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Because if whatever was going on had anything to do with drugs, she knew exactly where to go to find out
Chapter 4
Bourbon Street
New Orleans’ most famous tourist attraction, the sleazy, noisy, rowdy, free-for-all strip that stretched fourteen blocks from Canal Street almost to Esplanade It was closed to autoht of the week so tourists and revelers could walk uni in the street perfor partiers on the balconies above, dropping in through the wide-open doors of every music club, strip club, bar, souvenir shop, voodoo shop and sex toy shop along the way Bourbon was a wild and woolly, nonstop circus of decadence and indulgence
Caitlin hated it
There were so many pleasures in New Orleans, sensual and otherwise, that were sothan boorish Bourbon…although it did serve the purpose of keeping the more obnoxious visitors to NOLA confined in one easily avoidable part of the city
What fewer people kneas that Bourbon here ravitated More obviously, it was also the drug capital of the Quarter
Before venturing up to Bourbon, Caitlin waited for dark, since the shifters she meant to call on rarely showed their faces before sunset And that gave her tilalamour was one of Caitlin’s favorite spells Not everyone could do it, but she was a quick study, and she’d had a good teacher…but she wasn’t going to think about that
Standing in front of a full-length ht of the ht of a candle did nicely What wasconscious of every part of her body…and then focusing particularly on the whole of her skin She looked into the low of the candlelight on her…until she began to feel the glow as photons of light, a rain of warht pass through h h me, no one will seeon the light, until the borders of her silhouette beca, like the war of a candle flaht
And then she could see the cabinet behind her, as if she was no longer there She felt, not saw, herself s seen and those not seen, let me walk now in between As I say, so mote it be!"
She turned, invisibly, and walked toward the door
On Bourbon, Caitlin strode through the crowds clogging the street with no fear of the prowling pickpockets and the inevitable drunkhard, had she not been protected by the cloak of the gla invisible as the air, through the warringfrom the wide-open doors of the clubs: Zydeco; karaoke; slow, sultry jazz…
The street looked, as always, like a stage set There was so able to see for blocks and blocks, and the balconies of revelers up above…there was a Shakespearean flavor to everything that she had to ad…especially when you were invisible
She was entirely unnoticed by the drunk revelers, the break-tap-dancing teenagers…the buskers holding signs advertising Huge Ass Beers To Go and the opposing signs waved by religious crazies: God Punishes All Sinners Caitlin squeezed quickly by the sign wielders, gri a blind street rave; la Ray Charles, he stepped right in her path and bowed, a breathtakingly courtly gesture, and spoke "Lovely lady"
Caitlin froze, as confused as the crowd of tourists around her, who looked around the no idea who or what theto, unable to even wrap theiranyone at all It could all just have been part of the show to the surprise, Caitlin told herself There were psychics of all kinds in NOLA--either the city drew them or actually bred them--and it wasn’t much of a stretch that a blind man would have learned to use other senses
But she had her own mission, so she quickly side stepped the jazzman and continued on into the crowd
Behind her on the sidewalk, Ryder straightened in his Ray Charles body, swept up the hat containing his tips, and followed her at a distance, tapping his cane for show
The glaive her that It de him in the shop earlier that day had done If this Keeper’s sisters were as good as she was, there was a strong Keeper presence in the city, as strong as he’d seen in any town for a long ti as their parents’ had been rumored to be