“Fools!” she shrieked at them, her crystal-blue eyes wild and shining with the fervor of a believer.
Erin shot Antoine Camber twice as he lumbered toward them. The first bullet struck him in the chest and sent him staggering backward. He bumped into a plinth holding a stone statue of a Loa, sending statue and plinth both crashing to the floor where they shattered into a mass of dust and white shards. The second shot took him in the throat, blood and bone spraying from the exit wound and splattering one painted wall and part of the altar. As Jean-Marie screeched a sound of incoherent rage at the defilement of her altar, Antoine coughed up a gout of blood, and then he also crashed to the floor amidst the broken pieces of statue.
Jean-Marie screeched, “You have dared to interrupt the ceremony and defiled the sacrifice! You will die!” Spittle flew from her lips. The dagger trembled in her hand. She exuded a glittery-eyed, unhealthy aura of near-rabid belief in something so outlandish that most people would go insane just trying to wrap their heads around how anyone could believe in it.
The storm of emotion roiling inside of Flynn broke free and raged through her with as much force as the floodwaters had broken through the levees five years ago. She shot Jean-Marie. The mambo made a choked-off urking sound as the bullet entered through her forehead and blew out the back of her skull. The dagger fell limply from her hands, clattered to the floor and skittered away into a corner. As the mambo fell dead, Ariel screamed and backed away into a corner, hands frantically swatting at the red smears of blood on her face and arms.
“Goodnight, bitch,” Flynn muttered. Ignoring the whimpering Ariel for the moment, she moved quickly to the altar and gently tugged the cloth gag loose from Dana’s mouth. The reporter sucked in a single whooping breath, and began to cough violently. Flynn untied the ropes from her wrists and ankles and slipped an arm under her bare shoulders, helping her to sit up. Face suffusing with color, eyes watering with the force of her coughing, she clung to Flynn.
“I’ll see if I can find some water—” Erin Krueger offered and Flynn gave her a grateful nod.
“Are you okay?” She ran a critical eye over the reporter. The wound appeared to be superficial, not deep enough probably to leave a permanent scar. All the same Flynn’s stomach clenched and the red mist of anger descended on her again as she looked at how Jean-Marie had marked Dana with the veve of Damballah Wedo.
“I’m fine,” Dana managed to wheeze. She coughed again, then leaned into Flynn’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Flynn felt the reporter’s breath warm against her neck as Dana. “She—” with a quick jerk of her chin, Dana indicated Ariel, “gave me some kind of paralytic drug. Thank you, Flynn, for coming to get me.”
“Never any question I wouldn’t,” Flynn assured her.
Erin reappeared then, carrying a tin cup that sloshed water onto the floor. “I tasted it—seems fresh enough,” she said.
“Thanks. Here. Sip this slowly.” Flynn held the cup to Dana’s lips whilst the reporter drank. She only managed a few sips before she began to shiver violently, however, and Flynn felt her flesh burning up. She threw a poisonous look in Ariel’s direction. “What’s happening to her?”
Ariel’s already pale features had blanched to a ghostly gray. She looked sick with fear as she shook her head hard enough to make her dark hair fall over her eyes. “It’s just the drug flushing through her system,” she whispered, using one trembling hand to push the hair out of her eyes. “The Old Ones need her—aware for the completion of the ritual.”
Feeling both her gorge rise and an urge to just pick up one of those hideous Loa statues and beat Ariel to death with it, Flynn quickly looked away from the crouching woman, focusing on Dana instead. She indicated to Erin to hand over her jacket, which the agent did reluctantly. “This is hand-stitched leather, you know,” she complained.
Flynn rolled her eyes. She draped the leather jacket around Dana’s shivering shoulders. “Y’all can send me the dry cleaning bill. Right now you need to get her to Leon. Give this to him—” she scooped the pages torn from Ariel’s journal out of her pocket and handed them to Erin. Then she lifted Dana’s chin with two fingers, angling her head so that she could look into the reporter’s dark eyes. “Erin is going to take you to a friend of mine. He’ll look after you. He’s a doctor. This is over now, Dana. No one is ever going to need to know that you went through this, do you understand me?” She used her thumb to tenderly wipe the tears away from Dana’s pale cheeks. The flesh was damp and felt white hot.
Erin stepped forward, working her shoulder under Dana’s right arm and wrapping her own arm around the reporter’s back. “You think you can walk?” she asked. Dana nodded grimly.
On impulse, Flynn picked up one of Dana’s limp hands, raised it to her mouth and lightly kissed the backs of the fingers. “It’s gonna be okay,” she promised.
For a moment Dana held tight for a moment to her hand. “Thank you,” she whispered again. Then she stood up from the stone slab of the altar and allowed Erin Krueger to lead her out of the temple, and the nightmare she had endured there.
CHAPTER TWENTY
After the door closed behind Erin and Dana, Flynn finally faced Ariel Rousseau. The familiar scent of cinnamon and patchouli radiated from her but now, rather than reminding Flynn of sex on a summer afternoon, it made her think of Ariel’s softly spoken lies and promises that were as hollow as a husked-out gourd. Firelight from the torches reflected in Ariel’s green eyes and against her jet-dark hair, giving her the look of a big cat that had been cornered and cowed.
“You know that you’re not leaving here, right?” Flynn said.
Ariel gave her a flat smile. “You can’t kill me. I know you think you want to—but you can’t hurt anyone that you care about. And you do care about me. I know you do. I remember what we did together.”
A joyless perversity in Flynn made her smile at this delusion. Did Ariel really think it was that simple? “But I don’t care about you,” Flynn told her. “What we did—that was just sex. Nothing more. I don’t love you. Not now. Not ever.”
“No—” Ariel shook her head. “You’re lying, Flynn. We could’ve had so much more. We still can! Tell me, did you dream about me after we were together?”
Flynn’s whole body jerked in surprise. Ariel’s smile turned sly. “You did. I knew it. What did it mean to you, Flynn?”
“It didn’t mean anything. It was a dream, that’s all.” Against her better judgment, but curious too, Flynn lowered the Beretta. “Why did you think I dreamed about you?”
“We have a connection,” Ariel said simply. Her green eyes glowed. “Don’t deny that at least, Flynn.”
“We had a connection—maybe at one time,” Flynn corrected her. She extended an arm to indicate the temple. “To what end was all of this meant?”
Ariel laughed softly. “Power. What do any of us want out of this miserable fucking existence but power? Power over others to make them do our bidding. And you could have shared in it, Flynn. You still can. Just listen to me—”
But Flynn gave her head a hard shake, cutting off the pleas. “No. I told you that it’s over. There are no Loa. There are no Old Ones. All of it was moonshine fed to you by Jean-Marie.”
“It is real,” Ariel insisted. “I’ve seen what the Loa can do.”
“Only thing is real here is that you assisted in the murders of two women and were about to help murder a third,” Flynn pointed out.
Ariel apparently found something funny in that. As she laughed, Flynn shot an arm out and landed an open-handed slap on her mouth. The laughter died abruptly as blood welled from Ariel’s lower lip. She licked it away with the tip of her tongue, curled red-smeared lips in a grotesque parody of a seductive smile.
“Their sacrifices would have brought forth the Old Ones. Jean-Marie and I would have been so powerful. The Old Ones reward those who serve them.”
Flynn’s stomach coiled. She raised the Beretta again. “Tell me how you convinced Anthea and her mother to be y
our sacrifices?”
“The girl was first,” Ariel told her. “She came into my store looking for a love potion, so I gave her an Erzulie veve. She was a virgin, that was obvious, and it made her just right for the first sacrifice. I convinced her to come back with the promise a ritual would win the heart of whatever goddamned boy she was having her feverish little virgin dreams about. After we sacrificed her, it was just as easy to call her mother and tell her that we knew where her precious little girl was. Anthea had told me all about how her mama was a good Christian woman—perfect for the second sacrifice.”
“Jesus,” Flynn sighed, shaking her head.
Ariel gave her a sly look. “I might’ve thought twice if I’d known that Jeannette Larue was in touch with you. The police are idiots, but I’d have known you were smart enough to figure it out. When you came into the store asking about that little fuckwit Johnny Cakes -? I thought you were onto me then.”
Flynn smiled. “Don’t even bother trying to flatter me, Ariel. It isn’t going to work. Besides, I didn’t figure anything out—that was down to Pierce Boudreau.” She sucked in a deep breath. “I assume that it was Antoine who raped both women?”
“The Old Ones allow their faithful servants to use the sacrifices any way they may choose,” Ariel said with a shrug.
“Rape,” Flynn stated.
Ariel’s jaw worked and her gaze shifted. “Call it what you will.”
“So—what? You seduced me as a way of distracting me?” The words stuck in Flynn’s throat, tasting sour and rotten there.
Ariel shook her head. “Is that what you think? I love you, Flynn. And I can love you way better than that uptight little reporter bitch can.”
All at once the urge to punish Ariel drained out of Flynn as she realized just how lost inside her own delusions the woman was. In fact, Ariel was just lost, period. She wasn’t the same woman that Flynn had known that long-ago summer. She tilted a pitying look at Ariel now. “How did this happen?”
Ariel scowled. “Shit happens.”
Flynn nodded. The first rule of life: shit always happens. “You’re right, shit does happen. But that isn’t what I mean. What happened to you, Ariel? This was never something that you would’ve done when I knew you before.”
Ariel’s green eyes snapped with anger. “Prison, Flynn. Federal fucking prison happened to me. Until I met Jean-Marie…” she winced, shook her head. “Well, it was bad for me, okay? Jean-Marie showed me how things could be.”
“I get all that,” Flynn said, “but a murderer—?”
Ariel smirked. “I think I hear a pot calling a kettle black. How many people did you kill? I’ve never judged you for what you were, Flynn. Can you say the same for Dana Jordan? Would she ever be able to let you touch her, fuck her—get inside her—without thinking about how much blood is on your hands?”
That no-going-back line loomed right ahead of Flynn. An angry pulse throbbed in her temples, beating in time to an inner voice that urged her to just go ahead and cross the fucking line. Last time she’d been in this position was on the night she spotted her drunken, abusive father staggering along the levee and she had known she could kill him, that no one would ever know what she’d done.
“The Old Ones would find great use for you,” Ariel told her, and with a sly smile she nodded with her head at a point beyond Flynn’s left shoulder. “If you just look hard enough, you’ll see them.”
A chill seized the back of Flynn’s neck, and her scalp tingled with it. Instinct made her turn her head and glance over her shoulder into the smoky red-tinged darkness.
In that moment of Flynn’s inattention, Ariel made a lunge for the ceremonial dagger dropped to the floor by Jean-Marie. She snatched the weapon up even as Flynn whipped her head back around and raised the Beretta.
“Don’t do it,” Flynn warned her.
“The ritual must be completed,” Ariel whispered. Flynn’s eyes widened in stunned horror as Ariel plunged the dagger deep into her own gut. A flower of dark red blood bloomed on the front of her white robe. Her hands fell away from the weapon and she slumped sideways against the wall.
Shocked, Flynn set the Beretta aside and grabbed Ariel by her shoulders, trying to push her upright against the wall. When that failed, she hovered her hands over the seeping wound, unsure what to do, then freezing in mid-reach when Ariel smiled up at her. Blood bubbled on her lips as she spoke.
“Old Ones, come to me!”
Flynn jerked her hands away, stared at the dying woman.
“Too bad it has to end this way, Flynn,” Ariel told her. “You really could have had your very own Voodoo woman. Now I’ll be the final sacrifice…”
Flynn started to shake her head, to say something, but then she realized that Ariel would be dead before she finished the sentence, and instead she forced a smile. “I’m sorry,” she said instead.
Ariel nodded. “It is done,” she whispered.
One of the many skills Flynn had learned in her previous employment was how to stage a crime scene.
She worked fast. First she wiped the Beretta and pressed it into Ariel’s hands, leaving it on the floor beside her body. Then she rearranged the bodies of Antoine Camber and the mambo, and finally she doused the temple in oils. Carefully lifting one of the torches from its sconce, she used that to set light to the oil. It burned quickly and Flynn had to move fast to reach the door through a choking haze of rancid smoke.
She closed the door on the burning temple, and in her mind she heard Ariel’s words echo: Too bad it has to end this way. You really could have had your very own Voodoo woman. As she walked down the passageway to the street outside, she shook her head sadly. “No, I couldn’t have had that. The price would’ve been too high, even for me,” she murmured.
That Ariel had been willing to take her own life the way she did, was testament to just how deep inside of the delusions spun by Jean-Marie she was. In her desperate need to see the mambo’s crazy predictions come true, she had turned herself into a twisted version of the final sacrifice.
Rain continued to fall, a hazy damp curtain of it strung across Rampart Street, obscuring the spires of the cathedral and the lights of the nearby Quarter. Flynn walked to the nearest payphone from there she placed an anonymous call to the emergency services, reporting a fire at the temple address. She hung up on the dispatcher’s questions, and continued walking toward the Quarter where she could become lost in the crowds. A shiver of wind blew through the trees lining the park fence on her left, the rustling of their leaves, unnaturally loud inside the gray fog of rain, making the hairs on Flynn’s neck rise. She turned sharply to look behind her, heart thudding, but the street was empty, and the absurdity of her own apprehension made her scowl. All that fucking Voodoo shit, it had gotten under her skin. In the distance, she heard sirens wail as New Orleans’ finest responded to the anonymous call.
She didn’t regret what she’d done tonight. Jean-Marie, with the help of Antoine and Ariel, had murdered two people to feed their collective delusion. Sending Jean-Marie back to prison—where her reputation would precede her—would simply have given her more of the notoriety and adulation which she craved. Ariel, too, would have eventually become as hardened as the mambo. Flynn hated that thought. It was better that they all should have died here tonight.
In the French Quarter, Flynn found a cab to take her to Leon’s home in the Upper Garden District. Leaning back in the cab’s rear seat, the heater raising steam from her clothing and warming her face, she momentarily wondered just how much her life—all of their lives—would be changed by tonight’s events?
Because murder always changed you, no matter who you were.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Flynn arrived at Leon’s Garden District mansion ten minutes later—coincidentally situated less than half a block from where Danny once had lived—to be ushered straight inside by his loyal houseboy and occasional surgical assistant, Chan. Leon himself appeared from a downstairs parlor close on the houseboy’s heels.
“How is Dana?” Flynn asked immediately.
Leon gave her a reassuring smile and a gentle pat on the arm. “Your friend is going to be just fine. I made up the antidote just as it was described, and it seems to have done the trick. She’s sleeping now.”
Flynn nodded. “And the—wound,” she added hesitantly, “will it be okay?”
“Superficial,” Leon assured her. “It will heal and she will hardly even notice it’s there. I know this probably doesn’t make it any better, but whoever did that her, they were an expert cutter.”
“Yeah well, they had some practice,” Flynn muttered. “Thanks for taking care of her, Leon.”
“Of course. Your, uh, other friend is with her.” Leon’s shaggy salt-and-pepper brows climbed his forehead. “That’s an intriguing woman, Flynn. Ms Krueger, I mean.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Flynn gave a wan smile, then took a step toward the staircase. She paused to extend a hand to the doctor. “Those pages, Leon, I’ll need them back.”
Leon sighed as he handed them over to Flynn. “This would’ve been such an interesting read. I have never seen a drug quite like the one described—a fascinating Zombie Dust variant. This Ariel person is a talented chemist indeed.”
“Was,” Flynn corrected. Leon’s brows rose. Flynn pocketed the pages to be destroyed later, and smiled. “Ariel was a talented chemist. Sadly, she’s no longer with us.”
“Oh dear. That is too bad.” Leon pursed his lips, then gestured toward the darkened upstairs of the house. “Second door on the right, Flynn. When your friend wakes, she’ll be thirsty, but you shouldn’t let her drink too much water, nor too fast, or it will make her violently sick. I’ll have Chan bring you coffee. Make yourselves at home for as long as you need.”
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