OCTOBER 27 Some cities are naturally holiday cities. London is a Christmas city. Paris is a Valentine’s Day city. And no place in the world is a Halloween city more than New Orleans. Maybe I feel that way because my first introduction to the Big Easy happened over Halloween a few years ago. Back then I’d headed there to find my twin sister who’d been kidnapped by our psychotic grandmother, Lavinia. Now the grandmother was dead, Maisie was the leader of the underworld, and I was the leader of all the Dark Races in the corporeal world and had made the Big Easy home. Life was funny like that sometimes. Or maybe it was that New Orleans always felt like a liminal space, where the veil between the living and the dead was gossamer thin. Often, walking down the streets of Faubourg Marigny or through one of the infamous Cities of the Dead, you could almost swear that the veil didn’t exist at all. It seemed the Big Easy, more than any other town in America, had long ago come to terms with its mortality, and its humans reveled in how close they danced with death. As an immortal, I found myself drawn to the ironic and inevitable sense of life their knowledge of death gave the city. Yeah, a lot of people associate New Orleans with Fat Tuesday, a time of excess and gluttonous revelry.