LITMIR.BIZ

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riding a black veil that covered her face, she laughed low in her throat like the madwoman she was and gazed down hungrily into the Chalice.

      “Ah, mon beau, if we could have taken your magnificent body as well as your ferocious soul, I would give you such pleasure before I feed you to Le Devourer,” she murmured, as she ran her tongue around the rim of the Chalice, her eyes heavy with lust. He could feel her heat, smell her desire.

      “I have never slept with a Gifted male as powerful as you. Think of the child we could make, you and I. I am half Blood and half Flames, like my accursed sister. And you are Shadows. Our child would be a baby born of all three Houses—the Flames, the Blood and the Shadows. A child of Shadows born, destined to rule over thousands of Gifted.”

      She sighed with pleasure and threw back her head. “Such a dream,” she whispered. Then her smile faded, and her features hardened. “Unfortunately you will never father children. In fact, your soul won’t last another quarter hour. I have promised it to Le Devourer, and he always gets what he wants.”

      Not this time. Not this soul, Jean-Marc vowed.

      It was difficult to stay lucid when he was in so much pain. He would sell this soul of his to have fists to fight with, a mouth to utter magical incantations and kill Lilliane on the spot.

      He had seen soulless living men. He had listened to them shriek and jabber, drowning in physical pain and spiritual anguish. They begged for their souls, would promise anything, everything, if only it would stop, it would stop, it would stop.

      Total oblivion was their best hope. An end to the agony. But he could not go into that good night.

      I can’t leave Isabelle to face the nightmare alone.

      Mon Roi Gris, he prayed to his own demon patron. Écoutez-moi. Hear me. He strained for a sign that the Grey King was with him, but there was none. He was completely alone.

      So be it.

      “Alors, it’s time,” Lilliane whispered.

      She plucked up the Chalice with one hand and lifted her skirts with the other, tripping barefoot up the dungeon stairs and pushing open the ornately carved ebony door. Her honor guard snapped to attention—dark, handsome Gifted men in full battle armor and helmets with their visors up. Uzis were slung against their chests, and they wore thick belts equipped with clips of ammo and grenades. Jean-Marc knew their magical arsenals of spells and fireballs were far more destructive than their Ungifted submachine guns and Magnum .357s. But when one was guarding one’s queen, one took no chances.

      Half a dozen torch-bearing bokor priests and priestesses joined the procession, regaled in their voodoo finery—billowing black robes sewn with mirrors, animal heads and chicken claws; headdresses of crow feathers, crocodile skulls and human bones.

      The tallest, a man, stepped forward, his face hidden by a grotesquely carved wooden mask with a pointed nose, almond eyes and a rictus smile decorated with human teeth. Around his neck he wore a gris-gris of chicken feet. The priestess beside him held out a simple painted black gourd, and a noxious odor wafted from it. He dipped his fingers and flicked them at Lilliane, who curtsied.

      “Merci,” she said humbly, though she was convulsing with silent laughter.

      The company moved swiftly down a foul-smelling corridor. Then they burst out into the moonlight, and the thirteen hundred members of the Malchance family—the House of the Blood—raised their voices in salutation.

      “Lilliane!” they thundered. They could barely move, crammed as they were into the courtyard of the ancient medieval castle that was the family seat. The Knights Templar had abandoned it in 1301, after their leader had been burned at the stake for sorcery.

      In the Devereaux way of Seeing, Jean-Marc’s perspective shifted. Though he knew he hadn’t left the Chalice, he looked down on the island as if he were flying. He Saw lines of zombies roped together beside the stone stairs that led to the voodoo altar. Voodoo drums pounded all over the island; loa—voodoo gods—slithered in their snake shapes through the plantation cane rustling in the night wind; and Ungifted danced around enormous bonfires blazing along the beaches. The island of Haiti had seen much death, but the death of the soul of a Gifted Guardian was a once-in-a-lifetime event.

      Fly! Leave! Jean-Marc commanded himself. His soul batted the sides of the Chalice like a caged falcon. Then all his senses tumbled from the sky, confined to the Chalice, as Lilliane raised it, saluting her family. Their cries thundered and echoed over the courtyard.

      “Lilliane! Lilliane!” The night shuddered with her name. A miasma of black magic saturated the air.

      “Here we go, Jean-Marc,” she whispered, dancing up the stairs with the chief bokor at her side.

      With a flourish, she reached into the chalice and plucked up Jean-Marc’s soul, giving it a shake that ignited every point of pain to blistering intensity.

      “Devereaux is ours!” Her voice rang out. “We will feed him to Le Devourer and he will suffer eternally!”

      “Oui!” the people cheered. “Vive, Le Devourer! Vive, Lilliane!”

      The crowd surged forward, shrieking; the voodoo drums pounded. Overcome, clumps of people broke into gyrations, collapsing and writhing on the ground. Madness and evil infected the House of the Blood. They had pledged their loyalty to the Forces of Darkness, and sooner or later, that choice would destroy them. Of that, Jean-Marc had no doubt.

      Lilliane and her chief priest approached the altar. Silver hands, crosses, X’s, and silver eyes decorated the altar. Black mambo serpents and cockerels hissed in their cages on top of the shrine, upon which burned crimson candles.

      A dead raven lay bleeding on the altar. Lilliane’s ceremonial dagger, her athame, protruded dead center from its chest. She yanked the athame out of the raven’s body. Blood dripped onto the stone.

      In the courtyard below, the raised voices of the House of the Blood shook the stones of the temple and the ground beneath their feet shifted and tottered.

      “Devereaux, là-bas! Fils des Ombres, là-bas!” Down with Devereaux, Son of the Shadows! Their enemy must suffer horribly, terribly. No compassion. No quarter.

      “Adieu,” Lilliane whispered to Jean-Marc.

      Then she turned the athame tip down and stabbed Jean-Marc’s soul with savage violence. The pain catapulted him out of the world and beyond the universe—the pain of soul mutilation was indescribable. She gave him no chance for recovery; her people pushed forward with their arms raised toward her, shrieking, weeping with hatred, urging her on.

      “This is for my dead husband, murdered by this man and his woman!” she screamed. “By Isabelle, my own twin sister! I will do this to her next!”

      “Isabelle là-bas!” the people chanted. “Jean-Marc là-bas!”

      Then the shadow of a huge red demon flared around Jean-Marc like a firestorm. With Seeing altered by magic and pain, he saw flashes of black fangs, smoking horns and an enormous, six-fingered scarlet hand tipped with talons as sharp as scimitars reaching for him. The stench assaulted him: sulfur and carrion, rotten blood, evil. The thing was Le Devourer, Lilliane’s patron. His hand closed around Jean-Marc’s soul, and its talons slashed through the radiant mass.

      Jean-Marc rocketed past sanity from the violation. He had no thoughts, no emotions. He ceased, because being was too horrible. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know that he was.

      But one thing remained: a woman’s name, and he shouted it with the voice of the possessed:

      “Isabelle!”

      Chapter 1

      The Bayou, New Orleans

      Isabelle.

      —Exquisite warmth grasped him as he thrust into silken moistness. Gentle and yielding, creamy and sweet, the rhythm surged through him; pleasure rode him, pleasure; arching for it, grasping

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