Everything was grey. The sky with its heavy ma.s.s of low clouds, clouds that looked too wide and too heavy for it to hold up. The water that lapped along the side of the boat, the dark shapes that swam underneath the steel water, even the flowers that hung from the nearby trees, rising out of the swamp, were absent of any color.
"Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily," the voice went on, pleasant and clear.
I looked around me. There was no sign of where I"d come from, no hint of where I was going. It was like I was in a grey globe, floating in a giant circle. I didn"t even have oars.
There was a splash in the water alongside the boat and I looked over. There was a long, thick serpent wriggling in the waves. Its head was the head of my mother, pale grey skin, dark grey eyes. Fangs for teeth.
She started rising out of the water, that awful smile, that scaly black body.
She opened her mouth and sang in a deep, demonic voice, "Life is but a dream."
Then she lunged for me, her mouth snapping.
But she didn"t get me. She couldn"t reach.
I stared right into my mother"s soulless eyes and recognized the expression in them. The fear. The failure.
She dropped straight back into the water as if she"d been struck.
I looked up. There was another rowboat in the distance, moving away from me, toward the horizon. A woman sat in it, too far away for me to see. She was sitting still, her body small and frail, and the only thing I could make out were glinting eyes.
She floated away until she was a dot, until she totally disappeared, swallowed up by the grey waves and sky.
When I came to, I was already screaming. The pain was everywhere.
I opened my eyes and saw Ambrosia standing in front of me, a sharp and b.l.o.o.d.y knife in her hands. I looked down. I was tied down to a chair, totally naked except for my boxer briefs. My bare chest bore a long, deep cut down the middle of it. Red blood dripped from my collarbone, down between my pecs, to just below my ribs. That explained the excruciating pain. I blinked hard and fast at the scene, trying to get my breath. I was in the middle of a darkened room, a circle of salt and candles burning all around me. It looked like the interior of a small cabin, all dark wood and splintering floors. Between a few cracks, I could see the gleam of water wavering underneath. A house on stilts. This must have been Ambrosia"s lair.
It wasn"t just the two of us in the room. At first I thought the shadows were watching me, that I was imagining eyes amongst the black. But then I could see the figures of zombies-her slaves-coming through, standing around against the walls, waiting, and biding their time.
And in one corner of the room was Rose. She was also tied to a chair, stripped to her bra and underwear. She had the same marking as me, a slash made down her middle, though she also had one that ran horizontal, completing a cross. I suppose that was next on the torture agenda. She had another symbol drawn on the tops of her feet, the blood coagulating into dark droplets. Her head had flopped to the side, her frizzy white-blonde hair covering her face. I couldn"t tell if she was breathing or not. I couldn"t tell if she was alive or dead.
I licked my dry lips and tried to talk. It took a few seconds before I could form words. "What have you done to her?"
Ambrosia pa.s.sed the knife from one hand to the other. "Considering I just made you bleed and I"m still standing here with a knife, you should be more concerned about yourself, Declan Foray." Her eyes went over to Rose and back to me. She smiled. "But for all intents and purposes, Rose is dead. Just like you"ll be once I"m done with you."
With deliberation, she stepped forward and placed one hand on my shoulder, holding herself steady, and raised the knife. I tried to squirm and headb.u.t.t her, tried to break free of the ties, but I couldn"t. My muscles strained, sweat covered my brow, but the ropes only dug more into my flesh. She worked fast. With one agonizing swipe, she drew the blade across my chest.
I bit my lip, trying to hide my scream. The fresh cut bled profusely, just underneath my tattoo, as if And With Madness Comes the Light was underlined in red.
"Trying to be brave are we?" she said with amus.e.m.e.nt. "Dawlin", you have no idea what you"re in for, do you? This is just the beginning of the ritual. Once I start removing pieces of you, you won"t be so brave anymore. You"ll have to scream, even if I remove a piece of your tongue."
I tried to not let my eyes widen at that part about "removing pieces" but it was hard not to. With any other person, I would have called her bluff, but I knew Ambrosia had it in her.
"You"re one ugly b.i.t.c.h, you know that?" I snarled at her.
Her face jerked back momentarily before she appeared smooth and calm again. "So I guess I can"t compel you anymore, can I? Well, that will change when I"m done with you. All your precious willpower will be out the window. You do know what"s out the window here, don"t you? Many, many alligators. Swimming rats. Snakes."
My mind flashed back to being in the boat amid the grey, the Beetlejuice version of my mother. Had that been the Thin Veil?
"You intrigue me Declan," she said. She crouched down with the knife and began carving intricate patterns on the top of my foot. The pain was blinding. "Your energy is unlike anything I"ve ever seen, anyone I"ve ever met. I knew the moment I met you, that I needed you, I needed it."
"It?" I grunted as she went to the next foot.
"Yes, it. Your essence. What makes you, you. Your mother told me some wonderful things."
I was so disgusted, so angry, that I could barely feel the pain as the blade dug slowly into my foot, sc.r.a.ping along the bone. "What do you know about my mother?"
"I know she was easy to conjure. I know she"s been trying to reach you. I know what she wants with you."
"What?" I seethed.
She looked up at me and smiled. "That"s for her to say. I wouldn"t want to step on any toes. Speaking of toes..." Her gaze went to my feet. "I wonder if you"d miss yours."
"What do you want with my toes?"
She stared at them for a moment before shrugging. "Nothing actually, they don"t hold much. Though they"re pretty large for your height." She smiled at me. "I already have my sacrifices worked out for me."
She crouched and began drawing the blade from my ankle bone up my inner calf and thigh, hard enough to draw blood. She paused, the blade dangerously close to my b.a.l.l.s, and I sucked in my breath, daring myself not to move.
Quick as a wink, she swiftly took the blade back down and did the same up the inside of my other leg. Then she cupped my b.a.l.l.s in her hand and squeezed them lightly.
She leaned in and whispered into my ear, her hair smelling sickly sweet. "If I were a lesser woman, I"d cut off your b.a.l.l.s and make good use of them. The amount of power and testosterone you carry is enough to fuel a small city."
I winced as she squeezed them even harder. "It"s too bad you weren"t weak enough to give me a good time, because I would have given you the best time. You can"t even get hard."
I narrowed my eyes at her and hoped she could hear the venom in my words. "There"s only one woman I"ll get hard for."
She rolled her eyes, her lip curling slightly. "Oh, of course. This Perry. Well, I hope you had fun with her while it lasted, because when this is all over, you"ll be no different than the men over there. You"ll be mine, you"ll do as I say, and any memories of this life will be gone."
I watched as she straightened up and walked around the circles of candles, the flames licking at her ankles. The eyes of the dazed men in the shadows followed her every move.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked, my voice dry and hoa.r.s.e. If I was going to die here, I might as well get some answers. "What"s the point?"
She stopped and glared at me. "What is the point? I thought that was pretty obvious. People underestimate me, they always have. They don"t even believe that I"ve descended from Voodoo royalty. The Voodoo Queen"s blood runs through me! But everyone thinks I"m a sham, thinks I"m nothing but a stupid, delusional girl."
She was definitely delusional.
"Only Maryse took me under her wing. She was the only one who believed in me."
"And then you got her shunned."
Ambrosia pursed her lips. "Well, yes. She didn"t want to have anything to do with the dark arts. But the dark arts is where all the power is. It is what Voodoo is. All these years it"s become white-washed and weak. All the real traditions, the rituals, the real power had been stripped. It"s become commercialized. I want to take that power back, back to who started it, to those who deserve it, those who can make the world whimper."
"The Mambo wouldn"t have let you do that."
"No, you"re right. And she didn"t." She walked over to a door and opened it. I heard the squawking of a few chickens, and she emerged with a black one in her hands. "I"ve been putting hexes on her from the very beginning. Nothing large, just enough to wipe her memory, to make her comply to me. Like you, I could never really make her do what I wanted, but I got enough out of her. I got her to teach me a lot of things that she never would have otherwise. I practiced and practiced and practiced until I knew I was ready."
She walked to the middle of the circle and quickly sliced off the chicken"s head. It fell to the ground with a wet thunk, the eyes still blinking, the beak still moving. I hoped that was its nerves backfiring, that the poor f.u.c.ker wasn"t still alive.
She held the headless body in her hands like it was still alive, blood spurting out from the neck.
I swallowed thickly, my eyes drawn back to the chicken head. It was staring at me. "If you"re all about tradition, if you think the culture has gotten white-washed, then why are you going after black people? They"re your own."
"To make a point," she said angrily, and I saw that facade of hers slip again. "Aren"t you listening? Look at my brothers and sisters in this city. We made this city, and now we"re being kept in these neighborhoods to kill each other. n.o.body cares. The police don"t. The city doesn"t. The country doesn"t. We thought that after Katrina the focus would be on us and our crime and our poverty and what was really going on. But it didn"t last. It"s back to s.h.i.t again. No one even cares if black people are dropping left and right like flies. If anything, they"re happy. They only care when they reappear and start attacking white people."
I couldn"t fathom her reasoning. Her point was lost. She was mad, and mad with power. I wanted to buy more time by asking more questions, but I didn"t know what I"d end up doing with the time I got. "But you"re turning them into slaves, just like they once were. Doesn"t that strike you as wrong at all, or just a little ironic?"
She glared at me. "Everyone has to make sacrifices. You"re one of them."
She jerked the chicken at me and the blood went spraying onto my body, covering me with hot rivulets from head to toe. She came forward and glared down at me.
"I tried everything with you, Declan. I tried to give you the easy way out. If you"d been weaker, this would have been over with before it got painful. I tried the candles, the oils, the poppets. Everything. The only way I"ll ever have complete control of you is if I take parts of you away. You"ll be weaker, and I"ll be stronger. It worked with Maryse, it will work with you."
She reached out to my face with a b.l.o.o.d.y hand and I tried to jerk away. "What happened to Maryse?"
"She"s dead," she said. "And the real kind of dead. She was too frail to serve me as a slave, though that would have been wonderfully ironic. She"s underneath the house right now, a snack for the alligators."
Her fingers traced my cheekbone. "You really are a handsome man," she whispered soothingly. "Perfect cheekbones. Perfect lips. The darkest eyes. Everything about you is perfect. Except for your ear."
I froze. Her fingers moved up to my ear and began stroking the lobe, her skin sticking to mine from the chicken blood.
"What about my ear?" I asked, my voice shaking.
"It"s a shame I"ll have to take part of it. Though I"m going to guess you"re not much of a listener anyway."
She took out the blade and aimed it at my ear.
No. f.u.c.king. Way.
I started bucking in my seat, trying to find a point of concentration, trying to get my strength back to break through whatever motherf.u.c.king spell this b.i.t.c.hy witch put on me. It was almost working too; though my feet felt paralyzed, I could feel the restraints around my arms coming loose.
Ambrosia tried to get the knife close, but I kept moving. I ended up with a large gash along my jaw and she started swearing in French. Suddenly, she stood up straight and raised her hands in the air. The shadows began to move and five of her slaves came at me. They held my head in place. I stared up at them, looking into their dull eyes, pleading for some recognition, for some humanity to be left. There was nothing in them at all. My hope was fading.
"I"d try and stay still if I were you," Ambrosia warned me. "Unless you want me taking out your eye instead."
I closed my eyes, not wanting that. I reached out in my mind to Perry, hoping that somehow she could hear me. I listened, and hoped I could hear her. There was nothing but the labored breathing of the zombie slaves, their foul stench of death.
Ambrosia took the knife and very slowly, to prolong the pain and agony that seized every part of me, she cut away the very top edge of my left ear.
I screamed and screamed until my throat felt ripped, my lungs raw. Warm liquid rushed down into my ear ca.n.a.l, trickling down my neck.
She moved away, proudly showing me the piece of my ear. She reached into her dark blouse, pulled out a small bag she was wearing around her neck, and put the piece of ear inside. She grinned at me. "The things I can now do with this, the person I"ll become."
I could barely talk through the pain. My ear stung and throbbed, so hot and so fiercely. "You"re pure evil."
She shrugged and wiggled her lips. "You know, when people keep telling you that you"re bad and that your beliefs are bad and everything you do is bad...well, eventually you just become bad. Why not? Why not give them what they want and then make them wish they never wanted it."
I looked over at Rose, at her lifeless body. Ambrosia caught my eye and went over to her. She grabbed her by her hair and yanked her head up. Rose had an X carved in her forehead, her eyes were open and unseeing.
"Rose and I never got along," Ambrosia said to me, as if she were confiding with a girlfriend over drinks. "I didn"t like how Maryse pandered to her, to someone so...ordinary. But, she does have some attributes that gave me a little bit of mojo. And it was really fun trying to compel her. She led you right to me and she didn"t even know it."
"What are you doing with her?" I was starting to feel woozy from the pain and had trouble keeping my head up straight.
"I told you. Same thing I"m doing to you. I already gave her a dose of the poison. Comes from the pufferfish. Does a fine job of tricking your body into thinking it"s dead, so fine that even doctors can"t tell. You saw what happened to poor old Tuffy G. Then I"ll bury her for a while...There"s a tiny mound out back that used to be an ant hill. I can only stick her about three feet in or so before the water floods the coffin but it should work for the sake of the ritual. I"ll do a few rites, dig her up after a few hours, give her the datura. Then she"s all mine to do my bidding. That is unless I accidently give her too much. That"s the problem with the elixir. If you don"t give enough, the person still has a bit of free will, albeit terrible hallucinations and memory loss. If you give too much, you"ll lose them completely and forever. They go mad, so mad that even I can"t control them. I learned the hard way with Eric Smithe. I just wanted him to attack someone in the parking lot, act like a real zombie, something that people would really fear and talk about. I wanted this to start becoming front page news. Then he turned on me and bit me."
I"d stopped listening. The room was starting to spin a bit and I was dangerously close to pa.s.sing out. I couldn"t tell if it was the loss of blood and stress on my heart, or if she had really taken something from me after all of this bloodplay.
She let go of Rose"s head and came over to me, bringing a small vial out of her pocket. "The trick with you will be figuring out how much to give. I can"t be sure how this will work on you since you"ve been so resistant to me. But considering I have most of your essence now, I think if I accidently leave you brain-dead, it wouldn"t be the worst thing that could happen. Your body will still be fun to use for a short time, whether you"ve gone mad or not."
She nodded at the zombie slaves who were still standing around me and they went for my head again. They held it in place, while two of them pried their large hands into my mouth, one holding the top jaw, the other holding the bottom.
"When you wake up, you"ll only know me. You"ll only remember me. I will raise you from the ground, save you from the dirt, and you will do my worst for me. You won"t have Perry. You won"t have your friends. You"ll have no memory of who you are. I pray, for your sake, that you do what you"re told and that no one you love will ever see you in your new state of being."
I tried to move, even though I knew it was useless. I tried to push my tongue forward, to prevent anything from going down my throat. But it was futile. Ambrosia came over and poured the liquid down my throat, a vile, thick poison, and I choked on it.
They stepped away and I immediately tried to vomit, to throw it back up. But things were already happening. My throat began to close. My fingers, toes, arms, legs, everything became rigid like I was being held by millions of imaginary hands. In my chest, my heart thumped loudly, then became slower and slower, losing its rhythm, its speed, its sound. The air stopped reaching into the depths of my lungs, becoming more and more shallow.
My brain started its final descent, slowing shutting down the circuits. I was losing the capacity for thought. So, this was the death of Dex Foray. This was the end of the man I was.
I realized it didn"t mean anything without Perry by my side. She was my reason for living. She was the reason I"d come alive in the first place.
It"s a shame, I thought for the last time, I realized that truth far too late.
CHAPTER NINETEEN.
It was the noise above me that woke me up. My consciousness came on like a dimmer switch, slowly introducing my brain to the new reality.
I was happy to recognize that it was my own brain. It didn"t mean I felt 100%. In fact, my thoughts felt slow and stunted and I felt the drugs coursing through me, trying to bring my vitals down to a dangerous level. But I was still Dex.
And I was being buried alive.
It was black as tar and the noise that had woke me was the sound of dirt being thrown on top of the narrow coffin I was in. I could also hear Ambrosia chanting to herself, sounding faraway and m.u.f.fled.
And now"s when you panic, I told myself. I tried to move, but my limbs weren"t having any of it, the poison still in control of that part of my system, reluctant to let go.
The dirt kept coming, quicker and quicker. I had a feeling that Ambrosia was having her minions do the burial services, and even though she said she was only burying me three feet underneath the ground, that three feet was enough to eventually asphyxiate a person. I could tell they were getting close to being done too. The fresh dirt that was being thrown on top wasn"t as loud as before.
I started breathing harder in my panic and tried to slow my breath. I needed to conserve air in here and I needed to think. The minute she dug me out would be the minute she"d try and administer the datura, the mind-control drugs. The stuff that turned you into a mindless slave, or a bats.h.i.t crazy lunatic. I"d seen enough in the mental hospital to know that a bats.h.i.t crazy lunatic wasn"t as fun as it seemed, even if it meant I"d try and take a bite out of her. When I saw her, there"d be little to stop me from ripping her f.u.c.king head off and p.i.s.sing on it.
Aside from her slaves, of course. I didn"t know how strong I was, I just knew that I was conscious when I wasn"t supposed to be. I was supposed to be in a state of near-death until after she"d administered the mind-control drug. She was expecting to open the coffin, hoping to find me alive but helpless, and that would be that. I finally had something on her-my own f.u.c.king free will again, and I knew she wouldn"t see it coming.