Date: 2021-12-31 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Romance
Description: Zombie curses, licorice witches and ghost children, oh, my! When Luke Montague was hit by a truck, courtesy of Angharad’s witch magic, I was in shock. But, when he opened his eyes and looked up at me, saying “ma minette,” I knew my life would never be the same again. And I was right. But, even with Drake alive again, everything isn’t daisies and roses. No, far from it. I’m still playing puppet on a string to Guarda (ahem, zombie puppet on a string) and important artifacts are still going missing throughout New Orleans, stolen at the hands of ghostly children. As if that weren’t enough, there’s

HAUNTINGLY HAPPY

by

H.P. MALLORY

MIDLIFE SPIRITS #10

Other Series by H.P. Mallory

Paranormal Women’s Fiction Series:

Haven Hollow

Midlife Mermaid

Midlife Spirits

Paranormal Shifter Series:

Wolves of Valhalla

Arctic Wolves

Paranormal Romance Series:

Underworld

Lily Harper

Dulcie O’Neil

Lucy Westenra

Paranormal Adventure Series:

Dungeon Raider

Chasing Demons

SciFi Romance Series:

Virtual Escapes

Academy Romance Series:
Academy of Necromancy

Reverse Harem Series: (Writing as Plum Pascal)

Happily Never After

My Five Kings

HAUNTINGLY HAPPY

Published by Rain Press

Copyright © 2021 by H.P. Mallory

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Hauntingly Happy

Chapter One

Alive.

The word kept echoing through my head, like a drum beat.

Alive, alive, alive.

My heart gave a painful thump against the inside of my ribs as I stared down into familiar brown eyes. My tongue felt thick, clumsy in my mouth, and I had to drag in a shaky breath before I could speak.

“Drake?”

Luke, no, Drake, weakly smiled up at me from where he lay on the floor of my living room. The bones in his face and body had stopped shifting around and popping back into place, so the only sign of the accident was the puddle of tacky blood smeared around him and soaking into my hardwood floors.

“Are you… are you okay?”

I wasn’t sure what else to say—what more I could say. Because what had just happened—it was impossible, defied explanation. And yet…

And yet it was true… I’d seen it with my own eyes.

Seconds before, Luke had been hit by a truck and, for all intents and purposes, he’d died. But, then he’d come to, yet when he had, he hadn’t been Luke.

Of all the mystical, magical things I’d seen since moving to New Orleans, this had to be the most unbelievable. Even now, I was having trouble wrapping my head around it.

But that was Drake’s smile turning up the corners of his descendant’s mouth, crinkling the corner of his eyes. Luke Montague had never looked at me with anything other than anger, arrogance, or the pinched expression of a man who’d bitten into a particularly sour lemon. But, his expression now…

I recognized the look in those deep, melting, dark eyes. I’d seen that expression, those eyes, in dreams, in the dark space behind my eyelids, in memories. And those eyes were all Drake. No one else had ever watched me with that type of soft wonderment, as if I were the miracle, and not the man who’d been dead for more than a century suddenly being alive again.

“Ma minette,” he breathed, scanning my face. One hand reached up to brush gentle fingers over my hair.

I couldn’t get enough air.

A roaring sound built in my ears and pressure burned at the corner of my eyes as tears threatened to break through. But, I absolutely refused to cry. If I started, I might never stop.

I looked at Drake and inhaled a deep breath. I just… I had to make sure… had to convince myself that this really was… him.

“How is this possible?” I asked in a hollow tone.

When he’d died, Drake had left behind an older brother as well as a host of distant relatives. There had been something erroneous about his will, because my great aunt, Myra, had purchased the rambling mansion and then passed it down to me.

But, a couple of weeks ago, Drake’s living doppelganger showed up on my doorstep, informing me he was Drake’s great nephew, Luke Montague, and that he’d be suing me for ownership of my house. And such was the start of a terrible relationship.

Luke had shown up earlier that day with his lawyer to harass me when my newly made witch… acquaintance, Angharad, had enchanted him with a twirling umbrella and convinced him to walk out in front of a truck. Then she’d brought the dying Luke inside the house, dressed his wounds… with magic, and convinced the truck driver and the lawyer they hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. I’d never get the sound of screeching brakes and that final awful crunch of broken bones hitting hard pavement out of my head.

But when those chocolate brown eyes had opened, it had been Drake behind them, and not Luke.

Drake’s gentle touch moved from my hair to the side of my face. Warm, strong fingers cupped my cheek, cradling it.

“I do not know, mon chaton,” Drake admitted, still looking a little unfocused and confused. “All I remember was a great rush of energy sweeping me up, and then I blinked and found myself inside this body.”

The feel of Drake’s hand against my skin felt amazing—in a way I’d never experienced before. In the past, when we’d touched, it occurred in dreams or time-traveling visions. It was never concrete, never real. It was nothing compared to feeling the warmth of his skin, the solid weight of him. But there was something besides the awe and magic of this miracle (and that’s exactly what this was)—there was also a feeling within me that this was somehow wrong—like it was something that shouldn’t have been allowed. Because however I looked at it, a man was dead. And even though I tried to remind myself such was the case, I couldn’t seem to move past the fact that Drake was alive, that he was here, that he was whole…

It almost felt like it was too good to be true—like if I looked away or blinked too many times, the magic might break and the carriage would turn back into a pumpkin.

“Oh, ma minette.” Drake’s thumb swept over my cheekbone, and I felt the shiver of it all the way down my spine. “You’re even more beautiful in… real life.”

I knew I shouldn’t have allowed his words to cause such warmth to ride up within me, but they did, and I couldn’t help it. Yes, this was Drake, but it also wasn’t Drake. The first time I’d ever seen Luke, when he came to challenge my ownership of the house, and appeared on my porch, my stomach had dropped all the way down to my toes because I was convinced I was staring at a real live version of Drake. That’s how similar the two appeared and yet, as I looked upon him now, there were subtle differences. His face wasn’t quite as angular as Drake’s and his eyes weren’t exactly the right shade of chocolate. And his voice… it didn’t quite have the deep, rich cadence of the policeman’s who had died in the early 1900s.

Regardless, shock was making its way through me, breaking up like ice on a river in spring time, and something warm, golden, and glowing was bubbling up to the surface.

Drake was alive.

And, suddenly, that was all that mattered.

It no longer mattered a damn that I’d had a mysterious curse laid on me, or that my house had been broken into, or that someone was throwing live snakes into restaurants in the French Quarter, or that somewhere inside my house was a witch who’d just enthralled a man to walk into traffic then erased the memories of those involved with a truly worrying lack of empathy. None of it mattered, because I couldn’t focus on any of it. All I could focus on, rejoice in, was Drake Montague being alive, Drake holding my face, and Drake looking up at me like I was the paradise he’d been promised.

I cleared my throat, trying to focus. If Drake was here, in Luke’s body, then where the heck was the body’s original owner?

“Drake, do you know where Luke’s… soul is?”

The accident, if you could call it that, had been pretty horrific. Before his body had started knitting itself back together, I’d been pretty sure Luke was dead.

Drake went still, his gaze drifting slightly to the left, like he was trying to remember something.

“I do not know. He is not in here with me, nor was he ever—not from the moment I felt the gust that brought me here.”

I let out a little breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. That was one nightmare scenario averted. While I wasn’t happy Luke was dead and absolutely had mixed feelings about my own joy to find Drake now alive, I certainly wouldn’t want Luke trapped as a passenger in his own body. No, I knew what that was like only too well.

I’d shared my body with Drake, for a while. Literally, not biblically. At the time, the situation had been a bit of an emergency and I’d had to possess myself with Drake in order to act as an anchor for him once he’d lost his connection to the house.

Having someone else in my body and my head had been pretty unsettling at times, but both of us had entered the situation willingly. I’d also been in total control, since it was my body. I couldn’t imagine how terrible it would have been for two strangers to be forced into a body time-share arrangement. Especially since, as far as I knew, Luke hadn’t even been aware that ghosts or the supernatural actually existed.

But that still left the question of where exactly the man’s soul was. Because the idea of Luke and Drake switching places, leaving me with a crabby, arrogant ghost to haunt my house wasn’t a great outcome, either.

“Peyton.”

My attention snapped back to Drake. Usually he was all purring pleasantries, so hearing him use my name in that amber whiskey voice caught my attention.

His fingers ghosted over my brow, the bridge of my nose, the corners of my mouth, like he was trying to memorize my face from touch alone. Little shivers followed the path of his fingers. My skin felt sensitive, pulled too tightly over my body.

I wasn’t sure when I’d leaned forward, but I was suddenly close enough to feel the warm brush of Drake’s breath against my skin. If I laid my hand on the strong, tanned column of his throat, I’d be able to feel the steady pulse of a heartbeat.

He was alive.

It was like my thick brain just wasn’t grasping the obvious.

He was alive.

He was alive…

He was alive!

A grin broke over my face, even as I shook my head, not understanding entirely how it had happened, but Drake was alive. I was just so happy. For him, for me. For us both. After a century of being forced to haunt your own house, watching the years drift by without being able to interact with another person (before me at any rate), it must have been torture for a man like Drake.

And now? Now the whole world had just opened up for him.

Drake’s stomach growled.

The sound helped shock me back to reality, and I straightened up with an awkward laugh. “Are you okay, Drake?” I repeated my question from earlier. “You’re not in any pain, are you?” I mean, Drake hadn’t been in it at the time, but that body had just been literally run over by a truck.

“Non, I am unharmed.” Drake slowly sat up from where he lay sprawled on my living room floor.

I gave myself a shake. There were a lot of real world things that still needed to be dealt with. I really needed to figure out what the heck had actually happened to Luke, and what exactly this… new state of affairs meant for the impending lawsuit. Drake was uninjured, but he was still covered in blood, and his borrowed clothing had so many rips in it that I was getting an eyeful of the body barely hidden underneath.

I probably should have been worrying about where Angharad had wandered off to. She’d been way too ready to resort to murder as a problem solving technique, and that didn’t bode well. But, I couldn’t worry about the lawsuit or think about Angharad at the moment. No, now all my thoughts were centered on the man before me, someone who had become… my best friend.

I reached down to help Drake up, but once he was on his feet, I didn’t let go. Neither did he.

“Ma minette, I—” He swallowed. “If he is gone, then I am sorry for it.” He was quiet as we both nodded and I could see the regret playing out in his eyes. I imagined it was similar to the guilt I felt—guilt that was laced with extreme joy.

“I know,” I started, but he shook his head.

“Perhaps this is a sign of my bad constitution, but I cannot stop from being elated to be here. With you.”

My chest ached, and I gave Drake’s hand a squeeze. How horrible would it be to get your greatest wish handed to you, but at the cost of your own great-nephew’s life? Even if Drake hadn’t been responsible for fate, it was still an awful burden to bear. I could see the shadow of that blame still playing out on his face, and it hurt to witness.

Drake’s stomach rumbled again, and in spite of everything, the corners of my lips twitched into a smile. I couldn’t deal with metaphysic or moral issues that were facing us currently, but I could at least take care of the practical ones, like making him a sandwich.

“You’re hungry.”

The ghost of Drake’s usual crooked smile tilted his lips, and he gave my hand another squeeze.

“Oui, mon chaton. I find myself quite hungry.”

I eyed Drake’s ruined clothing. It was more rips and bloodstains than cloth at this point. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Then we can see what I’ve got in the kitchen.”

“Oui, I am… quite hungry,” he repeated as he took me in from head to toe. The teasing, dark note in his voice caused a flush to climb over my cheeks.

“I meant food, Drake.”

He laughed, seeming more like himself. “If you insist.”

But he still didn’t release my hand.

Chapter Two

There was a dead man rummaging through my refrigerator.

I groped behind me for one of my kitchen chairs and sat down heavily. I was still having trouble wrapping my head around everything that had just happened. In fact, my head was spinning. Or maybe that was just the exhaustion… it was hard to tell.

Daschel pressed against my leg where I sat, his attention split between whining at me in concern and wagging his tail while watching Drake eat peanut butter straight out of the jar with a spoon as he went through my cupboards. I dropped my hand to ruffle Daschel’s fluffy golden ears, giving what reassurance I could.

The discovery of a half-full box of Frosted Flakes cereal caused Drake to put the peanut butter down for a second, so he could shake out a handful of frosted breakfast goodness. As soon as he tasted the sweetness, his lips twisted up into a smile as he chewed.

“Is this truly meant for breakfast, ma minette?” He glanced down at the bright blue box, reading it over. “C’est très doux. It is very sweet.”

“Don’t judge,” I answered with a small smile. “Sometimes a girl needs sugar to get her going in the morning.”

He flashed me another boyish smile, the corners of his melting dark eyes crinkling up at the corners, and my breath caught in my throat. He was just… as beautiful as he always had been—just as stunning as the times I’d seen him in my dreams.

I flinched as the memories of everything crashed back down on me.

When I’d first inherited my great aunt’s house in the Garden District of New Orleans, I’d been ready for a big change. My divorce had just finalized and inheriting the house had seemed like fate, so I’d packed up my bags and moved to the ‘city that care forgot.’ Well, I have to say, the ‘big change’ I received was kind of an understatement. I had a seismic shift in my whole worldview, and it had all started with meeting former police officer, Drake Montague.

I say ‘former’ because Drake died in the early 1900’s and had been haunting my, previously his, house ever since. With Drake came a whole host of other supernatural shenanigans, ranging from voodoo priestesses, to the demonic spirits of century old serial killers, to wandering the spirit world of 1910 New York City, trying to solve a century old missing persons’ case.

With all the crazy twists and turns my life had taken since moving here, this was the one that had totally thrown me for a loop. Witches I could handle. Ghosts I could handle. Becoming a medium and meeting a host of spirits both humble and famous? Sure. Bring it on.

But having the ghost of the man I’d been slowly falling in love with over the course of months, while knowing we could never be together in any capacity, suddenly alive and in a body again? I needed to sit down for a minute. Or maybe the rest of the year.

Drake who, other than the brief period of time he’d spent possessing my body, hadn’t had a chance to taste food in almost a century, was poking at my Keurig coffee maker, as though doing so would make the coffee brew faster. As he watched it, he took a bite out of the sad, withered looking apple that had been the only piece of fruit in the entire house.

I’d have gone grocery shopping if I’d known I was going to have guests. But, alas, most of the people who dropped in on me these days didn’t have a body to feed.

Which brought me back to the problem I’d been so desperately avoiding thinking about.

I hadn’t realized I’d dropped my face into my palms until gentle fingers brushed against the back of my hands. It took a huge effort to lift my face up. I was so tired, and my head felt like it weighed more than a bowling ball. And that was owing to the fact that I’d been cursed.

Drake knelt beside my chair, his handsome face full of concern.

“Mon chaton,” he whispered, fingers still resting against my hand. “I am sorry. I did not intend for this to happen.”

I tried to smile, but the expression ended up being something more like a grimace. Daschel pressed tighter against my side, his tail thumping gently against the tile floor. Having the dog near me seemed to be the only boost to my energy. I twisted my wrist so I could take Drake’s hand in mine, linking our fingers together.

“I know you didn’t.”

And I did know that. Drake might have reveled in living through me vicariously, constantly nagging me to go out, to eat this or that, to cram in as many experiences as he could after a hundred years of being trapped inside the same four walls. But, at his core, Drake was a protector. He would never have taken the chance to live at someone else’s expense, much less his own relative.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said quietly, flexing his strong tanned fingers that were linked between my own. “I heard shouting. You screamed and… c’est tout un flou. There was a rushing like wind, but I could actually feel it. And then I opened my eyes, and there you were.”

“It’s okay, Drake, none of this is your fault and you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. It just… happened.”

His breath ghosted against my skin a second before he laid a brief kiss on the back of my hand. “Comme un ange. You are so like an angel.”

I tried to smile, but my eyelids felt like lead curtains. As it was, I was using every ounce of strength left in me to stay seated and upright.

Drake raised his free hand up in front of his face, frowning as he examined the skin and the shift of muscle and tendons as he made a fist and released it.

“He is gone. My kin. I never got to meet him, and now he is dead.”

My fingers tightened in his grip, and I laid my free hand on his shoulder, even though the move was almost enough to spill me out of my chair and onto the floor. “I’m so sorry, Drake.”

Lovie, my witch and voodoo priestess friend, had gone in search of Angharad because the witch had literally disappeared. I didn’t know where either of them had gone, and I wasn’t sure I cared right then. I kept seeing the blank stare of Luke Montague’s face as he stepped out in front of that truck. And hearing the crunch of the impact.

I didn’t understand why Angharad had done it. I also wasn’t sure how I could ever look at her again, knowing what she was capable of. Just thinking about it left me tired.

Of course, the exhaustion could have had another source. Like the fact that the most powerful voodoo priestess in town had cursed me…

Guarda was the descendant of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, and she had an alarming amount of power at her disposal. For whatever reason, she’d set her sights on me when I’d gone to her for help a few months back, and now she was bent on turning me into her zombie.

And before you start to bring to mind brainless dead people walking like Frankenstein with bits of flesh dropping off them, voodoo zombies aren’t the same thing as Night of the Living Dead zombies. A zombie is actually a mindless servant, bound to the caster’s will. And while most of the time I was beyond tired and felt so sick, I honestly thought I might die, that wasn’t the point of a zombie curse.

Daschel pressed harder against my leg, golden fur rasping against my jeans. I felt a little better and a little less tired as Daschel’s healing aura soaked into my skin. My bones didn’t feel like they were carved out of lead, at least.

I needed to try to find a way to break this curse. If only because I didn’t want to feel so tired I could barely hold my own head up. I also didn’t want to keep waking up outside, in strange places, with no knowledge of how I’d gotten there. Or worse, waking up in my own bed with black earth caked to the bottoms of my feet. And no idea where I’d been or why.

At the thought of the curse, tears burned the corners of my eyes, but I took a deep breath and refused to let them fall. I had all the time in the world for self-pity but, right then, Drake needed me. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through. To be suddenly alive again, something he’d longed for, but at the cost of his nephew’s life had to be exhausting in its own right. And, the trade-off was horrible. I might not have been capable of much, but I could hold his hand and stroke the dark hair back from his forehead, and just be there for him. I could be a warm touch after a century of cold nothingness.

Drake’s pulse beat hard enough that I could feel it in my hand when I rested my fingers against his neck. He leaned back, dark eyes searching mine.

“Ma minette,” he said, voice hoarse. “I—”

“I think I got all of it.” Maggie, my eighteen-year-old cousin, stepped into the kitchen holding a dustpan heaped with shards of porcelain. She chewed her lips, staring down at the remains of what had once been an antique doll. The antique doll, Lizzie, had been possessed by a ghost. Normally, a haunted doll was the stuff of nightmares, but Lizzie had been a benign, protective spirit. She could move her doll body a bit, enough to point or stand, and could speak to people through thought. And she’d saved her previous owner from a house fire by waking her in the night.

And then someone had broken into my house and shattered her. With a stolen sword.

But back to my cousin, Maggie had witnessed the whole thing outside with Angharad and the hypnosis umbrella and then Luke and the truck. But, she hadn’t witnessed the fact that when Luke came to, he wasn’t Luke, but Drake. Instead, after the accident, she’d hurried to her room and I hadn’t seen her until this exact moment.

“What should I do with her?” Maggie continued and she was understandably still shaken up. “I mean, we shouldn’t just… throw the pieces away, right? Should we bury them or something?”

Drake leaned away, looking in Maggie’s direction, but saying nothing. When Maggie’s attention fell to Drake, the two just stared at each other for a few seconds, and Maggie’s eyebrows knitted over her eyes. I wasn’t sure how she hadn’t seen him when she first walked in, but I figured that was just shock for you.

Now she definitely saw him and, in seeing him, appeared to be completely confused.

“How is it possible that he’s sitting in our kitchen?” she started, shaking her head? “The last time I saw him, he was getting hit by a truck?” She spoke extremely slowly.

I cleared my throat. “Maggie, meet Drake… in the flesh.”

Maggie didn’t say anything right away. She just stood there and looked from Drake to me and then back to Drake again. “Drake?”

“Drake.”

“As in… the ghost who used to haunt our house?”

I nodded.

She shook her head. “How… is that possible?”

So I explained everything that had happened, everything we knew so far. Maggie just stood there dumbly, not really responding to the words coming out of my mouth. Once I’d finished explaining, she took a deep breath and glanced down at the dustpan still clutched in her hands. Her knuckles were white.

“What do I do with this?”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She wouldn’t take her eyes off the mess in the dustpan. “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath. “But, I want to know what to do with the remains of Lizzie.”

“Just put her on the counter.” I rubbed my hand over my forehead, trying in vain to soothe the dull throbbing agony still building there.

Maggie did just that, then looked at me. “Is Lizzie’s spirit still here?”

“I don’t know… Drake?” I asked as I looked up at the man in question. “Can you sense if Lizzie is still here with us?”

“I’m sorry, mon chaton.” Drake shook his head. “I cannot sense her. I do not know if that is because she is no longer with us, or because my own senses have changed rather rapidly.”

I nodded and sat up straight, drawing in a deep breath and feeling like I was ready to pass out. This becoming a zombie thing sucked the big one.

“Can I go back upstairs?” Maggie asked.

I nodded. “Just leave the dustpan on the counter, and I’ll see to Lizzie. Thanks for sweeping up.”

Maggie nodded hard enough that she had to reach up and adjust her beanie. “What do you want me to do with the sword?”

Right. I still had an ancient sword lying in my living room. An ancient stolen sword. The artifact had been lifted from the museum the other day by a child who, witnesses said, reached straight through the glass and lifted the sword out. That pretty much confirmed the thief was a ghost.

A ghost child stealing a sword from a museum. The idea sounded ridiculous, but similar instances had been happening all over town. Strange objects were being taken by children who vanished before they could be caught. And I was pretty sure one of them had shown up on my doorstep, since she looked like she’d been lifted straight from a 1950’s Sears catalogue. She’d asked to play with the doll, with Lizzie.

And now, Lizzie was shattered beyond repair, and one of the stolen artifacts had ended up on my living room rug.

Ghosts stealing things was weird enough, but not only were the ghost kids stealing things, they were stealing specific objects that I doubted most children would be interested in. I sensed the activities were all targeted. Even the ghost of the little girl from the 1950s had said someone had ‘told her’ there was a doll here for her to play with. I was fairly sure someone was controlling the kids, influencing them to steal. But, why? I had no clue.

My best guess had something to do with the witch who’d recently turned up in the French Quarter. I’d had dreams about her, specifically about her walking down Royal Street and chucking bits of licorice into the stores and restaurants, black candy strands that turned into deadly, venomous snakes once they hit the ground. I was fairly sure a water moccasin wasn’t the kind of thing you’d welcome while you were making your way through a plate of crawfish etouffee.

I blinked up at Maggie, trying to focus on the question she’d asked me. “The sword. Right. Would you mind bringing it in here, please?”

Maggie nodded, already hurrying back toward the living room.

A twinge of guilt ran through me. Maggie was only visiting me for a couple of weeks, to take in everything New Orleans had to offer. In the time she’d been staying with me, it had been nonstop goulies and ghosties and things that went bump in the night. Her mother probably would never speak to me again. Not that I was certain that would be a total loss, but I still felt guilty, all the same.

The only thing that soothed my conscience was the fact that Maggie was fascinated with the occult and seemed to be handling it okay, well, with the exception of the Drake and Luke situation.

“Here it is,” she said as she walked through the kitchen doorway, carrying the sword in her hands.

Drake hadn’t risen from his crouch by my chair, so Maggie had to awkwardly lean over him as she put the sword down. She shot him a look, but Drake ignored her. He seemed wholly fascinated playing with my hand, slotting our fingers together, or gently caressing my palm. There was a complicated emotion in those melting chocolate eyes, so I gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. The gesture earned me a smile.

The sword lay on my kitchen table, gleaming under the fluorescent lights and looking faintly ridiculous. This was a weapon meant for battles and protection, full of history both bloody and terrible. And, yet, here it was sitting on my table in my half-renovated kitchen next to the salt and pepper shakers.

I’d majored in history in college, before my ex-husband had convinced me to drop out and focus on becoming a perfect Stepford wife, but swords had never been my area of expertise. Instead, I’d delighted in antique furniture and artwork and, most recently, objects of intense occult significance.

Still, even with that gap in my knowledge base, I could tell the sword was old. The metal had weight to it that had nothing to do with iron or steel, and a faint patina of age had crept down the blade that no polish or solvent could touch, making it look like a foggy mirror. If the grip had ever been leather wrapped, the leather had long since rotted away, leaving only a bare metal hilt. Part of me wanted to close my fingers around it and lift it up to examine it further. But my aching muscles probably couldn’t support the couple of pounds the sword weighed, and it would be just my luck to drop the thing and break it. Or cut off a toe.

I ran my fingers gently over the flat of the blade, unable to resist touching it. My fingers bumped over a faint ridge, and I frowned. The blade didn’t look nicked or cracked in any way.

Only by leaning close and holding my breath so I didn’t fog up the metal did I see it—an engraving had been painstakingly etched into the metal of the sword’s blade, hugged right up close to the hilt and guard.

An engraving of a snake.

I ran my fingers over the engraving again, slowly, feeling every curve and dip of the snake’s body. That particular reptile seemed an odd choice for a motif. Snakes didn’t exactly have a good reputation, historically speaking. Though, some cultures revered them.

The memory of a scarlet wax candle shaped like a coiled snake and held in a bony hand made me shiver, and I shook my head sharply as if I could knock the thought out of my head entirely.

The slide of Drake’s thumb over the back of my free hand returned my attention to the situation at hand.

“What are you going to do with it, ma minette?”

“Well,” I started slowly, feeling my way over the engraving again. “Return it, I guess? This is a pretty significant artifact and, I mean, it is stolen.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” Maggie blurted, shaking her head. “The museum can’t keep it safe, obviously. It’ll just get stolen again if you give it back to them. How would they ghost-proof it?”

Drake gave a particularly languid shrug, more of a shoulder roll, really. “As much as I hesitate to agree with l’enfant terrible, I fear I must, mon chaton.”

Maggie made an indignant sound, but Drake just rolled right over the top of her sputtering. “Besides, ma minette, how would you explain to the people of the museum that you had come to acquire their stolen relic?”

I winced. “Something tells me ‘ghost children left it in my living room’ wouldn’t be an explanation they’d go for.”

“J’ai peur que non.” Drake shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

Maggie nodded sharply, looking close to triumphant. “See? It should stay here, where we can keep an eye on it and maybe figure out why the ghost took it in the first place.”

“It could be stolen from here just as easily as the museum,” I pointed out and gestured from the sword to the poor shattered remains of Lizzie.

Drake tilted his head one way, then the other, considering. “Peut-être pas.” He looked up at me then. “Perhaps not.”

I frowned down at him, confused. “What do you mean?”

Drake finally straightened up from his crouch, brushing off the knees of his pants as he spoke. “I mean, mon chaton, that whoever came here, did so, at least in part, to remove Lizzie and her protection of this house.”

“Right.” I still didn’t understand what he was getting at. “And now she’s shattered.”

“Exactement.” Drake glanced back at the sad pile of porcelain shards in the dustpan on my kitchen counter before turning back to face me. “And yet, something drove them out of the house. Even with poor Lizzie shattered, they did not stay. They had to leave in a rush, for certain.”

“Why do you think that?”

He shrugged. “Why else would they have abandoned their stolen treasure?” he asked, gesturing to the sword.

A dull, nauseating pain began to throb at the base of my skull, and I rubbed at it absently. Daschel pressed so tight against my leg, I could feel the steady pulse of his heart through his ribcage.

“Why come here at all?” I asked, following Drake’s line of thinking. “Was it just to shatter Lizzie? What was the point of getting rid of her?”

Maggie chewed on her lower lip, glancing between me and the sword gleaming under the kitchen lights. “Maybe,” she started slowly. “Maybe they were after… something else.”

Chapter Three

Chills rolled down my spine at Maggie’s words.

I’d figured the thieves had been after Lizzie, but then, it didn’t make sense to have shattered her. Unless Lizzie somehow fought back?

But, what else could they have been after? Sure, I had an attic full of items laced with paranormal mojo, some that made my skin buzz when I brushed up against them, others that made me feel like I’d plunged my hand into ice water. But, out of all my antique shop, auction, and thrift store findings, not one jumped out as something that screamed, ‘prime bait for ghost children thieves.’ I didn’t have any enchanted swords, that was for sure.

I blinked, and it was a real effort to pry my eyelids back up. They felt like weights were dragging them down.

“Okay, we’ll keep the sword here for now.” I had to reach down and touch Daschel’s ears in order to get the energy to complete the thought out loud. “We can hide it in the attic… with all the other occult stuff. Hopefully, that will make it harder for someone to find, if they come looking.”

“Ah,” Drake nodded, satisfied. “Perfect, ma minette.”

“Okay.” The plan, however foolish it was, was set. It made me feel better to have that much accomplished. “I’ll just—”

I attempted to stand, and the movement pulled me away from Daschel. He yelped in warning, a sharp, surprised sound. Instantly, a lead curtain came slamming down on me. My vision grayed out, and I sagged toward the floor as every bit of energy drained out of my body.

I heard a shriek, and a curse, but both blurred together into a kind of a smudge of sound. And then I was falling. There was no pain of impact, because someone caught me, keeping me from slamming face first into the linoleum.

I could feel arms around me, warm and strong, but they felt distant somehow—far away. My skin was too cold and too numb to really feel the contact.

“Mon chaton! Are you all right? Speak to me! Peyton!”

Things had to have looked pretty dire for Drake to use my actual name.

A cold, damp nose pressed against my arm, and Daschel gave a concerned little whine before all but crawling into my lap, where I sat on the kitchen floor. I managed to flop a hand up to stroke his fur, working my fingers into his soft undercoat. I felt better almost instantly as a little bit of life trickled back into me.

“Good… boy,” I murmured.

Daschel was something of a miracle. He possessed a healing spirit, which was exactly what I needed. Just being near him, in contact with him, kept me from the edge of the zombie curse. As to where Daschel had come from, I had no clue. He’d literally just showed up at my door one day, with a note saying that his previous owner had fallen on tough financial times and couldn’t afford to look after him anymore. One look at the fluffy little face and soulful eyes and there was no way I wasn’t going to adopt him. Learning he also had healing powers and could, as far as I could tell, understand what I was saying was just a bonus.

“Le bon Dieu, what were you thinking?” Drake hovered over me, fussing like a mother hen.

“I just wanted…” I had to pause to take a breath. Talking had winded me. “To hide the sword.”

Maggie crouched on my other side, her hands hovering awkwardly near me, as if she were afraid I was going to try to stand up again. “Yeah, I don’t think stairs are in your immediate future.”

Drake tucked a lock of my platinum bob behind my ear with gentle fingers. “You need to rest, ma minette. Not to rush off on another quest.”

Frowning took too many muscles, but I made the effort anyway. “I don’t think… the attic of my own house counts as a quest, Drake.”

Having to pause to gasp in a breath mid-sentence was just embarrassing.

Drake’s jaw set, firming into the stubborn look I was already so familiar with. Granted, I wasn’t used to seeing it so solid, or outside of the spirit world.

“You need rest, mon chaton. Please. Pour moi.”

That was emotional manipulation, and blatantly unfair to boot. But, looking up at him, into those melting chocolate eyes, it was hard to get huffy about it. I was so tired; it was pretty hard to get huffy about anything, really. Lying there on the hard linoleum of my kitchen floor was starting to feel good, which was probably a bad sign.

“He’s right,” Maggie agreed. “You should sleep, Peyton.”

“Well… we can’t just leave the sword lying around,” I protested. “We don’t know why the thieves left it, so what’s to keep them from coming back and trying to steal it again?”

“I think I am insulted, ma minette.” Drake gave me a look, his hand pressed to his chest over his heart.

“Insulted?”

He nodded. “To think I would allow ruffians into our home while you slept. I will be here to guard your dreams. You needn’t worry.”

I was finding it harder and harder to keep my eyes open. “I just think it would be safer if the sword were hidden.”

Maggie sprang to her feet. “That’s probably true, so I’ll put it up in the attic.”

“Absolument pas,” Drake said, glaring up at her. “Absolutely not.’

She wrapped her hands against her chest. “And why not?”

“There are too many dangerous things up there, and we cannot trust you not to go poking about. We have enough problems without you disturbing the wrong item, or releasing something evil into the house.”

I opened my mouth to say something, then I remembered the Ouija board I’d used to accidentally summon the Axeman was still in the attic, so I stayed quiet. Even seemingly innocent games could be dangerous when they had enough supernatural oomph. And there was more than enough supernatural oomph in the attic.

Maggie stomped her foot, the toe of her sneaker squeaking against the floor. “Would you lay off? I’ll put the sword somewhere out of sight, and come straight back down. I’m not going to go snooping around!”

One of Drake’s brows lifted into a devastating arch.

“Again, you mean?” he said, his tone as close to snide as I’d ever heard him.

An angry, embarrassed flush climbed up Maggie’s neck and onto her cheeks. “I said I won’t poke around, and I won’t.”

“You’ve already proven yourself a liar, so why should we trust you now?” Drake’s voice was calm, but I could feel the tension in his body through his arms which were currently cradling me. His heart thumped under my ear, and the feeling of those arms was almost too much for me to process. I felt tears press against the backs of my eyelids because I was just so grateful, so happy, to have him here, in the flesh.

Yet, I was less grateful for his constant bickering with Maggie.

I couldn’t blame him, really. The two of them had gotten off on pretty bad footing, but I was so tired I just couldn’t bear to continue to listen to it.

Daschel whimpered, worming further into my lap. I felt his tongue brush the inside of my elbow, and I managed to crack my eyes open long enough to see him giving me a very concerned look.

“Please.” My voice was barely a whisper, and even that took more effort than I could imagine. But Drake and Maggie shut up so fast, you’d think I’d bellowed the words through a megaphone.

“Please, I just… I can’t listen to you both arguing right now.”

“Of course, ma minette. Pardonne-moi.”

Maggie tugged on the hem of her shirt, twisting it in her fingers. “Sorry, Peyton.”

“Come, mon chaton.” Drake slid one arm around my back, the other under my knees. “Let us get you to bed. You must rest.”

The sound I made when Drake lifted me into his arms would have probably been best classified as a squeak. I’m built fairly slender, though I’d finally started putting weight back on after my divorce. I liked to think I’d gotten my curves back as part of the settlement. But I was still 5’10, which made me anything but a lightweight. I wasn’t used to being carried.

But Drake rose smoothly, holding me against his chest, as if I were as light as a child. The wave of nausea that rolled through my stomach had less to do with the sudden shift and more to do with losing contact with Daschel. One of my arms slid off my stomach, dangling limply in the air. Relief followed as a cool, damp nose pressed against my fingers.

Drake carried me through the house and into the ground floor guestroom I’d taken as my bedroom while the house was under construction. Thinking about the renovations made my heart ache because they brought to mind Ryan Kelly, the general contractor who had been, until very recently, my boyfriend. But, Ryan hadn’t been able to deal with all the paranormal in my life (not that I could really blame him) and he’d broken up with me. We hadn’t really talked much since.

I flinched away from the memories, instead watching Drake as he lowered me onto my bed. My mattress felt like heaven, especially once Daschel jumped lightly up to snuggle in beside me, tail thumping against my leg. Normally I wasn’t much of a ‘dog on the bed’ kind of person, but I could see myself converting.

Drake smoothed my hair back with gentle fingers. His face was tight with concern, but he smiled down at me, anyway.

“Rest, ma minette. Sleep will make you feel better.”

I so wished that was true. But as long as I was under Guarda’s hex, sleep really just meant a total loss of control. If I didn’t wake up covered in mud or collapsed in my own garden, it would be a miracle. The zombie situation and its exhausting repercussions was beyond frustrating and even more so now that Drake was no longer confined to the house, and in his own body, yet I was struggling to stay conscious.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, fighting to keep my eyes open.

“Porquoi, mon chaton? What do you have to be sorry for?”

“I’m just sad I can’t spend any quality time with you, now that you’re here… er… back.” I took a deep breath, and it burned in my lungs. “There are just so many places I want to take you and things I want to experience with you… beignets at Café du Monde, riding the street car, or maybe going on a river cruise. Listening to a jazz band. Eating seafood at Acme Oyster House.”

“Once you are well, mon chaton, once you are well.”

I lost the battle with my exhaustion, and my eyelids slid closed again, so I missed whatever expression Drake was making.

After a moment, warm lips pressed against my forehead. “Feel better, ma minette. The city awaits us and it shall continue awaiting us until you are well.”

“You should still go out,” I murmured. “You must be itching to get out of this house.”

“Non. Not until you are beside me.” There was another brush of fingers against my hair, there and gone. “Rest now.”

The floorboards creaked as he walked toward the door, and I managed to pry my eyes open just in time to see it close behind him. Then my gaze fell on the letter folded up on my nightstand, and I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. It was from Ryan and in it, he’d explained all the reasons why we couldn’t be together.

I’d been trying not to think about Ryan, but that didn’t work for long. He’d been such a big part of my life ever since I’d arrived in New Orleans. From the very first night, sitting in the dark in an empty old house watching the few pots I owned slowly filling up with water from my leaking roof, he’d come knocking on my door and been with me ever since.

Ryan had stood beside me for the nightmare of the Axeman, he’d gotten a crew together to fix up my house, and held my hand in a hotel room in New York as I’d slipped out of my body to walk through the spirit world in order to investigate a mystery that had waited for more than a century to be solved.

Truly, Ryan had stepped into my heart as easily as he’d stepped through my door that first night, all muscles, blonde hair and howdy neighbor charm. Ridiculously tall and twice as handsome.

But Ryan wanted a normal life. That’s what the letter explained. He didn’t want the ghosts and the hexes, the time travel and the voodoo. He didn’t want Drake and Daschel. And that meant he didn’t want me because I was all those things.

So, he’d written me a letter to end things between us, asking me for space.

I understood.

That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell.

Chapter Four

I woke slowly to the creak of wood and the singing of crickets.

Dust tickled my nose, and I scrunched my face up in response, patting around the bed to find where Daschel had ended up. But my hand didn’t encounter a warm and soft dog. Instead, it encountered scratchy wool and confusion caused my eyes to snap open.

And when I took in my surroundings, my heart started to beat in earnest, because I wasn’t in my light, airy bedroom in New Orleans. Just as to where I was, though, I had no idea.

I sat up slowly, feeling lumps in the uneven mattress. Turning around, I realized the wood framed bed stretched the word ‘antique’ to its furthest definition, and with the way the feathers had been poking my cheek, there was goose down in the flattened pillow.

The house appeared to be one big room, with the far wall dominated by a huge stone fireplace and chimney. A fire blazed in the hearth, sparking embers kept at bay by an iron fire grate. Other iron implements filled the area: a poker, a tiny shovel, and what looked like an elaborate spit that stretched across the entire fireplace with hooks to hang things.

The rest of the house was wood, sanded planks carefully fitted together with something akin to cement smoothed over any gaps to keep out the chill and the rain. There wasn’t a ceiling per se, instead the inside of the house was open to the roof, with heavy log rafters exposed. Bundles of herbs and ropes of vegetables strung from the rafters, to dry or to keep away from pests, I assumed.

A glance at the open window told me that, wherever the heck I was, it was night. The inside of the house was dark, with only the crackling fire and a few candles burning in holders to alleviate the pitch black to the otherwise gentle twilight. The whole place smelled faintly of dust and beeswax and dried herbs.

The furniture was rustic, to say the least. There was a long table set up near the center of the room, with what appeared to be a scooped out bench running down either side. A rocking chair sat empty by the hearth, with a basket of spindles full of thread. A washbasin sat against one wall, and a worn rug of soft grays and blues stretched the length of the floor.

The floorboards creaked gently as I rose to my feet. A long, undyed nightgown brushed against my legs as it slid into place. I held up my hands to see the cuffs of the nightgown drawn snug around my wrists and, from the scratch of the lace, it extended partway up my neck, too.

Strangely enough, I no longer felt exhausted and Daschel was nowhere to be seen…

My stomach fell to my knees as I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Whatever was going on, I could and would face it just like I had every other insane situation that had faced me. This one would prove to be no different.

I stepped over to the window but I couldn’t see anything in the broad expanse of darkness beyond the panes. No streetlights, no other houses, or movement. Just the gentle sound of the wind whistling against the pane of glass, the singing of crickets, and, distantly, I could hear the rush of waves against the shore. The sky was a brilliant wash of stars.

I took a step back from the window, slid my hands up into my hair, and resisted the urge to tear out a couple handfuls because I recognized this style of house. Long, wooden, with one chimney bearing wall made entirely of stone… This house was what was known as a ‘stone ender,’ thank you very much ‘History of Colonial America 101’.

While I might have known what a ‘stone ender’ was, it was also currently my biggest struggle, because this style of house had fallen out of favor in the early eighteenth century.

And yet, this house was no abandoned ruin from a long forgotten past. Instead, it was clearly lived in, well-stocked, and well-kept.

Now, I’d time traveled before, using my connection to Drake to traverse the spirit world and witness and solve a few mysteries. But, those were deliberate, planned trips. They’d required magical aid, and voodoo ritual. I’d had to bring things with me on those trips—things that spoke to the time period being visited and, most importantly, I’d had a way to wake myself up.

This was none of those things.

I had no idea where I was, why I’d come, or how I’d even gotten here. And, everything felt way too real to be a vivid dream. I felt way too real.

The only upside at all was that I didn’t feel like death warmed over. But, even that started me on another path of unanswerable questions—what the heck was my body doing without me in it? Was this an out of body experience? If so, how was I supposed to find my wake back to reality? How was I supposed to wake myself up? Would Drake or Maggie think to check on me? I’d been so lethargic lately, would they even notice something was wrong?

I took a deep breath and tried to get a grip. If I’d traveled to the past, which I was more than eighty percent sure of, then I had to be here for a reason. Now just to figure out what that reason was…

Usually, when I walked through the spirit world it was in order to help a ghost, witness some past event, or to solve some old unsolved mystery. So, that’s exactly what I’d do in this instance—I’d act just like I did each time I’d traveled back in time—I’d get a feel for my surroundings, and go from there.

Yes, this was a flimsy plan, but I still felt better for having it.

So far as I could tell, nothing had changed in the colonial house while I’d been having my private inner crisis. Same sparse furnishings, everything well swept and scrupulously clean. No one had arrived (thank God) and everything was just as it had been.

I brushed my hand over the heavy wool blanket that graced the bed. The air inside the house was comfortable, but the fire was going out, and the blanket spoke of cooler nights than those in New Orleans. The muted roar of the sea outside told me I was on the coast somewhere, further north I’d guess. The stone ender style of house was popular among colonials. So, I was probably on the East Coast. New England, somewhere?

I threw out a hasty prayer to whatever deity might be listening that I wasn’t in Salem, circa 1692. I couldn’t handle the Witch Trials at the moment, please and thank you. If such were the case, I was more than sure I’d be the next on the hanging block.

I turned toward the heavy chest at the end of the bed to see if anything inside might give me some clue as to exactly where I was, and when I was. As I neared it, a glint of metal caught my eye. The glint came from a necklace, which was sitting on the oak lid of the chest. The chain consisted of heavy links, and it was long enough that the pendant would hang against my sternum if I were to put it on.

The charm hanging off the chain was what first caught my eye. A snake curled into a circle, biting on its own tail to close the loop. There was a winking sliver of a gemstone for the snake’s eye, and a few of the scales had been etched into the soft gold. It was small, delicate, and rendered with exquisite detail. As I continued to study it, the candlelight glinted off its coils, giving the snake the illusion of movement.

As a historian of antiquities, I’d seen this snake before. It was called an Ouroboros, and was a symbol that had originated in ancient Egypt, traveled across Europe, as far as the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. The snake, as a symbol, had some kind of magical connotation, the cycle of life and death or something like that, but I couldn’t remember anything more. Such was the biggest struggle when you found yourself stuck in the past—I’d have killed for my cell phone and a link to the internet.

Even holding the pendant up close to my eyes and squinting, it was hard to make out all the details of the necklace. The metal looked old and, if my suspicions were correct and I was somewhere in the late 1600’s or early 1700’s, that meant this pendant was really old.

The only other source of light in the house was the hearth, so I headed towards it. Something told me this necklace was important, and I wanted to give it a proper look. I took about four steps when something that had previously been hidden in the shadows of the rafters launched itself into motion.

Throwing my hands up to cover my head, I shrieked as something pale, silent, and fast flew at my face. There was no sound, but I felt feathers brush the back of my hand as whatever it was flew out the open window and into the night. With my heart in my throat, I stayed crouched down for a few racing heartbeats before straightening up and telling myself it was just a bird.

It was just a bird.

It was just a bird!

My brain finally got with the program, and I realized the creamy white and pale gold blur had been a barn owl. It must have been sitting quietly up near the roof, and was startled when I’d gotten too close.

Yeah, well, that made two of us.

Palm pressed against my chest, trying to get my pulse back out of imminent heart attack range, I took a deep breath. And then my blood went cold as I realized the necklace was gone.

My hands were empty.

I must have accidentally flung the thing when the owl scared me . I glanced down but the floor was bare, swept free of dirt or dust or any hint of gleaming gold. I started frantically searching for the necklace, lifting up the corner of the rug just in case the pendent had somehow rolled while dragging the chain behind it.

Nothing.

It wasn’t in the little ewer of water on the table, and it wasn’t in the wash basin. It wasn’t under the table, and it wasn’t, thank goodness, in the hearth. Gold was soft and had a ridiculously low melting point. If the necklace had ended up in the fire, it would have been a little lump of molten metal by now.

Just in case, though, I used the poker to sift through the ashes, eyes sharp for a glint of gold or emerald. But there was nothing. The iron poker clanged as I shoved it back into its holder, all the while trying not to cry with frustration.

How in the world could the necklace have just disappeared? But, that’s exactly what it had done—blipped out of existence.

Not to mention, the Ouroboros was the only clue I had as to why I was standing in an old, wooden house in a granny nightgown, and now it was gone.

What if… what if the owl had stolen it?

As I was seriously considering the possibility of owls stealing important jewelry relics, a quiet voice spoke up from behind me, and I almost went into cardiac arrest for the second time that night.

“Are you all right, girl?”

I spun around so fast, I almost fell down, unable to speak around the huge lump in my throat that I was pretty sure was my heart trying to escape my body.

Sitting before me was an old woman in a rocking chair by the hearth. And she hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier.

“Where… how did you get here?” I managed.

“I have been here.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that because I couldn’t recall anyone being in the room with me, but that was the way of dream visions—sometimes things happened that you couldn’t easily explain and this was probably one of those things.

Back to the strange woman, she was dressed in a long, black dress, with a stiff white collar and cuffs, and a neat white cap covering her graying hair. I thought she appeared old, but really, she probably wasn’t much past her late fifties or early sixties. The heavy wrinkles lining her face told me her years had been hard ones.

Her hazel eyes were fixed on my face, but she kept her hands busy, winding light blue thread around a wooden spindle, her pale fingers lined and spotted with age, but still quick and steady.

I gaped for a few seconds before I remembered she’d asked me a question, and secondly, that though it was more modest than literally any piece of clothing I owned, I was still dressed in a nightgown.

Blood flooded my face as I stammered out a few words. “Yes, I’m fine. I just… the owl scared me.”

The old woman nodded sagely, never looking away. “If it is of any comfort, the fright was mutual.”

It wasn’t any comfort but I kept that to myself.

Meanwhile, the old woman’s lips curved up into a small smile, pulling the lines on her face along with them. She hummed in acknowledgement, but didn’t comment.

After the awkward silence intensified, I cleared my throat. “Who are you?”

A gray brow rose, and she gave me a very grandmotherly type of look: half amusement, half exasperation.

“You ask for my name without first offering your own?”

Oh, right. Was that rude? I was probably in her house, so it would be considered polite to introduce myself. But would doing so interfere with things if she knew who I was? Could that knowledge somehow alter history? Was I actually even in ‘history’ or was this just some hallucination of my zombie mind? Probably the latter, but it was better to treat my surroundings as if they were real… just in case.

Yet, somehow, this wasn’t anything like my usual trips into the past. For one thing, this old woman was asking about etiquette slip ups, instead of questions you’d assume were worth asking—like ‘why are you in my house,’ or ‘where did you come from?’ or ‘how did you get in here?’ All reasonable questions to ask when one finds a strange woman in one’s house in the middle of the night. Not to mention, I was pretty sure the bed I’d woken up in was hers.

“I’m Peyton. Peyton Clark.” I gave an awkward little nod, my bare toes curling against the wood floor.

The old woman hummed again, watching my face, her fingers constantly moving as she wound the thread again and again. The action was almost hypnotic. If my name meant anything to her, she didn’t allow it to show.

“Beatrice Litten,” she said and then breathed in a long, heavy breath as I frowned at her in confusion. “You asked for my name. I am Beatrice Litten.”

“It’s nice to meet you.” I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say in a situation like this and my answer just sounded stupid to my own ears, but there it was. Shifting my weight from one foot to the other, I glanced around myself again and wondered why she wasn’t demanding to know what I was doing in her house… unless she already knew what I was doing in her house. “Um,” I started, worrying the fabric of my nightgown as I faced her. “I, uh, I have no idea how I got here.”

“I see.” Again, there was no surprise in her voice.

“You wouldn’t happen to know why I’m standing in your house, would you?” My voice trailed off, not having much hope for an easy answer.

“Of course I know why you’re here,” Beatrice answered, laughing lightly, as if my question were an obvious one. Meanwhile, she tucked the full spindle back into her basket.

“You do?”

She nodded. “I called you.”

“What?” It was all I could manage, though the word sounded dumb. Yet, out of all the possible responses I could have fathomed, this one hadn’t been on my list. Could people just summon me through the spirit world, now? Was that how this gift of mine now worked? And, furthermore, was Guarda somehow involved?

“I called you here,” Beatrice repeated brusquely, folding her hands into her lap. “Granted, I was only able to accomplish your visit owing to the fact that you are quite frighteningly detached from your body.”

“Detached from my body?” A shiver rolled down my spine like little drips of ice water. “What do you mean?”

Beatrice Litten shook her head, but there was sympathy in the downturn of her mouth. “You must feel it, girl. You’re slipping away, moment by moment.”

“I’m dying, you mean.” My lips were numb, tripping over the words.

Beatrice nodded. Then I nodded because she was right—I did feel it, had felt it.

“We haven’t much time,” she continued as she looked up at me and real fear appeared in her eyes. “Neither of us.”

“Much time for what?”

“She is coming, and she cannot be permitted to have it. For all our sakes, you must hide it from her.”

I raised my hands, confused, and shook my head. “Who’s coming? And she can’t be permitted to have what?”

For the first time since she appeared, Beatrice Litten’s calm cracked.

“Her,” she spat. “The Jezebel. The betrayer. The witch.”

“Um…”

“She’s coming for it, and by God, I will not see it fall into her hands.”

I was completely lost and what was more, I was beginning to wonder if Beatrice still possessed all her faculties—there was just the look of… complete and utter lunacy in her eyes. “What is she coming for? I don’t understand.”

Serenity restored to her pale, wrinkled face, Beatrice’s eyes met mine.

“We’re running out of time.”

And then, as if foreshadowing her uncertain words, a gunshot shattered the still night.

Chapter Five

I just about jumped out of my skin, heart slamming against the inside of my ribs. The gunshot had been unnaturally loud in the stillness outside. The crickets fell silent. Even the wind off the sea seemed to fade away, until it felt like the night itself was holding its breath.

“Was that a gunshot?” I asked stupidly, because obviously it was. There was nothing else it could have been. It had just sounded so close.

Beatrice Litten didn’t so much as twitch, not at the crack of gunfire, and not at my reaction. Instead, she sighed, and the sound trembled on the way out, but otherwise she gave absolutely no sign that she was concerned at all.

“They’ve arrived at my daughter and her husband’s home again. They’ve been plagued for some days, now.” She sighed again. “They know what the witch seeks, of course, but not exactly where it is. That’s why you must hide it, Peyton Clark, and you must keep it safe.”

So, we were back to talking in riddles, were we? Rhetorical question.

But, there was a little tidbit in that grouping of sentences that did catch my attention—apparently Beatrice intended for me to hide something that people with guns were after?

“They aren’t after it, they’re after her,” Beatrice said, as if reading my mind. And, for all I knew, maybe she was reading my mind. Maybe she was a witch and maybe she was after it, too?

“Didn’t you just say she, this witch, was after it?” I railed at her, feeling like we were playing a game of ‘Who’s on first?” “And for the love of God, will you tell me what ‘it’ is?”

“The name of the item cannot be repeated, for there is magic even within words—magic that could lead the witch directly to it.”

“Great,” I muttered.

Beatrice’s face tightened with frustration, her lips pressed flat. “Listen to me, Peyton Clark. the greatest risk is allowing her to take it into her possession. If she completes her ritual, if she succeeds, you have no idea the devastation she will wreak upon the world.”

My stomach clenched, and I swallowed carefully to keep from shouting or throwing up. I wasn’t sure which. “How do you know—”

“Because I have seen it,” she snapped, her hands clenching in her lap, bunching up the white apron draped over her knees.

“What does that mean?”

Beatrice let out a long, ragged breath. “All my life, I have foreseen things before they came to pass. It is my curse. My mother swore it was an act of the devil, to try and tempt me into deviating from God’s plan. I prayed, for hours, for days.” She nodded repeatedly, shaking her hands as she looked down at her gnarled branch fingers. “Yes, I prayed, pleaded to have this burden taken from me. But the visions continued.” She tipped her chin up to face me then, eyes full of determination. “And now I have seen what will happen to the world if that witch succeeds with her mad plan. It cannot be borne. This curse I have been saddled with, I believe it was given to me for a reason. I must believe that God intends for me to interfere in the way of evil proceedings. Why else would He not remove it from me?”

There were so many things I didn’t understand and things Beatrice apparently didn’t want to tell me.

Another gunshot sounded in the night and my breath sawed in my throat, heart kicking against the inside of my chest like a rabbit trapped in a cage. That shot had sounded closer than the last. If I walked to the window, what would I see? Would the thick wooden shutters offer any protection if we closed them?

Surprisingly long fingers closed around my wrist, and I startled out of my thoughts.

Beatrice squeezed my wrist, a fierce demand in her eyes. “Take it. Keep it safe. You must.”

“I still don’t even know what I’m supposed to be keeping safe!” I snapped, frustrated and frightened.

She reached out toward me with her other hand, a gold chain dangling from her fragile fingers. My breath caught at the glint off the metal, the Ouroboros reflecting the scarlet and amber light of the hearth fire. So the owl hadn’t taken it after all…

I took the necklace with a hesitant hand, not quite sure what I was getting into, but unable to turn away when Beatrice obviously needed my help. I mean, how hard up did you have to be in order to go four centuries into the future and bring back some half-dead would-be zombie, entrusting her with a super important relic?

Beatrice folded my fingers around the Ouroboros, and then clasped my hand in both of hers, squeezing tight enough that the metal bit into my skin.

“Keep it safe.”

I nodded and gave her the only answer I could. “I will.”

I wasn’t even sure I could carry the necklace back to the present time. But I couldn’t look into her fierce, desperate eyes and mention my doubts. Instead, I just gave her a brief smile and tightened my hold around it.

A third gunshot, followed rapidly by a fourth, caused me to flinch.

Beatrice rose from her rocking chair and strode for the window, peering out into the night. She gripped the wooden sill until her fingers blanched white, all the blood driven out, and jerked her head toward the door.

“Go now.”

My feet stuck to the floor as I looked between Beatrice and the door. “But…”

Where would I go? I didn’t have any way to wake myself up, or to get home. Did Beatrice mean for me to run into the dark, barefoot with my borrowed nightgown, glowing like the beacon of some Gothic heroine? Regardless, I’d have to hide somewhere before the people with the guns found me. And once I was good and hidden, hopefully someone would wake me up, back in my own time.

This was a terrible plan—actually, it really wasn’t even a plan. It was more of a hope for a plan. But, I didn’t have a better one.

Beatrice turned, a lock of graying hair escaping from under her cap. There was something darker than desperation in her face as she pointed at me. “Go!”

So, I went.

The door handle was cold under my hand as I tore the door open, sprinting into the night. I could barely see, with no street lamps, or even ambient light from other homes. There was dirt under my bare toes, and the nightgown whipped around my legs as I ran.

Something big loomed in the dark ahead of me, a darker shade of black than my surroundings, and I twisted aside to avoid running into what turned out to be some kind of outbuilding.

Once I was past it, there was more light to see by, which was both good and bad. Good, because it kept me from plowing into the cluster of armed men ahead of me. Bad because some of the light was coming off the men themselves. An eerie, pale green luminescence surrounded them like a halo in the night, glinting off dark eyes, tarnished buckles, and torn clothing.

They turned to face me as I slid to a stop in the damp grass, and their faces were blank, not a trace of emotion on a single one of them. The odd lack of expression was so much more unsettling than even anger would have been.

Were they ghosts? No, I didn’t think so—because they were armed, rifles cradled in their hands. And they appeared to be fairly fleshly and three-dimensional. Furthermore, I couldn’t see through them. So, no, probably not ghosts.

One of them took a gliding step toward me, and I stumbled back as off to my right, I heard shouting. The voices were coming closer. There were lights bobbing in the darkness there, too, flickering like flames, but too contained to be torches. Lanterns, maybe.

I didn’t stick around to find out.

Instead, I spun on my heel and ran as quickly as I could from the approaching lights. The shrill yells and raised voices didn’t sound happy, and I had no interest in finding out to whom they belonged.

My toes were numb as I raced across the damp grass. My lungs burned trying to get enough air, but I kept going—I wasn’t sure how I managed, but I didn’t stop. All I could think about was finding a place to hide—a place that would allow me to think about what to do next. And I was all too aware of the gold chain and pendant clutched in my hand. It felt heavier than gold should have.

The sound of my own breathing drowned out everything else around me. The world narrowed down to the few feet I could see ahead of me, the rest swallowed up by the night. The darkness was disorienting. It was terrifying. There was nothing to keep me from running off a cliff, or falling into the sea, only to be dragged down by the current and the enveloping folds of the white nightgown.

After a few more steps I couldn’t feel my feet anymore, just the dull impact of my soles striking the earth. A stitch burned in my side like someone had slipped a knife between my ribs and breathing was painful.

I stumbled, pitching forward with no time to brace myself or bring my arms up to shield my face. But impact never came, instead I just kept falling as the wind howled around me in a hundred voices. Shadows streaked past, full of faces I didn’t know and squeezing my eyes shut didn’t help.

One face flashed on the backs of my eyelids like an afterimage. It was a woman with narrow lips and a set of cold, watery blue eyes. She was dark haired, about my age and, while I didn’t know her, I could have sworn I’d seen her somewhere before.

But, no, the clothes were wrong. That was the problem. I’d never seen this woman in a somber black dress with a white collar and apron, or with a white cap hiding all but the few front tendrils of her hair. So where had I seen her? When had I seen her?

Another face crowded my vision—this one with wrinkles and staring, hateful eyes.

Guarda.

Her lips twisted, pulling back to reveal a mouth missing most its teeth. It looked like she was going to spit something out, and my heart clenched in my chest.

I jerked awake in my own bed with Daschel curled up against my ribs.

There was something hard in my hand.

I turned my head, opening my fingers so I could see what I was holding. The Ouroboros necklace lay in my palm, glinting in the late afternoon sun.

I stared at the pendant in my hand, disbelieving what had just happened.

Bringing physical things through the spirit world was extremely difficult and, even if you attempted to, it took preparation. But, even after I squeezed my eyes shut and looked again, the Ouroboros remained in my palm, winking at me cheerfully with its single emerald eye.

Daschel shifted in his sleep, whining slightly as he pushed more firmly against my ribs, and I flinched. He was feverishly warm to the touch. Was he all right? Could he even get sick? And if he could get sick, where would I find a vet able to heal a magic dog?

But then I realized. Daschel wasn’t hot. I was cold.

No, I was more than cold.

My skin was icy, almost numb. The chill had seeped into my bones so deeply, I couldn’t even shiver. My muscles felt like blocks of wood, stiff and unwieldy. Just turning my head was a monumental effort. I wasn’t sure I could move my arms, let alone sit up.

Was this sleep paralysis? Or something worse?

I wanted to call out, but my lips were numb and my throat felt like someone had wiped it with sandpaper. I made a breathy little whimper of sound.

The bedroom door remained firmly closed, but Daschel’s head came up, ears pushed toward me. He rose to his feet and padded up the bed until he reached my head, and with a concerned little whine, started licking my chin.

Normally, I’d think a dog licking my face was pretty gross, but it was actually bringing a tiny bit of heat back to my body. Enough that I could swallow and not feel like I was choking on ice shards.

As if he understood what was happening to me, Daschel’s whining took on a sharper tone, his licking becoming more frantic. He barked out a warning tone a few times. Yes, he knew something was wrong.

Something was very wrong.

The soft knock on the door sounded like it was coming from down a long, hollow tunnel.

“Ma minette? Are you awake?” Drake called from the other side of the door, even as he opened it and peeked his handsome head inside. “Lovie is here. She has something she believes will help you.”

My tongue dragged over my lips, and I tried to force my voice out of my throat. “Drake.”

My voice was the whisper of a whisper. I knew he couldn’t hear me and tears of frustration welled up in my eyes, only to slide down my cheeks and drip onto the pillows. The streak of moisture they left behind was the warmest part of my body.

Daschel sat back on his furry little haunches, tipped his muzzle to the ceiling, and howled.

The door immediately swung open, revealing a concerned Drake.

“Que se passe-t-il? What is going on?”

His dark eyes grew wide, and he hurried into the room, reaching for me. “Mon chaton? What is wrong?”

I wanted to answer him, but I couldn’t, even if I knew what was happening. The feeling of falling had followed me out of my dream, and I felt like I was plunging down a deep pit with no way to stop myself—no way until I reached the bottom.

Drake half climbed onto the bed, dragging me into his arms. Every point of contact between us blazed with warmth. I finally found some forgotten measure of strength and curled toward his chest to tuck my head under his chin.

He felt like heaven, just glorious. I wanted to roll into the heat of his body—heat which seemed to be firing out from him, encircling me in a warm embrace. Or maybe that was just his arms closed around me.

“Mon Dieu, you’re freezing.” Big hands chaffed up and down my arms and back, trying to bring some warmth to my skin. It helped a little, enough for my body to realize it wasn’t quite ready to give into the shivering cold.

Chapter Six

I could feel the hammering of Drake’s pulse under my ear, and I wanted to tell him I was scared, so incredibly frightened, but my teeth were chattering hard enough though that I wasn’t sure I could risk talking without losing a chunk of my tongue.

“Lovie!” Drake turned his head toward the door so he wouldn’t shout into my ear, but I could still feel the echoes of his voice through his chest. “Come! Hurry!”

Lovie bustled through the door looking like a concerned rainbow. Her purple blouse, violet and scarlet flowing skirt, and royal blue tignon were a welcome splash of color in the room. She took in everything quickly, her dark eyes flicking over the whining Daschel, the frantic Drake who had me practically sprawled across his lap, and, finally, her dark eyes settled on me.

I tried to give her a reassuring smile, but from the way her eyes widened and her hand fluttered up to her chest, I didn’t succeed.

“Good Lord, Peyton.” Lovie yanked open her oversized purse and slid a green glass bottle out of one of the many little pockets inside. The vial looked like it belonged to an upscale perfume minus the little wax seal.

Lovie stepped closer to the bed as she worked the stopper out of the bottle. The scent of citrus and roses curled through the room the moment the wax released, with earthy undertones bringing up the rear. It was probably just a trick of my overly tired eyes, but I could have sworn a couple little fizzles of light sputtered out of the bottle once it met the air. I couldn’t lift my arm enough to rub my eyes, so I blinked hard. When I looked again, there was nothing but plain green glass.

“Peyton, honey, we need to anoint you with this potion.”

I rolled my eyes to look up into Lovie’s concerned face. It was hard to think, but Drake’s hand felt so warm on my brow, like the glow of sunshine.

Lovie moved closer, tipping the bottle into her palm as she then reached out and dabbed some of the oil on either side of my neck, then the insides of my elbows and wrists. “This will help, Peyton.”

The urgency in Lovie’s tone reached me, even if the words didn’t really make a lot of sense. But if she thought the vial of liquid would help, she had to have her reasons.

Whatever was in the bottle smelled like flowers, like lilies and roses, but also like lemon and something herbal. It felt like it was some sort of numbing agent because each place where Lovie anointed me was now buzzing slightly, going from cold to warm and the feeling was stretching—down my neck, up from my wrists and out from my elbows. After another few seconds, I was able to take my first full breath in what felt like days. And seconds after that, the hazy, dreamy feeling that had been my constant companion suddenly cleared, like fog being blown away by a strong wind.

“What—” I had to stop to clear my throat, the smell of roses heavy on my tongue. “What was that?”

I sat up a little, not pulling away from Drake, but not sprawling so heavily on him anymore.

“That, my dear,” Lovie said, holding up the empty green bottle. “Is Uncrossing Oil.”

From the expression on Drake’s face, ‘Uncrossing Oil’ didn’t mean any more to him than it did to me. I wasn’t sure if Drake had actually heard what Lovie said, because his dark eyes were fixed on me to an almost uncomfortable degree, searching my face for I didn’t know what. The intensity of his expression brought a little bit of a flush to my cheeks, and I had to look away.

“What’s Uncrossing Oil?” I asked, trying to stay on topic.

Fortunately, Lovie didn’t seem to notice our mini staring match, too busy slipping the empty bottle back into her purse. “It’s a potion for getting rid of bad luck an’ hexes, that sort of thing. I had a friend of mine send it to me when we figured out what was happening to you.”

I was feeling better by the second. Not perfect, but any change from ‘it hurts to open my eyes’ was, frankly, incredible. I sat up a little more, no longer feeling like I needed full body support. Drake let me up reluctantly, hanging onto me until I was able to stand on my own. Then he hovered close by, hands out, like he was afraid I might keel over again. It wasn’t an outlandish fear, so I didn’t comment.

It was then that what Lovie had just said caught up to me, and I stared at her. “Wait, a potion? Like, a magic potion?”

Lovie smiled and patted the top of her purse. “Exactly.”

“A magic potion?” I repeated, shocked because this apparently magic potion had really worked. I hadn’t felt this good in a long time.

Lovie laughed and nodded. “A few months ago, I was looking for a banishment potion and one of the girls in town mentioned a woman who had set up a potion shop in a town called Haven Hollow. The owner, Poppy, is the best I’ve ever met when it comes to brewing potions. I swear by her Gris-Gris Oil.”

“Wow.” My brain was still coming up to speed. I felt like I’d just woken up from a seriously long nap, body refreshed but my head still a bit sluggish. “You have a friend who makes magic potions? And her name is Poppy?”

“Yes.” Lovie made a waffling motion with her hand, tipping her head back and forth. “And fortunately for us, she’s willing to ship. Even overnight things, if the situation is dire.”

‘Dire’ was one word for it.

All I could do was shake my head. “Well, she’s a miracle worker. I feel… so much better. Better than I have in a really long time.”

Lovie frowned, glancing from me to Drake and back again. “It’s not a cure, Peyton,” she said quietly. Regretfully. “But it will buy us some time to solve this mess.” Then she shook her head and sighed. “While you were sleeping, I tried again to break the zombie hex.”

By the expression on her face, it didn’t seem like she was going to be the bearer of good news. “But, it didn’t work?”

She kept on shaking her head. “Guarda’s magic is just too strong and I’m afraid my power is no match for hers.”

Drake rested his hands gently on my shoulders, and when I didn’t pull away, his grip got a little firmer. “Ma minette? How are you feeling?”

My heart squeezed inside my chest. Drake was really something. A few hours into being alive again for the first time in a century, and here he was, by my side, while I was completely bedridden and useless. I reached up and patted his hand where it sat on my shoulder.

“I’m feeling better. Thank you,” I said, and then repeated the same to Lovie. They’d both helped me so much, and I could never repay their kindness.

“C’est rien,” Drake murmured, tilting his head close to my ear, while Lovie smiled and said, “You’re very welcome.”

“So, what do we do now?” I asked.

Lovie and Drake exchanged a look I couldn’t follow. It felt a bit like they were having a conversation over me in a language I didn’t understand, which was a little irritating. I was hexed, not an infant.

“For now,” Lovie said before I could work up a proper head of steam. “You should rest. Eat something, get more sleep. Be gentle with yourself, Peyton. I’m going to reach out to Poppy and see if, between the two of us, we can come up with a more permanent solution for what’s ailing you.” She paused a moment before nodding. “I just don’t believe my magic is enough to break the curse.”

“You think Poppy might be able to help me?” I could hear the hope in my voice and tried to squash it, making my words sound more neutral. I hated to dump all this on Lovie, but the truth was, I was scared.

“She might.”  Lovie smiled, calm and reassuring.

“This woman,” Drake interjected. “Is she a witch, or a priestess?”

Lovie shook her head. “Neither, actually. She’s a Gypsy. One of the ancient magic line of Scottish Travelers.”

“Oh,” he answered and sounded disappointed.

“Don’t doubt,” Lovie said with a laugh. “Poppy has power and she has strength—both of which suffuse her potions.” She looked at me. “Case in point.”

Drake nodded slowly, looking thoughtful.

I poked him lightly in the ribs. “Why does it matter?” Magic was magic, right?

His eyes snapped back to my face, and a rueful smile twisted up his lips. “Forgive me, mon chaton. I find myself uneasy with the idea of a stranger working magic upon you.”

Normally, I’d probably snap at him that I could take care of myself, but at that point, it was a fair observation. I was a little worried myself.

“Poppy’s on the side of the angels, don’t you worry.” Lovie readjusted her purse strap on her shoulder. “I’m going to go give her a call now, honey.” Then she paused as she faced me again and worried her lower lip.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I never was able to find Angharad,” she answered on a sigh.

“Then you haven’t heard from her since the day…” my voice wavered because I wasn’t really sure how to phrase it properly. “Since the day Drake came back?”

Lovie shook her head. “It’s as if she’s simply vanished.”

“Hmm,” I said as I wondered what could have become of the old woman. I’d never really known whether Angharad was friend or foe, and I figured that topic would remain a mystery. Lovie clapped her hands then and gave me her wide and beautiful smile.

“You take care of yourself. Call me if you need anything.”

And that was when I remembered the necklace, the Ouroboros, and how it had traveled with me from the dream. I fingered it where it lay in my hand and opened my mouth to tell Lovie about it, but something strange happened. As soon as I was about to speak, I completely forgot what I was going to say.

“Peyton?” Lovie asked, frowning down at me.

“I, uh, I meant to tell you about something, but now I can’t remember what it was.”

The Ouroboros, I reminded myself. Right. Then I started to open my mouth again and the same thing happened—nothing.

“You need your rest,” Lovie announced and, flustered, I simply nodded and said goodbye.

“Ma minette,” Drake coaxed. “You should eat something to keep your strength up. I believe l’enfant terrible is attempting to make something for you in the kitchen.”

I felt a spike of fear for my poor defenseless kitchen before remembering Drake’s one-man rampage through my lackluster pantry earlier. “Is there anything to make?”

A self-conscious huff of laughter escaped Drake before he shook his head. “I believe I left one or two things unsampled.”

“Okay.” I swung my legs off the bed, reasonably certain for the first time that they’d actually support me. “Let’s go see what we’re working with before Maggie burns the house down.”

When Drake headed for the door, I slipped the Ouroboros pendant into my pocket, where it burned like a lie.

###

I realized just how fraught the last few days had been when I sat down across from Trina at the little formica table at Mother’s Restaurant and she gave me a sympathetic look and asked, “How are you holding up?”

I nearly burst into tears.

I knew she was asking about Ryan specifically, but she might as well have been asking about my life in general. Still, I didn’t want her to feel bad about the fact that my life was going to hell in a handbasket or, worse, say something to her brother, so I just gave her a watery smile.

“I’m hanging in there.”

Regardless of the fact that it was difficult to see Trina because my breakup with Ryan was still very new, I was also so, so grateful she’d come back home. Trina was the first friend I’d made when I came to town, and she’d always been so kind (even if she was the reason we’d released the spirit of the Axeman into my house).

It turns out that accidentally summoning a homicidal demon is quite a bonding experience.

Anyway, Trina had moved a few states away for a new job, and she just happened to be home to visit family and friends. I felt beyond lucky to be on that list of friends, especially given the fact that I was her brother’s ex-girlfriend.

I asked all the required questions about the new hotel where she was working—what it was like, if she liked her job, was she happy, etc. etc. That kept her chatting happily for a good while, telling me about the city, her co-workers, and the cute bartender she’d been seeing.

Eventually, though, the inevitable question came.

“Peyton, are you really okay?”

I glanced around, hoping the waitress might interrupt by bringing our lunch to the table and sparing me from having to answer, but luck wasn’t with me, it seemed.

I just couldn’t tell Trina the truth—not just about Ryan because that was too close to home, but the truth about everything—about Drake, Daschel, Guarda and the zombie curse. I was worried about dragging her into my business, not that any actual dragging would be necessary. Trina was a self-proclaimed voodoo priestess, though after meeting Lovie, I quickly understood Trina had as much in common with a voodoo priestess as I had in common with my ex-husband (nothing). Yet, Trina’s fascination with the occult made Maggie’s enthusiasm look lukewarm by comparison. I was worried if I told Trina about all the things going on, from the hex, to Drake, to the Ouroboros following me home from a dream, she’d be all too happy to dive right in. And I’d never be able to forgive myself if she got hurt along the way.

Speaking of the Ouroboros, when I’d tried to mention it to Drake, the same thing had happened as with Lovie—I completely lost my train of thought. And even though I’d been wearing the pendant around my neck, no one seemed to notice it. At least, Maggie and Drake hadn’t. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if Beatrice had somehow magicked the thing so I wouldn’t be able to discuss it? She’d made that weird comment about words having their own sort of magic, so I figured such was probably the case.

But, back to my lunch with Trina… there was a part of me that looked into Trina’s blue eyes, at her gold hair so like her brother’s, that my heart clenched in my chest and I pictured Ryan instead. Unfortunately, Trina was a reminder of what I’d lost, and seeing her now tore the scab off a wound that hadn’t really closed. Not all the way, anyway. Instead, it was upstaged when the leg it was located on got yanked off.

Nice comparison, Peyton. Really nice, I grumbled to myself.

“It’s been hard,” I said eventually, when the silence got awkward. And on that note, people with confetti and balloons should have leapt out to congratulate me on winning the ‘understatement of the year’ award.

As hard as things had been lately, I was still beyond grateful to Lovie’s gypsy friend, Poppy, for brewing such a kick-butt potion. I felt better than I had in a while. I didn’t think I realized exactly how long I’d been feeling drained until I was finally feeling like myself again. I’d been planning to take Drake out on the town while we figured out what our next move was, but then Trina had called to tell me she was back in town and asked me to grab lunch with her.

Of course, a battle had ensued with Drake over whether or not I was healthy enough to go to lunch but when I’d assured him that Trina would pick me up and drop me off and I’d only be gone for an hour or two, he’d finally relented. Personally, I thought he was just irritated that I wasn’t including him, but this was a girls only visit.

I promised myself I’d make it up to him, though.

Chapter Seven

Mother’s restaurant was located in the warehouse district, and looked it. The décor was framed pictures, stone work, and exposed brick, with a cherry wood counter taking up the wall across from the door. The tables were small, but the food was comforting, not to mention absolutely delicious, and that was exactly what I needed.

When the waitress slid my fried oyster and shrimp po’boy in front of me, I could have kissed her. The smell alone was heaven. The first bite was even better, golden fried seafood, crisp lettuce and tangy remoulade and a little bit of pickle that gave it a sweet-sour hint.

We ate in silence for a few minutes before I took a bite from a french fry and asked as casually as I could, “So, how’s Ryan doing?”

Trina hesitated, looking conflicted, and I immediately backtracked.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked… I wasn’t trying to put you in the middle.”

Trina shook her head, putting her sandwich down. “No, no, it’s not that.” She shook her head, wiped her face on her napkin and gave me a sweet smile. “I’m glad you’re still concerned about him.”

Did she think I wouldn’t be? That I could care for someone so deeply and then just discard him once we stopped dating? Ryan had asked for space, and I was respecting that, but that didn’t mean I didn’t still care about him. Because I did. A lot.

Not only that, but Ryan was the first relationship I’d had after my divorce and I… well, I was the first relationship he’d had since the death of his wife in a tragic accident six years ago. So, our relationship was a pretty big deal—to both of us.

“Is Ryan okay?” I asked in a mouse voice.

Trina chewed her lip, looking like she was wrestling with something. “Honestly?”

“Please.”

Trina pushed her plate away. “I’m actually… I’m really worried about him.”

A ball of ice settled in my stomach, squashing my previous hunger flat and creeping up my throat. “Why do you say that?”

Trina picked up her napkin, twisting it around her fingers. “He’s just been acting so odd lately. I mean, I expected him to be sad about the two of you breaking up, I get that. I remember how I didn’t want to come out of my house for weeks after my last relationship ended. So, yeah, I understand that part.”

“Okay…”

“And I figured he probably might even throw himself into his work, you know? Like fill his time by getting super busy so he wouldn’t have to think about things, or feel feelings.”

“Okay…”

“It’s just…” She slumped back in her chair with a sigh, paper napkin balled up in her fist.

“Just what?”

“He’s not sad all the time?” It was a statement, but she treated it like a question. Her forehead wrinkled up, like she was thinking hard about how to phrase something correctly.

“Well, that’s good.” I drew the words out, trailing up like a question. I wasn’t expecting Ryan to be sad all the time, no, because that would be absurd. But, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact that it sounded like he wasn’t sad? Was it too much to ask that an ex might think about things from time to time and maybe miss me, a bit?

The napkin in Trina’s hands was rapidly becoming a pile of shredded paper confetti on the table. “No, I mean sometimes he is sad. I can see that he misses you, a lot. Of course he won’t talk to me or anyone else about it because he’s Ryan but…” She shook her head and gave me a smile. “He’s sad. I can see it.” Then she frowned. “But there are other times when he just kind of goes about his day and acts like nothing is the matter at all. Like it’s just any other ordinary day. And then sometimes…” She trailed off, chewing her lip again.

I waited patiently for about ten seconds before prompting, “Sometimes?”

“Sometimes he seems like he’s just totally detached,” Trina blurted, tearing a new chunk of napkin free. “He eats dinner with me, and watches movies and stuff, but if I try to talk to him, it’s almost like he’s not there at all. He just… does his own thing and practically looks through me. It’s not like he’s full on ignoring me, but it just feels so weird. And all his friends have said the same thing—that he’s ignoring them.” She took a breath. “It’s like… he’s not the Ryan I know so well—he’s not my big brother. It’s almost like… he’s someone else.”

Chilly unease squirmed up my spine. That didn’t sound like Ryan at all. He was always engaged, and he always had time for the people in his life, especially Trina. Ryan was a people person, and he made friends wherever he went. He was outgoing, and thoughtful, and honest, and it drew people to him like bees to honey. He was also fiercely protective of his loved ones. Ignore his baby sister? That wasn’t something I’d never think he was capable of.

“And then there’s the dogs…”

I glanced up at Trina, concerned. “What about the dogs? Are they okay?”

“They’re fine.” Trina flapped her hand, like she was waving away my concerns. “It’s just sometimes he seems almost indifferent to them, too. Like he forgets they’re there? And the weirder part is that the dogs do the same to him. If he’s in one of his moods, they don’t even want to be in the same room with him. I’ve noticed that sometimes they watch him from another room. It’s like they’re almost… afraid to be near him.”

That didn’t sound good. At all.

Trina shot me a guilty look. “I’m sorry to dump all this on you, I know you guys aren’t together anymore and it’s not really your problem—”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” I interrupted, holding up my hands. “First of all, worrying about Ryan isn’t a ‘problem,’ regardless of our… relationship status. Boyfriend or not, I still care about him and I always will.” I reached across the table and took hold of one of her hands, giving it a squeeze. “But I’m also your friend, Trina.”

“Thanks, Pey,” she said, calling me by the nickname Ryan used to call me. It made me feel suddenly nostalgic and sad.

I nodded. “I just wish I knew what to do to help. And, before you ask, because I have a good idea where this conversation is headed, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to try to talk to him. He asked me for space and if I don’t give it to him… it might make things worse.”

Trina blinked hard a couple times, but she smiled. “Thanks, Peyton. It’s fine, really. I’m probably just being a fusspot.”

“It’s not wrong to care about your brother, or to worry about him.”

She laughed, a little self-conscious. “Yeah, but I think I’m making a bigger deal out of it than it probably is. He’s sad, that’s understandable. If he’s lethargic or apathetic a bit when I’m going on about my new life, well, that’s understandable, too. Maybe I’m just blowing everything out of proportion in my head.” She gave another, more genuine laugh. “Speaking of, this one time, I could have sworn his eyes turned white—”

I never knew what made me glance up at the front door of the restaurant. The chime hanging over the hinge wasn’t particularly loud, and none of the other patrons coming in had caught my attention.

For whatever reason, though, I glanced up when the door chimed, and was struck by a sudden, intense wave of déjà vu when a woman half stepped inside. She was certainly attention grabbing, with her tall black top hat, the multicolored beaded necklace and her black suit with purple accents. The whole ensemble was surrounded by a long black cape. Hers wasn’t a wholly outlandish outfit for a city that was famous for Mardi Gras costumes, but I couldn’t look away.

I was sure I’d seen her somewhere before, though, in a less eye-catching outfit. She looked a few years older than me, dark haired, blue eyed, thin lipped with a bit of a weak chin. I couldn’t put my finger on where we’d met before, though.

A smirk slid across the woman’s face as she looked inside the restaurant, and then drew back her arm and tossed a thin licorice whip into the middle of the room, then closed the door with a nasty laugh.

I just stared at the candy flipping through the air in apparent slow motion, before memory caught up and my mouth opened to scream a warning. It felt like I was moving under water, slow, and muted.

One moment, a piece of black licorice was arcing through the air. The next, a furious cottonmouth snake hit the floor, its black coils bunching up into a knot. The snake hissed, flashing the shockingly white gums that gave it its name, and lunged for a man in a seat nearby.

Chaos erupted.

People started screaming, jumping out of their chairs and trying to get away from the snake. I lunged across the table to grab Trina’s arm, half dragging her around to my side so she wouldn’t be as close to the Cottonmouth which was currently thrashing around on the floor. And I was fairly sure it was growing in size as we looked at it.

“Did someone just throw a snake in here?” Trina’s voice was much louder and higher pitched than usual. And based on her question, she was clearly in shock and disbelieving her own eyes.

Her rendition of the event was close enough to what had actually happened that I wasn’t going to quibble, especially with a venomous snake between us and the only way out.

People were shoving and pushing, racing for the door. Meanwhile, one of the servers was standing behind the counter on the phone, hopefully with animal control. Regardless, I wasn’t sticking around for someone with a catch-pole to show up. The snake was angry, frightened and looking for a place to hide, and our rapidly emptying corner of the restaurant must have been lots more appealing than the corner by the doorway, full of panicking people.

The snake slithered towards us, moving like an oil slick on fast forward, the fluorescent lights gleaming off its night-dark scales. And, the more I watched it, the more I realized it wasn’t growing like I’d originally thought.

Trina shrieked, and honestly, I probably did too, as we scrambled out of its path. The crowd had thinned enough that people were spilling out the door in a steady stream rather than bunching up. We quickly got in line and seconds later, found ourselves standing outside on the sidewalk surrounded by fascinated onlookers.

We just stood there, holding each other’s arms and trying to relearn how to breathe for a few seconds. And then a few seconds more.

In the dreams I’d had about the licorice witch, I’d never seen her face. But just now I’d recognized her face. How? Because the licorice witch had been in my dream the previous day— I remembered the dark hair, light skin, blue eyes and narrow mouth. Yes, I’d seen this witch in the dream I’d had when I’d brought back the Ouroboros, which currently felt like it was burning a hole in my pocket.

So, of course, that begged the question: was the licorice witch the ‘she’ that Beatrice Litten had warned me about? If so, how the heck did the woman look like she was in her mid-thirties when she’d been born literally hundreds of years ago? Clearly, the answer to that one was: magic.

Furthermore, was the licorice witch the one who was after the Ouroboros? And then something dawned on me—the Ouroboros was in the shape of a snake and the witch woman had thrown wands of licorice that morphed into… snakes.

Hmm.

What was up with the snake obsession?

And, more importantly, what was I going to do about it?

Chapter Eight

Early morning light spilled in through my bedroom window, pressing against my eyelids. I groaned, burrowing my face further into my pillow. I must have forgotten to close the curtains the night before when I all but fell into bed, exhausted from the day. Poppy’s potion had certainly helped me, but by the end of the day, it must have worn off because I was back to feeling fatigued.

After the chaos at Mother’s Restaurant, Trina and I had grabbed a coffee and sat in the park to calm down before parting ways. Our ‘calm down’ idea hadn’t really worked, with both of us constantly on the lookout for a witch in a top hat who might lob a snake at us at any moment, so we’d finished our coffees and Trina had dropped me off at my house.

She promised to keep me updated about Ryan, even though I felt slightly guilty about her keeping tabs on him, since doing so was an invasion of his privacy, but I didn’t tell her not to. The truth was, I was worried about him. Nothing Trina had told me sat right because she was correct—his actions recently weren’t like him. At all.

Especially not the way the dogs were acting around him. They were usually all over him like a slobbery coat. And I also couldn’t help but remember the moment when Trina swore Ryan’s eyes were glowing white. I’d seen the same thing happen to him a few times.

I spent the rest of the day filling Drake in on what had happened at Mother’s Restaurant, and we both attempted to figure out who our ‘anti-St. Patrick in a top hat’ was, without success.

Without a name or any other identifying information other than ‘likes snakes and hats’ and ‘may or may not be leading an army of child ghost thieves,’ it was really hard to track someone down, even with the full might of the internet behind us. It wasn’t like Google offered much on the search phrase: ‘coercing the dead for evil rituals’.

If I’d had the reflexes at the moment the licorice witch had assaulted the restaurant to have snapped a picture of her, I might have been able to do an image search, but most of my thought process had been taken up with ‘eeeek, snake—get away!’

So, with no leads and nothing but frustration to reward me for the time I’d spent, I’d finally given up and gone to bed. It had taken a frustratingly long time to fall asleep, and my dreams had been odd and unsettling. Nothing I could remember, but feelings of being lost and trying to find my way out of a dark maze lingered in the morning.

I cracked an eye open, feeling more tired than when I’d gone to bed. Slamming my eyelid closed again, the stabbing pain of brilliant sunlight refused me further repose. Daschel yawned and then stretched beside me as his tail started to wag.

“Good morning, buddy,” I muttered as I reached for the Uncrossing Oil sitting on my side table. It was the only thing that was going to get me through the day. Feeling completely exhausted and weak, it wasn’t an easy process to anoint myself in the crook of my elbows, my wrists and the sides of my neck, but I managed and with each drop of the potion, I felt my energy restored.

Being awake was highly overrated, I decided as I rolled over to put my back to the window. The early morning sun felt good against my skin and as the potion did its job, I could feel the heat within me competing with the heat from the sun.

Glancing down, I realized something was amiss. I’d gone to bed wearing a tank top and pajamas shorts, but now I wasn’t wearing them. In fact, I wasn’t wearing anything at all. Feeling my heart welling up into my throat, I lifted the sheets away from my body, revealing more bare skin and what looked like dark green paint.

The paint extended over my stomach, creeping up onto my ribcage, and appeared to be a symbol. It looked almost like an extremely stylized snake coiled around a stick, with what could have been stars painted on the skin surrounding it. More green paint stained parts of my hand, and my nails were caked to the quick.

I stared at myself for a long time as I tried to understand what in the world could have happened. But, I only drew question marks. One thing I did know—the paint hadn’t been there when I went to bed and I certainly hadn’t painted myself. Regardless, the paint was there now and someone had taken a long time to create the intricate symbol on me, yet I had no memory of it.

Almost numb, I swung my feet to the floor, and noticed there were bits of grass caught between my toes.

I burst into tears.

It was all too much. The snake attack, Ryan, Drake, the mystery witch, the zombie curse, and the idea that someone had painted symbols on my naked body while I was asleep and vulnerable and completely unaware. I couldn’t deal with any of it.

Hysterical tears can only last so long, and in less time that I thought possible, I’d cried myself dry. Daschel, meanwhile, sat beside me and licked my face, comforting me in the only way he knew how. But, I couldn’t take much comfort in him or anything else, for that matter. Not when it appeared my life was falling apart and there was nothing I could do about it.

The tears left behind a hollow, scoured out feeling. I mopped my face up the best that I could with my bare hands and then stood up, heading for the bathroom. It was at that moment that a knock sounded on the door and Drake called out, “Ma minette? Are you up?”

“I’m, um, I’m getting into the shower,” I called back, not ready to see Drake. I just… I wanted to clean the paint off my body and the mud from my toes. But, even though the desire to cleanse myself was almost suffocating, I also thought it would be a good idea to snap a picture of the symbol so I could show it to Lovie later. (And Lovie only because with the way the symbol was painted on me, I’d have to reveal my entire naked body).

“Very good!” Drake called back. “I have started a pot of coffee for you!”

“Thank you,” I called back as I turned on the water and, once it was hot, stepped under the welcoming stream. Then I scrubbed myself like I’d never scrubbed before.

When I finally felt clean, I anointed myself again with the Uncrossing Oil, then dressed in my favorite jeans and a snazzy soft peach sweater before stripping my bedsheets and carrying them out of my room.

Drake and Maggie were huddled together at the kitchen table when I walked into the hall, and Maggie immediately stood up to help me with my sheets.

“You shouldn’t be doing anything you don’t have to do,” she explained.

“Thanks, Maggie,” I answered, not in the mood to argue about who should be doing the laundry. Instead, I went looking for a much-needed cup of coffee. That was when I paused at the threshold of the kitchen, with the sudden realization that the two of them had been talking quietly amongst themselves and… not arguing.

Daschel wagged his tail beside me, giving a little yip as if to say, “get on with it.”

Drake sprang up from the table, looking almost guilty, like I’d caught him at something.

“Mon chaton,” he exclaimed, stepping away from the table toward me. “Bonjour. Good morning. You are awake.”

“Yes.” I drew the word out, suspicious. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, nothing.” Drake waved off my concerns with a quick smile. “I have made coffee for you.”

“Right. You said that earlier.”

Maggie returned from the laundry room and announced, “I fixed your coffee after Drake made it.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding. “Thanks, Maggie.”

She just bobbed her head, watching me carefully. Even weirder, Drake didn’t take any offense to the implication that he’d messed up making the coffee, he only hurried to get me a mug from my mostly empty cupboards.

“All right,” I said, unnerved. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Maggie blurted, while Drake gave me an innocent smile so fake, it should have peeled off like a sticker.

“Whatever do you mean, ma minette?”

My eyebrows climbed up to my hairline, and I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting.

It took less than a minute for them to break.

“It is only that,” Drake began, after a quick glance at Maggie, who nodded at him. “I was waiting near your bedroom for you to awaken, and it sounded like you might have been having a… difficult morning.”

Part of me cringed over Drake hearing me crying because I’d wanted to keep that little episode to myself, but the rest of me softened at the show of concern from them both.

“I’m okay,” I started, before taking a deep breath and amending, “I will be okay.” They both shot me disbelieving looks. Even Daschel tilted his head to one side, ear cocked, like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. “I really just want to get out of this house and not think about the things going wrong in my life.”

“We could go out,” Maggie offered tentatively. “Maybe explore the city a bit?”

I could see Drake fighting to keep his expression neutral, but it was clear he was excited about the prospect of seeing the city again. And he’d been beyond jealous when I’d gone out with Trina for the afternoon. Yes, Drake had gone on a few walks in the neighborhood around the house, but he never ventured far because he was too concerned about me. Now, his boyish expression caused warmth to flow through my chest, chasing away some of the lingering chill.

“Sure.” I smiled at their obvious excitement. “But, first, I’m going to need that coffee.”

# # #

We mostly stuck to the French Quarter in our wanderings, and I let Maggie and Drake take turns deciding where we would go next. The outing was a mixture of the familiar and the new for Drake. Some places had changed very little from the time he remembered, like Jackson Square, whereas the World War II museum was new, or new by the ‘been-dead-for-a-century’ definition of new.

New Orleans of today wasn’t a complete culture shock to Drake, since he’d been able to see parts of the city while possessing my body, but as he said, possessing me wasn’t at all the same as walking around alive again. Being able to feel the sun on his skin, the heaviness of the humid air, to smell the faintly fishy Mississippi River, and to hear the bright ringing brass sound of a band wandering the streets with his own ears—there was nothing that could compare.

When we broke for lunch, we chose a small place, Café Amelie, with a patio where we could sit outside, and Drake tucked into his catfish sandwich with every sign of delight.

Later, when Maggie and I were finishing up our drinks, I noticed Drake had grown very quiet. Even though he was sitting at the table with us, his eyes were a thousand miles away, fixed on something in the distance. Then he glanced down at his hands and closed them into fists before slowly opening his fingers again, flexing to make the tendons pop up.

I could guess at the thoughts going through his head—something along the lines of how awful to know that his enjoyment, that his new life, was only possible because someone else had died. Luke Montague had been Drake’s descendant. Possibly his only close descendant, and now Luke was dead. I knew Drake would never have willingly made the decision to take Luke’s body at the cost of Luke’s soul, but Drake hadn’t been given the choice, and I hated to see him suffering when this wasn’t his fault.

“I spoke with Lovie while you were sleeping,” he started and there was a sad look in his eyes. “She said she believed it would be easiest if I… stepped into Luke’s shoes.”

It took me a second to understand what he was saying. “You mean pretend to be Luke?”

He nodded. “As Lovie pointed out, the rest of the world will still believe Luke is alive. Especially because the witch, Angharad, magicked the driver of the truck and Luke’s lawyer into believing nothing happened.”

“Right,” I said and nodded.

“So, I believe I must do that, ma minette. I must become Luke.” He sighed, long and hard. “And, of course, I will cancel this silly lawsuit of his.”

“What about his job and his family?” Maggie asked as she looked at me. “Do we know anything about him?”

I shook my head. “Only that he was after the house.”

“I am going to have his mail rerouted to our house, mon chaton,” Drake continued. “Then perhaps I can learn more about him. And, of course, I shall have to quit whatever occupation he had, and later I will look into selling whatever real estate he might have owned.”

I nodded and reached out, covering his hand with my own, lacing our fingers together.

He looked up at me, a little startled, but a sad smile quickly spread across his face. He gave my hand a squeeze. It was good to see him smiling again, though.

“We can handle all of this together, Drake. It doesn’t have to be tackled right away.” He nodded, but his eyes were still downcast. “And… There’s nothing you did wrong,” I whispered. “So… try to enjoy your new life because… it’s a miracle.”

“Thank you, ma minette,” he answered in a soft voice and I nodded.

“So,” I turned to Maggie. “Your choice next, Maggie. Where are we heading?”

Maggie squirmed in her seat, looking vaguely guilty, and I knew instantly that I wasn’t going to like what she was about to say.

She shot me an apologetic look. “I know you said you didn’t want to think about paranormal stuff today…” She twisted her shirt cuff between her fingers, hesitating.

“Just spit it out, Maggie.” I had said I wanted to avoid ghosts and goblins today, yes, but also, I was a realist and Maggie was fascinated by the occult.

“I really, really, really want to go to the Voodoo History Museum, and it’s just a block away, and… can we go?” She gave me a big smile. “It’s one of the few museums I haven’t been to yet.”

The sentences came out so fast, all the words blurred together and it took me a few seconds to figure out what she’d actually said, and then once I did, I winced.

I’d really hoped for a day where I didn’t have to think about voodoo and witchcraft and magic and curses. Speaking of, my abdomen still felt itchy, like the paint I’d washed off earlier was somehow still there.

Yet, as I looked at Maggie’s hopeful expression, I realized it would take a heart harder than my own to turn her down.

Besides, if I said no, she’d just go by herself some other time, and the idea of the trouble she might get herself into unsupervised was, frankly, terrifying.

Drake’s face had darkened, and he opened his mouth like he was going to berate Maggie for even voicing what she had, but I interrupted before he could.

“Okay.”

Maggie blinked, like she wasn’t sure she’d heard me right. “Okay?”

I took a last slurp of my drink, the ice rattling in the glass. “Yes, we can go.”

“Wait, really?” Maggie looked elated, but the expression was still shadowed by guilt.

Drake looked surprised, too, almost downright skeptical. “Truly? Mon chaton, we needn’t go if you do not wish to.”

“It’s fine.”

I repeated the words to myself, trying to calm my heart, which had started to beat double time. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Nine

The New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum was smack dab between Bourbon and Royal Street, at the heart of the French Quarter.

The museum wasn’t a large place; it was two rooms, but it was absolutely packed with artifacts, paintings, relics and sculptures. There were masks hanging on the walls, a full bull’s skull, and some flags and tapestries with Veves pictured on them. Veves were geometrical drawings and sacred symbols of the voodoo tradition.

A tall, handsome man with dark skin greeted us when we walked inside. He was smartly dressed in slacks and a collarless button up shirt, with a close-trimmed beard and his shoulder length hair done in braids. He had a warm and kind smile.

“Hi, I’m David. Let me know if you have any questions, or if you’re interested in signing up for a tour,” he said in a voice like velvet. “We’ve got a cemetery tour this afternoon which still has some spots available.”

“Thank you,” I said, cutting off whatever Maggie was about to say. I’d seen the way her eyes lit up at the mention of a tour, but I had to draw the line somewhere. Museums were one thing, heading into spirit central was another.

“We are just here to look around, monsieur,” Drake added.

“Very good,” David responded. “Enjoy your visit.”

Maggie sighed, but didn’t comment. Instead, she headed for one of the glass display cases that held an open cloth pouch. The fabric had been carefully embroidered with a coiled serpent, its eyes and scales delicately picked out in silk thread. Nestled beside the bag were a collection of objects, a few herbs, what looked like a silver ring, and most impressively, a full snake shed.

For some reason the papery, eyeless bundle of skin made a shiver run up my spine. The plaque beside the display proclaimed the bag to be a gris-gris, a talisman in the voodoo tradition, used for protection.

“A gris-gris,” Maggie exclaimed on an inhaled breath.

“We have to be careful with that one,” David said with a slow smile as he saw where our attention had landed. “Keep it sealed up tight.”

“Why? Is it dangerous?” Maggie asked as I took a step back, eyeing the snake shed uneasily.

David’s smile widened, revealing a dimple in one cheek. “No, not at all. But it’s very old, which means we need to protect the contents, so the snake shed doesn’t crumble or decay.”

“Hence why it’s in the display case?” I asked.

David nodded and then leaned forward, dropping his voice to a whisper, like he was sharing a secret with me. “It’s rumored that this gris-gris was made by Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, herself.”

I forced a smile for him, but inside my stomach did a backflip. Considering the situation I had found myself in with a descendant of Marie Laveau, Guarda, I didn’t want any other reminders of the Voodoo Queen.

Out of the corner of my eye, one of the wall hangings caught my attention. It was a long, rectangular black cloth, with a stylized snake twisting around a straight line all done in white thread. As soon as I faced it fully, all the blood rushed out of my face because I’d seen it before.

“That symbol,” I said, pointing and trying to keep my voice steady. “What does it mean?”

David glanced at the tapestry and nodded. “The Veve? That one is the symbol of Damballah Wedo. He’s the father of all the loa, the gods in the Voodoo tradition, he’s the husband to Ayida Wedo, and the loa of creation.”

Creation? I shook my head, trying to settle my thoughts. “So, he’s… a friendly loa?”

David gave me an odd look, tinged with amusement. Blood heated my cheeks, and I had the urge to tilt my head forward so my hair might hide it.

“Yes, Damballah Wedo is friendly, I suppose you could say. Though the loa’s all have their less than friendly characteristics. He’s a paternal figure, wise and loving—when he wants to be.”

I thanked David for his time and then walked away from the display. He must have thought I was a weirdo for retreating as quickly as I had, but inside my brain a war was brewing. Thoughts rampaged against each other, all circulating around the same subject: why had the veve for the creator loa appeared painted on my stomach?

I was more confused than ever, so I walked to the far end of the museum and pretended extreme interest in the candles featured there. All the while, I attempted to catch my breath and steady the nonstop stream of thoughts flooding my head. I was idly aware of Maggie and Drake, who were standing a few feet from me, busily looking at the preserved head of an alligator.

Under the guise of running my fingers through my hair, I rubbed my temples because a faint throb of pain had taken up residence there, promising a truly spectacular headache to come. But, I wasn’t much concerned with a blossoming headache at the moment. Instead, I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I needed answers in the worst way and yet, I seemed to only come up with more questions.

“Hey.” A sharp finger jabbed me in the ribs. “You.”

I didn’t shriek, so a point for me. I did jump, but that was justified. Whirling around, I found myself looking down at the woman who’d come up behind me. “Me?”

The old woman who’d poked me had deep brown skin, and what hair that had escaped her tignon was solid gray. She was dressed a bit like Lovie, but her blouse was dark purple, and her skirt was gray and violet. The top of her head didn’t come up past my collarbone, and her face was so lined with wrinkles, she looked like one of those shrunken heads from South America.

The woman squinted up at me from behind a pair of tortoise shell glasses so thick, they could have doubled as bullet-proof windows. Her eyes nearly disappeared into their nest of wrinkles. She gave a little grunt, and I had no idea if that grunt was supposed to mean ‘yes,’ ‘you’re in my way,’ or just ‘ugh.’

She turned and began shuffling away with the aid of a black cane. I watched her go, bewildered. She almost made it to a door off the hallway between rooms when she turned to give me a dirty look over one shoulder.

“Well?”

I was so lost, I suddenly felt like crying again. “Well, what?”

The glare intensified, her dark eyes narrowing. “I ain’t got all day. Hurry it up.”

“I don’t—” I started to say, but she’d already opened the door and stepped through.

Drake and Maggie were still examining the displays, muttering to each other as Maggie stabbed a finger at a tortoise shell. I tried to catch their eyes for a few seconds, and then just shrugged and followed the old woman through the door.

The tiny room beyond was cramped, barely more than a closet big enough to hold the little card table and two chairs within it. The room smelled of tobacco and incense, and something bright and citrusy I couldn’t name. The old woman seated herself at the table, and I noticed two glasses of sweet tea had already been set out, condensation beading along the sides as though they’d been poured hours ago.

When I stood in the doorway, the woman thumped her cane against the floor and glared up at me.

“Sit down, Peyton Clark.”

The fine hair on my arms prickled, goose bumps running over my skin. “How do you know my name?”

“Been waiting for you.” She sniffed, her jaw tilting up at a mulish angle. “You’re late.”

“How can I be late for an appointment I didn’t know I had?” I threw my hands on my hips and glared at her in frustration. “I didn’t even know I was coming here until a half an hour ago!”

The woman gave me an unsympathetic look. “You want help? Sit down. You want to keep whining? Do it somewhere else.”

She pulled a deck of oversized cards out of her skirts and started shuffling, not paying me any more attention—as if whatever option I chose, it was all the same to her.

For lack of any better options, I sat. Yes, I was frustrated and had no idea what was going on, but if this woman was actually willing to help me, I would take what I could get, even if I had no idea what was going on. And, somehow, she did know my name…

Sitting down at the table got me a brief look that was almost approving. At least it was approval adjacent, so to speak. Also, there was the hint of a smile on the old woman’s face, but that could have been a trick of the light.

“So,” I said tentatively, after a few moments of silent shuffling. “You know my name…”

She grunted. “Yvonne.”

“Nice to meet you, Yvonne.”

I didn’t get a response, so for lack of anything better to say or do, I picked up the glass in front of me and took a sip. My taste buds braced for impact as I took a mouthful of the sweet tea that was ubiquitous in New Orleans. Emphasis on the ‘sweet’. Normally at home, I mixed mine with unsweetened tea to keep it from making my teeth ache. But now that wasn’t an option, so I took a sip, ready to hide a wince, but was pleasantly surprised. The tea had only a hint of sweetness, and a little twist of lemon, and I was more than sure that had everything to do with the fact that such was exactly how I liked it.

Somehow, this less than toothachingly sweet tea was the most unsettling thing that had happened since I’d arrived in the city—ghosts trying to murder me, time traveling through the spirit world, dead men coming to life again. Sure, okay, I could deal with all that. And a stranger knowing my name? Creepy, but I could roll with it. But, someone I’d never met knowing my tea preference? That was where I drew the line.

The glass made a click when I set it down on the table. “Who are you?” My voice shook a little on the way out, but my words were still closer to a demand than a question.

Yvonne paused in her shuffling to look at me over the rim of her glasses. “Someone who’s doing you a favor.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“No,” she agreed. “You didn’t.”

There was a subtle emphasis on the ‘you’ in her sentence.

“Who asked you to do me a favor?” This conversation was easily one of the weirdest I’d ever had, and I regularly talked about ghosts and time travel, so that was really saying something.

Yvonne started shuffling again, the cards moving easily through her old fingers even though she kept her eyes trained on me. “That’s between me and them.”

Frustration boiled in my gut. By all rights, steam should have been shooting out of my ears. “It’s my business if it’s about me.”

Completely unimpressed by my anger, Yvonne blinked slowly. “You ever hear the phrase ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’?”

“Of course, but—”

“Good, then you know what to do,” she said, drawing the first card.

I’d assumed she was using tarot cards, but the colorful images laid out in the spread before me were totally foreign to me. I’d never seen anything like them before. They were pictures of silhouettes, more shadows than people, flowing symbols that almost looked like letters in an unfamiliar language. Or maybe it was more à propos to describe them as colorful patterns that looked more like Rorschach tests than actual pictures. A few animals appeared. The one most easily identified was a snake with rainbow patterned scales… of course. It seemed I couldn’t escape anything having to do with snakes recently.

Yvonne looked down at the spread covering a good portion of the table, and her gray brows crept up her forehead until they almost brushed the cloth of her head scarf.

“Girl, you got all kinds of trouble.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it and the laugh came out as more of a wheeze, but some of the tension leaked out of my spine. “Tell me about it.”

The joking statement fell a bit flat. Yvonne’s lips pursed, and she tilted her head to one side, eyes on the cards, as if she’d taken me seriously.

“You don’t need a review. You need clarity.”

My breath caught in my throat, the muscles squeezing tight. “Yeah.” My voice came out a little thick, but it didn’t waver.

Yvonne looked over the cards again, thumping her cane against the ground almost meditatively. “The stranger. The one with the snakes…”

“Yes?” I asked, leaning forward because I was suddenly more than interested.

Yvonne nodded. “The answers you seek lie in the relics taken.” She looked up at me then. “Look to them for what you need to know.”

Of all the things I’d expected when I followed an old lady into a glorified coat closet, actual answers hadn’t been on my list. But, I was both inordinately relieved and excited to learn answers were exactly what I was getting.

“You can see that?” I leaned forward, straining to see and understand the cards better.

Yvonne thumped her cane against the ground more firmly. “Yes,” she said, voice tart. “Now let me work.”

Duly chastised, I leaned back into my chair until I worked up the courage to tell her what was on my mind. “With all due respect, I’ve looked to the relics and they haven’t answered any of my questions about… anything,” I said.

With another glare, she turned back to the cards. “Speak to the Frenchman. He can point you in the right direction.”

The Frenchman? Drake? Well, he was the only ‘Frenchman’ I knew, but talking to Drake didn’t make much sense, because if he’d known anything about all of this, he would have already told me.

But maybe he didn’t have all the facts, I thought guiltily. The Ouroboros pendant pressed against my leg, as if burning me through my pocket. I’d taken it off from around my neck because it made me nervous and I’d figured it would be better kept in my pocket—close but not too close. Speaking of the necklace, I still hadn’t told anyone about it yet, mainly because I couldn’t.

I opened my mouth to ask why I appeared to be blocked in connection with the necklace, but Yvonne tapped a few of the cards to the right of the spread. They were covered in shadows and little fires, the silhouettes of people twisting and writhing on the glossy cardstock.

She fixed me with an intense look.

“You know you’re under the influence of dark and powerful magic.”

It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. My throat was so dry, it hurt to swallow.

Yvonne sucked her teeth, the sound unnaturally loud in the small space. “You need to reverse the curse before you find yourself coming to a bad end. Time will run out, faster than you can imagine.”

My heartbeat kicked up, slamming in the side of my throat. My pulse was so heavy it almost hurt. I ran my tongue over my suddenly dry lips. “What can I—”

“Hey!” someone shouted from the room outside, loud enough to be heard clearly through the door. “Get back here!”

I glanced at Yvonne, startled.

She gave me a look heavy with significance before rolling her eyes toward the door.

Reluctantly, I rose from my chair and headed for the door. She clearly wanted me to investigate, but I had a million more questions I was dying to ask her—namely, how in the hell I was supposed to remove the zombie curse which was obviously going to do me in. But, the expression in Yvonne’s eyes told me she wouldn’t tell me anything more if I didn’t do as she asked. So, I took the three steps necessary to get to the door and stepped back into the main room.

A hand latched onto my upper arm, tight enough that it hurt.

“Ma minette!” Drake glared down at me. “Where have you been?”

“I was just talking to someone.” I pried my arm out of his hold, glaring at him because he was keeping me from something important! “I tried to tell you before, but you and Maggie were busy.”

I glanced around. David was on the phone, his free hand buried in his hair, a frown on his handsome face. A bunch of patrons, including Maggie, were all clustered around the doorway, staring out into the street.

“What’s going on?” I demanded, returning my gaze to Drake’s concerned expression. “I heard shouting.”

Drake rubbed a hand over his face, his dark hair falling over his brow. “There was a theft, mon chaton.”

I gaped at him. “A theft?” I felt my heart drop down to my toes. “What did they steal?”

He nodded to an empty display case, the one that had held the gris-gris that Marie Laveau herself had supposedly made. The bag was gone, along with the objects that had been positioned around it, including the snake shed.

“A young girl, a child, came in,” Drake explained. “I thought her to be with a group that visited after us. She was looking at the displays, and I did not pay much attention to her, as I had noticed you were missing, ma minette.” He gave me an impatient look. “Just what were you doing in the closet?”

I waved him on. “There was this woman, who… I’ll tell you later. Tell me about the theft... please. The girl grabbed the gris-gris?” He nodded as I shook my head. “Why would a kid want a talisman bag?”

Drake pursed his lips, drawing my attention to them. I deliberately dragged my gaze back up, swallowing. It was so not the time for a forcible reminder of just how handsome Drake was.

“The question is not why would the child want it, but how the child stole it, ma minette.”

My eyes narrowed, and I glanced back over at the display case. The closed, locked, hermetically sealed, unbroken glass case. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I am not, mon chaton. According to witnesses, the child simply reached through the glass and scooped up the objects before running out the door. A few gave chase, including young David there, but the girl vanished into the crowd without a trace. And she was not known to any of the other patrons who came in with her.”

I figured it made sense that Drake, a former police officer, would have all the facts of the case. Apparently, some things never changed.

“Now,” Drake said, drawing my attention back to him. “Who is this woman you were speaking to?”

“Oh, right. Yvonne. She asked me into the back room and was in the process of reading fortune cards for me...”

Which reminded me, I had about a hundred more questions I wanted to ask her. Maybe she or the cards or whoever asked her to read the cards for me would know how to break the zombie curse before I became a puppet to Guarda’s will.

Whatever Band-Aid Lovie’s friend, Poppy, had provided me in the form of the Uncrossing Oil, had worked wonders because I no longer felt like I was becoming a walking corpse, but that didn’t mean the walking corpse bit wasn’t still happening. I needed a more permanent solution.

The door to the backroom was less than five steps away, but when I pushed it open, a question on my lips, I found both the chairs empty, and no sign of Yvonne. Even the glasses of sweet tea had vanished as if they’d never been.

Chapter Ten

It was dark.

I could hear whispers surrounding me in the shadows… fearful voices, soft weeping. A baby gave a sad little wail, and someone shushed it quietly. I blinked once, and then again, and the dark receded just a bit.

It took me a second or so to realize my face was smushed against rough wood, and my hair clung to the bark as I sat up. Somehow, I’d been slumped against a wall made out of what appeared to be logs. A pair of glass domed, oil burning lanterns broke up the absolute pitch darkness of the building I was sitting inside. The lanterns were enough to give a tiny bit of light, but not enough to illuminate the corners of the room.

I became conscious of other people beside me—too many people huddled in too small a space. I was pressed between a middle-aged woman who was knitting solely by touch, and an older woman who was consoling a little boy. Neither of them seemed concerned that I was there, or had apparently been sleeping between them. Still, I kept quiet, trying to reposition myself to better see the room at large.

There were no men, that was what struck me first. No boys over thirteen or so, either. All those who were huddled together were women and girls ranging from toddler to gray-haired, with a few little boys clinging closely to those I assumed were their mothers.

Long skirts rustled as I shifted my position to take a look around myself, and I glanced down to see I was wearing a dark colored dress with stark white cuffs. The others were dressed similarly.

A gunshot tore through the silence, and I wasn’t the only one who jumped. One woman cried out, muffling the sound behind her hand. The baby wailed again, and two women converged to help the mother soothe the baby’s volume back to fretful whimpers.

There was another shot, and then two more rang out in rapid succession. It sounded like the shots were getting closer. Somewhere outside, a man swore.

“What will we do?” One woman whispered once silence fell back around us like a shroud.

“These devils cannot be killed,” another answered.

“What are we to do?”

“Take heart,” a younger woman said, leaning forward to take the first’s hand. “My Benjamin and his brother have gone to Ipswich for aid. They will return with enough men to send the devils back to hell.”

The knitting woman crossed herself, mumbling a prayer under her breath as I tried to puzzle out where Ipswich was—I was fairly sure it was on the East Coast, near Salem, Massachusetts, if memory served.

Please let me not be in Salem, I prayed to myself. The last thing I needed was to be hanged for being found guilty of witchcraft.

My eyes finally adjusted to the dark, and I realized with some amazement that we were inside a garrison. I’d seen reproductions in text books and, looking at this one now, felt like I was on a movie scene. But, this was no movie. Neither was it real, per se, but the smell of wood, of hay and metal was all so real, I had a hard time believing otherwise.

The truth was that I must have slipped through the spirit world again, into the past. This behavior was becoming a habit, and not one I wanted to embrace.

The older woman beside me spoke up for the first time, but quietly, as though the words weren’t meant for anyone but me.

“The men of Ipswich will be of no help. They cannot fight what comes for us with bullets and blades. And the aggressors will not go until they find that which they seek.”

I jumped and realized the woman sitting beside me on the bench was Beatrice Litten. “You!” I struggled to keep my voice down, but didn’t want anyone else to overhear. “Did you bring me here again?”

Beatrice tucked the little boy on her lap more firmly to her chest when he mumbled in his sleep before turning her head to face me.

“Is it safe?”

“What?” I realized what she was referring to a second after I spoke. “You mean the—”

“Do not speak of it here!” She whisper-hissed the words, blue eyes fierce in the dark. “Is it safe?”

A quick glance around told me that all the others who were hunkered down in the garrison were too preoccupied with whatever was going on outside to bother eavesdropping on us.

I swallowed, my mouth suddenly bone dry.

“Yeah,” I croaked. “It’s safe.”

Or the Ouroboros had been when I’d gone to sleep, at least. The outfit I was currently wearing didn’t seem to come with any pockets, and I wasn’t wearing the Ouroboros around my neck, so it didn’t seem to have made the trip with me.

Beatrice Litten nodded and appeared very serious and satisfied, her jaw squared. “Good. She cannot find it then. And it is only a matter of time before they catch up with her, as all past sins come due in the fullness of time.”

Fear and frustration simmered together in my belly, bubbling uncomfortably. “What does that mean?”

Beatrice gave me a look like I was the dumbest person she’d ever had the misfortune to encounter, which might have been true, but owing to the fact that she was asking me for a favor, it was frankly uncalled for.

“It means the witch,” she said so quietly it was barely a breath of air between us. “The one who would set herself against God’s will, and battle against the sanctity of life, is after it.”

“That’s what you said before, but I still don’t know what it means!” And that reminded me of another handy, little subject. “And… why is it that whenever I try to discuss it with anyone, I can’t!”

Beatrice narrowed her eyes at me. “Because you should not be discussing it with anyone!”

“Regardless, have you put a spell or something on it that disallows the wearer to discuss it?”

She nodded then. “I have done everything I can to protect it.”

Well, that was one mystery put to bed. Now to face the million others.

Beatrice Litten looked almost as frustrated as I must have, which seemed pretty unfair to me given the fact that she was in the know and I… wasn’t.

“Please tell me more about this witch who wants… it,” I said.

“She would sacrifice her immortal soul in the search for earthly eternity.”

I still wasn’t one hundred percent positive I understood what she was talking about but, I now figured it had something to do with eternal life. Was that what the Ouroboros promised? At least, according to what Beatrice just said… “Does this witch have a name?”

“We do not speak her name for fear of retribution.”

“Can you at least say it once? It’s important for me to know who is after… it.”

Beatrice nodded quickly and then leaned over fully, pulling her hand up to cover her mouth as she whispered into my ear, “Margaret Sawyer.”

I blinked in surprise. I hadn’t been expecting an actual, straightforward answer, and my reaction proved as much. Up to this point, everything had been so couched in misdirection and ye olde English speak that I’d given up on the possibility of learning anything useful.

“Oh, okay.” I winced. Not my greatest comeback, granted. But really, the name wasn’t all that useful when I thought about it.

Beatrice gave me a look that said she couldn’t believe she’d been burdened with me. Well, ditto.

“Is it safely hidden where she will not find it?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, she’s not going to find it.”

“How are you so certain?”

“She’s probably four hundred years dead by the time I’ve hidden the… the necklace.”

Beatrice’s face went through a series of expressions that I couldn’t fully understand, thanks to the overall darkness and the dancing shadows cast by the lantern light.

“She is a witch,” Beatrice explained with exaggerated patience.

“Right. You said that already.” I wasn’t sure how such was relevant.

Beatrice didn’t say anything more, just let the expectant silence linger.

Suddenly, the meaning of her words hit me like an electric shock, and I jerked in surprise. “As a witch, do you mean she’s still alive in my own time?”

The sigh that Beatrice released had to be her most exaggerated one yet.

“The Lord does not burden us beyond what we can bear, I know. But sometimes…” She shook her head.

I opened my mouth to rail back at her, but another round of gunfire erupted outside and I flinched and fell silent. The sound wasn’t like modern gunfire, one furious crack of noise after another. This gunfire was almost worse, in a way, because when multiple shots rang out, those shots had to have originated from different guns. Which meant there were at least four people opening fire on the garrison.

I shrank back against the wall as a girl screamed. Frightened voices rose around me like an icy tide. Beatrice reached out in the confusion, put her palm on my forehead, and shoved me backwards.

I tumbled off the bench, but didn’t hit the wall. Instead, I just kept falling, flipping down a long, dark tunnel filled with flashes of people’s faces, voices, shadows and light.

I awoke with a start in my bed. It took me a second to catch my breath and to calm the sporadic beating of my heart. Once I managed, I sagged back against my pillow, taking stock of everything around me.

Glancing down at myself, I noticed there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary as far as I could tell—no grass, mud, strange symbols. I was just a little sweaty from my dream, er the nightmare. A minimal side effect, which was basically a miracle.

And now I knew the name of the ancient witch—Margaret Sawyer—who may or may not have been coming for the Ouroboros that was tucked into my nightstand. I felt marginally better.

At the thought of the snake necklace, something tickled other thoughts in the back of my head—thoughts that hadn’t been in the forefront of my awareness—thoughts of snakes, witches, time travel and immortality. Was there a chance that Margaret Sawyer had not only survived all these years, but that she and the ‘licorice witch’ were one and the same person? Was Margaret Sawyer the one terrorizing New Orleans with her little ‘turning licorice into snakes’ magic trick?

I hid my face in my hands and let out a frustrated groan. On the one hand, that line of thinking made a kind of sense. And it seemed a little more plausible than a second random witch showing up and stealing magical artifacts in town, unrelated to Beatrice Litten’s warnings.

But, I wasn’t convinced. No, I needed to talk to someone who knew a lot more about witches and magic than I did.

Also, I needed coffee.

Preferably first.

# # #

For lack of a better option, everyone convened at my house and spread around my newly purchased antique mahogany dining room table. The table sat the five of us comfortably, so I didn’t have to bring out the leaf that would expand it to seat up to twelve.

In the last hour, we’d pretty much covered the surface of the table with notepads, pens, resource books, and printed up pictures from the internet, and a truly impressive number of take-out containers. In the center of it all was assembled the artifacts we were researching.

Lovie tucked into the spread with great delight, especially enjoying the cornbread and jalapeno hushpuppies. Her delight was just outdone by Drake who had already loaded his plate with crawfish etouffee, shrimp and grits, jambalaya, seafood gumbo, and two boudin balls. Now he was going back for seconds and I’d caught him eyeing my muffuletta sandwich more than once. Maggie seemed pleased with her vegetarian gumbo and Daschel was benefitting from the goodies everyone around the table kept gifting him. The only person who didn’t seem pleased with the cornucopia of Cajun cuisine was Christopher, the warlock, who wouldn’t touch anything, let alone eat it. But, such was Christopher and I couldn’t say I was surprised.

Sitting next to Lovie in her brilliant yellow, orange and scarlet glory, Christopher in his black flouncy shirt and ubiquitous cape, looked like the shadow cast by her rainbow. Though I had to give him credit—his black eyeliner was probably more on point than mine. Actually, come to think of it, I’d forgotten to put any make up on at all. So, yes, Christopher had me outdone for sure.

Looking over the artifacts before us was a little bit like trying to assemble a puzzle of a waterfall, but the piece in your hand has pictured on it the tire of a corvette.

None of it made sense.

I couldn’t understand how the artifacts were related to each other, let alone why anyone would want to coerce a bunch of ghost children into performing daring daytime heists to acquire said artifacts.

The objects included a sword from the Civil War, now dull enough that it couldn’t even be used as a letter opener. A bunch of old photos of James Sumpton Sutherland, suspected Satan worshipper and proven disgrace to humanity. Sutherland had sacrificed his slaves to the Dark Lord before he ended up face down in the river with a pentagram carved into his forehead. Next up was an old, carved wooden box covered in script, wax and numerous locks meant to keep whatever was inside it, inside it. The box was known as a Dybbuk Box. Finally, there were numerous photos of the gris-gris supposedly made by Marie Lavoe that had gone missing from the Voodoo Museum.

If the snake-flinging licorice witch really was behind all of this, I couldn’t imagine why she’d go to the effort of stealing all these objects, unless she was planning on holding the world’s most eclectic yard sale.

“Okay,” I said around bites of muffuletta. “So, do you have any idea what the gris-gris might have been intended for?”

Lovie looked over my scrawled notes and the couple of blurry photos I’d managed to find on the Voodoo Museum’s website. Christopher, meanwhile, stared into the distance, his aura of boredom and disdain polished to a diamond gleam. To be fair, he was a warlock, not a practitioner of voodoo. But I still figured he might have some insight on what the items might have been used for, in general, if not specifically. Christopher might have been difficult, but he was knowledgeable.

“That particular gris-gris was definitely meant for protection,” Lovie said, sitting back up and accepting a glass of sweet tea with enough sugar in it to blast the enamel off my teeth at forty paces. “The snake shed is a dead giveaway. It’s a gorgeous piece, even if it’s inactive. A snake skin like that is used for talismans of protection and healing, and that shed was mostly intact. It must have been a strong one.”

“But it’s inactive because the gris-gris bag was opened and pulled apart?” Maggie asked.

Lovie made a little wobble motion with her head. “Yes, but it wouldn’t have mattered. A gris-gris like that would have been made for one person. It wouldn’t have worked again for someone else.”

“Then why would anyone steal it?” I asked, shaking my head because none of this made any sense.

“That is the question,” Lovie answered with a clipped nod.

I slid my hand up into my hair and somehow resisted the urge to yank out a handful. “Okay, so what about the box? The dib… dibbit—”

“Dybbuk,” Christopher said with more disdain than a thirteen-year-old girl being embarrassed by her parent’s mere existence. “It is a Dybbuk Box.”

Maggie took another bite of her gumbo and didn’t bother finishing it before she asked, “So, what’s a Dybbuk and why does it need a box?”

The sigh Christopher gave her could have blown out an entire ballroom’s worth of candelabras. “A Dybbuk is a malevolent wandering spirit from Judeo-Christian theology,” he answered, his tone akin to someone sitting on a chair full of knives… sharp ones. “This type of spirit is known for its ability to possess the living in an attempt to steal their bodies, and can only be trapped by a sufficiently skilled magic master who must have a prepared box in which to trap the entity. Hence, a Dybbuk Box.”

I threw my hands up in the air. “Why would anyone steal one, then? It sounds like something you’d want to get rid of.”

“Unless you wished to release the spirit,” Drake managed between mouthfuls.

“Yes,” Lovie answered with another clipped nod.

Why release a malevolent spirit? The idea that this Margaret character might be upping her game from throwing venomous snakes to releasing a body-snatching ghost into the city made my skin go cold.

“Yet,” Lovie started as she shook her head. “This box… feels… empty to me.”

“Empty?” I repeated.

Christopher nodded. “That’s because it is empty.”

“Which makes even less sense as to why someone would want to steal it,” I said.

“Unless,” Lovie started.

“Someone wanted to fill it,” Maggie finished for her. Lovie looked at Maggie and gave her a little smile, nodding.

“The Dybbuk Box was prepared, the magic locked inside,” Christopher said.

“Right—it was sealed with wax and locks, so that says to me that something was sealed inside it,” I pointed out.

Christopher shook his head. “The magic within the Dybbuk is the trap and once it has the object it seeks within its sight, the correct verse will trap the spirit within the confines of the box.”

“And this one appears to be very old,” Lovie said.

Christopher nodded. “There is power, old and strong power, radiating from it. Whoever weaved the magic around this Dybbuk was a very capable magic-user.”

So this Margaret character, potentially the licorice witch, wanted to trap a spirit rather than release one. Interesting…

Chapter Eleven

I pushed the pictures of the Dybbuk Box, the gris-gris, and Sutherland over toward Drake. “Are you sure you don’t know anything about any of these?” I asked for probably the fifth time.

Drake somehow managed not to snap at me, but he gave me a look that was somewhere between annoyed and baffled. “Ma minette, I have told you, non. Why do you think I would have any knowledge of these items? I have never been a practitioner of magic or the occult, and none of these artifacts are even from the time in which I lived and died.”

“I know,” I said and nodded, sighing. “I just was hoping maybe you’d… remember something. It was a longshot. It’s just…” I sighed, my upper body sagging toward the table. “The lady at the museum told me that the ‘Frenchman’ would know about the artifacts.”

Christopher shot me a withering look. “A random woman told you that a ghost had the answers and you just believed her? How much did you pay her?”

“I am hardly a ghost,” Drake shot back but Christopher ignored him.

“Nothing, actually,” I railed back at him. “She said someone else had gifted me the reading.”

Christopher closed his eyes, like the sight of me pained him. For all I knew, maybe it did. Well, we were even because his certainly pained me.

“You know, I once used to wonder how it was one person could get into so many ridiculous situations. It all makes a terrible lot of sense now.” With the way Christopher spoke, you’d swear you were watching him in a black and white movie from the thirties.

Drake looked baffled, his dark brows drawn down. “You assumed the card reader meant me?”

“Well, yeah.” I shrugged, frowning. “I don’t know any other Frenchmen.”

“Ma minette, I am not the only Frenchman to live in New Orleans,” he answered on a laugh.

That made sense, but… “Well, who else could she have meant then?”

“Who is ‘she,’ Peyton? What woman?” Lovie asked, concern in her dark eyes. “What reading?”

Maggie looked up, offended. “You got a reading done and you didn’t even tell me? Rude!”

“It wasn’t—” I sighed, sitting back in my chair. “I didn’t plan on getting a reading. A woman approached me at the Voodoo Museum, told me she’d been expecting me, told me I was late, and then led me to the back room and laid out some cards for me. It wasn’t as though I had much choice in the matter. ”

Christopher gave a dismissive huff of laughter. “And you fell for it? That’s a common trick used against tourists.”

“Really?” I asked, annoyed. “And do the readers usually know the tourists’ names before the tourists have even opened their mouths?”

He flapped a hand, his cloak rippling. “She probably heard one of your companions call you by name.”

I opened my mouth to fire back at him, but Lovie interrupted me by laying her hand on my arm. She had a cooling and calming energy and right now it was beyond welcome. Christopher certainly had a way of setting my anger ablaze.

“Peyton, did this woman give you a name?”

“Um, yes, actually. She said her name was Yvonne.”

Lovie and Christopher went still and both of them looked at the other, neither saying anything.

“What did she look like?” Lovie continued.

I glanced between them, uneasy. “She was pretty short, older. Probably in her late seventies or eighties. Glasses and she wasn’t very friendly.”

Christopher and Lovie shared another look before turning back to me.

“How was she dressed?” Lovie asked in the quiet tone people use when they really want to shout.

I looked at her warily. The question felt loaded, like there might be a wrong answer. “Kind of like you, actually. More purple though.”

Lovie and Christopher shared a more significant look.

Maggie took an obnoxiously long slurp of her milkshake as she faced Lovie. “So, you and Christopher obviously know her. How about a clue for those of us playing along at home?”

Lovie pulled her glass closer but didn’t take a drink. Instead, she turned the glass around and around, making absent little circles. “Yvonne Devoreaux is something of a legend in the occult community of New Orleans. She is a seer, and a particularly gifted one.”

“A seer?” Drake glanced between Lovie and me. “Qu’est-ce que c’est? What is that?”

“Someone uniquely gifted in foretelling the future,” Lovie explained. “She’s also something of a recluse. Dropped out of the public eye more than ten years ago.”

“So she’s the real deal?” I asked, just to be sure.

Christopher laughed but there was no humor in the sound, probably because there was no humor in the person. “Yes, she’s the real deal.”

“It must mean something, that she’s come out of her self-imposed exile?” I asked as Christopher’s face puckered up like he’d bitten into a lemon.

“I can’t imagine why she’d bother with you.”

“Hey!” I said, irritated.

He gave a negligent shrug. “No offense.”

“How would it be possible for that statement not to be taken offensively?”

“What else did Yvonne tell you, Peyton?” Lovie asked.

“Did she give you any messages or anything?” Maggie asked.

“Not really.” I wracked my memory as I shook my head. “Mostly she told me the answers to the questions I had relating to the licorice witch were in the relics taken.”

“Licorice witch?” Christopher looked pained.

“Well, what do you want me to call her?” I snapped at him, tired of his attitude. “She throws licorice whips and they turn into snakes, hence ‘licorice witch’.”

Lovie interjected, obviously trying to stop a fight before it happened. “Yvonne said the answer was in the relics taken?”

“Yes,” I huffed, still annoyed. “And then she said to speak to the Frenchman, that he’d be able to point me in the right direction.”

“And you believed she meant me,” Drake said, the inflection in his voice turning the sentence from a question into a statement.

I nodded. “Right. I don’t know any other Frenchmen, so I don’t know who else she could have meant. And then she told me that I was cursed and running out of time. Nothing I didn’t already know.”

It was hard not to sound bitter about that last bit. Would it have killed Yvonne to tell me how to get rid of the curse? Maybe she’d been about to tell me when the gris-gris went missing in the museum.

Regardless, she’d disappeared, and I didn’t even have a way to contact her.

“You do, you know.”

I stared at Christopher, confused. Had he just read my mind? I really hoped not. “Do what?”

His pale hand pressed flat against the table, black nail polish making his skin appear whiter. “Know a Frenchman. At least one.”

Phew, at least he couldn’t read my mind. That was something I just didn’t want to deal with. Christopher in my head was the absolute last place I wanted him.

But, back to his statement that I knew a Frenchman, I wracked my brain and came up empty. “Who?”

Christopher let out an impatient breath. “Jean Lafitte.”

A shiver worked its way up my spine as my thoughts turned to the Old Absinthe House and its ghostly proprietor, the infamous pirate king, Captain Jean Lafitte. He’d been the scourge of the Gulf of Mexico for years, until Andrew Jackson had convinced him to defend New Orleans in the battle of 1812. Then the Pirate had turned privateer, protecting the local waterways and keeping the invading British from taking the Mississippi River.

Of course, even as a war hero, Lafitte hadn’t suddenly turned squeaky clean. He might have refrained from piracy, but he was still a skilled smuggler until the end of his days. Now, beyond the end of his days, he held court at the two-centuries-old bar, The Old Absinthe House, at the corner of Bourbon Street and Bienville, trading in gossip and information. The Pirate King had turned spy master.

I chewed my lip, looking down at the pictures and notes strewn between cartons of cooling take-out. “You really think Lafitte might have the answers?”

Lovie made a sound of consideration, almost a hum. “It’s likely. Ghosts can go everywhere that isn’t deliberately warded against them. Sometimes they can even hide themselves from practitioners who can see them. If Jean Lafitte doesn’t know what the, ah, licorice witch is up to, he probably knows a spirit that does know, and they probably owe him a favor.”

She was most likely right, at least about the ‘owing him a favor’ bit—it seemed everyone in this damned city owed Lafitte a favor. And if I wanted anything from him, I’d be added to that long list. My stomach sunk down to my knees.

Captain Lafitte wasn’t exactly an altruist. He was a very ‘quid pro quo’ kind of ghost, which made sense since he’d spent most of his life being a pirate in one fashion or another. But that meant he wasn’t just going to hand over information out of the goodness of his heart. He’d want payment. And I already had an inkling of just what sort of payment he’d want.

The last time I’d gone to Jean Lafitte, he’d made it clear he wanted a chance to experience life again. The options for such were limited for ghosts, and all of them required possession. That’s right, the pirate king wanted my body, and not in the way hinted at by trashy romance novels. He wanted to share my body, my life, and hitch around experiencing all the things possession entailed. He wanted to do the same thing I’d let Drake do.

At the time, that had been a hard pass for me. But now…

No, I thought to myself. I’d allowed Drake that incredibly personal favor because… well, Drake was different. Drake was special.

I glanced up at the man in question to find him sipping at a paper cup of café au lait, eyes closed, looking for all the world like a cat basking in the sun. Relaxed, pleased, and wholly focused on the moment.

Almost against my will, my lips curled up.

Yes, Drake was special.

It wasn’t like I’d known Drake long when I signed up to be personally haunted by him, because truthfully, I hadn’t. No, I’d allowed him to possess me because he’d been in danger of being consumed by the spirit of the Axeman of New Orleans. And the only reason he’d been in danger of being consumed was because he’d been trying to protect me.

Drake had tried to shield me from the malevolent ghost, and had, in fact, saved my life. So, no, I hadn’t known Drake well back then, but I’d known enough about him.

And as for what I knew about Jean Lafitte, well... What I didn’t learn from history books was enough to fill my right shoe, and still have room for all five toes. He was charismatic, I’d give him that. I could understand why people followed him, as a captain and as a ghostly information broker. That didn’t mean I trusted him, though, or that I’d ever be comfortable sharing headspace with him.

I tried to keep the resignation out of my voice when I spoke. I wasn’t very effective. “I’ll go to the Old Absinthe House and talk to Jean Lafitte again. I mean,” I gestured to the gleaming sword laying on my dining room table. “Some of these artifacts might even be familiar to him.”

“Mon chaton, you are not going alone into that den of depravity.” Drake glared at me, like he was expecting me to object.

Maggie started bouncing in her chair so hard, I was afraid she was going to launch herself into the ceiling. “I’m coming, too!”

I pointed at Drake. “Him, yes.” The finger swung in Maggie’s direction. “You, no.”

Drake relaxed, looking borderline smug.

Maggie’s lower jaw immediately thrust out as she pouted. “Why not?”

“For one thing, you’re underage.” Maggie was only eighteen, not to mention the fact that while Maggie was very new to the metaphysical side of things, she did have power. She was able to see Drake right away, and not many people could perceive ghosts.

That meant she had just enough ability to be able to get herself into a lot of trouble. What was worse, she didn’t know enough not to poke at things. The first time she’d been left alone in my house, she’d sneaked into the attic and started going through the stuff I’d stashed up there. She hadn’t managed to stumble across anything that could take a bite out of her, but that was just sheer luck.

The last time I visited the Old Absinthe House, the spirits had made it clear that they wouldn’t tolerate anyone messing around. So, no, I wasn’t about to run the risk of Maggie managing to tick off one of the most powerful ghosts in the entire city. And I could absolutely see that happening.

I wasn’t about to tell her that, though. It would just kick off an argument I wasn’t in the mood to have.

“Are you kidding me?” Maggie threw herself back into her chair and seemingly breathed out all her air. “You’re telling me ghost bars actually card people? Their patrons are dead!”

“They do,” Christopher said, being overtly helpful for the first time in his entire existence.

Maggie let out a sigh that said the laws of the land had been crafted just to spite her, personally, and it took everything in me not to smile at her dramatics.

“Okay.” I took a deep breath, wanting to get back to the topic at hand. “Drake and I will go to the Old Absinthe House after dark.”

Maybe we’d finally be able to get some answers.

Which reminded me—I still hadn’t broached the topic of my dreams lately. It was the main reason I’d invited Lovie and Christopher over—so I could tell them… everything. Well, everything minus the information about the necklace, owing to Beatrice’s spell on it, that made me instantly forget what I was talking about. Well, that was a dead end, but what wasn’t a dead end was my dreams, themselves.

“Oh, hey. I meant to ask you earlier.” I twisted in my chair to face Lovie and Christopher more directly. “Have either of you ever heard of someone named Margaret Sawyer?”

The plastic fork in Lovie’s hand snapped in half.

Chapter Twelve

Lovie breaking a fork with her grip was one of the more surprising things I’d ever witnessed from her.

Even Christopher had lost his affected ennui and stared as wide-eyed as the rest of us.

Lovie carefully put the broken bits of cutlery to the side, and then smoothed out her skirt, all yellows and deep reds, before she turned to me with a carefully neutral expression.

“Why do you ask?”

So, I told them—all about the dreams of Colonial Massachusetts and the name Margaret Sawyer. And, of course, as soon as I got close to mentioning the Ouroboros, I promptly forgot what I was talking about. Frustrating, but there it was.

As part of the conversation about the dreams, I remembered waking up covered with green paint and the image of a serpent on my stomach. So, I explained as much to everyone assembled around the table and then pulled out my phone and, being very careful not to let Drake or Christopher see it, I showed the picture to Lovie. She drew in a breath, eyes wide.

“It’s the sign for Damballah Wedo,” she announced.

“The loa of all the loas?” I asked, and Lovie answered.

“But why would,” I started.

“I don’t know,” Lovie interrupted. “But Guarda, or whoever painted you, was calling on the greatest of the loas.”

I took a deep breath, my head starting to ache over all these questions that just bombarded my poor brain. At least there was one question I had a feeling Lovie could answer. “Going back to Margaret Sawyer,” I started. “I take it you know her?”

“I know of her.” Lovie’s voice was clipped in a way I’d never heard it before.

“And?” Maggie asked, eyes wide.

Lovie nodded and then cleared her throat. “Margaret Sawyer was a witch who escaped the Salem Witch Trials.”

I waited for the rest of the explanation, but Lovie’s lips were pressed into a thin line, and she seemed disinclined to say anything more.

“Okay.” There had to be more to it than that. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

The witch trials had been a pretty horrific time, and was a rather infamous stain on the history of our country. Someone actually escaping it after being accused of witchcraft should have been celebrated, right?

“It’s rather more how she escaped that’s the problem,” Christopher said, still eyeing Lovie with concern. Then he turned to face me and the concern blanched from his expression. “Most of the people who were accused of witchcraft weren’t even practitioners. They had no power to speak of, and were just unfortunates swept up by the paranoia and fear-mongering of their neighbors.”

“Right,” Maggie said, nodding jubilantly. “I learned about that in my American history class.”

“I was speaking, child,” Christopher reprimanded her, and she immediately swallowed her own smile. He turned his irritated expression back to me and continued.

“So, was Margaret Sawyer a real witch?” I asked.

Lovie nodded. “She was most definitely a real practitioner,” she started, folding her hands primly in her lap. “Margaret Sawyer, once she was accused of being exactly what she was, then turned the spotlight from herself to a dozen or so other people when she accused them of witchcraft, people she knew were innocent and vulnerable. She then used the ensuing confusion and chaos to escape. She caused the deaths of at least a dozen innocent people.”

I shook my head, feeling sick. “How didn’t I know about this? None of this is recorded or if it is, I’ve never heard this story or Margaret’s name before.”

Christopher sneered, tossing his cloak over his shoulder dramatically. “Those in power wanted to record the fact that they’d done the Lord’s work. They wanted to make themselves appear upstanding and righteous to all of posterity. Not one of them wanted to record the fact that they’d been duped by a witch and one who managed to escape.”

I guessed that made sense. Still, all those poor innocent people who’d suffered because of Margaret’s lies. The thought made me sick.

“How on earth did that woman’s name come up for you, Peyton?” a few sips of sweet tea and Lovie seemed to be more herself. Her brow creased as she looked to me for an answer.

I took in a deep breath, letting it out my nose.

“So, there’s something I need to talk to you all about,” I started, looking from Drake to Maggie to Lovie and finally, Christopher. I wasn’t sure why I felt guilty, but I did all the same. “But, every time I do, I can’t continue the thought because there’s a spell in place that disallows me to talk about it.” Even as I said the words, I forgot what they were in reference to.

Lovie looked at Christopher. “She was blocked.”

Christopher nodded. “I think so too.”

“Blocked?” Drake repeated. “What does that mean?”

Lovie inhaled deeply. “It means someone didn’t want her to make mention of whatever it is she keeps forgetting.”

Christopher smiled, long and languid. It was one of the more unsettling expressions I’d ever seen him wear. He looked at Lovie and then at me. “One of the practices I am considerably better at than others is hex breaking,” he announced.

“That ability of yours wouldn’t extend to zombie curse breaking, would it?” I asked with a flippant laugh because I already knew the answer.

“We have tried to break your curse numerous times,” Christopher answered as he shook his head. “But Guarda’s power is too potent.”

“Right,” I nodded.

“But, that doesn’t mean we can’t remove your block,” Lovie added.

Then they both turned to me and smiled.

# # #

It took maybe twenty minutes of candles being lit, sage being burned, chanting and holy water being dropped on my forehead to complete Christopher’s hex-breaking spell. When he was finished, I couldn’t say I felt any different.

“Now, tell us what you needed to tell us, Peyton,” Lovie said with an encouraging smile.

I took a deep breath and thought about the necklace. “It might be better to show you.” Then I reached into my pocket and slipped the Ouroboros out, holding it up by the chain, letting the metal pendant dangle and catch the light. Lovie sucked in a shocked breath, and Christopher stood up so fast, his chair tipped over.

“Hmm, looked like you are pretty good at breaking spells,” Maggie said and shot Christopher a smile. But, his attention was riveted on the necklace. So was Lovie’s.

“There is…” Christopher cleared his throat and then continued. “There is a great deal of power bound up in that pendant.”

I blinked, caught off guard by their reactions regarding the necklace. Even Lovie regarded the Ouroboros like it might turn around and bite me.

“There is?” I asked as I brought it to eye level and inspected it.

Lovie actually caught my arm and tugged it away from my face. “It’s very old. Where on earth did you get it?”

“It kind of followed me home…”

“Followed you home?” Christopher repeated, eyeing me narrowly. “You make it sound like a dog.”

“How do you mean, mon chaton?”

“Um, well, it followed me here… from one of my dreams?”

His black cloak snapped as Christopher dramatically flipped it over one of his arms. “Are you asking us or telling us?”

“Telling you?” He shot me a venomous look, and I laid the pendant on the table. “Telling you.”

“Explain,” Christopher ordered.

“Well, remember how I told you I started dreaming about the distant past—like the seventeenth century?” They all nodded. “While I was there, I met a woman who claimed to have called me to her. Her name was Beatrice Litten, and she was dressed like a pilgrim.”

Christopher and Lovie exchanged a glance. Drake looked like he was chewing on his tongue to keep himself from interrupting. Maggie was taking notes.

“Go on,” Christopher prompted.

I shifted in my seat, restless. “Beatrice gave me the necklace, and told me to take it somewhere she could never find it.”

“Did she tell you who this mystery woman was, ma minette?” Drake was clenching his jaw so tightly, his words came out strained.

“Yes, that’s where I got the name Margaret Sawyer, remember?”

Christopher inhaled deeply and Lovie was quick to follow.

I turned back, glancing down at the pendant. For a second, the light glinted off it strangely, and made it look like the snake had moved. So weird.

Drake shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest, and pulling my attention from the necklace back to him. The sleeves over his button-up had been rolled back, revealing dark hair and corded forearms. I tried not to look too hard.

“I fail to see how a witch from over three centuries ago could be relevant to our situation today, mon chaton.”

“I’m pretty sure Margaret Sawyer is the licorice witch.”

Dead silence met my announcement.

Until Maggie looked up from her notes. “Wait, what? How’s that possible?”

That was an excellent question. Too bad I had zero answers for her. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But when I was waking up from the dream, the licorice witch’s face popped up in front of me, but she was dressed like a Puritan, with the little starched cap over her hair and everything. And then when I was out to lunch with Trina, I got a good look at the witch’s face while she was, you know, throwing a snake at me.”

“And it was the same face from your dream?” Maggie asked as I nodded.

I’d also seen Guarda’s face in that dream, but I didn’t want to think too hard about that. The less I focused on that awful old woman, the better. Though, at least Guarda was dressed like she always was, not done up in some Pilgrim Halloween costume. I shook my head, like I could physically knock the memory out of my brain. Thinking about Guarda made me think of other things too much. My nightly adventures, the curse, Ryan…

My throat closed up as a fist of regret clenched behind my heart.

“If this Margaret Sawyer is the licorice witch,” Maggie began, slowly. “Then doesn’t that mean she’s the one using kids’ ghosts to steal all this stuff?” She made a circling motion with her pen over the pictures and sword arranged on the table.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I answered.

“What in the world would a witch want with a picture of an old, dead bigot? I mean, the Veve and the Dybbuk Box I guess I can understand.” Maggie picked up the picture of the Dybbuk Box, squinting at it. “They’re like, magic, right?”

“Right,” everyone answered.

“But what would a witch from the dark ages want with this guy?” she finished, pointing to the images of James Sumpton Sutherland.

I winced. “It wasn’t the dark ages, Maggie. It was the late 1600’s, not the 1200’s.”

“Whatever, not the point.” She waved me off with the photo in her hand. “The point is, why pictures of a guy found floating in the river—someone who was missed by precisely no one. One of these things is not like the others.” She sang the last bit, voice cracking a little at the end.

“I guess that’s what we need to find out,” I said, lifting the photo of a photo between my fingers.

Chapter Thirteen

I flipped through my armoire, hangers sliding along the metal rod, wondering what I should wear that might give me the upper hand in bargaining with a ghost pirate.

I wanted to look nice, but maybe not too nice. Truth was, I was nervous, and unsure, but my appearance was something I could still control in the mixed-up mess my life had become. It was probably the only thing I could still control. So yes, I was going to spiff myself up a bit. But I didn’t want to go too far and give Jean Lafitte any more ideas than he already had.

I felt like I was suiting up for battle—as if the skinny jeans I slid over my hips could offer me some edge in negotiations. Well, one thing I could count on was that Jean Lafitte was still as fond of women as he was when he was alive. And, if I did say so myself, this particular pair of jeans made my butt look pretty good. I could also admit, if reluctantly, and only to myself, part of me wanted to look pretty because Drake was coming with me.

On that subject, since I hadn’t felt my best lately, I definitely hadn’t looked my best, and though it was totally silly and narcissistic to admit, I wished the first moment Drake had come back to life, I’d actually looked halfway decent instead of halfway dead. But, alas, things were what they were and it wasn’t like I could go back in time and change them…

Unless.

Peyton, you are not going back in time to put on mascara and do your hair! I yelled at myself. You have more pressing concerns to think about!

Right. Good point.

After anointing myself with more Uncrossing Oil to maintain my energy supply for the evening, I slipped on a red halter top when a soft knock on my bedroom door pulled me out of my thoughts.

“Ma minette,” Drake called through the door. “Are you ready to go?”

I took a deep breath and put one small dab of gloss on my lips before straightening away from the mirror.

“I’m coming,” I called back, and made my way to the door.

I smiled at Drake as I stepped into the hall with him. He looked handsome as ever in a dark button up shirt and slacks, his hair brushed back off his forehead. It was strange, but even though Luke Montague had always struck me as Drake’s doppelganger, there had always been something about Luke—maybe in his manner or his words—that had separated him from truly embodying Drake. And yet, now, with Drake at the helm of Luke’s body, there was nothing about Luke that didn’t remind me of Drake. It was as if they were one and the same and always had been. Almost as if Drake’s spirit had sharpened a few edges, dulled others, changed a bit of this and that and ultimately created an embodiment of Drake Montague that was as exact to the original Drake as it was possible to be. Even his voice seemed deeper than Luke’s had been.

In all the bizarre chaos of the past few days, Lovie had managed to take Drake to the hotel where Luke had been staying in order to collect the dead man’s luggage, so at least Drake had some clothes to wear until we could go shopping. And Drake had also checked out of the hotel so as not to run up a bill that he’d eventually have to pay since Drake was now assuming the role of Luke.

As to Drake stepping into Luke’s shoes, he’d been… reluctant about the whole thing. And I was still feeling just as conflicted as I had—sorry, but not sorry. Grateful but guilty.

Once Drake saw me, he was quiet for a few seconds, just looking at me in an awe-struck sort of way as he took me in from head to toe. I could see his appreciation in the twinkle of his eyes and I suddenly felt flushed and nervously self-conscious, which was silly.

“You look beautiful, ma minette,” he breathed as he reached out and offered me his arm, ever the dutiful gentleman.

“You’re looking pretty nice yourself,” I said in my best Mae West impersonation (even though she was after his time), to which he threw his head back and laughed heartily. It was a wonderful sound and one I imagined I could get very used to. Luckily, it seemed I might get the chance.

I took his arm and, giving it a little squeeze just to feel the muscle flex, we started down the hall.

Lovie had decided to stay while we ventured to the Old Absinthe House in order to look over the evidence, just in case we’d missed something. Also, incidentally, to make sure Maggie didn’t try to sneak out after us (something I didn’t put past her).

Christopher had departed to… brood, or mope, or whatever it was he did when he wasn’t acting the part of a raincloud. I was a bit surprised he hadn’t insisted on accompanying us like he had the last time I’d gone to the Absinthe House, but I figured he thought since I’d been there before, I could handle it on my own this time.

Drake and I took an Uber, because trying to find parking for my behemoth of a vehicle (a Scout International) anywhere near Bourbon Street would take more magic than I’d seen since I’d set foot in New Orleans.

The evening sky hadn’t been dark long when we arrived but, even so, the line to get inside wrapped around the front of the square stucco building and down the road.

The Old Absinthe House was over two hundred years old. Sure, the insides had changed in that time, but the shell of the building remained the same, barring a few cosmetic changes. The structure was two stories tall, squared off, with archways on either side. The green shutters beside the doors and windows were open to the night, allowing the lights inside to spill out in golden puddles on the sidewalk. The second floor included a wraparound black iron balcony with a few tables for patrons who preferred to sit outside and enjoy the cooler air.

Without Christopher’s aura of indifference to shield me, I hesitated in bypassing the line. The last time we were here, he’d just led me to another entrance, since apparently being a member of the supernatural community gave you VIP credentials. Still, people were never happy with line jumpers.

From the corner of my eye, I spotted a man dressed in a puffy shirt and a hat with the brim rolled up at the sides—clearly a ghost from another era. He caught sight of me at the same time from where he hovered near one of the unused doorways. The ghost waved me over with an impatient gesture. Duly summoned, I headed his way and tried to ignore the glares and the angry muttering of the living who were still stuck in line. They couldn’t see the ghost doorman, so I must have looked like a real jerk.

“Peyton Clark, medium,” the ghost intoned when we were close enough to hear him. He turned to Drake, eyebrow raised. “And escort.”

There was a hint of amusement in his voice, and a little bit of heat trickled into my cheeks. The last time I’d been here, Ryan had accompanied me and now here I was with Drake. But, I was hardly going to discuss the details of my romantic relationships, or lack thereof, with a ghost bouncer, so I remained quiet.

It was then that the doorman frowned, squinting intently at Drake as if he were a normal (as in: alive) bouncer trying to decide if an ID was fake. The intensity of his expression made a drop of sweat bead against the nape of my neck. I hadn’t brought Drake around any ghosts, not since he’d stopped being one himself. Could the man tell Drake wasn’t a garden variety human? The spirit world was already in the know about Drake possessing my body and that was bad enough. If it got out that he’d gotten a second chance at independent life, the spirit world would never leave me alone again.

“Thank you,” I said, a little too brightly and a little too loudly. “Will you announce us, please?”

The doorman glanced at me, still suspicious, but grunted.

“He causes any trouble, you’re both out.”

“I assure you, monsieur,” Drake said, the hand I wasn’t holding coming up to press against his chest as if to demonstrate his sincerity. “I am fully housebroken.”

I swallowed back my nervous laughter and nearly choked on it.

Drake’s joke got a narrow-eyed response from the doorman, like he was questioning letting us in, but he finally relented with a grunt and tossed his head toward the door, gesturing for us to go inside.

I smiled, big and bright, and scooted past him before he could change his mind.

I hadn’t considered that ghosts might be able to sense something different about Drake but apparently such was the case. That was something we’d have to be careful of.

A glance through the open door revealed the place was packed, customers standing three deep at the bar, waiting for their drinks. But, passing through our little side entrance led to a nearly empty tap room. There was a young woman in a slinky silver dress over in the corner, her blonde hair done up in an artful spill to cover part of her face. She looked like she was from the twenties or early thirties and was clearly a ghost. She watched us as we walked past, playing with the stem of the cherry from her drink.

Another table held three men, all wearing dark trousers, puffy sleeved shirts, and vests—these guys probably from the eighteenth century. They sat, silently, a single empty shot glass on the table between them. One man stared down into the glass for a moment, and then pushed it towards one of his friends, who repeated the pattern. They never looked up, and never spoke a word as far as I could tell. Odd.

I took another step into the room, and the floorboards creaked. Between one breath and the next, the room was full of people. Laughter bounced off the walls along with the clink of glasses and the hum of too many patrons in a small space. Drake and I were pushed together by the swell of the crowd, our bodies touching from shoulder to hip. We had to drop our linked arms for the safety of our ribs, but his strong, warm fingers linked through mine so we wouldn’t get separated in the crush.

We made our way across the room, like eels weaving right and left as space opened for us. Seeing one of the only empty tables, we dove for it, squeezing between a couple of patrons, and then stumbling forward, unimpeded, as the crowd vanished again.

Drake and I quickly commandeered the free table, putting our backs to the wall in case the crowd returned. This was exactly how it had been the first time I’d visited the Old Absinthe House—time blipping back and forth between the current moment and a much more ghostly one.

I scanned the room again and found another ghost. Leaning against the mantel of the fireplace in the back corner, he looked exactly the same as he had the last time I was here—white pirate shirt, sleeves belling back to reveal arms corded with muscle. He wore a long black cape, and a conical hat with a feather at the front. It almost reminded me of something a seventeenth century Pilgrim would wear, but not quite.

He didn’t look very old, about the same age as Drake—probably late thirties, early forties. Pale skinned, his thin, dark mustache stood out against his face. Even though by modern standards he was short, the regal aura around him made him seem much taller.

Once you’d met Captain Jean Lafitte, there was no mistaking him for anyone else. Even across the room, I could feel the weight of those dark eyes on me, as well as the force of his personality. When he caught me looking at him, the corner of his mouth tilted up ever so slightly.

Chapter Fourteen

“Is that Lafitte, mon chaton?” Drake pressed close as he whispered to me. A tiny whisp of breath touched my ear, and I shivered.

“That’s him,” I confirmed. Then it hit me. “You can see him?”

“Oui.”

So, that answered one question. It seemed Drake’s lengthy stint as a ghost had left him at least marginally aware of the spirit world.

“What about the others?” I tried to glance at the other ghostly patrons without making it obvious. Apparently, I shouldn’t have bothered. The men still didn’t look up, and the woman was openly staring at us, still rolling the cherry around by its stem. “Can you see them too?”

“Three gentlemen sharing a drink?” His tone was wry, voice still barely a breath. “And une belle femme with eyes like a shark in the corner. If there are others, I cannot see them.”

“If there are others, I can’t see them.”

Drake huffed a laugh, and the rush of warm air across my neck made me bite my lip. I closed my eyes and told myself to get control—I’d have to deal with my confusing emotions regarding Drake (and Ryan, for that matter) later because now I had a job to do.

Giving myself a firm shake, I smoothed the front of my shirt. “Okay. I can do this.”

Drake’s hand tightened around mine, squeezing gently. “I am with you every step of the way, ma minette.”

We made our way across the floor to where the captain was holding court. No one popped up to stop me from approaching him as they had the first time I’d met him. Maybe Jean Lafitte had been expecting me? When we were close enough that he wouldn’t have to raise his voice to be heard, the famous pirate captain spoke.

“Peyton Clark. We meet again.” His French accent was even heavier than Drake’s, the r’s rolling off his tongue in quick succession.

As I stepped closer, the sheer power of Lafitte’s aura washed over me. The captain was no low-level spook. His energy shivered over my skin, sparking like a mile long electrical current and making the hair on my arms stand on end.

“Captain Lafitte,” I returned, offering my hand with a smile. He took it, brushing his lips over my knuckles before releasing it.

“And who is your escort this evening? I do not see your warlock companion.”

The last time I’d visited the Old Absinthe House, I’d had both Christopher and Ryan at my side. Lafitte had made both of them wait elsewhere while we spoke, clearly not interested in my male companions. I wasn’t sure what to expect this time. Most of me wanted Drake by my side, and only partly because I was worried he’d get into trouble. But I was also worried about Drake’s cover being blown. If anyone would be able to spot him as a metaphysical miracle, that person would be Lafitte.

I smiled, trying to hide my nerves. “This is… Luke.”

Drake shot me a look, but didn’t correct me, instead he dipped his head to Captain Lafitte.

The spirit looked him over, a wrinkle forming between his dark brows as he squinted. It was as if he were having trouble seeing Drake, like the latter were a television just slightly out of focus.

Lafitte made a considering sound and extended his arm to me before facing Drake again. “Won’t you join us, monsieur?”

I didn’t need Lafitte to take my arm and escort me the four steps to the table beside the fireplace, but I didn’t make a fuss about it. We were trying to play nice and, ultimately, we did need something from him. The pirate turned privateer settled me into my seat before turning to his own, right beside me. I watched as Drake took the chair on my other side. All the while, Lafitte watched me with those dark eyes.

“So, Peyton Clark. What brings you to me?”

I let out a slow breath. This would be the tricky part. “I need some… information.”

The satisfied smirk that crept across Lafitte’s face even curled his mustache up at the corner.

“Do you?”

I nodded, clearing my throat. “I do.”

“Then you’ve agreed to my price?”

“What is your price, monsieur?” Drake asked but Lafitte shook his head, his eyes still pointed on me.

His price, of course, was letting him possess me so he could experience new life, which was still a big no. I was definitely a one ghost kind of gal, even if that person was no longer a ghost. I breathed in deeply, wondering if this was going to signal the end of our discussion. “No. I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.”

The smirk fell off his face. “Then we have nothing else to discuss, mademoiselle.”

“Hold on,” I said, even though he hadn’t actually made any move to leave. “I didn’t come empty handed. I can give you at least some of what you want.”

Lovie, being the absolute genius she was, had put together a gift that I was fairly sure would appeal to Lafitte. I rummaged through my purse with one hand while I spoke to Drake in a low voice. “Could you go and get some rum from the… living bar?”

He got up with a nod, striding across the suddenly packed floor, weaving between the bodies easily.

Lafitte frowned, the lines of his thin mustache emphasizing the downward turn of his lips. “Refreshments are already on their way and, need I remind you, I can only imbibe in the spirit world, Mademoiselle Clark. Rum from the mortal world is beyond me.”

“Just bear with me.” I lifted the little clay dish out of my purse, peeling away the tissue paper it had been wrapped in. Lovie had… done something to it and that something had everything to do with voodoo magic. She’d also painted it with smoke and water mixed with herbs I hadn’t recognized.

Lafitte gave it an unimpressed look as I set it down on the table between us with a soft click. Granted, it didn’t look like much. And we hadn’t really had a chance to test it. I was hoping I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself in front of the most famous person I’d ever met. And the only person who could help me.

Drake returned, drinks in hand. He settled at the table, politely turning away from the look of naked want in Lafitte’s face as he admired the rum.

“Now, just breathe on the clay dish.” At Jean’s look of consternation, I amended. “In order to activate the magic, you must imbue it with your essence.”

Lafitte brushed his hand over the surface of the little clay dish, still looking skeptical. I nodded to Drake, and he very carefully dribbled a tiny bit of rum into the shallow vessel. The liquid evaporated before it ever touched the clay.

Lafitte sucked in a shocked breath, his eyes wide. Both hands came up to press against his mouth, as if trying to help him to hold on to the taste.

“How?” He gasped, voice hoarse.

“Think of it as your own offering dish. Anything you put in it, you should be able to taste. Really taste.” Not whatever echo of flavor existed in the spirit world.

He swallowed hard enough that I could see the bob of the Adam’s apple in his throat. Then he grabbed hold of the clay dish, forcibly relaxing his hands to avoid possibly damaging it. It was clear he wanted to test it further, but he restrained himself, drawing his control around him like he would his cloak.

“What information do you seek in return for this item?”

I wondered how many years it had taken to learn that control. His voice had no inflection, but his knuckles would have whitened with the force of his grip if he’d had any blood in his hands. It was clear that the dish was invaluable to him.

“I’m still looking into the snake-wielding witch who’s stealing magical artifacts,” I admitted. “I’m trying to figure out what the artifacts are being collected for, but I haven’t been able to identify a connection.”

Lafitte watched me, unblinking. “There are some secrets even I must keep, mademoiselle.”

That was just as frustrating as my first visit when he either couldn’t or wouldn’t give me information about the licorice witch. And now it appeared he still wouldn’t. I could only wonder why. Was he somehow sworn to secrecy? Had he promised her he wouldn’t speak of her? Why was it that he was so unwilling to help me? “Why?” I demanded.

His eyes burned. “There are some rules in the cosmos that even I cannot thwart,” he answered, thoroughly confusing me.

“What about the artifacts? Can you tell me anything about them?”

“What do you care to know?”

I swallowed hard and grew hopeful that on this topic, he’d talk. “Just that some of them make sense as to why they’d be important—some have historic or occult meaning, but I don’t understand why this witch swiped pictures of James Sumpton Sutherland. What do his pictures have to do with her plans?”

Something flickered across Lafitte’s face, some emotion I didn’t understand. Then he smiled, giving me a little nod of his head. “We have a deal, Mademoiselle.”

Lafitte was already beckoning someone forward and a second later, a spirit stepped out of the shadows, a man, maybe in his forties. His hair was cut close to his scalp and he was dressed in loose brown pants and an off-white shirt with ties at his throat that made his dark skin gleam in the dim light. He offered us a curious smile before turning to face Jean, as if asking why he had been summoned.

Jean leaned back in his chair and tilted his head toward me. “Antoine, the Mademoiselle requests to know about James Sumpton Sutherland.”

Antoine’s face tightened, his brows drawing down as his lips pressed into a hard line. “That man was a monster,” he said, voice harsh.

No argument here. From what I’d read, ‘monster’ was probably a more polite term than the bastard deserved.

“They need to know how Sutherland died,” Lafitte amended.

Antoine took in a deep breath and, at the captain’s gesture, took a seat at the table.

Spirits didn’t need air, so it said something about how difficult this discussion was for him that Antoine braced himself with deep breaths. He remained silent long enough that I wondered if he might refuse to speak.

“Did you know him?” I prompted, gently.

“Yes.” Antoine took another deep breath, like he was grounding himself, and then looked up at me. His eyes were very dark. “The things he did. He hurt people, killed them. Offered their souls to the Devil, thinking it would grant him power. And, maybe it did,” he admitted reluctantly as I swallowed hard.

“Sutherland had wealth, station, and the ability to lord it over the people in his household. I’m not sure what more the Devil could have given him. But he didn’t let that stop him,” Antoine continued, then leaned forward, intent. “We were desperate. We didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t any escape, and to just sit around and wait to be the next sacrifice…” He shuddered.

I wanted to reach out to him—to comfort him. My hands twitched before I could stop them, but I held back, not sure if the comfort would be welcome.

Antoine noticed the gesture and managed a small smile. “We prayed. Every night, we prayed, and begged for help. We turned to Damballah Wedo, the Father of the Loas, the protector, and we asked to be delivered.”

Damballah Wedo? Memory flickered and I remembered an image of a snake embroidered on a Veve at the Voodoo Museum, each scale picked out with a delicate hand.

“The next night, Sutherland set his sights on a little girl. She was barely twelve.” Antoine shook his head, his eyes unfocused, like he was caught in his own memory. “He went after her, and Damballah Wedo struck him down.”

I blinked, surprised. “How?”

Antoine continued to shake his head. “I couldn’t tell you. All I know is Sutherland went down like a stone, and he never hurt anyone again.” He breathed in deeply. “We put him in the river, so he wouldn’t be found in the house. We didn’t want to be blamed.”

That made sense, but… “What about the pentagram in his forehead?” That wasn’t exactly a Voodoo symbol. I doubted it was something a loa would bother with.

“We did that.” Reluctance dragged Antoine’s voice down. “We hoped when people found him, they’d just assume the Devil claimed one of his own, and they’d leave it at that.”

I sat back, my thoughts whirling. “Thank you, Antoine.” He’d given me a lot to consider, but I didn’t really feel as if I was really that much more in the know. I still had no idea what the licorice witch, what Margaret Sawyer, wanted with Sutherland’s pictures.

But, that was all I was going to get from Jean Lafitte—he’d made that clear at the onset of our conversation and it was just as clear at the end. Thus, Drake and I made our farewells to the captain, who waved us off easily, all his attention on the little clay offering dish.

Drake towed me through the crowd that filled the Old Absinthe House, the living and the dead pressed into tight quarters side by side. I barely paid attention to where we were going, other than putting one foot in front of the other.

All the while, I could only think about the fact that all these missing artifacts all tied back to Damballah Wedo. A man struck down by Damballah Wedo for his heinous acts. A protective gris-gris marked with the image of a snake and filled with a snake’s shed. I remembered running my fingers over the old sword and how, just beneath the hilt, there was a serpent etched into the blade itself. Had it been a dedication? A plea for protection?

Why was Margaret Sawyer after artifacts that directly tied to Damballah Wedo? What did she have planned?

The Dybbuk Box was still another mystery. Especially because both Lovie and Christopher had believed it to be empty—ready to fill with the essence of a powerful spirit. And Margaret Sawyer was after the final piece of the snake puzzle—the Ouroboros. I’d started wearing it around my neck because I was nervous at the prospect of leaving it anywhere, especially at the house, since it had already been broken into once. Not to mention, now I was without Lizzie to scare any potential interlopers off.

So, on top of all the other pieces to this case, I had an ancient snake charm that represented renewal and eternal life. At least there was a general theme—that being snakes. Snakes and Damballah Wedo, the father of the loas.

“Merci, mon chaton.” Drake said, drawing me out of my thoughts. “Thank you for allowing me to accompany you.”

I blinked up at him, a little confused. “Thank you for coming with me. I’m glad I didn’t have to go alone.”

He smiled, slow and sweet. One hand came up to cup the side of my face as his thumb swept over my cheek. My heart rate kicked up, and my throat was suddenly very dry.

“Ah, ma minette,” Drake sighed, his thumb a light pressure against my cheekbone. “I would accompany you anywhere, if you would allow it.”

His eyes were so dark, the pupils expanded until I could barely see the brown of his irises. The streetlight behind him cast its light around his body like a halo, and standing in his shadow made the night feel closer, more intimate. I was so glad to have Drake with me, to stand near him, free of the house he’d been bound to for so long. I could feel the heat radiating from him, chasing away the light evening chill. And I wanted to revel in it—wanted to laugh and sing and praise anyone who would listen that he was alive—he was really alive!

I opened my mouth to tell him as much, to tell him that he was important to me in ways I couldn’t explain, but my mouth was too dry. I licked my lips, trying to get some moisture back, and Drake’s gaze dropped to follow the gesture. His nostrils flared slightly.

He used the gentle hold he had on my face to tip my head back ever so slightly, so I was looking up at him and then he was suddenly close enough that I could feel his breath on my lips, and I shivered.

A drop of rain landed on my forehead, and I jerked in surprise.

A second followed suit, and then a third as Drake straightened with a muttered curse. In typical New Orleans fashion, after a brief warning, the sky opened up and a torrent of rain pelted the streets. Caught without an umbrella, or even a jacket, I squealed and wrapped my arms around myself. Drake made a shrugging gesture, before his brows pulled down in confusion, like he’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing a jacket he could offer me.

There were awnings we could have ducked under, or we could have gone back to the Old Absinthe House. A downpour like this wasn’t likely to be a drawn out one, so we wouldn’t have had to wait long. But, we did neither.

Instead, a devilish grin stretched across Drake’s face, his eyes suddenly alight with excitement. He took my hand in his, unwrapping it from my midriff, and tugged lightly.

“Vite, mon chaton,” he laughed, rain sparkling in his dark hair. “This way. Quickly!”

We ran down the street, hand in hand, laughing like children. I didn’t even care that I was soaked all the way through to the skin by the time we managed to get a ride. The warmth of Drake’s hand in mine, the heat of his body pressed against my shoulder as we sat in the back seat of our long-suffering Lyft driver’s car, made it worth it.

Chapter Fifteen

The grass was damp under my bare feet, sticking to my soles and up between my toes. One foot in front of the other, I moved at a steady, if slow, pace.

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going, but that didn’t bother me. Everything was hazy and soft, like being wrapped in gray cotton wool. The softness surged over my eyes, and I blinked heavily. My eyelids felt like lead weights were dragging them down.

I paused on the side of the road, passing under an enormous oak tree, its gnarled limbs draped with moss strands that hung down, swaying in the night breeze. The sight almost made me stutter my steps, confused. There hadn’t been a tree there a moment ago, only short grass and a wrought iron fence.

The gray fog rolled up again, lapping over my head like warm bathwater, and the confusion swirled away. Another step forward, and the landscape changed again. I made my way toward a trailer that had seen better days. The grass was longer here, and the paint on the siding was peeling away. I found it difficult to focus on anything, but the gentle clinking of glass made me glance up. The huge tree next to the trailer had bottles hanging from its branches. The bottles were attached to the branches by strings, the night breeze making them sway and click gently together, making their own sort of music.

Spirit bottles.

That’s right, they were spirit bottles. As soon as the thought came to me, it was swallowed up again, gone. I took another step forward.

No more walking.

Now, I stood in place, as I’d been instructed.

As a tiny tendril of fear began to spiral up from within me, it was suddenly doused with warmth.

Everything was fine. There was nothing to be concerned about.

It was just a warm, gentle fog that wrapped around my thoughts.

A woman stepped up to me, appearing out of nowhere, as if the air had suddenly birthed her.

Wrinkles lined her dark skin as she squinted up at my face. Her hair was hidden by a dark blue tignon, but there was gray in her eyebrows. It was so hard to focus on what she was saying. The words just drifted through me, in one ear and out the other. And they held no meaning. Just sounded like wind whistling through bare branches.

I knew that face; I was sure of it.

I drifted in and out, thinking about it, until the knowledge finally clicked into place.

Guarda.

Yes, that was right. The face belonged to a woman named Guarda.

Guarda Guarda Guarda.

I was pretty sure I was afraid of her. At least, I thought I was and yet, I couldn’t seem to dredge up any emotion at all, drifting as I was in that calm, soft fog.

Her gaze sharpened, and she held out her hand, palm up.

She… Guarda.

“Peyton Clark,” she said, in a surprisingly melodious voice. “Give me what you carry.”

My arm moved, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t told it to. Honestly, my limbs were so numb that for a few moments, I wasn’t even sure I still had them.

My right arm rose, and my left a heartbeat behind it. With clumsy fingers, I reached behind my neck and fumbled with something very small.

When Guarda’s face tightened with impatience, fear started traveling through me, feeling as cold as a graveyard at midnight. I wrapped my fist around the chain that disappeared into the neckline of the tank top I’d worn to bed and yanked at it.

With a brief sting of pain, the necklace came free. I dropped the golden snake charm and the chain with the broken clasp into Guarda’s waiting hand.

She smiled, wide enough to show the gap where her back molars had once been.

An unpleasant sensation crawled up my spine, like a snake’s scales rasping against exposed skin.

And then the fog rolled up over my head, and I knew nothing more.

# # #

Someone was knocking on the front door.

Groggily, I shoved the bed covers back so I could stumble to my feet. A quick glance under the duvet cover told me I was dressed in the shorts and tank top I’d gone to sleep in, so I was decent enough to face whoever happened to be knocking at my door at way-too-early o’clock.

I mean, the sun was up, and probably had been for a couple of hours judging by the angle of the rays coming through my window, but it still felt like an injustice to be dragged out of bed.

Another knock sounded, and I took a deep breath.

“Coming!” I yelled, while I wondered why Maggie or Drake weren’t already tending to whoever this was. Then I thought it might have been them—maybe they’d locked themselves out or something?

I shoved tangled blonde hair out of my face as I made my way to the front door. I’d forgotten to anoint myself with my Uncrossing Oil so I felt fairly exhausted and Daschel was nowhere in sight.

My hand hesitated on the doorknob when I reached it, because I wasn’t sure who it could be. But, then I figured I might as well find out and I pulled open the door. And sucked in my breath, feeling jolted back to full awareness, like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water at me.

Why? Because Ryan Kelly stood on my doorstep.

Yes, that Ryan Kelly.

As in ex-boyfriend, Ryan Kelly.

He cleared his throat and held out a paper drink carrier with two coffees in it, balancing a paper bag on top. I knew without opening the bag that it was full of beignets. The smell of sugar and fried dough made my stomach growl with embarrassing loudness.

“Um, hi,” he started.

“Hi,” I answered, still trying to control the shock that was waging a war through me and winning.

Ryan’s smile kicked up a notch at the sound of my voice. He looked—the same as he had the last time I’d seen him—huge, handsome, boyish and perfect in his t-shirt and worn jeans.

“Hi,” he said again and then shook his head and laughed because he was obviously uncomfortable. “Can I, uh, can I come in? I was hoping we could talk.”

I stared at him, too surprised to answer and completely unsure of whether or not I wanted him to come in. On the one hand, I wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him how much I’d missed him. On the other hand, he’d dumped me and now, seeing him, I wanted to cry. Still, another part of me wanted to jump past all the BS and get to the part about why he was here—because he wanted to work on things, or he just wanted ‘to be friends’?

Seeing him standing there made part of my heart heal and break at the same time.

All I managed to say was, “Yeah, of course.”

I stepped back, pulling the door open to allow Ryan to step inside.

“Ma minette? Who is it?”

The smile froze on Ryan’s face as he stopped on the threshold. He stared at Drake, who had just emerged from the kitchen. Drake stared back at Ryan and it looked like they both were deer caught in headlights.

Ryan’s brows drew down, his expression incredulous. “What the hell is Luke Montague doing here?” he demanded as he turned to look at me.

Drake and I both stared at him, totally caught off guard as realizations slowly sunk in: the last time Ryan had been here, Drake hadn’t been in Luke’s body yet. And, oh boy, had a lot of things happened since then.

I suddenly felt exhausted.

I didn’t want to have to recap and fill Ryan in on everything, but I also didn’t want to lie to him. He’d asked to be kept out of the supernatural part of my life, had, in fact, made it clear the paranormal was the reason we couldn’t be together. But I owed him this truth, at least. Plus, there was absolutely no feasible reason why Luke Montague would be lounging in my kitchen after he’d been scheming like a cartoon villain to take my house out from under me.

“Um,” I started and stepped between the two men, my hands up. “We have a lot of talking to do,” I managed with a little laugh and a shake of my head.

“Is everything okay, Peyton?” Ryan started, turning his expression from me to Drake. “If you’re threatening her,” he started, and I immediately shook my head.

“He’s not threatening me.”

“As if I would ever,” Drake added, glaring at Ryan as he wrapped his hands against his chest.

I took a big breath and faced my ex-boyfriend. “That’s not Luke, Ryan.”

Ryan looked at me as if I’d just sprouted another head. A really ugly one.

I nodded. “I know it sounds crazy and it’s a very long story, and I will explain it all to you in detail if you want to hear it, preferably after coffee.”

“If that isn’t Luke Montague, then who is it?” Ryan demanded, but by the expression in his eyes, he already knew.

“I am Drake Montague,” the man in question answered for himself. “Alas we meet, face to face.”

If Ryan were surprised, he didn’t show it. Instead, he turned his narrowed gaze to me. Silence stretched for a truly uncomfortable length of time. A muscle ticked in Ryan’s jaw. He took in a slow breath through his nose and released it from his mouth, and then he nodded.

“I’m going to need that explanation, Peyton,” he said, his voice tight.

# # #

Needing to settle my nerves before I approached this subject and desperately wanting to get dressed, I took a shower in record time, and the hot water did wonders for clearing the cobwebs out of my head. Dressed in soft jeans, and a lilac turtleneck, with teeth and hair brushed, I now felt armed and armored for the discussion I was walking into.

Ryan and Drake were sitting at opposite sides of my kitchen table, both of them tense, though I was fairly sure not a word had exchanged between them. If I couldn’t feel the tension in the air from down the hall, I’d have thought the icily silent room was empty before I stepped inside.

Some thoughtful individual, Drake probably, since Maggie didn’t seem to have woken up yet, had made coffee. I made myself a cup with a kind of eager desperation, knowing I was going to need every one of my wits on board and working for this conversation.

Fortified with sweet, sweet caffeine, I leaned back against the counter and faced the two men at my table, because taking a seat between them was just too close to a metaphor to deal with.

Ryan gave me a look somewhere between reproachful and sad. “I brought a coffee for you… from the bakery.” He indicated one of the travel cups in the paper carrier.

“Thank you.” I took another sip from my mug, even though it was hot enough to scorch my taste buds clear off. “I’ll drink it next.” Yes, this conversation was going to require two cups of coffee… at the very least.

Ryan shot another look at Drake, who wore the most neutral expression I’d ever seen. Poker face and then some.

“I think I’d like that explanation now,” Ryan said, mostly calm.

I took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. Eyeing the take away coffee Ryan had brought me mournfully, I launched into the most succinct version of what had happened from the moment Angharad had caused the oncoming truck to run into Luke, instantly killing him, up until now.

Ryan waited until the end of my explanation, and then snapped, “And you’re just okay with all this?” His eyes bored into mine and his tone was exasperated.

“I’m not sure I follow,” I started, but Ryan shook his head and interrupted me.

“Someone gets murdered right in front of you, but you think everything is fine because your little ghost pal has a new body?”

“I am not Peyton’s ‘ghost pal’,” Drake growled, his eyes narrowing so they were as slivered as Ryan’s.

“No, I’m not okay with it!” I railed back at Ryan, shaking my head and hurt that he could even say such a thing.

“A man died!”

“And what exactly do you want me to do about it, Ryan?” I demanded. “Do you want me to take on the witch who convinced a man to step out into traffic with a freaking umbrella? Or contact the police to arrest her for murder, when no one who was there remembers anything, or even that they were present at all? Not to mention the fact that I have no idea where Angharad even is!” I took a breath, still shaking with my own fury. “And let’s say the cops believed me, and they investigate Luke Montague’s ‘death’. What happens then?” I pointed to Drake. “As far as anyone knows, ‘Luke’ is up and walking around, none the worse for wear!”

“It’s not right,” Ryan insisted, his jaw held at a stubborn angle.

I threw my hands in the air, grateful I’d already put down my empty coffee cup. “Of course, it’s not right! But what’s done is done, and I can’t undo it.”

“It is not fair for you to put such guilt on Peyton,” Drake said. “This is none of her fault.”

Ryan turned to face him with narrowed eyes. “This conversation is between Peyton and me.”

“It appears that is a mistake in mathematics,” Drake answered languidly and pointed to me, himself and then Ryan. “There are three of us present, monsieur.”

Blue eyes locked onto mine with laser focus. “There’s only one question I’d like to know, Peyton.”

“Okay.”

“Would you reverse things if you could?”

I shook my head, confused. “Would I, what?”

“Would you undo everything Angharad did? Undo Luke’s death, undo Drake now being… corporeal?”

Chapter Seventeen

My heart clenched in my chest, throbbing painfully.

I turned to look at Drake, who was watching me carefully. I thought about the warmth of his hand in mine, his secret smiles, our laughter in the rain, the brush of our shoulders when we walked side by side, or sat next to each other. I remembered his delight in trying a snowball doused in powdered milk on the day we’d explored the city with Maggie.

I swallowed hard. “Luke is dead. There’s nothing that can bring him back.” Ryan looked like he wanted to interrupt, so I held up my hand to stall him. “But, if what happened could be undone, and that is a big if, then that decision would be up to Drake, not me.”

A slow smile spread across Drake’s face, full lips quirking up. I hadn’t known dark eyes could shine like that.

Ryan looked like he’d bitten into a lemon. “What’s he doing here, anyway?”

I blinked, confused. “What do you mean?”

Ryan looked at Drake and his expression was the same as if Daschel had just entered the scene and shat on his foot.

“He’s got a body, now. He doesn’t need to be haunting your house any longer.”

“It is very rude to refer to someone who is present in the third person,” Drake said, glaring at Ryan, who glared right back at him.

“Why are you still here, Drake?”

“Drake lives here,” I answered, slowly. I was so confused, feeling like I was missing something and not sure what that something could be. I just didn’t understand where Ryan’s questions were coming from or how he couldn’t understand that this was exactly the place where Drake belonged. “This is just as much Drake’s home as it is mine.”

Ryan’s chair scraped across the linoleum as he stood up abruptly. “So, what, he’s just living with you now?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer the question. “For right now, yes.”

“Sleeping with you?” Ryan demanded as my mouth dropped open.

“I have made my bed upon the couch!” Drake railed at him. “How dare you assault Peyton’s honor!”

Ryan continued to glare at me. “What the hell does Drake being… alive mean for us?”

My mouth worked for a second, but no words found their way out. I felt like I was in a play, but I had the wrong script.

“What does this mean for us?” Ryan demanded again, voice louder this time.

“There is no ‘us’, Ryan,” I answered, shaking my head as I frowned at him. “You broke up with me, or have you forgotten?”

Ryan froze, staring at me. His lips parted, but he didn’t say a word for a worryingly long time. Finally, he tilted his head forward and his hand came up to press against his temple like he had a headache. In the odd kitchen lighting, I couldn’t see the blue of his eyes at all, just a field of white from lid to lid.

“You’re right,” he rasped, nodding, as if he’d forgotten what had passed between us. His voice sounded like it had been dragged over ten miles of gravel and razor blades.

“I…” He looked up and took a big breath, standing up straight. “This was a mistake. I should go.”

Before I could respond, he was already striding for the door.

I stood frozen in place until I heard the front door open and close as quietly as it was capable. A lump of ice formed in my throat, choking my breath and my voice. The icy feeling was hard to breathe through, squeezing so tight that tears pricked the corners of my eyes.

“Ma minette?” Drake rose from his own chair and approached me cautiously. Like I was a wild thing he was trying desperately not to scare away. “Ça va? Are you alright?”

I took a shaky breath and nodded but inside, I was breaking. My hand crept up to my neck, reaching for the Ouroboros necklace. Clutching the necklace had become a habit over the last couple of days.

“He is in shock,” Drake continued. “He lashed out because he is hurt.”

But, my thoughts weren’t centered around Ryan or his reaction to seeing Drake in the flesh. Instead, they were centered around the fact that, though my fingers were searching for the necklace, they found nothing but the soft cotton of my collar.

The Ouroboros was gone.

The blood drained out of my face, and I patted my chest, hoping the necklace had accidentally dropped into my bra, but I knew better.

“Ma minette?” Drake held his hands out, as if afraid to touch me. His voice was soft with concern. “What is wrong?”

I spun in a circle, searching the ground. Had the Ouroboros just fallen off? But there was no glint of gold anywhere. Nor was there any sign of it down the hallway, or near the front door. I darted back toward the bedroom, my heart pounding in my throat.

I knew I’d been wearing it the night before. I’d taken to keeping it with me, at all times, and, more recently, to wearing it. And yet now it was gone.

Gone.

Gone!

The necklace had followed me through my dreams, and I’d promised Beatrice Litten I’d keep it safe. She’d trusted me, and I’d let her down. No, I’d beyond let her down.

What if the licorice witch, Margaret Sawyer, had gotten her hands on it? Would she have everything she needed then to pull off whatever evil she had planned? Christopher had said the Ouroboros was powerful. Who knew what kind of trouble an ancient, malicious witch could work with it?

I could hear Drake behind me, trying to ask me what was wrong, probably, but I couldn’t hear the words over the throbbing of my heartbeat in my ears. Panic was winding through me and I couldn’t stop yelling at myself that I’d lost the one thing I wasn’t supposed to lose!

My socked feet slid on the wood floors as I skidded into the bedroom to stare at my still unmade bed. Pillows and blankets went flying as I tossed through the bedding, searching for the necklace like a cop on a television show searching a suspect’s house for drugs.

I yanked the comforter back far enough that it sagged off the bed to puddle on the floor, and then I froze.

There were bits of grass scattered on the sheets near the foot of the bed.

Echoes of my dream from the previous night came back to me in a rush, including that hazy cotton feeling that had insulated me from the world. I remembered a long walk through the dark night, the massive tree at the end of the block. The spirit bottles. Guarda.

My knees turned to jelly and I crumpled onto the floor, well I would have if Drake hadn’t caught me.

“Mon chaton!” Drake pulled me to the bed and wrapped his arms around me. “Ce qui s’est passé? What is the matter?”

“It’s gone.” My lips felt numb. A white-noise buzz filled my ears. “The Ouroboros. It’s gone.”

Gently chaffing my arms, Drake ducked his head lower to meet my eyes. “We will find it, ma minette. Do not fear. I will help you look for it.”

I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand. It’s gone.”

Drake’s dark brows pulled down in confusion, a tiny wrinkle appearing between them. “How—”

“Last night,” I spoke over him, the words coming out in a tumble. “I dreamt I was outside, that I was walking somewhere. And now… I remember walking up to Guarda’s house, and the spirit bottles were rattling in the trees. She… she told me to give her the necklace, Drake, and I did. I just handed it over to her. Guarda has the Ouroboros.”

With shaking fingers, I touched the back of my neck. There was a brief sting, like the skin there had been abraded by something. Something like yanking a necklace free by force when the old clasp got stuck.

I wasn’t sure if the idea of Guarda having the power of the Ouroboros instead of Margaret Sawyer was better or much, much worse. Talk about the devil you know versus the devil you’re not really sure about. But, at the end of the day, a devil was still a devil. And that’s exactly what Guarda was. And I’d just handed her a seriously powerful artifact.

Bile burned in the back of my throat, and I swallowed carefully to avoid throwing up on Drake.

“Ma minette, mon amour, it will be alright.” Drake brushed my hair back off my clammy face, his fingers gentle. “We will make it right.”

“How?” My voice came out in a croak as I shook my head and laughed at him. “How are we going to make it right?”

Beatrice Litten had trusted me, had reached out through time and beyond death to entrust me to protect the necklace, and I couldn’t even manage that.

Drake seemed to be thinking hard, his dark eyes intent on my face. “We will go to Guarda, demand the necklace back.”

“Demand?” I laughed, but there was nothing humorous in the sound. “I can’t even keep Guarda from parading me around like a puppet on a string! There’s no way I can demand anything from her!”

I couldn’t face Guarda. She had too much power, and absolutely zero hesitation in using said power to do whatever she wanted—not to mention I was already at her beck and call. I was her zombie, or I would be soon—if we didn’t figure out a way to break this curse.

I just wanted to crawl back into my unmade bed and forget the morning had ever happened. Everything was just too much. First Ryan, then the Ouroboros, and the reminder that I was still well on my way to becoming Guarda’s zombie servant.

As stupid as it was, I suddenly wished I could start my day over again—that I never would have woken up, never would have answered the door or seen Ryan. Better yet, I wished I could go back to the night before and take the necklace off before I went to bed. If I hadn’t been wearing it, would Guarda have known I had it?

While I was making implausible wishes involving time travel, why not go all the way back to the beginning and just never have allowed myself to meet Guarda in the first place? Maybe if I’d never had to deal with the Voodoo Queen in the first place, none of this would have ever happened.

My breath caught in my throat.

Was it possible… could that work?

Drake noticed me go still, and he pulled back enough to search my face.

“Mon chaton?”

“What if…” I paused to swipe my tongue over my lips, desperate for some moisture. “What if we went back?”

“Back?” Drake shook his head, his lips pulled into an unhappy frown. “Back where, ma minette? What are you talking about?”

“What if we could go back to a time before Beatrice Litten gave me the Ouroboros?” I asked as I nodded, thinking and hoping this plan might actually work. “I could get the Ouroboros before Beatrice had the chance to give it to me in the dream. Then I wouldn’t have been able to give it to Guarda!”

I was gripping Drake’s arm too hard, I could tell. My fingers were blanched white, the blood driven out by the force. But he didn’t make a sound of discomfort, or even seem to notice as he looked into my face, dark eyes full of concern.

“Mon chaton, I do not claim to be an expert on such things. I cannot say if it would be possible to return to such a time, or if your ability to bring the necklace with you through your dreams was something this Litten woman aided with, or if it was by sheer accident.” He rubbed my arms, silencing my protest before I could voice it. “I am not saying it cannot be done. But, ma minette, Peyton, how would we make such an attempt? Only Guarda knows how to work the magic that allows us to travel through the spirit world and into the past. We would need her power in order to defeat her power, and I do not believe she would aid us in such a quest, nor do I believe we could come up with a lie to convince her we were working in her best interests.”

My shoulders slumped.

He was right, of course. I’d forgotten that huge glaring detail. Without Guarda, we had no way into the past. And even if I were desperate or dumb enough to put myself into her power again, I very much doubted she’d help us. No, she’d see right through us.

But, what else could I do?

I couldn’t just sit around and let Guarda do whatever she was planning on doing with the Ouroboros. Maybe there was another way, a way that didn’t involve Guarda at all?

I bit my lip, worrying it as an idea started to take shape in my head.

“Mon chaton?” Drake asked, worriedly. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” I said, slowly, feeling out the words as I spoke them. “That Guarda isn’t the only magic wielder in the world.

No, I thought to myself as an image of the Uncrossing Oil, which was currently sitting on my bathroom counter, came to me. This Poppy woman was apparently uncommonly good at brewing potions, at least that’s what Lovie had said. So, didn’t it then follow that she’d be adept at magic in general?

There was only one way to find out and I was already whipping my cell phone out of my pocket and speed-dialing Lovie.

Chapter Eighteen

“Wow.” Wanda Depraysie, witch, tossed her ink black hair over one shoulder as she gave me a once over. “Who did you piss off?”

I sighed as I sank down onto one of the customer chairs at the cash desk of ‘Poppy’s Potions’, feeling every one of the twelve hours of travel (two flights, one canceled) I’d just endured. Thank God for the Uncrossing Oil or I’d never have made it. “It’s kind of a long story.”

After my realization that the Ouroboros was gone, I’d turned to Lovie for advice and she’d pointed me to Poppy and her friend Wanda in Haven Hollow, a little town just a couple of hours outside of Portland.

Half a day of traveling, and Drake and I had pulled our rental car outside an honest to goodness potion shop in the heart of downtown. Or what passed for downtown in the tiny Hollow.

The little shop looked like a cross between a high-quality perfume salon and an old-timey apothecary shop, with its beautiful wood shelving and displays of hundreds of bottles made from a rainbow of delicate glass. The place somehow didn’t even stick out as strange against the surrounding stores.

On the corner of Main Street, there was an ice cream shop called ‘Stomper’s Creamery,’ with a drive through window like something out of the 1950’s. Up from that was ‘Sweeter Haunts,’ a permanently Halloween-themed candy store that, if I hadn’t been in the middle of a convergence of a half a dozen crises all at once, I would have spent half the day perusing. And across the street from Poppy’s Potions was Wanda’s store, ‘Wanda’s Witchery’ which, apparently, sold enchanted clothing.

The town was a strange combination of cozy nostalgia and overt magic weirdness, but after living in New Orleans, a city where the supernatural and the mundane lived side by side, nothing surprised me anymore.

Lovie had organized this visit for me and she’d also volunteered to stay behind to keep an eye on Maggie, who had all but tried to stow away in our luggage in order to come with us. The kid was determined, I’d give her that.

Poppy brought Drake and me cups of tea that smelled like oranges and cloves and felt like a much-needed hug.

Poppy was around my age, with light blonde hair and kind blue eyes. She was small and pretty and made me think of Hallmark Movies because she just had this air of innocence surrounding her. Wanda was the opposite. She was like the bad kid in high school who introduced you to cigarettes and then laughed when you choked on them.

In sharp contrast to Poppy’s soft, friendly demeanor, all long skirts and cozy sweaters, Wanda Depraysie came through the door like a knife pulled from a scabbard. Her black hair tumbled over the shoulders of her black sheath dress, and I was pretty sure the knee-high leather boots she was wearing cost more than my entire dining room set.

Taking one look at me, her nose had wrinkled up like she’d smelled something offensive.

“Oh, no. No way. One zombie is more than enough, I’m not taking in another one.”

Poppy emerged from between two free standing shelves, a selection of glass bottles held carefully in her arms. “Wanda, Peyton isn’t a zombie but she is a friend of a good friend of mine, so please be nice.”

Wanda frowned as she looked me up and down again and shook her head. “I’ve never seen someone who’s so close to death and yet is still alive.”

Whatever that meant. “Nice to meet you, too,” I said, so dry that every potion in the shop should have spontaneously evaporated. “I’m Peyton Clark.”

Dark eyes flicked up toward my face and Wanda’s lips twitched in a way that I suspected meant she was trying not to smile. “I’m Wanda Depraysie.”

“And I am Drake Montague,” Drake said, giving her a smile.

Wanda immediately returned it. “Well, hello, Frenchy.”

“Don’t mind her,” Poppy said to me nervously, as if afraid I was about to go jealous girlfriend on Wanda. “She’s got a boyfriend.”

Wanda turned to scowl at her. “Lorcan is not my boyfriend! How many times do I have to tell everyone that?”

“Anyway,” Poppy continued, giving us both encouraging smiles. “Drake and Peyton have traveled all the way from New Orleans to ask for our help.”

Wanda nodded as she faced me again, shaking her head. “That’s some curse you’re carrying around, which means you really pissed off some practitioner good. You’re either really stupid, or really brave.”

“I like to think it’s a bit of both, thank you,” I answered, figuring that was about as close to the truth as I could manage.

Drake actually relaxed a little, biting off a chuckle like it sneaked out when he wasn’t looking. Wanda’s attention zeroed in on him again and she gave him another appreciative once over. I tried not to bristle at the way her eyes lingered on him, or the smile that curled her lips. And it was equally annoying that he smiled right back at her.

The expression on her face then turned curious and she approached Drake, holding up her hands so her palms were facing him. She frowned, then her eyebrows reached for the ceiling as she then started nodding; her smile spreading.

“Seems like Frenchy has a few of his own secrets.”

“Do you know?” Drake whispered, his eyes going wide.

“What are you talking about?” Poppy asked.

Wanda never pulled her gaze from Drake. “Just that Pierre Le Pew over here used to have a whole lot in common with Darla.”

“With Darla?” Poppy continued, shaking her head to say she wasn’t following. Of course, I had no idea who they were talking about.

“Yes, as in… both were dead and now… both aren’t dead,” Wanda finished.

“Incroyable,” Drake said, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.” Then he turned to face me, nodding. “She is quite good, ma minette. Quite good.”

I had a feeling Drake’s good impression of Wanda wasn’t just owing to her abilities of ghost and zombie detection, but also because she happened to look like sex incarnated.

“Okay,” I said, wanting to cut to the chase because Wanda’s appreciation of Drake and, likewise, his appreciation of her was getting beyond irritating. “Can we focus on the whole ‘you’re dying, Peyton’ part of the conversation?”

“It’s okay, Peyton.” Poppy placed the bottles she was carrying carefully onto the desk before reaching over to pat my arm. “Wanda will be able to help you. There’s not a better witch.”

“Blood Witch,” Wanda corrected.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Wanda looked at me coolly. “Think half vampire, half witch.”

“Wait, there are vampires?” How had I not known this?

“Incroyable,” Drake said again. I wanted to elbow him in the ribs.

Wanda tossed her hair back over her shoulder and ignored us both. “I can’t make any promises that I will be able to help you, or that I’ll want to, but let’s get a look at you.”

I’d kind of expected her to come closer, like she was going to perform a doctor’s examination on me. But, instead, she stood there with her arms crossed as she silently appraised me and then took a step back.

“Aren’t you going to, I don’t know, examine me or something?” I held out my arm in her direction, like I expected her to take my pulse.

Wanda raised her eyebrow at me, looking unimpressed. “Who’s the witch here, and who’s the person slowly turning into one of the shambling undead?”

I bristled, drawing my arm back into my lap. “I’m not turning into the shambling undead.”

“You keep telling yourself that… but, do it inside your head, because I’m trying to concentrate.”

What followed was an extremely uncomfortable five minutes as Wanda stared at me, her forehead getting more and more furrowed as time went on. She finally shook her head, like someone coming awake after a deep sleep.

“Son of a witch,” she said in a tone that made it a curse.

Poppy looked between us, concern clouding her face. “What is it?”

“This…” Wanda shook her head, looking troubled.

Granted, I didn’t know Wanda very well, but something told me that her being troubled was both a very rare, and a very bad thing.

“What is it?” I asked, dread pooling in my stomach. Lovie had been so sure these women could help me. Not just with the curse, but she also thought they’d be able to unlock the power to walk the spirit world without my having to endure Guarda’s venomous touch.

Wanda shook her hair back, one hip cocked to the side as she visibly wrapped herself in bravado, as if the uneasiness had all been in my imagination. “I’ve been around the magical block a time or two. But this curse… I’ve never seen anything like it.” She raised her hand when I started to protest, mauve tipped nails catching the light. “I mean, it’s definitely a zombie curse. That’s not really anything special. But there’s a lot of power here, something that’s not witch power for sure.”

“Is it voodoo?” I asked.

Wanda shrugged. “Could be or… it could be… something else.”

“Something else?” I asked “Like what? A demon?”

Wanda shook her head. “No. Definitely not a demon.” Something flickered through those night dark eyes. “I know my demons.”

Drake’s hand wrapped around mine, strong fingers slotting into place between my own. “Peu importe.” He looked at Wanda and nodded. “All that matters is, can you remove it?”

Wanda examined her nails, boredom in every line of her. “I’m going to say… no.”

Tension sang through every line of Drake’s body. I felt like I was sitting beside a very angry statue. He opened his mouth to say something, but Wanda waved him off.

“Relax, Romeo. You don’t want me to break this curse, trust me.”

“Pourquoi?” Drake’s teeth were gritted so tightly together, I was surprised he got the question out at all.

Wanda gave him a look that was too impatient to be pity, but was still sympathy adjacent. “Because if I did, the mystery power’s sponsor and my magic would work against each other, and we’d probably end up ripping your girlfriend, here, spiritually apart.”

“Um, Drake and I… aren’t together.” My voice was thin, almost tinny and I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to say as much, especially when I should have been focused on the fact that Wanda couldn’t break Guarda’s curse.

Furthermore, it appeared Drake wasn’t exactly thrilled with what I’d just said either, owing to the look he gave me. Wanda just looked at me with that irritating smirk and raised one brow. Even though she hadn’t uttered a word, her look said it all—she could tell I had feelings for Drake, no matter what I pretended otherwise.

“So,” Wanda faced Drake and continued breezily, as if we weren’t talking about my life and possible death. “Unless you’re okay with your girlfriend’s soul getting ripped out of her body, or mangled, or left aware in a dead body, I’d say the only person who can undo this curse is the person who created it.”

Silence rang, louder than any shout could have.

Poppy wrung her hands. I didn’t know people did that outside of books and movies. She glanced from Wanda to whatever expression my face was making, and started fussing with my tea cup.

“That’s not to say we can’t help. I’m sure we can do something.”

“You said you gave Peyton Uncrossing Oil?” Wanda asked her.

Poppy nodded as Wanda was silent for a moment before she sighed. “Let me see what else you have. She’s going to need something stronger.”

She stalked off to the shelves then, her boot heels clacking defiantly against the wooden floor.

I sat, feeling numb. Was there really nothing to be done? Sure, they said they could make the curse better, but what did that really mean? Was I going to be stuck anointing myself with potions for the rest of my life? And what did that mean for Guarda and her hold over me? Was it inevitable that I’d just end up becoming Guarda’s unthinking zombie puppet?

“There’s another thing. I think Lovie mentioned it.” My throat was dry, so I picked up my cup to take a sip. Even lukewarm, the tea was soothing. “I was hoping you could help me get rid of a barrier that keeps me from walking the spirit world.”

“Come again?” Wanda asked.

I nodded, realizing I needed to further explain. “I know I’m capable of time-traveling, for lack of a better word. I’ve done it before, under someone else’s magic. But,” I swallowed. “I don’t want to have to depend on… that person.”

Wanda’s voice drifted out of the shelves as she pawed through a few bottles. “Because she’s the bitch who did this to you in the first place?”

“Right,” I answered.

“Why would you want to go to the spirit world?” Poppy asked in her soft, mom-like voice that reminded me of milk and cookies.

“I want to go back in time to prevent a couple of witches from getting their hands on a magical artifact.”

Silence again. Poppy stared at me, blue eyes wide. Even Wanda poked her head out from around the shelving unit.

“Okay. This sounds like something I might actually want to hear.”

So, I spilled it. All of it. Every moment. Meanwhile, Poppy made sounds of sympathy and kept my tea refreshed, while Wanda listened with something approaching patience.

“So, in short,” I said, my throat feeling scratchy, like I’d been yelling all this time. “I need to go back in time to keep Margaret Sawyer from getting a necklace and doing… something with it. I’m not clear on the particulars, honestly. But, even more importantly, I need to make sure Guarda doesn’t end up with it.”

Poppy stared at me, eyes still wide. “Wow.”

“Wait.” Wanda frowned, tugging at a strand of black hair. “Margaret Sawyer? Not the Margaret Sawyer.”

Chapter Nineteen

“I think so?” I asked, looking at Wanda.

“Where did your Margaret come from?”

“Colonial times,” I answered. “But, even then, she still looked middle aged.”

“Okay, what else?”

“She has a fondness for snakes.” I paused as Wanda nodded. “Do you know her?”

“Not personally. But her reputation precedes her, and not in a good way.”

“Because she was the cause of many innocent lives lost? Yes, we have heard about Margaret Sawyer,” Drake said as he clutched my hand and held it tightly.

Wanda’s expression darkened. A dangerous light sparked in her eyes. “I’m sure you haven’t heard the whole story,” she started. “Margaret Sawyer was a witch and in case you weren’t aware… covens aren’t exactly sororities. Witches thrive on competition, not comradery.” She looked back at Poppy. “That’s why being friends with Poppy sometimes makes me want to pull my hair out or, failing that, shove a fork into my eyes.”

Poppy giggled. “I love you too, Wandellmelia.”

“Anyway,” Wanda continued, and then speared Drake and me with a serious expression. “Either of you calls me that and I’ll curse you with a familiar as awful as mine.”

“We would not think to call you that,” Drake answered, his expression so sincere, I had to bury a smile behind my hand.

“What was I talking about?” Wanda asked.

“Covens,” I answered

“Right,” she nodded. “They’re not places you go for hugs and pep talks. But there are some things you do not do, some lines you don’t cross. Ever. Margaret Sawyer crossed them all.”

For a split second I could have sworn a ribbon of bloody light twined its way between Wanda’s fingers, there and gone in a heartbeat.

“Witch hunts aren’t normally a serious problem for actual witches. It’s the people with minor magical gifts and mundanes that tend to suffer under the persecution of their fellows.”

“Mundanes?” Drake repeated.

“Oh, that’s just a term we use for ordinary humans who don’t possess magic,” Poppy explained.

“Ah,” Drake answered and gave Poppy a wide grin.

“If Margaret Sawyer hadn’t been both sloppy and stupid, she would have been fine, even in the heart of the Salem Witch Trials,” Wanda continued and grimaced, the skin on her cheeks pulling tight. “And when she felt the metaphoric and literal flames creeping closer, she broke a cardinal rule in the coven, and turned on her sisters, giving them up to save herself.”

The shadows that had gathered in every part of Poppy’s shop lightened again when Wanda shrugged. “She gave up a lot of humans, too.” She said that part like selling out some humans was negligible compared to the crime of turning in witches.

“How many people were in the coven?” I asked. “From what I’ve read, only twenty-four people were—”

Wanda laughed. The sound had a nasty edge to it. “Don’t believe everything in history books.”

I drew in a breath and shook my head. “I just don’t understand what Margaret is doing running around New Orleans now. For that matter, how is she even still alive?”

Poppy refilled my tea, looking pensive. “Witches live a lot longer than non-magical folk. It’s possible she’s just survived all this time.”

“She looked like she was my age,” I said.

“I do not understand how such is possible,” Drake said, shaking his head.

Wanda raised her eyebrow in a devastating arch. “I’m a hundred and forty-one, and I’m considered just about middle aged for a witch. Margaret would be on the upper end of our lifespan, but it’s still technically possible.”

“So, witches are a bit like wine, non?” Drake smiled, flashing his straight white teeth. “They do not grow older, simply more complex.”

Wanda smirked. “We do both, sadly.” Then she turned to face me again. “If Margaret Sawyer were really a three-hundred-year-old witch, she’d look like a crone, not a woman in her forties.”

I toyed with my tea cup, holding it between my hands. I didn’t have room to drink anymore, but the warmth was soothing against my icy fingers. “So… maybe she is a ghost?”

Poppy and Wanda exchanged a glance. Wanda shrugged. “Maybe. Without seeing her myself, I wouldn’t be able to say.”

If Drake hadn’t been holding my hand, his thumb sliding gently back and forth across my knuckles, I probably would have given in to my urge to pace. As it was, my foot tapped against the floor, an irritatingly quick rhythm that at least allowed me to vent some of the restless energy building in my body. “I just don’t understand why an old witch, or an old witch’s ghost, would be so invested in stealing items linked to Damballah Wedo that she’d hijack a pack of ghost children to steal for her.”

“Maybe she is alive, then,” Poppy said, a sad cast to her face. “Otherwise, she’d be able to steal for herself. Those poor kids.”

“Hold on.” Wanda twirled back to face me, the hem of her dress sliding around her legs. “Back up. Damballah Wedo?”

“Yeah, as far as I can tell, all of the items that have been stolen have something to do with snakes. And when I did my homework, I found out that Damballah Wedo is the serpent loa.”

“Right,” Wanda said and nodded. “He’s portrayed as a great white snake.” Wanda tapped her lower lip with her nail, her gaze suddenly far away as she breathed in deeply.

“Wanda?” Poppy rested her hands on the cash desk. “Are you okay?”

With a sigh, Wanda perched on one of the chairs and crossed her legs in a smooth gesture. “Witches live longer than humans. Not like, vampire long, but long.”

“I still am floored to learn that vampires are actually a thing,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

Wanda ignored me, speaking almost over me. “But the long lives witches are gifted isn’t long enough for some people. There have been witches who have gotten greedy, thinking they’re too good for the cycle of death and rebirth. They’ve turned to forbidden methods in order to extend their own lives.” She paused and took a breath.

“Forbidden methods?” I repeated.

Wanda nodded. “Dark magic.”

“And your covens allow for that?” I asked.

“No they don’t allow for it!” Wanda nearly yelled at me. Then, after receiving a reprimanding expression from Poppy, she calmed down and explained. “Witches dealing in dark magic is exactly the type of thing local covens sit up and take notice of and then shut down with extreme prejudice.”

“But there is no coven in New Orleans,” Drake said, a line wrinkling his brow.

“Correct.” Wanda tossed her hair, looking pensive. “Based on what you’ve mentioned, it sounds like Margaret Sawyer might just be looking for another, more reliable, way of stretching out her miserable life.”

Things were starting to click into place like tumblers on a lock. “You think she wants to make a deal with the loa?”

Poppy bit her lip, looking distressed. “From what I’ve learned from Lovie, Damballah Wedo is a powerful, benign being. He’s the Father of the Loas, and he’s a paternal source known for protecting others. I really can’t see him helping a murderer and a betrayer to extend her own life.” She took a breath. “How would Margaret even get such an important loa to take notice of her in the first place?”

She made a good point. Was that what was up with all the snakes? Was Margaret trying to attract the snake loa’s attention? Seemed like a stupid way of doing it, unless all she had was surface level information about him. He didn’t seem like the kind of loa who’d appreciate deadly pranks.

Wanda hummed. “Well, you’re not wrong. Which leads us to a worse, more dangerous and infinitely more idiotic possibility.” I smiled at her as if to say I wasn’t sure which possibility that was. Wanda breathed out an irritated breath. “Margaret’s not trying to bargain with Damballah Wedo. She’s trying to compel him.”

“Le bon Dieu,” Drake swore. “Is something like that even possible?”

“Considering I don’t practice, nor am I familiar with voodoo practices, who can say?” Wanda answered, sounding far too calm for the situation. “But, it does sound true to form for Margaret to make a mess and then leave other people to suffer the consequences.”

I wobbled on my stool, feeling faint.

“We need to get that Ouroboros,” I said grimly, even as I blinked dark spots out of my field of vision. “It might be the only way we have of stopping her.”

I took a deep breath, and something else occurred to me. “Do you know anything about a woman named Beatrice Litten?”

“Only a few things.” Wanda went back to examining her nails. “I don’t really bother with history that isn’t about witches.”

“Beatrice wasn’t a witch?” I asked.

Wanda shook her head. “No, from what I understand she was a seer. A pretty good one from what I recall, but still.”

I gaped at her. “You don’t think being able to see the future is a big deal?”

“Divinations.” Wanda snorted. “Who can’t do them?”

“Most people who are magically inclined can look ahead to see what the future holds,” Poppy interjected apologetically. “Even if only in dreams.” She looked at Wanda then. “Sometimes those powers go to people’s heads, making them dismissive of other people’s talents.”

Wanda threw her arms up in the air. “No one is questioning your talent with potions! I buy them from you, don’t I?”

Poppy laughed and then faced me with a look of victory in her eyes.

“While it’s true that some mortals can have useful little talents,” Wanda went on with an air like she was rehashing a long-standing argument. “Those talents tend to be weaker than even the dimmest witch’s, and are therefore, uninteresting.”

“Well, uninteresting or not,” I started, giving her my own little victorious smirk. “You might be interested to know that even if Beatrice wasn’t a witch, she was able to weave enough magic around the Ouroboros that disabled anyone in possession of it to discuss it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, I literally was unable to discuss the Ouroboros at all—and that was all having to do with Beatrice and her magical abilities.”

Wanda shrugged. “Well, she still wasn’t a witch.” And I figured that was the end of that conversation.

Drake chuckled and Wanda gave him an expression of surprise, as if she weren’t aware she was being humorous. I sort of wondered how it was possible that Poppy was even friends with this woman, but according to Lovie, they were as close as close could be.

Wanda turned back to me, and waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “So yes, Beatrice was a seer. No, I don’t know more.”

Beatrice Litten had looked ahead and seen what Margaret Sawyer had planned, and it had frightened her enough that she’d reached out to me through time in order to hide the Ouroboros.

I couldn’t let her down.

I looked at Wanda. The Blood Witch’s face was impassive. If I hadn’t noticed the tiny frown wrinkling her brows, it would have seemed like she was bored with this whole conversation.

“I need to be able to walk the spirit world under my own power,” I continued, getting back to the subject. “I won’t depend on Guarda for anything, ever again.” I hadn’t meant it as an oath, but it kind of came out like one. “Can you help me?”

Wanda waffled for a moment, tapping her bottom lip like she was thinking about it.

“Wanda,” Poppy chided.

“Oh, for spell’s sake, fine.” She huffed, propping her hands on her hips. “But you’re really lucky I’m uniquely suited for this kind of thing. You’re also lucky it’s the waning moon tonight, otherwise, you’d have to wait, and frankly, I’m not sure how much waiting you have left in you.”

Drake went ramrod stiff beside me, his arm feeling like stone.

“Thanks for the reminder,” I managed.

“I’ll pull a few things together for you,” Poppy said, her hands already flying over the little glass bottles on the counter. “I don’t have much more Enchantment Oil, and I’ll need to wait for the full moon to make more. But I do have some of Aunt Sally’s Dream Oil. And of course, some Voodoo Oil for Lovie, but I’m sure she won’t mind waiting a few more days. Oh!” Poppy clapped, her eyes shining. “Now that makes sense!”

I frowned at her. “What makes sense?”

“Well, just the other day, I had this urge to make a potion I hadn’t made in a very long time, owing to the fact that it’s quite tedious and lengthy. But, for some reason, unknown at the time, I just felt this need to brew it. And now I know why!” She clapped her hands together again.

“Why?” I asked.

She reached under her counter and pulled out a small stoppered vial made of bright green glass, sealed with wax and stamped with a snake.

“What is it?” Drake asked.

“Damballah Wedo Oil. It’s used for protective spells and anointing candles.”

“Premonition much?” Wanda asked on a laugh.

Poppy nodded. “I’d say so.”

The knot in my chest loosened slightly, and I smiled. “Thank you. Thanks to both of you.”

“Well, don’t get ahead of yourself,” Wanda said airily as she rose to her feet. She smoothed her skirt with both hands, sliding the fabric over her hips. “You still have to survive when I tear down the veil.”

I blinked, taken aback. “Wait, what?”

She laughed, dropping an exaggerated wink. “If time traveling were easy, everyone would do it.”

Chapter Twenty

I’d only considered what I was planning as potentially life-endingly stupid once I was already following an unfamiliar and mostly disagreeable witch into a graveyard at midnight.

No, I wasn’t attempting to time travel at the current moment. Instead, we were making ‘preparations’ as Wanda had termed them—preparing me to time travel. And once ‘preparations’ were finished, Drake and I would be catching a plane to Boston, where the proper time traveling would take place.

As Wanda had explained, owing to the zombie curse, time was of the extreme essence and I had no time to wait—that was why as soon as this ritual was over, Drake and I were headed to the airport.

But, going back to the life-endingly stupid part, Poppy trusted Wanda, and Lovie trusted Poppy and, quite frankly, I was all out of other options so, here we were. Figuring it wasn’t likely that I could end up more cursed than I already was, I just shrugged and went along with it.

Once the circle had been set using Poppy’s potion anointed candles which were burning on top of half crumbled gravestones, it was the moment of truth. And I was ready. The only thing that had surprised me was the moment when Drake stepped into the circle beside me.

At first, I thought he was just worried when he gave my arm a squeeze, but then he said, “I would like to be able to walk the spirit world with Peyton, as well, mademoiselle sorcière.”

“Drake,” I started, shaking my head. “This could be dangerous.”

“Non,” he insisted, shaking his head more insistently. “I will not listen to such comments. We have always traveled together, mon chaton.” Then he looked at Wanda. “As I said, mademoiselle, I would like to be included.”

Wanda heaved a sigh, sounding terribly put upon. “I’m sure you would. But this isn’t a ride everyone can get on, Frenchy. Your girlfriend only has a shot because she’s steeped in death magic. It’s infiltrated every part of her life. You can’t—”

And that’s when she stopped herself—once she remembered Drake was as steeped in death magic as I was.

“I assure you, mademoiselle,” Drake interrupted with a knowing smile. “I have had my own brushes with death and quite recently.”

“Right,” she answered, or actually it was more à propos to say she ‘muttered’. “How could I have forgotten?”

“So,” I said, too brightly because I was beyond nervous and just trying to hide that fact. “What do we have to do?” Secretly, I was beyond happy to have Drake beside me for yet another journey into the past. The idea of going by myself was definitely more… daunting.

Wanda’s expression teetered for a second between irritation and amusement and finally tipped over into the latter. She snorted.

“You? Not much. Just stand there and don’t die.”

“Have you ever considered motivational speaking?” I snarked. I just couldn’t help it. The past few days had been beyond stressful and Wanda was like hydrogen peroxide on a rug burn. “You have lots in common with Tony Robbins, you know?”

Poppy got a good laugh out of that one.

“Be quiet, if you can manage,” Wanda continued, giving me a raised brow expression, but there was a current of amusement in her tone. “I’ll be doing all the actual work.”

Ribbons of blood-colored light then began to fan out from her hands, snaking through the cemetery and winding around the graves. Some of them brushed over my skin, and I shivered. A few wound around Drake, and he raised an eyebrow to show his surprise and obvious awe. Wanda only smirked.

The candles blazed up in towers of light, and then dimmed down until they were barely more than embers, looking like dying stars in the dark night. A cold wind picked up then, whipping my hair around my cheeks, tugging at my clothes and howling a doleful tune as it swept through the trees and gravestones.

I could tell Wanda was speaking because I could see her mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear her over the call of the wind. Regardless, her face was set into a fierce expression, fierce and demanding. This must have been what it meant to be a witch, to ride the lightning strike that was magic, and not only hold on, but take the reins and steer. Wanda called her commands to the universe, and the universe answered.

I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the stinging grit and graveyard dirt the winds whipped up in a mini typhoon that surrounded the two of us, existing only within the circle of candlelight. There was a small light behind my eyelids, though, and as I watched, it grew in size. Fairly soon, I was able to see through my mind’s eyes and with a jolt, I realized where I was.

When Drake had still been a ghost sharing my body, any time I’d wanted to see him, speak to him as more than just a voice in my head, I’d come here. To this secret place in my mind. This secret location had always appeared to be a room in my house, either the parlor or a spare bedroom, places both Drake and I were familiar with. I’d never known which of us had chosen the setting, though I’d always strongly suspected it had been Drake.

Now, this special place appeared as an empty space, a room disused. There were tarps thrown over furniture, dust on the floors, and a single black wood door set into the wall. I moved through the room, fingers brushing over the couches and the table underneath the white shrouds, and I felt a little twinge of regret as I realized I had an answer to the question Ryan had asked me earlier. Of course, I’d had the answer then too, even if I hadn’t been able to face it. But, yes, the truth was that I’d never trade Drake, alive, for anything.

But at the same time, a part of me missed the days when he visited me in my dreams or when I felt him in my mind and body. I’d never felt as close to anyone as I had sharing space with Drake. There was something extremely comforting knowing he was always there, a word in my ear, a slow smile at the back of my mind. I’d never had much in the way of family, and having such an intimate connection to another person had been exactly that—intimate.

Beyond intimate.

The door shuddered on the wall, rattling the multiple locks and chains that held it closed. Light leaked around the edges, like someone behind it had set up a halogen lamp, the illumination searingly bright like a halo around the dark wood.

One by one, I watched as locks grated open, as chains cracked and their links parted. Wanda was still speaking somewhere far away. Her voice echoed with a hollow note, like one of us was at the bottom of a well and still trying to hold a conversation with the other.

The wind built, inside and outside, metal clattered across the dusty floors. White sheets rippled, flaring up around me like I was caught in a storm of wings and light.

Wanda’s voice crystalized, booming through my head, and I could finally understand her words.

“So mote it be.”

The door burst apart.

Light filled the room, searing every corner. A thousand voices rushed past me, talking, shouting, weeping, singing, laughing, screaming. I slapped my hands over my ears, but it didn’t help. The voices were inside my head and I couldn’t block them out.

The light swelled, bearing down on me. It was effervescent and weightless. It was a crushing avalanche. It was there and then it was gone. It rolled over me, caught me in a riptide of wind and voices and spun me up, and up, and up.

When I pried my eyes open again, I was lying on my back in the cemetery with early morning dew soaking into my jeans. I blinked once. The pre-dawn seemed brighter than it should have been.

My head rang, not quite a migraine because there was no pain, but it felt like a Faberge egg on a narrow base—precarious and fragile.

A shadow fell over my face as Wanda stepped up to loom over me.

“Oh good,” she said, sounding so cheerful it was mocking. “Look at you, not dead.”

“It was my only job,” I mumbled, patting around for Drake’s hand in the grass. Was he okay?

“Merde. J’ai l’impression que ma tête va éclater.” Drake groaned as he sat up, the hand not wrapped around mine going to his head.

“Oh, no, he’s lost the ability to speak English,” Wanda said on a laugh.

Drake frowned up at her. “I must say, being dead, at least I did not have to suffer hangovers.” He groaned and rubbed his forehead.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Wanda put her hands on her hips and nudged his leg with the tip of her leather boot. “Being alive does have some perks. Do you need help remembering them?”

I staggered to my feet and almost blacked out again, the ringing in my ears going up an octave, but I didn’t let it slow me down. “If we live through everything, we’ll send you a fruit basket.”

Poppy laughed at that and then turned to Wanda. “Is that preparations done then?”

Wanda nodded. “Preparations done.”

As to what Wanda had done to us in order to prepare us for our time-traveling undertaking, I wasn’t sure. And owing to Wanda’s less than friendly persona, I decided asking too many questions probably wasn’t a good idea. Instead, I’d helped Poppy collect her candles and then followed the two of them out of the graveyard, dragging Drake with me.

###

I sank back into my airplane seat and wished my headache would subside enough that I’d actually be able to read the screen of my phone.

Drake was torn between fussing over me and all but pressing his face to the little round window next to him, watching the clouds slide over the wing. I’d given him the window seat on our way to Portland, too. He’d never been on a modern airplane, not properly in his own body anyway, and he’d been very excited to see everything from this high up. That was the thing about Drake that enchanted me—he never seemed to get tired of all the things I took for granted. He was like a little boy discovering the world around him for the very first time, and his excitement was on another level. It was also… contagious. I found myself smiling and laughing more in the last few days than I had in weeks.

Gray dawn was spreading its light in the east, and I was torn between wishing I could sleep and wanting to read what Maggie and Lovie had dug up for us about our upcoming trip to the past, as in the Colonial past.

Flying from Portland to Boston took five hours, and I wanted nothing more than to sleep. My head was still pounding, and what was worse, I kept seeing little glimpses of things from the corner of my eye. Flashes and bright lights and glowy orbs. Ghosts, essentially.

Considering all I’d had to give them to work with was, “Colonial, East Coast, village under attack, and witch trials,” I had to admit Maggie and Lovie had really come through.  I hadn’t expected much, and most of the stuff they’d found hadn’t felt quite right. But then I’d opened a file Maggie had attached, a scanned portion of what appeared to be a book of East Coast ghost stories, and I’d felt a little thrill of recognition shiver up my spine the more I perused the content.

The Phantom Attackers, it read.

It seemed the sea port of Gloucester had found itself besieged in the summer of 1692 when it came under attack by armed men. These men were ambushing the residents, who assumed them to be an Indigenous tribe raiding party. That is, until the villagers realized that none of their return fire seemed to have any effect on their attackers.

After the ambushers retreated, the people of Gloucester found their useless bullets lodged in trees and walls. Trees and walls that had been behind the people they’d been aiming at, as if the shots had passed right through them. With the witch trials going on in Salem, whispers of ghosts and devils had started building in neighboring communities, along with assumptions that the port was cursed.

People were afraid to leave their homes. The villagers worked within their community by day, trying to go about their work, and retreated to the garrison at night, hunkering down and praying to see the morning. Then, as abruptly as they’d been besieged, the attacks simply stopped. The attackers never returned. And there was no rhyme nor reason for any of it.

I couldn’t help but wonder what the ‘ghosts’ had been doing there in the first place. Were they looking for something?

Or someone?

There wasn’t much more than that in the article pages, but too much of it seemed to fit. At least Drake and I now had a destination once we reached Gloucester. And that destination was July, 1692.

# # #

Drake leaned back against the appallingly pink floral comforter of the hotel room’s bed, and stretched his arms out. The sultry smile he gave me nearly made me swallow my tongue.

“Are you going to join me,” he purred, dark eyes hot enough to scorch. “Mrs. Montague?”

“Don’t call me that, silly.”

When we’d checked in, Drake had insisted on using his name for the reservation and because we were sharing a room (since we had to be in the same space in order to travel back in time together), he’d said he wanted to ‘save my reputation’. Yes, Drake was going to have to get used to the way things now were in a society that was much less uptight than the one he was used to.

At the invitation to join him in bed, I actually had to physically turn my back on him to set up another one of the candles Poppy had packed for us so he wouldn’t see whatever expression my face was making. Because a rather large, and growing part of me wanted to say ‘to hell with it,’ and just cannonball into bed with Drake, and forget all about this ghost, spirit world, witch and curse stuff.

But, I didn’t jump into bed with Drake because I couldn’t jump into bed with Drake. Not when all this ghost, spirit world, witch and curse stuff was going on. And not when I was still thinking about Ryan. Not necessarily in a ‘let’s get back together’ sort of way, but the thoughts were still there, all the same.

Not to mention that I was also still confused about Drake. With him alive, I didn’t know what that meant for us. When Ryan had asked why Drake was still living in my house with me, he’d brought up a good point—was Drake going to continue playing the part of my roommate? Or did he plan to get a place of his own? Or would he expect me to get a place of my own? Furthermore, now that he was his own person again, that meant he had the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do and that meant… date.

A sour taste started in my mouth at that thought and I had to swallow it down. This wasn’t something I was going to think about—not when there were way bigger, more important subjects on the horizon.

As to Gloucester, it was absolutely gorgeous. The bed and breakfast where we’d found a room, while a little dated in the décor, had a fantastic view of the ocean off the balcony. I could see the lighthouse up the coast, and white sail boats drifting on the currents. The smell of almonds and pine and a hint of black pepper from the candles filled the air with sweetness, and I wished Drake and I were here for reasons unrelated to death and darkness.

It would have been nice if we were on vacation instead, able to go for a stroll along the seashore. Maybe grab a lobster roll from a little shop near the beach, and watch night climb up from over the waves. But then, if my life were normal, I would have never met Drake in the first place, nor any of the people in New Orleans who had come to mean so much to me.

“Okay,” I said, blowing out the match I’d used to light the candles. “How do I look?”

I gave a little twirl, feeling the heavy fabric of my skirts slide around my legs. Getting clothes for this little adventure had been interesting. We’d had to drive quite a ways out of town to find the nearest costume shop and then it was more about hoping for the best. So long as no one checked my ‘authentic Colonial woman’ costume and found the tag with its dry clean only instructions, I was pretty sure it would pass muster. Too bad it was so itchy and really, really heavy.

Drake grinned, looking far too dashing in his own ensemble. The dark blue waistcoat with its brass buttons made him look like a handsome pirate. The weird little hat less so, but so long as he didn’t comment on my own starched cap, I wouldn’t comment on his.

“You look beautiful, ma minette. As always.” He held his hand out to me. “Shall we?”

I scrubbed my hands against the front of my skirt, trying to wipe away any sweat before I took Drake’s hand in mine. Yes, I was that nervous. He helped me onto the bed so I didn’t have to squirm around awkwardly in my dress.

Lying with our heads on the pillows, shoulder to shoulder and looking up at the white stucco ceiling, I cleared my throat. “Drake?”

“Oui, mon chaton?”

“Thank you. For being here.” I didn’t know how I would have made it through the past days without him standing at my side.

He was quiet for so long, I closed my eyes, taking in a deep lungful of candle sweetened air, Aunt Sally’s Conjure Oil, and the lily floral scent of Piercing the Veil Oil as I pictured the dark room in my mind with its single door.

There were no locks or chains, now. No solid wood door in my mind that had to be pried open. Now, a gauzy black curtain was all that stood between me and the other side. It rippled in a wind I couldn’t feel, shimmering with rainbow colors like a heat mirage.

Just as I reached for that curtain to draw it back and step through to whatever awaited me on the other side, I felt Drake lift my hand.

Warm lips brushed over my knuckles.

“Always,” he breathed.

The curtain wrapped around me. It felt like mist, like cool air against my skin. I took in one last deep breath, and I let the doorway pull me through.

Chapter Twenty-One

I opened my eyes to a sky drenched in color.

Peach, orange, pink, and gray faded into the darkest blue as the sun sank below the horizon. I could hear waves slapping against the rocks, and the cry of gulls as they wheeled through the sky, fighting over scraps of fish. The air was heavy with summer heat, and when I licked my parched lips, I tasted salt.

I sat up gingerly, barely daring to breathe as I looked around. Drake stirred next to me, but his eyes weren’t open. He looked so handsome in his sober dark suit, with his lashes fanning against his olive cheeks. I wanted to lean over, to press my mouth against those full lips and kiss him awake.

Instead, I turned away, smoothing my dress down over my legs.

Gone was the stretch of houses and hotels, and there wasn’t a trendy shop in sight. No telephone poles, no radio towers, no electric lights buzzing to life with the setting of the sun. Ships bobbed along the wharf, their wooden hulls creaking with the surge of the tide. Huge, white sails were painted in sunset colors, not an outboard motor to be found.

Up the coast were houses made of wood, one and two stories tall. There was a stone walled garrison, casting a long and formidable shadow across the surrounding buildings. People in dark clothing made their way to the garrison building—not exactly running, but not lagging, either. They walked in groups, as if not daring to walk alone in the gathering twilight.

This was Gloucester in 1692.

I was seeing things no one alive had ever seen. Except ancient witches, apparently. My inner history nerd was doing backflips. I’d never traveled so far back in time before. I wanted to see everything, to run my hands over homespun yarn, to taste fresh bread that had never seen a preservative, to crawl under a seventeenth century table and examine exactly how it was put together.

Drake stirred beside me, drawing my attention back and keeping my inner historian from hyperventilating. He looked up at me from where he was lying on the long, golden beach grass, and a slow smile spread across his face.

“Ma minette. It worked. I am here with you.”

He reached up and cupped my face with one big hand, thumb sliding over my cheekbone. I wanted to melt into his touch, but we were kind of on the clock and lingering in the past wasn’t an ideal situation. Eventually, someone would notice we’d never left our room, and if anything went wrong, there was no one watching over our bodies to wake us up.

So, as much as part of me wanted to linger here, watching the twilight spread over the ocean while gazing at Drake’s stupidly handsome face, I was on a time crunch.

As it turned out, getting to your feet from a prone position in a heavy dress that reaches your ankles is so difficult, it should have become an Olympic sport. After a lot of huffing and yanking fabric around, and at one point bracing the ground with my hands, I managed to scramble to my feet. I huffed, smoothing some flyaway tendrils of hair back under my little cap while Drake bit his lower lip and did a bad job of trying not to laugh at me.

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. “Yuk it up. Come on.”

I offered him a hand, and noticed the glimmer of mischief in those dark cocoa eyes in time to snap, “If you pull me down again, I will roll you into the sea.”

Drake stifled a laugh, rising to his feet with enough grace to make me seriously grumpy.

“I would have helped you up again, mon chaton. I would have carried you in my arms, if need be.”

“Because that’s what we need—to be stuck in the past while you give yourself a hernia carrying around sixteen tons of wool dress. I feel like I’m going to need a crane to lift this thing off me once we’re home.”

Drake pressed a hand to his chest, just over his heart, and gave me a look as if he were a knight making an oath to his lady.

“Ma minette, I am always available to aid you out of your clothing.”

I wanted to push him off a cliff. Just dunk him in salt water and tell him to swim his butt home to the future. Instead, I shook my head at him. “Focus, Drake. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“My apologies,” he said with a quick nod.

“We need to find Beatrice.”

I remembered Beatrice lived in one of the single-story houses, but that didn’t narrow it down all that much. There were a lot more buildings and people than I’d imagined there would be, but I supposed that made sense. Gloucester was one of the first seaports in the New World, so it would have grown quickly.

I grabbed a double handful of skirt and started walking. “So our choices are, sneak around in the dusk, peering in windows and looking for Beatrice while hoping we don’t get shot. Or, march up to the garrison where all the people are hiding because phantom strangers have them under siege and ask to speak to Beatrice and hope we don’t get shot.”

“You do sum it up nicely, oui.”

“I think we should…” I trailed off, staring.

“Mon chaton?” Drake laid a hand on my upper arm, concerned.

I nodded toward one of the closer houses. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

There was a man creeping between the houses, peering in windows, and at one point, poking the butt of his rifle into a stacked pile of coiled rope. He was dressed much the same as Drake, in a waistcoat and jacket with breeches, which definitely needed to make a comeback in modern times, judging by how very well Drake filled them out.

But, back to the man… he had no hat, and his light-colored hair was tangled around his face. There was an odd tilt to his head that never quite straightened, and a lurch to his step as he moved.

“Am I crazy, or is that—”

“A ghost? Oui, ma minette.” Drake’s eyes narrowed. “That would explain a great deal about the ‘Phantom Attackers’, would it not?”

“It would. But…” I watched as the ghost lumbered around the corner of a house, peering between the shutter slats as he went. There were others moving among the houses, I realized as my eyes adjusted to the dark. “Does it look to you like they’re searching for something?”

Drake nodded, his eyes serious. “Or someone.”

There was a thought. “Do you think they’re here for Beatrice and the Ouroboros? Or Margaret Sawyer?”

“That, I cannot say, ma minette.”

We needed to get closer, and do so without being seen by anyone, dead or alive. “Come on, let’s take a look.”

For the record, if ever asked how hard it is to sneak while wearing an unfamiliar, ankle length dress that involves freaking panniers, the answer is: extremely hard. Ducking was about all I could manage, even with Drake’s help. I couldn’t crouch without walking on my hemline and face planting, and if I hoisted my skirts up with both arms, I had no way to balance myself.

We ended up in an awkward kind of bridal train, with Drake holding my skirts up a little behind me, and even I wanted to laugh at how ridiculous we must have looked. We ended up ducking behind a wagon as another ghost rounded the corner, and I sucked in a breath because the man’s head and blue waistcoat were smeared with blood. The red streaks didn’t look fresh, but somehow they didn’t look old either. The ghost moved almost methodically, despite his rather impressive head wound. But then, I guess you don’t need to worry about concussions when you’re dead.

I held my breath as he moved past. Drake was still beside me, the muscles in his legs tense and ready to spring if needed. I felt a stab of fear, like an icicle lodged in my chest.

Whenever I’d gone walking into the spirit world in the past, Drake had been with me. But he’d been a ghost, and owing to that fact, I hadn’t needed to worry about him. He was dead; he couldn’t be hurt. But feeling the steady pulse of his heartbeat through his chest pressed against my shoulder, hearing his slow, calm breathing brought it home that Drake was alive. And that meant he could die.

What if he got hurt? What if he didn’t come back, not even as a ghost? What if something happened to him?

“Breathe, mon chaton. Slowly. Calm yourself. I will not allow anyone to hurt you.” His voice was barely more than a breath at my ear, and I shivered at his warm touch.

I wanted to laugh, but doing so would both give us away and probably come out a touch hysterical. Here we were, crouched behind a wagon, and we were both worried about protecting the other.

The ghost in the blue waistcoat passed within a couple arm’s lengths of our hiding spot. Which was probably the only reason I heard his shattered glass voice as he mumbled over and over.

“Where is she?” The ghost shuffled past. “Where is she?”

So, they were definitely looking for a person, but it was still up in the air as to who they meant, exactly.

When the ghost moved on, we scuttled toward one of the houses closest to us.

“Okay,” I whispered, trying not to huff in Drake’s ear. I needed to do more squats or something, because crouch walking was absolutely murdering my thighs. “Now, from what I remember, Beatrice Litten lived in a one-story house that wasn’t close to any of the others. She must be on the edge of town. I’m just not sure which edge of town.”

“So, she could be on the other side of the entire port?” Drake’s lips thinned as he looked out over the large cluster of houses, as if judging the distance.

“Yeah.” I tried not to wilt. “But we could probably—”

The crack of a gunshot echoed through the night, and all the air in my chest left me in an implosive little scream.

The shot had been way too close for comfort. Even as Drake pulled me back into the shelter of his arms, there was another shot. And then another.

The cry went up. Men were shouting.

“There they are!”

“I see them!”

“Open fire!”

The ghost in the blue waistcoat ran past our hiding spot, before another gunshot rang out and he went sprawling into the dirt.

What was happening? You couldn’t shoot ghosts! They didn’t have bodies to injure. So why had the man dropped like a stone? What in the world was going on?

I almost leapt out of my skin when the ghost jumped back to his feet and, in a smooth motion, lifted his own rifle and returned fire.

A strong hand clamped down on my arm, half yanking me out of Drake’s protective embrace. We both spun, and I found myself staring up into Beatrice Litten’s thunderous scowl.

“Get up, you half-wits!”

We didn’t need any more prompting. Drake all but hauled me to my feet, and we hurried after Beatrice. She led us to a familiar house, and bolted the door behind us once we raced inside. Almost all the lights had been extinguished, with only the banked coals in the fireplace to give us anything to see by.

Beatrice rounded on us the moment the door was secure, her frown putting lines on her face at her mouth and the corners of her eyes—eyes which were narrowed on me.

“You. Why have you come? What are you doing here?”

I drew in a shaky breath, the thanks for dragging us to safety withering on my tongue under her blistering glare. “We came to get the Ouroboros. The necklace,” I clarified when she only gave me a blank look.

There was a long moment of silence while Beatrice looked me up and down like she’d never seen me before. “Are you daft? I already gave it into your keeping. Do not tell me you’ve lost it.”

“Yes, but…” I floundered, wondering how in the world she knew she’d already given it to me because… that wasn’t supposed to have happened yet. “But this moment, er right now, is before you gave it to me, isn’t it?” I swallowed hard as she looked at me blankly. “Isn’t this… July, when the first of the attacks began?” She nodded. “So, you should still have it.”

Her mouth pursed so lightly, I was surprised she could still speak. “It was given. That means it has been given, it will be given, and always shall be.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around that. Clearly, the ways of magic were beyond my understanding. “So, you… don’t have it?”

A note of hysteria crept into my voice, making it shrill. Drake smoothed his hand up my back, quietly soothing. Any other time it probably would have helped. Now it didn’t.

“I gave it into your keeping so that it would not be here for her to find.” Beatrice’s eyes flashed in the dim light of the fire. “Are you telling me truly that it is no longer in your possession?” I didn’t want to nod, but I had to. Beatrice breathed in sharply and then shook her head. “How can that be? It can only go where it is given willingly!”

My stomach sank like a lead balloon. The ‘willing’ part might not have been completely accurate, but I had handed the necklace over to Guarda easily enough.

The little white cap on my head made it impossible for me to grab a handful of my hair, but I was tempted to try anyway. If there was ever a time to tear your hair out, I was pretty sure it was now.

A series of shots exploded outside, and I jumped.

Beatrice glanced towards the shuttered window, her lips pursed with displeasure. “The fools. Don’t they understand you cannot use lead shot against a spirit? A waste of ammunition is what it is. But will they listen to an old woman? Of course not.”

“What are the spirits here for? Not the necklace?” I wasn’t sure how far a bullet could travel in the late 1600s, but I twitched away from the windows and doors anyway, pulling Drake with me.

“In a way.” Beatrice shook her head. “They’re here for her. You cannot betray a witches coven with no consequences.”

“So, they’re here for Margaret Saw—”

Beatrice whipped around so quickly, I bit off the rest of the word.

“Do not speak her name,” she hissed. “They will hear you!”

We were all silent for one long, heart tight moment, as if waiting to see if armed ghosts would break down the door in search of their target.

When nothing happened, Beatrice’s shoulders relaxed as she uttered a small sigh. “They are her victims. The ghosts. People whose deaths she caused either with her own hand or by indirect means. Poor souls. They’ll never know peace until they take their revenge. It is a cruel curse that bedevils victim along with victimizer.”

A squeak and a grating of metal came from the door, and I turned just in time to watch the bolt slide back in its braces. The metal seemed to twist and slither, more like a serpent than anything solid had any right to be.

I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but the door flew open before I could say a word.

Margaret Sawyer looked a lot different without her purple ribboned top hat and black cloak, but I recognized the contemptuous eyes immediately, even if she wasn’t flinging a venomous snake into a crowd.

She stepped into Beatrice Litten’s house, and the door slammed shut behind her with an ominous thud.

Silence rang for a second while she stared at Beatrice. Margaret didn’t spare so much as a glance for Drake and me, though Drake twisted, putting me behind him until I basically had to peek over his broad shoulder to see what was going on.

“Did you really think you could hide it from me?”

I jerked when Margaret spoke. I’d expected her voice to match the rest of her, pinched and demanding. But her voice was rich and low. She’d have a good phone voice, once phones were invented, that is.

Beatrice gave her an unimpressed look. “You are haunted by your past, Margaret Sawyer. Can you feel the devil nipping at your heels?”

The witch took another step forward, and the banked coals in the fireplace roared back to life, orange and scarlet flames shooting up the chimney.

I bit back a shriek.

“I followed that artifact across the ocean,” Margaret sneered. “To think, your ancestors entrusted it to you, and you thought hiding it in this miserable little hovel would be enough to keep it from me? Your grandmother must be rolling in her grave.”

The fire roared, shooting sparks over the metal grate and into the room. Drake and I scrambled to stomp out any that touched the floor, and I slapped out a tiny flame that started on a wooden chair. Three quarters of the house was made of wood. If a fire broke out with Margaret between us and the door, it wouldn’t end well.

Beatrice Litten didn’t even flinch. She raised her chin, a fierce light in her eyes. For a moment, I could see her as she must have been as a younger woman, straight backed and proud.

“You’re too late. It’s gone. I’ve sent it somewhere you will never reach it. Give up this mad quest.” From most people, it would have been a plea. Beatrice made it a demand.

Margaret stopped, her watery blue eyes searching Beatrice’s face. Her lips twisted up in an ugly scowl, and she shook her head.

“We will see about that.”

And for the first time since she’d come through the door, Margaret Sawyer turned her head and looked straight at me.

I froze in the act of stomping out another stray spark with my not even close to period boots, feeling her gaze like a tangible thing. It was cold, and clinging, like chilled oil. Her eyes raked over my face, searching for something or just committing my face to memory. I had no idea, but I didn’t like either of the options.

Drake grabbed my arm, tugging me behind him, and Margaret’s poison stare switched to him. Ice formed in my belly. I never wanted that woman to have any reason to look at Drake. I didn’t want her near him, or even to know about him.

The witch raised her hands, and something that looked like greasy smoke twined around her wrists and hands.

I yelled, wordless and panicked, and tried to drag Drake backwards and away, but the stubborn man dug his heels in and wouldn’t budge.

She could hurt him. She could kill him.

The thoughts echoed through my skull like an alarm bell. She could hurt him or kill him, and I couldn’t stop her.

Before the spell could congeal out of smoke and magic, Beatrice Litten swung the iron poker she’d picked up at some point during the argument, and slammed it into Margaret Sawyer’s gut, hard enough to make the witch double over with an explosive breath.  The tendrils of smoke crackled and spat once before fading out as the witch wheezed, trying to relearn how to breathe.

“Go!” Beatrice barked the word at me, even as she raised the poker over her head.

I hesitated.

I hated to leave her here, facing a witch who was clearly willing to hurt even her own coven sisters in order to get what she wanted. The hardest part of traveling through the spirit world was reminding yourself that everything you were experiencing had already happened. And you couldn’t change it, even if you desperately wanted to. For better or worse, Beatrice Litten and Margaret Sawyer had had their confrontation three hundred years before I was even born. There was nothing for me to do about that now.

With a silent farewell, I wrapped my arms around Drake and heaved us both back through the curtained doorway.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ours was a subdued trip home.

Drake and I barely spoke as we checked out of the bed and breakfast and dropped off our rental costumes. I think we both were just too caught up in our own thoughts.

The bits of grass caught on the back of the dress made the woman at the register raise an eyebrow. Then she glanced at Drake and winked at me with a secret smile.

I dragged up something approximating a return smile for her, before shuffling out the door, still wrapped firmly in my gray, depressive shroud.

I’d been so sure this whole necklace fiasco would have been a mistake I could undo. That if Drake and I could just go back and get the Ouroboros, it would give us at least a bit of breathing room. But it seemed you could be too late for things, even with time travel, and some things really couldn’t be undone.

I couldn’t be too hard on myself. I mean, Beatrice Litten had the literal gift of prophecy, and she’d looked through time to see my disaster of a life and, yet, she’d still chosen me to safeguard the Ouroboros. Talk about a bad decision. So maybe this was her fault. Furthermore, if she could see the future then she should have known I was going to lose the necklace to Guarda so why give it to me at all?

Drake shadowed me through the airport, close enough to bump against me, but he seemed to understand that I wasn’t really in a talking mood because he was uncharacteristically silent. I was pathetically grateful for it, because I had absolutely no idea what to say. I’d banked so hard on getting the necklace back, and now that it was clear that wasn’t possible, I had no idea what to do next.

Maybe Lovie would have some ideas? I mean, an entire coven of witches had been betrayed and killed by Sawyer in the past, but it was possible that a priestess, a warlock, a teenager, a reincarnated ghost, a disaster of a medium and a dog could succeed where they’d failed, right? Yeah, wrong. This wasn’t an after-school special with a ridiculously happy ending. This was Peyton Clark’s miserable and useless life.

I let my head fall back against the headrest of my seat and ignored the burn of tears at the corner of my eyes until they went away.

I texted Lovie when we landed, to let her know we were on our way back to the house, and then I stuffed my phone down into my pocket because I couldn’t bear to answer any of the questions she probably had. I’d just wait until we were face to face to disappoint her.

It wasn’t until I’d parked the car and was staring up through the windshield at my house, so tired I couldn’t even imagine hauling myself up to the door, that Drake finally spoke.

“Ma minette?” He reached out slowly to tuck a strand of hair back behind my ear. “Are you with me?”

The brush of warmth against made me shiver, and I turned in my seat to face him. “I’m sitting right beside you.”

“You have been very far away all day, mon chaton.”

I knew what he meant, and a fresh cupful of guilt was added to the mess stewing away in my chest. My teeth sank into my lower lip. “Sorry.”

Drake shook his head, his eyes very dark in the shadowy interior of the car. “Do not apologize. It is not your fault.” He paused, like he was searching for the right words. Then he leaned forward, his voice growing firmer. “None of it is. It is not your fault, ma minette.”

The little laugh I gave came out watery, and I had to take a couple of breaths to get my voice back under control. “Beatrice trusted me to protect the Ouroboros. You heard what she said.” Drake looked like he wanted to interrupt, but my words kept coming, and I couldn’t stop them. “And, I just handed it over to Guarda. I failed, Drake,” I continued, shaking my head. “And look at all the trouble I’ve caused.”

“What trouble, ma minette?”

I gave him a look that said he knew what trouble I was talking about. “Ever since I moved here, I’ve done nothing but attract trouble. I keep dragging Lovie and Christopher into all kinds of dangerous situations. I unleashed the freaking Axeman onto the city. Maggie’s probably in danger staying with me. What happens if Guarda takes control of me while I’m asleep and I hurt Maggie, Drake?” I shook my head, because I didn’t even want to think about it. “I’ve failed—I couldn’t even keep things going with Ryan.”

Drake’s face twitched at Ryan’s name. “I do not believe you failed with him.”

A tear escaped, sliding in a scalding trail over my cheek. “I did,” I answered. “Ryan was just starting to open up again. He’d been so badly hurt ever since he’d lost his wife. And when he finally decided to try again, to trust he could be happy again, I made it plain that he wasn’t worth me walking away from the supernatural. Chasing ghouls and ghosts and things that go bump in the night meant more to me than he did. No wonder he broke up with me.”

A second tear joined the first. And then another.

“I never meant to hurt him.” I drew in a shaking breath as I looked up at Drake, who was looking back at me with those big, beautiful brown eyes. “And then there’s you.”

Drake moved then, fast enough to make me gasp as he took both my hands in his and raised them between us. He spoke with his lips pressed against the skin of my knuckles. “My life has been made immeasurably better since you entered it, Peyton Clark, and I will not allow you to pollute my words.”

His tone was fierce, like he was demanding something. It shocked me into silence. Even my tears stopped flowing.

Dark hair had tumbled onto Drake’s brow, his pupils expanded until only the thinnest ring of chocolate remained. He seemed somehow wild, feral—nothing like the usually contained and orderly man I’d come to know so well. I’d never seen him so undone.

“I had nothing until you came into my existence, ma minette. A dead man drifting around the hollow shell of a house. You have brought light and life to me, more than I ever thought I could have. Do not ever think, for one moment, that I would have been better off without you.”

The lump in my throat swelled, blocking off my words. All I could do was cling to his hands and hang on.

“Ryan,” he spat. “Barbare that he is. He had the unimaginable gall to tell you to lessen yourself. To carve pieces of you away until you could fit into the mold he had set for you, and then he had the gall to believe he had a right to keep you? Ridiculous! Impardonnable!”

I drew in a shuddering breath, and Drake pressed his lips to the back of my hand again, his eyes fluttering closed. After a long, heart-tight moment, he drew back. Calmer, but no less determined.

“Ah, ma minette. A man would walk with you into any danger, face any horror at your side, and consider himself blessed by the privilege.”

In spite of everything, a smile stretched across my face until my cheeks hurt with the pull of it. “Okay.” My voice came out as a whisper, so I cleared my throat and tried again. “Okay. Let’s rally the troops, and figure out how to take down an ancient, murderous witch. And, once that’s done, we’ll figure out how to take down a slightly less ancient murderous witch.”

Drake let my hands slip out of his, but his gaze remained fixed on my face. A hint of a smile quirked up the corner of his lips as he said, “Wherever you lead, I will follow, mon chaton.”

Opening the car door felt like letting the world back into our little bubble. I could hear traffic on the streets nearby, and the singing of a stubborn cricket in the neighbors’ bushes.

With a deep breath, I slipped my phone back out of my pocket, wanting a forewarning of what I was about to walk in on. But there were no messages. Neither Lovie nor Maggie had responded to my texts.

“Weird,” I muttered. They’d probably gotten caught up in their research.

My stomach chose that moment to give an embarrassingly loud gurgle, reminding me I hadn’t eaten since sometime that morning.

“Let’s go in and see what Maggie and Lovie are up to,” I said, mounting the steps to the front door. “Maybe we can order something because I don’t feel like cooking.” Of course, I never felt like cooking, so that wasn’t really anything out of the ordinary.

Drake’s eyes lit up. “Perhaps that Pythian Market that Lovie mentioned? We could get a little bit of everything, that way.”

I laughed, shaking my head. Who knew that a century old ghost could turn into such a serious foodie? “That’s fine.”

The door was unlocked, which was a little odd. I’d have to say something to Maggie later. Daschel was a dog, yes, but he was more of a lap snuggler than a guard, and without Lizzie to watch over the house, it wasn’t a good idea leaving the front door unlocked so just anyone could come waltzing in.

I stepped into the foyer, holding the door for Drake who was still behind me.

“We’re back,” I called out toward the dining room, expecting Maggie and Daschel to both come running. But neither my niece nor my dog answered. Instead, a voice like poisoned honey said,

“Welcome home, Peyton.”

And everything went black.

###

I came to lying on the floor of my dining room with something warm moving over my arms.

It took a few seconds for the fuzziness in my head to clear, and the memory of that chillingly pleasant voice to come back to me. I tried to bolt upright, but whatever was wrapped over my arm tightened and hissed in warning.

Ice water filled my veins, and I went very still. My head tilted ever so slightly to the right, as my heartbeat leapt into a gallop.

There were snakes draped over my body, more than a dozen of them. Flat, black scales on some, the distinctive stripey pattern of a water moccasin on others. One of the black snakes opened its mouth enough to flash stark white gums, and I realized they were cottonmouths. Among the other, more subdued colors, I caught a flash of one small snake all done up in jewel tones. Scarlet, black, white and gold bands made up the length of its sinuous body, and while there was a chance it was just a corn snake, it probably didn’t matter, surrounded as it was by its extremely venomous cousins.

“Have you come back to the land of the living?”

My pulse froze for a second, before resuming double time.

Margaret Sawyer stepped close enough to loom over me, dressed in her chunky beads, top hat and cape.

“You,” I managed, voice tight.

She glanced down at the pile of snakes squirming over my legs and torso. “As long as you stay still and cooperate, none of my little friends will feel the urge to give you a nip. Or your friends, for that matter.”

Panic won over caution, and despite the warning rattle I heard from somewhere down my left thigh, I craned my head around until I caught sight of the rest of the room. Drake, Maggie, Lovie and even Daschel were there, too. All lying on the floor a few feet away, laid out on their backs with their hands folded on their chests. Thankfully, they weren’t covered in snakes. They looked like they could be sleeping. Or ready to be buried.

I licked my parched lips and turned back to the witch standing over me. “What do you want?”

Something ugly spasmed over her face before it smoothed back into mild pleasantry. “Are you really going to play games? With your friends’ lives on the line?” She took a thin length of licorice out of her coat pocket, and I swallowed back a panicked cry as, instead of flinging it like I thought she would, she bit into it and chewed savagely.

“Long life breeds patience, it’s true. But I’ve been searching for centuries, and I’m all out of patience.” She bent down, until her face was so close to mine, I could smell bitter anise on her breath. “Give me the Ouroboros.”

“I don’t have it.”

Her smile was chilling. “So, we’re going to play games?” She straightened up, and drew another licorice whip out of her pocket. “Okay. Then games we shall play. How about ‘which of your friends do you like the least?’ Do you want to pick, or should I?”

She approached Drake and I felt myself swallow hard. “Ah, what a handsome, handsome man.” She looked back at me. “Your beau?”

“Wait!” I tried to thrash and a water moccasin snapped its jaws near my face. Sweat ran down the side of my face, limbs locking as I tried not to further disturb the snakes. I wouldn’t be able to help my friends… dead. “I really don’t have it!”

“Don’t lie to me!” All the mellowness was gone from her voice. The hiss that boiled up out of her mouth could have come from one of her serpents. “I saw you with it!” When my eyes went wide, she explained. “You think only that meddling old seer has the gift of prophecy? I know she gave it to you because I watched it! I’ve searched far too long to be lied to by an idiot child with no idea what she’s playing with.”

“I did have it, yes,” I managed, nodding, figuring at this point the truth was my best accessory so I’d wear it. “But, I don’t have it anymore.” My voice shook like tree branches in a wind storm, but I got the words out. All I could think about was keeping this awful woman away from Drake and the others. I couldn’t see what she’d done to them, unable to turn my head very far, but all I could do was pray it was temporary.

“Are you telling me you gave the Ouroboros to someone else?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

Margaret scoffed. “And you expect me to believe that?”

“Yes, because it’s the truth.” A tear slid down my temple, and I felt the feather light brush of a snake’s tongue flick over the damp skin left in its wake.

Margaret knelt near my head. It was a struggle not to shake at the expression on her face. There was no warmth, no compassion in it. She looked at me like I might look at a fly that had just landed on my ice cream.

“If you’re lying to me,” she said, her pleasant tone completely at odds with the terrifying blankness on her face.

“I’m not lying to you and I will tell you who has the necklace you’re looking for.” I swallowed hard and took a deep breath, the immediate need to stall, to earn myself some time taking over. “But before I do,” I started.

“What?” she demanded irritably.

“There are a few questions I still don’t understand.”

“What questions?”

I could tell by the look in her eyes that she would take the opportunity to explain, merely because she would enjoy the role of ‘she who is in control’ as opposed to me—‘she who is not’.

“The artifacts you had all those ghost children steal for you,” I began.

“What about them?”

“What was the purpose? To extend your life even longer?”

“You don’t understand the urgency to live until you look death in the eyes,” she answered and though the response was succinct, at least now I knew for sure what her intentions had been all this time.

“Then all of those artifacts, when brought together, were strong enough to give you, what, immortality?” I asked, still wanting more of my questions answered.

“Not on their own, no, they were offerings to someone who could offer that immortality.”

And that someone was Damballah Wedo, I was fairly certain. But I also wanted to play the part of dumb and uninformed because it was better to let Margaret think as much. “I understand the significance of the sword because it had the serpent carved into it. But what use was the gris-gris to you? I thought they were only created for one person and are useless to anyone else?”

She nodded. “That gris-gris was created for me long ago, thus it was only right it be returned to me.”

“It was originally created for you?” I asked, amazed, as she nodded.

“And the Dybbuk Box? There wasn’t a spirit in it.”

She nodded again, and there was a certain proud twinkle in her eye. “There soon will be.”

“Who are you planning to trap?” But, I already knew and the shock suddenly blazed through me. How was it possible that Margaret Sawyer was planning to trap Damballah Wedo in a spirit box?

She glared at me then. “I’ve had enough of your questions.”

“Wait,” I said, nearly cutting her off as something else occurred to me. “Why wouldn’t Jean Lafitte tell me what you were doing here? What do you have over him?

“I have nothing over him.”

“Then why did he refuse to speak about you?”

“It wasn’t that he refused to speak about me, he refused to speak about it.”

“The Ouroboros?” She nodded as I frowned. “Why?”

“Because it belongs to the loa of all loas and even spirits are afraid of him.”

The Ouroboros belonged to Damballah Wedo? Interesting. “One more thing,” I started.

“I grow tired of your questions.”

“Why did you paint the serpent on me?”

She frowned then, and real confusion registered in her expression. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I swallowed hard. “You didn’t paint the sign of the Ouroboros on me? In green paint?”

“I did not.”

Then who had?

Scales slid over the skin of my neck. I swallowed very carefully, trying not to disturb the snake.

“Now then,” Margaret said, with death in her cold blue eyes. “Who did you give the Ouroboros to?”

So, I told her.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Guarda’s place looked the same as it had the last time I’d been there, the same as it had in my dreams. The spirit bottles clinked together lazily in the evening breeze, and the sound caused nausea to coil in my gut.

I had to resist the urge to touch my neck. Obviously, I couldn’t lead Margaret if I was covered in a pile of snakes, so she’d commanded one to simply wrap itself around my throat like a collar. All of the threat, none of the mobility hindrance. It had looked disturbingly pretty in the rear-view mirror of the Scout, scarlet and gold and black against the chalky pallor of my skin. Too bad about that whole ‘second most venomous snake in North America’ thing.

After parking, I led Margaret up the walk to Guarda’s trailer, and tried desperately to think of a plan. I’d just wanted to get Margaret away from my unconscious friends before she hurt them, but now I was scrambling. I didn’t want her to get ahold of the Ouroboros, but I also really didn’t want Guarda to have it. Both seemed like apocalyptically bad choices. Maybe I could wait for them to duke it out, and then grab the necklace and run while they were distracted.

“This is the place.” I gestured at the door, and stood to one side.

Margaret shot me a look, and I waited for her to utter another threat, or demand that I go and knock for her or something, but she didn’t bother. She marched up to the trailer, and hissed a word I didn’t hear under her breath.

The door blew off its hinges and went flying into the night.

I yelped, cringing back as the metal and glass door sailed past my head. The coral snake around my throat gave a warning squeeze, but relaxed as I straightened up again.

By the time I’d unwrapped my arms from their defensive position around my skull, Margaret had already stalked inside. I hesitated for a second, but then scurried after her. The idea of being caught between a furious witch and a voodoo queen made my scalp go numb with terror. But I couldn’t let either one of them get their hands on the Ouroboros, especially if it had significance to Damballah Wedo. I wasn’t sure what exactly that meant, but it sounded important. I decided to bide my time and see if there was a chance to snatch the necklace and then run without being poisoned or turned into a zombie. Or, further turned into a zombie.

As I hurried through the door, I heard Guarda’s raspy voice.

“Who dares?”

I ducked in through the door in time to hear Margaret reply, “You have something that belongs to me.”

Guarda shot me a nasty look as I stepped inside, which felt particularly unfair. She was the one who’d dragged me into all of this, and taken the Ouroboros in the first place. If anyone should have been giving someone the stink-eye, it should have most certainly been me.

I started to snap something really stupid at her, but froze, my mouth dropping open in complete shock, disbelief and panic. Standing there, in the corner of the room, among the candles and preserved bits of animals, was Ryan.

“Ryan,” I said, my voice thin, like all the questions I wanted to ask were trying to squeeze out of my throat at once.

He turned to look at me, his eyes milky white in the candlelight of the dim trailer. He winked.

What was Ryan doing here—standing in Guarda’s house as nonchalantly as could be? What were they doing here together? And why were his eyes glowing?

Those blank, marble white eyes made my skin prickle with their wrongness. The smile on his face was wrong too, it was more of a leer, too many teeth showing for Ryan’s usual boyish grin. It was almost as if something else had taken up residence within him, peeking out of his eyes, wearing his face like a mask.

“I’ve waited long enough,” Margaret interrupted the still quiet. “Hand it over, and this doesn’t have to get ugly.”

Guarda was shaking, dark eyes so wide, I could see the whites around her irises. It took me a second to realize it wasn’t fear that was making her tremble.

It was rage.

“You come into my house,” she rasped in a dangerous tone. “And you show me such disrespect?”

Margaret gave the inside of Guarda’s trailer a dismissive look, her lip curled up in distaste. “Do you really want me to start tearing this place apart?” She turned toward the back wall, her outstretched hand wreathed in sourceless smoke. “How about I start with your little altar?”

Guarda’s fists clenched at her side, so hard her hands trembled with the force. She spit something under her breath, staring daggers at Margaret. “Leave, now. Or they won’t find your bones.”

Ryan had been watching the argument with amusement, which was enough to tell me that he wasn’t currently piloting his body. As to who was? I had no clue. Regardless, whoever this was, his expression slid toward boredom, or irritation as Margaret and Guarda faced one another.

I looked around the room wildly. There had to be something I could do that didn’t involve standing at ground zero while two supernatural power houses took each other on.

Grabbing something off the wall with which to fling seemed like a bad idea. So did throwing one of the dozen candles that littered every surface. I didn’t want to set the place on fire—all I wanted to do was get the Ouroboros and get out of here.

What about Ryan? I asked myself and inwardly cursed because I didn’t have an answer.

My gaze settled on the floor and I noticed there were lines painted there, curving words and symbols I didn’t recognize. We’d interrupted some kind of ritual. Maybe it was the power of the spell that hung on the air like a thundercloud instead of the threat of imminent magical violence.

One of the symbols caught my eye, a snake curving back and forth around a line, with markings like stars surrounding its coils. I recognized it from the Voodoo Museum. It was the symbol of Damballah Wedo. But why would Guarda bother herself with…

The snake still curled around my throat brushed its tongue against my ear, and hissed. Strangely the hiss almost sounded like the words ‘tell them’. The thought hit my brain as though the snake had just whispered as much to me. I crossed my fingers that my hunch was right, and shouted over the argument still going on.

“Margaret Sawyer wants the Ouroboros to compel Damballah Wedo! She’s trying to steal his power, to trap him into a Dybbuk Box, in order to force him to give her immortality!”

Margaret barely glanced back at me, but Guarda gave me a look like I’d just said the stupidest thing she’d ever heard, and she was judging me for it.

But I hadn’t said it for either of them.

I’d said it for… him.

Ryan jerked at my words like I’d reached out and slapped him.

“What.”

The word came out flat, not posed like a question at all. It also came out in an accent I’d never heard Ryan use before.

I focused on those marble white eyes, speaking so quickly, I tripped over the words. “Margaret Sawyer has been stealing artifacts for weeks, things that represent or are tied to Damballah Wedo. She’s going to try and compel him, to steal his power.”

Margaret made an impatient gesture with one hand, and my mouth closed so quickly my teeth clicked together.

“Are you my narrator?” she snapped, turning back to face Guarda.

Something rippled over Ryan’s face. Any hint of amusement or lecherous cheer was erased like it had never been. Instead, his skin pulled tight with anger.

“You dare?” he demanded.

Margaret sighed. “Get your peanut gallery in line,” she said to Guarda. “Or I’ll get rid of him, first.”

Guarda gaped at her, shocked speechless as she threw a worried glance at Ryan.

He stepped forward. “You are not worthy to even look upon the presence of the Father, li Grande Zombi.”

‘Li Grande Zombi’ was another title for Damballah Wedo and as Ryan said the words, I had the aching suspicion I knew who was taking residence within him. And it wasn’t the father of the loas.

“When I want the opinion of some idiot human,” Margaret said with a dismissive sneer. “I’ll conjure it out of them. So why don’t you…”

Her words trailed off, and I couldn’t blame her. Because Ryan’s face rippled, showing pale bone and blocky teeth beneath his skin. His eyes were dark, like holes in his face, or like little round lenses. For a heartbeat, I could see a burial suit and the strings of cotton plugs trailing from his nostrils, then the image was gone again leaving only worn jeans and a soft t-shirt. But, I knew—my hunch had been right. This was Baron Samedi, the loa of death.

Ryan who was not Ryan took another step forward, and Margaret Sawyer actually took a step back.

“You grasping child.” I knew that voice, but I’d never heard it so full of anger before. “You reach for things you have no right to.”

Anger flashed over Margaret’s face and rooted her feet to the floor. She tilted her chin up, staring Ryan down. “I’ve been working magic for three centuries and more. I’ve twisted spells and struck deals you can’t imagine. I’ve commanded the dead and stripped them of their secrets and memories. What’s one more spirit to bend to my will?”

“One more spirit?” Ryan laughed, but it was an angry sound that tore at my ears. “You refer to the father of creation as ‘just one more spirit’?”

A slow realization grew on Margaret’s face as she caught another glimpse of the skull hiding behind Ryan’s handsome face. “You can’t—”

Ryan took another step forward. His voice dropped into a threatening purr. “Did you think that stealing the years of others meant you would continue living? Oh no, cher. Their deaths cling to you like tar, staining your very being.” He grinned again with too many teeth, cheeks curling up. “Under all that arrogance and power, you’re still just a ghost, clinging to an old relic.”

Body shaking, Margaret brought up her arms, power misting around her hands. “Who are you? Reveal yourself!”

Ryan laughed, big and boisterous. He was still chuckling when he turned to her. “I am the loa of the dead.”

And Baron Samedi opened his mouth. Wide, and then wider. Far past the physical capability of a human mouth. It looked like a snake unhinging its jaw to consume prey. The slabs of his teeth were like tombstones, and behind them was a void.

Margaret Sawyer shrieked.

She tried to summon her power, to fight, and then realizing she couldn’t defeat the loa of death, she turned to run. But, streamers of shadow were peeled from her, only to disappear into the yawning abyss of the Baron’s open mouth.

She stumbled away, flickers of shade and light being drawn from her in one long, devastating inhalation. Finally, her screams petered out, voice swallowed up. She collapsed to her hands and knees and I watched in open-mouthed horror as she simply crumbled apart into fine gray ash.

Baron Samedi brought his teeth together with an echoing little click and tipped his head back to blow a smoke ring into the air.

I stared down at the surprisingly small pile of ashes that had been Margaret Sawyer, the licorice witch. Now, I didn’t even know what to think. The witch that had terrorized New Orleans for weeks was gone, just like that.

I swallowed hard and realized that at some point the little coral snake around my neck had vanished.

Guarda’s rasping laugh snapped me out of my stupor and I brought my head up. She was laughing so hard she wheezed, clutching her chest.

Just when I was seriously considering making a run for it, she shot me a smile so evil it turned my guts to ice water.

She raised her hand. Dangling from the gold chain clutched in her fist was the Ouroboros.

All of the candles in the room flared up at once, their flames burning six inches high, looking more like road flares.

Shadows crowded my vision.

I caught a glimpse of Ryan’s blank, white eyes.

“It will be alright, mon cheri,” he said.

But I didn’t understand how that could be when there was a roaring sound in my ears that sounded like dozens of different voices, until one stood apart, ringing over the rest like a clarion call.

Guarda said only one word. “Mine.”

I blacked out.

###

Waking up on the floor of different places was becoming a habit I was very much looking forward to breaking.

Guarda’s old carpet was an inch from my nose when I blinked my eyes open sometime later. My whole body hurt. Even my hair, which shouldn’t have even been possible, but still was somehow true.

I needed to get up. I couldn’t stay here. I needed to get back to Drake and Lovie and Maggie. I needed to know they were all right. Then I had to get ahold of Christopher and see what he and Lovie could do for Ryan.

And I still didn’t know what it meant that Guarda had the Ouroboros.

My head gave a sickeningly painful throb, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I might have to put a trip to the hospital on my to do list, because it was possible I had a concussion.

What had Guarda done to me?

I raised my arm to prod at the back of my head, and froze halfway through the motion, because the skin on my arm was dark, and creped with wrinkles. The veins on the back of my hand were prominent and dusted with liver spots. My arm started to shake as I held it there, staring in panicked confusion.

It took a lot of effort to scramble to my feet, especially in my long skirt, but I managed to haul myself up. Then I moved through the empty house, making my way to the tiny bathroom, where a chipped old mirror clung to the wall.

My heart was pounding so hard, it felt like it was going to burst. Meanwhile, my breath sawed in my throat, burning with every panicked inhale. I grasped the sides of the old, stained sink, and looked into the mirror.

Guarda’s face stared back at me.

The End

Peyton will return in Midlife Spirits #11

SPELL BINDING

Did you enjoy the cameos by Poppy and Wanda?

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About H.P. Mallory:

H.P. Mallory is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. She writes paranormal fiction, heavy on the romance! H.P. lives in Southern California with her son and a cranky cat.

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