Black Magic Woman (31 page)

Not quite.

Everyone there—with the clear and unimportant exception of Erica—knew to whom the name Manon referred, but Rafe and Graham looked puzzled over Sosa. Asher suffered a jab of memory and a rush of adrenaline.

“Sosa is the name of one of D’Abo’s followers,” he said tightly, remembering how the angry man had roared his minion’s name at the club, ordering him to attack Daphanie. That minion, in fact, had been the one to tear the small strip of fabric from her shirt. It made perfect, crystalline sense.

Except for one thing.

“I remember the man.” Asher frowned. “He had all the personality and animation of a wet dishtowel. He just stared straight ahead of him unless he was given a direct order. I assumed he was one of the zombies D’Abo had bragged about creating.”

“How did he move?”

He glanced at the witch. “What?”

“How did he
move
?” she repeated. “That is one of the characteristics that identifies a zombie. A so-called thousand-mile stare is common, but zombies always move slowly and carefully because they only do so when directed by the
bokor
who controls them.”

Asher remembered seeing Sosa reach for Daphanie and recalled that he’d moved with remarkable quickness.

He told her and watched her shake her head very definitely.

“If he grabbed her that fast, he wasn’t a zombie. They’re not capable. He might have been brainwashed, or heavily influenced, but he was clearly just a follower.”

Or had he been a subtle mastermind who had recognized the familiarity of Daphanie’s features and seized an opportunity for action?

“So if he wasn’t a zombie,” Graham puzzled slowly, “then…”

“He is likely the very man we are looking for,” Rafe acknowledged. “I thought Logan had led us to the wrong place, or that our quarry had laid a false trail, but it seems I should have had more faith.”

“Thank you,” Logan said wryly, emerging from the alley that ran alongside the building. “I could have told you that if you’d asked. Our guy was definitely here, recently. But he used the rear entrance. I would have gone in, but the place is full of people.”

Erica pointed to a sign on the door. “Apparently, the Société is having a service tonight in honor of D’Abo. That’s what the notice says, anyway. It called it a memorial service, but I figured that was impossible. If D’Abo were dead, your problems would be solved, wouldn’t they?”

Rafe shook his head. “It turns out that Sosa, not D’Abo, was the man behind all of this. He killed D’Abo sometime last night, and now we’re afraid he had further plans for Daphanie, as well.”

The witch looked shocked. “Then you have to stop him. Is he at this memorial service, do you think?”

Asher thought that would be too much to ask. But he intended to ask anyway.

“We can only go and see for ourselves,” Rafe said, taking the woman’s elbow and ushering her toward the corner. “I thank you for your help, my dear, but we have reason to fear Sosa may be dangerous. You should take yourself home and out of harm’s way.”

The Felix murmured reassurances to the woman as he walked her toward the corner of Second Avenue and hailed a passing cab. While he bundled her inside, Asher turned to Logan and asked, “How many people did you see?”

“None,” the beta admitted. “There are no windows back there, but the outside is lit up like a beacon, and I can hear people inside. Smell them, too.”

“Sosa?”

“I don’t know. I know he went in at some point, fairly recently, but his scent is all over the place. He comes here regularly, which makes it hard to pick out what’s lingering and what’s current.”

Asher tamped down his frustration.

Graham jerked his chin toward the alley. “Let’s go check it out.”

He ordered the bulk of the Lupines to remain where they were, then led Asher, Rafe, and his packmate toward the darkened alley.

The alley turned out to be more of a narrow walkway, perhaps the remains of an old carriageway from the area’s distant past. It led them around the side of the building to the actual alley shared by several of the buildings on the block and giving access to the rear exits. As Logan had indicated, the area immediately behind the storefront blazed with the illumination provided by a pair of floodlights mounted above a riveted steel door. Just to the left of the entry, an old and cracked wooden sign hung from a hook embedded in the brick. The sign read,
“Byenvini à la Société de Bon Anges. Antre kontanman.”

Below it, an old domed doorbell sat adjacent to the door’s heavy handle. Farther down the alley, the pavement stretched into darkness, but in front of the Société there was light enough to read the look in another person’s eye. There just weren’t any unfamiliar eyes to be seen.

“Okay, we checked,” Asher barked impatiently. “What do you suggest we do now? Because in about fifteen more seconds, I’m busting down the door and searching the place inch by fricking inch.”

A faint sound had Graham turning his attention to the far end of the alley. He peered into the darkness for a couple of seconds and then grinned.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” he murmured and gestured to the figure emerging from the shadows.

It was the shopgirl from that morning.

She had obviously gone home and changed clothes. Instead of the jeans and T-shirt from before, she now wore a loose white peasant blouse and full matching skirt tied with a multicolored sash dominated by bold swaths of red and gold. Her short dark hair had been curled and styled and pushed back from her forehead with a wide red bandeau. The heels of her tall black boots had alerted Graham to her approach, which halted abruptly when she spotted the men gathered at the Société’s closed door.

“Hey, I know you,” she announced with admirable powers of perception. “You two were at the store today looking for Papa D’Abo. Did you hear the news?”

Graham and Asher exchanged careful glances before Graham nodded. “We did.” He gave the girl one of his fatally charming smiles. “I’m Graham. I’m sorry, but I don’t remember your name.”

“Daisy.” The girl shrugged the strap of a large canvas purse higher onto her shoulder and sniffled.

“We were very sorry to hear about it, Daisy,” Graham continued, injecting just the right tone of sympathy and friendship into his voice. “That’s why my friends and I stopped by again. To pay our respects.”

Daisy nodded, looking unsurprised. “A lot of people knew Papa D’Abo. Everybody misses him real bad.” Her lips trembled, but she continued bravely. “Tonight’s ritual is private, though. It’s the
boule zen
. Mambo Amanda is in charge. There will be a public service in a few days, though. You’re welcome at that. I’m sure we’ll have the details in the store by tomorrow or the day after. You should check back.”

Asher wanted to grab the girl by the throat and shake her until she told them where to find Sosa. He imagined using her as a human shield as he forced his way into the middle of the ritual and demanded Sosa as
his
human sacrifice.

Rafe’s hand on his arm stopped him. The Felix nodded meaningfully toward Graham, who, Asher had to admit, was in the middle of one hell of a performance.

“Mambo Amanda?” Graham repeated with a small, perfectly gauged frown of confusion. “I’m surprised. I thought Sosa would be the one to perform D’Abo’s ritual.”

Daisy shook her head. “No,
houngan
Sosa was
la place
for Papa D’Abo. His assistant,” she explained. “So it was decided he should take all the highest-ranking
hounsi
with him and perform the
dessounin
in private.”

Asher didn’t understand half the words she spoke, but he didn’t need to understand Creole to extract the gist of her message. Sosa was not at the Société tonight. He had specially selected a group of their most powerful initiates and taken them off to a secret location to perform an alternate, powerful ritual.

His spider sense began to tingle.

At the same moment, Rafe’s phone beeped. He smiled at Daisy politely and stepped away to answer. Asher divided his attention between the Felix and the alpha, but frankly he was more concerned with getting as much information as they could from D’Abo’s shopgirl. He could almost feel Sosa’s slimy little throat beneath his hands.

“Of course.” Graham nodded, looking wise and knowledgeable and completely convincing. “I should have figured. Are they performing the day-sue-nan at the traditional site?”

For the first time, the girl eyed him oddly. “At the crossroads? I assume, but no one other than the
hounsi
can attend. And three quarters of them weren’t even invited. How did you say you knew Papa D’Abo again?”

Graham scrambled to cover his mistake. “Well, I just thought—”

Rafe leaped back toward the little group so fast, he nearly overshot and sent Asher bowling into a surprised Daisy. “Never mind. Thank you for your help. We will check back about the public memorial. Good night.”

He grabbed Graham and Asher by the backs of their shirts, jerked his chin at Logan as he propelled them all back toward the street.

“Hey, what the hell is this?” Graham complained, trying to free himself with a shrug. “I didn’t screw up that bad. I could totally have salvag—”

“Not now,” Rafe snarled, sounding in that moment every inch the jaguar. “We have to get back to your place.”

“Why? What’s going on?” Asher demanded, a frisson of dread snaking down his spine.

Rafe just pushed them faster until the small group was running toward the nearest avenue, the pack automatically falling in at their heels. The Felix’s sense of urgency was contagious.

“Rafe!” Asher prompted, his stomach knotting. “What is
going on
?”

“Samantha has raised the alarm,” he bit out. “One of the guards thought she saw someone exit the club about fifteen minutes ago.”

“So?”

“So, she swears she thinks it was Daphanie.”

Twenty-three

Evil is as evil does. The trouble being, of course, that from time to time, evil does some pretty nasty things.

—A Human Handbook to the Others,
Chapter Two

Daphanie’s body carried her unwillingly out of Missy’s front door and down the street to the neighborhood’s small, private park. She remembered glimpsing the black iron of the fence—hopelessly boring and of mediocre craftsmanship—and feeling the cool blades of grass under her feet; but that was the last thing she recalled before she opened her eyes to the sound of rhythmic drumming.

Frickin’
drums
again. Daphanie had grown to
loathe
the sound of drums. In fact, she was instituting a new rule that from now on, the bloody things were not allowed within seventy-five frickin’ feet of her. On pain of death.

Daphanie wasn’t quite sure how you went about killing a drum, of course, but she figured one would make perfectly nice kindling for her forge. She also imagined her hammer would make a beautiful music of its own as it blew right through layers of goathide and oak.

Gingerly, aware of an uncomfortable ache reminiscent of a wicked hangover, she turned her head to take in her surroundings. It took a few seconds for her to register that she could do so, that she’d done it of her own free will, and Daphanie had to bite back a whoop of glee. Finally, she was mistress of her own body again!

With a sense of gratitude and a vow never to take the action for granted ever again, Daphanie pushed herself into a sitting position and propped herself up against the nearest vertical surface. Judging by the feel of it, said surface was a rough brick wall, crumbling in places and coated here and there with moss. That, plus the cool damp of grass beneath her butt told Daphanie she was outside.

But where? The park down the street from Vircolac? She couldn’t picture the sound of drumming going unnoticed in such a quiet, upscale neighborhood.

No, she must have wandered somewhere else.

She looked around, squinting against the glare of a bright light, and realized she was staring into a roaring bonfire. Averting her gaze, she blinked her eyes twice with slow deliberation until she could focus on the dimmer corners of her surroundings.

The bright glow of the fire cast most of the area into shadow, but she thought she could discern the outline of an enclosed area roughly forty feet square and bordered almost entirely by high brick walls. If she craned her neck, she could see that the wall against which she leaned belonged to some sort of building, as did the one directly opposite. On the left, the wall rose maybe a dozen feet in the air before ending in a cap of rough gray stone. The wall to her right reached about half that height with a gap of approximately six feet at the center spanned by a tall iron gate with a double door, currently shut fast. Matching iron rails surmounted the low walls on either side, bringing the fortifications on the street side of the courtyard into alignment with the others.

Within the small yard, Daphanie could make out one tree, a towering, stately old elm, as thick around as a child’s wading pool. It stood just to the rear of the middle of the space, looking as if it had rooted there before the Revolution, its branches spreading out to canopy most of the yard.