Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 01 - Dark Bayou (18 page)

I felt Lyla shudder in my arms. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

She sighed. “I promise I’ll believe you.”

I couldn’t tell her about Charlemagne and his holy knights or their blood line. I certainly couldn’t tell her that I was one of them and Clothilde and Lyla, too. Lyla didn’t even know she was one yet. I had to protect the identity of the paladins, so I settled on the simplest explanation. “It was a ghost,” I told her. And that wasn’t entirely untrue. I was told that Les Foncés had the ability to be ghosts and the Dark Man was certainly ghost-like at times, even though he did have a physical form.

“A ghost?”

I nodded.

She shook her head in disappointment. “Leigh.”

“You said you’d believe me.”

“Okay. I know you well enough to know you’re holding something back from me. But I also know you well enough to know it’s for a good reason. If you say a ghost, I’ll believe you. And if you say I have nothing to worry about, I’ll believe that, too.” She gave me a weary smile.

I mouthed the words,
Thank you
.

Later that night, after Carrie begrudgingly helped me turn around every single mirror in her house, the three of us slept in the living room. Carrie took the couch, and Lyla clung to me on the sofa bed. Father Ben was right. The Dark Man did not bother us for the rest of the night. Before I drifted off to sleep, my cell beeped once with an incoming message. It was from Lucas.
Sweet dreams
, he wrote.

I hoped he was right.

10

Tracking the Dark Man

I
t
was
a sweet dream.

At first, anyway.

Lucas and I were in my bedroom back in
Los Angeles
, but it wasn’t my old apartment. This was a chic penthouse that looked out onto the L.A. skyline, lit up against the
black night
. My lamp was on, casting a soft glow on our entwined bodies. His lips were all over me, my legs locked with his. With each kiss, every worried thought I had left my mind. Later, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

I’m not sure how much time passed in the dream, but I woke up and it was still dark, save for that beautiful skyline. I walked to the window to stare out at the view. I felt so happy and safe with Lucas only a few from feet from me. I was again eighteen-hundred miles away from
Acadiana,
and I felt like I could breathe again.

I smiled at my faint reflection in the window, impressed with how content I looked. But my smile was suddenly not my own. The teeth became yellowed and brittle, and my eyes changed, too. They became very luminous, and my red hair turned white. My reflection had become the image of the man from Bancker; the Dark Man. I stepped back in horror and he grinned wider. A white dove flew up to the window and started violently pecking at it.

I turned around to reach out to Lucas for help. But the elegant bedroom was no more. The walls were a sickly gray color. The bed had rotted sheets caked in mud and wild grass grew around it. Lucas’s body was stretched out on the bed—at least I thought it was him. The body was a heap of decrepit flesh falling off of bone. I gaped in horror and turned to run, but found that I was moving more slowly than I should. I looked down and realized that I was no longer standing on the soft carpet of the once-chic bedroom. Instead, I was knee-high in murky green water. I started to panic, unable to trudge through it.

I turned back to the window, desperate for anything, even to jump out to my death if that’s what it took. When I turned, it was no longer night time. It was late afternoon and, instead of the L. A. skyline, I saw a lake before me.

In the instant that I saw the moss-draped Cypress and Tupelos, the entire room I was in disappeared, and I found myself inside a very small room with old, warped floor boards and a dirty window over a rusted sink. There was a small wood-burning stove in the corner. Adjacent to that was a tiny table, only big enough to seat two people, though there was only one antique wooden chair pushed under it. On the floor was a large maroon stain. My mind flashed to the picture of my mother sprawled out on a floor like this with a knife deep in her abdomen. It was here. I was sure of it. This was the cabin where she was killed, the one in the
Atchafalaya Basin
where she and the other paladins chased Les Foncés.

I slowly walked over to the door, cautiously opened it and stepped out into the late, hazy afternoon. There was an old rocking chair on the porch here. I remembered that from my previous dream, but there was no hooded figure rocking in it now.

Before me, the soft soil sloped downward a few yards and turned to silt as it reached the swamp. In that other dream, my mother had told me to keep Lyla away from here. But I wasn’t exactly sure where here was. If it was indeed the Basin, that was a huge area to avoid. I-10 ran right through it. If it was
Lake Martin
, how come I didn’t see this cabin when Lucas and I were there? Of course, we only covered part of
the lake
that day.

As soon as I started to analyze the dream, my conscious mind decided to come forth to tell me I was dreaming. That was the end of it. I woke up, alone on the sofa bed. It was bright outside and there was no one in Carrie’s living room.

I got up and went to the kitchen. No one there, either, but there were dishes in the sink and the smell of toast and grits and oatmeal still hung in the air. I looked outside the patio doors and saw Carrie and Lyla each holding a plastic garbage bag. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was when I saw a big pile of black feathers. They were bagging them, a rake on the ground nearby.

I slid open the door and Carrie turned to look at me while Lyla continued shoving feathers in her bag. Carrie didn’t say anything, but the look on her face was enough. It was a look of anger, fear and confusion. Her face could certainly say a lot with a few well-placed lines. I didn’t say anything. I went out, helped them bag the remaining feathers, and Carrie and I hauled the bags to the curb while Lyla did the dishes.

“So, do I have to worry about anything tonight?” she asked as we set the bags against her trash can. There was an edge of agitation to her voice.

“I don’t think so. You should be fine tonight.” She nodded. “Care … I’m sorry. I really am. I didn’t want you to get dragged into this.”

“And you can’t tell me what ‘this’ is.”

I shook my head. “Sorry,” I whispered.

She sighed. “Do you need help? Or does Lyla need—”

“She’s why I’m back. I’m here to help her. I just don’t know how yet. I’m going to put a stop to this as soon as I can.”

“Okay. But you promise me that if you do need me, you won’t hesitate to call, right?”

I smiled. “I promise.” I took a deep breath. “I think Lyla and I need to go back to Clothilde’s now.”

She smiled and hugged me. “Keep me updated, okay?”

“I will. Thanks for everything.”

“No prob, Leigh-Leigh.”

* * *

We didn’t talk on the ride home, but she looked scared. I wanted to tell her everything would be fine, but I didn’t know if that was true. I was utterly lost. I had no clue how to find the Dark Man and what to do with him when I found him. If I had this healing ability, how was I supposed to get it and use it? And how would that even protect Lyla? All I could do, it seemed, was fix her
after
she got hurt. As it stood now, Lyla had more of an ability than I did. I didn’t think I could heal an ant if I tried.

The sky was a little overcast by the time we got back to Clothilde’s, just before 11:00 AM. Anything to block the horrid June sun was a blessing to me. Summer was not exactly my favorite season in Louisiana. Lyla went upstairs to unpack her things. I dropped my overnight bag by the foot of the stairs and looked around for Clothilde. I didn’t see her, and the house seemed quiet. I went outside and found her in her shed, brewing up some mysterious concoction with her spoon in hand. I was afraid to ask what it was this time. Before I could even say hello, she was already down to business.

“Lucas called for you,” she said.

“Here? Why didn’t he just call my cell?”

“He said he tried, but kept getting an e-mail.”

“You mean voice mail?”

She banged the wooden spoon against the pot of mysterious goo and reached for the lid. “Mais, whatever it’s called with those portable telephones!” She put the lid on the pot and set the fire to simmer.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. I forgot I had turned it off after Lucas sent me that last text before I went to bed. I turned it on and slipped it back into my pocket.

“You okay?” I asked, wondering why she sounded so angry.

“Go call Lucas. He said he really needed to talk to you.”

“Bad news?”

She looked like she was at her last straw. “I don’t know if it’s bad or not. I have other things to worry about.”

“
What’s the—”

“I’ll tell you later. But first I have to talk to Father Ben again. He’s coming back this evening.” She went to the other side of the shed and started pulling out little glass bottles that looked like the ones in her kitchen cabinet, except these were empty.

“You need help with those?”

“No, but thank you,” she said, softening. She grabbed an armload and brought them to the small table in the middle of the room. She started to align them in some kind of order that wasn’t clear to me. It didn’t look like size, volume or color, but it was clear she could see an order in her mind.

“Father Ben really helped us out last night,” I said.

She nodded, still concentrating on the bottles.

“The Dark Man can’t hurt Carrie, can he?”

“He can, but he won’t. He doesn’t want her. He wants Lyla, for now.” She reached under the table and pulled out a box filled with small plastic bags that contained an array of herbs and powders and leaves.

“For now?”

She grabbed a handful of plastic bags and laid them out on the table in front of the bottles. “I think this particular entity started off like other Foncés. It just randomly caused chaos and destruction, like they all do. But this one is now attacking our side of the blood line, trying to cut it off. It knew David had the gift before David knew it. Michelle was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would have gotten Lyla, but she figured out a while back that she had a gift. And, she’s able to do something that most traiteurs can’t.”

She reached across the table and pulled a ceramic bowl with a large silver spoon in it toward her. “Lyla can self-heal, as long as she’s conscious, anyway,” she continued, opening one of the bags and pulling out a pinch of some herb I didn’t recognize and placing it in the bowl. She opened another bag and took out a handful of some powdery substance and placed it in the bowl with the herb. She started mashing them together, making an even finer powder.

“Traiteurs can’t heal themselves? Why not?”

“Because our gift comes through God to do God’s work, which is helping others.”

“Doesn’t God want us to be able to help ourselves?”

I could sense her agitation again. “To totally be in service of others is to be in a permanent state of grace. It’s what we strive for as holy knights.”

“So does this mean that Lyla isn’t in a state of grace?”

Clothilde stopped grinding the ingredients together and opened one of the bottles. She scooped up some of the new powder in the silver spoon and began to carefully pour it into the bottle. I noticed her hand was shaking a little. “She’s a child. Children are always in a state of grace. Miss Cee Cee believes that, since she is a child, that’s why she has this enhanced ability. She thinks it’ll wear off as she gets older. It could be that all child healers are the same, but we don’t know any to compare her to. None of the children healers we’ve known with the blood line have recognized their gift that young.” She stopped pouring when the bottle was filled and screwed on the cap.