Black Heart Loa

by Adrian Phoenix

  “Maybe you and the Baron are right about the loa, Addie,” Kallie said, speaking quietly to keep from earning herself another nick from the knife. “And if you are, I won’t fight you. But I need to find my cousin first. Need to bring him home. Let me do that, then I’m all yours.”

  “Kallie, no!” Divinity and Belladonna protested practically in unison.

  Addie looked at Kallie, face bleak, eyes hollowed. “The Baron thought you’d say something like that. So he gave me a message to pass on to you: ‘You be all mine now, Kallie Rivière. And as for yo’ cousin—don’t worry yo’ pretty little head, jolie. We be finding him soon enough.’”

  “Goddammit, Addie,” Kallie pleaded, her hands curling into fists. “Don’t do this. Let me find Jackson—”

  Addie turned her face away from Kallie, a muscle twitching in her jaw. “John,” she called to a member of her posse. “Fetch the duct tape from the nomad and let’s get everyone in the back room. Let’s get this damned thing done.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  AN OLD GRUDGE

  Maverick and Jude never made it to the consultation room. Addie ordered the pair of glowering nomads to be triple taped at wrists and ankles, then locked in the supply closet as a safety precaution.

  McKenna spared herself the same treatment with the words “I have an exorcism tae finish—a Vessel with a hostile spirit aboard.”

  “Never met a Vessel,” Addie commented, voice in trigued. “All right, then.”

  The first thing Kallie noticed once they’d been herded into the room was that although Layne-Augustine still sat in the rocker, he now wore his leather jacket. She also noticed that his Glock rested on the floor in front of his boots.

  When a member of the hoodoo posse—skilled in hoodoo, but utterly inexperienced in subterfuge and hostage taking—picked up the gun, then moved away without bothering to search the nomad for additional deadly items, Kallie felt hope blossom within her.

  He still had his knives.

  But given the strain on Layne’s handsome face, the tension in his body language, Kallie suspected that Augustine’s hold over Babette was wearing thin. She wondered how long he could hold out. She had a feeling he was wondering the same thing.

  The dark-haired root doctor in his early forties named John moved from person to person in the crowded room, carefully binding everyone’s wrists and just as carefully avoiding their gazes, while Addie and her shotgun kept an eye on the proceedings. Once Kallie’s wrists had been taped together, the knife was removed from her throat, and she could finally breathe a little easier.

  Divinity was perched on the edge of Layne’s former bed, Belladonna beside her, her duct-taped hands in her lap, her back stiff, a fierce and bitter fire burning in her eyes as she stared at Gabrielle.

  McKenna knelt on the floor, wrists bound, with what looked like a slim willow branch inlaid with delicate curls and twists of silver clutched in one hand—her kosh, she’d called it. A wand she would use as a focus for her will and energies when she performed the exorcism.

  Addie stood in the center of the consultation room beside the chalked symbols and burning candles on the floor. Tiny flames danced reflected along the barrel of her shotgun. The sweet smell of candle wax mingled with the musky earth tones of the incense wafting up from the brazier.

  “I need tae begin the exorcism,” McKenna said, looking up at Addie. “Before his control slips.”

  Addie studied Layne-Augustine for a long moment. Sweat beaded the nomad’s face. She nodded. “Okay, yeah. Go ahead and get started.”

  Layne’s head cocked to one side, a tight smile curving his lips as Augusine’s chessboard-assessing gaze shifted to Gabrielle.

  Kallie wondered what the Brit had up his duct-taped sleeves. No illusion would work right in magic’s currently twisted stream. No time for smoke and mirrors. But … Her pulse picked up speed as she considered the foremost tool of any illusionist—misdirection.

  “So you’re Gabi, Doctor Heron’s sweetheart,” Layne-Augustine said in posh tones. “Gabrielle LaRue—the woman clever enough, ruthless enough, to poison his clients and put him in prison when he refused to leave his wife.” He winked. “Hell hath no fury, indeed. Kudos.”

  “What? No,” Gabrielle said, startled. She stared at the nomad. “I never—” Her words were cut off as the man she directed them to suddenly stiffened, then slumped in the rocker, his eyes rolling up white.

  Uh-oh, Kallie thought.

  “Holy Mother,” McKenna muttered. She started chanting rapidly in a flowing language that Kallie didn’t recognize, a language the pixieish nomad spoke with ease and authority.

  Layne straightened in the rocking chair and scanned the room, his icy green gaze coming to rest on Gabrielle. A chill crawled over Kallie’s skin when she saw Babette looking out through Layne’s eyes. She wondered if Augustine was still inside or if he’d bailed.

  Layne-Babette rose to his feet awkwardly as Babette adjusted to the feel of a physical body after a ten-year absence. “Of course you never,” he said without a British accent or Layne’s easy tones. “It was me. I was the clever one, you husband-stealing, home-wrecking whore. And I taught you both a well-deserved lesson.”

  Layne-Babette lurched forward, kicking aside Mc-Kenna’s candles and brazier, and spilling melted wax and hot incense across the floor, as he shuffled after Gabrielle, bound hands extended zombie-style.

  “Shite!” McKenna scooted away from the wax and embers. Swiveling around on her knees, she resumed her melodious and exotic chant, her kosh aimed at Layne-Babette’s back.

  “Sit back down!” Addie commanded, following Layne-Babette with the shotgun.

  “It be de hostile spirit inside o’ him,” Divinity said. “Seems she holds an old grudge against Gabrielle.” She tsked. “No surprise dere. De exorcism will take care o’ de problem. Now, aim de gun at de floor befo’ you accidentally shoot someone.”

  Flustered, Addie did just that. “John, grab the girl and let’s wait for the Baron in the other room.”

  “Okay,” the root doctor replied, ripping his fascinated gaze away from the slow-motion chase and heading for Kallie.

  Gabrielle stepped backward until she stood just in front of Kallie. Reaching back with one surreptitious hand, the mambo tapped something against her knuckles. A glance down revealed a folded pocketknife. Kallie’s heart gave a little leap. Grabbing the knife, she tucked it against her palm.

  “Run,” she whispered, before saying in a loud, contemptuous voice, “The only lesson you taught, Babette, was how to hate. Your poor daughter is dead because you poisoned her heart and soul as surely as you poisoned your husband’s potions.”

  Kallie whirled and shouldered her way past the surprised—and distracted—hoodoo standing behind her and raced into the botanica, arrowing herself at the back door.

  “Stop her!” Addie shrieked. The thud of multiple pairs of feet pounding against the hardwood floor behind her goosed Kallie even faster toward the door, flooded her veins with adrenaline. Her heart thundered in her chest.

  Slamming up against the exit, Kallie unlocked the dead bolt with a quick flip of her fingers, then threw the door open. The pungent scent of hot-peppered rum and dark tobacco curled inside. Baron Samedi stood in the doorway, dapper as ever in shades, a black fedora, and a fine-cut suit, a smoldering cigar clenched between his teeth.

  Kallie fell back, her breath caught in her throat.

  “Toldja I wouldn’t be forgetting you, darlin’,” Cash-Samedi drawled. “You or your damned cousin.”

  But Kallie noticed he wasn’t looking at her, the Baron’s head was swiveling and cocking from side to side like a blind man’s, as if he couldn’t see her and was waiting for her to betray herself with sound or scent.

  Her thoughts flew back to their encounter in the grave and the Baron’s abrupt disappearance—and the unhappy black hen’s equally abrupt appearance—when he’d worked a trick to compel the loa inside of her.

  Am I hidden from him some
how? Blocked by a magic snafu?

  Kallie backed away as quietly as possible, knowing the cause was lost as Addie’s hoodoo posse slowly surrounded her. She fumbled the pocketknife’s blade open.

  The Baron stepped into the botanica and shut the door. He blew a plume of blue-gray tobacco-fragrant smoke in her direction, then grinned. “I hear yo’ heart, jolie femme. I also see a circle o’ people. I bet a certain purple-eyed hoodoo be in de center.”

  “C’mon, now,” John Blaine said, reaching for her. “This is hard enough, no need to make it any harder—”

  Kallie sank the knife tip into the back of his hand, then pulled it back out—a snake strike minus the venom. With a sharp cry of pain, the root doctor jumped away from her, his bleeding hand held against his chest.

  “She’s got a goddamned knife!” he cried.

  A whiff of tobacco and rum, then the Baron stood a few feet in front of her, his head cocked as he tried to figure her exact location. Kallie shifted to the side, but one of the hoodoos took hold of one of the Baron’s hands and directed it toward her.

  “She’s right there.”

  Before Kallie could shift again, the Baron’s hand clamped onto her shoulder. Electricity thrummed through her at the contact, shocking her senses and short-circuiting her control over her body. She heard a tunk as the pocketknife tumbled from her numbed fingers to the floor.

  She tried to speak, to wrench free, but her body was no longer her own.

  “Ah, dere you be, ma belle,” the Baron murmured. And Kallie wasn’t sure if he was speaking to her or the loa. He reached a hand into her chest.

  Pain exploded through Kallie like a nuke made of ice—cold and razor-sharp and devastating—as the Baron’s fingers closed around something inside of her and yanked.

  Kallie tried to scream, but couldn’t. The pain had stolen her voice.

  Augustine watched, amused, as Gabrielle LaRue evaded Babette St. Cyr’s shambling attack, easily stepping away from Valin-St. Cyr’s outstretched hands.

  One advantage to being recently deceased, I know how to use a body and move it, it’s still a natural and automatic action. For Mrs. St. Cyr, however, it seems to be quite the opposite.

  Powerful and positive energy charged the room’s atmosphere as the little nomad shuvani continued her exorcism chant—sounds like an intriguing blend of Gaelic and Romany—following Valin’s stumbling progress around the room with her slim, silver-inlaid kosh.

  The woman with the shotgun and her accomplices all chased after the fleeing Kallie Rivière, leaving her aunt free to hop down from the bed and hurry to her worktable—the lovely Belladonna Brown right behind her.

  “You found a poppet bearing your name at Jean-Julien’s shop, didn’t you?” Valin-St. Cyr said in sly tones. “And you thought he’d tricked you into bed.”

  Gabrielle paused in front of the empty rocker and looked at the slowly pursuing nomad, comprehension glittering in her eyes. “That was you too,” she said. “You planted the poppet where you knew I’d find it. I accused Jean-Julien of toying with me. And broke off our relationship.” She shook her head in disgust. “I underestimated you.”

  “That you did. You should’ve never taken up with my husband.”

  “You’re right,” Gabrielle said softly. “I shouldn’t have. I was young, foolish, and believed myself in love. I wronged you and I apologize for that.”

  The nomad staggered to a halt. “You what?”

  “Apologize. Jean-Julien was a married man with a child on the way. Taking up with him was wrong. I’m sorry for all the pain I caused you.”

  McKenna finished her chant and pointed her energy-quivering kosh at Valin’s leather-jacketed back, allowing it to channel her will in a concentrated beam of power. Valin’s body went rigid as though struck by lightning, the muscles in his neck cording, his dreads coiling up into the electrified air.

  Even in his ghostly shape, Augustine detected the strong odor of ozone.

  A dark mist sieved out of Valin’s body, coalescing into Babette St. Cyr’s form. She stared at Gabrielle, the sheen of tears on her face, but whether from rage or grief, Augustine couldn’t tell. Valin collapsed bonelessly to the floor, a marionette with broken strings.

  “Shit,” he groaned. “That did not feel good.”

  With a soft sigh of relief, McKenna lowered her kosh to her side, perspiration glistening on her forehead. Sitting on her heels, she closed her eyes.

  Augustine watched as Babette St. Cyr rippled over to Gabrielle and touched a hand to the woman’s hair. Gabrielle shivered convulsively and wrapped her arms around herself as though she’d felt a cold draft.

  “I will never forgive you,” Babette said.

  “And I ain’t forgiving you,” Valin growled, rising up on his hands and knees, gaze locked on the late Babette’s inky, swirling form. “And neither will they.”

  Babette’s attention shifted from Gabrielle to Valin. Her eyes narrowed. “‘They’?”

  “The spirits of those you poisoned,” Valin replied. “They’re waiting Beyond. Been waiting a long time. All I gotta do is let them in.”

  Babette flowed over to Valin, her eyes electric with fury. “You’re talking shit, boy. You can’t do no such thing.”

  “Watch me.”

  Power radiated from the nomad, setting the ghostly ether ablaze with a blinding white light. Squinting, Augustine averted his face from the source of that cold and dangerous brilliance—Valin himself—fear prickling along his figurative spine.

  Electricity crackled through the air. Augustine caught a glimpse of an ethereal gate pinwheeling open near the ceiling and breathing ice into the room.

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “Hellfire!”

  “For Gage.”

  From within the gate’s jet-black and icicled mouth, Augustine heard a low, multivoiced sigh, followed by

  Babette screamed in terror as a gray and silent tide rushed in and enveloped her. The tide shimmered, wavered, then vanished, leaving behind the fading echo of Babette St. Cyr’s scream.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Kallie’s aunt repeated, voice stunned.

  “Well done, luv,” McKenna murmured. “Our Gage has been avenged.”

  “Doesn’t feel that way,” Valin whispered.

  Augustine stared at the nomad. I had no idea he possessed power of that magnitude. I wonder if he knows his limits, his strengths. Could be interesting finding out.

  “Aye, luv, I ken what ye mean, but give it time,” Mc-Kenna sympathized.

  “Seems justice does exist after all,” Augustine murmured, sauntering over to Valin’s body and sieving into him with a small contented sigh.

  The nomad struggled up to his knees, then grabbed ahold of the bedpost to pull himself upright.

  Augustine informed him, surrounding himself with a security bubble.

  Valin ran for the door.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  BOUND BY THE BARON

  Head throbbing at his temples and behind his eyes, Layne raced to the doorway, pulling a blade free from inside his jacket. But what he saw as he loped into the botanica iced his blood and made him grab a second blade.

  Kallie, her long, espresso-dark hair veiling her face dangled limp and lifeless in the grasp of a white guy in fedora, suit, and shades along with a skull-painted face.

  The white guy—Baron Samedi, Layne assumed, never having seen the loa before—was busy hauling something out from within the swamp beauty, a struggling female shape, black and glistening, and giving the loa the fight of his existence.

  A small circle of people near the pair had backed a healthy distance away, their faces drained of color, expressions shaken.

  Cold fingers clenched around Layne’s heart. Adrenaline fueled his muscles, stretched out his long stride. With Kallie’s soul removed and hidden, he had a suspicion that the loa planted inside of her had taken her soul’s place in more
ways than one, and without the loa, she might die.

  He couldn’t lose her. He refused to lose her. Not after having fought so hard to keep her alive and to give Gage’s loss some kind of meaning. He didn’t know if stainless steel had any effect on loas or not, but he was about to find out.

  Layne heard someone running just behind him and figured it had to be a friend, since everyone else stood around Kallie and the Baron.

  Shoving past a pair of chalk-faced onlookers, Layne brought both blades up for a double-sided stick to the Baron’s throat, just as the loa gasped in horror and tossed Kallie aside. The female-shaped loa disappeared inside Kallie once more.

  “By Bon Dieu’s holy cock, I be hexed,” the Baron cried, trying to shake a cobweb of darkness from the hand he’d plunged into Kallie’s chest. “De damned girl be right. It ain’t de loa. It be—” He and his cheval vanished in a stinky and sulphurous puff of black smoke before he finished speaking.

  Layne skidded to a stop on the hardwood floor beside Kallie’s crumpled body, then dropped to his knees. He brushed her hair away from her face and touched shaking fingers to her throat. He sucked in a rough breath when he felt a slow, steady pulse beneath his fingertips.

  “Virgin Mary in a leaky boat,” he said. “Stay with us, sunshine.”

  “Is she okay?” Belladonna asked, her voice tight with fear.

  “She’s alive,” Layne said, resheathing his knives, then scooping Kallie into his arms. “But I don’t know about okay.” Cradling her unconscious body against his chest, he rose easily to his feet and turned around.

  Divinity, McKenna, and Gabrielle had followed him and Belladonna into the botanica and they now stood alongside the frightened-looking hoodoo crew.

  “Dear God. What went wrong?” the woman with the shotgun asked. “Where did the Baron go?”

  “He mentioned a hex,” someone else replied. “What do we do now?”

  “He said it wasn’t de loa inside Kallie, so you all be fools,” Divinity snapped. “And as for what we do now, we figure out how to break a hex without using magic.” She looked at Layne, lines of worry bracketing her mouth. “Take my girl to de back so I can look her over.”