“Uh…” Oksana began, clearly at a loss.
“Forgive our intrusion, but we need your help with a very important matter, Madame,” Duchess interjected smoothly, coming to Oksana’s aid.
A slow smile spread across Mama Lovelie’s face, revealing white, square teeth. “That much,” she said, “is painfully obvious.”
Mason wasn’t sure if he should feel amused or offended on the others’ behalf. The expression on Oksana’s face was so gobsmacked that it made him want to chuckle. He stifled it, not wanting to give her any more reason to feel uncomfortable around him. He definitely got the impression that she was second-guessing her decision to bring them here, though.
Oksana appeared to recover herself. “Mama Lovelie, we are here to investigate reports of children disappearing from this region, only to reappear later, but changed.”
She indicated Mason with one hand. “This is Dr. Walker—a physician who specializes in helping traumatized children. He tells us that he’s heard reports of these disappearances from families in the villages around here. I felt that it would be… prudent… to request blessings from the spirits before we venture further into this matter.”
“Can’t, luv. I’m far too busy,” Mama Lovelie said dismissively, and bustled out of the room, taking the candle with her.
Mason couldn’t see a damned thing, but the silence spoke volumes.
“Is she really too busy?” Mason asked, when it seemed no one else would break the stunned hush.
Another pause, before Oksana said, “No, I think she’s just testing our resolve. Follow me.”
Mason heard the rustle of clothing as the others moved to go with her. He could barely make out shapes in the dark, but followed cautiously after the sounds, feeling his way to avoid bumping into anything.
Oksana led them into a modest room at the back, lit with a kerosene lamp. Five small, circular mats were laid out on the floor, as if awaiting their arrival. Candles and incense burned on a low table in the corner.
One might almost think that Mama Lovelie had been expecting four visitors, though of course that was ridiculous. This village was in the middle of nowhere, and it was either ridiculously late or ridiculously early, depending on one’s point of view.
Their eccentric hostess stood off to one side, preparing a tray with three cups on it. She looked up as they entered.
“Oh, you’re still here?” she asked. “Well, I suppose you’d better sit down and have some akasan, in that case.”
She finished stirring and handed one cup to Mason and one to Oksana before lifting the third to her own lips. Mason looked down at the milky, anise-scented drink, and back up at Mama Lovelie.
“Aren’t you going to offer some to the others?” he asked, more than a little bewildered by the woman’s actions.
She waved off his question with her free hand. “They don’t want any.”
His confused gaze moved to Xander and Duchess. Xander only shrugged. “As bodily fluids go, I can’t say milk holds much appeal, no.”
Oksana sank gracefully onto the nearest mat and looked up at the others with an expectant flicker of one dark eyebrow. Mason lowered himself down onto the mat next to her, careful not to spill the warm drink he was still holding.
The room seemed very still, as if he had just stepped, completely unprepared, into a church or holy site of some kind. He had never been a particularly religious man, and here he was, apparently right in the middle of a vodou ceremony designed to ask for the blessings of spirits he didn’t remotely believe in.
Still, the only polite things to do were to sit down, shut up, and respect the beliefs of others. He only wished it wasn’t costing them precious time.
Mama Lovelie finished her drink and set it aside. She knelt on the mat facing Oksana, her head tilting in curiosity like a bird’s.
“Why do you come here seeking the blessings of the spirits, child?” she asked. “Surely you have the favor of the goddess?”
“That’s… a little up in the air, I guess you could say,” Oksana replied, looking more than a bit discomfited.
Mason knew he was missing the subtext, here, but there was nothing to be gleaned from either the mambo’s cryptic remark or Oksana’s vague answer.
“Why would you say that, child?” Mama Lovelie pressed. “Her light shines inside three of you, and the human has potential.”
Mason blinked. The human? What on earth was this woman talking about? This conversation was veering straight past odd and into surreal.
If possible, Oksana looked even warier than before. “Perhaps, but… that’s really not why we’re here. We just need blessings from—” she began, only to be interrupted again.
“You,” Mama Lovelie said in a sharp voice, jabbing a small stirring stick towards Oksana, “do not get to come into my house, asking for blessings from the loa, while you are so desperately trying to hide what you are. What you have become. The cosmos is moving around you and the prophecy will be fulfilled. You cannot flee from this. You cannot stop what has already been set in motion. Your cowardice will anger the spirits and drive them away.”
Mason, unable to stay quiet any longer, cleared his throat. “Look, I’m sorry—but do you all know each other somehow? What is this about, exactly?”
Both women ignored him, still locked in a stare-down.
“It’s not cowardice,” Oksana said, her voice burning with intensity. “I’m trying to protect him.”
“How is this protection? You cannot protect him,” Mama Lovelie replied. “You know that.”
Oksana flinched, a small, wordless noise torn from her throat. A flicker of sympathy crossed Mama Lovelie’s face, replaced a moment later with determination.
“I’m sorry, child,” she whispered, reaching out and patting Oksana’s knee. “This, you cannot avoid.”
“She’s right, Oksana,” Xander murmured, breaking the tense standoff. “It’s time. It’s past time, in fact.”
“It’s not!” Oksana insisted, her eyes going wide. “We don’t even have confirmation that Bael is behind this—”
“Petite soeur,” Duchess said gently, “of course he is.”
“Right,” Mason said. “Would someone please tell me what the hell you four are talking about?”
Xander closed his eyes, and when he opened them, they were blazing green with a bright, unnatural light. Mason’s heart stuttered once and began to pound.
“What—” he choked out, his eyes caught fast by that otherworldly glow.
Xander smiled, his lips pulling back to reveal lethally pointed canines. “If you’ll forgive the misquote—there are more things in heaven and earth, Ozzie, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
SEVEN
MASON SAT COMPLETELY still, barely even breathing as he stared at the…man? Creature? At the individual in front of him. He thought he understood now what a rodent must feel like when staring into the face of a cobra poised to strike.
Hypnotic eyes, and the teeth of a dangerous predator.
Both set in the face of a charming Pom who’d chatted with Mason pleasantly and teased him for being from Australia. The implication of the fangs was obvious, but Mason… just… couldn’t make his mind go there. He was a doctor, for fuck’s sake. A man of science. Bad enough that he was wandering around in a war zone searching for zombie children—not that he believed in zombies, either.
The Englishman—who apparently wasn’t a real Englishman—continued to gaze at Mason until the silence became stifling. Then, he blinked, and when he opened his eyes, they were once again a striking—but totally normal—shade of moss green. He frowned at Mason, as if perplexed.
“Okay… I’ll admit I was expecting a bit more of a reaction that that,” he said. Mason opened his gob, but no words came out when Xander leaned over and spoke out of the side of his mouth to Duchess. “Er… I didn’t accidentally break him, did I?”
Mason closed his jaw with a snap and looked at Oksana, who seemed to be silently willing herself to
sink straight through the dirt floor beneath her and disappear. Then, he looked down at the cup of akasan he’d set aside after taking a few sips.
“There was something in the drink, wasn’t there?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing as he pinned Mama Lovelie with a suspicious glare. “What did you dose me with? Was it in all three cups, or just mine?”
The mambo snorted. “There were several things in the drink, blan. Milk. Corn flour. Sugar. Cinnamon and star anise. A pinch of salt. I’m sorry to say, I ran out of vanilla beans last week, however.”
“You’re not hallucinating,” Oksana said hoarsely. Her eyes flashed angrily at Xander, and Mason was certain he saw a flare of violet light within their dark brown depths. “Xander, how could you?”
The look Xander gave her was almost pitying, but there was steel beneath it. “You’ll thank me for it later.”
Duchess snorted. “She’ll thump you for it later, more likely,” she muttered, before lifting a perfectly plucked eyebrow at Oksana. “But it still needed to be done, chérie.”
Mason had surreptitiously taken his own pulse during the exchange and run himself through a short cognitive test. Everything seemed… normal. And now, he wasn’t sure which idea was more upsetting—the idea that he was hallucinating the results of his quick and dirty self-diagnosis, or the idea that he wasn’t, and the last couple of minutes had truly happened.
“You and I need to talk,” he told Oksana, since this madness seemed to center around her, somehow, if their hostess was to be believed.
She still looked like she wanted nothing more than to vanish into thin air, but Mama Lovelie said, “Yes. You two talk. There is to be a ceremony tonight in the village center. I will use it to appeal to the loa for deliverance from the evil that has gripped our country. You may attend and ask for their blessings on your journey at the same time. If the spirits favor you, we will speak in more depth afterward.”
Mason’s attention was mostly for Oksana, but he was peripherally aware when Duchess rose gracefully from her mat and crossed to the small window in the far wall.
“It will be dawn soon,” the blonde woman said. “Will you offer us sanctuary, Madame, or should we leave you in peace and find shelter elsewhere?”
“You may stay,” Mama Lovelie said. “I require payment, though.”
Xander reached into a trouser pocket. “That’s not a problem. Do you prefer American dollars or Haitian gourdes?” he asked.
The mambo laughed—a clear, rich sound.
Xander quirked an eyebrow. “So… Euros, then?”
“Oh, nightwalker,” said Mama Lovelie. “You are a sly one, aren’t you? I have no use for your paper notes. What I require is far simpler—a few drops of blood from each of the three of you.”
Oksana stiffened, her earlier reticence forgotten. “Why do you want it?” she demanded.
Duchess turned her gaze from the window, suddenly watchful. Xander deliberately lowered his eyebrow and pulled his hand from his pocket. “I’d be curious about the answer to that question, as well,” he said in a deceptively mild voice.
Mason clambered upright, fighting an unexpected moment of vertigo as his body chose that moment to remind him that he’d barely slept in the last two days. He was so far out of his depth right now that the surface was merely a distant glimmer. Part of his exhaustion-fogged brain insisted that he was the butt of some kind of elaborate joke, and the punch line would come any minute now. The other part was babbling, now the voodoo lady wants to take blood from the sodding vampires, are you fucking well kidding me?
Mama Lovelie regarded Oksana with an inscrutable expression. “Why do I want it? Why do you think? There is power in blood.”
Mason stepped up shoulder to shoulder with Oksana. “Yet you don’t ask for mine. Just theirs.”
Amusement was clear in the mambo’s reply. “Some kinds of blood have more power than others, blan. Perhaps I will ask for yours another day.”
Duchess pushed away from the window. “We can leave. There is still time to find someplace else to stay.”
Oksana lifted a hand, her gaze not leaving Mama Lovelie’s. “Give me your word that you don’t intend to use our payment in a way that would bring harm to innocents.”
“Oksana. Are you sure about this?” Xander asked, looking at her quizzically.
Mason couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “This is mad.” He rubbed at his eyes until he saw stars, trying to scrub away the fogginess. “Okay, so look. You’re a vodou mambo. I get it. There are certain expectations from the villagers you need to meet, right? You have to display the trappings. But it’s just blood. The only way it could be dangerous is if it contains disease vectors, or if you transfuse it into a person with the wrong blood type!”
There was a beat of silence, before Xander murmured, “Ozzie… oh, mate. You have no idea.”
The mambo was still staring at Oksana and ignored his words. “If I am able to utilize it to bring harm to someone, child,” she said, her tone flinty, “it most certainly won’t be an innocent.”
Oksana’s shoulders tensed visibly. “So, you do know something about the children.”
Mama Lovelie snorted. “Am I a fool? Of course I know what is happening on my own doorstep. I already told you—make your peace with the truth, and then, if the spirits favor you tonight, we will talk further.”
After seeming to struggle with a moment of indecision, Oksana looked at Duchess and Xander. Her eyes moved to Mason next, but they slid over him like water across an orange peel—as if she found it physically painful to look at him.
“All right,” she said. “Fine. We’ll pay your price.”
*
After Oksana, Duchess, and Xander had each sliced their palms with the knife Mama Lovelie provided and squeezed a few drops of blood into the three glass vials she indicated, the mambo carefully sealed the containers before giving the four of them a quick tour of the house where they would apparently be spending the day.
It was larger than most structures one would expect to find in a village such as this, with four modest rooms in total, plus a raised and covered sleeping porch built against the north wall. Xander and Duchess retired a short time later, giving Oksana what seemed to Mason to be rather pointed looks as they left to get some rest.
Oksana looked… cornered. Mason pondered the idea of giving her an out—pleading exhaustion and begging off to sleep for a few hours. But for one thing, he didn’t think he would be able to sleep until he talked to her and got some kind of mental handle on this insanity, and for another, he thought the other two might well intervene if they thought she was in danger of weaseling out of the conversation.
There were more undercurrents swirling around than he could possibly hope to follow in his present befogged state, but it was painfully clear that they needed to talk. He followed her out onto the sleeping porch as the sky began to lighten with the coming dawn. The outdoor space was homey and welcoming, with a hammock hanging from two of the posts holding up the roof, and a mattress taking up one corner of the floor. A couple of rattan chairs with a low table set in between completed the setup.
Mason flopped down in a chair. Oksana moved to one of the posts supporting the hammock, her smooth, almost feline grace belying her missing lower limb. She leaned against the rough wooden pole at an angle that let her look out across the village, while keeping Mason in the corner of her eye.
The first hint of golden light appeared as the sun breached the horizon, and they watched it from the shadowed porch. Mason let the silence stretch until it became clear that she would not speak unprompted.
“You’re uncomfortable around me,” he observed, breaking the spell of the morning stillness. “Painfully so. Why?”
Her pause was long enough to make him wonder if she would refuse to speak at all. He let his gaze wander, taking in the low bank of slate-colored clouds hugging the western horizon, illuminated now by the morning sun. A flash of electricity crackled within the gray, swirling mass.
&
nbsp; Was there a storm coming this morning? Well, now… how terribly apt.
Oksana sighed—a sound of capitulation.
“It’s complicated,” she said.
He looked away from the distant lightning in favor of examining her beautiful, melancholy features. “Try me.”
Her eyes met his, that spark of glowing violet visible once more within their soulful depths. “You saw what we are, yet you don’t believe the evidence of your own senses,” she accused.
Mason regarded her steadily. “I’m sleep-deprived well past the point where hallucinations are common, and I still have no guarantee that I wasn’t drugged with something in that drink,” he said. “I wouldn’t be much of a doctor if I immediately jumped to the least likely explanation for what I thought I saw, now would I? Occam’s Razor cuts both ways.”
She gave a frustrated shake of her head. “Then what is the point of us talking, if you won’t believe anything I say?”
He frowned. “As you’ll recall, I didn’t ask you about Xander’s teeth, or about that violet glow I’ve seen in the depths of your eyes. I asked you why you were uncomfortable around me, when I’m not aware of having done anything to make you react that way.”
Her eyes flicked back from the view beyond the porch, settling on him properly for perhaps the first time since they’d arrived here.
“Because my presence here has drawn you into danger,” she said. “The worst danger you’ve ever faced.”
He snorted. “The worst danger I’ve ever faced? And you’re sure of that, are you? I hate to disillusion you, Oksana, but three days ago I spent a good twenty minutes staring down the barrel of an AK-47 held by a frightened teenager who was hopped up on so much cocaine he could hardly see straight.” He gestured at the sleepy village around them. “I assure you that I was in far more danger then than I am now—and I hadn’t even met you at that point.”
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