The city is alive, and the French Quarter its beating heart. Tourism feeds this strangest, most eccentric of creatures, crouched beneath sea level, as though hiding from, or perhaps preparing to pounce upon, the world around it. And it happily devours all kinds, from history and architecture buffs to gothic obsessives looking to contact vampires or dead Voodoo queens. It is beautiful, filthy, cultured, vile, sophisticated, and vulgar. Usually before noon. And to Padraig, it was as close to a home as he’d ever known.

He emerged from the public restroom into the early-evening sun, leaving the stench of vomit, heroin junky, and vomit-covered heroin junky behind, quickly orienting himself by much more pleasant smells. Beignets and chicory coffee beckoned downwind. Bennie had at least had the decency to drop him in the French Market.

Other aromas, wafting up from the general direction of his clothing, indicated a change of wardrobe would be in order before any attempt to pass for decent society could be made. Fortunately, when Bennie had become his handler years ago, Padraig had quickly learned two lessons; never sleep naked, and always keep your wallet and your phone on hand. His "reassignments" came swiftly, and without warning. But only once without clothes.

Padraig ambled down Decatur, into tourism-dense territory where he wouldn't be able to swing a set of obscenely shaped beads without hitting a souvenir shop. His pace was slow and measured. The event Benny described had disturbed him, but not enough to prevent soaking in the ambience. He didn't make it to the city often enough. They hadn't parted on the best of terms.

Once, while lingering in Seattle, Padraig had attempted to use a therapist to make some sense of his life. The subject of New Orleans had come up frequently, as the backdrop of so many stories from his early twenties. The doctor sought significance in the distance Padraig had put between himself and the city in the intervening decade, since it was obviously so important to him. It was a concept Padraig had found laughable, knowing what he knew, what he was not prepared to tell this stranger.

When Padraig intimated as much, the doctor’s next salvo had landed a little too close for comfort. He posited that Padraig clearly associated so much happiness with the city, and perhaps didn't feel like he deserved that kind of joy anymore. That depriving himself of the place he loved most, through some misguided belief that he was no longer worthy of it, was his path to redemption.

The therapist had wanted to press the issue, to find out what had made Padraig feel this way, but the omnipresent alarm had rung, and Padraig wasn’t about to pay the overtime rate. The shrink had made him promise to journal about it and come back prepared to discuss where this martyr complex may have come from.

Padraig never showed up for his next session.

His reverie was broken by a shrill, familiar whistle-hum. A man, covered head-to-toe in silver body paint, kazoo clinched firmly between his teeth, was entertaining a family by pretending to be a robot. Unkempt hair sticking out from beneath the funnel strapped to his head and an untucked shirt tail spoke of the mad scientist behind this creation having a low attention to detail.

Padraig had remarked, once upon a time, that he felt kazoos were a poor design choice for a robot, and that he would have a hard time respecting an army of killer cyborgs marching towards him if they sounded like a herd of circus clowns.

"Maybe their officers would have accordions, instead."

She had laughed so hard at that stupid, stupid…

Teeth and fists clenched, reflexively. Eyes clamped shut. Blocking memories. Quarantining sections of his brain with practiced precision. Deep breaths. It was too vivid here. Deep breaths. This was neither the time nor place. Deep breaths.

Looking up, he realized he had arrived at a chotchkie shop, t-shirts draped across over-crowded racks spilling through the door, congesting the sidewalk, slogans boiling the entire New Orleans experience down to titties and beer. Reaffirming to himself that he'd rather reek of tourist than of sick, he ducked in, attempting to check his nostalgia at the door like a teenager’s backpack.

He emerged a while later in khaki shorts, sandals, and a shirt sporting a simple gold fleur-de-lis listed at a drunken angle. It was either that, or proudly proclaiming that he had gotten "Bourbon Faced on Shit Street," but he wasn't certain what kind of company he would be entertaining before the night was through. Best to keep it at least somewhat above board.

The shoddily constructed robot had been replaced by a heavy-set man in worn overalls, singing blues with a wellspring of anguish that belonged in a recording studio somewhere, instead of busking for tips on a street corner. Amid the pained verses of how his woman had done him wrong, awash in the ever-closer smells of fried dough and strong coffee, Padraig, feeling on safer ground now, closed his eyes.

He allowed the music and the smells and the city to move through him. Relaxed. Envisioned his surroundings in his mind's eye. Expanded that image. Higher and higher. Reached out. Felt a twinge. A tug. South. He let it lead him. His mental vision shifted, blurred, refocused. A bright glow, centered on Commerce Street, then a faint trail, too faint to follow, leading away. But it was at least a start.

Padraig came back to himself with a jolt. He had a bit of a hike in front of him, which would tragically take him directly past Cafe du Monde. Somehow, he felt, he would find a way to cope.

Disguised as a tourist, a wolf in sheep's clothing, he set off for Commerce Street. For the glow. The place where his sigil, his secret name, his most dire of warnings, had gone off like a road flare. A lightning strike that would not fade for some time, bright enough to be seen across vast distances, for those who knew how to look.

He quietly prayed that no one else was.

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Having failed to escape the gravitational pull of the cafe, Padraig found himself engorged on beignets, coated in a thin layer of powdered sugar, and running on thick, black coffee. He was meandering towards Commerce Street once again as the sun began to dip beneath the New Orleans skyline. Bennie would have been annoyed by this delay, which had made it even sweeter.

He could hear that insufferable, sing-song voice lecturing him in his head, but Padraig had no doubt that this, like all the other times he had been flung across hell's half acre, would be a false positive. He had scratched, etched, and carved his mark all over this town, his home, the place he was most protective of, and not once had anything tripped these alarms. If They were going to make a play for this place, he'd have known the second they wandered too close. Of that he was certain.

But a sigil had gone off, he could feel that much. Nowhere near his old haunts. A blue haze hung in the air now as he got closer, one he could more feel than see. A tingle making the hair on his arms stand up. The question remained as to why.

Normally it was a ripple; a butterfly in Japan flapped its wings, moving the metaphorical needle just enough through the ether. Currents shift, patterns change, it wasn't a perfect science. Only twice had it been a genuine proximity alarm, in places he no longer ventured. But those memories were enough to slow his steps and make him soak in his impromptu sight-seeing tour.

Either it was a false positive, and he didn't need to hurry.

Or it wasn't, and he didn't want to get there too soon.

The idea that this one had been carved into a person, though…that gnawed at his mind. Who possessed those arts around here? How would they even know where to begin? How to operate it? What it would do? Why him, or his Name?

Suspicions grew. He tried to suppress them, focused on the sights and sounds that had once been his salvation. These triggered memories that only fed his fears, and he instead took a cue from the police horses he passed in the Quarter; blinders on, eyes locked forward. One foot in front of the other.

A left on Lafayette, steadily onward into the parts of the city that modernity had devoured. Gone were the brick facades and wrought-iron balconies. Progress had replaced them with chain stores and gaudy window displays, filled with mannequins that would likely have been mugged and left in the gutter if they tried to walk the streets dressed as they were.

A right on to Commerce, steadily onward, piercing the blue haze, into the electric air. But now, coming around the corner, the sights and sounds assailed him in full, breaking through the blinders with the pulse of blue lights. An NOPD forensics van, flashers playing off the darkening textures of the buildings. Barricades. Crime scene work. All in a tidy perimeter directly around what he knew was his destination.

Padraig scanned the crowd and cursed his own procrastination. It was sparse, down to employees from nearby buildings craning out the doors on their smoke breaks and panhandlers with nowhere better to be. This city loved a show, and for interest to have waned this much, he could only surmise that whatever had happened had been what Benny’s superiors had picked up on. Hours had elapsed. This was mop up, and leads were getting scarcer by the minute.

He homed in on the transients standing nearest the police tape. The press of humanity would have drawn them there early on, either for spare change or careless wallets, and they would not leave until the curiosity of all potential marks had dried up. Padraig knew they would be his most comprehensive news source.

He steadied his breath and let his eyes lose focus, let auras come in to being, tried to find one that did not vibrate and refract as though being viewed through rushing water or a swarm of angry bees. He needed answers, not a knife wound.

Like any big city, New Orleans had its share of homeless and invisible people, and while any such population contained unstable sorts who had never gotten the help they needed from a society that had failed them, others had simply been dealt a bad hand. And a scant few of those, as they would tell you if you'd let them bum a cigarette off you in the park, found they enjoyed the freedom of being beholden to no one in a city that embraced that spirit like few others.

In his more idealistic days, Padraig believed they were rationalizing away their circumstances. After a decade of life as he knew it now, a spot under a bridge with only the elements and his own biological needs to contend with had a certain appeal. Looked better by the minute, really.

The aura of an older gentleman slightly off to one side, his leathery, craggy face speaking to years of sun exposure, glowed a gentle gold. He watched the proceedings with a somber expression. Padraig approached, grateful that his souvenir-store outfit, still laced with traces of powdered sugar from his beignets, screamed oblivious tourist.

"What happened here? Someone get hurt?"

The old man blinked slowly, a tear escaping one eye, funneling down in to the labyrinthine grooves of his cheek. He said nothing. Padraig sighed and pulled a $20 out of his wallet, proffering it close-palmed to the man so none of his competitors would consider hounding him for it.

"Don't want your damn money," he said in a voice cracked with age and emotion in equal measure.

"Not trying to offend. Just trying to help you come out even on this deal, if you'll tell me what's going on."

He said nothing more, for quite some time, but Padraig shrugged and stood in commiserate silence all the same, staring at a disturbing blue tarp on the ground, too flat to have anything, or anyone, beneath it.

Everyone talked eventually. He wasn't sure if it was part of his Gift, residue from years of freelance bartending, or a calming presence, but everyone talked. There wasn't a life story he hadn't been told whether he'd wanted it or not. Eventually.

The authorities switched into clean-up mode. A few patrol officers made half-hearted attempts at the “show's over” routine, but shift change was coming up and they were cracking down on overtime, so it wasn’t long before they gave up, made for their cruisers, and sped off.

A pressure washer was brought out of the back of the van. The blue tarp removed. A disconcerting, ruddy stain revealed.

"The same thing happened to my Darlene," the old man volunteered, barely audible over the crescendo roar of the washer's compressor. "She did the same damn thing. To this day I don't know why."

"What is it that happened to your Darlene, sir?"

Padraig couldn't help but wonder if it was the event that drove him to where he was today, standing at a crime scene in worn surplus fatigues, shopping cart of earthly possessions not far off.

"I hope her family gets answers," he continued, too lost in his memories to even register Padraig had spoken. "Not having answers is the hard part."

The old man cast a meaningful glance upward. Padraig followed his gaze, up five stories, up to the edge of a parking garage roof, where another officer was visible. Taking notes. Taking pictures.

"I hope they get their answers."

Déjà vu crashed over Padraig, like the leading waves of a hurricane pushing its storm surge ashore.

"Hell. I hope she has a family."

The hairs on Padraig's arms began to stand on end. His mind keyed in on the sound of seagulls crying over the river.

"If she's anything like me, I just hope someone knows her name."

The brewing storm made landfall, the electricity coursing down every nerve in his body.

Who would have known his true name, indeed.

Padraig shoved the twenty in to the glassy-eyed man's pocket, recompense for a gentle soul that he felt he’d walked into a dark place with.

Then he took off at a dead run for the closest hospital he knew.