Black Heart Loa (44 page)

Ambrose knelt and draped a blanket over Jackson, then gathered him into his arms. “Let’s get y’all over to my home, get ready for the blowdown.”

Releasing Jackson’s hand, Kallie rose to her feet. Her vision grayed and a high-pitched humming filled her ears. The cottage’s dim interior spun.

Kallie felt herself falling, then felt strong arms snapping around her. She caught a whiff of musk and sweet orange and knew the arms belonged to Layne.

“I’m surprised de girl stayed conscious dis long,” she heard her aunt say.

Then nothing as Kallie tumbled into a dreamless dark.

T
he eerie shrieks of
a thousand furious cats shredded the dark and yanked Kallie up from sleep. She stared at the unfamiliar ceiling above her, heart pounding, struggling to remember where and when and what—until the wind’s steady howl sank in.

Le Nique. Blowdown. Evelyn had arrived.

Rain machine-gunned the house. The roof creaked and groaned.

Kallie sat up, pushing a quilt off her legs. She realized she still wore the sheet she’d grabbed from the
cabane
and that she was on a bed in a darkened room that smelled faintly of ripe apples. Layne slept on his back beside her, his face turned away toward the plywood-protected windows. Beyond them, Evelyn raged.

Kallie slid off the bed and stood, then gasped. Every muscle in her body ached and she was sore in some very tender places. She glanced over her shoulder at Layne. And no wonder. A marathon eight hours.

Her cheeks heated as a tide of emotions—embarrassment, affection, uncertainty, yearning—washed over her. It was a ritual, she reminded herself, a necessity. Not a
romantic hookup. Not even a date. Still, she couldn’t stop herself from turning around, leaning over the bed, and trailing a finger along one pale dread.

When Kallie straightened, she noticed her clothes resting in a neat pile on the nightstand. Removing her sheet-sarong, she dressed quickly. At the door, she paused to give Layne one last look, then slipped from the room.

Clad in a white
tee and jeans, Jackson sat hunched forward on the sofa in the front room, his body knotted, his fisted hands braced between his knees. Shadows and soft light from the lantern on the end table flickered across his face. The bottom edge of his tattoo peeked out from beneath his right sleeve.

Gone, but never forgotten
Nicolas & Lucia Bonaparte
Junalee & Jeanette, my angels
Je t’aime toujours

A pang of sympathy cut through Kallie. She suspected that the hurricane outside had nothing on the blowdown of grief and rage and survivor’s guilt Evelyn had resurrected within her cousin.

“Hey, Jacks,” she said.

He looked at her, his eyes glowing a pale absinthe green in the lantern light. “Hey back,” he replied, rising to his feet as she crossed the room to join him, a smile on his lips.
“Comment ça va?”

“
Ça va bien.
How about you?”

“Never better, short stuff. Thanks to you.” Jackson wrapped Kallie up in a tight hug. As always, he smelled of the sea—brine and surf and wet sand—a soothing,
familiar scent. “
Ti-tante
said that you and Bell never stopped searching for me, never gave up.”

“You’d do the same for me,” Kallie said, looking up into his honey-eyed gaze.

He grinned. “In a fucking heartbeat.”

“What happened to you—the Change—was all my fault,” she said, throat constricting. “If you’d … if anything had …”

“Bullshit. It was my mother’s fault, Kall, not yours. All you did was set me free.”

“And nearly killed you in the process!”

“Again, wasn’t your fault,
chère. Ti-tante
told me what happened.” He chewed on his lower lip as though mulling over the words he’d just spoken. “Or most of it, anyway. She told me that we-all needed to have a long talk when we got home.”

“Understatement,” Kallie muttered. She wondered how her cousin would react to the news of his aunt’s new identity—correction:
original
identity.

Kallie reached up and pushed Jackson’s dark hair back from his face. No pointed ears like Devlin Daniels’s. “How did it feel?” she asked. “Changing.”

Releasing her, Jackson stepped back a pace. “You know when you get a tattoo, how it hurts like holy hell as the needle pierces your skin over and over until your brain kicks out the endorphins and everything goes numb and you’re riding an awesome endorphin high?”

“No, actually, but I’ve heard that’s how it works,” Kallie replied.

“You didn’t pick up any tats while in N’awlins?”

“Nope. But was that how Changing felt?”

“Oh, hell, no. Changing hurt like a motherfucker.”

Kallie whapped his shoulder. “While I’m really sorry to hear that—I’m relieved to note that you’re still a goddamned brat.”

Jackson snorted. “I coulda told you that.”

Kallie hesitated for a moment before saying, “Y’know, it took me a while to remember what you’d told me when we were little—about your papa being a
loup-garou.
It’d been so long, I’d forgotten about it. How come you never mentioned it again?”

With a low sigh, Jackson sank back down onto the sofa. “After Papa moved out of the house and Mama told us that we’d never Change, that it wasn’t in us, I was so disappointed”—he shrugged—“that I didn’t want to talk about it. For a while, I even thought Papa had left
because
we couldn’t Change.” A muscle flexed in his jaw. “I know different now.”

Kallie sat beside him. “How you doing with all of this? You’ve had a ton of shit dumped on your plate in the last forty-eight hours.”

One dark eyebrow quirked up. “So have you,” he pointed out. “Me, I’m fine.”

Kallie knew better, but she let the lie pass. She looked around the shadowed room to where Belladonna and Divinity sat at a lantern-lit table playing cards with Ambrose and January—Go Fish, given Belladonna’s polite request for Divinity’s twos and her aunt’s crowed, gleeful response. An anxious
whoo
from beneath the table and the gleam of lambent eyes revealed Cielo’s huddled presence.

“Where’s everyone else?” Kallie asked.

“Gabrielle left fo’ Lafayette right after de magic fix,” Divinity replied. “Some o’ de udder hoodoos left about
den too; a few stayed to ride out de storm. Dat little nomad, McKenna, she be over at Angélique and Merlin’s place. Me, I invited her to come here, but she refused.” She glanced at Ambrose. “Gimme all o’ yo’ fives.”

The Alpha sighed. Plucking two cards from his hand, he gave them to Divinity. “Never play cards with a hoodoo,” he grumbled.

“Mmm-hmm,” Divinity affirmed.

Kallie could understand McKenna’s refusal. Could imagine how she would feel in the
shuvani
’s place if an ex-husband she still loved had just spent eight sweaty, passion-drenched hours in the sack with a woman she despised.

“How long was I asleep?” Kallie asked. “And when did Evelyn make landfall?”

“Almost six hours, Shug, for sleep,” Belladonna answered, “two hours since landfall. It’s a little past midnight. I thought maybe you’d just snooze through the whole thing.”

The house shuddered in a fierce blast of wind, the rain’s nonstop staccato hammering sounding like a herd of cows tap-dancing on the roof. Something thudded hard against the side of the house.

“Not me. But it looks like Layne might,” Kallie said. “For some reason I thought he’d be a light sleeper, since he’s a nomad and all—”

“I potioned him,” Divinity explained. “His head was hurting again. The sleep will do him good.”

“It will,” Kallie agreed.

A heavy crash from outside jarred the house. Cielo backed farther into the shadows under the table. Jackson jumped to his feet.

“Just a tree, boy,” Ambrose commented. “It missed us, otherwise the wind would be whipsawing through here, tearing everything apart.”

“Gonna check.” Tension edged Jackson’s voice. He winced as he headed for the kitchen and the back door at its end, his stride as slow and stiff as that of an arthritic old man.

Bet he hurts everywhere. Muscles. Joints. Tendons. Even his skin and teeth.

But it was Jackson’s haunted heart that worried Kallie the most.

She rose from the sofa and hurried after her cousin, catching up with him at the back door as he was lifting up the wooden bar barricading the door. Kallie blinked. Seemed that
loups-garous
didn’t believe in locks, just slabs of wood to keep doors shut during blowdowns.

The wind wrenched the door from Jackson’s grasp and slammed it open against the counter. Falling in horizontal sheets, rain slashed into the kitchen, slicked the floor tiles. The din outside was deafening—a monstrous roar. Things thumped and snapped and twanged in the pitch-black darkness beyond.

Wind blasted into the kitchen, sucking at Kallie’s breath and yanking at her hair. “Close the door!” she shouted over the noise. “You can’t see nothing anyway!”

Jackson grabbed the doorjambs and braced himself. “I wanna see if the water’s rising. I’ll grab a lantern.”

“Even if it is, the house is on pilings. The water can’t reach us. Forget the goddamned lantern and close the goddamned door!”

Rain needled Kallie’s face, stung her eyes. She spun
away from the door and Evelyn’s savage maw. Wind grabbed at her, shoved.

“Our house was on pilings too,” Jackson yelled, trying to be heard over the storm. “Ten feet up, remember? And it wasn’t enough. Not even close. Gaspard’s storm surge turned out to be eighteen fucking feet. We never had a chance.”

Kallie’s heart drummed against her ribs. Those were the first words he’d ever spoken about what had happened during that awful day nine years ago. She turned back around to face him. Jackson was struggling to wrestle the door shut, fighting the wind, the muscles cording in his arms and neck. Kallie joined him, and it took all of their combined strength to close the door.

Panting, Jackson dropped the thick wood bar back into place. He was soaked to the skin, his white tee rendered transparent by the rain and clinging to his chest and flat belly. He shoved his wet hair back from his face. Behind him, the shrieking wind pounded at the door, rattling it in its frame.

“Tell me,” Kallie said softly, pushing back her own wet tresses. “What happened that day,
cher
? How come y’all didn’t get out in time?”

Jackson stared at her for a long moment, his back against the shuddering door. Water dripped from his face. A muscle in his jaw snapped taut. “We were only supposed to get the edge of the storm,” he said, his tone flat. “But Gaspard shifted course from Texas to Louisiana. We didn’t find out until it was too late. When Mama realized what was happening, she loaded us into the pickup.”

Jackson slid down the door to sit on the rain-puddled floor and wrapped his arms around his upraised knees. He
continued speaking, and tears stung Kallie’s eyes as she sat down beside him and listened to his heartbreaking monotone words.

The pile-driving wind refuses to allow Papa to open the truck’s door, so Papa pulls them from the truck through the driver’s-side window after Mama manages to it roll down. Jackson is lifted out last. He scoops Jeanette up and she locks her arms around his neck in a near stranglehold and scissors her legs around her waist. He feels her trembling against him.

“Tout va bien,”
he promises her. “Everything’s gonna be okay,
p’tite.
Just hold on tight.”

“It’s too late to drive outta here!” Papa yells, gathering Junalee into his arms. “Head back to the house!”

They race back home through horizontal sheets of rain and caterwauling wind, fighting to keep upright every step of the way. Once inside, Jackson coaxes his baby sister into releasing her death grip around his neck and eases her onto the sofa.

Even though it is still daylight, Mama busies herself with lighting lanterns and handing out flashlights. With the windows boarded up against the storm, the house is full of shadows and gloom. The girls sit huddled together on the sofa, eyes wide and faces pale as things thump and thud against the roof and exterior walls.

Jackson fetches Monopoly out of the hall closet and sets the game up on the coffee table. Papa claims the top hat, and Mama the iron. It takes some coaxing, but finally Junalee picks the thimble and Jeanette the dog, leaving Jackson the roadster.

They’re in the middle of the second game—Junalee has hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place—when the sound of splintering wood and screeching nails from overhead
suggest that parts of the roof are being peeled away. Jackson’s heart launches into a frantic rhythm.

Everyone looks up.

“What’s that, Papa?” Jeanette asks in a small voice.

Papa rises to his feet, his gaze on the ceiling. “Just the wind,
p’tite.”

Something large crashes against the outside wall and the house sways as though no longer anchored to the pilings or the foundation, then shifts. Cracks zigzag along the walls, the ceiling. Plaster dusts the hardwood.

Jackson stands and reaches for Jeanette. The house is starting to disintegrate beneath the howling wind’s ferocious onslaught. Just as he scoops his baby sister into his arms, the front door slams open and a brown wall of churning water a good eight feet high surges into the house, knocking Jackson off his feet and sucking him and Jeanette under.

In the dark, tumultuous water Jackson can’t tell up from down. Debris and furniture swirl along in the briny tide, crashing into him with bruising force. Arms locked around his sister, he kicks upward—or at least what he
hopes
is upward—and breaches the water’s surface.

He has a split second to realize that the house has vanished before something massive—maybe an uprooted oak—smashes into him. Pain knifes his ribs. His vision grays. By the time the tree sweeps past him, Jackson realizes his arms are empty.