New Orleans Stories I: The Vampire Tour PG-13

[librarian_7]

Disclaimers: First, as usual, I don’t own Josef. Pity, that. Secondly, the allusion to local history stories included from the New Orleans vampire tour are from what I heard on taking the tour on April 8, 2009. And lastly, Tangie, Kathi, and Rachel appear by permission.

New Orleans Stories I: The Vampire Tour

Josef pulled out his maroon silk pocket square and flicked it fastidiously over the flaking black paint of the Jackson Square park bench before settling gracefully into the seat. Kathi and Tangie immediately took up spots beside him, while Lucky and Rachel sat on the other side of the bench, close enough that Lucky could keep a hand on his shoulder.

“I can’t believe I let you girls talk me into this,” he groused.

“But Josef, we’re in New Orleans,” Kathi said, as though that explained everything.

“And it’s a beautiful night,” Lucky added. “Just look at the moon!”

Josef glanced up at the full moon rising over the square in front of the Saint Louis Cathedral. Encircled by a wide band of glowing mist, it rivaled the street lamps lighting the flagstones surrounding the square. “Maybe so,” he replied, “but—a Vampire tour? Seriously?”

“You are a vampire,” Tangie murmured demurely. “Besides, you might learn something.”

Josef smiled, but his teeth were clenched. “I was a vampire when this place was a pestilential swamp. Oh, wait. It still is.”

Rachel giggled. “Imagine what a surprise you could give the tour guides.”

He snorted. “All right, all right. But if any of you let slip one word—my friend Michel assures me there are even nastier places than tar pits around here for disposing of fractious freshies.”

Lucky leaned close to his ear and whispered. “Josef, we all know your bark is worse than your bite.”

Josef growled lightly, his fangs dropping. “Are you saying my bite is bad, Lucky?”

“Uh huh, right, Josef,” she replied. The freshies all snickered, and petted Josef. Not that he needed their reassurance that he was, in fact, the best bite ever, but still, playing with the girls always relaxed him. It was like shedding a mask, and he thought the human contact, the caring presence of these women, soothed him as few other things he’d found could do.

As they waited, from around the corner of the iron fence came a trio of tour guides, dressed in clothes that suggested flowing black robes, the two men long-haired and vaguely menacing. Pausing directly opposite the doors of the cathedral, they busied themselves putting up a black sign that proclaimed in large silver Gothic letters, “Vampire Tour.” A knot of customers coalesced suddenly out of the tourists drifting around the dark square. Most were obviously tourists; middle-aged, wearing their light jackets over silly and vulgar Bourbon Street t-shirts, the odd Goth teenager or two in tattered lace and chipped black nail polish.

“Are you sure about this?” Josef asked.

Kathi nodded vigorously. “How can we miss it?” The others concurred, and Josef rose with an exaggerated sigh of martyrdom, the girls flocking around him as he approached the ticket seller, who had seated himself on the steps by the iron gates to the square.

The man looked up at the tall well-clad figure before him, flanked by no fewer than four attractive women. Josef was a little surprised to sense from the spike in the man’s heart rate, and a sudden change in his scent, that somehow he was sensing Josef’s—difference.

But there was no change in his expression, or giveaway in his tone. “How many?”

“Five.”

“One hundred.”

Josef pulled a bill clip from his trouser pocket and snapped out a single crisp bill. In return, he received five black stickers with the company name, and got an admonishment that they needed to be displayed in sight at all times.

The vampire scowled at his women as he distributed the stickers. “If this adhesive ruins my Armani…” he threatened, “you know who I’m taking it out on.”

Lucky snorted. “Promises, promises,” she said, sliding in close to him. “One of these days, Josef, you’re going to have to pass out a few of these spankings you keep making noise about.”

“Maybe holding out on you is more of a punishment,” he responded, a smile playing over his lips.

Lucky fixed him with steady gray eyes. “You’re such a tease.”

Meanwhile, Tangie snuggled in closer, shy at being out in a strange city at night. “I’m sure it’ll be fine, Josef.”

He smiled down at her. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

As the time grew nearer for the tour to begin, a few more people arrived, college boys arrogant in pressed khaki slacks and fine cotton polo shirts, half-drunk hurricanes in their hands. As they purchased their tickets, they nudged each other and eyed the girls around Josef. One of them went so far as to speak to Rachel, who only looked away, grimacing at Kathi.

Eventually, though, the tourists were sorted into three groups of around twenty, and began to move off from the lights of Jackson Square down the alleys at either side of the white cathedral.
Pirate’s Alley was dimly lit, and the freshies were giggling as they trailed along after the guide. Josef was less amused, trying to avoid the narrow channel of black runoff in the center of the unevenly paved alley. He thought that some things never changed in this city. Bad pavement, miserable weather, and the smell in the French Quarter. The atmosphere here smelled as it did nowhere else in the world, an odor compounded of river water, spices, alcohol, and the stink of centuries of human habitation. At least, he reflected, there was no longer much need to avoid stepping in horse droppings.

As they stopped for the first lecture point, their guide smiled broadly, flashing long, pointed canines. “Good evening,” he said as the crowd gasped, “my name is Vlad, and I’ll be your guide for tonight through the dangerous world of the vampire.”

“Josef?” Tangie asked in a low whisper.

“Humph. No. Don’t think so,” he returned, dropping an arm around her shoulders.

The lecture was pretty standard. Eastern Europe, mythology, Vlad Tepes, garlic, sunlight, yadda, yadda. The guide stopped from time to time to throw questions to the group, and quickly learned that his best bet for getting the answers he wanted was from the tall red-headed woman, until she caught a quelling look from the young auburn-haired man in the hand-tailored suit, and fell silent, although she continued to listen closely, an interested smile on her face.

As they moved through the Quarter, up Chartres to St. Phillip, to Royal, to Ursulines, seeing locations used in filming ‘Interview with the Vampire,” interspersed with the bloodier and more inexplicable aspects of local history, Josef caught sight of shadows moving as no shadows should, caught the occasional gleam of misted moonlight on an eye here, a fang there. He suspected Michel was keeping an eye on him; the old Frenchman had minions enough to do it. Josef took no offense. He’d do the same, were Michel duBois to visit Los Angeles. Although, he noted sourly to himself, the chances of having to detail men to follow Michel as he walked through the night-time city streets of L.A. in the company of a gaggle of human tourists were slight.

The guide continued, spinning his tales of the odder manifestations of serial murder, and strange deaths from blood loss. The group gasped and sighed at all the right places, and the guide was persuasive enough that many of the party were starting to look a little convinced around the edges. While he listened, Josef himself grew more thoughtful. There were indications that some of the stories were far too close to unmasking what he felt should remain concealed. Michel wasn’t keeping nearly a tight enough lid on things here. This was information that conferred, he thought, a certain power. Josef reflected that even something as distasteful as this bourgeoisie diversion could be useful, if one knew the right things to look for.

The guide licked his red mouth, tongue lingering caressingly on his sharpened canines. Kathi felt a familiar ripple of excitement curl through her stomach at the sight, and instinctively moved closer to her real vampire as the fake one began to tell a horrendous story of abducted victims some seventy years ago who were found living but seriously depleted of blood. That much could be put down to human perversity, but as the story progressed to tales of strange, unnatural prowlers sighted near the building decades after the supposed execution (and subsequent mysterious disappearance of the bodies) of the killers. Had he been less in control of himself, Josef would have sworn audibly. These New Orleans vampires acted like poorly socialized boors, and sloppy ones at that.

Bodies poorly disposed of. Bodies at all, for that matter. It was careless. Josef looked around him. Tangie still snuggled close, Kathi and Rachel giggling together, Lucky listening, storing up details behind intent gray eyes. How stupid to attract attention by attacking random humans—and how wasteful. It was far more delicious to feed from the willing. And no matter what, there were always the willing. Always.

They were stopping again, this time outside a bar, said once to have been a hub of the vampire underground, which, the tour guide hastened to explain, had largely vanished. The girls exchanged glances. They’d spent the evening before at a very chic, very discreet vampire bar, not two blocks away from where they stood now. This bar—this dive—could never have been a decent freshie bar. And going in, they certainly saw no vamps inside, and no one who seemed to their critical eyes like any kind of decent freshie material.

Josef had noted the special advertised on a board outside, and stepped up to the bar to order his girls a round of bloody marys.

“And how about you, honey?” the bartender asked, batting heavily mascaraed lashes at him.

He took a deep whiff of the drinks, noting the acid tang of tomato juice, pickled okra, olive, and lemon drowning out the sting of the vodka. “I think not,” he said, as he placed cash on the bar and turned to pass drinks to the girls, while the bartender’s eyes widened at the size of the tip.

Lucky and Tangie were there, close at hand as always, but Rachel and Kathi were standing back, besieged by the khaki-clad college militia, who seemed determined to entice them into a post-tour bacchanalia and bar crawl. And they weren’t taking no for an answer.

Josef pushed by the human males, a bloody mary in each hand. “Here you go, doll,” he said, offering a drink to Kathi.

She smiled gratefully. “Thanks, Josef. Are they good?”

“You’re asking me? Lucky says it’s like barbeque sauce with vodka. Sounds delightful. Enjoy.” He shifted his gaze. “Rachel, babe, how about you?” A shove at his shoulder sent the last drink sloshing, and a few drops of the bright red drink flew onto Rachel’s white lace blouse.

“Hey, we were talking to these ladies.”

“And they are here with me,” Josef replied. Rachel, blotting at her ruined blouse with a napkin, widened her eyes. She cast a worried look at Kathi, and they both faded back a step, although Kathi snagged the last bloody mary from Josef’s hand, thinking he might need his freedom of movement. He didn’t acknowledge that, but she wasn’t surprised. They’d all seen him focus before.

The boys, of course, had no idea. And they kept up their bluster. Three against one, after all. Easy odds, after all.

“Seems to me, man,” one of them stated, “you’re taking up more than your share of the pretty women. You could share a bit…and I’ll bet the ladies would have more fun.”

Josef dropped a mask more firmly across his features. He told himself he really couldn’t just rip the heads off these losers. It would distress the girls, and cause unnecessary paperwork. He hated paperwork. He hung an utterly false smile on his face, a façade of bonhomie. “Seems to me the ladies make their own choices. Always. And they have chosen to be…with me.”

“Yeah, well, that was before someone better came along.” One of the boys made an ill-timed grab for Rachel’s wrist. “Let’s blow this tour and go have a private party, baby. I can take you places you’ve never been before.”

Josef choked back a roar as Rachel snatched her hand away, and the imposing figure of tour guide stepped between them, his black robe swirling around his boots.

“I think it’s time for us to be moving on,” he said. “If you’ll join the group outside…”

For the remainder of the tour, the girls were distracted, hanging close to Josef. The college boys kept a few tourists between them, and Josef was fine with that. He was plotting mildly about the beating these boys were in for later, if they stepped drunkenly into a French Quarter street not quite well-lighted enough. And they would. Josef was sure of that. He sighed. He was due in a meeting with Michel at 11:30, and he didn’t want to delegate this one. He was looking forward to it too much. But it wasn’t feasible, so he supposed Joe Asshole Fratboy and his buddies would just have to get a free pass. This time.

The tour wound down with a last horrific anecdote about the survivor of the 1930’s attack who went on to become a vampire serial killer himself, then disappeared mysteriously when his crimes were about to be discovered. The guide finished by fixing the three college boys with a baleful glare. “You may think,” he said in a slow, portentous voice, “that you’re the top of the food chain, that you can behave as you like with impunity. I’m not saying that vampires are real, but I’ve seen a few strange things myself—here in the Quarter—that make me wonder. And it’s a good idea to be careful—about who you offend. It might come back to bite you. In the neck.”

A few more words, the obligatory sales pitch for the keepsake book, which Lucky bought, even though she snorted a few times about typos and such as soon as she opened it to flip through, and the group broke up, drifting away from the alley by the cathedral into the cooling, misty night.

Josef waited quietly until the others were gone. The girls had recovered their good spirits, still sipping at their spicy bloody marys, although Rachel made a face with every taste. At last, though, they were close to alone, and Josef extended his hand to the guide.

“What’s your name?” Josef asked.

“Vlad.” The guide smiled, tucking one thumb in his broad black leather belt, and taking what Josef had offered in his other hand.

“Yes, you said. What’s your real name?”

The guide looked down at what Josef had given him, a crisp hundred and a business card, and looked back up.

Josef nodded. “I asked you a question,” he said, but his tone was friendly. “I think you’ve got potential to be more than a tour guide.”

The guide’s expression grew thoughtful for a moment. “Joseph,” he said. “My name is Joseph.”

“Call me sometime. We can talk about your future.” And the man turned away, gathering that extraordinary group of women around him, their silence suddenly dissolving into chatter and laughter as they moved away into the night.

Joseph/Vlad stroked his chin and watched them walk away. As he’d said, he’d seen some strange things in the quarter, especially on full moon nights like tonight. He tucked the card away for later.

[cassysj]

I love it!!!!! The idea of Josef being subjected to a vampire tour is priceless. One of my favorite lines is the following.

Josef smiled, but his teeth were clenched. “I was a vampire when this place was a pestilential swamp. Oh, wait. It still is.”

He snorted. “All right, all right. But if any of you let slip one word—my friend Michel assures me there are even nastier places than tar pits around here for disposing of fractious freshies.”
.

Also how he acts so put upon, he could have said We're not going period, end of discussion. But he is a very indulgent vampire.

Those college boys were very lucky Josef had other plans for the evening.

What were these boys thinking???? Have more than his fair share of women indeed.

[ari]

I loved this! Do hope there will be more coming and soon

[eris]

An interesting beginning, Lucky. Considering the track record, I'm not sure I like the idea of an old French vamp lurking about... though if one of those shadows wanted to give the frat boys more than a hangover, I wouldn't complain.

(J.A.F. isn't recognized by any University, but it's the largest brotherhood in the world. You don't even have to "Rush" to be member.)

[librarian_7]

Cassy--yes, Josef is very indulgent. Has to keep those freshies sweet, you know. I like the idea that there's this kinder, gentler, playful side he only shows to his girls...the "relaxation mode" Josef. And he may talk a good game about the Vampire tour, but he was interested in what was said.

Ari--there is another New Orleans story in the works, although it's all Josef and Freshie Lucky. I'm still writing on that one, but it'll be out soon.

and yes, Eris, I think we've ALL met members of that particular frat. If you don't recognize Michel, he appeared in La Posada, as one of the board members. So he and Josef go back quite a ways, as business associates, at least.

Lucky

[LadyAilith]

I just love reading your fics, Lucky. I could honestly smell the reek of the French Quarter. I visited there the spring after Katrina. I asked if the smell was due to the hurricane and was told no, that it pretty much always smelled like that!

Those frat boys got off easy. I'm sure that under other circumstances Josef would have taught them a less that they'd not soon forget! And good for Josef for being willing to indulge his ladies. It certainly would enhance the taste of their blood - a happy freshie is a sweet freshie! ;-D

Well done! I'm looking forward to more, both in New Orleans and the old West.

[mitzie]

Loved it!! Those frat boys don't know how lucky they were!! Looking forward to more about New Orleans!!!!

mitzie

[moonlight_vixen]

I just loved this one! It was so much fun to read. The very idea of Josef being subjected to a vampire tour is classic But he will do anything for his girls...

“Yeah, well, that was before someone better came along.” One of the boys made an ill-timed grab for Rachel’s wrist. “Let’s blow this tour and go have a private party, baby. I can take you places you’ve never been before.”

Yeah, right! There is no way he's taking me anywhere! As if I would ever trade Josef for an immature fratboy...

At least I know Josef will buy me a new top, since the frats ruined mine I wonder what Josef has in store for Vlad/Joseph as well.

Great story!

[librarian_7]

LadyA, yes, the French Quarter has its own distinctive smell. Not good, but not exactly bad, either. And I'm so glad you enjoyed this, and are enjoying Dust, too!

mitzie, love you, hon! Thanks for reading!

M_V, well, J could have just said no, but he knew how much the girls wanted to do the tour, and he didn't like the idea of them being out alone at night...he knows all too well the kinds of things that are out there. And even if the threat was mundane, it's a good thing he was there, wasn't it?

Lucky

[bluedahlia3]

Gosh Josef in New Orleans! Perfect, and who better to take the ladies on a vampire tour. Wonderful job, well written. They do seem comfortable with poking at him, don't they? I loved your description of the city and the people tourists. And you really could smell the swamp.

[librarian_7]

Thanks, Blue...sometimes I write fics as sort of souvenirs of experiences and places, and the trip to New Orleans seemed ripe for fic'ing.

I actually wrote the first part of it, up to the beginning of the tour, while sitting waiting for the tour to start. Like Josef and his girls, I got there early!

Lucky

[allegrita]

Lucky, why am I not surprised that you got there early?!

I like this story. It's nice to see the doll freshies beginning to stretch their (plastic) legs and get out into the world. Josef certainly had to work hard at the affable yet long-suffering boss routine, didn't he?! But when you think about it, that's what Josef is all about anyway.

I loved this look into a weird and wonderful world. I can't wait to find out what happens next!

[Catmoon]

Read and enjoyed. Amusing idea, Josef on a vampire tour. It was the title that attracted me. I have to disagree with Josef though, I like Nola.

[librarian_7]

Read and enjoyed. Amusing idea, Josef on a vampire tour. It was the title that attracted me. I have to disagree with Josef though, I like Nola.

I think he likes it, too...but he has to put up a good front.

Lucky

[Josefismysire]

This is such a fun piece, Lucky. What an original and creative idea to have Josef take his girls on a vampire tour..and discover some snippets of truth to it. Love it!! You have such a wonderful imagination!!