Black Magic Woman (32 page)

The space beneath the branches remained largely empty, and open. The neat carpet of grass stretched from wall to wall, obviously thick and well tended, broken here or there by pale stones jutting up out of the sod.

Gravestones. And gravestones in Manhattan meant a churchyard, of which precious few remained. Daphanie knew the most famous, of course—the New York Marble Cemeteries, Trinity Churchyard, St. Paul’s. She’d wandered into most of them during her teenaged morbid phase, but this one looked unfamiliar.

She thought she would remember it if she had seen it, if for no other reason than the appearance of the two distinctive graves in the back corner. One bore a stone sarcophagus with an effigy of a man—presumably the occupant—reclining along the marble lid. If she squinted, Daphanie could see writing carved into the side facing the yard, though she remained too far away to read it.

Next to the grand tomb, wedged into the corner, stood a plain, granite obelisk, about four feet tall and as thick around as a ten-year-old boy. It bore no writing, no carvings, no distinct marks of any kind, and yet around the square base, she could see a row of X-shaped marks drawn on the pale stone with something the color of charcoal.

Beneath the elm’s leafy branches, near the wall behind the sarcophagus, Daphanie thought she saw the figures of five or six men gathered around a low table that all but groaned under the weight of food and flowers and all manner of decorations.

Her subconscious fit the pieces together in an instant.

Drums
+
fire
+
graves
+
me
=
Someplace I
really
don’t want to be.

Keeping her eye on the figures on the far side of the small graveyard, Daphanie carefully braced her hands on the ground, steeled herself against the agony in her head, and eased slowly to her feet. She stood there for a moment, verifying that her legs would hold her and more importantly would obey her commands, before she began to sidle toward the gate. Her progress was slowed by her desire to keep to the shadows, but she had made it nearly as far as the corner between the church and the street wall when a deeper shadow blocked her path.

“Oh, no, Ms. Carter, you can’t leave us,” a man’s voice said, slick and obviously amused. “After all, you’re very nearly our guest of honor.”

Daphanie didn’t recognize the voice, but she recognized the presence. It felt as thick and black and oily as Manon Henri had felt in her dreams, and when she forced herself to look, she recognized the face.

Sosa.

Before her stood the man who had grabbed her at D’Abo’s urging that night in the club. The man whose eyes had stared blankly into the middle distance while his “master” bellowed and blustered like a summer thunderstorm.

Tonight, Sosa’s eyes looked anything but empty. Tonight they were filled with a kind of gleeful anticipation that had her stomach tightening and her instincts screaming in protest. Tonight they held a look of malice and an intent so evil she thought he must make Manon Henri a very suitable assistant.

Daphanie Carter had been a lot of things in her life, though, and a coward had never been one of them. She didn’t care if her knees knocked, her teeth chattered, or her palms sweat. The only thing that mattered was that she would not cower before this monster. She hiked up her chin before she spoke to him.

“You’re the one who placed a curse on me,” she stated simply, and she felt a rush of satisfaction that the words emerged calmly and evenly.

She saw surprise flicker behind his cruel smile.

“Very good,” he complimented her. “I had of course intended that you blame D’Abo for your predicament, but at this point, I suppose it hardly matters. Not that Charles will mind the confusion—”

“Because you killed him.”

Anger tightened his features for an instant before he managed to soothe away the strain and resume his expression of amused condescension. “It is true that I never imagined his body would be found quite so soon—something I believe I owe to your friends. My plan had been to continue with the charade until tonight’s work was complete, just to be safe. I do so like to wrap things up neatly, but he expressed the most distressing intention to attempt to stop the proceedings, and naturally I couldn’t have that.”

He corrected himself.

“We couldn’t have that.”

“You’re planning to sacrifice me to Henri, to take away my soul and give her my body.” That managed to surprise him, and she took a certain amount of satisfaction in knowing he had thought himself too clever for her. “I should tell you that I don’t intend to let you do it. Did you think I would go along quietly? I happen to like being who I am. I have no intention of giving it up so you can be the bitch queen’s chief flunky, the same way you were for D’Abo.”

Sosa threw back his head and laughed. “Is that what you think? That I would do all this to be a servant? You foolish girl. When Manon rises, she will call down Kalfou Himself,
gran’ maître
of all dark magics, and be granted all the powers of His world. She will become the new
loa,
Maman Manon, and in her gratitude to me, the one who raised her, she will make me the most powerful
bokor
who has ever lived.” His eyes flashed with greed and madness. “I will serve
no
one, especially not a pretender the likes of Charles D’Abo. He was never more than the means to an end. And the end is near.”

“Not my end.”

Sosa leaned in close, so close that the smell of rum and tobacco on his breath made her stomach churn. His nose almost bumped hers, and she could count the red veins in his bloodshot eyes. “You will do as I command.”

Daphanie shook her head. “No,” she said quietly, her voice as resolute as her heart. “I won’t.”

“You have no choice,” he hissed and jerked away. “You forget,
putain,
I brought you here, and if I have to, I can make you beg for the
coup poudre
.”

Stepping back, he raised his hand as if to strike her, and she could see for the first time that he gripped something tightly in his right fist. Her eyes fixed on the object and she frowned, an uneasy feeling clawing through her belly. It appeared to be a lump of clay or wax, crudely molded into an approximation of a human form.

The sorcerer followed her gaze and laughed, the high, evil cackle of a witch or a madman.

“Ah, yes, you see my
’tite Daph’nie, non
? She looks just like you, doesn’t she? She should, since she is wearing your clothes and your hair.”

Daphanie recognized the glittery fabric of her tank top instantly; she’d almost expected to see that. But it took a moment for his words about her hair to sink in.

An image flashed into her mind, absent of all context save a bowl of white porcelain. Her hairbrush in Danice’s sink, balanced drunkenly in the shallow curve,
shed hairs clinging to the bristles.

Her heart stuttered to a stop.

How stupid of them.

She and Asher had just assumed because they had noticed nothing missing after the break-in that nothing had been taken. A few fingers full of shed hair from a brush was only so much trash. Why would they even have checked?

It would be unlikely a doll could control you unless the
bokor
had something of yours to bind the doll to you
, Erica had said. A warning, if she had only listened.
Something you’ve had for a long time and used or worn frequently is usually preferred, because the closer it is to you, the more of your energy it will have stored.

What could be considered closer to Daphanie than her own hair? It had literally been a part of her. And now it decorated the doll a madman intended to use to march her toward her own living death.

“Oh, yes,” Sosa hissed, the firelight casting his features in sharp relief, making his eyes look as black as a well and his mouth as red as blood. “Maman Manon will be suitably grateful, especially when she looks upon her image and sees herself exactly as she remembers. In the beginning, I had thought any girl would do, provided she was not too old, not too fat or too ugly, but now I see that fate made me wait for you. The
loa
knew you were coming, and they made me bide my time until you came.”

And here, Daphanie thought desperately, she had always believed fate was on her side. Had it deserted her now? Had it returned her to Manhattan, to her home and her family, and introduced Asher into her life only to end it now?

It hadn’t, she assured herself. It couldn’t. Men like Sosa might be crazy and cruel, but fate was impartial. Fate would always deliver what a person deserved.

Clinging to that thought, Daphanie hoped fate still believed she had been a good girl.

With her eyes on the madman and her heart with Asher, silently, earnestly, Daphanie began to pray for a miracle.

Twenty-four

The highly specialized variety of Other known as a Guardian is not to be confused with the human conception of the “guardian angel,” something a Guardian would be the first to tell you. The Guardians of the Others are not sent by a benevolent deity, or any deity at all, but rather are assigned their duties of protecting humans from supernatural threats by the oldest and most respected member of their kind, an ancient and awe-inspiring figure known only as the Watcher. What he watches, no one is precisely certain, but given the success rate of his army in protecting and preserving the humans under their protection, one assumes it must be the human race in its entirety.

Not every human will fall under the protection of a Guardian during his or her life; in fact, very few of them will. But those who do find themselves under one of these creatures’ sheltering wings can rest assured that while that Guardian lives, that human shall come to no harm.

—A Human Handbook to the Others,
Chapter Nineteen

Asher had never known fear like what he faced when he returned to the Upper East Side and found the bed in Missy and Graham’s guest room cold and empty. Unless it was the fear he felt when he stood with his back to the front wall of the Church of St. Mary the Consoler and heard Daphanie’s voice calmly challenging the man who intended to end her life.

When he got his hands on her again, he was going to kill her. And then he was going to make love to her until she was permanently crippled and would never again be able to walk away from the safe place where he had left her. Just see if he didn’t.

But first, he had to find a way to rescue her from the clutches of Emmanuel Sosa, something that he feared would be easier said than done, since the man would have made a hell of a military strategist. He had set himself up in a place that was both spiritually significant and easily defensible. Asher, Rafe, and the Lupines had discussed it as soon as they had gotten word of where Daphanie had been taken. Getting his woman out wouldn’t be easy, but few of the important things in life were, and he knew nothing would ever be more important than this.

Thanks to the quick thinking of the female Silverbacks Samantha Carstairs had handpicked to guard the Winters’ house while Daphanie was inside, her midnight stroll had not gone unnoticed. The Lupine who had been stationed across from the front door had been surprised to see it open just before eleven o’clock and even more surprised when Daphanie had emerged apparently under her own power. Surprise, though, hadn’t kept her from doing her job.

Robin, the guard in question, had taken note of Daphanie’s solo state and her awkward, shambling gait and gotten curious. Although Asher might have preferred that she had simply stopped his woman and marched her right back into the house, at least the Lupine had made sure to follow her, keeping Daphanie in sight as she entered the small fenced park a few short yards from the door of Vircolac.

The men there had taken Robin by surprise. She had seen three of them surround Daphanie and immediately leaped forward, only to feel a sharp blow to the base of her skull and then see nothing but the inside of her eyelids for approximately ten to fifteen minutes. When she’d regained consciousness, Daphanie had been gone, but her scent had been fresh. Angry and ashamed, Robin had followed the trail on foot all the way downtown to the Flatiron district and Mary the Consoler, tucked into a side street between Madison Square Park to the north and Union Square to the south. She had taken one look at the situation in the churchyard and run back uptown at top Lupine speed. By the time she’d collapsed in the front hall of Vircolac, Samantha’s call had been made, Asher and the others had returned, and Robin—all of twenty years old and stupid with it—had been cowering on the floor at Graham’s feet with her paws tucked to her chest and her belly exposed.

Asher had resented the five minutes it took to calm her down enough to tell her story, about the poor decisions she had made in allowing Daphanie to leave the building and then allowing herself to be taken by surprise when she should have been providing a rescue. Eventually, though, she had spilled her guts and Rafe had nodded, turning to Asher with purpose.

“I know the place. Not the church, but the area, and it makes sense. Broadway was one of the few major roads that existed in Manhattan during the eighteenth century, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that an east-west road intersected with Broadway in that vicinity. It would have provided access from the farms to the populated area at the tip of the island. When Manon Henri was slain, that could very well have been a crossroads, and her killers would likely have considered it to be so far outside the city that a grave wouldn’t be found or disturbed.”