Black Magic Woman (30 page)

This time, there were no lights burning in the small room at the top of the stairs, no sound of pages being quietly turned. She was entirely alone, but from the corner of her eye, she could see a small green light glowing from an object on the bedside table. It took her a second to figure out what it must be—a baby monitor.

True to her word to care for Daphanie while her husband took Asher and Rafe out to search for the big baddie, Missy had proved herself both resourceful and as big a mother hen as her friends always teased her about being. She had removed the baby monitor from her son’s nursery and placed it next to Daphanie’s head, just in case her friend called for help.

In other circumstances, the clever, protective gesture would have made Daphanie smile. In the present one, the smile fled quickly from her mind when she felt her body jerk into action without the slightest prompting from her.

Confused and more than a little freaked out, Daphanie felt her legs flex and swing themselves over the side of the bed. She felt her palms flatten against the mattress and press down to lever her onto her feet. She felt her center of gravity shift and her balance immediately compensate, and she felt another silent scream well up in the base of her throat.

Dear God, what was happening to her?

Daphanie’s feet padded silently across the soft carpet, completely ignoring her frantic mental commands to stop! Halt! Desist! Cut it the fuck out! They moved her inexorably to the door, their betrayal soon joined by her hand, which reached out and wrapped around the cool glass doorknob, turning it with slow, deliberate care.

The latch barely made a click as it opened, and the door swung silently on well-piled hinges. The baby monitor would never register a sound, and Daphanie would be herded by her own out-of-control body onto the chilly wooden boards of the upstairs hall.

Daphanie choked back a sob. Why? Why the hell was this happening to her? Why the hell would someone do this? She had not asked to be born the spitting image of some evil witch from the eighteenth century, and she sure as hell had no desire to offer her body up as a sacrifice to allow the woman to rise from the dead.

Daphanie had plans of her own! She wanted to live her life, build a career. Marry the infuriating man with the huge white wings, and have a dozen fat, sassy babies with silver-gold eyes and the ability to jump off the roof without worrying about the fall.

The power guiding her didn’t care about her plans. It forced her down the stairs, moving her along the edges of the treads to prevent the betrayal of noisy creaking.

Daphanie felt like a sleepwalker, only one without the comforting oblivion of sleep to shelter her. In her mind, she screamed and clawed and fought, wept and railed and struggled like a wildcat for her freedom. But in reality, she moved steadily forward on silent bare feet and glided out through the front door and into the night like a ghost.

Twenty-two

It is impossible to call any one group or species of Other in its entirety “evil.” Throughout the pages of this book, we have demonstrated that within the society of the Others, an individual is no more likely to act evilly than is a human, and the Others resent any implication otherwise.

Of course, the Others also realize that their natural abilities give them the power to harm humans more easily than they themselves might be harmed. This is the reason for the existence of the Council of Others, and that group takes its duties of government and enforcement very seriously indeed.

—A Human Handbook to the Others,
Chapter Twenty-one

Logan Hunter earned Asher’s respect the minute he arrived at the doors of Vircolac clad in dark clothes and bad temper. Graham had given him a brief overview of the situation on the phone, and he had come to the club with a small army of Lupine warriors led by himself and two elite trackers.

“No one messes with a mate,” he had growled in Asher’s direction after nodding respectfully to his alpha. “We’ll find him.”

The men had been quickly divided into three groups and sent to three locations to begin the search. Asher, Logan, Graham, and Rafe had all chosen to start at D’Abo’s apartment. His killer had almost certainly been behind the attacks on Daphanie, and his scent there was more than a day fresher than it would be at the Callahans’ place.

The police had been to the building on Eleventh Street by the time the men returned, but it was a simple matter to bypass the crime scene tape and the seal on the apartment door. It took Rafe barely more time to let them in than it had the first time.

Logan curled a lip at the smell of blood and decay in the empty living room, but he wasted no time getting to work. He moved all the way to the rear of the bedroom where D’Abo’s scent was less likely to be mingled with others and worked his way forward until he hit on something different. Pausing near the doorway that led to a small galley kitchen, he turned his head from side to side, inhaling deeply as he went.

“I think I have it,” he said. He snorted once to clear his nose and inhaled again, moving to stand directly above where D’Abo’s body had lain.

“Yeah, this is it,” he muttered, almost as if he’d forgotten the other three men in the room. The rest of the Lupines had waited outside the building. “Nasty little fucker. Smells like death and crazy.”

He looked up at the others and grinned, a sharp, feral baring of teeth. “Let’s go get him.”

Asher had chuckled in grim satisfaction, and the sound had suited nothing so well as the Lupine beta’s smile.

Logan led them briskly out of the apartment, his eyes narrowed and his head constantly moving as he followed the lingering scent of their quarry. They quickly turned onto First Avenue and headed south toward SoHo. Asher didn’t care which direction they took, so long as it brought him closer to Daphanie’s tormentor.

Logan didn’t speak as he worked, but Graham and Rafe walked with Asher and attempted to be reassuring.

“I asked Samantha to call Erica and get D’Abo’s weird little message to her right away,” the alpha said, striding along at Asher’s right shoulder. “You can count on Sam. She’s my right-hand man.”

Apparently, the fact that Logan wasn’t talking didn’t mean he wasn’t listening, because he shot Graham a speaking look. The man just grinned and flipped him the bird. “Ignore my beta. He recognizes a figure of speech when he hears one.”

“I only hope Erica recognizes the symbol,” Rafe murmured from Asher’s left. “I cannot help feeling that we’ll be missing some vital piece of information until we discover what it was meant to convey.”

“She’ll call as soon as she knows.”

“Soon cannot be too soon.”

Listening to them debate back and forth around him made Asher feel like a man in one of those old images with an angel and a devil perched on his opposite shoulders. On another night it might have amused him.

On this night, he was focused on other things.

He followed Logan along First Avenue, watching the Lupine move from shadow to light, shadow to light, as they walked past illuminated storefronts and darkened alleys. The sun had set before they even left Vircolac, and now the night deepened around them, pressing down on the oblivious city like a heavy cover.

Asher usually took no notice of the dark. He saw in it well enough that it inconvenienced him very little, and much of his work was done at night, as that tended to be the time of day when most humans found themselves stumbling into places they shouldn’t have been or encountering Others they shouldn’t have known. Tonight, however, the darkness left him feeling uneasy, as if it obscured things he needed to see and muffled sounds he needed to hear.

Still, he didn’t miss it when Logan picked up his pace.

“Getting closer,” the Lupine growled over his shoulder.

Asher broke into a trot and battled back his surprise. He hadn’t expected results this quickly. Were they even out of the East Village yet?

Looking around him, Asher caught sight of a nearby street sign and cursed roundly. He knew exactly where they were, and suddenly he knew exactly where they were headed.

He increased his pace until he drew even with Logan. The Lupine glanced at him in surprise, then looked back when Graham shouted something about them being on the wrong damned trail, but Asher ignored them. He ran past the tracker, rounded the corner, and skidded to a halt exactly where he didn’t want to be. In front of la Société de Bon Anges.

He hadn’t expected, though, to see a familiar face peering through the window of the darkened storefront. The woman turned at his approach and gasped. “What are you doing here?”

The rest of the search party caught up with Asher, and she gave a short laugh.

“
All
of you?”

Rafe shouldered his way forward. “Erica. I could ask the same of you. Didn’t you get Samantha’s message?”

The witch nodded, lifting her hand to show she gripped a crumpled piece of white paper in her fingers. “That’s why I’m here. Though, really, if I’d known you were coming here yourself, I wouldn’t have bothered. Why did you ask me to find out what the thing means if you already had it figured out?”

“Had
what
figured out?” Asher snapped.

Erica jerked back and gestured weakly toward the storefront. “That message on the paper is contained in a
vévé.
”

“We didn’t have it figured out,” Rafe said, laying a calming hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Running into you here was a complete coincidence. Explain what you have discovered.”

“The message uses the letters of several words and phrases to form the pattern of a
vévé,
” the woman explained, still eyeing Asher warily. “Even if I don’t know voodoo, I know a
vévé
is a symbol that represents one of the major
loa
. Every
loa
has his or her own symbol that can be used to invoke the spirit during a ritual. That part I know in theory. In practice, I know some of them are pretty pictures that are often used in jewelry and decorations.”

“So you recognized this as the symbol of whom?”

Erica grimaced. “I recognized it
was
a symbol, not which
loa
it represents. I hoped the words would give me a clue, but I don’t speak French, let alone Creole, so I thought I’d come down here and ask. What are you all doing here?”

“The story would take too long to explain properly. Were you able to speak with someone who knew about this particular
vévé
?”

She shook her head. “The store was already closed when I got here, but if you look at the poster hanging on the near end of the counter, you can see the patterns listed and labeled. This appears to be the symbol of Carrefour, also known as Kalfou.”

There was that name again, and with it, another connection to Manon Henri. Corinne had said that Kalfou was the demon with whom the priestess had once attempted to strike her bargain for unlimited power. Asher got a bad feeling at hearing Kalfou’s name come up again during a search for the man they suspected of trying to raise Henri from the dead.

“From what I understand, he’s not a very pleasant fellow, but the few words on this page that I can make out don’t appear to be very nice, either.”

Asher refocused on the witch, his gaze sharpening. “What words can you make out?”

She took a step backward and closer to Rafe, as if seeking protection. Asher didn’t have time to reassure her.

“Only a couple,” she said hurriedly. “I know that
bokor
is a word that means ‘one who serves with both hands’ and it refers to a voodoo practitioner who performs black magic.
Barriè
is a barrier, specifically the barrier between our world and the spiritual world where the
loa
live. And
bizango
…” She paused. “I thought that one was just a legend. The
bizango
were said to be a secret society of
bokor
dedicated to black magic, specifically various forms of necromancy. They were the ones who were said to raise people from the dead as zombies.”

The silence on the street nearly deafened him. Asher heard the witch’s story and found himself powerless to speak. No one else made a sound. He could have sworn no one even drew breath. This was what they had feared. This was the fate some nameless, faceless monster had planned for Daphanie. Asher would die before he let that happen.

“Really, though, I would think the names would be the important part,” Erica continued. “I’m sure you must have recognized those. Have you done any research to try and identify them?”

Rafe’s hand tightened visibly on the witch’s shoulder until she squeaked in protest. The Felix immediately loosened his grip, but his expression remained hard and intent. “We couldn’t make out anything,” he informed her. “We thought it just a random collection of letters. What names did you find?”

“Only two that I could point to as definite names, but neither was complete enough to point to any particular individual,” she said, sounding apologetic. “Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

“What. Names.”
Asher spat the words like bullets from a machine gun.

“Manon,” she revealed. “And Sosa. But those could refer to almost anyone.”