The Psychic Detectives: The Vampires Of DeRidder Book 2

The spring of 1933 had arrived in New Orleans the way a guest arrives who knows they are not entirely welcome — tentatively, with a kind of apologetic warmth that never quite settled into comfort. The azaleas along the fence of the Greenwood residence had bloomed a week late, their petals a shade too pale, and the magnolia in the side yard had dropped its flowers before they fully opened. George had noticed it, as he noticed most things, with a detached and clinical curiosity. He had recorded the dates in the small, leather-bound ledger he kept in his breast pocket, placing the entry beneath a header titled Meteorological and Botanical Deviations and filed the whole business away under a category he privately labeled as probably nothing. The Delacroix case had concluded three months prior, and three months of relative quiet had a way of making a man generous with his optimism.

He sat at the writing desk in his study, the silver-topped cane disassembled before him on a square of chamois leather. The concealed blade had accumulated a faint, milky residue along the fuller — a remnant of the last evening in the bayou that no amount of ordinary cleaning would shift. He worked a small cloth along the steel, the motion methodical and unhurried, the kind of repetitive task that allowed the analytical portion of his mind to idle without fully disengaging. The morning light came through the tall windows at a low, honey-colored angle, and the study smelled of pipe tobacco and the cedar oil he used to condition the leather grip. It was, by any reasonable measure, a peaceful morning. George was not entirely sure he trusted it.

Through the open window that faced the garden, he could hear Heather. She was not speaking, but she had a habit of making small, soft sounds when she worked outdoors — a murmur of concentration, an occasional quiet exhale. He had learned to read those sounds the way a navigator reads weather. This morning, the sounds had changed. There was a hesitation in them, a particular quality of stillness that preceded her more troubling episodes.

He set down the cloth and looked through the window.

Heather was crouched at the edge of the garden bed where she had been working to establish a row of lavender, her copper combs glinting in the thin morning light. Her hands were flat against the soil, and she had gone very still. Her silver cross pendant hung forward from her neck, swaying slightly in a breeze that did not appear to be touching anything else in the garden. George was on his feet before he had consciously decided to move.

He stepped through the back door and crossed the flagstones toward her. She heard him coming but did not look up. Her fingers pressed deeper into the dark earth, and when he crouched beside her, he could see that her face had gone the color of old bone.

"Heather." He kept his voice level, close to her ear. "What are you feeling?"

"The soil." She lifted one hand and looked at her palm. The dirt clinging to her fingers had a reddish, oxidized cast to it that was entirely wrong for their garden bed. "It smells of copper. And something underneath the copper — something older. Like wet stones in a place that hasn't seen daylight." She turned to look at him then, and her violet eyes were carrying something she had not gone outside with. "George, nothing will grow here. I can feel it. The ground is refusing."

He pressed two fingers into the soil where she had been working. The earth was oddly cold for a spring morning, with a density that felt less like healthy loam and more like something compacted by long pressure. He brought his fingers to his nose and smelled the faint, metallic bitterness she had described. It was not the smell of a garden preparing to receive seeds. It was the smell of old violence, of iron left in the rain.

"Come inside," he said quietly, and helped her to her feet.

They were still at the kitchen sink, Heather washing the reddish soil from her hands and George standing behind her with a towel, when the knock came at the front door. It was a sharp, urgent knock, the kind that had no patience for the ordinary rituals of arrival. George moved through the hallway and opened the door to find a young courier on the front step, his hat crushed in both hands, his face carrying the wide, unsettled look of someone who had handled something he would rather not have touched.

"Dispatch for Mr. Greenwood, sir," the boy said, and held out a letter as though relieved to be rid of it.

George took it. The envelope was made of heavy, cream-colored stock, the kind favored by civic offices, and it was addressed in a hand so pressured that the pen had nearly broken through the paper in several places. The return address read: Office of Mayor Quin Roberts, DeRidder, Louisiana. George tipped the boy a coin and closed the door.

He was still reading when Heather appeared in the hallway, drying her hands on a kitchen cloth. She looked at the letter, then at his face, and the expression she wore shifted into something careful and watchful.

"Who is it from?"

"The Mayor of DeRidder." George moved to the sitting room and held the letter toward the window light. The handwriting was frantic to the point of illegibility in places, the letters crowding each other as if the writer's hand could not keep pace with his fear. He read aloud: "I write to you in a condition of the most desperate urgency. Our town has been afflicted by what the local physician calls a wasting sickness, though the description is inadequate to the reality. People are found in their homes, drained of all vitality, cold as river stone, and the nights have become entirely without safety. I have maintained a curfew these past six weeks, but it is not sufficient. Three more families lost this past fortnight. I have heard of your work. I beg you to come."

The silence after his voice stopped was the particular kind that gathers weight.

"He's terrified," Heather said. She had not moved from the doorway. "Even from here, I can feel the terror in those words. It isn't the ordinary fear of a civic official facing a public health problem." She paused. "May I hold it?"

George handed her the letter. She took it with both hands, the way she always handled objects that carried residual impressions, and she closed her eyes. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then her breath changed — a sharp, involuntary catch, like a woman stepping into ice water — and George crossed the room in three strides and put both hands on her shoulders.

The vision, when it came, did not announce itself with any ceremony. It simply arrived, flooding through the paper and her fingertips and into the seat of her perception with the force of a door blown open by a gale. She saw a mine shaft, its timbered walls glistening with moisture, and from the walls seeped something that was not water. It was thick and black and moved with a sluggish, purposeful quality, as though it were looking for somewhere to go. The walls of the shaft wept with it. The air inside the vision smelled of sulfur and something older, something that had no name in any language she had ever studied. And then a face — not a face exactly, but the suggestion of one, assembled from shadows the way a cloud assembles a shape. It had no fixed features, but it had intent. It turned toward her with the patience of something that had been waiting for centuries and did not mind waiting a little longer.

Heather's knees buckled. George caught her before she went down, pulling her back against him and taking the letter from her hands with his free arm. He lowered her into the armchair by the cold fireplace and crouched in front of her, his hands bracketing her face, watching her eyes until the glaze behind them cleared and she came back to herself with a long, shaking exhale.

"A mine," she said, before he could speak. "A silver mine. And something inside it that is not silver. Something old, George. Something that was put there deliberately and is now being disturbed." She pressed her fingers against her sternum, where the silver cross rested. "There was a woman's face in the dark. Not a living face."

George sat back on his heels and looked at the letter in his hand. He turned it over, examining the back of the envelope with the focused attention he brought to physical evidence. The cream-colored stock had a faint watermark, but beneath the watermark, pressed into the paper with such lightness that it was nearly invisible at a casual angle, were characters that did not belong to any modern alphabet. He angled the paper toward the window light and studied them for a long moment, his jaw tightening incrementally as his recognition assembled itself.

"The Mayor didn't write this letter alone," he said.

Heather looked at him. "What do you mean?"

"The text we can read is his — the panic is genuine enough, the handwriting is consistent with a man in acute distress. But underneath the signature, pressed into the stock rather than written on it, there are characters." He handed her the envelope, positioned so she could see them without touching the paper directly. "Old Latin. Church Latin, specifically, but corrupted. It's a form of blood-pact inscription — the kind used in binding rituals to ensure the signatory cannot retract what they've agreed to." He stood up. "Someone made the Mayor write this letter. And they wanted whoever received it to know, in some subliminal way, that the man who sent it is already committed. Already bound."

The word bound sat in the room between them with an unpleasant weight.

"He's not asking for help," Heather said slowly. "He's delivering a summons."

"The question," George said, setting the envelope on the mantelpiece and retrieving his cane from the study, "is whether we go anyway."

Heather stood up from the armchair, and the steadiness that returned to her posture was not the steadiness of someone who had recovered from a fright. It was the steadiness of someone who had made a decision. "Of course we go. Those people in DeRidder did not choose to become a feeding ground. Whatever has control of that Mayor, whatever is in that mine, it was operating before we ever received this letter. The difference now is that we know." She crossed to the hallway closet where they kept their travel cases. "I'll start packing."

George watched her go, then turned back to the window and looked out at the garden. The lavender that Heather had been trying to plant lay flat against the copper-smelling soil, already wilting. The peace they had returned from the bayou to find had not been peace at all. It had been the quiet of an intake of breath.

They packed with the systematic efficiency of long practice. George retrieved the reinforced travel case from beneath the bed and laid out its contents on the coverlet: iron spikes wrapped in oil cloth, three paper envelopes of kosher salt, a bundle of dried rue and wormwood tied with red thread, the crossbow broken down into its components, and a separate, locked box of silver-tipped bolts. He repacked them in a specific order, weight distribution balanced for a long journey, and then cleaned and reassembled the concealed blade in the cane with a precision that bordered on ritual. Heather moved through the bedroom with quiet efficiency, packing her own case, laying out her braided leather bracelet with its iron and silver beads, checking the clasp on her silver cross. They had done this before. The choreography of it was almost domestic.

The train departed from the New Orleans depot at half past two in the afternoon, and they arrived at the station with forty minutes to spare. George had expected the depot to carry its usual character — the cheerful, chaotic energy of a busy rail hub, the smell of coal smoke and vendor carts, the overlapping noise of a hundred separate journeys. What he found instead was an atmosphere that had been subtly but definitively altered, as though someone had replaced the original painting with a near-perfect copy that was wrong in ways difficult to immediately articulate.

The mist was the first thing. It lay along the platform in low, thick bands, unusual for the time of day and the temperature. It was not the river mist that George was familiar with, which carried the organic smell of the delta and dispersed in direct sunlight. This mist was denser and colder, and it tasted, when he breathed it in, of ozone, the way the air tastes immediately before a lightning strike. It did not disperse. It moved, slowly, along the platform edge as though tracking something.

The ticket agent's window was a narrow rectangle of yellow light in the gray afternoon, and the man behind it was unremarkable in every physical particular — middle-aged, thinning hair, the green eyeshade of his profession pulled low. He processed their tickets with practiced speed, sliding the folded stubs across the counter without looking up. George reached for his, and in the moment his hand came level with the window, the agent did look up.

The eyes that met his were dark and entirely without reflection. Not dark in the sense of brown or black irises — dark in the sense of an absence. Light entered those eyes and did not return from them. They registered George's face with the flat, evaluating the quality of something, assessing the weight and condition of livestock, and then the agent looked back down at his ledger as though the exchange had never happened.

George pocketed the tickets and moved away from the window at a measured pace, keeping his expression neutral. Heather fell into step beside him, her locket in her hand and her grip on it tight enough that the knuckles had gone white.

"He knew who we were," she said, low enough for only George to hear.

"Yes," George agreed.

"And he wasn't frightened of us."

"No," George said. "He wasn't."

They found their carriage and settled into their compartment, George taking the seat that faced forward and gave him a clear sight line to the corridor. He set the travel case on the overhead rack with the handle facing out, accessible in under two seconds. These were habits so ingrained they required no conscious thought. Heather sat across from him and looked out the window at the platform, where the ozone mist had continued to thicken against the afternoon light.

"The garden this morning," she said quietly, not as a question.

"Yes." George had been thinking about it since they left the house. The copper smell of the soil, the way the lavender had collapsed against the ground before it had any reason to. The land around their own home, reflecting the sickness of a place they had not yet visited. "It suggests the range of influence is already considerable."

"Or it suggests that whatever is in DeRidder is aware of us specifically," Heather said. "That it's been reaching toward us." She turned from the window. "The vision I had from the letter — the face in the mine — it wasn't searching blindly, George. It had direction. It was looking at me."

George looked at her steadily. This was the part of his work that his analytical framework handled least gracefully — the moments when the evidence pointed not to a thing that had been found, but to a thing that had been waiting to be found. He adjusted his spectacles and chose his words carefully.

"Then we ensure that whatever advantage it believes it has in knowing us is negated by what we know about it," he said. "It's operating a mine. It has compromised a civic official. It's enforcing a curfew. These are the actions of something organized and deliberate, but they are also physical actions, which means they have physical vulnerabilities."

Heather looked at him with the expression she reserved for when she found his clinical framing both admirable and gently insufficient. She did not argue with it. She simply held her locket and looked back out the window.

The train began to move at precisely two-thirty, the platform sliding past the windows in a slow withdrawal of familiar geography. The steam from the engine rose in great white billows that merged with the ozone mist on the platform, and for a moment, as the depot disappeared behind them, the two could not be told apart. George watched the city give way to the outskirts, then to the low, flat country that spread southward and westward from New Orleans in wide, wet expanses of cordgrass and shallow water. The sky above it was the pale, washed-out blue of a Louisiana afternoon, but along the horizon to the northwest, toward DeRidder, the color was different. There was a quality to it that George observed with the same careful neutrality he brought to all evidence, though what he observed required a certain effort to categorize as coincidence.

The horizon to the northwest was the color of an old bruise.

He turned from the window and allowed his eyes to travel the length of the corridor beyond their compartment's glass door. The carriage was not full. Three other compartments were occupied. In the first, a woman with a child, the child sleeping against her arm. In the second, a traveling salesman type, his sample case on the seat beside him, a newspaper folded on his lap. In the third compartment, nearest the far end of the carriage, there were four passengers seated in a configuration that should have suggested the ordinary randomness of strangers sharing a space. It did not. They were distributed with a geometric evenness around the compartment, two facing two, and not one of them had moved since the train left the station. They were not reading. They were not speaking. They were not looking at one another, or out the window, or at anything that George could identify as a point of focus. They simply sat, with the total, unblinking stillness of things that did not need to blink.

As the train rounded a long, gentle curve in the track, the angle of the light through the carriage windows shifted, and for a moment it fell directly across the far compartment. The four passengers did not react to it at all. No squinting, no adjustment, no instinctive turning of a face toward warmth. The light moved across them and left them exactly as it had found them.

George looked at Heather. She had already seen it. Her face was composed, but her hand had moved to the braided bracelet at her wrist, her fingers finding the iron beads with the unconscious precision of long habit.

"Four of them," she said, barely above a breath.

"Possibly more in other carriages," George said. He did not move from his seat, keeping his posture easy and unremarkable. "They're not here to interfere. Not yet. We're being observed." He reached into his jacket pocket and confirmed by touch the weight of the silver dagger there. "They want to know what we know before we arrive. They want to know whether we understand what we're walking into."

"And do we?" Heather asked.

George considered the question with the gravity it deserved. A silver mine in western Louisiana, weeping black ichor in a psychic's vision. A mayor writing in a dead language he almost certainly did not know he was writing. A ticket agent with eyes like the bottom of a well. Four passengers on a train who breathed without any apparent necessity. The copper smell of a garden that had never been near DeRidder.

"We know enough," he said, "to know that what is in DeRidder is old. Older than the coven in the bayou. Older than most things we've dealt with. And we know it's organized in a way that suggests long preparation." He paused, and the train swayed through another curve, the Louisiana flatlands stretching away on either side in their vast, indifferent green. "We know that Heather is the reason we received that letter specifically. And we know that whatever is in that mine wants her there." He met her eyes. "Which means our first priority, before anything else, is ensuring that what it wants from her and what it gets are two entirely different things."

Heather held his gaze for a moment. Then she straightened in her seat, the same quiet resolve settling into her posture that had been there when she'd crossed to the closet to start packing. It was the look of a woman who had made her reckoning and intended to stand in it.

"Then we go prepared," she said. "And we go clear-eyed."

"We go clear-eyed," George agreed.

The train ran on through the long Louisiana afternoon, the landscape outside the windows gradually softening from the managed edges of the city's outskirts into the older, stranger country of the interior. The cordgrass gave way to pine, the pine to stretches of water-logged cypress and the dark, glinting surface of standing pools. The sky deepened by degrees, the bruise-colored horizon drawing closer as the miles accumulated. In the far compartment, the four passengers did not move and did not speak. The ozone mist that had gathered on the platform at New Orleans had not dispersed, as mist ordinarily disperses when a train moves at speed. George watched it through the window, a thin, persistent veil clinging to the sides of the carriage, moving with them the way a shadow moves — not following exactly, but never falling behind.

He cleaned the chamois cloth he had used on the blade earlier and folded it into a precise square, and placed it back in the interior pocket of his jacket. He checked the salt envelopes in the travel case overhead without appearing to do so. He catalogued the layout of the carriage, the distance to the exits, and the probable weight of the compartment doors. These were the habits of a man who had learned, at considerable personal cost, that the time to prepare was always before you needed to.

Heather had closed her eyes, not in sleep but in the careful, deliberate stillness she used to manage the impressions that arrived without invitation. Her lips moved once, briefly, in something that might have been a prayer or might have been a piece of the old protective verse she had memorized years ago. The iron beads on her bracelet caught the failing afternoon light and held it.

Outside, the country that unrolled past the windows was beautiful in the particular way of things that do not care whether they are observed. The cypress trees stood in their black water with a vast, indifferent patience. The evening herons moved across the sky in slow, separate arcs. And beneath all of it, beneath the ordinary sounds of the train and the ordinary sights of the Louisiana interior, George felt the presence of something that the physical world was only imperfectly concealing — a pressure, a depth, a weight that the landscape was carrying without acknowledgment. The Delacroix case had introduced him to the idea that certain places could be spiritually ill. This felt different. This felt like moving toward the source of the illness rather than one of its symptoms.

The train whistle sounded once, long and low, as they crossed a trestle bridge above a stretch of black water. Below the bridge, the water reflected the bruised sky without distortion, a perfect mirror of something that should not have been so perfectly mirrored. George did not look away from it until the bridge was behind them.

DeRidder was four hours from New Orleans by rail, and the light would be nearly gone by the time they arrived. He had planned for this. He had planned for most things he could identify in advance. It was the things that could not be identified in advance that required the other kind of preparation — the kind that Heather carried in her steady hands and her violet eyes and the quiet, unflinching courage she brought to looking directly at things that most people organized their entire lives to avoid seeing.

He looked at her across the compartment, at the silver cross against her collarbone and the composed line of her jaw, and felt the familiar, complicated mix of admiration and protectiveness that never fully resolved itself into either one alone. She was the reason they were effective at this work. She was also, now, the reason they were being watched on a train moving through the gathering dark. He would not apologize for wanting to keep her safe. He would also not pretend that keeping her safe and using her gifts were compatible without cost.

The train swayed on through the deepening afternoon. The four passengers in the far compartment remained still as carved things. The ozone mist pressed its thin face against the windows of the carriage. And somewhere ahead, in the fog-shrouded western parishes of Louisiana, a town called DeRidder held its breath behind a mandatory curfew and waited, as the letter had suggested it had been waiting, for someone to arrive who might understand what it was waiting for.

George folded his hands in his lap and watched the dark water of the bayou country slide past the windows, and allowed himself exactly one moment of something that was not quite doubt and not quite fear, but occupied the cold territory between them. Then he set it aside, with the same deliberate motion he used to fold the chamois cloth, and turned his attention back to the work.

The steam from the engine rose into the evening air and spread behind the train in a long, white trail, and where it met the ozone mist that had followed them from New Orleans, the two merged into something that was neither one nor the other, a pale and purposeful haze that moved with the train like a drawn breath that had not yet been released.