Survival of the Witchiest (A Nightshade Detective Agency Cozy Mystery #2)

1. One

ONE

The Garden District was exploding, and it wasn’t because people were overenthusiastic with their Fourth of July fireworks. Sure, that happened when you were only days from the big holiday, but not like this.

I stood in the center of the flashing lights and wondered how I had gotten myself into this situation.

It was like those videos I kept seeing of someone frozen in a moment, the world turning to crap around them, and then a voice comes on: “Yup, that’s me.

I bet you’re wondering how I got into this situation. ”

Normally, I was good under pressure, but no one could have expected this.

“Freya.”

My best friend Alex “Lex” Cortland tried to get my attention. I didn’t respond.

He tried again. “Freya.”

I looked left, to where ghouls were trying to set one of the oldest houses in the Garden District on fire, and then right, where a ghoul was trying to crawl under a porch to collect a small dog as the house’s security system wailed and pulsed various colors of light.

The ghoul wasn’t trying to pet the dog, it was trying to eat it.

“Freya Holmes!” Lex screamed my name, and that was enough to jerk me out of my fugue.

Things were not supposed to go like this.

We’d been hired by an older woman in the Garden District because she said the crawl space under her huge house — it was a mansion, no matter what she said — was infested with ghouls.

As the owner of Nightshade Detective Agency, I’d dealt with ghouls so many times I’d lost count.

They were easy. And dumb. So, so dumb.

The plan had been simple. We would frighten the ghouls from under the house and then end them in the backyard.

Lenore Hopewell-Hayes, the woman who had hired us, said she’d seen three different faces.

Even on our worst day, Lex and I could handle three ghouls.

We probably could have done it with one arm tied behind our backs, something Lex had actually suggested.

But it wasn’t three ghouls.

Yes, she had three ghouls under her house. Plus another four, making seven total. We still could have handled that.

It was the other ghouls, the ones that crawled from under every house at the intersection of Second Street and Chestnut, that had me freezing in place.

There were seven homes, and ghouls were crawling from under all of them.

Not one or two. We’re talking full nests.

We were about to be overrun by thirty ghouls.

Where in the mighty parishes had they come from?

“Freya!” Lex grabbed my shoulders and started to shake. He was a big guy, a solid six-foot-seven with broad shoulders and muscles to spare. He was so proud of those muscles that he never wore real shirts, even on dangerous jobs, so he could show off his full sleeves of tattoos.

He was a gator shifter, common in bayou country.

Sure, we lived in New Orleans, but the bayou was never far from our hearts and minds.

Lex was the sort of guy who made panties drop at every turn.

Locals and tourists threw themselves at him despite his ridiculous blond mohawk.

He was handsome to the point of distraction, but I was immune to his charms.

We were friends for life, nothing more.

Despite his size, Lex’s abilities were all tied to his shifter genes. He could shift into a big gator and start ripping limbs from the ghouls in a heartbeat. There were too many of them, however. He would be overrun by the creatures and turned into a food source if he wasn’t careful.

“Freya, if you don’t snap out of it I’m going to kill you myself,” Lex warned. He sounded desperate, which was ridiculous because they were ghouls. Ghouls were easy.

I forced myself to focus. Yes, this job had gone sideways from the moment we’d arrived, but we could handle it. We were professionals. We were … that ghoul was really going to eat that dog.

I wasn’t a big fan of little froufrou dogs.

They were yippy and prone to biting. My mother had gone through a phase when she owned three, Mitzi, Shitzi, and Bitsy.

My father hated them but acquiesced because he loved my mother.

For the lifetime of those dogs — a full twelve years — I never made it through a single meal without one of those things humping my leg.

It was ridiculous. They’d died within months of each other, supposedly of broken hearts after Mitzi fell victim to bone cancer, if you believed my mother.

Despite not liking little dogs — I much preferred the big slobbery ones that were goofy and friendly — I had zero intention of allowing this one to die.

“Hold on,” I ordered Lex as I strode into the yard.

Everything in this neighborhood was overblown, from the wrought iron fences to the colonial porches.

Whenever a movie depicted New Orleans, at least outside of the French Quarter, these were the porches they highlighted.

Weirdly, they weren’t all that popular outside of the Garden District, but within the confines of this neighborhood they were everywhere.

I could hear the ghoul smacking his lips as he tried to get the dog, which kept yapping at him while evading his long fingers. I grabbed the ghoul’s feet, gave them a tug, and slammed a dagger into his head.

Here’s the thing: New Orleans is bursting at the seams with paranormal activity.

If New Orleans were a dress, the paranormal population would be the extra ten pounds put on every winter.

It felt as if something was about to rip those seams to the point they couldn’t be mended with a needle and thread.

It was going to take something bigger, but that was a concern for a different day.

Lex raised an eyebrow as I stepped over the ghoul to hunker down and look at the growling Maltese hunkering in the corner.

“Stay there,” I ordered the pup, then frowned. “You’re not even cute.”

The dog growled at me as if I were the enemy and hadn’t just saved it.

“It’s not my fault you’re not cute,” I said.

“Stay there anyway.” I turned back to study the scene.

The ghouls that had vacated the other houses were all collapsing in on this house.

They were shambling messes, sort of like zombies, but with higher brain function.

That wasn’t saying much. They were eating machines and nothing more.

No one had ever looked at a ghoul and said, “That’s one of the great thinkers of our time. ”

“What are we going to do?” Lex gritted out. He wasn’t the type to panic, but he looked close to it now.

“We kill them,” was my simple reply.

“Oh, well, we kill them.” Lex threw up his hands. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you chose a very long time ago to get through life on your looks,” I replied.

“If you’re implying I’m shallow, I don’t care. There are worse things to be.”

“Like what?”

“Um … Virgos. Did I mention the woman I went out with this weekend was a Virgo? She was wound so tight I thought she was going to strangle me.”

Still debating if he meant that literally, I slammed my dagger into the head of the ghoul that had been trying to sneak up on me from my left. It went down without a fuss. They really were easy to kill. Well, when there weren’t so many of them.

“We have to do it the old-fashioned way,” I said. “We have to move around, not get boxed in, and maybe use this porch to keep them from getting us.” I gestured to the huge porch behind us.

“They can climb stairs,” Lex said dryly.

“Not very fast. And these things have seen better days. We can do it.”

Lex touched his tongue to his top lip, then growled. “Fine.” To my surprise, he grabbed me around the waist and launched me onto the porch. He followed, his athleticism on full display. To this day, there was no sport he didn’t excel at.

Well, maybe golf. He’d never expressed a great love for golf.

He pulled a dagger from the back of his pants — where had he been keeping that thing without a sheath? — and gripped it tightly. “Focus on the ghoul directly in front of you. Don’t get distracted. Knock them down like bowling pins.”

I cast him a sidelong look. “Why is everything a sports metaphor with you?” I swiped left with my dagger and caught a ghoul, neatly severing his neck and causing him to lose his head. I did not watch to see where the head rolled.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Lex complained. He was a maestro with his weapon, all smooth moves and no wasted energy. He’d already dropped two since we’d climbed onto the porch.

“That bowling thing you just said.”

“Bowling is not a sport.”

“It’s on ESPN.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it. “Let’s talk about something else. How are your parents after that whole being taken hostage thing?”

Taken hostage? That was not how I would define what had happened to them, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. “They’re fine,” I replied, opting not to argue with his word choice. “You wouldn’t know their house was ever invaded.”

My parents were … a lot. My father, Atticus, was a vampire. He’d taken one look at my mother, Audra, and swore he’d fallen in love with her in a single afternoon. I didn’t believe him. He was prone to hyperbole. My parents did love one another beyond reason, however.

My mother was a witch, but my father had turned her into a vampire.

Vampires and witches mating was rare. It was even rarer to get children out of the deal.

My parents had managed to get three, including my brother Miles, who spent four years as the apple of my parents’ eyes — he was spoiled rotten and loved if you believed his stories — before my sister Holly had come along.

She was a good girl when younger, and then started running with a bad crowd.

No one denied that. She snuck out to see boys and visit parts of New Orleans she wasn’t supposed to visit.

And then, one day, when she was newly 15 and I was 12, she didn’t come home. At first, we assumed she was sneaking around with someone she shouldn’t be sneaking around with. As hours stretched into days, however, it became apparent that wasn’t the case.