Chapter 1: Late Night Beignets
The clock over the counter said 3:07 in the morning, and Iris Potter was wearing most of a kilo of powdered sugar.
It was on her fingers, her chin, the tip of her nose, and in a fine white dust across the bodice of her neon-pink dress. Her bag, currently matching the dress to the shade, sat open on the bench beside her like a co-conspirator. Three empty beignet plates stood stacked at her elbow, and a fourth sat in front of her, barely holding together under its own snowdrift of sugar.
She took a bite, sighed like a woman who had found religion, and looked around the café with bright green eyes that catalogued everything. Tourists yawning over café au lait. A bachelorette party in matching sashes, hoarse with drink. A man in the corner booth who hadn't blinked in the entire twenty minutes she'd been watching him, and who cast no reflection in the mirror behind the counter. And the piano player, whose fingers moved like he'd been playing since before pianos existed, and whose melody had a low humming undertone that made the sugar on her skin tingle.
New Orleans, Iris decided, was exactly what she'd been promised.
She pulled a band of tiny paper fireworks out of her bag, the ones Fred and George had labelled Extremely Rude and sold to her at a family discount, and began charming them to launch from under the tourists' tables at staggered intervals. Her magic came off her skin in a faint crackle, like static before a storm, and she could never quite be bothered to dampen it down. Why would she? It was a lovely feeling, and it made interesting people look her way.
One of them did.
He slid into the opposite side of her booth without asking, a tall man with dark curling hair and a leather jacket that cost more than her hotel. Warm brown eyes, sharp cheekbones, a smile like he'd already heard the punchline. She felt his attention land on her magic the way a cat feels a laser dot.
"You're leaking," he said.
"I'm sorry, I didn't realise I was a public facility." She bit into her beignet and spoke through the sugar. "You're going to have to be more specific, mystery man."
"Your magic. It's coming off you like sparks off a flint. Loud enough that I heard you three streets away." He plucked a beignet off her plate and ate it with the ease of a man taking liberties he was confident were welcome. "Kol Mikaelson. And you, little storm cloud?"
"Iris." She considered him. His pulse was there, faint and steady under the skin of his throat, but it wasn't doing anything. It was just a clock ticking for show. Vampire, then. Fun. "Iris Potter. And I wasn't finished with that plate, you thieving bastard."
"There are four plates," Kol said.
"There are four plates left." She raised her wand under the table's lip and flicked it. The first rude firework detonated.
The sound was a cross between a kazoo, a raspberry, and something anatomically improbable. A shocking purple smoke burst under the bachelorette table and spelled out the words BIGGEST LIAR IN THE FRENCH QUARTER in glittering cursive six feet above the bride's head. The café erupted. The bride screamed. Someone's coffee went flying.
Kol's eyebrows climbed. "Did you do that?"
"No," said Iris, and launched the second one.
This one went off under the man who didn't blink, and instead of smoke it produced an enormous animated golden arse that galloped around the ceiling on little legs, winking. The reflectionless man shot out of his booth, snarling, and Iris looked directly at him, pointed two fingers at her own eyes and then at him, and mouthed, caught you. He went for the door at speed.
"You," Kol said, delighted, "are the finest thing to happen to this city in a century."
"Flatterer." She sprinkled more sugar on a fresh beignet, unbothered, and pushed the plate towards him in a gesture of forgiveness. "Your turn, Mikaelson. Tell me something interesting about this city or I'm going to set something on fire."
"You've already set something on fire."
"Not yet I haven't. That was fireworks. Fireworks don't count as fire, they count as ambience."
Kol leaned in, elbows on the table, studying her like a fascinating specimen. "There's a vampire over there," he said, nodding at a booth by the window, "who owes me four hundred dollars from a poker game in 1886, and his face, if you're wondering, has aged approximately none."
Iris followed his gaze. "That's a debt collection method? Telling strangers?"
"My collection methods are considerably more inventive. I once collected a gambling debt from a man by cursing his house to sing sea shanties every hour on the hour for a decade." He took another beignet. "He paid."
Her whole face lit up. "You can do that?"
"Witch friend of mine did the cursing. I provided artistic direction." He tilted his head. "Why are your eyes doing that?"
"Because," Iris said, and was already rummaging in her bag, "I have been carrying around a cursed singing object for two months waiting to meet someone who'd appreciate it." She came up with a small brass frog. "Do you want to see something wonderful?"
"Always."
She charmed the frog, kissed it for luck, which was completely unnecessary, and lobbed it gently across the café. It landed on the head of the piano player and clamped on. A moment later, in a voice like a foghorn with a chest infection, the frog began singing a bawdy verse of "The Mermaid and the Sexton" in a key that existed nowhere in nature. The piano player kept playing, unbothered, which told Iris a great deal about this café. The bachelorette party howled. The bride attempted to catch the frog and was flung sideways into a chair by an invisible ward.
"Iris," Kol said, and then he was laughing, genuinely, helplessly laughing, shoulders shaking, eyes wet, and he had to shove a beignet in his mouth to stop it and nearly choked on it, coughing sugar onto the table. "Bloody hell. Bloody hell. A thousand years in this world and I have never once seen a frog do that to a piano player."
"Thank you. He's my best work." She sipped her bourbon coffee. "I've got more. I've got so much more. I've got a fireworks display that spells out insults in Latin, I've got sweets that make you cluck like a chicken for an hour, I've got an entire indoor swamp in a bottle."
Kol stopped chewing. "Say that last part again."
"Indoor. Swamp. In. Bottle." She produced a squat glass jar the size of a fist, in which something green and miniature waved lazily: cattails, a tiny alligator with beady glass eyes, a layer of scummy water that looked alarmingly alive. "Break it indoors and you get six square metres of authentic Louisiana bayou. The gator grows to about two feet. It's temporary. Mostly."
"Mostly."
"I say mostly because one of them got out in a hotel in Brighton and the resolution was inconclusive." She set the jar on the table between them like a fine wine. "The question, Mikaelson, is not whether. The question is where."
Kol looked at the jar. He looked at her. He looked around the café, at the tourists and the wards and the unflappable piano player with a foghorn frog still singing on his head, and Iris watched a thousand years of bad decisions play out behind those warm brown eyes and lose to all of them at once.
"Corner table," he said. "There's a vampire who's been rude to my sister, and a load of tourists who will remember tonight for the rest of their tiny lives."
"You're an enabler."
"I'm a patron of the arts."
She bought two minutes of cover by charming the espresso machine to produce a fountain of whipped cream, which distracted the staff magnificently. Then Iris stood on the bench seat of the corner booth, held the jar high like an Olympic torch, and smashed it down on the floorboards with all the strength in her small arm, which was considerably more than the floorboards had expected.
The jar shattered. The swamp came out.
It did not trickle. It billowed, green and wet and loud, moss unfurling up the booth upholstery, cattails bursting through the gaps in the wrought iron, a foot of brackish water sloshing across the tiles with a smell of genuine frog-pond wilderness. The miniature alligator hit the ground at two inches and grew with an audible wet crackle, crack, crack, to two feet of indignant swamp predator that immediately took umbrage at the wedding sash dragging off a tourist's chair and clamped onto it.
The screaming was biblical. A vampire by the window hissed. Another one stood up and put a foot into six inches of pond water and made a noise that no thousand-year-old predator should be able to make. The frog on the piano player's head reached the filthiest verse of the sexton ballad, in foghorn key, directly over the chaos.
And through all of it, Kol Mikaelson was pounding the table with his fist, wheezing, tears in his eyes, beignet crumbs down his front, laughing so hard he'd lost the ability to speak entirely. Iris stood on the bench with her hands on her hips, wand up, hair full of moss, surveying her masterpiece with the satisfaction of a master painter.
"There," she said, "is what I call ambience."
The rude bride's party stampeded for the door. The vampire who'd been rude to Kol's sister went for the exit at a dead sprint, silk shoes squelching, dignity abandoned. The alligator, having eaten most of a sash, fixed its glass eyes on Iris and inclined its tiny head in what she chose to interpret as a bow.
The piano player finished his number, took the frog off his head, looked at it, put it in his breast pocket, and began a slow, filthy blues as if nothing at all had happened. Iris decided on the spot that she would live in this city forever.
Kol finally got air into his lungs. "Marry me," he gasped.
"Absolutely not, I've known you eleven minutes." She flopped down into the swamp-soaked booth, entirely unconcerned, and fished a firewhisky bottle out of her bag. "But I'll consider a business partnership."
"What are the terms?"
"You know every interesting person in this city. Every secret, every old monster, every place that's fun after dark and every place that's fun in a way the daylight people would cry about." She took a swig and passed it to him. "In exchange, I bring the artillery."
Kol drank. He looked at her over the bottle, at the sugar and the moss and the wand calluses and the green eyes that had just watched a room burn down without a flicker of remorse, and he thought, with something very like awe, where in God's name did you come from?
"There's a rather large house," he said slowly, "full of my family. My brother Elijah will attempt to lecture you on decorum. My brother Klaus will attempt to scowl at you. My sister will try to adopt you within the hour. And I would very much like to see what happens when you walk in."
Iris's smile went wide and wicked. She flicked her wand and the last firework, the big one, the one Fred and George had labelled For Emergencies And Weddings, shot up out of her bag and burst against the ceiling in a silent, glittering cannonade of purple smoke that spelled, in letters ten feet tall:
WELCOME TO NEW ORLEANS.
"Lead the way," she said.