Hotel Monteleone, Italians had always been part of the early history of New Orleans, but it was believed they immigrated from Sicily in the 1800s to escape a corrupt and lawless existence.
The mask now proved the Venetians may have arrived centuries earlier, possibly seeking refuge from the plague and bringing their blood-sucking legends with them, making them the source of all vampiric folklore in the Americas.
Something the French had laid claim to, until now .
Bleary-eyed, Dana continued to translate the manuscript in front of her, searching for names of Italian origin.
She glanced up from her manifest to gaze at the death mask in the glass display case on the desk where she worked.
She knew it was just her imagination, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that death itself was staring back at her.