Chapter 7

 

“Well, that’s fucking fantastic.”

What is?

“He was the only one who had any real answers. But instead we got riddles.”

He just said if you have eyes to see…

“He was quoting Jesus. Priests do that shit all the time.”

Isabelle chuckled. That might be, but I think the point is that the answer shouldn’t be hard to find. We have to find a way to summon Marie Laveau, or at least find her, so she can help us restore Legba.

“Brilliant one, Nancy Drew. You know? I hadn’t figured that out.”

Not a mystery, Annabelle. That’s just what he told us.

“I was being sarcastic… never mind.” I rolled my eyes. I expected riddles and shit like that from the Loa, from pretty much anyone in the Voodoo world. But a priest—aren’t they just supposed to tell you like it is, give you the answers you need? I probably shouldn’t have been as annoyed as I was. But when finding out I’ve been chosen, and had no say in the matter, to become the new Voodoo queen, and the current one—who was dying but had to be involved in helping me become the next one—was off playing some kind of bullshit game of hide-and-seek while bloodthirsty vampires were running amok in the city and a devilish Loa was trying to wage a war against pretty much everything good on God’s green earth because he wants something I have… well, I’ll just say adding the pressure of jumping through hoops can make a girl a little testy.

These were the moments when I needed Pauli… He’d probably crack a joke about “testes” that would make me smile. I needed to smile right now. While Isabelle is great for a lot of things, comic relief is not one of them.

I bit my lip. “The door behind the desk, the one where Legba used to chain himself up at night to prevent Kalfu from running free…” Not a bad place to start.

I looked at the door. I tried to draw in some magica—this was going to take some force. If it was meant to keep Kalfu in when he and Legba shared a body, it would probably be more than effective at keeping me out.

The magica fizzled out.

“Did you just cut me off?”

Why don’t you try the doorknob first?

I rolled my eyes. “It’s going to be lock—” The knob turned, and it opened. “Well, fuck me!”

I’m already inside of you… I’m afraid in our relationship, that’s the closest we’re going to get.

I snorted. Okay, maybe I spoke a bit too soon about Isabelle’s lack of a sense of humor. She could have one from time to time—provided it came at a moment that was as good as her saying “I told you so.”

This place is creepy…

I nodded. Isabelle was right. It looked like some kind of dungeon—shackles on the wall. No whips or ball gags. Not that kind of dungeon. This was more… medieval. “I can’t believe Legba used to lock himself up in this thing every night. I wonder how he got out. If he could just let himself out, it would kind of defeat the purpose.”

Someone had to let him out every morning… after sunrise.

I scratched my head. I used to walk past this place each morning before my six o’clock training with Oggie. It was right around sunrise, though truthfully, since we couldn’t see the sun in Vilokan, we were more dependent on clocks to know the time of day than most people. You don’t realize how much you depend on nature to tell you how early or late it is until you’re stuck in an underground city and can’t see the sun. Chances were if someone was coming here on a daily basis to let Legba out, I’d have seen someone coming or going. Not a guarantee. I mean, maybe whoever was doing it was just waiting until all was clear, so no one would notice. Not a likely thing, particularly since in those days the old staircase leading to his office would rock back and forth making the worst of sounds anytime someone went up or down it. And I was never the only person walking through here in the mornings.

“I wonder if there’s another access point back here somewhere. A hidden door maybe.”

Or not a literal door, but…

“You thinking a portal?”

Remember before? Aida-Wedo said that Legba had created a portal in this room.

“One that led to the slave quarters on our property.”

And Kalfu’s veve was there, which meant it was here, too. What if Marie Laveau was the one who came to free Legba each morning?

“Presuming she didn’t have Aida-Wedo’s aspect, she’d need a portal of some kind. One that Aida-Wedo might have set up.”

Perhaps that’s one reason Aida-Wedo was so intent on us coming here?

I shook my head. “Why wouldn’t she just tell us what we needed to find? The Loa make everything so much more difficult than it needs to be.”

“Well, child,” Aida-Wedo’s voice spoke from behind me. I jumped, not expecting her to show up. She stood there, gripping a burlap sack of some kind. Whatever she held was roughly the size of a softball. “If I told you, you’d never have found the priest. You’d never know what he had to tell you. And in truth, I did not know this was your path until now. Only that there was a path here and that it was yours to find.”

I rolled my eyes. “How long have you been watching us?”

“Long enough, child.”

“And is there another portal? Something you might have set up here for Marie Laveau? Something that could take us to wherever she is?”

“Yes, child, the veve you seek is beneath the floor. Hidden from plain sight but there, no less, and just as powerful.”

“Clever,” I said. “How do we use it?”

“You cannot travel through the gateway by normal means. It was meant only for one who bears the likeness of Papa Legba or the queen herself to access.”

“Pauli could do it,” I said. “Since he got Nix, the water elemental, he can shapeshift.”

“But he does not possess the essence of either Laveau or Legba. He does not have their bones, their marrow…”

I bit my lip. “So we’re still basically screwed.”

“No, child,” Aida-Wedo said as she removed her bony necklace from her neck. Aida-Wedo always wore weird shit—but this one, which she’d worn only recently, was amongst the creepiest. The bones of a human hand dangled in the front, as if a skeleton were gripping at her chest. Other bones were strung along some kind of string or wire. I wasn’t sure which bones these were. I never paid enough attention to those classes in school. But they weren’t large. Probably taken from the other hand, or the feet. Aida-Wedo began placing the necklace over my neck.

I recoiled and backed away. “Ew!”

“These are the bones of Legba’s host, child. If you hope to pass through the veve…”

Isabelle was laughing in my head—she didn’t mind “gross” stuff so much. She kind of reveled in it. But me? Look, I could get my hands dirty. I’d seen my share of blood. But when it came to dead people and their remains—as if I hadn’t had to encounter more than my share of that lately, anyway—I didn’t have the stomach for it.

I took a deep breath and lowered my head. “Pauli is going to have a wise crack or two about this.”

“He’ll call you a trendsetter, child.”

“Dear Lord, I hope I don’t make this a trend. Wearing human bones? Only if the spring catalogers declare homicide in for the season.”

Aida-Wedo grinned slightly—not something she did often, but it was oddly comforting to see. Her smile expanded—giving me a rare view of her slightly yellowed chompers—as she reached into her burlap sack.

“Holy shit!” I screamed. “I mean, Legba mentioned it in his letter…”

In Aida-Wedo’s hand was a shrunken head—but not just any head. The head of Legba’s former host, the man he’d named as Pierre Lescarbot. But when I saw it, all I saw was Legba. It was the face I knew him by, only about half the size and scrunched up as if he’d just eaten a lemon. Aida-Wedo extended her hand—the one holding Legba’s head—to me.

I hesitated and took it, gripping it by a tuft of hair which, now that his head was smaller, made the hair seem longer than it had been before. “I’m always trying to get a head…”

Aida-Wedo cocked her head and pressed her lips together.

“Get it… a head… ahead. It’s a joke.”

Her expression didn’t change.

“Never mind.”