CHAPTER ONE
VOODOO WARS
EXT. BAYAU – NIGHT
MARIE LAVEAU and PERRINE, both ethereal yet sexual in their white cotton shifts, face off on opposite sides of the clearing, the voodoo serviteurs cowering around the perimeter.
MARIE
For your treachery, Perrine, I will see you flayed before Erzulie and Baron Samedi.
PERRINE
(laughs cruelly)
Like your lover was flayed by Louis?
She flashes a triumphant smile at LOUIS LALAURIE, standing in the background. Imposing in black dress clothing. Pure evil.
MARIE
(quietly, to Louis)
I will destroy you.
She suddenly whirls around, grabs a torch from the ground. Raises it and it turns into a sword, the blade rippling with blue flames. Louis’s eyes widen with surprise and unaccustomed fear as he recognizes Marie’s murderous intent.
Before Marie can launch the stroke, however, Perrine seizes a torch of her own and attacks, her torch undergoing the same transformation. Perrine parries Marie’s sword just in time, flames crackling up and down the lengths of both blades.
A kickass fight ensues, both women utilizing their physical skills as well as their sorcerous powers. Shooting bolts of energy from their free hands. Invisible spirits raise winds, strike invisible blows. Snakes boil out of the earth.
Marie drops her sword and shoots bolt after bolt of power from her palms, Perrine finally falling to the ground, whimpering in pain and fear as Marie strides forward, standing over her.
PERRINE
Louis, my love, save me!
LOUIS
(lips curling in scorn)
You are neither worthy of my help nor my love. Marie is the only woman who is a true match for me. I have wanted no one else since I first saw her invoke Damballa… the sweat of worship glistening on her skin…
He stares at Marie with open lust.
You are mine, voodoo queen.
CLOSE ON PERRINE…
Her expression a combination of betrayal, heartbreak… andthe terrible fury of a woman scorned. She and Marie exchange one energy-charged look between them. They don’t need words. They both know what needs to happen next.
Both women turn as one to face Louis, rising into the air in a united front. Marie once again wielding her flaming sword as Perrine sends bolts of energy from her hands.
Another kickass fight takes place.
BAYOU EF’TAGEUX
NEAR NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
PRESENT DAY
Dressed in Marie’s white chemise and full skirt, doing my best to look both sexy and ethereal—yeah, you try it—Ipicked up one of the “ensorcelled” broadswords that would ripple with flames during each take.
Real flames.
I’ll admit I’d had major doubts about this when Cayden Doran, the film’s co-producer, co-writer, stunt coordinator, and second unit director—Cayden wears a lot of hats—revealed his plans for Voodoo Wars’ climatic battle. It had seemed like a bad idea, then and now, shooting in a clearing next to a bayou and waving flammable weapons around all the foliage.
Ideally, for an action sequence this complex and potentially dangerous, we would’ve been filming it on a studio lot. But no. Devon Manus, the film’s director, wanted the authenticity of the bayou, complete with the dilapidated eighteenth-century house in the background. The very flammable eighteenth-century house, all weathered with warped gray boards and cobwebs.
Since the climactic fight took place in a torrential downpour, we had a local weather witch with mad skills that were augmented by all the ambient Louisiana humidity. Even so, CGI seemed a wiser choice. Any flames that might withstand the rain would be difficult to put out if anything ignited—like, say, the house… or an extra. Both Cayden and Devon were confident they could handle any mishap. I trusted Cayden more than Devon, but still… playing with fire wouldn’t have been my call.
While we waited, the two of them held a quiet powwow behind the main camera setup on the far side of the clearing, near the side of the house. Devon was a well-built man who always looked pleased with himself. Sun-kissed blond hair. Like Cayden, he had the kind of tanned skin that only comes from outdoor activity. Copper-ringed brown eyes. He looked anywhere between thirty and fifty.
In his mid-thirties or thereabouts, Cayden outdid him. He topped the director by about half a foot. Pale blue eyes. Hair a shaggy mane, somewhere between red and auburn. Both men wore light khaki cargo pants tucked into sturdy leather lace-up hunting boots, Cayden in an off-white expedition shirt rolled up at the sleeves to show off muscular forearms, while Devon went with a short-sleeved bush shirt that screamed “crocodile hunter.” This allowed everyone to notice when he flexed his admittedly well-developed biceps.
The testosterone was as stifling as the humidity.
As the extras relaxed, Leandra Marcadet, the curvaceous actress playing Marie Laveau, sauntered off the set, deliberately choosing a path that took her past Cayden. She brushed against him with the casual drive-by attitude of the cat she was, and then headed for the craft service tables. Cayden managed to look smug and indifferent at the same time.
Taking a long pull from a bottle of ice-cold water, I looked around, a wave of sadness washing over me as I realized this was my last day working with the cast and crew of Voodoo Wars. I would especially miss Angelique, who played Perrine and did her own stunts.
I loved working with her. It’s kind of like finding a good dance partner. Some stunt players are competent. Others match you move for move. With steady training, Angelique would someday be as good with weapons as I was—and, not to brag, I’m damn good. Her heritage as a feline shapeshifter gave her an athleticism and grace that would take her far. I hoped to get her out to the West Coast and into the Katz stunt crew.
“Are you sure this is safe?” Standing close by, Angelique directed her question to Cayden, a Cajun lilt to her voice.
He nodded. “The spell produces a fire specifically bonded to your weapons. If it touches your hair, clothing… anything that hasn’t been spelled, it’ll go out.” We must have both looked dubious, because Devon walked over and put his arms around our shoulders.
“Ladies, you’re both too valuable for us to be less than a hundred percent positive about this.” Devon was half Irish gancanagh—think sexed-up leprechaun—and half Australian manly man. He tended to favor whichever dialect got him what he wanted at any given moment. This time it was the Irish brogue.
I was surprised he didn’t call us “lasses.”
“Yeah, but this is the last day of filming,” I pointed out.
“Ah, but there are sure to be reshoots,” he replied with a grin, “so you can trust me.”
I shrugged. “Fair enough.”
Cayden muttered some arcane-sounding words and pointed at the swords. The flames licked their way up the blades, but no real heat came from the fire. Pretty damn cool—in addition to his other credits, Cayden also was a sorcerer.
I always preferred working on films where the cast and crew are aware of the weirder things in life. Some folks, when faced with the presence of creatures that have populated the nightmares of mankind for centuries, will shut down completely, end up in therapy for years, or utilize the age-old coping technique of compartmentalizing. It’s a lot easier if everyone’s reading from the same script.
We ran our choreography, marking it at half speed to make sure it was locked into our brains and bodies before going for a take, and then I asked for one more rehearsal. While I was confident of Angelique’s skills, she’d been injured just a few weeks earlier. Thanks to her shifter blood, she’d healed quickly and was ready to rock and roll in less than two weeks.
Even though her injuries wouldn’t factor into the stunts, I didn’t want to take any chances. Sometimes she had to be dissuaded from overdoing it.
Like Leandra—and all the serviteur extras on set—Angelique was part of the Marcadet clan, a family of feline shifters. The Marcadet lineage had started when a slaver brought a leopard shifter from Africa in the early 1700s, selling him to Antoine Marcadet, a French plantation owner with a reputation for abusing his slaves. After six months, Antoine, his family, and the overseer were found with their throats ripped out. The tracks of what looked to be a pair of large cats led off and vanished into the bayou.
Most of the plantation’s slaves had run off, including a young woman from a tribe of indigenous werepanthers from Florida.
The two shifters managed to stay hidden during the subsequent hunt for the missing slaves. The search had ended when most of the slave hunters were found slaughtered at the edge of the swamp. Co-opting the surname of their former “master,” the leopard shifter and his mate kept to themselves and raised children, occasionally finding other therianthropes to bring into their clan.
Angelique’s clan were a thriving extended family, good-looking and impossibly graceful, with skin tones ranging from “I take my coffee black” to “a splash of coffee in my cream, please.”
My skin veered toward the latter, depending on how much sun I got, but I was pretty much in perpetual stealth mode when it came to pinpointing my ethnic background. Thick, wavy, dark brown hair. Full lips, strong cheekbones, straight nose. Eyes so dark a blue, they looked almost black in some lights. I used to think I’d won some sort of genetic lotto, but then I found out my ancestress was Lilith, Mother of Demons, the first woman on earth. This explained how I managed to pass as pretty much any ethnicity—a very handy attribute when it came to stunt doubling.
That was the upside to the family heritage, which came with an obligation to kill the spawn of Lilith while she languished in a hell dimension. No 23andMe results had ever dropped a bombshell as messy.
“Lee, you ready?”
That knocked me out of my thoughts. Mike, one of the two Ginga brothers—aboriginal shifters from Australia—sidled up beside me, grinning and showing a few too many sharp, pearly whites. Dark, weathered skin and curly dark brown hair threaded with blond and bronze highlights from hours in the sun. Eyes an unusual shade of yellowish gold, with pupils that shifted between normal to a reptilian slit, like little eyes of Sauron.
Mike and his twin brother Ike were in charge of the rigging on Voodoo Wars, which meant—among other things—they’d been responsible for making me and Angelique rise into the air in a safe, controlled manner while making it look totally kickass. That sequence was in the can, and oh, was I glad. They were really good at their jobs, but it’s just that some things really aren’t comfortable, and a snug flying harness giving you a wedgie while you’re being pulled around by wires is one of them. ...
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