“That’s fantastic!” I said.
Oggie was not smiling. “But the matter was not decided in our favor. Sogbo has returned, and his newest initiate swayed his opinion in favor of Brigitte and Erzulie.”
“Sauron.” I sighed. “I should have known.”
“And the new headmaster?” Mikah asked.
“Erzulie,” Oggie said. “The queen wished to give the honor to Sogbo, but he declined. It seemed that Brigitte had escaped punishment already by the skin of her teeth. And Aida-Wedo sided with me. Majority rule determined the new headmaster, and Erzulie was the only candidate who remained.”
“That’s the bad news?” Ashley asked. “I mean, she’s my sponsoring Loa!”
Oggie glanced at Ashley and then looked at me directly. “This will probably result in some favorable treatment for your sister. But it will radically change the culture of the Academy. Erzulie’s ways are….”
“Unconventional?” I asked.
“To put it kindly,” Oggie said. “But that is the least of our concerns. I suspect that Erzulie intends to fulfill her commitment to Maman Brigitte.”
“To bring back Baron Samedi?” I asked.
Oggie nodded.
“But how? If he’s still in Guinee…”
“Papa Legba governed the crossroads. As headmaster, Erzulie inherits that right. She can open the gates and allow any Loa to pass through. With her love spell already compelling the Baron to seek a path back, she need only open the gates once and he’ll be back. If she hasn’t done it yet, she will undoubtedly do it soon.”
“Which is tomorrow, when classes resume?”
Oggie nodded. “I hope you have a handle on your gen eds. Because you aren’t going to have much time to study this semester.”
“Isabelle has that shit down,” I said. “She’ll help me pass the tests.”
Mikah shook his head. “That’s not even fair.”
I shrugged. “Being possessed has its advantages.”
Chapter Eleven
It looked like Hello Kitty and Twilight Sparkle had fucked—and this place was their lovechild. What happened to my Academy? My home away from home, the dark and broody place that matched my perpetual mood… perpetually? Erzulie happened.
I gripped Letty’s leash as she barked at the scene—apparently feeling as visually assaulted by it as I was.
Mikah had warmed me—by way of his flirty texts intended for Isabelle—that we’d be shocked at how much it changed. He’d arrived a few hours earlier, as each class was scheduled for new policy orientation at a distinct time.
I just couldn’t get over how much the place’s new decor made me want to throw up. Marie Laveau seemed so sophisticated during our brief encounter. She seemed wise, reserved, and calculated. Would she really approve of the way Erzulie decorated the Academy?
I’d seen less pink the last time I visited Victoria’s Secret. Don’t get me wrong, I like pink… if it’s highlighting my black. Pink is badass that way. But when pink is the dominant color—practically the only color—I’ll just say we could have flooded the place with Pepto Bismol and it would look less pink than it did now.
“So, Pauli, what do you think?” I asked, relishing in the opportunity for my fashionista friend to have a conniption.
“This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. It is disrespectful to the color pink. It’s a perfectly decent color, but this…”
“Horrific?”
“It’s like a first time drag queen trying way too hard.”
I laughed. “I’m not sure I know what that means.”
“Honey, you can always spot the first timers. They’re so desperate to be as feminine as possible they take everything that is culturally construed as girly, throw it in a blender, and slap it on their bodies.”
“It’s not that bad,” Ashley interjected.
“Puh-lease, girl!” Pauli said. “You’re biased anyway since the new headmistress is your sponsoring Loa.”
“Not really,” Ashley said. “It’s kind of endearing.”
I rolled my eyes. “I feel like someone filled the toilet with glitter, forced my head into it and flushed. It’s a glitter swirly, this whole place. How can you even pretend to think it looks good?”
Ashley shrugged. “Different strokes for different folks?”
“No one’s stroking it to this, sister. Trust me.” Pauli gave Ashely the talk-to-the-hand gesture.
The one positive change, though, was the staircase that led up to the headmaster’s office. The previous stairs should have had a warning to check with your physician before attempting to climb them—individuals with heart conditions, pregnant women, and small children not allowed. It was that frightening. But now, the stairs had been replaced with something much sturdier—gaudy as hell, but sturdier. The new stairs spiraled upward and glistened like pearls. As put off as I was by the whole decor, I couldn’t help but admire the stairs. And then the door at the top of them opened, and out came Erzulie.
Her countenance radiated beauty but also authority. Her long yellow hair flowed down toward her waist like a fountain of liquid gold. Her eyes glowed with a pink that made all the room’s nauseating decor seem, somehow, bland.
“Welcome, students!” Erzulie said as she descended the stairs, clapping her hands together. Ellie followed close behind, her My Little Pony T-shirt matching the mood of our new… environment.
I exchanged glances with Pauli.
“First, students, let’s all give Ellie a round of applause! Our Academy hadn’t been updated in over a century, and I think she has done a marvelous job!”
I joined the rest of my classmates—including Sauron, who had just joined us and stood in the back of the group—in a slow clap.
“Everything makes sense now,” Pauli whispered in my ear. I giggled. Ellie wasn’t a bad girl—but aside from her addiction to steamy romance novels, she gave off the kind of childish vibe of someone who stubbornly resisted the maturation process. I’m pretty sure she still hoped she’d become a “Princess” when she grew up—which probably wasn’t ever going to happen.
“Oh!” Erzulie exclaimed, her eyes wide with joy. “It appears the new recruit for College Samedi has joined us!”
I turned to see the person whose footsteps I’d barely heard coming up behind me… and I knew those eyes. Only the last time I’d seen her, she had a black hood shadowing most of her face. Letty turned to her and growled—she sensed something brutish about the girl who approached.
“Everyone, welcome Mercy Brown to College Samedi!”
I turned, jaw dropped toward Erzulie. “Madam headmaster, you realize that she’s a vampire, right?”
“Miss Mulledy, I don’t know how things were at Catholic girls’ school, but in the Voodoo Academy we do not discriminate against the dead.”
Pauli coughed into his hand, “Undead.”
Chills ran up my back. I turned to look at Mercy a second time. Her long black hair fell down either side of her pale face. Her eyes were red—which I knew, since they’d glowed in the dark mausoleum before. But now, in the light, her irises were as red as blood. Her lips were full, and she licked them, barely exposing her fangs as she returned my stare with one of her own, one that seemed to say, “It’s time for lunch.” Don’t get me wrong—she was gorgeous in a way that even I found irresistible, and trust me, I don’t do girls.
I glanced at Pauli and thought, for a moment, he felt it too—but then he licked his lips. I elbowed him in the ribs.
I think he’s hungry, Isabelle commented.
I nodded. This was going to be a problem. On several fronts.
Chapter Twelve
I didn’t get a wink of sleep all night. Something about Mercy sitting on the other side of the room, her beady red eyes glowing and staring right at me, made falling asleep difficult. Half of me wanted to summon Beli—who I was hoping might take the form of the stake that he’d taken before—and take care of the problem. But Nico had my parents, and she was no doubt sent her
e by him to spy on me. Since Maman Brigitte had to be the one to sponsor her, that meant that she had to be in on Nico’s plan, too. Which, frankly, made sense—she was desperate to get her husband, Baron Samedi, back.
The one bright side to all of this, though, was that without any boys left in the first-year class—Pauli doesn’t count—I didn’t feel nearly as self-conscious getting dressed in front of them.
Ashley had settled in with Ellie on the opposite side of the room. Ellie’s bed had been replaced with bunks, and after Ellie informed Ashley that she liked to be on top, Ashley willingly took the more convenient lower bunk.
I nudged Pauli, who apparently hadn’t set the alarm on his phone and was still snoring thirty minutes before we had our respective trainings with our Loas.
“No!” Pauli shouted, leaping out of bed. “It’s hideous! The horror!”
“Nightmares courtesy of Kalfu?” I asked.
Pauli took his sheet and wiped the sweat from his brow. He shook his head. “No. I mean, it was a nightmare. But not from Kalfu. I don’t think even he is that sadistic.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“I dreamed that corduroy was making a comeback for the winter season.”
I laughed out loud. “You realize that corduroy is the herpes of the fashion world, right? No matter how many times it goes away, it will always come back.”
Pauli shook his head. “But not even an outbreak of the herps could ruin my weekend like corduroy.”
I rolled my eyes. “Get your sparkled ass out of bed. You overslept.”
I strolled over toward Ashley while Mercy, still reclined on her bed as she had been all night, her knee-high boots still laced and crossed in front of her, stared at me with a piercing gaze as I walked across the room. I casually flipped her off as I passed, which didn’t faze her in the slightest.
“Sleep well?”
My sister shrugged. “First night in a new place. Could have been worse. You?”
I shook my head. “No, for obvious reasons.”
“The vampire?” Ashley whispered.
I nodded. “But I don’t think whispering matters. I’m reasonably certain they have super hearing.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. She been staring at you all night?”
I nodded.
“That’s annoying. Why is she so fixated on you?”
I bit my cheek. Lying to my sister wasn’t something I was accustomed to. Still, involving anyone unnecessarily in the Nico situation would only put my parents at risk. “Maybe she knows about all the vamps we’ve been slaying the last couple months?”
“Well, she isn’t stalking me the way she is you.”
“I’m the one staking them all. I’m the bigger threat.”
Ashley rolled her eyes. “You think I’m not a threat to them?”
I sighed. “Doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what she thinks that matters. And no offense, I’m the one who has been staking them one-by-one back to the land of the dead.”
“I get it,” Ashley said as she pulled up her leggings. “Just be careful.”
“You be careful,” I said. “Erzulie’s ways can be a little… freaky.”
“I can take care of myself, thanks,” Ashley said. She was the big sister. The one who was supposed to protect me—and for the most part, she always had. And she was right—as a Shaman she was formidable in her own way. But she was in my world now, the Voodoo world, and it wasn’t going to be at all like her experience training with Roger at the reservation. Roger loved her… genuinely. These Loa, the ones who ran this place, even Oggie, had their own agendas. It wasn’t like they didn’t care about us. But their care had more to do with how we fit into their various plans than anything else.
I was sure after a session or two with Erzulie, Ashley would have more than her share of stories to tell. I mean, I once caught Ellie drawing a yin-yang. I thought, wow, I never pegged her for a Taoist—not that you couldn’t embrace Voodoo alongside other religious beliefs, but that would be an odd combination. Ellie proceeded to explain how the symbol resembled her favorite “number” (you know the one), and how it symbolized the balance between our innate sadistic and masochistic tendencies. That’s how things went, in my limited experience, with Erzulie. Everything related to our innate… desires. Compared to Erzulie, Freud was a puritan. Her college shrouded everything under the banner of “love,” but in truth, I wasn’t sure they knew the difference between love and lust.
As I briskly went out the door, heading toward Oggie’s office, footsteps approached me from behind.
The hair on the back of my neck rose. I quickly turned, and Mercy stood not two feet away from me.
“What’s your problem?” I asked.
Mercy shrugged. “Bark like a dog.”
I barked. “What the fuck?”
“Sing ‘I’m a Little Teapot.’”
I sang the whole damn thing, complete with the accompanying gestures. Mercy was smiling widely, exposing her nail-sharp incisors.
“How are you doing that?”
“Pick your nose.”
I obediently went digging for gold.
“How the hell?”
Mercy shrugged. “Vampirism comes with unique abilities. We don’t all have the same ones. One or two new ones come in every century or so.”
“So you just tell people to do shit… and they do it?”
“Every time.”
“What does Nico think about that?”
“Nico has his own share of impressive abilities. But this one came in while he slumbered, and I didn’t feel obligated to let him know about it. Not yet.”
“Does it work on him?”
Mercy shook her head. “He’s my sire. He might be the only creature in the universe who can resist my commands.”
“So that whole scene in the mausoleum…”
“When you kissed your goddess’s shoe?” Mercy smirked.
“I’m not calling you that.”
“You will if I tell you to.”
“But yes… that happened because of your abilities?”
“Of course,” Mercy said. “Nico thought you obeyed because you felt guilty about what you did to him.”
“I do feel guilty about that…”
“But that’s not why you obeyed my command. That was all me. But here’s the thing. I can’t control you every hour of the day. I’m simply here to ensure that you are not dissuaded from your task.”
“To control the Baron when he comes back?”
Mercy nodded. “Stay the course, and I’ll leave you alone. I’ll be a fly on the wall. Get any other ideas, and it would be a shame for your friend, maybe your sister, to suddenly become suicidal.”
“You bitch… you wouldn’t…”
Mercy shrugged. “Would you rather I make a meal out of them? Your sister looks quite… delicious.”
“Touch her and I’ll stake you in a second.”
Mercy laughed. “You’d have to get close to me first. And as you probably figured out, I don’t need much sleep.”
“One more thing,” I said. “How the hell did you manage to get sponsored here? Does Brigitte know Nico is alive?”
“He isn’t alive,” Mercy said. “Not exactly. And no, she doesn’t. This plan was my idea—Nico didn’t think I could pull it off. He was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Loa seemed so agreeable to my… suggestions.”
“You used your power to get in here?”
“Of course,” Mercy said. “But there’s one more issue we need to address. Your friend… the one who saw us the other night.”
“Pauli?” I asked.
Mercy nodded. “I have two concerns about him. First, he knows about us. See to it that he keeps his mouth shut. And second, what did he do before he showed up to rescue you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m asking nicely. I could force you to tell me the truth…”
I bit my lip. “He was looking for my parents. I br
ought him along because I knew he could get past your wards. I had to know that they were okay.”
“But there’s more, isn’t there?”
I shrugged.
“Tell me what else he did…”
I tried to resist speaking, but I couldn’t. “He bit Ramon. He’s possessed by Kalfu. He has a thirst for your blood.”
Mercy squinted. “Now was that so hard? Don’t ever hide information from your goddess again. That’s a command.”
I nodded. “So much for staying a fly on the wall.”
“Don’t be smart. Or I’ll have you on your knees at my boots again.”
“I understand. But please don’t refer to yourself that way.”
“As your goddess?” Mercy smirked.
“That term implies worship, and worship is an act of the will. You can’t compel that.”
Mercy grinned. “The human will is an illusion. My will is all that matters.”
Chapter Thirteen
“What are we going to do?” I muttered under my breath as I approached Oggie’s door.
To resist Mercy? Isabelle asked.
I nodded. “To give a vampire… to give Nico control over the Baron. No one should have that much power.”
He’s trying to recover his soul.
“Do you really believe that? What happens if he does? We leave Mercy in control of the vampire world? With what she can do, just imagine… As of now he’s the only one who can resist her.”
Not the only one…
“Who do you mean?”
She can’t control me!
“Are you sure about that?”
Vampiric abilities come from the realm of the dead. But my power comes from the Tree of Life.
“Let’s say what you’re telling me is true. She can still control me. And if I give you the reins, all she’d have to do is command me to take over. You know as well as I do that all it takes is the slightest emotional pull and I’m back in the driver’s seat.”
I didn’t say it would be easy, I’m just saying she isn’t the goddess she’d like you to believe she is.
“But once she realizes she can’t control you, she’ll never let you hold on to the reins. She’ll command me to take back over in a second if she sees you in charge.”
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