Free A Circle of Celebrations: The Complete Edition by Jody Lynn Nye

pay for breakfast somewhere. Irmani dropped the worn leather billfold into the green crocodile handbag between her feet. Her partner Gib gave her a silly, lopsided grin, teeth shining in his good-looking, dark-skinned face.
    “You’re going to Hell for that. Stealing in the house of God. Before His very face!” a wispy voice hissed.
    Irmani looked around. A stern, wrinkled face like a piece of wadded up newspaper glared at her. The old woman had to be at least ninety, but sharp as broken glass. Irmani frowned. She thought she hadn’t been observed. Never mind. She crossed her forefinger over her thumb and pointed it at her accuser.
    “You didn’t see anything,” she whispered. The old woman’s face crumpled with confusion for a moment. When it cleared, she smiled a little vacantly at Irmani, then went back to her prayer book.
    Irmani and Gib exchanged the kiss of peace with the rest of the congregation and headed back to their seedy little hotel to change out of their Sunday best.
    “How much you get?” Gib asked, handing over the two wallets he had lifted during the service.
    “Just four,” Irmani said, counting twenties with that inward thrill that she always got at the sight of money. “But the pickings will be good this afternoon, I promise. The city is just full of tourists!”

    “Hey, sorry, babe,” a tall, fair-skinned man said, clutching her arm with an unsteady hand. His eyes were bloodshot, the result of drinking all the Hurricanes that had been in the stack of cups he carried in his other hand.
    “No, it’s all my fault,” Irmani assured him, putting a friendly hand on his shoulder. Gib nudged up behind him and lifted the wallet out of his pocket and that of the equally drunken friend who swayed and giggled beside him. “Hey, you all have a nice day, huh?”
    “We are, babe, we are!” At her mental nudge, they noticed another booth selling Hurricanes on the street and staggered toward it, holding out their towers of glasses. Too bad they weren’t going to be able to afford another one unless they left their ATM cards back at their hotel.
    With its ornamental painted tiles and fancy curlicue ironwork, the 300-year old French Quarter looked dressed up for Mardi Gras already. There was magic all around the place. Irmani felt it and loved it. Her own talents were shallow by comparison. The Jedi mind trick she pulled on the old lady in the church and the two drunken frat boys were about all she could do, but she was aware of the strong underpinnings of magic in the old city around her. Music was both a part of it and a result of it. She knew little about New Orleans before she got there, but Gib had insisted it would be fun to go to Mardi Gras, so they went.
    Irmani laughed at the girls who stood on the antique balconies and yanked up their shirts for strings of beads thrown up to them by shouting men down on the street. There was no way she’d make a public fool of herself for anything, particularly not plastic beads. She noticed that it was only the tourists who did it, not the locals. In fact, she noticed the locals watching her with suspicious eyes from the doorways of residences and shops as she went by, as if they could see the growing stash of purses and wallets in her tote bag. Did they know she wasn’t the innocent shopper she appeared to be?
    New Orleans was a strait-laced town, much more than she had expected from the come-as-you-are, anything-goes travel brochures. Sure, it was still more than half messed up since the hurricane, but it still had the feel of a place that knew its own mind. It was definitely a Catholic city, like Boston, where she’d spent one miserable week the summer before, but this had a real mind to it, like none of the others had. New Orleans possessed character. It didn’t really approve of all those drunk, happy people with money in their pockets, buying round after round of Hurricanes, collecting throws and hot sauce and t-shirts and masks, paying no