Watery Graves Read online

I willed Beli to turn back into a blade. I gripped my sword with both hands and charged the Bokor in black.

  He cast a torrent of wind at me. I couldn’t run against it. He extended another hand, formed something like a tornado around the massive phallus, and sent it out the door.

  “Thank you for packaging them all up for me,” the Bokor said. “Kalfu will be pleased.”

  “Fuck you!” I screamed.

  Give me control! Isabelle shouted in my mind.

  I released the reins, and Isabelle took over. She extended her hand and shot green energies at the Bokor. They struck his cloak, forcing the whole thing to illuminate with lightning, like electricity, somehow shielding him from her spell.

  Isabelle tried again, with more force this time. The spell ricocheted back, striking Pauli and sending his boa constrictor body hurling through the air. He quickly vanished in a rainbow before hitting the wall, then fell limp on one of the bleachers.

  “Be glad it didn’t strike you,” the Bokor said. “Kalfu demands you remain unharmed… until the time is right.”

  “He’ll never have me!” Isabelle shouted.

  The Bokor shook his head. “We’ll see about that.”

  The next thing I knew, his whole body was enveloped in a tornado infused with lightning. He and the phallus of souls spun together out the door and surely out of Vilokan. Isabelle started after him.

  No, Isabelle. We can’t stop him. But you can help Pauli…

  Isabelle nodded, reversed course and ran to Pauli’s side. She extended a hand over his body, willed some green magica into his flesh, and seconds later he was slithering again.

  “Welcome back, my friend,” Isabelle said.

  “You sound… kind, gentle. This must be Isabelle talking.”

  “It is,” Isabelle said.

  “Did you stop the Bokor?”

  Isabelle shook her head. “He got away. He took the souls.”

  “He used us… ugh, he fucking used us. You can’t capture a soul like that without their consent. We bound them on the promise we’d free them. That bitch was just waiting for us to do it.”

  We’ll get him, I said.

  Thankfully, Pauli could still hear me even when I was inside.

  “Like I said, bad mamba jambas. I don’t doubt it. But first, can we check on my wardrobe? I know they’ll be soaking wet… but I need my clothes! Especially my Louboutins.”

  Isabelle smiled. “Yes. But then we have to get back to the rest. Back to Casa do Diabo. And we need to find Mikah.”

  “You miss him?”

  “Yes. But it’s not that. I can only hold the reins for so long. Once Annabelle takes back over…”

  I think I have some of the pills in my wardrobe. If we’re going there anyway for Pauli, we can grab them.

  “I still think we should go find Mikah.”

  I understand. I need to see Oggie, too.

  I did want to see Oggie—though not for the same reasons Isabelle longed to see Mikah. My attraction to Oggie was more physical than anything else. Still, I did want to see him. Frankly, he was the only one who might know what we could possibly do. The Bokors—and Kalfu—now possessed the souls of all of Vilokan’s fallen, Dudley included. What they’d do with those souls, with the powers they might possess… I shuddered at the thought. Even with Isabelle in charge, we struggled to stand a chance against one Bokor who’d been fused to Alexa’s soul. The other souls might not be as powerful as she was… but they’d have powers. In some ways it was the unknown that was as frightening as anything else.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We made our way back to our old dorms to salvage what we could and to retrieve my anti-headache herbal pills that Mikah had made me. Isabelle popped two, released the reins, and I took back over without so much as a dull throb in my head. Not to mention, Isabelle and I needed a change of clothes as much as Pauli needed clothes at all—the dress I’d been given by the Merfolk was a bit too loose for my liking. It was clearly meant to cover a tail and fins—not my slender rear and legs.

  Pauli shifted back into human form and opened his wardrobe. Water poured out of it, but he retrieved a plastic garment bag.

  “Be prepared!” Pauli said.

  “Were you a boy scout or something?” I asked.

  “Bitch, I’m a straight-up Eagle Scout, thank you very much.”

  “I’m sure you were a blast on camping trips. How’d you ever get by out in the wild without your luxuries?”

  “Honey, I re-tailored my whole uniform. Totally unconventional. Made my scarf from cashmere. It was luxurious.”

  “And they let you become an Eagle Scout?”

  “I mastered all the knots!” Pauli exclaimed. “Even the ones I could tie with my body. Wanna see? I’m not just talking about doing it in snake form either. That would be cheating.”

  I laughed. “No thanks.”

  Pauli retrieved some designer black pants and a button-up shirt. He put them on.

  “How about that! Totally dry!”

  “That’s incredible,” I said. “But I’m grateful. I was tired of seeing your oversized schlong dangling around. What did you do, make it even bigger still this time?”

  “Damn! I thought if I only added an inch at a time you wouldn’t notice!”

  “No one wants one that big, Pauli.”

  “Bitch, you don’t know! Besides, you wouldn’t have noticed the extra inch unless you were looking at it.”

  “How couldn’t I?” I asked. “The thing is like a monster.”

  “Roar,” Pauli said.

  I took a deep breath. Sat on what used to be my bed. Groaned. “Ugh, should have realized it would be soaked.”

  “Your clothes are all wet anyway. What gives?”

  “I don’t know. Just feel like bitching about something I guess. I’m so fucking sick of being three steps behind Kalfu. Seems like every time we make some progress, we accomplish something, he finds a way to get stronger and more powerful.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kalfu used to be stuck inside my head. Well, I mean he still is, technically. But you know what I mean. Inside my old body, my old head.”

  “Was it like that when you were trying to suppress his influence?”

  “Every day. He’d shut his yap just long enough for me to think I’d put him out of my mind. Then he’d start saying murderous, crazy, hateful shit just to get under my skin. Homophobic shit. Racist shit. Whatever. Whatever it took to irk me. When he’d get me angry, he’d move a little deeper into my psyche. It’s like my frustration and emotion just opened up new areas of my mind for him to haunt. There was no getting ahead.”

  “You let his shit get in your head. You let him occupy your head space by giving in to his manipulations.”

  Pauli nodded. “Haters gonna hate. Villains gonna be all villainy and whatnot. What good does it do to get angry?”

  “It’s one thing to say getting angry or upset, or feeling defeated, isn’t constructive or helpful. It’s another thing to deny those feelings.”

  “I’m not saying you have to deny your feelings. Haters piss me off. Racists make me righteously angry. But I learned in my experience with Kalfu that I couldn’t dwell on that. Other people’s shit is just that. It’s shit. And as much suffering as their shit might cause people, I only give them more power when I let their shit occupy my mind, when I allow it to affect me on the inside.”

  “So much good that did you. You ended up having to get soul transfused out of your body into a reptile to get away from him.”

  “I learned that lesson too late. Being a snake for a while gave me a new perspective on things.”

  “Because you were always on the ground?”

  “Bitch, I’m not being literal. Just listen.”

  I chuckled. “Sorry.”

  “So much of who I am is wrapped up in my clothes, in my style. In fitting an image that I convinced myself was Pauli… but then I lost my body. I became a sn
ake of all things. Ew. Who likes snakes.”

  “But you became a fabulous snake.”

  “Not because I have rainbow-colored skin, honey. I became fabulous because I owned it.”

  “So you’re saying I need to own what I am.”

  “A bad mamba jamba, honey! You and Isabelle both! You think some demon asshole is going to take you down? I don’t care how many powers and souls he accumulates. You’re a force, both of you!”

  I shook my head. “It isn’t just us. Not just Isabelle and me. It’s you, too, Pauli. I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I do without you. It’s Ashley. It’s Mikah and Oggie. It’s everyone. We are the bad mamba jambas.”

  “Team Annabelle! Holla!” Pauli exclaimed.

  I laughed and echoed him back. “Holla! Let’s go find everyone else.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mercy was waiting for us as we left Vilokan and entered Père Antoine Alley.

  “Based on the look of the last asshole who passed through here, I’m guessing you ran into some trouble,” Mercy said.

  “To say the least. That Bokor… I was just about to shatter the vessel and release all the souls…”

  “That giant… thing he was carrying?”

  I nodded. “Long story. It was one of Pauli’s old art projects.”

  Mercy smirked. “Of course it was.”

  “And he took the vessel at the last minute.”

  “And based off the kind of magic he had coursing through him when he busted into the alley, I’m guessing he gave you fits.”

  “To say the least. He’s fused with the soul of Alexa Windstrom.”

  “Fuck,” Mercy said. “I mean, tons of respect. But still.”

  “Respect?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “To pull off harnessing a power like that, without it destroying you from the inside… yeah, it deserves respect. It’s one reason why I stopped fucking with you, Annabelle.”

  “You stopped fucking with me because you lost your power of compulsion.”

  Mercy ginned, showing off her fangs. “You don’t think I could still find a way to manipulate your will if I wanted to?”

  I bit my lip. She had my parents—and now all my friends—at Casa do Diabo. She did have leverage over me, and she knew it. “I’m not saying…”

  “I’m not manipulating you, Annabelle, because I came to respect you. What you did for Nico in the end. He loathed you—he’d loathed you for centuries. But you set him free. Even a heartless vampire like me has to respect that.”

  “If you respect me so much, why not explain the whole heartless thing?”

  “After I was turned—after I’d died—Nico waited around to see what I’d do. How I’d handle myself. At first, the blood cravings were intense. I snuck back to my family, fed from my own brother at night.”

  “Damn,” I said. “That’s pretty fucked up.”

  “The craving is fucked up,” Mercy said. “It’s unlike anything a human could possibly understand. Think of a junkie who needs a fix, and you’ll understand about a tenth of the power that a craving for blood has over a new vampire.”

  “So how didn’t you end up staked?”

  “I pretty much did. During daylight, a few of the townsfolk became wise to what I was up to. They took my body from the grave—it was in broad daylight, the middle of the day. They cut my heart and liver from my body…”

  “And you didn’t die?”

  “Not exactly. There was a witch among them—one whom Nico himself had, unbeknownst to me, planted in their church. She advised them to burn my heart and liver and feed it to my brother.”

  “Nasty!” I said.

  Mercy nodded. “His health returned for a short time. But he was going to die anyway. Not from my bites—not like they thought. He also had contracted consumption.”

  “Tuberculosis?”

  “One and the same,” Mercy said. “But what the witch had done was not a spell to heal him, it was a spell that gave me immortality, even as a vampire. When I’d told you I’d never been staked before, that’s not strictly true. Many hunters have tried and failed.”

  “Because you don’t have a heart.”

  “Not in my chest. My heart was given to my brother, and it lingers with his soul as a wraith in the land of the dead.”

  “Wait, we were there. You told me to go there so we could rescue Ramon.”

  Mercy pressed her hands together. “That was true. We did go to rescue Ramon. But I had another agenda. I hoped to locate my brother. I hoped to find a way to reclaim my heart and set his soul free. But then things went south, and we had to bail quickly.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” I asked. “I mean, if you got your heart back, you’d be just a normal vampire. You’d be killable.”

  Mercy shrugged. “After this many years I’ve learned enough, controlled my cravings well enough, that I felt I could take my chances against any hunter. Even against you. But my brother…”

  “You wanted to set him free.”

  Mercy nodded. “Maybe I’m not the heartless bitch you thought I was.”

  “I was wrong,” I admitted. “And you do have a heart. At least in all the ways that matter. If you felt something for your brother, that’s the only heart you need.”

  Mercy shook her head. “Someday I want to go back there. I want to try and free my brother again.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Don’t do any stupid shit. Help me defeat Kalfu. And once this is over, we’ll talk about it.”

  “Deal,” Mercy said.

  I nodded. “For now, take me back to my friends. We have Bokors to stop, and I’ll need all the help I can get to pull it off.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Half of me hoped Mercy would betray me, because the last place I ever wanted to go again was back to hell, the land of the dead. I’d barely gotten out of there alive the first time—in fact, I actually died. It was only because I had unwittingly been given Baron Samedi’s aspect that I had a “get out of hell free” card and could come back to life. Still, if promising to help Mercy out assured she wouldn’t double-cross me or my friends, I suppose risking a second trip to the land of the dead was something I could reluctantly accept. That’s sort of how my relationship with Mercy had gone from the moment I met her—we always had to have something on each other, some kind of leverage, something the other wanted. So long as we maintained a mutual dependency, we actually got along well enough and could be fairly strong allies if push came to shove.

  I stood outside Casa do Diabo waiting for Mercy to come out with my friends. It wasn’t the first or even the second time I’d waited outside the place. It was the only vampire coven I knew about in New Orleans. Didn’t mean there weren’t more—I just didn’t know about them. If there was, though, none of their activities had ever intersected with mine. Frankly, the handful of experiences I’ve had with Mercy’s coven have been enough to satisfy my vampire curiosity for a lifetime.

  “I wonder what’s taking so long,” I said out loud.

  It’s only been two minutes, Isabelle said. Someone might have had to pee.

  “True that,” I said. I was just impatient. Seconds later Ashley appeared at the doorway.

  “Annabelle!” she said, running to me and giving me a big sisterly hug.

  I hugged back. Not far behind her was Roger, her Choctaw Shaman boyfriend, Ellie and Sauron. Then I looked up and saw them—Mom and Dad in the doorway.

  I lost it.

  “Mom! Dad!” I ran to them, tears in my eyes. They’d been out of their senses for years. Their minds affected by the zombie bite, the bite that through healing had eventually turned them into vampires once the vampire who’d animated the zombies—Nico—had reawakened after his original self disappeared in Guinee.

  Apparently when their vampirism took over, they recovered their minds—but they thought no time had passed. When they awoke, they thought I was still nine years old. I’m sure it was as shocking to them to see me all grown up as
it was for me to see them as vampires. As dreadful as it was that they’d become vampires, truth be told, I’d take that any day over having them wither away with dementia for the rest of their lives.

  “Annabelle!” my parents each said as they took turns hugging me. They were oddly cold to the touch—a symptom of their vampirism.

  “You’ve grown up so much!” Dad said.

  “It’s been half my life.”

  “We’re so sorry we were a burden to you all these years. We never meant…”

  “A lot of things happened that no one meant. But we coped. We’re here. I trust you’ve been treated well?”

  “Oh, Mercy is a delight!” Mom said.

  “Always so thoughtful,” Dad added.

  “Are you sure we’re talking about the same Mercy? I mean, I’m glad she treated you well.”

  “She’s been welcoming to all of us,” Ashley added. “I don’t know what we’d have done without her. And what she did for us, no one could expect—”

  “What did she do for you?” I asked, raising my eyebrow.

  Ashley and my parents exchanged glances. “When we first came, her boyfriend, the vampire we’d staked before…”

  “Ramon?” I asked.

  Ashley nodded. “He tried to bite Ellie. Thankfully he didn’t succeed. Poor girl is still having nightmares about it. But Mercy had to put him down.”

  “Put him down? You say that like he’s a sick dog or something.”

  “She staked him, Annabelle.”

  “Her own boyfriend? Are you serious?”

  Ashley nodded. “Wasn’t easy for her. But she said he was feral. His bloodlust couldn’t be tamed. It was her only option.”

  I huffed. I couldn’t believe it. Mercy had basically compelled me—when she still had that ability—to go into hell itself with her to bring Ramon back. And now… she staked him? To protect my friends? I should have taken that as a gesture of good-will, a sacrifice that could earn my trust. But a part of me still suspected she was up to something. After all, a simple “staking” can be easily undone. Ramon would wander the land of the dead until the stake was removed—which is nothing short of a hellish existence. But it wasn’t permanent. Not with a simple stake. If I’d used my soul blade, however, that’s not so easy to undo. A lot had happened in the few days since I’d left. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. The whole Voodoo world had been unsettled and, with it, all of my friends’ lives.