Phantom of the French Quarter. Colleen Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ as much as any of her fellow theater students, imagined them the garments of a dark witch…or an Old World sorceress.

      “You should have heard the shrieking,” Caitlyn went on. “She said she’ll file a complaint with the police if I don’t return the ring by noon today. Swore she’ll have my license pulled and I’ll lose everything I’ve worked for…everything Jacinth and I are turning ourselves inside out to try to—”

      With the fog lifting, she saw the roll of Reuben’s eyes and heard his scoffing laughter.

      “Come on, kiddo. Calm down. First of all, what kind of idiot wears a rock the size of a pigeon’s egg around the Quarter after dark? Even a tourist should know better. And who’s gonna honestly believe you could somehow manage to slip that ring right off her bony finger without her noticing and screaming bloody murder?”

      “Josiah Paine, that’s who.” Caitlyn grew morose, thinking of her former boss, the man who’d taken a chance on hiring her not long after she and her sister had come to New Orleans to settle their grandmother’s estate. They hadn’t planned on staying in the city their mother had refused to speak of, the city where their father had been murdered when Caitlyn was an infant. Nor had the sisters planned on falling in love with the crumbling Esplanade Avenue mansion they’d inherited, or the decaying, magnolia-scented tales of a place that all too quickly felt like home.

      “Or at least he’ll pretend he buys it,” she grumbled, “so he can scare off every potential customer in earshot.”

      “Paine can be a pain, all right.” Reuben gave a shrug. “But the more he trash-talks your business, the more free advertising the fool’s giving you. I’ve told him as much myself.”

      “I’d rather find the ring than test your theory.” Caitlyn poked among the weeds screening a stone obelisk, her mood darkening with the memory of the night her former boss had erupted, accusing her of holding back tip money, which he claimed as his due.

      She’d grown used to his moods, his tendency toward pitting the employees against one another, even his shouting, but that night he had laid hands on her, slamming her so hard against a wall that she’d found bruises later. Embarrassed that she’d put up with his abuse for so long, she’d told no one, instead walking out and putting the whole sordid episode behind her.

      And savoring the sweet revenge of seeing her dramatic delivery and winning people skills earn her the sort of word of mouth his cowed and miserable employees never could. Though she still couldn’t afford an office of her own, she was booking more and more business using her home phone and computer.

      Caitlyn moved along the row of tombs, weathered structures built in deference to the high water table’s alarming tendency to float coffins to the surface. Some of the houselike vaults, mausoleums and monuments were more recent, clearly well tended, while others tilted, crumbling within the confines of fenced familial plots. Losing sight of Reuben, she followed the route she had taken last night, the pathway leading to the cemetery’s oldest section.

      So intent was she on her search that she never noticed how the chorus of morning birds fell silent. Nor did she pay any heed to the fiery disk of the sun climbing above the bruised horizon.

      Half-hidden by another spray of weeds, she caught the bloody wink of a ruby flanked by a pair of teardrop diamonds. Her heart leaping with joy and relief, she opened her mouth to call to Reuben.

      And that was when she noticed that the ring adorned a finger. A finger on a hand so pale, it might have been chiseled out of marble.

      A hand connected to the outstretched arm of a young woman lying on her side behind a tombstone, her features set and rigid, her long blond hair fanned out…

      And her green eyes looking like those that stared back at Caitlyn from her mirror every morning.

      Except that these were glassy, hollow, as dead as the girl who lay there and said nothing, though her open mouth, obscenely rimmed in still-moist red lipstick, remained forever frozen in a hell-born silent scream.

      MARCUS LE CARPENTIER HAD HER in his sights. So ethereal, so fragile, she looked as though she might crumble into dust with the weight of the slivered sunbeam that pierced the fog layers like the devil’s darning needle.

      Like the light, his caress came from a distance, focused by a lens that captured the rising bands of moisture, the single, slanting ray and the wings of the stone angel atop the mossy tomb. He blew back thick dark hair from darker eyes, his skin tightening with delicious anticipation.

      When he saw this dawn angel, Isaiah would be so pleased, but it was nothing compared to the pleasure Marcus himself was deriving from this moment.

      Moving the tip of one long finger atop the shutter button, he held his breath and framed the ethereal light, the mist, the haunting artwork he had come so very far and through so very much to—

      A gasp caught his attention a split second before something struck him from behind, hard enough to send both his four-thousand-dollar camera and its case flying. As he fell, Marcus instinctively grabbed for the one indispensable, irreplaceable item he had left to his name.

      It hit the hard stone corner of a raised vault with a splintering noise before bouncing off and striking the bricked surface below.

      “No!” he shouted, as he fell down on hands and knees.

      Adrenaline pounding through him, he leapt panting to his feet, his fists already rising to ward off another attack.

      The blonde who’d fallen into him scrambled out of reach, an instant before a piercing scream erupted from her rounded mouth, quickly drawing a brute with a graying buzz cut and blood in his eyes.

      “What did you do to her?” The huge man stepped from the mist to move in on him, his own fists raised like a prizefighter’s.

      Marcus stood his ground, an eerie calm icing his voice. “To her? Let’s talk about what she did to my camera, plowing into me like that.”

      Though he towered over Marcus’s six feet, the man with the buzzed hair stopped short, studying his younger, lighter adversary. With the force of a stare that made most fights unnecessary, Marcus kept the human pit bull at bay.

      Meanwhile, the young woman, no older than her early twenties, finally found her voice. “Not him, Reuben. It’s the—she’s dead!”

      Both men followed her pointing finger toward a body. A body even paler than the terrified blonde who had destroyed his camera.

      In every other respect, they looked virtually identical. Beautiful, with rivers of hair like summer moonlight and rounded eyes green as the bayou.

      Except that one was still as stone, with her mouth agape and a lurid line of color bruising her alabaster neck.

      “Holy hell.” Reuben jerked a cell phone from his rumpled jacket. “Who is—she looks almost like—”

      “Like me, I know.” Terror pinched the living woman’s voice.

      Marcus knelt beside the crumpled female, his hand reaching to confirm what his eyes already knew. The skin of her wrist was cool and unyielding, as well as pulseless. Along the underside of her bare outstretched arm—her top was sleeveless, and ink-black to match her short skirt—he focused on the line of livid purple, then the bruising on her neck. The splash of blood at the hollow of her СКАЧАТЬ