Black Magic Woman (28 page)

“No, and I learned an awful lot about that over the last day, too,” Corinne said firmly. “I don’t think what Manon Henri practiced was voodoo. Everything I’ve read about that religion confirms that the people who practice it are sane, ordinary men and women with a perfectly reasonable world view that includes honoring and invoking ancestor spirits called the
loa
to help them or offer them advice in times of need. It sounds like some do incorporate the occasional animal sacrifice of chickens or goats, but it’s done as humanely as kosher butchering and the animals are then used to feed the congregation as well as the gods. What Henri brought with her to New York was something else entirely. It wore a pretty, colorful suit of voodoo, but it was a hell of a lot darker.”

“I’m beginning to believe you are right about that,” Rafe said, sounding grim and thoughtful. “What I would dearly like to know is whether Charles D’Abo practiced the traditional religion, or if he attempted to follow in Manon Henri’s footsteps.”

Daphanie heard the shift of cloth as Corinne shrugged. “If he performed the same rites as Henri, he sure as hell did it more discreetly. If there were human sacrifices being made at La Société, the police would have been all over them. I haven’t heard so much as a whisper about that.”

Asher caught the hesitation in her voice and pounced on it. “But?”

“But I found something else while I was digging through the Society’s archives,” she said. Daphanie heard her weight shift in her chair and the rattle of a metal buckle. She pictured the reporter reaching down and flipping open her backpack to pull something out. Then she heard the rustle of papers and imagined one of her friend’s thick folders full of the fruits of her research. “I’d like to think I’m making too much of it…”

She trailed off, her voice troubled. Daphanie heard her riffle through the papers in the folder, stopping at one particular sheet. This she drew free and held for a long moment of silence.

“Look at this and tell me what you see,” she said. Then she handed the paper to Asher.

Daphanie felt like a toddler in front of a candy story counter. She knew that somewhere above her, something very, very important was taking place, but she could do nothing about it. She couldn’t hurry it along, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t do anything but feel her own impatience and strain for the audio clues to what her friends were doing and seeing and thinking.

She was going to lose her damned mind.

She heard the paper rustle as it changed hands, heard a quick, hissed intake of breath, heard Rafe mutter a curse in Spanish. Then she heard Asher murmur a single, strangled word.

“Daphanie.”

Twenty

Ghost
—the noncorporeal specter of a deceased being. While it can be confirmed that ghosts do exist, they themselves do not qualify as Others, being a rather more universal phenomenon. Ghosts may spring from humans, from Others, or from any creature possessing a soul. With that being said, however, many Others do seem to have the natural ability to detect and to communicate with ghosts in a way that can only be accomplished by humans with supernatural gifts. Among certain groups of Others, to see a ghost may be considered an omen of good luck.

—A Human Handbook to the Others,
Glossary

Asher felt as if he’d just seen a ghost.

The paper Corinne handed him was crumpled around the edges as if someone had gripped it too tightly, and he couldn’t swear that someone hadn’t been him. The single sheet was a slightly too dark photocopy of a photograph of a painting, and as such, the quality left something to be desired. The background was blurred to an indistinct blob of variegated charcoal, but the face in the foreground was as familiar as his own.

The image in his hand was one he’d never seen before and was obviously antique, and yet the face that stared out from the page possessed features he would have recognized in a crowd of thousands.

Daphanie.

“Where did you get this?”

“From the New-York Historical Society. It’s a portrait of Manon Henri, dated 1796. Apparently, it’s owned by the Frick, but has never been hung.”

“Impossible.”

“I said nearly the same thing, but the society has documents that back it up. Several letters about Henri refer to the portrait. More than one man acknowledged her beauty in one sentence and called her the daughter of Satan in the next.”

Daphanie—the woman in the portrait, he corrected himself—had been painted from the torso up wearing an elegant-looking gown of the period that exposed the upper swell of her breasts above a rounded neckline. An elaborately folded and tied turban obscured most of her hair, allowing only a few, tiny pincurls to peek out near her temples. She wore a delicate string of beads around her neck and the same teasing smile he’d seen Daphanie wear at least a dozen times.

The resemblance left him stunned.

Behind him, Graham whistled through his teeth. “Holy shit.”

“I am afraid I have to agree with that eloquent assessment,” Rafe said, frowning down at the portrait. “I have never seen such a likeness. Daphanie could have posed for this just this morning.”

Corinne nodded. “I stared at it for like half an hour before I found the tiniest little difference, but you have to look closely. See, the woman in the portrait has a mole at the end of one of her eyebrows. You can barely see it, but it’s there.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Missy exclaimed, crowding closer. “Good catch, Rinne.”

Asher could only continue to stare, the uneasy feeling he’d had during the whole of Corinne’s story intensifying until he felt as if thousands of stinging insects crawled over his skin.

“This is wrong,” he murmured. “This means something very, very wrong.”

Rafe nodded. “I think you are right. This feels … significant.”

Asher looked back at Corinne. “What happened to Manon Henri after she came to New York?”

“That was the most difficult thing to discover,” she told him. “The background I had by dinnertime yesterday. The end of the story took me until just before Missy called. I think that no one wanted to talk about it. None of the principal parties involved left so much as a mention of it, but there was one letter that dropped enough hints for me to put it together.

“In September of 1797, Manon Henri was interred in an undisclosed location in lower Manhattan. The undisclosed part is kind of a laugh. I mean, even if they
had
disclosed it, most of the cemeteries in Manhattan were closed and the bodies moved back in the mid-nineteenth century. No one wants to state flat-out how she died, but I think it’s pretty clear that she was murdered.”

“By whom?”

“Again, no one wants to admit to it, but I’m guessing it was murder by committee. That summer, just before she died, rumors had been flying around the city about her activities. Witnesses claimed to have seen her drinking human blood, consorting with the devil, sacrificing babies … the whole nine yards. A century before and she’d have been burned at the stake. That made a few people nervous but what really sealed her fate was when people heard her talking about a
nouveau régime
and had her followers referring to her as
la reine
.”

“The queen of what?” Rafe asked.

“The world, according to her enemies. The last letter I read was written by the son of a man named Phineus Jay-Martin. The family were cousins a number of times removed of John Jay, the Supreme Court Justice. Anyway, in the letter, Phineus’s kid, William, refers to his father’s ‘gentlemen comrades’ and lets slip that Phineus and four of his closest friends—all prominent members of New York’s elite—were responsible for putting an end to the ‘evil harlot’s quest for power.’ They staked out the area that Manon was using for her ceremonies—pretty much where Eleventh Street and Avenue A meet today. At the time it was nearly on the water and completely outside the city. Her followers would set up a tent there and they’d perform the rituals at night when no one was around or likely to stumble across them.”

“Except for the ‘gentlemen comrades,’ one assumes.”

“Right. Though stumbling was the last thing they did. They kept watch on her for over a week, trying to decide what to do. Then on the night of September ninth, Manon Henri began to perform a ritual designed to call forth a particular entity called, among other things, Kalfou and invite it into her body. The goal doesn’t appear to have been possession, but power-sharing. Henri was offering her body as a host to Kalfou in exchange for him giving her unchecked magical powers. For a woman already said to spread the pox with a look and to kill animals by pointing at them, God only knows what ‘unchecked’ might have looked like.”

Asher flinched under a lash of memory. “Kalfou. D’Abo tried to call that name in the club when he wanted to curse Daphanie.”

“It would have been appropriate,” Corinne said, looking far from pleased. “Kalfou is the name of one of the Petro
loa
—the dark spirits of voodoo. Actually, he’s their king, you might say. He’s called the grand master of curses, charms, and black magic, and he’s the guy who can open the door to the other world to let all the bad things in.”

“Sounds like a real charmer,” Graham growled.

“That’s exactly what the ‘gentlemen comrades’ thought. They also seem to have suspected—as others have throughout history—that Kalfou was just another name for Satan himself, so William wrote that they felt they had no choice. They brought a small army of servants and slaves with them, and when the
Société
members were all inside and beginning the drumming to start the ritual, they collapsed the tent and set it on fire, killing all seventeen people inside. Reportedly, Manon was the only one to make it out, but as soon as they saw her emerge, they opened fire, shooting her twice in the stomach, four times in the head, and once in the heart.”

Graham winced. “That seems excessive.”

“Not if you believe Phineus’s statement that the first six shots didn’t kill her.”

“Holy shit.”

“William wrote that the men took her body with them and buried it in secret because they feared she had other followers who hadn’t been at the ritual that night and who might attempt to raise her from the dead. Each man swore to take the location of the body to his grave. It sounds like they might have been traditionalists, though, and treated her like any other evil creature by burying her at a crossroads with a stake through her heart.”

“Christ, I thought only vampires provoked those gruesome customs,” Rafe said.

“I think they feared her more than a vampire. The irony, though, was that because these were all New Yorkers and none of them spoke Creole, they must not have realized that in Haitian Creole, ‘Kalfou’ means crossroads. They’re apparently one of his major symbols.”

Asher felt his blood chill. All at once, he feared he knew exactly what D’Abo had planned. “Has anyone ever attempted to raise Henri the way the men feared would happen?”

“There’s no record of it, but I’d be surprised to hear about it. Like I said, none of them ever revealed where they’d put her body. Without that, a resurrection would be kind of a moot point, wouldn’t it?”

“Not if they decided to raise her spirit into someone else’s body instead.”

There was a long, tense moment of silence.

In the end, it was Corinne who spelled it all out. “That’s exactly what I was afraid of. I hoped I was overreacting, that it was just my writer’s imagination spurred on by all those hours at the archive and the story of the attack coming so close on the heels of the shock of seeing that portrait. But now I don’t think so. I think you’re right. I think Charles D’Abo was trying to get to Daphanie so that Manon Henri can come back to life and take possession of her body.”

Asher turned immediately to Graham.

“I need your best tracker,” he bit out. “I don’t care if the monster behind this has gone to ground on the moon. I don’t care if he’s the bloody ghost of Christmas past. You’re going to find him, and we’re going to stop him.”

The alpha was already headed for the door. “That would be Logan. I’ll call him right now. He’ll bring at least two others, the best we have. We’ll start trails from D’Abo’s apartment, the
Société,
and the Callahans’ apartment. One of them will lead us to something.”

Rafe stepped into the doorway, blocking Graham and Asher from exiting. He must have caught the look in Asher’s eyes, because he hurried to explain himself before the Guardian removed him bodily from the path.

“We might already have the most vital clue we could wish for.” The Felix nodded at Asher. “Do you not still have the paper you discovered in D’Abo’s grip?”

If Asher could have done so he would have lifted his boot and kicked his own hell-cursed ass. As it was, he had to content himself with calling himself nine kinds of fool while he fumbled in his pockets.

He couldn’t have said what he’d been expecting to see. A neatly worded paragraph explaining everything and naming the villain in boldface type would likely have been too much to ask for. Apparently, even something as simple as a name was, too. Instead, Asher found himself frowning down at some kind of voodoo crossword puzzle and wishing he’d kicked D’Abo’s corpse when he’d had the chance.

“What the fuck is this shit supposed to mean?”