Back here again?
She moved farther into the room, and I stood, intending to act as a guide, just as the young girl had done before she’d left.
The witch waved me off. “I know my way ’round my own digs. Besides, I have Jean-Marie to wait on me most times, though she’s left for the night. It’s part of her tutorin’. And I wish I didn’t have to explain that to you every time you slink back here.”
“I’ve been here before?”
“Well, you don’t often bring amours with you.” Amari gestured toward Philippe.
“Yes, about him . . .”
“He’ll be out for a while, judgin’ on what I know you can do with those skills of yours.”
Could she see, in spite of that blindfold, with some sort of witch vision?
She sat in a chair behind the animal-bone table, then gestured for me to take the one opposite. Reaching under the table, she came out with a small crystal ball, setting it down, gesturing for me to touch it. The moment I did so, the boots hugged my feet, not violently but with comfort.
“You haven’t been here for two days, Lilly. I was worried.”
Clearly, she hadn’t begun to divine me with that ball, or whatever she had planned. “I wish I could tell you what was occupying me. I woke up in a small hotel at dusk, not knowing where I was.”
“Nothing new there.”
Was I ever going to find out the reason?
Amari clucked, and I noticed that her mouth was lovely: red lips tipped up at the corners. A chin with a dimple.
“Child,” she said, “I don’t envy you, but them boots were the only solution when I found you out by the road a week ago.”
A week ago? When Philippe had that vision of me?
“You’d just come into town,” Amari said. “Stole some poor soul’s pickup on your way here from Lord knows where else. Some time ago—you’d lost track ’bout how long it was, I guess—you were in Southern California.” Cal-ee-fornia.
“What was I doing there?”
“If you’d write all this down in a journal, like I tell you to, I wouldn’t have to explain. You been dependin’ on me to always catch you up, but you’ll be doin’ some writin’ tonight, like it or not. Next time you come here, you’ll be readin’ that instead of listenin’.”
I almost told her that it’s hard to read without any lights in here, but I could always go to the porch, yes? I had high doubts that one argued with Amari.
Those blindfolded eyes seemed to look into mine. “I’ll tell you once more and once only. Burnt to a pitted mess, you were, but somehow you were alive and kickin’. Later, after I divined you, I found out why that was.”
“And?”
“Oh, I’m not going through that complicated story again. A woman gets tired, you know.”
Amari gripped the top of the ball, and I knew that I would be experiencing my tale through it.
But the witch wasn’t ready to give it over to me just yet.
“Your truck had run outta gas down the road,” Amari said. “You’d crawled the rest of the way here, ’cuz somewhere along the line, you’d heard that there was a witch outside New Orleans who healed folk. You were so wounded you’d almost run outta gas, too.”
“So you helped me?”
“That’s what I was born to do. Help, not hinder.”
My chest constricted. I wasn’t getting the sense that I had known people like this back “home.”
“The boots,” I said softly. “You used magic and healing to create those boots, and when I put them on, the burns . . .”
“Go away. When you take ’em off, you go back to bein’ burnt. Nature heals, Lilly. We’re all a part of it. We’ve only just forgotten.”
The boots . . . vines from the bayou. An enchantment from a white witch.
“I remembered something when I arrived here,” I said. “You had told me that there’s a price for these boots. I thought you meant money. I even believed that I might have stolen them from you.” I touched one boot, gently. It seemed to respond, pulsing under my fingers.
“Oh, they’s a price,” Amari said, laughing. And it was a nice laugh. A song, just like the ones the night creatures were singing outside. “You woke up without a memory tonight. Every night.”
I didn’t react.
Amari sighed. “That’s the price them boots demand. Nature, or them vines, give to you, Lilly. It give you health and healing, but it need to take, too, and every mornin’ them boots get spent, and they need your help to revitalize, just as you need them.”
“We’re both . . . parasites?” Living off each other?
“That’s a fair notion. When they take from you, they don’t drain you in the physical way. They take somethin’ stronger—from your soul. Some of your essence, your being.”
“My identity.”
“And your short-term memory. But like all livin’ things, they ain’t perfect. They leave specks of memory for you to cling to sometime.”
Like the instincts I had about what I was capable of doing. And they left me muscle memory, too, based on the martial arts I’d performed tonight.
I tried to bring everything together: I had no doubt been out and about last night, perhaps even the nights before, chasing my identity. When the sun had come up, my boots had needed sustenance, and I had broken in to the bed-and-breakfast to collapse. Until I woke up again, drained.
“I go through this every twenty-four hours?” I asked.
“That’s your curse. And your blessing. It’d be up to you to see what you’re eventually gonna make of it.”
“What do you mean?”
Amari smiled. “You’re about to see.”
With that, she bent her head to the crystal and my eyesight went black, plunging me into an emerging pool of visions so vivid that my adrenaline surged.
A foggy memory of a dark control room with a console . . . watching screens . . . An image of a fanged dragon, destroyed . . . heart breaking, a scream pulled from my lungs as I sank to the floor . . . An explosion, burning me as I crawled away from the destruction, still alive . . .
Then, staring up at a ceiling from a bed, bandages over my face except for my eyes. “You’re retired,” said a man, my father, as he fit a spindly device over my head and my mind went blank.
Coming awake again, this time by the hand of a woman who looked very much like me. A cousin? Doing her bidding, fighting for control of my body, winning, then losing . . . Then burning in another fire, not from an explosion, but a bonfire, punishment for failing the family, more screams as I ran and ran from the flames, rolling on the ground to put out the fire on my skin, near death . . .
Real life swirled in front of me again, and I realized that Amari had let go of the crystal ball. Her voice soothed me to calm.
“You were ramblin’ away on the night I found you, before I made them boots. How you used to be a keeper of a vampire called the dragon, how he died under your watch after some hunters blew up his underground home. You blathered about bein’ ‘retired’ by your family because you’d disappointed ’em so, and from what I guess, retirement was like death, a livin’ coffin.”
I remembered how Philippe had read me earlier, and mentioned a glass coffin.
I tried not to glance at where he lay on the floor, but I couldn’t stop myself. Philippe, who had helped me, but merely because I was a means for him to get reward money for his own family. A noble cause, to be sure, but one that conflicted with mine.
“My family did that to me?” I asked.
“And worse. From what I heard from you, they call themselves the Meratoliages, and they swore in ancient times to protect the dragon’s line of vampires. Not so long ago, they raised you from that retirement to go after the hunters who slayed him. They know the dark arts, and they were able to control you as a revenant. You didn’t take too kindly to that, and you burnt again. I believe, though, it was a sight better than that retirement of yours. Just judgin’ by what you said. I’d rather burn than be buried alive, myself.”
Now that she was telling me, it all seemed so very familiar. “Did your boots heal my mind, too? It sounds as if I didn’t have much of one when I was brought out of this retirement.”
Amari nodded, hands folded on the table again. “But there’s one thing them boots didn’t give you.”
“Powers,” I said. “I had them all along.”
“And they kept you alive tonight.”
Yes. Proof of that was on the floor, not five feet away from me.
I explained how Philippe had a vision of me. “He must have also divined that my family is looking for me. He said they were offering money.” I paused, my eyes widening. “There was a . . . thing. Earlier tonight. Dressed all in black, with red eyes. You didn’t send it after me?”
“No.” For the first time, Amari sounded troubled.
My boots thudded, shuddering through me, and another memory stirred: my old uniform as dragon keeper—all black, masked, with night-vision goggles. Red eyes.
My hunter was a member of my family?
I sat back in my chair. “Is it possible that the Meratoliages have sent someone after me themselves?” And was it also possible that the reason my attacker hadn’t come into Philippe’s shop was because Philippe had asked one of his voodoo friends to protect the area from anyone else who might want to turn me in? His psychic visions would have given him ample time to make such a preparation.
“Either you been runnin’ from your family for a few nights now,” Amari said, “or they just found out where you is. Either way, you best get your shit together before more hunters come for you. I can whip up a protection spell now that I know who’s chasin’ you, but if Philippe is right about there bein’ money offered for you . . .”
“A spell might not help.” I swallowed. “You’re not interested in a bounty?”