Redemption Song [Midnight, New Orleans Style 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Read online

  Heidi realized her eyes had been blindly staring at a section of a newspaper someone had left on the bar. Voodoo Priestess’s Tomb Gets Makeover in Pink. Apparently last winter someone had snuck into a cemetery in the dead of night and painted Marie Laveau’s tomb Pepto-Bismol pink to obliterate the Xs pilgrims had been making in the marble, in pencil, ink, or more permanent Sharpie. Apparently Marie Laveau’s spirit was “perturbed” about the pink paint. Someone had meant well, but the paint was latex, which doesn’t allow marble to breathe.

  Marie Laveau. That name rang a bell. Heidi asked the busy barman, “Who is this Marie Laveau?”

  He gave her a look of disbelief. “Laveau? She’s only the most famous high voodoo priestess in all of New Orleans. She was a free person of color who worked her way up around 1830, first as a hairdresser in the homes of the rich, and then a powerful, influential figure. She told fortunes, healed the sick, kept people from the gallows.”

  “And why do people leave Xs on her tomb?”

  The bartender looked disgusted. “They think their wish will be granted. It’s asinine. You really only have to place your hand over the tomb to make a wish. You can rap three times, or turn around three times. When she grants it, or returns to you in a dream, then you go back and make an offering. Just flowers, food, or rum. Rum’s her favorite.”

  An idea formed as Heidi brought the drinks back through the brick maze. Their friend Dani had now joined the group at their table dressed like a pretty blue fairy. Heidi had to kick out a guy dressed as a piece of bacon from her wrought iron chair, and Shayla apologized.

  “Sorry. I tried to save your seat, but he kept claiming his fat was burning.”

  “Never mind. Look at this article.”

  Comprehension dawned on Shayla’s face as she read the newspaper. “Marie Laveau! That was the priestess Lisette kept going on and on about. She worshipped her.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? It’s eleven now. At midnight it’ll officially be Halloween.”

  Shayla’s eyes gleamed. “I think I’m thinking what you’re thinking. Erin, Faina, Dani…look at this.” She gave her former roommates the newspaper Heidi had stolen from the bar, and their fate was sealed.

  They were going to take the Canal streetcar to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

  * * * *

  Thirty minutes later, Heidi was seated on the yellow and red streetcar, a big bottle of Jamaican rum in a bag on her lap, like a derelict with a stash of bum wine. It was a raucous party train chugging down the nighttime street as though in a colorful cartoon. Heidi wound up sitting next to her Ukrainian friend, Faina. Normally as beautiful as a model, in the passing neon lights streaming in the window, Faina was downright luminescent.

  Heidi had chugged some of the voodoo priestess’s rum, and she now handed the brown bag to Faina.

  Faina screwed up her face when she swallowed the fiery stuff. “I haven’t drunk this much in years.”

  Heidi nodded sagely. “I haven’t drunk this much since Raoul rudely dumped me a month ago.”

  Faina’s eyes turned as round as mint cookies. “What?” She swore in Ukrainian.

  “I don’t know what that means, but I hope it’s bad.”

  “It means motherfucker. That asshole. I was always reluctant to say this out of respect for you, but I never liked him. Just the way you described him, he seemed so fake. So…plastic.”

  Heidi took the bottle back from her old college friend. She didn’t shudder when she drank. “Stupid bastard. All he ever cared about was his image. I guess I didn’t fit into that image.”

  “Then you need to forget about that bastard tonight and have a good time. We’ll find this tomb and make our wishes. Without carving a stupid X on it.”

  “I want to ask Lisette’s forgiveness.” Heidi was slurring, and she didn’t care. They’d leave enough rum at the tomb to satiate the Voodoo Priestess. She probably didn’t need much. She probably had all sorts of rum every day from all sorts of pilgrims. “I’m going to wish that Lisette has passed into the highest realm of all, or even possibly reincarnated by now into a happy, fulfilling life. She deserves it.”

  “You believe in reincarnation?”

  “I do now. Boy, do I now!” The Hawaii drowning experience had happened way after Lisette had died. Lisette was always talking about reincarnation, rebirth, revitalization. She thought that dead people could be resurrected, too, like some kind of walking, talking zombies, only with less mold and decay. “Reincarnation is a fact, Jack!”

  Heidi’s rant was abruptly stopped when Dani cried out, “We missed our stop!”

  The driver wasn’t about to make a special stop for them, so they made their way to the front. Strangely, the crowd had thinned out to almost nothing, although they were far from the end of the line. Had everyone gone to the same party?

  “The Voodoo Priestess is going to be pissed if we’re late,” said Shayla.

  Faina giggled. “She’ll be more pissed if we drink all her rum.”

  Dani said, “One block back the way we came, and one block up.”

  The driver said wearily as though he’d said it a bazillion times. “Lots of jazz musicians interred there. “ He seemed to look directly into Heidi’s eyes when he said, “Dominique You is there. Right-hand man to Jean Lafitte.”

  And she was supposed to care because…? Heidi frowned back at the burnt-out driver.

  They babbled as they wove their way up Robertson Street, away from the overhead drone of Interstate 10. Now they were officially in the Tremé, away from the touristic flash of the French Quarter, and it showed. The very air gave Heidi a mystic and otherworldly chill. Of course no one had thought to bring a flashlight, and the waxing full moon lit everything with a silvery, supernatural glow. The women skirted a high cement wall looking for an open gate.

  “You’d think there would be more people here on the night before Halloween,” said Shayla. “I don’t hear any voices.”

  It was eerily quiet inside the cemetery walls, and Heidi wasn’t so sure she was glad when they found the entrance. If she hadn’t needed to pee, she might have suggested blowing off the wasted idea and going to another bar. A mystical hourglass with wings was depicted in the center of the iron gate, and Heidi wondered aloud to break the silence.

  “Does that hourglass mean that time flies?”

  “Maybe that time is a deceptive figment of the imagination,” suggested Shayla, who had always listened the closest to Lisette’s mystic ramblings.

  “I’ve got to pee. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Heidi wandered down a lane of aboveground vaults. Several of them had broken bricks that seemed, in the indistinct moonlight, to be displaying things that shouldn’t be seen. Was that a pair of false teeth sitting in the midst of crumbling brick? That’s definitely part of someone’s jacket or skirt. Shitpickle. Holy Jesus on a stick! Is that a femur? Stop swearing!

  Heidi was so frightened she could barely pee. Oh shiznit, I hope I’m not peeing on anyone. She had actually forgotten about Raoul for an entire fifteen minutes now. She only remembered him because of the one time they were driving from San Francisco to Mendocino to a bed and breakfast. She’d had three cups of coffee but he wouldn’t pull over to let her pee.

  Heidi squeezed her eyes shut and spoke to Lisette. “We want to cleanse our guilt, Lisette. We never should’ve made you leave your gris-gris at home that night. We were all wrong. Can we be forgiven? Give us a challenge—some trial by fire we need to endure in order to cleanse our wrongs.”

  Somewhat satisfied with this speech, Heidi even rapped three times on some nearby tombstone before resuming her walk down the row of crypts. Only, she reached the main pathway and no one was there.

  She wasn’t worried at first. No doubt her friends had to find a bathroom, too. She started heading in the direction she thought the streetcar ran, but after ten minutes, no one. Heidi nearly jumped out of her skin as she passed a massive mausoleum overgrown with branches and vines. A headless, larger-th
an-life statue of an angel was cradled in a half-circle of columns, giving Heidi such a fright that she called out.

  “Shayla! Faina!”

  Nothing. Heidi stood still so her footfalls didn’t muffle any sound. Strangely, she could no longer hear the monotonous drone of the interstate. She clutched her rum bottle tighter, sorry now that she had opened it.

  There. Some jubilant cries coming from the northwest corner of the cemetery. Heidi sped her pace. Some…drumming? “Oh, no,” she whispered. “Not more pilgrims.” She didn’t want to be led astray by strangers, taking her even farther from her friends. As she walked, she punched Shayla’s speed dial into her cell, but it went straight to voice mail.

  Her nostrils filled with the swampy, humid scent of the bayou. She was nearly upon the drumming and wailing now, and a flickering glow told her that someone had lit a campfire over this wall of vaults. She cleared her phone and punched Faina’s speed dial. She held it to her ear as she rounded the corner of crypts.

  Her arm fell as her jaw dropped.

  A wild woman, naked as the day is long, danced around the bonfire with a live boa constrictor around her shoulders.

  Heidi knew she wouldn’t find her roommates here.

  Chapter Two

  A warm mouth clamped around Rémy’s cock.

  Somehow, it didn’t seem odd that in the middle of a cemetery such a thing would be happening. Rémy relaxed and went with it. It suddenly seemed natural that, leaning back against Dominique You’s marble headstone lit only with pagan candles in colored glass jars, an eagerly sucking mouth would latch onto his erection and hoover him for dear life.

  It was such an odd ceremony to begin with. Rémy Lafitte had hired Madame “Laveau” to contact his ancestor, the pirate Jean. Colette Laveau was definitely not a descendant of Marie Laveau. Rémy had run a background check on her. She was Susan Oldman from Newark, New Jersey. The caterer and bartender was even a bit suspicious in her choice of the fruits she was offering at the graveside altar. Apparently she couldn’t even afford pineapples or peaches, the usual Santeria fruit offerings. She certainly could have bought pumpkins with the fee Rémy had paid her, but only rotten bananas lay scattered around the grave.

  Colette didn’t scrimp on the cane alcohol though, a favorite of Rémy’s egun. Egun apparently were spirits of dead ancestors. Rémy gulped freely of the spicy stuff from a red plastic cup. Colette had started by incanting a litany of names of egun, both Rémy’s ancestors and also many he didn’t recognize. The priestess had explained to Rémy that they needed the assistance of many egun to reach the orishas, or powerful spirits. One spirit in particular, she had told Rémy, could assist him in what he sought.

  Elegua was a warrior, a guardian of the crossroads. He could speak between humans and gods. Big, monumental decisions couldn’t be made without Elegua’s assistance. If Elegua didn’t favor Rémy with his approval, Rémy would never find out where Jean Lafitte’s bars of gold were hidden.

  Conjuring up Elegua involved breaking out a terrifying boa constrictor from its kennel. Dancing and rotating her hips, Colette’s eyes rolled up into her head. The snake flicked its tongue as it twined up her torso. Rémy wasn’t particularly fond of snakes, but he could tolerate this one if it meant finding the treasure. He clutched You’s headstone with one hand, his fingertips pressing into the engraved lettering. The elegy gave Rémy strength.

  Intrepid warrior on land and sea

  In a hundred combats showed his valor

  This new Bayard without reproach or fear

  Could have witnessed the ending of the

  World without trembling

  It was a lot more than just wanting his birthright, the treasure. In the past few years Rémy, founder and COO of Corsair Software based in Austin, Texas, had become increasingly interested in his infamous ancestor. His entire life people had jokingly asked if he was related to Jean Lafitte, and he’d always truthfully said “yes.” Lately, though, the power of Google had proven too persuasive, and he’d found himself increasingly reading about the fabled gold bars. He was pretty sure they were somewhere on the Barataria Preserve, Lafitte’s pirate stronghold. His assistant had discovered a credible source that narrowed the search area down considerably. Now their GPS only had to search within certain coordinates for a fifty-foot island of black mangrove and pelicans. Problem was, since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, much of the landscape had changed.

  Hurricane Katrina had also disturbed many of the graves in Cemetery Number 2. Upon first arriving here tonight, dim twilight had vaguely bathed a few crooked mausoleums that had been knocked off their foundations. Crumbling brick and the high tide waterlines of the hurricane told that the place was saturated in experience, turmoil, antiquity. One of the morbid crypts belched personal items—broken eyeglasses, plastic flowers, a shoe—that no one had seen fit to clean up. Rémy had expected his supernatural search to be grisly and creepy, but now he was starting to wonder if the ghost of the real Marie Laveau was pissed beyond all reason by all the disturbances and desecration of tombs going on lately. The only way Rémy could describe the air was otherworldly as he settled back onto You’s gravestone and the drummers began percolating away.

  The trio of percussionists Colette had brought were skilled at tapping up an atmosphere that lulled Rémy. His fuzzy, almost blissful trance couldn’t be accounted for by the rum Colette had given him. What did she put in this cup with the rum? There was an astringent bitterness that wasn’t unpleasant. It was almost like an instant addiction to the substance that urged him to drink more. More, more. Colette had explained to Rémy that the especially dangerous egun were ones who had been insane, criminals, or had suffered a violent death. Rémy was unsure about all three counts in regards to his piratical ancestor. The turmoil they’d experienced in life kept them trapped on earth, and now they flitted restlessly looking for hapless morons to harass, Colette had said.

  Pirates certainly had turmoil. Jean Lafitte’s lifestyle could not be described as relaxed or restful.

  “They are especially attracted to hospitals, places where accidents happened,” Colette had explained. “The air around graveyards is especially clogged with them.”

  “But that’s what we want,” Rémy had assumed.

  “That’s what we want,” Colette had agreed. “We have to let the egun know we remember and honor them. If we just act like we want personal gain from them, they will get mad and ignore us.”

  Now the bubbling pitter-patter of drums, Colette’s incantations, and the supernatural image of the snake twined around her shoulders all combined to send Rémy into another realm. Warm air feathered his bare forearms, and it didn’t seem out of the ordinary when grasping hands fondled his prick. In the indistinct light, the form kneeling between his thighs was just a hunched, formless creature. It wasn’t Colette, and it wasn’t a drummer—that was all Rémy knew or cared as the person released his cock from his jeans and inhaled it.

  The talented and hungry mouth urgently slurped away the entire length of his dick. Rémy didn’t care who or what it was. The frenzied drumming called a sort of trance upon him. The steam from sacred cauldrons swirled around his chest and neck. Lord knew what was in those cauldrons. The smell of smoky fish and bitter kola nuts tickled his nostrils.

  Rémy’s hand fingered the beads of his eleke, a skeleton key necklace Colette had assured him was for his protection and to receive messages, especially from Elegua. By wearing this, he had the blessings of every orisha in Lafitte’s pantheon of spirit guides. Colette had already wrung the neck of a live chicken. After letting it run around headless for a few minutes, she had tossed it into one of the cauldrons, a foot garishly sticking from the pot.

  Rémy’s other hand caressed the skull that bobbed at his groin. He was mildly surprised to feel a nearly bald head covered with close-shaven, crisp hair. The warm mouth sucked Rémy to a higher plane, drawing waves of lust from deep within his pelvis. He began moaning, because over the sound of the drumming and Colette�
�s wails, nobody could hear him anyway. The moaning vibrated his chest, resonated deep into his groin, enhanced the pleasure the mouth was drawing from his dick. He thought he could hear the mouth smacking, and the groans of the being who suckled vibrated deep within his balls, making him gasp.

  Just as Rémy felt on that dizzy precipice before ejaculation, something else touched his shoulder. Oh God, why did I have to see that? Long-nosed, like a dinosaur in an old kid’s movie, the boa constrictor was flicking its tongue at his throat.

  “Gah!” Rémy jerked away, yanking his cock from the hot mouth that had been pleasuring him. “What the fuck? That thing is fucking possessed!”

  “It’s just curious about you.”

  Rémy did a double take when the lilting, French-tinged man’s voice came from near his knees. He leaped back against the headstone, instantly remembered the constrictor that was twined there, and jerked in a new direction, breaking his eleke. The beads rained down on the man at his feet, but this was no time for caring about fashion or protection from evil spirits.

  A man had just given him a blowjob. That idea was more mortifying than any woman dancing with a snake or a headless chicken in a cauldron.

  “What the fuck, dude!” Rémy shouted, stuffing his still-erect cock back into his jeans. “Who the fuck are you? One of the drummers? I’m getting the fuck out of here. This bitch is a charlatan.”

  Colette was still dancing mindlessly, now without the snake, and the French guy was feeling around for Rémy’s fallen beads. “You’ve got to keep that eleke on! Tie knots in it so you don’t lose the rest. Without the egun, you can’t interact with the orishas. You’re going to need to talk to your orishas to find out what you’re seeking.”