Fucker.
“Sugar tits, I’m not really wearing walking shoes here. It would’ve been nice to know we’d be headed out on a trek across the French Quarter.” I strutted ahead of him with fat chick determination.
“Ugh, I wish you two would just beat the shit out of each other and see who wins. But I like you both too damn much to let either of you get hurt,” Tatum’s voice called from just behind me.
Malcolm scoffed and I pictured him walking behind me with that stupid look he gets on his face like he’s so much better than everyone else. I immediately thought of Philippe, Diego, whatever, and the bloody mess I’d made of him. Poor little vampire boy. I smiled an awfully sinister smile when my mind placed Malcolm’s head on Philippe’s gory body. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I frighten myself.
“Here,” Tatum flung a pair of thin roll-up flats over my shoulder and forced me to snap out of psycho-land.
“Thanks,” I said as I jerked the stupid shoes from her hand. It wasn’t nice, I know, but who really fucking cared in the end.
“Give me your hand.” Cyrus stood next to me and I allowed him to hold my arm while I took my three inch heels off and replaced them with the lifesaving flats.
Normally, I would have protested, even in the most moderate sense, at permitting Cyrus to aid me in any way, but I was too stubborn to allow myself to look like more of a fool by falling on my face trying to change shoes all by my lonesome.
Honestly, I was much happier without the stupid heels on, but now I had to carry the damn things.
“Please,” Cyrus reached a long fingered hand out and gently took the shoes from my white-knuckled clutch.
I was so taken back by his unsolicited chivalry, I let go of the shoes and stared at him in awe. His beautiful white smile spread across his face in a grin that was just as attractive as it was threatening. I’d always suspected Cyrus Atossa as the predator type, but I could never put my finger on why. The more time I spent with him, the more I realized someone this perfect had got to be either stupid or deadly; there was rarely a gray area in these types of situations. And I’d be damned, the boy wasn’t stupid.
I shook off my feeling of astonishment and walked on, reveling in my newfound comfort.
Walking the streets of the infamous French Quarter, was nothing I expected it to be. I’d always made the idiotic assumption it was a tourist trap filled with college students and drunk topless girls. Apparently, that was is exclusive to Mardi Gras and Tijuana. I was slightly disappointed. Not that I’d ever let the girls fly free in public, just a prime opportunity to throw stuff at ridiculous people.
Instead of tourists and too much booze, I found locals mixed with sight seers all mingled together in the hustle and bustle of the closing of the business day. The sun was setting and many shops were preparing to close for the night or were turning on lamps and lights to announce their presence to passersby. A few shops were decorated for Halloween, boasting hanging ghosts and macabre décor. Or maybe that was their everyday décor. I didn’t know.
I passed a small shop with long strings of beads dangling in the doorway. The actual door had been propped open with an obviously heavy brass statue and the smell wafting from the opening was spicy and intriguing. The terrace from the floor above jutted out over the entry and held a wooden sign that read ‘Madam Azelie’ surrounded by a few scattered carvings of different symbols that intrigued me more than something so routine should. I supposed that was the intent.
A standing sign out front told me this was the place to get inexpensive psychic readin’s and charms. Without asking a soul in my group, I made the quick turn from the sidewalk through the beaded doorway. What could I say, I was a rebel. The wooden beads clanked together with a dull noise as I passed through them. The room was a perfect square, painted terracotta, and filled to the brim with as many candles and satchels and dolls as one tiny little room could hold. Odd mixes of Catholic symbols, such as crucifixes hung from the ceiling and statues of an odd looking Virgin Mary were surrounded by clay forms of naked humans and candles in the shape of the grim reaper. Wooden masks hung at various intervals on the packed walls and tufts of feathers poked from the tops of jars. It appeared to be a shop, but nothing was marked with a price.
Wafts of smoke puffed at odd intervals from an unseen source behind a counter covered in painted fabric. The distinct sound of a record player spat out unknown drumbeats from somewhere in the back. The muddling of sensory overload made my head swoon a bit with a feeling of disorientation.
A teeny tiny girl emerged from behind a colorful silk curtain in a far back corner. Her smile was welcoming but the aura she projected let me know she held some sort of power. I respected that and smiled back, allowing my suddenly fast heartbeat to slow to a more manageable pace.
“Aye, dawlin’. What bring you here?” Her voice was a hiss in her quasi-French accent you could rarely hear anywhere but in Louisiana.
“Actually, your nifty sign out front.” I said, shifting on my feet uncomfortably.
The small woman stared at me through a thick caking of charcoal eye make-up. Her hair was flopped up to the crown of her head into a large poof of thick, dark dreadlocks held together with a skinny strip of leather. The stark contrast of her nearly black hair against her butter--colored skin shocked me, but the sky blue eyes peering out at me from black smudges on her lids scared the shit out of me. Other than the eyes, she didn’t seem to be wearing any make-up. Two shiny silver rings adorned her nose and her ears were filled from the lobe up with oddly shaped rings and plugs. She had beautiful skin. Or it may have been the dim light brought from the kerosene lamps that hung from sconces on each wall. I wondered why Mr. Edison had skipped out on this particular establishment, but decided it was best not to ask.
“Your future you seek?” The girl slithered her body toward me like a snake on two legs. Her eyes looked me up and down as her head shifted on her shoulders. From the neckline of her bohemian half-top, I could see a black-inked tattoo nestled neatly in her modest cleavage that reached up toward her neck. Simple, single lines creating some kind of symbol I wasn’t familiar with.
Her eyes were so intense it felt like they were crawling on my skin, feeling every inch of me with her stare. “A charm? For protection m‘be?”
Her voice didn’t quite match her body. A near baritone, her voice slipped out with an accent I pegged as Cajun, or as close to it as I could recognize anyhow. I wasn’t really good at that sort of thing.
“Do I need protecting?” I asked, honestly concerned she knew something I didn’t. I’d heard of people like that. People that could sense death coming. I didn’t necessarily believe in that sort of thing, but if someone were to tell me I was going to die in a bus accident on a Friday, I’d likely not ride a bus on Fridays for a while. Just in case.
The little woman stepped back a step or two. “Protection you have.” Her head snaked again and her eyes focused over my shoulder.
A second later, I heard the distinct sound of wooden beads softly clanking against each other. I turned to find Tatum in the doorway. Cyrus stood behind her, nearly beside, but Malcolm peered over their shoulders from the street. Pussy.
“Hey, Dylan, let’s go,” Tatum said from the doorway.
“Yes, let’s,” Cyrus said from over her shoulder looking overly concerned.
I rolled my eyes and ignored them both. “My future. I’d like you to read my future.” I turned to the girl and nodded my head confidently.
“Come, ‘cher,” the girl beckoned me with a crook of her finger.
I followed her behind a silk curtain and away from my friends. No one said a word. Not one of them tried to stop me. So, fuck ‘em.
“A man…two men?” she asked over her shoulder before she even sat down.
“No men,” I said with a smirk.
“Yeah, heaps and heaps,” she smiled right back as the two of us sat across a small round table from each other, my back facing the entranceway that led to the public
area of the store.
In the center of the table, sat a rectangular shaped object wrapped in a fancy silk fabric. The girl’s child-like hand reached across the table and took the silky block from the center. One hand was wrapped with a simple black rosary that dangled between her fingers. The cross that hung from it dragged along the table as she moved about. She unwrapped the hidden shape and revealed it to be a deck of cards. My moderate knowledge of the occult told me it was likely a set of tarot cards.
“Take ‘dis and hold it tight, yeah,” she handed me the stack of cards and pushed my hands toward my chest. “Make a thought of what you want or a question you need answerin’. Focus. Then cut the deck two times.” The miniature girl sat across from me with the stillness of a marble statue. Her bare arms showed more tattoos trailing from her wrists up to her bare shoulders. Each one similar to the one on her chest, several kinds of symbols. Sort of like the ones I’d seen on her sign. More symbols dangled from gold wires and brown leather strips wrapped in her neatly matted dreads.
I followed her instructions and thought hard about my question. More likely, my mind raced with a good one. Over and over images of Cyrus’s beautiful green eyes and Mike’s adorable ass came through my thoughts. I forced myself to concentrate on one thing, where is my life going? I took a deep breath in and slowly let it out through pursed lips.
“Cut twice and hand it back,” she said through the momentary silence as if she knew just when my mind had been made up.
Without further words, the girl took the deck and began dealing them across the table in an intricate pattern, a cross dragging along the silk table covering. One on top of the other, then to the side, to the north and the south, then at random in a straight line. The cards depicted images in crude thick line drawings and paint; a woman sitting atop a throne, a man holding a bunch of sticks, a child on a horse, a man stepping off the edge of a cliff. I watched with intense eyes, hoping to decipher what was coming across the cards. I had nothing. Well, unless I was going to become a queen and order men to build me things and leap from cliff edges. No, nothing.
“How the hell is this supposed to tell me my future?” I said, mostly to myself. In fact, I really hadn’t expected to say it out loud.
“Not your future, ‘cher, your path. A path can be changed. The future is loosely defined,” she spoke without looking up from the cards.
“You don’t believe in fate? Destiny and all that?” I asked a bit too smugly.
The girl let out a petite scoff, “Ah, fate. You said future. Fate comes as it wills. Nothin’ moves fate.” Her eyes moved over each card, reading them, as far as I could tell. “From the city of angels I see,” she said and moved on without waiting for my response. “You seen death.” Again, a statement not a question. “On your hands, blood,” a slender finger lifted from the card and waved in the air in front of my face. “Tsk, Tsk, Tsk, naughty girl.”
“What? What do you see?” I wiggled in my seat at the thought of her possibly knowing the ins and outs of the deaths of two young men at my hand. Mike had pulled a ton of strings and got me off the hook, but that’s not to say it wouldn’t come right back and bite me in the ass someday. This day.
“I see death…and you. And blood. Yours…and others. Lust. Greed. Sex,” her eyes never left the cards. It was like she was seeing things in her head I couldn’t. Regardless of her apparent focus on the cards, it was obvious her focus was wide spread throughout the room.
It was my turn to scoff. “Sex? Yeah, right,” I said, trying to ignore the tightness I was beginning to feel being stuck in that tiny back room.
“Don’t mock, just listen,” her small hand lifted as she spoke and waved, beckoning me to focus on her. It worked. My eyes shifted to focus on her face. “You’re with those not of your kind. Discomfort. Betrayal. Your path shifted,” her head turned to the side eerily similar to that of a bird hunting its pray. Listening to something I couldn’t hear. “‘Cause death done come through your house. The dead surround you now.” Her eyes lifted from the layout of cards to glare into mine, “Murder…and magic bring you here.”
“Ha ha, what?” I laughed nervously. “What are you talking about?”
“You…” her eyes penetrated my guard and pulled at my thoughts. I could feel her prodding inside my head. “You bring death in my house. Blood on your hands. Blood of the dead come wit’chu where you go. Why you seek me?” Her train of thought switched so suddenly I almost didn’t catch it.
“I saw your sign. I was walking with my friends and I saw your sign. I don’t know,” I shrugged, “I just came in.” The tiny girl held a stare that would make a lesser man shit his pants. Luckily for me, I was a woman.
Her eyes narrowed and I felt her delve deeper into my head. I’d never been to a supposed psychic before, but I was pretty certain this was not the norm. “Meurtrière,” she said in a near whisper.
“What? No, what are you talking about?” I said, plotting my expedient exit should shit hit the proverbial fan.
The girl inhaled dramatically and stood in one fell swoop. “Murderess!” Her miniature finger came up to point at me with such vengeance I felt the force in my soul.
“You’re fucking nuts!” I stood too. For the first time in my twenty-six years, I felt two things at once, horrendous fear and pretty fucking tall.
When I stood, my chair toppled over and hit the cement flooring with a wooden clank. In a heartbeat, I heard the beads at the front door and felt a rush of electricity as another being entered the room.
Cyrus wrapped his thick arm around my waist and pulled me backwards from the tiny backroom. All the while, the tiny girl with the dreadlocks was cursing me rampantly in an unintelligible mix of English and some form of French. It wasn’t the first time someone chewed me out in a foreign language and it likely wouldn’t be the last.
“Put me down, goddammit!” I wailed and kicked my feet at his shins.
Admittedly, I didn’t kick as hard as I could have. I didn’t want to bruise the poor boy. But I sure as hell wanted him to let me free so I could take my vengeance on the little woman still cursing my future grandchildren in her odd language. I should have been afraid, hell, terrified, but all I wanted to do was rip her tiny little head off. In my defense, I tended to transform fear into sheer rage. It was sort of a habit.
We were halfway down the block in a matter of seconds, Cyrus still holding me with little effort around my waist. I fought and screamed all the way.
“Are you stupid?” Cyrus let me go with such force I stumbled backward and nearly fell on my ass.
“Fuck you, asshole!” My hair was in a mess from being pressed so closely to him and my dress was bunched around my hips exposing my thick thighs and the bottom of my butt cheeks. I quickly adjusted the dress and made an attempt at the hair.
“Do you know what she is? This isn’t a game, Dylan!” Cyrus was so intense he only exacerbated my fear. Er, I meant rage.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“That girl in that shop believes with everything in her soul she has power. You can taste it on the air the second you enter the beaded doorway. She’s a priestess, Dylan. A high priestess if I had to guess. And she has it out for you now.”
“And how do you know that? Because she saw it in her little cards?”
“No, because she cursed your house while I was dragging you out of the room.”
“Oh and all of a sudden you speak French?”
“No, I speak English, and so does she. Enough of it for me to understand you’ve made an enemy in your first hour in the city. Way to go,” Cyrus paced around me as he spoke.
“Shit, sorry. I was unaware I was supposed to sit idly by while some little girl accuses me of murder.”
“She didn’t accuse you, to be accused she’d have to be wrong, or at least presumably wrong. You are a murderer, of sorts. You killed two boys and she knows it.” Tatum, who’d been meandering, with her stupid ginger boyfriend, down the street to meet us, piped in
with her two cents.
“Who asked you?” I turned to glare at my absentee friend. “Maybe if you’d bothered to glance up from that freckled bloodsucker, you could’ve stopped me, but apparently it doesn’t matter what time zone we’re in, you’re still shoved so far up his ass you can taste his haggis.” I stamped my foot against the cracked pavement and moved my vengeance toward the Persian. “And how did she know what’d happened? You’re telling me she’s a psychic? A priestess and psychic? Well, fuck me, eh?” I flapped my arms at my sides unattractively and let out an even less attractive huff.
“You’re the idiot that went into a voodoo shop in New Orleans,” Tatum shrugged her shoulders as if she were talking about washing a red sock with the whites. She didn’t even acknowledge my blatant attack on her and her new found relationship. No big deal. “Why the hell did you go in there in the first place? I never knew mysticism was your thing.” She turned her head coyly as her retarded boyfriend kissed her neck.
“Are you on drugs?” I asked without expecting an answer; Cyrus laughed. “I don’t know why I went in. I’m in fucking New Orleans! What else is there? Ghost tours, voodoo, and apparently red headed vampire boys who can’t stop sucking face with my friend.” No response. “Jesus, I saw the sign. I liked the symbols. Besides, I’d do pretty much anything to get away from this bullshit.” I lifted my hand and used all my fingers at once to point in the direction of the disgusting show of public affection.
No response. I’d followed Tatum halfway across the country taking her at her word that all she wanted was to spend time with me. To ensure I had fun. To pull me out of the gun-toting funk I’d slipped into since becoming a murderess and full-time author. I’d been with them just over seven hours, including the flight, and all I’d seen of her is the side of her face as it was suctioned tightly to the face of Vlad the Ginger Kid. I had half a mind to pack my shit and head right back to my dungeon.
“Darling, please make better choices in the future. I’d hate to see you lose that pretty head of yours.” Cyrus took his strong hands and held my face gently between them. I felt instant calm wash over me. Warm hands and pretty green eyes had that effect on people.
Endless Night (Dylan Hart Odyssey of The Occult Series) Page 4