by Mina Carter
My heart thudded despondently as her words sank in, my spirit floundering in the current of dread flowing through me.
“I’m going to siphon your immortality from you, and that’s going to be bad, but there will be worse to follow. If you don’t want to end up being his plaything for all eternity, you’re going to have to agree to let me desecrate your body.”
“No way in hell!” Shane exploded.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”
She ignored Shane’s outburst and leaned closer. All the while Z-20 coiled tighter and tighter around me making it even harder for me to breathe. “The immortality thing’s non-negotiable. I need it from you for the Gris Gris to work. We’ve been collecting for a while, and you’re the last one we need to break the curse on him that keeps him from returning to the form he prefers. Leon will ask it of you and you won’t be able to refuse. But I’ve also learned he plans to have me resurrect your physical body.”
I sucked in a shocked breathe. “You can’t do that.” I whispered.
“I’m afraid you’re quite mistaken. It’s dark magic, the Creator’s own that has been twisted to serve our purpose. It’s something I can easily do when a corpse is fresh. It’s just a variation of the Gris I perform every thirteen months to maintain myself the way I am today, the way I always intend to be.” She tapped her lips again.
“Why should I believe anything you say?”
“No doubt you are a clever girl.” She scooted back in her chair pulling the robe over her knees. “You don’t have to, of course. The choice is up to you. But if you don’t do what I’m suggesting, I vow by the great Zombi himself, the flesh eating dark deity for which my lovely pet is named, and whose spirit I will channel tonight, that you will wish you had. Because once reborn you will be bound to Leon for eternity. Forced to do his bidding, to feel the pain of the things he will enjoy doing to you over and over and over with no hope of ever escaping him.”
I closed my eyes but I’d seen too much to doubt any of it anymore. Nightmares, legends, myths. They were all becoming reality in front of my eyes.
“What is Leon?” I whispered with trepidation.
“Why, he is Apollyon the Destroyer. The one Christians call Satan or the Prince of Darkness. But he’s so much more than that. He’s the ruler of the In Between, the pitiless deceiver, the one who guides the dead and whose touch hastens it.”
“Holy shit!” Shane exclaimed.
I opened eyes to see the truth in Marie’s gaze or at least the truth as she believed it to be. And as I feared it truly was. “I’ll agree, but only if you let Shane go.”
“I cannot do that,” Marie said softly. “It’s not in my power. Already I risk much being here. I have oaths to Leon that I am bound to keep, but I also have other alliances and ambitions of my own. And I can’t seem to shake this feeling I have about you, either. That there’s more to you than meets the eye.” She trailed off, looking out the window, then back at me. “But we’re running out of time. I have to prepare myself and then prepare you before Leon arrives.”
“Don’t do it, Thyme.” Shane threw an arm over his eyes. “The price is too steep.”
“What price?” I asked, and Marie’s gaze swung back to me.
“Once I take your immortality your body will become weak and fully mortal. When you die, if your body is marked as I am suggesting, Leon won’t be able to bring you back as his slave, but you will become a restless shade, never able to cross the River, and forced to wander the earth without a place to call your home for all eternity.”
“What kind of choice is that?” I scoffed. “It sounds awful. Both options are. Live and be Leon’s slave or die and wander the earth aimlessly.”
“The choice seems hard to you now, but I promise that you do not know Leon the way I do.” She stood and brushed her hands over her robe apparently done and out of patience with me. She turned and headed toward the door.
“Wait.”
She hesitated in the doorway looking back over her shoulder.
“Thyme, no!” Shane shouted rattling the bars of his cage.
“Suppose I agree.” I couldn’t look at Shane or Marie as I made my decision remembering the words of Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?’ I lifted my chin. “Will I be with Shane after I die? I don’t care so much about the wandering bit.” My voice sounded stronger and braver than I felt. “That doesn’t matter to me as long as we’re together,” I explained.
She stared at me long and hard. I saw a flicker of something unexpectedly soft in her gaze. She dipped her head as if in respect or approval. “I cannot say for sure. If the tie between you is strong enough it’s not impossible.”
“Then I’ll do it.”
Chapter 10
For tis not in mere death that men die most. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Thyme
I stared into the hand mirror that a young woman who claimed to be Marie’s attendant held up to my face. My makeup and my hair were flawless. The desecration markings Marie had finger painted on my skin using arcane water were invisible to my eyes.
My nose itched but I couldn’t reach it. My arms were currently pinned by the python that had remained in my cage since my conversation with Laveau. The white silk chemise they’d dressed me in flowed to my ankles, but felt cooler against my skin than the snake.
I wanted to close my eyes and pretend it all away, except it meant that I’d be robbed of my last few remaining minutes with him. Shane and I had agreed to do whatever we could to escape, but while we waited for an opportunity to present itself, we focused on enduring, together, each with the other.
There was a heavy somberness that saturated the air, a portent of doom inside every bit as palpable as the coming storm outside.
“I love you,” I mouthed to Shane. I didn’t want to say it aloud. The words were only meant for him.
He returned the silent words, and I felt his love in my heart and savored it in these last few remaining moments before midnight when the ceremony would begin.
I heard the heavy beat of drums first. Hypnotic chanting followed as men clad only in plain black pants and women wearing colorful headdresses and smocks filed into the room. Their voices were low as they sang unfamiliar words. Their eyes were vacant and milky grey. Thirteen in total, they wound between Shane’s cage and mine, breaking our connection.
They gathered around a waist high table draped in white that had been brought in earlier. Simple wrought iron candelabras with six thick spherical candles on each flickered on either end of the table while in the center a shiny black bowl mirrored their light.
Wearing a flowing black robe and matching headdress, spine held regally straight, Marie Laveau stood behind the table. The reflected light of the night clouds in the window above gave her face a remote otherworldly glow. “Bring the offerings,” she intoned.
Four men broke off from the circle and headed in Shane’s direction. An equal number of women came toward me. This was our chance. As soon as they unlocked my door and removed my chain, I butted the head of the woman in front of me and kicked another with my legs. Immediate disappointment burned inside of me when I realized all my effort gained was one paltry measure of freedom.
A familiar shadow slid over me blocking out all the light. The attic that had been sweltering with heat and humidity suddenly went surprisingly chillingly cold. The fine hairs along my arms and nape stood on end. Turning slowly, I saw with my own eyes what had caused the faces of the women with me to go paler than their eyes. Or rather who.
Leon.
It was him, only it wasn’t. His auburn hair was slicked back, the hint of horns blatantly obvious now. His black eyes glowed and his pointed chin and thick lips peeked through the bottom of a grotesque half mask. The rest of his body was the stuff of nightmares. Taller and broader than before, his chest was smooth, muscled and masculine
. His arms however, were as devoid of flesh as I’d imagined them to be; all bleach white bone from his shoulder sockets to his ungloved fingertips. From the waist down he was covered in wiry fur. His exposed member was huge and aroused, his legs grotesquely shaped like an animal, his feet hooved.
Without the cane, he clopped across the floor toward me.
“Thyme, look out!” Shane shouted the warning, but I was already backing up, pressing myself as far away as I could get from Leon. My brain screeched for me to run and my heart raced as he came for me, reaching out and grabbing my handcuffs, hauling me across the room as though I were his own personal party streamer.
His supernatural nature was no longer in doubt.
When he set me down in front of Marie, Shane was already there, his face red from exertion, his mossy eyes bright as if he had a fever. I worried about that head wound. He seemed unfocused. Six had his thick arms wrapped tightly around him apparently having been summoned to hold him in place. Or was it to keep him upright? I was so scared now that I could barely bring in enough oxygen to keep up with the rapid pace of my heart. Our escape attempts had failed and our last hope for help was walking out the door. “Please!” I shouted to the others, my voice shrill. “Help us! Don’t let them do this!”
“They can’t help you.” Leon tightened his grip, sharp edged bone biting into my soft flesh. “They only hear my voice. They’ve already given their souls to me.”
The door closed leaving behind only one huge milky eyed man by Marie’s side. Leon slid off the mask and dropped it on the table. Marie made a motion with her hand, and Z-20 uncoiled from me and slithered across the table to her. She began to chant something in a language I didn’t understand while the snake settled itself around her shoulders like a shawl.
Shane’s defeated gaze met mine. He had given up struggling. There was no way he could loosen the creature’s hold. He dropped his chin as if ashamed he had failed me. Panic overcoming paralysis, I bucked and tried to kick Leon, but stopped when he whispered in my ear. “Don’t. Or I promise you, I will hurt the boy. Badly.”
“Provide the sacrifice,” Marie ordered in a deep voice that didn’t sound a bit like her own. “Zombi demands it.”
The man beside her withdrew a ten inch knife from a holster attached to his belt. The long shiny serrated blade seemed to be made of the same black material as the bowl, the cuffs and the cages. He moved toward Shane.
“No!” I thrashed trying harder to break free from Leon’s hold, but to no avail. His fingers cut into my upper arms. “You promised! No!” I shouted, but it was too late.
Shane didn’t stand a chance. He hissed as the blade slashed through the skin of one of his cheeks and then the other, crimson trails appearing beneath each eye. He swayed and grabbed onto Six’s arms for support, his eyes glittering mossy green malice above the dripping red at Leon.
My stomach roiled. Ineffectual anger made me tremble. If I had eaten anything since the day before it would’ve come up as I watched drops of Shane’s blood running down the blade the man handed back to Marie. She ran her fingers through it and then swirled them in the clumpy liquid contained within the black bowl. Horrid things floated near the top. Chicken feet, animal testicles, unseeing eyes and what appeared to be fingernails.
The ritual they were performing wasn’t only for show. I could feel the evil they had invited into the room. Shadows that seemed to have life of their own pressed in crowding the space. The temperature of the air was like a walk in freezer. Marie was cold, too, totally emotionless. There was no sign of the woman who had made the deal with me earlier, only a detached, merciless priestess.
She scooped out a ladle’s worth of the vile maroon liquid. My brain skittered away from thoughts about what the base of that concoction might be. When she set it on the table before me as if it were a gift, I recoiled. “Drink, daughter of Bacchus.”
“I can’t.” I found my voice again and pressed my lips together tight.
“You will.” Leon’s voice commanded seeming to rattle the walls with its strength. Marie had been correct in her warning. I was powerless to do anything but obey. My hands quaked as I reached out to take hold of the hellish brew. I brought it to my lips. It smelled fouler than Six and Leon put together.
“Drink deeply,” Leon purred softly, but not less authoritatively. I tried not to give in to it. I had resisted him before outside this room, but I couldn’t now. Maybe it was because I had been weakened by the confinement, or maybe it was because he was so powerful in this form. Whatever the reason, I opened my mouth and the thick gelatinous glop glided down my throat. It was salty and metallic and so foul that I wretched, my stomach bile coming up to mix along with it.
And then…my eyes seemed to clear, as if I hadn’t seen things the way they really were until that moment.
The walls of the attic faded away. Thick clouds over thirty thousand feet tall boomed with thunder. Wind battered my body and my hair lashed my face like a cold whip. Flashes of lightening revealed that I stood on the edge of a precipice with churning white water below. I tried to keep my balance as the waves rose pummeling my perch, but the ground crumbled beneath my feet. As I fell it seemed as though I could hear the sound of thousands of voices suffering the same fate and wailing in sorrow. The pressure of our combined despair ruptured my eardrums and warm liquid ran down my neck.
And then, I plunged beneath the warm water. Down, down, down I went, the liquid saturating my gown and the current feeling like strong hands pulling me under. My nostrils and lungs filled with salt and silt. My chest burned and my head pounded. I was running out of air. I was drowning. The end was near.
“Help me,” I screamed silently, a psychic plea. But not to Shane. There was someone else. Someone I could feel far off, but who I knew somehow deep in my soul had the power to save me. “Please.”
“Thyme!” A voice commanded. The wrong voice. The one I couldn’t disobey.
I blinked once, then twice, the water disappearing along with the far off face I’d desperately wanted to see. I focused my eyes and looked into merciless ones that held the promise of the terrible things to come. “Yes, Master. Whatever you wish of me, I will do it.”
“No, Thyme. Don’t! Stop! I was wrong.” The voice that spoke those words was close, beside me in this room, but too insignificant to matter. Except that it made my master angry.
My master grabbed the obsidian blade from the table and plunged it into the dissenter’s side. I watched moss eyes turn so dark green they almost looked black. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice screamed and screamed over and over again hysterically, only I didn’t realize until much later that it had been mine.
Twice the blade, a remnant of the Creator’s pure magic sliced through his flesh as if it were butter, making a sickening wet squishy sound, my master’s biceps flexing with effort only when his weapon met the resistance of bone.
Whispering my name, dropping to his knees, Lord Apollyon’s foe slumped forward, and went completely still.
Chapter 11
Love is my religion - I could die for it. - John Keats
Thyme
The Voodoo Queen leaned over me, dipping shiny obsidian forceps so far into my mouth and down my throat that I gagged. Though it was unpleasant, I felt strangely disconnected from the operation and endured it because my master wished it.
Then it got worse.
Sharp bolts of pain bracketed my body. A fine sheen of perspiration formed on my feverish skin. She tugged and twisted again and it felt as though she were trying to detach something screwed in deep beneath my breast bone, something knitted into the very fiber of my being. She yanked once more with such force that I felt as if I were being split in two. Waves of nausea and agony crashed over me. My limbs vibrated uncontrollably as the tongs reappeared outside my body, a shimmering, iridescent, mesmerizingly beautiful ribbon gripped between their tweezer shaped tips.
Pictures like memories seemed to dance along its length. The more of the length
she tore from me, the weaker I became, the more wrong I felt. Deflated. Empty. Bereft.
I grew so weary, I could barely keep my eyes open as she wound the ribbon around and around an inscribed stylus and then scraped it off with her hand into the hollow of a onyx pendant shaped like a claw. Its two inch length appeared to be far too small to hold the volume of what she stuffed inside it.
She screwed the silver top closed and passed it to my master.
“You did well, my darling.” He flashed a sharp smile and slid the chain around his neck. The moment he did flesh appeared on dry bones where none had been a moment earlier, and his lower body transformed too changing in the blink of an eye from animal to man.
“Come, my dear.” He swept me off my feet and into arms that now bulged with strength and vitality because of what he had taken from me and all the others. My head lolled back onto his shoulder. He stared down at me with triumphant eyes. Distant déjà vu assailed me. “Your pain was just an appetizer. I’m still hungry for more. It’s time for you to feed me, and I’m in the mood to play with my food.”
“Yes of course,” I replied.
But what more did I have left to give?
*****
The screams that had poured out of my throat all night left me feeling as if I had been fed broken glass. My flesh was scored with grievous injuries, but within my soul there was a wound so deep that it made those seem insignificant.
Leon had done horrible things to me. Unspeakable things. Evil things.
But worse than any of that, he’d taken Shane from me.
As the driving rain from Katrina continued to relentlessly pound the outside walls and the hurricane winds howled their rage, inside my mind my thoughts were just as violent. I remembered everything now and clawing its way through the pain and crushing loss was a razor sharp hatred. I had only one goal to live for now.
