Authors: Jocelynn Drake
I could feel the excitement rolling off her in massive waves as she stared down the empty street. She was up to something and I knew that I wasn’t going to like it. I released her hand and shoved mine back into my jacket pocket. Mira rubbed her hand over my chest one last time as she smiled up at me before threading her arm back through mine.
“What have you done?” I asked in a low voice, trying not to attract the attention of anyone else standing near us.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, looking up at me with what I’m sure she meant to be an innocent expression, but she couldn’t even manage that as she quickly broke into a smile.
“We’re going on an evening tour of the city?” I pressed, arching one eyebrow at her, which only sent her into a soft fit of giggles.
“Nate is a tour guide.”
“How are we going to talk to him if he’s giving a tour?”
Mira shook her head at me, her smile slipping a little bit. “Part of the tour goes through this house, but that section of the tour is given by the actual homeowner, so Nate will have a fifteen-to twenty-minute break. We can grab him then.”
“I don’t understand why a nighttime tour of the city is so popular,” I grumbled. “You can hardly make out all the amazing architecture that blankets this city. It makes more sense to do this during the day.”
Mira’s hand tightened on my arm and her smile had completely disappeared when she looked up at me again. “Is the city that much more beautiful during the day?”
For a moment, I had forgotten that Mira had never seen her city bathed in sunlight. She had never seen Forsyth Fountain glistening in the summer sun or the way the light cut through the thick leaves of the live oak trees that filled each of the squares. She had never seen the bustle of tourists through the city market as they prepared to grab one of the carriages that crisscrossed the historic district of Savannah.
“You have a very beautiful city,” I found myself saying, one corner of my mouth quirking in a smile. “Both in sunlight and by the moon.”
“Thank you,” she whispered as she looked back down the street. “Oh, look! Here he comes!”
I turned my attention from the nightwalker that was clinging to my arm as if we were out on a date to the vehicle that was rumbling down the street we had walked down just a few minutes earlier to reach River Street. It was not a tour bus like I was expecting. No, it was a trolley. A black trolley with a black light glowing from its undercarriage. Tattered lace and fake spider-webs hung in the rounded windows. And across the side in white letters was written GHOSTS & GRAVESTONES. That explained the nighttime tour; it was a ghost tour.
Laying my hand over Mira’s, I pulled her a couple steps away from the rest of the crowd and hunched down so that I could growl in her ear. “A ghost tour? Is that what this is?”
“Of course! Why else would you see the city at night?” she asked, looking up at me as if I were the one who had lost his mind. “Savannah has a reputation of being the most haunted city in America. Of course we’ve got ghost tours.”
“Yes, but I didn’t expect you to want to do this! I mean, this is ridiculous. There are no such things as—”
“Finish that thought and I will drain you, Danaus,” she said in a low, dark voice. “You of all people should know better.”
Yes, I knew better. There were such things as ghosts. I couldn’t see them or talk to them, but there had been a few occasions where I had felt them. However, it was nearly impossible for most humans to detect the presence of a ghost. It just didn’t work that way. In most cases, sightings could be explained away as an overactive imagination, while pictures were generally nothing more than dust on a lens.
“I do, but this…” I said, motioning toward the black trolley, which people were now boarding. “They can’t possibly expect to see a ghost.”
Mira lifted her chin at me and gave a little sniff. “You’d be surprised,” she said, then turned back to the trolley. “Besides, we’re not here to see a ghost. We’re here to talk to Nate. And there he is.”
At that moment, a man in baggy brown pants and white shirt stepped off the trolley. In his hands were an old-fashioned lantern and a shovel that clanged when he set the tip on the sidewalk. He was dressed as a gravedigger, which seemed only fitting, since I was sure that I was going to put Mira in her grave if she tried to pull me onto this trolley.
“Nate!” Mira cried, pulling me along as she walked over to him.
“Mira?” The gravedigger spun around at the sound of his name. When he turned, I found a youthful face covered in a white and gray theatrical makeup to give the effect that he had spent more time with the dead than the living. Mira released her hold on me when Nate scooped her up in a bear hug. I jerked out of the way just in time as the spade of the shovel came close to taking off my nose.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, holding her at arm’s length.
“I was hoping to talk to you about a couple things,” she said, then motioned toward the trolley. “Couple work-related items.”
Nate set his lamp down on the sidewalk and scratched his chin. “Yeah, I guess I should have been expecting you. I think a part of me was hoping that I was overreacting.”
“Has it been that bad?”
“No, not like you would think,” he said, then shook his head as he shoved one hand through an unruly crop of brown curls. “Actually, can we talk more later? I’ve got another tour to start in a few minutes.”
“We’re actually on this tour. Already cleared it with Emmy. Can we talk at Sorrel-Weed?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Who’s with you?”
To my surprise, Mira actually blushed, though it was almost impossible to make out in the faint lamplight. She reached over and pulled me back to her side. “Danaus, this is a friend of mine, Nathaniel Mercer. No relation to Johnny Mercer. He’s a grad student over at SCAD, specializing in historical preservation. By night, he’s a gravedigger tour guide for Ghosts and Gravestones.”
“Good to meet you,” Nate said, shaking my hand.
“Likewise. What’s SCAD?” I asked as I released his hand and took a step backward.
“Savannah College of Art and Design. A place Mira has been a big supporter of. We wouldn’t be able to accomplish half the things we have without her assistance,” Nate said.
“You’re helping to preserve and restore a city I love. How could I not?” Mira said with a slight shrug of her shoulders.
Nate just shook his head as he bent down and picked up his lantern again. “Go ahead and get on the trolley. We’ve got to get this tour rolling before we get behind schedule.”
Mira stepped onto the black trolley and I followed behind her, trying to keep from frowning. I was going on a ghost tour through Savannah. Not exactly how I anticipated my evening would go. But then again, nothing had gone how I might have expected since our brief appearance at the Dark Room. Mira was just full of surprises this evening.
At the back of the trolley, Mira paused and allowed me to sit next to the window while she sat as close as possible to me. The trolley soon filled up with somewhat hushed tourists as they took in the pseudo-creepy décor of fake cobwebs, skeletons, and tattered antique lace. After a brief introduction by Nate warning that the trolley was going to be traveling into the dark, grim past of Savannah and that passengers should be forewarned that the dead were eager to reach out and make new friends, we pulled away from the sidewalk and rumbled down the uneven stone street.
As we traveled down River Street, Nate wove tales of despair and woe. Once-prosperous shops from ages ago were filled with tales of suicide and fires, murder and disease. When we turned off River Street, I looked over at Mira to find that she was watching Nate with rapt attention.
How can you buy into this stuff?
I asked, touching her mind so that I wouldn’t disturb the other passengers who were listening to Nate with a mixture of mild interest and vague boredom.
It’s not the ghosts,
she mentally scoffed.
It’s about the history of Savannah. Some of these stories I was actually here to witness firsthand. I remember reading about some in the paper. For me, it’s about reminiscing about events that I lived through. Don’t you ever like to look back at your past? Take another look at what you survived?
In truth, I tried to never look back. I had survived more than a millennium of world events. Wars, famine, natural disasters, the rise and fall of entire civilizations, the discovery of new worlds, the deaths of people I viewed as friends. My memories were colored by a bleak landscape of death, blood, and struggles against an evil that I was now seated cozily against in a black trolley. But most of all, my past was covered in a seemingly vast emptiness that could never be filled up.
No.
To my surprise, Mira wrapped her arm around mine again and laid her head against my shoulder. I could feel her relax against me as if some secret weight had slipped from her shoulders. I tried not to think about her soft body pressed against mine, nor listen to Nate’s monologue of death and despair, but I wasn’t having much luck. Tonight, Mira had gone out of her way to touch me and remain close. When I was surrounded by nightwalkers, I had taken it as a way of signaling to them that I belonged to her and that I was not to be molested. However, seated in the dark trolley, surrounded by human tourists as we wove our way through the old city, there was no reason that I could think of for her to be touching me. And yet, I could not bring myself to disentangle her from my frame. In fact, I sat back against the seat and felt some of the tension ease from my own shoulders. For a moment in time, we weren’t running, hiding, or fighting. We were just two people on a ghost tour of Savannah. I had forgotten what it was like to do something normal and mundane.
It had been more than seven decades since I had last touched a woman like this. I had been hunting vampires in Paris for more than a week, and had finally succeeded in eliminating the strongest of them. The remaining few had left the city, from what I could tell, and I was prepared to do the same. Yet, I lingered one last night in the City of Light, wandering through the winding streets and past the crowded restaurants and cafes. Pausing briefly in the doorway of one bar, I looked up to find a woman smiling at me, a cigarette between her pursed lips. Her name was Cherise and she had green eyes.
We talked of nothing and laughed and kissed over a bottle of cheap wine. We walked down the rain-slicked streets, arm in arm. And then we were attacked by four nightwalkers. I had been distracted by Cherise, wasn’t watching my back. They killed her in an instant, leaving the blood on my hands as they escaped before the sun could rise.
Time had left a gaping void of loneliness within my chest, haunted by a pair of green eyes and an enigmatic smile. There had been no other women since Cherise and too few before her. I couldn’t protect them. Just fragile flowers waiting to be crushed under the heel of the world I lived in. Too many years of fighting had piled up to leave me with nothing more than a memory of green eyes.
Mira shifted in her seat beside me, leaning forward to look around my chest and out the window as we passed by an old hotel. She squeezed my arm as she looked up at me, flashing me another excited smile. The woman that sat beside me now wasn’t fragile or weak. She was strong, a powerful force within our world. And while I was under orders to protect her, Mira had been protecting me along the way as well.
After passing a couple of old hotels and some locally famous houses, we pulled up to a two-story burnt-orange house with palm trees surrounded by a brick wall. It was the infamous Sorrel-Weed House; supposedly one of the most haunted homes in all of Savannah. The occupants of the trolley quickly pushed to their feet and exited the trolley for what Nate said would be a brief tour of some of the rooms of the Sorrel-Weed House. We held back until everyone had gotten off the trolley before we exited.
Nate laid down the shovel he had been holding in the trolley and leaned against a tree, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“So, what do you think of the tour?” Nate asked as I stepped to the sidewalk. “Cheesy, right?”
“It’s interesting,” I said slowly, bringing a smile to his lips.
“It’s one of the most popular in Savannah because we’re the only ones that get you into Sorrel-Weed,” he said proudly.
“It’s fun, too. You know, just to pretend that some of it might be real.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts?” I asked while Mira snorted behind me.
“No, I believe,” Nate said with a wry grin.
“Nate can see them and talk to them,” Mira volunteered. I turned to look at her, confusion undoubtedly filling my face. I had never heard of a human being able to do such a thing.
“Talk to them? Necromancer?”
“Dear God, no!” he cried, pushing off of the tree that he had been leaning against. “Who would want to look at a decaying corpse? Besides, from what I hear, they don’t come back all that intelligent. I just talk to the spirits.”
“Speaking of which…” Mira said, trailing off as she finally got around to the actual topic at hand.
“Yeah,” Nate sighed, leaning up against the tree again. “Things haven’t been too good lately. Well, actually that’s not exactly right.” He hesitated, running one hand through his curls, sending them into disarray. “Things have been oddly quiet. A number of the locals that I’m used to seeing have disappeared and the few that have remained rarely come out. I’ve talked to a number of the hotel owners along the route and they say that activity has dropped to almost nothing. Mira, this isn’t good. We’re a city known for being haunted. If things go quiet, the tourists might stop coming.”
“The tourists aren’t going to stop coming,” Mira said, waving off his genuine concern. “What about Sorrel-Weed?”
Nate made a noise in the back of his throat like a laugh, while one corner of his mouth pulled into a frown as he looked up on the looming structure. “The ghosts in that house are too angry to ever go completely silent. However, Scott, the owner, says things have recently been limited to the carriage house.”
“Should you try talking to them, considering they’re still active?” I suggested.