Grandmother Marie spoke of Vivienne’s work as being the future of the faith.
With no one else to talk to, she’d turned to Christophe. Christophe was given duties and access to things that Vivienne was not. Especially when she was away at school he became important to Rosalie and their grandmother. He was also his mother’s confidant. She remembered the day she had shown him the letter. It was five years ago, and she had expected that he would find some comfort in it and some understanding of Rosalie’s suicide that he didn’t have prior. That wasn’t the case, though.
“I’m glad you showed me this; I wanted to tell you about this for a long time, and when mother was alive she wouldn’t let me. Grandmother certainly didn’t want you to know until you were deemed ready.” He traced his finger over Rosalie’s signature before handing the letter back to Vivienne.
“Was she always this deluded? How did I not see it?”
Christophe shook his head. “First, she wasn’t deluded. Secondly, she purposefully kept you away as much as she could. She was trying to protect you.” He gave a small laugh. “I asked them both to take me instead, but they dismissed the idea.”
Vivienne stared at him for a moment. “What do you mean? You can’t tell me that you believe what she says in the letter?”
“You have no idea. Yes, what she says in the letter is true. At the very least if she was deluded that means she and grandmother both believe the same lie. They certainly fought over it plenty. As the first born and only daughter, you are apparently her chance to move forward. She’s quite upset that you haven’t married yet. She wants to ensure you have a daughter to take your place before she makes the switch.”
Having a child of her own had been an easy thing to avoid. Vivienne focused on her studies and her work in the community in her early adult years. She’d had relationships in college and beyond, but they were short-lived and most often were with women.
“How is it done?”
He frowned. “I don’t know all of the details, but I do know that the preparation includes longer rituals with just the two of you. Mother was not able to avoid them, as grandmother used you as bait, basically. Sometimes she would use me as bait as well, threatening harm if mother did not go along with her. She also threatened to kill father.”
They hadn’t talked about it since; Vivienne initially thought that the entire thing was a shared fantasy. But in the last year, her grandmother had turned her attention to Vivienne, asking her help with different preparations that normally she would have done herself. She also talked a great deal about how Vivienne’s academic work would help the family line and add to their prestige. Vivienne looked at her work as her own. Now, her grandmother was asking to be included in the setup of the exhibit at the Voodoo Museum, and in their work together, Vivienne noticed a lot of older relics and texts written in what appeared to be her grandmother’s hand among the things that she considered sharing in the exhibits.
They had argued a lot in the past few months. Her grandmother kept asking when she was going to settle down and have a family, pressing for information about her private life and suggesting that she was not getting any younger. When she replied by saying that Christophe had not yet settled down, her grandmother dismissed her complaints, reminding her that Christophe could procreate until the day he died but that she was limited in her time.
Vivienne couldn’t explain it, but she felt impending danger from the old woman. Whether it was some hereditary madness, the simple power of suggestion, or if her mother had been telling the truth, she couldn’t be sure. But she knew the only person she could talk to about it was Christophe.
Chapter Twenty-Three
As time passed, Wren felt more confident that Olivia was growing to trust her, and she knew that there must be a way to get out. She was excited to learn more about her condition, so she could play to her strengths rather than be a victim through her ignorance.
She also felt empowered after her initial visits with Vaughn. She felt no fear telling her story and it was easy to tell it without involving Olivia. In the first visit, she could tell that he was frightened by her, despite her being behind glass. She could also feel desire from him, and she knew she could possibly use both the fear and lust he felt for her to her advantage.
As a stripper she played on those two impulses all the time.
Their first true interview began with Vaughn asking her to tell him about her childhood. “I want to get a clear picture of where you started; if this is going to be a book-length piece, I have to be able to tell your story before you ever met Alex.”
Wren laughed a little. “What are you, some kind of armchair therapist? I don’t think that my childhood will reveal why I did what I did, but if it makes you feel better, let’s go for it.”
Vaughn shook his head. “I’m not here to cure you, but I am interested in learning about you, Wren. I want to know your story, and I think my readers will too. It’s not that I think we’ll find a root cause or something that turned you into a killer. If the world was that tidy, I suspect it would have been cleaned up and peaceful a long time ago. Humans are messy creatures, that I know for sure.”
He paused for a bit, and they stared at each other. She was shackled for his protection as part of standard safety protocol. Since she had not been violent with him and seemed a bit more stable, the parish prison officials allowed them to sit at the same table in an interview room. The shackles prohibited her from moving her hands above the surface of the table and she couldn’t make any swift strides anywhere without falling on her face. She suspected that if she tried she could break the bonds, but she also knew that it was important she play along. Any news that she was misbehaving was likely to make its way to Olivia, either through the guards she fed from or perhaps from Jan, if not through reports and notes Vaughn compiled. So, she would play along. They were kind enough to put a can of diet soda in front of her with a straw that was long enough for her to lean over and drink from.
Vaughn shifted around in his chair, trying to find a comfortable position. He opened his notebook and set a small recorder between them. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to record our sessions. I want to make sure that I get the information down and that I don’t misrepresent things in my notes which would lead to the final work being inaccurate. I want to help you tell your story, rather than create what I think it should be.”
She nodded. “I appreciate that, Vaughn.” She saw that the notebook had a variety of questions scrawled on the top page, which he had numbered and he took a second notebook out to write the answers down.
They began. “Why don’t you tell me about your early childhood, starting with your birthplace, your parents and their situation, and the family set up.”
“I was born in Florida, actually, in one of those small towns that no one ever hears about because Florida is always about orange juice and Disney. There wasn’t much of either in my life when I was a kid.”
Vaughn wrote down “Florida.” “OK, what was the name of the town?”
“Cinco Bayou, about 130 miles east of Mobile. My mother was a waitress. I know, how cliché, right? My father worked offshore. That was one of the things Alex and I had in common—our dads both worked on rigs offshore. Of course, her father was far more attentive. I might see mine at holidays if I was lucky. He and my mother were never married.”
“What was Cinco Bayou like when you were growing up?”
“It’s part of the Fort Walton Beach area, so as a teenager, there was plenty to do. Heck, it was close enough that even when I couldn’t find a ride, I could walk to the beach.” She took a sip off the straw. “Mom worked in a little dive in Fort Walton Beach, and once I was old enough to work, she arranged for me to help on heavier shifts. Even so, I had plenty of recreational activities, if you catch my drift.” She winked at him. “Eventually I figured out that waitressing and bussing tables wasn’t where the good money was though. I realized I could go down to the beach when tourist season was going good. Well
, let’s just say I learned pretty quickly how to supplement our household income.”
“Were you hooking at this point?”
She laughed. “Oh, honey. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve hustled plenty, but I’ve never hooked. I just did small jobs back then. Like I might make friends with a woman with a purse and kids to watch after, talking to her kids and playing with them to gain her trust so I could lift some cash out of her wallet when she asked me to watch her kids or her purse while she went to the john. I never took all of the cash, and I never took their cards or anything they’d miss. Lipstick and small bills, sure.”
“OK, so how did you wind up in New Orleans?”
“I knew that if I stayed there I’d wind up like my mother. There just aren’t opportunities there, so I decided that as soon as I graduated from high school I was out of there. I did well enough in school that I got a couple of little scholarships, and with mom being a waitress and single mother, financial aid was easy to get. I went to LSU Baton Rouge, which was far enough from home that I was able to live on campus. I didn’t have a car, so it wasn’t like I was obligated to come home.”
“What was that experience like?”
“It was typical, I suppose. I partied a lot. I majored in business because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to be my own boss and do something creative. As you can see, that worked out real well for me. I graduated with a degree in marketing, so I guess it did kind of work. I market myself quite well.” She took a long drink off the soda. “I was close enough to New Orleans that every spring break and vacation I had, I managed to get here. I soon discovered that hustling here was easy, and I decided that it would be a great place to start my marketing career.”
Vaughn finished his notations and looked up at her. “So, how did you go from a marketing graduate to stripper?”
“My plan was to get a job first, then consider getting an MBA. I found out pretty quickly that no firm was going to hire a 22 year old kid with no actual work experience beyond waitressing; they loved interviewing me and stringing me along, taking me on second and third interview lunches. They basically treated me like a free escort. So, I decided to go back to school and hope that an internship would help out. I applied at UNO and got in, but there just aren’t grants for MBAs like there were for undergraduate degrees. I wasn’t interested in taking out a lot of loans, and I figured that if those young business men were interested in shelling out money if I was their escort in a suit who thought she was being interviewed for a job, why not just cut the crap? That was when I started dancing.”
He wondered if the decision had probably bothered her in the beginning and if she felt cheated by having to compromise herself as she had; it was hard for him to fathom having to make that choice.
She continued. “I never meant for it to be a long-term solution. The plan was to save up money for tuition and living expenses, but after about six months I realized that I was having fun and that I was making more than I could hope to working some cubicle job. My eventual plan was to open my own business, but those plans didn’t quite work out.” She was starting to get glassy eyed, and Vaughn could tell that the interview was winding down. He decided to wrap up for the day.
“OK, I think I’ve got a good base to work with here, Wren. My plan between now and the next interview is to follow up on some of the information you’ve given me, doing some research on Cinco Bayou and your time at college, if that’s ok with you.” He made a few more notes. “Would it be ok with you if I contacted your mother?”
“She died a couple of years ago. She drank herself to death; the years of smoking, waiting tables, and failed romances were not kind to her. Her name was Evelyn Stevenson.”
“So, Anderson is your father’s last name?”
“Yes. And you won’t find him either. James Eugene Anderson died of stab wounds from a knife fight somewhere in Mobile when I was 17. I’m not sure what started the fight, but it was in a bar, if you can imagine that.” He noticed that she didn’t seem to show any sadness as she told him of either death.
“I’m sorry, Wren.”
“Hey, no sweat. It’s not like they were friends of mine. They were nice enough, but they never went out of their way to really parent, you know?” She gave a weak smile as she stood up. The limitations on her range of motion made her wobble a bit, and he reached out instinctively to steady her. She didn’t flinch at his touch; instead, she leaned into him a bit. He stepped closer, moving the chair she had been sitting on out of her way. Her lips brushed his neck as he leaned toward the chair, and he felt her breath on him. For a split second, he felt the urge to kiss her. He assumed that she missed human contact, and even though he felt that urge, he resisted, thinking of how hurt Audrey would be, how disappointed he would be in himself.
Later that night in her cell, she waited for Olivia, staring at the point where the door met the floor in her cell, waiting for the strands of smoke that would signal her arrival. Shortly after midnight, first almost imperceptible wisps, then curls of smoke came rolling in. She continued to focus, trying to stay calm and to maintain control over her emotions.
Olivia noticed; even after she fully materialized Wren was not grasping at her or giving off the stink of desperation.
“You are getting stronger; I am proud that you are doing so well.” Olivia stood in the center of the cell, Wren on the bed. “I take it your interview with the reporter went well?”
She sat on the bed, testing Wren to see how close they could get with Wren controlling herself. She found it titillating that Wren did not beg her, did not cling to her seeking approval.
Wren nodded. “Today was easy in terms of the talking. He asked me questions about my childhood. The only trouble I had was when the interview was over.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s an outsider, an innocent. Feeding on him would have been so glorious. While I truly appreciate the donors who work here and who allow me to feed, I miss the hunt. His neck was so close to my mouth as he reached over to help me up from the chair, and I so wanted to feel the flesh give beneath my teeth, to feel the warmth bubble up.”
Olivia laughed under her breath and leaned in, nipping at Wren’s neck, barely marking her. She raised her face to Wren’s ear and whispered, “You can be rough with me with no danger to either of us.”
Her breath smelled of violets and Wren remembered Olivia’s love of violet mints. She marveled at the stories of vampires that stank of rotting flesh. Her smell memories of Olivia were always of flowers. It was never cloying, but always floral. Her head swam with the closeness of Olivia’s mouth to her own and with the offer Olivia made.
She felt her heart quicken, and a hard tug on her solar plexus almost as if someone grabbed her waistband and pulled her forward. She so wanted to lean into it and put her lips on Olivia’s. She fought it.
“Ah, you have been working on your restraint and self-control. That’s obvious in your ability to resist taking the reporter, and even more obvious in your ability to resist my offer at all.”
Olivia pressed her lips to Wren’s. Before, Wren always tasted bland; now, kissing her in a moment where Wren was in control of herself and truly consenting, Olivia found her much more interesting. She was warm, spicy like cumin and cinnamon. She pressed her against the wall, kissing her harder, her tongue pressing between her lips. Wren was yielding at first, but then kissed back. In their previous sexual encounters, Wren was the submissive, always passive and always seeking approval and permission. Tonight, though, she did not submit. Instead, she pushed Olivia back on the bed. First she straddled her, sitting on top of her, kissing her hard, then sliding her lips, barely touching, over the skin of her neck, pressing them in the curve of her shoulder. Olivia did not resist, did not try to regain control.
Wren made her way to a nipple, unfastening clothes as she went. She took the nipple between her teeth, barely grazing it. Her hands fumbled with buttons on Olivia’s trousers. She stood and grasped the fly
, popping them open. Her hands slid along Olivia’s flat belly, sliding around to the small of her back before grasping the back of her waistband, pulling the trousers and her underwear off roughly. Olivia raised her hips to help. Wren had never seen her so willing to let someone else have control.
She slid both hands up Olivia’s inner thighs, then over her hip bones. She pressed her body on top of Olivia’s, first kissing her on the mouth, then trailing to her neck, nipping her in much the same way Olivia had done to her earlier. She took great care, savoring the give of skin between her teeth which had grown sharp. As she pressed her mouth to the wound, she slid her fingers inside Olivia. Olivia arched against her, feeling herself slipping over the edge.
“What shall you give me if I help you?”
Wren stopped feeding just long enough to whisper in her ear, “I can only give you myself, that is all I have.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tiffany shifted in the chair. Belinda, whose stage name was Blaze, was reading the box for the hair dye. Tiffany was nervous, but she knew that Belinda did her own hair coloring and she’d done some of the other girls’ hair. She felt pretty confident that she wouldn’t screw up, and she wasn’t out much money if she did. She could always get a real beautician to fix it if it went awry. Her anxiety was more about worrying about the overall look. She had finished the second tattoo of a pentacle on her left shoulder and she opted for a fake nose piercing. The hair color and the makeover that Belinda was working on today were the last steps. When she stepped on stage tonight, she would be Morrigan reborn.
Brigitte's Cross (The Olivia Chronicles) Page 14
