The Malveaux Curse Mysteries Boxset 2

by G A Chase

  Kendell might see her as a sister, but the day was coming when she or Myles would start making subtle comments about Sanguine finding another abode. Where she really wanted to go was back to hell with her wings and ability to see the future, but that wasn’t an option, at least not so long as Myles held the only key to her returning.

  For a clairvoyant, Sanguine had surprisingly few ideas regarding her future.

  When the lovebirds returned from their clandestine meeting with the church elder, Sanguine prepared herself for the eviction. Better to throw myself out than be tossed on the street. “I’ve overstayed my welcome. You two must want your privacy back. I’ll find some place to crash.”

  Kendell looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “You’re family, and you’re being ridiculous.”

  Myles looked less decisive. “We would never kick you out, but I might have an option if you’re looking for your own place. The Scratchy Dog has an upstairs that used to be an apartment. Charlie and I use it mostly for storage, but we’ve got plenty of room for the inventory. Say the word, and the place is yours.”

  “No charge,” Kendell added. “It would be nice to know someone was keeping an eye on the place. I’m sure Charlie could find a job for you if you wanted to make a few bucks.”

  Sanguine laughed. “Yeah, as a shot girl. Can’t you just see me in a skirt so short you could see the curve of my ass, flirting and forcing drinks down the throats of drunk college dudes? I don’t think I’d last one night. But I will take you up on the apartment. Honestly, I was a little concerned about where I’d end up.”

  Kendell sat on the couch and put her arm around Sanguine’s shoulders. “I guess we’ve spent so much time in other realms that we haven’t paid a lot of attention to how you’d fair in this one. New Orleans must seem like another dimension to you.”

  Sanguine couldn’t bring herself to tell Kendell how right she was. “How did the meeting with the monsignor go?”

  “We have a plan, but it’s complicated.”

  Sanguine listened as attentively as she could manage. When Kendell finally shut her mouth, Sanguine couldn’t take it any longer. “You really are out of your mind.”

  Myles pulled out a pad of paper and started making some notes. “We realize there are a lot of moving parts, and they’ll all need to fit together perfectly.”

  “You think?” Sanguine wasn’t on board, but she managed to resist stomping around the room.

  Once Myles started listing the elements of a plan, there was no distracting him. “First, we need to figure out how to make mirror images of every person in New Orleans. Of course, the only real important ones would be those in close proximity to Colin. Anyone a block away probably would just need to look like a mannequin.”

  Sanguine leaned forward. “He’s going to interact with them. Have you thought about that? For example, we can’t know the history he has with his secretary. Some things can’t be faked. He’s going to see right through your plan the minute he talks with someone he knows.”

  Myles pointed the eraser of the pencil at her. “Good point. Our mirrors will have to reflect the actual people he knows. We should be able to come up with a list pretty easily.”

  “Then what?” Sanguine asked. “You’re just going to download their memories into some voodoo totems? This is never going to work.”

  Kendell snagged a piece of paper from Myles’s pad and started jotting down names. “We don’t have to include everyone he’s ever met, just those we choose to mirror in his hell. His mother, uncle, secretary, and a handful of others. Everyone else can be out of town. There was a hurricane after all.”

  Sanguine couldn’t believe they were even discussing a virtual reality. “Fine. So you’ve got this handful of people. What about you?”

  Kendell stopped writing. “Of course I’ll have to be mirrored. As will everyone I’ve worked with in pursuing Colin.”

  “And if he turns Mirror Kendell into Sexbot Kendell?” She knew it was a cruel question, but Kendell needed to be shocked back to reality.

  “Won’t happen,” Kendell said. “I can put in restrictions.”

  Myles tapped his pencil against the coffee table. “Then it won’t be real enough to fool him. Sanguine’s right. For this to work, Colin has to believe he can win you over. We can distract him from business conquests by saying everyone’s out of town due to the hurricane, but that’s only going to make him double his focus on you.”

  Kendell started doodling a cartoon of herself. “So Mirror-Kendell becomes Evil-Kendell?” She put horns and a devil tail on the sexy drawing.

  “It has to be a possibility,” Myles said, “but not an inevitability. However, isn’t that kind of what we’ve done with the seven gates? He has to think he can win or he won’t bother playing our game.”

  Sanguine still didn’t see how this was going to work. “You’re still not answering my question. How are you going to build these androids?”

  Myles returned to his pad. “We need to understand more of what Delphine was talking about. I’m not saying we sacrifice a piece of our souls like ripping our hearts out of our chests, but we should be able to find the equivalent of giving a pint of blood.”

  “And you’re going to sneak in like vampires and take the blood of the chief of police and bank president? Even if Colin’s uncle mistrusts his nephew, his mother will never go along with your plan.”

  “I wasn’t saying actually giving blood, just the spiritual equivalent. My point was that Delphine is our resident expert in creating the mirrors. As for the android aspect, though you’ve proven that spirits can take on physical forms in his hell, we can’t rely on your angelic magic.”

  Kendell drew Sanguine as a beautiful angel next to her devil self-portrait. “Professor Yates is pretty good with mechanisms of a paranormal nature. Though they don’t need to be robotic, they will need to be more than holographic.”

  Sanguine hated when her mind started formulating an argument that helped the other side, but she couldn’t help sharing it. “It may not be that complicated. My grandmother’s version of hell is a little like a whole-body virtual-reality suit that Colin wears. He can still sense his body getting older, but how he interacts with his environment is kind of a simulation.”

  Kendell threw her pencil on the table and stared at Sanguine. “So none of this is real? You’ve let us run around like voodoo chickens with their heads cut off for no reason at all?”

  “Of course not. I said her hell was like a virtual reality. Clearly, there is a real danger of him breaking through. All I was trying to say is, we don’t need hell robots. If you can make the mirror images real enough, we should be able to inject them into my grandmother’s program without the need for building physical bodies.”

  Kendell shook her head as if what Sanguine said made no sense at all. “Fine. Then Professor Yates can build a viewing device in this reality to record people milling about, and we can project that, along with the people-mirrors, into Colin’s hell.”

  Myles returned to his list. “Watch out for step one—it’s a doozy. Step two shouldn’t be as bad. We can’t just plug step one into Colin’s hell without some hardware upgrade, so to speak. Though the people might be physical holograms, Professor Yate’s projector will need to actually be in hell. With my cane, I can make the trip back through Guinee, but I’m not willing to risk either of you making the trip back to hell. We’ll need a go-between.”

  “Seems like a perfect job for the embassies,” Kendell said. “Delphine’s Scratch and Sniff, Luther’s World Trade Center, Our Lady of Mercy convent—if we can round up enough of them, each might work as a small projection booth. And unlike the bank or police station, those who run the embassies might be willing to help.”

  Myles scribbled down some notes in the “Step Two” section. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Without knowing what Professor Yates comes up with, we don’t know what he’ll need. But for my list, I’ll leave the embassies as possible answers. So we have our new r
eality, and we have our way of projecting it into hell. Now comes the really tricky part. We have to convince Colin that our fake reality is the one he wants to break into.”

  “I wish I’d kept that golden guitar pick,” Kendell said. “With my connection to the curse isolated in it, he’d probably follow it like a dog chasing a car.”

  Sanguine couldn’t believe she was helping with this madness. “Having it already in his hell, though, makes it easier for us to convince him you’re there. That stupid little voodoo pick might be the lynchpin to your whole plan. It contains a piece of your essence—your connection to the Malveaux curse—and it’s already in hell. Once your plan of getting him to think he’s leaving hell only to end up back where he started is complete, that pick might work as a Kendell beacon to convince him he’s in the same world as you.”

  “It’s also a physical object,” Myles added. “Professor Yates used to drone on and on about energy left in objects.”

  Kendell stopped her doodling. “I remember. You pursuing his ideas is what drew us together.”

  He smiled at her. “Even if Colin did figure out our ruse, he might stay if he thought you were with him. His make-believe will become more enticing than our reality.”

  “The curse comes full circle.” Kendell looked entirely too pleased with herself.

  Sanguine almost hated bursting her bubble. “He’s going to know the difference between his hell and our reality. The stupid little hunk of gold isn’t going to be enough to confuse him. And since it’s already in hell, it won’t work as the Kendell bait you’ll need to convince him to change realms.”

  “True,” Kendell said. “But it does give us an end point for the chase. He’ll be back in hell but with a virtual overlay that will make him think he’s escaped back to the land of the living. And with the voodoo guitar pick pumping my energy into his world, he’ll believe the mirror image of me is the real me. Which I guess brings us to Myles’s step three.”

  He put pencil lead to paper. “He’s going to try to escape, and we know, from him giving Kendell his cufflink, that he’s using her as his bull’s-eye. Which brings us back to Delphine’s idea of capturing a part of Kendell, adding it to Baron Malveaux’s cufflink, and putting it in a voodoo totem. Then me tossing the totem into his dimension but at a time just after he sets off his escape bomb. Simple.”

  “Right,” Sanguine said. “That’s where I step off your crazy train. Kendell is not a rabbit sacrifice used to attract the fox into a snare.”

  Myles played with the pencil. “We’re in complete agreement on that point. As Kendell taught me, sometimes the best way to find an answer is to jump to the next step. This whole plan depends on waiting for Colin to make his move. If we dump our virtual reality into his world too soon, he’ll know it’s not real. He has to make his escape. Once he’s chasing down Kendell to get to our time and space, then we change his reality so when he catches her—or rather the mirror-image of her reflecting off the golden guitar pick in his hell—he thinks he’s won.”

  Sanguine couldn’t believe how flimsy the idea sounded. “So your whole plan hinges on waiting for him to do something? What, we’re just going to spend all our time staring in our gates to hell, hoping to get a glimpse of him getting ready to leave? Even if I accept every item on your piece of paper, you’ll never be able to spring the trap exactly when you need to. And what happens to the essence of Kendell you put into the totem?”

  Myles slowly set the pencil onto of the pad of paper. “You’re right. I only see one way of making this whole plan work, and it depends on you.”

  After spending her life with the swamp creatures, she knew when a snare had been tripped, just as she knew the increased adrenaline of being the one trapped. “You want me to return to his hell but to pursue your agenda, not mine. And I assume, from what you’ve intentionally not said, it will be up to me to save Kendell. Has anyone told you you’re a sneaky bastard?”

  Kendell put her arms around Sanguine. “He is a sneaky bastard, but his plan does beat the Church’s alternative of making you into Colin’s Satan. We’re putting an awful lot of trust in you to do the right thing, and I’ll be relying on you as my protection from Colin while in hell.”

  30

  Myles found Luther Noire to be far more amenable to his ideas now that Myles had helped with his rescue. He didn’t even have to go through Joe Cazenave to enter Luther’s building. The cantankerous old goat still smoked his pipe behind his desk like an old-time banker considering loaning money, though Myles suspected that was only because he lacked social skills. Professor Yates sat beside Myles like some overly attentive father ready to cosign the loan. Myles was amazed that both men listened to his plan without butting in with their opinions.

  “So what we need is a way to record every action in the French Quarter and some means of projecting all those videos into Colin’s hell.”

  Luther let out a swirl of smoke from his pipe. “You’ll need more than that. Every store will need to be stocked, every restaurant will have to prepare food, clubs like your Scratchy Dog will have to put on performances—basically everything New Orleans is known for will need to be replicated.”

  “Then there’s time itself,” Professor Yates added. “The torture of Colin’s hell is his lack of time. There’s not really any point in proceeding if you can’t convince that old swamp witch to change her ways.”

  The conversation with Sanguine the previous night regarding her grandmother had lasted so late that Myles, Kendell, and Sanguine had all fallen asleep in the living room with the two dogs.

  “Once we know we have all the pieces in place, Sanguine will go back to hell. She’s going to have a sizable amount of work ahead of her, not least of which is going back in time. She’ll have to meet with her grandmother. If the two swamp witches can’t come to an agreement, the whole plan will come to a stop. But if they can, we have to be ready.”

  Luther stroked the bowl of his pipe. “If time moves, Colin will experience the need for sleep and food. He’ll consider those biological needs powerful indicators that he’s succeeded in returning home.”

  Myles felt like he was presenting a doctoral dissertation to a review board. “If Professor Yates can develop a way to record people in the Quarter, experiences like eating shouldn’t be too hard to replicate. After all, it’s not like the menus change all that often. And musical groups have been recorded on both audio and video for generations.”

  “Polite of you to not say since we were boys,” said Luther. “I get your point. The whole experience may be beyond the technological abilities of current virtual reality, but we have the advantage of actual places and experiences to build from. What do you expect from me?”

  “Colin used this building to project his energy into our paranormal streams when we were creating the seven gates that hold him in hell. I’m hoping to tap into that same power to run our simulations. If we don’t, this whole plan will literally blow up in our faces.”

  Luther leaned forward in apparent interest. “I’ve been keeping an eye on him as best I can. He has the controls, but he can’t stop my gauges from telling me what he’s doing. He’s kept the bomb from exploding, but barely. If your plan works, we’ll have all the power you’ll need. Plus, our reality won’t depend on him keeping a lid on things. Count me in.”

  Myles was never sure how far to trust either man, but being men of science, they didn’t usually overstate their abilities. He turned in his chair to face Professor Yates. “Now, how about those virtual-reality cameras and projectors?”

  “I’ve got some ideas. I hope you kept your class notes from The Transfer of Human Energy into Inanimate Objects, because we’re going to need to put some of that theory into practice.”

  * * *

  Myles held Kendell’s hand as they walked down Esplanade toward Professor Yates’s office. “Thanks for coming with me.”

  “It’s like we’re back where we started. Do you even remember me in his class? I was such a recluse bac
k then.”

  He’d had many experiences reading energy and taking trips to the deep waters, but the philosophy class meant to investigate such ideas had proved to be mostly a hoax and hadn’t been sanctioned by the college.

  “You sat in the back row,” he said, “wore a black trench coat, and didn’t say a word for the entire semester.”

  “That’s not true. I did participate. It’s just that no one was listening. You and the others were more interested in disputing everything Professor Yates had to say.”

  Myles feared that dredging up memories of his distrust of the old man wasn’t going to help with their current dilemma. “His philosophy didn’t match my reality. I’m not sure which one of us has changed, but I find his ideas more palatable now than I did a few years ago.”

  “Do you think he can build what we need?”

  Myles could remember many discussions with Professor Yates about the atoms of the classroom walls being affected by everything that went on in the room, but none of them were likely to result in a usable gadget. “He’s surprised me at times, but even if he could build something, I fear Colin might notice it.”

  “So we’ll make it invisible.” She knocked on the glass-and-metal door before Myles could respond to her joke.

  “Come on in. I’m just finishing getting set up.”

  Myles pushed open the door, expecting the one-time receptionist’s office to be filled with all manner of semiuseless equipment. To his surprise, the room was empty except for three chairs and a desk. “You haven’t gotten started? I thought you’d have something to show us.”

  With his hair in disarray and his clothes so rumpled they looked like he’d slept in them, Professor Yates had the air of a mad scientist. “Not this time. We need to delve into the ideas we discussed in class first.”

  Myles didn’t have time to be lectured to again about stuff he already understood. “I’ve already proven I can read energy left in objects. Hell, that’s what started this misadventure.”