The Serpent's Dirge: A Sophie Quinn FBI Mystery Thriller Book 6 by Georgia Wagner

Author:Georgia Wagner [Wagner, Georgia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

“She will weave across my path like the threads of a basket.”

The petitioner looked up through the foggy night air to the stars above him. Grinning, he took in the swirling darkness of distant spirits flitting in that void between each bright spot of light, and with idle fingers, he traced an amulet under his shirt, feeling the heartbeat of the gris-gris pulsing between his flesh and the spirit world.

The hard street under his sandaled feet clapped, and he listened to the distant sound of nightlife voices at bars and clubs, sharp laughs between the hissing of tires on the damp roadways around him.

Under one arm, he held a fabric satchel. But looking down into his hands, the petitioner tried to match the stars overhead to the streets around him, mingling them in his mind against the flat designs on his gripped instrument.

A pale, pink dot drew his focus on the flat plane of the instrument in his hands and he looked up.

A willowy young woman peeled off from a group of men and women about her age, waving and smiling as she crossed the street. She wore a violet top that revealed her arms, and dark shorts that revealed pink thighs and shins until her fashionable black boots took over. Attire that indicated she was from a climate that would consider this chill, foggy night ‘warm’ despite the season.

The petitioner suppressed his grin as he passed the young woman close enough that he could have grabbed the dark tresses of her long, wavy hair.

Shimmering spirits twisted in the foggy air between them as if inviting him to turn and follow her.

The petitioner steeled himself, focusing and resisting. He looked down at the instrument in his hands, watching the pale pink trail as he and the young woman separated.

It was the third time he had crossed her path, weaving around her, drawing his invisible net. The charm took time, patience… but it was well worth it. He would weave a basket around her, his path narrowing hers until he closed the trap.

“Patience, spirits,” the petitioner murmured, turning a corner around the old brickwork. They weren’t in the heart of New Orleans anymore. A few more miles and they’d be in dark country, where the electric streets and jazz gave way to moonlight and crayfish songs. But here, on the fringe, were quieter places, places young people with either too much money or not enough, depending on how you looked at it, would buy beds for a few nights, perhaps a week at a time.

These were the perfect places for his work. Places where the old and the new overlapped. Where the corrupted and the wicked would stray from the indulgent world that cradled and protected them; where the hungry spirits of the old bayou would follow his beckoning call.

Because that was what this was about, the petitioner reminded himself as he passed under a flashing billboard advertising cheap drinks around smiling faces. Corruption. Finding out the corrosive people rotting this ancient place.

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