Twenty-One

by D. Victoria BonAnno

  “Hey!” Chloe shouted over the thickening rain. “Miss! Can you hear me?”

  The woman was spread eagled on the cross, bound by rope at her wrists and ankles. Chloe touched the woman’s leg.

  “I’ll get you down. Can you hear me?” she repeated.

  The woman didn’t move. She was nude like Chloe, with olive skin and a slender, graceful figure. A thick metal collar glinted through her hair. Her eyes were closed, her lips moving feverishly. Chloe leaned in to hear her over the rising wind.

  “I am Seventeen,” she heard the woman murmur. “I am a slave. I will obey. I will be used. I will not question. I will please my Master.”

  Chloe took a step back, dread creeping through her veins. She looked at the woman’s ankles. The rope was tied in a series of complicated knots.

  “I’m going to get you down,” she said again. “We can get out of here. We’ll escape.”

  She dug her fingers into the rope. It was soaked with rain, and the knots held fast. The woman did not give Chloe any sign of understanding. She repeated the same words over and over again, words that froze Chloe’s blood.

  “I will not question. I will please my Master. I am Seventeen. I am a slave.”

  A siren shattered the sound of rain and whirling wind, muffled within the house. Chloe burst into panic. She tore at the woman’s restraints, her breath running ragged.

  The siren seemed to snap the bound woman from her stupor. She lifted her head. Her eyes snapped open. She looked at Chloe for the first time. Her eyes were large and brown and wide with alarm. She leaned toward Chloe as much as the restraints allowed.

  “Run!” she hissed.

  Chloe dropped the rope and sprinted toward the tree line. She couldn’t look back at the woman. She had to get to the trees. She ran beside the stone building and toward the woods. She could hide there, and then find a road. Find a road and escape. Get help. Escape.

  Suddenly the tree line disappeared. For a moment, Chloe thought she was staring at the roiling storm clouds, but the colour, though grey, was too light, too fierce, blazing with a rage a storm can only depict in lightning.

  Steely fingers clutched her arms. Chloe screamed.

  Demetrius’ face blurred as rain soaked Chloe’s eyes. He flung her into the grass like a discarded doll. Her chin struck mud. She rolled, thinking to spring up and make a break for the woods, but the fall had rattled her, and she was too slow. Demetrius dug his fingers into her scalp and wrenched her up from the ground.

  “No!” Chloe screamed into the storm. She tore at the hand in her hair, the nerves in her scalp straining, screaming. She kicked out wildly and struck his stomach. He folded with a grunt, his grip loosening. Chloe had no thoughts as she stumbled toward the trees. She was like a rabbit leaping to escape the wolf at her heels. She was not fast enough. Demetrius caught her by the neck and thrust her against the stone building. Her back hit the wall and knocked the air from her lungs. Lightning raked over the trees, which were just feet away, blocked by her captor’s body against her.

  Demetrius’ face was terrifying with his wet hair flung across it like black tentacles. His mask hid most of his expression from her, but his eyes glowed, as if his rage was a gas flame that burned just behind them. He pressed his forearm against her throat, forcing her to tilt her face up or be choked. Rain pelted her face. The sound of it striking the building deafened her. A terrible scream caught in her throat, trapped by his arm.

  “I never thought you would hurt Three,” came a terrible snarl from the mask, hoarse with hollow panting. “I took you for the nurturing type.” He deflected Chloe’s weak, flailing arms. “But you certainly felt bad about it, didn’t you, ma chère? That’s why you tried to help Seventeen, isn’t it? Petíte héroïne?”

  His words stirred a fury in Chloe she had never experienced. If she had imagined herself in a similar situation in the past, she’d have guessed she would be too terrified to be angry, terrified for her life. But it was rage and not fear that coursed through her as she stood crushed against the rough brick, her naked feet barely touching grass, wheezing against Demetrius’ arm. How could a man who stole her away not a week ago, a stranger, know her so well? She felt more violated than when she had first woken in the cage, stripped and helpless. Chloe strained against his arm to find enough air to speak.

  “Fuck you.”

  Demetrius’ eyes widened. He looked completely unhinged. Chloe braced herself for violence.

  Demetrius struck her face hard enough to jerk her head to the side. Lightning ignited the sky. Through the blur of her rain soaked vision, she saw him rip the mask from his face and lunge at her.

  Demetrius’ mouth sealed against Chloe’s, hot and supple and frantic. He kissed her as if he would eat her alive, his teeth barely concealed by his lips. Electricity pulsed through Chloe, as if the storm itself had entered her through his mouth. He kissed her again and again and she matched his fervor with lips and teeth and tongue, overtaken by his insatiable mouth, lost in the way it melded against hers so perfectly. He pried her lips apart with his tongue and explored her, and she opened to him. His brutal grip softened, his hands slid to the sides of her face. She felt the cool graze of metal studs on one side of his lower lip, a surprise that enflamed her. She was lost, lost, and in this moment, she didn’t care. The storm howled around them, but there were only his lips, his hands, his body so hot through his drenched clothes. She pressed herself against him, unable to touch enough of his body, and he thrust her harder against the wall with his hips, grinding himself against her sex. Chloe cried out into his mouth, but as her hands found their way to his neck, he tensed as if a switch had been flipped. He pulled back from her and twisted her to face the wall. She strained to turn her head, to see his unmasked face, but his arm locked around her throat, and in moments, the storm dissolved into blackness.

  Chapter 8

  June 7, 2002

  Demetrius hadn’t expected today to be a day he would never forget. After all, he hadn’t even woken up until it was half over, coming to on the sticky floor of one of Mama Dede’s spare rooms with his worst headache in recent memory. He struggled to his feet, thankful that it was a cooler day. The piles of miscellaneous trash around him had begun to stink as summer grew warmer in New Orleans. Dede kept her parlour, living room, and kitchen in immaculate condition, but the other rooms of the house were packed to hoarding levels. The bedroom she let him stay in was just as bad as this room; he had had to clear a path from the door to the bed. He wasn’t sure why he had woken up in a different room; whatever he was coming off of had erased his memory of the night before and left him with his throbbing temples and a dry mouth. He supposed he should just be grateful that he had found his way back to the house and had avoided a mugging or worse while stumbling through their neighborhood in the middle of the night.

  In the shower, Demetrius noticed dried blood under his fingernails and a few scratch marks on his arms. He sighed. So it had been one of those nights. Dread crept into his veins and remained there until he checked his wallet as he dressed, finding it significantly lighter than it had been. Whoever she was, she hadn’t been too injured to accept his money. That was the best thing he could hope for on days like these.

  He ambled into the kitchen and looked for something to take the edge off his hangover. He didn’t like this feeling…he didn’t like not remembering. It was too much like the events that had brought him to New Orleans months ago, when he had woken up in a hospital bed in Toledo. But he didn’t want to think about that. He shifted his leather mask for a swig of whiskey from the open bottle on the counter. His face still ached. It had been four months since the attack. He wondered if the pain would ever subside.

  He heard chatter coming from the parlor at the front of the house. Mama Dede’s low, smoky voice was among them. Her shop was open for business. Demetrius took another swig. He’d have to get a good buzz going to move past the idiotic clients of Dede’s Haitian Vodou Boutique to get out the door.


  Mama Dede was about as Haitian as apple pie. On one of the rare occasions she had mentioned her past, she had told Demetrius that she had been born in Thibodaux, Louisiana. But she never bothered to correct clients who assumed she was Haitian when they came to her for a lave tet. No one ever dared question the old woman. Despite being only four foot eleven and old enough to have a skeletal appearance, Mama Dede commanded more respect than anyone he knew. Since the day he had stumbled into her boutique, horror stricken by a strange vision he had experienced in the Lafayette Cemetery, he had respected her. And she had taken him in, a nomad off the streets who didn’t even remember who he was. She had let him stay the night he had come to her, and he hadn’t left.

  Despite having lived with her for months, Demetrius still wasn’t certain if she actually believed in the religion she sold to brave tourists and socialites in her front room. She sold it like an expert, rattling off various names of loa spirits that would assist her client with whatever had brought them to her door, instructing them on building tables for the spirits and gaining their favour. She performed lave tets; ceremonial “head washings”; and other rather theatrical tasks. She even sold mojo and gris gris bags even though they were not relics of pure Haitian Vodou. They belonged to the melting pot of cultures and superstitions that had become New Orleans Voodoo, nearly a religion in its own right.

  But Dede had no personal shrines to the loa; only the huge over decorated tables in her parlour for public viewings. She performed ceremonies and pushed various Vodou luck charms on those around her (she never let Demetrius leave the house without a liberal application of lemony Van Van oil on his pulse points,) but Demetrius had never seen her use them herself. Though she often used Vodou to explain situations, tell stories, or justify her opinions, Demetrius often wondered if Mama Dede’s involvement with the religion had sprung from profit and, over the years, had developed into a weak superstition, like an excommunicated Catholic who still crosses himself when he feels threatened.

  For Demetrius, Vodou was a unique religion, but all religion was simple superstition at its core and therefore became trite and dull very quickly. He found it interesting that the loa were represented by symbols and images of Catholic saints, a trait that Dede told him had sprung from Haitian history, when the French colonized the island and attempted to stamp out Vodou in favour of Catholicism. He found most followers of Vodou considered themselves devout Catholics, as Mama Dede did. He also found it interesting that those who practiced Vodou claimed to barter and even argue with their deities, rather than simply pray to them and wait for a sign from the heavens. The loa were far more involved spirits than the detached, omniscient God of Abrahamic mythology. But even its uniqueness came from the same fears and desires from which all religion sprung; the desire for control over the uncontrollable aspects of life, the fear of death and the unknown; and the novelty of Vodou became as dull as Sunday mass. Still, he found himself in the parlour more often than not when Dede opened it for business, listening to the requests of clients ready to empty their wallets for the illusion of control in love or business or what have you. Their desire for that illusion, desire which drove them far past any logical thought, was fascinating to him. Today, however, with his pounding head and scratched arms, their incessant need for control would only be irritating and juvenile. Today, they were nothing but chattering roadblocks who stood between him and a cup of black coffee from the café down the street.

  He had expected the parlour to be abuzz with curious tourists, but he only saw Mama Dede, her thin frame wrapped in a loose cotton dress, chatting with a couple of regular clients beside one of her large shrines, the one with the eerie portrait of the Virgin Mary with scratches running down her face. Demetrius often saw Dede show that particular shrine to prostitutes and pregnant women, selling special oils or showing off the beautiful curved dagger that lay in the center of the table. Demetrius found himself staring at the portrait frequently, with the Virgin Mary’s long, weary face staring off into the distance as she cradled baby Jesus, whom in this painting looked more like a miniature man than an infant. There were two long scratch marks on her right cheek, a feature that didn’t fit with the serenity of the work of art.

  He caught Mama Dede’s gaze, her tawny green eyes looking him up and down before continuing with her conversation. Dede’s expression spoke just as loudly as her voice; he knew then that he looked as bad as he felt. He nodded at her and headed past the shelves and shrines for the door. Incense burned on one of the shrines and the stench turned his stomach. But no sooner had he quickened his pace than the sight of a girl standing near a white linen shrine stopped him in his tracks.

  He knew immediately that she came from a privileged place in life, standing in the front room with her pale arms crossed over a designer sundress. She ran her fingers along the great white snake statue on the table, perusing the shrine as if she were in a boutique in the French Quarter rather than an old woman’s house in the lower Ninth Ward. The fact that she was there at all, alone, pointed to a callous curiosity that only children of money are afforded. Something about her stopped his heart in his chest. He couldn’t pinpoint it. It was as if the sight of her wavy brown hair curling down her back made the world stop. Her eyes, large and brown and bored, met his. She gave him a nervous little smile as she studied his mask, his dark attire, the long undercut he had just given himself a few weeks before.

  “Do you work here?” she asked. She had a voice that was rich but soft with youth, soft like the gentle slopes of her curves beneath her dress. She couldn’t have been older than seventeen.

  Demetrius could not speak. Some emotion left him dumbstruck, something overwhelming like fear, but his chest ached. He was not an idiot. He didn’t believe in trite notions like love at first sight. His reaction toward seeing this girl had to be something else. Perhaps she looked like someone from the past he couldn’t remember, someone he had loved enough for his heart to burst in his chest. The idea didn’t slow his racing pulse.

  “I live here,” he finally managed to say.

  A smile from her again, a genuine smile he hadn’t earned from their interaction.

  “You look like you had a long night,” she said. She looked him up and down. “Why do you dress like that?”

  Her blunt attitude stunned him, and it shouldn’t have. He had deduced that she was a child of wealth, and they were notorious for never having learned manners. Nothing about her tone suggested judgment or distaste. She looked at him with genuine curiosity, like a small child. When people he had known finally got around to asking him why he dressed the way he did, he normally responded with something cryptic or clever, depending on what he wanted from them. He surprised himself this time by responding with the truth.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve always dressed like this.”

  He had no control over this situation. No control over what came out of his mouth. He wasn’t used to this. It terrified him.

  The girl nodded as if his gibberish had made perfect sense. “It suits you,” she said. “I couldn’t see you in anything else.”

  A response he couldn’t have predicted, one a stranger shouldn’t have said. Demetrius wondered for a moment if he were dreaming, or if this was a bizarre hallucination like the one that had brought him to Dede’s doorstep. He felt the world shift, felt like he barely clung to the ledge of sanity. Was this real? How could he tell?

  “Can you tell me about this god?” the girl pointed at the snake statue on the table. “Is he evil?”

  She folded her arms over her chest, more tightly than people normally do. She was nearly hugging herself. Demetrius would have taken this to be discomfort, but nothing else in her manner suggested anything but the casual curiosity of the easily bored. The gesture made her appear even younger, though she spoke with the confidence a woman much older.

  “The loa aren’t gods, they’re more like spirits. None of them are good or evil.” He heard Dede’s words coming out of his mouth, words he’d neve
r paid attention to but had heard often enough to absorb. He gestured to the snake statue. “Damballah is the most respected.”

  The girl looked at the shrine. It was decorated with crystal eggs and champagne flutes. A white chicken egg, which Demetrius knew Dede had rubbed in a sweet smelling cologne called Pompeii Lotion, sat on top of a mound of flour on a crystal dish in the center of the shrine. The girl touched the egg gingerly and brought her fingers to her face to smell the cologne.

  “What does he do?” she asked, rubbing her fingers together and wiping them on her sundress. Demetrius followed her every gesture. Words failed him.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She laughed, a musical sound that was loud enough to surprise him. Her brown eyes, almost too large for her oval face, studied him as if he were part of the shrine. He met her gaze and his headache melted away as if it had never been. Again he felt his pulse jump, a burst of adrenaline, as if his body wanted to run. But he remained, staring into those large liquid eyes, and an inexplicable calm followed, a strange…peace. He could think of no more appropriate word. He stared at the girl and he had no questions haunting him, no pain from the wounds on his face. He knew then that she couldn’t have been real. She had to be a hallucination, some figure from his past from the annals of his mind that he couldn’t access with his severed memory. He wondered if Mama Dede were actually in the room with him, standing there with her regulars, watching him talk to no one in front of the shrine. He wondered if he were even in the parlour at all, or if he was unconscious somewhere, waiting to wake up. He didn’t want to. He wanted to remain in this vision with this girl, forever asleep like Endymion, who dreamt for all eternity that he held the moon in his arms.

  The hand on his arm was very real, with Mama Dede’s unmistakable grip.

  “Miss Belaire,” she said to the girl in her alto voice. “You’re a ways from home. What can I do for you?”