Black Dust Mambo

by Adrian Phoenix

  “What’s with the coffin? You ain’t Goth, so I’m figuring it’s a hoodoo thing.”

  “How do you know I ain’t Goth? Never judge a book, yada yada.”

  “You’re right, my bad. Are you Goth?”

  “Nope, and you’re right, it’s a hoodoo symbol. The coffin represents Baron Samedi. He’s the lord of death, and he stands at the crossroads.”

  “Is that what the X is for? Or is that a cross?”

  “Both. It represents the crossroads. The Baron alone decides who crosses over into Guinee —the realm of the dead—or doesn’t.”

  “‘Or doesn’t?’ What does that mean, exactly? Sounds kinda ominous.”

  “Not really. It just means that he’s also the loa of resurrection. A lot of times, he’s called upon as a last resort when someone’s near death or dying.”

  “And this one? The saint medallion?”

  “Saint Bernadette, for healing.”

  Gage traces a gentle finger along the scar at her temple: “Healing. Death and resurrection. Sounds like you faced something pretty rough once upon a time.”

  “My aunt thought so, anyway. She gave me both of these, and I promised to always wear them.”

  “Good symbols to wear, you ask me. I know someone who’d love to have a chat with the Baron about open and instant admission for everyone into the land of the dead.”

  Kallie knew now that Gage had been speaking about Layne. Releasing the pendants, she wondered if she’d at least be able to give the nomad a gift to send with Gage without resorting to binding a Mc Kenna poppet.

  “Why don’t you help me judge the wet-boxers contest?” Belladonna said. “Have a little fun and get to ogle men’s packages with impunity to boot. I’ll see if you can be the one who hoses them down.”

  Kallie felt a smile tugging at her lips. “I hope they plan to use warm water. Maybe. It’d be fun, for true, but first I gotta meet with Augustine and see what he wants.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Belladonna mumbled around a mouthful of cotton candy. “Where did he ask you to meet him again?”

  “Some bar on Bourbon Street—The Latex Closet.” Belladonna snorted. “Sounds like a dominatrix fashion boutique.”

  Kallie grinned. “Well . . . he is British.”

  “And he’s in Layne’s hot body. Imagine him all decked out in latex.”

  Heat fluttered through Kallie’s belly at the image Belladonna’s words invoked. Nomad in skintight latex. Yum.

  “Go, girl, but make sure you’re here for the wet-boxers fun. Hunky conjurers and illusionists in skimpy underthings, you with a hose . . .” A wicked smile danced across Belladonna’s lips.

  “Wouldn’t miss it. I’ll meet you at the contest stage when I’m done.”

  “I’ll have a hose waiting for you, Shug.”

  Kallie blew Belladonna a kiss before turning around and heading for the may madness arch; the wrought iron glinted like polished black pearl in the sunlight. She headed back across the courtyard and to the hotel, Gage’s words haunting her thoughts.

  “Healing. Death and resurrection. Sounds like you faced something pretty rough once upon a time.”

  Cold fingers closed around Kallie’s heart. Nothing she’d faced compared to what Gage had suffered alone, and nothing ever would.

  TWENTY-ONE

  DOCTOR HERON

  Jean-Julien St. Cyr strolled along the scarlet-flowered Persian carpet through the Prestige’s spacious, people-thronged lobby. Light from Canal Street filtered in through the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows stretching along the walls on either side of the bustling entrance, sparking soft illumination in the lobby’s mirrored columns.

  Phones trilled and voices rose into the air, buoyant with laughter. Hotel guests in shorts, T-shirts proclaiming laissez les bon temps rouler or a fleur-de-lis embellished who dat? clustered near a long table covered in a pristine white cloth, spooning complimentary jambalaya into bowls, buttering corn bread, or stirring sugar into coffee while children chased each other with toy fairy wands across the lobby.

  “You’re a frog!”

  “Then you’re a fly and I just ate you!”

  “Did not!”

  Hotel employees in gray uniforms, the prestige embroidered in red on their suit jackets, pushed luggage racks toward gleaming elevators, and maids in gray dresses, white aprons, and sturdy rubber-soled shoes whisked along beside them.

  A sharp pang pierced Jean-Julien as one young woman with platinum-blonde hair bustled past, shoving a keycard into a pocket of her dress. Throat tightening, he looked away and continued across the lobby toward the room marked STARLIGHT CONVENTION HALL.

  “You’ll find it in the dealers’ room, Papa. Tucked into the dirt of the potted palm tree beside the creole mojo booth.”

  “I know what it’s like to be locked up, baby-girl. I’ll get you out of there, safe and sound, as soon as I can.”

  “I know you will, Papa.”

  A smiling overweight young man in a gray uniform—one stretched to the seams—perched on the edge of a stool in between the convention hall’s open double doors.

  “Evening,” Jean-Julien said, slowing his pace and smiling.

  “Good evening, sir. May I see your badge, please?” Jean-Julien stopped beside the young man’s perch and handed him the visitor’s day pass Rosette had mailed to him the day before.

  “Thanks.” The doorman waved him inside. Jean-Julien walked into the dealers’ room. Booths of all shapes and sizes looped the room’s perimeter in diminishing rings. The smell of woody patchouli incense hung in the air, curling around the sweet scent of jasmine and rose and the heated spice of cayenne pepper and pungent anise.

  A few people strolled the aisles, but the majority of carnival attendees were most likely at dinner or outside enjoying the May Madness festivities. Derision twisted cold along Jean-Julien’s spine. Carnival. As though magic was just a game, a plaything for bored children.

  He knew better, of course. Magic was a gator submerged just beneath the dark surface of the water. Waiting. Hungry and patient. And it didn’t care who or what it devoured as long as it fed.

  As for himself, he cared very much that his hex had killed an innocent nomad instead of Gabrielle LaRue’s hoodoo-schooled niece. But nothing could be done about the life and soul lost. All the hand-wringing in the world wouldn’t change a thing. The nomad remained dead and Kallie Rivière alive. All Jean-Julien could do was move forward.

  He walked the circling aisles until he spotted the creole mojo booth and the potted palm beside it. Painted with flowing grace at the top of the booth’s lemon-yellow covering was a picture of a serpent uncoiling up from the ground beside a black pot from which a rainbow arched across the sky—a vévé symbolizing Damballah Wedo and asking for wealth and luck.

  “Bonjour! If you need help finding anything or have any questions, m’sieu, please ask, oui?” the woman tending the booth said. She was attractive, perhaps in her midforties, her smooth skin darker than Jean-Julien’s, chocolate to his butterscotch, her eyes a warm shade of deep brown.

  “That I will, m’selle. Merci beaucoup,” he replied, winning a smile from her as she turned to greet another customer.

  Jean-Julien browsed through the racks of prepackaged herbs and roots; examined packages of incense, floor wash, and bath salts, and bottles of oil labeled lady luck oil and court case oil and follow me boy oil; and surveyed shelves of candles, statues of Catholic saints, and voodoo-doll kits, before purchasing a small packet of powdered St. John the Conqueror Root—after studying it with a critical and practiced eye to make sure it was authentic.

  Too many folks out there willing to cheat you in order to make a quick buck. No honor left in the world. Nor trust. All lessons he’d learned the hard way.

  Thanking the woman, Jean-Julien walked past the booth to the potted palm. Dropping his purchase, he bent and plunged his fingers into the pot’s dark soil, quickly finding the rounded edges of the thing he sought.

  “Kallie
Rivière’s room has been sealed, Papa, but I’m sure they’ll give her another. It’s also possible that she might stay with her friend, Belladonna Brown, in room 629.”

  Jean-Julien pulled the keycard free of the dirt; a maid’s universal keycard, one that provided access to every non-restricted room in the hotel.

  Palming the keycard, Jean-Julien picked up the powdered-root packet, then straightened, and slipped the key-card into his trouser pocket.

  He strode from the convention hall and across the busy lobby for the elevators. Each person he passed seemed as insubstantial as an image flickering on a computer screen—bands of light and data, an illusion.

  His daughter’s words whispered through his memory:

  “Once they believe they have the killer, they will have no need to protect or hold the old sorciere ’s niece. They will release her.”

  “And you? What will become of you?”

  “I am happy to be your sacrifice upon the altar of revenge, Papa.”

  A muscle flexed in his jaw. If they’d hurt his Rosette in any way . . .

  Once inside the elevator, Jean-Julien glanced up at the old-fashioned tin ceiling and punched a floor button at random. When he looked, he saw that the 10 button had lit up. As bon Dieu willed.

  Jean-Julien would go where the loa guided him. Once Kallie Rivière was dead, then he’d concentrate his efforts into freeing his daughter—so much like her mother, his long-lost Babette.

  Babette, ma belle femme, ma morte chère.

  But first a little prep work on his daughter’s behalf.

  Jean-Julien stopped in front of the first room that drew his eye. Reaching into his trouser pocket, his fingers slipped past the packet of purchased powder and the hard, folded shape of his pocketknife to the vial he’d filled the night before.

  Jean-Julien pulled out and uncorked the vial, releasing the pungent odor of bergamot, licorice, and calamus root into the still air—a potent bend-over blend—and carefully tapped a portion of the black powder into the palm of his hand. Stuffing the stopper back into the glass mouth, he dropped the vial back into his pocket.

  He rapped his knuckles against the door of room 1013. A moment later, the door was yanked open, revealing a red-haired woman tying a paisley scarf around her hair. She frowned, puzzled.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Jean-Julien lifted his palm to his mouth and blew the dust into her face. “My bidding you desire, no will of your own, my word holy fire.”

  The woman stumbled back a step, coughing, blinking, and fanning the air in front of her shocked face.

  Jean-Julien shoved into the room after her, closing and locking the door. The woman stopped coughing. She stood in the entry staring at Jean-Julien with a blank and black-dust-sooted face, her watering eyes unfocused.

  “Turn around and go sit on the bed,” Jean-Julien said gently.

  Obeying, she shuffled to the unmade bed and sank down onto it, hands in her lap. Jean-Julien crossed to the desk and the phone sitting on its polished surface. He dialed room service.

  “Fruit plate and coffee, please. Room 1013.”

  The woman stiffened and glanced around the room, her dust-smudged face anxious. Hanging up the phone, Jean-Julien went to the bed and knelt on one knee on the floor. Grasping her chin, he turned her face toward him.

  “It’s not for you to bring, not your task,” he said. “Your task is to get up, go into the bathroom, and wash your face. Be sure to dry it with one of the towels hanging on the rack, then come back to the bed.” Releasing her, he rose to his feet.

  The woman stood, her movement rigid, then tottered off to the bathroom like a woman twice her age. A moment later, he heard the sound of water pouring into the basin—a sound that continued even after she shuffled out of the bathroom, her face scrubbed clean of powder and dry.

  “Ah-ah. Go back inside and turn off the water.”

  Wheeling around, the woman teetered back into the bathroom. The blast of running water stopped.

  Jean-Julien waited. Nothing. He sighed. Zombies. “Come out of the bathroom now,” he called. “Return to the bed and lie down.”

  Once the woman had lain down and curled up on her side, Jean-Julien instructed her to sleep, murmuring that all she would remember of the evening was a strange dream she couldn’t quite recall. Her eyes closed. Within a minute, her breathing had dipped into the slow and easy rhythm of sleep. Jean-Julien pulled the sheet up over her.

  Pulling the vial of bend-over powder free of his pocket, he sat down in one of the high-backed chairs beside the French window leading to the balcony. He filled his palm again with the black and pungent powder, and waited.

  Rosette’s failure to kill Dallas Brûler still rankled. A simple jinx—a tricked poppet—and the root doctor from Chalmette, and Gabrielle’s prize pupil once upon a time, should’ve been dead.

  “Papa, she was just there . It was almost as if the loa themselves had guided her to him. I mean, for her to be there at that very moment. And maybe they did—punishing us for murdering an innocent man’s soul.”

  “No, that man’s death is just more blood on Gabrielle LaRue’s hands. Another consequence of her actions all those long years ago. You watched your mama die, Rosie. Watched pain devour her inch by inch. Don’t go soft on me, girl.”

  “Never, Papa. An eye for an eye is never enough. Never, never, never.”

  No truer words existed.

  Jean-Julien would deal with his daughter’s screw-up and make sure Brûler joined the ranks of the dead. But if it came down to choosing between the root doctor and Gabrielle’s niece, he’d choose the one whose death would break the hoodoo woman’s heart and spirit and will. Her niece.

  He yearned to be a spider tucked into a corner of Gabrielle’s ceiling when she learned about her niece’s death, yearned to see the devastation on her face when she realized that Kallie Rivière’s body hadn’t died alone, that her soul had perished as well.

  And just when Gabrielle would be thinking nothing worse could ever happen, her nephew, the seafaring and bayou-raiding Jackson Bonaparte, would suffer the same fate.

  Then Jean-Julien would make damned certain Gabrielle knew why.

  “An eye for an eye is never enough. Never, never, never.”

  A polite rap on the door drew Jean-Julien’s attention away from his thoughts. Rising to his feet, he strode to the door and opened it. A smiling young man in a gray uniform stood in the hall, a plastic-domed tray in his hands.

  Jean-Julien ushered the dark-skinned waiter inside, then lifted his palm and blew the dust into his startled face. “My bidding you desire, no will of your own, my word holy fire.”

  The tray fell to the floor with a loud crash, the plate and glass shattering, splattering the carpet with fruit and black coffee. The sharp scent of pineapple and cantaloupe wafted into the air.

  Once the waiter had finished coughing, stumbling, and gasping, and had gone still, his black-powdered face blank, his brown eyes wide and unfocused, Jean-Julien gave him the item he’d need to carry out his soon-tobe-assigned task: a vial containing a black oil—a deadly shadow-work potion—with the pieces of a torn-up paper command floating inside. Using his pocketknife, Jean-Julien sliced a small piece of fabric from the hem of the waiter’s white shirt.

  “Put that vial away,” Jean-Julien instructed. The young man slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Do you know the name Rosette St. Cyr?”

  “Yes.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “She is a maid here, or was until she shot Lord Augustine. Now she’s—”

  “What?” Jean-Julien stared at the waiter, his pulse thundering in his ears. “Did you say she shot Lord Augustine?”

  “Yes.”

  Jean-Julien raked a hand through his close-cropped hair, his thoughts whirling through his mind so fast he couldn’t nab a single one. Drawing in a deep breath, he worked on centering himself, calming the frenzy in his mind. His thoughts slowed; his pulse dropped to a c
anter.

  The plan had been for Rosette to turn herself in as the dead nomad’s murderer, to name herself as the guilty party in the attempted murder of Kallie Rivière so that the need for protective custody would no longer be necessary. Instead, the girl had shot the Hecatean master, the head of the Alliance. Why? And where in bon Dieu’s name had she found a gun?

  What had gone wrong? What the hell had Rosette done?

  Jean-Julien asked, “Is Rosette St. Cyr still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  Relief curled through Jean-Julien. “And Lord Augustine? Is he still alive?”

  “We haven’t been told.”

  Jean-Julien mulled over that bit of information. A couple of possibilities for the official silence rolled through his mind. One—the news was bad, Augustine wasn’t expected to survive or had already died. Two—Augustine was expected to survive, but in fear of another attempt on his life, the news was being kept quiet.

  “Do you know where Rosette St. Cyr is being held?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “On the fifteenth floor.”

  “Once you return to the kitchens, you will do everything in your power to make sure you stay on duty until I need you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Once I contact you, you will take food to the guards watching Rosette St. Cyr. Before serving them, you will add the contents of the vial I gave you to their food. Divide it equally among them and mix it up well. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “No thoughts shall occupy your mind except for the instructions I have given you,” Jean Julien said. “My bidding you desire, no will of your own, my word holy fire.”

  “Your bidding my desire, no will of my own, your word holy fire.”

  “Yes. Now go into the bathroom and wash your face. Turn off the faucet when you’re done and be sure to dry your face with one of the towels.”

  “Be sure to dry your face with one of the towels,” the waiter parroted, turning. He disappeared into the bathroom.