The Malveaux Curse Mysteries Boxset 2

by G A Chase

  Serephine didn’t seem to notice as she pointed to the water below. “Are those alligators?”

  Sanguine slowed her flight to just above stalling speed and circled back. “Those are my friends. I call them Lefty and Righty because they stand on either side of me when I need them for protection.”

  “Cool. Can I pet them?”

  Sanguine had never before worried about occupying another creature while in flight. With Serephine in her arms, however, she only dared to touch the mind of Lefty without continuing on to full possession of the beast. She’s my precious child. Protect her with every ounce of your being.

  “I think they’ll behave for you.” She landed on the bank of the bayou.

  The two river monsters climbed out of the water and lay down at a respectful distance from the two humans.

  Sanguine had to hurry to keep up with Serephine. “Slow down, child. I said they’d probably be good. How am I going to explain it if you get eaten after we did so much work to save you?”

  The small girl looked like little more than a gator treat as she flopped down on her stomach and stared the creatures in the face. “They have such funny-looking big teeth.”

  “That’s because they’re from hell. There are lots of monsters out here for my gators to contend with.”

  The child reached out and touched one of Lefty’s razor-sharp incisors.

  “Serephine, don’t antagonize them. I can see being your guardian angel is going to be a full-time job.”

  The girl rolled over and sat up to face Sanguine as if turning her back on the monster was no big deal. “I’d like it if you called me Sere. And I’ll call you Sangy.”

  Stop wiggling your way into my heart. “I suppose that would be okay. Are you ready to see my home now?”

  “Yes, please.” The girl popped up from the ground so fast Sanguine wondered if she had springs in her legs. “Will Lefty and Righty come too?”

  “I’m sure they will.” Sanguine took the child back in her arms and lunged into the air for the short flight out to the cabin in the trees.

  Sere pointed out everything she noticed in the swamp. Sanguine found a new appreciation of the simplest pleasures when seeing them through the girl’s eyes. She glided up to the porch and carefully set Sere down where she wouldn’t slip off the angled surface. “Sorry for the condition of my cabin. I’m afraid a hurricane relocated it before I was born. It’s a challenge doing maintenance with it twenty feet up.”

  “You live in a tree house!” Sere continued flapping her arms as she ran around the porch. She looked like a little bird exploring her nest.

  I guess living in a tree house is actually pretty cool—especially to a child. “When I was your age, I slept on that hammock where the original stairs were.”

  Sere flapped her arms back to Sanguine. “Who raised you? Did you have a mother and father?”

  “I never knew my father, and my mother died when I was born. My grandmother raised me. She’s the one who built this whole world. She spent most of her life working on it.”

  “Do you have any children? I bet they’d have wings too.”

  Sanguine couldn’t stop herself from caressing Sere’s soft hair. “I don’t. It’s just me and the animals out here.” And up until this instant, I thought that was enough.

  Sere clasped her hands behind her back. “I could live with you if you want. I don’t have anyone else either.”

  The tears in Sanguine’s eyes made it hard to see. “I’d like that very much, Sere. But first we have to deal with your father.”

  55

  Sanguine watched Sere sleeping quietly in the porch hammock. The poor child had endured more in one day than many people do in a lifetime. The animals of the bayou sounded as if they were serenading the girl’s naptime. I could spend my life looking after that child. If only the rest of hell would leave us alone.

  But hell wasn’t yet hers to command. Like lawyers arguing over the custody of a child during a divorce, Kendell, Myles, and Colin would be discussing what best to do with Sere. Sanguine couldn’t take their arrogance a minute longer. She kissed the girl’s delicate forehead to get her to wake up. “I have to go back to the city, but you can stay right here. My alligators will protect you.”

  “You’re not going to make me go with you?”

  The girl’s sleepy voice made Sanguine wish she could cuddle up in the hammock with her. Sanguine caressed the hair out of Sere’s eyes. “I’m not going to let them take you from me. This is the safest place for you. If you get scared, think of a bird. One will land right here on this railing. Tell it what you need, and it will come find me.”

  Sere smiled, further driving love into Sanguine’s chest like cupid’s arrow. “Is that true, or are you teasing me?”

  Sanguine turned toward the trees and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, a flock of white-winged doves had landed on the railing.

  Sere clapped her hands in glee. “Can you teach me how to do that?”

  Sanguine had never had a stronger desire to impart what she knew. “I’m sure there will be loads we will teach each other, but for now, get some rest. I’ll be back before nightfall.”

  She waited until Sere had closed her eyes and her breathing had deepened before turning away from the domestic bliss of the sleeping child. With a jump off the porch, she was airborne. After the joyous flight out to the swamp, she once again flew like an angel on a mission. She maintained focus on what she wanted but resisted the temptation to fly into that future. I need to make it happen, not simply escape into that possibility.

  Unlike the river route that she’d taken with Sere, her flight path over the lake into New Orleans created few distractions. The vast expanse of open water seldom displayed any changes except for the weather. So long as the day didn’t transition into night, she could be sure she hadn’t accidentally allowed her mind to drift her into the past or future. When she came up on the city, however, she had to double-check her sense of time. The sundrenched afternoon she’d left was now as gloomy as twilight after a fire. Though the sun still shone high in the sky, the colors of the city looked as if someone had turned a dimmer switch. Few people wandered the streets, and those who did had the slow, impersonal gait of zombies.

  She headed over City Park to the river in hopes that the change was isolated to the Lakeshore neighborhood, but the malaise looked to have infected all of New Orleans. Swooping low over the Mississippi, she came upon the only three people engaged in a lively discussion. From the gesticulations, it was clear Kendell, Myles, and Colin hadn’t gotten any closer to a compromise regarding Sere.

  Sanguine alighted on the brick walkway of Spanish Plaza but kept her wings spread wide. She needed everyone to know at a gut level that she was the one in charge. “Where are we at?”

  Colin looked frantically at her. “Where’s my daughter?”

  “She’s safely out of the way. I’m not subjecting her to a pointless discussion about her future.”

  With the two men focused on the angelic arrival, only Sanguine caught Kendell’s smile.

  “So you’ve decided to be Sere’s advocate?” Kendell asked.

  Sanguine returned the look of understanding. “More than that. Since her body is merely a projection, she won’t be able to return to life, and since she doesn’t want anything to do with the loas of the dead, that only leaves one option. I’m staying in this realm to raise her.”

  Colin wasn’t nearly as irate as she’d expected. “Then I’ll join you. There’s no point in continuing my plan of rescuing souls from Guinee if it takes this much energy just to maintain Serephine’s existence. We can be a happy family in a world all our own.”

  “Fat chance,” Myles said. “If you believe we’re going to accept that you’ll magically change your tune for love, you must think us beyond naïve. You’ve played that card once too often. Besides, as you said, a death is demanded for both hell and Guinee.”

  Kendell put her hands up to the two men as if preventing a fi
stfight. “We’ve been going over the same ground all afternoon. If Colin is serious about sacrificing himself for his daughter, I say we find a way to make that happen. Clearly, his idea of allowing him to stay here and raise Serephine is delusional.”

  Sanguine agreed. She considered her relationship with Colin far too tumultuous to be the basis for a long-term partnership. Though he might have some goodness in him somewhere, she didn’t think she could raise two children—especially when one had happily considered himself the devil. “All I care about is Sere. Do what you want with Colin, but don’t expect me to keep an eye on him every minute of every day.”

  If he considered the rejection a betrayal, he didn’t let on. He turned back to Myles. “So we’re back to you having to trust that I mean what I say. Serephine is all that matters to me now.”

  After hours of talking, Myles still looked ready to resort to fists. “No one gives a damn about what you have to say.”

  “Clearly,” Colin said. “I’ve been in enough hostile boardrooms to know when the opposition needs to get their story straight. I could stand here for days, debating with you about what’s right, but even if we did reach a tentative agreement, unless you agreed among yourselves, there wouldn’t be much point to negotiating. When you’re ready to talk with a unified message, you can find me in the courtyard behind the club. I believe that’s the next gate I’m supposed to approach.”

  As he headed off down the path along the river, Sanguine wondered what new mischief he was considering. Once Colin was out of range, Kendell turned to her and Myles. “He had a point. We need to figure out what we’re doing. All this bickering is pointless. Colin can’t leave this dimension without going through our remaining three gates. I’m not even sure the cane would work to move him out of hell because he wasn’t cast here from a voodoo spell but from a witch’s curse. If Agnes had been around for us to make our case, it seems unlikely that she would have just let him leave without making him follow the rules we laid down. Once out of this hell, Colin ultimately has to go through Guinee to get to the deep waters. That has to be our objective.”

  Myles hadn’t turned away from the man, who was now little more than a black coat among the handful of pedestrians. “But if we let him through our gates and back into our reality, what’s to stop him from raising holy hell?”

  “All I’m saying is, we should look at this one step at a time,” Kendell said.

  Sanguine knew a little bit more about hell than the other two. “Even though it’s the three of us standing guard at the remaining gates, there’s no guarantee Colin would make it through. He has to prove himself. This isn’t just a matter of holding the doors open. My grandmother’s realm has a way of judging the truth. The three of us will honestly have to believe he’s changed in order for Agnes to let him pass through the seventh gate.”

  “And if he does pass,” Myles said, “Kendell and I will have to deal with him on our own. I suppose that’s only fair. We did leave you in charge while he’s been in hell. I won’t deny that I’ll be more comfortable knowing you and Sere are safely out of his path.”

  Sanguine knew her next recommendation wasn’t going to be popular. “You and Kendell need to return to the land of the living. For you to open your gates, it should be done on that side of the border between life and hell. Since my grandmother left me in charge here, I can stay and still let him through the sixth gate without having to cross over myself.”

  “No,” Kendell said. “We’ve left you alone too long. We can manage our obligation from this side.”

  Myles put his hand on her back. “If we try to authorize Colin’s passage from the wrong side of the gate, we might end up following him into the unknown, like Baron Samedi sucked into Agnes’s hurricane. I’m not losing you again to the insanity of a misaligned portal. Sanguine is right. We have to go back and do this thing correctly. Besides, I’m not chasing this asshole after he crosses the final barrier. If we’re among the living, we can be ready and waiting for him.”

  * * *

  Myles wished he could enjoy the relief of being out of hell and back to the reality he knew, but like a high school student who’d just walked out of class after blowing a test, he knew the consequences of his actions would soon be barreling down on him. “So I guess now we wait for Colin to make his move.”

  Though they were still on the river path, life—with its throngs of people enjoying the crisp fall afternoon—was easily distinguished from the vacancy of hell.

  Kendell pointed along the walkway toward Professor Yates’s lab. “So long as we have some time, I’d like a better understanding of what’s going on with Sere. While you guys were working on stabilizing the girl’s energy, I had the feeling there were things the professor didn’t say for fear that Colin was listening in.”

  “Good thinking. It’d be nice to have something positive to offer Sanguine. I got the impression she’d grown fond of Sere.”

  Kendell gave him the patronizing look that said, You’re sweet but kind of stupid. “It’s more than just fondness. Those two need each other. From the moment I met Sanguine, I knew there was something missing in her life. At first, I thought it was a romantic partner, but as I’ve gotten to know her, I’ve realized her longing had less to do with missing a lover than desiring someone to cherish. Funny how people find each other in the most difficult of situations.”

  Myles put his free hand around Kendell’s waist. “We’ve had a pretty spectacular adventure ourselves. Assuming we do manage to send Colin into the great beyond, we’ll need to figure out what comes after defeating the devil.”

  She pointed at his cane. “When Papa Ghede gave you that stick, he wasn’t talking about a single conflict. My guess is they’ll find enough situations that require our help to keep us busy—as if running a club and looking after two dogs weren’t enough.”

  Professor Yates’s lab was a hive of activity. Polly was manning the gauges while Lynn, Minerva, and Scraper worked the myriad of dials and levers. The professor was leaning over the diorama and making notes. The pad he was working on looked as if half of the pages had exploded, leaving crumpled-paper shrapnel scattered on the floor.

  The professor pointed at Lynn. “Take some more power from the flood-control pumps. I don’t want to have to cut any more people out of the realm if we don’t have to.”

  “What’s going on?” Myles asked.

  The professor kept making notes while he talked. “Hell is collapsing. Since Sere’s soul is from Guinee and not our virtual dimension, pumping our paranormal energy into her is like dumping water into leaky bucket. Somebody needs to talk to those damn loas. If we don’t plug the hole soon, the World Trade Center is going to start losing its containment fields.”

  Kendell stared around at the activity as if watching firemen hosing out a burning building. “Just trying to save one little girl is causing all this chaos?”

  The lanky professor checked the gauge that indicated the power drain on the abandoned building. “We’re dealing with multiple organizations, all working at cross purposes, each with its own agenda. Colin is trying to create his new hell. The loas of the dead think they’re maintaining control over Guinee. And Luther and I are attempting to manage our projection from life. We’re all struggling with the same power source. Serephine is just caught in the middle.”

  Myles didn’t hear any blaring alarms or the smell of smoke. Things can’t be dire just yet. “How long can this be maintained?”

  “Depends on what you want hell to look like. So far, we’ve been able to maintain the clocks, but we’ve had some close calls.” He turned his notepad back a couple of pages. “At this rate, I’d guess we’ve got a week before all hell breaks loose, literally.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Myles was the only one who could approach the loas of the dead, but he would have to be careful what he said in order to keep Sere safely out of their clutches. He took Kendell’s hand. “I’d leave you here to help, but I think you’ll be more use at my side.�
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  “Agreed.” She turned back to the front door and rushed outside. “Where would be the best place to reach that old fart?”

  “I’d say the bank office, but that’s not the easiest place to get into. We don’t need every loa of the dead knowing what we’re up to, so the other gates to Guinee are out as well.” Myles led the way toward the club. “I guess we’ll have to take our chances in the courtyard. So long as I don’t open the portal to hell, Colin shouldn’t be a problem. Papa Ghede did say all I’d need to do is set out a rum offering, and one of the loas would show up.”

  With every step through the Quarter, Myles tried to figure out what to say—and what not to. The loas would need a reason to help. Presumably, that would be to retrieve the lost soul of Serephine Malveaux. The bait and switch of promising Sere but delivering Colin would only work, however, if Myles didn’t outright lie. The loas would detect any untruth. Please let it be Baron Samedi. At least he has a vested interest in seeing Colin poured into the deep waters.

  Out behind the club, Myles checked the locks on the shutters covering the speakeasy before setting three wrought-iron chairs next to the courtyard table. He carefully poured the rum shots, hoping someone from Guinee would respond. Ever since giving him the cane, the loas had been noticeably missing when he called. For good measure, he also poured an offering over the glowing-green crystal of the cane.

  Baron Samedi looked tired as he materialized on the chair, but also much better fed than when he’d left hell. “You have some explaining to do. All we wanted was for you to go to hell and retrieve the soul of Serephine Malveaux. What’s with the lightning display? It’s like Guinee is in the middle of a dry thunderstorm.”

  Myles wasn’t in the mood to deal with the problems of the dead. “That’s why we summoned you. Serephine wasn’t in a condition to be returned to Guinee. We needed to stabilize her soul, but the energy we’re pouring into her is being syphoned off into your dimension. The hole needs to be plugged to return her to normal.”