Black Magic Woman

by Christine Warren

  She stared up at Asher and felt fear and love and rage well up in her chest until she thought her body couldn’t contain them, but his expression didn’t change. He couldn’t see any of it.

  Panic returned, hot and sharp and bitter.

  “Daphanie,” he repeated, more insistently. When she betrayed not the flicker of an eyelash, she saw him straighten and glare at Missy. “Why isn’t she saying anything?”

  “I don’t know. She’s been like this since she opened her eyes. She hasn’t said a word, hasn’t made a sound. She hasn’t even twitched. It’s like she’s … not really there.”

  Daphanie wanted to scream a denial. Of course she was there! How could they think otherwise? How could they not tell that she was still herself? She just couldn’t show them.

  “Shit,” she heard Graham curse from a few feet away. “You don’t think the attack or the spell … damaged her … do you?”

  Damaged her? Daphanie’s mind gave a hysterical laugh. Was he talking about brain damage? Did he think she was a bloody frickin’ vegetable?

  “I don’t know,” Missy said quietly, but it was the uncertainty in her voice that made Daphanie want to scream.

  How could any of them think that?

  “Do you think we should … call someone?” her friend asked.

  “Like the witch?”

  “No.” Rafe overruled Graham. “She’s already seen her and told us what she knows. I think a doctor might be a wiser move. Medical tests might tell us … where she stands. I could contact a physician I know and ask him to visit.”

  “To hell with a physician,” Missy swore, and the incongruity of it got everyone’s attention, including Daphanie’s. “I’m calling Annie. She has medical training, has a master’s in neurobiology, and she’s the smartest woman on the planet. Plus, if I can reach her, she’ll be here in less than an hour. That should give you just enough to time to tell me where you’re going to look for D’Abo next.”

  There was a grim silence, then Asher spoke.

  “We don’t need to look for D’Abo anymore. We found him.”

  “You found him?” Missy cried. “Then get him up here! Whatever is wrong with Daphanie, you know he did it to her. Drag his sorry ass up here and make him break the spell.”

  “We can’t,” Graham told her, firmly but gently.

  “Why the hell not?”

  The answer slapped Daphanie like a heavy hand.

  “Because he’s dead.”

  Nineteen

  Humans have searched for the keys to immortality for as long as they’ve understood that, inevitably, they would die. From the mummification of corpses by the ancient Eqyptians to the Spanish conquistadors’ questing for the fountain of youth, from the alchemists’ search for the philosopher’s stone to modern medicine’s research into the genetic components of aging, humanity has always sought a way to live forever.

  What the Others can teach us, however, is that nothing lives forever. Vampires might exist indefinitely on a diet of the blood of other beings, and the sidhe might seem as eternal and ageless as time itself; but even they can die. All living things can be killed, somehow, in some way. So even for those creatures we humans jealously refer to as “immortal,” the reality is that they, too, shall pass.

  —A Human Handbook to the Others, Chapter Twenty-three

  The words fell on the company like a live mortar. Daphanie experienced a wave of nausea and a sick rush of vertigo.

  Dead?

  “Dead?” Missy parroted. “How can he be dead? If he were dead, wouldn’t Daphanie be out of danger? Wouldn’t the curse be lifted?”

  “We assume it would,” Rafe said. He sounded ruthlessly calm, as if every ounce of his will were trained on containing his fury.

  Daphanie could definitely sympathize.

  “The fact that nothing has changed lends credence to our theory that D’Abo was not the force behind this,” the Felix continued. “Someone wanted us to believe he was responsible, most likely to shift blame away from himself.”

  “But how are we going to find out who that is? We have to find out,” Missy insisted. “Daphanie is depending on us.”

  And she was.

  “Oh, my God! Got here … fast as I could! She okay? Had … cell phone … turned off. They … make everyone turn … phone off. Please … tell me … she’s okay!”

  Daphanie could practically hear heads turning toward the sound of Corinne’s voice. She could picture the woman framed in the bedroom door, clinging to it as if poised on the verge of collapse. In her mind’s eye, Daphanie pictured her bent forward at the waist, her hands braced on her thighs as she gasped for air. The picture formed easily, colored by the fact that Corinne had barely gotten her words out because she was panting so hard. She sounded as if she’d just run a four-minute mile, and Daphanie could smell the slight dampness of perspiration on her skin.

  “I could ask the same of you,” Missy scolded, the shush of movement sketching her hurried path to the other woman’s side. The sound of footsteps and rustling cloth painted the image of the reporter being herded into the chair beside Daphanie’s bed. “What did you do to yourself?”

  Corinne slumped audibly into the seat, and a soft thump made Daphanie envision the battered leather backpack she habitually carried in lieu of a purse sliding off the woman’s shoulder to the floor at her feet.

  Daphanie felt Corinne’s gaze fix on her in concern. “Just ran. I’ll be fine … soon as I catch my breath. Was on the other side of the park at the Historical Society when you called. Just grabbed everything and took off … faster than trying to get a cab.”

  Missy spoke with a frown. “I never intended for you to try to kill yourself. Daphanie’s been unconscious almost since Asher brought her in.”

  Corinne gulped in a last deep breath. She blew it out in a long, controlled stream and then seemed to regain her focus. “Okay. Good. Well, not good, because I can see something’s wrong, but good that she hasn’t taken a turn for the worse, or anything.”

  Daphanie wondered silently how she thought it could get worse, but she could of course say nothing about it. She also was smart enough to realize she didn’t actually want to contemplate an answer to that particular question.

  “She’s been just like you see,” Missy told the other woman, her voice low and serious.

  Corinne digested that information for a moment, then shifted her attention to the group gathered around Daphanie’s bed. Daphanie could have sworn she literally felt the change in direction of the other woman’s energy.

  “Tell me everything that just happened,” Corinne ordered. “I need to make sure I have all the facts.”

  Rafe was the one who related the story of how Daphanie had wound up back in the guest room at the Winters’ home.

  “Daphanie and Asher went to her studio that morning so she could try to get some work done,” the Felix explained briefly. “They were there for several hours and everything appeared normal. But just after noon, Daphanie experienced some sort of … attack.”

  Corinne swore, fluently enough that Daphanie wished she could laugh. She had teased the woman many times about having a mouth like a sailor. Corinne always responded that a reporter who couldn’t curse was like a lifeguard who couldn’t swim.

  “Someone broke in there, too?” Corinne asked. “Why the hell didn’t Logan and his boys stop them? What the hell did they think they were there for—”

  Rafe cut her off. “Not that kind of attack. I’m referring to something more subtle. An attack of the spirit, as it were.”

  He offered a succinct outline of the events. It actually worked out well for Daphanie, filling in the parts of the story she’d missed by being either unaware or unconscious. Of course, hearing it now stirred up all the anger and fear and confusion she’d been working so hard to keep in check, but she couldn’t afford to let those emotions overwhelm her, not when the information was so important. Almost as important as figuring out how the hell she could be in this predicament
when the man she’d thought had placed her there was dead.

  When the Felix finished, Corinne took a deep, shaky breath and spoke in a voice that did little to offer Daphanie reassurance. “In that case, I think you guys definitely need to hear about what I was able to dig up.”

  “Dig up?” Missy asked.

  Corinne made a sound of confirmation. “Yesterday morning, I called Daphanie at your place.”

  Daphanie assumed she was referring to Asher’s place.

  “After hearing about the real break-in, at Danice’s apartment, I thought Daph might be facing a rough morning dealing with everything. I was going to ask if she wanted to catch a movie or maybe hang out and watch a few DVDs.”

  Daphnie felt a surge of affection. Her friends really did love her just as much as she loved them. Given her current circumstances, it helped to remember that.

  It helped a surprising amount.

  “I never got around to asking, though,” Corinne continued. “Before I could, Daph asked me to do her a favor instead.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “She told me she’d had another one of those dreams.”

  Since she already knew all about this part of the story, Daphanie had to struggle with her impatience. Not that she could do anything to hurry Corinne along, but she still had to struggle. Giving in to her emotions would feel too much like surrendering. When her emotions were the only things she could control, losing control of them would send her one step closer to madness.

  “But she said that this time she was able to figure out what was going on,” Corinne explained. “Or at least a significant element in them. So she asked me to find out what I could about a woman named Manon Henri.”

  Daphanie could feel the others frowning.

  “Manon Henri?” Graham repeated. “Where did Daphanie pull that one from?”

  “Trust me, I asked her the same question, but for an entirely different reason. I’d already come across the name when I was trying to get Daph some info on D’Abo. Forewarned is forearmed and all that.”

  Asher latched on to that tidbit. “Manon Henri and D’Abo are linked somehow?”

  “ And how,” the reporter confirmed. “The thing was, I’d never mentioned the name to Daphanie, so I was surprised as hell to hear her spitting it back at me and asking me to find out more. When I asked her why, she explained that in the dreams she’d been having, she was convinced that she had taken on the persona of Henri. She made it sound almost like she felt she’d been possessed by the woman. It had really freaked her out, so I told her I’d found out what I could.”

  Everyone in the room leaned forward at the sound of the word “possessed.” If she could have, Daphanie would have done the same. Corinne had definitely earned their undivided attention.

  “At first I found a lot of mentions of her, but no real details. Like I told Daphanie, the basic sources say that Henri was a voodoo priestess who emigrated to New York from New Orleans sometime in the mid-1790s. She supposedly founded her own church here and then faded from the record. The part I found interesting was the church she founded is a little place called ‘La Société de Bon Anges.’”

  She didn’t have to explain the significance of that to anyone. Daphanie felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Based on the tone of Corinne’s voice, the story she’d uncovered didn’t stop there, and Daphanie was impatient to hear it. She wished she could shout at the other woman to hurry.

  “Go on,” Rafe urged, and Daphanie would have kissed him if she could.

  “Okay, so right away I could see there was a link to D’Abo, but I found it a little odd that all the histories of the city that I consulted gave that same spiel and nothing else. Since Daph asked me for more, I had to widen my search, so I spent the last twenty-four hours holed up at the New-York Historical Society over on West Seventy-seventh. Or at least every single one of those hours when I wasn’t being escorted out by security and locked out after hours. The society has some very interesting information on Henri.”

  “Like what?” Asher bit out.

  Corinne seemed to understand her audience’s growing impatience. “Like, from what the stories say, Manon Henri was Marie Laveau before Marie Laveau was ever born. Meaning, she was the most recognized and feared voodoo priestess in Louisiana between about 1785 and 1795. The problem was that while Marie Laveau became famous for her charity work, philanthropy, and political activism during her lifetime, all Manon Henri was known for was having ‘the blackest soul on the bayou.’ And that, by the way, is a direct quote from one of the letters I read.”

  “How did she end up in New York?” Missy asked.

  “Conflicting reports. When it comes to Manon Henri, I think just about everything is part of a conflicting report. Except for the part about her being ‘snake mean and pure evil.’ That’s another quote, but I couldn’t find a single source who disagreed with it,” Corinne said. “Part of the problem is that no one could say for sure whether Henri was born a free woman of color or a slave. They did agree that she had mixed ancestry, and she seems to have been considered a quadroon. Certain rumors suggested her father was a white planter and her mother was his placée —his mistress; others that her father was a Creole politician and her mother a mulatto prostitute at a brothel in the Vieux Carré; and some that she was born to a slave of mixed Indian and African descent who had been raped by a French plantation owner. The first two could have left her a free woman, but the last one would have meant she was a slave herself.

  “Personally, I can’t say I’d choose any of those, but they could affect how she got up here. If she was a slave, she could have either been sold or brought up here by her owner. And all this talk about people ‘owning’ people really makes me want to take a shower.”

  She shuddered. “Anyway, if I were a betting woman—and, incidentally, I am—I’d place my money on her being free, because I also tend to believe the other story about how she got here, that she was run out of New Orleans by the terrified citizens after she was discovered practicing human sacrifice as part of her black magic rituals.”

  “Human sacrifice?” Missy repeated, sounding half a step from dumbstruck. “Is that really a part of voodoo?”

  “No, and I learned an awful lot about that over the last day, too,” Corinne said firmly. “I don’t think what Manon Henri practiced was voodoo. Everything I’ve read about that religion confirms that the people who practice it are sane, ordinary men and women with a perfectly reasonable world view that includes honoring and invoking ancestor spirits called the loa to help them or offer them advice in times of need. It sounds like some do incorporate the occasional animal sacrifice of chickens or goats, but it’s done as humanely as kosher butchering and the animals are then used to feed the congregation as well as the gods. What Henri brought with her to New York was something else entirely. It wore a pretty, colorful suit of voodoo, but it was a hell of a lot darker.”

  “I’m beginning to believe you are right about that,” Rafe said, sounding grim and thoughtful. “What I would dearly like to know is whether Charles D’Abo practiced the traditional religion, or if he attempted to follow in Manon Henri’s footsteps.”

  Daphanie heard the shift of cloth as Corinne shrugged. “If he performed the same rites as Henri, he sure as hell did it more discreetly. If there were human sacrifices being made at La Société, the police would have been all over them. I haven’t heard so much as a whisper about that.”

  Asher caught the hesitation in her voice and pounced on it. “But?”

  “But I found something else while I was digging through the Society’s archives,” she said. Daphanie heard her weight shift in her chair and the rattle of a metal buckle. She pictured the reporter reaching down and flipping open her backpack to pull something out. Then she heard the rustle of papers and imagined one of her friend’s thick folders full of the fruits of her research. “I’d like to think I’m making too much of it…”

  She trailed off, her voice troubled.
Daphanie heard her riffle through the papers in the folder, stopping at one particular sheet. This she drew free and held for a long moment of silence.

  “Look at this and tell me what you see,” she said. Then she handed the paper to Asher.

  Daphanie felt like a toddler in front of a candy story counter. She knew that somewhere above her, something very, very important was taking place, but she could do nothing about it. She couldn’t hurry it along, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t do anything but feel her own impatience and strain for the audio clues to what her friends were doing and seeing and thinking.

  She was going to lose her damned mind.

  She heard the paper rustle as it changed hands, heard a quick, hissed intake of breath, heard Rafe mutter a curse in Spanish. Then she heard Asher murmur a single, strangled word.

  “Daphanie.”

  Twenty

  Ghost —the noncorporeal specter of a deceased being. While it can be confirmed that ghosts do exist, they themselves do not qualify as Others, being a rather more universal phenomenon. Ghosts may spring from humans, from Others, or from any creature possessing a soul. With that being said, however, many Others do seem to have the natural ability to detect and to communicate with ghosts in a way that can only be accomplished by humans with supernatural gifts. Among certain groups of Others, to see a ghost may be considered an omen of good luck.

  —A Human Handbook to the Others, Glossary

  Asher felt as if he’d just seen a ghost.

  The paper Corinne handed him was crumpled around the edges as if someone had gripped it too tightly, and he couldn’t swear that someone hadn’t been him. The single sheet was a slightly too dark photocopy of a photograph of a painting, and as such, the quality left something to be desired. The background was blurred to an indistinct blob of variegated charcoal, but the face in the foreground was as familiar as his own.