by G A Chase
7
Colin stalked his desk like a CEO planning a hostile takeover. Finally, he picked up the radius bone that was still attached to the skeletal fingers grasping the cane and shook it. “Let go of my walking stick, you fucking devil voodoo bitch!”
Early in his captivity, he’d hallucinated quite a lot. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw the middle-finger bones extend out from the cane then wrap back around the stick.
“Maybe it’s better that you hang onto it. Swamp witch only knows what would happen if you let go. I certainly can’t grab it. It’d probably just fall straight through the building’s floors to another form of hell.”
He tossed the bones holding the hologram-like cane back on his desk. “At least those pesky kids won’t get their hands on it.”
The dull glow around the buildings on the far side of the Quarter indicated the location of the hellish VW with the band of women. He longed to confront them, but he feared relinquishing the upper hand. This was his realm. His only real competition, Baron Samedi, was isolated in his office fortress. The swamp witch, like most deities, didn’t deign to make herself known.
That only left Serephine in the old mansion. For weeks, he’d made the pilgrimage from the Central Business District to the Garden District on the off chance that she might see him again. Each time, the mansion looked like a corpse with the flesh falling from its bones. Great gaping holes in the siding revealed the studs without the internal walls. In places, he could see straight through the structure to the vine-covered backyard.
The place depressed him, but not because of the forever-arrested state of disrepair. A reality existed in which his daughter was busy living her life, and he had no part in it except as a memory she kept hidden away like some ex-lover’s pain-filled letters.
“Fuck her. If I’m the devil here, I might as well embrace the role. Those kids were fools to stumble into my domain. They will pay the price.” He turned back to the bones on his desk. “You hear me, voodoo queen? You may have your precious magic wand, but you can’t protect the insects that fly into my web.”
All of his bravado, however, didn’t change the fact this was no longer only his realm. Finding the cane had been simple enough. After all, Marie Laveau had been a longtime resource for keeping Archibald Malveaux’s adversaries in check, so when she originally approached him with the idea of stealing the cane from Baron Samedi, he’d listened. As the most powerful banker in the city, and the primary patron for New Orleans’s first Mardi Gras parade, he’d been one of the few to ride on the grand marshal’s float. What no one knew was that Baron Samedi was also on that float. Snatching the cane had taken little more skill than that of a common pickpocket.
But Marie hadn’t meant for him to keep the magical cane. Foolishly, she thought she was using him. Figuring out that the stick had run home to Mama, he’d chosen her tomb as one of the first places he’d vandalized.
But seeing the vintage VW driving down Convention Center Drive—now, that had come as a surprise. Time hadn’t meant a damn thing, but with someone else in his realm, it would be a race to see who could control the cane first. Possessing it gave him the clear advantage, but he’d made no progress since getting it and the bones back to his office.
“I suppose it’s back to your great-granddaughter’s shop and all your mysterious books.”
Waiting would only give those damn kids a chance to catch up. Having the advantage only worked if he kept one step ahead and didn’t use it as an excuse to sit back and coast.
* * *
“Looks like we’re too late.” Kendell pulled a couple more bricks from the bashed-in front of the aboveground crypt.
Myles peered around her into the deathly darkness. “I think she put up a fight. Look at the top of the casket. Looks like something tried to bust out. There’s wood splinters all over the place.”
Kendell had never been afraid of dead things, and her time studying voodoo only heightened her understanding that the wall between the living and the dead wasn’t as solid as many suspected. She lifted the lid in the house of the dead. “She’s missing an arm bone at the elbow. The way the rest of the bones project toward the lid of the coffin makes me think she was reaching for something. I’d have to believe that would be the cane.”
“Even in death, she’s got a hankering for it. I’ll be glad to see it returned to Guinee, where it belongs.”
Kendell knew enough of the story to believe Marie Laveau wouldn’t have wanted the inheritor of Baron Malveaux’s soul to once again possess her voodoo prize. “I doubt it would do her any good now. My guess is she put some spell on her crypt to somehow snatch the cane if possible.”
“Since the only person in this reality is Colin Malveaux, we don’t need three guesses to figure out who has it. But this hell still seems the way Sanguine described it, so though he might have it, he must not know how to use it.”
Kendell felt the stirrings of hope. “Baron Samedi said we’d need to make it part of our reality. What if the reason she’s missing an arm is because he can’t handle it? He’d need to find answers, but he wouldn’t know we have the curse diary regarding the cane. The last time he would have seen the book would be in Delphine’s lap as she read the passage about removing the silver skull while Sanguine and I performed our magic. She didn’t give me the journal until after he left to chase Sanguine.”
Myles leaned against the tomb. “So our next stop is Scratch and Sniff?”
Kendell thought they might finally be one step ahead of their adversary. “He’ll assume we’ll be searching for the same answers. If he pursues us, we might be able to set a trap. At the very least, we could find something voodooish to use against him.”
As they walked the handful of blocks from the cemetery to the shop, she tried to imagine what Colin might have done with his time in hell. Certainly a trip to Scratch and Sniff would have been high on the list of places he’d go for answers, but she wondered if he could even enter the building. Between it being Delphine’s shop and filled with Marie’s work, there had to be some powerful voodoo protection spells to ward off any intruder. However, this wasn’t the voodoo realm. Had Kendell been in his position, she’d have carefully boxed up all of the writings and transported them to her lair for intense study, but Colin didn’t strike her as the book-nerd type. Assuming he was able to get past the front door, his irritation at not being able to decode the writings would have set off a fit of rage. The journals were hard enough for her to figure out under the guidance of Delphine.
Myles pointed at the hole in Scratch and Sniff’s front door where the doorknob had been. “Looks like we’re not the first ones to come here for answers. You’d better let me go in to check things out.”
Though she firmly believed in female equality, she didn’t see the harm in a little male chivalry from time to time. “Just be careful.”
He stood still for a moment. “What would that look like—being careful, I mean? We’re in hell, and I’m about to walk into a voodoo shop that the devil probably frequented.”
“Don’t be an ass, or I’ll go first.”
He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “For luck.”
* * *
Myles didn’t get far into the empty building before he realized he’d set off the trap. The room shifted from shades of gray and blue to red and orange. The bare walls he’d seen from outside the door where now covered in symbols drawn in blood. Demon wraiths flew out of the broken bottles that covered the floor, freed from the voodoo totems that were lined up along the wall like sentinels. The spirits swirled around him like flames enveloping a witch being burned at the stake.
“Kendell, if you can hear me, do not come in here. It’s a trap.”
The sound of his voice set off the evil minions. They dove on him like piranhas devouring a carcass, but it wasn’t his flesh they were after. His thoughts and memories became disjointed like a book having its pages ripped out and tossed into the wind.
“We meet again.” The
sound of the man’s voice quieted the spirits of flame.
Myles found he couldn’t move—not his legs, arms, or even his eyes. His thoughts, however, could still form. Who the hell are you?
“I’m hurt. You don’t recognize me? I suppose I was more spirit to your physical body last time. Now I’m the reality, and you’re the interloper.” Colin Malveaux walked around to face Myles.
He leaned on a metal rod. The top had been mangled into a handle. His clothing was impeccable, much like the loas of the dead but clean and better fitting. A scar snaked out from under the center of his top hat, ran along his forehead, and ended at his right eye.
You’ve looked better. Myles’s defiance was one of the few things that had kept him sane while under Baron Malveaux’s possession.
“Trust me, I’ve looked worse. When the old swamp bitch dropped me off here, I was barely a shadow of the man standing in front of you, but I’ve had time to learn about my environment. You and your friends were fools to challenge me in my own reality. Wicca may provide the bars to my prison cell, but I get to do whatever I want with the interior.”
Without the wraiths chewing on his soul, Myles began to regain some functionality of his body. “Where am I? We can’t have left your demon dimension, so I should have seen it from outside the door.”
Colin swung the iron rod as he talked. Each time it hit the floor, sparks flew up as if he were poking a fire. “My dear daughter gave me the clues to building this cell. She explained I was in a school hallway. Such places are lined with lockers. This realm may only exist within the four walls of this room, but it is all mine.”
Myles knew that the man, or rather the various men he used to be, never did anything impulsively. To have built this trap meant he wanted to capture a hostage. “What do you want?”
“I should think that would be obvious. I want to take this elevated being I’ve become and return to the land of the living, where I can be a god, though I’d settle for a devil—either one, really, so long as there are people to follow me.”
The fact that neither Myles nor anyone of his group could give Colin what he wanted gave Myles a sense of peace. “We wouldn’t give you what you wanted even if we could. So you might as well turn loose your demons to do their worst.”
Colin moved his hand down to the shaft of his cane and slowly rotated the iron bar. Myles’s body followed suit until he was facing the open door. Kendell stood at the entrance, horror stricken. “She can see you but not hear you. With my little pets dancing around your body, she can see the parts of your soul being chewed on like rats ripping at a block of cheese. Not a bad metaphor actually. You always were about as smart as curdled milk.”
Myles closed his eyes to focus his attention on Kendell’s soul. You can hear me. I’m okay. He’s only trying to scare you. Find the others, and get to work.
He could feel her nod of understanding. When he opened his eyes, she was gone. “What, exactly, do you think is going to happen here?”
Myles watched the room spin as Colin turned him back around. “Right about now, I expect Kendell is running to find Baron Samedi. I know you two opened the door. I should thank you for that, but after my first week or two here, I realized that wasn’t the gate I was looking to open. A spirit like his out of his realm of power is kind of like a cartoon character come to life. They can make you laugh with their antics, but they can’t really do anything of value.”
At least keeping the devil talking worked as a distraction from him following Kendell. “Then why would you want her to run to Baron Samedi if he can’t get you what you want?”
“All stepping stones along the path.”
8
Kendell ran down the streets of the Quarter in the dark, dodging the water-filled potholes. At least there weren’t the drunk gutter punks to avoid. As she rounded Royal Street for the shortcut toward the Scratchy Dog, she plowed into Sanguine, who was running toward her.
“He’s trapped the band. I didn’t even see the voodoo dolls until Polly smashed the front window,” Sanguine said between breathes.
“Apparently, Scratch and Sniff wasn’t his only snare. He’s got Myles too. We need the cane, and we need it now. But all I’ve got is Samedi’s vague description of it not being in this reality and the fact that Colin already stole it from Marie’s tomb.”
“If Colin didn’t have it with him, where would he hide it?”
“It has to be in his office. If Myles can keep him distracted long enough, we should be able to sneak in and steal it.”
Sanguine took Kendell’s arm, not letting her start down the street toward the high-rise. “Then what? Once again, you need to think beyond the next obvious step. So what if we have the cane?”
Sometimes acting fast was better than sitting around talking. “It’s the first step. Once we have it, we can figure out how to stick the silver skull back on. Then I’ll beat him over the head with it if I have to. Who cares what we do next? We’ve got to seize this opportunity while we can.”
Kendell pulled her arm out of Sanguine’s grasp and started running through the Quarter. If they had to strategize, they could at least keep moving while they did so. From behind her, Sanguine kept offering up obstacles like garbage tossed into the road. “So you’re just going to fix the cane like he wants—again. My grandmother isn’t going to whip up another hurricane to save us this time.”
“Once we have the cane, we can get Baron Samedi out of his cage.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re looking for some big, strong voodoo lord to save you. I’ve never imagined you to be the submissive type of woman.”
Kendell nearly stopped to confront Sanguine. “If we didn’t have to get this thing before Colin loses interest in torturing Myles, I’d be more than happy to explain to you how I am not looking for a man to save me. But sometimes people, and spirits, have their uses.”
The towering office building didn’t look all that different from the last time Kendell had confronted Colin, then known as Lincoln Laroque, in his penthouse office.
“You’re not worried that this is another trap?” Sanguine asked.
Kendell had been considering the possibility for the last two blocks. “It’s possible, but Delphine didn’t have an unlimited number of voodoo totems. So far, that seems to be the extent of Colin’s powers—using what someone else created. You can stay out here if you think it’d be safer.”
“No. I’m not going to be the last woman standing in hell. Of the two of us, you’re the stronger.”
Kendell turned away from the glass entry doors and back toward Sanguine. “I think that’s the first compliment you’ve ever given me.”
“You mean more to me than any sister ever could, but that also involves you having to deal with my snarkiness.”
“Fair enough,” Kendell said. “At the risk of you calling me stupid again, do we just walk in? It’s not like he’d have any guards.”
Sanguine picked up a rock that formed part of the landscaping border and threw it like a baseball pitcher at the glass door. The barrier shattered, covering the marble entry floor with miniature glass pebbles. “How’s that for stupid?”
After twenty-seven years of conditioning, Kendell expected some kind of alarm or armed security officer. “You’ve proven we can break in, but just in case there’s some kind of paranormal alarm system, we’d better get moving.” Even with the lack of armed response, Kendell avoided the elevator. “It’s a long way up, but my gullibility only goes so far.”
“Agreed. I’m never averse to a little physical exercise.”
Kendell consulted the wall directory. “Climbing fifty-five stories isn’t what I consider a light workout, but if you can do it, so can I.”
Sanguine bolted for the door. “Last one to the top is a Hogwarts dropout.”
By the fifth floor, Kendell was sorry she’d inadvertently caused Sanguine to challenge her. Buy the twentieth, she no longer knew how much higher her friend was up the stairwell.
“Com
e on, slowpoke.” The younger woman’s words echoed down the shaft.
“Now, this is stupid.” But Kendell knew Sanguine couldn’t have heard her.
Sports had never been Kendell’s passion in school. It wasn’t the physical exertion. She had plenty of boyfriends who would attest to her stamina. It was the damn uniforms. She focused on her irritation at the school system’s inability to make exercise a lifelong activity, and her anger made the next twenty floors much easier to climb.
By the forty-seventh floor, she caught Sanguine gasping for air on the landing. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
“Suddenly, the idea of taking the elevator doesn’t seem so foolish,” Sanguine said. “You don’t suppose we could just jump out the window to go back down, do you?”
Laughing hurt Kendell’s sides. “Maybe. After all, this reality is nothing more than your grandmother’s imagination. Come on. We’re almost there.”
They climbed the remaining steps together. “No more stairs. I guess this must be the place.”
Kendell pushed on the release bar across the door. “He didn’t even lock it. What do you suppose that means?”
“If we’re lucky, it means he didn’t think anyone would be dumb enough to walk up fifty-five flights of stairs.”
Kendell wasn’t sure if it was the exhaustion or her time hanging out with Sanguine, but she was beginning to see the worst-case scenarios all around her. “It could be a trap. He’s just sadistic enough to wait until we’d done all that work before springing it on us.”
“Very good. But I suspect it’s more likely that he wants us to find the cane. If I were in danger, my grandmother would let me know. Come on. I didn’t come all this way to turn around now.” Sanguine pushed past Kendell into the room walled with windows. “For a jailbird, this is one impressive perch.”