Black Magic Bayou (28 page)

“But I
didn’t
.”

“Listen, we’re going to help you regardless of how it happened. But enough crap. Tell us what happened so we
can
help.”

This time she looked at Cash, and I knew she was debating how much the truth was going to make him hate her. She had summoned a demon and been responsible for at least two deaths, but she was still worried about what her boyfriend thought of her.

What a world.

She turned and withdrew into the empty fortress, and we hesitated before following her. I felt pretty confident this was the real Tansy, but I also didn’t trust her. She
had
called up Gamigan, after all, so it was hard to say what hidden power she might have. I wasn’t about to let my guard down for a second.

I led the way into the building, but Wilder—still in bodyguard mode—was right at my heels, with Cash and Santiago bringing up the rear. A few benches had been installed inside the building for tourists, and she took a seat on one of the stone slabs, burying her face in her hands. Her shoulders trembled for a few moments, and I was about to interrupt her sobfest when she sat upright, wiping tears from her round cheeks with the back of her hand.

It was hard not to feel some sympathy for her. She just looked so damned pitiful.

I had no intention of offering her comfort though, no matter what my humanitarian urges were.

Santiago didn’t care about her story. He was pacing around the interior of the fort, checking the distance between the walls, and then settling on a spot he liked, he pulled a huge bag of salt from his tote and started measuring out a large circle. Wilder, watching him work, stepped out of the way before he was in the middle of the ceremony space. Cash, too, was watching the witch work, but in spite of the confusion in his expression he didn’t ask any questions.

Good, because it would only get weirder from here. Might as well save the questions for when Santiago pulled out the blood and tiger piss.

Or, you know, when we trapped an immortal demon inside a tiny gold statue. That would be a great time to host the Q&A.

“Tansy, you’re not going to get in trouble, okay? There’s nothing we can do to you at this point that will make your situation worse. I’m not going to report you to anyone.”

This might or might not be true depending on what she’d done to Liam, and if it was intentional murder, but I’d wait until later to clarify what I meant. For now I just wanted her to start talking. Dawn would be upon us soon, and I doubted the demon would come out as willingly during the day. We’d also have a much higher chance of running into civilians in the morning light, and no one here wanted bystanders in the mix.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” she insisted.

“I know.” This much I believed. I didn’t know Tansy very well, but from what little I’d seen, I doubted she had a malicious heart.

Whatever she said next would confirm if I was right or not.

“Just tell us what happened,” Wilder urged. He had a knack for putting people at ease, and I hoped his presence might be the thing to get her talking.

She gave Cash one last sorrowful glance, then the floodgates opened. “He talks about you a lot,” she said to me.

Weird place to start. “Me?”

“Yeah, I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it, but he mentions you. Talks about how tough you are, how capable. I started taking this Fundamentals of Paranormal Society class this fall, and he talked about what he’d learned from you.”

Funny how I’d always thought Cash tuned me out when I talked about how stupid those classes were and how wrong the stuff they taught was. Maybe he’d been listening after all.

“We had to do this paper, and we could do it on anything we wanted. I think most people were going with werewolves and vampires, and I figured the library would run out of good material, so I picked something different.”

“Demons?” Wilder asked.

“Witches.” She had pulled her sleeves down over her fingers and tucked her legs up under her like she was settling in for the long haul. “I’d been fascinated with the whole Salem thing as a kid, and I wanted to write about the differences between real witches and the women the Puritans accused of
being
witches.”

The former had powers, the latter were just really unlucky. End of paper.

She went on. “I couldn’t find much in the library on the modern stuff, only a lot of outdated texts about Salem and the Satanic Panic of the eighties, that sort of thing, but the Tulane library didn’t have much on
real
witches.”

A cold knot was building in my stomach because I could already see where this was going.

“So I started looking on the Internet.”

Ding ding ding ding ding.

“Let me guess, you found a ton of pages for Wiccans about using amethyst and rosehip to help with your cramps, or whatever.”

Tansy nodded. “Spiritual New-Agey stuff mainly. At first.”

“At first?”

Wilder had drifted off from the conversation and was walking around the outside of Santiago’s circle. The witch had been busy, laying out herbs and setting candles into place in the ground, though none were lit yet. He’d marked each point of his herb pentacle with a different offering. The jar of blood was still sealed, and the little silver bowl had a lid on. It was hard to make out the others, but I saw bones in a pile at the far point. In the middle of it all was the gold idol. I was impressed with the speed he’d set the whole thing up.

I returned my attention to Tansy.

“I was on a message board, asking people for advice on real history, and someone sent me a link.”

“Who?”

She shrugged. “Some anonymous user. They private messaged me this website address, but it was just like, the numbers? You know?”

“The IP address,” Cash supplied.

“Sure. I went there, and it was all sorts of scans, like pages from an old book. And whoever had scanned them had written notes in the margins. And this one… I guess spell? They were spells I think. It had a note in the margin that said
Repeat these words and you will understand
.”

“That’s it?” I sat on a bench facing her, and Cash continued to pace nervously by her side. “It just said
you will understand
?”

“Yes.”

“And so you read it?”

Her cheeks flushed. “It gets complicated from there. The spell called for me to get a blank notebook and write the words out as I said them. Anyway, I wrote out the whole thing and said the words, and nothing happened. At least not at first. But I left the notebook overnight, and when I came back the next morning, all my writing was gone. I thought someone had maybe torn out the pages, but then I looked at it, and there was one word written on the front page.”

“What word?”

“
Ask
.”

A vessel spell. Fucking hell, someone had given her the keys to invite a demon onto our plane using nothing more than a pen and paper and her ignorance.

“Let me guess, you wrote in some questions, and it started to tell you all sorts of fascinating stuff. I’m guessing it gave you a name—probably someone you could Google—and told you all sorts of historical stuff.”

Tansy’s head snapped up, and she gaped at me. “H-how did you know?”

“Did it ask you for blood?”

Now Tansy looked super spooked, as if I were taking the thoughts out of her mind without her permission. As far as she was concerned,
I
was the demon in this moment.

“Yes,” she said finally.

“You were baited. You put your blood on the pages of the notebook, right? And the blood vanished?”

She was on her feet suddenly, pointing an accusing finger at me. “You can’t possibly know that.”

“Sure I can. I haven’t summoned a demon, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t read about how they sneak across. Someone duped you to help their own cause.” I really wanted to know who had sent Tansy that information, because she wasn’t my villain. Someone
else
had planned all this, and she was their patsy.

“I didn’t think a drop of blood would matter.” Her voice was shaky, and she sat down again. This time Cash took the seat beside her and tried to take her hand. She pulled away and wrapped her arms around herself once more.

“Blood always matters in magic.”

“I know that now.”

“Tell me about Alexandra.”

This was where she broke down completely, tears flowing freely now, her words almost incomprehensible through the sobs. “It wasn’t me,” she said, half-shouting. “I-I woke up covered in blood, and s-she was dead, but I s-swear it wasn’t me.”

Santiago had finished his setup and came to stand beside me. Wilder lurked around the outside of the group, keeping an eye on everything being said and done.

“This was after you put your blood in the journal?” Santiago asked her.

“Y-yes.”

He turned to me, taking me by the arm to pull me closer, and whispered, “It had her by then. She was just a puppet.”

Indeed, the second Tansy had put her blood inside the book, she’d given Gamigan a direct conduit to take her over. At that point she ceased to be Tansy and started being nothing more than a hapless slave for the demon.

“And Laura and Heidi?” I hadn’t told her yet that they were safe because I wanted to see how she’d react.

“I didn’t hurt them.” The sleeves of her shirt were so stretched out they’d started to become flimsy at the cuff. “I think. I-I don’t know. I don’t remember what happened. They j-just vanished, and I knew it was my fault, but I didn’t know why.”

“What about the guy behind the bar?” This was the part that had been driving me mental. There had still been girls living in the house when the bar fight happened. If Gamigan wanted fresh blood, why hadn’t it taken from the obvious sources? Or had her kill off Laura and Heidi?

“What bar?” Cash asked. “What guy behind the bar?”

Santiago, too, looked curious about this. The only people not mystified by this question were Wilder—who had seen the same memory from Carlos’s head—and Tansy herself.

She looked at Cash and whispered, “I’m so sorry.” Her lower lip trembled.

I glanced over to where Wilder was standing, and he moved towards the door in case she decided she was going to make a break for it. We’d need her when Gamigan showed up. Part of the demon was in her now.

“Did you kill him?” I asked.

“I…”

“Tans, no.” Cash shook his head. “You wouldn’t.” For a second I thought his lawyer training was kicking in and he might stop her from saying anything else to implicate her further, but she was already too far gone to look back now.

“I had to.”

We were all quiet. What was the right response to something like that? You either needed to be a sociopath or completely deluded to think you
had
to murder someone, unless they were coming for you guns blazing.

“What happened?” I asked quietly.

“The book. The book told me it would bring back Laura and Heidi. Told me it would leave me alone and everything would be fine. No one would know about Alexandra. It would go away and never bother me again.”

“But it wanted more blood,” I guessed.

“It wanted me to prove how badly I wanted it.”

Santiago sat down beside me, suddenly way more interested in the girl than he’d been before. “It asked you to
shed
blood.”

“Y-yes.”

She’d killed him. She had intentionally killed Liam at the bar and taken the cinder block home as proof to show the demon. Sweet holy fuck. I was hoping there’d be some other explanation, some way to maintain her innocence. But she’d just shattered that all in one small word.

“Why
him
?” I asked.

She was crying silently now, no sobs or wailing. Wiping away a steady stream of tears, she took a shaky breath before speaking again. “I went where I thought people w-wouldn’t be missed.”

“Oh, Tans.” Cash looked like he might be sick.

My blood boiled, thinking of how my boys had been there. How Emmett and Mason and dozens of other people with families and friends had been at that bar. But because it had been in a shitty part of town, she’d gone there thinking she could take someone’s life and no one would care.

“People cared.” My voice was so low it spooked even me. I had never wanted to hurt a person quite as badly as I wanted to hurt Tansy in that moment.

She was dumb, and she’d made dumb choices, and because of her flagrant stupidity people were dead. Lives were ruined and ended, and a goddamned demon was wandering the streets of New Orleans.

“I’m sorry.” It felt like the hundredth time she’d said it, and it was starting to lose its impact.

“Yeah, well,
sorry
doesn’t cut it.” I got to my feet, not able to look at her anymore.

“I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I saw the fight and thought…accidents happen all the time.”

Wilder groaned. He must have known this would set me off, but he didn’t move to hold me back.

“Give me your knife,” I said to Santiago, still no longer acknowledging Tansy’s presence.

“W-what?” she stammered.

I wheeled around, leveling a finger at her. “You’re done talking.”

Cash didn’t leap to her defense this time. He was still sitting beside her, but he hadn’t tried to touch her or comfort her since she’d confessed to killing Liam. He looked shell-shocked.

Seeing his face was the first time I’d felt an ounce of guilt since this whole conversation had begun almost twenty minutes ago. His world had just been shredded in front of him.

He had thought he was escaping the insanity of the paranormal when we broke up, and ended up dating a demon-summoning murderer instead.

And I thought I had a complicated love life.

“Give me your knife,” I repeated, holding my palm open in front of Santiago.

“It’s my knife.”

“I’ll give it back.”

He hesitated. I knew how valuable a ceremonial knife was, especially one of
Memere
’s. So valuable, in fact, Cain had been willing to trade me favors to get his hands on one. I understood why Santiago didn’t want to give it away like a prize, I really did, but now was not the time to get possessive over magical artifacts.

I left my hand open and waggled my fingers at him, giving him a look that said I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.