Tropic of Darkness by Tony Richards

early age. Camille, once she’d reached her teenage years, had ended up becoming a Santera, a priestess of the cult. She’d taken on great power. And she loathed living in poverty.
    â€œAnd so she cast a spell on the old man, making him love her?” Jack asked, a little humorously.
    But his companion didn’t even pick up on that.
    â€œUh-huh. Perhaps,” Luis suggested, still entirely serious, “she even brought about the drowning of his second wife.”
    Some versions of the tale—and there seemed to be plenty of them—insisted that she really did marry him, but not in any Christian fashion. In a secret ritual in the woods.
    Whatever the truth, nine months after they first met, she bore him children. Twins. Two girls, Isadora and Lucia. It was said that you could tell them apart only by the color of their eyes. They both grew up to be extremely beautiful themselves. And learned their mother’s secrets, becoming Santeras in their own right.
    Camille must have loved them too much, blind to all their faults. Since, having been raised in luxury and comfort, her daughters were greedy, selfish women.
    â€œSantería is mostly a benign religion, but all things have their darker side. Brujería , it is called. The worship of bad orishas . Some even say the pair of them became Awo —witches—and learned the unholy art of Palo Mayombe .”
    Either way, by the time that they had turned eighteen, they’d become powerful enough to break their mother’s spell on Santiago DeFlores and replace it with their own.
    â€œOh my God. You mean . . . they made their father . .  . ”—Jack faltered—“love them? As in, that way?”
    Luis nodded uneasily.
    â€œThey slept with him, yes. And it increased the dark side of their powers in a way that nothing else could.”
    For his own part, DeFlores must have been wracked with guilt, and terrified of what might happen if Camille or anyone else ever found out. The one solution he could think of was to leave her on her own to manage the plantation, while he brought his daughters to the capital.
    â€œBut of course, Camille finally learned the truth. One day, late in the summer of that year, she took a horse and rode the whole way to the mansion. And she stole inside while everyone was out. She scattered through the master bedchamber a colorless, odorless potion known only to her kind. Then, she hid in the gardens and waited.”
    DeFlores and the twins must have sat through dinner that evening and then retired to bed. And once she saw the light was on, Camille employed a very unique spell.
    â€œHer orisha was Changó, you see. The god of lightning and fire. The potion she had scattered was special to him. And the room burst into violent flame, trapping her husband and daughters inside. The twins joined hands, and it is said that in their dying agonies, they made a vow. That they would come back to this world one day, stronger than ever before.”
    It all sounded pretty insane to Jack, but he still asked, “How?”
    â€œBy something called egungun , ‘possession’ in English,” Luis told him. “The tradition of Santería is full of it. We do not touch their graves because we fear the souls of the two sisters will possess us. And we soak the soil above them with the blood of animals to keep them trapped below the ground.”
    Jack tried not to smile at this old wives’ tale. But he regarded the boy cautiously, seeing how convinced he was about this. “Let’s hope it works, then,” he murmured quietly, for want of anything better to say.
    â€œYes. Let’s hope.”
    They started making their way back to the cemetery gates, Jack’s head still spinning from the heavily detailed but rather farfetched story.
    â€œAnd how about Camille?” he asked. “Whatever happened to her?”
    â€œShe died a few years later, so it’s told.