Hoodoo Woman (Roxie Mathis Book 3) (2 page)

The next morning I woke to an insistent pounding on the door. I stumbled out of bed with reluctance. The kind of nature magic I’d been doing gave me a lot but took a lot too. I was still sleepy, starving, and a little hung over from the energy overload. Only Blake Harvill’s voice could get me to the door.

Before letting him in I cast my senses to check for Stack. With no sign of him, I felt safe opening the door, refusing to think about why I still hid his existence from my boyfriend and the other people in my life.

Blake greeted me with a smile and hustled inside. I shut the door against the cold morning air and returned his smile.

“You better have brought me breakfast, waking me up this early.” I stepped into his arms for a hug.

He gave me that hug and a kiss too, his lips soft and soothing. “Got any groceries? I’ll cook for you.”

“Mmm.” I nuzzled his chest. “I know I put bacon, eggs, and toast on the list. Can’t remember if they got bought.”

“Didn’t forget the booze, though.” His gaze zeroed in on the half-empty bottle of bourbon on the coffee table. Stepping away, he shrugged out of his coat and hung it on a hook by the door. “Need an aspirin with your eggs and toast?”

This wasn’t the first time he’d made a similar remark. He thought I was drinking more than I was, way more. How did I explain to him it wasn’t me drinking all that liquor, it was the supernatural entity I’d conjured in a moment of desperate magic? Yeah, that conversation would go real smooth, especially considering our history. We first met when he’d needed my help to banish a demon he’d conjured. I’d given him all kinds of hell for summoning something he couldn’t banish, so I wasn’t too keen to admit that I’d done the same thing by accident.

I said, “Only thing wrong with me is I need a shower.”

The flesh around his eyes twitched slightly, a sign he didn’t believe me, but the next kiss he gave me told me he wouldn’t pursue it.

Blake had breakfast waiting for me after my shower. We ate in companionable silence, then talked over coffee. He said, “Shelby is really making great strides in controlling fire.”

Shelby Conrad was a younger friend of ours, the granddaughter of a client I’d worked a big job for. Unbeknownst to most of her family, Shelby was a practitioner, one with a lot of talent but still a lot to learn. What had started out as casual conversation eventually led to a mentor-mentee relationship. Blake was a surprisingly good teacher. “Good. It makes Daniel nervous to be around someone who can pop fireballs out of their hand.”

“I don’t think it’s the fireball trick that makes Daniel nervous when it comes to Shelby.”

Gossiping about Daniel felt disloyal. “What else have you got her doing?”

“Right now, a paper on Aleister Crowley.”

“You’ve got her doing homework? Doesn’t she have enough to do at Vanderbilt?” Shelby was a freshman at the venerable old university.

“It’s not enough to learn something by reading. She writes about it, she’ll demonstrate whether she’s really learned or not. These are difficult concepts. It takes critical thinking skills beyond what’s required at a college.”

I raised an eyebrow. It was one thing to know Blake could be a good teacher, but sometimes his level of dedication to it really blew me away. “Is this how you were taught?”

His mouth quirked into the smirk I loved. “Yeah, but I thought I’d leave out the elemental tests my teacher used on me.”

“What were they like?”

“He’d shackle me somewhere, set the place on fire, and leave me to get myself out. If I made it back alive he’d continue teaching me.”

Good God. No wonder Blake had so many issues. “I don’t think Shelby would take too kindly to that.”

“No, she’s fine with writing a term paper.” He pushed the dishes aside and reached for my hands. “How have you been? It’s been almost a week.”

We both worked a lot and didn’t see each other as much as we’d like. “I had a job yesterday. A séance with some girl country singers who wanted to talk to Patsy Cline.”

“How’d it go?”

“Not so great.” I shrugged. “No tip. How about you?”

“Graham called. He wanted to know what I thought about creating a Qabalah class to go along with my one on ceremonial magic.”

When Blake decided to stay in town last year, he’d floundered for a while. Occasionally he worked with me but as I developed more of a rapport with my secret supernatural assistant, I frequently “forgot” to call Blake. Eventually an old friend of Blake’s got in touch and asked if he’d be interested in creating a course for a witchcraft and magic school. Blake got deeply involved in it, aided by Shelby’s eagerness to learn. He taught long-distance classes in addition to Shelby and a couple of other local students. It was a big change from the dangerous sorcerer he’d been when I first met him, but he wore it well.

I wasn’t sure if it suited me anymore. “Sounds like a lot of work.”

He nodded, a slight smile curving his lips. “Be good, though. I like writing, I’m good at it.”

“You are.” I squeezed his hand. “When does he want it done?”

“We didn’t get that far. I need to figure out how detailed the class would be, how much history to get into. What sorts of practical lessons to create. Even just figuring out a proposal will take some time.”

“You gonna be there tonight?” Daniel and I had a longstanding tradition of karaoke once a month, an indicator of how much I loved my ancestor.

“I might be late.” Blake moved his chair closer, sliding an arm around my waist. The timbre of his voice changed. “I miss you.”

“I’m right here now.” I turned toward him and put my glasses on the table. His star-field aura shimmered with silver and shades of magenta. I felt the magic humming in his blood, heightened by desire.

He kissed me tenderly at first, taking his time. Passion soon followed, but it was a quiet kind of thing, tempered by the secrets I kept and the changes in him.

Daniel Rambin looked like a movie star under the glow of the stage lights. Blond hair brushed the collar of his flannel shirt that hung open over a white Henley. Blue eyes scanned the crowd, locking onto the girl sitting next to me. Every woman in the room but me, and a few of the men, wanted that gaze on them. Wickedly handsome, devilishly charming, and sweet as pie when he wanted to be, Daniel would have been a great catch. Except for the part about being a vampire.

He was also my ancestor, which was why I didn’t mind his smoldering gaze skipping me. We told people we were cousins to keep from being asked why we didn’t date. Not that any of my living family knew anything about him. Daniel had been a Confederate soldier, a slave owner who fell in love with a woman he owned. It was through their child, a son he never knew, that we were related. I looked white as the driven snow and so did the rest of my family. My mother and grandmother used to do genealogy until they abruptly stopped years ago. It amused me to think they might have found a slave on the family tree and couldn’t accept the fact. Amused and disturbed. This part of the country had a uniquely horrific history that could be hard for a modern Southerner to make peace with. Some kept trying desperately to relive it for reasons beyond my understanding. Some, like myself, pretty much ignored it until forced otherwise.

The Civil War, slavery, and the woman he lost were not things Daniel liked to talk about. Nor were any of the other various wars he’d fought in or his earliest years as a vampire. Nowadays he enjoyed the beautiful but absurd antebellum home in which he lived just outside of town, going on the occasional ghost-evicting job with me, and karaoke nights like this. He was well adapted to modern life but there was a strain of something deeper and darker in him I thought had little to do with being a vampire and more to do with the world in which he grew up. On plenty of karaoke nights he belted out off-key versions of Conway Twitty, Kenny Rogers, and Porter Waggoner. The man had an abiding love of classic country. It suited the goofball side he was comfortable showing me. Tonight, though, he showed something else.

Daniel’s voice was quiet, rather than its usual bluster when he sang. Like whispering a dark tale in a candlelit room, a story of secrets and ambiguity. He brought the raucous bar to a standstill with
Ode To Billie Joe
, the stage lights giving him an otherworldly glow. For once he didn’t holler out of tune and off key, didn’t exaggerate the Southern accent that lingered after more than a century. He needed no vampire mind powers to mesmerize the crowd, just his voice and the song. He transcended the song’s literal story, taking its late-in-the-day shadows and pulling them into an eldritch dusk. Closing his eyes every time Billie Joe jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, did he see those things from his past he never spoke of? Faces he’d outlived unnaturally by decades?

I had a few secrets of my own but Daniel kept an ocean hidden beneath his placid surface that not even my supernatural vision could discern.

The song ended. He took a bow, the applause bringing a smile to his face. A guarded smile, though, literally. His fangs were hidden. I lost sight of him as he walked off stage and the next person entered the spotlight to torture the bar with a Carrie Underwood number.

Shelby Conrad flipped her sleek dark ponytail over her shoulder and toyed with the straw in her soda. “So, does he ever drink straight from the vein?”

I nearly choked on a pretzel. “That’s not something we really get into.”

“Why not?”

“It’s kind of personal, don’t you think?” I knew he kept himself supplied with black market blood bags but I was pretty sure he went out hunting sometimes. He’d told me once he never killed innocents, his demeanor insisting there would be no further discussion. Then later I found out he kept tabs on the local sex offender registry and I didn’t want to know anymore.

“I was just curious.”

“Did you ask him?”

“He said it was none of my business.” She sipped her drink.

I pushed the bowl of pretzels away and reached for my iced tea. “I guess that means it’s none of your business, then.” I dug my cellphone out of my bag to check the time. “You heard from Blake? He’s really late.”

Daniel dropped gracefully into the seat between us, a beer in one hand and a shot glass in the other. Normally he preferred mixed drinks with a little blood added, but that didn’t really work well in public. “So what’d y’all think? I was in a Bobbie Gentry mood but I couldn’t decide between
Ode To Billie Joe
or
Fancy
. I went with
Ode To Billie Joe
. Did I make the right choice?”

Shelby said, “It was better than that shit you were singing last week.”

Daniel wagged his finger in her face. “Don’t you talk about George Jones like that. The man was a titan of country music.”

She slapped at him. “Get your finger out of my face, old man.”

The vampire blushed, a sight that never failed to make my eyes just about bug out of my head. Shelby Conrad calling him
old man
always did that, and she liked to do it a lot. I never knew whether to be amused or terrified.

I said, “Bubba, I think what she’s trying to say is, maybe sometime you could sing something a little more current.”

Shelby nodded. “Yeah, I’m tired of that geezer crap.”

God damn it. I was not in the mood to referee another fight between these two. I’d had enough country music of any decade, too. I tapped the table for Shelby’s attention. “Have you heard from Blake? He should have been here by now.”

Guilty knowledge colored her face. “Um.”

My heart rate sped up. “What?”

“No, it’s cool. He just wanted it to be a surprise.”

My heart nearly stopped. “He wanted what to be a surprise?”

Daniel said, “What’s going on, Shelby?”

She glared at the vampire but relented. “He just said he wanted a romantic evening for y’all. You’ve both been busy and he wanted to surprise you with something nice.”

I sat back in the chair, relieved. “Let me guess, flowers and wine at his place.”

Shelby smiled. “Yours, actually.”

Shitshitshit
. I launched from the rickety chair and ran from the bar. I was halfway to the parking garage when Daniel caught up. He must have argued with Shelby first, his vampire speed could certainly do better.

He handed me the coat I’d forgotten. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” I couldn’t look him in the eye while lying so I concentrated on getting into my coat.

“Bullshit. You don’t want him in your home. Why?”

“I don’t want anyone in my house when I’m not there. Would you?”

He grabbed my arm, careful not to hurt me though he definitely could have. I had no choice but to stop. It was like being held in a gentle steel trap. “This is me, Roxie. I know you better than he does, way better than Shelby. You’ve been hiding something for months. Ever since the Maple Hill job.”

I tried to wrench my arm away but he wouldn’t budge. Even on a cold weeknight there were plenty of people out on Broadway. If he didn’t let me go soon, passersby would notice. “Let me go, Bubba.”

He lowered his hand to grasp mine, his skin cold but not from the weather. “Whatever it is, you can talk to me.”

I still couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead I stared at our joined hands.

He lowered his head so only I would hear. “For Christ’s sake, I’m a vampire. There’s not a damn thing you can tell me I’m likely to pass judgment on.”

I knew that was true but for some reason I still couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t embarrassment over unintentionally summoning Stack. Maybe I wanted Stack all to myself. If no one knew, there would be no questions about his origins. No questions about the magic I worked with him. No questions about the way I could feel it changing me.

But if there was anyone I could talk to, it was Daniel. Finally I raised my head and made eye contact. “I’ll tell you. I promise.” I squeezed his hand. “But not right this minute. Okay?”

He studied me for a long moment. “Think you got a mess waiting on you at home?”

“I sure hope not.”

“Call me if you need me.” He kissed my cheek and let me go.