by Dana Fredsti
“What if she doesn’t call you back?”
“I hunt down the ink shop where she works and look for answers myself.”
“We hunt down the ink shop.” She smiled serenely. “I’m going with you.”
* * *
Pieces of bodies… pale-brown limbs mixed with those of a darker hue, strong and well-muscled, strewn on the swampy ground. A thick odor comprised of rotting vegetation, freshly spilt blood and decomposing flesh mixed with the pungent fragrance of burned herbs.
“Étienne?”
No. It couldn’t be.
Here was a torso. There a well-muscled calf. And there, a forearm and hand, the fingers long and graceful. The hands of a musician. Still I kept hope alive, a small but bright flame that refused to accept what was before my eyes.
Amidst the tangle of bloody limbs, I saw a glint of silver. Slowly, I reached down and picked up Étienne’s St. Christopher medal, smeared with blood.
The flame inside me flickered and died.
“Oh no…” Soft words that couldn’t even begin to encompass the vastness of my loss. A pit opened up inside me and all that was good in the world fell into it, followed by any happiness and any hope I’d ever feel again. Gone forever.
Just as well because the sight that met me when I finally raised my eyes from the gory remains on the wooden floor would have crushed me beyond belief if I could have felt anything.
Men and women, chained to wooden posts, thick manacles around throats, wrists and ankles, the unyielding metal cutting into soft flesh. The sickly-sweet odor of rotting flesh permeated the air. None of the prisoners were white—no doubt these were slaves of the LaLaurie family.
Surely no slaves had ever been treated as vilely as this.
To my left, a young woman hung suspended by her wrists, which were locked in manacles. Her bare toes brushed the wooden floorboards. The skin around her shoulders was red and shiny, stretched taut over the dislocated bones. A scold’s bridle had been inserted into her mouth, blood dribbling down her chin. My horrified gaze fell upon a bench covered with surgical instruments and more common tools, along with several more of the metal gags, with spikes that would dig into the tongue should the wearer try to speak. Barbaric.
Still, that was nothing compared to what lay beyond in the shadows of the attic.
The things that were shackled to bolts screwed into the wall had once been human. I recognized hands, eyes, other specific body parts as having once belonged to men and women. But they weren’t in the right place.
Hands were stitched onto elbows. Feet sprouted from shoulders. Others had animal parts sewn on in place of human. There was no rhyme or reason to the mutilations. But in every single instance, the most horrifying aspect was that each victim was still alive and aware of what had been done to them.
Including Étienne.
I recognized my lover only because his eyes were still untouched, although the rest of him had been tortured and rearranged beyond imagination. Hellish awareness was clear in his gaze, as well as his recognition of me. How was he—how were any of them—still alive? How could anything living endure such horrific mutilations and still draw breath?
I’d thought nothing could penetrate the layers of numbness swaddling me. I was wrong. Throwing back my head, I screamed my anguish to the gods as smoke continued to seep through the floorboards from the fire below…
* * *
I woke up, sweat running down my face and breasts in rivulets, heart pounding as if I’d run a few laps at top speed. “Holy shit,” I whispered, throwing the covers off to let the cool temperature-controlled air take some of the heat off my body.
Sexy scary dude without a face was starting to look pretty good about now.
What the hell? I thought as I got myself a glass of water. This wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t the script playing with my head. These dreams had to mean something, but I had no way of telling what on my own. I needed help. I glanced at the bed next to mine where Eden still slept soundly and serenely.
Grabbing my phone, I went into the bathroom and hit Sean’s name. It rang through straight to voicemail. “Sean…” I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry again. “I know it’s early… I’m sorry. Can you call when you have a minute? It’s… things have gotten weird. I could really use your advice.”
I hit “end” and stared at the phone. Then I sent Sean a quick text along those same lines, adding, “If you could call me back as soon as possible… I think it would be a good thing. Family issues.”
Hopefully he’d get what I meant by that. Sometimes Sean can be infuriatingly literal.
The phone rang ten minutes later. It wasn’t Sean who showed up on my stalker vision, but Seth. I hesitated for one ring, then answered.
“Hey,” I said warily. I glanced over at Eden, sawing the cutest little snoring logs ever. “Hang on a sec.” I got out of bed and padded into the bathroom, shutting the door behind me.
“Okay, I’m here. Um… I don’t want to be rude here, but I called Sean.”
“He’s on a conference call with Abe O’Bannon.” The producer of Spasm. “He got your text right before he went into the call. Passed it onto me because he thought you sounded overwrought.”
“His word or yours?”
“Fine. He said ‘upset.’”
I came that close to ending the call, but something—maybe common sense or maybe desperation—kept me on the line.
“Whatever, Seth. I need help, okay? Things are getting weird here and I don’t know if it’s related to the whole ancestral curse or if I’m just susceptible to suggestion and bad scripts.”
There was a muffled laugh at the other end of the line. “Talk to me,” he said.
So I did. I told him about the dreams I’d been having. “They’re different from the other dreams—”
“What other dreams?” he cut in.
“Just some weird dreams about cliffs and a guy with red eyes and no face. Shit like that.”
Silence. I continued.
“The dreams I’ve had since I got here are totally different.”
“What are they?”
“There’s… They’re all different, but like in some fucked-up chronological order. I wake up in a room, I know it’s my bedroom. Someone’s missing, though, and when I try to find him, I end up in a clearing with drums and incense and chanting that sounds like something out of a… I don’t even know what, but it doesn’t sound like it belongs in this world.”
“Is that all?”
I took a deep breath. Maybe he didn’t mean to sound quite as dismissive as he just did. Maybe I was just uber-defensive. Or maybe Seth thought I was nuts.
“Well, no,” I finally answered. “Five girls… well, young women, have disappeared in the last few weeks. I found what I think might be one of them. And this all feels like… It’s like a super-duper case of déjà vu, really shitty déjà vu. Same with the dreams. In the last one… the one I just woke up from, I found a bunch of bodies, mutilated. Pieces of them. And then I found… in the dream, I found… they were still alive, but…” I stopped. “But they shouldn’t have been.”
Silence from the other end of the line.
“Look, I know this sounds nuts, but given everything else that’s happened in the last few months, maybe it’s not. I just want to know if I’m crazy, okay?”
Pause.
“You’re not.”
That was it?
“You wanna tell me how you know that for sure?”
“All I can tell you is that one of your ancestors was in New Orleans before. Back in the 1800s. You’re experiencing inherited memories. They’re not necessarily relevant to anything else going on in the present day.”
“Not necessarily?”
“Look, I need to talk to Sean.” Seth actually sounded flustered. “I’ll call you back or have him call you.”
“Seth, I—”
He’d hung up.
“Son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The next day’s shoot was pretty mellow, mainly working with Angelique on the finer points of knife fighting in prep for a fight with another contender for the voodoo queen’s figurative crown. Cayden had given me free rein on the choreography of this particular fight, so Angelique and I spent most of the day out at the bayou location having ourselves a blast playing with rubber knives while the set and FX crews prepped for the next day’s shoot. Tomorrow would be the start of the voodoo ritual scenes, leading up to the big magic battle between Marie and Perrine.
When he wasn’t working, Micah hung out and watched us, adding his two cents as we worked the choreography. “Y’all gonna mud wrestle next?” he said when Angelique slipped, inadvertently dragging us both into the muddy water of the bayou. We looked at each other, each grabbing a handful of mud and throwing it at him. He dodged my muddy bullet, but Angelique’s hit him square in the face.
“Score!” she crowed triumphantly. Micah grinned, unperturbed.
Later, during the meal break, the three of us sat outside and ate our lunch together. It was obvious Micah had a crush on Angelique, and just as obvious that she hadn’t noticed. She treated him with offhand affection, like you’d treat a younger brother. When she went to get some more water, the expression on his face as he watched her walk away was painfully clear.
“Hey, Micah,” I said, to fill the awkward silence, “you mentioned earlier that the land across the water here belongs to another family.”
“That’s right.” Micah gave a little nod and took a big bite of a sandwich.
“I get the feeling that this family and the Marcadets aren’t exactly the best of friends.”
Micah finished chewing, swallowed and said, “That’s what y’all would call an understatement.”
I waited, figuring he was either going to give me more information or he wasn’t. I also got the feeling he enjoyed stringing me along instead of giving me straight answers. I don’t like being strung along under any circumstances, for any reason.
He took his time with another seemingly impossibly huge bite of sandwich. He swallowed, wiped his mouth on the back of his shirt sleeve, and sat there for a moment. I kept quiet, nibbling on my own sandwich with an air of indifference. Or so I hoped.
“Castro family,” Micah said, ending our little stand-off. “Real nasty, real strange. They’re not exactly shifters, but some point in their past they had to get down and dirty with some kinda amphibian or reptile. And they stay out of the voodoo rituals, they don’t even go near the places those are held. They got their own freaky shit going on, somewhere deep in the swamps where you do not want to be going.”
I nodded, keeping my thoughts to myself for the moment. After making another impressive indentation on his meal, Micah continued. “Let’s just say the Hatfields and McCoys got nothing on the Castros and the Marcadets. They even have their own star-crossed lovers and illegitimate babies.”
I almost didn’t want to ask my next question, but I did anyway. “What happened to those kids?”
Shrugging, Micah took a big gulp of Mountain Dew. After he swallowed, he said, “’Bout what you expect. Treated like shit by both sides of their families.”
Bad as that sounded, I was relieved. I’d expected something more along the lines of “they were sacrificed to the swamp gators” or worse. I didn’t ask for any more details, instead taking the conversation down a new path.
“What was it started the feud in the first place?” I tried to think back on my history lessons. Surely we’d covered something as iconic as the Hatfield–McCoy feud.
“Some say it was over land. Some say a couple of Marcadet cats got friskier than they should’ve with one of the Castro girls. Them cats, they sure like to play.”
Well, that conjured up plenty of nasty images in my head. “One more thing. You say this feud is still going on?”
“Yes, ma’am. Just as strong as it ever was or has ever been.”
Great. “Any reason to think those Castros might take it into their heads to fuck around with the filming? Seeing as we are filming on Marcadet land and Leandra is one of the lead actresses?”
“I doubt it. Now, if we were to step on their land…” He gave an unpleasant chuckle and shook his head. “That might result in some real trouble.”
I didn’t ask what kind of trouble. I had enough on my plate worrying about Tia, who was still MIA.
* * *
“Is this the place?” Eden pointed down an alleyway. I followed the direction of her finger to a projecting sign hanging perpendicular to the brick wall. The sign read “LeRoy’s Ink Shop.”
“I think so,” I replied. The name LeRoy rang a sharp bell in my memory.
As we entered the alley, the temperature dropped, and I immediately experienced a strange disconnect. The sounds from the street were oddly muffled, almost as if cotton batting had been swaddled over my ears. “Is it just me or—?”
Eden shook her head. “No, it’s not just you.”
“It’s kind of like the entrance to Ocean’s End,” I said slowly. “But creepy instead of cool.”
We walked slowly toward the door, the soles of my boots crunching on whatever littered the cracking cobblestones. A particularly loud crunch made me glance down, and I gave an indrawn hiss when I saw what looked like finger bones sticking out from under my right foot.
No fucking way.
Taking a deep breath, I shut my eyes, counted to three, then slowly opened them again. The only thing under my feet were leaves, twigs, and the partially crushed remains of a to-go daiquiri cup.
Eden eyed me with curious concern. “You okay?”
“I officially do not like this place,” I said with complete sincerity.
We reached the door. Small frosted-glass windows set into the wood. The interior of the shop was dark, and the “Closed” sign on the inside of one of the windows was weathered with age.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “This is weird.”
“Are you sure that this is the right place?”
“Pretty damn sure.” I slammed my hand against the door in frustration. “I definitely remember the name LeRoy. And Tia said it was off of Pirate Alley.”
“Huh. This place looks like it hasn’t been open for months.”
I slapped my hand against the door again, this time on the glass. I didn’t expect the glass to fracture underneath my palm. Yet fracture it did, jagged shards falling inside the shop.
Oops.
Still, if that didn’t seem like a cosmic invitation…
“Well,” Eden finally commented, “this seems like breaking and entering in the most accidental sense, don’t you think?”
I thought about that for a second. Would the production and Cayden consider me worth putting up bail money for? I could lose my job over this. And then I thought about the thing I’d had to kill last night, about its victim, and about the glazed pain in its all too human eyes. If the person responsible for that was in this shop, I’d take my chances. Especially since Tia hadn’t shown up. She could be in danger, and the only person who could help might be me.
Eden shrugged at my expression. “If you’re looking for someone to talk to you out of this,” she said, “you’ve got the wrong girl.”
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
“Can I help you ladies?” A man’s voice with just a hint of an accent. Maybe French.
I’d like to say neither Eden or I were startled, but it would be a lie of the devil. We both let out surprised yelps, kind of like coyotes.
“Are… Are you LeRoy?” Eden recovered her composure first, stepping forward with a bright smile that had opened many doors for her in Hollywood. I just stared at him—medium height. Dark eyes. Tan, almost weathered skin. Wavy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail at the base of his skull. Totally familiar even though I knew I’d never met him before. Maybe it was because he was a “type”—the handsome but creepy owner of a Dark Arts store in a supernatural TV show.
“The sign says
‘closed,’” he said, not answering Eden’s question.
“And yet here you are,” she responded brightly. “We’re so sorry to burst in like this, but—”
“But what?”
“But we’re looking for our friend Tia,” I broke in. “She said to meet her here, so we didn’t think there’d be a problem if we came inside.”
His expression remained borderline threatening. “This isn’t a bar, ladies.” His emphasis of the word “ladies” made it clear he meant just the opposite. “And Tia isn’t here.”
“She’s not?” I couldn’t hide my dismay.
“No.” He leaned against one of the counters and regarded us coolly. “Tia has not been into work for the last two days, you see.”
“But that’s—” I stopped before the word “impossible” slipped out because then he’d ask me how I knew that, and I wasn’t a particularly good liar. “That doesn’t sound like Tia,” I finished lamely. “Why would she tell us to meet her here?”
He shrugged. “Maybe her plans changed between the time you last spoke and this evening. She was young, a drifter. Very talented, but unstable. A substance abuse problem, perhaps.” He heaved what I thought was an overly dramatic sigh. “I had high hopes for her, but… it was not to be.”
I glanced up on the wall behind one of the stations where a picture of Tia and a young man that might be her brother was taped. The edges curled up, a sign that this was an older photo, one that had traveled more than a few miles. No way Tia would have left it behind if she had suddenly decided to leave New Orleans.
Nor would she have left her backpack, which lay on the floor next to the chair.
I kept my expression neutral even as my heart started pounding a mile a minute in my chest. “You said Tia hasn’t been here for how long?”
“Two days,” he lied smoothly. Then he stared at me some more. “I feel like we’ve met. Perhaps you were in here to visit Tia another time?”
