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

  Stuffing the remainder of the necklace into his jean pocket, Rémy shoved the kneeling man’s shoulder. “Get the fuck away from me! What kind of sick pervert do you think I am? You come at me in a fucking graveyard when I’m vulnerable, trying to contact my poor dearly departed ancestor—”

  The French guy was standing. Flickering candlelight showed him as a nicely dressed, light-skinned black man with diamond studs in his earlobes. He had a pleading look that almost made Rémy feel sympathy. “Look, some demon made me do that, mon ami. Look. Look at this!” He swiped up the cup Rémy had been drinking rum from. Taking a small sip, the genteel guy made a big show out of spraying it from his mouth with disgust. “Cane toad! Cane toad and jimson weed! This brew causes amnesia and hallucinations. I thought I was back in the Vieux Carré in my drawing room with my—with my friend Michel and—well, never mind. Tell me how I got here so I can remove myself from this frightening place.”

  Rémy drew himself up with pride. Not only had this good-looking guy just given him the cocksucking of a lifetime, but he seemed just as disoriented as Rémy. There must be a lot of cane toad in this rum. “What the fuck? How you got here? Didn’t you come with this quack, this Susan Oldman from Newark, New Jersey?”

  The Frenchman looked appalled at the idea. “What? That crazy woman? I’ve never seen her before in my life! Last thing I remember, I was having a pleasant time with Michel Dugrasse on my divan—”

  Rémy cut him off with a swipe of the hand. “I don’t care what your girlfriend’s name is or what you do with her. I’m making like a baby and heading on out. I’m just going to walk like a normal person back to the streetcar, because this”—Rémy gestured at the entire bizarre occult scene around him—“is just too much for me.”

  But the Frog had other plans for Rémy. With the horrified hand of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he pointed over Rémy’s shoulder. “Aaah, aaah!”

  After being blown by another man and nearly French kissed by an enormous snake, Rémy wasn’t sure what to prepare himself for. In the shadow of a wrought iron gate something moved, but it was only a meek, frightened woman. Eager for an excuse to get away from You’s gravestone, Rémy took several long strides and grabbed the girl by the forearm as she shrank back into the fence.

  “You’re not with this crazy lady.” Somehow, Rémy knew that this shy girl had nothing to do with the New Jersey bartender. Her straight strawberry-blonde hair hung trembling over one of her cornflower eyes, and she looked as disoriented as him. She had a lovable, innocent demeanor that Rémy might have appreciated more under different circumstances. “Don’t repeat a word of anything you saw here tonight to anyone, under any circumstances.”

  “Don’t frighten her.” The Frog was suddenly at his side. “I do want to know what happened here. Madame, from which way did I arrive? Did I take the streetcar, or did I emerge from a hack?”

  Rémy gaped at the black man. Who was this bizarre cocksucker, anyway? The thin scarf around his neck must have choked all sense from him, and for the first time, Rémy bothered looking down at the guy’s brocade vest. He shouted, “I’ll tell you who’s a hack! You and your fellow bartender Susan Oldman! You charge me five hundred fucking dollars to decapitate a chicken, drug me with a poisonous toad, and now you assault me to prevent me from saying anything to anyone! Come on, miss, I’ll take you out of this hellhole. You shouldn’t be alone here this late, especially on Halloween with all the whackos like this guy out loose.”

  He started taking the meek girl’s arm, but she protested. “No! I know I drank too much alcohol, but that doesn’t explain what I saw this guy….do…”

  Rémy rolled his eyes. “We don’t want to think about what this guy did. Come, let’s get out of here. What are you doing wandering around, anyway? Part of a party?”

  “No!” cried the gentlemanly Frog. “Let her explain what she just saw! I’m just as confused as you, and I’m starting to get a very eerie feeling about this. I think the egun and the orishas have got a lot of explaining to do about why I was—wait!” The Frog got a faraway look in his eyes. “There was a struggle…”

  The girl could contain herself no more. She burst out, “You came out of that mausoleum! You came staggering like you were drunk, looking around like you’d never seen this place before. It’s the Free People of Color section of the St. Louis Cemetery—I know, because I was just wandering there looking for my friends.”

  “Yes!” proclaimed the bartender. “I am a gens de couleur libres! But why would I be inside a mausoleum, unless someone kidnapped me?”

  She continued, “There’s all this construction tape because Hurricane Katrina unearthed a lot of those Free People of Color from their crypts. But it looks like a lot of stuff is still unrepaired.”

  Rémy snorted at his newfound buddy. “Damn, did it unearth you, mon ami.”

  But the Frog was taking the woman’s words dead seriously. Stretching out his arms, he felt himself, examined himself. He patted himself down as though he couldn’t believe he was real. Rémy was starting to get a creeping feeling, too, especially when he noticed a couple clods of moldy-smelling dirt crumbling from the Frog’s wide shoulders. Had the guy really been in the crypt? He was just sucking my dick with a mouthful of corpse dust.

  “Mon Dieu!” The Frog got that faraway look again, staring slack-jawed into the darkness. “I was in my drawing room—”

  “With Michelle, yes, we know,” Rémy practically spat with anger.

  “—when my sister Sabine came rushing in sobbing her little heart out. She told me that Monsieur Leclerc had finally stepped over the line with her. He went farther than he ever had and mortally offended her honor. I became enraged. I raced out, hailing the first hack I saw.”

  “A hack is a sort of carriage,” the woman told Rémy.

  “I know.” Rémy was beginning to get that idea, but an even worse creeping feeling was coming upon him. Watching the French guy describe his living room scene with his hands and eyes, it was as though Rémy could see the picture the guy painted. The divan was covered in red velvet, and several ferns were placed in pots around the room. The wallpaper was even flocked, the drapery lush, held back with satin cords.

  Rémy knew that the cocksucking Frog was not from this time.

  Chapter Three

  The more Niko de la Concepción Valdés talked, the stranger conclusions he reached about what had happened. The events he described to his newfound friends seemed like only yesterday.

  The beautiful man the sorceress called Rémy and the sweet-faced girl listened with more respect now. Niko described taking the hack and paying the driver extra to whip the mount into a frenzy in his zeal to get to Leclerc’s house. Down St. Charles Avenue they flew, Niko’s rage growing in intensity as he thought of what Sabine had told him. Niko gripped the Bowie knife he’d stuck into his boot as the carriage rattled under the moss-covered live oak trees that formed a canopy above.

  “Nothing bad happens without something good coming out of it,” they used to say in Cuba. Well, something damned good was about to come out of Leclerc’s unwanted advances upon Sabine.

  Niko had already flung some coins at the hack driver by the time it rolled to a stop in front of the pillared mansion. The bastard was at home. Niko could tell right away by the ostentatious landau with the glass windscreen parked in the carriage house. Niko didn’t wait for any damned footman to open the door for him. In fact, he didn’t even knock.

  “Leclerc!” he roared, stomping into the foyer. An aghast butler appeared openmouthed at the bottom of the stairs, not daring to make a move. “Leclerc, come out this instant! You are finally going to give me my satisfaction!”

  Niko could hear Leclerc in his study behind the closed door, scurrying around, probably loading his pistol. Niko wasn’t such a coward as to need a pistol, but he also wasn’t stupid enough to barge on in to the businessman’s house unarmed. Whipping the Bowie from his boot, he stood facing the study door, braced for action.

&nb
sp; “Come on out, Leclerc! You need to finally take responsibility for your reprehensible actions! I will defend my sister’s honor until death!”

  At this, the butler vanished back upstairs, his limbs all splayed in terror. Predictably, Leclerc sprinted into the foyer speedily, the barrel of his Colt’s pistol aimed directly at Niko’s skull.

  Anticipating this, Niko dodged the first bullet handily by leaping to one side. The acrid cloud of sulfur created a nice fog through which he could lunge at the evil bastard. His Bowie sliced Leclerc’s shoulder, sending a surprising fountain of warm blood spurting forth, splashing Niko’s chin. He would have been disgusted if he hadn’t been so enraged, and he yanked the knife out, preparing for his next move.

  Like some rejuvenated corpse, the man was just too heinous to die. Even with his shirt drenched in blood, Leclerc was able to nimbly cock the hammer and fire again, this time at such close range the ball tore through Niko’s waist and into the banister behind him. Again Niko plunged the knife through Leclerc’s ribcage, connecting a solid hit to the heart. The knife ground against bone, a sickening feeling, but madness fueled Niko’s strength now, and once again he extricated the Bowie.

  The force of his action sent him reeling back into a coat stand. Tangled in some overcoats, his bloody knife slashed at the clothes, and Leclerc was able to squeeze off another ball. This was the mortal shot that hit Niko in the pit of the throat.

  Explaining it now to Rémy and the girl, Niko faltered, trying to find words. The fake voodoo queen still writhed, calling out to Santeria orishas that Niko recalled from Havana and The Vieux Carré. She yelled, “I am Colette Laveau!” Which was ridiculous, because the real Marie Laveau was a voodoo queen, not a priestess of Santeria. She was obviously a charlatan and a fraud, but her antics were helping Niko piece together what had transpired.

  Rémy said, “So you…died?”

  “Yes, I tell you! Leclerc and I were locked in forever combat. It was a fight to the death, and we both finished each other off.”

  Rémy said hesitantly, “In…1855?”

  “Yes! Don’t you think I know what damned year I died?”

  The honey-haired girl cut to the matter at hand. “So go back to your story. What’s the last thing you remember after this Leclerc asshole shot you in the throat?”

  Niko conjured up the memory again. “Well, he fell against me, dead as well. We both collapsed on the ground. I dropped the knife. I felt a strange soaring sensation, and I was looking down on my body entwined with Leclerc’s on the floor. Suddenly I was angry no more. Although it was the ultimate mortification to lie with my fateful enemy in death, suddenly I didn’t care. In Santeria we believe in the afterlife, and I was just glad to discover it was true, to have proof. I watched as the blood pooled around us, and I was overjoyed.”

  “Yes, yes!” cried the girl. “I’ve had a similar experience when I almost drowned in Hawaii. Did you see any spirit guides? Was anyone helping you?”

  Niko frowned. “That’s the odd thing. I was expecting all of that, and nothing of the sort happened. All I remember is blackness.” A sick feeling of dread spread from the pit of his stomach through his limbs. “I think I was in Everlost. Somehow Leclerc’s bitter demon of a spirit became mingled with mine in death, and we became relegated to Everlost, a no man’s land. Not dead but not mortal, stuck between worlds. There is no reincarnation or redemption, no moving on to the next plane, until Leclerc or I come to an agreement. He is stuck there, as well, along with my poor sister Sabine.” Suddenly Niko knew, although it had not occurred until 1873, that Sabine had taken her own life, childless, alone. He almost felt he could reach out and touch her, talk to her, because they were both condemned to Everlost.

  “But wait a minute.” Rémy sliced the air with his hand. “If you’re stuck in this no man’s land, how can you be standing here now? You seem pretty damned real to me. I can even smell the decay on you.”

  “Yes,” said the girl. “What happened next? What’s the next thing you remember?”

  Rémy turned to the girl. She was beautiful in an innocent, unworldly way, as though she hadn’t seen or experienced much. Purity radiated from her—calmness, patience. “Who are you, anyway? You never even told us your name. How do you fit into all of this?”

  “I’m Heidi, a stockbroker from San Francisco, and I’m not sure how I fit into all of this, to be honest. I came here to St. Louis Cemetery with my friends to find Marie Laveau’s tomb and make a wish for our deceased friend, and I got separated from them.”

  “Maybe that’s your problem,” said Rémy. “You’re in St. Louis Cemetery Number Two. Marie Laveau’s tomb is in St. Louis Number One. I came here to find the grave of Dominique You, an associate of my ancestor, the pirate Jean Lafitte.”

  “Oh, crap,” said Heidi. “That would explain why everything has gone south. So tell me, Mister…Monsieur—”

  “Niko de la Concepción Valdés,” Niko said grandly, bowing at the waist. Clumps of dirt rained from his shoulders. Mortified, he brushed them off. Mon Dieu. Am I really back from the dead? I feel fully human, yet I can hear the echoes of Sabine’s voice in my ears. “I remember gasping for breath, air filling lungs that had not breathed mortal air in…” He looked critically at Heidi and Rémy. Rémy was reasonably clad in some working man’s sort of denim pants and a simple work shirt. Stunningly handsome, he did remind Niko of his lover Michel. His haughty nostrils flared with indignation, just the way Michel’s did when offended. His neatly trimmed mustache and beard, shoulder-length hair in a ponytail at the back of his neck, almost identically mirrored Michel’s style. Niko remembered exactly what he’d done with this beautiful man, and why. He just had a feeling Rémy wouldn’t like it.

  But Heidi was clad oddly in an exceedingly short dress that showed her knees, almost like a nightgown. Unless she had sleepwalked to the cemetery, there was no explanation for attire like that. Yet she wore somewhat normal visiting shoes, albeit with exceedingly high heels.

  “What year is this?” Niko asked. When Heidi told him, he gasped and fell back against the wrought iron fence. He felt the cold metal through his thin waistcoat, the one he’d been wearing while sucking Michel’s beautiful penis on the divan, well…over a hundred years ago.

  This was impossible. “I’m being given another chance,” he said weakly. “Another chance at redemption.”

  Heidi took his arm to prop him up. “I understand it’s a lot to take in, but we’ve got to get to the bottom of this, Monsieur Valdés. Now tell me, what happened when you breathed in air—?”

  “Let’s just get out of here,” Rémy said with irritation, perfectly mirroring Niko’s beloved Michel. “I don’t think this crazy bitch is going to be of any help to me in my search. Look at her, wailing away about a divine messenger. Where are you staying, Heidi? Let’s just all go to my house on Terpsichore Street and figure this out.”

  The half-naked charlatan was wailing, “Man of the crossroads! I respect you by dancing in a circle!”

  Niko said, “When someone comes to a big decision, the crossroads is governed by Elegua. He is a master communicator between humans and gods.”

  “Yes!” Rémy frowned, suddenly interested. “That’s the orisha she said could help me.”

  Niko said, “The orishas are more willing to help those who interact with them than those who just want physical gain.”

  Heidi inserted a hand between the two men. “Finish your story, Monsieur. Maybe she’s not such a fake after all.”

  “Perhaps not,” admitted Niko, “because she managed to bring me forth from Everlost. I took some breaths and heard the chants I had not heard in so many…decades.” He shuddered. “I heard the names of my egun and their orishas, and I greeted them. I became carried off in a frenzy with the drumming, and suddenly I felt that I was back in my drawing room, before any of the…unpleasantness happened. Before Sabine came rushing in.”

  Rémy shifted uncomfortably on his feet, but Niko continued with his story. Heidi, a
t least, was rapt with attention.

  “So I came forth from the mausoleum. I saw the Santera, the drummers, the chicken in the cauldron. I saw the clay head of Elegua and the offerings, and I knew I was at a crossroads—”

  “Hellmouth,” said Rémy. “A window that can open to different worlds.”

  “Yes, Hellmouth. I saw you and you looked exactly like my dear Michel. I was compelled to come to you, to kneel before you in respect, to take your big, hard penis into my mouth so I could pleasure you—”

  Rémy grabbed Heidi by the forearm. “Let’s get out of here. This is no place for a woman to be alone late at night, especially on the night before Halloween.”

  Heidi protested. “But don’t you want to know—”

  “Zut alors!”

  Niko had been watching over Rémy’s shoulder as the boa constrictor slithered up the crumbling façade of a tombstone, maybe that of Dominique You, the famed pirate. That was nothing unusual. But suddenly the giant snake reared up like a viper, not in a manner that constrictors were known for. Niko took heed.

  The snake’s eyes glowed an otherworldly shade of red, and it started to sprout black, glossy locks that grew like a flowing creek over ears that were beginning to look long and cupped, like a devil’s. Niko cried out and pointed with a stiff arm.

  Heidi shrieked and jumped backward into Niko’s embrace. Interestingly, Rémy stood in front of both of them with feet spread, hands shaped like claws. The snake was now losing its scales as it puffed out and became muscular, with a deep barrel chest. Colette, the charlatan, beseeched it to grow, but Niko wasn’t listening to her words anymore. He clutched Heidi to his chest as the snake continued to grow in size. Now wearing fur that was turning crimson, two long corded arms stemmed from its broad chest.

  “Jesus H. Criminy,” growled Rémy.

  Heidi was more direct. “Holy shit. What is that?”