Chapter 2 #3
Her grandmother’s chin lifted even higher.
“Not my problem. Now dat you be home, you be stuck wit’ dis ol’ woman.
” Though she called herself old, her grandmother moved like someone half her age and disappeared down the hallway to her bedroom, where the shiny brass bed was covered with a quilt passed down from her grandmother to her mother and then to herself.
A tight knot festered in Lissette’s chest. She wanted to pound her fist into Ron Cormier’s face for getting away with the Gautier reliquary. The first relic retrieved and lost in the same day.
Grand-mère paused in the doorway to her bedroom and looked back at her granddaughter, her eyes narrowing in the shadowy hallway. “Whatever you be t’inking, never work angry, chère.” With her final words of wisdom, she walked through the door and closed it behind her.
The anger bubbled up inside Lissette and spilled out in a frustrated growl. “I feel like I’ve traded one prison guard for another,” she muttered. “Don’t talk to old contacts. Let the law handle it.” She flung her hands in the air. “They know and have done nothing to recover the relics.”
She paced the kitchen twice and then pushed out the front door, stalked across the porch and down the steps into the yard.
Napoleon launched himself out of the shadows and fluttered to a stop near Lissette.
This time, she was still too angry to startle, not slowing as she marched across the yard to the dock, spun and marched back.
“How in hell am I supposed to find the relics if I don’t tap into the network of swamp rats?” she said aloud as if Napoleon cared or could give her answers to her problems.
“I know I’m not supposed to consort with criminals, especially those tied to the cartels or the mafia, but how else can I get the information I need?
Even if I don’t recover anyone else’s relics, I’ll be damned if I let them get away with stealing our family’s reliquary and everything it contained.
I have to find the stolen relics. My former network of contacts is the only way.
” She stopped in the middle of the yard and faced the rooster.
“Seriously, Napoleon, it’s not as if I can magic them out of thin air. ”
She spun and started toward the cottage. After only three steps, she came to a sudden, complete stop.
Napoleon, hurrying to catch up, bumped into the backs of her legs, squawked, and flapped his wings to put some distance between them.
“I hadn’t thought of it,” she said, tapping her chin.
“But why not? The bastards stealing all those things can’t be allowed to get away with it.
I can’t stand by and do nothing. I won’t let them get away with it, and I won’t give up and walk away.
That’s not who I am, no matter what people say, even my own family. ”
She frowned at the cottage, her thoughts churning, an idea forming. “I need the book.” She raced up the steps, quietly entered the house and eased the screen door shut behind her.
Lissette tiptoed into the sitting room, where Madame Gautier, the Bayou Mambaloa Voodoo Queen, kept her book of spells, tinctures and workings.
She’d been teaching Lissette and her cousins, Gisele and Holly, the ways of their kind.
Recently, she’d come across a spell that could help locate missing items. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner?
If she used magic, she wouldn’t have to tap into her old network of miscreants, thieves and killers to get the answers she needed. The answers would come to her.
She flipped through the old, yellowed handwritten pages, careful not to make any noise that would wake her grandmother. When she found the spell she was looking for, her heart leaped, and a tingling sensation spread from the page into her fingers and throughout her body.
She studied the handwritten words and the symbol at the top of the page, which looked like a sword with the tip of an arrow.
This was it. Her chance to give back to the people she’d wronged in the community she had to live in. If she helped them recover their property, maybe, just maybe, they’d find it in their hearts to forgive her, or at least not turn and walk the other way whenever she was around.
And if that didn’t work, they could all go to hell.
Anger still roiling through her, she gathered the heavy book in her arms, carried it into the kitchen and laid it on the small table.
Then she pulled out a large mixing bowl and gathered the items the spell called for. She found most of what she needed in her grandmother’s special pantry, full of the strangest ingredients most people could imagine, which her grandmother used to help others.
Thankfully, the recipe didn’t call for heating the concoction.
Once she’d measured and added all the ingredients into the bowl, she stirred the required ten times, slowly.
Recipe complete, she poured the liquid into a small bottle, rinsed the mixing bowl and put it back where it belonged and gathered the other items she’d need for the casting, placing them in a woven basket.
She wrote the instructions and spell on a piece of paper, added it to the basket, and carried it all out to the dock, far enough from the cottage her grandmother wouldn’t hear.