by G A Chase
Doodlebug’s energy grew faint. “I can only take you to the border between demon and human. You’ll be unprotected.”
Though she had the soul of Serephine Malveaux, Sere also existed on the energy of Jennifer’s doppelgänger. “I understand. Make sure Dooly doesn’t waste any time.”
The isolation of being caught between the counter-rotating tubes of the demons and the damned tore at Sere’s soul. Each demon whose energy held the human souls captive had either been put down by Sere personally or through one of her trusted accomplices. As for the people who were trapped under the demons’ fire, she bore responsibility for every one of their deaths.
As the first person to succumb to a demon, Larry was the first to greet Sere. “How’s that motorcycle? No new blown head gaskets, I hope.”
She desperately wished she had a body so she could hug the mechanic. “Purrs like a kitten.” The feeling of tears filling her eyes transcended the lack of a body. “I never meant…”
“Don’t even say it.” Kelly, who’d protected Sere and introduced her to the magic of coffee and apple pie, was so intertwined with Larry’s energy that Sere had trouble differentiating the two. “Helping is only honest if the consequences are accepted as part of the deal. I thought I was protecting you from a physically abusive relationship. I would have gone toe-to-toe with the brute of a biker I imagined was pursuing you. This hell might be worse than either Larry or I bargained for, but we wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
Sere wasn’t sure if dead souls could lie, though the two overly caring individuals had never impressed her as the type to hesitate if someone was in need. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
“We know you will.” The sentiment came so firmly from the two that Sere wasn’t sure which had said it. The feeling echoed along the passageway made of souls.
A man’s voice resounded up from hell. “You’ll have to fight me first.”
“No, she won’t.” Larry had the same determined tone he’d had when facing a frozen engine bolt. The cylinder of human souls formed an impenetrable barrier between the souls of Aloysius and Sere.
The smugness of the nascent devil filled the tube. “Good luck freeing your precious little people. Just know that once they’re gone, you’ll be stuck between me and my minions.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Sere said. Like an unidentifiable wisp of cold air on a hot day, the flames trapping Sere in place wavered. “Doodlebug?”
“I’m back with Dooly. Baron Samedi needed a human soul to latch on to in order to access the professor’s computers. But even with her, he can’t descend into hell—only the outer casing of this power cord. As a human-doppelgänger hybrid, you’re the only one who can transcend the layers. With Dooly and Baron Samedi outside, I can hold the outer casing of demons open. If you can guide the souls through the gap, Samedi will be ready to welcome them home.”
Sere turned to the energy of Larry and Kelly. “We’ve got a plan. I’m going to open a seam between human and demon, then you need to follow me through. Bring the others along with you.” She imagined reaching her hand through the thin veil that separated her from those she cared about. Larry’s oil-stained grip was as firm in death as it had been in life.
Like water erupting from the split in a weak section of garden hose, Sere shot out of the power cord, followed by all of the souls the demons had incarcerated.
“Oh no, you don’t.” Marjory’s scream of desperation filled the tube, but even with her force of will, with no structure to the pipeline, the demon flames wafted through the air like a torch that had lost its oxygen supply.
“I can’t close the breach,” Doodlebug yelled.
“You don’t have to,” Baron Samedi said. Like having someone stepping on the garden hose to stop the flow of water, the power cord made of demon spirits collapsed on itself, leaving the smoky ghosts to drift away.
Sere looked up into the loa of the dead’s dark eyes. Towering over her and the other disembodied spirits, he sat in a tall-backed wooden throne covered in African carvings. Cigar smoke drifted over his top hat and up to the embossed tin-plate ceiling. Though lit candles of varying usage coated the tables in wax, Sere couldn’t make out the framed images that hung above them on the blackened walls. She struggled to her feet. “Thank you for meeting me.” Behind her stood the nineteen lost souls like mannequins in a clothing store’s back room.
From the overwhelming smell of rum, it wasn’t difficult to guess what Baron Samedi was drinking. “You have a present for me.”
She resisted being ushered to Guinee herself, even though the people killed by demons moving through the voodoo version of purgatory would be a step out of hell and toward everlasting peace. “These souls were stolen from life. They deserve their rest.”
He blew a cloud of blue smoke that encircled the people behind Sere. “My precious lost souls, you’ve endured more than Guinee ever would have demanded. I welcome you into the beyond and will personally escort you to the deep waters.”
The relief that followed the dissipation of the spirits warmed the room. He nodded over Sere’s head to Doodlebug and Dooly, who remained standing together along the back wall. “One of you is alive, and the other a mirror. I leave you in peace until your time is finished.”
They too dissipated from the room.
“I’m not going anywhere.” The defiant tone of Aloysius Laroque made Sere reach for the knife in her boot. Even without her physical form, the blade had become such a constant companion that she could feel the handle.
Samedi shook his head. “You are in my realm now. As you are neither alive nor dead, you are none of my concern.” He flicked his cigar ash at the man. “I cast you back from whence you came.”
“We have unfinished business, Sere Mal-Laurette,” Aloysius yelled as he wafted into the ether. “I promise you, we will meet again.”
I don’t doubt it. She turned back to the dark man on his throne of judgment. “It’s down to just the two of us, old man. Do I get a say in what happens to me, or are you just going to summarily hand out justice as always?”
“What would you have me do with you?” Smoke from his cigar stub drifted up under his hat and around his face.
“Hell needs a guardian. You’ve claimed it’s not your domain or responsibility. Fair enough, but if the demons it spawns work their way into life, your cut-and-dried responses to the living and the dead won’t work. As is evident from the nineteen souls you just returned to the reservoir of humanity, you need me.”
He crushed out the thick stump of stinky tobacco. “Immortality is a condition we cannot abide, but as you’ve crossed that bridge, we can’t force you back to human form.”
She knew the dangers of comparing her situation to the loas of the dead. They hated any whiff of competition. “My enemies are trying to find a way around death.”
He leaned back with his tumbler of rum. “I won’t engage in the enemy of my enemy argument with you. From the first Mardi Gras when your father stole my cane and put himself on the path of becoming the devil, I knew your family would be trouble.”
“I am not my father.” She never could stand being compared to the devil.
“We shall see. For now, you have earned my favor. We part as allies. I return you to your life and loves, Sere Mal-Laurette.”
“I’m guessing this isn’t what you had in mind.” Sanguine said from the side of the vault.
Sere pounded her fists against the iron wall and stamped her feet. “Can’t that fool of the dead do anything right?”
“Don’t blame him.”
She turned in horror toward Jennifer’s spirit. “Don’t tell me he trapped you too?”
“It wasn’t Samedi,” the homemaker said. “When Fisher took the pellet out of you and you didn’t come to, Bart zoomed out on his Ducati to get me. We all agreed the only way to save you was to establish our connection.”
Sanguine sat with her arms around her knees. “As you can see, that didn’t go so well.
With you stuck under some dimensional rock, Jennifer ended up pulled into the vault. Fortunately, I was able to stop her before she followed you into whatever nightmare you landed in.”
“I wasn’t gone that long!”
Sanguine raised her palms to the ceiling. “In this in-between dimension, how would one keep track of time? You’re in limbo. You should understand that better than anyone. After all, you started your doppelgänger existence by zapping from being a dead child in pre-Civil War New Orleans through Guinee to modern-day hell all in the blink of an eye.”
Though Sere did understand, she didn’t see how that was any help. It certainly didn’t ease her frustration. “And what about you? Are those magic future-seeing eyes of yours on the blink? You couldn’t have warned me that this was going to happen?”
“Limbo,” Sanguine said as if a one-word answer should suffice. “I can’t see the future if there is no such thing as time. Besides, you know full well that I see multiple possible futures, and the only way for me to explore them is to fly while focusing on the specific time line.”
“Whatever.” Even after a lifetime together, Sere never really got what use the angel’s crystal eyes were for avoiding problems. She turned back to Jennifer. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“We were thinking you were in trouble. Which you were.”
“You two need to stop arguing,” Sanguine said. “Trust me, allowing your emotions to get the better of you drains this vault’s ability to keep you alive.”
Sere slunk to the floor in front of Sanguine. “So I just made the hurricane worse with my little temper tantrum?”
“Something like that. With the three of us in this power chamber, anything we do will be magnified out there.”
Jennifer tapped her fingers against the wall. “But now we can work together to figure a way out. Couldn’t we just slide down the shoot to hell and escape like we did the last time?”
Sere tried hard not to snap out her response. “It doesn’t work that way. Jenna didn’t yank us into her dimension this time. We’re stuck in this box, and it’s not in either hell or life. The bottom line is that even if we could open the door, we can’t walk straight from this vault into either dimension.”
Jennifer’s tapping was getting on Sere’s nerves. “But you said because we met over coffee the last time that Jenna was able to haul us into hell.”
Sere doubted that the woman knew the first thing about hell even after having been hauled through it like a balloon animal on a string, but she did her best not to resort to her earlier perspective of Jennifer being nothing but an airheaded homemaker. “What’s your point?”
“That if Jenna could drag us into hell before, even if we’re in this vault, maybe she can again. You said she zeroed in on our combined souls. With her as the third point in our messed-up triangular existence, she must sense something even with us in this isolation box.”
Sere felt the cold chill of the vault’s walls creep up her spine. “Though having her drag us under might solve one problem, it could turn loose another. Marjory is after this vault and would very much like to have me out of the way of her demon invasions. If Jenna pulls us and the vault into hell, there will only be that door’s lock protecting us from turning into ghosts in the wrong dimension.”
Sanguine’s feathers quivered. “And as the Cormorant, Jenna has made it clear she considers Sere’s body her own. If she has both of your souls locked in this cage, where you can’t fight back, Jenna could pretty much take whatever she wants, including fulfilling her claim of being an immortal power.”
“Right.” Sere stood up and put her hands on the sides of the vault. “Between the three of us, we should be able to detect which dimension we’re in. If Jenna does manage to drag us under, we need to send as much energy into these walls as we can muster. It may be our only chance at keeping the bird deity out of our business.” She looked at Jennifer, half wishing the woman had been smart enough to stay on her side of the dimensional line, and half grateful she’d accepted Bart’s harebrained scheme of connecting her to hell. “If you were crazy enough to try to rescue me, you can bet Bart will be moving heaven and earth to retrieve this box.” She just hoped he wouldn’t be doing it alone. “We just need to ward off any attempt at opening the door until help arrives.”
7
Doodlebug came to, lying on the water-saturated mattress of her dimly lit hotel room. “At least I made it home before getting re-sucked into the bridge. Aloysius must be throwing a hissy fit.”
“And Baron Samedi let us go,” Dooly said over their headband connection.
Doodlebug forgot she was still wearing it. “Where did you end up?”
“I’m in Myles and Kendell’s condo. To contact Baron Samedi, Myles needed his magic loa of the dead cane.”
Doodlebug rubbed at the headband. “I’m not sensing Sere.”
Dooly curled her body into a tight ball on the couch. “She’s still comatose in Fisher’s offices. No one knows what to do. Bart brought in Jennifer, but now she’s unresponsive as well. You don’t think Baron Samedi would have claimed both souls, do you?”
Doodlebug couldn’t imagine not having Sere as her mentor and savior. If the devil’s own daughter could be defeated, what chance did a sixteen-year-old doppelgänger have against the forces of hell? And without her Get Out of Hell card, Doodlebug wondered if any future act against either Marjory or the Cormorant made any sense. She latched on to one of her remaining straws of hope. “What does Myles say? He was the one to call in the loa of the dead.”
“According to him, Baron Samedi let her go, but Myles only has me as concrete proof that the baron did what he said. If Sere is gone, what do you want to do? The Laroque party is tonight.”
Doodlebug stared through the blown-out window. “If I’m stuck forever in this hell, I need to know whose side to join. We should continue with the plan.”
“Marjory sounded seriously pissed that her connection to hell had been destroyed.”
Doodlebug was still dizzy but able to sit upright. “That’s an understatement. Fortunately, she doesn’t know what we look like. To her, I was just a spark in her electrical line. As far as she knows, I was just another dead doppelgänger whose energy was locked in her malware and now haunts the professor’s offices. She’ll need to keep her desperation in check to negotiate with the Cormorant. Though with Marjory’s human ability to lie and the Cormorant being unfamiliar with deception, the whole event should be quiet entertaining. I’ll need to get my emotions in check or suffer the consequences of being pointed out should things turn ugly.”
“How do you want to handle our attendance?” Dooly asked. “You said you wanted me to take point, but I’ll only take over to the extent that you want me to.” The girl actually sounded downright concerned.
Between being a conduit for Aloysius’s soul and getting stuck with Sere in Baron Samedi’s office, Doodlebug hadn’t given the party a great deal of thought. “I guess I’ll want my motorcycle close by so I can get out of there if something goes wrong. That would also give me a place to stash my weapons as I’m sure I won’t be able to walk in armed. My transfer to your actions will have to be after I’ve secured my belongings.”
“My band landed the gig without any fuss,” Dooly said. “We’re marching with the performers in a second line from the Bywater to the Garden District. I don’t imagine you’d want to make the switch while marching, but it would give us a chance to sync up our movements. The band has been told to come to the mansion’s back entrance.”
The whole idea of giving up her self-will made Doodlebug even more queasy than she was from being a part of the bridge. “The back door is probably a concession to the mirror party in this dimension. There will have to be a coatroom for the rain slickers. Marjory wouldn’t want the hired help soiling her floors in either dimension. I can use the excuse of changing into my musician outfit to find a place to turn myself over to you.” Even saying the words felt like forfeiting her soul.
“Just be careful. If you do anything stupid, I won’t be able to contain my reaction. I’ll contact you again during the march to the mansion.” Doodlebug pulled off the headband and rubbed her forehead. The intense connection had lasted longer than she’d bargained for, and she needed time to regain her personal thoughts before handing over her existence to Dooly again.
Doodlebug pulled out the weapons she would need from the bathroom and laid them on the seat of the Honda Blackbird parked next to her bed. With her motorcycle, change of clothing, and weapons, she would be set for before and after the party. How she looked and acted during the show would be Dooly’s responsibility. Getting to the second line and marching with the other performers, however, required festive attire that had never been a part of Doodlebug’s wardrobe. “Damn it.” She secured the katana to her back and slipped a sickle under her belt for her foray into the Quarter.
Shopping wasn’t a concept she embraced. Between collecting weapons off decapitated harvesters, receiving necessities as payments for protecting doppelgängers, and selectively keeping items projected from Dooly, Doodlebug couldn’t remember ever stepping into an actual store. Hiding inside the secure buildings gave the sales people a measure of safety from the harvesters. The trips to and from work, however, required the protection of Doodlebug’s small army of gutter punks and homeless street people, and that indebted the clerks to Doodlebug. She hoped that sense of obligation would be enough to get in the door.
