Only Fools Walk Free - Sandra R Neeley Page 0,1

to go away but you refused — you brought this on yourself. Now I take your life from you.” Clarice’s father kicked him, then turned away while barking orders to his henchmen. “Finish him off, then throw him in my family crypt. No one will ever think to look for his kind there.”

~~~~~

Samuel lay on the cold, stone floor of the immaculate, white marble crypt, his life slowly seeping away from him. He could barely move, couldn’t breathe, his body broken and bloodied. Yet his mind turned to thoughts of Clarice. After several attempts he finally managed to reach into his pocket, withdrawing the cameo ring he’d saved for months to buy. He’d planned to give it to his Clarice, his love and as of two nights ago, his young wife. He’d not had it when they married, but had delivered the final payment this very morning and was planning to slip it on her finger the moment she joined him for their escape from this city. He wrapped his hand around the ring, holding it in his closed fist — the last symbol of his love for her held in his dying hand. He struggled to say the words he longed to say to her aloud. “I love you, my Clarice. I will bear this pain and more, as long as you are safe. Please,” he whispered to the fates, the powers that be, “keep her safe.” Samuel closed his eyes, prepared to let everything float away — the pain, the suffering, the longing.

But instead of cold and nothingness, he felt… warmth, and realized a soft light glowed beyond his closed, swollen eyelids. Slowly he forced his bruised eyes opened. He blinked, wincing with the pain, then blinked again, thinking his eyes deceived him. There, crouching on the floor not two feet from him, was a woman. A woman like him. A woman he had no doubt was labeled as he was — Mulatto.

She was dressed in bright, colorful skirts, and her head was wrapped in a scarf with large golden earrings dangling from her ears. A bright red peasant blouse with flounced ruffles hanging just off her caramel-colored shoulders. Her tinkling laughter filled the crypt he lay in, bouncing off the stone walls. The luminescent green eyes many of his mixed race shared, peering through his very soul. “And just what would you give for it?” she asked seductively.

Samuel was growing weaker by the minute and couldn’t raise his head any longer. He could barely speak, and when he did it was a breathy rasp that carried but a bit of his voice into the crypt. He peered at her as best he could through his battered eyes. His brow furrowed, so many questions in his mind. “For what?” he finally managed.

“Your Bebe’, you pray for her safety, no? I heard you,” she said, lightly tapping her ear. “So, I answer your prayer, and I ask, what would you give for it?”

“Everything,” he finally managed to rush out in a whisper.

“You have nothing left to give, no. Only your soul. And that’s not yours much longer anyway, I think,” she answered.

Samuel was no stranger to the ways of Voodoo. He’d been raised among some of the most powerful Voodoo priests and priestesses in New Orleans. His own mother, in fact, was one of the most powerful in the entire city — the highest priestess of them all.

His father was the son of a wealthy land baron. A member of the upper-crust of society, yet unable to officially claim the woman he’d loved for most of his adult life — Samuel’s mother. But he’d been able to provide for Samuel. To see to it that he and his mother were well taken care of, well fed, and had all they needed.

They saw him when they could. Though each night he went home to his proper wife, in her proper home, in her stiff skirts and staunch judgments left Samuel’s mother a little more broken. Despite his mother’s power, she was a slave to the love she had for his father. She’d begged him to run away with her to warmer climates, more tolerable lands where they could live forever together in the shade of palm trees with soft, warm sands beneath their feet. But he’d refused, claiming he had duties he’d been raised to perform — his father and family depended on him. So he never left his proper family. And he never joined Samuel and his mother in