Page 21

Once done, I thought about what he’d said.

“Little witch, I’m coming for you.”

I gripped the bathroom counter. “Who the fuck are you?”

Silence answered.

The bite throbbed beneath the layers of red flannel, white cotton, indigo cloth, and more white cotton.

My heart beat with it.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Then the black heart at the center of my chest pulsed harder. “Oh, hell no.”

I hurried into the hotel room, grabbed my phone from the nightstand, and called my Grand Aunt Delphine.

She answered on the fourth ring. “Why are you calling me so early? You know it’s the witching hour.”

It was a fourteen-hour difference between Kyoto and New Orleans. Six in the evening for me meant four in the morning for her, and that was when Aunt Delphine did her real work. The witching hour—when the veil thinned and the dead pressed their faces against her kitchen window to watch.

I could see her clear as day.

Barefoot on the cypress floorboards, standing in a wide dark puddle of blood that was probably still spreading. Her white dress soaked with fresh blood from the knees down. Both her forearms painted to the elbow with even more blood like she'd dipped them in buckets.

Some man would be on the floor behind her.

Wrists tied.

Throat opened from ear to ear.

Aunt Delphine made sure her sacrifices were bad people and confirmed their atrocities several times before she had my cousins grab them. They were husbands who'd put their wives in the hospital too many times. Uncles whose young nieces felt uncomfortable when they came to visit and were too scared and hurt to say why.

The city forgot those nasty horrible men.

The loa didn't.

Her current male sacrifice’s chest was probably cracked wide, and his heart already lifted out and set steaming in a clay bowl beside her knee.

Nine black candles would be burning in a half-circle around him with some of the man’s blood running between them.

And I’d just interrupted the big moment before she started casting powerful spells.

“I’ll be quick, Auntie.”

“Don’t matter how quick you’re going to be, I’m hanging up soon. Don’t want the blood to dry.”

“I went to the shrine, picked the roots, and saw this wolf-thing with eight tails that was broken and shattered. I healed him and—”

Delphine’s dark chuckle filled the phone. That made the hairs rise along my arms. She was enjoying this. That was never good.

My nerves flared. “What’s so funny?”

“Everything, child. Everything.”