Vampire U (12 page)

I thought that now I would see the pentagrams and candles, but the inside of Momma Bones's modest home was well kept and oddly plain.  An old TV and DVD player sat in a Wal-Mart entertainment center.   Old children's movies cluttered its top shelf, their labels faded with time.  An air conditioner mounted on the front window hummed quietly beneath thick old curtains.  She led us past a couple of low couches with gaudy blue slipcovers and into a small, neat kitchen.

"Sit down, sit down," she said, waving me to a small handmade table that had seen a lot of use.  "I make some coffee, no?"

I hurried to protest, insisting that wouldn't be necessary, but Momma Bones silenced me with a look.  "You ain't been sleepin', dat plain.  She brandished a can of Folgers crystals at me, "You gonna need all da help ya can get."

So I waited, staring at the broad back of Momma Bones's old robe as she bustled around the kitchen.  After a few minutes, she set down a tray with two steaming mugs.  Then she settled into a chair across from me, which gave out an alarming creak as her wide bottom engulfed it.

I took one of the mugs, and despite my protests, the hot coffee reinvigorated me from the first sip.  "This is wonderful!" I said.

Despite her ragged old voice, the sound of Momma Bones's laughter had a light, musical quality.  "I put in a lil' sometin' extra jes' for you, girl."

"Please, call me Danielle," I said as I forced a smile onto my face, trying not to think about what she might have slipped in.  
Toad eyeballs, newt testicles...
  My imagination ran wild.  Did newts even have testicles?  I'd have to Google that later.

"Nothin' you wouldn't find in da grocery, sweet one," Momma Bones said with a wink and a smile.

My smile faded.  Could 
she
 read my thoughts too?  I started to wonder if I'd ever have any privacy again, even in my own head.

Momma Bones sat back and laced her fingers across her big belly.  "So, girl, tell me why you here.  De truth now.  What I don't know can kill ya."  Her black eyes gazed into my soul like shovels digging for secrets.

A wall of deep shame held my secrets inside.  For a while, I just laid my hands flat on the table and stared at them.  Had it not been for Jacob's faith in this woman, I might have said nothing, but where else could I turn?  Taking a deep breath, I said, "There's a fraternity at Romanus University that's full of vampires."

"Beta House," Momma Bones hissed.

I looked up, surprised.  "Yeah.  How did you know?"

Momma Bones scowled.  "Girl, there plenty of bad 
loa
 in Baton Rouge.  Been dat way since long before de Europeans sailed up dat rivah an' saw a blood-covered tree.  The city be a crossroads between the spirit world and dis one."

"
Loa?
" I asked.  "What are those?"

"Spirits, child.  Some good, others bad.  The 
loa
 behind dis fraternity though, it be de baddest.  
Petro loa."
  A pained expression came over her round old face.  "It got its claws in ya, and I don't know I can help."

"I don't care about what happens to me," I said, and as the words slipped from my lips, I realized they were the truth.  Whatever Mander had done to me, I'd let it happen.  But Morgan deserved better.  "They have my friend," I said.  "I want to save her."

Momma Bones snorted.  "You want to be killin' de one what took her then."

"So how do I do that?" I asked.

The big Cajun woman pursed her lips.  "You don't know what you askin', girl.  You kill one, de rest gonna come at you hard.  You best be ready to run, dat happen."

Fighting despair, I slid down in the flimsy chair until my bottom hung off the edge and I slouched like a sullen child.  Fatigue washed over me in waves.  I wanted to give up, to crawl into the other room and curl up on the couch.  I'd left Chicago for college less than a month ago, full of hope and excitement.  Now everything I knew had been turned inside out, and my future looked short and bleak.

The tears came, and I let them flow.  "I can't do this," I sobbed, throwing my head down on the table.  My chest lurched with deep sobs, but it was hard to care.  Momma Bones seemed to exude a motherly aura.  I wanted to nestle my head against that tremendous bosom and feel safe.  I buried my head in my arms, hoping for comfort, but when she offered none, I looked up and saw her watching me with unsympathetic eyes.  So much for motherly.

"You want to sit and cry, go 'head," she told me.  "I cried a time or two myself.  I buried two children, seen a son go to prison.  I seen good children do without food while dey parents wallow in drugs and self-pity.  Givin' up be easy.  Ain't no one gonna fault ya."  She took a long pull on her coffee.  "But I also seen people fight until dey got nothing left.  Keep going after hope dies just because dey stubborn.  I seen the dead get up and walk, girl.  I seen 'em find dey way to salvation."

My sobs quieted, and my face flushed with embarrassment.  This old black woman had lived through harder times than most people could imagine.  What must she think of a young white girl bawling in her kitchen?

I lifted my head, and she caught my gaze with her ancient brown eyes, their corneas so yellow they had almost gone brown.  "What can I do?" I said.  "I can't fight them."

"De way I see it, you got two choices.  You can sit on de bank and wait for Mister Gator to come for you, or sink in his swamp and lay in de muck, wait for him to come swimmin' by and show his soft white belly."  Her lips curled up in a feral grin that revealed a few teeth that looked like the last hangers-on after a raging party.  "That's when you show him de knife."

"I don't think a knife will work here," I said.  "They're too strong."

Momma Bones shifted in her chair, oblivious of its pleas for mercy.  "You know de kudzu vine, chile?"

I nodded.  I'd seen those vines on my drive through Louisiana, vast green blankets of them draped over the treetops, choking the trees beneath them.  "It's an invasive plant species that spreads all over the place."

She nodded.  "De same.  You ever get dat in your garden, hard times.  You pull it and pull it, but de roots go deep and spread wide.  Birds eat dem berries, shit 'em all over de place.  You leave jes' a bit, and dat kudzu sneak on back out.  Next thing you know, it's everywhere."  She leaned back in her chair, and I heard several dull pops from her vertebrae.  "Dese 
loa
 jes' like dat.  Dey were here when de Indians hunted the swamps, but dey weak back den.  You know how dis city get its name?"

I straightened up.  "They told us in freshman orientation.  Baton Rouge is French for 'red stick.'  Early explorers found a marker between the hunting grounds of two tribes here."

Momma Bones stared at me, nodding slowly.  "You half right, girl.  Dey found a marker, but weren't no 'red stick.'"  She settled back in her chair and gestured toward Jacob.  "Settle in, girl.  Momma Bones gonna give a little history lesson."

Every child that grows up in the state of Louisiana knows that Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville was its founder.  But he wasn't some brave explorer.  That Frenchman came to the bayou with blood on his hands back in the Seventeenth Century.   Before he came down south, Le Moyne was an officer up in New York, where he had a reputation as a bloodthirsty murderer even before he helped massacre the whole town of Schenectady.  When that war got too hot for him, he headed south just one step ahead of a court martial.

Legends say that Le Moyne took his canoes up the river and discovered a post hung with animal carcasses.  He claimed that the post marked the border between the hunting grounds of the Bayogoula and the Houma.  And there was a post alright, but it wasn't a marker.

It was a warning.

The native tribes knew there were evil spirits in the swamps.  Even before Jesus Christ walked the earth, the Houma tribes learned to avoid that place.  How it started is lost in time, but we know it was a place of blood sacrifice, where an evil spirit lured young women to its lair and fed on them, growing stronger and stronger.  But its hunger grew too great, and quiet whispers of a killer in the dark became the angry muttering of a tribe that knew its very survival depended on stopping it.

The Houma planted a powerful totem in the ground there, soaked in blood and infused with powerful magic, then made an oath to keep their people away.  For centuries, not a single soul ventured into that deadly swamp, and the spirits starved and weakened.  That might have been the end of it, but like a kudzu vine,
 petro loa 
are hard to kill as long as a seed remains.  When the Europeans came, that seed awakened.  Le Moyne and his men were like warm sunshine on dark, rich soil, and for the first time in a thousand years, evil began to grow.

Le Moyne was a bad man, and they say that like draws like.  The evil drew him to the swamps and twisted him to its purpose.  Turned him into something even worse.  The Houma feared this place.  They thought it was the home of
 Nalusa Falaya, 
a devil with pointed ears and the body of a snake.  After Le Moyne came, most of the Houma fled.

The white man brought his slaves and his cotton, and though the stories say Le Moyne went to Cuba to die, I believe he stayed here under another name.  Life was cheap for the next two hundred years.  A plantation raising cotton and sugarcane would also raise plenty of sweet young Negro females to feast on.  Le Moyne sacrificed slaves to the ancient
 petro loa
, and it gave him unnatural long life and dark powers.  At the same time, it began to grow, until one man - even a powerful man like Le Moyne - couldn't sate its hunger. That's when Le Moyne began to turn others, making them vampires like himself.  He would draw strength from their feedings, and the
 loa 
drew strength from them all.

The Civil War brought an end to that, though.  Slavery was a thing of the past, at least in name.  Many blacks were too poor to go north, so they stayed on to work for pennies on the land of their former masters.  But there was one plantation owner, a man named Lamare, whose slaves ran from the city on the very day that the Union Navy landed on our shore.  Lamare was said to be a cruel master, so cruel that even white folks frowned on his treatment of slaves.

The big war ended slavery, and thanks be to
 Bondye
, but
 petro loa 
don't die as easily as Confederate soldiers.
  
Others might have been ruined, but Lamare's wealth was vast.  He used much of it to build Romanus University, which he styled after the old Ivy League institutions of the Northeast, with their genteel men's fraternities.  A perfect hiding place for men who never grow old and require a steady crop of fresh blood.

***

I interrupted.  "You're saying the whole college was built by 
Beta House?
"

Momma Bones nodded.  "To dem, it just another plantation full o' young and ig'nint fools.  Took a long time after the war, but 
loa
 don't grow old like men.  They be patient."

"But they can be killed, too," I said, remembering the three I'd seen incinerated by sunlight.

Momma Bones chuckled.  "Oh, de hollow shells of men dat de 
petro loa
 wear, dey can die, but a spirit ain't so brittle!"

"But they can die?"  I asked, my voice quiet.

Momma Bones fixed her eyes on me, and the yellow morning light filtering in through the window above the sink etched deep lines of fatigue in her round face.  She shook her head.  "May be there ain't no way.  But if you want to get rid of a kudzu vine, you got to dig out de deepest roots.  Dis vine's roots go deep, all the way to the spot that the Houma tribe marked with dat bloody totem so long ago."

"And where is that?" I asked.

She grinned at me with a wide mouth full of white teeth and shrugged.  "I ain't never seen, but I imagine it be way down deep under Beta House."

I thought of the old antebellum mansion with its huge walls, its rooms teeming with vampires, an impenetrable fortress.  I suspected Momma Bones was probably right, but that didn't ease my mind.  "I don't understand," I said.  "Even if I could get in there, which I don't think I can, what am I supposed to do?"

"
Petro loa
 were men once," Momma Bones said.  "Bad men, most like.  And bad men fear what's beyond this world.  Dey hang on tight like dey clingin' to a branch at the edge of a bluff.  Holdin' on for so long takes energy - the kind of energy that comes from blood.  Nobody know for sure, but I imagine that's why these vampires so hungry.  The 
petro loa
 doin' all it can to hang on.  You want to save your friend - and maybe yourself - you got to hurt the spirit where he closest to the world.  You get close enough to dat spot, gonna blur de line between spirit and man.  Hurt de man, you hurt de 
petro loa.
"

So she wanted me to infiltrate a fortress and kill an immortal monster who could control me like a puppet.  I let out a deep sigh and shook my head.  "I can't do this," I said.  Momma Bones's hard gaze pushed at me, and I stared down at my lap, where my pale hands lay limp and lifeless as a corpse in a coffin.

Momma Bones leaned across the table and scooped them into her own warm grasp with a firm squeeze.  Her wise old eyes finally pulled mine up, and she gazed into my soul with a fiery vehemence.  "You been too far to give up now, girl.  Once you on the back of a bull gator, you hang on til he tires out, or he'll eat you first chance he get."  She stood, thrusting out her massive bosom as she stretched her old back with a satisfied grunt.  "Now you get on outta here."  She collected our coffee mugs and rinsed them in the sink, then shooed me out into the living room, still dark despite the slivers of sunlight peeking from beneath the heavy curtains.

"Can I use your phone?" I asked.  "I left mine at school, and Jacob's my ride."  She waved me toward an old avocado-green handset on the wall with a twisted cord.  I dialed Jacob's cell phone, but it went to voicemail after the fourth ring.

"Dammit."  I tried the 
Scryer's
 office phone, but Jacob didn't pick that up either.  Momma Bones was staring at me with her hands on her broad hips.  "No answer," I said.  "I'll try back in a few minutes."