Voodoo Queens of New Orleans - Vol. I | ✓

Chapter 44: This Stays Between Us

"I know a tailor on St. Peter's street," Ava said.

Mama nodded, "Let's head over there before sundown."

The Coterie began to file out of the house. The girls and I stood behind, watching them leave. I could practically see their limbs shaking with anticipation; they wanted to pry my mouth open, to hear everything I knew. I was hoping Mama wouldn't ask any of us to join them to the tailors. In fact, she told us to stay in the house until they got back - Me, Kizzy, Imani, Esther, Rocio, and Mikael. Aza was the last one to leave the house. Her eyes scanned all of us with lips firm and pressed. Then, she closed the door behind her.

Kizzy was the first one to speak.

"Lisa," she breathed out anxiously. Then the girls began to bombard me with questions. I didn't even know where to start exactly, so I told them about last night when Hezekiah came into the house and showed me the locket. I told them about the parchments, how Mama burned them, and I told them about tempus summatum. I also told them about how Marie II possessed Mama and spoke through her to Hezekiah about us, solidifying the fact that I had achieved tempus summatum.

"Wait, wait," Imani said, "Think about this for a second. Madam Dumont burned those parchments thinking they had this 'ritual' in them. But ironically, she burned the only hope of us being able to defeat Abraham or the Council if they were to find the real ritual."

"Mama's attempt at keeping me from tempus summatum only drew me closer to it," I whispered to myself, and when everyone else realized this, we all went quiet, because we knew that the loa had twisted the hands of fate. No matter what we did to run away from the prophecy, they would find a way to make me fulfill it.

"What if the only way we can defeat these bloodsuckers is if we have those papers?" Kizzy said. "That means, Lisa, you have to travel back in time. There's no other option. Because you're the one who wrote them."

"But I don't know how!" I said. "I'm not a witch, I'm not a hounsi, I'm...I'm nothing."

"That's not true," Esther said with a hopeful smile. "You might not know how to do it, but you'll figure it out."

"How do you know that?"

"Lisa, you traveled back in time already," Kizzy began to explain to me. "Your future self, whether it be a month or a year or five to ten years from now, traveled back to the 19th century. You haven't done it yet, but your future self has. The reason tempus summatum is so dangerous is because you are removing yourself from points in time and manipulating the past where you are going to. It isn't like the conventional type of time travel where, if you were to travel back to the 19th century at this very moment, you would see yourself writing rituals with Marie Laveau. No, you aren't there in the past anymore. Your body is breaking itself down and surrendering itself to time and the universe to move through it. And if it isn't done correctly, you could simply disappear or stretch yourself over different periods of time and kill yourself."

My heart began to beat uncomfortably fast in my chest. I was a sacrifice. That's all I could think of it as. I had no faith in myself that I would be able to achieve tempus summatum. Even though I had already done it, that was my future self. What if time had changed somehow? What if, my present self, now doesn't have the same means to learn this spell because we changed the timeline in some way, shape or form? Hezekiah wasn't supposed to tell me anything about me traveling back in time, but he did anyway, and now we had this knowledge that the loa possibly didn't intend on me to have yet.

"Time is complicated," Rocio, surprisingly, added. "It's a full circle. Every action determines the other. You went back in time to write these papers because Madam Dumont destroyed them. This was probably supposed to happen. You made the papers, they were in the possession of the Coterie for all these years, Madam Dumont destroyed them in this time so that way you would have to travel back in time to write them again so we could use them in the future. See? Full circle."