His fingertips played over her chin. “Not just ghosts, no. I never doubted you. This was always happening to you, but you aren’t alone. We’re together. You and me.”
She practically fell into his arms again. “Thank you.”
“That’s what I’m here for. To believe you even when the world is crazy.”
“But no ghosts.”
“No ghosts.”
“And no hallucinations.”
“No. There’s just you and me.”
“Mmm. I like that. Just you, and me, and--”
She stopped talking. Something was not right.
Forget it, a voice inside her head whispered. Let it go.
It was her voice.
Or was it?
No, no, no. There was something important pressing on her thoughts, demanding her attention. Something she’d just said, or maybe something she was going to say. The face. She was thinking about the face of Madame Marie Laveau, the one she saw in the basement, and the one she saw in her mind’s eye when Xavier had been telling her the woman’s story.
Madame Laveau’s face, just like Carlson had said.
Only...
With a gasp, she pushed back from him, cradling her injured hand to her chest.
“Carlson, I...”
His smile was oddly out of place. “Yes?”
“I never told you.”
“You never told me what, ma chere?”
The walls around her felt like they were closing in. A moment ago, she’d been free.
Now she felt trapped again.
“Carlson,” she said to him, her voice low and hollow sounding. “I never told you that it was Madame Laveau who Xavier was talking about. I told you he wanted to raise a voodoo queen. I never said which one.”
The candlelight reflected off his eyes. “I knew you were a smart one, Katie Pearson. I knew it when I saw you there on the street that first day. Was just a matter of time, before you saw the truth.”
“Truth? Carlson, what truth?”
“The truth of who you are. The truth of who I am.”
She took a few steps back from him. “I’m me, Carlson. I’m Katie Pearson. I’m not anyone else and I don’t need to figure out who I am.”
His hands waved at each other, just an inch apart. The language of New Orleans, spoken in hand signs. “Then who am I, hmm? If you’re just you, then who am I?’
“You...you’re Carlson Hastings. You’re the guy I met on my trip. You’re the guy who was making me feel special, and loved, and safe.”
She wanted him to agree. She wanted him to take hold of her, and kiss her, and tell her it was all right.
Instead, he shook her head.
“No, Katie. You’re the one who is at the heart of everything and I...”
He put his hand to his chest, fingers spread out wide. “And I’m the guy who is going to take your heart from your chest and replace it with another. You will be made whole by being turn apart. You belong to us now, Katie.”
Her back pressed up against a wall. She was sure there had been a hallway behind her. Now, there was nowhere to go.
“You belong,” he said, “to me.”
Chapter 25
Her heart was hammering painfully against her chest. Each beat rattled against her ribs. She stared at this man she had trusted with her life and with her heart and irrationally she wished that he would die right there where he stood.
“Oh, now, don’t be like that,” he chuckled. “We had a good time, me and you. This is just the next step in our relationship.”
“You want to use me,” she managed to say. Her mind was reeling. “You’re going to use me like just like Xavier.”
He clucked his tongue. “No, not at all. Xavier was a misguided man. He thought he could shake a divination wand over your head and chant a prayer or two, and make you convert to the faith of voodoo.”
“Never,” she whispered. “I would never do that.”
“I know!” he smiled, as if that had been obvious from the start. “My friend Xavier, he was a little naïve. You can’t make someone be voodoo. They have to want to be voodoo.”
Damn it, if only her thoughts would settle down and stop racing off in a hundred directions at once. “But the basement. What he did to me in the basement. You said it was real. You said you believed me!”
“I do believe you. It really happened.” He took another step closer. “That was a ritual voodoo sacrifice of your body to the loa.”
“Xavier was going to--” she started to say.
Carlson shook his head. “Not Xavier.”
If the wall hadn’t been there to support her, Katie would have toppled down to the floor as the memory of her experience in the basement overwhelmed her. Flashes of that experience came and went like bits and pieces of a movie that her spirit was trapped in.
She was in the circle, on the cold floor.
The cloaked figures chanted. The candles burned.
Katie screamed.
No, that was the memory.
She screamed, and the chanting grew louder.
Pran fi sa a, fe l’pou ou. Pran fi sa a, fe l’pou ou.
In front of her now, Carlson grinned. “That’s right. Remember.”
Katie fought against the memories returning but there was no help for it. She was plunged again into that scene.
Naked on the floor between the lines of the pentagram.
Candles burning around her.
The chanting.
The figures in their dark cloaks.
And someone approaching her like a dark shadow.
Katie gasped and threw her head back against the wall as she faced Carlson. “No. That was Xavier! He did that to me. He made me do things. He made me kill Madam Parlander!”
He slowly shook his head. “Xavier didn’t make you do that. In fairness, Katie, it wasn’t you who killed her. That was me.”
Now the tears started falling from her eyes. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t fair! All this time she’d been living with the horror of what she had unwittingly done to that woman, only to find out she didn’t do it?
“You’re a monster,” she hissed through trembling lips. “What are you trying to do to me?”
Carlson spread his hands wide and took another step closer. “Needed you to believe, ma chere. Needed you to come right here, to this point, all on your own.”
“But...why?”
He almost looked sad about it. “You weren’t going to come back to this house on your own. Not unless you thought you had no other choice. You had to come back voluntarily or the loa wouldn’t accept you.” He took another step closer. “This had to be your choice. So I drugged your dinner with a little Haitian zombie powder. Makes you sleepwalk. Makes you forget moving around in your sleep.”
“But I killed her...”
“No, that was me. I needed to scare you back here. That meddlesome fortune teller almost spilled to you about the loa riding your soul. She needed to die, just in case she grew a conscience and came looking for you. She would have ruined everything.” He shrugged again. “I figured, she needed to die anyway. So I brought her to my club and I stabbed her in her heart. I drew the pentagram. I put the knife in your hand. You didn’t notice I had blood all over me, too, when I picked you up?”
Katie had been so scared, thinking she had killed someone in a fugue state, that she hadn’t noticed anything else. It hadn’t made sense that Madam Parlander had just shown up at the club like that, ready to be murdered, but now it did. Carlson was the killer, not her.
Which also meant...
“I didn’t try to kill you either!” Damn it. Everything with him was a lie! “That was the final thing that made me come back here. I didn’t try to stab you with that knife. You drugged me!”
“Sure did. Sorry. Don’t like to use that powder but it’s got it’s uses, I suppose.” He was close enough now that she could see the pulse beating in the hollow of his throat. “I prefer real voodoo. The magic. The power. Nothing
like it in the world.”
Katie saw everything about the last few days unravelling right in front of her eyes. Lies. It had all been lies. Carlson had been manipulating her from the start.
The memory of the basement came to her again, this time with crystal clarity. She was lying helpless, in the pentagram. The chanting filled her ears. A dark figure approached her through the others in their cloaks...
Now she saw the man’s face. It had been blocked from her memory before. Like she didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to know who it was.
Now she saw that it wasn’t Xavier who had done that to her in the basement.
It was Carlson’s face she saw. It had always been Carlson.
Chapter 26
In that moment, she realized something else.
Everything he had told her was a lie. Everything. All of it. There was no evil spirit within her. He had been drugging her to make her do things. He had been manipulating her all this time, right from the start, even to the point of taking her into his bed. What had seemed like love making had been just another form of control for him.
She felt violated, in every possible way.
Everything with him had been a lie. Which meant the voodoo nonsense of magic and spirits and something squirming inside of her was also a lie.
There was no loa inside of her. It was just Carlson, making her believe.
Her eyes narrowed on him as the cold dread of her fear was slowly replaced with an angry heat. She was Katie Pearson. She had faced down ghosts and evil spirits and bad people. She was stronger than this. She wasn’t going to cower in the hallway of this old house and let this man make her feel weak and powerless.
Not anymore.
Her hand curled into a fist and she pushed away from the wall, closing the distance between them, and swung at his face just as hard as she could.
He stood there, unimpressed, as her hand stopped in midair.
Katie pulled her arm back, staring at it. The cloth around her wrist was now dark with her blood, but it was her arm. Her hand.
There were no strings on her.
She swung her fist at him again.
And again.
Each time, her body froze before she could touch him.
“You can’t hurt me,” he told her. Then he leaned in closer, his eyes looking through hers and into the hollows of her soul. “She won’t let you. Not while she’s inside you.”
Katie whimpered. The magic was real. The evil was real.
The loa inside of her...was real.
Her panic from before threatened to overwhelm her now. Her mind couldn’t take this. Everything was going wrong and she was really possessed and Carlson was trying to kill her or use her or manipulate her and she didn’t know what was real or what was fake anymore!
Voodoo was real.
Voodoo was real!
Quickly reaching into her front pocket she felt the familiar, comforting ceramic hide of the horse. Her little horse, that she loved so much. It had been blessed. It had been made into a gris gris with power to ward off evil.
Evil was standing in front of her.
She thrust the horse out in front of her like a shield, silently begging it to protect her from this man.
Carlson looked down at it.
Then he looked back up at her.
And he smiled.
“You’ve got to be kidding me, chere. I gave that to you. Do you really think I’d put a talisman in your hands you could use against me?” He reached out, and simply plucked it from her fingers and all Katie could do was stand there and let it happen. “You are the horse, remember? That’s why you were drawn to this. It represents your body, now that the loa is riding in you. This was a talisman for me, not for you.”
Katie felt the tears again. “Wh-what do you mean?”
He trotted the horse through the air, mocking her. “It helps me keep track of you. Helps me find you. My friend Brian Samedi tied this to your soul, and wherever you went, it watched you for me.”
She put her hands up over her mouth, holding in the scream that wanted to burst out of her lungs.
“Oh, come on now,” he told her. “I had to do something. When you bought that damned onyx ring from the street vendor, it pushed off my power. Happens sometimes. These peasants in the city fall into a real item of voodoo power without even realizing it. When you put it on, I felt my power leaving you. The loa cringed away from me when you had that on. Had to convince you not to wear it.”
He held the horse up in front of her eyes, making it trot again. Katie realized now that even though it was sculpted to look free, it was trapped in the bonds of its creation. It wasn’t really free. It never had been.
Nether had she.
Wrapping his fingers around the figurine, Carlson pressed it into his palm, harder, and harder, until the tendons were sticking out like cords and then there was a loud SNAP and the horse was crushed to powder.
“You,” Carlson said to her, “should have kept that ring.”
Opening his palm, he blew the powder of her horse into her face.
Everything went black around her, and she tumbled into darkness.
Chapter 27
The cold of the basement floor woke her as it seeped into her bones.
Katie screamed, remembering everything that had just happened.
Xavier, dead on the floor.
Carlson, smiling at her fear.
Her, trapped in a nightmare.
So she screamed, as loud as she could.
Silence. Only silence.
Katie thrashed her arms and her legs and tried, tried, tried to get up.
Her body stayed completely still, lying there on the floor.
It wasn’t her body to control. It wasn’t her mouth scream.
Something else was in control.
The thing inside of her.
Carlson’s voice reached her. Wherever she really was, she could hear him. She couldn’t see him.
“I knew you,” he said, “from the first moment I saw you. That face. That face is famous to any true practitioner of voodoo. You weren’t wrong when you thought you saw someone with your own face coming for you. Floating into you. The loa owned you from that moment.”
She felt his hand touch her cheek and she reached up to swat him away.
Her hand never moved.
“You’re the spitting image of Madame Marie Laveau. I don’t want to use the word reincarnation, but it happens. People come back after they die. You came back to us. You will be her way back to the Earth.”
Katie wanted to run away. She wanted to be anywhere but here.
Her body wouldn’t move.
“That idiot Xavier was going to ruin everything,” Carlson kept going. “He didn’t know the true power of voodoo. He didn’t know the way to bring Madame Laveau back completely. He only knew you were pretty, and people would follow you, if you embraced our ways. Only, you would never do that, would you? Not the good little Katie Pearson. Not the woman who faced ghosts and big bad things and sent them all back to Hell. You were too pure of heart to do that.”
Katie tried to argue that wasn’t her. She believed in right, and she believed in wrong, but she wasn’t pure of heart.
Hell, she’d been screwing him for the past few days, right after a breakup with Riley. She could still smell Riley’s scent on her, sometimes, and now she was spreading herself for a man she had only just met.
A man she obviously didn’t know at all.
“So I’ve been helping you come to this point for days. I guess I should apologize for all the nasty things I did to you. Making you think you were a murderer...that was hard on me. I didn’t want to put you through that but you had to come here willingly. It had to be your choice.”
Katie tried to move again. She tried to push herself off the floor. She tried to do anything at all that would make her body be her own again.
Her fists hit something.
The floor, she thought. It must be the floor. Whatever
Carlson had done to her was wearing off and she could feel the floor underneath her now. That meant she could escape. That meant she could beat him.
She pounded her fists against the floor.
Only, it wasn’t cold. It wasn’t hard as stone like concrete should be.
It was soft, and warm.
Katie pounded her fists, and she screamed. She could hear herself now, and she knew she must be waking up from whatever had been done to her.
She could open her eyes now.
What she saw made no sense.
It was her face in front of her, only it was backwards. It was reversed. Not like a mirror. Like...
Like she was seeing her face from the inside, looking out.
Her fists pounded against her own flesh.
No one could hear her screams, because she was crying out from inside her own mind.
The loa of Madame Laveau rode her now, and she had no choice but to obey the will of her rider.
Chapter 28
The world around her was contorted. It was like she was looking through a distorted pane of glass at a world that had gone completely loopy. It was worse than looking into a funhouse mirror and seeing the world all twisted around itself.
Like she had fallen down the rabbit hole, and nothing was going to be the same again.
“Now,” Carlson said, his voice booming, “rise up. Rise up, and be yourself again!”
Katie saw candles ignite in the room. Her head lifted up off the basement floor. She blinked around the room. She smiled.
Only, Katie wasn’t doing it. She didn’t move her head. Didn’t move her lips. None of that was her but she was helpless to stop it.
Her body wasn’t her own. She was just an observer.
The candles were at the points of the pentagram, stuck to the floor with their own wax. She smiled to see it. This was the way. This was the truth. Magic had brought her back to herself.
She was Madame Marie Laveau.
Lifting her hands up in front of herself, she examined them closely, and the rest of her new body. Long, graceful fingers. Strong arms. The curve of her hips. The way her breasts filled out her shirt. She was young again!
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 92