“Did Veek give you a key?” I said.
“Anyone of Jake’s blood can get in, if they know how,” she said. “Did he give you a key?” she countered.
I sat up, scratching my scalp. “Why did you come back?”
She turned away. “It takes nine days to bury someone properly.” She dumped her gym bag on the floor, opened her suitcase, and calmly began unpacking things. She put a cloth over Jake’s card table. On it she put saints’ candles, empty coconut half-shells, a bunch of herbs, several empty dishes, sealed bottles and jars half full of things, trinkets and plastic toys. It looked fascinating.
I said, “What is vodou training like? How hard is it? How long does it take?”
With her back to me Mme Vulcaine replied, “It isn’t for everybody.”
“You mean, it is not for me? Why? Because I’m not African?”
“I mean, you may not be called by the lwas.”
“How would I know if I am called by the lwas?” I said.
The old woman said brusquely, “For those with ears to hear, they speak.” She did things with the objects on the tablecloth. “They belong to the earth. If you don’t know nature, you’ll have a hard time meeting them.”
I thought about the only place where I had really loved nature—at Montmorency, where I was safest and most at home. “How does one know when the lwas are speaking?”
Mme Vulcaine turned to look at me. “The lwas are with us in many ways. They arrange things so that we meet the same persons all the time. They come to us in dreams. They heighten our senses. They ask us to do things for them, things that perhaps cannot be done . . . and yet we must do them. And sometimes we find ourselves performing miracles.”
I didn’t know the right words, but I asked anyway. “And the possession?”
“That takes time, study, commitment, a pure heart, courage, and money.”
I nodded. Everything came down to money sooner or later, in my experience.
“Doesn’t it—” I began, looking inward, thinking of Jake becoming someone énorme there on his deathbed, and of Veek and his marvelous powers. “Does it sometimes happen all by itself?”
Her eyes were truly alight now. “You have someone in mind. One of the lwas has visited you?”
“Maybe.” The room was very quiet. “It—it changes the whole world, doesn’t it?”
Mme Vulcaine broke into a smile so warm that I thought she liked me, maybe. “Yes,” she said, “Yes, it does.”
I nodded. “So our Veek—is he a good witch or a bad witch?”
“Veek?”
I flapped a hand. “Jake’s friend. The one you scold. You call him a coward.”
Mme Vulcaine looked away as if I had challenged her at last. Bon. I had already decided that she must not scold Veek so much. “Then I’ve been too harsh. He backs into his bravery like a donkey backing up a staircase. But he’s no coward.”
That was so true, it made me smile. “But is he a good lwa or,” I flushed to the ears, “or is he evil?”
Mme Vulcaine shook her head. “That’s the wrong question.” She showed her teeth. It was like one of Veek’s non-smiles. “A lwa just is. He has his purpose, his place in the world.”
I thought about that. Veek called himself a sex demon. I wasn’t ready to ask Mme Vulcaine about sex demons.
She said, “What is good or bad is how you use his help, how you approach him, and for what purpose. A person may ask a lwa to do something for him—or her—which they should not ask. That’s one of my jobs, to test you for purity of heart, before you go asking the spirits to step into your skin.”
I thought about asking a lwa to step into my skin. “As long as it’s Veek, I don’t think I would mind. Can he be hurt?” I said.
“I don’t know. Can he? You’re in a better position to know than I am.” Her eyes quizzed me wickedly.
“What if you’re in love with him,” I said in a small voice. “With a lwa, I mean.”
“This is not uncommon. There is more danger if he is in love with you.” She stopped and said nothing. Was she thinking? Or probing me to the heart again? “This happens from time to time. There is a ceremony. It is very challenging, and it cannot be undone. Your life changes forever.”
I swallowed. “What’s it called?”
She smiled the real smile again. “It’s called a wedding.”
Something clanged inside me like a great door shutting, or opening.
It shocked me to realize I was seriously considering marrying Veek.
I was not some poor hungry little beggar girl, me. I expected to marry, someday in my thirties—marry a man of my own class. I had always hoped to marry someone who might not want me for money alone.
But as she said “wedding,” a great, shouted Yes! rang inside me.
I nearly fell off my chair.
Marriage to Veek, or whatever his name was, would not be such a marriage as that. Family board meetings, and choosing schools for our children, and attending charity dinners for carefully weighed reasons? No.
Would he go on the road again, as he did with Jake? So many stories Jake had told me in those few days. Fighting in bars in dusty villages out west. Sleeping among bears and wolves. Riding freight trains. Getting lost in snowstorms up in the mountains. Going to jail for bedding married women. Washing dishes for a meal.
I could save Veek from those things. But would he want me to?
Would he want me at all, in fact?
Why did I feel like he owned me?
“What,” I said, swallowing again, “if the lwa doesn’t want to marry you?”
“These things are the lwa’s choice.”
I could see why. Veek could vanish into air. One would not ask of him, Where have you been all night? like a fishwife. He said he was a sex demon. I blushed, thinking of how good he was at that. Would he give that up with everyone but me?
“Marriage to a lwa would not be like other marriages,” I said aloud this time.
“No,” she agreed.
I thought some more. “How do you know all this? Is that why you came, to fetch Jake’s body? And to see what Veek has become? To destroy him if he has been—been corrupted?”
She smiled a genuine smile again. “Oh, no. I was sent here for the same reason Jake was sent. Because I could be spared, in case your Veek destroyed me.”
My eyes grew round. “How could he do that?”
She turned her palms up and shrugged. “One never knows, with the lwas. I have become a part of my house’s investment in your friend. Now I’m expendable.”
That shocked me for two reasons. First, I couldn’t see Veek harming a soul. Second, I had thought her the wise woman of her people, full of experience and power. I narrowed my eyes at her. The puff of her lower eyelids showed that she saw things; the lines about her mouth warned that she said little. No, she had not been thrown away, like a soldier who becomes disposable the moment he puts on his uniform. They would miss her if she didn’t come back. I knew I would. I had never met anyone who could challenge my thoughts the way she did. She made me feel slow-witted.
“That’s quite an investment,” I said.
She gave me one of those looks again, as if to say, you might not be stupid.
I nodded. “Bon. Let’s get down to business. How do we find out what kind of lwa he is?”
BAZ
I returned to the Lair in a foul mood. I was supposed to protect her from shit like that. Instead I got my ashes hauled and I stopped thinking. What the fuck? Women didn’t affect me like that. It had to be some throwback to my fucked-up rock’n’roll year, those twelve months that had tempted me out of retirement and pumped me full of all the evil old conqueror chemicals and crushed me like a bug and sent me crawling back under my rock.
Should have stayed there. Who was I kidding? I was starstruck, tickled to be banging a goddess in training, getting sucked into her lifestyle even while I was trying to convince her there was life after stardom. I was a fucking hypocrite. A lazy, hor
mone-driven hypocrite with shit for brains and a short circuit between his dick and his common sense.
She’d re-invited me to jam with them tomorrow. That was before her uncle got his teeth into her, plus who knew who else had been lurking in that suite, waiting with a hairbrush in their hand. For a grown woman. A goddess. Who was desperate to hang onto her family, no matter how big a pain in the ass they were.
I suddenly remembered attending my roommate Kamadeva’s wedding in New Delhi earlier this summer. He told me something his bride had said to him about her family. The bride was his long-lost goddess, she’d lived with him for nearly six thousand years, but she had reincarnated among mortals, and she told him she wanted to hang onto her mortal family as long as they lasted, no matter how much they got on her nerves. I have you forever, Rathi had said. I’ll only have them for another sixty years.
Yoni was so alone. These guys were all she had. And here I was, fucking that up for her. Putting her in a position where she had to choose. I couldn’t imagine she’d want to see me tomorrow after all that.
I decided that I would be too hung over by morning to play bass. I went about arranging it.
There was still a pile of uncut emeralds in the kitchen. I swept them up one-handed with beer therapy in the other hand and dumped the stones into a trash bag.
Veek showed up some time after I’d switched from beer to tequila. He actually looked more cheerful than when I saw him last.
“What happened to you?”
He started shaking his head, went to the fridge for beer, got it, opened it, threw the bottlecap out the open window to fall tinkling into the alley two stories down, and was still shaking his head as he dropped into the La-Z-Boy beside mine.
He definitely looked less gray around the edges than he had all summer.
“Well? You score tonight?”
That set him nodding. He nodded until he was giggling, and then chuckling, then he busted out laughing.
I found myself grinning because he was so fucking happy. “Spill it. I need some news to cheer me up.”
Veek wiped tears out of his eyes and sucked beer. “That girl.” He shook his head, then nodded, and might have gone off again if I hadn’t punched his arm.
“What girl?”
“You know her. Sophie. Your rock star’s stalker. You met her outside the botánica.”
I frowned. “The teenager who has your navel string.”
He nodded, giggling. “The one who rappelled down off the hotel roof and entered your rock star’s suite through the window.” He toasted me and broke into a belly laugh.
That made me go cold. “I don’t get it.”
“She’s, how you say, a piece of the work. I lost her at the concert, so I went over to that woman’s hotel. And there she was in a climbing harness, swinging in at the window. By the time I got to the roof myself, she was back on the roof, mightily pleased with herself.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Such a dance she led me.” Veek drained his beer, got up, fetched the rest of the six, and flopped in the La-Z-Boy again. “I brought her back here to the Lair. I apologize for that.” He sobered a bit, looking over at me. “I didn’t realize you were here with that woman until I felt the energy surges. As soon as I knew—pouf—I whisked my crazy mademoiselle out the back way. And do you know what she did?”
“No clue.”
“She broke into this man’s house. She told me it was her girlfriend’s place, the boyfriend was away, oh, so many lies. Par exemple, she said her key wasn’t working at first—she must possess burglar’s tools as well as climbing gear. I wouldn’t be surprised. We went upstairs to fuck.” Veek fell silent a moment, his face going soft. “And then the poor bastard who lived there came home and found us. Nearly found us. She jumped out the second-floor bedroom window while I tripped him up on the stairs.”
“Did she hurt herself?” I blurted.
“I doubt it. She has the lives of a cat, the disposition of a puppy, the courage of a lion, and the bon sens of a butterfly.”
“Must be like screwing a menagerie.”
“Little bit,” he conceded, smiling around the beer bottle.
“You still need help getting your navel string off her?”
He swung his head around and narrowed his eyes. Just a little threat.
I put my hands up. “I withdraw the offer.” Shaken, I took a pull on El Patron.
His menacing look vanished. “And your evening? The lady?”
“She’s fine,” I said shortly. He didn’t say anything. I had another slug. I confessed, “We got caught by a paparazzo over on Irving. I should have been on guard. I fucked up.”
“Merde. One man? Young, white, badly shaved and ill-dressed?”
Only Veek would notice if a paparazzo was GQ or not.
“That’s him,” I growled.
He got very solemn. “I’m sorry. My most humble apologies. I’m terribly sorry. That was my fault.”
I looked skeptically at him. “You brought the paparazzo to Ravenswood?”
“He followed Sophie. It occurs to me now that he was waiting for your rock star at that hotel, and saw Sophie come out of it with me, and he must have thought, Voyons, wherever that mad little creature goes, there you find the star. So. We led him straight to you. I’m sorry.”
I slid back into my La-Z-Boy with some relief. I was marginally less of an asshole. The bastard hadn’t followed us to the Lair, so he didn’t know where I lived . . . yet. But I wouldn’t bet a nickel that he or someone at his rag would fail to recognize me.
Once they did, they’d be all over Yoni. What’s more, they’d find out where I was working now, and then I’d get no peace.
Not time to celebrate yet, in fact.
“So that’s the sorrow you’re drowning tonight?” Veek said.
“What?”
“Come. You have my story. I get yours.”
Drunk and cranky and sorry for myself as I was, I warmed to think that Veek was opening up to me at last. Must be this stalker chick, I thought. She’s got him by the balls.
“Lemme show you something.” With some effort, because the Patron was starting to hit me, I lurched out of my chair and pulled the garbage bag of emeralds out from under the sink. I dropped it, closed, into his lap. “Careful. I already swept these off the floor once.”
Veek opened the bag, took out an emerald, and turned it, peering through it at the fluorescent ceiling fixture. “Is it real?”
“Beats me. I imagine so. She sure didn’t have any pockets big enough to hide ’em in.” Standing up didn’t feel so good. I took another slug of tequila. “That’s not all. C’mere.” I staggered to the kitchen doorway, missed and clobbered myself in the face with the door frame, then turned left, toward the head, instead of right toward my room. “Shit.” I put my hand to my face, clonked it with the tequila bottle, dropped the bottle, touched my face, and found blood. “Well, goodness me.”
Veek came up behind me and guided me into the bathroom. “Tout droit, mon frere. Let’s not make a mess.”
“Oh, why not?” I shook my head, and then all that beer and tequila came up.
He had me on my knees at the toilet barely in time.
After I’d given up everything I had and a bit more, he stuck a bandage on my cut cheekbone and tried to make me drink water. “You’ll hurt tomorrow if you don’t.”
I rinsed my face and mouth, but I refused the water. “I want to hurt. I deserve to hurt.”
He smacked the back of my head with a towel. “Stupid fellow.”
“Wait.” I belched, held it, and decided it would stay down. “Something else.” I took the towel and wiped my face in a half-assed way, then led him to my room and showed him the coverlet made of thick, creamy, spotty lynx pelts.
His eyes widened. Like I said, Veek had a taste for luxury.
“Mon Dieu.” He ran his hands over it. “This is beautiful.” He flipped one edge over and examined the seams. Sometimes I wondered if that guy
was gay. “What is this thread? And look, a monogram? Where did you get it?”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. My stomach was upside down, my mouth tasted like bilge, and my head was already splitting. “It appeared, like the emeralds, when I had Yoni up here. Under specific circumstances.”
His brow furrowed. “What does it mean?”
“It means she’s turning into a goddess. She knows it. I didn’t realize that until we really talked, but she does. And apparently hanging around with me makes it worse.” I told him about the gold plated hotel suite full of rose petals.
Veek said thoughtfully, “Clearly she’s doing it right.” He looked worried again. That would never do. I hadn’t seen Veek laugh like tonight in, well, in forever.
“And you’re doing it wrong?” I said.
He showed me a startled face.
Then he started to talk.
I’d always wondered what his real story was. Listening to him talk now about his isolated, rigid, luxurious, empty childhood, I wished I was sober. He got to the part where he ate the offering food at the vodou ceremony and I burst out, “Holy shit. Did they lynch you? Hell, I remember officiating at massive offerings to Ashur, to Bel and Erishkigal, to Tammus and Marduk and Ishtar. Piles of burning livestock. If anyone had tried to steal from that we’d probably have added his body to the pyre.”
He put his shoulders up. “What? I was brought up Catholic. We ate God every week.”
“So did this Samedi guy make you a god?” Veek stood suddenly, as if he was done with questions. I was too drunk to be sensitive. “Well, did he?”
Veek looked down at me. “To be a god, one must be worshipped. You know this.” I didn’t like the scorn in his narrowed eyes.
I conceded the point. “I was a god from the day I put on my first crown at seventeen.”
“To be a god, one must also serve.”
I opened my mouth to say something else thoughtless, maybe about the care he had lavished on that horse’s ass, Jake, or all the women he had serviced, if not served. I thought about how Yoni served, sweating bullets at every show, and my old roomie Kamadeva, certainly the most cheerful immortal I’d ever met, putting it out for the sake of duty.
Walking on Sunshine Page 15
