The Cities of Dead (Book 3)

Chapter 5: Killing a Witch

A redolence of enchantment clung to the air around witches, but the scent of magic transcended the olfactory. It was partly a scent and partly a sound—so faint you wouldn't catch it if you didn't know what to listen for, like the crackle of water as it frosts—but magic was mostly a feeling. It changed the very air around you as you breathed it in. Or maybe that was just the intoxication that came with a sense of something you once had and will never get back.

That hint of magic now imbued my senses.

Emilio stretched and clenched his fists. He'd picked it up too. We both moved faster down the street, our soundless steps in perfect sync.

A magical upbringing focused on the third eye, honing and mastering a witch's intuition as a first line of defense, elevating them above the mundane; but the predatory senses of a vampire were astronomical in comparison. I didn't need to see a mark. I could usually sense a witch with a couple of deep inhales.

Although, in New Orleans, it was a little trickier to track the supernatural. The jasmine-infused humidity cradled everything that traipsed through it, but tonight not even weather could hide this witch's scent. My family had searched every block of the French Quarter for Callisto's coven, and then Emilio and I had searched the Faubourgs Trémé and Marigny, and what was left of the Ninth Ward, on our own. Tonight, we'd widened our search to a more desolate part of the city. It was only fitting to be reduced to the two of us, given that we'd been entangled in this chase on and off for the last two hundred years. No matter how different were the lives we led, and how far away from each other we stayed, the Salazars always seemed to bring Emilio and me back to the same point on the globe. And Saint-Germain always brought us back to La Nouvelle-Orléans.

And suddenly it was the 1790s and 1840s and 1930s all over again, which was how we both knew with complete certainty that Callisto Salazar was not dead. The Animarum Praedators had escaped death so many times thanks to their peculiar Spektral power that I'd never believe they'd met final death until I touched their hollow, spiritless bodies with my own fingers. Not until I heard the silence coming from their chests.

The air crackled, and my fangs snapped to point. Emilio and I gave each other the exact same look. This witch was foolish enough to use magic on the street. The traces were woven through the air like an enchanted tapestry, and a loose thread was dangling right in front of us. Surely they knew we were hunting them? A part of me wondered if it was a trap. The other part of me was ready to rip my way out of it, if it meant unveiling Callisto. With hardly a signal to each other, we split off to opposite sides of the street.

Usually this particular cat-and-mouse chase brought a fire to Emilio's eyes, birthed in a time gone by when it wasn't entirely uncommon for a man to slay another in the street with his blade, and when war was an inevitable part of the male birthright. The glint was there now but overshadowed by a darkness I'd never seen in my brother. A darkness stirred by pain, loss masked by infuriation. Pain that condemned Callisto Salazar.

It had been ages since Emilio and I had so irrevocably agreed on something, but after the events at the convent, the Salazars needed to be eradicated. No more chase. No more feud.

The Salazars almost got Adele.

Because of my carelessness.

I sucked in a deep breath and moved faster, following the enchanted thread, tugging it, my desire for what we'd find on the other end becoming intemperate. I could imagine why Callis would be enthralled with this city—how he thought he was going to make it his own, build a castle where the supernatural dripped with the rain and bebopped alongside the pentatonic scales. A spiritual nexus that drew the willing and beguiled the mundane. It was no wonder descendants of so many of the Great European witching families had ended up here. New Orleans was a place you wanted to be born from and die in. Even I, who'd been drained of magic for centuries, could feel her alluring whisper begging me to stay.