Blood Divine

by Greg Howard

  Cooper didn’t respond. Even though he knew that only made Randy more uncomfortable, he couldn’t help it. He seethed inside, his anger directed both at Randy and himself for opening his heart and making such a dumbass move. Again.

  All signs of vulnerability had vanished from Randy’s face. He smiled the good-buddy smile. The childhood-friend smile. Invisible walls flew up all around him, shutting Cooper out completely.

  “So. Do you feel safe here, now? Like Buffy said?” Randy moved toward the back door, putting even more space between them.

  Cooper nodded and looked down. He wasn’t used to having his advances rebuffed. He should have known better, having been down the very same road once before with Randy years ago.

  Randy cleared his throat and tucked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans. “Good. All this vampire-witchy stuff—I need some time to get my head around it, if you know what I mean.”

  Cooper looked up, heat rising on his neck, his words pointed. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Randy inched toward the back door, finally making contact with the knob. “You have my number if you need anything, right?”

  Cooper plastered on a fake smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’m always fine.” His insides burned. He curled his fingers inside fists. A familiar rumble churned in his core.

  “Bye, Coop.” Randy nodded, lowered his head, and walked out the door.

  When the reverberation of the glass panes in the door stilled, the kitchen was silent. Cooper stood staring at everything and at nothing. Alone. The raging darkness inside him his only refuge.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cooper entered the sitting room and ran smack into an icy wall of silence. Betsy stood regal and on guard at the front window. Eunice knitted in the occasional chair by the fireplace. Perched in the center of the sofa, Eudora’s nose was so deep in a book that he couldn’t even see her eyes. None of them looked his way.

  Betsy spoke with her back to him. “He could be dangerous.”

  “Who, Randy?” He walked over to her.

  She faced him. Her eyes were like two black pebbles resting at the bottom of a shallow creek bed, shimmering in the light but cold and hard just the same. “Yes,” she said. “Randy.”

  “Very handsome, that one,” Eunice mumbled, still focused on her knitting. “They certainly did not build young men like that back when I courted.”

  Betsy took a graceful step toward him. “He has feelings for you. Alexander will pick up on that if he hasn’t already. He will use Randy against you, and we can’t afford to give him that kind of leverage.”

  Cooper stifled a chuckle. “Okay, let me just stop you right there. I think you are confused about something. Randy may be sweet, sensitive, and gorgeous, but he’s about as heterosexual as they come. Trust me. I know firsthand. He was married for fifteen years. The boy is as straight as I am gay. The only feelings he has for me are as a close friend of the family.”

  She studied his face for a moment. “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

  Cooper dismissed Betsy’s musings with the shake of his head. He could never bring himself to hope for such a thing. The potential disappointment was far too great.

  “This word, gay,” Eudora said, lowering her book. “I think I am missing its contemporary meaning.”

  Eunice huffed and looked up. “God’s balls, Dora! It means he prefers men to women. Even I know that.” Her voice was so thin and piercing Cooper winced.

  He walked over, rested his hands on the back of the sofa, and glowered at Eunice. “It’s an orientation—not a preference, or a choice for that matter. Like how even though I would prefer not to be sitting here talking to dead people, I apparently don’t have a choice in the matter.”

  Eudora craned her head around to him, her eyebrows rising until they nearly reached her hairline. God. Now he was arguing with dead witches over proper homosexual terminology. He’d officially lost it.

  Cooper looked at Betsy and leaned against the back of the couch. “In any case, I don’t think Randy will be around much anymore.”

  Betsy nodded. “Good. Reinforcements should be here tomorrow morning.”

  Cooper crossed his arms and cocked his head at her. “Reinforcements?”

  “Jericho.” She mumbled the word as if it was of no consequence. “The Manheeg insisted.”

  She obviously was in no mood for chitchat. That or she was hiding something. Cooper wasn’t having it. He was tired of being kept in the dark when he was the one supposedly in so much danger. “The Manheeg?”

  Betsy glanced up at him, waving her hand in dismissal. “The leader of the Jericho army.”

  Cooper dropped it and sat in the wingback chair opposite the sofa. He rubbed his eyes and then stared from one Phipps twin to the other. For a moment, neither of them regarded him at all, so he cleared his throat. They both looked up at him with simultaneously raised eyebrows and tightly pursed lips. The mirror effect was damn creepy.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were really here,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “I feel like I’m going a little nuts.”

  “Well, where else in the world would we be, dear?” Eudora said with saccharin sarcasm.

  “This is our house,” Eunice said under her breath.

  Eudora glanced over her shoulder at her sister. “Not anymore, sister.”

  “It’s Lillie Mae’s house,” Cooper said definitively. “Lillie Mae is still around. Don’t forget that. You are in her house, though I don’t have the slightest idea why.”

  “We left Phipps House to Lillie Mae in our wills,” Eudora said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She was the only living Phipps heir at the time. When she is gone, it will be yours.”

  Cooper leaned forward in his chair. He didn’t care about the house and certainly didn’t want to discuss what would happen when Lillie Mae was gone. But he had to admit he was curious about the remaining blanks in his family tree. “Lillie Mae’s maiden name is Carter, not Phipps.”

  Eudora sat her book down on the coffee table. She picked up the picture of Sally, still stained with a bloody thumbprint. Betsy looked over Eudora’s shoulder at the picture, bit her bottom lip, and retreated back to the front window.

  “Your grandmother,” Eudora said, “was only raised by the Carter family. She was not born a Carter.”

  “Thank God for that at least,” Eunice said through a series of overdone snorts. “Nothing more than a pack of wild animals, if you ask me.”

  Eudora stared at the picture. “Lillie Mae’s mother was Sarabeth.”

  Betsy physically winced at the mention of the name he recalled from the family tree in the Bible. “I will check around the house.” In a whirl of thick black smoke, she disappeared from the room.

  Eunice coughed twice and waved her hands around. “God’s balls, I wish she wouldn’t do that. You know what they say about second-hand smoke!”

  Eudora smiled. “The subject of Sarabeth is a mite tender for our sister.”

  Cooper sat straight up in the chair. “Your sister? Betsy?”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Eunice said with an overdramatic roll of her eyes.

  Eudora nodded. “Yes. Elizabeth is our older sister. She was Elizabeth Phipps before she married Jonathan Parker. They had three children, Andrew, Stephen—”

  “And Sally.” Cooper finished her sentence, his familial connection to the Phipps name finally solidified in his mind. “Betsy wasn’t like you, was she? With the magic? Or Divinum stuff, I mean.”

  Eunice huffed. “No. Elizabeth was a huge disappointment to the family when she turned eighteen without exhibiting any Divinum power. The Phipps line was nearly as powerful as any pure-blood Divinum. She, however, got none of it.” Eunice stared at her knitting needles and scraped them together like she was sharpening knives. “She was still Mother’s favorite, however.”

  “My sister is not wrong there,” Eudora said with a raised eyebrow.

&nbs
p; “When we were young, beauty, poise, and social graces were Elizabeth’s strong suits. Eunice and I always played second fiddle to her with Mother and Father, even though she was not born with the Seraphic gene.”

  Cooper nodded and clasped his fingers together. “My mother never showed any signs of it either, though I was really young when she died.”

  “Sometimes it skips a child or even a whole generation.” Eudora wrangled a stray strand of hair and tucked it behind her ear. “While it always flows through the original ancient bloodlines, the Seraphic gene is as particular as it is potent. It skipped Elizabeth, your mother, and your brother, just as it skipped Lillie Mae’s daughter, Charlotte, and her mother, Sarabeth.”

  “Half-negro, that one,” Eunice barked without any hint of social grace.

  Cooper craned his neck around and gawked at her. “What did you just say?” He shook his head. “The term is mixed or biracial, if you don’t mind.”

  Eunice held her hands up and shrugged. “That’s what I said! She was half white and half Negro. Same thing. You and your fancy modern terms.” She huffed and went right back to knitting.

  Cooper couldn’t help but chuckle, but not at Eunice. He had mixed race blood in his ancestry, too. Didn’t see that one coming, but it was South Carolina, after all. Plantations of the antebellum South were not safe places for enslaved women of color.

  Cooper shifted in his seat and leaned forward. “By the looks of her in that picture, Sally Parker was a rich white girl. If she was Sarabeth’s mother, then who was the father?”

  Eudora eased back into the cushions of the sofa, crossed her arms over her healthy bosom, and cocked an eyebrow. “You are correct. Sally was about as fair as they come and a plantation princess. Jonathan Parker owned one of the richest estates in the county.”

  Cooper shook his head as puzzle pieces finally slipped into place. “Warfield.”

  “Yes,” Eudora said. “Sarabeth’s father was a slave at Warfield.”

  Cooper stared at her, dumbfounded. He scooted to the edge of his chair and entwined his fingers. “Lillie Mae’s grandfather was a slave? Who was he? What was his name?”

  Betsy’s voice drifted into the middle of their conversation like a falling feather. “You know him as Blue.”

  Cooper snapped his head around and stared at her, standing over his shoulder by the fireplace. The ticking of the grandfather clock counted down the five seconds it took for her words to register in his brain.

  He stood and faced her, his knees nearly buckling under him. “Blue?”

  Betsy nodded.

  Cooper walked over to her. “You mean Blue, the ghost…”

  Eunice cleared her throat.

  “I mean… spirit,” he continued, “who has given me nightmares my whole life?”

  “Yes,” Betsy said. “That Blue.”

  “His birth name was Gazini Mutamba,” Eunice said. “The slave traders gave him that silly nickname for obvious reasons. I’ll never forget those unsettling eyes. A mark of the devil if you ask me.”

  Betsy crossed her arms. “More like creative breeding.”

  Cooper had to move. The walls were closing in on him. He circled the room, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and his index finger without saying a word. It made no sense to him. Blue. His ancestor. Un. Freaking. Believable. He made himself dizzy pacing, so he went back to the chair and sunk down into it.

  He looked up at Betsy. “I saw him tonight. At Warfield. He was there in the kitchen house, right before I fell through the cellar door.” He couldn’t stop shaking his head. “Blue and your daughter?”

  “Sally fell in love with Blue the moment she saw him.” Betsy paused and smiled, her eyes glazing over. “She had such a capacity for pure, blind love and compassion. She was also naïve to the ways of this world. She was a wondrous and magical creature from another time and place.” She fell silent, seemingly adrift in a sea of memories from which she didn’t want to be rescued.

  “Different times, back then,” Eunice added. “Not anything goes, like you people these days.”

  Eudora leaned forward like the wise old sage who was about to enlighten him. “The Phipps line is one of the oldest and purest of all Divinum bloodlines. The power flowing through your blood is legendary in the heavenly realm.” She was practically salivating. “And Blue was an incredibly powerful Houngan.”

  Cooper shrugged at the unfamiliar term.

  “He was born of the Bokor,” Eudora explained. “The Vodoun high priests of the dark magic, very powerful and dangerous. That is the origin of your dark side. The mixing of two such powerful and diverse bloodlines is unprecedented.”

  Cooper stood and rested hands on his hips. “So you’re telling me that I am descended from a powerful witch and some badass, evil voodoo priest.”

  Eudora shrugged. “Evil is a relative term. Not all darkness is evil.”

  “If all this is true, then why has Blue tormented me all my life? Why did he scare the hell out of an eight-year-old kid at Warfield that day? What was he doing at the kitchen house tonight or standing in the middle of the road when I drove into town?”

  “He was likely trying to warn you,” Betsy said, standing beside his chair. “To stop you from putting yourself in danger like you did in the kitchen house. You were always Divinum, Cooper. You were born that way. All those years ago at Warfield, when Blue touched you, he simply awakened the dark side of your powers—his Bokor seed in your blood—for your own protection.”

  Eudora straightened her spine and brushed the wrinkles from the lap of her gown. “Betsy is right, dear. He was never your tormentor. You created that in your own rather overactive imagination.” She cocked her head, one eyebrow creeping a little higher than the other. “Blue is your guardian.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The next morning, sunlight slipped in through the cracks of the curtains, casting bright horizontal lines across the width of the bed as Cooper woke. He’d managed about five hours of uninterrupted sleep, after lying awake pondering Betsy and Eudora’s seemingly implausible revelation. Blue. His ancestor. And some kind of damn voodoo high-priest, guardian angel.

  The information was hard to get his head around after twenty years of thinking Blue was just a malevolent spirit hell-bent on scaring the crap out of him. Apparently, he’d been trying to protect Cooper all those years. It made little sense in the absence of caffeine. He pushed the muddled thoughts from his mind, slid his hand under the pillow, and touched the cold blade of the dagger Betsy had left with him just in case. Grabbing his phone from the nightstand, he unlocked the screen with the swipe of his finger. No calls from Randy, not that he really expected one after their awkward encounter last night. He just hoped Randy was safe.

  The familiar sounds of the creaky old house soothed him as he lay there pondering his next move. He needed to know how to kill an Anakim, if it was even possible. He couldn’t ask Betsy. She would never let him get within a mile of Alexander again. He could think of only one other person in Georgetown that might know.

  Cooper threw back to the covers, sat up, and stared at the pile of clothes on the floor beside the bed. He didn’t even remember taking them off. Old habits. At least he wasn’t doing a walk of shame this time. That old life of his seemed pretty lame now since becoming aware of the dark world around him.

  After a quick shower, he pulled on some well-worn jeans, his navy Vanderbilt sweatshirt, and ambled down the hall to check on Lillie Mae. Turning the doorknob as quietly as possible, he cracked the door open and peeked in. She lay on her side facing him, emitting a low, steady snore. The creases in her timeworn face had smoothed, and a nearly imperceptible smile curled her lip. Maybe she was lost in a beautiful dream. He hoped so. He pulled the door closed.

  She would be out for a while, and it was morning. Phipps House had its veil of protection, and he would be back soon. Still, he felt guilty for sneaking out.

  Old habits.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Prince George Winyah
Episcopal Parish was a regal battleaxe of a church at the corner of Highmarket and Broad. Having endured over two hundred fifty years of wartime occupations, fires, and hurricanes, the church stood in the heart of Georgetown’s historic district as a beacon of spiritual perseverance and fortitude. A third generation recovering Pentecostal, Cooper always found the quiet reverence and dignity of Prince George Parish alluring. If Lillie Mae ever minded his preference for the liturgical, she’d never said so.

  He stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the belfry and rubbing his hands together. The temperature had risen almost fifteen degrees since yesterday, so nerves chilled him more than the cold. He hadn’t stepped inside a church for almost a decade, and he was sure the walls of the historic landmark would crumble around him the moment he darkened the doorway. He’d nearly convinced himself to turn around and walk the ten blocks back to Phipps House, when a rotund figure sporting salt-and-pepper hair and a clerical collar barreled around the corner of the building.

  “Cooper Causey! I thought that was you.” Wayne Johnson was cherry-cheeked and a little grayer on top, but no worse for the wear. The rector of Prince George had been a high school buddy of Cooper’s dad and a close friend of the family since before Cooper was born. Not only an eloquent speaker, Wayne was the foremost biblical scholar in the state, versed in a variety of subjects ranging from Old Testament history to demonic possession. If anyone in Georgetown—any human in Georgetown—could help him, it was Wayne.

  Cooper pushed through the iron gate and extended his hand. “Good to see you, Reverend.”

  Wayne looked down at Cooper’s hand with a frown and pulled him into bear hug. “Reverend, my big fat patoot. Don’t sass me, boy.” Wayne slapped Cooper’s back and squeezed his shoulders. “Your daddy gave me carte blanche to bend you over my knee whenever necessary.”

  Cooper chuckled and looked down, flustered by the brazen display of affection. “Sorry, Wayne.”

  The rector draped an arm around Cooper’s shoulder and centered his eyes on him. “How is Aunt Mae?”