A Touch of Dead

have devastated Aunt Linda as much as the stark fact of Hadley’s murder.
    I was more detached. I’d written Hadley off long ago. I’d never thought I would see her again, so I had a little spare emotional room to think of other things. I still wondered, painfully, why Hadley hadn’t come home to see us. She might have been afraid, being a young vampire, that her bloodlust would rise at an embarrassing time and she’d find herself yearning to suck on someone inappropriate. She might have been
shocked by the change in her own nature; Bill had told me over and over that vampires were human no longer, that they were emotional about different things than humans. Their appetites and their need for secrecy had shaped the older vampires irrevocably.
    But Hadley had never had to operate under those laws; she’d been made vampire after the Great Revelation, when vampires had revealed their presence to the world.
    And the post-puberty Hadley, the one I was less fond of, wouldn’t have been caught dead or alive with someone like Waldo. Hadley had been popular in high school, and she’d certainly been human enough then to fall prey to all the teenage stereotypes. She’d been mean to kids who weren’t popular, or she’d just ignored them. Her life had been completely taken up by her clothes and her makeup and her own cute self.
    She’d been a cheerleader, until she’d started adopting the Goth image.
    “You said you two were in the cemetery to perform a ritual. What ritual?” I asked Waldo, just to gain some time to think. “Surely Hadley wasn’t a witch as well.” I’d run across a werewolf witch before, but never a vampire spell caster.

    “There are traditions among the vampires of New Orleans,” Mr. Cataliades said carefully. “One of these traditions is that the blood of the dead can raise the dead, at least temporarily. For conversational purposes, you understand.”
    Mr. Cataliades certainly didn’t have any throwaway lines. I had to think about every sentence that came out of his mouth. “Hadley wanted to talk to a dead person?” I asked, once I’d digested his latest bombshell.
    “Yes,” said Waldo, chipping in again. “She wanted to talk to Marie Laveau.”
    “The voodoo queen? Why?” You couldn’t live in Louisiana and not know the legend of Marie Laveau, a woman whose magical power had fascinated both black and white people, at a time when black women had no power at all.
    “Hadley thought she was related to her.” Waldo seemed to be sneering.
    Okay, now I knew he was making it up. “Duh! Marie Laveau was African-American, and my family is white,” I pointed out.
    “This would be through her father’s side,” Waldo said calmly.
    Aunt Linda’s husband, Carey Delahoussaye, had
come from New Orleans, and he’d been of French descent. His family had been there for several generations. He’d bragged about it until my whole family had gotten sick of his pride. I wondered if Uncle Carey had realized that his Creole bloodline had been enriched by a little African-American DNA somewhere back in the day. I had only a child’s memory of Uncle Carey, but I figured that piece of knowledge would have been his most closely guarded secret.
    Hadley, on the other hand, would have thought being descended from the notorious Marie Laveau was really cool. I found myself giving Waldo a little more credence. Where Hadley would’ve gotten such information, I couldn’t imagine. Of course, I also couldn’t imagine her as a lover of women, but evidently that had been her choice. My cousin Hadley, the cheerleader, had become a vampire lesbian voodooienne. Who knew?
    I felt glutted with information I hadn’t had time to absorb, but I was anxious to hear the whole story. I gestured to the emaciated vampire to continue.
    “We put the three X’s on the tomb,” Waldo said. “As people do. Voodoo devotees believe this ensures their wish will be granted. And then Hadley cut herself, and
let the blood drip on the stone, and she called out the magic words.”
    “Abracadabra, please, and thank you,” I said automatically, and Waldo glared at me.
    “You ought not to make fun,” he said. With some notable exceptions, vampires are not known for their senses of humor, and Waldo was definitely a serious guy. His red-rimmed eyes glared at me.
    “Is this really a tradition, Bill?” I asked. I no longer cared if the two men from New Orleans knew I didn’t trust them.
    “Yes,” Bill said. “I haven’t