Black Heart Loa (10 page)

Fury rippled like oil across Babette’s face. “Of all the things Jean-Julien was, he was
never
innocent,” she spat. “Who are you, dead man, to speak to me this way?”

“I’m a man your daughter murdered by mistake,” Augustine replied.

“By mistake?” Babette glided forward, the hem of her black dress a spill of ink trailing the muddy road. Her body flowed and undulated, her shape suddenly fluid.

Augustine felt a moment of uncertainty. Babette St. Cyr had been dead for ten years, he for less than twenty-four hours. Ten years removed from life and humanity. He had no idea what she was capable of.

She halted in front of Augustine. A lightless corona danced and flickered like black flame around her body, crowned her lovely head. “How did my Rosie kill you by mistake?” Her hand lifted for his face, tiny sparks of incandescent energy arcing between her fingertips.

Augustine took a controlled and, hopefully, nonchalant step backward, placing himself out of touching range. “I got between Rosette and the woman she intended to shoot.”

Babette frowned. “
Shoot?
Rosette didn’t have a gun—only spells and tricks that Jean-Julien taught her.”

“Trust me,” Augustine said dryly, “she found a gun when her hex failed. Oh. Wait. It
didn’t
fail. She killed an innocent with her hex as …” His words trailed off when Babette blinked away.

Where did she
—His heart leapt into his throat.
Valin.

Whirling around, Augustine saw Babette standing beside the splintered mailbox post and Valin’s body. Wonder thawed the ice from her expression. Energy danced from her fingertips in electric Frankenstein flickers as she reached a hand toward the nomad.

“He feels like sanctuary, like an invitation,” she breathed. “Like a hearth-warmed home after a long wandering in dark and icy woods.” Turning her head, she lifted her gleaming gaze to Augustine. “He your Vessel?”

Not wishing to startle Babette into action—by sliding into the nomad’s body, for instance—Augustine suppressed his intense desire to sprint, and forced himself to amble over to Valin’s crumpled form.

“Yes. But he’s injured and unconscious. An accident with the truck that barreled out of your driveway.”

Babette snorted in irritation, then waved a hand. “Foolish creatures and a doomed boy, but I expected more from the dog.”

Augustine blinked. Maybe Valin truly
had
seen a Siberian husky and a pair of wolves in the back of the speeding hit-and-run truck. “It was my hope to use the cell phone to summon help for him,” he said.

“The dog?”

“Yes, absolutely, the dog and I chat on a regular basis.” Augustine flipped his hair out of his eyes with a flick of his fingers. “No. The nomad bleeding on the ground.”

“Won’t do you no good. You don’t have enough juice in you to use this phone, dead man,” she said, tossing it into the palmetto bush.

“Name’s Lord Augustine, not
dead man
. Although it
does
have a certain cachet.”

Babette snorted. “How does
Lord
Dead Man suit you?”

“I could do far worse, Lady Murderess.”

“Think you’re smart, think you’re clever,” Babette murmured, returning her gaze to the nomad. “Think you’re all manner of fine things, don’t you, dead man?”

“I try not to blow my own horn.”

Lightning licked across the sky, a jagged white snake’s tongue. Augustine felt his body suck up the residual energy charging the air and crackling like static electricity along his body, but it wasn’t enough. Not yet.

Her eyes brimming with radiant storm light, Babette slid a coquettish look Augustine’s way as she bent over the nomad once more and said, “Finders keepers.” She lowered her hand to Valin’s face.

Knowing that a Vessel could carry only one ghost at a time, Augustine hurled himself at Valin.

“H
ellfire!”

Belladonna slammed on the brakes and Kallie grabbed the back of Kerry’s seat to brace herself, her other hand locking around the shotgun. The Dodge Dart stuttered to a halt, gravel scrunching beneath its tires and pinging against its undercarriage.

“Jesus. Is that a motorcycle?” Kerry asked, leaning forward and trying to peer past the rain and the furiously tocking windshield wipers.

Unease snaked along Kallie’s spine. The black-and-chrome object lying in the road like a kissing-game bottle that had been spun, then abandoned, was a motorcycle. And it looked like Layne’s Harley.

“Sure is,” Belladonna affirmed.

And crumpled at the road’s edge beside a damaged mailbox post, a helmeted and leather-jacketed figure. “Layne,” Kallie whispered.

“Shit,” Belladonna breathed.

Fumbling with her seat belt, Kallie pushed at the back of Belladonna’s seat. “Let me out.” But her best friend was already swinging the door open and ducking into the rain.

Kallie shoved the driver’s seat against the steering wheel, then climbed from the car, shotgun in hand. Sucking in a breath of air thick with the smell of wet greenery and gravel, she ran to the side of the road and the man lying so still at its edge, the rain soaking her to the skin in the brief time it took her to reach him.

With a wordless glance at Belladonna, Kallie handed the mambo-in-training the rain-slicked shotgun, then dropped to her knees beside Layne. She touched her fingers to his throat, seeking his pulse.

His heart beat, slow and steady, beneath her fingertips.

Kallie sighed, relief draining the tension from her body like a tossed-back shot of premium whiskey. What the hell was Layne doing in Chacahoula anyway? When he’d left her place, he’d been headed for New Orleans and Gage’s cremation. Given the driveway he’d ended up in—the same one Kerry had directed her and Belladonna to—a dark suspicion simmered at the back of her mind.

I told him Doctor Heron’s dead wife was involved in the attack that killed Gage by mistake. What do you wanna bet he decided to go looking for her? And what do you wanna bet it’s no coincidence that we ended up at the same place?

“He still breathing?” Belladonna asked, crouching down beside her. Glimmers of rain jeweled her blue and black curls.

Kallie nodded. “So far.”

Belladonna tsked. “Saving his sexy nomad ass is starting to become a habit, Shug. Not that I object,” she amended, eyeing his unconscious length. “Not at all. But this just underscores the point I was making the other night.”

“Which point was that?” Kallie unstrapped Layne’s cracked helmet and removed it with slow, easy care, trying
not to aggravate any injuries he might have. She hoped the helmet had spared him from anything more serious than a temporary loss of consciousness.

“Oh, you know, the one about how helpless men as a species are,” Belladonna replied. “Falling into pits. Knocking their thick skulls against, from, on, or off all manner of hard-ass things. Hurling themselves out of objects moving at high rates of speed and/or altitudes. Poking sticks at things they shouldn’t.” Bottles clinked as she searched through her bag. She tsked. “Without us …”

“They’d be in a pretty pickle,” Kallie agreed, easing Layne’s goggles up to his forehead. “But I know women guilty of the things you just listed too, so it ain’t only the men.”

“By
women
do you mean
woman,
as in Kallie Rivière?”

“I’ve
never
hurled myself out of anything or—”

Layne moaned softly, but his eyes remained closed. Kallie trailed the back of one finger along the stiletto-thin sideburn curving along the line of his jaw, then touched the stylized fox black-inked beneath his right eye, naming his clan. Even though she wanted to stay with him, she couldn’t.

Layne was still breathing, yes, but Jackson might not be.

She slid her fingers along the rain-chilled chain of the Saint Bernadette medallion around her throat, then up to unfasten the clasp. Bending, she looped the chain around Layne’s neck, clicked the clasp shut. She straightened the medallion as it dipped and nestled in the hollow of his throat and rested her fingers against both—cool silver and warm, taut flesh—as rain continued to pour.

Heal him, O Glorious and Blessed Lady. Soothe and mend his hurts. Keep him intact. Amen.

Kallie lifted her hand. “Stay with him, Bell, and check him over.” She tossed Layne’s helmet into the grass as she rose to her feet. “I’m going to fetch Jacks.” She held her hand out for the shotgun.

Belladonna arched an eyebrow as she relinquished the weapon. Her drenched tunic hugged the curves of her breasts and hips. “You’re gonna need help digging him free, Shug.”

“I know,” Kallie replied, striding to the car and crossing to the passenger side. She opened the door.

Kerry looked at the shotgun, then up at her, his dark eyes uncertain. “Hey, hey, now. I brought you to the place your cousin is buried, just like you asked—”

“Yup, and I might need your help working a shovel,” Kallie said, tucking the shotgun’s stock under her arm. “I’m gonna untie you, but if you try to run …”

Kerry winced as she plucked a single dark hair from his head. Twirling the hair between her thumb and forefinger and making sure he got a good look, she said, “I’ll fix you but good.”

The color drained from Kerry’s face. “Ain’t no call for that. I’ll help and I ain’t running. To be honest, I never felt good about leaving your cousin behind like that in the first place.” He shook his head, looked away. “Man, I told Cash this whole thing about hitting Bonaparte’s house was a fucking … excuse my French … bad idea.”

“A goddamned shame the bastard—excuse my English—didn’t fucking listen to you.” Kallie slipped the hair into a pocket of her cutoffs. “You’ll get that back as soon as we have my cousin out of the ground. Now, lean forward.”

Kerry complied and Kallie quickly unknotted the rope Gabrielle had tied around his wrists, then tucked the rope into her hip pocket.
Just in case.

Leaving Kerry rubbing his freed wrists, Kallie raced around to the other side of the Dodge Dart. She shoved the driver’s seat back into place, hopped in behind the wheel, slammed the car into gear, and turned into the driveway marked by the broken mailbox post.

She drove up the rutted and bumpy drive, feeling a bone-deep chill as she recognized the house and its sheltering palm trees from her blood divination.

Doctor Heron’s home.

As she’d suspected, Layne’s presence
wasn’t
a coincidence. And that ended any remaining mystery as to who had ordered Jacks snatched from their home and put into the ground.

Icy fingers locked around Kallie’s heart. If the twisted and vengeance-seeking root doctor had ordered Jackson buried alive, there’d been a goddamned good reason for it. Fear pulsed through her like blood.

She could think of any number of dark and nasty potions that could’ve—and most likely had—been forced down her cousin’s throat before he’d been tossed into his grave.

Potions of command and compelling. Potions of brutal transformation. Enslaving potions. Potions that extended pain and suffering.

A muscle jumped in Kallie’s jaw. As if slowly suffocating to death weren’t bad enough …

She eased her foot off the gas as she reached the end of the driveway, then hit the brakes. A flash of lightning strobed across a grave-size hole in the side-yard beside a
pile of mud and dirt. Several mud-smeared shovels rested in the grass at strange angles, as though flung aside.

Kallie thought of Layne and wondered if by some weird quirk of fate he’d somehow stumbled upon Jackson’s burial site before the accident happened and had dug him up. But if he had, where was her cousin? The yard was empty, no sign of anyone around, living, ghost, or otherwise.

“You sure this is the right driveway?” Kallie asked, even as her mind tossed back:
Hello, even if it ain’t, just how many homes along this stretch of road have people buried in their yards? A neighborhood zombie garden?

“Yeah, positive. This is the driveway and the house,” Kerry replied. “And that there’s where they buried your cousin. But,” he added, voice puzzled, “looks like he ain’t buried no more. Maybe they-all just wanted to scare him.”

“Maybe.” But given this was Doctor Heron’s house, she doubted just scaring Jackson was the intention, even as she hoped Kerry’s words were true. Her CPR-aching ribs and sternum gave testimony to the dead root doctor’s true intentions.

Switching off the engine, Kallie slipped out of the car, shotgun in hand, and raced through thinning rain across the wet, slippery yard to the grave. She pressed a protective hand against her bruised breastbone, felt the rapid drumming of her heart as she halted at the hole’s foot.

She wanted to look, but an image of Jackson lying broken and pale and lifeless at the grave’s muddy bottom stole her strength.

Ah, Jacks, please. You can’t. You just can’t. You may have been born my cousin, but Hurricane Gaspard and my mama made us siblings. I ain’t about to lose the only brother I’ve ever had.

Kallie closed her eyes and, as she drew in breath to voice a prayer, lines from a Keats poem she’d heard Jackson quote from time and again, always with his wicked drawl, played through her memory and slipped from her lips instead, like a prayer, a summons.

“‘Give me women, wine and snuff / Until I cry out “hold, enough!” You may do so sans objection / Till the day of resurrection: / For, bless my beard, they aye shall be / My beloved Trinity.’” Kallie opened her eyes. “You ain’t said ‘enough’ to anything yet, Jackson.”

Drawing in a deep and steadying breath of air laced with the smells of wet wood and leaves, of muddy ground, she stepped forward; but just as she was about to look down, she caught a nose-crinkling whiff of pungent cigar smoke and booze and something spicy like …

Kallie’s blood chilled.

… hot peppers.

“I too be fucking fond of de women and wine, but give me a big ol’ cigar over snuff any day,” said a jovial but nasal voice from behind her.