Return of the Hunters (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 4)

by Sonya Bateman

  Zoba made a sound. It didn’t suggest that he wanted to wait outside.

  “Very well, then,” the man said quickly. If he had a handkerchief, he probably would’ve been mopping his face with it. “If you’ll follow me, please.”

  He headed for the back of the store. As I walked after him, I noticed the other customers had suddenly decided they had more pressing matters elsewhere and needed to leave in a hurry. Preferably without going anywhere near Zoba.

  I couldn’t help a small smile. Even in the heart of New Orleans, these people had never seen anything like us before.

  Twenty minutes wasn’t quite long enough, but I was surprised at how quickly they finished my suit. It probably helped that all three of the staff members worked on me like their lives—or their commissions—depended on it.

  They only freaked out a little when I took my shirt off for the fitting. Not in horrified sympathy, but in mute respect with a hint of fear.

  Once it was done, Slate Three-Piece led me to a full-length mirror and practically held his breath while I looked. He didn’t have to worry. I’d wanted powerful and intimidating, and they delivered beyond my expectations.

  My reflection almost scared me.

  I hadn’t looked at myself without glamour since that single accidental glimpse, way back when I was practicing my Chief Foley impersonation the first time we went up against Milus Dei. I’d forgotten how different my true form was from the ordinary face I knew. My skin was the color of a newly dead corpse—ash-pale and on the verge of translucent, with a blush of necrotic blue beneath. My features were gaunt, my cheeks hollow. I had slightly longer limbs and a more slender profile. And my ears weren’t quite pointed like a full Fae, but they were close enough to be disconcerting.

  Add to that a midnight black, formal funeral suit with tails, a double-button vest, crisp white shirt and shimmering black tie, and flawlessly polished black shoes, and I was a perfect living sculpture of a nightmare.

  I was the DeathSpeaker.

  “Excellent work,” I finally said. “Thank you.”

  Under different circumstances, the collective sigh of relief from the staff would’ve been hilarious.

  I left them to do whatever they wanted with the stuff I’d been wearing, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it involved burning, and headed back to the main room. Denei, Reun and Zoba had appropriated chairs from somewhere in the store and set them up right in the middle of the place. They stood up when I walked in.

  No one said a word for an uncomfortably long time. I figured that was confirmation enough.

  It was time to take on the god.

  CHAPTER 34

  Bastien and Isalie were waiting for us on a bench beneath a sprawling oak tree when we walked into Congo Square.

  Denei told me a little about it on the short drive from the French Quarter to Tremé. The square, located inside Armstrong Park, had been a place of power since the early 1800s, when it was designated as the only allowed gathering point for slaves to practice their religion. At the time it was considered the “back of town,” just behind the French Quarter and away from the sight of allegedly respectable people.

  Here, voodoo practitioners and their congregations celebrated their temporary freedom on Sundays with drum circles, singing and dancing, and costumed rituals and ceremonies, a tradition that continued in the present time with more public demonstrations. In the earlier days, some people referred to the spot as Place des Nègres—or the more crudely informal Circus Square.

  The brief history lesson turned my stomach. But she’d said it was also a place where slaves bought and sold goods, and earned money to buy their freedom.

  Which made it an ironically appropriate location for what we were about to do.

  Congo Square was a large, open space, paved with flagstones laid out in concentric circles and almost completely surrounded by greenery. Old-fashioned lamp posts just outside the borders of well-maintained trees, bushes, and reed plants provided some light, and the half-moon in a cloudless sky enhanced the glow.

  We met the other two inside the center circle. Bastien was the first to react to my new look. “Damn,” he said, stretching the word out in a low, breathless drawl. “Color me wrong before. Now you is one scary mother.”

  Isalie didn’t even try to correct him.

  “All right, now.” Denei flashed a smile with a brittle edge. “You get everything?”

  “Yeah, we set,” Isalie said, looking around the square nervously. “Denei…what’s gonna happen to us if this don’t work?” she half-whispered.

  “Oh, cher. Don’t you worry about a thing.” Denei hugged her tightly for a minute. “We gonna be fine…jes’ fine.”

  She didn’t let any of her siblings see her face, because it made a lie of her words.

  My heart ached for them. I thought about Abe, and Taeral and Sadie, and maybe even Daoin. The others at the Castle. My foster parents, and the few friends I’d managed to make over the years. For most of my life, there was no one who cared whether or not I lived—and now I had all of them. The family I’d chosen instead of the one I was stuck with. They’d all be upset, and probably angry with me, if we died here.

  But just like fighting Milus Dei to save the innocents they wanted to destroy, this was worth the risk. Because the people here with me were family, too.

  “We gotta get ready.” Denei composed herself and stepped back from Isalie. “You two, wait here,” she said to me and Reun. “Won’t be but a minute.” The four of them walked over to the oak-shaded bench, gathered the bags and boxes that Isalie and Bastien had left there, and vanished into the bushes.

  I let out a breath. Normally I would’ve shoved my hands in my pockets, but this suit wasn’t made for that kind of posture. I settled for folding my arms instead. “Any idea what they’re doing over there?” I said.

  Reun shrugged. “She’d not tell me anything, save that we needed to come to this place.”

  “Great. I love surprises.”

  “I cannot say the same, in this case.” He smiled crookedly and looked like he’d shove his hands in his pockets too, if he had any. But he was wearing his usual Robin Hood-style outfit in forest green. At least he didn’t have any ridiculous hats to go with them. “Gideon…I do not think I’ll survive this,” he said quietly.

  The pained conviction in his voice went straight to my gut. “You can’t think like that,” I said. “If you do, you won’t have a chance. You heard Denei, right? It’s all about belief.”

  “Aye. And I believe I’ve no chance against this creature.” He shuddered and stared at the ground. “You did see what happened last time?”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t know anything about him then,” I said. “Now you do. Come on, man, you’re a noble. Where’s all that noble confidence?”

  He looked at me with empty eyes. “I’ve no wish to be considered noble,” he grated. “I do not deserve my title. What happened with Moirenha…any confidence I might have gained when I set out to right my own wrongs was destroyed that day. And learning that the King had ordered my arrest only reinforced the fact that I am not worthy. I am no Lord.”

  “Reun. Braelan pardoned you—”

  “Because of you!” Frustration colored his shout, and he slumped in place. “I apologize. I’d not meant to imply that any of it was your fault. You saved me yet again, and I am grateful,” he said. “Though I fail to understand why you’d continue to risk your life for mine.”

  I looked hard at him. “Because you’ve done it for me. And Daoin, and Taeral, and Denei, her family, everyone at the Castle. Whatever you did in the past, it’s not who you are now.”

  “I do not know what I’ve done in the past. Aeshara—” He blanched as his dead wife’s name left his lips. I remembered what happened with her. A backfired curse, intended to wipe out his memories. She’d succeeded in erasing the better part of four hundred years from his mind before he accidentally killed her trying to deflect the spell. “I cannot increase something that does
not exist,” he said. “I’ve no confidence to build on.”

  Jesus, he was really going to give up without even trying. I couldn’t let him do that—not the least because Denei would kill me if I did. “Look, I know you can handle this,” I said. “You can make people believe stuff that’s not even close to reality. I’ve seen you. Remember what you did to me when we first met, down in the subway?”

  “Yes, I do recall. And thank you for reminding me,” he said with a smirk. “I feel ever so much better now.”

  “I’m serious.” Reun had come at me with some insanely strong power-of-suggestion shit. First I couldn’t move my legs, then my arm turned black with rot and burst open like a corpse in the sun, then I couldn’t move at all—just because Reun said it was so. “That’s your own personal voodoo, and it’s real magic. Legba’s is stolen, fake. You’re stronger than him.”

  He still looked dubious. “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” he said.

  Before I could come up with any more rallying speeches, the Duchenes emerged—though it took me a minute to verify that it really was them. Zoba and Bastien wore simple black suits with blood-red vests and sashes, and Denei and Isalie had white wrap-around dresses, matching head scarves, and heaps of bead and hemp-rope jewelry. Both of them held large, lidded woven baskets in front of them like shields.

  With the exception of Zoba, who already had one, they’d painted their faces with starkly elaborate black-and-white skulls.

  The overall effect was beyond chilling.

  “Okay,” I finally managed to say. “Maybe someone can tell us what we’re doing now?”

  Denei moved toward the middle of the center circle of flagstones. “We cain’t catch him at the club. He won’t be there for at least another week,” she said. Her and Isalie set their baskets on the ground simultaneously. “So, we gonna summon the bastard.”

  I didn’t know much about summoning, but that sounded like a really bad idea. “Won’t that piss him off?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Somethin’ fierce.” Denei leveled a grim smile. “So we’d best be ready to move, soon as he gets here.”

  I could feel my confidence slipping already.

  CHAPTER 35

  They used red chalk to draw a summoning sigil on the tiles. One big cross, four small crossed circles in each segment, swirled flourishes at the top and bottom, left and right. A fancier flourish to the far left, and on the far right, a straight line with a little jag at the top. They enclosed the whole thing in three widening circles.

  “This is Legba’s veve,” Denei explained as the four of them drew things from the baskets and heaped them on the center of the chalked cross. Twigs and straw, dried tobacco leaves, a clay cup of rum. White chicken feathers with bloody clumps of flesh attached to the ends. And the severed head of a snake. “He take the name, he answer to this,” she said.

  I nodded like I had some clue what she was talking about.

  Isalie and Bastien grabbed handfuls of small parchment envelopes and started circling the heaped offering, tearing them open and sprinkling colored powders. When they finished, Zoba stepped forward with a bone-handled kris dagger, the kind with a wavy blade. He held an arm out and sliced deep, splashing blood on the offering.

  Poor Zoba always got to supply the blood.

  Finally, Denei moved up with a box of wooden matches. She lit one and dropped it into the cup of blood-clouded rum—producing a sudden flare of impossibly high flame. The fire settled as it caught the grass and twigs around the cup, crackling at a steady pace.

  The four of them moved outside the chalk circle, one at each point of the cross. And they began to sing.

  It was almost a chant, a rolling melody of syllables in a thick patois that bounced seamlessly between Denei, Bastien and Isalie—sometimes trading off, sometimes overlapping in haunting harmony. Zoba contributed a single, powerful bass note that stretched unbroken beneath the song.

  My skin prickled in appreciation for the beauty of the music. I could only imagine what it would’ve sounded like with all six of them.

  As they sang, the white smoke that drifted from the still-burning offering thickened—and started to change color, passing through every vivid hue of the powders they’d added. The final color, a deep royal purple, darkened to black.

  And out of the black, a great voice boomed, “Who dares to call on me in this manner?”

  The singing stopped. Zoba pulled a brightly painted ceramic rattle from his sash, held it over his head, and shook it deliberately, four times.

  “Papa Legba,” Denei called in a clear, strong tone. “Ouvè baryè pou lwa yo.”

  Zoba threw the rattle into the smoke. There was a tinkling smash, and a sudden hot breeze blew through the square, carrying the smoke away.

  And leaving Legba in its place.

  He was facing Zoba—he didn’t see me moving toward him from the right. His lips drew back from his teeth, and he raised his cane a foot from the ground. “You have made your last mistake, child,” he said. “Now we end this. For all of you.”

  “Well, you’re right about one thing,” I said. “This ends now.”

  He whirled toward me. And froze. Behind the purple glasses, I saw fear in his eyes.

  The Duchenes pulled away and gathered with Reun behind Legba as I stepped into the chalk circle. My heart pounded hard in my chest, and I was barely breathing, but there wasn’t a single outward sign to betray my nerves. No tremors, not a single drop of sweat.

  “Playtime is over.” I faced him with a loose stance across the scorched remains of the offering. “You’re going to free them, all of them…or you’re going to die.”

  Legba stared at me. Slowly, his eyes went from wide and worried to shrewd and narrowed. Just as slowly, one corner of his mouth lifted.

  I couldn’t help it. I flinched.

  “So this is the DeathSpeaker.” Legba leaned forward, an easy shift weighted with challenge. “I can see into your soul, child,” he said. “And you are going to have to do much better than that.”

  He flicked his cane up and pointed it at me.

  A bolt of purple-white light flew from the end and blasted me square in the chest.

  CHAPTER 36

  I wasn’t prepared to be struck by lightning.

  The impact hit me like a hammer. It knocked me out of the circle, flat on my back, and I skidded several feet across the stones. There was a scorched hole in my shirt the size of a bowling ball—and scorched flesh beneath the melted fabric.

  And my right foot throbbed like a bitch. I looked down to find the toe of my shoe blown out, where the lightning had exited.

  That was how real lightning behaved.

  I didn’t have time to panic about the completely not-fake power that had failed to not really fry me from the inside. I scrambled to my feet and limped back toward the circle, where Legba had turned his attention to the rest of them. And like the first time we’d faced him, Reun was actively trying to draw all the death on himself.

  He stepped in front of the others and thrust a hand out. “Míilé lahn!”

  I recognized that spell. The Unseelie Queen had tried and failed to cast it on a walking dead man. A thousand knives.

  Not half a second after Reun spoke, Legba waved his cane. “Ranvèse,” he said.

  Reun screamed and crumpled to the ground as the spell struck him instead.

  Christ. I had to do something, before the bastard started ripping out centipedes. I focused on my clothes and cast a glamour that made everything look untouched—no scorched shirt, no blasted shoe.

  Then I stepped back into the circle.

  “Legba!”

  He shook his head and took his sweet time turning. “What is it now, DeathSpeaker?” he said. “I am quite busy destroying my children. I will play with you again…once I have…” He trailed off when he got a look at my clearly-not-struck-by-lightning self. “Impossible,” he breathed.

  I grinned coldly. “Like I said. Playtime is over.”

 
; “No!” His flustered state lasted for all of five seconds, until he drew a deep breath and exhaled through pursed lips. “No, child,” he said. “I have dealt with countless frauds and charlatans, over centuries of amassing power. Not one of them has equaled me. Not one of them has touched me.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I have.”

  “Perhaps you think you have.” His hands folded serenely on his cane. “I see what you are doing, no? You try to make yourself bigger—just as those before you have tried, and failed. And why do they fail? Because they fear my power. They know they cannot be bigger than me.” A terrible smile spread on his face. “You are weak, child. You are nothing. And you will not escape my fury again.”

  Some quivering corner of my mind started screaming he was right, and that voice drowned out everything else. Of course he was right. Weak. Nothing. No escape. Hadn’t I learned those lessons over and over, at the ends of fists and belts, blood and bullets, years of absolute helplessness?

  Weak. Nothing. No escape…

  Except I had escaped. Twice.

  And I could do it again.

  I came out of panic mode just in time to see Legba raising his cane again. Light crackled at the end of it, and another bolt flew toward me.

  Not this time, asshole.

  I raised a hand, palm-out, and called, “Stahd.” A simple spell. Stop.

  The lightning struck my palm—and exploded in a shower of harmless sparks.

  Legba’s cane clattered on the stones below. “Impossible!” he shouted. “You have no power over me, child. I am Legba!”

  “No, you’re not.” I took a step toward him, and he shrank back. My heart beat normally. My breath came easily. I’d beaten the Valentines, conquered everything they stood for in my life. Compared to them, this clown was less than nothing.

  I had no fear left.

  “You are not Legba,” I said. “But I am the DeathSpeaker. Do you doubt me, you overgrown worm?”