 
Our Blissful Bayou Beginnings

Danielle Peterson

Copyright 2012 by Danielle Peterson

Smashwords Edition
Chapter One

Love eternal.

And not love in that generalized "love for your fellow man, love of knowledge, love of art, love of abstract beauty" arena, I mean the love between a man and a woman. And not just between any man or woman, but between myself and what I at the time of my error believed to be the most perfect woman who could ever grace this moribund planet.

How wrong I was. It is almost comical in retrospect. Almost.

She is still beautiful, make no mistake about that. Her long brown hair still cascades down like some sort of waterfall of personal mockery towards me. It shines with an unholy radiance in the glow of the sunset, even more visually pleasing than it was when I first met her. But the heavy whalebone enforced corsets have long been cast aside in favor of the liberating and promiscuous fashions of these modern times.

Sometimes I can almost forget that I am a cursed man. To have seen empires turn to dust and the dark reaches of the stars penetrated in pissing contests between ideologically radical governments is, admittedly, an interesting thing. When I made my mistake I wrote on imported paper with imported ink; such decadent scribbling were the dominion of the upper echelon. Nowadays any idiot can produce endless literary vomit and share it with the world. My fascination with the internet was very quickly quelled by a bottomless chasm of utterly pointless nonsense. But I use it still. It helps me keep tabs on her, and she on me. And I am a fan of the digital piracy. I am always looking for something interesting to watch. I have a lot of time to kill.

But I digress. Surely the introspective ramblings of two hundred and twenty six year old man will not find warm welcome on this internet. Perhaps I should encourage you to get off my lawn. We could all have a laugh over it.

No, you've come here to read about my folly. I should say it began with my birth, but that was interesting only to myself. Please indulge me though, as I share it. I was born on February 16, 1785. My mother had been a French duchess, or something, I am not sure, she never really spoke of it to anyone and I had heard only second hand accounts from family members. I found that to be odd. After all, what was the point of being royalty if you did not tout it? I have long since deduced that she had been disgraced in some manner but years and years of research have produced nothing. She had a certain amount of class and sophistication that made the men of New Orleans easy pickings.

Mother was quite beautiful, or at least that's what Father told me. She died of malaria when I was but a baby. That was all Father spoke of her, not that she was kind or short tempered or well read or a deft hand at crafts. Mary, my sister, and I were raised by a succession of black nurses. Is it alright to say black? I have been chastened in the past for my usage of descriptive words for the people of African descent. I mean, of course, no disrespect. She, my 'eternal love' is of African descent. I just want to be clear. These were the times wherein my Father owned black slaves, I do not wish to whitewash history, nor do I wish to anger anyone. Regardless, Mary and I were attended to by a series of young to middle aged black ladies on our father's sugar plantation in what is now called the state of Louisiana.

When I came of age I was sent to study law at the College of William and Mary. I did not want to lead the plantation life as my father had. I found it terribly dull compared to life in the slowly growing city of New Orleans. I wanted a neat and tidy house in the Spanish style and a dutiful and beautiful wife. Of course, that all changed when I met her.

I came back from Virginia with my head swirling with Latin phrases and enough confidence to open my own law office. My name was painted on a door to the office and my many noble ideas of saving an innocent man from the hangman's rope or an help an indigent woman claim justice against her ravisher were soon mitigated into endless lawsuits over the most mundane things. It turned out that the market for criminal law was not as lucrative as I had hoped and I had to fall back on litigation. Still though, it paid well, and I was well on my way to becoming a very eligible bachelor.

You young men today, and by that I mean the past century or so, have it all too easy. To be handsome or charming or having some remarkable skill is enough to convince a woman to sleep with you. When I was in my early twenties dating wasn't so simple. My family name was a respectable one and as such there was an elaborate courting procedure to be followed. Once I had made enough money and successfully represented enough men about town I proposed marriage to a mousy young woman named Louisa Honore, the daughter of one of the most successful dry good merchants in the American South. My memories of her are not very clear. I recall that she was of a highly religious conviction, constantly attending masses and invoking saint this or that. She was pleasant enough though, and I suppose I must have found her attractive in some way because I agreed to marry her and I had my pick of many young ladies.

Now, I would not be marrying until I was almost twenty-seven years old, which meant that I had been a sexually mature male for some fifteen years or so. In my day women just didn't have a roll in the hay with you because they wanted to themselves, at least not the sort of women a prosperous young plantation raised lawyer came in contact with. Nor was there unlimited free streaming pornography in the comfort of your own home. In 2012, of course, only the saddest and least attractive of men have need of prostitutes. But when I was a young man it was a necessity. Either you were celibate until you wed relatively late in life or you paid a woman to pretend to enjoy copulation with you. As my male readers will understand, most men ended up paying for sexual services before their wedding, and after it as well.

Which is where I met her. She actually came highly recommended to me by a client. In those days brothels were not what they are today-sad places with blacked out windows, masquerading under euphemism of Massage Parlor. Of course there was the lower class whorehouses with bare planks and homely women, but the ones that I and my peers patronized were well maintained and appointed with the latest fashions and the most attractive and well mannered women. The ladies were charming and well spoken and one could even imagine that one was not in the company of whores.

But that illusion did not last long, of course. I'd rut my whore and leave, go home to my stately Spanish home and review my briefs or pen a letter to my sister Mary, who had long since been wed herself and was now living in Georgia. But not with her, not with my beloved. The illusion never wilted. It was as if all the ridiculous romantic poetry I had read in college (times were different then, and the artistic movement of Romanticism was all the rage, just as videos of friends farting in each others sleeping faces is the fun thing now) had been distilled down into a single point of heart rendering sentiment. I am embarrassed as to what a fool it made me.

A short note-all quotations are paraphrased from my memory, which has been stuffed over the past two centuries. Sometimes I think I will have written something that is one hundred percent accurate, and then she would remind me that it didn't happen that way, or that she wasn't even there when I am convinced that she was. I am still in contact with her, of course, because the ranks of us, the longliving, are not great and we just seem to keep running into each other. And also because I am still a sentimental fool I still love her, despite all of the seemingly endless decades of painful intimacy we have shared.

So, back on track here. One day in early spring of 1810, I am fairly sure it was early spring because my fiancé was having some sort of religious conniption over Lent, I was just finishing up with a client, Mr Blackwell, who was in the middle of suing his half brother over a contested will. He was a notorious patron of Madame Layfette's, a brothel that catered to a white man's taste in women of color. Again, that's one of those things I am not sure I can talk about. But it was common when I was young. Well, I still am "young" but I will address that later.

"You must ask for Mademoiselle Violet," Blackwell suggested as the topic turned to the women we paid to satisfy our animal urges. "She is clever, too clever for such a position. A shame she wasn't born a white man, then she could really do something with her life."

"What do you care if she's clever?" I said.

"Don't you like to talk afterwards?" Blackwell was about ten years older than myself. He had a naturally gregarious nature and I imagine that yes, he did like to talk afterwards.

"No. I like to go home and sleep." I think I probably said more, in fact I am fairly sure I did. Somehow the conversation turned to the merits of sparkling conversation after a good copulation, something Blackwell swore by. So I agreed that yes, next time I was at Madame Layfette's, I would ask for Mademoiselle Violet.

Next time turned out to be the following evening. Or maybe a few days later. Also, I would like to point out this was all happening in French. I grew up speaking it and it was only later in my education that I learned English. But I have had enough time to become comfortable in English. I suppose I should be a proud Francophile, but I honestly prefer English, probably because that was the language of my sentimental British poetry. Mostly I speak to her (clearly Mademoiselle Violet was not her real name. There was a trend at the time to use flowers as 'professional' names. I romped my way through many a garden.) in French, it was only later that she learned English, along with the many other languages we encountered on our travels. Still though, she comments on my Facebook in her misspelled French (she never could spell, I blame it on a lack of formal education) to this day.

I had been to Madame Layfette's several times before. I did not have an exclusivity to any particular race or combination thereof- a beautiful woman is beautiful in any color. Goodness, I cannot stress how easy the men of today have it. I had read travel accounts of the mysterious Orient and I would have given my left testicle to even see a beauty from those distant shores, much less have at her. Now you can summon up all manner of distressing Japanese pornography on a computer. On one hand, there is no more mystery, and in a way I suppose I feel bad for you.

I put in my request. I had gotten there early enough and she was available. Since I had already made a selection I didn't need to muck about in the salon, so I was shown upstairs by a servant and ushered into a lavishly appointed bed chamber. She was getting dressed, or undressed, or however you would like to phrase it, so I removed my hat and gazed at an framed etching, depicting a rather plump lady with her skirt up, getting prodded by a tonsured monk. I found it incredibly unerotic, probably because of the religious connotations. I thought that it was an ill omen and perhaps I wouldn't enjoy my time with Mademoiselle Violet after all.

How wrong I was. If I hadn't had enjoyed myself I would have long since been dead and happy. I've had a long time to think about it and still I find words lacking in describing my attraction to her. I don't mean she's sublime, or rather, she is, but sublime beauty is a concept that's understood. My fascination with her cannot be expressed. Either you have personally experienced such a flood of desire and of attraction, of earth shattering need, of all consuming lust, or you haven't. It is best if you haven't because it is likely to destroy you in some way.

Her mother had been a free mulatto prostitute and her father a white landowner of some fame, considering that to this day a small town is named after him. She grew up in the back rooms of whorehouses and had been selling herself for a premium since she was fifteen, parlaying her remarkable beauty, sharp intelligence, and bewildering charm into a modest fortune financed by a select group of clientele. When she was twenty-two she destroyed my ambitions for normalcy and transformed me into a cliché of tempted passion.

The fact of the matter was that to this day she still will not tell me how many clients she had before me. She tells me that it is not important and I am forced to conclude it was a great deal. For goodness sake, she'd been in the game for nearly seven years when I met her. Last time I asked her on MSN Messaging she claimed she did not remember. I know that she's lying, she's always had a great memory. She should be writing this, not me, but she has declined as she is too wrapped up in her latest endeavor. That's always been a major point of friction between us. She always had some sort of scheme brewing, be it actual brewing like she did during prohibition or opening a Betamax rental shop. I still rib her over that one. Right now she's selling gourmet cupcakes in Boston, I think it. She enjoys her eternity much more than mine. She calls me a sour puss and encourages me to engage in some sort of lunatic scheme. Says it's fulfilling.

As I previously mentioned, she didn't need my money. She moved in with me not because she needed to; in fact, she would be financially better off should she continue to work and earn capital in which to invest. Since she was born to a free woman, she herself was free, and was allowed to make her own investments since she had no husband to default to. Property rights for women at the time were not exactly fair, but she had enough admirers in the local government to overlook the more unfair parts of the law and ensure that when she retired she would be a woman of independent means, should she wish to be.

But, getting back to the story, (there will be lots of these little side ramblings, so get used to it or GTFO) she was a professional at feigning interest in men. I am not going to get into the details of our physical interactions, if you want such sordid details I am sure you can find them elsewhere. Suffice to say she was justified in charging a high fee. As Blackwell claimed she was indeed good at conversation and managed to keep me with her for long after our business, as it is strictly defined, was over.

I wandered back home that night through alleys and streets I was unfamiliar with in order to preserve the intoxicatingly wonderful feeling she had stirred in me. I convinced myself it was love. It was an emotion I felt much more keenly than the tepid and lackluster attraction I had to my fiancé Louisa. I returned the next night. And the next. For several weeks it continued like this. I was even more indiscrete than usual about it and I believe word may have reached Louisa that I was having an exclusive affair with a whore.

Certainly word got back to Louisa when Mlle Violet moved into my home. At that point I was so far gone I didn't care what Louisa or my family or the neighbors thought. I was not the first man to have a colored mistresses, but I may have been one of the few bold enough to lodge her at my own home. It was a scandal, but a scandal whispered into cocked ears and gasped at by women. It may have been enough to call off the wedding even, but I didn't not particularly care, at least not at first. It was an impossibility for me to marry my most beloved. Shameful as it is, interracial marriages were not permitted in my home state of Louisiana until the late year of 1967. But the longer I laid with her, in the dark and humid bedroom that we shared, holding her soft and perfect body against mine, conferring over my legal business (she is terribly clever. Clever enough to make any man believe she loved him, but perhaps I mark myself as the largest fool of all when I say with all certainty she really and truly loved/loves me), particularly cases that had frustrated me, listing to her tell me about the particularities of the side of the city I had never seen, and of course all manner of vulgar interactions, made me rethink the cruelty of the law.

I loved her so much, much more than I loved Louisa, if you could consider my feeling for Louisa love of any kind. I began to fantasize about fleeing this cruel land and taking her with me up to the frozen north's where a man could have a blackish wife, presuming that he didn't parade about in the wrong places with her. I believed we could have a farm or something. I was too drunk on love to really think it all the way through. But I would have done anything for her, as you will soon discover.

We lived in this comfortable limbo for about a year. I kept delaying my wedding, trying to work up the courage to flee with her to upper New York state, hoping that our unorthodox relationship would likely go unnoticed in that vast wilderness. She had agreed to it, which is what convinced me that she really did love me too. Her willingness to start a new life with me in a frigid wasteland was something that I treasured, and still do. Down through the years it has remained a source of comfort to me to know that at that point our love really was everything I dreamt it had been.

Then it all went to Hell.

Spring, 1811. I had been delaying my wedding for far too long. All of my family and friends and acquaintances had figured that my reluctance stemmed from my obsession with her. It was one thing to keep your mistress in her own home and discretely visit her while your proper wife kept house for you; it was another to live with your mistress and keep your fiancé waiting. Louisa would wait though, she found religious justification for it. Her family, however, would not.

I remember the date. April 15, a Monday. The day after Easter. I had seen Louisa and her family at mass the day before. Her father took me aside and informed me that on no uncertain terms was I to not delay any further. He referred to my beloved as she was, or had been, calling her a harlot. That incensed me, regardless of it's accuracy. I lost my good breeding and education and shortly informed him that I would wed my harlot before his daughter. I rode back to our home, where she was waiting for me (she attended another church, much more exotic, flavored with remembered rituals from Africa). I was supposed to attend a family gathering but she was spurned by them, of course, so I chose to spend all my free time with her. We spent the entire day as we were wont to do, celebrating my decision to finally pack up and bail for the north, since I had told Monsieur Honore to more or less piss up a rope that morning.

Her eyes sparkled like I had never seen them do or had since seen. "Really? No more waiting? No more excuses?" she asked me. A smile was hiding behind her hopeful expression and I wanted nothing more than to draw it out and have it on her forever.

"Yes," I answered and pulled her onto the bed with me. "Yes. Soon. I will dismiss the servants this week. I will close my practice. I will take out all the cash I have from the bank." Of course I am sure that love had given my words more eloquence, but the effect was the same. We had decided that since she owned more property than I (I actually owned nothing other than the house, I had just always assumed that I would inherit my father's plantation) that she would keep it, at least for the time being, should we need income to fall back on.

"Oh, mon canard, how wonderful!" She kissed me, but then sat up. "Really?" she asked again.

She always seemed to doubt me. Perhaps it was because other men had promised her such things before and always disappointed her. I wanted to make her feel secure and safe in my love for her, for her to know that I would not proclaim to love her on one hand and on the other wear a wedding band from another woman. I did anything I could and I was about to do the ultimate act, or at least what I thought was the ultimate act, and marry her in complete disregard for society at the time.

"Oui," I said again. I am going to do this bit here in French because it sounds much better in French. "Ma bichette, je ne te quitterai jamais. Je t'aimerai toujours." Plug it into Google, you uneducated punks, some things I am not going to translate because it's how it happened. I've seen and experienced remarkable things in my two-hundred plus years, but nothing has ever left as much of an impact on me, and in so many ways, than my feelings for her at the moment in time. But should you be lazy and not care exactly what I meant, _bichette_ does not mean bitch. It means my little doe. It would be unthinkable to refer to the woman you love as your bitch. Tsk tsk indeed, you young punk bastards.

I hope she believed me. I ask her now if she did and she says yes, yes she did. But if she truly believed or just really wanted to and made herself do so, I am not sure. These things are irrelevant now, of course, but it's a detached curiosity that I have now about our shared past. I wonder how things might have played out differently had I not been a passionate fool, or had I not delayed my marriage for so long, or had I just conformed and kept Ma Bichette on the side as was to be expected. I have mentioned my idealism earlier, however, which had been influenced by my tutor as a young boy, who had told me of his own beliefs which had been influenced in turn by the radicals who wrote the American constitution. He claimed to have spoken to Thomas Jefferson himself on several different occasions. If that was true or not I didn't know. But what mattered what that it had worked, against all odds, which got me to thinking about the conformities placed on my own life. I saw no reason why I couldn't have a black wife. Later I would see society catch up to me, but far too late for it be of help for me and her.

But I digress. Easter Sunday was to be last full day of my mortal life.
Chapter Two

Monday, the 15th, began normally enough. I started the process of closing my practice as I swore to her I would. I had fried clams for lunch at the tavern across the street from my office. Before heading home for the day I lingered behind with an associate. We smoked cigars while I went over with him the clients I was handing over to him. He was grateful for the business. I rode home around sunset, eager to be in the arms of Ma Bichette again.

Our cook, Jean, was standing on the porch, grimly staring at me as I approached. She was a spindly woman who I had owned since I came back from Virginia. I had told her I was giving her her freedom at the end of week when we fled, as well as the fourteen year old boy who tended to my horses, and Ma Bichette's maid, Bess.

Jean shook her head as I walked up the steps.

"Dark times," she muttered to me. "I'm sorry."

"What do you mean?"

She sighed. It was a deep sigh and I still can hear it. "They're wanting to talk to you."

I felt my stomach drop out. "Who is wanting to talk to me?"

"Inside." She did not want to break it to me. I cannot blame her.

I entered the house, a sense of foreboding spreading throughout my body. Two officers of the police force stood in my entrance hall. I could hear another speaking in the parlor. "Monsieur Toupinier?"

I nodded, although part of me wanted to deny my name and flee from whatever awful thing I was about to learn.

I listened as they explained to me that they were sorry. She was dead.

I didn't move. I couldn't breathe.

"Monsieur Toupinier?" they asked, perhaps fearing that I had gone daft.

"Where is she?" I demanded to know.

"Monsieur, there is nothing you can do."

I heard a door upstairs close. Her boudoir. I recognized the creak in it. Before they could stop me I dashed up the stairs.

Before I reached it, the door opened and her personal maid, Bess, tried to push me away. "No, don't, she wouldn't want it," she tried to reason with me, but I pushed her aside.

Ma Bichette.

I was dimly aware of Bess crying from behind me. At the time I did not wonder who had done it, who had wrapped a hemp rope around her lovely neck suffocated her original life out of her. She had not gotten far that morning, she was still wearing the dusty pink dressing gown she had been wearing that morning when I had left for work. She lay limp on the floor.

I knelt down to her and picked up her hand.

"Ce n'est pas la fin." I held her cold hand in mine. _This is not the end._ And that's when I went completely insane.

My mind went to rumors I had heard since my childhood. Of a house deep within the recesses of the bayou where a sorceress or a witch or whatever you would call her would bring the dead back to life. Seems ridiculous, I know, and I always had presumed that it was the belief of the uneducated underclass. As I write this I know how preposterous the whole arrangement was. But I was desperate and beyond grief. I simply could not exist without her. I was willing to believe anything if it could bring Ma Bichette back.

I must have knelt there for over an hour. I was aware of the voices from downstairs. Investigators of the fledging police force questioning our servants. Since I was a member of the legal establishment they were extending professional courtesy to me by giving her murder a high priority of investigation, at least for the time being. Eventually I heard footsteps climb the stairs behind me.

"Monsieur Toupinier, I must ask you about this morning."

I did not turn from her. I hadn't even let her hand slip from mine. "Ask."

"Did anything unusual happen this morning?"

"No."

"Has anything unusual happened recently? Have you run into unsavory characters in your professional life? Did she have any former lovers?" The investigator threw a series of questions at me, all of which I numbly shook my head no to. Their investigation was not a concern of mine. Their investigation would not breathe life back into her.

I took her arm and laid it across her stomach. I stood up and looked out the window. My bay horse was still where I had hitched him, the stable boy was too distraught over the situation to attend to my mount. Dusk was enveloping the city. I could not wallow in my shock any longer. I needed to attend to business.

I bent over and scooped her up into my arms. She was so cold and still. To pick up a corpse is unlike picking up a living body; there is an innate emptiness in a corpse. I ignored the investigator's protest that I set her back down. Yes, now I know how crazy I must have seemed. I am not denying it. I left the rational investigators and servants behind in the house. No one seemed to know quite what to do to stop me, but nothing short of a hail of gunfire would have stopped me. I know I am coming off as quite dramatic, but I had taken leave of my senses. Every now and then you read about a criminal who is using temporary insanity as a defense. I cannot say if it's true for them, but I can guarantee you, dear reader, that such a thing exists.

I rode to the west, propping her up in front of me in the saddle. I had no idea where I was going, but I was determined to find the witch. I rode along the road that led from New Orleans towards Father's plantation. I passed several travelers and a wagon on my way out. They stared at me. As they should. I was holding a dead woman in my arms, for God's sake.

The horse soon grew tired of the full run I had him at and after a while began to trot. Ma Bichette's head lulled unnaturally from side to side. Never once did I have a moment of realization that this was madness, a flash of "what in the Hell am I doing?", an outside look at myself. No, I was going to ride with her until Judgment Day if that's what it took. Of course, she would decompose long before that, and I like to think that I had spent several days roaming about the bayou with a rotting corpse my senses would have returned to me and I would have wandered back home, tail between my legs, begging the police to continue their investigation. I would have bought her the most ostentatious tomb in New Orleans, and that is no mean feat.

I had not passed anyone in some time. The musical harmony of crickets and frogs and the primordial growl of alligators gave no illusion of a calm and sleeping wilderness as I slowed down to give the horse a chance to rest. Several fishflys had landed in her hair and I brushed them off. I dismounted and she slumped forwards, almost sliding out of the saddle. I held the reigns in one hand with the other I arranged her in a more balanced position. The horse drank from a stagnant pond, which normally isn't something I would allow, but I had much more important issues on my mind.

From the recesses of the swamp I saw a bobbing lantern light come towards me. That's another one of the rumors and stories that had been perpetuated in my youth-that either the Devil himself or a delegated minion would lure unwary and lost travelers deep into the swamp with a beacon of help or safety they'd never reach. Alas, the true Devil is not that straightforward. But the light was supposed to be moving away from me, not towards me. Within a few moments a female voiced called to me.

"I think you are looking for me," she said. It was odd. She must have been a hundred feet from me, yet she didn't yell. I heard her as if she was standing next to me.

I didn't say anything, but I am no fool. When in that sort of situation, you recognize when you've found your supernatural goal. I thanked God. That was premature.

"Come," called the voice. "Leave your horse, there is no way for him to get through."

I tied the reigns on a nearby branch and took her from the horse. Cradling her against me, I stepped into knee deep water and waded through the filthy muck until I came to the sorceress, who was standing on dry land. The sorceress grabbed me by my arm and pulled me up onto the small island she was on with surprising strength.

"Can you?" I asked. Since she knew who I was, apparently, or at least what I wanted, I figured she could surmise what I meant by my question. The witch had tanned skin, but was a white lady with dark hair and almost black eyes. I was mildly surprised, I had expected her to be a vodou priestess, similar to the ones that could be glimpsed in New Orleans. She spoke butchered French with a Spanish accent and I had to concentrate to understand her.

"The body is whole and it is here. Yes, of course I can." She studied Ma Bichette's face and frowned.

"What? What's wrong?" I asked, afraid that there was something wrong. I mean, other than the obvious.

"I can still do it," she said. "Follow me."

I followed her for what must have been hours. Never once did her feet leave dry ground, she expertly knew her way through the winding swamp. I said nothing. My arms were beginning to ache from carrying her for so long. Finally, we reached our destination.

A stone house. It was not what I was expecting. I am not sure what it was I was expecting. A ruined wooden shack, perhaps, or something even more archaic, like a thatched roof earthen hut. But it was a neatly built small house of rounded stones. I followed her into the house. Boxes and baskets and bottles filled dozen of shelves and tabletops. The sorceress pointed to a conspicuously empty table. "Here."

I carefully laid Ma Bichette on it.

The sorceress came up from behind me with a fine crystal glass. In it was an amber liquid which to this day I have never tasted the likes of. "You look like you could use a drink," she said. I obediently drank it. It was both fiery and sweet and I could feel it slide down my throat as the sorceress rummaged about in a chest at the end of the table that Ma Bichette was lying on.

I leaned against the wall. "Do you have a name?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

_Well, because you're a witch,_ I thought.

She laughed from across the room. "Witches have names too. Alava, you can call me, if you want to call me something other than witch."

Having my mind read like a book would have bothered me before but now it was comforting. At least she was a real witch.

Alava opened up a small leather bag and pulled out a handful of worn and polished bones. They looked like human finger bones. Again, had Ma Bichette's corpse not been lying before me I would have been worried. Alava tossed the bones on the table next to her, examined the bones, and then repeated the action twice more.

"There has been a misfortune," she said and turned to me.

I hadn't eaten since lunch and my head was swirling with my particular madness and whatever liquor Alava had given me. "I know. She's dead."

"That is not it. When a person dies, the soul is separated. Usually the soul lingers for a day or so, then leaves. But hers is not here."

"Where is it?"

"No longer on the Earthly plane. I can call it back, but, it is a different process. You will be subverting the will of God. It is not a thing to be taken lightly."

I took it lightly. "Do it."

Alava nodded. "It will cost you."

"You can have my soul."

Alava turned from me and began to collect boxes and bottles from around the room. "What would I do with it? You think I haven't got enough already? No, I want your house. I want out of this swamp. I think it is safe for me to return to civilization."

I didn't care what was safe or not safe or why she had been exiled. I just wanted her to get on with it. "Fine."

She laid out a plethora of containers next to Ma Bichette. "This comes with conditions you must realize. Since her soul is no longer easily available I have to use dark magic to reanimate her body with her soul in it. That means she is no longer mortal. She will walk in her body, ageless, until Judgment Day."

That caused me pause. I did not want to her to wander about alone forever. "Do it to me too then."

"I cannot. You still live."

Alava's mental power was distracted by her examination of Ma Bichette. I spied a bottle with a skull on it (cliché, I know, but I suppose clichés exist for a reason) on a shelf not too far from me. I grabbed it before Alava could detect what I was up to, lest she try to stop me since this was going to complicate her job considerably.

"You want that house, you bring us both back." I then tilted my head back and dumped the contents of the bottle down my throat.

I would like to detail what a bad idea that was. Whatever poison it was was both fast acting and painful. My insides felt aflame, and not just aflame with spicy flavor. It literally felt like flaming coals had been teleported into my torso. I fell to my knees, then collapsed entirely. My body tried to vomit out the poison, but the bile and fluid went no further than my mouth, upon which point I swallowed it and drowned in my own vomit.

I cannot stress how absolutely idiotic my actions were that night. Not only to kill myself in an emotional rampage, but to do so without hearing the full terms and conditions of my resurrection was also a very bad idea. There was no guarantee that Alava would not just roll her eyes, decide it wasn't worth the trouble, and toss us both out to be eaten by alligators. But I wasn't thinking clearly. All I was thinking of was Ma Bichette and being with her again. I wasn't the type to kill myself out of love, after all, that would have been much easier. No, I _had_ to have her back, with me, alive here on Earth and not in some distant paradise.

Well, I suppose my own thoughts on my foolish behavior aren't as interesting as me actually physically dying and coming back to life. You probably want to know what dying is like. It hurt, for me at least, but I think that had more to do with the poison I had ingested then the act of my soul being ejected from the body. Choking on my vomit had been fairly merciful actually, had the poison had it's own sweet time to kill me I would have writhed about in agony for almost an hour, or so Alava told me later. All I knew was that at what seemed to be the climax of the pain it abruptly stopped and I was standing, if that is the word for it, over my own rumpled body.

"Satisfied?" I heard Alava say to me. Her voice echoed oddly in my ears, as if it the sound was rippling through a thick ether.

The novelty of the situation distracted me from Ma Bichette for a moment and I stared at my own body. I was lying face up, khaki colored vomit and drool lining my lips. My eyes were still open and I looked simply ghastly. Everything seemed slightly out of focus as I remembered why I had done such a foolish thing. I turned back toward the table, hoping to see Ma Bichette's soul. But like Alava had said, she wasn't there.

"That was terribly rare, you know, what you drank." Alava lectured me as she knelt down to my body.

"Keep the furniture in the house then. Half of it is imported," I said, or tried to say, but my words came out as faded static.

"Don't try to talk." Alava shook her head as she hoisted my body up onto the table, wedging me next to Ma Bichette. She actually passed through me, or my ghost, or my soul, or whatever form I was in at the time. She wiped my mouth off with a damp rag and positioned me on my back. There wasn't enough room on the table to lie us both on our backs along with her potions and ointments, so she set them on the ground underneath us.

Next, she cut off the rope that was still tied around Ma Bichette's neck. I had neglected to do so myself and now I wondered why I hadn't. The imprint of the coils were clearly visible on her flesh and I found that even outside of my body I was capable of emotion. My poor dear dead little doe. I hadn't given the actual act of her murder much thought up until that moment, I had been too focused on bringing her back. How frightening it must have been for her, to be going about her own business and then to have had a rope tightened around her. It must have hurt, too. I wondered where to and why her soul had fled. I tried to touch her hair but my fingers slipped right through her head as well as the table. My own death was unimportant to me, except for a brief acknowledgment that I had died a very unglamorous death. When one envisions his own passing, rarely does vomit come into the image.

Alava was preoccupied with grinding various seeds and herbs in a mortar. She mostly ignored me, save for the advice that I not speak to anything else that might pass through her small stone home. I wondered what she meant until a small furry creature crawled in through the window. It was about the size of a house cat, but I have never seen a housecat with human-like hands and feet or empty eye sockets. It called my name and then jumped onto my body.

"Nice, nice," it said as it poked at my face with it's miniature human hands. "Might if I try it out?"

I attempted to swat it away but of course it was an ineffective gesture. A tube-like organ shot out of it's right eye socket and probed my still open eye. "I see, yes, I see," it muttered.

Up until this point I had been fairly blasé about being dead. It all seemed to be going according to plan and I was getting what I wanted. But this was just all too bizarre and I was beginning to get seriously freaked out. Again I tried to bat it off my corpse but it quivered with suppressed laughter at my efforts.

"Pretty girl, dark rooms, paper, paper, paper," the creature said in a high pitched voice as it spied on my memories.

"Alava! Alava!" I yelled to the best of my ability, hoping to get her attention somehow.

My distorted voice got her attention and she turned. "Tsst! Tsst!" she hissed at the creature and it scampered off and out through the window.

"Don't worry about that," Alava said as she went back to her preparations. "It's harmless. There are much worse things."

I felt terribly uneasy and for the first time I began to wonder if I had made a mistake. From the same window the little cat thing crawled in I glimpsed a spectacularly huge feathery thing scuttle out of sight when I turned my attention to it. I wanted Alava to hurry up. I began to pace about the table. I realized that my ghost or whatever was completely nude but I was much too distracted to care.

After what seemed like hours Alava began to resurrect us. First she removed our clothing and then rubbed every inch of our bodies with a translucent oily paste. In our left hands she placed a white egg that had symbols written on it in indigo ink and in our right hands she placed a half of an onion that had been boiled in the blood of the chicken that had laid in the aforementioned eggs.

"Since it's the same onion the same spell will bind you two to each other until the Lord Himself comes to have you explain yourself," Alava said aloud. "If you do not follow the correct monthly ritual you both will perish. If she doesn't not follow the correct monthly ritual you will perish along with her. Both your souls will be thrown into oblivion."

"What?"

Alava must have sensed my confusion despite my inability to be coherent. "You should have waited for me to explain everything before swallowing that poison, hm? Lovesick fool."

Whatever ritual she was referring to I was not too troubled by at the moment. _Soon,_ I thought _, soon I will be back with her. And we will have forever. The entire world, all the time to enjoy it._ I believed that I would be in as much love with her forever as I had been in the past year, and she with me. But forever is a long time. A year isn't. And not just that forever is a long time, fifty years is a long time. One hundred years is a long time. And two hundred years is longer still.

On our foreheads she drew an ouroboros in scarlet ink. Alava tied red and white strings around my flaccid penis and she pressed a white ceramic bead and a red glass bead into Ma Bichette's vagina. With a silver knife she made an incision on both our chests in the shape of an upside down V, and in that she rubbed a black paste. Finally, in our mouths she placed a rolled up mass of herbs and clay and a specialized ingredient for the both of us-in hers, a pieces of the rope that had killed her and in mine, shards of glass from the bottle of poison I had drank.

"I am going to bring you back first," Alava said, as she took an iron hammer out of a drawer from a chest that must have had a hundred tiny drawers. "She will be in shock when she comes back, the intensity of it depending on where her soul has been."

Without further explanation or ritual Alava smashed the egg in my hand and I felt a rush of air and a flash of light and an instant later I had shuffled back into my mortal coil. I rolled over the table as my body twitched and jerked as I settled back into it. The ointments she had rubbed on me stank strongly and the strings she had tied around my penis were less than comfortable. I immediately arose, eager to have Ma Bichette's egg broken. The ball of herbs and glass and clay Alava had placed in my mouth had dissolved, but it left behind a stinging sensation.

Alava handed me another glass of the liquor I had drunk earlier, this time diluted with crisp and cold water. "Everything working okay?"

I nodded. "Can I take this stuff off now?" I swallowed the contents of the cup and felt a bit better.

She gestured towards a basin sitting on a low stool. "There is a well behind the house. After you're done fill it back up."

I untied the strings and set them on the table. Eager to have Ma Bichette back, but wanting to not be covered in stinking goo when she returned, I washed off the ointment the best I could. As I did so Alava gathered up the broken egg shells and the onion half. After Ma Bichette returned she would do the same with her and then burn them, thereby sealing the spell. Once I had done the best I could I dressed again and went behind the house and refilled the basin. I rushed back in, remembering to wipe the mark off of my forehead before Alava summoned her back.

"Ready?"

"Yes."

When Alava smashed her egg there was no rush of air or flash of light. Instead there was only silence. For a moment I feared the worst, that something had gone wrong, but after a moment or two she moaned and her eyes fluttered open.

"Ma bichette," I whispered and suddenly forgot the presence of Alava. "Ma chérie, mon amour, tu es de retour d'entre les morts. Tout va bien. Nous avons toujours maintenant. Oh, mon biche, nous ne serons jamais défait de nouveau." I grabbed her hand, which was slimy with egg and ointment.

"What? What?" she said. "Where am I?"

"You're with me darling, you're safe, we have forever." I said to her. I had never felt happier. She was alive again and now we could begin our absolutely wonderful lives together.

She sat up slowly and her eyes took in the interior of the stone house. She was shaking and she seemed unable to focus on one thing at a time. Her eyes darted around, looking at me, looking at Alava, glancing about at the cramped personal pharmacy. "What happened? Where was I?"

"Shh," I said as Alava pried the onion half from her hand. "It's alright, ma bichette, it's alright. You were dead but now you are not." I ignored the ointment and embraced her bodily. "Ma chérie, mon amour, mon trésor," I whispered into her ear. "Mon amour."

"Lovesick fool," I heard Alava say. "She's in shock. She probably doesn't know who you are. You're scaring her."

I didn't let her go. "You know who I am, don't you?"

There was a pause and Ma Bichette's breathing became heavy. "Mon canard," she mumbled after a moment, and then repeated it a bit louder. "Mon canard."

"Oui," I whispered. "Votre canard éternel." Good God. I know that I just came back from the dead and all, but even that was a bit too far. That was pretty much the high point of my overly melodramatic overture, however.

Alava gripped my shoulder. "For God's sake, give her some air."

I let go of her. Ma Bichette stayed seated on the tabletop, still quivering and confused. "What happened?" she repeated. "Why am I here?"

Alava handed me the basin. "Explain it to her."

I started to wipe the ointment off of her. "Do you remember being killed?" I asked her.

She stared at me. "Yes," she said after a moment and then started to cry. "Oh, mon canard, it was so horrible."

"It's all right now," I reassured her. "Who did it? Was it Monsieur Honore?"

She said she didn't see who had attacked her, just that she had told Bess to leave her alone for the day since she was feeling a bit nauseous and was going to lie down and rest without the distracting noises of Bess going about her chores. Bess then left to go visit her grandmother on an outlying manor. She was in her boudoir, combing her hair, when she felt a handkerchief being pressed against her mouth and nose. She tried to fight, but a garrote was tightened around her throat and she was both strangled and suffocated. It took a long time, she said to me, as she fought back tears of terror. She assured me that it was indeed a man who had done it because only a man would have been so strong.

"What happened then?" I asked her.

Ma Bichette's eyes focused on mine. "Well, I died, that's what happened."

"Yes, but where did your soul go? It wasn't here."

"Oh." She shivered as I wiped the residue from her breasts. "There was tall trees with flowers instead of leaves, and it was raining. I was alone. I don't remember it very well though."

"The Magdalenian Plane," Alava said. "A place of purification for those who have bartered flesh." She went to a closet and pulled out another cloth and handed it to me.

"I brought you here," I said to her as I moistened the fresh cloth. "I have heard of Alava, that she could bring the dead back. So I asked her if she would do it to you."

"And I did," Alava said. "Your idiot lover here killed himself as well so I could bring you both back under the same conditions."

"Really?" she asked me. "Did you really do such a thing?" I nodded and she smiled. "Oh, mon canard, how romantic!"

Alava laughed. "But he did it before I could explain to him exactly what he has signed you both up for." Alava then began to explain what I should have waited to hear before I swallowed liquid death.

Basically, it boils down to this: she and I are still, technically speaking, dead. We breathe and our blood still is pumped about our bodies, but that is only through artificial black magic. Our bodies are invulnerable to damage, but beyond that there was no special gifts. Our bodies have to be invulnerable since our souls would not be able to leave them. It wasn't so much a deal with the Devil as it was cheating Death himself. The only thing that will void Death will be Judgment Day, and then and only then could body and soul be separated again. Until that day, however, we need to fuel the dark magic that resides in us. Should we not fuel it, we would begin to rot. There would be no end to the decomposition of the flesh, and should we not fulfill the dark rituals our souls could be trapped in inert bones and dust until Judgment Day.

Ma Bichette gasped in horror and I was taken aback, to say the least, when Alava told us what we had to do to continue to cheat death. Once a month, within three days of the new moon, we would have to eat a human heart. A fresh one, Alava stressed, that had been taken from it's owner with our own hands. That would apparently satisfy Death, since we were bringing him a fresh soul to replace our own on a regular basis.

"Mon Dieu!" she weakly said. I was rendered speechless.

"But because it was the same spell, you can share the heart," Alava summed up.

"Mon Dieu!" Ma Bichette said again. "No, it cannot be, this cannot be, this is all a nightmare!"

"No," I said. "It's alright. We will just do it to people who deserve it, we'll harvest them out of prisons, men who are awaiting the rope."

Alava laughed. "Fool," she said to me. "How are you going to do that? How will you walk into a prison and start ripping out hearts without being noticed?"

Ma Bichette burst into tears. "We are damned!"

"No," I said over her sudden hysteria. "No! That will not happen! Ma Bichette, I swear to you, you will not be damned! This was not your choice, only mine!" She collapsed into my arms, weeping and still half covered in the ointment. "I know who we will do first too," I said to her. "Your killer. That cannot be wrong, can it? And we will find more killers, and cruel masters, and the sort of men who beat your friends from Madame Layfette's. There is a whole world full of them, and we cannot be damned for stopping them, can we?"

She didn't answer. She was out of sorts for a long time over this, even after we begun our dark rituals. My ideological views helped mold me into what I believed was a dispenser of justice. The man who cursed at us for being a mixed race couple in Oklahoma in 1986, the British socialite who was acquitted of murder on a technicality, our neighbor who beat his children black and blue; I justified my ghoulish actions by convincing myself I am doing the right thing. Even to this day I when I can find a suitable victim I tell myself that I am not a murderer, I am a vigilante. That's what makes the internet so great. So easy to find and track down wrongdoers. But when I don't, when the new moon has come and I haven't found someone who has sinned enough...well, I have to find someone. I try and distance myself from it, to have a detached coolness, to classify myself as just another natural cause of death that strikes down even the good.

But she did not share my view. For the first few decades I exclusively hunted our quarry and provided her with the hearts. By the time we separated for the first time, however, she had to learn to do it herself. Now days she isn't so sensitive. Nor is she as discriminate as I am with my victims. It is a point we fight over and has caused us to break up at least twice.

Alava caught my eye as I held my weeping love. "We need to discuss payment," she said. Except she didn't say it with her mouth. I heard it in my head. Looking back, I realize she was being deferential to Ma Bichette.

"Now?" I thought.

"Yes now. I want to get out of this swamp," I heard her in my head.

I nodded and soaked the cloth in the basin and started to clean off her back.

"The dawn after your first feed I will arrive at my house with my lawyer and make all the required changes. I want this to be legal. You will be there?"

I nodded again. I wondered if I knew her lawyer, but considering what abnormalities I had seen that night it would be a unlikely that her lawyer be a mere regular attorney like myself.

"You are not stupid enough to cheat a witch, are you?"

"Of course not," I thought at her.

"Good. Are you not satisfied? You got what you wanted."

"I did," I thought and stroked Ma Bichette's hair. "How long will she be like this? I've never seen her cry before or even be upset."

"It's a very traumatic thing," I heard Alava in my head. "She's in shock, I told you. But shock or not, you need to have a heart inside you and her within three days of the new moon. You can fry it, boil it, bake it in a pie, it doesn't matter. But you will have a terribly unpleasant afterlife if you don't."

Ma Bichette suddenly stopped bawling and brought her head up. "What if we are imprisoned? We will stay there forever! And will be unable to get our food!"

She raised a good point. Ma Bichette is and always has been clever and this wouldn't be the first time her foresight would save us.

Alava nodded. "Most do not think of that."

I sighed. "Is there anything that you do?"

"Of course," Alava said in her ear-shredding butchered French. "But that was not the deal we made, you stupid duck."

Before I could answer Ma Bichette addressed her. "He has got me the most beautiful dresses, made with silk and fine cotton, and fans and bonnets and shoes from Paris, all because he felt bad he couldn't marry me. A year of guilty gifts." She grimaced and seemed to become aware of herself again. She wiped off the egg on her hand onto the rag she had just taken from my hand. "I don't know why you're here, Madame Alava, but I bet you can't get anything pretty to wear out here."

"Yes," I said while Ma Bichette started to wipe herself off. "The clothes, they were not part of the deal. Just the house."

Alava rolled her eyes. "Very well. It isn't a big process anyway."

Alava turned to the same chest she had taken the hammer out of. She began to open drawers, looking for something. I turned my attention to Ma Bichette. "Do you feel better now?" I whispered to her.

She nodded. "Yes, a bit. It's still strange, but, I suppose that's the way it is now, isn't it, mon canard?"

"Yes it is ma bichette." I touched the black upside down V between her breasts, trying to wipe it off, but it seemed to be permanent. Well, not seemed, it is. Mine is as well. A few years ago I was at the gym (I enjoy swimming) and I saw another man with a similar mark. It is difficult to begin that conversation. It is not easy to say "So, when did you sign up for an immortal life of murder?" so I had to start it a bit more discretely. He saw mine though, and caught my eye (sounds rather gay, doesn't it?) and over a game of racquetball we exchanged stories. He had been changed some four-hundred and fifty years ago in Germany. I asked him if it got easier and he said the first three hundred years are the worst. I certainly hope so.

"Did many people see me dead?" she asked me.

"The police came," I said.

She frowned. "I must stay dead. People will suspect me of being an unholy monster should I come back."

_You are,_ I thought. _We both are._ Alava laughed.

I don't think Alava had been communicating with her telepathically but Ma Bichette seemed to understand what had transpired. "I don't want to be a monster," she said.

"Too late," Alava said as she came back with a small wooden case in her hand. "You'd better not be lying to me," Alava told Ma Bichette. "Those clothes better be nice." She opened the case and took out a small silver key, the sort of one that people only see in cartoons or gothic horror these days. And when I say silver, I don't mean tarnished, as you would expect a swamp-dwelling witch to have. It was so polished it caught the meager light of the candles and shimmered enticingly in the nest of black sand it was resting in. I was hoping that this would not involve more oily creams or pagan symbols. Alava told us to hold our hands out, which we obediently did.

Much to my surprise the end of the key was razor sharp and Alava quickly plunged it through our hands, deeply enough that the point passed straight through our palms. The lack of pain was more alarming than the pain would have been. I stared in amazement as the key passed through my hand, causing no blood to pour forth, only a gelatinous ripple as she withdrew the key and my skin healed itself.

"Unnatural," Ma Bichette whispered as Alava did it to her.

"Any lock you touch with that hand will open. It's a very popular procedure with dedicated thieves," Alava said as she set the key back in the box. "Of course, most of them bleed."

My eyes wandered about, my episode of madness draining from me, to be replaced by a dazed and detached feeling. I had sort of expected that this night would last forever, but I noticed that the blackness had been replaced by a predawn blue. I realized I had no plan. I realized that I had run out of my house with a corpse in my arms and disappeared into the night. By this time word of my actions surely must have spread throughout the neighborhood, if not the city. And if they hadn't heard, they would soon. It was all very dramatic. A good story, which is one of the reasons why I am writing it.

Alava noticed me staring out the window. "Your horse is still there," she said as she handed Ma Bichette her dressing gown. "It's a long walk."

"What if we have questions?" I said as Ma Bichette pulled her dressing gown about her. The gown has long since rotted or been eaten by moths or surrendered to whatever forces should consume organic materials, but I can still see it clearly in my memory. There are good chunks of my afterlife I don't remember. For example, I spent almost three years in Cuba after the American Civil War and I hardly recall any of it and that despite the large fight we had before I went there (it was one of the more epic ones) I missed Ma Bichette greatly. But the towns I visited, the people I met, even the false name I assumed for myself-nothing, none of it. But I remember the gown. Watered silk, which gave the impression of ululating hues of dusky pink, a wide cream colored sash that tied just under her breasts, and loose sleeves. She had been wearing nothing under it. Now days I watch television and I have come to understand that her dress would have been just swarming with evidence, as would have the boudoir and even the rope. But such things did not occur to us.

"Questions?" Alava laughed at me. "Do you think that this is something that can be coded like your laws? This is not a science."

"That may be," I said. "But there certainly seems to be all manner of ridiculous rules about the hearts, and magical keys, and whatever the hell it is you smeared us with. I would just like to know if there isn't a book or manuscript or something that explains this better."

Alava and Ma Bichette both stared at me. Ma Bichette had a better innate grip of the mystical nature of whatever it was that had reanimated us. I chalk that up to her being a woman. To her, me asking for a rulebook was the earliest manifestation of what she calls my "unrelenting wariness of all things". I disagree, of course, had I been so wary in the first place we wouldn't be in this situation. She makes me out to be a joyless miser, which is not the whole story. Of course I have become a touch bitter over the years, having had my heart pummeled so many times, but just because she is unstoppably optimistic, even haphazardly so, does that make me the worse half of our pair? Oh, of course she says it isn't an issue of who's the better half, but when she is calling me the ultimate bring down (which is unwarranted, I assure you, I still know to have fun) how can she claim that she is not making me out to be the bad guy? How can I be the ultimate bring down, my dear one, if you keep wanting to me to come and visit you?

Anyway.

Of course there wasn't a guidebook for it. Alava laughed again at me. "Go," she said. "You will figure it all out soon enough."

We exited the stone house, Alava a few steps behind us, carrying her lantern. I looked about for the path we had followed but soon realized there was none. We were on an island. In the surrounding waters I noticed an unusual amount of alligators, gliding through the water in a clockwise pattern around the island. Our invulnerability had not yet sunk into our minds completely and I put my arms around Ma Bichette as they began to crawl onto the island, creeping towards Alava, completely ignoring us.

"My pets," Alava said to us. "I will miss them."

I said nothing and felt Ma Bichette lean against me. Once she had told me of a close encounter she had with an alligator as a child. If she was scared she was doing a good job of not showing it. I, on the other hand, had simply been through far too much in the past eight hours or so to be afraid of something as mundane as an alligator. The creatures throatily growled to greet their mistress and Ma Bichette moaned softly.

"Where is the way we came?" I asked. Ma Bichette kept her eyes on the alligators.

Alava outstretched her lamp over the black water and a path emerged from under the surface. It stretched into the labyrinth of cypress and, hopefully, to my bay horse.

"Remember what I told you," Alava said. "Dawn."

Apparently tiredness is not a vulnerability. Long before we got to the horse my eyelids began to droop. But I talked with her for as long as I could, formulating our plan to both get revenge and our first "meal."

By the way, we both still eat normal food. Undead or not, all the rudimentary chemical reactions your body uses food to sustain, we need as well. Remember, we are just cheating Death, our bodies still work. In fact, they sometimes work much harder than yours. For example, I have been shot several times. To patch myself up, I need lots of calories to do it. It's a shame really, that there isn't a guidebook, because I have become truly curious as to the mechanics of my undead husk.

We rode back that day, with her in front of me on the saddle like when we had rode out, playing dead in case anyone saw us. She played dead very well. Unnervingly well. Every fifteen minutes or so I would whisper into her ear and ask if she was feeling all right still, just to reassure myself that she was indeed alive again and that I hadn't dreamt the whole encounter. She would answer yes, she was fine. She looked a mess. I had wiped the ouroboros off of her forehead, but she was sweaty and still stank of the ointment, although we had managed to scrub most of it off. At some point she said that she felt something in her "chatte" and fidgeted around until she removed the beads. She still has them. She calls them her good luck charms and have made them earrings. Yes, I might be a touch aloof now, I'll admit that, but at least I didn't make a blasted friendship bracelet of my penis strings. She's a bit batty at times, Ma Bichette, and after a while that stops being charming and starts grating upon the nerves of a dignified gentlemen such as myself.
Chapter Three

We arrived at our house in the midday. By this point the horse was in a bad state and the stable boy took him from me, wordlessly, as I dismounted, clutching my "dead" little doe. The cook heard me and came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Where did you go?"

I ignored her. I tried to paint a tortured grimace upon my visage, but I was far too exhausted. "Leave me in peace with her now," I shouted at them as I carried her up the stairs to our bed chamber. "Go to the coffin maker if you haven't already, send for the priest, but let me alone with her now!" Fortunately the police were no longer there so I did not have to deal with them.

Once in the bed chamber I locked the door behind us and closed the drapes. She laid on the bed and I pulled a sheet over her. A shroud. I laid down next to her and held her hand. We exchanged a few words, encouraging each other and comforting each other, and then immediately fell asleep. I couldn't have slept for long before a persistent knocking at the door awakened me. She lay still as I arose.

I had not given my fiancé a thought up until that moment. "Louisa," I said flatly. "What do you want?"

"I, I came to give you my condolences," she said. It was remarkable that she was acknowledging both the existence of Ma Bichette and the grief that her death had logically caused me. "I heard what had happened, that you-" she stopped abruptly, her eyes meeting mine, not condemning me for my actions but expressing genuine concern for my emotional state.

"Have you come to get a firm date for our wedding?" I am ashamed at the way I treated her. Louisa was being very nice to me, very understanding, but I was in no mood for it. We had a plan that had to be set into action. The new moon was just four days away, so that meant between that moment and seven days we had to kill her murderer and eat his heart. It was all a very taxing situation, and all the Christian love that Louisa tried to heal me that day fell far short of it's goal.

"No, no, of course not. I came to offer my help with the arrangements."

I couldn't believe what she was saying. "Help? You want to help me bury my mistress?" I stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind me. "You know that's who she was, right? You do know what we did, right? You do know she's the reason I kept delaying our wedding, right?" My ordeal had given me newfound bluntness and I had no intentions of fulfilling my betrothal to Louisa anyway. I saw no reason to pussyfoot around the issue anymore. "Do you know what I did with her? Things you would never do, my dear, things you could never imagine. You and yours wouldn't let her type come within a hundred yards of your stuffy carriages and cotillions, and yet you come here, after hearing that I have gone completely mad over her, that I've ridden off with her corpse into the swamps, and that I've come back with her body, and still, still you come here, offering to help me?"

I must have been either a tad too harsh or merely more confrontational than she was used to because tears welled in her eyes. "We are to be married," she said. "Father told me that it is best to put your sinful past behind you, and I want to help you. I love you."

"Love? What do you know of love?" It was an accurate accusation. I had not so much as kissed my fiancé. The bulk of my interactions with her had been polite conversation and dancing at the aforementioned cotillions, although in the past year or so I had been neglecting her in favor of Ma Bichette. Louisa's idea of love must have been shaped by the chaste novels that her mother allowed her to read and I honestly feel like she would not have been able to handle the full forces of my passion that I directed towards Ma Bichette. Louisa was a shy and reticent thing, even then, in her full bloom of youth, and if had I brought Louisa back from the dead she would not had been able to deal with it like Ma Bichette had. And that was not the kind of woman I could love.

"I love you!" Louisa said again.

"You think you love me? Do you know me at all? Because I certainly don't know you. I knew everything about her, we told each other our secrets and our fears and our desires and our hatreds. I don't know you at all, Louisa. Oh, I know that you are a pious woman, and that your family has raised you well by the standards of our ridiculous society, that you are instructed well in fortepiano, and that you just cannot wait to have children by my pedigree. But that is it. I know your finely crafted selling points, your prioritized skills and features that have meant to polish you into marriage with a successful man such as myself. I rejected them in favor of Ma Bichette. I loved her, Louisa, I do not love you."

"But, you will come to love me," she said. I feel sorry for her now. She wanted what I had promised her when I asked her to marry me-a normal life. At the time I wanted her gone. She was annoying me. I wanted to go lie down and sleep for a while, at least until the coffin was delivered. "Soon we will marry, mon chérie, and-"

I cut her off. An opportunity to advance our plan presented itself. "If you still want to marry me, fine, I will consent. Pick your day. Send your Father over as soon as you can. I will speak with him over the arrangements."

She smiled. "Yes, mon chérie."

"Don't call me that," I said and slammed the door shut. I carefully locked it behind me. Should anyone come in with the intention to soothe me or perhaps talk me out of holing up with a corpse and discover Ma Bichette still breathing and warm, we would be in for a world of hurt. Not that we weren't already, but a world of hurt that we hadn't planned for.

"Soon," I whispered to her and caressed her back. We had decided that it would be best that she play dead completely, lest someone spy on us. Just the word 'soon' could be interrupted ambiguously enough, (say for example that I decided to kill myself. Again.) so I learned in even closer.

"Did you hear her at the door?" I asked.

She didn't reply immediately. "But we cannot tonight," she said after a moment of thought. Her voice was small and quiet and I prayed that should any servants be spying on us they would chalk it up to me talking to myself. "Tomorrow night, at the earliest."

You really can get away with a lot once you've gone mad with grief, it turns out. None of the servants were willing to challenge me on my decisions. Ma Bichette had no family to speak of and decorum dictated that since I had "kept" her for so long none of her other customers, no matter how fond of her they had been, would come. Can you imagine how awkward that situation would have been? Never mind pretending that she wasn't dead anyway, but to receive the men who had flopped her as well, listening to them reminisce on what a fantastic lay she was? Of course they would not have come out and said it, but it would be the underlying sentiment. Theoretically, I have a difficult time imagining a more awkward situation. Naturally, the death of my mistress would not be recognized by my family in any manner either. Just the servants and a few of her acquaintances and friends would attend. It would not be too difficult to conceal the resurrection.

Huh. I just realized that I've more or less completely ignored the investigators. They were not police in the same way we define them today. Militia would have been a better word for it. Upon discovery of the body there would have been a ruckus raised by the servants and the militia or police or whatever you would like to call it would be summoned. Honestly, there was not much they could do. Fingerprints, DNA, microscopes, we would all see these things come later. I'm not saying it would be impossible to conduct an investigation, but as much as it pains me to admit it, as much as the injustice of it still sears me, no one really gave a shit about the murder of a litigation attorney's mixed race mistress. Since I had not told them of my suspicions regarding Monsieur Honore they had concluded that it was a robbery. Certainly I had bought Ma Bichette many lovely things, they reasoned, so without any other suspects as far as the New Orleans Police Force was concerned, Ma Bichette had been killed by an anonymous thief. I am curious if there is still any record of it anywhere. If there is any newspaper clipping in a file or a yellowed handwritten note pertaining to her murder. Surely someone, somewhere, at some point, must have wondered about what had happened to my dearest most beloved doe.

Ducks and does. I've thought of them often in the past two hundred years or so, whenever I see one of the other I always think of her. Me being the duck, obviously. Of course I come across much more ducks than I do deer, so I am constantly reminded of my rash decision even more often than I should be. I asked her once if she did the same thing, this must have been, oh, forty or fifty years ago. She stared at me. "No," she said in a tone of voice that I was unaccustomed to. It sounded like myself when I was in the throes of my extensional complaints. That unnerved me alone, but she leaned in closer to me. "You sentimental fool," she hissed at me, "with your talk of innocent does and loyal mallards and an almost eternity in which we have this cyclical and unbalanced dance together. Mon canard, I am not reminded of you when I see some stupid bird begging for bread. I am reminded of you and your stupid, stupid decision when I smile at man, bring him back to my bed, and stifle his screams as I kill him."

"Now who is being dramatic?" I said to her and she pulled away from me.

But that was all to come later. I tend to skip around a lot.

Monsieur Honore did not dally. Less than an hour after I dismissed Louisa, Bess knocked on my door and in her most respectful and somber tone informed me that my future Father-in-law had arrived. I squeezed Ma Bichette's hand. We were putting the first phase of our plan into action. I pulled the soft velvet curtain open and a deluge of searing light flooded into the chamber. She was already playing dead, however, and didn't even flinch when light fell upon her eyes.

"You look better dead than most women do alive," I whispered in her ear and she smiled a little bit.

"Stop smiling," I whispered and I leaned in to kiss her. "Stop smiling, stop smiling," I repeated and she suppressed a giggle. "You're going to get us in trouble."

Her face fell blank and her limbs went limp. "Ready," she said.

I straightened up and brushed some stray flecks of dried mud from my shirt. Ma Bichette and I had deduced that Monsieur Honore was behind her murder. We doubted that he had done it himself, that would have been terribly uncouth, but we believed it to be most likely that he had hired whomever strangled Ma Bichette. I was ready to just lay claim to Monsieur Honore without trial but Ma Bichette wanted to be sure. And what she had suggested did sound like entertaining.

I did not need to apply much in the way of theatrics to play my role in our little tableau. I had acquired over the past day or so a truly impressive thousand yard stare, and as I gazed in the mirror next the door to the hallway I was rather alarmed at my own reflection. Certainly this was not the sophisticated young lawyer I had cultivated myself into over the past twenty-six years or so, this was some exhausted stranger, weary with rue and anxiety.

I descended the stairs to the parlor with an uneven gait. Honestly, there was nothing more I wanted than to crawl back into bed with her and sleep until her funeral, but I reasoned that my drooping eyelids and inattentiveness could be chalked up to grief. Bess emerged from the parlor with a coffee service and passed me on her way to the kitchen. I plopped down on the green and white striped settee opposite Monsieur Honore.

I glared at him. I believed he had murdered Ma Bichette, but I did not want to tip my hand this early in our hunt. He had bristly white hair and a short beard and direly did I feel the impulse to smash the blue blown glass whale oil lamp that sat on the end table against his craggy and dignified face and then set it aflame. However, I did not believe that such a savage act would be covered by my perceived crazed grief. So I stared at him intently, forcing him to make the first move.

He took a long sip of my terribly fancy imported Turkish coffee. "I am sorry for your loss," he said after a few moments of silence.

I tensed my slack hands into fists at his apparent crocodile tears. I let a few more moments of silence pass between us. The ticking of the ornate brass mantle clock seemed even louder than usual. "Yes," I said after a moment.

"The loss of a faithful servant is never easy," he continued. He set the cup down on the saucer and the clink almost made me flinch.

Had I not already decided I was going to kill him the next day I would had made that conclusion anyway at that comment. To suggest that my cherished little doe was nothing more than a servant to quell my carnal needs was vexing beyond measure. However, I just said "No, it is not easy."

"So you are ready to move on?"

I nodded at his blunt question.

He scooped up some sugar and mixed it in his coffee. "Good. Your behavior has caused my daughter much heartache, both at your hands and the hands of gossip. Would it not cause her more embarrassment and heartache I would have annulled your betrothal months ago."

I felt like laughing. His serious demeanor about such a trivial issue to me now was akin to the time I had been scolded by my tutor as a boy for using improper Latin gender articles. But the laughter died on my lips the moment he continued.

"I presume you've gotten all this unpleasantness out of your system?"

To refer to Ma Bichette's and my delicate and complex relationship as an unpleasantness rankled me like nothing else had, and to imply that after he had gone and murdered her was just adding insult to murdered lover. "Unpleasantness?" I asked. My voice was low and soft, belying my anger.

"You will, from now on, conduct yourself with decorum," he said to me. He took another sip of coffee. Ma Bichette had picked the china pattern out. Green with roses and gold trim. I hadn't even given them much thought before, but at that moment I was acutely aware that she had picked pretty much everything out, even the settee I was sitting on and the noisy clock. She was my wife in everything but name.

"Decorum?" I asked.

Monsieur Honore sighed. "Do not be imprudent. You know full well what I mean."

"I am afraid I do not," I said. "Do you not visit the sporting houses as well? Ma Bichette told me her name. Georgine, right? Our indiscretions went to church together. "

His hand froze in mid air. I had broken a rule of polite society by pointing out that he was being hypocritical. The clock steadily ticked on for a few moments.

"I apologize," I said. "Please forgive my imprudence." I had let my emotions get the better of me, yet again. In the past two hundred years I've started to reign that in, but it has been a learning process, to say the least. Not that I was worried about embarrassing him or anything, but for our plan to work he had to see her body now.

I might know the names of the mistresses of every man in town but I certainly did not know their faces. Like Ma Bichette, they were hidden away in private homes and never seen in public with their men. Since we doubted that Monsieur Honore had done the deed himself he would not know what Ma Bichette looked like.

But since I had apologized, the same rules that I had broken required that Monsieur Honore forgive me. He arose. "You are not recovered enough to discuss your marriage."

I arose as well. "Before you go I must ask an indulgence."

"In regards to what?"

"I would feel better if you could verify that you were not one of her customers," I said and avoided eye contact. Ma Bichette has assured me that he had not been, this was just our rouse. "I would not be able to marry your daughter, it would be a gross impropriety for me." Again, a lie. I would not care if Ma Bichette had lain with him or any other man. Nothing she had done before I met her could affect my feelings for her. Things she would do later, well, that is another story.

Yes, it was an odd request, and Monsieur Honore hesitated, but I pressed the issue. I claimed that I could not marry his daughter if such thin walls of nonsense had been compromised. I knew that even if he had, he would lie and said he hadn't. But in a day or so all of that would be so very irrelevant.

I led him up the stairs. We paused at the door to the bedroom and I rambled loudly for a while about the potential barbarism about me and my father in law having bedded the same woman as to give Ma Bichette warning that we were coming. I reached out and opened the door.

Quickly I glanced at Ma Bichette. She had rearranged herself since I last saw her; now her arm was hanging off of the bed and her head was angled towards the door. It puts me in mind of _La Mort de Marat,_ which I saw some years later in Brussels, I believe it was. There was even a trace of a smile on her face. I only glanced at her though, then studied Monsieur Honore face.

He seemed relived to not have to lie. It was a look I had seen many times in the courtroom. "No, I have not known her," he answered. His eyes lingered on her. I wonder if he was taken in by the eerie beauty she had in "death" or if he was just morbidly fascinated with a murder victim. But the longer he drank her in, the better. _See what you did,_ I thought as he looked at her. _Remember her face well._

He turned to go. "A shame," he mumbled under his breath.

How I hated him then. How I hated him for only showing some sort of genuine compassion upon seeing what a beauty she was. Was it only a shame that she had died because she had been beautiful? I looked forward to killing him. My blood began to pound in my ears as I watched him leave our home. I felt an actual blood lust. Well, heart lust. I ached to put my teeth into his meaty, juicy, delectable heart just as much as I had ever wanted to lie with her. I had never tasted a human heart before, of course, but at that moment, as I watched his middle aged frame saddled up and ride off, there was nothing else I wanted more than to dig through all the viscera and bone of his chest like a wild predator. It would be so warm, so moist, so inviting. To put it vulgarly, I was horny for murder.

That caught me unawares. Previously I had imagined myself to be something of a milquetoast. I had never been keen on hunting and I simply abhorred bull baiting and other blood sports. I watched him through the windows, caught between my unease at my newfound predatory instinct and relishing my aforementioned predatory instinct. I was breathing rather quickly and my palms were beginning to sweat. _Tomorrow night,_ I thought. _Wait for just a day._

Bess softly asked if I needed anything.

"No," I said. I fidgeted with the buttons on my shirt, trying to hide my abominable new desire with the busy, soft hands of a lawyer. "I am having the funeral tomorrow," I said and turned to her. "Here. I will be taking her to be buried at my family's plot." More lies. I think Bess knew that was a lie, but I think she knew better than to ask what I was planning to do. Since she lived in the house as well, in the attic, she understood me better.

"I am terribly sorry," she said. Unlike Monsieur Honore I knew she meant it. "She's in a better place."

Such a trite platitude. I nodded though. "Have you sent for the coffin maker?"

"Yesterday, when you were gone, Jean and I thought it best to have that ready when you returned from...wherever you went."

My thoughts flashed back to that stone house. How surreal it all seemed now, there in my familiar and average home in the daylight, listening to the humdrum background noise of a typical day in the city. I wanted to tell Bess about our adventure in the bayou, just to hear it aloud and confirm to myself that it hadn't been some bizarre shared hallucination Ma Bichette and I had. I had not grown fangs or sprouted fur or anything as obvious as that. I had died and returned and now I required human flesh regularly, but there are not any outward signs of that. Save for the little v shaped tattoo, Ma Bichette and I are one hundred-percent normal looking.

I stared at my palm. Where the key passed though there was nothing that remained of a scar. I hadn't had a chance to try out the lock picking skills I had been endowed with yet. Then I remembered what Ma Bichette had promised Alava in exchange for the spell. It would turn out to be the second greatest deal of the past two centuries, eclipsed only by America's purchase of Alaska.

"Bess," I called out suddenly and turned around. She had already gone down the hall but quickly reappeared.

"Yes?"

I ran up the stairs and shouted at her from the balcony. "You're about the same size as her, right?" I peered at her from the railing.

Her face was understandably confused. "Uh, yes," she answered. I could tell she feared a return of my madness.

I spun some elaborate explanation of Ma Bichette's unwillingness to be judged before the Lord in costly and fashionable ensemble and instead that she should meet her maker in a humbler dress. I am deft at spinning lies, although I assure you all of the stuff about witches and afterlives is factual. Long story short, I paid Bess three half-eagles, or fifteen dollars (something like two-hundred today), for her second best serving dress, in which I would 'bury' Ma Bichette. Considering I legally owned Bess I could have just taken it, but liar and cannibal that I may be, I was not about to bully my servants around. Besides, I was turning her out at the end of the week, and Lord knows freedom is a costly endeavor.

I suppose I try and justify the fact that I was a slave owner with all of these patronizing comments about what a good and just man I was to my servants. I don't feel unduly terrible about it. That was the reality of the times, and I never beat anyone nor deprived them of any reasonable comforts. Unjust and cruel system that it had been, I was but one man and too preoccupied with my own pursuit of happiness to really and truly concern myself with an institution so powerful that it is still such an issue today that I feel forced to address it in my memoirs. Many social ills exist today, dear reader, and in fact there is more human trafficking now than there was in my time, but I would bet my fortune in real estate and stocks that you are not doing much to change that, either, save for the odd donation via text message or Facebook repost. When that long-awaited Judgment Day arrives finally, the fact that I owned other human beings is not going to be a concern of mine on that tally sheet.

If anything, Ma Bichette was worse. I would be content to wallow about in an untidy house, but since she had been a star attraction at her bordello she had been waited on hand and foot for several years and expected near-perfection from our servants. She was not cruel, but a tardy dinner tray or poorly laundered sheet would provoke a sharp word or two from her. Ma Bichette is a bit of a prima donna naturally anyway, but she holds herself to very high standards and expects others around her to do the same. She was far from unfair though, and more than generous with my money, insisting that the servants eat the same meals we did and have new clothes every other month and that they have plenty of time off in which to visit their families.

Family had always been a weak point with Ma Bichette. Her mother had died of some kind of cancer when she had been in her early teens and she herself could not have children as a result of an enthusiastic abortion. Although she knew who her father was she had never spoken to him, although in her youth her mother had received money to help support her. Years later when he died she slipped back to New Orleans to visit his gravestone and catch a peek at her half brothers and sisters. They, of course, had aged, but she assured me she could still see herself in them. Life is not fair, she had said to me when she returned to our home at the time in the wilderness of Ohio. It had only been the second time I'd seen her openly cry.

Anyway, the dress was a simple affair, dark green cotton with white stripes and simple hemmed edges. It lacked the high waist that was so common at the time, marking it as a functional garment as opposed to a fashionable one. Ideally it would have to be taken in a bit at the waist and let out a bit at the bottom, but there was no time.

"Would you like me to dress her?" Bess asked as she returned from the attic with the dress.

I had to choke back a genuine smile. "No," I answered, remembering the great many times I had either undressed Ma Bichette or helped her dress. If nothing else I knew my way around women's clothing. Besides, the regency period of fashion was not nearly as complicated as the later 19th century would prove to be. No stiff corsets or wide petticoats or ridiculous hoops, just fairly straightforward simple dresses and shawls and jackets.

I instructed Bess to bring up a tray of whatever food was on hand and leave it outside the door. I entered the bedroom, using my finger to undo the lock as opposed to the key. It worked perfectly. Much to my dismay Ma Bichette had clearly grown bored and was flipping through an art book while lying on her stomach.

Quickly I shut the door behind me. "You are supposed to be dead!" I mouthed at her when she looked up at me.

She rolled her eyes and snapped the book shut. I laid the dress on the back of a chair. She sat up and stretched, eyeing the dress with distaste. "Undress me," she ordered. Not that she needed help, she was just wearing a dressing gown that buttoned in the front. But she knew that I took particular pleasure in it.

I double checked that the door was locked and pulled the curtains tightly shut. In the darkened room I knelt in front of her as she sat on the side of the bed and meticulously unbuttoned the front of her pink dressing gown and then slid it off her perfect body. I was enjoying my familiar ritual but she was understandably distracted.

She leaned closer to me and whispered into my ear. "Did he say anything?"

My delight in my favorite diversion was spoiled at the recollection of Monsieur Honore. "Nothing remarkable," I answered. I sighed and stood up. "You're just filthy," I said and walked into the washroom. I closed the shutters and she followed me.

The large wooden basin was full of clean water, which had sat in the basin since yesterday morning when Ma Bichette had Bess bring it up. Usually Ma Bichette stewed herbs in hot water and then rinsed herself with that, but that would not scrub off the residue and sweat and mud that speckled her soft and dusky skin. She smiled at me, knowing I liked this as well, handed me a bar of English soap and told me to wash her.

"I do not think there is any reason to dwell on it," she said as I rolled up my sleeves. She kept her voice low.

"On what exactly?" I rubbed the soap against the cloth and dunked it into the tepid water several times.

She paused. "On having to...eat people." She turned her back to me and pulled her hair aside.

"Oh." I dunked the cloth in the water again and then brought it to her back. "No, not really. It's not like we have a choice in the matter."

"I certainly didn't," she said under her breath.

There was silence for a few moments, broken only by the sloshing of the water. She was right. She hadn't had a choice. But she wasn't open about her bitterness yet.

Ma Bichette turned to face me. "There is no sense to dwell upon it. That's the way it is," she said. She was trying to reassure herself.

I dropped the cloth in the basin. "Mon amour, we are never going to get old. We are never going to get sick or die. We have the rest of the time on Earth to be together. That's the way it is." I held her hands in mine, however she still seemed distracted.

"I don't want to go to Hell," she said.

"Who does?"

She smiled sadly. "You do, apparently, you made a deal with the Devil for the both of us."

"That's not entirely accurate," I reasoned and started to soap up her unmentionables. "The Devil was never mentioned, only God and Death. Alava did not identify herself as an agent of the Devil. I have no way of knowing from which source she derives her power."

Ma Bichette laughed. "You couldn't make a guess?"

"That is not my responsibility."

I continued to bathe her until I was satisfied that she was back to her perfect self.

"Only bad people, right?" She said after a moment. "We will only target them."

I nodded. "Yes. There are plenty of them."

"I love you," she said. "But-" she left that hang in the air.

I wrapped a towel around her. "Everything will work out, you'll see." I did not have any idea what was I was talking about, of course.
Chapter Four

The funeral, held in our parlor, was a pitiful affair. Had she still been dead the lack of attendees would have been heartbreaking for me. Only our servants and some of her friends from church attended. I sat near the front, only half-listening to the coffee-colored preacher as I was too concerned with our most recent problem. Her flesh was still warm. She laid in the coffin motionlessly, listening to her own eulogy. Lucky for us people tend to have an aversion to staring at corpses for too long, otherwise they may have detected the slight rise and fall of her lovely chest. But as the funeral progressed my worry over her skin temperature increased. How would I explain that should someone feel the need to kiss her or some such? I hadn't even thought of it until the service began.

Even if I had thought of it there wasn't much I could do, I figured. If our rouse was discovered we would have to simply flee, right then and there. What would people think? My head swam with these thoughts and ones like them. Perhaps it was unusual that I appeared outwardly much more anxious then aggrieved, but I was in the front and no one could see me except the preacher, and he had probably seen the whole gamut of emotions in such circumstances.

Towards the end of the service an idea came to me. It no longer matter what people thought. We would soon be gone, we would abscond into the ages, disappear into a dizzying maelstrom of metropolises and a linear progression of rural abodes. No longer did it matter what people believed me to be, for none of them would live long enough for it to be of any consequence for me. Empires would fade, dynasties would fall, the world would change into something I could never have imagined; so I reckoned that what I did that day would be of upmost unimportance.

As soon as the preacher had completed his amens and blessings I rose up and snapped the lid of the coffin closed. I sensed rather than heard Ma Bichette's surprise at this unscripted turn of events. The noise of it echoed through the house. I turned to the assembled mourners. All eyes were upon me.

Public speaking had never been a phobia of mine, in fact I enjoyed the attention. Even then, in such unusual circumstances, I knew I had their attention and the part of me that so direly sought attention could not let it go to waste.

"It is not likely," I said after a moment of thought collection, "that I could ever find another women so lovely. I do not refer to her physical perfection, something that can be found many times over, but instead to her temperament and character." Clearly I withheld all truly tender sentiments for our intimate moments. I have heard people emote more over a merely satisfactory steed.

The preacher nodded solemnly in agreement and I turned back to the coffin. I was not exactly at a loss of words, but the words that occurred to me when I considered that save for a quirk of fate, Ma Bichette really would have had been lost to me, were not exactly the sort of thing I felt comfortable sharing at the time. I ran my fingers over the mahogany coffin, the alternate timeline wherein she was actually dead encroaching on me. Had I not dealt with Alava this would not have been a charade, but instead a terrible reality.

"She was so abruptly ripped from this world," I continued, and I was slightly embarrassed to have a waver in my voice. The infringing shadow of her all too real actual death started to suffocate me. It was challenging to remember that I had been spared the naked pain and inside that solid box she was probably rolling her eyes at my faux eulogy. I wanted to end this, to get everyone out, to open it up and feel her inconveniently warm skin again.

I fell into silence and remained motionless, hoping that people would get the hint and begin to respectfully file out. I raised my eyes from the coffin and stared out the window. We lived on a somewhat busy street and as the mourners filed out into the foyer I watched the blissfully mortal inhabitants of New Orleans walk or ride past my house. Our plan was to dismiss the servants for the rest of the day, replace the weight of her body with bricks that we had collected last night, and then send the coffin on it's way to be entombed in a local cemetery. Then we would wait until nightfall, descend upon Monsieur Honore, then the next morning I would withdraw all the cash from both our account and be on our way to Florida, which was still under Spanish control, and lie low there for a while and plan our next move.

One person left, then another, until only the preacher remained in the room.

"I had known her for some years," he said to me while I stared out the window.

"Did you?" I was too distracted by his mere presence to be interested. Ma Bichette had made me promise to get her out of the coffin as soon as possible and I could rightly empathize with her for it must have been terribly claustrophobic in there.

The preacher began to tell me about what a wonderful person she was and so forth, but I saw something outside the window that caused me to gasp. At first I was certain I imagined it, but at second glance I felt my stomach drop out. At this latest twist I shook my head.

"What is he doing here?" I said aloud, cutting off the preacher.

"Pardon?"

I turned from the window and swiftly exited the parlor. I felt no animosity for my father in the least, but I did not exactly feel warmth or affection for him either. Simply put, we were two different people. While he did not hold me in contempt, at least not openly, for my lack of enthusiasm for the life of a planter, he did not embrace with vigor my choice of career either. He was a boisterous, generous man, as opposed to my guarded and sentimental nature, and while we didn't exactly clash neither did we see eye to eye.

He had never met Ma Bichette, obviously, but as I stepped out on the front porch I realized belatedly that word of my dash into madness must have reached him. The stable boy took the reins from him as my father gracefully dismounted his brown gelded Morgan. He strode up the porch to where I stood, silently trying to gauge his mood. While I could push aside the preacher and the servants and the police force I would not be able to do so with my father.

"Now, mon vieux, you don't look as bad as everyone is saying you are!" Father said to me as he climbed the steps.

I wondered how exactly I looked. It certainly was not carefree. "What are people saying?"

Father put his arm around my shoulders. He was a good head taller than I am. I am not a short man either, mind you. "Now, don't concern yourself with rumors."

I turned and walked back into the house. Father would not have made the several hour journey by horseback just for a quick hello. No doubt he saw it as his duty to comfort me in his own way. He intended on staying at least for supper and by that time I intended to be on the road with Ma Bichette. Before I could think of what to say to possibly dissuade him from his intentions, he caught sight of the closed casket. The preacher was no where to be seen.

"Ah, so that was true," he said in a much more gentle tone than he had been using. "I am sorry."

I was sick to death of hearing that. That people were sorry that the love of my life was dead. Just sorry, nothing else. But I don't suppose there is anything they could have said that would have given me any sort of genuine relief anyway. "She is dead, yes," I said. My voice sounded hollow, mostly because I was extremely weary of this charade. I could only imagine how weary Ma Bichette was of being a corpse.

There was a few moments of silence. I guessed that Father was debating on whether or not to ask me if I had indeed rode around with her body in my saddle, since the first part of the rumor was indeed true. He decided to approach it in a roundabout way. "That bay of yours, the Narragansett, she can gait a great distance without tiring, correct?"

I plopped down into the settee in the parlor. "That is the selling point of them."

Bess appeared from nowhere. "Shall I bring anything?"

"Yes, coffee," Father imperiously ordered.

Bess turned to go. "Claret as well," I said in a forceful way that I hoped echoed the authority of Father. It was a far too early to start drinking, only around one in the afternoon, but if there had ever been a situation in my life that I needed the cradling touch of alcohol this was it.

Father sat across from me. He eyed the coffin and we sat in silence. I stared at the clock. After Bess brought us our refreshments Father spoke up. "When your mother was dying, she made me promise to remarry,'' he said. His tone was casual, as if this was something we had discussed before as opposed to the first time I'd ever heard him mention my mother. "She did not think it fair that you and your sister grow up without a mother of some kind."

Despite the stress I was under my curiosity was piqued. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that this would probably be the last time I would see Father. "But you never did." I took a long sip of wine.

"No." Father stirred in a spoon of sugar. "Do you understand why now?"

I blinked several times. "No one could ever take her place."

"Precisely." He sighed. "I am not ashamed of what you did. It's all over the plantation, that young master has taken leave of himself, young master has been possessed, young master has killed himself out of grief. That last rumor I thought I should investigate further."

"Obviously it isn't true." Obviously that was a lie. I flicked my eyes towards the coffin. "I am feeling much better now."

"You don't need to lie for my sake."

I finished the rest of my wine in one swallow. "You want to hear the truth? Fine." I poured another glass, twice as much as Bess had allotted me. "It's awful. I feel awful. I wish I had died, not her."

"It will get better."

I could see Ma Bichette's face, screwed up with impatience and frustration, as she listened to Father and me talk. That was never a good mood to have her in. "What was Mother like?" At least I could demonstrate to her that I was using my time wisely.

The memory that the question brought up caused noticeable wistful pain in the corners of his eyes. "Very much like you. A soft-hearted intellectual idealist."

I frowned. "Oh."

"No, I didn't mean that as an insult." Father sighed deeply. "She was a wonderful woman."

"Papa, I wish the world was a different place. I wish that I hadn't have had to hide our love. I wanted to marry her, not Louisa," I said, suddenly overwhelmed with having had to have hide all my feelings as well as everything else. I started to feel a tinge of sadness over the necessity of severing all ties with family. Only then had I begun to really know who Father was.

"I am sorry, but that is the way things are. They are that way for a reason." He stood up as well.

Trying to tell him that the only reason things were that way was just only because the world was, and is, a terribly unjust place was an argument that we had many times before. I was not about to have it again. Instead I just chugged my claret.

"May I see her?"

"No." I felt an explanation was not required. After all, young master had lost his mind.

"You should not be alone at this time," Father said, almost to himself. "Do you have any idea of who did it?"

"What does that matter? She's dead."

"You didn't answer my question."

"No, I do not know who did it."

Father shook his head slowly. "You may have educated yourself into quite a slippery little eel, but I can still tell when you are outright lying."

I felt my face glow warm.

Father lowered his voice so that the servants would not overhear. "Have you got something planned?"

"No, no, of course not. You know me, what would I ever do about it, hmm?"

"Listen," Father continued, eyeing me with suspicion, "it is not worth it. Think about her. Is this what she would want you to do?"

Yes, this is exactly what she wanted me to do. She had come up with a good chunk of the plan. "Father, you know me, you know that would not-"

He interrupted me, his voice slow yet firm. "I know that you are an emotional little _gosse_. When I heard that you had gone galloping into the bayou with her corpse, oh, I believed it. I am quite happy to see that you had not killed yourself, for I believed that too. And I believe that you would feel obliged to finish this yourself, should you know who is responsible."

"I have faith in the legal system," I said after a moment. "He'd hang."

"You know that it is a he?"

I avoided Father's stare. "It is a guess."

Father sighed again. "You are the only family I have left in these parts. I know that we are not of the same mind, but it would pain me greatly if something happened to you." He took a cigar case from his breast pocket. "You will hate hearing it now, and believe me, I understand, but you need to move on. Do not make this your defining characteristic. Do not become me."

Oh, how I wish that he had delivered that sound advice sooner and even more do I wish that I had not been too much of a fool to take it. I wanted to tell him what had happened, I wanted to admit what I had done, to let him know that there was such things as witches and afterlives and horrible little cat monsters. That he was right, that I had killed myself and that I was planning to take my own revenge. I always have had this need to come clean, to be punished for what I have done. That is why I am writing this now. My full fledged confession, of all the sins I have committed, laid out for your reading pleasure, for you to either believe or dismiss at your leisure. Of course, you will not believe me. That's the earthly punishment for me, that I have lived and continue to live this incredible life, that maybe because I have seen so much of history first hand that my opinions matter more than the average persons', that I could be of great use to the world-but no one will believe me.

The hours passed at a snail's pace for me. Father would not leave me alone for more than a moment. Apparently he believed that the best remedy for my current sorrow was a second shadow. Finally around dark he excused himself to retire to bed. Thankfully years of being a planter had him accustomed to awaking before dawn and he simply could not stay awake past nine in the evening.

As soon as he had ascended the stairs I scampered into the parlor and pulled the drapes shut and cracked the coffin open. "Oh, Ma Bichette, I am sorry, I could not get rid of him."

She stared at me, wordless rage boiling in her eyes. "You! Could! Not?" she hissed at me.

The house was silent, save for the shuffling footsteps of Father above us on the second floor. I had dismissed the servants that afternoon and they were off visiting. I pulled the lid of the coffin open and scooped her up in my arms and lifted her out. "No," I whispered. "He is a forceful man."

"You are undead!" she said to me, a bit more loudly than I would have liked. "You must learn to be more assertive, otherwise this is not going to work out, is it?" That is still her favorite flaw of mine to pick at, that I am not assertive enough. Fortunately or not, however, she is for the both of us.

"Hush," I ordered and set her down. Quickly we piled the bricks we had secreted away in a cabinet into the coffin. I kept a lookout on the stair, lest Father return, as Ma Bichette quickly changed out of her burying costume and back into her pink dressing gown.

Apparently just being out of the coffin was enough to put her back in a good mood. "I'm just starving, do you suppose there is anything to eat in the kitchen."

"I will have to check." I went to the kitchen and hunted up some bread and jam.

"It looks like I will have to become a proper little housewife," Ma Bichette said lightly as she began to eat. We had agreed that having servants in the future would only serve to complicate matters. It was an agreement we would break, but at the time it seemed like an easy enough commitment.

An image of her kneading bread came to me. At the mere idea of it I smiled. The promise of a cozy little home on the frontier where no one cared who we are was my new goal. However, the image was soon shattered because next to the freshly baked bread there was a raw human heart.

The despair visibly washed over me. She noticed and stopped eating. "Ah, mon canard, don't be like that," she said and embraced me. "I was thinking in there today, that nothing we can do to change things, so we may as well enjoy ourselves, monsters or not."

That was a suspiciously upbeat thing to say. But Ma Bichette is a very different person than myself in many ways. "I suppose," I mumbled and she stood on her tiptoes and kissed me on my cheek. I do not know if I had mentioned it before, but she is a rather short woman. Alava would have to have quite a few alternations done on the gowns.

We waited until one am or so, then stole out into the night. One thing that you could not really understand is the level of darkness that existed, even in a good sized city, before the introduction of electricity or even gas lamps. At this late hour the city was cast into an inky darkness. Since it was the new moon only the stars glowed in the sky and most buildings were dark, save for the occasional yellow gleam from a window. The streets were fairly deserted, but just to be safe Ma Bichette wore a bonnet and tailed behind me so it wouldn't be obvious we were together.

She followed me to the Honore household. Not a smudge of light came from any of the windows and I relaxed somewhat. I stood across the street from the house and felt Ma Bichette touch me from behind. "Ready?"

I was not going to get more ready, at least. "Yes." With some degree of difficulty we managed to scale a large elm tree that grew along side the house, and with what we hoped was stealth stepped onto the roof. Knowing that underneath our feet slept Louisa, her parents, and her spinster sister Josephine, we trod as lightly as possible.

All the windows were tightly sealed, save for the hallway window, which was slightly ajar in order to air out the home. Since I was supposed to be at my own home we decided I could not risk being seen. So from that point forward the scheme was completely in Ma Bichette's hands, at least until the time to tear out Monsieur's Honore's heart came. I insisted on doing that myself. As I watched her hang off of the eave and gently pry the window open the bloodlust bubbled up in me again. I pressed my lips together and commanded myself to be patient.

Posing as a ghost, Ma Bichette would, either through words or bodily force, command Madame Honore to leave the room while she exacted her due vengeance. Then she would lock the bedroom door (we had discovered that our enchanted hands worked both ways), open the window, at which point I would enter and then use the dagger I had under my coat to tear out his heart.

Ma Bichette wanted him to die in terror, as she had, and she desired to look into his eyes as it happened. Obviously, it retrospect, it was not the best plan. Later, once we had honed our hunting skills, we would mirthfully reminisce on the stupidity of our amateurish first few hunts, but at the time our nerves were tightly drawn, or at least mine was.

A rider galloped by. I knew that we were very likely to draw attention and was scoping out the alleyways from the roof top when I heard a muffled scream from below me. A moment later a window was ripped open.

I hastened to the sound and was about to drop down when I heard Ma Bichette. "And, let no one disturb my revenge!" That was a phrase we had worked out, lest something go wrong. I held back.

"You! You!" yelled a voice I recognized as Louisa. "Were you not enough of a problem to me alive? Must you still plague me? And my poor father? Oh, Papa!"

"Get out of here!" Ma Bichette growled at Louisa. She had quite an aptitude for theatrics and was speaking in a gravely, ghostly meter. "I only want the life of my killer!"

"Spirit, I demand that you leave in the name of Christ!"

"No, you leave!" Ma Bichette spat at her. I caught a rise of panic in her voice.

I heard a male voice moan, then pounding on the door.

"You are no spirit! You are flesh" Louisa said, then I heard a clatter of metal and a gasp from Ma Bichette.

"Demon! Demon! Unholy beast!" Louisa screamed at the top of her voice. The pounding on the door grew frenzied. "Spare me! Spare me! I beg your forgiveness!"

Ma Bichette clearly had figured it out by this point. "Did you think I would not discover that you had done it? Did you think that the grave could stop me from letting your sins known?"

I never would have guessed that mousy, shy, pious Louisa had killed Ma Bichette. For someone who clothed themselves in the shroud of piety, forgiveness, and love she certainly had no reservations about killing a woman, someone who's only crime was that I loved her more. I was rather naïve then, more than happy to take people at face value. Since I was a lawyer I was aware that such things happened, although this was my first real encounter with duplicity in my personal life. I was too shocked to move. Dumbly, I listened to the drama unfolding beneath me.

Ma Bichette was a bit quicker on the uptake than I was. "Confess it! Confess to Rémi what happened!" Why she was saying this I hadn't a clue. Oh, I should have mentioned before that my name is Rémi, although I could not fathom why in the hell Ma Bichette wanted Louisa to tell me this later since I was obviously listening now. The simplicity of our murder plot had been twisted and mangled and I no longer had control over the situation. "Do this and I will spare you!"

"Yes, yes, I will," Louisa agreed.

"Leave!" Ma Bichette ordered, her imperious tone squelching her scary voice. "Leave this house!"

A thundering of footsteps later I heard Louisa shout- "The door, you have sealed it with your evil magic! Release me!"

"I think it would be easier to kill you!" Ma Bichette hurled at her. The rage in her voice was remarkable, I had never heard anything like it from her. "You stole my life from me!"

Louisa plead. "Everything would just be easier if you were dead!" At that lame excuse I was prodded out of my shocked state. Louisa's selfishness sickened me. It was one thing to be disgusted with your fiancé's mistress, it was quite another to decide that her life was something you could take just because you wanted the problem gone.

"That is not the truth and you know it!" Ma Bichette has an intuitive grip of when people were being deceitful. "You must reveal all, before me and the Lord, Louisa, or you will never be forgiven!" She is also a master manipulator.

"Please! Please! Release this door!" Louisa yelled over the faint and frantic cries of Josephine in the hallway.

"All of it!" Ma Bichette demanded. "Confess! Be forgiven!"

"You had bewitched Rémi, you! A filthy whore and an unworthy negress! You would never let him marry me! Father told me that Rémi had finally told him that he would not marry me, that he would rather live his life in sin with you! The shame of it! To be rejected in favor of a whore!"

"Call me a whore again and I will run this blade through you!" Ma Bichette's anger was at a boiling point.

"Forgive me!"

"Keep talking!"

"The night before I snuck into your house and poisoned your eau de toilette. But it didn't work the way it should have, it wasn't enough or something. I had my maid enquire your cook about your health when they were at the market together. You were only ill, and it was supposed to kill you immediately. I was not going to try that again, I knew I must be more direct. I disguised myself as a boy and I snuck in into your house. It was easy, you were weak, it was dark in your room." Louisa said all of this very quickly.

My imagining of her murder was rapidly altered. Instead of a massive man looming over her instead I saw Louisa's figure, not too much larger then Ma Bichette's slender frame, effortlessly choking her with one hand and holding a towel against her face with the other. I tried to come to grips with Louisa's claim to love me and then her actions which ultimately have caused me so much pain. I never gave the pain I bestowed to Louisa much thought, granted, but what I did was nothing compared to what she had done to me.

Now, with the benefit of centuries of consideration, I know realize that all of this heartache and damnation was caused because I was too much of a coward to tell Louisa it was over. All of this was over me, a foolish and spoiled young man who preferred to while away his existence hiding with his mistress than to man up and end my relationship with a woman who was hopelessly in love with me and ultimately harbored a fatal obsession. Regret over his has long since been replaced with self-loathing. I do not contend that fate has been fair to me. But it has been most unfair to my dear little doe. I had condemned her right along side me, again not taking any one else's feelings into consideration. I still sharply feel regret for that.

"You motherless whore," Ma Bichette said to Louisa after her confession. "You damnable bitch, you soulless killer," she cursed her. "Did it never occur to you that Rémi would have been a terrible husband after that? If you only knew, if you-" Ma Bichette stopped talking, lest she reveal too much of exactly what a horrible husband I would be as an undead ghoul.

"My love could have helped him recover completely!" Why on Earth Louisa was so madly in love with me I had no idea. I had been nothing but rude to her in the past year or so, and even in our salad days our relationship had been nothing more than polite and silted conversation. How could she be reticent enough to shy away from a kiss from the man she was to marry, yet bold enough to commit a murder? After two hundred years I am nowhere close to understanding women.

"Rémi doesn't love you! He loves me! Only me!" Ma Bichette shrieked. All this fuss over me. I honestly do not see it, but then again I am not into men. I wanted to drop in to the room and finally tell Louisa that yes, I only love Ma Bichette. But of course I was too yellow.

I heard the door being wretched open violently. "Run! Fetch a priest because your father will need his last rites!" Ma Bichette yelled at Louisa as she chucked her over the threshold. I climbed in through the window the moment I heard the solid oak door slam shut.

Ma Bichette turned to look at me, rolling her eyes in annoyance. I immediately saw what had terrified Louisa so much. Louisa had ran Ma Bichette clean through her stomach with Monsieur Honore's saber. Several inches of the tip extended out her back. Speaking of Monsieur Honore, he lay on his bed, breathing heavily.

"Does that hurt?" I asked.

She shrugged. "It hurt going in, but now it doesn't." She gestured to Monsieur Honore. "Well, get on with it."

"But he didn't do it," I said. My blood lust had been slacken by the resolution of the murder mystery.

"He knows too much now," she said and grasped the handle of the saber. "He's going to die anyway, seeing me gave him a fit of some kind." She pulled the saber out and gasped.

She gasped because the way our bodies heal is rather unique. When there is damage of any sort it is instantly healed. For example, should you try to behead me, by the time the blade completely passed through my neck the location of the entry would be completely healed. But for the moment that the trauma is happening we feel it. Physical pleasure works rather the same way, but it really is not so much of a change from the mortal perception. I only feel her touch (or the touches of other women, yes, surprise surprise, throughout the decades of break-ups and reunions I have been involved with other women) when I am touched. La petite mort has suffered for it though, it's duration cut in half at best.

I regarded Monsieur Honore. He was in a bad way, indeed. The shock of seeing a "ghost" had been too much for him. No longer conscious, his irregular breathing would be troublesome if we had planned on keeping him alive. At first I was hesitant, but then a hunger for flesh was awoken in me. He had given me such a condescending lecture, and, after all, he had raised a murderer...I pulled out my dagger.

"Where is Madame Honore?"

Ma Bichette was examining her stomach in wonder. There was a hole in the fabric yet her skin was unblemished. "Not here." Later we would find out that she had gone to her son's home to tend to him in illness. Apparently Louisa had tested out the poison on him first. Louisa had terrible luck with the poison and had not managed to kill anyone with it. "I woke him up and he just dropped. Louisa must have heard me or something, because she was right behind me when I came in here."

I braced myself. Of course I had never done anything like this before. My hand shook as I held the knife against his neck.

"Hurry," Ma Bichette said. "Mon canard, please hurry."

Her sweet voice provided me with just enough encouragement to follow through. I quickly slashed the old man throat, and once he had stopped bleeding profusely I figured he was good and dead.

The unpleasant scene distressed Ma Bichette some and she pointedly avoided me while I went through the almost comical motions to extract the heart. Today I can do it with better than surgical precession and in less than a minute. The trick is to cut directly below the sternum and fish it out from below with a powerful grip, deftly avoiding the lungs and other viscera. But even if I had had experience in the field of murder it was unlikely that I would have with heart extraction, so that night I blindly tried to hack, then pry, my way through the rib cage.

Once I finally had gotten the bulk of it out it was pretty mangled. I was saturated in blood as I turned to Ma Bichette. "Bon appitite." I held out her share.

She stared, wide eyed, at the organ as I pushed it into her hands. It was odd. She had been so confident in dealing with Louisa, but for some reason holding a human heart caused her to blanche. Women. Her face was fraught with trepidation as she beheld me devour it.

"What does it taste like?" she asked after I gobbled it down.

I wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve, violating one of the first maxims of etiquette I had been taught. Murder, cannibalism, spitting in the face of God Himself, breaches of basic decorum; I was breaking all the rules tonight. "Not terrible. Gamey."

Ma Bichette sniffed the heart. Then she held it to her mouth and looked directly at me. Her tongue darted out and licked it.

"Didn't you say we should hurry?" I picked my dagger up and wiped it off on the sheets. Nowadays I must be much more careful about leaving behind evidence, but short of leaving a signed confession there isn't much they could do back then.

She glanced towards the door she had locked. Then, steeling herself, she jammed the heart in her mouth and furiously chewed at it. They don't taste horrible, not like, say, brains do (no, I have not eaten human brains, technical zombie that I may be, but before the days of supermarkets yes, people used to eat all kinds of terrible things). It's a big muscle, really, and the most unpleasant part is the thick and chewy valves. Cooked it tastes much better, and should you be interested I can list some recipes in the follow up volumes.

Her perfect lips dripped blood. I would taste blood on them ever after, even when she hasn't feasted. Not that I am complaining. After all, I am a blood craving monster. She managed to form a smile. "Now, that wasn't too bad."

We slipped back out the window, this time simply dropping to the ground. She rolled gracefully but I had a brief jolt of pain in my ankle when I landed. We briskly walked home. I was glad that the night would hide the blood that drenched my clothes.

"Why did you ask Louisa confess to me?" I asked in a hushed whisper as we strode through an alley.

"She's your fiancé, she's your problem," Ma Bichette answered, a joke of which I was the butt of twinkling in her eyes. This was the beginning of her payback for not being consulted on her immortality. "After all, I am dead. You can devote all of your attention to her now."

"What would you have me do?"

"Oh, you seem good enough at making your own decisions." She squeezed my hand. "I did just not want to kill her, you know. That is too easy. Likely she would not go directly to Hell, because she is clearly mad with jealousy. No, I think that should she live and be forced to be judged by her own world, that would be fitting."

"She might find sympathy," I pointed out.

Ma Bichette laughed. Her sense of humor had been summoned back from the other world as well. "Possibly. But she will never find a husband. Who wants a wife who will kill your mistress?" She chuckled darkly. "It is so important to her to be married, I think, just like it is for all of them. Not to puncture your ego, but it was not you Louisa is in love with but the idea of marriage and children and all the nonsense that goes with it."

"And yourself? What idea are you in love with?"

"Just you."

I felt immensely gratified and for a moment all my worry dissipated. I put my arm around her waist, despite the risk that we may be seen. "So what shall we do about her?"

"You, mon canard, not me."

I wanted to punish Louisa. Simply killing and eating part of her father wasn't enough, she'd get over that because apparently she was a remorseless lunatic. But she cared for her own well-being, and Ma Bichette had promised her forgiveness only if she confessed to me. A devious idea came to me.

"Nothing. I will not even hear her out. Nor will I see her. I must see Alava tomorrow, but as for Louisa, she can spend the rest of her days searching for penance. I will not grant it to her."

Chapter Five

Ma Bichette and I crept towards our bedroom in the darkness of the house. The coffin was still where it was left. Everything had worked out. I opened the door, intending to change out of my bloody outfit.

"Well, now what have we got here?" said a voice in the darkness.

Ma Bichette yelped and then covered her mouth. I should have known better, really, than to try and deceive Father. I sighed.

"Bricks." He said this casually and then turned up the wick on the oil lamp on the table he was sitting next to. He coolly took in my blood stained appearance and my resurrected love.

"Mademoiselle, it is a pleasure to finally see you in the flesh," Father continued, seemingly unfazed. "I took to wondering, what sort of beauty had tortured my son so? So I snuck a peek after I had retired. I see now that his infatuation was not undue."

"I can explain," I said. I couldn't really, at least not without lying, but I was mighty sick of lying.

"Mon canard, you cannot-"

"Silence yourself," Father barked. "You have already gotten my son in enough trouble."

"I have done no such thing!" she protested. She was not used to being treated like an inferior, which unfortunately was the way that Father treated people of color. "Your son, he has done all of these things himself."

"Silence yourself," he said again. He looked to me. "What sort of trouble did you get yourself into? What sort of insanity has befallen you? I cannot, for the life of me, understand what is going on here, and I will not be deceived any further."

"For the life of you!" Ma Bichette shouted from behind me. "That is what it will cost you, old man, if you keep demanding things which are not yours."

"Control your pet, Rémi, or I will. Now tell me, what in the name of God have you been up to tonight."

It all came out of me before Ma Bichette could stop me. She glowered at Father with distaste from behind me, narrowing her beautiful brown eyes at him as I covered the whole unlikely ordeal. Father's face never once registered shock or surprise, even when I ended the tale with the story of what had transpired at the Honore household. What can I say? My options were to either kill Father or tell him the truth, and had previously mentioned, I did want to tell someone.

"Right." He stood up and addressed Ma Bichette. "You there, you seem clever enough. Is this a shared delusion or are you just going along for the ride?"

Ma Bichette tossed her head at him. She stepped to the front of me, opened my jacket, and slipped my dagger out of it's sheath. "It will only hurt for a second, mon canard," she murmured, then plunged the blade into my chest.

I tried to be a man about it and made little to no sound. Father, however, finally shed his cool indifference. He leapt up and violently tore Ma Bichette from me. "You're mad, the both of you!" He threw Ma Bichette on the bed, where she rolled a few feet and sat up.

"Come on, mon canard, just show him, alright?" she said to me.

Father turned his attention to me. Since I was doused in the blood of Monsieur Honore it was not apparent that I was unharmed. "Father, look, I am perfectly alright," I said quickly, lest he advance on Ma Bichette. There, of course, was nothing he could do to her, but I did not like to see her in any sort of distress. I quickly pulled off my jacket and then unbuttoned my shirt and opened it, tearing the fabric on the knife still caught in my flesh.

"Nonsense, that's impossible!"

The brief pain had long since faded and I felt just dandy, physically at least. I yanked the dagger out and made an effort not to gasp, instead gritting my teeth. "See Father? Nothing." I wiped my skin with the shirt the best I could.

Father forgot about Ma Bichette and approached me. "It's a trick, a false blade, a slight of hand-"

"We could do this all night, we could go and get knives from the kitchen and the neighbors and pistols and, oh, whatever you'd like, Father." I gave the knife to him. "Inspect it. It is real."

He dully inspected the blade. "It is impossible. This is impossible. All of this." He shook his head. "No. I do not believe it."

"Your opinion doesn't matter," Ma Bichette shot from the bed. She and Father had gotten off on a bad foot. "Believe whatever you want, it won't change the fact it's true."

Father ran his finger over the blade several times. "What have you done?" he asked me softly, terror dawning in his eyes.

"He just told you," Ma Bichette chirped from the bed. She rolled off the bed and went to my wardrobe.

"I couldn't not do something," I answered Father, ignoring Ma Bichette's unpleasant attitude towards him. "I can't just concede to a fate I don't want. Now, I will make my own."

"You've become a murderer! How can you say that you've mastered your own fate! You are now controlled by evil! You killed an innocent man!" Father reasoned. He had a point, although I wouldn't agree with him completely.

"Life wasn't fair to me or to her, there's no reason why anyone else should except different," I quickly replied. I had been thinking about that on the walk home. Life was not fair, and I refused to follow it's rules anymore. Having eaten that heart changed me in a way. My natural softness and affinity towards non-violent resolutions had been blasted away by such an act. No longer could I pretend that I was a genteel academic. I crave the blood and flesh of mankind, and that isn't something that can be reconciled with humanist philosophies and dew-eyed idealism. Not that I don't believe these things don't have their place in society anymore, but I can not retain those paradigms. It would make me world class hypocrite.

My glib statement relieved Father not one iota. He gaped at me. His staring was making me uncomfortable. I felt like a butterfly pinned under glass. My eyes darted away and I gazed at her. She was idly taking off her dressing gown and pulling on a nightgown.

"Now, listen here, Old Master Toupinier," Ma Bichette began as she wiggled her divine body into the nightgown. At some point along the line she had completely exhausted modesty and had no reservations about changing with Father in the room. "He is right, it isn't fair. But I haven't got a choice now, have I? And you've got even less of a choice. The choices that I suggest you make is that you turn your buckra self around, go back out that door, forget that you sneaked a peak at my brick body, forget that you discovered our horrible little secret, and that you go back home."

Maybe it was a good thing that Ma Bichette and I could never marry because she and Father never would have gotten along. Her tone, rich in disrespect, archaic slurs for white people, and her typical haughty rejection of authority (oh, how the rebel in me loved her so) stirred Father into action. "How dare you speak to me like that?" Father angrily said to her.

"Papa," I said and pulled him out into the hallway before Ma Bichette could escalate the drama further, "what do you want? This is what happened-"

"No!" Father pulled my hand off of his shoulder. "It didn't just happen, you decided to do this! You chose this! You bring shame to me and to your mother!"

I glowered at him. "Oh, how would you know? She's been dead for twenty-five years. Not like the opinion of a woman ever mattered to you anyway." I want to believe that if Mother had been all the things Father had claimed her to be she would have understood. Father was right, of course, but even more obviously I did not want to hear it.

Father hadn't laid a finger on me since I was about nine or so, thus my surprise as he clocked me square in the jaw. "You'll keep your mouth shut about your mother!"

The brief pain was nothing compared to my shock. "Did you just hit me?" It was a solid punch, I honestly didn't know the sixty-year old man still had it in him. I was a touch impressed.

Father started down the stairs. "You're weak, Rémi, you always have been. You are weak in spirit and in flesh! I always knew you would come to a bad end, but I hoped it wasn't true!"

"How you do run on," I said, rubbing where he had struck me. "I have sacrificed upon the altar of love and you treat me like I'm Gille de Rais."

"That! That is exactly what I mean!" Father tore through the hall closet, searching for his coat. "You are a soft creature, your heart so fragile it can be corrupted by any harlot which has designs on you!"

"You will not call her that!" I yelled from the balcony.

"Never darken my door again!" Father yelled as he slammed the door behind him.

Ma Bichette cautiously opened the bedroom door. "Are you all right?"

How could I be? I turned towards her slowly. "Yes."

She smiled at me sadly. "You do not need to lie to me, mon canard."

"It will be all right." That had become my mantra.

She took my hand gently and pulled me back into the bedroom. "Come and sleep, you'll feel better. You're tired, we both are." I must have looked more despondent than usual.

"I can't, I need prepare the paperwork." Alava was due to come in a few hours. I had nearly forgotten my deal with her in the hustle and bustle of the last day.

She made some light disparaging noises. "You are just covered in blood, at least take that off."

I sat down on the bed and started to undress. Ma Bichette busied herself by searching for the little metal box in which I kept all important papers, deeds included. "You know, I was thinking, there really is no ceiling to this. We do not really have to hide, no one can stop us, no one can kill us," she said and she slipped my shirt off.

"You have got to be joking," I answered. My incredulous concern at her suggestion was never to slacken. Even now sometimes she brings it up. "That is the last thing we would want, having everyone know what we are."

"Why?" she pointedly asked. "Why hide it? We cannot change anything now. Why not live like gods?"

I turned to stare at her. "Because..." I was at a loss for words. Of all of the reasons why not, the first and foremost in my mind was what Father had delineated for me. I had made the choice to be a monster, and while nowadays that would be quite hep, two-hundred years ago it was not the sort of things that got you invited to nice diner parties. Of course, I would no longer be invited to them in New Orleans anyway, but I held out hope that eventually I may begin to reintroduce myself to society, if for no other reason than to make hunting my unworthy prey easier. Secondly, it certainly would make it harder to function in day to day affairs if everyone knew we were damnable ghouls. I honestly feel I don't need to list all of the ways that our curse should be kept secret.

"Why though?" she smiled with her thoughts of domination over her supposed superiors. "No longer would I have to step aside for them, no more waiting until everyone else has been helped," she clasped my hands in excitement. "Let's stay here, mon canard, and tell them all what happened. And then let's get married! Let's see them try to stop us!"

The enthusiasm in her voice was hard to say no to, but I suppose I must begin somewhere. "Ma Bichette, that really is not the best idea. Alava might not be happy, for one, and she could probably destroy us if she wanted. Imagine if everyone found out that it was possible? After a while everyone would be like us or eaten. And hunting won't be easy if people are barring their windows."

Her smile fell. "Yes, I suppose," she admitted. She has never been as discrete as I am with her hunting. I think a part of her wants to get caught just so that she can lord her superior traits over the common folk, but out of respect for me she does not come out and expose herself to the world.

I took my pants off and went to the bath room to wipe the blood off. When I came back to bed Ma Bichette had my lap desk waiting for me. Oh, writing used to be a sheer ordeal. Fountain pens and dip pens wouldn't be available for a while yet so I still used a quill pen. As opposed to having a pen you had the pen and all the accessories that went with it-an ink bottle, blotting powder and little sharpening tools for the quill itself. The act of writing was much more annoying, since the ink would only flow out of the quill in a certain way and you had to take care not to make any abrupt movements. You are all spoiled, with your cheap ballpoint pens and keyboards and texting. I say this without jealousy but with the desire to educate-everything, from writing to lighting a cigar (remember, the humble match had yet to be invented in 1811) to major things like transportation and agriculture, was much more difficult than it is today. Just the effort required to make white sugar is monumental. White sugar used to be a luxury, which is why back so few people were land whales. You didn't just put it in everything, you savored the infrequency of which you used it. I had plenty of it, of course, to put in my coffee and make cakes with, but most people used it sparingly.

The reason I am going off on this little tangent here is to remind you that probably everything within your immediate radius is an unimaginable luxury to the general populace of two centuries ago. Eating meat every day or most days was hallmark of the upper class. Books and newspapers were expensive since paper itself was expensive, not to mention some poor bastard had to line up the letters by hand. Glass was hand blown and very difficult to get perfectly flat, and as such our window panes were a bit bumpy. For goodness sake, I rode a damn horse not because I was a horse hobbyist, like so many people are today, but because that was how you got around. You had this massive beast which had to be fed and watered and brushed down and shit everywhere and oh yes, it might just decide to die of disease or infection or it might die because God only knows why. Why in the name of all that is holy and unholy would people still want to muck about with these unpleasant things when someone has gone through all the trouble of making a car I can't fathom. You cannot imagine the inconvenience in which we led our lives, but to us? It was normal. God forbid I had been a woman, the clothing alone would have been enough to drive me to murder.

Although Ma Bichette was functionally illiterate (she is not now, of course, and should you suggest such a thing to her she will rip your heart out even if it isn't either of her times of her month) she was trying to learn, but legal documents are not really the best place to begin. She had a slate upon which she'd practice copying out whatever it was I was writing, so instead of the simple sentences about dogs running or cats eating or whatever simple sentences that lend themselves to learning, she practiced forming letters with phrases such 'force majeure' and 'travaux préparatoires'. Tonight was no exception and while I sat up in bed, carefully wording out my part of the arrangement, she sat next to me and studiously practiced her words, occasionally interrupting me to ask on the specification of pronunciation or some such. This little ritual served to calm her and brushed her vengeful thoughts of domination away.

I had a fitful sleep that night since I was expecting Alava and her lawyer to come in a few hours. Ma Bichette slept well though, her perfect little body curled against mine the whole time. Things were beginning to settle back into normal. This was to be last night we slept in this room, however, since as soon as my business was concluded with Alava we would leave. I wanted to hold on to those hours of peace for as long as I could. I shut my eyes tight and squeezed Ma Bichette and spent all my mental energy committing that sensation to memory. This is why I had done it, I told myself and soaked up her warmth and smell and the slight movement of her breathing. No matter what would and could ever happen, I would have that memory which I could take out and huddle around for warmth.

About half an hour before dawn I heard the stirring of the city. It was a sound that I rarely heard as I tended to sleep late. I was about to wake Ma Bichette when she awoke herself. She sleepily turned to me and opened her mouth to say something, but what it was replaced by the pounding of the front door. Since I had freed the servants yesterday there was no one to answer it.

Ma Bichette leapt out of bed and peered out the window, quickly followed by me. The predawn glow gave a silhouette of young lady in a nightgown. "Rémi! Rémi! Rémi!" she screamed as she pounded. "I must talk to you!"

I had supposed it was her anyway. I didn't expect Alava to make her entrance via something as mundane as a door. I laid back in bed. Let her make a spectacle of herself in front of the neighborhood. Maybe it would give all the busybodies something to talk about other than me.

Ma Bichette continued to observe her though, taking care to keep hidden behind the curtain. "She's frantic," she said with joy in her voice. "Oh, she believed me! I was worried she wouldn't."

"Yes, well you did sort of eviscerate her father now, didn't you?"

Ma Bichette shot me a look. "Who did what now?"

"Ma bichette, you are the horrible vengeful ghost. I've been here in bed all night. Grieving."

She threw a pillow at me. "You are horrible," she said with a smile. "Look at you, ignoring your fiancé when she is in such dire straits."

I am sure I had some snarky little remark to give in return, but at that moment a rather heavy rock was thrown through my bedroom window, nearly hitting Ma Bichette. "Rémi!" Louisa shouted again and again from the street.

"Looks like you made her crazy," I mumbled as I sat up. May as well get dressed, Alava would be there before too long.

"I think she was already crazy," Ma Bichette said over the increasingly high pitched yells from Louisa. "Good thing you found out about this before the wedding." She dressed in what I had bought from Bess.

"Rémi! It killed Father! It's coming for you!"

"Now, I don't think she listened to me at all. Why would I kill you? I haven't got anything against you," Ma Bichette mused. "What did you like about her again?"

"Oh, come on, give her a break, you've clearly scared the daylights out of her."

Another rock sailed through the window and broke a mirror. Alava was not going to be pleased about that. Oh that's another thing, mirrors were ridiculously expensive. I bought Ma Bichette a little pocket mirror in a case with her initials engraved on it for her birthday some two-hundred years ago and I was gratified last time I saw her to see that she still uses it.

"Maybe you'd better do something. Isn't Alava coming by soon?"

I shrugged. "Let her scream all she wants. I am sure Alava can get in here if she wants without using the front door."

"Indeed I can," Alava answered from behind me.

Just amazing. The bedroom door didn't even open. "Uh, welcome," I managed to stammer out.

She nodded at Ma Bichette and I. "Since I've already seen both of your unmentionables I decided that there wasn't any more harm that could be done by coming right into your bedroom." Alava almost seemed disappointed that we had dressed. Oh, I do not mean in a sexual way, I think she just would have enjoying catching us off guard. "My lawyer is waiting downstairs though, of course."

"I will pack some things," Ma Bichette said. "No clothes though."

Alava eyed her. "Well you can keep what you are wearing. And what is that racket? Obviously she wants to talk to you. Go down there and shut her up, it's much to early to listen to this."

"Uh, well, it's complicated," I started to explain but I suddenly heard Alava in my head again.

I just looked at your memories, it's quicker than you explaining, she thought at me. Very well then, it's your choice. So you shouldn't have a problem with this. Alava took out a small polished stone from a roughly sewn reticule, rubbed it on the back of her hand in a counter clockwise motion several times. Louisa suddenly stopped squealing.

The little rock in Alava's fingers shimmered for a moment, then she noticed me watching her and placed it against her neck. "Oh, how could you, mon chéri, how could you go to that nasty old witch?" Alava said in Louisa's voice. It was startling, to say the least.

Ma Bichette grinned at my discomfort. "Wonderful!" she commented in a low voice, less anyone hear her now that Louisa could not drown her out.

Alava tossed it at her. "Keep it. I've got dozens."

Oh, the fun Ma Bichette would have with that in the decades to come. For years it hilarious to her to press it against her neck and proposition me in terms so vulgar I cannot bring myself to repeat them. She got quite the thrill out of debasing her rival like that, but after the first hundred times it got annoying.

Downstairs her lawyer was waiting at the dining table. His Acadian accent was thick and quite the contrast to my and Ma Bichette's humid drawl. I wondered exactly who he was. Was he like us? He must have been in the know to some degree since he had relatively few questions as he reviewed my documents. Several signatures later I was officially homeless and debt free.

"It was a pleasure," Alava said after her lawyer handed her the papers. "I want to move in today. When are you leaving?"

"As soon as she's done packing." I was going to miss my home, where I had spent what was undoubtedly the happiest year of my nearly two hundred and twenty seven. It still stands, although I believe there has been some flood damage. It was even on the market not too long ago and for a wild moment I thought about buying it back. But that was a pipe dream. I could never have any of that back. Louisa may have killed Ma Bichette and set all of these things into motion, but I was accountable for this catastrophe in a lesser capacity. I've ruminated upon it earlier, but choices I had made had led to this. Ma Bichette had been the only innocent party in this whole tragic affair, a fact that would be pointed out to me time and time again by her.

However, that would all be hashed out later.

At that moment the only thing we had to put a damper on our spirits was the gruesome business of, well, you're well aware. We had each other, we had forever, we had perfect invulnerable bodies. We assumed that that would be enough to sate us forever. But forever is a very long time.
Epilogue

After I finished writing the bulk of this I decided I should go and visit her. The last time I had seen her we saw Jurassic Park in the theater, so it has been some time, at least fifteen years. Although honestly, after so long, the years and months just sort of meld together into a tangled knot of memories and one of the most reliable ways I have of recalling when an event had taken place is what I was watching or listening to at the time.

She is in Boston now, making cakes and something she informs me are designer cupcakes. It's some moronic fad, I am sure, but I had spent a week sequestered in my darkened home, typing this out, so I resolved to rebuild that repeatedly burned bridge. I miss her. Plain as day I do. She has made it abundantly apparent that she is a bossy, self-absorbed, bitter woman, but God help me after ten years or so I really do start to miss her.

Her shop, for lack of a better word, was colorful. It must have been the time of day when everyone decides they need cupcakes because I waited patiently in the back of the store while she rang up oodles of the overpriced little treats. Her Creole accent isn't gone, it's just hidden. There are no malapropisms in her speech, just a voice as sweet as the garish frosting, chirpily helping customers. Her hair was swept up into a retro-elegant nest of curls, cemented with what I assumed to be a metric ton of hairspray. She wore a dark green sleeveless shirt and a heart shaped pendant swung tantalizingly over her breasts.

The last customer had left and she smiled at me. "I did not expect you to take me up on my offer to visit."

"Are you upset?" I asked her.

"If I was I wouldn't be smiling, now would I?"

I laughed. "Yes, yes you would."

She stopped smiling. "Ah, mon canard, do not be like that." This was the point in our reconciliation where she became sentimental. "How about we make it work this time?"

"Ma bichette, we have had ages to try. I just do not believe it ever will," I said, playing my part quite well, because if I didn't resist there would be no satisfaction on her part when I eventually capitulate and agree to try again. And then comes the inevitability of the break-up. It could be one week from now or several decades. But it will come again, and I have as much faith in that as I have in the conviction that one of us will come crawling back to the other.

She reached into the glass counter and picked out a cupcake. "I tried this recipe out when I invited you."

"I thought you thought I wasn't going to come." I approached the counter.

She shrugged. "True. But after all, I need to come up with new recipes. It's pineapple."

Her eyes studied me so of course I had to eat it. "Hmm," I said after I finished, "it's, unusual."

Her beautiful smile lit up her face again. That was it, I know that that's it, that's my reward for all of this nonsense. "It's awful, it's not a good flavor for cake." She took my hand in hers. "Tell you what, how about here in three weeks I fix you up a special cupcake, alright? Will you stay that long at least?"

Of course I did. I showed her all of this, everything I wrote, and she was rather flattered to say the least. If nothing we are completely honest with each other. She wants my attention now, so I must leave the glowing light of laptop and the silent living room (so much more comfortable than the parlor) and go and see what she needs from me now.

For more information about the author and upcoming releases, please visit wordswithdani.com. She's always glad to hear what people think. Thank you for reading!

Stay tuned for Volume Two.

