Wicked Bleu (Simone Doucet Series Book 2) - E. Denise Billups

Wicked Bleu (Simone Doucet Series Book 2) by E. Denise Billups

Book excerpt

MY SENSES SWELL WITH THE DEAD. My mind whispers lies. The latter I forever thwart, but sometimes old habits endure like the distant fable of voices whenever I hear thunder. The devil’s riding his two black horses and chariots across the sky. Ingrained superstitions never die, though I see them for what they are—outright fallacies, unfounded fears that darkened my childhood, but education colored me wiser. Yet one cannot dispute personal experiences. Ever since my trip to Natchez, Mississippi, I can no longer discount the afterlife. But falsehoods I’d tossed out long ago still boomerang around my consciousness.

Delphine Randolph, an ancestral ghost, opened my eyes wide to the afterlife, made me a believer, and unlocked a passage allowing other ancestral souls to follow. As a girl in Baton Rouge, stories of mystics and healers born of en-caul births piqued my interest because Mom said, you were one of those infants. God delivered you swathed head to toe in a seer’s cloak. You’re special, Simone. But I never possessed second sight, or a sixth sense, until Delphine roused a latent tendency, opened a spectral chasm to nameless spirits vying for my attention. They rap at my mind like a faint pulse, rattling abilities dormant for years.

In hindsight, many childhood events I’d deemed fearful imaginings were actual spectral manifestations. The ephemeral silhouette near my bed wasn’t a dream, as Mom said. The shade around Dad wasn’t his aura. And the murky shadow, cast on my bedroom wall in the black of night, wasn’t a figment of my mind.

Now, under bright recessed lights where nothing can hide, an intoxicatingly sweet spirit has wandered through that expanding passage. It clings to my mental senses, creeping and breeding around my soul like jasmine nightshades as I descend the front stairs. At the bottom, my roomie's ski boots hug the wall beside the open entryway closet stuffed with winter coats. Closing the door, I move beyond the lamp-lit foyer console toward the cellar door and pivot my head, hoping to glimpse a shadow, a shape, a disturbance in the air, something—

Boom-Boom. Boom.

The thunderous rumble above the landing startles me to an abrupt halt. At once, a rainstorm clouds my vision. I grasp the steep cellar stairwell’s wooden handrail and brick wall. Irrational childhood fears invade my mind as swiftly as the laundry basket slipping from my arm, pinwheeling over vanishing stairs to the basement floor.

The momentary vision fades. The stairwell reappears.

Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

Jeez, it’s just a gritter trundling over potholes, I reassure my fearful mind. The truck roars past the brownstone, salting snow-covered streets, the fleeting vision gone, but the jasmine scent lingers like a spectral garden.

“I know you’re there,” I whisper to the mysterious presence.

I descend the stairs and lift the basket from the remodeled basement’s carpeted floor, scanning the open space around the home theater for anything unusual. Past the leather wrap-around sectional, my shadow moves across the 85-inch flatscreen TV on the wall, causing me to whip my head around. I inch past the dim half bath, staring hard, waiting for something to show itself. It doesn’t but bristling hairs on my nape and arm as I near the laundry room in the back presage its nearness.

Through the swing doors into the modular laundry room, I glance up at the slider window covered in snow and place the basket on the folding tables directly below. In front of the steel-gray double-stacked washer and dryer, I freeze, catching a blurred image behind my reflection in the glass panel, sending chills rippling along my spine. The air cools around me, but the hot dryer vanquishes goosebumps as I cram dry wash in the basket. The boiler hums and kicks in the adjacent utility closet, reassuring me the nippy cellar isn’t from lack of heat but the reluctant visitor haunting for days.

Unruffled, unafraid, I climb the stairs to the main floor, where a snow shovel scrapes outside the front door. My roomies’ hushed voices hiss like switchgrass in a windstorm from the kitchen when the whirring blender pulses to a stop. I continue one more flight to my bedroom, awaiting a spectral connection.

I can’t see it, but its faint floral aroma clings to me like a subtle perfume.

“What do you want?”

Ceiling lights flicker as they have several times this week. I presume heavy snow accumulated on electrical grids or an electrical shortage, the latter of which only occurs during heatwaves. At once, houselights die altogether. The black monster swallows me whole. A deafening silence sweeps the home. The jasmine scent intensifies, frigid, drifting ahead, a glacial wall halting my steps.

In the cold blackness, condensation reverses as though my breath smacked an impenetrable surface. I reach out my hand, at once retracting it when something skims my arm, sending a shiver rolling through me. I step back, halted by a phantom grip. The laundry basket drops to my feet. The scented aura encroaches upon my face, icing my skin with a frigid blast as though it blew a forceful breath intentionally.

“You’ve got my attention. Show me what you want?”

Simmm …

The sound reverberated far away but brushed my ear like an immediate whisper. I quieten my fear, straining to hear the hollowness before me that moves closer in the dark. I worry the tiniest move will plunge me into its abysmal depths. A force tightens across my body. I panic, unable to move. Icy needles prickle my flesh, spreading limb to limb likes vines, pushing through my skin, claiming my body. It pulses around me, thrusting its essence into mine. I stiffen every muscle, rejecting the specter’s invasion. The jasmine scent grows pungent, angrier as I fend off the attack. My second sight magnifies, perceiving a slight translucence adhered to my body.

At once, house lights flicker on, vanquishing the specter, reluctant to be seen. The quick release of my body leaves me weak and breathless. Remnants of prickles linger, gradually subsiding. I steady my breath, look around the hall, then gather spilled laundry from the floor, grazing the specter's cold spot. Sheets, towels, and underwear dangle from the lopsided basket in my arm as I rush through the hall into my bedroom, shutting the door.

A nervous titter escapes my chilled, shivering lips. “It’s a ghost, not a burglar,” I reprove. A wooden barrier won’t deter an intangible ghost from entering. I suspect it’s not snow or an electrical shortage flickering the lights but my invisible guest who haunts day and night with persistent chiming bells and a thunderclap.

As old superstitions have it, new angels received their wings with every chime. But myths are speculative unlike ghosts, who make themselves known in tactile ways, establishing their existence when they want your attention. A fleeting hair-raising chill. An eerie whisper. An unexplainable shadow. A trailing aura that hovers close like a fearful child as my present specter does. A cloying odor, much as Delphine’s peach redolence eight months ago. Or an acute ailment such as the bothersome headache and sore throat that manifests each time with my nameless wraith.

I dump the citrus-scented laundry onto the bed when inner turbulence threatens my peace once more. The immediate sorrow and poignant heartache of the unseen visitor beset my mind and heart. My gaze flits to the rosemary-sage smudge stick on the bedside table. No. I rebuff and look away, dismissing the idea, wishing to calm my mind, not banish the presence.

“Tell me what you want.”

I peer around the candle-lit room, groping for a sign, an image. Although born with a seer’s veil, I’ve never been so blind.

“Please, show yourself.”

I’ve yet to see a concrete figure of the current occupant who engulfs my senses with intermittent fragrance and sounds surging from a mysterious sea. I perceive not one but two presences clamoring for me to see them, hear them, their stories intertwined.