Black Heart Loa (7 page)

Rum gone, the Baron saluted Gabrielle with the emptied bottle. “T’anks fo’ de drink,” he said, his silver-handled walking stick shimmering into his right hand. “And if I wasn’t married to my beautiful Maman Brigitte, I would fuck yo’ sweet pussy till you begged fo’ mercy.” Another lewd wink, then a sigh. “But I be married and I got motherfucking work to do.”

“My petition …”

“Ah,
oui.
Since Jackson Bonaparte already be in his grave, I t’ink it best to keep him dere.” The Baron laughed again, but the humorous warmth was missing this time. This time the
loa
’s laughter cut through the air like a razor-edged shovel. “The sonuvabitch had it coming,” he said, sounding in that moment exactly like Cash.

But that was impossible. A possessed
cheval
remained that way until released by the
loa
. They had no voice of their own, no say, no—

“And you were right about that rum not being for any mortal man,” the Baron continued in Cash’s voice. “Hoo-ee! It was hot enough to set my throat on fire and burn my gut to ash. Good thing I ain’t mortal no more, huh?”

Gabrielle stared, mouth dry, heart pounding.

Scooping up the bread and cup of coffee from the altar, Baron Samedi sauntered back into the smoke, then smoke,
loa,
and the man he rode vanished as thunder cracked overhead.

Oh,
Bon Dieu!
How was this possible?

Feeling faint, Gabrielle pressed her fisted hands
against her chest as though to keep her heart from pounding its way free. She stared at the woman snoring on the sofa in front of her, wondering how to tell her that Cash—the man who watched as her nephew was buried alive—not only housed the
loa
of death, but
controlled
him.

And he still hated Jackson Bonaparte.

F
ound you, Daddy
.

An image of Cielo flared behind Jackson’s eyes—ears pricked forward, intelligence and concern in her eyes (one blue, one brown), her muzzle lifted as though sniffing the air—and prodded him from the half-dreaming twilight he’d tumbled into, poked at his awareness until he was no longer dreaming.

Here, girl …

He woke up. Unable to breathe. Unable to see. Unable to move.

Panic writhed through Jackson, wriggling like worms underneath the skin, then memory flared like heat lightning across a summer-scorched sky, and he remembered the whole damned nightmare.

The desperate and brutal fight in the yard with three men he’s never seen before—two black, one white, all deadly—wondering who hired them even as he swings the baseball bat at their heads.

Being forced out of his own goddamned pickup, wrists bound, and marched in front of a freshly dug grave, a cold sweat bathing his body.

Falling to his knees as his feet are kicked out from under him. Pain ripples along his scalp as someone grabs a handful of hair, jerks his head back, and pours a potion down his throat—a dark liquid smelling of graveyards, oranges, and decay. Jackson gags, struggles to pull free. Fails.

Refusing to look at him, to meet his eyes, the white dude slices at Jackson with a pocketknife—arms, thighs, chest, belly, scalp. Blood pours, stinging, into his eyes. Slicks his skin. Soaks his shirt, his jeans. Warm and wet and sticky.

“Careful, asshole! He’s supposed to bleed out
slow.”

A numbing cold curls through his veins, crackles across his thoughts, slows his heart. And even before they kick him into the grave, Jackson knows he is beyond fucked.

The earth weighed down on Jackson like a lead-lined blanket, pushing him further toward its dark, moist heart, slowly crushing from his aching lungs what little air he’d managed to keep. Dirt clogged his nostrils, clung to his lips, and coated his tongue despite the arms he’d managed to crisscross protectively over his face as the bastards had shoveled soil on top of him.

All business, those sons of bitches. No laughing. No teasing final words. Just the solid
schunk
of shovel blades into the ground, followed by the cascade of dirt on flesh and denim.

Hell, he could understand that—why waste breath on a tricked-up dead man? But who the fuck would go to so much trouble? None of the crews or dealers he liberated goods from dealt with hoodoo or voodoo—as far as he knew—they’d just plug two into the back of his skull, then dump his body into the bayou.

Another image of Cielo filled Jackson’s thoughts. He smelled sunshine warm in her fur.

Daddy. Digging.

A tendril of hope rooted itself in Jackson’s heart.
Good girl, you.

Six feet above, he heard howling—a sudden blow-down, maybe, or Cielo singing as she worked. His body itched and burned and spasmed, his thoughts spinning like a steering wheel ripping a three-sixty turn.

Panting for air, Jackson slipped underneath the surface of dreams again and plummeted into a cold and endless twilight. And remembered another day, another savage storm.

“The wind is scaring me, Jacks!” Jeanette yells, locking her arms tight around Jackson’s neck as he carries her across the yard to the Dodge pickup. Her long dark pigtails, rain-soaked and thick, whip against his face.

“Moi aussi!
But I’m glad I’ve got you to keep me safe,
p’tite peu,”
Jackson teases, despite the tension knotting his belly. “Do you think we could stop and change places?
You
carry
me
to the truck?”

“No, silly.” Jeanette tightens her stranglehold around his neck. For a split second he feels like he can’t breathe, but the sensation vanishes when his sister giggles into his ear. “And don’t call me ‘little bit’ no more. I’m turning seven tomorrow, so I’m big now.”

“Big enough to carry me?”

“Uh-huh. I just hafta shrink you with a backwards magnifying glass, then tuck you into my pocket.”

“Got that backwards magnifying glass with you?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Looks like I’m gonna hafta keep carrying you, then,
bebelle.”

“Okay.”

Jackson loads his baby sister into the pickup, rain soaking him to the skin despite the dark blue slicker and rubber fishing boots he wears. The wind slams into him, a bully’s hard, ruthless shove, and he plants his feet wide in the driveway as he fights to keep his balance. Gulf-warm water needles his face, stings his eyes, sucks at his breath.

“Get your butt in the truck, Jacks!” his mama yells over the wind’s ever-increasing shriek as she struggles to open the driver’s door and climb in behind the wheel. Her cinnamon curls, café au lait skin, and green slicker glisten with rain. “We need to get the hell outta here before it’s too late.”

Jackson gets in, and pulls Jeanette onto his lap. Shivering, she wraps her cold, wet arms around his neck. Ten-year-old Junalee sits next to Mama, her dark hair rain-soaked, wet tendrils plastered against her face and neck. She glances at Jackson, and he sees his own fear and doubt reflected in her amber eyes. Sees it validated in the worry furrowing Mama’s brow.

It’s
already
too late to leave.

At fourteen, Jackson’s weathered a handful of hurricanes—some in Houma, before his folks split, the rest in Morgan City—and he feels like an old hand. But not today.

Today butterflies whip up a storm inside his gut and his body thrums with the need to run, to hunker down and hide.

Hurricane Gaspard was supposed to make landfall in Texas at Corpus Christi. Morgan City only expected heavy rain and wind, and Jackson helped Mama make sure they had plenty of canned goods and bottled water on hand. Made
sure the generator was primed and that bottled propane was at hand in case something went wrong with the generator.

By the time the weather service realizes that Gaspard has no intention of making landfall at Corpus Christi and has changed its course with unheard-of speed, arrowing for the Cajun coast instead, Jackson barely has time to nail plywood up over the house’s windows before the wind’s intensity makes it impossible for him to wield a hammer, let alone remain on a ladder.

Papa calls just before the landline goes out. “Get out of there. A monster’s on the way. Tell your mama to head north,
cher.
I’m heading your way, me. I’ll meet y’all on the road and follow until I’m sure—”

The line crackled, then fell silent.

Jackson passed Papa’s instructions to his mother, but instead of the usual argument
—Dat man. Still be t’inking he can tell me what to do—
she just nodded, face grim, and told the girls to get into their rain gear.

The truck rocks in the wind like a boat bobbing on rough water as Mama steers it down the driveway for the road. The windshield wipers are useless and would only be stripped from their housing if turned on, so Mama peers through the water and leafy debris sheeting the windshield, interpreting the shapes and shadows beyond it with an unerring confidence that eases a little of the tension in Jackson’s knotted muscles.

Jackson locks his arms around Jeanette, squeezing her tight against his chest, when a shrieking gust of wind catches the truck’s underside and tips it for a moment before dropping it back onto all four tires. Just as his pulse is throttling back down, another fierce gust broadsides the truck and flips it onto its side.

Jackson’s head and shoulder smack into the passenger window and then his breath explodes from his lungs when weight—Mama and Junalee—slams into him. Jeanette squeaks.

The wind shrieks in a powerful and eerie rise and fall cadence, the sound as loud as a freight train hurtling at high speed toward disaster. Jackson feels his heart pounding but doesn’t hear it even internally. The hurricane has drowned out all other sound.

Hurricane Gaspard now composes their universe. Nothing else exists.

Lightning fills Jackson’s vision with eye-slitting white brilliance. A door slams, the sound quickly swallowed by the howling wind. Maybe headlights, not lightning?

He hears Papa’s voice, screaming his mother’s name, “Lucia!”

Jackson struggles to suck in a breath of air and …

… and choked as dirt
poured into his windpipe.

Jackson tried to cough, but his empty lungs spasmed, sucked in more dirt. Suffocating. Pain seared every inch of skin as though his body were a cushion for thousands of burning pins. White stars and black flecks danced behind his closed eyes. But even as his mind and lungs craved and struggled for air, his body remained still, his heart untroubled. And dread burrowed deep inside of him.

Maybe I’m already dead.

A familiar and frantic
whoo-whoo
bounced against his dirt-muffled ears. Hands or maybe paws brushed at his face. And light glimmered against his eyelids. Hands hooked around his shoulders—hot palms, a bruising steel
grip. Hauled him out and up into buckets of rain, the dirt—no, mud now—making a wet, sucking sound as he was yanked out of the grave.

“Breathe, you,” a rough male voice insisted, accompanied by more
whoo-whoo
s. “C’mon, boy. Breathe. Open yo’ eyes.”

“Smell that?” a female voice asked. “Sulfur and piss and anise? Black juju.”

It took every bit of Jackson’s strength to inhale a lungful of fresh, sweet air, to force his mud-caked eyelids open. He winced as gray morning light shafted into his eyes.

Cielo, ears pricked up, gaze intense, stared at him from behind two crouching, mud-streaked, and
beaucoup
nude people, one guy and one gal with wild and wind-twisted hair. Both studied him with gleaming silver-frosted eyes.

Well, hell, maybe I ain’t been rescued after all.

A firestorm raged inside his skull, ashing each thought as it raced through his mind. Jackson struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. Ghosts? Fellow zombies-to-be fresh from their own graves to welcome him into his new undead life?
Welcome to the Zombie Corps, maggot
.

Something nagged at Jackson, something he knew he should know, something about the mud-streaked and crouching pair’s gleaming silver eyes, but the pain in his head stomped all recollections flat.

“Hey, girl,” he tried to say to Cielo, but all that came out was a dirt-rough croak.

“Hoo-eee, look at his eyes, Jubilee,” the guy said. “He be in a world of hurt, him.”

The crouching feral gal’s nostrils—
Jubilee?
—flared.
“For true,” she agreed. “And he looks and smells like he’s just about done bleeding out, too.”

As Jackson’s vision narrowed to a single point of gray, rain-streaked light, he heard Jubilee add, “Might be too late for this little
chien de maison,
so let’s haul ass.”

House dog?
Jackson wondered as pain chewed into him with sharp and splintered teeth, then darkness swallowed him once more.

O
ne more stop before
Gage is truly avenged and Kallie truly safe. A quick visit to the vengeful spirit of Doctor Heron’s long-dead and bitter wife.

Dead or not, she does
not
get to walk away from this.

Layne Valin arrowed his Harley along US 90 East toward Chacahoula, the engine a deep, steady rumble beneath him, the pavement rain-slick and gleaming as the early morning downpour continued. Though getting soaked to the skin in a storm while speeding down the road was nothing new, Layne was grateful that at least the rain was warm.