“But my dad’s ability untangles souls…”
Legba smiled—which I must say, on a shrunken head is creepy as hell. “The vampiric abilities cannot exist apart from a host because what a vampire holds is a collection of bits and pieces of souls, no total soul. They could not exert their will against Kalfu even when they’d escaped his body. Your father’s presence amongst them unsettles them, no doubt. But so long as he still holds your father’s abilities, he won’t be able to absorb Isabelle.”
“Do you think he’ll fuse Isabelle with Hailey?” I asked.
“It’s possible. But I know Kalfu well…”
“So do I,” Pauli added. “There’s no way he’s going to let some witch apprentice wield the ability he’s been craving all this time.”
“His hubris,” Legba said, “is great. It is also his weakness. But he may have no other choice. He can fuse Hailey and Isabelle so long as he still has the ability to separate them later. Only, he’ll need to find a way to shed that ability before he can take Isabelle himself.”
I nodded. “And Hailey, if she isn’t getting the power she was promised, if they can’t find a way to transfer Dad to Hailey, we might have an opportunity there.”
“Indeed,” Legba said. “If the witch feels like he’s spurned her and reneged on his promise to her…”
“A promise—a bargain—that Kalfu himself broke this time.”
“If there was any bargain that bound Hailey to Kalfu,” Legba said, “it’s now null and void.”
“But he could still use Mercy’s old ability and compel her, prevent her from turning against him in any way,” I said.
“Indeed,” Legba said. “But on two accounts now he has failed her. He has not given her the power which, even if she was doing his bidding by her own will it was, by her own admission, for the sake of power. And if there was a bargain, it is no longer in force.”
“Isabelle is the only one I knew who could resist Mercy’s compulsions before. They had no effect on her. Presuming Hailey is fused to Isabelle, the one thing Kalfu definitely won’t be able to control is what Isabelle can do. If only there’s some way to convince Hailey to allow her to take the reins.”
Pauli bit his cheek. “What if we don’t have to convince her? You said before, when you went to Guinee, that Isabelle could take control more easily. That your soul didn’t seem to hold on to the reins as tightly.”
I bit my lip. “Brilliant. That might just work. But once we get Isabelle in control, we’ll have to bring them back quickly. And if Hailey takes control again, at the very least she’ll have the headache to reckon with.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I had to see Ashley first—I had to tell her alone. She took the news about Dad about as well as can be expected. He’d died a hero—that was all she could really say. More like he’d died trying to play the hero and got himself killed in the process. But I wasn’t going to let my pessimism water down whatever mind games she wanted to play with herself to elicit some comfort out of the fact that Dad was gone. Truth is, we tell ourselves all kinds of bullshit to make us feel better when people die. We know, deep down, that that’s all it is. But we swallow that deep-down stuff as deep as we can because, well, we have no choice. We have to go on living, we have to press on. And now, more than ever, we didn’t have time to feel the loss. Too much was at stake—and we had a narrow window of opportunity to try to stop Kalfu.
In the short time since I’d been gone, I was impressed—and somewhat intimidated—by the sheer number of people who’d flooded into Vilokan. There would be more—these were only those who lived close enough to get here quickly. But Sauron and Mikah were still gathering more. Perhaps more disconcerting, however, was the number of vampires Mercy had gathered. Vampires move quickly—and they had to in order to make it before first light—but Vilokan was swarming with more vamps than vodouisants two to one, at least. There may have been two hundred of them. Who would have ever thought so many vampires existed—much less lived close enough that they could make it here in such short order. Even with vampiric speed, they weren’t going to be traveling far and wide. Vilokan was a good-sized city, all things considered. But if things continued at this rate, it wasn’t going to be large enough.
“Holy shit, Mercy,” I said, pulling her aside. “How many vampires are there in the world?”
“Not many,” Mercy said. “Only a few hundred in every state, a few hundred thousand worldwide.”
“A few hundred thousand!” I exclaimed. “And these who you brought in?”
“Just those who live—well, exist—in Louisiana.”
“I thought you all were rare. I seriously only expected a hundred or so.”
Mercy laughed. “Nico didn’t let many survive whom he’d turned. He staked them out pretty quickly when he couldn’t tame their cravings. Sometimes he staked them just because he couldn’t be bothered. But even one youngling gets out there and starts biting people, the shit spreads like a coronavirus.”
I shook my head. “And I suppose vampires don’t engage in social distancing to prevent the spread?”
“Of course not. Vampires don’t do take-out. The world is our buffet.”
I shook my head. By the smirk on her face it was evident that she had no idea how fucked up that sounded. Or maybe she did, and she just enjoyed seeing me squirm.
“Well, I think I might need your help. With Hailey…”
Mercy raised one eyebrow. “It takes a vampire witch to handle a vampire witch, I suppose.”
I explained to Mercy what had gone down. She seemed completely unsurprised—as if she’d seen it all coming. I’m pretty sure it was just Mercy’s way of playing it cool, acting like due to her almost two hundred years of existence she’d seen it all and wasn’t taken off guard by anything. I knew better. I’d seen her face when Kalfu bit her—she definitely hadn’t seen that coming, and I was reasonably certain she hadn’t seen any of this coming either. Who could have?
“Bottom line,” I said. “I think we’re going to try to bring Hailey here. See if we can convince her to turn on Kalfu.”
“And you need my witchery to do that?” Mercy asked.
I shook my head. “No. I just need you to be Mercy. She’s just like you—hungry for power.”
Mercy huffed. “You sell me short. I want a lot more than power.”
I ignored her comment. “Thing is, you turned on your sire. In a manner of speaking. You bit him to get his power, didn’t you?”
“Well yes, but—”
I raised my hand to stop her. “I know what your reasons were. We’ve been through it already. Doesn’t matter. What you need to do is convince her to do the same. Convince her that Kalfu took advantage of her, broke his deal… reneged on his promise to give her power.”
“Why would we do that?” Mercy asked. “Even if she decides to turn on him, she won’t stand a chance. Kalfu has too many powers right now.”
“Which is why we need to convince her to fuse herself to Isabelle…”
“But why wouldn’t we just get Isabelle back and put her back inside of you?”
I sighed. “I won’t be able to get close enough. Kalfu will have the vessel that contains her soul well guarded. Even with Pauli, there’s no way we could get in and out of there with it. But Hailey could.”
“If Kalfu doesn’t see it coming,” Mercy said. “Besides, you’re seriously asking me to trust that girl again? After what she did the last time?”
“Trust her? No. But hell, Mercy, I don’t trust you either.”
“Fair enough. The feeling is mutual.”
I nodded. “But we share a common goal. Hailey made it clear to me that she was with Kalfu only because of what he could give her. She wanted my dad’s power.”
“But why would she want that power so bad?” Mercy asked.
I honestly hadn’t thought about it. I mean, Mercy had a point—what would a young vampire witch do with an ability to untangle fused souls? It was a pretty impressive power
in our context, but in most situations it would be pretty useless.
“Maybe that isn’t the power he’d promised her after all,” Mercy said. “Just the power he had to give her so he could claim Isabelle for himself.”
“If that’s true, there might be something else he promised her. Something that was contingent upon her gaining that ability.”
“Possibly,” Mercy said. “But if she really was as perturbed by Kalfu taking that power as you suggest she seemed to be, maybe it’s the scope of your dad’s power that we’ve underestimated.”
“You mean the untangling of souls is just a side effect of something else his power does?”
Mercy nodded. “And Hailey betrayed us before we even knew your dad had that power.”
Again, I heard a muffled voice from my burlap sack. And again, I retrieved Legba’s head.
“The vampire makes a good point,” Legba said. “Vampires tend to manifest abilities that reflect their personalities. While the power is grown from the pieces of souls they collect, their powers are a reflection of something they desired desperately when they were still human.”
“So, Mercy,” I said. “As a child you were a control freak? Just wanted everyone to do what you said?”
“Actually,” Mercy said, “that’s not far from the truth. Not that I was a control freak, but I’d always felt like I was out of control of my life. Like my family had planned everything out. That’s why I started with witchcraft to begin with, to get control.”
“And what was your father like?” Legba asked.
I shook my head. “I barely knew him. I mean, I was nine when he was bitten, and he and Mom were never the same since. She started losing her mind first, and all Dad ever did until his mind started to go was take her from doctor to doctor, quack to quack. He was determined to fix her.”
“To fix her, you say?” Legba asked. “Just to make things right again, to put things back in their place.”
“So the untangling of souls… are you saying Dad’s ability is more about trying to put people back where they belong?”
“The dead should be dead, the living should be living, free of supernatural interference. Spirits bound to Kalfu don’t belong.”
“And why would a young girl like Hailey want that ability for herself?” I asked. “I mean, she’s a vampire, she’d get her own abilities eventually.”
“She’s a young girl somehow estranged from her family, am I right?”
I nodded.
“It sounds to me like that’s something she’d like to fix.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The plan was simple—Pauli zaps his snakey self to wherever Hailey is, snags her, and brings her back here. I didn’t have the advantages I’d had before—none of Isabelle’s powers. But I did still have multiple aspects from several Loa. Even without Isabelle, I could be a force to be reckoned with. The biggest downside was that without her I also lacked the ability to heal myself. That ability had probably conditioned me to be a bit more reckless in the past than I should have been. Sure, wounds hurt. But I could handle the pain. If pain was all I had to risk, I was more inclined to risk my body than when my life might be on the line. I was vulnerable—and Kalfu and Hailey both knew it. To put it plainly, I had to be careful. My friends were all assigned to their various tasks—Sauron and Mikah were off soaring through the clouds gathering Voodoo practitioners from all over the region. Mercy needed to go gather more vampires—but I couldn’t afford for her to leave the ones she had gathered alone here. Someone had to take responsibility for them in case any of them got hungry. The one thing I didn’t want was to turn Vilokan into a vampire buffet.
Ellie, Ashley, and now Tressa, who had apparently joined our little crowd, were trying to get the influx of new Vilokanians settled, organized, and oriented toward what New Vilokan was going to be about. I just came up with that now, by the way. New Vilokan. Kind of has a ring to it, don’t you think?
Bottom line was, I’d have to depend on Mercy—once again—even in my most vulnerable condition, to get through to Hailey. Getting her here wasn’t going to be the problem. Convincing her to betray Kalfu, fuse herself to Isabelle, and then let Isabelle take the reins was going to be another thing entirely. If we couldn’t do that, there was always plan B.
With the plan in place, all we had to do was dispatch Pauli and wait. We went to the academy gymnasium. The place had been warded against several different kinds of magic—mostly to keep students safe—but it wasn’t a completely magic-free zone. Still, if it took a few things out of Hailey’s arsenal, it was worth it. Besides, we needed a good open space, one where there weren’t a lot of gawking newly arrived citizens who might be mildly perturbed to find out we’d brought someone from the enemy’s camp into town on day one. Pauli wouldn’t take long. He’d gotten increasingly proficient at wielding his aspect, and he could practically teleport anywhere so long as he could visualize the place he hoped to go. Pauli zapped away from us—Mercy stood there with her wand ready, just in case she’d need to engage in a witch’s duel once Hailey returned, and I was ready to summon Beli if need be. But I didn’t want to greet her with a blade—usually when you’re trying to convince someone that you’re really on their side, the last thing you want to do is greet them at the point of a blade.
I stood there in awkward silence as we waited. Even ten seconds can feel like ten minutes when you’re in a room, alone, with a vampire like Mercy Brown.
A light reappeared, and Hailey was there, Pauli’s boa constrictor body wrapped around her. Depositing her in the room, Pauli zapped away again and came back into the room a few seconds later.
After momentarily regathering her wits and processing what happened, Hailey looked up at Mercy and me and started laughing. “I should have known! Momma hen and her vampire pawn.”
“I’m no pawn,” Mercy said, narrowing her eyes.
I raised my hand—a subtle gesture meant to diffuse the tension. We were trying to get Hailey on our side, not escalate the conflict. Mercy nodded, and I lowered my hand. “I saw the look on your face when Kalfu took my dad’s power. He’d promised you that power, didn’t he?”
“You think I’m going to talk to you?” Hailey asked. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not on your side. And I don’t need your help.”
“You weren’t happy,” I said. “When Kalfu took my dad’s power for himself.”
Hailey shrugged. “It was nothing. Just a bit surprising.”
“Because he’d promised you that power?”
Hailey laughed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Because when he took that power for himself, it meant he couldn’t acquire Isabelle.”
Hailey bit her lip for a second—her vampire fangs were just starting to come in. “It’s just a minor complication. He’ll get her eventually.”
“Not if you stop him,” I said.
“And why would I do that?” Hailey asked.
“Because he broke his deal with you already. He promised you power, and he took it for himself.”
Hailey rolled her eyes. “Your dad’s ability was just one opportunity. When we saw what your dad could do, and we knew that if Kalfu took that ability it would complicate his ability to absorb Isabelle… well, seemed only natural that I should take that ability myself.”
“You realize it wouldn’t have worked,” Mercy said. “You’re a vampire. You don’t get abilities by biting other vampires.”
“I have my ways,” Hailey said.
“Necromancy?” Mercy asked.
Hailey stared blankly at Mercy. “What is it to you?”
Mercy pulled out her wand and twirled it in her fingers. “I’m a witch too, you know. That makes us pretty unique, you and me. Both vampires. Both witches.”
“Then you know it wasn’t necromancy,” Hailey said. “Not exactly.”
“You were going to try to make him human again,” Mercy said. “That’s the only way. Turn a vampire human, bite him almo
st immediately while the powers still linger, then you can get them. Tried that once, too.”
“Didn’t work so well for you, did it?” Hailey asked, as if she already knew the answer.
“I did manage to acquire Nico’s abilities when I did that… for a moment.”
“Then Kalfu bit your stupid ass,” Hailey said.
Mercy narrowed her eyes. One thing about Mercy—you don’t want to insult her. It wasn’t that she couldn’t take it, but she wasn’t the sort who relished having her past failures thrown back in her face. I mean, who does really? But with Mercy, if there was one way to guarantee she had a conniption, it was to expose her failings, her weaknesses. She was a power junkie, just like Hailey, just like Kalfu. Only difference was that she had interests on the opposite side of this particular conflict. “You guys think you have this all figured out,” Hailey said. “Poor girl got caught up with big bad Kalfu, if only we can show her that we really care!”
I stared at Hailey, trying to emphasize the point that we did care—but she wasn’t buying it because, well, she didn’t care.
“Truth is,” Hailey said, “Kalfu isn’t the one you should be afraid of.”
Suddenly Hailey’s eyes glowed green—I knew that green. Holy shit… she’d already been fused with Isabelle! She extended her hand as if she intended to release a torrent of Isabelle’s magica… but the green faded.
“She cut you off,” I said. “She can do that, you know.”
“Stupid bitch!” Hailey screamed.
“Hey, that’s my friend you’re talking about!” I protested. I needed to cut a gate to Guinee—if Mercy could throw her through the gate, I could join her there and try to get Isabelle in the driver’s seat.
“Beli!” I shouted.
Nothing happened.
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