by J. R. Rain
One piece of unfinished business nagged at me.
Angela Jenkins. You know, Wendy’s roommate. Maybe nobody had hired me to go looking for her, but I couldn’t just walk away without finding out her fate. When I asked, Eulalie and Wendy glanced at each other.
“What?” I asked.
“She was jealous of Wendy,” said Eulalie. “A vessel must be humble, and she wasn’t, always stirring up trouble. I gave her to several in our crew, but she was not content with her place. She wanted to become one of us, a vampire. In the end, we banished her.”
I sighed. I hate cliques; I hated them in high school. I hated them even more when I worked for the feds. That political crap is one of the main reasons I’ve stayed a loner in the vampire world. The others always seem to join clubs, like vampirism is nothing but a weekend hobby or some sort of social group thing. Like being a Trekkie.
“So what happened to her after that?” I asked.
“The last I heard, she has become a slave of the voodooienne, Marie Laveau. The voodoo queen.”
“Marie Laveau?” It took a minute for the name to ring a bell. “But I thought she was dead. I was just visiting her tomb when Saint-Cyr’s clown posse showed up.”
“Of course she is dead! Many times over. The god, Zonbi, who these people worship demands their souls, you see. Each Marie Laveau since the first—the one who was my friend so many years ago—has had a daughter who resembles her and who she trains in the magical arts. The present Marie is the fifth or sixth, I cannot keep count. It is a family business, the voodoo, mostly for the tourists, but her powers are real, and her people are also our enemies.”
I rolled my eyes. “How many does that make?” New Orleans was turning out to be an occult warzone.
Eulalie’s expression grew serious. “There are many factions here, as you must know. If only we were united, we vampires would be strongest, but as you know, there are two warring groups between us, as well as several smaller ones who keep to themselves. Then there are the loups garous; they are my allies and yours, but hate all other vampires. There are also the voodoo worshippers and the Satanists, both very deadly cults. So… five.”
“I see. Where can I find this Marie Laveau? Angela Jenkins must have parents somewhere, too, and they’re probably just as worried as Wendy’s. I’d like to be able to at least drop them an email to let them know their daughter’s alive.”
The woman’s eyes widened in horror. “You mean tonight? Now? Are you mad, Samantha? Tonight is the blood moon, the most magically powerful night for several years. The worshippers of the great god Zonbi will be in a frenzy holding their greatest voodoo rite, the sacrifice of the ‘goat with no horns.’ It is far too dangerous for you to go there!”
I raised an eyebrow. “‘The goat with no horns?’”
“A willing human victim.” From her tone of voice, I could tell she meant Angela Jenkins.
Oh hell no. My eyes narrowed. “Where?”
Eulalie looked wildly from side to side, then she stared up at me imploringly. “Moon Bayou. In our time, they held their ceremonies in the Bayou St. John, but that is now a public park. You must not—”
“Can you drive me there?”
Wendy gave a loud gasp and clutched at Eulalie’s arm. “No!”
“Madame Moon… Samantha… I beg of you, reconsider. Please. You will be one alone against hundreds. I cannot help you, and the loups garous are already dispersed. It is too late to call them back.”
“I get it,” I said. “Don’t worry, I won’t drag you into it. Maybe you can give me a ride over to Moon Bayou—I could fly there on my own, but I don’t know where it is. Look, I’ll be okay, I promise. I won’t do anything crazy.”
Later, I’d look back on this promise and decide that it qualified as pretty much the dumbest one I’d ever made, but at the time, I’d been halfway sincere. I think the thrill of killing the other vampire and briefly gorging myself on his blood made me blindly overconfident.
So quite reluctantly, Eulalie left her cop friend Duane behind to keep an eye on Wendy, and we drove off in the GMC.
“You know, Angela may not be the only one of those girls who wants to be turned,” I said as we pulled out of the parking lot. I told her about the licking incident with Wendy and my wound.
“Mon Dieu!” she said. “How much did she drink? Would a few drops of your blood be enough?”
I shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I have no idea.”
“Who else should I ask? I cannot create a vampire. But you have done so many times, Samantha—you should know. You created me. I still cannot believe you do not remember that. It is as if you are a changed person now…”
Okay, this whole thing was getting seriously crazy. I changed the subject back to Wendy and whether or not the crew would accept her if she turned vampire—Eulalie seemed to think yes—and we avoided the other topics all the way out to Moon Bayou.
Mostly the topic of whether Eulalie was totally out of her mind, or I was.
Chapter Eleven
The moon really did have the color of blood.
It hung in the sky like a huge, dark throbbing orange. It was almost the butt crack of dawn, and all along the banks of the bayou, fires burned. Chanting and the dull, rhythmic throbbing of voodoo drums filtered through the curtain of swamp cypresses and tall oaks hung with Spanish moss. I’d finally convinced Eulalie to drop me off about half a mile from where the gathering took place.
She didn’t want to—still insisting on coming with me, in spite of the danger. Finally, I convinced her to wait there for the girl and me.
“Give me till six o’clock. If I don’t return with her by then, go back to Wendy. Make sure she calls her parents, promise me?”
“Yes, and I will send Duane and the police after you,” she said grimly.
Deep down, we both knew any rescue attempt by the cops would come way too late.
She mentioned there would be hundreds of… cultists I figured the best way to describe them. My best chance at getting Angela out of there alive had to be Talos. No way would I have any chance fighting my way out. I’d have to swoop in, snatch her up like a hawk diving on a field mouse, and haul vampiric ass into the sunrise. Or something like that.
It’s kind of funny; Eulalie had already witnessed my transformation—or at least she’d seen me change back into human form when I landed on the roof of her SUV. But I still felt too shy to do it in front of her again. I know, weird, huh? I wandered off a ways through the trees, my ears filled with the sound of crickets and bullfrogs. The rain had stopped, but it left the ground muddy. The steamy night air stank of swamp and sewage. Upon finding a suitable branch, I removed my borrowed hospital scrubs, bathrobe and slippers, hung them, and closed my eyes.
I focused on a distant flickering candlelight in the darkness, beckoning it closer, calling out to Talos. I spread my wings and took off over the trees… not as easy as it sounded.
Some of those old oaks, the ones Hurricane Katrina had spared, stood around eight stories tall, and had wide-reaching branches that snuck up on me every so often. . I had to pick my way carefully between their dark outlines, silvery with moss, like a shark avoiding fishing nets. Once I made it above the canopy, I followed the flickering fires and the sound of voodoo drums.
As I drew closer to my quarry, the chanting and screeching grew more clear. In this form, my vision was much sharper, which let me pick out the dancers and writhing couples on the ground up ahead. I didn’t know anything about voodoo and didn’t realize that this close to sunrise, things were pretty much winding down. Most of the worshippers had been there all night. About a third of them were white, but everyone was so covered in mud, you couldn’t even tell.
A small group still danced around a central altar in front of a fire in the middle of a clearing, around a huge cage, the kind you see in a zoo. Gleaming scales moved about inside it, like the lair of a dragon. After a moment, I realized it as the biggest snake I’d ever seen in person. It must be the python
they used to channel Zonbi, their snake god.
I drifted downwards in a slow, lazy spiral. Two young women below caught my eye. The first, a tall, very elegant woman of color wearing a white shift—the only person anywhere in sight still dressed. She had bangles on her wrists and ankles and held a big butcher’s knife. The voodoo queen, the new Marie Laveau. She raised her blade.
The second woman lay still, on a big table in front of the queen, blonde hair, wet and ropey from the rain, draped off the end. Naked, her lily white skin practically glowed in the moonlight. She had to be the intended sacrificial victim—the ‘goat without horns,’ Eulalie had called it. Whether she was still alive or already dead, I couldn’t tell. I recognized her from her police photo: Angela Jenkins.
“No!” I screamed.
Somehow, the woman with the knife heard me and looked up. Others followed her gaze and stopped their chanting. One of the main drums went silent, even though a smaller one continued to beat.
“Canga bafie te!” the woman shrieked at me, staring upwards and waving the knife like a wand. “Bomba hen hen! You not welcome here, creature of the night! Go, before Papa Limba come to take you away with him!”
“Not without the girl!”
I flew down closer, and the queen slashed at my talons. My flapping wings beat up a storm around me. Lightning cracked the sky, and I could sense the crowd around us—most of them had fallen asleep—waking up. The dancers nearest us howled and reached up as if to grab me and drag me to the ground. My original plan to snatch Angela away wasn’t exactly working out well.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any better ideas. In the heat of the moment, I couldn’t come up with a plan B. Luckily, nobody down there had brought any silver bullets along with them, or I might have been in even bigger trouble. Lightning flashed again all around me. A loud clap of thunder followed, which seemed to galvanize the crowd, and the big drum started up again, Queen Marie leading her people and chanting, “Papa Limba! Papa Limba! Envoyer la monstre dos dans temps!”
Even so, I might have had a shot at rescuing her, but as soon as I swooped down to give it one more try, Angela’s eyes snapped open wide as moonpies and she screamed, “Papa take me! Pa-paaa!”
“Canga do ki li! Canga li!” echoed the voodoo queen, and before I could stop her, she plunged her knife into the girl’s chest just as the first rays of dawn broke.
At that same instant, a bolt of lightning blinded me. The world turned white, and my body vibrated like a gong struck by a hammer blow. I also went deaf, and I guess must have passed out for a few seconds. The next thing I knew, my ears filled with a roaring noise, and when I opened my eyes again, I found myself inside a dark swirling vortex.
My first thought was that a tornado had somehow picked me up and carried me off, like in the Wizard of Oz. No old witches pedaled by, and I didn’t see any flying farm animals or chicken coops.
After a few long agonizing minutes, I fell deep into unconsciousness again.
Chapter Twelve
I woke up in a patch of broad daylight with a splitting headache. Even the faint notes of birdsong in my ears hurt.
And oh, yeah, I was naked again.
I laid on the ground in the middle of the same clearing from the night before. When I forced myself to sit up and look around, it struck me that my surroundings looked quite a bit different from where I’d been the night before. No sign of any other human beings existed, for one thing: no trash, no discarded clothes, not even any footprints in the dirt. For another, the tree cover seemed a lot thicker and denser, almost like jungle. The muddy waters of the bayou were much closer. Had they carried me someplace else and just dumped me there after I blacked out?
Low, unearthly growling from behind me interrupted my thoughts. It seemed to echo like an earthquake, though it definitely came from the throat of some kind of beast. My first wild thought was that the voodoo queen had left me there to be eaten by the great snake god Zonbi, but then I realized snakes don’t growl. In spite of the heat of the morning, I goosebumps ran up and down my spine. I turned and the sight behind me worried me only slightly less than a magical voodoo snake the size of a telephone pole: I found myself eye to eye with an enormous alligator. It gaped its jaws wide open at me from about three feet away. Row after row of white teeth glinted like cruel little swords, disappearing into a big, pink, hungry gullet.
What was I supposed to do now? Were alligators like guard dogs? Should I sit still, let it lick my hand, my face, or whatever? All rational rules of engagement with the animal kingdom flew out of my head, and I backed away on my hands and butt, warbling, “Holy shit, good gator… nice gator…” in a voice so high and shaky, I sounded like Sam Smith singing Stay With Me. I mean, supposedly vampires are immortal, but I totally didn’t want to test my limits at that moment by being torn apart and half-eaten by a ravenous reptile.
The gator burped in a growl as loud as thunder, and, Lord help me, but it smelled like one of Anthony’s farts. Then it snorted and lowered its head, as if about to charge. Without thinking things through any further, I jumped to my feet and took off running like a bat out of hell.
The marshy woods had choked with waist-high weeds and underbrush between the trees that scratched at my naked skin. Every few steps, I kept sinking into what felt like quicksand and pulled myself out again by clinging to the big arching roots of swamp cypress trees. In places, I couldn’t tell where the trees ended and the bayou began, but terrified another alligator would spring out of the water and drag me down, I kept skirting the deeper areas as best I could.
I waded through this muck for what seemed like an hour or so, until the sun was almost directly overhead. The ground got firmer, and the trees and undergrowth thinned out. The soles of my feet burned like they’d been cut to ribbons, but I was so covered in thick greyish mud to my elbows and waist that I couldn’t see any blisters or bleeding anywhere. To make matters even worse, I was plastered over by leaves and grass straw like the Swamp Thing.
At last, I came to a sudden stop when a pair of huge, fat, white pelicans rose from the swamp grass right in front of me, squawking and flapping their wings in my face; they scolded me for a few seconds and then flew off. A water moccasin oozed into the brackish water, which had narrowed no wider than a small creek. Beyond a grove of bamboo, about a half mile of yellow cornfield stretched into the distance. Beyond that, I caught a faint glimpse of buildings and smoke.
Respecting the snake—its bite might not kill me, but I was betting it would hurt like hell—I limped upstream a ways and then waded across the shallows. Tiny crayfish and guppies darted around my ankles, and a swarm of midges on the other bank attacked me. I badly needed to find civilization. Or somebody with a cell phone I could borrow.
I stood there for a moment until all the little cuts, scratches, and scrapes healed.
Obviously, the seemingly organic cornfield had been planted by a collective of sustainable farming hippies or something. Hopefully, they’d take me in and let me use a phone, maybe even lend me some clothes. Or I could rob a scarecrow. I followed a blue jay down one of the corn rows. The stalks were about nose-high, so it was kind of like peering out over a rippling green sea. I couldn’t spot any scarecrows, but I did see a pair of straw sombrero-like hats bobbing up and down a few rows over about fifty yards away.
These turned out to belong to a pair of big African American guys in faded overalls picking corn from the stalks and tossing them into baskets. The moment they saw me, they both dropped their baskets and gawped like in a cartoon, their jaws literally dropping open.
Then one of them said “Police!” and they both ran off.
Police? Seriously? I mean, WTF? Was I still in my giant bat form? I looked down at the mud and swamp debris—no, I was definitely a bare-ass-naked human. But what was up with all this urban farming shit, anyway? And were those chickens in the distance? Had I wandered onto a movie set?
However, I decided that with all this weirdness going down, maybe it was a goo
d idea if somebody called the cops for me. Obviously, I didn’t want to have any more to do with Kathy Bordelon, like ever again, but Lieutenant Labruzzo had seemed like a pretty straight-up guy. Hopefully, if I dropped his name to the uniforms, Labruzzo would at least make sure I got back to my hotel. I might even be able to grab a shower in the station house locker room.
So I followed after the two fleeing guys until I came to a dirt road lined with giant pecan trees. A rooster crowed loudly. On the other side, a row of tarpaper-covered wooden shanties stood on stilts. Tiny black children played in their front yards, most of them as naked as me.
“Do any of your moms have a cell phone I can use?” I called out, and the kids all immediately disappeared around the backs of the shacks, leaving me alone with the rooster.
It was totally weird. There wasn’t a car or a satellite dish in sight, and I hadn’t heard any auto traffic or planes overhead since I’d woken up.
“Oo-kay…”
I wasn’t going to chase after the kids, not looking like I did. Instead, I set off down the road in the direction of the smoke I could still see rising up above the tree line. I could smell it, too, mixed with garbage and cooking odors on the breeze and lots of horse piles on the rutted dirt road. I must have walked for about a mile before a pair of evil-looking assholes suddenly appeared out of nowhere, blocking my path. These dudes were bearded and wearing black boots, butternut uniforms with red trim, and slouch hats like Crocodile Dundee. Both carried long-barreled rifles, and one had a sword hanging from his belt.
Yep, I’m not kidding—a sword. My first thought was that I’d stumbled across some kind of Civil War reenactment. Whatever. They stared at me like they’d never seen a naked woman before—especially not one covered in swamp mud.
Finally, one of them got his act together, first tipping his hat. “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said, in an Irish accent so thick that even Jacky, my Irish boxing trainer, might have a hard time understanding. “I see you’re in some distress. Am I right in thinkin’ you’ve maybe been”—he dropped his voice—“the victim of an infamous outrage by the darkies?”
