Scarlet Dream (25 page)

While she still looked like a dead thing, in that moment Ezili Coeur Noir changed, and Lilitu stood in the reactor, her psyche fused together once more. Through the window in the little safety hatch, Lilitu saw the face of Kane as he stood spluttering for breath and spitting out the water he had swallowed.

“Nooooo!” Lilitu screamed as her body was pummeled by atomic forces, ripping itself apart in a tremendous implosion.

Out in the swampland, in a dilapidated house that had acquired the name of Lilandera, two figures shook in place as they were called back to the core personality.

Standing in place in the hallway, the voodoo doll just out of reach where Papa Hurbon had jammed it into the wall, Third Body Maitresse Ezili shuddered as her portly
figure was reduced to a heap of dust. Her last thought had been of love.

Just a few paces away, sitting at the kitchen table, Second Body Ezili Freda Dahomey rocked as if drifting off to sleep. Then she, too, was gone, the only evidence of her passing a single fleck of skin, a dark scar on it in the shape of a beetle.

Deep beneath the ground, in the reactor room of Redoubt Mike, First Body became whole even as she ceased to be. The process took less than two seconds and it sounded like nothing, left nothing in its wake. It was as if Lilitu, or Ezili Coeur Noir, or whatever other aspect she had taken, had never even existed.

In the mat-trans room outside the reactor, Brigid watched as the readout needles shuddered then stabilized, the water still raining down on them from the overhead sprinklers. As the needles finally returned to their base level, the beautiful redhead breathed a sigh of relief. “It's over,” she announced.

Kane looked around, as if seeing the room in a new light. “I expected it to be louder somehow,” he said, “when she finally went.”

Brigid peered through the tiny security window of the reactor. “This is what it sounds like when gods die,” she said as the reactor powered down.

Together, the three warriors made their way to the mat-trans unit that waited at the front of the room. The reactor charge would remain for ten minutes yet—more than enough time to send them on their way back home.

 

O
UTSIDE THE BURIED
entrance to the redoubt, the light was turning to dusk, April turning to May and taking with it the
Mange-les-Morts
. Papa Hurbon wheeled himself along the dirt road that trailed through the bayou. He
peered over his shoulder now and then, but there came no evidence that anything had changed, just the dead leaves and the sounds of distant insects and birds, as it had been when he had arrived.

Still, he liked to think he knew that it was over. Because, if it wasn't over, he was pretty sure he
would
know; something would be crawling or seeping or shambling from the entryway.

Hurbon smiled then, as he took the little doll from his lap, the black material that made up her body still wringing wet from the traumas inside the redoubt. With pudgy fingers, he loosened the black ribbon that he had used to bind the doll, loosened it just a sliver, just enough to let the doll breathe, as it were.

“Doll of wax, doll of dust,” Hurbon muttered as he brushed dirt from it. “You're all fixed now. Soon you'll come back, my precious little girl, and this time it is I—not you—who will be making the demands.”

Papa Hurbon smiled as he wheeled himself down the dirt track toward the tarmac road beyond.

Once again there came the strange sensation of nonmovement, the stomach rolling of sea-sickness.

Then the mist began to clear and Kane, Grant and Brigid found themselves standing within the mat-trans unit in the Cerberus ops center, the familiar brown-tinted armaglass materializing behind the swirling mist.

“Good to be home,” Kane said, brushing at his wet hair.

Brigid nodded as she tapped in the door code that would release the lock and allow them to exit the mat-trans chamber. Her own damp hair clung to her face. “I need a shower,” she said. “A warm one this time, with soap.”

“Sounds good,” Grant agreed as he rubbed at his aching shoulder, following Kane and Brigid from the mat-trans chamber and out into the familiar ops room.

What confronted the three Cerberus warriors was a scene of carnage.

Something had paid Cerberus a visit.

Something bad.