YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY JUST TO DIE

{My posts read easier at 125%}

I've had emails from some of my new visitors. They're unfamiliar with Samuel McCord. They ask : just who and what is he?

I thought I would answer in this post from the first chapter to NOCTURNE'S sequel : NEW ORLEANS ARABESQUE. As we enter Samuel McCord's life, it is two months since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. He has emerged from his quarters in his jazz club, only just recovered from the injuries sustained in rescuing Death herself from a realm some call Hell :

CHAPTER ONE : IN THE HUSH OF A DYING CITY

Meilori's. Where death, life, and undeath sit at the same dark table. Still and all, it was my jazz club, and I loved her. Sort of tells you what kind of man I am, right?

Wrong.

Even I don't know what I am. All I know is that I can't die. Am I a revenant? Wash out your mouth and get that giddy look off your face. You really have no idea the horror that a true vampire is. Sadly, neither do they. Denial's not just a river in Egypt.

The blood of the entity called Death has mingled with mine. It was already an odd stew before then. Elu, my Apache blood-brother, was only half-Apache. His mother was the being the Apache called The Turquoise Woman and the ancient Greeks called Gaia. What did that make him, make me?

Screwed mostly.

Life isn't like Hollywood paints. Neither is undeath. There are no rules clearly written in some ancient, human-flesh bound book. Most children of the night don't know just what they are, what limits they truly have, and what secrets lay in their tainted blood. Life is never quite what you expect. Why should unlife be any different?

I stood in the shadows on the staircase leading down to the main floor of Meilori's. It twisted a bit so I was still hidden from those waiting for me at the front tables. I had maybe four beats of a living heart before they sensed me. I had known they were here from the moment they entered my club without my invitation. My club and I are linked like that. I drew in a deep breath that I didn't need to collect and center myself.

Somewhere in misty woods, lean wolves ran wild and free. Sitting on sandy shores, little children laughed at the lapping waves. Half a world away on mountain peaks, tall and unclimbed, the crisp winds sang their song of elusive eternity.

And standing here on these stairs, I was so weak from hardly healed injuries I actually trembled. I hurt all over. And the two leaders of the world's living dead waited for me at the bottom of these steps. Since they trusted each other about as much as I did them, they had brought their deadliest bodyguards.

I smiled like the wolf I was. Just another day for Captain Samuel McCord, eternal Texas Ranger. I had taken that oath some two hundred years ago. But I was still standing so it was still binding. Leastways, to my sense of honor it was. I suddenly pulled up straight and tall.

Down below, Diana Krall, Canada's queen of the piano, had changed from "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" to "You Call It Madness." The last tune was our signal for a deathtrap. I cocked my head and listened close. The keys were being hit by trembling fingers.

My friend was terrified.

I felt my face become stone. Let the rest of the world go to hell. But here in the French Quarter, in my club, no one preyed on innocents. No one.

I stepped down and around the corner as I smiled my death grin.

"Empress Theodora. President Abigail Adams. You've come a long way just to die."
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