"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 reservedfor 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."
