For one, through the cracked windshield I could see a darkened figure coming down the street, cloaked entirely in black. Whoever it was walked with purpose and also with ease. They were seductive, confident, and smooth. It was the walk of a woman who knew what she wanted and knew she was about to get it.
It was then that I suddenly couldn’t move. I had leaned back against the seat when I saw the figure, and now I was frozen in place, the flashlight dropping out of my mouth again, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. My limbs wouldn’t lift, my head wouldn’t turn. I was lucky my mouth was closed but I couldn’t even open it to scream.
Suddenly the glove compartment started shaking like something was inside and trying to get out. It rattled, and I was torn between watching that and watching the figure move toward me. She was still obscured by the distance, the darkness and the fractures in the glass. But it didn’t matter. I could already tell who it was. And for once I wasn’t enamored by her.
For once I saw things very clearly, very deeply.
Ambrosia.
Somewhere she laughed, maybe it was out on the street, or in the truck, or in my head.
The glove compartment popped open with a hiss, a sound that sunk into my spine. The large black head of a python came out, its long, skinny tongue flicking like the Devil’s pitchfork. It slowly emerged, pushing forward, its shiny scales undulating. Its head hung there for a moment, seeking, searching, before it pushed itself out of the glove compartment and dropped to the passenger seat. It curled up momentarily as the rest of its mammoth body continued to flow out of the tiny space. It was somehow bigger than the one in my room last night, at least fifteen feet long and two feet thick at its middle, and yet I knew it was the same beast, the same entity. Li Grand Zombi. It had come back for me.
I could have easily closed my eyes and just given up. My nerves were so shot, so frayed, that any sudden movement from the python would have put me into cardiac arrest. I knew that. I knew that if I was lucky, I would be found the next day, maybe days later, apparently dead from the effects of a car crash.
But I couldn’t just give up. I was tired of doing that. I wanted to fight.
Ambrosia stepped forward, closer now so that I could see her coldly beautiful face, her wicked eyes. I wondered how I could have been so foolish to fall for her. The way I acted around her when Perry, my f**king Perry was there, the things I’d said. I’d acted like a douche of the highest order, a horny ass**le, the worst of the worst. This woman had controlled all of it, and for all my supposed willpower, I had let her. I had let myself succumb to her advances, perhaps not all of them, but enough to make me a walking idiot in her wake. I should have known better—I should have been a better man. Now I knew, now I felt her power pulling at me, trying to glamour me, compel me. She got as far as my body, able to hold it in place. But she couldn’t get in my mind anymore. I had seen the truth.
The snake began to rise upward so its head and beady eyes were at my level. I wasn’t even sure if pythons could move like cobras, but this one was. It looked ready to strike.
“Declan,” Ambrosia said, her lips moving as she came into view. “I was told that was your full name.”
I couldn’t have had a snappy comeback if I wanted to. Only my eyes were mobile. I wanted to ask her why she was doing it, but I had a feeling I knew why. I wanted to ask where Rose was but I had a feeling I didn’t want to know.
Ambrosia stopped walking, her cloak flapping behind her, and raised her hands straight up to the sky, crying out something in a language that borrowed a lot from French but contained a whole bunch of words I didn’t understand.
Suddenly, the darkness on the sides of the streets that I had assumed was foliage or structural remains began to move amidst dots of flickering light. It was the zombies, and they were walking forward, stepping out into the street, holding candles in their steady hands. There must have been forty of them, much more than I had counted earlier. It was the same mob, still moving in unison, their scarred faces glowing from the candlelight, their eyes glinting dully. A mass of people who had died and were brought back just to do this one woman’s bidding. Her power was terrifying, and once again I felt for Perry, the only person who had suspected her from the beginning.
There was no time for my self-inflicted pity party, no time to think about where I went wrong and what the repercussions would be. The python hissed something that sounded like Devil and lowered its head. I prepared for the strike, for its teeth to wrap around my skin, but then I remembered how pythons killed. Not from their bite. From their muscles choking the last living breath out of you. Ambrosia was the one who was poisoning me—the snake would just finish me off. Li Grand Zombi and she were working in tandem.
The snake began to slither across my lap, and I heard a scuffle in the seat behind me. My eyes flew to the mirror, even though I knew I shouldn’t have looked, and there was my mother.
“My son,” she said, a fleshless skeleton hand coming forward and resting on my shoulder. “Come meet your potential.”
I looked ahead, my heart slowing down, my lungs closing up. Ambrosia smiled and blew a kiss at me. All the lights from the candles around her went out. Everything went dark.
A snake tongue slithered across my hand.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream…”
Somewhere in the distance, someone was singing. I was on a small, white boat, peeling paint coming off the sides, flaking onto my feet.
I was alone.
Everything was grey. The sky with its heavy mass of low clouds, clouds that looked too wide and too heavy for it to hold up. The water that lapped along the side of the boat, the dark shapes that swam underneath the steel water, even the flowers that hung from the nearby trees, rising out of the swamp, were absent of any color.
“Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” the voice went on, pleasant and clear.
I looked around me. There was no sign of where I’d come from, no hint of where I was going. It was like I was in a grey globe, floating in a giant circle. I didn’t even have oars.
There was a splash in the water alongside the boat and I looked over. There was a long, thick serpent wriggling in the waves. Its head was the head of my mother, pale grey skin, dark grey eyes. Fangs for teeth.
She started rising out of the water, that awful smile, that scaly black body.
She opened her mouth and sang in a deep, demonic voice, “Life is but a dream.”