Black Heart Loa (30 page)

Ice-cold fingers brushed against his forehead and Jackson sucked in a breath, inhaling the earthy and familiar scents of juniper and ashes, ripe apples and cinnamon. A husky voice—one from long-ago dreams—said, “
Les zaricos est salés, cher.
Jackson. Can you hear me?”

Jackson forced his eyes open again, squinting against the light. His uncle Ambrose still stood over him. Persistent dream, this. But—no harm in double-checking. “You real?” he croaked.

A sad smile brushed Ambrose’s lips instead of the joyous grin that Jackson remembered. “
Oui,
boy, I’m real. Your
tante
January is here, so is
Tante
Angélique. You finally found your way home.”

“Home?” Jackson looked past his uncle to the woman with the ivory hair standing beside him in a tight purple T-shirt over jeans. Remembered her mesmerizing eyes, the lullabies she would sing in Cajun. Remembered her white fur and fast paws.
Tante
January.

“I’m in Le Nique?” he whispered, feeling like he’d slipped in time. He saw shelves behind his uncle, stocked with jars and bottles of potions, powders, and salves like at his
tante
’s botanica, then realized he lay on a sheet-draped and padded examination table.

“Yes,” a woman’s voice said. “René and the others followed your dog and found you where you’d been buried. Do you remember any of that?”

“Cielo …” Jackson began, alarmed. A cold, wet nose nuzzled his hand, reassuring him.

Daddy.

“That her name?” the woman said. “She’s fine. She’s been fed and watered and she’s refused to leave your side.”

“Good girl, you,” Jackson murmured, giving his fingers to Cielo’s warm tongue. He felt himself falling toward the bonfire raging just beneath him. And shook himself.

Stay awake. You need to get a grip and figure out what’s going on.

“Do you remember what happened to you?” the woman asked again.

Images flashed behind Jackson’s eyes, stabbed at his thoughts—a desperate and brutal fight, an oily potion, a knife slicing into him, shovels, dirt. No air and bad memories and a woman’s voice—all silver sea tones.

Might be too late for this little
chien de maison.

Lâche pas, lâche pas.

“Musta pissed someone off royal, me,” Jackson whispered. “Zombie-hex and a fucking grave.”

“The hex didn’t take, near as we can tell,” the woman said. “But we plan to follow up with a cleansing, make sure you’re uncrossed for true.”

“C’est ça bon. Merci,”
Jackson rasped. Despite the potion he still tasted on his tongue, pain throbbed at his temples. Fire smoldered beneath his skin.

“Here’s some water.”

Jackson felt an arm slide beneath his shoulders and ease him up so he could drink from the glass someone pressed against his lips. He drank the cold water down in long, grateful gulps, icing his aching throat and
cooling—for a moment—the fevered heat behind his eyes. When he finished the water, he was laid down again.

“Better?” the woman asked.

Jackson turned his head, following the sound of her voice to the other side of the table. A woman with warm, emerald-green eyes met his gaze. Her long hair was tied back, but a single auburn ringlet had escaped to frame her pretty face. He didn’t recognize her at first, not until her lips curved into an encouraging smile. She’d been a freckle-faced teen when he’d last seen her—a lifetime ago.

“
Tante
Ange,” he breathed.

She nodded, her smile widening, only to fade as concern flickered in her eyes. “Do you know what’s happening to you? What comes next?”

Fear iced Jackson’s spine. “‘Next’? I thought you said the hex didn’t take.”

“It didn’t,” Angélique assured him. “That’s not why you’re hurting, not why you’re fevered. Did your papa ever talk to you about your First Change?”

Jackson stared at her. “First Change?” he repeated, pulse racing through his veins. “Just that I ain’t …”

The words turned to ash in Jackson’s throat as the bonfire blaze snapped up from below and engulfed him. Pain wrenched at him as his muscles spasmed. His eyes snapped shut. Hands as cold as Arctic icebergs grasped his shoulders, pinned him down. His body twitched and thrummed—a live wire.

The spasm ended as abruptly as it had begun and Jackson gasped in relief. But the freezing hands remained on his shoulders, heavy as steel.

“We’re running out of time,” he heard his uncle say, voice wire-tight. “Jackson, can you hear me, boy?”

Light needled Jackson’s eyes as he forced them open and met Ambrose’s grim gaze. Realized the hands holding him belonged to his uncle.
“Oui, Nonc.”

“
Bon.
Then I need you to listen close,” Ambrose said. “I don’t know what-all you remember, but you need to understand what’s happening to you. Your papa was a
loup-garou
and you’re a half blood. And you’re going through your First Change.”

Jackson’s heart pounded wildly in his chest. “Change? No. I was told that some half bloods
never
Change and that I was one of those.”

January stirred beside Ambrose. “Who told you that?” she asked. “Your mama? She lied to you, Jackson—”

“That doesn’t matter,” Ambrose cut in, slanting a dark look at his wife. “Not now. This ain’t the time.”

January shook her head, but said nothing more, her lips compressing into a thin, bitter line.

Fury shook Jackson. He aimed his heated gaze at his snowy-haired but youthful
tante
. “You ain’t got no business saying my mother lied to me or to anyone else,” he said, voice strained. “No business. None.”

January met his furious regard, a wolfish and powerful light gleaming in her jade eyes, but no regret. Her lips parted, but before she could say anything, Ambrose spoke, his words sliding like a butter knife between them.

“Nicolas was just as responsible as Lucia in what happened to you and your sisters.”

Jackson’s heart clenched. He remembered Jeanette snuggled in his arms, Junalee’s smile. Tried not to think of how they’d looked in the end. “My sisters?” He shifted his attention from January to his uncle. “No disrespect,
Nonc,
but what the hell are you talking about?”

Releasing Jackson’s shoulders, Ambrose said, “Your papa never told your mama what a half blood faces during First Change until after Junalee had been born.” He paused, trailing a long-fingered hand through his hair, his expression pensive. “I don’t know whether it just never occurred to Nicolas that Lucia might want to know
before
they had kids or if he deliberately ‘forgot’ to tell her. He never told me.”

Jackson felt sick as he remembered the late-night arguments between his folks when they thought the kids were sleeping.
Over us. The fights were over us.

“In any case,” Ambrose said, “your mama was so worried about what might happen to y’all during First Change that, after she learned the truth, she used her hoodoo to bind all you kids to one form—your human one. And she forbade your papa to ever bring you here again.” He shook his head. “Nicolas was hurt and furious.”

Jackson looked away from his uncle and stared at the timbered ceiling. He didn’t want to believe what he was hearing, didn’t want to believe that his mother
had
lied to him and buried a part of who he was.

Maybe if she’d lived, she woulda told me when I was older, allowed me to choose for myself
…

“What happens during First Change?” Jackson asked from a throat gone tight. “I don’t remember Papa ever having trouble during his Changes.”

“It’s different for half bloods,” Ambrose admitted, voice low. “Far more difficult and dangerous. You’ll be bound to the cycle of the moon, when we’re not. If your human nature is too entrenched, you won’t be able to accept the wolf. Your papa tried to help you by making sure you knew that the wolf was a natural part of who you are.”

Until Mama changed all that and Papa stormed from
the house, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, hurt and fury glinting in his eyes.

Ain’t gonna forgive you for dis, Lucia. Dey be my kids too. You t’ink I wouldn’t guide dem tru de Change? Keep dem safe? Dis ain’t done, woman. Not by a long shot.

Papa never lived in the house again.

“If your First Change is successful,” Angélique told Jackson in a gentle voice, “then you’ll Change during full moons—just like in the movies—but you won’t be a full wolf, you’ll be a hybrid wolf-man—
loup-homme
—with fangs and claws, heightened senses and strength, and the inherent need to run and hunt. But your heightened senses and strength will remain with you always, during all phases of the moon.”

Jackson lowered his gaze from the ceiling and looked at Angélique. He felt his potion-distanced pain starting to return. “And what happens if my First Change is unsuccessful?”

“You could end up mindless and stuck in a monstrous wolf-man form,” she replied, sympathy glinting in the green depths of her eyes. “Or lost to madness in two forms, or dead.”

Jackson nodded, mouth almost too dry for speech. “Well, then. Need to make damned sure I succeed, me.”

Angélique smiled, but looked away for just a split second, and he realized that she hadn’t told him everything.

“Hey,” Jackson said, “I need to know every—” Another spasm bit into his muscles. His teeth sliced into his lower lip and the copper-penny taste of blood trickled into his mouth. Pain snaked out from its hiding place and sank sharp teeth into him everywhere.

Angélique whispered into his ear as the spasm passed.
“All you need to know is this: Be a wolf, Jackson. Don’t let your humanity Change you into a monster. Or end your life.” Something pressed against his lips—the cool mouth of a glass bottle. “Drink.”

Jackson did as she asked, gulping down another potion of thick honey and bitter herbs, then closed his eyes again, trying to make sense of everything he’d just been told. Trying to understand what he was facing, trying to prepare for it, but pain kept dashing his thoughts to pieces against a wicked reef.

“I’ve got his bath ready,” a man said, a voice Jackson didn’t recognize.

He opened his eyes and saw a black guy, his hair twisted into a bunch of short braids poking out in all directions and angles around his skull, dressed in jeans and a deep-blue T-shirt. He was standing beside the table with a large basin of steaming water in his hands.

Nomad,
Jackson realized when he saw the little squirrel tat inked beneath his right eye. Then he noticed the man’s eyes. One dark brown and one deepest blue. “Never seen that in a person before,” he marveled, then clarified, “Your eyes. Is it a
loup-garou
trait?”

“Wouldn’t know, since I’m human,” the man said with a quick smile. “But I got a feeling they all
wish
it was a
loup-garou
trait.”

Someone snorted.

“Be quick, Merlin,” Ambrose growled. “We need to get Jackson to the cage
tout de suite
.”

Before Jackson could question his uncle about what he meant by “the cage,” he felt himself drifting away on a tide of fever and potion and distant pain, and his eyes fluttered shut.

Words from one of his favorite Keats poems curled through his mind, as though whispered into his ear by an older brother who’d shared the same grief, guiding him through the shoals of darkness he’d washed up against following Gaspard.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death / Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme, / To take into the air my quiet breath; / Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain …

To cease upon the midnight with no pain.

He’d
never
wanted to cease, he’d always been in love with life and laughter. But not to feel—that had been another matter. Not to remember the weight of a sister in his arms or the sight of her empty and staring eyes …

No. Oh, hell no. You can’t afford to sleep, to drift. To peel scabs off half-healed wounds. You need to focus so you can survive what’s coming. Change. First Change.

Jackson grabbed onto that thought and reeled himself up from the dark and soothing herb-soaked depths like a free diver following a weighted line to the ocean’s light-glimmering surface. He forced his eyes open.

Merlin bent over him, a look of intense concentration on his face—as if praying—as he dipped a cloth into the steaming water and wrung it out. Jackson breathed in the odors of myrrh and minty hyssop and warm milk.

Jackson tried to lever himself up on his elbows. Merlin glanced at him, surprised, wet cloth in hand. “Help me up—
s’il vous plaît,
” he said. “I need to take part in what-ever’s going on—all of it—since it’s my life.”

Merlin didn’t even hesitate. He dropped the cloth back into the basin of water, then eased Jackson up into a
sitting position with strong but wet hands. “Damn straight, man. It
is
your life.”

The room spun and black spots peppered Jackson’s vision, and for a moment, he thought he was going to pass out; but the nomad supported him with one hand between his shoulder blades, the other gripping his shoulder until the room steadied.

“C’est ça bon,”
Jackson murmured, gripping the table’s edges for balance. He met Merlin’s bicolored eyes. “Thanks.”

“We got no time to waste,” Ambrose reminded them. “Get this done.”

“Mais oui, Premier,”
Angélique said in a respectful tone.

With a quick smile, the nomad wrung the cloth out again. “Close your eyes and try to envision a column of white light pouring in through the top of your skull and flowing like blood throughout your body, okay?”

Nodding, Jackson closed his eyes and did just that—or tried to, anyway. The potion’s drugs and the fever kept chipping away at his concentration like chisels into ice.

He felt a wet cloth on his skin, trailing ice along his chest, his back, his limbs. Smelled smoky incense. Heard Angélique’s soft voice chanting, “Spirits of the wilderness, sacred mother, fair and true, I appeal to you. Jackson Bonaparte has been crossed by evil and desires to be free of this negative and attacking energy …”