“Another funeral.”

I turn to my right to see who has spoken. A rangy woman dressed in black is leaning against the same low wall I am, sucking on a freshly lit cigarette. “More and more funerals these days.”

I look again at what I had previously thought was a wedding. It’s a joyous troupe, led by a small brass band. Each of the many members in the company has a white handkerchief, which they are waving enthusiastically at the crowd, while a man in black with a calla lily corsage and woman in a white dress skip along at the front, grinning. Other than the lily, perhaps, it doesn’t seem like a funeral.

“I… think that’s a wedding,” I offer.

“Oh it is.” She blows out her smoke. “I just like to call them funerals. I don’t believe in weddings.” She takes another thin puff. “I take it you do?”

“I’m an optimist,” I say cheerfully.

“So am I,” replies the woman. “About everything but marriage.”

“Have you tried it?” I ask, suspecting I already know the answer.

“Yep.” She ashes. “Didn’t work out so well.”

“It worked well for my parents,” I say lightly. “I figure I’ll give it a shot, someday.” I look at her curiously. “What do you do? For a living?”

“This.” She gesticulates broadly towards the area in front of St. Louis Cathedral with her cigarette; rough brick streets, wrought iron lamps, a busker playing an eerie rendition of House of the Rising Sun on an array of water-filled glass goblets. “I’m a Vampire Tour Guide. You’re going on it, right?”

I am.

I love all vampire media; the schlockier, the better. I refuse to apologize. You have to see the humor in these situations. I might have gone crazy a long time ago, otherwise.

I open my mouth to ask the tour guide what her day job is, but before I get a chance, she flicks her cigarette to the ground and walks away.

When the cathedral bell strikes the half-hour, the guides round us up. There are three, and our group has been assigned to “Jonathan.”

I turn.

A tall, long-haired man is standing to the side, looking extravagantly broody and mysterious. He is wearing tight black pants—faux-leather, even in this nighttime heat—and a flowing white shirt that is meant to look colonial. It is tremendously silly. This, then, is Jonathan.

I hide a smile.

Jonathan leads us to an alley beside the cathedral and strikes an immaculately offhand pose in an arch. I turn a snort into a small cough. He looks at his attentive listeners and begins, “Ladies…”

I look at my companions, slightly taken aback. Unlike the others, this tour group is, indeed, entirely female. And I am the only woman who is neither fourteen nor forty.

Jonathan finishes his sentence: “Let’s get one thing straight. Vampires… do not… sparkle.”

A breathless laugh runs through the girls. This is exactly what they wanted: the real stuff. They fan themselves furiously in the still air with their tour pamphlets.

We walk slowly through the French Quarter. Even off-season, the bars are strewn with beads and masks and elaborate plastic drinking paraphernalia. Everything sold in the shops we pass is a luxury—antebellum weaponry, sterling silver necklaces, silk scarves, antique crab tongs, hats and perfumes and carven grand pianos—all delightful to look at, but unlikely to be useful unless Ulysses S. Grant swings by again, or you find yourself serving tea to a visiting duchess.

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Jonathan is speaking. He is affecting a vaguely Transylvanian accent as he orates. He tells us that New Orleans is the largest center for modern vampirism; humans who spiritually identify as vampires. Elemental, pranic, sexual, sanguinary. One of the girls asks nervously, in a moment of quiet as we all draw up outside a shop selling nothing but fur stoles, “Are you a vampire?”

Jonathan looks her straight in the eye and says, gently but firmly, “That is a very rude question, young lady.”

I must remember that one.

He continues to answer individual questions as we walk down a street smelling of étouffée, so after a trio of girls leave off—they’re collectively writing a vampire story: one of them is busily scribbling notes into a notepad—I step in and ask quietly, “What do you do during the day?”

He smiles. “Sleep.”

Perhaps I should be the one taking notes. “What do you do after you’re done giving tours?”

His grin gets wider. “Stay awake.”

“Doing what?”

No easy glib answer for this one; he thinks for a moment before responding, in his most charming voice, “It depends on who I’m with.”

I laugh.

I drop back to the group, and we all walk on to the site of an alleged vampire murder. Suddenly, in the middle of a frank discussion of having one’s aorta ripped out of one’s back, one of the girls faints.

I watch as her mother kneels in front of her and holds her hands. She’s conscious but dazed. Everybody directs their frantic fanning efforts at her. Except for the outfits, it’s exactly the sort of scene you’d expect to find in Gone with the Wind. I stare for a moment before realizing nobody knows what to do.

I kneel at her side. “Okay,” I say gently, “I’m going to have you put your head between your legs. We need to get your head lower than your heart—your brain’s not getting enough oxygen.”

She bends over slightly. I put my hand on her back and press her lower.

“I know it’s not ladylike,” I say, “but you need to get your head as low as possible, way between your legs. Here—” I commandeer some water from the other girls and have her sip at it. Her mother pours some of it over her neck as the rest of the tour group moves on, leaving us behind.

After a few minutes, it doesn’t look like another swoon—or more serious medical problem—is imminent, so one of the mothers and one of the girls immediately offers to walk me over to the rest of the group, because it’s not safe to walk alone. I’m amused. The group can’t have gone more than a few blocks, and the French Quarter’s quite safe, but, seeing as how we did just listen to a story about how two girls got brutally murdered in this area at night, I don’t think they would have taken, “Thanks, but I’m fine,” as an answer. Their concern is sweet. I look young for my age.

I rejoin the group just as Jonathan is wrapping up (“How do you keep a vampire from following you home? … Tip him!” We all did). The girl who fainted and her gaggle of friends file by, each thanking me as they go by after the moms like a row of ducklings. Very polite.

Jonathan is treating the stragglers to one last story. When he finishes, I turn and head for home; a large old house in the Marigny, built in about 1850 for a wealthy family and its servants. Since then, it has been a brothel, a Jewish group home, an insane asylum, and now the bed and breakfast at which I am staying. I’m halfway down the block when I hear my name called.

I stop and turn. Jonathan is striding towards me.

“Wandering alone into the night?” he asks as he nears. He smiles. “I like it.”

I smile back guardedly, no longer certain how my evening will go. I remain silent and keep my face as attentively blank as possible.

“Are you lost?” he asks. “Do you know where you’re going?”

“Yes,” I reply, cheerfully neutral, “I’m going… that way.” I point in the direction we’re already walking. “And I still want to know what you do afterwards.”

“I told you,” he answers easily, “it depends on who I’m with.”

He’s matched his pace to mine, and lopes along casually for a while as we make small talk: where I’m from, the shirt he’s wearing, when to get a beignet from Café du Monde such that the line will not be around the block.

He stops at a cross street. “This is where I leave,” he says, and then, very seriously, takes my hand. I think he is going to kiss it for a second, but instead he just holds it for a long moment. Then he turns and walks away.

“Wait,” I call.

He turns.

I walk towards him. His eyes light up.

“Your tour was very good,” I say. I approach him at an angle, as though I am going to pass him in the street. He drifts towards me. We are both walking now, very slowly, away from the light, towards an archway that leads to a shadowed courtyard. “Excellent actually.” I stop just on the other side of the arch. “You only missed one thing.”

“And what might that be?” The Transylvanian accent is gone. His face is practically incalescent with anticipation. It never gets old, watching men become such eager boys. I have never suffered from the ennui that plagues so many of my compatriots.

I smile. My fangs are sharp.