What Voodoo Do You Do? Read online

  What Voodoo Do You Do?

  Sam Cheever

  Electric Prose Publications

  Copyright © 2021 by Sam Cheever

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Stay in Touch

  A Lares Shall Heroic Be

  1. A Call to Save the Weak From Harm

  2. A Plea to Sound the First Alarm

  3. A Rupture in the Fetid Soil

  4. A Magic Much Like Rancid Oil

  5. The Weak Succumb to Powerful Fates

  6. The Vessels for an Oily Hate

  7. A Good Man Falls, A Guardian Weeps

  8. When Virtue Dares and Evil Sleeps

  9. Let Failure Pierce a Guardian’s Pride

  10. With Dangerous Allies at Her Side

  11. Below the Soil a Villain Sounds

  12. A Fractured Earth, a Treasure Found

  13. Past Mistakes an Ally Bound

  14. A Friend Caught Out by Someone’s Lies

  15. The Lares Must her Peers Apprise

  16. When Malevolent Forces Spread Their Wings

  17. A Deadly Soup of Horrendous Things

  18. A Guardian’s Light Must Burn and Blaze

  19. To Forge a Path For Brighter Days

  20. Or Let the Darkness Rise and Rule

  21. Relenting Means She Plays the Fool

  22. At Last the End is Coming Clear

  23. The Guardian’s Loss a Thing to Fear

  24. When Golden Days Return at Last

  25. The Lares Must Look to the Past

  Don’t Miss Out

  Also by Sam Cheever

  About the Author

  Praise for Sam Cheever

  “You have that essential Je ne sais quoi that it takes to tell a story so mesmerizing you cannot stop reading once started. You are not telling stories to your readers…you are taking them with you on your adventures so that the experience can be shared by all as it happens and not simply replayed like a memory on the page of a diary! You are indeed gifted and it is my pleasure to read your books!”

  Valerie Irwin

  I’m discovering that glossing over that whole “epicenter of a magical vortex” thing when I took this Lares job was a mistake. Looking back, that now seems like important information.

  * * *

  Whoever said midlife was a time for reflection and relaxation clearly wasn’t an ancient guardian deity. I’d just started to think I was getting a handle on this whole Lares thing, and then the earth decided to open up into a giant, fiery hole of evil nastiness.

  Talk about your hot flashes!

  Add in a deadly new ally, a magical weapon I’m pretty sure I’ll never get the hang of, and being forced to play “Where’s the Voodoo Queen” while trying to deal with everything else…well…let’s just say that crepey skin is probably the least of my worries.

  Stay in Touch

  Sam doesn’t give away a lot of books. But she values her readers and, to show it, she’s gifting you a copy of a fun book just for signing up for her newsletter!

  * * *

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  A Lares Shall Heroic Be

  When evil’s core begins to rise, and devil’s gaze on man resides, the Lares’ spirit rules the day, if evil cannot earth hold sway, though love and loss be fairest friends, the guardian’s tears will guide their ends.

  * * *

  A call to save the weak from harm,

  A plea to sound the first alarm,

  A rupture in the fetid soil,

  A magic much like rancid oil,

  The weak succumb to powerful fates,

  The vessels for an oily hate,

  A good man falls, a guardian weeps,

  When virtue dares and evil sleeps,

  Let failure pierce a guardian’s pride,

  With dangerous allies at her side,

  Below the soil a villain sounds,

  A Fractured Earth, A Treasure Found

  Past Mistakes an Ally Bound

  A Friend Caught Out by Someone’s Lies

  The Lares must her peers apprise,

  When malevolent forces spread their wings,

  A deadly soup of horrendous things,

  A guardian’s light must burn and blaze,

  To forge a path for brighter days,

  Or let the darkness rise and rule,

  Relenting means she plays the fool,

  At last the end is coming clear,

  The guardian’s loss a thing to fear,

  When golden days return at last,

  The Lares must look to the past.

  1

  A Call to Save the Weak From Harm

  Gong!

  I jerked awake, the darkly melodic tones of the bell still reverberating through my mind. The sound was more than a warning. It was more than an invitation.

  It was a summons.

  On the heels of that realization, my cell phone rang. I shoved the covers off and swung my legs over the side of the bed, grabbing my phone. “Hello?”

  Monty trotted past me and hit his doggy stairs, descending at a run and disappearing down the hall in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Is this Aggy?” the voice on the phone asked.

  “Yes. Who is this?” I didn’t recognize the voice, but something about it rang a familiar note.

  “Oh, thank heavens!” the woman said. Her voice was rusty as if she’d been pulled from sleep as she’d done to me. She coughed wetly as the force of her exclamation tore at her throat. When she spoke again, her voice broke beneath her words. “You need to save us. This is cataclysmic.”

  I stood and headed for the sweatshirt I’d thrown over a nearby chair. “I’m sorry. Who is this?”

  “It’s Molly. Molly Stanton. From Golden Years senior home. We need your help, Madam Lares. We’re about to be overrun.”

  I hesitated, remembering Molly from my days of working at the senior facility. As I recalled, the eighty-something-year-old woman had been strange. Beyond strange. I suspected she had a touch of dementia. I glanced at the clock and grimaced. Three AM. “I can come in a couple of hours,” I told the octogenarian. “Would that be okay?”

  The tension in my shoulders relaxed as I realized the crisis I’d been expecting was probably just the creative imaginings of a woman with compromised faculties. I grabbed a hair clip off my bedside table and smoothed my straight black hair back, twisting it into a quick bun and clipping it to get it off my face.

  Monty’s claws tap, tap, tapped up the hall. The sound of something dragging along the floor as he ran sent a chill through my system.

  “No! You have to come now. Please, Madam Lares.”

  I frowned at the title. Non-magical humans didn’t call me that. They didn’t know about my newly-minted guardianship. When I’d worked at Golden Years, I hadn’t had any magic. At least none that I’d known about. And Molly had seemed just as human as I was. Which, looking back, just might have proved the point I was missing. If I could become an ancient Roman deity in the space of weeks, there was no reason to assume Molly couldn’t become something…more…too.

  Monty trotted into the room with his leash clutched in his mouth, bounced up to me, and dropped the leash on my feet. He barked emphatically, his fringe of a tail whipping enthusiastically behind him.

  The leash thing was new but not surprising, given that everyone and everything in my life seemed to be embracing a magical core. The bat in my belfry (not a metaphor,
I actually had a bat in my belfry) was magical. My adopted mom and sister were magical. I had a magical raven that sometimes showed up out of nowhere. My gardener was a gnome. The sexy man candy in my life had wings. The contractor working on my renovations was a warrior fairy. And the ancient brass bell in my belfry (again, not a metaphor.) was enchanted.

  I fully expected my single-serving coffee maker to someday sprout hands and make the coffee for me.

  If only I could get my oven to make pumpkin muffins...

  A sharp, terrified scream came through the phone line, followed by a roaring sound that rolled over the screaming and swallowed it whole.

  “Molly?” I yelled into the resulting silence. “Molly? Are you still there?”

  Down by my feet, Monty whined. He shoved the leash with his long, black and tan nose. “Woof!”

  I paced my room, my nerves atwitch with the feeling that something cataclysmic had just happened. Without warning, the foundation of my pretty little church slash home slash business shuddered beneath a concussion so powerful it nearly threw me to the ground.

  Monty lunged in my direction, dancing on his back legs in a terrified plea to be held. I scooped him up and ran toward the front door. Flinging it open, I ran out onto the small front porch and searched the darkness for anything that would explain the explosion.

  In the distance, beyond the picturesque town of Rome, Indiana, the sky was lit with a pale red glow. Beneath the glow, the horizon burned gold and orange and smoke lifted to the slate-gray sky.

  Fire! I grabbed my cell again and dialed 9-1-1. The phone rang and rang, but nobody responded.

  Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  Shoving the phone into my pocket, I said, “Come on, little man. We need to go find out what’s happening.”

  Golden Years Senior Home was an old facility. It had been in its current location since I was old enough to ride my bike into the country with my friends and head to the reservoir only a couple of miles away. Despite their age, the buildings had been well-maintained. The facility had gone through several owners over the decades of its existence, and each one had put his or her own personal brand on it.

  A hodge-podge of styles and a mix of tastes, Golden Years was an ugly sucker, rising from the corn and soybean fields on either side of it like a boil on the verdant earth.

  I climbed out of my car and eyed the building, not seeing any damage that would explain the explosions I’d heard. And felt.

  The parking lot held only one car at that time of night…day…and the windows were mostly black. The door in the glass-fronted entranceway was locked, as expected, and a soft light inside showed no activity in the lobby.

  Goochy Goochy Goo, Your Mom Needs you. Goochy Goochy Go, She Won’t Take No!

  Goochy Goochy Gum, You Know You Can’t Run. Goochy Goochy Glee, You Know You Can’t Flee.

  “Curse, curse, swear!” Why did I leave her alone with my phone? I hit the button to answer the call from Mavis. “Mom. You know it’s the middle of the night, right?”

  Mavis and her daughter Bev had been my family in every way that counted since I’d lost my birth mom to cancer when I was fifteen. My ex-husband was Mavis’s son. Their family had lived next door to mine back then. Mavis had opened her heart and home to me from the day my mother died, treating me like a daughter, even as Bev treated me like a sister and best friend all wrapped up in one. Neither of them had ever wavered in their support or love.

  But Mavis had recently formed an annoying habit of changing my ring tone to weird, mother-themed songs when I wasn’t looking.

  “Actually, Aggy, it’s early morning.” Mavis didn’t sound like her usual, sunny self, but I wasn’t surprised, given that it was three-thirty in the curse, curse, swear morning! “What’s going on? I felt something,” she demanded.

  “You felt that explosion?”

  “Something exploded?”

  “You didn’t feel it?”

  “No. What exploded?”

  “If you didn’t feel it, why are you calling me?”

  “Because I felt…something.”

  I clamped my lips together, scrubbing a hand over my face. Monty dragged his leash past me and trotted over to a nearby bush to pee. “I’m standing outside the Golden Years Senior Home right now,” I told her. “Molly Stanton called and begged me to come out here because there was some kind of danger. Then I heard an explosion.”

  Mavis’s voice shook slightly, and I heard the sound of keys jangling. “Don’t move from that spot. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her everything looked fine, but was confronted by dead air. She was gone. Sighing, I walked over to the keypad on the wall and punched in the code to unlock it. Luckily, I’d recently resumed my regular visits to the home, bringing the ever-bubbly Monty along to enthrall and delight the residents. They’d given me the code so I could come and go as I pleased.

  I stepped into the darkened building, listening to the soft whir of air moving through the ducts. As it had appeared from outside, the lobby was empty. That didn’t surprise me since the night nurse stayed pretty close to the resident rooms in case there was an emergency. The place was only dimly lit via security lights over both exterior doors and a small lamp on the table next to the couch. I started toward the door into the resident wing. “Come on, little man,” I told my dog. “Let’s go find Molly.”

  Light flickered past the windows overlooking the courtyard, jolting me to a stop. Monty took off toward the light, barking a warning I couldn’t ignore. Flames suddenly bathed the air beyond the doors. I turned and started running, hitting the bar on the glass door with momentum and diving out into the fiery night.

  I expected to see burning buildings. Or, at the very least, a large fire in the enclosed courtyard. But what I saw was much stranger than that.

  And infinitely more terrifying.

  2

  A Plea to Sound the First Alarm

  I managed to step on Monty’s leash before he got away from me. Slipping my hand through the loop, I held on as he did everything he could to escape my grip and get to the nightmare unfolding in front of me.

  The world roared and burned as if I were standing beneath an army of attacking dragons. But there was no smoke. There was only fire, which sat upon the grass without burning and slipped along the ground as if testing its taste and texture.

  The noise seemed to be coming from the center of the space, where a small decorative well wavered behind the type of aura caused by waves of excessive heat over an asphalt road. The tiny bucket hanging from a metal rod over the well waved violently as if an unseen hand continually shoved at it. The heated air spun with the colors of fire around the decoration, the light source appearing to be somewhere underneath the well.

  A familiar figure stood on the far side of the yard decoration. Molly’s head was thrown back, her soft white hair dancing around her small head and her frail arms stretched as if in supplication.

  I moved through the strange atmosphere of the courtyard, the heated air pushing back at me with every step I took. Eyeing Molly for signs of awareness, I noticed her eyes were closed and her lips were moving.

  What in the curse, curse, swear was going on?

  A burst of red and yellow light flared from the well and shot skyward, the sound like an explosion from a small cannon. The light hung suspended above my head, reflected off the glass of the dozens of windows overlooking the courtyard space. A shadowy shape moved through the light, its motions frantic and aggressive.

  Monty yelped and ran back to me, pressing his trembling body against my legs.

  As I stared into the strange illumination, a heated jet of air smacked into me, taking me to the ground, and a husky laugh, as deep and gritty as a sinkhole in the desert, boomed around me. Monty nervously licked my face. He wanted me off the ground.

  Heeding his warning, I shoved to my feet, instinctively grabbing for the power coiling in my core. I held the energy at my fingertips, feeling its a
nxious bite on my skin. But I didn’t throw it for fear I’d hurt Molly in the process of battling whatever had invaded the once-tranquil space.

  “You have no influence here, Lares,” the voice informed me.

  I took a surprised step back before I could stop myself. The faceless, shadowy entity perched above me seemed to fold into itself, reaching for me with amorphous limbs that made the air crackle and spit.

  Monty lunged at the shadow, snapping his jaws as if he could stop the voice by biting it.

  Panicking, I let my magic dance around my hand as I tried to find the source of the disembodied voice. I felt the need to fight back but didn’t have a target.

  The laughter filled the space, pinging off the building and bouncing back to me even louder than before. “You have no influence here, Lares,” it said again. A rotting meat smell rose up around me, the stench so strong it made my eyes water.

  “You’re repeating yourself,” I yelled, stalling for time while I tried to pinpoint the source.

  More laughter. The sound sliced through any bravery I’d managed to muster like a butcher’s knife. Panic layered me in a cocoon that dulled my surroundings. Monty’s frantic barking sounded far away, though I could feel his furry body pinging frantically against my legs. I fought the urge to turn and run. But my gaze was drawn back to Molly. I yelped in fear. The diminutive woman stood only three feet away, and her eyes were a solid black.