Read Online Circle of Blood by Debbie Viguié - Free Book Online Page B

know it’s the same, that it works, too?”
    “Okay, you can have this one, then,” he said, letting go of the one they had both been holding.
    She thought about putting it in her pocket and then had a vision of the two times she had seen it falling out of Martin’s. She turned around and stuffed it down her shirt and into her bra. There was no way she wouldn’t notice movement there.
    She turned back around and he waved her to a seat at the kitchen table. “After everything that’s happened today, you certainly deserve some answers,” he said as he sat heavily, groaning like a man twice his age.
    “Does this all have to do with voodoo?” Desdemona asked, pointing to the bag he was clutching in his fist.
    “No, with hoodoo.”
    “Aren’t they the same thing?” she asked, blinking.
    “While there are some similarities, they are not the same. While voodoo is a religion, hoodoo is folk magic mixed together with Catholicism that involves heavy reliance on superstition and spiritualism.”
    “Okay. So this is hoodoo.”
    “Yes.”
    “And what is that thing, a spirit, demon, ghost?”
    “It is . . . complicated. It is all of these and none of these at the same time. It is the result of a curse being placed upon me when I was but a child.”
    “Why?”
    “A family feud gone very wrong that I ended up the sole recipient of.”
    “That’s messed up.”
    “Something tells me you know a thing or two about messed-up family dynamics.”
    “What gave you that idea?” she asked coolly.
    “Not what, who, as in
it
.”
    “Ah. It does seem to know quite a lot about just about everything.”
    “Yeah. You have to be careful, though. It lies.”
    “It wasn’t lying earlier when it tried to save my life.”
    He shrugged. “Maybe it likes you. I don’t know.”
    “I got the distinct impression that it could jump from one person to another.”
    “It’s attached to me. It can only possess a person it’s in the same room with, and it can only be in the same room with anyone if it’s possessing me.”
    “And these little bags keep that from happening.”
    “Yeah, filled with lots of good stuff.”
    “It smells like sage,” she noted.
    “Among other things. Sage is often used in purification rituals, keeps out the evil spirits, that sort of thing.”
    “Why did you tell Nala where to find me?”
    He paused. “Nala? Is that the homeless girl I saw outside the amusement park when I went back to see if you were there?”
    “Yes.”
    He shook his head. “I didn’t. I started to talk to her and the next thing I knew I was all the way across town and she was waving from down the street. I found the bag on the seat next to me. That’s been happening a lot lately. I’m not sure why.”
    “Your spirit told me that there were other entities it had basically enlisted to try to get the bag off your person so he could have his way with you.”
    Martin swore under his breath and looked shaken. “I had suspicions, but I didn’t want to believe it was true.”
    “There are other protection rituals you can do. Maybe you need to guard yourself against other kinds of spirits as well.”
    “Apparently so.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “Do you have any idea why I, it, sent Nala to your house?”
    “It said that she could ask me what happened to her friends at the amusement park.”
    He dropped his eyes. “All those people. They’re dead, aren’t they?”
    “Yes.”
    “Sometimes, after he’s gone, there are images, impressions left behind. I try to ignore them, but after you left I got the most terrible ones. They haunted me. That’s why I went back later. It was stupid. I don’t know what I expected to find, you standing on the curb waiting for a taxi or something.”
    “Instead you found Nala.”
    “Yeah. I need a drink. You want something?”
    She shook her head.
    He stood and got a beer from the refrigerator, then sat back down. She felt herself growing impatient, but she told herself to just take