Story Eight: Last of the Duvaliers

Sebastian held his head in his hands. Subconsciously, his fingers intertwined with his long strands of hair. His eyes were closed, his brow furrowed, drawing lines across his dark forehead. Sebastian dropped his hands, but remained hunched over; he wrung one hand in the other, sublimating his thoughts with the rubbing motion's methodical redundancy.

The ashes of his reality laid around him. When Sebastian's eyes re-opened, he could see the shimmering glow of his world, its shine a mockery to his pain. His eyes had an illusory look—as if the dark colors were swirling around, beginning and ending, older than possible for the twenty-seven year-old—yet they were not moving at all: rather he just stared off at nothing.

Sebastian closed his eyes again and took a series of deep, slow breaths, fighting to re-center himself, to calm the storm within him, which felt like a boiling sea of dark force, swirling in his abdomen, encircling his heart, and threatening to rise into his throat and choke him. Sebastian wanted to blame the papers in front of him or the computer that had received the information. He wanted to hate Lucas, the man who had sent him the information. But none of them were to blame. No one was, really.

Sebastian had been so busy with the duties of being a mage on the forefront of the Ascension War, and all the battles and trials that it brought, that the enigmatic presence of his cousin Katrina, who was supposed to be dead, was only a madness creeping in the back of his brain. How could she have been alive? Why hadn't she contacted him sooner? Who was holding her and why? Worse was the fact that her father still blamed him for her death and would hear nothing of her resurfacing. Lucas Devara did not understand that it was Sebastian who had answered Katrina's call, not the other way around. In fact, she had led that fateful cabal in Rochester. Sebastian had had very little to do with the circumstances leading to her death, other than the fact that he had been there.

Despite having peppered Lucas with emails and harrying him with messages, the man wanted nothing to do with Sebastian. He always seemed to be purposely unresponsive. Lucas believed Sebastian was delusional, and did not appreciate his nephew reminding him all the time of his dead daughter, whose death he was trying to put behind him. When Lucas did reply, he often reminded Sebastian that they were not blood. Rather, his wife (also deceased), Dina, was Sebastian's aunt; he was only an uncle-in-law, so to speak. Yet nothing could stop Sebastian from trying to hold onto the only family he had.

Sebastian ran his fingers through his hair as he stood up from the desk. He looked around the disarray of his office. The room was wide and long, furnished with polished dark brown mahogany, filled with books along all of the walls; pictures and plaques hung in all the empty spaces. Why, he wondered. What did it all get me? What good was any of this? Fuck! He knocked several of the papers, assorted pens, disks, and books off of the desk. As he did, his hair furled in front of his face, drawing a brief mask over his contorted features. Sebastian turned and punched the long row of books on the shelves. He pulled back his arm and struck again, but with a sweeping motion, sending several of the books flying through the air.

Images fluttered across Sebastian's view, more real to the time-mage than they ever could be for mundanes, visions corresponding to times and places long gone: brown muddy waters, running faster than the little boy cold swim, making the other bank several miles down as the sun rose over Jackson Square, walking through the cathedral holding his mother's hand and smiling at promises of beignets afterward, jumping into the pick-up with his father.

Sebastian's reality snapped back to the now. His father. Sebastian laughed out loud, the kind of laugh that was halfway between crying and choking. The mage leaned on the now-empty section of bookshelves, resting both forearms on the cold wood and closed his eyes again, letting his hair fall over his face. More visions of a ten year-old staring at the burning wreck of his parents' car even though he had never been there, his feet swinging over the banks of the Mississippi, crying and crying before not, and for over a decade, roaming and rogueing, but always running. What was family to a child brought up by his own hand, learning of his gift alone, carving his own niche in the war for Ascension: a fragment of the primordial pure ones, piecing together the shards of reality: Gangrels his fathers and Ecstatics his mothers. He had acquired and discarded family after family, paying repect only to whim, fickle as lady luck: chaotic as the swirling mass of entropy which one-third of reality rested on and which ever fluttered about his dark, impenetrable heart. Who needed a family? Who cared? All that they shared was blood. How many of them backstabbed and betrayed each other anyway? Young Sebastian had made his family those he had trusted and those that had trusted him, bonding with word what he could not with blood.

The smooth cold of the wood could not relax Sebastian and he pulled away from the bookshelves, only to collapse loosely on the floor, resting near the papers he had just printed, still warm from the laser printer. Lucas had finally found a way to rid himself of Sebastian. All he had to do was break his promise to Sebastian's mother and the entirety of his wife's family. All he had to do was tell Sebastian who his real father was. All he had to do was explain that Sebastian's mother was not from New Orleans.

His half-black, half-native mother had only remarried in New Orleans, careful to fall in love with a white man to explain her son's complexion. She had never wanted her son to know that she had been exiled from Haiti, that she had been the mistress of the ruler of that country. She had never wanted her son to realize that his father was Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Jean-Claude had beena cruel dictator, who had followed in the footsteps of his father, "Poppa Doc" Duvalier. Both were known for murder and butchery. It was even said that "Poppa Doc" was a powerful voodoo sorcerer. He may have even been a real mage—one who used his power for evil. Grandpa, Sebastian laughed to himself bitterly. Jean-Claude had never been the effective tyrant his that voodoo father had been. He was a hedonist, giving and spending power like the child he was. Given his vices, he was probably an easy mark for the Setities, Kindred that were known to have influence in that country.

It was all conjecture, though. Not that it mattered. Sebastian blew the hair out of his face, throwing it aside when that failed. How could I never have known? How could I never have sensed it? "Baby Doc," as his father was known, had been exiled to France with his wife, the only survivors of the family after a violent coup in Haiti. Presently, many people still wanted him tried for crimes against humanity. Sebastian’s mother had left the country much before that, almost right after she had conceived him.

Sebastian threw the printout away from him, frustrated as it fluttered only inches away from him and then swirled back, cycloning right under his leg. Again he pushed the piece of paper away, this time standing in deference to it. "Fuck!" What good is this? Sebastian wondered. What good has anything we've done accomplished? Who are we? What have the Faulknarians done? Is the world any different? Is there any less of a probability that this kind of person could exist? Why did he have to be my father?

Since Rochester, where and when Katrina supposedly died, I have never run from knowledge, even if it brought pain—ignorance be damned—because with that knowledge was supposed to come power, the power to help people, to protect people, to stop the world from creating Poppa Docs.

Sebastian paced aimlessly back and forth, lost in his thoughts before turning to the cabinet next to the desk and pulling out a bottle of bourbon and a small rocks glass. He splashed some into the short glass and swallowed it all. He poured another glass before setting the bottle back in the open cabinet. He leaned on the desk, exhausted, confused, his mind a jumble of thoughts through which he could barely discern the voice speaking to him. He didn't notice until it whispered into his ear, at which point he looked over his shoulder slowly, his senses recalibrating, torqueing to match the phantom menace that he occasionally knew as his avatar.

Sebastian turned all the way around, looking down at his own swirling body: a chaotic mix of light and dark, abysses and skies, thens and nows, something that was there, but wasn't, and something that looked almost real compared to the luminescence of the mischievous icon before him. The creature also had long, black hair, although longer than Sebastian's chin-length cut; his eyes also were dark and brooding, yet dancing at the same time, older than they should have been for such a young face—so like Sebastian's—and it was only his pale, nordic features that separated him from Sebastian's smooth, dark tones.

"Come on, Sebastian, aren’t you even going to say hello to your oldest friend?"

"Don't pretend that we've ever gotten along well," Sebastian said.

"At least you're beginning to acknowledge who we are."

"Who you are, Loki," Sebastian spat.

"Don't delude yourself into thinking there's a difference," his avatar said, narrowing his eyes and stepping forward.

"You and I create something unique, but you are separate from me. You've lived many lives, I have not."

"Really. So sure of that you are?"

"Yes."

Loki walked around Sebastian, slowly drawing a finger along his shoulders and back, as Sebastian stood frozen, still holding the glass. Sebastian did not look at Loki, but instead took in the room. It was different, but not. The simalcrum differed only in all the ways that mattered: a pale representation of the room across the gauntlet from Sebastian.

Loki rested his palms on Sebastian's shoulders, remaining behind him, silently speaking into his ear. "It was bad enough when you could not accept us, yes? Now you cannot accept yourself."

Sebastian turned and pushed his other self away hard, spinning in a viscously quick maneuver. "What do you want from me?"

"So quick to anger. You are much like your father."

“Did you know?” Sebastian asked.

“So impatient,” Loki said, waving his forefinger at Sebastian, and making a tsk-tsk sound.

"Fuck you! What do you want from me?"

Loki eyeballed Sebastian’s glass, his pupils flitting down then up. "You know you can't drink that here, right?"

Sebastian looked at the glass, holding it up. Slowly, deliberately, he turned it upside-down. The liquid did not move. Sebastian looked past his outstretched arm and the glass, to Loki. Sebastian’s passive face morphed slowly, liquid-like, into a coarse frown, followed by a furtive glance of hate and a short snarl; he pulled his arm back and threw the glass at Loki. The soaring projectile roared right through Loki and struck the wall behind him, shattering into a myriad of minute shards, all of which fluttered away like dustmotes in the wind.

Loki, unaffected, picked up an hourglass off of Sebastian's desk and turned it over, watching the sand fall slowly. Sebastian turned from him and went back to his chair, slumping into it and pushing away from Loki, sliding on its soft wheels.

"Don't worry about yourself, Sebastian," Loki said quietly. "Your father might have represented a great evil, but surprisingly, your mother was a wonderful woman, who possessed great intelligence and kindness: attributes belied by her former station in life."

"Then where does that leave me?” Sebastian asked softly. His gaze was buried in the floor

"Where it's always left you," Loki drawled through the glass of the timepiece before him, "right in the middle. You have always preached the balance. You have always resided on the fence between good and evil, practicing and preaching both. This changes nothing."

"You're not telling me anything I don't already know," Sebastian said, looking up at his avatar.

Loki looked around the hourglass, smiling. "Isn't that the point?"

For the first time, Sebastian's dark eyes swirled with something other than self-pity.

"What did you say?"

"You heard me." Loki said, as his self-stare over the hourglass pierced Sebastian, the sands continuing to fall.

Sebastian paused. His hands gripped and ungripped the armrests of the chair. He looked at the hourglass. "The sands still fall," he said.

"Yes," Loki breathed.

"Then there's still time."

"Yes."

"The game's not over yet," Sebastian said.

"No."

Sebastian looked down again, his thoughts manifesting as his body's representation swirled faster and more chaotically, rhythmically already wavering between spirit realms, mundane places, and times.

"So what are you going to do?" Loki asked.

"The only thing I can,” Sebastian said standing. “I'm going to find my father."

Loki smiled mischievously. "Maybe we don't have to hate each other all the time."

Sebastian stared at his avatar, losing himself for a moment in the mire his swirling, dark eyes.

Sebastian looked up from his drink as he leaned into the desk. He lifted his head and looked around the office. It was empty. A mess, strewn with books and papers, but empty. He finished his drink and sat back down at his computer.

 

*                              *                              *

 

"Pardon. Pardon."

Sebastian glanced about the airport, eyes narrowed under thin, dark sunglasses. The Paris airport was more crowded than he liked or expected and he had to traffic through a menagerie of sleepers running back and forth, counting the seconds left on their schedules. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and frowned. In some senses, his dark colors fit right in with the old macabre Goth style of old Europe, yet the black jeans and leather jacket fit about him in a brash American way. Perhaps with his graceful stride and model length hair and looks, not to mention the odd echoes of power around him, he might have drawn plenty of looks, yet Sebastian had an arcane way of not being noticed, of slipping through the cracks of observation. His rough Caribbean French helped him ease through the culture gaps. In many ways, he was at home.

Had he been there for any other reason or occasion but this one, he might have found good company and headed straight for the best restaurants, or perhaps dining in something as gaudy, if not as scenic as the Eiffel Tower. Yet he could not. Further, he needed to do what he needed to do during the daytime. He had been warned that the cities of Europe were not usually safe for the Hidden powers. Mages and Lupines, powerful as they might be in the Old Country, let the ancient Kindred have their way for that half of the day. That was fine with Sebastian. The last thing Sebastian wanted or needed to deal with now was a hungry centuries-old leech.

Sebastian had a loosely conceived plan. He intended to rent a taxi indefinitely, paying the cabbie well to take him where he asked, tracing all known appearances of his father: using correspondence and time to splice the strands of time and space, he would stalk the palpable evil of his own blood. Had he brought his long-time friend and cabal mate, Chip Zelinsky, Sebastian could have used his life magick to find the nearest genetic match to himself, but this was not something he could involve the others in. Nor was it something he could even tell the others about. Recently, they had discovered that Chip's avatar was the same one possessed by King Arthur of Camelot. Sebastian's own inner soul appeared as a dubious Norse god of mischief and his father and grandfather were evil tyrants, responsible for murder and assorted other acts of barbarism. How could he air that kind of legacy next to Chip’s lineage?

If not for Sebastian's exorbitant cash payment, there was no doubt the taxi driver would have dropped Sebastian off soon after picking him up. Not only did the mage refuse to talk to his chauffeur, but he looked about, twitching and recoiling, seeing and feeling things that did not exist to the driver, slipping through the temporal stream, jumping into the waters of time and giving himself to them, speaking in the present only to follow the future becoming past.

After two days of tracing dead ends and nearly losing his ride, Sebastian found the correct country villa. Sebastian asked the man to take him to the nearest village where he could stay and paid him a final bonus payment. There, he obtained lodging at an inn under a false name and headed to the inn's dining room. He sat down and slowly chewed on his bread, sipping red wine, and thoughtfully, distractedly, pushed small pieces of a soft fish sitting in a creamy, reddish sauce into his mouth, wondering if his father was doing the same thing—his senses telling him that he was not. Sebastian stopped his speeding feet, dropping out of heightened time as he exited the forest cover and slipped softly onto the outlaying grass which surrounded the compound. In the distance, he could see his father's villa. Sebastian's senses covered the ground quickly, examining it closely, rotating around the building, entropically discerning the weakest point of defense and his best avenue of attack. After standing still for several moments and examining the compound thoroughly, Sebastian found what he was looking for. The side door to the east was the weakest point; there was only one guard there.

Cloaked in the shadows and his dark apparel, he saw the guard easily with his correspondence vision. Making his move, Sebastian abandoned stealth and sprinted directly toward the guard. The man went for his gun, but was no match for Sebastian's super-speed. In the last ten yards, Sebastian exploded: feinting a kick, he stuttered and sliced forward with his taut fingers, stabbing the man's windpipe. The guard immediately put his hands to his throat, desperately trying to breathe, and in that instant Sebastian drove his palm forward with his other hand: smashing the guard's nose into his brain.

With one hand, Sebastian caught the man's jacket and let him down slowly; with the other he caught the gun. After setting him down, Sebastian pulled the man's keys out of his pocket and inserted them into the door. His eyes glazed as he slid the keys into the lock and turned the knob, and he knew what awaited him.

The door swung into a kitchen, where a cook in a white apron and a little white hat stood, preparing the next day's meal, chatting with another guard, who was holding a sub-machine gun loosely, hung over his shoulder on a short strap.

Before either man could do any more than raise their eyes and let them go wide in shock, Sebastian's gun was raised, and a shot was fired into each one's chest. They both fell over violently, the cook knocking utensils over in his backward sprawl, and the guard falling heavily with his gun rattling loudly on the tile floor.

Sebastian walked swiftly over the two men and put an extra shot into each one's forehead, just to make sure they wouldn't get back up. As he walked past their corpses, just before pushing the swinging door to the living room open, Sebastian sensed another guard circling around behind him.

Without pausing or giving the man time to fire upon his backside, Sebastian moved through the door, cascading his entropic will onto the dutiful guard, focusing on the probability strings of the man’s cranial bloodstreams, locking onto the ones that dictated their collapse. Even as the guard raised his gun to fire into Sebastian's back, he faltered, hampered by the collapsing threads of his life weakening, and then failing under the strain of a fatal brain embolism.

As Sebastian walked into the next room, his eyes targeted all of the oncoming soldiers at once, multi-tasking his entropy search for their vital points, locking onto them all: using his time-honed speed to fire upon them before they could even get off one shot; each bullet from Sebastian's gun ripped through their hearts, dead-on.

As if a hot waterstream was running down his back or someone was stimulating his spine with a soft feather, Sebastian could feel the soft tingle of paradox infecting his body, but he just walked on, uncaring.

Sebastian turned down a hallway and kicked in the door to his father's bedroom, a cold, empty look on his face. The mage's old eyes flared and his nose wrinkled as he saw only a pale woman lying under the covers, shivering: shrinking from him. He raised his gun to her as he walked in, but the pistol only triggered an empty clicking sound.

A shotgun blast ripped from the bathroom doorway, only a few yards away from Sebastian. Luckily, with his time-increased senses, he had seen the point-black shot coming and had dove forward, rolling towards the shooter: ducking under the arc of fire. Even as he stood and tossed his own gun away, he broke down the firing mechanisms of the assailant’s gun.

The man, dressed only in a bathrobe shot a wild look at Sebastian, as if he would interrogate him kill him and befriend him all at once, but only pointed the long barrel of his firearm right at Sebastian. Sebastian leaned against the mouth of the barrel and stared directly into his father's dark eyes.

"Pull da trigger, Jean-Claude," he said softly.

His father raised his eyebrows incredulously, but pulled the trigger with little hesitation. There was an impotent noise and then nothing. Sebastian slapped the gun out of his father’s hands and slammed his father into the wall.

"We need ta talk," Sebastian said.

"Who are you?" Jean-Claude asked

Sebastian threw his father away from him, sending him sprawling towards the floor, near the bed. Landing, he eyed Sebastian's discarded weapon.

"Do you want it?" Sebastian asked. "Go ‘head. Take it. Shoot me."

Jean-Claude looked at his horrified wife, back at Sebastian, and then dove for the gun; lying on his side, he fired at Sebastian. Yet the gun was empty still. Jean-Claude went through several dead clicks before acquiescing.

"You're pathetic," Sebastian said, walking towards him. "Didn't you hear it click empty when I aimed it at your woman?"

Jean-Claude only looked nervously at his wife. "My wife," he stammered softly. "What do you want from us?"

Sebastian looked at the woman as he leaned over his father. "You worried ‘bout her?"

Jean-Claude looked at her also, before returning his nervous gaze to Sebastian. "Leave Michelle out of this. If you have a problem with me, settle it with me."

Sebastian knelt down next to his father, carefully holding Jean-Claude's chin in his right hand. His left reached out to touch Michelle's leg. "Don't worry ‘bout her."

Jean-Claude turned to his wife, "Michelle, get out of—what?" His command faltered as he saw her nose beginning to bleed. "What? Michelle?" He pushed past Sebastian and took hold of his wife, shaking her. "Michelle. Michelle!"

With a growl, he turned and lunged at Sebastian. "What have you done to her?" he screamed.

Sebastian deftly sidestepped his father, tripping him. The mage then turned to meet the swinging fist of Jean-Claude, only to catch his fist, twisting Jean-Claude's arm behind him, nearly breaking it.

"You done yet?" Sebastian said.

"Michelle!" Jean-Claude sobbed. "You fucking bastard."

"Are you done yet?" Sebastian screamed.

Roughly releasing his father, Sebastian sat down on the edge of the bed. Jean-Claude stood up and walked away before turning, rubbing his arm, and staring at Sebastian.

"We need to talk," Sebastian said.

"So you've said, before you killed my wife," Jean-Claude spat.

"And everyone else here," Sebastian said, staring at the floor.

"Fuck you! Who are you? What do you want?"

Sebastian looked up out of the tops of his eyes. "I am the son of Clarissa Duvalier."

Jean-Claude's jaw dropped. "The son of . . . "

"The son of the woman you kicked out of your country."

"Impossible," Jean-Claude breathed.

"Is it?" Sebastian asked, staring at his father.

Jean-Claude gesticulated wildly. "What did you expect? She was only a servant. Was I supposed to care for her? Her pregnancy would not have been accepted."

Sebastian almost got up and struck the man, but he realized that he already had, in a sense. Instead he just shook his head. "I don' expect anyting from you. Father."

"And what? The prodigal son returns?" Jean-Claude laughed. "You know, you should have been the next ruler of Haiti. Did you know that my poor wife Michelle was barren? I was not able to have any more children?"

"I'm glad."

"How can you be so harsh with a person you've never met? Is this because I wasn't a good father?"

"You weren't a father,” Sebastian said, standing. “I'm jus’ glad dat your poisonous seed wasn't able to corrupt any more a da world."

"I was hardly the poisonous one. It was my father who was the murderous wizard."

Sebastian lowered his head and closed his eyes for a moment. "Of course. It was all him. He really did know magick, dough, eh?"

"Yes,” Jean-Claude said. “He was a powerful voodoo houngan. I, however, had no interest in anything but the pleasures of life. What was so wrong with that?"

"And I'm sure your poppa's old cronies were only too happy to supply you wit whatevah you wanted, right?"

"Of course ," Jean-Claude said.

"And dey knew voodoo too," Sebastian said.

"Yes."

"But dey only appeared at night, right?"

"Yes. So what?"

"And dey gave you whatever you wanted if you ran the country like dey wanted."

"Yes, what do you care about all this? It's the past!" Jean-Claude asked.

Sebastian stepped forward. "Dey were called Setities."

"I don't think I've heard that name. What of it?"

Sebastian laughed. "Dey were probably an evil a lot greater den your father."

"Your grandfather," Jean-Claude snapped.

"Whatever."

"Like I said, it was they that did wrong. My father, or these Setites. Not me. I was just a figurehead. A scapegoat." Jean-Claude wiped sweat from his forehead.

"You let it happen," Sebastian said.

"Such is the world. Some suffer, some revel."

"You disgust me," Sebastian said.

"That may be, but I am your blood. I am your father," Jean-Claude said. "And there is nothing you can do or say that will change that."

"You may be mah father, but I am not your son," Sebastian replied.

"Oh really?" Jean-Claude said, standing.

"And I cannot allow you ta be mah father."

"What are you going to do? Ask the loa to send you back in time, to change the past?"

"No," Sebastian said. "Ah'm going ta change da future."

Sebastian stepped again toward his father, who nervously was looking around for a working weapon, fearing that his son was going for one.

Sebastian did not need to read his father’s mind to know what he was thinking. "I don' need no weapon," he said. "Ah too am a powerful sorcerer. Only mah duty is ta stop dose dat make others suffer, no matter who, no matter how. Ah use my power ta help dose dat suffer while others revel."

Jean-Claude's wild eyes stared into his son's, paralyzed suddently by Sebastian's gaze: fearful, fateful, trembling, and shaking.

Sebastian's eyes collapsed into a dark black: smoldering, almost smoking, falling around his black jacket and pants, falling around his loose hair, falling around the room, intangibly reaching out and touching Jean-Claude Duvalier like the dark god of evil and filling his black heart, infiltrating it, decaying it. For Jean-Claude, the slow, steady thud and repetition of life which was once taken for granted, became the ceaseless silence of death. Jean-Claude clutched at his chest, gasping for breath: horrified by knowing that they were his last, incredulous at this turn of fate.

Sebastian Duvalier caught his collapsing father and knelt by his side. "Mah name is Sebastian Duvalier," he whispered. The former dictator's eyes were wide, as if they were arms outstretched, desperately calliung for help. Sebastian remained at his father's side until Jean-Claude had taken his last breath, his life extinguished. The magewaited for his father's body to chill, sitting there on the floor, rocking back and forth in an autistic stupor, holding it. Finally Sebastian stood up. Using his magick, he decomposed his father's corpse into dust and strode out of the room, wondering whether it was his father’s legacy that darkened his soul or if it was his own.

On his way out of the building, Sebastian used the stove to light a fire which he carefully applied to several rooms across the villa. Standing outside the blaze he threw his own dark garments in, leaving him shaking in the cold, naked. His eyes wide open, he turned his back upon the blaze of his blood and past, feeling the surge of his own mischief, his own evil, not knowing if what he had done had fulfilled the prophecy of balance, or whether it had destroyed it. Yet all he kept thinking to himself as he turned and ran through time, was what else could I have done?