Chapter 13: Deception

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Remember when I said that I missed Hezekiah right when he left? Well, I immediately retracted that statement when I woke up.

My eyes shot open at the sound of loud thumping followed by shouting. Quickly, I sat up in my bed and looked around my room before slipping on a robe and slippers. The shouting was amplified once my door was opened—the Coterie.

"We gave it to you, Alize!" Mother Babette yelled.

"I know that! But now, it's gone! It is gone."

Everyone was in the meeting room on the second floor—the Coterie and their novitiates stood in the middle while the other House members stood on the outside of the circle, whispering to each other with scared faces. I inched into the room slowly as Mother Babette went on.

"We'll just double-check—"

"We've tripled-checked already, Boo," Qadira said.

"What's going on?" I asked them. Everyone turned to face me with these empty expressions.

Mama was still in her robe, headwrap tight on her head. She looked tired and stressed; I knew it was worse than what I thought.

"The seal is missing," she told me. She said it as if I should have automatically known what she was talking about; like I was invested enough to know what the 'seal' was. But it only took me a moment to remember what seal she was speaking of—the enchanted one that belonged to the Coterie, used to stamp important letters and ensure that they weren't opened without the matching letter opener. So, if the seal was gone, then the letter opener was gone, too.

Fuck.

The Coterie kept making up logical explanations for its disappearance. But who were we all fooling? We knew it was stolen. The real question was, by whom?

"If anyone wishes to come forward and return our sacred seal, now would be the time to avoid the necessary consequences," Mama announced. Silent minutes rolled by without a culprit coming forward. We all looked around at each other, the 'trust' established suddenly deteriorating.

"So, that's it, then?" Mambo Nene said. "Ain't no one gonna come up and give it back?"

"Maybe someone from the outside stole it," Esther said.

"Someone from the outside?" Mama asked her. "Voodoo practitioners ain't want nothing to do with the Coterie. There's no reason for them to come for the seal."

"Unless it wasn't no Voodoo priestess," Miss Aza said softly. Everything went quiet again, the air chilled against the May heat. Even though Miss Aza's suggestion wasn't concrete, we all knew who she meant. Especially me; my ears burned like they were on fire, my heart beating so fast I was positive Mama could hear it.

Ava Claudette approached Miss Aza, the most concerned priestess out of the entire Coterie; she didn't dismiss the notion as quickly as the other Queens. "A bloodsucker?" she said, her eyes darkened with worry. "How?"

"It ain't possible," Priestess Qadira butted in. "There ain't no way one could of gotten in here-"

"-Unless someone invited one inside," Imani reminded us.

I'm surprised I didn't catch on sooner - Hezekiah. It was him. That sly, sneaky, lying, no good son of a bitch. It was him and I knew it. I knew it the moment the word 'bloodsucker' was brought into the conversation. That fucker tricked me in order to get into the house; seduced me in order to steal the seal. And all of this for whom? None other than goddamn Abraham - the vampire that Hezekiah swore he was on bad terms with.

Fuck, fuck, fucking shit, I'm fucked.

Sometimes, I would underestimate just how smart my mama was. Really, she was a genius - capable of the most intricate art of deduction and even just the reading of human behavior. She knew that I fucked up; she saw it in my eyes, in my posture, in the way I tried to walk back into my room as everyone blamed someone for bringing a bloodsucker into the house. And as everyone tried to find the idiot dumb enough to invite a vampire inside the house, they were oblivious to the fact that it was me. I was the idiot that was dumb enough to have not only invited a vampire into the safe house but dumb enough to invite in the Elder vampire who killed Tia Valeria.

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