There was no handle for front-seat passengers, so I had to make do with white-knuckling the door as Lacroix wove through pedestrians and parked vehicles. I doubted my steak and cheese would taste all that great the second time, so I did my best to swallow it down. At least we were in sight of the church quickly.

  Lacroix parked the car at the end of what looked like a stone road. I hopped out to peer down the alley surrounded by brick buildings and old gas lamps that had been repurposed. I could just make out a sign for the old pirate bar that I really wanted to visit. Down the center of the road there was a thin, but deep trench.

  When Lacroix saw me eyeing it he said, “Still got the original plumbing.”

  At the end of the road was a white miniature Gothic cathedral with sharp spires poking the sky. The haze from the heat blurred it slightly in the distance. It had the appearance of a structure that wasn’t fully materialized, like the stories my mother told of the goblin markets that would appear and disappear periodically.

  “You say he’s in the church?” Lacroix asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Looks like we beat the other officers here. O’Malley, you wait in the car.” He said, and when I opened my mouth to disagree he put his hand up to stop me. “I ain’t bringing a photographer along to a potentially dangerous area, even if the assailant supposedly left. You’re lucky I brought you at all. There’s a radio in the car. I can call you when I find your fiance. Jack’s his name?”

  “Jack Frost,” I said, while getting back into the front seat.

  Lacroix was about to take a step away from me but paused. “What kinda whiteboy name is that?” But, then shook his head and continued away from me.

  My wrists continued to burn, meaning Jack was still strung up. No matter how much it was going to get me on Lacroix’s bad side, I had to find Jack before one of those nutbags decided to do to Jack what they had done to Kurt. I watched Lacroix walk all the way down the road. Once he was fully out of view, I slipped out of the car and took off at a brisk pace down the cobblestones. There were a few tourists milling about, since it was a weekend morning, but it was not tourist season. Evidently a woman rushing through Pirate’s Alley in the morning didn’t merit any second glances.

  By the time I approached the front steps to the church, I assumed Lacroix was already inside. Once I was standing in front of the building, I could see how spooky it actually was. Dark-roofed spires extended from the top of the church like spears trying to puncture the sky. All the top windows had been boarded up like I would expect to see in an abandoned building, but the lower sections were obviously maintained. A rounded wooden door took up the center of the bricks with Latin words inscribed above it. I wondered what had warranted the eerie addition of the cast iron bars to the lower windows.

  I didn’t want to be turned away immediately, so I decided to try my luck for another door. There was a thin alley between the church and the brick building beside it. The windows on the sides of both buildings had dark shutters. If this were a movie, I would expect the villains to be in some sort of creepy basement beneath the church, but New Orleans didn’t have basements on account of being barely a foot above the water table. With no other ideas, I’d have to try to find an open door and hope for the best…or I’d almost walk into a man in a hooded sweatshirt smoking on the side of the church.

  Luckily, he was looking the other way when I peeked down the alley. The white-painted bricks were surprisingly cool as I leaned against the wall of the church waiting to hear the door slam shut behind the man. After a brief scan of the area to make sure no one saw me, I dashed down the alley. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the superhero I had dreamed myself to be, because as soon as I stubbed the front of my sneaker into the uneven ground, I gave a new definition to the term ‘face-plant’ by smashing my face into weeds growing through the cracks in the stone ground.

  I stood and brushed off the dirt while assessing myself: a few new scrapes and bruises to add to the rest, but my pride had been immeasurably damaged. At least there were no witnesses. When I tugged on the door to the side of the building, I thought it was locked until it inched open slightly. Leaning back and using the weight of my entire body, I tugged until it opened to reveal a dark corridor on the other side.

  The stark contrast from the sunny day made it nearly impossible for me to see anything. If a person were standing in the hall, it would have taken me minutes to notice they were there, and it’s not as though dragging open the metal door had been quiet. My heart skipped a beat, but I knew there was no turning back. My eyes adjusted after a few steps into a hall lined with bizarre paintings of the shoreline, but with symbols painted over them that I did not recognize. The floor was made of cement with grates in the center. There was a damp, slightly moldy smell throughout the hallway and, I assumed, most of the building.

  Ahead was an open doorway with light emanating out into the hallway. I could hear raised voices from the room, which I hoped would cover any noise my footsteps made. Pressing my back against the wall at the edge of the room, I listened to what they were saying.

  “What do you mean there’s a cop asking for him? How would they know he’s here? It’s all a set up!” One man yelled.

  “Calm down, and keep your voice down,” a woman said in a raised whisper. “The pig’s still out there. I told him there was no one here and he said he wanted to take a minute to pray before he left.”

  “Let’s just kill the faerie and get out of here,” another man said.

  With that, I had built up the courage to peer around the corner. There were three people wearing gray hooded-sweatshirts, but their hoods were not up. The taller of the two men had a rag tied around his ankle where his pants were torn. He was holding what appeared to be a cast iron pan. Even from where I was standing I could see that he had something wrong with his skin, and his hair was thin for the age he appeared to be.

  The other man was shorter, but heavier. He was wearing a baseball cap that shaded his face, but the yellow of his eyes was hard to miss. I was surprised when I recognized the woman next to them. It was the blond woman who was with Pete the night before, and she looked even worse for wear than the previous night. If she had gone on to commit murder after the roof-top party, it was unlikely that she had slept at all.

  All along the walls were hideous paintings of frogs surfacing from watery depths and devouring animals and even people. One of the paintings captured the texture of the bumpy frog skin in a way that actually made it look wet, but the majority were not skillfully constructed. There were candles flickering next to frog figurines covered in symbols I wasn’t familiar with. A large cardboard box on the table near the tall man was open to reveal a dozen ceremonial daggers with brass handles.

  A lot of the Christian paraphernalia had been repurposed or replaced with monstrous depictions of aquatic creatures with open mouths. The words “Advent Anura Society” were displayed on a banner blocking a massive cross.

  Then I saw it. I didn’t know how I could have missed it before, but under the banner dangled the legs of someone chained to the cross who was wearing black boots—Jack!

  “You could just let me go,” Jack pointed out in a shaky voice.

  “No!” the woman yelled.

  “Alicia, we don’t have time,” the heavy man said, “let’s vamanos. We can sacrifice another fairy later.”

  “No! It has to be this one. I saw him there before they took my Petey away! He has to pay!” Alicia screamed and grabbed a piece of rebar that was sitting in a pile in the corner of the room.

  I tried to make sense of what she was saying, but there was no logic to it. If she was trying to get revenge on faeries for the terrible things Pete had been doing to her, I would have understood, but she was mad at the Fae for Pete’s disappearance? Maybe it was true that some people only wanted what was worst for them.

  “Nah, you said the fairies were trying to stop the ascension, not that they did something to your boyfriend,” the taller man said. He then dropped the pan. It fell to the ground with a heavy thud. In a swift motion, he scooped up one of the ceremonial daggers from the box beside him to hold menacingly. “Look what happened to my leg because of you!”

  “Faeries? Ascension? What are you talking about?” Jack asked meekly.

  “Shut up, you liar!” Alicia ran forward holding the rebar like a spear in both hands. With Jack hanging from his wrists, Alicia’s head was at his sternum.

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  Right then Lacroix burst into the room from the main section of the church. His gun was drawn and he yelled at Alicia, “Drop the weapon!”

  She ignored him and threw herself at Jack.

  Lacroix let loose a bullet in an attempt to stop her, but it was too late.

  Before the bullet made contact, she thrusted forward with the rebar piercing Jack just above his pelvis. He let out a grunt from his clenched teeth. Red began to dye the bottom half of his white t-shirt.

  At the same time, I felt a sharp pain in my lower right side. When I looked down, I saw my own blood spilling out. I doubled over from the most intense, sudden pain I had ever felt.

  Meanwhile the heavy-set man ran at Lacroix with the metal pan. Another bullet, and he was on the ground. The thin man took his dagger to his own neck.

  During the commotion, I limped into the room. Each step was excruciating. I couldn’t see the top half of Jack due to the banner. I was pretty sure Lacroix saw me in his periphery, but he was in the process of talking down the man with the dagger. When I was closer, I could see Alicia’s eyes, wide open as the color faded from them. Lacroix’s bullet had pierced her chest. Her turbulent life had come to an abrupt end.

  Jack’s blood was dripping down his shirt onto the cement floor below. He looked even paler than usual. I had to do something fast. If it were a normal person, yanking the penetrating object from the wound would be a terrible idea. It would likely cause the person to bleed out even faster, but Jack was not a human. I could feel what he was feeling, and it was both painful and terrifying. All I could think to do was pull the bar out.

  Beside me, I heard Lacroix yelling at the taller man and him mumbling in response, but I couldn’t pay attention to the words. Instead, I grabbed hold of the rebar with both hands. I looked up at Jack who nodded at me. Holding it tightly, I pulled with all my strength and felt a terrible ripping sensation in my gut. Each bump that passed through was worse than the last.

  Alicia must not have had the strength or the leverage to get the jagged metal too deep. Relief washed over me when the object was out, but when I saw more blood spurting out of the hole in Jack’s torso, I wondered if I had made the wrong decision.

  Lacroix began yelling and then stopped abruptly. I turned in time to see the taller man slit his own throat with the ceremonial dagger. Lacroix called over the radio that he needed a medic; the three assailants were down.

  “Are you hurt?” Lacroix rushed over to me. “I told you to wait in the car!”

  I was leaning on the table in front of me by this point, feeling a bit dizzy from the sudden pain and blood loss. I couldn’t get the sensation of the metal tearing its way through me out of my mind. But, when Lacroix moved my shirt up to examine the wound, there was an odd sensation. We both watched as the wound closed up and vanished. He pulled out a handkerchief to wipe the blood away to reveal smooth, undamaged flesh underneath. The wound was gone, and the pain with it.

  The first thing Lacroix did was move Jack’s shirt to find a similar closed wound. He looked back and forth between us. “Uh-uh,” He said, “I aint messin’ with none o’ that. You keep your hoodoo to yo’selves.’

  “Can you help me get him down?” I asked.

  “The key’s in her pocket,” Jack motioned to Alicia.

  With the help of Lacroix, we were able to get Jack loose quickly. Lacroix stood on the table to unlock the iron manacles. I doubted I would have been able to reach them even with the use of the table. Once free from the chains, Jack fell a short distance to his feet. The burning sensation in my wrists was gone as soon as he was free. It was then that more uniformed officers appeared followed by a medic.

  “ ’bout time!” Lacroix hollered. “These two are comin’ back to the station with me for statements. Gonna have to turn in my gun when I get there.”

  Jack pulled me into his arms in a tight embrace, and I hugged him back. After all, we had almost died, again. He held me a little longer than I expected, but his grip loosened once the medic spoke.

  “Live one,” the medic said while standing over the heavy-set man. “Shot’s clear through. He’ll probably make it.”

  “Good, maybe we can get some answers from him. Close up two cases,” Lacroix said. “I’m gonna be stuck in counseling from this one, and I’m taking you with me O’Malley, cuz you should’ve waited in the damn car!”

  “Sure,” I said, still dazed by what had happened.

  When more uniformed officers arrived, Lacroix ordered them around. “All right, you help the EMTs get this guy to the ambulance. You close up the crime scene. And the rest of you secure this building. I don’t want no more loonies jumpin’ out of the woodworks with knives.” He waved for Jack and me to follow. “We’ll be down at the station spending the rest of our lives filling out paperwork.”

  “They need medical?” one of the EMTs asked about Jack and me, since our shirts were both bloody.

  “Nah, that’s from the assailants,” Lacroix said.

  “I just had a bloody nose,” I said quickly, realizing my blood was likely all over the crime scene.

  Lacroix led us into the larger room of an open church. It had a plush red carpet and a pipe organ with long brass tubes. The main room looked more like how I would imagine the innards of a church with pews and religious iconography that wasn’t based on amphibians. Jack took hold of my hand while we walked, and I let him.

  Once we were outside, squinting against the clouds magnifying the sun, Lacroix said, “You two go get new shirts from that pirate bar. I’ll be in the car, and I don’t wanna hear nothin’ more about you magically healin’ in the frog nightmare room in the house of God. Ain’t no one need to hear none of that. As far as I’m concerned, the crazy lady missed when I shot her.” Then he added, “And you’re welcome,” before marching off to his squad car.

  From his reaction, this certainly hadn’t been the first time Lacroix had dealt with the paranormal. I wondered how many times Lacroix had seen unexplainable phenomena and decided it would be easier to let it go.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, Jack said, “Hailey, can you believe it?!” He rolled up his shirt again to expose the tight muscles on his stomach.

  “I don’t understand. How did you heal so fast and from iron?”

  “How did we heal so fast? It’s you Hailey! Well, and me.” He lifted my hand that had our fingers interlocked to put the clunky ring in our line of vision. “I would heal a normal injury that fast, but not iron because the Fae are allergic. But, you’re not allergic. Isn’t that amazing? We’ve solved a problem that’s plagued the Fae forever!” He was giddy with excitement. “And here I thought being stuck with you was only a detriment.”

  I removed my hand from his, not sharing in his enthusiasm. I certainly did not want another reason for Jack to trap me into another deal with him. “But if I get injured, you heal slower.”

  “Right, we may be able to solve that…”

  “Jack!” I said a little too loudly. At this point we were approaching the bar and getting glances from patrons. “We are getting this ring off!”

  “Of course,” he said and drew his fingers through his disheveled hair. “I was simply making an observation for future experimentation.”

  “Not with me.” I wanted to make everything perfectly clear. “I don’t understand why it’s still stuck on me anyway. We basically figured the case out. There’s a frog cult offing themselves. What else is there to it? Where did you get this ring anyway?”

  “I guess we have to find out who’s behind the cult, and the ring’s a long story, like an Odyssey level adventure.” Jack said with a smug expression. He knew that would pique my interest, and he refused to say any more.

  We entered the brick building with a big ship’s wheel as the sign. Pirate paraphernalia was strewn about the walls in the form of skulls and bones, mini ships, and rope nets. Also on display were the pirate bar shirts in an array of male sizes. Jack hailed the bartender and asked for two shirts while throwing cash on the table. She eyed us for less than a second and threw us ones that were the most likely to fit.

  Jack had no qualms stripping in the middle of the bar and replacing his soiled t-shirt with his new skull and crossbones one, which got some grins from a table of college-aged women. I was on my way outside undoing all of the buttons on my stained-workshirt. I had a t-shirt underneath it that was also stained and sticky, but I threw the pirate t-shirt on over it. As I suspected, Jack’s new shirt was a little too short, like it had shrunk in the wash, and mine made it look like I had shrunk in the wash.

  “Jean Lafitte actually did go to that bar, you know. I mean it was different then,” Jack said when we were walking back.

  “The pirate?” I asked. I was excited, and Jack could see I was. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “Tons. The Queen takes a special interest in pirates. Not sure why, since she would never let her court rebel that way. But, yeah, after Jean and his older brother had to flee a French Colony, because they were killing nobles like his family for being Jewish, they ended up in New Orleans. They started out smuggling slaves and stolen goods through the swamps. Then they married freed slaves and decided to bring slaves to freedom. He even ended up fighting for Andrew Jackson in the battle of New Orleans and was a very accomplished sea captain. All while he couldn’t even sign his own name.” We were walking up to Lacroix’s car when Jack finished his story.

  I was hanging on every word. “My family was supposedly related to the Pirate Queen.”

  “Oh, I know,” Jack said.

  “You do?”

  “Of course, that’s all your dad ever talks about,” Jack said matter-of-factly before popping the back door to the police car and twisting himself inside.