It wasn’t long before we were set up with keys to two connecting rooms—a king for me and a double for them. When we unlocked the doors, I stopped short. A quick look at Raptor and Voodoo showed the same expression as I’d had.
“What the fuck?” Raptor asked as he glanced my way. The rooms had LED lights running along a ledge about a foot down from the ceiling. Suddenly, the guy at the desk mentioning “mood lighting” came back to me, and I busted out laughing.
“What color is your room?” I asked as I wiped away tears.
“Purple.” Raptor snickered before following Voodoo inside.
I tossed my bag on the desk and opened the connecting door. “Okay, kids, let’s go eat!”
That time, they both flipped me off.
We went over to the Mexican place, had an amazing meal then returned to the no-tell motel. We congregated in their room. The restaurant wasn’t the place to ask questions or discuss our plan, especially since Voodoo hadn’t brought anything up while we were there.
“Okay, so what was with the stop at the witchy store? I’m assuming that’s what it was by the name and your comment this morning about going on a witch hunt,” Raptor spoke up before I could ask. He was sitting in the desk chair playing with the “mood lighting” by making it change colors and flash.
“Would you knock that off?” Voodoo shook his head, then sat on one bed, and I plopped on the other. I fell back and threaded my fingers behind my head.
“I was looking for either of the owners,” Voodoo cryptically replied, and I rolled my head to the side to look in his direction.
“Why?” I boldly questioned as my gaze narrowed. “And why didn’t we just go inside the damn store?”
“I’d rather not say until I see them with my own eyes.”
“Okay, well, do you have a picture of them?” I stared Voodoo in the eyes when I asked.
He reached into his cut and pulled out several pieces of paper folded in fourths. Two he separated from the pile and smoothed out. He passed one to me and one to Raptor.
My breath caught when he handed me a printout of what appeared to be a hand-drawn image. Besides being absolutely stunning, the woman could’ve passed for his sister. Dark hair the color of midnight fell sleek and long around her shoulders, icy-blue eyes stared at me like they could read my mind, high cheekbones, arched brows, a full mouth that tipped on one side in a secretive smile, and a slender throat that I swear to Christ I wanted to wrap my hand around and taste. Shaking myself out of whatever spell the drawing had cast on me, I handed it back.
Raptor still held his, a crease in his brow as he studied it. Then he looked up. “What the hell are these? Police sketches? Voodoo, what the fuck is going on?”
Confused, because I felt as if I’d missed something vital in this conversation, I sat up and studied Voodoo.
“Grandmé told me I needed to come here and find them. Her vision told her they were in danger, and I was the only one who could help them. She saw the older woman, who I’m assuming is the mother, traveling into Texas as a young woman, and she was crying. She also saw the sign of the shop. These drawings are the women she saw. They could be a little different, but I guarantee they are very close. My grandmother is really good at replicating what she’s seen. Unfortunately, she didn’t see exactly what the danger was. She only had a sickening sense of dread for them. We couldn’t figure out why. Neither of us was able to see much more in our visions, even with extreme preparation.” He paused, and a shudder ran through me at the thought of his “extreme preparation,” because God knew what that entailed.
“In the very few instances that she’s had visions of people she didn’t know, they turned out to be eerily accurate. Like me, occasionally she has visions or dreams that simply come to us. There may be no rhyme or reason as to what we see or when we see it. We can only elaborate on those types of visions through our prayers and rituals. In this case, something was blocking my grandmother’s visions—and mine.” He ran a frustrated hand through his hair and stared at the image I had returned to him.
“Are they any connection to you?” I asked.
His shoulders seemed to slump. “My grandmother believes they’re powerful witches, and that’s why she couldn’t see much about them.”
“And?” I prompted, having a feeling I knew what he was going to say.
“And she thinks the daughter may be my sister.”
Though I was expecting that answer, it still had me sitting there stunned.
Raptor dropped the hand that was holding the second image and threw his head back in resignation. “Shit.”
“Exactly.”
The reason this was a concern was that we didn’t know if she would follow their father’s personality or her mother’s. Not that we knew a damn thing about her mother. If they were truly powerful witches and the daughter carried the evil streak of their father, it could get ugly. But if that was the case, Madame L wouldn’t have wanted us to help them. Right?
“So now what?” Raptor spoke up.
“Do you have their names? Surely, if you have the name of the business, Facet could’ve looked into the owners and employees. Found where they are from to see if it was possible for your father to have been hers. I highly doubt Venom or the chapter would’ve had an issue with having him look into this before we came all the way down here,” I rationalized.
“He did. Annette and Sloane Fontenot. Mother and daughter. Annette’s name pops up when she established residency in Texas. At that time she changed her name to what we now believe was her great-great-great-grandmother’s name. That information was buried deep. Very deep. Annette obviously had friends in either very high or very low places. Before she moved here, it’s as if she never existed. Her history is wiped clean. Sloane was born here approximately eight months after she arrived. No father listed on Sloane’s birth certificate. No other children. They’ve owned Blue Broomsticks since Sloane was a teenager. Right around the time Annette’s grandmother died and left a considerable fortune to her, which was the only reason Facet was able to uncover anything about their history.” Voodoo rattled off the few statistics he had from memory. He ticked off their address—they lived together—their birthdays, the daughter’s education, the history of the business and its financial records, and what kind of cars they drove. That was all Facet had been able to uncover. The main thing he couldn’t seem to find was why they would be in danger. Voodoo’s biological father was dead. So was his douchebag half brother. Who else could there be?