The Quarter had settled into that normal hush that follows last call—not silence, exactly, but a careful, exhausted quiet. Distant jazz bled from a few open doorways; heels clicked once or twice on wet cobbles. Laughter flared and faded like a match.
The night had its usual perfume. The stench of pricy bourbon, cheap beer and cigarette smoke, the sweet rot of heat-soured garbage, and beneath it all the river’s green breath, carrying silt and secrets from places I’d never been.
That’s when I caught the other smell.
Faint at first, almost politely tucked beneath the city’s usual musk—a wild note, sharp and animal, out of place on a human street. The hairs on my arms lifted. A bone-deep warning tugged at me, the way a mother might take a child’s hand before crossing.
The footsteps began a block later. They matched my pace with unnerving precision—an old-fashioned courtesy, almost. When I quickened, they obliged. When I slowed, they kindly adjusted. Not the hard click of dress shoes nor the soft hush of sneakers—bare, callused, wholly unconcerned with what a city scatters underfoot.
My hand closed around the pepper spray on my keychain—slipped into my purse by an ER nurse who had her own opinions about my "accidents"—and even as my fingers curled around it, I knew it offered only the slimmest hope. Pepper spray was for men who might be startled into reconsideration. Men like Royce, who mistook fear for power. Not for the presence that trailed me with such patient attention.
The feral scent thickened, cutting through the night like wet fur laced with ill intent. My stomach lurched. My sinuses stung. Every instinct I possessed leaned close and whispered the oldest command.
Run.
I stepped into the alley where two collapsed cottages leaned toward one another as if conspiring, and pressed my back to the warm, rough brick. Sweat gathered at the small of my back, turned my shirt damp. The footsteps stopped at the mouth of the alley.
For a moment there was only my heartbeat and the city's low hum.
I told myself I was being foolish. Baton Rouge habits. Paranoia with good reasons. Perhaps—perhaps it was only John's warning talking. Perhaps Royce had—
I tasted fear and swallowed it down.
Then the breathing came. Too measured, too composed for human panic. Not the breath of a person lost in the dark, but of a creature for whom the dark was home.
When the voice followed, it was human. Male. Conversational. A courtesy extended in the night.
"I can smell you, ma jolie."
The words slid over me like a cold hand at the nape of the neck. Not Royce—too polite, too roughened at the edges—and somehow that made it worse. Royce was a monster I could chart and classify. This voice belonged to a predator who understood the rules and preferred to step neatly around them, wearing a smile.
"So small," he said, closer now, the faintest lilt threading the syllables—French washed thin by other places. "So very brave to wander alone. After midnight the city keeps different company, hein?"
I pressed harder into the bricks, as if I might tuck myself inside the wall and be spared the indignity of being found. The smell thickened—wet fur, blood cooled in air, and, disturbingly, a reptile-house odor that reached under memory and tugged at a childhood unease.
"No need to tremble," he said gently, almost fond. "I have followed you with care. Consider it… an escort." He paused, as if savoring the night air. "In New Orleans, they call twilight l'heure entre chien et loup—the hour between dog and wolf. The hour when you can't tell friend from enemy." His voice dropped to something almost tender. “We are past twilight now, ma jolie. And I am no friend."
That was when I saw the eyes.
They caught the ragged light from a broken streetlamp—not the flat reflection of human pupils, but a soft, uncanny gleam, yellow-green, as if some small moon had taken up residence in each. The shape that held them stepped into the light.
Once a man, perhaps. Now wrong in ways the mind resists. Seven feet, at least. The shoulders spread too wide, the arms extended too far, and the joints bent in ways that implied a body intended for a different posture—closer to the earth, closer to the hunt. The face—the face still clung to human around the brow and eyes. Below that, the jaw had moved forward to make room for too many teeth.
He glanced up at the sky, at the waning crescent moon barely visible between buildings. When his gaze returned to me, there was something like appraisal in those inhuman eyes. "Not the best night for a turning," he murmured, almost to himself. "But you'll do."
"There you are," he said, louder now, and when he smiled it was a cathedral of points.
I ran.