Black Dust Mambo (8 page)

Kallie’s stomach clenched at the mention of food, and she shook her head. “Ugh. No food, but some black coffee would be welcome.” Her parched throat made another request. “And water.”

“Black coffee and water it is,” Augustine said before turning around and tugging his cell phone from an inside pocket in his suit jacket.

Kallie listened as he called someone named Mrs. Fields and asked her to bring Belladonna and Dallas to quarantine station 1. Her gaze dropped to her hands. All the muscles in her chest knotted when she saw Gage’s blood staining her fingers.

“Is there some place I can wash my hands?” she asked, her voice small.

“Just a moment,” the Brit replied as he dialed the kitchen, then placed an order for bruschetta, coffee, and water.

Hands still gripping the chair arms, Kallie pushed herself to her feet. Or tried to, at least. Electricity prickled against her skin, weaving invisible straps of nettled barbs around her torso and her arms and legs, effectively buckling her into the sigil-bordered chair like a death row inmate into Ol’ Sparky. No matter how hard she twisted or tugged, she couldn’t pull free or gain her feet.

Panic blazed a path down her spine. “Hey, you god-damned sonuvabitch! What kind of a stunt you pulling?”

“The bruschetta will help settle your stomach, Ms. Rivière. There’s absolutely no reason for hostility.” Augustine swiveled around to face her, dark brows knitted, expression stern.

“I’m not talking about the goddamned bruschetta.” Kallie glared at him, serving him up dead a thousand different ways as she continued her struggle to free herself from the chair.

Augustine’s expression went blank. “Are you actually unable to get out of that chair?”

“As if you don’t know, you goddamned bastard,” she snarled. “Let me go!”

“What an intriguing impossibility,” Augustine said, his voice a near whisper. “Those sigils are meant to trap and hold magic, spells, potions, items.” His gaze locked with Kallie’s. “Not people.”

“Yeah, well, clearly you’re goddamned wrong.” The electric tingling intensified the more she struggled. Her fingers went numb. “Let. Me. Go.”

“No, I am
not
wrong,” the Brit said. “I carved those sigils myself. To trap magic. People
perform
magic, Ms. Rivière; they
craft
it and
shape
it.
Command
it. But human bodies don’t harbor magic. Don’t carry it pooled inside the deep wells of their hearts. Nor does it snap along the synapses of their brains or pulse through their veins. At least, that’s the case with
human
bodies.”

Kallie went still, her heart hammering against her ribs. “What are you saying?”

Tilting his head, Augustine stared at her. “What
are
you?” he asked.

T
EN
W
ITH
N
ONE TO
G
IVE

Layne stood beside the gurney he’d parked in the spacious bathroom and washed the blood from Gage’s face and body with warm soapy water. He drew his washcloth along his clan-brother’s stiffening limbs in gentle swipes. He cleaned Gage’s blue-ink-tattooed dark skin until it glistened beneath the room’s overhead lights.

But despite the soap’s clean scent, he still caught the faint, nostril-pinching stink of decay. Scrub all he wanted, he’d never be able to wash
that
away. Just like he couldn’t scrub, bargain, or magic away Gage’s death.

Nor could he turn back time. Or stop the fucking endless litany of what-ifs.

If only the nightmare had awakened him sooner.

If only he’d run his breathless dash through the hotel halls to Kallie Rivière’s room faster.

If only he’d talked Gage out of the trip to New Orleans in the first place.

Layne whirled and, ignoring the molten pain the movement cost him, hurled the wadded-up washcloth across the room with all he had, a fastball with heat. It hit the wall with a splat, then slid down to the slate floor.

Why the hell had he had the nightmare anyway—a warning of what was to come—if it made no difference? What the
fuck
?

Gage runs in a full-steam-ahead lope past a statue of a man on a rearing horse, his breath rasping in his throat, sweat beading his forehead. Manicured grass cushions his footfalls as he races through the black-iron-fenced square, the spires of a white cathedral looming ahead of him. He tosses a look over his shoulder, panic gleaming in his eyes.

But Gage needs to look
up.
The sky bursts into flame, rippling fiery shadows across the statue and the cathedral. Gage slows to a stop and looks up just as a fireball comets through what remains of the night and slams into the earth with a ground-shaking
whoomph.

The statue, the cathedral, and Gage cease to exist. And New Orleans burns.

Even with dreams brimming with omens and warnings, he’d been unable to save Gage. Just like he’d been unable to save his sister.

“Hold that thieving. lying nomad bitch down, boys. Got a few lessons to teach her after we finish stomping her thieving nomad buddy.”

Layne’s breath caught roughly in his throat as pain shivved his heart, the tip scraping against his soul.
Not now. This won’t help anything. Take care of Gage.

Drawing in a careful breath, Layne pushed away his last memories of Poesy and the shit-kicking, mouth-breathing squatters who’d murdered her in a Winn-Dixie parking lot. He walked over to the washcloth and picked it up with shaking hands. Then he stood there for several long moments, eyes burning, waiting for his hard-pounding pulse to slow and quiet. Once it had, he turned around and walked back to the gurney.

Walked back to all that remained of his best friend and drinking buddy, his
draíocht-brúthair,
the man who’d saved him and his sanity after he’d handed himself over to his dead sister as her Vessel.

Gage kisses Layne’s lips, tender and slow, his own salty with tears. Kisses Poesy good-bye. Poesy kisses him back.

Layne swung the gurney around so he could angle the head of it toward the bowl of the sink, gritting his teeth against the pain in his chest—a distracting physical ache he welcomed. The sweet scent of peaches filled the air as he shampooed Gage’s curls.

“You were right about Kallie’s eyes, bro,” Layne murmured. “Just like you said—hyacinths in sunlight. You were right about a few of her other attributes too.” He laughed, the sound just a little rough. “Woman don’t take shit, and, bro, those curves. Man.” He shook his head, the weight of his tied-back dreads sweeping against his back. Filling the bathroom cup with warm water, he rinsed the shampoo from Gage’s hair.

But if she’s a murderer . . .

He used soft white towels to dry the last of the water from Gage’s body; then he dried his clan-brother’s hair with the bathroom’s built-in blow-dryer, finger-combing the blue-black curls as he went. But even clean and groomed, the usual lustrous gleam in Gage’s hair was missing—drained away with his blood and his life. And his soul.

Layne pushed the gurney and its burden out of the bathroom and back into the room proper. He walked over to the dresser, his gaze falling on the brochure for the French Quarter ghost tour that Gage had picked up a day or so ago.

“Come with, bro?”

“Sure, what the hell. When in Rome or wherever . . .”

Layne’s throat closed. A muscle flexed in his jaw. He yanked open the top drawer and dug through the clothes inside.

“When my time comes, I wanna be cremated. Spread my ashes on the dawn, bro.”

“Poetic. But you’re talking like I’m gonna outlive you, man. Hello, Vessel here.”

“Good point, bro. So how do you wanna be sent off?”

“Hmmm. How about firing me into the night sky from a catapult?”

“You wanna be wearing anything during that catapult flight?”

“Buck naked. Fireworks up my ass.”

“You got it, bro. I wanna be wearing my
TOLDJA!
T-shirt and my greasiest jeans. Should make me burn like a fucking torch.”

“You got it, man. Wan’ another beer?”

Layne tossed shirt after shirt onto the floor until he’d emptied the drawer. Gage hadn’t packed his
TOLDJA!
shirt, or maybe he’d already worn it. Layne went to the dirty-clothes trash bag and dumped out the contents. Crouching, he pawed through wrinkled tees, jeans, boxers, and smelly socks. Not there.

“Fuck,” he muttered. Rubbing his jaw with one hand as though he could coax an idea from deep within the bone, he looked around the room. Gage’s sketch pad and several Sharpies lay on the table beside Layne’s laptop.

Arm braced against his ribs, he stood, and returned to the dresser. Fetching a white tee from his drawer, he took it over to the table and scrawled
TOLDJA!
on it with a black Sharpie. Good enough.

And as for a pair of greasy jeans, Layne scooped up from the dirty-clothes pile the ones that Gage had been wearing when they’d ridden in from Florida. Again, good enough.

Dressing Gage—black boxers, socks, jeans, and new
TOLDJA!
tee—took the better part of an hour and left Layne drenched in sweat. Pain sawed at his sternum like a broken-toothed chainsaw. Exhaustion burned through his muscles. A part of him was tempted to call it a morning and crawl back into bed. But just part. And only tempted.

Layne leaned over Gage and kissed his cold forehead, stroking his thumb along Gage’s clean curls. Then, straightening, he went to the bed and yanked off the bedspread. He draped it over Gage’s body.

Layne stripped and hit the shower, scrubbing his exhaustion and sweat away with the hotel’s tiny bar of perfumed soap, shaving his face, the hot water doing little to ease the kinks from his muscles. Once he was dressed again in jeans and a black Inferno tee, he sat at the table and strapped on his scuffed and flame-painted scooter boots.

Hopefully, Mc Kenna had learned where Kallie Rivière had gone or where she’d been taken if Augustine had caught and detained her. If not, Layne’s course of action would be straight-forward—he planned to ask Basil Augustine for her whereabouts. His gut told him that Kallie was innocent of Gage’s murder. But someone wanted her dead—
more
than dead—and if he could figure out why, then he’d have Gage’s killer.

Boots on, Layne rose and walked to the closet. He slipped his leather jacket free of its hanger and eased it on, wincing at the pain the movement jabbed through his broken ribs. Kinda warm for leather, but he wanted the Glock and the knives concealed in its pockets and attached to its lining. The knives, most of all.

Once he’d found the bastard who’d killed Gage, he’d finish things like he had in Mississippi after he’d healed enough from his beating to walk out of the hospital. He’d hunted, pounding the pavement and turning over every moss- and lichen-furred stone, until he’d found the shit-kicking mouth-breathing squatters. Every last fucking one of them.

Each had died hard and slow and messy, drenched in their own steaming blood and weeping for mercy from a man who had none to give. That part of Layne had died with Poesy.

After checking the magazine in his Glock and chambering a round, Layne flipped on the safety, then tucked the gun into the front of his jeans near the left hip and underneath his Inferno tee. He’d meet up with Mc Kenna and find out how her talk with Frost had gone; then he’d start his search for Gage’s killer and the hoodoo beauty’s would-be killer. First stop—Basil Augustine’s office.

On his way to the door, Layne paused beside the gurney and squeezed Gage’s comforter-draped shoulder. “Be seeing you, man,” he whispered, knowing he wouldn’t—his best friend was well and truly gone.

Layne reached inside his jacket, the well-worn leather creaking, and drew a finger along the smooth hilt of one of the knives buckled against the lining. He felt a measure of razor-edged calm steal in through his fingertip. A promise to himself.

For Gage.

Layne strode from the room.

E
LEVEN
A
SHOWER OF
W
HITE
S
PARKS

“What the hell do you
mean
‘what am I’?” Blowing hair out of her face, Kallie glared at Augustine, wishing she could slap his perplexed but oh-so-curious expression from his goddamned aristocratic face. “At least I know what
you
are—a goddamned lying sonuvabitch. Let. Me. Go.”

“That’s what I’m endeavoring to do. But I need you to calm down and hold still.”

“
You
calm down and hold still.”

Augustine rolled his eyes. “Really, Ms. Rivière, that’s not helping the situation.”

“Meaning I’m making too big of a fuss for your taste, you lying bastard?”

Augustine pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Fuss away, then. When you’ve tired of it, then perhaps we can work to get you free.”

Stupid Brit. He sounded almost reasonable. Of course,
he
could afford to sound reasonable. He wasn’t trapped in a goddamned chair, now was he?

Kallie squirmed and twisted and strained, but remained right where she was. The electric prickling had shifted into a deep-bone thrumming. Pain pounded at her temples like fists against shutters. White light flared through her mind.

She stands beside the bayou’s cypress-shadowed waters, a gleaming knife clenched in one hand, a red candle cupped in the other. The mingled scents of roses and cinnamon curl into the air as the anointed wax melts, trickling hot over her fingers. In the darkness behind her, the rhythmic and steady throb of palm-slapped drums echoes through the night.

Ripples arrow along the bayou’s green surface as a gator glides toward the bank. But her gaze seeks the shadow flitting among the live oaks and cypress on the bayou’s other side, a man-shaped shadow that drops from upright to all fours. A shadow that lopes in easy, four-pawed grace across the sawgrass, moonlight pooled in its gleaming silver eyes.

The vision vanished in a shower of white sparks. Blinking, pulse racing, Kallie looked down at her hands, half expecting to see red wax hardening on her fingers.

Cold fear corkscrewed around Kallie’s heart.
What the hell was that?

“Ms. Rivière? Did you hear me?”

Kallie shifted her gaze to Augustine. “What?”

The illusionist folded his arms over his chest and arched an eyebrow. “I asked if you were wearing any charms or talismans. Any magically inked tattoos?”

“Oh.” Kallie quit struggling long enough to look down at her bathrobe-covered chest and realized that, even though her pendants were still in place, her red flannel mojo bag was missing—most likely it had fallen off during all the enthusiastic getting-to-know-you tumbling she and Gage had done the night before. She also noticed that she’d managed to flail around enough in her attempts to wrench free of the chair to loosen up and part her bathrobe. At the moment, Augustine was not only getting an eyeful of her thighs and the vee of red lace panties between them, but of her red lace bra and the pushed-up cleavage it created.

Kallie tried to pull her hands free of the chair arms so she could close her robe, but nada. Still stuck. “Stupid robe,” she muttered. “Maybe my pendants are the problem. They’re for protection—gifts from my aunt.”

“Well, that would qualify as magicked, but mild magic,” Augustine murmured, studying the chair. “Let’s remove them, shall we?”

“Okay.” Kallie bowed her head to give Augustine better access to the clasps. He leaned over her, brushed her hair aside, and then unhooked and removed her pendants.

“Try to get up now,” he said, stepping back.

But the thrumming still vibrated through Kallie’s bones and veins, buzzed her thoughts. She attempted to lift her hands. Nothing. She blew her breath out in frustration. “Goddammit.”

“Very intriguing. You should be able to get up,” Augustine said, eyeing the chair.

Kallie realized that the Brit actually
was
perplexed, and that unnerved her. “You really don’t have anything to do with this, do you?” she asked.

“Ah, the light finally dawns,” he replied, gray eyes glinting. “Have you finished with your tantrum?”

“I can always start another just for you, asshole,” Kallie said, wishing she could flip him off and/or knuckle another right hook into his jaw.

A smirk angled across Augustine’s lips. “I have no doubt of that, Ms. Rivière. But it won’t be necessary.” One arm braced against the other, he stroked his chin thoughtfully as he studied her or the chair or both.

“Okay, so now what? How are you going to get me out of this chair?”

“I’m going to search you to make certain you don’t have any other charms. Well, you
do
possess ample charms, Ms. Rivière—physical ones, at least, and certain to delight most males—but I’m referring to—”

Most
males? Hmmm. “The magical ones, yeah, yeah.”

“I’m hoping you won’t force me to muzzle you à la Hannibal Lecter?”

Kallie rolled her eyes. “Just search me already. Christ.” Augustine’s hands slid along her bathrobe-blanketed sides, his fingers probing the material. She caught a whiff of vanilla and frankincense from his oil-anointed cigarettes. His hand dipped into her left hip pocket, then into her right. “Aha.”

He pulled a blue chamois bag from the pocket’s depths. A
gris-gris
bag. He held it up for Kallie to see. “Intriguing sigil, but not one I’m familiar with.”

“It’s a
vévé,
” Kallie said. Stitched into the bag was a heart framed by coiled snakes on either side and decorated with various symbols of the
loa
. “Marie Laveau’s talisman for protection.” And one of Belladonna’s favorites.

She must’ve slipped it into the pocket when she handed me my robe.

Kallie tried to stand, hoping against hope that, despite the still-present thrumming, the
gris-gris
bag had been the problem. But she remained right where she was—stuck in the goddamned fricking chair. She looked at Augustine. “Now what?”

“We resort to desperate experimentation.”

Augustine leaned forward and grasped Kallie’s upper arms with strong fingers. The deep-bone thrumming quieted, returned to a skin-prickling tingle. The Brit murmured a phrase in what sounded like Latin or Greek.

“What are you say—” Her words trailed off as another shower of white sparks filled her vision; then the invisible straps binding her fell away, vanishing along with the electric prickling against her skin. She bolted to her feet and practically teleported across the room.

Augustine stepped back from the now-empty chair and turned around. He regarded Kallie with a speculative expression. “Why is it, I wonder, that my spell to release magicked
items
from the nullifying power of the sigils released
you
?”

“Because you trapped me there and only fooled me into thinking you hadn’t,” Kallie said, rearranging and rebelting her robe. She smoothed the pink terry cloth into place. “Or maybe it took a moment for the
gris-gris
mojo to wear off.”

Augustine looked unconvinced. “Must be quite a powerful talisman to have kept you in that chair. Normally, the chair would’ve rendered the bag useless, not trapped its wearer.”

Kallie shrugged. “Belladonna knows her shit.”

“I have no doubt, but I can’t help but wonder what would happen if you sat down in the chair again
without
the bag.”

White-hot pain pounded at Kallie’s temples and uneasiness twisted through her guts. Damned hangover. “Wonder all you want. I’m still not convinced you ain’t playing games.” She held out her hand for her pendants.

“I assure you that I’m not, Ms. Rivière.” Augustine gave her back the
gris-gris
bag, then coiled the pendants and their chains into the palm of her hand. “Perhaps you might indulge me? For curiosity’s sake?”

“If you’re so goddamned curious, plant your own ass in that chair. I’m not going anywhere near it again.” Kallie put her pendants back on, fastening the clasps with practiced ease.

“Excuse me? Are you saying you won’t go anywhere near my
ass
again?”

“No! The goddamned chair.”

An amused smile quirked up the corners of Augustine’s mouth. “Ah.”

A polite knock sounded at the door. “Room service.”

“My bruschetta and coffee,” Kallie said, pleased with the interruption. She tucked the
gris-gris
bag back into her pocket.

Augustine looked at her for a moment, as if he was considering tossing her into the chair again; then he nodded. “Indeed. Let’s get you fed and settled then, shall we?”

“Let’s.”

Augustine strode to the door, unlocked it, and swung it open. A young woman with café-au-lait skin and platinum-blonde curls walked into the room, a plastic dome-covered tray in her hands. She looked familiar and Kallie figured she’d probably delivered food to her and Gage the night before; the fruit, cheese, and bread platter that had turned out to be his final meal. Kallie blinked, eyes burning.

Still holding the doorknob, Augustine looked at the woman from over his shoulder. “Rosette,” he said, his voice mystified. “You also work in the kitchens?”

“Only today,
m’sieu,
” she—Rosette—replied. She stopped beside Kallie and placed the tray on the table. She grasped the dome’s knob.

Kallie’s nose wrinkled. Beneath the garlic and tomato and fresh coffee scents, she caught a faint whiff of something off—rotten eggs—maybe from the hall, maybe from Rosette’s pockets. Something that smelled like sulfur.

Alarm prickling along her nerves, Kallie glanced out the partially open door into the hall and spotted boot soles. Her heart springboarded into her throat. Someone was down. Sprawled on the carpet. Her gaze whipped back to Rosette.

Black dust. The HA guards. And facing her—the bitch who’d laid the deadly trick in her bed and killed Gage.

Memory clicked into place and Kallie knew where she’d seen Rosette before: the maid from upstairs, the one holding a vacuum’s handle and staring wide-eyed as she and Belladonna had raced down the hall to Dallas’s prone body.

“Shit! Augustine!”

Rosette tossed aside the plastic dome and scooped up the gun lying beside the plate of bruschetta—a gun Kallie suspected the maid had lifted from one of the drugged and fallen guards. Lips thinned with determination, face pale and beaded with sweat, the maid aimed the gun at Kallie’s forehead with locked and trembling hands.

“Sorry,” she whispered, “but an eye for an eye is never enough.”

Mama turns and faces her, aims the gun carefully between her shaking hands. Her hands shake, but her face is still, resigned.

“Sorry, baby. I ain’t got a choice.”

Blood roaring in her ears, Kallie hooked a hard left into the maid’s nose. Bone crunched beneath her fist.

Blood slicked her knuckles. The maid staggered, the gun wavering in the air, then quickly leveling. Her finger flexed against the trigger.

Time pulsed to a stop.

Rough hands latched onto Kallie’s shoulders, and spun her away. Augustine’s suit jacket whispered against her robe as he twisted his body past hers. Thunder cracked through the room, spiking pain through Kallie’s ears.

Mama pulls the gun’s trigger and the side of Papa’s head explodes in a spray of blood and bone. He slumps down in his chair, a bottle of Abita still in his hand.

“No!” the woman cried.

Augustine grunted. He stumbled against Kallie, slamming her into the wall as he toppled into a boneless heap on the slate floor. The back of Kallie’s skull thumped against the plaster and
into
it. A kaleidoscopic burst of fireworks detonated behind her eyes in a dazzling and dizzying array of color.

Kallie blinked the nauseating sparkles from her vision in time to see the murdering bitch again aim the gun at her forehead.

Mama pulls the trigger again.

Kallie moved without thinking, shoving away from the wall, her adrenaline-amped muscles straining forward with everything she had. She tackled Rosette, and they both hit the floor with a bone-rattling thud. The maid’s breath whoofed out of her lungs. A second round of fireworks dazzled Kallie’s vision. Then another ear-piercing peal of thunder exploded through the room.

Mc Kenna slapped the button for the fifteenth floor, the three-inch-long pile of silver bracelets encircling her wrist clinking musically. Muzak—a fast-paced zydeco that sounded like a kissing cousin to an Irish reel—spilled from ceiling speakers as the elevator doors
schunk
ed shut.

“So the whole clan is coming to see Gage off?” Layne asked. He leaned against the mirrored back wall, hands shoved into the pockets of his leather jacket. A button she’d given him reading raised by wolves was pinned to its right lapel, and a button underneath it asked: NO STRAITJACKETS?? WHAT KIND OF PLACE IS THIS??

“Aye. Yer mum figures fifteen hours, give or take, fer travel. They’ll be here in the wee hours.”

Layne nodded, and Mc Kenna caught a heart-tugging whiff of sweet orange and musky sandalwood from his unknotted dreads. An intimate scent that reminded her of sleeping tucked into the hollow of his arm, her head on his chest.

“And Frost understood the situation?” he asked. “Aye.

Yer mum said nothing of Gage’s soul.”

“Good.”

Layne seemed to study the red digital numbers ticking away each floor they passed, the skin beneath his eyes smudged with shadows, his jaw tight. Despite his casual posture, his cable-tight body almost seemed to thrum with coiled tension.

Her heart ached just looking at him. She’d seen him like this before. Ignoring his body’s pain and hiding the anguish tearing him apart inside.

Poesy’s gone, Layne. She died on the way to hospital. There was nocht anyone could do, luv.

He’d survived a beating that, by all rights, he shouldn’t have. He’d survived the murder of his big sister, the sister who’d taught him everything she knew about running cons for quick cash from squatters.