Black Heart Loa (31 page)

“Incoming,” Merlin whispered into his ear.

Jackson opened his eyes, trying to puzzle out that cryptic comment, when the nomad upended the basin over his head and ended his speculation. Jackson gasped as the potioned and fragrant water cascaded over
him—fever-morphed into an icy waterfall—streaming down his face, chest, and back. Soaking his hair. He shivered convulsively, his skin goosebumping, and pushed his wet hair back from his face.

Cielo watched him, tongue lolling, from where she sat beside the table, looking somehow amused.

Get-in-the-tub time, Daddy.

Angélique stepped past Merlin, a lit white candle in one hand—which she passed to the nomad—so she could anoint Jackson on the forehead, throat, heart, just above the belly button, and then, as he shifted uncomfortably beneath her light touch, on the crotch of his boxer-briefs with oil that smelled of sandalwood and patchouli and myrrh.

“Protection comes to you this day, negativity and evil no longer hold sway,” Angélique chanted. Pacing back a step, she handed Merlin the bottle of oil and took back the candle. “So be it,” she proclaimed, finishing her trick.

Jackson felt a strange energy pogo through the room like a hyperactive child freebasing sugar, then Cielo disappeared from view. Vanished. Jackson blinked. He was pretty sure either the fever or the drugs or both were fucking with his perceptions again, since Siberian huskies didn’t possess cloaking devices.

“Did y’all see that?” Angélique said, her words slow and stunned and shaken. “The dog just went invisible.”

Oh, she’s gonna like that,
Jackson reckoned. A soft
whoo
confirmed his opinion.

Voices clamored that they had, indeed, seen the dog go invisible, and what the hell just happened? And what had been that weird-ass energy that had bounced through the room just prior to the dog’s vanishing?

Jackson closed his eyes, listening, as a burning tide of fever and reawakening pain swept over him. He swayed and his fingers tightened their grip on the edges of the table. The muscles in his right forearm spasmed, then quieted.

“We’ll figure it out later.” Ambrose’s voice cut through all the perplexed and anxious chatter. “It’s time to go. I’ll carry Jackson.”

“No.” Jackson opened his eyes. “I’ll walk. I might need some support,” he admitted. “But I’m going on my own two feet. Ain’t being carried, me.”

Ambrose nodded, and Jackson could see that his response had pleased him. “
C’est bien.
We’ll walk together.”

Once Jackson had swung his legs around and slid off the table to the floor, Ambrose’s steel-fingered hand locked around his biceps and kept him on his feet when his legs wobbled beneath him. Angélique draped a blanket over him for the walk outside.

With Angélique on one side and Ambrose on the other, Jackson walked slowly—more like tottered, he thought grimly—to the door, his muscles protesting each step. A tall, powerfully built man with tawny hair and beard stepped aside.

“Bonne chance,”
he said.

Recognizing his voice, Jackson stopped. “René, right? I remember you. At the grave and in the pirogue.
‘Lâche pas,’
” he said.
“Merci beaucoup.”

René inclined his head, brown eyes glinting with an emotion Jackson couldn’t name, then said, “And it still holds true, you.
Lâche pas
.”

Once outside, the small party—Jackson, Ambrose,
January, and Angélique—followed a well-trod dirt path past other swamp cottages and
cabanes
dripping with rain beneath a canopy of oaks and cypress. The air smelled of wet leaves, moss, and the bayou stretching beyond the houses and serving as their driveways.

Jackson sensed more than saw people watching from their windows and on their porches. The quiet was so profound—except for cicada buzz and bird trills—he heard only their own quiet footfalls. A cold dread nestled in his guts.

At the path’s end, he saw a small stone cottage with narrow slits for windows near its roofline.
Must be the cage
. His dread deepened.

“It’s tradition to have someone with you during First Change,” Angélique said. “Someone to comfort and encourage and guide.”

“Under normal circumstances,
oui,
” January replied. “But not with such a late First Change … if he becomes a monster, a mindless wolf-man. Too dangerous.”

Jackson stiffened at his
tante
’s words:
such a late First Change
. Did his age make a difference in his survival—his human nature too deeply rooted?

“He’s my brother’s son.
Mon neveu préféré
. I’ll stay with him. See him through.”

“Ambrose, no …” January sighed.

Sudden dizziness spun Jackson and he stumbled. His uncle kept a tight grip on him. “No shame if you don’t have the strength to walk any farther, boy,” he murmured.

“I’ll make it,” Jackson replied, feeling like he was coming unmoored and about to drift away again, a piece of flotsam on a dark tide.

He thought of Keats, dying of consumption at
twenty-five, trapped in a cramped little room on the Spanish Steps, listening to the sounds of life just outside his window and wanting to get up and walk out—yearning for it, but unable to. He’d never leave that room again. Not alive.

I have a choice and I can walk.

When they reached the cottage, Ambrose grabbed the thick stone door’s iron ring and pulled it open, stone scraping against stone. Stale air smelling of straw and old blood and musky pheromones rushed out.

Angélique gently drew the blanket from Jackson’s shoulders and draped it over her arm. “You can do this,” she told him. “You came back to us for a reason and it wasn’t to die.” She brushed the backs of her fingers against his cheek, the touch of skin icy against his. “Whatever you do, don’t give up.”

“I won’t,” Jackson promised, a smile brushing his lips.

January said nothing. Instead, she embraced him tightly, then released him and walked away.

As Jackson stepped into the dark cottage, he heard the click of nails against stone. “Out, you,” he said to his invisible dog. “You be a good girl and go with Angélique.”

Angélique came over and patted the air, feeling for Cielo. Cielo’s argumentative
whoo-whoo
gave her position away and the
traiteur
was able to grasp the Siberian husky’s collar. With a reassuring smile at Jackson, she led Cielo away, which looked pretty damned odd—a woman walking hunched over, her fingers looped through an invisible collar.

“Over there,” Ambrose said, pointing at the far wall. Steel glinted in the gray daylight shafting into the cottage. Chains.

Jackson nodded, mouth too dry for speech, and sat where his uncle had indicated. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. Butterflies raged in his stomach. He felt cold stone underneath him, heard the clink of chains, felt their icy touch against his skin as Ambrose locked them around his wrists and wrapped them around his waist. He smelled straw and steel, his uncle’s juniper scent.

“I’m here, boy,” Ambrose said quietly. “You ain’t alone, you.”

And like a dog whistled to a bone, the pain capered over on eager paws. Seized him. Wrenched and pulled. Tore him apart. His body arched and contorted as his bones cracked and shifted.

The chains clanked as the links suddenly pulled taut.

Jackson screamed.

I
t was nearly midnight
and the rain had stopped by the time the scarecrow finally wandered out of the sugarcane field. Wearing weather-beaten Goodwill clothes and her husband’s old straw cowboy hat, the scarecrow tottered on stiff, straw-filled legs into the pale pool of light spilling into Addie Martin’s front yard from the porch.

Addie watched from her front porch, hands on the hips of her bluebell-printed sundress, as the scarecrow—missing one black button eye—plowed straight into the palm tree near the cracked sidewalk leading up to the steps, bounced, then fell into a heap of faded cloth and straw on the lawn.

“One of your backfires?”

Addie nodded. “At least I think so.” She glanced at the dark-haired man standing beside her wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and faded jeans, a root doctor up from Jeanerette to attend the hoodoo emergency meeting. “The result of a spell I fixed this morning for good health—of all things.”

The root doctor—and now Addie’s memory deftly supplied his name, John Blaine—shook his head. “Near as
I’ve been able to learn, it seems like everything started going to hell in a handbasket right around dawn.”

“Sounds about right,” Addie agreed. “The wards musta went haywire near that time too.”

“Whatcha gonna do about
that
?” John nodded his head at her yard.

Addie sighed as the scarecrow heap twitched and rustled as though the straw were crawling with beetles, then pulled itself up onto its straw feet. Again.

“Ain’t a whole helluva lot I
can
do without laying a few tricks,” she said. “I thought about burning it. But I couldn’t imagine what I’d do if it started screaming.”

“Can’t scream. Ain’t got no vocal cords.”

“Ain’t got no bones neither, but it seems to be standing upright just fine without ’em.” When the scarecrow wobbled back into the palm tree’s trunk again, she amended, “Mostly.”

The stomach-rumbling smells of a late, impromptu supper wafted out from the porch door: butter-grilled cheese sandwiches, dill pickles, potato salad, and sweet tea. Voices murmured from inside the house, caught in urgent conversation as they listened to the Weather Channel and discussed the nightmare they were facing.

Magic gone wrong, the wards playing siren to seaborne disaster, luring it in.

In all of Addie’s twenty years of hoodooing, nothing like it had happened before.

Miraculous Mother, save us.

Addie eyed the scarecrow and wondered if shooting it full of buckshot and salt would do any good. She doubted it. Besides, it seemed incapable of doing much more than playing scarecrow bumper car with the palm tree. Harmless.

And she had a meeting to tend to. Fifteen hoodoos, conjurers, voodooists, and voodooiennes had traveled over to her place to discuss how to find the problem and, once found, how to solve it. Others had been too busy calming their communities and preparing for the blowdown.

It troubled her that her invitation to Gabrielle and her niece, Kallie, to join in the discussion and problem-solving session had been declined. Well. More or less. Addie replayed her most recent conversation with the blunt root worker.

“I’d like to come, but I have me a patient to tend to, plus I have t’ings I need to take care of—t’ings dat won’t wait. Kallie and Belladonna are still at dat carnival o’ fools down in New Orleans, so I ain’t expecting dem back until tomorrow. But I’m sending a friend in my place in de meantime, a mambo from Lafayette by way of Haiti.”

Addie had murmured her understanding, but the only thing running through her mind was:
What on earth could be more important than fixing the magic glitch and stopping the jinxed wards?

Addie couldn’t think of a single thing. And that made Gabrielle’s absence all the more disturbing, despite the arrival of her mambo friend, Gabi—and
that
must make get-togethers fun, Gabrielle and Gabi—a slim, fiftyish woman with dark skin and hazel eyes more honey than green who’d arrived in an orange and ancient VW Bug.

Taking in a deep breath of air laced with the sweet scent of fresh-cut grass and wet lilac, Addie dropped her hands from her hips and silently gave the scarecrow her blessing.

Enjoy your short life, palm tree scrapes and all.

Addie glanced at John as she turned around. “Time to get back to work.”

“If that’s what you call talking ourselves in circles, then yup, time to get back to it,” he agreed with a wink. The porch door creaked as he opened it and held it for her.

The hoodoo rootworkers, conjurers, and root doctors were gathered in the book-crammed living room, paper plates heaped with grilled cheese sandwiches and potato salad balanced on knees or resting on the coffee table as they gave their attention to Addie’s new flat-screen TV. Addie and John silently joined them.

Across the bottom of the screen, the words
HURRICANE WARNING MANDATORY EVACUATION
kept scrolling past in a bright yellow banner.

Addie stood behind the plush microfiber sofa, gaze locked on the high-definition screen, her arms folded under her breasts, and discovered, despite the food’s buttery, toasted aroma, that she had no appetite.

The talking heads on the Weather Channel kept up a grim patter about Hurricane Evelyn’s continuing increase in wind speed and ferocity. Just yesterday, the system had been a tropical storm headed for Belize. Now it was a category five hurricane with wind speeds nearing 180 miles per hour. And building.

“This hurricane is a monster, Jim,” one of the talking heads commented. “I’ve never seen one develop this fast before and it’s setting new records all across the board. Size. Speed. Ferocity. It’s not looking good.”

“I agree, Greg. Any idea where it will make landfall and when?”

“As of now, its trajectory puts Hurricane Evelyn on a direct path to the Louisiana coast, with landfall expected—right now—anywhere between Houma and New Orleans. As for when—my estimate, based on its current forward
speed, and keep in mind that keeps increasing as well—is tomorrow evening, maybe the following morning. Evelyn’s outer rain bands accompanied by tropical storm force winds will reach us within a few hours if her present forward speed continues.”

A short, stunned pause, then: “That doesn’t give folks much time for evacuation.”

“No, it sure doesn’t, Greg. This could be the biggest and deadliest hurricane in a century.”

And just like that, with a few words and a few satellite and radar images, a bad situation became infinitely worse.

HURRICANE EVELYN NOW A CATEGORY FIVE WITH WIND SPEEDS OF 180 MPH AND STILL INCREASING. EXPECTED TO MAKE LANDFALL IN 24–36 HOURS. MANDATORY EVACUATION IN THE FOLLOWING PARISHES: JEFFERSON, ST. BERNARD, PLAQUEMINES, ORLEANS, ST. TAMMANY, LAFOURCHE
…