Cursed (2 page)

“He came when the Fourth House resurfaced in New Orleans last time and left when the serial killer claimed her life. The Fourth House is here again. We should just send its member away,” Olivier reasoned.

“No,” Marie said quietly. “It is too late. This time, the Red Man will not be satisfied with the girl. He brings great evil.” The images the spirits had shown her flooded her mind: those of a gorgeous young woman with the touch of death. Marie pushed the vision back. “Evil that will not stop.”

“Your ancestors told you this?” Olivier’s tone was hushed.

“Yes.”

“Marie, can we speak to them? Please?” Candace asked. She leaned forward, her brown eyes concerned, and took Marie’s hand. “Maybe there are things they told you that you don’t recall. Maybe we can ask them for guidance.”

Marie hesitated and looked around the dreary room. “The spirits … there are always some near,” she said. “But we should be outside, where more will hear us and speak through me.”

“This is too important to wait. Even if they only tell us a little bit more, we must know,” Olivier said. He stood and removed his jacket, draping it over his chair. “I’ll prepare the area.”

Marie frowned, torn about letting them talk to her ancestors. She feared revealing her family’s secret and exposing her beloved grandson, Jayden, to harm. The spirits had told her recently that his fate lay in a direction filled with black magic. The most she could do: try to protect him while he traveled his path and guide him to using healing magic rather than blood magic. It would not be long before he learned of his role in what was to come.

Soon, he’d meet
her
, the white zombie that plagued Marie’s dreams. A beautiful girl in her early twenties with blonde hair and light eyes. An un-dead girl whose spirit was returned to her even after her body was gone. Her siren song would draw the Red Man and doom everyone around her.

“Marie, we’re ready for you.”

Marie blinked herself out of her troubled thoughts and stood. Olivier had drawn a large circle with ritual powders that smelled of licorice and vanilla, along with other earthy herbs. In the center was a candle dressed with cascarilla. He stood on one side of the circle, opposite Candace. Both were barefooted.

Marie reached into her pocket to grip her chicken claw gris-gris for a moment then took a deep breath. She nodded and walked to her place near the candle. Bowing her head, she said a prayer to her family’s god, her ancestors and to the Christian god, whose teachings she still heard every Sunday morning.

When she was finished, she started to shuffle around the candle in a simple dance.

The two other House leaders began to sing quietly, Candace in her native Swahili and Olivier in French. Marie listened to their voices as they called to her ancestors to help them. They danced around her, near the inside edge of the protective circle. Their discordant melodies synced, and energy surged through her, a sign the spirits had agreed to help.

Marie flung her head back and readied herself for the blackness that always came when the spirits possessed her. The scent of the candle and potions filled her senses while the singing warbled as if traveling through water to reach her. She was fading, being replaced by a spirit.

The darkness came. It was like sleeping, except that her body was awake while her mind stepped away to allow the spirits to communicate in a language others could understand.

After a moment of pitch black, a vision formed. She saw the white zombie walking the dark streets of New Orleans with the grace of a ghost, dressed in a glowing white dress. She appeared to be following the Red Man, a mysterious figure in a maroon robe whose quick step soon outpaced the girl and Marie. With a flare of red, he disappeared from Marie’s dream, slipping easily out of her mind while the white zombie stayed.

The beautiful girl from the Fourth House stopped and bent over to touch the booted foot of a bum passed out against a building.

The man’s foot began to rot then fall a part. The deterioration crawled quickly up his body, consuming all of him, before he crumbled to a powder right before Marie’s eyes.

She stepped back, repulsed by the touch. She was able to use power channeled by spirits to kill small animals for sacrifice, just by looking at them.

But the magic she’d just seen was different.

The building the bum leaned against began to rot next, then crumble.

Everything the white zombie touched rotted and died: people, buildings.

Jayden. He was across the street, frozen mid-step.

As if she just noticed him, the white zombie started to cross the two lanes separating her from Marie’s grandson.

“Stop!” Marie shouted, chasing the vision in her dream. “You cannot have him!”

The zombie turned.

Marie stopped suddenly, afraid the girl meant to hurt her.

“Please! He is free of the curse. Leave him be!” Marie pleaded.

“He is both curse and prophecy,” the girl replied. “Just like you. Our families are linked and will remain so. There’s nothing
you
can do to stop me. Only the Chosen, Warriors and Devil can.”

For a moment, Marie was too stunned to talk. The white zombie had never done more than threaten her before.

The girl turned towards Jayden once more.

“Wait!” Marie said quickly. “Tell me – who is the Chosen? The Devil?”

“Good luck finding them.” The girl began walking. “Before I do,” she said over her shoulder.

Marie opened her mouth to speak or scream and warn her grandson.

She was wrenched awake. The external world was too real, too fast, and she crashed to the ground.

“Marie!” This voice wasn’t the white zombie but Candace’s.

Marie felt hands rolling her over, fingers digging into her thick neck to check her pulse. She was sweating profusely and exhausted.

A fuzzy face appeared above her. Her eyes focused once more.

“Oh, Marie!” Candace exclaimed. “How are you? Are you well?”

“Y…yes,” Marie managed. “Takes much … energy for the ritual.”

Olivier brought her water, and Candace helped her sit. Marie sipped the water, wishing again it was her Sezarec. She needed a stiff drink after the exchange with the zombie.

The two were quiet. They were gazing at one another, not at her.

“What is it?” she asked. “What did they say?”

“The Red Man isn’t the only danger. A curse and a prophecy,” Candace answered. “We can’t stop what comes. Only
they
can.”

“The Chosen, the Devil, the Warriors,” Marie said. What was the connection between the Red Man and white zombie? Why had she been after Jayden?

“Yes,” Olivier said. “Our salvation rests in the Fourth House that bears the curse and the prophecy.”

“What else?” Marie asked anxiously.

Candace’s eyes were filled with tears. “They said many will die. People we love. The three Houses of New Orleans will fall before the prophecy is fulfilled.”

“Unless we find those who can stop it,” Marie whispered.

Olivier nodded.

Her heart racing with fear, Marie could think of nothing except Jayden. The spirits guided her to protect him at all costs even while warning her that many would die.

Jayden was special. She didn’t fully understand why, but she had to make sure he survived whatever evil was coming. If it took her all night, she had to finish the ritual to bind the protective spells to the dog tags before he came to visit the next morning.

“Lookin’ good, Jayden.”

“Got your daddy’s rich-boy smile and yo’ mama’s good looks.”

“He dresses like a magazine ad.”

Jayden forced a smile at his laughing uncles and cousins. He was doing his best to hide his irritation at his
mother’s side of the family. He gently threw the football back and forth with one of his uncles, not wanting to injure his uncle’s pride or aggravate the back injury that left him on unemployment.

“You get scouted yet?” another uncle called from the sideline.

“Yeah, by a few places,” Jayden said, grunting as he threw the ball again. “Nothing big yet.” He wasn’t going to tell them he entered his senior year of high school with scholarship offers from two huge football colleges, the University of Georgia and Lousiana State University.

“Maybe your daddy can make a phone call.”

The resentment was killing him. He recalled why he didn’t like coming to the family barbecues, and it was more than the rundown house north of New Orleans. He didn’t wish bad upon anyone, but he didn’t know how his grandmother’s house had withstood the hurricanes. It was the only one for miles that hadn’t been destroyed.

She’d probably tell me it was the spirits protecting her.

His eyes went to the good-sized shed leaning against the back of the house. While the men were out back with him, barbecuing, drinking and tossing the football, most of the women in the family were gathered within the shed, listening to his crazy grandma talk to the spirits of their ancestors and cast voodoo
luck spells that never seemed to work for his mama. Her family was what his wealthy father referred to as
ignorant
.

Caught between two families that couldn’t be more different, Jayden was grateful he wasn’t more screwed up than he was.

A commotion came from the direction of the house. Jayden’s mother slammed the screen door open. She was arguing with one of her sisters. They both held glasses of alcohol and cigarettes. Jayden was too far to hear what they fought over.

“So much for being sober. She never been able to stick to anything,” one of his uncles said.

“Shoulda stayed with Jay’s daddy. We’d all be rich if she did,” another said.

This was the other reason Jayden hated the barbecues: his mother was a wreck every time they left. The sisters quarreled for a few minutes before the door of the shed was opened by the third sister in the family of eight kids. She waved for them to come inside.

Gritting his teeth at the thought of putting his mother back together again, Jayden caught his uncle’s latest throw and made a show of studying the time. It was close to noon, and he had to take his mother home before crossing town to his dad’s.

“If we don’t leave now, we’ll get stuck in a few funeral processions on our way out of town. It’s about the time when they start up,” he said, aware that at least two graveyards were between his grandmama’s house and the downtown apartment where his mother lived. “We’ll play next time, Uncle Tommy.”

“A’ight.”

Jayden flashed another smile and jogged to the picnic table area. He grabbed a pulled pork slider, tossed the football on the ground under a massive oak tree and headed towards the house. Dear god, could the elderly voodoo priestess cook! He wolfed the sandwich down and entered the house to grab his keys and wallet first.

The interior was in worse shape than the sagging exterior. It smelled moldy beneath the rich scents of homemade barbecue sauce and collard greens. The wallpaper had long since yellowed or peeled in many rooms. Grandmama Toussaint smoked like a chimney and burned her magical incense to the point that the house reeked. Worn, outdated furniture, filthy drapes, the scent of cat urine …

He paused to sneeze before snatching his belongings then leaving quickly for the backyard. Approaching the shed, he opened the door. A cloud of heavy incense engulfed him. Jayden wrinkled his nose to keep from sneezing again. He ducked beneath the short doorway.

The three sisters, his grandmama, and two of his great-aunts were huddled around a table with a few of his cousins. Wooden shelves lined the walls, cluttered by clay jars, hanging herbs, bottles of discolored liquid – some with unidentifiable items suspended in them – and mummified pieces of animals he’d never stayed long enough to identify.

Jayden
hated
this place. It reeked of death, despite the incense and cigarette smoke.

“You ready to go, Mama?” he asked.

The women at the table all faced him at once. Every female born in his mother’s line bore the same birthmark in the same place: a small, faint mole between their eyes. His Haitian grandmama said it was the sacred mark of Loa Loko, the voodoo god of healing and herbs from which the powerful priestesses in his maternal line received their powers of protection and healing.

Faced with a table full of women bearing the same mark, Jayden felt a little weirded out. No part of him believed in any form of magic, but the same birthmark appearing on three generations of women struck him as unnatural.

His grandmama’s round face lit up. Her eyes contained a wild gleam, and her grin was punctuated by three gold teeth and three white teeth. Her wide smile almost swallowed her face.

“They said you’d come!” she exclaimed.

He didn’t want to know
who
said he’d come.

“Are you
mambos
or grandmama today?” he asked, only half-joking. He’d seen one of her possessions before and planned on running the next time she started.

“Child,” she chided and stood. She was barely five feet tall and round, clothed in a purple gown with a matching headscarf. Necklaces and bracelets of bone and wooden beads clicked together with her movement. “I am always your grandmama, and I always serve the spirits. I have something for you.” Her accent was thick, her pronunciation of English words careful.

“Grandmama Marie, I have what you gave me last time. I’m good,” he said. Recalling the fuzzy … thing she gave him last month, he tried not to cringe as she maneuvered her large body to a shelf and bent over.

He looked at his mother expectantly. She rolled her eyes at his silent plea to hurry and put out her cigarette, leaning down for her purse.

“Your great grandpapa was here last week,” his grandmama continued. “He came to me in a vision and warned me. There is someone in your life who will do you great ill. I prepared a spell for you, my Jayden.”

“Oh, Jayden!” one of his aunts exclaimed.

“A
protection
spell,” his youngest cousin informed him. “Grandmama chose me as her apprentice.
I
helped with the rite this morning.”

“Great,” he said, scratching the back of his head.
If this crap was real, grandmama would use her magic powers to buy a winning lotto ticket.
He repressed a shudder at the surroundings that freaked him out. “Maybe you should become an apprentice for something you can get a degree in.”

“I
know
, Jayden,” his cousin sighed in exasperation. “I’m only in seventh grade. I can help Grandmama and study for school.”

“Here it is.” Grandmama Marie straightened and reached over the heads of those at the table to hand him a small box.

Jayden took it reluctantly.

“Open it!” his cousin squealed. She was dancing in place.

Jayden’s sensitivity to the feelings of the women in his life overcame his revulsion. He held the box away from him and opened it warily. His dread turned to interest. He withdrew the round, tarnished dog tags on an equally aged ball chain. He was forced to squint to read the name in the candlelit shed.

Rene-Baptiste Etienne Toussaint

“Grandmama, are you sure?” he asked, surprised.

His cousin hugged him. He wrapped an arm around her squirming body instinctively. She pried the tags from his hand and held them up for the rest of the women to see.

“He wanted you to have them,” his grandmama responded with a proud smile.

His great grandfather had volunteered to fight for the U.S. overseas during World War One rather than live in repression in Haiti during the U.S. occupation. The dog tags were a family legacy, one of the few pieces to survive a fire that occurred before Jayden’s birth. As much as he wished he wasn’t related to the people practicing voodoo, he was humbled by the piece of family history in his hand.

“You have to put them on!” his cousin demanded. She grabbed his arm and tugged him down until he yielded and bent. Solemnly, she placed them over his head, murmuring a few words in French he took to be a prayer to the dead man who allegedly wanted Jayden to have the tags.

“Thank you for … uh, protecting me,” he said. “I’ll take good care of them.”

Her eyes glowed. Jayden straightened and tucked the box into one pocket while pulling out his keys.

“And they’ll take good care of you.” His grandmama laughed, along with the other women.

Jayden looked down at the dog tags, amazed by the gift from the crazy woman in the shed.

“Jayden, you must not take them off,” Grandmama Marie said, growing serious. “Ever.”

“I won’t, grandmama,” he assured her.

“No, Jayden.” She approached him, peering up at him with intensity that left him unnerved. Her words were hushed, so that only he was able to hear them. “The white zombie is going to kill you. Your great-grandpapa will protect you.”

Jayden didn’t know what to say. He wanted to laugh. How ridiculous was this?

“Okay, Grandmama,” he said at last.

She appeared satisfied with the response. “You are the hundredth in our line. You are meant for great things.”

“I know, Grandmama,” he said. “But becoming a voodoo priest is nowhere in my future.”

She harrumphed and turned around, returning to the table.

“I’ll call you later, Mama.” His mother rose and kissed his grandmama then hugged her sisters, aunts, and nieces.

Jayden fled. He was out of the shed before his mother finished her farewells. He went back to the house and waited in the kitchen, preferring the scents of barbecue and cat urine to death.

“Mama didn’t get to tell me whether or not to go on that date,” his mama complained as she tugged open the screen door.

“You don’t need some dead ancestor to tell you dating a con is stupid,” Jayden replied.

She narrowed her eyes. His mother was tall and slender, her flawless, cocoa skin, large eyes and high cheekbones rendering her beautiful despite the abuse she did to her body over the years. She’d bleached out the family mark to the point it was only noticeable up close. Her looks had captured the attention of Jayden’s father, who married her after a whirlwind romance, despite the objections of his respectable family, one of the oldest and most prominent in the South, even before Jayden’s daddy made his millions.

“You’ve been sober for two years and haven’t smoked in one,” he added, eyes on the drink in her hand. “You remember why you’re supposed to stay that way?”

“Don’t lecture me like I’m a child, Jay.” She frowned at him then glanced at the alcohol, as if not realizing she’d been drinking.

Most days, Jayden felt like he was raising a teenager instead of being raised by a mother. Single and struggling, Cora Toussaint’s reliance on drugs and bad decisions had culminated in the incident Jayden would never forgive her for, the one that almost claimed the life of his little sister. He owed it to his mother to help her, even if he didn’t want his sister anywhere near her ever again.

“Mama, I need to talk to you about something,” he started, aware he’d agreed to come this weekend for a reason other than to see the family he had nothing in common with.

“I’m in no mood for it.” She placed the glass on the counter and led him through the living room.

About to press her, Jayden sneezed hard instead.

His mother gave him the
don’t-be-rude
glare, and he held his nose to keep from sneezing again. He’d never been so happy to smell the combination of cigarette smoke and unshed rain as he was when he left the house and reached the front porch.

“Yo’ daddy buy you that car, Jay?” Uncle Tommy asked from his seat on the front porch.

“Yeah,” he managed to keep his tone friendly, out of respect for his mother. “It was a birthday present.”

“Must be nice not to have to work for a living. Why’d you divorce him, Cora? We coulda all had nice cars,” his uncle laughed.

“Yeah. Well, good seeing you, Uncle Tommy,” Jayden said.

“You take care!” his mother said, hugging her brother. “Have Mama call me
later
.”

Jayden’s smile faded as he strode to the car. He didn’t want to drive to the barbecue, knowing he’d catch hell about the car his daddy bought him, but his mother’s car was barely fit for driving down the block. He wasn’t about to risk having to spend the night here.

The car was a sauna in the late, muggy Louisianan afternoon. Incense and smoke clung to him, stinking up the car quickly. Jayden turned on the air conditioner full blast, but it still took too long for the car to cool down.