The Black Lily Society by Alice G Holmes

Author:Alice G Holmes [Holmes, Alice G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: paranormal, urban fantasy, asexual, demisexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, poly, ghosts, vampires, Night Hag, empath, neurodivergent, New Orleans
Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
Published: 2024-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

HE’D CHANGED HIS clothes. Elias wore a black button-down shirt, gray slacks, and black wing-tipped shoes. His hair was tied back, except for a few wisps of forelocks framing his face. He’d shaved too, the usual stubble nowhere to be found.

I walked past Elias and said, “I’d rather you didn’t come in, but we can talk on the porch.” No way was I inviting him into my apartment.

Heather stood on the steps to the porch and I walked through her. “Oh, classy,” she snarked.

“Don’t stand in my way then,” I replied.

“Is someone here?” Elias asked. He walked through Heather too.

“Just a ghost.”

“Are there a lot in this neighborhood? I confess I am curious.”

I shrugged. “It depends on how you define ‘a lot’. Not as many as the French Quarter, the Marigny, or the Bywater.”

“What about the Ninth Ward?”

“I haven’t been down that way.”

“Are you afraid?”

I sat down in the chair Jaime usually occupied, and gestured to the other chair, which Elias took.

“I don’t know that it’s fear so much as I don’t want to disturb anyone. I read an article a while back about tour groups who still go to the Ninth Ward on Hurricane Katrina tours. They point out damaged buildings and tell sensationalized stories about the ferocity of the storm and how many people died. It turned my stomach. People still live in the Lower Ninth. And that area may never recover from the damage of Katrina. It feels gross to exploit something both painful and relatively recent in history, especially just to sate my own curiosity.”

“Hm, yes, I see your point.” Elias gestured across the street to a large Greek revival mansion. “I imagine you get a lot of tourists here as well.”

“Yes. Four houses on the block are on several different walking tours so there’s a lot of foot traffic. I don’t begrudge tourists who want to see the houses. I just wish they’d remember this is a neighborhood. And a majority of the buildings are private residences.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve had an incident or two. I found a couple girls in the courtyard last week taking pictures of the rose bushes. They got all indignant when I asked if they were guests of any of the residents. Then my neighbor Jaime came out to see if everything was okay. They told him I was threatening them when I did no such thing. Jaime said he heard the whole conversation. Then he declared they were trespassing, and the girls needed to leave.”

“Perhaps that is why I frequently see signs that say ‘be nice or leave.’”

I laughed. I knew exactly which signs he meant. They were made by an artist named Simon of New Orleans. He had a shop on Magazine Street where he sold garishly painted signs with the motto painted on them. As a matter of fact, there was one two blocks away nailed to a telephone pole.

“I assume so. I mean, tourists as a group aren’t bad. But there’s always one or two bad apples who act as though this is Disneyland and they can do whatever they like.

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