Black Heart Loa (22 page)

“Lâche pas, lâche pas.”
Soft and soothing like a lullaby. “Hold on.
Lâche pas,
you.”

“Told you, René,” the silvery-toned voice said. The freezing grip on his legs tightened. “He ain’t gonna make it. It’s come too late for him. We should just give him to the bayou and the gators. Only merciful thing to do.”

“He’s one of ours, Jubilee. We can’t just give up on him. We found him for a reason.”

“Dammit, he’s been poisoned with bad juju. Hexed. Did you forget that we dug him up from the ground? We should end his misery before he finishes becoming whatever he was spelled to be.”

Careful, asshole! He’s supposed to bleed out
slow.

Smell that? Sulfur and piss and anise? Black juju.

Caught in eddying currents of pain, Jackson thought the woman with the sea’s restless voice had a valid point about ending his misery and giving him to the gators and the bayou, even though he had a feeling he’d normally protest a comment like that. With everything he had.

Problem was, he felt gutted and hollowed and scraped dry. Nothing was left.

“Jubilee’s right,” the other male voice said. “What if he’s going zombie right now?” His voice dropped. “Or worse.”

“C’est ça couillon.”
Disgust deepened René’s voice. “Fools. Both o’ you. Boy’s poisoned and Change-sick and dat’s all.”

“And that’s more than enough to kill him,” Jubilee said quietly.

Silence descended over the boat, except for Cielo’s panting, the rush of water past the boat’s prow, and the rapid pounding of Jackson’s heart. Pain tiptoed away, a monster seeking a hiding place to pop out from later.
Gotcha!

Jackson heard the engine cut off, its vibration vanishing from his cindered and broken bones, then he felt a small bump as the boat butted up against a dock or maybe the shore. The boat rocked as people stood and started moving.

His thoughts skimmed away into a deep twilight, still seeking the cool dark. He became aware of cold hands latching around him, lifting him up into air cooled by the rain and savory with the smells of mint and rosemary and frying bacon. Felt himself tossed over a shoulder as easily as a duffel bag.

Feet thumped up a set of stairs and across a wood
porch. Jackson heard the twang of a screen door being pushed open. Heard the click of claws against wood, the jingle of a chain collar.

Daddy.
Cielo’s nose iced Jackson’s face.

Still here,
he thought, then made a liar of himself when the darkness he’d been seeking finally rose up, a leviathan from an ice-sheeted abyss, and swallowed him.

M
cKenna Blue’s stomach dropped
when she saw the matte black shorty-style helmet turtled in the grass beside a badly listing and fractured mailbox.

Bugger all. I was bloody right.

And on one of the rare occasions when she didn’t want to be.

McKenna guided her Triumph Speedmaster to a stop on the dirt road’s edge and dropped the bike down onto its kickstand. Killing the engine, she swung off, then pelted over to the helmet and picked it up. Her heart drummed so loudly in her chest, she barely heard Maverick and Jude pull in behind her on their bikes—engines rumbling, tires crunching over gravel.

McKenna stared at the helmet in her now numb hands, her worst fears realized as she took in the crack splitting along one side.

Layne.

“Shite,” she whispered.

About an hour after her last terse conversation with Layne, she’d felt a profound uneasiness, a deep, intuitive knowing binding McKenna to her ex-husband. Divorced
they might be, but some ties could never be severed.

Layne is in trouble. Nocht but darkness and disaster surrounds him. And I’d bet my right tit that sodding swamp witch Kallie Rivière is the reason.

McKenna always heeded her intuition, especially when it concerned Layne.

When she hadn’t been able to reach him by phone, McKenna had gone to Augustine’s Bondalicious assistant, Felicity Fields, and had learned that Layne had phoned in a report for Augustine.

“Chacahoula? To banish a fooking ghost?”

Felicity tilts her head, her shining curtain of strawberry blonde hair sweeping against her face. “Both Lord Augustine and Mr. Valin believed it best not to leave any loose ends, Ms. Blue. And besides, wasn’t it you who invoked
Daoine shena liri
in the first place? I believe Mr. Valin is simply doing as that pledge requires.”

Clan law of the People. A nomad blood pledge. A promise to avenge a death, no matter how long it took, or how far, or how many needed to be killed. And aye, she was the one who invoked it following Gage’s death.

“But as for banishing it,” Felicity continues, “it seems doubtful at the moment. Magic seems to have short-circuited. Perhaps Mr. Valin ran afoul of some spell.”

“Give me the address in Chacahoula,” McKenna growls.

Address tucked into the hip pocket of her jeans, McKenna had then gone to the Fox clan chieftain, Frost Valin—Layne’s mother.

“I’m sending a pair of riders with you as an honor escort and in case you run into trouble,” Frost says, her green eyes—as always—cool and steady. “I know Gage’s family
will want their son’s best friend and the clan
shuvani
in attendance at his wake, so I shouldn’t have any problem getting them to postpone it until you return.”

And McKenna notes that there is no doubt in Frost’s voice that they
will
return. The chieftain’s already lost one child to unthinkable violence. She refuses to lose her sole remaining child.

“I’ll keep ye posted,” McKenna promises, throat tight. Unspoken:
Neither of us will lose him.

“That Layne’s helmet?” Jude asked, her voice tight with concern. She unstrapped her own helmet, ash-blonde locks tumbling free.

Maverick stepped up beside Jude in an earthy swirl of wet leather and patchouli, his red hair rolled into a wind- and helmet-frayed topknot. Rain goggles hid the clan foxes inked beneath their right eyes.

“Aye.” McKenna scrutinized the ground around the busted mailbox post and where the helmet had been lying. “Look for anything tha’ might tell us where he is.”

“You got it,
shuvani,
” Maverick replied.

Leather creaked as Jude and Maverick moved away and started searching the area, walking carefully through the wet grass to avoid stepping on anything that might help them figure out what had happened to their clan brother.

McKenna crouched and touched her fingers to the splintered post—impact damage. Question was, had Layne walked away on his own or had he been rushed to the nearest hospital, an ambulance summoned by concerned witnesses to the accident?

“Shuvani!”
Maverick’s voice boomed through the still air.

McKenna straightened, then sprinted up the driveway, her heart skipping a beat when she saw Layne’s Harley parked in front of the house bordered by palm trees at the driveway’s end. Maverick squatted in front of the motorcycle, his gloved hands skimming the tank.

“Bike’s dinged up some,” Maverick said as McKenna drew up alongside him. “Looks like Layne mighta dumped it in the road. Maybe whoever lives in the house ran him in for medical aid.”

“Aye, right, not bloody likely,” McKenna said, shaking her head, voice grim. She placed Layne’s helmet on the bike’s seat. “Only a ghost lives here—the wife of the fooking bastard who killed our Gage.”

McKenna found herself forced to admit that maybe Augustine’s presence inside Layne was a good thing in this instance, since it meant that Babette wouldn’t be able to claim him.

On the front porch, goggles pushed up on her forehead, Jude rattled the doorknob, then stepped over to the window and peered inside, cupping her hands beside her face. “Don’t see anyone and the place is locked up. Want me to kick in the door?” she asked hopefully.

At the Harley, Maverick rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Ever since those tae kwon do lessons in Tampa …”

“No need for wanton destruction, lass,” McKenna said, suppressing a smile. “Not yet, anyway. Let’s get back to searching.”

Maverick rose to his feet, unfolding his six-three length with fluid grace, waiting for Jude to trot down the stairs and join him. McKenna headed off to the right, while the two scouts swung left. As she walked the length of the
house, she saw what appeared to be a large hole dug into the side yard beyond the porch railing. Dirt was heaped on the ground beside the hole. A chill touched McKenna’s spine when she saw shovels lying in the grass.

Always believed tha’ I would feel it if Layne died, always believed tha’ I would have some instant and immutable knowledge, the fact of his passing emblazoned in fire across my heart.

But what if I’m wrong?

McKenna raced breathlessly to the edge of the mudrimmed hole and looked down. Empty. She closed her eyes for a moment, waiting for her pulse to slow from a wild gallop. Once it had, she opened her eyes, then called for Maverick. His keen scout’s eyes would glean every possible bit of information available embedded in the ground.

Spotting something in the mud, McKenna bent and plucked out a shell casing, a .45, she thought.

A moment later, a whiff of patchouli and leather told McKenna that Maverick had joined her.

“Looks like a grave,” he commented. “An unfinished one. And we’ve got a man’s sneaker prints, boot prints topside—two sets, both female—and boot prints down below—male and female—a dog, and what sure as hell looks like wolf prints.”

McKenna looked at the crouching Maverick. “
Wolf
prints?”

The broad-shouldered scout nodded. “Yup, they’re all jumbled up with the dog’s prints, so I ain’t sure how many—two or three. And I’m seeing a barefoot print or two also, but again, I ain’t sure how many—two, maybe three people. Tire tracks—a pickup, I’m thinking.
Between the rain and the folks who tromped around here mucking the scene up, hard to read the story.” He shrugged. “Given the wolf prints and the bare feet, we could have us some werewolves.”

“Werewolves, huh?” Jude said, pacing to a stop beside McKenna. “Ain’t never seen any, but I’d love to. From a safe distance, that is.”

McKenna sighed and raked her fingers through her hair. “Werewolves wouldn’t’ve taken a human, and especially not an injured human. They woulda just left Layne wherever they found him.”

“Unless they needed a Vessel for some reason,” Jude tossed in quietly.

“No, I don’t think so,” McKenna said. “Werewolves don’t hold to their dead the way humans do. They don’t even have cemeteries.”

“Looks like a bunch of shit went down here,” Maverick mused. “But in all these prints, I ain’t seeing any that match Layne’s boots. I don’t think he was a part of whatever happened here.”

“Unless he was carried,” Jude said.

“What
are
you?” Maverick asked in a low voice. “The fucking harbinger of doom? Unless this, unless that. Holy shit, woman.”

Jude raised her hands palms out, a gesture of peace. “Hey, just listing possibilities so we can rule them out, that’s all.”

“So who woulda carried him?” McKenna asked. “And where? No’ to the grave or he’d be in it. Same for the house. I think Maverick’s right, Layne wasnae a part of wha’ happened here. He mighta come along
after.
”

Jude nodded. “Could’ve, yeah.”

Maverick narrowed his eyes. “I swear to shit that I’m seeing chicken tracks down in the grave. Maybe this was gonna be a BBQ pit or something.”

“For barbecuing mastodons, maybe,” Jude scoffed.

Maverick glanced up at McKenna. “Nothing here says Layne.”

McKenna nodded. Raked her fingers through her hair. Her gaze skipped from one scout to the next. “Keep searching,” she told them. “We need to find something that’ll lead us to our clan brother.”

“Shuvani,”
Maverick murmured, rising to his feet, Jude’s quiet acknowledgment heeling his. Both walked away, headed for the opposite side of the yard.

McKenna closed her eyes again, drinking in the quiet and centering herself with deep breaths of air rife with the scents of mud, sharp cedar, and blossoming roses. She listened to the drip-drip-drip of rainwater from the eaves of the house and the branches of the trees.

She mentally traced along the edges of the hard knot of dread and anxiety lodged in her solar plexus. Following it back to the moment when she realized something bad had befallen Layne.

Show me the way.

At the May Madness Carnival in New Orleans, her intuition had raced her through the hotel, taking her unerringly to the room Layne was in—heart-stopped and unbreathing—when she hadn’t known he was in a room other than his own.

She called upon that intuitive knowing again.

Give me a path.

An image of Kallie Rivière as McKenna had first seen her shaped itself in the darkness behind her eyes:
Wearing
only a well-filled red lace bra and bikini panties, the dark-haired woman is kneeling beside Layne, her joined hands pressing rhythmically against his chest as she performs CPR on his sprawled body.

And beyond them, Gage lies unmoving on a blood-soaked bed.

McKenna’s hands clenched into fists. The image vanished in a furious haze. Her eyes opened and she called for her scouts even as she found herself moving, walking with a determined stride for her Triumph, knowing where she needed to go.

Bayou Cyprés Noir.

H
earing the thump of
a pirogue against the house dock, Angélique Boudreau put the blackberry-jam-smeared butter knife down on the counter beside the plate of fried cornmeal mush and wiped her hands against her apron.

In their high chairs, the twins were busy with their breakfast. Grease gleamed on their pudgy little fingers as they scooped cut-up bits of
boudin blanc
from the bowls on their trays and stuffed them into their grease-smeared rosebud mouths.