Chapter Six
Chapter Six
I let the comment pass. Maybe he was trying to scare me. Maybe he wasn’t. Didn’t matter.
I followed Murphy into the hall. “I hear you’re called Cowboy.”
He flinched, shoulders drawing in, backpack shifting. “Nicknames like that get people killed.”
“Not John Wayne,” I muttered. “He never died. In his movies anyway.”
“Sure he did. The Cowboys. How’s that for irony? I think he died in one of his war movies, too. Green Berets maybe. Or Sands of Iwo Jima.”
“You’re a John Wayne fan?”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“I thought John Wayne was an American icon. Don’t the Europeans consider him a sad commentary on our cowboy nation?”
Now I was fishing—trying to get Murphy to admit where he was from. He merely shrugged, and I was forced to try harder.
“Why do they call you Cowboy?”
“They call me Koboy.” He gave the name a Creole twist.
“Whatever,” I snapped. “Why?”
“They call all Americans that.”
Aha! I thought. What I said was: “Not me.”
Murphy let his gaze wander from the tips of my brand-new hiking boots to the top of my bare head. I’d have to dig out my hat before too long or risk sunstroke. See, I knew a few things about the tropics.
“You don’t look like a Cowboy,” he said.
I eyed him down and up, the way he’d eyed me. With the feathers in his long hair and the earring in his ear, he looked more like an Indian—even if he was nearly blond. He’d taken off his arm bracelets, but not his silver thumb ring. After the bartender’s comments about fighting, I wondered if that was more a brass knuckle than an adornment.
“So you’re American?” I pressed.
He gave me a cocky smile. “You’re thinkin’ so?”
The brogue was back, thicker than ever. God, he was annoying.
Without waiting for my answer, Murphy started downstairs. I followed, bumping into his backpack when he paused only a few steps down.
“What—?” I began.
He lifted a hand, silencing me. His head tilted as he listened to something, or someone, below. From the tension in his body I knew enough to shut up.
“Upstairs,” the bartender said. “But he is with a woman.”
I made a face, which Murphy, when he whirled and practically shoved me onto the landing, ignored.
“Let’s go.”
He pushed past me, grabbing my hand as he went, then dragged me after him down the back stairs, which were narrow, creaky, and dangerous. We burst out of the tavern and into the alley where a battered Jeep waited.
Murphy let go of me and jumped into the driver’s seat. I scooted around the hood and barely managed to dive in before he floored it, scraping the passenger door against the chain-link fence.
We spilled onto the street. He flicked a glance into the rearview mirror. “Duck,” he said, the tone so casual I could only stare at him dumbly.
He reached over and shoved my head into his lap, dipping his own just as gunfire erupted. He didn’t stop, didn’t flinch, just kept driving, and in a moment we’d left our pursuers behind.
His thigh pressed against my cheek; his zipper scraped the back of my head. We’d jumped into the car still wearing our backpacks and mine was twisted awkwardly between my shoulders and the seat. His had to be shoving him practically into the steering wheel.
I sat up; he let me. I removed the pack and tossed it backward, then helped him do the same. Silence settled between us, a silence I couldn’t let stand. “Friends of yours?”
“They didn’t seem very friendly.”
“What did they want?”
“Me dead, I think.”
“I can understand the sentiment, but what did you do?”
He gave a short bark of laughter and cast me a speculative glance. “You want me dead, sweet thing?”
Southern accent this time.
“Maybe not dead,” I allowed.
He was, after all, the only one willing, or perhaps able, to take me to the bokor.
“If not dead, then what?” he asked.
“Truthful.”
Did he really know how to find the bokor? Or was he taking me into the mountains with nefarious designs, if not on my person, then on my money or my life?
My fingers crept to the knife at my waist. I really wished I could trust him, but I didn’t.
“The instant you’re truthful with me, sugar, I’ll be truthful with you.”
I scowled. He had a point; however, I wasn’t going to tell him what I was really after until we were too far away from Port-au-Prince for him to take me back and dump me at the nearest insane asylum.
“The way you switch accents gives me a damn headache,” I muttered.
“A damn headache?” Southern. “Well, we cannot have that.” English. “Which accent should I use?”
American.
I didn’t answer. I wanted to slug him.
“I’ll pick one,” he said. “American seems to get me the farthest around here. Can’t imagine why, since you people invaded the place not too long ago.”
Over ten years ago, but who was counting? Probably the Haitians.
“We do that,” I said drily. “Invade. But we’re only trying to help.”
Murphy snorted.
His words— you p eop le—made me rethink his nationality. I wasn’t sure what he was all over again.
He stared into the rearview mirror and frowned. I turned around so fast my neck crackled, but the road behind us was empty.
“I didn’t know them,” he murmured.
“Then why did we run?”
“I owe some money. I planned to pay as soon as we got back.”
“Sure you did.”
“Stiffing people is not healthy in these parts.”
I thought of my drug-dealing husband and the enforcers he’d employed. “It’s not healthy in any parts.”
He cast me a quick glance. Oops. Must have let too much emotion shine through. A mistake I rarely made anymore. I schooled my face into the polite mask I’d perfected since I’d become Priestess Cassandra. But I doubted the expression fooled Murphy.
“Anyone who comes to Chwal Lanme asking for me is usually someone I owe.”
“Until I showed up.”
“Which was a refreshing change of pace.”
“I bet. Let’s get back to the goons with guns. Who were they if not the people you owe or their minions?”
“Minions?” His quick grin was infectious. I very nearly smiled back. “Gotta love that word.”
“Unless you’re a minion.”
“Mmm.” He concentrated on making a tight turn and avoiding a stray dog taking a nap in the middle of the road. “They could have been after you.”
“Except they asked for you.”
“Perhaps because you were asking for me. All over town from what I gathered.”
Could the men who’d come to the tavern have been Karl’s? It had been so many years since I’d changed lives, with not a hint that anyone had found me, I’d begun to feel safe, and maybe I’d made a stupid mistake.
My coming to Haiti was an invitation for them to dispose of me. No one would ever figure out what had happened. Or at least that was what the assassins thought. I doubted they knew about Edward and his own army of minions.
Still, it wouldn’t do me a whole helluva lot of good if Edward figured out I’d been killed for my previous life rather than my current one. I’d still be dead. And so would my little girl.
“No one’s after me,” I lied. “I’m just Priestess Cassandra, your friendly New Orleans voodoo practitioner.”
“Your what?”
“Did I neglect to mention that?”
He shot me a glare.
“Sorry.” Funny, I didn’t sound sorry at all. “It’s just my j ob. No worries.”
His j aw worked as he ground his teeth together. I’d finally annoyed him, and I wasn’t even trying.
“You come to Haiti,” he said in a voice gone deep with fury, “and ask me to take you into the mountains to meet an evil voodoo sorcerer, but you f orget to tell me that you’re a voodoo priestess, and I’m supposed to think nothing of it?”
“I’m not paying you to think anything of it.”
“That’s the problem with some people; they can’t help but think. Even if they aren’t being paid for it.” He slid a glance my way. “You don’t look like a voodoo priestess.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
We left Port-au-Prince behind, driving north along the coast, before turning inland toward more distant mountains.
No further shots were fired; no one tried to stop us. Of course Haiti had only two main roads. The one we were on eventually led to Cap Haitien. Le Cap, the former capital, was the main launching place to the nearby beaches of the Labadie Peninsula. Sun, sand, and surf—too bad we didn’t have the time.
A second road curved southwest, ending at Les Cayes. All other thoroughfares required a Jeep or a truck or one’s feet to traverse.
As the day wore on, my j aw ached from clenching it to avoid biting off my tongue as we lurched over every bump and rut in the country. When dusk approached, Murphy wheeled onto a hard-packed dirt track.
We stopped at the base of a tree-covered mountain, the foliage such an unusual sight I could do little but stare. My skin tingled at the loss of sensation and my ears rang at the loss of sound.
“We’ll camp here,” Murphy said.
“Already?”
He glanced at me, no doubt trying to figure out if I was being sarcastic. I wasn’t sure myself. The trip had been long, but we hadn’t been walking. We still had about an hour before dark.
“No point in going on tonight,” he answered, taking my question at face value. “Better to get a fresh start in the morning.”
“Trees,” I murmured.
His brow creased. “You OK?”
“It’s just… there aren’t that many trees here and suddenly—” I pointed.
“This is the south side of a national park near Citadelle La Ferriere.”
“The fortress?” I stared at the midnight blue mountain rising above us.
In the early nineteenth century, King Henri Christophe built the largest fortress in the Western Hemisphere three thousand feet above sea level. The 12-foot-thick walls and 140-foot-high ramparts had to have impressed everyone who’d managed to climb high enough to see them.
“The bokor lives in a national park?” I found that hard to believe.
“Not exactly,” Murphy said, and grabbed his backpack.
I stepped out of the Jeep and promptly fell on my face.
Murphy hunkered down next to me. “You OK?”
“My legs are asleep.”
“We didn’t stop to eat. That was a mistake.”
“I didn’t notice.” Ever since there’d been no one to worry about but me, food had lost its allure.
Murphy helped me to my feet, but he didn’t let go. “You want to die, sweetie pie?”
His blue-gray gaze remained steady on mine. If I wasn’t careful, he’d wrest every secret from my head, and there were some in there I didn’t ever want to examine again.
“Rhyming now?” I kept my voice light as I inched out of his grip. “Please stop.”
“Only if you start. Eating.”
“Skipping meals has never bothered me before. I’m not sure why it did now.”
“The heat.”
“This isn’t heat. Try living in New Orleans.”
“You don’t sound like you’re from New Orleans.”
“Because sounding like you’re from somewhere means that you are?”
“Point taken,” he said. “But not eating, combined with the adrenaline rash of being chased and shot at, means dizziness and eventual fainting.”
“Then I should be just dandy from now on.”
“How you figure?”
“We lost those guys. So we shouldn’t be chased or shot at again.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” he muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Once we get out there,” he pointed to the trees, “it’ll be open season for anything.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why do you think no one else would take you where you want to go?”
“They didn’t know where the bokor was?”
He shook his head, and his earring sparked orange in the light of the setting sun. “The locals know better than to come to this place. They call it Montagne sans retour. Mountain of No Return.”
“Why do they call it that?”
“Because people have a nasty habit of disappearing whenever they go looking for Mezareau.”
That didn’t sound good, but I refused to be intimidated by rumors and a nickname. Nevertheless, I cast a wary glance at the steadily darkening shadows. “We should probably stop using his name.”
“Why?”
“He’s a bokor, a sorcerer. Speaking his name out loud could allow him to see us, maybe hear us. He’ll know we’re coming before we even get there.”
“Right.”
“How else do you explain the disappearing people?”
“Oh, I don’t know …” He spread his hands. “Great big guards who dispose of any and all trespassers?”
“Maybe.”
But I didn’t think so. I’d felt watched from the moment Murphy had said the bokor ’s name. I might be paranoid, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t spying on me.
***