by G A Chase
Sanguine was sprinting toward the truck. “Fuck! We’re going to have to make a run for it.”
Kendell tried to run, but her feet slipped on the gravel, and she fell to the ground. “Take the cane and go!”
Sanguine barely got the truck door open before the menacing airboat flew up the boat launch with Colin standing on the bow like a Viking warrior. The truck engine spun but refused to start.
They were outnumbered and trapped, but that didn’t seem to be a deterrent for Sanguine. She jumped back out of the truck and tore at the cloth wrapping the cane. She pulled the staff out as if it was a high-powered sniper rifle. “Get back, or I swear to my gods I’ll use this thing on all of you.”
Colin jumped from the airboat with all the arrogance of a general whose men had just secured a beachhead. He shook his head as he stared at Kendell. “About time you came to rescue her. Did you really think I’d be so foolish as to try and capture the swamp witch on her own territory with nothing more than a leaky rowboat?”
“You want it?” Sanguine said. “You’re going to have to pry it from my dead hands, and even then, you’ll have a fight. This stick doesn’t obey you any longer.”
Colin motioned to his goons. “Empty threats? I expected better after all that time playing cat and mouse in the swamp. You really did a skillful job of keeping me on the hunt. Of course, having Kendell come to your rescue was a monumental mistake. I’m curious—why didn’t you entice me so far out into the cypress grove I couldn’t find my way back? Even with my GPS, I found returning to your grandmother’s shack dicey a time or two.”
Sanguine had the wild look of a cornered panther. “Ask Kendell. I would have been more than happy to let you die out there. Listening to her is a mistake that will forever haunt me.”
Even dirty and ragged, he maintained the aristocratic attitude that both revolted and enticed Kendell. “So I have you to thank for my life. I’ve said it before. We’d make powerful allies.”
Kendell wanted to spit in his face, but the time for direct confrontation had passed. “I promise you, saving your life is a mistake I won’t make a second time.”
His self-important smile made her want to vomit. “Get in the airboat, both of you.”
Sanguine still hadn’t let go of the cane. “Why?”
“Thanks to Kendell’s boyfriend, I now have Marie Laveau’s diary regarding this stick. With Delphine’s help, we’re all going to see if we can get that damn silver head off and release the cane’s full power. I never should have let that old voodoo queen convince me to let her put it on in the first place.”
Sanguine kicked hard at the guards trying to manhandle her. She refused to let go of the cane, choosing instead to bite the arms of the men wrestling her to the ground. Kendell admired the hell out of the woman.
* * *
Kendell had plenty of time on the noisy ride to gather her questions for Sanguine. When the boat finally docked, they were at a lavish house on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, far from the constant activity of New Orleans—and far from those Kendell relied on for help.
As the two guards escorted Kendell and Sanguine off the boat, Colin led the way. “You’ll be locked up in one of the bedrooms until Delphine arrives. Do what I ask, and we can all part amicably. Fight me, and things won’t be nearly as pleasant.”
Sanguine continued to hold the cane tightly. “Fat chance.” She was unceremoniously shoved into the bedroom.
Kendell didn’t see any point in wasting her energy resisting. She waited until the door lock clicked before turning to the young swamp witch. “Isn’t getting the silver skull off the cane what we want? Can’t Baron Samedi materialize—or whatever he does—and take it back to Guinee?”
Without her adversaries present, the other woman’s energy evaporated. She collapsed on the bed like a little girl. “It’s not that simple. We needed to get the cane away from Colin before removing the lock. Marie’s spell did hold the cane in the physical world, but it also prevented the powers from the netherworld from being used here. If we remove the spell while Colin’s holding the cane, he’ll have control over those powers.”
“What about Baron Samedi?”
She sat up and held the cane up for Kendell’s inspection. “Ownership doesn’t mean the same thing in the afterlife that it does here. Right now, you might think I own this stick because it’s in my hand, but it won’t respond to me. Through magic and trickery, Baron Malveaux stole this cane from Baron Samedi. That gave him some powers when it came to the afterlife, but not this life. Removing the lock while the cane is in Colin’s possession will give him its full powers. But Baron Samedi isn’t going to take that change sitting down. Colin’s back among the living, and Samedi’s back at the seventh gate—for now.”
“So you’re saying there will be another conflict?”
Sanguine turned the silver skull so it looked as though she was addressing it. “Should the two decide to duel it out, yes. But all that assumes we can get this thing off. Colin said you found a book?”
Kendell was still working her way down her list of questions. “I wanted to ask you about that. I could only open the front cover. It talks about you and I being the people who can remove the spell, but under the supervision of Delphine. The rest of the pages seemed like they were glued together.”
“Did you try singing to it?”
Kendell didn’t think it was the time for jokes. “Why on Earth would I do that?”
The look Sanguine gave Kendell again made her think of a snarky sibling. “That voodoo bitch didn’t tell you? My gods, you two must be simple. Think, Kendell. Why would you sing to it?”
In a flash of insight, she understood what Sanguine was saying. “Madam de Galpion casts spells through smell. That’s her special skill. I’m a musician. So you’re saying that’s how I express my power—through music?”
“How could you not know that?”
Though Kendell loved learning, being lectured annoyed the hell out of her. “So what would happen if I started singing to the cane?”
“How the hell should I know? Wicca isn’t voodoo. We don’t cast hexes and go looking to the afterlife as the source of our power. Nature is my religion. What I do know is you don’t go playing with magic without first knowing how to use it.”
“For someone who keeps saying she’s not a practitioner of voodoo, you do seem to know a lot about it. I’ve only been involved for a little while. A year ago, I was just a barista at a small coffee shop.”
Sanguine slid up the bed to sit against the pillows stacked against the varnished pine wall. “A year ago, I was a sophomore at Tulane studying botany. That was before you started messing with the Malveaux curse. Once my grandma noticed the activity, she called me back to the swamp to teach me about my familial obligation.”
Kendell sat at the edge of the bed. “I thought you’d always lived in the swamp.”
If Sanguine had a snarky response, she didn’t express it. “Of course I knew about my grandmother the swamp witch, and I spent a lot of my youth out there with her, learning about nature. She wanted me to get an education. I guess that’s going to have to be on hold for a while.”
“Is that why you hate me?”
For the first time Kendell could remember, Sanguine smiled. “You should talk to some of my past lovers. I’m at my most disagreeable with those I care about. My grandmother could see the future like waves on the ocean. Sometimes, a small undulation in the deep water can become a towering crest close to shore. She told me my life would be extraordinary, but even she didn’t know how that would play out. You’re the undertow that makes me rise up. Never think that I hate you.”
Kendell had known Sanguine would make a powerful partner. “We need a plan.”
“Yep, and it needs to be better than the last one because that’s not working out so well.”
* * *
Myles saw the flashing blue and red lights in front of his apartment as Joe missed the turn. “What the hell?”
<
br /> Joe kept driving straight. “I don’t know what they want, but it can’t be good. And I’m driving a stolen van. Is there somewhere I can drop you and the professor while I figure out what’s going on?”
“Take me across Rampart.” Myles hoped they were early enough to catch Charlie at home.
Unfortunately, passing from the Quarter to the Treme didn’t provide the relief Myles had hoped to find. A tow truck was dropping off Charlie’s beat-up truck.
Myles barely waited for Joe to stop the van before he launched out the door. “Please tell me that damn thing broke down and Kendell is in the house.”
“Sorry, man. I really wish that were the case. When she didn’t get back, I got worried. Fred here’s a buddy of mine who patrols the highway along the spillway for stranded motorists. I had him take a look. He found the truck but nobody with it. From the marks in the gravel, it looks like she had company, and not the type she expected. The truck door was open and the key in the ignition.”
Myles turned back to Joe. “It has to be Colin’s men. Any idea where they’d take her?”
He jumped from the front seat and glared at Myles. “First things first. What was Kendell doing out there? I thought we had an agreement that we’d discuss plans before running off on some half-baked idea. I can’t provide protection if I don’t know what’s going on.”
Myles could see he was more than perturbed. “Nothing personal, but someone told Luther Noire about the professor’s equipment. I’d bet my tips for the night that they’ve been following the professor around, waiting for their opportunity to strike. I couldn’t be sure telling you what Kendell was up to wouldn’t result in exactly this same situation but with different players.”
Joe uncrossed his arms. “Smart. Don’t trust anyone you don’t have to. How bad is the situation?”
Beyond Kendell once again being in danger, Myles hadn’t considered what was at stake. “They would have waited until Sanguine showed up. That means they have the walking cane.”
“Do they have the book?”
Myles stared at Joe, assessing what he might know. “How do you know there’s a book?”
“Isn’t there always some diary from Marie Laveau that has all the answers?”
Myles wasn’t buying it. “Sure, but you weren’t asking in general terms. What do you know?”
“You have your research libraries, and I have mine.”
Joe would’ve had access to Luther’s secret material. The man’s office rivaled Delphine de Galpion’s voodoo library.
“Our plan was for Kendell and Sanguine to use the diary to release the cane,” Myles said. “Then with my connection to Guinee, we were going to have Baron Samedi come and take it back.”
“Who has the book now?”
Myles’s throat went dry. “Madam de Galpion.”
“That’s not good,” Charlie said. “She was the first place I tried when I heard from Fred about the truck. Her car is missing from out back of her place.”
Professor Yates had been quietly listening from the open sliding door. “I’ve got my equipment here in the van. My guess is they’re all long gone from New Orleans. The good news is there are only a couple of ways out of town, and with them picking up Kendell on Highway 55, we’d have to assume they were headed north. I know it’ll be like hunting for a stick in the forest, but it’s the best I can come up with to find her.”
Charlie didn’t even bother checking on his truck before heading for the open sliding door of the van. “I’m coming with you. If there was ever a group that needed a bartender, it’s one made up of a paramilitary dude, a crazy professor, and a guy who thinks he can hear voices in physical objects.”
57
A long black 1970s Cadillac peppered the bedroom window with gravel from the driveway. Like a daughter waiting for her mom to get home, Kendell peered out between the curtains. Delphine slammed the car door as though pissed and stomped up the walkway to the front door.
Once the door opened, Delphine yelled loudly enough to be heard by everyone in the house, “I told you to leave her out of it!”
Colin’s response was also pitched so that everyone could hear. “So long as everyone does as I ask, you’ll all be free to leave this house at the end of the day, unharmed.”
At the sound of the bedroom door being unlocked, Sanguine jumped off the bed with the cane still in her hand. “Time for us to get to work.”
Kendell wished she’d had some way to practice her newly revealed skills, but at least she no longer saw herself as a pawn in the high-powered game.
The guard motioned for them to move to the living room. In the middle of the elegant but comfortably furnished room, Delphine stood in her defiant stance in front of Colin.
The man had clearly gotten a shower and once again wore his old-fashioned suit. “Now that we’re all here, I’ll lay out what I want.”
Sanguine clutched the cane to her chest like a cherished pet. “Whatever you have in mind, you can count me out. Your goons might wrestle this stick from me, but I’ll never open its powers to you. I’ll die first, and you know that’s true.”
“I expected some resistance. Delphine knows firsthand what I can do. Though she may not like my methods, she doesn’t dare cross me. Kendell may still be discovering the extent of my powers, but she’s suffered enough to know I’ll stop at nothing. But you, Sanguine, hardly know me at all, except for the ghost stories your grandmother might have told you. I no longer have the powers over the dead as I once did—and will again—but there are conditions worse than death.” He turned toward a black box on an end table. “Television on, weather channel. Leave the sound off.”
Above a grand fireplace that took up an entire wall, a TV larger than Kendell’s apartment came on. The hurricane it showed took up most of the Gulf of Mexico.
“It’s bigger than Katrina,” Colin said. “The reports are saying they don’t even have a scale sufficient to categorize it. Most of Louisiana, from the gulf to the floodgates, will be wiped out. And we all know how unreliable any form of protection is when nature shows her hand, don’t we, Sanguine?”
She turned as pale as her sandy-blond hair. “You couldn’t have caused the storm—so this isn’t a threat—that must mean you think you can stop it.”
“Not on my own. I’m betting there are instructions in that book that will enable those of us in this room to at least influence its direction. But we’ll need the power of the cane first. New Orleans is my home and base of power. The last thing I want is to see it flooded again. I just wanted you to see that we have a shared purpose.”
Sanguine turned from the reporter’s look of terror to the room’s picture window and the clouds on the horizon. “And if I say no?”
“Dying is easy. Watching everyone and everything you care about get washed out to sea—and knowing you alone could have prevented it—will leave you a life filled with regrets. I’m not asking you to join me, only to see that, for the moment, we have a shared obligation.”
The swamp witch’s knuckles turned white as she squeezed the cane. “I’ll go as far as reading the diary, but if there isn’t some specific spell to combat that monster, I won’t help you.”
“That’s a good girl. Kendell, you have the power to open this book.”
His patronizing voice made Kendell wish Sanguine would hit him over the head with the cane. “I don’t have the foggiest idea of how to unstick those pages.” Her opening gambit held the advantage of partial truth, just in case anyone had the ability to detect such things.
Delphine pulled the book out of her oversized purse and set it on the coffee table. “You have to sing to it.”
So you knew all along and didn’t tell me. Once again, I’m going to have to apologize to Myles. Thank God he’s smart enough not to rub it in. Kendell refrained from commenting, but her trick had confirmed Sanguine’s suspicion that Kendell wasn’t being taught what she needed.
Colin motioned toward the stereo system. “I know it’s not the sam
e as a live band, but this is a smart house. Just ask, and it’ll play anything you like.”
Kendell had had time in the bedroom to consider her choice, but she took a moment anyway. “House, play ‘Diary of Jane’ by Breaking Benjamin.” Then she closed her eyes and sang along.
She’d experienced the power of an audience while standing on stage with her band at the Scratchy Dog. Performing while handling a cursed object from the baron had given her a feeling of being amped up on some high-powered energy drink. Even playing with the golden pick from the loas of the dead was an energy she could identify. Standing without her guitar and relying on only her natural abilities—both mystical and musical—made her feel emotionally naked. No mystical force was propelling her—just the magic of music, which she’d known all her life. The power that built within her wasn’t from an outside source. The only time she’d felt something similar was when Myles had taken her to the deep waters. She was sensing her connection to every living soul. It was her back door into Guinee.
No one in the room had the impertinence to interrupt her while the song was playing. When she opened her eyes again, she saw the book open on the table, but the releasing of the pages had only been the confirmation of her abilities. She gave Sanguine a single nod. Only the swamp witch would know Kendell had established her connection with the cursed items Colin Malveaux wore as part of his costume.
After an hour of intense study, the three women came to a consensus.
Sanguine looked over her list of ingredients. “I think this will do it. Most of the stuff you should be able to find in the herb section of any grocery store. The plants are going to be more of a challenge. Someone will need to find a good local nursery. Anyway, this is what I need.” She handed the slip of paper to the guard towering over her.
He scanned the list. “A vanilla frosty and fries?”
“For the last week, I’ve been eating bugs, snakes, and pickerelweed. If I’m to perform the nature spell correctly, I need to be in the right frame of mind. That includes food.” She turned to Kendell. “Anything you want?”