by G A Chase
It won’t be long now, my sweet Serephine.
Love Me Like Voodoo
Love Me Like Voodoo Blurb
While Sanguine is locked in hell, keeping an eye on the devil, Kendell and Myles are happy to finally get on with their lives. But Colin Malveaux has other plans. The devil will go to any lengths to get his deceased daughter back, even if it means ripping the fabric of multiple dimensions with her resurrection.
Now there’s a bigger problem. If the divide between the living, the dead, and the damned is breached, Colin will gain command of every person’s soul. As the protectors of humanity, the loas of the dead are willing to engage in all-out war to block him from taking his plan any further.
For Kendell and Myles to save the girl, stop Colin from becoming all-powerful, and prevent the coming apocalypse, they must engage in an act of interdimensional terrorism. They’ll need everyone they love to help them break the Malveaux curse and free the world of the devil.
***
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50
Colin Malveaux ran his hands over the polished mahogany desktop in his office at New Orleans Bank and Trust. He felt a renewed confidence. As Bank President Baron Malveaux, he’d used the desk as his command post, where he’d ruled New Orleans through loans, intimidation, and ruthless business practices. Even that paled in comparison to the role the bank desk had served after his death, when it had been his seat of power over the seventh gate to Guinee. Most recently, however, Kendell and Sanguine and their gang of fools had turned his beloved office into the fourth gate between the life he remembered and the hell they’d created for his incarceration. The elegant room had become more of a one-man prison than a palace befitting a man who had so much authority over others—and his cherished desk stood in mockery of his once-great power.
More recently, having successfully tricked his jailors into believing he was ignorant of their little game, he was once again in charge of his destiny. How much of an idiot did they think I was?
Not that their foolishness regarding his understanding of hell mattered. Even if they had figured out what he knew about their seven gates, they would have simply assumed he was trying to sneak back into the land of the living. Telling Sanguine of his plan to populate hell with the souls from Guinee probably wasn’t the smartest move, but it was a risk worth taking to gain her trust. Revealing a partial truth ensured he had her full confidence, and that gave him space to operate. With any luck, he might still entice her to his side.
He pulled the two pastel drawings Fleurentine Laurette-Malveaux had made of their children out of the top drawer of his desk. Even after one hundred years, Serephine’s expression, captured in chalk on parchment, still touched his heart. He picked up the second drawing of her and her brother Antoine. The boy had been a roadblock to Baron Malveaux practically from the moment he was conceived. Fleur had lost her youthful waif-from-the-street sex appeal during her pregnancy. When she gave birth, the last vestige of the baron’s interest for her had evaporated.
Colin pulled the scissors from his desk and cut the drawing in two. He didn’t need Antoine butting in. With only the images of Serephine on his desk, Colin took the cursed pipe tool from his pocket—the same object that she’d used to kill herself.
Like a skilled jeweler preparing for a delicate watch repair, he placed the small tube of connected tools on a fresh sheet of paper along with a magnifying glass and set of microscrewdrivers. With the aid of his desk lamp, he inspected the miniature screw and flange that allowed the pipe tool to open. As he took it apart, he watched for even the tiniest of flecks to fall from the gold assembly. The tiny screw proved to be his ultimate prize. It was still coated with a brown crust. He brushed the caked blood onto the paper, being careful to not lose a single mote of dust.
He bent the white paper into a V, causing the dried blood to collect in the center, then repeated the action in the opposite direction to consolidate the flecks into small mound. The total amount of his daughter’s precious essence barely covered his fingertip. He put the treasured powder to the tip of his tongue. At first it tasted like metallic dirt, but as his saliva resuscitated the girl’s life force, he picked up the savory aroma of humanity.
Serephine materialized in the chair opposite him. “What am I doing here?” She sounded less scared than confused.
He touched his finger to his tongue in order to retrieve her rehydrated blood. “I called you back to save you, my darling daughter.”
“But where’s Baron Samedi and Antoine?” At seven years old, she still had the innocent trust that tugged at his heart.
“We don’t need them any longer. Baron Samedi’s only job was to guard the fourth gate, but you and your brother set me free. After that, he no longer needed to watch over you from this room. As for your brother, I’m not ready to confront him just yet. Today is just about you and me.” He tried to keep his excitement from getting the better of him. Samedi had been a fool for allowing the children into Colin’s office, but the loa of the dead hadn’t been the real challenge. There would still be a day of reckoning with Antoine, and if Colin’s plan worked, that confrontation would be sooner rather than later.
The little girl kicked her feet back and forth under the chair. “I’m not supposed to leave Guinee alone.”
“I know. After I died, I spent an eternity searching for you. I assumed you passed into the deep waters, but you didn’t, did you?”
“I don’t know anything about the deep waters. Did I do something wrong, Papa?”
“Nothing at all, my child. Your death was an accident. No one should have ever condemned you for a simple mistake. The loas of the dead took you from me. I now understand why I couldn’t find you. It’s because you didn’t stay under their control. I brought you forward to this time in order to rescue you. Come to me, Serephine.” He reached out his arms, hoping she would run into his embrace.
She remained in the chair. “Antoine says I shouldn’t trust you.”
Damn that kid. “Is he talking to you now?”
She looked down at her feet the way he remembered her doing when she’d been caught in a lie. “No, but he always looks out for me.”
Colin resisted the urge to demand the hug. He needed her trust, not her fear. “I know he does. You two did agree to let me go through your gate, though. That has to count for something. I can’t be all bad.”
She looked up at him. “What do you want from me?”
Her trusting blue eyes made it impossible to lie to her. “I want to save you. Your death was my fault, but I’ve been working really hard on fixing that mistake. You don’t have to be dead any longer, Serephine. I have a replacement body ready for you. You will be the first person who can live forever. All you need to do is let me hug you.”
Even in life, she’d never worried about why some things were possible and others weren’t. The idea that her father, who was flesh and bone, might not be able to embrace a girl who was only spirit didn’t stop her from getting off the chair and walking into his arms. She felt like sparks of electricity against his cheek and hands. He held the finger with her blood away from her spirit until he knew he had her complete love. As his hand swept through her body, the power of her soul switched from gentle shocks to a lightning bolt of searing flame. When he opened his eyes, she had vanished.
* * *
Sanguine Delarosa spread her angel wings and glided into New Orleans from her beloved swamp. The time aloft gave her the peace and privacy to consider what to do about Colin. Allowing him to have sex with her seemed like the kind of thing most religions would frown on. The question was, as an angel in this realm, how did she feel about making love with the devil?
Emotions aside, as she envisioned the mechanics of rub
bing their naked bodies together with her ten-foot wingspan, she could see she would maintain a position of sexual dominance during the act. It wasn’t as though she could take the submissive role of lying under him, and her wings wouldn’t just stay folded up. They had a way of betraying her every emotion. I guess faking it is out.
Kendell and Myles would probably object to the liaison, but now that they had all but abdicated their roles in guarding Colin, Sanguine was free to do as she chose. Her body quivered in midair as if she’d hit a pocket of turbulence, but from the goose bumps on her arms, she knew the disturbance was more emotional than physical.
Far below her was a school of agitated fish in churning water. “Damn it. What is he up to this time?”
She folded her wings to her body and dove down to the wave crests. Her animal spies only caught on to Colin’s activities about half of the time, and often when they were watching, he wasn’t doing anything noteworthy. But as the fish kept their eyes out for any activity around the World Trade Center’s paranormal vault stashed in the shipwreck, Sanguine took anything they saw as worthy of investigation.
“He wouldn’t have taken Kendell again. Even he isn’t that stupid. And with her safe, he doesn’t have access to anyone else. He’s probably just looking for a quiet place to sulk where I can’t see him. It would be just like him to turn that iron interdimensional cage into a man cave.”
She drifted off to the right side of the river then banked in a lazy half circle across the water. A flock of seagulls were squawking their lungs out over the trees that hid the partially submerged boat. She dove so low she was able to stare straight into the windows. At the last second, she spread her wings and gracefully set her bare feet in the three inches of water that covered the deck. Let’s see what you’ve been up to.
The cabin of the luxury yacht was much the way she’d left it: walls scorched, doorframe chopped by her sword, and windows blown out. Sanguine ran her hand over the damage. “I guess we’ll need to fight in less incendiary locations.”
She pulled open the iron door to the vault. Inside the room, the contents had been yanked off the shelves and tossed around as if an angry adolescent had been grounded for a week in the small space. Baron Malveaux’s old chests, filled with men’s jewelry, desk items, and other paraphernalia cursed by Marie Laveau, lay broken on the floor. From the look of the splintered wood, it appeared some chests had been launched at the solid metal walls with considerable force.
“This damage isn’t from Kendell. Colin only had her soul imprisoned, not her body. She couldn’t have interacted with the boxes.” Sanguine picked up one of the shattered containers and looked for teeth marks. “The dogs didn’t do this either. So who did he trap this time? And what happened to them?”
Leaving the small pilothouse, she looked up at the birds for an answer. They’d already flown well inland but were still making such a racket that they couldn’t be missed. She jumped into the air and flew after them with all the speed her wings could manage. She unsheathed the small dagger that responded to her anger. As she held it aloft, it lengthened to the sword she remembered, complete with rippling flames that spread from the tip to the hilt.
At the edge of the grove of trees, she saw the birds swirling around as if caught in a tornado. Below them, Colin stood on the street, looking around as if lost.
She alighted in front of him with her sword of truth still ablaze. “What have you done now?”
“None of your business.” He tried walking past her as if she were just some random person on the street, but she angled the blade of fire to block his path.
“Don’t make me burn you with my sword again. You don’t really want another pyrotechnic argument. I might not be as able to control my anger this time. Who have you imprisoned?”
“I haven’t imprisoned anyone.”
His games weren’t boding well for their continued relationship.
“Something tells me you’re lying,” she said. “You do remember you’re supposed to be regaining my trust, right?”
He finally stopped looking everywhere except at her. “I was running an experiment. Unfortunately, my test subject ran off before I found out if my idea worked. At worst, I may have hurt one of your voodoo puppets.”
Sanguine knew when she was hearing at least a partial truth. The flame of her sword diminished to glowing steel. “This is about your plan to save people’s souls from Guinee, isn’t it? What’s the point? You don’t have the cane back.” She resisted adding yet to her comment.
“There are still tests I can run without it. I don’t want to end up with a faulty connection. As I’m sure you’d tell me, the marionettes projected from life aren’t meant to house human souls. Even you must see that a certain amount of testing would be prudent.”
She returned her sword to its scabbard. “I can help you look.”
The relief on his face was way too revealing. He’d done more than simply steal a virtual-reality projection. “No need, but if you’re free tonight, I would enjoy taking you out to dinner. Now that you’re not hiding behind that sex-bot, it might be nice to get to know each other in person.”
You are far too sly for your own good. “As I explained before, there’s no promise of sex just because we share a meal.”
“Brennan’s at seven?”
She still wasn’t convinced he wasn’t up to something sinister, but having revealed her true self, she couldn’t exactly keep following him without being noticed. Her animals would have to do. “I’ll meet you there.” She spread her wings. “These things don’t fit comfortably in back seats.”
* * *
Like the random beeping of a smoke detector when the battery was dying, Myles Garrison couldn’t identify the source of his irritation—only that it was somewhere in the apartment. “Why do these things always happen at three in the morning?”
Kendell Summer rolled over and kicked him under the covers. “I don’t hear anything. Now, let me sleep.”
“You honestly don’t hear that random knocking?”
It shouldn’t have surprised him. She could sleep through a hurricane.
“It’s probably the neighbors,” she said.
“We live on the top floor, and there’s a brick wall between us and the next building. Our only real neighbors are downstairs.”
She pulled the covers up over her head. “Why are you bothering me?” Her words were muffled by the thick blankets. Even their two dogs at the foot of the bed started growling at being disturbed.
For the sake of family unity, Myles got out of bed and threw on a bathrobe. “If this ends up being a Halloween skeleton that you left plugged in, you’re going to owe me big time.” Cheesecake, Kendell’s longtime canine companion, quickly took the warm section of bed Myles had vacated.
Kendell’s response was a half mumble that ended in a soft snore. Reluctantly, Doughnut Hole got off the bed to join Myles in a search of the apartment.
Myles reached down and rubbed the black Lhasa apso puppy’s head. “At least I’ve got you watching my back.”
The full moon lit up the living room, but the creepy feeling that forced Myles to check behind each chair made him search along the wall for the light switch. “I don’t see anything out of the ordinary, but something’s wrong. I can feel it.”
Doughnut Hole looked up at him then walked to the hall closet that Myles used for his stuff. The pup lay down at the folding doors as if to prevent Myles from checking inside.
“Of course, it’s that damn cane.” He had to lift the dog out of the way. Behind his dress shirts and coats was the gun case he did his best to avoid. Once he had the door open, he saw the glow of the green stone that nestled under the silver skull handle. He snatched the magical staff out of the closet and headed for the veranda. On his way, he grabbed a couple of glasses and the bottle of rum he kept reserved for the loas of the dead.
He took a shot of rum to combat the outdoor chill. The cane continued to vibrate in his hand like a cell phone demanding
to be answered. He set it against one of the metal chairs and filled the two glasses with rum. “Okay, I’m here. What do you want?” He hoped the conversation wouldn’t last so long he’d need to take a seat, but when Papa Ghede materialized next to the cane, Myles knew it was serious. The head loa only showed up when there was bad news.
The chief of Guinee downed the glass of rum in one shot. “It’s time for you to get to work.”
Myles had never applied for the job of assistant to the loas of the dead, but that didn’t appear to matter. Once they’d given him Baron Samedi’s cane, they seemed to think he was at their beck and call.
In spite of his irritation, he sat opposite the old man. “What’s the problem this time?”
The dark man helped himself to another glass of rum. “I gave you that cane for a couple of reasons. We needed it out of Guinee, in the hands of someone who wouldn’t turn it over to Colin Malveaux and who serves as an ally in life we could trust. What I didn’t tell you is we’ve had a hundred-year-old mystery that we were hoping might solve itself, and if it didn’t, we had you as our backup plan. Serephine Malveaux wasn’t just killed by the curse—she was abducted from our world.”
Myles balled his fists under the table. “Colin stole her soul the way he took Kendell, didn’t he?”
“It’s worse than that. He took her from the past. The seven gates between life and hell are your responsibility, but as Baron Samedi helped create the portals for you, we’ve been able to keep tabs on what was happening in hell. When Colin made it through the fourth gate, Baron Samedi’s obligation to watch over Serephine and Antoine was fulfilled. Our emissary wasn’t allowed to loiter around to see what happened next, so we’re down to guesswork on our end.”
And guessing isn’t something you’re good at. “If she died over a hundred years ago, and she’s been missing all that time, how do you know he took her?”