To Be Where You Are, page 10
Ben gave him a wry, one-sided smile. “Depending on your point of view,” he said, “I suppose having a penchant for evil and a taste for pretty men might qualify.”
Chapter Eleven
Jackson let out the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He gaped at Ben for a couple of seconds. “Is he a bokor?”
Ben looked surprised. “You’re familiar with that stuff?”
“Yeah, somewhat.” Jackson didn’t want to say more. “So, is he?”
“That’s a good enough description.”
“Shit,” Jackson whispered. “Do you know if he’s currently at his aunt’s house?”
“I hope not,” Ben muttered. He lifted his glass and drank, his eyes still trained on his companion.
“Why? You afraid of him?”
Ben slid a glance toward the counter, which Lucille was wiping down after having removed the dishes. Only when she returned to the kitchen did he start talking again.
He leaned farther over the table and spoke in a murmur. “He, um … came on to me about five years ago, the summer before I left for college. I don’t know if he sensed I was gay or just liked the way I looked. My mother had to go talk to his Aunt Bechima, who has some control over him. She’s the local mambo.”
So Ben definitely was gay. Jackson knew he could have this young man—all he had to do was say the word—and that realization gave him a disturbing, guilt-drenched little thrill. “Nothing came of Joseph’s attention?” he asked, trying to shove all dirty thoughts aside.
“He backed off,” Ben said. “But ever since then, I go cold all over whenever I catch him looking at me.”
And you’re mighty easy to look at, Mr. Twenty-two. Jackson cleared his throat. “I can imagine. So, why didn’t this guy just become a houngan if his aunt’s a mambo? Couldn’t he pretty much have walked right into that position?”
“Pretty much,” Ben said, “but from all the talk I heard growing up, he wouldn’t settle for being an ordinary voodoo priest. He’s always been arrogant and headstrong and a little crazy, always seemed drawn to the dark side. That’s what the older folks say, anyhow.” Ben took a drink and wiped his upper lip with his lower. “I’m inclined to believe them, based on the contact I’ve had with him.”
Jackson stared for a couple of seconds before shaking himself out of his hormone-induced stall. “How do I get to Bechima’s house?”
Ben gave him directions of the landmark variety—look for this dead tree and turn at the green house with the chicken coop out back—but they were sufficient. Jackson began to inch out of the booth.
“Jackson?” Ben reached for him but pulled his hand back without delivering a touch. “Would you maybe like to talk more over dinner or drinks or something?”
At that uncertain moment, his youth became glaringly obvious. Touched and flattered, Jackson watched him with an indulgent smile. “Are you asking me on a date?”
The color deepened on Ben’s beautifully molded cheekbones. “No,” he blurted. “I was just trying to… I mean, if you’re straight, don’t think I’m—”
“I’m not,” Jackson said quietly, his smile still in place. “Straight, that is. But I do have a partner who means the world to me. So I’m not going to court temptation.” He lightly squeezed Ben’s wrist. “Thanks for your help. And for the ego boost. I’ve got more than a few years on you, my man.”
Lowering his eyes for a moment, Ben exhaled a single laugh. “Sir, regardless of your age, your ego shouldn’t need any boosting.” When he looked up again, his gaze had lost its innocence. It was sultry and boldly seductive. “In case you change your mind—”
“I won’t,” Jackson said. He got out of the booth. “Have you ever been in love?”
Ben shook his head. “No. Haven’t met the right person.”
“Well, when it happens, you’ll probably find out at some point what I’m going through right now.”
“And what’s that?” Ben’s taunting, come-hither smile hadn’t gone away. He was still trying.
“How it feels to walk away from someone like you.”
“How does it feel?” Ben asked, his voice matching his look. He slid to the edge of the bench and sat with his hands braced on either side of his crotch.
The move was so coy yet so obvious, it was actually kind of charming. Jackson’s smile broadened for an instant. “Kind of like walking with one foot in heaven and one in hell.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“You will.” The heaven was Adin, and his love for Adin, and knowing he was being true to that love. The hell—well, that was turning his back on one groping, panting, sweating, coming good time. “It was nice meeting you. Enjoy your time with your family.”
Ben sighed. “I suppose I should admire your scruples.” His gaze wandered down and up Jackson’s body. “Although I’d rather admire other things.”
Shaking his head, Jackson chuckled at the corny line and turned toward the door. God damn. Hit on by a handsome kid young enough to be his son but old enough to know his way around dick.
“Be careful,” Ben said as Jackson opened the door. “I mean it. Don’t anger him.”
Jackson didn’t say what he was thinking. Good ol’ Joseph better worry about not angering me. He was about to leave the diner when Lucille called out to him from the counter area.
“Hey, big spender,” she said with ghost of a smile. “You goin’ to see Joseph Beaudry?”
“Looks that way,” Jackson answered, marveling at her hearing.
Lucille picked a saltshaker off the counter and tossed it at him. Jackson grabbed it out of the air. “You might need that,” she said.
Jackson pulled down his mouth as he regarded it. “Hm.” Making sure the shaker was upright, he shoved it into the pocket with the most room. “Thank you.”
Lucille’s smile widened for an instant. She nodded once in reply.
“Take care,” Jackson murmured to Ben. He was tempted to squeeze the kid’s shoulder but refrained. No sense in giving him encouragement, however unintentional.
Jackson left the diner and strode toward the rental car.
He was in no mood for more games that made him feel jerked around. There’d been enough stimuli in recent days—things that turned him on, things that pissed him off, things that did both at the same time—to submerge his disposition in a whole tub of cranky.
It was another remnant of his Supe the Biker incarnation. Back then, in his early and mid twenties, if circumstances conspired to shove a burr up his ass, the only thing that could dislodge it was a fight. He was more discriminating now, wouldn’t provoke just anybody who looked at him the wrong way, but he was no less capable of copping an attitude.
“Ultimatum time, Noah.” Jackson yanked open the car door and landed behind the steering wheel like a keg of gunpowder.
Drink straw in mouth, Noah gave him a clueless look.
Jackson started the car. “If you don’t release Celia Quill’s mind before the day is out, I’m gonna fuck you up. I’m gonna fuck you up so bad, Noah, you’ll want to find sanctuary in a church while your brain is at the dry cleaners. I shit you not.”
The tires bit into dust and spat it out.
Noah’s open mouth tried to prove it was good for something. “Then we’d better—”
Jackson fired a forefinger at his face. “No, you’d better.”
He settled more comfortably into the seat. There. Now that was one way to help unstick an ass burr.
* * * *
Perez felt trapped in a bottle of dark, heavy oil, like melancholy distilled into substance. Was the bottle hanging from that tree? He couldn’t tell. Beyond his gelatinous prison, lights flickered and shadows moved. Now and then, a sound penetrated his cocoon. A husky murmur. A dusky chuckle. Ominous chittering.
Most of the time, he wasn’t aware of his body. Sometimes, he was … when touch kindled awareness. A crow’s wing scratching down the length of one leg. A snail crawling along his cheek or neck or chest. He couldn’t see these things; he only fancied he knew what they were. The measured violence in those touches often goaded his cock into plumping. He couldn’t see his cock, but he could feel the telltale, thick quiver in his groin.
Where were the colors? He missed the kaleidoscopic colors of his previous dream. And of his life.
Noah, come get me. I’m lost.
* * * *
Just as Jackson saw a person up ahead—an older, heavyset woman, lumbering down the road—Noah’s fingertips dug into his thigh. Jackson curbed an urge to grab his hand and fling it aside. Instead, he swung his head in Noah’s direction.
“Jackson, I just heard him,” Noah whispered. “He’s in trouble. He needs me. And he’s close by. Stop up there!”
Startled by his outburst, Jackson nearly veered off the road. Noah was pointing at the woman. Jackson didn’t question him, just slowed the car and eased toward the pedestrian. Shielding her eyes with one hand, the woman stopped walking and peered at them.
“You just chill out,” he said to Noah, who suddenly looked like something was coming apart inside him.
Jackson stopped right on the dirt road, since there was no shoulder. He leaned out the car window. “Excuse me, ma’am.”
She didn’t approach but silently kept eyeing them.
“Do you happen to know a man named Joseph Beaudry?”
Her eyelids stretched. She seemed to swallow. After a few seconds, her head dipped. The movement looked more like a tic than a nod.
“Are we going the right way to his house? We need to talk to him.”
“Why?” she asked curtly. She kept looking from Jackson to Noah.
Jackson glanced at his companion, since Noah was getting most of the woman’s attention. Fucker looked deranged, like a saucer-eyed ventriloquist’s dummy. Great. That was bound to put her at ease.
“A friend of ours might be with him. Slender, attractive man, long hair, kind of … feminine seeming.” Jackson nearly grimaced at his own words. Shit, he didn’t know how to describe Perez. Not to a sixty-something rural Southern woman.
Her face rumpled in a peculiar, distressed way. She hustled over to the car and, without asking, got in the back seat. Jackson and Noah turned to look at her.
“He’s there, isn’t he?” Noah said briskly. “And something’s—”
Jackson shut him up by firmly curling a hand around his wrist. “Noah,” he said, as if addressing a child, “you just calm down and let me talk to this lady.”
“So you know that pretty man who come here from Nawlins,” she said, her accent and haste blurring the words. She closed her eyes and began rocking, muttering something in Creole.
“Are you Joseph’s aunt?” Jackson asked.
The woman nodded as she rocked.
“And our friend is with Joseph now?”
Dolorously, she wagged her head. Jackson couldn’t tell if that meant no or if she was bemoaning the situation. When she spoke again, he understood. Sort of.
“I sent his foulness to the tree, night before he left. I trapped it there, but he called his dark hand back, busted it right out of that jar.”
“Please,” Jackson said, “tell us if our friend is with Joseph.” He could only infer what the rest of her babble meant, based on the fact she was a mambo.
She’d apparently performed some ritual designed to cast out and confine her nephew’s wickedness. The rest of the stuff didn’t mean much of anything to Jackson, or matter really, except that this mambo was convinced the bokor had retrieved his badness.
“Joseph bound him,” she said. “Joseph think he catched Erzulie Freda in that man-lady. And Joseph gon’ keep him!”
“Ma’am, ma’am, please slow down.” Jackson needed to piece together all these claims so he could determine how best to proceed. He needed to know what he was up against. If this alleged bokor was holding Perez by physical force, that was one thing. But supernatural force was something else entirely. “How did Joseph bind Perez? How does he plan on keeping Perez?”
The woman cast a jittery look out the car window, back the way she’d come. “Bound him with the words and the necklace and the potions. But then Mr. Lady want to leave, return to his home. So Joseph used the powder. The powder.” Her eyes lost their focus as her face began to droop in despair. She clapped her hands over it. “Oh no oh no oh no.” She again began muttering, fast and not in English.
Turning forward, Jackson did a quick visual check of Noah, who wasn’t even blinking. That was a good thing. He might’ve been paralyzed with horror, but at least he wasn’t getting his crazy on.
One word suddenly rose, loud and clear, from the woman’s jumble of Creole and English. Zombi. Dread fisted in Jackson’s gut. The raw material of a zombie was a corpse.
“Ma’am.” Shit, what was her name again? He did a quick recall of his conversation with Ben. “Miss Bechima, is our friend all right?” Jackson didn’t want to say “still alive,” because he didn’t want to unzip Noah’s fragile stillness.
Finally, she uncovered her face. The whites of her eyes looked like watered-down egg yolk. Her mouth trembled. “Deep asleep on Joseph’s bed. Dead asleep.”
Dead asleep but not dead. Nope, not if Noah just heard his thoughts.
“Well,” said Jackson, “if you don’t mind, we’re going to go get him.”
Bechima rapidly shook her head. “Joseph won’t like that. Joseph watchin’ over him. Joseph in a state right now. You don’t wan’ be messin’ with that. Unless you got your gris-gris and it be good and strong.”
Jackson smiled. “Oh, I got my gris-gris. And it’s very strong.”
Chapter Twelve
Once Bechima had secured a pledge from Jackson that he wouldn’t harm Joseph—not too badly, anyway—she got out of the car and kept walking toward her destination, wherever it was. Jackson got the impression she was going to consult some fellow practitioner about how to tighten the reins on her wayward nephew. Silently, he wished her luck.
When he felt confident he’d found the right house, he pulled onto the side of the road just short of an overgrown dirt driveway. He figured the lush and knotted shrubbery would conceal the car from anybody in the house.
Noah was about to bolt from the car as soon as it stopped, but Jackson grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “Now cut the shit,” he barked. “I’m not sure yet what we’re dealing with, so just sit here and let me think. A few more minutes won’t matter.”
“That prick’s got him saturated with pharmacological substances,” Noah said with a kind of frantic fury. He lifted a book he’d brought along and waved it between them. “They can be mind-numbing. That’s what’s made Perez so damned tractable.”
“Well, not only that,” Jackson murmured.
Noah dropped his hand and the book to his lap. “What, you think this creep can actually cast spells? Can actually ‘bind’ people, even zombify people?”
“Anything’s possible with strong enough sorcery. And charisma. You should know that.”
Noah stared at him for a moment. “You’re right,” he said, shoulders sagging. “I guess I just didn’t want to entertain the possibility. But I should’ve known. I’ve heard Perez talk about Candomblé. I’ve even encouraged him to start mastering it.” Ruefully, Noah smiled. “But it’s like trying to convince a firefly it should learn to blink on cue.”
Jackson patted his leg. “I know. Now just give me a few minutes to collect my thoughts, all right?”
Noah nodded.
Jackson pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and threw it on the dashboard. He’d never risk a face-off with any kind of magician with his wallet on his hip. Too many personal identifiers. Besides, he had his Swiss Army knife in one front pocket and Lucille’s salt shaker in the other. That was enough freight. He was starting to feel like a Boy Scout with OCD.
Jackson leaned his head against the seat’s headrest and closed his eyes.
Erzulie Freda. Okay, he remembered the name from his trips to New Orleans and the Caribbean. She was a loa, a member of the spirit pantheon, an intermediary between mankind and God. Each loa had a very distinct appearance and personality and was associated with certain aspects of life and death. Erzulie, as Jackson recalled, had a few different manifestations.
This Joseph character believed for some reason that Erzulie Freda, one of the spirit’s forms, hadn’t just temporarily possessed Perez but had taken up permanent residence in him. So the Freda variant, Jackson deduced, was the one associated with courtship and romantic love, with flowers and perfume and finery. Erzulie Freda also favored homosexual men. All this made sense in relation to Perez.
Noah was likely right about the use of substances. Voodoo practitioners drew upon a vast pharmacopeia derived from plant and animal parts, some of which were innocuous, some of which had distinct effects on the human mind or body. Perez’s doors of perception had probably turned into the revolving type. But that still left too many things unexplained. Jackson would have to confront Joseph to get a better sense of what havoc he was capable of wreaking.
“Okay, listen,” he said to Noah. “I’m going to the house now. What you need to do is stay here and do your thing. Get through to Perez, urge him to fight off this guy’s influence. You also need to get into Joseph’s head if you can and stir things up in there. Make him unsure of himself or willing to let Perez go or whatever you think will help.”
“It’s going to be hard.” Noah seemed to have pulled himself together, now that they’d reached a critical juncture in this rescue attempt. “I know next to nothing about him or the people around him. That means I don’t have much of an access point. And I’ve never invaded a bokor before.”
“Just try,” Jackson said, opening the car door. “Don’t worry. We’ll get Perez away from him.” He paused. “And don’t forget what I told you earlier, Noah. About—”
Weakly, Noah smiled. “It’s already done, my friend. The woman has her own thoughts back. Now it’s up to her to decide what to do with them.”
