Chapter 5

 

The night before hadn’t exactly been the escape I was looking for. The last thing I wanted to think about was death, but what I’d learned about this place, how these Merfolk were basically sacrificing their youth so they could preserve whatever they had left of a society as long as possible… the specter of death was haunting me even more than before. But now it was less a sense of mourning and more a resolve—I wasn’t going to let what happened to Vilokan happen here. Especially not at the hands of some ghastly bitch who commands zombie sharks.

The Merfolk didn’t have beds. Instead they had sleeping bags woven together with seaweed. Not the most comfortable things in the world, but it prevented your arms and legs from flailing around in the water while you slept. It also came with straps and hooks that connected to loops on the floor to prevent it from floating away at night. I’d slept on water beds before, but this was something else entirely. Not uncomfortable, exactly, but certainly unfamiliar. That alone meant I probably didn’t sleep more than a few minutes, scattered here and there, throughout the night. If it was really night at all. No sunlight down here. No mechanism for telling time. I just sort of followed the lead of everyone else at the club who seemed to think it had gotten late. Not to mention, I hadn’t slept since everything went down in Vilokan. When I woke up the day before in my bunk in the first-year dormitory, the last place I thought I’d wake up next was in a mysterious city somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. You couldn’t make shit like this up. But that was my life as of late. Weirder and more unpredictable by the day.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead!” a familiar voice said, full of southern twang.

I rubbed my eyes. Joni stood there, looking gorgeous as ever. Now, no longer in shell-clad armor, she was wearing what might have been the skimpiest seaweed bikini she could possibly assemble without violating any decency laws. If there was such a thing down here. She’d always been something of a southern belle—conservative, polite, and modest. This Joni… something was different about her. She’d really come out of her shell.

Joni! Isabelle exclaimed. Isabelle knew Joni before she’d been soul-fused to me. It was for Joni’s sake—to warn Joni about what Isabelle’s sister, Messalina, had intended to do to her and her family—that Isabelle’s ghost reappeared in the realm of the living to begin with. It was their tale, thwarting Messalina and such, that culminated in my family being attacked, leaving Isabelle’s soul fused with mine.

Joni cocked her head. “Isabelle awake in there?”

I yawned. “She’s unbelievably thrilled to see you.”

Joni grinned. “You were pretty incredible out there yesterday.”

“Not incredible enough. I’m sorry about Evan.”

Joni pressed her lips together. “Loss is something the people here have come to live with.”

“Is that why you left? Why you’re here? And how did you get a tail, anyway?”

Joni laughed. “Didn’t realize we were playing twenty questions.”

“Well, you up and left. Broke Roger’s heart. Then all we heard from him is that you went ‘missing’ and he wouldn’t talk about it. Especially not after he started seeing Ashley.”

Joni cocked her head. “Roger and Ashley are dating?”

I nodded.

“I’ll be. Not like I shouldn’t have seen it coming. She’s a pretty girl, and she’s had eyes for him so long as I can remember.”

“Still fairly new. But he’s been training her. He was, anyway, before she joined me at the Academy.”

“Some place, that Academy, ain’t it?”

“It was…”

Joni nodded. “My condolences, honey. Agwe told me…”

I nudged Pauli, who had tied himself in a knot and was still trying to sleep. “This guy here. He saved a lot of lives down there.”

“Still, losing that much life, and in such a short amount of time. We’ve had to live with that here, too. You never really do wrap your mind around it.”

“I just feel numb. Sounds crazy, but the only time I broke down and cried was when I realized my dog had probably died in Vilokan, too.”

Joni nodded. “Lives lost is tragic. But when they aren’t people close to us, it’s easy to kind of push it to the back of your mind. People die every day, ya know? But when you lose someone close to you, even a dog, it becomes a personal loss. I get it.”

I wish she never left…

I smiled. “Isabelle wishes you never left. What in the world happened when you moved anyway? How’d you end up here?”

Joni shook her head. “Met a boy. Fell in love. Broke his heart. Got into some deep shit of the supernatural variety. Met a Fomorian. Came here to try and sort some stuff out. I guess I just never left. You can really lose yourself in this place. The beauty of it. The culture…”

I nodded. “But what about the people you left behind? Didn’t you stop to think about how they still needed you?”

Joni nodded. “Every day, honey. I still do. But after a while it just becomes too late, ya know? I did lose myself in this place. I became someone else. The old me could never go back. And when I saw how much I was needed here…”

“Speaking of that, do you think I could help with that? I mean, I can actually kill those sharks.”

“Can’t kill what’s already dead, honey.”

“You know what I mean. With my soul weapon, I can send them to the realm of the dead. Get them out of your hair. With me, you might actually be able to beat this Anne Bonny chick.”

Joni grinned. “You’re here for a quest, Annabelle. To recover my husband’s trident.”

“Did you just say husband?”

Joni smiled widely. “Yes, I married Admiral Agwe.”

I scrunched my brow. “You realize he’s married to Erzulie, too, right?”

“Who isn’t married to that bitch?” Joni said, chuckling. “To love a Loa means accepting some things that aren’t ordinary. But there is no love between Loa. Not really. Their marriage is more like business than romance.”

“Still, it’s hard to imagine…”

“This isn’t about me, is it? It’s about you and Ogoun.”

“How’d you know about that!”

“My husband said Ogoun kissed you, just before you left with him.”

I almost blushed remembering it. A slight grin split my face. “Yeah… that happened. Was the first time, though.”

“And you’re reluctant because he’s married to Erzulie, too?”

“Amongst other reasons. Isabelle isn’t exactly thrilled with the idea either. And she has her own boyfriend.”

Joni scrunched her brow. “How in the world does that even begin to work?”

I laughed. “The boy she’s seeing, he’s really good with herbs and whatnot. Concocted a formula that would prevent those horrendous headaches I’d get after I let her take the reins and ended up back in charge.”

“Still,” Joni said. “Has to be weird. Both of you seeing different guys. Each of you having to experience…”

“Trust me, I know. It’s downright awkward at times. I guess we’ve come to accept that we’re either going to live our lives loveless, or we’ll have to tolerate a little discomfort now and then for the other’s sake.”

“Sounds like you two have figured out a way to coexist.”

I laughed. “We don’t bicker as much as we used to. But don’t get me wrong, we’re still as different as the night is from the day.”

Talk about the understatement of the century…

“And Isabelle concurs,” I continued. “The one thing we might actually agree on is the fact that we disagree about everything.”

Joni laughed. “Your boa friend over there. Is he all right?”

I nudged Pauli again. He uncurled, his body limp.

“Shit, he’s having one of his visions again.”

“Visions?” Joni asked.

“His real body is inhabited by Kalfu.”

“Oh, he’s the one…”

I nodded. “Most of his soul was transferred to the snake. But there’s something that connects him. Every now and then he gets glimpses of whatever Kalfu is doing. Just need to give him a little jolt of magica to wake him up.”

“I can help with that,” Joni said. “I just need a taste and I can amplify it. Keep what else you have in your reserves.”

I nodded. My eyes glowed a little, and Joni inhaled—her blue eyes changed to green. Joni placed her hand on Pauli, and a jolt of jade energies flooded his boa constrictor frame. He jerked, curled into a ball, and then started swimming around the room like he was out of his mind.

“Holy shit! Bleh! Bleh! Ack! Thank you for getting me out of there! Oh my god!”

“Pauli,” I said, “calm down. What did you see?”

“Some ceremony. In the woods. Kalfu was with a bunch of Bokors. We drank blood… real blood… I could taste it. I’ve had a lot of bodily fluids in my mouth, even vampire blood, but this stuff… ugh…”

What kind of blood? Isabelle asked.

“I think it was goat blood. Had to be. There was the body of one burning over the fire.”

“At least it wasn’t human…”

“We should tell my husband about this,” Joni said. “He might understand what it means.”