“The Mambo wouldn’t have let you do that.”

“No, you’re right. And she didn’t.” She walked over to a door and opened it. I heard the squawking of a few chickens, and she emerged with a black one in her hands. “I’ve been putting hexes on her from the very beginning. Nothing large, just enough to wipe her memory, to make her comply to me. Like you, I could never really make her do what I wanted, but I got enough out of her. I got her to teach me a lot of things that she never would have otherwise. I practiced and practiced and practiced until I knew I was ready.”

She walked to the middle of the circle and quickly sliced off the chicken’s head. It fell to the ground with a wet thunk, the eyes still blinking, the beak still moving. I hoped that was its nerves backfiring, that the poor fucker wasn’t still alive.

She held the headless body in her hands like it was still alive, blood spurting out from the neck.

I swallowed thickly, my eyes drawn back to the chicken head. It was staring at me. “If you’re all about tradition, if you think the culture has gotten white-washed, then why are you going after black people? They’re your own.”

“To make a point,” she said angrily, and I saw that façade of hers slip again. “Aren’t you listening? Look at my brothers and sisters in this city. We made this city, and now we’re being kept in these neighborhoods to kill each other. Nobody cares. The police don’t. The city doesn’t. The country doesn’t. We thought that after Katrina the focus would be on us and our crime and our poverty and what was really going on. But it didn’t last. It’s back to shit again. No one even cares if black people are dropping left and right like flies. If anything, they’re happy. They only care when they reappear and start attacking white people.”

I couldn’t fathom her reasoning. Her point was lost. She was mad, and mad with power. I wanted to buy more time by asking more questions, but I didn’t know what I’d end up doing with the time I got. “But you’re turning them into slaves, just like they once were. Doesn’t that strike you as wrong at all, or just a little ironic?”

She glared at me. “Everyone has to make sacrifices. You’re one of them.”

She jerked the chicken at me and the blood went spraying onto my body, covering me with hot rivulets from head to toe. She came forward and glared down at me.

“I tried everything with you, Declan. I tried to give you the easy way out. If you’d been weaker, this would have been over with before it got painful. I tried the candles, the oils, the poppets. Everything. The only way I’ll ever have complete control of you is if I take parts of you away. You’ll be weaker, and I’ll be stronger. It worked with Maryse, it will work with you.”

She reached out to my face with a bloody hand and I tried to jerk away. “What happened to Maryse?”

“She’s dead,” she said. “And the real kind of dead. She was too frail to serve me as a slave, though that would have been wonderfully ironic. She’s underneath the house right now, a snack for the alligators.”

Her fingers traced my cheekbone. “You really are a handsome man,” she whispered soothingly. “Perfect cheekbones. Perfect lips. The darkest eyes. Everything about you is perfect. Except for your ear.”

I froze. Her fingers moved up to my ear and began stroking the lobe, her skin sticking to mine from the chicken blood.

“What about my ear?” I asked, my voice shaking.

“It’s a shame I’ll have to take part of it. Though I’m going to guess you’re not much of a listener anyway.”

She took out the blade and aimed it at my ear.

No. Fucking. Way.

I started bucking in my seat, trying to find a point of concentration, trying to get my strength back to break through whatever motherfucking spell this bitchy witch put on me. It was almost working too; though my feet felt paralyzed, I could feel the restraints around my arms coming loose.

Ambrosia tried to get the knife close, but I kept moving. I ended up with a large gash along my jaw and she started swearing in French. Suddenly, she stood up straight and raised her hands in the air. The shadows began to move and five of her slaves came at me. They held my head in place. I stared up at them, looking into their dull eyes, pleading for some recognition, for some humanity to be left. There was nothing in them at all. My hope was fading.

“I’d try and stay still if I were you,” Ambrosia warned me. “Unless you want me taking out your eye instead.”

I closed my eyes, not wanting that. I reached out in my mind to Perry, hoping that somehow she could hear me. I listened, and hoped I could hear her. There was nothing but the labored breathing of the zombie slaves, their foul stench of death.

Ambrosia took the knife and very slowly, to prolong the pain and agony that seized every part of me, she cut away the very top edge of my left ear.

I screamed and screamed until my throat felt ripped, my lungs raw. Warm liquid rushed down into my ear canal, trickling down my neck.

She moved away, proudly showing me the piece of my ear. She reached into her dark blouse, pulled out a small bag she was wearing around her neck, and put the piece of ear inside. She grinned at me. “The things I can now do with this, the person I’ll become.”

I could barely talk through the pain. My ear stung and throbbed, so hot and so fiercely. “You’re pure evil.”

She shrugged and wiggled her lips. “You know, when people keep telling you that you’re bad and that your beliefs are bad and everything you do is bad…well, eventually you just become bad. Why not? Why not give them what they want and then make them wish they never wanted it.”

I looked over at Rose, at her lifeless body. Ambrosia caught my eye and went over to her. She grabbed her by her hair and yanked her head up. Rose had an X carved in her forehead, her eyes were open and unseeing.

“Rose and I never got along,” Ambrosia said to me, as if she were confiding with a girlfriend over drinks. “I didn’t like how Maryse pandered to her, to someone so…ordinary. But, she does have some attributes that gave me a little bit of mojo. And it was really fun trying to compel her. She led you right to me and she didn’t even know it.”

“What are you doing with her?” I was starting to feel woozy from the pain and had trouble keeping my head up straight.

“I told you. Same thing I’m doing to you. I already gave her a dose of the poison. Comes from the pufferfish. Does a fine job of tricking your body into thinking it’s dead, so fine that even doctors can’t tell. You saw what happened to poor old Tuffy G. Then I’ll bury her for a while…There’s a tiny mound out back that used to be an ant hill. I can only stick her about three feet in or so before the water floods the coffin but it should work for the sake of the ritual. I’ll do a few rites, dig her up after a few hours, give her the datura. Then she’s all mine to do my bidding. That is unless I accidently give her too much. That’s the problem with the elixir. If you don’t give enough, the person still has a bit of free will, albeit terrible hallucinations and memory loss. If you give too much, you’ll lose them completely and forever. They go mad, so mad that even I can’t control them. I learned the hard way with Eric Smithe. I just wanted him to attack someone in the parking lot, act like a real zombie, something that people would really fear and talk about. I wanted this to start becoming front page news. Then he turned on me and bit me.”

I’d stopped listening. The room was starting to spin a bit and I was dangerously close to passing out. I couldn’t tell if it was the loss of blood and stress on my heart, or if she had really taken something from me after all of this bloodplay.

She let go of Rose’s head and came over to me, bringing a small vial out of her pocket. “The trick with you will be figuring out how much to give. I can’t be sure how this will work on you since you’ve been so resistant to me. But considering I have most of your essence now, I think if I accidently leave you brain-dead, it wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen. Your body will still be fun to use for a short time, whether you’ve gone mad or not.”

She nodded at the zombie slaves who were still standing around me and they went for my head again. They held it in place, while two of them pried their large hands into my mouth, one holding the top jaw, the other holding the bottom.

“When you wake up, you’ll only know me. You’ll only remember me. I will raise you from the ground, save you from the dirt, and you will do my worst for me. You won’t have Perry. You won’t have your friends. You’ll have no memory of who you are. I pray, for your sake, that you do what you’re told and that no one you love will ever see you in your new state of being.”

I tried to move, even though I knew it was useless. I tried to push my tongue forward, to prevent anything from going down my throat. But it was futile. Ambrosia came over and poured the liquid down my throat, a vile, thick poison, and I choked on it.

They stepped away and I immediately tried to vomit, to throw it back up. But things were already happening. My throat began to close. My fingers, toes, arms, legs, everything became rigid like I was being held by millions of imaginary hands. In my chest, my heart thumped loudly, then became slower and slower, losing its rhythm, its speed, its sound. The air stopped reaching into the depths of my lungs, becoming more and more shallow.

My brain started its final descent, slowing shutting down the circuits. I was losing the capacity for thought. So, this was the death of Dex Foray. This was the end of the man I was.

I realized it didn’t mean anything without Perry by my side. She was my reason for living. She was the reason I’d come alive in the first place.

It’s a shame, I thought for the last time, I realized that truth far too late.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was the noise above me that woke me up. My consciousness came on like a dimmer switch, slowly introducing my brain to the new reality.

I was happy to recognize that it was my own brain. It didn’t mean I felt 100%. In fact, my thoughts felt slow and stunted and I felt the drugs coursing through me, trying to bring my vitals down to a dangerous level. But I was still Dex.

And I was being buried alive.

It was black as tar and the noise that had woke me was the sound of dirt being thrown on top of the narrow coffin I was in. I could also hear Ambrosia chanting to herself, sounding faraway and muffled.

And now’s when you panic, I told myself. I tried to move, but my limbs weren’t having any of it, the poison still in control of that part of my system, reluctant to let go.

The dirt kept coming, quicker and quicker. I had a feeling that Ambrosia was having her minions do the burial services, and even though she said she was only burying me three feet underneath the ground, that three feet was enough to eventually asphyxiate a person. I could tell they were getting close to being done too. The fresh dirt that was being thrown on top wasn’t as loud as before.

I started breathing harder in my panic and tried to slow my breath. I needed to conserve air in here and I needed to think. The minute she dug me out would be the minute she’d try and administer the datura, the mind-control drugs. The stuff that turned you into a mindless slave, or a batshit crazy lunatic. I’d seen enough in the mental hospital to know that a batshit crazy lunatic wasn’t as fun as it seemed, even if it meant I’d try and take a bite out of her. When I saw her, there’d be little to stop me from ripping her fucking head off and pissing on it.