The figure of a man—dark and looming. His face was blurred as if he were masked, his voice muffled.
But she understood the meaning.
It whispered through her brain like a serpent’s hiss:
“The consequence of sin is death.”
And then a cold wind blew through her soul, and she cried out.
The wraith had disappeared and yet … she felt his breath, and by instinct, as if pulled by a spiritual magnet, she turned to face west. Deeper into the woods. Toward the swampland.
Somewhere in the darkness, she sensed evil lurking.
She stared into the night. “I see you,” she said, but spied no eyes catching in the moonlight, heard no breathing.
And yet …
He was moving.
Quietly.
On measured footsteps.
The scent of blood in his nostrils.
On the hunt.
Chapter 21
Murmuring incantations, Jeanne LaRoux lit the candles on the altar, watching the charred wicks tremble with light, tiny flames casting shifting illumination on the grayed walls of the hut she’d constructed by hand half a century earlier. The boards were rotting here, so near the swamp, but this was still her sanctuary, where she connected with the spirits.
Whether they were good or evil.
One by one, the candles began to glow.
For power.
For wisdom.
For cunning.
There were dozens of them, all flickering quietly, tapers and pillars and votives stacked upon the altar where the bleached bones of sacred animals appeared to stare at her from dark, knowing spaces where once there had been eyes.
She loved them all.
Remembered them as living creatures.
Revered them in death.
A red-shouldered hawk with its wicked beak and wide, filigreed wings.
A snake, its flexible skeleton coiled.
An alligator’s skull, missing a few crooked teeth.
And on the highest level, centered over the crossbeam, was the deer skull. A white-tailed buck, his antlers stretching wide over the altar below.
Jeanne LaRoux had known these creatures in life.