The witch of New Orleans

The fog came with her.

It rolled in thick and grey from the Mississippi River, swallowing the cobbled streets of the French Quarter in a silence so dense it muffled even the call of the night herons. Gas lamps flickered, their light strangled by mist, as if the city itself had grown afraid of what crept through its veins.

At the edge of Rue Charbonnet, a carriage blacker than midnight came to a slow, creaking halt. Its driver-a man with cataract eyes and a stitched mouth-said nothing. The horses, skin clinging too tightly to their bones, steamed in the cold air, but did not stir.

The door swung open on its own.

A heeled boot emerged, laced in ivory ribbon and stained red at the toe. Then another. Slowly, a woman stepped out-tall, robed in black velvet that shimmered like raven feathers. Her skin was pale, moon-pale, and her eyes... those eyes were darker than any night New Orleans had ever known.

Isadora Bellerose had returned.

Ten years ago, they had burned her house to the ground.

Ten years ago, they had slaughtered her family.

Ten years ago, they had whispered "witch" as they spit on her name.

And now the whispers had returned, curling through the mist like snakes.

From behind shuttered windows, the old creoles muttered prayers. Candles flickered in devotion to saints who would not answer. Children were pulled inside. Dogs howled. Somewhere, a bell rang three times-an omen of death.

Isadora moved past the gates of the Bellerose estate-once grand, now crawling with moss and rot. Ivy choked the iron railings. The fountain in the courtyard bled rust. Vines had taken the walls like parasites claiming a corpse.

She paused before the door. Her gloved hand touched the faded sigil carved into the wood: a rose encircled by flame.

"Still marked," she murmured, voice smooth and thick with accent. "Still cursed."

A breeze stirred. But it wasn't wind-it was breath. The house was breathing.

When she stepped inside, the door closed behind her with a sound like a coffin sealing.

The air was thick with dust and decay. Shadows clung to the corners like memories refusing to die. Portraits of long-dead Belleroses stared down at her, their painted eyes cloudy with time. One had been slashed across the face-her mother. Another torn in half-her brother, Jacques. And her own portrait? Burned out, blackened, erased.

She moved through the house as if she were gliding, each step measured, slow. Candles flickered to life as she passed-unlit for years, they awakened at her presence. Magic throbbed in the air, subtle but ancient, stitched into the very bones of the manor.

She descended into the cellar.

The room was damp, lit only by a single crack in the stone wall. A circle had been carved into the floor-old, older than her family. Symbols crawled across it like ants made of ink.

She knelt.

Her hand dipped into her cloak and pulled out a small silver dagger, still crusted with blood from a past too recent to forget. She drew the blade across her palm without flinching, letting the blood drip into the circle.

The symbols pulsed. The stone began to tremble.

"I call you forth, Keeper of Secrets. I offer pain for power. Vengeance for favor. Speak to me."

At first, there was only silence. Then-whispers. Not in her ears, but in her bones. In her blood. In her memory.

"Isadora..." the voice rasped, in a tongue long dead.

"Daughter of betrayal. Blood of fire. The dead remember."

She smiled faintly. "Then you remember what they did."

"You wish to unmake them."

"I wish to make them suffer."

A wind howled through the chamber, though no door was open. The candles flared. The circle glowed red-hot, and from its center, black vines burst upward, twisting, writhing, forming the shape of a man-but not a man. Eyes hollow, mouth stitched shut. The same as her driver.

The thing bowed to her.

"Then let it begin."

She rose, bloody palm closed in a fist.

Outside, the fog thickened. A priest three streets away choked on his own rosary beads. A socialite's throat split open in the mirror as she powdered her face. A merchant's infant screamed with two voices at once.

New Orleans was waking.

And the witch had come home.