Black Heart Loa (36 page)

“Run,” she whispered, before saying in a loud, contemptuous voice, “The only lesson you taught, Babette, was how to hate. Your poor daughter is dead because you poisoned her heart and soul as surely as you poisoned your husband’s potions.”

Kallie whirled and shouldered her way past the
surprised—and distracted—hoodoo standing behind her and raced into the botanica, arrowing herself at the back door.

“Stop her!” Addie shrieked. The thud of multiple pairs of feet pounding against the hardwood floor behind her goosed Kallie even faster toward the door, flooded her veins with adrenaline. Her heart thundered in her chest.

Slamming up against the exit, Kallie unlocked the dead bolt with a quick flip of her fingers, then threw the door open. The pungent scent of hot-peppered rum and dark tobacco curled inside. Baron Samedi stood in the doorway, dapper as ever in shades, a black fedora, and a fine-cut suit, a smoldering cigar clenched between his teeth.

Kallie fell back, her breath caught in her throat.

“Toldja I wouldn’t be forgetting you, darlin’,” Cash-Samedi drawled. “You or your damned cousin.”

But Kallie noticed he wasn’t looking at her, the Baron’s head was swiveling and cocking from side to side like a blind man’s, as if he couldn’t see her and was waiting for her to betray herself with sound or scent.

Her thoughts flew back to their encounter in the grave and the Baron’s abrupt disappearance—and the unhappy black hen’s equally abrupt appearance—when he’d worked a trick to compel the
loa
inside of her.

Am I hidden from him somehow? Blocked by a magic snafu?

Kallie backed away as quietly as possible, knowing the cause was lost as Addie’s hoodoo posse slowly surrounded her. She fumbled the pocketknife’s blade open.

The Baron stepped into the botanica and shut the
door. He blew a plume of blue-gray tobacco-fragrant smoke in her direction, then grinned. “I hear yo’ heart,
jolie femme.
I also see a circle o’ people. I bet a certain purple-eyed hoodoo be in de center.”

“C’mon, now,” John Blaine said, reaching for her. “This is hard enough, no need to make it any harder—”

Kallie sank the knife tip into the back of his hand, then pulled it back out—a snake strike minus the venom. With a sharp cry of pain, the root doctor jumped away from her, his bleeding hand held against his chest.

“She’s got a goddamned knife!” he cried.

A whiff of tobacco and rum, then the Baron stood a few feet in front of her, his head cocked as he tried to figure her exact location. Kallie shifted to the side, but one of the hoodoos took hold of one of the Baron’s hands and directed it toward her.

“She’s right there.”

Before Kallie could shift again, the Baron’s hand clamped onto her shoulder. Electricity thrummed through her at the contact, shocking her senses and short-circuiting her control over her body. She heard a
tunk
as the pocketknife tumbled from her numbed fingers to the floor.

She tried to speak, to wrench free, but her body was no longer her own.

“Ah, dere you be,
ma belle,
” the Baron murmured. And Kallie wasn’t sure if he was speaking to her or the
loa.
He reached a hand into her chest.

Pain exploded through Kallie like a nuke made of ice—cold and razor-sharp and devastating—as the Baron’s fingers closed around something inside of her and yanked.

Kallie tried to scream, but couldn’t. The pain had stolen her voice.

Augustine watched, amused, as
Gabrielle LaRue evaded Babette St. Cyr’s shambling attack, easily stepping away from Valin-St. Cyr’s outstretched hands.

One advantage to being recently deceased,
I
know how to use a body and move it, it’s still a natural and automatic action. For Mrs. St. Cyr, however, it seems to be quite the opposite.

Powerful and positive energy charged the room’s atmosphere as the little nomad
shuvani
continued her exorcism chant—
sounds like an intriguing blend of Gaelic and Romany
—following Valin’s stumbling progress around the room with her slim, silver-inlaid kosh.

The woman with the shotgun and her accomplices all chased after the fleeing Kallie Rivière, leaving her aunt free to hop down from the bed and hurry to her worktable—the lovely Belladonna Brown right behind her.

“You found a poppet bearing your name at Jean-Julien’s shop, didn’t you?” Valin-St. Cyr said in sly tones. “And you thought he’d tricked you into bed.”

Gabrielle paused in front of the empty rocker and looked at the slowly pursuing nomad, comprehension glittering in her eyes. “That was you too,” she said. “You planted the poppet where you knew I’d find it. I accused Jean-Julien of toying with me. And broke off our relationship.” She shook her head in disgust. “I underestimated you.”

“That you did. You should’ve never taken up with
my
husband.”

“You’re right,” Gabrielle said softly. “I shouldn’t have. I was young, foolish, and believed myself in love. I wronged you and I apologize for that.”

The nomad staggered to a halt. “You what?”

“Apologize. Jean-Julien was a married man with a child on the way. Taking up with him was wrong. I’m sorry for all the pain I caused you.”

McKenna finished her chant and pointed her energy-quivering kosh at Valin’s leather-jacketed back, allowing it to channel her will in a concentrated beam of power. Valin’s body went rigid as though struck by lightning, the muscles in his neck cording, his dreads coiling up into the electrified air.

Even in his ghostly shape, Augustine detected the strong odor of ozone.

A dark mist sieved out of Valin’s body, coalescing into Babette St. Cyr’s form. She stared at Gabrielle, the sheen of tears on her face, but whether from rage or grief, Augustine couldn’t tell. Valin collapsed bonelessly to the floor, a marionette with broken strings.

“Shit,” he groaned. “That did
not
feel good.”

With a soft sigh of relief, McKenna lowered her kosh to her side, perspiration glistening on her forehead. Sitting on her heels, she closed her eyes.

Augustine watched as Babette St. Cyr rippled over to Gabrielle and touched a hand to the woman’s hair. Gabrielle shivered convulsively and wrapped her arms around herself as though she’d felt a cold draft.

“I will
never
forgive you,” Babette said.

“And I ain’t forgiving you,” Valin growled, rising up on his hands and knees, gaze locked on the late Babette’s inky, swirling form. “And neither will they.”

Babette’s attention shifted from Gabrielle to Valin. Her eyes narrowed. “‘They’?”

“The spirits of those you poisoned,” Valin replied. “They’re waiting Beyond. Been waiting a long time. All I gotta do is let them in.”

Babette flowed over to Valin, her eyes electric with fury. “You’re talking shit, boy. You can’t do no such thing.”

“Watch me.”

Power radiated from the nomad, setting the ghostly ether ablaze with a blinding white light. Squinting, Augustine averted his face from the source of that cold and dangerous brilliance—Valin himself—fear prickling along his figurative spine.

Electricity crackled through the air. Augustine caught a glimpse of an ethereal gate pinwheeling open near the ceiling and breathing ice into the room.

“Sweet Jesus.”

“Hellfire!”

“For Gage.”

From within the gate’s jet-black and icicled mouth, Augustine heard a low, multivoiced sigh, followed by

Babette screamed in terror as a gray and silent tide rushed in and enveloped her. The tide shimmered, wavered, then vanished, leaving behind the fading echo of Babette St. Cyr’s scream.

“Sweet Jesus,” Kallie’s aunt repeated, voice stunned.

“Well done, luv,” McKenna murmured. “Our Gage has been avenged.”

“Doesn’t feel that way,” Valin whispered.

Augustine stared at the nomad.
I had no idea he
possessed power of that magnitude. I wonder if he knows his limits, his strengths. Could be interesting finding out.

“Aye, luv, I ken what ye mean, but give it time,” Mc-Kenna sympathized.

“Seems justice
does
exist after all,” Augustine murmured, sauntering over to Valin’s body and sieving into him with a small contented sigh.

The nomad struggled up to his knees, then grabbed ahold of the bedpost to pull himself upright.

Augustine informed him, surrounding himself with a security bubble.

Valin ran for the door.

H
ead throbbing at his
temples and behind his eyes, Layne raced to the doorway, pulling a blade free from inside his jacket. But what he saw as he loped into the botanica iced his blood and made him grab a second blade.

Kallie, her long, espresso-dark hair veiling her face dangled limp and lifeless in the grasp of a white guy in fedora, suit, and shades along with a skull-painted face.

The white guy—Baron Samedi, Layne assumed, never having seen the
loa
before—was busy hauling something out from within the swamp beauty, a struggling female shape, black and glistening, and giving the
loa
the fight of his existence.

A small circle of people near the pair had backed a healthy distance away, their faces drained of color, expressions shaken.

Cold fingers clenched around Layne’s heart. Adrenaline fueled his muscles, stretched out his long stride. With Kallie’s soul removed and hidden, he had a suspicion that the
loa
planted inside of her had taken her soul’s place in more ways than one, and without the
loa,
she might die.

He couldn’t lose her. He
refused
to lose her. Not after
having fought so hard to keep her alive and to give Gage’s loss some kind of meaning. He didn’t know if stainless steel had any effect on
loas
or not, but he was about to find out.

Layne heard someone running just behind him and figured it had to be a friend, since everyone else stood around Kallie and the Baron.

Shoving past a pair of chalk-faced onlookers, Layne brought both blades up for a double-sided stick to the Baron’s throat, just as the
loa
gasped in horror and tossed Kallie aside. The female-shaped
loa
disappeared inside Kallie once more.

“By Bon Dieu’s holy cock, I be hexed,” the Baron cried, trying to shake a cobweb of darkness from the hand he’d plunged into Kallie’s chest. “De damned girl be right. It ain’t de
loa
. It be—” He and his
cheval
vanished in a stinky and sulphurous puff of black smoke before he finished speaking.

Layne skidded to a stop on the hardwood floor beside Kallie’s crumpled body, then dropped to his knees. He brushed her hair away from her face and touched shaking fingers to her throat. He sucked in a rough breath when he felt a slow, steady pulse beneath his fingertips.

“Virgin Mary in a leaky boat,” he said. “Stay with us, sunshine.”

“Is she okay?” Belladonna asked, her voice tight with fear.

“She’s alive,” Layne said, resheathing his knives, then scooping Kallie into his arms. “But I don’t know about okay.” Cradling her unconscious body against his chest, he rose easily to his feet and turned around.

Divinity, McKenna, and Gabrielle had followed him
and Belladonna into the botanica and they now stood alongside the frightened-looking hoodoo crew.

“Dear God. What went wrong?” the woman with the shotgun asked. “Where did the Baron go?”

“He mentioned a hex,” someone else replied. “What do we do now?”

“He said it wasn’t de
loa
inside Kallie, so you all be fools,” Divinity snapped. “And as for what we do now, we figure out how to break a hex without using magic.” She looked at Layne, lines of worry bracketing her mouth. “Take my girl to de back so I can look her over.”

“No,” Gabrielle said, resting a hand on Divinity’s arm. “You can’t. She’s still in danger and she needs to get out of here before it finds her.”

Divinity’s eyes narrowed. She jerked her arm free of the mambo’s touch. “What else have you done, woman? What kind o’ danger be looking for Kallie?”

Sorrow and guilt shadowed Gabrielle’s eyes. “You ever heard of the demon wolf of the bayou, Devlin Daniels?”

“Dat I have. A
loup-garou,
ain’t he? One with powers beyond dose of other
loups-garous
because he was conceived in de crossroads, his daddy a
diable
posing as Papa Legba?”

Gabrielle nodded. “Close enough. He’s my godson. And the Baron forced me to summon him to hunt Kallie down.”

“Hellfire,” Belladonna breathed.

“Den call him off,” Divinity insisted. “If he be yo’ godson, make him listen.”

“I can’t,” Gabrielle choked. “The Baron bound him to the hunt and to Kallie. The binding only ends when Devlin finds her.”

First
loas
and now
loups-garous.
Layne didn’t like the sound of that one bit. “Do I need a goddamned silver bullet to put him down?” he growled.

“Silver’s not necessary,” Gabrielle said, and Layne had the distinct feeling she wasn’t telling him the whole truth. “Regular bullets affect him. Devlin didn’t ask for this any more than Kallie did. He’s lost so much already. He can be reasoned with. Don’t kill my boy—please.”

“Ain’t making any promises,” Layne replied. “Not where Kallie’s life is concerned.”

Gabrielle nodded, jaw tight. “Then you’d better go. Maybe he’ll lose her trail. Maybe I can convince the Baron to unbind him.”

“We’ll take my car,” Belladonna said. “Continue the search for Jackson.”

McKenna stepped past the mambo and Layne saw his Glock in her hand. She slipped it into his jacket pocket, then yanked one of his dreads. Layne winced. “Dammit, Kenn.”