“I saw a waterfall leading to a long lake. At the end of the lake, I saw Kivunjo’s village filled with his people and a snow-capped mountain behind it.”
Bryn sat down. “That could be Lake Albert and the Mountains of the Moon. But it could also be Lake Victoria and Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
“It’s the headwaters of the Nile,” Fenix said. “King Solomon’s mines were rumored to be there. I saw King Solomon in the dream.”
Fenix made that up, but what else could she do? Bryn was not going to believe anything she said.
“We’ll still do a scrying,” Bryn said. “I’m not going to the Congo without a positive location. It would be beyond stupid.” She patted Fenix’s arm absently. “Between your dream and the scrying, we should be able to pinpoint Kivunjo’s exact location.”
Chapter 3
Bryn didn’t like Fenix’s new-found air of authority or her insistence on being included. She’d been caring for her sister for centuries. Fenix often acted like an adult for a time but invariably returned to childish behavior. She was immature; she had never been allowed to age long enough to mature in any of her incarnations. But her sister seemed so positive of the whereabouts of the witch doctor. She shrugged. It mattered not. The scrying would reveal all.
Samantha entered the breakfast parlor at that moment and sat down. As usual, she wore a rubber apron and had thick goggles on top of her head. These were of a new design with brass rims, a leather strap and an additional lens on a small lever set into the rubber on the left side. Sam eyed Fenix as she selected a slice of bread and buttered it. “I would kill for a beignet.”
“Coffee or chocolate?” Bryn asked. “Or if I ring for Babbette, I think she could produce tea.”
“Coffee is fine though it would taste so much better chasing a sugary beignet.”
“When you leave one world behind, you embrace the new one,” Fenix said. “New Orleans is gone. We left it and all it represents behind. We are now Parisians and we lives as such. Good morning, Sam.”
Sam’s mouth fell open. “Fenix! How are you feeling today? You went through a very trying experience.”
“I did indeed, but I’m feeling very strong today. You might even say powerful.”
Sam shot Bryn a questioning look and Bryn shrugged. “When you’re finished eating, Sam, I wish to do a scrying. Can you prepare the chamber in the basement?”
“Of course. I assume we search for the dagger and the offensive witch doctor. I’ll get my feather.”
Quinn erupted into the breakfast room at that moment followed by Tomlinson who was charged with excitement. “Sam,” he exclaimed. “There’s a Titan Airship at the Exposition. We must get a look at it before it leaves.”
“No! I can’t believe it.” Sam leaped to her feet. “A Titan? Really? I’ve longed to examine one this age. By all means. Let us leave at once.”
“Sam! We must perform the scrying first.”
Sam grabbed Bryn’s hands across the table. “Oh my goodness, Bryn, you have no idea. The Titan Airship is the most modern aircraft of the century. It can travel at an amazing fifty knots and holds twenty people. I heard the engine is very light and the fuel they use is revolutionary. You know I’ve been looking for a new fuel for the aircraft Arthur and I are building.”
Bryn sighed. “I do know, Samantha, but this is so important.”
“Please Bryn.”
Bryn rolled her eyes. “Fine, if indeed you must.”
Sam grinned and her round eyes widened. “I knew you’d understand.” She leaped to her feet and thrust the feather from Kivunjo’s headdress into Bryn’s hand. “I love you,” she said.
“And I you,” Bryn returned. Sam’s impish face split in a wide grin causing her freckles to dance across her pug nose. “This is going to be so amazing.” She kissed Bryn’s cheek and charged out of the room with Tomlinson right behind her.
Stunned by Sam’s defection, Bryn turned to see Fenix smirking. “Now there is only me, dear sister. We will do the scrying and find Kivunjo. And we will find him just where I said he will be. Let’s do it now.”
Fenix led the way down the steep stairs to the basement, home of Sam’s lab. She crossed the lab and entered a small room connected to the lab by a narrow corridor. It was shaped from the living rock into a circle with a pentagram, a five-sided star, etched into the floor. At the center of the star a small altar supported a huge crystal. It was a foot tall and as clear as spring water.
Bryn took Sam’s feather and her bundle of strange smelling herbs out of the pocket of her split skirt and placed them on the altar in front of the crystal. Fenix stood on one side of the altar and Bryn on the other. They placed their hands on the crystal and closed their eyes. Bryn’s eyes immediately flew open. The crystal was on fire. Usually as cool as rain water, the huge stone was lit from within by a bonfire. The flames leapt toward the top. Suddenly Kivunjo danced into view as he gyrated around the fire shaking a lion’s tail switch and Lazarus’s dagger.
“Do you see him?”
“Yes, and he is visible because of me,” Fenix said. “I called him.”
Bryn snorted. “He is visible because of the crystal.”
Fenix ignored this. “See the mountain behind him?”
Bryn peered into the crystal and saw a snow-capped peak rising behind Kivunjo. The witch doctor danced around the fire and she saw the village perched on the shores of a large body of water. The water could be any lake or river, but the mountain was clearly Jino Mkubwa, the Great Tooth. It was a peak in the Mountains of the Moon with a terrible reputation as being haunted by evil spirits. “It’s the Tooth.”
Fenix smiled. “The village will be easy to find. We’ve been on the Tooth before.”
They had, as teenagers. Fleeing from the pharaoh who killed their parents, they had traveled into the African interior completely alone, relying on their magical powers. A group of Bedouins had taken them into the desert and tried to sell them. They’d escaped the Bedouins and taken shelter with a tribe of Tuaregs who kept them for many years while they matured. During that time, they traveled to the head waters of the Nile and climbed the Mountains of the Moon as the Tuareg tribe searched for their roots. When the Tuareg queen, Tin Hinan, tried to marry them off to her relatives, they once again fled, this time to Europe.
“Getting there will be very difficult,” Bryn said.
“We can fly in that airship of Sam’s.”
Bryn was about to answer when she heard a rustling sound, like dry leaves being brushed by the wind. She turned to look at the door as Fenix snatched her hands off the crystal and screamed. “Snakes!”
Bryn leaped to her feet. Five huge black snakes slithered through cracks under the door from Sam’s lab and attacked. Bryn barely had time to put up her palm and stop the snake flying toward her with its jaws open, fangs dripping with poison. Fenix then did something that made Bryn’s blood freeze. Moving at a speed Bryn could never duplicate, Fenix caught all four remaining snakes with one hand, held them by their necks, and tore each snake’s head from its body one at a time.
* * * *
Draak Priest smoothed thick black hair away from his brow and frowned. His snakes had entered Bryn’s house and found her, but the red-headed witch had captured four and beheaded them before he could catch more than a brief glimpse of what was inside the crystal. As she held them in her hand, he’d seen a mountain inside the crystal, a vaguely familiar mountain, through one of his pet snake’s eyes. He’d also seen the hideous witch doctor dancing around a fire.
After checking to see if anyone was watching, he slipped out of the alley next to Bryn’s house, flagged a cab and told the hack driver to take him to the docks. The witch doctor was somewhere in Africa; it looked like the Mountains of the Moon. It was a large range and would be difficult to reach, but the reward would be well worth the hardships needed to acquire it. He wanted the dagger Kivunjo had stolen from him during his ritual of change, but more than that, he knew Bryn needed Lazarus’s dagger to end he
r curse and he wanted her. She would follow the dagger and then the luscious Bryn and her equally delicious sister would be his.
Protecting herself and Fenix in Paris, where she’d lived on and off for centuries, was easy for Bryn. She had eyes in place and a safety net of spies and spells. In Africa, she would be alone and on her own, her and her sister ripe for the picking. As the cab clattered along the cobbled streets, Priest rubbed his hands together. Thinking about the two women had him hard as a tree limb. He rubbed his aching crotch and smiled. Youth was under-rated. He’d only had it restored for two days and already lost count of the number of women he’d claimed.
He tapped on the window and told the driver to take him to Madam Daphne’s establishment on the waterfront. He would satisfy his needs with one, no perhaps two, young women before putting his new plan into action.
These delicious thoughts were suddenly and horribly interrupted. “After you futter the women, we will kill them.”
Priest jerked upright. “Who’s that?” The voice had seemed to come from inside his head.
And then he heard a dry chuckle also inside his head. “Did you think I had no power?” The disembodied voice asked. “Did you think you could use my bones, my skull, with no consequences?”
“Who are you?” Priest whispered.
“No need to speak. I hear all of your thoughts. As dark and delicious as they are, I prefer killing women to lifting their skirts. You have much to learn about true pleasure.”
“Cardinal Malenfant?”
“No other,” the evil voice giggled. “You have resurrected me. I live inside you. Oh, my son, together we will commit so many sinful acts I shall be condemned for two eternities not just one.”
“I won’t do it,” Priest vocalized. “I love to stick my cock into women, many, many women, but not kill them.”
“If I recall correctly, you have killed plenty of women, strangling them with your rosary beads after which you hacked off their breasts and violated them with your knife. I found all those memories delightful to peruse, but together we will make many more.”
“No, I won’t kill the women I lie with. Now that I am young again, there is no need to murder them or violate them. I am filled with the lust of youth and have the hard cock to go with it.”
“You may futter as many women as you like. I must admit, I’ve enjoyed your escapades up to this point, but now, you must allow me to take your primitive act to a higher level.”
Priest grabbed his head. “Get out of my mind!”
The dry chuckle escalated into a loud belly laugh that echoed throughout his skull. “You can’t get rid of me. You dug up my bones. You took them from their consecrated resting place and woke me. My spirit helped you regain your youth and I intend to enjoy it with you.”
“You can’t be inside me. You’re ruining everything. I’ve been waiting for this moment for centuries. Get out!”
“Maybe you should employ a witch to help rid your mind of my spirit.” More loud guffaws filled Priest’s mind and he tore at his hair.
“Noooo!”
When he screamed, the cab driver stopped his horse, jumped off his box and ripped the door open. Priest tumbled out of the cab and onto the cobbles still tearing at his head. The driver kicked Priest away from his vehicle, leaped back on the box and whipped his horse into a trot, leaving Priest laying on the cobbles rolling back and forth, holding his head and shrieking.
Chapter 4
“We have to leave right now,” Bryn yelled over her shoulder. “Priest sent those snakes. He’ll be back.”
Fenix followed her up the stairs to the second floor. “Where’s Quinn?”
Bryn shrugged. “I don’t know. He was here when we went into the basement.”
Quinn’s head popped out of Bryn’s bedroom. “I’m right here. What is amiss?”
Bryn grabbed his shoulders. “Priest is still in Paris. He sent five snakes into the house to kill us.”
Quinn shook his head. “Why would he want to kill you now? He got what he wanted. I imagined him screwing his way through most of the whorehouses in Paris.”
Bryn snatched her trunk out of the closet and began tossing clothes into it willy nilly. “Fenix, pack!” She paused in her furious packing and stared blankly at Quinn. “It’s been two days since he regained his youth. Maybe he got tired of screwing his way through the brothels of Paris. He’s been after us forever. It’s become a habit. His life. We have become an obsession with him.”
Quinn grabbed her arm to stop her from throwing an armful of intimate apparel into the trunk. “Where do you think you’re running off to?”
“Africa.”
“What? Are you insane?”
“No, we know exactly what we’re doing and where we must go. We will go to the Belgian Congo specifically. We did a scrying and the dagger is there.”
“Stop, Bryn, and listen to me. You can’t just run off to Africa. It’s a very long ways away.”
“I know that, Quinn, I was born there.”
“Just how do you plan to get there?”
“Airship. Sam and Tomlinson are examining the fastest airship in the world right now at the Paris Exposition. I’m going to borrow it.”
Quinn tilted his head. “An airship?”
“Yes, the Betsy Ann. It’s a Titan Airship, fastest one made.”
Quinn grabbed his valise and began shoving his own garments into it. “I’m coming with you.”
She stopped packing and stared at him. “You would come to Africa for me?”
He smiled and pulled her against his hard body. “My darling, I would walk across the Great Sahara barefoot for you. I also have an interest in ending this curse as you know.”
Bryn smiled. “I do know. And when we find a safe place and a few hours to ourselves, I have a surprise for you.” Bryn still had the amulet given to her by her friend and fellow witch, Katherine. The witch had promised the amulet would release her from her curse for one night. That meant, for one night, she would be able to make love to Quinn without fear of him bursting into flames and dying a horrible death.
“What kind of surprise?”
She produced a black velvet bag from the drawer beside her bed. “In this bag is a charm that will allow us one night of pleasure.”
Quinn’s eyes flew open. “Are you joking?”
“No, my dear, it was given to me by a witch I have known many centuries.”
“And you trust this, this charm?” His face reflected doubt and also hope.
Bryn shoved the black velvet bag into the outside pocket of a brightly-colored carpet bag and Quinn grabbed her wrist. “You mean we can consummate our relationship in a normal way?”
She smiled. “There’s no time to explain fully. Hurry and pack. We must leave immediately.”
Quinn snagged her arm. “Oh no you don’t. Finish telling me. What does this charm do?”
She grinned at him mischievously. “You must wait. We have to leave.”
“The minute we are alone, you will explain.”
She tilted her head. “Of course, and I guarantee you the wait will be worthwhile.”
When all the bags were downstairs, Fingle loaded them into her carriage and Bryn hugged Babbette. The maid could not leave Paris. She was tied to it in a very strange way and would wither and die it she left. She’d been caring for Bryn’s home for two hundred years.
“Send me a message when you are safe,” Babbette said.
Bryn kissed the maid’s cheek. “I will. Take care of yourself.”
Babbette’s shrug spoke volumes. She smiled and waved as Bryn climbed into the carriage. Fingle mounted the box and headed the horses in the direction of the Eifel Tower and the Paris Exposition.
* * * *
The Titan was easy to find. It rested in a large field on the outskirts of the Expo. Bryn leaped down and went hunting for Samantha who was integral to her plan. Her dear friend had her head crammed into the engine compartment under the metal shroud encasing one of the hug
e engines hanging under the floating gas bag. There were two engines flanking the passenger compartment. Each brass shroud concealed an engine as large as the passenger cabin.
She tapped on Sam’s back. Her friend started, bumped her head on the shroud and backed rapidly out of the engine. “Bryn, you scared me nearly witless. Why are you here?”
Bryn glanced left and then right to make sure no one could overhear. “We must leave immediately. Priest is still after us. He sent snakes into the house.”
Sam had a smudge of grease on her cheek and her curly brown hair was a mess. “Where will we go?”
“The Belgian Congo. The witch doctor is there.”
Sam’s round eyes were filled with confusion. “How?”
Bryn rolled her eyes in the direction of the airship.
“No! You can’t.”
Bryn shrugged. “Why not? You and Tomlinson can fly it. Can you not?”
“Well yes, but what about Commodore Brightstone? He does own it.”
“Is he here?”
Sam nodded.
“Then I suggest we take him. I’ll have a talk with him right now.”
“Bryn, this is crazy.”
Bryn grabbed Sam’s shoulders. “You think I am unaware of this fact? We are desperate, Sam. Now is not the time for feminine histrionics. Now is the time to act. Show Fingle where to stow the luggage.”
Sam nodded. “I will, but I don’t think the Commodore is going to be happy.”
Bryn waved. “The Commodore is going to be delirious with joy at the opportunity to accompany us to Africa.”
The Commodore, his hands locked behind his back, strolled leisurely around the outside of the airship at the head of a small group of Parisian officials. As he expounded on the speed and efficacy of his two engines, Bryn slipped into the group of four men dressed in three-piece suits, ties and bowler hats. Two carried canes and one periodically checked an enormous timepiece.
Separating the Commodore from the herd would be the trick. She pulled her blouse lower to expose her cleavage and tugged at his sleeve. The Commodore turned to speak to her and his eyes dropped to her breasts. He smiled. “How may I help you, Miss?”
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