“Come on,” I said. “I get hurt, she can heal me. And have you seen what she can do when she’s in control?”
“And when she isn’t in control, your abilities are unpredictable. It happened again tonight. You were tapped out and basically helpless. If that guy hadn’t shown up…”
“All right,” I said. “I get it. Without Isabelle, I’m basically worthless.”
“That’s not what I’m saying, Annabelle.”
“Whatever. You’re still drunk.”
Ashley shook her head. “I’m just saying that this school apparently wants you, and not me. And, well, maybe you could use it. Get a few skills of your own to back you up when you run out of magica. Not to mention, this might finally be our chance…”
Ashley had a point. For nine years we’d prodded every paranormal mystery that came our way. By sheer force of will, combined with Isabelle’s unique abilities and insights, we’d helped ghosts cross over, we’d exorcised our fair share of demons, and even staked a vampire. Still, we weren’t any closer to unlocking the mysteries of our own tragedy than we were nine years ago. We knew that the world of Voodoo was connected to the Loa, but we’d never found anyone who was a part of that world who was inclined to help. For whatever reason, they just didn’t trust us. But if this Oggie fellow was really a Loa, if he really was a teacher at this Voodoo Academy… it might be the best lead we’ve had yet. And, we literally “crashed” into it without even looking. It was a stroke of luck that we couldn’t pass by. I knew as much. Still, all I felt was trepidation.
“I’ll think about it,” I said as I collapsed on the antique sofa in our living room. “How about you talk to me about it in the morning. You know, when you’re sober. Besides, isn’t Roger supposed to come over in the morning?”
Ashley grinned widely. “Bright and early.”
“Well you’d better shower,” I said. “You smell like a distillery.”
She’d had a crush on the Choctaw Shaman since we were little girls. He’d been single for a while now, but only recently had he seemed to reciprocate her feelings. He was there that night—the night our family was attacked. Flashes of that night appeared in my nightmares almost every night since it happened. With all of those memories brought to the fore of my mind by tonight’s events, I was sure tonight’s terrors would be especially vivid. I took a deep breath as I laid my head on my pillow.
“Brace yourself, Isabelle… I’m sure we’re in for another fabulous night.”
Goodnight, Annabelle…
* * * * *
BANG! Crash!
That was always how the nightmare began… No matter how many times I’d had this dream and knew what was coming, it always felt real, like it was happening in the moment. I’ve always been told that if you can recognize you’re dreaming, then you can take control of it. That might be the case for some people, but it wasn’t the case for me. Once this nightmare began it was destined to unfold in precisely the same horrific way it always did…
Ashley and I were watching Disney’s Frozen… Elsa was in the middle of belting out “Let it Go” when the door to our room was ripped from its hinges.
Ashley and I screamed in concert, but our high-pitched voices didn’t dissuade the monster. It looked like it might have been human once. Skin, some dry and rotted, other pieces still moist, clung to its exposed bones. It reeked like roadkill. This thing was so repulsive that it made the “walkers” on The Walking Dead seem cute and cuddly.
I dug my nails into the floor as the zombie grabbed my ankle. Another one burst through the door, seizing Ashley around the waist. I screeched in pain as my fingernail snapped, a splinter from the floor piercing the nail bed of my index finger. I struggled against the monster’s grip, swinging and kicking with all my strength. The zombie didn’t seem to feel any pain… and its strength was otherworldly. It was useless. Something struck the side of my head… A violent thud rattled my skull. Everything went dark.
Sometimes, the nightmare ended here… but not tonight. The horrors had just begun, and I knew what was coming.
When the darkness cleared, a girl was looking me in the eye… Isabelle’s sister, Messalina. I knew that only because I’d relived this moment so many times before.
“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” she said as she brushed a stray curl from the side of my face. “I wish I had gotten here sooner.”
I wanted to punch her in the face… because I knew how this nightmare was going to play out. But I couldn’t change this dream. I’d tried. Many times.
“Don’t listen to her!” Ashley shouted. I should have listened to her. She suspected it when I hadn’t. “How do you know she saved us? We don’t know that she wasn’t the one who did this!”
We were in the old slave quarters behind our house. Ashley warned me. Don’t trust her! But Messalina told us our parents had been bitten by zombies… the rot would spread if we didn’t allow her to help us.
I could still feel the desperation I’d felt that night… anything to save my parents. Yes, I’ll wear the locket. If it gives me the power to heal Mom and Dad…
I felt it when Isabelle’s spirit flowed out of the locket and into my flesh, filling my mind. I sensed Isabelle’s terror when Messalina evoked the Loa.
Baron Samedi… that’s what she called him. He looked like death itself, emaciated to the point that he was almost a skeleton. A thin veneer of skin covering his skull, his complexion was white as snow. He was supposed to owe Messalina something. I still don’t know what. But she told us he’d give Ashley powers. What I inherited, by assuming Isabelle, would heal my parents as the rot spread through their bodies. What Ashley would receive from the Loa was supposed to cure them completely. A spell cast in love, Messalina said, was the only way. It was complete bullshit.
Messalina was using me to try to bring her sister back to life, and she was using Ashley as a bargaining chip to give to the Loa in exchange for making it happen.
I wanted to scream as I saw these events unfold, as I accepted the locket, as the Loa appeared…
I was startled awake… I rubbed my eyes. That was always where the dream ended.
Everything that happened after that…neither I nor Isabelle could recall more than a few flashes, broken and disjointed memories. A part of me wanted to fall back asleep—I’d tried many times. I hoped the dream would continue, that events buried in my subconscious would somehow come back to mind. But I had no memory beyond the first few moments after I put on the locket. My mind was spinning so much trying to accommodate the presence of a whole second soul that had now been fused to mine that I was completely aloof.
The first thing I remembered was the most beautiful blond girl I’d ever seen touching my face, looking in my eyes… A Druidess, Isabelle said. Her name was Joni. For the first few years she used to come with Roger to visit us. Ashley hated her with a passion—mostly because so long as she was around, she held all of Roger’s affections. But a couple years later Joni moved away… then disappeared. If Roger knew where she was, he wasn’t talking. Ashley would get pretty jealous anytime her name came up.
Was Baron Samedi really gone? I barely remembered him, but something about him still terrified me. The one thing Ashley remembered was that he’d wanted me… wanted Isabelle. When the Loa seized onto Isabelle, tried to claim her for himself, things went south. Messalina ended up dead—sacrificed herself in hopes of breaking her bargain with the Loa. Baron Samedi was the Loa of death, the Grim Reaper himself. The one thought that still haunted me was this: you can’t kill death… you can’t run from the reaper. Eventually he’ll catch up with you. Death always does.
And now, it seemed, there was another Loa on my tail…
Chapter Four
Early morning walks around the plantation had become something of a ritual for me—it was a great way to clear my mind. The smell of dew and the sound of birds singing their morning songs reminded me that there was peace of a sort always underlying the chaos that was my life. Ashely and I lived alon
e—well, with Isabelle—on my family’s ancestral plantation. We had nearly a hundred acres. Used to be more, but my grandfather sold off most of it as New Orleans grew. The old slave quarters were still intact. As a little girl, Isabelle actually grew up there. At least until she and her sister were sold off.
You’d think she’d have reason to hold a grudge. I mean, I know I didn’t do any of that shit. But what was old history to me was still a memory for her. I wouldn’t blame her, frankly, if she hated me for it. But she didn’t. Isabelle, for all her faults, was an incredibly forgiving spirit.
A cool breeze blew through my hair. It smelled of spring wildflowers. A cornucopia of pinks, oranges, and yellows beautified our fields. Long blades of grass tickled my shins as I strolled leisurely past the slave quarters and toward the back end of our property.
I think we should do it, Isabelle said. We should go to the Academy.
I sighed. This was going to be difficult. This was her life, too. I had to remember that. I had to let her have a say, an equal say, in most decisions we made. It was only right. But still, it was hard not to imagine that I was in charge, that I always had the final say. I mean, it was my body. But she didn’t ask for this “arrangement” any more than I did.
“I don’t know… I mean, your sister practiced Voodoo. It led her down a dark path.”
Her resentment led her down the path of the Bokors. That’s why she became a Caplata. She wanted revenge. Voodoo wasn’t the problem.
“It just doesn’t feel right,” I said. “I mean, your magica is pure. This stuff… I don’t know.”
You think it’s tainted? Isabelle asked.
I paused a moment, unsure how to respond.
It’s a whole worldview… something my ancestors brought with them on the slave ships. It’s no more or less pure than any other kind of magic.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “I guess I’ve just seen too many movies.”
Not all of the Loa are the same. Not all of them are evil.
“If not exactly demons, then what are they? Gods?”
Not gods either. More like human beings than gods, really. Sometimes they can be generous. Other times selfish. You know, just like people.
“Well, you know enough as it is. Why do I need this school?”
I don’t know much at all, Isabelle said. I just know enough about it to realize that most of the stereotypes about Voodoo are not true. I was never a Mambo.
“A Mambo?”
A priestess… it’s what my sister was trying to become, before she let her anger and passion take her down a different path.
I took a deep breath—we needed to talk about this, but frankly, I was eager to change the subject. “Wanna take a ride on a Treant?”
Isabelle laughed. You realize, the trees do not exist for our amusement.
“They don’t,” I said. “But you know they enjoy it too… even the trees like to have fun. No one wants to be a stick in the mud all of the time.”
I’ll make you a deal, Isabelle said. We will evoke a Treant… if you promise to take this whole Academy thing seriously. If you’ll consider it.
“You know what,” I said. “Roger will be here in a bit. I’ll do you one better. Let’s run it by him. If he thinks we should go, we go. If not, we don’t.”
Fair enough, Isabelle said. But you have to let me speak. He needs to hear my side, too.
“Deal,” I said. I felt Isabelle open my access to her magica. I only needed a little. As impressive as it was, animating a Treant was a fairly simple spell. We just needed to let the magica touch the tree’s essence, then we could speak to it, ask it to come to life.
Releasing a little magica, we animated our favorite oak. As it came to life, the tree’s limbs cracked and popped, echoing back to us from a distance. After it lowered one if its branches, I straddled it and gripped a limb that protruded from the branch in front of where I mounted it. Quickly, the tree lifted us into the air. I don’t know exactly how high we were… but we were high enough, on this oak, to get a good view of the whole plantation. So long as the spell was active, Isabelle was able to communicate directly with the tree. I couldn’t always understand what she was saying. It wasn’t a language they used to communicate. It was more like an impression, a sixth sense of a sort. As the oak managed to pull its last root from the soil, it started moving ahead briskly. Its roots danced beneath it in a way that seemed random but, somehow, coordinated. You’d think they’d get all tangled, the way the tree moved them. But they never did. As the oak moved across the fields, the cool wind struck my cheeks and sent my long hair blowing behind me.
“Woohooo!” I shouted. It was pure exhilaration. Better than any roller coaster. Flying across the plantation as if I had wings, I never felt more connected, more alive. It was a kind of living that most people never experience. And it was addicting… not in a bad way. It gave me a sort of clarity that I never had when I was trudging through life on my own two feet. Isabelle felt it too. As much as we disagreed about… everything, at these moments we felt connected, like we actually belonged together.
I looked out toward our home on the other side of the property, as Roger’s rusted-out Jeep pulled up to the house.
Should we go and greet him? Isabelle asked.
“Ashley is down there… and I suspect she wants a few private moments to ‘greet’ him in her own way.”
Isabelle giggled. The Shaman had been something of a mentor for us for years, but this newfound “fling” between him and Ashley… well, it made her happy enough that it was worth assuming the awkward position of the third wheel whenever he came over.
Roger Thundershield… I still chuckled every time I thought about it. What kind of parents choose a name like Roger to accompany a last name like Thundershield? All the cool points he scored with his last name were immediately countered by the plainness of his first.
We gave them a good five minutes, enjoying our ride on ol’ Oakey for a while before reluctantly making our way inside. The way I looked at it, no matter what they were “doing,” five minutes was more than enough time. For most guys, anyway.
As I stepped inside, I spotted the two cuddling on my grandma’s century-old couch. It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable piece of furniture in the mansion, but for some reason, that’s where Ashley and Roger always ended up.
I was halfway disappointed that I hadn’t walked in and interrupted them mid-tryst. I looked forward to the possibility of them, awkwardly, attempting to straighten out their clothes while pretending that nothing had been going on.
Instead, it appeared that they were deep in “conversation.” Nothing too exciting about that.
“How’s it going, Thunder-thighs?” I asked. He didn’t have large thighs. If anything, he was totally leaned out. Still, it was my custom to greet the Choctaw Shaman with some kind of half-witted play on his name.
“Where there’s thunder,” Roger said, with a half grin, “there’s lightning.”
“I don’t know about that,” I admitted. “Ashley, care to comment?”
My sister rolled her eyes. “We were just talking about your invitation.”
“Can you believe it?” I asked Roger as I scrambled through my mind searching for a good reason to reject the invitation. “I mean, can you imagine, a white girl living on a plantation—and a Catholic one at that—learning Voodoo?”
“What’s wrong with that?” Roger asked.
“Well, I mean… wasn’t Voodoo a part of slave culture?”
“Your point?” Roger asked.
“Wouldn’t it be offensive if a privileged white girl shows up… trying to force her way into it all?”
“Well, what does Isabelle think?”
I hesitated a moment. I’d agreed to let Roger know her point of view. “She thinks I should go.”
“So, you’re seriously going to play the cultural appropriation card… when a girl who used to be a slave herself says it’s totally cool?”
“She mig
ht be okay with it, but she doesn’t have a Twitter account. The trolls on there are brutal about that kind of thing.”
“And in this case, they’d be wrong,” Roger said. “Not to mention, are you really going to let trolls control the decisions you make?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“They invited you, Annabelle. If they were half as worried about your whiteness as you are, they’d never have asked you to join.”
“You’re missing the point,” I said.
“No,” Roger said, staring at me intently. “You are missing the point. Why do white folks think that all the stuff they came up with should be for ‘everybody’ because it’s all so stinking great… like you do us a great charity by finding us jobs, giving us welfare programs… but things that came from indigenous culture or African culture… well, that stuff is just fine… for dark people.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, folding my arms. “But I see your point.”
“They are wanting to share something with you… something powerful. And by turning them down, you’re basically saying ‘How cute, but that shit isn’t good enough for me.’”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying…”
“Using social justice lingo to dismiss what’s really bothering you isn’t only unfair to the whole idea of social justice. You aren’t being fair to yourself, either.”
“I don’t know what—”
“Yes you do,” Roger interrupted. “You can’t disassociate the Loa at the Academy, or the priests and priestesses there, from the Loa and the Caplata who attacked you.”
I sighed. “Well… maybe you’re right. Can you blame a girl for being a little hesitant?”
“As long as I’ve known you,” Roger said, “you aren’t known for taking big, moral stands on things. That is, unless doing so helps you avoid something you’re afraid of.”
“That’s not entirely true,” I said.
Voodoo Academy Page 3
