Flame Unleashed (Hell to Pay) (10 page)

She took another sip of wine in an effort to drive down the tightness in her throat along with her memories. Holy hell, how long had it been since she dwelled on this pain and explored her punishment? How about never? She refused to think about the past, much less discuss it over dinner.

Odie waited with a solemn expression. Beneath the curl of dark brown hair, the black slashes of his eyebrows drew together.

Before she had to produce an answer to the unspoken question, Philippe saved her by delivering their steaming appetizers.

Stirring the crab bisque soup, the tomato and seafood essence wafted up from the bowl. The tender crab pieces blended beautifully with beads of tapioca starch that captured the creamy liquid and transported it to her taste buds with every bite. For a moment, she lost herself in the enjoyment of the meal.

He leaned forward and whispered. “I didn’t want to spoil your evening.”

“It was already spoiled when I killed a man and then Satan stopped by to flirt with me.”

She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with the soft linen and forced herself to relax her hands, one on top of the other, on the edge of the table. Manners first. No need to punish this man. It wasn’t his fault, the mess she was in.

Odie leaned back in his seat. “Well, as penance, I would be honored to share my history with you. May I describe how I came to be this horrible creature you see before you today?”

Despite herself, the corners of her mouth lifted.

“Are you familiar with the origins of the Cajun culture? Acadia?”

“As in Nova Scotia?”

“Yes, exactly. I was born in Acadia, a New France colony. At that time, Acadia included much of Nova Scotia, some of New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. My grandparents wanted a more prosperous life than they could have in France, so they had established a farm holding. That’s where my father was born and where I was born. Let’s see, the year of my birth was ...” he studied the ceiling, “1731. Our farm was tucked into the woods off the coast, about a day’s ride north from Halifax, if you have an idea where that is.”

She nodded, enjoying his wistful smile as he reminisced.

“What was your home like?”

“Crowded. When I was young, our house contained grandparents, parents, and my siblings. Later, my brother and his wife and children lived with us until they had their own place. Every single day was full of activity and strong opinions.”

“Sounds like a loving household.”

Odie cut a piece of his roasted duck, closed his eyes, and swallowed. She followed suit with a savory piece of chicken in buttery béarnaise sauce. Time slowed as she waited for him to continue.

“I had a good family, and we all worked very hard. Father organized the planting and harvesting, which my brother, Gerard, and I did along with our grandfather. Then Father would go out fishing each day in the bay. Mother and my sister, Marien, preserved foods for the winter. It was a nice rhythm of life.”

“Were you the oldest?”

“No, youngest. And oh, how I caught it from Marien—she loved bossing me around. It wasn’t until I grew taller than her that she finally backed off. But by then, she’d discovered boys and lost interest in tormenting me.”

Fine lines at the corner of his eyes crinkled with each smile as he told his story, and his strong hands emphasized points of his tale. His damp mouth, tinted red with wine, tilted her equilibrium.

Unable to stop herself, she licked her bottom lip and blinked hard to focus before continuing. “What happened to your brother and sister?”

“Gerard died of pneumonia while in the stockade awaiting deportation. Marien went to South Carolina with her husband. They left early in
Le Grand Dérangement
.”

The way he said it as he gripped the knife and fork in his big hands contradicted his too-calm expression. His gaze had gone black as the muscle in his jaw jumped.

“What was that?”

“
Le Grand Dérangement
, otherwise known as The Great Deportation, was politically motivated by the British during the French and Indian War in the 1700s. The first wave removed thousands of Acadians to the thirteen colonies.”

“So your sister ...?”

“Since she and her husband lived near the main settlement of Grand-Pré on the coast of the Bay of Fundy, they got rounded up sooner and were forced to move to South Carolina. They worked on a plantation for years, paying off ... debts.”

“What debts?”

His black stare absorbed the candlelight. He set down the fork and kneaded his forehead, as though he wanted to rub away the memory. “They went unwillingly to South Carolina, which served as simply a place to live. It wasn’t home. They had to work off fabricated debts for nothing that they wanted in the first place. Debt for the privilege of being run off of their own land.”

“So they were slaves?” Her knife clanked against the plate, and she cringed. Thankfully, the few remaining patrons didn’t appear to notice.

Percussive waves of anger flowed from him across the table. Even though he hadn’t moved, somehow he had grown larger, as if every muscle flexed at once.

“It was called ‘subsidized’ work, meant to pay off their debt of passage and of resettlement. But when you figured in the lack of choice and the punishments? Yes, indentured slavery.”

“And you?”

“By then I had a wife, Yvette, and two young daughters, Vivienne and Ada. We’d moved deeper into the southern forests of Nova Scotia, hoping to escape the British. Eventually, though, we too became part of the second wave of expulsion.”

“Is that when you came to Louisiana?”

His strong hands now punctuated the story with angry chops. Each time he mentioned a family member, he became even more animated and his scowl deepened.

“Unfortunately, no. In this second wave of the
Dérangement
, all remaining Acadians were shipped directly to northern France. I suppose the authorities figured that our people came from France sixty years prior and we should all go back there. So I packed up my wife, our two daughters, my wife’s parents, and off we sailed to France. The trip was misery, but even more so were the settlements there, which were nothing more than cold, muddy shantytowns.

“After a year of barely surviving, we had the opportunity to leave, encouraged by the French who wanted nothing to do with the lowly Acadians, and sail to Louisiana. There was no future for us in France. But Yvette’s parents weren’t in good health, and they stayed. The decision to leave was a gut-wrenching one, but I saw no other viable option at the time.”

At Odie’s sad frown, Ruth resisted the urge to reach over and stroke his arm. Her eyes burned, knowing how this strong man must have struggled to keep his family together, even as fate tore them apart.

“The real nightmare began two days into the trip. Yvette was five months pregnant. They packed all of the passengers into the bowels of the ship, stuffed in there like animals. Yvette got sick, lost the baby, and died a few days later of womb fever.
Mon dieu
, how she suffered. The fevers, her dry lips, the endless bleeding and pain. I tried to shield my girls from the worst of it, but they saw how their mother died. Yvette was buried at sea. Dumped overboard.”

The solid metal handle of the knife gripped in his fist had bent into an angle. He dropped the deformed utensil to the table and his wide, black stare bored right through her.

She shivered. “Oh, God. So was that when Jerahmeel changed you?”

His laugh came out as a harsh barking sound. “No, even with Yvette dying, as much as I screamed to the heavens, Jerahmeel didn’t answer my call. So we arrived in the small settlement of New Orleans. I, a shell of a man, accompanied by my two girls. All I wanted right then was to bury the pain of Yvette’s death, but I had so much to do. I had to create a good life for my daughters. We had to survive. We rented a room, and a kindly lady watched my girls while I worked at any odd job I could get. Eventually, we moved into a place of our own outside of town. We lived off our garden and a few animals, and I built a small house.”

“It sounds like hard work.”

“
Oui
, but rewarding. I watched my daughters grow up. They were such sweet girls, so lovely with dark hair.”

In response to the wistful smile playing over his sensual lips, the corners of her own mouth rose. Then his strong mouth turned into a frown, and Ruth’s heart sank.

“One hot, hellish summer, the girls got typhoid fever.” His strong tenor voice cracked, and a knot formed in Ruth’s midsection.

She had treated typhoid during the Civil War. The relentless, bloody flux robbed young men of their lives. Years later, in the hospital wards, hundreds of patients suffered with typhoid, and in children, the disease was almost always fatal. She could only imagine what Odie had endured, losing his wife, then having his daughters fall critically ill.

“Vivienne was ten at the time and Ada was eight. I did every single treatment the doctor asked of me to try to help them. Their fevers were so high, and Ada constantly bled from her nose. Their delirium and suffering, as they called out for their dead mother, it destroyed me. One night, when both seemed close to death, I called out to the heavens for someone to help me, anyone. I finally got an answer, but not the answer I wanted. The Lord of Hell showed up.”

“Jerahmeel.” Although she’d never talked about it with anyone, she knew how Odie felt at his darkest moment. She understood his hope, sorrow, and the willingness to do anything to save a loved one.

If he clenched his jaw any harder, she feared the bones would break.

“At the time, I didn’t care. Jerahmeel said he could help, so I signed the paper he held in front of me. Didn’t read it. Didn’t care. My life was forfeit without my daughters. I’d lost everything else I loved, and I couldn’t lose them as well.”

“Did he save them?”

“One of them.”

“What?” Blood drained from her face.

“I had to choose.”

What kind of horrible parent could choose which child lived and which died? Odie rubbed his face, trying to erase the images of his gravely ill daughters, writhing on their beds, sweat and blood rolling down their sunken cheeks. Dry lips had pleaded with him to make the pain go away. Each weak cry ripped him like shards of glass on raw skin. Like it happened yesterday, damn it all. He pinched the bridge of his nose, desperate to push the memories away.

“What did you do?” Ruth asked.

Did she truly want his answer?

He leaned forward. Bad enough that he would speak of it to her, there was no need for anyone else in the restaurant to hear about his failure as a parent. An invisible knife twisted in his chest.

“I picked, damn it. What a sick shame. I picked a child to live. Hedged my bets. If one daughter could pull through on her own, it would’ve been my oldest, Vivienne. So I picked my baby, Ada. She was little more than a skeleton by this stage, except for her swollen belly. God help me, I chose Ada.”

Ruth reached across the table, and he curled his fingers around her hand and returned the pressure. He didn’t deserve it, but
mon dieu
, her very presence gave him comfort.

Her eyes glistened. “You did what you had to. Any parent would struggle with that decision, faced with the imminent death of both children. You had to make an impossible choice.”

“
Merci
, you are too kind, but I question my fitness as a father every single day.”

“What happened after Jerahmeel left?” Her reassuring squeeze of his hand spread warmth down to his toes.

“Ada slowly improved and returned to me. Vivienne fought valiantly and survived but barely. She remained frail for the rest of her life.”

“You must have been protective of them.”

“Of course. But you know the Indebted rules as well as I do. Per the terms of the contract with Jerahmeel, I was forbidden any further contact with my girls.”

Even now, hundreds of years distant, the sucking emptiness when he had to leave his daughters caught him so unexpectedly that his lungs couldn’t expand. The invisible band around his ribs finally relaxed.

He shook his head and pushed back the hair from his forehead with his free hand.

Anger played across her sculpted features as her brows furrowed. Then the tension faded into sadness and understanding. Yes, she, too, had given something up to become Indebted. They all did.

He rubbed a thumb over her elegant fingers. “I made sure the girls were raised in a good home and paid a lady handsomely to do so. Since I didn’t need to sleep anymore, because of ... you know ... I worked day and night to support them.”

“Did they grow to adults and have families of their own?”

His harsh laugh held no mirth. He withdrew his hand to knead tense muscles in his neck.

“Did they grow old? Not exactly. Ada, whom I had sacrificed my soul to save, died in the arms of her lady caretaker a few years later at the age of twelve. Yellow fever epidemic. Did you know we can only use our sacrifice once? If something else happens to a person we love, tough. We’re simply out of luck. What a deal.”

“My God. And Vivienne?”

“She became such a sad thing, all alone, pining for her sister, her mother, her father. Everyone had left her. The typhoid had made her so delicate. She did indeed marry a man, a teacher. He was a good husband. But Vivienne died bearing her second child.”

Pop, pop, little simmering bubbles of outrage began to surface from Odie’s crippled heart. Everything he had lost—his wife, his homeland, his children, his very humanity—and for what?

“What a tragedy.” He curled his hand into a fist and thumped his leg. “Those were dark times for me. Darker even than when Yvette died on that damned ship. I still had to kill, I still was eternally Indebted, but it was for nothing. I never again could touch my girls’ sweet faces, hold them as they cried, share their lives as they grew into adults and had their own families. Damn it, if I didn’t feel robbed.”

“I feel the same way.”

“Of course,
chère
, I know you’ve had your trials. We all have, every last one of us, chained to Jerahmeel forever. How rude of me, all melancholy, ruining your dinner.”