by Cate Morgan
Beyond the festival bead curtains lay an oblong living space, long and narrow. Callie noted the clutch of mismatched folding chairs clustered opposite a tweedy, mildewed sofa of indeterminate color or pattern. The empty eye sockets of a dozen or more festival masks, chipped and molting, followed their stilted progress through the room. Sulie’s pace would have tried the patience of the most enthusiastic Boy Scout.
They followed her hot pink shuffle up a narrow oak staircase to the windowed watchtower crowning the little house. They passed through a low doorway into a plain room of white washed wood paneling and hardwood floors. At one end, by the bay windows, stood a folding table covered in white cloth and a jumble of rum, cigars and misshapen little carved statuettes. One sported a little top hat.
Sulie moved fast, as though by passing through the door, she had passed through a barrier, and was now free of its constraints. “You been dreaming again, Irish-Man.”
Liam shrugged. “Am I that predictable?”
Sulie stooped to draw between two pillars with a hunk of chalk. “Tell me.”
Liam crossed his arms. “As symbols go, it was fairly unusual.”
The priestess chuckled, pausing to admire her handiwork. “Well, it would be.” She nodded in Callie’s direction. “I felt her kind die.”
“Raven in a burning tree—”
“Nothing unusual about that. Why that creature follows you around, I’ll never know.”
“There was a lot of fire, actually. Not to mention the great bloody demon. And a woman who changed appearance at least half a dozen times, until Eva.”
“Fire can mean many things—I’m inclined to death and rebirth.” She stood and stretched her back. “As for the demon, this city has faced fires before. Fires and storms and, yes, even other demons. That La Laurie woman was something to contend with, let me tell you.”
“Don’t remind me.” Liam handed her the fresh bottle of rum. “Who do we contact?”
“Papa Legba—the real one,” she amended, as her black rooster fluttered across her chalked sketch.
Donal eyed the animal with some measure of trepidation. “We’re not going to…you know.” He dragged his finger across his throat.
Sulie blinked at him. “Where do you get your ideas about Voudon, boy? Leggie’s my link to the Loa realm, so he’s already been sacrificed, in a manner of speaking. It’s what makes him so cranky.”
“‘Leggie?’” Callie mouthed in Liam’s direction.
Liam gave her a crooked smile. She grinned back.
“I assume we’ll forgo the usual theatrics,” he said to Sulie.
“You know firsthand what troublemakers the Loa be. I hope your new friends are ready for this.” She eyed Donal balefully.
“I suspect they’re up for the experience.” Liam raised an eyebrow in Callie’s direction. She nodded.
“Then we’ll see what Legba has to say for himself.”
He backed away into Sulie’s circle until he reached the center. Callie followed him. Donal and Chase retreated.
“I won’t remember what happens, after,” Liam said to Callie. “Try to spare me the more embarrassing aspects, will you?”
Callied smiled. “Oh, now you’re just asking for trouble.”
Sulie opened Liam’s rum and poured it into the hollow of her spider-webbed palm until the alcohol overflowed. “Papa Legba, you know me.” She sprayed rum in an arc surrounding Liam and Callie and poured another handful. “We have spoken many times, and every Tuesday I make you all your favorite things to eat. Roast corn, peppers, coffee laced with rum and chicory.”
The atmosphere in the room changed, grew close and heavy. Callie’s breath tightened as the room seemed to move around her. Her head gave a shallow, dull throb. She pressed her boot soles into the floor.
Sulie poured a third and final measure of rum and flung it around Liam, completing the circle. “We seek guidance at this, the Crossroads, for a soul that has been lost.”
Callie clenched her fists as the room spun once, one hundred eighty degrees of tilt-o-whirl violence. It snapped into place with a finality that took her breath away.
She found herself thrust into the firestorm of Liam’s dreams, the heat searing through her veins and erupting from every pore. Thousands upon thousands of pinpricks beyond her capacity to feel. A distant cry was lost in a rush of wind. She couldn’t tell if the cry was hers or someone else’s.
Callie stumbled and almost fell. Liam, already on his hands and knees, stared at her with unseeing black eyes. The fabric of his shirt rippled with his shifting of his muscles beneath the surface. She looked around. Everything, including Sulie, had receded into the middle distance, leaving the circle and patterns surrounding her floating in a void that wasn’t quite anchored to the room.
She caught her breath. She was between, but not the hollow between space and time familiar to her. This was something else altogether—a dream state existing on another plane.
Liam stood, unfolding gracefully until he tried to straighten his spine. He caught up in unbending his lower back, and seemed to favor one leg. His black eyes regarded her with onyx iridescence and no whites, and he smiled a slow, Big Easy smile. His low laugh was almost a purr.
“One champion lost,” he said, resonant voice reverberating in all her dark, secret places. “Another found.”
Callie located her voice, hiding somewhere down in her gut. She dragged it back. “You know me.”
Liam-Legba took a hobbling step toward her. “I know what you be.”
“So if I were to say I am one of the nineteen…”
“I would call you a liar, for there are nineteen no longer.”
“Our Eva is lost to us.” Callie tried not to stumble over the words. “Has her soul passed through to your realm?”
A shake of the head, another step closer. One more and he would be standing on her toes. “There is more lost than you know. But not enough yet for the demon to gain its freedom.”
“What is this demon? What is its name?”
“To have a name is to have power. It is not of our realm.” The final step was taken, small but telling, in a dance close enough to bend his spine so his mouth whispered along the curve of her neck. She stood very still, tilting her head as his fingers brushed the curls away, and his lips feathered her lobe. “It is unrequited, made of fire, and passion born of jealousy. We cannot touch it ourselves.”
She turned her face toward his. “Who summoned it?” she wanted to know. “Why?”
“Answers can only be had at the Crossroads of the dead and damned.” Then he turned her head that last quarter inch, and kissed her in a way that made her spine soften, her toes curl, as the felt-but-silent wind of between howled around them.
Chapter Three
“This is just creepy, if you ask me.” Donal stumbled on an exposed tree root, making the light from the lantern he carried spin crazily about.
“You think everything’s creepy,” Chase observed, arms tight around a crate of supplies necessary for the summoning ritual they were about to perform.
“Well, things generally are, in my experience. I mean, okra? What is that?”
“A vegetable, I think.”
“So you say.” Donal looked over his shoulder at Callie. “Don’t you think this is creepy?”
Callie smiled, squelching behind her bickering friends through one of New Orleans’s oldest cities of the dead. “Speaking as someone who’s died once already, I find it’s all a matter of perspective.”
Liam’s eyebrows lifted in open curiosity as he trooped beside her. She merely shrugged, electing not to elaborate.
They came upon a squat vault reminiscent of a brick oven, dripping with the paraphernalia of Voodoo—burned-down candles, piles of pennies scattered like rose petals across the ground, flowers, photographs and the inevitable beads. The vault’s stone facade was covered in sets of triple red Xs, especially the door, upon which Liam knocked three times.
Donal looked around, taking in t
he miniature necropolis. “Is that really a good idea?”
Liam snorted. “Don’t tell me you believe in zombies.”
“Zombies? No. Ghouls—definitely.”
“It’s tradition to knock on the tomb door of Marie Laveau before attempting a Voodoo ritual in the vicinity of her final resting place. As a matter of respect, just to let her know we’re here.”
“Great. Wonderful. Perfect.” Donal started forward again with bad grace. “Can we get this over with, please? I’m all full up on heebies and jeebies, thank you very much.”
“If it makes you feel better,” Liam added helpfully, “most people believe she’s buried in another tomb in one of the other cemeteries. Could be we’re knocking on the wrong door altogether.”
“Oh, that’s just loads better.”
“Glad I could help.”
They reached a four-way intersection between rows of tombs, surmounted by soft grass. Liam considered the ground with distant eyes while Chase set the crate down and began emptying its contents.
Callie cocked her head to one side, much like Liam’s friend the raven. “Donal’s not the only one having the jeebies,” she observed.
Liam hoisted a game smile onto this face. “Perhaps one or two,” he conceded, with a shrug. “This is where I arrived, when I first came to the city. Sulie was here when I woke up, Marked and bleeding. I had a feeling at the time—still do—that I had been diverted, or something.”
He didn’t need to mention the waiting, decades upon decades spent marking time until the true reason for his lengthy existence revealed itself. She knew. Besides, he kept watching her with those enigmatic dark eyes, clearly wondering.
Callie took her first good look at where they were standing. Right smack in the middle of a grassy crossroads, in a city where the dead resided above ground, sharing cramped tenements with other remains, in New Orleans. She took a quick mental tally. By her experienced reckoning, there weren’t many places left in the world where the Loa were still recognized, let alone welcome. “My, we did hit a trifecta, didn’t we?”
Liam conceded the point. “It is a bit much, once you understand the implications, isn’t it? It doesn’t get much more of a Crossroads than this.”
Callie let the subject drop, curiosity satisfied. Knowledge gained correlated with a shift of focus. “Chalk won’t work here.”
“That’s why we’re going to use string.” Liam accepted the roll from Chase and handed her the loose end. His fingers lingered on her bare arms as he shifted her a foot or so to the left. Her skin prickled, rash-hot and delicious. The strange energy between them sparked. Then he moved from corner to corner, end to end, in a seemingly random pattern and occasionally directing Donal in the placement of large white candles. Chase merely crossed his arms and watched.
Eventually Papa Legba’s vévé was complete, the door to the Loa realm ready to be opened. Callie wondered, not for the first time, if the door weren’t perpetually ajar. Liam spread a black fringed shawl over the ground. It barely ruffled in the still, humid air. He unscrewed the top from a bottle of spiced rum and repeated Sulie’s act of spreading handfuls around the circle. “Papa Legba, you know me,” Liam called. “You have helped me before, and have agreed to help me again tonight by opening the door to truth. We have followed your instructions, and now await your answer.”
At first, nothing. If anything the air grew more still, making it difficult to tell if the unnatural quiet was due to the perverse weather eccentricities of New Orleans, or of its Loa.
Suddenly the shawl took to the air like a plastic bag drifting over a dusty street. The fabric furled and wafted with delicate folds until it draped itself in midair around invisible curves. Shifting moonlight drew darkness and light together until they coalesced into form. Clamoring instinct drove Callie several steps back into deepening shadow.
The woman who finally appeared out of midnight was stunning. Tall and lushly curved as Venus, fire bright hair pinned in messy curls and eyes like summer sky. Elegant hands gathered the shawl more closely about her pale naked form, but her silky bright smile indicated she’d throw it off at least provocation.
Liam visibly started. “You—”
“You remember me,” the woman purred, clearly delighted. “Darling boy, how long it’s been. Have you been here all this time?” Her smoky laugh was meant for dark bedrooms and steamy nights.
Callie was rendered frozen solid by a flood of recognition and unadulterated rage. Suddenly everything—Eva, the demon in Liam’s dream—made a horrible kind of sense.
“Why would Legba open the gate for you?” Liam demanded. “What do you have to do with any of this?”
Another bright laugh, jangling Callie’s already stretched nerves. The woman spread her hands like a master conjuror, the shawl threatening to slide from her shoulders. “Goodness, my sweet, don’t you know that everything is connected? You asked Legba to open the gate to truth, and here I am.”
Callie’s rage shattered. She stepped into view, to the edge of the circle. “Hello, Maeve.”
The woman’s head snapped around on her lovely neck, smile faltering. Then it blossomed again into a fully-fledged grin. “Hello, cousin.” The word sounded overly sweet and brittle all at once. “It’s been simply decades since last we met. When was that? Boston?”
“Texas. Corpus Christi.” Callie laid the syllables in a neat, even line, each with a clang like iron.
“Ah, yes. Aunt Brighid’s girls are so alike—I sometimes find it difficult to keep you all straight. Only there aren’t so many of you now, are there?”
Anger and grief hurt more than her actual words. “Where’s Eva?”
“Dead, didn’t you know?” A feigned start of realization. “Oh, you mean her soul. Well…” Her hand fluttered in the air with butterfly grace. “Now, if you don’t mind, cousin, I have Crossroads business to conduct.” Her eyes fixed on Liam with dark hunger.
Liam’s smile could have cut glass. “What is this demon, and who summoned it?”
Maeve clasped her hands before her, all demure innocence. “Valuable knowledge indeed,” she acknowledged. “Now here is my question in return. How much are you willing to sacrifice for the answers—and for the power needed to do something about those answers—this time?” She reached for him.
Liam opened his mouth, but got no further.
Callie launched herself between them. She grabbed Maeve’s arm and pulled her roughly back. Maeve stumbled, snatched her arm away with a hiss. Callie breathed hard, lip curling. “You will not touch him.”
Now Maeve’s laugh was derisive, less playacted. “You would protect him? From me? You forget yourself, cousin. This is my realm, not yours.”
Callie stalked a predatory circle, cross-footed. Maeve revolved in place to follow her movements. “Take another look, Maeve. This isn’t your territory or mine. We called you here for a purpose and you are compelled to answer whether you like it or not—or suffer the consequences.” Callie feinted left, stepped right as Maeve tried to get past her to Liam. Maeve hissed again, which Callie answered with a feral smile. “You can’t make a Crossroads deal here, as this is not one of your making.” She laughed as Maeve stilled in surprise. “Didn’t you think I’d figure it out? ‘All things are connected’, aren’t they?”
Now Maeve fairly snarled. “All Crossroads are the All-Mother’s. As all demons are her children.”
“Not this Crossroads,” Callie said, pointing. “This is Legba’s door, and the Loa’s realm. I have permission to enter, and I can close it any time I want.” Of course, there was no rule stipulating Maeve was compelled to give them a straight answer, but Callie would sort that out later.
Maeve’s eyes shifted to Liam, who lingered just beyond her reach, the circle in which she found herself trapped. She pulled the shawl over her bare shoulder. “As you say, all things are connected. The All-Mother releases her children into the world as she sees fit. She has a particular interest in love, especially when it is unrequited�
�it is this interest that drew her to Lucifer, after all. What you don’t know is this particular demon has been summoned as bait.” This time Maeve’s smile was absolutely genuine. “For you.”
Callie’s pacing came to an abrupt halt. “Me?”
Maeve stood in the center of the binding circle, letting shadow and light alike fade. “And now you are trapped, more so than I. The best part is, cousin, it was you who sprung it.” And with a bright, tinkling laugh of wicked delight, she was gone.
An instant later, the rum bottle shattered against the nearest moss-hung tomb.
The iron railing clasped tight in Callie’s right hand was cool and dry, the wild green scent of the courtyard below reaching her past the city’s unique blend of eau de Carré.
Smell notwithstanding, she liked the feel of New Orleans—the buzz of it in her blood, its humidity on her skin. It made her feel alive, vital. Like Liam’s eyes on her face, his hands on her skin. She reveled in the pulse of the city beating around her in the form of laughter and life and music.
She wondered at her gut-jump reaction when Maeve reached for Liam—a reaction that couldn’t entirely be explained by her anger. She touched the fingers to her lips, where his unexpected kiss lingered like the stain of hard liquor not easily removed, or put aside as one of those things, part of an often-strange job.
From some of the things he’d said, Callie gathered he was probably as old as she, if not older. He was the Loa’s chosen protector of the city. He was Marked.
He was like her. But was he the exception of her self-imposed rule, borne of necessity? The idea made her a little breathless.
The door behind her slid open with a muffled scrape. Callie looked over her shoulder as Liam came through with his hands full and nudged the door closed again with an elbow. He’d divested his expensive shirt and shoes, leaving him barefoot in dark slacks and one of those white shirts that used to be considered underwear pre-Marlon Brando. His Marks vined up his left arm in seemingly random patterns and crept beneath his shirt.