by Aneesa Price
She felt the absence of her sisters when they left to fulfil the tasks the witches gave them in preparation for the unbinding ritual. Her sisters, she thought and her heart broke. The pain of their pending loss struck deep even through the heat of the fire. What would become of them, she wondered. Sophie had said that she was the glue that bound them, the lynch pin. What would they do when she wasn’t around? Would they stick together, rebuild their life on the plantation without her? Would they be able to? What happened to vampire children when their makers died? Anais had never bothered to find out. She’d been so complacent in her assumptions of immortality, so busy carving out a life for them all that it never occurred to her that those she sired would one day be without her. Now she wanted to go, to slip away into the inviting darkness of death so much, increasingly so as the pain stabbed at her again. Yet, she wanted to pull through for them, for her sisters. The casket girls of New Orleans.
Casket. Coffin. Would she, when she died, dissolve into ashes as vampires do upon death or would the witch half, royal witch half of her remain in solid human form. If she did remain in her body, would they bury her? Ludicrously the grave stone would read, ‘Anais born 1794 died 2012... Conall’s voice interrupted the tombstone she imagined as a means of separating the fire-fed torture from her conscious thought. Conall. He’d been right. She’d never experienced love-making like they’d had before. Conall. The man was still a mystery to her but he drew her like no other. Not even Raulf tugged at her the way the Irish witch prince did. Now that she had royal blood in her veins, mingling with that of Yves’ vampire legacy to her, would that change things between them? Anxiety coated every word he spoke; it seeped through her frozen skin whenever he reached over to touch her reassuringly. Raulf had touched her too. She knew his because she’d smelled his unique, earthy scent as he came forward to whisper reassuringly to her. Strange that she could feel Conall’s touch and not his. Possibly because they were related through shared ancestry and he was the race’s prince whereas she had no blood ties to Raulf at all. The connection that Conall was always ranting about for not being there with her, was perhaps there all along, bound by the same shackles that kept her magick locked away.
They witches seemed to be nearing the end of their strategy. Encouraged by her lack of thrashing and screaming, they were positive that she’d pull through. Sylvain was the only sceptic amongst them. She hoped he knew. Knew somehow that they’d moved all of what had happened to her internally. It wasn’t better, it was worse. Disempowerment ate at her as she lay there, silent, still, unable to have even the luxury of expending the horror through screams.
Her eyes were glued shut by some unseen substance, so she fought the feelings of pain and focused on words, footsteps and her memory of what the room had looked like to figure out what was happening around her. The sound of fresh chalk scraping along the floor boards meant that they were re-drawing the protective circle. The smell of matches lighting new wicks all around her, meant that they were placing candles at four points of the circle, one for each of the elements. Expletives escaped from both Niall and Raulf when they felt her cold skin, lifting her. Conall’s spicy scent momentarily washed over her, when he crept beneath them to re-draw the pentagram. Rosary beads clicked as Miss Suzette said a prayer while the ritual space was being prepared.
The sudden silence indicated that they were ready. The silence gave a gap for the excruciating pain to invade her mind. Thank God, the witches opened the ritual with rhyme and a call to the elements and Goddess. It was words that Anais clung to, to maintain sanity, as her insides continued to char courtesy of the branding knife of the dark magick within her. The chlorinated smell of water. Holy water. Miss Suzette must be sprinkling her with it. She smelled the scent of the pure earth very close, all around her - the sisters offering soil from the land of the Goddess, the witch Goddess - they were sprinkling that over her and within the circle. Conall came over and whispered what sounded like a blessing in the Gaelic tongue that rolled from his lips into each of her ears. She whimpered mutely as she felt his touch when he leaned over and placed a kiss on her forehead. She wanted to hang onto the feeling of those warm lips seeping through her cold skin. Then silent darkness. Aggravated by the lack of connection to the world outside her suffering body, an involuntary shriek mutely departed from her motionless form.
Pain hit her hard, ending her body’s immobility as she felt her body jerk up into the air, legs and arms flapping like a rag doll, her head bent backwards at an impossible angle an inch away from snapping. Pain so intense she didn’t, couldn’t force her attention to what was happening around her. She wanted to die. The peace of death seemed so near, nearly within reach but not quite close enough to grasp. The magick was taunting her, keeping her away from even escaping to death. Whatever the witches were doing was ripping her insides apart, scattering blood, organs and bone in every direction inside the vessel provided by her skin. Anais screamed and both felt and heard the anguished sound tear itself from her throat. Her vision came streaming back. It was blood red. She saw flashes of the room as her head rolled around, still in the air. Everything in the room looked as though gallons of blood had been thrown at it, covering it.
Suddenly her skin was on fire too, as it had been before they’d contained the bound magick’s attempt at escape. Anais looked at her body and saw that it had erupted into crimson flames. She was burning alive – and the last time she checked, vampires erupted into ashes when burned.
“Anais! You need to fight it!” Conall’s firm voice, filled with fear, penetrated the wall of anguish that surrounded her and infiltrated her.
Throat sore from screaming, parched by fire, she barely whispered, “How?”
Relief flooded through him at that first sound of hope. “You need to feel for the binding inside of you. Find what’s hurting and visualize yourself pulling it away from the rest of your body. Pull it into a ball and put it somewhere.” Conall saw her attention being pulled from and grasped her face between his hands, forcing her to look at him. “Find the pain and pull it together. When you do, the pain will be concentrated into one spot. I want you to blink or shout or anything you can do to indicate to us when you’ve done that and we’ll cast the spell.”
Anais had heard what Conall said but was once again consumed by the fire. She tried to let herself feel it, to imagine her hands pulling at its strings as it attached itself to her body like a parasite. She tugged and twisted the strings but nothing happened. She was too weak. “I can’t,” she croaked. “It’s too far gone. It’s everywhere.”
“Do it Anais,” sweet Sophie’s voice urged and her beloved friend came into her red hazy view followed by the rest of her sisters. “Feel the witches’ magick. Let it in. Use it to help you fight.”
Anais concentrated, battling the singeing slices of fire and found tendrils of magick lingering just on the inside of her skin, like guests unsure of their welcome. She visualized her hands reaching for it and pulled the magick towards her. The more she pulled, the more the flames dancing on her skin abated and her vision started to return to normal. It was happening again. The fire was being contained inside her skin. “It’s not working. Like before. It’s just taking it inside.” Breath gasping, it took all the steel in her spine to get the words out, to communicate with them. Something she’d taken for granted until now.
V stepped up to her. “Will you trust in us, Anais?”
Anais could barely nod her affirmation, feeling like an inadequate master puppeteer holding onto the witches’ magick with one visual hand while desperately fighting off the enveloping binding with another.
“Conall, Sylvain,” V addressed the men in charge, “she’s not like your princess or your average royal witch. She’s half vampire. It is a good half of her too and she needs that magick to help fight this.”
“It’s too risky,” Sylvain was fighting memories, old demons he thought he’d laid to rest. “We can’t trust that the dark magick in vampirism won’t feed the bindin
g.”
“She will not survive like this! The white magick you’re using is not working. There’s good in the vampire half too, the good’s in the love and bond she has with us. She trusts us, so let us help.” V bit out, anger and fear making her eyes glow red.
“Let them try. If anything happens, we’ll be ready or as ready as we can be for the unknown.” It was Raulf that had stepped into the verbal war. “V’s right. They do love and no dark can exist in that.”
“We don’t have time for this fretting. V, do what you think will help.” Miss Suzette had been operating on robotic energy until then, found her voice and stepped up for her girls. She pointed a finger at the witches and Sylvain, “They know her – trust that.”
Conall was at an end. He’d racked his brain for answers and had found none “Very well, let’s do it.” His voice was sounding strained. He’d given more of his energy to Anais than what was prescribed as safe – they all had.
Vampiric motion soon had Anais drinking down a goblet of their combined blood. Thereafter, arms linked, Sophie, who stood in the middle connected first to her sisters and then to Anais. The pain Anais was suffering immediately branded them, bringing them to their knees. Teeth clenched, they held on.
“I’m going to link to them.” Conall decided that if this was a solution, he’d be part of it and give it his best. He sent out a tendril of magick to Sophie, the one connecting all of them and pulled it to the other that Anais was holding onto.
Power flooded Anais’s senses. Vampire dark with witch light. It looked like a multi-colored ball of twinkling lights. So beautiful it mesmerized her.
“Anais!” Conall’s shout brought her out of the trance. “We can’t hold on much longer. You need to visualize our magick penetrating the binding.”
Anais forced herself to focus and cast her gaze around at them, confirming what Conall stated. Droplets of sweat dotted their faces; their clothes were drenched as though they’d stepped out from under a cloud burst. All her sisters’ eyes were red and seeping blood as they kneeled on the floor. Raulf and Miss Suzette were pale, praying feverishly. Raulf’s hands had transformed into paws under the duress of the magickal connection. They looked close to their own ends. They couldn’t all go. She could but they couldn’t. Anais realised that they had chosen to go her. For their own unique reasons, they’d stay with her even if it meant their own end.
She grasped at the love and magick they offered so freely and pulled it towards the heat of the binding. As her hands pulled towards each other, each one holding different magick, she saw their colors meld, rainbow colors of light seeped into the red fire of the binding, infiltrating it, over-powering it. Then it was gone. And her body fell to the floor.
Rainbow lights continued to sweep through her body, brushing away the remnants of the binding, strand by strand. Anais felt comfortable coolness wash over her skin and insides. She felt it move and mend, filling her with renewed vitality as well as the magick and the love of those who’d given to her, who had sacrificed for her. Knowledge filled her; age-old knowledge of the craft, of witch history and of power and the responsibilities that came with it. It was as though millennia of experience infiltrated her very essence where the binding had been moments ago.
Conall watched the transformation, astonished, transfixed by the metamorphosis occurring before him. Still naked, she stood up. She was beautiful before as a vampire. As a royal witch-vampire, she looked like a goddess. A glow emanated from her skin, illuminated it in multi-colored lights. Her hair, black before, was the shiny ebony of a raven’s feathers. Her previous brown eyes were speckled with gold and red and sparkled with the knowledge of eons. He wanted to go to her, to claim her as his as he’d decided even before her transformation. Conjuring a gown to cover her, he moved towards her and placed a kiss on her brow. “Welcome back, Anais,” he whispered in her ear, his lips brushing its velvety softness. He wished they were the only ones in the room but that wish was not to be granted.
Miss Suzette abruptly stepped up to Anais, concern reflected in her maternal eyes and nudged Conall away. “Enough of that now. Y’all can go at it like rabbits later but mind that you don’t get yourselves into another fix like this one.” Miss Suzette visibly shook at the recollection then gathered herself again, using bossiness as a front, “I need to get my girls home to a hot meal and bed. And then I’m going to have one myself. Y’all come up to the big house to do the same.” Her nerves had had all that it could take and she wanted to resume her reign over her chicks and gain some semblance of normality. She deliberately ignored the changes she saw overcome her baby girl and hustled the vampire sisters up with unnatural speed for her age and form. In record time, she’d commandeered the vampires, Raulf and Anais and had them speeding out the slave quarters towards the house.
Conall grinned at the characteristic human coping skill of point-blank denial. Ida and Brigid, usually not around humans often, especially bossy, Cajun mamma hens, looked at the departing figures with gaping mouths
Fianna wasn’t as tactful. “What the hell?”
“No,” Conall corrected, mouth spread wide in a grin, “the phenomenon we just witnessed is not hell; it’s a concerned mamma called Miss Suzette.”
Chapter 15
They’d forgone their usual kitchen spot for the lounge. They had a vow renewal taking place in the plantation that evening. It was one of the events that had been booked so well in advance, and paid for, that they wouldn’t cancel when Yves made his announcement of the witch vampire ‘foreign exchange program’. Their sense of business ethics also wouldn’t allow them to cancel.
“These are great!” Rose mumbled through a mouthful of crawfish rèmoulade.
Anais surveyed the tray of hors d’ oeuvress, lingering over a bite-sized portion of spicy shrimp cocktail nestled in a curled leaf of lettuce and chose smoked trout Pontchartrain on melba toast instead. She closed her eyes in bliss, savored the taste. She’d had it before but the taste – the taste was unbelievable, she swore the transformation had heightened her sense of taste too!
“Merci, Rose,” Marie acknowledged the compliment, oblivious of Anais’ sensory experience, while Miss Suzette basked. “The cold hors d’ oeuvres menu worked out well – both for the hot weather and for our capacity. The cake’s been finished too – that was the only thing that really required a lot of work.”
“And that’s where I’m grateful for that vampire speed y’all have,” Miss Suzette stated, “no other way all those sugar and chocolate roses would’ve been done in time.”
“So, that’s it then. Once the flowers arrive, we’ll have it all taken care of.” Anais ticked the last item off her mental list. She glanced through the huge French windows to the outside where an army of staff were setting up tables and chairs in the alley.
Sophie came to stand next to her, sharing in the joy of watching something they loved doing evolve into the picture they’d imagined. Puzzled, she pointed to the team in the alley, “Why are they stringing the fairy lights through the trees?”
Anais responded, “I instructed them to do that a moment ago. I think that the garlands and strings of white flowers interspersed with the fairy lights will look magical. With the candles along the alley at the feet of the trees, it will be magical. If there’s any left over we can string the flowers and fairy lights along the white draping of the bandstand too, give the jazz band a true platform. The couple swore that jazz had brought them together and insisted that they have jazz tonight as a token of further good luck. So, we’ll honor that too.”
“That will tip us over our budget.” V came to join them at the window. “I’m sure that they wouldn’t mind paying the difference but we’ve always prided ourselves on coming in or under budget. I don’t want to change that now.”
“I know,” responded Anais softly, “but we can afford to spring for the difference for this couple. We can write it off as a goodwill expense, an anniversary gift from us to them.” She shrugged elegant shoulders, “I nee
d magic tonight. Our magic, the wedding planner kind - not the magick of witches or vampires – the kind we give to couples that come to celebrate at Papillion. After the past few days, I want normality, control and the beauty of our work - the pleasure we take from giving to others and sharing our homes with them.”
“Then we’ll do that. We have enough money that we don’t use anyway,” V acquiesced.
“It’s a lovely gesture,” agreed Sophie, looking to Marie and Rose for their opinions.
Rose nodded and Marie added, “And I can’t think of a more deserving couple.”
“Merci,” Anais beamed with gratitude. It felt good to be in the thrall of orchestrating the event. She could just picture couples swaying and stepping to the lovely sounds of New Orleans mixed with those coming from the bayou beyond the alley in a magical forest of their creation.
“I’m really glad we couldn’t cancel tonight’s event.” Sophie smiled, appreciation of romance radiating from her. “The Gautier’s are a lovely couple. I have to respect what they’ve accomplished as well. I mean, we’re vampires and have been long before they were born yet we don’t have partnerships like that whereas they have been together for fifty years!”
“Oui, I couldn’t agree more.” V acknowledged. “After last night, I think we all needed a bit of frivolity and what better than a real celebration of love. They’re such an easy couple to please too. No bridezilla moments from Evelyn and Remy is a picture of contentment.”
