Below them all, in a small open space in the graveyard at the foot of the hill was a man. He seemed almost small and insignificant among the gathering of loa, but Sara knew he was as powerful as many of them and more evil than most. It was Guillaume Sam. Chittering on his shoulder was the beast he called Baka, short for his real name of Bakula-baka.
Baron Samedi roared forth a welcome, and all the loa joined in with cheers and jeers and catcalls. The cemeteiy sounded like Pandemonium, the demon city of hell. Samedi threw his arms wide, and his sons called for quiet and the chaos melted into silence.
“No, my spirits,” he said. “We should be kind to our guests. Never has Guinee seen such rare entertainment. A policewoman and a dead man on the right hand. A bokor and our own Bakula-baka pn the left. Who will prevail?” Baron Samedi shook his hei'd, chuckling with evil mirth.
“The Guede!” he shouted.
The assembled spirits took it up as a chant: “Guede! Guede! Guede!” until Sara could no longer hear the voices in her own head. She fell to her knees, covering her ears as the loas’ voices speared into her brain. Paul Narcisse tried to help her rise. He shouted into her ears but she couldn’t hear a word of what he was saying. He pointed and she looked and saw that Bakula-baka was charging at them.
“Tonight I drink your blood, blanc," the loa roared, machete held high, his horrible face rent by the thing he called a smile.
Guinee was the land of the spirits. Her body was back on the realm of earth, sleeping in the arms of Alek Gervelis, but somehow she knew that if her spirit were defeated here, she would never awake. Her flesh would ton cold and stiff and Alek would wake up with a corpse in his arms.
That horrible realization brought her to her feet to face the charging loa, made her reach deep into the abyss of her being and call forth that which she knew as the Witchblade, a thing of cold metal and razor edges, to armor her frail human flesh.
For a moment there was no answer to her summons, no sudden, familiar embrace. But she did not panic. She called out again, imperious in her desire to protect those whom she loved, as well as the innocent and weak whom she didn’t even know. To shield them from the rapacious maw of Guillaume Sam and his band of cutthroats and killers. And certainly love was stronger than mere greed, or how could the world.survive at all?
The Witchblade cam! to her, arriving with Bakula-baka. Sara fell to the left, Paul Narcisse to the right, as the spirit, confused for a moment, deliberated over his target. He picked Sara and swung his machete in a great decapitating blow, but she had already moved and his thrust met no resistence whatsoever. His momentum yanked him forward and he fell, thudding face first into the rich Guinee soil.
' -Sara sprang upon his back with the lithe grace and ferocity of a jungle cat. She wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed, as if trying to hug him to death.
Bakula-baka roared. Even from behind him she could smell the grave-stench on his breath. She could smell it emanating from his body in waves of gagging putrescence.
Can you kill that which has no life? Sara thought, then answered her own question. I guess we’ll find out.
The spirit bucked and wrenched and Sara grimly held on. She wrapped her legs around his chest, gripping with her knees and heels. He shook like a mastiff trying to throw off a flea, yet Sara still grimly held on.
The Witchblade grew razor edges and quills and spikes that bit into Bakula-baka’s flesh, but the flesh of a loa is not that of a human. It’s stronger, harder, more resilient. But Sara gritted her teeth and pulled harder until the tendons and ligaments stood out like iron bars on her arms and neck, and she felt as if she herself were going to break.
Suddenly the loa had no more breath to waste bellowing in anger .and growing, fear. He flung himself backward to the graveyard earth and Sara felt the weight of a mountain slap down,upon her. The weight of the loa was crushing her, the chains that dangled from his limbs dug into her flesh. At least her broken ribs didn’t hurt. That would have given Bakula-baka an edge she probably couldn’t have overcome. Still, she couldn’t draw her breath, and for a moment was on the verge of passing out. Darkness clouded her vision and the stench of the Bakula-baka filled her mouth and nostrils.
NO! she screamed, or thought she did. Perhaps the ■sound came from the voices clamoring in her mind.
“NO!"
“NO!”
“NO!"
“NO!"
She didn’t know how long she screamed, but suddenly she realized that the weight pressing her down into the earth was dead weight. Bakula-baka was no longer moving, no longer trying to dislodge her. She felt wetness upon her face and chest and she realized that it was the blood, or the life essence of the thing, running back down upon her.
She heaved with all her strength and rolled the gigantic body off of her. She kneeled in the dirt next to him as he lay unmoving. She panted like a dog, her body crying for oxygen, as she looked down at him. The razor edge of the Witchblade had nearly hewn through his bull-like neck. Bakula-baka’s head was attached to his body by only a thread of dried flesh.
An awful scream made her look up from the body. Guillaume Sam, his face twisted into a demented mask, was running toward her like a maniac. Like Sara, he didn’t seem to fefel the sting'of his earthly wounds, or perhaps Paul Narcisse’s bullet hadn’t done him any real damage. He bent over ain'd scooped up the machete that Bakula-baka had dropped. Sara had only time to lift her arm up as he swung it at her, and the machete hit the Witchblade and shattered into dozens of dull iron shards.
Guillaume Sam looked at the broken blade, dumbfounded, and suddenly Paul Narcisse grabbed him by the shoulder and whirled him around. Narcisse grasped his cheeks and put his mouth on Sam’s, tight and hard, and kissed him long and deep, but without passion or love.
It was a spirit duel of will power and mental strength as each strove to absorb the other’s gros-bon-ange.
In the end, Guillaume Sam tried to pull away, but the spirit of Paul Narcisse was too strong. Guillaume Sam made an awful moaning sound and started to shrivel. First his legs and arms were sucked up into his body, then his abdomen and chest started to wither. Soon his entire body was just a flap of wrinkled skin hanging from his head, which still remained in Paul Narcisse’s deadly grasp. Then that too began to shrivel like an apple in a hot oven and finally Paul Narcisse was kissing nothing. Guillaume Sam had vanished.
Paul Narcisse looked down at Sara and put out a hand to help her to her feet.
“What happened?” she asked.
He took a small earthenware jug out of the macoute
that he carried over his shoulder and showed it to Sara. “I
.' .. **■
was no longer using my pot-de-tete. I thought Guillaume Sam’s gros-bon-ange might find it comfortable.”
“That means—” She couldn’t articulate the words.
Paul Narcisse,nodded. “His soul has been captured. His body lies empty* He smiled'at her. “Yet Guillaume Sam will waken this morning. And my body will rest easy, knowing I have a new ahd interesting home.”
“But-”
”Hush,” Paul Narcisse said gently. He wiped Bakula-baka’s blood from Sara’s cheek and neck. “We can talk about this later. Now we have to pay our respects to Baron Samedi, his family, and allies.”
“Respects!”
“Certainly. They are most deserving of it. They are great and powerful loa. And if they live in the darkness, do they not therefore help to defme the light?”
They approached their audience, which had been deadly silent during the latter stages of the duel. Paul Narcisse kneeled and put out his arms in supplication while Sara, still dad in the Witchblade, stood by his side.
“Great Baron Samedi,” Paid Narcisse intoned, “Baron La Croix, Baron Cimetiere. Madame Brigitte, and other spirits high and low, accept our sacrifice to your greatness, and our thanks for our soujoum in Guinee.”
“Hmmm,” Baron Samedi harumphed. “A poor enough sacrifice, as it turns out. Do you k
now how long it will take to mend our brother, Bakula-baka?”
“At least you can fix him,” Sara observed. “Unlike those humans he killed on Earth.”
Baron Samedi laughed his earthshaking laughter. “Defiant to the last, eh, girl?” He shook his head and sighed.
“Well, it shows how little you know if you think that. Still, you’ll find out soon enough.”
Sara didn’t like what Samedi implied, but decided it would be better if she didn’t question him any more closely.
“And you,” Baton Samedi asked. “Will you sacrifice to us as well?” . ■
“If it’ll keep you off My turf,” Sara said.
Samedi laughed, and his brothers joined in, “Go, blanc,” he said, waving his hands at her in a shooing gesture. “Go home. You are needed there, and here, after tonight, I think we all need a rest.”
Paul Narcisse touched her shoulder and together they turned and walked out of the cemeteiy. The air, she noted, was again warm and sweet. She could hear night birds singing in the trees as they walked down toward the crossroads and the old man waiting for them there.
“It’s funny,” Sara said, “but Guillaume Sam told me once that Baron Samedi promised him he’d live for eternity.”
“Oh, he will,” Paul Narcisse said, shaking the pot-de-tete. “It just won’t be a very exciting eternity.”
Sara sighed.
“Unlike our next couple of days,” Sara said. “How are we going to explain all this to my Captain? We need a fall guy to take the blame, or you’ll have a much too exciting twenty-to-thirty in Attica.”
“We have a fall guy. Two, in fact: Gene and Jean. Give the police their underground headquarters. We can put enough information there to pin dozens of killings on them-killings they did indeed commit. The green card scheme will come to an end. I’ll see to that. The money laundering is more problematic, but we can always blame it on an amuck accountant. Guillaume Sam will gladly pay back taxes and restitution. Don’t worry. It’ll work out.” Sara sighed. She was paid to solve crimes, not cover them up. This was another fine mess the Witchblade had gotten her into.'Or at least complicated, once she’d gotten herself into it. j%
“It is not our fault—
“—we did nothing—”
“-no blame—”
Oh, shut up, Sara thought.
And they did.
EPILOGUE
It was an unusually warm and mild spring, flowers and birds arriving early and abundantly.
Sara had little time to visit Cypress Hills, but she went to St. Casimir’s whenever she could. Father Baltazar was always glad to see her. The church was clean and neat, freshly sandblasted, and well lit by a new electrical system donated by Guillaume Sam. Carl Dickey had retired from the N.Y.P.D. He was running a bookstore that had recently come on the market, and seemed happier, though he still had his deep, sad voice, and suits that were two sizes too big.
Club Carrefour was still the neighborhood’s most popular dub. Little had changed there, unless you were privy to the back office, where the altar that had once been there had been taken down and replaced by another whose main attributes were snakes and rainbows.
Magdalena Konsavage had retired from the music business. It seems that she had fallen in love with the manager of her old band, Mountains of Madness, and they had married and moved far-away from Cypress Hills. Father Baltazar thought they’d opened up a travel agency in Miami, specializing in tours of the Translyvanian Alps.
The drummer from Mountains of Madness—Sara never did learn his name—had become a priest, but had not retired from the music business. Father Baltazar said you could hear him play(
Alek Gervelis disappeared for a while, then released a solo CD that garnered a small but intense critical and popular following. It was introspective, lyrical, almost mystical in nature. The most popular song on it was called “Sara Seraphim.”
Sara got postcards from him from Kathmandu, Casablanca, Lhasa, and Leng. They said that he had learned 'much, but there was still much to learn. Someday, they always said, he would find his way back to New York City, and her.
Sara tucked each and every postcard into a painted tin box she’d taken as a keepsake from Paul Narcisse’s altar. And each time she did so, the voices in her head were blessedly silent.
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