"My name's Marie. Marie Luna."
Elise felt a thud deep in her belly.
This was Strata Luna's daughter. The one who was supposedly dead and buried. The one who was supposed to have hung herself.
She recalled Strata Luna's sadness when they were discussing daughters. Elise had thought she'd been sad because her children were both dead. Instead, she'd been sad because at least one of her offspring was twisted and evil.
What do you do with an evil child?
What Strata Luna had done? Pretend she was dead?
"We're sisters," Marie Luna said.
At first Elise thought she meant "sisters" as in all women were sisters.
"Jackson Sweet was your father," Marie Luna continued. "He was my father too."
The floor shifted.
All her life, Elise had wanted to know her roots, know where she'd come from, but this was a sick joke-that's what it was. Her father-a root doctor. Her mother a prostitute turned permanent monastery guest. Her sister a murdering psychopath? Didn't get much funnier than that.
Marie Luna was just playing with her head. Trying to trip her up.
"That makes us half sisters." Marie Luna took a step closer, then another, the fabric of her heavy skirt shushing across the stone floor.
She's lying, Elise told herself, her stomach churning.
Marie Luna stopped. "Look at me. Our skin isn't the same color because your mother was white-mine was black. But look at my eyes."
Oh, God. Those eyes. They were Elise's eyes. She could even see a resemblance to Audrey in the woman's face.
Marie Luna nodded and kept smiling that horrid smile, pleased that Elise was now convinced of their familial bond.
Kill her.
She laughed. "I'm your sister. You wouldn't hurt your own sister, would you?"
Emotions rose in Elise's throat and she let out a choke of denial. This is a nightmare. This isn 't real. It can't be real.
Elise risked a glance at David.
Staring at her. Life in his eyes. Trying to tell her something.
She has a knife, David tried to say, but no words came out. Hidden in her skirt.
He could see the horror in Elise's face, see her struggling with what Marie Luna had told her.
Marie Luna would be able to see it too. She would be ready for the second Elise wavered.
Things were changing. David's body was waking up. He could feel sparks of electricity shooting along nerve pathways, zapping him.
He forced himself to let go of his thoughts of Elise and focus on the physical. Don't think about anything but getting your ass off this slab.
Move, his brain commanded.
Move!
Suddenly he lurched sideways, rolling off the marble vault, the lantern going with him.
He tried to catch himself. His arms didn't respond. He smacked into the floor, the lantern shattering.
Marie Luna lunged for Elise, screaming, the knife appearing seemingly out of nowhere.
Raised.
Plunging.
A gun discharged.
Marie Luna tugged the blade free, then brought it down again.
Elise's flashlight hit the floor, the lens shattering.
Absolute darkness.
Strata Luna's daughter continued to shriek, stringing words together that made no sense.
Elise was silent.
Silent.
Blond hair floating in the tub.
Little blue fingers.
NO!
This couldn't be happening.
Not again.
Another gunshot.
Deafening.
Followed by another, and another.
David's ears hummed hollowly as he dragged himself across the floor, digging his fingers into the cracks between stones, pulling his own deadweight.
From the tunnel entrance came the sound of running feet. High-powered flashlights blinded him.
"Jesus fucking Christ." Starsky. Hutch.
Too late, you assholes. Too damn late.
David followed their gaze to where Elise lay in a pool of blood. Sprawled across her was Marie Luna. Tears burned his eyes.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Elise. Dead.
Marie Luna shifted.
The detectives jumped forward, guns and flashlights braced and ready.
A voice-Elise's voice-came from beneath the bloody pile. "Can someone get this evil bitch off me?"
Chapter 47
"What's that look about?" David asked with concern, eyeing Elise closely.
They were on the balcony outside her bedroom, Elise in a wicker rocker, David lounging against the railing. He was barefoot, dressed in faded jeans and gray Savannah Police Department T-shirt. Elise wore a pair of loose black pants and a top in various shades of red that Audrey had dug from the closet and convinced her to wear.
"Does evil move through bloodlines?" Elise asked fearfully. Would it resurface in future generations? In Audrey's children or grandchildren?
"You know what?" David pushed himself away from the railing with his hip and reached to pluck a magnolia from a nearby tree. "I'm just glad you're alive." He tucked the white blossom in her hair, above her ear. "And I'm glad I'm alive. I don't want to think about that other stuff."
He was right. It served no purpose to obsess about something that couldn't be controlled and would probably never happen.
Major Hoffman had offered David his job back, and he'd accepted, along with a year's probation. His criminal profile had been fairly accurate other than the sex and education of the perpetrator. And except for a bit of short-term memory loss that LaRue, who was out of jail and also on probation, assured them would go away soon, David didn't seem to be suffering any ill effects from the TTX.
After forty-eight hours in the hospital, two pints of blood, and eighty-some stitches to four defensive wounds, Elise had been sent home. The all-purpose vest had saved her from any fatal injuries.
Strata Luna herself was alive and in stable condition, the knife blade having missed her heart by a hair.
"When I get outta here, I'm gonna teach you some good root doctoring," Strata Luna had said from her hospital bed when Elise had stopped to visit.
The lights had been draped with blue scarves to chase away evil spirits, and Strata Luna had gotten into trouble several times for burning heal-me-now incense.
"I gotta have somebody to pass the mantle to, and who better than Jackson Sweet's daughter? And later, when the time is right, you can pass it on to your girl."
"I don't know…," Elise had said noncommittally, while at the same time experiencing a sense of excitement at the thought of embracing her past so openly. But she was a cop. A detective. She shouldn't be messing around with root work. And yet…
"You can't let it all just stop. One more generation gone by and nobody will even know what root doctorin' is. Don't waste your heritage, girl," Strata Luna had told her. "You could be using it to be a better detective."
An intriguing notion…
Then the conversation turned to Marie Luna.
"I always suspected she killed her own sister," Strata Luna confided. "But as a mother, I couldn't believe it." She shook her head. "Thought I had to be mistaken. Just in case, I decided to keep her away from school and teach her at home. Maybe that's where I went wrong. Maybe she shouldn't have been denied the company of kids her own age."
"I think you made a wise choice," Elise said. History had proved that someone with Marie Luna's tendencies only got worse when forced into the public education system.
"There were the usual things," Strata Luna continued. "She was mean to animals. I learned real fast that she couldn't have any pets, but she still caught baby birds and tortured them till they died. I tried all kinds of spells, but they seemed to make her worse. For a while, I even tried to keep her sedated."
"With tetrodotoxin?"
"Not a zombie potion, but a relative of it. Meant to take the edge off her energy. Instead of knocking her out it made her so she couldn't sleep. She started prowling those damn tunnels all night long."
"I've heard of sedatives having that kind of negative reaction sometimes," Elise said. If only Strata Luna had asked for help. But there was no use telling her what she already knew.