Voodoo Queens of New Orleans - Vol. I | ✓

Chapter 57: The Gift of Darkness

I moved down the list, for I didn't know how much time I had left.

"How?" I asked him, struggling to get the context out. "How are you my father? You're dead. You can't create life anymore."

"But I created you," he answered, toying with me.

I gritted my teeth. "I know. But how?"

"I will credit the voodoo witches and their magic, however that vile shit works. It's capable of doing incredible things."

The vagueness of his answers was making me irritated, but I didn't want to show him that he was getting under my skin. "Magic. So, my 'conception,' it was planned? Orchestrated between you and the Coterie?"

"Yes," Abraham said—the only concrete answer he had given me. I connected the dots then—the prophecy that drove my grandmother crazy spoke about a Child of an Unholy Union that my mother conceived. Abraham must have wanted to be the father of this said child, knowing it was capable of incredible things, whatever they may be. It made sense, then. I was only a chess piece in his game. Nothing more. Once he was done with me, I was sure that he wouldn't hesitate to kill me, regardless of our shared blood.

I couldn't help but feel hurt. I was a pawn, it seemed, in everyone's game. I was only born to fulfill someone's desire, whether it be a desire for power, for protection, for spiritual connection. I was a channel. It created this existential doubt in me; did I truly have a purpose, or was I someone else's purpose?

Surprisingly, Abraham reacted differently than I expected to. When he saw how upset I became, he tried to comfort me. With another story.

"I had always known that I wanted my offspring to be capable of great things," he began. "I wanted my children to inherit the empire I set out to create. To carry on my vision. All the kids I did have didn't do that—they ended up dead 'fore the age of five or dead from war. I ain't had no grand-children; they all died 'fore they could have kids, and I had become a vampire shortly before my last child passed. So, when you were born, I had felt this sense of purpose I ain't felt in centuries. I could feel the power radiate from you; I saw myself in your eyes, Lisa. More than with any of my other children. You were a miracle—the product of life and death. I knew you were special. But your Mama didn't want to see your potential. She wanted to shield you, keep you locked away, give you a pathetic life when the life of a goddess was your birthright.

"We didn't see eye-to-eye on your future, which put us in another war between her sisters and my brothers over you. First part was short; Terah wanted to keep everybody quiet, so he drew up more territories that kept me away from you. This "peace" went on for four years until I realized how stupid Terah was, bending and breaking for those voodoo witches. Conflict started again, things got violent from both ends, which led Terah to conspire with the voodoo witches and betray me. He was too much of a coward to kill me for my war crimes, so him and Alize buried me deep in the earth somewhere no one would find me. I was chained in the dirt, laid in darkness for twenty years by my own master. Silence and darkness for two decades..."

Mama had told me a variation of this story, and Abraham had told me about what Mama did to him the first time we met; the first time he kidnapped me. But Abraham's version was a lot different this time; there was this anguish in his voice. This hurt and betrayal. I stood there after the break in his story and tried to process his testament, but it was hard. Not in the sense of connecting, but in the sense of grasping it. Accepting his truth, even though I'd been advised for so long not to trust Abraham's word.

"Is that why you killed Terah?" I asked him. "Because of what he did to you?"

"Thanks to a few of my loyal brothers and sisters who hadn't forgotten about me, I was able to arise from the dirt by their hand; they had looked for me incessantly for twenty years until they found where I was buried. My master's betrayal could only be amended by his death."