Tainted Love

by Nancy Morse

  There was something decidedly unnerving about her that he could not put his finger on. She had come to his cottage outside the city for an evening of pleasure only to leave in haste. Could she have overheard his conversation outside and been displeased by it? She would have to possess an extraordinary ability to hear whispers from afar, which was impossible…unless…

  As a boy growing up, he heard the stories the old Cajuns told of the Rougarou, creatures that prowled the swamps. It was whispered that they could read thoughts and hear far-off conversations, that they had the strength of twenty men and could wing like bats across the face of the moon and lope through the marsh like wolves, that they transformed others by sucking their blood at night and returned to human form at sunrise.

  What if the creature was a full-breasted, voluptuous woman with a beautiful face, hair the color of ale, eyes as blue as a cloudless sky, and skin as pale as milk?

  And what about the man who accompanied her, the one whose footsteps made no sound and whose eyes made a hardened buccaneer shiver down to his bones? The Cajuns, descendants of French settlers exiled from their land, brought to the swamps of Louisiana ancient legends. One such legend carried across the ocean from France was about a creature that drank the blood of humans. The tales swelled with each generation’s telling, but one feature was invariably the same. The creature had eyes that were bright and cold and green.

  Stede laughed nervously. What was he thinking? It was the voodoo queen’s elixir that brought such outrageous thoughts to his mind. It wouldn’t be the first time he had imagined things while drinking the green liquid.

  Still swirling from the effects of la fèe verte, he got up and went to the window. The blush of a red sun wrapped its glow around the island, and the drumbeat of the surf had settled into a calm lapping on the sandy shore. The bay was busy with schooners and sloops, some coming in with merchandise, others going out to plunder. The sight of full masts squared and triangular silhouetted against the horizon in the purple twilight never failed to excite him. It was time to leave the swamps and bayous he knew so well and take to the sea.

  His thoughts drifted back to the plucky Englishwoman whose flesh, though cold to the touch, stoked the flames of his desire like no woman had done since Evangeline. The thought of the young quadroon girl he had loved and lost filled him with a sense of longing. He was older now and had seen enough of the world to be cynical and somewhat jaded, yet the longing never left him. It was a simple enough longing—to find a woman to love and settle down with, perhaps here on Grand Terre or in one of the old Spanish houses in the heart of the city, with great banana trees stroking the courtyard gallery where he would sit in the dusky evenings smoking a cigar to the gentle press of his wife’s hand in his while she chattered on about things women are so fond of chattering about. Through the tall windows he would hear the sound of his children playing in the parlor while a hound dozed peacefully at his feet.

  Was Pru that woman? He could not deny that she stirred something inside of him, but he was not sure if it was his heart or merely his loins. He thought again of the Cajun myth and told himself that stranger things than Rougarou lurked in the tangled swamp. Was Prudence Hightower, with her pale, cold skin and nocturnal wanderings, part of the myth? Was that the secret she was guarding?

  Or perhaps it was the aftereffects of the Green Fairy that had him entertaining such notions. Granted, the drink did put wild thoughts in his mind and even caused him to see things that weren’t really there. Nevertheless, he’d come to rely on it to take him away from the hard, unscrupulous life he’d chosen. He glanced at the bottle on the desk, and frowned. It was nearly empty. He’d better send word to Christophe to go to the voodoo queen to obtain more of her special green elixir.

  His thoughts hardened around the voodoo queen, the mother of his lost beloved. With no more daughters to sell to the highest bidder, what mischief was that evil wench up to these days?

  ***

  In the cottage on Rue Ste. Anne Sabine Sejour stood over the kettle, her brown skin flecked with perspiration. She had ground the fennel seeds, coriander and cloves with a mortar and pestle, soaked the mixture in distilled wine, and allowed it to steep for two weeks. Now, she strained it through a muslin cloth and added the anise, wormwood and a sprinkling of herbs. The water was added, and there it was, la fèe verte, just the way her customers liked it.

  The oils from the herbs infused the spirit, and the herbs gave it a green color. Too strong a dose of wormwood could cause convulsions and even death, but why take the chance of losing a paying customer? In just the right dose, however, it would produce hallucinations not lurid enough to drive a man insane but strong enough to make him imagine he was seeing things.

  Men were nothing but trouble, she huffed to herself as she bottled the green liquid. She’d had her fill of men with their petty little minds. She had paid the ultimate price at the hands of men. They thought they put an end to her when they sacrificed her on an altar of stone in the ancient land, all for the sin of lying in the bracken with another woman by the light of the Beltaine fires. Who were they to tell her who she could or could not lie with? Little could they have known all those centuries ago that they could not destroy a witch as powerful as herself. In their haste to destroy her they had provided her with an eternity in which to cavort, inhabiting the bodies of the most beautiful, taking lovers young and old to satisfy her insatiable lust. She could still recall the sound of their laughter as they plunged the blade into her beating heart. But it was she who was laughing now, for they were long gone, having passed into oblivion, forgotten as if they never existed, while she was here, preparing the Green Fairy inside the body of this beautiful voodoo queen.

  When she finished decanting the green liquid into the bottle, she turned her attention to the love potion the blood-drinker wanted to make her young man fall in love with her. Withdrawing several unopened magnolia buds from a dark glass jar, she put them into two cups of rainwater saved from the first rain in May and a quart of vinegar and boiled it down until all the liquid was gone. Into this she put several drops of lavender and rose oil for attraction, strained the mixture and sweetened it with honey. But the buds and the oils of the voodoo recipe were nothing, she thought with malice, unless accompanied by an incantation to increase the magical energy.

  Her voice rumbled in her throat, building in pitch and frenzy until the chant burst forth in a lurid mixture of English and words from her ancient Dubh Lein that shook the walls of the small cottage.

  “Lig an glacadóir a deochanna an potion cithfholcadh an giver le grá ar emotion,” she chanted, the lilt of the ancient tongue she carried since her birth growing stronger. And then in English, “Let the receiver who drinks this potion shower the giver with love’s emotion.” Over and over she chanted the spell as the body of the voodoo queen swayed and rocked and Lienore’s power surged forth.

  When the chanting and the dancing were over, she collapsed in a chair. Making magic always wore her out, but at least the pretty blood-drinker would have the potion she asked for. There was something about the young woman that looked vaguely familiar, but then, there had been so many pretty faces over the centuries.

  She had no use for blood-drinkers. They were so predictable and obvious. Her method was much more clever. She didn’t need to drink blood when she had a whole body in which to reside, slowly eating away the mortal fiber until all that remained was a husk of skin and bones. And then she gleefully moved on to another. There had been so many beautiful, voluptuous bodies to inhabit over the centuries, and a wealth of them right here in the misty bayous and cobbled streets of this city in the new world.

  She’d been flitting around, a mere gust of vapor on the wind, searching for just the right body to inhabit when she spotted the Creole woman dancing among the slaves upriver. Skin the color of warm molasses, full lips, pendulous breasts and accommodating hips had attracted her attention, and in less than a heartbeat she’d made herself at home. What a combination they
made—the voodoo queen making gris-gris with the help of spells chanted by an ancient witch—the likes of which this soggy land had never seen.

  The evil gris-gris she concocted was unrivaled even among the voodoo spells from Saint-Domingue. Not even the Maroons, known for their magical powers, could compare. She knew the evil gris-gris well—the powdered head of a snake to cause blindness, a doll stuck with pins to bring death, little bags stuffed with dog or cat hair to bring misfortune. When people came to her asking for such things, she sent them away. She had no time for the trivial insults and slights that made them want to get even with the offenders. In the privacy of her Creole cottage, however, with no one watching or listening, in the form of the infamous voodoo queen, she could wreck havoc on the unsuspecting populace. She had her own special brand of gris-gris for those she wanted to destroy. And if anyone caused her insult, she needed no ancient spell or voodoo trick to exact punishment, just the inhuman strength of one such as herself. That miserable devil who had danced too close to her in the bayou was proof of that. It wasn’t often she exhibited her physical powers to watchers, but that night in the bayou, as the slaves had danced to the rhythm drums, they’d been too inebriated with her green elixir to know if what they witnessed really happened.

  She led the dusk-to-dawn rituals in the bayou, with bonfires, dancing, orgies and animal sacrifice, often writhing to the beat of the drums with a snake wrapped around her body to the shock and lurid delight of the slaves. But the ceremonies on Bayou St. John were nothing more than showy displays of magic at its most primitive, and this voodoo queen whose body she inhabited relied on amulets and charms, fortune-telling and hexes, and gris-gris for this and gris-gris for that. This was nothing like the diabolical magic she herself made when she was still mortal and worshipped the Goddess. Her power then and now was undaunted, relentless, and merciless.

  A knock upon her door drew her thoughts away from voodoo ceremonies in the bayou. She adjusted her tignon as she got up and went to answer it.

  A disapproving frown tugged at the corners of her mouth when she saw who it was.

  “Oh, it’s you, Christophe,” she said curtly. “Come in. The drink is ready.” She didn’t like the way the quadroon looked at her with those watery blue eyes, as if he expected something, although what it was, she could not imagine as she swished away, the bells tinkling at her ankles. “And stop looking at me like you haven’t eaten in days. Isn’t that miserable pirate feeding you well enough?”

  “He is good to me,” Christophe replied.

  “No doubt when he has enough la fèe verte in him.”

  “What have you got against him?” he asked.

  Other than the fact that he is a man? she huffed to herself. Or that he was once in love with the daughter of the voodoo queen and made such a nuisance of himself over it that the foolish girl killed herself? Everyone, the voodoo queen included, thought it was the plantation owner who killed her, but Lienore knew otherwise. She could smell the stench of suicide through the decades.

  She shrugged her elegant shoulders. “Qui sait? Maybe I don’t like his face.” She leveled a hard look at him. “Or yours. Take the drink and leave the money on the table.”

  He placed a gold doubloon on the table and hesitated. “Sabine.” His blue eyes held an unspoken plea.

  “Go away. You are nothing to her.”

  “Her?” he questioned.

  “To me,” she quickly corrected. “Now shoo. Or I will put a hex on you.”

  Christophe shook his head. “There was a time—” he began.

  “Do not speak to me of times that were,” she cut in with sharp reproach.

  “It all changed when you went upriver,” he lamented.

  It changed long before that, on a night in May by the light of the Beltaine fires, she thought viciously.

  “When you returned, you were, I don’t know, different.”

  “Not different. Better. So much better.”

  “How can you say better when before you were a loving woman and now it seems that you hate everything?”

  “Not everything,” she replied. “I love this body.” She ran her hands seductively over her full breasts and the curve of her hips and smiled with satisfaction at the loud catch in his throat. “You want to touch, don’t you, cher?” she teased.

  He moved toward her, but she floated away as if on a cloud. “I will not give this beautiful body to a slave.”

  “But I am not a slave. You of all people should know that.”

  “Ah yes, un homme libre de couleur. Eh bien, not even your free hands will touch this body.” She moved away from him with a sneer of disdain. “Now go. I have to finish a love potion for some foolish woman who thinks she needs the love of a man, although it won’t do her any good, I can tell you.”

  Christophe hung his head and muttered, “I had the love of a good woman once.”

  “Ah, but your woman was mortal. This one is not.”

  His head snapped up. “What’s this you say?”

  “You are surprised? You should not be. Where else but here, in this city of the night, can the undead walk among us unnoticed?”

  His blue eyes sparked with interest. “Where will I find this creature?”

  She cocked her head at him and asked suspiciously, “What do you want with her?”

  “It is not for me that I ask,” he answered evasively.

  She contemplated her reply before speaking. She could have told him to wait as the blood-drinker would be arriving shortly for her potion. Then he could follow her and he would know exactly where to find her. Were the creature a man she would have obliged him. But why should she aid in the destruction of a woman? A vampire, yes, but a woman nevertheless. “I do not know,” she said at length. “And if I did, I would not tell you.”

  “You do not fear her?” he asked.

  The light from the hearth softened the features of her strong, lovely face when she laughed, but the sound was cold and carried no mirth. “I fear nothing. I am—” She paused. Ancient, powerful, incapable of being destroyed. “I am the voodooienne.”

  She seemed to grow taller with every word she spoke. He blinked his eyes several times and backed away. The door flew open behind him and a wind rushed in, not like that from the river, but such as he had never felt before. It shook the walls and rattled the copper pots hanging over the hearth. Unnerved, he ran out. His footsteps flew over the flagstone path, down the alley and out to the cobbled street. In his haste to flee, he ran right past the woman coming down the street, not noticing the tendrils of ale-colored hair that escaped from her bonnet and the blue eyes that flashed as she jumped aside for him to pass.

  Chapter 12

  Into Pru’s nostrils wafted the aroma of peanuts cooking in the confectionary vats, malts from the ale houses, ripened fruit from the open-air market, spices from the levee, the tang of fish from the wharves, and the odor of fear emanating from the man who rushed past her on the banquette. She glanced over her shoulder at Christophe’s retreating back and wondered what had frightened him as she lifted her skirt to cross the muddy street on her way to the cottage on Rue Ste. Anne.

  “I thought your kind doesn’t come out in daylight.”

  There was something insolent and cunning in the voodoo queen’s face when she answered Pru’s knock on her door. She was dressed in a kimono, wore slippers on her feet, and her tightly kinked hair was tucked carelessly beneath a blood-red tignon.

  “I tolerate the sunlight quite well, thank you,” Pru said.

  The woman made a little sound, not quite a laugh. “Eh bien.”

  “Forgive me, Madame Sejour,” Pru said when it looked to her as if the woman had just awakened. “I did not mean to disturb you. I would come back another time, but—”

  “But you are in need of the potion.”

  “I do not necessarily believe in any of this, you understand, but I do so desire the love of this man, I am willing to try anything.”

  “You do not flatter me, blood-
drinker.”

  “I beg your pardon. I meant no insult.”

  The same hand that had ripped out the heart of a man dismissed the remark with a negligent wave. “I have heard worse. Come in. Besides, you are not disturbing me. I’ve already had a visitor.” She shook her head ruefully. “What men will not do for la fèe verte. A steady customer sent his man by for it. If you ask me, he drinks too much of it. It will be his undoing. Not that I care. He deserves whatever happens to him.”

  Pru watched her shuffle across the brick floor and shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Here she was, in the home of an ancient witch bent on revenge against life itself. The witch hid her hatred well, but it was there, festering like an open wound that defied healing. But Pru harbored hatred of her own, not against men or the mortal life she left behind, but against the eternity that stretched before her like a great abyss. Without a soul there was nothing to look forward to except untold centuries of always longing for love. Oh, yes, she’d use the love potion on Stede Bonham, but except for the chance that he would not destroy her if he loved her, what good would it do for him to grow old while she never died? The thought that there was no future for her with any mortal man drove her to distraction and hardened her resolve to trick the witch into chanting the spell that would reclaim her soul and restore her mortality.

  But how would she do it? The witch was clever and would see through any trick she might devise. She had to find a way to gain her trust. And then it came to her, a thought so sly and intriguing she could have clapped her hands with glee. She smiled at her own deviousness, and a vow pierced her thoughts with the sharp intent of a killing blade. The witch would pay for what she did to her and to her dear mama and poor Aunt Vivienne. She would extract from the witch the chant and then find a way to destroy her.