Louis groaned. “Stop trying to piss him off, and move, you twat!”
Twat, did Louis just call me a twat?
Before I thought better of it, I took a swing at him and cuffed him upside the head, which threw both him and his buddy, Clovis, back a few steps. Did I dare make a break for it?
Yup, time to run. I might not get another chance.
Okay, so hobble run. My ankle screamed bloody murder at me as I forced myself to take off from Clovis and Louis.
Louis screamed, “Don’t leave me with him!”
“He’s your friend, you make nice. I don’t have to!” I yelled back. I doubted I’d get away this easily, but I was sure as hell going to try. What I wouldn’t be doing was going back for Louis. He’d tried to steal the fairy cross for his boss. We weren’t on the same side anymore. My ankle throbbed, and each step felt like the gator had its teeth on me again, but I kept moving.
Because there were two issues with me finding Gran. One, I didn’t think it was a good idea to give Clovis what he wanted. (He needed her for the full spell, I was sure of it. And if it was as bad as Penny thought, we could not let him have it.) And two, which was a rather important point, I had no idea how to find her. I mean, if I followed my gut, it would take me home to Savannah, all the way back to the Hollows and the angel statue. Because right then, I wanted to bury my head in some familiar sand and pretend everything was okay.
A roar built up behind me that was a mixture of a human voice and something unearthly, the word prohibere riding the sound, and I redoubled my efforts despite my legs suddenly feeling even more sluggish. I might not have known exactly what that word meant, but I knew it didn’t bode well for me. The ground rumbled like it had with the statue in Jackson Square.
I ran for several minutes, sweating and cursing under my breath. This was not going well. I was running for all I was worth, and I knew it wasn’t fast enough. It would not take much for Clovis and Louis to catch up to me at this rate.
A whimper on my lips, I whispered a plea for Kinkly or Crash to find me. Of course, I knew in my heart that Clovis had helped set them up too, keeping them busy so they wouldn’t be around to help me. Maybe he’d given Karissa the idea to look for the wings? Maybe he’d been hedging his bets, thinking she’d keep Crash busy and might, as a bonus, find them. Easier to steal from her than to find them in thin air. And then . . . nope, I had to focus on this moment. I’d think about what was going on elsewhere later.
I took corner after corner, weaving my way through the area, looking for something, anything I could use to stave off the necromancer, and coming up empty-handed.
“Sweet baby jaysus,” I hissed under my breath as I took a corner and ran smack into one of the tonton macoutes. Yelping, I bounced off the weirdly stiff body, like it was made of leather. I guess it was, only the leather was made of human skin.
Gah.
I ducked under the reaching arms and grasping hands, getting a good whiff of something sharp and acidic leaking in drips from the body. I grabbed the edge of the building I was next to and used it to slingshot myself around the corner and out of reach.
Or so I had thought.
Ahead of me was a milling crowd of early tourists. Only they weren’t tourists. Clovis had kept hold of Marge and Homer’s peeps for himself. That’s why he’d chased the two of them away. And now the army was waiting for me. The tonton macoutes were everywhere, and I knew how deadly they were.
I leaned against the wall of the building, taking stock of the competition. There were easily a hundred of them, and I couldn’t outfight or outrun them all.
I fumbled with my bag, flipping it open and hoping for some sort of miracle to appear out of it.
What I got was Jinx.
“Hey, are we rescuing that kid or what?” She tumbled out of the bag, still a very small spider.
“Can you get me out of here?” I asked.
It took Skeletor several minutes to get out of the ground—I didn’t have that kind of time. I yelped as I swung my remaining knife at the tonton macoutes next to me. He screamed and fell backward, and I swallowed hard.
Hadn’t Penny told me they couldn’t feel pain? Not alive, not dead, she’d said. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I’d seen the necro use Louis as a marionette. Maybe this was the same thing on a much bigger scale. No matter how I sliced it, dealing with them was dangerous to both them and me.
Jinx grunted. “I’m not a damn horse!”
“I’ll get you whatever books on editing you want for the rest of my life!” I yelled as I pushed another voodoo person back, not wanting to use my knife again. “Books on craft, books on passive writing, books on shitty dialogue and how to fix it, anything you want! Just get me out of here!”
“Oh, now you’re talking,” Jinx said.
I turned and groaned at the sight of what she’d shifted into. It just had to be that animal, didn’t it?
26
I stared for half a second at Jinx, who was now the size of a small elephant because that was what she’d turned into. A freaking elephant, though her skin was dark as night and she seemed to have retained her spider hairs on her legs, which all but quivered as if they’d shoot out and stick me.
Before I could contemplate this turn of events, she grabbed me around the waist with her trunk and all but threw me up onto her back. I belly flopped but managed to grab the top of her left ear to keep from sliding off to the side.
“Why not a horse?” I hollered as she lumbered forward, slowly picking up speed. I finally got upright so I could see where we were going.
Jinx let out a bellowing trumpet before she answered. “How boring is a horse? Anyone can say they rode a horse into battle, but how many people can say they rode an elephant? And a black elephant, no less!” She flung her trunk from side to side, clearing the voodoo people out of her path, and those she missed with her trunk, she flattened with her big-as-serving-tureens feet.
They screamed and wailed as she blew through them, not caring about the damage she did.
I swallowed hard. “Be careful, I don’t think those are dead people!”
“They are dead, I can smell them and they can’t feel shit!” Jinx tossed a few more bodies out of her way. Since I didn’t want to think about the ramifications, I decided to go with it. “We need to find Crash. He’s one of the only ones who can stand up to a power like this!”
I didn’t disagree with her. “I don’t know where he is, do you?”
“I can find him. He’s my boss after all. As the crow flies, he’s this way.”
She changed direction and headed toward St. Louis Cemetery Number 1.
My stomach dropped.
The thing was…
“Whatever spell is around that cemetery makes me super weak! And there is something in there that doesn’t like me! Like a whole lot of somethings!”
“Well, that’s a problem,” Jinx grumbled as she boomed her way down the streets. I was surprised I didn’t see the houses bouncing as if we were in some cartoon. “You’d better figure it out, because we’re almost there.”
As we thundered across lanes, I could see the cemetery up ahead, and the buzzing started in the soles of my feet. Nausea twisted up my guts because the last time I’d tried to enter the cemetery, I hadn’t made it twenty feet before I had to crawl away, unable to stand the sensations. And I’d only made it out because of Robert.
We were on Treme Street, and Jinx headed straight for one of the rusted gates. It was closed, the two sides linked by several chains, but she put her head down and plowed threw them as if they were wet tissue paper.
“I love being an elephant. I need to do it more often,” she said and promptly reached up with her trunk and grabbed me around the waist. She set me on the ground, and the second my feet hit the surface, I crumpled.
Jinx pushed at me with her trunk. “Seriously? Are you just being a weak old lady, or is it really that bad?”
I dug my fingers into her trunk as if I could pull h
er closer. “Keep going, find Crash. Go!”
I put as much emphasis as possible into that last word, and with it I felt a pull on my magic. She let out a belching grunt and then trundled off, dragging me with her. Sure, she could have put me on her back, but that would have been the nice thing to do.
“I’m going to ask for a lot of books for this,” she hollered at me.
I rolled onto my hands and knees, unable to keep what little food I had left in me where it was supposed to stay.
Only suddenly Jinx squealed, trumpeting, and then she was back to a tiny spider, scuttling away.
A hand gripped the back of my hair as I continued to heave, and dragged me to my feet, which meant puke ran down my chin and onto my shirt. I slapped weakly at the hands, feeling the death around him. “Damn you, Bogus Clovis. Leave me alone!”
“Stop fighting him!” Louis snapped. “You cannot fight his power. You aren’t strong enough.”
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black!” I spat back at him, hoping my anger would help me get and keep my legs under me.
Clovis tightened his hold on my hair and shoved me forward. “You broke through the remaining pieces of your gran’s spell on the cemetery for me, thank you. I can feel your gran through you. This way.” He turned to the left, holding me out in front of him like some sort of human dowsing rod.
Vile creature!
You are not welcome!
Kill her.
You let him in!
The voices were back, pounding into my skull worse than ever. Yet, I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t being allowed to. This was why they didn’t want me here? Because something in me opened the cemetery for Clovis?
Every time my legs went weak, he shoved me, pushing me ahead of him. We wove between the aboveground tombs, the pathways made of concrete without a stitch of grass. That is, if I didn’t count the few overly tough weeds that had broken through the manmade paths in order to reach for the sun. The smell of rain hung in the air, along with a hint of smoke. I tried slapping away his hands but found myself struggling as though he were an adult and I a naughty child in his grip.
With each step we took, the sun brightened the sky a little farther until it was full daylight. It was a dark day, granted, presided over by rainclouds, but dawn had come, and it gave me a little hope.
“Louis, you can’t possibly see this as a good idea!” I said as I was pushed around another tomb. “Come on, dude, help me!”
Louis said nothing, so I pressed on. “They’re trying to find the ingredients for a spell, and it isn’t a good one! This is only going to help them.”
“And who are ‘they’?” Louis asked. “Who are we to be afraid of if you know so much?”
“Well, obviously, Bogus Clovis here!” I yelped as the hand in my hair tightened. Weirdly enough, although the metaphysical attack I’d been undergoing wasn’t under my control, the buzzing under my skin had lessened, the needles that had wanted to drive into me before had eased their attack. “And whoever he is working for or with!”
Perhaps she is not the enemy.
She doesn’t like the death bringer.
The voices began to confer with one another, their hold on my mind easing.
Louis grunted and slid between French and English. “Je ne suis pas surpris. Vous ne savez rien. Of course, you know nothing. Perhaps you should have listened when we told you that you should not be in the Hollows!”
Indignation roared through me. “You were one of the ones who supported me! Don’t you try to gaslight me! I have damn well lived with enough of that.” I twisted around to take a swing at Louis, just because.
He jerked away from me and hid behind Clovis. Clovis threw me ahead of him. “We are here.”
On my hands and knees, I looked up to see a tomb in front of me. Big, square, ugly, and made of a dull gray stone.
“Touch it,” Clovis said.
When I didn’t move, he picked me up and threw me at the tomb. I hit the stone hard and rolled. A flash of light and the air heated for a split second as a spell ripped open.
I blinked up at the tomb, which was no longer big, square, and ugly.
What I saw made me reel backward. It was as if I had been transported back to Savannah—impossible, I know, yet that’s how it looked.
Even Louis sucked in a breath. “It cannot be.”
The tomb was the mirror image of the one that presided over the Hollows’ training area. Right down to the broken wing, albeit it was on the right side instead of the left.
Clovis let me go. “This is the place. This is the tomb where the witch hid the angel wings.”
He stepped forward and Louis was forced to go with him. I should have been worried, except I wasn’t, not for an instant.
You see, I’d realized something they couldn’t possibly know.
Gran wasn’t here.
Which meant this was not where Gran’s spirit had gone to protect the remaining angel wing or wings. It was a ruse of Gran’s. A diversion, just like I’d done with the fairy cross to keep it safe. I stared up at the angel statue, daring to put a hand on the marble base. There was no warmth.
The warmth had been in the matching statue in the Hollows.
Damn it, Gran, why did you stay quiet then?
The buzzing in my body had slowed even more, and then it stopped all together.
We were wrong.
You must flee.
Danger comes.
Only I just sat there, my butt in the grass, watching as Clovis raised his hands above his head and begin to intone words that sounded Latin, but were deeper, darker and, if I were to guess, far older than simple Latin.
“Aperta. Revelare. Potestas mea.” Clovis boomed the words and Louis repeated them in a whisper, his head bowed and shoulders shaking.
“Louis! Don’t help him!” I pushed to my feet, my legs and body my own again.
I would have taken a step farther, but someone grabbed me from behind. I spun and found myself looking up into the eyes of a wraith.
“Ah, duck me,” I whispered.
The wraith dragged me away from the tomb as Clovis worked to get it open. Stone on stone shrieked through the air as the tomb was slowly pulled apart one piece at a time.
If the wings had been there, they weren’t anymore, I was sure of it. But Clovis didn’t know that. I could keep him believing that for a while longer.
The wraith’s hands dug into me, and that awful sucking sensation overcame me, as if all the energy was being siphoned from me, ice and fire at the same time. The ground beneath me softened, and my legs slid impossibly down through the solid path.
Fight, I had to fight. I didn’t know if Suzy and the others had managed to keep up, if they’d followed. Or where Crash was if he was indeed in this cemetery. Even Robert was gone.
I was alone in that moment.
“Let me go!” I growled the words, struggling to find the magic I possessed. The wraith tipped its head to the side as if considering my request.
“Not the right words,” the creature said in its whispery voice. “Must be the right words.”
I struggled against the wraith even as my energy drained out of me, my magic being stripped away.
The right words?
I twisted around to see Louis staring at me. Was he doing this? The ring he’d given Eammon was cool against my skin, and I scrambled to get it off.
I was up to my waist now in the ground, and there were bones under my feet, which wasn’t great for my nerves, even if they were harder than the soil and cement around me. I managed to get my fingers around the ring and rip it free from the chain, which sent my Gran’s amulet onto the ground too.
The ground stopped trying to suck me down. That was good, wasn’t it? Nope, the wraith kept coming.
“What the damn hell of a hot, messy shart are the right words? Please?” I yelled, fear and anger about the only things keeping me upright as my energy level sunk with my body. What little magic I had left seemed to curl around me and
the wraith, and it was as if I could see my words forced into the critter.
The wraith blinked down at me, its mouth moving even though it didn’t seem to want to speak. “Go and harm no more,” it finally said, writhing like a fish on a hook. “Damn youuuuu.”
I couldn’t find my knife. But my fingers brushed against the piece of leather I’d taken from the mansion. I pulled it out and the whip appeared in my hands, ethereal and shimmering. I snapped it forward and it wrapped around the wraith far tighter than it should have by my swing. The wrath screamed, body flailing against the hold of the whip. I yelled the words he’d given me. “Go and harm no more.”
He shrieked and fell away from me, and I was left there, puffing for air as the ground began to harden. The whip shrunk once more to a single piece of leather.
Shit, shit, shit! What was left of my strength was used to pull myself out of the hole I’d been stuffed into by the wraith. Covered in bits of dirt and tiny granules of rock, I lay on the pathway breathing hard. I could still hear Clovis and Louis chanting away, working on the tomb. I scooped up my gran’s amulet and tucked it into my pocket, but left Louis’s ring. Just in case.
I sat up with a groan in time to see a bolt of lightning arc out of the sky and strike the statue. The marble angel cracked right down the middle, falling as if in slow motion to either side.
Clovis laughed, his hands above his head as Louis crouched at his feet.
The necro wouldn’t find what he was looking for, and once he realized that, he would turn on me again. This was my chance to stop him. I just didn’t know how.
Breathing hard, sweating enough to make my own little ocean, I wobbled up to my feet. It had worked with the wraith, why not with the necromancer?
Flipping the knife into a throwing position, I snapped it toward Clovis with all I had as I spoke the same simple words. “Go and harm no more.”
The only problem?
Someone else stepped into the path of the spinning blade.
27
I yelped out a warning—too late—as Louis, who’d apparently seen this as his opportunity to run away, took my spinning blade in his right shoulder. He screamed and flung himself at Clovis, hugging the robed necromancer to him. The two of them tumbled into the gaping pit the lightning bolt had created when it split the angel statue in half. If this tomb was anything like its sister in Savannah, that hole went down a long, long way.
Midlife Ghost Hunter: A Paranormal Women's Fiction (The Forty Proof Series Book 4) Page 21