Black Magic Bayou (19 page)

The memory I needed to connect to only happened a day ago, but with an ingredient this potent the memory would come through as clear as if we were living in it.

Wax was often used in the aid of astral projection, and what I was attempting to do was project the memory of one person onto the minds of several.

I would need all the help I could get.

Once he found the right drawer, he handed me a small yellow wax brick. I found a box of paper squares like the ones used in bakeries to grab donuts and pastries, and wrapped the square carefully so it wouldn’t melt in my hands.

In the fauna tunnel, live animals squawked and grumbled, all hidden from view. I’d never had a reason to use a live animal sacrifice—that was blood magic and I wasn’t that kind of witch—so I had no idea what kind of animals were here. Their voices were strange and vaguely alien, though.

Ez stopped in front of a glass case and riffled through various small drawers. He whispered under his breath as he sorted through objects unseen, then with a quiet
aha
he withdrew a rock about the size of my closed fist and held it in front of the light of his torch so I could see it.

Flame danced behind the golden brown crystal, giving the impression of fire trapped inside the stone. It also gave me a clear view of the tiny body frozen within. A little frog, his legs poised as if crouched to leap, was hovering inside the amber, with a few bubbles near his head, having captured the exact moment of its last breath.

I took the amber and looked closer, seeing the perfectly preserved creature stuck in the last dream it would ever have, a dream it was living in forever.

Amber with the soul of a dreamer in it.

“Perfect.”

Ez nodded and handed me a small basket. “You’ll need this.”

I deposited the lump of wax and pods into the basket alongside the amber. Ez pulled out a big box from underneath a workbench, and when he opened it, a millipede the size of my arm crawled out and fell to the floor, skittering across my foot as it ran for an exit.

A full-body shudder rocked me as the hundreds of feet scraped against my shoes.

“Sneaky fuckers,” Ez said, barely registering the monster that fled the scene.

This made me wonder what else lurked within the depths of the basement, and reminded me all the more that I didn’t want to know.

He withdrew a large glass mason jar, the kind you might store canned peaches in, and rattled it. I grabbed a small paper bag out of the stack on the counter and handed it to him. Ez counted to three as he poured something dry and hard into the bag, then handed it to me. When I peeked inside, a dozen small, milky orbs like pale brown raisins stared back at me. I gagged.

Owl eyes.

Well, I
had
asked for them.

Next he led me around a corner to a narrow corridor with shelves lined three deep with more glass jars, these all filled with dark liquid and floating solid objects. Some had full-sized animals inside, suspended not unlike the frog in amber. Ez walked sideways down the corridor, the space too narrow for his body to fit comfortably. He scanned the shelves, then found what he was looking for on the bottom one behind two smaller jars.

He handed me the torch so he had both hands free to pick up the jar, letting out a little grunt as he did. The container in his hands was enormous, at least six quarts, and when he approached the light, I could see the brain floating inside. It was huge, twice as big as a human brain.

“Jesus,” I muttered. Carrying that thing on the motorcycle was going to be one hell of a juggling act.

I decided then and there I never wanted to do this spell again.

“I’ve got this one.” He kept the jar tucked under his arm and pointed towards a tunnel directly opposite us. “That’s the one we want, just be careful where you step. One of the paths gave way last month, and there’s a hole in the floor. Not sure how deep it goes, and not really interested in finding out.”

Holding the torch ahead of me, I inched my way along the path until we came to the place he’d warned me about. A narrow, makeshift footbridge had been installed in the form of a long two-by-four.

I got across bit by bit, making the mistake halfway over of looking down. A black abyss yawned beneath me, like a hungry mouth waiting to swallow me whole.

My palm was sweating profusely, and the torch slipped down in my grip. I struggled to keep hold on it and tottered uneasily on the bridge.

“Breathe, Genie. Just look straight ahead and take another step.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and took another two steps, then three, the board bobbing under my feet. When I touched hard stone again, I let my breath out in a
whoosh
of relief.

In spite of Ez being much larger than me, he moved across the gap with easy grace, joining me on the opposite side within a few seconds.

At the end of the tunnel was a door identical to the one upstairs, only this one had no locks. I set the torch into a sconce on the wall and turned the handle, the metal slick and almost too hot to touch. When the door popped open, I didn’t wait for his instruction; I ducked through, clinging to my basket.

Leaving the basement was a lot easier than going down. The same sensation of air rushing past was there, but no suffocation and no screaming. It was the sensation of jumping from a ledge, but flying up, not falling.

My ears popped again when I stumbled through the door on the opposite end. I sucked in deep lungfuls of air. Even the stuffy warmth of the shop seemed cool and refreshing compared to the basement.

Ez was right behind me, shutting the seven locks and whispering to seal the door once more. He called back through the curtain to let Gus know we were back. Through the front window I could see the sun had set and the gloom of dusk had settled over the street. The clock on the wall said eight o’clock.

We’d been gone almost ten hours.

My phone started to buzz as soon as we were through the door, lighting up with missed texts and emails. Rather than check, I made a beeline to the beaded curtain, looking for Wilder.

He was sitting at a small kitchen table with Augusta, eating a plate of spaghetti.

“
Finally
,” he said as I came through.

For some reason I’d been sure he would leave. I had forgotten how different time functioned in the basement, each minute the equivalent to an hour in the real world.

“Yeah, I probably should have explained how that was going to work.” I shrugged apologetically.

Wilder gave me a look not easily readable, but it was somewhere between annoyed and amused. I figured I wasn’t in too much trouble given the way his lips twitched in an effort to suppress a smirk.

Ez was still out in the shop, and the sound of clinking jars and rustling paper filled the silence in the kitchen.

“Do you want yellow
and
white candles, or just yellow?” he called, his big voice booming through the small space.

“Both.”

He hummed merrily to himself, moving about the shop to get the more basic parts of my spell together. Evidently now that I’d passed the test about the harder ingredients, he was willing to gather the dried flowers and herbs without a quiz.

“Can I get you a plate, Genie?” Gus pushed her chair back from the table and headed towards the stove.

“I can’t, we need to get going.” My stomach growled loudly, betraying me. The pasta sauce smelled amazing.

I recalled how Santiago had been making sauce the previous night and wondered if it was just something in the air causing witches around New Orleans to crave carbs. If it had been anyone other than Gus and Ez, I might have grown suspicious of the herbs mixed into the tomato sauce, but they wouldn’t pull a trick like that.

“Are you sure?” She lifted a ladle of sauce from the pot and held it out like she might feed it to me standing.

“If you have any garlic bread left, I wouldn’t say no.”

Gus beamed and opened the oven, wrapping two slices of thick golden-brown bread in a paper towel and forcing the bundle into my hand. I realized, then, I was still holding the basket from the basement, and Ez would need it to ring me up.

I moved back into the front of the shop, thanking Gus for my to-go meal, and set the basket on the counter. Ez had already wrapped the jar holding the elephant brain in bubble wrap and was busy putting small paper bags of belladonna and rosemary into a reusable tote bag with the shop’s logo on the side.

“Do you know the real name for belladonna is
Atropa belladonna
?” he asked.

I shook my head as I unloaded the owl eyes and beeswax, handing them over for him to weigh and package.

“
Atropa
comes from the name Atropos, the Fate who chooses when and how a person is to die.”

I stopped moving, and he kept an eye on me as he finished sorting my goods, setting two full bags—one with just the brain in it—on the counter in front of me.

“That’ll be seven thousand five hundred and forty-eight dollars. And twelve cents.”

In spite of twelve hours spent in an alternate dimension of space-time and testing the upper limits of my credit card, we still beat Detective Perry back to the crime scene.

Good, because I wanted it to look like I knew what I was doing when he got here, and right now I just felt like a huge imposter.

Wilder parked his bike in front of the alley next to a row of other motorcycles. I hadn’t taken into account that the area would be full of people when we returned, which seemed like a gross oversight now.

Bass thumped from the strip club, and every so often I’d hear the DJ’s muffled voice introducing a new girl to the main stage. If my hearing was as good as I knew it to be, the woman currently taking her clothes off was named Badger.

A dozen cars were parked in the strip club lot, and six more were lined up in front of the bar. Hardly a massive showing, but enough warm bodies moving around might make this whole ordeal a bit trickier.

That said, it also meant the bar was open, and that was great news because I was going to need a full bottle of Jack Daniels to myself when this was all wrapped up.

Hopefully, if everything went according to plan, I’d leave here tonight knowing Emmett and Mason would be free to go, and the real killer would be one phone call away from arrest.

That was if I didn’t manage to screw everything up and wipe some poor schmuck’s memory in the meantime.

I pulled out the bulk-sized bag of salt Ez had thrown into my shopping bag and set about creating a circle around the crime scene. I wasn’t planning on summoning anything, but performing magic left me exposed, and if I was going to make myself and those around me open to psychic impressions, it was also my job to make sure no one used that open mental door to let themselves in.

I used to think being wary of demon possession was a joke.

I didn’t think that anymore.

The line wasn’t a perfect circle thanks to the constraints of the narrow alley, but it would serve my purposes for the evening. Four people could comfortably stand within the demarcations, with room enough for the body as well.

We’d stopped at a Walmart so I could buy a steel pot, not wanting to pay another three hundred bucks for a cauldron and also not having any desire to ruin one of my own pots with elephant brain.

Funny how working magic could take you from the doorway of one near-hell to another.

Who was I kidding? I loved Walmart.

Where else could I buy a pot for spellcraft, a barbeque lighter, and seven bags of M&M’s at the same time?

The M&M’s were candy corn flavored, and I was popping them into my mouth three at a time while I rifled through the big bag from Ezekiel’s. I probably wanted to finish off what was in my hand before I started sorting through the owl eyes. Mixing those two things up would be revolting.

And adding little globs of sugar to the pot wouldn’t help the spell out any, either.

Sugar was for love spells. And making people nicer.

Neither was necessary here.

With the salt line in place it was easy for me to start working on the actual spell. I added the dried herbs first, layering them on the bottom of the pot so they overlapped, mixing them together into a sweet-scented concoction. Next came the owl eyes, dropped in one at a time at even spaces throughout the herbs. One white and one yellow taper candle lay next to the pot, and the wax, amber, and elephant brain were lined up next to those.

The waiting ingredients couldn’t be added to the pot until I spoke the incantation, and I couldn’t do that until we had a body and our witness. I revisited the words of the spell in my mind but didn’t dare test them out loud.

Had
Memere
said
all will be revealed
or
I will reveal all
? Ez’s warning about using one wrong word was nagging at me. I had no clue who this witness was, but I didn’t want to fuck up their brain.

At nine o’clock on the dot, as I was about to start pacing, Perry pulled up in a U-Haul van and backed it up into the alley. The space was
just
wide enough for him to open the driver-side door to get out, but whoever was in the cab with him couldn’t get the passenger door open wide enough and had to climb out over the driver’s seat.

The witness Perry had brought was a young Latino man with long dark hair and a small, well-trimmed beard. The facial hair gave him the illusion of being older, but as far as I could guess I don’t think the kid was over twenty-two. Maybe a super-young twenty-five at best.

“Hey.” The guy waved, then must have thought the gesture didn’t match the events, because he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and stared at his feet.

With the van in place, we were effectively blocked from all activity on the street, meaning we had the illusion of privacy at last. I could have hugged Perry for thinking of it. Wilder’s motorcycle wouldn’t have done the job nearly as well.

“Carlos, meet Eugenia McQueen. She’s a werewolf princess.”

This got the kid’s attention. His eyes lifted to me, and his expression was pure, naked panic.