The Taking (2 page)

Camille Comeaux lit the candles on either side of the French doors to the gallery, igniting taper after taper and watching with pleasure as the flames cast dancing shadows on the wall behind, framing the doors with a moving, undulating arch of darkness.

“Don’t light too many,” Felix said from behind her, his hands coming to rest on her shoulders. “You’ll risk a fire.”

Enjoying the press of his strong fingers on her bare shoulders, Camille lit another candle and still one more, pleased with the effect, excited by the danger. If the draperies caught on fire, it would only be fitting. Conjuring the dead deserved drama.

“I want to be sure it works,” she told him. She wanted that more than anything.

She knew that Felix didn’t understand her drive, her need, but then she knew he was using her, the same as she was using him. He wanted her wealth, and perhaps her body, while she wanted—needed—his power. His magic.

“It will work,” he said, leaning around her and snuffing the last two candles she had lit, squeezing the flames between the tips of his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t perform any ritual that isn’t successful.”

It was easy to believe such confidence, and Camille studied his profile, pleased with her choice of voodoo practitioner. Daring, bold, and successful, Felix was also singularly beautiful, with the thick dark hair and rich skin tone that revealed the African heritage of his mother’s family, along with the narrow, aquiline nose of his French father.

At some point soon he would take her virginity along with the vast amounts of her money he had already acquired, she knew that. Perhaps even tonight. Regardless of when it happened, it was inevitable, given the course she had set them upon, and she could not regret it. The future had been altered irrevocably when her entire family had perished in the fever four months earlier, and every day, every decision, had led her here to this moment.

This was the night she would call forth her mother and father and sisters from the grave.

Felix stared at her, and she stared back, a smile playing about her lips. There was a question in his brilliant blue eyes, a doubt that she could see the ritual through to the end, and it made her laugh out loud. She had no doubts, none whatsoever, and she would do whatever was necessary to speak to her family, to express her love, her loneliness, her grief and desperation.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Perhaps he thought she was mad. Perhaps she was. Certainly twelve months earlier she would never have imagined that she would be standing in her parents’ bedroom
en chemise
with a man such as Felix, the expensive chest of drawers from France converted to an altar for his implements to aid in the ritual. A year ago, Camille had been a pleasant, content young woman of wealthy means, her days busy with embroidery, playing her instrument, receiving callers with her mother, and doing acts of charity in the hospitals of less salubrious neighborhoods.

But she was no longer that girl. She was a woman now, a manic angry woman with no one to love her, and no one to live for. Camille grabbed the open wine bottle off the altar and drank straight from it, the sweetness sliding down her throat. “I am absolutely certain.”

Felix didn’t hesitate. He closed the distance between them and kissed her, a hot skillful taking of her mouth that had Camille’s head spinning and her body igniting as the candles had. He gripped the back of her head, his tongue tasting and teasing, his thumbs brushing over the front of her chemise, finding her nipples and stroking them.

Camille was always surprised at how good it felt when Felix touched her, how wonderfully free and alive it made her feel. She ran her fingers over his bare chest, excited by the hard muscles, by the power his body contained. Whether it was the wine, or the excitement, or the sexual desire stirring to life, she didn’t know and didn’t care, but she could see through half-closed eyes that the room was in motion, the shadows pressing in and back out again, the furniture crisp and sharp, the candles appearing pliant and alive.

Everything was dark and warm, the yellow glow of the tapers plunging the altar into light, yet leaving the corners of the room black and secretive. Felix slid his tongue across her bottom lip and she shivered, her body aching deep inside, between her thighs. He stepped away and turned his back to her, leaving her breathing hard and reaching up into her hair to pull the pins away, to let the blonde tresses tumble over her shoulders. Her bare feet dug into the rug and she licked her moist lips, the heat from the sultry September night, from the candles, from her own pleasure and excitement, creating a deep flush on her face along with a dewy sheen between her breasts.

When Felix turned around to face her again, he had a snake in his hand, its long brown body wriggling in an attempt to escape, but its captor brandished it high in the air, chanting lowly. Camille hadn’t known about the snake, had never guessed one of the baskets was holding a living reptile, and she gasped. Not from fear, but from excitement. This was right. This was magic.

Felix’s hand moved the snake so skillfully that it looked as if it were dancing, its body moving to a rhythm its master created, a decadent, primitive form of expression. A glance down the length of Felix’s hard chest and past his trousers showed that his bare foot tapped out a beat, and with his free hand he pulled a stick from his pocket and hit the chest of drawers, the sharp rap of the rhythm loud in the closed room. The hand tapped out time, the snake did his dance, Felix’s foot went up and down, but the rest of him held still, a hard, lean body of control.

“Dance for me, Camille,” Felix commanded, his eyes trained upward.

She did, first swaying softly, hands in her loose hair, then closing her eyes and letting her body feel the rhythm.

It started in her feet and worked its way up to her hips, her shoulders, until she was careening to the staccato beat, feeling it from inside her, springing to life, wanting out, needing air to fan the flames.

“You have the power,” he told her. “The magic comes from you. Reach for it.”

It did. She could feel it, boiling up in her body, and she would have it. Camille opened her eyes as she moved, dancing in a pounding circle, her arms reaching up and out, sweat trickling down her back, and she loosened her chemise in a sharp tug at the ribbons, wanting the air, wanting the brush against her bare skin, wanting Felix to see her, wanting to connect with her very essence, the heart of who she was.

Felix brought the snake to her, and where she would normally have recoiled, Camille didn’t flinch or retreat, but danced for Felix while the reptile twisted and turned in front of her. They moved together, and she tore at her chemise with trembling, excited hands until she was completely naked, writhing like the snake, her fingers in her hair.

“You
are
ready,” Felix said.

She was. She was ready for whatever this night would bring.

Regan Henry wanted to leave her husband tonight. She wanted to leave him so desperately that the mere sight of him mingling across the room at his law firm’s Christmas party made her palms twitch, her heart race, and a cold trail of sweat trickle down between her breasts.

Get out.

That’s all she could think, and it took everything in her to not turn around and run from the room.

He wasn’t a bad guy. Some would call him the perfect man, the perfect husband. Attractive, successful, charming.

But perfection demanded perfection, and Regan was exhausted from the effort of trying to live up to that expectation.

When she realized he was making his way to her, a smile on his face as he adjusted his tie, she took a gulp from her glass of wine to fortify herself.

“You could try to smile,” he said, his own smile still in place, the words light and teasing. To anyone around them, it would seem as if he were trying to cheer her up, include her, but Regan heard the censure behind it.

“I have a bit of a headache,” she said, which was the truth. Her temples were throbbing, and a dull pain jabbed above and below her eyes. The room was cold, and she was wearing a sleeveless black cocktail dress. Between the chill and her own stress, every muscle in her body was tense.

“Do you think maybe you should lay off the wine then?” He reached out and took her glass. “That’s your third.”

She wasn’t sure if it was or not, but she felt compelled to argue. “It’s only my second.”

He gave a laugh, which to Regan’s practiced ear held no true amusement. “It’s okay. I’m not criticizing. I knew you were a lush when I met you.”

His voice had a quality when he was displeased that Regan had come to think of as humming. It sounded normal, pleasant, teasing, to most people, but when it took on that light, singsong quality, she knew he was unhappy with her, and God, she was so tired of having her every move, every word, every decision scrutinized and found lacking.

“Three glasses of wine do not make me a lush.”

“So now you’re agreeing it’s three?” He finished off her wine himself, and tucked her hair behind her ear, flicking a finger over the pearl earring he had given her for their first anniversary that October. “Why didn’t you wear your hair up? I like it best that way.”

It was nothing, something a thousand husbands might say to their wives as mere flirtation or playful pouting, but to Regan it was the latest in a litany of disappointments, accusatory glares, and criticisms veiled as suggestions from the man she was supposed to recognize was so much wiser than her. Patronizing words he dropped one by one, like stones of Puritan punishment, letting them settle onto her chest, robbing her of breath, crushing her slowly and painfully. Word after word had pressed, piling on top of one another, paralyzing in their heaviness, rendering her incapable of speech or protest, unable to defend herself, until she knew it was time to leave or lose her voice in her marriage forever.

Shifting her hair out of his touch, she masked her shudder as his fingers fell from her skin. Every touch, every invasion of her personal space, had grown more difficult to endure with each passing day, and it was hard to remember why she had married him, how she could have ever thought herself happy. There was no affection left for him, only the keening and urgent need to flee before she cracked, and lost control.

She was perilously close to it at this goddamn cocktail party.

He rendered a long-suffering sigh next to her. “Fine. Don’t talk to me. Don’t wear your hair up because I like it. Just be a bitch, I don’t care.”

Regan said nothing, digging her fingernails into her palms. She hoped they bled. She hoped breaking open her own flesh and feeling the sharp sting of pain would keep her from screaming, would hold the persistent tears at bay.

“But before you prance over to the bar and get another glass of wine, which I have no doubt you’re about to do, could you put yourself out long enough to do your duty as a hostess at this party?”

Turning her head to stare at her husband, taking in his good-looking and proportionate features, his tidy and stylish blond hair, his elegant and expensive suit, she waited for him to finish. He would tell her which VIP he wanted her to chat with, which pet project of which partner’s wife she was supposed to volunteer to assist with, what invitation for which party she was to extend.

Then she was going to go home to their fabulously trendy condo off Magazine Street and she was somehow going to find the nerve to pack her bags and leave.

He would fight her on it. Dirty. He would twist and bend the truth, manipulate, and threaten with whatever weapons he had at his disposal.

But she had to find the courage to know that no longer mattered.

“You know John’s wife is into all that metaphysical crap and she has that guy here doing voodoo readings as some kind of entertainment. Only no one is getting readings because no one wants to appear to believe in that bullshit. It will make John’s wife, and therefore John, happy if you go and have a reading.”

Regan relaxed her shoulders a fraction. “Sure, I can do that.” It would get her away from her husband and all the mindless chatter of the corporate gathering. “Where is he?”

Retreating into a corner and letting someone tell her she had a financial windfall coming very soon was the perfect way to hide from the party, to regroup and gather herself to get through the rest of the night.

“He’s in the interior courtyard. Don’t worry, you have to pass the bar to get there.”

With that, he dismissed her by turning around and walking away, a smile on his face and his hand out to shake, but not before he put that hand on the small of her back, thumb pressing into her flesh. To anyone watching, a sweet gesture of intimacy, to her, a stamp of his ownership, a tactile reminder that she had let her fear drag this out too long. He expected to touch her, and she cringed at it.

Forgoing the bar out of a childish and pointless defiance, Regan crossed the elegant room, a former residence in the French Quarter turned restaurant and caterer. Her heels, a forty-dollar bargain on sale at a boutique on Chartres, slipped a little on the wood floor when she took the slight step down to the brick courtyard. Teetering, she grabbed the doorway for balance, not daring to look back to see if her husband had seen.