Midnight Lullaby

by Jen Blood

  “You’re not getting Lisette,” Wolf said. “Tell me where you took Maisie, and I’ll let you leave. You can get out of here.”

  “I’m done playing games,” Elias said. He turned on Wolf. His face was destroyed from Solomon’s and my attack earlier in the night. He still wore the bloody shirt he’d had on when he left us. “You think I’m leaving here empty handed? That Johnny would really let me get away with that?”

  I could read the impact of the words from Wolf’s hitched breath alone. “Stop screwing with me,” he said. He stepped forward, gun still up. “Give us Maisie, and get out of here.”

  “I don’t have her, you ignorant prick,” Elias shouted. Lisette shifted beside me. I realized her intention an instant before she made a move, and grabbed her arm.

  “Wait,” I whispered. She frowned, but stayed where she was.

  “Haven’t you wondered where your brother’s been in all this?” Elias continued. “What he’s been doing, while you’ve been shacked up with your niggers in his house?”

  “You’re lying,” Wolf said.

  “Afraid not, big brother,” another voice said—Johnny. He stepped outside the cabin, unarmed, his hands raised. “You gonna shot me, after everything I’ve done for you all these years? You came back from the Gulf a broken man. I gave you a job. A roof over your head.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Wolf demanded. He’d lowered the gun unconsciously. Lisette held her breath beside me.

  “What the hell is wrong with me?” Johnny said. “You come into my house, you fuck my girlfriend—and then, worse than that, you’re stupid enough to fall in love with the little bitch? I’m doing you a favor! It’s time to get rid of them, cut them out of our lives.”

  “By butchering them?” Wolf said. He took a step toward his brother, gun down now, while Elias looked on with polite disinterest.

  “That’s not me,” Johnny said. “All that shit—the magic or Voodoo or whatever... That’s Foster. He gave us the money to get the girls, that’s it. I don’t care what he does with them after.”

  “Lisette trusted you,” Wolf continued. He closed the distance between them. “I trusted you. I defended you, for Christ’s sake.” There was something in his voice, more pain than fury. He grabbed Johnny by his shirt front and backed him up toward the house. “I don’t care if you were the one who cut her or not, you’re part of this. You killed Charlene... You would just let Maisie die? A little kid who’s done nothing to you—”

  “Calm down,” Johnny said. “Don’t act like a fucking saint here—I know what you did in the Gulf. People die. Kids die.”

  “That was war!” he roared. “This is money! This is...this is bullshit. You don’t kill—”

  “Stop acting so naive,” Johnny said. Incredibly, he pushed back against Wolf, his hands planted firmly in his brother’s chest. Wolf stumbled backward but stayed upright. “You know what I do for a living. You know the score. You don’t get to pretend we’re saints now.”

  “Not murdering someone doesn’t make you a saint, you ignorant prick,” Wolf said. “It makes you a human being. What do you think—”

  “All right,” Elias interrupted. I heard the slide and echo as he released the safety on his gun. “Enough already. Wolf, step back. Tell us where Lisette and the girl are so we can get out of this fucking hellhole, collect our paychecks, and move on.”

  Wolf turned on him, his gun up once more. Elias had his back to me, his body blocking my view. Lisette was the one who realized what he was doing, long before I ever did. He turned, more quickly than I ever would have imagined for a man his size.

  “Wait!” Johnny shouted.

  Elias didn’t wait, though. He didn’t even pause. Wolf was still getting a bead on him when Elias fired from a few feet away.

  The impact shoved Wolf backward. Johnny cried out. Wolf went down. Lisette screamed, and I grabbed her a split second before she ran into the fray. It didn’t matter, though—we were done. I stepped out from behind the cabin and saw that flash of color in my periphery: dress blues. Doug Philbrick stood watching me. I heard a rustling behind us.

  Before I could turn, something heavy and hard slammed into the back of my head. I pushed Lisette away. “Run!” I shouted. And then, I went down.

  Chapter 22

  When I awoke, it was light outside. My hands were tied behind my back, I was on a hard wood floor, and my mouth tasted like I’d eaten a bag of cotton balls soaked in battery acid. Lisette sat against a floral-wallpapered wall a few feet away, her hands also tied. Her eyes had the distant cast, the dead stare, of a woman in deep shock.

  “Where are we?” I croaked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She shifted her gaze toward me, but didn’t meet my eye. “They drugged us both. I’m not certain how long we were out.”

  “What about Wolf?”

  Her eyes filled with tears even as her jaw hardened. She shook her head.

  “And Maisie?”

  At that question, the tears dried. She scooted across the floor to me and lowered her voice. “They say they do not have her. They keep asking me where she is.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Someone else was in the woods last night. You felt it, didn’t you? Something else followed us.”

  I didn’t say anything. My head hurt like hell. I thought I might be sick.

  “Someone else took Maisie,” Lisette continued. “They came to protect her, when we could not.”

  There was no time to respond before the door opened and Elias appeared. He cast a long shadow, and he didn’t look good. However, he had a gun and both hands untied, so there was little question who had the advantage.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “Why don’t you have your people call my people, and they’ll set something up.”

  He strode across the room before I could brace myself for what was coming, and smashed the butt end of the gun across my cheek. My head whipped backward. “You want to keep playing, shithead? Because I’m done. Where’s the kid?”

  I spit blood onto the hardwood floor. Life growing up with a strict preacher who hated my guts had given me a pretty tough skin, but I didn’t know if I was prepared for this.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “She disappeared in the woods while we were out there. We thought you had her.”

  “Well, I don’t.” He crouched in front of me and pressed the barrel of his gun into my left nostril. “Think again. Where is she?”

  I could see Lisette behind me, her back against the opposite wall. The hatred in her eyes was visceral. “I’m telling you,” I said. “We heard her scream, and then she just...vanished. I don’t know what happened to her.”

  He pulled the gun back and stood. This time, I was able to prepare myself a little better for the next blow: Elias’s boot straight to my gut. The best I could manage for defense was to puke, but I did manage to get a little on Elias before he slammed out of the room.

  Lisette remained where she was until I was able to sit back up again and scoot as far as possible from the pool of vomit on the floor.

  “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah. Sure.” My mouth was still bleeding; I spat on the floor one more time and looked at her apologetically. “Sorry. I’m not making this great for you.”

  “I’ve seen worse.”

  One look in her eyes and I believed her.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I asked. I had a lisp that I definitely hadn’t had before. Solomon would love that.

  “What the hell is going on?” Lisette guessed.

  “Yeah. Though I would have used something stronger than ‘hell.’”

  She smiled faintly. “I suppose you’ve earned the full story.” Not that it would do me any good now.

  She shifted, stretching her long legs out in front of her in an effort to make herself more comfortable. Or as comfortable as possible while sitting on the floor with her hands tied behind her back.

 
“In 1986, I was a twelve-year-old at St. Mary’s School for Girls in Darfur. You had already guessed South Africa was a lie?”

  “I had a hunch.”

  She nodded. “At that time, no one had heard of Sefu Keita—the witch doctor I would soon come to know very well. There were of course others to fear in the area, though. The school was meant to be secure, a safe haven—it is why my parents chose it. The drought was very bad then, however... While African and Arab had lived together peaceably for many years, this was changing. Conflicts were escalating, making the country increasingly volatile. We knew there was risk, even in our school.

  “Late one night, we heard the nuns screaming. They told us to lock our door, and to remain hidden inside until someone came for us.” I’d spent nights hiding from my father when I was a kid, but I’d known the worst I could expect was a few lashes with a leather belt on my backside— maybe something a little more extreme if he was feeling vindictive. Nothing like this. “We spent much of the night beneath our beds,” Lisette continued, “listening to the screams and cries of the nuns who had been our teachers. Early that morning, Sefu’s soldiers broke through the heavy door that was to keep them out. Sefu took ten of us. He chose carefully, examining each of us. Charlene was the first selected. I was the last.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t imagine.”

  “In this world, it is unimaginable. In my country, you hear this story and much worse, every day.”

  “How did Foster and Davies come into the equation?” I asked.

  She grimaced at the reminder. “They were meant to come on a diplomatic mission—a way to bargain with Sefu, and ideally free those students who remained. That is what we were told. But Mr. Foster—he was not a congressman then—was not interested in freeing anyone. He was interested in Sefu’s magic. Mr. Davies is a good man... He did not want to be there when he realized what was happening; he begged Mr. Foster to stop.”

  She wet her lips and leaned her head back against the wall, shutting her eyes for a moment. I let her come back to the story in her own time.

  “Sefu had powerful drugs. He gave those to both men. The hallucinogens made Mr. Davies very frightened, but the congressman... Mr. Foster took these drugs, and the monster inside him was unleashed.”

  “And you were in his path?” I guessed.

  “He liked me very much. Sefu told him that he could use me how he liked for the time he was there. Three days.”

  I tried to imagine what those three days would have been like for her. Fourteen years old, terrified, her body violated... I felt a rush of anger that burned past pain and fatigue. More than anything, I wanted Foster to pay.

  “I didn’t know until later that I was pregnant,” Lisette continued. “I was very ill then, much smaller and less hardy than the other girls. I gained very little weight through the pregnancy. At the same time, Charlene and Jacob were expecting their first child.”

  “And that child didn’t make it,” I guessed.

  She looked at me, surprised that I’d figured it out. “How did you know?”

  “Mary said something the other night before she cut out—that she didn’t have any blood left to stick around for. That seemed callous, until I started thinking about it. And Maisie’s pretty fair-skinned to be the child of Charlene and Jacob.”

  She nodded. “It’s true. Their child died. But my baby... She was born small, but healthy. We knew Sefu would sacrifice her, though—I had no power, not like Charlene, but an infant has great magic when offered to the gods.”

  “So you told them your baby was Jacob and Charlene’s,” I said. “And you left not long after?”

  “They told Sefu that I had died—it wasn’t uncommon to lose people in our camp. If I had stayed, Sefu would certainly have killed me next. Jacob helped me to get away. I changed my name, and fled the country. In South Africa, I began working as a prostitute. I was starving, and very sick. It was then that an American spotted me on the streets of Cape Town, and said she believed I could be successful.”

  I could see how the modeling agency hadn’t known how to run with that particular success story, though I didn’t say so.

  “I came to America and tried to forget that life,” Lisette continued. “I changed my name. Created the story of coming from South Africa... But then Mr. Davies followed through on a promise he had made during that first visit. He went back to Sudan and found Charlene, Mary, and my daughter. Again, Jacob helped them to escape—but this time, he was nearly killed.”

  I thought of the story Maisie had told, of watching her father die. I wondered what she’d thought when he came to save her and Lisette the other day.

  “And now?” I asked. “How did Foster figure out who you were? Or, more than that, how did he figure out Maisie was his daughter? And what the hell is he doing now? Charlene’s murder was hardly low profile... I can see trying to buy your silence, and then maybe making you and Maisie quietly disappear if that didn’t work. But this...”

  She shook her head, apparently baffled herself. Muffled footsteps sounded outside, climbing the stairs. We both fell silent.

  I expected panic from Lisette, but she merely looked resigned. We were both tied, and the room was completely empty—there was nothing to use as a weapon, even if I did decide to do something crazy and try to get the jump on Elias when he came in.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. The footsteps, lighter than I would have expected, got closer.

  Lisette smiled—a faint, embittered smile that belonged on a woman much older. “Maisie got away from them; this is all I care about. What comes next...I will handle it.”

  I wished I could be so graceful. The footsteps paused outside the door. The knob turned. I found myself thinking unexpectedly of Doug Philbrick. If there were an afterlife, or even an in between, it occurred to me that he’d be getting a hell of a kick out of all this.

  The door pushed open a quarter of an inch.

  An inch.

  A red head peered inside.

  Not Elias.

  “Thank Christ,” Solomon whispered. “This place has more rooms than the Taj Mahal.” She came inside quickly, shut the door behind her, and crossed to Lisette first.

  “How did you—” I asked.

  “Ssh,” she cautioned. She untied Lisette with surprising speed before she moved to me. I tensed when I heard Elias’s voice outside the house, talking to someone. Johnny? Solomon wouldn’t look at me. I could feel her hands trembling as she untied the ropes around my wrists.

  “Sol—” I began.

  “Don’t,” she said shortly. “Just shut up, okay? If Elias hadn’t already worked you over I’d kick your ass, you son of a bitch.”

  Elias’s voice rose to a belligerent shout. Once I was free, I stood on shaking legs and crept to the window. We were on the second floor of an old colonial home. Elias and Johnny were talking beside Elias’s Corvette, in the driveway below. I still couldn’t make out the words, but Elias looked pissed. He gestured to the car, then looked around. I ducked back against the wall, out of view.

  “Come on,” Solomon said. “Train’s leaving the station with or without you.”

  Before we made a move, the front door opened downstairs. Whoever was coming in wasn’t happy, either; it slammed shut, reverberating through the house. Solomon tensed beside me.

  “Shit,” she whispered.

  “Diggins!” Elias shouted. “What kind of game are you running?”

  Lisette opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off by an answering shout—this one from someone I hadn’t thought I would hear again.

  “You want to play games, motherfucker?” Wolf asked. His voice was pained, but surprisingly strong. “Let’s play.”

  Solomon grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the door, nodding at Lisette at the same time. “Come on. That’s our cue.”

  ◊◊◊◊◊

  When we came downstairs, Hector was bringing Johnny in with a gun at his back. Wolf had a gun trained on Elias, and he leaned ag
ainst an old side table for support. His face was pure white. He dripped with sweat, his shirt stained with blood.

  “Please,” Johnny said. Usually cavalier, today Johnny wasn’t looking so hot himself. “You weren’t supposed to get hurt. I did this for you.”

  Wolf staggered to his brother and slapped him, hard, across the face. Johnny fell backward. “You ready to go?” Wolf asked Hector, never taking his eyes from Elias or Johnny.

  “Car’s out front,” Hector confirmed.

  “We can cut you into the deal,” Johnny said. He hadn’t gone down when Wolf hit him, but his mouth was bleeding.

  “Go out and wait for me,” Wolf said to us.

  “But—” Solomon began.

  “Please,” Wolf said quietly.

  “Come on,” Hector said. He nodded toward the door. Lisette went first, without a word. I took Solomon’s arm and tugged her toward the exit. She shrugged me off, but left regardless. I took one last look at Wolf, barely able to stand, Elias and his brother at gunpoint in front of him, and left him.

  A black Buick was idling out front. We were at a farmhouse surrounded on all sides by forest—New England woods most definitely, but it was hard to tell much beyond that. We had been here at least a while, though: the sun was setting over a horizon of evergreens, the sky a swirl of gold, pink, and purple.

  “Wolf and Lisette will take the back,” Hector said. I nodded. Solomon got in the front seat first and slid in beside Hector. Lisette got in back. I lowered myself to the passenger’s seat beside Solomon and scanned the horizon for some sign of my ghosts. They must have taken the day off.

  The act of sitting took more effort than expected. I winced when my ass hit the seat, pain radiating through my stomach and chest from Elias’s boot. Solomon glanced at me, but remained silent.

  Five minutes passed, counted out in the glare of electric green numbers on the dashboard. At 8:52, a gunshot sounded inside the farmhouse. Then another. Two minutes later, Wolf emerged alone.

  Chapter 23

  Hector headed out as soon as Wolf was in the car. We rode in silence down a long dirt road through thick forest. Though we must have traveled at least a few miles, we didn’t pass another house until we reached paved highway.