by Faith Hunter
Louder now. “Liberatio!”
My legs jerked. Or, rather, the boots did. At a sensation of release, a loosening, I pressed my advantage, sticking my hand between my calf and the vines, pulling them away from my skin. When the boot gave, I dropped the revolver, using both hands.
“It’s working!”
He came to a knee next to me, pulling at my other boot. And when he uttered the word again, we managed to yank both of them off.
Freedom!
We leaned back against the wall, laughing. I had the urge to hug him or kiss him or . . . Whatever it was, I didn’t do it.
I said, “Those bones . . .”
“From animals. Amari must’ve used them for the spell that she put on the boots.”
I kept laughing. Now the witch could have her property, and I would get that red-eyed creature off my trail. That would leave me free to discover the rest of my puzzling life.
Dropping a boot on the floor, I said, “Who needs to run that fast or be Jackie Chan, anyway?”
Philippe’s laughter faded. “Yes. Who needs that?”
The way he looked at me now wasn’t with amusement, or with a pirate’s gleam in his moonlit eyes. He was serious about something I didn’t quite understand.
“I think,” he said, “it’s time we left, cher.”
Why did it sound as if he had been waiting to say that ever since I had run into his shop?
I didn’t have the opportunity to answer, because my skin . . . It had begun to do something strange.
Shriveling. Puckering.
I lifted my hand. In the moonlight, I could see my flesh changing before my eyes, as if it were . . . scarred from burns?
A scream welled up within me as the female voice in my memory returned. There is a cost for these . . .
What cost had she been referring to?
My instincts shuddered, telling me to put the boots on again. When I reached for them, Philippe intercepted me.
“Forgive me, darlin’, but I did mean it when I said that I don’t need you to be Jackie Chan.”
As the skin all over my body—my face, my neck, my legs—pruned and ached, he gripped my wrists with one hand and quickly picked up the revolver I had put down with the other. He aimed at me.
“I had to get those boots off you,” he said, “because when I started being honest with you, I couldn’t have you running so fast away from me that I wouldn’t be able to catch up. I didn’t need you to fight me with the strength those boots clearly give you, either. That’s why I brought you here.”
I felt like a mummy without its bandages by now, and tears clouded my sight. The boots—they hadn’t only given me strength and speed. They had kept me from this—scars from the fire Philippe had seen. He hadn’t been lying about what he had divined when he had touched me earlier. The evidence was obvious on me now.
“You’ve probably guessed already,” Philippe said, letting go of me and standing, “that there was more to my vision than you running into my shop, Lilly.”
The sound of my name washed over me like acid, burning from the inside out. I was withered, wounded, betrayed.
I was Lilly.
He kept waiting for me to take his hand. “Come along with me now. I won’t hurt you, cher. I promise.”
“What will you do with me?”
“Take you back to your family. I saw that they are searching for you, offering money I can use for my maman’s health. We’ll both be much better off afterward.”
“My . . . family?” Why did the word leave a bad taste in my mouth?
He merely watched me, as if his vision hadn’t told him any other details about my parents, or siblings I might have.
There was a different burning inside me now. A heat. A hatred. And it wasn’t directed at Philippe.
Deep down, where nothing made sense, I knew I couldn’t return to my family. Not at any cost.
“Lilly,” he said, “you’ve made good with the witch. If Amari was the one who sent that red-eyed thing after you tonight, then you’re in the clear. We can leave, and I will take you to safety, where people know you.”
I felt the burning again, but this time I saw fire. Felt fire even as my skin began to wither. Smelled the smoke choking me, looked into a pair of eyes that were so like mine as flames consumed me.
Had my family done this to me?
With a yell of rebellion, I kicked, sweeping my leg under Philippe so swiftly that he didn’t have time to react. He fell to the floor, the revolver skidding away from him. Even without the boots, I was on him in a lightning flash, using a wrestling hold to pin his legs with mine, my arms threaded with his so he couldn’t move.
In the dimness, I could see his stunned expression, but he was laughing softly. “Seems you don’t need those boots. I didn’t see that comin’.”
He used all his power to kick me off him, but I sprang back at him, wrapping an arm round his neck, using my other hand to pinch him between the shoulder and neck in a spot that made him slump.
“Well . . . played . . . cher . . . ,” he whispered as he passed out, tumbling the rest of the way to the floor and taking me with him.
I didn’t move for a moment. I wanted to make sure he was down. And he was.
My pulse steady, I took my hand from his sweet spot, but I didn’t roll away from him. I stole a moment, feeling his muscled back against my chest, smelling his carpenter’s wood-chip scent, wishing . . .
For what?
I pushed away, knowing in my core that I didn’t love. I wasn’t certain I could, although there I was, still looking at him, my head tilted, when I heard someone come in through the front door behind me.
“Oh, Lilly,” said the female voice from my memory. “What’ve you done this time?”
4
The witch was framed by the door, backlit by the porch lantern. She held on to either side of the opening, dressed in a beige robe with a sash round the middle. Long, frizzy red hair framed a face that was covered by a cloth that tied behind her head, covering her eyes. There were two subtle dark circles on the white linen, ghosts of where a gaze would be.
From behind the witch, a teen girl with dark braids hanging over her shoulders ducked under Amari’s arm. She guided the woman inside the rest of the way, then went outside, apparently leaving.
“Get them boots back on,” the witch finally said to me with a backwoods drawl. Amari had a young voice. Was it because she led a charmed life? Or was she as young as she sounded?
Marveling that the witch hadn’t commented on Philippe, who was still lying prone on the floor, I obeyed her. As soon as I slipped the boots over my legs, they leeched to me, coming home, it seemed. I sighed as I felt all my skin moisten, unwithering, returning to normal just like that.
“Can’t even make a house call without havin’ to come back to this shit,” Amari said with a head shake. “I knew you’d be a challenge. Warned you over and over again ’bout how them boots work, but you’re full of yourself. I’m hopin’ you finally learned somethin’, though, since you’re back here again like a tamed pup.”
Back here again?
She moved farther into the room, and I stood, intending to act as a guide, just as the young girl had done before she’d left.
The witch waved me off. “I know my way ’round my own digs. Besides, I have Jean-Marie to wait on me most times, though she’s left for the night. It’s part of her tutorin’. And I wish I didn’t have to explain that to you every time you slink back here.”
“I’ve been here before?”
“Well, you don’t often bring amours with you.” Amari gestured toward Philippe.
“Yes, about him . . .”
“He’ll be out for a while, judgin’ on what I know you can do with those skills of yours.”
Could she see, in spite of that blindfold, with some sor
t of witch vision?
She sat in a chair behind the animal-bone table, then gestured for me to take the one opposite. Reaching under the table, she came out with a small crystal ball, setting it down, gesturing for me to touch it. The moment I did so, the boots hugged my feet, not violently but with comfort.
“You haven’t been here for two days, Lilly. I was worried.”
Clearly, she hadn’t begun to divine me with that ball, or whatever she had planned. “I wish I could tell you what was occupying me. I woke up in a small hotel at dusk, not knowing where I was.”
“Nothing new there.”
Was I ever going to find out the reason?
Amari clucked, and I noticed that her mouth was lovely: red lips tipped up at the corners. A chin with a dimple.
“Child,” she said, “I don’t envy you, but them boots were the only solution when I found you out by the road a week ago.”
A week ago? When Philippe had that vision of me?
“You’d just come into town,” Amari said. “Stole some poor soul’s pickup on your way here from Lord knows where else. Some time ago—you’d lost track ’bout how long it was, I guess—you were in Southern California.” Cal-ee-fornia.
“What was I doing there?”
“If you’d write all this down in a journal, like I tell you to, I wouldn’t have to explain. You been dependin’ on me to always catch you up, but you’ll be doin’ some writin’ tonight, like it or not. Next time you come here, you’ll be readin’ that instead of listenin’.”
I almost told her that it’s hard to read without any lights in here, but I could always go to the porch, yes? I had high doubts that one argued with Amari.
Those blindfolded eyes seemed to look into mine. “I’ll tell you once more and once only. Burnt to a pitted mess, you were, but somehow you were alive and kickin’. Later, after I divined you, I found out why that was.”
“And?”
“Oh, I’m not going through that complicated story again. A woman gets tired, you know.”
Amari gripped the top of the ball, and I knew that I would be experiencing my tale through it.
But the witch wasn’t ready to give it over to me just yet.
“Your truck had run outta gas down the road,” Amari said. “You’d crawled the rest of the way here, ’cuz somewhere along the line, you’d heard that there was a witch outside New Orleans who healed folk. You were so wounded you’d almost run outta gas, too.”
“So you helped me?”
“That’s what I was born to do. Help, not hinder.”
My chest constricted. I wasn’t getting the sense that I had known people like this back “home.”
“The boots,” I said softly. “You used magic and healing to create those boots, and when I put them on, the burns . . .”
“Go away. When you take ’em off, you go back to bein’ burnt. Nature heals, Lilly. We’re all a part of it. We’ve only just forgotten.”
The boots . . . vines from the bayou. An enchantment from a white witch.
“I remembered something when I arrived here,” I said. “You had told me that there’s a price for these boots. I thought you meant money. I even believed that I might have stolen them from you.” I touched one boot, gently. It seemed to respond, pulsing under my fingers.
“Oh, they’s a price,” Amari said, laughing. And it was a nice laugh. A song, just like the ones the night creatures were singing outside. “You woke up without a memory tonight. Every night.”
I didn’t react.
Amari sighed. “That’s the price them boots demand. Nature, or them vines, give to you, Lilly. It give you health and healing, but it need to take, too, and every mornin’ them boots get spent, and they need your help to revitalize, just as you need them.”
“We’re both . . . parasites?” Living off each other?
“That’s a fair notion. When they take from you, they don’t drain you in the physical way. They take somethin’ stronger—from your soul. Some of your essence, your being.”
“My identity.”
“And your short-term memory. But like all livin’ things, they ain’t perfect. They leave specks of memory for you to cling to sometime.”
Like the instincts I had about what I was capable of doing. And they left me muscle memory, too, based on the martial arts I’d performed tonight.
I tried to bring everything together: I had no doubt been out and about last night, perhaps even the nights before, chasing my identity. When the sun had come up, my boots had needed sustenance, and I had broken in to the bed-and-breakfast to collapse. Until I woke up again, drained.
“I go through this every twenty-four hours?” I asked.
“That’s your curse. And your blessing. It’d be up to you to see what you’re eventually gonna make of it.”
“What do you mean?”
Amari smiled. “You’re about to see.”
With that, she bent her head to the crystal and my eyesight went black, plunging me into an emerging pool of visions so vivid that my adrenaline surged.
A foggy memory of a dark control room with a console . . . watching screens . . . An image of a fanged dragon, destroyed . . . heart breaking, a scream pulled from my lungs as I sank to the floor . . . An explosion, burning me as I crawled away from the destruction, still alive . . .
Then, staring up at a ceiling from a bed, bandages over my face except for my eyes. “You’re retired,” said a man, my father, as he fit a spindly device over my head and my mind went blank.
Coming awake again, this time by the hand of a woman who looked very much like me. A cousin? Doing her bidding, fighting for control of my body, winning, then losing . . . Then burning in another fire, not from an explosion, but a bonfire, punishment for failing the family, more screams as I ran and ran from the flames, rolling on the ground to put out the fire on my skin, near death . . .
Real life swirled in front of me again, and I realized that Amari had let go of the crystal ball. Her voice soothed me to calm.
“You were ramblin’ away on the night I found you, before I made them boots. How you used to be a keeper of a vampire called the dragon, how he died under your watch after some hunters blew up his underground home. You blathered about bein’ ‘retired’ by your family because you’d disappointed ’em so, and from what I guess, retirement was like death, a livin’ coffin.”
I remembered how Philippe had read me earlier, and mentioned a glass coffin.
I tried not to glance at where he lay on the floor, but I couldn’t stop myself. Philippe, who had helped me, but merely because I was a means for him to get reward money for his own family. A noble cause, to be sure, but one that conflicted with mine.
“My family did that to me?” I asked.
“And worse. From what I heard from you, they call themselves the Meratoliages, and they swore in ancient times to protect the dragon’s line of vampires. Not so long ago, they raised you from that retirement to go after the hunters who slayed him. They know the dark arts, and they were able to control you as a revenant. You didn’t take too kindly to that, and you burnt again. I believe, though, it was a sight better than that retirement of yours. Just judgin’ by what you said. I’d rather burn than be buried alive, myself.”
Now that she was telling me, it all seemed so very familiar. “Did your boots heal my mind, too? It sounds as if I didn’t have much of one when I was brought out of this retirement.”
Amari nodded, hands folded on the table again. “But there’s one thing them boots didn’t give you.”
“Powers,” I said. “I had them all along.”
“And they kept you alive tonight.”
Yes. Proof of that was on the floor, not five feet away from me.
I explained how Philippe had a vision of me. “He must have also divined that my family is looking for me. He said they we
re offering money.” I paused, my eyes widening. “There was a . . . thing. Earlier tonight. Dressed all in black, with red eyes. You didn’t send it after me?”
“No.” For the first time, Amari sounded troubled.
My boots thudded, shuddering through me, and another memory stirred: my old uniform as dragon keeper—all black, masked, with night-vision goggles. Red eyes.
My hunter was a member of my family?
I sat back in my chair. “Is it possible that the Meratoliages have sent someone after me themselves?” And was it also possible that the reason my attacker hadn’t come into Philippe’s shop was because Philippe had asked one of his voodoo friends to protect the area from anyone else who might want to turn me in? His psychic visions would have given him ample time to make such a preparation.
“Either you been runnin’ from your family for a few nights now,” Amari said, “or they just found out where you is. Either way, you best get your shit together before more hunters come for you. I can whip up a protection spell now that I know who’s chasin’ you, but if Philippe is right about there bein’ money offered for you . . .”
“A spell might not help.” I swallowed. “You’re not interested in a bounty?”
“Why would I be when I already live in paradise?” she asked, gesturing round the room.
I wanted to laugh, but stayed silent instead. Outside, a bayou symphony played in the dark, creatures out there swimming in the water, brushing against vines like the ones that had given me a second chance.
This was it, then. I had to make the right decisions tonight, before the family caught up to me. Meeting Philippe had changed my patterns, changed everything.
“Don’t worry,” I told Amari. “I intend to take care of my business before dawn.”
The witch reached under the table once again, then handed me a knife with a long, gleaming blade, almost as if she had already seen that I would be needing it very, very soon.
5
Amari put the protection spell on me before I walked down the road, just to set a bit of distance between her cabin and what I knew would be tracking me down before too long.