Page 30 of Obsession

The warm welcome vanishes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone by that name. I’m Miss Mable. How can I help you and your friend?” She gives Damion a hard look; it’s different from the lustful one he typically receives from women.

Is she a demon-seer? I ask Damion. We encountered such a woman on the street back when Damion and I were bound together. He explained some people are more attuned to demonic energy. I’m wondering if Bettina is one of those people.

I don’t know.

“This is your business?” I ask her.

“Yes. I’m Miss Mable of the world-famous Miss Mable’s Ghost Tours. Unfortunately, tonight’s tour is sold out, but I have spots available for tomorrow night.”

“Is there somewhere we could go to speak in private? I’m Aubry Brooks, Cora Brooks’s daughter, and this is—”

“Come with me,” she says, visibly shaken.

Bettina looks like she’s just seen a ghost, and we haven’t even started the tour, I mentally tell Damion, and he groans.

She leads us to a back room and we take a seat on a small 1970s style rust-colored couch. She pulls over a folding chair from a card table on the opposite side of the room and has a seat. “Now, tell me who you really are and what you want,” she says as she draws a circle around herself in the air with her index finger and begins chanting under her breath. Her eyes dart nervously toward the door and then back to us.

Damion’s eyes glow with power, and I can feel the heat radiate from him, like being too close to a roaring fire. “If you’re planning on unleashing your familiar, just know cats love me,” he says with a demonic-sounding laugh that sends a chill down my spine. As if on cue, Bettina’s cat trots in and jumps in his lap. Damion begins scratching behind the ear of a beautiful black Persian.

“I didn’t know Cora had a child,” Bettina says with mouth agape. I’m not sure if her shock is because of me, the demon, or her traitorous cat. “Where is your mama?”

“Dead.” She looks shocked. “Tell me about the coven,” I say.

Bettina looks at me with wide eyes, and then to Damion with her familiar cozying up in his lap.

“I’m sorry, this is my boyfriend, Damion Blackmon.” Good southern manners are hard to shake.

“Bettina,” he says her name like a loving caress, capturing her undivided attention. “We can do this the easy way, where you answer all of Aubry’s questions,”—he flashes his dimples—“or, we can do this the hard way, where eventually you’ll answer all of Aubry’s questions,” he says, switching over to a menacing demonic tone. And why that turns me on, now’s not the time to analyze. “Either way, your choice.”

“Cora and Lucy joined the coven around the same time,” she says with a steady voice, but her trembling hands give her away. She folds them in her lap and continues, “Witchcraft was still in the closet back then, but New Orleans has always been more open-minded than most places. My mother, Kathrine Davis, was the high priestess. She died about a month after they joined,” she says, matter-of-factly.

“How did she die?” I gently ask.

“Breast cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She nods. “We knew it was coming, so at least we had time to mentally prepare…” she trails off. “Anyway, that left me, Cora, and Delilah, with Lucy taking the role of high priestess.”

“How did Lucy become the high priestess?” I wonder, knowing little about coven hierarchy.

“Lucy expressed her interest and we voted.”

“And so then what happened?” I ask, looking over to the cat in Damion’s lap who is now asleep. Figures.

“For a while, it was perfect. We felt we could shape our coven however we wanted and abandon the old-fashioned traditions and rules.” Like the old-fashioned magical rule of do no harm? “Lucy was really into angelology. We began trying to work with angelic energies, but she decided we weren’t getting anywhere. We shifted focus.”

“Shifted focus how?” I question her.

“Lucy introduced the coven to, shall we say, darker magic. It started out innocent enough. The first hex we cast was on a woman who’d stolen Lucy’s boyfriend. This woman hurt one of our sisters, and so we justified taking retaliatory magical action.” She shrugs. “Plus, we started seeing faster results, better results.”

“So what happened?” I ask.

“We went too far down the dark path. You don’t realize it’s happening until it’s almost too late. I knew we were getting close to the point of no return, so I called a meeting behind Lucy’s back. Lucy had to go, but Cora and I couldn’t agree on the best way to oust her.”

“Why?” I wonder.

“Lucy had grown powerful, and I argued we would need to use dark magic. Your mama argued in order to get away from dark magic, we couldn’t use dark magic. Delilah, bless her heart, was a follower and would just go along with whatever we decided.”

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