“Come on.” Carys untied Teacup from the hitching post and started to walk down the street, Teacup’s hoofs clacking against the cobblestones. After a few steps, she turned, curls flying. “You coming?”

Greta hurried after her.

Carys finished whatever was in the plastic cup and tossed it into the next trash can they passed. “This is the Old Ursuline Convent,” she said, pointing. “You know the story of the filles à la cassette?”

Greta shook her head.

“Are you interested in the macabre and supernatural?” Carys asked, her voice that of a natural storyteller.

“Uh. Yes.”

Wasn’t everyone?

“In the 1720s, the population of New Orleans skewed quite male, making marriage impossible. They required an influx of women, and France was only too happy to scour the streets, prisons, orphanages, and brothels, snatching whoever they deemed undesirable or a strain on the system, loading them onto ships, and sending them to the French colonies in need of marriageable women.”

“Jesus. They took them away from their families?”

“A lot of them didn’t have families. When they arrived in port, the filles à la cassette trooped off the ship carrying their belongings in casket-shaped chests, their mouths bloody, their skin as pale as death, burning instantly in the Louisiana sun. Or so the stories go.”

Carys raised an impish eyebrow and ran a hand through Teacup’s mane.

“Until their marriages, they were cloistered here by the Ursuline nuns. One by one, the girls were married off, leaving their belongings behind. Gossip circulated that these were not happy marriages, and some of the girls ended up on the streets, or worse. The mortality rate in New Orleans began to rise noticeably after their arrival. Rumors arose that the girls had transported not clothes in those caskets all the way from France but vampires. The nuns went to the attic where the caskets had been stored and found them all empty.”

She paused for effect, and Greta gazed up at the attic windows of the convent.

“Terrified that the vampires would come back to sleep in their caskets, the nuns bolted the door to the attic and nailed the windows shut with nails blessed by the pope. But one of those windows had an uncanny habit of swinging open in the middle of the night.”

Greta was hanging on her every word.

“In 1978, some paranormal investigators decided they were going to crack the case of the filles à la cassette. They were denied entry to the convent itself by the archbishop, so they climbed the convent wall and settled in to spend the night there, hoping to see the attic window open…and solve the mystery of who—or what—was responsible.”

“Did they?”

“The next morning, their decapitated bodies were found splayed across the steps of the convent. They had been completely drained of blood. Their murders have never been solved, but locals speculate the filles à la cassette couldn’t have their secrets getting out.”