Not Just Voodoo

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “No,” I said, “You can’t…”

  “No one must know I was here. No one.”

  He rushed at me, closing the gap with preternatural quickness. A moment later he was above me, one knee on the grass beside my head, one hand on the lantern, the other on the knife. It twinkled when he raised it to strike. At that moment, I pulled my hand out of the dirt and threw a clump of cold soil into his face.

  The cloaked figure brought the knife down hard, but I had struck him in the face with wet earth and his arc was wild. I rolled out from under him

  “Bitch!” he said, wiping the dirt out of his eyes.

  I got up on my feet and turned to look at him. “Get away from me!”

  He stood and tossed the lantern to the ground. The glass smashed, and the flame died the instant the wick touched the wet soil. I stared at him, at the path beyond him, and then at the mausoleum. He was advancing again, but this time slowly. Why wasn’t he using magick?

  “Stay right there,” I said.

  He lunged, swiping in a wild arc, but I caught the gleam of the knife and managed to duck under the blow, twisting around his body and positioning myself behind him. I opened my third, magickal eye, concentrated my psychic might into an invisible ball of energy, and cocked my arm. “Étourdir,” I said, and I threw the ball of magick at him. The spell struck him in the back and shattered into a dizzying show of sparkling, multi-colored energy.

  I watched him spin around again, swiping at the air. “Where did you go?” He swiped again.

  I backed away and headed for the mausoleum, quickly squeezing through the gap. I pushed my weight against it and the door thudded shut. This time there was no flash, no spark. That must have been some kind of defensive spell, one he worked into the door to keep him from being surprised. I was thankful it was gone.

  I should have run, should have bolted while I had the chance, but this place belonged to my family, and I wasn’t going to let him desecrate it.

  The man ran at the door with his shoulder and it shuddered hard, opening an inch or two. I pushed my weight against it again, screaming with the effort.

  “Get away from here!” I said. “This is my family’s tomb and you have no right.”

  He slammed the door again. My foot slid back, but I pressed myself against the door again and got a better hold.

  “I won’t let you in here,” I said, “You’ll have to kill me.”

  “I’m ready to do that,” the voice on the other side said. I believed him, too. Twice he had tried to hit me with that knife.

  He tried to push the door open again, but I held firm and the door only wobbled. I braced myself for another attempt, but none came. My heart was pounding against my temples. I could feel it pulsing, blood pumping hard through the veins in my head. Sweat broke out on my forehead. My breath ran hot and steaming into the air.

  I scanned the room. Darkness. Only now I didn’t care about being spotted.

  I pushed my back against the wall and made a throwing gesture with my right hand. “Lumière,” I said, and a thousand tiny white motes of light flew into the air where they hung, suspended, like little glittering flares.

  The light bounced off the stone walls. In the walls, there were nooks containing urns filled with the ashes of distant relatives. There were sarcophagi in the walls, too—six of them—and one standing in the center of the room; pots with brittle, withered flowers; plaques with faded names on them; and more cobwebs than I could count. The air was heavy with mildew and rust, and the door at my back was damp and cold.

  I noticed something odd about the sarcophagus in the center of the room. Some of the dust on the top had been wiped away, revealing a small, golden object reflecting the light from my spell. I wanted to approach, but this unknown witch had broken the seal on the door with magick. I also couldn’t hear him outside.

  Where was he, why had he come here, and what was he doing?

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and flicked the screen on. No service? No way that was natural. This was him. He had done something to block the signal. But if he had all this magick, then why not use it on me? I listened again but could hear nothing save for the low, ever-present whispering of voices at the edge of my senses.

  “Tell me what to do,” I said into the mausoleum. “What do I do?”

  The golden item shone again, and I accepted this as a sign. I stepped away from the door and moved toward the center of the room, keeping my attention equally split between the entrance and the sarcophagus. The shining object, I saw, was some kind of locket embedded into the stone; a golden locket with a beautiful green jade set in the center.

  The jewel sparkled as if it had been cut yesterday, but the date on the sarcophagus read eighteen fifty-six. The locket, though… I recognized the locket. It had belonged to my grandmother Marguerite. The last time I had seen it, she had been alive, and it had been around her neck.

  My skin began to crawl. Immediately my eyes went for the door, but it hadn’t moved, hadn’t opened. My heart was beating fast again. I could feel it thumping not only in my head and neck, but also in my fingers, which were warm with adrenaline—and fear. But my skin continued to prickle. The man in the cloak, I knew, wasn’t gone yet. I could sense him lurking, one living presence among many dead ones.

  Then it was gone.

  My stomach went cold. I closed my eyes and reached for him with my mind, but he wasn’t there. When I opened my eyes again, my light spell had all but run out. Only a few twinkling motes remained. I headed for the door and grabbed the handle. If he was out there, he would get me as soon as I opened the door. I would have only a split second to react.

  Best open it quickly, then.

  I yanked the door hard. The cold, earthy, graveyard air came rushing at me all at once, but no man in a cloak. I scanned left and right. Empty. Dark. Still. My hands were trembling, the cold hand of the night caressing the sweat on my skin. Had he left?

  A sudden surge of energy came hurtling at me. Not a person or a wind, but a shadow whose passage left me cold and numb and unable to move. I shut my eyes as hard as I could and imagined a bubble of shimmering, silver light expanding out from within my chest and surrounding me. Feeling returned to my fingers, my hands, my arms, my neck.

  I turned, and the man with the cloak was inside the tomb, his hand plunged into the stone as if it were made of clay. He was speaking Creole, and an ill wind had gathered around him, filling the inside of the mausoleum. When he pulled his hand out of the stone, the golden locket came free with it.

  Ignoring my own instinct for self-preservation, I threw myself at him and with a hard shoulder-charge knocked him off his feet. The locket came free from his hand and went clattering into the darkness, across the floor, along with a pouch he had been carrying. But he was stronger than me. He heaved and rolled me onto my back.

  A moment later, his hands were wrapped around my neck, his thumbs pressing into my soft throat.

  4

  I couldn’t breathe, and the rapid fluttering of my heart was killing whatever oxygen was left in my blood by the millisecond. Two last twinkling motes of light remained floating nearby, defiantly refusing to wink out. My throat was burning. I was choking. My lungs called out for air but I couldn’t give it to them. Darkness began to close around my eyes but I could still see those two little lights.

  With what little strength I had left, I stopped trying to claw at my assailant’s face and grabbed his hands. In my mind, I summoned an image of a massive, glowing silver ribbon of light, and willed this ribbon to rip through my body and throw itself at him like an explosion. This undisciplined magickal attack was no act of finesse, but the suddenness of it caused his grip on my throat to give just a little, and a trickle of air to enter my lungs. My vision cleared and I saw his mouth now, twisted into a snarl.

  I pushed again, sending another pulse of raw magick crashing like a wave against his defenses. His grip faltered. I struggled to get loose from the hands that almost killed me, wriggling ou
t from underneath him and rolling across the floor. My throat was burning. Water stung my eyes, but I didn’t need my eyesight anyway. Not anymore. Whatever I had done had worked; I had breached his defenses and destroyed the protective spells around him. I could sense him now.

  And when I realized who he was, my body froze.

  I held my throat, coughed, and said “Clarke?”

  The man stood and dusted his torso down. He pulled his hood back and shook his hair. “You weren’t supposed to be here,” Clarke said. The dim lighting highlighted the contours of his face but deepened any recesses, giving him a sinister look; nothing like the man I had just been kissing, the man who I had been going out with for a couple of weeks.

  “I… don’t understand,” I said, forcing the words out.

  “If you leave,” he said, “And you don’t say a word about what’s happened here, I will let you walk out of here and leave you and your family alone.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m not going to answer your questions, Nicole, but I’m giving you a chance to run. Take it.”

  “No,” I said, “I won’t. This is my family’s mausoleum.”

  “What’s in here is trash. Don’t throw your life away protecting it.”

  “If it’s trash then why do you want it?”

  “You don’t need the things that are in here. I do.”

  “So, you thought you’d steal them? Thought you’d date me for a while so that you could find out about this place?”

  “I already knew about the tomb. But I wanted to do the things I had to do without you suspecting it was me. I liked you. I wanted to stay with you.”

  “If you liked me you wouldn’t have tried to steal from me.”

  “Just leave, Nicole. Last chance.”

  I swallowed a ball of pain. “No,” I said, “This is my place to protect. You won’t desecrate my family’s resting place.”

  His fingers began to crackle with harsh, green light that was difficult to look at. “I won’t hold back,” he said.

  “You already tried to kill me once.”

  He made a ball with his hand and cocked his arm.

  “Fè nwa dife!” he yelled instantly before hurling a wave of sickly green energy at me.

  I ducked behind the sarcophagus and the energy bit into the wall behind me, kicking up a spray of dust, and stone, and ash. The last of my light spell winked out, and the room fell into total darkness. Now I had the advantage. I closed eyes and let my psychic tendrils feel out for his body like a snake tasting the air. When I had his exact location, I came out of hiding with the same dazzling spell I had hit him with earlier and threw it at him.

  “Étourdir,” I said, and the ball of magick struck him in the chest, causing him to stagger back a couple of steps. His right hand came up again, wreathed in crackling green light, but the wave of magic that spat out of it flew wildly, striking a stone wall. This time there would be no running from him. My magick senses surrounded him now, letting me know where he was and what he was doing.

  He staggered from side to side, like a drunk after an all-night bender, but I knew my spell wouldn’t last. My magick was weak, and I didn’t have much time. “Contrôle,” I said, and I forced my will upon his. He drew in a sharp gasp; fell back against a stone wall; took another breath.

  He was resisting, his mind screaming out. “Get out of my head!” he said, drawing in another harsh breath. “Get the fuck out of my head!”

  Tears filled my eyes. My skin crawled, my heart raced, and my hands were starting to sweat. I was using magick as dark as his, but I had little choice. The magick he had hurled at me was lethal. One hit, and if I didn’t die outright, I would have wished for death.

  Again, I pushed into his mind with my own, feeling the wall of resistance between us begin to crack.

  “No,” he said, “Don’t… don’t do this.”

  “You were going to kill me,” I said, my voice echoing in the dark chamber. “But now you’re going to listen to me and do as I say. Do you understand?”

  “I…”

  “Do you?”

  “I will do as you say.”

  I paused, feeling my way around his mind for memories of me. They were on the surface, laid bare. He had been thinking of our kiss, of our next date. Part of him did like me, had been genuine in that. But there was another part of him; the part of him motivated to steal magickal artifacts from powerful witch families. He had been using magick to hide that part of himself, to obfuscate his true intentions, but there was no hiding now.

  “I want you to leave,” I said, “Leave New Orleans and never come back. Never steal. Never manipulate other people like you did me. That part of your life is over.”

  “Over,” he repeated.

  “Forever. You will never do this again.”

  “Forever.”

  “Go back to where you came from, Clarke,” I said, releasing him from my psychic domination.

  Clarke remained where he was for a moment, hesitating. I thought my magick hadn’t worked, that maybe he had been playing the part, but then headed for the door, opened it, and stepped into the night. My lungs released the trapped breath of air in one quick exhalation. I grabbed the sarcophagus and used it to support my weight, letting my head drop and taking long, deep breaths.

  Once I had recovered, I headed over to the corner of the room where the locket had been dropped and picked it up. A cool wind tugged at my hair. On it, a humming sound came and went. I turned and stared at the door to the mausoleum which now stood open. A shape, standing in the middle of the open door, was breaking the rectangle of ambient light coming in from the outside.

  But it wasn’t Clarke.

  5

  “Grand-mère Marguerite?” I asked.

  The humming came and went again—a soft reminder of a lullaby I had heard sung to me as a child.

  My heart started to beat powerfully again, but this wasn’t due to any imminent threat. I didn’t feel like I was in danger. “He tried to steal it,” I said.

  The figure by the door nodded.

  I walked over to the sarcophagus and inspected the top. The stone had been warped and misshapen by whatever magick Clarke had used. The locket in my hand would no longer fit in the carefully designed crook it had been placed into. But at least Clarke’s hand hadn’t dug deep enough to put a hole in the stone and expose the skeletal remains within.

  “I can’t put it back,” I said.

  Don’t.

  My grandmother’s voice registered as barely more than a whisper. It didn’t echo, didn’t linger. “Why?” I asked. “Where should I take this?”

  Keep it, petit fleur.

  “Keep it? I couldn’t. It belongs here.”

  It belongs with the family. You are the family.

  “What did that man want with this?”

  To have what is not his. You denied him, so the power is now yours. You must keep it safe.

  I stared at the locket again, caught the glint of gold and jade even in the darkness. “I wouldn’t know what to do with this,” I said.

  In time. You will need it for what is to come.

  “What is to come?”

  My grandmother didn’t respond.

  “Please,” I said, “What is coming?”

  Danger.

  “What kind of danger? Am I in danger?”

  The figure at the door turned and disappeared, allowing the natural passage of light through the door once more. I crossed toward it and scanned left and right. The graveyard was empty. “Grandmother?” I said.

  Nothing. She was gone.

  I stared at the locket again, spinning it around in my fingers. What is to come, I thought. I clasped the locket around my neck and closed the mausoleum door. Whatever magick Clarke had used on it had damaged the locking mechanism, and I didn’t know any magick that could fix it. I would tell my mother. Maybe she would know what to do.

  Walking home, with my hands in my pockets and my thoughts pointed inward
, I thought about what my grandmother had said. Danger. What is to come. We had always shared a connection, my grandmother and I. As I walked, I realized it was she who had alerted me to the intrusion at the mausoleum, not a random dream or vision. She had wanted me to go and protect the family resting place.

  What I couldn’t understand was why. Why me? My mother was a more powerful witch than I was, and there were any number of other witches in New Orleans who could have helped. Relatives, friends, people my grandmother had known in life. Maybe it was our link, or maybe she had something else in mind for me. I didn’t know. I also didn’t question it.

  Maybe tonight was nothing; just a day in the life of a Harriman witch. Or maybe it was the start of something different. Something exciting.

  Time would tell.

  The End

  About Katerina

  Katerina Martinez lives on the Rock of Gibraltar with her husband, her daughter, and their three cats. Her most recent series, the “Half-Lich” Trilogy, put her on the map and opened a number of doors to her that had been closed until the second half of 2016. Now armed with a much deeper understanding of the publishing business and with a firmer hold on her craft, she wants to deliver novels that not only have the power to make your skin crawl, but also make your heart swell.

  She hopes you have enjoyed this story and encourages you to  sign up to her mailing list  to keep in touch, and go out and buy  Magick Reborn, which is the novel that takes place after the events of this short story!

  More from Katerina

  A powerful witch. A house of secrets. A deadly war.

  When Madison traded up for a gorgeous Victorian house in the New Orleans French Quarter, she thought she was getting away from her toxic life. Sure, the house was old and run-down, but it was hers, and it was exactly the fresh start she wanted.

  But then she meets Remy, a mysterious, sexy witch with power, class, and charm to spare, and everything changes.