VenCo(104)

“No, not since last night.” He rubbed his head, thinking. “We sat around the courtyard after I got off work telling old ghost stories, and she was in fine form, talking about this maniac who tunnelled into her building. I walked her to her door at about midnight, I think? Weren’t you already in bed?”

Lucky didn’t know what to say, so she just shook her head.

“Okay,” she said, finally, reaching for both of Theo’s hands, trying to hold it together. “I’m gonna go out and walk around to see if I can find her. If you think of anywhere she might have gone, you call me. If she comes back here, you call me. If you hear anything that could help in any way, you call me. I’m giving this an hour, and if I can’t find her, I’m calling the police.”

He nodded.

“Theo, say it all back to me,” she insisted. “I need to know you understand.”

“I’m to stay here. If she comes back, I hug her and call you. If I remember anything, I get real excited and call you. If anyone comes in here and says there’s a fabulous old bitch wandering the Quarter, I scream at them until they tell me where, and I call you.”

“That is exactly right.” She let his hands go and ran for the door. Just outside the hotel entrance her phone rang.

“Stella?”

“Lucky. It’s Meena.”

“Meena, I can’t talk now.”

“Lucky, just wanted you to know we got seats on the ten p.m. flight.”

“Stella is missing.”

“Wait, what? Where are you?”

“Still at the hotel in New Orleans.”

“Lucky, you need to get to Lafitte! Where is Stella?”

“I just told you, she’s missing!”

There was a pause, and Lucky was on the brink of hanging up when Meena said, “We’re running out of time. You need to make a decision, but it’s one I don’t think I can ask you to make.”

Lucky closed her eyes and leaned against the brick wall of the hotel. She was the one who had walked out on her grandmother after a fight. She was the one who’d left her with strangers in a city neither of them knew. And she hadn’t thought of her at all—not when she was searching, not when she found the Benandanti, not until the very moment she found her gone. She could be at the bottom of the Mississippi. She could have been mugged or hit by a car. She remembered what Jay Christos had screamed—he was going to kill Stella, he was going to tear her apart.

“Meena?”

“Yes?”

“I need to find Stella,” she said, and hung up.

She chose Stella. She would always choose Stella.



Lucky walked the streets, up and down each one, from Canal to the Esplanade. She searched every alley, too, and walked into each bar, every open restaurant, most still empty at this hour. She showed the staff the photo of Stella she’d taken on her phone the day before they left Toronto—Stella trying to feed cereal off a spoon to Jinx, who was busy staring down Lucky with the particular menace he saved just for her. No one could remember seeing her.

By eleven a.m. she had crisscrossed Bourbon from Decatur to Rampart, and the first drunks were starting to appear, with their plastic to-go cups and disapproving wives, not yet throwing up in the garbage bins but heading there. At the door to a vintage store that might have caught Stella’s eye, her phone rang again. It was the hotel.

“Theo? Is she back?”

“No. She’s not. But I know where she is.”

“Thank god! Where?”

“Aggie found her. They’re at the Blacksmith’s Shop. It’s a bar at the far end of Bourbon. You’ll think you’ve missed it ’cause there’s houses in between it and the main drag, but you haven’t.”

She put him on speaker and opened her map app. “What’s the cross street?”

“St. Philip, just past Dumaine.”

She shouted into the phone before she hung up, “I’m on the way.” Then got her bearings and ran. All she could think of was Jay Christos standing over her little grandma and her even smaller, older friend.

Theo was right—she thought she had missed it at first, catching the sound of glassware and raised voices at the last minute. She hustled through the open door and then paused. It was so dark inside, she needed to let her eyes adjust.

“Watchu having?” the bartender asked.

“I’m looking for someone.” She fumbled with her phone as he stood with one hand on his hip, bar rag thrown over his shoulder. “Hold on, I have a picture of her . . .”

“Hey there, Lucky.”

She almost dropped her phone. She turned, and there was Aggie, sitting at a two-seater by a small window, casually drinking a beer.

“Where’s Stella?”

“Powder room.” She took another sip.

Lucky fairly collapsed into the open chair. “I don’t know how to thank you. How did you find her?”

“I watched.” Aggie wiped the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “That’s what I do. I’m a Watcher.”

“Wait . . . I’ve heard about Watchers.”

“I’ve sent word back to VenCo, to the Oracle, that you are here. They seemed very invested in your little adventure.” Something caught Aggie’s eye over Lucky’s shoulder, and she smiled.