Black Magic Woman (33 page)

“They’ve taken Daphanie to Manon Henri’s grave,” Graham said, cursing and making Robin shake so badly her teeth rattled like castanets.

“What better place to raise her than at the site where she was buried?” Rafe asked.

Five minutes later, they had organized an army of Lupines and set off for the church.

At least Robin’s description of the space had been accurate. Asher could almost have wished she had exaggerated the problems inherent to getting inside unseen.

The buildings on either side and the high brick walls in front of and behind the churchyard narrowed the possible means of access to strolling through the main gate—which was easily observed and even more easily defensible by one man with a sharp right hook—and scaling over the walls. The second option offered more secrecy, but it also left the invaders vulnerable to being picked off by bullets or spells fired by the voodoo priests inside.

The best way to go, he had finally acknowledged, would be to follow Rafe’s risky plan, an idea he liked only marginally better than no plan at all.

Rafe’s two-pronged assault relied on the combined forces of stealth and might to carry the day. The first ones into the yard would be he and Asher, but they wouldn’t go over the walls; Sosa and his men would be expecting that. Instead, they would come down from the sky, relying on the cover of the elm tree to block them from view and on the fire to weaken the men’s night vision. Asher would fly them up there and deposit himself and Rafe in the branches of the tree. Thankfully the thing was so huge and old, it would take their weight easily, and the breezy night air, the beat of the drums, and the crackle of the fire should combine to mask any sounds they would make.

Once inside the walls, Rafe would descend on the dark side of the tree, relying on his stealth, the uneven light, and the camouflage of his jaguar form to conceal him as he made his way to the rear wall of the church. Tucked into that rear corner was the small door that gave access directly from the sacristy to the graveyard. The Lupines would wait in the church and be ready to attack the minute Rafe reached the door and gave them the signal.

As Asher had grudgingly admitted, it was better than no plan at all, but only barely.

His own goal was Daphanie, pure and simple. Let Rafe worry about evening the odds against the angry witch doctors; all Asher wanted was to grab his woman and drag her to safety so he could beat the living hell out of her. Or kiss her bloody senseless. One or the other.

Taking a deep breath, Asher stepped away from the wall of the church, caught Rafe’s eye, and nodded. The Felix returned the gesture and motioned silently for the small pack of restless werewolves to head into the church. Glancing quickly up and down the deserted street, the man nevertheless took the precaution of stepping back into the dubious privacy of the church’s recessed entryway before he stretched, shifted, and blurred from the form of a tall, dark-haired man to that of a sleek, muscular jungle cat. By the time he padded back onto the sidewalk, Asher had done his own stretching and released his wings from their confinement along his spine.

Someone had asked him once how he folded his wings back into his skin so that it was almost impossible to detect them, even with his shirt off and his naked back exposed. Asher couldn’t explain it. He just knew that when he folded them tightly behind him, they sank down into his flesh like the mattress of a convertible sofa bed—not the most glamorous of images, but a fairly accurate one. His body had been designed to hold his wings, and he could feel them inside him even when he wasn’t using them.

Now, he would definitely be using them.

With a sharp jerk of his shoulders, Asher unfurled the full span of the feathered, white appendages and felt the thrill at the freedom of stretching muscles too seldom used. Wings were less of an exciting gift in the modern world than one might think; they tended to attract attention even when one was trying to be discreet, so Asher seldom used them for anything other than effect; and he’d found they had a perfectly satisfactory effect even when fully or three-quarters furled. But now he got to open them full and wide, and he saw a glint of envy in the Felix’s eyes.

If the other man only knew what it felt like to truly fly, that envy would grow to more than a glint. Right now, though, Asher had a mission, and his mission was Daphanie.

He reached for the jaguar, pausing for permission before hefting the enormous cat in his arms and swaying a little under his weight. As a Guardian, Asher had been gifted with the strength necessary to bench-press a city bus, which he discovered in that instant was good, because Rafe felt like he weighed as much as one.

Grunting, Asher shifted the Felix in his grip, earning himself a pointed glare. Satisfied that he had balanced his load as well as possible, the Guardian bent his knees, flapped his wings, and launched himself toward the sky.

*   *   *

Daphanie stared at the doll in Sosa’s hand, unable to look away. It was like staring at one of her own internal organs and seeing the blade of a madman’s knife pressed against it. Only instead of a human heart, the voodoo doll looked like a deformed hand—Sosa might have a talent for magic, but he clearly lacked any talent for art—and the weapon the
bokor
pressed against it was his own index finger.

“I made you join us here.” The man grinned, teeth flashing sharp and white in the firelight.

He ran the tip of his finger over the doll’s legs and Daphanie felt the touch on her own skin. Bile rose in her throat and she fought the urge to shift her feet. She refused to give him the satisfaction.

“I made you lie still and I made you walk,
chère
. Shall we see if I can make you beg?”

His eyes glinted and his fingers bent the doll’s legs in half. Daphanie fell to her knees with a sharp cry.

“Very nice.” The
bokor
laughed. “If I had more time, I would make you dance, but the hour grows late and Maman Manon grows restless. Can’t you feel her? I promise you, you soon will. She hungers,
chère
. It’s time
pour le mangé loa
!”

Sosa shouted to the other men, who took up their drums and launched into a driving rhythm. There was no hesitation, no buildup. The only one not ready for tonight’s ceremony was Daphanie, and about that, no one else would care.

The fire crackled, flames shifting in the night breeze. The same wind rustled the branches of the elm tree as Sosa grabbed her by her ponytail and dragged her toward the granite obelisk. Manipulating the doll, it seemed, was too much work. Sosa had grown impatient. He tucked the poppet into the pocket of his baggy trousers—the pocket on the side away from Daphanie, damn it—and relied on brute force rather than magic to compel her forward.

He began to chant even before he reached the pale monument. This, Daphanie now knew, was where Manon Henri’s body had been hidden. Her killers might have taken the secret of the location to their graves two hundred and some odd years ago, but since then someone had discovered the truth and marked the spot with a statue. The Xs on the base, Daphanie could see, were drawn in groups of three, like those on Marie Laveau’s tomb in New Orleans, in order to beg favors from the spirit of the priestess. Daphanie wondered hysterically how many of those requests had been in vain. She couldn’t imagine that the woman who wanted her body for her own corrupt spirit felt particularly moved to help anyone but herself.

If Daphanie had hoped to make a break for it while Sosa was occupied with his ritual, she had hoped in vain. Instead of the way she remembered in her dreams, Sosa had the others dance. He occupied himself with chanting as he gripped her hair in one hand and grabbed a handful of powdered ash in the other.

“Madame Manon, fille de Kalfou,”
he called, his voice echoing in the small yard,
“Ouvrey baye. Ouvrey baye pou muem, Kalfou. Maît d’baye, gran Carrefour. Frè d’Legba. Modi Legba. Vo la gran maît tu! Kalfou, Manon gaye. Gaye asteur! Mange! Bwè! Gaye!”

Sosa dragged her close to the fire and began to scatter the ashes on the ground where the grass had been burned away. At first Daphanie thought the motions were random, but as she watched she saw a pattern begin to emerge, then two. The first looked like a compass with arms that curled at the ordinal points instead of pointing straight. Stars decorated each of the ordinal arms as well as the corners of the drawing, and a circle enclosed the intersection of the arms with two smaller circles within so that it resembled a round, blank face staring out into the night.

The second pattern also sprang up around two crossed lines like the most basic of compasses, but instead of two ordinal lines, a single long snake slithered from west to east across the northern arm. Touching the belly of the snake, the point of an inverted heart seemed to pierce the animal, just as the blade of a knife pierced the heart. Below the heart, a crescent moon hugged the southern arm. Again, stars twinkled in the corners.

The patterns should have looked pretty, or at least intriguing, but Daphanie could barely bring herself to look at them. Just the sight made her stomach heave, and when she looked at the second drawing, her head began to spin and her knees to weaken.

“Gaye, Maman Manon!”
Sosa shouted, the excitement building in his voice.
“Gaye e pran ce ko po ou! Gaye, Maman! Gaye! Retournen a mwen! Gaye! Viv!”

Daphanie could understand not a word of his hoarse, frantic shouts, but she didn’t need to in order to understand the way the ground beneath the churchyard began to tremble. She didn’t need to speak his language to feel the cold, thick blackness of that dreaded fog begin to seep into her consciousness; and she didn’t need to understand to know that he had called on the spirit of Manon Henri to rise from her grave and take Daphanie as her sacrificial lamb.

Too bad the lamb had no intention of going quietly.

In her head and her heart, Daphanie fought. She fought harder than she’d ever fought in her life, drawing inspiration from the fresh breeze that shook the branches of the elm tree over their heads. She pictured the breeze stirring inside her mind, pictured it gathering strength until it became a steady wind and began to blow the insidious, heavy fog away. She concentrated until the wind became a gale, but still the fog crept forward until it threatened to pull her under the dark, oily blanket.

With the last of her strength, Daphanie gathered her will, gathered her breath, and screamed.

Twenty-five

For there is no greater magic in all the world than that of love.

—A Human Handbook to the Others,
Frontspiece

Asher crouched on a thick branch high in the canopy of the elm tree and watched the scene unfolding below him with fear, impatience, and barely suppressed rage.

He growled low in this throat when he saw Sosa bend the object in his right hand and heard Daphanie cry out in shock and pain, crashing to her knees at his feet. He wanted to launch himself straight onto the man’s back and break his neck with a quick brutal twist. That wasn’t the plan, though, and Asher knew that their best chance for retrieving Daphanie alive and unhurt rested with the plan.

Still, his resolve nearly deserted him when the
bokor
grabbed Daphanie by her long, high ponytail and dragged her across the small churchyard with brutal disregard. Hell, reason nearly deserted him. All he could think of was rage and revenge. He half rose from his crouch, his intention to swoop down, grab Daphanie, and fly away before Sosa even realized what had hit him. Only a supreme exercise of will stopped him.

He had been through this with the others. Of course, his first instinct had always been to fly directly to Daphanie’s rescue. What good did it do a man to have wings, after all, if he couldn’t use them to save the woman he loved? As Rafe had pointed out, though, removing Daphanie bodily from Sosa’s grasp wouldn’t save her from him; not while he still possessed whatever charm he had bound to her energy. Asher needed both Daphanie and what he now suspected was the voodoo doll the
bokor
had concealed in his trouser pocket.

Asher waited anxiously for Rafe to pick his way along the yard’s back wall to the sacristy door. The Felix used the shadows cast by the structure to his advantage, and the growth of moss and ivy in patches along the brick surface contributed to the camouflage of his roseate-spotted coat.

While Asher kept one eye on the man’s progress, most of his attention remained fixed on Daphanie, ready to leap forward on a moment’s notice, plan be damned. If he saw an imminent danger to his woman, he would act, and to hell with the consequences.

Fate allied itself with the good guys.

Everything came to a head in a single instant. After several tense minutes of scattering ash over the exposed dirt and shouting foreign words over the frantic beat of the drums, Sosa threw back his head and Asher could feel the change in the air. The ground seemed to tremble, the vibrations racing up the trunk of the mighty elm. Daphanie screamed, loud and shrill. And Asher’s powerfully acute hearing picked up the soft scratch of feline claws on the antique wood of a darkened door.

Showtime.

Before Rafe even had his paw back on the ground, Asher gave a deafening roar and beat his wings with one powerful motion. The action lifted him from his concealed spot, sending secondary and tertiary branches cracking and tumbling to the earth.