This Wicked Game

THIRTY-ONE

Eugenia came into the room just after Claire washed and dressed in the white garment, leaving her own clothes on the floor near the chair.

“Come with me,” she said.

Claire walked toward the door.

Eugenia didn’t move. She just stood there, blocking the doorway, staring at Claire with a strange expression on her face. She flinched when Eugenia reached out to straighten the garment, moving Claire’s long hair back from her shoulders.

“I hope you understand that my motives are different from Max’s,” she said softly.

Stunned by the change in Eugenia’s demeanor, Claire didn’t speak.

“Max wants revenge,” Eugenia continued. “And, while I don’t blame him, it’s my intent to restore balance to the equation. A life was needlessly taken. My daughter’s life. It’s only right that someone be held accountable for the crime. That your power is so strong is your misfortune.”

Claire shook her head. “But it’s not. I don’t even believe. I’ve never believed.”

Eugenia smiled, an eerie, knowing light in her eyes.

She reached for Claire’s hand. “Come.”

Claire wondered if the others were waiting, but the main room was empty. Eugenia led her through it to the front door.

The first thing that caught Claire’s eye when they stepped onto the porch was the fire. It had been lit in the center of the clearing, and while it wasn’t huge, it was obviously meant to be the center of the ritual.

Claire wasn’t surprised to see black candles lit in a ring around it, but it still brought forward a new surge of panic. Colored candles were used for all kinds of spellcraft and ritual, the colors corresponding to different kinds of work.

Black candles were the most dangerous of all, used to summon the darkest forces of the spiritual world, something that was risky even when done by an experienced priest or priestess.

Maximilian was sitting cross-legged on one side of the fire, Herve and Jean-Philip in the same position across from him. She could see the resemblance between them in the light of the fire; the same angular features, the same dark eyes. A wooden platform, too low to the ground to be a table, stood very near the flames.

Claire stopped walking. She knew a sacrificial altar when she saw one.

She held on to the door frame as Eugenia stepped forward.

When she realized Claire wasn’t with her she looked back. “Come, now.”

Claire shook her head as she frantically eyed the field.

Eugenia turned toward the men. “Herve. Jean-Philip.”

They stood, and Claire saw that they, too, were in white tunics. They came toward her, stepping onto the porch and grabbing her arms. They carried her down the steps like she weighed nothing at all, even though she kicked and screamed every step of the way.

She tried to dig her feet into the wild grass and mud as they hauled her across the field, but it did no good. Herve and Jean-Philip just raised her higher, her feet too far off the ground to be of any help.

Maximilian remained seated as they approached. Claire was only dimly aware that she was still screaming. That it was her voice echoing across the clearing, although the words were unintelligible.

It didn’t matter. There was no one to hear her.

Herve and Jean-Philip lifted her onto the altar, laying her on her back. She tried to sit up, to struggle against them, but they were stronger than they looked. Herve held her down while Jean-Philip tied her wrists and ankles to the legs of the altar.

She flailed and thrashed, testing the strength of the bonds. They held fast.

Now Maximilian rose. He moved around the fire, murmuring to each of the others. Herve sat back on the ground, a drum between his legs. Eugenia pulled something from the pocket of her tunic, bringing it over to Jean-Philip, who was mixing something in a basin on the ground.

They seemed oblivious to her, like she wasn’t tied up right in front of their eyes.

Herve began to beat on the drum, and the atmosphere changed instantly. Claire recognized the subtle shift, had felt it before in rituals and ceremonies, though if someone had asked her about it prior to tonight she wouldn’t have been able to put her finger on it. The beat was primal. It moved through the air as Herve began to chant in French.

Jean-Philip moved with the rhythm of the drum, his face transformed. He was no longer the staid mannequin Claire had seen uptown, but a voodoo priest lost in the beat of the rite.

Eugenia and Maximilian turned their backs on the fire and bent to the ground, picking something up. Claire saw what it was a moment later when they each lifted elaborate feathered headdresses onto their heads.

They would act as the high priest and priestess in the ritual, Houngan and Mambo, summoning the loas. Claire wondered which of them would give their blood for the spell that would turn the blood of the firstborns cold.

She hardly recognized them as they turned back to the fire. It was more than the ritual garb. It was something in their eyes. A far-off gaze that made Claire think they weren’t there in the field at all but somewhere else completely.

Eugenia started to move, too, bending and jumping and prostrating around the fire in time to the beat, moving in opposition to Jean-Philip’s position. The chic European woman Claire had met in the store that first day was gone, replaced by a Mambo queen whose connection to the ancient, primal craft was evident in every movement.

Claire thought Maximilian would join in. Instead, he bent again to the grass. When he rose and came toward her, she saw the shine of a knife blade in his hand.

She was momentarily shocked into stillness as her brain processed what was happening. He was coming toward her, a knife in one hand, small bowls in the other.

She heard Xander’s voice on that faraway afternoon outside the house on Dauphine.

They bled you . . .

And then, in the car on the way to Eddie’s as he told her about his dream: I can’t get to you, Claire.

It hadn’t been a dream after all. It had been a prophecy. They were going to use her blood to fulfill Marie’s addendum. Maximilian was going to bleed her, and Xander wouldn’t be able to save her.

He’d already seen it.

She started to thrash again as Maximilian came closer. “No. . . . No! You have it wrong. I’m not the one. I don’t even believe.” Claire was crying now, desperate. “I’m sorry about Elisabeta, but it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t our fault. We were just kids.”

He bent down when he reached her side. She couldn’t see what he was doing, but when he stood, he didn’t have the bowls. She guessed he’d placed them under her somewhere to collect the blood.

His face was so close to hers that she could see his eyes, but there was no pity there. Only concentration as he lifted her right arm and lowered the knife blade to the tender skin of her forearm.

She turned her head away, trying to lose herself in the rhythm of the drumbeat, the otherworldly chanting coming from Eugenia and Jean-Philip. A second later she felt the knife bite into her skin followed by a warm trickle onto her wrist, hand, fingertips.

Maximilian moved to the other side of her body, repeating the motion with her other arm.

Then he was walking away, joining the dance around the fire, his own voice rising to meet the voices of the others.

Claire’s head began to feel fuzzy. The events around her became increasingly surreal, like it wasn’t her on the altar at all, but someone else. Someone whose eyes were barely open, whose blood ran like a river down her arms, pooling in the bowls underneath them.

After that there were only flashes of consciousness as her hold on reality slowly slipped away.

The flicker of the fire casting strange shadows on Jean-Philip’s face as he danced.

Darkness.

Maximilian dipping something into the bowls he’d placed on the ground, using it to paint a circle around the ritual site. Was the circle painted in her blood? She couldn’t be sure.

Darkness.

Max, lifting one of the bowls underneath her hand, pouring a thick, dark liquid into the basin of ingredients that Jean-Philip had been mixing when they first tied her to the altar.

Darkness.

And then Eugenia, pulling the dolls from her pockets. The dolls with hair and clothes from Xander and Sasha and Allegra and the rest of the Guild’s firstborns.

She submersed the first one in the mixture, lifting it into the air, liquid dripping from it as she howled her requests to the loas.

She set it beside the black candles and moved on to the next one.

Claire tried to stay alert, but she couldn’t help the slip into unconsciousness. When she came to, she had no idea how many of the doll babies Eugenia had already done or how many were left.

Was she wrong? Was her blood powerful enough to use in the Cold Blood spell? Were Xander and Sasha already dying? Was it quick? Painful?

I don’t believe, Claire reminded herself, moving her head back and forth in a gesture of denial.

She muttered the words. “I don’t believe . . . I don’t believe . . .”

She knew no one could hear her over the chanting and the beat of the drum, but she said it anyway.

Eugenia was poised over the basin with another doll baby, preparing to lower it into the mixture, when she suddenly stopped.

She looked up, her gaze drifting to the forest surrounding the clearing, her body still, even as Maximilian and Jean-Philip continued the ritual, Herve still drumming.

Then Max’s movements slowed, his gaze following Eugenia’s.

Claire tried to lift her head. Tried to see what they saw.

But when she finally focused on the figures moving toward the fire, her mind couldn’t make sense of it.

At first, she only saw two. Two people moving toward them from the forest.

Then there were more. Three, four, five . . . Claire wasn’t sure how many.

The drumbeat slowed and then stopped altogether as the figures came closer.