by Lyla Payne
Maybe we should have had Birdie come along, since she knows the history inside and out, but I don’t have six months to get her to admit to the mere possibility of a curse on her family, never mind convince her to help me prevent it.
Daria climbs into the backseat of Beau’s Buick, which he insisted on driving because it would arouse less suspicion on the cameras at Drayton Hall.
“Well, at least this car doesn’t smell like ghost vomit,” she comments, folding her legs under her on the seat and heaving a bag onto the floor. It clatters, a sound reminiscent of wooden vampire stakes to my ears.
“You got your Buffy supply kit in there?” I ask.
Daria rolls her eyes as Beau pulls back onto the highway. “No. I have provisions to protect us and to help the spirit transition, since that’s what you want to try.”
Beau startles, shooting a look toward me. “That’s your plan? To get her to walk into the light?”
“Or the hellfire. Whichever,” I reply. “I’m not the judge, just the bailiff.”
“It’s not a bad plan, exactly.” Daria’s defense makes me more suspicious than pleased. Having her agree with me isn’t normal, and I’m not sure it’s good, either. “It’s the only thing we can really do, because she’s too strong to force off the property using my normal tactics.”
“Plus, that wouldn’t solve anything. My issue with her isn’t that she’s hanging around Drayton Hall.”
We ride in silence for a while, the backseat so quiet I think maybe Daria’s fallen asleep and turn to check on her. I’m pretty sure she’s awake because she’s sitting up straight, but her eyes are closed. A wrinkle in the middle of her forehead suggests she’s concentrating, and I start to worry that I should be doing the same.
She’s probably going to yell at me for disturbing her, but it won’t be the first time. Not the last, either, if we survive this thing.
Nerves spread through me at the errant thought, and the memory of Mama Lottie tossing me into the sliding glass doors explodes in my head. What if she pulls something like that again? Could she hurt all of us? Drown us in the river? Have her snakes bite and kill Beau for real this time?
My breathing starts to come fast, too fast, and before I know it I’m struggling with little sips of air instead of gulps. I roll down the window, even though it’s too cold tonight, and lean out, letting the chilly wind whip into my face.
“Goddamn it, Graciela,” Daria shouts from the backseat. “I’m trying to focus back here!”
I ignore her, concentrating on breathing and the reassuring weight of Beau’s hand on my knee until I feel better, and only then do I sit back and roll up the window.
“Sorry,” I pant, realizing I do not sound the least bit sorry.
“If you’re going to freak out, you should try meditating instead of freezing out the rest of the people in the car. It helps with connecting with the spirits, too.”
“I don’t know how to meditate.”
She snorts. “No one does. You just be quiet, and get your mind to go quiet, which is the bigger trick, and focus inward.”
“That sounds like a lot of hooey.”
“Most people would say everything we do ‘sounds like a lot of hooey’.”
She has a point, and the amused glance Beau lifts to the rearview mirror suggests he agrees. I wonder what he thinks of her turquoise hair and all-black ensemble, but he doesn’t seem to be bothered. Maybe we’re all getting used to Daria’s nonsense. It doesn’t stop her from helping, so whatever blows her skirt up is fine with me.
“Is there anything I can do that will help, Gracie Anne?” Beau’s voice is soft.
“Not die tonight?” I suggest, the words trembling out of me.
“Trust me. My ancestors survived her, and I plan on continuing the tradition.”
I keep my mouth shut about how the only reason they survived was her own magic, in the form of her son. We don’t have that, but we do have Daria. And me. And knowledge and being right.
Like that ever saved anyone.
I close my eyes and try to follow Daria’s advice. My mind is cluttered, and it’s not easy to wipe it clean. I do my best, though, because I need to find some sort of inner calm to do the grounding and spirit guide stuff before we meet Mama Lottie. I don’t know that it does any good, but Daria insists on it and it certainly doesn’t hurt.
The feeling in my chest as we pull onto the Drayton property and glide down the lane to the gravel parking lot reminds me of sitting in a classroom waiting for the professor to show up and hand out a test. I was always a little anxious that I hadn’t studied the right material, but mostly dying to just get the damn piece of paper so I could start.
We get out of the car, the sensation washing over me exactly like that, but on steroids.
“Gracie, I know you and Daria have done this a few times, but if you could prepare me for what to expect, I would appreciate it.”
Beau doesn’t look scared, so much as freaked out. It would be impossible to blame him for either.
“Well, the last couple of times I’ve wanted to talk to Mama Lottie, she hasn’t come out. The only reason she did the last time is because Frank was there and she didn’t have a choice.” A sick pang tries to distract me at the thought of him forcing dead people to do his bidding, but I ignore it. “I’m hoping Daria’s presence helps tonight, or that she’ll be listening even if she’s not showing herself.”
“Then we tell her what Gracie found out about what really happened to her son and her grandson, and hope to God she doesn’t insist on continuing to blame your family for every bad thing that happened to her.” Daria makes eye contact with both of us before continuing. “That’s key. As long as she feels as though revenge is the only way to complete her mission on this plane of existence, she’s not going anywhere.”
“How do we make her believe that it’s not my family’s fault?” Beau asks, his skin pale in the silver moonlight. “If she really thinks the Draytons who purchased her knew she wasn’t a slave, does the rest of it even matter?”
We stand in silence for a moment, the wind finding ways inside my coat and freezing the nervous sweat on my skin. Shivers run over me, and again, I want to get this over with.
“Your family was good to her,” I tell Beau, even though doubts temper my confidence. She was a slave. Could anyone owned by another human forgive them, even if they were kind?
“They were kind because she had something they wanted.” Daria scoffed. “Let’s not go that route. I suggest we focus on what happened the last time she tried to take revenge on the family.”
Daria and I had texted the entire time Beau drove to pick her up, so she was up to speed as far as Charlotta and James’s fate. Her plan sounds like a good one, and I nod along in agreement.
“Yes. The last time she tried to kill your family, she killed her own son instead. According to the ghost of Charles Jr. she may or may not have accepted that fact, and your sister said Mama Lottie didn’t know about Charlotta being pregnant at the time.” I bite my lip, working out details in my mind. “Who’s to say it won’t be worse, this time around, that she’ll end up ruining the lives of her own descendants in the course of ruining yours…”
That sinks in, and it feels like the right answer. Mama Lottie must feel guilty about what happened to her son. It was never her intention, of course, to have him step in the way he had. She underestimated his love for his beloved Charlie and didn’t know about their child. Perhaps she figured that her tales of how the Draytons had wronged her, surely poured into his ears from a young age, would infest him with the sort of hatred and anger that ruled her life, and she never realized that he had a good heart.
Daria goes still, lifting her eyes in the direction of the river. I feel it, too—a change in the wind, with a biting, slithering cold underneath the previous chill.
“Is she here?” I whisper.
Daria nods, pressing her lips together. She tries and fails to hide her fear from me. “Let’s ground now,
then walk back. Let me take the lead when it comes to helping her along, okay?”
I nod, then close my eyes. It’s easier since I practiced in the car, and after I give my invisible spirit guide an extra long talk about staying with me tonight, I open my eyes to find Beau looking at me. His hazel eyes are wide with concern, but there’s a tinge of pride in them that makes me want to puff out my chest.
The confidence probably won’t last long, so I’m glad when Daria finishes her prep a moment later and we start to walk toward the river. Her bag of Buffy tricks bangs against her hip, again sounding like wooden stakes, but I resist the urge to ask her what she’s brought along. I’m sure I’ll have to learn about it at some point, but for tonight, I’ll let her deal with whatever aspect she hopes to achieve with the supplies.
Part of my question is answered as we pull up between the two trees where I first saw Mama Lottie. The sight of a huge snake curled around a branch punches the wind out of me, but it’s good news—confirmation that our ghost is close, if not present visibly.
Daria digs in her bag and pulls out two wooden containers, which she promptly unlatches. One is full of what looks to be sea salt, and she shoves it at Beau. “Sprinkle this in a circle around where we’re standing. It’s for protection. She shouldn’t be able to come inside it to hurt us.”
I’m skeptical. She hadn’t touched me the other night when she’d flung me into the window. She’d been five feet away. I say nothing, though, because I’m no expert, and it helps a little to believe it will work. Sometimes I think belief is nine-tenths of the battle when it comes to spirits. Like maybe more people could see them if people didn’t start out with the assumption that ghosts didn’t exist.
The second box is flatter and longer, and there are sticks inside that have a pungent scent. She catches my curious gaze. “Sage. It’s used for lots of things, including scrubbing areas and helping spirits find their way to the next plane of existence.”
I’ve noticed before that Daria never says next world, or death, or into the light, or anything cheesy like that. If we make it through this, that will go on my list of things to ask her as far as what she actually believes about these spirits of ours.
Beau finishes his task and hands the box back to Daria. She dumps it in her bag and gives me one of the sticks, and the three of us stand shoulder to shoulder as we wait.
“Are you going to, like, talk to her?” I whisper.
“You talk to her, Graciela. You’re the one who has something to say, remember?”
I take a deep breath, then another, organizing my thoughts. Where to start? For the first time in my life, I wish I had some kind of background in psychology instead of history. Had I known I would be forced into a career of undead counseling, perhaps I would have considered it as my major.
Focus, Gracie.
The stray thought about shrinks gives me an idea, though. Empathy. It had been simple for me to see Mama Lottie’s side when I thought of her as that scared, kidnapped child. I could start there. By agreeing with her.
“Mama Lottie, I want to talk to you,” I call out into the night. It’s not loud enough, so I clear my throat before continuing, even though I suspect she could have heard me if I’d whispered. “I’ve learned most of your story, the one you want people to hear, and I’m so sorry for the things that happened to you. No one deserves to be kidnapped, to be sold and owned and degraded.”
We all wait, and it feels as though Beau and Daria are holding their breath, too. I clutch the sage stick and peer into the moon-dappled darkness, but nothing happens.
“Sarah Martha Drayton treated you well, but you knew it wasn’t because the Draytons cared. It was because they needed you.”
“It was because they feared me.” Her voice rumbles, shaking the ground like a giant clap of thunder. She appears near the low-hanging branch and her snake.
All of the moisture leaves my mouth, and my heart pounds so hard she can probably see it from ten feet away. Beau, Daria, and I tighten up until our shoulders touch, as though we all decide at once to make sure we’re well inside the circle of salt.
“Yes.” I lick my lips. “They feared you. They couldn’t let you go so they didn’t bother to ask the questions they knew they should have about your origins.” I pause. “But Charles Henry, the first one, he was your friend. Like a brother to you. He was just a baby when he inherited the Hall. He couldn’t have known anything about how you came to live there.”
She glares at me, suspicion flickering in her obsidian gaze. “He could have asked me. If he were truly my friend.”
I don’t argue with her, because I suspect she knows as well as I do that a child would have had no way to guess one of his family’s slaves had been procured illegally.
“Why did you stay? After the war.” I figure the answer is simple revenge, but I want to hear her say it. “You could have left. Taken your son and gone back home, found your family.”
Anger swirls on her face like dark, ominous clouds.
Shit. Apparently that was the wrong thing to say.
“How could I go back home, disgraced as I was? I’d been used and enslaved, and I would have been an embarrassment to the women who came before me.”
“You stayed because you hadn’t found a way to make the Draytons pay yet, you mean?”
She folds her arms over her generous chest and peers at me as if she’s trying to figure me out. It’s an expression I’m intimately familiar with these days.
“Who says I was going to make them pay before…” she starts.
“Before they tried to take James?” I guess softly.
Her eyes burn, flames leaping high. “Yes. Before that girl thought she could run off with the only thing I ever had that was only mine.”
I pull the journals out of my bag and set the pouch on the ground, reaching inside for the one I left on the top. In it is the first entry that mentions how the two of them were in love, and how they planned to run away. “They were in love, Lottie. They were young, and it happened, and then she got pregnant. It’s not such a strange story, don’t you think?”
“I wanted more for my boy than having to support a girl who would likely have left them once she realized what a life outside of her daddy’s plantation looked like.” Her lips twist. “And he was going to up and leave me behind without a word.”
“He was scared of you,” I whisper. “Scared of your anger, I bet, and scared of the fact that your blood ran in his veins. Did you know he had your power?”
She shook her head, gazing out over the river. Mama Lottie is different tonight. She’s still angry, but instead of lashing out, she’s letting it simmer beneath the surface. “We never talked about it. Never had a male inherit it on my side of the family. That was the others.”
My breath caught in my chest. “My father’s side.”
Her head snaps back around, and she levels me with a harsh sneer. “Yes. Your father’s side. Took you long enough to put things together.”
“I’m a slow learner.”
“Get on with it,” Daria hisses. “The longer we engage her, the weaker my protections and the stronger she gets.”
“You didn’t know Charlotta was pregnant, the night you tried to kill her, did you?” I ask.
Mama Lottie doesn’t answer, looking at me like she’s trying to figure out what to do with my dead body instead.
“Would you still have done it?” I go on.
“How can you ask me that? I would take it all back if I had known that James would give his life to save hers.” She shakes her head and spits on the ground. “Why did he have to save them all? He would have lived if he had only saved the girl. He had to have known that.”
It doesn’t sound as though she’s talking to me, or to us, at all anymore. It sounds like she’s asking herself a question for the thousandth time since James gave his life for the Drayton family.
“He loved her, Lottie. He wouldn’t have been able to live with seeing her devastated after the loss of he
r family. Of his child’s family. Your boy was good.” I rush on before she can blow up at me for saying the wrong thing again, which the daggers in her eyes promise happened. She’s going to be even more pissed in a hot second. “It was your fault he died. Your poison, or curse, or whatever you put in that chicken ended up killing James. He died because of your need for revenge, because your hatred for the Draytons overtook everything in your life. If you do it again, if you go through with this curse, you’ll hurt James all over again because his blood and Charlotta’s are mixed together for eternity. You can’t change that, but you can decide to lay down your anger and hate and walk away now, the way you should have done then.”
The air around us goes still. Daria tenses at my side, fumbling in her pocket before pulling out a lighter. Fear grabs my heart in a tight grip, refusing to let it beat, and I hear Beau breathing heavily on my left. Mama Lottie comes toward us, her steps measured but her expression wild. Every instinct I have screams danger, hollers run, but I’m rooted to the spot, praying the salt does the trick.
“You dare to tell me what to do? You presume to know anything about what it takes to stay strong for as long as I have, to remain here to finish my life’s work?” She’s screaming, the sound like nails on a chalkboard, and I have to resist the urge to cover my ears. “I cannot stop now! If I stop now, James will have died for nothing.”
I swallow my terror, my own eyes so wide they feel like they’re going to fall off the side of my head. “He didn’t die for nothing. He brought a son into this world, but if you curse the family, you’re undoing that. You’re cursing yourself, Lottie. Haven’t you endured enough? Shouldn’t the one good thing you did—nurtured a son who was a good man, who had another son, and so on—be enough to let you go?”