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Once a strict grarammarian I winced "Sorry Why isn’t there s "For one thing, unlike other belief syste from the African diaspora, obeah doesn’t appear to have been syncretized with Christianity"

"Could you, um, elaborate?"

"Plantation owners in the Caribbean did their best to suppress any expression of faith rooted in the traditions of African slaves and their descendants," he said "They feared, not without cause, that those they oppressed would find sufficient inspiration in such worship to entertain notions of rebellion In some places, such as Haiti and Cuba, practitioners continued to worship in a covert manner They si deities, their loas and orishas and what have you, and Catholic saints For exaba in Haitian vodou, a probable descendant of the Yoruban Elegua, is the god of the crossroads He’s commonly associated with Saint Peter, who perforatekeeper"

"So so to Saint Peter when in actuality they were praying to Papa Legba?" I asked

"Precisely" Mr Leary nodded "Or Saint Lazarus, I believeso I’d be happy to look it up for you if you think itabout obeah"

"Right" I sipped"Which wasn’t syncretized So that meant it was driven deeper undercover?"

"It’s conjecture on my part," he said modestly "It’s also entirely possible that little is known simply because there’s little to know, that rather than a complex, multifunctional belief system, obeah is merely an umbrella term for a particular accretion of superstition and folklore"

I give Mr Leary a lot of credit for the fact that I have a not-totally-eh school education, but it tookout of that one "Maybe" I had the sense that the Right Honorable Mrs Sinclair’s Moer than an accretion "But I wonder, does it work?"

"Does it work?" he echoed

"Obeahthe ice cubes rattle "How can it? You know the saying: As below, so above As far as I know, Jamaica doesn’t have an underworld So I don’t see how it can have functioning side his nose, à la Saint Nicholas in "’Twas the Night Before Christs in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy But that, my dear Daisy, is your bailiwick I can tell you what history has or has not recorded of obeah I cannot tell you if it works"

After finishing my iced tea, I thanked Mr Leary and headed back to Peht don, but maybe because it’s only a block and a half from the police station, it’s always been out than a tourist joint It’s plain and unpretentious, a diner rather than a bistro; the kind of place where you can always get a decent sloppy joe or tuna salad sandwich My mom has her own business as a seamstress now, but she waitressed here for a lot of years when I was growing up, so it holds fond memories for me

"Hey, Daise!" Jen, already seated in a booth, waved me over I slid into the seat across fro with curiosity "What’s the scoop? I’ht? What happened out there, anyway? The whole town’s buzzing"

"Oh, yeah" I glanced around to make sure no one was in earshot, then leaned forward and lowered ave her the story The whole story

Jennifer Cassopolis and I have been best friends since high school, when her older sister, Bethany, took up with an insufferable vampire prat nao out to the House of Shadoith Jen to check on her Eight years later, that situation’s still unresolved, but at least we check in on Bethany often enough to know she’s okay, or as okay as she can be under blood-thrall to a snotty vaood balance for each other She greith a crappy home life: slutty older sister; abusive, alcoholic dad; battered er brother she tries to protect

Meanwhile, ood hoe there a lot when she couldn’t deal with her own situation But then there’s the Belphegor factor De true of ed naïveté to knock her up when she accidentally summoned him with a Ouija board

So, yeah, Jen and I balance each other pretty well Since we’ve been friends, I’ve only kept one secret from her and that was my crush on Cody Which, to be fair, I kept in part because he and the whole Fairfax clan are on the eldritch do But it all came out earlier this summer, and the upshot of the matter is that I admitted my crush to Jen and outed Cody as a olf in the process Which I should have done a lot earlier, since Jen’s friendship is more important to me than the eldritch honor code, and I knew she’d keep Cody’s secret

So, okay

What that all meant noas that the whole story included the part at the beginning where Cody and I were groping and ers, as well as the evening’s culmination in bom-chicka- sex with Sinclair

Jen stared at me "Are you serious?"

"Uh-huh"