Her daughter Rachel could play the innocent all she wants, Sylvia thought. But Rachel was no innocent. She benefitted financially from her mother's perpetual widowhood as much as Sylvia. She had just always been weak. But maybe not so much anymore. The fact that she had made such a deal with these people impressed her mother. But Sylvia knew she had to keep the upper hand.
As much as she pushed her daughter to rely on Hoodoo, in reality Sylvia always wanted to make sure she herself remained the stronger woman – so she always held back on info. She never let Rachel know the details of her own love spells – and how they worked so well.
For the most part, Rachel always seemed to stay a bit subservient to her mother. Unbeknownst to Sylvia, however, Rachel had always wanted togo there as well. She just never thought she had what it took.
Now, maybe she had a shot.
Rachel figured she would need her mother to track down whatever this curse was and how it was done, so that they could also reverse it. But it was Rachel who was the broker of the deal – and she certainly knew how to maintain control of THAT. Her mother never worked for a living – she seduced her way into money. Rachel used magick to give her an edge with her career – but she still worked hard for the money she earned. That seemed more fair to her. Like she was simply using the spiritual realm for networking, like others simply had the right connections in the human realm.
Sylvia LaBelle arrived early the next morning at the secret location with two suitcases – one with her designer clothes and the other with the family grimoires. The grimoires went back a hundred years. They were old dusty books with every spell reportedly known in the LaBelle family line. Sylvia was a handsome woman in her 50s who had chosen to go the dermafill route rather than subjecting herself to facelifts. That and a little Botox and Pilates kept Sylvia svelte and smooth-skinned.
Mother and daughter ordered a pitcher of mimosas from room service and sized each other up over cocktails. Neither really trusted the other, each a mirror image of the other's insecurities and subtle or overt manipulations. They reflected Madame Eve LaBelle's past, present and future without even realizing it.
Sylvia and Rachel spent the rest of the day scouring the books until they found what they were looking for.
“Well, I'll be damned,” Sylvia said. “There it is, after all.”
Rachel looked concerned.
“This is one screwed-up spell,” she said. “This is something really difficult. How are we going to get toenail clippings from a 10-year-old alligator? How can we tell if it's 10 years old?”
“We don't have to cast it, Rachel. We just have to break it.”
“Yeah – for over maybe ten thousand people, probably.”
“Are you suddenly backing out? This was your idea.”
“No,” Rachel said. She firmly snapped the grimoire shut and placed it on the stack of others sitting on the hotel bed.
Looking for a distraction, she grabbed the television remote and turned the TV on. One of McEvan's wildlife documentaries was on. Rachel let out a frustrated sigh and shut it off, throwing the remote across the room.
Her mother stood up and went to pick up the remote. She turned the TV back on.
“Look at him, Rachel,” she said. “No LaBelle woman lets a man just break up with her like that.”
Something had started burning in Rachel's heart since the breakup. Her mother was right. She was sick of things not working out with men, and she was sick of always being the dumpee. What the hell was wrong with her?
Suddenly, Rachel heard a voice.
It's not you – it's them. And you know what to do now.
Was it in her head? Was it in the room?
Had her mother heard it? She didn't look like she had heard the voice.
“Let's focus on what we need too,” Rachel said, feeling a bit shaken.
Yes – you need to focus, said the voice. Rachel realized it was coming from one of the grimoires. But not the one with the curse in question. It came from another one – one that seemed a little older.
This time, Rachel knew the voice was right. Enough was enough.
And suddenly she knew with full conviction that the Guyettes and whomever else had deserved what they had gotten. She wasn't going to lift the Alligator Curse for $700,000 or even twice that. There are some things that money can't buy. Let her mother sit around trying to figure it out.
Rachel picked up the grimoire that spoke to her.
“That one's useless,” her mother told her. “We already read through it.”
It's not useless,said the voice. The real spell is in this one.
Rachel understood that the spell that had seemed so obvious was really just a guesstimate drafted by a later LaBelle. The real one was written in code in the dingy old grimoire she held in her hand.
“I'm going out,” Rachel said.
“Where?”
“I just thought of something,” Rachel said. “I'll be back.”
She needed to go somewhere and figure this out on her own.
Chapter 24
Brandy showed up at Animal Sphere the next morning for work. Jake had called her late the night before, but she already was asleep. When he saw her on the bridge overlooking the gator pit as he was in the middle of a show, he gave her a big smile, and then turned back to the audience.
They managed to keep their hands off each other during the rest of the day, surrounded by visitors and staff. But as soon as things quieted down, Jake took slight advantage of her – notfulladvantage – during an afternoon break.
After Brandy left to go home, Jake had some paperwork to go over before he promised to meet her for dinner at a restaurant one town over from Escala. That's when he got the call from Rachel. She told him he needed to come over to her place and pick up some things he had left behind. Since they were broken up, she didn't want to have to look at them anymore. She wanted a fresh start, she said, without his old T-shirt and CDs lying around.
When Jake arrived at his ex-girlfriend’s, he had no idea she had set a trap for him.
The voice of Eve LaBelle had been speaking to her great-great-great granddaughter from the grimoire and from the great beyond. The Alligator Curse – the real curse – was so shockingly simple that Rachel was surprised more angry women hadn't been using it. It's simplicity was what made it necessary to be kept hidden.
The voice of Eve LaBelle told Rachel there was more to learn – more that she would teach her – if she could prove herself by pulling this off.
Rachel called her mother and told her she had a lead on the spell, and that she wouldn't be back in Key West until the next day.
That will give my mother some time to go try and pick up some old rich retiree,Rachel mused sarcastically.
Rachel collected the ingredients as Eve instructed her and mashed them together in a heavy duty mortar with a large pestle. Then she set the mortar out so the ingredients would dry in the sun.
Eve had given her the directions to a swamp, and she went hunting for alligator eggs. Even though it wasn't mating season, Eve told her they would be there. She snatched some eggs without alerting the mother, and brought them back to the apartment.
Cracking the eggs, the alligator fetuses were identifiable in form, but nowhere near hatching. Rachel clipped off the jaws and the tail from the rest of the body. This was easy to do, since they were so soft and fragile. Then she doused them with whiskey and lit them afire with a match. She added the ashes to the rest of the ingredients. Another splash of whiskey, and another strike of a match.
By the time she was done, she had a fine charcoal grey powder with flecks of red. She lit a couple of candles in the kitchen alcove where she kept her altar, and she waited for McEvans.
In the dim light of the kitchen, she turned to face a mirror.And there instead of her own image was the face of an even more beautiful woman. This woman was proud and sharp-eyed, with milk chocolate skin and topaz eyes. Around her head was a blue silkengele – the head wrap worn by Creole
women back in the day.
Eve LaBelle stared back at Rachel with more fondness than her own mother had ever shown her.
When McEvans arrived, she invited him in. She had a fistful of the powder hidden in her hand. When he followed her into the kitchen, she orchestrated things so that his back was to the alcove. Then she raised her hand, and with a quick exhalation, she blew the powder into his face, so that McEvans had no choice but to breath it in.
Then she waited.
“What the hell was that?” McEvans asked her. He sneezed, then rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.
He stared at Rachel. And then he immediately forgot what happened.
Rachel smiled wanly at him.
“I'll get your stuff – wait here.”
McEvans sat down at the kitchen table. Within a couple of minutes, Rachel reappeared with a cardboard box. He stood and and took the box without checking it.
“Thanks,” he said.
“I'll show you out,” Rachel said.
She walked him to the door, and watched him get into his truck and drive away. How she had managed to pull that off so smoothly without showing her emotions, she had no idea.
Very good,the voice of Madame Eve LaBelle told her.I was never all that impressed with your mother, by the way.
Rachel felt vindicated. She had no doubt the spell would work. If Jake McEvans wanted to be completely obsessed with alligators to the exclusion of her, then she had ensured that he would no longer just wrestle alligators. He wouldbecomeone.
He would become a smarmy reptile.
Subhuman.
Eve had assured Rachel that the curse came with numerous hidden pitfalls and booby traps. The seven cursed families had only figured out a few of them thus far, even given a hundred years of life experience.
McEvans would, for example, never again be able to safely travel beyond any geographic region with a temperate zone. Rachel felt smug satisfaction over this particular fact, as she watched his truck pull out of her driveway. Being the world traveller that he was, that immediately roped off more than half the planet for McEvans.
Oblivious to what had just befallen him, McEvans headed off to meet up with Brandy. When he called her on his cellphone, she picked up immediately.
“I'm running a few minutes late,” he said.
“No problem,” Brandy said.
“I had to go pick up some stuff I left at Rachel's.”
“At Rachel's?”
“It was fine. It was quick. We barely even talked.”
Brandy's curiosity rose not because she was worried or jealous, but because Rachel was supposed to be hiding out somewhere unknown, under the watchful eye of the Cliburn bounty hunters. Of course, she couldn't tell McEvans that.
During dinner, McEvans seemed a little distracted. He said it was because he was still trying to get an initial quote on an estimated budget for Brandy's proposed swamp project at Animal Sphere. He was getting annoyed that it was taking so long.
It didn't take much convincing for McEvans to get Brandy to agree to spend the night at his place. They were barely two steps through the door when McEvans caught her off guard and pinned her against the wall. Her heart leapt and her knees almost went weak. His lips went to her throat and she reached up, running her hands through the hair at the nape of his neck.
Suddenly, McEvans felt a stabbing pain in his gut, and he pulled back, doubling over.
“What's wrong?” Brandy asked. “Are you okay?”
McEvans dropped to the ground. He tried to speak, but could barely get out a whisper.
“I – just give me a second,” he said.
The spasm seemed to subside as quickly as it started. He straightened up.
“Sorry – I don't know what happened there,” he said.
Brandy looked worried.
“Maybe you should go lie down?”
“Yeah, okay.”
They made it upstairs without incident. McEvans pulled back the covers of his bed and they tried to lie down and relax for a minute. McEvans' home was pretty impressive. It was a ranch in a very expensive gated community not far from Animal Sphere. Brandy had been here before, of course, but as an alligator she had not gotten a tour of the whole house. His king size bed was heaven, Brandy thought.
“Where did you get these sheets?” she asked.
“They're 1,000 thread-count Egyptian cotton,” he said. “I brought them back from Morocco.”
“Seriously?”
Brandy snuggled back in the crook of his arm, then turned to face him.
“Feeling better?”
“Much,” he said.
And he proved it to her.
Shortly before daybreak, Brandy awoke first. She looked over at McEvans, who was fast asleep. She noticed that he had a hard patch of flaky dry skin on both his forearms. She hadn't noticed that before on him.
“I can feel you staring at me,” McEvans said, his eyes still closed.
“I was looking at your arms,” she said. “You have eczema?”
“Huh?” McEvans opened his eyes and looked to where she was pointing.
He scratched at his left arm a bit.
“That's weird,” he said. He shivered a bit. “I feel chilly for some reason.”
“Why don't you go take a hot shower,” Brandy said.
“Why don't you join me?”
McEvan's bathroom was as luxurious as his bedroom, and the shower stall had plenty of room for two. Brandy slipped in first, enjoying the ripple of steamy hot water cascading down her long hair and back.
McEvans stepped in a minute after her. His plan was to soap Brandy up from head to toe, but he never got the chance. Once the water hit him, the world as he knew it altered forever, and the floor seemed to fall out from underneath him.
First, he fell backward, but managed to steady himself. Then he started to fall forward, but he managed to break his fall. He crouched in the shower, with Brandy hovering over him, frantically worried.
“Jake, what the hell is going on?! Do we need to get you to the hospital?”
“No!” He snapped. Instinctively, he knew that was a bad idea.
Then they both heard his jaw pop.
McEvans looked startled, but Brandy had heard that sound before. Her eyes widened in shock. Could this be happening? How?She answered her own question within seconds. Rachel LaBelle.
The first shift was always the hardest, and it could take awhile.
“What do you remember about going over to Rachel’s?” she frantically asked.
“What – ah – nothing – I just picked up my stuff,” he said. His voice clearly indicated that he was having a hard time breathing.
The skin on his back started to crack into scales. He wasn't aware of it yet, but Brandy could see it.
“Don’t panic,” Brandy told him. She was trying not to panic herself. “I don't know what happened exactly, but you’re shifting.”
“I'mwhat?”
“You'reshifting – you're shifting like me.”
McEvans look at her astonished. He couldn't fully absorb the implications of what was happening. His whole body was convulsing.
“How?Why?”
“Let's get you out of the shower and back to bed. This could take awhile.”
Once they got out of the water and Brandy dried McEvans off with a towel – he was too weak to do it himself – she noticed that the process slowed.
So, we've learned one thing about the spell,she thought. It activates for the first time when a victim gets wet.
Brandy explained to McEvans that Rachel LaBelle was descended from Madame Eve LaBelle, and that she must have cursed him for breaking up with her. This was definitely a step above a mojo bag and a love spell. Brandy had underestimated Rachel. And McEvans was in too much discomfort and too distracted right now to actually be angry about this the way he was over the love spell.
“It will get better,” she told him. She was trying to stay calm for him. “It’s not always like this.”
McEvans passed out a couple of times, and he had brief dream snippets taking him back to the campfire in Africa where he had first heard about shifters. In Kenya, some believed that men could turn into lions or leopards.
Just before dawn, McEvans fully shifted. Now there was no longer room for the two of them in bed, so Brandy got up and let McEvans rest in his shifted state for a bit. He was a big gator, too, just like Brandy. Bigger actually. He measured at 13-feet-7-inches. Brandy guessed he was about about a thousand pounds, and his jaws were four feet long. This was pretty impressive.
“Let’s get you to the pool,” she ordered.
McEvans crawled down the stairs easy enough on his newly sprouted, stubby short legs, but he found it awkward rounding tight corners with such a long body, trying to walk down the hallway through the den to the backyard without banging his tail into every wall.
The in-ground pool in the back was lavish and huge. Brandy shifted and both of them slipped in for a swim.
A lot would come naturally to McEvans in terms of basic instinct. But how he would respond to this psychologically, she wasn't sure.
They swam around, and Brandy tried to distract McEvans from panicking over his altered reality by opening up to him more about her family background. She had no reason to keep secrets anymore. She explained Jenny's plan – backed by the Powells – to reverse the curse even though most of them didn't want to.
They stared at each other, beady-eyes to beady-eyes right above the waterline.
“I'll have full control of this, right?” McEvans asked her. “Like you?”
“If it's the same curse, then yeah – the results should be the same.”
After two hours in the pool, suddenly, McEvans felt euphoric. All his life he had been studying animals. Now he actually WAS one. This wasn't acursehe realized– not for him. This was a miracle!
McEvans libido responded to this elation by going into overdrive. He swam over to Brandy and started circling her. Then he moved in close and started nuzzling her, cheek to cheek. He slowly angled himself so that he was now side by side with her. Brandy hadn't realized what was happening until he slowly slipped over her and started pushing gently down under water.
Big Gator: A BBW shape shifter paranormal romance Page 12
