Chapter 4 #2
The storage facility was a massive warehouse complex that looked like it could house a small airplane. It was surrounded by chain-link fencing and the kind of security cameras that meant serious business. Jeff was waiting for us in the parking lot. He looked like he could melt.
"Hey, love," he called to his wife as we climbed out of the blessed cool of the SUV and back into the sweltering heat. He kissed Kota and then looked around at each of us. “Ready to get a look around?”
The main building was exactly like the last time we visited.
There were rows upon rows of elaborate floats in various stages of repair and decay.
This trip we bi-passed the newer floats being used in current parades and went to the older section.
It was tucked away in the back corner where decades-old floats sat gathering dust like forgotten dreams. And they drew my attention like a magnet.
"These haven't been used since before we were born," Jeff explained as we made our way through the maze of covered structures. "Some of them belonged to krewes that disbanded in the sixties and seventies."
I began examining a particularly ornate float depicting some kind of mythological sea scene, running my hands along the elaborate mermaids and sea serpents. My fingers found an irregularity in the base. It was a slight depression that didn't match the rest of the ornate detailing.
"There's something here," I called to my sisters, my pulse quickening. "It's a hidden panel or something."
"On my way," Kota replied as she jogged over from where she'd been poking around a faded Bacchus float. Dre and Dani weren't far behind, their footsteps echoing in the cavernous space.
"What kind of something?" Dre asked, dropping to her knees beside me and running her own fingers over the area I'd found.
"The bad kind, probably," Kota muttered as she pulled out her phone's flashlight to get a better look.
It took three of us working together to pry open the concealed section. Dre and I pulled while Kota wedged her keys into the seam. Dani, Phi, and Dea supervised and gave advice. When we finally managed it with a grinding screech of old metal, we hit the supernatural jackpot.
Inside was a collection of preserved gris-gris bags. Each one was carefully labeled with spidery handwriting and arranged like precious artifacts. The smell that wafted up made my stomach recoil. It was a mixture of decay and dark power.
"Well, shit," Kota breathed as she leaned back on her heels.
"St. Louis No. 1 - New Moon," Dani read from one of the labels. "Lafayette No. 3 - Waning Crescent. These go back decades."
"Someone's been using these for a very long time," I said as I studied the meticulous handwriting on each label. "They’ve been trying different combinations. They’re systematic and organized."
Adèle’s voice startled me when she gave us her opinion.
She’d remained at home and wasn’t even with us this time.
"Not exactly. These bags were created to maintain balance," she projected.
"They're not corrupted like the ones we found yesterday.
These were made to strengthen the barrier between worlds. "
"So, we've got two groups," Kota said. "One trying to keep the entity bound, and one trying to set it free."
"Which means we need to figure out which side that woman with the amulet is on," I replied. "And fast."
We were handling them like they might explode at any moment as we loaded the gris-gris bags into the back of my SUV.
Given our recent luck, that wasn't entirely out of the question.
Kota was muttering under her breath about the smell, while Dre carefully arranged them in a box Jeff had given us.
That was when my magical early warning system decided to lose its ever-loving mind.
It wasn't the gentle tingle I'd felt at the restaurant. This was a full-body, five-alarm, ‘run for your life’ kind of warning that made every nerve ending I possessed scream in unison. A vice tightened around my chest, and for a split second, I couldn't breathe.
"We need to move," Dea said as she grabbed the last of the bags. "Something's drawing me toward the old section of Metairie Cemetery.”
“By something, do you mean the kind of something that usually tries to kill us?" Kota asked as we hopped into my car.
Dea laughed as I pulled out of our spot. “It’s like you can read my mind.”
The drive to Metairie Cemetery felt like racing toward a supernatural storm front. With each mile, Dea became more agitated until she could barely sit still. It put everyone on edge. By the time we reached the cemetery gates, I swear I could see the spectral figures.
"There," Dea pointed toward an abandoned mausoleum in the older section. "Whatever's happening, it's happening there."
I parked a few feet away from the structure.
I’d barely put the car in park when my sisters jumped from the vehicle.
Slinging my go bag over my head, I joined them.
We approached the mausoleum with the kind of caution you'd use around a sleeping dragon.
Nothing could have prepared us for what we found.
Dozens of ghosts were gathered around the structure. It was bad if we could all see them.
“Are these ghosts different?” I asked Dea, our resident ghost expert.
“They aren't the wispy, translucent spirits we usually encounter,” she replied grimly.
Now that she said something, I realized they were solid enough that they cast shadows. And solid enough that they could manipulate physical objects. “They’re in the middle of a ritual,” I blurted.
"Holy shit," Dre breathed. "Are there more we can't see?" She asked Dea.
Dea nodded and grimaced. “The others aren’t involved in the ritual, though. They might be fuel for it.”
A woman wearing a fringe dress that screamed 1920s stepped forward. "You shouldn't be here," she said. "This is guardian business."
"Guardian business?" Dea asked, taking a careful step closer. "What kind of guardians?"
Instead of answering, the ghost woman made a gesture to the others. They began to fade. They didn't disappear. They merely became less solid. "Wait!" I called out. "We're trying to help! We know about the entity, about the binding—"
"Too late," the woman's voice echoed as she became fully translucent. "The barriers weaken. We cannot hold much longer."
Dea began chanting a spell, but her attempt to keep them there failed. The ghosts were gone, and we were left standing in an empty cemetery with more questions than answers. We'd just missed something critically important.
"Well, that was unfortunate," Kota muttered.
"But informative," Phi countered as she began taking photos of the area where the ritual had been taking place. "Did you see what they were doing? They were reinforcing something. I don’t think they were trying to break it down."
"They were the good guys," I said when I assessed more of the scene. "Those ghosts were part of whatever group created the gris-gris bags we found. They're still trying to maintain the binding."
"Which means the woman with the amulet might be on our side," Dea suggested hopefully.
"Or she might be the one coordinating attacks against the guardians," Dre said grimly. "We still need more information about her."
"Where do we get that? We looked for over an hour and found nothing," Kota countered, throwing her hands up in frustration.
"We need to ask Marie," I suggested, already calculating the drive time in my head. "I can't believe she's becoming a regular source for us."
Kota snorted and headed back to my car, pulling her keys from her pocket. "Right? If you'd asked me if we could trust her a few months ago, I would have said hell no."
The drive to Marie's house took us deeper into the bywater.
We went past shotgun houses with sagging porches and yards that looked like they were fighting a losing battle against the Louisiana humidity.
Marie lived in a converted Creole cottage that practically hummed with protective magic.
It was the kind of place that made my skin tingle just walking up the front steps.
She answered the door before we could knock.
Her dark eyes took in our grim expressions, and the box of gris-gris bags Dre was carrying like it contained live snakes.
"Come in," she said simply before stepping aside.
She gestured for us to go to the back of the house.
"Something tells me this isn't a social call. "
“You're not on our Monday Margarita list,” Kota replied. Her comment was a reminder that we were enemies not that long ago. Marie laughed in response and opened a door to a room we hadn’t been in before.
There were candles everywhere, dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, and enough crystals to stock a New Age shop.
We settled around her antique wooden table while she cleared away what looked like the remnants of an earlier reading.
We told her everything from the woman with the amulet at the restaurant to the trip to the storage facility and finding the gris-gris bags.
We ended with the ghostly ritual we'd witnessed at the cemetery.
With each detail, Marie's expression grew more troubled.
When we finally placed the bags on her table, she went pale as moonlight.
"These belonged to Les Gardiens du Voile," she said as she handled the bags with the reverence usually reserved for sacred relics.
"The Guardians of the Veil. My grandmother told me stories. I thought they were just that—stories."
"What were they about?" Drawn by the promise of a good tale, I leaned forward.
"The Les Gardiens du Voile was a secret society formed in the 1850s during the yellow fever epidemic," Marie explained.
"When the entity first appeared and began feeding on the death and disease ravaging the city, it took the combined efforts of voodoo practitioners, witches, Fae, and even some of the old Catholic families to bind it. "
"Some of them were the families Cyran mentioned," Dani said.
"I would imagine his ancestors were involved.
His family has always been a big part of the city.
The binding required constant maintenance, and the group created the Guardians who were tasked with performing rituals at specific times and locations to keep the barrier strong.
" Marie gestured to the gris-gris bags. "These would have been part of that system. "
"What happened to them?" Kota asked. “Why were they hidden at the bottom of an old parade float?”
"Time would be my guess," Marie said simply. "People died, knowledge was likely lost, and younger generations probably didn't believe in the old ways. The society disbanded sometime in the 1970s, I think."
"Some of them kept going," I guessed. "Including those ghosts we saw."
"Something's disrupting their work now," Phi pointed out. "Someone with enough knowledge to corrupt the protective symbols and turn them into feeding stations."
The ringing of my phone interrupted our conversation. My stomach clenched when I saw Detective Payne's name on the caller ID. His calls never brought good news. "Another body?" I answered, putting it on speaker.
"Worse." His voice was tight with stress. "Three more missing persons reports came in today. All of them were last seen near locations you've been investigating. I just wanted you to know."
“Thanks. We are still investigating and will let you know if we find anything,” Dre promised.
I hung up the phone and thanked Marie for her information. She promised to keep researching the Guardians of the Veil. "I hope they don’t show up dead at other cemeteries,” Phi suggested as we loaded into my vehicle.
“You and me both,” I agreed as I took off down the road.
We were maybe five minutes from Marie's house when shit went sideways.
A creature shambled out of the tree line, looking like someone had taken a corpse, added too much preservative, and forgotten to maintain the refrigeration.
It moved with jerky, unnatural motions, and its skin was mottled and gray.
Its eyes also burned with an intelligence that was not normal.
"Oh, come on," Kota muttered as I slammed on the brakes of my SUV. "We can't even drive five miles without getting jumped by supernatural ugliness?"
The creature—because calling it a person felt wrong on every level—lurched toward my vehicle with surprising speed. "Everyone out of the SUV!" I yelled, grabbing magical supplies from my bag. "We can't let it attack any innocents!"
The thing that had once been human opened its mouth and released a sound that was part scream, part death rattle, and entirely horrifying.
When Dre hit it with a blast of her magical energy, it dissolved.
Literally dissolved into a pile of grave dirt and goo that left a stain on the asphalt worse than an oil leak.
"Well, that was easy. And gross," Dea said, poking at the remains with a stick she'd found. "Look what it left behind."
Nestled in the gooey debris was a medallion. It’d been tarnished with age but clearly bore the same symbols we'd been finding carved into cemetery stones. I picked it up with a tissue, not trusting anything that had been inside a walking corpse.
"These are the same symbols from the corrupted ritual sites," I confirmed. "Which means this thing was connected to whoever's been sabotaging the guardian rituals."
"They sent it after us specifically," Dani added. "We're definitely on someone's radar now. How did they find us, though? We’ve been all over the place."
“It was tracking us," Dre replied as she looked closer at the talisman. “Maybe it can follow our magic kind of like Lucas and Noah track scents."
Kota shuddered and took a step back, saying, “I was thinking the same thing. We have unique magical signatures and haven't bothered trying to hide them.”
I stared down at the medallion in my hand. We were dealing with ancient entities, secret societies, and disappearing people. It made sense that we would be targeted. The stakes kept rising, and I was starting to wonder if we were in over our heads this time.
I looked at my sisters. We'd faced worse odds before.
Maybe not this complicated, but we'd always found a way through.
"Come on," I said, shoving the medallion in my bag.
"Let's get back in the SUV and head home.
We need to figure out our next move. If they're sending supernatural hit squads after us, it means we're getting close to something they don't want us to find. "
"Define close," Dani said as we climbed back into my SUV.
I looked back at the stain on the road where the creature had dissolved. "Close enough that they're scared," I replied. "And that means we're finally asking the right questions."