Blood of the Stars by J.L. Murray

Blood of the Stars by J.L. Murray

Author:J.L. Murray [Murray, J.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hellzapoppin Press
Published: 2016-09-13T05:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER TWENTY

The bar is barely in the French Quarter. The buildings evoke equal measures of rollicking and dastardly, amusing and sinister side by side. I stand in front of Sparrow's Rest, your standard hole in the wall, just looking at it, and feel a shiver go up my spine. The place holds bad memories the same way that other places have an ocean view or cherry blossoms in spring. I feel like my insides are full of worms when I look at it. A white lady with a bouffant hairstyle covers her nose as she passes the open door of the saloon, probably from the smell of cigars and stale beer, but the way she hurries past is from collective memories. They trickle into the back of your mind, and even though you don't know what happened here, it fills you with urgency. Either to get away as fast as you can or to rush through the door and feel them wash over you.

Have I been here before?

I have no idea how Felicia is going to react to me. She told Jo's family that I'd done something very bad. She may be blaming me for all of the dead travelers. But I need her help to save the world that we, the travelers, may have ruined beyond repair.

We were just trying to make things right. To rewrite history the right way. To end the falsity and one-sided propaganda that modern history textbooks had become. If we corrected the truth, the world might just become less xenophobic, there might be fewer bigots, we might just learn that everything is a struggle and we're all in it together.

Looking back, it seems naive. To learn we were being picked off by the loa for the pieces of God inside us was absurd. And yet, here we all were. Here, in this time and place, and I was walking into some sort of crude trap. But my fault? How could it have been?

I walk through the door and blink as my eyes adjust. There's a man playing a 12-string guitar on a small stage in the back of the dingy bar. The bartender is staring at me, a short, stocky Creole man with a Semper Fi tattoo on his forearm. He looks at a door on the other side of the room, then back at me, worried. I walk to the door and take a deep breath.

“Hey,” says the bartender. “Something wrong with that lady.”

I open the door quickly, before I can rethink any of this, before I can turn tail and run away, hiding until the world ends. And I force myself to walk into the small room, closing the door behind me so I can't turn back. I can hear the blues guitar through the door, though it's muffled. Otherwise the room is dead silent. I blink in the dim light. For some reason I am reminded of the bare bulb when Baron Samedi had me tied to a chair. There's no bare bulb here, but the fixture on the ceiling is dusty and coated with grime.



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