was a neatly tailored jacket that was cut short, reaching barely to the small of her back. Her clothes, like her name, were blue.
“You ever meet one?” Papa Hurbon asked, his voice so low it sounded like the rumbling of distant thunder.
Hurbon was a large man, both tall and corpulent, with the lustrous, dark skin of an octoroon. His skin glistened with free-flowing rivulets of perspiration, which he wiped from his heavy brow as they trudged through the Djévo, passing glass jars filled with herbs, feathers, snail shells and other curios. Hurbon wore a sweat-stained undershirt and cutoffs, with a homemade sandal on his remaining foot. His right leg was missing below the knee, and a wooden strut had been shoved in its place that he used to totter forward with a lunging, rolling gait that looked as though he might overbalance at any moment. Hurbon’s shaved head was shaped like a bullet, wide at the bottom and tapering at the top, and when he smiled it was a gap-toothed maw that seemed to engulf the whole width of that impressive, bucketlike jaw. Both of Hurbon’s ears were pierced in multiple places, both at the lobes and along the archlike helix of the ear, and what appeared to be two tiny fetus skeletons depended from their bulbous lobes.
“I’ve never had that pleasure,” she admitted, her long blond tresses sweeping across her back as Ohio Blue shook her head.
Hurbon offered his wide, all-encompassing smile. “Ain’t no pleasure,” he told her. “You can take my word for that. Ezili Coeur Noir came here one time, ’bout a year ago. Mad bitch took my leg. Laughed the whole time she was doing it, too. When she was done she held it up before my congregation, blood spittin’ everywhere, and she laughed and told them to do the same. Mad bitch.”
Ohio blanched at the story. “And did they?”
Hurbon’s brow creased in a frown. “Did they what?”
“Remove their legs?”
Hurbon nodded. “Some did,” he said, resignation in his voice. “They wanted her blessing, lizard-skinned vision that she was. That sound crazy to you, Mam’selle?”
“Like I said, I never held much stock in gods,” Ohio told the corpulent man as they passed through an arched doorway and into the center of the voodoo temple.
Papa Hurbon stopped for a moment, openly admiring Blue’s shapely figure from head to toe. “With the gams on you, that’s probably for the best, little peach,” he said with a rich basso laugh.
Through the archway, the inner room was much smaller than the Djévo, roughly square and just nine feet from wall to wall. Lit by candles, this was a mirrored room, wherein one side balanced the other. Thus, it featured a door to the far side, precisely opposing the one that Ohio’s party had entered. Several figures could be seen milling about in the room beyond that far doorway, and Ohio’s bodyguards tensed as they eyed them through the gloom.
This inner room was uncluttered, holding just a few objects. A polished broadsword had been placed horizontally on the wall, resting there on two hooks, ornately weaved tassels drooping down from its leather-wrapped hilt. Two matching hooks had been drilled into the opposite wall and they held what appeared to be a human shinbone of roughly the same length as the sword, polished so that it shone in the flickering light of the candle flames. Two foot-high clay pots filled with the dried stalks of dead flowers sat at opposing corners of the room, placed at diagonals to each other.
A curious-looking chair waited in the center of the room. The chair appeared to be carved of some kind of plant root, and it had a seat and a back but apparently had no legs. Instead, the seat itself had been ignominiously placed atop a stack of house bricks, like some stripped-down automobile.
“Here she be,” Papa Hurbon rumbled, indicating the odd-looking chair.
Ohio appraised the strange chair for almost half a minute, pacing slowly around it to view it from all angles before she finally spoke in her soft drawl. “Where did it come from?” she asked, sapphire eye still peering at the chair.
Hurbon pointed to the ceiling. “Tumbled out of the sky,” he said, “just like my people told you. Gift from Ezili Coeur Noir. Instructed me to take care of it, tend to its needs. It gives visions in the head, makes you see beyond the Barriè.”
Blue looked quizzically at Hurbon for a moment until, finally, he elaborated.
“The Barriè, the spirit world,” he said. “So, you want?”
“How does it work?” Blue asked.
“Just sit down,” Hurbon encouraged, “and let the visions flow through you. Simple as that. Chair of the gods, you see?”
Ohio Blue looked dubious as she considered the man’s strange boast. Finally, she turned to her two bodyguards. “One of my people will test it,” she decided, “to verify your claim. If that is satisfactory to you.”
Hurbon shrugged. “The gods deserted me. What do I care?”
Ohio turned to her waiting bodyguards, who had assumed positions at either side of the entry door, their expressions grim. “Brigid? Kane?” she asked, addressing each in turn. “If one of you would be so kind…?”
Kane smiled sourly. A muscular man with steel-gray eyes and short, dark hair, Kane resembled a wolf, for his limbs were long and rangy and his body seemed furiously powerful, a coiled spring waiting to release. He was like a wolf in other ways, too, naturally adopting the role of pack leader and equally comfortable striking out on his own. Despite current circumstances, Kane was not a bodyguard, and nor was he an employee of the blond-haired trader, Ohio Blue. An ex-Magistrate, Kane was one of the Cerberus exiles. The Cerberus redoubt was hidden in Montana, and its residents were dedicated to the protection of humanity, tasked with freeing it from the hidden shackles that the alien Annunaki race had placed upon it. Kane’s role had taken him across the globe and beyond in his quest to eliminate the Annunaki’s nefarious meddling in the affairs of humankind, and his appearance here, as Ohio Blue’s bodyguard, was yet another instance of that ongoing struggle for freedom. He wore a ragged denim jacket and pants over the figure-hugging black weave of his shadow suit, which offered protection from radiation, contamination and could even withstand minor blunt-force trauma.
Ohio Blue was playing her own role admirably, Kane thought. An independent trader, Blue had a solid reputation in the Tennessee/Louisiana area and boasted a whole network of contacts through whom she could locate items of value and interest. As such, she had one important asset that the Cerberus team lacked—credibility among the minor players who occasionally ended up with something the Cerberus exiles might need. A recent meeting with Blue had resulted in Kane saving the woman’s life, and she had vowed to return the favor should he call on her to do so.
This operation, however, had not come at his urging but at hers. Aware of Kane’s interest in alien artifacts, Ohio Blue had contacted him with information regarding a possible sighting out here in Louisiana. In this case, Papa Hurbon, a houngan priest in a small voodoo sect hidden in the swampland, had come into possession of what was rumored to be a section of the Annunaki mother ship, Tiamat. It seemed that this odd-looking chair was that item, although Kane couldn’t be certain. He had been inside Tiamat during that final, frenetic battle that had resulted in the destruction of that incredible Annunaki starship, but he was hard-pressed to remember all of the details of the furniture that he had seen there. Kane nodded dourly toward the other bodyguard, indicating that she was better qualified to examine the chair.
The other bodyguard was a striking woman with an athletic body and vibrant long hair the red-gold color of sunrise. Her name was Brigid Baptiste and she had partnered with Kane ever since
