Unsympathetic Magic

by Laura Resnick

  “The Petro loa are hungry gods. And I’ve sought a lot of favors from several of them. They want the most impressive and costly offering there is: a human life.”

  I looked up at the flashing, thunder-crashing sky, and I thought I saw dark gods looming overhead, come to drink my blood and consume my soul. “No!”

  Heedless of my screams and protests, the zombies started hauling me up the precarious old spiral staircase that wound around and around the tower, dragging and carrying me all the way up to the lookout platform.

  Now I understood the names that had haunted Shondolyn’s dreams: Marinette, a servant of evil; Mama Brigitte, who presided over black magic and helped her worshippers acquire ill-gotten gains. The other names in Catherine’s personal pantheon no doubt had similar profiles.

  I also understood now why she had used the white darkness to possess my predecessors, to teach them docility and obedience in a trance state. I was making this process every bit as noisy, slow, tiresome, and inconvenient for Catherine as I could. The higher we climbed and the harder I fought against the zombies dragging me along, the more I screamed and shouted at the bokor, the more annoyed she looked. This was clearly not how she had pictured her victim behaving on the big night.

  When we reached the lookout platform, she turned to me and snapped, “Can’t you be a bit more decorous? The gods can hear you! You’re spoiling an important and emotional event for me!”

  “Good grief!” I said, gaping at her. “Evil incarnate! Right in front of me! You’re not just evil, you are Evil!”

  She slapped me again. “Stop your babbling!” She pointed overhead. “Right there! The dark loa whom I have summoned are right there.”

  With my hair blowing across my face, I looked up. They were indeed right there. Shifting shapes and amorphous shadows loomed and writhed overhead, spilling out of the belly of the crashing thunderclouds directly above us. The shapes were immense and, although not even vaguely human, they had a clear form and seemed to move with conscious intent.

  “I have prepared for this night for a long time!” Catherine shouted at me as the fierce wind made her red robe billow. “Ever since that do-gooder houngan left for Haiti. He was always interfering. It was such a relief when he left town. You have no idea—”

  “Now who’s babbling?” I butted her nose with my forehead.

  Catherine shrieked and fell back several steps as her nose spouted blood. With uncontrolled rage in her eyes, she started hitting me repeatedly while the zombies held me still.

  “Esther!”

  Through my pain and terror, through the clash and crash of thunder, through the roaring of the wind and the cold sting of the rain that started falling again, I thought I heard someone call my name.

  “Esther! Esther!”

  I turned my head away from Catherine’s next blow and craned my neck to look down from the platform. I shied back reflexively, not having realized just how high up we were. Then I realized I saw figures scrambling around on the plaza below us. Biko was fighting with the baka down there, while Max tried to get past them to enter the tower. The baka seemed intent on preventing entry. I realized that Catherine must have left them there as sentries.

  A bolt of lightning flashed, illuminating the moment that Biko shoved his rapier through the torso of one of the monstrous little creatures, then yanked it upward to gut the thing.

  “Ouch,” I said involuntarily.

  Max tried again to enter the tower. The remaining baka leaped for him., The creature was skewered in midair by Biko’s sword. The young fencer beheaded that one, then dashed into the tower after Max. Even above the rage of the thunder and Catherine’s screams of protest, I could hear the rattle and echo of the shaky iron stairs as my rescuers ran upward in pursuit of me and my captors.

  Catherine yelled something at the zombies. They released me and turned, descending the stairs at their usual measured pace. They’d obviously been instructed to stop Max and Biko. As soon as they let me go, Catherine seized me by the hair and began chanting loudly, her free arm raised toward the thundering black clouds. Despite the obvious collapse of her plan, her face was exultant with religious fervor—and greed. Oh, yes, there was definitely a healthy dose of greed there. As long as she could sacrifice me to her dark masters and get Martin Livingston’s immense fortune, then all other problems were solvable, apparently. Including the two heroes racing up the stairs even now to foil her plans.

  I decided to be a problem, too. I’m an actress. I’ve trained in stage fighting and I do my own stunts. I can run in spiked heels if I absolutely have to. I face casting directors as part of my regular work week. I deal with theatrical agents! So it was well past time to show this murderous academic bitch that it would take a lot more than a few zombies and a little hair pulling to turn me into a human sacrifice.

  I made two fists and swung my bound hands into her nasty, arrogant face as hard as I possibly could. She shrieked and let go of me. I started hopping away from her as fast as my bound legs would carry me. When I felt her hand on my hair again, I dropped to the platform’s floor—ignoring the pain of the hair that tore out of my scalp—and rolled over, kicking at her with both legs.

  Below me, I heard Biko shouting, “Darius! Darius, it’s me, Biko! Darius!”

  “Oh, no,” Catherine said. “That’s how it got away last time.”

  “If a zombie’s name is called by someone who knew it in life,” I panted, remembering what Max had told our group in Puma’s shop. So that’s how Darius had wound up wandering the streets the night I had first encountered his zombie. This cold bitch had forgotten for one moment that the lover she had murdered was now an it, and she had used his name.

  I felt strong hands hauling me upright. I was scared for a moment, until I realized Biko was the one manhandling me. He used his weapon to slice open the bonds around my hands and my feet. Then he lunged in Catherine’s direction.

  “No!” Max’s voice cried behind me.

  I whirled to face him. He was staring up at the roiling black clouds and the dancing, menacing shapes overhead. His face was a horrified mask of alarm.

  “Biko! No!” he shouted. “No!”

  Biko halted and turned to look at him.

  Max was panting hard, sweating, and red- faced. I realized the climb to this platform would have been a little demanding for him even if he hadn’t had to fight through baka and zombies to get here.

  “We must go! Now! Now!”

  Biko met my gaze and then, trusting in Max, we ran toward the steps and started down them. Darius’ zombie was just standing there, looking confused. It made no protest as Biko shoved it out of the way and then helped me and Max run past it. Three more docile, dazed zombies were in our way, and they each simply moved aside, too, when Biko pushed them.

  I noticed foamy white stuff bubbling out of their mouths. “What is that?”

  “Salt!” Biko shouted.

  I remembered learning at Puma’s shop that salt was one of the theoretical ways to awaken a zombie. Thank the heavens it had actually worked!

  When we reached the bottom of the stairs, I tripped over a baka corpse. Biko caught my arm and pulled me upright before I could fall flat on my face.

  “Keep running!” Max shouted, clambering down the steps behind us. “We may yet be too near!”

  We headed for the crumbling stone steps and began descending them.

  “No, no! Slow down!” I shouted. “I can’t see!” We were going down those treacherous stairs at reckless speed in nearly total darkness, our way illuminated only by the violent flashes of lightning overhead.

  “Keep going!” Max cried. “Run!”

  “Max!” I protested.

  “Faster!”

  I took his fear quite seriously, even though I didn’t know what caused it. But my fear of dying in a fatal tumble down those lethal stairs was real, too. Biko solved my dilemma by grabbing my arm and dragging me with him at top speed, so that our descent was little more than a scrambling, co
ntrolled fall to the very bottom of the steps.

  Max was wheezing with exhaustion by the time we reached street level. Biko and I paused, seizing Max’s arms to support the old mage when we thought he might keel over.

  “Must keep going,” he panted. “Keep going.”

  With the two of us supporting him, we made our way across the park and toward the entrance gate as fast as we could. Then we ran across the street and stood outside one of the darkened row houses.

  “Here?” Biko said, breathing hard.

  It had better be here. I couldn’t go any farther. Not until I got my second wind.

  “Yes,” Max panted. “Yes . . . Here . . . Safe . . . I think . . .”

  Despite the complete absence of electricity in the city, we would see the lookout platform on the old watchtower quite clearly from here because there was so much meteorological—or mystical—activity directly above it. The thunder made my head ache even at this distance, and the dancing light illuminated the platform so well that I was sure I could see Catherine’s blond hair swirling around her head in the violent wind. Her red silk robe was easy to spot as she raised her arms to exalt the dark loa whom she had summoned with the promise of a human sacrifice.

  My gaze was still on her when the lightning came straight down from the churning black clouds and made her explode into hot red flames that were then sucked up into the sky. A pale pillar of ashes stood in her place for only a split-second, and then the wind began to disperse it.

  “She promised them a human sacrifice,” I said in a stunned, breathless voice that scarcely sounded like mine.

  “Well,” Biko said prosaically, “looks like they got one.”

  “The Petro loa are deadly dangerous,” Max said, still breathing hard. “To make a promise which one cannot keep . . . invites their rage and punishment.”

  25

  “ Max!”I cried suddenly.

  “Whoa!” Biko did a double-take so big he nearly fell down. “Don’t scare me like that! Not now. Didn’t you just see what we, uh, just saw? I’m a little rattled.”

  “Lopez!” I shrieked. “Max! Lopez!”

  I started to run in the direction of the foundation. Biko tackled me and stopped me.

  “Lopez!” I wailed.

  “He’s fine!” Biko shouted into my ear. “He’s fine! Lopez is fine!”

  “What?” I panted in panic, clutching him. “What?”

  He shook me by the shoulders, met my eyes, and said loudly into my face, “Lopez is okay. We found him. Puma and Jeff are with him now. He’s going to be all right.”

  “He is?” I could barely choke out the words, I was so relieved.

  “He’s fine,” Biko repeated. “Well, almost fine. A little hardheaded, if you ask me.”

  I burst into tears and started wailing with relief.

  “Uh, Max,” Biko said awkwardly. “Could you deal with this?”

  “Of course.”

  Max embraced me and patted my back while I wept copiously against his shoulder. Every so often, he murmured soothing words to the effect that Lopez would be fine.

  After a little while, I pulled myself together enough to ask my two companions, “What happened?”

  Far from being satisfied by his talk earlier in the day with Catherine Livingston, Max had felt dark suspicions about the woman after ending the conversation.

  “So I returned to several questions that have been vexing me,” Max said, as we walked wearily in the direction of the foundation. “Why summon so much dark magic? There must be a purpose or goal, and yet we had not yet perceived it.”

  “Power and money.” I glanced at the hilltop, recalling the words of my murderous ex-nemesis. “She said everything is always about that, in the end.”

  “A simplistic view,” Max said. “But then, for all her education and achievement, she did not strike me as a woman of complex insight or emotional wisdom.”

  “I’m with you, Max,” said Biko. “I never liked her.”

  “I also continued to wonder what Shondolyn had been conditioned for. It must be an important role, since so much effort and risk had been invested in trying to gain influence over the girl. Unable to achieve a breakthrough in attempting to discern whom Shondolyn might be used to harm, I instead began to think about how she might be used as a victim. Which was when the prospect of human sacrifice occurred to me.”

  “It never occurred to me,” said Biko. “Not once. And I’m glad. I don’t think I want to be the sort of person who gets thoughts like that.” After a moment, he said, “No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” said Max.

  “Look.” I pointed to the hilltop. The angry churning of the black clouds was dying down, the flashes of lightning were fewer and less fierce, and it looked as if the storm gathered directly over the watchtower was starting to break up.

  “The dark loa have had their meal,” Max said. “They’re preparing to depart.”

  “What are those?” Biko asked.

  In the intermittent flashes of light overhead, we could see thin columns of smoke curling upward from two spots on the plaza and several places on the spiral iron staircase inside the tower.

  “Her creatures,” Max said. “Their existence ended when hers did.”

  “Oh, right,” said Biko. “You said once that to dispatch the zombies . . .”

  Max concluded, “We would simply have to dispatch the bokor.”

  “Looks like the Petro did it for us,” said Biko. “Even so, there wasn’t anything simple about it.”

  “But how did you know about her?” I asked. “Or that I was in danger? Or that she had poisoned—”

  “After the citywide power failure, Detective Lopez came to my shop looking for you. Two patrolmen he had dispatched to the foundation to find you had already reported that you weren’t there. With no way of reaching you by phone—”

  Biko said, “All the towers went down when the power failed. No one’s been able to use a cell phone all night.”

  “Detective Lopez started hunting for you in the places he thought you might be. Your apartment, my shop. He told me his next stop would be the set of the television show.”

  “The show!” I said. “I’m supposed to be at work!”

  “Are you kidding?” Biko said. “We’re in a major power blackout, Esther. No one’s working except emergency personnel.”

  I realized that if Lopez was willing to speak to Max and to the staff of The Dirty Thirty, he must have been very worried about me.

  I said, “After realizing I wasn’t with the cast, he probably suspected that the patrolmen he had sent to the foundation had been hoodwinked.” I gave a scant summary of what Catherine had related to me about his behavior when he arrived. “By then, he must have realized I was in danger.”

  “Meanwhile,” Max said, “in his anxiety about you, Detective Lopez was rather more forthcoming than usual. He told me his suspicions about Catherine Livingston. Recognizing that he is a man of very conventional beliefs in certain key ways, I did not precisely share my suspicions with him, but we did come to a mutual understanding that something was wrong at the Livingston Foundation, we both feared for your safety, and we should each try to find you by any means available.”

  Wow. To trust Max to look out for my well-being suggested that Lopez had been at wit’s end by then.

  “So I proceeded to the Garlands’ home, where I asked Puma and Jeff to recount to me again how Martin Livingston had died,” said Max said. “Considering the story now from the detective’s perspective—his conviction that Martin Livingston’s wife murdered him—certain features of the unfortunate event suddenly suggested an obscure method to me.”

  “A method of murder?”

  “Yes. Since Martin’s confessed murderer is now dead, we’ll never know for certain, but I believe Catherine put a curse on him that is known as ‘sending the dead.’ It is a particularly dreadful way to die. The bokor sends dead spirits—in many cases, destructive, malevolent ones—to inhabit
the victim. The result is often a delusional form of apoplexy.”

  “A massive stroke accompanied by hallucinations,” I said.

  “And fatal,” added Biko. “Once we realized Dr. Livingston might have killed her husband, and might done it using all the voodoo, Vodou, hoodoo, and other stuff she’s learned over the years, a lot of other things fell into place. Max and Puma saw the pattern, and they realized that your life might be the big mojo offering that she was going to make to the dark loa who were bringing storm clouds over the city.”

  We looked up at the Mount Morris Park watchtower again, where our evil adversary had so recently met her well-deserved end.

  “Hey, look,” I said. “It’s clearing up really fast now.”

  Instead of looking like the mouth of a particularly turbulent hell, the sky overhead was now starting to look like just a healthy summer storm. Fat grayish-black clouds moved slowly across the vault of heaven, outlined at infrequent intervals by soft flashes of lightning.

  Max inhaled deeply, paused for a moment, then said to me, “The flow of life energy here has returned to its normal pattern. All is well again.”

  “That’s good news, Max. I’ve had enough of the dead coming back to life. They’ve got a right to rest in peace.” I said to him and Biko, “Tell me how you found Lopez.”

  “We were looking for you,” said Biko. “We thought the dark ritual room seemed like the sort of place you might be held prisoner. Or sacrificed. We weren’t really thinking of anything as, uh, epic as what Dr. Livingston did tonight. Anyhow, we went down there, and that’s when we found him, and . . . Oh, man.” Biko shook his head. “I swear I screamed like a girl. For one thing, at first, we thought he was dead, because Dr. Livingston’s poison was paralyzing him. And the setting . . . He was lying next to Mambo Celeste’s corpse and not far away from Napoleon’s head. Grisly.”

  “He’s a brave man,” said Max. “Upon being rescued, his only thought was of you—of trying to learn your fate. None of us had any idea where you were, you see.”

  “But how did you cure him? How did you know what poison Catherine would use?”