Dark Destiny: Book One of the Destiny Novella Series (Destiny Novellas 1) (13 page)

Dahlia scanned markers to the left of the main path, while Lily cast her light over the right side. “What was the name again, Poppy?” Dahlia asked over her shoulder.

“Desjardin,” Poppy and Othello said simultaneously, his tone distinctly the more curt of the two.

Lily fought an insane urge to laugh. It was the second time Dahlia had asked that question in as many minutes.

“Well I am so sorry,” Dahlia snapped. “I’m a little stressed.”

Lily clutched her phone, her fingers numb. She wiped the rain from her forehead, wincing when droplets of water dripped into her eyes and mixed with her mascara. She rubbed her finger under her eye, trying to ease the sting, and dropped her phone into a puddle.

“Dammit.” She bent down to retrieve it, still rubbing her eye; she had likely smudged the mascara into a black mess and couldn’t bring herself to care.

Dahlia paused, and Poppy and Othello caught up to Lily. Poppy bent down and grasped her arm, her pink skirts billowing against Lily’s darker gown. The night had taken on a surreal sensation, and Lily was beginning to feel as disoriented as she had when the shop had first exploded, sending her flying.

“I’ve got makeup in my eye,” she said, her temper flaring, “and I’m freezing. Pretty sure I have a fever, and everything hurts. I wish the pact worked retroactively, because then I’d be magically healed.” She glared up at Othello, who watched her with clear apathy.

“Here,” Poppy said, and grasped the phone from the puddle, shaking it and placing it in Lily’s hand with something else that felt like a small, smooth stone. She helped her rise, rubbing her thumb under Lily’s eye, brows drawn in concern as the rain grew steadily worse.

Othello emitted something that sounded like a growl.

“I’m good,” Lily told her as she fought the urge to hiss back at him, and moved past Poppy to continue searching for the elusive mausoleum.

“It shouldn’t be so hard to find,” Dahlia said, resuming the walk. “I swear this place gets bigger the farther we walk.”

Statues both large and small marked the paths and sat intermittently atop lonely graves. Wrought iron gates enclosed family plots, and long-neglected headstones were partially obscured with overgrowth. The dark night lent the quiet graveyard a macabre feel that wasn’t helped at all by the increasing rain.

Lily looked down at her phone, making a show of shaking the water from it as she examined the other object Poppy had given her. It was her ear piece. Lily closed her eyes briefly and rubbed the back of her arm against her forehead, shoving her hair from her face. Poppy was smart. Now that Othello’s attention was wholly focused on her, she couldn’t risk him seeing the equipment, small though it was.

Lily was desperate to put the ear piece in place, hoping so much to hear Bennett’s voice. She didn’t even know if the communication included him, if Jeremy was doing all the talking on their end. She made herself wait for a better opportunity, shuddering, wondering if she’d ever be warm, feeling a sense of desperation that life would never go back to normal. Again, that insane urge to laugh. What was normal for her? For her family? That she’d avoided the craziness for the last decade or so was a miracle, but not necessarily one that had worked in her favor.

“Be careful what you wish for,” she murmured, shivering violently and trying to hide it.

“Give her your coat,” she heard Poppy tell Othello.

Lily looked back at him through the rain; he regarded Poppy for a long moment, his expression tightening. He shrugged out of his coat, his eyes on the young woman, and moved closer to her by degrees. Poppy didn’t flinch or retreat, didn’t react when he lowered his mouth to her ear. Lily heard his silken voice, the deep murmur that delivered the command.

“Do not ever do that to me again.”

Poppy maintained eye contact when he straightened, and Lily held her breath. Poppy must have used a compulsion push on him, and apparently he hadn’t liked it. He threw his coat at Lily, who fumbled with it and nearly dropped it in the mud. He then put his hand on Poppy’s back and propelled her forward, ahead of Lily and Dahlia.

“Enough of this,” he snapped, and Lily used the opportunity to quickly insert the ear piece. She was slick with rain, and it slipped, but she eventually shoved it into place, wondering if she’d need surgery to remove it.

“What’s going on?” she heard Bennett ask, and her knees nearly buckled. She bit her lip to keep from crying and shrugged into the coat, which was huge on her. It still held Othello’s body heat, which caught her by surprise. She figured it would feel like an ice block.

Dahlia lifted the hem of her sodden gown and made her way to Lily’s side, putting an arm around her and moving her forward. “We need to stay close to them,” she whispered to Lily. “I see him getting away.”

Lily glanced at Dahlia as they walked, lifting her dress to keep from tripping on it. “With the talisman?” she whispered.

Dahlia shook her head and frowned. “I don’t know.”

“We need to move in,” Bennett said in Lily’s ear, and she heard Jeremy’s voice answer him affirmatively.

She wanted to tell Bennett to wait, that she still intended to corner Othello one last time to get him to admit he’d tried to kill her by destroying the Bohemian Boutique. They had willingly gone with him to the graveyard—it wasn’t as though they could even hold him on kidnapping—they needed that confession. And now that he had a general idea of where the talisman was likely hidden, he’d return later to claim it and wreak who knew what kind of havoc with it.

Desperate, Lily fumbled with the bulky material of her skirt, finally locating the pocket and shoving her hand into it. She grasped the small square of fabric that held one tiny piece of Lady Chamonix and focused her energy on it completely. Othello stopped in his tracks and trained those strange, silver eyes on her as she used her flagging strength to call upon the dead priestess for help.

Lily and Dahlia reached them on the path and Lily shook her head at the tall man when he opened his mouth to question her. “Just give me a minute,” she said and closed her eyes.

Sensations, warmth, washed through her like a mother’s gentle caress and Lily dropped her head, welcoming it.
Where is the talisman? I won’t let him have it, but we must find it.

There were no words in her head, no vision of the woman herself, but as Lily lifted her head and looked through the rain, she knew exactly where to go.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Lily stumbled through the mud and tripped over her dress twice before coming to a stop at a large stone mausoleum completely engulfed in vines and overgrowth. She pulled on several large strands of dying vegetation that obscured the entrance; they eventually came away from the name above the door, which read
Desjardin.

“How?” Othello asked her, drilling his eyes on her as if he could read into her brain. He was soaked to the skin from the rain, his hair wet and shoved back from his face. Tall, dark, and handsome. And scary as hell.

“A woman has to have her secrets,” she said. “Let’s get this finished. You have a phone call to make to your henchman, and we have less than fifteen minutes.”

The wind gusted, hurling the rain sideways so that it pelted rather than fell. Lily put her hand to her temple where an ache began and she was tempted to release the focus she’d clamped down on Lady Chamonix. The pain intensified and she closed her eyes. “We need to hurry,” she said. “I can’t hold her forever.”

Othello tried the heavy door under the family name, to no avail. He murmured a brief string of words Lily couldn’t hear and waved his hand over the lock. It opened an inch on hinges that squeaked in protest and he shoved against it, widening the opening.

Lily raised a brow at him and glanced at her sisters, who regarded him similarly, each saying nothing. Lily was the first to find her voice. “How?”

“A man has to have his secrets,” he said, and if he’d smiled, if he’d been even the least bit genial at his core, she might have thought he was teasing.

“Fair enough.” Dahlia grasped Lily’s arm, brushing past the
bokor
and pulling her into the mausoleum. “Let’s do this before Chamonix gets tired of visiting. You do have her with you, right?”

Lily nodded and squinted in the darkened interior, looking back at the doorway as the only source of light. Othello had his hand on Poppy’s back and shoved her into the room.

“I’m not running away,” Poppy said, the angry whisper echoing off the walls. “Like it would do me any good.”

Lily looked sharply at her sister. What had she meant by that? It had been a loaded, furious statement. Certainly it held more significance than irritation over the pact’s general “side effects” she’d described.

Dahlia pulled on Lily’s arm again. There was too much swirling around in her head and she couldn’t decide what to do next. She was so cold she didn’t think she’d ever be warm again, but her head was on fire. She couldn’t make sense of the disparity, didn’t know who she had to help. Everyone was in danger and she was near collapse.

Dahlia took Lily’s shoulders in her hands and shook her. “Lily. Focus on the talisman.”

She looked at her sister, who was now illuminated with light from Poppy’s phone. Dahlia’s face blurred and then came into focus, only to go fuzzy again.

Mom…please…

Lily pulled the fabric scrap from her pocket and clutched it tightly in her fist against her heart. She pulled inward, thinking of nothing but the voodoo priestess, feeling her loneliness, her despair over lost loved ones, her rising sense of power as she studied the voodoo arts, the confidante she’d found in Veronique Dubois. The talisman she used to cast spells, to protect her home, to do good even when the means were ethically murky.

Lily opened her eyes, recognizing the small room, the squares on the walls chiseled with names of the bones that rested behind them. She spun, examining the wall behind her.

There. It was there.

Lily ran her fingers along the wall, coming to rest on a square in the farthest corner.

Therese Desjardin. Maman. Mon couer.

Lily’s fingers were pale in the dim light, the bokor’s large jacket dwarfing her and giving her the appearance of a child. She heard his footsteps behind her and she shuddered inwardly, wondering how she was going to keep the talisman from his hands. She pulled at the edges of the square, ran her fingers along the corners, not having a clue as to how she’d open the thing. “There’s nothing here for you to punch a code into, Poppy…the letter…” She looked up at Poppy, who studied the wall intently.

Othello was there beside her, then, and murmuring again in what she assumed was Romanian, he waved his hand over the deceased one’s name. The square slid forward with a grating sound and he pulled it off, revealing a small urn that rested inside. Next to the urn lay an object, and Lily watched helplessly as he reached for it. She felt a surge of horror that wasn’t her own, and she grabbed her head as pain shot through it.

She sank to the floor and slumped against the stone wall as the
bokor
pulled the talisman from the box and looked at it, nestled in his palm. Dahlia rushed to Lily and pulled her close, fear and desperation on her face.

“Lily, look at me.” Dahlia took Lily’s chin in her hand. “Look at me!”

Lily had tried so desperately to reach Chamonix, and now she couldn’t get her to leave.
Please, I will fix it. I will get the talisman back.

Lily heard a sob and a crushing sense of sorrow as the priestess finally withdrew. The pain in her head receded enough that she focused on Dahlia’s face and nodded at her.

Othello stood and made his way to the door.

“Wait,” Poppy called out and followed him. “You need to call your guy, have him release Mimi. I’ll hold that for you in the meantime.”

Othello laughed, raised a brow at Poppy as he pulled his phone from his pocket. He touched the screen, put it to his ear, and said, “Release the old woman.” Replacing the phone in his pants pocket, he sobered and pinned his gaze on Poppy. “There. Your grandmother is safe, and none of you have anything to fear from me. I have what I need.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Poppy asked, moving closer to him. “Why do you need it so much?”

“Careful, little witch,” he said, splaying his hand around Poppy’s throat. “I told you not to do that to me again.”

“And you can’t hurt me.”

He winced and stumbled back, his hand still clutching her neck and pulling her with him. Poppy remained on her feet, grasping his wrist with both hands. Lily’s mouth dropped open in surprise and she glanced at Dahlia, who also regarded their sister with her mouth slack.

“Hang on, Poppy,” Dahlia whispered. “They’re almost here.”

But Poppy didn’t have the ear piece anymore, Lily did. She registered a voice in her ear, Jeremy, zeroing in on their position, telling them to stay still and away from the door.

“Poppy, get away from the door,” Lily cried out and lunged forward.

Othello stared at Lily, his eyes hardening to silver chips of ice. A shout outside drew his attention and he whirled around as though hit by a fist. Poppy gasped; he shoved her from him and she fell back into the interior of the mausoleum as he disappeared into the night.