Page 51
She swallowed. “Big Mae was a powerful voodoo priestess who lived deep in the Louisiana bayou. People knew her for working with darkness. If somebody wanted revenge, they went to her. If somebody wanted another person dead then. . .”
“They went to her too?”
“Yes.”
A sudden chill slipped through the car, carrying the phantom scent of wet earth, candle smoke, and stagnant water.
Gabby looked toward the opposite window.
I kept my eyes on the curse, and I knew that it had also begun listening. “She lived alone in a cabin on the bayou. One day, she hired a carpenter to add on a big conjuring room. For a week, he came out to the bayou every morning and worked until sunset.”
Gabby turned her head and looked out at the rain falling outside the window. “Big Mae fell in love with him while he built the cabin, and she knew from the first day that he was a heartmate to another woman.”
“A heartmate?”
“Two souls bonded by God before either person is born. They can live across the world from each other, but something will keep pulling them together. Once they meet, their spirits recognize each other. Their souls have already chosen.”
I smiled.
Gabby’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you smiling?”
“So, the same as us.”
She said nothing, yet her silence pleased every form within me.
“Continue, little witch.”
She glanced away from me. “So. . .Big Mae tried everything. Food spells. Attraction powders. Come-to-me oil. She even put her period blood in the spaghetti she cooked for him.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Typically the menstrual blood will bend a man’s will, if he hasn’t found his heartmate.”
“But he had found his.”
“So it didn’t work.”
The curse pulsed harder. The red threads buried inside it began winding themselves again.
“So. . .she performed a deadlier spell. A nasty one that. . .demanded the death of a newborn baby.” Her gaze dropped to her bandaged hand.
The feminine form inside me recoiled. My kitsune spirit bared its teeth. The beast warrior surged beneath my jaw with such violence that the bones in my face almost cracked open to reveal it.
Calm down. . .
Rain hammered the roof of the car.
“She kidnapped somebody else’s newborn. Then, waited for the full moon, killed the poor soul, and wrapped its body in red string.”
The threads inside Gabby’s curse writhed.
“She dripped black candle wax over the child and carried the body to an ancient oak tree near the bayou. One that white men had used for lynchings. So many Black people had died hanging from its branches that the ground beneath it had turned wrong.”
“Why did she choose that tree?”
“She needed roots soaked in blood, terror, and rage.” Gabby returned to looking out the window. “She buried everything at the base of the tree, carved symbols into the trunk, and called every dark spirit she knew.”
“What happened?”
