The Traiteur's Ring (26 page)

“Wanna head to the room?” she asked. “I would really love to be naked with you, and I think that would go over the line here – I don’t care if we are in New Orleans.” She gave him her best I love you and want you smile. He lustfully glared back.

“Don’t have to ask me twice.” He kissed her and then finished off his beer.

They walked home in quiet but Christy had become used to these times. She knew his mind moved rapidly, though through what exact thoughts she had no way of knowing. She suspected it had something to do with home and his past and a lot to do with the old man from the street. She held his hand and let his mind work. She felt a tingle, like the brush of static electricity you feel when you run your hand through your hair on a winter day, and she looked down at his hand in hers. The ring on his right middle finger glowed bright enough to nearly cast light on the flickering passing shadows. The ember red burst looked tinged with orange, but the brightness and the way it seemed to pulsate made her stomach churn. She had an overwhelming need to pull her hand away. She realized the ring didn’t just disgust her (it did, and she had no idea why even such a bizarre piece of jewelry would make her nauseated), but it frightened her. She resisted for a moment, but finally shook her hand free of his, and wrapped her arm around his waist so he wouldn’t notice her irrational aversion.

She wanted that ring gone. Not just off his hand, but gone from their lives. She wanted it thrown into the sea or, even better, buried deep in the ground. She decided she would have to wait until he finished his journey through his past over the next day. By the time they arrived in Destin, she decided she would ask him to get rid of it. She couldn’t bear the thought of it still being on his hand when they walked into their town house in Virginia Beach for the first time as Mr. and Mrs. Morvant.

Not much later her obsessive revulsion of his ring faded (though didn’t disappear) as their mouths explored each other on the big bed in their room at the Dauphine. She was aware of the ring on his hand and equally aware that she tried to avoid touching it.  As his caressing fingers explored her body she found herself moving around to avoid that damned circled band, but after a few minutes, as her passion and arousal rose, the aversion faded into the background.

A short time later, as she bucked her hips up to meet his, their bodies sweaty and their eyes locked in a loving stare, she thought of nothing except how fantastic he felt inside her and how great his ass felt in both of her hands. They exploded together and only a short time later fell asleep clinging to each other. Her last thought as she fell into a contented sleep in his embrace was relief that his left arm draped across her instead of his right, but this time it brought a sheepish smile instead of the near terror she had felt earlier.

Later she heard the soft but rowdy sounds from Bourbon Street and felt him slip from their bed – presumably to go to the bathroom. She lay half awake and felt something else, too, something inside her. It felt strange but wonderful, but she had no idea what it could be. She never really woke up enough to wonder it through. She did feel like she had forgotten something, but didn’t think it could be anything important. She fell back into a deep sleep before he returned.  

Chapter 23

Ben awoke from the first dream with no memory whatsoever of its content. He felt calm and safe and so for a moment wondered if he had really dreamed at all. He knew he had, but figured the lack of anxiety (and the clean feet that he stole a glance at when the urge finally overwhelmed him) meant maybe it had been nothing more than a normal person’s dream. He didn’t think he had those much, but his life was better than ever now, he realized with a glance at his sleeping wife. He slipped out of her embrace to hit the head and relieve himself and saw that she stirred only a little.

When he returned Christy had both hands on her belly, just below her navel. For a moment, he worried she might have some abdominal pain or cramping from their food and beverage binging, but the very content, almost angelic smile on her face allayed his worries that his wife might be sick.

He slipped into bed beside her and snuggled close (her familiar, but ridiculously high, skin temperature less important than the touch of her skin) and watched her sleep. Then, his own eyes grew heavy, and he drifted off again before he knew what was happening.

The old man spoke to him from far away and only for a moment – a gentle reminder of the awake-journey that lay ahead of him. Ben couldn’t even see him. He found himself seated with his back against a large and gnarled tree trunk, and the voice came to him as if from the jungle itself.

“A many folk be waitin’ yo, Bennie boy. See dem fo sho’ ‘neff down dat dark butt hole in dem woods, heah. Don’ lettin’ em down be. Bes fo yo also be, wit all comin’ for yo’ den in dat ‘affa time. Dey tellin’ yo mo in dat dark hole, sho’ ‘neff true dat ist ‘kay? Yo be memberin’ dat way and git down dat hole. Jess yo boy. Leavin’ dat woman back fo sho’ ‘neff. Bes fo her, too. Don fergit dat mos ‘portent ting. Alone, boy.”

Ben didn’t answer, probably wouldn’t have had he seen the old Cajun beside him, but definitely not when the jungle spoke to him in that Cajun voice. He knew he would go and needed no reminder in any case. The old man needn’t worry about Christy – there was no fuckin’ chance in hell he would take her along down that dark hole in the woods. No matter what he did or didn’t find there, she would wait behind.

So the voice did little to shake him from his thoughts of where he found himself. He recognized this patch of jungle very well. He was nowhere near the village now, but only a click and a half away from the other village – the one where they had hit the presumed leadership for the Al Qaeda cell that had slaughtered his people. He had managed to put most of that night out of his head these last two weeks. Now, as he sat beside the tree just in from the clearing into which Viper team had fast roped that night, it all crashed back on him. The whispers from the jungle, and the voices in his head on target. His own violent slaughter of the killers in the target house. The feeling of being watched if not guided. And Reed, of course – Reed’s mortal wounds that had not killed him. The fireflies from his own hands and the pulsations from the ring.

All of these images flittered around him like mosquitoes, and he unconsciously waved his hand to shoo them away. The images went nowhere, and the emotions that came with them continued to churn inside him as if that night had happened only hours ago. He felt his eyes turn wet at the images of Reed, pale and weak and clearly near death. He remembered how he asked about lightning after Ben had healed his ravaged chest. The thought and feeling of knowing his dead best friend would now survive filled him with happiness.

He felt no guilt at the men he had killed that night. He regretted the task force may have lost some intel, but other than that, the death of those animals left him with nothing – no, maybe there was something – a warm sensation of justice. A feeling that lives might be saved from the death of those bastards.

“You are more than a seer, Ben – more than a Traiteur, if you like. That is part of it, but you have been born to be much more. Your Gammy would call it Rougarou.”

That term Ben remembered from his childhood in the woods. It sounded like werewolf, but really meant a protector – someone who hunted down and killed the evil that threatened his people. Like a Sentinel – or maybe like a SEAL. It was a term more Indian than Voodoo, but likely familiar to both.

Ben looked over and felt no surprise to see the Elder squatted beside him and watched as he poked at the ground with a green stick. He looked tonight much like when Ben had first met him – an old man, thin but fit, with a much younger man’s eyes. It surprised him to realize he had missed the old villager. He spoke to Ben out loud, and he heard him in English. But somehow he knew they spoke in another language – an ancient language he should not know but realized he always had.

“Rougarou is a fable – a monster of sorts, but one for good – in the minds of children in the bayou at least,” Ben told him.

“Yes,” the man said and drew in the dirt. “And like all such things, it finds its origin in fact. The Rougarou is the evolution of the Seer – or Traiteur – and only some of us receive that gift. You are one such Seer. Perhaps only once in a few hundred or even a thousand changes of the seasons, does the Living Jungle need such an Ashe, such a power, but that time is now.”

They sat in silence while Ben absorbed what the Elder told him.

“Why now?” he asked. “And why me? I share nothing with your people except one horrible night when I failed you miserably.”

The old man looked at him, his face split over a jutting mouth of rotting teeth.

“Now is because the dark force returns and seeks to destroy us. Not just my village but all of our people. It uses the men you fight now, but it is greater than them and wants much more.” The old man looked at him with eyes that seemed to slip back and forth between old, wise mystical orbs and those of a much younger man. Both held life and power. “The ‘You’ is beyond us. You were not chosen by me, or the Mami Wata you know as Gammy – you simply are what you are. We are children of the Ginen. We share a lineage, if not of blood then, for sure, of spirit – both descendants of the ancient one – Children of Ginen and sons of the Living Jungle – the Great Vodu.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Ben said, but he thought he partly understood.

“You will learn more from your own Mami Wata soon. The rest maybe you don’t need to know – only the Great Vodu can decide.”

The old man went back to poking at the dirt with his stick. Ben thought the symbols he made should hold some meaning for him, but they didn’t. The Elder continued.

“The Ashe that grows now inside you has been yours always and is focused by the ring, but not from it. You will learn on your own how to use it, and I cannot help you with this, nor can Mami Wata.”

Ben felt the world around him shimmer and bow and the sane part of his brain he still clung to reminded him that anything is possible in dreams. The woods around him reshaped – that seemed the only real word for the change – and he recognized the forest it became. Without looking back, he knew he leaned now against a ramble shack house in the bayou that could not possibly still exist. But he believed now it probably did. A new part of his memory clicked into place, and he saw a brilliant fire from the past – a blocked memory that explained why he knew with such certainty that their shack, his home with his Gammy, couldn’t be here anymore. Other things from his troubled history tumbled back into place, as well, but he had no time to think about them now. He had to take his very familiar, sometimes nightly over the years, stroll through the Cajun forest of home.

Ben walked along the path in the moonlight as he had done thousands of times. He felt the same anxiety that traveled with him each passing moment and again reminded himself of the dicked-up nature of dreams. Why be scared of a dream that ended the same way night after night after night?

Because you don’t choose what you fear in dreams.

Ben came to the clearing and stopped. His Gammy stood naked and pale in the moonlight, head back and arms outstretched. Her quiet voice mumbled words that meant something to him but he didn’t know what.

And, then it came.

Not a doe this time, and Ben felt his already pounding pulse quicken more.

The man was thin and pale, his face covered in dirt and stubble, his hair long and unkempt.  What looked most familiar were the eyes – the blue, impossibly small eyes from the doe of so many dreams, looked wide eyed on the thin man that walked towards his Gammy as if called. The blue seemed surrounded by yellow, and Ben remembered the man had been sick when he came to Gammy the first time. He remembered, from his bed in the loft of their shack, the shouts exchanged in a foreign tongue, and the fear he had heard for the first time in the voice that belonged to Gammy. He remembered those blue eyes tinged with yellow and how they flashed reddish orange when the man held a long bony finger at his Gammy, the words meaningless to him but the threat clear.

He watched the man with the blue and yellow eyes approach his Gammy, his back arched as if his mind fought against his body as he glided slowly toward her. The face looked expressionless, but the eyes showed the fear trapped inside.

Gammy kept her head back and her mouth barely moved as she chanted, her arms outstretched and hands upwards. The right hand remained balled up tightly, white knuckled, around the handle of the knife.

The man stopped beside her and leaned forward. For a moment Ben thought the man would nuzzle her as the doe had in the dream so many times before. Instead he stopped and then his own head tilted back and upward, his thin neck pale and stretched before the old woman and his red lids closed over the familiar, jaundiced eyes.

Ben knew what would be next and tried to tear his eyes away, but couldn’t. He wanted to shout out to his Gammy, to tell her to stop, but his voice stuck in his throat. He didn’t want it to happen, didn’t want to lose his innocent childhood love for his gentle grandmother.

The flash of moonlight on the steel blade looked the same as it always did, but a scream stuck in his throat because everything else was different. Gammy mumbled loudly as the long, curved blade opened the man’s neck easily, the cut in his throat so deep that Ben thought the head would tumble off into the dirt. An explosion of crimson spray soaked his grandmother followed by two pulsing geysers that looked grayish black in the moonlight, but Ben knew would be bright red in daytime. The head fell backwards, nearly striking the man between the shoulder blades, and the now lifeless face stared upside down at him. The tongue flicked in and out of the mouth as if trying to expel some foul tasting shit, and the grey geysers of blood painted obscene patterns across his Gammy’s face and sagging breasts as she again raised her hands up at the moon and let her own head fall backwards as she shouted more meaningless words up into the night.