Healing the Bayou (21 page)

“Camille, remember a while back when you told me about Aunt Vivian draining that man’s powers?”

Her eyes lit up. “Yes! That’s perfect!”

“How did she do it?”

“Oh, geez.” She scratched her head, thinking hard. “I really don’t know what she did. She sat him down next to her, and she put her hands on him like she does when she’s Healing. When she let go, he was different.”

Damn it. It was a good plan, but I wasn’t any challenger for her unless I knew what to do. She could end up retracting my powers instead if I wasn’t careful.

“Well, when you heal someone you’re giving them your light,” Samuel offered. “Right?”

“Basically.” I nodded. “When I do it the right way I just imagine the light moving from me to them.”

“Exactly!” He smiled with excitement and shook me by the shoulders. “So if you imagined pulling
in
her light…”

“You could just absorb it,” Jenny shouted.

“Like sucking in through a straw.” Camille made a slurping sound, pretending that was what she was doing.

“I don’t know, guys.” I paused. “Vivian is a lot more experienced than I am.”

“But you’re way stronger than she is,” Samuel reminded me.

He was right. Even Vivian had said herself that I was the most powerful healer she had ever seen.

But what if we were wrong? I wished I had another healer to talk to, but the only one I knew besides Vivian was Pascal and somehow I doubted he would be the one to advise me on how to take her down unless he was benefited in some way. I wasn’t going to banish a ghost to make way for a demon.

I had to try. My parents deserved it. Marie and Lucas deserved it. Hell, I deserved it. I was tired of looking over my shoulder, waiting for the next near-death experience to come my way. Samuel couldn’t be expected to keep pulling off miracles and getting me out of harm’s way before it was too late. How he’d helped me during the car accident? I would have to ask him that later. Right now, there was a war to start.

“Do you have your gloves?” I asked Samuel.

He pulled them from his back pocket. “I’ve always got them handy. Just in case.”

“I’m going to need you to come with me. If she doesn’t fight me, Marcus probably will.”

“I wasn’t about to let you go alone.”

“Camille!”

She whipped around, ready to receive orders.

“You head back to his dad’s place,” I said.

“No way,” she said. “You’re going to need as much help as you can get.”

“I’m coming, too,” Jenny said in a way that suggested she wasn’t exactly asking for permission.

“I don’t know what she’s going to do,” I said. “I don’t want you two getting caught in the crossfire. And what if she calls the cops? You could end up in jail on my account.”

I really wanted them out of the way. I was going to need to focus all my energy on stripping Vivian, and I didn’t want to have to worry about keeping them safe. But they weren’t going to budge. Both of them stood looking as if they were twins with their arms crossed, jaws clenched, and hips slanted down. As pretty as they both were, they would have been perfect high school bitches in one of those movies.

“Let’s go.” I jogged for the parking lot and hopped into his car, impatient to get it done and over with.

Samuel chased close on my heels, trying to put on his gloves and fish out his keys at the same time. The girls weren’t far behind him, and once we were all in the car, he turned on the engine and looked at me—fear and concern consumed his beautiful face.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“No,” I answered honestly. “But I can’t let her get away with it.”

He leaned over the center console and kissed me gently. “I know you can’t.”

The tires screeched as he sped off, and I glanced down at the clock on the radio. 1:43 a.m. We should definitely have the advantage of surprise.

He cut off the headlights and parked up the street a few houses down, and we tiptoed to the front porch. The spare key was under the mat as usual, and I held my breath as I slipped it into the lock. It made so much more noise than it normally would. Each pin that the key passed through sent a shock into my nerves, making me flinch.

With a racing heart, I turned the knob and slowly creaked open the old door. Aunt Vivian was sitting just across the foyer in her rocking chair, sound asleep.

“Shh.” I warned the others to be quiet when they followed my steps, and I waved in her direction to be sure they saw her.

“Should I restrain her?” Samuel whispered. “Or do you want me wait until you’ve already done it?”

“Just wait,” I told him. I didn’t know if it was even going to work, but if it did I didn’t know if he would suffer if he was touching during the exchange.

We silently crept over to her, and Samuel inched between the back of the chair and the wall behind it, arms hovered over her shoulders ready to hold her down with his protected hands if there was any trouble. Camille and Jenny both collected household items to use as weapons. Camille had a broomstick and Jenny found an old, thick spell book. Blocking all paths of escape, they took their places, one on each side of me, and closed in on her.

My arms were only half stretched out in front of me, and if I could bring myself to extend them more, I could easily touch her exposed arms. I held myself in that position, trying to gather the courage to keep going.

“Eliza…” Samuel tried to pull me from my last minute self-doubt. “She could wake up any minute.”

I shook my head, and a tear fell down my cheek. “I can’t do it.”

“You’ve got to do it,” he pressed. “We can’t turn back now.”

“I know,” I murmured. “I still want to do it. I just have to give her a chance to explain herself.”

“How can she explain
killing
your parents?” Camille stressed the point.

She was right, of course. There was no way Aunt Vivian could defend herself for that, not to me anyway. But I couldn’t do this to her without at least knowing why. And Samuel Heard it.

“Damn it,” Samuel growled, and he slammed his hands down onto her, detaining her by the collar. “Wake up, witch.”

She inhaled sharply and tried to bounce up from her seat, but Samuel pushed her back down.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded from me. “I told you that you weren’t welcome here anymore. What you’re doing is trespassing.”

“Does it look as though I’m here for tea?” I sneered.

She looked around the room. She was surrounded. “Marcus!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “What are you going to do? Are you going to kill me?”

“No, Vivian. I’m not a murderer. I’m nothing like you.”

“What the hell is going on?” After barreling down the stairway, Marcus flipped on the light switch when he reached the bottom. “Samuel? What are you thinking, man? Get your hands off her!”

He tried to get to Vivian to help her, but I stepped in his way.

“Eliza,” he growled. “Get out of my way. I don’t want to hurt you.”

When I ignored him, he snatched up my shoulders and tossed me to the ground. Not with enough force to hurt me—he only wanted me placed out of the way. I think his restraint was motivated by knowing if he hurt me, his fate would be sealed. Samuel wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. The two had been in more than enough romps for Marcus to know he was no match for my keeper, especially not when it came to protecting me.

“Marcus, stop,” Camille ordered. She cupped his face in her hands and tried to reason with him. “Do you honestly think we would be doing this if we didn’t have a good reason?”

“Don’t listen to them!” Vivian shouted. “They’re trying to steal my place, that’s all this is about. They’re going to kill me!”

I lay still on the ground, trying to anticipate his next move. He took a small step in her direction, but then took it back.

The poor boy was torn between his matriarch and the two people he had shared a home with most of his life—people he had grown to love as if they were his brother and sister.

“No.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I know Eliza well enough to know she doesn’t have the heart to kill anybody. Hell, she couldn’t even sacrifice that goat at the altar.”

My heart warmed as he held out his hand to help me back to my feet.

“Thank you,” I said gently.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he warned. He pointed his finger and ran it across the room at each of us. “You all had better have a damned good excuse for this, or I’m calling the cops.”

“Tell him,” I ordered Vivian. “Tell him about my parents. And then tell me why.”

Her face paled, and she looked up at Samuel. “But, you’re here. My spell didn’t work?”
Samuel’s entire face clenched and his body stiffened at the mention of the spell that put his life in jeopardy. “I didn’t tell her. She figured it out.”

She relaxed a little as if she thought perhaps we were talking about two different things.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” she lied.

Holding up a small satchel, I said, “Do you know what this is? It’s Revealing Dust. Now, it’s your choice. You can tell him just enough to get the point across, or I can use this and you will confess to every gruesome detail of your crimes. And I will make sure you don’t just stop with what applies to me.”

Revealing Dust was a spell I had come across when I was looking for the Truth spell. It essentially was magic sand. If I breathed it onto her nostrils, she would be forced to answer every question I asked, and she wouldn’t be capable of leaving any part of the truth out. Lying by omission was still lying.

I was bluffing, however. Besides not wanting to get mixed up in witchcraft, I didn’t have the ingredients I needed to make it. The bag was empty.

Vivian stared fearfully at the worn out cloth satchel, but she pursed her lips and shook her head, giving me an unspoken refusal to comply.

“All right then.” I pretended to dig at the strings that held the opening closed. “I have more than enough to keep you rambling until the police get here and can listen themselves.”

“Damn it,” she said. “Get your boyfriend’s ox hands off of me and I’ll talk.”

Samuel looked at me for permission, and I nodded. His tight face showed he was not happy letting her free, but with all of us here she wasn’t going to get away.

“Why did you kill them?” I asked, my voice breaking.

“I didn’t kill them,” she insisted.

“Kill who?” Marcus was trying to catch up.

“You bitch,” I spat. “Tell the truth! You owe me that much after everything you’ve done to me.”

She jumped up from her chair so that we were face to face, eye to eye.

“After all I’ve done to you?” she yelled, poking her boney finger into my chest. “You little brat! If it wasn’t for you, I would still be the Queen! And if those idiots hadn’t messed up twenty-four years ago, I wouldn’t even have had to deal with you at all!”

“I didn’t come here to take your throne,” I screamed back at her. “I wanted to be a family. I didn’t care if I never used my magic again. I just wanted to be a family!”

Tears were gushing from my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t even attempt it. I wanted her to feel how badly she had hurt me, hoping maybe just a little bit of her humanity was left to feel guilty for it.

I was left longing for her sympathy when she started to chuckle. “What you are is an abomination! A mongrel! A keeper and a healer mating, who would stand for such blasphemy?”

“My parents were ordered to create me!”

“Your parents manipulated the Spirits! They appealed to Damballah’s desire for rebirth to get what they wanted.”

“I think you should give the Spirits a little more credit than that, Vivian.”

“They have weaknesses just the same as mortals do, believe me,” she said. I did believe her.

“Regardless,” she continued, “I was prepared to wait until Marie left the throne. She didn’t have the stomach to rule. I wouldn’t have waited long.” She looked at me with disgust. “She was a weakling, like you. She couldn’t handle the dark side of Voodoo any more than you can.”

“Having compassion for life is not a weakness,” I contended. “Selfishness, on the other hand…”

“Wait,” Marcus was waving his hands in the air and he brought them together to make the letter T. “Time out. Vivian, you killed her parents?”

“And she tried to kill Eliza,” Jenny spoke up for the first time since the scuffle began.

Shrinking away, Marcus looked wounded. The woman he thought he knew so well was turning out to be a monster.

“I get it.” I wanted to keep Marcus’s mind off his own hurt until I could afford to comfort him, so I kept the conversation moving. “You wanted to kill me because to you, I was a modern-day Frankenstein. But why did you have to kill Marie and Lucas?”

“To get them out of the way,” Samuel started to fill in the gap for me. “She couldn’t be a matriarch as long as they were together. Even if she’d only killed you, they would have birthed another child to come and take over.”

Vivian clapped her hands. “Very good, Keeper.”

I could feel my heart slowly breaking down. Was she really clapping as if Samuel just won a game of Murder Mystery? I was overcome with a burning needed to pause out of respect for my birth parents, but I had come here for the truth. I had to keep going.

“What about my adoptive parents?” I swallowed hard to keep hysteria from taking over. “What the hell did they do to piss off the Royal Vivian Paris?”

“You can thank your darling Samuel for that tragedy.” She smiled.

I swung around in horror. “What?”

“Oh, now,” Vivian said in a very motherly voice. “Don’t be too hard on him, dear. He tried very hard to keep it a secret. I had no idea you were still alive, but he slipped last Christmas when he came home to visit. Not to me, of course. But to Marcus.”

The weight that came off my shoulders could have sent me crashing to the floor. I was furious with myself for even letting her make me think Samuel would hurt me. I couldn’t be mad at him for telling Marcus his healer was alive, and couldn’t be upset with Marcus for telling Vivian since he had no way of knowing she was this evil…thing.

“You killed my parents to get to me again?”

“They didn’t have to die, but they wouldn’t tell me where you were, so they weren’t any use to me. I tried again a few weeks ago.” She sighed as if trying to kill me was such an exhausting chore. “But Samuel couldn’t keep himself out of the way.”