Blessing said nothing. Nothing she said mattered; in fact, it could only dig a deeper hole.
“Your mother thought you were an ogbanje, but I do not believe that is the case.” He made a scolding “tsk” sound. “I believe you are a witch. The devil is in you, Blessing, but not all is lost. I will speak to your parents. I can deliver you—if they are able to pay for my services.”
I should leave you all to them. Let them drink your blood, eat your flesh, and gnaw on your bones.
The fat pastor, who called himself Papa Joe, put to work in his vegetable gardens the witch children whose parents were too destitute to pay him. He glared at her with watery, bloodshot eyes. She had seen him snorting lines of cocaine late at night, on her way home from the hunt as she sneaked through the village’s yards, through an open window in his kitchen. He owned the biggest house for miles around. She had inferred what was to happen as soon as he set foot inside her family’s hut, and she needed no special powers for that.
“Such a pretty girl,” he huffed onto her neck and in her ear, his breath stinking of tobacco and coffee, his weight a boulder crushing the life out of her. He had turned her onto her stomach and entered her as he might another man, or a boy. She wondered if he had done those things. But he did not want to disturb her stitches, of course. And so he plowed into her with his short, blunt cock like the handle of the screwdrivers she had seen in the Americans’ toolboxes when they came to help the village build a school. “You’ll make a fine wife one day. Obedient and quiet.”
She buried her face in the mattress and let him finish. Stopping him—and she could have easily done so—would have been like speaking. Futile. They would have probably tortured her on the spot, or dragged her off to meet her fate beneath a machete’s blade in a field somewhere. Villagers found witch children’s mutilated bodies now and then.
He lifted his bulk from her bed, straightened his clothing, and thumped into the next room. She listened to their voices. The pastor said that though she had tried to seduce him with her demonic powers, he believed he could save her. He understood her family was poor, but would they pay for the deliverance? It was in Jesus’s hands, not his.
They agreed. They would give him half their weekly wages until they paid for the deliverance.
When the pastor left, Blessing’s mother appeared in the doorway, holding a cooking pot. The room was small, too small. She crossed it in three steps and threw the hot oil at Blessing’s head.
As Blessing’s hair and skin melted away, as the flesh broiled and frothed beneath her fingertips and she screamed for her mother, the mother who had just tried to murder her, she understood at once who had followed her into the forest.
Chapter Eleven
“Magic,” Blessing had said, “centers on action, not thought. But you can focus your emotions to enhance the effectiveness of your spell.”
Tristan trudged through the humid, buzzing swamp. No weapons allowed, no Blessing allowed, only her rudimentary magic and her bare hands. The mud sucked at her boots and, having filled them, saturated her socks. Focus my emotions? The only thing she could focus on was getting the hell out of this place.
These people and their damned Voodoo. Some Bokor who’d found the dark side was—surprise, surprise—more lucrative than the light had decided to terrorize the local backwaters with a zombie outbreak. A fighting knife could’ve settled it real quick. Stupid test.
She slapped a screen of Spanish moss out of her face. A light glimmered in the distance. The Bokor’s shack.
Tristan leaned against a tree and wiped sweat from her forehead as bullfrogs sang deep-throated love songs to each other. She squashed a mosquito on her arm. Little fuckers died as soon as they tasted her blood, but that made them no less annoying. She could’ve become a pesticide magnate, she thought, and smiled wryly.
Tristan scanned the water for wakes indicating possible alligator activity. The last thing she needed was to step on one. Might be fun to practice her magic skills, though.
She suspected she would be tested soon enough. Zombies almost certainly watched her from behind the trees, waiting for their houngan’s command. Their creepy, dead-alive stares crawled over her with insect curiosity.
Tristan slogged through another stretch of water until she reached an ancient tree, around which was tied a white cloth. Fresh leaves, pots of honey, and bottles of dark spiced rum festooned the base of the trunk. This Bokor didn’t bother with the usual loa, and Tristan recognized the signs only because Blessing had so easily attuned herself to the indigenous folklore. He went straight for the fierce and capricious spirit of the forest, the Grand Bois. Naturally.
The shack, like the houses of the Cajuns who had lived in the swamps for over three hundred years, rose on stilts above the marshy terrain. Tristan darted beneath it and drew the shadows around her, visualized herself as part of them. Insubstantial, empty, dark. Cloaking spells were the easy part. Offensively, she didn’t have a clue what would work against a houngan channeling one of the most powerful loa.
Blessing might love it here, but Tristan was way over the Deep South. On her and Blessing’s first visit to New Orleans, they had headed straight to St. Louis No. 2, an isolated and lonely cemetery located between a housing project and the Interstate. Tristan didn’t want to go out there, alone with only her odd companion and countless rotting bodies crammed into forgotten tombs.
The place was over a hundred and fifty years old and all but abandoned. A second Marie Laveau, thought to be the original’s daughter, was interred there, and dusty red crosses marked her tomb much as they did her mother’s in St. Louis No. 1. Unlike that more famous cemetery, few people visited No. 2, , which made more dangerous the already unsafe cities of the dead. Two young girls couldn’t hope to fend off a gang of robbers. Or so the robbers would think.
Only the noise of vehicles rushing over asphalt beyond the stone walls reminded Tristan she was in the present age and not back in the eighteenth century, when New Orleans was a wild and dangerous French colony and popular port, home to legendary pirates and its fair share of murderers.
She followed Blessing past the Greek Revival tombs lining the straight center aisle. Without warning, Blessing came to a stop. Tristan, clutching the iron nail around her neck like a crucifix, stumbled into her.
Iron possessed a special ability to ward off evil (and faeries, oddly enough), but detecting said evil in the first place rested on the Hunters. They were like detectives, but one had to be born a half-blood to do the work. So Tristan scanned the crumbling tombs, known as “ovens” in New Orleans, for the telltale sights and sounds of supernatural shenanigans.
Or their smell.
She approached the tomb, stamping over weeds that had shot up between the cracks in the ancient pavement. A corner of the chest-high stone structure came off in her hand and turned to dust. The stench, like fish left out in scorching midday heat, overpowered her, and she choked on the rank odor until she leaned into the tall grass to vomit.
“Tristan? Are you all right?”
“Don’t you smell it?”
Blessing frowned. “Of course.”
Yeah. Of course. Blessing hadn’t grown up middle-class in Toronto, and Tristan still hadn’t adjusted to the malodorous perfumes Hunting forced upon her.
Blessing pried open the oven door, and more stone chunks fell away. She pulled out the top tray, upon which the corpse of a man in his thirties lay, looking very much dead though not decomposed enough to warrant the stench to which she’d developed immunity. “Cut off his head.”
With one blow of her fighting knife, Tristan hacked the head clean off.
Blessing lifted the head by its hair and gave her a triumphant smile as the stump of its neck dribbled rank fluids onto the grass.
“Now we must bury the head somewhere else.” Blessing navigated the tomb maze until she reached a grassy corner near the wall, at the farthest point from the gates. She and Tristan dug up the soil until they had made a hole big enough fo
r the head, then packed the dirt around it.
They rented a shack from the conjure woman with whom Blessing studied. And there Blessing remained, because she could not intervene in the test even if she’d wanted to.
A sonorous laugh reverberated through the floor’s planks. The shack trembled with each step, as if the houngan’s legs were themselves thick trees. He stomped down the steps and stopped just feet away from Tristan. His brown skin began to shift between shades of luxuriant green, for he was the protector of the forest and everything in it.
He has a fetish somewhere. I have to find it and destroy it.
“Grand Bois knows you’re here, Gypsy girl! Grand Bois knows when someone don’t belong in his forest!”
Tristan crouched and backed up even further into the darkness. “Dontseeme,” she chanted, so softly even she could barely hear it.
The houngan waved his enormous, erect penis like a wand bestowing its life-giving magic upon the land. Just when she thought she’d seen it all.
The boisterous laughter came again. The houngan bent over and pointed his cock at her. “Grand Bois sees you, Gypsy girl!”
Tristan scurried out from under the shack. So much for cloaking. The fetish had to be inside. Too bad the Bokor blocked the steps. His green skin shimmered as did his hair, which rustled like leaves and blew out behind him in a breeze Tristan could not feel. He stood at least ten feet tall.
From behind the cypress trees emerged nine zombies, young men the houngan had poisoned with tetrodotoxin and kept in a docile, suggestible state with moonflowers. Blessing had warned her about the Bokors’ love of zombies. Gaunt, their gray skin pulled tightly over their bones, they shambled forward with a slow, unsteady gait as if they had not walked in a very long time. Their eyes were fixed on her, staring. Tristan figured she could take them if it came to that. But she’d rather not kill them; they had no control over their actions, and another Bokor could revive them. She had to incapacitate them somehow. Tristan scoured her brain for something Blessing had taught her, an incantation…
“Ego ligare mortuis ad hoc sepulchrum,” Tristan shouted at the men. “Ego ligare mortuis ad hoc sepulchrum. Ego infirmare mortuis. Spero cum spes, ut numquam evader. Omnes creaturae intra cesset. Se confirma mortuis. Ego ligare mortuis ad hoc sepulchrum. Ego ligare mortuis ad hoc sepulchrum.” She repeated the whole incantation three times, because Blessing insisted the sacred number three made chants more potent.
The zombies attempted to march forward but found themselves rooted to the ground. All right, maybe Blessing really did know her shit. Used to having the will of others imposed upon them, they merely stared through Tristan as if she weren’t there anymore. A perfect spell against the weak-minded, but it didn’t stand a chance against the houngan. She had to find the damned fetish.
“Grand Bois gonna show you who the forest belong to!”
Tristan dashed back to the tree and grabbed a bottle of rum. “Hey! Big Boy! Mind if I have a drink?”
“How dare you defile Grand Bois’ altar!”
Tristan uncapped the rum. The smell alone made her shudder, but drinking it ought to piss him off more than just dumping it on the ground. For all she knew, that was some kind of sacrament. She took a swig, gagged, and forced it down.
The houngan lumbered toward her, each step shaking the earth, his roar a wind rattling leaves in the trees.
“Come on, motherfucker! Have a drink with me, eh?”
“Grand Bois gonna kill you, Gypsy girl!”
“If this rum doesn’t kill me first. Your Bokor got you the cheap shit, bro!” She gulped another mouthful before hurling the bottle against the tree. Syrupy brown liquid sprayed the bark and stained the white cloth.
The houngan wailed and beat his fists against the trunk, then embraced the tree as if to absorb the spattered alcohol into his skin.
Tristan sprinted toward the shack and up the stairs, through the open door. Candles everywhere, the place a total disaster with moonflower petals scattered on the floor, the tables, along with animal bones, herbs, and bottles of liquor strewn about as if a hurricane had just hit. In a fish tank at the back of the hovel, several pufferfish swam languidly in greenish, unfiltered water.
The fetish. Where was it? What was it?
Outside, the houngan still carried on, his voice juddering the thin windowpanes. The entire shack pitched and rocked like a fishing boat caught in a tempest. He must have grabbed one of the stilts. Didn’t even care if he knocked the place over so long as he shook her out of it. Tristan surveyed the room. Just one room, for God’s sake. How hard could it be to find the thing?
It was easy to overlook in the mess, the tiny brown figure of a kneeling man. Tristan snatched it up. She needed something with which to smash it, or she could just set it on fire—
A ferocious gust blasted through the door and slammed her against the far wall. The tank shattered, soaking her with fetid water, and out rolled the pufferfish onto the floor, their gills flapping in a desperate struggle against suffocation. The spiny, bug-eyed little balls opened their mouths wide in an expression of indignation before ceasing to move altogether. Tristan winced and rubbed her back. She plucked a shard of glass from just beneath her shoulder blade.
“Grand Bois warned you, didn’t he?”
“It’s on now, motherfucker.” Tristan channeled her thoughts, her emotions, into a single burning point of light. She envisioned it penetrating the houngan, cutting straight into his heart and emerging out the back. “In this night and in this hour,” she chanted, “I call upon the ancient power. Death takes all and now takes thee. Take him for eternity.”
The Bokor burst through the doorway. He clutched at his chest but, despite her best intentions, did not topple to the floor and die.
I hate magic. Fuck magic. Fuck it in the ass with a chainsaw.
“Gonna…kill…you,” the houngan gasped.
Tristan supposed she’d settle for a massive heart attack, though it wasn’t very flashy. But just to be safe, she set the fetish on a table, picked up a black pillar candle, and torched the thing. Instantly, the houngan’s erection withered and died, dangling like an uncooked sausage link between his legs. His skin shimmered between browns and greens and finally settled on walnut. His entire body deflated into the stature of an average forty-something man with natty black hair hanging down his back and an unkempt beard. His face was painted white with black around his eyes and on his lips.
“I’d let you live, but I know you’re just gonna pull this shit again, so…you know, die already, eh?”
The fire, having consumed the fetish, now lapped at anything flammable, which was nearly every object in the shack.
The houngan’s legs crumpled beneath him. Smoke inhalation, heart attack, whatever. The deed was done.
Tristan ran for the door, the bubble of heat swelling so that she could barely breathe as the walls went up in flame and black smoke crawled over the ceiling like a ghost in a Japanese horror movie.
As Tristan fled down the stairs, the houngan’s blistering arm emerged from the doorway, gesturing at her for mercy or a promise of revenge. She escaped into the swamp as fire burst from the windows.
The masterless zombies shuffled back into the forest. If another Bokor did not cure them soon, they would certainly die out there. Blessing could probably do it.
Tristan followed the marsh lights all the way back to the cabin. There was running water but no electricity. Water was a sacred element and integral to the working of many spells. Electricity, not so much.
“You did well,” Blessing said, lifting her head from the pages of Secrets of the Psalms she read by candlelight. “I can feel it.”
“All I feel is the need for a shower.” Tristan pulled off her boots, which made a loud slurping sound as they detached from her feet, and dropped them on the floor. Her skin bristled with whatever insects and microscopic organisms had hitched a ride out of the swamp. She peeled off her socks nearly black with swamp muck.
; “We don’t have a shower.”
“Whatever. A bath.”
“Tristan.” Blessing laid a hand on her shoulder. “You passed. I know it.”
“Thanks. By the way, there are some zombies wandering around that need to be cured.”
Blessing arched one eyebrow. “Of course.”
Tristan entered the washroom and locked the rickety wooden door behind her. They’d be moving on soon, whether Blessing liked it or not. Too much evil in the world. Not enough Hunters.
She sank into the old-fashioned claw foot tub and immersed herself in cold water, which turned an ugly shade of bayou. This was it. Her life.
Tristan closed her eyes and dreamed of drowning herself.
Chapter Twelve
Anasztaizia flicked away a black beetle the size of her finger. Mice were common enough, and she grew accustomed to them in the donjon, but insects disgusted her. She tolerated only spiders, which wove elaborate webs in the corners of her room and generally kept to themselves, quietly ridding her of any airborne pests. Legends claimed the forest was home to a spider that lived nowhere else in the world. She hoped to discover one, to watch it weave. She’d never been able to catch the donjon spiders in the act.
She lay back against an ash tree as her companions built a crude hut from fallen branches. They’d be safe for the rest of the night, but by daybreak, when Ispán Gergo awoke and found them gone, he would put the hounds on their trail.
As if reading her mind, Gazsi said, “It is two days’ journey to the river. Once we cross it, we can hide within the royal city. Then we will make our way south, to Bulgaria. There are believers like us there. They will shelter us.”
“He will follow us.” Anasztaizia rubbed the bruise on her wrist. Outside the castle walls, on the run in the forest with no clear plan in place, the reality of their situation began to sink in. “He will alert every castle district on the trade route that his only daughter has been stolen by the servants. If he catches us, he will execute all of you on the spot. He will…”
Those of My Kind Page 8